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With pandemic still raging, ‘there’s no place like home’ |
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By John Freivalds
Published 11/1/2021
Duluth News Tribune
At this time of year our friends and neighbors ask us where we are going for the winter to get away from the cold. “Florida, Arizona, somewhere in the Caribbean?” But I am an old grain trader and always evaluate the risks and rewards in taking a position. And these days the risk in going somewhere out of our safe demographic bubble is not worth the reward.
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Local View: Let's please rename Columbus Day for Amerigo Vespucci |
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By John Freivalds
Duluth News Tribune
Published 10/1/2021
As Columbus Day approaches two Mondays from now, I wonder how many people know who Christopher Columbus really was. Growing up in Washington, D.C., and then being a Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia, I made no connection to Columbus the person. It was just a name. Yes, there is a Columbus, Minnesota, and Duluth has a Columbus Street, and throughout the United States there are Columbuses all over.
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Roanoke Times Op-Ed Death, taxes and whatever the US does in Afghanistan will fail |
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By John Freivalds
Roanoke Times, Roanoke Virginia
Published 9/22/2021
It was Founding Father Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) who first said” in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” If he were alive today, he certainly would have added the abject failure of everything the US tried in twenty years of war in Afghanistan would fail. Hey, that’s not just my opinion but the conclusion of Craig Whitlock in his new book The Afghanistan Papers. Whitlock, an investigative reporter for the Washington Post interviewed 1,000 people in a “lesson learned “project who were involved with the Afghan war. What an exhausting tale of woe and very expensive cultural blindness! Whitlock examined the military efforts, the geopolitical strategies, the nation building, the economic efforts to try to find something, anything, that the US could be proud of. Results: Nope. Nada. No way José. And now Congress will try to figure out what went wrong-and who to blame.
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Can’t Make Dogs into Cats: Democracy Can’t Be Franchised |
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By John Freivalds
Duluth News Tribune
August 31st, 2021
While the politicians and pundits in Washington keep fervently trying to find some ONE person to blame for what is happening in Afghanistan, the discourse should focus on who we are as a people. Americans are optimistic: we send people to the moon, invent electric cars and daily mail delivery, create Disneyworld, have school board elections, fly 747’s, find cures for disease, and invent the internet and soap operas. But with that comes the belief that we can transfer all that made America great and democratic (overnight!) to another country suffering from despotism, bad roads, and poverty for centuries.
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Getting us out of Voidstan (oops Afghanistan) |
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By John Freivalds
Minneapolis Star Tribune
In 1801 Founding Father Thomas Jefferson and our third President said this in his inaugural address: :” the US should consider its military alliances to be temporary arrangements of convenience and should freely abandon or revers them as indicated by the national interest.” Neither President Bush, Obama or Trump paid any attention to him and continued the US support of Afghanistan. Forget all that stuff about ‘staying the course”, “strategic posture” et.al. None of them wanted to look bad and weak in our supercharged political environment. President Biden didn’t buy into those fears and is taking Jefferson’s sage advice.