Commentary
Rev. Kobia: The international community, including churches, has a very important role to play to make sure that the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement between North and South Sudan -- including the Jan. 9, 2011, Southern independence referendum -- is implemented in full. It is important for international churches to accompany Sudan’s churches to help with civic and voter education, and to help the churches be able to monitor the elections.
There is no question that the results of the referendum will be disputed: The North will not accept the South as separate, the South will not accept any result that does not give them separation. Currently, there are no clear mechanisms on how to resolve that; we are putting this to international actors.
We also have no less than half a million internally displaced persons, Southerners living near Khartoum. These people could easily be rounded up -- and even massacred. They also are being intimidated; they might not be able to exercise their right to vote.
Finally, we are seeing hot spots: Abyei, Southern Kordofan, the Nuba Mountains, and Blue Nile. Even if the North and the South separate peacefully with the referendum, these hot spots could be the sparks causing violence to start again.
When we contemplate what is likely to happen if the referendum does not take place on Jan. 9, we tremble. Because should there be another war, it will be more bloody and widespread than even the previous two; the Southern Sudan People's Liberation Army is better prepared. We pray this does not happen.
Back in the Clinton era, Congress and regulators shredded many of the ground rules that had been keeping our financial system working safely since the Great Depression. The people making the big money (and creating the toxic assets) set themselves and their cronies up as the "experts" and told the rest of us not to worry our pretty little heads about it.
The crash of 2008 made it painfully clear it was time to stop letting Wall Street make up the rules. Last June, Congress passed, and President Obama signed into law, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. In addition to creating the much-needed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the act contains reforms that can head off future crashes. But, to put that law into action, various agencies have to write ground-level regulations and definitions.
How these rules get written can make Dodd-Frank either an effective, strong law or—if Wall Street’s swarm of lobbyists gets its way—a washed-out shell. "The number of people that have come in requesting to be exempt from the law, or to have the law delayed, has literally shocked me," a Commodity Futures Trading Commission official told Bloomberg News.
If the love of money is the root of all evil, let's just say the devil is trying to get into the details.
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Why do so many try to lighten the impact of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech?