| Thursday, July 03, 2008 |
| The Thursday morning blend |
Rush Limbaugh signs an eight year, $400 million deal to continue his top-rated radio show. Premiere Radio Networks: Palm Beach County's property tax rolls (and the underground pill trade), thank you.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the pay scale: U.S. employers cut another 62,000 jobs in June, making it six months in a row of job cuts for the Bush economy. And, says the New York Times:
... as job losses mount, even those still on payrolls have felt the pain: employers are cutting hours for their full-time employees and shrinking salaries, just as workers face record-high prices for gasoline and food. The unemployment rate stayed steady in June at 5.5 percent, the highest level in four years. The elevated figure dispelled speculation among some economists that last month’s half-percentage point jump, the biggest monthly spike in 22 years, was a statistical anomaly. ...In the last 12 months, the economy had seen a net gain of only 15,000 jobs, the lowest net increase since November 2003.
The Hill reports that both the Obama and McCain campaigns are touting plans to turn the bleak employment picture around.
The Democratic presidential candidate promised that he would “restore broad-based, bottom-up growth that benefits all Americans.” “I will provide working families with a middle-class tax cut; fight for affordable health care and college tuition; work to help raise workers' wages, and invest in infrastructure, education and a clean energy future to create millions of new jobs,” he said. Sen. John McCain also noted that Americans are feeling the pain of a struggling economy and said that “Washington can no longer abdicate its responsibility to act.” “To get our economy back on track, we must enact a jobs-first economic plan that supports job creation, provide immediate tax relief for families, enact a plan to help those facing foreclosure, lower healthcare costs, invest in innovation, move toward strategic energy independence and open more foreign markets to our goods,” the Arizona Republican said. Both sought to paint the other party as responsible for the woes. But of course! (The San Francisco Chronicle has a story about how some banks are trying to help struggling homeowners stay in their homes.)
Meanwhile, the Hill also reports that McCain says he did indeed get a heads-up on the Colombian Army's FARC raid.
“Last night, President Uribe and the defense minister did brief us that the operation was going to take place today,” said McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, who was visiting Colombia Wednesday to promote a free trade agreement and to discuss drug trafficking.
“Today, I spoke by phone to President Uribe. He told me some of the details of the dramatic rescue of the people who were held hostage. Three Americans are now free and Ingrid Betancourt is now in good condition,” said McCain. “I’m pleased with the success of this very high-risk operation.” No word on whether he got wind of the raid from the Bush administration before he planned his trip...
The WaPo, meanwhile, has a story on the Bush administration's shocking and entirely unexpected foreknowledge of a U.S. oil company's plans to do an end-run around the new Iraqi government, by cutting an oil deal with the Kurds:
Bush administration officials told Hunt Oil last summer that they did not object to its efforts to reach an oil deal with the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq, even while the State Department was publicly expressing concern that such contracts could undermine a national Iraqi petroleum law, according to documents obtained by a House committee. Last fall, after the deal was announced, the State Department said that it had tried to dissuade Hunt Oil from signing the contract with Kurdish regional authorities but that the company had proceeded "regardless of our advice." Although Hunt Oil's chief executive has been a major fundraiser for President Bush, the president said he knew nothing about the deal. Yesterday, however, Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released documents and e-mails showing that for nearly four months, State and Commerce department officials knew about Hunt Oil's negotiations and had told company officials that there were no objections. In one note, a Commerce Department official even wished them "a fruitful visit to Kurdistan" and invited them to contact him "in case you need any support." That guidance contradicted the administration's public posture. The Bush administration made an Iraqi national petroleum law, which has still not been adopted, a top priority last year in the hope it would more tightly bind the country's regions together and open the way for international oil companies to invest in much larger oil fields south of Iraq's Kurdish region. The State Department said, and continues to assert, that it opposes any contract with a regional Iraqi authority in the absence of a national petroleum law.
The Bush administration dabbling in secret oil deals? Say it isn't so!
The Post also has news of hundreds of Zimbabwean opposition members seeking refuge in the U.S. embassy to escape the wrath of monstrous dictator Robert Mugabe's goons.
Meanwhile the Independent UK has a story about how Zimbabwe's political crisis could affect, of all things, cricket.
And the paper reports that Google is being forced by a federal court to disclose viewing data on Youtube, to satisfy a copyright infringement claim by Old Media company Viacom.
A coming Jerusalem "Berlin Wall"? ... The Guardian reports on a possible move to partition Jerusalem's Arab and Jewish neighborhoods, after this week's deadly bulldozer attack.
And the Guardian profile's freed Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt, "Colombia's Joan of Arc."
| Labels: Barack Obama, Colombia, dictators, FARC, John McCain, news and current affairs, Robert Mugabe, Rush Limbaugh, terrorism, the Bush recession, u.s. economy, Zimbabwe |
posted by JReid @ 11:58 AM   |
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| Tuesday, July 01, 2008 |
| If Zimbabwe had oil... |
... the African Union wouldn't have been the only ones greeting Robert Mugabe as a liberator...
For all the condemnation of Zimbabwe, Foreign Policy in Focus reminds us that the world, and the U.S., are much more tolerant when it comes to thuggish leaders of countries that have vast natural resources, including "Swaziland, Congo, Cameroun, Togo, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Rwanda, Gabon, Egypt, and Tunisia. None of these countries holds free elections, and all have severely suppressed their political opposition."
And the worst of all? Our good friends, Equatorial Guinea. My take here, FPIF's take as follows:
Among the worst of these African tyrannies has been the regime of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea. Obiang has been in power even longer than the 28-year reign of Mugabe and, according to a recent article in the British newspaper The Independent, makes the Zimbabwean dictator “seem stable and benign” by comparison. Obiang originally seized power in a 1979 coup by murdering his uncle, who had ruled the country since its independence from Spain in 1968. Under his rule, Equatorial Guinea nominally allowed the existence of opposition parties as a condition of receiving foreign aid in the early 1990s. But the four leading candidates withdrew from the last presidential election in December 2002 in protest of irregularities in the voting process and violence against their supporters. In that election, Obiang officially received more than 97% of the vote (down from 99.5% in the previous election.) Though the U.S. State Department acknowledged that the election was “marred by extensive fraud and intimidation,” the Congress and the administration devoted none of the vehement condemnation that was so evident after the recent, similarly marred election process in Zimbabwe. One major reason for the difference in response is oil. The development of vast oil reserves over the past decade has made Equatorial Guinea one of the wealthiest countries in Africa in terms of per capita gross domestic product. Virtually all of the oil revenues, however, goes to Obiang and his cronies. The dictator himself is worth an estimated $1 billion, making him the wealthiest leader in Africa; his real estate holdings include two mansions in Maryland just outside of Washington, DC. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the country’s population lives on only a few dollars a day, and nearly half of all children under five are malnourished. The country’s major towns and cities lack basic sanitation and potable water while conditions in the countryside are even worse. During his most recent visit to Washington in 2006, Obiang was warmly received by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who praised the dictator as “a good friend” of the United States. Not once during their joint appearance did she mention the words “human rights” or “democracy.” At the same press conference, Obiang praised his regime’s “extremely good relations with the United States” and his expectation that “this relationship will continue to grow in friendship and cooperation.” None of the assembled reporters raised any questions about the regime’s notorious human rights record or its lack of democracy, instead using the opportunity to ask Secretary Rice questions about the alleged threat from Iran. In 2002, the dictator met with President George W. Bush in New York to discuss military and energy security issues. He followed up in 2004 with meetings with then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. Cozy Relations Equatorial Guinea receives U.S. government funding and training through the International Military Education and Training Program (IMET). In addition, the private U.S. firm Military Professional Resources Incorporated – founded by former senior Pentagon officials who cite the regime’s friendliness to U.S. strategic and economic interests – plays a key role in the country’s internal security apparatus. Furthermore, as a result of Obiang’s understandable lack of trust in his own people, soldiers from Morocco – one of America’s closest African allies – have served for decades in a number of important security functions, including the role of presidential guards. Maintaining close ties with such a notorious ruler has led even conservative Republicans like Frank Ruddy, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Equatorial Guinea in the mid-1980s, to denounce the Bush administration for being “big cheerleaders for the government – and it’s an awful government.”
Though the Chinese have also recently begun investing in the country’s oil sector, U.S. companies ExxonMobil, Amerada Hess, Chevron/Texaco, and Marathon Oil have played the most significant role. A report by the International Monetary Fund notes that U.S. oil companies receive “by far the most generous tax and profit-sharing provisions in the region.” Congressional hearings recently revealed how U.S. oil companies paid hundreds of millions of dollars destined to state treasuries directly into the dictator’s private bank accounts. A Senate report faulted U.S. oil companies for making “substantial payments to, or entering into business ventures with,” government officials and their family members.
The Bush administration can, in essence, rant and rave about Zimbabwe all it wants, with no consequences. The Bush administration gets to pretend it means business with all this talk of "democracy," even as they know that South Africa, Russia and China will likely block any serious sanctions against Zimbabwe in the U.N. Security Council. And they get to keep on ignoring and playing ball with the vicious governments of places like E. Guinea and Nigeria, where so long as the oil keeps flowing, the U.S. could give a damn.
| Labels: Africa, Big Oil, dictators, Equatorial Guinea, U.S. foreign policy, Zimbabwe |
| posted by JReid @ 11:23 AM |
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| Mugabe's 'victory,' Africa's shame |
 Robert Mugabe was received as a hero this week by fellow African leaders following his blunt-force victory in a no-contest poll in Zimbabwe, where he remains dictator. The venue was the African summit, where the heads of the continent's 53 nations gathered just after Zimbabwe's phony elections. Many of the African "presidents" share Mugabe's methods, so I guess they do really understand him:
President Omar Bongo of Gabon, who has held power for 41 years and won a series of widely criticised elections, gave his public backing for Mr Mugabe as leaders met in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. "He was elected, he took an oath, and he is here with us, so he is President and we cannot ask him more," said Mr Bongo. "He conducted elections and I think he won." Mr Bongo added that African leaders would not allow Western governments to dictate their view of Zimbabwe. "We have even received Mugabe as a hero," he said. "We understand the attacks but this is not the way they should react. What they've done is, in our opinion, a little clumsy, and we think they could have consulted us first."
But the real shame is that the few real democrats (small d) in Africa, like South Africa's Thabo Mbeke, couldn't find the strength to do much more than complain:
Mr Mugabe has faced fierce criticism from his fellow Africans. The AU's election observers ruled that Zimbabwe's presidential contest did not meet democratic "standards", the first time they have ever denounced an African poll. Raila Odinga, Kenya's prime minister, urged the AU to respond by taking punitive steps against Mr Mugabe. "They should suspend him and send peace forces to Zimbabwe to ensure free and fair elections," he said. While many are deeply unhappy about Zimbabwe's crisis, African leaders are unlikely to snub Mr Mugabe or pass judgement on his country's crisis at this summit. Instead, they will probably confine themselves to urging Mr Mugabe and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change to negotiate. South Africa's foreign ministry said that talks on the creation of a "transitional government" to cope with Zimbabwe's "challenges" were needed. The private frustrations that President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has felt towards Zimbabwe's regime have now emerged. In 2001, he wrote a 37-page "discussion document" for Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF party setting out a series of stark warnings and recommendations. "Of critical importance is the obvious necessity to ensure that Zimbabwe does not end up in a situation of isolation, confronted by an array of international forces she cannot defeat, condemned to sink into an ever-deepening social and economic crisis," wrote Mr Mbeki.
The British have taken to targeting Mbeki for criticism, (they're not alone. In early June, a pre-election article in the New Yorker called Mbeki:
... a lame-duck President, required to step down next year, and he has lost control of the A.N.C. party apparatus to his chief rival, Jacob Zuma. But his coddling of Mugabe has made him complicit in Zimbabwe’s devastation. So perhaps there is some justice in the fact that the Zimbabwean crisis he denies threatens to become the defining crisis of his Presidency. After all, the recent mayhem in South Africa only serves Mugabe, creating a distraction as he bleeds Zimbabwe in the final stretch of the election, with forebodings of greater slaughter hanging over the outcome. ...
... though to be fair, the Brits don't do much themselves beyond complain, for fear of looking like the colonial power trying to butt back in. Nor has the United Nations been much help (surprise, surprise...) And the Bush administration? Put it this way: like the late Saddam Hussein, Mugabe is a thug, who holds pretend elections and terrifies his own people into knuckling under (his militias burned a political opponent's wife alive this election cycle.) Unlike Saddam, he has no oil that Bush and Cheney's friends in the Industry want to exploit for their own gain...
So far, the African leader most willing to stand up to Mugabe has been Kenya's prime minister, Raila Odinga, who has called for Zimbabwe's suspension from the AU:
Earlier, Odinga broke ranks with other Africa leaders following Mugabe's widely discredited re-election as the Zimbabwean president.Speaking from Nairobi, he said: "The African Union should not accept or entertain Mugabe. "He should be suspended until he allows the African Union to facilitate free and fair elections between him and his opponent." Yesterday, Odinga called for AU peacekeepers to be sent to Zimbabwe and the UN urged the union to negotiate a political settlement. But Odinga is largely alone, and few other African nations have the strength or stability to challenge the status quo. And with South Africa being the strongest country, economically and politically, in sub-Saharan Africa, it will continue to bear the brunt of criticism for Africa's collective inaction. That same New Yorker article, written by Philip Gourevich, concluded:
To watch the intertwined agonies of South Africa and Zimbabwe today is to see what Frantz Fanon meant when he wrote, in “The Wretched of the Earth,” that “the last battle of the colonized against the colonizer will often be the fight of the colonized against each other.” Mbeki and Mugabe belong to a generation of liberation fighters who seem incapable of seeing the world through any lens beyond that of anti-colonial struggle, and who invoke their revolutionary bona fides as immunity against all political criticism and all challengers. Their time has passed. Pity no one has told the dictators.
Meanwhile, back at the AU summit, Mugabe tells his critics to "go hang."
| Labels: Africa, dictators, international news, news and current affairs, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe |
| posted by JReid @ 10:52 AM |
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| Monday, June 30, 2008 |
| The morning read, insomniac edition |
 Robert Mugabe retains power, dodges the Hague ... plus other morning news
Swiftboat veterans seek to reclaim the dignity of the name from the sleazeballs who attacked John Kerry's service in Vietnam in 2004. Meanwhile, T. Boone Pickens is a phony and a liar, just like the attack group he funded...
In the New York Times: Surprise! The Bush administration "advised" the Iraqi government on contract deals with five major wester oil companies:
A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.
The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts’ announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism. In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said. And why would they do such a thing?
Though enriched by high prices, the companies are starved for new oil fields. The United States government, too, has eagerly encouraged investment anywhere in the world that could provide new oil to alleviate the exceptionally tight global supply, which is a cause of high prices. Iraq is particularly attractive in that light, because in addition to its vast reserves, it has the potential to bring new sources of oil onto the market relatively cheaply. As sabotage on oil export pipelines has declined with improved security, this potential is closer to being realized. American military officials say the pipelines now have excess capacity, waiting for output to increase at the fields.
Ah yes, the oil. The oil!
“We pretend it is not a centerpiece of our motivation, yet we keep confirming that it is,” Frederick D. Barton, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in a telephone interview. “And we undermine our own veracity by citing issues like sovereignty, when we have our hands right in the middle of it.” And the story wouldn't be complete without a completely contradictory comment from Condi Rice:
Criticism like that has prompted objections by the Bush administration and the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who say the deals are purely commercial matters. Ms. Rice, speaking on Fox News this month, said: “The United States government has stayed out of the matter of awarding the Iraq oil contracts. It’s a private sector matter.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post has a wrenching, first-person account of treating PTSD among our troops returning from the dual war zones.
The soldier from Ohio studied the wall carefully. It was amazing, he said, how much the layout of those picture frames resembled the layout of the street in Tikrit that was seared in his memory; the similarity had leapt out at him the first time he came in for a session. He traced the linear space between the frames, showing me where his Humvee had turned and traveled down the block, and where the two Iraqi men had been standing, close -- too close -- to the road. "I knew immediately something was wrong," he said. The explosion threw him out of the vehicle, with his comrades trapped inside, screaming. Lying on the ground, he returned fire until he drove off the insurgents. His fellow soldiers survived, but nearly four years later, their screams still haunted him. "I couldn't go to them," he told me, overwhelmed with guilt and imagined failure. "I couldn't help them." That soldier from Ohio is one of the nearly 40,000 U.S. troops diagnosed by the military with post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 to 2007; the number of diagnoses increased nearly 50 percent in 2007 over the previous year, the military said this spring. I saw a number of soldiers with war trauma while working as a psychologist for the U.S. Army. In 2006, I went to Fort Dix as a civilian contractor to treat soldiers on their way to and return from those wars. I was drawn by the immediacy of the work and the opportunity to make a difference. What the raw numbers on war trauma can't show is what I saw every day in my office: the individual stories of men and women who have sustained emotional trauma as well as physical injury, people who are still fighting an arduous postwar battle to heal, to understand a mysterious psychological condition and re-enter civilian life. As I think about the soldiers who will be rotating back home from Iraq this summer as part of the "pause" in the "surge," as well as those who will stay behind, I remember some of the people I met on their long journey back from the war. ...
Also in the WaPo, would-be gunslingers line up in D.C. ...
"We've had a lot of people inquiring," Metta said. "What's happening now is a huge history maker." He said his best-selling handguns are Glocks, Berettas and Rugers, which cost $350 to $700. People usually say they want them for self-defense, or sometimes as collector's items, he said.
...or just to generally, you know, blow someone away...
On the lighter side, the San Francisco Chronicle does an episode of "all the candiates' wives."
So now we know: Michelle Obama shops at Target, hates pantyhose ("painful") and made the "fist pump" cool. And Cindy McCain does lots of under-the-radar charity work, favors Oscar de la Renta and has a credit card bill that's been somewhere between $100,000 and $250,000 this year. But rest assured, America: With a major female presidential candidate no longer in the running, there's plenty more we'll learn about the stylistic, literary, grooming and culinary penchants of the two women who aspire to be first lady of the United States.
In the Financial Times, John McCain gets the cold shoulder from workers at a GM plant in Ohio:
Three hours after John McCain’s campaign bus left General Motors’ plant in Lordstown, Ohio, workers started streaming in and out of the factory’s gates for the mid-afternoon shift change.
Only a fraction had caught a glimpse of the Republican presidential candidate when he toured the production line and still fewer attended the meeting he held in an adjacent conference room. “Management invited him,” said 38-year-old Tim Niles. “It had nothing to do with us. We’re with Obama.”
Mr Niles, a white, working-class Democrat who wears a “Bubba’s Army” T-shirt, is exactly the kind of voter Mr McCain was courting on his trip to northern Ohio on Friday. On the day Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton staged their first joint rally, Mr McCain was trying to undermine their reconciliation by wooing Mrs Clinton’s blue-collar base. His efforts appeared wasted on many. “We’re a working-class factory,” said 49-year-old Greg George. “McCain calls himself moderate, but his party has been a disaster for working people over the past eight years.” And the U.S. warns that Mexico's battle against powerful drug cartels is threatening to escalate into a crippling, all-out war.
Over at the Guardian, the thoroughly discredited dictator Robert Mugabe is sworn in after an election in Zimbabwe in which people were forcibly marched to the polls, where the results were sealed through intimidation, and in which the opposition was threatened, attacked, and forced to quit the election and flee for his life.
Meanwhile, reports the Independent, the world rises in revulsion, as Mugabe rushes to form a coalition government with the opposition he just terrorized, his fears of winding up in the Hague temporarily quelled by the phony election.
| Labels: 2008 election, Barack Obama, dictators, Iraq war, John McCain, Mexico, news and current affairs, politics, Robert Mugabe, Swiftboat vets, u.s. economy, veterans, Zimbabwe |
| posted by JReid @ 12:39 AM |
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