Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in testimony to a House subcommittee warned that the United States risks losing influence to China because it is too slow to deliver aid to needy nations. Kudos to the Secretary for noticing the costs of America’s strategic distraction. The geo-political winner of Bush’s misbegotten adventures has been Beijing. While Bush preoccupied himself in search of weapons of mass destruction that he knew didn’t exist, China was been free to fill vacuums from Myanmar to Argentina and across the whole of Africa. In her testimony today, the Secretary cited a recent example where China swooped into Jamaica.

“They (Jamaica) have just signed a memorandum of understanding with China…and now they have got a government-to-government relationship with China,” Clinton said.
“We have to be sure we have in place the safeguards so that the money goes where we intend it to go,” Clinton told the subcommitee on foreign operations of the House Appropriations Committee.

She also urged Congress to move quickly to deliver aid for Mexico’s drug wars.

“It’s just too slow, and when I was in Mexico, that’s what I heard from both the president and the foreign secretary,” Clinton said, referring to talks with Felipe Calderon and Patricia Espinosa last month in Mexico City.

She said the United States, for example, has been slow to release the money needed for Blackhawk helicopters to fight the drug cartels.

“Let’s try to get to the bottom of this because you all do your work, you get it appropriated, I go around talking about what we need to do and it’s kind of hollow, and we’re losing ground,” Clinton said.

“And we’re seeing particularly China come in right behind us, because countries get tired of talking to our bureaucracy and decide they’re going to cut a deal with someone else.”

Furthermore the Republican mismanagement of the economy over the past 30 years has weaken our national security to such a point that China now fills a role that US and the West has historically filled. And yet incredulously the Republicans would have us believe that they are the party of national security. Jamaica approached China because the United States is preoccupied with its own financial problems, our legacy from the cut taxes and still spend GOP.

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Fernando Lugo made history last year when he was elected President of Paraguay leading a leftist alliance to unseat the long-ruling Colorado party. For Paraguay, it marked the first peaceful transition of power to the opposition in its history. Lugo’s election was significant in many ways. For starters, he joined the pink tide of leftist leaders governing across the continent. But what made him rather unique was his background. He was a bishop in the Catholic Church and an adherent of liberation theology. Indeed he is widely known and respected as the “bishop of the poor.” He is also a father to his flock literally.

The first allegation that he fathered a child out of wedlock was stunning if only in its details. The story broke two weeks ago when lawyers for Viviana Carrillo, 26, filed a paternity suit claiming he had fathered her child, Guillermo, two years ago. The former parishioner said the relationship started when she was just 16 seduced by the bishop’s “pretty words, his beautiful expressions”.  At the time that relationship began, Fernando Lugo was 47. To say the least it has caused a stir throughout Latin America and it has now led to the cancellation of a visit to Washington that was to begin tomorrow.

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Asking “wouldn’t it be wonderful if our city could feed itself?” Joe Leitch ponders everybody in Portland planting a chestnut tree. Pam Leitch relates how they both left the corporate world after reading the book “Your Money or Your Life”. As educators on sustainability and resource depletion, permaculture and social justice, they soon learned of Peak Oil. Pam initiated bringing a Peak Oil resolution to the Portland City Council, who passed it unanimously in 2006 and set up a citizen task force to make recommendations for city action. See a bit of the permaculture farm Pam and Joe are creating in residential Portland, cultivating fruit trees, vegetables and compost, rainwater catchment, and innovative neighborhood cooperation.

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In Ecuador a racist campaign advertisement has provoked outrage ahead of the country’s general election on Sunday.

Afro-Ecuadoreans who were targeted in the commercial, say racism and discrimination against them is nothing new.

Mariana Sanchez reports from Esmeraldas, home to Ecuador’s largest black community. In Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, African communities have long existed on the margin of their respective societies.

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