Authors and commentators Gary Younge and Ian Buruma, discuss the relationship between Barack Obama and the world's media at The New School in Manhattan.

Watch here.

Do non-US and American media cover Obama differently?

Yes and no, according to a report by media monitoring organization, MediaTenor:

While international TV news remains enthusiastic about Barack Obama, domestic TV news paints an ambivalent image of the first 100 days of the new president. Even in the main eve-ning news of ABC, CBS and NBC, that are not normally judged to support the Republican party, positive and negative news are balanced in the period between January 20th and April 9th, 2009. When Fox News is taken into account, the overall picture turns even negative. This compares quite unfavorably with the TV coverage of George W. Bush's first 100 days in 2001. Bush received more critical coverage but generated even more positive news.

"The main focus of internationals stations lay more on Obama's appealing personality and the presentation of his dog than on the issues, that dominated US TV news: the economy, tax policy and the selection of his administration ", Roland Schatz, President and founder of Media Tenor International explains the different news selection in between US and international TV programs. The research institute has been from continuously monitoring the TV coverage of the President and of other leading US politicians from the year 2000 on, not only in the US but in Germany, UK, CNN World News and the Arab satellite stations Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera and LBC TV as well.

Positive international news coverage accompanied Barack Obama on his long way in the White House and this positive perception outlived the first 100 days in office as well. Especially German and Arab TV news remained enthusiastic about Barack Obama with a share of 21.2% and 17.9% of positive statements respectively. The share of negative information on the other hand did not exceed 8%.

But in domestic as well as in international news, positive reporting focused on the personality of Obama and his public appearance. "The hopes as sociated with the new President focused on the economy", explains Dr. Christian Kolmer, head of political studies at Media Tenor. "About 1/4 of the US coverage and more than 1/5 of the reports in international TV news related to economic issues." It is telling that Obama's public appearance was more important for US TV journalists than foreign policy. "This is one of the causes of the weak approval rates for Obama in the US: With a job approval of 49% Obama has already lost much of his credit with American voter over the first 100 days of his presidency."

Obama's trip to Europe has pushed the financial crisis down on the media agenda, especially in international TV news - with positive consequences for his evaluation. But the picture became more balanced in April in the US as well - even before the new dog arrived in the White House. "Obama has raised great expectations in Europe and the Muslim World", comments Dr. Kolmer. Obama benefits in these countries from th e favorable comparisons with his predecessor George W. Bush as well. This leads Dr. Kolmer to a cautious forecast: "It is only a matter of time, till when the media will address the virtually unchanged demands US policy directs towards its European partners. And then disillusionment and declining polls will cross the Atlantic."

Media Tenor International analyzes the media coverage of US politicians, parties and of the US Government on an ongoing basis in the main evening news of ARD, ZDF, BBC, ITV, Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera, LBC TV, CNN World News, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox. For this analysis overall 12,866 news stories with 69,898 statements have been examined for the pe-riod from January to April 2009.

Eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm, who has captured the momentous changes of the last century or so in his numerous publications, writing in The (UK) Guardian:

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the "capabilities" of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy - not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.

The Pentagon sponsored a first-of-its-kind war game last month focused not on bullets and bombs but on how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy, a scenario made all the more real by the global financial crisis.

The two-day event near Fort Meade, Maryland, had all the earmarks of a regular war game. Participants sat along a V-shaped set of desks beneath an enormous wall of video monitors displaying economic data, according to the accounts of three participants.

"It felt a little bit like 'Dr. Strangelove,'" one person who was at the previously undisclosed exercise told Politico.

But instead of military brass plotting America's defense, it was hedge-fund managers, professors, and executives from at least one investment bank, UBS -- all invited by the Pentagon to play out global scenarios that could shift the balance of power between the world's leading economies.

Their efforts were carefully observed and recorded by uniformed military officers and members of the U.S. intelligence community.

In the end, there was sobering news for the United States -- the savviest economic warrior proved to be China, a growing economic power that strengthened its position the most over the course of the war game.

The United States remained the world's largest economy but significantly degraded its standing in a series of financial skirmishes with Russia, participants said.

Link.

From RawStory:

A confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has revealed that medical officers and health personnel supervised, and in some cases assisted as detainees were deprived of food, exposed to extreme temperatures, and subjected to waterboarding. A copy of the 2007 report was posted on a magazine web site Monday night. The report quotes one medical official telling a detainee: "I look after your body only because we need you for information."

The new details of alleged CIA interrogation practices are contained in a 43-page volume written by ICRC officials who were given unprecedented access to the CIA's 'high-value detainees' in 2006. Excerpts of the report had been leaked previously, and the entire document was made public for the first time on Monday evening by author Mark Danner, a journalism professor, on the New York Review of Books online site.

Some of the details:

•   Suffocation by water poured over a cloth placed over the nose and mouth...
•   Prolonged stress standing position, naked, held with the arms extended and chained above the head...
•   Beatings by use of a collar held around the detainees' neck and used to forcefully bang the head and body against the wall...
•   Beating and kicking, including slapping, punching, kicking to the body and face...
•   Confinement in a box to severely restrict movement...
•   Prolonged nudity...this enforced nudity lasted for periods ranging from several weeks to several months...
•   Sleep deprivation...through use of forced stress positions (standing or sitting), cold water and use of repetitive loud noises or music...
•   Exposure to cold temperature...especially via cold cells and interrogation rooms, and...use of cold water poured over the body or...held around the body by means of a plastic sheet to create an immersion bath with just the head out of water.
•   Prolonged shackling of hands and/or feet...
•   Threats of ill-treatment, to the detainee and/or his family...
•   Forced shaving of the head and beard...
•   Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food from 3 days to 1 month after arrest...

Geographer David Harvey in an interview (link to transcript and video) with Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman:

AMY GOODMAN: If you were Timothy Geithner, if you were the Treasury Secretary--

DAVID HARVEY: Yes, if I was Treasury Secretary.

AMY GOODMAN: --what exactly would you be doing?

DAVID HARVEY: Oh, I would take a lot of that [stimulus] money, and I would put it into some kind of a national reconstruction corporation. And I would say, "Look, your first duty is to take care of the foreclosure crisis and the people who have been foreclosed upon. So go into cities like Cleveland and so on that have been devastated, and go into sort of areas in California and so on and take care of the foreclosure crisis."

AMY GOODMAN: How would you do that?

DAVID HARVEY: Well, I think one of the ways you could do that is to start to buy out all of those houses that are about to be foreclosed on and put them into some kind of, I don't know, municipal housing association or some collective form of that kind, and then allow people to remain in those houses, even though they're no longer necessarily owners. So the ownership rights would shift.

I mean, we have a myth in this country that homeownership is the gospel, as it were. But for a lot of people, homeownership is not a good idea. And I think, actually, it's not a good idea in general.

Trade Unionist Bill Fletcher on Obama's Afghanistan strategy:

Sometimes I feel like I am reliving the era of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The era of "guns and butter," as they called it. At the same time that Johnson was launching his "War on Poverty" he was escalating the US war against the people of Vietnam and Laos, as well as carrying out the criminal invasion of the Dominican Republic (1965). Not only did these interventions (and others) isolate the USA and set back the efforts of these various countries at self-determination, but they wrecked the US economy, siphoning off badly needed resources.

My last post was about evidence of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's history of bad advice (there's also a story in the Washington Post today how he lost site of the target while head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York).

Now its the turn of his colleague, Lawrence Summers, director of President Barack Obama's National Econonic Council, who already has a long back history of bad decisions, first as a senior official of the World Bank and later as President of Harvard University :

As the Boston Globe reports today:

Back in 2002, a new employee of Harvard University's endowment manager named Iris Mack wrote a letter to the school's president, Lawrence Summers, that would ultimately get her fired.

In the letter, dated May 12 of that year, Mack told Summers that she was "deeply troubled and surprised" by things she had seen in her new job as a quantitative analyst at Harvard Management Co.

She would go on to say, in later e-mails and conversations, that she felt the endowment was taking on too much risk in derivatives investments, and that she suspected some of her colleagues were engaging in insider trading, according to a separate letter written by her lawyer that summarized the correspondence.

On July 2 Mack was fired. But six years later, the kinds of investments she allegedly warned about did blow up on Harvard. The endowment plunged 22 percent last summer, in part due to the collapse of the credit markets. As a result, the school is cutting costs and under criticism that it took on too much risk in its investment portfolio.

Mack, who holds a doctorate in mathematics from Harvard, had been with Harvard Management for just four months when she approached Summers. She asked him to keep her communications confidential, or risk making her life "a living hell."

But on July 1, Mack was called into a meeting by her boss, Jack Meyer, then the chief of Harvard Management.

The next day Meyer fired her, according to the letter from her attorney, Jonathan Margolis, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe. Meyer told Mack that she was fired for making "baseless allegations against HMC to individuals outside of HMC," according to the Margolis letter.

Mack's saga surfaced yesterday in a report by the Harvard Crimson in which Mack reportedly said she warned of swaps and other complex instruments that the endowment had recently begun working with. The Crimson reported that Mack said the staff had "no background whatsoever" in some of the investments they were wading into.

Mack, who had been a trader for Enron the year before joining Harvard, worked in the group run by Jeffrey Larson. Larson left Harvard in 2004 to start a hedge fund, Sowood Capital Management, which shut down in 2007 after losing $1.6 billion, more than half of its assets, on highly leveraged investment bets. The firm returned about $1.4 billion to its clients. The Harvard endowment, among Larson's clients, lost $350 million with him.

More here.

 

When Barack Obama announced his champion to rescue the world from economic ruin, it was the first time most Americans had ever heard the name Tim Geithner.

The initial impression was good. The stockmarket surged and the pundits swooned...

If anyone in the US media had thought to ask a former Australian prime minister for his assessment, they would have heard a different view. And they would not have been so surprised at Geithner's performance since.

"Tim Geithner was the Treasury line officer who wrote the IMF [International Monetary Fund] program for Indonesia in 1997-98, which was to apply current account solutions to a capital account crisis."

In other words, Geithner fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. And his misdiagnosis led to a dreadfully wrong prescription.

More in the Sydney Morning Herald

In an exclusive interview with the BBC's John Simpson, Mexican President Felipe Calderon has warned that corruption among American officials may be making it harder to deal with drug-trafficking between Mexico and the US.

Speaking in Mexico City before leaving for his state visit to London immediately ahead of next week's G20 summit, ... President Calderon said it was impossible to smuggle tonnes of cocaine into the United States without the complicity of some American authorities.

"There is trafficking in Mexico because there is corruption in Mexico," he told the BBC.

"But by the same argument if there is trafficking in the United States it is because there is some corruption in the United States... It is impossible to pass tonnes of cocaine to the United States without the complicity of some American authorities."

President Calderon complained about the smuggling of American guns into Mexico. Ninety per cent of the guns used in the current wave of drugs violence came from the US, he said, and he pointed out that there were 11,000 gun stores in towns and cities close to the Mexican border.

Link

A recent Los Angeles Times editorial on the prominence of Al Shabab, an Islamic terrorist group based in Somalia that may form the nucleus of the new government and has close ties to Al Qaeda, makes for interesting reading.

The editorial is interesting for two reasons: one for implicating US policy in the rise of Al Shabab ("Al Shabab probably would not exist were it not for the disastrous failure of U.S. policies in Somalia. In other words, we are the authors of our own undoing").

It is also interesting for publishing a chronology of the events leading to the present crisis in Somalia ("a failed state overrun by armed militants that makes Afghanistan under the Taliban look like the garden spot of South Asia") that is unusual in an American publication:

After [the tragic events of 1993 when US soldiers were murdered by Somali militialand during a failed attempt to hunt for the country's leading warlord], the United States was mostly content to leave Somalia's crumbling affairs to the United Nations. The U.N.-backed regime that followed was a bad joke, struggling to control the immediate vicinity of its enclave in Baidoa while leaving the rest of the country to fend for itself. But a glimmer of hope appeared in the early years of this decade when Muslim groups began banding together in a network called the Islamic Courts Union. It imposed a particularly repressive brand of Sharia law on the territories it oversaw, but also brought something the country hadn't seen for more than a decade: order.

The Islamic Courts Union disarmed the populace, tamed the warlords and stamped out piracy on the country's coast. But its versionof Islamic nationalism was deeply troubling to the Bush administration, whose intelligence services reported that it contained radical anti-American elements. Fearing a repeat of the Taliban experience in Afghanistan, the administration first armed warlords who pledged to fight the Islamists, then encouraged the government of next-door Ethiopia, a strong U.S. ally, to invade in 2006. Ethiopian troops encountered little resistance and quickly took over. But the Ethiopians found themselves confronting a grinding insurgency akin to that in Iraq, and a refugee crisis as people fled the increasingly dangerous streets of Mogadishu. Ethiopian troops pulled out in January, leaving a power vacuum behind.

Into that vacuum stepped Al Shabab. With most of the moderate elements of the Islamic Courts Union having left the country or been driven underground during the Ethiopian occupation, it was the radical young members of Al Shabab who were left to fight the insurgency, and who have emerged as probably the most powerful military force in Somalia. Islamic Courts Union.It is a measure of how badly things have deteriorated since the Ethiopian invasion that the West is looking to Somalia's latest president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, as the best hope to bring stability to the country, despite the fact that he is nearly powerless and that he had previously been a leading figure with the hated Islamic Courts Union.

The former US envoy to Sudan, Andrew Natsios, has an interesting piece on the redesigned website of Foreign Affairs magazine, arguing that the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir will make things worse for the people of Darfur.

Natsios, who worked as George Bush's Special Envoy to Sudan in 2006 and 2007, is known to have held some of these views for a while, but this is the first time that I have seen him publicly articulate it in such a systematic way in a mainstream publication read by foreign policy elites. More significantly is the fact that Natsios's views broadly coincide with that of the Columbia University anthropology and political science professor, Mahmood Mamdani. In this, his views contrasts sharply with that of the US-based Save Darfur Campaign, most Republicans, and the ICC chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

Here are some highlights from the piece that will certainly reverberate in debates about US foreign policy on Sudan:

The question now is not whether ... crimes were committed [by the government in Khartoum] -- they were -- but what consequences the ICC's latest action will have for justice, peace, and stability in Sudan. They will not be good.

... Advocates of the recent ICC decision believed it would pressure Bashir and his government to behave better. It has already done the opposite, and now the regime will do everything necessary to remain in power and make sure that Bashir is never arrested. The chances of a peaceful political transformation in Sudan, admittedly slim to begin with, have become even slimmer with the order for Bashir's arrest. So long as the threat of the order loomed, it probably did help to restrain the Sudanese government. With the threat now realized, the regime has far less to lose.

Paradoxically, the ICC warrant also gives Darfuri rebels the wrong incentives. The more international advocacy groups, the media, and foreign politicians demand war crimes trials for the perpetrators of atrocities in Darfur, the longer the list of nonnegotiable demands the rebels there will make and thus the more remote the possibility of any political agreement, which is the only real hope that refugees have of safely returning home...

Sudan's leaders are not going to arrest themselves, and the international community has neither the political will nor the troops to do the job... In the meantime, either the Darfur camps will become another Gaza or the Sudanese government will disperse residents by force, probably causing many deaths.

Another unintended side effect of the ICC indictment, and perhaps the most disturbing, is that it has united many Arab and African governments behind Bashir, including some that both despise his regime (and have told me so privately) and have signed the ICC's founding treaty.

Natsios also challenges Luis Moreno-Ocampo's data:

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the court's chief prosecutor, claimed that 5,000 war-related deaths continue to occur each month in Darfur. Presumably, he believed that the court's action could reduce that number. Not only does history suggest he will not get the results he expects but the data on which he based his assertion were questionable. He provided no source for it, but according to the human rights group Genocide Intervention Network, about 1,500 people were killed in Darfur in all of 2008, 500 of them Arabs killed by other Arabs. (The rest were Africans killed by Arabs.)

Even assuming that these accounts understate the number of casualties by half, it would be difficult to get to 5,000 deaths for the year 2008, let alone per month, as Moreno-Ocampo asserts. Statistics for 2007 were similar, which suggests that the fairly clearly delineated situation of 2003-4 has mutated into more general anarchy and that the line between victims and aggressors is no longer so clear. Reports from the United Nations and several nongovernmental organizations show that mortality rates from disease and malnutrition in the internally displaced camps are now well below those in the villages of Darfur. The high mortality rate during the 2003-4 civil war was largely accounted for by deaths among displaced people suffering from malnutrition, dehydration, and disease before the aid community could assist them with food, water, and medical care. By invoking a monthly death toll of 5,000, Moreno-Ocampo seems to suggest that Darfuris still die from these causes as a result of continued displacement, if not from violence per se. But this is simply not true -- at least it was not until the arrest warrant for Bashir, because the work of aid agencies had been keeping mortality rates down. These groups' recent expulsion now puts Darfuris at risk, but since that was retaliation for the ICC's move, that problem cannot justify the court's action.

Finally, Natsios (like Mamdani) emphasis a political, rather than a military or a legal solution, an ends his column with a warning that

... In seeking a justice that cannot be obtained, rather than a realistic peace that might be, the international community risks bringing Sudan not to the doors of Eden but to the gates of Hell.

Read the piece here.

Writing in the op-ed pages of The Washington Post, Meizhu Lui, director of the Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative, brings this bad news. Based on data for 2007 from the Federal Reserce:

The gap between the wealth of white Americans and African Americans has grown. According to the Fed, for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, the African American family has only one dime. In 2004, it had 12 cents.

Why is that the case?

The biggest predictor of the future economic status of a child is the net worth of the child's parents. Even modest inheritances or gifts within a parent's lifetime -- such as paying for college or providing the down payment on a home -- can give a child a lift up the economic ladder. And historically, white families have enjoyed more government support and tax-paid subsidies for their asset-building activities.

and they're the victims of redlining and predatory loan sharks:

White families are five times as likely as families of color to have a bank account and access to responsible loan terms. Because of the lack of federally insured and regulated financial institutions on reservations and in inner cities, rural areas, barrios and Chinatowns, payday lenders and other shady financial dealers operating without government oversight have preyed on people of color, fueling the economic and foreclosure crises. African Americans and other people of color were more than three times as likely as white borrowers to be steered to high-interest loans, even when they qualified for a prime loan.

What should be done? Lui suggests, among others, changes to the tax code, establish a Financial Product Safety Commission "... to act against discriminatory lending policies and to stop the marketing of dangerous loans such as exploding adjustable-rate mortgages. We also should cap the mortgage interest deduction and make it refundable so low-income homeowners can benefit."

Link.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that that close to 200 inmates in the country's prisons were on death row and that "some of them have been there for 15 to 20 years, waiting for the hangman's noose."

Source.

South Africa barred the Dalai Lama from a peace conference in Johannesburg this week, saying Monday it did not want to endanger the government's relationship with China. The move prompted sharp criticism from the Nobel Committee, among others.

Thabo Masebe, spokesman for President Kgalema Motlanthe, said now was not the time for such a high-profile visit from the Tibetan spiritual leader and added that South Africa hoped to avoid being "the source of negative publicity about China."

Source.