Late Night Libya Update: Defections and “Secret Talks”

Posted: April 1, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, Central Intelligence Agency, Foreign Affairs, Libya, MENA, open thread, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , | 19 Comments

Saif Gaddafi

This is just a quick update on the events of the last couple of days related to Libya. You can use this as an open thread. The big headline is that Gaddafi’s sons may want to find a way out of the mess they’re in. Last night the Guardian reported that

Colonel Gaddafi’s regime has sent one of its most trusted envoys to London for confidential talks with British officials, the Guardian can reveal.

Mohammed Ismail, a senior aide to Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, visited London in recent days, British government sources familiar with the meeting have confirmed. The contacts with Ismail are believed to have been one of a number between Libyan officials and the west in the last fortnight, amid signs that the regime may be looking for an exit strategy.

Disclosure of Ismail’s visit comes in the immediate aftermath of the defection to Britain of Moussa Koussa, Libya’s foreign minister and its former external intelligence head, who has been Britain’s main conduit to the Gaddafi regime since the early 1990s.

In the Guardian’s follow-up article, Peter Beaumont writes that Gaddafi’s sons seem to be running things in Libya, and they want to make a deal with the opposition fighters.

…increasingly, according to those familiar with how Saif and his brother Saadi are thinking, Gaddafi’s sons have become aware that they have a problem that they need to find a way out of – despite Saif’s bellicose language.

Ismail’s visit, described in Tripoli as a trip to see his children who are being educated in Britain, is all the more significant given the defection of Libya’s foreign minister and former external intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa.

He was here, say Foreign Office sources, on regime business. And that is significant at a time when diplomats and others have been in the capital to discuss how Libya might be after Gaddafi.

While it is difficult to assess in a regime as opaque as Libya, the evidence is that something is afoot. What it suggests is that under intense international pressure, key figures around Gaddafi – including, it would seem, some of his sons – are reaching out to channels of communication with the west.

According to Beaumont, there have been a number of contacts between Libya and the Brits, the French, and the U.S. in the past couple of weeks. Nevertheless, Gaddafi turned down the opposition’s offer of a cease fire today.

The tempo of diplomatic and military action paving the way to a possible ceasefire in Libya’s bloody civil war was gathering pace yesterday with reports that a son of Muammar Gaddafi was attempting to broker a deal.

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who has appeared as a public and belligerent face of the regime during the weeks of violent strife, is said to be proposing an agreement which would limit the role of his father and include opposition figures in an interim government. Elections would be held in the near future and a “reconciliation process” put in place.

The details of the plan cannot be independently verified. However, according to diplomatic sources, senior officials in the West view Saif al-Islam, who supposedly wants to remain to play a “constructive role” in a post-war Libya, as a credible figure.

I don’t think the opposition is interested in having anyone from the Gaddafi family involved in the running any future Libyan government though.

Some other important members of Gaddafi’s regime have already defected, and the Guardian provides a list of those, along with big names who are sticking by the Libyan dictator.

The latest defector was Ali Adussalm Treki, had been appointed to represent Libya at the UN. Yesterday Treki, who was in Cairo, announced that he would not accept the post and did not intend to return to Libya. The Arabist Blog excerpted an article from the London Times (behind a paywall) that says more defections are coming.

…there were reports that other top Libyan officials had also defected, including the Prime Minister, the Speaker of Parliament, the head of external intelligence and the Oil Minister. An influential deputy foreign minister was also said to have quit.

If those reports are confirmed, it would suggest that Colonel Gaddafi’s regime is is indeed “crumbling and rotten” – as David Cameron said today – and about to collapse around its leader.

Another name added to the list of defectors was Ali Adussalm Treki, a former foreign minister whom Colonel Gaddaffi had appointed as ambassador to the UN. He refused to take up the post, condemning the “spilling of blood”.

Since Gaddafi was running low on candidates for the UN ambassador, he asked someone from Nicaragua to do the job. From Bloomberg:

Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, a former foreign minister of Nicaragua’s socialist Sandinista government and one-time president of the United Nations General Assembly, has been named by Muammar Qaddafi’s regime as Libya’s ambassador to the UN.

D’Escoto Brockmann, a Catholic priest who was General Assembly president in 2008 and 2009, once said former U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were “possessed by the demons of manifest destiny.” D’Escoto was Nicaragua’s foreign minister for the Sandinista government as it fought U.S.-backed contra rebels during the nation’s 1980s civil war.

He called Reagan a “butcher of my people” for supporting a rebellion that caused Nicaraguans to suffer “something much bigger than the Twin Towers,” a reference to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

Nicaragua’s government said in a statement that D’Escoto Brockmann received instructions from Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to “accept this nomination and represent the people and government of Libya to re-establish peace and defend their legitimate right to resolve their national conflicts without foreign intervention.”

Meanwhile, Libya is apparently crawling with CIA, MI6, and goddess knows what other secret operatives. Mark Hosenball, who first broke the story of Obama’s “secret finding,” now says intelligence operatives were there before Obama signed the authorization. I guess those guys don’t count as boots on the ground? Well, they still make me nervous.

U.S. intelligence operatives were on the ground in Libya before President Barack Obama signed a secret order authorizing covert support for anti-Gaddafi rebels, U.S. government sources told Reuters.

The CIA personnel were sent in to contact opponents of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and assess their capabilities, two U.S. officials said.

“They’re trying to sort out who could be turned into a military unit and who couldn’t,” said Bob Baer, a former CIA case officer whose memoirs were turned into the Hollywood thriller “Syriana.”

Baer said the U.S. operatives most likely entered Libya on the ground through neighboring Egypt and are lightly equipped.

The president — who said in a speech on Monday “that we would not put ground troops into Libya” — has legal authority to send U.S. intelligence personnel without having to sign a covert action order, current and former U.S. officials said.

Within the last two or three weeks, Obama did sign a secret “finding” authorizing the CIA to pursue a broad range of covert activities in support of the rebels.

Hosenball also says Obama is considering sending in special forces to help train the Libyan opposition fighters. I don’t like the sound of that either.

I’ve been supportive of the no-fly zone, just to prevent a massacre, but I don’t want to see this go much further.

UPDATE: The former Sandanista who had agreed to act as Libya’s UN representative has changed his mind.

The apparent about-face by Mr. D’Escoto, whose country has forged an unlikely friendship with Libya, marked a modest setback for the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. It has endured several high-profile defections from among its diplomatic ranks this week, including the decision of its former foreign minister, Moussa Koussa, to defect in London.

Libya’s ambassador to the United Nations, Abdurrahman Mohamed Shalgam, defected in late February after denouncing Colonel Qaddafi during a Security Council meeting in which he pleaded for international help to save Libya from bloodshed. Then, the Libyan government’s choice to replace him, Ali Treki, a close associate of Mr. Qaddafi and a former United Nations General Assembly President, left the government and the country. But Mr. Treki said in an interview in Cairo on Friday that he would not call himself a defector.

A Nicaraguan diplomat, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that the initiative to appoint Mr. D’Escoto as Libya’s envoy had come from Libya, and not Nicaragua. He declined to comment on the reasons underlying Mr. D’Escoto’s decision to represent Nicaragua instead, but he said that Mr. D’Escoto would use his new position to press for a cease fire in Libya.

Hmmm….sounds like someone pressured someone. Maybe Russia?

Income Inequality, Redux

Posted: April 1, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: income inequality, poverty, The Media SUCKS, the villagers | Tags: , , , | 12 Comments

US Income Inequality – Too Big To Ignore

I had to frontpage this because I just can never make this point enough.  Vast income inequality is not the sign of a healthy society or economy.   H/t to Corrente for my first look at this Joseph Stiglitz article at Vanity Fare called ‘Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%’. We’re back to the Versailles days and the Bush tax policies–extended by Obama–are a good part of the source of the problem.  I hate to just lift just one paragraph out of Stiglitz’ rant because the entire thing is worth reading. However, here’s two for starters.  Go read the entire thing, please.

But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way. The most obvious example involves tax policy. Lowering tax rates on capital gains, which is how the rich receive a large portion of their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride. Monopolies and near monopolies have always been a source of economic power—from John D. Rockefeller at the beginning of the last century to Bill Gates at the end. Lax enforcement of anti-trust laws, especially during Republican administrations, has been a godsend to the top 1 percent. Much of today’s inequality is due to manipulation of the financial system, enabled by changes in the rules that have been bought and paid for by the financial industry itself—one of its best investments ever. The government lent money to financial institutions at close to 0 percent interest and provided generous bailouts on favorable terms when all else failed. Regulators turned a blind eye to a lack of transparency and to conflicts of interest.

When you look at the sheer volume of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent in this country, it’s tempting to see our growing inequality as a quintessentially American achievement—we started way behind the pack, but now we’re doing inequality on a world-class level. And it looks as if we’ll be building on this achievement for years to come, because what made it possible is self-reinforcing.

The other reason that I decided to front page this is the here-here response from Michael Tomasky at the UK Guardian.  It’s aptly called ‘Sad, just sad’.  He mentions something we’ve said for some time.  The villagers are also the beneficiaries of this kind of windfall.  Why would those DC beltway types want to downsize when they can blame teachers, nurses, firefighters, and police officers for all those budget woes? It’s the overgenerous tax cuts.  A nation can’t sustain itself without roads, airports, electrical grids, education, and public health and safety programs unless your idea of an ideal nation is that found in the Grapes of Wrath.

Stiglitz might have added the very important point that the majority of the country’s most prominent pundits who go on television and interpret all this for the American people, who soothe their audiences with assurances that all this is completely reasonable, are in the top 1%, which means households above around $380,000 per year. Many of course are far above that (Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, etc.). High-end print journalists who aren’t quite at that level are still likely in the top 2%.

Anyway, the piece makes many important points, all of which boil down to the idea that while income inequality has several initial causes, there is only one thing that sustains it: a political process that is owned lock, stock and barrel by the top 1%.

Stepping back and looking at this context, and staying aware of it, makes watching these budget cuts particularly noxious. That’s not to say there isn’t waste, fine. But it is to say that the US political system of today is pretty inevitably designed to help the rich and punish the poor. So it’s no surprise when GOP Congressman Paul Ryan proposes, as he just has, cutting $1 trillion from Medicaid, which provides health care for poor people and the disabled (and to some extent, a greater extent than many people are aware, middle-class families, too, in the form of nursing-home cost support or in-home services like those from NY CDPAP agency).

Yes, Medicaid costs are high, killing the states. The feds could actually pick them up. Ronald Reagan proposed doing this. But that would be radical today. If Americans, especially wealthy ones, were paying taxes (income and capital gains) even at the rate we were in the Reagan era, we’d have no budget problems.

This brings me to the latest “Dopiest Constitutional Amendment of All Time”  discussed by former economist Bruce Bartlett. The very same people that gutted tax revenues and funding sources for ten years and went on a spending spree on Treasury Bills now want to demand a federal balanced budget amendment.  It’s not like watching the states get into deep trouble with their own versions of the stupid thing has taught any lessons.  Balanced budget amendments simply lead to bad economics.  When the revenues come in, the politicians spend like crazy on unnecessary things because the money’s there and the economy doesn’t require the expenditures.  When the recession hits, the revenues go down, and the balance the budget part hurts, they start doing things that basically put their states in worse situations.  This should be immoral, unethical and illegal.  Instead, they stick in constitutions.  Evidently none of these guys ever got away to reading the Grasshopper and the Ant. They’re all Grasshoppers until the real need for fiscal management comes into play.

Today, all 47 Senate Republicans introduced a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget. Full text available here. Presumably, this is the amendment that Republicans plan to demand as their price for increasing the federal debt limit. Of course, simply refusing the raise the debt limit would balance the budget overnight — the nation would default on its debt and we would be plunged into the worst fiscal crisis in history, but the budget would be balanced. I have previously explained the idiocy of right wing advocates of debt default (here and here) and the idiocy of a balanced budget amendment (here and here). However, the new Republican balanced budget proposal is especially dimwitted.

At what point do the Republicans just change their name to the party of Batshit Crazy Liars?  At what point do the Democrats start fighting some of this?  It’s unbelievably hard to watch a group of people with so little at stake except their own re-election just run through a country’s future and assets like a Mardi Gras krewe tossing trinkets to bystanders.  How much more looting of national resources to benefit their cronies can we honestly take before people really take to the streets and say enough!

TGIFriday Reads

Posted: April 1, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: commercial banking, morning reads, We are so F'd, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , | 61 Comments

Good Morning!!

Well, I’m hoping that this Friday goes smoother than my last one when what I thought was an innocuous zit turned into MRSA  and sent me to the emergency room.  I’m home now and waiting for groceries to be delivered.  My face was all swollen and I’m finishing off my steriods and antibiotics.  I certainly don’t want to be exposed to anything else for awhile and I availed myself of an internet-based delivery service.  What I really need at the moment is a cook and nurse, but no such luck or fortune. So, I’m going to start out with some good news.

If you follow twitter much, you may have noticed that the New York Bronx Zoo’s Egyptian Cobra went missing and was “tweeting” it’s adventures.  It seems the snake had hid out in its home–the reptile building–and was lured out with the smell of rodent-infested wood shavings.

An Egyptian cobra that drew thousands of Twitter fans has been found alive after it went missing for days from a New York City zoo. “As you can imagine, we are delighted to report that the snake has been found alive and well,” Bronx Zoo Director Jim Breheny said Thursday. Zoo officials conducted around-the-clock searches for the 3-ounce, 20-inch long reptile, he said.

Breheny said the cobra had sought a secure hiding spot within the holding areas of the zoo’s reptile house — a complex environment with pumps, motors and other mechanical systems. But it was lured out after zoo officials sprinkled wood shavings from exhibit beds across areas where they guessed the cobra was hiding. “It was the scent of rodents (on the wood clippings) that we hoped would bring her out,” Breheny added. “The key strategy here was patience,” he said in a prepared statement. The snake went missing Saturday from an off-exhibit enclosure, prompting the zoo to close the reptile house.

The cobra’s twitter ego was a blast to read.  There were various comments about Samuel Jackson and Sex and the City’s Samantha.  Anyway, I’m glad the little asp is back in his nest and that’s no April Fool’s day joke.  I wish this next item was a bad April Fool’s day joke, but it’s not.  A Democrat in Florida’s legislature was rebuked for using the word uterus on the floor. I guess a few people think girl parts are dirty words. (h/t to pdgrey)

During last week’s discussion about a bill that would prohibit governments from deducting union dues from a worker’s paycheck, state Rep. Scott Randolph, D-Orlando, used his time during floor debate to argue that Republicans are against regulations — except when it comes to the little guys, or serves their specific interests. At one point Randolph suggested that his wife “incorporate her uterus” to stop Republicans from pushing measures that would restrict abortions. Republicans, after all, wouldn’t want to further regulate a Florida business.

Apparently the GOP leadership of the House didn’t like the one-liner. They told Democrats that Randolph is not to discuss body parts on the House floor. “The point was that Republicans are always talking about deregulation and big government,” Randolph said Thursday. “And I always say their philosophy is small government for the big guy and big government for the little guy. And so, if my wife’s uterus was incorporated or my friend’s bedroom was incorporated, maybe they (Republicans) would be talking about deregulating. “It’s not like I used slang,” said Randolph, who actually got the line from his wife. He said Republicans voiced concern about young pages hearing the word uterus. “I think it’s a sad commentary about what we think about sex education in the state,” he said.

I’m having a difficult time associated Hillary Clinton with John Yoo but Adam Serwer at American Prospect does just that in calling Obama’s presidency imperial.  Wow, have times changed!  There’s a raging debate right now on congressional war powers again.  Considering the adventures we’ve been on from Korea, to Vietnam, to Iraq, and forward, it seems like an odd time for this issue to pop up yet again.

Look, there’s no other way to describe this other than lawless. The Obama administration and its defenders in the civil-libertarian community have always maintained that, because it derives its authority from Congress, that authority can ultimately be undone by a legislative branch that asserts itself. If this portrayal of events accurately reflects the administration’s view, then this is no longer the case. Moreover, the Obama administration has explained its failure to fulfill certain promises — such as closing Gitmo — on having to obey limits set by Congress. If the administration’s view is that Congress cannot constrain the president’s actions in wartime because he is commander in chief, then those restrictions are ones the administration acquiesces to willingly in order to avoid making good on politically risky commitments. If Congress can’t tell the administration it can’t wage war, it sure as hell can’t tell the president where to keep alleged enemy prisoners.

I wanted to put this Dean Baker link up earlier so here it is: How Credit Card Companies want to Debit You. One of the provisions of Dodd Frank that banks would like to remove is a provision that no longer let’s them take their bad debt out of your backside. Right now, banks charge retailers incredibly high fees that get passed on to consumers on many items.  The deal is that even if you use cash, you still can feel the sting of the fee.

This fee is, in effect, a sales tax. Since the credit companies generally do not allow retailers to offer cash discounts, they must mark up the sales price for all customers by enough to cover the cost of the fee. This seems especially unfair to the cash customers, since they must pay a higher price for the items they buy – even though they are not getting the convenience of paying with a debit or credit card. Those paying in cash also tend to be poorer than customers with debit or credit cards, which means that this is a transfer from low- and moderate-income customers to the banks. This is where financial reform comes in. One of the provisions of the Dodd-Frank bill passed last year instructed the Federal Reserve Board to determine the actual cost of carrying through a debit card transfer and to regulate fees accordingly. The Fed determined that a fee of 10-12 cents per transaction should be sufficient to cover the industry’s costs and provide a normal profit.

The Fed plans to limit the amount that the credit card companies can charge retailers to this level. This would save retailers approximately $12bn a year, at the expense of the credit card companies and the banks that are part of their networks. The prospect of losing $12bn in annual profits has sent the industry lobbyists into high gear. They have developed a range of bad things that will happen if the regulated fee structure takes effect and also argued that big retailers would be the only ones benefiting.

I really liked Mark Thoma’s latest at CBS’s MoneyWatch.  It’s called “What’s Good for Wal-Mart Isn’t Necessarily for America”.  It’s in response to WalMart executives who are in a dither about potential future inflation. Thoma makes three quick points to show you why your interests and there’s are probably not aligned.

1. Labor costs are 70% of production costs. Until we see wage inflation, and we aren’t seeing this yet, there’s little likelihood that prices will be forced upward rapidly.

2. Wal-Mart has an interest in a strong dollar (i.e. anything but inflation). They import most of what they sell, so labor costs here aren’t an issue – but the exchange rate is. However, the road to recovery is not through maximizing what we bring in from other countries, but rather what we export. Increasing net exports requires a falling exchange rate, the opposite of what Wal-mart wants. Thus, in this regard, what’s good for Wal-Mart isn’t what’s good for America.

3. The other thing to note as that to the extent that this is being driven by a change in the world demand for commodities (and almost all the credible analyses I’ve seen places the blame for rising commodity prices on this), there’s very little the Fed can do about it. For example, one of the concerns of Wal-Mart is rising labor costs in China, but the Fed has no control over labor costs in there, so the Fed cannot fix the problem for Wal-mart. However, this could help businesses here who cannot compete with low labor costs and a manipulated exchange rate, and that would help the US generally, but that is not what Wal-Mart wants.

Here’s more to think on when considering Walmart.  This time it’s about the kinds of people that work so that cheapie goods are available to Walmart shoppers and they don’t have to deal with the United Ladies’ Garment workers.

The largest retailer in the United States is making an aggressive push into urban areas such as Chicago, Philadelphia, New York while the United Food and Commercial Workers union plays an underdog role in garnering public attention of Walmart’s abuse of workers from garment factories to employees in their Supercenters. UFCW is trying to highlight these abuses in a Worker Truth Tour featuring people who have or currently work for the massive corporation or a subsidiary.

The tour reached Chicago earlier this week featuring two women from Bangladesh who work in garment factories. The youngest of the two, Aleya Akter, continues to work 208 hours a month for a mere $80. It comes out to 38.5 cents an hour. She started working in the factories at the age of nine in 1994. She claimed there are lots of violations, long hours, and forced overtime. Additionally, she said through a translator, “Enough is enough. We need to change the working conditions in the factories.” Almost as an afterthought Aleya alleged that the workplace in these garment factories are unsafe and some of the women are physically abused by managers.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve got today.  I’m still sort’ve reeling from the drugs, so hopefully you can add some more things from your reading and blogging list for us!!

Newer Entries →