Article of the Day, Author at Prose Before Hos

Author Archive

Did The Baby Boomers Destroy The Economy?

Posted on November 24, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Who Destroyed the Economy? The Case Against the Baby Boomers by Jim Tankersley in The Atlantic.

The Text: My father taught me how to throw a baseball and divide big numbers in my head and build a life where I’d be home in time to eat dinner with my kid most nights. He and my mother put me through college and urged me to follow my dreams. He never complained when I entered a field even less respected than his. He lives across the country and still calls just to check in and say he loves me.

His name is Tom. He is 63, tall and lean, a contracts lawyer in a small Oregon town. A few wisps of hair still reach across his scalp. The moustache I have never seen him without has faded from deep brown to silver. The puns he tormented my younger brother and me with throughout our childhood have evolved, improbably, into the funniest jokes my 6-year-old son has ever heard. I love my dad fiercely, even though he’s beaten me in every argument we’ve ever had except two, and even though he is, statistically and generationally speaking, a parasite.

This is the charge I’ve leveled against him on a summer day in our Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation, in what should be a slam-dunk trial–for me. On behalf of future generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a better country on to its children than the one it inherited.

A Rumsfeld Reminder Of Terrorism

Posted on November 23, 2012 in Articles

The Article: A Rumsfeld-era reminder about what causes Terrorism by Glenn Greenwald in Salon.

The Text: The debate over Afghanistan — or, more accurately, the multi-pronged effort to pressure Obama into escalating — is looking increasingly familiar, i.e., like the “debate” over Iraq. The New York Times is publishing articles filled with quotes from anonymous war advocates. Permanent war-justifier Michael O’Hanlon is regularly featured in “news accounts” as he all but blames Obama for increasing combat deaths due to his failure to escalate the moment the military demanded it. The New Republic is churning out pro-war screeds. Every option is on the proverbial table except one: not fighting the war. And there’s a widening gap between (a) public opinion (which sees Afghanistan as “turning into another Vietnam” and which opposes more troops, with 49% favoring a full or partial withdrawal) and (b) the virtual unanimity of establishment punditry which, as always, is cheerleading for the war. The only difference is that, with a Democratic President, there seems to be more Democratic and progressive support for this war (though there was, of course, plenty of that for Iraq, too).

The primary rationale for remaining — and escalating — in Afghanistan is the same all-purpose justification offered for virtually everything the U.S. has done since 2001: Terrorism. Apparently, the way to solve the Terrorist threat is by sending 60,000 more American troops into a Muslim country and committing to at least five more years of war there. That, so the pro-escalation reasoning goes, will make us safer.

In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld directed the Defense Science Board Task Force to review the impact which the administration’s policies — specifically the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — were having on Terrorism and Islamic radicalism. They issued a report in September, 2004 (.pdf) and it vigorously condemned the Bush/Cheney approach as entirely counter-productive, i.e., as worsening the Terrorist threat those policies purportedly sought to reduce. It’s well worth reviewing their analysis, as it has as much resonance now as it did then (h/t sysprog).

When A Soldier Becomes A Mass Murderer

Posted on November 22, 2012 in Articles

The Article: What Turns a Soldier Into a Mass Murderer? by Heather Horn in The Atlantic.

The Text: Germany has launched an investigation of Johann ‘Hans’ Breyer, an 87-year-old Philadelphia man. That he was an SS guard at the infamous Auschwitz, no one, least of all him, disputes. The issue is whether he should be considered an accessory to hundreds of thousands of murders. Given our increasing distance from the time of World War II, this could be the last investigation of its kind. And while that means trials of the living are winding down, it also means the historical investigations of the dead are gaining fresh perspective.

Just last week, for example, the first English edition of the gripping Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying–the Secret World War II Tapes of German POWs was published in the U.S. A collaboration between historian Sönke Neitzel and psychologist Harald Welzer, the book presents and analyzes a series of conversations among not the elite Nazi SS guards, but ordinary German soldiers, navy men, and airmen, captive in British camps.

Conventional myth on the crimes of World War II has held (a) that they were almost exclusively German, and (b) that they were almost exclusively perpetrated by the SS — the Nazi Party paramilitary organization — rather than by ordinary conscripts. Neither of these two points is true, though they were certainly convenient for a time, especially (in the case of the first) when the Allies required Soviet cooperation, and (in the case of the second) when the West German government desperately felt the need to forgive and forget in order to maintain a stable post-war society.

Guantanamo Death Shines A Light On More Leftist Hypocrisy

Posted on November 21, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Another Guantánamo prisoner death highlights Democrats’ hypocrisy by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian.

The Text: A detainee at Guantánamo was found dead in his cell on Saturday, according to camp officials. He is the ninth person to die at the camp since it was opened more than ten years ago. As former Gitmo guard Brandon Neely pointed out Monday, more detainees have died at the camp (nine) than have been convicted of wrongdoing by its military commissions (six). This is the fourth detainee who has died at the camp since Obama’s inauguration.

Although the detainee’s identity has not been disclosed, a camp spokesman acknowledged that he “had not been charged and had not been designated for prosecution”. In other words, he has been kept by the US government in a cage for many years without any opportunity to contest the accusations against him, and had no hope of leaving the camp except by death.

Indeed, dying in due process-free captivity now appears to be the only way for many of these detainees to leave. The last person to leave the camp via death was a 48-year-old Afghan citizen, Awal Gul, who died in February 2011 of an apparent heart attack. Gul, the father of 18 children, was accused by the US of being a Taliban commander – a charge he vehemently denied because, as his lawyer put it, “he was disgusted by the Taliban’s growing penchant for corruption and abuse.” But the due process-free indefinite detention policy still in place at the camp meant that those conflicting claims were never resolved, and he died after more than nine years in captivity – thousands of miles from his family, in the middle of a foreign ocean – despite never having been convicted of anything.

Julian Assange: Obama’s Latest Neasayer

Posted on November 20, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Assange mocks Obama via video at U.N. event in Reuters.

The Text: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, speaking via a choppy video feed from his virtual house arrest in London, lashed out at U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday for supporting freedom of speech in the Middle East while simultaneously “persecuting” his organization for leaking diplomatic cables.

Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy since June to avoid extradition, made the comments at a packed event on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

Assange mocked Obama for defending free speech in the Arab world in an address to the United Nations on Tuesday, pointing to his own experience as evidence that Obama has “done more to criminalize free speech than any other U.S. president.”