By Celia Canon- Talk Radio News Service

Human Rights Attorney Gonzalo Himiob Santome exposed Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s judicial corruption at a press conference at the National Press Club on Wednesday.

“Several cases… have proved that the judicial system in Venezuela has been deteriorating in order to be used as a weapon for persecution and intimidation of the opposition and the political dissidents,” Himiob said.

Himiob was in Washington D.C to introduce a book he and attorneys Robert Amsterdam and Antonio Rosich wrote that documents the case of Eligio Cedeno, a victim of repeated human rights violations by the Venezuelan government.

According to Himiob, “In common crime, from 306, 000 cases reviewed by the general attorney’s office on 2008, only 8000 cases were submitted to formal accusation. That led us to a conclusion that there is a 97% impunity rate of common crimes.” Himiob added that “If the judicial system is not working for persecuting the criminals, what are they doing?”

“In this case, it’s very clear that it doesn’t matter that they are guilty or not. The thing is [they] use the procedures themselves as a punishment… no matter if [the accused] are innocent or not. They are showing that they can submit you to a trial and they can hold you in prison without any respect to the regulations, internal and international regulations. just because they want to make you feel their power over you,” Himiob added.

By Michael Ruhl, University of New Mexico – Talk Radio News Service

Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.)
Photo by Michael Ruhl

In the next 5 years, the Pakistani infrastructure will be fortified by almost $10 billion American dollars, if Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) have anything to say about it. The aptly titled Kerry-Lugar Bill will provided money for rebuilding the lives of civilians in war torn Pakistan.

Both Kerry and Lugar said that most of the money that has been funneled into Pakistan in the past few years has gone towards security. The aim of this bill is to shift the balance, to place more of an emphasis on infrastructure.

The Senators want to use the money for building schools, improving health care, building bridges, water projects, and other elements of infrastructure. Kerry said that the target projects are “things that would improve life and give people a sense of progress” to civilians.

The money would also be used for ensuring an independent media, expanding human rights and the rule of law, expanding transparency in government, rooting out political corruption and countering the drug trade.

Additionally military funding would be conditioned upon several things, including Pakistani security forces preventing al Qaeda and Taliban forces from operating in Pakistan. The military forces would not be able to interfere in politics or in the judicial process, according to the provisions of the bill.

The legislation bill would give $1.5 billion each year from FY 2009-2013, and would recommend similar amounts of money over the subsequent five years. There would be required benchmarks to measuring how effective the funding is, and the President will have to submit semi-annual reports to Congress about progress made.

Freshman Congressman Tom Perriello (D-VA) explains how he believes that Congress is dedicated to ending corruption, and how the Clean Law for Earmark Accountability Reform marks a major move in the direction to stamp it out. He believes this issue transcends all political parties because it is an issue that casts a shadow over all representatives. (0:28)

 

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Representative Paul Hodes (D-N.H.) explains why he feels that the Clean Law for Earmark Accountability Reform Act is so important for Congress. He believes that it will help to restore Americans trust in their elected officials. (0:45)

 

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Jonathan Bronstein, Talk Radio News Service

Super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff has become the embodiment for all that is wrong and corrupt with American politics, and while what he did was illegal, another type of legal corruption has pervaded American politics–receiving campaign contributions from a company and then giving them preferential “earmark” legislation.

In an effort to stem any conflict of interest, Representatives Paul Hodes (D-N.H.), Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz) and Tom Perriello (D-VA) unveiled the Clean Law for Earmark Accountability Reform Act, CLEAR Act. This act would make it illegal for lawmakers to accept campaign contributions from companies and their top executives who have requested any earmarks.

“As lawmakers we are stewards of the public trust,” said Hodes “and we are in a period of time when it is important to rebuild the public’s trust in the government.” He continued on to say, “This law will help lawmakers avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

The CLEAR Act would mark a major reform in curbing earmark reform, as it will eliminate all possible ethical and legal dilemmas. Additionally, the Representatives hoped that this act would help to reinvigorate Americans confidence in their elected officials.

“We have tried very hard to break the link between lobbyists and a link between legislators,” said Giffords, as representatives can no longer take gifts, food, or ride in lobbyists private jets.

By Michael Ruhl, University of New Mexico – Talk Radio News Service

America must invest more time, money, and human resources to help those displaced by the ongoing Iraq War, according to human rights advocates from the Washington, D.C.-based Refugees International.

The presence of 2.6 million displaced Iraqis persons is overwhelming to neighboring Middle East countries and is “undermining” to the social fabric of Iraq, said Ken Bacon, President of Refugees International, at a speech made today at the National Press Club.

President Barack Obama talked about displacement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during his surprise visit to Iraq on Tuesday.

Bacon is happy at what is being seen as a distinct change from the “little attention” that the Bush Administration paid to Iraqi displacement.

It is estimated that since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, 2.6 million Iraqi’s have lost their homes and have fled other parts of the country. An additional 2 million have fled to neighboring countries, including Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

Bacon said that greater American and international support in receiving refugees and providing financial-aid can help stop the crisis.

Displacement of that many people “affects the whole region”, said Bacon, which results in educated citizens and specialized workers fleeing the country.

There are only 18,000 practicing doctors in Iraq, down from 32,000 doctors in 2002. There are more Iraqi doctors in Jordan than in Iraq’s capitol city of Baghdad, Bacon said.

Last year Democratic Senators Robert Casey (PA) and Benjamin Cardin (MD) introduced a bill to increase aid to Iraqi refugees and allow more of them to enter the United States. Since the FY2010 Budget has been approved by Congress, any appropriated funds to help Iraqi citizens would have to come through additional legislation, Bacon said.

A spokesman for Senator Cardin said it has not been decided yet if similar legislation would be introduced in this Congress.

Refugee International’s Field Report on the Iraqi refugee situation said that the Iraqi government is trying to keep more of its citizens from fleeing their homeland. It is feared by the Iraqi government that the existence of so many refugees tarnishes the image of overall security within the country.

The report also said Iraq violated international refugee laws in 2007 by asking Syria not to accept any more Iraqi refugees.

Many refugees have fears of returning home, the report says, because many of those that returned already have been killed.

Kristele Younes, an advocate with Refugees International, says that security is a major issue in Iraqi neighborhoods, with each little borough acting as its own walled off “fiefdom”.

Younes said that the United Nations is trying to place a tourniquet on the flow of persons out of the country by the end of the year, but significant challenges remain in Iraq, including budgetary shortcomings due to low oil prices, corruption within the government and sectarianism.

The Refugees International’s report on Iraq can be found here.

A Zogby poll sponsored by the organization Judicial Watch found that 81.7 percent of Americans believe that political corruption was a major factor that lead up to the current financial crises. According to Thomas Fitton, Judicial Watch’s President, the evidence suggests those 81.7 percent are correct.

“American’s seem to get what the problem is, but because ‘everyone’ is involved, you wont hear a peep about it from the city’s establishment,” said Fitton, speaking at a Judicial Watch panel discussion on the causes of the financial crisis.

“Arguably, the financial crisis is part of the biggest government corruption scandal in our nation’s history, and it doesn’t get much bigger than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac…the companies took care of both political parties.”

Editor of the Real Clear Markets website John Tamny said that deregulation was not the cause of the crisis, as some democratic leaders are suggesting.

“If you look at the biggest freeze so far in this mortgage meltdown, it’s been of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac If we ignore first of all the fact that both parties to varying degrees were literally horizontal in bed with these guys, the idea that they didn’t have oversight of their activities is laughable,” said Tamny.

Instead, Tamny attributes the origin of the crisis to the weak dollar.

“Real estate is very commodity like, and just how commodities always do well when the dollar is weak, so does real estate. And with housing making big gains upwards in nominal terms in recent years, Americans logically chased this performance and piled into the housing sector.”

This housing boom resulted in people purchasing risky mortgages under the belief that if they found out they could no longer afford it, they would be able to sell it easily in the empowered real estate market. Eventually, the housing market turned sour, and the housing investments followed.

Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute Alan Reynolds found blaming the recession that is taking place worldwide on U.S. housing to be a ‘bit of a stretch’, and claimed that a spike in oil prices had a role in the crisis, pointing to nine occurrences when oil prices tripled, only to be followed by periods of recession. Reynolds expressed skepticism to a government solution.

“Recessions happen. If energy prices get too high, they have to come down. If home prices get too high, they need to come down. If homebuilders build too many houses, they have to stop building for a while until they get the inventory down..if the governments really knew how to stop, prevent, alleviate recessions, why do we still have recessions?”
John Berlau, Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship said that the initial emphasis the government put on housing in the finance system was not as helpful as originally believed, and instead suggested that they should have focused on getting the poor to save and invest.

Berlau said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were essentially hybrids of government and private industry which had dangerous consequences.

“Fannie and Freddie were kind of the worst of both worlds. They could lobby like the private sector could do, but they were also built by congress and had built in government support where they had a 2 billion dollar line of credit…that made investors think, and it turned out rightly, that if anything happened they would be bailed out by the government.”

Author Peter Andreas sees the root of new Bosnian corruption in the little known role of a criminal economy in the Siege of Sarajevo. (0:45)

 

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“Based on the cases that I have personally investigated, I believe that at least $18 billion has been lost due to waste and corruption in Iraq, more than half of which is American tax payer money,” said Former Chief Investigator (Baghdad) of the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity Salam Adhoob during a hearing on corruption and waste in Iraq.

“Of this $18 I billion believe at least $4 billion has been lost due to corruption and criminal acts in the Ministry of Defense alone.”

Adhoob went on to explain the extent of the corruption in the al-Maliki government, citing instances in which senior members of the Ministry, including the Defense Minister and Defense Secretary General, would establish poorly funded front companies through relatives which they would then award billion dollar contracts. These deals apparently brought very few results

“The front company charged $4.5 million for helicopters that cost only $1.5 million dollars…the company never delivered the M-18 helicopters. Helicopters were not the only military equipment not delivered by these front companies. Despite having been paid in full the two companies delivered only a small percentage of weapons and other military equipment that had been ordered by the Ministry of Defense,” said Adhoob.

CPI investigators later found out that the front companies diverted a substantial amount of their profits to fund to al-Qaeda. Adhoob stated that nobody involved in the Defense Ministry has yet faced any legal consequences.

The committee also addressed accusations of corruption among U.S. officials and corporations.

“One of the biggest U.S. contractors, the Parsons Corporation, was paid $31 million to build an Iraqi prison in Diyala, Iraq. Iraqi contractors got paid an additional $9 million…the prison was supposed to house 3,600 inmates, but it was never finished, and today it sits abandoned,” said Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.)

An anonymous witness later stated that the Minister of Justice specifically told an U.S. government officials that the Iraqi government did not want this prison built since it was too close to the Iranian border. The U.S. ignored this request and contracted it anyways.

There is doubt over how corruption and waste will be confronted in the future. The current head of CPI announced that an amnesty law passed by the Iraqi Parliament will block the investigation of 700 cases of alleged corruption in Baghdad alone.

James Mattil, who had been Chief of Staff for the Office of Accountability and Transparency (OAT), says that OAT was set up to “provide assistance, training, and support to Iraq’s anti-corruption agencies.” He says that OAT was under-staffed and had no operating budget, and that whenever OAT tried to implement U.S. policy, “our own officials blocked us.” He says that “corruption and its consequences are the fuel that sustains the insurgency, providing the money, the people and the motivation to fight Americans in Iraq.” (0:56)

 

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