American Views Abroad

James Carroll in Making Some Sense of $700 Billion:

Step back. All of last week's handwringing hoopla over the emergency bailout stands in stark contrast to utter indifference with which politicians approved an equivalent layout for the military --- an approval so routine that it was ignored in the press and by the public.

.....Here is a question that no one is asking about America's grave financial crisis: By fueling corporate profits, jobs, and private-sector growth for two generations with massive over-investment in the military, has the United States gutted the real worth of its economy? One needn't be an economist to know that spending money on war planes, missiles and exotic weapons systems, not to mention combat operations, creates far less social capital than spending on education, bridges, mass transit, new forms of energy --- even the arts. www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/06-5

The New Yorker's Choice for President:

At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned in the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader's name is Barack Obama.

www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/10/13/081013taco_talk_editors