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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSI who wrote (68241)	1/24/2003 12:27:06 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

MSI, in case you have not been following the news, all of Venezuela has been paralyzed by a general strike for two months now. If you think the CIA can muster millions of Venezuelan followers, I have a bridge you might interested in. There are some people running governments in this world who are nastier even than Republicans, MSI. Quite a few, in fact. Have John Ashcroft's boys locked up the ANSWER organizers yet? Beaten them? Tortured or raped them? Let's keep some sense of proportion here.

To: MSI who wrote (68241)	1/24/2003 12:59:13 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The state of citizenship By Robert B. Reich Editorial The Boston Globe 1/23/2003 THE STATE OF THE UNION is an opportunity for the president to rally Americans, but toward what? Throughout history, Americans have spoken in two distinct ways about what we owe one another as members of society. In different periods, one view of citizenship predominates over the other. The first is the language of shared sacrifice - of honor, duty, and patriotism. We're asked to rise above selfishness and honor the common good. We are in this together and can survive and prosper only to the extent we dedicate ourselves to the public interest. Whether in town meetings or school committees, volunteer fire departments or soup kitchens, we celebrate that which binds us together. America is the land of public-spiritedness. The ideal of shared sacrifice arises especially in times of war or national economic crisis. In the aftermath of World War II, few questioned that the very rich should pay a high proportion of their incomes in taxes or that every young man should be eligible for the draft. It was thought unseemly for corporate executives to earn vast multiples of the pay of average workers and shameful for corporations to disregard the public interest in favor of shareholder returns. Government's purpose, likewise, was to act on behalf of the nation as a whole. Democracy was thought to be the means by which we discovered the common good and summoned the fortitude to achieve it. The other language is that of individual opportunity and personal ambition. Here, our first responsibility as citizens is to do all we can for ourselves and our families. By working hard and striving toward our own private goals, we exemplify the benefits of liberty. In seeking to maximize the our own well-being, we contribute to a strong economy. Within this ideal of citizenship, the common good is largely the sum of these personal efforts, and the nation's well-being depends primarily on individual enterprise. Corporations should do everything they can to maximize profits. Indeed, the competitive race invigorates all our institutions. Meanwhile, the assumed purpose of government is to maximize individual well-being; citizens are consumers of public services, analogous to consumers in the private sector. Democracy is thought of as a process for reconciling competing claims. The ideal of personal ambition gains prominence in times of peace and prosperity. The norm of shared sacrifice becomes less powerful because there's less agreement about the common good and less urgency to achieving it. The past few decades of comparative peace and prosperity have witnessed a gradual decline in the language and ideal of the common good and a corresponding increase in the ideal of personal ambition. By the 1990s the public-spirited heroes of the ''greatest generation'' had been supplanted by the entrepreneurial heroes of the new economy. Few thought it unseemly for CEOs to earn 400 times the wages of average workers or for corporations to deny responsibilities to the broad public. The era of big government was over, Bill Clinton assured us, to thundering applause. We now find ourselves in an awkward age, poised between these two conceptions of American citizenship. The legacy of the 1980s and '90s lives on, still giving prominence to opportunity and ambition. The president argues in favor of more tax breaks for the rich, which he says will motivate them to invest and thus spur economic growth. That the gap between the rich and most other Americans is wider than it has been in 60 years and that the gap will widen further as a result of this initiative is assumed to be beside the point. Yet the new challenges of the 21st century call for shared sacrifice. More than 100,000 Americans are now in the Persian Gulf awaiting further orders. Within the next months it is possible that some of them will be called to risk their lives for their country. This war may not be brief. Surely an occupation of Iraq, if it comes to that, could continue for many years. We are also called to protect ourselves against terrorism within our borders. The job will require widespread vigilance by American citizens. We will have to join together not only against terrorism but also against any corresponding erosion of civil liberties, undermining of public trust, and unleashing of prejudice and fear. There is, finally, a distinct possibility that the American economy will stall, or worse. Many Americans may find themselves in economic peril. If so, a central question will be how to spread the burdens. Here again we will be called upon to examine what we owe one another. If we are to meet these new challenges, the ideal of personal ambition may have to give way, once again, to the ideal of shared sacrifice. The cohesion and moral authority of the nation will depend on it. Our leaders will have to speak the language of civic virtue. As in previous times of crisis, we will be less tolerant of unbridled individualism and ambition, of conspicuous consumption, of greed, and of corporate disavowals of responsibility. We will be summoned to act together on behalf of the common good. ___________________________________________________ Robert B. Reich, former US secretary of labor, is professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. boston.com

To: MSI who wrote (68241)	1/24/2003 1:08:26 AM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

French react angrily to Rumsfeld's `old Europe' remark By DANIEL RUBIN Knight Ridder Newspapers PARIS - French leaders have been howling ever since U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld described France and Germany on Wednesday as part of the "old Europe." "If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east and there are a lot of new members," Rumsfeld said. The Germans reacted coolly to Rumsfeld's comments, made to a group of foreign journalists in Washington after a show of Franco-German solidarity against an early Iraq war. But his remark infuriated the French, who spent a good part of Thursday accusing the sharp-tongued secretary of indiscretion, tone-deafness, supporting terrorism and even criminality. The politicians' umbrage reveals more than French national pride. It reflects widespread anger, analysts say, and deep, fast-growing opposition to a U.S.-led war against Iraq. The French are also determined to remain at the center of any decision to go to war. "The `old Europe' still has some spring, and is capable of bouncing back," Economics Minister Francis Mer told the French television station LCI. Mer said he was "deeply vexed" by Rumsfeld's comment. Jack Lang, who has served as France's minister of both culture and education, called Rumsfeld's remark "irresponsible, dangerous and criminal." Martine Aubry, mayor of Lille and a former labor minister, criticized the "arrogance of the U.S. that keeps wanting to govern the world by themselves with fewer and fewer rules." The French public remains firmly against military action, even with a United Nations mandate. Three-quarters of French polled Jan. 17 by the CSA agency for the liberal newspaper L'Humanite said France should veto any U.N. Security Council resolution approving the use of force against Saddam Hussein. French opposition to military action is registering above 80 percent. Leaders in Paris have slowly begun to reflect public opinion. On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said his nation saw "no justification today for an intervention, since the inspectors are able to do their work. We could not support unilateral action." The next day, French President Jacques Chirac stood by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder at a celebration of 40 years of postwar cooperation, and declared that the two countries are committed to letting the U.N. inspectors finish their work. Inspectors are due to brief the U.N. Security Council on Monday in New York. Francois Heisbourg, who runs the Foundation for Strategic Research, a private research institute in Paris, said he'd never seen American-European relations so grim. The French position on Iraq is not posturing, he said. "There is more going on here," he said. "There is a ground swell of rejection of the war. This is true in essentially all of Europe, only slightly so in the United Kingdom." The French, Heisbourg said, suspect that the United States' main motive for war is economic: Iraq has the world's second-largest supply of oil. "The French think a case for clear and present danger in Iraq has not been made," he said. "There are folks around here who take Iraq seriously, but nobody is going out on the hustings saying, `If we don't go to war in the next six weeks the world will be a much worse place.' That proof is not around." Polls in Germany mirror French sentiment that a strike against Iraq would damage the international war on terrorism. Sixty-eight percent of Germans said military action against Iraq would increase terrorism, according to a Jan. 15 poll released by the German agency Forsa. Despite France's peaceable rhetoric of late, some analysts see the French position as still flexible, and doubt that France would block a U.N. resolution supporting an Iraq war. Jeffrey Gedmin, an American conservative who heads the Aspen Institute in Berlin, a transatlantic research center, said Schroeder's and Chirac's latest statements showed France's caginess and Germany's immaturity. Schroeder has promised not to vote for a war resolution when Germany rises to lead the Security Council on Feb. 1 for one month. Chirac said any decision about war should be made by the United Nations - after the inspectors have finished. "The French give themselves many doors and windows, while Schroeder seems to make the box he is in tighter by every utterance," Gedmin said. "If the (Bush) administration handles this one right, the French will say no until one midnight to midnight," Gedmin predicted. "But when they see that military action will happen, and they know it will be multilateral, with Britain and Spain and Italy and a small coalition of Arab states, and they know we will be successful, then they will say yes." miami.com