My city feels like a crime scene and the criminals are all melting into the night, fleeing the scene. No, I’m not talking about the kids in black who smashed windows and burned cop cars on Saturday.
I’m talking about the heads of state who, on Sunday night, smashed social safety nets and burned good jobs in the middle of a recession. Faced with the effects of a crisis created by the world’s wealthiest and most privileged strata, they decided to stick the poorest and most vulnerable people in their countries with the bill.
Off topic but important:
ReplyDeleteBOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- The verdict this week was a milestone: A distant court affiliated with the Washington-based Organization of American States held the Colombian government responsible for the 1994 assassination of a prominent senator.
Lion of a radical political party whose members were slain by the hundreds, Manuel Cepeda was shot dead in an operation partly organized by Colombia's army. The case is one of hundreds of murders and massacres, old and new, that have entered the inter-American justice system from Colombia, a nation suffering from a simmering, half-century-old guerrilla conflict.
As President ?lvaro Uribe prepares to leave office in August after eight years in power, investigators at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the OAS, are grappling with many of these cases. The most recent have triggered a national and international firestorm over the army's systematic killing of peasant farmers to inflate combat kills and revelations that Uribe's secret police spied on opponents, foreign diplomats and rights groups.
"If you put all of this together, the extrajudicial executions, the espionage of human rights defenders, it's all really a constant over the years," Santiago Canton, an Argentine who has headed the rights commission for nine years, said by phone from Washington. "That's very dangerous."
Of course, there is one big place to reduce expenditures - the military. Military expenditures do provide jobs but far fewer than if the money were used otherwise. This does not apply only to the biggest spenders like the United States. A virtually uncommented aspect of Greece's debt problems was its heavy expenditure on the military. But are governments ready to reduce significantly military expenditures? It doesn't seem too likely.
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