Don't Blame Russia: The Entire Point of the Two-Party System is to "Divide the Country"

FiveThirtyEight is all in when it comes to Russiagate. The latest is this morning's "Why We’re Sharing 3 Million Russian Troll Tweets," by Oliver Roeder, which invites readers to peruse a database of tweets allegedly produced by the infamous Internet Research Agency of St. Petersburg:

FiveThirtyEight has obtained nearly 3 million tweets from accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency. To our knowledge, it’s the fullest empirical record to date of Russian trolls’ actions on social media, showing a relentless and systematic onslaught. In concert with the researchers who first pulled the tweets, FiveThirtyEight is uploading them to Github so that others can explore the data for themselves.

The data set is the work of two professors at Clemson University: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren. Using advanced social media tracking software, they pulled the tweets from thousands of accounts that Twitter has acknowledged as being associated with the IRA. The professors shared their data with FiveThirtyEight in the hope that other researchers, and the broader public, will explore it and share what they find. “So far it’s only had two brains looking at it,” Linvill said of their trove of tweets. “More brains might find God-knows-what.”

The data set published here includes 2,973,371 tweets from 2,848 Twitter handles. It includes every tweet’s author, text and date; the author’s follower count and the number of accounts the author followed; and an indication of whether the tweet was a retweet. The entire corpus of tweets published here dates from February 2012 to May 2018, with the vast majority from 2015 to 2017.

[snip]

“Russia’s attempts to distract, divide, and demoralize has been called a form of political war,” the authors conclude in their paper. “This analysis has given insight into the methods the IRA used to engage in this war.”

This war may or may not have had an effect on the 2016 election, but it certainly wreaked havoc. The man who would be named national security adviser followed and pushed the message of Russian troll accounts, according to the Daily Beast, and Trump’s eldest son, campaign manager and digital director each retweeted a Russian troll in the month before the election. Twitter itself informed 1.4 million people that they’d interacted with Russian trolls.

But the researchers emphasized that the Russian disinformation and discord campaign on Twitter extends well beyond even that.

“There were more tweets in the year after the election than there were in the year before the election,” Warren said. “I want to shout this from the rooftops. This is not just an election thing. It’s a continuing intervention in the political conversation in America.”

“They are trying to divide our country,” Linvill added.

No, they're trying to make money. Nothing refutes Moon of Alabama's analysis from when Mueller's indictment was made back in February: The Internet Research Agency is a run-of-the-mill marketing firm engaged in the type of commercial activity common in the online world. You would think that FiveThirtyEight would reference the story from earlier this month of Twitter closing millions of fake accounts, which primarily didn't have to do with Russia but normal business activity of boosting commercial products and personalities.

Does a foreign power really need to expend any effort to divide the United States? That's the entire point of the two-party system.

“What Happens if We Get into a War?”

There is a quote that caught my eye. It was in a Mark Landler story, "Trump Crows as a Steel Plant Fires Up, but Tariffs Singe Soybean Farmers," about Trump's celebratory visit to a United State Steel Corporation mill in Granite City, Illinois. The plant had recently fired up a second blast furnace, presumably because Trump's tariffs on Chinese and European producers are increasing demand for U.S. steel.

Landler walked the floor of the plant interviewing rank-'n'-file steelworkers:

Nathan Kessler, 52, a millwright who just returned to his job after 10 months out of work, said the United States needed to have its own steel production for national security reasons — citing one of the White House’s criteria for imposing 25 percent tariffs on European and Asian steel.

“What happens if we get into a war?” Mr. Kessler asked. “What are we going to do? Melt down Kias?”

Wow. Isn't the U.S. at war already? The U.S. is presently deployed in over 150 countries; and in terms of ongoing military conflicts, the U.S. is fighting a (losing) war in Afghanistan, controls about one-third of Syria's geography, is actively engaged in the Saudi-led war against Yemen, once again maintains an active presence in Iraq, is arming the Baltics and Eastern Europe, has trainers in Ukraine, and regularly sends Navy patrols near China's installations in the South China Sea. Then there's Africa (Libya and Somalia). One could go on and on.

I know what the millwright is thinking though. He's thinking of total war, or at least a huge mobilization a la Desert Storm. With talk of a forthcoming U.S. strike on Iran, the U.S. might indeed "get into a war."

Ortega Defended

This article, "The Case Against Daniel Ortega," by Chuck Kaufman, arrived in my inbox this past week. I've been receiving emails for years from AfGJ, the Alliance for Global Justice. Sadly, I rarely if ever read them. (When I was a treasurer for the local Green Party we shared an office with the Seattle AfGJ chapter. Their sole staff organizer was a textbook case of passive aggressive politesse. Last I heard he was working for SEIU. Perfect.) Fortunately, I read the email which included the article by Chuck Kaufman.

Nicaragua is in the mainstream U.S. press again. Protests have roiled the country for the last several months. A bare-minimum synopsis can be found in a AP dispatch, "8 Nicaraguan Doctors Say Fired for Treating Hurt Protesters," published yesterday:

At least 448 people have been killed, most of them protesters, since the protests began in April. Demonstrators were initially upset over proposed social security cuts but are now demanding Ortega leave office after a deadly crackdown by security forces and armed pro-government civilians.

It's all too familiar to jaded readers of Western corporate media. There's a ruthless despot senselessly butchering the freedom-loving people of his country. The U.S. stands in righteous opposition to this anti-democratic brute. Sanctions are levied. Et cetera, et cetera.

We're never asked to wonder, for instance, why sanctions aren't levied against Bahraini royals when doctors are tortured for treating patients during the Pearl uprising.

In any event, Chuck Kaufman addresses all the mainstream talking points. It's lengthy, but I quote his blog post in full because it is an excellent primer on the recent political history of Nicaragua.

The Case Against Daniel Ortega, by Chuck Kaufman

The Nicaragua Network/Alliance for Global Justice and I have recently been called Orteguistas (Ortega supporters). We used to be called Danielistas before it became necessary to the narrative to demonize him completely by denying him the practice in some parts of Latin America of calling those you respect, like Fidel and Che, by their first names. In case you are not clear, calling someone an Orteguista is an insult on par with calling someone a Stalinist or a Trot. It doesn’t really carry any meaning anymore; it is just used as a pejorative to discredit the person or organization it is aimed at.

I’m sure the Ortega government would be surprised of that characterization of us. We have not had even informal relations with Ortega or the FSLN since the mid-90s when a report we sent to the National Directorate following the Zoilamerica charges was taken as interfering in Nicaragua’s affairs and we were cut off from party structures.

Not having ties to the FSLN did not relieve us of the obligation to expose and oppose our government’s intervention in Nicaragua’s sovereign affairs. We continue to support the Sandinista Revolution and its institutions, but our main focus is to change our own government, a charge given to us by many Nicaraguans, high and low, in the 1980s.

But, perhaps because we didn’t have direct contact with the FSLN or the government, since the FSLN’s return to power with the 2006 election of Daniel Ortega as president, we haven’t really countered the disinformation campaign against Daniel, his wife, and his government. We mistakenly assumed that the demonstrably improving standard of living, the reduction in poverty, infant and maternal mortality, the lack of Nicaraguans coming north to the US border, the return of economic and political rights stripped from the people during 17 years of neoliberal US vassal governments, would outshine the lies.

Partially because of our failure to counter the lies before they took on the weight of truth, opposition forces in Nicaragua and their US overlords mistakenly thought they could drive out the democratically elected government. As a result, over 200 people are dead. The coup has failed thanks to the support of the majority of the Nicaraguan people for peace, but half a billion dollars in damage has been done and the peace is incomplete, like Venezuela’s, without the resolution, accountability, and truth-telling needed for true reconciliation.

The case against Daniel Ortega.

First and foremost, we all know that Daniel is a dictator, right? We know it because corporate and progressive press alike can’t say his name without the modifier, dictator. So what are the criteria to be a dictator? When I googled “dictator definition” the top one was pretty clear: “a ruler with total power over a country, typically one who has obtained power by force.”

Have we forgotten that after losing the highly unequal 1990 election, Daniel Ortega was the first Head of State in Nicaraguan history to peacefully pass the sash of office to a successor of another party? That election was free, but hardly fair. The US spent more per voter in support of its candidate, Violeta Chamorro, than Bush and Dukakis combined spent per capita in the 1988 US presidential election. 

Fraud denied the FSLN a return to office in 1996 so it wasn’t until 2006 that Nicaraguan voters, tired of structural adjustment, power outages, and a moribund economy, returned the FSLN to the presidency headed by Daniel Ortega. He won by the slimmest plurality of 38% against a divided opposition. He won reelection in 2011 with 63% of the vote, and in 2016 by 72.5%. The Organization of American States officially accompanied the vote. They made recommendations for some electoral reforms which the government agreed to, but said that the outcome reflected the legitimate will of the people. Dictators don’t win fair elections by growing margins.

Now some people argue that the 2011 and 2016 elections were unconstitutional. Granted the 1987 political constitution contained a one-term limit for executive offices. Ortega challenged the prohibition of re-election and the Supreme Court threw out term limits, just the same as the Costa Rican Supreme Court did when Oscar Arias made a similar appeal a number of years earlier. And, of course, in Honduras, after overthrowing President Manuel Zelaya after he merely proposed doing away with term limits for future presidents, Juan Orlando Hernandez did not even ask for a Supreme Court ruling. The Nicaraguan opposition and the US State Department did not contest the results in either Costa Rica or Honduras.

So, failing to meet any of the criteria of the charge of dictatorship, we must find Daniel Ortega not guilty on that count.

The second charge of the indictment is that Ortega is forming a family dynasty like the Somoza dictatorship. To be a dynasty there is at least a minimum requirement of succession of office by another family matter. I don’t know what is in Daniel’s heart and mind, he might very well dream of passing on the presidency to his wife or one of his children, but it hasn’t happened yet, and the only way it could happen would be with the votes of a majority of Nicaraguans in a free and fair election. In the US, the Bush family can rightly be called a dynasty. They have Sen. Prescott Bush who was the father of President George H. W. Bush who was the father of George W. Bush. That dynasty hopefully fizzled out with the failure of George W’s brother Jeb in 2016. The Clintons were a contender for dynasty, but Hillary Clinton’s electoral failure in 2016 destroyed that dream.

So, failing to meet any of the criteria of dynasty, we must find Daniel Ortega not guilty. 

The next charge in the indictment is corruption. Do you remember when they used to say that Fidel Castro was the richest man in the world? They made that claim by assigning the value of all Cuba’s state-owned property and resources as Fidel’s personal wealth. Well that’s how they come up with the claim that Daniel is enriching his family while in office. I realized how this argument was being spun in 2008 when the Sandinista Renovation Movement leadership attempted to convince a delegation I was leading that the Ortega government has spent zero cordobas on poverty alleviation. They defended that insultingly obvious lie by assigning all of the Venezuela oil aid, which was providing the funds for Zero Hunger, Zero Usury, school lunches, peasant agriculture and small business loans, to Ortega’s personal balance sheet!

The World Bank, the IMF, the EU countries have all singled out the government of Nicaragua for its effective use of international loans and grants. That means the loans and grants were spent for the purposes they were given, not siphoned off into the pockets of Ortega and his supporters like happens in so many countries. You can’t fulfill the UN Millennium Goals to cut poverty in half, you can’t grow the economy by 5% a year without significantly increasing income disparities if you are pocketing international aid, and you can’t grow tourism without displacing small and medium businesses, not to mention residents, if you are pocketing international aid.

The one sub-charge of corruption that might hold water would be that of nepotism, the favoring of his children for jobs that he controls. That is a fairly minor crime and one that is common almost everywhere in the world. I don’t know whether it is a fair accusation.

So, failing to meet any of the criteria of the major charge of corruption, we must find Daniel Ortega not guilty. On the minor charge of nepotism, we have a hung jury.

The fourth charge in the indictment is that he controls all the institutions of government. Well, so does Trump. In addition to the executive, legislative, and judicial branch that we are familiar with, Nicaragua has a fourth independent branch, the Supreme Electoral Council, which runs elections. This is a common branch of government in Latin. America. The way magistrates are chosen for the Electoral Council and the Supreme Court is that the president nominates them and the National Assembly, the legislature, elects them. Other parties can and do put forward their own slates of magistrates. During Daniel’s 2007-2011 term, the FSLN had the largest caucus in the National Assembly, but not a majority. Magistrates and Justices were selected by compromise and included supporters of multiple parties. Voters gave the FSLN a majority in the legislature in the elections of 2011 and 2016. That’s how bourgeois democracy works. The parties that get the most votes hold the most power.

So, failing to prove that a crime was committed, the charge of controlling all public institutions is dismissed.

The final major count in the indictment is that following peaceful demonstrations by students on April 18, 2018, against reforms to the social security law intended to restore the fund to solvency, Ortega ordered the National Police to fire live ammunition at peaceful protestors. On April 18, a student was allegedly killed (who later turned up alive), causing a series of marches, riots, paralysis of the country from hundreds of roadblocks, over 200 deaths including protestors, police, and Sandinista supporters, and the loss of economic activity and governability for three long months.

This is the most serious of the charges. No one explains why a police force that in 39 years had not repressed the Nicaraguan people would suddenly go berserk. International reporting and reports from the human rights community, both Nicaraguan and international, have been one-sided and ignore evidence that does not fit the narrative of the violence being one-way directed by the government against the “peaceful” “student” opposition.

The only way the truth will ever be known and guilty parties held accountable, is if the violence ends through dialogue and a fully independent, internationally-funded investigation and truth commission takes place. No verdict is possible until that happens.

Having disposed of the major charges against President Ortega and finding nothing that justifies an extra-constitutional removal from office that would throw the country into a Libya-like chaos, I personally, and the Nicaragua Network/Alliance for Global Justice will continue to support the legitimacy and the platform of the Sandinista Front for National Liberation and its leader President Daniel Ortega. If that makes us Orteguistas, well then we will wear that label with pride even though it is inaccurate.

But, before I end this blog, I want to deal with three charges brought by people who consider themselves Left of the Sandinistas.

The first is that the Ortega government is a neoliberal government. That is true to the extent that neoliberalism is the dominant economic model that even social democratic governments must bow to in order to survive. But, the Ortega government is not slavishly devoted to neoliberalism like its US-backed succors. It told the IMF to go to hell and made them like it when its poverty alleviation and targeted economic subsidies worked.

That Nicaragua, the second poorest country in the hemisphere, has any leverage at all with the IMF, the enforcer of neoliberalism, is a tribute to Ortega’s effectiveness as a national leader. But due to Nicaragua’s size and small economy, his leeway in independently deciding economic policy is strictly limited. The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) is a good example. Free trade agreements are the epitome of neoliberalism. Former US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick passed on the message to Ortega in advance of the 2006 election that as long as he sticks with CAFTA, the US doesn’t care who is president. Let’s work for a day when the US doesn’t have the power to tell another country’s president what to do rather than criticize Ortega for taking an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Another charge from the Left is that Ortega kowtows to the US by cooperating with the Drug War and allowing US troops on Nicaragua’s national territory. I would not use the word kowtow, but the charge has some truth. Daniel is personally extremely opposed to all drug use. Even without the US militarized Drug War he would oppose the decriminalization and legalization of any drug including marijuana. Besides, the Nicaraguan Army wants the little toys it gets from the Pentagon for cooperating with the US Drug War. Daniel also does not want a return of the Contra War. Even in the 80’s he had a propensity to make compromises on the belief that the US would play fair. It never has. On the positive side, unless they manage to do so through the present turmoil, the international drug cartels have not gained a foothold in Nicaragua and Nicaragua does not suffer the social problems and violence of its northern neighbors.

And finally, there is the charge that Ortega criminalized abortion. That is not a factual statement, but it might be true to say he didn’t stop the criminalization of abortion. Abortion has always been criminalized in Nicaragua, but the Liberal Party President Jose Santos Zelaya who was president from 1893-1909 when he was overthrown by the US, adopted an exception to save the life or health of the mother. In 2006, in the final year of the Bolaños administration, the Catholic hierarchy and evangelical protestant leadership created a campaign to completely criminalize abortion. It became an election issue, of course.

In order to neutralize the Catholic bishops who had openly campaigned against him in previous elections, Ortega told the legislators in the Sandinista caucus that he was not imposing party discipline for the vote and they should vote their conscience. Some voted no on criminalization, the majority abstained, but enough voted with the right-wing legislators to pass the bill. What Ortega’s detractors leave out is that under his government not a single medical official or woman has been prosecuted under the law. Compare that with El Salvador where women who have had natural miscarriages have received long prison sentences, and I think we have to find Ortega not guilty on that charge too.

I think it is an indictment of us on the Left in the US that so many of us are willing to accept the groundless charges against Ortega and his government because we have a deep-seated bias against government period. It is a small step from believing unconsciously that all government is bad to believing false negative charges against any particular government. What I find completely distressing is those on the Left who are willing to throw away all the advances of the Sandinista Revolution with support for a coup that will only benefit the Nicaraguan oligarchy and US goal to restore hegemony over Latin America. I am very disappointed, although I am also encouraged that as we’ve begun to fight back against the disinformation, many more people are coming forward in support.

Extra: Radio interview with Chuck Kaufman and Max Blumenthal

Our Confused Gutenberg Galaxy

Tried and true 20th century media are collapsing. The numbers of broadcast and cable television viewers are declining. With the announcement earlier in the week of the New York Daily News chopping its newsroom staff in half, the last days of cities with multiple daily newspapers are upon us.

But there's bad news for new digital media too. Facebook lost nearly $120 billion in value yesterday. The market reacted to Facebook's reduced growth forecasts. One of the chief drivers for lower projected growth is that the company is having to staff a vast -- think Terry Gilliam's Brazil -- bureau of censors.

A new day is dawning but it's not clear if the weather is going to be fair or foul. The old media is dying, and the new media is pausing because of government attempts to exert control, as well as basic "peak screen time" burnout.

What follows are some key passages gleaned from this week:

From Wednesday's Significant Digits:

33 million cord cutters
According to a media research firm, 33 million people — or 32.8 percent of television watchers — have cut the cord. That is, they’ve canceled pay TV in favor of “over the top,” or streaming, television services. That’s more than last year’s projections of 27.1 million, he typed as his shiny little black streaming device purred lovingly in the background. [Mashable]

****

Matt Phillips' "Facebook’s Stock Plunge Shatters Faith in Tech Companies’ Invincibility":

[I]nvestors responded Thursday by hammering the stock of Facebook, one of the world’s most valuable companies. Shares of the social media giant fell 19 percent, wiping out roughly $120 billion of shareholder wealth, among the largest one-day destruction of market value that a company has ever suffered.

Investors dumped Facebook shares after the company reported disappointing second-quarter earnings, in which the company warned of a sharp slowdown in sales growth in coming quarters along with rising spending on security and privacy enhancements.

[snip] 

It was the details of Facebook’s report that seemed to spook investors. The company’s quarterly revenue fell slightly short of meeting the expectations of Wall Street analysts. And executives warned that the company would invest heavily in privacy and security, and that revenue growth would most likely slow in coming quarters.

[snip] 

Still, the sheer size of Facebook’s fall on Thursday became a focus for investors. The decline in Facebook’s market value was roughly equivalent to the entire value of some of the country’s best-known companies, including McDonald’s, Nike and the industrial conglomerate 3M.

"Facebook Starts Paying a Price for Scandals" by Sheera Frenkel

Facebook has also said it wanted to hire 20,000 people by the end of 2018 to help review content posted on the site and to work on its security team. The company’s head count has already risen 47 percent since last year, to 30,275.

****

"Daily News Newsroom Cut in Half by Tronc as Top Editor Is Ousted" by Jaclyn Peiser

The News had a digital reach of 23 million, but it wasn’t enough. The challenge of wringing profits from page views has eluded much of the industry, and the paper proved unable to end its losing streak. According to securities filings, it lost $23.6 million in 2016. Since then, its business has continued to suffer.

[snip] 

The longtime home of the columnists Jimmy Breslin, Dick Young and Liz Smith and the cartoonist Bill Gallo, The News reveled in its role as the voice of the average citizen. Etched into the stone above the entrance of its former home, the Daily News Building on East 42nd Street, is a phrase attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “God must have loved the common man, he made so many of them.”

“You used to see everybody reading the newspaper on the subway,” said Michael Daly, a onetime News columnist who now writes for The Daily Beast. “The News was the right size. It was the perfect size for the biggest city.”

One of its most famous headlines — “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” from 1975 — summed up President Gerald R. Ford’s refusal to send federal aid to a city on the verge of bankruptcy. Ford later said the headline had played a role in his losing the 1976 presidential election.

"Newspapers in New York, Like Their Readers, Are Vanishing" by Andy Newman

There are, of course, still people who treasure the solidity of newsprint. Some of them are even young. Ella Noman, 25, who works in a flower shop near the 30th Avenue subway station in Astoria, Queens, said she read the store’s copy of The Daily News every day, in part because she felt that the news she sees on social media can be unreliable.

“Not everything comes in the internet,” Ms. Noman said. “It goes really fast and I can’t find much detail.”

But they are fewer and fewer. Domingo Taveras, 55, who works at the Vinmel and Jose Barber Shop on West 110th Street in Manhattan, said he missed the days when customers would read the paper while waiting for a haircut. 

“Inside this barber shop, nobody reads The Daily News, or any paper at all, to be honest,” he said. 

That includes Mr. Taveras himself. He gets most of his news from NY1 or the occasional copy of The Post he finds lying around. When he reads The Daily News, he does so on his phone. (The News installed a paywall on its website in February. Readership promptly tanked, The Post gleefully reported.) 

Mr. Brown, the M.T.A. maintenance worker, said he had noticed The News shift focus to its online content, which is unapologetically heavy on sensational out-of-town news. 

“I could see the quality of the coverage was diminishing over time,” Mr. Brown said as he stood near the Municipal Building in Downtown Manhattan. “The recent times that I’ve had the paper in my hands, the print, the quality of the paper, it just didn’t look like The Daily News that I grew up with.”

National Vote in Pakistan: "The Biggest Theft of an Election Since the 1970s"

UPDATE: From Reuters' "Pakistan's Imran Khan declares victory, on verge of becoming prime minister":

With 48 percent of the total vote counted, Khan’s PTI was listed by the ECP in its provisional results as leading in 113 of 272 contested National Assembly constituencies.

Sharif’s PML-N was ahead in 64 constituencies, and the PPP, led by the son of assassinated two-time prime minister Benazir Bhutto, led in 42 constituencies.

Although Khan still appeared likely to fall short of the 137 seats needed for a majority in the National Assembly, he should have no problems finding coalition partners from smaller parties and independents.

[snip] 

Investors welcomed Khan's election success, with Pakistan's benchmark 100-share index .KSE surging as much as 1.9 percent to 42,136 points in early trade, before closing 1.8 percent up. Analysts said there was relief Khan was unlikely to have to rely on major opposition parties in a messy coalition.

Khan has promised an “Islamic welfare state” and cast his populist campaign as a battle to topple a predatory political elite hindering development in the impoverished nation of 208 million, where the illiteracy rate hovers above 40 percent.

****

After 9/11 and for much of the aughts mainstream U.S. media coverage of Pakistan was relatively plentiful in terms of foreign affairs reporting. There was broad if superficial understanding that 9/11 tracked back to Pakistan, and then following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan it was common to read in the "newspaper of record" that Pakistan's powerful equivalent of the CIA, the ISI, Inter-Services Intelligence, was orchestrating the Taliban's insurgency.

If I had to guess I'd say at some point during Obama's second term, as the U.S. military announced that it was winding down its mission in Afghanistan, Pakistan -- the sixth largest country on the planet; home to the "Muslim bomb" -- largely disappeared from American collective consciousness, such as it is.

Trump brought back Pakistan front and center briefly at the beginning of the year when he threatened to cut foreign aid to the country due to its support for terrorism.

Yesterday there was a national election in Pakistan. If you were going to choose from two stories to read -- Jeffrey Gettleman's "Imran Khan, Former Cricket Star, Pulls Into Lead in Pakistan’s Vote Count" or the Guardian's roundup, "Pakistan election in disarray as incumbent rejects result" -- I'd go with the Guardian.

The Guardian says that Imran Khan's party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), looks to have won enough to seats to form a government. But The New York Times says the PTI has come up short.

On top of it all is a broad rejection of the election by parties other than the PTI due to vote-rigging, not to mention a delay in the official count because of a software meltdown. According to the Guardian:

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), an independent body, blamed the delay in announcing the result on a breakdown in the Results Transmission Software it purchased from a British company.

“There’s no conspiracy, nor any pressure in delay of the results,” the ECP secretary, Babar Yaqoob, told reporters. “The delay is being caused because the result transmission system has collapsed.”

[snip] 

As election workers sorted through massive piles of paper ballots, almost all the parties – except the PTI – alleged that their polling agents had been excluded from polling stations. 

Bilawal Bhutto, the leader of the liberal Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) – the country’s third-largest party – tweeted it was “inexcusable and outrageous” that his activists had been excluded “across the country”.

The complaint was echoed by his rival Khadim Rizvi, the foul-mouthed cleric who leads the far-right Islamist group, Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP). “This is the worst rigging in history,” said a spokesman for Rizvi.

The PMLN senator Musadik Malik told journalists that security officials had taken over proceedings inside polling stations, with a particular focus on constituencies where the race was close between the PTI and PMLN.

“If what most political parties are alleging is true,” Aqil Shah of Oklahoma University said, “it would be the biggest theft of an election since the 1970s”, adding that the the parties should “unite and demand a repeat.

France's Boy King on the Ropes

There has been some good news recently. The French boy king, the darling of the neoliberal ruling class, Emmanuel Macron, is looking increasingly wobbly.

Macron and his administration have been caught up in the Benalla affair. Alexandre Benalla, the head of presidential security for Macron, was caught on video roughing up May Day protesters. Benalla was terminated belatedly once the video became public, but opposition parties in the French Assembly are demanding to know why it took so long.

Macron has remained silent until today, when he accepted responsibility. An Ipsos poll on Tuesday showed Macron had reached a new low. Sixty percent of poll respondents report an unfavorable opinion of the boy king, a low not even Macron's fondling partner Donald Trump has reached.

Even the usually supportive New York Times has started to publish pointed criticism. This is from Adam Nossiter's "Macron’s Image and an Ex-Aide Give Critics Plenty of Ammunition" which appeared in yesterday's national edition:

Mr. Macron’s distance from his constituents — highlighted by a string of recent missteps, including the public upbraiding of a bewildered teenager and the ordering up of a costly dinner service for the Élysée — was on display during his trip last week. He engaged with the crowds easily enough, smiling and shaking hands.

But he couldn’t resist lecturing a middle-aged woman in the crowded receiving line in the provincial capital, Périgueux. She was distraught over her shaky financial situation. For 10 minutes the woman engaged stubbornly with the president, pleading for help, as hundreds watched.

“Listen to me well, Mr. Macron,” she said. “I work but I no longer have the means to live. My life was better before. I work and I have a diploma. I work every day. I have children, and I can’t even pay for their vacations. We’re just not making it.”

“You say you are lightening up taxes on the one hand, but on the other you are loading us up,” she added. “And we are just not making it.”

Mr. Macron responded fluently but with abstractions and little empathy, describing a series of government programs and plans he insisted confidently were going to make life better.

“No, no,” the president said. “First of all what you are saying isn’t strictly speaking true. And then, when you pay your phone bill and your gas bill, it’s not the state that’s setting the rates. You can blame the state for everything, this or that is going up, but, it’s not all the state’s fault.”

“Yes, but I can’t change the tires on my car,” the woman responded. “I can’t afford the inspection. I can’t even maintain my car. We’re really in the hole. This is not the life I dreamed of.”

Later, Mr. Macron made a speech in this rural village, promising more attention from the state, a “reinvention” of state services. The crowd listened politely but the applause was light. 

“That was absolutely nothing, nothing, it’s the usual promises,” said Thierry Krevisan, a salesman who had stood for hours in the hot sun waiting for the president to show up. “It’s always the same speech.”

Neoliberalism does not work for the masses. Neoliberalism works for the wealthy, allowing the rich to capture an ever-larger portion of the pie; it can't be defended anymore as "a tide which lifts all boats." 

Liberals Must Not Forget What the CIA Really Does

After more than a year spent in exile Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum returned to Afghanistan on Sunday to face multiple criminal charges, including rape and murder. The Islamic State greeted him with a suicide bomber who killed at least 14.

What is singular about the frontpage story written by Rod Nordland, "Accused of Rape and Torture, Exiled Afghan Vice President Returns," is the forceful way it lays Dostum on the CIA's doorstep:

Long a protégé of the Central Intelligence Agency, which mentored and armed him, General Dostum has proved a powerful political player in Afghan elections in recent years, able to deliver his small but united Uzbek minority as a four-million-strong bloc, giving him outsize influence. Mr. Ghani took him on as his running mate in 2014, despite previously calling him a “known killer.”

Nordland goes on from there to list one example after another of Dostum's brutal depravity, something liberals should keep in mind when they rush to defend the CIA's integrity on Russiagate:

Several people have come forward to give accounts of General Dostum’s violence and sexual abuse, and diplomats and American Embassy cables released by WikiLeaks have detailed even more.

A former personal chauffeur to General Dostum, Saleh Mohammad Faizi, was interviewed by The New York Times in refugee housing in Austria, where the authorities have granted him asylum because he was under threat from the general, whom he served for 23 years. He gave explicit permission to be identified and photographed as he came forward with his accusations.

He said he fell out with General Dostum when he refused to marry the general’s girlfriend, whom he described as a 15-year-old girl, in order to provide a discreet means for Mr. Dostum to see her. General Dostum already had two wives, who would not consent to his taking a third one, Mr. Faizi said.

Infuriated at Mr. Faizi’s refusal, General Dostum, with the help of his bodyguards, repeatedly raped and tortured Mr. Faizi over a period of several days, he said, eventually chaining him by his lip — the scar is still evident — to the inside wall of a truck container. Mr. Faizi said he was able to escape after a C.I.A. team won his release in 2013; he later fled the country.

Mr. Faizi also accused General Dostum of killing his first wife, Khadija, and of numerous rapes of political opponents as well as underage boys and girls. “I know whom he killed, and when and where he put the bodies,” he said.

While several diplomats and government officials have confirmed Mr. Faizi’s account of how he was treated by General Dostum, there is no independent corroboration of his charges of numerous other rapes and murders.

It is a testament to Ghani's weakness that Dostum is being brought back. Trump's Afghanistan reboot is already being dismissed as a failure. According to Thomas Gibbons-Neff's "Insider Attack in Afghanistan Exposes Risks for Advisers at Center of Trump Strategy":

Even before the July 7 attack, two Defense Department officials said, the brigade was struggling to find its footing — not just because its soldiers had recently arrived, but also because of its new role in areas of Afghanistan that American forces had not been in years. 

Once they settled in, which took months, the advisers worked with little guidance and little understanding of the Afghan forces they were supposed to be training, said the Defense Department officials, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. 

Jason Dempsey, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said it was unlikely the advisory brigade would have a lasting influence.

“They’re probably just figuring out who’s in the zoo just a few months before they have to leave, and then the next group will have to do this all over again,” Mr. Dempsey said. 

But the next group is not expected to arrive in Afghanistan until three months after Colonel Jackson’s brigade leaves this fall, one of the military officials said. That means many Afghan troops will go without American training until then.

It's all a charade. American airstrikes continue to kill civilians in Kunduz Province. Nothing changes. U.S. policy in Afghanistan achieves nothing but death and destruction, which, in the end, must be the goal: a bloody proving ground for the U.S. military. Not to be left out, Islamic State, now in a pitched battle with the Taliban in Jawzjan and Sar-e-Pul, is in Afghanistan for the same reason.

And in all of this there is barely a peep from U.S. voters or politicians. It's surprising that The New York Times devotes as much space to Afghanistan as it does. If the political climate of today had held during the early- to mid-1970s, the Republic of Vietnam might still be standing in some little rump form.

Democrats Chant "U.S.A." on the House Floor

Two very good posts this morning on mounting Russiagate hysteria are aggregated by Niqnaq in "caitlyn [sic] plus moon of alabama on the lemmings." All I needed to know about the ballooning Russophobic lunacy of the Democratic Party is contained in a story by Nicholas Fandos and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Republicans Block Anti-Putin Resolutions Before Senate Approves One Rebuke," that was published in Friday's paper:

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee voted down a request to subpoena testimony from the State Department interpreter who accompanied Mr. Trump into his private meeting with Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Finland. And on the House floor, Republicans blocked a Democratic effort to add hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding for election security to a spending bill.

“The flashing red light calls us to action,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat. “Surely we can rise above pandering to party and Putin to act on behalf of our freedom and our security.”

Mr. Hoyer’s remarks stirred Democrats to chants of “U.S.A.” on the House floor.

As MoA explains in his post, " 'Progressives Are Putin Stooges' - How Centrist Democrats Help To Reelect Trump," Russophobia is fundamentally about keeping the Democratic Party safely neoliberal, corporatist, and militarist.

It can't work because the party has already passed through Clinton and Obama phases -- the one explicitly neoliberal and the other faux-progressive -- and whether voters can articulate it or not it is going to take something different, namely, a candidate who demands "Medicare for All," or the end of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, or any of a number of legitimately progressive policies the public has not seen enacted in decades.

Mass Confusion

The fallout from Trump's Helsinki performance continues to dominate the news. There is very little narrative coherence to the front page now -- with the possible exception of the multiple trade wars percolating -- other than the "enemy within," which has been recast as the "enemy in the White House." Caitlin Johnstone has a compelling appraisal in "Russiagate Is Like 9/11, Except It’s Made Of Pure Narrative":

The last few days have been truly amazing. I didn’t even write an article yesterday; I’ve just been staring transfixed by my social media feeds watching liberal Americans completely lose their minds. I can’t look away. It’s like watching a slow motion train wreck, and everyone on the train is being really homophobic.

I’ve been writing about Russiagate since it started, and I can honestly say this is the worst it’s ever been, by far. The most hysterical, the most shrill, the most emotional, the most cartoonishly over-the-top and hyperbolic. The fact that Trump met with Putin in private and then publicly expressed doubt about the establishment Russia narrative has sent some political factions of America into an emotional state that is indistinguishable from what you’d expect if Russia had bombed New York City. This despite the fact that the establishment Russia narrative consists of no actual, visible events whatsoever. It is made of pure narrative.

I don’t even know where to start. Everyone has been completely mad across the entire spectrum of what passes for America’s political “left” today, from the usual suspects like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and their indistinguishable Never-Trump Republican allies, all the way to supposedly progressive commentators like Cenk Uygur and Shaun King. Comparing this pure narrative non-event to Pearl Harbor is now commonplace and mainstream. I just watched a United States Senator named Richard Blumenthal stare right into the camera refer to the hypothetical possibility of future Russian cyber intrusions as “this 9/11 moment.”

“We are in a 9/11 national emergency because our country is under attack, literally,” Blumenthal told CNN while demanding a record of Trump’s meeting with Putin at the Helsinki summit. “That attack is ongoing and pervasive, verified by objective and verifiable evidence. Those words are, again, from the director of National Security. And this 9/11 moment demands that we do come together.”

Nothing about the establishment Russia narrative is in any way verifiable, and the only thing it has in common with 9/11 is the media coverage and widespread emotional response.

September 11 had actual video footage of falling towers. You could go visit New York City, look at the spot where those towers used to be, and see them not being there anymore. You could learn the names of the people who died and visit their graves and talk to their family members. Exactly how it happened is a matter of some debate in many circles, but there is no question that it happened. There was an actual event that did happen in the real world, completely independent of any stories people tell about that event.

Russiagate is like 9/11, but with none of those things. It’s like if 9/11 had all the same widespread emotional responses, all the same nonstop mass media coverage, all the same punditry screaming war, war, war, except no actual event occurred. The towers were still there, everyone was still alive, and nothing actually happened apart from the narrative and the emotional responses to that narrative.

Russiagate is 9/11 minus 9/11.

And from Bill Van Auken's "The 'treason' charge against Donald Trump":

Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history must question the current glorification of these agencies as defenders of democracy against the “traitor” Trump.

In any democratic society, the secret police and intelligence forces of the capitalist state have always been regarded with the greatest of suspicion. Nowhere is this truer than in the US. 

Indeed, so great was the suspicion of the CIA, that its founding charter barred it from conducting operations within the US itself, based on the recognition that its secretive activities took place outside of the parameters of the law, both national and international. 

Dubbed “Murder, Inc.” for its organization of assassinations, it also engineered coups against democratically elected governments that installed savage dictatorships from Iran and Guatemala to Turkey and Greece and countries throughout Latin America. 

As for the FBI, its record is littered with judicial frameups, provocations and murders. The agency conducted a virtual war against the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement and every section of the American left, flooding organizations with thousands of spies and agent-provocateurs. 

These agencies are largely responsible for the twin lies that have been utilized to justify the last quarter century of US foreign policy based on unending wars of aggression: “weapons of mass destruction” and the “war on terror.” 

That expressing skepticism as to the veracity and integrity of the CIA, FBI and NSA can be branded as treason represents a stark warning of the dangers of a US police state. 

The other “treasonous” act was the attempt to diminish tensions with Moscow. While Trump views Russia through the prism of his transactional “America First” foreign policy, the predominant factions within the US ruling establishment and Washington’s vast military and intelligence apparatus are so committed to the preparation for a military confrontation aimed at carving up and colonizing the Russian federation that no letup can be tolerated. 

These are the interests expressed by the Democrats, the consummate party of Wall Street and the CIA. It is unwilling and unable to oppose Trump from a progressive, not to mention left-wing, standpoint because it is the defender of the interests of finance capital and the Jeff Bezoses of this world. 

The terms “left” and “right” have ceased to have any real significance within the context of bourgeois politics in the US. The neo-McCarthyite politics embraced by the Democrats express the shift by the entire ruling establishment and its warring factions toward reaction and the destruction of the basic social and democratic rights of the broad mass of working people. 

That the same dynamic prevails among the pseudo-left organizations orbiting the Democratic Party was made clear by the reaction of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) to the uproar over the Helsinki summit, where, it declared, “Trump managed to look like a dupe of one of the most transparently evil people on the planet.” 

All of these political tendencies, reflecting the interests of the more privileged layers of the upper middle class, are being pushed sharply to the right by the upsurge in class struggle in the US and internationally and the threat of a revolutionary social explosion.

For an actual assessment of why Trump is in the White House read Thomas Edsall's "Why Don’t We Always Vote in Our Own Self-Interest?" --

One question that has troubled Democrats for decades is freshly relevant in the Trump-McConnell era: Why do so many voters support elected officials who are determined to cut programs that those same voters rely upon?

Take Kentucky, which has a median household income that ranks 45th out of the 50 states.

Over the past half century, residents of Kentucky have become steadily more reliant on the federal government. In the 1970s, federal programs provided slightly under 10 percent of personal income for Kentucky residents; by 2015, money from programs ranging from welfare and Medicaid to Social Security and Medicare more than doubled to 23 percent as a share of Kentuckians’ personal income.

Twenty years ago, there was only one county (out of 120) in which residents counted on the federal government for at least 40 percent of their personal income. By 2014, 28 counties were at 40 percent or higher.

But as their claims on federal dollars rose, the state’s voters became increasingly conservative. In the 1990s, they began to elect hard right, anti-government politicians determined to cut the programs their constituents were coming to lean on.

It is a confused, resentful, unselfed nation. 

Brexit Crackup

While the media remains transfixed by Trump's Helsinki performance, the Conservative government of Theresa May finally appears to have slammed into a wall on Brexit. For the last couple of days votes on May's Brexit legislation have been taking place in parliament. Robert Stevens explains in "May government in meltdown over Brexit":

The votes imperilled May’s government, as she was forced to accept four amendments to the Bill from the hard-Brexit faction—which effectively wrecked the agreement on a soft-Brexit she had finally reached with her Cabinet just a week earlier. This deal was reached only under intense pressure from broad sections of business who demand continued access to the European Single market—the UK’s largest trading partner.

To wreck the Chequers agreement, around 20 Tories in the hard-Brexit European Research Group faction, led by backbencher and potential leadership challenger Jacob Rees-Mogg, threatened to vote against the government if their amendments to the bill were not accepted. The most divisive of the four Monday amendments overturned the complex UK/EU tariff proposals contained in the agreement reached at May’s country residence, Chequers, under which the UK would collect tariffs on goods on behalf of the EU. 

According to the Daily Telegraph, the party’s “Eurosceptics have set up a ‘party within a party’ with a highly organised whipping operation among Tory Eurosceptic MPs to try to frustrate Theresa May’s Brexit plans.” 

It detailed how “[m]ore than 100 Eurosceptic Tory MPs are now on a WhatsApp group co-ordinated by former Brexit minister Steve Baker who is giving them voting instructions.”

Leading soft-Brexit Tory Dominic Grieve said his party’s pro-Brexit rebels appeared “willing to plunge the country into a serious crisis to achieve the purity of their objective.”

Following the 2016 referendum vote to leave the EU, Prime Minister David Cameron resigned to be replaced by May—who was a supporter of Remain but pledged to implement Brexit. This compromise has blown up, not simply due to events in Britain but because these events have been shaped by the extraordinary antagonisms between the United States and European powers following the election of US President Donald Trump.

A path forward for May's soft Brexit appears blocked, but it doesn't appear that the hard Brexiters have the votes to lead. So impasse and a cliff's edge Brexit crackup seem the safe bet here.

The Neoliberal World Order Exposed

Why all the wailing? Reading the principal write-up in The New York Times this morning, Julie Hirschfeld Davis's "Trump, at Putin’s Side, Questions U.S. Intelligence on 2016 Election," one gets the impression that the scapegoating of Russia is the absolute foundation of U.S. policy both foreign and domestic; for Trump to publicly repudiate that scapegoating in Helsinki -- with "the evil Putin" at his side -- has created such an incendiary reaction from the political class in Washington, D.C. that it calls into question that political class's connection to the rest of us:

The 45-minute news conference offered the spectacle of the American and Russian presidents both pushing back on the notion of Moscow’s election interference, with Mr. Putin demanding evidence of something he said had never been proved, and Mr. Trump appearing to agree.

When asked directly whether he believed Mr. Putin or his own intelligence agencies about the election meddling, Mr. Trump said there were “two thoughts” on the matter: one from American officials like Dan Coats, his director of national intelligence, asserting Russia’s involvement; and one from Mr. Putin dismissing it.

“I have confidence in both parties,” Mr. Trump said.

He then changed the subject, demanding to know why the F.B.I. never examined the hacked computer servers of the Democratic National Committee, and asking about the fate of emails missing from the server of Hillary Clinton, his campaign rival.

“Where are Hillary Clinton’s emails?” Mr. Trump said.

His performance drew howls of protests from Democrats and some Republicans, prompting John O. Brennan, who served as C.I.A. director under President Barack Obama, to suggest that the remarks warranted Mr. Trump’s impeachment.

“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors,’” Mr. Brennan wrote on Twitter, calling the president’s behavior “treasonous.” “Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”

Key Republicans are calling on Trump to repudiate his press conference comments. And Trump just might. But damage to his opponents has already be done. Craig Murray writes (see "Detente Bad, Cold War Good") with his usual clarity that,

The entire “liberal” media and political establishment of the Western world reveals its militarist, authoritarian soul today with the screaming and hysterical attacks on the very prospect of detente with Russia. Peace apparently is a terrible thing; a renewed arms race, with quite literally trillions of dollars pumped into the military industrial complex and hundreds of thousands dying in proxy wars, is apparently the “liberal” stance.

Democrats are headed for a brutal presidential primary, but they have to deal with midterms first. Anything less than a takeover of the House is going to be interpreted as another failure.

With the exception of a race here and there, Democrats have given up on the idea of pulling people to the polls -- minorities, youth -- who don't usually turnout. So the question is whether Democrats can win a wave election minus the "Obama coalition"? I'd say no. But there's the example of Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania's 18th CD special election. Educated suburbanites will flock to the polls given the right circumstances.

There Won't be a Trial

There's a decent interview of Michael Isikoff by Real News Network's Aaron Mate. A friend of mine has been trying to get me to read Russian Roulette.  He is convinced that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Trump.

Joe Lauria points out in "Clinging to Collusion: Why Evidence Will Probably Never Be Produced in the Indictments of ‘Russian Agents’" that the indictment announced Friday is not meant to end in a trial. It is primarily theatrical, of the cold war variety.

Evidence Likely Never to be Seen

Other apparent sources for information in the indictment are intelligence agencies, which normally create hurdles in a criminal prosecution.

“In this indictment there is detail after detail whose only source could be intelligence, yet you don’t use intelligence in documents like this because if these defendants decide to challenge this in court, it opens the U.S. to having to expose sources and methods,” Johnson said. [Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson.]

If the U.S. invoked the states secret privilege so that classified evidence could not be revealed in court a conviction before a civilian jury would be jeopardized.

Such a trial is extremely unlikely however. That makes the indictment essentially a political and not a legal document because it is almost inconceivable that the U.S. government will have to present any evidence in court to back up its charges. This is simply because of the extreme unlikelihood that arrests of Russians living in Russia will ever be made.

In this way it is similar to the indictment earlier this year of the Internet Research Agency of St. Petersburg, Russia, a private click bait company that was alleged to have interfered in the 2016 election by buying social media ads and staging political rallies for both Clinton and Trump. It seemed that no evidence would ever have to back up the indictment because there would never be arrests in the case.

But Special Counsel Robert Mueller was stunned when lawyers for the internet company showed up in Washington demanding discovery in the case. That caused Mueller to scramble and demand a delay in the first hearing, which was rejected by a federal judge. Mueller is now battling to keep so-called sensitive material out of court.

In both the IRA case and Friday’s indictments, the extremely remote possibility of convictions were not what Mueller was apparently after, but rather the public perception of Russia’s guilt resulting from fevered media coverage of what are after all only accusations, presented as though it is established fact. Once that impression is settled into the public consciousness, Mueller’s mission would appear to be accomplished.

For instance, the Times routinely dispenses with the adjective “alleged” and reports the matter as though it is already established fact. It called Friday’s indictments, which are only unproven charges, “the most detailed accusation by the American government to date of the [not alleged] Russian government’s interference in the 2016 election, and it includes a litany of [not alleged] brazen Russian subterfuge operations meant to foment chaos in the months before Election Day.”

More Plastic Than Fish by 2050

A good post by Gaius Publius, "Which Would Be Harder to Ban, Single-Use Plastic or Money-Bought Government?," appears this morning on Naked Capitalism:

In a related piece EcoWatch notes, “More than 8.3 billion metric tons of new plastics have been generated, distributed and discarded as of 2017. Much of that material ends up in our oceans. Every year humans send an estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic out to sea. If plastic consumption continues at this rate, we are on pace to fill oceans with more plastic than there are fish by 2050.”

More plastic than fish in the ocean is a lot of plastic. Most or all of this plastic is single-use. You touch it for five minutes — drink your slurpee, drain your sugery coke, carry your groceries to the kitchen — then throw it away. Five minutes on the finger tips, a thousand years on the hips of an already over-burdened planet.

There’s so much plastic in the ocean that mussels are now so riddled with it they should not be eaten:

Shellfish are the natural filter systems of our seas, mechanisms of purity. So, to discover in a report released on World Oceans Day that mussels bought from UK supermarkets were infested with microplastic seems like a final irony in the terrible story of the plasticisation of the sea. According to the study by the University of Hull and Brunel University London, 70 particles of microplastic were found in every 100 grams of mussels.

We feed plastic to the ocean, and it feeds plastic to us. Our modern life, “consumed with that which it was nourished by,” eaten by what we eat.  

Soy, A Chinese "Glass Jaw"?

Yesterday the Trump administration announced another $200 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods to go with the $34 billion in tariffs already in place. Tariffs announced yesterday won't go into effect until after a public comment period scheduled for the end of August, giving China or the U.S. ample time to blink. The concern of the financial markets is there is no indication that either side has any intention of relenting.

It is important to remember that what the Trump administration is shooting for is to have China scrap its industrial policy, "Made in China 2025," and that's not going to happen. China is not a small nation willing to compromise its sovereignty to get along with a super power upon which it relies for its security. The United States is a rival. To relinquish is to capitulate.

There has been more reporting of late about China's voracious appetite for soy, something The New York Times considers a Chinese "glass jaw." But what I took away from Raymond Zhong's excellent "China’s Taste for Soybeans Is a Weak Spot in the Trade War With Trump" is that things are not as bad as they seem for China.

For one, Chinese agriculture is not as wedded to the pesticide-drenched industrial GMO model as the United States:

As an incentive, the provincial government offered generous subsidies to farmers both for growing soybeans and for switching their fields to soy from corn.

Word of the new subsidies spread quickly on the social media app WeChat. And soon, many farmers were returning corn seeds and fertilizer they had already bought and planting soy instead.

With all the government support, Guo Qiang, a 35-year-old farmer in the village of Dawusili, said that he would love to grow only soybeans, and no corn, on his family’s 50 acres. But his farm cooperative requires that members rotate their crops to keep the soil healthy.

[snip] 

To reduce its dependence on American soy, Beijing could also try to squeeze more beans out of each acre at home. But farmers in Heilongjiang acknowledge they are a long way from being as productive as farmers in the United States, where agriculture is more mechanized and genetic modification is embraced.

China allows imports of genetically engineered crops, but Heilongjiang forbids farmers to grow them. Many people here harbor deep doubts about such products’ safety, both for people and for the land.

“I wouldn’t grow them even if the government allowed it,” said Gai Yongfeng, the head of the Jiaxing farm cooperative in Dawusili. “They’re bad for the soil. After you’ve grown them somewhere, nothing else will grow there. That’s what everyone says.”

An ethic of sustainability appears to be stronger in China than in the United States, which is a long-term plus. But with its food security in doubt China will take this opportunity to diversify its suppliers:

American farmers could still take a sizable hit in the long run if China’s tariffs prompt Brazil and other suppliers to expand their soy acreage, or if China bankrolls cultivation outside its borders. Many people from Heilongjiang are already growing soybeans across the Amur River in the Russian Far East, where land is cheap and plentiful.

In 1969, fighting erupted between Soviet and Chinese troops along this border. But these days, relations are good and trade is brisk. In the border city of Heihe (pronounced “HEY-huh”), many street signs are written in both Chinese and Russian. In Xiaowusili (“SHYEEOW-oo-suh-lee”), the parks have trash cans painted to look like giant matryoshka nesting dolls.

China’s hunger for soybeans could deepen ties further. In a recent interview with the Chinese state news agency Xinhua, the head of a Russian soybean association said that the group was looking to team up with Chinese companies, and had set up an office in Heilongjiang’s provincial capital, Harbin, to attract investment.

Zhong could have mentioned but didn't the sizable investment the Chinese have made in arable land in Africa.

For a long time the Chinese knew this train was coming down the track. The only thing Trump has done is opened up the throttle on the locomotive. Instead of thinking in terms of 20 years from now, we're thinking of right here, right now.

There's no going back. Take a look around. We're living in a new age.

New Age

Trump arrives in the United Kingdom on Thursday to what the Guardian says is a massive police mobilization "in numbers not seen since widespread rioting in 2011, in order to meet planned anti-Trump protests." The UK is in turmoil as the hard Brexiters play out their weak hand. There is no appetite for a clean break with the European Union. Business is raising an alarm of massive layoffs. According to Stephen Castle's "Theresa May in Fight to Save Government Amid Brexit Rift":

Several major British employers have issued warnings in recent weeks over the risks of a chaotic, or “cliff edge,” Brexit. Most prominently, Jaguar Land Rover said it could derail more than $100 billion worth of investment plans in Britain and force the closing of some factories. Airbus and BMW also questioned whether they could continue to keep manufacturing facilities in the country under those conditions.

May's muddle will continue until the day of reckoning when parliament must vote to accept whatever deal the EU grants it.

But that's several months off. Right now it's summer, and I feel as if we entered a new era. It's Trumpian of course: Life on the street as the floor beams of neoliberalism continue to disintegrate.

Craig Murray captures the spirit of our new, confused age in his post devoted to the OPCW report on Douma, "No Trump, No Clinton, No NATO":

Trump’s reaction to yet more lying claims by the UK government funded White Helmets and Syrian Observatory, a reaction of missile strikes on alleged Syrian facilities producing the non-existent nerve agent, was foolish. May’s leap for British participation was unwise, and the usual queue of Blairites who stood up as always in Parliament to support any bombing action, stand yet again exposed as evil tools of the military industrial complex.

Hillary Clinton, true to form, wanted more aggressive military action than was undertaken by Trump. Hillary has been itching to destroy Syria as she destroyed Libya. Libya was very much Hillary’s war and – almost unreported by the mainstream media – NATO bombers carried out almost 14,000 bombing sorties on Libya and devastated entire cities.

The destruction of Libya’s government and infrastructure directly caused the Mediterranean boat migrant crisis, which has poisoned the politics of much of the European Union.

Donald Trump has not started any major war. He has been more restrained in military action than any US President since Jimmy Carter. My own view is (and of course it is impossible to know for sure) that, had Hillary been in power, Syria would already have been totally destroyed, the Cold War with Russia would be at mankind threatening levels, and nuclear tension with North Korea would be escalating.

“He hasn’t destroyed mankind yet” is faint praise for anyone. Being less of an existential danger to mankind than Hillary Clinton is a level achieved by virtually the entire population of the planet. I am not supporting Trump. I am condemning Clinton. I too, like Susan Sarandon, would have voted for Jill Stein were I an American.

Brexit: The Big May Muddle

UPDATE: Boris Johnson's resignation so far has created no Tory stampede. As was to be expected, Theresa May is blocking the fire exits by inflating the Corbyn bogeymen. According to the Guardian,

The prime minister, Theresa May, addressed MPs at the private 1922 committee for an hour, warning them that divided parties would lose elections and said any further division risked a Labour government, backed by loyalist MPs like Patrick McLoughlin and Damian Green.

One cabinet minister said:

"If we don’t pull together, we risk the election of Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister. At least half a dozen people made that point and the prime minister responded too – what is good for the country is a Conservative government."

**** 

It's been two years since the British voted to opt out of the European Union, a shocking result that prefigured Trump's upset victory five months later. Not a whole lot has been clear since then. The date to keep in mind is March 29, 2019; that's exit day, which is not too far off now, a mere nine months.

The latest Brexit news is the resignation of David Davis, Theresa May's minister in charge of negotiating Britain's withdrawal from the EU. Davis is a hard Brexiter. He resigned because he considers May's plans to pursue a customs union with the bloc too soft.

Talk now is whether the hard Brexiters in the Conservative Party have enough support to trigger a vote of confidence in the prime minister. Yves Smith ("David Davis Resignation Throws UK Brexit, Cabinet Into Chaos") counts only 42 votes out of the 48 needed to launch a new leadership contest.

Speculation centers on what foreign secretary Boris Johnson, also a hard Brexiter, will do now. It seems to me that Brexit has more to do with internal Tory politics than anything else. British business is opposed, and Leave voters, now that the tide of Syrian war refugees has receded, don't seem energized. Cameron called for a public referendum on remaining in the EU in order to steal the single issue that animated UKIP. It worked. UKIP evaporated seemingly overnight once Brexit went through. But the Tories have been left holding the bag, and it is has not been a plus for the party.

Yves Smith concludes with a statement that more uncertainty lies ahead:

I could say more, but we are in the midst of an overly dynamic situation, and much depends on whether May judges it to be necessary to make serious concessions to the ultras, or whether they’ve taken their best shot at her, and she can manage to stare them down. Businesses clearly want to avoid a hard Brexit (and actually any Brexit at all if they understood that even a “soft” Brexit won’t give them the frictionless borders they so keenly want to preserve) and popular sentiment is also moving against a hard Brexit and even towards having a second referendum, despite it being far too late for that sort of things. But whether those external factor make any difference are to be determined.

I don't see the Tories bringing down their own national government. Should it happen, Corbyn likely becomes prime minister. That's an outcome that terrifies neoliberals everywhere.

No, the big May muddle will probably continue right through the summer and into the fall before fear and loathing focuses the mind.

Germany's SPD Nixes Migrant Detention Centers

Germany's Social Democratic Party showed that it still has some juice and is not merely a zombie partner in a GroKo with Merkel's CDU and Seehofer's CSU. According to "For Europe, Cutting the Flow of Migrants Challenges Basic Ideals," by Steven Erlanger and Katrin Bennhold,

The German deal came into sharper relief on Thursday night after the Social Democrats, Ms. Merkel’s other governing partners, signed off on it on the condition that instead of in new camps, migrants would be processed in existing police stations along the border and that they would be held for no longer than 48 hours. In addition, Germany will pass an immigration law by the end of the year that gives would-be immigrants the chance to apply for a work visa.

It's important to remember as the "novichok" canard is recycled that the Washington consensus -- perpetual warfare and market fundamentalism -- creates existential problems that it is unable to solve. Europe's refugee crisis has abated from its zenith in 2015, as every mainstream story on the subject now reminds us; but it was 2015 that provided a moment of collective satori for voters in Europe. So much so that the only big neoliberal victory at the polls since has been the spectacular achievement of Macron's En Marche! And what was the spring that set the 2015 refugee crisis in motion? Western sponsored wars in Syria and Libya.

Stanley Reed explains in "Saudi Arabia Promised More Oil. So Why Are Prices Rising?" that "Saudi Arabia is under pressure to quickly increase its production of oil, but those increases may not be enough to offset declines in three countries grappling with crises: Iran, Libya and Venezuela." It is Washington's default bellicosity that is coming home to roost in the form of $70 a barrel West Texas Crude. All three countries -- Iran, Libya and Venezuela --are or have been the target of U.S. belligerence. Call it regime change, call it a policy of state destruction, it is what the United States does; it is the foundation of its foreign policy.

It's not sustainable. Blow back occurs and has a big impact. Scapegoats need to be identified. That's Russia. But the decay proceeds unabated.

Borders are Returning to the European Union

Melissa Eddy reports that today German officials meet with their counterparts in Austria and Hungary to see if they can come to an agreement about setting up "transit camps," a.k.a., detention centers, for migrants. The concept of transit without borders is at an end. Whatever remains of the "European Dream" going forward it will have to include hard borders. (It is interesting that immigrants are no longer referred to in the press as "refugees"; rather, the preferred term is now "migrants.")

Eddy thinks the German SPD will go along with Merkel's other coalition partner, the Bavarian CSU, and accept the detention center proposal. A party in retreat and collapse tends in the direction of more retreat and collapse.

Max Fisher and Katrin Bennhold, writing for The New York Times, are bearish on the EU, as are most commentators. There is no way, once Germany starts erecting borders, that other EU nations won't follow suit. Germany, after getting a general go-ahead in Brussels last week, is now building the new border system bilaterally. Jean-Claude Juncker has blessed Merkel's efforts as upholding the law, which stipulates that a refugee must apply for asylum in her/his country of entry.

Once can foresee the outcome. Greece and Italy are going to be left with the responsibility of managing migrants. Full stop. In other words, the status quo without all the pretty words and evasive rhetoric on inclusion and human rights. And Libya will have to be re-colonized.