From the Sitting Room Window

Citizens of Walworth protesting sales of Council-owned property to private owners and the rise of the chain supermarket and demise of the small shop. According to my neighbour Steve, a die-hard Socialist who is deeply involved in community politics, the march consisted of 'rich, lazy Marxists and drunks with no connection to the properties involved'.

Brief Moment of Clarity

Banco Nacional de Cuba v. Sabbatino, 376 U.S. 398 (1964)

Prior to the Cuban revolution, Cuba’s sugar was controlled by a corporation largely owned by U.S. stockholders. After the revolution, and subsequent to the U.S. reducing their Cuban sugar quota, Cuba expropriated the sugar corporation's property and rights. The U.S. broker for the sugar agreed with the Cuban Government to continue to import and sell the sugar, however, after Cuba exported a shipment of sugar, the broker refused to deliver the proceeds to Cuba and instead paid the then defunct corporation.

Cuba then sued the broker and the corporation in U.S. District Court to recover the proceeds. The court held that the corporation's property interest in the sugar was subject to Cuba's territorial jurisdiction, and acknowledged the "act of state" doctrine, which holds that a nation is sovereign within its own borders, and its domestic actions may not be questioned in the courts of another nation.. The court however rendered summary judgment against Cuba, ruling that the act of state doctrine was inapplicable when the questioned act violated international law, which the District Court found had been the case here. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed.

In U.S. Supreme Court reversed holding that “expropriations take place for a variety of reasons, political and ideological, as well as economic” and that “both the national interest and progress toward the goal of establishing the rule of law among nations are best served by maintaining intact the act of state doctrine in this realm of its application.”

Not surprisingly, Congress immediately passed an amendment mandating the courts not to apply the act of state doctrine as a bar against hearing cases of expropriation by a foreign sovereign, thereby destroying Cuba’s claim.

I’ll take mine unsweetened.

Feminism is Over?

Today Erica Jong wrote in the Guardian that '1968 was brief flare of hope for the human species. It was extinguished' .What now?

Excerpt from 'Notes on the Twentieth Century' by Hans Koning

OF course, the division of time is arbitrary, and has as little meaning as a child's chalk mark on an endless road. A year as a unit of time has a natural significance only on our own planet. The decimal system has practicality because we have ten fingers, but there is nothing inevitable about it. Decades and centuries are just bookkeeping units that help us in our ordering and arranging.

Nonetheless, we can assign the twentieth century a visible face, a character. I know what I mean when I write that in 1900 the world was young. Indeed, humanity in our corner of the world has aged through the century -- aged by losing a chunk of its innocence and hope, aged also in the sense of matured, by having become wiser because of what we have gone through, less arrogant, less cruel, less biased -- if, often, only by being more conscious of how we should think and act.

How to wind up these random notes? By asking that we not look at the changes around us in the resigned manner of European peasants or Native Americans watching the railroads invade their lands. The changes presented to us, or put over on us, at the end of the century come from our near neighbors, our fellow men and women. They can be turned to the good or to the bad. They are not fated.

Their perimeters must be our common decision.
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www.hanskoning.net