U.S. Busts Out ISIS from a Taliban Prison

I saw this Tim Anderson tweet in a Niqnaq post: a story from the Tehran Times, "U.S. Caught Helping ISIS Commanders Escape from Taliban Prison in Afghanistan," about U.S. special forces busting "40 Daesh ringleaders" out of a Taliban prison in Badghis Province, Afghanistan, and helicoptering them away to safety.

It makes you wonder if Islamic State's presence in Afghanistan has been orchestrated by the United States from the very beginning. I'm watching the Netflix series Narcos. I knew next to nothing about Pablo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel. The Medellín Cartel is eventually superseded by the Cali Cartel thanks to the intercession of the CIA and the ultra-right anticommunist paramilitary organization of the Castaño Brothers.

Afghanistan is no different from the Narco wars in Colombia. Fight terror with terror; it's a preferred method of the CIA.

Venezuela and the Zombie Politics of Death and Destruction

Sputnik has an interview with Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro which covers the U.S.-engineered coup underway. I've read the quotes about Venezuela possessing the world's largest proven oil reserves, but I had no idea about its abundance of other natural resources:

Sputnik: What do you think are the primary motives behind US actions in Venezuela? Oil?

Nicolas Maduro: There are a couple of goals. The primary goal is to get Venezuelan oil since we have the biggest reserves of certified oil in the world. We are certifying what is on track to become the biggest gold reserves in the world, we have a quarter of world's gas, we have vast reserves of diamonds, huge reserves of drinking water, aluminium, and iron. We are a power in the field of energy resources, natural resources. But there is a certain point that needs to be taken into consideration, which is more than 200 years old. Venezuela is the country where Bolivar was born, we have the strongest Bolivarian tradition here.

Over the course of 200 years, our revolutionary project has influenced Latin America and the countries of the Caribbean. They [the US authorities] fundamentally want to destroy the example, the idea, the spirit of Simon Bolivar. This is the second big reason — to kill this spirit — spiritually, culturally, politically. And to move without any resistance to neocolonialism in Latin America. They [the US] consider us their "backyard". And we say, we are not anyone's backyard, we are an independent republic. As you would say in Russia, we have a 200-year historical impulse, we are winning and we will win.

Yesterday Jacobin ended its silence on the coup. "The US Should Stay out of Venezuela" is an interview with former Ecuadorean foreign minister Guillaume Long. Long makes a couple of important points. The mainstream Western media makes it seem as if Maduro has no support; that Venezuelans uniformly favor the opposition. Long says that this is false, that there is still plenty of support for Chavismo. The country is split.

Long warns Europe of its drift to the coup camp:

As for the European Union, and its constituent powers, it is showing signs of adopting the Trump and Lima Group line. I think it is important that the European Union does not follow this path. Initially, they seemed to show restraint, but recent statements about recognizing Guaidó subject to elections within eight days fall in line with this hawkish approach.

Unfortunately, underlying all of this is a return to a kind of Cold War politics in Latin America. Bolsonaro has been the best example of this, saying he would not permit “communism” on the continent and vowing to rout out “the reds.” He said this with reference not only to the Workers’ Party (PT) and other left-wing parties in his own country, but also to left-wing governments like Venezuela and Cuba. This dynamic has been deepened by the United States’ intervention under Donald Trump and John Bolton, who have recently reintroduced figures like Elliott Abrams, one of the most notorious figures of the 1980s Contra dirty wars in Latin America, to the region’s politics.

I think Europe should be adopting a more nuanced approach which would allow it to play a more productive role in Venezuela, and indeed in Latin America, including even mediation some time down the road.

In the end, Long doesn't see Guaidó being able to topple Maduro, which means that the U.S. will escalate, which means death and destruction for Latin America:

It is hard to see how the Guaidó camp can succeed on its own, without the military and with society deeply divided. Even with the support of the Western powers. The escalation of sanctions is going to make the situation increasingly untenable. Economic sanctions always hurt the poorest in society and have been a substantial contributor to Venezuela’s economic crisis. They will also, in all likelihood, prevent the Maduro government from engineering the kinds of change that would increase its support base to pre-2015 levels.

The encouragement, particularly by the Trump administration, of further escalation in Venezuela is therefore extremely dangerous. It underestimates the resilience of the Chavista camp and rests on the idea of overwhelming popular support for the opposition. If Reagan-style policies from the 1980s are what the United States has in store for Venezuela, then it is very bad news for Venezuela and for Latin America as a whole.

Venezuela’s crisis has already produced a huge migratory crisis — and further escalation into violence would make this much worse. We have seen in Syria, Iraq, and Libya some of the potential outcomes in this regard. I don’t think even the continent’s right-wing governments have the stomach for that. This realization may eventually lead a growing number of Latin American states, including members of the Lima Group, to understand that the Venezuelan crisis should be resolved at the negotiating table.

The politics of death and destruction, this brain-dead march of the zombies, is on display in "Is There Room in 2020 for a Centrist Democrat? Maybe One or Two.," by Alexander Burns. The Democratic Party is fracturing. Both Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have captured the rank'n'file with promises to tax the rich. This is something the party's big donors cannot abide. The superannuated, Mike Bloomberg and Joe Biden, are being trotted out to defend a bankrupt neoliberal "centrism."

It is not going to work because the only audience that defense persuades is the 1%. Burns cites the polling on taxation:

Arkadi Gerney, a Democratic strategist who runs the Hub Project, a liberal advocacy group that has focused heavily on taxes, said that intensive issue polling had consistently found powerful support for raising taxes on the wealthy, not just among Democrats but also among working-class white voters in Mr. Trump’s base.

“The thing that was consistently the most popular in those experiments was: raise taxes on the rich,” Mr. Gerney said. “It is tapping into anger that a lot of people have.”

This anger is not going away. Mike Bloomberg complaining that Medicare For All will bankrupt the country after congress just gave trillions to corporations, Joe Biden saying he can reach across the aisle to work with Republicans -- that kind of hokum is not going to work.

The 2020 Presidential Election Campaign as of January 2019

As we've seen in the UK, fealty to Israel, and all of Israel's odious policies vis-à-vis Palestine, is being used to buttress the zombie consensus that governs the mainstream "left." It aligns neoliberalism and perpetual warfare with a "My country, right or wrong" defense of the Jewish state.

Now, according to Jonathan Martin ("Prominent Democrats Form Pro-Israel Group to Counter Skepticism on the Left"), a new PAC, Democratic Majority for Israel, devoted to electing Democrats opposed to BDS, has been announced.

The election last fall of Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan has terrified the Democratic establishment. This is where the cutting edge of the party is located: Women of color, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are not willing to abandon advocacy of social justice in exchange for a seat at the boardroom table.

Efforts at cornering the BDS movement are going to prove futile. Martin outlines the demographics in play:

Beyond individual races, the more fundamental challenge pro-Israel Democrats are confronting is that many millennials are growing far more wary of Israel and particularly the Netanyahu government. The Pew poll indicated that while 56 percent of voters over 65 sympathized more with Israel than the Palestinians, only 32 percent of those under the age of 30 who were surveyed said they felt the same way.

“My generation sees the occupation and what’s happening in Israel-Palestine as a crisis the same way we do climate change,” said Simone Zimmerman, 28, a co-founder of a progressive group, IfNotNow, that opposes what it calls Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Ms. Zimmerman scorned what she called “the Trump-Netanyahu” alliance and said “too many in the American Jewish establishment and the Democratic establishment have let them off the hook.”

At this early stage of the 2020 presidential election, it is clear to me that the Democratic Party establishment is tilting towards Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Biden tossed a big hurdle up in front of himself by campaigning for Whirlpool scion and Republican Representative of Michigan's 6th CD Fred Upton (see Alexander Burns' "Joe Biden’s Paid Speech Buoyed the G.O.P. in Midwest Battleground"). Biden's defense is "Hey, this is a Republican who helped pass cancer research funding after my son Beau died." Then why accept $200K to praise Upton at a public forum three weeks before an election where the Democratic challenger had a real chance to ride the blue wave to victory?

It's rancid, and, in the Age of Trump, for any Democrat not see that, s/he would have to be brain dead. Biden is the zombie candidate par excellence, representing a neoliberal orthodoxy that is easily 20 years past its "sell by" date.

The other marquee zombie Democratic presidential contender is Kamala Harris, whose campaign hosted a kickoff rally at Oakland City Hall attended by an eye-popping 20,000-plus. I have to say I'm skeptical. The San Jose Mercury mentioned that the number was confirmed by the Oakland Police Department. I'm skeptical. If you have ever attended a march or rally, you'll know that 20,000 people is a huge number, truly gigantic.

Harris is basically running as a female Obama, of which there are numerous liabilities. The one plus is that I do think that the Harris campaign resonates with middle-age professional women and "soccer moms." But the minuses outweigh this single demographic plus, as Astead Herndon and Susan Chira make plain this morning in "Can Kamala Harris Repeat Obama’s Success With Black Voters? It’s Complicated." For starters, plenty of black voters had sobered on Obama by the end of his second term:

Across the country in Oakland, Calif., Kijani Edwards, 34, was also wary. “Ten years ago, I was moved by Obama. I was in tears in November of 2008, we all celebrated up and down,” he said.

But Mr. Obama did not bring the changes Mr. Edwards expected. “The banks got bailed out,” he said. “Interest rates got raised on the very citizens who bailed them out.”

“I’m tired of having the conversation of voting for the lesser of two evils,” he added, referring in part to Ms. Harris.

Also, Herndon and Chira make a pretty convincing case that 1) black voters are wary of Harris' record as a "tough on crime" prosecutor, and 2) black men don't want a woman to take on Trump; they're waiting for Cory Booker to enter the race.

That means, at the this point, January 2019, before Bernie Sanders announces, Elizabeth Warren has to be considered the front runner. And that's a problem for the neoliberals. Why? Take a peek at these two sentences at the end of Astead Herndon's slightly sneering frontpager from the other day ("Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 Strategy: Stand Out by ‘Nerding Out’"):

On Thursday, Ms. Warren announced a plan that would impose a new annual tax on the 75,000 wealthiest families in the United States. The proposal would raise $2.75 trillion in tax revenue over a decade, according to calculations by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, two University of California-Berkeley economists who consulted with Ms. Warren on the plan.

All of which explains Starbucks billionaire kingpin Howard Schultz's 60 Minutes announcement of an independent presidential campaign. Schultz is banking (see Andrew Ross Sorkin's "Howard Schultz Draws Fire from Trump and Bloomberg Over 2020 Plans") that a social democrat like Warren or Sanders is going to capture the Democratic nomination, and he's snatching billionaire Mike Bloomberg's spotlight. Usually Bloomberg commands frontpage attention while he ponders whether to run an independent presidential campaign. Now he's reduced to complaining that Schultz will help elect Trump.

Though on the issues Schultz is a neoliberal standard bearer, I have no problem with his run as an independent. The fact is that we don't live in an open society. It is a politically closed society ruled by the super-rich who control the two-party system. The United States is a democracy in name only. A billionaire -- and you need to be a billionaire to gain ballot access in 50 states -- running an independent presidential campaign will highlight how undemocratic the U.S. political system is.

As for Trump, read Rachel Bitecofer's spot on "Why Trump Will Lose in 2020."

U.S. Signals Surrender in Afghanistan (It's Past Due)

The bar appears to have been set very low in the framework peace deal negotiated by U.S viceroy Zalmay Khalilzad and the Taliban: Afghanistan can no longer harbor groups like Al Qaeda that use Afghan territory for training bases to launch international terrorist attacks. Mujib Mashal outlines the tentative peace framework in "U.S. and Taliban Agree in Principle to Peace Framework, Envoy Says":

As the first step in the framework, Mr. Khalilzad said that the Taliban were firm about agreeing to keep Afghan territory from being used as a staging ground for terrorism by groups like Al Qaeda and other international terrorists, and had agreed to provide guarantees and an enforcement mechanism for that promise.

That had long been a primary demand by American officials, in an effort to keep Afghanistan from reverting back to being the kind of terrorist base it had been at the war’s start, in 2001 after Al Qaeda’s Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

The next set of contingencies laid out by the senior American official involved in the talks would see the United States agreeing to withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan, but only in return for the Taliban’s entering talks with the Afghan government and agreeing to a lasting cease-fire.

Those last two points have long been resisted by Taliban officials, and could still provide trouble with the process, officials say. The Taliban delegation in Qatar said they had to break to discuss those details with their leadership.

But the agreement in principle to discussing them at all was seen as a breakthrough after years of failed attempts, American and Afghan officials said.

There is concern among senior Afghan officials about the fact that the Afghan government has still been sidelined from the talks. Officials close to Mr. Ghani say he is particularly concerned that the Americans might negotiate important agreements that Afghan officials are not party to, potentially including the shape of an interim government outside of elections.

One wonders about the status of the Islamic State. Is the Taliban now responsible for guaranteeing ISIS's defeat in Afghanistan? Another question, this one for the United States: If the bottom line for a U.S. military occupation is the presence of Al Qaeda bases, why did the Trump administration threaten Syria and Russia when they set out to purge Idlib Province of Tahrir al-Sham, a.k.a., Al Qaeda in Syria?

U.S. troop withdrawal apparently boils down to either less than a year or a year-plus. The U.S. doesn't want to be seen to retreat under fire; hence, the importance of a ceasefire. In order to negotiate a meaningful ceasefire the Afghan government must have a direct dialogue with the Taliban, something the Taliban has been reticent to initiate.

But the big question for Afghanistan is what happens to the Ghani government. As Rod Nordland and Mujib Mashal wrote on Saturday in "U.S. and Taliban Edge Toward Deal to End America’s Longest War":  

Any peace deal acceptable to the West and the Afghan government would mean recognizing the fundamentals of the Afghan Constitution — guaranteeing civil rights that conflict with the Taliban’s interpretation of Shariah, especially where the rights of women are concerned. Scrapping that constitution would be regarded by many world leaders as a red line that could not be crossed.

But the Taliban are unapologetically antidemocratic, believing in an outsize role for the mullahs in governance. Reconciling those two worldviews seems almost impossible, but somehow the shape of an eventual settlement requires just that.

The passages that jump out of the Nordland-Mashal story are the Ryan Crocker quotes:

Ryan Crocker, a former American ambassador to Afghanistan, said it was a rush for the exits.

“I can’t see this as anything more than an effort to put lipstick on what will be a U.S. withdrawal,” he said. Mr. Crocker said it reminded him of the Paris peace talks on Vietnam.

“By going to the table, we basically were telling the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, ‘We surrender. We’re here just to work out the terms.’ I just cannot see this getting to any better place. We don’t have a whole lot of leverage here.”

What a Vietnamesque retreat in Afghanistan portends is difficult to say. The fall of Saigon ushered in the age of neoliberalism. Today neoliberalism is a zombie paradigm but it still governs the planet. 

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan following 9/11 announced an age of super-militarism and perpetual warfare. Moving U.S. troops out of country and abandoning a puppet government will not end U.S. hyper-militarism; it's merely a rearrangement of pieces on the board. The Great Game is shifting to more direct conflict with China and Russia, as well as an old-fashioned coup in the U.S. "backyard."

The Attempted Coup in Venezuela: Which Side Are You On?

During clear "Which side are you on?" moments like these, and I am speaking of the U.S.-sponsored coup underway in Venezuela, it is interesting to click through the bookmarks on my web browser to see who is saying what. The Intercept and Jacobin have nothing to say as of this morning. Not surprising. The Intercept has long published Robert Mackey's regime-change talking points on Syria, while Jacobin stood on the sidelines when Trump bombed Syria last spring.

On the other hand, Consortium News has been good, as, of course, have been Craig Murray and Moon of Alabama.

A masterful write-up this morning can be found on World Socialist Web Site, Bill Van Auken's "US coup bid pushes Venezuela closer to invasion or civil war." The first WSWS posts on the coup were tainted by finger-pointing at Maduro's capitalist government; Van Auken manages to do without the petulant Trot predilection for ideological perfection.

In terms of the mainstream outlets, AP has an active "latest developments" story. Reuters provides up-to-date coverage, the latest dispatch being that Germany, France, Britain and Spain all plan to recognize the Guaido coup unless Venezuela schedules elections within eight days. Talk about blackmail.

The New York Times has been a beacon for the coup. Since Trump's election, the Gray Lady has refashioned itself as The Anti-Trump Times, unless he is bombing Syria or fomenting additional civil wars. Then the "newspaper of record" applauds the president for his statesmanship.

This morning the national edition of The New York Times features a frontpager by Nicholas Casey, "Within Venezuelan Military Ranks, a Struggle Over What Leader to Back," which is pure disinformation. The coup plan is obviously heavily dependent on the "bum rush" kabuki: There is so much opposition, both foreign and domestic, that Maduro has no other option but to resign, and Venezuela's military will deliver that message.

But it didn't work out that way. The military branded the coup "laughable." So onto Plan B: whip up the fiction that there is a rank'n'file officer rebellion brewing in Venezuela's armed services.

Unfortunately, Casey's reporting creates the opposite impression. There is no there there:

In 2017, [Lt. Hidalgo] said he was approached by a dissident military group called the Sword of God. Shortly afterward, he was captured by military intelligence agents but escaped to Brazil, he said.

Today, he works with Mr. Guillén, recruiting defectors who have left the country and have expressed interest in returning to start an uprising. During an interview, two of his comrades showed a spreadsheet with hundreds of names, ages, ranks and identification numbers — people they said were interested in joining them.

Among the documents were screenshots of what they said was a WhatsApp conversation with a young cadet in Venezuela expressing concern about whether he might be asked to put down the latest wave of protests.

“I’m not going to permit that someone fires on the people,” the message said. “The cadets are angry. We don’t want this government.”

A former American official said that these disgruntled military officers, along with thousands of other military-aged men who have fled the country, could present a serious challenge to Mr. Maduro if neighboring countries led by right-wing governments — like Colombia and Brazil — mobilized them, or allowed them to mobilize on their own.

Evidence of a rebellion within the military? WhatsApp screenshots and a quote from an anonymous U.S. ex-official.

Pathetic.

Alternative Media and the Coup in Venezuela

Recently I picked up Angus Mackenzie's Secrets again. I had started it several years ago and then set it down. The important message that Mackenzie has for his readers is that our current cult of government secrecy had its origins in the CIA's surveillance of the domestic alternative press in the Vietnam era, a.k.a., Operation MHCHAOS, sister to the FBI's COINTELPRO.

Yesterday morning I read the blog post from the alternative weekly newspaper The Stranger:

Venezuela has two presidents: President Nicolás Maduro has been in power for several years now and has overseen the complete implosion of the country’s economy. But they also have another president, Juan Guaidó, a 35-year-old National Assembly leader who has broad support among the people and the backing of powerful nations. One of those nations is the United States. After the Trump administration recognized Guaidó as Venezuela’s true president, Maduro tried to expel all U.S. diplomats and accused the U.S. of “gringo interventions and coups d’état.” Putin did more or less the same because Maduro is a Russian ally. Go figure.

Fifty years is a long time. So I guess it should be no surprise that an institution, the alternative weekly, which originally spread throughout the country because of opposition to the Vietnam War should now mindlessly parrot -- "Juan Guaidó, a 35-year-old National Assembly leader who has broad support among the people" [!] -- the legacy media and cheerlead another bloody foreign intervention. Nonetheless, it made me angry.

As Craig Murray writes in "The Coup in Venezuela Must Be Resisted":

Anybody who believes that a country’s internal democracy is the determining factor in whether the West decides to move for violent regime change in that country, is a complete idiot. Any journalist or politician who makes that claim is more likely to be a complete charlatan than a complete idiot. In recent years, possession of hydrocarbon reserves is very obviously a major factor in western regime change actions.

In Latin America over the last century, the presence of internal democracy has been much more likely to lead to external regime change than its absence, as maintenance of US imperialist hegemony has been the defining factor. That combines with oil reserves to make the current move a double whammy.

It is disheartening to see the Western “democracies” so universally supporting the coup in Venezuela. The EU in particular has leapt in to support Donald Trump in the quite ludicrous act of recognising corrupt Big Oil puppet Guaido as “President”. The change of the EU into full neo-con mode -so starkly represented in its bold support for Francoist violence in Catalonia – is what led me to reconcile with Brexit and a Norway style relationship.

When I was in the FCO, the rule on recognition was very plain and very openly stated – the UK recognised the government which had “effective control of the territory”, whatever the attributes of that government. This is a very well established principle of international law. There were very rare exceptions involving continuing to support ousted governments. The pre-1939 Polish government in exile was the most obvious example, though once Nazism was defeated Britain moved to recognise the Communist government actually in charge, to the fury of exiled Poles. I was involved in the question of the continued recognition of President Kabbah of Sierra Leone during the period in which he was ousted by military coup.

But I can think of no precedent at all for recognising a President who does not have and has never had control of the country – and has never been a candidate for President. This idea of the West simply trying to impose a suitably corrupt and biddable leader is really a very startling development. It is astonishing the MSM commentariat and political class appear to see no problem with it. It is a quite extraordinary precedent, and doubtless will lead to many new imperialist adventures.

One final thought. The right wing Government of Ecuador has been one of the first and most vocal in doing the West’s bidding. The Ecuadorean government has been colluding with the United States over the efforts to imprison Julian Assange, and at this very time has arranged for FBI and CIA personnel in Quito to take false and malicious statements manufactured by the Ecuador government in collaboration with the CIA, about Julian Assange’s activities in the Embassy in London.

Ecuadorean government documents had already been produced out of Quito, and shown to MI6 and CIA outlets like the Guardian and New York Times, purporting to show the diplomatic appointment of Julian Assange to Moscow in December 2017. I have believed throughout that these fake documents were most likely produced by Ecuador’s new CIA influenced government itself.

Today Ecuador, once a key part of the Bolivarian revolution, is simply a puppet of the CIA, voicing support for a US coup in Venezuela and working to produce fake testimony against Assange. I warn you firmly against giving credence to Luke Harding’s next “scoop” which will doubtless shortly emerge from this process.

To me it seems clear that the coup-planners had hoped to stampede the military into abandoning Maduro. That hasn't happened. The Times quotes a Venezuelan academic affiliated with a CIA-front called Citizen Control (the website, very slick, reminds me of the White Helmets website that appeared before that group became notorious) who outlines how the coup will proceed:

Rocío San Miguel, a defense analyst in Venezuela who studies the military, said it was notable that the military weighed in so long after Mr. Guaidó took the oath. For the time being, she said, commanders appeared to have concluded that Mr. Maduro has the upper hand.

While the armed forces “aspire to a peaceful resolution” to the crisis, they will “stick with the most concrete power structure, pragmatically,” said Ms. San Miguel, who runs an organization calledCitizen Control.

Ms. San Miguel said military leaders may ultimately flip. That, she added, would possibly happen if the rank and file were signaling clearly that they did not want to crack down on protesters.

“That would be the sign that Maduro has to leave,” she said.

Another Coup

The Unites States has initiated another coup. Yesterday on the streets of Caracas freshly-minted opposition leader Juan Guaidó appointed himself president of Venezuela. The White House promptly recognized the 35-year-old Guaidó as the legitimate president. The actual legitimate president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, responded by giving U.S. diplomats 72 hours to leave the country.

The U.S. State Department proclaims that it is not going anywhere. Maduro has said that the utilities to the U.S. embassy will be shut off. The U.S. has threatened a military intervention.

The reporting in The New York Times is an embarrassment, little more than cheerleading for yet another bloody civil war. Yesterday's "Who Is Juan Guaidó? Venezuela’s Young Opposition Leader," by Ana Vanessa Herrero and CIA asset Nicholas Casey, introduced Guaidó without answering the question in its title. You have to read Colonel Cassad, who is translated and re-posted by Niqnaq, to learn that Guaidó lives in Washington, D.C. He is basically an employee of the State Department.

We do learn from The Times story that Guaidó is a puppet of jailed opposition chief Leopoldo López.

In the latest dispatch ("After U.S. Backs Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s Leader, Maduro Cuts Ties," by Ana Vanessa Herrero), The Times manages this faint praise:

The opposition’s new leader, Mr. Guaidó, is an industrial engineer little known at home or abroad until this month, when he was sworn in as president of the National Assembly. His appointment reinvigorated that opposition-dominated legislative body, which had become ineffectual and deeply unpopular in recent years.

Moon of Alabama believes the coup will likely be a bust:

The military, which the U.S. already secretly tried to instigate stage a coup, is unlikely to do so. It does well under the socialists and has no interest in changing that. The U.S. also tried to incite Brazil and Columbia to invade their neighbor. But neither country is capable of doing such. The U.S. itself is also unlikely to invade. At the United Nation Venezuela has Russia's and China's support.

Like in 2017 we can expect several weeks of violent protests in Caracas, during which tens or hundreds of police and protester may die. There will also be a lot of howling from the U.S. aligned media. But unless there is some massive change in the political and power configuration, the demonstrations are likely to petter out.

Has the Trump administration a consistent game plan to achieve such a change in the balance of power? I for one doubt that.

China and Russia have made large investments in Chavista Venezuela. The U.S. has large investments in Venezuela pre-Chavez. Peace and tranquility are not in Venezuela's future. Its future looks a lot like Libya's or Syria's.

Brexit Re-vote Reassessed

I am hesitant to mention Brexit again until the House of Commons resumes debate on Tuesday. Brexit has proven to be nothing but zombie gnashing of the teeth. But Yves Smith's post this morning, "Brexit: May’s Sweatbox," is so illuminating it deserves mention.

While the mainstream media is just waking to the possibility that a re-vote might not be the promised land touted the past two-plus years (see "A Second Brexit Vote Could Worsen the Chaos Created by the First," by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, minders of the neoliberal consensus), Smith susses out MP Yvette Cooper's proposed bill, the current Brexit-exorcising deus ex machina which stipulates "[I]f a deal has not been approved by 7 March, the government would be required to seek an extension of the Article 50 deadline. That would mean asking the EU to postpone the UK’s departure until the end of this year – and EU leaders have said they would agree to an extension if it were to hold another referendum."

Yves Smith throws cold water on the whole charade. Parliament does not have the ability to move legislation on its own without the approval of the government. If parliament wants to move legislation and it cannot because it is opposed by the government, parliament must bring down the government in a vote of no confidence and elections must be held. This is the route Labour leader Jeremey Corbyn attempted last week and was rebuffed because the Tories and the DUP stuck together.

Smith concludes her post:

And thanks to a February break, as I read the Parliamentary calendar, there are 37 sitting days from the January 19 Meaningful Vote to Brexit Day (although May is threatening to cancel the holiday). The only way out of May’s sweatbox looks to be to remove her, and Corbyn threatened to keep lodging no confidence motions. But will MPs knuckle under to May, toss her out, or waste energy in Constitutional gambits which looked doomed to fail?

The hard-line Leavers and the DUP will stick with May to the end because a crash-out is their preferred result, which means that salvation in the form of a successful vote of no confidence must come from Tory Remainers, of which May herself was once one. I don't see how Tory Remainers bolt May to vote with Labour. The crash-out cometh.

Kamala Harris: Another Zombie Announces for President

Kamala Harris is rightfully being derided for her attempt to appropriate black righteousness by declaring her presidential candidacy on the holiday devoted Martin Luther King, Jr. The New York Times story, "Kamala Harris Declares Candidacy, Evoking King and Joining Diverse Field," is non-committal, if not poison-pilled (it refers readers to last week's editorial by law professor Lara Bazelon, "Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’"), but Yves Smith is downright scathing in her post this morning "Kamala Harris, Opportunist to the Core: Launches Prez Bid on MLK Day, Since She Has to Remind People She’s Black After Criminalizing Truancy, Keeping CA Prison Rolls Up to Provide Cheap Labor; Sends Tone-Deaf, Narcissistic Campaign E-mail":

It’s stating the obvious that [Kamala] Harris is yet another variant on the Obama formula: take an attractive, well-educated, mixed-race centrist and encourage the press and public to project that their “minority” background means that they’ll be staunch defenders of the downtrodden.

But the public isn’t so easily fooled. 9 million foreclosures, many of which could have been prevented, bailouts for banksters, a two-tier recovery with smug elites preaching “Let them eat training” to people stuck outside big cities or too old to be employable, and sky-high Obamacare deductibles mean a lot of voters are not going to fall for idpol packaging as easily a second time. Plus Obama had so little in the way of a political track record that it was easy for him to be a shape-shifter; he made his stint as a community organizer go a long way. Even now, hardly anyone knows that Obama, along with his wife Michelle and Valerie Jarret, as described by Robert Fitch, built their early career success by lending an appearance of legitimacy to moving black South Chicago further south on behalf of local real estate and finance interests.

Further complicating the foolhardy effort to cast Harris in the Obama mold is that she’s got way too much political baggage to fool all that many people as to what she is really about.

So it’s telling that self-absorbed Harris campaign imagery clashes with her slogan, “For the people”. Even more so than for most politicians, Harris’ team has to stick with the surface because that’s all they have to sell.

If the strategic shortcoming of the Gillibrand campaign is to hitch its wagon to a #MeToo  movement dependent on celebrity scalp-taking and tabloid journalism relocated to the pages of the prestige press, Harris' failure is believing that voters want another Obama.

Obama was a failure. Hillary takes all the blame for losing to a huckster like Trump. But Trump's path was paved by Obama.

Trump has captured the Republican Party. My epiphany over the weekend was the realization that the U.S. intelligence community has taken upon itself the defense of the two-party system by making sure that outsiders like Bernie Sanders don't capture the Democratic Party. How else to interpret Nicole Perlroth's story from last week "D.N.C. Says It Was Targeted Again by Russian Hackers After ’18 Election"? The story keeps the "Russians Stole My Election" meme moving; in this case, by spotlighting the CIA-friendly FireEye report alleging a spearphising attack by CozyBear on "multiple industries, including think tank, law enforcement, media, U.S. military, imagery, transportation, pharmaceutical, national government, and defense contracting."

The two-party system in the United States is under the same pressures as other neoliberal Western states. A parliamentary system like the United Kingdom, long anchored by the Conservatives and Labour, is splintering into many different political groupings. There is Momentum Labour, Blairite Labour, UKIP Tories, Remain Tories, SNP, Greens, Sinn Féin, DUP, Plaid Cymru. France is splintering too. The Yellow Vests are a manifestation of that. Germany has its own problems.

The solution being pursued by in the United States is a combination of rebooting the Cold War with China and Russia and censoring the internet. In terms of electoral politics, the intelligence community wants the Democratic Party to choose a neoliberal who favors perpetual war to square off against Trump. The difficulty here is that after Obama, after Hillary, Democratic primary voters are wary of voting for a Gillibrand, a Harris, a Biden, a Booker. It is going to take a miracle of propaganda to elect one of these zombies.

The Stillbirth of Kirsten Gillibrand's Presidential Candidacy

New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand announced her presidential candidacy on Stephen Colbert Tuesday night.

The New York Times has been lavishing attention on Gillibrand far out of proportion to her merits. Shane Goldmacher has been handed the portfolio for "the newspaper of record." His reporting has been decent; it manages to spotlight and promote the junior senator from New York while at the same time providing the discerning reader with everything one needs to reject Gillibrand's candidacy outright; for instance, Gillibrand -- who owes her senate seat to Hillary's ascension to Obama's Foggy Bottom, followed by an appointment from David Patterson, who himself had recently risen to governor thanks to the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal -- was a Blue Dog Democrat congressional representative of an upstate district with an A-rating from the National Rifle Association.

Gillibrand is a scion of a powerful Albany family, a corporate lawyer with a knack for fundraising. Goldmacher summarizes:

Born in Albany to a political family, Ms. Gillibrand was greatly influenced by her grandmother, Dorothea Noonan, known as Polly, a powerful figure in the political machine of the longtime mayor of Albany, Erastus Corning.

Ms. Gillibrand began her career as a Manhattan lawyer in the 1990s, and has said she was inspired to get into politics by listening to Mrs. Clinton, then the first lady.

She eventually ran for Congress, in 2006, in what was seen as a long-shot race against an entrenched incumbent, John E. Sweeney. The district was 93 percent white, and Republicans vastly outnumbered Democrats.

She easily secured re-election in 2008 in a House race that was the most expensive in the nation that year.

It's interesting that while The Times was rolling out the red carpet for Gillibrand it was smearing Bernie and Tulsi Gabbard.

Gabbard's candidacy was scotched for her past support for traditional marriage. Liam Stack reported in "Tulsi Gabbard, Democratic Presidential Candidate, Apologizes for Anti-Gay Past":

“We would hope that people have lifelong values of equality and inclusion that have been demonstrated over their lifetime,” said Stephanie Sandberg, the president of LPAC, an advocacy group for L.G.B.T. women. “From my point of view, this does not make good presidential material, especially from a progressive perspective.”

[snip]

Mr. Gabbard, who has been a state lawmaker since 2006, has been an outspoken anti-gay activist. In addition to the Alliance for Traditional Marriage, he also ran a group called Stop Promoting Homosexuality America and hosted an anti-gay radio show called “Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii,” according to Honolulu Civil Beat, a news organization.

Why not have a quote from a Parkland survivor in one of the Gillibrand stories saying "We would hope that people have a lifelong value of peace and well-being that have been demonstrated throughout their political career"?

But the Bernie smear is even worse. (See "Sanders Meets With Former Staff Members, Seeking to Quell Anxiety Over Sexism" by Sydney Ember and Katie Benner.) To target one campaign, Bernie's 2016 presidential run, as institutionally sexist, because some men were paid more than women for performing the same tasks and some women were hit on by male supervisors, without looking at Hillary's campaign organization or Jeb Bush's or Trump's or Marco Rubio's, is absurd. Pure disinformation and dirty tricks.

Unfortunately for Gillibrand, no matter how much puffing from The Times, her candidacy is going to be a bust. Gillibrand's gambit was to ride the #MeToo wave. But with the splitting and implosion of the Women's March over allegations of anti-Semitism (same counterintelligence tactic used to target Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party), and second-guessing within the Democratic National Committee's upper echelons over Gillibrand's taking Al Franken's scalp, Gillibrand is having to pivot and sell herself as a rural politician who can reach across the aisle to bring us all together and get things done; a 52-year-old "young mom"; a kinder, gentler Hillary; a female Obama in whiteface; "a winner who can beat Trump" -- in other words, a dud.

Any Democrat -- and I'm thinking at this point even Joe Biden and Kirsten Gillibrand -- should be able to beat Trump.

NFL Championship Playoff Games

Benjamin Hoffman of The New York Times has done well with his playoff picks. If you don't count the spread but just the straight-up picks, Hoffman is 6-2: 3-1 for the wild card round; 3-1 for the divisional round.

At 2-6, I am the opposite of Hoffman. I've been making these NFL playoff picks since 2013. Without doing an audit of my performance, I'd have to say this is my worse outing to date (though I think there was one year that I was equally bad during the wild card and divisional rounds before hitting the remaining championship and Super Bowl picks, ending up close to .500).

Usually I hover around .500. Maybe there was one year that I performed in Hoffman's range, hitting three out of four picks. But mostly I'm in coin toss territory. Not what I imagined in my 20s when I daydreamed about moving to the desert and supporting myself by picking winners at the Vegas sports books. In that dream I lived alone, as I do now, and drove a pickup truck on sun-drenched dusty roads, which I do not.

In thinking about what has gone wrong for me so far the one big mistake I have made is not factoring in what a huge advantage it is to be the number one or two seed and get a bye for the wild card round. Almost every year three out of the four teams competing in the conference championship games are one or two seeds. This year all the teams are one and two seeds, as it was for the 2015 season. The last time a wild card team won a Super Bowl was Green Bay during the 2010 season, almost ten years ago, after it being a regular occurrence during the aughts.

Something has changed, and I don't think it's an erosion in conditioning. Richard Sherman has repeatedly complained about Thursday games and the stress it places on the players. His season-ending Achilles tear last year on a Thursday night in Phoenix proved his point.

My feeling is that the speed and athleticism of the National Football League has increased. It's a difficult thing to maintain peak performance over a 17-game regular season schedule. When you factor in winter travel during the playoffs, no wonder teams that get a week off to play at home have a huge advantage.

With this in mind the lopsided games of the divisional round make sense. The only game that was truly competitive was the Philadelphia-New Orleans match-up, and I would argue that Alshon Jeffery's game-losing flub of a Nick Fole's pass was due to the fact that Jeffery was flat-out gassed. All the rested home teams displayed much more juice than their visiting opponents from the wild card round.

I'm going with the home teams for the championship round. The home teams are both favored, but Hoffman, while picking the Chiefs at home, is taking the Rams in the Superdome over the Saints. I don't see Los Angeles running the ball against New Orleans like they did against Dallas. Though, to be fair, I didn't foresee C.J. Anderson having such a huge day against the Cowboys. Nonetheless, Drew Brees's quick-release passing to Alvin Kamara out of the backfield and Michael Thomas over the middle is going to shred the Rams defense. Take the Saints.

The second of Sunday's game is the tougher one to call. Patrick Mahomes had the yipes when he played in Foxborough earlier in the year. If he had not made mistakes in the first half of that game the Chiefs would have won.

Brady has seemed uncharacteristically disinterested this season. You can see him dreaming about life after football as he sits on the bench. New England is not a particularly good road team. Regular season losses to Detroit and Jacksonville prove the point. The one hope for the Patriots -- and it's a possibility -- is that they can control the ball on offense and wear down the Kansas City defense. Temperatures are said to be in the 20s.

Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes will get it done in Arrowhead. Kansas City running back Damien Williams is playing incredibly well. Take the Chiefs.

The Great National Debate

French president Emmanuel Macron's response to the Yellow Vest protests roiling France is something dubbed the "Great National Debate." Adam Nossiter addressed it earlier this week in "Macron Hopes Talk Will Calm France, but an Air of Menace Prevails."

Tuesday Macron appeared before hundreds of mayors in the city of Grand Bourgtheroulde in Normandy. The mayors were there to convey the grievances of regular citizens. But, as Nossiter explains, fear and loathing shrouded the event. Grand Bourgtheroulde was a city on lock-down:

Even Mr. Macron’s rare public appearance — they have been deemed too risky since the beginning of the Yellow Vest movement — was made under virtual siege.

The police blockaded the village where he was to speak, Grand Bourgtheroulde, banning most traffic, preventing Yellow Vests from reaching it, and screening those leaving the highway and entering the village.

It was rural France, but tear gas, a regular feature of the protest movement, was deployed to push back some who managed to get through. Wagonloads of police officers were stationed in the woods surrounding the village.

Mr. Macron, tagged as “President of the Rich” by the angry Yellow Vests, was taking no chances. The current situation, he told the mayors, “presents our country with a lot of challenges.” That was something of an understatement.

Still, the French media noted, the president had spoken the words “Yellow Vest” in public for the first time — two months after the movement began — an omission seen as a sign of his often-noted remoteness.

This morning Naked Capitalism re-posts a piece, "France’s Great Debate," by Peter Collier. Collier summarizes the Yellow Vest protests:

The first Saturday protest in November mobilised 287,000. Most had never protested before. There have been eight Saturday protests. Over 5,000 were taken into custody and a thousand held in prison. Emmanuel Macron reacted by first, apologising, then freezing tax increases and bank charges while raising the minimum wage. Amazingly the Gilets-Jaunes won more concessions from the government than any trade-union or opposition party for decades. Paradoxically the more concessions Macron made the more the movement became radical. The moderate middle-class, unsettled by the level of violence, now stayed away on Saturdays. (For this alone it may be argued that Macron had played it this way.)

Collier notes that the question of raising taxes on the super-rich is banned from the debate. Macrons prefers questions about tax cuts. Nossiter concludes his article:

Mr. Macron set out what he regards as the central questions on the minds of the French — questions that are suggested by hundreds of so-called “Grievance books,” a term that goes back to the beginnings of the French Revolution.

The books have now set out in mayors’ offices across the country for the citizens to fill in. Tax cuts are clearly the popular priority.

“How can we make our fiscal system more just and more efficient?” Mr. Macron asked in his letter. “What taxes should we cut?”

But he warned the French, underlining a paradox that many have found at the heart of the Yellow Vest movement: “We cannot, in any event, pursue tax cuts without cutting the overall level of public spending.”

He continued, taking a risk in the live-wire French context, “Should we cut some public services which are out of date or too expensive in relation to their usefulness?”

This, of course, is all that fills what's left of the mind of the zombie. Wars rage perpetually overseas. Government exists only to cut taxes and social services.

But this world view no longer beguiles the masses, the proof of which is found in the barricades around Grand Bourgtheroulde. There is even some evidence that this world view is being abandoned by segments of the ruling class.

Yesterday there was a frontpager by Karen Weise, "Microsoft Pledges $500 Million for Affordable Housing in Seattle Area," which contained this bombshell:

“Of course, we have lots of software engineers, but the reality is that a lot of people work for Microsoft. Cafeteria workers, shuttle drivers,” Mr. Nadella [Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella] said this week at a meeting with editors at the company’s headquarters. “It is a supply problem, a market failure.”

But, wait. Markets can't fail. Markets are wholly rational; better yet, divine. What's Nadella problem? Is he some sort of Putinbot, trying to divide the country?

Craig Murray's Brexit Scoop: May Planning a Second Referendum

Craig Murray has a Brexit scoop this morning, "Machiavellianism and Brexit." Apparently May is prepared to acquiesce to a second Brexit referendum but one based on ranked-choice voting. Murray explains that

A Cabinet Office source tells me today No. 10 is considering agreeing a second referendum with three choices: No Deal Brexit, May’s Deal or No Brexit. It would be by alternative vote, ie you rate your preferences 1, 2. The thinking is that the first round might go No Deal 23, May’s Deal 37, No Brexit 40. The second round would then go May’s Deal 60, No Brexit 40.

They claim there is opinion poll evidence to support this. But I see a flaw. It is predicated on the current situation, where a lot of Remainers are prepared to support Brexit, to respect the referendum result. But surely a second referendum would release that psychological constraint and the overwhelming majority of Remainers would seize the opportunity to try and ditch Brexit?

The advantage of the ploy from May’s viewpoint is that it presents her “deal” as the only alternative to No Deal or No Brexit, and in an AV vote the compromise position is always boosted. What is more it keeps the numerous other options for deals outwith her red lines – eg EFTA, Single Market, Customs Union, EEA – all off the ballot paper. This limited choice referendum thus appeals to May as “out-maneuvering” the opposition parties. The idea is to sucker them in to talk on a second referendum, then produce this slanted one.

An earlier Brexit development was noted by Yves Smith in her post this morning, Brexit: Chasing Their Tails. May will present her Plan B, which will be nothing more than a cosmetic tweak of her Plan A that was torched by parliament on Tuesday, but it won't be debated until Tuesday, January 29.

To keep her coalition government intact, of which May has been successful, the prime minister cannot rule out a no deal crash-out, which is what the opposition parties want her to do, because it is a no deal crash-out that keeps the hard-line Brexiteers and the DUP loyal to May.

I would think that the DUP could suss out the implications of a proposed second referendum along the lines of ranked-choice voting and decide at that point to leave May's coalition. Whether that would be enough to halt a second referendum I don't know.

Smith concludes her post citing an interesting poll. A second referendum, contrary to what the mainstream media says, does not receive majority support:

New poll indicates UK voters do not want revocation or extension of Article 50. The survey, of over 2000 people by ComRes on behalf of the Daily Express, is a decent sample size and appears not to be an online poll. And it was taken before Tuesday’s vote, which is unlikely to have improved results:

Three-quarters of voters say the crisis-hit EU departure process has shown that the current generation of MPs are “not up to the job”, according to the data from polling firm ComRes. A root-and-branch overhaul of the country’s entire political system is wanted by a massive 72% of people quizzed in the survey. But despite the chaos embroiling Brexit, a majority of voters (53%) still want the result of the 2016 EU Leave vote to be honoured by ensuring the UK’s withdrawal from the bloc….

Less than a third of voters (31%) wanted Brexit cancelled or a second referendum on the UK’s relationship with the EU to be held.

This is What a Zombie Looks Like

UPDATE: From The Guardian's live stream:

Corbyn accused May of heading a “zombie government” and said any previous government would have resigned if it had lost as badly as May’s did last night. He said:

"Last week they lost a vote on the finance bill, that’s what’s called supply. Yesterday they lost by the biggest margin ever, that’s what’s regarded as confidence. By any convention of this house, by any precedence, loss of both confidence and supply should mean they do the right thing and resign …

"This government cannot govern and cannot command the support of parliament on the most important issue facing our country. Every previous prime minister in this situation would have resigned and called an election and it is the duty of this house to lead where the government has failed."

**** 

Under normal circumstances, a British prime minister would be expected to resign after losing a vote on a flagship policy. But the Brexit process has so unsettled political conventions that Mrs. May could survive to make revisions and pitch her deal again.

In December, Mrs. May survived a leadership challenge in her own Conservative Party and, under its rules, is safe from another until the end of the year.

“We have been in extraordinary circumstances,” said Nikki da Costa, a former director of legal affairs at 10 Downing Street. “Things that in normal times would not be considered survivable have become normalized. What the government would be looking for is a pathway through this.”

Ms. Da Costa predicted: “We will be doing this again in a couple of weeks’ time.”

Philip Cowley, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said he was struggling to identify a comparable defeat in the history of British politics.

“When you ask me for a historical benchmark, I can’t find any example,” Mr. Cowley said.

"May and Brexit Face Uncertain Future After Crushing Vote in Parliament," Stephen Castle and Ellen Barry

Despite sustaining a historical defeat on the principal policy of her government, prime minister Theresa May is poised to win a vote of confidence today. So cockeyed, the mainstream press is struggling to explain this to its readers. Castle and Barry emphasize a "Brexit changes everything" explanation, whereas the main Reuters story simply blows past the incongruity of losing by an unprecedented margin on your key initiative only to be voted up the next day by the same body that just rejected you by focusing on May's promise to consult with the opposition to hatch a Plan B.

What's really going on is that the Tories are doing whatever it takes to avoid elections that might bring a legitimate anti-war social democrat to power. It's a bizarre form of putsch where the putschists are already in power; the putsch is systemic and the victim is the voting public.

So the charade will begin anew. The problem is that for May to maintain the loyalty after the confidence vote of hard-line Tories and the Ulster DUP will require the prime minister to scrap the Irish backstop, and that's a non-starter for the EU because the EU has said it will not abandon Ireland.

A possible way out -- assuming the aforementioned unfolds: May triumphs today in the confidence vote and then concocts a Plan B that goes nowhere in Brussels -- is a suspension of Article 50 and the March 29 divorce date to allow for another referendum. It's a way forward that the mainstream supports, and I have no doubt that Remain would win this time. People are exhausted with the zombie and just want to be done with it.

Unfortunately it looks like the only thing that the British political system can deliver at this point is impasse.

Expect more of the same in the next couple of months. Yves Smith concludes in a post, "Brexit: Chaos," this morning:

May is very wedded to delivering Brexit. And she still seems to think someone will blink if she persists. The only thing that might change this dynamic is if the UK gets an extension and the idea of an Article 50 revocation gets traction in a big way in the coming months. But what is that path by which that occurs? Businesspeople, who you’d expect to have been making a forceful public case for the costs of Brexit, have been almost entirely missing in action. So perhaps I am suffering from a lack of imagination, but despite the high drama of yesterday's vote, nothing fundamental has yet changed.

May Will Lose in Parliament Today, But Don't Expect a Quick Resolution on Brexit + Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Most Popular Politician in the U.S.?

UPDATE: From The Guardian:

Theresa May has sustained the heaviest parliamentary defeat of any British prime minister in the democratic era after MPs rejected her Brexit deal by a resounding majority of 230.

The prime minister immediately announced that she would welcome a vote of no confidence in her own government, and would make time for it on Wednesday.

The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, quickly confirmed he had tabled the motion, with the support of the leaders of all other opposition parties.

Corbyn told MPs: “This is a catastrophic defeat. The house has delivered its verdict on her deal. Delay and denial has reached the end of the line.”

Unfortunately, "delay and denial" has not reached the end of the line. The DUP is going to support May in the confidence vote. The zombie appears likely to plod on. The downside for the Tories is that they will own the crash out 100 percent.

****

 
Parliament begins voting today at 11 AM PST on zombie prime minister Theresa May's Brexit agreement.

The vote is being framed in much the same terms as the vote May pulled at the eleventh hour in December: a narrow loss will allow May wiggle room to perform her Brussels kabuki yet again; a resounding defeat will lead to a confidence vote. You'll notice that the framing doesn't include the possibility of a May victory.

Either way, don't expect a change in the zombie narrative. The New York Times opines in "Brexit Vote: Parliament to Decide on E.U. Withdrawal Plan" that:

Still, few feel that it will bring any sort of conclusion, and many expect Mrs. May, if she survives, to try to return to Brussels for more talks before a second parliamentary vote and then probably ask for a delay to the legal withdrawal date of March 29.

European officials seem optimistic that the other 27 states would agree, as they must unanimously, to an extension, as long as there is a sense that Britain is on track to reach an agreement before elections for the European Parliament, beginning on May 23. No one wants a “no-deal” Brexit, even if some think it may shake the markets enough to cause Britain to rethink.

Because of an amendment passed by parliament last week, May is obligated to return to parliament on Monday, rather than in three weeks, with an alternative Brexit proposal. This affords May the opportunity to begin her "pilgrimage to Brussels" charade all over again. The Ulster Democratic Unionist Party, which keeps May's coalition government afloat, will play along provided May's Plan B scotches the current Irish backstop.

The only thing that is going to stop the zombie in its tracks is for May's government to fall, followed by snap elections. The fact that Corbyn has been reticent up until now to move a confidence vote seems to me evidence that he doesn't have the votes. Those Tories who don't support May's Brexit deal are content to support her as prime minister because the closer the UK gets to March 29 without any sort of agreement the greater the possibility of a crash out (which is really what the hard-line Leavers, the DUP included, desire).

****

In yesterday's national edition of The New York Times there was an article, "Ocasio-Cortez Pushes Democrats to the Left, Whether They Like It or Not," by Shane Goldmacher, which included some stunning numbers:

“Over 200 members voted for Nancy Pelosi today, yet the G.O.P. only booed one: me,” she wrote on Twitter on Jan. 3. “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.”

It has already been retweeted nearly 50,000 times.

Supporters and rivals alike agree that she has upended the traditional rules of engagement on Capitol Hill with a millennial’s intuitive sense of what sells online — all before she has hung anything on her barren office walls or even found a permanent place to live.

[snip]

It has all come in a rush: By the end of her full first day as a congresswoman, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had overtaken Ms. Pelosi’s following on Twitter. Her initials and Twitter handle, @AOC, have become shorthand for the phenomenon that is the talk of Capitol Hill.

She had a full “60 Minutes” segment devoted to her on her first Sunday as a congresswoman. She was the first lawmaker that MSNBC turned to after Mr. Trump’s first Oval Office address for analysis on what was Rachel Maddow’s most-watched show ever. And she has become a viral internet sensation many times over, including one video of her dancing outside her office that has topped 22 million views across the globe.

She’s a draw on the right as much as the left: Fox News spent more than two hours covering her first five days in Congress, according to a tally by Media Matters, the liberal media watchdog group. MSNBC spent 52 minutes and CNN 96 minutes talking about her in that span.

(Interest in Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is so intense that even her chief of staff has appeared on CNN — something almost unheard-of in Congress, where 30-second hits on cable are a sought-after commodity for members of Congress themselves, not their aides.)

In a recent Instagram chat — live from her kitchen with several thousand fans watching — Ms. Ocasio-Cortez outlined her strategy to “shape the national narrative” while chopping vegetables for an Instant Pot recipe.

“In Trump’s America,” she explained, “I’m not a big fan of bipartisanship.”

On the environment, she said that her goal was to move the boundaries of debate far enough to the left that a carbon tax would look like the moderate option, compared to “wildly ambitious” direct government intervention imagined in the Green New Deal.

Perhaps Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s most talked-about idea, raised on “60 Minutes,” has been that people she called “the tippy tops” — those earning above $10 million — should pay a 70 percent rate on income above that threshold. The remark set off days of debate among economists and pundits, on the right and the left, about tax rates unseen in America in decades but common during the post-World War II era.

“I’ve been trying to open up this rhetorical space for many, many years,” said Stephanie Kelton, a former chief economist for Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee.

“They used to talk about the Oprah effect,” said Ms. Kelton, now a professor at Stony Brook University. “I think it’s the Ocasio effect at this point.”

Julian Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and federal housing secretary who is running for president, was shown the clip of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s tax comment during an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos — and then went even further than her.

“As you know, George, there was a time in this country where the top marginal tax rate was over 90 percent,” Mr. Castro explained. “Even during Reagan’s era in the 1980s it was around 50 percent.”

The rank'n'file Democrat has found her avatar. and she is a socialist. The question becomes how long before a smear campaign appears to take down AOC? Tulsi Gabbard's presidential announcement was effectively tarred by numerous stories of her prior support for traditional marriage.

What's clear is that the Democratic National Committee and its many wealthy backers are asking themselves, as Luke Savage writes in Jacobin, "Who Will Be the American Justin Trudeau?"

There are several contenders: Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand. They will parrot AOC's issues. But if elected, they will be, like Obama, staunch neoliberals.

The problem for these candidates is that they have no real activist energy behind them. It took the DNC with an elephantine foot on the scale to hurl Hillary's rotten corpse across the finish line. There will be no such organizational unity of focus for the American Justin Trudeau.

Women as Chattel in Saudi Arabia

If you're want to get caught up on the present state of U.S.-Saudi affairs -- Khashoggi, the blockade of Qatar, the teenage Saudi runaway Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun -- read Ed Wong's dispatches from yesterday, "A Blockade and a Murder: U.S. Faces Enduring Problems With Saudis," and today, "Pompeo Presses Saudi Crown Prince on War, Murder and Diplomatic Rifts."

One comes away with the distinct impression that the tail wags the dog. The Saudi-UAE blockade of Qatar will continue indefinitely, while the U.S. will backup whatever judicial charade the Saudis concoct to shield crown prince Mohammed bin Salman from justice in the Khashoggi assassination.

Pompeo has been touring the Middle East for the last week in an attempt to get the ducks in a row for a war on Iran, part of  which is getting the Saudis to halt combat in Yemen.

My question is when are the Democrats, who now control the House, going to reintroduce a war powers resolution?

A new problem has arisen for the Saudi-U.S. alliance in the wake of the Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun imbroglio, and that is the chattel status of women in the kingdom. As Wong summarizes,

Human rights abuses within Saudi Arabi are also under the international spotlight. On Sunday, The New York Times published an Op-Ed by Alia al-Houthlal, the sister of a women’s rights activist imprisoned in Riyadh, Loujain al-Houthlal, beseeching Mr. Pompeo to ask Prince Mohammed for the release of her sister.

Ms. Houthlal wrote that her sister had been tortured in prison, and that a close associate of the prince, Saud al-Qahtani, who has been implicated in the murder of Mr. Khashoggi, was present at several torture sessions.

Over the weekend, an 18-year-old Saudi woman who had fled the kingdom, Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, arrived in Canada after being granted asylum by Ottawa.

She has talked of the plight of women in the Saudi Arabia and the oppressive system of male guardianship over women, despite Prince Mohammed’s support for some social reform policies.

"[O]ppresive male guardianship over women" is a polite way of saying chattel slavery.

The Times has been doing some good reporting on this issue. "Saudi Women, Tired of Restraints, Find Ways to Flee," by Richard Paddock and Ben Hubbard, doesn't pull any punches:

In 2017, Dina Ali Lasloom, 24, begged for help in a widely viewed online video after she was stopped while transiting in the Philippines. She was held at the airport until family members arrived and took her back to Saudi Arabia, where it is unclear what happened to her.

The women who make it out must contend not only with their families’ efforts to force them home, but also with the Saudi government’s extensive and well-financed efforts to do so, often involving local diplomats pressing for repatriation.

Women who are repatriated can face criminal charges of parental disobedience or harming the kingdom’s reputation.

“As Saudi women, we are still treated as property that belongs to the state,” said Moudi Aljohani, who moved to the United States as a student and has applied for asylum. “It doesn’t matter if the woman has any political views or not. They are going to go after her and forcibly return her.”

Reminds one of the antebellum Fugitive Slave Act in the United States 150 years ago and the Underground Railroad it spawned.

Tulsi Gabbard for President

Tulsi Gabbard, who represents Hawaii's 2nd congressional district, announced on Van Jones' CNN show that she will run for president in 2020. WaPo summarizes:

“There is one main issue that is central to the rest, and that is the issue of war and peace,” Gabbard said, according to CNN. “I look forward to being able to get into this and to talk about it in depth when we make our announcement.”

Gabbard is worth supporting. Max Blumenthal Tweets some of the key segments of Gabbard's interview with Joe Rogan:

If you want a formidable peace candidate in the Democratic primary, she's the one.

NFL Divisional Playoff Round

Last week Benjamin Hoffman of The New York Times did well with his picks in the wild card round. He went with all the favorites except for the Texans at home, and he came away 3-1.

Hoffman's only misfire was in the Eagles-Bears game. At 1-3, that was my only correct prediction.

My rationale for the wild card round was to go with the teams I wanted to win. It was a poor rationale.

Houston was completely manhandled by Indianapolis. The Texans seemed worn down from the regular season. Quarterback Deshaun Watson played poorly.

In the other AFC wild card game, rookie quarterback sensation Lamar Jackson performed even worse than Watson. The Chargers went into Baltimore and suffocated the Ravens potent read-option run offense, and they did it, improbably, by playing seven defense backs.

My hometown Seahawks came up short on the road in Dallas. Seattle should have notched a victory -- it was within the team's grasp -- if not for some excellent play by Cowboy quarterback Dak Prescott. I didn't see that coming. In the past Prescott has been just so-so in big games.

In the final wild card game of last weekend, the Foles magic carpet ride continued for Philly. The Bears, who I thought might be a dark horse favorite to go all the way, could not convert a last-second field goal. It must be a bitter pill to swallow for Chicago fans.

In this weekend's divisional round, Hoffman is once again going all in with favorites, except for one match-up, the Chargers-Patriots game in Foxborough.

After my woeful 1-3 showing last week, I'm going to switch things up and pick not personal favorites but those teams who I believe will win. Last weekend that would have resulted in my going with Hoffman's picks.

But I think Hoffman is off the mark in the divisional round. In the first game of the divisional playoff round, Hoffman acknowledges that Kansas City's defense is poor, and that the unsung Colt's defense is excellent; nonetheless, he predicts a Chiefs win.

Don't get me wrong. I hope Kansas City wins. Pat Mahomes, more than any other single player, turned the NFL ratings drop around this season. An angel-faced quarterback phenom who brought Harlem Globetrotter moves to the gridiron, Mahomes is a breath of fresh air. Most -- myself and Tom Brady included -- saw no end to the NFL hemhorrhaging viewers; but last weekend's wild card games saw a 12-percent increase over last year. That's big, and I believe renewed interest in the NFL is primarily attributable to Mahomes' stewardship of Kansas City's high-powered offense.

My problem with picking the Chiefs is that they're not that good. Seattle's Week 16 win provides a blueprint on how to beat Kansas City. Play ball-control offense and rush the passer on defense. The Colts can do both. Indianapolis is easily the hottest team in the AFC over the last two months. Take the Colts.

For the Saturday night game, Hoffman is taking the Rams in the L.A. Coliseum over the visiting Cowboys.

The Rams, like the Chiefs, have an electric offense, and the team deserves some credit in helping to turn the ratings drop around this season. But over the last month or so the rest of the league has figured out how to beat L.A.: shut down running back Todd Gurley (who, by the way, is nursing two bad knees), double- or triple-team Rams disruptive defensive tackle Aaron Donald, and let Jared Goff try to beat you throwing the ball.

Goff has yet to prove that he can put the club on his shoulders and win the game. The Rams play a lateral motion speed game. The young Cowboys defense is particularly well-suited for this. Dallas has strong pass rushers, fast linebackers and good corner backs. Dak Prescott, unlike Jared Goff, has proven he can deliver in crunch time of a playoff game; plus, the L.A. defense is weak against the run; that's how Seattle managed to stay close to the Rams in both games this season. The Seahawks ran the ball up the gut of the L.A. defense. With the betting line at Rams by a touchdown, if I were in Las Vegas I would put a couple hundred bucks on Dallas. That's how confident I am about this one. Take the Cowboys.

As I confided in my write-up of the regular season, my fear is that the Patriots are headed for another Super Bowl appearance. Perennially this is the doomsday scenario. New England secures home field for the playoffs and mops up all-comers who travel to Foxborough in January. This January's doomsday scenario shakes out as follows: Colts beat Chiefs; Pats beat Chargers. The young Colts, overawed by the super-historical stature of Brady/Belichik, travel to frigid New England and hatch a turd. Andrew Luck can't beat the Patriots. Think Deflate Gate.

But first New England has to best the Chargers. Hoffman likes Philip Rivers, and he is picking the Chargers for the one upset of the divisional round.

I wish. I would love to see Anthony Lynn hand Bill Belichik his hat. But New England's defense is better than people think, and the Chargers defense is not going to surprise Tom Brady like they did Lamar Jackson. Plus, I think Patriots running backs Sony Michel and James White are going to have a big day. Asking big bodies to jet coast-to-coast in back-to-back weeks is tough. Take the Patriots.

The final game of the divisional playoff round is at the Louisiana Superdome. The Saints are favored by eight points over the defending Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles. It is the largest spread of any of the divisional round games. Hoffman is going with New Orleans. And that's a pick that has a lot going for it. The Saints have a good defense, Drew Brees and two good running backs. I am concerned about Philadelphia's corner backs. If Mitch Trubisky can torch the Philly secondary, what do you think Drew Brees is going to do?

But at this point Nick Foles is what qualifies as an apotheosis in our alienated, fallen age. Let the scared triumph over the profane! Take the Eagles.

Don't Believe the Hype

The United States military announced today that the troop withdrawal from Syria has begun, but it doesn't say where or when:

The surprise announcement came in a statement from Col. Sean Ryan, the spokesman for the United States-led coalition against the Islamic State. Colonel Ryan said the coalition had “begun the process of our deliberate withdrawal from Syria,” adding that he would provide no further information about “specific timelines, locations or troop movements.”

But the announcement, coming days after [national security adviser John] Bolton’s remarks, added to a climate of chaos surrounding Washington’s policy on Syria at a time when Turkey has threatened to invade the country.

Ben Hubbard, "U.S. Begins Syria Withdrawal, Amid Uncertainty Over Strategy"

 Russia is skeptical that anything of the sort is actually happening:

Reflecting the confusion, Interfax reported that the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said in Moscow on Friday that the American military’s announcement added to the Kremlin’s growing doubts that the United States would soon withdraw from Syria.

It seems like Washington “is looking for a reason to stay,” she said. “I cannot share your confidence that they are leaving there because we never saw an official strategy.

Trump's initial announcement that U.S. troops would withdraw from Syria in 30 days precipitated a march of the zombies. SecDef Mad Dog Mattis and ISIS czar Brett McGurk resigned. Then the withdrawal was moved from 30 days to four months. Then, this week, Bolton announced that there were conditions that had to met before the U.S. would leave Syria. These conditions were dismissed by Turkey, with Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu promising once again a military campaign to oust U.S. proxy Kurdish forces from their Rojava stronghold.

We're right back to where we started when Trump made his initial pullout pledge. Hence the need to trot out a military spokesman to say, "No, we're really going. Trust us." The whole thing is a charade.

Like the Tories commitment to Brexit, zombie logic rules the U.S. occupation of northern Syria: It's unsustainable, shot through with contradictions, and is maintained by complete prevarication.

The only solace one can find is looking forward to the eventual collapse of the zombie. Brexit and northern Syria seem to be running on parallel timelines.

Next week May's zombie government should -- I say should because I've predicted her demise more than once -- lose a crucial vote and begin to wind down.

In Idlib Al Qaeda (HTS/Nusra) has recently consolidated its hold on the province at the expense of the Turkish proxy Free Syrian Army (re-branded the National Liberation Front). HTS/Nusra never adhered to the Sochi ceasefire agreement.

The question now is whether the U.S. will threaten to bomb the Syrian Arab Army if it begins an offensive against Al Qaeda in Idlib. It did last time, prior to the Sochi ceasefire. Now there will no question that the U.S. is acting as "Al Qaeda's air force."

Meanwhile, the Kurds are in talks with Syria regarding the status of Rojava. The Turks no doubt have communicated their red lines to Damascus: disarmament, no political autonomy, etc.

One thing is clear. No one can count on the United States. It's a blubbering zombie.