What annoys me this week

Instead of typing out what has annoyed me this week, I figured I'd post a couple political cartoons I've found recently and comment on them:

Bruce Plante. Tulsa World

Tulsa, OK

A lot of people, including Obama, have been criticizing the Supreme Court about their decision to let corporations contribute as much as they to political campaigns because laws limiting campaign donations would be a violation of the corporation's right to free speech. The logic leading to this decision seems interesting, but I don't think corporations are people who have the same guaranteed inalienable rights as actual humans. Then again, I'm not a lawyer who studies these intricacies. Intricacies aside, I don't want corporations to use their wealth to influence elections.

Luojie. China Daily

Beijing, China

This cartoon is more controversial, especially for some of my American friends. After studying in Europe for a little while, I can better see how American policy sees every problem as a military problem that needs a military solution. We're too eager to use sticks when we should use carrots, but we also use our carrots as if they were sticks. Americans also don't pay attention to what goes on in the world, so the US government can get away with much more than they would if the public actually read about foreign news once in a while. Case in point: many Americans look at Yemen and see terrorists; thus, the military needs to go in and root out the terrorists. However, the terrorists are there because there's a civil war going on there. Finding a way to fix the government so that the civil war can end so that the terrorists will lose their popular support seems like a more sensible solution than bombing them more.

Cameron (Cam) Cardow. The Ottawa Citizen

Ottawa, Canada

Another case of Americans being oblivious to US policy is Haiti: I've seen several news reports that bring up the several coups in that country and blame the local bad government on their current problems. However, the US is not innocent here. Some of these coups occurred in part because US policy was hostile to the local government, even if that government was democratically elected. Fareed Zakaria's program did mention that the US has blame in Haiti's problems. Specifically, Amy Wilentz mentioned on GPS that Haiti came of age when the US and other states were opposed to freed slaves controlling an independent state and undermined Haiti. On the same show, Madison Smartt Bell said, "We in the United States [...] tend to export our political divisions there, thus creating confusion in our foreign policy with them." I liked how Zakaria's show talked about the problems America has caused in this country.