American Foreign Policy Should Never Be For Sale To The Highest Bidder

I wanted to hurl when I saw that a member of Congress-- a Democratic member of Congress-- was able to corral enough freshmen Democrats (20) to help hard-core Republicans defeat a farm bill amendment offered by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY) that would have made it easier for U.S. farmers to sell agricultural goods to Cuba. In all, sixty-six Democrats voted against it. How did that happen? Glad you asked.

The defeat was engineered by an extremely corrupt tag-team, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a far right Cuban-American Republican congresswoman from Miami-Dade, and her BBF, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, one of the most corrupt Democrats in Congress, who took a great deal of money from right-wing sugar interests (which are against normalization of trade with sugar-producing Cuba for their own selfish reasons) and from an extremist anti-Castro PAC that normally only gives to Republicans. Ros-Lehtinen described Wasserman Schultz as "a tiger" in the battle against the amendment and she is generally blamed for its defeat. Wasserman Schultz has been building her power base inside the Democratic Party the old fashioned way-- she buys it. And she buys it by aggregating votes for special interests and directing tainted and very questionable PAC money to her colleagues, money from the US-Cuba Democracy PAC and money from her own extremely shady leadership PAC, the Democrats Win Seats PAC. Here's a list of the Democrats who crossed the aisle and voted against Rangel's amendment who were paid off by Wasserman Schultz. Next to their names is the amount of money she paid them; the second figure is the amount the US-Cuba Democracy PAC paid them. Many, though not all, are from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. The ones who aren't, are hanging out with a very bad bunch.

Jason Altmire (PA- $5,000/$8,000)
Mike Arcuri (NY- $2,000/$4,000)
John Barrow (GA- $4,000/$9,500)
Melissa Bean (IL- $5,000/$7,000)
Chris Carney (PA- $7,500/$7,000)
Joe Donnelly (IN- $5,000/$3,000)
Chet Edwards (TX- $2,000)
Brad Ellsworth (IN- $3,000/$3,000)
Gabby Giffords (AZ- $5,000/$5,000)
Kirsten Gillibrand (NY- $4,000/$8,000)
Phil Hare (IL- $1,000/$9,000)
Ron Klein (FL- $4,000/$10,000)
Tim Mahoney (FL- $7,500/$10,000)
Jim Marshall (GA- $1,000/$2,000)
Harry Mitchell (AZ- $4,000)
Patrick Murphy (PA- $4,000/$6,000)
Joe Sestak (PA- $2,000/$1,000)
Heath Shuler (NC- 5,000/$7,000)
Zach Space (OH- $2,000/$7,000)
Robert Wexler (FL- 2,000/$6,000)

[A side note here. Obviously this is a study of how Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her reactionary Big Money allies buy votes. Just to put it in some context, the US-Cuba Democracy PAC gives most of their bribes to Republicans. In fact, with the exception of Florida Democrats-- Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Ron Klein and Tim Mahoney-- and to Democratic Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (SC) and anti-Cuba fanatic Albio Sires (NJ), most of the really big money the PAC hands out has been to right-wing Republicans. In this batch, they also "donated" hefty $10,000 chunks to John Boehner (OH), John Cornyn (TX) and Mitch McConnell (KY).]

Perhaps you saw John McCain's Wall Street Journal editorial piece today-- written, no doubt, either by or with the guidance of Randy Scheunemann, McCain's chief foreign policy advisor who happens to know a lot about Georgia, being a very well-paid lobbyist for that country. (He says he "stopped" lobbying a couple of months ago when he came on board the Double Talk Express but a few days ago the government of Georgia-- which has been getting a great deal of taxpayer dollars lately-- sent the lobbying firm that Scheunemann owns another $600,000.) Anyway, the Journal OpEd by McCain and Scheunemann is called We Are All Georgians. I'm certain if we were all paid as handsomely as Scheunemann by the Georgians we'd feel as passionately as he and the rest of the McCain camp does. They call the dust-up in the Caucasus "stark international aggression," but today's Guardian expresses a very different point of view. Referring to McCain, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, Seumas Milne writes that the problem in Georgia has more to do with American expansionism on Russia's border than with Russian imperialism.

The outcome of six grim days of bloodshed in the Caucasus has triggered an outpouring of the most nauseating hypocrisy from western politicians and their captive media. As talking heads thundered against Russian imperialism and brutal disproportionality, US vice-president Dick Cheney, faithfully echoed by Gordon Brown and David Miliband, declared that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered." George Bush denounced Russia for having "invaded a sovereign neighbouring state" and threatening "a democratic government." Such an action, he insisted, "is unacceptable in the 21st century."

Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that in 2003 invaded and occupied-- along with Georgia, as luck would have it-- the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives?

...You'd be hard put to recall after all the fury over Russian aggression that it was actually Georgia that began the war last Thursday with an all-out attack on South Ossetia to "restore constitutional order"-- in other words, rule over an area it has never controlled since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor, amid the outrage at Russian bombardments, have there been much more than the briefest references to the atrocities committed by Georgian forces against citizens it claims as its own in South Ossetia's capital Tskhinvali. Several hundred civilians were killed there by Georgian troops last week, along with Russian soldiers operating under a 1990s peace agreement: "I saw a Georgian soldier throw a grenade into a basement full of women and children," one Tskhinvali resident, Saramat Tskhovredov, told reporters on Tuesday.

Might it be because Georgia is what Jim Murphy, Britain's minister for Europe, called a "small beautiful democracy." Well it's certainly small and beautiful, but both the current president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and his predecessor came to power in western-backed coups, the most recent prettified as a "Rose revolution." Saakashvili was then initially rubber-stamped into office with 96% of the vote before establishing what the International Crisis Group recently described as an "increasingly authoritarian" government, violently cracking down on opposition dissent and independent media last November. "Democratic" simply seems to mean "pro-western" in these cases.

The long-running dispute over South Ossetia - as well as Abkhazia, the other contested region of Georgia - is the inevitable consequence of the breakup of the Soviet Union. As in the case of Yugoslavia, minorities who were happy enough to live on either side of an internal boundary that made little difference to their lives feel quite differently when they find themselves on the wrong side of an international state border.

Such problems would be hard enough to settle through negotiation in any circumstances. But add in the tireless US promotion of Georgia as a pro-western, anti-Russian forward base in the region, its efforts to bring Georgia into Nato, the routing of a key Caspian oil pipeline through its territory aimed at weakening Russia's control of energy supplies, and the US-sponsored recognition of the independence of Kosovo-- whose status Russia had explicitly linked to that of South Ossetia and Abkhazia-- and conflict was only a matter of time.

The CIA has in fact been closely involved in Georgia since the Soviet collapse. But under the Bush administration, Georgia has become a fully fledged US satellite. Georgia's forces are armed and trained by the US and Israel. It has the third-largest military contingent in Iraq-- hence the US need to airlift 800 of them back to fight the Russians at the weekend. Saakashvili's links with the neoconservatives in Washington are particularly close: the lobbying firm headed by US Republican candidate John McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has been paid nearly $900,000 by the Georgian government since 2004.

But underlying the conflict of the past week has also been the Bush administration's wider, explicit determination to enforce US global hegemony and prevent any regional challenge, particularly from a resurgent Russia. That aim was first spelled out when Cheney was defense secretary under Bush's father, but its full impact has only been felt as Russia has begun to recover from the disintegration of the 1990s.

This morning's NY Times carries a story by Michael Cooper you are not likely to hear about on TV news, In Split Role, McCain Adviser Is Sometimes a Lobbyist. Yes-- Scheunemann, one of the true villains in this whole tragic episode, and one of the hundreds of corrupt lobbyists who infest the upper reaches of the McCain campaign. Right Web lays out his whole disgraceful history as one of the behind the scenes manipulators who tricked America into war with Iraq. A radical Neocon, he was the head of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (which included McCain and Lieberman as co-chairs) and the director for the Neocon mothership, Project for the New American Century. Today's Times story doesn't dwell on this but instead goes into the interesting relationship between McCain, jailed GOP rainmaker/lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Scheunemann. Keep in mind that McCain's "investigation" of Abramoff was a complete whitewash aimed at inoculating crooked Republican politicians who were taking bribes from Abramoff, like Conrad Burns (R-MT), David Diapers Vitter (R-LA), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Ted Stevens (R-AK), Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Gordon Smith (R-OR).

When Senator John McCain led a Senate investigation three years ago of Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist who later pleaded guilty to fraud charges, Mr. Abramoff’s old firm turned to a former McCain campaign adviser for help.

The firm, Greenberg Traurig, which had quickly cut its ties to Mr. Abramoff, hired Randy Scheunemann, who had been the McCain campaign’s foreign policy adviser in 2000-- and is again this year-- for advice on handling the Senate investigation.

“After Greenberg Traurig severed ties to Mr. Abramoff, Mr. Scheunemann advised the law firm on how best to cooperate with the Senate investigation,” said Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the McCain campaign. “The record reflects that the law firm cooperated.”

Mr. Rogers said he believed that Mr. Scheunemann was hired because he had worked in Congress for more than a decade and had experience with investigations, and not because of any ties he had to Mr. McCain. He added that Mr. Scheunemann had served the firm in an advisory role, and had never spoken with Mr. McCain about the issue.

Since the Russian invasion of Georgia, Mr. Scheunemann has drawn attention for his lobbying efforts on behalf of the Georgian government, for which he lobbied until March. Mr. McCain has been outspoken in his support of Georgia. During a flight on Tuesday on the McCain campaign plane, Mr. Scheunemann told reporters that Mr. McCain has known the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, for more than a decade.

Craig Holman, the governmental affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization, said Mr. Scheunemann’s dual role-- sometimes advising Mr. McCain as a candidate, and sometimes advising private clients on their interactions with him as a senator-- raised potential red flags. “This is a serious revolving door problem: a person who keeps fluctuating between being a lobbyist, and advising candidates,” Mr. Holman said.

...Last week, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition and an [unindicted] associate of Mr. Abramoff, had sent an e-mail message asking people to attend a fund-raiser for Mr. McCain next week. Mr. Abramoff had arranged for Mr. Reed to be paid several million dollars by Indian tribes that ran casinos to coordinate anti-gambling campaigns against competing casinos. McCain aides said Mr. Reed did not hold any position with the campaign and was not a host of the fund-raiser.

But it sure was... Christian of him to help McCain raise a bundle of dollars so he can continue running his full-time smear campaign against Barack Obama.

McCain's campaign is the most lobbyist driven campaign in the history of American politics. Everything is up for sale-- even foreign policy! Not even counting the money they get from foreign governments, McCain’s lobbyist bundlers, advisors and staff members have collected $930,949,819. That's a lot of money and people who pay it out expect something in return-- which is why Mikheil Saakashvili demanded that McCain go beyond just running his mouth and do something concrete to save his job.