Politics of Globalism
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Kerry Comment Detracts From Message
CHARLESTON, W.Va. - The upbeat speech that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry delivered after winning the Illinois primary was perhaps his only bright spot during a rough and tumble campaign week.
The Massachusetts senator has come under orchestrated fire from his Republican opponents for claiming that some foreign leaders quietly back his White House bid and hope he defeats President Bush in November.
Republicans, including Bush on Tuesday, demanded that Kerry identify these leaders. Kerry declined.
"If you're going to make an accusation in the course of a presidential campaign, you ought to back it up with facts," Bush said under questioning at the White House. Vice President Dick Cheney also weighed in for the second straight day.
Last week, an open-mike comment in which Kerry described his GOP critics as "the most crooked ... lying group I've ever seen" led Republicans to call on him to apologize. Kerry refused to say he was sorry.
Every time Kerry was pressed to answer the charges, whether by Republicans or reporters, was time spent off his message that he's fighting for working families on bread-and-butter issues like jobs and health care.
"Obviously, any day that we're not talking about the sluggish economy is a day that John Kerry is not talking about what he wants to talk about," veteran Democratic consultant George Shelton said Tuesday. "It's preventing him from talking about what he wants to talk about."
Bush used the same tactic during the 2000 campaign, repeatedly forcing Al Gore to respond to criticism on various issues, from questions about the vice president's fund raising to the uproar over President Clinton's impeachment trial. A coordinated assault on those issues left Gore off balance for much of the campaign.
As Kerry campaigned in West Virginia on Tuesday, Bush's re-election campaign released a new television ad targeted to the state accusing Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, of voting against U.S. troops.
Shelton said the dispute over which foreign leaders said what to Kerry won't last long, and will almost certainly be replaced by another effort to keep him off message. Shelton said Kerry will have to learn to deal with it as he and Bush wrestle for control of the campaign's agenda.
"This doesn't have legs," Shelton said. "But next week there'll be something else."
On Wednesday, Republicans will attempt to put Kerry on defense on national security. In a speech to be delivered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, Vice President Dick Cheney will try to draw a contrast between Kerry and Bush on that issue. "The American people will have a clear choice in the election of 2004 — at least as clear as any since the election of 1984," Cheney says, according to an advance text of his speech.
Kerry was due in Washington on Wednesday to unveil his plan for a "bill of rights" for military families.
After winning the Illinois primary, in which he was practically uncontested, Kerry tried to make the most of the moment. He relished the victory, which his campaign said gave him enough delegates to claim the Democratic presidential nomination, before several thousand cheering backers in a state the party hopes to reclaim en route to winning back the White House. The Associated Press tally showed Kerry had amassed enough delegates by last Saturday to assure him the nomination.
Bush won West Virginia and its five electoral votes in the last campaign.
"We say thank you for putting us over the top in the delegate count and for helping us to achieve our goal — a nomination marked by unity and not division," said Kerry.
In West Virginia, Kerry tried to portray himself as a war hero in a state with 203,000 veterans, or 15.4 percent of its adult population. He brought along several members of swift boats he commanded during his decorated service in Vietnam.
But in its new television ad, the Bush campaign said Kerry was "wrong on defense" for not supporting bills that would have ensured troops had body armor and higher combat pay and given reservists and their families better health care.
"Few votes in Congress are as important as funding our troops at war. Though John Kerry voted in October of 2002 for military action in Iraq, he later voted against funding our soldiers," the ad says.
Kerry labeled the ad "another distortion."
After the speech in Washington, Kerry was flying to Ketchum, Idaho, to begin a five-day vacation.
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Administration pushes trade agenda
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration's top trade official outlined plans Tuesday to break down trade barriers around the world, pitching the benefits of free trade to lawmakers focused on job losses and election-year politics.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said his office, fresh from successful trade talks with five Central American countries, Australia and Morocco, will soon enter negotiations with Panama, several South American countries, Thailand and Bahrain.
"Recent U.S. trade agreements have cut hidden import taxes and saved every working family in America as much as $2,000 a year," Zoellick said in prepared remarks to the Senate Finance Committee. "Our new agreements could add more to these savings."
With the loss of American jobs to overseas competition a major election campaign theme, however, prospects that Congress would act on any trade agreement this year are not bright.
Implementing the pending agreements in Central America, Australia and Morocco "will require tough choices and political courage," said committee chairman Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. "Unfortunately, political courage is not always in endless supply," especially in an election year, he said.
Congress in the past several years has ratified several major trade pacts, including free trade agreements with Jordan, Singapore and Chile, and has given the president "fast track" authority to negotiate new agreements that Congress must vote on but cannot alter.
But Democrats in particular say defective trade agreements have contributed to the flight of jobs out of the country. "I would like to focus today on one issue, and that's jobs," said Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, top Democrat on the committee and a supporter of free trade. "I think the primary goal of our trade policy should be to keep and create jobs."
Baucus also questioned the direction of the USTR's negotiations, noting that it is proposing talks with Sri Lanka, which bought $143 million in U.S. goods last year, while neighboring India is taking U.S. service-sector jobs and in 2002 cost American companies $342 million in retail revenues from software piracy.
Lawmakers also urged the USTR to get tougher on China, with Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, accusing the Chinese of "egregious practices" of deliberately undervaluing their currency to reduce the prices of their goods by 15 percent to 40 percent.
America's trade deficit with China last year hit a record $124 billion, the highest imbalance ever recorded with any one country.
Zoellick said he was spending a significant amount of time on rampant piracy of intellectual property rights there, as well as on Chinese tax policies that work to the disadvantage of American exports of semiconductors and other goods. He also noted that U.S. exports to China have grown 75 percent over the past three years, and China has become a major consumer of U.S. electrical machinery and transportation and telecommunications equipment.
In addition to bilateral talks, Zoellick said, his office is working to advance negotiations among 34 Western Hemisphere nations to establish the world's largest free trade zone. The agency is also involved in the latest World Trade Organization round of talks to liberalize international trade, he said.
Wednesday, March 03, 2004
Bush Raises Cash for Senate GOP Members
WASHINGTON - President Bush met privately with the Senate Republican fund-raising committee's biggest donors at Majority Leader Bill Frist's home.
Bush spent about an hour and a half at the event Monday at the Washington home of Frist, the Senate's leader and a physician from Tennessee. The event raised an estimated $2.7 million.
The reception was for members of the National Republican Senatorial Committee's new "Majority Maker" program. Donors give $25,000 annually to join, the most an individual or political action committee can contribute to a party committee.
The president appearance comes as the NRSC gears up for the fall elections. The GOP hopes to expand its narrow majority in the Senate, which has 51 Republicans, 48 Democrats and one Democratic-leaning independent.
Fund raising by the NRSC and its Democratic counterpart so far in the 2003-04 election cycle reflects the closeness of their divide in the Senate. Like the GOP's other fund-raising committees, the NRSC has raised more than its Democratic rival, but its donation advantage over the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is the narrowest among the party committees.
The Republican Senate committee raised $29 million and its Democratic counterpart $24 million as of Feb. 1, the most recent figures available. The Republican committee began last month with $9.7 million on hand, compared with $2.6 million in bills to pay and $2.6 million in the bank for the DSCC.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Bush to Meet With New Georgia President
President Bush is playing host to the new president of Georgia at a White House meeting designed to support the young lawyer's drive to expand democracy, improve the economy and fight corruption in the former Soviet republic.
Elected in January with lopsided support, Mikhail Saakashvili said before seeing Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell that he was committed to resolving disputes with secessionists without force and to turning Georgia's government into "the most democratic government in Europe."
It is a tall order.
Social services and medical care collapsed and pensions plummeted or vanished before President Eduard Shevardnadze, a former Communist party chief and Soviet foreign minister who served as the new republic's president for 11 years, was forced by widespread street protests to resign last November.
With construction of an oil pipeline under way, and the promise of a surge of investments in about a year, Saakashvili, 36, appealed on Tuesday for money to tide his country over.
He said he had no doubt that his popularity would slip from its current heights, and "we must move swiftly to take advantage of political support."
Saakashvili said he knew "the values of freedom and democracy are not established by grants and loans."
Speaking at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, he said authorities would go after police who take bribes, and his government would not use force in trying to resolve differences with secessionist movements in various parts of Georgia.
Since taking office, Saakashvili has overseen the arrest of several ministers from Shevardnadze's government on corruption charges.
Last Friday, Georgian prosecutors boarded a plane that was to leave for Paris and arrested Shevardnadze's son-in-law, Gia Dzhokhtaberidze, on tax evasion charges.
The U.S.-educated Saakashvili, speaking in nearly flawless English, said he had told police not to spare Shevardnadze if reason arose to arrest him. He said Shevardnadze's family had become in the last four years the richest in the former Soviet republic. He said, however, if the former president were arrested, he would ask the Georgian parliament to grant amnesty.
Saakashvili has been criticized at home for how authorities arrest suspects without warning. He said Tuesday, "Corruption was so rampant we had to do so."
As popular as Saakashvili is at home, he has faced critics in other areas. Journalists from a major Georgian television station marched down the main avenue of Tbilisi, the capital, last week carrying a coffin they said represented the demise of a free press.
Saakashvili dismissed the criticism. Pointing to the Georgian camera crews that crammed the Massachusetts Avenue auditorium where he spoke, Saakashvili said with a broad smile that 50 percent of the country's journalists oppose him 50 percent of the time, and the other 50 percent oppose him all the time.
Friday, February 20, 2004
White House tries to defuse criticism on jobs report
The White House sought Thursday to defuse criticism of its economic policies in the wake of its apparent retreat from a report on jobs projections, an issue that Democrats have seized on this election year.
On the campaign trail, Democratic presidential hopefuls hammered the president over the flap generated by the report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers. And House Democratic leaders Thursday called on the president to explain his policies on job creation and the deficit.
President Bush, meanwhile, touted his stewardship of the economy, and he tried to focus the debate on taxes as he delivered a speech in Washington.
"When you hear them say, 'We're going to repeal the Bush tax cuts,' that means tax increase. That's what that is," Bush said. " 'I'm gonna raise your taxes' is what they're saying."
But Democrats honed in on the economic report, which projected 2.6 million new jobs this year. This week, however, various administration officials downplayed the significance of that number, and Bush himself declined to endorse the projection when asked about it Wednesday.
Treasury Secretary John Snow and Commerce Secretary Don Evans have "refused to back up the official prediction by the White House that the economy will add 2.6 million jobs this year," the Democratic letter said.
"The numbers you are debating represent the jobs of American workers. What you believe to be an intellectual debate among your Cabinet members has a real impact on the lives of middle-class American families nationwide. If you no longer believe your economic program will create 2.6 million additional jobs, Americans would like to know, how many will it create?" asked the letter.
It was signed by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, and several other Democrats in leadership positions.
Bush made no direct mention of the report in his comments Thursday, but he defended his approach to job creation and its focus on tax cuts.
"If you're interested in job creation, why not focus on the job creators?" he asked rhetorically. "So the tax relief was passed, not only to help individuals, but to help our small-business sector."
But the administration came in for some ridicule on the campaign trail.
Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic front-runner from Massachusetts, poked fun at the administration's handling of its own economic report.
"Just last week, the White House promised to create 2.6 million jobs this year," he said in Washington as he picked up the labor endorsement of the AFL-CIO. "But yesterday, George Bush said he couldn't be held responsible for knowing the number of new jobs, because he's not in charge of numbers. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it just doesn't take a lot of fuzzy math to count to zero."
The flap over the job projections marked the second time recently that the White House found itself on the defensive over the economy.
Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, raised eyebrows with his testimony last week before Congress that seemed to suggest the movement of U.S. jobs overseas was a good thing. White House officials have since disavowed any such suggestion.
At the White House, press secretary Scott McClellan stressed Bush's commitment to American workers.
"This president is focused on one thing, and that is creating as robust an environment as possible for job creation," McClellan said.
And Bush said it was up to Congress to work with him.
"Tax relief is working, factory orders are up, housing is strong, the unemployment rate is down from 6.3 percent last June to 5.6 percent in January. Things are positive, but there's more that Congress should to do keep momentum alive."
Bush reiterated his call for Congress to make permanent a series of tax cuts it has already passed.
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Peacekeeper killed in Afghanistan blast.
A Canadian peacekeeper has been killed and three others injured when explosives were detonated near their patrol.
An International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoy of soldiers was patrolling the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Tuesday when a bomber approached them and detonated explosives, said Afghan interior ministry official Aroun Assefi.
At least nine Afghan civilians were also injured in the attack. Kabul's deputy police chief Khalil Aminzada said the Afghans hurt were pedestrians. The bomber was killed in the attack which took place near a Canadian base on the southern outskirts of the city.
Canada has about 2000 soldiers in the 5700-strong multinational force, making it the largest contingent.
The ISAF troops from 18 different countries were deployed after the US-led 2001 campaign to topple the ruling Taliban.
Tuesday's was the second attack on foreign peacekeepers in Kabul since their deployment.
Last June, four German peacekeepers were killed and 31
wounded in a car bombing in Kabul.
In the most recent attack in the city, five Afghan
security officials were killed when a man they had detained
blew himself up near the city's airport.
Names of Palestinian prisoners released.
Israel has issued the names of Palestinian detainees set to be released as part of a prisoner swap deal with Lebanese resistance group Hizb Allah.
The names of 400 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails, some without trial or charge, were published on Tuesday.
The full list was posted on the prison service's website in order to allow for any last-minute appeals to the high court before the exchange, which is expected to take place on Thursday.
Under a German-mediated deal, Israel will release Palestinian, Lebanese and other Arab prisoners in exchange for Israeli Elhanan Tannenbaum and three Israeli soldiers, widely presumed to be dead.
But Hizb Allah Secretary General Sayyid Hasan Nasr Allah alluded that the soldiers might be alive.
Hizb Allah captured Tannenbaum, who the group says is a Mossad spy, and the soldiers in October 2000. Israel insists Tannenbaum is a businessman.
The resistance group spearheaded a campaign to oust Israeli forces from south Lebanon in May 2000 after a 22-year occupation.
Iranian influence
Meanwhile, officials and diplomats said Iran played a key role in the negotiations.
While considered a coup for Hizb Allah, the deal probably would not have concluded without the intervention of Iran which - in the words of German mediator Ernst Uhrlau - used all its "powers of persuasion."
Nasr Allah paid tribute to Tehran's "cooperation" in securing the deal.
"The Iranians helped things along. They could have asked us not to pursue the negotiations but they told us to do what we thought necessary," he said on Sunday.
Iran and Syria both give what they say is moral support to Hizb Allah. But Washington and Israel accuse Tehran and Damascus of financing and arming the group.
"There is no doubt that Iran used its influence with Hizb Allah and helped to unblock the negotiations by proposing a two-stage compromise," said one Western diplomat.
The first phase of the deal includes this week's prisoner exchange, the repatriation to Lebanon of 59 Arab fighters killed and maps of landmines Israel planted in south Lebanon.
In the second phase Israel will hand over Samir al-Qantar, the longest held Lebanese detainee, in exchange for concrete evidence on the fate of missing Israeli pilot Ron Arad, whose plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986 during the war.
Nasr Allah said he expected information about Arad and four Iranian diplomats who went missing and are presumed dead, to be available in two or three months.
He said a committee - which sources in Beirut said would include representatives from Germany, Hizb Allah, Iran and Israel -would be set up in Germany to monitor the second swap.
Media reports
"Iran not only provided moral support to Hizb Allah but played a direct and essential role in reaching an accord," said Lebanon's al-Nahar newspaper.
The paper said the deal was linked to diplomatic developments in Iran in recent months, notably an accord with Britain, France and Germany on the Islamic republic's nuclear activities.
The deal led to Iran last year signing an additional protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, allowing surprise visits of its nuclear facilities by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA.)
In Tehran, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi described the release of the Arab prisoners as a "great victory for the resistance movement and the Lebanese people and government."
Diplomats said Syria was also instrumental.
"It was in Syria's interest to act as conciliator and to demonstrate its good will at a time when it has announced its desire to resume negotiations with Israel and is under US pressure to end its support for Hizb Allah," said a Beirut-based diplomat.
Monday, January 26, 2004
Kay: No evidence Iraq stockpiled WMDs.
(CNN) -- Two days after resigning as the Bush administration's top weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay said Sunday that his group found no evidence Iraq had stockpiled unconventional weapons before the U.S.-led invasion in March.
He said U.S. intelligence services owe President Bush an explanation for having concluded that Iraq had.
"My summary view, based on what I've seen, is we're very unlikely to find large stockpiles of weapons," he said on National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition." "I don't think they exist."
It was the consensus among the intelligence agencies that Iraq had such weapons that led Bush to conclude that it posed an imminent threat that justified the U.S.-led invasion, Kay said.
"I actually think the intelligence community owes the president rather than the president owing the American people," he said.
"We have to remember that this view of Iraq was held during the Clinton administration and didn't change in the Bush administration," Kay said.
"It is not a political 'gotcha' issue. It is a serious issue of 'How you can come to a conclusion that is not matched in the future?'"
Other countries' intelligence agencies shared the U.S. conclusion that Iraq had stockpiled such weapons, though most disagreed with the United States about how best to respond.
Powell: Violations justified war
Asked if Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States at the time of the invasion, Kay said, "Based on the intelligence that existed, I think it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat."
Although his team concluded that Iraq did not possess large amounts of weapons of mass destruction ready for use, that does not necessarily mean it posed no imminent threat, he said. "That is a political judgment, not a technical judgment."
Secretary of State Colin Powell defended the administration's moves Sunday. "Military action was justified by Iraq's violation of 12 years of U.N. resolutions," he said in an interview with First Channel Russia during a visit to Moscow.
"Iraq had the intent to have weapons of mass destruction and they had previously used weapons of mass destruction. They had programs to develop such weapons," Powell said.
"And what we were trying to find out was what inventory they actually had, and we are still examining that question."
Saddam Hussein was given the opportunity to divulge what his country was doing but chose not to do so, which resulted in the U.S.-led campaign to oust him, Powell said.
"And the world is better off, the Iraqi people are better off, because Saddam Hussein is gone," Powell said. "And we will continue to make sure we find all elements of his weapons of mass destruction programs and whatever weapons there might be."
Powell made the Bush administration's case that Saddam's regime possessed such weapons in a presentation to the U.N. Security Council last year.
Other failures
The discovery that Iran and Libya had nuclear programs also appears to have caught intelligence agencies by surprise, Kay said.
The Iranian program was uncovered not by intelligence agencies but by Iranian defectors, he said.
Libya's program contained a number of international clues, such as a connection to Pakistan and plants in Malaysia. "It was, in many ways, the biggest surprise of all, and it was missed," Kay said.
Last June, when he was appointed to lead the U.S. effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Kay expressed confidence they would be found.
Despite his group's failure to unearth such weapons, those predictions have not embarrassed him, he said.
"They're coming back to haunt me in the sense of why could we all be so wrong? ... It's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information."
Kay said he would not submit a final report on his work in Iraq, since the task of searching for weapons will continue, led by Charles Duelfer, a longtime weapons inspector who replaces Kay as the new CIA special adviser. (Full story)
Despite not finding any WMD, Kay said his team found that the Iraqi senior leadership "had an intention to continue to pursue their WMD activities. That they, in fact, had a large number of WMD-related activities."
Kay predicted investigators would find that Iraqi scientists were "working on developing weapons or weapons concepts that they had not moved into actual production."
Kay alleges Syria connection
Kay also raised the possibility -- one he first discussed in a weekend interview with "The Sunday Telegraph" of London -- that clues about banned weapons programs might reside across Iraq's western border.
"There is ample evidence of movement to Syria before the war -- satellite photographs, reports on the ground of a constant stream of trucks, cars, rail traffic across the border. We simply don't know what was moved," Kay said.
But, he said, "the Syrian government there has shown absolutely no interest in helping us resolve this issue."
Kay acknowledged that the truth might never be revealed. Widespread looting in Baghdad after the invasion destroyed many government records. "There's always going to be unresolved ambiguity here."
Kay said he resigned after his resources were diverted to other work from the exclusive goal of searching for unconventional weapons.
"It's very hard to run organizations with multiple missions, particularly if one half is controlled by the Defense Department and one half is controlled by the CIA. ... I thought that was the wrong thing to do."
Kay said he would like to write a book dealing with the issue of proliferation and intelligence.
"I'm not doing a Paul O'Neill," he said, referring to the former Bush treasury secretary who was the primary source for "The Price of Loyalty," a recent book that said the Bush administration was planning to invade Iraq almost from the time Bush took office.
Bush Seeks Medical Malpractice Award Caps.
WASHINGTON - President Bush is trying to resuscitate a measure to place nationwide caps on medical malpractice awards, a move he has made a centerpiece of his election-year focus on health care.
Bush argues that a nationwide ceiling would drive down soaring health care costs and save taxpayers money. Senate Democrats stalled the bill last year, arguing it would help the insurance industry, not patients.
In response, the president was issuing a new appeal for the legislation Monday in Little Rock, Ark.
With 43 million Americans uninsured, Bush included in his State of the Union address a five-pillared strategy for confronting the issue — most of them repackaged ideas he had previously advocated.
Facing record budget deficits, Bush chose measures that would require little government spending:
Setting medical malpractice limits; helping small businesses to band together to negotiate for lower insurance rates; offering refundable tax credits to help low-income Americans purchase health insurance; creating tax incentives to encourage the use of health savings accounts, which would let people save money for future medical expenses tax-free; and harnessing medical technology to prevent medical errors.
Medical malpractice caps are a favorite remedy of Republicans who seek to tackle rising health care costs.
"We can help control rising health care costs by cutting down on frivolous lawsuits against doctors and hospitals," Bush said in his weekly radio address Saturday.
"Frivolous lawsuits have dramatically increased the cost of medical liability premiums. These costs are passed on to patients in higher bills. These costs are driving doctors from important work, such as delivering babies, and these costs are driving some doctors out of medicine entirely."
As governor of Texas, Bush was a fierce guardian of states' rights, and he long fought against federal mandates on the states.
But nationwide caps on malpractice awards are merited, he has said, because high health care costs are stifling medical innovation, driving doctors out of the business and pricing patients out of insurance.
The legislation that died last year in Congress would have limited the pain and suffering portion of malpractice awards to $250,000 and punitive damages to either the same amount or twice the patient's actual financial loss. The bill, intended to supersede state laws, also would curtail lawyers' fees and patients' ability to file suit over old cases.
White House spokesman Taylor Gross said Bush chose Arkansas as the forum for his speech because the state Legislature last year enacted a limited medical liability cap similar to the one Bush seeks to impose nationwide.
But there was a whiff of politics in the air with Bush's new campaign on malpractice awards.
The effort is an implicit jab at Sen. John Edwards, a Democratic presidential candidate who made millions as a lawyer trying personal injury lawsuits against big companies. He finished a surprising second in the Iowa caucuses last week.
Edwards has said malpractice premiums are not the problem, and contended lawsuits against doctors are not the most significant factor in rising insurance costs.
Moreover, Bush is eager to win Arkansas again — a traditionally Democratic state that he narrowly won in 2000 and is the home of another Democratic contender, Wesley Clark.
The president's schedule this week bears the stamp of a campaign that is aggressively up and running.
On Thursday, Bush travels to New Hampshire, another state he narrowly captured in 2000. It also is where voters have been listening to a steady drumbeat of attacks on him from Democrats before Tuesday's presidential primary.
On Saturday, Bush makes his 24th visit to Pennsylvania, a state with a rich trove of 21 electoral votes — and one he lost in 2000.
