BACK IN THE USSA

The trip from Johannesburg to New York seemed forever and not only in miles. It was a journey between winter or “global cooling” as some there joked and summer with global warming as a heat wave hits the West and the buzz is about the Global Live Concert that will raise millions for a climate change coalition controlled by Al Gore. He has wisely remained the champion of an issue he has been associated with for decades.

I haven’t been able to blog much because I was staying in places without Wireless that wouldn’t connect my trusty Mac and so I was left at the mercy of clunkier Windows systems that I could not as easily master. I was also on the move from morning to night reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. I showed my film IN DEBT WE TRUST at a cool Ethiopian restaurant run by a former reporter from New York’s Newsday.

America’s war on Iraq had no supporters that I could find but I did learn that there are at least two thousand military “contractors,” from South Africa in Iraq—many fought in the apartheid army and that SA made military equipment is illegally finding its way there. Officially the country has been critical of the war and was not a member of the coalition of the winning/unwilling.

There was more talk of the war in the Congo than in Mesopotamia with South African forces on peace-keeping missions in Darfur, Burundi, Congo and other hot spots on the Continent. The nost newsworthy foreign story was about Khadaffi’s call for a United States of Africa—presumably to be headed by him—that the South Africans and most African states oppose.

There is also more agitation on Palestine and Israel with Ronnie Kasrils, a Jewish member of the Cabinet—a one time guerilla/underground fighter turned Minister of Intelligence—among the most outspoken critics of Israeli policies. He has enraged the Jewish Community there but feels it is a matter of justice and global solidarity to speak out. Many activists of every background support him.

I returned to Bush World with every second person I met glumly shaking his head about the Scooter Libby Commutation—didn’t he suffer enough?—with my InBox filled with groups trying to put impeachment on the agenda, starting with Dick Cheney.Oh, if only facts prevailed instead of the muck of real world politics where compromise and collusion is the order of the day

Michael Moore’s “Sicko” is in the theater next door and I am told he will personally do very well with it given the support he’s organize after the US government threatened him in the kind of maneuver that every filmmaker hopes for to create a controversy that generates publicity and ticket sales. I read that FOX NEWS had an “expert” on that equated national health insurance in other countries with terrorism. I am sure Michael thanks you too. (I am probably the last progressive in America that hasn’t seen it but I will so my duty soon and see it soon.)

Speaking of Fox, Rupert Murdoch did, as I predicted, get to buy Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. The paper was long a captive of the right on the editorial side and now it is the news pages that will SLOWLY succumb to the new sensibility.

Oddly enough, before the dirty digger, as he is known in England, did the deal, I ran into a Journal editor on the Air Train at JFK airport who knew what was on the horizon and is already mentally packing her bags after decades on the job there. She knows it’s over. And the rest of us should too.

And speaking of over, so is part of what remains of our democracy with the NY Times reporting Saturday morning: “A divided federal appeals court panel in Cincinnati ruled that a lawsuit’s plaintiffs could not show injury from a National Security Agency program.

So wiretapping remains legal. How about that? Here we go from Bush back to Beria…

It’s Saturday morning. I am off to Boston to see my dad. I hope to have more on Monday.

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