Two Cheers for Obama!

Tribune

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: August 7, 2015 Last modified: August 8, 2015

Attacked almost as fervently by the left as by the right, Barack Obama is now doing what second-term presidents often do – looking to his legacy. He has been remarkably successful, not least in the face of a rabidly hostile right wing in Congress and with a frequently lukewarm Democratic Party in support. Many Democrat legislators would make New Labour’s worst sound like Bolsheviks in comparison.

For Americans, Obamacare is his signature legacy. Although deeply flawed in comparison with a single payer system, compared with what passed for healthcare before, it is a huge step forward. Like most American legislation, it is a complex product of messy compromises with the pharmaceutical and insurance lobbies which had to be persuaded not to kill the reforms completely It is sad but true that while donors have considerable influence in the Tory Party, and were gaining it rapidly in New Labour, in the United States, quite often they literally write the law. That is one of the reasons why donor-driven policy making has failed to reform the American financial system since the sector is a major donor to the Democrats.

Even so, Obamacare has offered millions of Americans health insurance coverage who could not afford it before and has even managed to constrain the cost inflation that has already made American healthcare the most expensive in world. Diehard Republicans have tried more than 50 times to repeal it. The Republican leadership is glad at the failure. Depriving millions of voters of healthcare in the run up to an election would have brought reality crashing down on the empty rhetoric of the Republican right.

Foreign policy is a traditional recourse of second-term presidents trying to make the history books and here Obama has faced down strong lobbies such as the Israel and Cuba to make a mark. It is only a couple of decades since Bill Clinton bowed down to the Cuban American Foundation and ratcheted up sanctions against Havana in return for campaign donation. Obama has now finally normalised relations with Cuba and is surviving unscathed. Third-generation Cuban Americans now either don’t care or even actually welcome more access to their ancestral homeland. The business community is more concerned with getting its toe in the door than closing the gate on Cuba business. It has long been clear even to the more rational American conservatives that Cuba is no threat to the US nor to the hemisphere and that the policy has been counterproductive. The domestic lobby was moribund, and internationally there was nothing but praise for the move.

Over Iran, he has had to work much harder to overcome the prejudices and passions against Teheran where there are unlikely allies from the Saudis to the Israelis uniting to sabotage the deal. Obama has had to take on the mother of lobbies, AIPAC and its allies, exhorted on by Benjamin Netanyahu and a host of derangedly conservative Likudnik billionaires. Again, he saw his chance. Polling showed that Netanyahu’s support among the American Jews was minimal. Fewer and fewer American Jews see their identity as particularly tied to Israel and, like the general American public after Iraq and Afghanistan, even fewer relished the idea of another all-out war in the Middle East – let alone the one that the Israeli leadership is so ostentatiously trying to provoke. John Kerry and Obama have kept the line to get the agreement which is now enshrined in United Nations Security Council resolution 2231. Netanyahu’s attempts to interfere directly in Washington’s foreign policy decisions have been so outrageous that he might well have alienated the Democrats away from the hitherto unbreakable bipartisan support for the Israel lobby.

But Obama’s administration is so overcome with its own temerity that it shows signs of the “fight or flight” syndrome. The release of the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard is clearly an attempt to compensate Netanyahu, as is the public talk of increasing military and economic aid. So, can he force a durable Middle East peace settlement on Netanyahu and Israel? It was one of his first avowed ambitions on taking office, and after all the humiliations he has endured at the hands of Israel’s Prime Minster, it would be of deep personal and historical significance to pull it off now with political pressure instead of the traditional pandering.

About Ian Williams

Ian Williams is Tribune's UN correspondent

Half Cheer for Hillary

Ian Williams

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: April 18, 2015 Last modified: April 15, 2015

When many on the left were gushing adulatory about the election of America’s first black president, I tried to sound a cautionary note. Barack Obama was not really the second coming, but neither was he the Antichrist. And he was lot more promising than Hillary Clinton. Predictably, the vociferous sections of the left who revile anyone who is in power, started to fulminate as soon as he did not deliver the millennium. But then, he had never promised it. Sceptical to begin with, now the election circus hits town, I have to admit that Obama is actually doing better than I expected.

For all its manifest faults, Obamacare has delivered health insurance to around 16 millions of Americans who did not have it before. That is a huge achievement, not least in the American context, since those people were almost by definition not wealthy and therefore not in a position to bribe the legislators to pass the healthcare act. On the economy, Obama trod very carefully. Perhaps too much so, but he did complete the job of stopping the crash and turning the American economy round. He actually delivered a stimulus package without mentioning it. Perhaps he could and should have advertised government’s role in turning things around – but he had a mostly hostile Congress around, ranging from deranged Tea Party types to the right of the Democratic Party who overlapped what is left of the sane wing of the Republicans. Best to do good by stealth than shout and be thwarted.

He also extricated the United States from the tail end of the debacles in the Middle East initiated by George W Bush and Tony Blair, although their legacy has come back to haunt him. Reality there is messy, but it is surely no mean achievement to resist the pressures from so many powerful lobbies to start yet more wars in Iran and Syria. Resisting Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel lobby in order to reach a deal with Iran represents a major step forward. One does not have to admire the domestic policies of the Iranian ayatollahs to recognise just how unjust and counterproductive American policy has been. India and Pakistan that have fought numerous wars, and both have nuclear arsenals, the latter just a coup away from control by Taliban sympathisers. In a breath-taking display of hypocrisy, India, which has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, voted at the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council because there was a faint suspicion that Iran could develop the same nuclear fuel refining capacity to which it was entitled under the NPT!

One definition of chutzpah has to be the calls for war against Iran by Israel, a non-signatory of the NPT, the possessor of nuclear weapons, and wager of multiple wars and acts of aggression against almost every other country in the neighbourhood. Obama’s forestalling Netanyahu is an outstanding display of vertebracy among recent White House incumbents, as well as bringing comfort to all­ who wondered when the odious Likudnik would get his comeuppance. And what is more, it was good politics.

Obama has also defied the Cuban exile lobby. Much of Cuba’s economic travails derive as much from pseudo-Marxist mismanagement by the government, but normalisation will at the very least deprive the Castro regime of its excuses and hasten reform.

So what about Hillary Clinton? She would be Blair in a trouser suit. They share a conviction that the business of politics is get wonderful people like themselves elected, and if that means taking money from people and doing their bidding, what’s the beef if they get elected. Hillary is as free with her political favours to corporate donors as her husband was to doting interns. But unlike him, she keeps her promises to them.

At the moment, she is faraway the front Democratic candidate, which impales any sensible person on the horns of a dilemma. But wriggling apart, in the end, is it better to have an utterly cynical and selfish president who is in the same dimension as the rest of us, or a Republican ensconced in the Twilight Zone? Remembering what happened when people deserted James Callaghan and got Margaret Thatcher, there will be many who will reluctantly but inevitably make their mark next to Hillary Clinton, who might or might not reintroduce Rodham back as her middle name depending on what the polls tell her.

About Ian Williams

Ian Williams is Tribune's UN correspondent

Radio Rum

At 9 pm Monday 6th October, Catskill Review of Books is on the Radio again with Ian Williams interviewing Tom Gjelten about his latest book on Bacardi and Cuba.
It will be live and archived at http://www.wjffradio.org.

Bacardi & Castro

Ian Williams for World Policy Institute

Bacardi’s Muddled Fight for “Cuba Libre”

September 19th, 2008

Ian Williams
The Bacardi family elicits strong feelings across the world. Its propensity for mythmaking, its aggressive commercial competitiveness, its long history of lobbying in Washington, its family obsession with Cuba, and its understandable grudge against Fidel Castro’s regime are all guaranteed to produce friction.

Tom Gjelten has had unprecedented cooperation from both the family and from Cuban officials in writing his book, Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: the Biography of a Cause (Viking , 2008). Neither Castro supporters nor the Bacardi family have exactly trumpeted the financial, political, and logistical backing given by the family to Castro and the rebels. Both sides obviously regret the episode. Ironically, however, now that Raul Castro has succeeded his older brother, both sides are linked to the family business, since Raul married the daughter of a Bacardi executive family in a lavish Bacardi-hosted ceremony attended by Fidel, the original big brother.


Gjelten leaves nothing unrecorded in his objective, warts and all, history of an unusual company, illustrating Cuban history without the canonizations by leftist apologists for Fidel and the demonizations by conservative Cuban exiles and their friends.

He correctly questions some of the company’s mythmaking by copywriters, for example the “Cuba Libre” (rum and Coke), whose Bacardi origins were later dubiously certified by the Bacardi sales manager in New York. However, he is a little too accepting of the family tale, and indeed the Cuban view, of its innovation in rum-making. In fact, for centuries, the Spanish colonies were forbidden from making rum—not, as Gjelten suggests, to protect public morals, but to protect the brandy industry back home.

What Bacardi did was replicate the processes long used by the Jamaicans and other Anglo-Caribbeans, who had long before discovered how important aging in oak barrels was to make the product smooth and palatable. Bacardi made a lighter version of rum, filtered to take out much of the color and, in the opinion of many rum connoisseurs, much of the taste as well. But as part of its innovative marketing, the family was strong on quality control, ensuring that the brand, even if bland, was consistent.

In fact, the real innovation of the Bacardi family was its sedulous protection and cultivation of the brand name and trademarks. It was in many other ways a corporate innovator, despite being, as Gjelten says, “a closed, dynastic enterprise in an interconnected global economy.”

There is some irony in that the company has defied the capitalist consensus and does not trade on the stock markets that epitomize the modern economic age. It is still family owned, with shares being divided between the descendants of its founders and now led by a sixth-generation family member defying the old saw of family business, from muck to brass—and back again in three generations.

It became an early multinational, with plants in Puerto Rico and Mexico and its own distribution company in the United States. It was one of the first offshore corporations, taking its headquarters first to the Bahamas and then to Bermuda. (That was to avert confiscation by Fulgencia Batista, with whom the company had a long and hostile relationship, but it proved prescient when Castro repaid their support with confiscation in 1960.)

Indeed, even its off-shoring was free of the stigma of tax evasion. Bacardi was an exemplary corporate citizen: when Batista fled with the contents of the Treasury, Juan Pepin Bosch, who then headed the company, immediately took a check for $450,000 to the new revolutionary officials, in advance payment of the years’ estimated taxes.

Bacardi was also a model employer, and Gjelten’s narrative reminds us of something that Cuban dissidents have stressed in conversation. Cuba had an existing social-democratic, welfare-state tradition which included strong labor protections and which made it one of the most literate societies in the Spanish-speaking Americas.

The company had supported such reformism, to the extent that even its communist-led union had differentiated it from the general run of capitalists. It had a distinguished patriotic record, with members supporting the war against the Spanish, and attempting to build indigenous industry.

It is to the credit of the family, and its head Juan Pepin Bosch, who initially accompanied Castro on a delegation to the United States, that he was repelled by the firing squads that the rebels were so fond of. The progressive 1940 constitution had banned the death penalty. But Castro’s disavowal of the formality of elections, and his penchant for executions and imprisonment of former comrades like Huber Matos, did indeed give cause for opposition.

It was Bosch who a year later thwarted the effect of Castro’s confiscations by putting the crucial trademark certifications in the mail to New York. He realized that the value of the brand far exceeded the physical plant and the huge stockpile of rum left behind in Cuba, and astutely suspected that the crude Marxism of the rebels would not see the value in a brand.

In exile, the family picked up on old contacts. They had already started lobbying in the United States way back in 1901. They had secured a tariff preference for Cuban rums and lobbied and litigated their way past Puerto Rican opposition to build their biggest distillery in the territory, which secured tariff-free entry to the U.S. market. As an added bonus, under federal law, excise duties on Puerto Rican rum were returned to the commonwealth government, which used them to finance a big sales promotion for the “Rums of Puerto Rico.” The biggest, of course, being Bacardi.

That is one of the reasons why, for many years, Bacardi obscured its product’s Cuban origins. Yet the family still nurtured the cause. As Gjelten says: “Born of a love for Cuba and pride in their own role in its history, their patriotism was narrowed and made more spiteful as a consequence of exile.” Indeed, Pepin Bosch at one point bought a surplus bomber, intending to take out a Cuban power station. Later, as Gjelten recounts, the challenge of Pernod Ricard marketing Havana Club brought together two strands of the family lore—their ruthless competitiveness, and their desire for revenge on Castro.
Other Caribbean rum producers, including those in Puerto Rico, nurtured unkind thoughts about the company because Bacardi’s size and aggressiveness had kept them out of the U.S. market, but a combination of Havana Club’s exponential success and the familial grudge brought about an obsessive and expensive campaign—and a sudden revival of emphasis on the Bacardi brand’s Cuban origins.

The Cuban family that had owned the Havana Club brand name had not renewed their registration, which had lapsed, and the Cuban government re-registered it legally. Bacardi bought the family’s claims and litigated in the United States. It compensated for the weakness of its claim by buying political influence in Washington—just the sort of behavior they had complained about in Cuba under Batista—where legislators smuggled in clauses that retrospectively changed the law.

Jose Marti, the hero they shared with Castro, had written that the U.S. House of Representatives “is chosen by such corrupt methods that every election is falsified by the use of vast sums of money.” By then, Bacardi was pumping millions of dollars into the same sewer.

In the end, they succeeded in provoking a trade war with Europe at the World Trade Organization, to no commercial advantage whatsoever and provoking opposition from other major companies who did not want to see international trademark law impaled in the course of Bacardi’s Quixotic obsessions. In their process, the family’s association with some of the most reactionary Cuban exiles, and their support for maintaining the punitive embargo, compromised their historically progressive reputation.

Even though he wisely eschews any prophesy, Gjelten hints that even with a possible change of government in Cuba, the Bacardi family’s recent exercise of its grudges has rendered dubious any triumphant corporate return to a country where for a century nationalist opposition to the United States has substituted for ideology.

Ian Williams is the author of Rum: A Social & Sociable History (Nation Books, 2005).

Castro and Manichaean-Marxists - and rightists

Fidel Castro retires after half a century of being the dubious beneficiary of uncritical support from Manichaean-Marxists who firmly believe that being attacked by Washington is tantamount to canonisation. None of the Leninoid left's idols have feet with any hint of clay and Castro's halo of infallibility is already luminescing around Hugo Chávez.

There can be no denying Castro's charisma and attraction to many people across the world. Whether at conferences in the United Nations general assembly or receptions at the Cuban mission in New York, the presence of El Lider Maximo always pulled maximum crowds.

Across the Caribbean, crowds would gather to greet him for his stand against the US, but you did not see boatloads of Caribbeans paddling their rubber inner tubes to the promised land of socialism. Not even the desperate Haitians were, or are, that desperate.

I met Castro several times at such events, and, with my longer, redder beard at the time was rather chuffed that he called me "El Vikingo". On one level, it is easy to see why he attracts that support and even why it gives me frisson to be sobriqueted by a historical leader. In a world where almost everyone tries to do America's bidding, Castro has successfully defied president after president.

In that battle, the US has mostly been wrong, morally, legally and tactically. The Pentagon's torture chambers in Guantánamo on the island mock Washington's relatively recent rhetorical attachment to democracy and human rights. Earlier, its oft-expressed concern for human rights in Cuba belied its sponsorship of military regimes across Latin America, which killed more civilians in a single day than the Castro regime executed in the last 50 years. And of course sanctions on Cuba compare oddly with almost complete trade dependence on China, compared with which Cuba is an open society.

However, while Washington may have usually been wrong, that does not mean that Castro was always right. Castro's execution of his former comrades Antonio de La Guardia and Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez, and his wholesale arrests and imprisonments of dissidents merited condemnation, but when a group of us drafted a letter about the latter to the New York Review of Books, the vitriol from some of those who now condemn Bush for Guantánamo reflected the pseudo-Marxist Manichaean thinking of some of the left.

Inspired by the same unthinking solidarity that overlooked Stalin's purges, or indeed more recently Milosevic's mass murders, they reacted in fury. I have never quite understood why executions in Texas should be so obviously bad, while those in Havana or Beijing should be excusable, or vice-versa for that matter. But then Fidel's support for various mass murderers masquerading as socialists, from Mugabe to Milosevic showed the same uncritical solidarity of the Levant: his enemy's enemy was his friend.

These starry-eyed supporters will tell you of Cuba's education, of the health service. On one visit to Cuba, I went round to the house of Alberto Korda, the photographer who took the iconic photo of Che Guevara. Although he was getting his heart medication, he showed me the local ambulance station, where the ambulance was propped up on bricks, without tires. Others complained that they needed hard currency to buy medications, and I usually brought unobtainable across-the-counter painkillers for the arthritic parents of another Cuban friend.

Cuban education was indeed successful in effecting near universal literacy - but there are strict limits on what anyone is allowed to read with their skills. I had known several of the dissidents against whose sentences we had protested, and, sadly, I also knew the one who became a stool-pigeon for the regime. His eloquent and cogent denunciation of the falling intellectual standards brought about by such censorship suggests that he was turned later, or was a deeply conflicted person, old and weak.

But let us look at the reality. Also in the Caribbean is Barbados, where people do not need permission to leave the country, where free trade unions exist and where a government that was defeated last month has stepped down gracefully. It also has treble the per capita GDP of Cuba. Compare Barbados's UNDP human development report with that of Cuba.

When I checked, Jamaica actually had a larger proportion of its population abroad than Cuba, and like the emigrants from many Caribbean islands, they send remittances home and harbour no grudges against their home governments. The perverse genius of Castro was to declare most of those who left criminals or "worms", although it has to be said that it was not totally East German in its application. Cubans who married foreigners could leave with them, as many have.

Now that Castro has stepped down, albeit in favour of his brother, bringing Cuba into the North Korean dynastic socialist mode, one can only hope that there is a middle way. Sadly the signs are that some of the leadership are more interested in the Chinese model, letting the economy rip while the party holds ruthlessly onto power, while the Miami exiles' vindictive attitudes to those who stayed do not bode well for either democracy or equality.

Many of the dissidents I've met thought that Cuba should emulate Scandinavia and western Europe as a way of combining prosperity, democracy and social equality. Let's hope that with El Lider Maximo sidelined, they can persuade some in the leadership. Cuba is a wonderful country with enterprising and generous people. It deserves better than Castro has given them, or the Miami crowd can offer.

For more news coverage on Cuba click here

For more comment on Cuba after Castro click here

Clinton, Cuba, Obama

Obama, Clinton, and Cuba

In the current Guardian Comment is Free.

Bush's Miami Vice - full text

Bush's Miami vice

Cuban emigrants tend to hate Castro less than they once did. Maybe that's why they now seem less welcome in the US.
Ian Williams

Guardian Comment is Free
August 12, 2007 12:00 PM

The only certain thing about the mysterious hold-ups on Cuban visas is that Washington is lying. Are the new Cubans voting the wrong way? Since 1994, the US has issued 20,000 visas a year to Cubans in return for Havana's promises to try to stop Cubans swimming, rafting or boating their way across to Florida. Some recent surveys suggest these new immigrants, who have left with the cooperation of Castro's government and are more racially and socially diverse, are less likely to vote Republican and less likely to support the embargo against the Cuban government. Looking at the knife-edge, by-chad-or-by-crook elections in Florida, this could actually make a difference.

Dagoberto Rodríiguez, head of the Cuban interests section in Washington, went public on Wednesday with Cuban complaints about the Bush administration's slowdown of immigration visas at the Havana US interests department. It seems the Americans have issued only half of the 20,000 visas they promised to Cuba in 1994.


Another explanation, which does not necessarily preclude the first, is that Cuban exile hardliners in Florida and Washington think closing off the escape valve of emigration to the US will build up pressure for regime change inside Cuba. While cutting visas in Havana, the Bush administration has allowed fast-track immigration procedures for Cuban doctors sent to places such as Venezuela, presumably hoping to undercut Havana's flagship internationalist programme.


Of course, there is more than the usual whiff of hypocrisy about the whole thing. Castro's fatal mistake was to adopt East German, Stasi-style emigration procedures and to denounce those who did succeed in leaving as "gusanos" - worms. In fact, the whole Caribbean has been busily emigrating to the north for some centuries, and if Castro had been more laidback, all those emigrants would have been repatriating money, buying retirement homes and holidaying back in the fatherland.

Actually, not that many Cubans have left. The last US census figures show 870,000 Cuban-born residents in the country, which is less than a 12th of the population remaining in Cuba. In comparison, the far more prosperous Barbados (which has a developed-country economy and a health service!) has 52,000 immigrants in the US, which is almost a fifth of its stay-at-home population; Jamaica has about the same proportion - and these Caribbean island diasporas are patriotic supporters of their homelands.

If anything, it is surprising that so few came to the US, bearing in mind that, because of the strength of the anti-Castro crowd, the US guaranteed a green card to any Cuban. That policy fell apart in the early nineties, when an embarrassed Clinton had to explain why any of the (predominately white) Cubans who landed in Florida stepped on to a red carpet while black Haitians fleeing a CIA-inspired military regime were promptly deported.

That was the genesis of the 20,000 Cuban quota in return for Cuban connivance at holding back would-be emigrants, even if it made the US administration effective accomplices in a practice it had hitherto ferociously condemned. The US was supposed to send back any Cubans landing without papers, but in a typically Clintonian compromise it decided on the wet foot/dry foot policy: the US Coast Guard would turn back any caught at sea but the Immigration and Naturalisation Service would welcome any who actually made it to whatever passes for dry land in Florida.

The State Department's official response to the Cuban charges is so risible that it invites assumptions of nefarious politicking - and not just because this is, after all, an administration with something of a track record on the big fib front. It claims the hold-up is because the Cubans have stopped personnel and supplies getting to the US interests section in Havana. As Wayne Smith, a former State Department official and Cuba-watcher, chuckles: "I've not seen any signs of American staff denied entry, and as for allowing materials, the visa stamps and the forms are all there. The Cubans have the right of it on this."

The State Department quite rightly said Castro's government should allow freedom to travel, but that is more than a little hypocritical if the US does not give them visas. Once again, the US makes Castro look good.

Bush's Miami Vice

Bush's Miami Vice In the Guardian on the mysterious, and presumably malicious, State Department policy on Cuban visas.

All Hail Freedonia: Groucho for Congress

Here's the full text of "Save Freedonia" in the Guardian Comment-is-Free

When it comes to Western Sahara, America's Africa policy is so bad you'd think it was dealing with an imaginary country from a Groucho Marx movie.
Ian Williams

May 1, 2007 7:30 PM

Not many people have heard of the Western Sahara dispute and most congressmen could not tell it from Freedonia - until the lobbyists came a-knocking.

Yesterday, the UN Security Council fought back a Franco-American effort to rewrite international law in favour of Morocco and against the people of Western Sahara. Morocco has offered dubious "autonomy" to Western Sahara, but is refusing to hold the referendum in the territory that the World Court and the UN Security Council have called for - and to which Morocco had agreed, until it became clear that it would lose.

The compromise resolution did not endorse the Moroccan plan, but called for talks between Morocco and the Sahrawi Polisario, "with a view to achieving a just, lasting and mutually acceptable political solution, which will provide for the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara." The Moroccan plan directly precluded self-determination.

The US's new pro-Moroccan policy was heralded last week when no less than 168 members of congress signed a letter demanding that the White House support Morocco - regardless of international law or previous policy.

We can safely assume that at least 160 of them had never heard of Western Sahara a month ago. When the learned members of congress rush to sign a fact-free letter on foreign policy, you can be sure that there is a lobby at work.

Not that the lobbies have to work too hard. In foreign policy matters congressmen can be like urinal walls - you can write anything on them. In 1992, a Spy magazine reporter called some two score Republican congressional new-comers for the Newt Gingrich revolution and asked them what they were going to do about the situation in Freedonia. The neocons had not taken over then, so not one of them suggested regime change and getting rid of Groucho. Instead, they waffled in a statesmanlike way about the efforts they would take to ensure stability there.

So, on this occasion, who could be too surprised to discover that the lobbyists responsible for those diplomatic triumphs, the war in Iraq, the war on terror, the embargo on Cuba and America's uncritical support for whichever nudnik heads the Knesset were also those who garnered the 168 signatures?

Morocco has put in some $30m into its lobbying effort and, through its surrogate, the "Moroccan American Policy Center", has been tickling the soft underbelly of the congress.

Toby Muffett, a former Connecticut representative who had been elected on a Naderite clean-up-Congress ticket, engagingly described a week in the life of a lobbyist in the Los Angeles Times recently:

I leave and rush to the House side of the Capitol to meet another client, the ambassador from Morocco. We have a meeting with a key member of the Appropriations Committee. Morocco has a good story to tell. It is a reliable friend of the U.S. It believes that the long-standing dispute with Algeria and the rebel Polisario group over the western Sahara must be resolved.

We tell the congresswoman and her staff that the region is becoming a possible Al Qaeda training area. ...My idea is to sell this as a chance for Democrats to resolve a dispute in a critical region, in contrast to the president's utter failure to fix anything.

And on the Republican side, Elliot Abrams the "deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy", a hawkish pro-Israeli supporter and one of the neocon devisers of the Iraq war, has also been pushing the Moroccan plan, betraying the same insouciance towards legal technicalities that he did when convicted over the Iran/Contra scandal.

In Washington, the Moroccan Embassy hired Edelman for $35,000 a month as its lobbyist, which of course had nothing to with the timely letter from an increasingly conservative and belligerent American Jewish Committee weighing in with a letter of support for the king, who combines being chair of the Organization of the Islamic Conference's Committee for Jerusalem with being one of Israel's best friends in the Arab world.

For Morocco supporters, an enemy's friend is a hated foe. Polisario has the dubious benefit of Castro's support and that is enough, (plus a $15,000 monthly retainer) to rally the Florida delegation, which has also noticed that El Jefe has a soft spot for the Palestinians as well, with similar results on their voting patterns.


The 168 signatories are almost a roll-call of anti-Castro, pro-Israeli members of Congress, and their numbers were doubtless boosted when the MACP recently hired the law-and-lobbying firm of Alberto Cardenas, a veteran anti-Castro Cuban American who served two terms as head of Florida's Republican Party and co-chaired Bush's 2004 effort in the Sunshine State.

That alone should put in relief his concern for Democracy in north Africa. But just in case you had lingering doubts, Freedom House and similar bodies give Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara and Zimbabwe the same human rights score, just beating, by a wrenched out finger-nail, Tibet, Cuba, North Korea, and Sudan.

If in doubt, of course, invoke terrorism. Most of the letters from the King's men and women invoke the Polisario-held areas as potential heartlands of al-Qaida style terrorism. Oddly enough, in the real world, the Polisario's biggest supporter is Algeria, which is battling Islamic extremists with some considerable vigour - indeed a little too much for some tender minded observers - while Polisario itself was, until recently, proclaimed a communist plot by American politicians, which is why they have tacitly supported the Moroccan occupation all these years.

But luckily, it's not all Duck Soup on Capitol Hill - even if there are far too many horse feathers around for comfort. Most of the members of the African subcommittee in the house were among the 50-plus who signed an opposing letter demanding US support for Sahrawi self-determination. But without Moroccan money behind it, not many people heard about the story.

It's no way to rule a world!

All Hail Freedonia!

Latest on Guardian Comment is Free about Western Sahara and the lobbyists in Washington.
Click to join in and comment.

Bush and Alcohol in Brazil

An awful lot of baloney in Brazil

Bush wants a show of cooperation with the Brazilians over biofuels - while keeping the stuff out of the US.
Ian Williams


March 7, 2007 8:00 PM |

President Bush begins his tour of Latin America this week, hitting Brazil on March 9, in his attempt to woo America's backyard away from the seductions of Hugo Chavez. In an iconic display of content-free concern, Bush wants to engage Lula, the Brazilian president, in a show of cooperation over biofuels, in which Brazil is world leader - while keeping the stuff out of the USA.

Once upon a time, anyone who drank cachaça, Brazilian rum, could see why the Brazilians decided it may be better to use it to run their cars than stock their bars. However, times have changed. Aged cachaça and the caipirinhas made from them are high-end drinks in the world's cocktail lounges.

And the gasohol in Brazilian cars that used to cover the smell of alcohol on the breath of drivers is now an ecological blessing for a world where the oil is running out and the temperature is running up. Brazil's sugar plantations produce fuel that can compete on the world markets with the black stuff from the Gulf, and it is selling its technology to other sugar-producing countries. Renewable bio-fuels are good for the carbon cycle and global warming, and reduce dependence on fossil fuel which tends to come from countries whose rulers get uppity with Washington. They can also create economic opportunities in the developing world.

There are legitimate concerns about what the expansion of Brazilian sugar-cane production may have on its own society. However Lula has little choice but to use whatever comparative economic advantages the global economy gives him, while trying to spread the gains around domestically.

But the response from the industrialised world is, as usual, to protect its own climatic disadvantages with discriminatory trade practices. In Europe they subsidise sugar beet production - developed by Napoleon to beat British control of the Caribbean cane fields. But in the US, Brazil's hoped for biofuel market, there is a 54 cents a US gallon tariff imposed by the country that wants to impose free trade on everyone else in the world.

Two of the most potent lobbies, major sucklers at the teat of corporate welfare, have dressed themselves in a green figleaf with the bioscam. Archer Daniel Midland, and the exiled Cuban sugar barons, one of whom was, you may remember, important enough to interrupt Bill Clinton in his sort of suckling with his intern in Oval Office are generous donors to both parties.

Their campaign cheques are a sound investment. American biofuels and sweeteners made from corn or maize (as the British prefer to call it) can only compete with Brazilian sugar and ethanol because of the tariff wall, and because Washington subsidises corn syrup production and sugar production to the tune of billions of dollars.

So not only are American consumers paying over twice the world price for sugar, while their government effectively stomps on the chances for economic development of significant parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, but the diversion of a large proportion of corn towards syrup and ethanol production is raising American and world corn prices. Milton Friedman would not have approved.

The American companies concerned are fighting any attempt to reduce or remove the 54 cents a gallon ethanol tariff. Their spokesman told Businessweek that the tariff offsets the 51 cents a gallon tax credit for biofuels - making it fairly plain that the purpose of the tax credit was not to encourage better use of renewables but to boost the bottom line of Archer Daniels Midland and their colleagues.

So Bush's concern for biofuels will have all the sincerity of a Scooter Libby denial, and give Hugo Chavez yet more ammunition to highlight the hypocrisy of the gringos. Well done W.