Sunday, March 07, 2004

Sunday Morning Reading

1. Secret of Our Sauce is written by Thomas Friedman and appears in today's NY Times. Here's a bit:
America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products.
2. Coup in Haiti is a well written piece from Amy Wilentz and appears in The Nation. Here's a bit:
What happened in Haiti was a coup d'etat, and it's almost funny to hear Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Scott McClellan call that claim "absurd" and "nonsense." The coup didn't come in one fell strike, which fact camouflaged it for a time; we're used to a coup being a coup--which means a cut or blow in French--something sudden. But the coup against Aristide, and by extension against the Haitian people, was prolonged, a chronic coup. It began when Aristide was first elected at the end of 1990 and continued right up until he was hustled aboard a plane and flown to what he was told would be a place of his choice but that turned out to be the former homeland of fabled killer and diamond collector Jean-Bedel Bokassa, a country where, according to the CIA country report available on the web, a ten-year elected civilian government was recently replaced by a military coup d'etat. Sound familiar?

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