mykeystrokes.com

"Do or Do not. There is no try."

“Cuban Embargo Is Way Past Its Usefulness”: An Outdated Strategy That Accomplished Absolutely Nothing

It’s about time that a U.S. president had the courage and common sense to end our ridiculous policy toward Cuba. It was a relic of the Cold War, an outdated strategy that accomplished absolutely nothing except to give the Castro brothers an excuse for the dire poverty in which their citizens live.

President Obama deserves plaudits for his decision to open full diplomatic relations with the island nation for the first time in more than half a century. So does Pope Francis, who intervened to try to break the stalemate between the two countries. The announcement that the United States will open an embassy in Havana was a fitting tribute to the season in which Christians ostensibly turn our attention to peace on Earth and good will toward all men.

Not that there was an outbreak of good will on Capitol Hill. As any fifth-grader could have guessed, Obama’s announcement, which followed more than a year of secret negotiations, was met with outrage among the usual suspects — a bunch of hardliners who insist that the Castros’ dictatorship is such an affront to international norms that a full embargo should continue until… well, until.

It doesn’t seem to matter that the embargo — established in 1962, back when the Soviet Union was enemy No. 1, when the Berlin Wall still divided East and West, and the war in Vietnam was in its infancy — has not done anything to change Cuba’s internal politics. In fact, the opposite may be true: The embargo has hardened the resistance of Fidel Castro, who has found it convenient to blame his economic disasters on the United States.

(Technically, Obama cannot lift the embargo, which was imposed through a series of laws. He can, however, use his executive authority to circumvent much of it.)

Do Fidel and his brother, Raul, engage in human rights abuses? Absolutely. They imprison their critics and have been accused of murdering their rivals. They don’t tolerate free assembly and they restrict speech. They look for excuses to detain Americans, as they did Alan Gross, a contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development who was working to improve Internet access for a Jewish organization. His release helped to set the stage for détente.

In other words, the Castros are dictators. So is Xi Jinping, the president of China, another communist country. Yet President Nixon decided in 1972 that the best way to influence China was through diplomatic contact, and he set about normalizing relations. Few politicians now disagree with that strategy.

The Chinese government tolerates no dissent, imprisons its critics and even restricts religious liberty. But American businesses freely engage in trade with China; U.S. citizens visit as tourists; Chinese students matriculate at our universities. Why should Cuba, which doesn’t have a fraction of the economic or military clout that China has, be regarded as more of a threat to our interests?

In my three reporting visits to Cuba over the last 15 years, I found a country of resilient people who had a strong affinity for the United States. They kept up with Major League Baseball; they circumvented government controls to watch American TV shows; they begged relatives and friends to bring in the latest American music and fashions. The best way to steer them toward a thriving democracy is to encourage more contact between the two countries.

And the fact is that Obama didn’t take a big political risk, despite the hardliners and their continuing drumbeat of criticism. The president enjoys support among Cuban-Americans, even some — like Atlanta political consultant Angelo Fuster — who fled Castro’s takeover. “I think we are on the right path,” Fuster, who has led trade missions to the island, told me.

A Florida International University poll in June found that 68 percent of Cuban-Americans favor normalized diplomatic relations, and 52 percent want to ditch the embargo. As pollster Guillermo J. Grenier told The Atlantic, “We are witnessing a clear demographic shift with younger and more recently arrived Cubans favoring a change in policy toward the island.”

Regardless, restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba is the right thing to do. In this season, that ought to be reason enough.

 

By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, December 20, 2014

December 21, 2014 Posted by | Cold War, Cuba, Foreign Policy | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Hypocrite Alert!”: Republicans Believe In The Power Of The Free Market—Except In Cuba, Apparently

On Thursday, the White House announced that Alan Gross and an unnamed Amercan spy would be released from Cuba in exchange for three Cuban spies. President Barack Obama, who campaigned on normalizing relations with Cuba in 2008, has described Gross’s captivity as one of the main impediments to negotiations with Cuba. Speaking from the White House shortly after Gross’s release, Obama described plans to re-establish diplomatic relations, open an embassy in Havana, and ease travel and trade restrictions.

“It is clear that decades of U.S. isolation of Cuba have failed to accomplish our enduring objective of promoting the emergence of a democratic, prosperous, and stable Cuba,” said Obama. “We cannot keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. It does not serve America’s interests, or the Cuban people, to try to push Cuba toward collapse.”

Republican presidential hopeful Senator Marco Rubio, a strong believer in the democratic power of free trade, nonetheless denounced Obama’s decision. “Barack Obama is the worst negotiator that we’ve had as president since at least Jimmy Carter, and maybe in the history of this country,” he told Fox News Wednesday morning. “It’s absurd and it’s part of a long record of coddling dictators and tyrants that this administration has established.”

Earlier this month, Jeb Bush told a gathering of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, “I would argue that instead of lifting the embargo we should consider strengthening it again to put pressure on the Cuban regime.” Bush, who essentially announced on Tuesday that he’s running for president, has not yet commented on the White House’s policy shift.

Opponents of normalizing relations with Cuba say easing sanctions rewards a dictatorial regime that oppresses its people. However, this notion flies in direct contradiction with the theory that free markets breed democratic institutions. While there are obvious limitations to the democratizing effects of capitalism, the Republican Party has long touted itself as the vanguard of free-trade economics.

For several decades, America’s policy has been to funnel money into democracy promotion efforts in Cuba that have no proven efficacy (and endanger the lives of the Americans implementing the projects). In 2009, The Council on Hemispheric Affairs estimated that the U.S. had spent half a billion dollars over the past 20 years enforcing blockade restrictions and broadcasting pro-democracy messages on Cuban radio and TV stations (which were often blocked by the Cuban government).

There is no precedent for setting full democratic reform as a precondition to economic relations. Since 2011, Raul Castro has implemented 250 economic reforms modeled after the system in Communist China. In the 1970s, the U.S. normalized trade relations with China, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary after they took similar steps to implement preliminary economic reform. Even after economic normalization, the U.S. continued to pressure these countries to improve their human rights practices. As Obama said, “We know from hard-learned experience that it is better to encourage and support reform than to impose policies that will render a country a failed state.”

 

By: Jessica Schulberg, The New Republic, December 17, 2014

December 20, 2014 Posted by | Cuba, Free Markets, Marco Rubio | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“No New Or Plausible Idea’s”: Cuba Diplomacy; Behind Right-Wing Outrage, An Intellectual Void

Listen carefully to the Republican leaders and presidential hopefuls roaring with outrage over President Obama’s courageous decision to normalize relations with Cuba; listen very carefully, because no matter how long or how closely you listen to them, there is one thing you will surely never hear.

You will never hear a new idea – or any plausible idea – about bringing liberty, democracy, and prosperity to the suffering Cuban people.

Instead, the furious denunciations of the president’s initiative from his adversaries reveal only an intellectual void on Capitol Hill, where the imperatives remain partisan and cynical. Everyone paying attention has known for decades that the frozen relationship between the United States and Cuba has accomplished nothing – except possibly the prolongation of the Castro regime, which has long considered the embargo a plausible excuse for its own economic failures – and viewed the United States as a politically convenient enemy.

Anyone who has visited the island knows that the Cubans wish nothing more than to see the embargo lifted, because they know it has done nothing to advance their liberty or prosperity – just the opposite.

As former president Bill Clinton likes to say, the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. (He wanted to normalize relations as president, but the Cuban government clearly didn’t.) The U.S. government has been doing the same thing in Cuba for 54 years, yet the Republicans still don’t think that was long enough. They haven’t explained how or why – or when – their policy will achieve a different result.

Opponents of change have also failed to justify why treating Cuba so differently from other – and in various respects, worse – authoritarian regimes with which we maintain not only vigorous diplomatic relations but massive trading partnerships and even military cooperation. The conduct of those governments is arguably more repressive in important respects; there is, for instance, less religious freedom in China or Saudi Arabia than Pope Francis found in Cuba.

To browse human rights findings from the State Department’s annual reports or the online files maintained by groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International is to find at least a dozen countries with atrocious human rights records, from Chad to Turkmenistan. But the United States maintains diplomatic and trade relations with all of them.

Indeed, Republican leaders and businessmen – notably including members of the Bush family – have profited handsomely from investment in countries like China and Saudi Arabia for many years, with scarcely a peep about human rights violations in those places. It is impossible to forget how the first President Bush toasted the Chinese regime, immediately following the massacre in Tiananmen Square – and how his opportunistic family members showed up in Beijing and Shanghai, looking for a deal.

With the liberation of more than 50 political prisoners – along with USAID worker Allen Gross and an unnamed American spy – the Cubans have suddenly improved their human rights performance, while the Chinese continue to inflict horrendous repression and even torture on Tibetans, Uighurs, and Han Chinese who dare to dissent. (Many of our leading Republicans don’t object to torture, of course, unless it is perpetrated in foreign countries. Sometimes.)

House Speaker John Boehner accused the president of making “another mindless concession to a dictatorship.” What seems entirely mindless, however, is his insistence that we dare not abandon an unworkable and destructive strategy. No boycott observed and enforced by one country alone – even a powerful country like the United States – is ever going to prevail.

That is among the reasons why international human rights organizations, always the most consistent and implacable critics of Castro’s abuses, have long advocated engagement rather than embargo. As Human Rights Watch notes on web pages devoted to detailing those abuses, U.S. policy has imposed “indiscriminate hardship on the Cuban people” since 1961, “and has done nothing to improve the country’s human rights.”

Not long after the president concluded his historic speech – among the most lucid, logical, and inspiring he has delivered in his second term – a spokeswoman for Amnesty International called his new approach “the best opportunity in half [a] century for human rights change in Cuba.”

Designed to quarantine the Cuban government, the policy that failed for five decades has only succeeded in isolating the United States from the rest of the world. Its end is long overdue.

 

By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, December 19, 2014

December 20, 2014 Posted by | Cuba, Human Rights, Republicans | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Pipeline From Hell”: There’s No Good Reason To Build Keystone XL

The Senate will vote Tuesday on whether to authorize the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Republican-led House approved the initiative Friday by a wide margin. The Senate’s still-Democratic majority will bring the bill to the floor for the first time because of newfound support for the initiative within the party, mostly to boost Sen. Mary Landrieu’s bid for reelection in Louisiana as she heads into a runoff with Rep. Bill Cassidy, a Republican. Cassidy leads in every poll of likely voters in that race by an average of 5 percentage points.

Support for the pipeline has surged among Democratic legislators in the wake of the midterm elections, when Democratic senators in red states were swept out of office. Those that remain—among them Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri—are eager to boost their pro-energy, pro-business bona fides.

If Democratic support is new, Republicans’ enthusiasm for the project is not. Friday’s vote was the ninth time the House has approved the pipeline under a Republican majority. As soon as the midterm results had rolled in, the victorious party’s messaging shifted en masse. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus made the TV rounds on Election Night, and by the time he arrived on The Daily Show’s live edition, he had his message down to a T: “I think that what we’re going to see is that the president’s got to come to the table, and both parties are going to have to work together to get things done… It’s going to take the president saying ‘I want to work with you, I want to pass some of these jobs bills, I want to pass the Keystone Pipeline and get things done.”

It’s a well-worn, exceedingly vague message. From his phrasing, it seems that the pipeline is a no-brainer, a job-creation machine that enjoys support from Republicans and Democrats alike. Priebus mentioned it in seemingly every post-election appearance, references made their way into victory speeches from the GOP’s biggest power players, and they’ve since declared the project’s approval a top priority.

It seems America’s two major parties are finally coming together in favor of a significant legislative initiative. But should they be?

Keystone XL would be an addition to the existing Keystone Pipeline System. It would be built by TransCanada Corp. and would run from Alberta’s tar-sands fields through Montana and South Dakota to link up with the system in Steele City, Nebraska. It would transport bitumen and liquefied natural gas drawn from the tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast, mainly in Texas.

The XL addition was proposed in 2008, and studies on the project’s potential economic and environmental impact were commissioned in 2010 and 2011. President Obama rejected the project’s application in 2012 amid protests that it would hurt Nebraska’s Sand Hills region. An adjusted route through Nebraska has since been proposed, and a State Department report declared the project’s environmental effect was “not significant,” but the Obama administration announced in April 2014 that the review of the project has been extended indefinitely.

Why, if the project will create a lot of jobs and have little environmental impact, does it continue to be met with opposition? To begin with, it won’t actually create many jobs. According to a George Mason University study, via Bloomberg, the pipeline’s construction could create between 2,500 and 20,000 jobs. More likely (PDF), it’ll be between 2,500 and 4,650, assuming that a huge chunk (as much as 50 percent) of steel production will be outsourced to China, Canada, and India. Moreover, when construction ends, the number of permanent jobs could fall to 20. Yes, 20.

A rosier estimate, from the State Department’s report and Newsweek, puts the number of permanent jobs at 35. A study by Cornell’s Global Labor Institute claims that the project may actually kill more American jobs than it creates due to pipeline spills, additional fuel costs in the Midwest, and other factors. It also claims that 85-90 percent of people hired for the line’s construction will not be from the areas through which the pipeline is running.

So, it won’t create that many jobs. After all, it’s merely taking oil drilled in Canada to pre-existing refineries on the Gulf Coast. But it’s a $7 billion project, and the State Department has said it will have a minimal negative effect on the environment. Plus, it could increase America’s energy independence and strengthen our position in the Middle East and beyond. These are all good reasons to move ahead with the plan, but unfortunately, none of them are actually true.

The pipeline is a $7 billion project, but only $3 billion-$4 billion of that would be headed to the U.S. The rest is going to wherever that steel is getting outsourced. The claim of reduced dependence on foreign oil suppliers is also suspect. China has already invested billions in Canada’s oil sands, and Chinese corporations are upping their stakes all the time. Much of the oil transported by the pipeline will be refined in Port Arthur, Texas, where the main refinery is half-owned by the state-owned oil company of Saudi Arabia (PDF). The Keystone project is not an American one, but a global one, financed and favored by major multinational oil interests. Besides, real domestic oil production—oil drilled and refined in the U.S. by nominally American companies—has already increased 70 percent under the Obama administration.

All of this means that the pipeline’s approval would essentially be a continuation of the status quo, with a few billion dollars kicked the U.S. economy’s way. Except that the project would, in spite of the State Department’s claims, have drastic effects on the environment on both local and global levels. That study published by the State Department was conducted by Environmental Resources Management (ERM), a firm that listed TransCanada, the would-be pipeline builder, as a client in its marketing materials a year before it began the Keystone contract.

Both ERM and TransCanada told the State Department at the time that they had not worked together for at least five years, a term of the contract meant to limit conflict of interest. Of course, any doubts about a conflict of interest evaporated when it emerged that up until the summer of 2013, a division of ERM had been “working alongside TransCanada on the Alaska Pipeline Project.” These are two in a laundry list of troubling connections between the two companies.

Considering, then, that the State Department study was conducted by TransCanada’s business partner, it’s little surprise that it failed to find any environmental consequences for the project. The reality is far different. On a local level, pipeline leaks and spills could have a number of drastic effects. Recent leaks from similar lines have been bad. Really bad. A New York Times article cites a 2010 leak of 840,000 gallons of bitumen into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. The cleanup has cost $1 billion so far, and continues today.

It also mentions an Arkansas leak that sent 210,000 gallons of bitumen running through the streets of small-town Mayflower and left local residents with respiratory problems, nausea, and headaches. The proposed Keystone route would see it “pass over the Ogallala Aquifer, the lifeblood of Great Plains agriculture,” where the water table is close to the surface. A major leak could poison the water supply of large swaths of the Midwest that add up to one quarter of the nation’s farmland.

The pipeline also has environmental consequences on a larger scale. The pipeline would encourage accelerated extraction of Canada’s tar sands, which have greenhouse gas emissions 81 percent greater than those of conventional oil. By most measures, it is the dirtiest fossil fuel on the planet. James Hansen, formerly of NASA, claimed in a 2012 op-ed that the tar sands contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If true, its exploitation along with our continued use of fossil fuels at present levels would bring carbon concentration in the atmosphere above the 500 parts per million threshold often discussed by climatologists as the point of no return. That would create an irreversible cycle wherein the climate is beyond our control. Hansen describes it as “game over for the environment.”

Even if that’s an alarmist prediction, and Canada will exploit their tar sands with or without the Keystone XL Pipeline, there is no question that its construction will not help with controlling emissions, boosting energy independence, or creating jobs. The only people it will benefit are TransCanada, the Canadian oil companies (many part-owned by Chinese and Mideast interests) working in the tar sands, the multinational oil companies who will refine what it brings to the Gulf Coast, and a few thousand workers. Temporarily.

So why, you might ask, are many of our leaders so eager to build it? The answer is straightforward: money and political gain. The Democrats, feeling vulnerable after a midterm rout, are eager to move to the pro-business center and push through a “jobs plan.” A Nov. 12 Pew Research poll shows 59 percent of Americans favor building the pipeline, which provides some political cover from the backlash Democrats will likely get from environmentalists and other sections of the party’s base.

It also conveniently caters to the interests of Big Energy, some of the biggest campaign donors to both parties. Republicans, in the House especially, have been pushing Keystone for some time and raking in donations in the process. Now, Blue Dog Democrats like Mary Landrieu are happy to hop on board. After all, some of the world’s biggest energy firms, like Exxon Mobil, have been paying her campaign bills for some time.

An initiative most thought would be pushed by the Republican majorities in the next Congress will come to the floor in the current lame-duck session. In a rather pathetic political maneuver, the Senate Democrats will try to force the president’s hand before the new Republican majority gets the chance, apparently to help in a single Senate runoff election that will not in any way alter the upper chamber’s political landscape. After all, the Democrats have no chance of keeping their majority even if Landrieu wins.

For his part, Obama has said he will veto the measure. Pundits widely expected that he would insist on the need to wait for the results of further studies and the Supreme Court ruling on land use in Nebraska. Instead, he came out Thursday with an unequivocal rejection of the premise on which the argument for the pipeline is built: “Understand what this project is: It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. It doesn’t have an impact on U.S. gas prices. If my Republican friends really want to focus on what’s good for the American people in terms of job creation and lower energy costs, we should be engaging in a conversation about what we are doing to produce more homegrown energy.”

The president is right in his criticisms, but wrong to reserve them only for the Republican Party. Many from his side of the aisle are now just as wrong on this issue as his opponents are.

 

By: Jack Holmes, The Daily Beast, November 15, 2014

November 18, 2014 Posted by | Democrats, Keystone XL, Republicans | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“A Tired, Old And Wrong Cliche”: President Obama Is No ‘Bystander’

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) delivered a widely noticed speech in September 2011, condemning President Obama, not just on policy grounds, but specifically on the issue of leadership. “We continue to wait and hope that our president will finally stop being a bystander in the Oval Office,” the governor said. “We hope that he will shake off the paralysis that has made it impossible for him to take on the really big things.”

Much of the political media agreed and echoed the assessment. Pundits crying, “Why won’t Obama lead?” became so common, a tired cliche was born. The president may have run as a young, ambitious leader, eager to change the world, but the Beltway was increasingly convinced: Obama is an overly cautious, overly cerebral president who would rather talk than act.

Two weeks ago, Dana Milbank went so far as to endorse Charles Krauthammer’s thesis of Obama as a “passive bystander.”

The real problem with Obama is not overreach but his tendency to be hands-off.

Since the second year of Obama’s presidency, I have been lamenting the lack of strong leadership coming from the White House, describing Obama in June, 2010, as a “hapless bystander … as the crises cancel his agenda and weaken his presidency.” I’ve since described him over the years as “oddly like a spectator” and as “President Passerby.”

Let’s put aside, for now, the fact that the bystander thesis completely contradicts the other common anti-Obama condemnation: he’s a tyrannical dictator whose radical agenda is destroying the very fabric of America.

Instead, let’s focus on why the bystander thesis appears to be outrageously wrong – especially today.

Faced with an intensifying climate crisis, a hapless bystander, content to watch challenges pass him by, might have decided to do nothing. Maybe he’d call for action in a State of the Union address or issue a white paper, but President Spectator would struggle to shake off the paralysis that makes it impossible to take on the really big things.

Except Obama’s done the opposite, unveiling an ambitious domestic agenda, striking a deal with China that few thought possible, and challenging the rest of the world to follow his lead. It’s an effort wrought with political and policy pitfalls, but Obama’s doing it anyway because he sees this as an effort worth making.

As we discussed back in February, there’s a group of pundits who’ve invested almost comical amounts of time urging Obama to “lead more.” It’s never been entirely clear what, specifically, these pundits expect the president to do, especially in the face of unyielding and reflexive opposition from Congress, but the complaints have been constant for years.

As the argument goes, if only the president were willing to lead – louder, harder, and bigger – he could somehow advance his agenda through sheer force of will, institutional constraints be damned. And if Congress resists, it’s necessarily evidence that Obama is leading poorly – after all, if only he were a more leading leader, Congress would … follow his lead. The line of criticism became so tiresome and so common that Greg Sargent began mocking it with a convenient label: the Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power.

What seems obvious now, however, is the need for these pundits to reconsider the thesis.

Obama saw a worsening climate crisis, so he decided to take the lead. Obama is tired of waiting for a hapless Congress to act on immigration, so he’s leading here, too. Obama saw an Ebola threat, and he’s leading a global effort to save lives. Obama sees an ISIS threat, so he’s leading an international campaign to confront the militants.

The president showed leadership when disarming Syria of its chemical weapons. He’s showing leadership in trying to strike a nuclear deal with Iran. He showed leadership on the minimum wage, raising it for federal contractors while Congress sat on its hands. He’s showed leadership on health care, rescuing the auto industry, and advancing the cause of civil rights. [Update: several readers reminded me he’s leading on net neutrality, too.]

The policymaking process is filled with choke points, but when the president has his eyes on a priority, he doesn’t just throw up his arms in despair when one door closes; he looks for a new route to his destination.

Now, if Obama’s critics want to question whether he’s leading the country in the right direction, that’s obviously grounds for a spirited debate – each of the president’s decisions can and should be evaluated closely on the merits. “Leadership” is not an a priori good. Obama can take the lead on a given issue, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s right.

But if Obama’s detractors would have Americans believe he’s not leading at all, I haven’t the foggiest idea what they’re talking about.

 

By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 14, 2014

November 17, 2014 Posted by | Chris Christie, Media, Pundits | , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »