We all know what happened the last time a "let them eat cake" strategy was employed.

Public must learn to 'tolerate the inequality' of bonuses, says Goldman Sachs vice-chairman

Bankers' soaring pay is an investment in the economy, Lord Griffiths tells public meeting on City morality

by Kathryn Hopkins, The Guardian, October 21, 2009

Conservative peer Lord Griffiths said banks should not be ashamed of rewarding staff. Photograph: Rex Features

One of the City's leading figures has suggested that inequality created by bankers' huge salaries is a price worth paying for greater prosperity.

In remarks that will fuel the row around excessive pay, Lord Griffiths, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, said banks should not be ashamed of rewarding their staff.

Speaking to an audience at St Paul's Cathedral in London about morality in the marketplace last night, Griffiths said the British public should "tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all."

He added that he knew what inequality felt like after spending his childhood in a mining town in Wales. Both his grandfathers were miners who had to retire from work through injury.

With public anger mounting at the forecast of bumper bonuses for bankers only a year after the industry was rescued by the taxpayer, he said bankers' bonuses should be seen as part of a longer-term investment in Britain's economy. "I believe that we should be thinking about the medium-term common good, not the short-term common good ... We should not, therefore, be ashamed of offering compensation in an internationally competitive market which ensures the bank businesses here and employs British people," he said.

Griffiths said that many banks would relocate abroad if the government cracked down on bonus culture. "If we said we're not going to have as big bonuses or the same bonuses as last year, I think then you'd find that lots of City firms could easily hive off their operations to Switzerland or the far east," he said.

Goldman Sachs is currently on track to pay the biggest ever bonuses to its 31,700 employees after raking in profits at a rate of $35m (£21m) a day.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said today that City bonuses could soar to £6bn this year.

The chairman of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), Lord Turner, who was also present at the meeting, called once again for a global tax on financial transactions. He said that such a so-called "Tobin tax" could redistribute bank profits to help fight world poverty and climate change.

"The role of regulation is to bring a concordance between private actions and beneficial results," he said.

Link:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/oct/21/executive-pay-bonuses-goldmansachs

New York Times absence of journalistic integrity becomes ever more appalling -- now they shill for the health insurance industry, as well as ExxonMobil

Dear Readers,

It is getting to the point that the New York Times has become a simple prostitute for corporate interests (i.e., ExxonMobil, other fossil-fuel companies, and the health insurance industry, just for starters).

The NYTimes has so lost its journalistic integrity that it is hard to know which articles are puff pieces and which are not.

If the NYTimes believe they have a long-term future doing this, they are very mistaken.

All that remains is for Fox News to buy them out.

From the Naked Capitalism blog -- the best in describing what is really going on in the financial world. (Bold face emphases are mine.)

Naked Capitalism, Tuesday, October 13, 2009

New York Times: Missing in Action on Health Insurance Lobby Duplicity

In the early days of this blog, I would often wind up comparing coverage of news between the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal because the offender (almost without exception the Journal) had done a job so poor or misleading that it merited comment. Then the credit crisis forced the Journal to up its game, and the FT appeared to slip a bit (I wondered if it was catering, as in pandering, to US readers).

This time, the dubious reporting object lesson is the New York Times, on what is supposedly its most prized beat: Washington, DC, political reporting. The Times ran two articles that verged on sycophantic in its coverage of the health insurance industry as it moved its chess pieces on the health care reform game board. The Times acted as close to a PR outlet. From an early August post:

A similar charade is in motion on the health care front. My bullshit meter went into high alert earlier this week with this New York Times story, “For Health Insurers’ Lobbyist, Good Will Is Tested,” which was clearly a PR plant. It featured Karen Ignagni, a $1.6 million-a-year earning lobbyist to the health insurance industry as a heroine (I started getting nauseaous as soon as I saw the deliberately low-key picture of her in her office). And why should we see a representative of one of the biggest forces undermining democracy in America, the usually-successful efforts of well-funded industry groups to steam-roll legislative process, as a good guy, or in this case, gal? Because she supposedly talked a mean and obstructionist industry into playing nice.

Towards the end of August, in “New York Times Runs Yet Another Fawning Story on Health Insurance Industry,” I noted:

The latest salvo in the health care industry charm offensive is another story humanizing the health insurance industry, this one on the front page of the New York Times website, “Dealing With Being the Health Care ‘Villains’ ”

 So what is the story about? The author, Kevin Sack, interviewed a bunch of employees at Humana, the fourth-largest insurance company.

Let’s start with the basics. Why is this even a reasonable premise for a story? This is a perverse twist on a type of story the Times runs periodically, of dropping into a particular community, often in the heartland, to get the populace’s view on a pressing political or social issue.

Since when is it legitimate, much the less newsworthy, to get a company’s perception on its embattled status, at least without introducing either some contrary opinion or better yet, facts, to counter the views of people who will inevitably see what they are doing as right? I hate to draw an extreme comparison to make the point, but staff in Nazi concentration camps also thought they were good people. It is well documented that for all save the depressed, people’s assessments of their own behavior is biased in their favor.

Similarly, I don’t recall many examples of industries under attack having prominent members get flattering front page pieces. The now-famous AIG Financial Products “I Quit” letter was an op-ed. I will admit I could have missed it, but I did not see any New York Times front page pieces during the auto bailouts featuring GM or Chrysler execs and workers saying they were misunderstood. and were being maligned.

So what do we have here? You have a bunch of people whose livelihood depends on Humana. Of course they are gong to see the industry as benign.

And nowhere in this fawning piece do you see mention made of the ugly fact that as recently as the early 1990s, 95% of every dollar spent on insurance claims went to medical care. It is now only 80%. That is a simply stunning change, and shows how completely fact free the industry’s defenses are. The insurers are a major culprit in America’s high medical costs. But no, we are supposed to take the mere opinion of employees who are deeply vested in the current system as views worth considering.

Back in the days when I did M&A, one of my clients was a frighteningly good negotiator. He knew part of his reason for success was that he did not look the part: he was short, genial, a bit rotund, and bespectacled. He would (to those who he was certain would not spill the beans on him) describe himself as the Antichrist and say things like: “I rub their bellies and only years later do they realize what I have done to them.” And I have to say, he was masterful in getting people to think his self-serving view of things was the only sensible way to see a situation.

The insurance industry is not so adept, or more accurately, is less concerned about appearances than my old client. The Financial Times reports tonight that the health insurance industry, after its great show of making nice to the Obama administration, backstabbed it on the eve of a key vote. Do we see any coverage of this duplicity in the US media, much less the New York Times?

From “Health insurance lobby attacks reforms” in the Financial Times:

The White House and the health insurance industry on Monday descended into open conflict on the eve of a critical Senate vote that could determine the fortunes of Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans.

Supporters of President Obama accused the health insurance industry of attempted “sabotage” after it issued a report by PwC, which estimated that premiums would rise much faster under the proposed reforms than they would have done otherwise.

The 26-page report marked an abrupt end to the unlikely alliance between Mr Obama and America’s Health Insurance Plans – the main industry lobby group, which has spent about $100m on advertising to support the reforms….

A spokesman for Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which is to hold a key vote on Tuesday on its $829bn, 10-year, healthcare reform plan, described the report as a “hatchet job, pure and simple.”

The Wall Street Journal did report on the insurer “push back” and indicated that the industry had cooperated earlier, “attracted to the effort, in part, by the prospect of gaining millions of new customers.” So the Journal’s staff recognized this as a mere marriage of convenience from the get-go.

Update 4:30 a.m.: Robert Reich is more optimistic about the implications than I am, see “The Audacity of Greed: How Private Health Insurers Just Blew Their Cover.”

Link:   http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/10/new-york-times-missing-in-action-on-health-insurance-lobby-duplicity.html

Thomas Friedman: Where did "we" go?

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Where Did ‘We’ Go?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: New York Times, September 29, 2009

I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

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I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.

And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish nationalist as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did.

Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.

What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.

Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.

Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.

Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.

And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.

Again, hack away at the man’s policies and even his character all you want. I know politics is a tough business. But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble. We can’t go 24 years without a legitimate president — not without being swamped by the problems that we will end up postponing because we can’t address them rationally.

The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.

Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.

I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.
We can’t change this overnight, but what we can change, and must change, is people crossing the line between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable.

Link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/opinion/30friedman.html

Lin

L

Judge Jed S. Rakoff deserves to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor

This guy should be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor!

Judge Rejects Settlement Over Merrill Bonuses

The New York Times, September 14, 2009, 12:33 pm

A Federal District judge on Monday overturned a settlement between the Bank of America and the Securities and Exchange Commission over bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch executives just before the bank took over Merrill last year.

The $33 million settlement “does not comport with the most elementary notions of justice and morality,” wrote Jed S. Rakoff, the judge assigned to the case in federal court in Lower Manhattan, The New York Times’s Louise Story writes. (Read the decision after the jump.)

The ruling forces the commission to go back to the drawing board in its case against the bank, which focused on $3.6 billion bonuses paid out by Merrill Lynch late last year, just before that firm was taken over by Bank of America. Neither company provided details of the bonuses to their shareholders, who voted on Dec. 5 to approve the merger.

The judge focused much of his criticism on the fact that the fine in the case would be paid by the bank’s shareholders, those supposed to have been injured by the lack of disclosure around the bonuses.

“It is quite something else for the very management that is accused of having lied to its shareholders to determine how much of those victims’ money should be used to make the case against the management go away,” the judge wrote.

Bank of America has argued in its filings with the judge that it did nothing wrong in its disclosures.

The case before Judge Rakoff is just one of several investigations into the bank’s deal with Merrill. Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, is also investigating the bank’s disclosures of bonuses and of Merrill’s surprise losses late last year. The House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform is also looking into the merger.

Judge’s Rejection of S.E.C.-Bank of America Settlement
Judge's Rejection of S.E.C.-Bank of America Settlement

Reintegração de posse de terreno da Viação Campo Limpo no Capão Redondo

Link to images of 570 families being forcibly moved off of the land they have occupied illegally since 2007:

http://www.estadao.com.br/interatividade/Multimidia/ShowGaleria.action?idGaleria=2110

Excellent blog on responsible urban renewal -- Blog da Raquel Rolnick

You know it is really nice to see a Brazilian blog that offers up some concrete solutions to urban problems in Brazil, instead of the usual endless litany of complaints.

Parabéns Raquel!!!

• 

  Raquel é urbanista, professora da Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo e relatora especial da Organização das Nações Unidas para o direito à moradia adequada.

We need to focus much more attention on urban renewal in the U.S., as well -- after all, that is where most people live today and will live tomorrow.

Link: http://raquelrolnik.wordpress.com/

Blocked rivers threaten livelihood of Brazilian tribes

Plans to build more than 200 hydroelectric dams bring prospect of cheap electricity but destruction of Amazon habitats

Activists say government plans for up to 16 new hydroelectric plants pose an unprecedented threat to the 14 tribes that live in the park. Photograph: Tom Phillips

by Tom Phillips in Pavuru, Xingu national park, The Guardian, August 23, 2009

Once they were threatened by wildcat gold-miners and a measles epidemic that slashed their population to just 56. But now the Ikpeng, a proud tribe of Amazon warriors, say a new catastrophe looms over their future: the damming of the rivers they depend upon for food.

Across Brazil alarm bells are ringing over plans to build at least 229 small hydroelectric dams, known as PCHs, which the government hopes will generate electricity and drive economic development.

Opponents say they will damage the environment and destroy the livelihoods of thousands of Brazilian tribespeople.

There are 346 PCHs in Brazil, with another 70 under construction and 159 awaiting licences. If the construction of dams continues, "the fish will run out and the waters will start to go down," warned Komuru Txicao, a local tribesman. "Here in the forest we don't need electricity. We need fish, water and land."

Other hydroelectric projects planned by the government are huge — the $4bn Belo Monte dam further north along the Xingu river from Pavuru would be the third biggest plant of its kind on earth, producing over 11,000 megawatts of electricity. While Belo Monte has been described by the government as a "gift from God," critics say it will destroy lives, homes and traditions.For Komuru and his neighbours, the immediate concern is the construction of a network of PCHs around the Xingu national park in Mato Grosso state. Komuru fears the dams will block the tributaries of the Xingu, itself the largest tributary of the Amazon.

According to the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel), four PCHs – the Paranatinga II, Culuene, ARS and Ronuru – operate near the reserve; another, Paranatinga I, is waiting for its licence. Aneel says 13 PCHs are being built in Mato Grosso state, while another 19 projects are awaiting licences. The government says such dams will help power the agricultural revolution that is sweeping Brazil's mid-west and bring electricity to small towns.

Recent years have seen the Ikpeng, a proud tribe of Amazon warriors, embrace many of the comforts and distractions of the outside world.

Three months ago wireless internet was installed here in Pavuru, one of over 30 villages located in the Park — a vast, 2.8 million hectare indigenous reserve home to some 5,000 Indians from 14 different ethnic groups. Today Ikpeng teenagers spend their afternoons downloading tracks by artists such as Enrique Iglesias and the US rapper 50 Cents while many of the tribe's hunters use shot-guns rather than the traditional bow and arrow to hunt spider monkeys and wild-boar in the surrounding forests.

"Things are changing," admitted Karane Txicao, 28, sat behind an HP laptop in the village's concrete internet cafe. "Now people never leave the front of the computer screen."

Several of the traditional huts – or owros – also shelter large television sets, powered by a diesel generation which is switched on at 9 a.m. each day and turned off at 9 p.m.

But unlike the telenovelas and MP3s, government plans for PCHs around the Xingu Park have met with a furious reception.

"It is very worrying," said Kumare, a resident who is the local head of Funai, Brazil's indigenous agency. "This will directly affect us. They are damming all of the rivers." Kumare said the dams would make it impossible for the fish to migrate upstream thus decimating the main source of food for the reserve's Indians.

Last March the conflict escalated when eight staff from the electricity company responsible for one PCH spent five days held "hostage" near Pavuru. They were released only after the president of Brazil's indigenous agency, Funai, personally intervened. "We didn't kill them, we 'arrested' them," recalled Komuru.

Similar battles are raging across the Amazon region, where plans to build roads, hydroelectric dams and other major infrastructure projects have triggered a conflict between those who want to protect the world's largest tropical rainforest and its indigenous tribes and those wishing to drive development and relieve poverty. A dispute over the Belo Monte dam turned violent in May when an engineer from the Brazilian power company Eletrobras was attacked during a presentation about the plant. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has sought to allay fears over the dam, vowing that it "would not be shoved down anyone's throat."

But concerns grew in July when a federal court lifted an embargo on the Belo Monte licensing process, clearing the way for a bidding round later this year.

Having witnessed the Ikpeng's plight in the 1960s, Melobo, an Ikpeng shaman, who says he is around 60 years old and wears 15 shell ear-rings in each ear, fears history may be repeating itself. "The farmers ruin the Indian's things," Melobo said, in heavily accented Portuguese, standing on the banks of the Xingu river. "They ruin the Indian's water. They ruin the Indian's land." "We don't want to negotiate," added Komuru. "We don't want money. We don't want things that are worth nothing. We want our land."

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/aug/23/brazil-amazon-electricity

Câmara Sutra by Cassetta e Planeta!!!

I can't help it. I had to come here and laugh with the world about Cassetta e Planeta's skit called "Câmara Sutra" -- LOLOLOLOL (sacanagem politica).

If you didn't catch it on Globo TV, tonight, you really missed it!

If this ever comes out on YouTube, I will post it up.

Paul Krugman: Treason Against the Planet

Betraying the Planet

by PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times, June 28, 2009

Credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 °F by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 °F. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas, and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves — the kind that traditionally occur only once in a generation — may become annual or biannual events.

In other words, we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?

Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.

Given this contempt for hard science, I’m almost reluctant to mention the deniers’ dishonesty on matters economic. But in addition to rejecting climate science, the opponents of the climate bill made a point of misrepresenting the results of studies of the bill’s economic impact, which all suggest that the cost will be relatively low.

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/opinion/29krugman.html

Zimbabwe’s diamond fields enrich ruling party, report says

Miners in the Marange diamond fields in eastern Zimbabwe in 2006, the year the fields were discovered. The New York Times

by CELIA W. DUGGER, New York Times, June 26, 2009

JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe’s military, controlled by President Robert Mugabe’s political party, violently took over diamond fields in Zimbabwe last year and has used the illicit revenues to buy the loyalty of restive soldiers and enrich party leaders, Human Rights Watch charged in a report released Friday.

Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/Associated Press

Human Rights Watch says the military killed more than 200 miners in the Marange fields.

The party, ZANU-PF, has used the money from diamonds — smuggled out of the country or illegally sold through the Reserve Bank — to reinforce its hold over the security forces, which seemed to be slipping last year as the value of soldiers’ pay collapsed with soaring inflation, Human Rights Watch researchers said.

On Friday, Zimbabwe’s government roundly denied the charges in the report, which cited visits by its researcher to the diamond fields in February and interviews with soldiers, miners and other witnesses.

The information minister, Webster Shamu, of ZANU-PF, said in a telephone interview that the report’s aim was to tarnish the country’s image, block the sale of its diamonds internationally and, “in so doing, deny Zimbabwe much needed foreign currency.”

“The whole report is just not true,” he said.

Last year Zimbabwe’s state media depicted the military blitz, code-named Operation No Return, in the Marange district as a push to restore order in the midst of a lawless diamond rush in the area.

But the Human Rights Watch report charged that the military killed more than 200 miners and used the push to seize the Marange fields.

Some miners died when soldiers opened fire from helicopters with automatic rifles mounted on them, the group said. Many of the dead were taken to the morgue at Mutare General Hospital, or buried in mass graves, the report says.

Army brigades are being rotated into the diamond fields, discovered in 2006, so more soldiers can profit from the illegal trade, the report says.

Villagers from the area, some of them children, are being forced to work in mines controlled by military syndicates and have complained of being harassed, beaten and arrested, the report says.

“It’s a big cash cow for the military and the police, especially since Zimbabwe is virtually bankrupt,” Dewa Mavhinga, the Zimbabwean lawyer who was the main researcher for the report, said in an interview.

Mr. Mugabe, who has ruled for 29 years, is now governing with his rival, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, who spent the past three weeks in Western capitals seeking assistance for Zimbabwe’s devastated economy.

President Obama and European heads of state have generally declined to aid Zimbabwe’s government directly, in part because of concerns that it continues to flout the rule of law.

The Human Rights Watch report is the latest sign of growing international concern about charges of killings and human rights abuses in the diamond fields southwest of the city of Mutare.

“While Zimbabwe’s new power-sharing government, formed in February 2009, now lobbies the world for development aid, millions of dollars in potential government revenue are being siphoned off,” the report said.

The World Federation of Diamond Bourses, an umbrella group of 28 bourses in 20 countries, called on its members in April not to trade diamonds that originate in the Marange deposits in Zimbabwe.

“Somewhere along the line, we have to stand up and be counted,” Michael H. Vaughan, the federation’s executive director, said in an interview on Friday.

On Sunday, representatives of the Kimberley Process, an alliance of industry, civic and government officials set up to stop the flow of so-called blood diamonds, will be traveling to Zimbabwe to explore whether the country is complying with the alliance’s standards.

A coalition of nonprofit groups is lobbying to have Zimbabwe suspended from membership in the Kimberley Process. “There’s rampant smuggling out of the country,” said Annie Dunnebacke of Global Witness, one of the nonprofit groups. “The military is profiting from the trade and is directly involved in the sale of the diamonds.”

At a time when Zimbabwe is struggling to pay civil servants and soldiers a stipend of $100 a month, the extra income from diamond mining for soldiers is serving “to mollify a constituency whose loyalty to ZANU-PF, in the context of ongoing political strife, is essential,” the Human Rights Watch report said.

In December, soldiers rioted in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, to protest pay that had become virtually worthless as inflation increased to astronomical levels. Analysts and Western diplomats said at the time that Mr. Mugabe might lose his grip on power if he were unable to sustain the patronage he had deployed for decades.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/world/africa/27zimbabwe.html