Towards a global perspective . . .

After attending Eric Massa’s Town Hall Meeting on Health Care in Olean, I wrote a blog entry that was more a visceral reaction to the stressful circumstance than anything else. A week later, a friend who knew I attended, asked if I could fill her in on what Congressman Massa had said on the issues. Since he did share a lot of information and assert some pretty solid positions, I wrote her an email stating what I could remember of his remarks on these issues. As I was writing the email, it occurred to me that my blog entry was limited in that it really didn’t talk about Massa’s stand on the issues, but rather about my experience with being present at the meeting, which had a nightmarish quality due to the fact that a handful of libertarian protesters spoke at length, occasionally asking questions, but mostly just expounding their positions on a broad spectrum of issues. Since I agree with his stance on many of the issues, I thought this was really a failure that merits redress.

Read the rest of this entry »

Click here to read an interesting (and misleading) article on Pakistan in today’s New York Times:

At first glance, I thought that they were saying Pakistan is bumping up their capacity to deliver their nukes.   But no, they are just doing what any country would do with a small fortune in military aid and increasing their capacity to utilize their conventional weapons.   The timing of this mention isn’t ‘delicate’, it’s appropriate, and it’s obvious that we should think twice before giving them any more military money.  But the real joke is further down when they talk about how the US has been trying to halt an arms race between Pakistan and India.  And we are doing this by . . . . giving a small fortune in Military Aid to Pakistan while assisting India with our latest and greatest nuclear technology.     Very effective strategy, don’t you think?

Today I watched a film called The Tornado, a film made by Lebanese and Russians about the Lebanese Civil War.  It was released in 1992, is billed as a ‘devastating condemnation of war’, and has a pretty low rating on Netflix, probably because it is a ‘devastating condemnation of war’.   After watching I started to think about our attitudes towards the people of countries where these wars . . . I almost said ‘occur’, but I really mean, are instigated and/or perpetrated by other more powerful countries.    FreeSpeech TV ran a series made by some young producers from Democracy Now! about Israel’s 2006 “War” against Lebanon.   It was called Nothing is Safe.   Those are the words that came to mind as I watched the protagonist in this film, upon returning to his home, move through a completely alienated world with which he thought he was intimately familiar. Read the rest of this entry »

I went with my sister and her husband today, to a town hall meeting held by Congressman Eric Massa in the town of Olean.   It was a discussion of  the current health care reform options being formulated in DC.      I had heard an excellent interview on the subject of health care with Congressman Massa and Bob Smith on 1370 Connection.    Massa not only seemed very knowledgeable but committed to doable, meaningful reform.    The clarity of his reasoning and communication was refreshing.    Also, many of my friends have worked in his campaign.  So, I was enthusiastic about attending the Town Hall Meeting.  Also, I was enthusiastic about getting my sister involved, so going to the meeting in Olean was particularly attractive.

There has been talk about how the right wing ideologues have come to the meetings and created mayhem.   Some mainstream national newspapers were saying that these people were plants, brought in by the health insurance companies.   Others were saying that they are sincere people terrorized by scare stories circulated by right wing media pundits and encouraged by the health care industry.    Having heard them, I think the answer is a spectrum including those types.  I think many of of these people are discontented, generally ignorant folks who were provided support and materials to proceed by, well, by someone with money.   Others had sincere complaints.    Massa clearly had some idea of confronting them and, in some sense, overcoming the impediment to general communication they bring forward.   I suppose he was thinking of some variation on “killing them with kindness”.    But he had no idea of the depth of the discontent and alienation many of these people brought to the table.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here, the KRG is investing in the company that it is hiring to extract the oil.   This way, they are taking ownership of the resource, while not having to build the infrastructure to run it.   I am not sure of all the negatives and positives here, but this method of getting a return would be an improvement over the kinds of contracts the Baghdad Government has been encouraged to adopt, and which they clearly don’ t really want to adopt.   Read original article:  Read the rest of this entry »

There is still conflict in the system, but they are finding ways to work together that benefit everyone.   The government of Iraq is in some ways strangled by the necessity of developing every action through laws created in an environment that is not unified.   The KRG is not without problems, but they do have an established structure, and they have been more or less disengaged from the ongoing civil war, which has allowed them to focus on other issues of governance.

Although nationalized oil production would be a good thing, the Baghdad Government doesn’t have anyone competent to run it.   They also don’t have a legal framework for it (other than the Saddam era laws), and they are under huge pressure to privatize.   The result appears to be an administration too internally conflicted to come up with a constructive solution.

By successfully integrating the Kurdish Region as a Federalist State, they can take advantage of the Kurdish progress in this area to begin developing resources for all of Iraq.     Read the article below: Read the rest of this entry »