It's an ugly "joke" but it was an ugly war, too.
Big, strong kid from the Tennessee hills decides to seek his fortune in Alaska. Asks advice from old-timers in the Frontier Saloon. "Boy," he's told, "you ain't ready fer Alaska till you've screwed a Eskimo and shot a grizzly." Youngster leaves. A few weeks later he staggers into the saloon, gashed and bleeding, his clothes in tatters and a dead Eskimo over his shoulder. "Shooting the Eskimo was the easy part," he says. "The bear was somethin' else. But it was worth it."
Enter Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and the latest "it was worth it" regarding the Iraq war. “I think the price has been worth it," he said, after a one-day visit, "to establish a stable government in a very important region of the world.”
Stable? What is this guy smoking?
But even if the post-America Iraqi government were stable, would that really justify the cost not just in dollars, but in Iraqi and American lives and disability? Only if you accept the racist "dead Eskimo" mentality as the acceptable American norm: that collateral damage in dead civilians is too insignificant to bother counting.
American troops not only died there, unnecessarily; they also committed atrocities there. War crimes.
But "it was worth it."
Only to the shameless profiteers who sucked enormous fortunes out of the trillions of American dollars wasted on this war whose "end" we declared last week.
Or to the blood-lusting ignoramuses who think there is "honor" in war.
Or to the Machiavellian schemers who see endless war as America's manifest destiny to force "democracy" on nations we deem incapable of managing their own affairs.
"The price has been worth it."
Has it? The trillions of dollars? The innocent lives lost?
What about the forfeiture of our Bill of Rights at home? What about the utter demise of American democracy? What about the decimation of our economy, the distortion of our standards of justice, the loss of our dignity as a nation, of decency as a people?
"The price has been worth it."
Go fuck a grizzly bear, Leon.
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
'Tis the Season to Be . . . Selectively Good-Spirited
The intellectual hypocrisy of the Republican party is a top-to-bottom thing, perhaps because the same handful of propaganda mills like the American Heritage Foundation feed them all the political pabulum that passes for thought.
A case in point is a recent contumely published in the local rag under the byline of the county Republican chairman.
In it, he dismisses as "pseudo-intellectuals" all the progressives in the United States, to whom he refers (in what he obviously thinks is the ultimate disparagement) as "socialists."
He would, I infer, have us reject the thoughts of Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Paul Krugman, E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker and their ilk in favor of such luminaries as Michelle Bachmann, who doesn't know where the first shot of the American Revolution was fired; Rick Parry, who has trouble counting to three when it comes to his own beliefs; and Eft, the Republicans' great idea factory, who thinks the people of Palestine were "invented."
Heaven forfend!
The low-level GOP acolyte who wrote the piece dwells mainly, as a matter of fact, on heavenly inspiration.
He proudly wishes us "Merry Christmas" -- not "Happy Holidays" -- because the Dec. 25 holiday is by, er, God a Christian one. "Christmas," he lectures, "is not about the beginning of some season, Winterfest, or some other socially designed holiday. It is about the most revered religious holiday" because "it has been celebrated in one form or another by Christians for 2,000 years."
Never mind that non-Christians have celebrated "in one form or another" seasonal festivals like Inti Raymi, Calan Gaeaf, Modranect, Hanukkah, Yule, Yalda, Chahar Shanbeh Suri, Saturnalia and Koleda far longer. Tell their celebrants, after all these millennia, that they're wrong, it's about Jesus.
As they say on ESPN, "C'mon man!"
He writes, "Christ practiced compassion and brotherly love and Christmas provides us with many opportunities to follow his example." Yet he derides governments for keeping shiftless poor jerks on "the dole." Charity, he says, should be "the province of individuals and churches." Government has no damned business helping the nation's sick, its jobless, its suffering. Let them learn to fish!
Progressives, he says, don't acknowledge the rights of Americans to practice their individual religious beliefs. But he seems to argue that those rights apply only to Christian beliefs.
"Merry Christmas to all," he writes. "May each of us find that place in our hearts that urges us to reverently remember why we celebrate this day each year."
By the way, everyone. On this Dec. 16, 2011, I'd like to wish each and every one of you a Happy Beethoven's Birthday.
A case in point is a recent contumely published in the local rag under the byline of the county Republican chairman.
In it, he dismisses as "pseudo-intellectuals" all the progressives in the United States, to whom he refers (in what he obviously thinks is the ultimate disparagement) as "socialists."
He would, I infer, have us reject the thoughts of Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Paul Krugman, E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker and their ilk in favor of such luminaries as Michelle Bachmann, who doesn't know where the first shot of the American Revolution was fired; Rick Parry, who has trouble counting to three when it comes to his own beliefs; and Eft, the Republicans' great idea factory, who thinks the people of Palestine were "invented."
Heaven forfend!
The low-level GOP acolyte who wrote the piece dwells mainly, as a matter of fact, on heavenly inspiration.
He proudly wishes us "Merry Christmas" -- not "Happy Holidays" -- because the Dec. 25 holiday is by, er, God a Christian one. "Christmas," he lectures, "is not about the beginning of some season, Winterfest, or some other socially designed holiday. It is about the most revered religious holiday" because "it has been celebrated in one form or another by Christians for 2,000 years."
Never mind that non-Christians have celebrated "in one form or another" seasonal festivals like Inti Raymi, Calan Gaeaf, Modranect, Hanukkah, Yule, Yalda, Chahar Shanbeh Suri, Saturnalia and Koleda far longer. Tell their celebrants, after all these millennia, that they're wrong, it's about Jesus.
As they say on ESPN, "C'mon man!"
He writes, "Christ practiced compassion and brotherly love and Christmas provides us with many opportunities to follow his example." Yet he derides governments for keeping shiftless poor jerks on "the dole." Charity, he says, should be "the province of individuals and churches." Government has no damned business helping the nation's sick, its jobless, its suffering. Let them learn to fish!
Progressives, he says, don't acknowledge the rights of Americans to practice their individual religious beliefs. But he seems to argue that those rights apply only to Christian beliefs.
"Merry Christmas to all," he writes. "May each of us find that place in our hearts that urges us to reverently remember why we celebrate this day each year."
By the way, everyone. On this Dec. 16, 2011, I'd like to wish each and every one of you a Happy Beethoven's Birthday.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
A Year of Important Beginnings
This was the year The People stirred.
In the ultimate protest against oppression, a man in Tunisia killed himself by immolation and ignited a revolution. Our Brothers and Sisters in that country overthrew a corrupt dictatorial government.
In Egypt, The People seethed under the yolk of Hosni Mubarak, who threatened to "cut off the hands" of those who opposed him. By February, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians were demanding his resignation and Tahrir Square was on a billion lips around the world. With Mubarak gone and a military interim government, Egyptians took to the Square again in the fall to demand free and fair elections.
In Yemen, Bahrain, Iraq, Libya (with a little help from NATO), Syria, public squares filled, bullets flew, tear gas filled the air. Some protesters brought down brutal regimes as in Libya, others suffered brutal suppression. Syrian authorities delivered the butchered body of a 13-year-old boy to his parents.
But The People did not rest.
They protested in Europe. They protested in the United States.
In Madison, WI, the fascist puppet governor of the Koch Brothers oil empire set out to break the public employee unions. By the thousands they poured into the square around the capitol, demanding justice. Supporters from around the country joined them. Living on pizza and popcorn they occupied the capitol building. State police refused an order to remove them by force. Now the governor, Scott Walker, faces a recall election.
Using Ghandi's tactic of civil disobedience to injustice, thousands of Americans protested the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, a potential megabomb to the environment of a dozen states. More than a thousand demonstrators willingly went to jail for the cause. President Obama, a pawn of the interests behind the pipeline, summoned the gumption to postpone a decision until the heat was off.
And then came Occupy. Suggested by a lefty publication as a way to protest the vast income inequality between Wall Street and Main Street, between the richest 1% and the rest of us, it began by "occupying" Wall Street but soon spread to cities and towns across the country.
After first dismissing them as an insignificant, unwashed minority, our Oligarchy then moved to the tyrant's favorite reaction to dissent and forcefully dismantled the protestors' tent city, busting heads, spraying pepper and even manhandling reporters and photographers trying to record their misdeeds.
Occupy seized the initiative, for a while at least, from the budget-cutting whack jobs of Congress and forced the corporate sycophant in the White House to revert to the campaign trail populist rhetoric that served him so well on the way to his election. He pledged a return to "the vision that is truest to our history and most representative of the core decency of the American people." Of course he did not mention black hole torture centers, rendition, limitless detention without charge or the new right of the President to order the assassination of citizens he deems supporters of terrorism. Why stop at "cutting off their hands?"
Even in Russia, by year's end, The People stirred. Tens of thousands took to the streets to protest a rigged election; the police did not molest them and the media reported without bias on the demonstrations. The president promised to "investigate" the election fraud charges and The People sneered. The filthy rich Russian owner of an American professional basketball team announced that he would run against the regime for the presidency of Russia.
It has been a year of important beginnings. The People caused some good things to happen. Will they last?
Will the seeds The People planted in 2011 take root in 2012?
To be or not to be, that is the question.
In the ultimate protest against oppression, a man in Tunisia killed himself by immolation and ignited a revolution. Our Brothers and Sisters in that country overthrew a corrupt dictatorial government.
In Egypt, The People seethed under the yolk of Hosni Mubarak, who threatened to "cut off the hands" of those who opposed him. By February, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians were demanding his resignation and Tahrir Square was on a billion lips around the world. With Mubarak gone and a military interim government, Egyptians took to the Square again in the fall to demand free and fair elections.
In Yemen, Bahrain, Iraq, Libya (with a little help from NATO), Syria, public squares filled, bullets flew, tear gas filled the air. Some protesters brought down brutal regimes as in Libya, others suffered brutal suppression. Syrian authorities delivered the butchered body of a 13-year-old boy to his parents.
But The People did not rest.
They protested in Europe. They protested in the United States.
In Madison, WI, the fascist puppet governor of the Koch Brothers oil empire set out to break the public employee unions. By the thousands they poured into the square around the capitol, demanding justice. Supporters from around the country joined them. Living on pizza and popcorn they occupied the capitol building. State police refused an order to remove them by force. Now the governor, Scott Walker, faces a recall election.
Using Ghandi's tactic of civil disobedience to injustice, thousands of Americans protested the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, a potential megabomb to the environment of a dozen states. More than a thousand demonstrators willingly went to jail for the cause. President Obama, a pawn of the interests behind the pipeline, summoned the gumption to postpone a decision until the heat was off.
And then came Occupy. Suggested by a lefty publication as a way to protest the vast income inequality between Wall Street and Main Street, between the richest 1% and the rest of us, it began by "occupying" Wall Street but soon spread to cities and towns across the country.
After first dismissing them as an insignificant, unwashed minority, our Oligarchy then moved to the tyrant's favorite reaction to dissent and forcefully dismantled the protestors' tent city, busting heads, spraying pepper and even manhandling reporters and photographers trying to record their misdeeds.
Occupy seized the initiative, for a while at least, from the budget-cutting whack jobs of Congress and forced the corporate sycophant in the White House to revert to the campaign trail populist rhetoric that served him so well on the way to his election. He pledged a return to "the vision that is truest to our history and most representative of the core decency of the American people." Of course he did not mention black hole torture centers, rendition, limitless detention without charge or the new right of the President to order the assassination of citizens he deems supporters of terrorism. Why stop at "cutting off their hands?"
Even in Russia, by year's end, The People stirred. Tens of thousands took to the streets to protest a rigged election; the police did not molest them and the media reported without bias on the demonstrations. The president promised to "investigate" the election fraud charges and The People sneered. The filthy rich Russian owner of an American professional basketball team announced that he would run against the regime for the presidency of Russia.
It has been a year of important beginnings. The People caused some good things to happen. Will they last?
Will the seeds The People planted in 2011 take root in 2012?
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
The Great Universal Suicide Pact
Millions of Americans believed in the Republican bogeyman called "death panel" and so they rallied in town hall meetings to shout nonsense in objection to health care reform efforts.
As a result, we're still stuck with one of the poorest health care systems in the so-called "free world."
But there's a real death panel in this country. Its members are R. W. Tillerson, Chairman; M. W. Albers, M. J. Dolan, D. D. Humphreys, R. N. Schleckser, J. M. Spellings, Jr., S. K. Stuewer, T. R. Walters and J.J. Woodbury. They are the corporate officers of EXXON, the most profitable corporation in history, a corporation that pays no federal income taxes and in fact usually receives a fat refund from the government.
EXXON is only the most powerful of the multitude of hugely profitable extraction industries and their satellites who plunder finite planetary resources, often polluting the environment in the process, and who have used their filthy lucre to successfully ward off government intervention to save the earth.
Fittingly it is the United States, the biggest polluter, the biggest energy consumer, the most wastrel nation on the face of the earth, which, in its servitude to corporate power, has gummed the gears of world efforts to address climate change.
In Durban, South Africa, the nations of the world are working overtime to win commitments to a milksop package of compromises. The United States delegation seems reluctantly committed to backing some form of this too little, too late effort.
The United Nations climate scientists, who have documented beyond the shadow of a doubt what 's happening to our planet because of human actions like EXXON's, created the Global Carbon Project in 1997 to monitor greenhouse gas emissions. Signatories to the Protocol -- the United States refused to sign -- committed to reduce those emissions. But those commitments expire next year. Without the biggest polluter in he world, the efforts have come to nil.
How nil?
The latest Global Carbon Project report showed that carbon emissions from our planet had increased 5.9 percent between 2009 and 2010, the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution.
Since nothing's being done -- thank you, Mr. Obama, Mr. Tillerson, and all you other robber baron oligarchs throughout the world -- next year's report will be even more grim.
A planet already a dangerous one degree warmer because of human folly is racing to become suicidally two degrees warmer.
Tillerson's death panel is killing us -- with our tacit consent.
Is it any wonder that a society that tolerates such a death panel accepts as serious candidates for its presidency the likes of Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachman, Rick Parry and Rick Santorum, or gets its "information" from the likes of Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly?
"Keep government out of my Medicare!" indeed. Who needs health care when we've signed off on universal suicide?
What fools these mortals be!
As a result, we're still stuck with one of the poorest health care systems in the so-called "free world."
But there's a real death panel in this country. Its members are R. W. Tillerson, Chairman; M. W. Albers, M. J. Dolan, D. D. Humphreys, R. N. Schleckser, J. M. Spellings, Jr., S. K. Stuewer, T. R. Walters and J.J. Woodbury. They are the corporate officers of EXXON, the most profitable corporation in history, a corporation that pays no federal income taxes and in fact usually receives a fat refund from the government.
EXXON is only the most powerful of the multitude of hugely profitable extraction industries and their satellites who plunder finite planetary resources, often polluting the environment in the process, and who have used their filthy lucre to successfully ward off government intervention to save the earth.
Fittingly it is the United States, the biggest polluter, the biggest energy consumer, the most wastrel nation on the face of the earth, which, in its servitude to corporate power, has gummed the gears of world efforts to address climate change.
In Durban, South Africa, the nations of the world are working overtime to win commitments to a milksop package of compromises. The United States delegation seems reluctantly committed to backing some form of this too little, too late effort.
The United Nations climate scientists, who have documented beyond the shadow of a doubt what 's happening to our planet because of human actions like EXXON's, created the Global Carbon Project in 1997 to monitor greenhouse gas emissions. Signatories to the Protocol -- the United States refused to sign -- committed to reduce those emissions. But those commitments expire next year. Without the biggest polluter in he world, the efforts have come to nil.
How nil?
The latest Global Carbon Project report showed that carbon emissions from our planet had increased 5.9 percent between 2009 and 2010, the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution.
Since nothing's being done -- thank you, Mr. Obama, Mr. Tillerson, and all you other robber baron oligarchs throughout the world -- next year's report will be even more grim.
A planet already a dangerous one degree warmer because of human folly is racing to become suicidally two degrees warmer.
Tillerson's death panel is killing us -- with our tacit consent.
Is it any wonder that a society that tolerates such a death panel accepts as serious candidates for its presidency the likes of Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachman, Rick Parry and Rick Santorum, or gets its "information" from the likes of Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly?
"Keep government out of my Medicare!" indeed. Who needs health care when we've signed off on universal suicide?
What fools these mortals be!
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Owed to Frankie Luntz, Frightened Republican
"I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death. They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism."--Frank Luntz, Republican word-twister and strategist.
Little Frankie Luntz
Is known for bully stunts,
For wiggle words
And crafty grunts;
For lies and fibs and prevarications.
He's not a dunce,
This Frankie Luntz --
He invented the Tea Party!
He's such a smarty
That if he's on guard he
Must have reason for perturbation.
Frankie's quarrel?
"Capitalism's immoral,"
Some Occupiers say.
These heretics
Seem to get their kicks
By disparaging The American Way.
What's good for the Street
We must repeat and repeat
Is good for the working class, too.
People! To avoid being crass you
Must quit making waves right away!
Frankie, Frankie,
Why so fraidy cat?
Those women who sat
Weren't all Democrat
So why did the cops have to spray them?
And as for the books
The policemen took,
The paper may burn
But the ideas return
So nothing comes of your mayhem.
Little Frankie Luntz,
For all his bully stunts,
Hasn't a clue
Why people do
Things like Occupy Wall Street.
He's never been a renter
(He's a one percenter)
Who can't pay the lease
(The job's overseas)
And whose debt is set in concrete.
So quiver and cringe,
Frankie Luntz.
The outraged "mobs"
Simply want jobs
To feed the kids and pay the bills.
Choke on your lies,
You miserable guys,
Suffer your fears,
Swallow your tears;
How'd YOU like to work in the mills?
Little Frankie Luntz
Is known for bully stunts,
For wiggle words
And crafty grunts;
For lies and fibs and prevarications.
He's not a dunce,
This Frankie Luntz --
He invented the Tea Party!
He's such a smarty
That if he's on guard he
Must have reason for perturbation.
Frankie's quarrel?
"Capitalism's immoral,"
Some Occupiers say.
These heretics
Seem to get their kicks
By disparaging The American Way.
What's good for the Street
We must repeat and repeat
Is good for the working class, too.
People! To avoid being crass you
Must quit making waves right away!
Frankie, Frankie,
Why so fraidy cat?
Those women who sat
Weren't all Democrat
So why did the cops have to spray them?
And as for the books
The policemen took,
The paper may burn
But the ideas return
So nothing comes of your mayhem.
Little Frankie Luntz,
For all his bully stunts,
Hasn't a clue
Why people do
Things like Occupy Wall Street.
He's never been a renter
(He's a one percenter)
Who can't pay the lease
(The job's overseas)
And whose debt is set in concrete.
So quiver and cringe,
Frankie Luntz.
The outraged "mobs"
Simply want jobs
To feed the kids and pay the bills.
Choke on your lies,
You miserable guys,
Suffer your fears,
Swallow your tears;
How'd YOU like to work in the mills?
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Pay No Attention to Those Damp Squibs!
There are two ways to deal with dissent: derogate it as insignificant, or suppress it with brute force.
The ruling class in the United States, having tried the first tactic on the Occupy movement to no avail, has now resorted to the second. In city after city, riot-armed police have driven off peaceful Occupiers, bashing heads, making mass arrests, destroying tent encampments and, worst of all, burning books by the hundreds.
In England, Prime Minister David Cameron is invoking the first tactic to dismiss as a petty annoyance ("a damp squib," in his words) the strikes by public sector workers to protest proposed pension cuts. It's one of the "austerity measures" to bring down the debt bogeyman. All of Europe has been infected by the same obsession that fuels the insanity of the political parties here, as well: quit spending, lower the debt.
The austerity campaign is championed by the very people who caused the debt. None of their "austerity measures" will cost them a shilling. The One Per Cent Oligarchy will get still richer. Let the workers, the jobless, the sick, the elderly, the pensioners pay the cost of wars, unregulated financial markets and other follies of the free market priests and prelates.
In the UK, the effectiveness of Cameron's fizzling little firecracker can be judged the amount of time that elapses before he is forced to call in the armed goons and bash heads, as his peers have already done in police states around the world, from Syria and Egypt to the U.S. of A.
Governments today -- whatever label they wear: democracy, republic, dictatorship, military junta, social-democrat, monarchy, etc. -- are all in fact plutocracies. Their richest few either run the country directly, or control those delegated or "elected" to run it. They wring personal profit from traditional religious and ethnic hatreds, exploit hostility toward immigrants and love war as long as they're on the winning side. They're police states, to one degree or another. They are intolerant of dissent, whether they simply send goons to assassinate dissenters or merely throw them in jail without trial (as the United States increasingly does).
Exceptions to the rule seem almost quaint: how much do you hear or read about, say, Costa Rica? Described in 1719 as "the poorest and most miserable Spanish colony in all America," its citizens today enjoy an enviable quality of life, the highest in Central America. Their life expectancy level is among the highest in the Western Hemisphere. Their government health care system provides them with better health care than U.S. citizens receive. Once dependent on coffee, banana and beef exports, Costa Rica has diversified its economy. Its high level of education (state-supported) has attracted computer chip makers, pharmaceutical companies, and financial outsourcing enterprises to set up shop there. Ecotourism now earns more foreign exchange for Costa Rica than the combined exports of the country's three main cash cops (coffee, bananas and pineapples). The economy has no army to support: Rebels against its military dictatorship won a bloody civil war in 1948 and one of the first acts of the new government was to abolish the army altogether. Costa Rica's inflation rate, once a worrisome 13.8%, has declined to 5.7%. Its poverty rate is around 8% (vs, 15.1 percent in the U.S.).
Through its last 13 presidential elections, Costa Rica has remained stable, and it is a world leader in efforts to foster human rights and ecologically sustainable development. At home, it maintains one of the strongest social welfare systems in the hemisphere.
According to the New Economics Foundation Costa Rica ranks first in the Happy Planet Index and is the most environmentally responsible country in the world.
It is a government that believes government's principal obligation is to the quality of life of its citizens.
Weird idea, isn't it?
Some might call it paradise. Others would say it's a "damp squib."
The ruling class in the United States, having tried the first tactic on the Occupy movement to no avail, has now resorted to the second. In city after city, riot-armed police have driven off peaceful Occupiers, bashing heads, making mass arrests, destroying tent encampments and, worst of all, burning books by the hundreds.
In England, Prime Minister David Cameron is invoking the first tactic to dismiss as a petty annoyance ("a damp squib," in his words) the strikes by public sector workers to protest proposed pension cuts. It's one of the "austerity measures" to bring down the debt bogeyman. All of Europe has been infected by the same obsession that fuels the insanity of the political parties here, as well: quit spending, lower the debt.
The austerity campaign is championed by the very people who caused the debt. None of their "austerity measures" will cost them a shilling. The One Per Cent Oligarchy will get still richer. Let the workers, the jobless, the sick, the elderly, the pensioners pay the cost of wars, unregulated financial markets and other follies of the free market priests and prelates.
In the UK, the effectiveness of Cameron's fizzling little firecracker can be judged the amount of time that elapses before he is forced to call in the armed goons and bash heads, as his peers have already done in police states around the world, from Syria and Egypt to the U.S. of A.
Governments today -- whatever label they wear: democracy, republic, dictatorship, military junta, social-democrat, monarchy, etc. -- are all in fact plutocracies. Their richest few either run the country directly, or control those delegated or "elected" to run it. They wring personal profit from traditional religious and ethnic hatreds, exploit hostility toward immigrants and love war as long as they're on the winning side. They're police states, to one degree or another. They are intolerant of dissent, whether they simply send goons to assassinate dissenters or merely throw them in jail without trial (as the United States increasingly does).
Exceptions to the rule seem almost quaint: how much do you hear or read about, say, Costa Rica? Described in 1719 as "the poorest and most miserable Spanish colony in all America," its citizens today enjoy an enviable quality of life, the highest in Central America. Their life expectancy level is among the highest in the Western Hemisphere. Their government health care system provides them with better health care than U.S. citizens receive. Once dependent on coffee, banana and beef exports, Costa Rica has diversified its economy. Its high level of education (state-supported) has attracted computer chip makers, pharmaceutical companies, and financial outsourcing enterprises to set up shop there. Ecotourism now earns more foreign exchange for Costa Rica than the combined exports of the country's three main cash cops (coffee, bananas and pineapples). The economy has no army to support: Rebels against its military dictatorship won a bloody civil war in 1948 and one of the first acts of the new government was to abolish the army altogether. Costa Rica's inflation rate, once a worrisome 13.8%, has declined to 5.7%. Its poverty rate is around 8% (vs, 15.1 percent in the U.S.).
Through its last 13 presidential elections, Costa Rica has remained stable, and it is a world leader in efforts to foster human rights and ecologically sustainable development. At home, it maintains one of the strongest social welfare systems in the hemisphere.
According to the New Economics Foundation Costa Rica ranks first in the Happy Planet Index and is the most environmentally responsible country in the world.
It is a government that believes government's principal obligation is to the quality of life of its citizens.
Weird idea, isn't it?
Some might call it paradise. Others would say it's a "damp squib."
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