Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday will launch a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain’s public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer.
Retaliating for what it calls McCain’s “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign is e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The overnight e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends.
The Obama campaign, including its surrogates appearing on radio and television, will argue that the deregulatory fervor that caused massive, cascading savings-and-loan collapses in the late ‘80s was pursued by McCain throughout his career, and helped cause the current credit crisis.
Obama-Biden communications director Dan Pfeiffer said: “While John McCain may want to turn the page on his erratic response to the current economic crisis, we think voters will find his involvement in a similar crisis to be particularly interesting. His involvement with Keating is a window into McCain’s economic past, present, and future.”
Obama’s offensive comes after McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, spent two days telling voters, donors and reporters that Obama showed poor judgment in his relationship with the former radical William Ayers.
McCain’s campaign has vowed to make a major issue of Obama’s Chicago relationships in coming days, with a senior McCain official telling Politico that they are “the vehicle that allows us to question Obama’s truthfulness about his past and his plans for the future.”
The McCain campaign also plans to invoke money launderer Tony Rezko. Officials say they will not bring up Obama’s former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, because McCain has forbade his campaign from using that as an attack. But the officials said outside groups supporting McCain might highlight Wright.
Responding to the Keating blast from the past, a Republican official said the Obama team seemed “frantic” at “the mere mention of the word ‘Ayers.'”
“The fact that the Obama team is recycling this old garbage 24 hours after Bill Ayers entered the race is a testament to how worried the Obama camp is of an unfettered airing of his associations,” the official said. “Obama is a clever enough politician to know that his unexplored relationships with terrorists and felons are a serious liability in a race this close.”
The Obama website says: “The current economic crisis demands that we understand John McCain’s attitudes about economic oversight and corporate influence in federal regulation. … The Keating scandal is eerily similar to today’s credit crisis, where a lack of regulation and cozy relationships between the financial industry and Congress has allowed banks to make risky loans and profit by bending the rules.”
In 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee cleared McCain of corruption charges but cited him for “poor judgment” in meeting with federal regulators on behalf of Charles H. Keating Jr., a political patron who went to prison for fraud in connection with the collapse of the California-based Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which at the time was one of the biggest financial failures in the nation’s history.
A trailer for the campaign-produced documentary features William K. Black, a former bank regulator who McCain met with in the Keating case, saying: “The Keating Five involved all the things that have brought the modern crisis. Senator McCain has not learned the lesson, and has continued to follow policies that are going to produce a disaster.”
The Obama website has news clips and a narrative explaining the scandal and McCain’s involvement for voters and reporters.
The Keating episode took a searing toll on the senator and his wife, Cindy. Robert Timberg, in his 1999 biography “John McCain: An American Odyssey,” wrote that the trouble began with the senator “carelessly choosing his friends.”
“McCain had stumbled into a scandal of immense proportions,” Timberg wrote. “Charles Keating, it turned out, had built his financial empire on the life savings of elderly retirees, men and women who watched helplessly as their dreams were snuffed out along with the assets of Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.
“The story was complicated, but the press found a tag line that simplified it. McCain and four other senators with ties to Keating were dubbed ‘the Keating Five.’ The label stuck, imputing to all the same degree of guilt even though it soon became evident that at least two, McCain and former astronaut John Glenn of Ohio, were far less culpable, if they were culpable at all.”
Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), a close Obama adviser who is the fourth-ranking House Democratic leader, brought up McCain’s association with Keating on CNN’s “Late Edition” on Sunday. “John McCain got admonished by the Senate Ethics Committee for that,” Emanuel said.
Years of conflict in Somalia have left large parts of the country in the hands of warlords while its capital, Mogadishu, is contested by Ethiopian TPLF-backed government forces and armed insurgents.
The city has been abandoned by at least half of its residents. The BBC’s World Affairs Correspondent, Mark Doyle, sent this report from a war zone few Western journalists dare to visit.
The bombed-out buildings are shocking enough.
There are street after ruined street of them in the centre of Mogadishu.
Some have been reduced by shellfire to rubble. Others retain a building-like shape – the rough skeletons of once-ornate Italian colonial apartment blocks or shopping arcades.
But the really eerie side to many parts of Mogadishu is the lack of people.
The last 18 months of fighting have seen the population plummet in a way that even the infamous Black Hawk Down year – 1993 – did not achieve.
According to the United Nations, at least half of Mogadishu’s population – perhaps 500,000 people – have fled.
In 1993 a joint United States/United Nations aid effort descended into war. Somali warlords resisted the international force partly because it reduced their racketeering of food aid.
The Americans then fell into the trap of thinking the flip flop-wearing “Skinnies”, as the Marines disparagingly called Somalis, would be a pushover.
However, the “Skinnies” could fight, and fight well. The US and the UN withdrew in disarray.
But even back then – when tracer fire lit up the sky every night – the streets were still full of people.
Not any more. Parts of Mogadishu are now a ghost city.
The new situation has an intensity of street shelling and military atrocities that even this veteran war city has never seen before.
The latest conflict is between a weak, though internationally-recognized Somali government, backed by troops from neighboring Ethiopia – and armed insurgents who are a mixture of Islamists and nationalists.
The United States is still a key player, backing the Ethiopians Woyane. It accuses the Islamists of having links to al-Qaeda.
“Its getting worse and worse,” said Sophia Hussein, a housewife turned refugee. “Now foreign governments are involved” – a reference to the Ethiopian Woyane presence.
Mrs Hussein was speaking in a Kenyan refugee camp, surrounded by nine children she had rescued from Mogadishu.
Grafted onto the traditional clan wars in Somalia are new disputes that pit Islamists and nationalists against the Ethiopians TPLF and their US allies.
These new wars may explain why Mogadishu has been emptied of people like never before.
The political landscape began changing in 2005 when armed Islamists joined forces with businessmen to oust a chaotic collection of warlords from Mogadishu.
By 2006 the Islamists/businessmen had won and a group known as the Union of Islamic Courts ran the capital.
“They were efficient; they ran the city quite well,” said a senior Somali official with an international aid agency who requested anonymity.
In late 2006, the army of neighbouring Ethiopia Dictator Meles Zenawi intervened to oust the Courts and install the internationally-recognised government in Mogadishu.
It is widely believed that the US encouraged or participated in this move because of fears that the Courts had links to al-Qaeda.
Certainly, there was a long-range US missile attack at the time on fleeing Courts officials. The US later mounted other attacks on what it said were al-Qaeda operatives, and American drones still regularly buzz the skies of Somalia.
The Ethiopian Woyane army easily routed the Courts regime. But, in an echo of the early US military success in Baghdad, the Ethiopians TPLF Donkeys then appeared unsure what to do next.
Gradually, the Islamists and nationalists regrouped.
There was a traditional clan aspect to the new war. But what might be called the “Islamist/nationalist clan” to some extent transcended this in the face of what many Somalis saw as “Ethiopian Woyane occupation”.
‘Indiscriminate reprisals’
Today the remnants of the Courts administration, backed by Islamist fighters known as al-Shabaab (Somali for “The Lads”), have made much of south and central Somalia a no-go area for the government and the Ethiopians TPLF.
Al-Shabaab and related fighters mount hit-and-run attacks aimed at government forces but which often also kill civilians.
However, a more common complaint among ordinary Somalis I spoke to is that the Ethiopians TPLF thugs are “indiscriminate” in their reprisals – and that this is why Mogadishu has been emptied of people.
Stuck in the middle, and trying to inject some sanity into the situation, is the small and beleaguered 2,700-strong African Union Dictators Union peacekeeping Mission in Somalia, Amisom.
Its commander is Ugandan Major General, Francis Okello.
“I need more troops, I need more equipment,” he said, repeating the common refrain of peacekeeping commanders.
But the diplomat-general was wise enough to add: “I also need more political support, I need more diplomatic support. You cannot impose a solution on Somalis, you can only encourage peace”.
Tentative peace talks are taking place under a UN initiative but – as so often with peace processes – the talks are dominated by the moderates, not the radicals on all sides who are fighting on the ground.
Maso Aliyi mourns his dead child, Shibre Aliyi, at his home in the village of Kararo in Ethiopia on Thursday. Shibre had spent almost a month at a therapeutic feeding center. A lack of rain in the main February to April wet season has left at least 75,000 Ethiopian children under age 5 at risk from malnutrition, according to the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which also asserts that some eight million people need urgent food relief and another 4.6 million need emergency assistance.
Ethiopia TPLF has downplayed a worsening food crisis to avoid tarnishing the country’s image as it celebrates its millennium, an international aid agency said on Friday.
The United Nations appealed last week for $460 million to feed an estimated 8 million people hit by drought and high food prices.
Concern Worldwide’s country director Aine Fay said the Ethiopian government Woyane had been in denial about the emergency in a year in which it wanted to attract investment.
Ethiopia, which squeezes 13 months into each year, entered the 21st century on Sept. 12, 2007.
Fay also blamed aid groups for not acting fast enough, even when they knew the rains had failed and cattle were getting thin.
“We were all at fault. We were slow on the uptake,” she said. “I think part of it … was the government’s TPLF’s reluctance to admit there was a food crisis of any sort and that was, and is, very tied up with the fact that it was the millennium.”
Concern is helping people in Amhara in the north and the SNNP region in the south of the country.
Fay said people were so desperate that a riot had broken out at one of the agency’s feeding centres, forcing staff to lock themselves inside. Families are selling crops before they are harvested and women are borrowing undernourished children to claim aid.
One major problem was that the government Woyane did not put out its usual appeal to beg its donors early in the year to replenish its food stocks, now at their lowest level ever, Fay added.
“There was a huge fear of negative (images) when they were looking for investment in this millennium year which is so special to Ethiopia TPLF. I just think they took it a step too far.
“Whether we like it or not, the West does equate Ethiopia with (hunger) and I suppose the government TPLF was trying desperately to change that.”
The association with poverty and hunger dates back to 1984 when a famine killed more than one million people.
Fay said the government Woyane did not consider it had an emergency on its hands, even though it announced last week that 6.4 million people needed food aid. Aid agencies estimate the figure to be closer to 8.2 million.
DESPERATE MEASURES
Concern said rising food and fuel prices had also seriously affected the government’s Woyane’s ability to respond, and aid agencies had failed to pick up on numerous warning signs.
“We will analyse it to death, I have no doubt,” Fay said. “We were aware that the rains had failed and in some cases that disease had hit the crops. There was no pasture, cattle were getting thinner and the price of cattle was dropping in the market so people could not sell … and still a lot of agencies missed the crisis in the early stages.
“We should have been responding in March and we did not actually respond until May and that two months would have made a huge difference particularly to very young children.”
She said people had nothing left and were resorting to desperate measures to feed their families.
“The politeness, the welcome, the hospitality the Ethiopians have – I don’t think I’ve ever seen it so undermined as in this particular crisis.
“We had a riot on our hands in one feeding centre which is almost unheard of. We’ve had families who are receiving food aid having their houses robbed at night for 8 kilos of flour – it’s really not in keeping with their culture.”
Fay said the practice of mothers borrowing other women’s malnourished children to claim aid was dangerous because Concern was also administering medication at feeding centres. Babies and children presented numerous times would end up receiving multiple doses of antibiotics and de-worming medicine.
“The issue is the drugs. We will have to explain that the dangers of (double-dosing) might outweigh the benefits of the extra food,” Fay said.
Concern is giving out packages of 8.3 kg of fortified flour and a litre of oil as supplementary food for malnourished children and pregnant mothers. But Fay said the rations were being used to feed families of five or six.
The seizure of a Ukrainian vessel with military shipment to the Kenyan army is the latest in a spike of attacks on shipping by pirates on the Somalia ocean front who since January have ransomed close to three dozens of ships.
The Gulf of Aden that sits strategically in the Arabian sea, sandwiched between Yemen and Somalia, is an important waterway and its strangling by insurgents will have international trade as the first culprit.
The lawlessness experienced in Somalia is part of the legacy of inaction and miscalculation in the horn by comity of states, in the belief that, rather than employ diplomatic means to a conflict that has ravaged for close to two decades now, military might is a cheaper option in eliminating the problem. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
With the lifting of the UN imposed embargo, the coast was clear for the Ethiopian troops TPLF with an implicit backing by Washington- to march into Mogadishu and dismantle the fleeting hold by Union of Islamic Courts (ICU) on southern Somalia that had returned a semblance of order: rival warlords had been banished, piracy at the Somalia coast was unheard of, and business was running in Somalia towns.
CIA’s folly of financing rival warlords against the radical ICU (with alleged links to al-Qaeda) to dislodge the ICU from power and the continued US air raids that have claimed more civilians lives than their targets in Somalia villages have served to violently radicalise Somalis against the US.
Had Washington empowered moderates across rival camps, while at the same time ratcheting up pressure on rogue sponsors of warlords and kept military strikes as the last resort, the ouster of radical ICU would not have had such naked outcomes.
Good campaign
The recent UN sponsored ‘Djibouti Agreement’ was a good campaign of rallying moderates to prevail upon their camps to lay down arms, but it did not achieve real success because it did not at the same time talk down the ‘real patrons’ of these militia groups who exercise real control and supply them.
The al-Shabaab (for youth in Arabic) have since the beginning of this year emerged as a potent force against the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and their Ethiopian Woyane backers in the Horn of Africa nation where the world has succeeded very much in looking the other way as Somalia disintegrates into total chaos.
Still, their blacklisting by the US State Department as a terrorist organisations has maddened them into an insurgency that can only be likened to Iraq.
Writing just before the ouster of ICU, John Prendergast and Thomas-Jensen of International Crisis Group warned the US of lionising military intervention over robust diplomacy and applying of pressure on the backers of ICU to stop supplying them with ammunition.
A recent International crisis Group report clearly pinpoints the consequence of that folly: ‘defence and intelligence operations intended to make the US more secure from the threat of terrorism may be increasing the threat of jihadist attacks on American interests.’
Their chickens have come home to roost. As they wrote, ‘the hyenas have closed in.’ Interested States; not less than 10 of them,, with Ethiopia Woyane and Eritrea at the head have been successful using Somalia as satellite State; pumping weaponry into their respective militia, to square out their grouses in Somalia soil further adding gasoline to the fires of an already worse situation.
This has further driven Somalia drown the drain, aggravating the fundamental problem of lack of a functional government hence creating a fertile ground for al-Qaeda cells to mobilise support and stage potential attacks on US interests. Piracy has primed on the Gulf of Aden due to this.
For security to prevail in Somalia, we have to develop Somalia. Elections slated for 2009 as per the 2004 agreement that established the TFG look improbable in the current environment.
The TFG alone has lost all muscle and credibility before their subjects. Legislators had long ago defected en masse and the TFG is regarded as alien itself as long as it continues to piggyback its power on the back of Ethiopians Woyane.
As a matter of urgency, international players must own the Somalia problem.
Democrat Barack Obama is building widening leads in battlegrounds Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, in new polls released Wednesday in the trio of states that could be the key to victory on November 4.
The surveys reveal new momentum for the Illinois senator against Republican John McCain, as the rivals dash back to Washington to vote on a 700 billion dollar Wall Street bailout package.
The Quinnipiac University polls suggest Obama won Friday’s presidential debate and that McCain’s vice presidential running mate Sarah Palin is suffering from sliding popularity, after a stunning initial impact on the race.
They also find that voters trust Obama more to handle the financial crisis rocking the US economy, and he seems to be convincing Americans he is ready to be president.
“It is difficult to find a modern competitive presidential race that has swung so dramatically, so quickly and so sharply this late in the campaign,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac polling institute.
The surveys show that in Pennsylvania, Obama leads McCain by a gaping 54 percent to 39 percent after the debate, compared to 49 percent to 43 percent before the debate.
He is up 51 percent to 43 percent in swing state Florida, compared to a 49 to 43 percent lead before Friday’s first of three high-stakes presidential debates.
And in Ohio, Obama is up eight points, 50 percent to 42 percent, after having led by 49 percent to 42 percent before the clash in Mississippi.
The trio of swing states — which have a history of going either Republican or Democrat and swinging presidential elections — are vital stepping stones to the White House.
Nationally, the Pew Research Center gave Obama a seven point lead Wednesday over McCain with 49 to 42 percent.
While a separate Washington Post/ABC national poll found Obama holds a slim lead around the country over McCain, drawing 50 percent support from likely voters against 46 percent for McCain.
With the economy the election’s dominant issue, Obama holds a large lead over McCain among the 51 percent of voters who prioritize economic issues, that survey found.
McCain, Obama and Democratic vice presidential pick Senator Joseph Biden are all due for an intriguing close encounter in the Senate when the vote on the bailout, originally rejected by the House of Representatives, goes ahead late Wednesday.
No candidate has won the presidency since 1960 without securing two of the three battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, amid repeated campaign visits from Obama and McCain five weeks from election day.
The surveys showed that more than 84 percent of voters in each state said the debate had not changed their mind — but by margins of 13 to 17 percent, they said Obama did a better job in the clash.
Crucially for the Illinois senator, 15 to 27 percent of prized independent voters in each state said he had won the debate against McCain.
“Senator John McCain has his work cut out for him if he is to win the presidency and there does not appear to be a role model for such a comeback in the last half century,” Brown said.
“Senator Obama clearly won the debate, voters say. Their opinion of Governor Sarah Palin has gone south and the Wall Street meltdown has been a dagger to McCain’s political heart,” he said.
Obama’s advance in Pennsylvania will hearten Democrats of the vote who fear that McCain and Palin could swing the state into their column on election day by wooing blue collar voters.
“Pennsylvania is back in its role as the most Democratic swing state in the 2008 election mainly because voters believe that Senator Obama will do a better job handling the economy,” said Clay Richards, also an assistant director of the Quinnipiac polling institute.
But with 34 days still to go any number of events could still rock the race, such as the impact of the economic crisis, hurricanes Ike and Gustav and the jobless figures on the campaign in recent weeks.
“If the next 34 is like the last 34, we’re in for quite a ride,” said NBC-Wall Street Journal co-pollster Neil Newhouse.
The Quinnipiac polls among likely voters in the three states were conducted in two groups, between September 22 and 26, and September 27 and 29. The maximum margin of error was 3.4 percent.
