Corruption

A Very Expensive Fumble In The Stationery Cupboard

Capitalism, Corruption, Economy, Life under Capitalism, Poverty
Published on 1 Comment on A Very Expensive Fumble In The Stationery Cupboard

Phwarr, what a hunk of spunk. NOT.

I must say I’m enjoying seeing loyal Bushie and PNAC zealot Paul Wolfowitz left twisting in the wind at the World Bank over giving a job and pay rises to his mistress.

So far so typically corrupt, or at least that’s how this is being framed by the major media.

But it’s not as though his relationship with Shaha Riza wasn’t known about when he took the job and she’s hardly some brainless bit of arm candy. World bank employees complained at the time of his appointment in 2005:

From Inside the WB: Discontent over Riza We hear from Bank insiders that Shaha Ali Riza, whom Paul Wolfowitz has been dating for a couple of years, is not popular with her colleagues. As acting manager for External Relations and Outreach in the Middle East/North Africa region of the World Bank, she is to some degree the institution’s public face on that region.

Her personnel file at the Bank reportedly contains several complaints about her job performance as well as about a certain “lack of people skills.” This, we are told, is part of what is behind the World Bank Staff Association’s relatively more open disagreement with the U.S.’s choice.

The WBSA raised loud complaints a few years ago when Wolfensohn named Nick Stern as Chief Economist. Several staffers pointed out the Bank’s strict anti-nepotism laws should have prevented that move, since Stern’s brother was on staff at the Bank. Their complaints were never addressed seriously.

It should be noted that at least one civil society organization believes that Riza is one of the most effective gender experts working at the Bank.

But what’s not being reported is just how closely his Riza is connected in neocon and Bush/Cheney circles – she’s held some very powerful positions in the White House working alongside Liz Cheney on mid-east polcy and is closely connected to the total fuckup that is the Iraq invasion and occupation. No wonder she’s been called the most powerful Moslem in Washington.

A perfect match for Wolfowitz, himself instrumental in the Iraq debacle – truly these two are a poisonous pair.

2005:

Shaha Ali Riza, lately in the news as World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz’s Saudi-born girlfriend, has been assigned to the U.S. State Department. The move, which has not been announced by either huge agency controlled by the Bush regime, means that she’ll be working with Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney, a top official in the key Near East Affairs bureau.

That’s the word from one of my moles in the World Bank. This significant assignment — a hardened link between the money of the World Bank, which is supposed to focus on poverty, and the neocons’ aims of trying to salvage their privatization plans for Iraq — has not be reported anywhere else, to my knowledge, and I see no word of it on the World Bank website either.

This new loan by the World Bank is strictly from hunger, and it’s sure to do nothing to help us in the Arab world. Wolfowitz’s girlfriend and Cheney’s daughter, in charge together of the U.S. State Department’s Near East bureau? [My emphasis] W.B. Staffer One, as I’ve referred to this particular source, copied me on a September 16 internal memo from Christiaan J. Poortman, the W.B.’s vice president for Middle East and North Africa (MENA, in bank parlance), that says in part:

The Bank has received a request from the US State Department for the secondment of Shaha Riza — on external service — to the Near East Affairs Office of Partnership Initiative. In accepting this assignment Shaha will be responsible for setting up and managing an International Multilateral Foundation that will support reform in the MENA region.

I have agreed to this request which will allow Shaha to continue her work with civil society, complementing our own work on the reform agenda of our partners in the region. Shaha’s assignment will be effective September 19, 2005. Please join me in wishing Shaha the best in her new assignment.

Yeah, Poortman “agreed to this request.” At least it gets Riza out of the office. Wolfowitz got a grand sendoff by the Pentagon in late April, when he left to take over the World Bank. Maybe co-workers had cake for Riza, but maybe not. A similar public pronouncement of a new post didn’t happen for Riza, whose job at the World Bank — basically, head flack for the MENA office — caused plenty of grumbling about nepotism by other W.B. staffers.

More…

It’s not the nepotism that’s most important here, or the minor scandal of venality in office. That’s hardly anything new for Republicans.

What is important is the way all this corrupt manoeuvring has tied World Bank lending policy to White House foreign policy like a horse to a buggy. Where the neocons drive, Wolfowitz and the bank follow – Bushco, by using Wolfowitz’ besottedness with his girlfriend, has managed to subvert the bank’s putative independence and to the great consternation of international development NGOs and governments worldwide the World Bank (not that the it was exactly a fair insitution to begin with) from being previously just US-inclined, has now become the de facto banking arm of Bushco neoconnery and imperial expansion.

This is a lot more important than than just a quick bit of illicit nookie over the desk.

Anyhoo. Back To The Paranoia.

Civil liberties, Corruption, Manufacturing consent, Media, War on Terror
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Apropos of yesterday’s post on the building anti-blogger drumbeat: I came across a link to this document in the Grauniad’s comment section this morning, in reply to a somewhat wimpy post about blog civility by Jonathan Freedland – his general point being ‘Yes, I’m all for open democracy, but wouldn’t it be nice if we all were nice?’

Anyhow, this is or purports to be a declassified report from the US Departnent of Defence (pdf file) outlining plans to put information warfare at the core of future US military strategy.

(Click for larger version)

Very interesting reading indeed, once you climb over the acronymic detritus and negotiate your way around the redactions. (Someone’s been very heavy-handed with the magic marker). The appendices are particularly interesting; there are some nice little to do lists of ‘psyops’ tasks on page 75 that look less like psyops and more like full-on, unlimited-budget, marketing and PR campaigning.

Humanitarian roadshows, talking points for private exchanges with foreign leaders, town hall meetings, op-eds, preemptive global media campaigns (including web media and that means fake blogs and astroturf) – that’s not defence, that’s politics.

Can’t say it’s any real surprise to see that the DoD is just as riddled with loyal Bushies as the Dept of Justice though.

Mr. Smith’s Not Going To Washington.

'08/12 Election, Civil liberties, Corruption, Manufacturing consent, Media, US politics, War on Terror
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In comments to the Bush/Cheney shrubbery video, commenter Swan brought to my attention this article from Carpetbagger about media disinterest in the US Attorney scandal:

[…]

One should be cautious about throwing around phrases like “journalistic malpractice” casually, but for the nation’s leading news-weekly to entirely ignore the nation’s biggest political controversy, just as it’s reaching crisis mode for the White House and the Justice Department, at a minimum raises questions about the magazine’s editorial judgment.

To be fair, Time altered its publishing schedule recently, and the new issue was released today, making it practically impossible to offer any kind of meaningful coverage of yesterday’s Sampson hearings. Also, Time did report on a new poll, which at least mentions the story in passing.

But given the circumstances, it’s hard to fathom why the controversy has been given short shrift.

Indeed, there were plenty of key developments in this story earlier in the week, any and all of which would have made good copy. A senior Justice Department official has taken the 5th, Gonzales gave an unpersuasive interview on national television, Republican lawmakers are increasingly unwilling to defend the DoJ’s decision making, the White House is getting antsy, new questions have arisen every day this week about exactly what happened and why.

But Time magazine, to borrow its editor’s word, finds all of this so “uninteresting” that there’s no need to even mention it to readers.

[…]

Swan asked whether I thought it possible that there could be coercion involved.

Oh dear, you had to ask… and by the time I’d finished blathering at length about my views on US domestic spying and its purpose I realised I’d written a whole post, not a comment. So here it is, tidied up and with links added.

It’s been conclusively proven that the Bush administration has been spying internally within the US since well before 9/11. The fact that Bushco hired the former heads of the Stasi and the KGB to advise Homeland Security is also well known, and they didn’t do that out of the goodness of their hearts.

The politicisation of the organs of state control, the NSA, CIA, FBI and the Justice Department, has been going on since the beginning, as has the development of TIA, the total informational awareness programme, which was officially quashed but continues under other names and other budgets. This is no scatttergun approach, it’s being done for a purpose; it looks in certain lights like a deliberate, targeted programme of corruption and blackmail. It’s all about the practical application of power to individuals to to coerce them to circumvent pesky, inconvenient rules.

Do I think key figures in politics, the media and the civil service are being blackmailed? Duh.

Corruption and blackmail are the classic tools of non-violent repression. It’s simple – the one blackmailed is powerless and cannot report the crime for the fear of their own crime or or that of someone close to them being revealed (the latter technique, as in torture, is often the most effective) and is thus ripe for manipulation. The secret doesn’t have to be much: you just have to know which levers to pull and that’s where the spying comes in. One iill-advised phone call from a monitored phone and bingo… it doesn’t need to be blackmail either. Solve a little problem for someone and they’re beholden to you, too.

There’s also a whole swamp of corruption and favour-peddling, of which the high-profile corruption trials we’ve seen so far are just the stinking methane bubbles on top. There’s a whole lot more of the likes of Dusty Foggo’s ‘booze, broads and cigars’ parties (a classic spook honeytrap) to come out yet, for example. Such is the venality and of Republicans that most involved walked right into what was a was a classic cold war blackmail ploy – get a bunch of notables in compromising positions and record it for later use. FFS sake, they all knew Foggo was CIA… but they did it anyway. Have willy, will follow.

That happened in Washington and caught some big fish but think of all the minnows at all the other private wingnut ‘fundraising’ dinners in state capitals around the country… I expect thee’s a fair few county commissioners, state senators and school board presidents with some dirty little secrets they don’t want to come out.

Tax cheating, affairs, drug use, porn, sexual pecadillos, abortions, incest, domestic violence – just think what some of these allegedly Christian people have to hide and what they’d do to avoid being publicly denounced by their co-religionists. Cut off from wingnut welfare and the largesse of the religious right, a lot of these people would struggle to survive and they know it. That’s a massive incentive to keep in line and that’s one of the reasons why the government has been stacked with fundies, because there’s so many guilt levers you can pull and sexual buttons to press.

This sounds like a description of the US or UK media to me:

The press in **** is heavily biased in favor of the ruling party, *****. Most private newspapers also are biased in favor of the ruling party, since they in fact are not entirely “private.” Government supporters very often provide some of the financing for the “private” press, making news tipped in favor of the president and the key government positions and views. The opposition press is likewise political, in that the newspapers associated with opposition party candidates present their party perspectives and criticize the president and his party.

But no, it’s from a critical US-authored report on… Kazakhstan.

Since the days of Reagan networks and major publishers owned by right wing money have steadily promoted young conservatives through their ranks, and this cadre of journalists has always had an incestuous relationship with their counterparts in the GOP lobby firms and thinktanks, and latterly in the government itself – so much so that at times they’re hard to tell apart. They went to school together, they party and socialise together, their children go to the same schools and they belong to the same same churches. There’s a lot of leverage there.

The questions that the media, and that includes blogs, are failing to ask about US domestic spying are the simple ones – who, what, where, when and why. Yes, we know they spy, but we don’t know the specifics, other than when it’s liberals who’ve been spied on and they’ve sued.

A major figure in the mainstream media would have to be very brave to speak out and say they’ve been coerced into taking a certain line on something. To be honest don’t think there’d be any media figure who has the guts.

Oh, wouldn’t it be fantastic if it was like, all Hollywood and someone big spoke out against injustice and Bush was defeated, yay, and it all came right in the end with liberty and justice and popcorn for all?

Not gonna happen. This is a mess that can’t be tidied away, not with peak oil and a foreclosure crisis and an ecologically-driven depression looming. Even if a Democrat wins the presidency they’re going to want all the tools for repressing a rebellious populace that they can get, when faced with the aftermath of yet more Hurricane Katrinas, for example, or when the ‘lone wolves’ nurtured by the far-Right Turner Diaries and Left-Behind readers go on the rampage when they realise they have a black or a female president ..

If the Democrats win the election then a new Administration, faced with the rabid winger IEDs that the Right has placed all over local, state and national government, will want a political purge – and when they realise just what a powerful tool they’ve got on their hands in a politicised domestic spying programme they’ll be just as bad, if somewhat less incompetent, as Bushco.

This is the way it is now.

The Importance of ‘Attorneygate’

Bloody Lawyers, Corruption, Madness of King George, Manufacturing consent, US politics
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I’m planning on spending this morning catching up on Attorneygate, particularly on the Senate hearing testimony of Gonzales’ sidekick and Rove mini-me Kyle Sampson, the baby-faced boy wonder who at first glance seems to be trying to take the fall for his boss for the politically motivated firings of US attorneys, if what he’s admitted so far is any guide.

But is that true? Is Kyle Sampson substantially to blame? Is he taking the fall, and why?

I love this stuff.

But that’s the point at which many eyes are beginning to glaze over. Not all of us are totally obsessed with the minutiae and the internecine rivalries of the administration of US justice.

However, most of us do give a damn when the government of a country that thinks of itself as the world’s policeman, and which has such a disproportionate effect on world culture, economy and politics, is being deliberately corrupted from within. It affects us all one way or another.

That is the big picture here, and why Attorneygate’s so important. But where can we go to find out more in language the casual yet interested observer rather than the political obsessive can understand?

For a list of the dramatis personae and a timeline of events you could do no better than than Talking Points Memo or TPM Muckraker, whose valiant efforts have pushed this story to the prominence it has now and whose readers have uncovered the story by sifting the reams of email evidence released by the White House in an attempt to bury the inquiry in paper.

For those who want the backstory the links are fascinating – it’s like lifting up a log and seeing crawly things scurrying panicky away from the light.

The story, grossly simplified and in short, as I understand it, is this:

Bushco got scared when California politician Randall ‘Duke Cunningham” was convicted of corruption over defence contracts, because a co-conspirator of his, one Dusty Foggo of the CIA, was also on the verge of being indicted for his involvement in the same shady doings.

Dusty Fuggo’s a friend, intimate and business associate of many, many senior Republican figures up to and including in the White House and is privy to all sorts of CIA shenanigans like, oh say, rendition, and torture, and misuse of funds, and bribery and prostitution – take your pick. he also knows where the bodies were buried, figuratively (though possibly actually) speaking, in Honduras during Reagan and Bush Sr.’s Central American adventures.. So the notion of his testifying anywhere, any time, simply would not do.

Foggo could’ve exposed everybody.

Not only was that little storm brewing for the White House, meanwhile there was that darned Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago, worrying away at Cheny aide Scotter Libby and about to expose the White House’s complicity in the media outing of yet another CIA agent, which would then expose their out and out lies over Iraq’s alleged attempted importation of yellowcake uranium from Niger and reveal their whole pretext for the war as a lie and a sham. (Not that we don’t know that already from other extrinsic evidence but it would’ve been nice to’ve seen it proved in court.)

Oh no, exposure! Whatever to do? It all got a bit panicky.

It got worse: previously loyal prosecutors started chafing when pressured politically by Bushco to push unfounded voter fraud cases against Democrats. They might have drunk some koolaid, but even they had limits. There was no evidence, they said.

Karl Rove, the wily old snake, had a brainwave. They could stop the Foggo prosecution and fix the next election too, plus the added extra of bringing the whole national prosecutorial wing of the Justice department entirely under their political control. All their problems solved at a stroke – all they had to do was fire all the lawyers and put unqualified partisans in their place. Of course! Easypeasy, lemon squeezy.

Th idea of being able to prosecute their political opponents on a whim was too tempting to resist. Why, Rove himself had a young padawan, a zealous devotee of the dark Rovian art of candidate smearing, who’d fit perfectly – and in Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s home state of Arkansas too. How very handy for the next presidential election.

The plan was all going well for the little group of alleged conspirators, Rove, Gonzales, Harriet Miers, (potentially Cheney and Bush too but that remains to be seen) – great theory, great plan. It all got discussed by email within and outside the White House (by whom is exactly what the hearings are about) then it was up to Gonzales to put it into action, which he did in the same half-assed way Bushco do everything.

He palmed it off to his deputy Kyle Sampson, the man who’s now sitting in the chair sweating before the committee. Because the US attorneys, quite understandably, didn’t take to being fired on flimsy pretexts like incompetence very well and started to talk to the media, and it all began to unravel. The Democrats took Congresss, the story came out, and here we are, Bushco and its evil lawyer minions on the stand, looking for all the world like the low-rent theives they are.

The big question is: how high up can this be proved to have gone? While it may be obvious to most of us that Bushco’re as rotten as a log full of woodlice, because of the virulence of the Right’s revisionist attack trops in the media it has to be shown in the clear light of judicial sunshine that the Democrats are not, in their turn, using the administration of justice for partisan purposes.

The proof of Bushco wrongdoing needs to be revealed in public.

Yes, there’re a lot of grounds for impeaching Bush and Cheney and Gonzales too for that matter, but without the actual, physical proof of a crime it’s all just conjecture and accusation. The evidence that’s coming to light as a result of the Attorneygate hearings may be that actual, physical proof – or at the very least, we may hear the testimony that will finally put the criminals in the White House in the dock, not for grand historical war crimes but for squalid hole-in-the-corner corruption and conspiracy.

How worried are Bushco about this? Worried enough to have made a futile attempt to stop the hearings yesterday on procedural grounds.. I shall continue to watch this one with interest, it has great potential to be the blow that finally brings the rotten edifice of modern-day Republicanism tumbling down.