I have had some encounters lately in the private and public sectors that are only screaming one thing: "Not everyone is on board with getting the moeny to the right place(s).
I have recently checked on the recovery package, "followed the money" so to speak in helping myself get some simple service recently:
Get help at a local education advising office: the service was crap, it feels like the advisors were not as willing or readily prepared to not approach bu give the full assistance that may be required from someone like myself. Furthermore, it seems that the library in question i went to was going through some renovations, including the department i visited there (TERI). They seem very short of resources and i am not sure that the governor here cutting on certain programs' funding should affect that particular office as much.
That is the one thing i notice.
The second instance was checking the site grants.gov to check on the recovery money and how it was being made available to the average citizens. There is very little known about those grants, nothing regarding those grants and possibilities are known to the average public; i wonder why the local officials are not doing their parts to make those things known.
There are at least 4 Billion available to Social Security Income, and yet the complaints about poor individuals being denied fair customer care and proper resolutions to the setbacks int heir benefits are escalating.
I would love to be made an investigator to report on those things that i am noticing around me. I bet you there are probably worse in RED state.
The people have no access to the money, it is in fact being misused and misdirected.
No wonder the unemployment rate is not decreasing but instead going off the roof. I feel as though a lot more can be done. I think that the administration should consider setting up an investigative review committee to go about "following the money" and requesting that reports be sent or viewed by the end of this summer.
All this, if i understand politics well are made so the president and the administration look bad; as well as those of us who voted for him and chose to trust in his candor and good judgment. I hate to say it, but there may be a conspiracy out there to slow down things....
What do you think? Because i don't think that all this is necessarily related to the likes of Maddoff and those like him in the banking industry who have abused the system plenty...It goes also to those who have been entrusted to make sure that the package goes through smoothly and that jobs are created, that small businesses are easily created, and that the states' legislatures are held accountable for their actions or lack thereof of such.
+Apologies for typos...Hope to have gotten the point across!+
ESPECIALLY NOW:
http://www.hbo.com/films/recount/
“The time to fix our broken immigration system is now… We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace… But for reform to work, we also must respond to what pulls people to America… Where we can reunite families, we should. Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with the skills our economy needs, we should”
— Barack Obama, Statement on U.S. Senate Floor, May 23, 2007
The immigration department has several times misplaced my information, my paperworks went travelling from one of their non-supervised centers to another while i was crying myself to bed for years, wondering if my dreams will ever come alive. I came here with a purpose from the Ivory Coast, but because of the delay and disorganization in the system that prevented me from getting jobs and promotions, ways or financial aid to school, proper and steady housing. I have had to reconsider my dreams, abandon them for a while to result to the streets and vagabonding for a little before i could get my foot in the door somewhere; it wouldn't have happened (finally getting heard and have my case be looked at) in a segregated environment such as in MA where i reside, without exercising some political and annoying tactics and pressure to make this old and increasingly xenophobic System yield somewhat and give me what i paid for and what is rightfully my right as someone who has, in the face of all odds thus far, meant to move forth and progress in life for my sake and the sake of the family i left behind or decide to have here.
I believe that Barack and Biden's governing can change this corrupt and corporate-icized system once and for all to keep tab on the likes of new immigrants like myself who still come here through the legal and advised procedure, pay a lot of money to get through and yet get our documents and lives messed with.
I trust this man, not because he is a black or biracial man, but because he has the decency and the right approach to salvage this country from its pitiful state and image throughout the world. Someone like McCain will make you and i suffer and make nothing of the middle class; but rather cater to the right wing lobbies and corporations with no humanitarian bones but money and supreme domination on all levels on the brains!
THAT'S WHY I CHOOSE OBAMA! THE WORLD CHOOSES OBAMA AND BIDEN
Koré
Whether the surge worked or not, admitting it or not is not the main issue here. As a matter of fact, it's lame excuse and deviation from what is to be seriously and openly discussed right now; it is also politically retarded, yet of course coming from the GOP because there is nothing else to jump on. It is easier to brainwash the masses with some typical non-factual, almost MTV reality TV like fetched paraphrases and rhetoric that serve to hide there are nowhere about progress and betterment for the majority of the people of this country-but for the 10% on top, which is a Bush method and GOP main concern, an old Conservative republican strategy that we the people should not allow ourselves to be fooled or distracted by.
Hillary defends lobbyists, opens doors for rivals By: Ben Smith August 5, 2007 09:04 AM EST
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton offered an unusual defense (video link courtesy Breitbart.tv) of a hated Washington insider caste -- lobbyists -- before an audience of political outsiders in Chicago Saturday, drawing boos from the audience at the YearlyKos Convention and offering an opening to her rivals. “A lot of those lobbyists, whether you like it or not, represent real Americans,” the New York senator said in defense of her decision to accept campaign contributions from lobbyists. “They represent nurses, they represent social workers, yes, they represent corporations that employ a lot of people.” “I don’t think, based on my 35 years of fighting for what I believe in, I don’t think anybody seriously believes I’m going to be influenced by a lobbyist,” Clinton said. Clinton spoke in response to a challenge from former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards to his Democratic rivals to stop taking contributions from federal lobbyists.
It was a popular suggestion at a convention of bloggers and liberal activists for whom the central conflict, Daily Kos blog founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga told reporters, is less ideological than between insiders and outsiders -- between those who the Netroots believe too readily accommodated President Bush and those willing to fight him and Washington's entrenched interests. Clinton’s defense of lobbyists may have aimed at adding nuance to a debate in which Edwards and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama have cast federal lobbyists as dangerous influence peddlers while continuing to take money from corporate executives and state lobbyists.
But instead, it seemed to solidify the perception of Clinton as a Washington establishment figure in a year when Democrats are eager for change (Roger Simon has a different view). Her words drew jeers from the audience and invited sharp responses from Edwards and Obama. “They are not spending that just because they are contributing to the public interest,” Obama said of the health care lobby, a sarcastic rejoinder to Clinton that brought the crowd of about 1,000 bloggers and liberal activists to their feet. Edwards asked, mockingly, for a show of hands. “How many people in this room have a Washington lobbyist working for you?” he asked. Asked after the debate about Clinton’s kind words for lobbyists, her chief spokesman, Howard Wolfson, didn’t echo the defense but instead noted that Obama and Edwards each take other forms of corporate money. “Every campaign will make a different decision. We made ours,” he said, noting that Clinton -- like the other Democrats -- supports public financing for presidential campaigns. Obama’s advisers, however, were jubilant, joking with reporters about how quickly they would be able to turn her words into a television ad. “I can’t say I’ve ever heard a more fulsome defense of lobbyists before,” deadpanned Obama’s main adviser, David Axelrod. “It certainly stood out.” Those candidates, along with Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, met at the Chicago Convention Center for the second-annual YearlyKos Convention of the community that has evolved around the liberal blog Daily Kos. Much of the passion in the debate, and at the conference, turned on domestic and local issues, and on issues of specific importance to bloggers. Dodd, for instance, drew applause for attacking Fox News and the chief of its parent company, Rupert Murdoch. And the candidates won applause for promising to retain a blogger in the White House. But the debate wended along largely familiar lines until moderator Matt Bai raised Edwards’ challenge to the other candidates and the Democratic Party to reject contributions from “Washington lobbyists,” a broad group increasingly viewed as powerful and corrupt in the wake of the corruption conviction of superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. He cast his refusal to take lobbyists’ donations as part of his broader fight against “special interests.” “They are not going to give away their power voluntarily,” he said of American corporations, and he praised Obama for also refusing to take money from lobbyists. “I’m proud of him for that,” he said of Obama. Clinton's defensive response was met immediately on the Daily Kos comments thread with derision. “Yikes, Clinton’s lobbyist answer was ugly,” one commenter wrote under the name “speck tater.” “Just what America longs for -- business as usual in Washington, D.C.,” wrote another under the name Joe McGinniss Jr. Clinton did have her blogospheric defenders, including one writing under the name “prodigal.” “Don't entirely agree with her, but she's gutsy,” the commenter wrote.
See Also: Roger Simon's column -- Hillary booed (but only twice)
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After the Potomac Primary, Virginia is the new Massachusetts and Texas is the new Florida. Barack Obama claimed a “Chesapeake Sweep,” winning all three primaries—Maryland, the District of Columbia and Virginia—by decisive margins. Hillary Clinton, whose campaign conceded these, is betting the house on the forthcoming delegate-rich primaries of Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, with no campaign stops announced for next week’s voting states, Wisconsin and Hawaii.
As Kosovo declares its independence, we speak to two people who have closely followed the situation in the Balkans. Samantha Power wrote extensively about Bosnia and Kosovo in her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize. Jeremy Scahill is an independent journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent. He covered the NATO bombings of Kosovo and Yugoslavia for Democracy Now! in 1999. [includes rush transcript]
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Guests:
Samantha Power, Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy, based at Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She wrote extensively about Bosnia and Kosovo in her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize. Her new book is Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World.
Jeremy Scahill, independent journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent. He covered the NATO bombings of Kosovo and Yugoslavia for Democracy Now! in 1999. He is author of the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
AMY GOODMAN: [inaudible] extensively about, well, the background to all of this, but with the 200,000, perhaps a half-a-million, protesters rallying against Kosovo’s declaration of independence, can you explain what you feel is going on here?
SAMANTHA POWER: Well, Kosovo’s status has been frozen for the last nine years. It hasn’t gotten sufficient international attention. The world is polarized—it’s no secret—and to some degree, the polarization between the United States, on the one hand, or perhaps the West and the rest, you might even say, is playing itself out here. I think while you would certainly see protest in Serbia, what has given fuel to those protests is the knowledge that Russia stands behind them from afar, that Greece even stands behind them from afar. I was just watching the footage, and there were the flags of both Serbia, Russia and Greece. That is going to embolden people there.
And I’m not sure Putin is serious. I don’t think he’s going to put anything where his mouth is at present. He’s threatening to recognize all kinds of other autonomous movements around the world in retaliation.
But there’s no question that it’s both incredibly important for the fate of Serbs living within Kosovo that minority rights are protected, that we actually start to focus on the welfare of people who live in Kosovo, that the protests are diffused and somehow the Serbian people are given a path to some kind of integration into the West to end this kind of isolation and exclusionism that’s been going on, because it’s just—there’s so many people left out in Serbia, but moreover that we get to the structural issues in the international system, such that people don’t start threatening to recognize secession movements all over the world.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re an adviser to Barack Obama, in addition to having just published another book, but I wanted to play for you Hillary Clinton’s comments last night in the debate, at the Democratic presidential debate in Austin, when she brought up the issue of Kosovo. This is what she had to say.
SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: I’ve supported the independence of Kosovo, because I think it is imperative that in the heart of Europe we continue to promote independence and democracy, and I would be moving very aggressively to hold the Serbian government responsible with their security forces to protect our embassy. Under international law, they should be doing that.
AMY GOODMAN: Samantha Power, your response?
SAMANTHA POWER: Well, I just think it’s one thing—I mean, on some level, I agree. I think that if there wasn’t violence in Serbia today because of the declaration of independence, there would be violence in Kosovo today because the Albanians were literally just recoiling under international occupation, I mean, ultimately. So we were sort of in a lose-lose situation once it got to this point. And the tragedy is that the nine years weren’t used to do more to actually sort of deepen the economic ties and deepen the minority rights protections and so forth in Kosovo and that it has come to this. But I think that one has to be very careful not to think about Kosovo a la carte, and, to some degree, this sort of “I’m going to stampede ahead” and “We’re going to recognize this” and, you know, “The Serbs are responsible yet again”—I mean, that kind of implication probably isn’t going to do the people of Serbia any favors in the long term. We’ve really got to start to think about integration and not simply denunciation.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Jeremy, I’d like to ask you, you covered the original US-led NATO bombings in that region years ago, and it was raised then as sort of an example of humanitarian intervention that worked. And here we are a decade later, and we still have major, major divisions and problems in the region. Your perspective, as you look at this new upsurge of problems?
JEREMY SCAHILL: I find it very interesting that the Bush administration is talking about international law and how international law needs to be upheld for the protection of the US embassy. That certainly is true, but notice the selectivity of when the Bush administration chooses to recognize that there actually is international law. I mean, this is an administration that refuses to support any kind of an effective and independent international criminal court, preferring to support these sort of ad hoc tribunals, which have been used against Yugoslavia and certainly with Rwanda.
In the case of Hillary Clinton, what’s particularly interesting is that she and her advisers, which include many of the key figures involved with the original bombing of Yugoslavia and, in fact, the architects of much of US policy in the 1990s toward Yugoslavia, people like Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke, that Clinton holds this up as a sort of successful US foreign policy or international action.
And I think it’s important to remember that this declaration of independence from Kosovo was immediately supported by the Bush administration and many powerful countries in the world. I was recalling during the 2000 elections in the United States, being in Serbia and people joking that the worst thing that could happen to us is that Al Gore would be president, because then we’ll have the Democrats continuing to focus on us, and if Bush is president, he’ll ignore us. And, well, of course, Bush immediately recognized Kosovo, and that sort of seals the deal, in a sense.
But it’s important to remember how we got to this point. I mean, Samantha was talking a little bit about the broader context here. The fact is that this was sort of Clinton’s Iraq, in a way. He bombed Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days with no United Nations mandate. I was at the UN the night that it began, and Kofi Annan was sort of beside himself that the action had been taken so swiftly, this military action, seventy-eight days of bombing of Yugoslavia under the auspices of NATO.
Wesley Clark was the commander of those operations, the Supreme Allied Commander. They bombed a Serbian television station, killing sixteen media workers; some of them were media workers, some of them were makeup artists, others were engineers. They directly targeted passenger trains and then fabricated a video afterwards to make it seem as though it was a split-second decision. They killed thousands of civilians.
And the fact was that the exaggerations of what was happening in Kosovo by William Cohen, the Defense Secretary at the time, who talked about a million missing people—then it was scaled back to 100,000, then 50,000, then 10,000, and now the official number is that there were 2,700 people that were killed, and there’s been no determination of their ethnicity. Now, I can tell you from being on the ground in Kosovo that some of the worst violence that occurred, slaughtering of Albanians, happened after the NATO bombing began. And the fact was that the US sabotaged the work of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in the weeks leading up to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
And I think that what we have to understand here is that this is where the sort of liberals, like Hillary Clinton, come together with the neocons, because there are a lot of similarities between what happened in Yugoslavia and what happened in Iraq, with the lead-up to the war, the disregard for international law or international consensus, and then the outright killing of civilians under the auspices of a humanitarian intervention.
AMY GOODMAN: Samantha Power, your response? And you’re saying Barack Obama isn’t that different on this issue than Hillary Clinton in his attitude to what has happened.
SAMANTHA POWER: Well, I think he feels like it has come to this point, and, as I said, there was going to be major violence in Kosovo if the status of the province was left untended to.
I do have a different perspective from Jeremy from that period, as one who spent time in Kosovo in advance of the NATO bombing and wondered what on earth was going to be the fate of those people if the Serbian regime remained in power, and disagree with some of the specific facts of what he said about what actually happened during the bombing.
But I think the important fact is that we reveal, over time—in academia, one talks about revealed preferences, revealed agendas. If we could put the people of Kosovo finally at the centerpiece of our thinking about what to do about the region, or the people of Serbia, for that matter, I mean, whatever the motives are for getting involved, whatever happened back in 1999—and I’m not saying we should brush it under the rug, by any means—but what is revealed again and again is when we pay attention to these kind of places, it’s a spasm, and it’s usually for some combination of national—something to do with national interest. At that time, it was probably NATO credibility. But I have to say, if it weren’t for the atrocities against the Kosovo Albanians, there would not have been an intervention. It wasn’t merely about NATO credibility. You don’t just go bomb gratuitously—and I recognize that I’m probably in the majority at this table in believing this to be true.
But having gone in, you had a responsibility to the province, you had a responsibility to the Serbian minority. And what happened is we got involved and then turned our attention elsewhere. And Bush, in coming into office, pulled US troops out of Kosovo, basically said, “This isn’t my problem,” and then started to pay attention at the moment we recognized Kosovo’s independence. That’s not the way you go. You don’t sort of spasm here, spasm there. It’s going to produce this kind of turbulence and this kind of violence.
JEREMY SCAHILL: What the United States did, though, right after NATO forces entered Yugoslavia is they brought in some high-profile thugs and criminals, people like Agim Ceku, who became the commander, the military commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army. This was a man who was a war criminal from the war in Bosnia when he served in the Croatian military. He was trained by a US mercenary company called Military Professional Resources Incorporated. He was the guy that the United States was basically bolstering to become the new head of the Kosovo army, and it’s quite interesting that that man is a war criminal.
And the fact is that Camp Bondsteel is of tremendous, significant importance, significance, to the United States for geopolitical reasons, and I think that’s one of the reasons why Bush moved so swiftly to support the independence of Kosovo, is that the government in Pristina is very easy to manipulate. The government in Belgrade, that’s a tougher story. Vojislav Kostunica, who’s one of the main political figures, the prime minister of the country, is a fairly rightwing isolationist and I don’t think would be too happy about a US military base operating on Serbian soil.
But, you know, in response to some of what Samantha was saying, in the 1990s, the worst humanitarian crises in the world, certainly Rwanda and other African nations, certainly in Europe, but Iraq—I mean, where is the label of genocide for the US policy toward Iraq? It was Bill Clinton who initiated the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam against Iraq under the guise of humanitarian intervention in the north and south of that country, the sanctions killing hundreds of thousands of people. I mean, we have had one of the greatest mass slaughters in history, in modern history, in Iraq, going from 1990 to the present, and yet everyone talks about this as though it’s not genocide, as though it’s not part of that bigger picture. Clinton selling weapons to the Turks to slaughter the Kurds—I mean, there were all sorts of horrific things happening in the world. And it’s the selectivity of US foreign policy that I think is really outrageous. It’s not that no one should do anything about it; it’s that the Iraqis—it’s sort of, you know, good victims, bad victims.
AMY GOODMAN: Samantha Power?
SAMANTHA POWER: Where does one start? I mean, I would just like to know—I guess Jeremy just asked—the question is, since you’ve spent so much time there, at the moment that we’re at now, what do we do, in fact? I mean, are you suggesting that then basically the Serbian—the Kosovars should become part of Serbia? I mean, I felt like we hit a stalemate, and something had to budge. There was going to be violence in Kosovo. And I, again, don’t mean to brush all the crimes of American foreign policy under the rug, and I’ve written extensively also about sanctions and the toll of sanctions and so forth in Iraq. But just to stick to this moment—
JEREMY SCAHILL: But is that genocide, according to you?
SAMANTHA POWER: No, but we can talk about that. I don’t think the Clinton administration set out to deliberately destroy the Iraqi people as such.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Oh, I totally disagree. But what Madeleine Albright said, it was worth the price, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi victims of US policy.
SAMANTHA POWER: So can I just ask: so what exactly do we do now in terms of Kosovo, as one who has spent a lot of time there?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, now, I think we have a very serious problem, because I think, and as Professor Robert Hayden from the University of Pittsburgh pointed out last night, who of course is fluent in Serbian, spent a lot of time there and is a specialist in international law, there could have been some kind of a negotiated border agreement, I think, where the Serbs would have been guaranteed protection. I mean, I was talking to sources in Serbia last night who said that now the Serbian military is actually engaging in incursions into the northern part of Kosovo. This could potentially be a very serious issue.
And I think that even if we look at it from the most mainstream political perspective, it was unwise for the US to come in so swiftly without giving the Serbian government an opportunity to deal with the safety of the Serbs in Mitrovica and in some of those border areas. And I think, internally in Serbia now, one of the reasons we’re seeing so much protest is that the Milosevic government had a despicable policy toward refugees from all of the various former Yugoslav republics who found themselves in Serbia. And you have literally hundreds of thousands of Serbs who are sort of left without a place to go and don’t have full rights in Serbia. I just think it was very poor diplomacy on the part of the Bush administration to do this so swiftly, and I think it raises serious questions about what the US agenda there is. So we have a very serious international crisis there right now.
SAMANTHA POWER: I just think to call it “swift,” when for nine years Kosovo’s status has been hanging in limbo, is not right. And part of the issue is what—even stipulating everything you said about NATO bombing, what exactly do you do then about a province that is hanging by a thread where you have a Serbian minority? I mean, one of the things that I think we don’t talk near enough about is that there are no takers for the demand that monitors be put into Kosovo. You don’t see European governments, you don’t see other international governments around, you don’t see people stepping up to say, you know, “I prefer to do more than simply denounce George Bush; I’d actually like to help the Serbian minority in Kosovo.” Those minority rights protections have been in play for two years. The Serbian government wasn’t interested in negotiating and being a part of anything that would constitute a compromise in terms of Kosovo’s future.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Is your sense that the rush or the quick movement of the Bush administration to support this independence is in some way effected also by the continuing tensions between the United States and the rest of the Muslim world, that this is a—because I would assume that in other parts of the Muslim world, there’s support for this—for Kosovo independence?
SAMANTHA POWER: Can we just push back a little on this idea of swiftness, again, as I wasn’t very articulate just now? But there has been a process overseen by the United Nations by Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish prime minister [president], for I think now going on three years, as basically an effort to do this peaceably. I don’t see how there was ever going to be a way to get out of this bind without offending either Serbia or the ethnic Albanians and either stemming violence in Serbia or stemming violence in Kosovo. But whether there could have been a compromise or not, it was an international diplomat, who has the respect—allegedly, anyway—of both sides, who tried try to come up with a solution which would have protected the Serbian minority and would have protected hopefully ethnic Albanians, as well. That was rejected. There were no negotiations that were accepted by Serbia. Then, at a certain point, the Albanians said, OK, after three years, we’re going to declare independence, or we’re going—this is going to explode. Now, they don’t care about the Serbian minority at all. They’d just assume the Serbs be cleansed, I couldn’t agree with Jeremy more.
But the idea that this is swift, what it is is a swift response to the declaration of independence in the hopes, almost, that it will just go away, that if you could just get enough countries within the UN to recognize this independence, then maybe that will—cooler heads will prevail. And the irony of what happened yesterday in Belgrade is there’s some chance that perhaps the perverse counter-effect to the violence is that maybe in Serbia this will actually—because of the fear of thuggery and so forth, that tempers will abate. But I’m just trying to think about how to go forward in an impossible situation where Kosovo is also now sadly the playground for great powers, as it has been arguably for a very long time, rather than a place where people are actually focusing on the welfare of the people in peril.
JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, but what I do think is of particular concern to people in this country is when Hillary Clinton holds this up as a success. I mean, did you support, you know, the total sabotage of diplomacy at Rambouillet, when the United States put forward an occupation agreement that said that NATO ships and vessels and troops would enjoy free and unrestricted access throughout all of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo, and then said, “Oh, Milosevic rejected peace”? The reality was that Albright and Holbrooke delivered basically a document that no sovereign country on earth would have signed, and it was a setup. It was an occupation agreement that said immunity for US troops traveling around. I mean, this is how the Democrats and Republicans come together in their foreign policy. I mean, this is the Hillary Clinton-George Bush alliance. This is how international diplomacy is waged: through bombs.
SAMANTHA POWER: So Kofi Annan, who you invoked earlier, gave a very good speech in the middle of the NATO war, which was: I don’t want to live in a world where countries like the United States can just trample over the UN Security Council, as you alluded to earlier in terms of both Kosovo and Iraq. I also don’t want to live in a world where a government can commit massacres with impunity. Kofi Annan was much more torn—
JEREMY SCAHILL: As Clinton did in Iraq—
SAMANTHA POWER: If I may—
JEREMY SCAHILL: —and Bush is doing in Iraq.
SAMANTHA POWER: If I may—Kofi Annan was hugely torn about the Kosovo intervention. He didn’t want to see the UN Security Council trampled, you’re right. There wasn’t adequate international legal authorization for that, by any means. But he also didn’t want to live in a situation where the Serbs could massacre the ethnic Albanians at will.
Sergio Vieria de Mello, who at some point we will maybe talk about, was also somebody totally loyal to the UN Charter, totally loyal to the idea of civilian protection. He also supported the war in Kosovo. So, yes, in fact, I did support the Rambouillet negotiations. I don’t see it at all the way that you did. And, again, I haven’t heard a scenario by which ethnic Albanians would actually have been free of massacres and free of fear in the scenario which would have left the province alone in a way that you suggest.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both on this subject. Samantha, when we come back from our break, we’re going to talk about Chasing the Flame. We’re going to talk about Sergio de Mello. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. Jeremy Scahill, a Democracy Now! correspondent, author of the bestselling book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. It was just announced this week that he won a Polk Award for that book. Samantha Power, with us, her new book is called Chasing the Flame. We’ll talk about it in a minute.
Edwards Calls For Wolfowitz To Resign
John Edwards for President Apr 13, 2007
Chapel Hill, North Carolina – Senator John Edwards released the following statement today calling for World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz to step down.
"Fighting global poverty is the moral thing to do - and it's also the smart thing to do for America, because it will make us safer and more secure. Poor and failing states too often become incubators for terrorism. Taking bold steps to reduce global poverty, like those in the plan I introduced last month, can help to replace radicalism with education, opportunity, and democracy.
"The World Bank should be at the forefront of this effort. Unfortunately, Wolfowitz's tenure at the World Bank has been marked by some of the same failures as his term managing the war in Iraq -- cronyism and rhetoric that does not match reality -- and now serious questions of financial integrity that have alarmed our allies.
"America's ability to lead in the fight against global poverty is undermined with Paul Wolfowitz at the helm of the World Bank. He should resign. We have to restore America's credibility and moral leadership in order to convincingly make the case for global anti-poverty investments that are both strategically smart and morally correct."
To read about Edwards' plan for restoring America's moral leadership by fighting worldwide poverty, go to: Link ON JOHN EDWARDS IDEAS:
Senator John Edwards Hardball with Chris Matthews Mar 16, 2006
MATTHEWS: Thank you, Margaret Brennan. Welcome back to HARDBALL.
Today the U.S. military launched the largest air assault in Iraq since the invasion in 2003. The attack targeted an Iraqi insurgency camp north of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, the new NBC/"Wall Street Journal" Poll shows declining support for the president`s handling of Iraq. Only 35 percent approve now, while 61 percent of the country disapproves.
But first, direct from New Orleans, former Democratic senator and vice presidential candidate, John Edwards is down there helping with the Katrina recovery. Senator, thank you very much for joining us from down there. What`s it like down there? Is there a sense that things are working again or is this still a long way off?
JOHN EDWARDS (D), FMR. NC SENATOR: Long way off. I mean, where we are, I`ve got 700 college kids who`ve come with me to work during their spring break instead of going to the beach, which is an amazing thing. They`re from like 80 plus schools across the country.
And from what we`ve seen here -- we`re in St. Bernard`s Parish, and we`ve spent the day today, for example, gutting houses but there`s enormous work left to be done here. And, in fact, we could have brought more kids who wanted to come and participate in this, but it`s hard to find places for them to stay.
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about these houses. We were watching down there on the ground and we watched all those houses being flooded in St. Bernard`s Parish. Are those houses any good anymore, or you got to give them up for good or what? Or can you dig the muck up around them and get them sanitary again?
EDWARDS: Well, what you have to do is, you have to go in, dig out all the mess, shovel out all the mess. You can see some of it piled up behind me. We`ve done that on 50 different locations here in St. Bernard`s Parish all day long today. And once you get out the mess, then you can make a determination about whether the house could be rehabilitated. But I think a lot of these houses can be rehabilitated.
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about the situation in Iraq right now. You know the hell that`s going on over there. This day we launched a major initiative, Operation Swarmer -- you know, 1,500 troops, 50 helicopters, 200 land vehicles, an assault involving the United States and Iraqi forces, some who have mixed loyalties perhaps between the militia of the Shia and also the -- their commanders and our outfits were put together. Are you optimistic we can, quote, "win that war" or are we better off just gradually reducing our commitment?
EDWARDS: Well, my view is it`s extraordinarily unstable. I`m worried about it, my own personal feeling that the thing may be slipping away from us and I think ultimately it`s not going to be determined by the United States. I think it`s going to be determined by Iraq and the Iraqi people.
You know, they`ve got to decide if they`re going to actually have a representative government, whether they`re going to be able to protect themselves, and we can`t -- we can`t take responsibility for this over the long haul.
So -- and my own view is, we need to reduce our size, our footprint there and send an absolutely clear signal that we`re not going to stay there forever, that we`re going to let them govern themselves and protect themselves and that we`re not there for oil.
MATTHEWS: When is the point at which you think we ought to just say this is going to be a civil war, these people don`t want to form a common government, we`re not going to stay in the cross-fire? When would you know that would be the time to make that call?
EDWARDS: I can`t tell you today when that is. What I think we ought to do is we ought to start getting our presence much lower there. We ought to make them start taking responsibility for themselves and their own country and their own government.
And at some point in the future, if it`s clear they`re not going to do that, so be it. We can`t do this for them over the long haul. And we need to make it absolutely clear we have no intention of doing it over the long haul.
MATTHEWS: You know, Senator, before you and the others who were in the United States Senate at the time voted to authorize a use of force in that very tricky time right before the 2002 election, you were told a lot of things.
You were told that there were weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein, including a nuclear potential against us in this country, that our arrival in that country would be greeted -- we would be greeted as liberators. You were told by Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, that the Iraqi oil would pay for a mission which is now costing $1 trillion.
You were given all kinds of commitments over there. None of them turned out to be true. None of them. Do you feel it`s something that the Democratic Party as a whole should say, we were lied to, we were misled, we were B.S.`d, if you will, if that`s somewhere in the middle and that we ought to just say so, yet you`re one of the few who has said so.
EDWARDS: Well, here`s -- what I honestly think is that Bush, the administration, members of his administration, grossly misled the country, I think made an effort to mislead members of Congress.
But I think the other truth is, and I believe this very strongly, Chris, those of us who voted for this war -- and as you know, I`ve now said my vote was a mistake. Those of us who voted for this war, we had our own responsibility and we need to take responsibility for what it is we did.
Speaking for myself, you know, I was on the Intelligence Committee, I went to many hours of hearings and briefings, I talked to member -- former members of the Clinton administration and I made a judgment and it turns out that judgment was wrong.
Well, I`m responsible for that, but Bush and the administration are responsible for misleading the country, and making -- and just being absolutely incompetent in the way they`ve administered this war.
MATTHEWS: You know, Hillary Clinton, the senator from New York, will not say what you just said. She has a way of skirting the issue. We had her spokesman, Mr. Wolfson, on last night who said there wouldn`t have been a vote to allow force if the administration hadn`t made the case it made.
But she won`t say that she made a mistake. Is she hemmed in by the fact that she`s a woman and can`t admit a mistake, or else the Republicans will say oh, that`s a woman`s prerogative to change her mind, or another fickle woman? Is her gender a problem in her ability to change her mind?
EDWARDS: Oh, I don`t think her gender has anything to do with this. I think this is an individual, personal ...
MATTHEWS: I mean because how it would be used by the other side. Not objectively, obviously ...
EDWARDS: Right. Right.
MATTHEWS: ... but how the other side would use it.
EDWARDS: No, I wouldn`t -- I don`t think she`s concerned about that. I don`t think any woman leader in this country should be concerned about that. This is a difficult, independent judgment that people have to make about what they`re going to say.
For me, you know, I`ve been going around the country and the world talking about poverty and our moral responsibility. And I didn`t feel like I could do that if I didn`t tell the truth about what had happened with this war in Iraq, at least as it relates to me.
MATTHEWS: You`re very young.
EDWARDS: It`s also, I might add -- can I add, Chris?
MATTHEWS: Sure.
EDWARDS: It`s also -- in fairness to everybody, it`s very hard because, you know, I made a mistake, a serious mistake. So did lots of other people. President Bush made an enormous mistake. But the people who didn`t make a mistake are the men and women who have lost their lives in Iraq, and who have served in Iraq. And that makes it very hard to talk about these things. But I still think it`s the right and honest thing to do.
MATTHEWS: You know, like yourself, Jack Kennedy, when he ran for vice president in 1956 and lost, learned something about party politics. And he said afterwards, I`m going to be a full-time professional politician now, no more just showing up and giving a nice speech, I am going to be a great political leader. I`m going to build an organization and win the presidency. Does that sound like something you`ve gone through?
EDWARDS: Well, part of it is what I`ve gone through. I mean, you learn -- when you`re involved in a national campaign, you learn a great deal. You know, one of the things that I have seen and I have believed very strongly now is I don`t think the country is looking for politicians that are like the politicians they`ve seen all their lives.
I think they`re hooking for leaders. I think they`re looking for people who will tell them the truth, even when the truth is harsh and difficult to hear. And they`re hooking for leaders that have back bone and strength and conviction and will actually stand up and fight for what they believe, whether it`s popular or not.
I think the politics actually, the politics as usual as people say, is what people are sick of, and they see that all the time. They`re looking for something different. They ought to be looking for something different.
MATTHEWS: Do you feel that anyone has more of a right to run for president on the Democratic side than you do?
EDWARDS: No, but I don`t think I have any more right than anybody else. I think...
MATTHEWS: ... In other words, you don`t feel you have to wait in line behind John Kerry or Hillary Clinton or anybody else and wait your turn again?
EDWARDS: If I decide to do this, I`m not going to wait in line behind anybody. And I suspect nobody else will either.
MATTHEWS: Do you think you`ll be running?
EDWARDS: Him who?
MATTHEWS: Do you think you`ll be running, I`m sorry, Senator, you misheard me. Do you think John Edwards of North Carolina, now working in New Orleans, will be running for president, six months from now?
EDWARDS: I`m thinking about it, but I haven`t decided yet.
MATTHEWS: Well let us know, will you Sir? Thank you, thank you for coming on and good luck with that good work down there in New Orleans. It`s a great thing for kids to do rather than go to south of Florida, to the Gulf Coast and help rebuild. What a great thing, thank you.
EDWARDS: These kids are amazing.
MATTHEWS: By the way today -- it sounds like it. Anyway, thank you, Senator.
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