Dario on America

The United States is grand and powerful.
Whenever it trembles, a profound shudder
runs down the enormous backbone of the Andes.
If it shouts, the sound is like the roar of a lion.
And Hugo said to Grant: "The stars are yours."
(The dawning sun of the Argentine barely shines; the star of Chile is rising ... )
A wealthy country, joining the cult of Mammon to the cult of Hercules;
while Liberty, lighting the path
to easy conquest, raises her torch in New York.
But our own America, which has had poets
since the ancient times of Nezahualcoyotl;
which preserved the footprints of great Bacchus,
and learned the Panic alphabet once,
and consulted the stars; which also knew Atlantis
(whose name comes ringing down to us in Plato)
and has lived, since the earliest moments of its life,
in light, in fire, in fragrance, and in love
the America of Moctezuma and Atahualpa,
the aromatic America of Columbus,
Catholic America, Spanish America,
the America where noble Cuauhtemoc said:
"I am not on a bed of roses"-our America,
trembling with hurricanes, trembling with Love:
0 men with Saxon eyes and barbarous souls,
our America lives. And dreams. And loves.
And it is the daughter of the Sun. Be careful.
Long live Spanish America!
A thousand cubs of the Spanish lion are roaming free.
Roosevelt, you must become, by God's own will,
the deadly Rifleman and the dreadful Hunter,
before you can clutch us in your iron claws.
And though you have everything, you are lacking one thing:
God!

-1905

History is a Weapon

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon2/world.html

"Regardless of the value of these many lessons, History isn't what happened, but the stories of what happened and the lessons these stories include. The very selection of which histories to teach in a society shapes our view of how what is came to be and, in turn, what we understand as possible. This choice of which history to teach can never be "neutral" or "objective." Those who choose, either following a set agenda or guided by hidden prejudices, serve their interests. Their interests could be to continue this world as it now stands or to make a new world. "

-From History is a Weapon 

What's in Store.

What's to come in this new year? What's in store for the masses, the few, the multitudes and the individuals who determine their collective fate? 

As per 

AYAAN HIRSI ALI Somali-born feminist and writer,

"Given the gloomy state of the economy, I expect that 2009 will be a year of distress for many. Poverty is a relative matter. Some in the West will feel deprived if they do not get the big bonus they expected. Others will find themselves without jobs and will be faced with foreclosure and all the misery it entails. For many in those parts of the world that are truly poor, scarcity will pinch harder. Bitter conflicts over land, food and clean water will swell the numbers of the displaced and the starving. Funds once allocated for education, health care and sustainable development will be spent on emergency relief."

As per Ban Ki-Moon, 

"Like Roosevelt, I believe the only thing to fear is fear itself. If we give in to fear - if we lose our political will and long-term perspective - we will see a cascading series of crises, spilling from nation to nation. If we turn inward, we will lose chances to make a difference in places like Ivory Coast or Bangladesh, both trying to organize democratic elections, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where war and peace are so delicately balanced. If we turn inward or embrace protectionism, trade and global growth will suffer. If we turn inward, we will miss generational opportunities. This coming year, we have a chance to pick up where Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan left off so many years ago, a hair's breadth away from abolishing nuclear weapons. We must not let fear cloud our vision of the future."

And finally, as per Garrison Keillor, 

The rain will rain and the snow will fall and the seasons change and the small birds call and the compass will still point north and we will often recall November 4th which was a great day in so many ways - electing a good man regardless of race, yes, but I voted for Barack because he represents American civility, a combination of curiosity, ambition, humor and generosity, and I expect that the new administration will lift the spirits of our countrymen. I believe in heroes. I think we will all walk taller thanks to Barack's steadfast march to the White House.

I hope for a renaissance in America. So many people spent so much time stewing about and dreading the naked emperor and the miasma he created and now they can turn their minds to happier things, educate the young, exercise ingenuity, revive American manufacturing, move toward a green economy, lighten the work week, breathe deep, enjoy our good fortune living in this glorious land.

What I fear is blind violence, of course, such as in Mumbai, and its effect on civility. The thrashing of the banking system and the terrible losses inflicted on our friends and neighbors. The death of newspapers. The demise of literature, thanks to the arrogant idiocy of English departments. Prostate cancer, impotence, celibacy, spiritual purity.

Friedman on the mess...

"I have no sympathy for Madoff. But the fact is, his alleged Ponzi scheme was only slightly more outrageous than the “legal” scheme that Wall Street was running, fueled by cheap credit, low standards and high greed. What do you call giving a worker who makes only $14,000 a year a nothing-down and nothing-to-pay-for-two-years mortgage to buy a $750,000 home, and then bundling that mortgage with 100 others into bonds — which Moody’s or Standard & Poors rate AAA — and then selling them to banks and pension funds the world over? That is what our financial industry was doing. If that isn’t a pyramid scheme, what is?...


The Madoff affair is the cherry on top of a national breakdown in financial propriety, regulations and common sense. Which is why we don’t just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout. We need to re-establish the core balance between our markets, ethics and regulations. I don’t want to kill the animal spirits that necessarily drive capitalism — but I don’t want to be eaten by them either. "

1800-GENOCIDE

Darfur, Another Year Later

NYTimes Editorial, 12.10.08

In January, President Bush said this about Darfur: “My administration called this genocide. Once you label it genocide, you obviously have to do something about it.”

Yet, last week — nearly one year later — this is what the International Criminal Court prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told the United Nations Security Council about Darfur: “Genocide continues. Rapes in and around the camps continue. Humanitarian assistance is still hindered. More than 5,000 displaced persons die each month.” How can this still be?

The world has long declared its revulsion at the atrocities committed by Sudan’s government and its proxy militias in Darfur and done almost nothing to stop it. It took years of political wrangling to get the Security Council to approve a strengthened peacekeeping force with deployment set for Jan. 1. More than 11 months later, the Security Council has managed to send only 10,000 of the promised 26,000 peacekeepers. Large-scale military attacks against populated areas continue.

Much of the fault lies with Sudan’s cynically obstructionist president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. But Russia and especially China — which has major oil interests in Sudan — have shamefully enabled him. So have African leaders. The United States and its allies also bear responsibility for temporizing, most recently over how to transport troops and equipment to the conflict zone.

President Bush said on Wednesday that the United States was prepared to provide airlift. So why has this taken so long?

Now, the war crimes charges Mr. Moreno-Ocampo has brought against the Sudanese leader for his role in masterminding Darfur’s horrors (the burning of villages, bombing of schools and systematic rape of woman) may — may — be changing the calculus in Khartoum.

Mr. Bashir recently agreed to peace talks mediated by Qatar and pledged to punish anyone guilty of crimes in Darfur. Until proved otherwise, the world must assume that all of this is theater designed to fool the Security Council into delaying his reckoning at the Hague.

The African Union and the Arab League, seeking to protect one of their own, are pressing the Security Council to delay a formal indictment and arrest warrant, saying it would hurt chances for a negotiated peace. The Bush administration has threatened to block such a move and we hope it stands firm. President-elect Barack Obama and his advisers have called for strong action to end the Darfur genocide. We hope the next administration moves quickly. But have no doubt: Fixing Darfur, which is increasingly engulfed in inter-rebel warfare, gets harder by the day. The indictment, expected in February, is undeniably deserved. United Nations officials say that up to 300,000 people have been killed in the Darfur conflict and that 2.7 million have been driven from their homes.

Still it might be worth delaying if Mr. Bashir called off his murderous militias, stopped obstructing deployment of a strengthened peacekeeping force and began serious peace talks. The world is waiting.

What can I do?
Call 1800-GENOCIDE.
Write a letter to your Senator.
Spread the word in our digital world.

A Gun At Our Heads

"We need to put this in some perspective...$150 billion is more than the World Bank spent in 15 years.
We've spent that out on one company (AIG). We could have done enormous amounts to reduce poverty around the world. We have not been able to meet our commitments to the developing countries, saying its beyond our budget envelope. And yet, overnight, we found $150 billion dollars."

Basketcase

From the breadbasket of the continent, to the basketcase of the world...the slow and

steady decline of a nation under a murderous, negligent dictator, in stark image...

what can be done? what options remain on the table, with an inefficient regional development body refusing to act, and an African Union filled with members so unsure of their own democratic credentials, that acting would be glaringly hypocritical.

what can be done to save the 4 million people now on the cusp of starvation in the heart of Africa?

BBC's comprehensive reporting of the decline:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7771184.stm

Not More Government, Better Government

"Only in exceptional circumstances are markets efficient...
Markets, we are told, continually process available information to spit out accurate
gauges of reality in the form of prices. That's the theory. The reality: markets are
frequently inefficient, and dominated by humans, with all their frailties."

-Joseph Stiglitz

And so, we now live the truth of the words of a master of the trade. The key is in discovering the failure of fundamentalism in all facets of life, in all manners of existence; the middle path, the middle way, must be found; market fundamentalism as the downfall of the global economy; religious fundamentalism as the downfall of thriving, tolerant society.

Kissinger on Exceptionalism

"A country that has always prided itself on exceptionalism will not abandon the moral convictions by which it defined its greatness. But America needs to learn to discipline

itself into a strategy of gradualism that seeks greatness in the accumulation of the

attainable."

-Kissinger, December Economist

From December's Harper's Index:

Tons of international food aid provided to Sudan last year: 548,400

Estimated tons of food Sudan produces and exports to other countries each year: 534,000

Chance that a person worldwide lacks adequate drinking water due to socioeconomic conditions: 1 in 6

Percentage of Fortune 500 companies that own a Web address in which their name is followed by “sucks.com”: 26

Herbert on Power

Bob Herbert describing his unease at the recent Cabinet appointments made by Barack Obama. Extremely competent, yes; but a bit too ingrained into the inner workings of Washington? Will these minds be truly representative of a new dawn in the power corridors of D.C., a new dawn for the struggling working class of America which has languished so for the last eight years of neglect? Or will it be more of the same, the rich looking out for the rich, the powerful for the powerful?



"What I wonder is whether the members of this team, in addition to their grasp of the issues and success at achieving power, have a real feel for the needs of the people they are supposed to be representing...But the people at the pinnacle of power in Washington are encased in a bubble that makes it extremely hard to hear the voices of those who aren’t already powerful themselves...

Will this new Obama team, as brilliant as it appears to be, begin addressing on day one the interests of those who are not rich and who have not had the ear of those in power?"