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The Time for Slumber Is Over. It's Time for a Fury of Action. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=40776"><span class="small">Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Saturday, 14 July 2018 08:54 |
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Rather writes: "From the farce of yesterday's hearing on Capitol Hill ('oversight' by mendacity) to the spectacle in Great Britain (a President's destabilizing, unstable, and racist interview) to the trailing exhaust of American leadership left in Brussels (with a friend like the U.S. who needs... Russia)."
Dan Rather. (photo: Christopher Patey)
The Time for Slumber Is Over. It's Time for a Fury of Action.
By Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page
14 July 18
 rom the farce of yesterday's hearing on Capitol Hill ("oversight" by mendacity) to the spectacle in Great Britain (a President's destabilizing, unstable, and racist interview) to the trailing exhaust of American leadership left in Brussels (with a friend like the U.S. who needs... Russia?) to what awaits in Helsinki (a bromance with a wily KGB agent), what we are witnessing is far beyond the realm of this reporter to put into full context.
I doubt Dante could imagine the circles in which we find ourselves. P.T. Barnum couldn't figure out a way to sell it. And Rod Serling would shake his head in disbelief. All metaphors are rendered largely impotent - be they circus, swamp, or dumpster fire - because they seem to understate the sheer dangerous absurdity of it all. There can be no individual accounting of all damage.
I surmise this is what in some ways passes for the strategy of the President and his accomplices. See how many reactionary judges they can install, how many loopholes for the rich and connected they can construct, how many protections to health, water and air they can shred before the inevitable backlash.
I list all of this not to sow the seeds of hopelessness. Quite the contrary. That is what the forces of authoritarianism wish - that they can launch a reclamation of the Gilded Age on the backs of a demoralized majority. But I have seen these types of actors before. I have seen these odds. They cannot understand that the forces of goodness can channel a fury of righteousness and action. The time for slumber is over. No one can ever argue that elections do not have consequences. Even with the hurdles they are erecting to democracy no President and no political party, no matter how cynical they may be, is bigger than the country at large.
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Thursday's Ludicrous Puppet Show in the House of Representatives |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Friday, 13 July 2018 14:02 |
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Pierce writes: "During breaks in the action at Thursday's ludicrous puppet show in the House of Representatives, while Peter Strzok was enjoying a richly earned break from being badgered by morons, I scoured the intertoobz for something (anything!) to read that didn't involve Louie Gohmert's head spinning off toward Anacostia."
FBI agent Peter Strzok. (photo: Roll Call)
Thursday's Ludicrous Puppet Show in the House of Representatives
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
13 July 18
It was the most embarrassing episode in representative democracy in 400 years.
 uring breaks in the action at Thursday’s ludicrous puppet show in the House of Representatives, while Peter Strzok was enjoying a richly earned break from being badgered by morons, I scoured the intertoobz for something (anything!) to read that didn’t involve Louie Gohmert’s head spinning off toward Anacostia.
I came upon this interesting report from the Financial Times which did, in its own way, put everything that happened in the House in a different kind of context. It has to do with the essential subject under discussion—namely, that the president* of the United States is something of a wholly owned subsidiary of Russian oligarchs, who have kept his business afloat and who had a great deal to do with how he became president*. It concerns a Trump Tower project in Toronto.
The Financial Times has been investigating the money behind Trump Toronto for 10 months. Legal documents, signed statements and two dozen interviews with people with knowledge of the project and the money that flowed through it reveal that the venture connects the US president with a shadowy post-Soviet world where politics and personal enrichment merge.
Some of the money flows that the Financial Times has established raise questions about Trump’s vulnerability to undue influence now that he is in the White House. These include evidence that Trump’s billionaire partner in the Toronto project authorised a secret $100m payment to a Moscow-based fixer representing Kremlin-backed investors. That payment was part of a series of transactions that generated millions for the backers of the Toronto venture—a project that, in turn, made millions for the future president.
A month after the 2007 groundbreaking, Trump wrote a letter to The Wall Street Journal citing the financing for “our” Trump Toronto project as “a testament to the strength of the Trump name and brand within the financial community”. But when the FT sent questions to the Trump Organization for this article, it declined to answer them, saying: “The Trump Organization was not the owner, developer or seller of the Trump International Hotel and Tower Toronto. Consequently, it had no involvement in the financing of the project. Instead, the company’s role was limited to licensing its brand and managing the hotel and residences, which it did until June 2017 when its agreement ended.”
Here are the simplest of the simple facts. Russia currently is run by a former KGB goon whose geopolitical goals include the destabilization of this country and the Western alliance generally. Russia also is a deeply criminal kleptocracy that profits only those oligarchs who stay on the goon’s good side. (Several of the ones who failed to do that ended up dead.) At this point in his business career, the president* of the United States could not find a bank in the United States who would give him a loan. So, he went overseas and found a number of friends among the Volga Bagmen.
After a series of corporate bankruptcies in the 1990s and early 2000s left the property business he had inherited from his father largely unable to borrow from mainstream banks, Trump turned to ever more obscure backers. He was able to borrow sporadically from Deutsche Bank, with whom he had a long and fractious relationship, but, from about the turn of the millennium, he also adopted a new model, under which he licensed his brand to skyscraper developments that the Trump Organization would then manage under contract.
This was a time when the former Soviet Union’s newly minted oligarchs were seeking foreign havens for their wealth. By 2008, Trump’s son, Donald Jr, was telling a real estate conference: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets?.?.?.?We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Some of this came through sales of individual units in Trump-branded properties, where Trump was sometimes entitled to a cut.
Just as long as we’re all on the same page. It always has been about the money, and to whom the president* owes it, and what else he might owe those folks, and what might he do to settle those debts. Which makes the display in the House on Thursday all the more comical, as well as being the most embarrassing episode in representative democracy since the dissolution of The Useless Parliament in 1625, and that one had an outbreak of bubonic plague to excuse its floundering. This one only had Steve King. Not sure which way I’d go on the swap there, actually.
It helps to make sense of the nonsense to remember that the fundamental position of the Republicans on the committee was that the FBI went out of its way during the 2016 presidential campaign to help Hillary Rodham Clinton. Nobody who was alive during that time can find that contention anything short of ridiculous. Nobody who was alive on October 28, 2016, when FBI director James Comey wrote his letter to Congress about Anthony Weiner’s laptop, can find that contention anything short of ridiculous. (I mean, hell, there’s data.) Nevertheless, that was the basis for hauling Peter Strzok up to Capitol Hill to play the role in which they have cast them in their own heads.
Peter Strzok has been a conjuring phrase in the particular magical wilderness ever since it became clear that Robert Mueller was closing in on the real scandal and that El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago was going to need a pretty thick cloud of squid ink to obscure the extent of his corruption. (As for who Peter Strzok really is, and what he’s really done for the country, kindly Doc Maddow had a nice wrap-up on her show Wednesday night. Turns out there might not have been The Americans without him.)
However, they couldn’t stop themselves, again. They needed video for their favorite TV news stars to slobber over, and they needed some clips to use this fall to gin up The Base. They got those, but I’m damned if I can figure out what else they got out of this exercise. Strzok was a good witness on his own behalf, slamming Gowdy down almost before Def Congress Jam got started.
The first mistake everyone made was making this a joint hearing between the House Judiciary Committee and the House Government and Oversight Committee. Not only did this divide the overall chair of the panel between Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and Trey Gowdy, the lopheaded Javert of Benghazi, Benghazi!, Benghazi!, but also it brought together an exaltation of wingnut crazy unmatched in the Congress since the last time Michele Bachmann dined alone with the voices in her head. These included:
The Padishah Emperor of Crazy People: Louie Gohmert of Texas.
The DUI Guy: Matt Gaetz of Florida.
The White-Supremacist, Nazi-Retweeting Guy: Steve King of Iowa.
The (Allegedly) Sexual-Assault Enabling Guy: Jim Jordan of Ohio.
The (Allegedly) Sexual-Assault Enabling Guy: Jim Jordan of Ohio.
The Beating Up Reporters Guy: Greg Gianforte of Montana.
The Health Care Is Terrorism Woman: Virginia Foxx of North Carolina.
The Grand Theft Auto Guy: Darrell Issa.
The Atheists Caused Sandy Hook Guy: Jody Hice of Georgia.
The People Who Have Babies For Guinea Pigs Guy: Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin.
This is not the best face you want to put on your serious investigation, and that’s even before you get to James Sensenbrenner’s chortling, “Trump won!” as though that was dispositive of anything except the modern relevance of the Electoral College. And while the Republicans got to roll out every deep state fantasy they’ve been nurturing carefully since they realized the kind of president* they were going to have to defend for four years, they went out of their way to remind people of…the kind of president they have to defend.
Jordan spent almost eight hours reminding the American people about “the dossier,” while his presence on TV reminded people of what’s going on at The Ohio State University these days. They had Gowdy’s repeating “Impeachment!” over and over again. They gave Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democrat of Illinois, a chance to ask Strzok about Rudy Giuliani’s possible connivance with the New York field office of the FBI, and it gave Strzok a chance to talk about how that connivance worried him.
Did they really want to be the people who kept reminding America of that, or of the pee-tape, or the people who insisted on injecting the idea of impeachment into the public dialogue? Everybody except Gohmert, who is a fool, and Steve Russell of Oklahoma, who came around to it at the end of the day, the Republicans tap-danced around Strzok’s relationship with DOJ reporter Lisa Page? Did they really want to get into marital infidelity in defense of this president*? Do they think any of this helped the White House? Do they think anything they did on Thursday scared Robert Mueller?
There’s no real point in recapping the highlights. The videos are going to be in regular rotation for quite a while now. It was, as it was called at various points in the hearing, a kangaroo court, a show trial, and a travesty of a sham of a mockery of a sham of two mockeries. But it was designed to be that. It was a performance piece. It was not a very well-cast one, and several of the lead actors fell into the orchestra pit, but it managed to run from curtain-up to curtain-down.
And there’s still the basic fact out there that the president* of the United States needed money to shore up his failing businesses, and he went to Russian oligarchs in league with a KGB goon at the head of an authoritarian nation to get it, and that we don’t know what he owes, and to whom, and what he’s willing to do to settle his debts.
Again, from the FT:
An alleged Kazakh money-laundering network channelled millions through apartment sales at the Trump SoHo; a Russian oligarch bought a Palm Beach estate from Trump in 2008 for $95m, more than double what Trump had paid for it four years earlier; in Florida, 63 Russians, some with political connections, spent $100m buying property at seven Trump-branded luxury towers, Reuters established. The money was not exclusively from the former Soviet Union: at the Trump Panama, some of it allegedly belonged to Latin American drug traffickers.
In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that many of the oligarchs who made their riches amid the downfall of the Soviet Union have protected their fortunes by advancing the interests of the ruling cliques at home. This wealth has been coursing through western markets, often disguised by shell companies. Trump’s sector, real estate, has long been susceptible to infusions of incognito money. A large proportion of sales of high-end US property takes place through companies whose true owners are hidden. A US Treasury investigation last year found that one in three cash buyers of top-end property was suspicious.
It’s about the money. It’s always been about the money.
"I am a dentist. So I read body language very, very well." – Rep. Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona.
Jesus fcking God.
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The Killing of a Blue Whale Reveals How Disconnected We Are From Nature |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48209"><span class="small">Philip Hoare, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Friday, 13 July 2018 13:49 |
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Hoare writes: "This week an Icelandic whaling company, Hvalur hf, caused uproar when it was revealed that it had killed a blue whale."
A blue whale. (photo: Getty)
The Killing of a Blue Whale Reveals How Disconnected We Are From Nature
By Philip Hoare, Guardian UK
13 July 18
We need a better story than the pathetic one played out by beautiful animals that we haul into the sea of our ignorance
 hey might as well have shot a giant panda. This week an Icelandic whaling company, Hvalur hf, caused uproar when it was revealed that it had killed a blue whale. Hvalur has killed hundreds of fin whales – mostly destined as meat for export to Japan. It resumed its hunt in June, after a three-year hiatus. But no blue whale – a highly endangered cetacean – has been deliberately killed for 40 years.
“We have never caught a blue whale in our waters since they were protected,” Kristján Loftsson, the managing director of Hvalur told CNN. “We see them in the ocean. When you approach a blue whale, it’s so distinct that you leave it alone.”
Hvalur claims that the whale was a blue-fin whale hybrid. But experts agree the slumped leviathan on the Icelandic killing slope shows all the features of the largest animal that has ever existed on Earth. The mottled blue skin, the black baleen, the relatively tiny, hooked dorsal fin – all point to a pure blue whale (as if its purity actually mattered). Having seen many blue whales at close quarters, I can attest to this identification. As Peter Wilson, a whale expert and tour guide to Iceland, notes in his blog: “Whether they thought it was a blue or had someone out there who doesn’t know the difference, it shows complete disregard for any idea of expertise and a scientifically supported sense of sustainability”.
Surely the killing of such an animal should raise a furore as great as the one that met the shooting of Cecil the lion by a Minnesota dentist in 2015? Yet the (potentially very painful) death of this blue whale follows a under-reported story in May that Japan had killed 122 pregnant minke whales in its 2018 whaling season (sorry, “field survey”). It all starts to look like a sadly familiar game. Who can offend the most? Can they get away with it?
The heart of this issue lies in appropriation. Who owns a whale? When a sperm whale died off the coast of the Netherlands two weeks ago, it was towed back to land and lifted on to a quayside, where a necropsy was performed to determine cause of death (pneumonia) and ascertain how to deal with live strandings – a vital question on the shores of the shallow North Sea, where there has been a spate of such incidents in recent years. Unlike Hvalur, the organisations involved were behaving absolutely honourably. But as usual, the public was told to keep away, for reasons of “health and safety”. Sometimes science can get in the way of the very thing it tries to understand. By removing a whale from public sight – as if it is somehow shameful – don’t we increase the same sense of disconnection that can allow an Icelandic whaler to kill a blue whale, or Japanese whalers to slay hundreds of minkes?
“Charismatic megafauna” – whales, elephants, rhinos, lions, polar bears – have become the ammunition at the front line of ecopolitics. They’re media-friendly memes in the polarised debate over the animate “resources” of our planet. Both sides use animals to further their aims. The animals lose out, twice over. Their right to selfdom is denied, and the distance between us – what the art critic John Berger called “the narrow abyss of miscomprehension” – increases.
This spring, Cape Cod’s Center for Coastal Studies announced that the North Atlantic right whale, of which fewer than 430 remain, faces extinction by 2050. In the past 12 months, 18 individuals have been killed by ship strikes or by being caught in fishing gear. Not a single new calf has been observed this year. These whales haven’t been hunted by Icelandic or Japanese whalers. They die within sight of US shores, in the purview of the richest, most powerful democracy on Earth. Ordinary people are left feeling powerless. It is the monolithic leviathan of state that Hobbes critiqued, versus the exquisite yet fragile leviathan of the sea.
Ever since it began, the environmental movement has used the weighty issue of whaling as a Manichean struggle of good and evil. But given the urgency of this situation, we need new ways to think about ourselves and animals – as a continuum, not a demarcation. There is no “them” and “us”. The radical contemporary philosopher Tim Morton has defined a “dark ecology”, as an expression of “irony, ugliness, and horror”.
Are we doomed to re-enact these narratives, playing hopelessly with archetypes while animals die, over and over again? Or can we find a better story than the pathetic one told by that deflated, beautiful animal, hauled out of the infinite sea and into our sea of ignorance?
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FOCUS: Israeli, Saudi, and Emirati Officials Pushed for Trump to Strike a "Grand Bargain" With Putin |
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Friday, 13 July 2018 12:07 |
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Entous writes: "The Emirati leader Mohammed bin Zayed said that Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, might be interested in resolving the conflict in Syria in exchange for the lifting of sanctions imposed in response to Russia's actions in Ukraine."
President Trump greets Mohammed bin Zayed, one of the leaders who has encouraged an end to U.S. sanctions on Russia in return for help removing Iranian forces from Syria. (photo: Jabin Botsford/Getty)
Israeli, Saudi, and Emirati Officials Pushed for Trump to Strike a "Grand Bargain" With Putin
By Adam Entous, The New Yorker
13 July 18
uring a private meeting shortly before the November, 2016, election, Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, floated to a longtime American interlocutor what sounded, at the time, like an unlikely grand bargain. The Emirati leader told the American that Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, might be interested in resolving the conflict in Syria in exchange for the lifting of sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
Current and former U.S. officials said that bin Zayed, known as M.B.Z., was not the only leader in the region who favored rapprochement between the former Cold War adversaries. While America’s closest allies in Europe viewed with a sense of dread Trump’s interest in partnering with Putin, three countries that enjoyed unparallelled influence with the incoming Administration—Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E.—privately embraced the goal. Officials from the three countries have repeatedly encouraged their American counterparts to consider ending the Ukraine-related sanctions in return for Putin’s help in removing Iranian forces from Syria.
Experts say that such a deal would be unworkable, even if Trump were interested. They say Putin has neither the interest nor the ability to pressure Iranian forces to leave Syria. Administration officials have said that Syria and Ukraine will be among the topics that Trump and Putin will discuss at their summit in Helsinki on July 16th. White House officials did not respond to a request for comment.
The special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his F.B.I. team, tasked with probing Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, have been investigating whether the U.A.E. facilitated contacts between Trump’s team and Russian officials and sought to influence U.S. politics. Nine days before Trump’s Inauguration, Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and a confidant of Steve Bannon, met at M.B.Z.’s resort in the Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, whom the Emiratis used as a go-between with Putin. (An April, 2017, Washington Post story that I co-wrote revealed the Indian Ocean encounter and stated that “the UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective that would be likely to require major concessions to Moscow on U.S. sanctions.”)
Mueller’s team has also focussed on Trump transition-team meetings in December, 2016, that involved Emirati and Russian officials. One, at a New York hotel, was attended by M.B.Z., and another, at Trump Tower, was attended by Sergey Kislyak, then Russia’s Ambassador in Washington. During the December 1, 2016, meeting between Kislyak and Trump’s transition team, both sides wanted to discuss the conflict in Syria, and the Russian Ambassador proposed arranging a conversation between Michael Flynn, the incoming national-security adviser, and people he referred to as his “generals,” according to congressional testimony by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. To prevent intelligence agencies from eavesdropping on the conversation, Kislyak proposed using a “secure line,” prompting Kushner to suggest using the secure communications gear housed at the Russian Embassy in Washington.
M.B.Z. is regarded as one of the Middle East’s strategic thinkers. More than other Arab leaders of his generation, he hails from the school of Realpolitik. During the Obama Administration, M.B.Z. sought to establish closer ties between the U.A.E. and Putin, in the hope of encouraging Moscow to scale back its partnership with Iran, particularly in Syria. (Much like Israel, the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia consider Iran their biggest strategic threat. They also lacked trust in President Obama.)
As an inducement for Putin to partner with Gulf states rather than Iran, the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia started making billions of dollars in investments in Russia and convening high-level meetings in Moscow, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, and the Seychelles.
It is unclear whether M.B.Z.’s preëlection proposal came from Putin himself or one of his confidants, or whether the Emirati leader came up with the idea. But the comment suggested that M.B.Z. believed that turning Putin against Iran would require sanctions relief for Moscow, a concession that required the support of the American President. If Hillary Clinton had won the election, the idea of accepting Russian aggression in Ukraine would have been a nonstarter, current and former U.S. officials told me. But Trump promised a different approach.
Israeli officials lobbied for rapprochement between Washington and Moscow soon after Trump’s election victory. In a private meeting during the transition, Ron Dermer, the Israeli Ambassador to the United States and one of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest confidants, said that the Israeli government was encouraging the incoming Trump Administration to coöperate more closely with Putin, starting in Syria, with the hope of convincing Moscow to push the Iranians to leave the country, an attendee told me.
Like M.B.Z., Netanyahu made courting Putin a priority, particularly after Russia’s military intervention in Syria in 2015. The Israeli leader wanted to insure that Israeli forces could continue to access Syrian airspace, which the Russians partially controlled, to prevent the deployment of advanced weapons systems by Iran and its proxies that could threaten the Jewish state. A senior Israeli official declined to comment on Dermer’s message but said that “Israel does believe it is possible to get a U.S.-Russian agreement in Syria that would push the Iranians out,” and that doing so “could be the beginning of an improvement in U.S.-Russian relations over all.”
Separately, a former U.S. official recalled having a conversation after Trump’s Inauguration with an Israeli Cabinet minister with close ties to Netanyahu in which the minister pitched the American on the idea of “trading Ukraine for Syria.” The former official told me, “You can understand why Russia’s help with Syria is a far higher priority for Israel than pushing back on Russian aggression in Ukraine. But I considered it a major stretch for Israel to try to convince the United States that U.S. interests are well served by looking the other way at Russian aggression in Ukraine. Of course, Trump may disagree for his own reasons.”
After Trump took office, the idea was raised again, by Adel al-Jubeir, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, and Abdullah bin Zayed, the foreign minister of the U.A.E., during a private March, 2017, dinner that included several other guests. “Their message was ‘Why don’t we lift the Ukrainian sanctions on Russia in exchange for getting the Russians to push Iran out of Syria,’ ” an attendee recalled the foreign ministers saying. A senior U.A.E. official said that he did not recall the discussion. The dinner attendee told me, “It wasn’t a trial balloon. They were trying to socialize the idea.”
The timing, however, could not have been worse politically, current and former U.S. officials said. In addition to the looming Mueller investigation, members of Congress were pushing at the time to expand sanctions against Russia, not reduce them. Trump told aides that he was frustrated that he could not make progress because of political opposition in Washington. The Americans who heard the Israeli, Emirati, and Saudi pitches in late 2016 and early 2017 assumed that the idea was dead. But ahead of the Helsinki summit, Trump started making statements that suggested he could be open to making a deal with Putin after all.
On June 8th, Trump called for Russia to be readmitted to the Group of Seven industrial nations. (Russia was expelled four years ago, after it annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region.) Then, during a dinner at the G-7 summit in Canada, Trump reportedly said that Crimea was Russian because the people who lived there spoke Russian. Several weeks later, when asked whether reports that he would drop Washington’s long-standing opposition to the annexation of Crimea were true, Trump responded, “We’re going to have to see.”
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oddamn them all.
