The worst aspect of these scenarios – with climate, with financial services – is that the partying and the hangovers have somehow been separated from one another. The rich get to enjoy themselves, and the rest of us have to deal with the morning after.
We need to shift over from the hypermilitary approach to an economic development model, and quick. But that’s going to require a major, immediate, cessation of operations in that most dangerous province of all: the rogue fiefdom of Dickistan.
The world’s attention has been riveted in 2008 by election crises in Africa, first Kenya, and now Zimbabwe. In both cases, challenges remain in converting electoral victory to political power. Can a victorious opposition come to power in the face of an obstinate incumbent? This question is particularly relevant when the incumbent regime controls the coercive apparatus of the state and the opposition only has the ballot in its corner. In the battle of the ballot vs. the bullet, can there ever be a fair match?
Look at how angry John Bolton and the congressional hawks are at the recent Bush administration decision to take North Korea off the Trading with the Enemy Act list and the State Sponsor of Terrorism list. Never mind that North Korea has served up an accounting of its nuclear programs and even destroyed the cooling tower of its Yongbyon nuclear reactor, as per agreement. The bottom line: this is what diplomacy smells like. Bolton and company, however, catch only the whiff of sulfur.
When peasant farmers in Cacahuatepec set out to work in their fields in January 2003 they found heavy equipment bulldozing down the corn, fruit trees, and fences they depend on for survival. The indigenous Nahuatl communities of this region in the mountains above Acapulco demanded an explanation from Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission and for months received no answers.
This essay originally appeared in Japan Focus.
In the 1960s, a subculture of Americans became obsessed with alien abductions. Their ur-narrative revolved around the experience of Betty and Barney Hill, a sober, middle-aged, interracial couple who told of being taken from their car one night in 1961 and subjected to medical investigation by extraterrestrials with small bodies and large foreheads. They were not the type to fabulize simply to draw attention to themselves, so their story attracted interest beyond the usual UFO fans. Gradually others came forward with similar tales.
There’s a huge difference between acknowledging the U.S. role in behind-the-scenes manipulations around the world and asserting that Washington has pulled all the strings in a half-century-long global puppet show.
That’s the world that we should strive for — where people go hungry not because they lack enough food, but because they are doing so voluntarily in the cause of peace and justice.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Geneva accords that facilitated the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. On April 14, 1988, in Geneva, representatives of the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan signed three bilateral agreements intended to end the war in Afghanistan. These agreements addressed the principles of mutual relations, in particular non-interference and non-intervention as well as the voluntary return of Afghan refugees.