Barrack Obama in Austin

I went to hear the golden boy speak yesterday--a year before the first primaries in the 2008 election cycle and Barrack Obama gathered more than 15,000 to his Austin rally. I think the fact that he was able to draw that many people speaks volumes about where we are right now as a nation--people are hungry for something different. The few people that I spoke to, mainly regular people rather than volunteers or people sporting Obama-wear, seemed to be more interested in checking him out than in immediately throwing their support his way. However, this was not a representative sample as Obama had hundreds of volunteers working the event and there were others who were obvious supporters. I spoke to one guy who had driven in from Kilgore and was talking about starting an Obama Organization and taking out ads in local papers.

The big question I had going in was whether or not he would live up to the hype and the question I had leaving was whether or not anyone could have lived up to the hype surrounding Obama. I thought his speech was rather pedestrian--a lot of the usual red meat for anti-war folks, he talked some about universal health care, but his unifying theme (slight pun) seemed to be drawing Americans together rather than driving them apart. His presentation was good, but certainly not the oration I expected. He missed his beats on several obvious applause lines and flubbed a number of words along the way--that's to be expected in any stump speech but hardly the soaring rhetoric I was expecting. He seemed to be at his best when talking about the Civil Rights movement and his words actually did border on "stirring." But then as he headed to the finish line and was trying to inspire the audience to action, his big call to all of us to support him and help bring America together, there was no heat, no urgency, no passion. Maybe he was tired from the travel and events of the past couple of weeks since he announced, but if yesterday represented his best effort, his skills as an orator will not be enough to win the primaries.

The substance of his speech was very general, as one would expect from a stump speech. He called for getting our troops out of Iraq in an orderly manner but didn't say how he would achieve this. He called for universal health care as necessary for a country that outspends every other nation in health care and yet leaves 46 million uninsured; again, he didn't say how he would get this done. Much of his speech was devoted to the Vision Thing--contrasting the numerous times in our nation's history where most people thought the status quo couldn't be changed and yet small numbers of people began the movements that brought fundamental change--The Revolution, slavery, women's suffrage, Civil Rights and so-forth. If he can get enough people on board believing that he is an instrument of change, one of the people in history who can translate what "should be" into what is, he may be our next president.

Obama did have one really good riff in a part where he was ripping on VP Cheney. The gist of the section was that we can't trust Cheney's judgment on what's going to happen--wrong on the war, wrong on the insurgency, wrong on being greeted as liberators, etc. Essentially, he's been wrong on every prediction he's made, why should we trust him that the "surge" is going to do the job or that Iran is such a mortal threat and he's definitely wrong in saying that Tony Blair's move to get 1600 British troops out of Southern Iraq is a good sign. It was a gray and drizzly day and Obama brought it home with, "Cheney probably would have forecast it was going to be sunny today." It was funny at the time.

Did he win me over? He gave me enough to consider him and even to consider volunteering for him in some capacity, but mainly he gave me enough to do some research on his positions and find out what the substance is behind his policy goals. It's far to early for me to be picking who I'm going to support but it's not too early to begin the process of looking people over. Vilsack of Iowa is already dropping out of the race, who knows if Biden and Richardson will have the staying power to make it through the first few primaries?

http://www.barackobama.com/

UN Oil for Food vs. US Iraq Reconstruction

I have always been a little bit curious about the way many Americans disparage the UN and look at it as a totally useless organization. One of their main targets has been the Oil for Food Program that ran in Iraq between 1995 and 2003, the program that allowed Iraq to sell a limited amount of its oil on the world market and in return receive humanitarian supplies (food/medicine) for its people. The most interesting thing about these criticisms is that a lot of them have been leveled at the same time as the gross malfeasance involved in the US Iraqi reconstruction effort. Let’s look at the two situations in context.

The Oil for Food program ran for eight years, a total of $64 billion in Iraqi oil was sold under its auspices and roughly $46 billion of this was used to provide humanitarian supplies for Iraq. Around $16 billion was used to pay reparations for Iraqi acts in their invasion of Kuwait and the rest of the money went to UN overhead (2.2%) and the cost of the UN weapons inspections in Iraq. Different investigations have claimed that Hussein was able to dupe the system through kickbacks and "surcharges" for somewhere between $1.5 billion (Volcker report), $1.8 billion (UN investigation result) and $4.4 billion (U.S.G.A.O. report). Additionally, Hussein was able to circumvent the system and sell more than $6 billion dollars worth of oil on the black market. That’s a lot of money and the kickbacks and other devices used by Hussein were made possible because of the lax oversight by the UN (and there was apparently fraud by some of the UN managers as well). According to the UN report, a total of over 2,200 different companies, including corporations in the US, France, Germany and Russia paid the kickbacks to Hussein.

The malfeasance in the US reconstruction of Iraq is still clouded by the fog of war and incompetent book-keeping, but it is already becoming clear that much of the aid to Iraq has been thrown away with little to no oversight. In recent testimony, members of the Bush administration told lawmakers that up to $3 billion of the $22-25 billion earmarked for Iraqi reconstruction has been lost through fraud and abuse by private contractors (as reported on Voice of America). I want it to be clear that I’m using this number as the best one I could find—much of the investigations are ongoing and due to the nature of the spending (“bricks” of $100 bills being passed out to contractors for security at the Baghdad airport, for instance) an exact accounting of the waste will probably never be known. But even compared to the highest figure for Hussein’s abuses under Oil for Food ($4.4 billion out of $64 billion), the fraud in Iraq is much, much worse.

As a percentage of the Oil for Food program, 5/64ths (using the highest figure, rounding up and in billions) of the funds were fraudulently obtained by Hussein, or somwehere under 10% (again, rounding up liberally). If the lower Volcker figure of $1.5 billion is used, the waste is in the 3% range. In the US program in Iraq, if we take the $3 billion dollar figure and generously accept that $25 billion has been spent, then the fraud in Iraq has been around 3/25’s of the amount spent, or somewhere over 12%. And that doesn't even include the fact that anywhere between 12-40% of reconstruction costs were security--money that does no reconstruction at all!

So where is the outcry from the right? As I mentioned before, many Americans dislike the UN but the most vocal critics come from the Heritage Foundation and other right-leaning organizations that have pounded the UN for its mismanagement and fraud in various programs. And yet there is little to no demand from these organizations for more oversight and more investigations of the more substantial graft and corruption in US programs in Iraq. I’m not saying that the UN is blameless—it’s obvious from the above that some of the people running the program were involved in fraud and many were just negligent in their oversight of the oil for food program. But for those who crow about the efficiencies of the marketplace and the superiority of private corporations over the public sector, I think this is a pretty clear showing that even a UN program riddled with fraud can outperform US corporations in Iraqi reconstruction and aid.