Ruminations of an Expatriate

I arrived at the Veracruz airport early this afternoon to learn from the Mexicana folks that my flight had been canceled. I never did quite understand why. I did, however make it quite clear that I thought it quite bad form that the Mexicana folks hadn’t called me to let me know, since I had given the folks in the Xalapa office my number.

If the USA government policy relative to travel to Cuba wasn’t dictated by the rich Cuban expatriates in Florida and New Jetsey, who give lots of money to politcians, I could have purchased my airline ticket online with my USA credit card and would have received notice of the cancelation.

Oh well, here I am spending the night in Veracruz, with my hotel and taxi fare, to and from, the airport paid by Mexicana.

The only problem is my three friends who I was supposed to rendezvous with in Cancun who have never been to Cuba before.

Please keep in mind I am posting with my “smart phone”, which is not yet smart enough to include a spell checker. So I ask you forgive my editing errors.

Though I’ve had a very pleasant afternoon here, of which I will post more later, it’s really hot and humid here.

Nir Rosen provides a succinct summary of the results of the USA policy of “Constructive Instability” in implementing its “New Middle East” plan at Steve Clemmons’ The Washington Note blog.  The plans of the Bush administration brain trust haven’t worked out well.  In fact, they’ve pretty much been a complete failure.

I leave tomorrow morning for two weeks, during which I will be without  a computer.

The Washington Post reports that “Mexico’s Police Chief Is Killed In Brazen Attack by Gunmen”, as in the “national police chief.” The report indicates that Mexican based “drug cartels [are] blamed for 6,000 killings in the past 2 1/2 years…”

Given that USA consumers provide the chief market for the products moved by the Mexican based drug cartels, most of the six thousand killings in Mexico may be directly attributed to the misguided USA prohibition of now illegal drugs. Prohibition, as was learned during the prohibition of alcohol in the USA from 1920 to 1933, accomplishes nothing except to raise the price of a product to the point of enabling black market entrepreneurs, who are often not reluctant to eliminate their competitors with extreme prejudice.

The rates of prohibited drug use have not been materially changed through prohibition. Prohibition has made criminals of millions of otherwise law abiding folks, increased police corruption, increased the USA prison population by millions, and spawned an industry engaged in the promotion of the construction and filling of prisons. And it has created a situation where police agencies are essentially working on commission, seizing property and selling the property to further militarizing policing in the USA and the consequent increase in “Botched Paramilitary Police Raids” which have resulted in the killing and destruction of the property of innocent citizens.

The drug cartels in Mexico, Colombia, the Bahamas, and elsewhere would be put out of business in short order, and those countries returned to civil rule, if USA drug policy was changed to return the price of now illegal drugs to their true market prices.

It is perfectly permissible in the USA for one to be whacked out daily on  legal psychotropic drugs, such as Prozac, Valium, and etc., so long as one pays the doctors and pharmaceutical companies; but one goes to prison for growing marijuana in the back yard.   The policy makes no sense, unless, of course, you one of the folks enriched by it.

Here is a great slide show of photos of the eruption of the Chilean volcano Chaitén, including some spectacular photos of the resulting lightening storm.

I came upon this copy of the 2006 Yale Law School Commencement address through Professor Brad DeLong’s excellent blog.

Dan M. Kahan, Deputy Dean and Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law at Yale, presented a fascinating exposition relating to John Yoo’s failure to accept “moral responsibility” in producing the “torture memo” to justify the Bush administration policy of torture; and Jack Goldsmith, appointed in 2003 to head the Justice Dept. Office of Legal Counsel, exercising the “moral responsibility” of repudiating Yoo’s tortured legal reasoning, a noble act for which he was rewarded with his dismissal from the Justice Department. Along the way Kahan compares the training of folks in the ambiguous art of chicken sexing with that of imbuing a “situation sense” in student attorneys in the hope they will become “good rather than bad lawyers.”

It is a fascinating read for those interested and who have fifteen or so minutes. An excerpt to whet your appetite.

In the poultry industry, it is very important to separate out male and female chicks almost immediately after birth: the males are less valuable – they can’t lay eggs and their meat isn’t nearly so tender – and they end up competing with the female chicks for food. So you need to pick the males out and get rid of them. This job falls to the professionally trained chick sexer, who turning the chicks over gently in his or her hand is able to sort out male from female at a rate of 1,000 per hour and at an accuracy rate of 99%.

What makes this feat so astonishing, though, is that there just isn’t any readily discernable, or at least articulable, difference in the anatomy of newborn chicks. All zoologists agree that this is so. If you ask a professionally trained chick sexer what he is looking for, don’t expect a satisfying answer. Either he’ll confabulate, telling you some fantastic and silly story about the inability of the male chick to look him straight in the eye. Or more candidly, he’ll just shrug his shoulders.

But while the nature of the chicksexer’s skill may be inexplicable, how he acquired it isn’t. To become chicksexers, individuals go off for an extended period of study with a chick sexing grandmaster. He doesn’t give lectures or assign texts. Instead he exposes his pupils to slides– “male,” “female,” “male,” “male,” “female,” “female,” “male” – continuing on in this way until the students acquire the same special power to intuitively perceive the gender of a newborn chick, even without being able to cogently explain how.

What in the world does this have to do with law, you are asking yourself of a professor’s lecture, once again. Well, what I want to suggest is that what’s going on in the chick-sexing profession is the very same thing that goes on in
the legal profession. The formal doctrines and rules that make up the law – unconscionability, proximate causation, character propensity, unreasonable restraints of trade – are just as fuzzy and indeterminate as the genetalia of dayold
chicks. And yet just as the trained chick sexer can accurately distinguish female from male, so the trained lawyer can accurately distinguish good decision from bad, persuasive argument from weak. Ask the lawyer for an explanation, and in his case too you’ll get nothing but confabulation – “plain meaning,” “congressional intent,” “efficiency” – or what have you.

In addition, the lawyer attains her skill – to recognize what she can’t cogently explain – in much the same way that the chick sexer does: through exposure to a professional slideshow, this one conducted by law grandmasters, including law professors but also other socialized lawyers, who authoritatively certify what count as good and bad decisions, sound and unsound arguments, thereby inculcating in students and young practitioners the power of intuitive perception distinctive of the legal craft.

Now, by this point in my argument, you’ll likely recognize that my analogy between legal reasoning with chick sexing is just a colorful rehearsing of legal realism. As developed at Yale Law School in the 1920s and 1930s, legal realism was less interested to demonstrate that legal rules are formally indeterminate than to explain how lawyers nonetheless form such uniform and predictable understandings of what those rules entail. Llewellyn attributed this ability to what he called “situation sense,” an intuitive perceptive faculty born of immersion in professional and cultural norms – the slide show of law. Contemporary social psychologists use the concepts of pattern recognition and prototypical reasoning to describe the same cognitive processes – which are pervasive in all fields and facets of life, not just law and the poultry industry.

Well, if you accept this central insight of legal realism, as I do, then you will readily understand that effective legal training has very little to do with learning the mass and detail of formal legal rules. Instead, it has everything to
do with acquiring situation sense.

———-

A little over a decade ago, a brilliant 25 year-old [John Yoo] was standing where you are. Less than a decade later… [John Yoo] found himself serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General… battling internal opposition from career military officers and lawyers, [John Yoo] wrote a legal memorandum which construed the law to permit the use of interrogation techniques that the U.S. had for decades understood to be banned by the Geneva Convention. Because of the institutional stature and formal authority of the OLC within the Executive Branch; because of the function the memo was intended to play in resolving a debate among other governmental officials of immense authority; and because of the impact of 9-11 in provoking societal reconsideration of the relationship between civil liberties and national security, this Yale-trained lawyer did have every reason to believe that his memo, all on its own, would have a profound and shaping impact on the professional and cultural understandings that are our law. Yet he pretended this wasn’t so. When asked by an appalled career military intelligence officer whether the memo meant the President could order torture, he answered, “Yes, but I’m not talking policy. I’m talking law here.”

The analysis reflected in the so-called Torture Memo did not, in fact, become part of our professional and cultural understandings, our situation sense. But… credit for that belongs to another individual lawyer, who as a 20-something also stood where you now are about a decade and a half ago…. In 2003 he took over as head of the Office of Legal Counsel. And to the shock of his patrons, he immediately issued a directive advising the military intelligence services that they couldn’t rely on the so-called Torture Memo… at a time when high-ranking political appointees in the Justice Department and Pentagon were continuing to place decisive reliance on the Torture Memo. As a result, this lawyer had every reason to believe the Memo’s understanding of the law would persist, and that it would pervade and shape the shared professional and cultural understandings of lawyers, unless he as a lawyer took responsibility for repudiating it. So he did.

This lawyer, Jack Goldsmith, was ultimately pushed out of OLC…. Now that Goldsmith is there [at Harvard Law School], I suspect it’s much less likely that any of its future graduates will try, in cowardly fashion, to evade moral responsibility for their actions by insisting that law is nothing but a set of formally binding rules. And I have hope that as a result of [Goldsmith’s] actions, it’s much less likely any of you ever will either.

This was my last chance to teach you some law, Yale style. These were my final two slides: one bad lawyer, one good. What made the bad one bad wasn’t that he knew “less law.” It was that he, unlike the good lawyer, refused to take moral responsibility when he found himself in a position where his individual actions as a lawyer were likely to have a decisive role in shaping our profession’s situation sense, and thus in shaping the law itself.

Because you today are standing where these two lawyers stood, because you are standing where number members of Congress, Justices of the Supreme Court, and Presidents of the United States have all stood too, I feel petty certain that a number of you too will be in that position some day. If you are, how good a lawyer you are won’t be determined by how many rules you’ve learned; it will turn on how good a person you are. My apology for not teaching you more “law” is that I thought it was much more urgent to try to teach you that.

Cinco de Mayo, for those who don’t know, is somewhat of a holiday in Mexico.  I say somewhat, as it is not a national holiday.  The day is celebrated primarily in the state of Puebla, while  other communities throughout Mexico observe the day to one degree or another.  Here, for instance, my bank is open, though almost without customers this morning when I visited; but there is a parade celebrating the date.

The day commemorates the initial victory of Mexican forces over the French invaders at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.

The French, with the USA busy with its Civil War, invaded Mexico, initially with the support of Spain and Britain, after Mexican President Benito Juárez suspended interest payments on Mexico’s debt to foreign nations on July 17, 1861.   The Spanish fleets arrived in the Mexican port of Veracruz in December of 1861, with the French and British arriving in January 1862.   The Spanish and British withdrew within a few months after realizing  the French intention of conquering Mexico with the intention of exploiting the country’s mineral resources.

Eventually, in June of 1863, French forces took Mexico City and Austrian Archduke Maximilian was installed as Emperor in May, 1864.

The USA had supported the Mexican republicans and President Juárez; and with the end of the Civil War in 1865 50,000 USA troops, under General Philip Sheridan, were sent to the Mexican border to intimidate the French and aid the Mexican republican fighters.    Finally in 1866, after a series of Mexican republican victories over the French troops, as well as Austrian and Belgian mercenaries, things began to unravel for Emperor Maximilian.

The Austrian and Belgian mercenaries left Mexico in late 1866, the French evacuated Mexico City in February, 1867, Maximilian was captured in May and executed on June 9, and the Mexican republic was restored, Juárez was restored to the presidency, and the 1857 constitution restated.

Incidentally, the 1857 constitution, amongst other provisions, confiscated the landholdings of the Catholic church, established civil marriages, eliminated capital punishment, provided freedom to any slave entering Mexico, and forbade the participation of priests in politics.   The prohibition of the clergy wearing their vestments in public was rescinded only very recently, during the Fox administration I think.

Just in case you missed it, here’s what Bill Moyers, one of the USA’s permier journalists and a graduate of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, has to say about reverend Wright. Moyers, as you may recall, interviewed Wright a week ago Friday on his PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal.

May 2, 2008

BILL MOYERS:Welcome to the Journal.

I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam, “Who’s telling the truth over there?” “Everyone, he said. “Everyone sees what’s happening through the lens of their own experience.” That’s how people see Jeremiah Wright. In my conversation with him on this broadcast a week ago and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage. Over 2000 of you have written me about him, and your opinions vary widely. Some sting: “Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American hating radical,” one viewer wrote. A “nut case,” said another. Others were far more were sympathetic to him.

Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright’s transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I’m not a psychologist. Many black preachers I’ve known — scholarly, smart, and gentle in person — uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course I’ve known many white preachers like that, too.

But where I grew up in the south, before the civil rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else; a safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed. I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed, “We the people.” Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Connor, and Jesse Helms. Even so, the anger of black preachers I’ve known and heard about and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic.

That’s not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances this week. What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle ? forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy. Hardly anyone took the “chickens come home to roost” remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that actions have consequences. My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright’s absurd charge that the United States deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being. But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated, while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test. Does this excuse Wright’s anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You’ll have to decide or yourself. At least it helps me to understand the why of them.

But in this multimedia age the pulpit isn’t only available on Sunday mornings. There’s round the clock media — the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help — people who for their own reasons set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn’t running for president with the man in the pew who was.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions, or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Jon Stewart recently played a tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the oval office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy; this is wrong — white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.

Which means it is all about race, isn’t it? Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettle some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. We are often exposed us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this ? this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner before our very eyes. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said “beware the terrible simplifiers”.

I’m sorry for the iconoflatulence, but the revelations the last few days of the depravedness of Hillary Clinton and her campaign allies are just too much.

First there is Clinton’s naked pandering in calling for suspension of the federal gas tax through the summer, a proposal that would save the average consumer about $30. if the suspension actually cased gas prices to decrease, which, according to economists, almost unanimously, it would not, but would further enrich refiners.

Then there was the revelation yesterday, by Peter Dreier at the Huffington Post, “former journalist Sidney Blumenthal [who] has been widely credited with coining the term ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ used by Hillary Clinton in 1998″ and “a senior campaign advisor to Senator Clinton”, Sydney Blumenthal, has “almost every day over the past six months” sent out email messagges to media folks “that attack[s] Obama’s character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications.”

Yesterday, after super delegate Joe Andrew, whom Bill Clinton hand picked to lead the DNC, endorsed Obama, Howard Wolfson, a top staffer of the Clinton campaign, whose candidate drug her carpetbag to NY to run for the Senate, opined “Well, I’m not sure by the way that he’s [Andrew] actually from Indiana. I know he’s originally from Indiana, but –Senator Clinton has repeatedly demonstrated she is completely amoral. A stake must be driven through the heart of her campaign. Perhaps when Indianans learn of this video such will be done.

Just in case you are using Firefox browser and haven’t already discovered Adblock. It is a very fast download addon to Firefox which blocks web site ads from loading.

I am able to ignore ads on web sites but am sometimes irritated when the loading of a web site is delayed waiting for the ad server to load the ads. Adblock has taken care of that problem.

You may find it here.

The Financial Times carried a fascinating report a couple of days ago of the reduction in major oil company investment in exploration for new oil supplies and, instead, putting their burgeoning profits into stock buy backs.

“One could argue that companies spending this amount of money buying back stocks are slowly liquidating themselves,” said Robin West, chairman of PFC Energy, the consultancy.

“The majors have been reducing exploration dollars since 1988-1989, said Priscilla McLeroy, a director at Arthur D Little, the consultancy. She attributes it to them being so big that not even ‘elephant-sized’ fields are worth investing in; rather they need ‘mammoth-sized’ fields to get sufficient returns.”

It seems it is probably a good decision for Venezuela, and other South American nations, to nationalize their petroleum resources.

I must say I’m feeling a bit smug of the fact that I drive only once a month, or so, just to keep the battery in my truck charged.

Last Night I watched the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright address the Detroit Chapter of the NAACP at its 53 annual “Fight for Freedom Fund” dinner. The reverend addressed the theme of the dinner “A Change is Going to Come.” To its credit, CNN broadcasted Rev. Wright’s speak in its entirety; and CNN commentators Soledad O’Orien and Rolland Martin, present for the address, I think provided thoughtful commentary.

This morning, though I missed Rev. Wright’s address to the National Press Club, I did watch the question and answer session which followed.

The guy is brilliant, affable, and was often quite funny in derisively answering some really insipid questions tendered by members of the National Press Club audience, not members of the working press at the moderator hastened to point out. There were also, I should note, some very thoughtful questions offered up. A number of times he preceded his answers to questions, obviously induced by what the questioner had seen in the YouTube video snippets of a sermon, by asking if the questioner had heard the entire sermon.

He noted that in his “the chickens have come home to roost” comments, during a sermon in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, he was quoting a former USA ambassador to Iraq. Exapanding on the subject, he indicated that the USA government cannot reign terror on other countries and then to not expect such will be reciprocated and noted that the USA had sold biological weapons materials to Saddam, during the Reagan years (a sale facilitated by none other than Rumsfeld and Cheney) for use against the Iranians.

One questioner questioned his patriotism, as have many media talking hairdos. He answered that folks who question his patriotism have not heard his sermons and do not know him. He indicated that he spent six years in the military and asked “how many years did Cheney serve?” Responding to those who have referred to him as a “divider” he indicated that he is a “describer” not a divider.

Rev. Wright’s address to the NAACP fund raising dinner repeatedly returned to the themes of “A Change is Going to Come”; and that our differences in race, religion, and culture do not mean that one group is deficient to another, only different. “In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as deficient, and that anybody not like us was abnormal.” “But a change is coming because we no longer see others who are different as deficient; we just see them as different.”

Making the point that no one in the USA, other than British residents, speak English, he imitated Kennedy’s New England and Johnson’s Texas dialects while noting that no one suggested they did not speak proper English, as is often suggested of African-Americans.

Addressing the subject of his church, Wright said “We just do it differently, and some of our haters can’t get their heads around that. I come from a religious tradition where we shout in the sanctuary and we march on the picket lines.” and “The African-American tradition is different. We do it in a different way.”

Wright indicated that “Many of us finally are committed to changing this world that we live in, so our children and our grandchildren will have a world in which to live in, to grow in, to learn in, to love in and to pass on to their children.” And, in closing, he remarked that a change is going to come on how we treat, and mistreat, each other; and enumerated that folks of different faiths will change how they think of and treat those of other faiths, those of a particular race will change how they think of and treat folks of other races, that straight folks will change how they think of and treat gay folks. Different not deficient.

Wright was eloquent and seemingly not the least bit intimidated by the talking hairdos who have derided him. In fact, I suspect that many of those pundits will rue their acts in moving Wright to center stage of the national discourse, as he is entirely capable of, and seemingly not the least bit reluctant in, publicly exposing their vacuity. Nor does the reverend seem reluctant to confront the racism which pervades USA society and its media; and now that he is retired from the pulpit, I suspect we’ll being a lot more from him.

Here is a transcript of Rev. Wright’s comments to the National Press Club.

Apparently the spam filter used by the outfit which hosts my domain has been a bit over aggressive at disposing of my email messages.

If you have sent a blog comment or email to me recently chances that I have not received the message.

I have adjusted the filter sensitivity and apparently it worked as I almost immediately received one of those male gland enhancement messages.

Not being a “professional” wrestling fan I was unaware of the popularity of wrestling masks, until I moved to Xalapa.  There are shops here which sell nothing but these masks, which many of the Cabo San Lucas tourist shops also sell.

Life Long Harborite’s son and his son’s buddy, who were along on the trip, couldn’t resist.

Here’s a photo of Pico de Orizaba taken through the window of the airplane on the trip to Cabo San Lucas.

Below is a steaming volcano also taken from the airplane window.

Being generally out of touch with popular culture since, say, about 1970, I had never seen, or even heard of, the movie “A Love Song for Bobby Long”, staring John Travolta, Scarlet Johansson, and Gabriel Macht.

I have just now watched it on TV, and found it to be enthralling. If you haven’t seen it, it really is a very well done story of a young woman who returns to her dead mother’s New Orleans home to find a couple of reprobative, older men living there, one of whom, it is revealed toward the end of the movie, is her father.

Exit polling is indicating an end to the 61 year rule of the Colorado party in Paraguay, the party of the 35 years of the ruthless dictatorship of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, which ended in 1989 when he was dethroned by his own party and the Paraguayan military. The country had its first democratic election in 1993.

The projected winner is former Catholic Priest Fernando Lugo who has promised a government that will aid the poor and indigenous population of the country, Latin America’s second poorest nation ,with over 40% of its population living in poverty. Lugo has forged a coalition of labor unions, indigenous Paraguayans, and poor framers under the banner of the Patriotic Alliance for Change.

Also up for election are the 45-member Senate and 80-member lower House of Deputies, all for five-year terms. And 17 governors, 18 representatives to the Mercosur trade bloc, and local officials.

So it looks as though Paraguay is set to join Brazil; Argentina; Uruguay; Bolivia; Ecuador; Venezuela; Nicaragua; and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Chile in rejecting the “neo-liberal” policies advocated by the USA government, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Policies which counsel corporate ownership of natural resources and enterprises which provide essential public services.

UPDATE:  Reuters reports that with 72 percent of the polling stations reporting Lugo has a 9.5 percentage point lead over the Colorado party candidate.

Last July 28 I posted a report of my conversation with Juan Daniel and his predictions of what was in store for Cuba. Here is an excerpt:

Juan Daniel indicated his belief that the elections coming in October will be very important for the future of change in Cuba and that he thinks Raul will be elected as president by the National Assembly. He also indicated that Raul will likely oversee great changes here during the next four or five years when another, younger president will likely be elected.

I have just read a report at the Miami Herald web site that:
The Cuban government plans to ease restrictions on travel abroad, eliminating for most Cubans the requirement that they obtain “exit permits” and an “invitations from abroad,” the Spanish daily El Pais reported Friday.

The newspaper’s correspondent in Havana quoted “sources close to the government” as saying that the announcement is planned for the next several days or weeks.

This follows announcements in recent weeks that limitations of ownership of cellular phone and certain electrical appliances are to be lifted. The Cuban government has explained that the cellular telephone system and electrical generations, transmission, and distribution systems have been developed to the point that they can handled the additional loads.

You may remember that after the demise of the Soviet Union, and its subsidization of the Cuban economy, the Cuban government instituted reforms which permitted foreign enterprise ownership of up to 49%, of Cuban enterprises, which, almost without exception, are under state ownership. Consequently, companies from Canada, Spain, Italy, China, and other nations have taken ownership positions in the Cuban state telecommunications, electrical, nickel mining, oil exploitation, and other enterprises. The result has been great improvements in the telecommunications and electrical systems and in the economy in general.

It seems that Juan Daniel was right on the money. President Raul Castro is ushering in changes. It will be interesting to see what develops in the coming months, both relative to Cuban government reforms and to USA Cuban policy. Though, given the historical USA government policy prohibiting USA trade with Cuba, economic opportunities for participation in the Cuban economy have largely passed by USA enterprises.

Obama has expressed his desire for an end to the trade and travel restrictions, while Clinton has expressed her support for the status quo. I think because Clinton is running the traditional DLC type campaign which relies upon winning Florida, while Obama is pursuing a Howard Dean type “fifty state” approach, in which winning Florida is not crucial.

I believe that Cuba can institute economic changes which take advantage of capitalist incentives and the intelligence and innovativeness of the Cuban people, by allowing more private businesses and cooperative ownership than it now does, to advance the Cuban economy and the standard of living of the Cuban people, while maintaining the excellent publicly supported Cuban educational and health care systems.

We’ll see what develops.

In related news, the  San Diego Union-Tribune reports that the last of Havans’s  “camello” (camel, so named for the two humps) buses will make their last runs on Sunday.  The buses are being replaced by modern buses manufactured in China.

This is so wrong on so many levels that if it hadn’t occurred during the Cheney administration I would be really amazed at the audacity, as well as really appalled. One of the hallmarks of fascism is the interlacing of government and corporate interests. Another is government propaganda.

David Barstow has a really long piece up on the NYT web site reporting the Pentagon’s use of retired military brass, who serve as network TV “military analysts” and often military industry lobbyists, as propagandists. The Pentagon has provided these retired officers with classified information and taken them on “briefing” trips to Guantanamo, Iraq, and elsewhere to ensure they hew the party line when appearing as network analysts and the analysts often used the information obtained and their access to Pentagon officials to further the interest of the military vendors they represent.

So the next time you listen to one of these “analysts”, remember that chances are they are likely mobbed up Pentagon sluts.

Here’s a sample.
Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. “We will use it.”

Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

John C. Garrett is a retired Army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.

In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for everybody.”

At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. “Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.

Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. “You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.

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The Pentagon’s regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to Ms. Clarke. The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.

Rather than complain about the “media filter,” each of these techniques simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the military analysts would in effect be “writing the op-ed” for the war.

From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.

“Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.

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From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

“Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. “You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, “psyops on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. “It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. “It’s more subtle.”

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

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At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke. “Let’s think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,” he wrote.

By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.

The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.

It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to “re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military analysts.

The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87 billion in emergency war financing.

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