Elsewhere Today 425
Aljazeera:
N Korea floods 'kill hundreds'
TUESDAY, AUGUST 14, 2007
3:17 MECCA TIME, 0:17 GMT
Hundreds of people are dead or missing in North Korea following a week of torrential rains which have destroyed thousands of homes and damaged roads and railway tracks, state media says.
At least 30,000 homes, more than 540 bridges and sections of railway were destroyed in the rain and floods, the Korean Central News Agency said on Tuesday.
In a rare admission of suffering from the normally secretive country, it said heavy downpours since last week had caused "huge human and material damage".
Last year monsoons rains swept through much of the impoverished nation, killing hundreds of people.
In the mid-1990s, serious flooding triggered a famine in which aid groups estimate some two million North Koreans died.
"The material damage so far is estimated to be very big. This unceasing heavy rain destroyed the nation's major railways, roads and bridges, suspended power supply and cut off the communications network," the news agency reported.
Among the worst-hit areas were the southern provinces of Kangwon and North Hwanghae which border South Korea, and South Hamgyong in the east.
The capital, Pyongyang, and the neighbouring provinces of South Hwanghae, southwest of the capital, and South Phyongan to the north were also badly affected.
Farms submerged
Preliminary information on Sunday estimated that more than 30,000 houses were destroyed, affecting over 63,300 families.
"It also left tens of thousands of hectares of farmland inundated, buried under silt and washed away," the news agency said.
Many parts of the country received between 30 and 67 centimetres of rain between August 7 and 12, it added.
"As a result, the farmland in those areas was inundated, washed away and buried under silt and dwelling houses, public buildings, production establishments and other objects were completely or partly destroyed," it said.
Michael Dunford, deputy country director of the United Nations' World Food Programme in North Korea told Al Jazeera the devastation of agricultural land could have a big impact on the entire country.
"The DPRK is a country that does not produce enought food too feed itszelf and has had to rely on imports," he said. "Food security is always an issue of concern."
Deforestation blamed
Experts blamed decades of reckless deforestation for North Korea's flood problems, saying the country has been stripped of tree cover that provides natural protection.
Energy-starved residents have used every scrap of wood from the countryside to cook food or heat homes through the bitter winters, leaving large areas of the country vulnerable to flooding and landslides.
Officials made it worse by encouraging residents to expand farmland into the hillsides in a bid to grow more food.
A decade later North Korea is still unable to feed all of its 23 million people and depends heavily on international food aid.
Source: Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F46E65BD-DAE1-4E7B-A06C-B6900CA3693B.htm
AllAfrica: Crisis
Oil Workers Threaten Pull-Out From Niger Delta
By Tony Ita Etim
Daily Champion (Lagos) NEWS
Port Harcourt 13 August 2007
A major crisis loomed in the nation's oil and gas industry yesterday as senior workers threatened to withdraw from the Niger Delta if the current spate of killings in the region continues.
Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) which issued the threat also charged the Federal Government to summon enough political will to tackle increasing violence in the region.
Speaking in the same vein, Rivers State government urged the security agencies to address illegal oil bunkering and the activities of cult and militant gangs in the state.
However in Port Harcourt, the state capital, security was beefed up as operatives of the Joint Military Task Force were seen patrolling the major streets.
PENGASSAN in a statement signed by Peter Esele and Bayo Olowoshile its president and general secretary respectively said: "If the restiveness and consequent harassment and violence on workers in the oil and gas industry persist, we shall not hesitate to withdraw our members in the various oil and gas companies operating in the region."
The union called for sanctions against traditional rulers, local government chairmen and governors in whose communities militants' activities thrive.
Meanwhile, soldiers are patrolling the streets in Port Harcourt and its environ following seven days of shooting by unidentified gun men suspected to be cultists.
Heavy presence of soldiers was notice in flashpoint in the city such as Diobu, Town area, the new Government House Gate, UTC junction, Garrison junction, and other strategic places in the state capital such as oil installations and facilities.
The soldiers took over the patrolling of the state capital Sunday morning and ease the growing tension among Port Harcourt residents some of whom have fled the state capital.
At Diobu area, people passing by were asked to lift up their hands as a sign of surrender while suspicious characters were frisked by the soldiers.
Vehicles driving through strategic places where the soldiers mount a stop and search road blocks were screened and where the soldiers have doubt, the occupants are asked to come down for a body search and their vehicles scrutinized for arms.
The soldiers who are polite and civil do not tolerate arguments or respect status as no vehicle is spare the search.
The presence of the soldiers have restored a bit of assurance as residents of the city who have remained indoors for days came out and visit friends and other places of interest.
Daily Champion gathered that most of the bad boys in the Diobu area including cultists, kidnappers, armed robbers and other anti-social elements have moved from the area to safe places for fear of being arrested by the soldiers.
When contacted, the spokesman for the 2nd Amphibious Brigade and the Joint Task Force [JTF] Major Sagir Musa told our correspondent on phone that the soldiers were posted to strategic places, oil installations and other vulnerable places in the city.
Musa said the reason for the heavy presence of soldiers on the streets of Port Harcourt and its environment is to restore normalcy, law and order in Rivers State .
According to him, the soldiers were on the street to avert a likely breakdown of law and order and appealed to law-abiding citizens to go about their business without fear.
Musa appealed to residents of the city not to panic at the presence of soldiers but to cooperate with the various security agencies and provide useful and reliable information on the plans, movement and hiding places of the gunmen.
As at the time of writing this report about 6.30 pm there were gunshots from the Macoba Beach behind Stella Maris Secondary School , Port Harcourt in the Town area.
Meanwhile, the State Commissioner for Information, Mr Emma Okah, in an interview with newsmen in Lagos at the weekend said that the unchecked activities of illegal oil bunkering was the major factor fueling violence in the state. He said that the crisis is basically the result of territorial tussle between militants and cult gangs in the state, over who control the lucrative illegal oil bunkering business.
"We have from our investigation found out that illegal oil bunkers is the major problem fueling the violence. We have told the federal government to stop the activities of illegal oil bunkering because it is those that buy oil illegally from these bunkers that supplies the cult gangs and militants sophisticated weapons, which most often, our security agencies are unable to match, I mean in terms of their firepower. If the illegal oil bunkering is addressed, it will drastically reduce militancy in the region", he said.
Copyright © 2007 Daily Champion. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200708130390.html
Arab News:
Master of Dirty Tricks
Editorial
Tuesday, 14, August, 2007 (30, Rajab, 1428)
SO White House aide Karl Rove — the man they called “the president’s brain” — has quit. It is a significant departure which probably represents the beginning of the political end of this flawed and failed administration. Rove ran both George Bush’s successful election campaigns and also fulfilled a role as fixer and eminence grise at the White House. As deputy chief of staff, he played a major role in many decisions, including the one to invade Iraq. But last November he failed in the probably impossible task of saving the Republican hold on both houses of Congress. Bush, who has been consistently loyal to his staff, would probably have been happy for Rove to stay through the last 15 months of his presidency. But Rove decided that a decision that White House staff in post after this month should see out the presidential term was unacceptable.
He was probably glad of the chance to quit. This master of dirty tricks who is roundly disliked by Democrats — he once sent a crowd of Chicago down-and-outs to a swish Democrat reception, falsely promising they would be given free alcohol — was widely suspected of “outing” Valerie Plame, the CIA secret agent, in revenge for her ambassador husband Joe Wilson’s accurate debunking of administration claims that Saddam Hussein had been buying uranium yellow cake from Niger. Rove was called before a grand jury investigating the leak — which is an extremely serious federal offense — no fewer than four times.
In the end, Rove escaped prosecution as indeed did everyone else in the White House for this specific crime, despite evidence from journalists that the information came from there. In the end, the can, such as it was, was carried by another official, Lewis “Scooter” Libby who was found guilty of the lesser but no less reprehensible charges of perjury and obstructing the course of justice. There are many observers who believe that Rove should have been the man in the dock.
Rove’s key presence in the administration demonstrates the second fault line in this presidency. The bloody ruins and chaos of Iraq are testimony to the first — Bush’s ignorance and inability to take good advice from friends and allies, preferring the simplistic and bullheaded avenue of main force which in the end created more problems than it solved. It has, however, been little focused on the extent to which this presidential team has been prepared to resort to skullduggery and falsehood in order to achieve its ends.
Democrats, almost all of whom were complicit in the triumphalist crowing at the Iraq invasion and ouster of Saddam, seem unprepared to dwell on the lies and subterfuge that preceded it. They have not loudly claimed that they were misled. Why? Does the US political establishment accept that dishonesty is part of the political process? The electorate, it seem, does not. Only a quarter of Americans believe the Bush presidency will be considered a success. That number will be even smaller by Jan. 1, 2009.
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=99814&d=14&m=8&y=2007
Asia Times:
Asia has nothing to fear except monsters
By Alan Boyd
Aug 14, 2007
SYDNEY - Asia has limited exposure to the US subprime loans fallout, so we can all take a ringside seat while Europe and North America sort through the debris. Right? Wrong.
It's true that the tsunami rippling through the lowest and riskiest level of US mortgage lending has no direct bearing on this region. Asian stocks have been oversold in the equities fallout and logically their markets should by now have become safe havens for nervous investors.
But crises have a way of breeding paranoia and sapping consumer confidence long after the initial bruising has subsided, even when most stockholders are mere spectators in a drama being played out on distant shores.
Asian banks are more equipped than most to handle credit strains, having spent heavily on improved risk-management and regulatory systems after the 1997-98 East Asian economic meltdown. There is even a culture of corporate governance sprouting in boardrooms.
Balance sheets are generally in good shape thanks to healthy consumer growth and a flood of cheap financing in global money markets that has left banking systems awash with liquidity.
Capital inflows in East Asia, which has the continent's most developed economies, reached a record US$269 billion in 2006, according to the Asian Development Bank. The downside is that this windfall has exposed many economies to exchange volatility when the funds are withdrawn - as they often are during market upheavals.
Jong-Wha Lee, head of the ADB's office of regional economic integration, said last month that despite growing nervousness over the collapse of the subprime market, "We do not see this trend of short-term investors withdrawing money from Asia at this point."
Banks have improved their business models and asset quality by provisioning for dodgy assets. However, the ADB also noted that the full extent of bad loans in financial systems might not have been disclosed, especially in Thailand and Indonesia.
"The continued and possibly understated high levels of non-performing loans are a concern ... Any economic downturn could lead to the ratios rising from already elevated levels in a number of economies," the bank warned.
Much of the cash that arrived in 2006 is believed to have found its way into foreign reserves, but how much went back out to hedge funds or other volatile financial instruments is unclear. Hence the uncertain mood in Asian equity markets - and among monetary chiefs.
What we do know is that banks are not at any great risk. Rating agencies Moody's and Standard & Poor's (S&P) both stated on Friday that Asian banks had not lent money directly to US subprime borrowers.
The more likely exposure is from holdings of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) by banks and insurance brokers: Japan's banks alone have about $8 billion of declared subprime-related securities.
In Beijing, the Bank of China, the second-largest lender, is believed to have some subprime-mortgage-backed securities in its US portfolio, as do banks and insurers in Singapore and Hong Kong and several Taiwanese financial-services firms.
S&P said subprime-mortgage-related losses are likely to be "either minimal or manageable", pointing to a $13 million loss by Taiwan Life Insurance, a medium-sized financial-services group that had a stake in a collapsed hedge fund operated by Bear Stearns.
DBS Group, the largest bank in Southeast Asia, has told shareholders that it has an investment of $850 million in CDOs, with 22% holding varying exposures to US subprime mortgages.
Malaysia's largest lender, Maybank, has $60 million of credit-linked notes that were issued by financial institutions with what was termed a "significant" subprime exposure. There is no substantive bank exposure in India, Indonesia, Thailand or the Philippines.
All of these positions appear to be fully covered by risk reserves and account for only a tiny ratio of capital provisions. There is also no evidence that hedge funds have gone out on a limb, though it will be some time before we know for sure.
Market analysts say Asian funds mostly have little appetite for CDO tranches based on subprime instruments that are below investment grade, despite their extremely attractive rates of return.
The US mortgage and financing markets themselves are in no danger of collapse. American International Group, one of the lenders with the biggest exposure, has calculated that the housing market would have to decline by 30-40%, a level last seen in the Great Depression, before it would suffer extensive losses.
Let's remember that subprimes account for only a small portion of overall lending activity in the United States and have a negligible imprint in the stock market, which is backed by an imposing capitalization of more than $16 trillion.
So why the panic?
Securities brokers put it down to a fear of the unknown: Who is absorbing the losses and how much are they? What impact will the cleanup have on global interest rates? And how will monetary chiefs react, given that they are already dampening down liquidity at every opportunity?
Then there is the confidence factor. A mysterious herd mentality emerges during trading volatility that encourages investors to view all markets as suspect, curbing lending and eroding consumption to the point where the economic outlook is affected and even good loans begin to turn bad.
This isn't going to be a long process: reports from the US housing belt suggest that subprime pressures will peak in October and the whole mess will probably be cleared away by the end of the year.
But in the meantime, some equity markets will suffer more than others, especially if structural stresses emerge. Economies most at risk are those with large external debts, especially current-account deficits, and that have only modest foreign reserves to cover this exposure.
That immediately excludes India and most of East Asia. Among the few Asian countries rated as vulnerable are the Philippines and - to a lesser extent - Indonesia, which have already taken big hits in equity trading.
South Korea, caught in a policy conundrum after an ill-timed monetary tightening cut credit flows, may also be caught off guard. Household debt remains high by regional standards, though it has fallen from a peak of 70% of gross domestic product in 2002.
Japan is suffering from low liquidity after a spate of poor corporate earnings, forcing an injection of $8.4 billion into money markets by the country's central bank. Investors were already getting the jitters because of sluggish growth: Japanese funds lost 0.55% in July and are ahead only 0.72% for the year.
An exodus is likely from Japanese funds until the dust clears and the interest-rate trend becomes a little clearer in the US, with investors opting to park their money in safe government bonds.
And the winners? Countries that have adequate liquidity, a low reliance on external funding, and strong external balances will fare best. Singapore and Hong Kong can satisfy most of their financing needs from their own capital markets and have prudent fiscal planning.
Malaysia will benefit from the capital controls it has retained since 1997 specifically to regulate funding flows and is a market favorite for its strong government economic policies. Then there is China, which investors simply can't resist.
The accumulated foreign reserves of China have risen by 130% in the past decade, to $1.1 trillion, offering a sturdy defense against outside pressures. The 63 regional China investment funds posted growth of 7.44% in July - the best performance of any equities worldwide - and 33.86% for the year to date.
That's not a subprime performance by any standards.
Alan Boyd, now based in Sydney, has reported on Asia for more than two decades.
Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Asian_Economy/IH14Dk01.html
Guardian:
Close to tears, Bush's right-hand man bids farewell
Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Tuesday August 14, 2007
Karl Rove, President George Bush's closest political friend for the last 34 years and the man behind his two presidential election victories, announced his resignation from the White House yesterday.
Mr Rove, 56, is the latest and most important in a long line of confidants who formed the original Bush team to have left. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, is about the only remaining member of a team that included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Dan Bartlett and Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Standing beside the president, Mr Rove, who had a reputation as one of the most cynical and ruthless operators in US politics, was overcome by emotion. He repeatedly struggled to read a prepared statement. At times close to tears, he extolled Mr Bush as a visionary, a reformer and great war leader.
He made no mention of the near-record poll lows or the failures in Iraq.
His voice quivering, Mr Rove said: "I'm grateful to have been a witness to history. It has been the joy and the honour of a lifetime. But now is the time."
He would call on God to help Mr Bush in his remaining time in office. "I will join those whom you meet in your travels, the ordinary Americans who tell you they are praying for you."
Mr Bush, less emotional, praised the man who helped him not just to two White House victories but started his political career by winning the governership of Texas in 1994. Mr Bush, who nicknamed him the Architect, said: "We've been friends for a long time and we're still going to be friends." Alluding to his own departure from the White House in 18 months, Mr Bush said: "I'll be on the road behind you here ... in a bit."
They took no questions from the press, hugged one another and headed for a helicopter behind them that took them to Air Force One and onwards to Mr Bush's Texas ranch where they will spend a few days.
Mr Rove claimed he was leaving to spend more time with his family. He had been expected, at least by US commentators, to leave office with Mr Bush. But there is little left for Mr Rove, given that Mr Bush is now a lame duck president, facing a Democratic-controlled Congress and an increasingly disgruntled Republican party. Mr Bush's final attempt to secure a legacy, immigration reform, fell just before the summer.
Mr Rove found himself under siege for much of this year, facing investigation over a CIA outing scandal and a separate row over the sacking of eight US attorneys.
The Democrats may continue to pursue him after he leaves office at the end of the month. "There is a cloud over this White House, and a gathering storm," said Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the judiciary committee. "A similar cloud envelopes Mr Rove, even as he leaves the White House."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2148284,00.html
Jeune Afrique:
Attentat manqué contre un car de touristes à Meknès
MAROC - 13 août 2007 - par AFP
Un jeune kamikaze marocain s'est grièvement blessé dans la cité impériale de Meknès en se faisant exploser lundi avec une bonbonne de gaz à proximité d'un autocar de touristes sans faire de victimes, a indiqué lundi à l'AFP un responsable sécuritaire marocain.
"Il a tenté de monter dans le bus dans lequel se trouvaient des touristes de plusieurs nationalités, mais le chauffeur a eu la présence d'esprit de lui fermer la porte au nez", a-t-il affirmé.
Selon lui, le kamikaze, dont l'identité n'a pas été révélée, est âgé de 23 ans. Il s'agit d'un ingénieur de travaux publics, fonctionnaire à Meknès (140 km à l'est de Rabat), a précisé la même source.
Le responsable a précisé que, selon des témoins, le jeune homme était en discussion avec deux autres personnes avant de commettre son acte. Ses deux compagnons, qui ont pris la fuite, sont activement recherchées.
La déflagration, qui s'est produite vers 11H30 (locales et GMT) place Lahdim, un des lieux les plus fréquentés par les étrangers qui visitent la médina de la ville, n'a fait aucune victime parmi les touristes ni dégâts matériels.
"Les touristes, de différentes nationalités, notamment française, italienne et américaine, sont allés ensuite déjeuner et ont poursuivi leur périple au Maroc", a ajouté ce responsable.
Selon une source policière, le kamikaze a eu un bras arraché et a été atteint au foie. Il a été évacué vers l'hôpital militaire Mohammed V de Meknès, où son état est jugé critique.
Selon l'agence MAP, il s'agit d'une "tentative isolée et désespérée, face au renforcement des mesures de sécurité et aux campagnes d'assainissement ayant ciblé les milieux extrémistes, notamment ceux de la Salafia Jihadia".
Meknès, première capitale de la dynastie alaouite arrivée au pouvoir au XVIIe siècle, est régulièrement citée, avec Casablanca, Fès et Salé, comme étant l'un des bastions de l'extrémisme religieux.
En pleine période estivale, le 6 juillet, le royaume avait mis toutes ses forces de sécurité en état d'alerte maximum pour contrer une "menace terroriste avérée" qui, selon les experts, émanerait de la branche maghrébine d'Al-Qaïda.
Au printemps, Casablanca, capitale économique du royaume, avait été le théâtre d'incidents le 11 mars, et les 10 et 14 avril quand six kamikazes s'étaient fait exploser et un septième avait été abattu par la police avant de pouvoir actionner sa ceinture d'explosifs.
Un policier avait été tué et 45 personnes blessées, dont neuf grièvement, selon le bilan officiel.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP21857attensnkems0#
Mother Jones:
Interview with Chris Rabb: Founder of Afro-Netizen.com
MotherJones.com / interview / 2007
June 29 , 2007
Mother Jones: How do you think the idea of using the Internet to target specific groups will have an impact on the way groups in Washington reach out to African Americans?
Chris Rabb: Well, that already exists because in this very segregated society we already have parallel universes of communication and media. So we have black newspapers, we have black radio stations, we have black magazines, we have black books. So presently, the Democratic Party, Republican Party, consultants, campaigners, et cetera, can access black folks pretty straightforward. The question is: Do they want to spend as much money in the black community per capita as they do in other communities when everybody knows that 9 out of 10 black folk who are committed to voting are going to vote the correct way? And so if all they need to do is get Jesse, Bill Clinton, Sharpton, and now Obama, into a large black church the Sunday before the election and get CNN there. It's cheaper to do that than to run ads; you don't have to pay for that. And gosh, every black person listens to whatever Jesse says, so you know. I think it is a very cynical and racist shorthand strategy for not investing in black community, because they take our votes for granted.
MJ: Do you think what you call the digital ethnorati is going to be a significant factor in the political landscape and the upcoming elections?
CR: I have no idea, and I am not optimistic. But who's to say what the future holds? There needs to be a multiracial, inclusive agenda online for those who wear a liberal or progressive label. I think the big question is what are we doing on the Internet and to what end, because why and how black folk use the Internet is very different than how white people use it. We're less about social networking, more about information around education, housing, and health.
MJ: Why do African Americans not use social networking sites as much and focus on the information aspect of it?
CR: There may be an assumption that we're just not there. We don't really know. There are so many websites and new media sources that ask for everything. They ask for age, ideology, but they do not ask for race. MoveOn is the perfect example. MoveOn has I don't know how many million members and they've never asked their members what race they are. Which I think is kind of absurd, because to me folks who don't ask that but they ask everything else are organizations that are afraid of dealing with race. How can you possibly serve a diverse membership if you don't understand their concerns? We are progressive and our identity is very obvious and very verbose: "Oh, I'm a progressive, I'm antiwar, whatever." But why not ethnicity? At the very heart of American society is the whole creation of race. So not talking about it is very naïve or maybe something far more sinister.
So if I go to a social networking site and I'm not asked about race when I'm signing up, I'm going to have a very low expectation for connecting with people of color and African Americans in particular. And if it is intentionally designed to do so, then I think most African Americans can pick up on that fairly quickly. And also we find out about things based on who our friends tell us to visit. MoveOn is incredibly popular, but I've never met an active black person in MoveOn.
MJ: That's really interesting.
CR: What it is is segregated. It's the same segregation that exists offline. Despite the fact that it's not about an explicit political ideology. They're not talking about these issues in a meaningful manner and that is a real problem. The leadership of these organizations largely is ignorant. They don't know how to do it and they do not have the will to do it. Maybe it's because they feel inadequate or maybe because they feel doing so would be a distraction from more important things. And if it's the latter, you've lost many of us because so many of us believe that race and racism is very real and until we can address this stuff candidly, we can't do anything else.
MJ: What about on other social networking sites?
CR: I suspect that probably-there is probably reasonable parity, racial parity on MySpace. I don't know who over the age of 21 spends a lot of time on MySpace who's not a campaign worker or a marketer or a pedophile. I doubt that there is a majority of people on MySpace who are a) old enough to vote, b) registered to vote, and c) who actually vote. I know they have all these big things for Obama or Hillary or John Edwards, but what it would take for me to visit those sites. What info am I going to get from Obama MySpace that I can't get from barackobama.com?
MJ: So is open-source politics reality or hype?
CR: It's ultimately votes. At the end of the day it's the right votes from the right people in the right states. You gotta get your poll numbers up, which means you gotta get publicity, you gotta get media coverage. So now that MySpace and YouTube are part of media and the creation of buzz, that stuff is important. But there has to be a correlation between that stuff and people giving money.
So for instance, will Barack Obama advertise online and will he cater some of his stuff explicitly to black people? Maybe not explicitly, but intentionally tailor some of his content to black people online? I don't know. Where will his people put the money that is going to reach black people online? It's not going to be Daily Kos. It's not going to be Huffington Post. It's not going to be MyDD or Eschaton or whatever the major white blogs.
You have the corporate-owned black media, which is not particularly thrilled with scaring off corporate money for fear that they are too partisan or too black or too democratic, so that leaves the small built-in-my-living-room-over-the-weekend kind of websites that reach 500 people there, and 1,000 people here—that sort of thing. This is also symptomatic of the huge, huge racial wealth gap. The people who could afford to sleep on Howard Dean's couch in Vermont are the same people who can raise the money to build a digital consultancy or a social-networking site. They have the social capital to raise real money, which the African American middle class, which is much poorer than the white middle class, can't afford to do.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2007/07/chris_rabb.html
New Statesman:
Good Ol' Bill, the liberal hero
Entering the "grotesquely paid presence" of Bill Clinton
John Pilger
Published 09 August 2007
On 14 August, you are invited to "an audience" with Bill Clinton. You have a choice. You can attend the "breakfast and speech" or the "brunch buffet and speech". These will take place in the cosy Millennium Dome, where a place in the "Kings' Row" will cost you £799. Last year, Clinton made more than £5m granting "audiences". Not only the usual corporate types attend. A few years ago, I watched a conga line of writers, journalists, publishers and others of liberal reputation shuffling towards his grotesquely paid presence at the Guardian Hay Festival.
The Clinton scam is symptomatic of the death of liberalism - not its narcissistic, war-loving wing ("humanitarian intervention"), which is ascendant, but the liberalism that speaks against crimes committed in its name, while extending rungs of the economic ladder to those below. It was Clinton's promotion of the former and crushing of the latter that so inspired new Labour's "project". Clinton, not Bush, was Cool Britannia's true Ma fia godfather. Keen observers of Tony Blair will recall that during one of his many farewell speeches, the socio path did a weird impersonation of Clinton's head wiggle.
Clinton is able to make a shedload because he is contrasted with the despised Bush as the flawed good guy who did his best for the world and brought economic boom to the US - the fabled American dream no less. Both notions are finely spun lies. What Clinton and Blair have most in common is that they are the most violent leaders of their countries in the modern era; that includes Bush. Consider Clinton's true record:
In 1993, he pursued George H W Bush's in vasion of Somalia. He invaded Haiti in 1994. He bombed Bosnia in 1995 and Serbia in 1999. In 1998, he bombed Afghanistan; and, at the height of his Monica Lewinsky troubles, he momentarily diverted the headline writers to a major "terrorist target" in Sudan that he ordered destroyed with an onslaught of missiles. It turned out to be sub-Saharan Africa's largest pharmaceutical plant, the only source of chloroquine, the treatment for malaria, and other drugs that were lifelines to hundreds of thousands. As a result, wrote Jonathan Belke, then of the Near East Foundation, "tens of thousands of people - many of them children - have suffered and died from mal aria, tuberculosis and other treatable diseases".
Long before Shock and Awe, Clinton was destroying and killing in Iraq. Under the lawless pretence of a "no-fly zone", he oversaw the longest allied aerial bombardment since the Second World War. This was hardly reported. At the same time, he imposed and tightened a Washington-led economic siege estimated to have killed a million civilians. "We think the price is worth it," said his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, in an exquisite moment of honesty.
Clinton's economic "legacy" - like Blair's - is the most unequal society Americans have known. In his last presidential year, 1999, I walked along the ocean front at Santa Monica in California and was struck by the number of middle-class homeless, "bag gents" who had lost executive jobs and families thanks largely to Clinton's North American Free Trade treaty. As for working Americans, the boasted high employment figures concealed a reversion to real wage levels of the 1970s. It was Clinton, not Bush, who wiped out the last of Roosevelt's New Deal. Back in Santa Monica the other day, I noted the bag gents had multiplied.
You see Good Ol' Bill, or the Comeback Kid, as he is variously known, wiggling his head on the TV news these days, campaigning for his wife, Hillary, among Americans who, terminally naive, still believe the Democratic Party is theirs and that "it's time to vote a woman into the White House". Together, the Clintons are known as "Billary" and rightly so. Like Good Ol' Bill, his wife has no plans to address the divisions of a society that allows 130,000 Americans to claim the wealth of millions of their fellow citizens. Like GOB, she wants to continue Iraq's torment for perhaps a decade. And she has not "ruled out" attacking Iran.
Those settling down in the Kings' Row at the Millennium Dome on 14 August for breakfast or brunch with GOB, having transferred another swag to the Clinton bank account, are unlikely to reflect on the blood spilt and the epic suffering caused, or on the moral corruption of the liberal ideology that courted and acclaimed Clinton, along with the criminal Blair.
But we should.
John Pilger's new film, "The War on Democracy", will be shown on ITV on 20 August (11pm)
http://www.newstatesman.com/200708090019
Página/12:
Se marcha el máximo asesor de Bush
KARL ROVE FUE EL ARTIFICE DE LA CARRERA POLITICA DEL ACTUAL PRESIDENTE REPUBLICANO
Rove anunció que se va del gobierno a fin de este mes. El hombre al que los demócratas adoran odiar, el Rasputín de la Casa Blanca, se despidió ayer de su amigo personal, George W., a quien deja en una desgastada jefatura. Zafó de ser acusado en el caso de las filtraciones de la CIA, pero queda por verse su rol en el despido de fiscales.
Por Leonard Doyle *
desde Washington
Martes, 14 de Agosto de 2007
¡Karl Rove RENUNCIA! Ding Dong, ¡la bruja se murió! Noticia de último momento. Dulce y breve: Rove renuncia. Los bloggers estaban en eso ayer a la mañana, mientras corría la noticia de que el hombre que los demócratas adoran odiar, de anteojos y pelo rebelde, con un parecido a Andy Warhol, Karl Rove, había anunciado su partida de la Casa Blanca de Bush. Durante los últimos siete años, Karl Christian Rove, que tiene el cargo de asesor político de la presidencia, ha sido la mano invisible de la política estadounidense, el componedor del Partido Republicano y el Rasputín de la Casa Blanca, todo en uno. Timoneó a George Bush de victoria en victoria. Usando todas las armas a su alcance, fue el artífice de su reelección, antes de caer en desgracia tras las elecciones legislativas del año pasado, cuando los cada vez más impopulares republicanos perdieron su dominio en el Congreso.
El hombre conocido como el cerebro de Bush ya habló de irse el año pasado. Y la novedad ayer fue que se iba el 31 de agosto para pasar más tiempo con su familia, especialmente con su mujer, Darby, y su hijo de 17 años. Pronto estará empaquetando sus amados libros de la elegante casa de tres pisos y se dirigirá de regreso a Texas. “Si quería pasar tiempo con su familia –decía un blogger–, debió hacerlo antes de que su hijo fuera al college.” Rove, que tiene 56 años, se libró apenas raspando de ser acusado en el caso de las filtraciones de la CIA y ha sido intensamente vigilado por su rol oculto en el despido de los fiscales de Estados Unidos que eran considerados políticamente sospechosos. Ignoró una citación del Congreso aduciendo privilegios ejecutivos. Hace dos semanas nuevamente desafió a los congresistas al asistir a una audiencia sobre el uso que hace la Casa Blanca de las cuentas del correo electrónico del Comité Republicano Nacional.
Las crecientes investigaciones del Congreso apuntaban a que Rove se fuera. El dice que está cansado de la asesoría política y que tiene la intención de escribir un libro sobre la presidencia de Bush. Ayer a la mañana, usando una corbata verde, apareció en el parque de la Casa Blanca con el presidente Bush para una emocionada despedida. “Hemos sido amigos durante mucho tiempo y seguiremos siendo amigos”, dijo Bush. “Karl es un querido amigo. Nos conocemos desde jóvenes, interesados en servir a nuestro estado. Trabajamos juntos de manera de poder estar en condiciones de servir a este país. De manera que le agradezco a mi amigo. Te seguiré los pasos dentro de poco tiempo.” La voz y el rostro de Rove traicionaron su emoción cuando se despidió. “Estoy agradecido de haber sido testigo de la historia”, dijo. “Ha sido la alegría y el honor de una vida.” Por momentos con la voz quebrada, Rove recordó la asociación de catorce años con Bush. Estaba orqulloso, dijo, de la manera en que Bush había llevado a Estados Unidos a la guerra, fortalecido la economía y reformado la vida pública.
Estos no son atributos que llenen de orgullo a los estadounidenses, y con los desastres actuales en las guerras en Irak y Afganistán y la caída de los mercados financieros, muchos tendrán dificultad en reconocer los éxitos que él señaló. Bush pareció reconocer esto cuando ayer, parado junto a su amigo, dijo que él pronto lo seguiría y quedaría sin trabajo.
Bob Borosage, un veterano de varias campañas presidenciales, señaló: “El creía que el abrumador poderío militar de Estados Unidos se impondría en la política exterior. Vimos esto en el desprecio que expresó por todos los intentos de reconstruir Irak y Afganistán después de las invasiones”. “Lo mismo se aplica en el frente interno, donde la estrategia reemplazó a la política cuando trató de crear su propia realidad y fracasó.” “El legado de Rove es que fue uno de los arquitectos de una de las peores administraciones de nuestra historia, una en la que dominaban los objetivos políticos de corto plazo.”
El Washington Post lo describió ayer como “el estratega político más prominente de su generación y una ‘bête noir’ para los liberales y para muchos críticos conservadores”. Tiene el crédito de las victorias legislativas republicanas de 2002 y el triunfo sobre John Kerry en la reelección de Bush en 2004. Mientras se prepara para abandonar su oficina en la Casa Blanca, Rove anunció que no piensa unirse a ninguno de los candidatos republicanos para la presidencia y que quisiera enseñar en una universidad. Aunque no tiene un trabajo en vista, está seguro de que los ofrecimientos no tardarán en llegar.
El asombroso control sobre la política estadounidense proviene de su habilidad para categorizar, clasificar y finalmente cosechar votantes para el Partido Republicano. Desde el comienzo fue un experto en golpes directos de correo electrónico, buenos mensajes para dirigir a los votantes en la dirección adecuada. Ayudó a diseñar los insidiosos ataques de publicidad televisiva y descolló en sacar a relucir elencos, fueran estos gays, liberales, terroristas o sindicalistas a quienes sus candidatos luego usarían para someter al vulnerable electorado. Como comenta Tod Purdum, “como nadie, fue Rove el que convirtió a un poco convincente gobernador de Texas en presidente de los Estados Unidos”.
En la década del 60, cuando Estados Unidos creía que estaba pasando por la gran revolución del “flower-power”, cuando la política de izquierda estaba recibiendo toda la atención en los campus de las universidades de Estados Unidos, hubo un renacimiento igualmente poderoso de la derecha entre las universidades republicanas. Esta gente creía que el tiempo de la derecha política había llegado. Su historia es muy similar a la de los grupos marxistas que dominaron la política estudiantil en toda Europa, llena de intrigas, intentos de golpes y contragolpes. El rey de los republicanos del campus era un tal Karl Rove.
* De The Independent de Gran Bretaña. Especial para Página/12.
Traducción: Celita Doyhambéhére.
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-89661-2007-08-14.html
The New Yorker:
Swimming
by T Cooper
August 20, 2007
People say to me, “Didn’t you hear anything?,” or “Why didn’t you stop when you felt something hit the bumper?” But I don’t know how to answer either question. He was just there with us, alive, one minute, as we were eating barbecue and watching the Super Bowl on TV at my brother-in-law’s house, and then the next minute he was dead—very dead—under our car. I sold the car after that. My wife strongly suggested I do so, and that was when I was still trying to do pretty much anything she strongly suggested. In the end, I suppose that’s what made it possible for me to come to Cambodia. I got something like twelve grand, cash, for that car.
I’ve been living in Kep for a year and a half now, in a crappy little two-room bungalow I rent on the beach. It’s fifty dollars a month, and it’s literally on the beach, the wild gray Gulf of Thailand chop not twenty feet from where I lay my head at night. I think I fit in pretty well here, as well as a white guy can. A haole, or cracker, not that those names apply here. The Cambodians don’t seem to have a derogatory name for “white person.” In Thailand, there’s farang, but that’s not really derogatory—they’ll say it to your face. And I don’t think there’s an equivalent in Khmer. At least, if there is one I don’t know it.
Only two people in town know that I killed my son. There’s the expat Colin, who runs the coffee shop and guesthouse in Kampot, and there’s Veata, but I never know how much of what I tell her she really understands. It came up not long after I learned that she had a son, a fact that she had been keeping from me because—you know what? I don’t know why she was keeping it from me. I think her mother had told her to. But I’m no smitten soldier boy—I’m not going to take Veata home with me and send money back to her family every month. So I didn’t really care that she had a son—it didn’t matter either way. Which is also why I can admit that Angel’s actually kind of cute. He’s named after Veata’s patron saint, Angelina Jolie. Veata says, “He handsome like Maddox,” and she styles his hair in a faux hawk. He’s the only five-year-old running around Kampot with a faux hawk and trendy camouflage pants.
The day I learned who Angel was, Veata and I had just finished having sex, when her parents burst into the front room of my house with Angel wrapped in a blanket. He was bleeding from his nose, listless. I’d seen him a couple of times before, when Veata was looking after him, but she’d told me that he was her sister’s son and that she was just babysitting.
Veata threw on my robe, and I quickly pulled on some boxers and scrub bottoms and went out to the other room, shirtless, to see what the problem was. Veata’s father stared at the tattoo on my chest. I assumed that he wanted to kill me. If I were him, I would’ve wanted to kill me, too. But he didn’t. When you have next to nothing, I guess it’s not so insane to pin your hopes to a silly daughter’s fantasies and faux hawks.
Veata’s father put Angel on the floor, and I knelt over him. Veata and her parents spoke in Khmer, very softly and quickly, so as to prevent me from understanding. I can speak very rudimentary Khmer, but I can understand a great deal more after living here for so long, so I knew that Veata was telling her parents not to reveal that Angel was her son, and her mother was replying that Angel was very sick and they needed my help.
During my first week in town, I witnessed a really brutal motorcycle-versus-truck accident on the road between Kampot and Kep. One person—the driver of the motorcycle—died, and his passenger’s leg snapped in half. I temporarily set this guy’s open-femur fracture and stabilized him so that he could get on the bus to the hospital in Phnom Penh, three hours away. Word got around, and after that ailing villagers sometimes showed up at my door. I generally just directed them to the clinic in town, which has I.V.s and antibiotics and basic first-aid stuff that I don’t have. But if they were really poor, and I could handle the problem, I’d do it myself. I didn’t take their money, and the clinic took a lot.
So there was Angel on the ground, bleeding from his little nose, and Veata’s mother started to cry in little muffled hiccups, and then Veata started to cry even louder, and all I wanted her to do was go back into the bedroom and put some clothes on so that she wouldn’t be standing there with her titties hanging out of my robe in front of her father. I took the kid’s pulse and counted his respirations. He was very hot to the touch.
“Why did you bring him all the way here instead of to the clinic?” I asked.
Nobody said anything.
“Clinic? Kampot town?” I repeated.
Veata’s father shook his head twice, quickly, like he was saying no to a price in a negotiation.
“I don’t have what he needs,” I said.
I didn’t feel anything looking at that kid. Not one thing beyond the clinical. It was obvious by then that he was Veata’s child. I could see it just by looking at his pretty face.
Veata’s parents didn’t speak a word of English, so I asked her, “What do they want?”
“They walk here” is all she said.
I tried to get Angel to drink some water from a glass, but he wouldn’t take any, and the blood from his upper lip dripped into the glass of water, dispersing into a puff of maroon haze. I picked him up, rewrapped the blanket around him, and passed him over to Veata. I pulled on a T-shirt in the bedroom, and then came back out and took Angel again, nodding toward the bedroom for Veata to go in and get dressed.
Veata’s parents just stood there staring at me while she was gone. A storm was coming in off the gulf; you could feel a change in the humid wind. The waves lapped more frequently on the sand behind my house, rocks rolling noisily over themselves.
The wrinkles in Veata’s father’s face were positively elephant-like. He’d seen a lot. It was probably a miracle that he was alive. But I didn’t want to hear the story of his hiding out in some cave for years while Pol Pot killed the rest of his family or any crazy shit like that. I didn’t want to have to care, to have to marry his daughter and have a little half-American, half-Khmer kid who’d play soccer really well and have a funky haircut and be especially popular at the prep school we’d send him to in Connecticut or Vermont.
Mercifully, Veata came back clothed and we headed out front to my motorcycle. I told her to hold onto Angel and get on the back. Her parents followed us out and wordlessly watched us go. I looked back over my shoulder, pretending to check for cars—which never come by here—and caught a glimpse of them standing a couple of feet apart in front of my little house off the main dirt road.
At the clinic, I asked the nurse to start Angel on an I.V. drip, just basic Ringer’s lactate, and then to push some antibiotics as soon as we realized he had an infection going on. He was burning up: 105. Kids can die with that kind of fever. When I was a boy, I used to get fevers like that, and my mother would sit me in an ice-cold bath and pretend to make different outfits out of washcloths (tuxedo, tank top, wetsuit), draping the freezing wet cloths over my chest, arms, and head in hope of bringing down my temperature and avoiding a trip to the emergency room.
Angel had to stay at the clinic overnight. I left Veata there and drove the fifteen miles back to my place, shuttling first her mother and then her father back to the clinic to be with her. I didn’t say anything to either of them the whole time. Except once, when I gestured to Veata’s mother to watch out for the muffler on the bike, which was searing hot, just millimetres away from her thigh. When all three of them were at the clinic together, I turned to head back home, but Veata came out onto the deck and grabbed my elbow with her bony, birdlike fingers.
“I have to get my swim in,” I said to her. “Swim?”
I had to get my swim in. My daily swim that I paid good money at a good exchange rate to insure.
She looked at me with those full eyes, the kind that peek out of the tourist brochures for Southeast Asian cruises that stop in seven countries in seven days. I wanted to see hatred in those eyes, but all I saw was my own reflection.
“I had a son,” I said then.
“You have son?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, looking across the street, over the Kampot River and up at Bokor Mountain. Fog was hanging from the places where the jungle protruded from the dark-green mountain. “I killed him, though. I killed him.”
I don’t know why I always said things twice around her. Ostensibly it was because she didn’t understand English very well, but I’m sure that there was some other reason. Some sort of superiority thing. I have that. Doctors have that. Even doctors in training, like I was.
“I hit him with my car—accident,” I said. “He ran in front of the car. I hit him. Accident.”
Veata’s mother came out onto the deck then, the torn screen door slamming shut behind her. She spoke softly to her daughter, and I stepped aside and lit a cigarette to give them some privacy. After a few exchanges with her mother, Veata turned to me and said, “Cockroach go in Angel nose.”
This was something I’d heard about in med school. I remember the textbook for my pediatrics course saying something to the effect of “If a child presents with an infection and is a resident of a lower-income neighborhood, such as a housing project or other state- or city-subsidized environment, suspect an insect as a potential aggravating factor.”
Insects tend to crawl into small, dark, moist spaces. Seals crawl up onto land. Whales beach themselves. But I did not want to miss my daily swim. It was my right. For killing my child I had earned the right to swim once a day in the beautiful and sometimes smelly Gulf of Thailand. The right to fuck the youngest, hottest girl with the tightest pussy in town and make her fall in love with me and yet bear no responsibility toward her or her family beyond shuttling them to the clinic when their grandchild was ill. My God-given rights.
I missed my swim that day. The nurse-practitioner sedated Angel, extracted the roach from his nose, and amped up his antibiotics. He would soon be fine, back running around Kampot’s red-mud streets with his black hair spiked and newly shorn, just like Maddox Jolie’s.
It started raining while I was on the road to my house, and my rear brake stopped working. I pulled to the side of the road, where some kids were playing in the three inches of water that filled the small, square rice paddy in front of their house. It was a one-ox, two-story household, and there were a bunch of crusty chickens huddling under a tree to escape the rain. The boys looked up at me and laughed, pointing. Muddy water dripped from my hair into my eyebrows, lashes, and eyes, as I knelt to unscrew the lever that activated the rear brake. It had been wailing like crazy as I drove, metal on metal, but I didn’t have the time to deal with it then. Nor the tools. So I drove about five miles per hour the rest of the way back to Kep, using only my front brake—and sparingly at that. Stuck in second gear with a squirrelly front brake, I finally gave up all hope of a swim. It was dark, and it wasn’t worth risking a jellyfish crossing my path.
The next day, I went for my swim the minute I woke up. My swim. I wanted to make up for having missed the day before. I wondered momentarily about Angel’s infection, but as quickly as the thought had entered my consciousness it was gone again, and I was pulling on my trunks, swallowing a couple of little starchy bananas, and stepping out onto the bright beach. The storm had passed during the night, and there was some debris on the shore, a few stray coconuts and palm branches. The water was uncharacteristically glassy. I waded out up to my waist, pulled my goggles on, and dived in, staying submerged and swimming as long as I could before my first breath ran out. The water was too warm, but I pumped away freestyle, going as hard as I could for probably fifteen minutes before I felt even remotely winded. I felt as if I could sprint like that for hours. You know that feeling when you can’t get enough breath and every time you turn up for air you don’t know if you’re going to get a salty mouthful down your gullet or not? That feeling where you’re pushing so hard that you understand how a body could just as easily die as live, that living is just the absence of death, and thus always in a relationship with death? That’s what it had felt like fucking Veata that morning, too—like, bring it on, I don’t care—and then there was the frantic knock on the door and her parents were in my front room, and I thought I’d derive at least some satisfaction from staring that man, her father, in the face when he knew full well I’d been pounding away at his daughter seconds before. But you know what? There was nothing there. I felt more sorry for him than anything else, standing there all skinny and no taller than my own mother, holding his limp little camouflaged grandson in his arms.
I was swimming around the other side of the point and saw a long purple jellyfish in front of me, a few feet below. I turned toward the beach in case he had friends. I was in unfamiliar water, but I didn’t slow my stroke. I kept going, around the next bend and past the abandoned cinder-block house with no roof where a pack of dogs live with their pups. I kept cutting through that thick water, my shoulders burning in the water-magnified sun, and then all of a sudden I got this acute feeling that I’d forgotten something, something really big—that jittery flutter running the length of my musculature which I used to get sometimes even before Jake died. Even the water tasted different, as if something metallic were making all the particles buzz.
I stopped my stroke, pulled up, and trod water. I pushed my goggles up onto my forehead, and as my vision un-blurred I saw that there were three or four guys on the beach, standing around a massive, bloated dead animal. As I paddled closer I realized that it was a whale shark, its head and mouth smashed in, trailing thick blood into the water from the beach. Tiny waves lapped at the creature’s wide mouth.
I swam all the way in to shore, and when I stepped onto the sand I looked at my arms and legs, a red film hewing to the hair and the skin. I stood on the edge of the scene, but only one of the guys noticed me at first. He just turned and looked with no discernible expression on his face. He was beautiful like a woman. He turned back and said something to the two men who were on the other side of the fish, hacking away at the connective tissue around its liver. It was gigantic, the liver—blood-purple—and the two guys were covered in bloody entrails. The man who’d noticed me walked up the fish’s tail then and stood on top of the creature, cockily resting an elbow on the dorsal fin as if he were bellying up to a bar. The thing had to be thirty or forty feet long.
I wasn’t angry when Jake died. But those guys’ girlish little necks—I pictured my hands gripping them each tightly, and then snap, snap, snap. I walked closer, still catching my breath from the workout or the panic attack or both. None of the men smiled or really acknowledged me at all, though I vaguely recognized the one who was standing on top of the fish from the market in Kampot. The others just kept sawing away at the creature, whose spotted skin was now dull and rubbery in the sunlight. Dime-size flies had moved in, a swarm of them in the heat, and a few of the neighboring stray dogs sat in the shade on the perimeter, waiting to clean up. The men continued to ignore me, even when I stepped around behind them to get a closer look at the whale shark’s liver and chest cavity.
When my wife asked me to take a temporary leave from the hospital to spend time with her, I took a leave from the hospital and spent all my time with her.
When she asked me to move us to Vermont to be closer to her family, we moved to Vermont to be closer to her family.
When she asked me to move us back to the city to get away from her family, I found us a condo in Chelsea.
When she went off the pill and asked me to make love to her, I dropped everything and made love to her.
When she asked me not to touch her again, I didn’t touch her. I slept on the couch and watched five straight seasons of “M*A*S*H” reruns on the Hallmark Channel from eleven to one every week night. On weekends I played Internet poker, against a guy from Wisconsin named Hal.
When she asked me to do something—anything—to show that I was as destroyed by this as she was, I dragged her to a hipster tattoo studio in Williamsburg and squeezed her hand while a mook with Johnny Cash-black hair and dice tattooed on each of his knuckles carved Jake’s name into my chest in huge Gothic script.
When she asked me to go back to work, I tried to get a residency in New York. And when I couldn’t get a residency in New York I got one in New Jersey and commuted to Trenton, making it back to sleep on the couch every off-duty night, without exception.
When she said she needed to be distracted, to get a job of her own, I told her to get a job of her own, and she did, volunteering at a local public-radio station downtown.
When she said that there was a paid opening at the station and she wanted to apply for it, I said, Great, apply for the paid position, and so she did, and she got the job and worked a hectic nonprofit schedule, sometimes six days a week.
When she asked me to donate to the station and come to the holiday party, I donated to the station, put on a festive tie, and brought a fruitcake to the holiday party.
When she said that she needed to spend time with the producer of the afternoon music show because he understood her, because he’d lost a child to cancer, I said, Great, spend time with the producer of the afternoon music show because he lost a child to cancer.
And when she asked me to leave I left.
The producer moved in, and I took a little chunk of cash, left the rest for her, and bought a ticket to Bangkok.
I said that I was sorry. I’d thought he was inside. I wasn’t drinking. I was just tired. I didn’t even like football, or barbecue, or her brother’s wife, the frigid bitch. And I couldn’t say whether I’d heard something hit the bumper or not. I didn’t know I’d hit anything—hit him—until I finished parking the car and saw his little shoe by the tire. Obviously, if I’d heard something I would have stopped. I’ve stopped for less. I’ve stopped for a squirrel.
I drove my bike to Colin’s coffeehouse in Kampot and researched whale sharks on the Internet. They were threatened and protected, but a set of fins went for five hundred dollars a kilo, in the right hands. And the liver was like gold.
An Australian girl with a pink bandanna on her head was giggling loudly at the computer behind me as I read. She was instant-messaging her parents back home for more money, and detailing the conversation for her friend, loud enough so that everyone in the coffeehouse could hear. I fantasized about sending somebody to Phnom Penh to rob her when she visited the cash machine. Just to show her.
Before getting off the computer, I logged onto my e-mail account, which I hadn’t checked in a couple of weeks. There were a few new messages there, one from my wife from a week before. I opened it and read the first line. She’d sent the divorce papers for me to sign months ago, but I hadn’t picked them up from general delivery, and they hadn’t been returned to her, either, so she didn’t know what to do.
“Colin, can I use this address for some documents I need?” I called over my shoulder.
“Sure.”
I hit Reply and typed Colin’s name and business address, then skimmed over the rest of her note as an afterthought. She said that she was pregnant—with a girl—and wanted to get married to What’s His Face before she delivered, in a few months. I hit Return a few times after Colin’s address, and wrote, “I hope you feel better this time around,” before going back and erasing the line. When she was pregnant with Jake, she threw up for three months straight. I started typing again, “I hope you don’t get sick as much,” but then erased the “as much” and stared at the blinking cursor after “sick” for a few minutes.
Colin brought my coffee and set it next to the keyboard. Espresso was apparently the one thing I truly couldn’t live without. “Here you go, man. Enjoy,” he said.
I typed a period and hit Return, and then, “Enjoy it this time.” I quickly erased “this time,” hit the period key again, and left it at that. “Enjoy it.” I clicked Send, logged out, and took a sip of my coffee, which seared my tongue. I love that first sip.
Driving back to Kep later that evening, I took the side road that hugs the coastline until I got to the house where the dogs live, which was surprisingly quiet and empty for that time of night. I pulled out onto the sand through the brush, and my back wheel got stuck a few times, but I walked the bike out of the holes and managed to get onto wetter sand.
All that was left of the whale shark was a bunch of slop. There were about fifty dogs fighting over it in the bloody sand. I vomited a little from the smell. Indescribable. I covered my nose and mouth, straddling my idling bike. It was getting dark, but the moon was bright enough for me to see two very wide, deep tire tracks in the sand, leading all the way back up to the main road.
I didn’t go back to Kampot town for a couple of days, or maybe a week, and I can’t honestly say what I did that whole time. I barely ate. I did swim every day, sometimes twice. I drank up my stash of warm beer, and when I ran out of food and water and was low on gas I headed to Kampot for supplies. I swear Veata can sense me coming from a mile away—she’s like a dog that way—because she was in front of the market before I could swing my leg over my bike seat and cut the engine.
“Where you been?” she asked.
“Home.”
“Why you go to police? Why you go say Sopat do something wrong?”
“Because he did—he did do something wrong.”
“No, no, he didn’t do something wrong,” she said. It was the first time she had ever not been in complete agreement with me. “He say you do something wrong.”
“Me? Me. I did something wrong,” I said. “That’s great. That’s just fucking great.”
“Sopat say you make a hard time for him and all of them. Now they come and want more money from them. They take away the fins.”
“Who? Who took the fins?”
“You know who,” she said. “You—”
“Well, whale sharks are protected,” I said. “They’re all dying, and nobody’s supposed to kill them. Not your cousin, nobody.”
“Sopat, he is very angry.”
“I don’t care if Sopat is angry.”
“He say he just swim up on beach. The fish just swim right up on beach and he was very sick.”
“He didn’t swim up onto the beach, Veata.”
“He do that. Sopat say he do that.”
“No, he didn’t. They killed that poor thing. They went out and killed it. Its face was bashed in!” I yelled.
Veata flinched ever so slightly when I raised my voice, and with a swift kick to the fuel tank that came virtually out of nowhere she knocked my motorcycle over, and it crashed to the ground noisily, gasoline spilling into the dirt, spewing a little purple rainbow.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I screamed, even louder than before, and a few people nervously looked my way from the outer edge of the market—the same outdoor market where I’d first spotted Veata, in my second week in town. She and her friends had giggled uncontrollably from behind her uncle’s vegetable stand, where they were helping out. They had continued to laugh when I came up and asked in English to buy a loaf of bread that Veata’s mother was selling.
Alas, the flirty Veata smile was no different from the one she sported after kicking over my motorcycle. I picked up my bike and reset the kickstand. My left rearview mirror was broken. “You’re fucking crazy,” I spat. She just kept smiling.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Veata’s mother approaching, with Angel in tow. When Angel spotted his mother he ran up and hugged her around the thighs, the way little boys do. He eyed me suspiciously, but I could tell that he wanted me to pay attention to him. Veata’s mother said something in Khmer and then motioned toward me.
“My mother say my father say he want to thank you for taking care of Angel,” Veata said.
“I didn’t do anything for Angel.”
“Well,” she said, her mother nodding and smiling behind her, “we have a special dinner tonight, and my father, he want you to come.”
“No, I can’t,” I said. I knew full well how rude this was.
Veata’s mother frowned. Veata looked like she hated me. Pure hatred, and I had to agree.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked her.
She didn’t answer. Her mother said something again, and Veata argued with her. Angel kept looking up at me from his mother’s leg, his little faux hawk crooked and flattened in the back.
“My mother say you must come. My father, he will be very sad if you don’t come,” Veata said.
“O.K., O.K.,” I said, and then, “Thank you, thank you very much,” to Veata’s mother.
Veata’s family’s house was smaller than the one I was living in, but a pungent fishy coconut smell filled the place, and it seemed larger than it actually was. Angel ran around like a maniac as soon as I arrived, probably because his mother visibly stiffened at my presence. Veata’s father greeted me with a slight bow and led me to a table to sit. He poured me a whiskey, and sat only after I did. We drank in silence, nodding and smiling every so often until Veata’s cousin—Sopat, the whale-shark killer—showed up, eying me.
“Maybe I should go?” I whispered to Veata.
“Why you go?” Sopat asked politely.
“We eat now,” Veata said.
Her mother came out with two large bowls of coconut milk with garlic, onion, potatoes, and chunks of white flesh floating in it. It smelled wonderful. She put some rice in front of me on a small table and motioned for me to start eating, but I didn’t want to until everybody sat. Eventually, Sopat sat across from me, and after she put Angel to sleep on a mat on the floor Veata joined us, followed, finally, by her father. Her mother kept working by the stove.
“You like?” Sopat asked.
My cue to take a bite of rice drenched in the thick soup. The potatoes practically melted on my tongue, and the broth was spiced perfectly. But the fish was rubbery and oily when I got to chewing it. My gag reflex kicked in, and I looked for a napkin to spit. I could feel the sweat dripping under my arms. But soon the coconut milk counterbalanced the oil, and I swallowed. Veata’s father smiled at me expectantly, and as the partially chewed mixture went down my throat I managed a version of the same smile we had been exchanging over liquor before.
Everybody started eating once I did, even Veata’s mother, who sat on a stool behind her nephew and her husband. We ate in silence for the most part, with Veata and Sopat speaking intermittently, I couldn’t catch what about, but it seemed to be small talk. Sopat stared at me unsmilingly between bites.
I looked at Veata’s father there, rail-thin and stooped over his chipped bowl, chewing each bite for what seemed like ten minutes. He should’ve been Veata’s grandfather, not her father. In his face there was something I’d never seen in my own father’s—nor in my own, to be perfectly honest. He looked peaceful, happy even. Proud to be feeding a guest from whom he’d sought help just a week before.
I’d had the nerve to pity him. All the while he could’ve been pitying me. Or should’ve been. He chewed and smiled, chewed and smiled, and against all my own rules I found myself wondering about him, so I said as much to Veata after I’d managed to swallow another oily, briny mouthful.
She looked at me, stunned by the inquiry.
She began, “Father lost his first family to Khmer Rouge. They kill his two son in front of his eye because he try to hide them in the house. His wife, she die working in the camp, and—” Veata stopped, searching my eyes for a sign that she’d said too much.
Her father kept smiling between bites while Veata talked, telling me how he had found his way south to Kampot in 1980, during the famine. He had no idea what she was saying, but there he was, chewing his food full-cheeked as if he dined in this manner all the time. Dined like the King of Cambodia. Feasting upon the meat that kings eat.
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/08/20/070820fi_fiction_cooper
ZNet | Africa
Destination Darfur
A New Cold War Over Oil
by Vijay Prashad; CounterPunch; August 13, 2007
In February, George W. Bush announced the creation of a new unified combatant command for Africa. After several years of deliberation, the Pentagon finally agreed to create the African Command (AFRICOM), which will relieve the European Command (EUCOM) and the Central Command (CENTCOM), which earlier shared responsibility for Africa.
In July, Bush appointed General William “Kip” Ward to run AFRICOM, which will be based in Germany until it finds an African home (Liberia, home to an Omega surveillance system from 1976 to 1997, is openly lobbying to play host). Sensitive to criticism that AFRICOM seeks military solutions to African problems, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs, Theresa Whelan, said, “Africa Command is not going to reflect a U.S. intent to engage kinetically in Africa. This is about prevention. This isn’t about fighting wars.”
Navy Rear Admiral Robert Moeller, who led the Africa Command Implementation Planning Team, pointed out that “the increasing importance of the continent to the U.S.,” particularly on strategic and economic grounds, makes this development necessary. The proximate issues used to push for AFRICOM were the ongoing crisis in Darfur and the failure of the U.S. to act in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
And the less-talked-about issue is the importance of African resources for the U.S. economy and for multinational corporations. Oil is, of course, a central character in this story.
* * *
In September 2002, The New York Times ran an article with a telling headline, “In Courting Africa, U.S. likes the Dowry: Oil”. The article quoted then Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, who said, “Energy from Africa plays an increasingly important role in our energy security.” The following year, a senior Pentagon official told The Wall Street Journal, “A key mission for U.S. forces [in Africa] would be to ensure that Nigeria’s oilfields, which in the future could account for as much as 25 per cent of all U.S. oil imports, are secure.” This figure comes from the National Intelligence Council’s report of 2000 (when the U.S. imported 16 per cent of its oil needs from sub-Saharan Africa).
Since 9/11, the urgency of a stable source of oil has increased. Historian John Ghazvinian’s new book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, points out that not only is African oil of high quality, but it bears other significant political advantages: most African countries are not Organizations of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) members, their oil is not owned by powerful state oil companies, and the oil is largely offshore, which means “that even if a civil war or violent insurrection breaks out onshore [always a concern in Africa], the oil companies can continue to pump out oil with little likelihood of sabotage, banditry or nationalist fervor getting in the way.”
Eighty per cent of the oil reserves discovered between 2001 and 2004 come from West Africa, where the U.S. currently procures only 12 per cent of its total supply. West Africa is a crucial site for U.S. interests, so much so that the U.S. is willing to be openly hypocritical about its promotion of democracy and human rights when it comes to the region.
In April 2006, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warmly welcomed her “special friend”, Equatorial Guinea’s man of all seasons and many decades, Teodoro Obiang. Her own department annually chastises Obiang’s regime for corruption, human rights violations and electoral fraud. Despite being home to some of the poorest people in Africa, Equatorial Guinea is the third largest oil producer in the continent, whose oil the U.S. government hopes will flow across the Atlantic to power the U.S. The U.S. has been loath to put pressure on Nigeria for the very same reasons.
For decades, the oil regions in West Africa have been “swamps of insurgency” (as the International Crisis Group put it in a 2006 report). Wars in the Niger Delta, for instance, claim lives and communities, as well as barrels of oil. Both the Nigerian and U.S. governments are concerned about “resource control”, and it has been the task of the Nigerian military to clamp down on dissent. Resource wars in the Congo (over diamonds and coltan) and in West Africa (over oil) have set the continent on fire. The U.S. has thus far engaged with these conflicts through Africa’s national armies, who have increasingly become the praetorian guards of large corporations. None of this can be justified directly as protection of the extraction of resources, so it has increasingly been couched in the language of the War on Terror.
The Pan-Sahel Initiative (created in 2002) draws U.S. Special Operations Forces to Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. In 2004, the U.S. extended this to the major oil-producing countries of Algeria, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia and renamed it the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI). After 9/11, the U.S. moved a Special Operations Force into a former French Foreign Legion base, Camp Lemonier, in Djibouti. In July 2003, the U.S. earned the right to deploy P-3 Orion aerial surveillance aircraft in Tamanrasset, Algeria. Under the guise of the War on Terror, the U.S. government moved forces into various parts of Africa, where they trained African armies and have been able to intervene in the increasingly dangerous resource wars.
If the U.S. government is quieter in its approach, right-wing think tanks in the U.S. feel no such compunction. The Heritage Foundation lobbied for the creation of AFRICOM for several years, and arguably its work moved Donald Rumsfeld to consider an African Command. In a 2003 study entitled “U.S. Military Assistance for Africa: A Better Solution”, the Heritage Foundation argued: “Creating an African Command would go a long way towards turning the Bush Administration’s well-aimed strategic priorities for Africa into a reality.” Rather than engage Africa diplomatically, it is better to be diplomatic through the barrel of a gun. “America must not be afraid to employ its forces decisively when vital national interests are threatened,” the study said. Nevertheless, the U.S. will not need always to send its own soldiers. “A sub-unified command for Africa would give the U.S. military an instrument with which to engage effectively in the continent and reduce the potential that America might have to intervene directly.” AFRICOM would analyze intelligence, work “closely with civil-military leaders”, coordinate training and conduct joint exercises. In other words, the U.S. would make the friendly African military forces “inter-operatable” not only with U.S. hardware but also with U.S. interests. When AFRICOM became a reality, Heritage’s Brett Schaefer welcomed the “long overdue” move.
* * *
At a May gathering of African leaders in Shanghai, the Chinese government promised $20 billion for the continent’s development. Madagascar’s President Marc Ravalomanana enthusiastically said, “We in Africa must learn from your success.” In January, the Chinese Foreign Ministry released a White Paper that pointed out that unlike U.S. and European investment, Chinese finance for Africa would be driven by equity and sustainable development. Technology transfer, the entry of African goods into the Chinese market without barriers, and the entry of Chinese finance for development projects are the main elements of the Chinese strategy (also the main features of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation and the Addis Ababa Action Plan of 2004-06). With the U.S. and European aid at a low point and with resistance from the U.S. and Europe to compromise on the debt burden of African states, the Chinese proposal was welcomed in many parts of Africa.
But in Washington, among the U.S. establishment’s strategic planners (such as those in the Heritage Foundation), China’s entry into Africa has provoked concern. For people in the Heritage Foundation and in the White House, AFRICOM is as much a response to China as it is to the increased anti-terrorist efforts in the continent.
China is not in Africa for altruistic reasons. A quarter of China’s crude oil imports already come from Africa. African governments are well aware of the competition between the US and China, and they have used that standoff to their partial advantage (when the U.S. would not act fast enough to get Nigeria’s armed forces 200 patrol boats and funds, the Nigerian government turned to China).
A new Cold War over oil has begun in Africa, but the new players are the U.S. (as the face of global oil corporations) and China. The U.S. government’s response has not been able to match the Chinese initiative dollar for dollar, partly because it cannot. Instead, the U.S. government has gone after China for its dealings with the government of Sudan. China promised to invest $10 billion in Sudan, and it currently purchases 70 per cent of Sudanese oil (U.S.-based oil firms cannot trade with Sudan as a result of an embargo in force since 1997). The price for this oil is greater, however, than money.
China blocked votes in the United Nations Security Council on the ongoing violence in Darfur, although global pressure has now forced Beijing to appoint a special envoy to Darfur and put some modest pressure on Khartoum. The close relationship between the US and the leaders of Equatorial Guinea or Nigeria is repellent but not half as dubious as that between the Chinese and Sudanese governments. The U.S. government has, therefore, a potent weapon to wield against Beijing’s claim to be in favor of African development.
* * *
Since 1984-85, the western Sudanese province of Darfur has been in a prolonged crisis. The drought of those years made it hard for pastoralists to find grazing ground for their camel herds. Battles over land went on for two decades before an embattled and split Islamist government in Khartoum armed the most impoverished of the tribes (who had begun to regain their self-respect through a virulently supremacist ideology promoted by a group called Tajamu al Arabi, or the Arab Gathering).
These tribes began an onslaught against their settled neighbors, with Khartoum’s support. In a few years over a million people were driven out of their homes to neighboring Chad (the U.N. estimates that around 70,000 have been killed). (These numbers, incidentally, are dwarfed by the death toll and the population displacement forced by the U.S. occupation of Iraq.) The U.N. called the Sudan situation a “crime against humanity”, while the U.S., uncharacteristically, labeled it genocide. For a while the African Union was able to stabilize the situation, although it did not succeed in crafting a political solution to the problem. The African Union, created in 1999, has neither the financial ability to pay its troops nor the logistical capacity to do the job. The European Union, which paid the troops’ salaries, began to withhold funds on grounds of accountability, and this gradually killed off the peacekeeping operations.
Professor Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University (one of the world’s leading experts on contemporary Africa), says of this: “There is a concerted attempt being made to shift the political control of any intervention force inside Darfur from inside Africa to outside Africa”. In other words, the U.S. and Europe are eager to control the dynamics of what happens in Africa and not allow an indigenous, inter-state agency to gain either the experience this would provide or the respect it would gain if it succeeds. The African Union has been undermined so that only the U.S. can appear as the savior of the beleaguered people of Darfur, and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, it suits the U.S. that the campaigns to save the people of Darfur concentrate on the role of China and on what is often framed as an “Arab” assault on “Africans.” The Save Darfur Coalition in the U.S., for instance, has a report on the “Deadly Partnership” between Sudan and China but says nothing of the role of the U.S. in undermining the African Union’s attempts. The Coalition is more sophisticated than can fit into the Arab-African stereotypes, but its members include groups that are less careful (the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, for instance, is an organizational member; it has not yet tried to distance itself from its parent organization's role in the Gujarat pogroms).
The Save Darfur Coalition, which is the largest U.S. umbrella organization, was formed in 2004 through the work of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish World Service. People who have been motivated by the efforts of the group are aware of what is happening in Darfur. This is a worthwhile goal, particularly if it is able to bring a ceasefire and an eventual peace settlement in Darfur. But, the movement seems to have no viable strategy to do this beyond putting pressure on China and pleading with the U.S. government to take “tough” stands against Khartoum. The complexity on the ground is irrelevant.
The heads of the Save Darfur Coalition and the Genocide Intervention Network (set up by the Center for American Progress) are all liberal Democrats who played some kind of a role in the Bill Clinton administration. The Darfur campaign enables them to distance themselves from the excesses of the Bush regime and yet preserve an essential element of the Clinton foreign policy arsenal, “humanitarian intervention” (as in the Kosovo war of 1999). For that reason, these groups have begun to offer the slogan, “Out of Iraq and Into Darfur”. At a forum in New York City on July 15, a young woman asked why the U.S. could not use its superior firepower to defeat the Janjaweed in Sudan. At the same event, the documentary film The Devil Came on Horseback shows the former U.S. Marine Brian Steidle photograph a band of Janjaweed militia leave a village and wish he could exchange his telephoto lens for a gun-scope to “end it now”. Private mercenary armies such as the International Peace Operations Association and DynCorp International clamor to cross the Chad border and conduct operations against the Janjaweed.
The language of “no-fly zones” and sanctions is not only in the air, but it is close to becoming a reality. The New York Times’ Nicholas D. Kristof, on July 16, called for the creation of a U.S.-run “no-fly zone” over Darfur, which would be an entry point into the militarization of the response to what is, by the authority of the African Union and Human Rights Watch, a messy political situation (the rebel groups have split up and are themselves attacking humanitarian workers).
In May, Bush unilaterally implemented tighter economic sanctions, and promised to move another Security Council resolution. That the first head of AFRICOM is the former commander of the battalion that led Operation Restore Hope in Somalia in 1993 is an ominous sign. Would a cruise missile strike on Khartoum (a replay of 1998) and an invasion of Darfur create a solution to the current crisis, or would it only create an Iraq in Africa?
Vijay Prashad teaches at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu
This article originally ran in Frontline (Chennai, India).
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=2&ItemID=13517
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