You can’t survive on salt water
You can’t survive on salt water
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Divided We Stand?
Every culture, it seems, has the same joke: Put three Koreans—or Albanians or Poles or Kenyans or Californians—in a room. After an hour of debate, they’ll form four political parties.
Annotate This: Commander Guy Bush
On May 2, President George W. Bush addressed the Associated General Contractors of America at the Willard Hotel in Washington. An appropriate venue: in the 19th century, favor-seekers waited in the hotel’s lobby for politicians to drop by after work. Thereafter, they were known as lobbyists.
Congress Plays Politics over Iraq War
In the face of furious opposition from the White House, the U.S. Congress recently voted to end the U.S. war in Iraq. The bill required U.S. troops to begin leaving Iraq before October 1 and an end to combat operations by March 2008. The White House dubbed it “defeatist legislation” that set a “date for surrender.” President Bush vetoed the bill, and Democrats do not have the two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate to overturn the veto.
Making the Forum Truly Global
The existence of the World Social Forum is already a historic achievement. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crisis of the alternative movements and theories that opposed the current system, the fact that there was again a place stating that there is an alternative was an important step.
Another World
In 1990, I thought that another world was not only possible, it was happening before my eyes. With hundreds of other activists, I was in Prague to attend the Helsinki Citizens Assembly (HCA). The Berlin Wall was no more, the Cold War was receding with breathtaking rapidity, and a new age of people’s movements seemed to be dawning. It was a time for celebration for the peace and human rights activists from throughout Europe, North America, and what would soon become the former Soviet Union. When he was helping to plan the meeting in 1988, the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel fully expected the HCA to attract the full wrath of his country’s secret police and he would spend the time in jail. By 1990, the world had turned upside down, and Havel was opening the first session of the HCA as president of a newly democratic state.
America the Exceptional
Our allies should organize an intervention. I’m not talking about a military intervention, though some neighborhoods in the United States might welcome UN peacekeepers to replace the local constabulary. I’m talking about one of those interventions that friends organize when one of their buddies has become a drug addict or keeps driving when drunk or is maxing out a dozen credit cards on the Home Shopping Network.
Bad Behavior Brings Good Results
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) apparently has a penchant for badness. For visiting Syria, the Speaker received a harsh reprimand by Vice President Dick Cheney who thought it “bad behavior.” Though the Speaker remained relatively un-phased by the scolding, Cheney made his point.
A Unified Security Budget for the United States, FY 2008
As Congress works to balance the budget and find a solution to the Iraq crisis it must also focus on a different kind of budget balancing. Our country needs a rebalanced its security budget, one that strengthens a different kind of overall U.S. presence in the world. This budget would emphasize working with international partners to resolve conflicts and tackle looming human security problems like climate change; preventing the spread of nuclear materials by means other than regime change; and addressing the root causes of terrorism, while protecting the homeland against it. The rhetoric of these intentions must be underwritten by the resources to make them real. The overall priorities set by a Unified Security Budget must both symbolically and substantially guide the United States toward a new, more balanced foreign policy.
The Plane That Won’t Die…Or Fly
Calling the V-22 Osprey a Rube Goldberg contraption does some disservice to the late cartoonist who died in 1970. Vice President Dick Cheney tried to kill the V-22 in the early 1990s, when he was defense secretary. But it lives on today, and the Marine Corps announced on April 13 that in September it will begin flying its first combat missions in Iraq. A combination helicopter-plane with bells and whistles galore might have appealed to Rube, but he wouldn’t have unveiled it in public until he’d made it work.