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A Mission to Tell a Story About Where We Might Be Heading as a Society |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35918"><span class="small">Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Friday, 07 September 2018 12:33 |
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Moore writes: "I have spent the better part of this year constructing a film that will not only explain how the @#&% we ended up with Trump, but also help show us the way out."
Filmmaker Michael Moore. (photo: The New York Times)
A Mission to Tell a Story About Where We Might Be Heading as a Society
By Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page
07 September 18
 n my lifetime, I've had maybe only a dozen days like the one I woke up to this morning.
It's that rare day that a new film of mine will have its World Premiere, and that is what will happen tonight for FAHRENHEIT 11/9 at the Opening Night kick-off of the Toronto International Film Festival, North America's premiere film event. I am just hours away from that moment when the lights will dim, the curtain will rise and my work, with all its revelations and warnings and dangerous ideas -- well, dangerous politically to a President who has no intention of ever leaving office unless the Secret Service physically remove him -- will be shared with the world. This siren call of a movie is my contribution to ignite the fire underneath a despairing, dispirited public who must -- MUST -- do its job and end the madness at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I have spent the better part of this year constructing a film that will not only explain how the @#&% we ended up with Trump, but also help show us the way out. I must warn you -- I do not pull ANY punches in the film. No one is spared - not even me.
It is already being talked about in the press I saw this morning as one of the most “anticipated” films of the fall. There’s already a wonderful piece in The Hollywood Reporter (which I’ll post later). I especially liked Time Out NY listing it as one of the must-see “horror movies” of the year! Haha. THAT it is.
But here’s what I want to say to you, from my heart: FAHRENHEIT 11/9 is the moment of truth we've needed for some time, and I truly believe its release nationwide on Sept. 21st will be the real beginning of the end for Donald J. Trump (and perhaps, more importantly, the eventual end of the rotten, corrupt system that gave us Trump in the first place).
I also believe we will have, as we approach November 6th, a massive tsunami of women, young people and people of color (i.e., TWO-THIRDS of the American public) who maybe -- just maybe -- will drown the whole stinkin' lot of them in a record number of ballots for a midterm election.
But this will not happen on its own -- and any early celebrations of victory like those that happened in 2016 are sure to keep the Republicans in power for years to come.
Donald Trump did not just fall from the sky. His rise to the presidency was not an aberration and should not have come as a shock. It was the logical end result of a long, downward spiral in the U.S. that culminated in one of our most loathsome citizens conquering our most powerful office. One of our most deceptive minds commanding the bully pulpit. One of our most fraudulent hucksters armed with the powers of the presidency to protect him.
Ever since that fateful morning, at 2:29 AM on 11/9/16, when the Associated Press officially called the election for Trump, we have been trying to save what's left of our democracy. This is not a film telling you what a jerk Donald Trump is or what an buffoon Donald Trump is or what a liar Donald Trump is. You already know ALL of that. Everybody already knows all of that (except for your conservative brother-in-law whose mind you’ll never be able to change). I wouldn’t waste your time or my time making that kind of film. And with all due respect to your conservative brother-in-law, we don’t need him. We’re the majority in this country, he’s the minority, he knows it and that’s why he’s so mad!
Instead, my team and I have been on a mission to tell a much, much more important story. It’s a story about false hope and what happens when we get suckered in. It’s a story about deception and betrayal. It’s a story about what happens to a nation when it’s hit rock bottom. It’s the story about who we are as a people and what it means to be an American in the era of Donald J. Trump. Finally, it’s a story about where we might be heading as a society.
My crew and I have moved heaven and earth to make sure we deliver this film to you in time to have an impact on this year's midterm elections. I’m excited to announce to you that “Fahrenheit 11/9” will open in more movie theaters than any of my previous films -- over 1,500 theaters across America!
(It will also be opening in dozens of countries around the world.)
We open nationwide on September 21st, 45 days before the most important election in American history (and with voter registration still open nationwide!).
I’ve made a film that is specifically meant to be seen on a big screen, in a dark theater, filled hundreds of your fellow Americans. My hope is that you will experience FAHRENHEIT 11/9 this way and not home alone on a computer or phone. There will be no streaming before the election. The movie works best as a big shared experience. It's the best way to truly absorb the big story I'm telling you.
Any bit of anger, despair, or frustration you’ve felt over the past few years must be channeled into action this fall!
I am now on my way to Toronto. I don't have to make a run for the border a la "The Handmaid's Tale" -- yet. For tonight, I'll just be showing a movie. Then on Monday night in Flint, I will hold the US premiere of FAHRENHEIT 11/9. After that, everyone will have the chance to see it.
We are the majority -- never forget that. But we need to rise up. That’s the only way out of this mess. Tune in to Facebook Live tonight and I’ll bring you on the stage with me!
All my best,
Michael Moore
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This Is How Republicans Led Kavanaugh Into an Ambush |
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Friday, 07 September 2018 12:33 |
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Millhiser writes: "Republican efforts to keep much of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's record secret in the lead up to Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing placed the nominee in an terrible position this past week, often making him appear evasive, unprepared, or even outright deceptive."
Brett Kavanaugh. (photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA)
ALSO SEE: Kavanaugh Hearing: John Dean to Warn of a
'Pro-Presidential Powers' Supreme Court
This Is How Republicans Led Kavanaugh Into an Ambush
By Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress
07 September 18
By trying to keep Kavanaugh's records secret, Republicans set him up for embarrassment.
 epublican efforts to keep much of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s record secret in the lead up to Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing placed the nominee in an terrible position this past week, often making him appear evasive, unprepared, or even outright deceptive. As law professor Rick Hasen noted on Twitter,
Neil Gorsuch, who occupies a seat on the Supreme Court that Republicans held open for a year until Donald Trump could fill it, is arrogant. He is arrogant in a profound, personality-defining way that pervades his conduct on the bench and even sometimes enrages his conservative colleagues. It is less clear, however, whether Judge Kavanaugh is an outright liar or merely a man who was caught badly off guard during the most important job interview of his life.
Republicans did their own Supreme Court nominee a disservice by trying to keep so much of his record out of the public eye. Their secrecy meant that Kavanaugh had to respond to attacks on the fly, often while trying to remember what he meant in an email written 15 years ago, and without any warning about which attacks were coming.
Kavanaugh’s stilted performance at his hearing should be a warning to future nominees and their supporters. Sometimes, transparency is the best way to protect the nominee.
Advance warning
Compare the GOP’s treatment of Kavanaugh’s records to the way confirmation fights ordinarily play out. Like Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan, Kavanaugh worked in the White House before he became a judge. After Roberts and Kagan were nominated, the National Archives turned over piles of documents related to their work in the Reagan and Clinton administrations. Some of these documents painted the nominees in a bad light, such as a series of memos revealing that Roberts unsuccessfully tried to neuter much of the Voting Rights Act during his time in the Justice Department.
The Roberts and Kagan documents were available online days or weeks before their hearings, which meant that armies of lawyers and political operatives combed through them looking for ways to attack the nominee. Most of these attacks made their way into news articles well before the nominee’s confirmation hearing.
But the Bush and Obama White House’s transparency during the Roberts and Kagan confirmations ended up redounding to the benefit of their respective nominees. It meant that, by the time Roberts and Kagan appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, they already had a pretty good idea what sort of questions they would face. Roberts and Kagan had ample time to revisit the things they’d written years or decades prior, and offer their Senate interlocutors truthful answers that still painted their past work in the best possible light.
For a brief moment, it seemed possible the Kavanaugh hearing would play out more or less the same way. Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sought a raft of documents from the National Archives, and asked that they be turned over to senators by August 15.
But Kavanaugh also came of age in a very different era than Roberts and Kagan. Roberts served in the Reagan administration, when most intra-office communication was conducted by phone calls or internal memos. Email existed in the mid-to-late 90s, when Kagan served in the Clinton White House, but it was just beginning to become the universal method of conducting business that was by the time Kavanaugh joined the Bush administration.
The result was that Kavanaugh’s documents totaled an estimated 900,000 pages or more. The National Archives warned Grassley that it would not be able to produce all of these documents until the end of October. The Judiciary Committee tried to fill in some of the gaps by seeking documents from the Bush presidential library, but that meant that the document production would be overseen by a partisan operative closely aligned with former President George W. Bush, and not by a more objective archivist. Senate Republicans made matters even worse by designating many of the documents “COMMITTEE CONFIDENTIAL,” meaning that they could only be viewed by senators in secret.
Bring it
It’s not hard to guess why Republicans decided to move forward with the hearing this week, despite the fact that only some of Kavanaugh’s record was available — and the most likely explanation isn’t secrecy. If the hearing were delayed until after the documents arrived in late October, Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote would have to wait until after this November’s election. That could potentially place lame duck Republicans in the awkward position of voting on a Republican Supreme Court nominee shortly after they lost control of the Senate.
It would have raised a cloud of illegitimacy over the Supreme Court’s Republican majority, and it would have done so while a similar cloud still looms over the Court thanks to the dubious circumstances that placed Gorsuch on its bench.
But the GOP’s unusual treatment of Kavanaugh’s documents meant that Judge Kavanaugh came into his confirmation hearing without adequate warning about how he would be questioned by Democrats. It also meant that specific documents trickled out over the course of the week, several of which created the impression that Kavanaugh was hiding something.
In one particularly dramatic moment, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) announced he would release several “COMMITTEE CONFIDENTIAL” documents to the public. After Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) read aloud a rule suggesting Booker could be expelled from the Senate for doing so, Booker responded “Bring it.” (It is, of course, worth noting that a Senate expulsion requires a two-thirds Senate majority.)
Had these documents been released in advance of the hearing, as they were for Roberts and Kagan, Kavanaugh could have prepared crisp, clear — and, most importantly, believable — explanation for his past actions.
Consider, for example, a 2001 email from Kavanaugh to former Justice Department official John Yoo. During his 2006 confirmation hearing for his current job, Judge Kavanaugh testified that he was unaware of a Bush era warrantless wiretapping program until the program was revealed to the public by the New York Times. In reality, Kavanaugh wrote an email to Yoo less than a week after the 9/11 attack, which asked about whether a program similar to the one Bush eventually authorized would be constitutional.
One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that Kavanaugh intentionally committed perjury in 2006 and deserves to be in federal prison. Another explanation is that Kavanaugh simply forgot that he’d written that email to Yoo — a brief email he wrote during what must have been an extraordinarily stressful time for everyone in the White House.
Had Kavanaugh known in advance that this email exists — and that it would become public during his confirmation process — he could have prepared an entirely plausible explanation for its existence. “Thank you senator for the question,” he could have replied. “I regret that my 2006 testimony was not entirely accurate. That was an unintentional error on my part. I wrote that email to John Yoo during an unusually stressful time and apologize that I did not recall writing it five years later.”
It would have been an entirely believable explanation. I would have believed him.
Instead, Kavanaugh gave a halting response when Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) on Wednesday after Leahy asked him if he ever worked with Yoo “on the constitutional implications of any warrantless surveillance program.”
“I can’t rule that… right in the wake of September 11?” Kavanaugh replied. “It was all hands on deck on all fronts.” The Yoo email became public shortly thereafter.
Similarly, a series of “COMMITTEE CONFIDENTIAL” emails revealed that Kavanaugh received stolen information from a Republican Senate aide named Manny Miranda — Miranda hacked into Democratic records while he worked in the Senate and stole confidential communications regarding how Democrats planned to oppose several Bush judicial nominees. This prompted an embarrassing series of questions from Leahy to Kavanaugh about whether Kavanaugh knew that the information was stolen.
Again, had Kavanaugh known in advance that these questions were coming, he could have taken responsibility for not recognizing that he was receiving hacked information, apologized, and devised a plausible-sounding explanation for why he did not realize what Miranda was up to at the time. Instead, he was forced to construct an answer in real time to why he wasn’t bothered by an email with the subject line “spying” that began “I have a friend who is a mole for us on the left.”
My point is not to exonerate Kavanaugh. My personal view is that some of the attacks on Kavanaugh’s honesty are troubling, some are rather dubious, and others paint Kavanaugh as more of a weasel than a liar. Kavanaugh testified in 2006, for example, that Judge Charles Pickering, an appellate court nominee that Democrats opposed because of Pickering’s record on race, “was not one of the judicial nominees that I was primarily handling.” In reality, Kavanaugh did work on the Pickering nomination — though his statement that did not have primary responsibility for Pickering appears to be technically true.
Instead, my point is that transparency isn’t just a virtue for its own sake. Transparency often provides great benefits to the party that discloses information. Kavanaugh would have been better off if he’d not been ambushed in the middle of his confirmation hearing. And it was his own team’s fault that he did not know how he would be attacked in advance.
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The Simple Solution to Inequality |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47654"><span class="small">Matt Bruenig, Jacobin</span></a>
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Friday, 07 September 2018 12:32 |
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Bruenig writes: "How did the Nordic countries become more equal? Simple: they attacked the wealth of the super rich."
The New York Stock Exchange. (photo: Ben Hider/NYSE Euronext)
The Simple Solution to Inequality
By Matt Bruenig, Jacobin
07 September 18
How did the Nordic countries become more equal? Simple: they attacked the wealth of the super rich.
 hen I first read reviews of Nima Sanandaji’s Debunking Utopia: Exposing the Myth of Nordic Socialism a couple of years ago, I found most of the reported claims of the book fairly uninteresting. For instance, Sanandaji argues that Nordic longevity is partially caused by healthy lifestyles, not just high-quality public health care (which Sanandaji nonetheless thinks is a good idea — “I am myself in favor of the public sector providing health care”). Characterizing this point as “debunking” seems a bit much insofar as I’ve never seen anyone argue that the presence of public health care is the sole determinant of lifespans.
After wading through uninteresting tidbits like this and the vague handwaving that is typical of this genre (homogeneity, egalitarian culture, etc.), Sanandaji does end up making one very interesting claim that he relies upon throughout the book and which is the central point of most of the reviews I have read: Nordic equality precedes the welfare state and (implicitly) has little to do with it.
Here’s Sanandaji:
Yes, it is true that Nordic people have low levels of poverty. And certainly, to some degree we can explain this by the aid given to the less fortunate by the public sector. However, researchers have convincingly shown that Nordic countries moved towards income equality in a time when they combined small public sectors and low taxes with free markets.
Again:
Certainly, by distributing incomes and providing services such as universal health care, the welfare states do contribute to more equal incomes. Much like long life spans and low child mortality, however, even income distribution evolved in the Nordics before the transition to large welfare states.
Interestingly, Sanandaji is more positive about the welfare state in the text of his book than the reviews (or Sanandaji in other presentations) let on. As seen above, he always precedes his debunking of the welfare state with a statement that it “certainly” holds down inequality to some degree. But he nevertheless does go on to suggest, as the reviewers indicate, that the welfare state does not play a big role in the region’s low levels of poverty and inequality.
Despite making this claim over and over, Sanandaji does not actually provide evidence that backs it up. Worse than that, the evidence he does cite, which is only about the pretax incomes of the top 10 percent, appears to suggest that the best way to hold down the pretax income of the top 10 percent is through a massive expropriation event, followed by high taxes and public ownership of wealth. He says nothing about this in his book and, being a libertarian of sorts, presumably does not support these ideas.
Despite reviewers writing that “Sanandaji is systematic and innovative in the use of historical and empirical data in explanation of the Nordic experience,” all he really does on this key point is cite two papers that he does not describe in any detail. The papers are “The long-run history of income inequality in Denmark: Top incomes from 1870 to 2010” by Atkinson and Søgaard and “The Evolution of Top Incomes in an Egalitarian Society; Sweden, 1903-2004” by Roine and Waldenström.
In both studies, the authors use tax data to determine the pretax income shares of the top 10 percent and further subdivisions of the top 10 percent — the top 5 percent, top 1 percent, and so on. This type of evidence is irrelevant for the claims Sanandaji makes for two reasons:
- Pretax income does not count the welfare state. As the name suggests, “pretax income” refers to the distribution of income “before” counting the taxes and transfers of the welfare state. Indeed, in the Swedish paper, the authors even go so far as to strip out taxable transfer payments like “unemployment insurance, sickness payments, and parental leave payments” in order to ensure that their definition of income excludes all welfare benefits. Needless to say, an income concept that intentionally ignores the welfare state is not going to tell you much about the effect of the welfare state. For that, you need to measure disposable income, not pretax income.
- Top 10 percent income shares are not a complete picture of inequality. There is a whole 90 percent of people below the top 10 percent, and if you want to talk about inequality, you need to break down the distribution of their incomes as well. This is especially true when you are talking about poverty, because poverty is about how much income the bottom gets relative to the middle. It has nothing to do with top incomes. Yet Sanandaji cites this evidence as proving “low levels of poverty” precede the welfare state. The Danish study does have some data on the pretax incomes of those below the top decile that it spends a section on, but that data is mostly incomplete in early years (for example, in 1903, the tax system only touched 26 percent of Danish families).
Beyond these particular problems, Sanandaji also continually conflates the claim that 1) inequality was already low before the welfare state with the claim that 2) the Nordic countries have always been fairly equal, going so far as to quote his own brother saying that the Nordics never had “full-scale feudalism” in support of the latter contention. But the studies he cites — which, again, don’t measure the welfare state — actually show that pretax top incomes used to be extremely high in these countries, before coming down significantly in the first half of the last century (i.e. during the Great Depression and the two World Wars).
Measuring incomes right after the early-century top-income collapse and before the mid-century welfare state buildup in order to suggest the Nordic countries are just generally egalitarian is kind of silly. If anything, the more plausible story is that the welfare state locked in the one-off income collapses by imposing high taxes that prevented the rich from re-accumulating the wealth that they lost. Indeed, this is the theory offered in the Swedish paper.
It is hard to know whether Sanandaji is being intentionally deceptive in citing these studies in support of some of the claims he makes or if he genuinely does not understand how they work. He does not discuss the studies at all except to quote from the abstract of one of them.
Although the Danish study is limited by sparse data and a shifting income concept, the Swedish study is surprisingly robust. Old Swedish tax data distinguishes between labor income and capital income, and it is even possible to determine how much wealth those with top incomes owned over time. This allows for a more detailed examination of precisely why top incomes changed over time in Sweden. And the lesson of that examination appears to be that you trim down top incomes by taking their wealth.
The Swedish paper finds, firstly, that the pretax income share of the top 10 percent fell dramatically during the first half of the twentieth century and that this drop was almost entirely driven by the collapse of the incomes of the top 1 percent.
After the pre-1950 fall, the pretax income shares stabilize for a bit and then start to fall again in the 1970s.
The authors of the Swedish paper decompose the incomes of the top 1 percent into capital income, business income, and labor income in order to figure out what happened during this period. They find that 78 percent of the decline in the top 1 percent’s income share between 1912 and 1935 was due to drops in capital and business income. Around 57 percent of the continued decline of the top 1 percent’s income share between 1935 and 1951 was because of drops in capital and business income.
Why did capital income plummet for the 1 percent before 1950? Mechanically speaking, there are two possible causes, both of which happen to be the case.
The first cause is the decline of capital’s share of output.
Before 1920, around 35 to 45 percent of Swedish income was being paid out to capital. By 1950, it was down around 25 percent. Capital’s share dipped again in the 1970s, which is also the second time we see the pretax income shares of the top 1 percent fall considerably.
The second cause is the decline of the wealth share of the top 1 percent. At its peak in the 1910s, the top 1 percent of Swedes (in terms of income) owned over 60 percent of the country’s wealth. By 1950, they only owned around 25 percent of the country’s wealth.
When you put the two causes together, you get a pretty clear story about what happened to the pretax incomes of Sweden’s top 1 percent before 1950: they lost over half of their share of the national capital, and the capital they had left started receiving a much lower rate of return. These two changes dramatically reduced the amount of capital income the top 1 percent received, and thereby dramatically reduced their share of total national income.
Before we get into why the 1 percent lost so much of their capital and why capital’s share declined by so much, let us pause to reflect on what this paper, which Sanandaji cites approvingly, actually teaches us about how to reduce pretax income equality. If you were using Sweden’s pre-1950 experience as a guide, what you would do is expropriate the majority of the top 1 percent’s wealth and then immiserate capital further by lowering the rate of investment return. I can hear Sanandaji right now: it’s a myth that the welfare state is what gets you equality, it’s actually the wanton destruction of the capitalist class.
Returning to our story: why did the 1 percent lose so much of their wealth during this period, and why did capital’s share decline so much?
The authors aren’t much help here, writing that “the question of why the top wealth share decreased so substantially has no obvious answer.” They do go on to speculate that “the effects of the Great Depression” and the “dramatic collapse of the industrial empire controlled by the Swedish industrialist Ivar Krueger in 1932” are probably the most important causes of the wealth decline. They also speculatively reject the idea that the World Wars played a big part since Sweden was not directly involved, but I think this is an error on their part as there are significant wealth drops during the World Wars in their dataset and affluent Swedes likely owned assets outside of their own country.
While the authors provide little guidance as to why capital’s share declined so much, we do know that one way or another, workers started getting a bigger piece of the pie during this period. I don’t think it’s too out there to suppose that the Swedish labor movement had a lot to do with that. One of the errors Sanandaji makes in his treatment of the Nordics generally is that he only discusses their welfare state, ignoring their strong labor unions, which are just as important to the Nordic model and just as heavily emphasized by advocates of that model.
The final question is: why didn’t the 1 percent gradually re-accumulate the wealth that they had lost and run inequality right back to where it was?
The authors provide two answers. First, the high taxes of the post-1950s welfare state prevented the top 1 percent from having enough disposable income to amass new piles of capital.
Second, since wealth could no longer accumulate at the top of society, it instead “accumulated in the corporate and government sector and among the rest of the population.” The accumulation of wealth in the government sector was especially dramatic in the post-1950 welfare state period.
In 1950, the Swedish government owned 14 percent of the national wealth. By 1977, it was 43 percent. Once again, Sanandaji’s reduction of the Nordic model to the welfare state blinds him to its other aspects, in this case the high level of state ownership.
Sanandaji’s attempt to debunk the Nordic model starts with him admitting that the welfare state cuts down on inequality some and then pivots to arguing that welfare states don’t matter that much for inequality and poverty. He tries to support his claim by citing studies that neither measure welfare states nor overall inequality but show the pretax income shares of the top 10 percent. Those studies demonstrate that the Swedish way to rein in top incomes is massive wealth expropriation followed by high taxes and government ownership of capital.
Needless to say, none of this debunks anything the Left says about the Nordic countries or about how to tackle inequality generally. While you wouldn’t know it from the glowing right-wing reviews, Sanandaji’s book actually lends credence to the idea that strong labor movements, aggressive taxation, and robust build-ups of the public sector are the key to cutting down the incomes of the super rich.
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A Government for Impunity in Guatemala |
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Friday, 07 September 2018 12:32 |
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Weld writes: "Jimmy Morales, framed against a backdrop of uniformed soldiers, made a dramatic statement. He announced the overthrow not of a head of state [...] but rather of the only body capable of holding his government accountable for its corruption."
Protesters in Guatemala. (photo: Santiago Billy/Comvite)
A Government for Impunity in Guatemala
By Kirsten Weld, NACLA
07 September 18
A note on Guatemalan president Jimmy Morales' dissolution of the country's groundbreaking anti-impunity commission
 he imagery borrowed overtly, and self-consciously, from the military coups of the 1980s: as armored jeeps rolled through the streets of Guatemala City and marimba music chimed ominously over the radio, Guatemalan president Jimmy Morales, framed against a backdrop of uniformed soldiers, made a dramatic statement. He announced the overthrow not of a head of state— though Guatemala is no stranger to the autogolpe, or self-coup—but rather of the only body capable of holding his government accountable for its corruption. The UN-backed Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), Morales proclaimed, will be expelled from the country in 2019.
CICIG quickly found itself in the crosshairs of powerful military and business sectors involved in customs fraud, narcotrafficking, and money laundering.Since its establishment in 2007, CICIG, mandated to provide international support for local judicial processes, has been an uncommonly effective tool for tackling Guatemala’s “parallel state”—the shady networks of illegal clandestine groups which have, since the country’s long civil war (1960-1996), thoroughly captured state institutions. CICIG’s work strengthening Guatemala’s judicial capacity, cracking open formerly untouchable criminal cartels, and assisting the prosecutions of corrupt officials at the top echelons of local power structures earned it global plaudits. Accordingly, CICIG quickly found itself in the crosshairs of powerful military and business sectors involved in customs fraud, narcotrafficking, and money laundering. For years now, the Right has been trying to get rid of it.
CICIG’s survival until this point, in the face of such implacable opposition, can be partly credited to the backing it received from the United States. Even if the U.S.’ motives were the usual ones—to secure a safe investment climate for foreign capital, one unsullied by gross acts of criminality on the part of Guatemalan partners—the investigative work facilitated by that support was transformative. Morales’ predecessor as president, army general Otto Pérez Molina, now sits in prison largely because of CICIG, and the commission has repeatedly signalled that Morales and several of his family members, accused of fraud and illegal campaign financing, could be next on the chopping block.
But the Trump administration seems disinclined to continue its past level of support for CICIG. Morales has made a concerted play for U.S. favor, not only endorsing its deeply unpopular decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem but moving Guatemala’s own embassy to Jerusalem as an act of solidarity. Key players within the U.S. government, such as Republican senator Marco Rubio, have spuriously alleged that CICIG is in league with the Kremlin. And other reliable U.S. allies in the region, including Colombian president Álvaro Úribe Vélez—himself the subject of numerous corruption investigations—have denounced the commission and its lead prosecutor, the Colombian jurist Iván Velázquez. In response to Morales’ announcing the termination of CICIG’s mandate, the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala issued a conspicuously milquetoast statement which neither condemned the decision nor threatened any consequences.
Correctly gauging that the hemispheric political winds had shifted, the powers behind Morales decided to make their move, sending tanks to surround CICIG’s headquarters. CACIF, the powerful association of agro-industrial and commercial interests, quickly endorsed the government’s decision, and while human rights organizations issued vehement denunciations, whether they have the clout to reverse it depends on the degree of popular mobilization and international assistance they are able to muster. As the editorialists at the independent news outlet Plaza Pública put it, “It is not the moment to lose hope, but rather to stand tall and take to the streets, to defend the struggle for justice.”
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ost weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, the meaning of Bob Woodward’s new book and the New York Times op-ed by an anonymous administration official, the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, and John McCain’s legacy.
