Vin Weber, a top advisor to Jeb Bush’s campaign, has signed on to help Uganda repair its badly damaged image in the United States by lobbying for them in Washington.
From Lee Fang at The Intercept:
Uganda hired Mercury Public Affairs, Weber’s firm, for a $50,000 per month retainer with Weber as the only registered lobbyist on the account. The contract calls for Mercury to provide general “lobbying services” as well as communication services to promote trade and investment opportunities in Uganda.
Weber joined the Bush campaign effort in February as an outside adviser. According to the Washington Post, Weber has worked behind the scenes to develop ties between Bush and major donors and conservative leaders. He told the Post in June that he intends to “coordinate policy” for the campaign.
Uganda has come under fire in the West of late over their repeated attempts to criminalize homosexuality. Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, signed into law and then blocked by the country’s courts for procedural reasons last year, made “aggravated homosexuality” punishable by life in prison. Earlier versions of the bill called for the death penalty in such cases, but was revised after multiple nations threatened to cut their foreign aid to the country if such provisions became law.
Anti-homophobia protest in Uganda, via Creative Commons
As Fang notes, the ties between Uganda’s anti-gay policies and the United States run even deeper than Weber. The sponsor of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, David Bahati, is a member of The Fellowship, the secretive Christian organization that organizes the National Prayer Breakfast and counts a number of Republican politicians (and Hillary Clinton) as members. Despite repeated failures to pass his bill, Bahati has pledged to reintroduce it this year.
It’s important to remember in all of this that the American Religious Right feels a special affinity for Uganda’s Religious Right because America, in a great many ways, built that. Centuries of colonialism and decades of American Christian missionary work, which is ramping up as those same American Christians are losing the culture wars at home, have produced a mixture of poverty and religious fervor that will nearly always result in particularly ugly and all too familiar forms of persecution.
Now that the mess has been made, American theocrats are willing to help run interference. As long as the price is right, that is.
Jeb Bush’s campaign has, thus far, declined to weigh in on whether it is still comfortable paying for advice from Weber, who is now one of the principal pitch-men for Uganda’s anti-gay government on K Street.
![Creative Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Uganda_Anti-Homosexuality_Bill_protest.jpg"){kind=link}
As if we didn’t already know it, the Bushes, their operatives and the activities surrounding them, are just flat evil.
And don’t get me started about the Fundamentalist Christians. From Pat Robertson’s diamond mining enterprise to the current crop of Evangelicals proselytizing, it’s all about exploitation.
These people know that the U.S. is a fading market for them, as Millennials see that these guys are charlatans. There is no way for them to expand their U.S. base, which is necessary so that they can support the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed. So, it’s time to export and grab an emerging market’s cash.
I would expect nothing different from this bunch. They are exponentially despicable.
Agree no doubt about it.
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Somehow this comes as no surprise at all.
The Maoists are not building bases and militarizing nation after nation. Obama is.
“Reading Nick Turse’s new book, Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, raises the question of whether black lives in Africa matter to the U.S. military any more than black lives in the United States matter to the police lately trained and armed by that military.” http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/30/do-black-lives-matter-in-africa/
The Maoists are busily gobbling up all the resources they can get but they do it on the cheap. They let the US and NATO tear things apart and then they come in and charge to repair them and buy resources on the cheap. But the US and NATO are always the big winners. Iraq is a case in point. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/23/iraq-the-biggest-petroleum-heist-in-history/
“a new neo-colonial future being created by Obama.” Actually that prize goes to the Chinese, whose ingenuity has been outpacing American imperialism in Africa at every turn.
Africa is overexploited, not underdeveloped. The real problem in Uganda is the combination of a colonial past and a new neo-colonial future being created by Obama.
That’s as bad as Obama’s connections to one of the early supporters of the anti-gay movement there, Rick Warren. Warren only backed down when it was clear his efforts would result in murder.
People like Warren, Scott Lively, Weber and etc should all be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
Let’s get the skeletons out of every closet!
That’s got potential to discredit Jeb!
Jeb! Uganda! Anti-diversity!
Just say no! No! No!