hilzoy

by hilzoy

Yesterday, I wrote about John McCain’s chief political advisor, Charlie Black, and his history of being a paid shill for some of the world’s worst dictators. But I left one of his clients for a later post, because Jonas Savimbi truly is a special case.

Those of you who were too young to be paying attention during the 1980s might not remember Jonas Savimbi and his organization, UNITA. Briefly: there had been armed resistance to Portuguese rule for years, but when Angola became independent of Portugal in 1975, a full-bore civil war broke out. It lasted, with a few short breaks, from 1975 until Savimbi’s death in 2002. It started as a scramble for power after independence, heightened by the Cold War. (Apparently, declassified documents show that we intervened before the USSR and Cuba. I didn’t know that.) Savimbi, who started out as a Maoist and a Portuguese agent, became one of our guys (he was also heavily supported by the apartheid government of South Africa); his main rival, the actual government of Angola, was supported by the USSR and Cuba.

During the 1980s, this turned into a full-bore Cold War proxy fight. This did not have to happen. We could have let Angola be. Its government was dreadful, but Savimbi was no rose either; even if you think that we should intervene in other countries, when a country seems to have a choice between two awful options, there’s no real point in choosing sides, and certainly no point in plunging a country into civil war to get your side to win. This would not have prevented civil war — Savimbi was supported by South Africa, which had a policy of trying to bog down the states near its borders in civil wars — but it would have meant not actively contributing to the destruction of a country for no good reason. Alternatively, we could have chosen to support Savimbi, who was even more dreadful, in a civil war.

We chose to support Savimbi, with predictable results:

“The tap that Kissinger had turned on, and Carter had turned off, was opened again in 1981, when Ronald Reagan approved a covert aid package for Unita. South African Special Forces were good at what they did. Unita’s performance was already much improved by comparison with its half-hearted exertions against the Portuguese. Even so, Washington’s financial and diplomatic backing was an immense boost. The country, which was now a Cold War cockpit, remained undefeatable, but it could be comprehensively ruined, and this is what happened. The figures for war-related deaths, and child deaths in particular, leapt dramatically in the 1980s. Towns and villages were deserted or shelled to extinction. The countryside was a living death. There were landmines and limbless people everywhere (there still are). Young men were press-ganged into the burgeoning rabble of the Angolan Army, where the discipline of the elite units could not hope to reach. Unita kidnapped and abducted its fighters or picked up the homeless, traumatised survivors of Government offensives. Some of them were so-called ‘child soldiers’ – ‘premature adults’ is a better description. Provincial capitals became slum havens for hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Savimbi’s struggle, subsumed though it was in a large-scale offensive driven by South Africa and paid for in the United States, had come home to Angola.”

We did not have to make this choice. Angola’s government was bad, but all-out civil war was much, much worse for the Angolan people. What Charlie Black was lobbying for, in the 1980s, was enough US assistance to allow Jonas Savimbi to mount that all-out civil war, and to destroy his country.

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by hilzoy

Since McCain’s Convention CEO and one of his campaign’s regional managers resigned when it came out that they had been lobbying for the government of Myanmar, I figured it was only a matter of time before more information about the clients of the many lobbyists who populate the McCain campaign began to come out. And lo! here’s a rundown on some of them.

I’m going to concentrate on Charlie Black. He’s generally described as McCain’s chief political advisor. He was the chair of BKSH & Associates, a lobbying firm, until last month, when he announced he was stepping down to work on McCain’s campaign fulltime. There’s a good profile of him here:

““The Republican Party’s quintessential company man,” as one friend calls him, Mr. Black has worked in every Republican presidential campaign since 1972, and sometimes a couple each season, being diplomat enough to get along with both sides in some of the fiercest rivalries.

In between, and often at the same time, he has parlayed his political connections to become one of Washington’s most successful lobbyists, making him an embodiment of the city’s permanent establishment.

Now 60, Mr. Black is easing Mr. McCain into his new role as standard bearer for a party that the senator has clashed with and even snubbed over the years. Mr. Black has done so in the quiet way that has made him such an enduring player in Washington.”

Here’s Ken Silverstein quoting an offline piece from Spy, which has a different take on Black’s record:

“An indispensable read about Black’s past–sadly not available online–was a wonderful 1992 piece by Art Levine published in Spy magazine, titled “Publicists of the Damned.” (…) Back then Black was the lead partner at the lobbying firm called Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. (…)

Spy reviewed the operations of a number of top beltway lobbying firms and ranked Black, Manafort as the “sleaziest” of the firms it surveyed, giving it a “blood-on-the-hands” rating of four. That was a full bloody hand more than the rating accorded to lobbyist Edward van Kloberg, whose clients included Saddam Hussein and Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania.

Black, Manafort’s own clients at the time included Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire, one of the most kleptocratic rulers of all time, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, also known for stealing a few billion dollars, and the murderous Angolan rebels known as UNITA. “The well-compensated flacks at Black, Manafort stand at the pinnacle of organizational apologism,” Spy noted. “Name a corrupt despot, and Black Manafort will name the account.””

Over the years, Black has represented some truly dreadful people. In what follows, I will leave aside domestic clients, like Blackwater, Philip Morris, and Chiquita (which pleaded guilty to paying Colombian terrorists last year.) I will also ignore Black’s work on behalf of dictators who are bad but not truly horrific: for instance, Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo. I’m just going to focus on two groups: first, Black’s work for people who used disinformation to get us into the Iraq war, and second, the truly horrible dictators Charlie Black represented.

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by hilzoy

First thought: it’s worth taking a step back and noticing that the gas tax pander didn’t work. At least, it’s hard for me to believe that Obama would have come as close as he did to winning Indiana in the face of the flap over Rev. Wright, the possible involvement of Limbaugh Republicans, and so on, if the idea of a gas tax holiday had really caught on.

Senator Clinton gambled on the stupidity of the voters, and she lost.* That is truly worth celebrating.

Second, the NYT:

“Clinton advisers acknowledged that the results of the primaries were far less than they had hoped, and said they were likely to face new pleas even from some of their own supporters for her to quit the race. They said they expected fund-raising to become even harder now; one adviser said the campaign was essentially broke, and several others refused to say whether Mrs. Clinton had loaned the campaign money from her personal account to keep it afloat.

The advisers said they were dispirited over the loss in North Carolina, after her campaign — now working off a shoestring budget as spending outpaces fund-raising — decided to allocate millions of dollars and full days of the candidate and her husband in the state. Even with her investment, Mr. Obama outspent Mrs. Clinton in both states.”

This is where the rubber hits the road. If the campaign is “essentially broke”, and if she doesn’t somehow manage to raise money on tonight’s results, then the Clintons no longer get to decide whether to stay in the race, period. They get to decide whether to stay in the race on their own nickels. I imagine this might be a sobering thought. (But why? They can spare the money more easily than most of their supporters.)

Third: as I’ve said in comments, I think the fact that she has cancelled her public appearances for tomorrow is serious. God willing, she will drop out, and spare us any continuation of this nightmare.

Fourth: it occurred to me this evening that if Obama is the nominee, it will be the first time in my life that someone I have supported in a contested primary has been the nominee. Starting with McGovern in 1968 and continuing for the next forty years, the people I have supported have an unbroken record of failure in primaries. It was almost enough to make me consider coming out for Kucinich or Gravel, just to jinx them. (Though both of them seem to have done a fine job jinxing themselves, without any help from me.)

If Obama gets the nomination, I will scarcely know what to make of it. It will be almost as strange as seeing the sun rise in the west, or cockatiels quoting Proust. These things just don’t happen to me.

I hope I have the chance to get used to it. It sounds like fun. 😉

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by hilzoy

A few days ago, publius wrote about some of them. I just want to expand on one of his points.

The gas tax holiday is bad policy. Clinton has to know this. If she does, then she has come out in favor of it for purely political reasons: because she thinks it will give her an edge over Obama. (Note: this is the charitable reading of her conduct. I assume she’s much too smart to actually believe that this is a good idea.)

Moreover, this didn’t have to be an issue in the Democratic primary. It’s not as though it was already on the table and had to be discussed. Clinton made it an issue, and is running on it. Which is to say: she has not only come out in favor of a bad idea for political reasons; she has introduced a bad idea into the Democratic primary, and she is running on her willingness to embrace it.

Clinton is presently making a big deal about the fact that she is “a fighter”. After this primary season, I don’t think there can be any doubt about her willingness to fight. What Clinton’s gas tax proposal tells me is what she’s willing to fight for. She is not willing to fight for what she thinks is right in the face of public pressure. She’s not even willing to restrict her compromises to cases in which public pressure to do something stupid already exists. She will sacrifice principle and the public good when it’s expedient for her to do so.

Which is to say: she’s a fighter, all right, but what she fights for is her own interest, not what she thinks is right.

Based on this episode, how much confidence can we have that she’ll really be wiling to go to the mat to combat global warming? None at all. Based on her vote for the Iraq War Resolution — a vote that was, at the time, seen (wrongly) as one that Democrats had to cast if they wanted to secure their own political viability — how much confidence can we have that she’ll be willing to go to the mat to protect our national interests or to prevent a pointless, stupid, destructive war? Likewise, none at all.

If there’s anything we should have learned from George W. Bush, it’s that generalized combativeness is not a good thing in a President. We need not just someone who’s willing to fight in general, but someone who’s willing to fight for the right things. If you think that the right things just are the things that advance Hillary Clinton’s political interests, then there’s no problem. But if you want someone who is willing to fight for good policies that are in our national interest, that actually address serious problems, then it’s worth recognizing that while she is more than willing to fight, she is not willing to fight for that.

***

One other note:

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by hilzoy

I wrote earlier about the robocalls in North Carolina. Briefly: a group called Women’s Voices Women Vote made robocalls that seemed to suggest that voters had to mail in a packet of stuff in order to be able to vote. The calls were made after the registration deadline for the NC primary, and caused confusion among registered voters who thought they might not be eligible if they didn’t mail in the packet. In this post, I wanted to lay out the facts as I understand them.

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by hilzoy

The NYT on John McCain’s health care speech:

“Mr. McCain’s health care plan would shift the emphasis from insurance provided by employers to insurance bought by individuals, to foster competition and drive down prices. To do so he is calling for eliminating the tax breaks that currently encourage employers to provide health insurance for their workers, and replacing them with $5,000 tax credits for families to buy their own insurance. (…)

Some health care experts question whether those tax credits would offer enough money to pay for new health insurance plans. The average cost of an employer-funded insurance plan is $12,106 for a family, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy group. Paul B. Ginsburg, the president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan research organization financed by foundations and government agencies, said, “For a lot of people, the tax credits he’s talking about would not be enough to afford coverage.””

Not everyone has an extra $7,106 just lying around, waiting to be spent on health insurance premiums. What, I wonder, would happen to them? And wouldn’t you think that eliminating tax breaks for employers who offer health insurance might make some of those employers decide to stop offering it altogether? I would, and I’m not even a member of the party whose entire economic platform is designed around the thought that people are so exquisitely sensitive to tax rates that even a relatively small cut in the capital gains tax will unleash great raging torrents of entrepreneurial energy. McCain is; and yet, curiously enough, he doesn’t consider this possibility. Here’s what he says about employer-based health insurance: “Many workers are perfectly content with this arrangement, and under my reform plan they would be able to keep that coverage. Their employer-provided health plans would be largely untouched and unchanged.” Except for the ones whose employers stopped offering health insurance, ha ha ha.

Besides, you might be thinking …

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by hilzoy

Here is his statement:

Brief excerpt:

“The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago. His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church.

They certainly don’t portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that’s political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn’t know me very well. And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I might not know him as well as I thought, either.

Now, I’ve already denounced the comments that appeared in these previous sermons. As I said, I had not heard them before. I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia, explaining that he has done enormous good in the church, he’s built a wonderful congregation, the people of Trinity are wonderful people, and what attracted me has always been their ministry’s reach beyond the church walls.

But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the US government somehow being involved in AIDS; when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century; when he equates the United States’ wartime efforts with terrorism, then there are no excuses. They offend me, they rightly offend all Americans, and they should be denounced. And that’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally today.”

Here’s the Q and A:

Excerpt:

“In some ways, what Rev. Wright said yesterday directly contradicts everything that I’ve done during my life. It contradicts how I was raised, and the setting in which I was raised; it contradicts my decisions to pursue a career of public service; it contradicts the issues that I’ve worked on politically; it contradicts what I’ve said in my books; I’ve; it contradicts what I said in my convention speech in 2004; it contradicts my announcement; it contradicts everything I’ve been saying on this campaign trail.

And what I tried to do in Philadelphia was to provide a context, and to lift up some of the contradictions and complexities of race in America, of which Rev. Wright is a part and we’re all a part, and try to make something constructive out of it. But there wasn’t anything constructive out of yesterday. All it was was a bunch of rants that aren’t grounded in truth. And I can’t construct something positive out of that. I can understand it; people do all sorts of things. And as I said before, I continue to believe that Rev. Wright has been a leader in the South Side, I think that the church he built is outstanding, I think that he has preached in the past some wonderful sermons, he provided valuable contributions to my family, but at a certain point, if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it, in front of the National Press Club, then that’s enough.”

Watch the whole thing. If you can’t watch it, and are wondering whether this is just some sort of pro forma statement, trust me on this: it isn’t. He is outraged and angry, and (I think) genuinely saddened by what Rev. Wright said.

As for me…

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