Still With the Rihanna Thing.

This past weekend US President Barack Obama attended the Summit of the Americas in Panama. The headlines from this Summit were all about Obama's historic meeting with Cuba's Raul Castro. However beyond Obama's desperate attempts to gerrymander Florida in favour of Hillary Clinton the main business of the meeting were the negotiations over a replacement to the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change that is scheduled to be signed in Paris, France at the end of this year.

Long term followers of those negotiations will be well aware that there is an informal bloc of mostly South American nations who due to their Marxist heritage are very opposed to capitalist market based solutions to climate change. This bloc has been particularly difficult of late pushing for a binary type agreement when a hybrid type agreement that would allow poor nations to develop is more favourable and probably the only type of agreement that would be signed. There is clearly a suspicion that China is running this South American bloc in order to control the pace of the negotiations essentially to buy time for the US to catch up with everybody else on the issue.

One of the main things that links this informal bloc is the Petrocaribe program which sees Venezuela supply oil to 17 Caribbean nations on extremely favourable terms and at a heavy discount. Recently Venezuela's economic problems along with the collapse in the price of oil has made Petrocaribe unsustainable and Venezuela has begun to significantly scale back the program. So although he did offer some funding for clean energy development Obama's main purpose of his trip to the Summit was to offer an alternative to Petrocaribe that would see the US take over as the main supplier of cheap oil to the Caribbean states. Many of those same states are of course asking the US to pass legislation to stop US oil companies from giving away free petrol generators to help them wean themselves of imported oil.

Within South America a lot of the commitment to Marxism stems from the Cold War and the US' School of the Americas operations across the continent. At this time not being a South American Marxist meant that you were subjected to Fascist dictatorships such as Pinochet in Chile and Videla and Galtieri in Argentina. The US' blockade of Cuba is probably the biggest and most public relic of this era. So by meeting with Castro Obama was also trying to sweeten the deal.

Whilst Obama was in Jamaica preparing to travel to Panama everyone's favourite weather controlling popstar Rihanna was in her native Barbados making the latest donation to a local hospital as part of her Clara Lionel charitable foundation. Barbados very pointedly refused to join Petrocaribe and Rihanna's foundation has long been a source of irritation within climate change negotiations. It was rumoured that Rihanna would then fly on from Barbados to the Summit of the Americas where she would be presented with some sort of award by Obama. In the end Rihanna instead returned to the US to attended the Coachella music festival.

The mere rumour however placed Rihanna on the agenda for the summit. The fact she didn't attend only confused matters further by raising questions about whether we'd been taken in by a false rumour or whether Rihanna had cancelled the event on my advice. The US' intention here was to use Rihanna as something of a smoke screen to disguise what was really going on from the Chinese. The hope being that would keep interest in Rihanna going throughout the rest of the year.

15:05 on 15/4/15 (UK date).