Kyodo World Service, September 26th, 2007
Selected editorial excerpts from the U.S. press:
LIBERTY VS. EQUALITY (Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles)
The clash between North and South America is as enduring as
ever, but its rhetoric is evolving. Gone are the crude tirades about
imperialist oppression and the exploitation of the world's poor by
greedy corporations. Now it's all about the competition between
liberty, the preeminent value championed by President Bush, and
equality, the primary concern of his leading ideological adversaries,
presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Hugo Chavez of
Venezuela.
Bush laid out his liberty agenda before the U.N. General
Assembly on Tuesday. He ably anchored his argument in the U.N.'s 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1 of which states,
''All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.''
He said the U.N. must promote freedom ''from tyranny and violence,
hunger and disease, illiteracy and ignorance, and poverty and
despair.'' He went on to scold unnamed ''extremists'' and name the
names of tyrannical or violent regimes worldwide: Belarus, North
Korea, Syria, Iran, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Sudan and Cuba. (The Cubans,
as is their habit, walked out and released a statement calling Bush a
''criminal'' who has ''no moral authority to judge any other
country.'')
Bush is to be applauded for having the courage, in the face of
criticism of his own human rights record, to speak the truth to the
assembled tyrants. Yet he failed to mount a compelling response to a
compelling moral challenge facing the United States: How to lessen
the global inequality that, more than freedom, tops the political
agenda in the developing world?
The inequality agenda was clear in speeches this week about
climate change, the theme of this year's General Assembly. While
leaders from the industrialized world droned on about the need for
action, the developing world's heads of state delivered a stark
message: You're creating the warming, but we're the ones who are
going to suffer most from it. ''It is unacceptable that the cost of
the irresponsibility of a privileged few be shouldered by the
dispossessed of the Earth,'' Lula said.
In a speech that followed Lula's, Bush discussed U.S. aid for
fighting HIV and malaria. Yet other than opining that the poor ought
to be free to participate in the global economy, he offered no new
ideas about how to reduce the inequalities of wealth and power that
continue to rankle the world. The point is not whether Bush's
economic worldview is smarter than Lula's (of course it is). The
point is that if the United States wishes to exercise global
leadership, it must not only articulate but implement a global
anti-poverty, anti-warming policy that compels the respect and
admiration of its intended beneficiaries.
(Sept. 26)
