End of the 2018 NFL Regular Season

The 2018 National Football League regular season came to a close yesterday. The final Sunday had been hyped as a smorgasbord of climactic, playoff-meaningful action; but outside of the Cleveland-Baltimore game, everything unfolded pretty much as expected.

First, a statement about what I got wrong. I thought the NFL would continue to lose viewers. It did not. It actually saw a ratings increase as the season unfolded. Why? I think it is pretty obvious. Newness. The old -- Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady, to name two limelight hogs -- are being moved from center stage. Young, exciting players like Pat Mahomes and Lamar Jackson emerged, proving that the NFL can still captivate a mass audience if the corporate executives would just get out of the way.

Another thing I got wrong was the hometown Seattle Seahawks. I pegged them for the a losing season of anywhere from four to six wins, and they ended up winning ten games and qualifying for the playoffs as a wild card. Head coach Pete Carroll, after brutally dismantling the core of the Super Bowl Seahawks, Jiffy-Popped a playoff team into existence. He did it by crafting an old-fashioned power running game built around Chris Carson. Russell Wilson is an effective quarterback as long as he is not the sole focus of an offense. He needed Marshawn Lynch during Seattle's Super Bowl heyday. Now he's got Chris Carson.

We'll see what happens Saturday in Dallas. The Seahawks have proven this season that they can beat the Cowboys, and late last year they went into Dallas and knocked the Cowboys out of playoff contention. But the Cowboys defense is the best defense in the NFC after the Chicago Bears, while Seattle's defense has some real weaknesses, like its two young corner backs. It's a tossup.

I was impressed by the Colts last night. I hadn't seen them play this season. They're for real. Though I like the Texans, particularly quarterback Deshaun Watson, you have to figure the Colts are going to be favored going into Houston.

The other AFC team I fancy is the Baltimore Ravens. I believe them to be the most interesting story going into the playoffs. Joe Flacco went down with a injury, rookie Lamar Jackson stepped in, and the Ravens turned into a pure college-type read-option offense. CBS put up a stat during the Browns-Ravens telecast yesterday. The last team to rush for as many yards in December was the 1977 Chicago Bears with Walter Payton.

The remaining playoff game this weekend is the match-up between the Eagles and the Bears. The Eagles reanimated once Carson Wentz went to the sidelines with a back injury and Nick Foles stepped in. If any team were to go into Soldier Field and upset the Bears, it would be Philadelphia. But Foles is not entirely healthy and the Bears defense I think is the best in the league not just the NFC.

I'm sort of rooting for Chicago as a dark horse. Assuming that the Bears win, they will travel to Los Angeles to play the Rams. The winner of the Seattle-Dallas game goes to New Orleans.

In the AFC it would be nice if Kansas City were finally able to win a playoff game (something that hasn't been done since Joe Montana ended his career there). But that's not a lock since the only team that the Chiefs could safely dispatch, the Texans, they won't see. K.C. will play either the Ravens, the Chargers or the Colts. Any of those three can beat the Chiefs.

Once again I am left with an all-too real fear at this time of year that the Patriots are bound for another Super Bowl. New England looked good against the hapless Jets yesterday. If the Chiefs lose next weekend, which I figure is as an even-money proposition, the road to Atlanta (the site of Super Bowl LIII) will go through Foxborough.

"Somebody Please Kill Me"

I keep my eyes peeled for stories that appear in The New York Times that easily could have originated in fringe media. I think the attraction for me is the idea that there is indeed a basic reality to the times in which we live; despite all the effort to filter it and spin it, it shines through.

Yesterday in the national edition of The Times was Emily Badger's exemplary "Happy New Year! May Your City Never Become San Francisco, New York or Seattle." In it she encapsulates the secret truth of present-age United States: our urban tech hubs -- our "good as it gets" incubators of 21st century capitalism, the zenith of current civilization -- are dystopias:

In truth, most of these cities have qualities other cities would reasonably desire. Denver has one of the country’s fastest-growing tech labor forces, with minorities and women relatively well represented in those jobs. Seattle and Portland have among the fastest all-around job growth. New York has some of the fastest-growing wages. San Francisco has unemployment well below the national average and household incomes among the highest in the country.

But San Francisco-ization and the other -izations don’t refer to the process of acquiring any of these good things. Rather, those terms capture the deepening suspicion of many communities that the costs of urban prosperity outweigh the benefits. The tech jobs and the high wages aren’t worth having if they come with worsening congestion, more crowded development or soaring housing costs.

Amazon’s search this year for a new second headquarters made this trade-off explicit for many cities. Despite the tens of thousands of new high-paying jobs in tech and construction on offer, protesters in Chicago and Pittsburgh — even some in the winning areas of New York and Washington — concluded that they didn’t want to be the next Seattle.

Numerous writers in Seattle warned that they were right to oppose that future.

Embedded in these fears is something slippery, seemingly inevitable. Once you let tech giants in the door, you have a homeless crisis. Once you allow more density, you’re surrounded by skyscrapers. Once housing costs begin to rise, the logical conclusion is San Francisco.

“Bostonians: Do you worry more about Manhattanization? Or San Francisco-ization?” Tim Logan, a Boston Globe reporter who covers development, asked on Twitter this year. To him, the cities represent different routes to the same end of creating urban playgrounds for the rich.

This is what we are left with. We have no national project other than to cater to the whims of the super-rich.

Yesterday in the morning dark on my walk downtown to work where the skyscrapers of Amazon are being built a homeless guy camped out on Broadway was freaking out, screaming "SOMEBODY PLEASE KILL ME."

From there I strolled down the hill past other small homeless encampments. On Denny, where it begins its steep drop to the viaduct over I-5, the dividing line between my neighborhood and downtown, a young homeless man, obviously mentally ill, slept on a mattress in an abandoned storefront. He's there all the time, on the mattress, wrapped in a dirty sleeping bag.

In the 1990s the Famous Pacific Dessert Company occupied that storefront. At the time it seemed shiny and new; the neighborhood seemed up and coming, what with being Ground Zero for Grunge; rents were affordable, arts abounded.

Now that storefront reeks of excrement and is littered with trash; the neighborhood is dotted with high-rise high-end apartment buildings and condos; corporate retail lines Broadway. This is what we are left with.

It's a profound failure.

Centcom Chief Caught Lying to Congress

An excellent story appeared yesterday on the front page of The New York Times. In "Arms Sales to Saudis Leave American Fingerprints on Yemen’s Carnage" Declan Walsh and Eric Schmitt establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the U.S. military, despite statements to the contrary, knows exactly what decisions the Saudi coalition makes in Yemen:

The Pentagon and State Department have denied knowing whether American bombs were used in the war’s most notorious airstrikes, which have struck weddings, mosques and funerals. However, a former senior State Department official said that the United States had access to records of every airstrike over Yemen since the early days of the war, including the warplane and munitions used.

[snip] 

While American officials often protested civilian deaths in public, two presidents ultimately stood by the Saudis. President Obama gave the war his qualified approval to assuage Saudi anger over his Iran nuclear deal. President Trump embraced Prince Mohammed and bragged of multibillion-dollar arms deals with the Saudis.

As bombs fell on Yemen, the United States continued to train the Royal Saudi Air Force. In 2017, the United States military announced a $750 million program focused on how to carry out airstrikes, including avoiding civilian casualties. The same year, Congress authorized the sale of more than $510 million in precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia, which had been suspended by the Obama administration in protest of civilian casualties.

Walsh and Schmitt expose the head of Central Command, Gen. Joseph L. Votel, lying to Congress:

But in Congress, the mood was souring. In the March [2018] hearing, senators accused the Pentagon of being complicit in the coalition’s errant bombing, and pressed its leaders on how directly the United States was linked to atrocities.

General Votel said the military knew little about that. The United States did not track whether the coalition jets that it refueled carried out the airstrikes that killed civilians, he said, and did not know when they used American-made bombs. At a briefing in Cairo in August, a senior United States official echoed that assessment.

“I would assume the Saudis have an inventory system that traces that information,” said the official, who spoke anonymously to discuss diplomatically sensitive relations. “But that’s not information that is available to the U.S.”

But Larry Lewis, a State Department adviser on civilian harm who worked with the Saudi-led coalition from 2015 to 2017, said that information was readily available from an early stage.

At the coalition headquarters in Riyadh, he said, American liaison officers had access to a database that detailed every airstrike: warplane, target, munitions used and a brief description of the attack. American officials frequently emailed him copies of a spreadsheet for his own work, he said.

The data could easily be used to pinpoint the role of American warplanes and bombs in any single strike, he said. “If the question was “Hey, was that a U.S. munition they used?” You would know that it was,” he said.

Just Foreign Policy is circulating a petition asking senators and representatives to call Votel back to Congress to testify under oath:

Incoming House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff has promised a "deep dive" on the U.S. role in the Saudi regime's war in Yemen in his committee. Other Congressional committees should do the same. In particular, they should compel General Votel to testify, under oath, in both open and closed session, about what Votel knew about the U.S. role in Saudi atrocities in Yemen, and when he knew it; about what he should he have known, and when should he have known it; and about why this knowledge wasn't reflected in Votel's testimony to Congress in March, when the Senate was about to vote on the U.S. role in the war.

So much of what Obama did in the Middle East -- the war on Yemen, the war on Syria -- was predicated on getting the Iran nuclear deal finalized. When Trump came in and pulled out of the nuclear agreement it turned all U.S. policy in the region upside down. Trump was thinking, Why fight proxy wars when you can fight one war with the main enemy and win everything in one fell swoop?

The troop pullout in northern Syria is merely a prelude for a greater conflict.

A 2020 Xmas Eve

I traveled by air for the holiday. The airports, as far as I could tell, were unaffected by the government shutdown. Transportation Security Administration personnel remained on the job.

The only mention I heard of the shutdown was while eating breakfast at a restaurant counter on Christmas Eve. A young man, leisurely forking through plate of food as he stared at his phone, opined to a restaurant worker that it was congress' fault.

The Christmas Eve cable news shows did not focus on the Trump's border wall government shutdown; they focused on the 2020 presidential race. I watched Chuck Todd's MTP Daily.

Like a lot of these shows, it's a round-table format. Journalists (mainstream journalists), an ex-politico, a pollster were led by Todd through a series of questions on current events.

Prevailing insider wisdom appears to be that a Bernie Sanders candidacy is going nowhere; same thing for Elizabeth Warren; and, interestingly, same thing for Joe Biden. Leading the pack, according to Todd and his congregated pundits, are Kamala Harris, Beto O'Rourke and Sherrod Brown.

Bernie, as in 2016, was ruled out because of his purported unpopularity with blacks. The pollster asserted that Bernie had no chance on Super Tuesday.

You'll recall it was Hillary's commanding performance on Super Tuesday 2016 that kept Mike Bloomberg from entering the race as an independent candidate to protect the nation from a socialist.

I see it differently. The only Democratic candidate who has maintained his supporters is Bernie. He's the only one, besides Elizabeth Warren, who has a national base (Biden, merely name recognition). Kamala Harris might do fine on Super Tuesday, but she won't do as well as Hillary.

The crowded field in the Democratic primary almost guarantees Bernie will come out on top.

The mainstream talking point is that Bernie is passé. Which just goes to show you how completely disconnected mainstream journalism is from the mainstream.

World War Four

Today the keening in the prestige press is more high-pitched after the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. Mattis is pope of the church of the deep state. He stands for a unipolar world of U.S. global hegemony where wars are perpetual, no regional powers let alone peer competitors are allowed and the military spectrum is dominated fully.

On the bright side, Mattis' resignation is proof that Trump's pullout from Syria and his draw-down order in Afghanistan is legit; it has congressional power brokers on opposite sides of the aisle -- Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Marco Rubio, Nancy Pelosi -- singing from the same songbook.

If there was ever a moment when the nature of the U.S. warfare state is on display it is now. Mattis framed his resignation as a decision taken because Trump was insufficiently committed to World War Four with Russia and China. The lunacy of the deep state is that it is deeply committed to World War Four. Despite all the brainwashing, all the various Integrity Initiatives, what fraction of the electorate would vote for World War Four?

Another bright spot, the voters who voted for Trump -- and I believe that a significant percentage of Trump voters voted to blow the whole motherfucking show to kingdom come -- are finally getting the candidate they wanted. In a few hours the senate will reject the house funding bill which included billions for Trump's border wall. Parts of the government will shut down at midnight.

But the shutdown won't last long, not as long as, for instance, the October 2013 GOP shutdown over Obamacare. That one lasted 16 days; this one, worst-case scenario, will run just shy of two weeks, and take place during the quietest stretch of the calendar, the weekend before Christmas to the second business day following New Year's.

All in all Trump is delivering slabs of deep red meat to his base. He's obviously feeling vulnerable. But, to his credit, he's going straight at his opposition. If the deep state is going to make a move, now would be the time.

Now that the U.S. Appears to be Leaving Syria, a Real Political Settlement can be Reached

With Trump's announcement yesterday that he will withdraw 2,000 special operations troops from northern Syria the prestige press is emitting its expected animal wail, encapsulated as follows by The New York Times editorial board ("Trump’s Decision to Withdraw From Syria Is Alarming. Just Ask His Advisers."):

An American withdrawal would also be a gift to Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, who has been working hard to supplant American influence in the region, as well as to Iran, which has also expanded its regional footprint. It would certainly make it harder for the Trump administration to implement its policy of ratcheting up what it calls “maximum pressure” on Iran.

David Sanger, The New York Times' principal national security reporter, amplifies this "Great Game" wail in his "A Strategy of Retreat in Syria, With Echoes of Obama":

In fact, as recently as Monday, as Mr. Trump was contemplating getting out, the State Department insisted that America was not going anywhere — and Mr. Assad would be making a big mistake if he thought the United States was going to leave.

“I think if that’s his strategy, he is going to have to wait a very long time,” James F. Jeffrey, the United States special representative for Syria, said in an address at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

As it turns out, Mr. Assad will have to wait only about a month for the American withdrawal to be complete.

In his speech this week, Mr. Jeffrey made an impassioned case that the civil war in Syria was not just about the half-million people dead, nor the 11 million others who have been driven from their homes.

It has “become a great-power conflict,” he said, with Americans, Russians, Iranians, Turks and Israelis all involved. Any American policy, he said, “cannot focus only on the internal conflict.” He added later than “Iran has to get out of there,” meaning Iranian ground troops.

What goes unmentioned is any legal basis for the continued presence of U.S. troops on Syrian soil. The Hajin pocket, the last remaining toehold for ISIS in Syria, has been captured. The Times claims 20,000 - 30,000 ISIS fighters there, but that's ludicrous, an embarrassing display of "fake news" to gin up support for continued participation in the Great Game.

The deal is not yet done though. Don't count out the military just yet, as Mark Landler, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt report in "Trump Withdraws U.S. Forces From Syria, Declaring ‘We Have Won Against ISIS’":

The abrupt, chaotic nature of the move — and the opposition it immediately provoked on Capitol Hill and beyond — raised questions about how Mr. Trump will follow through with the full withdrawal. Even after the president’s announcement, officials said, the Pentagon and State Department continued to try to talk him out of it.

“We have won against ISIS,” Mr. Trump declared in a video posted Wednesday evening on Twitter, adding, “Our boys, our young women, our men — they’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now.”

“We won, and that’s the way we want it, and that’s the way they want it,” he said, pointing a finger skyward, referring to American troops who had been killed in battle.

The White House did not provide a timetable or other specifics for the military departure. “We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. Defense Department officials said that Mr. Trump had ordered that the withdrawal be completed in 30 days.

The decision brought a storm of protest in Congress, even from Republican allies of Mr. Trump’s like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who said he had been “blindsided.” The House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, suggested that the president had acted out of “personal or political objectives” rather than national security interests.

[snip]

Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of United States Central Command, and Brett H. McGurk, the American envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, fiercely protested the military withdrawal, administration officials said. Both argued that the Islamic State would never have been defeated without the Kurdish fighters, whom General Votel said suffered many casualties and always lived up to their word.

Officials said General Votel argued that withdrawing American troops would leave the Kurds vulnerable to attack from Turkey, which has warned it will soon launch an offensive against them. It would also cement the survival of Mr. Assad, whose ouster had long been an article of faith in Washington.

The Pentagon said in a statement that it would “continue working with our partners and allies to defeat” the Islamic State wherever it operated.

More on the humiliation of the odious McGurk, one of the architects of the caliphate, from Rod Nordland in "U.S. Exit Seen as a Betrayal of the Kurds, and a Boon for ISIS":

Brett McGurk, Mr. Trump’s special envoy in the fight against the Islamic State, said in a briefing last week that the fight was far from over.

“If we’ve learned one thing over the years, enduring defeat of a group like this means you can’t just defeat their physical space and then leave,” he said. “You have to make sure the internal security forces are in place to ensure that those gains, security gains, are enduring.”

He did not mince words about what an American withdrawal would mean. “It would be reckless if we were just to say, well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now,” he said. “I think anyone who’s looked at a conflict like this would agree with that.”

Efforts to reach Mr. McGurk on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

Not all is lost for the YPG. The PKK collaboration with the United States and Saudi Arabia was doomed to begin with. Rojava has a greater chance of survival as a (new) constitutionally protected federal territory within Syria.

As the Russians say, now that the U.S. appears to be going, a real political settlement can be reached.

The Integrity Initiative is How Mass Media Works

Yesterday RT featured a round-up on the Integrity Initiative, "Do it CIA style: What you need to know about latest leak on UK-funded psyop":

In a December 16 editorial, the Scotland-based Daily Record, which has been one of the only major outlets reporting on the scandal, suggested that if the II [Integrity Initiative] was "gift-wrapping intelligence for journalists desperate enough to pass it off as their own work without proper attribution” then that is “worthy of further investigation.”

Still not a peep about the Integrity Initiative in Reuters, AP and The New York Times. I searched AFP too. Nothing.

What does that tell you? It tells you that the Integrity Initiative is the skeleton in the closet, the bare bones of how mass media operates in the Western world. Spooks set the agenda, and the taxpayers pay for it.

As if to fill the void in their very own pages The New York Times has countered first with a "Those horrible Russians are dividing us and brain-washing our coloreds" rehash, and now today an exclusive about an alleged Chinese hack of an EU diplomatic network which -- lo and behold! --reveals that Trump agitates people.

The Reeducation Camps of Xinjiang

The dispatches on the Rohingya have dried up as the repatriation deal between Myanmar and Bangladesh, set to begin last month, stalled out.

Filling the void have been stories of Uighur Muslim internment camps in the restive western Chinese region of Xinjiang. Chris Buckley got things rolling in early September with "China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’" The story's bombshell two-sentence paragraph was

The number of Uighurs, as well as Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities, who have been detained in the camps is unclear. Estimates range from several hundred thousand to perhaps a million, with exile Uighur groups saying the number is even higher.

All qualification was quickly lost and the number of Uighurs detained for reeducation became 1 million. I was walking home from work one night right after the midterm elections and I ran into a guy, an Amazon worker, coming from an anti-Trump rally. We got to talking, and it turned out he was Iranian. I said most people in the United States have not a clue how devastating the Iran-Iraq War was. He said one of Saddam's Scud missiles blew up down the street from his house. While we agreed on a lot, he said he was more frightened of China than an errant U.S. hyper power. He mentioned the 1 million in internment camps in Xinjiang.

Chris Buckley, along with co-author Austin Ramzy, was back at it yesterday with "China’s Detention Camps for Muslims Turn to Forced Labor." The Xinjiang reeducation camps, come to find out, have a forced labor component. Residents graduate from indoctrination to jobs in textile mills, sometimes housed right there at the internment camp.

China is a nation run by the central planning of the Communist Party. The Communist Party has a problem with poverty and underdevelopment in Xinjiang. Xinjiang is also the focus of foreign powers attempting to create separatist problems for China by means of Islam. It is an established pattern for Western intelligence services: Afghanistan, the First and Second Chechen Wars, Libya, Syria, etc. So the Chinese are being proactive. Training and jobs. The refugees fleeing Guatemala and Honduras might very well favor such internment camps in Arizona, California and Texas if it meant permanent residency and stable employment. And what about the opioid killing fields of West Virginia and Ohio?

These stories about the Uighur internment camps of Xinjiang are a good illustration of how the news works a la the Integrity Initiative. Intelligence agencies fronting as NGOs develop and work with "clusters" to spread misinformation.

How Long Do We Have to Wait for Mainstream Media to Cover the Integrity Initiative?

I just searched the web sites of Reuters, AP and The New York Times. So far there is no mention of the "Integrity Initiative." The Integrity Initiative is an information warfare campaign run by the Institute for Statecraft, a Scottish charity which receives money from the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office and which acts as a front for UK military intelligence to spread misinformation, mostly of the New Cold War, Russophobic variety.

The Integrity Initiative was hacked and some of its confidential files revealed early last month. As explained in a Sputnik opinion piece:

On November 5, international hacking syndicate Anonymous published a series of internal files it'd appropriated from Integrity Initiative, an off-shoot of the Institute for Statecraft. The material was explosive, revealing the organization — which claims to be concerned with defending democratic institutions from Russian "destabilization campaigns" — to be an international "information war effort" run by British military intelligence specialists, which has disrupted the domestic politics of other countries.

As part of this enterprise, the organization has amassed 'clusters' the world over — lists of politicians, businesspeople, military officials, academics and journalists — who "understand the threat posed to Western nations" by Russian "disinformation" and can be mobilized to influence policy. The files suggest clusters are operational in France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Norway, Serbia, Spain and the UK — and there are plans to extend the scheme to every corner of the globe.

They also offer numerous examples of cluster mobilization in action — one boasts of the success of 'Operation Moncloa', an effort to block the appointment of Pedro Banos, an army reservist and author the Spanish Socialist party wanted to make the country's Director of National Security.

When Banos' candidacy was announced, members of the Integrity Initiative's Spanish 'cluster' — including Gonzalez Ponz, spokesperson of the Partido Popular in the European parliament, and Nacho Torreblanco, director of the European Council for Foreign Relations Office in Madrid — colluded via a WhatsApp group to flood social networks with anti-Banos messages, and provide the Spanish media with a 'dossier' of negative material on the former head of counterintelligence and security for the European army. The Initiative's UK cluster supported their work — within 24-hours, the planned appointment was dropped.

While the files don't offer an example of any similar plot in the UK, its cluster there includes Ben Nimmo, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, who has repeatedly claimed Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is being supported by the Russian state through various means, including a "twisted cyber campaign", without any supporting evidence whatsoever. The Integrity Initiative's official Twitter account has also posted numerous tweets and links to articles attacking Labour, Corbyn — one post said he was a "useful idiot" in service of the Kremlin — and other prominent party figures.

Given how fraught Westminster is these days, it's the attack on Corbyn, and the blanket denials by Theresa May's government, that lead me to believe that the story will find its way to the principal mainstream outlets.

In the meantime, Moon of Alabama has posted a substantial article on the Integrity Initiative, as has Craig Murray, with the promise of further revelations. Niqnaq re-posts a Yandex translation of Colonel Cassad's piece on the Integrity Initiative:

Operation Integrity Initiative: The Institute for Statecraft

Hackers Anonymous continue to spread in parts of a large leak on the operations of British intelligence in Europe, held in the framework of the program Integrity Initiative. In the next portion of revelations describes the activities of the Institute of Statecraft and the influence of agents in Italy, France and Scotland. Interesting highlights: 

1. MI6 paid their own agents to fabricate evidence of Russian involvement in the organization of a referendum on secession of Catalonia from Spain, for the subsequent charges of Russia meddling in Spanish Affairs. 

2. Money from British Intelligence paid for a campaign to discredit Jeremy Corbyn and his entourage, which actually was done in the interests of the Cabinet Office of Theresa May. In fact, Intelligence became a tool of internal political struggle. 

3. Agents of influence paid by MI6 in different countries had to constantly speculate about Russian involvement in the poisoning of the Skripals, in order to create the ground for diplomatic condemnation of Russia. 

4. In 2014, one of the functionaries of the network proposed mining the harbour of Sevastopol and lock in the Bay of the Black Sea Fleet, followed by demonstrations of military presence of NATO in the Black sea. 

5. The Institute for Statecraft, led by Director Christopher Donnelly, was in fact a front for British Intelligence and part of the infrastructure of the operations of Integrity Initiative. 

6. The document expressed regret that Russia’s influence is strong in the countries where lustration has not been completed in relation to people educated in the Soviet Union. It was written before the lustration of MGIMO graduates in Poland. 

7. Expected to negotiate with Yushchenko that he told the world that Skripal not the first one who became victim of the “cruelty” Russia, connecting the “attempt on the Skripals” with the “poisoning” of Yushchenko in 2003. 

8. Emphasizes the reliance on prominent public figures for stream of best abstract operations of Integrity Initiative. For example, the famous footballer Gary Lineker during the World Cup in Russia. 

Remarkably, today part of the published documents was removed or unavailable.

A Display of Sanity on Yemen and Khashoggi

Excellent news from Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Eric Schmitt reporting in "Senate Votes to End Aid for Yemen Fight Over Khashoggi Killing and Saudis’ War Aims":

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted on Thursday to end American military assistance for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen in the strongest show of bipartisan defiance against President Trump’s defense of the kingdom over the killing of a dissident journalist.

The 56-to-41 vote was a rare move by the Senate to limit presidential war powers and sent a potent message of disapproval for a nearly four-year conflict that has killed thousands of civilians and brought famine to Yemen. Moments later, senators unanimously approved a separate resolution to hold Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia personally responsible for the death of the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

Bernie Sanders, a co-author of the resolution, says it is the first time the War Powers Act has been successfully invoked by the Senate. The House will not take up the measure until the new congress is sworn in next month:

While Thursday’s moves were largely a symbolic, if stinging, slap at the Trump administration, they previewed what could be a far more consequential debate after Democrats take over the House in 2019.

“If Paul Ryan thinks on his way out the door his last public service gift to humanity is covering up for Saudi Arabia, great, he can make that his legacy,” said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, referring to the procedural gambit by Mr. Ryan, the House speaker, this week to prevent the war powers measure from coming up for a swift a vote.

“But we’re going to be around next year,” Mr. Kaine said, “and we’ll figure out ways that there can be consequences for this.”

UN-brokered peace talks in Sweden delivered a ceasefire in Hodeidah:

The agreement calls for an exchange of up to 15,000 prisoners, the creation of a humanitarian corridor into the city of Taiz and, importantly, the withdrawal of troops from Hudaydah. That city, on the Red Sea, is a key entry point to Yemen for essential products like food and medicine.

Peace talks are expected to continue in January in an effort to resolve what has become a humanitarian crisis in one of the poorest nations on Earth.

A Break from Brexit for the Holidays

This morning there is a convergence of the fringe and the mainstream. Naked Capitalism agrees with The New York Times regarding the meaning of prime minister Theresa May having survived a confidence vote yesterday 200 to 117.

First, Stephen Castle writing in "Theresa May Survives Leadership Challenge, but Brexit Plan Is Still in Peril" says that

Her strategy appears to be to delay the critical vote — now probably in the middle of January — and to hope that the growing risk of a disorderly departure brings some lawmakers back into line. But many doubt that will work.

“Clearly, her last throw of the dice is count down the clock and try to bounce people into voting for it,” Mr. Springford said. “But I am not convinced she will win that vote. I don’t think that she can get meaningful concessions from the European Union that would be enough to get her over the line.

“The best hope is that everybody calms down over Christmas, that they start to really worry about no deal, and that some more moderate people signal that they will support her. But everyone is now so high up their pole that I am not sure they can climb down.”

Next, Yves Smith in "Brexit: Endgame":

Just like Greece in 2015, May is playing a game of chicken. She will attempt to force a choice between her deal and no deal, on the belief that something will give so that she gets her deal, meaning either the Europeans blink on the backstop, or that MPs that would vote against her Withdrawal Agreement now lose their nerve as March 29 or the extended drop dead date approaches.

But we know the EU will not relent on the backstop, although the UK political and pundit classes will probably continue to refuse to accept that through much of January. They do not want to believe that even businesses on the Continent are not willing to go beyond the deal struck with May. They are not willing to give the UK a commercial advantage by being able to have lower labor and environmental regulations and still have special access to the EU. They’ve stretched the idea of what’s required to be in the Single Market and will go no further. They are prepared to take a “no deal” hit if they must.

This "run out the clock" reading of the situation has been apparent from the very outset of May's leadership. There has been plenty to obscure it in the last two years but no longer.

May has promised to bring her deal to a vote of parliament by January 21. But who can believe anything the prime minister says?

At least for the time being, say, the holiday season upon us, we can shelve Brexit for a while.

Tonight's the Night

UPDATE II: May wins a vote of confidence 200 to 117. The zombie plods on. What now? Hopefully markets will pitch a fit because a crash-out seems more probable now than if May had lost. Corbyn is going to have to make a move. Talk is of a nuclear option: a non-binding motion of no confidence  with hard-line Tory Brexiteers joining with Labour, SNP, Liberal Democrats and Greens. Corbyn has been resisting this. He can no longer.

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UPDATE: Touts are picking May to hold on. (See "Betting odds indicate 89 percent chance UK's May wins confidence vote" by Andrew MacAskill.) If you look to money flows, people unloading pounds prior to the Brexit vote proved to be a more accurate predictor of the outcome than the opinion polls. So maybe May survives. Heaven help us.

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Finally. Tonight's the night. The necessary 48 letters have been received by the chairman of the appropriate committee. The Conservative Party will hold a confidence vote on prime minister Theresa May. The New York Times is reporting that May needs a bare majority of Tory MPs to survive. That magic number is 158. But Yves Smith points out that this is not true:

ConservativeHome debunks some earlier misreporting about the process. For May to win just over half of the 315 votes of MPs won’t be enough to save her:

It is being claimed that “158 is the magic number” – since 157.7 is what one is left with if one divides the 315 MPs in receipt of the Conservative whip in half.

But imagine for a moment that 159 MPs express confidence in her leadership, if a ballot takes place, and 156 do not. Could she then carry on as Party leader? We don’t think so. The ballot would not have found sufficient consensus for her leadership. We cite a precedent. 204 votes were cast for Margaret Thatcher during the 1990 Conservative leadership contest, and 168 were not – 152 Tory MPs opted for Michael Heseltine and 16 abstained. She won a clear majority of those voting. But she was forced out none the less.

My guess is that May is done. If she survives, by rule, the Tories are stuck with her for another year. There is no path forward with her leadership. She was rebuffed yesterday by all the European leaders with whom she met. If May survives it's a one-way ticket to crash-out. And while there are plenty of Tories for whom crash-out is the desired outcome, if May remains the chances of a general election in the near term are much more likely. So she has to go. That's how it looks to me.

May's people are showing their desperation. They are scaremongering, saying to remove the prime minister at this late stage invites a crash-out because her replacement cannot assume the position until late January or February, at the same time they are providing gumdrops, saying May will stand aside before the next general election if she wins the confidence vote.

If the Brexit politics of the Tories are wicked and opaque, the same goes for Labour. The Trotskyites have been good at sketching this out. Blairites are angling for another Brexit plebiscite, what's being touted as The People's Vote. The Trots have been critical of Corbyn's lack of leadership in bringing a vote of confidence on May to parliament (Yves Smith too, for that matter). But Corbyn's diffidence on Brexit has served him and Labour well. I would argue that it has been masterly, which is some kind of achievement because diffidence is not usually an attribute ascribed to a master.

Brexit is a manifestation of a paradigm that no longer has any credibility. Societies are in upheaval. Too much is happening too fast. The U.S. appears to be on the verge of war with China. Turkey has declared it will invade Syria to rid it of U.S. Kurdish proxies. Let's hope with tonight's vote there is a first step in the UK towards some sort of sanity.

May and Macron

Macron addressed the French nation yesterday without mentioning the Yellow Vests by name, though it is the protests of the Gilets Juanes that brought "Jupiter" before the television cameras. Macron offered a ceremonial display of contrition coupled with several modest legislative fixes: an increase in the minimum wage and a scrap on the overtime tax as well as the social security tax on pensioners earning less than 2,000 euros a month.

Macron is trying to change the topic. The topic has become Macron's resignation. The protests continue.

In London prime minister Theresa May faced parliament after her ignominious about-face on bringing her Brexit plan to a vote. The Trotskyites are upset with Jeremy Corbyn for not promptly demanding a confidence vote. Corbyn wants to allow May one last tour of the continent, which is where May is presently trying to rallying support.

The story goes that May is trying to secure concessions from EU leadership on the Irish backstop. As The New York Times editorial page summarizes:

By delaying Tuesday’s vote by Parliament, Mrs. May bought some time. But not much, and at high cost. She evidently hopes she can squeeze some concessions out of a European Union summit meeting scheduled for Thursday and Friday that could placate some members of Parliament on the most contentious issue, the open border between Ireland and the British region of Northern Ireland. Both sides are committed to keeping the border open. But since that would mean keeping part of Britain in the union’s single market, the British and union negotiators agreed that as a “backstop,” Britain would remain bound by some rules of the European Union if another solution was not found by the end of a transition period in December 2020. To some supporters of Brexit this is anathema. But as an exasperated member of the European Union Parliament, Guy Verhofstadt, tweeted, “Just keep in mind that we will never let the Irish down. This delay will further aggravate the uncertainty for people & businesses.”

It is all a kabuki. May will return to face the inevitable next week.

Yves Smith is good this morning on the mechanics of bringing about a vote of no confidence within the Conservative Party. Hard-line Brexiteers are apparently only five letters shy of bringing this about. The risk for the hardliners is that if May survives by winning a majority of Tory MPs, she can't be challenged for another year.

There is a possibility that if May loses the confidence vote and Boris Johnson wins the race to succeed her, the coalition government could fall because BoJo is radioactive.

Smith concludes:

May’s plan, to the extent she has one, is disturbingly reminiscent of the strategy of the Greek government in the 2015 bailout negotiations: playing chicken. May is determined to produce a Brexit, and she is confident that it would wind up being hers rather than a no deal. She is running out the clock on the hope that fear of a crash out will lead the EU to relent on the backstop or Parliament to approve her pact. She’s not entertaining a second referendum or Article 50 revocation or any path to Remain. Recall the Telegraph revealed what her possible fallback is: a referendum that does not have Remain as a choice.

Bloomberg confirms this take:

Faced with a Brexit vote she can’t win, Theresa May appears to be gambling that running down the clock to a no-deal departure might change the arithmetic in Parliament. 

A Cabinet ally of May’s, speaking on condition of anonymity, put the prime minister’s strategy more charitably, saying that if the deal can’t go through then the only option is to keep talking — to EU leaders, in the hope they might offer something more, and to lawmakers, in the hope they might ask a little less.

In other words, May will continue to resist bringing her Brexit plan to vote. Corbyn is going to have to request a vote of confidence. The Tories might beat him to it though.

Theresa May, Putschist + NYT Continues Attack on al-Saud

Well, I suppose I might have been incorrect last week when I opined that British democracy was not more dysfunctional than the American variety.

After repeatedly assuring the public last week that the momentous Brexit vote in parliament would proceed on schedule for Tuesday, December 11, BBC is reporting, based on insider accounts, that May will postpone the vote.

"The report that May could cancel the vote came just hours after the top EU court ruled that Britain could cancel its notice to leave the bloc, which it is due to exit on March, 29."

May's path forward appears to be another trip to Brussels to plead for additional concessions. Why would the EU oblige her? Clearly May's only goal is to extend the life of her split, unpopular government and prevent new elections. The zombie plods on!

Checking with Yves Smith this morning, she lists the probable outcomes if May's vote had failed tomorrow:

• May could face a vote of no confidence in the Commons. Kier Starmer has said that Labour would table a vote, but with the DUP stating that they would support the Conservatives in such a vote, this is unlikely to succeed. If the Government did fall, there would be 14 days for another Government to win a vote of confidence in the Commons, or the country will have a General Election.

• Conservative MPs put in 48 letters, and the party has to have a confidence vote in the Prime Minister. If 48 letters go in, this would require a swift vote of confidence, where May must win more than 50 per cemt of the 315 eligible MPs. If she lost, the party then has to elect a new leader. Given the incredibly short timescale before 29th March, the Conservative Party would be signing its own death warrant to do this.

• Labour tries to table a censure motion about May – this is effectively a personal vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister, which is what happened recently to Chris Grayling. This would potentially allow Tory MPs to vote against the May without bringing down the Government. However the Government is under no obligation to provide time for an Opposition Day before Christmas, so this is unlikely to happen.

• The Prime Minister goes to negotiate with Brussels and brings back an amended deal. This would then require the Government to win a vote on its renegotiated deal, using the procedure outlined above. If no negotiated deal can pass through the Commons the UK will leave the EU without a deal.

For the last several weeks the scenario of choice floated in the pages of the mainstream press has been for May to lose the initial vote in parliament, but not by a disastrous margin, at which point she would proclaim renewed determination for a better deal and off to Brussels she would go.

That scenario started to disintegrate at the end of last week when it became apparent that May had been lying to the public about what exactly her Brexit deal with the EU entailed. Most MPs could not be seen to publicly support it. It was headed for a huge defeat in parliament.

So, despite numerous promises that the vote would go on, May is skipping the "lose round one" part of the scenario and, apparently, proceeding directly to the return to Brussels kabuki.

The shortcoming of May's about-face is that it deprives her coalition government, already living on borrowed time, of the last shred of credibility. May has zero credibility. The mainstream media can no longer shield her. 

A sort of putsch is underway where the Tories and the DUP are trying to lock in a crash-out. That's the only thing that makes sense at this point, above and beyond blocking snap elections. But the only way that's possible, given the EU ruling that Britain can simply cancel its notice to leave the bloc, is for the Tory coalition government to stay in power until March 29. Given all that has transpired since Chequers, to accomplish this will require a putsch.

Once again, as this latest Brexit episode illustrates, the zombie neoliberal paradigm refuses to be defeated. We are reminded again and again by those in power that there is no alternative. Use this lens to look at the unfolding events in France.

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Yesterday The New York Times devoted prominent placement in its cultural aircraft carrier, the Sunday edition, to two weighty, significant attacks on the House of Saud: the front-page account, "The Wooing of Jared Kushner: How the Saudis Got a Friend in the White House," of how Trump arrived at his main foreign policy initiative via a November 2016 meeting between son-in-law Jared Kushner and a Saudi delegation of high-raking officials; and Nicholas Kristof's must-read "Your Tax Dollars Help Starve Children," which thoroughly demolishes the U.S. case for assisting the Saudi-UAE coalition's war on Yemen.

Expect More Violence

The size of the protests are reported to have shrunk for Gilets Jaunes Act IV yesterday, yet the number of arrests more than tripled, from a little over 400 nationwide last week to nearly 1,400. So something doesn't quite add up.

Preventative detention no doubt was employed by the gendarmerie. But that won't stuff the Yellow Vests genie back in its bottle. We're probably looking at more force delivered by the state because the rebellion will continue. (Colonel Cassad thinks so.)

The mainstream media is beginning to shift its coverage of the Yellow Vests from sympathy to fear. More quotes of men and women on the Parisian street expressing consternation at the disruption of daily life.

At least the stories in The New York Times and Reuters both highlighted that the protests have shifted from demands that the fuel tax be repealed, which was accomplished last week, to demands that Macron resign.

Macron's election in 2017 was the singular spectacular achievement of a collapsing zombie neoliberal world order post-Brexit (post-Ghouta?). He will not go easily. Expect more state violence, if not a state of emergency.

Gilets Jaunes Act IV Tomorrow

Tomorrow the Yellow Vest rebellion in France stages "Act IV."

Macron has promised a major address to the nation next week. He has already capitulated on the fuel tax which sparked the uprising. Prominent Yellow Vest demands now include an increased minimum wage, a more robust retirement and Macron's resignation.

Close to 100,000 police will be on duty Saturday. It's conceivable that another violent weekend could prompt a state of emergency. Macron is running out of options. His approval rating is at 18%. He's promoting the idea that tomorrow will be violent.

Another indication of how dire things are for Macron is a story by Adam Nossiter, Paris correspondent for The New York Times. "How France’s ‘Yellow Vests’ Differ From Populist Movements Elsewhere" could have appeared in Jacobin. It's one of those rare instances where the mainstream mirrors the fringe. What makes it even more noteworthy is that Nossiter, though not as rabid in defense of the zombie neoliberal status quo as NYT's Rome bureau chief Jason Horowitz, puffed Macron shamelessly from the outset of the last presidential campaign. Now, as you can see, things have turned:

The uprising is instead mostly organic, spontaneous and self-determined. It is mostly about economic class. It is about the inability to pay the bills.

In that regard, it is more Occupy than Orban — more akin to the protests against Wall Street driven by the working poor in the United States than the race-based, flag-waving of Hungary’s increasingly authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban.

[snip]

“There’s this social distress that exists more or less everywhere,” said Marc Lazar, a specialist in Italian history at Sciences Po. “Of people who are very worried about the future, not only are they suffering, but they have profound distrust of institutions and political parties. This is what we are seeing everywhere in Europe.”

Comparing the four countries — Britain, France, Italy and the United States — Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer who has studied the demographics of the “left-behinds,” said “the sociology of the people in revolt is the same.”

“These are the people who feel endangered by the current economic model,” which doesn’t “integrate the greatest number,” he said.

[snip]

But [Macron's] base, then and now, was exceedingly small, presaging his current wide rejection by the French, not just by the Yellow Vests. He won only 24 percent of the vote in the first round of voting last year — while his opponents on the far right and far left together won over 40 percent of the vote. Those numbers have now come home to haunt Mr. Macron in a political landscape where nearly eight out of 10 French citizens no longer support him, according to a recent poll.

Occupy never went away. It has always been here since 2011. The Brexit vote got defined as primarily a response to the refugee crisis in Europe, which was less an issue of immigration and more about warfare run amok in the Middle East thanks to United States; but the Brexit vote had just as much to do with the Brussels-backed, German-enforced regime of neoliberal austerity as it did immigration. Now Briton Leavers are waking up to the fact that the people in charge of Brexit have no intention of working towards equality in a new Little England.

I have been telling people that the events in France and England offer a ray of sunshine as we head into winter. Though we seem to be hurtling back to the medieval, with hostage-taking of rival economic royals, the dialectic is churning forward away from zombie neoliberalism.

May's Government Falls Next Week

The big Brexit story today is that May will not delay next Tuesday's vote in parliament. Ministers in May's government are panicked that the withdrawal agreement will be defeated by a 100-vote margin. They were lobbying for a delay because that significant a defeat would almost certainly lead to the collapse of the government.

Yves Smith is starting to row back the "likely scenario"of May losing next week's vote by a margin small enough to allow the prime minister one more trip to Brussels for more ceremonial haggling. Now Smith is almost at the point of adopting May's talking points: It's crash-out or the Brexit withdrawal agreement on the table. Take your pick.

My sense is that the publication of the government's legal advice -- that Northern Ireland would be, for all intents and purposes, separated from the United Kingdom in perpetuity -- means the DUP can longer support May. The government should fall next week. That's the obvious conclusion. If this does not happen it means that British democracy is even more dysfunctional than democracy in the United States. And that is not the case. So mark your calendar. Finally, May's coalition government, after a year-and-a-half in power, comes down.

War Drums in Lebanon & Ukraine + INF Treaty + Zombie May + "Smoking Saw"

There are warnings of an Israeli attack on Lebanon, as well as a Ukrainian attack on Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in Donbass.

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Colonel Cassad assesses the U.S. ultimatum to Russia on the INF treaty. Not good.

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The first test of strength for May's Brexit plan got off to a shaky start in parliament yesterday. Yves Smith jousts against the conventional and opines that May actually fared pretty well:

May may survive next week. Even though her bill will be shellacked, the margin of loss on the contempt vote is a reminder that the Tories will be loath to oppose her if there isn’t a viable leader in the wings. And the reason May is still standing is that there hasn’t been one since she became PM. The Tories do not want Corbyn in, and the DUP does not want to sacrifice its temporary power player role. So the DUP and Tories will vote against May only if they are pretty certain they can quickly install a new PM and avoid a general election.

The scenario that appears to be coming together is that May loses next week but not by an enormous margin. She survives to trudge off to Brussels one more time to try renegotiate the Irish backstop with the EU. The Orangemen of the DUP don't want a perpetual border-free customs union that will bind Northern Ireland to the south. Nothing will come of May's efforts other than allowing her government to live into the New Year.

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After what looked like a triumph for crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) at the G-20 in Argentina (a high five from Putin!) the Khashoggi affair is back top of the fold. Reuters reports:

ANKARA (Reuters) - Istanbul’s chief prosecutor has filed warrants for the arrest of a top aide to Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and the deputy head of its foreign intelligence on suspicion of planning the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, two Turkish officials said on Wednesday.

The prosecutor’s office has concluded there is “strong suspicion” that Saud al-Qahtani and General Ahmed al-Asiri, both removed from their positions in October, were among the planners of Khashoggi’s Oct. 2 killing at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the officials said.

The move comes a day after senior U.S. senators said they were more certain than ever that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for the killing, citing a CIA briefing. The United Nations human rights chief on Wednesday called for an international investigation.

Lindsey Graham had a good line yesterday rebutting Pompeo's claim that there was "no smoking gun" linking MbS to Khashoggi's murder. Graham quipped, “There is not a smoking gun, there’s a smoking saw. You have to be willfully blind not to see it."

Endgame Brexit + Macron Flinches + AMLO's First Move

The Brexit vote in parliament is scheduled for next Tuesday, December 11. So gloomy are May's prospects of victory, the debate is over the margin of defeat for her withdrawal agreement. Touts think a loss in the 50-vote range will allow May to live to fight another day; a loss by 100 votes will lead to her ouster.

That's where Yves Smith has some worthwhile thoughts on the topic. Clearly the path forward after May's Brexit agreement is rejected next week will be for the prime minister to resign and new elections held. But, as Smith points out, the fractious Tory-led coalition government is united in not wanting elections:

Labour has said it would introduce a motion of no confidence if May’s Brexit were voted down and there is every reason to take them at their word. Some Conservatives have already sent in letters calling for a Motion of No Confidence, and the DUP is likely to vote against May. DUP leader Arlene Foster has recently said the UK could get a better deal from the EU if it pushed for it, which contradicts May’s claims. It doesn’t matter whether Foster believe this or not; it legitimates the DUP voting to toss May over the side.

However, the DUP does not want a General Election. It would almost certainly lose its powerful position as the key member in a coalition. Neither do the Tories. So if the Tories can rally around a new PM (Michael Gove?), the DUP would very likely join them. Recall that under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, the Government can forestall a general election if it can act quickly enough. From Parliament’s website:

"If such a motion is agreed to, and a new government with the support of a majority of MPs cannot be formed within a period of 14 calendar days, Parliament is dissolved and an early General Election is triggered."

The fact that May might be turfed out right before Parliament goes out of session starting Friday December 21 means that minds in the Tory party are very likely focused on this question right now. And since a General Election will not have been called under any scenario by the time of the EU Council meeting on December 13-14, one wonder what they will have to say.

Gove is positioning himself  to replace May. But what I don't understand is why anyone would want to lead a government responsible for a crash-out of the European Union. I don't see it. It might be a UKIP or DUP wish, but it's not the basis of a national government. A Gove government might survive for a moment on subterfuge and misdirection. But there is very little time between now and March 29, and the Tories are hemmed in by the EU on one side and Labour and SNP on the other.

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Macron flinched today and announced a six-month moratorium on his gas tax. The Yellow Vests promptly rejected the move as insufficient. Protests will proceed. My guess is that now having presented the carrot Macron can graduate to the stick. If the rebellion remains at the level of last Saturday, Macron will announce a state of emergency.

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AMLO is already cooking in Mexico. According to Maria Verza and Mark Stevenson, "Mexico’s ‘common man’ president pledges end to secrecy," reporting for AP:

On Monday, Lopez Obrador tackled a case that cast a long shadow over the previous government, signing a presidential decree creating a truth commission to investigate the 2014 disappearance of 43 students in an apparent massacre. He then posed with parents of the missing young people, who displayed photos of their loved ones.

Prosecutors have said the students from a teachers college in southern Guerrero state were killed by a drug gang and their bodies incinerated in a massive fire. But conclusive evidence has never been found or presented, leading the students’ parents on a frustrating, painful four-year quest for the truth,

Gilets Jaunes

After reading the latest from The New York Times on the Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) uprising in France, Adam Nossiter's "‘Yellow Vests’ Riot in Paris, but Their Anger Is Rooted Deep in France," one comes away with the impression that the movement will not die down anytime soon.

Alissa Rubin reports the results of Saturday's protest:

More than 260 people were wounded nationwide, at least 133 of them in Paris, according to the prefecture of police. Some were bystanders caught in the fray who needed treatment after exposure to tear gas. About 412 people were arrested nationwide.

The prefect of Paris, Michel Delpuech, said at a news conference late Sunday that the police had been faced with “extreme and unprecedented violence” and that protesters had thrown hammers and steel ball bearings at them.

Firefighters extinguished nearly 250 blazes that destroyed 112 cars and burned other property, including several buildings. The cost of the damage was being assessed on Sunday.

The French are comparing it to the student-worker rebellion of 1968.

Writing for Jacobin, Aurelie Dianara defines the Yellows Vests as a reaction to Macron's redistribution of wealth to the 1% and the widening immiseration of the working class:

In terms of their demands, the gilets jaunes first of all want to get rid of this “carbon tax.” But behind the anger there is something else. As they and their supporters have repeated over the last two weeks, to justify their actions (which have stirred no little upset), the fuel price issue is something of a “straw that broke the camel’s back.”

The voices heard in recent days express a clear feeling of exasperation, the sense of being the objects of the contempt of (and exclusion by) a political class which they generally reject. Many call for the government and President Emmanuel Macron to resign. They continually insist on his low support and weak electoral legitimacy: after all, in last year’s presidential contest he only scored 24 percent in the first round, and turnout in the runoff hit historic low. “Macron, resign!” is a slogan that thunders through the provinces and along the Champs Elysées.

This feeling of exasperation is the result of years of fiscal and social policies that have gradually strangled the low and middle classes, including in terms of the tax take. Immediately upon reaching office, Macron abolished the Solidarity Wealth Tax (ISF), giving €4 billion to the richest; and has strengthened the Tax Credit for Solidarity and Employment (CICE), a tax cut and exemption program transferring €41 billion a year to French companies, including multinationals. Shortly afterwards, with the 2018 budget bill, Macron established a flat tax that allowed a lowering of taxation on capital, handing another €10 billion to the richest.

At the same time, the government has increased the General Social Contribution (CSG) income tax to be paid by pensioners, while pensions themselves have ceased to be indexed to inflation (and thus to retirees’ ability to buy consumer goods). It has got rid of the subsidized contracts (which allowed large numbers to work on contracts partly financed by public bodies) and lowered by five euros a month the amount of housing contributions (APL) for the most disadvantaged.

As if that were not enough, the new “carbon tax” will weigh five times heavier on the budgets of the middle classes than on that of the upper classes. Yet the government has taken no steps to counterbalance this obviously unequal treatment — for example by giving aid to the families on the most modest budgets.

Building on policies already implemented by presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, the effect has been to produce a further massive increase in inequalities. Over the last two decades the largest fortunes in France have increased tenfold, while according to a recent study by OFCE and INSEE, French families’ average “purchasing power” has fallen by €440 a year since the 2008 crisis. In this context, it is unsurprising that a sense of injustice and humiliation has spread, as well as that of an arrogant “president of the rich.”

This has exacerbated a divide between the people and the privileged elite represented by the president, aggravated by a series of recent financial scandals enveloping recent heads of state. If governments have continued to repeat that tax breaks for the richest and big companies would stimulate investment, the figures tell us otherwise: we are still waiting for the million jobs promised by Hollande and his then-adviser Macron when CICE was launched in 2012.

We must see that the Yellow Vests are a continuation of Occupy Wall Street, the difference being that the movement originated from the exurbs rather than the urban core; also, the Yellow Vests don't dither when it comes to making demands, and the movement is not yoked to the occupation of a prominent public space.

The basic facts of life since the dot-com bubble and burst nearly two decades ago are rising housing costs and stagnant wages. Governments have done nothing to address the problem. Why? Because it is not of problem for the people whom those governments serve: The wealthy.

Eventually though the peasants rebel, even under the paradigm of zombie neoliberalism.

Macron shows no sign yet of recognizing the enormity of the challenge with which he is faced. Zombie neoliberalism has managed to last this long because there has not been a legitimate social democratic crack in its market-worshiping armor. That's about to change in Mexico. In the UK May should be gone before the end of the month.

Faced with a rebellion, what can Macron do? Both Le Pen and Melenchon are calling for the dissolution of the national assembly followed by new elections. Macron will declare a state of emergency first before he dissolves the national assembly.

In any event, this Saturday the Yellow Vests will be on the march again.