Kazakh president holds fast as Arab revolutions topple others

By Kathy Lally, Wednesday, April 13, 11:25 PM

ASTANA, Kazakhstan — The tempests that have whirled through other authoritarian states dissipated well before reaching this Muslim country, where last week citizens effusively thanked their president for his 20 years in power by awarding him five more.

In January, when Tunisians forced their president of 23 years to flee, Kazakhs considered extending President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s term to 2020. Instead, they settled on having the presidential election more than a year early and last week gave the 70-year-old leader 95.5 percent of their vote.

“I think the president is going to run the country for 10 years more,” said Yermukhamet Yertysbayev, the president’s pugnacious political adviser, “and if someone in the West doesn’t like it, they’ll have to get used to it.”

Although the West criticizes human rights violations — international observers found fault with the election, and last week an annual State Department human rights report noted a long list of problems — Kazakhstan’s relative serenity in strategic Central Asia is appreciated. U.S. oil companies have invested billions here, and the U.S. government desires friendship, unwilling to cede influence to Russia and China, which loom large and near.

“Nazarbayev won’t leave until he dies,” said Serikbai Alibaev, a leader of a democratic opposition group that is not permitted to operate legally.

Nazarbayev has ruled since 1989, when Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union and he was its party secretary. He is the country’s only directly elected official. His domination has been so complete that no serious political competition has emerged and so adroit that much of the population reveres him.

“He’s more than the leader of our country,” said Erlan Karin, secretary of Nazarbayev’s Nur Otan party. “People see him as a symbol of Kazakhstan’s development, independence and success.”

Local officials, all appointed by Nazarbayev, compete to get out the vote and get it right. “Here, 99 percent voted for the president,” said a triumphant Turkbenuli Musabayev, mayor of the small, depressed southwestern town of Aralsk. “He has visited us, and people know he cares.”

Kazakhstan’s 16 million people live on a landscape the size of Western Europe. Corruption is high, but oil and gas reserves have helped Nazarbayev bring the per-capita gross domestic product from $700 in 1994 to $9,000 now. The country has five billionaires, according to Forbes, including a Nazarbayev daughter and son-in-law.

Reminiscent of Peter the Great in Russia, Nazarbayev built his own capital in Astana and ordered the government to move here from Almaty at the end of 1997. He presides from a marble, blue-domed presidential palace over a city of glass towers rising from the wind-swept steppe, where horses and camels graze. A large shopping mall, designed to evoke a nomad’s tent, has tier upon tier of stores and restaurants, with a swimming pool on top set off by sandy beaches, thatched umbrellas and tropical-shirt-clad servers. Visitors ascend the 340-foot Bayterek Tower in the center of the city to place their right hand on a gilded impression of Nazarbayev’s own hand.

“The regime is unchallenged,” said Grigory Golosov, a St. Petersburg political scientist. “Almost everything is closely controlled, so controlled that most people can’t even think of an alternative to Nazarbayev.”

A desire for stability

In the days before the election, Nazarbayev’s presence hovered over city avenues and small-town lanes, his billboards emblazoned with the message “We vote for the leader,” his face rising out of a gently curving blue horizon.

“This is the image of a person who solves the problems of the universe,” said Alexei Vlasov, a Moscow political scientist. “And that’s how people treat Nazarbayev.”

Vlasov, who is director of the Information and Analytical Center for Post-Soviet Studies, calls Nazarbayev a powerful, pragmatic and tactical politician. “He knows when to make decisions,” he said, and he has benefited from the Kazakh desire for stability.

Rather than envy the revolutions of the Arab world, people are grateful that they have avoided the turmoil besetting neighboring countries. Tajikistan endured a costly civil war, and Uzbekistan, where the president is as long-serving but far more ruthless, has suffered civil strife.

“Russia, the U.S. and China are interested in a stable Kazakhstan,” Vlasov said. “That is why during the last 10 to 15 years they have never played against Nazarbayev, and they have always recognized him as a legitimate leader despite the lack of freedom of the press and speech and suppression of the opposition.”

This does not sit so well with the opposition, which is largely excluded from the political process.

“Kazakhstan keeps promising to hold free and fair elections,” said Alibaev, head of the Astana branch of the unregistered National Social Democratic Party, “but it doesn’t happen. Why do the United States and Europe believe this propaganda? It seems Kazakhstan’s wealth makes the world ignore what they don’t want to see.”

Nazarbayev and his Nur Otan party deftly change the constitution to suit their needs. One amendment last year made him “Leader of the Nation,” giving him and his relatives lifelong immunity from prosecution and allowing him to make government decisions even after retirement.

“The constitution has been changed seven times,” Alibaev said, “the last time Feb. 2, when they changed it in a few minutes so they could move up the elections.”

Printers can’t keep up — an exasperated Alibaev has taken to updating his copy of the constitution by pasting in newspaper notices of the changes.

Golosov, project director at the Center for Democracy and Human Rights Helix in St. Petersburg, said Kazakhstan has adopted the Russian system of what he calls electoral authoritarianism.

Elections give the impression of democracy, he said, even as the authorities make it difficult for candidates to run and parties to organize. Parties must win at least 7 percent of the vote to enter parliament, and Nur Otan holds every single seat. Western leaders and investors, however, find the trappings of democracy comforting, he said.

“Nobody wants to have any dealings with a dictator,” Golosov wrote recently, “but an imperfect democrat is quite a different matter.”

Yertysbayev, the political adviser, is contemptuous of the opposition that the president has made so weak, saying its members are forever calling, asking for ministry or embassy jobs. “Politics is a fight for power,” he said. “In Georgia, they brought people to the square and grabbed it. Here, they ask for favors.”

Squabble they may, but Nazarbayev holds steady, balancing the political forces around him.

“During these 20 years they have recognized Nazarbayev as the moderator of political dialogue,” Vlasov said, “and those who did not want to accept that now live in London.”



lallyk@washpost.com

Global stillbirths: 2.6 million a year, overlooked and often preventable

Image via Wikipedia
By David Brown, Wednesday, April 13, 10:41 PM

About 2.6 million babies are born dead each year, a largely ignored and silently grieved loss of life, about half of which could be prevented.

That’s the conclusion of a huge project unveiled Wednesday to enumerate stillbirths country by country and propose ways to reduce them.

Today, there are more stillbirths each year than deaths from AIDS or malaria combined. The stillbirth rate in sub-Saharan Africa is 10 times that of the industrialized world and equivalent to what existed in the United States in 1900. In many places, stillbirths aren’t reported to health authorities or counted as deaths.

“Stillbirth is a big problem, and it hasn’t been on the global agenda before. We hear a lot about ‘overlooked problems,’ but this is genuinely one,” said Joy E. Lawn, a physician who works in Cape Town, South Africa, and helped lead the effort that produced eight papers published online by the Lancet, a European medical journal.

Historically, the medical community has viewed stillbirth deaths as both less tragic and less preventable than deaths of mothers or children.

“I think what we’ve ignored in that argument is what the families think. The families don’t discount those losses,” she said.

About 98 percent of stillbirths — most commonly defined as death in the final trimester of gestation — occur in the developing world. Ten countries account for two-thirds of them, and two-thirds occur in rural families.

The global rate is 19 deaths per 1,000 births. Finland and Singapore have the lowest stillbirth rates, two per 1,000. Pakistan and Nigeria have the highest, at 46 and 42 per 1,000. The United States ranks 17th out of 193 countries, with three per 1,000.

The list of problems that cause babies to die before taking their first breath is long. The most weighty are problems during delivery; infections in the womb; illnesses in the mother, such as hypertension and diabetes; inadequate growth of the fetus (usually because of problems with the placenta, which provides oxygen and nutrients); and genetic abnormalities.

In the last few years, maternal- and child-health issues have returned to global health’s center stage, dominated for the past decade by AIDS. The Obama administration’s six-year, $63 billion Global Health Initiative will spend about 15 percent of its money on efforts to save mothers and newborns, and for reproductive and family planning services — all of which will also help prevent stillbirths.

The stillbirth rate in the last 15 years, however, has fallen only about half as much as maternal and child death rates, suggesting to many experts it needs to be specifically targeted.

Simple efforts would prevent some stillbirths. Screening pregnant women for syphilis and treating them — recommended almost everywhere, but overlooked in many places — would prevent 136,000 stillbirths. Folic acid supplements before conception would prevent 27,000. Providing insecticide-treated mosquito nets to women in malaria-endemic areas would prevent 35,000.

What’s most needed, however, is a way to assure that a pregnant woman can get a Caesarean section if she needs one. Worldwide, about 45 percent of stillbirths occur during delivery.

The World Health Organization estimates that for optimal protection of mother and baby, about 15 percent of all deliveries should be by Caesarean. As the Caesarean rate falls below 10 percent, the stillbirth rate rises steadily. Malawi and Mozambique are addressing the need for more Caesareans by allowing some highly trained non-physicians, called surgical technicians, to do them.

“This has actually been successful, and other countries are looking at it as a possibility,” said Elizabeth Mason, director of maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health at the agency, based in Geneva.

The WHO estimates that 1.1 million stillbirths and 1.6 million deaths of women and newborns could be prevented if 10 steps to prevent stillbirths were added to five previously proposed ones. The latter include giving antibiotics after premature rupture of membranes and steroids to women in early labor to speed development of the fetal lungs. According to WHO calculations, that would add $2.32 to the cost of a pregnant woman’s care in the 68 countries where nearly all those deaths occur.

“If we put better quality in this time period, we get a triple benefit,” Mason said.

In the United States, the stillbirth rate is twice as high for black women as white women and is also higher in households with less income and education. Lowering the rate depends in large part on reducing risk factors in the mother, such as obesity, smoking and high blood pressure, said Wes Duke, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who helped write one of the Lancet papers.


browndm@washpost.com

‘Spillionaires’ are the new rich after BP oil spill payouts

Image by drp via Flickr
By Kim Barker | ProPublica, Wednesday, April 13, 6:29 PM

The oil spill that was once expected to bring economic ruin to the Gulf Coast appears to have delivered something entirely different: a gusher of money.

So many people cashed in that they earned nicknames: “spillionaires” or “BP rich.” Others hurt by the spill wound up getting comparatively little. Many people who got money deserved it. But in the end, BP’s attempt to make things right — spending more than $16 billion so far, mostly on damage claims and cleanup — created new divisions and even new wrongs.

Some of the inequities arose from the chaos that followed the April 20 spill. But in at least one corner of Louisiana, the dramatic differences can be traced in part to local powerbrokers.

To show how the money flowed, ProPublica interviewed people who worked on the spill and examined records for St. Bernard Parish, a coastal community about five miles southeast of downtown New Orleans.

Those documents show that companies with ties to parish insiders got lucrative contracts and then charged BP for every possible expense. The prime cleanup company submitted bills with little or no documentation. A subcontractor billed BP $15,400 per month to rent a generator that usually cost $1,500 a month. Another company charged BP more than a $1 million a month for land it had been renting for less than $1,700 a month. Assignments for individual fishermen also fell under the control of political leaders.

“This parish raped BP,” said Wayne Landry, chairman of the St. Bernard Parish Council, referring to the conduct of its political leadership. “At the end of the day, it really just frustrates me. I’m an elected official. I have guilt by association.”

The economic benefits rippled throughout the gulf. In the six months after the spill, sales tax receipts, a key measure of economic activity, rose significantly in eight of the 24 most affected communities from Louisiana to Florida. In only one community, in Mississippi, did receipts dip significantly.

Sales tax collections from Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish rose more than 71 percent. And St. Bernard had a bigger jump than anywhere. That parish collected almost $26.8 million in sales and lodging tax receipts in the six months after the spill, almost twice as much as over the same period in 2009. Flush with cash from cleanup and claims, many fishermen bought new boats and trucks. Sales at the nearest Chevrolet dealer rose 41 percent.

Parish president’s powers

Just days into the crisis, St. Bernard’s parish president, Craig Taffaro Jr., invoked a Louisiana law to declare a 30-day emergency and handle the crisis without most normal government checks and balances. He chose the prime contractor that supervised the cleanup. He and people close to him decided which fishermen would be hired to put out booms and search for oil.

In some ways, parish residents seemed to view the disaster and BP’s culpability as an opportunity to recover from earlier blows. St. Bernard bore the brunt of Hurricane Katrina, which flooded almost every home in August 2005. Population dropped almost in half, from about 67,000 in 2000 to 36,000 in 2010, largely because people didn’t go back after Katrina and the hurricanes that followed. Before the spill, the parish slashed its budget by 11 percent, cutting garbage collection, the fire department and mosquito control. There was just no money.

The spill changed that. Fishermen were paid to lay out protective booms to try to corral the oil. Contractors were hired to manage the cleanup and provide security. Claims money began flowing to people who said their lives had been upended by the crisis.

The St. Bernard government was among the first to benefit, snagging a $1 million check for oil-spill expenses. Parish employees went shopping for cameras, printers, a file cabinet, staplers and 712 shirts emblazoned with the parish name. Taffaro and other officials said the parish shouldn’t have had to spend its own resources to respond to the spill. The shirts were necessary to identify employees at the cleanup site, they said.

Some of the money also went to overtime pay for more than 40 parish employees, including three who claimed overtime for picking up dog food for the animal shelter. St. Bernard’s homeland security director, David Dysart, a salaried employee, got almost $23,000 for working 497 hours of overtime in less than seven weeks, a fact first reported by the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Dysart did not respond to a query about his overtime.

As the money flowed, complaints spread. Subcontractors said those at the top of the cleanup creamed off money, while those at the bottom earned much less for doing the actual work.

BP provided only limited information to ProPublica. The federal government ceded control of cleanup spending to BP, and the U.S. Coast Guard, the federal agency most involved with overseeing BP’s response, said BP was spending whatever was required to clean up the spill.

Taffaro and other St. Bernard officials refused to respond to public-records requests ProPublica began filing in November. When asked again last week why the parish hadn’t provided any records, Dysart said that he would be happy to help but that filling the request would take time and cost a lot of money.

“I’m in the process of really, truly trying to assist you,” said Dysart, who is also the parish’s interim chief administrative officer.

In response to questions submitted by ProPublica last month, Taffaro said through his spokeswoman that he can approve overtime for salaried employees in extenuating circumstances and that Dysart eventually decided to stop taking overtime. Taffaro said that paying overtime for picking up dog food was necessary because the spill had caused fishermen to abandon their dogs.

Politically connected firms

Many companies and people earning big money in St. Bernard Parish had connections to parish powerbrokers, according to court documents, parish records and interviews done by ProPublica.

BP based its cleanup operation in the parish on land leased by Amigo Enterprises, which had been paying less than $1,700 a month to the Arlene and Joseph Meraux Charitable Foundation, according to the nonprofit’s most recent tax returns. But Amigo billed BP more than $1.1 million a month, BP spokesman Joe Ellis said. One of Amigo’s owners was St. Bernard’s sheriff of 26 years, Jack Stephens, who was also on the Meraux Foundation board.

Anthony Fernandez Jr., Stephens’s cousin and manager of Amigo Enterprises, said BP’s figure of $1.1 million was too high, but he refused to provide the actual amount. Stephens didn’t return calls for comment.

BP had no comment on the allegations that it was overcharged.

The company that benefited most from BP’s checkbook was Loupe Construction, a small, family-owned business. On May 5, Taffaro chose Loupe to manage the cleanup in St. Bernard, a contract that would eventually be worth as much as $125 million. Until then, its main job in St. Bernard had been helping to rebuild levees.

Taffaro said he selected Loupe after asking for proposals from several companies. The decision didn’t sit well with everyone.

“That company had no particular expertise in oil mitigation — none,” said Landry, the parish council chairman. “But we’ve been kept in the dark on the entire operation. Pardon the pun, but we’ve been left out of the loop.”

Company owner Paul Loupe referred questions to his attorneys. One, Karl Dix, said the company was chosen because of its levee projects and heavy construction work and because it was available. “There was this urgent need to start work immediately to protect the coastline,” Dix said.

After Taffaro named Loupe as the lead contractor, there was a feeding frenzy to get hired by the company. People with little connection to commercial fishing used old boats or bought new ones and signed up to work. Companies from Washington State, Nevada and Mississippi came to town. Everyone wanted a piece, just as after Hurricane Katrina. Only this time, the federal government wasn’t footing the bill. A reviled corporation was, and the prices reflected that.

BP sent a letter to the company in late August stating that all of Loupe’s invoices lacked the proper documentation.

“There was a lot of gouging,” said David Northcutt, who worked for a Loupe subcontractor and has since sued for unpaid wages. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a lot of people.”

As the cleanup dragged on, Loupe faced a cash-flow problem. For help, Loupe turned to Park Investments, a local company that primarily develops shopping malls. Park Investments and its related companies had done business with plenty of parish officials, including Stephens, the sheriff.

Although a search of court records showed that Park Investments rarely made such loans, the company agreed to loan Loupe an unspecified amount of money, with BP payments as collateral.

Park Investments and companies run by its two top executives donate frequently to Taffaro and other politicians, both statewide and nationally.

Confusing claims process

By fall, the small amount of oil that had hit parish waters was mostly gone, and the fishermen were getting the bulk of their BP money through the claims process, not the cleanup. The $20 billion compensation fund that BP and the federal government set up in August would run for three years, pay people who could prove damages from the spill and in theory avoid costly court battles.

Kenneth Feinberg, who administers the fund, said his team was initially overwhelmed by the number of claims it received.

The system didn’t differentiate between fishermen who got cleanup jobs with BP and those who didn’t. The amount people received for their initial six-month emergency claims was based on the paperwork they submitted, not their actual losses.

One man who earned $67,000 in 2009, fishing crabs and hunting a swamp rat called nutria, got $100,000 for his six-month claim. That was on top of $90,000 for working on the cleanup and $20,000 he received in initial BP claims. In the eight months after the spill, he made $210,000, more than three times his 2009 income.

But Thomas Gonzales, who said he filed $90,000 in taxable income in 2009, received only $22,000 in his six-month payment. “They’re giving the money to the young generation,” said Gonzales, who is 73. “They figure I got one foot over the hole.”

Many fishermen fretted that businesses that had been hurt by the recession, not the spill, were getting BP money: hairdressers, waiters, restaurant owners.

Felesia Carter, a manager at St. Bernard’s only off-track betting parlor, said customers were gambling away claims money. Her business was so good, she said, that employees worked overtime.

“I don’t understand how BP is just giving its money out like this,” Carter said. “Give it to the people who deserve it.”

Kim Barker is a writer for ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit news organization that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. A longer version of this article appears on the organization’s Web site. ProPublica’s research director, Lisa Schwartz, and researchers Kitty Bennett, Sasha Chavkin and Liz Day contributed to this report. To see a ProPublica story and video about a gulf fisherman, go to propublica.org/delacroix.


health-science@washpost.com

Egypt ex-president Mubarak detained for investigation over killings of protesters, corruption

Image via Wikipedia

Cheney and Mubarak in 2007

By Associated Press, Wednesday, April 13, 8:50 AM

CAIRO — Ousted President Hosni Mubarak and his two sons were detained Wednesday for investigation of corruption, abuse of power and killings of protesters, bringing cheers of victory from activists who hoped it marked a turning point in Egypt’s turbulent transition to democracy.

The 82-year-old Mubarak was under detention in a hospital, a step prosecutors depicted as a precaution to monitor his health while under questioning.

His sons Gamal, once seen as Mubarak’s successor, and Alaa, a wealthy businessman, were jailed in Cairo’s Torah prison, where a string of former top regime figures — including Mubarak’s prime minister, ruling party chief and chief of staff — are already languishing, facing similar corruption investigations.

The detention of the man who ruled Egypt unquestioned for 29 years set a new landmark in the already unprecedented wave of upheaval shaking the Middle East. It was arguably the first time an authoritarian leader in the Arab world has been brought to justice by his own people, given that Saddam Hussein was toppled and later captured by American troops, who handed him over for trial and execution by Iraq’s new Shiite rulers.

Corruption had been rife under Mubarak’s regime. In a country where 40 percent of the population lives on $2 a day or less, many resented the business tycoon-politicians elevated to power by Gamal Mubarak and accused of looting the nation’s coffers to enrich themselves.

As Mubarak’s sons were driven away after being taken into custody in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, where the family has been living since Mubarak’s fall, protesters pelted the police van with water bottles, stones and their flip-flops in a sign of contempt.

The detention was a significant victory for Egypt’s protest movement, which has been in an increasingly tense tug-of-war with the country’s new military rulers over the shape of the post-Mubarak future.

Protesters have been pushing hard for the apparently reluctant military to prosecute Mubarak. Tens of thousands held the biggest rally in weeks last Friday in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square to demand his arrest, and some protesters accused the military of protecting the former president.

Activists were now watching whether the military leadership is willing to definitively bury the remnants of Mubarak’s authoritarian rule and open up a transition many accuse it of monopolizing.

“The generals don’t know how to absorb that there are two forces,” columnist and activist Wael Abdel-Fattah said, referring to the military and the “revolution” protesters. “They try to say you can rest now, we will do everything. They don’t want to admit that there is another force that also dictates its will.”

“The next steps are for sure more difficult, to build a democratic system: elections, free media, and cleansing the current institutions,” said Abdel-Fattah, a founder of a group pressing for transitional justice in Egypt.

Shady el-Ghazali, a member of the coalition of youth activists who organized the 18-day protest movement against Mubarak, called the detentions “a positive step forward, even if it was late in coming.”

“This is the beginning of the return of trust in the military, but it can only happen if more steps are taken,” he told The Associated Press. “We hope that the message has reached them and that they allow the people to participate in the decision-making.”

Relations have soured in recent weeks between protesters and the Armed Forces’ Supreme Council, the body of top generals that holds power. Activists complain the military has been acting in ways reminiscent of Mubarak’s regime, putting protesters in military prisons, where some were reportedly tortured, or on swift trial before military courts.

Many Egyptians said the generals were heavyhandedly dictating the course of Egypt’s transition and not doing enough to ensure the remnants of Mubarak’s regime don’t retain power and thwart hopes for real democracy. The tensions came to a peak on Saturday, when troops stormed Tahrir Square before dawn, killing at least one protester and arresting dozens of others.

Military generals defended their tactics, saying military courts and “deterrent” action was needed to protect the uprising and prevent the country from descending into chaos. But in a signal they feel the pressure, Maj. Gen. Mohammed al-Assar said this week, “People must be reassured that their demands will be met.”

After Mubarak’s detention, the youth coalition canceled a planned demonstration Friday to demand Mubarak’s prosecution. But el-Ghazali said the protests could resume if other demands are not met, including the release of jailed activists and the review of military convictions of protesters. The coalition called for the dissolving of the former ruling party and the sacking of Mubarak-appointed governors, university deans and local city councils, all seen as levers of his regime.

The very idea of Mubarak being in custody facing possible prosecution would have been unimaginable only four months earlier, when the longtime president’s regime seemed firmly entrenched.

Even after being forced from power, he seemed untouchable, living with his family at a palace in Sharm el-Sheikh, though they were barred from travel and their assets were frozen.

On Sunday, Mubarak issued a defiant prerecorded message — his first address since his ouster — denying the corruption allegations against him and his family and inviting investigators to check his assets.

Prosecutors immediately announced that they would question him. On Tuesday night, Mubarak was taken to a Sharm el-Sheikh hospital because of heart troubles, and prosecutors said they would question him there so his health could be monitored.

Hours later, the public prosecutor announced early Wednesday that Mubarak was ordered detained in the hospital for 15 days for investigation. Authorities said later they were discussing whether to move him to a military hospital in Cairo. Mubarak has a history of health problems and underwent gallbladder surgery in Germany last year.

In its announcement, posted on the social networking site Facebook, the prosecutor said Mubarak and his sons were being investigated for allegations of killings of protesters, corruption, squandering of public funds and abuse of authority for personal gain.

Hundreds were killed during the 18-day uprising against Mubarak, when police opened fire and cracked down on the crowds. Officials say 365 were killed, but the Front to Defend Egypt Protesters, a group that provides medical and legal assistance to the demonstrators, said 685 people had died as of March 7.

Later Wednesday, prosecutors announced a new arrest — that of former parliament speaker Fathi Surour, a prominent ruling party figure who led the legislature since 1991 until it was dissolved following Mubarak’s fall. He was ordered detained for 15 days for investigation on allegations of amassing wealth and misuse of power.

“It is great that there will be trials and that they reach to the president. It is a precedent that will change history: to have a president tried according to the law because his people revolted against him,” said Abdel-Fattah.

But “this is not the end of the revolution. The real aim is a democratic structure, based on justice. The trial in it is a symbolic step. It was the people who brought Mubarak to trial not the army.”

_____

Associated Press writer Maggie Michael in Cairo contributed to this report.

NPR’s Andy Carvin, tweeting the Middle East

Image via Wikipedia
By Paul Farhi, Tuesday, April 12, 7:24 PM

Hold on a second, says Andy Carvin mid-conversation, swiveling to his laptop. He taps away for a few seconds, as quiet as a squirrel. And then he’s back.

Carvin does this 20, 25, 30 times — it’s easy to lose count — an hour. It’s practically second nature now. Often, he doesn’t even interrupt what he’s saying; the typing and the talking happen simultaneously.

Carvin is tweeting, relentlessly. Seven days a week, often up to 16 hours a day. He once went 20 hours straight, pumping out more than 1,400 brief messages on his Twitter account, @acarvin. That’s his guess, at least. It’s easy to lose count.

Since December, Carvin, a social-media strategist at NPR in Washington, has become a one-man Twitter news bureau, chronicling fast-moving developments throughout the Middle East. By grabbing bits and pieces from Facebook, YouTube and the wider Internet and mixing them with a stunning array of eyewitness sources, Carvin has constructed a vivid and constantly evolving mosaic of the region’s convulsions.

At a given moment, Carvin may be tweeting links to fresh video from Libyan rebels, photos of street protests in Bahrain or the highlights of a NATO news conference. His followers, in turn, point him to more material — on-the-ground accounts of the government crackdown in Yemen, breaking reports from Tahrir Square, the latest from Jordan or Syria.

The result is a dizzying, nonstop ride across the geopolitical landscape, 140 characters at a time:

• March 31: “Extremely graphic video of a Libyan man with half his jaw blown off, giving a V for victory sign & trying to talk” [link to video].

• April 11: “Video appears to show victims of shootings in Baniyas, Syria. More cameras than there are corpses” [link to video].

• April 9: “At least 10 casualties from tonight’s assault in Sanaa. Can’t really tell who’s alive and who’s dead” [link to Yemeni photo on Facebook].

And so on, into the thousands. “Is this the world’s best Twitter account?” asked the Columbia Journalism Review about @acarvin last week.

Carvin’s high-beam focus on the region has attracted more than 43,000 followers, essentially the readership of a small newspaper. His flock has more than doubled since he started tweeting about the Middle East in December during the first stirrings of rebellion in Tunisia.

Among those following his prodigious output: Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, actress Morgan Fairchild and Chad Ochocinco, the Cincinnati Bengals’ oddball wide receiver.

“It was very clear to me in December that Tunisia would be a big deal,” says Carvin, a stocky 39-year-old who seems to be constantly clicking, tapping or typing, “but it never occurred to me that this could kick off something much, much bigger. My tweeting kind of revved up with it.”

There isn’t really a name for what Carvin does — tweet curator? social-media news aggregator? interactive digital journalist? — but that may be because this form of reporting is still being invented. By Carvin, among others.

“I see it as another flavor of journalism,” he says. “So I guess I’m another flavor of journalist.”

Carvin likens himself to a radio or TV anchor, introducing the experts, the pundits and reporters. The difference, he hastens to add, is that Anderson Cooper has to go to the scene of his stories — and eventually has to go to sleep.

Not Carvin, whose anchor chair goes where he does and whose metabolism seems permanently set on “Go!” Carvin spends his workdays at a bland cubicle at NPR’s headquarters, but his tweets come from wherever he is (his wife, Susanne, says his iPhone is “pretty much an extension of his palm at this point”). He live-tweeted the first attack on protesters in Bahrain while he waited in line at the men’s room in Zaytinya, the downtown D.C. restaurant. He sent updates while at a Duran Duran concert at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, and at a pirate-themed birthday party in Baltimore with his 4-year-old daughter in tow. He regularly tweets on the Metro during his commute to and from his home in Silver Spring.

It doesn’t seem at all surprising that he suffers from repetitive stress in his hands and wrists and wears a special pair of corrective gloves when he’s planted at his desk at work.

Oddly enough, the one place Carvin hasn’t tweeted about the Middle East is . . . the Middle East. Carvin has been to Tunisia, Egypt, Israel and several other countries in the region, but has not been back since 2005, a time before Twitter.

Even more oddly: Before the tweet gig came along, the closest Carvin came to professional journalism was co-producing a documentary with his wife about Thai kickboxing. He spent more than a decade after college as a Washington policy wonk, specializing in technology and educational issues for such outfits as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the nonprofit Benton Foundation, for whom Carvin headed a project exploring ways to close the “digital divide” affecting poor communities. In 2006, NPR hired him to help the organization’s journalists make use of new media such as Facebook and Twitter. Carvin started tweeting soon after Twitter launched in 2006, mostly as a way to stay abreast of the news and to keep in touch with friends.

Susanne Carvin, a former National Geographic researcher who raises the couple’s two young children, says she understands her husband’s dedication to the story and the nonstop nature of it. “A few years ago, he would have been glued to a desktop,” she says. “Now, since he can do it all on his [iPhone], he can go to the garden with us, be walking along, check in with his contacts overseas. . . . It has become so commonplace, and he does it so regularly that half the time I don’t even realize he’s online.”

The Carvins’ children, meanwhile, take daddy’s wired habits for granted; his daughter and son, who is 2 1 / 2, have accidentally tweeted when he’s left his laptop unattended. So have the family’s two cats.

Part of the attraction of social media, Carvin says, is how it can be used for crowd-sourcing, or tapping a group’s collective knowledge and experience. During the 2008 election, for example, Carvin marshaled his followers to fact-check the presidential debates and provide tips about polling-place irregularities.

The same technique helped Carvin get to the bottom of a story last month. When he heard from a follower that Arab news sources were reporting that Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi had attacked rebels with Israeli-made mortar rounds, Carvin thought the story sounded fishy. He found the reports had a superficial basis: The Facebook page of Al Manara, a Libyan expatriate news service based in the United Kingdom, showed a photo of a munition stamped with what appeared to be a Star of David topped with an odd multi-crescent shape.

“They ID it as Israeli,” Carvin tweeted. “Maybe, maybe not. Need help to ID it. Anyone?”

Within minutes, Carvin’s “tweeps” — his Twitter people — began piecing it together:

“81mm calibre — it’s not eastern. Probably British,” responded one follower.

Another found a photo of a British-made 81mm shell with the same markings. Still another noted that the star logo indicated that it was an illumination round and the crescent signified a parachute, which deploy on such rounds to slow their descent.

This was soon followed by links to photos of similar rounds manufactured in India and France. Another follower posted a page from a NATO weapons manual that instructed member countries to identify their shells with the star-and-crescent markings.

Carvin declared the story “debunked,” even as other news outlets, including Al Jazeera’s Arabic TV channel, continued to report the bogus link to Israel.

“In a lot of ways, this is traditional journalism,” says Mark Stencel, NPR’s managing editor for digital news. Except that Carvin “has just turned the newsgathering process inside out and made it public. He’s reporting in real time and you can see him do it. You can watch him work his sources and tell people what he’s following up on.”

Another benefit is the “social” part of social media — Carvin has developed hundreds of sources through the give-and-take of Twitter. One of his best sources about opposition activities in Yemen is a former Miss Universe Canada contestant, Maria Al-Masani, a member of a well-connected Yemeni family.

Carvin also befriended a Libyan named Mohammed Nabbous, a tech buff who had created a 24-hour live video stream to report on events there. While witnessing fighting near Benghazi last month, Nabbous was killed in the crossfire. Carvin lauded him on NPR as “a pioneer” of an independent Libyan press.

Despite the speed of delivery and breadth of material that Carvin musters every day, the form has its weaknesses. Carvin acknowledges that it’s difficult to know the full context of some of the information he transmits, such as the harrowing footage he linked to last week of a father encountering his dead and disfigured son in a hospital room. The video apparently was from Yemen, but much else — who shot it, under what circumstances and when — was hard to substantiate.

What’s more, Carvin doesn’t speak Arabic or Farsi, which means he must rely on his followers for translations. He’s also never met about two-thirds of the hundreds of sources he uses for tips and tweets.

Carvin candidly notes another potential pitfall: He’s far more likely to get information from rebels than from the regimes. “The majority of people online [in the Middle East] are young, better-educated and skew toward reform,” he notes.

All this makes some observers raise an eyebrow about Carvin’s work. “To have NPR appoint a senior strategist with full knowledge that they are publishing news or information based on tweets of unknown or unvetted sources is troubling,” says Adam Curry, a media critic and vet­eran technology blogger (and long-ago MTV veejay). “Who knows where some of this is coming from? I’m not saying Andy’s a bad guy or has an agenda. But I do think it’s worth asking what NPR thinks it’s doing.”

Actually, NPR thinks Carvin is creating something new. “What you’re witnessing is Andy’s effort to determine the veracity of what’s emerging,” says Kinsey Wilson, the head of NPR’s digital-media division. “It’s not positioned as the definitive sort of piece that you might hear on NPR. It’s a different form.”

In his defense, Carvin says he relies on sources who’ve proven to be reliable and drops those with dubious track records. He’s open about unconfirmed material, flagging some claims with a single skeptical word, such as “Source?” or “Evidence?”

Carvin’s followers also are quick to point out his misfires. When Carvin tweeted a link to what he thought was video of nurses ministering to a wounded girl, his followers jumped in. The girl wasn’t wounded, they told him, she was dead; the women were washing the girl’s body for burial according to Muslim custom. Carvin quickly corrected his tweet.

The key, he says, is disclosing what he doesn’t know and asking others to fill in the blanks.

“It’s a self-correcting mechanism,” he says. “I don’t want to think of myself as a wire service. It’s an open newsgathering operation.”

He pauses, just before plunging back into the Twittersphere once more. “A lot of the time,” he adds, “I’m raising more questions than I’m answering.”


farhip@washpost.com

Top White House aide delivers Obama letter to Saudi king

Image via Wikipedia
By Karen DeYoung, Tuesday, April 12, 9:35 PM

A top White House aide delivered a personal letter from President Obama to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah on Tuesday, as the administration moved to calm tensions between the two countries over how to respond to upheaval in the Arab world and deal with their mutual adversary in Iran.

The hastily arranged visit to the kingdom by national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon came less than a week after Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates made the same trip. While administration officials confirmed the delivery of Obama’s missive, they declined to specify its contents.

Neither government denies that there has been a divergence of views between the entrenched, conservative monarchy and the administration, which is struggling to balance its substantial interests and alliances in the region with its desire to see democratic reforms.

The stakes are high for both sides, perhaps higher for Obama.

Saudi Arabia, in addition to being the world’s largest oil exporter and the site of the Muslim world’s holiest sites, is the leading U.S. regional partner on counterterrorism matters. An extensive bilateral intelligence and law enforcement infrastructure has been established over the past decade. A pending $60 billion arms deal with the Saudis is the largest in U.S. history.

A senior Saudi official said the back-to-back U.S. trips were less “fence-mending” than consultations on “how do we move forward . . . given all the things that are happening, in ways that best protect our interests.”

While the administration sees democratic potential in the Arab spring, the Saudis are feeling an ominous chill from all points of the compass — Bahrain to the east, Yemen to the south, Egypt to the west and Iraq to the north. They have also seen signs of internal unrest, with minor Shiite demonstrations in the eastern part of the kingdom in recent weeks.

Saudi leaders were furious last month when the administration criticized their deployment of troops to Bahrain, the small island nation in the Persian Gulf whose Shiite majority has taken to the streets to demand more political representation from Sunni rulers. U.S. calls for political dialogue were interpreted as a naive response to what the Saudis see as a clear case of interference by Iran’s Shiite theocracy.

Bahrain is the “reddest of red lines” for the Saudis, said a member of the Majlis al-Shura, the consultative council that advises Abdullah on a range of foreign and domestic issues.

Beyond Bahrain, the Saudis were stunned at Obama’s rapid abandonment of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, a decades-long ally. They have been dismayed by what they see as Obama’s failure to seize the initiative in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. They also consider Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki little more than a stooge for Iranian interests, and were disappointed in the administration’s support for his second term in office against Saudi advice.

“I don’t want to pretend we haven’t had some differences,” said a senior U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the situation on the record. “There are some things we need to work on.”

While the administration shares the Saudi concern about Iranian expansionism, it also believes that the Saudis have developed a dangerous fixation on Iran’s role.

“It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” the administration official said. “If you see every Shiite as an Iranian agent, that could very well turn out eventually to be the case.”

Underlying the current tensions is Saudi Arabia’s long-standing concern that it “has been taken for granted by the United States,” said another member of the Shura, part of a group that visited Washington last week.

The Saudis consider themselves “the voice for moderation and stabilization in the Middle East,” he said, and resent the U.S. implication that the administration is more attuned to threats such as Iran, or that the Saudi monarchy needs to move toward its own reforms at a faster pace than it believes is wise or necessary.

Some foreign policy experts in this country agree that Obama needs to pay more attention to the relationship. The Saudi king needs to know “that the president will provide a secure safety net of support, rather than undermine him” in the event of trouble in the kingdom, Martin Indyk, the director of the Brookings Institution’s foreign policy program, wrote in The Washington Post early this week.

Saudi uncertainty was reflected in a visit to Pakistan last month by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the head of the Saudi National Security Council.

Until the mid-1990s, Pakistan maintained a division of troops in Saudi Arabia, and it has long been a recruiting ground for Persian Gulf security forces. Although Bandar made no official request, he was assured of help if needed, a senior Pakistani official said. “We hold the Saudis so close,” the official said, “we have to really help them if there is a need.”

But others are more dismissive of Saudi concerns. “Our friends are mad at us because we said Mubarak had to go,” Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said Tuesday at the U.S.-Islamic Forum, a conference in Washington jointly sponsored by Brookings and the government of Qatar. “We didn’t say that . . . the Egyptian people did,” Kerry said. “We acknowledged a reality.”

“For leaders worried about their regimes, royal families and governments,” Kerry said, “this is an opportunity to adjust to how they stay in power.”

deyoungk@washpost.com

Chinese editors, and a Web site, detail censors’ hidden hand

Image via Wikipedia
By Keith B. Richburg, Tuesday, April 12, 6:13 PM

BEIJING — When fears of radiation spreading from Japan prompted a rush on iodized salt in China, a weekly business newspaper posted the story on its Web site under the headline: “Panic buying in Guangdong, Shenzhen and Dongguan; iodized salt out of stock, nuclear panic in Japan spreads.”

Within minutes, government censors called the Economic Observer’s vice chief editor, Zhang Hong, “and asked us to delete that post immediately,” he said.

In a small act of defiance, Zhang left the story on the site, but he changed the second part of the headline to read: “Salt bureau said the stock is sufficient.”

That March 17 incident is just one example of the daily, even hourly, tussle between editors of China’s state-controlled media and the Communist government’s army of propaganda officials and censors who want to shape every aspect of what Chinese citizens read, see and think.

Normally, the government’s relentless effort to control information plays out behind the scenes. But an aggressive news Web site called China Digital Times, based out of Berkeley, Calif., and run by Xiao Qiang, a longtime human rights activist, has begun publicly exposing the practice by publishing the official weekly directives and guidelines to the print media from the government’s main censorship organs.

Moreover, several editors and journalists have begun pushing back. Spurred by the growing popular demand for more openness, and with the Internet and microblogs offering more unfettered information, they are testing the boundaries of what is permissible. Some editors and reporters, in interviews, spoke candidly, albeit cautiously, about how censorship works in practice, and the growing competing pressures they face between a public that wants the truth and the censors who want to manipulate it.

The main censorship organs are the Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department and the State Council Information Office, among others. Together, the various agencies involved in censorship are known derisively among Chinese journalists as the “Ministry of Truth,” a reference to George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” about a fictitious totalitarian state that controls the population by falsifying history.

Several editors and journalists who were contacted said that they had not seen the specific directives but that the guidelines described by the China Digital Times Web site closely followed what they have been told.

The list of do’s and don’ts opens a window on how the party and government pay close attention to even the most seemingly routine news stories and how they might affect Chinese opinion.

For example, when the Japanese earthquake struck last month, during China’s annual meeting of its two legislative bodies, the news media were instructed to give prominent coverage to the disaster and the role of the Chinese rescuers, but not to neglect the annual legislative forum.

“We must fully propagandize the state of the rescue work that our teams have initiated in Japan. We must closely follow the circumstances of Chinese people and overseas Chinese in Japan,” the March 13 directive read.

“Do not deliberately criticize or champion the actions of the Japanese government, and do not make any comparisons with anti-seismic and rescue efforts in our country,” the directive continued.

On March 4, a directive read: “Do not report on the incident of an exchange student in Norway injuring himself after parachuting from a tower at the Chinese Academy of Science.”

And on March 3 came the intriguing item: “All media are not to hype the salary increase given to the People’s Liberation Army.”

The case of China’s railways minister, Liu Zhijun, who was fired for corruption, has received widespread coverage here. But on March 4, the Propaganda Department sent the instruction: “All media are not to report or hype the news that Liu Zhijun had 18 mistresses.” (Several outlets had reported on the mistresses before the order).

A March 28 directive stated, “Do not report, repost stories, or comment on the execution of a drug trafficker from the Philippines.” And on March 29, when a story circulated online about a plan by Peking University to screen students for “radical thoughts,” the censors wrote, “All Web site authorities are requested to stop these discussions, and quickly water down this topic.”

Several editors and reporters in Beijing and Shanghai said the latest censorship instructions appear more detailed than usual, reflecting, they said, an official nervousness among the ruling elite that uprisings sweeping North Africa and the Middle East might reach China.

Another senior editor for a Beijing-based newspaper, who asked that he and his paper not be identified, agreed. “Overall, compared with last year, it is true the situation this year is very tight,” he said. “Part of the reason is the general international environment. And also next year is an important year for China, too.” Next year, China is due for a leadership change, with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao set to step down from their posts.

Most journalists said they had never actually seen the written directives from the censors. Those are normally passed on only to a newspaper or television station’s top editor, and the rest of the staff receives spoken instructions.

For newspapers, the top editors are routinely asked to attend meetings at the Propaganda Office, where they are given the latest guidelines. If they cannot attend the meeting, a propaganda official will call the editor.

For Web sites, with their faster-moving pace, the censors prefer to use a Chinese instant messaging system called RTX. And some editors said they might receive a simple e-mail with up-to-date instructions.

In both cases, one editor said, the message typically ends with the request: “Please delete.”

Some editors said they see their jobs as a tricky balancing act, between the demands of a public hungry for real news in a competitive market and the aggressive censors who want to control the flow of news.

Hu Xijin is chief editor of the Global Times, a tabloid-size daily in English and Chinese owned by the Communist Party. “I’ve been appointed by them — they can remove me. So they have influence on me,” he said of the paper’s owners. “And the market has some influence on me. I live between them. But the market has a bigger and bigger influence.”

“We’re not as free as the American media,” Hu said. “But we are becoming freer and freer every day.”


richburgk@washpost.com

Researchers Wang Juan in Shanghai and Liu Liu in Beijing contributed to this report.

U.N. report: Palestinian Authority ready for statehood

Image via Wikipedia
By Joel Greenberg, Tuesday, April 12, 7:05 PM

JERUSALEM — The Palestinian Authority is ready for statehood, according to six key criteria, although urgent action is needed to bolster its progress in state-building, the United Nations said Tuesday.

The declaration, contained in a report prepared for a meeting Wednesday in Brussels of donors to the authority, is an important boost to Palestinian efforts to obtain international recognition of a Palestinian state in September.

The U.N. study echoed findings by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, who in separate reports prepared for the donors conference said last week that the authority was well-positioned to run an independent state.

“In six areas where the U.N. is most engaged, governmental functions are now sufficient for a functioning government of a state,” said the report from the Office of the U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. It defined those areas as: governance, rule of law and human rights; livelihoods and productive sectors; education and culture; health; social protection; and infrastructure and water.

The Palestinian Authority has improved its ability to plan and budget effectively and has upheld transparency, media freedom and mitigation of corruption, while drafting laws to ensure compliance with international human rights norms, the report said.

The report noted improvements in security and the economy in the West Bank, with an estimated 8 percent growth in gross domestic product in 2010. It said that the area’s health-care system was well-developed and that government spending on social services had created a “comprehensive social safety net.”

But the report cautioned that the continuing Israeli occupation, the unresolved conflict with Israel and the persistent divide between the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and the West Bank means that “the institutional achievements of the Palestinian state-building agenda are approaching their limits within the political and physical space currently available.”

Robert Serry, the U.N. special coordinator for Mideast peace, said that “further steps on the ground” are urgently needed. Israel has to “roll back measures of occupation” to match Palestinian progress in state-building, he said, and stalled peace negotiations should resume “if the state-building and political tracks are to come together by September.”

Israeli-Palestinian talks were relaunched last September with the aim of reaching a framework agreement for a Palestinian state within a year. The talks later broke off in a dispute over continued Israeli settlement building in the West Bank.

In a government plan initiated in August 2009, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad set a two-year target date for Palestinian institutional readiness for statehood. In his report for Wednesday’s donors meeting, Fayyad asserts that the Palestinian Authority is now prepared “to assume all the responsibilities that will come with full sovereignty on the entire Palestinian occupied territory.”

Palestinian leaders say that if there is no progress in peace efforts, they will ask the U.N. General Assembly in September to grant membership to a Palestinian state whose territory would include all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has argued that unilateral moves cannot be a substitute for peace talks. “Palestinians seek to go to an international forum and avoid peace negotiations,” he told European Union diplomats Monday. “It pushes peace farther back.”


greenbergj@washpost.com

Adapting to campaign-finance rulings, Democrats build big-spending network

Image via Wikipedia
By Dan Eggen, Tuesday, April 12, 5:46 PM

The first sign that the ground had shifted in political fundraising came last year, when conservative groups quickly took advantage of new court rulings to dramatically outspend their liberal rivals.

Now comes the next tremor, as Democratic activists finalize plans for an entirely new political infrastructure in 2012. A network of liberal groups formed in recent weeks is poised to spend $200 million or more in support of President Obama and other Democrats, in large part by raising unlimited donations from wealthy donors.

The effort — spearheaded by a small group of longtime congressional and White House aides — represents Democrats’ response to the electoral drubbing of 2010, when a coterie of conservative and business groups did a far better job than their opponents of adapting to a new campaign finance landscape.

“Our mission is to ensure that when Democrats are attacked by these third-party groups, we are there to respond,” said former Al Gore aide Monica Dixon, the executive director of Majority PAC, a new group that will focus on helping Senate Democrats. “We did not do enough last year to support our candidates. . . . Nobody can sit on the sidelines this year. There’s too much at stake.”

The plans underscore the rapidly growing importance of political groups outside the party system, many of which are free to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money because of a landmark Supreme Court decision and other court rulings last year.

The rulings led to a new kind of political action committee, dubbed “super PACs,” which must disclose their donors to the Federal Election Commission but are not bound by the financial limits that apply to political campaigns. House and Senate candidates are also free to solicit donations on behalf of such groups as long as they do not coordinate with those groups on how the money is spent.

The new Democratic strategy centers on building a network of such groups focused separately on the presidential race, Senate contests and opposition research. Another piece of the puzzle is expected to fall into place this week with the formation of a group to aid Democratic candidates in the House.

The strategy poses a political problem for Obama and other Democrats, who railed against unfettered spending by outside interest groups last year but didn’t pass legislation to curb them. At least two of the new Democratic groups — Majority PAC and American Bridge 21st Century — will include a nonprofit arm that will not have to disclose donors to the public; another group that’s focused on the presidential race could follow the same path.

Chris Harris, a spokesman for American Bridge — which is building a “war room” concentrating on opposition research — compared the situation to a college football coach who still participates in bowl games despite favoring a playoff system.

“In 2010, we sort of sat on our hands in protest and got stomped,” Harris said. “We’ve got to get off the mat and fight back. We may not like the way the system is set up, but we have to work with the system we have.”

Last year, Democrats were particularly critical of American Crossroads, a conservative super PAC, and a nonprofit sister group called Crossroads GPS, which does not have to reveal its donors. The two organizations together raised $71 million from wealthy donors in 2010, and they plan to raise more than $120 million for the 2012 cycle.

“What we’re seeing is a brazen hypocrisy among the center-left and good-government types, who spent enormous amounts of time and resources criticizing” the fundraising tactics of conservative groups in 2010, said American Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio.

In many ways, the emerging Democratic strategy marks a reprise of the 2004 presidential contest, in which several big-money groups helped Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).

In 2008, Obama and his team shunned outside groups to consolidate control within the campaign, which raised a record $750 million. For 2012, however, adviser David Axelrod, campaign manager Jim Messina and others have signaled encouragement to independent groups while also setting their own aggressive fundraising benchmarks.

Democratic strategists say they are particularly worried about groups such as American Crossroads — which was formed with the help of GOP political guru Karl Rove — as well as spending by billionaires Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, who reportedly plan to raise more than $80 million for various conservative projects.

The Democratic-leaning groups announced so far have an assortment of anodyne names: House Majority PAC; Majority PAC, which will focus on the Senate; and American Bridge 21st Century, which had to lengthen its initial title to avoid being confused with a construction firm.

American Bridge was founded by David Brock, a conservative-turned-liberal activist who heads the Media Matters advocacy group. The group will concentrate on gathering and disseminating information about Republican opponents, with a “phase one” budget of about $10 million and room to grow much larger later on, sources said.

Majority PAC — which includes former aides to Gore, Kerry and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) — is aimed at closing the gap with conservative groups, which spent almost $50 million more on Senate races in 2010 than their liberal rivals did, according to FEC records.

A fourth major group, not yet named, is likely to be the most influential. Headed by former White House aides Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney, the organization will focus on aiding Obama in the presidential race and could include both a super PAC and a nonprofit akin to the American Crossroads model, strategists said. The group hopes to spend at least $100 million — and probably much more than that — in an attempt to keep up with conservative organizations, sources said.

Unlike in 2004, when outside groups ran most get-out-the-vote operations, Democrats say the Obama campaign will spend much of its money trying to reestablish the “ground game” that helped inspire historic turnouts among blacks and voters younger than 30 last time. Pro-Democratic labor unions are also expected to mount aggressive organizing efforts in states such as Wisconsin, where GOP governors have taken on public employees.

“The negative results in November were a pretty significant wake-up call,” said one top Democratic adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the effort. “Sometimes people respond better to a crisis than they do to an early warning system.”

eggend@washpost.com

Staff writers Perry Bacon Jr. and T.W. Farnam contributed to this report.

$4-a-gallon gas fueling fears for US economic recovery

Image by Getty Images via @daylife
By Michael A. Fletcher and Ylan Q. Mui, Tuesday, April 12, 9:12 PM

Gasoline prices are soaring toward $4 a gallon, a threshold that some analysts say will damage the fragile economic recovery and crimp consumer spending just as families are planning their summer vacations.

Higher prices saddle businesses with higher transportation costs, causing them to either swallow them or pass them along to already strapped customers. As gasoline costs go up, consumers are left with less money to spend elsewhere. And there is evidence that the hike at the pump is beginning to push drivers off the road.

Gasoline prices, which are approaching record levels, “are going to have a very profound effect on the economy,” said Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland.

D.C. resident Amber Sutton, who drives 25 miles each way to her job in Woodbridge, said rising gasoline prices have caused her to cut back on restaurants and other entertainment.

“I already was spending a ton on gas,” she said. “But now it’s absolutely ridiculous.”

The average price for a gallon of regular gasoline Monday was $3.79 — up more than a dime from the previous week and 93 cents from a year earlier, according the Energy Information Administration. In California, the average is now $4.16, and prices are above $4 a gallon at some stations in the District and elsewhere.

Prices have risen so high, so fast that some market analysts predicted a sell-off in the short term. That sentiment sent crude oil prices tumbling Tuesday for the second consecutive day, dragging stock markets down about 1 percent, as evidence grew that escalating prices are beginning to threaten the global economic recovery.

But Morici and other economists say the pullback may only provide temporary relief at the pump and that higher prices could be here to stay.

Gasoline prices peaked in July 2008, when a gallon of regular sold for an average of $4.11 nationally. Some analysts fear prices could again approach that level in the near future, since demand for gasoline generally rises in the warm-weather months.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans says higher prices could slow their spending in other areas in the months ahead, according to a Deloitte survey of consumers’ spending intentions.

“We have an au pair from France, and she recently filled up our minivan and gave me a bill for $70,” said Melanie Janin, a mother of three from Bethesda. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”

Already, motorists are cutting back on driving because of the increasing prices. “We are seeing some deterioration in U.S. motor gasoline demand . . . as pump prices near $3.75 a gallon,” which is when demand got soft in 2008, said David Greely, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. “As the market moves to higher prices, the likelihood that you’re going to weaken demand increases.”

Bill Simon, chief executive of Wal-Mart U.S., said recently that the retailer sees fewer customers when gas prices begin to rise, because its mammoth stores are typically farther away than local grocery and convenience stores.

But as the spike continues, customers begin consolidating shopping trips and are more likely to visit just Wal-Mart instead of a handful of smaller retailers, Simon said. “We know that gas prices are going to continue to challenge people.”

New reports from Goldman Sachs and the International Energy Agency were the triggers for Tuesday’s $3.67-a-barrel drop in the price on the New York Mercantile Exchange, where a barrel of the U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate closed at $106.25.

Oil prices above $100 will hurt the recovery, the IEA report said. “Economic impacts from high prices are never instantaneous, and often take months to materialize, but preliminary data for early 2011 already show signs of oil demand slowdown,” the IEA report said. “Unfortunately, the surest remedy for high prices may ultimately prove to be high prices themselves.”

Fears of continued Middle East unrest and the possibility that supply disruptions could spread beyond Libya have driven up the price of Brent crude, another key oil benchmark that is used by about two-thirds of the world, from $100 a barrel in mid-February to $125 a barrel last Friday, a level not seen since May of the record-setting 2008. Yet inventories and spare production capacity are bigger this year than they were then, Goldman noted.

Goldman Sachs analysts did not change their target prices, which are $105 a barrel for Brent much of this year with a rise to $120 a barrel by the end of 2012. Brent prices closed at $120.66 a barrel Tuesday, down $3.32, after reaching 21 / 2-year highs Monday.

Recent oil price hikes increasingly look like the result of speculation. Saudi oil ministry officials, worried that prices are so high that they might lower consumption, have contacted major oil companies offering additional supplies. But the firms responded that they have ample supplies.

“I think you are starting to see that the market might have overextended on prices,” said Frank A. Verrastro, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But even though crude prices are retreating, there is no telling how low they will go, or when the price decreases will show up at the pump, he said.


fletcherm@washpost.com


muiy@washpost.com