Talks under way to replace Iraq PM

By HAMZA HENDAWI and QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press WritersSun Dec 10, 6:29 PM ET

Major partners in Iraq's governing coalition are in behind-the-scenes talks to oust Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki amid discontent over his failure to quell raging violence, according to lawmakers involved.

The talks are aimed at forming a new parliamentary bloc that would seek to replace the current government and that would likely exclude supporters of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is a vehement opponent of the U.S. military presence.

The new alliance would be led by senior Shiite politician Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, who met with President Bush last week. Al-Hakim, however, was not expected to be the next prime minister because he prefers the role of powerbroker, staying above the grinding day-to-day running of the country.

A key figure in the proposed alliance, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab, left for Washington on Sunday for a meeting with Bush at least three weeks ahead of schedule.

"The failure of the government has forced us into this in the hope that it can provide a solution," said Omar Abdul-Sattar, a lawmaker from al-Hashemi's Iraqi Islamic Party. "The new alliance will form the new government."

The groups engaged in talks have yet to agree on a leader, said lawmaker Hameed Maalah, a senior official of al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI.

One likely candidate for prime minister, however, was said to be Iraq's other vice president, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, a Shiite who was al-Hakim's choice for the prime minister's job before al-Maliki emerged as a compromise candidate and won.

News of the bid to oust al-Maliki, in office since May, came amid growing dissent over his government's performance among his Sunni and Shiite partners and the damaging fallout from a leaked White House memo questioning the prime minister's abilities.

Washington also has been unhappy with al-Maliki's reluctance to comply with its repeated demands to disband Shiite militias blamed for much of Iraq's sectarian bloodletting.

Bush publicly expressed his confidence in al-Maliki after talks in Jordan on Nov. 30. But the president told White House reporters four days later that he was not satisfied with the pace of efforts to stop Iraq's violence.

It was not immediately clear how much progress had been made in the effort to cobble together a new parliamentary alliance. But lawmakers loyal to al-Sadr who support al-Maliki were almost certainly not going to be a part of it. They had no word on al-Maliki's Dawa party.

They said al-Maliki was livid at the attempt to unseat him.

"We know what's going on and we will sabotage it," said a close al-Maliki aide who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities involved. He did not elaborate.

A senior aide to al-Sadr, who insisted on anonymity for the same reason, said the proposed alliance was primarily designed to exclude the cleric's backers and they would resist.

Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militiamen fought U.S. troops for much of 2004 in Baghdad and across central and southern Iraq. It is blamed for most of the sectarian violence raging in Iraq.

The cleric's supporters have been among al-Maliki's strongest backers, ensuring his election as prime minister. Relations have recently frayed, however, with the 30 Sadrist lawmakers and five Cabinet ministers boycotting the government and parliament to protest al-Maliki's meeting with Bush in Jordan.

The al-Sadr aide said recent contacts with the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, spiritual leader of most Iraqi Shiites, indicated the Iranian-born al-Sistani was not averse to replacing al-Maliki. Al-Sistani issued an unusually harsh criticism of the government in July.

Al-Hakim's SCIRI, along with parliament's Kurdish bloc and al-Hashemi's Islamic party, are likely to be the major powers of the new alliance. Independent lawmakers are also expected to join, legislators said.

Al-Hashemi's Islamic party said Sunday it would not join any future government unless it had a real voice.

Mahmoud Othman, a prominent Kurdish lawmaker and a sharp government critic, said talks on a new parliamentary alliance were initiated early this year, abandoned and recently resumed.

"This government must offer a remedy for all the problems we have in Iraq or publicly announce that it's unable to do so," said Othman, who is close to the negotiations.

Al-Maliki's government, under the Iraqi constitution, could be ousted if a simple majority of parliament's 275 members opposed it in a vote of confidence. Parties in the talks expressed confidence they had enough votes.

"The question of confidence in this government must be reconsidered," Parliament Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni Arab, told legislators Sunday. "Why should we continue to support it? For its failure?"

Outsourcer in Chief: PAUL KRUGMAN

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
The New York Times

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Outsourcer in Chief
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: December 11, 2006

Privatization through outsourcing is one reason the Bush administration has failed on so many fronts.

According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush has told aides that he won’t respond in detail to the Iraq Study Group’s report because he doesn’t want to “outsource” the role of commander in chief.

That’s pretty ironic. You see, outsourcing of the government’s responsibilities — not to panels of supposed wise men, but to private companies with the right connections — has been one of the hallmarks of his administration. And privatization through outsourcing is one reason the administration has failed on so many fronts.

[...]

...the presumption that the private sector can do no wrong and the government can do nothing right prevents us from coming to grips with some of America’s biggest problems — in particular, our wildly dysfunctional health care system.

[...]

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3 Americans killed, 2 wounded in Iraq

By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press Writer 51 minutes ago

Iraqi soldiers rushed to a mainly Sunni area of west Baghdad on Monday to free 23 Iraqis who had been taken hostage at a fake checkpoint there, a government spokesman said. A roadside bomb killed three Americans and wounded two. Fresh attacks against Sunnis in Hurriyah, a mixed neighborhood of northwestern Baghdad, have raised new fears of an organized campaign by Shiite militants to drive Sunnis from the area and strengthen militia control of the capital's north.

Witnesses say scores of Sunni families have been fleeing Hurriyah in recent weeks, and Sunni organizations claim that the Shiite-dominated Iraqi army and police have done little to stop the violence.

Iraqi commanders have denied the charge and said they are encouraging Sunnis to remain in Hurriyah and assuring them of their safety.

Mohammed al-Askari, Iraq's defense ministry spokesman, said security forces are doing everything they can to protect victims of sectarian violence, including families that are being driven from their homes in mixed neighborhoods of Shiites and Sunni Arabs.

He cited the example of Iraqi soldiers who rushed to Ghazaliyah, a primarily Sunni area of west Baghdad, on Monday morning to free 23 Iraqis who had been taken hostage at a fake checkpoint set up there.

"We killed one terrorist and arrested four others," al-Askari said at a news conference.

Iraqi commanders have denied the charge and said they are encouraging Sunnis to remain in Hurriyah and assuring them of their safety. Still, the authorities are clearly struggling to curb the violence.

Hurriyah was relatively calm Monday, two days after about 600 Iraqi soldiers were sent there in response to clashes in which police said at least two people were killed and two others wounded.

Asked about the area, al-Askari said: "We can't deny the presence of the outlaws in Hurriyah who have managed to intimidate residents and force some of them out of their houses. But Hurriyah isn't the only area where this is happening in Baghdad. It's going on in other neighborhoods, too, and all Iraqis are being targeted, not only one sect."

He said five Iraqi army companies are stationed in Hurriyah to protect all its residents.

"Some people are using places such as Hurriyah to support their false claim that the government and its security forces are incapable or unwilling to stop such violence," he said.

Three explosions struck Baghdad within a span of two hours on Monday, police said, after a roadside bomb in the capital killed three American soldiers and wounded two on a late-night combat patrol.

The soldiers were killed when the blast hit their military combat patrol in northern Baghdad, the U.S. command said. Insurgents often plant such explosives and hide nearby to set them off with hidden electrical cords or cell phone devices as coalition forces pass by in convoys.

The three deaths raised to 46 the number of American troops who have died this month. At least 2,934 members of the U.S. military have died since the war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

At 9 a.m. on Monday, a suicide car bomb hit an abandoned house being used by policemen as an outpost in Dora, southern Baghdad, killing one policeman and wounding five, a police officer said on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

At 9:45 a.m., a roadside bomb exploded near Mustasiriyah University in east Baghdad, wounding seven civilians who were standing nearby, said police Lt. Ali Muhsin.

A parked car bomb detonated at 10:30 a.m. near al-Maamoun college in western Baghdad, killing one student and wounding two others and two policemen, a police officer said on condition of anonymity out of concern for his safety.

Last week, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki urged university professors and students to ignore a Sunni Arab insurgent group's warnings to avoid class, calling them "desperate attempts." The group had sent e-mails to students and posted signs at schools and mosques in Baghdad, saying students should stay away while it cleanses the campuses of Shiite death squads, according to a statement from al-Maliki's office.

But the attacks on college students and professors have continued.

On Sunday, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani sharply criticized the bipartisan U.S. report calling for a new approach to the war, saying it contained dangerous recommendations that would undermine his country's sovereignty and were "an insult to the people of Iraq."

Talabani, a Kurd and one of the staunchest U.S. supporters within the Iraqi leadership, also said U.S. training of Iraq's army and police had gone "from failure to failure."

He criticized the recommendation by the Iraq Study Group calling for increasing the number of U.S. troops embedded with Iraqi units to train Iraq's forces from 3,000 to 4,000 currently to 10,000 to 20,000.

"It is not respecting the desire of the Iraqi people to control its army and to be able to rearm and train Iraqi forces under the leadership of the Iraqi government," he said during an interview Sunday with several reporters in his office in Baghdad.

The defense ministry spokesman played down the criticism of the report's recommendations to shift the U.S. military's focus from a combat role to more training.

"What has been mentioned regarding the military aspect, and I do not mean the whole report, is in line with the aspirations of the Iraqi security forces," al-Askari said, adding the goal was to improve the Iraqis' performance so they "can shoulder responsibility with effectiveness."

Tinker Bell, Pinochet and The Fairy Tale Miracle of Chile

Greg Palast

Chile’s former military ruler General Augusto Pinochet has died at the age of 91 - a week after entering hospital in Santiago to receive treatment for a heart attack.

Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Tinker Bell and General Augusto Pinochet had much in common.

All three performed magical good deeds. In the case of Pinochet, he was universally credited with the Miracle of Chile, the wildly successful experiment in free markets, privatization, de-regulation and union-free economic expansion whose laissez-faire seeds spread from Valparaiso to Virginia.

But Cinderella’s pumpkin did not really turn into a coach. The Miracle of Chile, too, was just another fairy tale. The claim that General Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse was one of those utterances whose truth rested entirely on its repetition.

Chile could boast some economic success. But that was the work of Salvador Allende - who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after his death.

In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.

In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.

Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle of Milton Friedman’s trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatized the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatized 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.

Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward … into bankruptcy and depression. After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile’s industry keeled over and died. In 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. The free-market experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass littered the laboratory floor. Yet, with remarkable chutzpah, the mad scientists of Chicago declared success. In the US, President Ronald Reagan’s State Department issued a report concluding, “Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management.” Milton Friedman himself coined the phrase, “The Miracle of Chile.” Friedman’s sidekick, economist Art Laffer, preened that Pinochet’s Chile was, “a showcase of what supply-side economics can do.”

It certainly was. More exactly, Chile was a showcase of de-regulation gone berserk.

The Chicago Boys persuaded the junta that removing restrictions on the nation’s banks would free them to attract foreign capital to fund industrial expansion.

Pinochet sold off the state banks - at a 40% discount from book value - and they quickly fell into the hands of two conglomerate empires controlled by speculators Javier Vial and Manuel Cruzat. From their captive banks, Vial and Cruzat siphoned cash to buy up manufacturers - then leveraged these assets with loans from foreign investors panting to get their piece of the state giveaways.

The bank’s reserves filled with hollow securities from connected enterprises. Pinochet let the good times roll for the speculators. He was persuaded that Governments should not hinder the logic of the market.

By 1982, the pyramid finance game was up. The Vial and Cruzat “Grupos” defaulted. Industry shut down, private pensions were worthless, the currency swooned. Riots and strikes by a population too hungry and desperate to fear bullets forced Pinochet to reverse course. He booted his beloved Chicago experimentalists. Reluctantly, the General restored the minimum wage and unions’ collective bargaining rights. Pinochet, who had previously decimated government ranks, authorized a program to create 500,000 jobs.
In other words, Chile was pulled from depression by dull old Keynesian remedies, all Franklin Roosevelt, zero Reagan/Thatcher.
New Deal tactics rescued Chile from the Panic of 1983, but the nation’s long-term recovery and growth since then is the result of - cover the children’s ears - a large dose of socialism.

To save the nation’s pension system, Pinochet nationalized banks and industry on a scale unimagined by Communist Allende. The General expropriated at will, offering little or no compensation. While most of these businesses were eventually re-privatized, the state retained ownership of one industry: copper.

For nearly a century, copper has meant Chile and Chile copper. University of Montana metals expert Dr. Janet Finn notes, “It’s absurd to describe a nation as a miracle of free enterprise when the engine of the economy remains in government hands.”

Copper has provided 30% to 70% of the nation’s export earnings. This is the hard currency which has built today’s Chile, the proceeds from the mines seized from Anaconda and Kennecott in 1973 - Allende’s posthumous gift to his nation.

Agribusiness is the second locomotive of Chile’s economic growth. This also is a legacy of the Allende years. According to Professor Arturo Vasquez of Georgetown University, Washington DC, Allende’s land reform, the break-up of feudal estates (which Pinochet could not fully reverse), created a new class of productive tiller-owners, along with corporate and cooperative operators, who now bring in a stream of export earnings to rival copper. “In order to have an economic miracle,” says Dr. Vasquez, “maybe you need a socialist government first to commit agrarian reform.”

So there we have it. Keynes and Marx, not Friedman, saved Chile.

But the myth of the free-market Miracle persists because it serves a quasi-religious function. Within the faith of the Reaganauts and Thatcherites, Chile provides the necessary genesis fable, the ersatz Eden from which laissez-faire dogma sprang successful and shining.

In 1998, the international finance Gang of Four - the World Bank, the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Bank for Settlements - offered a $41.5 billion line of credit to Brazil. But before the agencies handed the drowning nation a life preserver, they demanded Brazil commit to swallow the economic medicine that nearly killed Chile. You know the list: fire-sale privatizations, flexible labor markets (i.e. union demolition) and deficit reduction through savage cuts in government services and social security.

In Sao Paulo, the public was assured these cruel measures would ultimately benefit the average Brazilian. What looked like financial colonialism was sold as the cure-all tested in Chile with miraculous results.

But that miracle was in fact a hoax, a fraud, a fairy tale in which everyone did not live happily ever after.

******

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Armed Madhouse”. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com

Get a signed copy of Armed Madhouse for the holidays or browse for other signed gifts at www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org

Published by Greg Palast December 10th, 2006 in Articles

Big FEC fines soon to hit Swift Boat Vets, other '527' groups

FEC Likely to Fine Several 527 Groups
By Matthew Murray
Roll Call Staff
December 11, 2006

Just in time for the 2008 presidential campaign season and roughly two years after the agency began scrutinizing a handful of 527 organizations, the Federal Election Commission is likely to hand down significant fines in the near future against groups such as America Coming Together and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, according to campaign finance lawyers and other experts.

Agency officials and outsiders directly involved in the cases declined to discuss specifics of the investigations, citing confidentiality agreements and prohibitions against discussing ongoing enforcement matters. Still, many familiar with the cases’ issues, including the top lawyer for Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) 2004 campaign and a former commission chairman, suggested that a variety of factors point to the likelihood that the agency will soon “sock it” to 527 organizations that violated campaign finance laws, particularly those involved in the 2004 presidential cycle.

“They don’t have a lot of choice,” said Marc Elias, a Democratic campaign finance lawyer who worked for the Kerry campaign. “It’s been two years that they’ve had these cases and they have indicated publicly that the enforcement process is the way” the agency prefers to police 527 groups.

While agency officials were unable to indicate the status of ongoing investigations, they were able to confirm a number of organizations when asked about specific groups that complaints had been filed against, perhaps narrowing the field of potential cases that may be closed out in the weeks to come. Among those cited as being the subject of complaints were Texans for Truth, Progress for America Voter Fund, Leadership Forum, the Media Fund, the Joint Victory Campaign, Economic Freedom Fund and Majority Action.

Florida county gave voters flawed e-voting instructions

URL

Iraqi President: US Has Moved "From Failure To Failure"

December 10, 2006

Iraq’s President Harshly Criticizes U.S. Strategy

BAGHDAD, Dec. 10 — President Jalal Talabani said Sunday that the American program to train Iraq’s security forces had been a repeated failure and he denounced a plan to increase the number of American advisers working with the Iraqi Army, saying it would subvert the country’s sovereignty.

Mr. Talabani’s remarks, in an interview with Western news service reporters that was later summarized and distributed by his office, amounted to an extraordinarily harsh denunciation of a central American strategy in Iraq as well as a major recommendation of the report issued last week by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group in Washington. He is the highest ranking Iraqi official to criticize the report, adding to anger among Iraqi leaders who have disagreed with some of its recommendations.

By KIRK SEMPLE

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