Trump Will End Up Missing Mueller

Trump has a war of his own (see Bill Van Auken's "Tensions rise between US, Russia and China over Venezuelan coup"). Add to that his decision to join the court case to abolish Obamacare, and one can safely predict his defeat in 2020. Any Democrat, even Hillary, should be able to romp. With the ludicrous Mueller out of the picture, Trump will own his own narrative; it will be a litany of missteps and pratfalls. Mueller will have turned out to be Trump's best friend, and he will miss him dearly.

Rukban

The caliphate suffered its final defeat in Syria over the weekend, giving up the ghost to U.S.-proxy Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) in the town of Baghouz, "the last piece of territory held by ISIS."

One expected more fanfare; instead, the story came and went with hardly any comment. Trump has been proclaiming "mission accomplished" for months, and he has gone back and forth about stationing U.S. troops in Syria, the latest being February's announcement that a total of 400 will remain indefinitely, 200 in Rojava and 200 at al-Tanf.

Like the Integrity Initiative, al-Tanf is one of those topics that the Western mainstream media prefers to ignore. It is a critical border crossing (Syria-Iraq-Jordan) captured by jihadists in 2016 and expanded into a permanent base by the U.S.

Al-Tanf has been in the news recently. The U.S. and its proxies refuse to allow 40,000 refugees  living at the Rukban camp located within al-Tanf to leave. Syria and Russia have tried to negotiate with the U.S. for the freedom of the refugees, and on Saturday 360 refugees were allowed to leave.

The UNHCR has gotten involved. WHO has declared the conditions at Rukban "deplorable." According to a statement released from a multilateral meeting (one the U.S. refused to participate in) yesterday on Rukban:

The position of the command of the American troops is puzzling. They themselves invaded the territory of Syria, illegally occupied the 55-kilometer zone of al-Tanf and, under false pretences, blocked humanitarian initiatives to disband the Rukban camp. Despite the assurances of our American partners about joint cooperation, their goal is clearly not to save Syrian citizens dying from insanitary conditions, hunger, cold and diseases.

Brexit: Indicative Votes Tomorrow

The Brexit goalposts have been moved. The crash-out date has been pushed back from Friday to April 12.

Prime minister Theresa May has delayed bringing her withdrawal agreement before the House of Commons for a third "meaningful" vote. The thinking now is that May will reintroduce her divorce deal later in the week. Tomorrow the House of Commons will hold a series of "indicative" votes on alternatives to May's proposal. Those alternatives likely will include a customs union (soft Brexit), another referendum, or revoking Brexit outright.

As Stephen Castle reports in "Parliament Grabs Control of Brexit From a Wounded Theresa May":

Mrs. May is still hoping that no alternative will command more support than her blueprint, giving her a realistic shot at pushing her plan through by presenting it as the only alternative to a no-deal Brexit or a long extension.

Critics think that Mrs. May is favoring the interests of her Conservative Party by being willing to contemplate a no-deal Brexit — something hard-line pro-Brexit Tory lawmakers back — over a cross-party effort to produce a softer Brexit that might win approval from Parliament but would split the Tories and possibly precipitate a second election.

On the other hand, moderate voices in the party complain that allowing a no-deal Brexit against much opposition would be a risky move that could haunt the party for years to come.

There is a chance that a soft Brexit might garner a majority tomorrow. May is trying to beat that back by saying that a soft Brexit will precipitate elections.

It is important to remember that Brexit terra firma is erected on the avoidance of a general election.

But with head of the zombie May hanging by a string elections appear to be inevitable; to avoid them -- to usher May out without holding a general election -- would require a miracle.

On the other hand, Yves Smith interprets recent events as too little, too late to avoid a crash-out. See "Brexit: Controlled Flight into Terrain."

Russiagaters Beat a Retreat

A coworker poked her head into my office Friday afternoon and announced, "Mueller has delivered his report."  A few hours later, at the entrance to my apartment building, I ran into a neighbor, a bitter transsexual, who seemed to be in an unusually good mood, confident that once the contents of Mueller's report are revealed, Trump will be exposed as Putin's plaything.

What are all these liberal Democrats going to do now that Mueller has finished his Russia investigation without charging Trump?

Clearly the expectation was that Trump would be charged with accepting cash from the Kremlin or somehow facilitating the purported hack of the Democratic National Committee or the pilfering of John Podesta's Gmail password.

Trump's collusion with Putin has been an article of faith among card-carrying Democrats, and a mainstay of the mainstream media, for more than two years. Now what?

The walk-back is not going to be a walk-back but a double-time retreat. As Matt Taibbi writes,
"It’s Official – Russiagate is This Generation’s WMD."

The perspective of a proponent of Russiagate is just as illuminating. In "Three Takeaways From the Barr Report"  David Leonhardt utters the unthinkable:

I’m obviously not a fan of the president. And I think it’s important for all of Trump’s critics to accept the possibility — the likelihood, at this point — that his campaign did not work together with Russia in a meaningful way.

Yes, the Trump campaign seemed shockingly and unpatriotically open to doing so. But that’s not the same as following through. Progressives shouldn’t go down the Fox News road and start adopting their own factually weak or outright false conspiracy theories, like those involving Barack Obama’s birthplace, voter fraud, Uranium One, George Soros, Solyndra and on and on.

But that is exactly what Russiagate has been for the last two-plus years. There wasn't a vast conspiracy by a foreign power to elect Trump because no one, Trump himself, thought Trump was going to win.

Russiagate was a smokescreen to obscure the fact that the "greatest nation on earth" freely elected a white supremacist billionaire huckster who campaigned against the "Washington Consensus."

EU Gives UK a Second Chance. Labour Must Call for Another No Confidence Vote

A Brexit crash out has been delayed. After meeting in Brussels yesterday, leaders of the European Union crafted a multi-step compromise. Call it a zombie shuffle.

First, if May can get a third meaningful vote in the House of Commons on her withdrawal agreement (in other words, if Speaker Bercow reverses himself and allows a third vote), and the third time proves to be a charm and her agreement is miraculously approved, then the UK has until May 22 to leave the EU, an additional two months that will be needed to pass various supporting legislation disentangling Great Britain from the bloc.

If May fails for a third time, and there is almost no hint that she will succeed, then the EU has granted a delay until April 12, apparently the last possible date to avoid participation in elections for the European Parliament, to provide time for an alternative proposal to the withdrawal agreement. A second Brexit referendum and a general election were mentioned. If the UK can come up with such a substantive path forward, then the EU will grant a lengthy extension.

So, yes, the EU has thrown the UK a lifeline. The no confidence vote in January should have ousted May. That was the rational decision. But all the Tories who had voted against her withdrawal agreement stuck with the prime minister knowing that having a zombie as the head of government served their intention of impasse and crash out. New elections are to be avoided at all costs.

Nothing has changed this underlying dynamic. One good thing though is that after the withdrawal agreement fails for the third time, Labour will almost certainly make a motion of no confidence in the government. I was under the impression that May was safe for a year from another no confidence vote, but that pertains only to her party organization. The opposition can make as many no confidence motions as it pleases.

Since May admitted in Brussels yesterday that she has no alternative to the current withdrawal agreement, as soon as it fails next week, Labour must make its no confidence motion to prevent May from chewing up any of the remaining two weeks before the new crash-out date, April 12

Brexit Beulah Land

There are eight days before a crash-out Brexit, and even a delay until June 30, which is what May is peddling now, looks to be a long shot. Yves Smith assesses the situation this morning in "Brexit: Opening the Seals."

The EU is signaling its opposition to any extension unless May can get her withdrawal agreement through parliament in the next week. This would require that Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow allow a third "meaningful vote" on May's withdrawal agreement, something he overruled earlier in the week. The EU could facilitate a Bercow about-face by officially approving some side letters to the agreement. This would allow Bercow to argue that the agreement had changed and hence could be voted anew.

But if Bercow waves another vote through, there is no indication, even allowing for a DUP flip, that May's plan now has the votes to pass. The votes would have to come from Labour because the Brexit ultras among the Tories are going to stand pat; they're very close to the Beulah Land of a crash out.

A petition drive is underway to revoke Article 50. May has the power to revoke Article 50, but she steadfastly refuses to do so.

This is it. Time is about to run out. The British parliamentary system is at impasse. Panic will increase in the coming days. Things will not get better; things will get worse. When you've been living a zombie apocalypse year after year -- let's face it, decades -- you can't expect nirvana overnight.

The Beto Hallucination

There is some good stuff in Thomas Edsall's "Is Betomania Real or Phony?" Edsall tends toward the perspective that Beto O'Rourke is a will-o'-wisp, a not-Ted-Cruz with a conservative voting record as a congressman from El Paso, who will fail to gain purchase in a crowded Democratic primary field heavy on policy.

Beto's $6.1 million raised in the first 24 hours of his presidential campaign was eye-popping. It seems to me, much like Kamala Harris' campaign kickoff attended by 20,000 supporters, too good to be true.

The mainstream media does love Beto, slathering him with attention and amplifying his completely spent and discredited call "to reach across the aisle and act together as one nation." The mainstream media loves to peddle a wholly fictitious bipartisan centrism because it acts as a smokescreen to allow the corporate oligarchy that runs the planet to continue to rape and pillage freely.

One particularly interesting aspect of Edsall's piece is the assessment that Beto bites more out of Bernie's hide than Biden's. I would have thought it the other way around since Biden peddles the same centrist snake oil. But that's not what the early polling reveals:

While head-to-head polls are still in a larval stage, they do signal the demographic sources of support for the candidates.

The most recent CNN poll, released on Tuesday, shows, for example, that the leader, Joe Biden, at 28 percent overall, gets more support from moderates than from liberals, more from older voters than young voters, more from men than women and more from whites than from minorities. Bernie Sanders, at 20 percent, is just the opposite, stronger among liberals, young voters, minorities and women.

O’Rourke, at 11 percent, has a long way to go to catch up with either Biden or Sanders. But the CNN poll shows that O’Rourke’s supporters tend to be slightly more liberal than moderate, young rather than old, female rather than male, and O’Rourke gets more support from African-Americans and Hispanics than from whites.

In other words, O’Rourke’s backing is tilted to constituencies that are not normally associated with a moderate white Democratic politician whose voting record, by party standards, is on the center-right.

If these demographic patterns hold, O’Rourke is competing more directly with Sanders (and Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren) than with Biden.

The Sanders-O’Rourke battle has already begun. Bernie Sanders loyalists have been challenging O’Rourke’s credentials for the past three months as both men seek support from younger voters.

“Forces loyal to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders are waging an increasingly public war against Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the new darling of Democratic activists,” Jonathan Allen and Alex Seitz-Wald of NBC News wrote in December. “O’Rourke’s ability to connect with younger and progressive white voters,” they continued, “puts him in direct competition with the Vermont senator.”

On Tuesday, Sanders announced that he has hired David Sirota, one of O’Rourke’s harshest critics, as a senior adviser and speechwriter. On Dec. 22, Sirota published a 1,700 word denunciation of O’Rourke in The Guardian that concluded,

"Another blank-slate Democrat who pretends there is a unifying third way between the 99 percent and the 1 percent and who refuses to take sides in big fights against corporate power — that may excite Betomaniacs, establishment Democrats and those with stakes in the status quo, but it won’t rescue our country and it won’t save the planet."

If you're scratching for every single vote, yes, having Beto in the race is an impediment for Bernie. But general demographic overlap shouldn't be a real cause for a concern. O'Rourke will not eat Sanders' lunch.

Participation in presidential primaries is for the committed. Beto attracts the non-engaged voter, someone who views politics as a Hollywood drama. Push comes to shove the Beto voter is not going to give up his/her Saturday morning to pack into some hall for hours to attend a caucus.

Bernie will keep his true believers. Biden will have the party machinery, the union officials who double as PCOs, et al., just as Hillary did. Basically, once the crowed primary field is culled, it is going to be 2016 all over again.

I am the Product of Capitalism

I have a big canvas bag, like twice or maybe even thrice the size of a regular canvas tote bag. Every week or week-and-a-half I take it down chock full to the street-level recycle bin that serves the apartment building where I live. 

I can't believe how much recyclable plastic I accumulate in a week; it dwarfs by volume the glass and tin I toss into the bag, the daily newspaper I read too.

I buy a lot of berries, salad and fruit juice. All come in high-quality recyclable plastic containers. So while I might eat a healthy, organic diet, I am spewing out a load of plastic on a regular timetable.

I know intuitively that this augurs ill if not outright doom. How can one modest single person -- I only eat one full meal a day! -- produce so much plastic waste? Multiple that by billions and you have a classic case of overshoot.

And make no mistake, waste it is. Ninety-one percent of plastic is not recycled. Plastic that is recycled ends up in landfill anyway, and from there finds its way to the sea. Then you get yesterday's story, "Dead Whale Found With 88 Pounds of Plastic Inside Body in the Philippines":

A beached whale found in the Philippines on Saturday died with 88 pounds of plastic trash inside its body, an unusually large amount even by the grim standards of what is a common threat to marine wildlife.

The 1,100-pound whale, measuring 15 feet long, was found in the town of Mabini with more than 40 pounds of plastic bags inside its stomach, along with a variety of other disposable plastic products.

[snip]

The whale’s grisly death brought renewed focus to the worldwide problem of plastics ending up in oceans; a 2015 study estimated that five million to 13 million metric tons of plastic waste pollute oceans each year. But the problem is particularly severe in the Philippines, the world’s third-biggest contributor of plastic to oceans behind China and Indonesia.

Remember: more plastic debris than fish in the sea by 2050.

Some would say, "Do something about it. Stop buying plastic." I have basically. I'm not sure that my grocer even offers heads of lettuce anymore. Fresh juice doesn't come in glass containers.

Late-stage capitalism and colossal, ocean-choking plastic waste are synonymous.

Info War on Venezuela

It is total information warfare when it comes to Venezuela. I noticed Saturday morning that Twitter had labeled photos of the #HandsOffVenezuela march in Washington, D.C. as sensitive content, a bizarre form of censorship. Why are pictures of peace protesters sensitive?

The New York Times persists in blaming the Maduro administration for the blackout caused by U.S. sabotage. Nicholas Casey's lurid "Venezuela Was Crumbling. A Blackout Tipped Parts of It Into Anarchy.," appeared in the Saturday national edition. The passage devoted to identifying the cause of the massive multi-day power outage blames a brush fire:

The spectacular power failure was most likely result of a simple brush fire that destabilized the country’s electrical grid, union leaders said. It underscored the lack of maintenance of key infrastructure and the years of mismanagement of the country’s economy, which have become the twin hallmarks of the nation’s economic collapse.

Anonymous "union leaders" become anonymous "local electrical engineers" in a Reuters story, "Venezuela's Guaido launches national tour in 'new phase' to oust Maduro," which appeared Saturday:

Maduro has blamed a U.S. cyberattack for the outage, and this week the country’s chief prosecutor asked the Supreme Court to probe Guaido for alleged involvement in “sabotage” of the country’s electricity system. But local electrical engineers told Reuters the blackout was the result of years of lack of maintenance.

I think it's pretty obvious that these anonymous sources are opposition figures peddling lies to cover their Yankee masters' asses. Collapsing a nation's power grid certainly qualifies as a crime against humanity.

Nicholas Casey was back at it on Sunday with his latest info-war salvo, "‘It Is Unspeakable’: How Maduro Used Cuban Doctors to Coerce Venezuela Voters," a story built out of quotes from Cuban defectors.

The fact is that the U.S.-led Guaido-fronted Venezuelan opposition has been getting shellacked, even with the full power of the Western mainstream media monopoly filling the air with flak.

The New York Times might despise Trump, but it's willing to fetch the water when it comes to generating cover for yet another regime change campaign.

Brexit: Is Anything Clear?

Once again to get a sense of what's happening with Brexit the best place to turn is Naked Capitalism and the posts of Yves Smith. She's hitting her stride like she did back in the days of chicken between Greece and the troika.

This morning's offering, "Brexit: The Kindness of Strangers," tallies the results of yesterday session of parliament. The extension of Article 50 passed overwhelmingly, but a second Brexit referendum was voted down by a wide margin, with Labour abstaining.

So now what? Apparently May's withdrawal agreement will be voted for a third time next week. Smith raises the possibility that the DUP might flip, but this appears to me too little, too late.

Once May's deal suffers its third defeat, the prime minister will head off again to Brussels to ask for an extension. What then will the EU do?

The rest of Smith's post is spent sussing out the answer to that question. Her assessment is uncertain. The EU will want a clear definition of what the extension will be used for. Absent that, the only extension that the EU is likely to endorse is a long-term one, in the ballpark of one year (or so the thinking goes).

If this is the outcome -- a long-term extension -- one can begin to see the path forward. The zombie May will finally be decapitated and a general election called. I think the Tories are confident enough now, following a collapse of Labour in the polls, that they can reemerge will a solid majority. But this doesn't accomplish anything in terms of Brexit; it merely allows the Conservatives to re-position themselves on what should be more solid footing, buying themselves more time.

Venezuela's Blackout the Result of Sabotage

While The New York Times continues to pitch the sabotage of Venezuela's Guri hydroelectric plant as a Maduro administration lie, a desperate conspiracy theory meant to shield a tottering regime from responsibility, a Reuters story appeared yesterday, "Venezuela seeks to restore power amid looting; China offers help," confirmed, to my mind at least, that the power plant was in fact sabotaged:

China on Wednesday offered to provide help and technical support to restore electricity, and backed Maduro’s assertion that the problem was the result of sabotage.

China, always so reticent to pick sides in international disputes, is willing to stake Maduro on this. That's big. Yes, China has significant investments in the country. Regardless of that, the PRC is willing to joust directly with the USA not in the South China Sea but in Uncle Sam's "backyard."

Niqnaq features Colonel Cassad's take, "Eclipse in Venezuela: a crime against humanity."

Brexit: Still No Path Forward

Yves Smith has a good assessment ("Brexit: Chaos Visible") of yesterday's vote in parliament rejecting by a large margin for a second time prime minister Theresa May's Brexit deal with the European Union.

Assuming that the parliamentary votes go as expected the next couple of days -- the vote to reject a crash out; the vote to ask the EU for an extension of the March 29 deadline  -- Smith thinks the EU might not be in the mood to rubber-stamp a delay (and if it does it will demand a detailed plan for a path forward in return, not merely a few week or few months kick-the-can exercise).

Plus, Smith thinks that there is no hope for parliament to grab the wheel. A moribund, one-trick-pony executive remains in the driver's seat.

Smith mentions that to delay the March 29 Article 50 deadline will require something like 50 separate parliamentary votes. There is little reason to believe that a badly fractured parliament has the ability to delay a crash out even if that is its intention.

Another Momentous Brexit Vote in Parliament

The zombie drama of Brexit plods to yet another (faked?) climax today with a re-vote in parliament of prime minister Theresa May's "divorce deal" with the European Union. The last vote in January May suffered the largest parliamentary defeat by a prime minister in the modern era.

To prevent that from happening again, May has been engaged in what seems to be constant shuttling to the continent to pry concessions from EU leadership. Those concessions concern what is referred to as the "Irish Backstop." May's coalition government is kept afloat by ten MPs from the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland. The DUP, and many Tory Brexit ultras, don't like the way May's "divorce deal," absent a comprehensive agreement to be negotiated over the next couple of years, keeps Northern Ireland yoked to the Republic of Ireland -- and, hence, the UK to the EU -- perpetually.

May's last-ditch trip to Strasbourg yesterday to wrangle some sort of compelling statement from European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker turned out to be a bust. Today May's attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, according to NYT's Stephen Castle, said that last-minute pledges from the bloc did not fundamentally alter the legal status of the agreement. Juncker proclaimed there will be no more interpretations of interpretations.

So the vote, which happens at Westminster tonight, will go much like the one in January, with maybe the margin of defeat not as great. The reason we know this is that the DUP and the Brexit hard-liners are requesting that May postpone the vote.

Once May's deal is defeated again, two votes will take place later in the week. The first will be whether MPs want a no-deal, or crash-out, Brexit; the next, will be to ask the EU for an extension of the March 29 Article 50 deadline.

I'd say that it appears like progress might actually be visible. But I've been fooled before. If May loses tonight, as she should, and parliament successfully stages the vote first against crash-out and then postponement, parliament will be running the show and May will be merely a corpse propped up in the showroom window.

It's hard to see how May's government survives like this. But she has survived up until now. Maybe the Tories and the Blairites think Corbyn has been softened up sufficiently with incessant claims of anti-Semitism that he's vulnerable at the polls.

Mainstream Media: Purveyor of Fake News

Over the weekend The New York Times performed an about-face and debunked the regime change casus belli that Venezuelan troops set fire to aid trucks stuck at the Colombian border (see "Footage Contradicts U.S. Claim That Nicolás Maduro Burned Aid Convoy"). Max Blumenthal had already debunked the Maduro-burns-aid-trucks canard in real time.

Glenn Greenwald has a masterly write-up in "NYT’s Exposé on the Lies About Burning Aid Trucks in Venezuela Shows How U.S. Government and Media Spread Pro-War Propaganda" where he concludes that

What we have here is classic Fake News – spread on Twitter, by U.S. officials and U.S. media stars – with the clear and malicious intent to start a war. But no western proponents of social media censorship will call for their accounts to be cancelled nor call for their posts to be deleted. That’s because “Fake News” and the war against it is strictly a means of combating propaganda by U.S. adversaries; the U.S. and its alliesmaintain extensive programs to spread Fake News online and none of those anti-Fake News crusaders call for those to be shut down.

And the next time claims are made about Venezuela designed to fuel regime change and wars, the independent journalists and analysts who were absolutely right in this instance – who recognized and documented the lies of the U.S. Government weeks before the New York Times did – will again be ignored or, at best, mocked. Meanwhile, those in the media and Foreign Policy Community who uncritically amplified and spread this dangerous lie will be treated as the Serious People whose pronouncements are the only ones worth hearing. With rare exception, dissent on Venezuela will continue to be barred.

That’s because the U.S. media, by design, does not permit dissent on U.S. foreign policy, particularly when it comes to false claims about U.S. adversaries. That’s why skeptics of U.S. regime change in Venezuela, or dissenters on the prevailing orthodoxies about Russia, have largely been disappeared from mainstream media outlets, just as they were in 2002 and 2003.

"Classic Fake News" methods of mainstream reporting are spreading to cover larger sections of the daily newspaper. Brexit, the trade war with China, the occupation of Afghanistan repeat the same talking points endlessly, so much so it is hard not to ignore them (which is likely the intention).

It's Official: Refusing to Pledge Allegiance to the State of Israel is Anti-Semitic

The definitive write-up of yesterday's vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on an anti-Semitism resolution camouflaged within a broader "anti-hate" resolution is Barry Grey's "Democrats push through resolution branding Rep. Omar’s criticism of Israel as 'anti-Semitic' ."

Reading the newspaper yesterday at lunch, the reporting was such that it was not clear that any resolution would be voted. Pelosi pulled the original resolution on anti-Semitism, the one backed by key members of New York's Jewish congressional delegation, following a revolt of her freshman rank'n'file.

But a new, more inclusive anti-bigotry resolution was cobbled together which included white supremacy and anti-Muslim hatred, and that's the resolution that passed overwhelming yesterday, 407-to-23.

This vote, ambiguous and watered down as it is, has to be interpreted as a significant victory for the forces fighting desperately to maintain a capsizing status quo. Criticism of the state of Israel is now deemed anti-Semitic in mainstream discourse.

Grey explains how the incident involving an appearance by Ilhan Omar, Minnesota's representative for the 5th CD, at a bookstore metastasized into the latest anti-Semitism frenzy:

Last week, speaking at a Washington DC book store, Omar complained of demands that she be thrown off of the Foreign Relations Committee, saying she should not be compelled to declare “allegiance to a foreign country.” This was seized on by Rep. Eliot Engel, a hard-line Zionist who chairs the House Foreign Relations Committee, who called her remarks an “anti-Semitic trope” echoing slanders of Jews as disloyal aliens. Engel demanded Omar apologize once again and began drawing up a condemnatory resolution.

This is important. Omar never accused Jews of being AIPAC shills or having dual loyalty. Omar merely stated the obvious: She should not, as an elected member of congress, have to pledge fealty to Israel. The "dual loyalty" implication is a leap produced in the fevered brain of stalwarts to a collapsing "centrism."

No better example of this fevered, cockeyed anti-Semitism overreach is Ted Deutch's quote from yesterday's House vote:

“We are having this debate because of the language of one of our colleagues, language that suggests Jews like me who serve in the United States in Congress and whose father earned a purple heart fighting the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge, that we are not loyal Americans,” Representative Ted Deutch, Democrat of Florida, said Thursday morning in an emotional speech on the House floor.

Of course Omar said nothing of the sort. All she said, the most that can be implied from her words, is that she -- she -- should not have to pledge allegiance to Israel. She is right.

But even a suggestion that one doesn't wish to publicly proclaim allegiance to Israel is now being peddled in the mainstream as proof of anti-Semitism.

Amazing! What chutzpah. And unsustainable I should think.

Bloomberg, BDS and Biden

The news is neither good nor bad: Michael Bloomberg announced on Tuesday that he would not be running for president. After an extensive examination of his chances for victory, Bloomberg concluded his money would best be spent on launching a new initiative:

Beyond Carbon: a grassroots effort to begin moving America as quickly as possible away from oil and gas and toward a 100 percent clean energy economy.

At the heart of Beyond Carbon is the conviction that, as the science has made clear, every year matters. The idea of a Green New Deal — first suggested by the columnist Tom Friedman more than a decade ago — stands no chance of passage in the Senate over the next two years. But Mother Nature does not wait on our political calendar, and neither can we.

Speaking of Tom Friedman, his latest column "Ilhan Omar, Aipac and Me," is vintage Friedman. He defends the failed status quo -- in this case, the prohibition on criticism of Israel -- by marshaling arguments from the anti-establishment left.

Friedman grants that AIPAC is a blight, and chides its joined-at-the-hip alliance with the GOP, but he takes Ilham Omar's non-committal equivocations on BDS as proof that she hankers for the destruction of the Israeli state. I kid you not.

Here's Friedman's best shot, such as it is, at Omar:

When I see that dual-loyalty charge coming from a congresswoman who first signaled opposition to B.D.S. and then support for it, when I see it coming from a congresswoman who has never been to Israel, when I see it coming from a congresswoman who, to my knowledge, has never criticized the Palestinian leadership for its corruption and failure — time and again — to seize on peace overtures from Israeli leaders who, unlike Netanyahu, actually wanted to forge a two-state solution, when I see it coming from a congresswoman who seems to be obsessed with Israel’s misdeeds as the biggest problem in the Middle East — not Iran’s effective occupation of four Arab capitals, its support for ethnic cleansing and the use of poison gas in Syria and its crushing of Lebanese democracy — it makes me suspicious of her motives.

Basically it is the same old same old: corrupt Palestinian leadership (corrupted by who?); an Iranian bogeyman (a very tough sell); and Syrian poison gas (whose poison gas?).

But back to Bloomberg's latest aborted presidential run. The New York Times story made the argument that Bloomberg's path to the White House was a long shot, but it becomes well-nigh impossible with Biden in the race.

That leads one to believe that Biden is coming in (because, remember, Bloomberg waited until after Hillary's Super Tuesday 2016 romp before announcing that he would not pursue the presidency). All indications are that Biden will join the race soon. But why hasn't he announced already? Could it be he wants Andrew Cockburn's devastating Harper's cover story "No Joe!" off the newsstands before he tosses his hat in the ring.

Biden 2020 will be a version of Hillary 2016, with the DNC mucking about and a neo-McCarthyite song so shrill voters will a large supply of wax to plug up their ears.

The "Anti-Capitalism = Anti-Semitism" Freak Out

Here's the dead-end of conflating dissent against the neoliberal status quo with anti-Semitism. From Chris Marsden's "The assault on Jeremy Corbyn is a warning that must be heeded":

Blairite MP Siobhain McDonagh told John Humphrys on BBC Radio Four that anti-Semitism is “very much part… of hard left politics, to be against capitalists and to see Jewish people as the financiers of capital. Ergo you are anti-Jewish people.”

When Humphrys asked, “In other words, to be anti-capitalist you have to be anti-Semitic?” McDonagh replied, “Yes.” This astonishing libel against socialism passed without comment from the BBC’s presenter.

Now another anti-Semitism resolution is to be voted in the U.S. House of Representatives, likely tomorrow (see Sheryl Gay Stolberg's House’s "Anti-Semitism Resolution Exposes Generational Fight Over Ilhan Omar"), all because Ilhan Omar made a statement to the effect, as she tweeted in an exchange with Nita Lowey:

I should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee.

The "Israel, right or wrong" Democratic leadership of Pelosi and Hoyer are going to be on the losing end of this one. As the American Conservative notes, the polling on this skews heavily to old vs. young:

According to a 2018 Pew Research Center report, the number of Republicans that sympathize with Israel over Palestine has increased to 79 percent, while sympathy for Israel dropped among Democrats to 27 percent, a disturbing trend especially for the anti-BDS movement. Besides growing sympathy for the Palestinians, progressives are echoing the ACLU and other groups who say any law prohibiting [BDS] boycotts won’t ultimately survive a Supreme Court test. They are probably right.

Equating anti-capitalism with anti-Semitism is a true sign of desperation, a flashing red light along a road where the tried-and-true Russian bogeyman hazard has already been passed along the way to our crack-up.

The Term "Pinko" is Starting to Reappear

Trudeau continues to bleed out in Ottawa. Hillary opts out of another presidential run. Trump's trade war with China looks to conclude without laying a finger on Made in China 2025.

More fodder for the argument that neoliberal hegemony is cracking.

A guy I know emailed me yesterday about the following cover story devoted to the flourishing pinko cultural in New York City:

When did everyone become a socialist?” That’s the question posed on the cover of next week’s New York magazine: “Coolheaded Obaman technocracy is out; strident left-wing moral clarity is in. And while this atmospheric shift is felt most acutely among the left-literary crowd, it’s also bled into the general discourse, such that Teen Vogue is constantly flacking against capitalism and . . . one of the most devastating insults in certain corners of the internet is to call someone a neoliberal."

No, I mean, it's a real problem for the ruling elite.

That's why you had to recreate the evil Russian bogeyman bear Putin Rasputin.

Reading Ross Douthat's "The State of Russiagate” I noticed that he didn't hyperlink the "well corroborated" allegation that Russian intelligence was behind the hack of the DNC and the purloined Podesta emails released through WikiLeaks. If it is so well corroborated where's the hypernk to the proof-positive report? He hyperlinks to the Steele dossier, and that's it. The Steele dossier is a joke. What Douthat calls disinformation delivered as intelligence.

Ask yourself, What did the DNC hack reveal? (Let’s not even broach the topic that to my knowledge has never been refuted – the DNC couldn’t’ve been hacked because the download speeds online didn’t permit it; it had to be a leak to a thumb drive.) It revealed that the DNC leadership was conspiring against Bernie Sanders. What did the Podesta emails reveal? They revealed Hillary’s Goldman speech where she pledged allegiance to the banksters and told them, “I’m with you.”  
A Russian bogeyman had to be inflated – it’s part of our cultural DNA going all the way back to the Russian Revolution – because otherwise the Democratic Party, the party of Obama and Clinton – would be exposed for exactly what it is -- a private organization funded overwhelming by millionaires and billionaires to enact legislation favorable to their class.
Elites think they can derail the dialectic of history through disinformation and counter-intelligence. But it can only buy so much time before we end up like Egypt and Thailand. Truly closed society police states. 

Swing to the Left by Democratic Rank'n'File Revives Call for Fraudulent Centrism

There have been a raft of opinion pieces lately about the Democratic Party moving too far to the left. David Leonhardt's "A Dose of Moderation Would Help Democrats" is one of these. Leonhardt's columns allow The New York Times opinion page to air perspectives well to the left of what usually appears there. So it is somewhat noteworthy that the newspaper's progressive scout is alerting its readers to hold up for a centrist candidate in the Democratic primary.

Leonardt's argument is facile. Two Gallup polls show 1) that a majority of Democrats identify as liberal, and 2) most Democrats -- "by a margin of 54 percent to 41 percent" -- think the party should move to the center rather than the left. Hence, Leonhardt favors Obama's advice: the Dems should nominate a centrist.

The problem here is that centrist superman Joe Biden is tarrying once again on the sidelines seemingly unable to make up his mind, while unabashed centrists like Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar have so far resonated about as much as a liquid confetti fart.

That leaves Leonhardt pining for Sherrod Brown to hurry up and enter the race. I guess John Hickenlooper doesn't get Leonhardt's juices flowing.

Leonhardt forgets the the lesson from 2016: A centrist who doesn't excite the Democratic base is prone to defeat even though opinion polls say otherwise.

I think it's a fruitless effort at this point to keep the Democratic base penned in on the neoliberal reservation. Biden's candidacy is enormously flawed but it still might offer the best bet.

Good News: Justin Trudeau is on the Ropes

It's good news that prime minister Justin Trudeau is on the ropes (see Ian Austen's "Trudeau’s Political Woes Mount With Demands for More Inquiries"). Trudeau is accused of demanding that his justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, settle a criminal case with Quebec-based engineering giant SNC-Lavalin, and then moving her out of justice to the department of veteran affairs when she refused.

Wilson-Raybould resigned instead. Wednesday she was before the justice committee of the Canadian House of Commons providing damning testimony against Trudeau:

During nearly four hours of testimony before the House of Commons justice committee on Wednesday evening, the former minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, repeatedly contradicted and undermined Mr. Trudeau’s assertions that neither he nor his staff acted improperly in trying to settle a criminal case against SNC-Lavalin, a multinational construction and engineering company based in Montreal.

Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s description of 10 meetings, 10 conversations and a series of emails about the criminal case from senior government officials dominated social media and news coverage in Canada on Thursday, as Andrew Scheer, the Conservative opposition leader in Parliament, asked the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to open a criminal investigation of the matter.

[snip]

Mr. Trudeau has acknowledged that he and others spoke with Ms. Wilson-Raybould about cutting a deal in the case, in which SNC-Lavalin has been charged with paying millions of dollars in bribes to officials in Libya while the country was controlled by the dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, but he has denied acting improperly.

The deal would have seen the company pay a large penalty but not receive a criminal conviction, which would have barred it from government work for a decade — and possibly led to its leaving Canada or cutting thousands of jobs, particularly in Quebec.

Basically this is the same defense Trump gave for not pursuing any penalties against the Saudi regime for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

Despite the well-reported spat with Trump at last year's G7 meeting in Quebec, Trudeau has operated in lockstep with the White House -- arresting Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver, pushing regime change in Venezuela. etc.

Trudeau came to power, 2015, at a time when Obama was losing his stride and neoliberals were hankering for a new bottle to pour their vinegar. Trudeau fanfare was ecstatic. He even appeared, like Obama had before him, in a Marvel comic book. Trump's upset win the following year in the U.S. presidential election cast Trudeau in the role of defender of neoliberal orthodoxy against an engorged populist bogeyman, a role Trudeau has had difficulty performing; it's to the point now where he has capitulated. Trudeau is an empty suit, more gutless and played out in less than four years than Obama was in six.

The fall of Trudeau hopefully portends the fall of Macron in France.