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(Writer's note: this post provides multi-faceted background on Zimbabwe, whose President was assessed in the July 2007 final cable of the American ambassador. The post contains the full content of the cable. But is the post multi-faceted background or just meandering summary? Are the facts fair? You decide. Create yor own insights. Was Hillary biased, misinformed, pandering or sincere when she voted for US sanctions? Does it inform her current approach? How could the US ambassador ignore the devastation of AIDS? What was Tony Blair's real motive? Why did the US authorize sanctions, but still give aid? Why wasn't deflation an issue? How do the grass roots feel about the land grab? And why tap the President's wife? Why is the army loyal and apparently not interested in overthrow? Was colonialism racism? The point is to minimize the editorial and provide a platform of facts by which readers could form their own questions and conclusions./wr)

Buried in the buzzard of diplomatic cables released by WilkiLeaks is a remarkable piece of first source diplomacy. Bundled in the quarter million documents is the outgoing American ambassador's confidential report assessing the leadership and conditions in Zimbabwe, a deeply troubled regime in Africa. Entitled “The End is Nigh,” the 2600 word cable offers the insights and analysis of America's highest diplomat posted in the country.

Classified as “confidential,” the ambassador's report, dated July 13, 2007, expresses what a Canada-based, Zimbabwean online news site calls “admiration and disdain” for Robert Mugabe, only Zimbabwe's second President since its founding on April 18, 1980.

Robert Mugabe has served as Zimbabwe's president for 24 years and was the country's first prime minister. Before taking power, Mugabe was a leader of the Zimbabwe African Union or ZANU, one of two factions of armed resistance challenging the ruling minority regime when the former break away British colony was known as Rhodesia.

The media questions fielded by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the US State Department's press conference did not address the impact of the cable's release on US-Zimbabwe relations. Yet Zimbabwe's severe economic distress, political violence, and heavy handed laws threatens the stability of the whole of Southern Africa, a region of key strategic and economic importance to America.

In late October 2010, in Masvingo, 400 Zimbabwe's soldiers marched in a Sunday demonstration carrying placards, chanting the slogan, “provoke a hero, start a war,” pledging allegiance to Mugabe, and repeating insistently that he should rule Zimbabwe forever.

For many reasons, others fear Mugabe's rule. In early October 2010, the governor of Zimbabwe's central bank, Gideon Gono, suddenly disappeared into hiding. Reports surfaced Gono had carried out a five year, secret affair with Mugabe's 46 year-old second wife, Grace. Mrs. Mugabe served as the president's secretary and borne him two children before they were married in an elaborate 1996 Catholic mass after the death of his first wife. Famous for her extravagant personal spending, one UK newspaper parodied her lavish tastes in a country where the poor are starving with the headline, “Let them eat Chanel.”

Following Gono's 2003 appointment, hyper-inflation devastated and shredded Zimbabwe's economy. Between 2002 and 2006, Zimbabwe's economy lost more than half its value. Despite the country's stunning economic collapse, Gono boasted he was being reviewed for the presidency of the World Bank. His principal achievement seems to have been finding ways to fund Mrs. Mugabe's many shopping sprees to Asia—he often escorted her abroad and was a business partner. He also enriched many of the political elite while developing no base of support for himself.

Under Gono's direction, Zimbabwe maintains the world's highest rate of inflation and is considered the world's second worse economy, after North Korea. The rate of inflation was once measured in the hundreds of billions, but was probably exaggerated. To meet inflated currency demands, Gono authorized bills in new denominations as high as 100 billion Zimbabwean dollars. There are now no official exchange rates; the Zimbabwe dollar does not circulate outside the country.

Gono's monetary policy is peppered with biblical references; he frequently commits policy statements “into the Lord's hands.” Before becoming the governor of the central bank, he was Mugabe's personal banker. Gono is now prohibited by Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF party from traveling to the US. Sanctioned by the European Union, he is unable to travel to Europe. Since the rumors, he is no longer able to rest in his own Harare home with its 47 bedrooms.

Other protests of Mugabe's leadership have flared into public view. A one national hero who fought beside Mugabe during war for Zimbabwe's independence, refused to be buried in the national cemetery. In keeping with his wishes, his family declined to have him interred at the national shrine with those he considered “crooks and thieves.”

Since the ambassador's 2007 forecast of the country's and Mugabe's fortunes, the economy has made progress. The most recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report estimates GDP will be US$8 billion for 2011. That jumps from US$4.2 billion in 2008, an increase of 90 per cent in three years.

Industrial capacity is now up to 40 per cent compared to 2008. The mining industry, mainly gold and platinum, has expanded. Agricultural output is stable. Tobacco production more than doubled in 2009. Deposits now stand at US$2.4 billion and rise $80 million a month.

National tax revenues, only only $1 billion in 2009, will double to $2 billion in 2010, and are estimated to be $2.7 billion in 2011.

The party in power, ZANU-PF, blames the implosion of the economy on western “sanctions.” But in fact, the international community has been very generous to Zimbabwe. For the past three years, foreign aid to Zimbabwe provided food aid for more than half the population.

In 2010, foreign aid exploded to $800 million (all amounts, US$), half of it for humane assistance, including $200 million earmarked for health, $100 million for education and $50 million for water and sanitation. Ninety per cent of the aid comes from a group of States comprised of 17 countries loosely called the “Friends of Zimbabwe.” Within the group are the US, providing a third of all aid; Britain, at 14 per cent; and Germany and Norway each contributing 7 per cent. Transfers from the 3.5 million Zimbabweans living abroad in the diaspora total $1.2 billion annually.

The new growth of the macro-economy contrasts with miniscule wages of workers. Seventy percent of the 12.5 million Zimbabweans earn an average of $245 a year, less than half the average weekly American paycheck. Income disparaties are extremely wide. The top ten percent of the population receives nearly half of the country's income.

Using a macroeconomic comparison, Warren Buffett's 2009 total investment in the Burlington Northern Railroad of $44 billion is almost nine times greater than Zimbabwe's entire GNP for 2010.

Zimbabwe is a difficult country to start a business. Zimbabwe has few protections for property rights, and limited regulation, according to the US Heritage Foundation. Its GNP is one third of Zambia's, its neighbor whose GNP it equaled only 10 years ago.

Zimbabwe's army consists of 29,000 troops and is equipped with one of the world's most ubiquitous weapons, the Russian AKM, a variant of the well known AK-47. The police organize much of the country's corruption, extorting fees from vendors and drivers, and operate many of the country's illegal markets.

Despite its tensions and distress, Zimbabwe ranks tenth in African internet usage, with 1.4 million users, just behind the Sudan. (Nigeria is first with 10 million users.) The country has an active tourist industry, with visitors coming mainly from South Africa. The three major components of its economy are agriculture, mining (precious metals, coal), and industry (chemicals, textiles).

Zimbabwe before its current economic and political woes had a long and proud history as an ancient southern African urban center and thriving kingdom. Set in a broad, lush, green highlands with ample rain and bounded by north and south river routes along the Zambezi and Limpopo with access to the Indian sea, a major trade route ran up the rift valley the length of Africa to Asian minor and a web of routes within the region extended east to Angola and south to Cape Town.

Zimbabwe was the site of the city kingdom of Mapungubwe, which flourished from 1020 to 1270. Mapunubwe's ancient site, set along several hills, has yielded the ruins of an amphitheatre and elevated burial grounds with panoramic views with the remains buried upright with objects of prestige. Mapungubwe is one of the first southern African societies to exhibit extensive wealth and to draw social distinctions in housing, objects, and burial rites between its rulers and citizens.

The name Zimbabwe was first used for an community that built enormous granite walls and stone structures--the largest stone construction projects south of the Sahara. Perhaps as many as 10,000 people lived in the ancient city of during its zenith. The ancient Shona people smithed iron and gold and managed large herds of cattle; signs of their intelligence, status, and wealth.

Blue porcelain from China's Ming dynasty (1368-1644) made its way to Zimbabwe. Its central highlands were an essential part of the pre-industrial world's most important trade route, the Silk Road. Under hot dry skies, along paths worn by thousands of foot prints, ancient caravans of traders entered Zimbabwe and shared the comforts of its African hospitality. They packed pepper and sesame grown in the valley and ivory and gold to take away to China and Europe, and returned with goods from Istanbul and Beijing. They exchanged goods with honesty and integrity.

Today, AIDS has entered the country, its first case reported in 1985. Since 1990, life expectancy has dropped from 61 to 33 years. Zimbabwe ranks among the world's most infected countries. In the army, the infection rate may be as high as 80 percent. Almost sixty percent of infected adults are women. A million children are orphaned because of the disease. In four years, between 2002 and 2006, 4 million people died. The annual expenditure for an HIV-positive person in Zimbabwe is $4.

Once considered the best educational system in modern Africa, with a literacy rate above 90%, Zimbabwe's education system has also suffered. Its teachers have left the country. Examinations have gone ungraded. School children without notebooks have been observed writing lessons in the dust. The University of Zimbabwe has closed its residence halls and cut courses of study. In 2008, reports say schools only opened for 23 uninterrupted days.

Robert Mugabe went to Jesuit secondary schools and earned seven college degrees (two master's). Mugabe studied at South Africa's Fort Hare University, meeting African political leaders Kenneth Kaunda, and Julius Nyerere, the father of modern African education and a former President of Tanzania. Mugabe's degrees include two in law, one each in science, education, and administration from the University of London External Studies Program, an outstanding university program which has produced seven Nobel laureates in peace, physics, economics, and medicine. He knows the value of education; he refers to himself as teacher number one. But the country he governs can not buy desks for its school children.

Its a far cry from the proud moment when, after 47 plenary sessions, he and other Zimbabwe leaders signed the Lancaster House Agreement on December 21, 1979. The agreement called for a transfer of state power to the African parties, outlined an Independence constitution, a cease fire, and the transitional steps.

The issues in Zimbabwe have been characterized by a lot of shouting from all sides. The mining and agricultural industries, the nation's two most important economic sectors, have been the targets of aggressive laws, removing many of the traditional protections of corporate ownership and requiring increases in the African share of ownership. Western observers have classified Zimbabwe as a failed state, yet much of the state still works, albeit under extreme conditions. According to US Energy Information Administration statistics, Zimbabwe imports 12,800 barrels of oil daily, but is a net exporter of coal, producing 3.35 million tons of high quality coal annually, ranking 39th in the world. It ranks 96th in electricity generation and 78th in consumption. A number of business analysts point to deals that show an active interest in investing in Zimbabwe; its stock market trades 10 million shares a day. But these deals and shares mainly involve large mining firms, cellular service providers, breweries and have no impact on citizen lives.

The British newspaper site, the Guardian and Mail, tells a familiar story:

“Tobacco was the mainstay of Zimbabwe's economy during the 1980s and 1990s. The "golden leaf" was the county's main export product, accounting for about 50% of Zimbabwe's foreign currency earnings. About 700,000 people were dependent on the industry for their living. For decades, Zimbabwean tobacco was coveted by blenders as among the finest in the world. Zimbabwe was the second-largest producer of flue-cured tobacco after the United States in the 1990s. Its crop was recognized for its quality in major tobacco markets in Europe, Asia and the US.”

 The market crashed. In 2007, the time of the ambassador's cable, after recent grower protests, “the exchange rate of one US dollar to Z$250 was adjusted upwards to a special rate of one US dollar to Z$30,000, but farmers insisted that this was still not enough. The US dollar was at the time fetching 20 times more on the parallel market. A few farmers said they had received Z$5-billion, which is equivalent to only $5.”

In Zimbabwe, Z$5 billion was only enough to buy a five-liter pack of orange juice.

Harare's tobacco market was one of the largest in the world. But the tobacco market collapsed, when under Mugabe and the ZANU-PF party, the parliament has passed laws to limit private corporate ownership and to break up and transfer ownership of private commercial farms to those previously denied property ownership.

The land question, more than Mugabe's personality and flaws, or the systemic intimidation of his party, or its corruption or western sanctions, shapes and underlines the modern history and politics of Zimbabwe. Land drives the current struggle, the economic collapse and its repair.

In the 1890s, European settlers from South Africa entered Zimbabwe and bargained for land and mining claims, then seized additional land from the Shona, the indigenous African people. Establishing control, the settlers put down the Shona's armed fight to maintain sovereignty and force the land's return. First a mining company and later the new settler government provided large land grants to emigrating settlers and forced Africans to resettle in new areas. Uprooted from their traditional communities, they were required to live on reserves specifically designated for their use. Africans were unable to own land outside of the reserves.

After independence in 1980, power was returned to the African majority but the land remained in the hands of the generations of settlers, who sought to protect their property rights by becoming citizens in the new Zimbabwe. According to a BBC 2000 report, 4,400 white farmers owned 32 percent of Zimbabwe's prime farm land, in fertile locations with best soil, highest rain fall in country. In contrast, one million Africans owned 38 percent of the farm land, often in drought prone areas with poor soil. Settler farms were highly mechanized and industrialized. African farms primarily engaged in subsistence farming, scratching out a meager living by supplying families needs and selling the small surplus in local markets. For the first twenty years, the government operated on the principle of “willing buyer, willing seller.” The program for transferring land operated on the principle of matching buyers and sellers, providing government services and assistance to African buyers, but in 2000, that changed dramatically.

The old program had not raised agricultural productivity or African income. In 2000, it was scraped for a fast track resettlement program. The new program was command-driven and the government was in command. Within a year, 160,000 families had been resettled on 3,100 large scale commercial farms covering 7.3 million hectares. Despite the announced intent of the program to provide “growth with equity,” land was serendipitously vested in the custody of crusading politicians who often reaped personal benefits. One newspaper, the Zimbabwe Independent described the situation: “productive farms, misappropriated by ZANU-PF officials through the needless violent evictions of their owners, have been subdivided into unproductive smallholdings, residential plots, housing co-operatives for the party faithful or sold to the landless in hard currency for a profit to the politically connected.” It is now the government who decides “who gets land and who does not.”

Described as a “clique of dishonest political speculators masquerading as revolutionaries,” there are those who agree the government's claim to a revolutionary legacy of an iron fist is a legitimate point of view. The colonial debate has always been about puppets and puppet masters, and the passions of former post-colonial states are high; often they refuse to let go the legacy of the colonial victim. The legacy is replayed and frames each step forward.

Imperialism, the intent and ideology of western government and corporations to subjugate and control the resources and labor of poorer countries is the source of all opposition to the path of the new state, the theory goes. Imperialism fuels the criticisms of national policy; it topples and trashes the economy by withholding investments, grants, and lowering market prices. Every conflict points to imperialist stooges seeking to undermine the revolutionaries in power. Imperialism distorts media coverage. Imperialism is active, comprehensive, duplicitous, surreptitious, and determined to overpower, dominate, and control its target states.

Zimbabwe felt targeted. Mugabe and its leadership viewed every decision and action through the prism of rigorous European academic leftist analysis. They fought to maintain power at all costs. In America, “left” is a slogan, not a rigorous method of analysis. In Zimbabwe, “left” was a bulwark against those countries and corporate interests who many believed wanted to gain power by blunt force and proxy, who sought to squeeze the people to capitulate under their sufferings and vote Mugabe and his government out so those sympathetic to western interests could be re-installed.

Mugabe felt his years of resistance and negotiations with the British and with leaders in world capitols gave him a historic experience and an institutional memory that mandated his guardianship of Zimbabwe. The only fatal mistake, as he saw it, was compromising Zimbabwe's independence. For him, the country's independence was inextricably tied to his service as President. He alone had the fortitude and intellectual acumen to stand up to those who sought to bring the country down.

Mugabe had suffered long terms of imprisonment and missed the funeral of his three year old son. His first wife, Sally, a Ghanian woman he met while teaching in Ghana, was listed for deportation from England for her organizing activities. Two of his brothers had died from diseases as children. His father, a Malawian carpenter, abandoned the family. Mugabe trusted no one but himself to have the resolute strength to stay the course. Suffering was the price of his faith.

Britain under Tony Blair did use the new harsher land transfers as an opportunity to opt out of its commitments made to Zimbabwe as a part of the Lancester House Accord. As a part of the agreement, Britain agreed to make reconstruction payments to Zimbabwe to cover the costs of compensation to settlers for land transfers and to provide training and services to the Africans being re-settled again on the corporate farms. The intent was to address the interests of the settlers and successfully create a communal model of small farmers to replace the corporate farms and to alleviate the numbing poverty that existed on the African reserves.

Blair dropped the payments. He accused the Mugabe government of human rights violations, corruption, and a disregard of the rule of law. His views influenced other western nations. In the acrimony, the disruption caused by the suspension of payments helped tanked the economy and exacerbated tensions inside and outside of Zimbabwe. Those leaders inside and out who had once agreed to be partners were breaking Zimbabwe apart by pulling in different directions.

The men who negotiated were peers, but not friends. Britain wanted the honors of shedding the last vestige of its legacy of colonialism and to applaud itself for its rational transition to African rule. For Robert Mugabe, things were quite different. He had endured prison, struggled in the bush, traveled the capitols of the world, repeatedly countered the toothless arguments of those who insisted that land that was stolen was theirs by sovereign right. The theft was a matter of record, the land's return was a matter of struggle, and Mugabe was deeply determined that it should not happen again in any form. From the beginning, he was not inclined to be forgiving or to indulge the whim of any request that fortressed the rights of the settler communities and families. He saw nothing wrong with repaying their former privilege with hard slams or using the law to heighten their exposure to risks. When it was done to the Africans, there was no outcry he knew first hand, too well. He saw compromise as a first step to surrender.

The 107th US Congress during the tenure of George W. Bush as US president passed the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001 which proclaimed its support the struggle of the people of Zimbabwe to “effect peaceful democratic change,” but authorized a long, detailed list of economic sanctions. Among the hostile actions the act endorsed was intelligence gathering against Zimbabwe's government. Its senate sponsors included Republican Jesse Helms of NC and Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton of NY.

In a quote, Robert Mugabe in May 2007 article entitled “Our Cause is Africa's Cause” in New Africa magazine, expresses in populist terms the imperialist threat. He also frames justifications for violent police actions being well within the realm of proper use of state authority to answer these threats by those he views as imperialism's domestic agents:

“Mugabe: [Laughs]. I wasn’t there. I didn’t even know they had been beaten! [He is referring to an incident involving members of an opposition party.] But if a person challenges the police, breaches law and order, and thinks the police would just look at him and shake hands with him, and say “you’ve done a good thing by tossing and pushing us around.” well, he is quite mistaken. The police are there to maintain law and order. And it doesn’t matter who, if you threaten them with force, they will answer back with force. And the police did their work. We may regret that in doing their work, they might have exceeded the punishment they gave them. But these things happen. It happens in war, it happens everywhere. If you challenge the police, don’t think they are going to be merciful with you at all.”

Mugabe goes on:

“If America wants a man like Christopher Dell [the American ambassador] to remain here, then he’s got to behave because we will not brook further nonsense from him. Baffour Ankomah, interviewer: Everywhere else, when a country is under siege by foreign powers, as Zimbabwe now is, the opposition closes ranks with the government and fight the siege together. In Zimbabwe, it is the other way round. Have you tried to get your opposition to sit down and think this through? Mugabe: The opposition is an extension of imperialism, they are agents of imperialism; they are not home-grown opposition people, they were put together as an opposing package by the British, the three parties in Britain – the Labour Party, Conservative Party and the Liberal-Democrats – established the Westminster Foundation Fund . .”

Mugabe summarizes his view of American policy:

“Yes of course, they gave us that assistance during Carter’s administration, because they didn’t want a failure of our constitutional negotiations which were taking place in Lancaster House in London in 1979. But as soon as Carter was out and Ronald Reagan had come in, the funds were stopped, because they said we were communists. They accused me of being a communist. But they never, never really approved of a solid African government, a government that stands on its own. They were behind Nkrumah’s fall [Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana], and they have been behind the fall of other governments – in Latin America, everywhere. So we don’t trust them. They just don’t want a strong government, a government that lives by the truth and wants to help its own people, they don’t want that.”

This interview was given a month before the American ambassador penned his final confidential cable.

His cable is reprinted by copying its facsimile from a web page of the New York Times. The Times describes the cable: “As Christopher W. Dell leaves Zimbabwe after three years as American ambassador, he sends a frank account of its aging, erratic leader, Robert Mugabe.” Before being appointed ambassador to Zimbabwe, Dell, a career foreign service officer, served as ambassador to Angola.

Here is his cable in full:

Source Embassy Harare

Classification CONFIDENTIAL

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 HARARE 000638

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

DEPARTMENT FOR P, AF, AND AF/S FOR MOZENA AND HILL, NSC FOR SENIOR AFRICA DIRECTOR B. PITTMAN AND B. LEO; USAID FOR M. COPSON AND E. LOKEN

E.O. 12958: DECL: 07/12/2017 TAGS: PGOV, PREL, ZI

SUBJECT: The End is Nigh

Classified By: Ambassador Christopher W. Dell under Section 1.4b/d

1. (C) Having said my piece repeatedly over the last three years, I won't offer a lengthy prescription for our Zimbabwe policy. My views can be stated very simply as stay the course and prepare for change. Our policy is working and it's helping to drive change here. What is required is simply the grit, determination and focus to see this through. Then, when the changes finally come we must be ready to move quickly to help consolidate the new dispensation.

THE SITUATION

1. (C) Robert Mugabe has survived for so long because he is more clever and more ruthless than any other politician in Zimbabwe. To give the devil his due, he is a brilliant tactician and has long thrived on his ability to abruptly change the rules of the game, radicalize the political dynamic and force everyone else to react to his agenda. However, he is fundamentally hampered by several factors: his ego and belief in his own infallibility; his obsessive focus on the past as a justification for everything in the present and future; his deep ignorance on economic issues (coupled with the belief that his 18 doctorates give him the authority to suspend the laws of economics, including supply and demand); and his essentially short-term, tactical style.

2. (C) While his tactical skills have kept him in power for 27 years, over the last seven this has only been achieved by a series of populist, but destructive and ultimately self-defeating moves. In reaction to losing the 2000 referendum on the constitution, a vengeful Mugabe unleashed his “Green Bombers” to commit land reform and in the process he destroyed Zimbabwe's agricultural sector, once the bedrock of the economy. While thousands of white farmers saw their properties seized, hundreds of thousands of black Zimbabweans lost their livelihoods and were reduced to utter poverty. In 2005, having been forced to steal victory by manipulating the results of an election he lost, Mugabe lashed out again, punishing the urban populace by launching Operation Murambatsvina. The result was wholesale destruction of the informal sector, on which as much as 70-80 percent of urban dwellers had depended, and the uprooting of 700,000 Zimbabweans. The current inflationary cycle really began with Murambatsvina, as rents and prices grew in response to a decrease in supply.

3. (C) And now, faced with the hyperinflationary consequences of his ruinous fiscal policies and growing reliance on the printing press to keep his government running, Mugabe has launched Operation Slash Prices. This has once again given him a very temporary boost in popularity (especially among the police, who have led the looting of retail outlets and now seem well positioned to take a leading role in the black market economy) at the cost of terrible damage to the country and people. Many small grocery and shop owners, traders, etc., will be wiped out; the shelves are increasingly bare; hunger, fear, and tension are growing; fuel has disappeared. When the shelves are still empty this time next week, the popular appeal of the price roll back will evaporate and the government simply doesn't have the resources to replace the entire private commercial sector and keep Zimbabweans fed. It may attempt to do so by printing more money, adding even more inflationary pressure on a system already reeling from the GOZ's quasi-fiscal lunacy combined with the price impact of pervasive shortages. The increasingly worthless Zim dollar is likely to collapse as a unit of trade in the near future, depriving the GOZ of its last economic tool other than sheer thuggery and theft of others' assets.

4. (C) With all this in view, I'm convinced the end is not

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far off for the Mugabe regime. Of course, my predecessors and many other observers have all said the same thing, and yet Mugabe is still with us. I think this time could prove different, however, because for the first time the president is under intensifying pressure simultaneously on the economic, political and international fronts. In the past, he could always play one of these off against the other, using economic moves to counter political pressure or playing the old colonial/race/imperialist themes to buy himself breathing room regionally and internationally. But he is running out of options and in the swirling gases of the new Zimbabwean constellation that is starting to form, the economic, political and international pressures are concentrating on Mugabe himself. Our ZANU-PF contacts are virtually unanimous in saying reform is desperately needed, but won't happen while the Old Man is there, and therefore he must go (finding the courage to make that happen is another matter, however, but even that may be coming closer).

This is not some sudden awakening on the road to Damascus, but a reflection of the pain even party insiders increasingly feel over the economic meltdown. We also get regular, albeit anecdotal, reports of angry and increasingly open mutterings against Mugabe even in ZANU-PF's traditional rural bastions. Beginning in March, the other SADC leaders finally recognized (in the wake of the terrible beatings of March 11 and the international outcry that followed--another self-inflicted wound for Mugabe) that Zimbabwe is a problem they need to address. Thabo Mbeki appears committed to a successful mediation and is reportedly increasingly irritated with Mugabe's efforts to manipulate him or blow him off altogether. If Mugabe judges that he still commands all he surveys by virtue of being the elder statesman on the scene, he may be committing yet another serious blunder. Finally, one does well to recall that the only serious civil disturbances here in a decade came in 1998 over bread shortages, showing that even the famously passive Shona people have their limits. The terror and oppression of the intervening years have cowed people, but it's anyone's guess whether their fear or their anger will win out in the end.

WHAT WILL THE END LOOK LIKE?

1. (C) This is the big, unanswerable question. One thing at least is certain, Mugabe will not wake up one morning a changed man, resolved to set right all he has wrought. He will not go quietly nor without a fight. He will cling to power at all costs and the costs be damned, he deserves to rule by virtue of the liberation struggle and land reform and the people of Zimbabwe have let him down by failing to appreciate this, thus he needn't worry about their well-being. The only scenario in which he might agree to go with a modicum of good grace is one in which he concludes that the only way to end his days a free man is by leaving State House. I judge that he is still a long way from this conclusion and will fight on for now.

2. (C) The optimal outcome, of course, and the only one that doesn't bring with it a huge risk of violence and conflict, is a genuinely free and fair election, under international supervision. The Mbeki mediation offers the best, albeit very slim, hope of getting there. However, as Pretoria grows more and more worried about the chaos to its north and President Mbeki's patience with Mugabe's antics wears thin, the prospects for serious South African engagement may be growing. Thus, this effort deserves all the support and backing we can muster. Less attractive is the idea of a South African-brokered transitional arrangement or government of national unity. Mbeki has always favored stability and in his mind this means a ZANU-PF-led GNU, with perhaps a few MDC additions. This solution is more likely to prolong than resolve the crisis and we must guard against letting Pretoria dictate an outcome which

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perpetuates the status quo at the expense of real change and reform.

1. (C) The other scenarios are all less attractive: a popular uprising would inevitably entail a bloodbath, even if it were ultimately successful; Mugabe's sudden, unexpected death would set off a stampede for power among ZANU-PF heavy weights; a palace coup, whether initiated within ZANU-PF or from the military - in which Mugabe is removed, killed, exiled or otherwise disposed of, could well devolve into open conflict between the contending successors. Similarly, some form of "constitutional coup" i.e., a change at the top engineered within the framework of ZANU-PF's "legitimate" structures could well prove to be merely the opening bell in a prolonged power struggle. None of the players is likely to go quietly into the night without giving everything they have, including calling on their supporters in the security services. Moreover, experience elsewhere would suggest that whoever comes out on top initially will struggle, and more than likely fail, to halt the economic collapse. Thus, there is a good prospect of not one but a series of rapid-fire “transitions,” until some new, stable dispensation is reached.

2. (C) The final, and probably worst, possibility is that Mugabe concludes he can settle for ruling over a rump Zimbabwe, maintaining control over Harare and the Mashona heartland, the critical forces of the National Reserve Force and CIO and a few key assets--gold, diamonds, platinum and Air Zimbabwe to fund the good times. Under this scenario the rest of the country, in one of the comrade's favorite phrases, could “go hang,” leaving it to the international community to stave off the worst humanitarian consequences.

WHAT OF THE OPPOSITION?

1. (C) Zimbabwe's opposition is far from ideal and I leave convinced that had we had different partners we could have achieved more already. But you have to play the hand you're dealt. With that in mind, the current leadership has little executive experience and will require massive hand holding and assistance should they ever come to power.

2. (C) Morgan Tsvangarai is a brave, committed man and, by and large, a democrat. He is also the only player on the scene right now with real star quality and the ability to rally the masses. But Tsvangarai is also a flawed figure, not readily open to advice, indecisive and with questionable judgment in selecting those around him. He is the indispensable element for opposition success, but possibly an albatross around t heir necks once in power. In short, he is a kind of Lech Walesa character: Zimbabwe needs him, but should not rely on his executive abilities to lead the country's recovery. Arthur Mutambara is young and ambitious, attracted to radical, anti-western rhetoric and smart as a whip. But, in many respects he's a light-weight who has spent too much time reading U.S. campaign messaging manuals and too little thinking about the real issues. Welshman Ncube has proven to be a deeply divisive and destructive player in the opposition ranks and the sooner he is pushed off the stage, the better. But he is useful to many, including the regime and South Africa, so is probably a cross to be borne for some time yet. The prospects for healing the rift within the MDC seem dim, which is a totally unnecessary self-inflicted wound on their part this time. With few exceptions--Tendayi Biti, Nelson Chamisa--the talent is thin below the top ranks. The great saving grace of the opposition is likely to be found in the diaspora. Most of Zimbabwe's best professionals, entrepreneurs, businessmen and women, etc., have fled the country. They are the opposition's natural allies and it is encouraging to see signs, particularly in South Africa and the UK, that these people are talking,

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sharing ideas, developing plans and thinking together about future recovery.

1. (C) Unfortunately, among the MDC's flaws is its inability to work more effectively with the rest of civil society. The blame for this can be shared on both sides (many civil society groups, like the NCA, are single-issue focused and take the overall dynamic in unhelpful directions; others, like WOZA, insist on going it alone as a matter of principle), but ultimately it falls to the MDC as the largest and the only true political party, to show the way. Once again, however, these are natural allies and they have more reason to work together than fight against each other.

STAYING THE COURSE, PREPARING FOR CHANGE

1. (C) If I am right and change is in the offing, we need to step up our preparations. The work done over the last year on transition planning has been extremely useful, both for stimulating a fresh look at our own assumptions and plans and for forging a common approach among the traditional donor community. But the process has lagged since the meetings in March in London and should be re-energized. It is encouraging in this respect that USAID Washington has engaged the Mission here in discussing how we would use additional resources in response to a genuinely reform-minded government . I hope this will continue and the good work done so far will survive the usual bloodletting of the budget process.

(C) The official media has had a field day recently whooping that "Dell leaves Zimbabwe a failed man". That's not quite how it looks from here. I believe that the firm U.S. stance, the willingness to speak out and stand up, have contributed to the accelerating pace of change. Mugabe and his henchman are like bullies everywhere: if they can intimidate you they will. But they're not used to someone standing up to them and fighting back. It catches them off guard and that's when they make mistakes. The howls of protest over critical statements from Washington or negative coverage on CNN are the clearest proof of how this hurts them. Ditto the squeals over “illegal sanctions.” In addition, the regime has become so used to calling the shots and dictating the pace that the merest stumble panics them. Many local observers have noted that Mugabe is panicked and desperate about hyperinflation at the moment, and hence he's making mistakes. Possibly fatal mistakes. We need to keep the pressure on in order to keep Mugabe off his game and on his back foot, relying on his own shortcomings to do him in. Equally important is an active U.S. leadership role in the international community. The UK is ham-strung by its colonial past and domestic politics, thus, letting them set the pace alone merely limits our effectiveness. The EU is divided between the hard north and its soft southern underbelly. The Africans are only now beginning to find their voice. Rock solid partners like Australia don't pack enough punch to step out front and the UN is a non-player. Thus it falls to the U.S., once again, to take the lead, to say and do the hard things and to set the agenda. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of ordinary Zimbabweans of all kinds have told me that our clear, forthright stance has given them hope and the courage to hang on. By this regime's standards, acting in the interests of the people may indeed be considered a failure. But I believe that the opposite is true, and that we can be justifiably proud that in Zimbabwe we have helped advance the President's freedom Agenda. The people of this country know it and recognize it and that is the true touchstone of our success here.

(End of cable.)

Zimbabwe's recent stormy history has been entangled by brute collisions of power, hostile suspicions, ideology, misunderstandings, honest mistakes and dishonest intent on all sides. Zimbabwe argues it is being treated differently than even harsher regimes with deplorable human rights records like China, for example. The difference, Mugabe and its leaders argue, is the willingness to accept and protect western capital and to relinquish its strict control of its national resources.

Three years after the cable, Robert Mugabe is still President. He is moving to set another national election, nigh mid-2011 and to re-write the national constitution. To fight against outside imperialist forces corrupting the upcoming 2011 national elections, Zimbabwe's finance minister is using a US discretionary grant of $50 million to fund election operations and infrastructure. If this seems like being fed by the hand that wants to strangle it, in fact the Police Commissioner, Augustine Chihuri has said as much. Chihuri was quoted as telling a group of junior officers in Harare that "this country came through blood and the barrel of the gun, and it can never be recolonized through a simple pen [the vote].”

Three years after Ambassador Dell's cable, the battle in Zimbabwe for economic prosperity continues even within Zimbabwe's government. The Zimbabwean news site reports: “Legislators from all political parties are threatening to torpedo the 2011 national budget unless they are granted US$3,000 monthly salaries, increased from US$400 a month. Finance Minister Tendai Biti has staunchly resisted the demand. But the legislators have said the 2011 budget will not be passed and the House of Assembly is united across the political divide in its plans to sink the Appropriation and Finance Bills. "When the other two arms of the State – the Judiciary and the Executive are given Mercedes Benzes from day one, body guards, maintenance, fuel and everything – we are getting offroaders," one representative said amid applause from all the benches."The ministers are given two cars, they do not bear the cost of maintenance, no insurance on their part. Madam Speaker, there are Members of Parliament who are walking on foot here . . This is unacceptable at all costs." The legislators also expressed outrage at the budget overruns on foreign travel for ministers, which topped US$29 million between January and October 2010, meaning each and every minister blew almost US$1million in travel this year. Biti has said the action being taken by the honourable members are not supportive of the noble objectives to sustain the economic stability because they will trigger demands for salary increments by other sectors. "These will lead to a wage spiral, hence creating inflation and further weakening our competitiveness and threatening the nascent economic recovery," said a banking analyst. He said the salaries the MPs were demanding far outstripped the country's GDP per capita.”

The finance minister, Tendai Biti, a lawyer and member of an opposition party, had been arrested by the government every year since 2000 (including charges of treason) until he was appointed Zimbabwe's Minister of Finance in 2009. He quickly moved to demonetize Zimbabwe's currency, substituting a basket of currencies made up of the South African rand, Botswana pulo, US dollar, British pound, and the euro, with interconnected exchange rates. This quickly defused Zimbabwe's hyper-inflation. The finance ministry's excellent, well organized and transparent web site reports September 2010's annual inflation rate as only 4.2 percent. The country's consumer price index of 91.2 in September 2009 had only risen to 95.0 by August 2010. The site has restored confidence in the economy and the government's management by publishing publishing consumer and investment news, national budget and statistics with periodic reviews and updates, and answering citizen's questions. Zimbabwe actually ran a trade surplus with Europe in 2008.

Yet there is an ugly underbelly that lingers beneath the good news. French citizen Catherine Joineau-Meredith who owned a farm protected by bilateral investment agreements signed by France and Zimbabwe saw her farm destroyed and she was fined and ordered off by the courts. Ms. Joineau-Meredith is quoted in the Zimbabwe Mail as saying, “What happened on my farm has nothing to do with any kind of land reform: the land has not been utilized, the equipment and crops have been stolen, all my animal stock has been slaughtered and finally my home has been burnt.”

Has land reform become Zimbabwe's choice of political patronage? An article on ZimOnline states “all of ZANU-PF's 56 politburo members, 98 Members of Parliament and 35 elected and unelected Senators, 10 provincial governors, 16 Supreme Court and High Court Judges, 40 current and former ambassadors were allocated or seized former commercial farms and 65 percent of the country's more than 200 mostly traditional chiefs have benefited from land reform. These officials are estimated to control 50 percent of land for commercial farms, but have little experience with farming and leave the land fallow. The 350,000 commercial farm workers have seen little benefit unless they were members of the ruling party.”

I saw Robert Mugabe speak to a group of US senators on the foreign relations committee at a breakfast meeting in the Capitol on a trip to Washington in the early 1980s. He is a slight man, with a medium built. He was formal and straightforward. The senators were all smiles and effusive in the manner of American politicians. President Mugabe reminded me of someone whose heart, mind, history and character were a part of the resources of Zimbabwe. The long war and its protracted struggles and political engagements were the equivalent of a manufacturing process that produced the final product. The product was the reclamation of what he saw as “his” all along. The senators no doubt thought they he would be wooed by their charms and the potential largess America was willing to trade for bilateral influence. Zimbabwe, after all, had natural wealth, but it needed help. What they had not calculated on was that not only did Mugabe speak of independence and respect for differences, he wouldn't budge.

US Secretary of State Clinton calls the document leak that included the Dell cable an attack on America, the international community, and has said there is 'nothing laudable about endangering lives.' The current American ambassador to Zimbabwe, Charles A. Ray, is pushing the party line; he has said activists in Zimbabwe may suffer “beatings, imprisonment, and even death,” if their candid views are made public. But the views of all the major players are well expressed and well known by all parties. It is a strength of Africa that its leaders seldom speak in secret about their political leanings or their opponents. I have examined the Dell cable carefully and found nothing in the ambassador's views that would result in loss of life. The Toronto Star reports that Zimbabwe's leaders from all sides have already dismissed the cable's comments and opinions.

Nelson Chamisa, spokesperson for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change party, for example told the Associated Press that Dell’s statements are not “the collective opinion of the people of Zimbabwe who will determine the future of this country.”

The document, already widely published and available online worldwide, does illuminate American thinking about an historic, pivotal African state at the center of the 20th century's political storms. Its history mirrors the issues of north-south economic development. Zimbabwe was one of the last of the African colonies to gain independence. It used armed struggle to leverage the settler's century-old grab of power. Its leaders rose from the bush and the confines of African reserves. The country is rich in minerals and rare earth in high demand by the West. It is one of the most fertile agricultural centers of the world, but its principal crop is tobacco. It has an ancient history with monumental achievements. Its people and products were tied to Paris and Beijing.

It is at the center of a fierce 21st century debate: how do power, prosperity, and progress change hands between north and south, black and white? How is power conferred and transferred? What are its moral and political limits?

Zimbabwe is both simple and complex, and its example is compelling. It reflects the opportunities and challenges that confront US foreign policy and the debate about that policy's purpose. After writing the cable, Ambassador Dell left Zimbabwe without a courtesy call on Robert Mugabe. He declined the diplomat's traditional farewell visit to his appointed country's head of state. Currently, he serves in Kosovo.

Perhaps in these modern times, given the ease with which the diplomatic documents were obtained, the Cassandra-in-reverse of American policy, the country's myopic internal view, President Mugabe, Secretary Clinton, Dell and other diplomats and leaders would do well to recall an old Zimbabwe proverb that conveys the hazards of errant relations between process, content, and means: “It is only a fool who plays with fire when his arms are made out of grass.”

http://www2.ljworld.com/users/walterr... Nobel laureate Paul Krugman said in his New York Times column yesterday that the pending political crisis could deepen if the government makes the wrong policy decisions. He forecasts castrophic damage to families and workers and believes the appropriate analogy is the "blood bath" mentioned by Deficit Comission co-chair, Alan Simpson, former Republican senator from Wyoming. Stunning prediction for a man who reads charts to describes trends. My spin:

No blood, only charts! The decisions of politicians about the economy reflect cultural assumptions. Ironically the crisis for which you are the harbinger and predictor has historic antecedents. Not in the economies of Japan, Germany, or Ireland—or more appropriately, Iceland—but more recently in the cultural politics of Chicago.

Remember when Harold Washington was elected Mayor of Chicago? The city shut down. An intransigent block stymied the city council and refused to govern. The Chicago council refused to approve appointments. This parallels the Senate holding up Obama's appointments to the federal departments, commissions, and the courts, which recently prompted a group of Republican judges to write a letter to Senate Republicans to ask that Barack's judicial appointments go forward.

Chicago's economy tanked. An able man was brought to his knees. Notice the parallels?

There's an old southern joke that describes a southern gentleman meeting Booker T. Washington while traveling, and proclaiming Mr. Washington to be “the greatest living American.” Washington thanked the gentleman, but deferred the honor to President Roosevelt. The gentleman said he also once shared the same sentiment—until the President invited Mr. Washington to the White House for dinner. (Many on first reading may miss the implication and tragic humor here.) http://www2.ljworld.com/users/walterr... Outside of the Chicago analogy—more apt for the federal impasse than Newt's Kenyan anti-colonialism—are other unnoticed parallels. These are tied to the actions and influence of huge financial interests.

These interests always align and embed themselves in the system to create sleights of mind. The suffering of slavery was not revealed in economic charts. Rice, its profits, its rapidly increased production, its century-long sustained growth, its multiplier on global output from Sweden to Turkey, is replaced in the popular mind with cotton, but rice created the American dream, advanced trade missions to Europe, prompted Southern support for the revolution, and even fueled Rhode Island's rum industry, all while hiding its human costs. And why did Southern workers die defending the state's rights of the wealthy?

As with rice, even today those with money and power benefit from our suffering. How else can South Carolina rank 46th in income with unemployment above 12% elect Jim DeMint while producing convertible BMW’s for the world and soon, Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. The state also manufactures paper, Honda ATV's and cement. Yet 20% of its families have been below the poverty line for 30 years! The new governor wants to tax groceries (they bring no jobs she says). Featured on the cover of Time, she refuses to address and has no plan for the lack of demand. She ignores Rep. Clyburn's wisdom—how do you give a tax cut to businesses for which there is no demand or to a man without a job? http://www2.ljworld.com/users/walterr... While an imperfect comparison, the trade-off of $700 billion in tax cuts for the nation's top one percent while refusing $14 billion in economic relief for the nation's unemployed is a reworking of the old plantation and feudal systems. The rich and powerful are again gaining wealth from the toil of those who by their status are ignored or labeled as morally flawed — thereby deserving the sufferings and pain of their economic disadvantage. Yet there is evidence of a class revolt. 45 millionaires and Warren Buffet have encouraged the Congress to come together to raise their taxes.

The effort to de-legitimize the Obama Presidency has created a “truth” based on keeping up the fight against the President. For these folk, the goal and results justify the dirty process. Use everything from Marxism to birth certificates. In this brave new world, the system manufactures lies. The more radical and distorted the account, the more believeable is its hypervigilance. Witness the $200 million a day travel per diem—only a billion a week—repeated into the camera without shame or blame by one congresswoman, while another is tried on ethics. It's okay to lie and take money. Just don't ask directly. You can be influenced, just don't use your influence. And Republicans are influenced: why else would they pull the country into the breach and stand firmly against abandoning a policy that failed? Why are they willing to increase a deficit they claim to abhor? Why do they attack a cherished principle of American exceptionalism, paying taxes proportional to your means?

As long as the silent agenda to remove Obama rests on its denial, the distortions will continue. The only sure thing in the crystal ball is that the rich will benefit and the country will lose, and we will have economic charts to calculate its costs.

Mississippi cotton field workers, 1937. All images from the Library of Congress, used without restrictions.

Mississippi Cotton field workers, 1937. by walterrhett

“No taxation without representation;” the cry of the founding fathers now stands on its head. Now the governing representatives simply proclaim, “no taxes.” The caveat in the fine print seems to be “except for the middle class.”

The thirty or so daily media commentators, none whose best sellers have produced lasting works with the embedded brilliance of our constitution, or the patina of the writings of Madison, Jefferson, Paine, loudly commit an error first observed in the Roman senate by Cicero: they put the cart before the horse. The causes they shrill for are put ahead of the problems to be solved. Even in the recent election's Pyrrhic victory, the problems didn't go away. We are on the verge of offering or extending tax cuts that will not reduce the debt, deficit, or growth jobs. The cuts only certify rights to protect the private wealth of the 1% of individuals who control 24.3% the nation's net income. As others have observed, we are becoming a “kinder, gentler, banana republic. http://www2.ljworld.com/users/walterr... But the argument against taking $700 billion (the portion of aggregate tax on incomes over $250,000) out of the Treasury for schools, roads, health care, defense, deficit reduction, and legitimate government services is not simply emotionally biased or anti-rich. It is rooted in the base of American democracy. American democracy presumed the ideas of Jean Rosseau of a social contract based on an egalitarian democracy and of Adam Smith who decreed labor to be property, and of Thomas Hobbes who argued for, “giving to every man his own.” These ideas and others shaped the early absence of an personal income tax, but brought into debate the conflicts of interest and differences of means that rest in society between the poor and the rich.

Ironically, Alexander Hamilton, a pioneer of American capitalism who leveraged advantages under law, sounded a warning against his interests at the New York Ratifying Convention in 1788: “As riches increase and accumulate in few hands, as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard."

The common good doesn't depend on giving the rich a raw deal. Their earned income is not a national trough for big government welfare. But it has been a principle of American democracy that those who have more give more. It is a historic part of the government's “execution of its trust.” It is an old saw and staple that those who enjoy “the vanities of life,” pay more for the privilege. In America's tax system, people pay in proportion to their means.

SC's governor-elect plans to cut business taxes (2.7% of state revenues) while adding a tax on groceries. The justification for adding a burden to poor and working class families? Cutting the former grocery tax, she asserts, "didn't create one job." Her tax plan adopts feudalism at its ancient best. A world where the benefits of the manor go to a glided class and the burden is carried by those who toil on their behalf.

Republicans should not be allowed a soft sale of the hard and fast principle of progressive taxes. Progressive taxes should not be framed as a civil rights issue of fairness, or a principle of equity. SC's John C. Calhoun got it wrong in his famous “Disquisition on Government” when he breaks the contract for taxes into two antagonistic halves and ignores benefits to the whole. To the contrary, a progressive system reduces inequities and creates opportunities.

Calhoun was right in his idea that democracy can't be done by polls; it requires a concurrent majority, groups from all spheres of interests and incomes to agree. How else can we account for or address the disparity of income and services in South Carolina, with 12.2% unemployment, producing the world's convertible BMW's and soon, Boeing's 787 Dreamliner? Barack's idea of consensus or compromise doesn't rise to the challenge, since it weighs process as being more important than results.

The Dutch flipped Cicero and got it right, “harness the horse after the wagon.” Despite the pundits and Republican shrills, or Obama's seductions of compromise, we must maintain the fairness and historic principle, the social value and political trust of the progressive tax. It is the first step in reducing the deficit and the debt, restoring confidence and growing jobs.

Thanks for reading! /wr. Please stir the Perlo, add a comment. Images and photographs from the Library of Congress archives; no restrictions.

Those who practice the politics of suffering strike blows intended to wound every good effort to increase economic demand. Without increased demand, there will be no jobs growth. But the Chicken Littles who proclaim the sky is falling look only in one direction for shelter: tax cuts. Theirs is a one note world view.

The administration needs an immediate, massive public education effort, undertaken by leading economists, and yes, the effort can be bi-partisan, to examine the views of economic policy, and of those who mislead policy discussions by irrelevant examples, imginary threats, fallacies in logic, distortions of history, and old fashioned appeals to fear. It is amazing that most news programs now only have single guest experts whose job is to “interpret” the policy proposals for a $14 trillion dollar economy in sound bites less than 120 seconds long. Policy makers chase political numbers; analysis has become market driven.

The omission of facts, charts, graphs, and other visual aids in a visual medium is clearly intended to be deceptive and spread half-truths that have a full measure of fear and suffering. Economics is a dismal science not because its principles are muddled or unworkable; instead its sound body of developed knowledge and applications is clouded by those who alter and deliberately mis-read facts and exchange them for a currency of apprehension and distress, while sending links and posts to each other to congratulate themselves on the success of their efforts. But their success continues to be the country's downfall. Jobs will not come except from demand; and evil can not beget good.

In the still of the political eclipse, both Wall Street shares and corporate profits are up. Personal money spent in California races exceeded the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. But the country is dominated by the politics of suffering. Like sleath figures, the corporations walk past the struggles of workers and families to cloak their patriotism in lobbyist fees, secret contributions, and frozen hiring while being awash in cash.

The very, very sad news is as the gap among the people widens, the consolidation of power narrows. The election already shows, that after the voting, not much will change. The tea party candidates, if elected, will be co-opted. Corporations who becry the yoke of government will continue to yoke the government by shifting expenses and costs for everything from training to health care to public platforms. Neither side seems to have any interest in governing; mastering its principles, and if you do, you are shunted aside. Power and money attract synophants. Those who seek office have already proven they can ignore truth, facts, and progress to serve their own interests and ambitions. It’s a simple step to serve and pander for interests of wealth and power even greater than their own.

Thanks for reading! /wr. Please stir the perlo, add a comment.

Family Traveling During the Depression. Library of Congress. by walterrhett

In a $14 trillion economy, still the world’s largest, just a few days after Ford announced record profits of $1.69 billion for the quarter, and even after Bank of America posted $3.1 billion in profits in Q2 2010, one would think the idea of scary conversations about Republicans returning to power would be null. Especially in light of the crisis we averted. Yet the Republicans have managed to make the recovery scary.

Fear has more impact than the hard core numbers, so large they are insulated from their own good news. Fear brings it home. Fear lives next door, not across town. Fear feels more smug than common sense, or hope or freedom. To paraphrase W. H. Auden, fear “surrounds us like a baffling crime.”

And fear is closing the eyes of voters at precisely the time when their eyes need to be opened. It should be said that fear serves a political purpose. As do discussions of witches, anchor babies, headless bodies, and Newt’s Kenyan anti-colonialism (code for the Mau Mau who beheaded British whites). In 1868, Harper’s Weekly wrote, “How easily wicked and treasonable organizations may gain the control over the peaceable and the industrious members of society has always been signally apparent at the South.”

So do the crimes and ethic scars that are celebrated as being “just like you.” It’s all a sleight of mind! It’s framed as compassion spoken as a warning without acts of safety.

It ignores the questions: how did we become a nation divided? How we can be rich and poor?

The Economy

The drummed and hammered complaints that inspired fear have been a stimulus debt that provided a tax cut and clearly plugged the vortex into which the US economy went into free fall, and job growth.

But look at the economy and corporate outsourcing, cash hoarding, and profit expansion have deliberately inhibited job growth. This truth is hidden by the Republican spin. Profits are increasingly seven times faster than company revenues. Much of that very generous profit comes from down sizing and outsourcing, by zeroing out the employment revenue stream. The pay check is a target; it is snatched back for profit. As a poet e. e. cummings wrote: “strong men are in the streets digging for bread.”

The Republican positions simply mask the slash, smash, and burn techniques by which they plan to legislate another ill-fated take over of the economy, with more cash shipped to the private sector by no bid contracts, and more profits from lower wages and non-existent jobs.

Not one single idea offered by the Party or its candidates has the substance of growth or jobs. Their plans for austerity will not bring prosperity. They make only vague references to the power of the private sector. That power smashed the economy, fired workers, and now records record profits. (And strong men are digging bread.)

Jobs? Jobs are created by demand; to hire, there must be work to do. A tax cut doesn’t make work. It’s a private stimulus. It doesn’t have to be spent. It doesn’t automatically increase demand.

That power so extolled by Republicans is now driven by greed. It stole the principle of the common good and hung it in effigy. Shouting in the crumbling streets, uttering blame and inciting fear, the Party that anchors itself to the constitution has surreptitiously stolen the meaning of democracy in order to serve and enrich the select.

The Democrats

Push and pull once made for good politics and lively campaigns. And achievement used to count. Take Strom Thurmond; despite his horrific rhetoric on civil rights, his defense of segregation, (full disclosure: I’m African-American), I voted for him. When I was unemployed but actively seeking work, a phone call to his office and a 70 minute walk (saving bus fare), and I was a GS-10 in less than 72 hours. And after he invoked cloture on Jesse Helms’ filibuster of the King Holiday Bill, and delivered sewer, paved and lighted streets, and safety grants to SC’s small predominantly black towns, I voted by the deed rather than the word.

Now, the first African-American President and his party face the opposite problem. They have been matchless in acting for progress, but can’t get the message out. They have delivered, but have weak defenses and little attack. Quick: what is Chris Coon’s position on social security?

Could it be that the new source of wealth and prosperity is sourced in the permanent loss of jobs? (Republicans want to dismantle the safety net, shifting even more wealth to corporations.) The complaint, that Democrats have overspent, stimulated fear, and not messaged well, has partial truth. But it does not equal the massive truth of the Republican distortions and wackiness. DeMint, Boehner, McConnell, Cantor and the others are no Strom Thurmond. Thurmond didn’t neglect the message to his base or service to his constituents, and did both aggressively, delivering the goods by word and deed, even when they were at odds, and while getting his fair share, never uttered blame.

The President

Now there are “kinder, gentler” attacks that cite mostly personality and psychology with a little parody and cute word play to render the administration ineffective. In dry training speak, whenever any system is out of kilter, it is usual to single out and blame an individual for the failures and shortcomings of the whole.

Bad weather? Hang the ship’s captain. Bad economy? Blame the President. Reduce complex dynamics to a single, identifiable cause. http://www2.ljworld.com/users/walterr...

But start with Obama and work backward. There were “many” who sought to de-legimitize him with unprecedented withering attacks. He was shouted at, tsk-tsked, signed, caricatured, ballyhooed, cartooned, cursed, labeled, slimed, belittled, disrespected.

He took the wrong vacations at the wrong time, he waited too long to visit the Gulf, he hesitated too long before taking the lead on healthcare, he overlooked too long the shape of the economy. Yet the Gulf (take a deep sigh here and say a prayer) is doing well, healthcare is slowly rolling out, and the macro-economy, at $14 trillion and counting, is doing relatively well. In fact, Obama created more jobs in the first eight months of 2010 then Bush did in eight years. And it was Republican incumbents who lost their conservative seats to those who felt they were not conservative enough. Was Barack Obama supposed to campaign for them?

But as people pile on, at the top of the pile are jobs lost and not regained. Yes, like a stake, jobs stand above the buzz “of calling shapes, and beck’ning shadows dire, and airy tongues that syllable men’s names.” (Milton.)

“You didn’t fix the jobs crisis, dude.” You were supposed to turn the ship of state around in 24 months. Audacity meet mendacity; all blame and little help; all “socialist” and no capitalists to the aid; he was all calm when confronting fury: and now judged as weak, absorbed, even mediocre; a contradiction which has become an antithesis. But remember again this fact: Obama created more jobs in the first eight months of 2010 then Bush did in eight years.

Change hurts, whether it institutes new programs or people. It disturbs the status quo. It shifts power. Charismatic, reflective, Obama symbolizes the last broken barrier of America’s racial past. He challenged an ideal that many Americans cherished and he has suffered their contempt. He broke that barrier at the worst possible time; he became president at the arc of elite corporate political power; he spent billions on their bail-out while they acted in distain. But there is no going back.

Even after next week, Obama’s got two more years. And things can’t really get much worse. If they do, despite the mantras that lay doom at his door, there will be plenty of real blame to go around.

--Walter Rhett Thanks for reading! Please, stir the Perlo. Add a comment.

4th of July 1937 by walterrhett

Good riddance! Juan Williams, a journalist formerly with the Washington Post, who authored the companion book to the PBS special, "Eyes on the Prize," and who was frequently seen on Fox News and heard on NPR was fired as a news analyst by NPR. Juan was arrogant and out of touch. His bonafides were always suspect. (Many see ad hominen here; others nod, recalling his description to Michele Obama to "avoid being Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress.")

But many see his firing as further proof that we as a country require each statement to be "politically correct," never speaking of other groups of people in ways that actually express our inner and truest thoughts. Why can't a television personality be allowed to be critical of Jews, or express fear of Muslims? Or to question Obama's birth? Why can't journalists and others express negative views on intra-gender relationships? Why can't blacks be criticized for their own failings? Isn't self examination painful?

Truth is one thing, the public trust another. I am okay if someone wants to admits he or she is homophobic, racist, Islamophobic, sexist, or xenophobic. I openly call for their mea culpa. I would admire them for their open honesty. But should such a person be placed in a position of public trust, given their views? No. I don't want them to be judges or journalists, sprouting the fear that blames those who have the right to free expression for crimes they did not commit. For those in the public realm, it should be an issue of private therapy, not public confession.

And why not? Because the second part of their honesty is usually that they see nothing wrong with their self-indulgent views of bigotry and ethnocentricism. How would Juan Williams feel if people followed him in stores, thinking he might shoplift because of his color? Or if were followed home by the police because he can afford to live in a neighborhood that others may think is off limits to him due to color rather than income?

Honesty should never become a safe house for bigotry and prejudice. Confession of a crime, whether an act or idea, whether murder or bias, still carries consequences. Our compassion is to show mercy, certainly. But mercy should never endorse the sin.

Thanks for reading! Please, stir the Perlo, leave a comment. /wr {^_^}

Man on the Bench by walterrhett

The President in the Diplomatic Reception Room by walterrhett

One of the problems with deciphering Barack Obama and his administration's behavior is that any model or insight runs into cross currents generated by Republicans and those who seem to be naturally cynic.

It is obvious from the appearances and messages of the Administration that it is hesitant, indifferent or slow to act, willing to counter punch and compromise - which the cynics take as proof of his unpreparedness, over-his-headness, a failed presidency that wants to or will destroy the country and middle class life as we know it.

I think that the leap to conclusions says more about the cynics and the moans. But we are left with the telling comment of one woman in the MSNBC televised town meeting who eloquently said to the President: “Quite frankly, I'm exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle for change I voted for." Her words resonated. Donna Brazile sent her quote out by Twitter. CNN and other news shows highlighted the clip.

I think many of us - readers and commenters - have honestly missed the mark of the Obama/Chicago/New Cabinet mindset in which the pol David Axelrod is now a power but has a zone of comfort think more to do with not losing rather than winning. Carefully review the election strategy; it was about the slow accumulation of delegates, not a bold stride toward victory. What is so bewildering - and so amazing - it that Obama is a president to whom people can honestly articulate their deep felt feelings and experiences, and share ideas. Yesterday's MSNBC town hall was absolutely unprecedented in its degree of honest, unfiltered feedback from supporters and others, and Obama's willingness to really hear what was being said.

Members of Congress at the White House with the President by walterrhett

The break down I think comes in the machinery. In spin meisters who have been loyal to no one or principle (Axelrod and the others would protest!) and who in governing have deeply mischarted the positions needed to orient the administration.

One-on-one, I see a different Obama. When the team assembles, errors in political calculation and judgment seem to swiftly add up. Maybe it's time to change the team. Even without knowing why, and beyond the cynic's cliches, in candor, we can confirm some sorry, disturbing trends.

Thanks for reading! /wr. Stir the Perlo, please leave a comment. All images from the official White House photostream at flickr.com.

Charitable foundations set up by members of Congress really demonstrate the power of the old adage: charity begins at home. This is another instance of Congress not only failing to regulate itself, but also manufacturing new means to funnel influence under the guise of doing good.

Both Congress and the corporations believe this latest artifice offers a win-win for all parties; the community, the corporative giver, and the elected official. This arrangement can be touted with nominal risks and a proper public face, and is inured from legal challenges since no money directly changes hands. What gifts to Congressional foundations do is increase power and influence on both sides. Elected officials build a loyal base of followers by establishing a proven track record of building community opportunities. Corporations control the financial strings that build this base. Like all credits and swaps, the funding of the foundations take on a value. That value is a coin considered when Congress votes to regulate or protect the industries, markets, and products of its foundation's corporate givers. It's a sleight of a hand that is easy for all to see through.

Nice try, but who honestly thinks even Tea party candidates will be immune to the influence of money once elected, that they can resist pay-for-play if they win? Who really believes that Republicans, who cite polls to oppose current policies, are prepared to govern in a way that goes beyond their special interests? Especially after their members made pologies to BP, called the restoration fund a "shakedown," opposed the lifting of the ban on tax cuts for the rich under the guise of overburdened families and small businesses, and even opposed extending unemployment benefits for the long term unemployed? Who believes that liberal Democrats will fail to hold their nose and water down regulation of the drug, financial, and energy industries, when BP continues the outrage of having annual government contracts worth $10+ billion ($9 billion alone in Defense; for the complete list see http://bit.ly/bnhKOn) while demanding new leases for offshore drilling?

After the examples of William Jefferson (2009), Bob Ney (2006), Tom DeLay (2005), James Trafficant (2002), Newt Gingrich (1998), Dan Rostenkowski (1996), David Durenberger (1990), James Wright (1989), William Harrison (1982), and Michael Meyer (1990), and the current cases of Maxine Waters and Charles Rangel, Congress members on both sides of the aisle should have institutional memories against the corrupting influence of money.

Congressional foundations do achieve positive results. But their gifts keep on giving: corporations making the gifts wait on a return, and the public ultimately pays the cost. These foundations are periously close to vehicles for Congress to fund its vanity while peddling its influence.

Thanks for reading! /wr. Please stir the Perlo, leave a comment. All images: fair use.

Protest by walterrhett

Young Langston Hughes by walterrhett

Thinking about Langston today.

Langston Hughes was a poet who traveled the world. He who once motored by bus from Russia through Tajikistan to Turkmenistan to Tashkent and Samarkand and then to China; all of this after the film company he signed on with went broke and left him stranded outside of Moscow. His travelogue of the journey, “I Wonder As I Wander,” has him making friends in places where he couldn't speak a word of the language and seeing sites whose history and importance in ancient times was well beyond his means but not beyond his understanding. His first impressions allot to us the awe and innocence of being in ancient towns where Alexander the Great journeyed or the great caravans of the Silk Road traveled in the world's greatest period of security and open trade, a time when trade and culture flourished, connecting Beijing and Shanghai to Istanbul and Cairo, and to Paris and Cape Town and Nairobi. http://www2.ljworld.com/users/walterr...

Born in Joplin, MO, raised in Topeka, KS, graduating high school in Cleveland, OH, Langston's mother's first husband fought and died with John Brown at Harper's Ferry; a grand uncle was Virginia's first African-American member of Congress during reconstruction. Two of his great-grand fathers were white (Scot and Jewish). Before graduating from Lincoln University in PA, he worked as a bus boy in DC, where he left copies of his poems under the plate of poet Vachel Lindsay who become one of his benefactors.

His broken heart suffered in Mexico sent him spiraling into emotional collapse, led him to Cuba and Haiti, but mostly he lived in Harlem, in New York City, where he wrote of life of regular folk seen in the churches and avenues, bars and apartments and rented rooms of Seventh Avenue and St. Nicholas. He is in the wedding picture of one black America's greatest society weddings, the marriage of intellectual giant W.E.B. DuBois' daughter Yolande to the Yale educated poet Countee Cullen. http://www2.ljworld.com/users/walterr...

With words that twinkled and splashed and colored like paint, Langston Hughes captured the gay, Christmas-lighted life of the autumns and summers of urban folk who kept their country wisdom. They believed the main attitude one should hold toward life was joy, spiced with lots of laughs and plenty of hard work stirred with tenderness and hope. He marked the tough assignments for the poor and working poor of the first half of the twentieth century, but captured from the margins the fine details of their sorrows and triumphs in his stories and poems. They pulled for the Dodgers, shouted on Sunday, loved all week and drank their scotches neat.

As I post, today is day for primary elections in several states; it's the day 334 of this remarkable year, in the midst of Dr. Laura, Shirley Sherrod, and Imam Rauf; in the rush of death panels and million dollar tax cuts some claim we must endure because the economy is too fragile for them to end. It's a year moving fast through the slow ooze of oil as thick as tar floating up on the shores in the world's most important wetlands, in the resistance in the Amazon to international mining where soldiers sent to subdue the natives are killed by poison-tipped arrows; in China's purchase of Volvo, GM's bail-out, Goldman's money mystic, Sharron Angle's shrill call during her election campaign for Congress that those elected serve false gods and worship idols (of course she who has sanitized her website will no doubt clean the well). In the middle of thinking about second amendment remedies and dominatrix gay strip clubs visited by Republican Eagles, not to mention the recall of half a billion eggs when there was nothing wrong with the chickens, the lost of helium (Congress voted to sell off our stores!) and the ice caps melting (but like Obama's Christianity, many believe it's a fiction), I am thinking of Langston's poem, “Theme for English B.”

The instructor said,

Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you--- Then, it will be true. I wonder if it's that simple? I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem. I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this college on the hill above Harlem. I am the only colored student in my class. The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas, Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y, the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It's not easy to know what is true for you or me at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you: hear you, hear me---we two---you, me, talk on this page. (I hear New York too.) Me---who? Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. I like a pipe for a Christmas present, or records---Bessie, bop, or Bach. I guess being colored doesn't make me NOT like the same things other folks like who are other races. So will my page be colored that I write? Being me, it will not be white. But it will be a part of you, instructor. You are white--- yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. That's American. Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. But we are, that's true! As I learn from you, I guess you learn from me--- although you're older---and white--- and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

Wedding Party, 1926 by walterrhett

Written in 1949. It is taught and studied today in English classes in Morocco and China, and elicits meaningful comments on the web from Bermuda, Lebanon, Grenada, and Israel, and is used by the University of Chicago as a reading passage for its graduate admissions essay. I want my blog to travel like his poems.

I once heard “Theme for English B” recited on stage in Central Park under a hot summer sky on an indigo night in a listening crowd where I knew only the poem. I'm remembering my delight when my daughter told me she organized the Kwanza celebration for the New York Library branch where Langston Hughes spent many afternoons, reading, reading to children, and writing poems. I never met him, but his was the first hardback book I brought at 16, a collection of short stories I read for years. I did meet Cyprian Rowe, a Georgia-born Roman Catholic poet (who headed the National Office of Black Catholics) who knew him well with whom we celebrated one of Langston's birthdays.

The Future by walterrhett

I am remembering Langston because he approached issues and problems, differences and deficiencies with the joy of common sense. His work never yelled or sliced the truth into half measures, but it was never bombastic, in-your-face prevaricating, and no matter how dark the situation, always had an embedded sense of humor I learned to love.

I am remembering Langston because his writing spoke from his heart. It spoke with all of the complex feelings he allowed himself to feel. His work was honest and rich. It was open and allowed you to laugh at its short comings. His work left room for those who could not see their own folly or who pretended to perfection, or thought living was a battle won by knocking others down or who valued only their own views. He, in his writings, bestowed his humanity upon them. (see his poems, “Madam to You.”)

I'm thinking about Langston because he was a writer he who had the good sense to keep out of his own way. His sentences were clean, never loaded; they were aimed at the reader and presented a situation, served like a favorite dessert, defused of warning, gloom, harm, hate, defense, or haughty high mindedness. He used his craft was to give you the gift of the situation in a way that you could laugh and not worry, in a way that you were stronger, more alive, and wiser for having read what he served.

I loved Langston because he taught me everyday things matter. He taught me how to share. And how precious the gifts of words can be. He taught me wit meant having a good ear and eye. He taught me that to honor the word was to cherish the reader, and how to present a gift that was made from parts of us all, whether we like it or not.

You'll have to grade me, but that's my blog on “Theme for English B.”

Mother and Daughters by walterrhett

Thanks for reading! /wr. Please stir the Perlo, leave a comment.

Images from the top: a young Langston Hughes; James Vander Zee photo--one of the most famous 1920s photos by one of Harlem's most celebrated photographers; a Vander Zee wedding photo, 1926; next photo is a well known image by James Vander Zee; Langston's most famous poem is "Mother to Son," http://bit.ly/aXygrr. All images and quotes; fair use.

The misunderstandings about the request to build the Park Place Islamic Cultural Center are "dangerous," but the deliberately misleading statements of politicians using the mosque as a wedge issue are more likely to cause permanent harm and peril.

Their inflammatory statements ignore the fact their own words give comfort and aid to the terrorists. For the goal of terrorists is not to win, but to break down a country's values and ideas, and turn it against itself by instilling fear.

Now American politicians are shamelessly encouraging and fanning those fears. They are framing the issue in emotions or as concern for safety, security, jobs, respect. They make American believers in Islam the country's newest whipping boys. They assign collective guilt for an act committed by the distorted, vile contempt of a blinded, hate-filled few.

51 Park Place, NYC by walterrhett

Those who push this fear think they are being tough, but the opposite is true. They claim the presence of a mosque on Park Avenue is insensitive, demeaning, provocative, goading; but a prayer center for Islam already meets there. Where were the politicians before?

Those angered by the request to build the center on Park Place are asserting that proximity is policy. "Location is power; seize and preserve the ground at all costs" is the mantra. Strength and might are being equated as a "feel good" territorial imperative.

Crowd at the 44th Presidential Inauguration by walterrhett

The fact is this creates a subjugated class of citizens and rights. The fact is, this is exactly what the terrorists have called for, the breakdown and abandonment of American values. 9/11 was a physical act in a psychological and cultural war: the goal of terrorists at this stage is not physical or political conquest, but to attack and cripple American values, making these guiding principles useless, deprived of their strength. The terrorist are no doubt laughing at what they see as a disheveled retreat from these bedrock values as politicians, in the best tradition of war propagandists, are calling for vigilance over the "real threat."

As New York's mayor said in his statement, "We do not honor their lives by denying the very Constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights – and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked."

One Muslim woman writing yesterday, added an eloquent, personal voice: "Every day I watch . . . this country become . . . more hateful, and yet you tell American Muslims to become more moderate. You speak as if we have not assimilated, but we have, beautifully. American Muslims do not practice polygamy, we are educated, we speak English, our women are active and visible members of society. And through the past 10 years, through all the propaganda and hate and accusations, we have remained in this country and stood our ground, and we have refused to become involved in this so-called "global jihad" against America. We are a vision of moderation itself, even by American standards. . . And yet you give in to those who would use their own prejudice to attack us, as if we are the ones who are responsible for 9/11. American Muslims died that day in those towers. We were not the perpetrators, and we have not become the perpetrators. Americans have lost sight of who their real enemy is. . . .my family has been in this country for over 300 years. My ancestors fought in the American Revolution, the Civil War, WWI, my grandfather fought in Normandy, my father was in Vietnam. Yet you are telling me to be moderate and assimilate. Into this country which my family has helped to build! . . . I cannot fully express in words the frustration I feel."

Ignore the politicians partial measures of truth; ignore their manufactured fears. Ignore their feinted outrage, which is linked in unholy alliance with the stated goals of terrorists. Their's is not a wise or well served approach.

American Patriot by walterrhett

Despite their xenophobic outcries, cast in the protection of liberty, let us celebrate a longstanding American tradition: grace under fire.

Thanks for reading! /wr. Please stir the Perlo, add a comment. Images: 51 Park Place (right side of the street, with the arch window), proposed site of the cultural center. Crowd at the 44th Presidential Inauguration. American Revolutionary Patroit. Images in the public domain.