Tortured Democracy

"Good faith" may have limited application in contract law, but it has no place in constitutional law. If you flout the highest law of the land, especially if you are a top-level decision-maker, you should be brought to justice. If you provably condoned, approved, and justified torture against established national and international law, you should be prosecuted.

Madoffing the U.S. Financial System

We are seeing unfold before us nothing short than the Madoffing of the U.S. financial system. The recent reports of profitability for the major financial companies—Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, etc. are exactly Bernie Madoff on a large scale.

It is now forty years since my first visit to the USA. As a young engineer I travelled to New York, Pittsburgh and the Tri-Cities area of West Virginia. Times and values have moved on in those forty years. Then, somewhat dazzled on my arrival in New York, just before Christmas in 1968, I was met by the US agent of the company I worked for, a friendly and cultivated man, certainly older than my father, and a representative of the Westinghouse Company. I was delivered to the Biltmore Hotel and remember the next evening being invited to a fashionable French restaurant, which to my surprise was really like a Parisian restaurant.

Though there are many short accounts and (e.g., Studs Terkel's Hard Times), novels (e.g., Grapes of Wrath), movies and historical analyses of how various populations (e.g., migrant workers, Okies, etc.), I’ve seen few interesting, in-depth accounts of how middle class and upper middle class Americans in particular experienced the 1930s depression.

So Edmund G. Love’s 1972 autobiographical novel, Hanging On, Or, How to Get Through a Depression and Enjoy Life was particularly intriguing to me when I found it at a local used bookstore, and his story struck me as an especially timely one given current events. Though the book certainly includes much more then just the depression, relating, for instance, the author’s college experience, it is in large part a discussion of how nation's economic circumstances impacted the author and his friends and family and how they responded to these challenges.

IF ROMEO AND JULIET

I bet if Romeo and Juliet
had a phone they would have text'd
and their early demise not met
or let
two families suffer regret
full of tears salty and wet
and William's plot made thinner yet.

ARCTIC TERNS

What do they see of man
on their watery planet?
A thin island
knifing through the sea below
a puny object in the vastness
black dots on the ice.

Jan/Feb. 2009


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The views of the contributor authors are their own, and do not reflect the views of Charles Hugh Smith. All errors and errors of omission in the above texts are the sole responsibility of each author.

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