An Antidote? Indonesia fights corruption with people power
After the Berlin Wall, nostalgia for communism creeps back
| Ninety years ago, Europe called time-out from The Great War. Seventy-one years ago, they ramped up again in Germany with the Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, when Nazis looted Jewish businesses, vandalized synagogues, and killed at least 91 German Jews. Then 20 years ago, the people of the Baltics joined hands across their land, the students of Prague propelled a dissident playwright from a jail cell to the presidency, and German dissidents and demonstrators tore down the Berlin Wall. And across the world last week, citizens ousted a pair of powerful corrupt officials. We trim, blend, and append four 2009 articles from: (1) Associated Press, Nov 9, by Melissa Eddy & Kirsten Grieshaber; (2) BBC, Nov 9; (3) The Christian Science Monitor, Nov 8 by Michael J. Jordan; and (4) BBC, Nov 6, on Indonesia by Karishma Vaswani. |
by M. Eddy & K. Grieshaber, by BBC, by M. Jordan, and by K. Vaswani
- Thousands cheer 20 years since fall of Berlin Wall
Thousands cheered as 1,000 colorful dominoes along a mile-long route were toppled.
Poland's 1980s pro-democracy leader, Lech Walesa, and Miklos Nemeth, Hungary's last prime minister before communism collapsed, were tapped to push the first domino.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany's first chancellor to be raised in the former communist East, and 78-year-old former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev stood shoulder to shoulder as they crossed a former fortified border crossing point to cheers of "Gorby! Gorby!" amid a crush of hundreds who consider the man a hero for his role in pushing reform in the Soviet Union.
Merkel lauded Gorbachev, with whom she shared an umbrella: "You made this possible -- you courageously let things happen, and that was much more than we could expect.”
In the decades it stood, 136 people were killed trying to make their way across the border and the wall came to represent the split in ideologies between the communist East and the democratic West.
- Berlin remembers fall of the Wall
Communist East Germany erected the 155-km (96-mile) concrete barrier in 1961 to encircle West Berlin and prevent citizens from fleeing into the capitalist enclave.
Monday's celebrations were attended by tens of thousands of people despite a downpour of rain.
Ms Merkel said the events of 20 years ago had shown the world could tackle new challenges, from poverty to climate change.
The toppling of 1,000 giant foam dominoes -- painted with messages of freedom by young people -- symbolized how the then Communist governments of Eastern Europe fell one after another.
Ex-Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth's decision to open his country's borders first allowed East Germans to flee to the West.
- After the Berlin Wall, nostalgia for communism creeps back
Some Czechs long wistfully for the past. They reflect a trend across Eastern Europe, 20 years into the traumatic shift from dictatorship to democracy: creeping nostalgia.
Gone today are the past’s free healthcare and education and affordable, if scarce, goods and services.
What followed are inflation, joblessness, "brain drain”, materialism, corruption, lawlessness, and extremist parties.
The nostalgic forget the years of deprivation, poor-quality goods and services, severe censorship, and the climate of fear, of neighbors and co-workers spying on one another.
In the old days, too, the party ordered Záborí nad Labem residents to regularly clean up their village. They resented it, but the village stayed tidy. Today, no one is required to pick up litter or tend to vegetation -- and residents decry the slovenliness.
JJS: If those residents received a dividend, a share of the rental value of the land (locations) beneath their village, perhaps they would have felt more civic pride, more unity, more shared identity. Sharing benefits does create bonds.
Bigger picture, people will always be dissatisfied with both capitalism and communism and swing back and forth like a pendulum until we finally institute a third-way alternative -- geonomics. It offers the best of both worlds. You get both the efficiency touted by the right from no taxes on efforts but instead a public recovery of the rental value of sites and the equity touted by the left from no subsidies for insiders but instead an apportioning of the commonwealth, of all the money we spend on the nature we use. A popular movement to win geonomics would truly end history as we have known it.
Meanwhile, people keep waging the good fight.
- Indonesians fight corruption
Indonesia is often ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world by international watchdogs. Most citizens pay a bribe to get out of a traffic fine or slip some extra cash to an official at the immigration office. Many have little faith in the police or the judiciary -- which Indonesians have dubbed the "court mafia".
Fed up and frustrated with the levels of graft within the institutions that are charged with protecting them, Indonesians have taken to the streets in numbers not seen since the 1998 Reformasi movement.
Then thousands of citizens demonstrated against then-President Suharto, demanding that he resign from his post after three decades of authoritarian and often unjust rule.
Last week, wire-tapped recordings, allegedly between members of the police, the attorney general's office, and a businessman, revealed plans to frame the anti-corruption commission (KPK). The tapes were broadcast on national television.
Singing songs against the Indonesian police, and in support of the KPK, protesters gathered at the city's main roundabout, chanting for the dismissal of the police chief and officials in the attorney general's office.
Two of the country's most powerful and influential men resigned from their jobs -- Abdul Hakim Ritonga, the deputy attorney general and Susno Duadji, the head of the national investigations unit.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, re-elected in July in part because of his vows to clean up corruption, vowed that doing so would be a cornerstone of his 100-day plan.
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Jeffery J. Smith runs the Forum on Geonomics.
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Also see: China Joins Free Market With Informational Labels
Fighting the Pork Tax
Senate Committee Interrogates Henry George -- Conclusion |
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