Dick Cheney, Role Model for Sarah Palin?

Dick Cheney, Role Model

New York Times, October 3, 2008

In all the talk about the vice-presidential debate, there was an issue that did not get much attention but kept nagging at us: Sarah Palin’s description of the role and the responsibilities of the office for which she is running, vice president of the United States.

In Thursday night’s debate, Ms. Palin was asked about the vice president’s role in government. She said she agreed with Dick Cheney that “we have a lot of flexibility in there” under the Constitution. And she declared that she was “thankful that the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also, if that vice president so chose to exert it.”

It is hard to tell from Ms. Palin’s remarks whether she understands how profoundly Dick Cheney has reshaped the vice presidency — as part of a larger drive to free the executive branch from all checks and balances. Nor did she seem to understand how much damage that has done to American democracy.

Mr. Cheney has shown what can happen when a vice president — a position that is easy to lampoon and overlook — is given free rein by the president and does not care about trampling on the Constitution.

Mr. Cheney has long taken the bizarre view that the lesson of Watergate was that Congress was too powerful and the president not powerful enough. He dedicated himself to expanding President Bush’s authority and arrogating to himself executive, legislative and legal powers that are nowhere in the Constitution.

This isn’t the first time that Ms. Palin was confronted with the issue. In an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News, the Alaska governor was asked what she thought was the best and worst about the Cheney vice presidency. Ms. Palin tried to dodge: laughing and joking about the hunting accident in which Mr. Cheney accidentally shot a friend. The only thing she had to add was that Mr. Cheney showed support for the troops in Iraq.

There was not a word about Mr. Cheney’s role in starting the war with Iraq, in misleading Americans about weapons of mass destruction, in leading the charge to create illegal prison camps where detainees are tortured, in illegally wiretapping Americans, in creating an energy policy that favored the oil industry that made him very rich before the administration began.

Ms. Couric asked Joseph Biden, Ms. Palin’s rival, the same question in a separate interview. He had it exactly right when he told her that Mr. Cheney’s theory of the “unitary executive” held that “Congress and the people have no power in a time of war.” And he had it right in the debate when he called Mr. Cheney “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had in American history.”

The Constitution does not state or imply any flexibility in the office of vice president. It gives the vice president no legislative responsibilities other than casting a tie-breaking vote in the Senate when needed and no executive powers at all. The vice president’s constitutional role is to be ready to serve if the president dies or becomes incapacitated.

Any president deserves a vice president who will be a sound adviser and trustworthy supporter. But the American people also deserve and need a vice president who understands and respects the balance of power — and the limits of his or her own power. That is fundamental to our democracy.

So far, Ms. Palin has it exactly, frighteningly wrong.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/opinion/04sat1.html

Roger Cohen: Nixon, Bush, Palin

Nixon, Bush, Palin

by Roger Cohen, New York Times, October 1, 2008

Credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

In 1970, in the midst of the longest bear market since World War II, President Richard Nixon declared: “Frankly, if I had any money, I’d be buying stocks right now.”

The market soared.

Now, I’ve been asking myself, just for the heck of it, what would happen if President Bush tried his own jawboning of the market and said: “Frankly, if I had any money, I’d be buying stocks right now.”

My conclusion is: Mr. President, please, please do not say that! I reckon the market could tank in ways that would make this week’s one-day 777 point plunge look paltry.

I’m not about to write a paean to Nixon. I watched him quit in a bar in Bolinas, Calif.; I can still hear the cheer. But even his tortured, sleazy nature betrayed some essential seriousness about the fate of the United States. By contrast, the Bush crowd has gambled the future of this country with abandon.

(And Nixon did resign as impeachment loomed. Whatever happened to the notion that someone — a cabinet member, a Wall Street C.E.O., the inventor of credit-default swaps — might actually fall on his or her sword? Shame has become a quaint chivalric notion, like honor, a thing of another American time.)

A closer look at the Bush gamble is merited because the first person to reprice risk on the basis it no longer existed was the president. Now, that’s leading by example.

The gamble involved going to war in Iraq at an estimated cost to date of about $700 billion (does that figure sound familiar?), while opting not to raise taxes but to lower them. It involved going into that war, and another in Afghanistan, while asking not for shared sacrifice but a great collective maxing-out in the service of: shopping.

At the same time, Bush, who often seemed to need directions to the Treasury, opted to allow an opaque derivatives market to grow into the trillions without supervision, regulation or information. The market knew best. Turns out that what the market knew best was how to turn capitalism into a pyramid scheme for trading worthless paper.

The cost is now clear. But we should be grateful for small mercies. Remember Bush wanted to throw Social Security into the casino, too, by privatizing it!

Market capitalism is a sophisticated thing that calls for transparency, ethics and rules. Bush and his crowd gambled that some “new paradigm” meant these things were passé.

They’re not. We have to be careful now. Already the contagion of bank failures has spread to Europe. People are asking of the United States: what became of this country?

The Chinese have been ready to treat U.S. Treasuries as a rock-hard store of value and loan us the dollars they accumulate at a very low interest rate. But what if they start to doubt the U.S. government will repay its debt?

“We are getting closer to a tipping-point,” said Benn Steil, an economist. “People are asking: can we really trust the dollar as a store of value?”

The Bretton Woods system of monetary management collapsed in 1971, under Nixon. Since then the dollar’s been the primary reserve currency. Now, we’re reaching another point where a rethink of the foundations for a global economy is needed.

Global trade and capital flows are essential to prosperity. But it’s illogical to have a global system with no global reserve as insurance. Perhaps the trillions of Gulf and Chinese surpluses could be used to finance that. Or perhaps it’s time for a return to the gold standard.

I know one thing: this is no time for further gambling. John McCain rolled the dice on Sarah Palin. I’m grateful to Bob Rice of Tangent Capital for pointing out that the actuarial risk, based on mortality tables, of Palin becoming president if the Republican ticket wins the election is about 1 in 6 or 7.

That’s the same odds as your birthday falling on a Wednesday, or being delayed on two consecutive flights into Newark airport. Is America ready for that?

The lesson of the last eight years is this: when power is a passport to gamble, people can end up seriously broke or seriously dead.

There is one capable, sober guy in the Bush administration: Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He recently said that U.S. forces in Iraq had to learn counterinsurgency on the job. “But that came at a frightful human, financial and political cost,” he noted.

Gates warned that “warfare is inevitably tragic, inefficient.” He urged skepticism of any notion that “adversaries can be cowed, shocked or awed into submission, instead of being tracked down, hilltop by hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block.”

In short, he lambasted the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush war effort for its gambler’s irresponsibility. The financial equivalent of reckless “Shock and Awe” has been “Sub and Prime.”

And people’s houses across America really did go up in smoke.

And fear stalked the land.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/opinion/02Cohen.html

Roger Cohen: The King Is Dead

The King Is Dead

by Roger Cohen, New York Times, September 17, 2008

They’re listening to Coldplay down on Wall Street:

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

The leverage party’s over for the masters of the universe. Shed a tear. When you trade pieces of paper for other pieces of paper instead of trading them for real things, one day someone wakes up and realizes the paper’s worth nothing. And Lehman Brothers, after 158 years, has gone poof in the night.

We’re witnessing the passing of more than a venerable firm. We’re seeing the death of a culture.

For years, accountants, rating agencies and Wall Street executives decided to shoot craps and collect fees. Regulators, taking their cue from a distracted President Bush, took a nap. The two M’s — Money and Me — became the lodestones of the zeitgeist, and damn those distant wars.

The biggest single-day market drop since 9/11 reminded me that when trading reopened on Sept. 17, 2001, and the Dow plunged 684.81 points, some executives backdated their options to reprice them at this postattack low to increase their potential gains.

So that’s what “financial killing” really means. No better illustration exists of a culture where private gain has eclipsed the public good, public service, even public decency, and where the cult of the individual has caused the commonwealth to wither.

That’s the culture we’ve lived with. It’s over now. Some new American beginning is needed.

When I taught a journalism course at Princeton a couple of years ago, I was captivated by the bright, curious minds in my class. But when I asked students what they wanted to do, the overwhelming answer was: “Oh, I guess I’ll end up in i-banking.”

It was not that they loved investment banking, or thought their purring brains would be best deployed on Wall Street poring over a balance sheet, it was the money and the fact everyone else was doing it.

I called one of my former students, Bianca Bosker, who graduated this summer and has taken a job with The Monitor Group, a management consultancy firm (she’s also writing a book). I asked her about the mood among her peers.

“Well, I have several friends who took summer internships at Lehman that they expected to lead to full-time job, so this is a huge issue,” she said. “You can’t believe how intensely companies like Merrill would recruit at Ivy League schools. I mean, when I was a sophomore, if you could spell your name, you were guaranteed a job.”

But why do freshmen bursting to change the world morph into investment bankers?

“I guess the bottom line is the money. You could be going to grad school and paying for it, or earning six figures. And knowing nothing about money, you get to move hundreds of millions around! No wonder we’re in this mess: turns out the best and the brightest make the biggest and the worst.”

According to the Harvard Crimson, 39 percent of work-force-bound Harvard seniors this year are heading for consulting firms and financial sector companies (or were in June). That’s down from 47 percent — almost half the job-bound class — in 2007.

These numbers mirror a skewed culture. The best and the brightest should think again. Barack Obama put the issue this way at Wesleyan University in May: beware of the “poverty of ambition” in a culture of “the big house and the nice suits.”

College seniors might start by reading “A New Bank to Save Our Infrastructure” in the current edition of The New York Review of Books, an impassioned plea from Felix Rohatyn (who knows something of financial rescues) and Everett Ehrlich for the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank, or N.I.B.

Its aim, at a time when the Chinese are investing $200 billion in railways and building 97 new airports, would be to use public and private capital to give coherence to a vast program of public works. “This can improve productivity, fight unemployment and raise our standard of living,” Rohatyn told me.

It’s absurd that earmarks — the self-interested budgetary foibles of senators and representatives — should dictate the progressive dilapidation of America. How can the commonwealth thrive when its bridges sag, its levees cede, its public transport creaks?

So, young minds, sign up for the N.I.B.! Before doing so, read Nick Taylor’s stirring “American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the W.P.A.: When F.D.R. Put the Nation to Work.” It shows how the Works Progress Administration, a linchpin of Roosevelt’s New Deal, put millions of unemployed to work on dams, airports and the like. It’s a book about how imaginative political leadership can rally a nation in crisis.

They’re listening to Coldplay down on Wall Street:

Now the old king is dead! Long live the king!

Yes, the death of the old is also the birth of the new. In my end is my beginning. It’s time for the best and the brightest to step forth and rediscover the public sphere.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/opinion/18cohen.html

Roger Cohen: How Home Became Homeland

How Home Became Homeland

by Roger Cohen, New York Times, September 3, 2008

Oh, it’s good to be home.

The threat level has been raised (or was that lowered?) to orange. I wonder idly what this means — an image of medium-intensity jihadist chatter menacing Armonk, N.Y., comes to mind — but I have no time to get that vision in focus before another cheery message rolls out across the airport.

“Do not make jokes about security. You could be arrested.”

O.K., I won’t ask the Transport Security Administration guys with “TSA” on their shirts if the letters stand for “Team Standing Around,” and I won’t say, “Hey, remember how the U.S.A. used to be a land without fences and nobody ever called it a homeland,” and I won’t say, “Arrested? Ha! And then what?”

Nor will I mention the other America before “threat levels” and two wars and renditions and bumper stickers saying “Freedom is not free” — the land where jokes were not yet grounds for arrest and nobody got wrestled to the floor for “looking” suspicious and fear was not yet a coin of the realm.

Oh, but it’s good to be home, even if it’s a homeland now.

Just take a look at our home! A screeching belt in a bunker-like, airless hall (last painted in 1957) turns and turns without bags on it, watched by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ragged travelers straining to hear inaudible announcements, darting here and there like ants in a panic, blocking their ears against the screech, comforting babies, searching in vain for Delta baggage agents who’ve all gone home because there was a storm and it’s late and, hey, it’s summer!

Some of the marooned crowd are on cellphones screaming “Sorry, honey, you cut out, WHAT?” and the chorus rises, “Sorry, honey, you cut out, WHAT?” and I think that’s not a bad bumper sticker for this unraveled, disconnected homeland almost eight years into Bush.

Oh, yes, it’s good to be home.

Even if it’s a homeland, at least it’s not a fatherland. And how, I wonder, does our home look to others? As former President Bill Clinton noted at the Democratic national convention in Denver, the United States does better when it leads with “the power of our example” than with “the example of our power.”

To think this airport is named after J.F.K. — all that promise, and my Dad weeping at his loss in faraway London. Kennedy who asked us to ask ourselves what we could do for our country. Whatever happened to Lincoln’s “last, best hope?”

It got frayed. Let’s stop talking about an infrastructure bottleneck, sounds too like something in a Soviet 10-year Plan, and start talking about collapsing bridges, crawling trains, dilapidated airports, potholed roads, subway blues — the great national failure to build a network of public transport worthy of a modern state in the age of $110 oil.

We’ve been spending too much on fear while others spend on the future. And now J.F.K. looks like LOTH — Lagos-on-the-Hudson — while the Hong Kong airport shimmers the way American promise once did.

Yes, it’s good to be home. As Robert Frost noted, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.”

Unless you make the wrong joke, or knock yourself out on the scaffolding, or have a weird beard.

Speaking of the Democratic National Convention, security there involved police in shades with sub-machine guns riding around on the backs of trucks and the image they summoned with their truculent menace was Pinochet’s Chile circa 1986, the main difference being the Colorado vehicles still had license plates.

Police dogs combed through the gym and pool area of the Denver Grand Hyatt sniffing goggles and towels as wide-eyed kids gaped.

And there, at the convention, was another Kennedy, Senator Edward Kennedy, rising from his hospital bed with a bull-like courage that nobody who witnessed it will forget, and saying, unbowed: “We are all called to a better country and a newer world.”

Yes, it can still be good to be home.

Barack Obama had this to say: “America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.”

I reckon John McCain can agree with that. Everyone — Democrat, Republican or independent — can. Certainly the rest of the world can. Its thirst to close the Bush chapter is near feverish.

Winston Churchill said of the United States that it can be counted on to do “the right thing,” but only after it has tried every alternative. As Roger Smith, an acute political observer and blogger, put it in an e-mail: “Well, George W. is every other alternative.”

Unless you count Sarah Palin, John McCain’s new sidekick, the Republican lady risen from the ice out near Russia. She’s certainly alternative.

It’s good to be home, but it sure could be better.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/opinion/04Cohen.html

Arnaldo Jabor e Obama

Dear Arnaldo,

One of the things that I have always liked and admired about you is your continuing youthful outlook (in spite of your obvious weariness of lambasting Brazilian politicians and other thugs). And, of course it is true that we are all strongly affected by the experiences of our youth, which in your case you spent in St. Augustine during a period in U.S. history when events loomed large in the collective imagination.

But, don't forget that you lived in the South, and there are other regions in the U.S. with vastly different ways of doing things.

And, although I hate to remind you of this, your generation is not the same as the present generation. Many Americans are proud and pleased to see a black American well on his way to becoming President, as this has the effect of letting them off the guilt hook somewhat.

Personally, I don't believe Obama's skin color leaves him more at risk of being shot -- we have had lots of U.S. presidents shot -- and all of them were white, as I recall.

The only thing Obama really has going against him is the impression he makes of being a snooty intellectual. Lately, Americans have preferred to look down on their presidents, not up to them (well, except for Monica, that is).

Times have sure changed since you went to high school in Florida.

BOLETIM FEBRACTA: Controladores de Tráfego Aéreo Brasileiros

BOLETIM FEBRACTA

Controladores de Tráfego Aéreo Brasileiros,

Há alguns dias que nossos colegas de Manaus ouviram a sentença condenatória da Justiça Militar. É apropriado revelar que, dos membros votantes nesta causa (4 oficiais militares, JUÍZES NÃO TOGADOS, e um único Juiz de Direito, TOGADO), o membro civil, O JUIZ TOGADO isentou aos controladores de tais acusações, o que nos anima a acreditar que, em instâncias superiores à militar, lograremos êxito. Estamos articulando os próximos passos, juntamente com os Controladores de Manaus.

Lamentamos, também, informar que o Carlos Trifílio, Presidente da FEBRACTA, foi preso em flagrante, na quarta-feira, acusado de insubordinação (Art. 163 do CPM). O Dr. Tadeu, protamene atuou para para desfazer mais este ato, contra o Presidente da FEBRACTA. Ontem, Quinta-feira, dia 24 de julho de 2008, foi determinada sua liberação, tendo sido considerada abusiva tal atitude.

Há uma longa história que culminou nesta prisão em flagrante, levando-o à condição de preso de justiça e recolhido a uma cela da Base Aérea de São Paulo. Tudo isto por ter se deslocado da Base Aérea de São Paulo ao SRPV SP, aparentemente, contrariando seu chefe. Imagine, estamos no século 21, a maioria das 'Polícias' já aboliram esta prática. No entanto...

O Trifílio está afastado desde dezembro de 2006. Ele e o Alves, da Bahia, são os precursores neste processo de perseguição que se estabeleceu contra os diretores de Associações de Controladores por todo o país, exceto, logicamente, a associação de Curitiba. Depois deles muitos outros se encontram 'soltos' em diversas organizações militares e setores diversos da burocracia. Em torno deste evento há muito o que ser explicado, o que um dia, certamente, iremos poder falar abertamente. Toda esta história já está sendo registrada por diversas pessoas.

Nós temos muito a lamentar. Entretanto, confiantes nos princípios constitucionais contemplados, principalmente no artigo 5º da CF - DOS DIREITOS E DEVERES INDIVIDUAIS E COLETIVOS, sabemos que chegará a hora em que todas as 'autoridades e instituições' responderão pelos seus atos, sejam pelas ações judiciais impetradas pela FEBRACTA e seus Diretores, seja pelo inevitável do infortúnio, das conseqüências dos muito equívocos que se cometem em tantas medidas desencontradas no ATC brasileiro. Infelizmente, um grave acidente aéreo amadurece nos porões do intangível mundo do ATC. E, nesse momento, inevitavelmente, mudanças acontecerão. Isto não é uma profecia e nem constitui vontade desta instituição, que é de privada, sendo nada mais do que uma perspectiva lógica, fruto de muitas medidas que enfraqueceram tecnicamente a competência técnica geral no ATC brasileiro.

Lembramos, também, que o Trifilio encontra-se ABANDONADO pelos controladores de São Paulo, a quem imputamos responsabilidade pela omissão e egoísmo, além de seriamente ADOENTADO (apresenta um quadro de debilitação fisiológica preocupante). Mas tudo isto não é o mais importante diante da missão que todos nós aceitamos, diante do senso de que, antes de qualquer qualificação de condição funcional, militar ou civil, somos todos SERVIDORES DO PAÍS, com o DEVER de fazer o que é correto fazer, independente das conseqüências imediatas, que podem ser desde a incompreensão DOS PRÓPRIOS CONTROLADORES de nossas equipes operacionais, mas também de quem mantém este estado de coisas. Atualmente, nas Organizações Militares, muito se fala que, antes de controladores, são militares. Nós concordamos com essa afirmação, acrescentando que é exatamente por isto inevitável mudar esta verdade. Quem controla os céus do país com tanta dedicação e entrega precisa de DEDICAÇÃO EXCLUSIVA, não significando, objetivamente, uma melhora ou piora das condições, mas é necessário DESMILITARIZAR o ATC, inclusive na INFRAERO. Não é possível conciliar escalas operacionais beirando o absurdo com atividades colegiais militares (marchas, escalas e formaturas militares, por exemplo).

O que nos move nisso tudo, é a lembrança do sofrimento daqueles que ficam sem seus parentes que se vão em cada acidente aéreo. Imaginem vocês, por um pequeno instante, o que significa perder a vida àqueles que pagam por um Serviço Essencial, esperando decolar e pousar com SEGURANÇA. Não podemos permitir que se esqueçam dos rostos daqueles que ficam consternados pelos aeroportos, esperando uma informação, esperando por uma explicação plausível sobre o que aconteceu. Mães e pais, amigos e toda a sociedade brasileira sofre. Quem se omite de atuar, de fazer o que é certo, pensando, tão somente, em resolver seus próprios problemas, de fato, contribui com a manutenção do atual sistema e semeia conseqüências a si mesmo ou ao colega que estiver ocupando uma Posição Operacional num dia desses.

Não queremos polemizar, mas contribuir para uma reflexão sincera sobre o que acontece no ATC brasileiro. Pensem, pois, um pouco mais no que você tem feito para melhorar a SEGURANÇA no ATC aí no seu órgão ATC onde trabalha. Pensem no que nós, PROFISSIONAIS, temos feito pelo sustento desta luta.

Será que temos feito o que, REALMENTE, podemos?

Procure uma associação ligada à federação e ofereça recursos intelectuais e financeiros. Atue com coragem, cumpra o seu verdadeiro DEVER!

AGÊNCIA FEBRACTA

Caetano Veloso: Between Fidel and the CIA (or, "The Thrill Is Gone" -- long gone!)

BLOG DO NOBLAT, enviado por Caetano Veloso, 21.7.2008, 11.03 h

Entre Fidel e a CIA

Eu disse que voltava ao assunto: na Europa todos os jornalistas me perguntam sobre o caso Fidel. Eles sabem apenas que Fidel ralhou comigo por causa de uma canção sobre Guatánamo.

Fico um tanto triste. Na verdade acho que Fidel não foi político ao me acusar de pedir perdão ao imperialismo americano e ao chamar a atenção para um trecho de entrevista onde aparece crítica a Cuba (e reconhecimento dos conseguimentos civilizatórios dos Estados Unidos), em detrimento da canção em si, que é o que devia contar mais.

Afinal, uma canção é imediatamente ouvida e assimilada por muitos; uma entrevista, mal e mal por poucos. No nosso caso, a canção mostrou-se forte, arrancando aplausos entusiasmados em todos os shows do Obra em Progresso e repercussão na imprensa e um forte boca-a-boca. Com o evidente potencial de, uma vez gravada, tornar-se enormemente conhecida e mesmo amada.

Já a entrevista nem era boa. Tive pequenos problemas com o modo como ela foi editada (sobretudo no que diz respeito à sucessão presidencial e à ausência de crédito a uma frase de Mangabeira Unger), mas não especialmente no que se refere ao caso Fidel/Base de Guantánamo. Quanto a isso, sei que fui eu a me expressar de modo afobado e daí obscuro.

Eu não queria receber aplausos fáceis da esquerda e ser tomado por um anti-americanista recém-saído do armário. Não sou Neil Young. Nem quero ser o Mick Jagger de "Sweet New Con Or Something": um inteligente neo-liberal (no sentido nobre do termo) como Jagger jogando para a galera num tom que, a despeito do acerto básico na apreciação da questão, soa demagógico. Minha "Guantánamo" não tem nada disso.

O próprio estilo despido e enxuto (diferente aliás, quanto a isso, embora não quanto à sinceridade, do de "Haiti", com que alguém aí, erradamente, a identificou) atesta uma atitude direta nascida de observação simples que levou a um estado de espanto indignado. Pareço um poeta concreto, fazendo boa crítica positiva do próprio trabalho? Ótimo. Adoro parecer um poeta concreto.

Se o risco de a crítica estar muito aquém da que os pobres produtores das obras podem apresentar, para quê falsa modéstia? Fidel poderia ter sido aconselhado por aqueles que, perto dele, ouvem música e pensam em cultura a calar o bico e deixar a canção fazer sua parte, com a entrevista relegada ao esquecimento. O resultado seria um renascimento da força afetivo-simbólica que a revolução cubana tem na mente da minha geração de latino-americanos. E até da imorredoura simpatia que a própria figura de Fidel arranca do nosso cerebelo. (Ou hipotálamo?)

Mas não. Ele transformou o episódio numa manifestação anti-Cuba. Os europeus não conhecem a canção, só a fofoca de celebridades velhas do folclore político da América Latina: o Comandante contra o "ex-revolucionário" tropicalista. A ignorância! Mas insisto em que um país onde as pessoas precisam de permissão especial para viajar ao exterior não é o melhor exemplo de respeito aos direitos humanos. Ir e vir é simplesmente o mais básico destes.

Deixa os frankfurtianos dizerem que a "busca da felicidade" é mais cruel do que o nazismo. Tou fora. Só espero que com essas declarações sinceras de amor (mesmo meio morto) pela revolução cubana, não venha agora ser a CIA a anotar que pedi perdão ao ditador. Mas acho que a CIA é menos grossa do que isso.

Blog post here: http://oglobo.globo.com/pais/noblat/#115169

Thomas L. Friedman on Mugabe, Mbeki, Putin, and China

So Popular and So Spineless

by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, July 16, 2008

Much ink has been spilled lately decrying the decline in American popularity around the world under President Bush. Polls tell us how China is now more popular in Asia than America and how few Europeans say they identify with the United States. I am sure there is truth to these polls. We should have done better in Iraq. An America that presides over Abu Ghraib, torture and Guantánamo Bay deserves a thumbs-down.

But America is not and never has been just about those things, which is why I also find some of these poll results self-indulgent, knee-jerk and borderline silly. Friday’s vote at the U.N. on Zimbabwe reminded me why.

Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don’t like a world of too much American power — “Mr. Big” got a little too big for them. But how would they like a world of too little American power? With America’s overextended military and overextended banks, that is the world into which we may be heading.

Welcome to a world of too much Russian and Chinese power.

I am neither a Russia-basher nor a China-basher. But there was something truly filthy about Russia’s and China’s vetoes of the American-led U.N. Security Council effort to impose targeted sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s ruling clique in Zimbabwe.

The U.S. put forward a simple Security Council resolution, calling for an arms embargo on Zimbabwe, the appointment of a U.N. mediator, plus travel and financial restrictions on the dictator Mugabe and 13 top military and government officials for stealing the Zimbabwe election and essentially mugging an entire country in broad daylight.

In the first round of Zimbabwe’s elections, on March 29, the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won nearly 48 percent of the vote compared with 42 percent for Mugabe. This prompted Mugabe and his henchmen to begin a campaign of killing and intimidation against Tsvangirai supporters that eventually forced the opposition to pull out of the second-round runoff vote just to stay alive.

Even before the runoff, Mugabe declared that he would disregard the results if his ZANU-PF party lost. Or as he put it: “We are not going to give up our country because of a mere X” on some paper ballot.

And so, of course, Mugabe “won” in one of the most blatantly stolen elections ever — in a country already mired in misrule, unemployment, hunger and inflation. Some 25 percent of Zimbabwe’s people have now taken refuge in neighboring states. (I have close friends from Zimbabwe, and one of my daughters worked there in an H.I.V.-AIDS community center in January.) The Associated Press reported in May from Zimbabwe “that annual inflation rose this month to 1,063,572 percent, based on prices of a basket of basic foodstuffs.” Zimbabwe’s currency has become so devalued, the A.P. explained, that “a loaf of bread now costs what 12 new cars did a decade ago.”

No matter. Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s U.N. ambassador, argued that the targeted sanctions that the U.S. and others wanted to impose on Mugabe’s clique exceeded the Security Council’s mandate. “We believe such practices to be illegitimate and dangerous,” he said, describing the resolution as one more obvious “attempt to take the Council beyond its charter prerogatives.” Veto!

Mugabe’s campaign of murder and intimidation didn’t strike Churkin as “illegitimate and dangerous” — only the U.N. resolution to bring a halt to it was “illegitimate and dangerous.” Shameful. Meanwhile, China is hosting the Olympics, a celebration of the human spirit, while defending Mugabe’s right to crush his own people’s spirit.

But when it comes to pure, rancid moral corruption, no one can top South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, and his stooge at the U.N., Dumisani Kumalo. They have done everything they can to prevent any meaningful U.N. pressure on the Mugabe dictatorship.

As The Times reported, America’s U.N. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, “accused South Africa of protecting the ‘horrible regime in Zimbabwe,’ ” calling this particularly disturbing given that it was precisely international economic sanctions that brought down South Africa’s apartheid government, which had long oppressed that country’s blacks.

So let us now coin the Mbeki Rule: When whites persecute blacks, no amount of U.N. sanctions is too much. And when blacks persecute blacks, any amount of U.N. sanctions is too much.

Which brings me back to America. Perfect we are not, but America still has some moral backbone. There are travesties we will not tolerate. The U.N. vote on Zimbabwe demonstrates that this is not true for these “popular” countries — called Russia or China or South Africa — that have no problem siding with a man who is pulverizing his own people.

So, yes, we’re not so popular in Europe and Asia anymore. I guess they would prefer a world in which America was weaker, where leaders with the values of Vladimir Putin and Thabo Mbeki had a greater say, and where the desperate voices for change in Zimbabwe would, well, just shut up.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/opinion/16friedman.html

Um Heroi Brasileiro -- o Juiz Fausto Martin de Sanctis puts Daniel Dantas behind bars twice

A major row has broken out among Brazil's judiciary over a corruption probe that has seen a businessman arrested and freed twice in two days.

Each time, prominent businessman Daniel Dantas was ordered released by the president of Brazil's Supreme Court.

At least 130 members of the judiciary have signed a letter in support of the judge who ordered both arrests and who is himself now under investigation.

The Supreme Court chief said there was not enough evidence for the arrests.

The decision by Gilmar Mendes, the president of the Supreme Court, has also been criticised by the association of senior officers in the Federal Police and dozens of public prosecutors.

Bribery allegations

Mr Dantas was arrested earlier this week along with a number of other people as part of a wide-ranging corruption investigation.

Following an application by defence lawyers for habeas corpus, Mr Mendes ordered his release.

Mr Dantas was detained for a second time just a few hours later, amid allegations that some of his associates had tried to pay a bribe to interfere with the continuing police operation.

However, within 24 hours Mr Mendes again ruled that Mr Dantas should be freed.

The businessman was driven away from the Sao Paulo police station where he was being held.

Mr Mendes said in his ruling that he believed there was insufficient grounds for the arrest.

He also made clear he regarded the decision by a judge in a lower court that Mr Dantas should be detained a second time was an act of disrespect, and said copies of the judge's ruling should be passed on to the relevant legal authorities.

That decision caused considerable anger in legal circles, and at least 130 judges have now put their names to a statement in support of Judge Fausto Martin de Sanctis, who ordered both arrests.

The Federal Association of Judges of Brazil said Judge de Sanctis had done nothing more than exercise the role assigned to him by the constitution.

In a further bizarre development the office of the president of the Supreme Court was checked for listening devices after claims that the same judge had ordered the police to carry out surveillance.

Nothing was found, and Judge de Sanctis has denied this allegation.

The original police investigation is continuing, but of the 17 people arrested earlier in the week only one is still in custody.

For the moment the investigation's objectives seem overshadowed by the controversy which has engulfed the judiciary.

Link to BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7503600.stm

Bob Herbert: Cause for Alarm

by Bob Herbert, New York Times, July 5, 2008

Beaches, barbecues and flags as big as baseball fields. Fireworks as loud as thunder lighting the nighttime sky. Hot fun, as Sly & the Family Stone would say, in the summertime.

Friday was the 232nd anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Celebrations were ubiquitous. HBO offered a marathon telecast of its John Adams series. Bands of wildly varying quality, from one coast to the other, let loose with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

It was a July Fourth like many others. There was nothing overt to signal anything was wrong. The Red Sox had traveled from Boston to play a weekend series against the Yankees in the Bronx. In Washington, the National Independence Day Parade made its way along Constitution Avenue.

And yet, there was an undercurrent of anxiety in the land. Vacations have been curtailed because of the price of fuel. Since the holiday fell on a Friday, the monthly unemployment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics were released a day early, on Thursday. They weren’t good. The Times summed things up with a Page 1 headline:

“Outlook Darker as Jobs Are Lost and Wages Stall.”

The high and the low were being buffeted. The bad news bears were loose on Wall Street, and the prospects for the summer employment of teenagers were abysmal. The national employment rate for teens in June was the lowest in 60 years.

But the anxiety seems more intense than the usual concern for a cyclical economic downturn. Something fundamental seems to have gone haywire. David Boren, a former U.S. senator who is now president of the University of Oklahoma, has written a short book that he called, “A Letter to America.”

His sense of alarm in the opening paragraph could not have been clearer. “The country we love is in trouble,” he said. “In truth, we are in grave danger of declining as a nation. If we do not act quickly, that decline will become dramatic.”

I couldn’t agree more. The symbols of patriotism — bumper stickers and those flags the size of baseball fields — have taken the place of the hard work and sacrifice required to keep a great nation great.

You know that matters have gotten out of hand when, as we learned this week, American instructors at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, gave classes on torture techniques used by the Communists to extract false testimony from American prisoners during the Korean War.

Talk about defining deviancy down! As Al Gore reminds us, this is the first time in American history that “the executive branch of the government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by Gen. George Washington during the Revolutionary War.”

There are signs galore of the nation’s turn for the worse. We are fighting a debilitating war in Iraq without any idea of how to pay for it — or how to end it. No one has any real idea about how to cope with the devastating energy crisis, or how to turn the economy around.

The airline industry is a first-class mess and the knees of the General Motors colossus have buckled. Locks are being changed on foreclosed homes across the country and working families lucky enough to meet their mortgages are watching the value of their homes decline.

We can build spectacular new stadiums for football and baseball teams (the Yanks, the Mets, the Giants and the Jets are all getting ready to move into staggeringly expensive new homes) but we can’t rebuild New Orleans or reconstruct the World Trade Center site destroyed almost seven years ago.

This year’s presidential election is the perfect opportunity to place the truth before the American public in the form of a realistic examination of the state of the nation, and an honest consideration of creative ideas for moving forward. Instead, we’re getting hour after hour and day after day of trivia: Who’s up? Who’s down? Who’s patriotic? Who’s not?

Mr. Boren believes that the combination of unrestrained partisanship and the corrosive influence of big money have all but paralyzed the political process. He worries about the neglect of the nation’s infrastructure, about the growing divide between the very wealthy and everyone else, and about “the catastrophic drop in the way the rest of the world views us.”

The U.S., with its enormous economic and military power, is still better-positioned than any other country to set the standards for the 21st century. But that power and leadership potential were not granted by divine right and cannot be wasted indefinitely.

Patriotism has its place. But waving a flag is never a good substitute for serious thought and rolling up one’s sleeves.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/opinion/05herbert.html