Perspectives on the World by Tony Judt (continued)

"The Way We Live Now"
p. 205 "If America is to depend on its 'New' European friends, then it had better lower its expectations. Among the pro-U.S. signatories singled out for praise by Mr. Rumsfeld, Denmark spends just 1.6 percent of GNP on defense; Italy 1.5 percent; Spain a mere 1.4 percent -- less than half the defense commitment of 'Old European' France." --- p. 215 "[Let] us stop venting our anxieties and insecurities in vituperative macho digs at Europe."

"Anti-Americans Abroad"
p. 221 "What upsets them (foreigners) is U.S. foreign policy; and they don't trust American's current president (George W, Bush)."

"The New World Order"
p. 242 "And yet this country is obsessed with war: rumors of war, images of war, 'preemptive' war, 'surgical' war, 'prophylactic' war, 'permanent' war." As President Bush explained at a news conference on April 13, 2004, 'This country must go on the offense and stray on the offense.' " --- p. 244 "The U.S.outsourced targeted suspects to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and Uzebekistan. At least 27 'suspects' have been killed in U.S. custody." --- p. 245 "The Amnesty report lists 60 alleged incarceration and interrogation practices." --- p. 249 "Hard as it may be to grasp, much of the world no longer sees the United States as a force for good." "For the United States isn't credible today: its reputation and standing are at the lowest point in history and will not soon recover."

"Is the UN Doomed?"
"Sadly, the greatest impediment of all is the United Nation's most powerful member state and major paymaster, the United States."

"The Wrecking Ball of Innovation"
p. 308 "The wealth gap in the United States is now at the widest since 1929, 21.2 percent of U.S. national income accrued to just 1 percent of earners." "The new market narrative -- the way we think of our world -- has abandoned the social for the economic." It presumes an 'integrated system of global capitalism,' economic growth and productivity rather than class struggles, revolutions and progress."  --- p. 310 "One of the fundamental objectives of the twentieth-century welfare state was to make full citizens of everyone: not just voting citizens in Robert Reich's limited sense but rights-bearing citizens with an unconditional claim upon the attention and support of the collectivity. The outcome would be a more cohesive society, with no category of person excluded or less 'deserving.' But the new 'discretionary' approach makes an individual claim on the collectivity once again contingent on good conduct." "It reintroduces conditionality to social citizenships: only those with a job are full members of the community." --- p. 311 "The real impact of privatization, like welfare, deregulation, the technological revolution, and indeed globalization itself, has been to reduce the role of the state in the affairs of its citizens to get the states 'off our backs' and 'out of our lives' -- a common objective of economic 'reformers' everywhere -- and make public policy, in Robert Reich's approving words, 'business-friendly.' " --- p. 312 "The benign 'invisible hand' -- the unregulated free market -- may have been a favorable inaugural condition for commercial societies. But it cannot reproduce the noncommercial institutions ad relations -- of cohesion, trust, custom, restraint, obligation, morality, authority -- that it inherited and which the pursuits of individual economic self-interest tends to undermine rather than reinforce." --- p. 314 "We have become stridently insistent -- in our economic calculations, our political practices, our international strategies, even our educational priorities -- that the past has little of relevance to teach us." --- p. 315 "We may discover, as they did, that the universal provision of social services ad some restriction upon inequalities of income and wealth are important economic variables in themselves, furnishing the necessary public cohesion and political confidence for a sustained recovery -- and that only the state has the resources and the authority to provide those services and enforce those restrictions in our collective name."

"What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?"
p. 327 "Most of the things that governments have seen fit to pass into the private sector were operating at a loss: whether they were railway companies, coal mines, postal services or energy utilities, they cost more to provide and maintain then they could ever hope to attract in revenue." "The only reason that private investors are willing to purchase apparently inefficient public goods is because the state eliminates or reduces their exposure to risk." --- p. 329 "In the United States today, we have a discredited state and inadequate public resources." "We have diminished our allegiance to the state and lost something vital that we ought to share -- and in many cases used to share -- with our fellow citizens." --- p. 337 "The rise of the social-service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments."

"Generations In the Balance"
p. 356 [Amos Elon (1926-2009)] "As he (Elon) foresaw in 2003, Israeli insistence upon ruling over an Arab population that will eventually become a majority within the country's borders can only lead to a single authoritarian state encompassing two mutually hostile nations: one dominant, the other subservient." --- p. 357 "It (Zionism) has, for a growing number of Israelis, been corrupted into an uncompromising ethno-religious real estate pact, a pact that justifies any and all actions against real or imagined threats, critics, and enemies."