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A Guide to the Scandals Plaguing the World Cup

by CecilaCardell Posted on June 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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When the FIFA World Cup opens today in Sao Paulo, the eyes of the world will be glued to the action on the field—but recent developments off the pitch are threatening to steal the spotlight. From the news of strikes and protests coming out of Brazil to the shadiness surrounding the awarding of the 2022 Cup to Qatar, it’s difficult to keep all of the scandals straight. But fear not: check this cheat sheet to get a sense of the off-field stories that’ll be dominating conversations for the next month.

Brazilians are really, really mad.

Over the course of the past few years, Brazilians have grown outraged at the government’s handling of the World Cup. Even in this soccer-obsessed country, people are deeply resentful of the government’s decision to spend as much as $14 billion on the Cup while millions of its citizens lack basic services—services the government promised to improve ahead of the Cup. On top of that, at least nine workers have been killed in accidents related to rushed World Cup construction projects; activists are alleging that more than 250,000 people faced eviction threats to accommodate Cup construction and preparations; and the presence of brand-new Cup buildings has raised rent in working-class neighborhoods, pricing longtime residents out.

The streets of Brazil’s major cities have become chaotic battle zones. Tens of thousands, from the homeless to workers, have poured into the streets over the past few months to protest the government’s handling of the Cup and riot police have responded with rubber bullets and tear gas. A series of strikes by public-sector workers demanding higher wages has paralyzed Brazil’s largest cities, bringing yet more protesters and police into the streets. Subway workers are the latest to strike, inspired by previously successful efforts by bus drivers, and federal police, who threatened to strike. On Tuesday, subway employees went back to work after five days of striking, but threatened to resume the strike pending a vote. Sao Paulo, host of Thursday’s opener, is famous for its hundred–mile traffic jams, but strikes last week brought the city to a near stand–still. A scrimmage between the US and Belgium, planned for today, was called off due to the gridlock. As thousands of visitors descend on the city, another strike has the potential to disrupt official World Cup events.

And the stadiums, airports and transport systems aren’t even finished.

The unfinished stadium in Sao Paulo. Edson Lopes/Flickr

Although World Cup action starts today, and an estimated 600,000 visitors have begun to descend on Brazil, up–to–date reports indicate that the infrastructure still isn’t ready. Here’s a brief list of what remains unfinished:

The stadiums. Sao Paulo’s Arena Corinthians, which will host today’s opener between Brazil and Croatia, was supposed to be completed last year. But the roof is unfinished, and 20,000 fans will sit in seats that the Daily Mail alleged wouldn’t pass a UK safety test. In Manaus, deep in the Amazon, the stadium remains unfinished and the field is in horrible shape ahead of Saturday’s game there.
The airports. Several airports around Brazil are still not ready to handle the thousands of flights that’ll come in and out over the next weeks. In Manaus, workers, scaffolding and machinery are everywhere. In Belo Horizonte, there are muddy sidewalks, an unfinished food court and dust everywhere. Brazil’s Folha de Sao Paulo found that the airports of Brasilia and Sao Paulo were the only ones ready to handle the traffic.
The transit. In selling the Cup to the people, Brazilian officials promised 35 new rail projects—today, just five are complete. Visitors may have to resort to overcrowded roads to get to games. The rushed and haphazard construction of transit projects has also had an enormous human cost: on Monday, a worker was killed while working on Sao Paulo’s monorail. The still–unfinished prestige project was supposed to have been completed well before the Cup.

Across the board, it’s a mess of bad PR for Brazil, and Brazilians are worried that their country’s time in the world’s spotlight could become a historic embarrassment. President Dilma Rousseff’s approval ratings have slid to 34 percent, and it’s not a stretch at all to suggest that the success of this World Cup—even the on-field success of the Brazilian team—could influence her impending re-election campaign.

Bribery, corruption, and worker abuse have reached a boiling point in Qatar, the 2022 World Cup host.

Migrant workers on a construction site in Doha, Qatar. Amnesty International/Zuma

The world was shocked when Qatar won the bid to host the 2022 World Cup in 2010. Of course, there’s the weather: the Persian Gulf state suffers temperatures well north of 100 degrees—sometimes over 120—in the World Cup months of June and July. And there’s the fact that the tiny, oil-rich nation has little soccer history or presence on the sport’s international stage; it’s never sent a team to the Cup to compete.

Turns out, there may have been more suspicious factors behind FIFA’s bizarre decision. The British press have alleged that Qatari billionaire Mohamed bin Hammam paid off FIFA officials in order to secure their votes to bring the Cup to his country. Emails obtained by the Sunday Times suggest that Qatar and 2018 World Cup host Russia cooperated to help each other win bids, and that bin Hammam used his connections in business and government to bribe officials from Thailand to Germany. If the allegations are true, FIFA Vice President Jim Boyce said he’d push to strip Qatar of the Cup and re-award it to another country.

Another worry, especially for fans, is the cultural conservatism of Qatar. Gay fans have expressed concern about visiting the country, where homosexuality is illegal, and foreigners have been whipped and deported for violation. In 2010, FIFA President Sepp Blatter made headlines by suggesting that gays “should refrain from sexual activity” if they visit Qatar. He quickly apologized.

What could push all this to critical mass is ongoing outrage over Qatar’s mistreatment of the construction workers tasked with building Cup infrastructure. The long hours of hard labor in unbearably hot conditions have proven lethal: it’s estimated that 1,200 workers have died in Qatar since the country was awarded the Cup. They are almost exclusively migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia and can only leave Qatar with the written permission of their employers—a system some watchers have compared to slavery.

Five of the World Cup’s six top corporate sponsors (including Coca-Cola and adidas) have voiced concern over corruption and worker abuse allegations, and publicly back formal investigations. Blatter, in a rare off-message moment, admitted that giving Qatar the bid was a “mistake.” Qatari officials have denied wrongdoing on corruption charges and promised to reform labor laws—but clearly, they have a lot more to worry about than air-conditioning their stadiums.

There was match fixing at the 2010 World Cup events in South Africa.

While World Cups present and future are beset with trouble, the 2010 Cup in South Africa was widely considered a success and a model for future hosts to follow. That legacy may soon be tarnished, if only slightly: reports have surfaced that pre-cup exhibition matches in South Africa were fixed. A New York Times investigation alleges that powerful gambling interests paid off referees to manipulate the outcomes of certain games. At least five games, and possibly as many as 15, were targeted. While the referees giving out questionable handball calls and yellow cards are clearly to blame, FIFA concluded that some South African soccer officials probably helped to some extent.

If true, this scandal would cast doubt on South Africa’s World Cup legacy. But there are implications for this year’s event, too. It proves that match-fixing—a persistent evil in soccer—is alive and well, and not even the World Cup is immune. Billions are wagered on the Cup worldwide—over $1.6 billion will be wagered in Great Britain alone—and there are powerful interests seeking to manipulate outcomes. FIFA dragged its feet for years on the South Africa investigations, calling into question its ability to prevent match-fixing in Brazil, which officials publicly say is a risk.

A uniting thread in all of these scandals.

FIFA looks really, really bad. There’s evidence to argue that the overlords of international soccer are corrupt and incompetent; at best, they’re merely incompetent. Between insisting that Brazil and Qatar will be successes as planned and accusing World Cup critics of racism, FIFA looks plain ugly. Not convinced? Watch John Oliver’s brilliant explanation:

So, while the implications of these controversies are big for Qatar and Brazil, they’re big for FIFA, too. Some are arguing to get rid of it altogether. How the upcoming months unfold could determine President Blatter’s viability going forward. A group of prominent European soccer executives have called on the longtime president to step down. For the health and well-being of soccer and the countries that love it, that might not be a horrible thing.

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A Guide to the Scandals Plaguing the World Cup

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Residents Wheeze As England Hit By 2nd Day Of Smog

by NonaSwaniixzu Posted on April 18, 2014

earth911

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Residents Wheeze As England Hit By 2nd Day Of Smog

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Did Slavery Create Modern Medicine?

by kx0bq6uuw Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Many in the United States were outraged by the remarks of conservative evangelical preacher Pat Robertson, who blamed Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake on Haitians for selling their souls to Satan. Bodies were still being pulled from the rubble—as many as 300,000 died—when Robertson went on TV and gave his viewing audience a little history lesson: the Haitians had been “under the heel of the French” but they “got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.'”

A supremely callous example of right-wing idiocy? Absolutely. Yet in his own kooky way, Robertson was also onto something. Haitians did, in fact, swear a pact with the devil for their freedom. Only Beelzebub arrived smelling not of sulfur, but of Parisian cologne.

Haitian slaves began to throw off the “heel of the French” in 1791, when they rose up and, after bitter years of fighting, eventually declared themselves free. Their French masters, however, refused to accept Haitian independence. The island, after all, had been an extremely profitable sugar producer, and so Paris offered Haiti a choice: compensate slave owners for lost property—their slaves (that is, themselves)—or face its imperial wrath. The fledgling nation was forced to finance this payout with usurious loans from French banks. As late as 1940, 80 percent of the government budget was still going to service this debt.

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Did Slavery Create Modern Medicine?

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Does Winning $800 Really Make You More Right Wing?

by Danielzhg Posted on February 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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A few days ago a pair of British researchers released a paper that presented a startling conclusion: winning the lottery makes you more conservative. Apparently, having money, even if it’s just money you won randomly, pushes you to the right.

This got a lot of attention, and last night I finally got around to reading a summary of the paper. I was struck by the actual results, which nobody had highlighted. You can see it in the chart on the right, which shows the percentage of people who switched from supporting the Labor Party to supporting the Conservative Party. It’s about 13 percent for non-winners, 14 percent for small winners, and 17 percent for winners of £500 or more.

And….I dunno. Aside from technical arguments about sample size, appropriate statistics, robustness, and so forth, I just have to say that this seems unlikely. Even for people with modest incomes, a lottery win of $800 just can’t be that big a deal. I know that four percentage points isn’t really that large, but even four percentage points seems like an implausibly large effect for a one-time windfall of a few hundred dollars.

At first, I thought I had a clever explanation for this: perhaps being taxed on lottery winnings pushes people a bit to the right. It’s a big bite all at once, and it’s the kind of thing that often strikes people as unfair. But no. It turns out that lottery winnings are tax-free in Britain. So that’s not it.

Bottom line: the results of this study are intuitively appealing, since having money is pretty obviously associated with being more conservative. But I have a hard time believing this result anyway. I’d sure like to see a follow-up in some other country before I take it too seriously.

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Does Winning $800 Really Make You More Right Wing?

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If You Want Credit For an Improving Economy, You Have to Seize It

by GenevaN41gfx Posted on December 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Paul Krugman channels Simon Wren-Lewis today to complain about the economic triumphalism of British Prime Minister David Cameron, who has been crowing that his austerity policies are finally paying off. In reality, both men say, Cameron implemented austerity policies in 2010 and 2011, but then eased up. And now that he’s eased up, the economy is starting to improve. Austerity had nothing to do with it.

I want to use this as a springboard to make two random-but-connected points:

Politically, message consistency is key. Ronald Reagan never varied from his insistence that tax cuts would supercharge the economy, so when the economy finally did pick up in 1983, tax cuts got the credit even though they almost certainly played only a small role. Likewise, austerity is getting the credit in Britain because Cameron has never varied from his insistence that it would work. Liberals tend to be much worse at this kind of economic message discipline. When the economy improves, they get a lot less credit because they haven’t relentlessly prepared the public with a very simple message about what they’ve been doing.
On a related note, Wren-Lewis points out that Britain’s central government deficit in 2013 was 7.5 percent of GDP. Cameron touts this as evidence of his fiscal stinginess. In America, the federal deficit in 2013 was 4.1 percent of GDP. Conventional wisdom ignores this and continues to wail that we need ever more spending cuts in order to reduce our still-unconscionable deficits. One again, note the difference that message discipline makes.

My point is not that message discipline is everything. The real world matters more. But it does matter. If you want credit for good things, you have to make up a simple, plausible story about what you’re doing and then stick to it like glue until things finally turn up. It worked for Reagan and it’s working for Cameron. Obama, on the other hand, never had a consistent story, so he’s not getting any credit as the economy improves.

POSTSCRIPT: Needless to say, Obama also had much less control over the economy than Cameron, who doesn’t have to put up with a fractious Congress. So from a message point of view, maybe he was just screwed. Still, I suspect Obama could have done better than he did.

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If You Want Credit For an Improving Economy, You Have to Seize It

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At Least 194 Children Have Been Shot to Death Since Newtown.

by tunwoelx7 Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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You’ve heard this story before, the one that played out again the week of Thanksgiving—this time in Lakeland, Florida—where 2-year-old Taj Ayesh got his little hands on his father’s loaded pistol, pulled the trigger, and crumpled to the ground. You may have heard about 9-year-old Daniel Wiley, who was playing outside his house in Harrisburg, Texas, when a 13-year-old mishandled an unsecured shotgun, blasting Wiley in the face. You may also have heard about 2-year-old Camryn Shultz of Forty Fort, Pennsylvania, whose embittered father put a bullet in her head before turning the gun on himself. Maybe you didn’t hear about the case in which a child shot others and then committed suicide, but that also happened this year. Twice.

A year after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mother Jones has analyzed the subsequent deaths of 194 children ages 12 and under who were reported in news accounts to have died in gun accidents, homicides, and suicides. They are spread across 43 states, from inner cities to tiny rural towns.

Following Sandy Hook, the National Rifle Association and its allies argued that arming more adults is the solution to protecting children, be it from deranged mass shooters or from home invaders. But the data we collected stands as a stark rejoinder to that view:

127 of the children died from gunshots in their own homes, while dozens more died in the homes of friends, neighbors, and relatives.
72 of the young victims either pulled the trigger themselves or were shot dead by another kid.
In those 72 cases, only 4 adults have been held criminally liable.
At least 52 deaths involved a child handling a gun left unsecured.

Additional findings include:

60 children died at the hands of their own parents, 50 of them in homicides.
The average age of the victims was 6 years old.
More than two-thirds of the victims were boys, as were more than three-quarters of the kids who pulled the trigger.
The problem was worst over the past year in the South, which saw at least 92 child gun deaths, followed by the Midwest (44), the West (38), and the East (20).

Our investigation drew on hundreds of local and national news reports. In some cases specific details remain unclear—often these tragedies are just a blip on the media’s radar. As with previous reports in our ongoing investigation of gun violence, Mother Jones has published all the data we collected in downloadable spreadsheet form. (For an ongoing tally of reported gun deaths, see this Slate project.)

As I reported in May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that over the last decade an average of about 200 children ages 12 and under died from guns every year. But those numbers don’t capture the full scope of the problem, due to inconsistencies in how states report shootings, and because the gun lobby long ago helped kill off federal funding for gun violence research. Our media-based analysis of child gun deaths also understates the problem, as numerous such killings likely never appear in the news. New research by two Boston surgeons drawing on pediatric records suggests that the real toll is higher: They’ve found about 500 deaths of children and teens per year, and an additional 7,500 hospitalizations from gunshot wounds.

“It’s almost a routine problem in pediatric practice,” says Dr. Judith Palfrey, a former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics who holds positions at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. Palfrey herself (who is not involved with the above study) lost a 12-year-old patient she was close with to gun violence, she told me.

No other affluent society has this problem to such an extreme. According to a recent study by the Children’s Defense Fund, the gun death rate for children and teens in the US is four times greater than in Canada, the country with the next highest rate, and 65 times greater than in Germany and Britain.

The pediatric community has been focused on elevating the issue. Public health researchers have found that 43 percent of homes with guns and kids contain at least one unlocked firearm. One study found that a third of 8- to 12-year-old boys who came across an unlocked handgun picked it up and pulled the trigger. On Tuesday, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a video emphasizing physicians’ role in keeping children safe from gun violence. The academy also issued specific recommendations this fall, including making sure firearms have trigger locks and storing them unloaded and under lock and key.

State legislators around the country have sought to require such precautions for gun owners, but the gun lobby has fought them vigorously. The NRA and other groups downplay the dangers firearms pose to children—in part by citing deficient federal data.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, research has shown that when doctors consult with their patients about the risk of keeping firearms in a home, it leads to “significantly higher rates” of handgun removal or safe storage practices. Here, too, the NRA has done battle: It backed the so-called “Docs vs. Glocks” law passed in Florida in 2011, which forbid doctors from asking patients about firearms.

That law may have come with a price: Among the 194 child gun deaths we analyzed, 17 took place in Florida. Seven were accidents, including three involving unsecured weapons in homes. “The children were covered in blood,” a shaken witness told a reporter after toddlers in a Lake City home played with a gun and fatally shot an 11-year-old boy in the neck.

Florida’s tally was second only to that of Texas, which saw 19 children killed over the last year. By comparison, the other two of the four most populous states, California and New York, saw 11 and 3 deaths, respectively. Already known for strict gun regulations, California and New York both passed additional restrictions after Sandy Hook. Texas, meanwhile, enacted 10 new laws deregulating guns, including weakening safety training requirements for concealed-carry permit holders and blocking universities and local governments from restricting firearms. Florida tightened mental health controls this year—one of 15 states to do so—but has otherwise operated as a de facto laboratory for permissive gun laws, including its Stand Your Ground statute made famous by the Trayvon Martin case.

In scores of the cases we studied, the type of weapon involved was either unknown to law enforcement authorities or not specified in news reports. But at least 76 involved a handgun, while another 34 involved long guns. (Semi-automatic handguns are also the most common weapon used in mass shootings.)

Often when kids are killed in gun accidents, public outrage focuses on the parents. But legal repercussions are another matter: While charges may be pending in some of the 84 accidental cases, we found only 9 in which a parent or adult guardian has been held criminally liable. And in 72 cases in which a child or teen pulled the trigger, only four adults have been convicted. According to the nonpartisan Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which tracks state regulations closely, only 14 states and the District of Columbia have strong laws imposing criminal liability for negligent storage of guns with respect to children. (Florida, Texas, and California are among the 14.)

What happened a year ago in Newtown is still in some ways hard to fathom. The nation mourns again for the victims and families. But as Palfrey also puts it, “Newtown concentrated the horror in one place.” Whether by malice or tragic mistake, the day-to-day toll of children dying from guns goes on.

The data from our investigation can be viewed in two ways. See an interactive photo gallery of the 194 victims:

See the full data set behind the investigation in spreadsheet form:

Also see our award-winning investigation, America Under the Gun: A Special Report on the Rise of Mass Shootings.

Research contributed by Maggie Caldwell, Nina Liss-Schultz, and AJ Vicens. Charts produced by Jaeah Lee. Video produced by Brett Brownell.

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At Least 194 Children Have Been Shot to Death Since Newtown.

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Why Are American Doctors Paid So Damn Much?

by pa98grv Posted on November 20, 2013

Mother Jones

Conservatives have picked up today on a Kaiser Health News piece reporting on doctor complaints that insurers plan to pay them less for Obamacare patients than for other patients:

Insurance officials acknowledge they have reduced rates in some plans, saying they are under enormous pressure to keep premiums affordable. They say physicians will make up for the lower pay by seeing more patients, since the plans tend to have smaller networks of doctors. But many primary care doctors say they barely have time to take care of the patients they have now.

Matt Yglesias is unsympathetic. He says American doctors are very well paid and should quit griping: “If we ever reach the point where American doctors have been squeezed so badly that they start fleeing north of the border to get higher pay in Canada, then we’ve squeezed too hard. Until that happens, forget about it.”

That’s pretty cold. But if you really want to know what’s going on, take a gander at the chart below. It’s from the OECD, so it includes all of the world’s relatively rich countries:

That’s damn peculiar, isn’t it? If Econ 101 is to be believed, higher pay should produce more doctors. And yet, even though the United States pays doctors far more than any other country on the globe, we’re in the bottom third. We have more doctors per capita than poorish countries like Mexico and Poland, but far fewer than Belgium and Britain and Germany—all of which pay doctors considerably less than we do here. So what’s going on?

As Matt says, the basic answer is that U.S. doctors operate as a cartel. They artificially limit their own ranks, which drives up their compensation:

What we really ought to be doing is working to further pressure the incomes of doctors through supply-side reforms. That means letting nurse-practitioners treat patients without kicking a slice upstairs to an M.D., letting more doctors immigrate to the United States, and it means opening more medical schools. Common sense says that since the population both grows and ages over time, there should be more people admitted to medical school today than were thirty years ago. But that’s not the case. Instead we produce roughly the same number of new doctors, admissions standards have gotten tougher, and doctors have become scarcer.

This is yet another reason not to shed too many tears for doctors. They’ve basically brought this on themselves. If the market were allowed to produce as many doctors as there’s demand for, they’d already be getting paid less. Right now they’re enjoying the substantial rents that come from squeezing their own supply, and they’ve fought like lemmings for decades to keep it that way. You can hardly blame them for that, but there’s no reason the rest of us should put up with it. It’s time to fight back.

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Why Are American Doctors Paid So Damn Much?

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Yet Another Benghazi Story Falls Apart

by Cynthia Perez Posted on November 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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Earlier this week I wrote about Lara Logan’s sensationalistic report on Benghazi for 60 Minutes on Sunday. As it turned out, the only new bit of reporting came from a British security supervisor who has written a book and came on the program to publicize it, but even he didn’t really have anything new to add. When he got to Benghazi, he said, he realized it was a dangerous place and that al-Qaeda-affiliated groups were active in the area. This isn’t news.

However, the supervisor, who was dramatically disguised on camera and went by the pseudonym Morgan Jones, did have a very detailed account of his own heroic actions on the night of the attacks. Today, Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post suggests—well, she’s a straight news reporter, so she doesn’t suggest anything. But here’s what she reports:

In a written account that Jones, whose real name was confirmed as Dylan Davies by several officials who worked with him in Benghazi, provided to his employer three days after the attack, he told a different story of his experiences that night.

In Davies’s 2½-page incident report to Blue Mountain, the Britain-based contractor hired by the State Department to handle perimeter security at the compound, he wrote that he spent most of that night at his Benghazi beach-side villa. Although he attempted to get to the compound, he wrote in the report, “we could not get anywhere near . . . as roadblocks had been set up.”

….The State Department and GOP congressional aides confirmed that Davies’s Sept. 14, 2012, report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, was included among tens of thousands of documents turned over to lawmakers by the State Department this year.

….A person answering the telephone Thursday at Blue Mountain, based in Wales, said no one was available to discuss Benghazi or Davies, who no longer worked there. Damien Lewis, co-author of the book, said in a telephone interview that Davies was “not well” and is hospitalized. Lewis said he was unaware that the Blue Mountain incident report existed but suggested that Davies might have dissembled in it because his superiors, whom he contacted by telephone once he was informed that the attack was underway, told him to stay away from the compound.

So here’s what we know: (a) There was really no need for the dramatic pseudonym. Everyone knew who Davies was. (b) His official report differs wildly from his 60 Minutes account. (c) Davies is now conveniently sick and unable to explain himself. (d) Davies never told his co-author about his after-action report. (e) Presumably he never told 60 Minutes about it either. (f) Congressional investigators have had copies of Davies’ report for months.

Needless to say, neither 60 Minutes nor congressional Republicans care about any of this. They have their story and they’re sticking to it. The rest of us can make up our own minds.

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Yet Another Benghazi Story Falls Apart

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Magic Bust: Here’s What Roger Daltrey Is Helping Boehner and Kerry Unveil

by p9zyztu Posted on October 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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The US Capitol’s National Statuary Hall may be full of white supremacists. But tomorrow, it will also be full of Roger Daltrey.

On Wednesday, Daltrey, lead singer of legendary English rock band The Who, will perform at a ceremony honoring Winston Churchill. Secretary of State John Kerry and congressional leaders are expected to attend the event, where a bust of the former British prime minister will be unveiled.

“I am pleased to be part of the celebration of Winston Churchill and the longstanding relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States,” Daltrey said in a statement. “I am honoured to be able to show my appreciation to this great man who, as our Prime Minister, fought for and secured freedom for Britain, America, and the citizens of the world.”

You can watch the ceremony here when it streams live at 11 a.m. EDT on Wednesday. What will Daltrey sing? “A Man in a Purple Dress?” “Won’t Get Fooled Again?” “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” perhaps? You’ll have to watch to find out; Daltrey’s representatives, the Churchill Centre, and the office of House Speaker John Boehner are keeping the set list a secret until show time.

“What better way to celebrate Winston Churchill’s friendship to the United States than to have one of Britain’s most legendary recording artists perform in the halls of the Capitol,” Boehner said in a statement. “Roger’s performance is sure to guarantee that the Churchill bust receives the first-class welcome it deserves.” The Speaker’s office also posted this “teaser” video to YouTube last week, praising Churchill as the “best friend America ever had.”

The dedication ceremony—and Daltrey’s latest gig—is the culmination of Boehner’s nearly two-year effort to place a bust of Churchill in the US Capitol. In December 2011, the House passed a resolution that tasked the Architect of the Capitol with finding an “appropriate statue or bust” of Churchill. This was the fourth piece of legislation sponsored by Boehner after he became House Speaker in January 2011. Here is the resolution that Boehner submitted:

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2 H Res 497 (PDF)

2 H Res 497 (Text)

Republicans have a track record of really caring about busts of Winston Churchill. In 2009, President Obama returned to the British Embassy a Churchill bust that graced the Oval Office in the Bush era. The British press freaked out over this, and it became a conservative meme stateside that was revived in an extraordinarily dumb pseudo-controversy during the 2012 election. “This man, Winston Churchill, used to have his bust in the Oval Office, and if I’m president of the United States, it’ll be there again,” Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney said to a cheering audience at a GOP debate in September 2011.

But the bust being offered a home in Statuary Hall is refreshingly controversy-free. The Chicago-based Churchill Centre, which donated the bust, came up with the idea several weeks ago to invite Daltrey, and contacted Universal Music about bringing the rock star to the US Capitol. “He is an iconic figure in the world of British music of the past 40 years, and he responded very enthusiastically to coming over from the UK,” says Lee Pollock, the Centre’s executive director. “I don’t want to sound flippant, but Churchill contributed so many good things in his time, as did the British musicians of the ’60s and ’70s. They are similarly iconic, in their own rights.”

According to Pollock, Daltrey is playing the gig pro bono. He is expected to perform two songs, and to be accompanied by an acoustic guitar player, a pianist, and a local choir during the hour-long ceremony. Separately, the US Army Chorus will perform “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which was reportedly one of Churchill’s favorite pieces of music.

This mini-concert isn’t Daltrey’s first encounter with Washington politicians. Here is President George W. Bush honoring Daltrey and Who guitarist Pete Townshend in December 2008:

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Magic Bust: Here’s What Roger Daltrey Is Helping Boehner and Kerry Unveil

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President Obama’s Schmoozing Problem Goes Global

by billytalley1169 Posted on October 24, 2013

Mother Jones

On the international stage, it’s just an endless series of bad news for President Obama these days. It seems as if everyone is mad at him. Here’s Roger Cohen on Germany:

A senior official close to Merkel recently took me through the “very painful” saga of the Obama administration’s response to Syrian use of chemical weapons. It began with Susan Rice, the national security adviser, telling the Chancellery on Aug. 24 that the United States had the intelligence proving President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons, that it would have to intervene and that it would be a matter of days. German pleas to wait for a United Nations report and to remember Iraq fell on deaf ears. Six days later, on Friday Aug. 30, Germany heard from France that the military strike on Syria was on and would happen that weekend — only for Obama to change tack the next day and say he would go to Congress.

Things got worse at the G-20 St. Petersburg summit meeting the next week. Again, Germany found the United States curtly dismissive….Germany found the atmosphere at the summit terrible. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, insisted the Syrian opposition was behind the use of chemical weapons….Putin, to the Germans, appeared much more powerful than Obama. His strengthened international standing after America’s Syrian back-and-forth worries a Germany focused on bringing East European nations like Ukraine and Moldova into association accords with the E.U.

The French are upset too, and of course the Brazilians as well. Ditto for Saudi Arabia, which wants us to be tougher on both Syria and Iran. Andrew Sullivan reports similar complaints from Britain: “For all Obama’s re-positioning of the US as a partner, not a hegemon, in practice, the disdain for allies’ particular interests can seem as dismissive as Rumsfeld or Cheney. I’m not sure how to fix this substantively, unless the Congress reins in the NSA. But a little more respect for our European allies would surely help.”

I’m unsure what to think about all this. On the NSA spying front, it’s a little hard to take foreign complaints at face value since we know perfectly well that other countries do pretty much the same thing. We do more of it, because we’re bigger and richer than most countries, but that’s a matter of scale, not morals.

On Syria, there’s no question that Obama handled things clumsily. And yet, Germany eventually got the response it wanted. Is a little bit of confusion along the way really all that unusual? As for Putin, their concern over his improved stature strikes me as overblown, though obviously they’re much more sensitive to this than we are. Ditto for Saudi Arabia and its concerns over Iran.

So what to think? Some of this seems like posturing. Some seems like a legitimate difference in perspective. And some simply seems like a difference of opinion that can’t really be talked away. We want to negotiate with Syria and Iran, while Saudi Arabia wants us to flatten them. I don’t really blame Obama for pursuing the former course even though the Saudis don’t like it.

Beyond that, it seems like much of this is an example of what Bill Clinton says he eventually learned about foreign policy: that it’s basically the same as domestic policy. Everyone has their own interests, and you just need to keep plugging away at it. Unfortunately, this is, by common consensus, Obama’s worst trait. He doesn’t schmooze much with domestic leaders and he doesn’t schmooze much with foreign leaders either. This is why all these stories about our foreign policy travails spend at least as much time talking about feelings as they do about actual policies. Foreign allies feels dismissed; they feel unconsulted; they feel like no one in the White House really understands their needs. In the end, it’s not clear to me how much that matters, since foreign powers mostly do what’s in their own interest regardless of how warm their personal relationships are. George Bush may have had a friendly relationship with King Abdullah, but in the end we got along mostly because our interests coincided.

Still, those relationships matter at the margins. Obama is almost certainly suffering more from the latest round of disclosures than he would if he were a bit friendlier and chattier with his peers across the world. Unfortunately, that’s not his style.

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President Obama’s Schmoozing Problem Goes Global

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