Trumped up war with Syria

SUBHEAD: In order to to save his presidency the Donald will have to connive a "Fatal "Distraction".

By  Juan Wilson on 11 April 2018 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2018/04/trumped-up-war-with-syria.html)


Image above:Trump, Pence, Bolten meet with US military leaders on Syrian crisis.From (https://www.politico.eu/article/syria-crisis-collides-with-donald-trump-chaos-russia-vladimir-putin/).

Anybody here remember how the United States was conned into a full out effort to join into the Vietnam War?

Under President Kennedy our "contribution" to keeping South Vietnam from joining the north in what might be a Communist union had been through "advisors" - a few tens-of-thousands - who provided expertise, communications, weapons and aerial and naval backup.

Even so the corrupt South Vietnamese government was unable to beat back the revolution.

In 1965 US President Lyndon Johnson's CIA came up with a plan fort us to join into the ware effort openly.

Our Navy, in August of 1964 arranged for the US Maddox to be in the Gulf of Tonkin off the North Vietnam port of Hai Phong and was met by North Vietnam naval patrol boats.

The ensuing engagements in international waters of North Vietnam were our excuse to enter into the longest (and most useless) American war.

Until we got into the endless Middle East War that has destroyed several nation states that include Afghanistran, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Syria.

Donald Trump's crimes of corruption are about to destroy his presidency. There are a limited number of unlikely scenarios that might save it... economic collapse or more war.

We now have a convenient "war crime" in Syria to act on.

It's not exactly clear if Syria's President Bashar al-Assad decided on a chemical ware attack on innocent civilians as part of a desire for suicide, or one of his bombs hit a military target where chemical weapons were stored or the event was caused by another party in order to instigate a war that America would see as its destiny.

In any case it is convenient for Trump to deflect interest in the investigation that is about to show his bottomless corruption with organized criminal oligarchs working out of the remnants of the former Soviet Union. So war it is!

See articles below for a hint where Justice Department is going. Why the Cohen warrant search reaction while Trump sits with military brass on subject of Syria War.

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Trump knows he's the real target
(https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-knows-hes-real-target-fbi-raid-michael-cohen)

SUBHEAD: "It’s an attack on our country, in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for."

President Trump made a statement on Monday that many people in American never thought they'd hear from him. He said, "It’s an attack on our country, in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for."

Unfortunately, the president wasn't talking about the interference in our democratic election process in 2016.

He was referring to the FBI warrants served on his attorney Michael Cohen's office and two residences that morning, in which agents seized documents reportedly pertaining to suspected wire fraud, bank fraud and campaign finance violations. Trump believes that such an investigation is an attack on America because he believes it is an attack on him.

To paraphrase a quip from the great Molly Ivins, it sounded better in the original French: L'état, c'est moi.

Trump was very worked up, so worked up that he spent the first 15 minutes or so of a televised photo-op with his national security team and the Joint Chiefs railing against Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Department of Justice, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Hillary Clinton and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, among others.

It wasn't the first time we've seen this president deliver a petulant and angry denunciation of the Russia probe. But to do it as he sat around a table with the military brass, for a meeting called to decide how to respond to a chemical warfare attack, was stunningly narcissistic even for him.

The cameras didn't show much of his team, but one can imagine how they felt being led by such a man.

It's not hard to imagine how most people in the country felt either. No one will ever describe Donald Trump as a leader who shows grace under pressure.

These warrants were issued by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York (a Trump appointee, by the way), based on a referral from the special counsel's office. Nobody is quite sure exactly why it happened that way.

Some have speculated that this is about the Stormy Daniels case, and therefore far afield from Mueller's mandate, while others have suggested that Mueller passed this to a federal prosecutor to avoid the accusation that he crossed Trump's (nonexistent) red line.

At this point, all we can say for sure is that all warrants targeting an attorney go through an extraordinary process all the way up the line in the Department of Justice and are subject to extreme scrutiny by the magistrates who must approve them.

These are all lawyers, and by training and instinct they are protective of attorney-client privilege. The U.S. Attorneys’ Manual identifies six additional safeguards to ensure that the Department of Justice doesn't violate it in cases where an attorney is the subject of an investigation.

This particular lawyer is also the president's personal attorney, so it's fair to assume investigators were careful to demonstrate probable cause that Cohen had committed a crime in the course of representing his client and that he would be likely to destroy the evidence if they simply subpoenaed his records.

That may be the most extraordinary aspect of this entire event, although if you look at the way Cohen has talked and behaved over the years, it's not hard to see why someone might assume he could do that.

Nonetheless, any prosecutor would have to be aware of the political implications, and think long and hard about whether or not he or she had the goods to pursue such a case.
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Nobody should have been all that surprised by this, least of all Michael Cohen himself. He's at the center of the Stormy Daniels case, and the president unhelpfully exacerbated his problems last Friday on Air Force One when he referred questions about the alleged $130,000 payment to "my attorney Michael Cohen."

There is some speculation that he and Cohen believed they'd be protected by attorney-client privilege; if so, they were wrong.

But while that probably didn't help, it's almost certainly the reason Cohen's office and homes were raided on Monday. There's plenty of reporting to indicate that Cohen has been in the crosshairs for quite some time.

The Washington Post reported back in March that Mueller's office was interrogating witnesses about Cohen's negotiations during the presidential campaign to build a Moscow Trump Tower.

Reportedly, investigators were also exploring the odd story about the Russia-friendly "peace proposal" for Ukraine that Cohen received about a week after Trump was inaugurated.

Last week McClatchy reported that Mueller's team had shown up unannounced at the home of an unnamed Trump Organization business associate, "armed with subpoenas compelling electronic records and sworn testimony."

This person had reportedly worked with the company on overseas deals for years, and investigators were specifically interested in interactions with Cohen.

According to The New York Times on Monday, Mueller is also interested in a $150,000 payment paid to the Trump Foundation by a Ukrainian oligarch for a brief speech Trump gave during the presidential campaign. (You will recall that Trump has a way of pocketing money collected for his foundation.)

That deal was allegedly solicited by Michael Cohen. This apparently doesn't pertain to the warrants issued on Monday but rather the subpoenas issued to the Trump Organization last month.

Whether various federal officials are tracking Cohen's activities overseas, like the Moscow tower or the Ukraine speech, or the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, it looks as though all roads lead to President Trump's personal lawyer.

Considering that it's well understood whom Michael Cohen is working for every minute of every day, that means the road dead-ends at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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Trump reacts to Cohen raid
By Michael D. Shear on 9 April 2018 for the New York Times

(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/us/politics/trump-cohen-mueller-full-transcript.html)

President Trump spoke to reporters on Monday at the beginning of a meeting with military leaders and national security officials. He reacted to the news that the F.B.I. raided the office of his personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, and discussed his frustrations with his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and the special counsel’s investigation being led by Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Trump also touched on the potential for military action in Syria in the wake of a suspected chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government that killed dozens of people over the weekend.

The following is a transcript of those remarks, as prepared by The New York Times, with analysis from The Times’s Michael D. Shear, a White House correspondent.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: So, I just heard that they broke in to the office of one of my personal attorneys, a good man, and it’s a disgraceful situation. It’s a total witch hunt. I’ve been saying it for a long time. I’ve wanted to keep it down. We’ve given, I believe, over a million pages worth of documents to the special counsel.

Analysis
If there was one sign that Mr. Trump was furious about the raids of Mr. Cohen’s office and hotel, it was this phrase: They “broke in to the office.” Arms crossed, the president was clearly angry about how his friend and loyal attorney was treated — and did little to hide it.

TRUMP: They continue to just go forward and here we are talking about Syria, we’re talking about a lot of serious things with the greatest fighting force ever, and I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now, and actually much more than that. You could say it was right after I won the nomination it started.

And it’s a disgrace, it’s frankly a real disgrace. It’s an attack on our country in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for.

So when I saw this and when I heard it — I heard it like you did — I said that is really now in a whole new level of unfairness. So this has been going on, I saw one of the reporters who is not necessarily a fan of mine, not necessarily very good to me, he said in effect that this is ridiculous, this is now getting ridiculous. They found no collusion whatsoever with Russia, the reason they found it is there was no collusion at all. No collusion.

Analysis
In a presidency not known for consistency, Mr. Trump has never wavered from his insistence that “they found no collusion.” In fact, what congressional investigators have always said is they had not yet determined whether the president or his aides had colluded with the Russians. Mr. Mueller has not said publicly one way or the other.

TRUMP: This is the most biased group of people, these people have the biggest conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen. Democrats, all — or just about all — either Democrats, or a couple of Republicans that worked for President Obama — they’re not looking at the other side.

They’re not looking at the Hillary Clinton, horrible things that she did and all of the crimes that were committed. They’re not looking at all of the things that happened that everybody is very angry about, I can tell you, from the Republican side, and I think even the independent side.

Analysis
Mr. Trump immediately focused on Mr. Mueller and his team, but in fact, Monday’s raids were authorized by a United States attorney who was appointed by Mr. Sessions and is a former law partner of Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Trump supporter. They were not authorized by Mr. Mueller.

TRUMP: They only keep looking at us. So they find no collusion, and then they go from there and they say, “Well, let’s keep going,” and they raid an office of a personal attorney early in the morning and I think it’s a disgrace.

So we’ll be talking about it more, but this is the most conflicted group of people I’ve ever seen. The attorney general made a terrible mistake when he did this, and when he recused himself, or he should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself and we would have used a — put a different attorney general in. So he made what I consider to be a very terrible mistake for the country, but you’ll figure that out.

Analysis
Mr. Trump’s statement that “we’ll be talking about it more” — a reference to bias among the special counsel’s team — is an ominous one, suggesting that he might do something about it. What that would be is unclear, though adversaries and allies alike have at times worried that he might fire Mr. Mueller.

TRUMP: All I can say is after looking for a long period of time, not even before the special counsel because it really started just about from the time I won the nomination, and you look at what took place and what happened and it’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace. I’ve been president now for what seems like a lengthy period of time. We’ve done a fantastic job. We’ve beaten ISIS. We have just about 100 percent of the caliphate or the land. Our economy is incredible.

The stock market dropped a lot today as soon as they heard the noise of, you know, this nonsense that’s going on. It dropped a lot. It was up — way up — and then it dropped quite a bit at the end, a lot. But that we have to go through that, we’ve had that hanging over us now from the very, very beginning and yet the other side, they don’t even bother looking. And the other side is where there are crimes, and those crimes are obvious:

Lies under oath, all over the place, emails that are knocked out, that are acid-washed and deleted, nobody’s ever seen — 33,000 emails are deleted after getting a subpoena for Congress, and nobody bothers looking at that.

Analysis
After repeatedly hailing stock market increases during his first year in office, Mr. Trump has all but ignored the market’s steep declines in the wake of his protectionist trade policies. So it was ironic that the president would blame what he called “this nonsense” for a drop in the stock market. The Dow Jones industrial average actually ended the day up slightly after at one point rising nearly 400 points.

TRUMP: And many, many other things, so I just think it’s a disgrace that a thing like this can happen.

With all of that being said, we are here to discuss Syria tonight. We’re the greatest fighting force anywhere in the world. These gentlemen and ladies are incredible people. Incredible talent, and we’re making a decision as to what we do with respect to the horrible attack that was made near Damascus, and it will be met, and it will be met forcefully. And when, I will not say because I don’t like talking about timing, but we are developing the greatest force that we’ve ever had.

We had $700 billion just approved, which was the reason I went along with that budget, because we had to fix our military. General Mattis would tell you that above anybody, we had to fix our military and right now we’re in a big process of doing that, $700 million and then $716 billion next year. So we’re going to make a decision tonight or very shortly thereafter and you’ll be hearing the decision.

But we can’t let atrocities like we all witnessed, and you can see that and it’s horrible. We can’t let that happen. In our world, we can’t let that happen. Especially when we’re able to, because of the power of the United States, because of the power of our country, we’re able to stop it.

I want to thank Ambassador John Bolton for joining us. I think he’s going to be a fantastic representative of our team. He’s highly respected by everybody in this room and, John, I want to thank you very much, this is going to be a lot of work.

Interesting day, he picked today as his first day. So, generals, I think he picked the right day. But certainly you’re going to find it very exciting but you are going to do a fantastic job and I appreciate you joining us.

Analysis
The president shifted briefly to Syria, taking note of John R. Bolton’s first day as national security adviser. He hinted that the United States would respond militarily to the chemical attacks in that country, saying that “we can’t let atrocities like we all witnessed” happen. He did not indicate whether Mr. Bolton — a noted national security hawk — had argued for a strike.

JOHN R. BOLTON: Thank you. It’s an honor to be here.

TRUMP: Thank you all very much.

REPORTER: Any concerns about what the F.B.I. might find, Mr. President?

TRUMP: No.

REPORTER: Do you have any concerns?

TRUMP: No, I’m not.

REPORTER: Did you have an affair with Stormy Daniels?

TRUMP: Why don’t I just fire Mueller?

REPORTER: Yeah, just fire the guy.

TRUMP: Well, I think it’s a disgrace, what’s going on. We’ll see what happens. But I think it’s really a sad situation when you look at what happened. And many people have said you should fire him. Again, they found nothing and in finding nothing, that’s a big statement.

Analysis
Among Mr. Trump’s verbal tics is the phrase “we’ll see what happens.” He says it all the time. So when he was asked why he doesn’t just fire Mr. Mueller, it popped out. It is not clear whether that means he is really considering doing that, or if the response was just another instance of this habit.

TRUMP: If you know the person who’s in charge of the investigation, you know all about that deputy Rosenstein, Rod Rosenstein, he wrote the letter very critical of Comey. One of the things I said, I fired Comey, well, I turned out to do the right thing because you look at all of the things that he’s done and the lies and you look at what’s gone on at the F.B.I. with the insurance policy and all of the things that happened, turned out I did the right thing. But he signed, as you know, he also signed the FISA warrant.

So Rod Rosenstein, who’s in charge of this, signed a FISA warrant, and he also, he also signed a letter that was essentially saying to fire James Comey, and he was right about that. He was absolutely right. So we’ll see what happens. I think it’s disgraceful and so does a lot of other people. This is a pure and simple witch hunt. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all very much. Thank you.

Analysis
The president appointed Rod J. Rosenstein to be the deputy attorney general. But at Monday’s meeting, he criticized him for signing a FISA warrant, an apparent reference to the fact that Mr. Rosenstein had authorized agents to seek a warrant to wiretap Trump associates in the Russia probe. Mr. Trump and Republican allies have said the warrants were sought under false pretenses.

[Cross talk]

REPORTER: Can we get more clarity on who was responsible … [Inaudible]

TRUMP: We are getting clarity on that. Who is responsible for the weapons attack. We are getting very good clarity, actually. We have some pretty good answers. REPORTER: What are your options?

[Cross talk]

TRUMP: We have a lot of options militarily and we’ll be letting you know pretty soon.

AIDE: Thank you, everyone. Thank you all.

TRUMP: Probably after the fact.

AIDE: Thank you.


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The Lie of the Land

SUBHEAD: Will Trump’s presidency spell disaster for the climate, or can the green movement seize back the debate?

By Paul Kingsnorth on 18 March 2017 for The Guardian -
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/18/the-new-lie-of-the-land-what-future-for-environmentalism-in-the-age-of-trump)


Image above: Detail of photo of man in suit ignoring woman with sign reading "Need ticket home 2 Maine! Stranded in NYC w/abusive husband! Please help me get out of here!" From (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/why-education-wont-solve-americas-inequality-crisis/).

Last June, I voted to leave the European Union. I wasn’t an anti-EU fanatic but I was, despite my advancing years, still something of a green idealist.

 I had always believed that small was beautiful, that people should govern themselves and that power should be reclaimed and localized whenever possible. I didn’t think that throwing the people of Greece, Spain and Ireland to the wolves in order to keep bankers happy looked like the kind of right-on progressive justice that some of the EU’s supporters were claiming it represented.

So I voted to leave. I didn’t say anything about this before the vote and, despite being a writer, I didn’t write about it either. There was too much mudslinging on both sides already, and I didn’t want to throw any more or have any thrown at me. In any case, I didn’t have much to say.

The mudslinging, it turned out, was just a prelude to what would come next. The EU referendum, like the election of Donald Trump in the US five months later, and the Scottish independence question, newly reopened this week, tore the plaster off a pre-existing national wound that now began to bleed freely.

All sorts of things bubbled up that had been suppressed for years, and everyone was suddenly taking sides. Some people, when I told them that I’d voted to leave, looked at me as if I’d just owned up to a criminal record.

Why would I do that? Was I a racist? A fascist? Did I hate foreigners? Did I hate Europe?

I must hate something.

Did I know how irresponsible I had just been? Had I changed my mind yet? I needed to go away and check my privilege.

The eruption of anger that followed the vote, on all sides, was surprising enough. But what was also surprising to me was the uniformity of opinion among people I had thought I shared a worldview with.

Most people in the leftish, green-tinged world in which I had spent probably too much time over the years seemed to be lining up behind the EU.

The public intellectuals, the Green party, the big NGOs: all these people, from a tradition founded on localization, degrowth, bioregionalism and a fierce critique of industrial capitalism, were on board with a multinational trading bloc backed by the world’s banks, corporations and neoliberal politicians. Something smelt fishy.

I was born in the early 1970s. At around the same time, two forces – two movements, if you like – were also born that would shape the lives of my generation. One was neoliberalism. The other was environmentalism.

Neoliberalism was an economic project. It sought to replace stuttering statist economic models with a new laissez-faire order by removing “barriers to trade” wherever they might be found.

These barriers might be protectionist tariffs or taxes; they might also be national laws, local customs or environmental regulations.

The creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 was the culmination of a decades-long project, pushed by the economic and military might of the United States and its allies, to globalize the neoliberal model and cement it in international law.

By the early 21st century it seemed that this globalization process was both unstoppable and almost complete. Political parties from all traditions had surrendered to it, and the pundits and the economists were happily on board.

In the process, the economic project had developed into a cultural one, promulgated by its beneficiary class, the urban, tech-savvy, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie.

Often referred to as “globalism”, this worldview envisaged a borderless, one-world culture, in which trade tariffs and national boundaries were seen as equally damaging to the new hypercapitalist conception of freedom.

Traditions, distinctive cultures, national identities, religious strictures, social mores – all would dissolve away in the healing light of free trade and a western liberal conception of social progress.

Only bigots and luddites could possibly oppose such a utopian dream.

Being something of a luddite myself, I wrote a book, One No, Many Yeses, opposing it 15 years ago.

The book tracked the great wave of anti-globalization movements that washed over the world at the end of the 20th century, from the summit blockades at Seattle, Prague and Genoa to the uprising of the Zapatistas in Mexico and the anti-privatisation riots in South Africa.

What I found as I investigated these movements was that the most lasting of them were fuelled not by a general rage against “the system”, but by a sense of place and belonging.

Somewhere that people loved or felt attached to was being threatened by outside forces, whether they be trade treaties, buccaneering corporations or oppressive governments, and people were fighting to defend what they knew and what they were.

This sense of the uniqueness of places, and of the cultures that sprang from them, had been what pushed me towards green activism in the first place.

From a young age I had an inchoate sense that much of the world’s color, beauty and distinctiveness was being bulldozed away in the name of money and progress.

Some old magic, some connection, was being snuffed out in the process. It must be 20 years since I read the autobiography of the late travel writer Norman Lewis, The World, The World, but the last sentence stays with me.

Wandering the hills of India, Lewis is ask by a puzzled local why he spends his life traveling instead of staying at home. What is he looking for? “I am looking for the people who have always been there,” replies Lewis, “and belong to the places where they live. The others I do not wish to see.”

As a writer, whether of fiction or non-fiction, I have been looking for the same thing. That first book of mine, it turned out, was a journey in search of people who belong. It was a defence of a threatened fragility. A few years later, I wrote another, this time about globalisation’s impact on England, my home country.

I’ve since written novels and essays and poems and they always seem, however hard I try to write about something else, to circle back around to that primal question: what does it mean to belong to a place, to a people, to nature, in a time in which belonging is everywhere under attack?

 Does it mean anything? Why should it matter?

All I know is that it matters to me. That was why I joined what I wanted to believe was a movement that could derail globalization. For a while, it looked like it might.

Then came 9/11, and a different kind of anti-globalization movement – violent Islamism – began stalking the west. Governments cracked down on dissent and populations grew fearful. Everything suddenly seemed darker.

Still it seemed that nothing could stop the neoliberal train. It kept rolling, faster and faster, until in 2008 it hit a wall at full speed.

Remarkably, it survived the crash. When the banks were bailed out and the corporations given another series of blank checks, I gave up on the idea that much would ever change.

The power of money seemed as stark as the stench of corruption. Perhaps neoliberalism was unstoppable after all. Perhaps, as Margaret Thatcher had once famously claimed, there was, indeed, no alternative.

On 24 June last year I woke up, made a cup of tea and turned on my computer, wondering by what margin the nation had voted to remain in the EU. On the BBC website, the headline seemed to take up the whole screen: BRITAIN VOTES TO LEAVE THE EUROPEAN UNION.

Five months later, my morning seemed to repeat itself. I woke up, made another cup of tea, wondered how many votes Clinton had won by, and then gaped at the margin of Trump’s victory. It was clear the poles were shifting. Something big was going on.

On both occasions I can remember precisely how I felt. It was a feeling that had nothing to do with what might happen next, and it wasn’t really related to my opinions about any of the issues involved.

The feeling was exhilaration. I suddenly realized that for the last decade I had believed, even though I had pretended not to believe, in the end of history. Now, the end of history was ending. Change was possible after all.

I also began to realize something else: the anti-globalization movement had not died. Its impulse had driven Brexit as it had driven Donald Trump’s victory. It had driven Jeremy Corbyn’s rise, and those of Syriza in Greece and Bernie Sanders in the US.

In their different ways and for different reasons, coalitions of people were again pushing back against the dehumanizing world that the global economy was creating. Globalization had been impoverishing the south for decades. Now it was impoverishing the west, too, and the discontent had reached boiling point.

But change is a trickster and it makes no promises.

Back in the day, those of us who fancied ourselves as radicals thought we were the shock troops in the battle against globalization. As a young greenie, I would consume the words of Edward Abbey and Murray Bookchin, Vandana Shiva and EF Schumacher, James Lovelock and Dave Foreman.

These were the people who were constructing the sane future, and I wanted to join them.

Campaigning environmentalists, the “social justice” movement, the lefties and the greens: we would be the heroes of the coming hour.

Our rational solutions to climate change, our well-argued deconstructions of neoliberalism, our piles of evidence about the negative impact of trade treaties, our righteous demands for justice – these would shake the world. When they learned the truth about the continuing corporate stitch-up, the people would rise up in opposition.

They did rise up in the end, but it wasn’t us they were listening to. The message had found a different messenger. Trump said in his last TV spot before election victory:

“There is, a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities”.

They were words that could have been heard at any social forum, anti-globalization gathering or left-green beanfeast from the last 20 years, as could the rousing final sentence:

“The only thing that can stop this corrupt machine is you.”

In a penetrating essay in The American Interest last July, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt sought to place all this in context. He suggested that the old left-right political divide, which had been looking iffy for years, was being supplanted by a new binary: globalism versus nationalism.

Nationalism, in the broadest sense of the term, was the default worldview of most people at most times, especially in more traditional places. It was a community-focused attitude, in which a nation, tribe or ethnic group was seen as a thing of value to be loved and protected.

Globalism, the ideology of the rising urban bourgeoisie, was more individualistic. It valued diversity and change, prioritized rights over obligations and saw the world as a whole, rather than particular parts of it, as the moral community to which we all belong.

The current explosion of nationalism in the west, Haidt said, was due to globalism having overplayed its hand. Different attitudes to the issue of mass immigration – the spark that lit the fire on both sides of the Atlantic – demonstrated how this had happened.

While globalists saw migration as a right, nationalists saw it as a privilege.

To a globalist, border walls and immigration laws are tantamount to racism or human rights abuse.

To a nationalist, they are evidence of a community asserting its values and choosing to whom to grant citizenship.

Psychologically, Haidt suggested, what happened in 2016 was that many nationalist-inclined voters in the west felt that their community was now under existential threat – not only from large-scale migration, but from Islamist terrorist attacks and the globalist elite’s dismissive attitude to their concerns about both.

In response, they began to look around for strong leaders to protect them. The rest is history, still in the making.

This is the power of the new populists. The likes of Stephen Bannon and Marine Le Pen understand the destructive energy of global capitalism as well as the left does, but they also understand what the left refuses to see: that the heart of the west’s current wound is cultural rather than economic.

What is driving the modern turmoil are threats to identity, culture and meaning. Waves of migration, multicultural policies, eroding borders, shifting national and ethnic identities, globalist attacks on western culture: all that is solid is melting into air.

Who can promise the return of that solidity?

Not the left, which long ago hitched its wagon to the globalist horse, enthusing about breaking down everything from gender identities to national borders and painting any dissent as prejudice or hatred.

Instead, a new nationalism has risen to the occasion. As ever, those who can harness people’s deep, old attachment to tribe, place and identity – to a belonging and a meaning beyond money or argument – will win the day. This might be as iron a law as any human history can provide.

It didn’t take Trump’s cabinet of millionaires long, having got themselves comfortable in the White House, to start dismantling the nation’s environmental protections.

Two months in, the administration has given the green light to two controversial oil pipelines and removed environmental oversight on others, cancelled Obama’s climate action plan, removed regulations protecting clean water and appointed a former head of ExxonMobil as secretary of state.

Anti-green campaigner Myron Ebell, who believes that environmentalism is “the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world” was asked to head Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency, which he wants to abolish, and which has just seen its budget slashed by 25%.

Trump himself is notorious for his cavalier attitude to anything furry or leafy that gets in the way of his gaudy developments. The natural world has always been an inconvenient barrier to economic growth, which is why we are faced with a global ecological crisis.

But Trump’s anti-environmentalism, while it serves the interests of corporations, speaks the language of the people. In his telling, protecting the natural world from destruction is another example of the globalist elite sticking it to ordinary folk.

The notion that environmentalists are a privileged elite telling the hard-pressed that they can’t have decent lives has been a staple of corporate propaganda for decades.

Look at these horrible elitists, runs the line, trying to abolish your hard-earned holiday flights and double the price of your car journey. Who are they to tell you that you can’t give your children plastic toys at Christmas, or eat air-freighted avocados? Have you seen the size of Al Gore’s house?

Hypocrites!

Like all effective propaganda lines, this one works because there is some truth in it.

The environmental movement that emerged in the west more than 40 years ago, with the founding of organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and the birth of green parties across Europe, had its roots in the conservation world.

While its outlook was planetary – no true ecological movement can be anything else – its actions were often local or national. “Think globally, act locally”, perhaps the movement’s most effective early slogan, looks in retrospect like a beautiful combination of the best of the globalist and the nationalist impulses.

These days, though, as the Brexit vote demonstrated, green politics is a marker of the globalist class.

With their grand ecological Marshall Plans and their talk of sustainability and carbon, environmentalists today often seem distant from everyday concerns.

Green spokespeople and activists rarely come from the classes of people who have been hit hardest by globalization. The greens have shifted firmly into the camp of the globalist left. Now, as the blowback gathers steam, they find themselves on the wrong side of the divide.

All this can look like bad news from a certain perspective, but maybe it isn’t.

While environmentalism has changed the world in the last four decades, in recent years it has been spinning its wheels.

Increasingly unrealistic demands for global action on climate change, pie-in-the-sky manifestos calling for global rollouts of this or that eco-megaplan, the promotion of enormous windfarms or solar arrays that do more damage to wild nature than they prevent, all backed with a “40 months to save the world” narrative that’s been going on for 40 years: something had to give.

Some of the new populists may hope they can sound the death knell of the green movement, but perhaps they can instead teach it a necessary lesson.

What Haidt calls nationalism is really a new name for a much older impulse: the need to belong.

Specifically, the need to belong to a place in which you can feel at home. The fact that this impulse can be exploited by demagogues doesn’t mean that the impulse itself is wrong. Stalin built gulags on the back of a notional quest for equality, but that doesn’t mean we should give up on trying to make things fair.

The anti-globalist attack on the greens is a wake-up call. It points to the fact that green ideas have too often become a virtue signal for the carbon-heavy bourgeoisie, drinking their Fairtrade organic coffee as they wait for their transatlantic flight.

Green globalism has become part of the growth machine; a comfortable notion for those who don’t really want much to change.

What would happen if environmentalism remade itself – or was remade by the times?

What might a benevolent green nationalism sound like?

You want to protect and nurture your homeland – well, then, you’ll want to nurture its forests and its streams too. You want to protect its badgers and its mountain lions. What could be more patriotic?

This is not the kind of nationalism of which Trump would approve, but that’s the point. Why should those who want to protect a besieged natural world allow billionaire property developers to represent them as the elitists? Why not fight back – on what they think is their territory?

It has been done before. The nation that gave us Trump also gave us Teddy Roosevelt, another Republican populist president, but one who believed that America’s identity was tied up with protecting, not despoiling, its wild places.

Roosevelt created one of the greatest systems of protected areas and national parks in the world, using his presidency to save 230m acres of land. He wrote:

 “We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received,”“and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune.”

Protecting nature, Roosevelt believed, was a patriotic act.

If I had to offer up just one thing I have learned from my years of environmental campaigning, it would be this: any attempt to protect nature from the worst human depredation has to speak to people where they are.

It has to make us all feel that the natural world, the non-human realm, is not an obstacle in the way of our progress but a part of our community that we should nurture; a part of our birthright. In other words, we need to tie our ecological identity in with our cultural identity.

In the age of drones and robots, this notion might sound airy or even ridiculous, but it has been the default way of seeing for most indigenous cultures throughout history.

In the resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline, recently given the go-ahead by Trump, where the Standing Rock Sioux and thousands of supporters continue to resist the construction of an oil pipeline across Native American land, we perhaps see some indication of what this fusing of human and non-human belonging could look like today; a defense of both territory and culture, in the name of nature, rooted in love.

Globalism is the rootless ideology of the fossil fuel age, and it will fade with it. But the angry nationalisms that currently challenge it offer us no better answers about how to live well with a natural world that we have made into an enemy.

Our oldest identity is one that stills holds us in its grip, whether we know it or not.

Like the fox in the garden or the bird in the tree, we are all animals in a place. If we have a future, cultural or ecological – and they are the same thing, in the end – it will begin with a quality of attention and a defense of loved things. All else is for the birds, and the foxes too.

• Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, is published by Faber.

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For Old Order, and Earth, the jig is up

SUBHEAD: The existing Wall Street/Washington establishment has been repudiated and ended. 

By David Stockman on 9 November 2016 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-09/david-stockman-jig-america%E2%80%99s-voters-just-fired-their-ruling-elites)


Image above: Painting of scene of French Revolution at Musee Carnavalet titled 'Prise Du Louvre' by Jean Louis Bezard 1833. From (https://edu.hstry.co/timeline/the-french-revolution-b992).

[IB Publisher's note: Word is that Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Chris Chrisie and Sarah Palin are up for Cabibet posts and the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines as well as 'Clean Coal' are getting the Green Light under the Trump Administration.]

America’s voters fired their ruling elites last night. After 30 years of arrogant misrule and wantonly planting the seeds of economic and financial ruin throughout Flyover America, the Wall Street/Washington establishment and its mainstream media tools have been repudiated like never before in modern history.

During the course of the past year, upwards of 70 million citizens—–59 million for Trump and 13 million for Bernie Sanders—-have voted for dramatic change. That is, for an end to pointless and failed wars and interventions abroad and a bubble-based economic policy at home.

The latter showered Wall Street and the bicoastal elites with vast financial windfalls—-even as it left 90% of Flyover America behind, where households struggled with stagnant wages, vanishing jobs, soaring health costs, shrinking living standards and diminishing hope for the future.

The voters also said in no uncertain terms that they are fed-up with a “rigged” system that has one set of rules for establishment insiders and another for everyone else. In essence, that’s what servergate, the Clinton Foundation pay-to-play scandals and the trove of Wikileaks DNC/Podesta hacks was all about.

Indeed, in his brawling style, the Donald in effect convinced a huge slice of the electorate that the Clintons amounted to America’s leading crime family. And while he may have exaggerated the extent of their personal crimes and misdemeanors, the latter functioned as a proxy for the beltway racketeering that has become the modus operandi of the Imperial City.

Stated differently, the people did connect the dots. There is a straight line from repeal of Glass-Steagall by the Rubin-Clinton democrats in the late 1990s through the resounding repudiations of the Clintons last night. This string includes:

• The M&A roll-up of the giant Wall Street banks after 1998
• The subprime mortgage scams, housing booms and subsequent crash during the next decade
• The panicked multi-trillion bailouts of the Wall Street gambling houses in the fall of 2008 and the lunatic spree of central bank money pumping that followed
• The soaring stock market fueled by the Fed’s free money that arose therefrom
• The egregious global fund-raising and shakedowns of the Clinton Foundation 
• Personal wealth accumulations by the Clinton’s personally, capped by Hillary’s notorious $250,000 off-the-record speeches to Goldman Sachs.

What happened was that during the eight Obama years, Washington essentially borrowed $10 trillion, or nearly as much as the first 43 presidents did over 220 years, while the Fed expanded its balance sheet by 5X more than had happened during its first 94 years of existence.

This feckless resort to monumental public borrowing and money printing did generate a faux prosperity in the Imperial City and a $25 trillion gain in financial wealth among the gambling and financial asset owing classes at the top of the economic ladder.

But the bicoastal elites in Washington, Wall Street and Silicon Valley and its environs, luxuriating in their good fortune, essentially assumed that all was fixed and all was forgotten from the dark days of the financial crisis.

Not at all. The rubes remembered. No one in America supported the Wall Street bailouts except a few ten-thousands Wall Street operators, hedge funds and other gamblers; and the politicians and Keynesian policy apparatchiks who saw it as a new route to power and spoils.

What happened last election night —especially in the rust belt precincts where 70,000 factories have already closed and 6 million breadwinner jobs have disappeared – was nothing less than the third vote on TARP.

Whereas the cowardly House GOP had capitulated to Wall Street and their spineless leaders on the second vote in late September 2008, the rank and file voters of Flyover America last night proclaimed  loudly that it had not been done with their leave. Not at all.

The resentments and anger on main street has not only been simmering for years; its inhabitants have also figured out that it was on their backs that Wall Street was rehabilitated and then inflated to hideous valuations that bear no relationship to the faltering economy of main street.

Indeed, after getting a bailout they hated, main street then got a rogue central bank run by clueless Keynesian academics who deliberately and callously savaged savers and retirees; and also tried purposefully to trash worker wages with even more inflation than what was already destroying their jobs and shrinking the purchasing power of their paychecks.

We are now more convinced than ever that 2% inflation targeting is the greatest governmental assault on the working classes known to modern history.

And the working classes of Flyover America—-whose jobs are most exposed to the China Price on goods and the India Price on services—-finally said they are not going to take it any longer.

That’s a start, but it’s way too late for orderly reform and incremental change. The essence of last night’s thunderbolt— Brexit 2.0 on steroids — is that the ruinous rule of the existing Wall Street/Washington  establishment has been repudiated and ended.

But there is nothing to replace it. Donald Trump has no coherent program at all—-just a talent for name-checking the symptoms and rubbing them raw.

So as I said on Fox Business last night at about 11:30 PM, when I called the election for Trump long before the networks could bring themselves to face the truth, the election is over and the nation’s long nightmare has just begun.

For months and years to come, the Imperial City will be ungovernable and the nation will be racked with fiscal, financial, political and even constitutional crisis. By kicking the can in a ruinous direction for decades, America implicitly opted eventually for the bleeding cure.

To wit, the giant stock market bubble will now crash. The stock-price obsessed C-suites of corporate America will now panic and begin pitching inventory and workers overboard. We will be in an official recession within 6 months. The Federal budget will plunge back into trillion dollar annual deficits very soon.

Accordingly, Washington will descend into permanent warfare over the debt ceiling and an exploding $20 trillion+ public debt. Any notion of a Trump economic revival program—-even if it could now be confected—will be stillborn in the financial and fiscal chaos ahead.

And most important of all, the almighty Fed will be stranded high and dry—-out of dry powder and under political attack like never before from angry politicians and citizens alike.

The jig is up.

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Hillary - Unindicted Oligarch

SUBHEAD: A vote for Hillary is a vote in favor of the destruction of the rule of law and the Republic.

By John Hughs Smith on 20 March 2016 for Of Two Minds -
(http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/if-hillary-isnt-indicted-rule-of-law.html)


Image above: Indictment of Hillary over State Department related emails could close the road to the White House. From (https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/hillary-dead-end-campaign/).

Once the Oligarchy is above the law, the Republic is already dead.

To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway: How did you lose your Republic? Two ways, gradually and then suddenly. The Romans experienced this when their Republic was extinguished by Empire.

The erosion of the Republic was gradual: slowly but surely, the lower classes' representation in governance was curtailed; the Oligarchy of the wealthy and powerful cemented their privileges at the expense of the many; Oligarchs rose above the laws that were supposed to apply to all, and executive power was consolidated in top administrators and the wealthy at the expense of the Senate.

When Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army to seize control of Rome, the Roman Republic ceased to exist. Gradually and then suddenly: this is how Republics become Empires.

We find ourselves in a parallel moment in history: the American Republic has been hollowed into a shell that is maintained for PR purposes. Beneath the propaganda, the Establishment runs the nation for its own benefit.

The people are ignored, because they are powerless in this hollow shell of democracy: their only role is to provide bodies, talent and blood for the Imperial armed forces, pay taxes if they have any money, and be content with their food stamps if they don't.

Here's the proof:
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

Here are two articles in the same vein:
America the Banana Republic
The Quiet Coup

The United States has reached a crossing the Rubicon moment: either Hillary Clinton is indicted for knowingly violating statutes regarding State Department security, or the rule of law and the Republic are dead.

This is a binary moment: we either let Hillary evade the laws that were established to protect the security of the nation and confess there is no rule of law now for the Oligarchy, or the agencies tasked with defending the nation indict her.

There is no middle ground. If Hillary isn't indicted, the rule of law, i.e. no one is above the law, is dead.

If you believe Hillary that she didn't really do anything to violate the spirit or the letter of security laws, please review these statutes:

• U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual Volume 12 - Diplomatic Security
• 12 FAM 531.1 Top Secret Storage
• 12 FAM 531.1-1 Domestic
• (CT:DS-185; 01-31-2012)
• (Uniform State, USAID, OPIC, TDP)
• 2 FAM 558 CRIMINAL LAWS
  (TL:DS-70; 10-01-2000)

 Incidents involving intentional or grossly negligent release or mishandling of classified information may be subject to criminal penalties. An illustrative list of criminal statutes establishing penalties of fine and imprisonment for the release of classified information is set forth in 12 FAM 558 Exhibit 558.

Once the Oligarchy is above the law, the Republic is already dead. Once the people have lost the ability to influence the central state's policies and decisions, the Republic is dead. Once the elected officials can no longer impose the nation's statues on the Oligarchy (or have lost interest in doing so because they are all corrupted cronies), the Republic is dead.

Once the nation's agencies of law enforcement are stayed from indicting, prosecuting and jailing members of the Oligarchy, be they super-wealthy politicos like Hillary or super-wealthy Wall Street bankers, the Republic is dead.

The Democratic Party bosses and special interests have already selected Hillary as their shoo-in candidate for the Presidency, and these Oligarchs and special interests won't let any pesky details like laws protecting the security of the nation stand in the way of their Not So Quiet Coup.

The nation's Deep State, which I have covered extensively, has at least grudgingly approved Hillary as the next neo-conservative (never met an Imperial entanglement or drone strike she didn't like), neocolonial (we're going to put the "little people" in their rightful place, i.e. under our management) Imperial President.

A vote for Hillary, unindicted Oligarch, is a vote in favor of the destruction of the rule of law and the Republic.

This is the Rubicon every voter must decide to cross or refuse to cross: vote for Hillary (destroy the Republic and surrender to Imperial Oligarchy) or refuse to vote for an unindicted Imperial Oligarch.

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No Fear - No Caution - No Prudence

SUBHEAD: Could it be that America's ruling classes, its Imperial state and the Federal Reserve, no longer rule their own destiny?

By Charles Hugh Smith on 5 March 2016 for Of Two Minds -
(http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/americas-ruling-classes-no-fear-no.html)


Image above:This stunning McMansion is conveniently nearby CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia can be yours for 12.5 million dollars. From (http://dc.curbed.com/2014/12/2/10016304/stunning-mclean-mcmansion-can-be-yours-for-125m).

America's smug ruling classes are supremely confident: they feel no fear, no caution, and exhibit no prudence. I outlined the five ruling classes in America's Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy.

The Deep State is confident that its Imperial toady Hillary Clinton will win the election, beating the Upstart Crow, paving a smooth path to unhindered Imperial entanglements around the world. Hillary never saw an Imperial entanglement she didn't like, and her track record of abysmal failure doesn't faze her.

The Obama Administration, from the president on down, are confident their thin legacy will remain untarnished, and will provide them a cash-out in the tens of millions in book advances, speaking fees, and all the other rewards that flow to those who served the Financial Oligarchy and the Deep State.
The Financial Oligarchy is also supremely confident.

Obama's complete surrender to the Oligarchy in 2009 enabled a vast expansion of their wealth and power, and Goldman Sachs Hillary stands ready to do her masters' bidding.

The New Nobility (everyone between the .001% and the .05%) is also confident that the Federal Reserve will continue inflating their private wealth by whatever means are necessary--up to and including expropriation of middle class savings via zero interest rate policy and other financial tyranny.

The Upper Caste of technocrats that have skimmed billions in government contracts and stock options in Silicon Valley's Unicorn era are also supremely confident: thanks to the Federal Reserve, they can borrow money for essentially zero interest and use the free money to buy back millions of shares, boosting their own private wealth immensely.

The flim-flam of "innovation" will continue to sell their shares and their gadgets, and their dominance of New Media guarantees they have a lock on the devilishly effective soma of distraction, social media, mindless mobile gaming, etc. that persuades the debt-serf masses that they love their servitude.

The State Nomenklatura is also smugly confident that their privileged spot at the bloated Federal trough of trillions is guaranteed.

- Wealthy lobbyists are buying multi-million dollar McMansions in the cultural wastelands of Northern Virginia (the gaudy ugliness of the homes matching the pretensions of the Nomenklatura).

- Contractors are billing taxpayers billions for questionable services to the National Security State, and public union employees are confident that the Federal government will bail out their unaffordable pension and benefits plans once their local Democratic machines have strip-mined the taxpayers and bankrupted what's left of the local government.

This is hubris on an unimaginable scale. If there was any karmic justice in this Universe, all these classes would be ground into the dust of an era that they thought would last forever--an era doomed by their smug confidence that nothing could ever threaten their privileges, wealth and power.

Here's an interesting chart (courtesy of mdbriefing.com) of financial profits as a percentage of GDP and the ratio of debt to GDP. In the virtuous cycle of rapidly expanding financialization/credit, expanding debt pushes growth as measured by GDP (a misleading measure, but that's another story).

The cycle has reversed and is now unvirtuous: more debt is not pushing GDP higher, hence the declining ratio. Adding debt is not generating growth. Diminishing returns have grabbed the parasitic, predatory monster of financialization by its surprisingly vulnerable neck.

Meanwhile, financial profits are cratering. Wait, how could this be happening? Where's the Federal Reserve? Wave your wands, do some more magic!

Could it be that America's ruling classes, its Imperial state and the Federal Reserve, no longer rule their own destiny? Could their smug confidence be their undoing?

Only two things could upset the ruling class apple cart: a financial crash that the Fed can't stop, much less reverse, and Donald Trump winning the presidency.

What’s Been & What’s Next

SUBHEAD:  Ukraine is a mirror of ourselves and our sclerotic republic, poised to sink into poverty and disorder.

By James Kunstler on 21 April 2014 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/whats-been-and-whats-next/)


Image above: America reaching for world class poverty in Detroit. From (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2005550/Americas-pay-gap-Inequality-rich-poor-worse-revolutionary-Egypt.html).

The wonder is that more Americans are not ticked off about the state of our country than whatever is happening ten thousand miles away. 

For instance, how come the US Department of Justice is not as avid to prosecute the pervasive racketeering in the US economy as the State Department is for provoking unnecessary wars in foreign lands on the other side of the planet, over matters that have little bearing on life here? 

This racketeering, by the way, amounts to a war against American citizens.

I’m speaking especially of the US military racket, the banking and finance rackets, the health care racket and the college loan racket, all of which have evolved insidiously and elegantly to swindle the public in order to support a claque of American oligarchs. 

In other civilized lands, health care and college are considered the highest priority public goods (i.e. responsibilities of government), and national resources are applied to support them under the theory that bankrupting people for an appendectomy or a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering is not in the public interest. 

In our land, that would be considered “socialism.” Instead, we “socialize” the costs of supporting Too Big To Fail banks — so their employees can drive Beemers to their Hamptons summer house parties — and a military machine that goes around the world wrecking one country after another to support a parasitical class of contractors, lobbyists, and bought-off politicians in their northern Virginia McMansions.

Hence, the laughable conceit pinging through the news media lately that some dynastic grifter like Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton will slide into the White House in 2016 as easily as a watermelon seed popped into a shot glass. I don’t think it’s going to work out that way. 

The US political system needs to be turned upside down and inside out, and I expect that it will be. Either it happens within the bounds of electoral politics, or you’ll see it playing out in the streets and the windswept plains.

Just a glance around the USA these days ought to nauseate the casual observer. We have an infrastructure for everyday life that is failing in every way imaginable. Are you disturbed by the asteroid belts of vacant strip malls outside your town? Or the empty store fronts along your Main Streets?  

What do you suppose these places will be like in ten years when the mirage of shale oil dissolves in a mist of disappointment and political grievance? How are Americans going to feel, do you suppose, when gasoline just isn’t there at a price they can pay, and they are marooned in delaminating strand-board-and-vinyl houses 23 miles away from anything? 

Does the sheer immersive ugliness of the human imprint on the American landscape not give you the shivers?

Look at the pathetic and disgusting appearance of our cities, which for the most part present themselves as demolition derby arenas or war zones — except the strongholds of the red-white-and-blue oligarchs: Washington, San Francisco, and especially New York, Financialization Central.

What happens at the “magic moment” when Facebook stops being a narcissistic virtual playground for “selfies” and becomes a bulletin board for political revolution? 

Think that can’t happen here? And what if that revolution is a kind that doesn’t appeal to you — say, a revolution of race hatred, or fascist zealotry, or Marxist gangsterism of the type that took Russia hostage for 70 years?

All this is happening, incidentally, because the supposed best minds in our nation are paying no attention whatsoever to the most important story of our lifetime: the winding down of the techno-industrial global economy. 

It doesn’t really matter anymore why they don’t get it. Hubris. Greed. Distraction. Denial. All that matters is that they can’t be depended on and when that happens authority loses legitimacy. And when it comes to that, all bets are off.

The disintegration of Ukraine would be best understood by Americans as a mirror of ourselves and our sclerotic republic, poised to sink into poverty and disorder. Everything we do and say rings hollow now. 

What used to be called The Establishment has run out of ways to even pretend to save itself. We have no idea what’s next, but it’s not going to be more of what’s been.

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USA an Elitist Oligarchy

SUBHEAD: Political scientists show that average American has “near-zero” influence on policy outcomes.

By Jerome Roos on 17 April 2014 for Roar Magazine -
(http://roarmag.org/2014/04/gilens-page-us-oligarchy-elite/)


Image above: CEO's Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs) and Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Chase) and thirteen other bankers meet at White House with Oabama 2/27/09. From (http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/PFK_3GKtWNb/Obama+Meets+Heads+Major+Banks+White+House/vVu7Lgk1-rP/Jamie+Dimon).

Political scientists show that average American has “near-zero” influence on policy outcomes, but their groundbreaking study is not without problems.

It’s not every day that an academic article in the arcane world of American political science makes headlines around the world, but then again, these aren’t normal days either. On Wednesday, various mainstream media outlets — including even the conservative British daily The Telegraph — ran a series of articles with essentially the same title: “Study finds that US is an oligarchy.” Or, as the Washington Post summed up: 

“Rich people rule!” The paper, according to the review in the Post, “should reshape how we think about American democracy.”

The conclusion sounds like it could have come straight out of a general assembly or drum circle at Zuccotti Park, but the authors of the paper in question — two Professors of Politics at Princeton and Northwestern University — aren’t quite of the radical dreadlocked variety. No, like Piketty’s book, this article is real “science”. 

It’s even got numbers in it! Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University took a dataset of 1,779 policy issues, ran a bunch of regressions, and basically found that the United States is not a democracy after all:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

The findings, of course, are both very interesting and very obvious. What Gilens and Page claim to have empirically demonstrated is that policy outcomes by and large favor the interests of business and the wealthiest segment of the population, while the preferences of the vast majority of Americans are of little to no consequence for policy outcomes. 

As the authors show, this new data backs up the conclusions of a number of long-forgotten studies from the 1950s and 1960s — not least the landmark contributions by C.W. Mills and Ralph Miliband — that tried to debunk the assertion of mainstream pluralist scholars that no single interest group dominates US policymaking.

 

But while Gilens and Page’s study will undoubtedly be considered a milestone in the study of business power, there’s also a risk in focusing too narrowly on the elites and their interest groups themselves; namely the risk of losing sight of the broader set of social relations and institutional arrangements in which they are embedded. 

What I am referring to, of course, is the dreaded C-word: capitalism — a term that appears only once in the main body of Gilens and Page’s text, in a superficial reference to The Communist Manifesto, whose claims are quickly dismissed as empirically untestable. 

How can you talk about oligarchy and economic elites without talking about capitalism?

What’s missing from the analysis is therefore precisely what was missing from C.W. Mills’ and Miliband’s studies: an account of the nature of the capitalist state as such. 

By branding the US political system an “oligarchy”, the authors conveniently sidestep an even thornier question: what if oligarchy, as opposed to democracy, is actually the natural political form in capitalist society? 

What if the capitalist state is by its very definition an oligarchic form of domination? If that’s the case, the authors have merely proved the obvious: that the United States is a thoroughly capitalist society. Congratulations for figuring that one out! They should have just called a spade a spade.

That, of course, wouldn’t have raised many eyebrows. But it’s worth noting that this was precisely the critique that Nicos Poulantzas leveled at Ralph Miliband in the New Left Review in the early 1970s — and it doesn’t take an Althusserian structuralist to see that he had a point. 

Miliband’s study of capitalist elites, Poulantzas showed, was very useful for debunking pluralist illusions about the democratic nature of US politics, but by focusing narrowly on elite preferences and the “instrumental” use of political and economic resources to influence policy, Miliband’s empiricism ceded way too much methodological ground to “bourgeois” political science. 

By trying to painstakingly prove the existence of a causal relationship between instrumental elite behavior and policy outcomes, Miliband ended up missing the bigger picture: the class-bias inherent in the capitalist state itself, irrespective of who occupies it.

These methodological and theoretical limitations have consequences that extend far beyond the academic debate: at the end of the day, these are political questions. The way we perceive business power and define the capitalist state will inevitably have serious implications for our political strategies. The danger with empirical studies that narrowly emphasize the role of elites at the expense of the deeper structural sources of capitalist power is that they will end up reinforcing the illusion that simply replacing the elites and “taking money out of politics” would be sufficient to restore democracy to its past glory. 

That, of course, would be profoundly misleading. If we are serious about unseating the oligarchs from power, let’s make sure not to get carried away by the numbers and not to lose sight of the bigger picture.

• Jerome Roos is a PhD candidate in International Political Economy at the European University Institute, and founding editor of ROAR Magazine.

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Descent into Stasis

SUBHEAD: Get used a steep decline in standards of living and abandonment of privileges. By John Michael Greer on 9 May 2012 for the Archdruid Report - (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2012/05/descent-into-stasis.html) Image above: Make sure to post your local collapse experience on Facebook. From (http://inhabitat.com/reburbia-favorite-notable-mentions/).

Last weeks’ post attempted, with the help of the ancient Greek philosopher Polybius, to trace out the trajectory that democracies—and in particular the United States—tend to follow across time. The pattern that Polybius outlined, and that American politics has cycled through three times so far in the course of its history, begins with most of the nation’s political power concentrated in a single person, and follows the diffusion of power to the point that the entire political system settles into a gridlock only a massive crisis can break. Just now, according to that model, we are in the stage of gridlock, and thus of maximum diffusion of power.

Now of course this interpretation flies in the face of the standard narrative that surrounds power in America today. Both sides of the political spectrum these days like to insist that too much power is in the hands of the other side, at least when the other side is in the White House or has a majority in Congress. The further from the mainstream you go, the more strident the voices you’ll hear insisting that some small group or other has seized absolute power over the US political system and is running things for their own advantage. The identity of the small group in question varies wildly—it’s hard to think of anyone who hasn’t been accused, at some point in the last half century or so, of being the secret elite that runs everything—but the theory that some small group or other has all the power that everybody else seems to lack is accepted nearly everywhere. Whether it’s Occupy Wall Street talking about the nefarious 1%, or the Tea Party talking about the equally nefarious liberal elite, the conviction that power has been concentrated in the wrong hands is ubiquitous in today’s America.

It’s an appealing notion, especially if you want to find somebody to blame for the current state of affairs in this country, and of course hunting for scapegoats is a popular sport whenever times are hard. Still, I’d like to suggest that an alternative understanding explains much more about the current state of the American political system. The alternative I have in mind is that the political system is lurching forward like a driverless car along a trajectory set by the outdated policies of an earlier time, and that just now, nobody is in charge at all. Unpopular though this way of thinking about power in America is, I suggest that it makes more sense of our predicament than the more popular notion of elite control.

It’s important to understand what my proposal means and, more importantly, what it doesn’t mean. A great many of those who insist that power in America is in the hands of a small elite offer, as evidence for the claim, the fact that a relatively small number of people get an obscenely large share of national income and wealth, and they’re quite correct. The last three decades or so have seen America turn into something close to a Third World kleptocracy, the sort of failed state in which a handful of politically well-connected people plunder the economy for their own benefit. When bank executives vote themselves and their cronies million-dollar bonuses out of government funds while their banks are losing billions of dollars a year, just to name an obvious example, it’s impossible to discuss the situation honestly without using words like “looting.”

Still, the ability to plunder one corner of a complex system is not the same thing as the ability to control the whole system, and the freedom with which so many people pillage the institutions they’re supposed to be managing could as well be understood as a sign that there’s no center of power willing or able to defend the core interests of the US empire against death by financial hemorrhage. The only power the executives of, say, Goldman Sachs need is the power to block any effort to stop them from stripping their bank to the bare walls for their personal enrichment, or to cut them off from the access to tax dollars that’s made that process so lucrative. That much power they certainly have—but it’s a kind and a degree of power shared by many other influential groups in America just now.

Consider the defense industries that are busy profiting off the F-35 fighter, an impressively corrupt corporate welfare program currently chewing gargantuan holes in the defense budgets of the US and several other nations. Years behind schedule and trillions of dollars over budget, the F-35 is by all independent accounts a dog of a plane, clumsier and more vulnerable than the decades-old fighters it is supposed to replace. The consortium of interests that profit from its manufacture have the power to keep the process chugging along, even as the delays stretch to decades and the cost overruns head toward lunar orbit, and again, that’s all the power they need. It’s all the more telling that they’re able to do so when the F-35 project is directly opposed to crucial US interests: having the US and its allies equipped with a substandard fighter, at a time when China and Russia are both busily testing much better planes, risks humiliating defeat in future wars—and yet the program moves steadily forward.

Examples of the same sort of thing can be multiplied endlessly, and they aren’t limited to corporations. Cities and counties all over the United States, for example, are being driven into bankruptcy by the cost of public-sector salaries and benefits that politically influential unions have extracted from vulnerable or compliant local politicians. Equally, other countries—China and Israel come to mind—have learned to make use of the diffusion of American power for their own interests. It doesn’t matter how blatantly the Chinese manipulate their currency or thumb their noses at intellectual property rights, for instance; so long as they keep their lobby in Washington well funded and well staffed, they’re secure from any meaningful response on the part of the US government. I’ve come to suspect that the only reason the US government is down on Iran is that religious scruples keep the Iranian government from buying immunity the way the Chinese do; they’ve got the petroleum and therefore the money, and could doubtless have their own influential lobby capable of blocking hostile legislation in Congress, if only they didn’t let their ideals get in the way.

The power exerted by each of these groups is by and large a veto power. They may not be able to get new policies through the jungle of competing interests in Washington, a task that is increasingly hard for anyone to manage at all, but they can prevent policies that are not in their interest from being enacted, and they can defend any policy already in place that benefits them or furthers their ability to loot the system. They have that veto power, in turn, because no one in contemporary America has the power to get anything done without assembling a temporary coalition of competing power centers, each of which has its own agenda and each of which constantly has its hand out for the biggest possible share of the take.

Not every potential power center in American politics functions as a veto group, mind you. A great many groups have become captive constituencies of one of the existing power centers, and thus lost whatever independent influence they might have had. Compare the way that the Democratic Party has seized control of the environmental movement to the way that the Republicans have played the same trick on gun owners. In both cases, the party can ignore the interests of its captive constituency until elections come around, and then bombard the constituency with propaganda insisting that the other party will do horrible things to the environment or the Second Amendment if they win the election. The other party duly plays its part in this good cop-bad cop routine by making threatening noises about gun rights or environmental issues at intervals. It’s an efficient scam, and it keeps environmentalists voting for Democrats and gun owners voting for Republicans even though neither party gives more than lip service to the issues that matter to either group.

To the members of the captive constituencies, in turn, all this simply feeds the belief that there must be somebody in the system who has the power they lack; after all, they keep on voting for the right people, and yet none of their policies ever get enacted! Since very few gun owners ever sit down and share a couple of beers with environmentalists, there’s rarely an opportunity for them to compare notes and notice that neither side is getting what it wants, and the same gimmick is being used on both. The one place on the political continuum where this sort of comparison does take place is out on the fringes, where the extreme left increasingly bends around to touch the extreme right, and the paranoiac beliefs endemic to the farther shores of American politics turn the whole thing into yet another proof that the Freemasons or the Jews or David Ickes’ imaginary space lizards run everything after all.

Just as the ability to plunder one part of a system does not equal control over the whole system, though, the ability to manipulate a handful of politically naive pressure groups does not equal the ability to manipulate the whole system. It’s precisely because no one group has an effective monopoly on power that political parties and other power centers have to resort to complicated and expensive gimmickry to hammer together the temporary coalitions that enable them to cling to whatever power they have and, on increasingly rare occasions, force through some policy or other that favors their interests.

As the system settles ever more deeply into gridlock, in turn, policies put in place in previous decades become increasingly resistant to change. Even those that turned out to have severe flaws will inevitably get support from those who profit from them, and from employees of government bureaucracies whose jobs would go away in the event of a policy change. Machiavelli pointed out a long time ago that reforms always face an uphill struggle, since those who benefit from the status quo can be counted on to fight fiercely to hold on to what they’ve got, while those who might benefit from reform have less incentive to fight for gains they know perfectly well they may never see; factor in the mutual support among power centers who have a mutual interest in keeping the status quo fixed in place, and you have a recipe for exactly the sort of stasis the United States sees every seventy or eighty years, as the cycle discussed in last week’s post approaches its end.

How the endgame plays out is a matter of more than academic interest. In 1860 and 1932, a political system frozen in gridlock and incapable of anything like a constructive response to crisis finally hit a crisis that could not be evaded any longer, and the system shattered. In the chaos that resulted, a long-shot candidate with a radical following was able to pull together enough support from the remaining power centers and the people in general to win the White House and force through changes that redefined the political landscape for decades to come. That’s a possibility this time around, too, but a possibility is not a certainty, and nowhere is it written in stone that a crisis of the sort we’re discussing has to have a happy ending.

The range and scale of the crises facing the United States as it finishes the third lap around the track of anacyclosis, to begin with, pose a far more substantial challenge than the ones that punctuated the cycle in those earlier years. In 1860, as we’ve seen, the question was which of two incompatible human ecologies would dominate the North American continent; in 1932, it was the simpler though still challenging matter of how to pry the dead fingers of a failed economic ideology off the throat of the nation. This time, the United States faces two immense and parallel difficulties, neither one of which has the sort of straightforward solution that Lincoln and Roosevelt respectively had to hand.

The first difficulty, as I’ve discussed at length in these posts, is that the global empire established by the United States in the wake of the Second World War is coming apart. The American way of empire – the custom of leaving the administration of subject countries to puppet governments drawn from local elites – was cheaper than the traditional approach of subjugation and rule by an imperial viceroy, but it turned out to be more vulnerable to change and less directly profitable to the imperial government: American corporations profited mightily from the wealth pump directed at Latin America, for example, but very little of that money ended up in the coffers of the US treasury, where it could help cover the costs of empire.

As the American empire falters, in turn, rival powers expand their own military capacities and apply pressure wherever they can get away with it, short of being drawn into a premature war; the US military reacts with the same sort of stereotyped response that characterized the latter years of the British empire, preparing to fight bygone wars with ever more ornate and overpriced technology, while its most likely opponents show every sign of asking the hard questions about basics that lead to sudden revolutions in military practice. When this has happened in the past, the results have almost never been good for the established imperial power, and there’s no reason to think that things will be noticeably different this time around.

Meanwhile America’s “empire of time,” its once-immense energy resource base, has been drawn down at breakneck rates for more than a century and a half. Recent handwaving around shale gas reserves has served mostly to pump up the price of drilling company stocks, and enabled a certain number of rich men in influential positions to get away with another round of looting; we’ve all heard the strident claims that the United States will become an energy exporter sometime very soon, but the numbers don’t even begin to add up, and it’s a safe bet that a few years down the road shale gas will have gone the way of ethanol and all the other energy sources that were allegedly going to replace petroleum and keep the industrial age running smoothly ahead. The American economy is utterly dependent on very large quantities of petroleum; so is the American military; drastic changes, going far beyond the baby steps involved in manufacturing a few electric cars or running a naval vessel or two on biodiesel, would have to get started well in advance to cushion the end of either dependency, and those changes are not taking place.

The consequences of the end of these two empires can’t be dealt with on the battlefield, as the long debate over the shape of America’s human ecology was, and it can’t be dealt with by jerry-rigging a set of temporary expedients to overcome the mismatch between real wealth and a dysfunctional financial system, as the crisis of the Great Depression was. It will require massive changes in every aspect of American life, starting with a steep decline in standards of living and the forced abandonment of privileges most Americans think of as theirs by right. That would be an immense crisis at the best of times, and these are not the best of times; our political system has spent the last thirty years trying to evade exactly these issues, while sinking further and further into stasis, and it’s our luck that the crisis seems to be arriving just as American politics freeze up completely.

That might result in the kind of systemic shock that brings another long-shot candidate with a radical following into the White House, and catalyzes immense natonal changes. It might also result in the more extreme form of systemic shock that shatters a nation into fragments. In the weeks to come we’ll be discussing both those possibilities, and others.

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