Obama Seeks To Win Back Wall Street Cash
By Nicholas Confessore
NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON — A few weeks before announcing his re-election campaign, President Obama convened two dozen Wall Street executives, many of them longtime donors, in the White House’s Blue Room.
The guests were asked for their thoughts on how to speed the economic recovery, then the president opened the floor for over an hour on hot issues like hedge fund regulation and the deficit.
Mr. Obama, who enraged many financial industry executives a year and a half ago by labeling them “fat cats” and criticizing their bonuses, followed up the meeting with phone calls to those who could not attend.
The event, organized by the Democratic National Committee, kicked off an aggressive push by Mr. Obama to win back the allegiance of one of his most vital sources of campaign cash — in part by trying to convince Wall Street that his policies, far from undercutting the investor class, have helped bring banks and financial markets back to health.
Last month, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, traveled to New York for back-to-back meetings with Wall Street donors, ending at the home of Marc Lasry, a prominent hedge fund manager, to court donors close to Mr. Obama’s onetime rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. And Mr. Obama will return to New York this month to dine with bankers, hedge fund executives and private equity investors at the Upper East Side restaurant Daniel.
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CIO!: Clinton clearly needs to read the True Cost of Chevron:
Hillary Clinton Warns Africa Of ‘New Colonialism’
By Matthew Lee
HUFFINGTON POST
LUSAKA, Zambia — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Saturday warned Africa of a creeping “new colonialism” from foreign investors and governments interested only in extracting the continent’s natural resources to enrich themselves and not the African people [much like Chevron and Shell in Nigeria].
Clinton said that African leaders must ensure that foreign projects are sustainable and benefit all their citizens, not only elites. A day earlier, she cautioned that China’s massive investments and business interests in Africa need to be closely watched so that the African people are not taken advantage of.
“It is easy, and we saw that during colonial times, it is easy to come in, take out natural resources, pay off leaders and leave,” Clinton said. “And when you leave, you don’t leave much behind for the people who are there. We don’t want to see a new colonialism in Africa.”
Clinton said the United States didn’t want foreign governments and investors to fail in Africa, but they should also give back to the local communities.
“We want them to do well, but also we want them to do good,” she said.
“We don’t want them to undermine good governance, we don’t want them to basically deal with just the top elites, and frankly too often pay for their concessions or their opportunities to invest.”
Clinton said that American development aid and infrastructure projects come with good governance conditions and that the Obama administration is interested in Africa and the African people. Their success, she said, is in the long-term interest of both the African people and the U.S.
She spoke in a pan-African television interview in the Zambian capital. Her interview followed the handover of a U.S. built pediatric hospital in Lusaka to the Zambian government.
Earlier, at the inaugural meeting of the U.S.-Zambia Chamber of Commerce, Clinton laid out the U.S. strategy for helping Africa.
“We want a relationship of partnership not patronage, of sustainability, not quick fixes,” she said. “We want to establish a strong foundation to attract new investment, open new businesses … create more paychecks, and do so within the context of a positive ethic of corporate responsibility.”
“We think it’s essential that we have an idea going in that doing well is not in any way a contradiction of doing good,” she said.
Clinton is the first secretary of state to visit Zambia since Henry Kissinger came in 1976 to lay out the Ford administration’s policy for southern Africa as revolts against white minority rule in South Africa and what was then Rhodesia were intensifying.
Clinton, on the first leg of a three-nation tour of Africa, arrived in Zambia from the United Arab Emirates, where she attended an international conference on Libya. After Zambia, she heads to Tanzania and Ethiopia before returning to Washington next week.
Panel on Women-Poverty-Crises-Human Rights
United Nations Human Rights Council 17
3 June 2011
IMPACT OF WAR & CONFLICT SPENDING ON WOMEN & POVERTY
Beatrice Fihn, Reaching Critical Will – WILPF
www.reachingcriticalwill.org
According to the new report released by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global military expenditures was estimated at $1,630 billion in 2010, an increase of 1.3 per cent in real terms since 2009. This is the highest number ever.
At the same time, it becomes more and more obvious to people around the world that such continued investment in weapons and militarism does not make the state safer, and it definitely does not make individuals safer. Military investments are underpinned by a belief that states’ security can be guaranteed by threats of violence. It’s an investment in war and conflict. But military might cannot address the main threats that people all over the world are facing today, such as natural disasters, increased food prices, and lack of adequate health care, education, violence against women and a clean environment.
When states go to war, and use all of that purchased military equipment, it’s mostly civilians that fall victims, despite the arguments behind war often are based on assumptions about protection.
These weapons instead have disproportionate effects on women and increased military expenditures are draining resources from the world’s poor and in particular from women. Over 1.2 billion live in what is known as “extreme poverty”, i.e. less tat 1.25 USD per day. 70% of these are women. In addition, over 30,000 children die every year because of poverty. All the time, all over the world, women and girls are being discriminated against; they earn less money than men and suffer the worst consequences of poverty, lack of education and lack of political and human rights.
Despite the fact that the MDG’s state that poverty in the world is to be halved by 2015, enough efforts are not being made to reach them. The World Bank estimates that it would take between 35 to 76 billion USD per year until 2015 for the world community to be able to live up to the MDG’s. Compare these amounts to the 1,630 billion USD that was spent on world military expenditures last year. It’s nothing.
There is a strong connection between high militarization and its disproportionate effect on the spending available for development and poverty reduction.
One example that WILPF has pointed out is the relationship between military expenditures and maternal mortality rates. Reducing the maternal mortality rates is one of the MDG’s. The fourteen states which have the highest rates of maternal mortality have ALL been involved in major conflict, internal or external in the last 15 years. Most appear very high up on the global militarism index and are in the top the list on high military expenditures in comparison to GDP.
The war in Afghanistan had at the end of 2009 cost the coalition of states 287 billion dollars. In real terms this equals a $300,000 cash payment to each person in Afghanistan. One of these 287 billion dollars could pay for 2.5 billion meals for hungry people, or 31 million vaccinations against the six main childhood killer diseases – diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, polio, tetanus and tuberculosis, or 700,000 family homes, or 270,000 schools furnished with desks, chairs, tables or 53 million children supplied with school books for a whole year.
Unfortunately, military expenditures are often left off the debate in human rights and poverty. There needs to be a thorough examination of states priorities. Investments made into militarism negatively impact upon the fulfillment of states obligations and commitments in two ways:
The Human Rights Council and Universal Periodic Review process, as well as the Human Rights Treaty Bodies could be the forums where we examine and evaluate this balance of priorities demonstrated by governments. WILPF strongly believes that all issues of peace are linked, you cannot separate weapons production from social injustice, economic development and women’s rights. They are all interlinked and must be dealt with in connection to each other.
