A
visitor from the board of Amnesty
International in Japan met with our local group, as per the above photo,
reporting that AI membership in that country is shrinking and consists mostly
of older members who write letters, but don’t conduct rallies or marches or
engage with public officials. There are only 7,000 members nationwide in a
country 1/3 the population of the United States. Most citizens support the
death penalty, carried out by hanging, with a death-row inmate only informed
the day of his execution. Death-row inmates don’t know when prison officials
make their rounds if it will be their turn that day. An innocent man on death
row for 47 years was recently exonerated, the longest-serving exonerated
capital punishment inmate on record. Many Japanese apparently regard Amnesty as
a western import, making them wary, not only because AI opposes the death
penalty, but because of its support of the cause of aging Korean “comfort
women” gang raped by Japanese soldiers during World War II.
My Espaillat family friends in the
DR are pretty disappointed that their cousin, Adriano Espaillat, again barely lost to veteran Congressman Charlie
Rangel, age 84, who got endorsements from the Clintons and many fellow congress
members.
The
first lady of Honduras, Ana Garcia de
Hernandez, toured South Texas immigration shelters to learn more about the
plight of thousands of Hondurans, including children, who entered the United
States illegally.
It’s
troubling that not only is the in-fighting in South Sudan continuing, but is now involving child soldiers, some no doubt forced into fighting, but others
probably eager to join with adult men in carrying and shooting guns.
In
Haiti, a country I have visited
several times, including as an election observer in 1990, President Martelly seems to dragging his feet on calling for
elections and former presidents Duvalier and Aristide are apparently again getting
into the political fray.
Meanwhile,
there has been an abrupt slowdown in
foreign adoptions because many countries are not willing to let their children
leave, either because of national pride, failing birthrates, and political or
ideological disputes with the US (i.e. Russia). To the extent that such
adoptions are still allowed, the fees have become very high, unless a child has
a disability. In the US, licensed agencies, such as the local one on whose
board I serve, Holy Cross, are also seeing a
drop in domestic adoptions and, apparently, the same is true of other
agencies, both public and private. Instead, people who can afford it are
turning to high-tech fertility treatments and even surrogacy, or to high-priced
lawyers who offer expectant mothers everything short of actual payment for
relinquishing a baby for adoption. While outright baby buying is prohibited,
expectant mothers can get rent, food, medical care, a car, and other benefits,
for which adoptive parents pay indirectly through the lawyer. So adoption has
become the purview of people with financial means, except for older and
disabled youngsters, who are still left with traditional agencies.
I
must express annoyance at how Yahoo, Facebook, and even Microsoft Word
automatically “correct” my spelling of
similar Spanish words into the English version, requiring me to go back to
correct those “corrections.” While typing merrily along, I must be
super-vigilant, or else posible becomes
possible, compromiso becomes
compromise, autoriza becomes
authorize, Julio becomes July, and poco ends up as pocus. Thanks, but “no
gracias” for these misguided efforts!
Some
have compared South America’s newest literary star, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The central
narrative of his novel, The Sound of
Things Falling, is that PC ag volunteers were the originators of Colombia’
drug trade with the U. S. Among other events depicted, a PC staff member is
murdered, presumably by drug forces. This story line has now been amplified by
Amazon.com reviewers, via insatiable social media, to apply to Peace Corps
as an institution, judging by readers’ comments. Of course, the book is fiction
but do readers realize that? No PC staff member in Colombia was ever murdered
and, from 1981 until recently, there weren’t any PC volunteers in Colombia.
A
former PC volunteer reviewer of this book notes: “While it is fact that there
were volunteers working in agricultural projects in rural Colombia, it is a mythical transformation of their presence to
believe that the indigenous people they worked with were in a suspended state
of animation, breathlessly awaiting since pre-Inca times the arrival of
complete foreigners to awaken them to a new knowledge of how to convert coca
leaf from its centuries old use in religious ceremony to a secular application
in lands so distant from their own as to lie beyond their imagination.” During
the period 1961-81, some 4,300 Peace Corps Volunteers served in Colombia. There
is no record of any of them ever being charged with drug processing or
trafficking. All the good that they accomplished over these two decades can be
undone through literary inadvertence. According to Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan
Gabriel “is one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature.”
While his narrative is limited to a small group of imaginary volunteers in ag
projects, the powers of social media have now conflated that scope and
erroneously applied it to Peace Corps as an institution. One Amazon reviewer
recently wrote: “I had no idea Peace Corps was so integral in the growth of
Colombia’s drug industry.” I hope I’m not hereby furthering this book’s
erroneous message by mentioning it here. A major motion picture may not be far
behind.
Rare indeed is the
book, even one
published by a traditional publisher for a very well-known author, that has no errors. Because I was an editor for years at an
association publication, OT Week, I
cannot help reading everything with a gimlet eye. On p. 99 of Cheating Death by popular author Sanjay
Gupta, MD, I’m sure the word shown in red was omitted from this description of
a patient’s near-death experience: “He glimpses the spirits of relatives and
friends who have already died, and a warm, loving spirit of a kind he has never encountered before—a being of light—appears
before him.”
Surprise,
according to my last e-report from Amazon, two
people bought a copy of my Cuba book in euros! I’m curious about who and
where that might have been and hope the reader will get in touch with me via
this blog. I wonder how they heard about my book?
After I gave a copy of my book to
someone for her birthday, I learned that she had visited Cuba with Witness for Peace. Ordinarily, WFP
protects vulnerable people from government attacks, but, of course, if they
were to do that in Cuba, they wouldn't be allowed in. Instead, in Cuba, WFP
shows friendship and solidarity with the Cuba government, an interesting twist,
just another example of the double-standard among progressives when it comes to
Fidel Castro and Cuba. Every day, independent journalists, Ladies in White, and
gay people trying to meet or express themselves without government approval are
beaten up, arrested, and their writings, books, laptops, and DVDs confiscated. In
Amnesty, we just issued an Urgent Action for an independent
blogger (very hard to be in Cuba because the internet is virtually
inaccessible). He is Roberto de Jesús
Guerra Pérez who was beaten up by a government-sponsored mob, a
so-called Brigada de Respuesta Rapida, on his way to the Czech Embassy to
use the internet. We also have issued an Urgent Action for three brothers who have been in pre-trial detention in Cuba since
late 2012 have now been tried and are due for sentencing. They are at risk of
being sentenced to between three and five years’ imprisonment. Amnesty
International believes they are prisoners of conscience, detained solely for
exercising their right to freedom of expression. They are 22-year-old Alexeis Vargas Martín and his two
18-year-old twin brothers, Vianco Vargas
Martín and Django Vargas Martín, detained
in November and December 2012 respectively, tried on 13 June at the Provincial
Court in Santiago de Cuba, south-eastern Cuba. They are now awaiting sentencing
for the charges of public disorder of a continuous nature (alteración del
orden público de carácter continuado). The Public Prosecutor has asked for
Alexeis to be sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and three years for Vianco
and Django, who were 16 at the time of their arrest. They were reportedly
subjected to a summary trial, with none of the defense witnesses being allowed
to testify. The brothers, from the city of Santiago de Cuba, are all members of
the Patriotic Union of Cuba (Unión
Patriótica de Cuba, UNPACU), a civil society organization which advocates
for greater civil liberties in the country.
A delegation of top Google executives, including Executive
Chairman Eric Schmidt, reportedly visited Cuba this week to push for
greater Internet access on the island. The team has met with officials and
representatives of the Cuban technology and digital scene "to promote the
virtues of a free and open internet," according to 14ymedio.com, an independent news site launched
last month by blogger Yoani Sanchez. The group included Brett Perlmutter, Dan
Keyserling, and Jared Cohen, a former State Department official who co-authored
a book with Schmidt on how ubiquitous internet access will change society.
Moving
on to a more low-key issue like the content of school lunches, even that has become more contentious lately, school
administrators saying that kids are not eating the new foods, which are too
expensive anyway, and with nutritionists accusing them of siding with big
producers who don’t want to change over. Working as a school interpreter, even
before Michelle Obama’s push for better
nutrition, I’ve seen kids in lunchrooms throwing unopened milk cartons,
oranges, and vegetables wholesale into the trash. Like most consumers, they
prefer the usual salty, sweet, and fatty stuff.
Is that a matter of basic biology or due to advertising? I’m not sure,
but I do agree with school administrators that kids don’t benefit if they are
not actually eating the more nutritious food offered. The changeover, I would
think, needs to be gradual and accompanied by a lot of education of kids,
parents, and food manufacturers.
In
a previous blog, I commented on the growing gap between the super-rich and the
rest of us, that the 1% cannot possibly spend most of their wealth, no matter
how many homes, yachts, and sports cars they buy. Well, perhaps I underestimated the value to society of massive wealth held in
the hands of just a lucky few. In his 2012 book Unintended Consequences, former Bain Capital (Romney’s former
company) executive Edward Conard argues that only those with excessive wealth can afford to take the risks of innovation
and investment in new technologies and industries that move an economy
forward.
His
book dissects the economic recession and gives it an unusual spin, reserving
some fairly critical commentary for the responses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the housing crisis. Curious about the
literal meaning of those familiar nicknames, I did some sleuthing, and found
that they refer to entities dating back to 1938 and the New Deal. Fannie is the Federal National Mortgage
Association (FNMA) and Freddie is
the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC). The nicknames have
become so much a part of national discourse, we hardly ever ask what the formal
names are nor does author Conard bother to define them.
Of
course, someone like the now-popular French economist Thomas Piketty and others have argued that some super-rich are being overcompensated for positions heading up
corporations because company success is attributed to them alone, as “great
men” like other heroes in history, when, in fact, all great men, whether in
business or politics, do not act alone, but in concert with advisors and a
team of many others, including their workers, soldiers, or constituents.
Have
a good July 4 weekend! ¡Feliz
día del 4 de Julio!
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