It used to be that Latin Americans viewed Europe as far more humane than the United States because of the way undocumented workers there were treated. No more …
According to this editorial from Diario Co Latino of El Salvador:
“According to news coming from the Old Continent, a law passed by the European Parliament on the 18th of this month not only permits the expulsion of undocumented immigrants, but also provides for prison terms of up to 18 months and five-year prohibition on returning to Europe. … Many believed that today’s Europe, because its past was so appallingly bloody, was more democratic and humane than the U.S. But with this newly-adopted law, it has demonstrated that it’s the equal of the United States.”
July 4th, 2008 by SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
In India many boys of my generation in school grew up on a staple diet of American/British comic books (to the great annoyance of our parents who felt we were neglecting our textbooks). I was delighted to read The Independent report that comic/graphic books are emerging stronger and gaining popularity in view of the failure of the media to satisfy public thirst for information regarding the raging conflicts, including the Iraq war.
Here is what The Independent writes: “They’re a far cry from Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk. A daring new generation of graphic novelists is using the conflict in Iraq to explore America’s relationship with the rest of the world – and itself.”
But what is this ‘graphic novel’? The term ‘graphic novel’, in the Comic Books genre, was first coined by Richard Kyle in 1964, mainly as an attempt to distinguish the newly translated works from Europe which were then being published from what Kyle perceived as the more juvenile subject matter that was so common in the United States. More here…
The Independent continues:“Today’s broad countercultural coalition in the US is often motivated by frustration at the news coverage of the Iraq conflict and its aftermath from traditional media outlets. In such a climate, comic books thrive by reflecting the public bad mood, and they remain streets ahead of many of their rivals in the creative industries.
“While authors and filmmakers have taken their time preparing fictional responses to the war, comics are a relatively immediate form. In theory…’you can write and draw a comic and see it on the stands three months later. A movie can take years’.” More here…
The man was a sponge. Creating and editing New York Magazine, he soaked up the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and 1970s and gave it back to readers as a heady brew of New Journalism and cultural chic. Clay Felker, who died today at 82, was one of a kind.
Between jobs as a magazine editor, I wrote for him and witnessed the workings of his restless mind and insatiable curiosity. Visits to his office were a montage of people popping up at an open door with gossip, news and rumors and his prowls through the corridors, asking everyone who passed, “What’s new? What’s new?”
Magazine editors are unique among journalists in that they invent their readers. Rather than covering news over which they have no control, they fill their pages with whatever interests or obsesses them and, like magnets, draw the attention of those who find the results to their taste. Felker’s contemporary, Harold Hayes of Esquire, called it delivering an attitude toward the world on a regular basis.
Between them, they gave birth to the New Journalism, which mirrored a new kind of politics with a new kind of reporting. In New York, Tom Wolfe wrote about Radical Chic and Gloria Steinem profiled the man who was moving into the White House in 1968 (”When Richard Nixon is alone in a room, is there anyone there?”)
Almost single-handedly, Felker made journalism a subject of popular interest. Wolfe satirized the New Yorker, and everybody reported on the New York Times. Even I got into the act with a piece titled “The New York Times Discovers Sex” while writing about literary auctions (”What Am I Bid for Lyndon Johnson?”). Ralph Ginzburg going to jail for what he published (”The Punishment for Bad Taste Is Three Years”) and the melodrama surrounding the death of the Saturday Review.
Writers became celebrities, and Felker nurtured their fame but stayed out of the spotlight himself. After he lost New York to Rupert Murdoch in 1977, he moved to California and tried to duplicate his success there, but LA was too shallow for his kind of in-depth reporting and he turned to teaching journalism.
I would see him for lunch out there every so often, and he was still asking, “What’s new? What’s new?”
Our national schizophrenia on firearms defies rational explanation. In the wake of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision, both presidential candidates and, according to public opinion polls, most voters believe in “the right to bear arms.”
Yet only one out of three Americans owns a gun and, after mass murders like Virginia Tech, there is an upsurge of grief and outrage at the easy availability of deadly weapons.
Somehow, there is a disconnection between the idea of guns and the reality of what they do that can’t be explained away by NRA lobbying or the fierce protestations of “gun nuts.”
How do we reconcile the apparent contradiction that many of those who believe in preserving the life of fetuses are just as passionate about the right to own weapons that kill human beings after birth?
Countrywide Home Loans has pretty much been the poster child for the mortgage meltdown of the last 18 months or so. I can certainly understand why since many of my bankruptcy filings have included Countrywide. In many cases they held not just a first but also a second and even third mortgage on the homes.
Various attorneys general have filed lawsuits against the lender claiming fraudulent and criminal behavior. Today suits were filed by both Illinois and California. Ironically the suits came the same day that shareholders approved the merger between Countrywide and Bank of America.
On one level I can understand the reasoning behind these lawsuits. During the booming housing market it was possible for pretty much anyone to get a loan. If you walked in and told the lender you made $150,000 a year they just took your word for it and didn’t bother getting proof. In addition, many of the loans started out with teaser rates that made payments amazingly low before the rates spiked after a few years.
As long as the housing market continued to go up this system worked fine, the homeowner could simply refinance once the rates got too high, but since the market has collapsed this is no longer possible and people are crying foul.
To a certain degree this is a proper thing to do, given the behavior outlined above and discussed in the lawsuits. But at the same time I have a problem with excusing the homeowners as pure and innocent victims.
For one thing, many of the current foreclosures are not on homes people are living in but rather properties purchased for investment purposes. Obviously this is still a burden on people as they are losing their investment, but it is not quite the same as losing their home.
Also, in many of these cases the buyers lied about their income on the paperwork. I know there have been cases where it was the mortgage company employees who faked the paperwork and in those cases the company should be liable and the employees should go to jail. But there are also many cases where the buyer knew just what they were doing in terms of faking the paperwork.
The same holds true for many of these awful sub prime interest loans. I am not in any way excusing the fraud that people engaged in but at the same time the homeowner cannot be considered totally innocent. I have seen clients come in and show me the loan papers that allowed them to buy a 500,000 house with payments of 1,000 per month for 30 yrs.
Now I am pretty sure that even a 4th grader could do the math to figure out that 360 payments of 1,000 per month is not going to pay a 500,000 mortgage.
So while I absolutely agree that Countrywide needs to be investigated and people need to be punished, I also think we need to remember that people are to blame on all sides.
For most of us one of the most frustrating words of our childhood was the dreaded and disliked ‘Because’. When a parent would tell us we couldn’t do something or could not go somewhere and we asked why, the response was ‘Because I said so’ or just ‘Because’.
But as I grow older I think it is time we all revisit this term with a little more affection and respect. It is not much of a stretch to say that we are in less than encouraging times right now. We have a housing crisis and rising gas prices at home and an unpopular war overseas. Every day many of us cringe as we read the newspaper for the latest bad news to come across the wires.
Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that many of us have become less than cheerful about the future. But I think it is time for us to take a new look at things. Yes, the economy is in trouble, but it is not the worst economy we’ve ever had, indeed it is fairly good by historical standards. 5.5% unemployment is bad, but it is not the 20 or 30% reached during the Great Depression.
Gas prices are high, but most of us can still go to work, get our groceries and even take a vacation. For many people around the world just the idea of being able to ride in a car once is a fantasy.
The war is bad and every death is a painful one, but we are not seeing tens of thousands die like we did in past wars (nor have we ever seen the kind of death tolls suffered by many other nations around the world).
This does not, of course, mean that we do not face real problems. The ones cited above and many others are going to be taxing on all of us for weeks, months or even years to come. But the idea that our world is going to collapse tomorrow is a bit extreme, and yet it is an idea that many seem to want to promote.
The solutions to these problems will not be easy, but they will be found. We’ve had problems before and many times they have seemed far more unsolvable than todays issues, but we endured, persevered and moved on.
So take a page from your childhood and just accept those parental words…
The first general election in which I was able to vote was the British election of 1997 - held after four consecutive terms of Conservative government.
Following 13 years of Margaret Thatcher, who was thrown out in a very English coup, the Conservative party was in that year led by John Major, under whom it became rotten with hypocrisy – or “sleaze”, as it was called in almost every issue of every newspaper at the time.
I’d been brought up in a largely Conservative household, with a father who’d talk of how it was in the “bad old days of Labor” - the party that was responsible for the conditions that led to a bankrupt Britain in the ‘70s, the “Winter of Discontent” in ’78 to ’79, and the “three-day working week”, which saw trash pile up on the streets and bodies lie unburied by graves, as workers in all sectors went on paralyzing strikes.
Twenty-or-so years later, as I watched the campaigning for my first general election as a voter, a new kid on the block, Tony Blair, was leading the “New Labour” party, as he’d branded it. Since I didn’t know him from Adam, I wasn’t going to vote for him – and since I realized that the sitting Conservative administration was no Thatcher government, (and knew cowardly political wriggling when I saw it), I wasn’t going to vote for them either. Accordingly, I sat out the election, and didn’t vote.
Without having a horse in the race, I watched the results come in on the TV from a friend’s room in Cambridge. One by one, safe Conservative seats fell. A true “landslide” was indeed underway.
It was strangely exciting – not the excitement of having one’s team win, but more like that of landing for the first time in a new country.
And just like landing in a new country and getting the cab straight to the hotel immediately to sleep off the jet-lag, only the next morning can you walk the street and get any idea of what the new country feels like.
So it was, the morning after the election, with a new Labour government elect –not one I voted for – I walked the main street of Cambridge with an excited smile. I felt good but it took me a few minutes to work out why.
I’d just watched unwittingly, an entire country redefine itself – 60 million people collectively saying, “We’re not that any more; now we’re this”. Of course, no one knew exactly what “this” was going to be. But therein was an act of faith, of drawing a line, of self-confidence. In a loud clear voice, or perhaps choice, a nation said, “Today, the British choose what Britain is - and politicians do not”.
Such an act of self-assertion along is itself of great political power – not because of what it chooses, but because of what it is. Its value – quite independently of the party elected –is in reaffirming to everyone at the same that real power lies with the people. Especially when it sets a new direction, such collective decision-making inevitably jolts the political establishment more humbly back to the heel of the nation. And in so doing, an electorate not only chooses its preferred path but it also helps shapes the path taken by the new administration.
In the U.K., 11 or so years ago, walking around after the general election, all I knew was that I felt good – a little hopeful and a little proud, wondering the how exactly a collective decision could directly affect the feelings of an individual who had no direct involvement in it.
It can.
As in Britain in 1998, there will be a strong “feeling in the air” in the United States on 5 November 2008 – not least because of what has come before, in terms of leadership (or its absence), integrity (or its compromise) and political reactivity (rather than pro-activity).
How does America want to feel?
A country, like a person, acts out of the feeling it has about itself. Some say one should vote for the party whose policies one would like to see shape society; some say to vote for the character of the leader; both are reasonable. But a voter will also serve himself well by performing a little thought experiment – of imagining the feeling in the stomach when he first finds out the identity of the new President elect.
Feeling, after all, is the language of the soul. In an age of noise, of ideologies’ talking past each other and through each other, of obfuscation and a general factual inadequacy of corporate media, a gut feeling can tell more of one’s truth than any argument, ideological position, or extrapolation from history.
In the annals of presidential crime, George W. Bush is setting records again, this time violating a law he signed into existence less than a year ago.
By failing to appoint a White House coordinator for preventing nuclear terrorism, as required by Congress in a bill passed by a wide bipartisan margin last August, the Decider is going beyond using signing statements, as he has in the past, to invalidate legislation he doesn’t like.
This time, according to the Boston Globe, he is just ignoring the requirement for an “adviser focused solely on organizing the government to prevent terrorists from acquiring catastrophic weapons, such as a nuclear device, a radioactive ‘dirty bomb,’ or biological agents.”
June 22nd, 2008 by SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
It is a commentary on our times that any report from Afghanistan and Iraq in the news blogs/media now provokes at best a cynical remark, or worst a yawn. But there are a few indefatigable columnists/journalists whose assessments of the ongoing tragic drama continues to provide fresh insights. Simon Jenkins, a distinguished journalist, is one of them.
In a recent column in The Sunday Times, Jenkins makes interesting observations about Taliban and Al-Qaeda. “In seven years in Afghanistan, America, Britain and their Nato allies have made every mistake in the intervention book…They disobeyed the iron law of postimperial intervention: don’t stay too long. The British ambassador threatens ‘to stay for 30 years’, rallying every nationalist to the insurgents’ cause. The catalogue of western folly in Afghanistan is breathtaking.
“…All hope was buried in a cascade of hypotheticals. Victory would be at hand ‘if only’ the Afghan army were better, if the poppy crop were suppressed, the Pakistan border sealed, the Taliban leadership assassinated, corruption eradicated, hearts and minds won over. None of this is going to happen. The generals know it but the politicians dare not admit it.
“The Taliban’s chief objective is not world domination but a share of power in Afghanistan. While they cannot defeat western troops, they can defeat Nato’s war aim by continuing to build on their marriage of convenience with Al-Qaeda, which supplies them with a devastating arsenal of suicide bombers.
“What is sure is that Al-Qaeda, as a (grossly overrated) ‘threat to the West’, will not be suppressed without Taliban cooperation. This means reversing a policy that naively equates ‘defeating’ the Taliban with ‘winning’ the war on terror. Fighting in Afghanistan is as senseless as trying to suppress the poppy crop. It just costs lives and money.”
June 18th, 2008 by DAVID SCHRAUB, Assistant Editor
The question isn’t “is it ever justified”. Of course, sometimes it is — if America engaged in a massive genocide of the Jews, Jews would be justified in hating America. The question is, what would America have to do to an individual person for us to say, “that person is justified in hating America”? And more specifically, does years of extra-legal detention in an isolated prison where innocent people are tortured qualify?
This Guest Voice column is by Russian-Armenian banking IT specialist and Watching America translator Azat Souren Oganesian.
The Future of Russo-American Relations
by Azat Souren Oganesian
The future of Russo-American relations may be one of partnership and possible friendship or that of distrust and competition; which scenario manifests will naturally depend on the politicians and events within the two countries, but even more strongly on the events in the outside world.
The real question is whether the common threats to both America and Russia will be grave enough to make them both see a long term alliance as preferable to distrust and competition.
An historical example is valuable here. The European continent today is a place of stability and peace, where military aggression among west European states is regarded as a virtual impossibility. Nations such as France and Germany, which fought three bloody and humiliating wars in one hundred years, now coordinate their foreign policies with each other and have members of their respective nations sit in on each other’s parliamentary sessions. The European Union’s historical narrative is that these two nations, which have lost so much in these wars, have decided to cooperate to ensure that such a conflict never happens again.
There is, however, an historical view that contradicts this orthodoxy; it claims that France and Germany (alongside other major west European nations) saw a massive Soviet Union and a weakened Europe, and decided to unite or perish. With American help, a counterbalance was formed, with the frontline in northern Germany.
This was not an idealistic response, but a realistic one.
Precedents for such natural coordination exist from Herodotus to Kissinger (when the US moved toward China against the USSR). In a similar spirit of realpolitik, as Russia’s power drastically declined after 1989, Europe’s eyes turned westward and the underlying, almost subliminal message was: unity against American power.
Historically, nations that may easily become competitors, or are already competitors, put aside their natural antagonisms for a more prudent self-interest. The United States and Russia must see common competitors or enemies to remain on good terms. The most forceful statements made by Vladimir Putin during his major official visit to the Unites States in November of 2001, was that Islamic terrorism was a common threat to Russia and America. Putin coupled his war in Chechnya with the response to the attacks on 9/11. The Bush administration saw no need to contradict that line of reasoning. Russia was active in supplying the US with intelligence in the first months of the war in Afghanistan.
The rise of China may be another reason to speak in a single voice regarding major issues in the Far East. Read the rest of this entry »
The title ‘Getting Gas In Mexico’ may sound like the opening line to a really bad joke about mexican food but it is actually part of a hidden secret for those who live near the US/Mexico border.
In San Diego for example the average cost of a gallon of gas is running around $ 4.61, which is sadly typical for those of us living in the Golden State. But if you drive across the border to Mexico then the cost drops to about $ 2.54 per gallon and it’s even less if you convert over to pesos first.
There are several reasons for cheaper gas in Mexico. They are of course a major oil supplier, so they do have the advantage of resources. In addition, the state owns everything from the oil fields to the refinery, and while state ownership has many flaws it does allow the state to set the price. A 20 billion dollar subsidy is helping to keep the costs down.
Of course like everything that seems to good to be true, there are some catches to this special deal. For one thing, the local gas station is down the street while Mexican gas stations are a 30 minute drive away. Heading home can be an even longer drive due to traffic, often taking 1-2 hours.
As a result, the car may end up burning away all of the savings. According to the linked article, a car can burn a gallon of gas for every hour it idles. So the drive and the idling could burn 2-3 gallons of gas, though even then it is likely you would save some money over the whole tank.
On the other side of the spectrum, it seems some Native American reservations may be profiting from the mess. Since they are exempt from many taxes, it was long possible for reservation gas stations could charge less, but these days those deals appear to have vanished.
The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is a place most Americans rarely consider unless they are going on vacation in mid-winter. But according to this article from Spain’s La Vanguardia, the recent Democratic primary in the territory exposed an uncomfortable vein of seperatism there.
June 12th, 2008 by SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
The guessing game is becoming intense as to who would be the main players in Barack Obama’s aspiring administration. Obviously, Obama will bring in a new team to run the federal government, the Oval Office and the Democratic Party if he makes it to the White House. So who will run the country if the voters decide that Yes, He Can? The Economist takes a look at the potential candidates.
The article ends with the warning: “The ambition of Mr Obama’s team is exciting, but in office it could be dangerous. In 1993 the clever Clintons tripped up very quickly. What if Congress doesn’t care for the finely-tuned policies of Mr Obama’s top-notch economists? Or if Mr Obama finds he can’t pull out of Iraq as planned?
“Or if Americans tire of his charisma and he stops being able to attract adoring crowds tens of thousands strong? The lynchpin of his campaign has been a faith, almost messianic, in his personal excellence. If that fades, then the whole operation could collapse in frustration and disillusionment.”
Meanwhile more Americans believed that presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama can better handle economic issue, the current top concern to American voters, according to a poll released on Thursday. The poll conducted by CNN and the Opinion Research Corporation found that 50 percent of registered voters believe Obama, the Illinois Senator, would better handle the economy, while 44 percent prefer McCain in this regard. More here…
Another survey of 47,000 people in 60 languages by the Pew Global Attitudes Project shows that around the world, people who follow the US election view Obama more favourably than Republican nominee John McCain.
“Seventy-four percent of Britons expressed confidence in Obama, while only 44% do in McCain, according to the survey. The survey indicated that a world that has for several years held vehemently anti-American attitudes may be prepared to warm up to the US.”
It has often been said that just as there is no such thing as a former Marine, there is also no such thing as a former Boy Scout. Well speaking as a Boy Scout for nearly 30 years I felt obligated to post a little bit about the recent heroics by a group of young Scouts in Iowa.
This week a tornado ripped through a Boy Scout camp in Iowa. The storm killed four of the scouts and caused many injuries. Given that these are just boys, barely into their teens, it would not be at all surprising for them to have reacted with panic or fear.
But that is not what happened with this brave group of men. Echoing the long time Scouting motto “Be Prepared” they quickly sprang into action. Scouts moved to provide first aid to the injured around the camp, becoming the only form of rescue or relief as outside rescuers fought fallen trees to make the mile long trek to the camp.
Iowa Governor Chet Culver has praised the Scouts as true heroes, and I am hard pressed to argue with his assessment.
So the next time you see a group of Scouts out helping the community, take a minute to remember that sometimes these young guys in uniform show some of the heroics of their older brothers.
June 7th, 2008 by SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
If Barack Obama’s victory speech was graceful and chivalrous, Hillary Clinton’s clarion call to ensure the triumph of Obama in the race to the White House provided a fitting finale to a well fought out battle between the two Democratic Party rivals.
If Obama’s words were seen as inspiring and forgiving, Clinton’s revealed the deep emotive and sensitive side of her personality which remained her hallmark during the entire campaign. Proving her detractors wrong, Hillary showed that she was capable of leaving the past behind.
I read in the NYT the transcript of Hillary’s speech and was moved. “We may have started on separate journeys, but today our paths have merged. And we’re all heading toward the same destination, united and more ready than ever to win in November and to turn our country around, because so much is at stake.
“…During those 40 years, our country has voted 10 times for president. Democrats won only three of those times…We cannot let this moment slip away. We have come too far and accomplished too much…And that together we will work… That’s why we need to help elect Barack Obama our president.
“I have served in the Senate with him for four years. I have been in this campaign with him for 16 months. I have stood on the stage and gone toe-to-toe with him in 22 debates. I’ve had a front-row seat to his candidacy, and I have seen his strength and determination, his grace and his grit.
“In his own life, Barack Obama has lived the American dream, as a community organizer, in the State Senate, as a United States senator. He has dedicated himself to ensuring the dream is realized. And in this campaign, he has inspired so many to become involved in the democratic process and invested in our common future.”
The oratorial skills of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have held their audience in a trance. But it is time to move beyond words…and translate these into action. The sooner this happens the better it would be for the USA and the entire world.
I end with Hillary Clinton’s fervent wish: “Now, when I started this race, I intended to win back the White House and make sure we have a president who puts our country back on the path to peace, prosperity and progress. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do, by ensuring that Barack Obama walks through the doors of the Oval Office on January 20, 2009…”
June 7th, 2008 by BRIJ KHINDARIA, International Columnist
Now comes the hard part. Barack Obama has moved up from being underdog to the Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party by humbling the Party’s first family of Hillary and Bill Clinton. Hopefully, the somewhat narcissistic focus of Primary season watchers on the Democratic Party’s internal squabbles will now widen to issues that really matter for America and the world.
Yes, some of the squabbling was unseemly since it involved a white woman from America’s equivalent of royalty, however common her origin, and a half-black man whose grandfather was an illiterate goat-herder in a remote African village and whose father studied by candlelight as a boy.
Both Hilary and Barack are American success stories. They could not have happened in any other country. That should make all Americans proud, whatever further below-the-belt punches are delivered during another internecine struggle to influence the choice of Vice-Presidential running mate.
This operetta could turn into an operatic tragedy for the American nation as well as the Democrats, if the supporters of Hilary and Barack continue their wars of religion. Their fervor so far has been intense and disconcerting. Nothing was out of bounds and even bloggers tore at one another’s throats through the ether like the floating warriors of a Chinese cinematic saga.
Now, it is time to end all of that for the hard part is yet to come. The forthcoming election is not about Barack and John McCain and their running mates. It is about the role of America and Americans in the 21st century world. This century has begun badly for both the country and its citizens as participants in the world’s family of nations.
For the past half century, Americans have relied on their dollar wealth and their country’s awful military might to establish leadership in world affairs. Both are found to have feet of clay since 2002. The king is not quite naked but will get there soon, if attitudes continue unchanged.
American leadership and human values brought lasting peace to Europe after World War II and set up the kernel of a global community through the grand concept of a United Nations. They have worn so thin in recent years that nobody, not even loyal Britain, agrees with or follows the White House’s lead. Other Europeans and the governments of other continents are farther still from the American world view.
This is an untenable situation because Americans are no longer protected from the world by their two great oceans. Undeniably, issues vital for America and Americans include energy sufficiency and pricing; the frequency of climate-related catastrophes; global financial speculation, a sick dollar and inefficient risk assessment; the dangerous volatility of commodity and food prices; the burgeoning cost of health care and disease prevention; and the declining quality of basic and higher education.
Each of these issues affects domestic USA and the health, safety and livelihood of most readers of this space. None has an exclusively American or nationalistic solution. Nothing that Americans can do on their own can solve or significantly dampen the bite of these issues. Their impacts are not merely economic or social. They also directly affect the human security and homeland security of the US.
Overlaying these perils are the botched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the very foggy war against terrorism. In addition, the military and economic rise of Russia and China hold menace of new Cold Wars, while Islamic terrorism could trigger a very long drawn-out clash of civilizations.
The above is just a first summary of the most noticeable challenges facing this country. Despite its vast wealth, the US is no longer rich enough to buy its way out of any of these problems nor is it militarily strong enough to intimidate into submission those who challenge it.
The main reasons are that many others in the world are becoming richer and militarily stronger by the day. With each passing year the choices become starker —either all of us talk and get along somehow or all may have to face Armageddon through nuclear war, climate change or some new disease.
On its own, America no longer has the strength required to police the world. However, it does still have the huge reservoirs of creative thinking needed to seed the globe with processes capable of nurturing peace, health and prosperity. The missing ingredient is trust both among Americans and with other countries. The only requirement is to stop fighting at home.
The starting point is to end the fratricide within the Democratic Party. Without that, the Presidential nominee or Hilary Clinton will not be free to think beyond the self-absorbed blinkers of their supporters.
The 56th Bilderberg Meeting, an annual conference of influential politicians and businessmen, began Thursday in Chantilly, Virgina, according to a press release from the organization.
The Conference will end Sunday and deals mainly with a nuclear free world, cyber terrorism, Africa, Russia, finance, protectionism, US-EU relations, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Islam and Iran.
According to the press release, the meeting is private in order to encourage frank and open discussion.
About 140 participants will attend, of whom about two-thirds come from Europe and the balance from North America. About one-third is from government and politics, and two-thirds are from finance, industry, labor, education and communications.
An official list of the attendees can be found at Alex Jones’ Infowars.
Steve Lodefink says: A lot of my favorite fringe/kook information sites are chattering about the Secret Bilderberg meeting that is going on in the D.C. suburbs this week. Here is what the History Channel says. This is Wikipedia on the topic.
June 5th, 2008 by SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
There are people, within and outside the USA, who view the Nixon era as the beginning of a conscious effort to divide the country, and launching of ‘a civil war’ that would be politically advantageous to the ruling side. Are there now signs that the war may be coming to an end after four decades?
“There is genuine reason to hope that 2008 will bring at last an armistice — maybe even a lasting peace — in America’s Forty Years War, the internal conflict more commonly known as the Culture Wars, which began in 1968,” says historian Robert S. McElvaine, who is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts and Letters at Millsaps College. His latest book, Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America, has just been published by Crown.
“The charge of ‘elitism’ is one that Republicans have heaved at Democratic candidates to great advantage since the Sixties. Indeed, the Republican Party has been running as the anti-Sixties party for four decades now. That has been the main casus belli in America’s Forty Years War.
“It was left to George W. Bush…to carry the cultural warriors to the point of complete smashup.
“How fitting — even how poetic — it is that Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic presidential nomination during the week in which we mark the fortieth anniversary of the death of Robert F. Kennedy. This harmonic convergence has deep significance.
“These events may come to be seen as the bookends of the second American civil war, a war that has divided the nation and been a dominant force in our politics for four decades…”
