Schedule the IMF riot for April

David Jolly and Catherine Rampell

The gold-plated credit rating of the United States — an article of faith across America and, indeed, around the world — may be at risk in coming years as the nation copes with its growing debts.

That sobering assessment, issued Monday by Moody’s Investors Service, provided a reminder that even Aaa-rated United States Treasury bonds, supposedly the safest of safe investments, could be downgraded one day if Washington failed to manage the federal debt.

This threat to downgrade US debt, which would cause rising interest rates and a drop in growth, comes because of the reckless, unproductive tax cuts now being passed even by people we think of as progressive, like Al Franken.

The threat of a drop in ratings will next “force” Obama to accept cuts in social services that benefit the middle class and poor. Schedule the IMF riot for April.

More #Cablegate idiocy: Nicaragua

I was searching the cables using the nifty search engine here (nothing equivalent has been available from The Times or the Guardian) and stumbled across a cable similar to the Ford cable in its crudeness and historical illiteracy. Here’s an excerpt. See if you can figure out what’s missing:

This is the second in a series of three cables summarizing the crimes and abuses of power committed by Nicaragua’s corrupt party bosses and their associates. The first cable focused on Daniel Ortega and his family, while this one centers on the abuses of the Sandinistas more broadly, both when they were in power during the 1980s and subsequently. …

THE RECORD OF THE 1980S FLSN REGIME AND SUBSEQUENT SANDINISTA ABUSES OF POWER
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Rampant FSLN Human Rights Abuses, including Torture, Disappearances, and Murder
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¶2. (U) The FSLN regime declared a permanent “state of emergency” and interned and tortured thousands of people at prisons and camps scattered all over Nicaragua. The Sandinista State Security Directorate operated a network of special prisons where those held had no legal rights or protections whatsoever. In the mid-1980s, the regime had over 6500 political prisoners, the largest number in the entire hemisphere.

¶3. (U) Many prisoners were held for up to two years without ever being charged or facing a judge. The largest torture camp for political prisoners was in what is now the free trade zone near Managua’s airport. The regime also ordered numerous murders and disappearances, including the killings of hundreds of Miskitos on the Atlantic coast and the internment of thousands more in concentration camps in 1981 and 1982. These crimes against humanity were ordered by Daniel Ortega, Humberto Ortega, Tomas Borge, Lenin Cerna, and Omar Cabezas, among others.

¶4. (SBU) Sources: Sandinista declarations on the “state of emergency” and their incarcerations of political prisoners are a matter of public record; the CPDH human rights organization also has tens of thousands of complaints of 1980s rights abuses and on the imprisonment of political prisoners….

FSLN Wrecks Economy and Sets it back 50 years
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¶5. (U) By the 1970s, Nicaragua had developed one of the most advanced economies in Central America, with so many jobs being created that workers from other Central American countries came to Nicaragua seeking employment. Nicaragua was known as the bread basket of the region. When the FSLN came to power in 1979 and began confiscating property (over 170,000 total properties), driving out investors, and setting up a state-run soviet-style economy, it destroyed all the progress that had been made, setting the national economy
back at least fifty years

It continues with unsubstantiated attacks on the Sandinistas similar to what appeared in Ford’s cable about Zelaya. Is there any validity to them? If they’re based in the same sort of fairness that produced the rest of the cable, probably not.

In that regard, you might have noticed a few things missing. The earthquake that leveled Managua in 1972 and from which Nicaragua has never really recovered. The dictatorship of Anastosia Somoza. The civil war that led to Somoza’s departure. The Contra War waged against Nicaragua by the United States, with thousands murdered, tortured, etc. The mining of Corinto, which led to the condemnation for war crimes by the world of the United States, not the Sandinistas. The 16 years post-Sandinista in which Nicaragua could have recovered if the sole problem had been the Sandinista. Hurricane Mitch. The extensive corruption of non-Sandinista political leaders. The fact that the voters returned Sandinista Daniel Ortega to power in 2006.

One need not be a fan of Daniel Ortega or the Sandinistas to recognize that this “report” is propaganda of a particularly crude and historically ignorant kind. This is your State Department: stupid, incompetent, arrogant.

Show This To Your Koch-Confused FOX-Watching Climate Denialist Kin

Darryl Cunningham does us all a favor and explains the science of climate change — and the motivations of the obscenely-rich oil and coal barons funding the denialist groups, people like the multi-billion-dollar Koch brothers.

(H/t PZ Myers.)