Kataib Hezbollah Speaks

A spokesman for Kataeb Hezbollah denied that the group was behind the rocket attacks on U.S. bases, including the one that killed the American contractor, saying Washington is using them as a pretext to attack his group.

The spokesman, Mohammed Mohieh, told The Associated Press the death toll from the American airstrikes rose to 25 on Monday and that at least 51 militiamen were wounded, some of whom were in serious condition. The militia would retaliate, he said, but added that the group’s commanders would decide on the form of retaliation.

“These forces must leave,” he said of U.S. troops in Iraq, calling the latest attack a “crime” and a “massacre.”

"Iran-backed Iraqi militia vows revenge to US strikes" by Qassim Abdul-Zahra

 ****

A spokesman for Kataib Hezbollah, Mohammed Muhi, said his group intended to erect tents in the street in front of the United States Embassy for an opened-ended sit-in to pressure the Americans to leave Iraq.

“We will not leave these tents until the embassy and the ambassador leave Iraq,” Mr. Muhi said.

"Iraq Protesters Break Into U.S. Embassy Compound in Baghdad" by Falih Hassan and Ben Hubbard

Iraq's Parliament Must Act

Who knows what U.S. forces housed at an Iraqi military base near Kirkuk, the one that was attacked on Friday by Katyusha rockets resulting in the death of an American contractor (a.k.a., CIA mercenary), are really up to. The reporting on the presence of  U.S. military forces in Iraq and Syria is woeful. As of Friday it wasn't known who was responsible for the attack on the K1 military base. Yesterday the United States responded by attacking Kataib Hezbollah bases in Iraq and Syria. Kataib Hezbollah (KH) is a militia that is part of the Iraqi state-sanctioned Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), the self-defense forces mustered in response to the 2014 ISIS blitzkrieg of Mosul and Anbar.

As Moon of Alabama notes, the goal of the U.S. air strikes appears to have been to degrade Iraq's al-Qaem border station:

The al-Qaem/al-Bukamal border station is the only open one between Iraq and Syria which is not under U.S. control. The U.S. was furious when the Iraqi prime minister Adil Abdul Mahdi allowed it to be established. It was previously attacked by Israel which had launched its assault from a U.S. air force base in east Syria.

Iraq's parliamentary leadership, already under pressure from ongoing October Revolution protests, is going to have a respond to this U.S attack. As Reuters notes,

Iraq’s Fatih alliance, which holds the second-largest number of seats in parliament and largely consists of militia leaders, called the air strikes an attack on Iraq’s sovereignty.

PMF bases have been struck before, this past summer, by Israeli aircraft with U.S. logistical support. There was no incendiary reply from the PMF.

If it's true that the PMF are merely an Iranian cat's paw, then, since Iran favors the long game, there likely will be no proportionate response from Kataib Hezbollah.

But what has has changed since July is the political crisis spawned by the October Revolution. Parliament must act if it is to maintain any credibility. Let's hope that U.S. forces are asked to leave Iraq.

Iraq's October Revolution

To stay with the topic of mainstream media's poorly under-reported coverage of civil uprisings presently underway across the globe, let's take a peek at Iraq. The 2019 Iraq protests, also known as the October Revolution, started October 1. Protesters want the elected government to focus on job creation and income inequality, but also, as the BBC reported,

Iraqis are not simply calling for the downfall of a leader or political party. Instead, they are calling for the end of a political system which has existed since the US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003 - a system which, they argue, has failed them.

They specifically point to the way government appointments are made on the basis of sectarian or ethnic quotas (a system known as muhassasa), rather than on merit. Aggrieved Iraqis say this has allowed Shia, Kurdish, Sunni and other leaders to abuse public funds, enrich themselves and their followers and effectively pillage the country of its wealth with very little benefit to most citizens.

In this the Iraqi protesters have a lot in common with their comrades in Lebanon who are also protesting a sectarian-based political system, known as confessionalism. In both Iraq and Lebanon the United States supports, and had a hand in crafting, the confessional political order,

You won't find any of this in Baghdad bureau chief Alissa Rubin's latest article, "Iraq in Worst Political Crisis in Years as Death Toll Mounts From Protests." She summarizes protester demands as the "ouster of the government, an end to corruption and a halt to the overweening influence of Iran," without mentioning a demand to overhaul confessionalism or kick out the United States from its horde of Iraq military bases.

Rubin does go one to mention the reticence in Iraq's parliament to fiddle with the confessional political order, but she makes it seem as if it is entirely Iran's doing. The only time the U.S. is mentioned is at the end of the article:

While the pace of killings in Iraq has ebbed and flowed, the attacks have become more brutal and there has been an increase in kidnappings, arrests and disappearances of protest leaders, doctors who treat wounded protesters, and journalists.

Human Rights Watch and the United Nations Human Rights Commission have called on the government to halt its lawless crackdown. Human Rights Watch has demanded that the United States and Europe to do more to censure the government.

But some Iraqis say the U.S. is exerting its influence to return Saddam-era Ba'athists to government leadership.

Why would Iraq continue to allow all those U.S. bases after the defeat of ISIS if not for outright bribery?

The Disintegration of Haiti

With months-long protests in Chile, Lebanon and Iraq, it's fair to say that the coverage in the Western mainstream media has been spotty. It is also fair to say that media coverage of the year-plus protests in Haiti against president Jovenel Moïse over the collapse of Petrocaribe has been basically non-existent.

That's why it's nice to have NPR's Wednesday report from Carrie Kahn in Port-au-Prince:

It's going to be increasingly more difficult. There are supposed to be parliamentary elections in January - the second Monday of January. But there is no signs that they can hold an election, and that just means that there will be no active parliament in force come the middle of January. I think there's something like only 10 senators' terms have - will not be termed out, so that just will intensify. And many people and analysts believe that the protests will resume once the holidays are over.

[snip]

It's very difficult. The currency here - inflation has spiked. The currency is just worthless. It's hard to get basic goods. What is interesting, though, is that you have seen the president out in the open and trying to rehabilitate himself to sort of take advantage of this lull to get out. He seized the largest private electricity provider in the country. Many say this is an illegal move to silence his opponents, and the head of the company has been a very outspoken critic.

But he just is asking people to be patient, but patience has really run out, especially when it comes to electricity. He campaigned on bringing electricity 24 hours a day to Haiti, and people barely have three to four hours, at that.

The French in the Street are Fighting for Us All

A good synopsis of French president Emmanuel Macron's pension reduction scheme can be found in WSWS's "French unions meet prime minister to sell out mass strike to defend pensions":

The main measures in these cuts are a two-year increase in the retirement age to 64, the elimination of public-sector retirement plans, and going over to a system where workers receive “points” from their pension plans. The monetary value of these “points” is not fixed, and the state can modify them at will over time. As former Prime Minister François Fillon said in 2016, such a system “allows for one thing that no politician is admitting. It allows for reducing each year the size, the value of the points and thus to diminish the level of pensions.”

When a "man on the street" is quoted in mainstream media reports on this strike, the lack of definition of these "points" is usually cited. As Fillon correctly notes, the values of points will simply be watered down as the government wishes. No doubt the administrative power to do so will be included in whatever legislation Macron introduces in February.

Support for the strike remains high:

After nearly two million workers, students, youth and retirees marched against Macron on Tuesday, strikes and protests took place on Wednesday and will continue in the next days. Popular support for the strike remains high. According to an RTL poll, 62 percent of respondents said they supported the strike.

But the problem is that Macron La République En Marche control's the National Assembly. Macron can ram it through, something he promises to do.

Make no mistake. This struggle over the French pension system is a critical battle for the zombie peak neoliberalism Washington Consensus.

If the French working class fails and its best-in-the-world system of retirement is devoured by the ravenous flesh-eating zombie, well, then, we have an answer to the question I often ask on this page. 

How much longer for neoliberalism?

Longer still.

COP25

This year's United Nations climate summit, COP25, which was held in Madrid after being moved there because of anti-austerity protests in Santiago, Chile, ended Sunday in total failure. You can read a summation in The New York Times or hear about it on Democracy Now! Basically the entire UN Conference of Parties process to address climate change has broken down. The principal activity now is blocking any meaningful measure, and the chief blocker is the United States.

I know from reading Naomi Klein's latest book On Fire, that if we don't radically reduce carbon emissions by 2030 civilization as we know it is in real trouble. Given that the wealthy nations are unwilling to change their ways, we're headed back to the Hobbesian state of nature.

As Asad Rehman explained on Democracy Now! --

So you would have expected governments to come knowing that this was a critical moment and to come with ambition. And instead, we saw the United States, aided and abetted by other rich developed countries, take a wrecking ball to those outcomes. So, first of all, governments came not willing to take action in terms of the lost decade, when they’ve literally done nothing in the previous decade, which has meant that the critical actions that are required in the coming decade are much, much harder. They came attempting to block any support for poorer developing countries, as you’ve just heard from Tasneem. I mean, this is absolutely outrageous.

And what they were actually asking for, not just the United States, but the European Union, as well, is basically to have no liability for the damage that their inaction is causing. And more heinous than that is not only are they not putting anything on the table in terms of genuine emission reductions or the desperately needed finance; what they wanted was loopholes, so that their big polluting companies could continue to pollute, loopholes that would basically bust the budget for the 1.5-degree guard rail. So we’re coming here with governments with no willingness to act and actually acting not in the interests of their citizens, but acting in the interests of their big polluting companies. And it was an absolute disaster.

So the question now we must ask ourselves is: What will it take for our voices to be heard? Now, the climate talks move to the U.K. in 2020. It’s an unprecedented moment. We’re at the end of the decade, the lost decade, and now we’re in the beginning of the new decade. If governments don’t come with that willingness, then — which we can only as citizens force them and hold our own governments to account at a national level so that they come with the right mandates — I think we’re talking about not just losing the 1.5 degree, but the 2 degree. And just to put that in context — because I totally agree with you, sometimes these climate words don’t quite have the resonance — but the difference between the Ice Age and now was only 4 degrees. And already in the pledges that we’ve got for the Paris Agreement, we’re seeing warming that will lead to 3 degrees. We have absolutely no idea of what the world will look like. But what we can say is that the impacts on the poorest people, on the most vulnerable around the world, will be absolutely devastating.

A system as irrational as ours eventually is going to collapse. That's what we are going to witness the next ten years, this collapse, but also the extreme measures wealthy governments employ to manage the collapse.

Massive Election Fraud in the 2019 UK General Election?

George Galloway says he predicted that the "Red Wall" in the Midlands and Northern England would crumble to the Tories because of Brexit. Kate Hoey backs that up. But Catte Black considers the possibility that there was massive vote fraud:

Remember this? It only happened on Wednesday but it’s already some way down the Memory Hole.

Laura Kuenssberg, being the true idiot she really is, blabbing off on prime time telly about apparently institutional election malpractice – and not even having the basic brains to see the import of what she’s letting slip.

There’s been a lot of effort expended in minimising the significance of this in social media and in the mainstream press – and indeed by resident trolls on OffG. There have been claims it’s ‘routine’ – as if that somehow makes it ok. Or that Kuenssberg was misinformed, or ‘tired’.

Beyond the smoke, though, things remain starkly clear. There are three choices.

• Someone illegally and improperly accessed ballot papers prior to the count and before close of poll.  

• Someone pretended they had and fed disinfo to Kuenssberg who committed a felony by broadcasting it.  

• Kuenssberg lied.

It obviously must raise the question – how do we know the ballot papers are just being looked at? Are we supposed to just take it on faith that these people allegedly “routinely” breaking the law to look, will feel obligated to stop there?

But that’s just an intro to a much bigger question. The question. The one we are not supposed to ask.

Before going there let me put a case to you. A thought experiment as ‘twere.

Imagine that Assad had behaved like Johnson during the last presidential election. Imagine his bizarre election ‘campaign’ consisted almost solely of photo-ops and interviews in which he and members of his family display their evilness and idiocy over and over and over again in an almost ritualistic statement of contempt for their voting public.

Imagine he offered no plans or policies or even hope, but just rolled about insulting people, stealing their phones and hiding in fridges.

But still got elected. On an increased majority.

Imagine the day before polling day in Russia a journalist from TASS accidentally lets slip that the postal ballot papers have already – and illegally – been seen, and predict a landslide for Putin. A landslide then transpires, despite the fact he has become universally despised.

What would our own state-controlled and corporate media be saying about this?

More important, what would you feel perfectly free to say about this?

So why don’t you feel free to say it now?

Please don’t get me wrong here. I am not by any means claiming the December 12 election was rigged. I’m not equipped to make any such claim. I have seen very little hard evidence to suggest it and I don’t even know, currently, if it would even be possible.

My point is the double standard and elision.

Vladimir Putin’s election is automatically dismissed as fixed by the entire western media, even though it shows far fewer irregularities than many recent US presidential elections. Assad’s election likewise. If the events of the last few weeks in the UK had been happening in Russia, we all know what the media would be saying, and what many of our readers would be saying too.

What would be taken as clear fraud (even if it actually wasn’t) if it happened in a non-imperial state is not subject to the same analysis when it happens here. For some reason, we are debarred, and debar ourselves, from even considering this possibility in relation to western countries, even when it looks more than plausible. And this censorship seems to be based simply on geography and race.

Signs that societally would be read as clear evidence of a rigged vote in Syria, Russia, Venezuela or Iran, are not seen as such when they happen here in the ‘civilised’ western world.

Laura Kuenssberg’s idiotic announcement of casual criminality in the electoral process might have been just a stupid lie, hers or someone else’s. But even if it was it betrays a disturbing lack of respect for boundaries and legalities behind the scenes. And if it wasn’t a lie then – what?

As I mentioned once already – if people can and do illegally access ballot papers prior to the close of polling and commencement of the count, how far does this access go? Who actually counted those postal votes? Where did they do it? What happened to the ballot papers after having been illegally viewed and counted? Do we just assume they eventually found their way to a ballot box as they should?

We all saw the piles of ballot papers left uncounted during the Democratic primaries. We know those discarded votes could have made the difference between a Sanders victory or defeat. We all heard the stories of registered Democrats denied the chance to even vote by ‘bureaucratic oversights’. And we know the DNC basically rigged the primaries for Hillary Clinton.

We also know the 2000 presidential election was – at best – concluded dubiously when the count in Florida seems to have been interfered with.

Again, if we’d seen something similar unfold in Russia, the unavoidable conclusion would have been electoral fraud.

Despite all this though, and due to our own innate pro-western bias, we still refuse to acknowledge the bare possibility of electoral corruption.

This is not a natural limitation on debate, imposed by reason and analysis. It’s a form of censorship or self-censorship rooted in, what? A lifetime of subliminal propaganda about the West’s free and fair elections? An atavistic colonialism that still operates and makes us convinced beyond reason that wholesale corruption of that magnitude is simply impossible in the Mother of Democracy?

Consider the facts…

Labour’s socialist policies are known to be popular. Poverty has increased so much under the Tories that 22% of the country now lives below the poverty line, including 4 million children. 200,000 people have died as a result of austerity-driven cuts, foodbank use is increasing by tens of thousands year on year. The mortality rate is going up and up. And Boris Johnson was caught in a direct, proven lie about “protecting” the NHS.

And after all this, Labour heartlands – red since World War 2, through Thatcher and Foot and every anti-Labour hate campaign the media could muster – all voted Conservative?

Does that seem likely?

It's ironic that Boris Johnson is now going after the main source of the BBC's funding.

What is Bellingcat Going to Say Now?

Out of curiosity I entered "James Le Mesurier" as a search term on the Bellingcat website. "No results found."

I went to Bellingcat this morning because I wanted to see what sort of spookery, legerdemain and obfuscation would be on display to rebut the latest WikiLeaks documents release undermining the OPCW report which was used to conclude that the Syrian government was to blame for a chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018.

The latest WikiLeaks document release along with reporting by the Daily Mail's Peter Hitchens establishes that the investigators of the OPCW's Douma Fact Finding Mission (FFM) did not believe the official version of events. From the pristine condition of the pressurized metal canister supposedly dropped from great height which smashed through a reinforced concrete roof to the merely trace elements of normal chemicals -- not to mention the inconsistency of chlorine poisoning with victims foaming at the mouth -- the FFM investigators repeatedly voiced objections and raised concerns, which were then summarily suppressed by OPCW leadership.

In addition to WikiLeaks' OPCW document release on Saturday, Tareq Haddad, the Newsweek reporter who resigned after his story of the OPCW scandal was spiked, published his account, "Lies, Newsweek and Control of the Media Narrative: a First-Hand Account." Editors at Newsweek explained to Haddad that there was nothing to the OPCW scandal because Belingcat said so.

According to Caitlin Johnstone,

Newsweek’s foreign affairs editor Dimi Reider (who Haddad notes has Council on Foreign Relations ties) shot down Haddad’s pitch for a story about the OPCW scandal last month by falsely claiming that Bellingcat had “published a thorough refutation” of the story Haddad wanted to report on. In fact, as I documented at the time, Bellingcat had published an unbelievably pathetic spin job in which it tried to paint the whole OPCW scandal as a big misunderstanding.

Bellingcat argued that the concerns voiced in the leaked email published by WikiLeaks last month about the developing Interim Report in July 2018 had been fully addressed by the time the Final Report was published in March 2019, citing as evidence the fact that some slight adjustments had been made in the wording, like changing “likely” to “possible” and changing “reactive chlorine containing chemical” to “chemical containing reactive chlorine.” In focusing on this ridiculous, pedantic nonsense, Bellingcat tries to weave the narrative that because the whistleblower’s concerns were addressed with this pedantry, there was therefore no OPCW coverup. Never mind the fact that the multiple OPCW whistleblowers were still plainly so incensed by the organisation’s publishing that they felt the need to leak internal documents. Never mind that Bellingcat made no attempt whatsoever to address the aforementioned actual grievances by the OPCW whistleblowers like the low levels of chlorinated organic chemicals on the scene, the inconsistencies in symptoms and testimony with chlorine poisoning, or the Ian Henderson report. 

But that’s what happens when mass media outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian publish swooning puff piece after swooning puff piece about Bellingcat; they grant a US government-funded narrative management firm so much unearned legitimacy that even a transparently bogus argument like the one they made about the OPCW scandal gets passed around newsrooms by credulous editors assuring each other that it’s a “thorough refutation” of facts and reality. Mass media outlets help puff up Bellingcat’s legitimacy, and in turn Bellingcat rewards them with an excuse to not have to ever challenge establishment narratives. 

Reider also argued that Haddad’s report on the OPCW couldn’t be published because “not a single respected media outlet – many of whom boast far greater regional expertise, resources on the ground and in newsroom than Newsweek does – have taken the leak remotely seriously.”

That’s a great self-reinforcing system, isn’t it? MSM outlets validate US government-funded narrative managers like Bellingcat so they can tell them with authority why an unauthorised story shouldn’t be published, and each outlet sees the absence of other outlets reporting on it as evidence that it shouldn’t be reported on. And we wonder why no one’s reporting on the OPCW scandal. 

Given that Bellingcat specializes in open-source investigations of suspicious events, the fact that "James Le Mesurier," the co-founder of White Helmets who purportedly killed himself in Istanbul last month by jumping out of his apartment, cannot be found on its website is itself highly suspicious.

Jonathan Cook on the 2019 UK General Election Results

A must-read is Jonathan Cook's blog post from Friday, "Corbyn’s defeat has slain the left’s last illusion." I'd say it is definitive.

Shrunken moral horizons
The second illusion was held by the left. We clung to a dream, like a life-raft, that we still had a public space; that, however awful our electoral system was, however biased the red-tops were, we lived in a democracy where real, meaningful change was still possible; that the system wasn’t rigged to stop someone like Jeremy Corbyn from ever reaching power.

That illusion rested on a lot of false assumptions. That the BBC was still the institution of our youth, that it would play reasonably fair when it came to election time, giving Corbyn a level playing field with Johnson for the final few weeks of the campaign. That social media – despite the relentless efforts of these new media corporations to skew their algorithms to trap us in our own little echo chambers – would act as a counterweight to the traditional media.

But most importantly, we turned a blind eye to the social changes that 40 years of an unchallenged corporate-sponsored Thatcherism had wreaked on our imaginations, on our ideological lives, on our capacity for compassion.

As public institutions were broken apart and sold off, the public realm shrank dramatically, as did our moral horizons. We stopped caring about a society that Margaret Thatcher had told us didn’t exist anyway.

Large sections of the older generations profited from the sell-off of the public realm, and policies that flagrantly disregarded the planet’s future. They were persuaded that this model of short-term profit, of slash-and-burn economics from which they had personally benefited, was not only sustainable but that it was the only possible, the only good model.

The younger generations have never known any other reality. The profit motive, instant gratification, consumer indulgence are the only yardsticks they have ever been offered to measure value. A growing number have started to understand this is a sick ideology, that we live in an insane, deeply corrupted society, but they struggle to imagine another world, one they have no experience of.

How can they contemplate what the working class achieved decades ago – how a much poorer society created medical care for all, an NHS that our current one is a pale shadow of – when that history, that story of struggle is rarely told, and when it is it is told only through the distorting prism of the billionaire-owned media?

A rigged political system
We on the left didn’t lose this election. We lost our last illusions. The system is rigged – as it always has been – to benefit those in power. It will never willingly allow a real socialist, or any politician deeply committed to the health of society and the planet, to take power away from the corporate class. That, after all, is the very definition of power. That is what the corporate media is there to uphold.

This is not about being a bad loser, or a case of sour grapes.

In the extraordinary circumstances that Corbyn had overcome all these institutional obstacles, all the smears, and won last night, I was planning to write a different post today – and it would not have been celebratory. It would not have gloated, as Johnson’s supporters and Corbyn’s opponents in the Conservative party, large sections of the Labour parliamentary party, and the rightwing and liberal media are doing now.

No, I’d have been warning that the real battle for power was only just beginning. That however bad the past four years had been, we had seen nothing yet. That those generals who threatened a mutiny as soon as Corbyn was elected Labour leader were still there in the shadows. That the media would not give up on their disinformation, they would intensify it. That the security services that have been trying to portray Corbyn as a Russian spy would move from insinuation into more explicit action.

Future on our side
Nonetheless, we have the future on our side, dark as it may be. The planet isn’t going to heal itself with Johnson, Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro in charge. It’s going to get a lot sicker, a lot quicker. Our economy isn’t going to become more productive, or more stable, after Brexit. Britain’s economic fate is going to be tied even more tightly to the United States’, as resources run out and environmental and climate catastrophes (storms, rising seas levels, flooding, droughts, crop failures, energy shortages) mount. The contradictions between endless growth and a planet with finite resources will become even starker, the crashes of 2008 more familiar.

The corporate party Johnson’s victory has unleashed is going to lead, sooner or later, to a truly terrifying hangover.

The likelihood is that the Blairites will exploit this defeat to drag Labour back to being a party of neoliberal capital. We will once again be offered a “choice” between the blue and the red Tory parties. If they succeed, Labour’s mass membership will desert the party, and it will become once again an irrelevance, a hollow shell of a workers’ party, as empty ideologically and spiritually as it was until Corbyn sought to reinvent it.

It may be a good thing if this coup happens quickly rather than being dragged out over years, keeping us trapped longer in the illusion that we can fix the system using the tools the corporate class offers us.

We must head to the streets – as we have done before with Occupy, with Extinction Rebellion, with the schools strikes – to reclaim the public space, to reinvent and rediscover it. Society didn’t cease to exist. It wasn’t snuffed out by Thatcher. We just forgot what it looked like, that we are human, not machines. We forgot that we are all part of society, that we are precisely what it is.

Now is the time to put away childish things, and take the future back into our hands.

Zombie Reborn

I must say it came as a shock when the results of the exit polls were released yesterday showing a landslide victory for Boris Johnson's Tories. During the day at work I was following #YouthQuake on Twitter and became seduced by the idea that Labour could triumph thanks to a Hong Kongesque student surge at the voting booth; that, and polls leading up to election day showed a diminishing lead for Boris Johnson, not to mention even Reuters was reporting that the Conservative Party would likely fail to achieve a majority.

But a Tory landslide it was. The Conservative Party won 364 seats, or a majority of 38 seats, an outcome not seen since Margaret Thatcher's salad days. Labour won 203, down 59 seats from 2017, a performance so poor it has also not been seen since the salad days of Margaret Thatcher.

On the bright side, the Scottish National Party picked up 13 seats in Scotland, and another independence referendum will now be front and center.

For the takeaways on this election, consult Craig Murray's "Resolution." Both Murray and Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism (see "Tories Rout Labour; Corbyn to Depart; SNP Also Wins Big, Setting Up Long-Term Dissolution Struggle") believe Johnson will be unable to deliver his campaign slogan "Get Brexit Done." Remember, the Brexit deal that Johnson promises to place before parliament in the next week is just a transition agreement. The real trade deal with the European Union has yet to be bargained. The deadline for that agreement is December of 2020. Most likely Johnson will have to seek an extension before he can finalize that deal.

The main takeaway for those of us in the United States who are hopeful that Bernie Sanders has a chance to wrest the Democratic Party from its corporate overlords is think again.

The non-stop blanket vilification in the mainstream media of Jeremy Corbyn will be applied to Bernie Sanders if he appears likely to upset the Democratic establishment heading into Super Tuesday.

Johnson's landslide (though the Tory vote total of 13.9 million was largely the same as two years ago, 13.6 million) has to be labeled the second great electoral achievement of zombie peak neoliberalism, right up there with Emmanuel Macron's capture of the French presidency in 2017.

The zombie is reborn!

Afghanistan War Papers Prove the U.S. is a Nation Lost to Militarism

As Britain votes today, let's contemplate for a moment the meaning of the "confidential trove of government documents" released by the Washington Post on Monday. The documents "include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials." The interviews were conducted by the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

The conclusion to be drawn? The war in Afghanistan is a total failure that has been covered up for close to two decades.

My first reaction when a coworker told me about WaPo's scoop was what's new. SIGAR has been saying as much for years. The unsigned editorial published by The New York Times the other day pretty much says it all -- "Lots of Lessons From Afghanistan; None Learned."

America’s failure in Afghanistan may come as a surprise to some Americans. But the Americans who should not be at all surprised are the members of Congress who voted to launch the war, repeatedly voted to continue funding it and have been absent without leave in their duty to oversee its progress.

“This is truly shocking. Years and years of half truths and outright falsehoods,” said Josh Hawley, a senator from Missouri, in a tweet about the documents. Mr. Hawley is a member of the Armed Services Committee.

“It is deeply troubling to read a report of interviews with U.S. government officials that appear to contradict the many assurances we have heard at committee hearings that the continuing war in Afghanistan has a coherent strategy and an end in sight,” Kirsten Gillibrand, a senator from New York, wrote in a letter to the head of the Armed Services Committee, of which she is a member.

It is both truly shocking and deeply troubling that members of Congress, who oversee the military and are privy to classified assessments like those published by The Post, were surprised by the revelations in the documents, which took three years and two federal lawsuits to pry loose for public consumption.

I doubt members of Congress were surprised. Afghanistan might be a failure as a military mission or as an exercise in nation building, but as an experiment in the creation of a culture of overt militarism here at home it is a whopping success. Watch an NFL game on any given Sunday and all you will witness in the way of a national culture is the military. Members of the armed services are extolled as exemplary citizens, really the only true citizens, while the rest of us are merely a faceless rabble of mindless, soulless consumers.

In order for this celebration of the military to occur there must be an overseas proving ground where our men and women in uniform go to prove their innocence and goodness and protect us from the evil-doers. That's Afghanistan, and that's our national myth in the present tense.

In a prior age the WaPo report might have spurred congressional action; now, even with a Democratic controlled House of Representatives, it means almost nothing.

Craig Murray Predicts: No Tory Majority

Stephen Castle of The New York Times pens an acidic anti-Corbyn election eve report, "Jeremy Corbyn, U.K. Labour Leader, Races to Close Election Gap," rehashing all the old attacks on the Labour leader as too left to govern, anti-Semitic, unpopular, while barely uttering a peep about the mainstay of this UK general election to date, the complete free-falling fraudulence of Boris Johnson.

Craig Murray argues convincingly this morning in "The Largest Vote Swings in British General Election History Censored Out By the BBC and Mainstream Media" that the media have over-reported Labour voters defecting to the Conservative Party while under-reporting a much larger swing of Tory voters to the Liberal Democratic Party.

Murray thinks the Tories will fail to achieve a majority:

Remember this. The Tory vote has not increased. It is the same level as 2017. But the media has vastly over-represented, in vox pops and in debate and panel audiences, those switching from Labour to Tory.

More importantly, the YouGov constituency poll of over 100,000 interviews was conducted from 3 to 10 December. The momentum was already against the Tories, and the large majority of its responses were from before the Boris Johnson phone snatching interview and NHS child on the floor scandal, which I suspect has put off more prospective Tory voters. So it was a snapshot of voting intent mostly several days ago, not today, let alone tomorrow when we vote. Remember also the evidence of 2017 is that after a time the highly controlled, slogan-led campaign wears on voters. People who were quite impressed the first time they saw Boris Johnson say “Get Brexit Done” are less impressed when they have seen him say that and nothing else for four weeks. They are inclined to conclude he is an empty slogan parrot, as they did with Theresa May and “strong and stable.”

The final reason to believe that the Tory lead will narrow from the YouGov constituency model poll is that they themselves reported this. Their poll was taken over seven days; at that start of that period it was showing an 11 point lead to the Tories, by the last day it was showing an eight point lead. I see every reason to expect that momentum to continue. Finally, remember that YouGove are an extremely Tory friendly pollster.

Most importantly it shows the number of ultra-marginal constituencies to be substantially more than the predicted Tory overall majority, and all of them susceptible to tactical voting. Scotland and Wales are particularly important. Ultra marginals in Scotland and Wales alone can wipe out the projected majority if the go the right way. There are no Tory/Labour marginals in Scotland, only Tory/SNP marginals and I strongly urge everybody in Scotland who wants to stop Johnson to vote SNP.

I will post some thoughts on key seats in England and Wales in which to vote tactically later. But I already feel confident Johnson will not get his majority.

Let's imagine a situation where, thanks to an enormous government/media monopoly PSYOP, the appalling Johnson manages to equal May's 2017 performance. Will the DUP of Northern Ireland provide a bailout to the Tories like it did last time? Though party leader Arlene Foster has renounced Johnson, bribery of the DUP cannot be ruled out.

But there's evidence that the DUP is in trouble in Belfast. They might not have enough MPs after tomorrow to provide another bailout to the Tories.

So even assuming the polls are accurate, it is not looking good for Boris Johnson.

Then factor in what are almost certain to be Tory losses in Scotland and Wales, and a picture begins to form of a non-Tory government.

The big question though is how well are the Liberal Democrats going to perform. The Liberal Democratic Party is pro-austerity, pro-war and anti-Corbyn. If the party is as potent a force in this election as Murray has outlined then the formation of a coalition government by Labour is going to be difficult.

On the other hand, maybe a huge wave of young voters, like in Hong Kong recently, will appear tomorrow and put Labour over the top.

In any event, I think Murray is right. I think the Tories won't get their majority. And that is a huge victory for working people against government propaganda and another serious blow to the Washington Consensus.

Zelensky Appears to be another Fraud

It's worthwhile to read Clara Weiss's "Paris summit on Ukraine overshadowed by inter-imperialist conflicts" after reading Andrew Higgins of The New York Times "In First Meeting With Putin, Zelensky Plays to a Draw Despite a Bad Hand" and Colonel Cassad. Higgins breathes a sigh of relief that Ukrainian president Zelensky did not end the war with Russia. The ceasefire will be extended and a promise of a prisoner exchange reaffirmed, but on the main features of Minsk II, the special status of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and a new "federalized" Ukrainian constitution, there was no movement.

Higgins applauds Zelensky's intransigence, vaguely referring to spine-stiffening protests in Kiev:

Worried that Mr. Zelensky might succumb to Mr. Putin’s powers of persuasion, as Mr. Trump did in Helsinki in July last year, three opposition groups in Ukraine issued a manifesto ahead of the Paris meeting drawing six “red lines” that should not be crossed. They demanded that Mr. Zelensky make no concessions to Mr. Putin on Ukraine’s “Euro-Atlantic” foreign policy, the status of eastern regions and the timing of elections in territory occupied by Russian-backed separatists.

Early Tuesday morning, protesters gathered near Mr. Zelensky’s office in the center of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, voicing relief that the Paris meeting had not ended in the “capitulation” they had feared.

Here's how Weiss describes the "opposition":

Zelensky had been put under enormous domestic pressure from the US-backed far-right and substantial sections of the oligarchy seeking to prevent him from making any concessions to Russia. On Saturday and Sunday, thousands of supporters of the far-right in Ukraine gathered in Kiev to demonstrate against a rapprochement with Russia. The parties supporting the protests including the anti-Semitic neo-Nazi party Svoboda, which played an important role in the 2014 coup. Ex-President Petro Poroshenko addressed the far-right rally on Sunday.

Weiss assesses the Paris summit on Ukraine in terms of rising tensions within NATO:

The summit had been aggressively pushed for by the French president Emmanuel Macron, who has met with Zelensky several times, both before and after the latter’s election as president. Under conditions of growing transatlantic tensions, Macron has been calling for NATO and the EU to “reconsider our position towards Russia.” In a recent interview with the Economist, Macron called NATO “brain-dead.” His criticisms of NATO and the US were sharply rebutted by US president Trump at the NATO summit just days before the Ukraine summit on Monday.

Berlin too has rejected Macron’s dismissal of NATO. Despite growing tensions with the US, including over the Russian-German pipeline Nord Stream 2, Germany has insisted on the need to maintain and strengthen NATO. Recent weeks have also seen a worsening of relations between Berlin and Moscow, with Germany expelling two Russian diplomats, accusing them of complicity in the murder of two Chechen separatist leaders. Ahead of the Ukraine summit, the German defense minister Heiko Maaß stressed that Russia had to give in to the demands posed by Ukraine, and that the Kremlin was to blame for the crisis in the country. At the summit, Merkel and Putin reportedly met one-on-one to discuss the recent diplomatic crisis.

The escalation of warfare within the US ruling class and the intensification of the conflicts between the imperialist powers occur amid the unraveling of the strategy that US imperialism has pursued in the region since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991: aiming to secure its world hegemony through control of the Eurasian landmass, the US has aggressively worked to encircle Russia, above all by extending NATO to its borders and through the enlargement of the EU. The East European EU member states, above all Poland and the Baltics, have been transformed into critical props of US militarism in the region.

Ukraine has historically been central to that strategy. The US has pumped massive resources into the operation of turning Ukraine into a reliable prop of NATO and the US against Russia. In 2004, sections of the Ukrainian oligarchy and upper middle class with funding and support of the CIA toppled a pro-Russian government in the so called “Orange Revolution.” Then, in 2013-2014, the US and the EU supported the so-called Maidan movement which culminated in a fascist-led coup and the establishment of the Poroshenko regime.

Between 1991 and 2014, the US, according to the former US assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, pumped some $5 billion into Ukraine’s “civil society.” Since 2014, the US has spent another $5 billion on Ukraine, according to congressional testimony in the impeachment hearings. The US military has also taken an active part in training and arming the Ukrainian army and paramilitary fascist organizations like the Azov battalion. (See also: Who decided the US should fight a “hot war” with Russia? )

This strategy, however, has failed to achieve its main goals. Ukraine remains mired in a civil war and the Putin regime has remained in place and continues to be a thorn in the eye of US foreign policy. Analysts widely agree that it is impossible to resolve the military stalemate in East Ukraine without turning what is now a proxy war into a direct war with Russia.

Polls among the East Ukrainian population have repeatedly indicated overwhelming hostility to an accession of the country to the EU and NATO, making it all but inconceivable that these territories be integrated without massive political and military conflicts in the country. Zelensky himself was voted into office in April largely on the basis of promises to end the widely hated war, and discontinue the provocative anti-Russia policies of his predecessor Poroshenko.

Similarly, US efforts to prop up the right-wing liberal opposition in Russia and figures like Alexei Navalny and undermine the Putin regime through economic warfare in the form of sanctions have yielded only limited results.

The deadlock of US foreign policy in the region was spelled out in a recent piece in Foreign Affairs, the publication of the US Council of Foreign Relations, which advises US imperialism on its strategy. The journal noted, “Over the past quarter century, nearly all major efforts at establishing a durable post-Cold War order on the Eurasian continent have foundered on the shoals of Ukraine. For it is in Ukraine that the disconnect between triumphalist end-of-history delusions and the ongoing realities of great-power competition can be seen in its starkest form.”

The only solution offered by the advisors of US imperialism was to double down on a strategy that has proven both disastrous and dangerous, and escalate the war preparations against Russia and US involvement in the region. The piece concluded: “Washington’s best option at this point is to strengthen its bilateral political and security ties with Ukraine while working closely with its European allies to ensure Ukraine’s ability to protect its sovereignty… Above all else, Washington must protect the impeachment process from Russian interference and get past the illusion that it can promote a stable political order either at home or abroad without successfully navigating the shoals of Ukraine.”

Cassad thinks the Paris summit achieved very little:

As expected, the big breakthroughs of the summit, “Norman four” in Paris to no avail. The main message is that the parties agreed to negotiate further. The reasons for such insignificant results are quite obvious: the main player [United States] not involved in these negotiations, at least on the face of things. In fact, the main achievement of the summit was an agreement that in four months it will be repeated, which automatically means that the war is extended for another four months. That means it will be a year since the election of Zelensky under the promise to bring peace. As we can see, a year will have passed, and peace will not have come. People will always be foolish victims of deception.

For Labour to Win it Must Overcome a Massive Government PSYOP

Craig Murray's post this morning ("The Invisible Tories") addresses the issue of the Tories expansive lead in the polls (14 points in the latest) while the direct evidence of the senses is to the contrary:

I live in a marginal constituency, where the excellent Joanna Cherry of the SNP has a lead of just over 1,000 over the Tories. If the most recent opinion polls are correct, the parties’ standings at this moment are similar to the result last time, the momentum is with the Tories and this should be a key Tory target. Yet I have not received one single Tory leaflet (and I live on one of the main residential streets) nor have I seen one single Tory campaigner, including when I have been out delivering leaflets for Joanna Cherry myself. Nor have I seen one single Tory poster in a house.

The explanation closest at hand is that the UK electorate is suffering through a massive PSYOP campaign perpetrated by its own government and corporate media. According to the Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone:

Dozens of misleading hit pieces are circulating in the press that treat PSYOP specialists and regime-change lobby groups funded to the hilt by Washington, NATO, and the weapons industry as trustworthy and impartial.

British journalist Matt Kennard has documented at least 34 major media stories that rely on officials from the UK military and intelligence agencies in order to depict Corbyn as a threat to national security.

Conservative Party prime minister Boris Johnson has run an atrocious campaign. His solution to the problem of what to do about Northern Ireland in the context of Brexit has been revealed to be a lie; his government has been exposed conducting talks with the United States on the privatization of Britain's National Health Service. Then there is the issue of Johnson's cowardly avoidance of an interview with the BBC's Andrew Neil.

In any sane world polls would be registering a double-digit Tory deficit. But instead, no effort is being spared, as was the case with Hillary Clinton in 2016, to gussy up an appallingly bad candidate and trundle his political corpse across the finish line.

A stealth victory for Labour could nonetheless materialize, and it could happen the same way it happened recently in Hong Kong: a massive youth vote turnout.

Ceylan Yeginsu reports in "Young Voters Helped Upend Last U.K. Election. Can It Happen Again?" that

The intergenerational gap in support between the two main parties was so wide in the 2017 election that YouGov declared that age had replaced class as the dividing line in British politics. Over 60 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 backed the Labour Party in 2017, while 69 percent of voters over the age of 70 backed the Conservative Party.

That divide was driven by opposition both to Brexit and to the government’s decade-long austerity policy. One of the big questions in this election is whether young voters, who tend to be underrepresented in opinion polls, could spring a surprise.

More than 1.5 million people under the age of 34 registered to vote between Oct. 22 and Nov. 19, compared with 1.2 million in the same time frame in 2017, government figures show. An additional 452,000 people under the age of 34 applied to vote on the last day of registration on Nov. 26.

Analysts caution that while the numbers hint at the possibility of an explosive turnout, they could be overstating the potential impact. That’s because students are allowed to register twice, in their hometowns and in their university towns, but must choose a single place to vote.

Despite the surge in youth registration, the percentage of registered young voters, at around two-thirds, remains low compared with the older population. Young people also make up a big percentage of nonvoters: Only between 40 and 50 percent of the population between the ages of 18 and their mid-20s voted in the 2015 and 2017 elections, compared with about 80 percent of voters in their 70s.

[snip] 

“Labour is a fantastic party for the youth, but Jeremy Corbyn is a terrible leader and no one can imagine him as prime minister,” she said. “And then we have the Lib Dems who say they will cancel Brexit, but they aren’t going to get a majority, so people are in a pickle and are just choosing to vote tactically instead of idealistically.”

Even though Mr. Corbyn has lost popularity since the last election, following accusations of anti-Semitism and his refusal to take a personal stance on Brexit, youth support for his party appears to be gathering momentum once again.

“The Labour Party policies may appear radical to some,” Dr. Sloam said. “But with the exception of their ambiguous policy on Brexit, they are extremely popular and their campaign seems to be galvanizing young voters.”

This age gap also helps explain why the Tories have such a large lead in the polls. Old people are more likely to answer their phones than young people.

If Corbyn were to win it would be some of the most compelling evidence to date that the clock had run out on neoliberalism; for to win, Corbyn will have to overcome the entire corporate media and government intelligence establishment. It will mean that voters are sophisticated and motivated enough to look past the blanket of propaganda to vote their true interests.

Of course, winning a popular election does not guarantee an effective government. Dirty tricks and legislative snares abound. Nonetheless, there is really no way forward at this point except to scrap the neoliberal Washington Consensus.

Mudede on the Repo Market Crisis

I'm lucky in that the local alternative weekly features the writings of a topnotch intellectual, Charles Mudede. Mudede rails regularly on all the right things, homelessness, neoliberalism, etc.

Yesterday he took on the repo market in a post titled "Government Cuts $5.5 Billion from Food Stamps Over Five Years, but Gives Banks $300 Billion in Only Three Months":

The Federal Reserve is quietly pumping big money into the banking system by way of the market for repurchase agreements (the repo market). In September, this sector—which connects institutions with cash to institutions in need of quick cash (short term loans)—went suddenly dry, and interest rates on short term debts spiked from around 2 percent to 10 percent. To normalize interest rates, the Fed began pumping cash into market by purchasing stagnant paper (treasury bills and other securities). Since then, a staggering $300 billion (the feds pumped another $70 billion into the repo markets this month), has been spent to keep the repo market going.

Jerome Powell, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, claimed that this massive operation was not quantitative easing (QE)—the $4 trillion Fed program that re-inflated the insolvent stock market after the crash of 2008—because the government is now only purchasing short term debts. QE was about long term debts. But this distinction is meaningless for one simple reason: the repo operation is, like QE, expanding the Fed's balance sheet. Meaning, the cost of saving this financial market is, once again, being transferred to the public.

[snip] 

But why was there turbulence in the repo market in the first place? Why this spectacular credit crunch? According to conventional economic measuring instruments, the GDP is still growing. The unemployment rate is reaching lows that have not been seen in many decades. And the stock market is breaking records. Where did the cash or buyers go to all of a sudden? Jerome Powell has offered nothing in the way of an explanation. Some do not want an explanation—they just want more government cheese. Lots of mainstream economists and columnists have, predictably, blamed capital requirements imposed on banks after the crash of 2008. They claim banks have the cash but they can't use it because regulators want them to have a stash in case of an emergency. Others say it was the taxes that corporations had to pay. It sucked all of the money out of the market. [I've heard -- on the Keiser Report -- that the repo market crisis tracks back to trouble at Chase.]

That is where things stand, USA. You had a massive economic crash in 2008. Millions lost homes and jobs. The feds spent $29 trillion to bail out the global financial sector (read this PDF from Bard's Levy Economics Institute), and all you can get from economists and columnists in mainstream business papers is more blather about how the government is the problem. There is, as you can see, no shame in the game.

But the answer can be found in Hyman Minsky's hypothesis for financial instability (PDF). Markets do not naturally seek a state of stability (or an equilibrium point of sellers and buyers). Indeed, stability itself leads, according to Minsky, to greater instability. When things are volatile, speculators (not to be confused with investors—or entrepreneurs) take fewer risks. When things appear to be stable, then caution is thrown to the hurricane. There is no mystery in the repo crisis if you are familiar with Minsky's writings.

But guess what? The government has changed the rules for food stamps in such way that it can deprive a large section of the poor of basic assistance and save tax payers a grand total of $5.5 billion over five years. I have no words that can adequately express the scale of this kind of obscenity: $300 billion given to banks; $5.5 billion taken from the neediest members of our society.

Max Keiser sees the global neoliberal Washington Consensus headed towards neofeudalism. The bankers will own literally everything and everything will be monetized.

Let's Hope This Strike Heralds the Demise of Macron

Based on Adam Nossiter's description (see "French Strikes Are a Fresh Test for Macron") one would think that France has devised the ideal pension system:

The official retirement age is 62, but many retire before. Pensions as a percentage of working-age salaries are among the world’s highest, hovering at around 70 percent, and often even higher for state workers. Retirements tend to be long in France, and public leisure facilities — concerts, museums, theaters — are often full of vigorous retirees with lots of time on their hands.

The results of this complex system of 42 different pension plans are remarkable: France has among the world’s lowest old-age poverty rates, and average incomes of those over 65 are slightly higher than incomes under that age, a global rarity.

But as we know, vigorous, financially secure retired working people with time on their hands is not acceptable according to the bankrupt neoliberal consensus. So French president and neoliberal champion Emmanuel Macron, presently hailed in the mainstream media as the tribune of Europe, and who I have argued is the last great electoral achievement of neoliberalism, has vowed to overhaul the French pension system.

Reuters says that:

Macron wants to set up a single points-based pension system in which each day worked earns points for a worker’s future pension benefits.

That would mark a big break from the existing set-up with 42 different sector-specific pension schemes, each with different levels of contributions and benefits. Rail workers, mariners and Paris Opera House ballet dancers can retire up to a decade earlier than the average worker.

Currently pension benefits are based on a worker’s 25 highest earning years in the private sector and the last six months in the public sector.

Today there is what amounts to a general strike in France, with the transportation workers leading the way. Macron's disapproval rating, at 70 percent for much of last year because of his violent suppression of the Yellow Vest movement, has started to tick down into the 60s. That should reverse with the pension overhaul strike.

The next French presidential election is 2022, which is farther away than the mind's eye can see. My guess is that Macron will be thoroughly blown out by then.

Close at hand is next week's election in the UK. The negativity and obscurantism of that campaign provides a glimpse of future campaigns to come. We'll see what it delivers. Impasse appears to be on the horizon with a splintered parliament making it difficult to form a government, like in Spain and Israel.

I'm still hopeful that Tory losses in Scotland to the SNP combined with an under-the-radar better-than-expected showing by Labour will pave the way for a coalition government.

The Failure of Kamala Harris

Now is the time for a little schadenfreude. Kamala Harris, the first anointed corporate Dem of the 2020 presidential presidential campaign, has dropped out. Astead Herndon, Shane Goldmacher and Jonathan Martin have the main write-up in The New York Times, "Kamala Harris Says She’s Still ‘in This Fight,’ but Out of the 2020 Race."

Ostensibly, Harris threw in the sponge because she couldn't raise the money. There's definitely truth to that. On the other hand, she could have have pared down and rebooted her campaign, continuing on as a candidate while a super PAC did her ad buys. According to Herndon et al.,

Ms. Harris’s online fund-raising slowed in recent months, and large donors increasingly turned toward other candidates. In the third quarter of the year, she spent more than $1.41 for every dollar she raised, burning through millions. She stopped buying ads, both online and on television, slashed her staff in New Hampshire and retrenched to Iowa, where she spent the Thanksgiving holiday with her family.

In the days leading up to her withdrawal, as her campaign grew increasingly desperate, she surprised one donor who is not a major Democratic bundler by telephoning him to see if he could reach out to his associates who had yet to give. Another donor recommended to her that she leave the race. 

Even as she struggled, Ms. Harris had assembled a coveted list of more than 130 bundlers who had raised at least $25,000 for her campaign, more than half of whom were from her home state, California, one of the deepest wells of Democratic cash. Ms. Harris canceled a scheduled fund-raiser with some of her top bundlers in New York on Tuesday just hours before the event. On Wednesday, she had been scheduled to attend an event in Los Angeles at the home of Sean Parker, the billionaire tech entrepreneur.

A pair of California-based Democratic strategists, Dan Newman and Brian Brokaw, had just secured the money and the implicit signoff from Ms. Harris’s campaign to begin a “super PAC” in support of her candidacy. The group, named People Standing Strong, was to begin a million-dollar ad buy in Iowa on Wednesday.

The real reason Harris quit is that she was worried about what a poor showing in her home state on Super Tuesday would mean for her reelection as a senator in 2022. Ryan Grim tweeted

Some context: Harris only had a few days to get out before her name would appear on the California ballot, which gets mailed to voters in early February. Getting crushed in California would have been devastating, and set her up for a challenge in 2022 for her reelection.

The big picture is that Kamala Harris fronted the huge "block Bernie" fake narrative peddled by the media. According to this storyline, Bernie was old news this go-round. Voters were abandoning him in favor of bright and shiny new candidates, candidates like Kamala Harris, who shared some of Bernie's policy perspectives but who were "fresh."

When Harris stumbled badly in early appearances in Iowa -- staff having to coach her from the wings while she struggled on stage -- Joe Biden decided to enter the race, and there went the whole "voters yearning for a fresh face" narrative.

The spectacular failure of Harris' campaign is mulled this morning by the media elite. David Leonhardt took the opportunity to boom Buttigieg. None were more honest than Perry Bacon of FiveThirtyEight:

Here’s a final thought on Harris: I wonder if she and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke were both overhyped as candidates by the press, myself especially in the case of Harris. (I wrote a piece about her presidential prospects in June 2018.) As Joel Wertheimer, who served as associate staff secretary to Obama, wrote, “The story of Kamala Harris is one sports fans are familiar with: The scouts just got it wrong. That’s really it.”

Harris had been touted as the “female Obama” for years. A lot of the reporters and political staffers, including me, who now have a big role in America’s political conversation came of age professionally during Obama’s rise. We were (and probably still are) inclined to look for the next Obama. (I think looking for the next Obama also resulted in Sen. Marco Rubio being overhyped in the 2016 cycle, for example.)

But Harris is not Obama, and 2019 is not 2007. The rise of Trump and his brand of identity politics have probably made Democrats more wary of a female or minority presidential candidate. Obama is the defining figure of the party — multiple candidates, such as Biden and Buttigieg, are casting themselves as his logical heir, even if they aren’t black. And Harris, unlike Obama, was not the leading alternative to an establishment-backed candidate (Hillary Clinton) who had been wrong on the central issue of the day (the Iraq War). She was running in a primary with lots of viable candidates where one of the big questions is exactly what the primary is about (electability, restoring stability or big structural change).

Perhaps Harris, had the campaign unfolded a little differently, could have held onto the polling gains she made in the wake of the first debate. It’s possible that she got a bit unlucky and simply underperformed in a few crucial moments. But it’s also possible that pundits like me overestimated her chances from the start.

Anyone paying attention should have known that Obama was no longer popular in 2016. That's why Trump won. To miss the obvious means that mainstream political pundits get their talking points from some sort of central command. Whatever or wherever that corporate behemoth hive mind is.

Still, what I want to know is did Kamala Harris really turn out 20,000 people to her campaign kickoff in Oakland or was that number fictitious; and if it was real, how did she do it.

Tax the Rich

Something is shifting in the electorate. Can you feel it? It's the idea that the super-rich need to be brought to heel. According to an online survey commissioned by The New York Times and conducted by SurveyMonkey (see "Warren Wealth Tax Has Wide Support, Except Among One Group" by Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley):

The wealth tax has lost a few points of support since the last time The Times asked about the issue, in July. But it remains broadly popular, even more so than it was in February. Three-quarters of Democrats and more than half of Republicans say they approve of the idea of a 2 percent tax on wealth above $50 million.

Support for a wealth tax cuts across many of the demographic dividing lines in American politics. Men and women like it. So do the young and the old. The proposal receives majority support among every major racial, educational and income group.

College-educated Republican men, though, disapprove of it by a 15-point margin — though a vast majority of Republican men with college degrees would have a net worth below the tax threshold. (College-educated Republican women approve of the policy by an even wider margin than their male counterparts oppose it.)

This is a tsunami-size problem for the GOP as well as the plutocrats who control the Democratic National Committee. If Republican women are joining the sans-culottes, then business as usual is about to end. Even the main Mike Bloomberg ad saturating the television airwaves promises that "the wealthy will pay their fair share."

As Lambert Strether noted in yesterday's Water Cooler:

“Trump has turned the suburbs into a GOP disaster zone. Does that doom his reelection?” [Los Angeles Times]. “The orderly subdivisions and kid-friendly communities that ring the nation’s cities have become a deathtrap for Republicans, as college-educated and upper-income women flee the party in droves, costing the GOP its House majority and sapping the party’s strength in state capitals and local governments nationwide. The dramatic shift is also reshaping the 2020 presidential race, elevating Democratic hopes in traditional GOP strongholds like Arizona and Georgia, and forcing Trump to redouble efforts to boost rural turnout to offset defectors who, some fear, may never vote Republican so long as the president is on the ballot.”

Given the enormous difficulties facing the Republican Party and its MAGA standard-bearer, the action over the next six-to-eight months is going to be in the Democratic Party and whether the plutocrats can block the Warren-Sanders combination.

Can Mike Bloomberg's strategy of ditching Iowa-New Hampshire-Nevada-South Carolina and going all in on Super Tuesday pay off?

There's slim hope offered by The Times SurveyMonkey poll. High-school-educated economy-prioritizing voters are somewhat scared by taxing the "job creator" class:

The survey suggests that the newest member of the Democratic field, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, may have at least a narrow opening with voters on economic issues. About 6 percent of Democrats said they trusted Mr. Bloomberg most on the economy, putting him outside the four-person top tier (Mr. Biden, Ms. Warren, Mr. Sanders and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.) but ahead of the rest of the field.

Six percent doesn't seem like much to go on. These are voters mesmerized by the magic of money and cowed by ignorance. Bloomberg's campaign is obviously built around the assumption that Biden's voters can be swallowed along with Buttigieg's. But in order to do that Bloomberg is going to have to go darkly, satanically negative. And if he runs a pure fear campaign, he'll just drive more voters to Warren-Sanders.

With Buttigieg failing to register with voters of color, there's no place for plutocrats to go.

So it's going to have to be a Bloomberg kamikaze attack, and it's going to have to be hostile, fear-mongering, negative.

Germany's GroKo in Trouble. How Long Before a Red-Red-Green Government?

Hopeful news was to be found over the weekend in Germany. Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans won the Social Democratic Party dual leadership contest, beating business-as-usual pro-centrists Olaf Scholz, Germany's finance minister, and Klara Geywitz. As Jeremy Cliffe reports for the New Statesman,

All agree that the result will destabilise the “grand coalition” of Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), its conservative (CSU) sister party and the SPD. Esken, in particular, has questioned its future and suggested that the CDU and CSU will have to make hefty leftwards concessions to keep the SPD on-board. At a conference in Berlin next weekend the SPD will vote on whether to stay or to walk.

The pessimism is understandable. Since Gerhard Schröder lost the chancellery to Merkel in 2005, the SPD has governed as the junior partner in grand coalitions with her for 10 of the 14 succeeding years and along the way has has lurched from crisis to crisis. It has gone through 11 leaders, five of them provisional, and seen its vote share fall from its election-losing 34 per cent in 2005 to a record-low 20.5 per cent in 2017, which according to current polls would fall again by at least a third were elections held today.

The CDU's mini-Merkel, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, was dismissive of renegotiating the terms of the GroKo, saying that, according to Reuters, “We are concentrating on dedicating ourselves to work of substance — we are not a therapy facility for the coalition parties.”

We'll have a better idea what's in store for Germany's governing coalition after the SPD party congress begins on Friday. Reuters notes that

If the Social Democrats did decide to walk out, it’s unclear what would happen. Merkel’s bloc could seek to carry on in a minority government or, theoretically at least, negotiate an alternative coalition; or the result could eventually be an early election.

Merkel has said that this is her last term and she won’t run in the next election, currently due in the fall of 2021.

If elections to the Bundestag were to be held today, the CDU would nose out the Greens. The problem for the Christian Democrats is that parties aren't willing to govern with the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The only other natural partners for the CDU are the Free Democrats, but they're too small to create a majority. So this leaves the SPD as the key party.

Right now the SPD and AfD are essentially tied in polling as the number three party behind the Christian Democrats and Greens.

A red-red-green coalition appears to be the only path forward. The problem is that we might have to wait another two years before that path is chosen.

Death Knell for Kamala Harris for the People

Really all that is left for "Kamala Harris for the People" (read the resignation letter of its state operations director Kelly Mehlenbacher) is for its candidate to drop out. All the delicious details can be found in "How Kamala Harris’s Campaign Unraveled" by Jonathan Martin, Astead Herndon and Alexander Burns:

Many of her own advisers are now pointing a finger directly at Ms. Harris. In interviews several of them criticized her for going on the offensive against rivals, only to retreat, and for not firmly choosing a side in the party’s ideological feud between liberals and moderates. She also created an organization with a campaign chairwoman, Maya Harris, who goes unchallenged in part because she is Ms. Harris’s sister, and a manager, Mr. Rodriguez, who could not be replaced without likely triggering the resignations of the candidate’s consulting team. Even at this late date, aides said it’s unclear who’s in charge of the campaign.

With just over two months until the Iowa caucuses, her staff is now riven between competing factions eager to belittle one another, and the candidate’s relationship with Mr. Rodriguez has turned frosty, according to multiple Democrats close to Ms. Harris. Several aides, including Jalisa Washington-Price, the state director in crucial South Carolina, have already had conversations about post-campaign jobs.

[snip]

But her troubles go beyond staffing and strategy: Her financial predicament is dire. The campaign has not taken a poll or been able to afford TV advertising since September, and it has all but quit buying Facebook ads in the last two months. Her advisers, after months of resistance, have only now signaled their desire for a group of former aides to begin a super PAC to finance an independent political effort on her behalf.

To some Democrats who know Ms. Harris, her struggles indicate larger limitations.

“You can’t run the country if you can’t run your campaign,” said Gil Duran, a former aide to Ms. Harris and other California Democrats who’s now the editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee.

[snip]

Yet it has come to this: After beginning her candidacy with a speech before 20,000 people in Oakland, some of Ms. Harris’s longtime supporters believe she should consider dropping out in late December — the deadline for taking her name off the California primary ballot — if she does not show political momentum. Some advisers are already bracing for a primary challenge, potentially from the billionaire Tom Steyer, should she run for re-election to the Senate in 2022. Her senior aides plan to assess next month whether she’s made sufficient progress to remain in the race.

Interestingly Tulsi Gabbard's attack on Harris' record as a prosecutor during the July debate is acknowledged by insiders as the dividing line of the campaign.

Martin et al. don't trouble themselves with what Harris' demise means for the Democratic primary as a whole. Harris was the anointed -- a Clinton-Obama twofer -- a chic woman of color who hailed from the Golden State. The fact that "Kamala Harris for the People" has collapsed so completely spells trouble for the Democratic National Committee.

The Democratic electorate has joined much of the planet in open rebellion. Poll-testing sappy Reaganesque slogans no longer guarantees votes.

The frenzy from here on out is how the Democratic Party oligarchy is going to pacify this rebellion.

I think we've already been given a hint. Obama will be deployed to attack Sanders and Warren. The beautiful thing is that it won't make a bit of difference; in fact, it should boomerang.