Monday, January 14, 2008
“We don’t want to inject race or gender into this campaign.” – Hillary Clinton on Meet the Press
Economy: The politicians and major media are discovering it, but as Sunday’s NY Times noted, many economists fear it’s too late to head off what’s coming. The conventional politicians and economists keep thinking ‘in the box,’ as they offer non-solutions that essentially just add more debt.
Late last week the papers noted signs that the nation's economic woes are getting worse- Bank of America's announcement that it is buying Countrywide Financial Corporation, a weakened mortgage firm, amidst a deepening of the subprime mortgage crisis, now creeping into credit cards.
As leaders in Washington turn their attention to efforts to avert a looming downturn, many economists suggest that it may already be too late to change the course of the economy over the first half of the year, if not longer.
With a wave of negative signs gathering force, economists, policy makers and investors are debating just how much the economy could be damaged in 2008. Huge and complex, the American economy has in recent years been aided by a global web of finance so elaborate that no one seems capable of fully comprehending it. That makes it all but impossible to predict how much the economy can be expected to fall before it stabilizes. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/business/13econ.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
Gold: Return to Glory, i.e. $900/oz
There was a time when gold was money. In today’s uncertain world, the yellow metal is back in fashion. Bullion prices rose to a record nominal high after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan added to nervousness about the world economy. Part of gold’s allure is its traditional status as a safe haven. It is seen as a store of value when everything else seems risky. But the bigger drivers behind the rising spot price are a depreciating dollar and the prospect of negative US real interest rates.
A better way to think of gold may be as central bankers used to before America dropped the gold standard: not as a commodity, but as another currency. As long as the dollar stays weak, gold’s bull run will last. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/301c112e-bd51-11dc-b7e6-0000779fd2ac.html
What’s Happening, Iran: Incident a Non-Event Bush continues to talk tough re Iran, while this latest incident, has ‘understandably’ disappeared out of our papers.
A heckling radio ham known as the Filipino Monkey, who has spent years pestering ships in the Persian Gulf, is being blamed today for sparking a major diplomatic row after American warships almost attacked Iranian patrol boats.
The US navy came within seconds of firing at the Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz on January 6 after hearing threats that the boats were attacking and were about to explode.
Senior navy officials have admitted that the source of the threats, picked up in international waters, was a mystery.
A heckling radio ham known as the Filipino Monkey, who has spent years pestering ships in the Persian Gulf, is being blamed today for sparking a major diplomatic row after American warships almost attacked Iranian patrol boats.
The US navy came within seconds of firing at the Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz on January 6 after hearing threats that the boats were attacking and were about to explode.
Senior navy officials have admitted that the source of the threats, picked up in international waters, was a mystery. http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2240533,00.html
What’s Happening, Iraq:
That Embassy: Poor Planning, Corruption $736 million, almost the size of The Vatican, endless delays. Finally, a criminal investigation, though conducted by the Justice Department
The firefighting system in the massive $736 million embassy complex in Baghdad has potential safety problems that top U.S. officials dismissed in their rush to declare construction largely completed by the end of last year, according to internal State Department documents, e-mails and interviews.
Some officials assert that in the push to complete the long-delayed project, potentially life-threatening problems have been left untouched. "This is serious enough to get someone killed," said a State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation. "The fire systems are the tip of the iceberg. That is the most visible. But no one has ever inspected the electrical system, the power plant" and other parts of the embassy complex, which will house more than 1,000 people and is vulnerable to mortar attacks.
Other sources involved in the project, also requesting anonymity, insist that disputes involve technical paperwork issues, largely because the contractor had never built an embassy and did not realize that under State Department rules it needed approval for substituting certain materials. Now, much of that work needs to be reexamined and checked, they said, substantially delaying the project's completion.
The finger-pointing over fire safety is a microcosm of the suspicion that hangs over the troubled project, which is built on acreage almost four times the size of the Pentagon. Originally expected to be completed by July 1, 2007, at a cost of $592 million, the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in the world has been plagued by poor planning, shoddy workmanship and design changes that have added to the cost. The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation of the contract and related subcontracts, sources said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/11/AR2008011103772_pf.html
De-baathification: The Iraqi bill which accomplishes such- forgiving, employing former workers in Saddam’s government- is billed as a “significant step toward sectarian resolution” even if other ‘benchmark laws’ haven’t made progress. Other Iraqis minimize it- "The most important thing about this new law is that it is an Iraqi law."
Juan Cole suspects this is simply not such good news.
So the big political news today is that the Iraqi parliament on Saturday finally passed a revision of the "De-baathification" law issued by US viceroy Paul "Jerry" Bremer in May of 2003. That law got tens of thousands of Sunni Arabs fired from their government jobs and excluded from public life and helped kick off the Sunni-Shiite civil war we having been living through for the past few years.
The passage of the new law will be hailed by the War party as a major achievement. But as usual they will misread what really happened.
If the new law was good for ex-Baathists, then the ex-Baathists in parliament will have voted for it and praised it, right? And likely the Sadrists (hard line anti-Baath Shiites) and Kurds would be a little upset.
Instead, parliament's version of this law was spearheaded by Sadrists, and the ex-Baathists in parliament criticized it.
Somehow that little drawback suggests to me that the law is not actually, as written, likely to be good for sectarian reconciliation.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat writes in Arabic that the parliamentarians who criticized the law were drawn from the National Dialogue Council led by ex-Baathist Salih Mutlak, from the Iraqi National List of Iyad Allawi (an ex-Baathist), and from two of the three parties that make up the Sunni Arab National Accord Front.
So the parties in parliament that have the strong Baathist legacy did not like the law one little bit. But they are the ones that it was intended to mollify!
…The headlines are all saying that the law permits Baathists back into public life. It seems actually to demand that they be fired or retired on a pension, and any who are employed are excluded from sensitive ministries. www.juancole.com
Campaign:
Disenfranchisement in Nevada: The Clinton-allied teachers' union filed a lawsuit against voting in the coming Democratic caucus in nine Vegas Strip hotels. Hillary C denied any connection to the union.
The teachers union has drawn knives on the Culinary Workers, deepening the potential political rifts over Nevada’s Jan. 19 Democratic caucus.
A lawsuit filed late Friday in federal court seeks to stop the Democratic Party from holding caucus meetings at nine Strip hotels, which would diminish the influence of casino workers and hamper Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign.
The complaint, with the state teachers union and some party activists as plaintiffs, came as Obama accepted the endorsement of the Culinary Union. The timing seemed designed to cloud the good buzz from his campaign, which could only help Sen. Hillary Clinton’s efforts in the state.
The lawsuit claims that those voting in at-large precincts being held on the Strip would have too much weight compared with those voting at their polling places, violating the equal protection law of the U.S. Constitution. It also claims the at-large precincts violate state statute in the way they were drawn.
State Democratic Party officials disputed the lawsuit’s contentions. http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jan/12/voting-stripa-no-no-suit-says/
In what has become a proxy battle between the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the large hotel workers union in Nevada on Saturday attacked a lawsuit by another major union that would make it more difficult for hotel workers to vote in this state’s hotly contested Democratic caucuses.
Filed Friday in Federal District Court here, the lawsuit comes just days after the 60,000-member Culinary Workers Union Local 226 in Nevada endorsed Mr. Obama, a blow to Mrs. Clinton.
In the lawsuit, the 20,000-member Nevada State Education Association and six residents of the Las Vegas area argue that the Nevada Democratic Party’s decision to create at-large precincts inside nine Las Vegas resorts on the day of the caucus, next Saturday, violates state election law and creates a system in which voters at the at-large precincts can elect more delegates than voters at other precincts. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/us/politics/13vegas.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=politics&pagewanted=print
Race- Inject by Surrogates: BET Owner and Clinton Supporter Robert Johnson leaves out “cocaine” but his meaning is clear. One of many such comments. On Meet the Press, Clinton again insisted if anyone has injected race, it’s the Obama campaign.
"I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won't say what he was doing but he said it in his book." http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/01/clinton-surroga.html
Guantanamo, has begun its 7th year of operation. Worldwide protests marked the anniversary this weekend.
Demonstrators have been protesting against the sixth anniversary of the opening of the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. In Australia, they dressed like prisoners in orange jumpsuits, to press home their message outside the US embassy in Sydney.
In the Philippines, activists took a mock jail cell to the US embassy in Manila, and carried placards calling for an end to the detentions at Guantanamo Bay. The protests are part of a worldwide campaign organised by the pressure group Amnesty International, six years after the first transfer of prisoners to the detention centre in Cuba.
They want the American government to close the facility down, once and for all. The demonstrators have called Guantanamo Bay 'an insult to people who believe and respect human rights.' http://www.euronews.net/index.php?page=info&article=464175&lng=1
-R
