There’s been a lot of talk in the pundit universe and surrounding blogosphere about cabinet appointments. I suppose that’s the kind of news I should expect to hear between now and January 20, aside from reports on the continuing economic disaster, now rivaling Iraq as Bush’s biggest fuckup ever (if not in lives, certainly in dollars lost). For my own part, I’ll reserve judgment until more of the Obama administration is in place. I’d like to spend this longish constitutional intermission between election day and inauguration day talking about the issues that I think should be a priority for the new regime. Not that they will listen, but… here it comes, Mr. President-Elect.

This week, foreign policy.

The Congo War. This is the deadliest conflict since World War II (unless, perhaps, you roll all of the Indochina wars together), and it has gotten very little attention in our national media. This is pretty typical treatment for sub-Saharan Africa, but honestly… more than 5 million people have died over the past 10 years, and it’s still going. The war is often portrayed as impossibly complex and abstruse, but at its root are some very comprehensible motivations. The D.R. of Congo is a Western Europe-sized treasure house of mineral wealth, holding most of the world’s cobalt, as well as massive deposits of coltan and other materials necessary for the maintenance of our 21st-Century technology-obsessed consumer lifestyles. Whoever is doing the actually killing and mass rape at any given time – renegade Rwandan generals or Congolese government troops – these minerals continue to flow into our insatiable industrial economies, just as they did during Mobutu’s and King Leopold’s times. Seems to me that Obama’s foreign policy team could do worse than to make this war a priority, even if it isn’t costing U.S. lives. They could start by dropping the idiotic idea of creating an Africa Command for our military and taking a good hard look at U.S. companies – like Freeport McMoran – who do business in the Congo.

Israel – Palestine. The conflict in Israel-Palestine has run through eleven presidencies without resolution. Will Obama’s be the twelfth? I’m not sanguine about the prospects for an equitable resolution with Rahm Emmanuel, Dennis Ross, and Martin Indyk at the O-man’s ear. One can only hope that the President-Elect is smart enough and compassionate enough to recognize that what the Israeli government is doing right now, particularly in Gaza, constitutes a serious crime against humanity. There is only one obvious solution to this conflict and it’s based on the pre-June 1967 borders. Everyone knows this to be true, but we are frozen in the stalemate established by Nixon, Kissinger, and the Israeli government more than three decades ago. At the very least, Obama needs to apply some pressure to Tel Aviv to take the thumb screws off of those many thousands of families struggling to survive in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison. Something like this can only happen if people across our nation make their voices heard in support of that imprisoned population.

I’ve got more, but I’ll stop. Obama’s got a lot on his plate right now – don’t want to burn the guy out this early. Tune in next week, Barack-o. I’m just getting warmed up.

luv u,

jp

Yes, the Bush Administration is rolling to a close – sprinting to the finish line, as Junior has said – and they seem remarkably unfazed by a record of failure unsurpassed in modern presidential history. Just this past week Bush took the stage at the global economic summit in Washington and defended “free market” capitalism, “free” trade, and related virtues so dramatically discredited of late, warning his fellow national leaders not to depart too drastically from the neoliberal order concocted by Washington and implemented by the I.M.F. and World Bank. I was not in the room, but I imagine there were a few grimaces, maybe a laugh or two, and perhaps a lot of inattention during Bush’s remarks. Honestly, who is going to listen to the captain of the titanic as he lectures everyone on marine safety? How many of those people have one of those “Bush’s Last Day” countdown clocks on their desks? (Or wish they had one?)

Irony department: As Bush argued for hewing to the I.M.F./World Bank line, the I.M.F. released a report that was critical of the United States’ massive trade deficit… criticism which, of course, the U.S. can blithely ignore, in as much as we are an extremely wealthy nation and accept orders from no one. For the poorer nations, well, there are ways of making them cooperate, and any departure from the neoliberal order can bring consequences, often grave ones. This sounds like a double standard, but as Noam Chomsky and others have pointed out many times, it’s actually a very consistent single standard – wealth enjoys privileges. The “Washington Consensus” and the international institutions that enforce it were created by America and its rich international partners expressly to benefit themselves. Who will respect this system now that it has crippled its creators in much the same way as it has its subjects in the developing world?

It does seem as though people are becoming openly contemptuous of the administration’s financial team, in particular, in the closing months. Even ordinarily reserved public broadcasting was giving Treasury Secretary Paulson what passes for a hard time this past week, with somewhat prickly questioning coming from the likes of Robert Siegel and Jim Lehrer, for chrissake. Paulson and his assistant secretary Neel Kashkari have both been grilled by Congress (again, in a somewhat less incisive fashion than in previous decades, but nevertheless). Everybody is taking swings at them because public faith in the administration is so abysmally low… and with good reason. It’s pretty easy to shoot holes in the $700 billion bailout plan(s), which seems to be evolving by the minute. What amazes me is that, with states facing something like $100 billion in red ink, they don’t seem to show any impetus towards sending some of that money back to state legislatures just to shore up essential services. I mean, if we’re spending like sailors to get the economy going again, shouldn’t we at least consider a state government bailout? I’ve yet to hear it suggested by anyone other than economist Robert Pollin. (Would that Obama would make him treasury secretary…)

Oh, well. It’s nearly “over” time for them. Let’s try to make certain they don’t sink the ship before they jump overboard.

luv u,

jp