Too Cute by Half on Honduras, Mr. President
By Al Giordano
The President of the country whose seal is emblazoned on your correspondent’s passport took some heat from the right during his 2008 presidential campaign when his bride, Michelle Obama, said, “for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”
The statement was far from a spontaneous gaffe: It was very smart politics and from the moment it happened I marveled at the genius of David Axelrod, the Obama advisor who I suspected had orchestrated it. Michelle’s admission was a clarion call to tens of millions of US citizens who knew their government had betrayed its founding principles more often than not in recent decades and who had generally stayed away from the ballot box over the past 28 years. If there’s anything the United States of America has fostered in so many of its citizens, it is a healthy ambivalence about a “democracy” that hasn’t usually walked its talk.
The higher voter turnout that allowed Barack Obama to overwhelm the Clinton machine in the primaries and achieve a punishing victory last November was largely the result of citizens that do not regularly vote – young people, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, community organizers and others that know what I’m talkin’ about here –turning out and doing so because Obama presented the possibility that we might be able to be proud again.
Many of the causes of that long national ambivalence by a significant swathe of the US population could be found in Washington’s historic behavior in this hemisphere: from the 1955 US-backed coup d’etat in Guatemala to the 2002 US-backed coup attempt in Venezuela (turned back in three days by the Venezuelan people), the global power of the North - the first land to lead the hemisphere an a wave of insurrectionist rebellions against European colonialism - had become the hemisphere’s colonizing empire, and utilized shamefully brutal and violent methods to do so.
In that context, President Obama ought to think twice before bandying about the word “hypocrisy” again in the way he did last weekend while in Mexico. Asked about the widespread perception in Latin America that Washington hadn’t backed its words against the Honduran coup d’etat with deeds, the President said:
“The same critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras are the same people who say that we're always intervening and the Yankees need to get out of Latin America. You can't have it both ways.”
“If these critics think that it's appropriate for us to suddenly act in ways that in every other context they consider inappropriate, then I think what that indicates is that maybe there's some hypocrisy involved in their -- their approach to U.S.-Latin American relations that -- that certainly is not going to guide my administration's policies.”
As with all falsehood, there is a kernel of truth in what the President said: It would be hypocritical to repeat the dastardly deeds of the past. Counting only the actions since Barack Obama was born, the list is long and shameful enough: The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the 1965 US occupation of the Dominican Republic, the 1966 Green Beret intervention against rebels in Guatemala, the 1973 US-backed coup d’etat in Chile, the 1975 US launched Operation Condor to install and back military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, the dirty wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s (which included well-documented official US cocaine-trafficking to pay for it), the 1983 US invasion of Grenada, the 1987 US military “drug war” intervention in Bolivia, the 1988 US-backed electoral fraud in Mexico, the 1989 US invasion of Panama, the multi-billion dollar US intervention of Plan Colombia launched in 2000 (which continues through the present), the 2002 US-backed coup attempt in Venezuela, the 2004 US-backed coup in Haiti, the 2006 US-backed electoral fraud in Mexico, and the 2008 US launch of Plan Mexico among them.
As you can see from the above (and partial) list, this is not a matter of ancient history. Some of this crap continues through to the present day.
When in April of this year the US President went to the Summit of the Americas and promised a new beginning in US-Latin American relations, his counterparts to the South took him seriously and gave him much benefit of the doubt. That the US voted with the rest of the Organization of American States (OAS) to lift the ban on Cuba’s membership, while its Justice Department finally indicted ex-Cuban terrorist Luis Posada Carriles and Washington took its first baby steps to ease the embargo on the island, contributed to what could have been that new hemispheric order based on mutual respect that Obama waxed so poetically about.
US policy toward its closest neighbors had begun to turn the corner from dysfunctional to functional.
But suddenly, less than seven months into the Obama administration, all that promise of progress is now at risk, because of its ham-handed response to the June 28 military coup in Honduras.
I worry not for Latin America. As Narco News has documented for nine years, most of them while the US suffered under a tinhorn tyrant named Bush, the people of this hemisphere have been untying the colonial knot just fine even as Washington opposed them. And as I documented last week from distinct regions of Honduras, the civil resistance there will triumph sooner or later and topple the coup d’etat and its illegitimate regime with or without support or opposition from the United States.
What the US will get from its betrayal of its initial good statements against the Honduras coup will be a civil revolution that erases the institutions – executive, legislative and judicial – that existed until June 28 in Honduras and that replaces them with a more Latin American kind of democracy. I really don’t worry about Latin America. I’ve listened and learned too much to think that it needs Washington’s hand to do for itself what its majorities desire.
No, I worry for the United States of America.
Right now, the cadre of foreign policy bureaucrats to whom President Obama unwisely delegated hemispheric relations while he pursues lofty priorities like national health care have wrought their own special kind of coup d’etat in Washington. In the end, he can’t escape ultimate responsibility because he put them there. The buck stops at his desk. There’s no ultimate way for my fellow community organizer to wiggle around it. He’s the one that will stand for reelection in 2012 and perhaps be left wondering why folks like Michelle Obama who want to feel proud of their country may end up sitting on our hands and go back to our non-voting ways.
At the center of that coup in the United States is the Clinton machine that in some kind of macabre power sharing agreement has taken US policy in this hemisphere hostage and off the track of what the President promised when running against Secretary Clinton for president in 2008.
Not only have we now got Clinton attorney Lanny Davis lobbying on behalf of the Honduran dictatorship before an administration whose central promise was that it would end the undue influence of lobbyists, but as journalist Bill Conroy documented this past weekend for Narco News, the US-funded Millenium Challenge Corp. – whose board of directors includes Secretary Clinton – poured $17 million into Honduras oligarch interests between April and July of this year.
While DC apparatchiks told us they had cut almost $20 million (about ten percent) of US aid to Honduras and put the rest on pause, Clinton’s Millenium Challenge Corp. (MCC) has been quietly replenishing those funds through the back door.
A Narco News review of deposits to the Honduran Central Bank reveals that since the June 28 coup d’etat – in a little over a month – MCC has subsidized the coup forces in Honduras with $6.5 million dollars.
Those payments arrived on these dates and in these amounts:
July 9: $0.9 million
July 16: $0.3 million
July 23: $3.7 million
July 30: $1.6 million
While it’s possible that the US President doesn’t know about this sabotage of his stated policy – a small Central American nation with a population smaller than that of New York City might not exactly be front and center of his attention – his Secretary of State is on the frickin’ board of directors of the entity that, we now know, has been quietly funding the coup even after it was consummated.
So while I wholeheartedly agree with part of what the President said in Guadalajara this weekend – that it would be “hypocrisy” for the US to respond to the Honduras coup with military invasion, assassination, traditional covert black ops, electoral fraud, and the rest of the bag of tricks that have defined US-Latin American relations for all of Obama’s 48 years – the real hypocrisy at work comes, rather, when Washington tells us it has put funding for the coup regime “on pause” when it is now demonstrably true that it has not.
Last week, Obama told reporters that he couldn’t “push a button” and make the coup regime go away. That was also too cute by half, because there are buttons left unused through which it could do what it falsely claims it has already done: stop the flow of US dollars to the Honduran oligarchy and its coup regime.
At very least, his Secretary of State could make a motion on the board upon which she sits to stop that meddlesome anti-democracy funding.
The fact remains that giving that money to the regime or the private sector interests behind it are themselves the kind of US intervention that Latin American peoples have long struggled against.
Shutting down that money flow to the criminal enterprise that is the coup regime and its private-sector sponsors is not the kind of “Yankee intervention” that the region opposes: it is the continuance of that dollar spigot that constitutes the dirty intervention.
And that’s why the President’s statements – on hypocrisy and previously on the lack of a button to push – are too cute by half.
Again, I don’t worry or weep for Latin America or Honduras. The people united will never be defeated, and our authentic journalists, myself included, will be there alongside them reporting their every step in community organizing and civil resistance to win back what basic democratic principles establish is rightfully theirs. It really doesn't matter how much money or oxygen Washington gives to the Honduras coup regime: that baby is going down, and will go down hard, at the hands of an organized people.
But I’m looking at the faded gold ink on my 2001-issued US Passport and flipping through the pages right now: Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, the United States, multiple indentations and earmarks for most of them… I recently had to go to a US embassy to get additional pages woven into its book because the Brazilian consulate had demanded two blank pages to graffiti and the original ones had overflowed with entry and exit stamps. And I’m feeling sorry not for Honduras but for us, the pro-democracy citizens of conscience of the United States who, like Michelle Obama, want to be able to be “proud of our country for the first time in our adult lives,” but who see that dream slipping away once more.
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Crossposted...
Submitted August 11, 2009 - 12:39 pm by Al GiordanoTo The Huffington Post.
And to Daily Kos.
Thanks for this, Al
Submitted August 11, 2009 - 12:57 pm by Phoenix Woman (not verified)Sigh. Apparently, this is what trying to placate the PUMAs gets us.
Obama's boxed in because he can't openly say that he's at war with his own Secretary of State, even if (or especially if) he truly is, because that weakens him in the eyes of the world. But if he continues on this current path, he'll be pissing away any chance at a dialogue, much less a strong relationship, with any Latin American nation outside of thug-ruled Colombia.
The question is, will he continue to cover for her and pretend her buddies aren't really doing what they're doing, or will he force her behind the scenes to take some meaningful actions that might hurt her golpista buddies? Getting rid of her would not be advisable at this time, as the Republicans will gleefully block her replacement and turn it into a wedge issue, so we're going to have to live with her.
Mr. President's empathy deficit for the people of Honduras
Submitted August 11, 2009 - 1:24 pm by Jeff LarsonI'm deeply disappointed in the President. Foreign policy issues were my chief reasons for backing him. I thought I saw some substantive differences in his thinking - not just a quantitative difference in the amount of death and turmoil we cause for others around the globe but a qualitatively different approach for how we support human and civil rights in other countries. It was the reason I collaborated with a handful of people to bring some light to foreign policy issues at OMS, mydd and elsewhere.
I'm amazed that it is one month after your Lanny Davis article and nothing has improved in the US response. You've demonstrated a clear conflict of interest for Sec. Clinton with some very disturbing facts. It reminds me of "Bill's Excellent Adventures in Kazakhstan". Grab what you want around the globe and to hell with results for American policy.
Well my support for Obama is waning fast. Many other foreign policy issues and crises were inherited and he is somewhat limited. But this is shaping up to be his own big fat failure.
Something's Not Right
Submitted August 11, 2009 - 1:46 pm by Brendan CorcoranI don't know what it is, but something seems to have shifted within the Obama Administration, as if they are playing not to lose, and thereby playing very conservatively with the real hopes and aspirations of precisely the people who put Obama over the top--twice. The excuses about the Senate only go so far. The excuses about multiple crises only go so far. And the excuses for the Clinton State Dept only go so far. From foreign policy to the impending healthcare disaster to the failure to rationally address climate change (thusfar), it seems that the Obama administration is being run by Rahm/HRC and thus is petrified of doing anything in any sphere that smacks of liberalism. Something's not right. The disaffection is pervasive at ground level; Obama has stopped communicating, organizing, leading. Obviously, there is time to turn things around, but a lot of work needs to be done to ensure that many of us engage in 2012 with same verve as 2008.
@Al and others
Submitted August 11, 2009 - 2:38 pm by Tom W. (not verified)Al, I agree with you on the merits, if not on some of your interpretation of the details. I'll say it explicitly - the policy of President Obama toward Honduras is a pale, timid middle path. Likewise, Secretary Clinton and the State Department are not doing all they should, in my opinion. They say one thing, and do another.
And yes, the President and his SoS seem tightly bound in the post-coup U.S. policy - to use the cliche, there's no daylight between them at all. There's no "feud." There's no disagreement. Indeed, the Obama foreign policy machine seems to work as well from a structural standpoint as any in recent memory - though we may not always love their policy choices.
With respect to the MCC, you're leaving out a few cogent details - it's hardly a Clintonian apparatus, though the SoS is one of the three mandated members of the board and indeed chairs that body - the others are Secretary Geithner and trade rep Ron Kirk. It's also a US government agency, funded by Congress with full Senatorial review of top appointees! A clandestine, shadowy machine run by Clinton operatives, this is not. It's a presidential agency, though a small one, created by President Bush to try and align U.S. interests with the UN's Millennium goals and humanitarian development needs overseas - indeed, its biggest success has been in getting medical supplies to the HIV-ravaged sub-Saharan African nations (the one success Bush is rightly praised for in progressive circles).
That said, you're right - the Administration is being too cute by half. Obviously, if they step on the gas - whether at State or via an Obama order to law enforcement or defense agencies to pursue the criminal angle with sanctions (your brilliant idea) - it will have very real consequences. My view is they don't love or trust Zelaya and they want to maintain a slightly-improved but still relatively bellicose face to Venezuela, Cuba etc. while continuing military policies in Colombia and Mexico. It's the wrong move and doesn't align with how we like to think about the President, but I'm not sure I recall candidate Obama promising otherwise explicitly during the campaign. I'd love to see that language - which may be used to push him harder on this vital issue.
Finally, I have to defend Obama a bit here. I feel (strongly) that Barack Obama is nobody's fool - and that he's hardly under the sway of anyone. I may be upset with the Administration over its handling of healthcare and middle path on Honduas (for now), but our President is his own man and that's a good thing.
PS - thanks for the reporting, it's great.
Obama needs to stop ignoring the past.
Submitted August 11, 2009 - 2:52 pm by Alci (not verified)I know a lot of people like to praise the President for his intelligence, but the truth is he knows very little about Latin American history, culture etc. This is plainly obvious in his repetitive calls to forget the past and "look forward." Let's remember that even his press secretary called Eduardo Galeano's "Open Veins Of Latin America" a "work of fiction" after Hugo Chavez handed Obama a copy at the Summit of The Americas. We need to put pressure on our president, because his habit of dismissing history is also creating major problems in the Middle East.
Obama the power surfer
Submitted August 11, 2009 - 3:42 pm by Antony SchofieldIt's starting to become crystal clear that president Obama is no progressive.
The good thing is that this clarifies the situation, and our role in the change process.
Hold on a minute...
Submitted August 11, 2009 - 3:22 pm by Tribunus Plebis (not verified)Hold on a minute, folks, before we work ourselves up into a furious lather about what appears to be Obama Administration back-door aid to the Honduras coup regime, but may well be Millenium Challenge Corporation aid payments on automatic pilot, while the MCC staff and board remain laden with Bush appointees.
Two key things to keep in mind (and while these are not excuses for MCC aid payments to Honduras since the coup, they are explanations that create the distinct possibility that even Clinton did not know this was happening, much less Obama):
(1) Thanks to the more-exhaustive-than-ever background checks of Obama appointees occasioned in part by the need to surface any trivial matters that might lead to silly political attacks by Republicans, there are lots of empty slots in the State Department, which consequently is not exactly operating like a well-oiled machine. Also Mrs. Clinton has been abroad a good deal of the time since she was sworn in. It's more likely that she can be faulted for bad or absentee management of State, than for cleverly manipulating grants by an independent (though US-funded) public corporation.
(2) There is only one Obama appointee on the MCC board, and that's Ron Kirk, the special trade representative, whose job most likely gives him the board seat. It's highly unlikely that in his three months in his full-time job, he's had much time for MCC matters. All the other MCC board members are Bush people; they probably have fixed terms and can't be replaced except when their terms come to an end. Since MCC has a statutory mandate and separate appropriation, it's unlikely that the Obama Administration could clean house at MCC or dramatically change its policies in a short time anyway. Its biases or incompetence (as seemingly documented by the Government Accounting Office, and by Sen. Leahy in '08) can't yet fairly be laid at the feet of Hillary Clinton, and certainly not President Obama. Please remember that the Federal Government is vast, Bush had eight years to corrupt and mismanage it, and it will take Obama at least one full term to undo much of what went wrong.
Although I do not yet know this to be a fact, it is probable that the White House could not by itself, even if it knew about scheduled MCC aid payments to any country, stop them. The MCC is a bit like the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts or the Smithsonian -- they are part of the federal establishment and primarily funded by taxpayers, but they were set up to be independent of day-to-day political considerations, and their officers, staff and board handle all operations. (If the President, for example, tried to stop the head of the Smithsonian from authorizing a new art gallery on the Mall, the Congress would be outraged and the media would have itself another scandal-in-a-teapot.)
My guess is that the MCC payments to Honduras were already scheduled, and the staffer at the political level of State who was supposed to make a list of assistance to Honduras that could be suspended probably didn't think of checking to see what the MCC was doing.
In that context, Al's article is a fire alarm that the Obama Administration needs to hear, when it comes both to the MCC and what it's doing around the world, and whether that comports with Obama's foreign assistance priorities. Is the Clinton State Department and the White House happy with how the MCC operates? We don't know -- and they probably don't know. To the extent that the State Department could get the MCC to suspend payments to Honduras -- and it's not clear from a cursory review of MCC operations via the internet that that is possible -- then Al is absolutely right that now is the time for the White House to decide if the President actually intends to make good on his promises of a new approach to Latin America. If he does, a call from Secretary Clinton asking the MCC to suspend its payments to Honduras should be placed.
Secretary Clinton's Role at MCC
Submitted August 11, 2009 - 4:19 pm by Al GiordanoTribunus – Secretary Clinton is a very active member of the MCC board; chairs its board and actively participates in and supports MCC. She also played an active role in cutting off funding for Nicaragua on June 10. That she was so actively involved in that decision offers our first indication of what she could have and should have done by now in Honduras.
Here are some links that we will wrap later on into a full story, some from Secretary Clinton's own PR machine:
http://www.mcc.gov/blog/ceo/
Now, well into a new administration and era, I am encouraged by the level of support MCC has been given by Congress and senior government leaders. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, chair of MCC’s board, confirms, “President Obama supports the MCC, and the principle of greater accountability in our foreign assistance programs.” The Secretary herself has referred to Millennium Challenge grants as a “very important part of our foreign policy. It is a new approach, and it’s an approach that we think deserves support.” Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew has said, “MCC is getting off the ground and making real progress.
http://secretaryclinton.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/
Here’s what Hillary has on her plate for today, June 10th: 10:00 a.m. Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Board Meeting and Luncheon.
http://www.mcc.gov/blog/ceo/page/2/
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton chaired her first MCC Board meeting this week. I was pleased to be part of this historic transition, and I welcomed Secretary Clinton’s active participation at the meeting. Her presence and the presence of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other public and private sector Board members signal the importance of MCC’s ongoing commitment to delivering change in the lives of the world’s poor.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0609/p06s10-woam.html
LEÓN, NICARAGUA - US concerns over last year's questionable municipal elections in Nicaragua could be strong enough to cause leftist President Daniel Ortega, a cold-war nemesis of the US, to lose $64 million in development aid.
In a Wednesday meeting with the board of directors of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), an international development initiative started during the Bush administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will discuss whether to cancel the remaining portion of a $175 million compact awarded in 2006.
In December, the US government froze new aid after expressing serious concern about "the government of Nicaragua's manipulation of municipal elections and a broader pattern of actions inconsistent with the MCC eligibility criteria."”
Secretary Clinton even took time out from her busy schedule to shill for MCC while in El Salvador on May 31:
http://useu.usmission.gov/Article.asp?ID=DA7FB676-9980-4BE1-8DC7-A93D0E5A4D42
... As chair of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, it is wonderful for me to see the results of our work and our investment. And I commend you for everything that has been already accomplished. And I pledge that we will continue working with you.”
@ Al, on Hillary's culpability re MCC funds to Honduras
Submitted August 12, 2009 - 12:46 pm by Tribunus Plebis (not verified)I stand corrected on the awareness and oversight by Hillary Clinton of the MCC. Excellent reporting, Al (and Bill). However I'm still not convinced that her presence at these meetings represents "micromanagement" of disbursing MCC funds. When you say that "Washington has already determined that 'it’s appropriate' to deny MCC funds to a country for lighter and more transient reasons [Nicaragua] than those that exist to sanction a coup regime in another [Honduras]," there is still some ambiguity about who "Washington" is. When they attend external meetings of this kind, Cabinet secretaries are usually briefed and directed by staff. They might well not be briefed for more than 15 or 20 minutes about such a meeting, before going into it. I'm just trying to bring some bureaucratic realism to this. I'm not suggesting that she shouldn't be held accountable for her embrace of whatever the MCC does, but I can imagine Clinton approving a suspension of MCC funds for Nicaragua, and being unaware that funds were still flowing to Honduras.
The reason that distinction is important is that if you believe she was her own action officer on MCC, and knew that its money was still being sluiced to Tegucigalpa, then she's indeed a hypocrite and is effectively making the President a hypocrite when it comes to treatment of Honduras in contrast to that of Nicaragua. If that's true, then it really calls for pressure on the White House and the NSC, to flush out the President on the MCC money to the coup regime (and ramped-up vigilance about what Clinton is doing at State in general).
When all is said and done, it's Barack Obama's administration, and I agree with your fully justified question at the end of the Narco News story: "If 'it’s appropriate' to sanction Nicaragua for lesser reasons, why not apply the sanction of denying MCC funds to a criminal coup regime in Honduras that Washington claims it has 'paused' giving money, but that it continues to fund?"
The dream is over...
Submitted August 18, 2009 - 12:22 pm by Dennes LongoriaThe fact is that the United States, for better or worse, has appointed itself the cop of the world. In that vein, Bush at least was unabashedly honest, and close to, or some would say fully arrogant. But it didn't matter. And it still doesn't matter what any one says outside America (meaning the United States, not the entire continent), once Obama has become elected. The problem as I see it is that Obama understood America's leadership role in the world prior to becoming president, and so he campaigned as someone who was gonna fix all the problems of the world, not just ours. I mean, Palestinian so-called 'terrorists' were hoping Obama would win. The entire world did. He was packaged as "The World's Messiah", really...but now that it's 'after' the elections, the world can go to hell! ... Let Iran get nukes (at least he's pleasing the islamists)... Let North Korea actually TEST nukes, and then have bubba go over there and suck up to Kim Jung... Then Obama bends down in front of the Saudi King, but not in front of the Queen of freaking England, but tries to shake her hand... Then Michelle puts her arm around the Queen... like hello! that's never done! Then they say they're going to close Gitmo, but don't. Then they say they're against the coup regime in Honduras, but pour millions of dollars into it, as reported by NarcoNews... When are the people going to wake up: the dream is over, baby. Reality is harshly setting in and we're back to our old arrogant ways. Then Americans don't comprehend why they are hated by the rest of the civilized world....and only tolerated because they have no choice in the matter...because the U.S. can crush you in a second if it wants... Be afraid... be very afraid....
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