Subject: 2011, the aged gentleman with the long white beard, has taken his last shuffling steps across the paths of time. And now comes baby new year, 2012. . . . but what baggage the old man has left behind! Let's think about some of it for a minute, for perspective's sake.
Happy New Year! Notes from the North
January 10, 2012. Here are my picks for top Norwegian and American topics of 2011 and my suggestions for 2012. I look backward and forward, with a focus on being an American and living in Norway, altogether a very positive experience.
1. The Arab Spring and the Arab World. I love the Arab World. A world of particularism, and of ancient traditions and cultures. The efforts of the many who have risen up to overthrow dictatorial and non-representative forms of government during 2011 cannot be underestimated. Thousands have paid with their lives, lives whose hopes and wishes were for the peaceful coexistence of their peoples in communities controlled democratically. Democracy, on the other hand, is not an ‘efficient’ form of government, and so many find themselves struggling to create the mechanisms for representation and administration that were handled so efficiently – i.e. so top-down - in the past. Regardless of the efforts required, the goals are good, and will be good for the people. The need for people to control their means of livelihood, their communities and their national agendas bodes well for the common good. Now, Syria must rid itself of its own power-mongerers, and other nations will follow as the world shrinks, day by day.
Sustainability will become a much larger concern as this movement towards a one-playing-field global economy continues, and the law will have to play a more important part in seeing that sustainability is possible. This was the topic of a Fall, 2011 paper I delivered at Aarhus which I am now sending out for publication.
In addition, human rights, whose violations help hold dictatorships in power, will achieve new levels of undeniable recognition - as much through our new forms of global sharing of stories and events as through legislative and regulatory efforts.
2. American politics and the Occupy movement: Could Congress be any less effective as an organization? Could the President’s own powers be any further compromised, and could the Supreme Court be any less important at helping build a strong nation? Sadly, what we call “the balance of powers” not only needs re-balancing, but might start with training in the courtesies of discussion and decorum.
My suggestion: Occupy Congress – the balconies, your Representatives’ offices, your Senator’s office and phone lines, the e-mail and the snail mail, the hallways and the by-ways. Just take your real caring issues of concern to the persons who are supposed to work for you. In Congress and in the State legislatures, in the State departments and in the federal departments. When they don’t work for you, get rid of them with your vote. Think up new ideas and deliver them to those who can put them into practice. In this individualistic culture, more attention should be placed on respecting communal and group initiatives, and supporting individual efforts through group efforts.
In this, I am referring to the need to establish a better safety and health care net for Americans, as well as to re-structure the taxation of corporations and the rich so as to re-invigorate the American middle class. Don’t call it socialism because it’s not precisely that. Call it the Nor Way. It is the Nor way, and it is a good way to take care of society.
As for the Presidency, it’s too bad that this President inherited such a ‘perfect storm’ of problems. I don’t think anyone could have done any better, given the obstinacy of Congress. I also don’t think a Republican is going to be able to be good to the unemployed and powerless, even if he wants to be. Since there is as yet no viable woman candidate, 2012 will be the year Americans should vote for the man who is for the little man, regardless of his party. Who is that man?
3. Here, I am discussing Anders Breivik, Norway’s and the world’s mass murderer of 2011, as well as Odd Nerdrum, one of Norway’s greatest artists. How crazy can one country be when (1) the defense attorney for the mass murderer of 77 persons (the defense attorney requested by the accused) is busy on television and in the media telling us all about how difficult it is for his client, how his client thinks, what he wants, what he thinks, and why he thinks it; (2) the same country’s greatest artist is appealing a judgment that he be sent to prison for two years for tax fraud, rightly proven in Oslo court, with the special concern as to whether he should be granted the use of paints and brushes in his confinement; (3) the fact that a tax-paid commission is busy dragging its way through every known fact about the mass murderer’s life, striking quickly back at anyone who suggests that we just speed this up, hear the case and throw the self-confessed killer into prison for life; and (4) the parents of the children who were killed have had to get their own organization going just to try to get some recompense for the horrid job that the police and the State did, by protecting their own asses before getting in a boat and going over and catching or killing this guy so that their loved ones would still be living.
In order, (1) get off the TV, read the Rules of Professional Conduct, go back to your office, prepare your case in confidentiality, share it with the court, and get it over with. (2) Give this man a repayment schedule for the millions of kroner he should have paid the state, plus a sufficiently stinging punitive fine that he won’t get busy keeping his art sales activities ‘off the grid’ in the future. Don’t send him to jail, which accomplishes no purpose whatsoever. Then, someone find him an advisor who can help him decide which country he’d like to call his country of primary residence as well as his ‘tax home,’ and help him establish it legally. (3) Get this Commission out of their budget, paid for with my meager tax kroner, and get this report on the table, get this case heard in the court, and get this maniac out of the media – permanently. (4) Give these parents and their organization the support and compensation they deserve, and make the immediate changes needed to organizations such as the internal national guard and police at various levels. This whole episode should result in new standing orders for police (some of which were in place but not followed), a protocol of levels of orders and when individual initiatives are pre-approved, orders they actually obey when they are in the situation or are asked to intervene, as well as the equipment to immediately reach and answer mass calls for help from areas surrounding major population centers.
4. Global Financial Regulation. Ahh, what a mixed bag. Let’s see: Wall Street has battled Congress, while Congress has pretended to reply. The SEC has said their ‘follow-up’ activities are sufficiently strapping, even though the same financial giants break the law every other month or so, continuously. And the legislation designed to revamp the financial regulation of banks, shepherded by a small group of Congressmen, has blown up like a balloon stuck with a pin. In the same year, in Europe, the G-20, in an attempt to bring England into the European financial policy fold, attempted to establish their own over-arching and comprehensively revised financial regulatory structure for banks. To which David Cameron said, ‘No way,’ and ‘our banks need all the flexibility they can get’ (words to that effect). The immediate response to the fact that England refused to be held to the new European banking regulations were musings that perhaps England was ‘moving away’ from continental Europe again, as it has in the past – oh, dear, such a pity. No one has been discussing the fact that, if London is going to permit the same under-regulated financial structures to exist that the European Union is trying to get rid of, investors in the U.K. should be busy moving their money to Europe.
Greece and Italy have their own challenges, which would be quickly solved if their underground economies were brought to light. The rich underground of Italy can pay Italy back for its many blessings, satisfying all of its obligations. The Greeks can do the same for Greece but haven’t been. Financial accounting 101 – Record the income, spend less than you take in, deduct the taxes used for social and government services, repay your debts. Get everyone to do it. Everything’s fixed.
Respectively, first, get your votes behind someone who will actually deliver stricter financial regulation in the U.S. Second, get your money out of under-regulated financial institutions. Why not? Make a point. Money talks: make it walk. Go for financial regulation this year - as an ethical decision, if you have the funds to do that. There is still money to be made in the world’s economy - ethically and increasingly with good protections. Pay Europe back for financial regulation – invest in non-U.K. European banks. In sum, more global transparency and financial regulation now will be almost as important as anything we can do for the world as a whole in this next year.
I realize that these topics are over-simplified. However, as in art, the simplification of forms does occasionally reveal underlying truths. Here is a 2012 with many challenges. Some of these will have positive outcomes.
May some of those positive outcomes be yours in 2012!
-June Edvenson
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