|
A list for educational purposes of worrying trends in the contemporary world with links to significant articles. 6/12/06
Home;;
Some
personal opinions; My
worries for the world (in 2004); BLOG:
"Vital Concerns..."canfrobt@wustl.edu |
Since September, 2004
| In assessing major issues of
concern for our times we must recognize a major problem: Our world
is changing at an ever faster pace. As soon as we understand what
is going on we are out of date. So defining situations in our
times is ever more difficult and ever more contested. This is my
list.
For me one of the greatest worries about these issues is that scarcely any of my friends recognize even one of them; virtually none of my friends believes these situations are as threatening as I do. So, to this list of problems must be added one more: That those of us in the Western World who have the most to lose and collectively the most ability to do something positive, generally have little interest in tracking world affairs and little awareness of the risks to world civilization that are now at stake. |
|
THE MEDIA, DISHONESTY OF OUR GOVERNMENT, THE AMERICAN DEBT, PRISONER ABUSE, THE WHITE EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN, GENOCIDE IN DARFUR AND CONGO |
|
The failure of television journalism. It seems increasingly the case that those who rely on television for news will hear little about the abuse of prisoners by the CIA and the military. Here is Frank Rich's essay on the problem. IF YOU GET YOUR NEWS ONLY FROM TELEVISION YOU HAVE LITTLE KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE WORLD. The
demise of honest journalism The full text of the Moyers NOW
interview with Richard Viguerie, who has no interest in representing the
truth, only opinion.
My response: If CBS executives thought that journalism is just opinion they would not have felt it necessary to fire four of their top newsroom executives. Likewise, the New York Times would not have fired one of their reporters and the two top editors. Perhaps I am unduly wrought about these things, but in my old age I have become convinced that honest reporting, precise reporting – in anthropology, journalism and in any other field that seeks to represent “reality” – the claim to “truth” [recognizing how elusive it is] is crucial to the propogation of knowledge and to maintenance of a democratic society. The undermining of journalism – not a new threat, of course – is a dangerous trend in a “free” society. It is a threat to the pursuit of knowledge. Would that all news sources, including those that claim nothing more than to be “opinion” would acknowledge their public responsibility to represent the truth as they honestly know it; not just as free floating “opinion” but an honest search to represent the “truth” even if it is not what one would wish it to be. On the danger of being a journalist:
More journalists have been killed in Iraq [71] than were killed in all of World War II [69]. "Live From Baghdad: More Dying" By Maureen Dowd. New York Times May 31, 2006 A Reagan Republican on Bush Republican's Smear Tactics Is the Administration being honest?
On the release of the truth of the deception of our country by our own leadership "Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qaeda and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al-Qaeda to provide material or operational support" So says the CIA report to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2005. [See BBC 9/9/06; NYT 9/8/06] Anyone who knew the region would have known that. It is in fact not news; it was not even news in 2005. This was widely known, and certainly was known by the religious elite in the Muslim world, some of whose associates had been executed by Saddam because he distrusted them. It is tragic that such a report had to be written at all and that it is considered news now, after so much loss of life based on a misrepresentation that was repeatedly made by the President, the Vice President, and their staffs as justification for abandoning the war in Afghanistan and turning attention to Iraq. Would the American people have been willing to put our troops into war in Iraq in 2003 if they had known what the President and his people already knew -- that Saddam had nothing to do with the attack on 9/11/01? SHAME. Is the Aministration being wise?
On the Iraq War
Finally. They are admitting they got it wrong. One can't doubt the objective in Iraq has failed ... [Wm F. Buckley]. Americans, conveniently, "are serial amnesiacs; as a nation,
we forget what we have done almost immediately after doing it." [Kenneth
M. Pollack in The Persian Puzzle, 2004]
In the Summer of 2006 more people were being killed in Iraq every month than were killed in America on 9/11. Recomended book: Fiasco, by Thomas E. Ricks. "...the heart
of his book is the second half, beginning in August 2003, when, as he writes,
the war really began, with the bombing of the Jordanian embassy and the
emergence of the insurgency. His strongest critique is that the U.S. military
failed to anticipate--and then failed to recognize--the insurgency, and
tried to fight it with conventional methods that only fanned its flames.
What makes his portrait particularly damning are the dozens of military
sources--most of them on record--who join in his critique, and the thousands
of pages of internal documents he uses to make his case for a war poorly
planned and bravely but blindly fought." --Tom Nissley
CONCERN THREE: THE AMERICAN DEBT DO YOU REMEMBER? STRANGE AS IT MAY SEEM, THERE WAS NO AMERICAN DEBT IN THE LATE 1990s
Tragic to say, numerous instances of abuse of prisoners authorized
by officials in high rank have taken place.
Tony Lagouranis and Allen Mikaelian. 2007. Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark Journey Through Iraq. New York: New American Library. Christianity
Today on this administration's policy on Torture
The critiques of other nations:
From a Guantanamo detainee [now freed]: "[W]hat I heard so many times resounding from cage to cage, what I said myself so many times in my moments of complete despondency, was not, "Free us, we are innocent!" but "Judge us for whatever we've done!" There is unlimited cruelty in a system that seems to be unable to free the innocent and unable to punish the guilty." [Mourad Benchellali, "Detainees in despair" NYTimes June 14, 2006] During the Holocaust: “Everything that happened, happened
because someone made a decision. To pull a trigger, to flip a switch,
to close a cattle car door, to hide, to betray. ..." : [From
A
search for six million, by Daniel Mendolsohn. NY: Harper
Collins, 2006.]
Jimmy Carter's speech to the Democratic National Convention was one of the best statements of the dilemmas created by the Bush administration that I have seen recently. Gen. Anthony Zinni. Former CentCom commander: "The 10
mistakes that Bush made." A list of the catastrophic blunders made
by the Bush team leading to the Iraq nightmare.
"Ex-Diplomats Protest Bush's Anti-Palestinian Policies." By Jim Lobe. President George W. Bush's policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not only damaging the United States' credibility worldwide, but are putting U.S.diplomats, civilian contractors and the military at heightened risk. That's the message that at least 60 former U.S. diplomats and other government officials who have served overseas will deliver to the President later this month. http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405exdip.html A Constructive Vision for America's Role in the World by George Soros. Published on Tuesday, May 18, 2004 by CommonDreams.org. Commencement Address, delivered at the Columbia School of International & Public Affairs, Monday, May 17, 2004 Click Soros here " U.S. Military Whistleblowers Face Retribution" NPR <http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1905858>, NPR text <http://www.npr.org/transcripts/story.html>
CONCERN SIX: PROBLEMS IN PAKISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN, A DANGER CENTER Afghanistan
on the brink, summer 2006
Population of Heroin Addicts in Pakistan
A statistic: Every 30 minutes a woman in Afghanistan dies in childbirth |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| CONGO: A scale of death that exeeds our imagination: 4,000,000 in the Congo. More than the population of New Zealand. |
|
Warnings from the Comptroler General of the United States "The United States faces a long-term deficit that will only increase as the babyboomers retire." "[t]he current system of fedearl financial reporting provides an unrealistic and even misleading picture of the government's overall performance and financial condition." The deficit is about "four times the entire federal budget." Dishonest
Forecasting by the Administration
Dangerous implications of media conglomerates [T]wo thirds of the newspaper markets in America are monopolies. … [As a result,] reporters, editors and critics become caged birds singing the company tune in the information-commodities racket. When they begin to have more in common with the chairman of the board than with the working stiffs who read and watch, journalism turns to slush …. I keep coming back to the subject of media conglomeration because it can take the oxygen out of democracy. The founders of this country believed a free and rambunctious press was essential to the protection of our freedoms. They couldn't envision the rise of giant megamedia conglomerates whose interests converge with state power to produce a conspiracy against the people. I think they would be aghast at how this union of media and government has produced the very kind of imperial power against which they rebelled. Check on the title to see more The Bush Administration Adopts a Worse-than-Nixonian Tactic: The Deadly Serious Crime Of Naming CIA Operatives [JOHN W. DEAN] Chicago Sun-Times journalist Robert Novak reported that Valerie Plame Wilson - the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, and mother of three-year-old twins - was a covert CIA agent. … Why was Novak able to learn this highly secret information? It turns out that he didn't have to dig for it. Rather, he has said, the "two senior Administration officials" he had cited as sources sought him out, eager to let him know. …Why is the Administration so avidly leaking this information? The answer is clear. Former ambassador Wilson is famous, lately, for telling the truth about the Bush Administration's bogus claim that Niger uranium had gone to Saddam Hussein. And the Bush Administration is punishing Wilson by targeting his wife. It is also sending a message to others who might dare to defy it, and reveal the truth. … Nonetheless, what has surfaced is repulsive. If I thought I had seen dirty political tricks as nasty and vile as they could get at the Nixon White House, I was wrong. The American Prospect's observation that "we are very much into Nixon territory here" with this story is an understatement. … Leaking the Name of a CIA Agent Is a Crime …The White House's Unusual Stonewalling About an Obvious Leak. Click on the title to see more The progressive story of America [Bill Moyers] Instead of shrinking down the government, they're filling the bathtub with so much debt that it floods the house, water-logs the economy, and washes away services for decades that have lifted millions of Americans out of destitution and into the middle-class. And what happens once the public's property has been flooded? Privatize it. Sell it at a discounted rate to the corporations. It is the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime. I'll be frank with you: I simply don't understand it - or the malice in which it is steeped. ... These people seem to long for the Gilded Age. That I can grasp. They measure America only by their place on the material spectrum and they bask in the company of the new corporate aristocracy, as privileged a class as we have seen since the plantation owners of antebellum America and the court of Louis IV. What I can't explain is the rage of the counter-revolutionaries to dismantle every last brick of the social contract. Click on the title to see more Some Crazy Guy [Paul Krugman] Maybe Mr. DeLay's public profile will be raised by his success yesterday in sabotaging tax credits for 12 million children. Those tax credits would cost only $3.5 billion. But Mr. DeLay has embedded the credits in an $82 billion tax cut package. That is, he wants to extort $22 in tax cuts (in the face of record budget deficits) for every dollar given to poor children. ... Mr. DeLay pioneered the "K Street strategy," which - in a radical break with tradition - punishes lobbying firms that try to maintain good relations with both parties. ... When an employee tried to stop Mr. DeLay from smoking a cigar on government property, the majority leader shouted, "I am the federal government." Not quite, not yet, but he's getting there.... Mr. DeLay has described the Environmental Protection Agency as "the Gestapo." ... after the Columbine school shootings, Mr. DeLay called a press conference in which he attributed the tragedy to the fact that students are taught the theory of evolution. ... what we're looking at here is a radical power play, which if it succeeds will transform our country. Yet it's considered uncool to point that out. Click on the title to see more
Denial and deception [Paul Krugman] Leaks from professional intelligence analysts, who are furious over the way their work was abused, have given us a far more complete picture of how America went to war. ... we now know that top officials, including Mr. Bush, sought to convey an impression about the Iraqi threat that was not supported by actual intelligence reports. ... And yet the political and media establishment is in denial, finding excuses for the administration's efforts to mislead both Congress and the public. ... Well, launching a war on false pretenses is, to say the least, a breach of trust. So if you admit to yourself that such a thing happened, you have a moral obligation to demand accountability - and to do so in the face not only of a powerful, ruthless political machine but in the face of a country not yet ready to believe that its leaders have exploited 9/11 for political gain. It's a scary prospect. Yet if we can't find people willing to take the risk - to face the truth and act on it - what will happen to our democracy? Click on the title to see more Read my lips [Tom Friedman] That is, when the president says he wants yet another round of reckless "tax cuts," which will shift huge burdens to our children, Democrats should simply refer to them as "service cuts," because that is the only way these tax cuts will be paid for - by cuts in services. ... "It's not the government's services, it's your services" - and thanks to the Bush tax cuts, soon you'll be paying for many of them yourself. Click on the title to see more Opening America's View [George Soros] ... Bush makes absolutely no allowance for the possibility that we may be wrong, and he has no tolerance for dissenting opinion. If you are not with us you are against us, he proclaims. ... A dominant faction within the Bush administration believes that international relations are relations of power. Because we are unquestionably the most powerful, they claim, we have earned the right to impose our will on the rest of the world. ... here is a contradiction between the Bush administration's concepts of freedom and democracy and the principles of open society. In an open society, people can decide for themselves what they mean by freedom and democracy. ...[O]ur model, which has been successful, is not available to others because our success depends greatly on our dominant position at the center of the global capitalist system, and that position is not attainable by others. ... It is a kind of crude social Darwinism in which the survival of the fittest depends on competition, not cooperation. ... We live in an increasingly interdependent world and, due to the progress of technology, our power over nature has increased by leaps and bounds. Unless we use that power wisely, we are in danger of damaging or destroying both our environment and our civilization. ... Applying the concept of power to human affairs is altogether questionable. ...The current world order is a distorted form of a global open society. It is distorted because we have global markets but we do not have global political institutions. As a consequence, we are much better at producing private goods than taking care of public goods such as preserving peace, protecting the environment and ensuring economic stability, progress and social justice. ... There are large and growing inequalities in the world, and we lack the mechanism for reducing them. Therefore we need to strengthen our international political institutions to match the globalization of our markets. Only the United States can lead the way because without U.S. participation, nothing much can be done in the way of international cooperation. Click on the title to see more EPA leaves out data on climate change [Revkin and Seeley] The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to publish a draft report next week on the state of the environment, but after editing by the White House, a long section describing risks from rising global temperatures has been whittled to a few noncommittal paragraphs. ... The editing eliminated references to many studies concluding that warming is at least partly caused by rising concentrations of smokestack and tail-pipe emissions and could threaten health and ecosystems. Among the deletions were conclusions about the likely human contribution to warming from a 2001 report on climate by the National Research Council that the White House had commissioned and that President Bush had endorsed in speeches that year. White House officials also deleted a reference to a 1999 study showing that global temperatures had risen sharply in the previous decade compared with the last 1,000 years. ... "Political staff are becoming increasingly bold in forcing agency officials to endorse junk science," ... an introductory sentence reading, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment" was cut and replaced with a paragraph that starts: "The complexity of the Earth system and the interconnections among its components make it a scientific challenge to document change, diagnose its causes, and develop useful projections of how natural variability and human actions may affect the global environment in the future." Click on the title to see more A serious report on climate change: "Be Afraid ..." The ecological burden of humanity had already outstripped the carrying capacity of the earth two decades ago. There are signs that global warming and environmental degradation are accelerating much more quickly than anyone expected even 10 years ago, and thus our ability to reduce the scale of climate change is swiftly diminishing. Click on the title to see more Deficits and dysfunction [Peter Peterson] Among the bedrock principles that the Republican Party has stood for since its origins in the 1850's is the principle of fiscal stewardship -- the idea that government should invest in posterity and safeguard future generations from unsustainable liabilities. ... Over the last quarter century, however, the Grand Old Party has abandoned these original convictions. Without ever renouncing stewardship itself -- indeed, while talking incessantly about legacies, endowments, family values and leaving ''no child behind'' -- the G.O.P. leadership has by degrees come to embrace the very different notion that deficit spending is a sort of fiscal wonder drug. ... Since 2001, the fiscal strategizing of the party has ascended to a new level of fiscal irresponsibility. For the first time ever, a Republican leadership in complete control of our national government is advocating a huge and virtually endless policy of debt creation. The numbers are simply breathtaking. When President George W. Bush entered office, the 10-year budget balance was officially projected to be a surplus of $5.6 trillion -- a vast boon to future generations that Republican leaders ''firmly promised'' would be committed to their benefit by, for example, prefinancing the future cost of Social Security. Those promises were quickly forgotten. A large tax cut and continued spending growth, combined with a recession, the shock of 9/11 and the bursting of the stock-market bubble, pulled that surplus down to a mere $1 trillion by the end of 2002. Unfazed by this turnaround, the Bush administration proposed a second tax-cut package in 2003 in the face of huge new fiscal demands, including a war in Iraq and an urgent ''homeland security'' agenda. By midyear, prudent forecasters pegged the 10-year fiscal projection at a deficit of well over $4 trillion. So there you have it: in just two years there was a $10 trillion swing in the deficit outlook. Click on the title to see more Pattern of Corruption [Paul Krugman] More than half of the U.S. Army's combat strength is now bogged down in Iraq, which didn't have significant weapons of mass destruction and wasn't supporting Al Qaeda. We have lost all credibility with allies who might have provided meaningful support ... U.S. intelligence analysts have consistently agreed that Saddam did not have a "meaningful connection" to Al Qaeda. Yet administration officials continually asserted such a connection, even as they suppressed evidence showing real links between Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia. Click on the title to see more 16 Words and counting [Nicholas D. Kristof] ...the White House, eager to spice up the State of the Union address, recklessly resurrected the discredited Niger tidbit. The Central Intelligence Agency objected, and then it and the National Security Council negotiated a new wording, attributing it all to the Brits. It felt less dishonest pinning the falsehood on the cousins. ... Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, issued an open letter to President Bush yesterday reflecting the view of many in the intel[ligence] community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The open letter called for Mr. Cheney's resignation. Click on the title to see more Deception at the Pentegon Tell me how members of Congress benefit from increasing costs like this, driving weapons systems that the country doesn't need, spending money that puts us deeper and deeper in deficit. How does Congress gain? SPINNEY: They gain because they get money flowing to their Congressional districts. It's in the way Congress gains from controlling the federal budget. They get money flowing to the districts, that helps build your power bases. Click on the title to see more Unprepared for Peace in Iraq Despite the best hopes for an Iraqi democracy, the Iraqi people and the world see only the worst fears of occupation. Instead of inspiring steps toward self-government, we witness hit-and-run murders of U.S. soldiers, terrorist attacks and sabotage. Our military action in Iraq has forged a caldron of contempt for America, a dangerous brew that may poison the efforts of peace throughout the Middle East and result in the rapid invigoration of worldwide terrorism. Click on the title to see more http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2003-05-29.htm Sleeping with the Devil. [Robert Baer] The United States' policies on Saudi Arabia, Baer argues, are built upon the delusion that Saudi Arabia is stable—that both the country and the flow of its most precious commodity can continue on indefinitely. Sustaining that delusion is the immense amount of money (estimated at $19.3 billion in 2000) exchanged between the two partners: the U.S. buys oil and sells weapons, Saudi Arabia buys weapons and sells oil. Oil and the defense contracts underpinning its protection bind these two countries together in such a way that when Saudi Arabia falls—a fate Baer feels is absolutely certain —the U.S. falls too. Perhaps not all the way down, but, if we don't curtail our dependence, he argues, a failure in Saudi Arabia could have catastrophic consequences for the United States. |