Friday, July 24, 2009

VOX POPULI





THE BIRTH OF AGRICULTURE


About 15,000 years ago, when the continental glaciers began to retreat, primitive peoples stumbled upon the fertile Levant region, which borders the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, and the area known as the Fertile Crescent, which stretches from the southeast coast of the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. In these regions, abundant stands of wild wheat and barley grew in thickets on the uplands.


The stone-age peoples gathered the wild plants and used primitive stone grinders to process the cereals. The stability of this food supply encouraged people to build vented pottery in which to store and cook it. The began herding wildlife instead of hunting them. This led to a new system of animal husbandry. Wild dogs were also tamed and trained to manage several chores, including rounding up herds and warning of danger.


ERICKSON, J. Ices Ages: Past and Future. TAB books. USA. 1990. pp. 65.


'Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs' Welcome to my world!



No se me quita lo chismoso, deveras. No contento con leer las noticias diariamente, ahí me tienen interesado en las opiniones en la sección de comentarios del portal online de uno de los periódicos de circulación nacional. Una anécdota llama mi pronto mi atención, en ella el autor reseña un diálogo "casual" con un miembro de nuestra heroica PFP. El guardián del (¿constitucional?) orden habría "confesado" a su interlocutor que la guerra contra el narco no es más que una ad hoc puesta en escena, que todo está ya arreglado mero arriba, y que las capturas son escrupulosamente seleccionadas, tan en así que regularmente golpean a bandas rivales de los consentidos del sexenio. Hasta ahí no habría de pasar por una más de las expresiones populares que ven moros con tranchete a los sobrehumanos esfuerzos de nuestras eficientes autoridades policiales. Sin embargo, me atrae más la respuesta de otro compa, que en un dos por tres descalifica la anterior historia arguyendo que el anterior comentarista de seguro sabrá más del tema que la mismísima CIA y nuestros autóctonos cuerpos de inteligencia; quesque mejor hubiera de ser cobijado como asesor plenipotenciario pa´ resolver algunos de los más “enredados” problemas de seguridad pública de nuestro atribulado país.


aztec calendar Pictures, Images and Photos


Una interrogante, sin embargo, rueda en mi mente: ¿cómo es que algunas de estas leyendas urbanas son consistentes con ciertas elucubraciones periodísticas o académicas? Fieldwork, serendipity, or logical deduction? ¿O es que aún quedan terrenos inexplorados que esperan ser descubiertos? ¿Qué hay allá afuera en la calle que aún los más avezados teóricos ignoran?


marx Pictures, Images and Photos


Ciertamente, las (socialmente comprometidas) mentes más brillantes de México no parecen estar haciéndolo mal. Son ellos quienes creyeron en todos nosotros y demostraron fehacientemente el fraude en la elección presidencial de 2006, que tantas broncas ha causado a nuestra República Mexicana. Fueron los expertos que simpatizan con nuestro movimiento quienes balconearon el “gánsteril” manejo del presupuesto nacional durante la época de bonanza en los precios del barril de petróleo, una auditoria aún no resuelta, mi estimada Lolita. Los cerebros mejor entrenados del país nos avisaron de la difícil situación que padecen nuestros hermanos que emigraron pa´l norti, en esta difícil coyuntura of nearly (economic) depression in the states. Son nuestras luminarias quienes nos han advertido del esquizofrénico comportamiento del gabinete presidencial en cuanto al devastado sector turístico. Pero sobre todo, estos competentes académicos nos han estado develando que sólo un puñado de países han resistido esta mega crisis, y sin lugar a dudas ninguno de ellos (como el nuestro) sigue aplicando unas recetas económicas que hoy, con tal de ser benévolos, diremos que resultan obsoletas.



Desde el día de mi retorno a México he platicado con varios comp@s: desde la fabricante y vendedora de artesanías en El Tajín; a la prolífica señora de las aparentemente fuera de lugar tortillas de harina en el sótano de las golondrinas; rememorando también a los taxistas en Tampico y Morelia; volver mentalmente junto al guía turístico en las lagunas de Montebello, hasta llegar al adolescente matamorense de las historias narcas, han colaborado involuntariamente con nuestra causa.


Globalization Pictures, Images and Photos


Todos ellos, no obstante, comparten una característica: difícilmente tienen conciencia plena de lo que significa para los renegados, lo que estos comp@s reporteros han vivido, escuchado, visto, olido, palpado, percibido, e intuido. Pero todas sus experiencias han ayudado a que nuestras super stars hurguen para encontrar respuestas, o para exponer investigaciones y proyectos que parecían estarían eternamente enlatados. Si usted ha seguido con lupa la dinámica nacional, encontrará que una no despreciable franja de la sociedad mexicana está ya dispuesta a participar activamente en los sucesos cotidianos que directamente afectan su calidad de vida, lo cual tira por la borda el mito del apático (otros son los apátridas) mexicano.


three caballeros Pictures, Images and Photos


La mujer maravilla me comentaba recientemente que un compañero suyo le señalaba que el país está que arde, pero que no hay un verdadero líder que pudiera encabezar la rebelión que se avecina. Nosotros, los incansables huérfanos del 2006, sabemos que círculos de estudio, conferencias, mesas redondas, debates, son un método sistemático (y pacífico) para alcanzar nuestra madurez ciudadana, esta sabiduría popular está coja sin su contraparte, que es el análisis crítico. Los caminos de la ciencia son muy escrutables. Uno de los propósitos de este adiestramientos es prepararnos para, en un futuro cercano, exigir que a cada mexicano, sin distingo de ninguna especie, se le faciliten los medios necesarios y suficientes para que desarrolle su potencial humano, entienda objetivamente su entorno y, de ser posible armónicamente transforme, para el bien común, sus deficiencias naturales o artificiales. AL TIEMPO.



M@RCadencioso;


Av. San Diego, Cuernavaca; MOR(azán);


24/07/09.



..."Cuando el TECOLOTE canta..."



PREGUNTAS SIN RESPUESTA:


¿Qué países han realmente disminuido la desigualdad social durante el so called período neoliberal?


SPECIAL REQUESTS:


Que el roñoso se llame, Charlie, ¿no?



SITIO INTERNÉ DE LA SEMANA:


Asia Times online:


http://www.atimes.com/



ENCORE CON HARTA PACHOCHA:





Un Premio Nobel para Mrs. Clinton

(Tomado de Cubadebate)

El interminable documento leído ayer por el Nobel Oscar Arias es mucho peor que los 7 puntos del acta de rendición que había propuesto el 18 de julio.

No se comunicaba con la opinión internacional a través de una clave Morse. Hablaba delante de las cámaras de televisión que transmitían su imagen y todos los detalles del rostro humano, que suele tener tantas variables como las huellas digitales de una persona. Cualquier intención mentirosa se puede descubrir con facilidad. Yo lo observaba cuidadosamente.

Entre los televidentes, la inmensa mayoría conocía que en Honduras tuvo lugar un golpe de Estado. A través de ese medio se informaron de los discursos pronunciados en la OEA, la ONU, el SICA, la Cumbre de los No Alineados y otros foros; habían visto los atropellos, los abusos y la represión al pueblo en actividades que llegaron a reunir cientos de miles de personas protestando contra el golpe de Estado.

Lo más extraño es que, cuando Arias exponía su nueva propuesta de paz, no deliraba; creía lo que estaba diciendo.

Aunque muy pocos en Honduras podían ver las imágenes, en el resto del mundo muchas personas lo vieron y también lo habían visto cuando él propuso los famosos 7 puntos el 18 de julio. Sabían que el primero de ellos decía textualmente: "La legítima restitución de José Manuel Zelaya Rosales en la Presidencia de la República hasta el fin del período constitucional por el cual fue electo¼ "

Todos deseaban saber qué diría ayer por la tarde el mediador. El reconocimiento de los derechos del Presidente Constitucional de Honduras, con las facultades reducidas casi a cero en la primera propuesta, fue relegado a un sexto lugar en el segundo proyecto de Arias, donde ni siquiera se emplea la frase "legitimar la restitución."

Muchas personas honestas están asombradas y tal vez atribuyen a oscuras maniobras suyas lo que dijo ayer. Quizás yo sea uno de los pocos en el mundo que comprenda que había una autosugestión, más que una intención deliberada en las palabras del Nobel de la Paz. Me percaté de eso especialmente cuando Arias, con especial énfasis y palabras entrecortadas por la emoción, habló de la multitud de mensajes que Presidentes y líderes mundiales, conmovidos por su iniciativa, le habían enviado. Es lo que le pasa por la cabeza; ni siquiera se da cuenta de que otros Premios Nobel de la Paz, honestos y modestos, como Rigoberta Menchú y Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, están indignados por lo ocurrido en Honduras.

Sin duda alguna que gran parte de los gobiernos civiles de América Latina, los cuales conocían que Zelaya había aprobado el primer proyecto de Arias y confiaban en la cordura de los golpistas y sus aliados yanquis, respiraron con alivio, el cual duró solo 72 horas.

Visto desde otro ángulo, y volviendo a las cosas que prevalecen en el mundo real, donde el imperio dominante existe y casi 200 estados soberanos tienen que lidiar con todo tipo de conflictos e intereses políticos, económicos, medioambientales, religiosos y otros, solo falta algo para premiar la genial idea yanqui de pensar en Oscar Arias, para tratar de ganar tiempo, consolidar el golpe, y desmoralizar a los organismos internacionales que apoyaron a Zelaya.

En el 30 Aniversario del Triunfo de la Revolución Sandinista, Daniel Ortega recordando con amargura el papel de Arias en el primer Acuerdo de Esquipulas, declaró ante una enorme multitud de patriotas nicaragüenses: "Los yanquis lo conocen bien, por eso lo escogieron como mediador en Honduras". En ese mismo acto, Rigoberta Menchú, de ascendencia indígena, condenó el golpe.

Si se cumplían simplemente las medidas acordadas en la reunión de Cancilleres en Washington el golpe de Estado no habría podido sobrevivir a la resistencia pacífica del pueblo hondureño.

Ahora los golpistas se están moviendo ya en las esferas oligárquicas de América Latina, algunas de las cuales, desde altas posiciones estatales, ya no se ruborizan al hablar de sus simpatías por el golpe y el imperialismo pesca en el río revuelto de América Latina. Exactamente lo que Estados Unidos deseaba con la iniciativa de paz, mientras aceleraba las negociaciones para rodear de bases militares la patria de Bolívar.

Hay que ser justos, y mientras esperamos la última palabra del pueblo de Honduras, debemos demandar un Premio Nobel para Mrs. Clinton.

Fidel Castro Ruz
Julio 23 de 2009
2 y 30 p.m.


Desert sex amidst financial storm

23 July, 2009, 10:18

As hard times hit the world’s mainstream businesses, ladies in red are still making a living earning hard cash in brothels of the US state of Nevada.



Every man knows that women do not come cheap – something the sex industry has long capitalized on, even during recessions.

Read more

“I feel this business is recession proof, because it’s more of a luxury than a necessity. So if you cannot afford it, then you’re not gonna come,” explains Famous Alicia, a professional that has been working in legal brothels for over 15 years through all the economic ups and downs.

People have been coming to Chicken Ranch for ages. Found in Nevada, the only state where these businesses are legal, it is the longest running brothel in the US.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the girls of Chicken Ranch used to trade intimate services for live poultry, hence the brothel’s name. Now that the economy is in another recession, and trading chickens is no longer an option, but the remarkable thing about this business is that, despite the crisis, they keep raking in the dough.

Chicken Ranch choices can wet any appetite, but the $3,000 a night bungalow is empty on an early morning, and even for Famous Alicia, this is not full time work.

“I also have my realtor’s license. I have rental properties here along the strip, some of the hotel condos. And then I have a few homes – residential homes that I rent out in southern California as well,” boasts Alicia.

40 miles through the desert, in Las Vegas, you can find a former US marine, now known as Jessica Belle. In the process of transforming her gender, she also depends on the adult industry.

“It’s just a means to survive. You know, you have to do whatever’s gonna feed you at night and what keeps you afloat,” says a former marine.

Jessica is anything but a busty bimbo. Her personal blog shows an in depth understanding of the US financial system.

“You might ask yourself how can Americans have a negative interest rate, and it’s because they’re continuing to borrow and spend more than they can save, so that right there shows you that credit is expanding to a point where it’s inevitable for it to collapse,” predicts Jessica Belle.

Jessica does not just pose questions – she has answers. Former marine Belle says that “If we had sound currency based on gold and silver then you would not give up power to somebody to counterfeit money. Because that’s exactly what the Federal Reserve does, they counterfeit money. If you or I decided to print our own money, we would be thrown in prison, but they do it everyday in the trillions.”

So if even Las Vegas is feeling the economic pinch and the oldest profession in the world is taking a dive, it appears the future does not look so bright.







En Italia no basta con ver lo que sucede en el escenario. Como dice Roberto Scarpinato, autor del libro Il ritorno del Principe y fiscal adjunto de Palermo, la historia de Italia ocurre ob-scena, fuera de escena. Quitando el foco del tupido follaje del reality pornopolítico de Estado, que mantiene ocupado al público soberano con grabaciones y declaraciones escandalosas, se da uno de bruces con otras declaraciones que ayudan a entender mejor el sentido de la farsa erótico-pornográfica que tanta audiencia suscita en el mundo entero. Vayamos por flashes.

1. Hace un año Massimo Ciancimino, hijo de Vito Ciancimino, alcalde mafioso que participó en el “saqueo” urbanístico de Palermo durante los años 60 y 70, después de una larga temporada en la cárcel condenado por lavar el tesoro del padre, comienza a colaborar con la justicia sacándose de la chistera tres cartas que la mafia envió a Berlusconi en un periodo comprendido entre 1991 y 1995 (1). Estas tres cartas ya han pasado a formar parte del proceso contra el senador Marcello Dell'Utri, "embajador de Cosa Nostra ante uno de los grupos económico financieros más importantes del País, la Fininvest", fundador de Forza Italia después, condenado en primera instancia a nueve años de cárcel por mafia. Se prevé que esas misivas acabarán teniendo consecuencias políticas también para Berlusconi. Por si fuera poco, Massimo Ciancimino asegura que tiene un documento que prueba que existió una negociación entre Cosa Nostra y el Estado. Ayer la Comisión parlamentaria antimafia decidió abrir una investigación al respecto.

2. Toto Riina, Capo dei capi, "padrino de padrinos", el pasado día 19 de julio, aniversario de la muerte del juez Borsellino, declara a Repubblica, a través de su abogado Luca Cianferoni, que a Borsellino, “lo mataron ellos”, que él “no tiene nada que ver con esa historia”.

Francesco La Licata, un periodista experto en mafia, en un artículo titulado El Padrino nunca habla por hablar, advierte que Palermo suele ser "un laboratorio donde se experimentan guiones que luego se exportan y representan en el panorama nacional". En las últimas elecciones europeas el Partido de la Libertad de Berlusconi sólo alcanzó el 36,44% en Sicilia, cuando lo normal era superar el 45%, mientras que el Movimiento por la Autonomía del Sur del gobernador de Sicilia, Raffaele Lombardo, superó el 13%. En una palabra: Sicilia traicionó a Berlusconi. Detrás de la "estrategia mediática de desmantelamiento institucional" a la que asistimos actualmente, detrás del folletín de Estado con Papi, Noemí, la D'Addario y las veline, habría algo más. Crece el consenso del “Partido del Sur”; nace un nuevo referente político para Cosa Nostra.

Ayer mismo, Antonio Bassolino, presidente de la Región Campania, representante político de referencia del Partido Democrático en Nápoles y alrededores, en una entrevista al Corriere afirmaba que "nunca había hablado de partido del Sur", para añadir después que “hace falta un movimiento político-cultural de inspiración moderna que dialogue con las fuerzas mejores del Norte y desmonte el mensaje monotemático de que el Sur es el mal”.

Algo está cambiando en Italia. Ya lo anunció de modo oscuro el cerebro de la siniestra sinistra, Massimo D'Alema. El 14 de junio declaró: “Habrá sacudidas de terremoto. La oposición ha de estar lista y ser responsable”. Se interpretaron sus palabras como anuncio del ataque mediático al sultán Berlusconi. El día 5 de julio volvió a repetir: “Habrá más sacudidas”. Resulta cada vez más difícil esconder mediáticamente la crisis; la prensa extranjera insiste en sus ataques al Cavaliere; lo ataca buena parte del mundo católico, mientras el Vaticano se lava las manos. Si le faltara el apoyo político de las mafias, tal vez estaríamos asistiendo, ahora sí, al otoño de Berlusconi.

Notas:

1. En una de esas cartas Cosa Nostra pide a Berlusconi una de sus tres cadenas televisivas y amenazan con matar a uno de sus hijos.







Thursday, July 23, 2009


"Argentina: Turning Around" - an Interview With Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young

by: Benjamin Dangl, t r u t h o u t | Interview


"Argentina: Turning Around" is an exciting film which captures the spirit of Argentina's grassroots response to economic meltdown. Drawing from diverse interviews and incredible footage, the film offers an inside look at the victories and challenges of Argentina's neighborhood assemblies, protest movements and worker-run factories. "Argentina: Turning Around" skillfully transmits the country's courageous examples of social change.

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In this interview, film directors Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young talk about what led them to make the film, how the social and political environment in Argentina has changed since the 2001 economic crash, and how Argentina's methods of combating economic crisis on a grassroots level might offer lessons to activists in the US facing economic trouble.

Argentina: Turning Around is a documentary available from Bullfrog Films .

Benjamin Dangl: What led you to make this film, and how is it connected to the story of your previous film on Argentina, "Hope in Hard Times?"

Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young: Just as we prepared to leave for the World Social Forum in southern Brazil, and then to visit Argentina, the dominant US media reported Argentina's economic and political collapse of late 2001 with pictures of people pounding on the shuttered banks and the news that 30 people had been shot and killed by the police in just one day. We almost canceled our plans to visit Argentina for fear that it might be too dangerous or depressing. But friends in Buenos Aires encouraged us to come anyway.

And when we got there we saw what was not reported in the dominant media - a remarkable resurgence of grassroots democracy, mutual aid and cooperation, with street corner assemblies that sometimes led to takeovers of unused banks to form neighborhood centers, factories that had been shut down and were reopened by their workers in defiance of the law, large-scale community gardens, and daily mass blockades of streets and highways to demand government action to help those most hurt by the economic crisis. We pulled out our traveling camera and began to film. Although we were only able to stay for a couple of weeks, we continued to follow events in Argentina and returned six months later for more filming. The result was "Argentina: Hope in Hard Times" (2004) which has screened all over the world in its English and Spanish versions and has even been translated into Chinese for a screening in Hong Kong.

We were invited to screen "Hope in Hard Times" at the 2005 Festival de los Documentalistas in Buenos Aires. While in Argentina again, we tried to assess if things were back to business as usual, or if there were some fundamental changes from when we were last there. We revisited the grassroots projects in our film with camera in hand, and we even screened "Hope in Hard Times" in a couple of the worker-run factories. Many neighborhood assemblies were no longer active, but the factories that had been taken over by worker cooperatives were surviving and thriving, and we filmed at a few more.

We also visited a new community cooperative run by unemployed workers in the poor suburb of La Matanza, and a villa de miseria (slum) on the outskirts of Buenos Aires founded by cartoneros (recyclers). We met with economists, journalists and activists, including Esteban Magnani, author of "The Silent Change," who helped us to appreciate that the long-term significance of the events of 2001-2002 goes well beyond the accomplishment of a given factory or neighborhood. As Magnani puts it in "Argentina: Turning Around," "It was a miracle! People took over the scene again. We said that we are the protagonists of our own history, and we want to be the protagonists."

BD: Could you describe some of the main ways that Argentina's social and political environment has changed since the 2001-2002 economic crash and subsequent popular activism and organizing?

MD and MY: This is what "Argentina: Turning Around" addresses. For most people life has become more normal again. Once the emergency passed, the intense grassroots activity subsided, but many efforts in communities and workplaces continue. In 2003, Nestor Kirchner was elected president, and he was succeeded by his wife Cristina Fernández in 2007. They both talked a more populist line, and persuaded the courts and government agencies to give worker-run factories a chance to prove themselves [even as former owners tried to get them back]. Argentina paid off its entire debt to the IMF with help from Venezuela. They began to prosecute human rights offenders from the military dictatorship of 1976-83 (also touched on in "Turning Around"). As the economy recovered substantially in 2004-2007, official unemployment rates dropped from over 20 percent to eight percent. We were told that people would never again let the Argentine government favor the demands of global corporations and institutions at the expense of regular people, such as what happened in the 1990's.

Of course, now Argentina is feeling the effects of the global financial crisis, and right now too, the swine flu. The economy is down and unemployment is up. The expansion of lands planted with transgenic soy has raised food prices and contributed to inflation. And President Cristina Fernandez's party lost seats in the June midterm elections, with criticism from both right and left. (For more information, see Argentine journalist Marie Trigona's writings about swine flu and recent elections in Argentina.)

On a return visit earlier this year, we found that the 200 or so worker-run factories continue to "occupy, resist, and produce." A few have failed but others have started up. When eviction has been threatened by former owners, often the public has shown up to demonstrate their support for the worker-run enterprises. For the history of the Zanon ceramics plant, one of the first to be seized by its workers, see this article. Similar worker-run enterprises have taken root in Brazil, Venezuela and most recently, Uruguay.

BD: Could Argentina's experience with economic crisis and methods of combating that crisis on a grassroots level offer any lessons to activists in the US facing economic trouble?

MD and MY: Although there is seldom inspiring news from Latin America in the US press, we believe we can learn a lot from Argentina's activism, especially from the can-do spirit of horizontalidad (non-hierarchical organizations). As Esteban Magnani puts it in "Turning Around," "There is a vibe in the air that the important thing is to do it, to find your own way to do it, and to help other people find their own way!"

When "Hope in Hard Times" came out over four years ago, people at screenings in the US would say, "We have seen similar policies, such as off-shoring of jobs and privatization of public services here in the US. Will we have an economic collapse of our own? And if we do, would we pull together as people did in Argentina?" Fast forward a few years and we are in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The corporate agenda of globalization and privatization has been discredited.

Many in the US have quit expecting solutions from the top and are becoming active with others in their local communities, with a particular emphasis on local food and alternative energy. Workers at Republic Windows and Doors occupied their Chicago factory late last year, to demand severance pay and benefits after the factory closed, and they won. That factory is scheduled to reopen under new management to produce energy-conserving windows. Their example was followed by workers at Hartmarx clothing, who voted in May to sit in at their plants to protect their jobs.

But so far, we haven't seen workers begin to run these plants themselves. Even in Argentina, self-management didn't happen right away. At the beginning of "Argentina: Turning Around," Soledad Bordegaray of the Union of Unemployed Workers says, "It's not like people began with the idea of running things ourselves, we weren't taught to think that way. But no existing institutions were responding to our needs for jobs, education, and health care. People got together and said, why wait for someone else? Let's see what WE can do!"

We produced these films to encourage our own resurgence of grassroots democracy here in the US. It is hard to imagine resolving the current economic situation and the challenges of energy and climate change by relying on the same top-down, profit-maximizing institutions that got us into this mess in the first place.

BD: What are you working on now?

MD and MY: Earlier this year we visited Argentina again and personally delivered copies of "Argentina: Turning Around" to all who appear in the film. Our travels led us to film some of the current struggles of indigenous peoples in northwest Argentina. The expansion of mining contracts, burgeoning grape production for wines, and the lucrative soy plantations that produce animal feed for export are exerting pressure on the traditional lands of indigenous peoples. We also witnessed the successful vote in Bolivia for the new constitution that provides more rights for indigenous peoples. Some short pieces about these struggles will appear soon on You Tube. At the moment, we are preparing our most recent documentary for public TV broadcast in English and Spanish, "Good Food." Recently we signed a license with public TV in Argentina to broadcast "Buena Comida." Our web site is http://www.movingimages.org, and you can contact us through info@movingimages.org

"Argentina: Turning Around" is available from Bullfrog Films.

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Benjamin Dangl is the editor of TowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events, and UpsideDownWorld.org, a web site covering activism and politics in Latin America.


Greedy Banks

by: | Visit article original @ Le Monde | Editorial

Pretending that nothing had happened.... As though the global crisis they provoked weren't daily dragging along with it its cortège of social dramas, human tragedies and economic routs, banks are reviving yesterday's practices. The practices of a pre-crisis world. In the United States, investment bank Goldman Sachs is shamelessly preparing to fund an envelope of some $20 billion to devote to coming bonuses, or the sum the G-8 allocates to combating hunger in the world!

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French Economy, Industry and Employment Minister Christine Lagarde told London's Financial Times, "I think it is an absolute disgrace that guaranteed bonuses of several years could still be paid, or that some people are thinking of reinstating the old ways of compensating with insufficient relationship between compensation and lasting performance and risk management." (Photo: AP)


As though in the good old days, when, with complete impunity, they cooked up their little deals sheltered from the real world, the banks are reviving their guaranteed bonuses, intended to compensate bankers for their significant risk-taking, even as their original profits transform themselves into colossal losses. While the crisis is going to deepen the gap between rich and poor even further, these bonuses for greed are profoundly shocking. "Excess and one-upmanship," is the formula Ariane Obolensky, director general for the French Banking Federation, used in the July 22 La Tribune, excess and one-upmanship proscribed in France, thanks to the code on variable compensation adopted in the beginning of the year, but which exist elsewhere in Europe.

Christine Lagarde did not mince her words in the Financial Times of July 22: "I think it is an absolute disgrace that guaranteed bonuses of several years could still be paid, or that some people are thinking of reinstating the old ways of compensating with insufficient relationship between compensation and lasting performance and risk management." The [French] minister of the economy is in step with Barack Obama, who, on July 20, pronounced his own stern judgment: "You don't get the sense," he said, "that folks on Wall Street feel any remorse for taking all these risks; you don't get a sense that there's been a change of culture and behavior as a consequence of what has happened."

Less than four months ago, during the G-20 in London at the beginning of April, all the planet's great and powerful pledged to never allow the financial sphere to get the upper hand over the state ever again. They promised and swore: the crisis would be redemptive. It would supply new tools to regulate a world that had become insane. The post-crisis world would be completely different from the pre-crisis world. "Alas," says Mrs. Lagarde, "the 'old ways' are returning. They increase inequalities; they are dangerous for the economy as a whole; they arouse incomprehension and anger. They must cease."

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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.


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Opposition Goes to Court Over 'Voting Fraud'

By Na Jeong-ju
Staff Reporter

A coalition of three opposition parties filed an injunction with the Constitutional Court, Thursday, to nullify the passage of a bill reforming the broadcasting sector, claiming the governing party violated the law during voting Wednesday.

The legal action came after the National Assembly revised a set of disputed media reform bills aimed at allowing newspapers and conglomerates to own stakes in broadcasting stations, amid a opposition boycott.

Initially, the voting for the broadcasting bill fell short of the required number of voters, but Assembly vice speaker Lee Yoon-sung of the governing Grand National Party (GNP) called for a second vote to pass the bill.

Rep. Lee presided over the balloting on behalf of speaker Kim Hyong-o, who couldn't enter the Assembly main chamber as opposition lawmakers blocked his way.

"The re-vote is a clear violation of the National Assembly Law so the passage is invalid," said Rep. Kim Jong-ryul of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP).

According to the National Assembly Secretariat, however, it was legitimate for the Assembly to vote again because the vice speaker nullified the initial voting after finding a technical error in the voting system.

In the past, the Assembly has voted again on the same bill on four occasions, the secretariat said in a statement.

The argument came as opposition parties are threatening to boycott all remaining sessions and take to the street to hold rallies to protest the passage of the bills.

The DP claimed many of the votes were cast not by lawmakers, but by their aides or colleagues, as most GNP legislators were unable to get to their own seats while the balloting was taking place.

DP Chairman Rep. Chung Sye-kyun and floor leader Lee Kang-rae said they will give up their Assembly seats in protest of what they called "voting fraud."

Rep. Choi Moon-soon of the DP, who served as president and CEO of MBC-TV, tendered his resignation to protest the votes.

"From now on, we will move outside of the Assembly to bring attention to all the wrongdoings of this government," Chung told reporters Wednesday.

The GNP controls 169 seats in the 299-member legislature, compared with the DP's 84 seats.

Thousands of unionized workers at the country's newspaper and television networks have gone on strike, but the government vowed a crackdown, saying the strike was illegal. Opposition parties are set to join the striking workers.

The governing camp is expected to take steps to ease public anxiety over the passage of media reform bills, but the National Assembly may remain in limbo for a while, according to analysts.

President Lee Myung-bak may replace some Cabinet ministers and presidential secretaries this or next week to make a breakthrough in the political stalemate.

Cheong Wa Dae made no official comment on the passage of the media bills, but appeared to be satisfied.

jj@koreatimes.co.kr

How Constant War Became the American Way of Life


By David Bromwich, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on July 22, 2009, Printed on July 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141503/

On July 16, in a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the "central question" for the defense of the United States was how the military should be "organized, equipped -- and funded -- in the years ahead, to win the wars we are in while being prepared for threats on or beyond the horizon." The phrase beyond the horizon ought to sound ominous. Was Gates telling his audience of civic-minded business leaders to spend more money on defense in order to counter threats whose very existence no one could answer for? Given the public acceptance of American militarism, he could speak in the knowledge that the awkward challenge would never be posed.

We have begun to talk casually about our wars; and this should be surprising for several reasons. To begin with, in the history of the United States war has never been considered the normal state of things. For two centuries, Americans were taught to think war itself an aberration, and "wars" in the plural could only have seemed doubly aberrant. Younger generations of Americans, however, are now being taught to expect no end of war -- and no end of wars.

For anyone born during World War II, or in the early years of the Cold War, the hope of international progress toward the reduction of armed conflict remains a palpable memory. After all, the menace of the Axis powers, whose state apparatus was fed by wars, had been stopped definitively by the concerted action of Soviet Russia, Great Britain, and the United States. The founding of the United Nations extended a larger hope for a general peace. Organizations like the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and the Union of Concerned Scientists reminded people in the West, as well as in the Communist bloc, of a truth that everyone knew already: the world had to advance beyond war. The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut called this brief interval "the Second Enlightenment" partly because of the unity of desire for a world at peace. And the name Second Enlightenment is far from absurd. The years after the worst of wars were marked by a sentiment of universal disgust with the very idea of war.

In the 1950s, the only possible war between the great powers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, would have been a nuclear war; and the horror of assured destruction was so monstrous, the prospect of the aftermath so unforgivable, that the only alternative appeared to be a design for peace. John F. Kennedy saw this plainly when he pressed for ratification of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty -- the greatest achievement of his administration.

He signed it on October 7, 1963, six weeks before he was killed, and it marked the first great step away from war in a generation. Who could have predicted that the next step would take 23 years, until the imagination of Ronald Reagan took fire from the imagination of Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik? The delay after Reykjavik has now lasted almost another quarter-century; and though Barack Obama speaks the language of progress, it is not yet clear whether he has the courage of Kennedy or the imagination of Gorbachev and Reagan.

Forgetting Vietnam

In the twentieth century, as in the nineteenth, smaller wars have "locked in" a mentality for wars that last a decade or longer. The Korean War put Americans in the necessary state of fear to permit the conduct of the Cold War -- one of whose shibboleths, the identification of the island of Formosa as the real China, was developed by the pro-war lobby around the Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek. Yet the Korean War took place in some measure under U.N. auspices, and neither it nor the Vietnam War, fierce and destructive as they were, altered the view that war as such was a relic of the barbarous past.

Vietnam was the by-product of a "containment" policy against the Soviet Union that spun out of control: a small counterinsurgency that grew to the scale of almost unlimited war. Even so, persistent talk of peace -- of a kind we do not hear these days -- formed a counterpoint to the last six years of Vietnam, and there was never a suggestion that another such war would naturally follow because we had enemies everywhere on the planet and the way you dealt with enemies was to invade and bomb.

America's failure of moral awareness when it came to Vietnam had little to do with an enchantment with war as such. In a sense the opposite was true. The failure lay, in large part, in a tendency to treat the war as a singular "nightmare," beyond the reach of history; something that happened to us, not something we did. A belief was shared by opponents and supporters of the war that nothing like this must ever be allowed to happen to us again.

So the lesson of Vietnam came to be: never start a war without knowing what you want to accomplish and when you intend to leave. Colin Powell gave his name to the new doctrine; and by converting the violence of any war into a cost-benefit equation, he helped to erase the consciousness of the evil we had done in Vietnam. Powell's symptomatic and oddly heartless warning to George W. Bush about invading Iraq -- "You break it, you own it" -- expresses the military pragmatism of this state of mind.

For more than a generation now, two illusions have dominated American thinking about Vietnam. On the right, there has been the idea that we "fought with one hand tied behind our back." (In fact the only weapons the U.S. did not use in Indochina were nuclear.) Within the liberal establishment, on the other hand, a lone-assassin theory is preferred: as with the Iraq War, where the blame is placed on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, so with Vietnam the culprit of choice has become Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

This convenient narrowing of the responsibility for Vietnam became, if anything, more pronounced after the death of McNamara on July 6th. Even an honest and unsparing obituary like Tim Weiner's in the New York Times peeled away from the central story relevant actors like Secretary of State Dean Rusk and General William Westmoreland. Meanwhile, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger seem to have dematerialized entirely -- as if they did nothing more than "inherit" the war. The truth is that Kissinger and Nixon extended the Vietnam War and compounded its crimes. One need only recall the transmission of a startling presidential command in a phone call by Kissinger to his deputy Alexander Haig. The U.S. would commence, said Kissinger, "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia [using] anything that flies on anything that moves."

No more than Iraq was Vietnam a war with a single architect or in the interest of a single party. The whole American political establishment -- and for as long as possible, the public culture as well -- rallied to the war and questioned the loyalty of its opponents and resisters. Public opinion was asked to admire, and did not fail to support, the Vietnam War through five years under President Lyndon Johnson; and Nixon, elected in 1968 on a promise to end it with honor, was not held to account when he carried it beyond his first term and added an atrocious auxiliary war in Cambodia.

Yet ever since Senator Joe McCarthy accused the Democrats of "twenty years of treason" -- the charge that, under presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the U.S. had lost a war against Communist agents at home we did not even realize we were fighting -- it has become a folk truth of American politics that the Republican Party is the party that knows about wars: how to bring them on and how to end them.

Practically, this means that Democrats must be at pains to show themselves more willing to fight than they may feel is either prudent or just. As the legacy of Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton attests, and as the first half year of Obama has confirmed, Democratic presidents feel obliged either to start or to widen wars in order to prove themselves worthy of every kind of trust. Obama indicated his grasp of the logic of the Democratic candidate in time of war as early as the primary campaign of 2007, when he assured the military and political establishments that withdrawal from Iraq would be compensated for by a larger war in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

We are now close to codifying a pattern by which a new president is expected never to give up one war without taking on another.

From Humanitarian Intervention to Wars of Choice

Our confidence that our selection of wars will be warranted and our killings pardoned by the relevant beneficiaries comes chiefly from the popular idea of what happened in Kosovo. Yet the eleven weeks of NATO bombings from March through June 1999 -- an apparent exertion of humanity (in which not a single plane was shot down) in the cause of a beleaguered people -- was also a test of strategy and weapons.

Kosovo, in this sense, was a larger specimen of the sort of test war launched in 1983 by Ronald Reagan in Grenada (where an invasion ostensibly to protect resident Americans also served as aggressive cover for the president's retreat from Lebanon), and in 1989 by George H.W. Bush in Panama (where an attack on an unpopular dictator served as a trial run for the weapons and propaganda of the First Gulf War a year later). The NATO attack on the former Yugoslavia in defense of Kosovo was also a public war -- legal, happy, and just, as far as the mainstream media could see -- a war, indeed, organized in the open and waged with a glow of conscience. The goodness of the bombing was radiant on the face of Tony Blair. It was Kosovo more than any other engagement of the past 50 years that prepared an American military-political consensus in favor of serial wars against transnational enemies of whatever sort.

An antidote to the humanitarian legend of the Kosovo war has been offered in a recent article by David Gibbs, drawn from his book First Do No Harm. Gibbs shows that it was not the Serbs but the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) that, in 1998, broke the terms of the peace agreement negotiated by Richard Holbrooke and thus made a war inevitable. Nor was it unreasonable for Serbia later to object to the American and European demand that NATO peacekeepers enjoy "unrestricted passage and unimpeded access" throughout Yugoslavia -- in effect, that it consent to be an occupied country.

Americans were told that the Serbs in that war were oppressors while Albanians were victims: a mythology that bears a strong resemblance to later American reports of the guilty Sunnis and innocent Shiites of Iraq. But the KLA, Gibbs recounts, "had a record of viciousness and racism that differed little from that of [Serbian leader Slobodan] Milosevic's forces." And far from preventing mass killings, the "surgical strikes" by NATO only increased them. The total number killed on both sides before the war was about 2,000. After the bombing and in revenge for it, about 10,000 people were killed by Serb security forces. Thus, the more closely one inquires the less tenable Kosovo seems as a precedent for future humanitarian interventions.

Clinton and Kosovo rather than Bush and Iraq opened the period we are now living in. Behind the legitimation of both wars, however, lies a broad ideological investment in the idea of "just wars" -- chiefly, in practice, wars fought by the commercial democracies in the name of democracy, to advance their own interests without an unseemly overbalance of conspicuous selfishness. Michael Ignatieff, a just-war theorist who supported both the Kosovo and Iraq wars, published an influential article on the invasion of Iraq, "The American Empire: The Burden," in New York Times Magazine on January 5, 2003, only weeks before the onset of "shock and awe." Ignatieff asked whether the American people were generous enough to fight the war our president intended to start against Iraq. For this was, he wrote,

"a defining moment in America's long debate with itself about whether its overseas role as an empire threatens or strengthens its existence as a republic. The American electorate, while still supporting the president, wonders whether his proclamation of a war without end against terrorists and tyrants may only increase its vulnerability while endangering its liberties and its economic health at home. A nation that rarely counts the cost of what it really values now must ask what the 'liberation' of Iraq is worth."

A Canadian living in the U.S., Ignatieff went on to endorse the war as a matter of American civic duty, with an indulgent irony for its opponents:

"Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that the empire's interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state... Regime change also raises the difficult question for Americans of whether their own freedom entails a duty to defend the freedom of others beyond their borders... Yet it remains a fact -- as disagreeable to those left wingers who regard American imperialism as the root of all evil as it is to the right-wing isolationists, who believe that the world beyond our shores is none of our business -- that there are many peoples who owe their freedom to an exercise of American military power... There are the Bosnians, whose nation survived because American air power and diplomacy forced an end to a war the Europeans couldn't stop. There are the Kosovars, who would still be imprisoned in Serbia if not for Gen. Wesley Clark and the Air Force. The list of people whose freedom depends on American air and ground power also includes the Afghans and, most inconveniently of all, the Iraqis."

And why stop there? To Ignatieff, the example of Kosovo was central and persuasive. The people who could not see the point were "those left wingers" and "isolationists." By contrast, the strategists and soldiers willing to bear the "burden" of empire were not only the party of the far-seeing and the humane, they were also the realists, those who knew that nothing good can come without a cost -- and that nothing so marks a people for greatness as a succession of triumphs in a series of just wars.

The Wars Beyond the Horizon

Couple the casualty-free air war that NATO conducted over Yugoslavia with the Powell doctrine of multiple wars and safe exits, and you arrive somewhere close to the terrain of the Af-Pak war of the present moment. A war in one country may now cross the border into a second with hardly a pause for public discussion or a missed step in appropriations. When wars were regarded as, at best, a necessary evil, one asked about a given war whether it was strictly necessary. Now that wars are a way of life, one asks rather how strong a foothold a war plants in its region as we prepare for the war to follow.

A new-modeled usage has been brought into English to ease the change of view. In the language of think-tank papers and journalistic profiles over the past two years, one finds a strange conceit beginning to be presented as matter-of-fact: namely the plausibility of the U.S. mapping with forethought a string of wars. Robert Gates put the latest thinking into conventional form, once again, on 60 Minutes in May. Speaking of the Pentagon's need to focus on the war in Afghanistan, Gates said: "I wanted a department that frankly could walk and chew gum at the same time, that could wage war as we are doing now, at the same time we plan and prepare for tomorrow's wars."

The weird prospect that this usage -- "tomorrow's wars" -- renders routine is that we anticipate a good many wars in the near future. We are the ascendant democracy, the exceptional nation in the world of nations. To fight wars is our destiny and our duty. Thus the word "wars" -- increasingly in the plural -- is becoming the common way we identify not just the wars we are fighting now but all the wars we expect to fight.

A striking instance of journalistic adaptation to the new language appeared in Elisabeth Bumiller's recent New York Times profile of a key policymaker in the Obama administration, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy. Unlike her best-known predecessor in that position, Douglas Feith -- a neoconservative evangelist for war who defined out of existence the rights of prisoners-of-war -- Flournoy is not an ideologue. The article celebrates that fact. But how much comfort should we take from the knowledge that a calm careerist today naturally inclines to a plural acceptance of "our wars"? Flournoy's job, writes Bumiller,

"boils down to this: assess the threats against the United States, propose the strategy to counter them, then put it into effect by allocating resources within the four branches of the armed services. A major question for the Q.D.R. [Quadrennial Defense Review], as it is called within the Pentagon, is how to balance preparations for future counterinsurgency wars, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, with plans for conventional conflicts against well-equipped potential adversaries, like North Korea, China or Iran.

"Another quandary, given that the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan have lasted far longer than the American involvement in World War II, is how to prepare for conflicts that could tie up American forces for decades."

Notice the progression of the nouns in this passage: threats, wars, conflicts, decades. Our choice of wars for a century may be varied with as much cunning as our choice of cars once was. The article goes on to admire the coolness of Flournoy's manner in an idiom of aesthetic appreciation:

"Already Ms. Flournoy is a driving force behind a new military strategy that will be a central premise of the Q.D.R., the concept of 'hybrid' war, which envisions the conflicts of tomorrow as a complex mix of conventional battles, insurgencies and cyber threats. 'We're trying to recognize that warfare may come in a lot of different flavors in the future,' Ms. Flournoy said."

Between the reporter's description of a "complex mix" and the planner's talk of "a lot of different flavors," it is hard to know whether we are sitting in a bunker or at the kitchen table. But that is the point. We are coming to look on our wars as a trial of ingenuity and an exercise of taste.

Why the Constitution Says Little About Wars

A very different view of war was taken by America's founders. One of their steadiest hopes -- manifest in the scores of pamphlets they wrote against the British Empire and the checks against war powers built into the Constitution itself -- was that a democracy like the United States would lead irresistibly away from the conduct of wars. They supposed that wars were an affair of kings, waged in the interest of aggrandizement, and also an affair of the hereditary landed aristocracy in the interest of augmented privilege and unaccountable wealth. In no respect could wars ever serve the interest of the people. Machiavelli, an analyst of power whom the founders read with care, had noticed that "the people desire to be neither commanded nor oppressed," whereas "the powerful desire to command and oppress." Only an appetite for command and oppression could lead someone to adopt an ethic of continuous wars.

In the third of the Federalist Papers, written to persuade the former colonists to ratify the Constitution, John Jay argued that, in the absence of a constitutional union, the multiplication of states would have the same unhappy effect as a proliferation of hostile countries. One cause of the wars of Europe in the eighteenth century, as the founders saw it, had been the sheer number of states, each with its own separate selfish appetites; so, too, in America, the states, as they increased in number, would draw external jealousies and heighten the divisions among themselves. "The Union," wrote Jay, "tends most to preserve the people in a state of peace with other nations."

A democratic and constitutional union, he went on to say in Federalist 4, would act more wisely than absolute monarchs in the knowledge that "there are pretended as well as just causes of war." Among the pretended causes favored by the monarchs of Europe, Jay numbered:

"a thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts; ambition or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families, or partisans. These and a variety of motives, which affect only the mind of the Sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice, or the voice and interests of his people."

When, thought Jay, the people are shorn of their slavish dependence, so that they no longer look to a sovereign outside themselves and count themselves as "his people," the motives for war will be proportionately weakened.

This was not a passing theme for the Federalist writers. Alexander Hamilton took it up again in Federalist 6, when he spoke of "the causes of hostility among nations," and ranked above all other causes "the love of power or the desire of preeminence and dominion": the desire, in short, to sustain a reputation as the first of powers and to control an empire. Pursuing, in Federalist 7, the same subject of insurance against "the wars that have desolated the earth," Hamilton proposed that the federal government could serve as an impartial umpire in the Western territory, which might otherwise become "an ample theatre for hostile pretensions."

Consider the prominence of these views. Four of the first seven Federalist Papers offer, as a prime reason for the founding of the United States, the belief that, by doing so, America will more easily avert the infection of the multiple wars that have desolated Europe. This was the implicit consensus of the founders. Not only Jay and Hamilton, but also George Washington in his Farewell Address, and James Madison and Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams as well as John Quincy Adams. It was so much part of the idealism that swept the country in the 1780s that Thomas Paine could allude to the sentiment in a passing sentence of The Rights of Man. Paine there asserted what Jay and Hamilton in the Federalist Papers took for granted: "Europe is too thickly planted with kingdoms to be long at peace."

Have we now grown too used to the employment of our army, navy, and air force to be long at peace, or even to contemplate peace? To speak of a perpetual war against "threats" beyond the horizon, as the Bush Pentagon did, and now the Obama Pentagon does, is to evade the question whether any of the wars is, properly speaking, a war of self-defense.

At the bottom of that evasion lies the idea of the United States as a nation destined for serial wars. The very idea suggests that we now have a need for an enemy at all times that exceeds the citable evidence of danger at any given time. In The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson gave a convincing account of the economic rationale of the American national security state, its industrial and military base, and its manufacturing outworks.

It is not only the vast extent and power of our standing army that stares down every motion toward reform. Nor is the cause entirely traceable to our pursuit of refined weapons and lethal technology, or the military bases with which the U.S. has encircled the globe, or the financial interests, the Halliburtons and Raytheons, the DynCorps and Blackwaters that combine against peace with demands in excess of the British East India Company at the height of its influence. There is a deeper puzzle in the relationship of the military itself to the rest of American society. For the American military now encompasses an officer class with the character and privileges of a native aristocracy, and a rank-and-file for whom the best possibilities of socialism have been realized.

Barack Obama has compared the change he aims to accomplish in foreign policy to the turning of a very large ship at sea. The truth is that, in Obama's hands, "force projection" by the U.S. has turned already, but in more than one direction. He has set internal rhetorical limits on our provocations to war by declining to speak, as his predecessor did, of the spread of democracy by force or the feasibility of regime change as a remedy for grievances against hostile countries. And yet we may be certain that none of the wars the new undersecretary of defense for policy is preparing will be a war of pure self-defense -- the only kind of war the American founders would have countenanced. None of the current plans, to judge by Bumiller's article, is aimed at guarding the U.S. against a power that could overwhelm us at home. To find such a power, we would have to search far beyond the horizon.

The future wars of choice for the Defense Department appear to be wars of heavy bombing and light-to-medium occupation. The weapons will be drones in the sky and the soldiers will be, as far as possible, special forces operatives charged with executing "black ops" from village to village and tribe to tribe. It seems improbable that such wars -- which will require free passage over sovereign states for the Army, Marines, and Air Force, and the suppression of native resistance to occupation -- can long be pursued without de facto reliance on regime change. Only a puppet government can be thoroughly trusted to act against its own people in support of a foreign power.

Such are the wars designed and fought today in the name of American safety and security. They embody a policy altogether opposed to an idealism of liberty that persisted from the founding of the U.S. far into the twentieth century. It is easy to dismiss the contrast that Washington, Paine, and others drew between the morals of a republic and the appetites of an empire. Yet the point of that contrast was simple, literal, and in no way elusive. It captured a permanent truth about citizenship in a democracy. You cannot, it said, continue a free people while accepting the fruits of conquest and domination. The passive beneficiaries of masters are also slaves.

David Bromwich, the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke's speeches, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform, has written on the Constitution and America's wars for The New York Review of Books and The Huffington Post.

© 2009 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
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