It sounds like we mean business when we say we’re freezing all those Russian oligarchs’ accounts, but then you wonder, given this country’s reputation as a great tax haven, if we’ll ever be able to identify them.
Meanwhile, in such states as Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Mexico, and New Hampshire, fronts for shell companies, in the absence of any laws requiring transparency, can say they’re law-abiding. It is time to end in the world’s beacon of democracy this secretiveness that reeks of a dictatorship.
Thomas Friedman said in a recent column that Putin’s slaughter of apartment dwellers, hospital patients, and children in Ukraine is the first to be witnessed worldwide in live time, a gruesome fact that has, however horrific Putin’s war is, engendered universal outrage and condemnation that one trusts will never abate. His vicious, rapacious invasion cannot be explained away, and, obviously, must be resisted. One prays that he, the excommunicated judoist, will be thrown by his own pride.
It is depressing to think that war, nuclear weaponry, and oceans clogged with plastic will be our legacy to coming generations, and yet maybe the universality of information that exists now, the furtherance of education worldwide, and increasing collective actions by those who love the earth and still have hope for humankind, may offer a way out. Meanwhile, there’s no dodging the conclusion that we’ve mucked it up and that we continue to do so.
Enough for the moment — 10 minutes of depression is all I can take. Spring’s slowly on its way. One day last week, Monday, I think it was, you could really sense it and then came the rain — and the teams I cover are good and are happy to be outside playing, even on gray days.
“Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu.”