OF COURSE, robber barons and the diffident rich always have behaved so, even throughout American history. But when the First Family starts behaving like Marie Antoinette amid hard times, widespread austerity and spreading decay, you just may find you've become a banana republic.As the U.S. economy endures high unemployment and a jittery stock market, President Barack Obama has preached sacrifice and fiscal discipline. But the pictures coming out of a sun-splashed Spanish resort may be sending a different message.AT LEAST in Vegas, there's the slimmest of chances you might hit it big, though. When you're dealing with Washington, politics and the public's bankroll, not so much.
First lady Michelle Obama is in the midst of a five-day trip to a luxury resort along with a handful of friends, her younger daughter, aides and Secret Service. Her office said the Obamas would pay for personal expenses, but would not reveal the taxpayer cost for the government employees.
Elected officials -- Democrats and Republicans -- were reluctant to weigh in, not wanting to appear critical of the President's wife. But the trip provided fodder for television news shows, talk-show hosts and bloggers. Critics portrayed the foreign getaway as tone-deaf to the deep economic anxiety back home. Every first family takes vacations: the criticism aimed at Mrs Obama is that she chose to visit a foreign country rather than remain in the US and support its fragile economy.
Just last month, Mrs Obama flew to the Florida panhandle, a tourist draw hit hard by the oil spill crisis, and delivered the message that for parents "looking for things to do with their kids this summer … this is a wonderful place to visit."
The opulence of the European trip also has drawn scrutiny. Mr Obama has urged frugality in lean economic times. He once cautioned that families saving money for college shouldn't "blow a bunch of cash in Vegas."
Less than four months into Mayor Jim Suttle’s term, the Omaha police union conducted a poll that gauged whether the public would support a recall of the mayor.I HATE IT when people do things so brazen and bullying that it forces me to stand up for Jim Suttle. We can only hope that the police union has at long last badly overplayed its hand:
It was just one of several topics in the 25-minute telephone survey conducted this month, said Aaron Hanson, police union president.
The bulk of questions posed to 350 likely voters focused on police services, the police pension system and Omahans’ priorities on city programs.
Hanson declined to release the results on the question about Suttle and other politician-related questions.
Hanson said the police union has taken no position on whether it would support or oppose an effort to remove Suttle from office because no formal recall attempt is under way.
He also declined to say whether the poll was an effort to gain leverage in often-intense police labor contract negotiations, which currently are under way.
But asking the recall question, Hanson said, was fair game.
“The buzz is there,” he said. “There’s been discussion in certain circles.”
Overall, Hanson said, the Omaha Police Officers’ Association “wanted to take the pulse of the city of Omaha on a multitude of issues that are high priority today.”
Suttle had not seen the survey results as of Friday, said Ron Gerard, the mayor’s spokesman.
I AM a union kind of guy. I am not, however, a union-thug kind of guy. And the Omaha Police Officers' Association has been nothing if not thuggish -- not to mention brazen -- in its attempts to put local pols under its thumb.Some City Council members speculated that the poll was taken to strengthen the union’s bargaining position in the ongoing contract discussions.
Councilwoman Jean Stothert, a Republican, was among those who distanced themselves from any talk of a mayoral recall attempt.
She said she and her council colleagues were given the poll’s findings — minus any questions and responses about politicians.
“It seemed like it would be counterproductive ... to ask about a recall,” Stothert said.
Council President Garry Gernandt, who is a Democrat and a retired police officer, said he thought the survey’s purpose was to measure public opinion about city government priorities and police performance.Had he known about the inclusion of a recall question, Gernandt said, he would have done what he could “to stop it.”
An official of the Douglas County Republican Party also said he did not want to talk about a recall.
The interview is in Vermont's independent weekly, Seven Days:
SD: Given that you’ve been doing investigative work for newspapers for many years, what do you think will happen now that newspapers are in danger of going extinct?THAT'S A LINE all the "business firsters" ought to learn, live and learn to love, because it's true and getting truer: "You can’t have a healthy company in a sick society."
DCJ: Most serious journalism is still done by newspapers. What people see on TV at night typically begins with the work newspapers have done. The decline in print journalism is very bad in terms of protecting the public purse. Those who want to pick your pocket and enrich their friends are having a field day.
But if newspapers do die, that won’t necessarily mean we won’t have good journalism. Ninety percent of blogs read like drunks talking in a bar, but a few of them are very, very good. I’ve long warned that the collapse of serious news could be a precursor to a revolution in this country. And in a country as complex and as contentious as ours, a revolution could make Pol Pot’s Cambodia look tame by comparison.
SD: How could there possibly be a revolution in a country as apathetic as this one? There’s not much activism despite the economic crisis.
DCJ: Revolutions do arise from economic collapse. We’ve had a decade of faux economics that has left large numbers of people with no jobs and no prospects. We’re destroying social stability, and we’ve lost sight of fundamental principles.
SD: Such as?
DCJ: Where do you think democracy comes from? We got it from progressive taxation. It came about when Athens separated political power from economic power and gave ordinary people an equal voice. The only reason Athenians could get rich was because Athens made it possible for them to get rich. Civilization establishes necessary conditions, so the richer you are, the greater your burden to sustain civilization and democracy with your taxes.
That’s not what’s happening now. Americans making $26,000 a year have a tax burden about one-quarter greater than a person making $260,000. If you make $50,000 to $75,000, you pay roughly the same rate as someone making $100 million. My books show how all these devices take from the many and give to the few. America did all right for many decades because we got the rules right — until the rise of Reaganism. We then abandoned conservative, time-tested ideas for radical ideas that were sold as conservative. All throughout the Bible, taking from the poor and giving to the rich is denounced as evil. Almost everybody who runs for Congress and certainly for the White House makes at least a show of going to church. So how can it be that people who profess to believe in the Bible have enacted hundreds of laws that prescribe what’s described in the Bible as one of the most fundamental evils? We’ve just been through an era when it was argued that the only duty of a corporate executive is to push up share prices. But you can manipulate numbers, and a corporation doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It has customers, vendors, employees — and all the infrastructure of a democracy. You can’t have a healthy company in a sick society.
The Obama administration is considering making veterans use private insurance to pay for treatment of combat and service-related injuries. The plan would be an about-face on what veterans believe is a long-standing pledge to pay for health care costs that result from their military service.FORMERLY UNTHINKABLE and still unbelievable. Any nation that can tolerate such an abrogation of the debt it owes those sickened, wounded and maimed in its service can make no claim upon history or legitimacy to support its continued existence.
But in a White House meeting Monday, veterans groups apparently failed to persuade President Obama to take the plan off the table.
“Veterans of all generations agree that this proposal is bad for the country and bad for veterans,” said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “If the president and the OMB [Office of Management and Budget] want to cut costs, they can start at AIG, not the VA.”
Under current policy, veterans are responsible for health care costs that are unrelated to their military service. Exceptions in some cases can be made for veterans who do not have private insurance or are 100 percent disabled.
The president spoke Monday at the Department of Veterans Affairs to commemorate its 20th anniversary and said he hopes to increase funding by $25 billion over the next five years. But he said nothing about the plan to bill private insurers for service-related medical care.
Few details about the plan have been available, and a VA spokesman did not provide additional information. But the reaction on Capitol Hill to the idea has been swift and harsh.
“Dead on arrival” is how Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington described the idea.
“ . . . when our troops are injured while serving our country, we should take care of those injuries completely,” Murray, a member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, told a hearing last week.
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki said at the same hearing that the plan was “a consideration.” He also acknowledged that the VA’s proposed budget for next year included it as a way to increase revenue. But he told the committee that “a final decision hasn’t been made yet.”
Astounded by the U.S. government's failure to resolve the financial crisis threatening the foundations of the global free market, fingers of blame are pointing at America from around the planet.
Latin American leaders say the U.S. must quickly fix the financial crisis it created before the rest of the world's hard-won economic gains are lost.
"The managers of big business took huge risks out of greed," said President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, whose economy is highly dependent on U.S. trade. "What happens in the United States will affect the entire world and, above all, small countries like ours."
In Europe, where some blame a phenomenon of "casino capitalism" that has become deeply ingrained from New York to London to Moscow, there is more of a sense of shared responsibility. But Europeans also blame the U.S. government for letting things get out of hand.
Amid harsh criticism is a growing consensus that stricter financial regulation is needed to prevent unfettered capitalism from destroying economies around the globe.
And leaders of developing nations that kept spending tight and opened their economies in response to American demands are warning of other consequences — a loss of U.S. influence globally and the likelihood that the world's poor will suffer the most from greed by the biggest players in global finance.
"They spent the last three decades saying we needed to do our chores. They didn't," a grim-faced Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Tuesday.
(snip)
China's influence in the outcome of all this could be profound because it is a huge investor in U.S. debt. It is already calling for strict new international regulatory systems to apply to globalized financial markets.
Liu Mingkang, chairman of the Chinese Banking Regulatory Commission, said Saturday before a weeklong bank holiday in China that debt in the United States and elsewhere has risen to dangerous and indefensible levels.
The rest of the world is taking notice. Many newspapers made references Tuesday to China's increasing importance in global finance. In Algeria, a large cartoon on the front page of the newspaper El-Watan showed Uncle Sam at prayer: "Save us!" he says, kneeling before a portrait of China's Mao Zedong.
At some point, the story below will hit the American newspapers. Some time after that -- perhaps in the library of the federal prison in Oakdale, La. -- former Louisiana Gov. Edwin W. Edwards will see the headline "Bush lobbyist promises access for presidential library cash," throw the paper aside under a guard's wary gaze, then mutter "Son of a bitch!" And it will occur to the silver-haired old man once again that his big mistake in shaking down casino operators all those years ago was that, in his hubris, he wasn't subtle enough. That he didn't have a distant-enough middle man to give him that certain je ne sais quoi -- Comment tu dit en anglais? -- "plausible deniability."
DAMN THAT George W. Bush and all his Washington money . . . all his Washington lobbyists . . . his damned presidential library. "Why couldn't I have rounded up a lobbyist pal or two?" the erstwhile "Silver Zipper" will think. "Why not a @#$&*!!#$! Edwin W. Edwards Gubernatorial Library?"Why not, indeed. In today's editions, The Sunday Times (London) outlines how the old grafter could have gotten away with it . . . and stayed out of the federal slammer . . . if he had been Washington slick in addition to Louisiana greedy:
A lobbyist with close ties to the White House is offering access to key figures in George W Bush’s administration in return for six-figure donations to the private library being set up to commemorate Bush’s presidency.
Stephen Payne, who claims to have raised more than $1m for the president’s Republican party in recent years, said he would arrange meetings with Dick Cheney, the vice-president, Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, and other senior officials in return for a payment of $250,000 (£126,000) towards the library in Texas.
Payne, who has accompanied Bush and Cheney on several foreign trips, also said he would try to secure a meeting with the president himself.
(snip)
During an undercover investigation by The Sunday Times, Payne was asked to arrange meetings in Washington for an exiled former central Asian president. He outlined the cost of facilitating such access.
“The exact budget I will come up with, but it will be somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, with about a third of it going directly to the Bush library,” said Payne, who sits on the US homeland security advisory council.
He said initially that the “family” of the Asian politician should make the donation. He later added that if all the money was paid to him he would make the payment to the Bush library. Publicly, it would appear to have been made in the politician’s name “unless he wants to be anonymous for some reason”.
Payne said the balance of the $750,000 would go to his own lobbying company, Worldwide Strategic Partners (WSP).
Asked by an undercover reporter who the politician would be able to meet for that price, Payne said: “Cheney’s possible, definitely the national security adviser [Stephen Hadley], definitely either Dr Rice or . . . I think a meeting with Dr Rice or the deputy secretary [John Negroponte] is possible . . .
“The main thing is that he [the Asian politician] comes, and he’s well received, that he meets with high-level people . . . and we send positive statements made back from the administration about ‘This guy wasn’t such a bad guy, many people have done worse’.”
WHEN YOU HEAR folks in Washington talk about Louisiana as a "banana republic," what one needs to realize is it's not a slam on the Gret Stet as a corrupt, less-than-democratic kleptocracy where the rich get richer and the poor poorer. Though, of course, the Bayou State is all that.What Payne did not know was that the third person at the Lanesborough meeting last Monday was an undercover Sunday Times reporter. Nor did he know that the meeting was being recorded.
The Sunday Times had initially approached Dos earlier for help in investigating corrupt practices in his homeland of Kazakhstan. Many business deals there are said to involve the discreet transfer of money between figures high up in the Kazakh regime and western companies.
Dos is exiled from Kazakhstan after setting up his own political party, Atameken, at the end of 2006. He was forced to flee following threats to his life.
Before that happened, however, he acted as an adviser to Timur Kulibayev, the billionaire son-in-law of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Kazakh president, and a man of considerable influence within the country.
Dos said that in the autumn of 2005 he had been asked by the Kazakh government, via Kulibayev, to arrange a visit by Cheney. The intention was to improve the country’s international standing.
Dos had spent several days negotiating with Payne. A deal was eventually agreed, he said, and he understood that a payment of $2m was passed, via a Kazakh oil and gas company, to Payne’s firm.
The following May, Cheney made a brief trip to Kazakhstan. His visit was remarked upon in the media at the time, both for the lavish praise which he publicly heaped on Nazarbayev and for the stark contrast between this and a speech he had made just a day earlier at a conference in Lithuania in which he had lambasted Russia for being insufficiently democratic. Now he was lauding Nazarbayev, who has effectively made himself president for life and in whose country it is an offence to criticise him.
“Why did Cheney castigate Russia’s imperfect democracy while saying not a word about Kazakhstan’s shameless travesty of the democratic system?” said one newspaper following the visit. “Cheney’s flattery of the Kazakh regime was sickening,” said another.
Dos believes some of the money paid to WSP may have found its way to “entities” connected to the Bush administration.
In order to test which channels might be available to foreigners seeking influence within the US, Dos agreed to approach Payne, at The Sunday Times’s request, with a fabricated story about Akayev wanting to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the world. Akayev was not aware of the approach to Payne.
Dos initially contacted Payne, who is based in Houston, Texas, via e-mail, and mentioned the possibility of making payments to “the Republican party or any other institutions affiliated with the Bushes”. Payne responded quickly, saying he was in London the following week.
The meeting at the Lanesborough began with Payne explaining that later that evening he was meeting a Conservative MP, Mark Pritchard, in order to sign him up as a paid “adviser” to WSP. Also due to meet Payne later was Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, apparently for separate discussions.
Pritchard’s value to Payne lay in his position as chairman of the House of Commons all- party Russia group. The MP, Payne said, had named his price, and it was acceptable to him.
So certain, in fact, was Payne that Pritchard would “cement the relationship” that night that he had already included him in his latest “confidential” brochure as one of WSP’s consultants.
