Russia to help Cuba build space (Missle) center

Do you believe that Russia's intentions would be scientific and benevolent?  

This is purely an antagonistic and saber-rattling move.  The question is how will we respond.  This is a carefully planned chess-like move, preceded by his ruthless plunge into Georgia, and last weeks journey of two Russian bombers to visit the anti-American Chavez.  Clearly Putin is playing a master chess game.  Will we check-mate him, stale-mate, or lose the game? 

Moscow is ready to help Cuba develop its own space center, Russia's space agency chief said on Wednesday after talks in Caracas with Venezuelan and Cuban officials, Itar-Tass news agency reported.

Russia has stepped up efforts to develop closer links with both countries, which are ideological enemies of Washington, including sending Russian strategic bombers on a mission to Venezuela this month.

"We have held preliminary discussions about the possibility of creating a space center in Cuba with our help," the chief of Russia's Federal Space Agency Anatoly Perminov was quoted as saying by Itar-Tass in Caracas.

"With our Cuban colleagues, we discussed the possibilities of joint use of space equipment ... and the joint use of space communications systems," Perminov was quoted as saying.  MORE....

Why Putin should scare us

He’s an ethnic nationalist with a mystical sense of Russian destiny. Cold and pragmatic, he won’t play by the world’s rules.

By Ralph Peters

Possessing a clear vision of where he wants to go and the ruthlessness to get there, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is the world's most effective national leader in power. He also might be the most misunderstood.

Far from being a Marxist, Putin belongs to a long tradition of aggressive Russian nationalists. A complex man, he's cold-bloodedly pragmatic when planning — as both his rise to power and his preparations for the recent invasion of Georgia demonstrated — yet he's imbued with a mystical sense of Russia's destiny. The ambitious son of a doctrinaire communist father and a devout Orthodox mother, Putin's straight from the novels of Feodor Dostoevski (another son of St. Petersburg)

Putin's combination of merciless calculation and sense of mission echoes an otherwise different figure, Osama bin Laden. In both cases, Western analysts struggle to simplify confounding personalities and end up underestimating them. These aren't madmen but brilliant, driven leaders who flout our rules.

Nonetheless, Putin did carry over specific skills from his KGB career: As a former intelligence officer myself, I'm awed by his ability to analyze opponents and anticipate their reactions to his gambits (Russia is, of course, a nation of chess masters). Preparing for the dismemberment of Georgia, the prime minister accurately calculated the behavior of that country's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, of President Bush, of the European Union and of the Russian people. He knew he could get away with it.

Putin has a quality found in elite intelligence personnel: the ability to discard all preconceptions when scrutinizing a target. And when he decides to strike, he doesn't look back. This is not good news for his opponents, foreign or domestic.

Among the many reasons we misjudge Putin is our insistence on seeing him as "like us." He's not. His stage-management of the Georgia invasion was a perfect example: Western intelligence agencies had been monitoring Russian activities in the Caucasus for years and fully expected a confrontation. Even so, our analysts assumed that Russia wouldn't act during this summer's Olympics, traditionally an interval of peace.

Putin had been conditioned to read the strategic cards differently: The world's attention would be focused on the Games, and key world leaders would be in Beijing, far from their crisis-management staffs. Europe's bureaucrats and senior NATO officials would be on their August vacations. The circumstances were ideal.

It has also become a truism that Putin's foolish for relying on oil, gas and mineral revenue while failing to diversify his economy. But Russia's strongman knows what he's doing: He prefers a wealthy government to a wealthy society. Putin can control a handful of oligarchs whose fortunes flow from a narrow range of sources (once Russia's richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky sits in prison for crossing the Kremlin), but a diversified economy would decentralize power.

Putin's obsession with control — another national tradition — serves an overarching purpose: restoring Russia's greatness. He realizes he can't restore a Soviet Union that sprawled deep into Europe. What he hopes is to reconstruct the empire of the czars, from eastern Poland through Ukraine and the Caucasus to Central Asia. Putin's expansionist model comes from Peter the Great, but his methods resemble those of Ivan the Terrible, not least when it comes to silencing dissent. The main thing the prime minister has salvaged from the Soviet era is the cult of personality. He knows what Russians want — a strong czar — and his approval ratings have exceeded 80%.

Does this ruthless, focused leader have a weakness? Yes: his temper. Despite his icy demeanor, Putin's combustible. He takes rebuffs personally and can act impulsively — and destructively. Instead of lulling Europeans into an ever-greater dependence on Russian gas, he angrily ordered winter shut-offs to Ukraine and Georgia, alarming Western customers. Rather than concealing the Kremlin's cyber-attack capabilities, he unleashed them on tiny Estonia during a tiff over relocating a Soviet-era memorial — alerting NATO.

Putin's invasion of Georgia was also personal. In addition to exposing the West's impotence in the region, he meant to punish Georgia's defiant president. The lengths to which Putin was prepared to go in a personal vendetta should worry us all.

Such outbursts of temper suggest that Putin's campaign to restore Russia's greatness could end very badly. We needn't take his dispatch of a naval squadron to Venezuela or bomber flights over U.S. Navy carriers seriously — they're staged for his domestic audience and militarily absurd. But Putin's willingness to use naked force against regional democracies suggests that, like so many strongmen before him, he'll ultimately overreach.

Meanwhile, our next president will have to cope with this brilliant, dangerous man. That's going to require the experience and skills to exploit every element of our national power; to convince Europe that appeasement will only enlarge Putin's appetite; and to draw clear lines while avoiding drawn guns. Above all, our president will have to take Putin's measure accurately and not indulge in wishful thinking. Managing Putin's Russia could emerge as our No. 1 security challenge.

Ralph Peters is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors and the author of Looking For Trouble.   MORE....

Getting to the bottom with Barney Frank

In "Barney's Rubble" the Wall Street Journal presents the latest installment of their ongoing argument with Rep. Barney Frank regarding the government regulation of Fannie and Freddie.  Even now, with the obvious evidence of the failure of Congress' policies, Mr. Frank continues to protest any role of Congress in creating the problems with these two entities.  Mr. Frank has issued a letter stating his disagreement with their assessment. 


Here is the conclusion of their reply to his letter:

For years, Mr. Frank and other friends of Fan and Fred opposed not only bills written to limit the size of their portfolios, but any bill that in their view gave an independent regulator too much discretion to order a reduction. This was true of the reform that his House committee passed last year. Only when the White House caved to Mr. Frank and dropped its earlier insistence that a reform bill rein in the portfolios did Mr. Frank move his bill.

In his letter, Mr. Frank also repeats his familiar claim that Fannie and Freddie are vital because they support "affordable housing." This is political smoke. The awful irony of Fan and Fred is that they have done very little to assist affordable housing. Most of the taxpayer subsidy has gone to enrich shareholders and Fannie managers, as a 2003 study by the Federal Reserve shows.

Mr. Frank says he favored the disclosure of Fannie and Freddie compensation -- which is nice, but beside the point. The source of the rich pay packages was the Fannie business model that Mr. Frank fought so hard to protect. Instead of helping the poor, Mr. Frank was enriching Jim Johnson, Frank Raines, Angelo Mozilo and Wall Street.

If Mr. Frank thinks his "affordable housing" goals are so popular, he can always ask Congress to appropriate money for any housing subsidy he desires. But he knows those votes are hard to come by. It's much easier to have Fannie and Freddie take inordinate risks, even at taxpayer expense, so they can pay a political dividend called an "affordable housing trust fund" that politicians will disperse. In opposing genuine reform of Fan and Fred, Mr. Frank wasn't acting like a principled liberal. He was protecting corporate giants while hiding their risks from taxpayers until the middle class got stuck with the bill.  MORE....

The Journal  has also provided their archive of columns regarding their criticisms of Fannie and Freddie.  You can be the judge in this dispute.  

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• Bailout for Billionaires 09/11/08 -- The mystery of saving Fannie Mae's sub debt holders.

• Fannie Mae's Patron Saint 09/09/08 -- A bailout history, as told by Barney Frank.

• Weekend at Henry's 09/08/08 -- Propping up the living dead at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

• When Henry Met Fannie 08/19/08 -- That taxpayer capital injection looks closer all the time.

• Fannie Mae's Political Immunity07/29/08 --Congress sets the rules in favor of Fan and Fred, which then repay the Members with cash from their rigged profit stream.

• Fannie and Freddie's Enablers 07/21/08 – The same folks who put taxpayers on the hook for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are now demanding ransom to let taxpayers bail them out.

• Paulson's Fannie Test 07/15/08 – Does Hank Paulson want to leave the U.S. financial system better than he found it? That's his test in the wake of his commitment to use taxpayer money to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

• Fannie Mae Ugly 07/12/08 – Investors continued to flee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac almost as frantically as the political class tried to reassure everybody there was nothing to worry about.

• The Price of Fannie Mae 07/10/08 – It's time Americans understood the price they could soon pay for the Beltway's confidence game with these high-risk "government-sponsored enterprises."

• Too Political to Fail 04/21/08 – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aren't held to the same standards of accountability as everyone else.

• Fannie Mayhem 11/20/07 – Chuck Schumer is lucky Congress ignored his idea that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should ride to the rescue of the housing market.

• Fannie More 10/23/07 – Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer have come up with a proposal that would increase the risk to taxpayers from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

• Fannie to the Rescue? 09/29/07 – Fannie and Freddie went up the Hill to fetch a pail of money.

• Freddie Krueger Mac 05/10/07 – Just when you think they're defeated, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac arise in Congress to kill any attempt to clean up their dangerous habits.

• The Fannie Tax 04/12/07 – Democrat Barney Frank and the Bush Administration seem to have found common ground on new rules for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Naturally, there's a catch.

• Memo to Fannie 06/14/06 – A joke in Washington these days goes like this: "What's the difference between Enron and Fannie Mae? Answer: The guys at Enron have been convicted."

• Freddie's Friends on the Hill 04/27/06 – The Federal Election Commission sheds some light on how Freddie Mac rewards its friends.

• Fannie Mae's House 10/25/05 – Every Congressional session can be counted on to produce its share of bad bills. But the "reform" bill for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is in a class of its own.

• Fannie's Friends on the Hill 05/09/05 – Congress finally seemed ready to protect taxpayers from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Then Republican Mike Oxley decided to ride to their rescue.

• Fannie Turns a Page 12/23/04 – Fannie Mae – a slick, semiprivate firm operating with the patronage of politicians – is the kind of institution one still expects to find in a country like France.

• Fannie the Centaur 12/17/04 – Understanding their half-man, half-beast nature is crucial to fixing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the wake of their recent financial scandals.

• Fannie Mae Liberals 10/14/04 – There were many moments of high entertainment during the House hearings on Fannie Mae's creative accounting. But our favorite was the Mister Magoo performance given by Barney Frank (D., Massachusetts).

• Fannie Mae Enron? 10/04/04 – The company was cooking the books. Big time.

• Fannie Uncovered 09/23/04 – The housing-finance giant has been engaging in some accounting funny business.

• Fannie's Risky Business 02/25/04 – Alan Greenspan puts his credibility behind the cause of reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

• Christmas for Fannie Mae 12/23/03 – The Federal Reserve Board releases a new staff study about the impact of taxpayer subsidies for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

• White House Fannie Pack 11/11/03 – White House chief economist N. Gregory Mankiw dares to tell the truth about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The mortgage giants were not amused, which means we're getting somewhere.

• Fannie Takes the Hill 10/09/03 – When the House of Representatives can't get even a modest regulatory bill out of committee, the dangers of Fannie Mae become clear in reality.

• Speaking Truth to Fannie 03/12/03 – The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis warns of a potential crisis arising from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

• Fan and Fred Get the Business 02/19/03 – The year has not started auspiciously for the two mortgage-finance behemoths.

• Fannie Mae's Risky Business 09/23/02 – We've been suggesting that Fannie Mae was exposed to too much interest-rate risk. All of a sudden investors seem to agree with us.

• Fannie Capitulates, Sort Of 07/15/02 – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac end months of resistance, stonewalling and downright crankiness and agree to register their common stock with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

• Fannie's Inside Info 07/01/02 – Even in this post-Enron world, Fan and Fred do not provide as much information about these securities as private mortgage lenders do.

• Inside Fannie 03/19/02 – Fan and Fred don't function like other companies. They're allowed to pile up debt, implicitly guaranteed by taxpayers, without being held to even the minimum of corporate governance standards.

• Frantic Fannie 02/28/02 – Companies taking on so much risk and debt, and backed by taxpayers, ought to be more transparent in what they tell the world.

• Fannie Mae Enron? 02/20/02 – Fan and Fred look like poorly run hedge funds: lots of leverage and snarkily hedged risk. Does the word Enron ring any bells?