Category Archives: Commentary

All written commentary.

5 crazy facts from Uganda’s parliamentary debt farce

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uganda-flagA new Al Jazeera article takes us inside the Ugandan MP debt crisis that is rapidly devolving into farce. Essentially, the elected members of Uganda’s parliament are massively paid by peer standards but somehow are also, almost across the board, massively in debt.

Interviewees vaguely cited failed business investments as if that were a common affliction of the world’s elected officials. Others cited a need to spend personal money to buy votes to be re-elected to keep the money coming. At this point, the MPs believe the only solutions are a huge pay raise (from taxpayers) or bailout (from anyone willing to buy their support).

Here are the 5 craziest things I learned from the eye-popping piece:

  1. Uganda’s members of parliament, who are part of Uganda’s nearly three-decade-old quasi-democracy, were given a huge bribe pay raise to remove presidential term limits in 2005. They now claim President Museveni — Africa’s 5th-longest-serving leader — is intentionally blocking further pay raises. Why? Supposedly, so he’ll have leverage for future bribery incentivizing along the same lines.
  2. Despite how much money they made already, Uganda’s MPs are making new innovations in greed, spending sprees, and legalized theft of public resources. Debt aside, they now legally earn $7,680/month in a country where the average annual income is $510 and per capita GDP is $558. In 2011, many of them voted themselves $8,000 extra in one-time grants to “supervise government projects.”
  3. The parliament, as an institution, literally started lending money to its own members to help them out. Eventually the non-elected staff cut the MPs off from this source of cash because other creditors were then hounding the parliament to pay off debts or collect loans back.
  4. A Chinese bank actually tried to buy off the whole parliament by purchasing up the debts (probably in exchange for political support later) and giving better repayment terms to the MPs. These members of parliament were so greedy and unwilling to face reality they basically tried to accept this openly corrupt (and unpatriotic?) proposal. They blame the president again for stopping this brilliant plan.
  5. Uganda still has debtors’ prisons! This is where some MPs have already started getting hauled off to, when they fail to make good on their debts, like some sort of Dickensian version of House of Cards.

One suspects that these MPs, who are the same ones voting through radical anti-gay legislation handed to them by American evangelical activists, are not exactly the brightest lights in Ugandan society. But I suppose that comes with the territory when real governance power is removed from the parliament and transferred to an autocratic executive who has ruled for 28 years. Tends to discourage better candidates from seeking office.

The unbearable wifeness of being Mrs McDonnell

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Bob-McDonnell-by-Gage_SkidmoreAh, Bob McDonnell, the once and former future Vice President of These United States. Now a retired Governor of Virginia and (as of today) 11-times-over Federal convict. His wife was also convicted soundly on similar charges.

You may recall past highlights from his corruption trial proceedings included refusing to take an amazing plea deal that would have spared his wife altogether from joining him in 14-indictment hell:

The Feds were even willing to offer an extremely generous — perhaps overly so — deal to former Gov. McDonnell that would have protected his wife entirely, even though she seems to have orchestrated much of the corruption and solicitations. All he had to do was plead guilty to one felony count and serve time (probably very little considering who he is). Yet he said no.

 
And so down she went with him. But, we were told, it was all part of a cunning plan! This marriage needed to look so awful (for the jury) that refusing to spare her the investigation was just the final step.

Ah Bobby McDonnell, your masterful and foolproof “my wife is so horrible and I hate her and she was only taking bribes because she was in love with the briber” defense strategy worked like … whatever the opposite of “a charm” is. Just how low did you go in an effort to slime her for your own failed exculpation? Let us consult the New York Times:

Mr. McDonnell, who carried his wife over the threshold of the Executive Mansion the day of his inauguration, portrayed her in his testimony as a harridan whose yelling left him “spiritually and mentally exhausted,” and who was so cold that after he sent her an email pleading to save their marriage, she did not reply.

 
BOBBY. FOR SHAME. You made the New York Times editors break out the word “harridan.” They probably nearly asphyxiated from the dust of opening their expanded-volume dictionary just to find that word which could so perfectly summarize your cold-hearted view of your longtime wife and the mother of your five children.

BOBBY, I HAD TO LOOK THAT WORD UP JUST TO READ ABOUT YOUR DEFENSE. That is how mean you were to your wife.

And how, pray tell, did you brace yourself for your multitudinous convictions, good sir?

Leaving the courthouse at midday Tuesday once the jury began deliberations, Mr. McDonnell said the past 18 months had been tough on his family, but he said he drew strength from his 38 years of marriage and the five children he shared with his wife. “I think we’re stronger than we’ve ever been.”

 
And the shackles of their love will only grow in strength, no doubt, while they are both shackled in respective Federal prisons. Being apart from an unloving, backstabbing, corrupt spouse can only make the heart grow fonder. That’s in Proverbs.

Is Kansas about to vote out a Republican Senator AND Governor?

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It’s been an unexpectedly competitive cycle in Kansas politics this year. Today’s news is that the Democratic Senate nominee Chad Taylor has dropped out of a three-way race with an independent against a Republican incumbent. (Oddly, this also happened in the Alaska Governor’s race earlier this week.)

The decision, from what I can parse from the candidate statement and recent polling, was motivated by the realization that the independent candidate, moderate and apparently reasonable ex-Democrat Greg Orman, might actually have a pretty good shot — in a two-way race — at beating incumbent Republican Senator Pat Roberts in November, even though he was in third in a three-way race. (It’s still jaw-dropping, too, that Sen. Roberts is so unpopular he almost lost his GOP primary to a deeply unethical doctor who had posted patient X-rays of fatal gunshot victims to his Facebook account repeatedly with joking captions.)

The decision for Taylor to drop out seemed to have been done in consultation with (or perhaps even pressure from) Kansas Democratic Party leaders. A PPP poll last month found Orman leading Roberts in a one-on-one race, and in a good position to hold that lead into Election Day as the undecideds come down on one side of the fence or the other.

It’s unclear which party Orman would caucus with if elected, since he’s picking up a lot of Republican endorsements in the state on his pro-business, economics-oriented platform — seems like he’s targeting disaffected moderate Kansas Republicans of the old Eisenhower mold — but there’s also a number of arguably left-leaning positions in his platform too, though that again might just be sane Republicanism that is now what passes for left-leaning. He’s been careful to stake out a position much closer to the pragmatic center than Roberts, certainly. I suspect that, as with Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Senate Democrats, Orman would feel a lot more comfortable being conservative in the diverse Democratic caucus than trying to conform his pragmatism to the rigid lockstep extremism that has characterized the Republican caucus in recent years. Either way, I’m sure many Kansas Democrats feel it would be better to have Orman elected than have Sen. Roberts squeak into a fourth term in a 3-way race.

At minimum and regardless of outcome, this development might help Democrats nationally, by suddenly making a Republican Senator credibly more vulnerable and diverting crucial Republican resources out of other swing Senate seats where Republicans were trying to pick up a half dozen seats from Democrats to retake the majority this November.

Closer to home, in Kansas itself, creating a second competitive statewide race in Kansas could further help boost left and moderate voter turnout against the now-near-universally-loathed Governor Sam Brownback.
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US suddenly surprised to find Mideast states acting unilaterally

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A couple weeks ago, the United Arab Emirates Air Force struck targets in Libya’s capital in a surprise attack. According to the Pentagon, this secret operation attacked Islamist militias opposing the Zintan Brigade, which the UAE supports, and it was launched from Egyptian air bases. Both the UAE and Egyptian air forces — which are currently strongly opposed to political Islam and Islamic terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa regions — are trained and armed with American help, but the United States was not expecting or endorsing such an operation.

An Al Jazeera America headline blared an ominous warning: “UAE strikes on Libya stir US fears of a free-for-all in the Middle East”.

American unilateralism in the Middle East (particularly Iraq) combined with our arming and training these military forces to be self-sufficient was pretty much asking for that outcome. We provided the means and the model. They seized the opportunity. Why should we be surprised?

And as former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman is quoted in there as saying, Israel’s been doing the same thing for years (unilateral force actions, against US wishes, with US military aid) in its immediate sphere, so why should these other countries restrain themselves against targets that can’t hit back?

“Gulf states and Egypt have seen many instances of Israel doing whatever it wants without us,” Freeman said. “They’re saying, if Israel can use U.S. weapons to defy the U.S. and pursue its own foreign policy objectives, why can’t they?”

 
Moreover, the US seems to have managed to systematically take out all the restraints and countermeasures that had been delicately balancing the Middle East/North Africa and Southwest Asia regions, without then having a plan for what to replace it with, except more weapons to even more diffused points. And then we’re shocked — just shocked! — to see the house of cards start to fold in on itself in slow-motion. Which is not to say the US should have continued supporting most of those status quo regimes — they are the reason we’re in such a mess of rampant radicalism — but the handling of it from 2001 to present has been catastrophic. There had to have been a better plan to unravel the system than figuratively and sometimes literally carpet-bombing it without a roadmap toward any sort of objective.
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Pennsylvania gov’t admits fracking contamination

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Nice to finally have some confirmation that it wasn’t all imagined (as some have insisted to me and others many times):

For the first time, Pennsylvania has made public 243 cases of contamination of private drinking wells from oil and gas drilling operations.

As the AP reports, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection posted details about the contamination cases online on Thursday. The cases occurred in 22 counties, with Susquehanna, Tioga, Lycoming, and Bradford counties having the most incidences of contamination.

In some cases, one drilling operation contaminated the water of multiple wells, with water issues resulting from methane gas contamination, wastewater spills, and wells that simply went dry or undrinkable. The move to release the contamination information comes after years of the AP and other news outlets filing lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests from the DEP on water issues related to oil and gas drilling and fracking.

 
One wonders if there will be any consequences, though, given that the industry has spent massively on the campaigns of favorable state reps and state senators in Pennsylvania to open the way to fracking operations all over the state.

The industry lobby’s response to the disclosure, as reported by the AP/Wall Street Journal, was to fault Pennsylvania rocks for being difficult to work with and to blame the state government for lax regulation on drilling well construction and design (a statement which takes a lot of chutzpah).

US planes hit ISIS siege forces outside Amirli, Iraq

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A week ago I asked why there seemed to be a double standard regarding US response toward the Shiite Iraqi Turkmen community at Amirli, which was facing a severe humanitarian crisis after two months of ISIS encirclement, not unlike the situation at Mount Sinjar that had prompted the US to intervene militarily to break the siege around the Yazidi Kurds. The UN and other groups had begun calling for a relief mission to send more food and medicine to Amirli and were puzzled as to why a strong response had not already occurred.

It took longer than it ought to have but tonight we have a resolution to the double standard as U.S. airstrikes began on ISIS positions around the town of Amirli and coalition humanitarian aircraft arrived with help:

American warplanes launched airstrikes on Sunni militants who have been besieging the town of Amerli in northern Iraq on Saturday, in a broadening of the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The Pentagon announced the expanded strikes Saturday night. Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said that American planes also airdropped food, water and humanitarian aid to the town of Amerli, home to members of Iraq’s Turkmen minority. The town of 12,000 has been under siege by the militants for more than two months.

Aircraft from Australia, France and the United Kingdom joined the United States in dropping the supplies, Admiral Kirby said in a statement.

 

Update, August 31, 2014: Iraqi ground troops and Shiite paramilitary forces arrived into the town today after several days of slowly fighting ISIS through the surrounding area. The airstrikes cleared the final path.

Click on the map to navigate in Google Maps.

Click on the map to navigate in Google Maps.

The town, located several dozen miles east of Tikrit or south of Kirkuk, is at the nexus of the Sunni Arab heartland and greater Iraqi Kurdistan. Relations between Kurdish political leadership — who are closely aligned with the United States — and the Iraqi Turkmen people have sometimes not been good, as I explored in the post last weekend.

Possible coup attempt in progress in Lesotho

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Lesotho is a constitutional monarchy surrounded by South Africa, with some prior history of military involvement in its politics. The Prime Minister has fled across the border into South Africa, saying that a military coup is under way.

But it’s unclear what’s actually going on here, because the Prime Minister suspended parliament back in June to avoid a no-confidence vote against his unstable coalition government. And today the military allegedly may have just been trying to take him involuntarily to the king (I assume to insist that parliament be recalled into session and a new government be formed under a different prime minister). The military also claims they were merely acting today to disarm the country’s police force, which they accuse of providing weapons to the prime minister’s party supporters.

According to the BBC:

The army is understood to have acted after the prime minister attempted to remove its chief, Lt Gen Kennedy Tlai Kamoli.

The army said the general was still charge, saying the military “supports the democratically elected government of the day,” Reuters news agency reported.

A spokesman, Maj Ntlele Ntoi, denied staging a coup, saying: “There is nothing like that, the situation has returned to normalcy… the military has returned to their barracks.”

Earlier, troops were seen on the streets of Maseru and there were reports of gunfire.

Radio stations were taken off air and phone lines were cut, although later reports suggested they were working again.

 
Eyewitness account by Basildon Peta, publisher of the Lesotho Times, quoted by the BBC:

This whole thing started around 03:00. There were gunshots since early morning. The city is currently calm. People are playing it safe within their homes, but there is basically a media blackout.

To all intents and purposes it is a military coup with the aim of ousting the prime minister. There can be no other reason of soldiers behaving the way they have been behaving other than to seize power.

So far we have no reports of killings. It would be correct to call it a bloodless coup attempt. But I am not going to stick around. The chances are the situation may deteriorate. One does not know what is going to happen.

 
South Africa’s government, which has long had a very influential role in Lesotho’s politics, has said it is monitoring the situation closely and would oppose any unconstitutional change in power there.

The former British protectorate of less than 2 million people is very poor and still has a subsistence-oriented agricultural economy. The government is the largest employer in the country, according to the CIA World Factbook. The military has strongly resisted government plans to reduce its size to a more reasonable level for a country whose outside defenses are actually now maintained by another country (South Africa).

Map of Lesotho's location in southern Africa. (CIA World Factbook)

Map of Lesotho’s location in southern Africa. (CIA World Factbook)

Update, August 31 2014: There has been an attempted assassination against Lieutenant General Maaparankoe Mahao, who was Prime Minister Tom Thabane’s choice to replace Lieutenant General Tlali Kamoli as head of the armed forces. The latter is accused of leading the attempted coup this weekend.

Low-ranking soldiers contacted by AFP said it was unclear who was now giving their orders. They remain confined to barracks.

Prime Minister Thabane remains in South Africa. His political rival, Deputy Prime Minister Mothejoa Metsing, has also now departed Lesotho for Pretoria, at the invitation of the South African government, to try to sort out the situation. This appears to leave Public Service Minister Motloheloa Phooko, from the third rival party in the coalition government, as the acting chief executive, assuming the civilian leadership is still in power, despite the coup attempt.