Open Letter to Mr. President of the Republic Don Sebastián Piñera, a translation

This is an Open Letter to Mr. President of the Republic Don Sebastián Piñera, concerning the approval of the HidroAysén Dam Project, on 9 May, 2011. My English translation follows the original castellano.

Thank you very much to Brian Patrick Corcoran for forwarding this to me.

CARTA ABIERTA AL SEÑOR

PRESIDENTE DE LA REPÚBLICA

DON SEBASTIÁN PIÑERA

 

Señor Presidente:

Con el respeto que me merece su  persona y su investidura, me permito en mi calidad de ciudadano libre de compromisos políticos, empresariales e institucionales,  plantearle algunas preguntas y un comentario en relación al megaproyecto Hidroaysén, próximo a ser votado en cuanto a su factibilidad.

So what does abortion have to do with government fiscal responsibility?

Margaret Sanger, Founder , in 1916, of Planned Parenthood
(image via Wikipedia)

Other than possibly reducing the number of dependents upon the state who have been born into circumstances where they hardly have a chance at making decent lives for themselves, the two have little to do with each other. Yet this is a priority for people who claim to be crusading for liberty and ... no, not justice for all, but rather, freedom from the oppression of justice for all (and taxes).

A Rambling Diatribe Against How The US Conducts Its Latin American Foreign Policy: or How I Learned Who Exactly Is In Charge of this Ship of State Department

On Tuesday, 5 April, the US Ambassador to Ecuador, Heather Hodges, was declared to be persona non grata by the Ecuadorean government. At issue was an article in the Spanish newspaper, El País, about a WikiLeaks cable in which the ambassador had expressed her suspicions that police corruption rose all the way up to the level of President Rafeal Correa. When confronted about the allegations, the ambassador refrained from comment, her reason being that the cable had been illegally obtained.

Spiritual Vibrations

5 March, Ash cloud rising from Pu`u `Ō `ō as crater floor collapses
due to magma withdrawal, Kilauea Volcano. 


I was speaking figuratively in referring to Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess who lives in Kilauea Volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii, when I wrote:

This force that is welling up from the interior of the planet is another incarnation of Mother River, the Mother of Life, the Nurturer, but also the Destroyer. She is what the Hawaiians call Pele, the Volcano Goddess.

How was I to know that she was so soon to express herself?

No Time for Democracy?

Naomi Klein coined the phrase Disaster Capitalism to describe the way that corporate interests swoop in to take advantage of the state of shock that people are in after a disaster that these interests may or may not have themselves caused. She wrote about it in her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism in terms of the military coup in Chile that brought Pinochet into power, the gentrification of New Orleans that occurred after Hurricane Katrina, and the bumbled attempt at a corporate takeover of Iraq. She has continued identify “emergency measures” taken that have furthered business interests in the wake of disasters such as the financial meltdown and the earthquake in Haiti. And most recently, she has been talking about the situation in Wisconsin and other states that have manufactured fiscal crises in order to diminish the rights of teachers and other government-paid workers.

The Female Force Erputs

The earthquakes in New Zealand and the tremors that have been shaking the earth all around the Ring of Fire are connected with the events in Northern Africa and the Middle East. The roiling energy that is escaping where it can from underneath the Earth’s crust is being reflected in the uprisings of people who live in the very regions where the chain of humanity reaches far back into history’s depths.

Hope Began Anew

Euardo Galeano
photo by Wikipedia author, Daniel Zanini H

Ojalá podamos ser desobedientes, cada vez que recibimos órdenes que humillan nuestra conciencia o violan nuestro sentido común. †

If only we could be disobedient, each time we receive orders that humiliate our conscience or violate our common sense.

Imagine that – Eduardo Galeano’s wish has come to pass.

There are those who look upon the momentous events in North Africa and the Middle East, at the underlying food crisis at the base of these events, at an uncertain future with fear in their hearts, and then there are those who, like, me, are full of hope.

I am in no way optimistic but I remain a prisoner of hope. ‡

The Heroes of Egypt

Tahrir Square, Friday of Departure
photo by Mona sosh

79 million people strong, the Heroes of Egypt have at last triumphed over the Pharaos of Fear.

Hosni Mubarak has ruled the Land of the Pharaos through the Might of Fear – fear of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he fed to Israel and the United States in return for their support; fear of foreign imperialism, which he fed to his own people in return for their consent; and fear of chaos, behind which he built his wall of impenetrability; behind which the corruption by business and political elites continued to prop him up; behind which his brutal military and police tortured any Agents of Change that were perceived to be Enemies of the State of cruel Stability.

Mother River Power



Mother River
Statue of Mother Huang He, Lanzhou, China - photo by Fanghong

They are the wombs of civilization – Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Indus, the Yellow, and the Coatzalcualcos River Valleys. Agriculture, mathematics, written languages, astronomy, architecture, religious and social hierarchy, and urban culture were the children that they bore. These children were the eldest sons of the agriculture-based societies that fathered virtually all that defines modern humanity. The distant pasts of these civilizations define the struggles of today – pasts that share a kinship, even if they knew nothing of each other for millennia before contacts were made between them. They are brothers born of Mother River.

Más allá de Vietnam: Un tiempo para romper el silencio (parte II) - Por el Rev Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr con Lyndon B Johnson

Leer parte I de este discurso aquí

English speakers please read this astounding speech here:
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence By Rev. Martin Luther King, 4 April 1967

Más allá de Vietnam: Un tiempo para romper el silencio

parte II

Libertadores extraños

Nuestro gobierno se parece entonces que el pueblo vietnamita no estaban "listos" para la independencia, y volvimos a caer víctima de la arrogancia occidental mortal que ha envenenado la atmósfera internacional por tanto tiempo. Con esa trágica decisión rechazamos un gobierno revolucionario que buscaba la autodeterminación, y un gobierno que no se hubiese creado por China (para los que los vietnamitas no tienen gran amor), pero claramente por las fuerzas indígenas que incluía a algunos comunistas. Para los campesinos este nuevo gobierno significó una verdadera reforma agraria, una de las necesidades más importantes en sus vidas.

Más allá de Vietnam: Un tiempo para romper el silencio Por el Rev. Martin Luther King

Hoy es el Día de Martin Luther King, Jr. en los Estados Unidos. Por este presento el primer parte de un discurso menos conocida de los discursos del Dr. King en las masas, porque va más allá del tema de derechos civiles al tema de que todos somos conectados, una idea muy amenazadora a la estructura del poder de los Estados Unidos. Él fue asesinado exactamente un año después.

Esto es traducido por yo, entonces, puede ser menos que correcto. Sobre la traducción de las palabras “America” y “American,” conozco que la práctica es traducir estas palabras como “Los Estados Unidos” y “estadounidenses,” por sus intentos. Pero la verdad es que los estadounidenses casi siempre se refirieren a su país como “America,” incluso cuando estan tan conciente que Dr. King erá de que los Estados Unidos son sólo parte de América.

English speakers please read this astounding speech here:
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence By Rev. Martin Luther King, 4 April 1967

Hope Begins Anew

What a beautiful summer day we are starting the New Year out with. After a peaceful, gentle beginning, a late afternoon thunderstorm passed through, left a trail of evening sunshine in its wake, and then, all of a sudden, another, stronger one has moved in, striking bolts of lightning whose thunders echo all around the valley... and now – quel lluvias!

I can’t help but be filled with hope for the future, today. But it is not just the invigorating weather that is affecting me. It is the discovery, today, on this first day of 2011, of a writer and journalist by the name of Stig Dagerman, a Swede whose star blazed a brilliant path across post-WWII Europe, an enlightened soul who wrote of imagining peace long before John Lennon spoke of the same.