Why Time's Tim Padgett doesn't get a free pass for the day

Here is how Time’s Latin America bureau chief Tim Padgett concludes his article “Why Latin America Bashes Bush” on Bush and Latin America today:

“For the resurgent governing Left in Latin America, however, the reality is that
the summit's goal of eliminating poverty by creating jobs can't be achieved
without a certain level of economic globalization, especially in the form of
prodigious U.S. investment. Before the gap between Latin America's rich and poor
can be narrowed, the gap between Washington and Latin America has to be bridged
as well.”

Here’s where Tim Padgett is wrong. His equation that achieving social goals like creating jobs that will keep people from starving to death is only possible through the globalization model of foreign investment of capital buys into the prevailing free-market dogmas that the new Latin Leftists themselves repudiate. And justifiably so. Padgett himself refers to the systemic critique, though apparently is not interested in delving into its rationale.

“Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and other Latin nations banded together to nudge
Washington's Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) proposal off the agenda. The move, which has angered the Bush Administration, reflects growing skepticism in Latin America over the virtues of free-market reforms, which many believe have
simply widened the chasm between rich and poor in a region that already displays
the world's worst disparities in wealth.”

Contrary to Padgett’s “the reality is…can’t be achieved” dogmatism, Chavez and other progressive leaders in the South have said wait, why not? Why can't we protect local economies from the neocolonial encroachments of global capital and still achieve prosperity for our citizens? Why can’t we have our own citizens steward, and profit from, the riches of their environment, rather than let foreign investors take control and plunder environments they have no local domestic interest in protecting for the long term? Etc.

In other words, contrary to the capitalist dogmatism of Padgett, which he imbibes as the common air of North American economic thinking, the debate over capitalism and socialism is not yet dead in Latin America. The U.S. is still riding a triumphalist airship of capitalist millenarianism after the fall of the USSR and Eastern Bloc, but it is not a ride that the billions around the world still living in under-a-dollar-a-day poverty conditions have the liberty to take. Nor are they willing to accept its lofty perspective of “development” so easily and on faith.

Why should they, anyway? It is not like the “skepticism…over the virtues of free-market reforms” are unwarranted. Christ-sakes, read John Perkin’s Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. There’s a book that will confirm every leftist liberal progressives worst-case-scenario suspicions about the deliberateness of the hostile US Govt-Corporate takeover of foreign countries in the name of exploitative, extractive, degradative—in other words unutterably heartless—“free market” capitalism.

Padgett’s conclusion is a non-conclusion and a non sequitur. It doesn’t even try to engage in the serious debates of political philosophy. It simply tries to put an end to a column of daily copy by spitting out the party line that his bosses and presumably dozing audience wants to hear.

Administration's Stories Don't Add Up

The Administration’s story about why they outed Valerie Plame makes no sense.

One strategy early on was to deny they even knew who Joseph Wilson was. Don’t know him. Who is he? I wouldn’t know if he even had a wife. etc etc.

Soon after, and side by side with this previous denial strategy, Cheney and the others started claiming that the real reason, now, that they started focusing on Joseph Wilson—who is he? we don’t know….—was to “set the record straight.”

On what exactly? Well, it seems the most publicly damaging piece of “misinformation” about Joseph Wilson’s trip to Niger to look into the uranium claims was…who sent him.

Wilson had said that the CIA sent him, after a request from the Vice President’s office for more information about the Niger uranium claims. He never said the Vice President sent him. The CIA sent him. And they did. No false information there.

But the new lie was that the Administration was not outing a CIA agent, they were merely “setting the record straight” that it was Joseph Wilson’s wife—who is, oh yes, a CIA agent—who arranged the trip for him.

Meanwhile, everybody in the Admin during the investigation was denying outright that anybody in the Admin actually leaked the identity to the press. Apparently everybody in the Admin just heard it from the press, who got their information who the hell knows where. “Joe Wilson’s wife works at the CIA? I’ll be darned. News to me.” This was Libby’s line and that’s why he’s on the hook for five felony counts and thirty years.

Their story is ludicrous and makes no sense for several reasons.

1) There was no mistaken information to “set straight” in the first place. Wilson’s public account of his trip was true. If his wife was involved in recommending her husband—well qualified for the trip, by the way—that is an additional detail that in no way contradicts the original version.

2) How does one both not know anything about a person or his wife, but also undertake to “set the record straight” about that person and his wife?

3) Why would Scott McClellan split hairs in public about how “setting the record straight” differs from leaking a CIA operatives identity for political revenge, if it were in fact true (as in Libby’s sworn testimony) that the Admin did not reveal Plame’s name at all, rather the Admin only heard of her to begin with from journalists?

One could go on. The stories we’ve been told don’t jibe together, they just don’t add up. Rather, there are two or three contradictory narratives being used simultaneously in an attempt to explain away what really happened.

“We don’t know Joe Wilson or his wife.”

“We only heard about them from the press.”

“We only wanted to ‘set the record straight.”

These stories don’t add up—except to lies, and the liars ought to be tried, convicted, and shunted out of office into dismal cellblocks.