Montana Maven's
        Opinions Worth Ropin'
     

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Mr. Bush said. “We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

"There is a revolution coming.  It will not be like revolutions of the past.  It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act.  It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence.  This is the revolution of the new generation."

scarcely picked up on the fact that "The Greening of America" was purposely nonpolitical.  Its crux was personal and social liberation--in a word, "consciousness," which "plays the key role in shaping of society."  And so, "The revolution must be cultural.  For culture controls the economic and political machine, not vice versa."  Under that dreamy scenario, culture would be a silver bullet, able to bring down the otherwise intractable death machine.

 turn a few snapshots into a full-blown motion picture, with more than a little wishful thinking thrown in: The zipless luck of the new generation would ignite wisdom that had arrived by almost spontaneous combustion within a pressure cooker of affluence, alienation, plastics, and a war started by liberals.

Most of the important things in life, the things we truly desire, such as love, joy, and beauty, lie in a realm beyond the economic.  What we do not recognize is how economics has become the destroyer of our hopes.  It is economic tyranny that cuts off our view of a better future.

There will be no relief from either economic insecurity or human breakdown until we recognize that uncontrolled economic forces create conflict; not well-being.

For my money, pundits like Zakaria and Tom Friedman can't hold a candle to the brilliance of Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism".  She's my kind of intellectual journalist.  You know the kind that  actually talks to poor people in foreign lands and doesn't just sit around in cafes talking to Princes,  Shahs, Sheiks,  Pooh Bahs, and High Muckety Mucks.

But as I've traveled in the Middle East over the last few years, I've been struck by how little Iraq's troubles have destabilized the region. Everywhere you go, people angrily denounce American foreign policy. But most Middle Eastern countries are booming. Iraq's neighbors—Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia—are enjoying unprecedented prosperity. The Gulf states are busy modernizing their economies and societies, asking the Louvre, New York University, and Cornell Medical School to set up remote branches in the desert. There's little evidence of chaos, instability, and rampant Islamic fundamentalism.

The post-American world is naturally an unsettling prospect for Americans, but it should not be. This will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else. It is the result of a series of positive trends that have been progressing over the last 20 years, trends that have created an international climate of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

...America's unimpeded influence will decline. But if the world that's being created has more power centers, nearly all are invested in order, stability and progress. Rather than narrowly obsessing about our own short-term interests and interest groups, our chief priority should be to bring these rising forces into the global system, to integrate them so that they in turn broaden and deepen global economic, political, and cultural ties. If China, India, Russia, Brazil all feel that they have a stake in the existing global order, there will be less danger of war, depression, panics, and breakdowns. There will be lots of problems, crisis, and tensions, but they will occur against a backdrop of systemic stability. This benefits them but also us. It's the ultimate win-win.

I didn’t realize—I think I’ve always had a good idea about my native land, but I didn’t think that institutionally we were so easy to overthrow, because it was a coup d’etat, 9/11. The whole went crashing. And when we got rid of—when they got rid of Magna Carta, I thought, well, really, this wasn’t much of a republic to begin with.

"Toward a New Washington Consensus" http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/15/EDIR10N3RR.DTL
He debunks the media disinformation regarding Canada's outrage over Obama and Clinton's anti- NAFTA talk. Seems Canadians too think these trade pacts are bad.

Facts, however, are persistent things - facts like the Toronto Star report showing "almost half of all Canadians [believe] NAFTA should be renegotiated," with 80 percent saying it has done little or nothing for workers

And this from Central America:

When I spoke with Costa Rican economist Otton Solis, he told me, "Many Latin Americans see these trade agreements as an imposition." He pointed to accords helping agribusiness crush local farmers and pharmaceutical companies inflate medicine prices as typical examples of America foisting corporate-written edicts on poorer countries.

If there is one lesson to be learned from the past half-century of struggle for racial equality, it is that accusing elite blacks of selling out, calling on poor blacks to shape up or ship out and making a high-minded effort to change the hearts and minds of white Americans have not fundamentally reshuffled the deck of racial inequality in America, especially when black interests threaten white power and privilege. Change did not come only because of high-minded rhetoric or hope. It took the coercive power of the federal government and courts to desegregate schools. The opening of the American workplace did not happen because the shingles fell from the eyes of racist employers. It took grassroots activism and the threat of disruption, along with litigation and the power of regulation, to break down Jim Crow on the factory floor and in the corporate office.

I don't know who you mean by "we". Are you referring to the press or to Americans in general? In poll after poll, Americans say that the worst problems we face are the economy, the war in Iraq and the cost of health care. Unless prompted few Americans name security or the threat of terrorist attacks to be major problems for the nation.

If the media is concerned with security both national and international, and see all other countries as threats, it is because their source of information comes from other news pundits and the media. It is not the American people who are so concerned, so worried about national security and see every other country as a threat, it is the media who constantly enforce and re-enforce each others' superficial concept of the world.

The major reason for this is the inflated egos and conceited belief that their opinion actually matters, that they really are writing the first draft of history (which of course they are not) and that they should have an influence on outcomes and decisions made by the people and the government. They no longer feel it necessary to inform readers and viewers of what happened, they now think it their duty to speculate as why something happened and what might happen in the future because of it. This fulfills the need of the media to be "players" in events, instead of observers and avoid reporting on the much more difficult to understand issues such as the economy and health care. It is also far more glamorous to offer opinion and speculation on worldly events than to write articles that require slogging through government reports and textbooks explaining the workings of, say, health care or free trade agreements.

I wonder at your claim that the left's argument that Bush is incompetent creates more fear in Americans - why do suppose people think that? Bush is not incompetent, Bush is doing exactly what Bush said he was going to do, from the invasion of Iraq to the withholding of federal help to areas destroyed by Katrina - anyone who had paid attention to the 2000 debates would have been able to predict this outcome. Instead, we had a press fixated on candidate Gore's wardrobe, or recycling reports of other journalists on the "lies" told by Gore, or complaints of journalists who were "bored" during the debates because to them, Gore was boring, too cerebral, not beer buddy material and too ambitious.

You now argue that McCain is using those fear tactics of the right and the left to scare Americans and yet Americans aren't scared of China and Russia, it isn't even on the radar screen and instead of informing Americans that despite what McCain says, no other country is going to support McCain's policy and the chance that he might enact such a policy is zero, you choose to re-enforce his fear tactics. McCain is brazenly lying to the American people and instead of informing the public that this policy will be impossible to enact, you yourself frighten Americans with the specter of an alienated America, bereft of friends and a surfeit of enemies.

Frankly, there is no "we" or "ours" here - there is a you and your cohort who endlessly speculate in the echo chambers of book launchings and cocktail parties and foundation seminars and lectures, who have no idea as to what really worries Americans because you no longer have to worry about them. You have jobs, you have health care, you have pension plans - what you don't have is the fear that you won't have a job, you won't be able to make a living, you won't be able to afford health care and you will never be able to retire. It would seem that instead of speculating on which side is striking the most fear in Americans' hearts over foreign policy, you might want to know what it is they really fear and why they rightfully fear it. You needn't fear that "we" Americans have a "maximalist view of international security" because "we Americans" don't have this view, we're too busy worrying about making mortgage payments and filling the gas tank and feeding our children to form "maximalist views".

Posted by BevD
May 5, 2008 12:04 PM