Well maybe at least the Obama campaign can console themselves that she won’t be voting for McCain either. Instead, Clinton Texas delegate Frances Morey of Austin simply plans on leaving the top spot unmarked.

From the Austin American-Statesman:

Frances Morey of Austin, a Clinton delegate to the party’s June state convention, noted that Obama lacks the 2,118 delegates needed to seal the nomination. (Projections put him over the threshold based on surveys of superdelegates — party dignitaries and members of Congress who don’t have to commit until the convention.)

“So why is he prancing around in Europe like he’s the president-elect?” Morey said this week. “I cannot vote for him. I cannot bring myself to vote for this poseur.”

Morey said she’ll likely skip the presidential election on her fall ballot.

She’s not the only Texas Democrat refusing to tow the party line.

Houston lawyer Abraham Levit described himself as a Clinton supporter who intends to vote for McCain unless the Arizona senator makes a foolish choice of a running mate.

“I just can’t see myself voting for Obama,” Levit said, listing as factors Obama’s relative inexperience, what Levit views as the “ruled-by-mob” style of the primary-night caucuses and news reports that the candidate has shifted to the right on some issues.

Still others remain on the fence.

Dallas lawyer Doug Haloftis and his partner, Realtor Trent Hagler, raised more than $500,000 for Clinton. They haven’t committed to Obama.

Haloftis said he told an Obama representative he’d be inclined to raise money if Obama chooses Clinton as his running mate.

“Obviously, my efforts would spring into action,” Haloftis said. “Until that (vice presidential) decision is made, it’s really hard to decide to get on board 100 percent.”

My hunch is that unless Obama goes into the Democratic convention trailing John McCain, Obama will not succumb to choosing Senator Clinton as his running mate. And even then, I tend to doubt that Senator Clinton is interested. She has certainly giving no indication that she is.

But don’t worry, Howard Dean insists that they will come around. Yeah, right. They might come around in 2012 if the Democrats revert to being the party that honours its working class roots. Otherwise, all options are on the table.

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Cuba today celebrated its Revolution. I remain cautiously optimistic that President Raul Castro will continue to open up Cuban society and while perhaps the pace of reforms remains slow in the eyes of some, it can not be denied that under Raul Cuba will enact far-reaching economic reforms. While his speech today in Havana did not point to any new reforms, I find the speech remarkable in its candid assessment of the world’s economic turmoil.

From the New York Times:

President Raúl Castro used a speech Saturday on the 55th anniversary of the beginning of the Cuban revolution not to unveil any new changes but to call on everyday Cubans to prepare for tough times in the days ahead.

Citing the global economic downturn and the rising cost of oil, Mr. Castro said Cuba and other countries in the developing world face severe challenges that would require belt-tightening and patience.

“We must bear in mind that we are living in the midst of a true world crisis which is not only economic but also related with climate change, the irrational use of energy and a great number of other problems,” he said.

There was speculation that Mr. Castro, who officially took over the presidency in February from Fidel Castro, his older brother, would use Cuba’s important July 26th holiday — which commemorates a failed raid on a military barracks here — to extend the rash of modest changes he had announced in recent months. But he seemed eager to dampen expectations.

“We are aware of the great number of problems waiting to be solved, most of which weigh heavily and directly on the population,” he said, adding later, “Regardless of our great wishes to solve every problem, we cannot spend in excess of what we have.”

Citing one bright spot, he said that tourism had grown 14.8 percent in the first half of this year compared with last year, with nearly 1.3 million people visiting the island.

And the president, a former defense minister, said the country was as prepared as ever for any invasion that might be planned by the United States.

“We shall continue paying special attention to defense, regardless of the results of the next presidential elections in the United States,” he said.

Mr. Castro used last year’s July 26th speech to acknowlege that wages were too low in the country and pledge reforms to energize the economy. In 2006, Fidel Castro gave the speech, which turned out to be his final address before he underwent emergency intestinal surgery, from which he has never completely recovered.

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It may yet be that Obama’s week long trip abroad may come back to haunt the Obama campaign. Not for it did but for what it didn’t do. On Thursday, Senator Obama canceled a scheduled visit to a US medical facility for injured troops. He went to the gym instead. Obama stated that he didn’t want to politicize a visit to the troops. Speaking in front of a massive crowd of foreigners is appropriate, visiting with injured troops inappropriate. It should be noted that Obama’s speech in Berlin cost $3.5 million USD, half of which will be paid by the city of Berlin. I am still not quite sure how it is appropriate that Obama host a campaign rally on foreign soil to a largely foreign audience and have a foreign entity pick up half of the tab.

On this side of the Atlantic, CNN picks up McCain’s attacks on Obama for skipping a visit with the troops:

Sen. John McCain’s campaign lashed out at Sen. Barack Obama on Saturday for canceling a visit to an American military base in Germany on Thursday.

“The most solemn duty of a commander in chief is to fulfill his responsibility to the men and women who serve this country in uniform,” retired Lt. Col. Joe Reypya, speaking on behalf of the McCain, said in a statement. “Barack Obama … broke that commitment, instead flitting from one European capital to the next.”

And in a McCain ad that began airing Saturday, Obama is chided for making “time to go to the gym” instead of visiting with wounded troops.

The ad is being televised in Colorado, Pennsylvania and the Washington area, according to The Associated Press.

The incident is representative of the delicacy with which the Obama campaign has attempted to navigate the Illinois senator’s entire journey abroad, at once staging elaborate photo-ops beamed back to the American media while at insisting that Obama’s trip is not a political one by definition.

Obama arrived back in the United States on Saturday night.

The presumptive Democratic nominee had planned on visiting a U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, housing American troops injured in Iraq.

The visit was expected to come after Obama’s speech in Berlin, Germany, but the campaign suddenly announced Thursday that the stop had been canceled, saying Obama had determined that it would be “inappropriate.”

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The McCain campaign today released its latest television ad entitled “Troops.” The ad highlights Barack Obama’s record of not calling a single oversight hearing on NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, not visiting in Iraq for over 900 days, not supporting our troops when he voted against critical funding in 2007 and not visiting our wounded troops in Germany when he made time to go to the gym but canceled trips to Ramstein and Landstuhl. The ad will air in 18 battleground states.

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An article in the New York Times points to Colombia’s continuing struggle to eradicate the cocaine trade and how that trade continues to offer the FARC and other subversive groups a life-line.

Along with Colombia’s successes in fighting leftist rebels this year, cities like Medellín have staged remarkable recoveries. And in the upscale districts of Bogotá, the capital, it is almost possible to forget that the country remains mired in a devilishly complex four-decade-old war.

But it is a different story in the mountains of the Nariño department. Here, and elsewhere in large parts of the countryside, the violence and fear remain unrelenting, underscoring the difficulty of ending a war fueled by a drug trade that is proving immune to American-financed efforts to stop it.

Soaring coca cultivation, forced disappearances, assassinations, the displacement of families and the planting of land mines stubbornly persist, the hallmarks of a backlands conflict that threatens to drag on for years, even without the once spectacular actions of guerrillas in Colombia’s large cities.

For those caught in the cross-fire, talk of a possible endgame for the war seems decidedly premature, even given the deaths this year of several top guerrilla leaders, the desertion of hundreds of rebels each month and the rescue of prized hostages like the former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.

“The armed groups are like malaria, evolving to resist eradication and killing with efficiency,” Antonio Navarro Wolff, governor of Nariño and a former guerrilla from the defunct M-19 group, said in an interview. “If anything, Nariño shows the guerrillas may have lost their chance for victory but not their ability to cause suffering.”

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Gerard Baker satirizes the Messiah in his column in the Times of London entitled He ventured forth to bring light to the world:

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”

In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.
And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth - for the first time - to bring the light unto all the world.

He travelled fleet of foot and light of camel, with a small retinue that consisted only of his loyal disciples from the tribe of the Media. He ventured first to the land of the Hindu Kush, where the

Taleban had harboured the viper of al-Qaeda in their bosom, raining terror on all the world.

And the Child spake and the tribes of Nato immediately loosed the Caveats that had previously bound them. And in the great battle that ensued the forces of the light were triumphant. For as long as the Child stood with his arms raised aloft, the enemy suffered great blows and the threat of terror was no more.

From there he went forth to Mesopotamia where he was received by the great ruler al-Maliki, and al-Maliki spake unto him and blessed his Sixteen Month Troop Withdrawal Plan even as the imperial warrior Petraeus tried to destroy it.

And lo, in Mesopotamia, a miracle occurred. Even though the Great Surge of Armour that the evil Bush had ordered had been a terrible mistake, a waste of vital military resources and doomed to end in disaster, the Child’s very presence suddenly brought forth a great victory for the forces of the light.

And the Persians, who saw all this and were greatly fearful, longed to speak with the Child and saw that the Child was the bringer of peace. At the mention of his name they quickly laid aside their intrigues and beat their uranium swords into civil nuclear energy ploughshares.

From there the Child went up to the city of Jerusalem, and entered through the gate seated on an ass. The crowds of network anchors who had followed him from afar cheered “Hosanna” and waved great palm fronds and strewed them at his feet.

In Jerusalem and in surrounding Palestine, the Child spake to the Hebrews and the Arabs, as the Scripture had foretold. And in an instant, the lion lay down with the lamb, and the Israelites and Ishmaelites ended their long enmity and lived for ever after in peace.

As word spread throughout the land about the Child’s wondrous works, peoples from all over flocked to hear him; Hittites and Abbasids; Obamacons and McCainiacs; Cameroonians and Blairites.

And they told of strange and wondrous things that greeted the news of the Child’s journey. Around the world, global temperatures began to decline, and the ocean levels fell and the great warming was over.

The Great Prophet Algore of Nobel and Oscar, who many had believed was the anointed one, smiled and told his followers that the Child was the one generations had been waiting for.

And there were other wonderful signs. In the city of the Street at the Wall, spreads on interbank interest rates dropped like manna from Heaven and rates on credit default swaps fell to the ground as dead birds from the almond tree, and the people who had lived in foreclosure were able to borrow again.

Black gold gushed from the ground at prices well below $140 per barrel. In hospitals across the land the sick were cured even though they were uninsured. And all because the Child had pronounced it.

And this is the testimony of one who speaks the truth and bears witness to the truth so that you might believe. And he knows it is the truth for he saw it all on CNN and the BBC and in the pages of The New York Times.

Then the Child ventured forth from Israel and Palestine and stepped onto the shores of the Old Continent. In the land of Queen Angela of Merkel, vast multitudes gathered to hear his voice, and he preached to them at length.

But when he had finished speaking his disciples told him the crowd was hungry, for they had had nothing to eat all the hours they had waited for him.

And so the Child told his disciples to fetch some food but all they had was five loaves and a couple of frankfurters. So he took the bread and the frankfurters and blessed them and told his disciples to feed the multitudes. And when all had eaten their fill, the scraps filled twelve baskets.

Thence he travelled west to Mount Sarkozy. Even the beauteous Princess Carla of the tribe of the Bruni was struck by awe and she was great in love with the Child, but he was tempted not.

On the Seventh Day he walked across the Channel of the Angles to the ancient land of the hooligans. There he was welcomed with open arms by the once great prophet Blair and his successor, Gordon the Leper, and his successor, David the Golden One.

And suddenly, with the men appeared the archangel Gabriel and the whole host of the heavenly choir, ranks of cherubim and seraphim, all praising God and singing: “Yes, We Can.”

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This week Al Jazeera’s Inside USA travels to Mexico to look at the the drug war going on there, and to examine how the United States is involved. The bodies are piling up - over 1800 killings so far this year alone.

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The above video attests to the brimming confidence of the Piasa, as people from Medellín are called. Only a Piasa could compare Paris and Rome to Medellín favourably, though Medellín does have the world’s largest collection of Boteros. Founded in 1616, Medellín is now a city of two million people nestled 5,000 feet (1,500m) above sea level in a valley in the Colombian Andes. The city in Colombia has always had a reputation for an industrious character. That perception was shattered in the 1980s with the rise of the Medellín drug cartel. The city became associated if not intimately intertwined with native son Pablo Escobar. Since the death of Escobar and the fall of the Medellín drug cartel, the city has transformed itself by tying itself to the world economy.

In 2002, Colombian textile exports to the US were at $740 million USD. Following the enactment of the US Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act in August of that year that allowed Colombian products to enter the US duty free, Colombian textiles exports to the US increased to $1.51 billion USD in 2006 and were growing at 7% clip annually. In 2006, the US represented 68% of Colombian textile exports. The current political environment in the US seems to be anti-free-trade and that has many industrialists, economists and everyday citizens worried if the US is going to step back from its gospel of liberalized trade regimes.

The Washington Post has a lengthy and largely positive article on Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city. The article with a video report focuses on the impact of globalization on Medellín. The video can be seen here: Globalization in Medellín. The article entitled Sustaining the Medellin Miracle–Colombia Struggles to Hold On To Gains From Globalization is below:

This labyrinthine metropolis transformed over the course of a decade from a battlefield of drug lords, paramilitaries and leftist guerrillas into one of the safest, most dynamic cities in Latin America. Visionary inner-city renewal projects and a push to take back the lawless hillside slums by force deserve credit, but many here hail an unsung hero in Medellin’s urban miracle — globalization.

Exports surged in the 1990s as the United States granted temporary trade preferences to Colombia, allowing many of its products to enter the world’s largest market duty-free. They really took off after 2002, when Washington expanded that agreement to include Colombia’s all-important textile sector. Humming assembly lines making Ralph Lauren socks and Levi’s jeans sprang up across this picturesque Andean valley, creating tens of thousands of jobs and turning Medellin into a model of the curative power of liberalized trade.

Yet the renaissance of a city best known outside Colombia for years as the base of Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel is entering a period of uncertainty that illustrates just how fragile such gains can be. The city’s export industry has begun to slip backward, officials here say. It happens as Colombia and many developing nations are struggling to maintain their edge in the increasingly competitive world of global trade.

Inside the three sprawling factories of Crystal, a major textile maker here, the workforce doubled to 11,000 between 2001 to 2006 as the company’s U.S. sales surged. But following several local apparel makers, it has eliminated hundreds of jobs as contracts have dried up over the past 18 months.

The weakening dollar, which has shed almost 40 percent of its value against the Colombian peso in two years, has made it even harder to compete with cheaper production costs in China, where officials in Beijing are managing the exchange rate, cushioning the dollar’s fall to help Chinese exporters. Since 2005, Colombia’s textile and apparel exports to the United States dived 30.8 percent while China’s soared by 44.3 percent.

Colombia is also up against a resurgent global backlash to free trade — including in the United States, the country that had spent the past two decades cajoling Latin America to open its markets. An election-year debate has politicians in Washington blaming globalization for the loss of U.S. jobs, holding up a vote in Congress on a free trade agreement with Colombia. That bill would make the current trade preferences permanent while allowing most U.S. products to enter Colombia duty-free.

Colombia remains a vocal proponent of free trade at a time when the loudest voices in the region are against it. In neighboring Venezuela, Colombia’s second-largest trading partner, President Hugo Chávez is shifting the country toward socialism, nationalizing industries and barring the doors to free trade. He has signaled Venezuela’s intent to pull out of a regional trading bloc that includes Colombia and has sharply reduced quotas on Colombian-made cars. In recent months, that decision has forced Sofasa, a leading automaker in Medellin, to reduce shifts and lay off 600 workers.

Companies say doubts about Colombia’s future trading relationship with the United States have been a factor in a recent flow of jobs from Medellin into Central America, where a bloc of nations sealed a free trade agreement with the United States in 2006.

“If my client is wondering if a pair of socks made in Medellin will make it to the U.S. duty-free this time next year, they will just go to Central America,” said Luis Fernando Restrepo Echavarría, Crystal’s president. “That’s exactly what they’re doing.”

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Here is the Saturday, July 26th, 2008 edition of what is making news around the world.

Preah Vihear Temple Dispute
In the capital cities of Thailand and Cambodia, the military standoff that has seen hundreds of troops line up along their border over the past two weeks is widely believed to threaten war. A report from the UK Guardian and video report from France 24:

Bangalore Bombings
Indian police have few leads into the bombings in quick succession across the south Indian IT city of Bangalore that killed two people and wounded at least six others on Friday. More from the Times of India.

OECD Report on Indonesia
Indonesia is one of five countries being considered for membership in the OECD. The Asia Sentinel reports on Indonesia’s unlikely quest to join the club of the world’s largest economies. A copy of the report can be obtained at OECD: Indonesia Economic Assessment. The other four countries being considered at South Africa, Brazil, India and China.

Serbian Envoys Return to EU Capitals that Recognized Kosovo
Deutsche Welle reports that the Serbian government has decided to return its envoys pulled out of European Union capitals that recognized Kosovo as an independent state earlier this year.

US Toughens Sanctions on Zimbabwe
President Bush expanded sanctions against Zimbabwe on Friday even as he held out the possibility of a reversal in American policy if negotiations now under way result “in a new government that reflects the will of the Zimbabwean people. More from the New York Times.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

Christian Chavagneux and Ronen Palan’s Les Paradis Fiscaux is a great (and mercifully short) introduction to tax heavens, banking secrecy and the offshore financial world. And it’s in French. For my non-French readers, not to worry, hopefully, my review will give enough substantial information… or, y’all could learn French! However, I have preserved what I think are the best quotes in the original language so as to preserve their value.

The book’s central thesis is that the development of offshore financial centers since the 1960s is an integral part of the dynamics of contemporary globalization, both in the financial and productive sectors. Tax heavens are now a pillar without which contemporary economic globalization could not function.

And surprisingly, they have not been studied to the extent that they should have been. For orthodox economic literature, tax heavens are a product of overtaxation in industrialized countries or a simple manifestation of informal economies. Both views are faulty according to Chavagneux and Palan.
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