I think Hillary knows damn well the votes are there without her. Penn’s activities in no way upset her, in fact she may even be helping to push this thing forward behind the scenes. I don’t doubt it one bit, but one thing is clear, she supports it, her word to the contrary seem just lip service to me.

The Senate controls its own calendar. Tell me why it can’t just ignore these assaults on its calendar by a president who’s filled the moat and upped his drawbridge? Because McConnell will shut down actions and legislation the Dems do want? Someone please tell the Dems he’s doing that already. Thank you.

Bingo!

At least, that’s what I think. The whole set of announcements and statements from the Clinton campaign sounds like it could have been written by Penn, with maybe a little wordsmithing from the other campaign operatives.

It seems more like a reaction from Penn to disassociate himself and his business from Clinton’s platform, than vice versa.

.

This bothers me a lot because our PM did some public lobbying for Bush’s “free-trade” deal with Colombia last year, which I thought crossed a few lines of diplomatic propriety. Here’s a link, eg. That’s an interesting analysis of a Canadian Labour Congress report on a speech Harper gave to the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations last September:

“In my view, Colombia needs its democratic friends to lean forward and give them the chance at partnership and trade with North America. I am very concerned that some in the United States seem unwilling to do that. What message does that send to those who want to share in freedom and prosperity?” [My bold.]

If I were you — and especially if I were an American congresscrittur — I would be seriously annoyed at a foreign leader who dared to say such a thing. As it is, I am seriously annoyed for other reasons. But we certainly got some hemispheric trouble, I’d say.

Pre-Chavez, the efforts to do what we are working on now in Iraq, i.e., to seize control of the national asset from the people and transfer it into the hands of a compliant strongman who will insure that multinationals such as Exxon receive a large ownership piece of that asset – - those efforts had been pretty successful.

The Venezuelan people got not much, but had no access to courts and hearings to try to freeze control of their asset and prevent transfer of large amounts of that asset to the multinational. Then Chavez came around and he’s basically nuts and about as bad as Bush in a lot of ways, but he realized that an alternative way to get power is just to use that same government “format and fiction” that the multinationals had used to seize assets without paying the people of Venezuela a fair price, to seize back.

So when he started expropriating the interests of the multinationals and giving them a “take it or leave it” price, while at the same time Exxon was watching the Iraq transfer of large participation interests to the multinationals hit snags (not to worry, though, because in Iraq the famous oilman’s entreprenurial approach of using OPM and OPB, other people’s money and blood, to secure the asset was at least at work and Bush, Cheney and Rice were showing a devotion to continuing to squander American treasure and lives to get Exxon that participation interest), well, Exxon got pissed.

Now it might seem as if Exxon was basically going to court and saying – sure, no one made “us” pay fair value for what we took in Venezuela originaly, but now that Chavez has taken it back away from us, he should have to pay our version of value and btw, let’s freeze all of Venezuela’s assets so that they can’t buy food or get construction projects funded and see if that won’t help with a little “poplular uprising” efforts while we’re at it, but I’m sure that wouldn’t be a fair or charitable view.

In any event, per the Bloomberg story linked above and many others, despite the intial success in getting Venezuela’s assets frozen (remember, it’s those frozen Iraqi assets that we “unfroze” through some illegal mechanisms to give to Bremer and his CPA, with about 9 billion in cash being “lost” at some point thereafter – money that apparently no one has any duty to account for whatsoever), Exxon’s efforts started tanking in March.

A London court [March 18, 2008] dissolved an injunction freezing assets belonging to Petroleos de Venezuela SA, known as PDVSA, because the dispute wasn’t connected to the U.K.
…
Courts in the U.K., the U.S., the Netherlands and the Netherlands Antilles issued orders in December and January prohibiting PDVSA from shifting or liquidating assets such as bank accounts, refineries and storage terminals. Those measures forced PDVSA to postpone a $1 billion refinery refinancing and threatened to hamper plans to tap new fields to reverse a 34 percent slide in crude output since 1999
…
Judge Walker’s ruling also is a victory for Chavez amid food shortages and rising street crime that threaten the regime’s popularity eight months before state and municipal elections

Exxon has also been ordered to pay $767,000 to PDVSA in legal fees (joining Alabama USAtty Alice Martin who has cost the US taxpayer $500,000 in fees that will have to be paid to one of the victims of her political prosecutions) and PDVSA is also going to be seeking damages from the freeze.

But with the US actions, both on Iraq, Iranian and Venezuelan assets, you can see why the US is going to become a lesser and lesser favored haven. Just as the Bush SWIFT program has now pretty much driven SWIFT to need to relocate out of the US, US policies are going to inevitable foster withdrawals of capital and withdrawals of access to information, all at a time when we really can’t afford either.