Seven Years of the Condor

[ProSense]

Monday, June 11, 2007

Seven Years of the Condor

This picture always makes me want to cry.

Sometimes it does, like now.

The picture was taken in the Sudan in 1994 by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter. The subject in the foreground is of a famine-stricken toddler stopping to rest while painfully inching her way to a food relief station a full kilometer away. In the background… Well, we all know what that is and what it’s waiting for.

This picture won Carter his first and only Pulitzer Prize and he committed suicide months later. Maybe it was the guilt of not intervening to help her. Maybe it was the “necklacing” executions that he’d documented. Maybe it was everything.

Little did I know until I went to Randi Rhodes’ and Greg Palast’s websites that this picture would turn out to be figuratively as well as literally true. In today’s column, the invaluable and incomparable Palast, the patron saint of Everyman, was devoted to vulture funds. Here‘s Part One and Part Two of the podcasts.

If you haven’t heard of this story before or of vulture funds, here’s a basic overview: Vulture funds were set up by our government at around 2000 to assume the debt of poorer countries. They’re called vulture funds because they basically circle a corporation or nation on the ropes. Some time ago, some rapacious pieces of shit like Michael Sheehan and Paul Singer (more on them later) hit upon the ingenious idea to spend a few million buying up their debt then immediately calling in the note and asking for the full debt. So instead of the nation being allowed to pay back a fraction of their debt, they’re instead hauled into court and forced to pay the full amount (in Zambia’s case, $55,000,000) plus interest.

In one case, Paul Singer, owner of both George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani, earned $127,000,000 on a ten million dollar investment.

That’s right: Various people are using the government’s program for debt relief for the poorest nations on earth and are taking these same impoverished countries to court under threat of bankruptcy for no other reason than personal greed.

It appears that Giuliani’s flirtation with vulture funds began at least as far back as the fall of 2002 when he’d teamed up with vulture fund maven David Matlin to try to assume control of scandal-plagued WorldCom, the recipient of the most massive Chapter 11 ruling in the history of corporate bankruptcy. As a federal prosecutor, Giuliani made a living chasing around scumbags like Bernard Ebbers. One year removed from September 11th and he was busy chasing after their assets, instead.

That’s scummy enough. If a vulture like Giuliani wants to pick the bones of fat cat corporate crooks like Ebbers, fine. Who gives a flying fuck?

What ought to be distressing is that Giuliani, who’s no longer a federal prosecutor or big city mayor but a presidential candidate, is also accepting $15,000,000 in campaign contributions from none other than Paul Singer, another dirtbag who has made a killing off vulture funds that prey on poor nations struggling to obtain solvency. Singer, in fact, practically invented the vulture fund.

Singer, if you’ll do your homework, was George W. Bush’s single biggest campaign contributor in New York State in both 2000 and 2004 and, now that his usefulness as a roadblock to vulture fund reform is coming to an end, Singer has already bought off Giuliani. This is a story that, mind you, came out back in mid February but it has an interesting postscript:

Palast’s article from Monday the 11th mentions a meeting that Rep. John Conyers and Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ) had with George Bush just before he left for the G8 summit and urged him to look into vulture funds and how they’ll undermine the Group of 8’s efforts to end poverty and debt in Third World countries. Bush promised them he’d get right to work on it.

more

More: Testimony by Neil Watkins, National Coordinator, Jubilee USA Network, to the
House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health
May 22, 2007

"Rudy Giuliani may turn out to be the sleaziest presidential candidate ever"

[ProSense]

1. Kick! n/t

[Olney Blue]

2. Heartbreaking. Thanks for this post. K and R.

[blm]

3. Oh geez, ProSense.

You strike right at our heads and our hearts. This one is as tough as it gets.