Senate report details stretch Hummers, skirt-chasing attorneys, shrink-wrapped cash!

The senate is holding hearings and issuing a report today that shows how a number of corrupt African officials — and their American enablers — used the U.S. banking systems to launder vast amounts of money. A good chunk of the report builds on revelations made here last November about Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, son of the dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea.

Two American attorneys set up shell accounts for Obiang to help him buy a $30 million home in Malibu and a $38.5 million jet. All told, Obiang moved more than $110 million into the U.S. from 2004 to 2008. One of the shell companies was called Sweet Pink, named after the rapper Eve Jeffers, who was then Obiang’s girlfriend and the president of Sweet Pink. (Eve later dumped Obiang, reportedly after hearing rumors that his dictator father was a cannibal who ate his political opponents. The senate report neither confirms nor denies that Obiang Sr. is a flesh eater.)

One of Obiang’s helpers was attorney Michael Jay Berger, who will be testifying before the senate today. From the report:

In addition to this cash compensation, as a result of his relationship with Mr. Obiang, Mr. Berger was invited to exclusive social events and venues in Southern California. After a party called the “Nguema Summer Bash” on September 14, 2007, for example, Mr. Berger sent the following email to Mr. Obiang:

“Thank you very much for inviting me to your party and for being so nice to me at the party. I appreciate the super VIP treatment that you gave me…The food was great, the drinks were better than great, the house, the view, the DJ, the white tiger were all SO COOL! Best of all were the people that I met there because of you.”

Mr. Obiang also arranged for Mr. Berger to be invited to the 2007 “Kandy Halloween Bash” at the Playboy Mansion. After the party, Mr. Berger wrote:

Thank you very much for inviting me to the Kandy Halloween party @ The Playboy Mansion and getting me the VIP treatment. I had an awesome time. I met many beautiful women, and I have the photos, e-mail addresses and phone numbers to prove it.

Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, attended a press briefing on Tuesday. I asked him why Obiang was not on a list of corrupt foreign officials barred from the U.S., as is required by a presidential proclamation issued by George W. Bush and is supposedly enforced by the State Department. “That’s the right question,” Levin replied. ” We will press our report on the State Department.”

Other revelations from the report include:

Omar Bongo, the deceased former president of Gabon, used an American lobbyist named Jeffrey Birrell to buy armored vehicles (including a stretch H2 Hummer) and transport planes. Bongo’s daughter kept $1 million in shrink-wrapped bills in a safety deposit box at a New York bank

The arms dealer Pierre Falcone, currently in prison in France, had dozens of bank accounts with Bank of America.

In Aftermath of Court Ruling, McCain Facing Tough Re-election Challenge

From The Onion:

In a landmark decision that overturned decades of legal precedent, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Tuesday to remove all restrictions that had previously barred corporations from holding public office. “This is an unfair, ill-advised, and tragic mistake,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said before boarding a flight to Arizona in response to primary poll numbers that show him trailing the Phoenix-based company PetSmart by a double-digit margin.

“Despite the deep discounts and exciting promotions that they may be able to offer, these huge, soulless entities are not capable of truly serving the American people’s—or their pet’s—needs.”

Bottoms Up: Lobbyists win big for foreign rum maker

From ProPublica:

A transfer of billions of dollars in federal aid from public projects in Puerto Rico to one of the world’s largest liquor conglomerates over the next 30 years continues to move forward without any objection from Congress.

As a result, money that’s now being used to build schools and restore tropical forests in a U.S. territory is being turned into what is essentially a $3 billion tax break for London-based Diageo, whose $20 billion in sales last year were powered by Dom Pérignon, Captain Morgan and other popular brands.

Congressman Issa’s Joke: Dictatorship in Kazakhstan, and Washington D.C.

A bizarre congressional hearing yesterday, as Kazakhstan’s Foreign Minister, Kanat Saudabayev, testified before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is co-chaired by Congressmen Benjamin Cardin and Alcee Hastings. The Kazakh government is forever trying to give the impression that President Nursultan Nazarbaev is keen on democratic reforms, even though human rights groups and the media find no evidence to support that. “Rather than loosen its hold on media, internet is being increasingly censored,” Peter Zalmayev of the Eurasia Democracy Initiative told me. “Rather than cooperate with civil society to improve its laws, the government continues to throw its critics in prison.”

Even on the day of the hearing came news that Kazakh officials had “seized editions of at least five opposition and independent newspapers that contain an article alleging corruption by President Nursultan Nazarbaev’s son-in-law.”

Other than contingents of Kazakh government officials, beltway lobbyists hired by the government and a few human rights activists, hardly anyone turned up for the hearing. Hastings and Congressman Eni Faleomavaega, American Samoa’s non-voting representative in congress and an ardent ally of the Kazakh government who once suggested that the Kazakh dictator be nominated for the Nobel Prize, were on hand and Congressman Darrell Issa dropped by. According to someone at the hearing, Issa said there was basically no problem with Kazakhstan being a one-party state because Washington was now one as well.

Update:

Frederick Hill, a spokesman for Issa at the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee, says that transcript of the hearing “doesn’t back up the angle and criticism in your story and headline regarding Rep. Issa.”

Here’s the relevant section from the transcript:

[T]hroughout the region, not just in Kazakhstan, not just in Afghanistan, there has been a difficult time in the democratization of producing competing parties, although in your country—and I’ve had the honor of visiting, and I have a former staff member who works on democracy in Kazakhstan—there are competing movements. They seldom—the seeds don’t sprout, and so you don’t have a two-, three-, four-party system in which they have representation in your parliament.

I want to share with you something here today. Washington, D.C., is exactly the same. This is a one-party town, even though there are people who are not Democrats. And this town has decided to have representation, at least one member of the council, who is chosen simply to represent minorities. And I might plant that seed, that throughout the emerging democracies, even though it would not usually fit in the U.S. democracy system, we all have to struggle to find a way to ensure that those who cannot get enough votes, but who represent other forms of diversity, find a way to actually get representation within parliaments, city councils, and other bodies.

Issa added, “[Y]ou are not by any means the greatest democracy, nor are you least democracy (sic), but a struggling democracy trying to find the right way to lead your country in a post-Cold War period.”

Hill said that Issa has traveled to Kazakhstan “and on each visit has met with democratization and human rights advocates not only to gain their perspective but to show his support for their work. I’m concerned that your story will be used by opponents of democratic change in Kazakhstan to falsely press the point that Congress doesn’t care about these issues when this simply isn’t the case.”

However, an article at Eurasianet echoed my criticism of the hearing:

The US Helsinki Commission in recent months has been a frequent and vocal critic of Kazakhstan’s record on human rights and democratization. But commission members gave an enthusiastic welcome to Kazakhstani Foreign Minister Kanat Saudabayev on February 2…

The three members of the commission who were present during Saudabayev’s appearance asked no questions about, and offered no criticism of Astana’s internal situation….

Darrell Issa — a Republican congressman from California who has nominated Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, for a Nobel Peace Prize — used the occasion for partisan political purposes, attempting to equate the political situation in Kazakhstan with that of the United States.

Where Art Thou, Esme?

From Politics Daily:

Somewhere in England, I so want to believe, lives a jazz-loving, relentlessly honest, incisively bright, deeply sentimental 78-year-old woman named Esmé who long ago befriended an American GI in a tea shop on the eve of the D-Day invasion.

They only talked for half an hour — this self-confident and vulnerable 13-year-old girl, a war orphan, and this Army sergeant, who, in civilian life, had published a few fledgling short stories — chaperoned by her governess and her young brother, Charles. They never met again, although they exchanged letters, but somehow this chance encounter mattered deeply to both of them.

Maybe it was the way that Esmé told him, with the frankness and gravity of youth, “I’d be extremely flattered if you would write a story exclusively for me sometime. I’m an avid reader.” The soldier promised that he would, although he warned that he was not terribly prolific.

Though for my money Salinger’s best short story is still The Laughing Man.

Stop The Presses (no starch)!: Cosmo skewers the senate

“The treason of the Senate! Treason is a strong word, but not too strong, rather too weak to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be, and vastly more dangerous; interests that manipulate the prosperity produced by all, so that it heaps up riches for the few.”

No, that’s not an outraged recent editorial about the failure of health care reform and the general state of the senate under Harry Reid. It’s from a 1906 piece by David Graham Phillips in Cosmopolitan. (This was back in the day when Cosmo had fewer articles on dieting and dating, and when regular contributors included George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell.)

Here’s more from Phillips:

The greatest single hold of “the interests” is the fact that they are the “campaign contributors”—the men who supply the money for “keeping the party together,” and for “getting out the vote.” […] Who pays the big election expenses of your congressman, of the men you send to the legislature to elect senators? Do you imagine those who foot those huge bills are fools? Don’t you know that they make sure of getting their money back, with interest, compound upon compound?

It’s like he had a crystal ball.

Health Care Lobbying: There goes the GDP of Grenada

From the New York Times:

President Obama has blamed many factors for the stalling of his health care overhaul, from the recent special election in Massachusetts that deprived Democrats of their supermajority in the Senate to his own failure to better explain the legislation to the American people.

He has also prominently blamed lobbyists, taking them to task in his State of the Union address last week as he cited “special interests and armies of lobbyists and partisan politics.” But what the president did not mention in his address was that many of those lobbyists actually worked to support his health care overhaul, not oppose it.

According to the story, health care and insurance lobbyists spent at least $648 million last year, a figure that is likely to go far higher. Even at that rate, spending by the sector came close to matching the entire annual gross domestic output of Grenada. “It’s the most money ever spent by a business sector for federal lobbying,” Dave Levinthal, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, told the Times.

Hitler: There’s an app for that

The latest in the Downfall parodies: Hitler on the iPad (via Huffington Post)

The Real State of the Union

From The Hill:

A day after bashing lobbyists, President Barack Obama’s administration has invited K Street insiders to join private briefings on a range of topics addressed in Wednesday’s State of the Union. The Treasury Department on Thursday morning invited selected individuals to “a series of conference calls with senior Obama administration officials to discuss key aspects of the State of the Union address.”

The invitation, which went to a variety of stakeholders, was sent by Fred Baldassaro, a senior adviser at the Treasury Department’s Office of Business Affairs and Public Liaison. The invitation stated, “The White House is encouraging you to participate in these calls and will have a question and answer session at the end of each call. As a reminder, these calls are not intended for press purposes.”

Bernanke-gate! What’s in those memos?

Looks like someone leaked some very specific information to Congressman Darryl Issa. In a letter sent yesterday to Congressman Edolphus Towns, chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, he writes: “New information has come to light about documents in the possession of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors regarding the Federal Reserve’s decision to bail out AIG.”

Issa writes that he has information from a whistleblower that reveals “troubling details” about Ben Bernanke’s “personal involvement” in the decision to bail out AIG and asks Towns to issue a subpoena to the Fed for documents dating to September 2008 and “identified by the following electronic labels: sb-aig-01000092 to sb-aig-010000125 and “Draft Memo on AIG.pdf.”

Perhaps there’s no smoking gun in the memos but they certainly should be made available before congress votes on Bernanke’s reappointment. Meanwhile, Senator Jim Bunning is also asking about some memos on the same topic.

It’s sad that the tag-team of Bunning and Issa are leading the charge on the matter.

Waterboarding Zubaydah: It didn’t work so well after all

From Jeff Stein:

Well, it’s official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water…

Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story.

They’re Back!!!! A Neocon Resurrection?

From Newsweek

Had you Googled “neoconservative” and “death” that day, four days after the 89-year-old Kristol expired, you’d have found lots on their long-rumored—and for some, much-anticipated and -savored—demise. On both the left and right, neoconservatism was deemed a spent force. Its ideas, Foreign Policy magazine had pronounced, “lie buried in the sands of Iraq.”

But obituaries can be premature. At the moment, in fact, the neocons seem resurrected. One of their own, Frederick Kagan of AEI (Robert’s younger brother), helped turn around the war in Iraq by devising and pushing for the surge there. More recent-ly, President Obama—whose foreign–policy pronouncements (nuanced, multi-lateral, interdependent) and style (low-key, self-critical, conciliatory, collegial) were a repudiation of neoconservative assertiveness—has swung their way, or so they believe. First, he’s sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, nearly as many as leading neocons had sought. Then came his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which, with its acknowledgment of the need for force, its nod to dissidents in Iran and elsewhere, and its talk about good and evil, was surprisingly congenial.

Al Qaeda: The Pentagon’s official historian

From Justin Elliott at TPM:

When the Pentagon’s internal think tank decided in 2004 it needed a better understanding of Al Qaeda, it turned to an unlikely source: the terrorism analyst Laurie Mylroie, who was known as the chief purveyor of the discredited idea that Saddam Hussein was behind Sept. 11 and many other attacks carried out by Al Qaeda.

Mylroie was paid roughly $75,000 to produce a 300-page study, “The History of Al Qaida,” for the Defense Department think tank, known as the Office of Net Assessment, a DOD spokesman tells us.

Industry: Failure of health-care reform means less money for us

From the Associated Press:

Nearly as shaken by the Massachusetts vote were health care provider groups that have supported the Democratic effort, such as drug makers, hospitals and doctors.

While few were making public statements, industry groups that stood to gain millions of newly insured customers were worried that such potential gains were in jeopardy, according to lobbyists speaking on condition of anonymity to describe confidential conversations.

The Pillars of Afghanistan’s Economy: Drugs and bribes

From a new United Nations report:

Poverty and violence are usually portrayed as the biggest challenges confronting Afghanistan. But ask the Afghans themselves, and you get a different answer: corruption is their biggest worry. As revealed in this new UNODC report, for an overwhelming 59% of the population the daily experience of public dishonesty is a bigger concern than insecurity (54%) and unemployment (52%).

The report says that bribery and drugs generate nearly $5 billion in revenues per year combined, making them the country’s two leading economic forces.

Oh, but there’s good news too: the report says President Karzai has “recognized that corruption is destroying the economy.” So presumably we can expect fast action from him on this soon.

Obama, Year One

Many Democrats and liberal bloggers are trying to convince themselves, publicly at least, that last night’s victory by Scott Brown was largely due to the poor campaign run by Martha Coakley. She did run a lousy campaign but it’s pretty clear that disappointment with Obama and the Democrats contributed greatly to Coakley’s defeat.

After one year of Democratic rule, Obama and his party’s major achievements have been, in no particular order:

—Making the extremely popular cause of health care extremely unpopular.

—Electing a conservative Republican from the bluest state in the country to the senate.

—Reviving the corpse that was the Republican Party.

—Demoralizing the Democratic base.

—And yes, even enhancing the image of George W. Bush, by putting him in the spotlight on Haiti (which is particularly ironic given his administration’s support for the overthrow of that country’s elected leader in 2004).

At this rate, Dick Cheney may be a viable presidential candidate in another year.

Note: Best headline of day from the Village Voice:

“Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate.”

What the End of Democratic Rule Really Means

“Finally Americans will get the opportunity to see what it looks like when a filibuster-proof majority is squandered,” I wrote here last July, after Al Franken was declared the victor in Minnesota, thereby giving Democrats their sixtieth vote in the senate. But who knew how quickly they might squander it?

Last night, Jon Stewart offered this analysis of what it would mean if Martha Coakley loses to Scott Brown: “Democrats will only then have an 18-vote majority in the Senate. Which is more than George W. Bush ever had in the Senate when he did whenever the fuck he wanted to.”

And this also from Stewart: “It’s not your fault Democratic Party leadership — no one should have raised the bar of expectations for you. We should just leave the bar on the ground…[and] wait for you to trip.”

Chasing The Two-Dollar T-shirt

My article “Shopping for Sweat: The human cost of a two-dollar T-shirt” appears in the current issue of Harper’s. For those wanting to know more, I was interviewed about the story yesterday on KUER, the NPR affiliate in Salt Lake City.

Here’s the station’s set up for the show:

In 1999, Cambodia signed an agreement with the US to improve labor conditions in its garment industry. Since then, apparel has grown to three-quarters of the nation’s exports, with most of that headed to stores like Nike, Gap and Walmart. But while Cambodia has gained a “sweat-free” reputation, workers are still making a mere 33 cents an hour. Journalist Ken Silverstein went to Cambodia posing as an American businessman and he joins Doug to talk about the human cost of a two-dollar t-shirt.

More on Haiti’s History

Jack Shafer at Slate writes to say that I was unfair to Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution in an item yesterday on Haiti. I had referred to a post which offered a list of reasons for Haiti’s poverty that gave, in my view, short shrift to the historic role of the U.S. and France. “I thought that Marginal Revolution was thinking out loud,” Shafer writes.

He noted that Cowen subsequently linked to this good essay that offers a broader look at the reasons for Haiti’s poverty, offering the two “root causes” as being international forces and the Haitian elite:

The poverty and misery in Haiti are human created. The root causes are the political and economic systems which have dominated Haiti for the whole of her 182 years. These oppressive factors have come from the international community, especially France and the United States. However, the Haitian elite, comprising only 3% of the Haitian people has also been a major factor in creating and continuing these oppressive conditions.

So I stand corrected about Marginal Revolution, but the broader point about the media’s general failure to provide historical context to the situation in Haiti certainly stands.

Glenn and Sarah: A love story

I try not to blog about Glenn Beck because there’s really not much to say at this point, but in this instance Jon Stewart makes it impossible. Watch the Daily Show’s take on Sarah Palin’s Fox News debut, including Beck reading her a journal entry/love poem that he wrote about her.

Photos From Haiti

The Boston Globe has a stunning collection of photographs from Haiti. Hard to take.