THE EURO CIRCLE JERK

The European Central Bank just announced that it would buy an unlimited amount of government bonds issued by the European Union’s 17 member states in order to save the Euro and avoid financial disaster. A shell game, a Ponzi scheme.

Up to now the Central Bank has been playing the old kick the can down the road game. The Central Bank was lending Euros at 0.75% interest to member state banks so that they would in turn buy their own government’s bonds fetching 6% or more in interest. Paper profits to prop up the banks’ balance sheets to avoid bankruptcy and liquidation. It was a short term fix to shore up the banks and hopefully to lower the interest rate demanded by skittish investors.   

With this new move the Central Bank has now become a direct investor. It is lending money to itself.  

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HIGH CRIMES, WAR CRIMES & MISDEMEANORS

Updated on Sunday, September 9, 2012 by Deyan Brashich

False voices, forked tongues, sometimes speak the truth, putting truth in play because of the source. Other times truth is revealed by words from honest sources making truth a proven fact, a given. When that occurs it is well for us all to take notice.

Most would agree that Desmond Tutu is much like Caesar’s wife, above suspicion. He was an Archbishop of the Anglican Church, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate in ’84, the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Prize winner in ’86, given the Pacem in Terris Award in ’87, the Sydney Peace Prize in ’99, the Gandhi Peace Prize ’05 and our own Presidential Medal of Freedom in ‘09. When he speaks, you better damn well listen, and listen well.

This month Tutu spoke, or rather he wrote in England’s The Guardian newspaper that George W. Bush and Tony Blair should be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity and “should be made to answer for their actions in The Hague”, all the more so because their crimes were committed “on the basis of a lie”.

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WE CAN'T AFFORD PEACE IN OUR WAR ON DRUGS

We can’t afford the cost of peace to end our disastrous stupid futile war on drugs.     

War destroys lives, the lives of the guys in the trenches and the inevitable collateral damage to those not directly involved in the conflict. Waging war is expensive and the cost has a way of spiraling out of control. Peace is the only solution, but can we today, in a time of recession, afford peace in our drug war?

In 1971 Richard Nixon declared “War on Drugs”, a war that has had full congressional support. Voters, some of them at least, approve. The war is now entering its 5^th decade without an end in sight. It is a war fought overseas, in Columbia, Panama, Peru, Afghanistan and with ever increasing violence next door in Mexico. It is a war fought on our borders and on the high seas. It is also a war that is fought domestically in our large cities and small towns.

Modern wars have abandoned the “Take no Prisoner” approach. But this civilized approach results in thousands of prisoners of war, prisoners that we are warehousing in our federal, state and local prisons, approximately 420,000 as of today and counting, with 1,337,000 on probation or parole as of 2009, but more on this later.

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BETHEL'S NEW OLD PAINTED HOUSE: AN ARTIST'S VISION

Connecticut houses never cease to please the eye. Litchfield’s grand colonials, back country Greenwich Georgians, Hartford’s colorful Victorians all dazzle. But once you have seen one, you have seen them all. That goes for the ones in Wethersfield, Simsbury, Glastonbury and wherever. After a while they become generic, boring.

Drive down Putnam Park Road in Bethel you pass a nondescript house, a modest cape of no historical or architectural interest. But that unique house makes you stop, and that is a full screeching stop, to marvel at this tribute to art and artists in all the colors of the rainbow.

The house’s attached garage is the canvas on which “Homage to Picasso” has been painted. It’s a collage of five major Picasso paintings assembled by the personal inspiration of the artist, more about her later, to illustrate her strong held belief that a sense of space is the fount of inspiration. Her surroundings, the home which also houses her studio, are what motivates her and motivated Picasso’s genius, his inspirations.

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YOU AND ME AND THE POLICE

Updated on Friday, August 17, 2012 by Deyan Brashich

There were two deaths by gunshot in New York last week. Yes, there were others, and there were killings in Hamden, New Haven and Bridgeport as well. But the two deaths I write about were at the hands of police officers. Once was by single bullet at the corner of 14^th Street and 2^nd Avenue, the other at 36^th and 7^th Avenue from twelve shots fired in a split second. The one shot victim was a barking mixed breed mutt; the twelve shot victim was deranged black man, waiving a knife.

The two incidents are strikingly similar. The mutt, a regular in front of the 14^th Street Kentucky Fried Chicken, protecting his passed out homeless owner was barking wildly. The cops maced him. When that did not work they put him down with one shot. The black guy was smoking pot on 47^th Street and Broadway when the cops told him to stop, not to disturb the tourists in that pedestrian mall. The guy, clearly deranged, kept retreating down Seventh Avenue waiving a knife pursued by at least a dozen cops. He was maced several times and when that did not stop him, he was put down with twelve, in-a-second, shots.

This is not a proper forum to decide if the police actions and the 13 shots were justified. Let a grand jury or a departmental trial made that decision. What the two incidents make clear is that there is a widening divide between the uniformed thin blue line and the civilian population. Suffice it to say that a detailed study by The New York Times [August 15, 2012] found a “high [excessive] use of force” in four precincts, Harlem, The Bronx [2] and Jackson Heights, precincts with large minority populations.

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