|
FOCUS | Beyond Golden Shower Diplomacy: Preserving the Positive Legacy of an Empire in Decline |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=38620"><span class="small">Alfred W. McCoy, TomDispatch</span></a>
|
|
Wednesday, 23 May 2018 12:28 |
|
McCoy writes: "Month by month, tweet by tweet, the events of the past two years have made it clearer than ever that Washington's once-formidable global might is indeed fading."
Donald Trump. (photo: Getty)
Beyond Golden Shower Diplomacy: Preserving the Positive Legacy of an Empire in Decline
By Alfred W. McCoy, TomDispatch
23 May 18
When I was young, I often imagined myself as an American diplomat. Back in the early 1960s, it seemed like serving my country in such a role would be an honorable, even glorious, path to take. Can you believe that I ever thought such a thing in this twenty-first-century moment when diplomats by the hundreds are being pushed out of, or have fled, the State Department? I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that, despite my dreams, I’m not today the U.S. ambassador to South Korea (or Germany or Turkey or scores of other countries) -- not that, these days, anyone is. As those of you who read TomDispatch might guess, I never ended up in the State Department or anywhere else in the U.S. government in a job dealing with the rest of the world. Instead, sometime in the 1960s, in the midst of the horrors of the Vietnam War, my urge to serve went into opposition and I’ve never looked back.
However, that ancient Tom Engelhardt and his dreams popped into mind again this week when I read today’s piece by historian and TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, whose take on this country's fall from imperial grace looks ever more eerily accurate as the Trump era progresses, day by day, tweet by tweet. Only this week, for instance, National (in)Security Advisor John Bolton evidently tried to depth-charge the coming North Korean talks in Singapore by comparing that country's nuclear situation to what he called the “Libyan model.” Who -- certainly not Kim Jong-un and crew -- could forget what happened to de-nuked Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi? (In Hillary Clinton’s infamous words, laughingly said, about the U.S. intervention in his country in 2011, “We came, we saw, he died.”) And then President Trump, evidently misunderstanding what “the Libyan model” even was, followed up by directly threatening the North Korean leader with Gaddafi’s fate. Brilliant! But I digress.
McCoy, thinking about what American decline amid such “diplomatic” chaos means on a planet in its own kind of decline, reminds us that in these last decades the urge to serve globally wasn’t mine alone (or that of my then-future wife who joined the Peace Corps in 1964). There has, in fact, been a certain American tradition of grassroots involvement with the world -- ranging from evangelicals to military veterans to Peace Corps volunteers -- a tradition that we might indeed sadly lose in the chaos of an American world turning itself upside down.
As for me, I’ve always thought that TomDispatch represented my youthful urge to serve transferred to another dimension, my own aging version of citizen diplomacy. But enough about me. Consider instead what McCoy has to say about a world increasingly in chaos and what might be lost in it.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Beyond Golden Shower Diplomacy
Preserving the Positive Legacy of an Empire in Decline
 onth by month, tweet by tweet, the events of the past two years have made it clearer than ever that Washington’s once-formidable global might is indeed fading. As the American empire unravels with previously unimagined speed, there are many across this country’s political spectrum who will not mourn its passing. Both peace activists and military veterans have grown tired of the country’s endless wars. Trade unionists and business owners have come to rue the job losses that accompanied Washington’s free-trade policies. Anti-globalization protesters and pro-Trump populists alike cheered the president’s cancellation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The idea of focusing on America and rebuilding the country’s tattered infrastructure has a growing bipartisan appeal.
But before we join this potential chorus of “good riddance” to U.S. global power, it might be worth pausing briefly to ask whether the acceleration of the American decline by President Trump’s erratic foreign policy might not come with unanticipated and unpleasant costs. As Americans mobilize for the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential contest, they might look beyond Washington’s mesmerizing celebrity scandals and consider instead the hidden consequences of the country’s ongoing withdrawal from the global arena. Indeed, this fitful, uncontrolled retreat carries with it such serious risks that it might be time for ordinary voters and political activists alike to put foreign policy, in the broadest sense, at the top of their electoral watch list.
First, let’s just admit the obvious. After 18 months in office, Trump’s one-man style of diplomacy, though potentially capable of a few “wins,” is clearly degrading American global stature. After surveying 134 countries, Gallup’s pollsters recently reported that worldwide approval of U.S. leadership has plunged from 48% in 2016 to a record low of 30%, a notch below China’s 31% and significantly under Germany’s 41%.
As Trump has abrogated one international accord after another, observers worldwide have struggled to find some rationale for decisions that seem questionable on their merits and have frayed relations with long-standing allies. Given his inordinate obsession with the “legacy” of Barack Obama, epitomized in a report, whether true or not, of his ritual “defiling” of his predecessor’s Moscow hotel bed via the “golden showers” of Russian prostitutes, there’s a curious yet coherent logic to his foreign policy. You might even think of it as Golden Shower diplomacy. Whatever Obama did, Trump seems determined to undo with a visceral vehemence: the Trans-Pacific trade pact (torn up), the Paris climate accord (withdrawn), the Iran nuclear freeze (voided), close relations with NATO allies (damaged), diplomatic relations with Cuba (frozen), Middle Eastern military withdrawal (reversed), ending the Afghan war (cancelled), the diplomatic pivot to Asia (forgotten), and so on into what already seems like an eternity.
As bizarre as all this might be, Trump’s four to eight years presiding over what still passes for U.S. foreign policy through such personal pique will have lasting consequences. The American presence on the global stage will be further reduced, potentially opening the way for the rise of those autocratic powers, Beijing and Moscow, hostile to the liberal international order that Washington promoted for the past 70 years, even as -- thanks to Trump’s love of fossil fuels -- the further degradation of the planetary environment occurs.
The Delicate Duality of American Global Power
To fully understand what’s at stake, you would need to reach back to the dawn of U.S. global dominion and try to grasp the elusive character of the power that went with it. In the closing months of World War II, when the United States stood astride a partially wrecked planet like a titan, Washington used its extraordinary clout to build a new world order grounded in a “delicate duality” that juxtaposed two contradictory attributes. It fostered an international community of sovereign nations governed by the rule of law, while also building its own superpower dominion through the raw Realpolitik of economic pressure, crushing military force, unrestrained covert action, and diplomatic leverage.
Keep in mind that America had emerged from the ashes of that world war as a behemoth of unprecedented power. With Europe, Japan, and Russia in ruins, the U.S. had the only intact industrial complex left and then accounted for about half of the world’s entire economic output. At war’s end, its military had swelled to more than 12 million troops, its Navy ruled the seas with more than 1,000 warships, and its air force commanded the skies with 41,000 combat aircraft. In the decade that followed, Washington would encircle Eurasia with hundreds of military bases, as well as bevies of strategic bombers and warships. In the process, it would also confine its Cold War enemies, China and Russia, behind that infamous Iron Curtain.
Throughout those early Cold War years, Washington’s diplomats walked tall in the corridors of power, deftly negotiating defense pacts and trade deals that gave the country a distinct advantage on the world stage. Meanwhile, its clandestine operatives maneuvered relentlessly in the shadow lands of global power to topple neutral or hostile governments via coups and covert operations. Washington, of course, eventually won the Cold War, but its tactics produced almost unimaginably dreadful costs -- brutal military dictatorships across Asia and Latin America, millions of dead in Indochina, and devastated societies in Central Asia, Central America, and southern Africa.
Simultaneously, however, the U.S. victory in World War II also brought a surge of citizen idealism as millions of American veterans returned home, hopeful that their sacrifice had not only defeated fascism but also won a more peaceful world. To ensure that the ravaged planet would never again experience such global death and destruction, American diplomats also began working with their allies to build, step by step, nothing less than a novel architecture for global governance, grounded in the rule of international law.
At the Bretton Woods resort in New Hampshire in 1944, Washington convened 44 nations, large and small, to design a comprehensive economic regime for a prosperous post-war world. In the process, they formed the International Monetary Fund, or IMF (for financial stability); the World Bank (for postwar reconstruction); and, somewhat later, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (for free trade), the predecessor of the World Trade Organization.
A year after that, in San Francisco, Washington led 850 delegates from 50 allied nations in drafting the charter for a new organization, the United Nations, that aspired to a world order marked by inviolable sovereignty, avoidance of armed conflict, human rights, and shared prosperity. In addition to providing crisis management through peacekeeping and refugee relief, the U.N. also helped order a globalizing world by creating, over the next quarter century, 17 specialized organizations responsible for everything from food security (the Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO) to public health (the World Health Organization, or WHO).
Starting with the $13 billion Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe, Washington also supplemented the U.N.’s work by providing billions of dollars in bilateral aid to fund reconstruction and economic development in nations old and new. President John F. Kennedy globalized that effort by establishing the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that today has a budget of $27 billion and 4,000 employees who deliver humanitarian assistance worldwide by providing, for instance, $44 million in emergency relief for 700,000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.
Washington was careful to weave this new world order into the web of international law it had been building assiduously since its debut on the world stage at the Second Hague Conference on peace in 1907. Under the U.N. charter of 1945, the General Assembly convened the International Court of Justice, which took its seat at the grandiose Peace Palace in The Hague built by steel baron Andrew Carnegie years before to promote the international rule of law.
Just months after its founding, the U.N. also formed its Human Rights Commission, chaired by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, to draft the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in Paris on December 10, 1948. In addition, instead of firing squads for the defeated Axis leaders, the U.S. led the Allies in convening tribunals at Nuremburg and Tokyo in 1945-1946 that tried their war crimes under international law. Three years later, Washington joined the international community in adopting the four modern Geneva conventions that laid down the laws of war for future conflicts to protect both captives and civilians.
During the 70 years that Washington led many of these international institutions, half the world won national independence, economic prosperity spread, poverty declined, hunger receded, diseases were defeated, world war was indeed avoided, and human rights advanced. No other empire in world history had presided over so much progress and prosperity for such a significant share of humanity.
Citizen Diplomats
Some scholars of international relations remain confident that the international institutions America has long promoted can survive its demise as the globe’s dominant power. But Trump’s control over foreign policy and his erratic leadership make that prospect at best uncertain. While scholars place their hopes on the internal resilience of the liberal world order, an equally important source for its potential survival lies with the millions of U.S. citizen-diplomats who have served, for the past 70 years, as adjuncts in its promotion and remain, as activists and voters, potential advocates for its preservation -- and these even include one group that might normally be considered unlikely indeed: the very evangelicals who, in recent times, have backed Donald Trump in startling numbers.
Unlike the genteel elite exchanges and government programs that marked Europe’s old empires, America has influenced billions of people worldwide pervasively through mass communications and directly through citizen initiatives. While in Britain’s imperial heyday, elite circles communicated with each other via telegraph, newspaper, and radio, America has freed the flow of information for uncounted billions through television, the Internet, and cell phones -- making grassroots activism a global reality and citizen diplomacy a major force in a changing world.
Although much less visible than those cellular towers lining rural roads and the computer screens dotting desktops in every city, the global impact of U.S. citizen initiatives has been no less profound. Despite a foreign policy that frequently retreated into isolationism or hyper-nationalism or brutal wars, since the end of World War II a surprising number of Americans have immersed themselves in the wider world, arguably far more deeply than any other people on the planet. The old European colonial empires were state enterprises, but the U.S. imperium has been, in significant ways, a people’s project (as well, of course, in Washington’s coups and wars, as an anti-people’s project).
If Europe’s missionary efforts were generally state-sponsored, the spirit has moved millions of individual American evangelicals to “go on mission,” often to the most remote, rugged parts of the planet. From the Civil War to World War II, mainline Protestant denominations sponsored small numbers of career missionaries who made the conversion of China the aspiration of the post-Civil War generation. But since the Boeing Corporation introduced cheap jet travel in the 1960s, countless millions of evangelicals have launched themselves on short-term missions. While religious conversion has certainly been their prime goal, providing medicine, food, and education to remote areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America has also been a key part of that endeavor.
As a way to count these countless evangels, in my own small family circle a cousin, a Harvard-trained pediatrician, has made several medical missions to West Africa; the real-estate agent for my mother’s house repeatedly slowed the sale by going on education missions to Cambodia; friends from my Anglican parish travel regularly to Haiti on a development mission to a sister church; and my father-in-law’s old army buddy for years flew his private plane down to Central America on gospel missions.
Whenever global disasters strike, the Mormons, along with the 5,000 employees of Catholic Relief and 46,000 workers of the Protestant World Vision, mobilize what has become billions of dollars annually to send massive shipments of relief goods to the farthest corners of the Earth.
America’s concern for the world beyond its borders also has a no-less-vital secular side. Paralleling the rise of Washington as a world power, the Chicago-based Rotary International, for instance, has grown into a global network of 33,000 clubs in 200 countries. Since 1985, its 1.2 million members have donated nearly two billion dollars to inoculate two billion children worldwide against polio. As someone who still limps from this childhood disease, I was delighted to learn a few years ago, when I spoke before my local Rotary Club in Madison, Wisconsin, that my speaker's fee had been automatically donated to the worldwide fight against polio.
When I spoke to the local Kiwanis chapter, I found that they were crisscrossing the state collecting antique foot-pedal Singer sewing machines for shipment to rural co-ops in Central America without electricity -- catalyzing this small city’s Sewing Machine Project that has sent 2,500 machines worldwide since 2005. In a similar fashion, recent immigrants to the U.S. have often sponsored schools and medical care in their former homelands; military veterans have promoted humanitarian efforts in old battlegrounds like Vietnam; the 230,000 returned Peace Corps volunteers have been voices for a people-oriented foreign policy; and the list only goes on.
Whether passing the plate down the pews or logging onto the Internet, millions of Americans send billions of dollars overseas every year through their churches or activist groups like Doctors Without Borders, CARE USA, and Save the Children USA, whether for the Ethiopian famine, Indonesia’s tsunami, or the Rohingya crisis.
This tradition of what might be thought of as citizen diplomacy and the ingrained internationalism that goes with it were manifest in the extraordinary eruption of mass protest that occurred when, in his first week in office, President Trump tried to ban travellers from seven Muslim-majority nations. Within a day, a small crowd of 30 people with placards at JFK international airport in New York swelled into impassioned protests by thousands attending demonstrations across the city. Over the next week, there would be parallel protests by tens of thousands in some 30 cities nationwide, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Portland, Maine. It is these ardent demonstrators and the millions more with their own international causes who seem mindful of what might be lost as America heads for the exits from the world stage.
China Rising
Yes, CIA coups, the Vietnam War, and untold other horrors of empire will long remain troubling memories of U.S. hegemony, not to speak of the twenty-first-century war on terror, those CIA black sites, drone strikes, and so on, so why should anyone, liberal or conservative, who harbors doubts about America’s global power be concerned with its accelerating decline? At its core, the U.S. world order has rested, for the past 70 years, on that delicate duality -- an idealistic community of sovereign nations and sovereign citizens equal under the rule of international law joined tensely, even tenuously, to an American imperium grounded in the grimmest aspects of U.S. military and economic power.
Now, consider the likely alternatives if Donald Trump succeeds in withdrawing the U.S. from any form of idealistic internationalism. While the downside of Washington’s harsh hegemony of the last almost three-quarters of a century was in some part balanced by its promotion of a liberal international order, both Beijing and Moscow seem inclined to the idea of hegemony without that international community and its rule of law. Beijing accepts the U.N. (where it has a seat on the Security Council) and the World Trade Organization (a convenient wedge into world markets), but it simply ignores inconvenient aspects of the international community like the Permanent Court of Arbitration, recently dismissing an adverse decision there over its claims to the South China Sea.
Beijing has quietly challenged what it views as pro-Western organizations by beginning to build its own parallel world order, which it naturally intends to dominate: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization instead of NATO, its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in lieu of the IMF, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership to supplant the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. The trillions of dollars in trade and development agreements that Beijing has doled out across Asia, Africa, and Latin America in recent years are the epitome of commercial Realpolitik, devoid of any concern for the environment or for workers’ rights. Putin’s Russia is even more dismissive of the restraints of international law, expropriating sovereign territory, invading neighboring nations, assassinating domestic enemies abroad, and blatantly manipulating elections overseas (a subject in which, of course, the United States once showed a certain expertise).
Although overshadowed in recent years by its endless counterterror operations and its devastatingly destructive wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa, the United States has nonetheless had a profound and often positive impact upon the world, in terms both of its high politics and its mass culture. Long after the damaging excesses of Washington’s hegemonic power -- the CIA coups, the torture, the drone killings, and those never-ending wars -- fade from memory, the world will still need the more benign dimension of its dominion, particularly the very idea of global governance through international organizations and the rule of law, especially as we face a planet similarly in decline. The loss of all of that would be a loss indeed.
If the world experiences a slow, relatively peaceful transition away from U.S. hegemony, then the subsequent global order just might maintain some of the liberal international institutions that still represent the best of American values. If, by contrast, the golden-shower diplomacy of Donald Trump continues, while the Chinese and Russian versions of hegemony only gain strength, then we will likely witness a harsher world order based on autocracy, Realpolitik, and commercial domination, with scant attention to human rights, women’s rights, or the rule of law. At this critical turning point in world history, the choice is still, to a surprising degree, ours to make. But not for long.
Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, the now-classic book which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the recently published In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, and Nick Turse's Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead.
 |
|
FOCUS: One of Michael Cohen's Russian Business Partners Agrees to Sing |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44647"><span class="small">Abigail Tracy, Vanity Fair</span></a>
|
|
Wednesday, 23 May 2018 10:44 |
|
Tracy writes: "The government has flipped a longtime associate of Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in the latest sign that special counsel Robert Mueller, in coordination with New York prosecutors, is executing a 'Gambino-style roll-up' of Trump associates."
Robert Mueller. (photo: Xinhua News Agency)
One of Michael Cohen's Russian Business Partners Agrees to Sing
By Abigail Tracy, Vanity Fair
23 May 18
New York’s “Taxi King” just cut a deal that should worry Donald Trump.
 he government has flipped a longtime associate of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in the latest sign that special counsel Robert Mueller, in coordination with New York prosecutors, is executing a “Gambino-style roll-up” of Trump associates. Evgeny Freidman, a Russian immigrant known as the “Taxi King” and Cohen’s longtime partner in the taxi-cab business, has reportedly agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in state or federal investigations in exchange for leniency—a development that could portend serious legal consequences for Cohen and, potentially, the president.
Freidman’s remarkably light sentence suggests the government assigned a high value to his cooperation. As Sol Wisenberg, a deputy prosecutor in the Starr investigation, explained to me after former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to the F.B.I. earlier this year, prosecutors “don’t want to give somebody too good of a deal if they have done some really damaging things,” unless they have information about a higher value target that prosecutors couldn’t get anywhere else. According to The New York Times, Freidman faced four counts of criminal tax fraud and one of grand larceny stemming from allegations that he failed to pay more than $5 million in taxes—charges that could carry a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison each. On Tuesday, the Taxi King pleaded guilty to just one count of evading $50,000 worth of taxes. In exchange for his cooperation, he will avoid jail time entirely, and faces just five years of probation if he delivers on his agreement. He will also be forced to pay $1 million to the state attorney general’s office.
Given the extent of his ties to Cohen—Freidman and Cohen worked together for many years in a taxi-cab management company with fleets in New York and Chicago—Freidman’s deal might foreshadow Mueller turning the screws on the president’s longtime lawyer. Cohen is facing a federal investigation into his business practices led by the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, which was referred to the case by Mueller. Cohen, who tried to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the campaign and was later involved in a bizarre scheme to deliver a pro-Russian Ukraine peace treaty to Trump, has emerged as a key figure in Mueller’s probe. Federal investigators are reportedly scrutinizing a $130,000 hush-money payment Cohen made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, along with millions of dollars funneled through a shell company, Essential Consultants LLC, for consulting work beginning shortly before Trump’s election victory. (Stephen Ryan, a lawyer for Cohen, declined to comment to the Times.)
If Freidman’s deal involves ratting on Cohen, he’s not saying. In a statement to the Times, Freidman said, “Michael is dear dear personal friend and a passive client! That’s it! I am humbled and shamed!” A former lawyer who was disbarred earlier this month, Friedman characterized the guilty plea as “me taking responsibility for my actions,” and added, “I had been an officer of the court in excess of 20 years and now I am a felon! I hate that I have been grouped in this runaway train that I am not a part of!” But when asked about cooperating with the government, Freidman did not respond.
Cohen has often dismissed speculation that he might flip on Trump, never failing to declare fealty to his client. “I’m the guy who protects the president and the family. I’m the guy who would take a bullet for the president,” Cohen told my colleague Emily Jane Fox in September of last year. But as the noose tightens around Cohen, the lack of support from Trump’s allies appears to have unnerved him. People in Washington, he has said, have been treating him as though he were “disposable,” and his friends have remarked that “Washington has made a huge mistake” in leaving him to fend for himself. “That,” one person told Fox, “is a dangerous place for him to be.”
If Trump was alarmed by Freidman’s plea deal, his agita could not be distinguished from his broader Twitter meltdown over the past 24 hours over news that the F.B.I. used an informant during the 2016 campaign to uncover links to Russia. Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s personal attorneys in the Russia matter, told the Times that Trump is “just not involved in the taxis,” and presumably has no reason to worry. “He has as much involvement in it as I do.”
|
|
|
The Cohen Reimbursements and Retainers: Part II |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=45295"><span class="small">Bob Bauer, Lawfare</span></a>
|
|
Wednesday, 23 May 2018 08:33 |
|
Bauer writes: "Did Cohen make the arrangement in the days before the campaign to head off a major political problem? If he did, that would mean that the payment had not been made 'irrespective of candidacy,' and the campaign finance rules - both contribution limits and reporting requirements-would apply."
Donald Trump. (photo: The White House/Flickr)
The Cohen Reimbursements and Retainers: Part II
By Bob Bauer, Lawfare
23 May 18
 n Friday, I wrote that Rudy Giuliani’s answer to the the campaign finance question arising out the Stormy Daniels payment made little sense. He asserted—wrongly—that, as a matter of law, the president’s belated reimbursement of his personal lawyer Michael Cohen “negated” any liability for an illegal contribution. Since then, Giuliani has issued a statement to clarify the president’s legal position on the $130,000 payment Michael Cohen made to Stormy Daniels and that, Giuliani says, the president reimbursed. He has now attempted to peg the Trump legal theory to the relevant campaign finance rule, contending that Trump would have made the payment even if there had been no presidential campaign: or to put it in the language of FEC regulations, he would have made the payment “irrespective of candidacy.” So Giuliani concludes that, for this reason, Cohen’s advance of the funds did not implicate the campaign finance laws: It was not an illegal contribution. He has now relegated the reimbursement to the status of a secondary defense in the event that this primary one fails.
The Giuliani statement on this point is more focused than the earlier version, and somewhat more coherent. But it remains a botched defense of the campaign finance issue. His explanations over several days still raise more questions than they answer, and they may point to other serious issues beyond campaign finance.
Giuliani’s reminted theory of the case has an additional hole in it. If Trump did not know of the payment until recently, then the only intent relevant to the legal issue is Cohen’s. Did Cohen make the arrangement in the days before the campaign to head off a major political problem? If he did, that would mean that the payment had not been made “irrespective of candidacy,” and the campaign finance rules—both contribution limits and reporting requirements—would apply. It is hard for Trump to argue that he was concerned about the effects on his family of any Daniels revelations if he had no idea at the time that she was about to go public with her story.
Of course, Trump and Cohen could be lying about the absence of any communication between them at the time about Daniels. But that is not their story—and if taken at face value, the story as they have told it means that Cohen’s intent is controlling. If there is evidence that Cohen consulted with the campaign before making the payment while saying nothing to Trump, then the personal motivation fades and the campaign purpose behind the payment surges decisively to the forefront of the case.
Trump might argue that Cohen had a standing agreement that he was to pay off any threat like the one posed by Daniels—from other women. Giuliani resisted going this far, saying on ABC’s “This Week” that Cohen would have paid off claims similar to Daniels’ on Trump’s behalf if it were “necessary,” but that he, Giuliani, did not know of any such other claims or practice. So his case for the president rests on this one payment within the context of an attorney-client relationship in which, without informing his client, Cohen could spend money to solve a problem for Trump and be reimbursed “sometimes.”
This leaves open the question of what Cohen thought his client’s interests required at the time of payment. And if the evidence shows that his purpose was to protect Trump’s campaign, then the campaign finance issue remains very much alive.
Speaking on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Alan Dershowitz made an alternative case for treating the campaign finance issue as relatively insignificant. Dershowitz rightly criticizes the manner in which Giuliani has mounted his client’s defense—that is, in a series of interviews with regular corrections or clarifications. But he also argues that any campaign finance violation would not be “substantial” and the liability for a violation would fall on the campaign’s treasurer for failure to report the Daniels payment as a Cohen contribution to the Trump campaign.
When we do not have all the facts, it is not clear how Dershowitz can reasonably conclude, as he did on “Meet the Press,” that the case is a “close” one. But it is a mistake to assert that in the event that an illegal contribution was made, the treasurer—not candidate Trump—would have liability, and that the failure to report would be the only issue. Dershowitz seems to believe that the late reimbursement cured any illegal contribution—that is, a contribution that exceeded lawful dollar limits—that Cohen may have made by advancing the money for the Daniels payment. So Dershowitz imagines that if there was a violation, it is no more than a reporting issue, and the treasurer has to answer for it.
To the contrary, both Trump and Cohen would have exposure for this excessive and unreported contribution under both the civil and criminal standards for campaign finance law enforcement. To the extent that the treasurer would be involved, he or she would be cited only in an official capacity, as representative of the campaign committee, and would not have no personal liability for events of which he or she was not informed.
In his ABC interview on Sunday, Giuliani attempted to argue that those pressing the campaign finance issue are resisting his legal defense of Trump “because [Giuliani’s case] gets [Trump and Cohen] out of trouble and it makes the whole investigation and ... the tactics that we use by the prosecutors totally repugnant.” The campaign finance argument does a great deal of work in Giuliani’s picture of things: Supposedly, once the suggestion of a violation is refused, the predicate for the investigation—at least the Trump-Cohen aspect—has been eliminated.
But it is also possible that Trump and Cohen have conceived this argument to deflect attention from the unanswered questions about what else may be of concern in their relationship. Consider Giuliani’s claim that the payments made were not all for the purposes of playing off Daniels. He referred to “incidentals” plus some return to Cohen that significantly increased the amount reimbursed. This description is curious. It is meant to convey the notion that this additional money paid to Cohen was peripheral, and yet those payments ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars—according to Giuliani, $460,000 to $470,000, or more than three times what was required to pay Daniels. Given that these sums are hardly “incidental,” it is a stretch for Giuliani to wrap them into references to the “reimbursement” related to Daniels and cloak them in the overall campaign finance narrative.
The New York Times reports that Michael Cohen’s finances are complex, and his business associations and practices are apparently a topic likely to be of intense interest to prosecutors. Some of that work involved ventures with Trump, such as the Moscow real estate venture in 2015 that Cohen sought to develop with the assistance of Felix Sater—a former business associate of Trump with a criminal history and murky involvement in Russia-related matters, who famously told Cohen in an email that their work could help get Trump elected to the presidency. If Trump was paying Cohen significant sums of money through 2017 and 2018, in the middle of the Mueller investigation, and supposedly had an understanding that Cohen could bill him “on retainer” for whatever he thought needed to be done on the president’s behalf, campaign finance may well not have been the chief concern behind those payments. The campaign finance argument, weak as it is, may be just the best his legal team can do on the facts they have—or it may be largely a cover story, with the real tale even more problematic for the president.
Giuliani declines to say when Trump knew the purpose of the payments and authorized the reimbursements, or even the period over which the installments were paid. This is an important point, and yet Giuliani continues to waffle on the answer. The issue of timing may shed light on Trump’s motivations for the payments. And Giuliani has argued that Cohen was “sometimes” paid for his help to Trump, and sometimes not: In the Daniels matter, the help was not forthcoming immediately, but much later. What prompted Trump to begin paying? And when did he begin doing so?
Giuliani has also not explained why Trump made the repayment in installments. If the purpose of paying Cohen was to dispose of any issue of a campaign finance violation, then it is difficult to understand why the self-described billionaire—whom Giuliani described as unconcerned with a payment as small as $130,000—broke the payment out over several months. Again, the argument that reimbursement would resolve the legal issue makes little sense. But even if we accept it at face value, each month that the Cohen payment was not fully reimbursed, the amounts unpaid would constitute a continuing legal issue. One could see the installments as one way that the president could keep Cohen’s attention, stringing out the reimbursement to keep Cohen close.
To be sure, this is speculation. But the multiple confused and incomplete accounts provided by Giuliani invite some effort to make some sense of of what he has had to say in this subject. And Giuliani must surely have expected rigorous scrutiny of his answers in view of the earlier denials by Cohen that he was acting on behalf of the president or that Trump paid him to do so, and by Trump that he knew anything about Cohen’s efforts for his benefit.
As for the question of keeping Cohen close, it should not be overlooked that Giuliani, questioned about a pardon, refused to rule it out. “That’s not a decision to be made now,” he told George Stephanopoulos. There’s no reason to pardon anybody now.” He ended each of these sentences with a hedge—for “now.”
|
|
Traumas of Dispossession: The Crisis of American Family Farming |
|
|
Wednesday, 23 May 2018 08:27 |
|
Dudley writes: "We're living through another crisis of American family farming. But don't expect a rural revolt any time soon."
Dave Fendrich helps Bryant Hofer harvest a field of corn on October 2, 2013 near Salem, South Dakota. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty)
Traumas of Dispossession: The Crisis of American Family Farming
By Kathryn M. Dudley, Jacobin
23 May 18
We're living through another crisis of American family farming. But don't expect a rural revolt any time soon.
 here are Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young now? A generation ago, these musicians came together to found Farm Aid in 1985 and host a star-studded benefit concert that awakened the nation to the worst agricultural crisis since the Great Depression. Yet today, as a perfect storm of similarly adverse conditions gathers across the country, celebrities such as these are nowhere to be found.
Nonetheless, as tariff threats mount in Donald Trump’s escalating trade war with China, America’s farmers once again find themselves at loggerheads with national policy priorities. Not since Jimmy Carter’s grain embargo weaponized food in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan has the fate of rural communities hung so precariously in the balance.
That 1980 policy blunder compounded an unspooling foreclosure crisis that had already given rise to the American Agriculture Movement, a grassroots coalition of family farmers best known for their iconic “tractorcades” — most memorably those that led three thousand farmers to drive their tractors to Washington, D.C. in the winter of 1979.
It remains to be seen whether the present trade dispute, which may likewise exacerbate intensifying distress in the farm sector, will lead to a political change of heart among rural voters who have otherwise been this president’s stalwart supporters. Lessons from the 1980s, however, suggest that further immiseration, not grassroots activism, is the most likely result.
Trump’s saber rattling comes in the midst of what has been dubbed the “next” farm crisis. Since 2013, farm incomes have plunged by 50 percent, 42,000 small and mid-sized farms have already been lost, and countless more are destined to follow if commodity prices tank and debt-to-asset ratios rise. Economists have reason to believe that the current contraction will not be as severe as it was in the 1980s — thanks in part to today’s low interest rates — but this is cold comfort for rural America.
Those who have experienced the wrenching scene of farms sold on the auction block first- or second-hand recognize these events as traumatic. Families are publicly dispossessed of their land and source of livelihood — the tangible products of their labor, often in service of an intergenerational project. This injury finds few parallels in capitalist societies. So fearsome is this degradation ritual that some farmers consider it a punishment worse than death.
During the 1980s, the suicide rate among male farmers rose to three times the national average; today it is over four times that of other occupational groups. Then as now, the specter of a simmering rage in search of targets casts a pall over the heartland as sensational stories of middle-aged white men who shoot their bankers, their livestock, and themselves grab headlines.
In the face of these tragedies, reporters issue rote disclaimers, often after ferreting out signs of mental illness, assuring us that farmers are no more likely to perpetrate a rampage than anyone else. Yet in contrast to media coverage of gun violence in general, the news usually treats barnyard mayhem with a carefully cultivated tone of subdued respect. As in Jane Smiley’s 1991 Pulitzer Prize–winning portrait of a Midwestern farm patriarch, we ascribe Lear-like qualities to the hardship that unfolds across vast fields and isolated homesteads. However deranged the protagonist, however dearly those within his orbit must pay for his sins, we recognize that he, too, is a flawed hero in capitalism’s signature drama of debt and dispossession.
Looking for Heroes
In the 1980s, small-scale agriculturalists would tell me, “Farmers are on the bottom rung of the food ladder. They get kicked on the way up and on the way down.” That is, farmers are exploited at the points of production and consumption.
The prices they receive for their commodities don’t always cover what it costs to produce them, and those payments represent a small fraction of what consumers shell out for their products after they are processed and sold commercially. Though examples vary depending on specialization — pennies on the dollar for the potatoes that make French fries, the grain that goes into breakfast cereal, or the milk sold in supermarket cartons — you can’t miss the point: profit accrues to those at the top of the supply chain, not those on the bottom.
Rural communities typically understand farmers’ persistence in the face of this abuse as a test of character. For those who endure, it becomes a matter of pride. In this worldview, low commodity prices and high input costs are inevitable adversities to be reckoned with, like pestilence or extreme weather. In the early 1980s, this stoic fortitude met its match when the Federal Reserve attacked soaring inflation and propelled the prime rate to a high of 21.5 percent, ushering in a recession.
The rest of the nation reeled, but family farm agriculture took a hit from which it has arguably never recovered. The spike in interest rates caused land values — previously propped up by rampant speculation — to crash, decimating the equity that secured most farm mortgages. Faced with loans worth far more on paper than on the market, banks and other lending agencies scrambled to initiate foreclosure proceedings, often before payments came due, forcing hundreds of thousands of farmers out of business and many more to refinance their operations with the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA), the federal agency known as the “lender of last resort.”
Amid this maelstrom, neighborly codes of silence about financial management and economic distress began to break. All across rural areas, farmers listened to their counterparts who spoke out against farm auctions and called attention to the unjust loan contracts that allowed lenders to unilaterally seek repayment in full.
The history of this era is replete with the courageous acts of men and women of all racial and ethnic backgrounds who dared to put a human face on the toll taken by neoliberalism’s massive restructuring of American agriculture, which by century’s end drove over a million farmers off the land, reduced the total number of farms by 50 percent, and consolidated half of the nation’s food supply in the hands of the remaining 1 percent.
Against this tide, activists staged “no sale rallies” and sit-ins. They drove their tractors and donkeys to Washington, D.C., lobbying for credit reform. They sued the USDA for racial discrimination and built “farm survival” hotlines, advocating for and ministering to those in financial, physical, and psychological need. And they planted white crosses in public squares, honoring farmers lost to foreclosure and suicide.
Journalists and scholars were drawn to these figures at the time, and now they are returning, hoping to find precedent for a liberal resurgence in the midst of another farm crisis. This impulse, however hopeful, privileges a historically specific, and perhaps outmoded, form of political consciousness.
The Left has often idealized a liberatory model of working-class heroism, and nowhere is this more true than in agrarian studies. From the eighteenth century’s English food riots to the Great Depression’s milk strikes to today’s global slow-food movement, we celebrate the appearance of salt-of-the-earth “moral economies” and believe that our food system will serve as ground zero for the kind of direct action that underpins participatory democracy. Only in the grip of the life-and-death urgencies of food politics, we think, can producers and consumers unite in resisting the forces that oppress them. These coalitions can topple kings, corrupt governments, and with luck, transnational corporations.
But what about the rebellions that never happen? What about the majority of farmers, who rally to no cause because they gauge the risk of public humiliation too great or, consumed by depression’s demons, berate activists for their moral failings and ideological errors? Does suicidality index the absence of historical agency or its assertion?
These questions draw us not only into the vortex of past and present farm crises but also into the social traumas repeatedly visited on those whose life and labor is deemed expendable.
Politics of Disruption
It was the spring of 1994, winter’s chill still in the air. Fingers of light stretched long across harrowed fields as the sun rose on a small homestead in western Minnesota. Puffs of breath formed like word bubbles over the figures of a man and woman bent toward each other beside an idling pickup truck, low-lying steam from its tailpipe swirling around their feet.
They were praying.
When they finished, the man jumped into his truck and left the driveway without looking at me. I had arrived early that morning to interview his wife, and she had asked me to wait in my car, explaining apologetically — or was it defiantly? — that her husband still refused to talk about what happened when they lost their farm a decade before.
Her story, like so many others relayed to me in farm kitchens and living rooms, began with a blow-by-blow account of how one misfortune after another — adjustable rate mortgages, refinancing with FmHA and its meddlesome oversight rules, costly accidents involving equipment, livestock, or crops — culminated in crushing debt that, after a protracted period of struggle, became too burdensome to bear.
But here, the story swerved unexpectedly. Instead of narrating an ineluctable process of foreclosure and dispossession, she explained that her husband had vanished. He took family photographs and mementos from a safety deposit box but left no message or sign of his intent. After filing a missing person report and overseeing the unsuccessful search for his body, she found herself unable to imagine a future.
Lenders temporarily backed off. Activists moved in, hoping to make her, a mother of young children fighting to save her farm, emblematic of their cause. But she demurred, intuitively sensing that the publicity would not bring her husband home.
As months passed, panic attacks left her feeling unable to cope — not so much with her financial predicament as with its social effects: the family doctor who dismissed her complaints of blurred vision and forgetfulness; the church friends who avoided her as if her suffering were contagious; the store clerks who whispered behind her back. When the Canadian Royal Mounted Police called to tell her that her husband had been pulled over for driving with an illegible, mud-splattered license plate, she felt God’s grace and found the strength to go on.
Five years later, a similar narrative disruption occurred in an otherwise quite different account of the same farm crisis. I was talking with a North Carolina family who had joined a 1999 class action lawsuit brought by African-American farmers against the USDA for racial discrimination in FmHA lending practices between 1981 and 1996.
This farmer and his wife, a public schoolteacher, lost their farm when FmHA delayed and eventually denied them the operating loans it continued to extend to neighboring white farmers. This couple was a pillar of their community, “staunch conservatives,” as they described themselves, in financial matters as well as moral outlook.
Here too, the story about the forced sale of the farm, where a white farmer bought their land for much less than they had paid for it, was interrupted. Voice breaking, this man described deciding to take his own life, unable to accept a future in which he could no longer do the work he had done all of his life. His wife discovered him comatose, an empty pill bottle in hand. While in the hospital, a vision of an angel in the whitest robe he had ever seen appeared at his bedside, assuring him that God was with him and giving him reason to live.
The trauma of economic dispossession — of land, of labor, and of national belonging — is never restricted to a single event, to a foreclosure notice or a farm auction. It is an ongoing experience of political-economic abandonment that links the loss of a person’s expected future to an intolerable sense of exposure and humiliation.
Rituals that hold us accountable for our own fate, even when we know that the suffering endured is due to forces beyond individual control, normalize our society’s recurrent abandonment of producers, forms of labor, and entire communities.
Emancipatory collective action is one way to combat the legitimation of this injustice. But it is not the only, nor a universally available, option. We must recognize that there are other strategies for dislodging trauma’s grasp on our political imagination, other ways to interrupt the repetition of injury.
It is no coincidence that rising “deaths of despair” caused by substance abuse and suicide are strongly correlated with support for Trump’s presidency throughout rural and postindustrial America. We must recognize, in these tragedies, that precarity’s affects, however fatalistic, contain their own politics of disruption.
We are living in a historical conjuncture in which the experience of dispossession and degradation is ritualized, normalized, and individualized in ways that continually reproduce the original injury. Those caught in this punishing regime of violence may turn to desperate, even self-defeating measures to counteract pain, powerlessness, and the theft of their dignity. But make no mistake: these are collective political actions nonetheless. Only by attending to how social trauma is produced — and how it forecloses a sense of futurity — can we begin asking how things might be otherwise.
|
|
eemingly downplaying the importance of his planned June 12th summit with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday that there were “many other Koreas” he could meet with.
