Cameroon deepens involvement against Boko Haram

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Following a coordinated, massive assault by Nigerian-based Boko Haram militants on Cameroonian targets, the government of Cameroon for the first time ordered airstrikes and rocket strikes on the attacking fighters. BBC:

About 1,000 militants attacked five villages, including Amchide, and seized the nearby Achigachia military base, where they raised their black flag, army spokesman Lt Col Didier Badjeck told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme. He said President Paul Biya then personally ordered the air force to intervene, forcing the militants out.

 
The base was reportedly retaken and the attackers repulsed. According the Cameroonian military, one soldier was killed and 41 Boko Haram members were killed. It was not immediately clear what aircraft participated in the counterattack, given the very weak state of the country’s air force.

This marks a significant development in Cameroon’s involvement in the regional war against Boko Haram. Thus far the country has been primarily concerned with trying to secure the border with Nigeria to stop militants trying to cross over.

Flag_of_Cameroon

Sweden’s budget deal is American-style extortion

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Sweden’s ruling center-left government, elected only in September and led by the Social Democratic Party, will live to fight another day after reaching a deal with the mainstream center-right opposition (led by the so-called “Moderate Party”) to support the Moderate Party’s proposed budget this year instead of their own but avoid going to early elections. The extreme right was expected to make big gains if elections were held within just six months of their last big jump and less than a year after their big performance in EU elections.

This is a bad deal but probably still worth taking, at least in the short term. It’s worth taking in that it avoids that dangerous election and will commit the mainstream opposition to supporting the government’s budgets through 2022, after this one. But it’s bad in that adopting the opposition’s proposed budget even this year is kind of the opposite of what is supposed to happen when they lose an election and it effectively constitutes political extortion (much like U.S. Republicans extorting concessions for vital debt ceiling increase votes).

In the long run, that means the mainstream left is likely to lose even more support for being “sellouts,” while the mainstream right continues to be extremely unpopular. The only clear upside, besides the immediate prevention of a risky snap vote, is that it pushes the next election out to 2022 and avoids several future budget showdowns, which is still a better outcome than most recent U.S. budget and debt ceiling fights.

What should have happened here is either a Grand Coalition between the two biggest mainstream parties or the main center-right party holding their noses to vote through a center-left budget instead of trying to tank it, as they did. That’s what a losing but responsible conservative party would do to avoid strengthening the far-right, particularly in a week that saw 2 different mosques attacked by Swedish extremists trying to burn people alive and vandalize property.

Instead, the “Moderate Party” extorted the ruling Social Democrats (and Green Party) by demanding their budget proposal be adopted anyway. Their budget is, in fact, the polar opposite of what the Swedish population has been demanding and had been a factor in the rise of the extreme right.

In the last 8 years, Sweden became the economy with the fastest growing income inequality in the industrialized world. The previous, Moderate-led center-right coalition government in Sweden pursued not just an austerity agenda — like many of their peers (on both sides of the center) across Europe during the recent crisis — but they also pursued an aggressive effort to roll back government services and programs and introduce private sector participation in functions traditionally managed by the Swedish state.

Although some of the policies were introduced in the 1990s, they were ramped up even more in recent years. In particular, Swedish government attempts to privatize and voucherize public education — along the lines promoted by many right-leaning education “reformers” in the United States — devolved into a mess. One recent poll, by Gothenburg University’s SOM Institute, found that ahead of the September elections 70% of the country was opposed to the privatization and corporate subsidy schemes of the Moderate Party government that subsequently lost.

In the September general election, the mainstream center-left Social Democrats won the most seats in Sweden’s parliament, but they also finished with one of the party’s lowest vote shares of any election held after the 1909 reform that granted male workers the right to vote. That’s because many of the seats previously won by the mainstream center left and right were lost to smaller parties. Most notably, a far-right, anti-immigrant party, the Swedish Democrats became the third biggest party in Swedish politics.
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Suddenly, Mitch McConnell admits ACA can’t be repealed yet

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Interesting that Mitch McConnell wasn’t acknowledging this reality any time in the past 4.5 years, when he was using “repeal” as a talking point to whip up the base and try to win more seats in Congress:

So, we’re certainly gonna keep our commitment to the American people to make every effort we can to repeal it. It is a statement to the obvious, however, that Obama — of Obamacare — is the President of the United States, so I don’t want people to have [unrealistic] expectations about what may actually become law with Obama — of Obamacare — in the White House. But we intend to keep our commitment to the American people.

 
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Egypt censors fret over accuracy of Ridley Scott’s “Exodus”

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There are many reasons one might consider banning “Exodus: Gods & Kings” from your country. Excessive use of mediocre CGI for hours on end, for example! Or blasé anti-Arab racism by Ridley Scott!

But then there’s the reason given by the Egyptian state cultural censors:

Egypt has banned a Hollywood film based on the Biblical book of Exodus because of what censors described as “historical inaccuracies”. The head of the censorship board said these included the film’s depiction of Jews as having built the Pyramids, and that an earthquake, not a miracle by Moses, caused the Red Sea to part.

 
Still, I suppose as questionable factual editing by government officials goes, it’s still no state media claiming the military cured AIDS. At least nobody gets hurt by not being able to go see a terrible Ridley Scott movie in cinemas.

The Pyramids at Giza. (Credit: Ricardo Liberato via Wikimedia)

Above: The Pyramids at Giza, which definitely weren’t built by the Hebrews, so good job at least on catching that, Egyptian censors. (Credit: Ricardo Liberato via Wikimedia)

Syria’s war is not over, but the revolution definitely is

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The Syrian Civil War may still have a long hard slog ahead of it, but the Syrian Revolution is definitely over and the “moderate fighters” are now commanded by the religious extremists (not “moderate civilian leaders”), according to new reporting by The New York Times:

In northern and eastern Syria, where Mr. Assad’s opponents won early victories and once dreamed of building self-government, the nationalist rebel groups calling themselves the Free Syrian Army are forced to operate under the extremists’ umbrellas, to go underground or to flee, according to Syrian insurgents, activists and two top commanders of the American-financed F.S.A. groups.

 
The recent Nusra Front victory at the besieged Syrian military base at Wadi al-Deif — which had held out against rebels for two years on the primary north-south artery in Western Syria — seemed to crystallize the entire situation in one place, according to the Times sources:

The fall of the army base at Wadi al-Deif, which straddles an important supply route in Idlib Province, proved the Nusra Front’s dominance, they said. Other insurgents had long besieged the base without victory. Nusra succeeded after seizing much of the province from Harakat Hazm and the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, two of several groups that until recently, American officials were calling the opposition’s new hope.

 
Back in November I noted a story about Nusra Front crushing the CIA-backed Harakat Hazm rebel group and stealing their weapons, which was believed to include some pretty heavy hardware. That seems to have played a role in the Nusra Front victory at Wadi al-Deif:

Those groups had received sophisticated American-made TOW antitank missiles, and their commanders expected to act as the ground force in the American-led campaign against ISIS. But lately they say the flow of American aid has dwindled as Washington’s strategy shifts to building a new force from scratch.

How exactly the Wadi al-Deif battle unfolded remains murky, with different commanders giving different versions. But reports and images from the operation make two things clear: antitank missiles were used, and Nusra claimed the victory. That means that the American-backed fighters could advance only by working with the Nusra Front, which the United States government lists as a terrorist group, or that they have lost the weapons to the Nusra fighters, effectively joined the group or been forced to follow its orders.

One commander of a group that received antitank missiles said that some F.S.A. fighters were forced to operate them in the battle on behalf of the Nusra Front, which had captured them from American-backed groups — a turn of events that he worried would lead the United States to cut off support.

 
Earlier this month I was also reading a whole bunch of articles about how miserable life under the Syrian rebels is (in stark contrast with how normal things have returned to under regime-held areas). Based on those reports, the rebels spend most of their time attacking each other, looting their own occupied zones down to the studs, profiteering from the populace, and generally causing mayhem and misery. In some communities, such as Douma, residents are openly staging protests against the rebel authorities and counting down the days until “liberation” by the government they once opposed.

Maybe I’m biased in favor of seeing what I want to see (because I’ve been opposed to intervention and as opposed to the rebels as the regime for 2.5 years now) or maybe I’m just reading slanted sources. But the more I keep reading about what’s going on in Western Syria, the more open I am to considering that the regime might actually be the real lesser-of-two-evils at this point, even if they didn’t start out that way.

Is the regime criminal and horrific? Yes absolutely. But probably not more so than the rebels, who at this point are the ones really dragging out the misery for civilians, through direct cruelty and indirectly by refusing to concede a severely lost cause. Did the regime wildly mishandle the first year-plus of the war, to everyone’s detriment and pain? Agreed. Is the regime viscously sectarian, as critics still maintain? Yes, but so are the opponents.
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The hip new screw-you to America’s poor: Subprime phones

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NPR has been investigating the scammy world of subprime lease-to-own smartphone contracts targeted at low-income markets. Here’s an excerpt:

NPR visited six MetroPCS locations that offer SmartPay and called a dozen more, and their representatives made the same 90-day pitch — even though many customers don’t qualify for it.

Atchley doesn’t have a lot of spare cash, and he wanted out. He couldn’t return the phone for a refund to MetroPCS because, he says, he had already talked on it for over an hour. And when he called a Better Finance, their rep didn’t help either, he says.
[…]
Atchley and 231 other SmartPay customers have filed complaints with the Better Business Bureau and five have filed with federal regulators, consistently saying they were misled.

 
Update at 3:44 PM ET: Dave Weigel has also just published a piece on a related topic: abusive subprime auto lenders and their political influence. There is a much more detailed report in yesterday’s New York Times Dealbook on the dangerous world of car title loans to low-income folks.

A review by The New York Times of more than three dozen loan agreements found that after factoring in various fees, the effective interest rates ranged from nearly 80 percent to over 500 percent. While some loans come with terms of 30 days, many borrowers, unable to pay the full loan and interest payments, say that they are forced to renew the loans at the end of each month, incurring a new round of fees.

Customers of TitleMax, for example, typically renewed their loans eight times, a former president of the company disclosed in a 2009 deposition.

[…] roughly one in every six title-loan borrowers will have the car repossessed, according to an analysis of 561 title loans by the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit in Durham, N.C.

 
As a side note, I’ve also just blocked 19 categories of credit & lending advertising on this site because I noticed predatory ads showing up next to this post unfortunately. Hopefully those go away quickly.

The value of outrage

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Noah Berlatsky published a piece in The Atlantic on the pernicious (and recurring) trend of policing strong emotions — primarily “outrage” — as “unserious” in favor of “respectability” and “civility.” He looks at some historical examples of amped-up political and cultural outrage from well before the internet age and muses on its role in moving democracy forward. Here’s just a tiny taste:

The Ferguson and Eric Garner protests have been heavily promoted, organized, and in some cases funded on social media. Setting online outrage against “real” organizing neatly sidesteps the knottier truth—which is that outrage and organizing, online and off, are intertwined. The challenge is not to separate out the outrage, but to figure out a way to harness it to meaningful causes.
[…]
Outrage will never create perfect justice, because nothing will create perfect justice. It has undoubtedly been and is still used for trivialities, and not infrequently for evil. But the difficult truth of democracy is that without the logic of outrage, it’s hard to strive for a better world.

 
It’s also a bit frustrating to watch people try to curb or dismiss outrage that comes from a very real place and life experience. What if there aren’t two sides to be heard? (Or at least not two legitimate sides.) What if it’s actually valid to have and express strong emotions? What if being calm, cool, and collected is actually the inappropriate response? The cool cucumbers don’t seem to consider those possibilities.

Which isn’t to say everyone should be outraged, or has reason to be outraged, or should be outraged all the time. But it is to say that it has its place and isn’t automatically unjustified. It also doesn’t make someone automatically less intelligent or less qualified to speak. The content of people’s complaints is probably far more important than the tone.