Chavez strikes back

U.S. analysts say Venezuela's decision Thursday to nationalize the country's cement industry shows that President Hugo Chavez still is determined to create a socialist state despite a defeat at the polls last December. The move by the anti-U.S. Chavez, whose support had been eroding before a diplomatic dispute with neighboring Ecuador was resolved amicably and Venezuela prevailed last month in a compensation dispute with Exxon Mobil, could help restore his government's popularity. Chavez has been very popular with Venezuela's poor because of lavish social spending funded by the booming oil market. But his proposal to accelerate the nationalization program was defeated by Venezuela voters last year and Chavez promised to focus on reducing crime and food shortages. Venezuela's government has been under fire for failing to build enough houses and analysts said the takeover of the cement industry could be a way to solve that problem quickly, according to the Reuters international news service.
Chavez had accused the industry, which was privatized in the 1990s, of exacerbating the housing situation by exporting cement instead of selling it to domestic builders. Reuters said a poll showed public support for the government slipped to 34 percent in February, its lowest point since 2003. "The measure in some ways is an attempt to move more rapidly in one of the problem areas," said Daniel Hellinger a political science professor at Webster University in St Louis, according to Reuters. The nationalization move affects facilities owned by Mexico's Cemex, France's Lafarge and Switzerland's Holcim. "This is another iteration of the gradual move to a command economy as the government is steadily encroaching on private sector activity," said Albert Ramos, a senior economist at Goldman Sachs, according to Reuters. Venezuela usually pays compensation for such takeovers.

Shortsighted vision thing

What is going on at NASA? The U.S. space program, long a source of immense pride, appears to be in trouble because of inadequate planning and funding. According to a report presented Thursday to Congress by the General Accounting Office, NASA's ambitious plans to build a new space vehicle to ferry astronauts to the moon and to Mars is foundering. The space agency's Constellation Program, charged with building the Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle and the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle to replace the shuttle, is in danger of collapse because of a lack of resources, the GAO report indicated. "If something goes wrong with the development of the Ares I or the Orion, the entire Constellation Program could be thrown off course and the return to human spaceflight delayed," the report said. The report also said the agency's test facilities were inadequate for testing the Ares I engine. "From its beginning, NASA's Exploration initiative has suffered from chronic under-funding, with a 'once-in-a-generation' project to develop a new space transportation system 'shoehorned' into a NASA budget that in some years hasn't even kept pace with inflation," said Mark Udall (D—Colo.), chairman of the House subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, according to the Reuters international news service. Former astronaut Kathryn Thornton, a professor at the University of Virginia, said costs linked to retiring the shuttle had not been accounted for in NASA budgets. Inadequate planning, unrealistic budgeting — where have we heard that before?

Zimbabwe election drama continues

The future of democracy in Zimbabwe will be on the line Friday when longtime President Robert Mugabe meets with leaders of his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party to decide whether he should seek another term as head of state. Results of Saturday's election appear to show challenger Morgan Tsvangirai with around 50 percent of the vote, but possibly not enough to avoid a runoff. But Mugabe, who has led Zimbabwe for 28 years, also saw his party lose its majority in parliament to Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change. MDC claims its count shows that Tsvangirai received enough votes to avoid a runoff and fears Mugabe could try to intimidate voters in a runoff. Opposition parties claim Mugabe stole the 2002 election. Mugabe's popularity has plummeted in recent years with the collapse of Zimbabwe's economy, once one of Africa's strongest. The White House has expressed concern about the slow vote count and called for the election to be decided quickly. President Bush regards Mugabe as "a discredited dictator."

Fuzzy on the details

Sometimes, you just have to wonder about these guys. To his credit, San Diego-area Republican Congressman Darrell Issa has begun retreating from comments he made yesterday at a meeting of two House committees complaining about additional requests for compensation for victims of the Sept. 11 attack on New York. But he didn't apologize for his seeming lack of understanding of an event that sent shockwaves across the country. In a statement posted on his Web site today, the congressman's office said the comments had been misunderstood. "Contrary to what some have stated, Rep. Issa did not state that the 9/11 attacks were not an attack on America itself; he did not object to the billions in federal aid that has already been sent to New York City (including help for injured and sick responders) that he has previously and consistently supported; and he never minimized the horrible tragedy that took place on September 11, 2001," the statement said. That would be good, if it were true. But Issa also must have forgotten that what he said in the hearing would be recorded. Issa asked "why the firefighters who went there and everyone in the city of New York needs to come to the federal government for the dollars versus, quite frankly, this being primarily a state consideration." Issa described the attack on the World Trade Center, in which two fuel-laden airplanes were crashed into the twin towers, eventually destroying them and thousands of people who worked there, as "a fire that had no dirty bomb in it" and "had no chemical munitions in it. It simply was an aircraft, residue of two aircraft and residue of the material used to build this building." That sure sounded like he was minimizing the attacks. Does he also think the plane that hit the Pentagon was merely a crash, and not a terrorist attack?

Congressional criticism

The spectacle of oil company executives testifying before Congress on the price of gasoline was just that — a spectacle full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Congressional lawmakers do not have the guts — or the votes, for that matter — to do anything about the profit-gouging behavior of multinational oil companies. Even if the new Democratic majority in Congress wanted to do something, such as passing a proposal now before them to repeal $18 billion in tax breaks, President Bush would surely veto it. Bush is still the president, and everybody knows where his sympathies lie. Executives from five companies — Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP and Royal Dutch Shell testified Tuesday before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to explain their record profits while the price of fuel paid by U.S. citizens soared to new highs. "The American people deserve answers and it is time for Big Oil to go on the record about these record prices," said Chairman Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and a longtime oil industry critic. The executives said prices were rising because the price of crude has increased more than 500 percent since 2002. "Given that the largest contributor to the cost of gasoline is crude oil, this has translated into record-high gasoline prices," Peter Robertson, vice chairman of No. 2 U.S. oil company Chevron, said in testimony. Rep. John Boehner, the Republican leader, called the hearing "politically motivated" and "made for TV." Boehner was right on both counts, although it's hard to see how politically motivated is a bad thing. The citizens of the country are demanding answers, and their elected representatives are trying to respond. And the Republican leadership takes that as some kind of insult? No wonder nothing gets done in Washington.

Zimbabwe voting for change

Results from Zimbabwe's parliamentary election released Monday indicates longtime President Robert Mugabe's ruling party, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, will lose its majority in the lower house of parliament. Results have been trickling in but so far Mugabe's party nearly even in seats with Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change, but five seat have been won by a breakaway opposition party that is likely to combine with MDC. Seven of Mugabe's cabinet ministers had lost their parliamentary seats as of Monday, according to the Reuters international news service. Tsvangirai said his party would announce its own tally of the results on Wednesday out of dissatisfaction with the slow pace of the count. Opposition leaders have expressed concerns that the slow count reflected an effort by the ruling party to fix the vote, as they suspect happened in 2002, when Mugabe was re-elected. Projections in the vitally important presidential race show Tsvangirai getting 50 percent of the vote, but maybe not enough to avoid a runoff with Mugabe. Many Zimbabweans blame Mugabe and his party for the collapse of the country's economy, which used to be one of Africa's success stories but now suffers from the world's highest inflation rate, and recurrent shortages of food and fuel. Mugabe has been Zimbabwe's president for more than 28 years. U.S. President George W. Bush called Mugabe a "discredited dictator" in a speech last month.

The torturer's apprentice

Now that we have the documents, let's not get silly about this. Let's listen and learn. The Pentagon's release Tuesday of the infamous 2003 Justice Department memo justifying the Bush administration's decision to violate U.N. treaties barring torture of detainees didn't change anything — everybody already knew what was in it, if not the exact language, and it has already been withdrawn. But here's what it said: "Customary international law is not federal law and ... the president is free to override it at his discretion." That was the conclusion of John Woo, now a college professor but then deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Office of Special Counsel. And that's really what President Bush thinks. The soaring optimism of the United Nations Charter, the somber poetry of the Geneva Conventions — these are ideas for the world we want to live in, not the one we do live in. You can sign all the agreements you want, it still doesn't change rule number one. After he finished reading My Pet Goat to those kids in New Jersey, Bush was made to understand that the United States had been attacked and that it could be the big one. So, he forgot all that treaty garbage and barreled ahead. The amazing thing was not that Bush thought this — everybody knows a lot of people who think this way, even some that have been to college — but that the U.S. Congress and now the Western alliance have gone along with it, too. All of the abuses that have become synonymous with the war on terror — Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, enemy combatants, waterboarding, the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein — merely illustrate the illogic of this approach. We can't out-brutalize the feudal organizations that fight us and still pretend we're civilized. The American Civil Liberties Union said the Pentagon released the memo as a result of its lawsuit to force the release of more documents on the war on terror, according to the Reuters international news service. The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said under Yoo's view of executive authority, there is "literally no limit at all" to the president's power in wartime. "The whole point of the memo is obviously to nullify every possible legal restraint on the president's wartime authority," Jaffer said. "The memo was meant to allow torture, and that's exactly what it did." No, the whole point was to demonstrate that there are no legal restraints on the president's wartime authority. If the citizens of the United States think there need to be some limits, it's long since time to write them into the Constitution.