Short of the 24/7 television visual horror of the Katrina catastrophe, what might it take to penetrate the country's painstakingly constructed wall against reality? Surely we can't be rooting for the worst-case nuclear scenario in Japan, can we?by Ken
I hope everyone has read Howie's post earlier today on the subject of the reaction of people supposedly "in the know," technically speaking, about the Japanese nuclear disaster-in-the-making. As he notes, this is yet another case in which the screeching ignoramuses and murderous kleptoplutocrats of the Right have been caught laying the groundwork for future episodes of the (in this case literal) destruction of the country as we once knew it. Nuclear disaster -- what, we worry?
Last month I took a lingering look at a New Yorker blogpost by Andrew Solomon on the developing insurgence in Libya, who had written about the Qadaffi regime for the magazine in 2006. One of the things that popped out at me was his description of one of the basic mistakes the regime had made since he wrote his piece, its "lack of attention to the poverty of the population."
Libya is North Africa's most prosperous country, given its tremendous oil wealth and small population. Yet most Libyans live in deplorable conditions. The state provides little by way of civil society and does not take care of even the most basic government obligations. There are police to control people who stray from supporting the Leader, but there is little else. As a housing crisis has escalated in the past few years, the regime has made no effort to provide adequate public accommodation. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of the very few. It would have been easy for Qaddafi to raise the standard of living for the population as a whole either by creating a sustainable non-oil economy or simply by distributing some portion of oil revenues, but he chose to do neither. [Emphasis added.]\\
rest at http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2010/03/has-anyone-researched-how-many.html
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