Obama and Biden promise but others deliver

Obama and Biden are promising that they "will embrace the Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty and hunger around the world in half by 2015, and they will double our foreign assistance to achieve that goal. This will help the world's weakest states build healthy and educated communities, reduce poverty, develop markets, and generate wealth."
So what will that mean?
An increase in foreign aid as a percentage of US Gross National Product from around 22% of one per cent to 44% of one per cent?
With most of it targeted to flow into Iraq or Afghanistan and out again in the pockets of American corporations?
Well whoopee.......the US might just retain its position as second last within DAC for this statistic.

Think we Aussies with a population of only about 21 million do a bit better than that in percentage terms.
According to the OECD:
"Australia has made substantial, positive changes to its aid programme since 2004, reinforcing its focus on reducing poverty, on promoting the MDGs, and completely untying its aid programme. Its aid volume was USD 2.67 billion in 2007, representing 0.32% of its gross national income (GNI). Australia has committed to contributing 0.5% of its GNI to official development assistance (ODA) by 2015/16."

Of course the sheer size of the American economy up to 2007 has meant that the US was at, or near, the top of the table for total of actual dollars contributed when you include its debt forgiveness to countries it unlawfully invaded, politically destabilised etc., and its low-interest loans.

Aid at a Glance charts for all donor countries are found here.

John Howard and his great and powerful friend

Come 20 January next year George Dubbya ceases to be US President and John Howard quite literally loses his 'great and powerful' friend.

Tectonic plates are already shifting across the political arena and last week the US Senate released a summary of the Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry Into The Treatment of Detainees In US Custody, which pointed a finger squarely at the Bush Administration and Donald Rumsfeld for encouraging and approving mistreatment and abuse of Guantanamo Bay prisoners and others through the redefinition of torture, suspension of the Geneva Convention and specific interrogation instructions.

How long before John Howard's role in refusing to support international law and failing to support Australian citizens caught as 'enemy combatants' comes to light in yet more detail?

With most of his allies gone from office or otherwise neutered, will the truth about Howard's time as an Australian prime minister finally come to light?

Can the world dig faster than Little Johnnie can backfill?

Summary of Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry Into The Treatment of Detainees In US Custody here.

Everyone's lining up for a George Dubbya 'closing down sale' presidential pardon

I've always found US presidential pardons a fascinating subject - Jimmy Hoffa, Richard Nixon, Deep Throat, Caspar Weinberger, Marc Rich and Patty Hearst received them to name just a few.
Outgoing presidents often hand out these pardons as they pack their bags to leave the White House for the last time.
Already George Dubbya is getting a request or two according to media reports and Conrad Black, Michael Milken, Marion Jones, John Michael Lindh, Scooter Libby have all been mentioned as possible lucky dip winners.

Bill Clinton is often accused of having been profligate in handing out 140 'going away' pardons on his final day.
Including one for his brother Roger with the convenient cover of "aiding and assisting in the preparation and filing of a false corporate tax return", which is not a good look in Hillary's bid for Secretary of State in the Obama Administration.

But David Latt at The Huffington Post wonders if Bush may have to go even further and pardon virtually everyone who worked for him given the constitutional and human rights excesses during his tenure and concludes:
"So, the question of the hour is: Who will President Bush pardon before he leaves office? Will he put himself at the top of the list?"

"We'll nuke Poland" says Russian general. Yeah? Well I'll tell my mother on you!

It seems that Russia has entered a silly season all of its own, if this piece below is any indication.

Can't say that I am all that impressed by what has to be a barely credible veiled threat to use nuclear weapons by Анатолий Алексеевич Ноговицын. [Pic from U.K. Telegraph]

If it looks like a nong, and talks like a nong - then it's a nong as far as I'm concerned.
Don't think the Kremlin was too happy with Anatoly either. Tsk. tsk.

"Poland agreed on Thursday to host elements of a US global anti-missile system after Washington agreed to boost Poland's own military air defences.

"The USA is engaged in an anti-missile defence for its own government, and not for Poland. And Poland, in deploying (elements of the system) opens itself to a military strike. That is 100 percent," Interfax quoted Nogovitsyn as saying.

Nogovitsyn said Russia allows nuclear weapons to be used in circumstances defined by its current security doctrine.

The Russian government revamped its national security doctrine in 2000, broadening the range of conflicts in which nuclear weapons could be used."

Why Anatoly thinks nukes are needed is not all that obvious when Russia can just walk in and bash down the bedroom door anywhere it likes, courtesy of Bush, Blair and Howard's previous comprehensive trashing of international law.

There is absolutely no need for the Russian Government to pretend it has kultury when these three amigos publicly turned barbarian.

One thing's for sure - this is going to make 'fitness to lead' a bigger question in the U.S. presidential race, if Russia continues to throw its military might around and threatens to nuke the Ukraine as well if it signs on the dotted line for the U.S. anti-missile network.

Slate's interactive guide: Who in the Bush administration broke the law, and who could be prosecuted?

A little 'light' Sunday reading from Slate online magazine last Thursday.

What kind of lawbreaking has happened on President Bush's watch, among his top and mid-level advisers? What hasn't? Who is implicated and who is not? Despite the lack of or*l s*x with an intern, the past seven years have yielded an embarrassment of riches when it comes to potentially prosecutable crimes. We have tried to sketch out a map of who did what and when, with links to the evidence that is public and notes about what we may learn from investigations that are still pending....

Click here for the diagram, and here for a text-only version.

A cynical George Bush advances US interests in the face of global food shortages

Two days ago US President George Bush announced increased food aid to assist with a global food shortage, partly caused by increased dedication of land to biofuel crops world-wide and in America $5 billion annually in domestic subsidies for bio-fuel production.

 

THE PRESIDENT:  In recent weeks, many have expressed concern about the significant increase in global food prices.  And I share this concern.  In some of the world's poorest nations, rising prices can mean the difference between getting a daily meal and going without food.

To address this problem, two weeks ago my administration announced that about $200 million in emergency food aid would be made available through a program at the Agriculture Department called the Emerson Trust.  But that's just the beginning of our efforts.  I think more needs to be done, and so today I am calling on Congress to provide an additional $770 million to support food aid and development programs.  Together, this amounts to nearly $1 billion in new funds to bolster global food security.  And with other food security assistance programs already in place, we're now projecting to spend nearly -- that we will spend nearly $5 billion in 2008 and 2009 to fight global hunger.

 

However this aid appears to come with an US export promotion component, increased pressure to allow US free trade across the globe, a push for abolition of tariffs and wider acceptance of GMO technology and crops.

 

The Emerson Trust of course deals only in US commodities, so that most of the extra $200 million will not boost the domestic economies of struggling countries but will flow back to benefit American agriculture.

As the trust also appears to use commodity releases to compensate for food crop shortages in the US, it would seem that its own large food bank may contribute to the global problem in the first place.

 

The US Government Accountability Office was critical in 2007 of the wasteful nature of the US food aid program and the fact that non-government organisations receiving American grain act as grain traders in poorer countries and sell-on the scarce resource to fund their own programs.

Over the past four years at least $500 million worth of food aid has been sold-on in this way.