Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

In what has swiftly become the world’s latest tragic humanitarian crisis, the truly hapless victims are the Rohingya people of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma). Despite the Burmese government’s statements to the contrary, not for an instant has there been any question among human rights activists about what they were witnessing: vengeance, pure and simple, used as an excuse to undertake full-blown ethnic cleansing and, hence, genocidal actions. But a top UN human rights official this past week formalized that assessment, calling Myanmar’s persecution of minority Rohingya Muslims a case of “textbook ethnic cleansing”.   More than 400,000 Rohingya have been forced to flee to Bangladesh.  Addressing the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the institution’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, referred to the Myanmar military’s attacks on the Rohingya community in Rakhine State as a “brutal security operation” that represented a “clearl...

This month marks the 97 th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States of America. Although long considered the framework model for much of Western democracy, the US only granted the vote to its female citizens in 1920, ratifying a women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution on August 18 th of that year. And it was hardly a right justly recognized and bestowed upon women out of a progressive sense of democratic constitutional correctness. It was, rather, a hard-fought right won through the tenacity and sacrifice of a handful of women leaders who little by little convinced a huge following to back their demands for what should have been rightfully theirs from the outset: the right to an equal voice in choosing those who would govern and make the country’s laws. It would take eight decades of struggle for American women to win the right to vote. And the means by which they pursued that civil right provides an exemplary case study of peaceful protest and non-violent c...

The general idea behind the theory of Universal Basic Income (UBI), which I’ve written about in two previous blogs — http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2017/06/universal-basic-incomeintroduction-to.html and http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2017/07/milton-friedman-conservative-voice-for.html — is that it should be unconditional. For this reason, some economists and political philosophers translate the UBI acronym as Unconditional Basic Income. The majority of proponents of the idea agree on this single point. The most socially sound reason for this is that UBI is a way of ensuring a universal alternative to abject poverty. But the best economic argument in favor of UBI is a very practical one: By providing all citizens, no matter what their economic or social conditions might be, with a basic form of subsistence, the enormous bureaucracy currently involved in vetting the beneficiaries of social welfare programs would be vastly reduced, as would the budg...

Milton Friedman Milton Friedman, who died in 2006 at the age of 94, was for decades considered, a leading US economist, who garnered worldwide renown. Winner of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his many achievements, Friedman criticized traditional Keynesian economics as “naïve” and reinterpreted many of the economic theories broadly accepted up to his era. He was an outspoken free market capitalist who acted as an honored adviser to emblematically ultra-conservative world leaders such as US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and his theories on such key areas as monetary policy, privatization and deregulation exercised a major influence on the governing policies of many Western governments and multilateral organizations in the 1980s and ‘90s. Such a staunch conservative would seem like an unlikely academic to go to in search of backing for the controversial idea of giving spending money away to every person and family, no strin...

Back in May, I analyzed the French presidential election, in which I pointed out that Emmanuel Macron’s stunning victory had come despite his not having been affiliated with any traditional French party. This, I posited, would be seen by many observers as a weakness, the assumption being that he might not be able to garner the favor of parties that he didn’t represent in Parliament. But I added that, seen from a different perspective, it might actually turn out to be a strength, because he was bringing no inherited political rivalries with him into office. This, I said, was a place where Macron needed to avoid failure, seeking to be the representative of a broad base of French voters and lawmakers who are fed up with the apparent incapacity of the French left and right to put aside their pointless ideological impasse and seek ways to actually serve the wide-ranging interests of the people. And that this, in turn, could provide an example to other countries, such as the United St...