One Man's Opinion

I'm all for truth-in-advertising as a legal principle, but distinctions should be made between matters to which it applies. There are, to be sure, health and safety concerns that must be addressed in requiring a high standard of veracity of claims of what a product or service will do. But, for the most part, I think that we all agree that the cosmetics industry deals in fantasy and fabrication. Women knowingly delude themselves into thinking that those products will really make them look better and younger, although, deep down, they know that it's just not true. It's  the feminine condition, that keeps them going back to the cosmetics section, hoping against hope. So, no one is really fooled when seeing the airbrushed ads of Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington that England has just banned for being excessive. Women know and they don't care. They will continue to buy those products, not because they have been duped into believing that they work miracles, but because i

The U.S., which bitches endlessly about other countries' justice systems, continually comes up short with regard to to its own standards. Take the recent case of the former employee of the National Security Agency whose home was raided looking for evidence in a leak of documents. It took the government two and a half years just to indict him, and then, a year and a half later, the day before his trial was set to begin, the prosecution dropped all felony charges against him. So, after four years, they decided that they didn't have a case. Rightly so, the judge has chastised the prosecutors and praised the defense lawyers. This is just another example of the difference between propaganda and reality in the United States, especially in cases involving "national security." And yet, this is exactly the sort of thing that the U.S. always criticized other countries for. The fact of the matter is that there isn't that big a difference when it comes down to protecting th

It took her six years, but a woman named Greenhouse who blew the whistle on a huge no-bid contract for work to be done in Iraq has been vindicated, to the tune of almost $1 million. When in 2003 she objected to a $7 billion contract going to a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company with which Dick Cheney had been associated before becoming Vice President of the U.S., without a bid, soon after, she was demoted by the Army Corps of Engineers, a supposed watchdog agency in the U.S. government. So, she went to court, and, finally, the Corps agreed to pay her damages. This is just one more case of how the private sector gets rich by having "its" people in government approve programs and projects to benefit them. War may be hell, but it's a hell of a business for the private sector.

Bolivian President Evo Morales is absolutely right about being fearful of either a coup staged with U.S. support or an American effort to link him to the illegal drug trade. Can anyone even slightly familiar with the history of the U.S. in this hemisphere doubt that these are real possibilities? Of course not. On top of everything else, Morales is an Indian, and we all know how the U.S. has treated its Indians. So, why should it be any different with a lowly, Bolivian Indian who has had the gall to follow in the footsteps of Castro and Chávez, in not acting as puppets of the American government and economic interests? Overtly or covertly, the U.S. will not rest until it gets rid of Chávez, Correa, Humala, Morales, Ortega and anybody else who dares oppose its domination in Latin America.

The latest figures show that , on average, white people in the U.S. have 20 times more wealth than blacks and Latinos. Even with all the economic problems in the country, whites are much better off than the so-called minorities. As time goes by, the difference has gotten bigger. That is not progress, by any standard. So, the American Dream is still just that, for a big part of the population. Unless one believes that blacks and Latinos are inherently inferior, there must be something wrong with a country in which there is such a disparity in income and wealth along ethnic and racial lines. The differences are so great and persistent over time, that one can only conclude that the system is biased in favor of whites. But, we already knew that, didn't we?

The business part of medical care, as most other businesses, seems to be rotten to the core. Medical personnel in the U.S. claim in a lawsuit that a major provider of kidney dialysis has wasted medicine, by using bigger dosages than needed, on purpose, given the fact that Medicare pays for the full dose, even if the rest has to be thrown away. All this, to make a quick buck off such a sensitive health issue as this one. There are also indications that this is just part of a wider practice that includes other aspects of medical care; for example, the treatment of some blood diseases. The relentless drive to make a profit is the worst "disease" of all.

Hillary Clinton, looking old and tired, has gone to China and Japan to try to calm the U.S. creditors' fears of default on its debt. Lying and trying to put on a happy face has taken its toll on the woman these past three years. One has to feel for her. Not only has she had to endure the egregious embarrassments of the Wikileaks revelations, but also has to sort of humble herself before the Asians who hold so much of the American debt in their hands. No easy task this one for the Secretary of State, who usually goes around the world telling everyone what to do. Now that we all know what's going on in Washington through CNN and the Internet, it's almost impossible for her to lie abroad with a straight face. Still, not abandoning her imperial ways entirely, she has chastised the Chinese --without calling them by name--for not playing by the rules of international trade, according to her. See, only the Americans get to be unfair and impose their conditions on the internation

Here are a couple of interesting items on the medications front. First, Johnson & Johnson has recalled more than 25 products in the last two years . Second, an advisory committee has recommended that the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. not approve a new drug for type 2 diabetes. The drug is supposed to lower blood sugar through urine, but there are indications that it increases the possibility of breast and bladder cancers . At bottom, the root cause of both these situations is the fact that the pharmaceutical companies are in a hurry to market new drugs all the time, in order to increase their profits. Haste not only makes waste, but also leads to bad science. Thus the rejection of new products and the very frequent recall of those on the market. My best bet continues to be to refuse any and all pills for my slightly high blood sugar and blood pressure.

In Don Quixote , there is a famous line: "We have come up against the Church, Sancho!" or words to that effect, meaning that the Catholic Church is a formidable opponent. What was true in the early 17th century is still true. Sadly, the Church is as unmovable now as it was then. But, times have changed, and people are no longer so beholden to the Church. Even nuns and priests, as well as laypersons, are increasingly willing to challenge Church doctrine or directives, such as celibacy for priests, the ordination of women and married men. All around the world, in places such as Australia, Austria and the U.S., there is a growing dissatisfaction with Rome's stranglehold on the priesthood and religious orders. The Pope's claim of infallibility on these and other issues rings hollow. His and the rest of the Roman curia 's credibility have been severely compromised by the pedophile scandal. In not allowing women to be ordained and priests to get married, the Church is

Latin America, once held in very low esteem as backward, by North America and Europe, has come into its own as a progressive region on many fronts. The El Salvador Congress has just overridden a presidential veto, to approve a ban on smoking in closed spaces. Obviously, they have really taken a bold step in a country where, as most of its neighbors, democracy isn't all that firmly established, after decades of autocratic rulers and bloody civil wars. In this regard, so did Honduras, which, back in February, passed a law that allows relatives to call the police on their kin, if they smoke around the house. Whether one may find it somewhat extreme, it's just another example of how seriously that country has taken the idea that smoking is deadly. Something to think about, the next time you hear someone disparaging Latin America.

It seems that cheating in school examinations is on the rise in the U.S., probably due to the pressure on students and teachers to do well, so that their schools receive public funds contingent on good academic performance. Students have always cheated, but the disturbing trend now is that teachers are participating in the cheating, so as to artificially improve the test scores of their students. This is what appears to be happening in close to three dozen schools in New Jersey where there is an abnormal percentage of erasures from wrong to right answers. A few other states show a similar pattern, so it's a growing trend around the country. This is where corruption starts. Individuals learn to cheat in school, get away with it, and, pretty soon, it becomes a way of life. Anything to get ahead. People used to say that prisons are schools of crime. Now we know that schools are schools for dishonesty.

Although a free press is a democratic value to be cherished, it stands to reason that it must be held accountable for its actions. The press can be biased and vindictive, ganging up on a public figure or a private individual, all in the name of freedom to inform. Irresponsible journalism covers itself under the mantle of constitutional rights. Coincidentally with the phone-hacking scandal in the U.K., in Ecuador, the President has sued a newspaper for publishing the outrageous assertion that he ordered soldiers to fire on a crowd of protesters against his government. Predictably, this has been portrayed as an attack on the press. The distinction has not been made between objective reporting and defamation or slander. The fact that the newspaper now wants to settle speaks volumes about its case. President Correa has refused the offer, and well he should. Let the chips fall where it may.

Borders, the giant bookseller, has finally bit the dust completely. It was too big not to fail. It had too many stores with too many books, too many copies of the same book and too many books on arcane subject matters that would not be sold in our lifetime. Given all those books, they needed huge stores that paid a lot of rent at shopping malls. To me, as writer and editor, as well as reader, these were the reasons for its downfall. Granted that the e-book phenomenon did not help, but had they had more manageable stores, they would still be in business. A couple of other things did them in. They were constantly moving books around, for reasons that no one could understand, making it very frustrating to locate what you were looking for. Add to that the fact that the computerized catalog was largely unreliable. Which brings me to the other problem: too many temporary employees who knew very little about authors and books, and were unable to provide information to the customer. It incre

The so-called "Arab spring" is turning into a "long, hot summer." Crowds have become mobs, and, smelling blood, there's no stopping them. Drunk with people or street power, they want everything done  now, with no excuses . Understandably impatient after decades of autocratic rule, these new devotees of democracy are going too far, too fast, making rational and sensible government impossible. In their quest for democracy, they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The rule of law and legitimate reform take time. Shortcuts lead nowhere but back to authoritarian regimes.

For a long time, the scenario has been that, in Latin America, there are guerrilla, insurgent and rebel groups who are the "bad guys" and then there's the army and the police who are the "good guys." But, "truth being stranger than fiction" and much more complex, we keep finding out that the guys on the law-and-order side are very often worse than the people that they supposedly protect us from. In one of the latest revelations in this regard, officers of the Colombian armed forces have admitted that they killed innocent people on purpose and dressed them up as rebels, in order to justify their actions. So, while demonizing the FARC, they did awful things and covered them up by blaming the guerrilla. We should all keep this in mind, the next time we hear a government praise its security forces and the U.S. support them.

Now, this is the kind of thing that gets people mad as hell. With so many economic problems and lack of funds to deal with them, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is preparing to spend more than $300 million on faulty and unproven radiation detectors  for large containers at ports and airports. For the last five years, this technology's performance has been, at best, spotty; so much so, that there were plans to scratch it. But, suddenly, the DHS has decided to ignore the report of the National Academy of Sciences and invest all this money on it, without even testing it independently and properly. Someone must be getting rich quick.

Sometimes, you can go too far in pursuing a worthy goal. There's no question that hate crimes or the incitement to violence toward a particular group must be fought against in any society. But, just expressing yourself outrageously should not be a crime. It seems to me that the case of Fito Páez, the Argentine rock star who has said publicly that those who voted for a certain political candidate "make him sick to his stomach", and is being threatened with prosecution for "discrimination", is an example of taking things too far. Bad manners or bad taste should not be a basis for prosecution. As far as I know, he did not call for people to bring harm to those who voted the way he considers abhorrent. He was just expressing his views forcefully, and, although one might have a quarrel with the way he did so, this is hardly cause for applying the criminal code to him. Free societies should not be so touchy over the expression of unpopular ideas, as long as they do

The U.S. trade deficit has hit the $50 billion mark, the highest in almost three years. Although a surge in oil imports  is blamed, the overriding cause is the fact that Americans are buying more foreign goods and selling less to the rest of the world. That has a simple explanation: shoddy workmanship. Of course, it's easier to blame China, for example, for its monetary or fiscal policies, but, taking the cost of goods into account, the truth is that people don't necessarily buy what is cheaper; they want reasonable quality for their money. There are entire lines of goods that are no longer manufactured in the U.S., or their quality is so poor that no one wants them. So, even if the rate of exchange with certain other currencies were to be favorable to the U.S., it would still have an unfavorable trade imbalance with those countries. The Americans just don't get it.

Conventional wisdom holds that crime -- especially, violent crime -- and a general sense of insecurity is bad for business. Investors are wary of putting their money in dangerous or unstable places. Well, apparently not. Mexico's well-publicized drug wars haven't had a significant impact on foreign investments, particularly from the U.S. The numbers seem to show that American plants already in Mexico not only have no intention of leaving, but are getting ready to expand their operations. In spite of all those kidnappings and killings on a daily basis, cheap labor and other costs are still economically advantageous. As long as it's profitable to do business there, those companies are willing to risk it.

Argentine President Cristina Fernández is to be commended for using the powers of her office to forbid newspapers from printing sex-service ads, a general practice around the world. Rightfully condemning papers for the hypocrisy of standing against sexual exploitation of women, while carrying these ads, Fernández has finally done something about it by issuing a decree banning this double standard. Fernández has made the distinction between this and the women who ply their trade, who very often are victims of economic circumstances or, worse, a slave trade, and she has made clear that they won't be persecuted on that account. Nonetheless, the general media should not serve to publicize something that, at best, belongs in a more discreet forum, hence the ban.

Texas Governor Perry's decision to go ahead and execute the Mexican man who was not afforded the right under international law to have the assistance of his consulate when arrested for murder 17 years ago is extraordinary. Not even Obama's plea was enough to dissuade him from carrying out the death sentence that, truth be told, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, a backing that, obviously, emboldened the governor in his deathly pursuit. Of course, it must be said that, despite its protestations in this case, the U.S. has never had international law in a high regard. Whenever international law has not suited its purposes, the American government has always chosen to disregard it, claiming that they don't feel bound by it. So, in a way, they have no one to blame but themselves, for having fostered the disrespect that they now complain about.

Colombia's President has apologized to the family of victims of a 2000 massacre by a paramilitary and right-wing group. The killing of rebels or people who are deemed their sympathizers is a tragedy all too frequent in Latin American history. Governments on the right and center of the political spectrum seem to feel justified in doing just about anything to "stop communism or socialism." So, these paramilitary groups -- very often closely associated with the military -- have the government's blessing to do what it can't do officially. Add the fact that, invariably, those groups are either financed or helped in all sorts of ways by the U.S., and it explains how they are able to carry on with  impunity. So, it's all well and good that the government -- this one and all the others throughout the region --  recognizes the crimes and sins of the past, but everyone would be better served if it really stopped using such groups to do a big part of its dirty work.

The phone-hacking scandal in Britain is part of a press gone wild, stopping at nothing to get a scoop and publish racy and titillating material at any cost. Despite all his protestations, Murdoch's track record in tabloid journalism and sensationalism, both in print and broadcasting, points to a policy set at the top. There is a hubris in the world of news, that drives many of those involved in it to act as though they are accountable to no one. Lord Acton was right: "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." Big journalism, like any other big business, will, ultimately, abuse its power.

Not too long ago, I made a bold prediction: Tiger Woods won't win another golf tournament. My son, the sportswriter, said I was a crazy pessimist, always waiting for the worst-case scenario to unfold. Well, not only hasn't Tiger not won in quite a while, he hasn't even played. The man has, obviously, been affected by his personal problems, and seems to have lost his touch on the golf course. There have been other elite athletes that, for different reasons, have taken a break from their sport, and when they come back to it, they have lost their ability to perform at the highest level. It's almost a mystery why, sometimes after just a short hiatus, it's all gone, and those athletes, frustrated, end up retiring earlier than expected. Time will tell if Woods is to be one of them, but, as of now, it doesn't look good.

I never thought I'd say this, but I agree wholeheartedly with the U.S. Republicans from the House of Representatives. As the majority, they have put a stop to the passing of resolutions that merely congratulate, recognize or salute whatever or call attention to some disease. According to a tally made, this so-called symbolic legislation amounted to 36% of the legislative output. I don't know if our situation in Puerto Rico is quite as bad, but it's bad enough, and, for once, I would favor that our Legislature adopt this Republican policy, so that it can devote its time and effort to more productive things.

The man without a helmet who was part of a protest in the U.S. against the law that requires motorcycle riders to wear a helmet, who died because he fell from his bike and hit his head, is a perfect example of a certain strain of libertarian idiocy that passes for defense of personal freedom. There are people who will fight any and all laws, rules or regulations that they feel encroach on their personal freedom. They want to feel free to harm themselves, just to prove their point. Of course, it's never quite clear if they are unwilling to receive medical assistance, once they do hurt themselves. For, why should the community bear the financial burden or allocate scarce resources to treat someone who has consciously put himself in jeopardy by refusing to obey a law designed to protect him? People who live this way haven't really understood the concept of freedom. They are just sick and stupid, unfit to survive.

For the second time in the last six years, the Minnesota state government has had to shut down, due to a budget crisis. The crucial issue seems to be that the governor, a self-styled Democrat, wants to tax the 2% of its citizens in the top bracket, and the Republicans, true to form, refuse to allow him. Thus the impasse that closes the government's doors. Partisan politics aside, this shows how fragile the U.S. economy has become. Cities and counties go broke, state governments shut down; even the Federal government has either shut down or being on the verge of doing so on more than one occasion. All this in the land of plenty, capitalism capital of the world, where the market rules and corrects itself, should there be any problem. And yet, it looks more and more like a Third-World country...

Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez has been weakened by cancer. We still don't know if it's a temporary or more "permanent" condition. It seems that all that ill-will towards him both inside and outside Venezuela has finally worked its [black] magic.  I imagine all the behind-closed-doors gloating that goes on in the U.S., Venezuela and elsewhere, by those who want to see him dead for having gone the socialist route. What they couldn't do with votes or even a coup d' etat, they now hope to achieve with cancer. We'll see if Cuban medicine, among the finest in the world, is able to restore him to health, just as it did with Fidel, a man who has also cheated death, in spite of all the hate directed at him for over 50 years.

It seemed like an open-and-shut case. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who is no angel in the sex department, was accused of raping a maid at a New York hotel. The American media had a field day, judging him guilty on all counts. Stories portraying him as a sex maniac were bandied about, and there was a sort of gloating about the Frenchman's misfortune. Not so fast. Now, it seems that the maid has contradicted herself and lied on several occasions before and after the incident. There seems to be no question that there was sex involved, but there is reasonable doubt about its involuntary nature. Most significant, it is the prosecution that has brought all this up , thereby weakening its own case. At the end of the day, although not innocent, the man may be not guilty as charged.