Dick Cheney Rewrites Iraq War History and Claims Disbanding Saddam’s Army Influenced Nothing
September 19, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media (h/t Heather at VideoCafe ) Dick Cheney is still on his book tour and Sunday he disgraced CBS with an appearance on Face The Nation . Not only has he proclaimed that he was the Decider in Chief of the Bush administration during the 9/11 attacks in his book and the military refused his order to shoot civilian planes down, but he had the audacity to lie about how the Iraq invasion escalated into a full blown civil war after the invasion was over. He responded to Colin Powell’s criticisms of the job he did as VP. COLIN POWELL: “He says that I went out of my way not to present my positions to the President but to take them outside of the administration. That’s nonsense. The President knows and I had told him what I thought about every issue of the day. Mister Cheney may forget that I’m the one who said to President Bush ‘If you break it, you own it, and you’ve got to understand that if we have to go to war in Iraq, we’ve to be prepared for the whole war, not just the first phase.’ And Mister Cheney and many of his colleagues were not prepared for what happened after the fall of Baghdad. Remember, Cheney was the one who kept telling America that the Iraq conflict was in its last throes (as far back as 2005) over and over again as the violence kept escalating. Schieffer actually asked the right question. SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you this…was it a mistake to get rid of all the people in the army? To disband the army as they did? CHENEY: Well, it may have been a mistake. It wasn’t as though we had total control over everything. In effect, what happened for a large part of it was they just packed up and went home. They disappeared back into the countryside and went back to their private lives. So they weren’t there, it wasn’t as though they’d all found a place where they were waiting for us to come in and take command of the army. What was that? The army’s response to being disbanded by the Bush administration immediately destroyed what fragile peace there was and turned the Sunnis Muslims against the Shiite Muslims, leading to a horrifying blood bath. Probably the single decision that triggered the hostilities was when Paul Bremer was appointed in Iraq and he unceremoniously told Saddam’s former army members that they were not allowed to be part of the newly forming government . Sweeping away remnants of pre-war Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, on Friday dissolved the Iraqi Armed Forces, the ministries of Defense and Information, and other security institutions that supported Saddam Hussein’s regime. An American senior coalition official said the move effectively disbands the Army, the Republican Guard and the Revolutionary Command Council, among others, and cancels any military or other ranks conferred by the previous regime. — It also put an estimated 350,000 to 400,000 soldiers out of work, as well as an estimated 2,000 Information Ministry employees. A deal had been brokered to keep the fragile peace in Iraq by the military leadership and Bremer, who has a history of destabilizing countries by defaulting on their promises without even consulting them. Gen. Peter Pace, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in February 2004 that the decision to disband the Iraqi Army was made without the input of the joint chiefs. “We were not asked for a recommendation or for advice,” he said. These troops were angry and didn’t take their Tonka trucks and go home as Cheney depicted here. They picked up their guns started the civil war. Director Charles Ferguson explained much in his excellent documentary “No End In Sight” The worst mistake, however, was the disbanding of the Iraqi Army in May 2003, two months after the invasion. This was a decision made by only a few men — specifically Bremer in his capacity as the head of the occupation authority, and his aide Walter Slocombe — and against the advice of just about everyone with any on-the-ground knowledge of the situation. (According to Ferguson, it’s unclear if President Bush approved of the idea.) Bremer and Slocombe apparently believed that the Iraqi Army had to be rendered powerless, though others explain to Ferguson that Bremer and Slocombe were confusing the army with the Republican Guard. The Guard consisted of Baath Party loyalists; the Iraqi military was a professional force that had always tried to keep its distance from the Hussein regime. When the war began, the army had faded into the countryside, leaving the Guard to do the bulk of the fighting. Once the Americans prevailed, according to Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff, Iraqi military officers indicated their willingness to work with the occupiers, but instead they and their troops were stripped of their positions and careers. An estimated 500,000 to 800,000 men, 7 to 10 percent of the Iraqi work force, lost their jobs. And they had guns. “More than any other single action,” Ferguson says, the order to disband the army “created the Iraqi insurgency.” C&L had Charles Ferguson on for a live chat when his film was released in 2007.
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Click here to view this media President Barack Obama Monday introduced his plan to trim the deficit, including a ” Buffett rule ” — named after billionaire Warren Buffett — which would ensure that people making over $1 million a year would pay a tax rate as high as the people that work for them. “Middle class families shouldn’t pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires,” the president declared. “That’s pretty straightforward. It’s hard to argue against that. Warren Buffett’s secretary shouldn’t pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. There’s no justification for it.” “Anybody who says we can’t change the tax code to correct that, anyone who has signed some pledge to protect every single tax loophole so long as they live, they should be called out. They should have to defend that unfairness,” he added. “If their pledge [is] to keep that kind of unfairness in place, they should remember the last time I checked, the only pledge that really matters is the pledge we make to uphold the Constitution.” Obama went on to fire back at Republicans who had called his plan class warfare . “We’re already hearing the usual defenders of these kind of loopholes saying this is just class warfare. I reject the idea that asking a hedge fund manager to pay the same tax rate at a plumber or teacher is class warfare. I think it’s just the the right thing to do,” he said. “Both parties agree that we need to reduce the deficit by the same amount, by $4 trillion. So what choices are we going to make to reach that goal? Either we ask the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share in taxes or we ask seniors to pay more for Medicare. We can’t afford to do both. Either we gut education and medical research or we’ve got to reform the tax code so that most profitable corporations have to give up tax loopholes that other companies don’t get. We can’t afford to do both. This is not class warfare; it’s math.”
Continue reading …Voluntary Taxes? Obama Will ‘Ask the Rich’ to Pay More, Claims New York Times
September 19, 2011 No Comment
Sunday’s lead New York Times story by White House correspondent Jackie Calmes pushed the president’s new plan to raise taxes on “the wealthy.” The president, in what the Times seems to think is a bright idea, is calling his proposal the “Buffett rule,” after the billionaire who made waves with his complaint, printed in the Times, that uber-wealthy investors like him were not being taxed enough. Here is the stack of headlines: “ Obama Tax Plan Would Ask More Of Millionaires – Called ‘Buffett Rule’ – Populist Sales Pitch to Press the G.O.P. in Budget Talks .” Why write “Ask More of Millionaires”? Are these tax increases going to be voluntary? President Obama on Monday will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers, according to administration officials. …. Mr. Obama, in a bit of political salesmanship, will call his proposal the “Buffett Rule,” in a reference to Warren E. Buffett, the billionaire investor who has complained repeatedly that the richest Americans generally pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than do middle-income workers, because investment gains are taxed at a lower rate than wages. Mr. Obama will not specify a rate or other details, and it is unclear how much revenue his plan would raise. But his idea of a millionaires’ minimum tax will be prominent in the broad plan for long-term deficit reduction that he will outline at the White House on Monday. Mr. Obama’s proposal is certain to draw opposition from Republicans, who have staunchly opposed raising taxes on the affluent because, they say, it would discourage investment. It could also invite scrutiny from some economists who have disputed Mr. Buffett’s assertion that the megarich pay a lower tax rate over all. Mr. Buffett’s critics say many of the rich actually make more from wages than from investments.
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The assumption that global population will peak around 9-10bn may be overly optimistic — and if it is, population will continue to rise, placing enormous strains on the environment In a mere half-century, the number of people on the planet has soared from 3 billion to 7 billion, placing us squarely in the midst of the most rapid expansion of world population in our 50,000-year history — and placing ever-growing pressure on the Earth and its resources. But that is the past. What of the future? Leading demographers, including those at the United Nations and the U.S. Census Bureau, are projecting that world population will peak at 9.5 billion to 10 billion later this century and then gradually decline as poorer countries develop. But what if those projections are too optimistic? What if population continues to soar, as it has in recent decades, and the world becomes home to 12 billion or even 16 billion people by 2100, as a high-end UN estimate has projected? Such an outcome would clearly have enormous social and environmental implications, including placing enormous stress on the world’s food and water resources, spurring further loss of wild lands and biodiversity, and hastening the degradation of the natural systems that support life on Earth. It is customary in the popular media and in many journal articles to cite a projected population figure as if it were a given, a figure so certain that it could virtually be used for long-range planning purposes. But we must carefully examine the assumptions behind such projections. And forecasts that population is going to level off or decline this century have been based on the assumption that the developing world will necessarily follow the path of the industrialized world. That is far from a sure bet. Eyeing the future, conservationists have clung to the notion that population will peak and then start to decline later this century. Renowned evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson has propounded what he terms the bottleneck theory: that maximum pressure on the natural world will occur this century as human population peaks, after which a declining human population will supposedly ease that pressure. The goal of conservation is therefore to help as much of nature as possible squeeze through this population bottleneck. But what if there is no bottleneck, but rather a long tunnel where the human species continues to multiply? Population projections most often use a pattern of demographic change called the demographic transition. This model is based on the way in which high birth and death rates changed over the centuries in Europe, declining to the low birth and death rates of today. Thus, projections assume that the European experience will be replicated in developing countries. These projections take for granted three key things about fertility in developing countries. First, that it will continue to decline where it has begun to decline, and will begin to decline where it has not. Second, that the decline will be smooth and uninterrupted. And, finally, that it will decline to two children or less per woman. These are levels now found in Europe and North America. But will such low levels find favor in the Nigerias, Pakistans, and Zambias of this world? The desire for more than two children — often many more than two — will remain an obstacle and will challenge assumptions that world population will level off or decline. In quite a few developing countries, birth rates are declining significantly. But in others they are not. In Jordan, for example, the fertility rate still hovers around 4 children per woman. Indonesia was a country that was widely acknowledged for its innovative and steadfastly pursued family planning program in the 1980s, when its total fertility rate fell to 3 children per woman. It has been hovering for some time around 2.5. In a recent survey, about 30 percent of women with 2 living children said that they wanted another child. That figure was 35 percent for their husbands. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is the region that now causes the most worry. It remains in a virtual pre-industrial condition, demographically speaking, with high fertility and rather high mortality. The UN projects that fertility will decline from a high level of 6 children per woman around 1990 and reach about 3 children per woman by 2050. Many sub-Saharan African countries have seen some decline, and today the average fertility rate is 5.2 children per woman. Should the UN’s assumptions prove correct, sub-Saharan Africa’s population would still rise from 880 million today to 2 billion in 2050. Countries such as Congo, Kenya, Madagascar, and Rwanda have identified rapid population growth as a problem and committed sufficient resources to address it. Yet their fertility rates remain at 4.6 to 4.7 children per woman, and a future halt in fertility decline in those countries would surprise no one. But most future population projections assume a continuing decline. Often fertility rates might decline from a higher level and then “stall” for a time, not continuing their downward trajectories to the two-child family, resulting in a higher-than-projected population. In sub-Saharan Africa, this has happened in Nigeria, where the fertility rate has stalled at about 5.7, and in Ghana, where the fertility rate is 4.1 and apparently resuming a slow decline. Very recent surveys have shown that fertility decline in Senegal has likely stalled at 5.0 children and has risen somewhat to 4.1 in Zimbabwe. Clearly, not all countries will see a continuous decline in fertility rates, and some have barely begun to drop, meaning that projected population sizes will turn out to be too low. Fertility rates are lowest among educated, urban women who account for much of the initial decrease. What will it take to reach large, often inaccessible rural populations, whose desire to limit family size is frequently quite limited and whose “ideal” number of children is quite high? Challenges include: the logistical task of providing reproductive health services to women; informing them of their ability to limit their number of children and to space births over at least two years; low levels of literacy; the value husbands place on large families; and securing funding for family planning programs. India provides another cautionary tale. The country is often hailed as an emerging economic power, yet 930 million people — three-quarters of India’s population — live on less than $2 per day. Some advanced Indian states, such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu, have excellent family planning programs and fertility rates of 1.8 children per woman, which will lead to declining populations in those states. But some of India’s poorest and most populous states — Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh — have total fertility rates ranging from 3.3 to 3.9. The Indian example illustrates an important trend: that the challenge of soaring populations will increasingly be concentrated in the poorest countries, and in the poorest regions of nations such as India. The real possibility of fertility decline stopping before the two-children level is reached requires demographers, policy makers, and environmentalists to seriously consider that population growth in the coming century will come in at the high end of demographic projections. The UN’s middle-of-the-road assumption for sub-Saharan Africa — that fertility rates will drop to 3.0 and population reach 2 billion by 2050 — seem unrealistically low to me. More likely is the UN’s high-end projection that sub-Saharan Africa’s population will climb to 2.2 billion by 2050 and then continue to 4.8 billion by 2100. The dire consequences of such an increase are difficult to ponder. If sub-Saharan Africa is having trouble feeding and providing water to 880 million people today, what will the region be like in 90 years if the population increases five-fold — particularly if, as projected, temperatures rise by 2 to 3 degrees C, worsening droughts? Many factors may arise to cause fertility rates to drop in countries where the decline has lagged. A rising age at marriage, perhaps resulting from increased education of females and from their increased autonomy; rising expectations among parents that their children can have a better life; decreasing availability of land, forcing migration to cities to seek some source of income; real commitment from governments to provide family planning services and the funds to do so. The list goes on. But we must facts. The assumption that all developing countries will see their birth rates decline to the low levels now prevalent in Europe is very far from certain. We can also expect the large majority of population growth to be in countries and areas with the highest poverty and lowest levels of education. Today, the challenge to improve living conditions is often not being met, even as the numbers in need continue to grow. As populations continue to rise rapidly in these areas, the ability to supply clean water for drinking and sustainable water for agriculture, to provide the most basic health services, and to avoid deforestation and profound environmental consequences, lies in the balance. Population Energy Waste guardian.co.uk
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Cicciolina to get €39,000 a year for serving one term as an MP in Italy’s Radical party She is famed for being the first woman to uncover her breasts live on Italian television, for recording a song entirely about the male organ, and for offering sex to Osama bin Laden (in return, she said, for giving up the terrorism). But now Ilona Staller, better known as Cicciolina, is the unlikely centre of a bitter row over the cost to ordinary Italians of the perks enjoyed by their country’s tens of thousands of politicians. It emerged on Monday that the Hungarian, who starred in almost 40 hardcore pornographic movies, will soon be enjoying a €39,000-a-year (£34,000-a-year) pension, provided by the taxpayers of her adoptive homeland. The stipend, which is for life, is her reward for labouring as a member of parliament for all of five years, from 1987 to 1992. Staller was elected for the libertarian Radical party and sponsored a number of mainly sex-related bills, including one to set up “love parks and hotels”. Her entitlement is no different from that of any other one-term politician in Italy. But their pensions have come under resentful scrutiny at a time when politicians are seeking painful sacrifices from the rest of society to prevent a Greek-style debt crisis: last week, parliament gave final approval to an austerity package that includes an increase in VAT and provision for big cuts in income tax allowances. Commenting on news of Staller’s pension on the website of the daily Corriere della Sera, one reader said the country’s politicians “got rich doing almost nothing” and cared little about “people who work: people who often struggle to make ends meet and pay their taxes by doing real work”. But the former porn star, who will start to get the pension in November when she turns 60, told the Guardian: “I earned it and I’m proud of it.” She said that during her five years in parliament she had tabled 12 bills including measures to introduce sex education in schools, give prisoners conjugal visits and ban vivisection. None had made it on to the statute book, but in those days, she said, it required a couple of parliaments to get bills passed. “All politicians who are ex-members of parliaments get pensions for life and I think it is fair that I should too,” Staller said. According to one recent estimate, Italy’s cohorts of politicians cost the taxpayers almost €1.3bn a year. With four levels of government – national, regional, provincial and municipal – the country has an inordinately large number of elected representatives. But that has not stopped them from giving themselves a distinctly comfortable lifestyle. According to the Italian parliament website, the gross salary of a member of the lower house is €140,000 a year plus an attendance allowance of up to €42,000 and a contribution towards expenses of up to €63,000. They are also entitled to free public transport, free air and sea travel within Italy and exemption from motorway tolls. Italy Europe European debt crisis John Hooper guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Cicciolina to get €39,000 a year for serving one term as an MP in Italy’s Radical party She is famed for being the first woman to uncover her breasts live on Italian television, for recording a song entirely about the male organ, and for offering sex to Osama bin Laden (in return, she said, for giving up the terrorism). But now Ilona Staller, better known as Cicciolina, is the unlikely centre of a bitter row over the cost to ordinary Italians of the perks enjoyed by their country’s tens of thousands of politicians. It emerged on Monday that the Hungarian, who starred in almost 40 hardcore pornographic movies, will soon be enjoying a €39,000-a-year (£34,000-a-year) pension, provided by the taxpayers of her adoptive homeland. The stipend, which is for life, is her reward for labouring as a member of parliament for all of five years, from 1987 to 1992. Staller was elected for the libertarian Radical party and sponsored a number of mainly sex-related bills, including one to set up “love parks and hotels”. Her entitlement is no different from that of any other one-term politician in Italy. But their pensions have come under resentful scrutiny at a time when politicians are seeking painful sacrifices from the rest of society to prevent a Greek-style debt crisis: last week, parliament gave final approval to an austerity package that includes an increase in VAT and provision for big cuts in income tax allowances. Commenting on news of Staller’s pension on the website of the daily Corriere della Sera, one reader said the country’s politicians “got rich doing almost nothing” and cared little about “people who work: people who often struggle to make ends meet and pay their taxes by doing real work”. But the former porn star, who will start to get the pension in November when she turns 60, told the Guardian: “I earned it and I’m proud of it.” She said that during her five years in parliament she had tabled 12 bills including measures to introduce sex education in schools, give prisoners conjugal visits and ban vivisection. None had made it on to the statute book, but in those days, she said, it required a couple of parliaments to get bills passed. “All politicians who are ex-members of parliaments get pensions for life and I think it is fair that I should too,” Staller said. According to one recent estimate, Italy’s cohorts of politicians cost the taxpayers almost €1.3bn a year. With four levels of government – national, regional, provincial and municipal – the country has an inordinately large number of elected representatives. But that has not stopped them from giving themselves a distinctly comfortable lifestyle. According to the Italian parliament website, the gross salary of a member of the lower house is €140,000 a year plus an attendance allowance of up to €42,000 and a contribution towards expenses of up to €63,000. They are also entitled to free public transport, free air and sea travel within Italy and exemption from motorway tolls. Italy Europe European debt crisis John Hooper guardian.co.uk
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Heavy rain and thick cloud hamper relief effort after more than 100,000 homes in India, Nepal and Tibet were damaged Rescuers trying to reach villages cut off by mudslides after a powerful earthquake killed at least 63 people and damaged more than 100,000 homes in India, Nepal and Tibet are battling heavy rain and thick cloud. Thousands of soldiers and rescue workers continued to pull victims from rubble as the number of deaths climbed to 35 in the north-eastern Indian state of Sikkim, site of the epicentre of the 6.9-magnitude quake that rattled through the Himalayas on Sunday night. Thick cloud prevented helicopters from flying over parts of the affected areas, but some mountain passes blocked by landslides were reopened, police said. “The earthquake has loosened the hill faces, and when it rains, it causes landslides. So the situation is still very dangerous,” said Deepak Pandey, a spokesman for the Indo-Tibetan border police. More than 400 people had been rescued overnight, he said, including some in the worst-hit area of Pegong in the north. Although it may take days for the final number of fatalities to be confirmed, border police said they did not think the death toll would rise significantly. More than 6,000 troops have been drafted in to clear concrete slabs, bricks and mud and reach scores of people trapped under collapsed houses. India’s home secretary, Raj Kumar Singh, said that airforce helicopters had dropped food to villages, airlifted a medical team, evacuated the injured and conducted damage assessments. Heavy construction equipment had also been used to clear some of the blocked roads. “The rescue and relief operations are in full swing, though they were hampered … by poor weather,” he said, “[but] there may still be villages where people are trapped under collapsed houses that we have not been able to reach.” Singh said that at least 10 of those who died in Sikkim worked for the same hydroelectric project. At least 13 other people were killed in the neighbouring Indian states of Bihar and West Bengal, he added. Eight people died in Nepal, and China’s official Xinhua news agency reported seven deaths in Tibet. Most of the deaths occurred when houses already weakened from recent monsoon rains collapsed because of the force of the quake. By midday on Monday, workers had managed to clear landslides from one lane of the main highway connecting Sikkim with the rest of India, and an initial convoy of 75 paramilitaries had started moving toward Mangan, the village closest to the quake’s epicentre, officials said. In Gangtok, Sikkim’s capital, 42 miles south-east of the epicentre, police said they had cordoned off the office of the state’s top elected official after the building was severely damaged. TV footage showed buckled buildings, cracked pavements and two major roads collapsed. Shops, businesses and offices were closed in the town and neighbouring settlements, and many areas remained without electricity. Water supplies were scarce because of burst pipes and telephone communication was patchy. Nepal’s government said at least eight people died there, including two men and a child who were killed when part of the perimeter wall of the British embassy compound in Kathmandu collapsed. A spokesman for the UK Foreign Office confirmed the incident, adding that it “deeply regrets” the death of the three Nepali citizens and the injuries to others. “The ambassador met with and offered his condolences to the local community on Sunday evening and met with relatives of the victims on Monday[yesterday] morning,” he said. “The embassy will continue to do everything possible to help the local community and the government of Nepal.” In West Bengal, utility workers toiled through the night to restore power to a large swath of the state which plunged into darkness after power lines were snapped. The earthquake, which was followed by several aftershocks, was felt as far away as the Indian capital. An official from the UN’s disaster management team in New Delhi said that humanitarian assistance would still be needed even if casualties turned out to be low, as people who lost their homes would need food and shelter. The region has been hit by major earthquakes in the past, including in 1950 and 1897. Natural disasters and extreme weather China India Nepal Tibet Sam Jones guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Heavy rain and thick cloud hamper relief effort after more than 100,000 homes in India, Nepal and Tibet were damaged Rescuers trying to reach villages cut off by mudslides after a powerful earthquake killed at least 63 people and damaged more than 100,000 homes in India, Nepal and Tibet are battling heavy rain and thick cloud. Thousands of soldiers and rescue workers continued to pull victims from rubble as the number of deaths climbed to 35 in the north-eastern Indian state of Sikkim, site of the epicentre of the 6.9-magnitude quake that rattled through the Himalayas on Sunday night. Thick cloud prevented helicopters from flying over parts of the affected areas, but some mountain passes blocked by landslides were reopened, police said. “The earthquake has loosened the hill faces, and when it rains, it causes landslides. So the situation is still very dangerous,” said Deepak Pandey, a spokesman for the Indo-Tibetan border police. More than 400 people had been rescued overnight, he said, including some in the worst-hit area of Pegong in the north. Although it may take days for the final number of fatalities to be confirmed, border police said they did not think the death toll would rise significantly. More than 6,000 troops have been drafted in to clear concrete slabs, bricks and mud and reach scores of people trapped under collapsed houses. India’s home secretary, Raj Kumar Singh, said that airforce helicopters had dropped food to villages, airlifted a medical team, evacuated the injured and conducted damage assessments. Heavy construction equipment had also been used to clear some of the blocked roads. “The rescue and relief operations are in full swing, though they were hampered … by poor weather,” he said, “[but] there may still be villages where people are trapped under collapsed houses that we have not been able to reach.” Singh said that at least 10 of those who died in Sikkim worked for the same hydroelectric project. At least 13 other people were killed in the neighbouring Indian states of Bihar and West Bengal, he added. Eight people died in Nepal, and China’s official Xinhua news agency reported seven deaths in Tibet. Most of the deaths occurred when houses already weakened from recent monsoon rains collapsed because of the force of the quake. By midday on Monday, workers had managed to clear landslides from one lane of the main highway connecting Sikkim with the rest of India, and an initial convoy of 75 paramilitaries had started moving toward Mangan, the village closest to the quake’s epicentre, officials said. In Gangtok, Sikkim’s capital, 42 miles south-east of the epicentre, police said they had cordoned off the office of the state’s top elected official after the building was severely damaged. TV footage showed buckled buildings, cracked pavements and two major roads collapsed. Shops, businesses and offices were closed in the town and neighbouring settlements, and many areas remained without electricity. Water supplies were scarce because of burst pipes and telephone communication was patchy. Nepal’s government said at least eight people died there, including two men and a child who were killed when part of the perimeter wall of the British embassy compound in Kathmandu collapsed. A spokesman for the UK Foreign Office confirmed the incident, adding that it “deeply regrets” the death of the three Nepali citizens and the injuries to others. “The ambassador met with and offered his condolences to the local community on Sunday evening and met with relatives of the victims on Monday[yesterday] morning,” he said. “The embassy will continue to do everything possible to help the local community and the government of Nepal.” In West Bengal, utility workers toiled through the night to restore power to a large swath of the state which plunged into darkness after power lines were snapped. The earthquake, which was followed by several aftershocks, was felt as far away as the Indian capital. An official from the UN’s disaster management team in New Delhi said that humanitarian assistance would still be needed even if casualties turned out to be low, as people who lost their homes would need food and shelter. The region has been hit by major earthquakes in the past, including in 1950 and 1897. Natural disasters and extreme weather China India Nepal Tibet Sam Jones guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Matt Lauer Fawns Over Clinton: ‘Are You Surprised at How Good You Are?’; Allows Him to Bash GOP
September 19, 2011 No Comment
In a softball interview with Bill Clinton on Monday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer gushed over the former president's Global Initiative: “One of the things that's always impressed me….you're really good in a closed room. I mean you get people to commit to things, to invest money…. Are you surprised at how good you are at that?” At the same time, Lauer allowed Clinton to slam Republicans as stubborn ideologues when he asked: “Mitch McConnell came out on that and basically said, 'We've thrown a big wet blanket over the private sector economy and now we're threatening to raise taxes on top of it'….What's your reaction to that?” Clinton replied: “…the Republicans in Washington always say the same thing, any tax on any upper income person is bad because they're job creators. It's an insult to those people. They don't mind being asked to pay their fair share.” Lauer lamented the current state of politics and became nostalgic for the Clinton era, giving the former president sole credit for accomplishing goals pushed by Republicans: “You got things done. You know, you reformed Social Security. You balanced the budget. What's different today? What's changed the dynamic?” Clinton used the opportunity to again bash the GOP: “In 1995, we didn't get much done because they shut the government down twice trying to force me to agree to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency and eliminate the Department of Education-” Lauer interjected: “And then they decided they had to work with you.” Clinton replied: “That's right, because the American people made their preferences clear. ” Lauer followed up: “But clearly there is a changed dynamic, it's more politics now it seems, they put politics ahead of the good of the country. When you travel around the world as part of your role for the global initiative, do you find a similar dynamic in other countries all around the world?” Clinton argued: “They're much more interested in what works. This is the only major country that I go to where people just take a position and it doesn't matter if there's no facts to support it.” Almost as an afterthought, Lauer wondered: “Is it true of Democrats and Republicans by the way? Do both play politics equally?” Predictably, Clinton claimed: “…mostly this is the anti-government extreme position that you see on this tax thing….It scares people around the world. They think Americans have basically voted for a government that's ideological and too uprooted from facts and that bothers them.” In response to Lauer's question about how good he was “in a closed room” raising money, Clinton proclaimed: “What works in bringing the economy back is cooperation. What works in getting on the news programs and in politics is conflict. Conflict is great for politics, great for news coverage, lousy for economic policy. That's what the problem is. We got to go back to a cooperative environment where everybody kicks in a little.” Here is a full transcript of the September 19 interview: 7:00AM ET TEASE: MATT LAUER: The next big showdown. President Obama set to unveil his long-term plan to bring down the national debt this morning. But Republicans are already saying some of his ideas are dead on arrival. What does Bill Clinton think? The former president speaks out in an exclusive live in-studio interview. 7:01AM ET TEASE: LAUER: Also, as we mentioned, former President Bill Clinton is here in our studio this morning. He's bringing together some of the world's top minds this week to try to figure out how to jump-start the global economy and the struggling jobs market. We're going to talk to him about that and also get his take on the 2012 presidential race, as well as some other topics as we discuss the Clinton Global Initiative. 7:09AM ET SEGMENT: LAUER: Now back to politics and a morning exclusive. What will it take to turn the nation's struggling economy around? We're joined now by the former President of the United States Bill Clinton. Mr. President, it's good to see you. BILL CLINTON: Thank you, Matt. LAUER: Sixth Global Initiative, you're getting that underway here in New York this week and you're going to bring together the top minds in the world, in the world of business. I guess we would all want to be a fly on the wall and we would want to pull up a chair because one of the things you're going to be discussing is jobs, jobs, jobs. Are you going to come up with or are you going to hear ideas this week that you think can dramatically help the problem? CLINTON: I tell you yes and no, that is, keep in mind, we work all over the world. LAUER: Uh-huh. CLINTON: And there are literally hundreds of millions of people looking for jobs all over the world. This is a global meltdown. And the crash occurred in 2008, about four months before the President took office, and if you go back several hundred years, on average, when the financial system collapses, it takes longer for countries to get out of it, at least five years. So we'll be talking about how to speed it up in areas where that's occurred and in areas where you didn't have it, how to speed it up. Yes, I think there'll be a lot of good ideas. LAUER: Cynics are going to – listen to what you're saying right there, Mr. Clinton, and they're going to say, 'Five years, he's saying it's going to take four or five years. Conveniently that takes us right through this election and we should have patience.' And I know you're looking at history. CLINTON: Well, conveniently that's the truth. When the Japanese did it and they had a lot more stimulus spending than we did because they had more money, because they hadn't gone back – they didn't double the debt before it happened, as the previous administration in Congress did – it still took them ten years to get out of it because they didn't reform their banking system. I think the quickest thing we could do to move out of this would be to clear this mortgage debt more quickly. That is, the – everybody that's got an underwater mortgage where the mortgage is worth more than the house, either write the mortgage down or lengthening it out, if they still couldn't make the payment, give the people the option to convert it into rent and that to cover the taxes and utilities and the maintenance instead of dumping more houses on the market. There are lots of variations on that. If you did that and you cleaned up the banks' balance sheets, then I think there's enough money in the banks and in corporate treasuries to get this economy going again. We could beat the five-year period but would have to do something on the houses. LAUER: You talk about corporate treasuries. You sit down in your role these days and you meet with some of the biggest business leaders in the world and particularly in this country. By all accounts, businesses, corporations in this country are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash. CLINTON: That's correct. LAUER: And they're not spending it. They're not hiring people. When you talk to those leaders, what is the one reason they give you that they're afraid to spend that money and hire people? CLINTON: Well, first, they don't give me just one reason. They say demand is weak, they're not sure that if they do hire more people, the products they make will be sold. Most of them believe that we should have a more competitive tax system in America. No one complains about the price of labor. No one complains about the quality of labor. All the corporations that I talked to said the American workers are highly productive, they work like crazy, they're more flexible. They're – they like that. So what I think what we have to do is to find ways, sector by sector, to increase sales for them and to make our business taxes more competitive. There's some businesses that pay as little as 15% on their income and others that pay the full 35% and we need to level it out so everybody pays about the same. LAUER: You talk about increasing the markets and getting people to buy things, so let's talk about the average consumer, okay? You've got people out there hearing terms like 'double-dip recession,' that we're back in the dumps in the economy and the average consumer says this is a time to hunker down, 'I am going to cut to the bone. I'm not going to spend.' If you were still president, how would you convince the average consumer out there that they've got to help us by spending our way out of this recession? CLINTON: Well, first we can't completely spend our way out of the recession. The problem –
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