Democrats Adrift: There Will Be No Impeachment

It is obvious at this point that Pelosi is not going to change her tune about impeachment (see Lisa Mascaro's "Speaker Nancy Pelosi remains cautious on impeachment talk"). A reading of Mueller's statement reveals that he is not urging congress to begin impeachment proceedings; rather, he says that the special counsel cannot bring the president to justice for obstructing justice: “[T]he Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting President of wrongdoing.”

That's it. Not much of a ringing endorsement of all the breathless reporting in the mainstream media about Trump being a Kremlin stooge. Even the truly odious Adam Schiff, singing from the Pelosi hymn book, declines to support impeachment.

Mueller does uphold the basic narrative though. He asserts Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Mueller just couldn't uncover any evidence that the Trump campaign worked with Russian agents, and he doesn't absolve the president of wrongdoing for impeding his investigation.

So basically we are back to where we started, which is nowhere. Democrats concocted a "stab in the back" hypothesis to explain Trump's victory. But they never bothered to explain how revealing Hillary's speech to Goldman Sachs or the DNC's systematic efforts to torpedo Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign or the fake Facebook accounts illuminating the Clinton record on criminal justice actually led to her loss of the White House. To do so would be to admit that their candidate is truly horrible and didn't deserve to be anointed.

Now the Democratic rank'n'file feel set adrift. They have been told to resist, to fight the stab in the back, but now their leaders refuse to fight.

Bolton

Today in Riyadh a GCC planning session is being held to chart the next steps in the war against Iran. Preparatory to the war powwow, U.S. national security adviser, John Bolton, who is in the region, made a statement blaming Iran for sabotage earlier in the month of oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. Bolton's words -- “naval mines almost certainly from Iran” -- clearly carefully chosen, prove nothing; worse, they point in the direction of a false flag operation.

Helpful to understanding Bolton's role in Trump's quixotic quest for reelection is "Trump Undercuts Bolton on North Korea and Iran" by Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman:

Mr. Trump picked Mr. Bolton in part as a reaction against the narrative that the current and retired generals in his administration were really running things, and in part to find a polar opposite of Mr. Bolton’s predecessor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster. It also helped that Mr. Bolton had the support of Sheldon G. Adelson, the casino mogul and Republican financier who has been a key backer of the president.

Unlike General McMaster, Mr. Bolton figured out how to brief Mr. Trump in a more effective way, according to administration officials, but the two have never bonded on a personal level, which is so important in this White House. Mr. Trump is not fond of Mr. Bolton, according to a half-dozen advisers and associates, and he makes no secret of it in private.

Bolton allows Trump to present himself as a dove. Trump is enough of a student of American politics to know that a war-pig will have a difficult time winning a presidential election, particularly since Trump was able to beat Hillary by promising not to wage fruitless Middle Eastern wars of choice.

It's going to be a complicated dance. Bolton will have to be kept on the job to guarantee Adelson's financial support in 2020; but the longer Bolton sticks around, the greater the possibility of war with Iran.

Trump's coup de main would be to sack Bolton on the eve of the presidential election. Adelson's money bags would have already been transferred to the reelection effort, and Trump could parade himself as a champion of peace.

That's going to be tough to pull off. Don't rule out a Democrat assist. If Biden wins his party's nomination, Trump can run as a dove because Biden voted for the Iraq war.

China and Plastic Waste

One way we consumers can intuit the out-of-balance manner in which we live in late-stage capitalism is the amount of plastic waste that we produce. As I have mentioned before, it seems to me that the each purchase is consecrated with a carapace of plastic.

No greater bounty of refuse plastic can be found than in your average takeout order. Walking to a coffee house yesterday at lunch I crossed paths with a young woman toting a billowy white pillowcase of a plastic bag holding plastic clam shells containing her meal.

The main story, "Food Delivery Apps Are Drowning China in Plastic" by Raymond Zhong and Carolyn Zhang, in yesterday's business page of The New York Times manages a twofer: 1) it sketches the importance of the growing popularity of takeout orders made by smartphone in the planet's burgeoning plastic pollution problem; and 2) it maligns China.

Zhong and Zhang are not so successful in the former. China still produces less plastic waste per capita than the United States, and, come to find out, a lot of U.S. plastic recycling was based on its ability to export it to China, something now endangered since China banned the importation of many types of plastic:

People in China still generate less plastic waste, per capita, than Americans. But researchers estimate that nearly three-quarters of China’s plastic waste ends up in inadequately managed landfills or out in the open, where it can easily make its way into the sea. More plastic enters the world’s oceans from China than from any other country. Plastic can take centuries to break down undersea.

Recyclers manage to return some of China’s plastic trash into usable form to feed the nation’s factories. The country recycles around a quarter of its plastic, government statistics show, compared with less than 10 percent in the United States.

[snip]

China is home to a quarter of all plastic waste that is dumped out in the open. Scientists estimate that the Yangtze River emptied 367,000 tons of plastic debris into the sea in 2015, more than any other river in the world, and twice the amount carried by the Ganges in India and Bangladesh. The world’s third and fourth most polluting rivers are also in China.

Takeout apps may be indirectly encouraging restaurants to use more plastic. Restaurants in China that do business through Meituan and Ele.me say they are so dependent on customer ratings that they would rather use heavier containers, or sheathe an order in an extra layer of plastic wrap, than risk a bad review because of a spill.

[snip]

This deluge of trash might not be such a big problem were China not in the middle of a monumental, if flawed, effort to fix its recycling system. Recycling has long been a gritty, unregulated affair in the country, one driven less by green virtue than by the business opportunity in extracting value out of other people’s leavings.

The government now wants a recycling industry that doesn’t spoil the environment or sicken workers. The transition hasn’t been smooth.

China recently banned many types of scrap from being imported into the country, hoping that recyclers would focus on processing domestic material instead. That killed off a lucrative business for those recyclers, and left American cities scrambling to find new dumping grounds for their cardboard and plastic. Some cities have been forced to end their recycling programs.

No doubt most neighborhoods in the U.S. will eventually be impacted by China's ban. Mine is. The silver lining here is that a domestic fix will have to be devised.

(By the way, Naked Capitalism regularly covers plastic pollution issues.)

Green Party Performance is the Key Takeaway from European Parliament Elections

It's the last takeaway of the five listed in "European Parliament Elections: 5 Biggest Takeaways" by Steven Erlanger and Megan Specia, but I think it's the most important story coming out of the elections for the European Parliament:

The Green Party had broad — and surprising — success.

The Green Party made gains across Europe, from Germany to Portugal and across the Nordic countries, based on early figures, with some analysts framing the rising support as a “green wave” of voters. Climate change, a surge of young voters and anger at existing policies seem to be behind it all, leaders of the movement say. 

Bas Eickhout, a Dutch member of the European Parliament and a Green candidate for the European Commission presidency, thanked voters Sunday night as results poured in. The Greens, he said, were “very clearly asking for change, asking for change for a new Europe, a Europe that is fighting climate change, a Europe that is looking for a green transition in a socially just way.”

In Germany, the rise of the Green party, which secured more than 20 percent of that country’s vote, is being seen as the big story of the election. The center-left Social Democrats suffered their worst defeat in decades, with many voters on the left, particularly young people, turning instead to the Greens.

The Green Party also saw a surge in Ireland, where it previously held no seats, at the expense of Prime Minister Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael, particularly in its supposed stronghold in the capital, Dublin. In Britain, where Brexit dominated the agenda, the Greens gained a record seven seats.

Turnout was at a 20-year high. The ultranationalists made gains but nothing in proportion to the amount of attention that has been lavished on them by the mainstream media. The preferred narrative in the mainstream media is of a global populist tsunami drowning the poor rational folk clinging to the neoliberal center. The abandonment of the center-left nominally socialist parties in favor of the Greens is usually barely mentioned; and when it is, it is whispered at the margins of the story. At least Erlanger and Specia included it as a takeaway.

One can't help but reach the conclusion that the Greens are now the established number two party in the wealthiest country in Europe. The Greens came in second in Germany with 20.5%, compared to 15.8% for the Social Democratic Party.

In France, the Greens won 13.5% of the vote and came in third behind Le Pen's National Rally and Macron's En Marche!, out-polling the collapsed center-left and center-right parties.

An old Green myself, I am not terribly confident that the party can crack the neoliberal consensus. Greens are for the most part not revolutionary. They will most likely welcome neoliberal rats as they scurrying off their sinking ships. But at least the robust showing of the Greens proves that neoliberal ships are in fact sinking.

A Silver Lining in Britain's European Parliament Elections

Those polls from a couple weeks back showing the Conservative Party placing fifth in elections for the European Parliament proved to be accurate. According to Stephen Castle in "Nigel Farage’s Populist Brexit Party Wins Big in European Parliament Elections":

With many of the votes counted, the Brexit Party was ahead with 31.5 percent of the vote. The Liberal Democrats were second with 20.5 percent, followed by Labour with 14.1 percent and the Greens with 12.1 percent. The Conservatives pushed into fifth position with 9.1 percent of the votes.

The Conservative Party’s dire performance will increase pressure on those campaigning to succeed Mrs. May to take a hard-line approach to Brexit that could result in the country leaving the European Union without any agreement.

At first glance the results do appear to favor a crash-out. On the other hand, if the Tories end up selecting a Leave ultra, then the opposition in parliament could coalesce to torpedo the government, triggering new elections. May's particular zombie genius was to fudge, dither and burn the clock; it's going to be hard, I would imagine, for whomever ends up as the new prime minister to replicate that.

New elections, as Nigel Farage boasts, would not likely lead to a Brexit Party as a member of a governing coalition. Look at the vote totals. Evening assuming the 9.1% Tory vote is all Leave, that means the Brexiters are at a little less than 41%. Add the Remain vote together (the assumption here is that Labour can be categorized entirely as anti-Brexit) and you get almost 47%. Not a majority, but significantly larger than Leave. There is a possibility that Labour could form a new government.

Finally, the Demise of Zombie May

Wonderful news to begin the holiday weekend: Two Fridays from now, June 7, Theresa May will resign her role as leader of the Conservative Party. The following week the process to select her replacement will begin formally, with her successor in place before parliament's recess at the end of July.

In all the sententious write-ups of May's departure there's precious little about what actually triggered it. A pre-resignation story from yesterday by Benjamin Mueller (see "Britons Pause to Vote in an Election Many Did Not Want") leads one to believe that Tory backbenchers had marshaled the votes to rewrite the 1922 Committee rules, paving the way to topple the zombie prime minister with a new no-confidence vote:

But Mrs. May’s undoing seemed more a matter of timing and choreography than anything else. She will meet on Friday with Graham Brady, who leads the committee of Mrs. May’s Conservative backbench lawmakers. He is holding onto secret ballots from some of those lawmakers that could allow the party to change its rules and try to unseat Mrs. May almost immediately.

The event that put some pep in the 1922 Committee step is yesterday's election to the European Parliament. The Tories are predicted to be headed for another catastrophic rout; this coming on the heels of the disastrous local elections of May 2. Apparently the foul odor of the zombie prime minister finally proved to be too much.

In fact, the zombie May is a perfect personification of the reigning, tottering neoliberal world order. Caught between rising demands for a return to social democracy on one side and an establishment drift to neo-fascism and ultra-nationalism on the other, mainstream leadership chooses to fudge, dither and run out the clock, hoping that the dialectic of history somehow reverses course. That's why Theresa May's predicament has been worthy of attention, particularly since her shockingly poor showing in the June 2017 general election: how long can leadership deny the obvious? In May's case, the answer is two years. Her minority government was a joke to begin with.

Boris Johnson will be no improvement, assuming he will be the new prime minister. Nothing will have changed, other than support for crash-out will have gained momentum. So we're right back to crash-out or a snap general election. Since all Brexit decisions are guided by the Tory avoidance of a general election, odds at this point are on a crash-out.

Crass Propaganda on Idlib

A noxious example of propaganda appeared yesterday in the national edition of The New York Times. Penned by Edward Wong, "U.S. Says Assad May Be Using Chemical Weapons in Syria Again" revives calls for the United States to bomb Syria on behave of jihadists, to act as "Al Qaeda's air force."

Two things jump out about this article:

1) Nowhere in 18 paragraphs does Wong mention that Idlib Province is principally controlled by Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), which is a re-branded Al Nusra Front, the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate. Last September in Sochi Syria, Russia and Turkey reached a a ceasefire agreement for Idlib, an agreement which excluded HTS/Nusra. Turkey was supposed to neutralize HTS/Nusra, but over the last year HTS/Nusra has gobbled up more territory in Idlib. There is not a hint of this in Wong's article. Instead the reader is presented with the old cartoon of a bloodthirsty tyrant whose main purpose in power is to bomb and gas helpless civilians.

2) Wong provides a recent history of chemical attacks in Syria; he refers to the Douma incident, saying 

In April 2018, Mr. Trump and European allies ordered limited airstrikes and missile attacks from warships after they concluded the Syrian military had carried out a chemical weapons attack near Damascus that killed at least 40 people.

No mention is made of the recently leaked OPCW engineering report which concluded that the Douma attacked was staged. (Even Bellingcat has been mum.)

It was frequently mentioned during the siege of Aleppo that the Western mainstream media had turned a corner from which there was no coming back, so extreme was the propaganda. I can see why.

Rank'n'File Democrats Rueing Anew Pelosi's Leadership

Democratic dithering over impeachment (see Nicholas Fandos' "Democratic Calls for Impeachment Inquiry Grow as Leaders Instead Vow to Toughen Tactics") is splitting its caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. The latest humiliation is former White House counsel Donald McGahn ignoring a subpoena to appear being the House Judiciary Committee.

Trump is on firm footing here. Congress is significantly more unpopular than the president. Trump can continue to defy the feckless Democratic leadership of the House and the result will be a widening split between Pelosi and the rank'n'file of her party because Pelosi will do everything in her power to slow-walk any confrontation with the White House.

Interestingly, Fandos reports that the Dems have yet to bring contempt charges against AG Barr to a vote of the full House:

Mr. McGahn may become a test case. He skipped the Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday after being instructed to do so by the White House, leaving an empty chair where Democrats had hoped he could serve as a star eyewitness. In ordering him not to appear, the president cited a Justice Department legal opinion that the Constitution gives senior presidential aides “absolute immunity” from congressional subpoenas compelling them to testify about their official work.

In addition to fighting those claims in court, Democrats indicated that they would swiftly move to hold Mr. McGahn in contempt, perhaps taking the case straight to the House floor rather than waiting for a committee vote. They are newly considering altering House rules to allow for so-called inherent contempt penalties, like fines, people familiar with internal discussions said.

The Judiciary Committee has already voted to recommend that the full House hold Attorney General William P. Barr in contempt for his defiance of another subpoena asking for Mr. Mueller’s full report and underlying evidence. Democratic leaders had been stalling on bringing the contempt citation to the floor of the full House, but have not indicated they will accelerate a vote when they return in June from the Memorial Day recess.

Ms. Pelosi is said to be newly open to pulling Mr. Trump’s policy priorities into the fray, too. Thus far, she had refused to touch some of Congress’s traditional leverage buttons, like government appropriations bills. They could force Mr. Trump to reassess his approach, but also run the risk of backfiring on Democrats.

Pelosi is trying to thread the needle. She needs to keep all popular agitation within the caucus to a minimum while maintaining voter motivation going into a presidential election year. The endgame is to keep the Democratic Party in the thrall of large donors. It's not that impeachment hearings will guarantee Trump's reelection; it's that impeachment will accelerate the leftward shift of the party, create new leaders, mobilize a hungry, activist base that will not be Obama-ized this turn of the wheel.

Trump knows how rotten the Democratic Party is at the top, and he's playing the moribund leadership for all its worth.

Bernie Blows Up Gray Lady Red-baiting

For a quick gulp of the wretchedness of the prestige press one must read Sydney Ember's "‘I Did My Best to Stop American Foreign Policy’: Bernie Sanders on the 1980s," a follow-up interview the reporter conducted with Bernie Sanders after her article with Alexander Burns, "Mayor and ‘Foreign Minister’: How Bernie Sanders Brought the Cold War to Burlington," was published on Friday. That article was a hit piece designed to discredit Sanders as a Commie-loving flake who as mayor  of Burlington sought to align his city with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; in order to accomplish their objective, Ember and Burns cavalierly equate the Reagan administration's illegal dirty wars in Central America with the conduct of the Sandinista government under Daniel Ortega:

Mr. Reagan regarded Mr. Ortega as an intolerable threat — a Marxist revolutionary with ties to the Soviet Union and Cuba. Even as the Contras faced mounting allegations of brutal killings and other atrocities, Mr. Reagan backed the anti-Communist forces with a determination that ultimately plunged him into legal scandal after his administration defied congressional restrictions on funding them.

Contra atrocities appalled the American left, but Mr. Ortega’s forces were also implicated in grave human rights abuses, including the killing and forced relocation of civilians.

Mr. Ortega, who lost power in 1990 and returned to the presidency in 2007, has been accused in recent years of carrying out crimes against humanity.

This is how history is re-written, something to bear in mind as you read the following exchange between Sanders as Ember:

Q. In the top of our story, we talk about the rally you attended in Managua and a wire report at the time said that there were anti-American chants from the crowd.

The United States at that time — I don’t know how much you know about this — was actively supporting the Contras to overthrow the government. So that there’s anti-American sentiment? I remember that, I remember that event very clearly.

You do recall hearing those chants? I think the wire report has them saying, “Here, there, everywhere, the Yankee will die.”

They were fighting against American —— Huh huh —— yes, what is your point?

I wanted to ——

Are you shocked to learn that there was anti-American sentiment?

My point was I wanted to know if you had heard that.

I don’t remember, no. Of course there was anti-American sentiment there. This was a war being funded by the United States against the people of Nicaragua. People were being killed in that war.

Do you think if you had heard that directly, you would have stayed at the rally?

I think Sydney, with all due respect, you don’t understand a word that I’m saying.

Do you believe you had an accurate view of President Ortega at the time? I’m wondering if you’re ——

This was not about Ortega. Do you understand? I don’t know if you do or not. Do you know that the United States overthrew the government of Chile way back? Do you happen to know that? Do you? I’m asking you a simple question.

What point do you want to make? [Obviously she doesn't understand. Sanders is exposing her as a totally empty bot.]

My point is that fascism developed in Chile as a result of that. The United States overthrew the government of Guatemala, a democratically elected government, overthrew the government of Brazil. I strongly oppose U.S. policy, which overthrows governments, especially democratically elected governments, around the world. So this issue is not so much Nicaragua or the government of Nicaragua.

The issue was, should the United States continue a policy of overthrowing governments in Latin America and Central America? I believed then that it was wrong, and I believe today it is wrong. That’s why I do not believe the United States should overthrow the government of Venezuela.

The interview continues on from there with Ember trying to tie Sanders to Ortega and the Soviet Union.

What's perplexing is why The New York Times feels the need at this point -- 532 days before the presidential election -- to go all-in with red-baiting. Red-baiting is going to be the GOP's main line of attack if Sanders somehow performs a miracle, overcomes the DNC and survives the primary.

This red-baiting by The Times also comes on the heels of Ilhan Omar being feted by rank'n'file Democrats for taking on Elliott Abrams and his role in El Salvador’s El Mozote massacre.

The conclusion, I believe, one must draw from this is that the architects of mainstream consciousness will do everything in their power to either elect a Democrat warmonger neoliberal or reelect Trump. That's the only choice we will be allowed to make.

It's early yet. All hope is not lost. Biden's poll numbers -- his 20-point lead -- are soft. A lot is still in play.

European Parliament Elections this Week. Brexit Party Looks to Topple May

Once-every-five-years European Parliament elections are to be held this week. For a soporific write-up, see Steven Erlanger's "European Elections Will Gauge the Power of Populism." Erlanger's assignment is to inflate the Salvini-Orban-Le Pen bogeyman, a wrathful specter designed to keep the good folk penned in on the dystopic neoliberal reservation, something that Erlanger fails to do when he acknowledges that the anti-EU populists are slated to win at most 180 seats in a parliament that seats 751: "Opinion polls suggest that populist parties could win up to 180 seats in European Parliament, enough to create serious delays and difficulties."

One anti-EU party expected to top the polls is Nigel's Farage's new Brexit Party, which, as Robert Stevens writes in his excellent "Conservative Party implodes over Brexit crisis as May agrees to stand down next month":

The crisis of rule in Britain and the meltdown of the Tories will be exacerbated by the expected victory of the newly formed Brexit Party in next week’s European elections. A victory for the Brexit Party, set up by former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, will further polarise divisions within the main parties. The vast majority of Farage’s support comes from disillusioned Tory voters and is particularly strong among older generations.

According to opinion polls, the Brexit Party is set to win by taking anything up to 34 percent of the vote and could possibly score higher than both the Tories and Labour combined. There are even estimates that the Tories may only poll in single figures and finish sixth overall—which would be the worst national election result in their history.

Farage's Brexit Party has seemingly accomplished something that none of the other UK parties and their various factions have been able to do -- topple the zombie prime minister Theresa May. Last week it was announced that after a fourth vote in parliament on her Brexit plan in June she would make way for the Conservative Party to select her replacement, a process that will gobble up the newspapers this summer. Jeremy Corbyn responded to the news by pulling Labour out of the Brexit negotiations with the Tories:

The moves by the Conservative Party to replace May prompted a letter from Corbyn to May on Friday morning. Corbyn wrote, “I believe the talks between us about finding a compromise agreement on leaving the European Union have now gone as far as they can … The increasing weakness and instability of your government means there cannot be confidence in securing whatever might be agreed between us.”

It's hard to believe that May is in fact on her way out. If true, it is a cause for celebration. We've been here before though, and the zombie prime minister always manages to plod on.

What would that take now? The Tories would have to over-perform this week and the Brexit Party would have to crater at the polls; Labour, too. Then possibly May could fudge her replacement until after the new October 31 crash-out deadline.

The U.S. is Wholly a Warfare State

The latest threat cited by the Trump administration to justify its war mobilization in the Persian Gulf are photographs of Iranian missiles on small boats. Whether we are to add this to or use it to replace the previously cited casus belli of Iranian-aligned Popular Mobilization Forces moving missiles close to U.S. bases in Iraq is unclear. There is also a Houthi casus belli (drone attacks on a Saudi pipeline), not to mention the mysterious sabotage of four oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. Take your pick.

For a good summary of the Trump administration's march to war with Iran read Ed Wong's "U.S. Orders Partial Evacuation of Embassy in Baghdad."

As Wong notes:

Iraqi officials have voiced skepticism about the about the threat described by the Americans, and on Tuesday, so did the British deputy commander of the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, or ISIS.

“No, there’s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria,” Maj. Gen. Chris Ghika, speaking from Baghdad, told reporters at the Pentagon by video link. There are threats in the region to United States and coalition forces, he said, referring to “noncompliant actors” among the militias, but “there always have been.”

[The Trump administration is laying the groundwork for major military action against Iran, but it may have a hard time rallying domestic and international support.]

The Pentagon’s Central Command released a statement saying that General Ghika’s comments “run counter to the identified credible threats available to intelligence from U.S. and allies regarding Iranian backed forces in the region,” and that as a result, United States forces in Iraq were “now at a high level of alert.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts and a Marine veteran who served in Iraq, introduced legislation to require the Trump administration to have congressional approval before “engaging in hostilities” with Iran. In April, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, pressed Mr. Pompeo during a hearing for the same commitment, but the secretary of state deflected the request.

It's important to remember that Congress could pull the plug on this right now; that it will not is proof that the United States is, like Hitler's Third Reich, wholly a warfare state.

World War Four Cannot be Ruled Out

What would be the consequences of a US war against Iran, a country that is four times as large and has more than twice the population of Iraq? The war launched by the Bush administration 16 years ago killed over a million Iraqi civilians, while claiming the lives of nearly 4,500 US troops and wounding over 30,000 more. Not only would the carnage this time around be vastly greater, but a war against Iran would inevitably draw in the entire region, as well as the countries dubbed by Washington’s military and intelligence apparatus as US imperialism’s “great power” competitors, including nuclear-armed Russia and China—under conditions where the US has launched an all-out trade war against Beijing.

Bill Van Auken "No to war against Iran!"

It's hard to imagine the United States going from kabuki to actual war. Sanctions and gun-boat cock walks are its stock in trade. Fighting wars are another matter. Wars have not gone well for the United States over the last several decades. To take a recent example, Raqqa was destroyed in order to save it. That's not a strategy that can be applied to Iran.

On the other hand, Trump has painted himself into a corner in his high-stakes conflicts with China and Venezuela. Venezuela can be kept on a back-burner simmer, but it will be hard for Trump to dictate trade-war terms to China, and he can't been seen to capitulate prior to the 2020 presidential election. So some sort of limited military confrontation of Iran would suit Trump electorally as well as engage his primary foreign clients, the Saudis and Zionist Israelis.

The danger, the one that has commentators both mainstream and fringe alarmed, is that a military confrontation of Iran is likely to spiral out of control and drag the rest of the planet into the whirlwind.

Does Trump really believe that the homeland would rally to his cause once the shooting starts? I don't know. Trump won in 2016 because he was shrewd enough to pose as a dove. But he was always clear during that campaign about his bellicose intentions towards Iran. So World War Four cannot be ruled out.

Bad Day for the "New McCarthyism"

It was a bad day yesterday for Western propaganda. The New York Times published on its front page a laughable story by William Broad, "Your 5G Phone Won’t Hurt You. But Russia Wants You to Think Otherwise." Broad argues that Putin is trying to hijack 5G in the United States by creating hysteria over its possible negative health effects.

So ham-handed and cartoonish is the story, I couldn't help submitting a comment to the newspaper after I returned from lunch:

How can the article twice quote the chief operating officer for New Knowledge, identifying it as "a technology firm that tracks disinformation," without mentioning that New Knowledge created a phony Russian botnet in order to discredit troglodyte GOP candidate Roy Moore during the 2017 United States Senate special election in Alabama, something The Times covered extensively in December and January? If you're going to quote an expert on disinformation maligning RT, don't you think it would be helpful to your readers to know that the expert's firm was caught manufacturing Russian disinformation?

The comment was not published, and, from what I can tell, neither were any comments mentioning New Knowledge's role in spreading phony Russian disinformation. Rania Khalek made note on Twitter.

Another "analyst" that Broad quotes is Molly McKew, a lobbyist for the discredited former president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili.

Candide for Neoliberals

Last Monday Brad Plumer's "Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace" was published by The New York Times. Its opening two paragraph read:

WASHINGTON — Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Times columnist Margaret Renkl contemplates this morning the immensity of this contemporary mass extinction in "Surviving Despair in the Great Extinction: One million species of plants and animals are heading toward annihilation, and it’s our fault. How can we possibly live with that truth?"

That’s one million species. Every individual creature in a species — times one million. We can’t possibly conceive of such a thing. We can hold in mind, however uncomfortably, the image of a single animal who died a terrible death. Devastation on this scale is beyond the reach of imagination. How could we hold in mind a destruction so vast it would take not just one sea turtle but all that animal’s kind, as well as all the kind of 999,999 other species?

Whole expanses of the natural world are disappearing. It’s not just poster animals like polar bears, tigers and elephants; it’s life on earth as we know it.

I hear a truth like that and succumb to despair. I look around at all the ways I’ve tried to help — at the reusable grocery bags and the solar-field subscription, at the pollinator garden and the little meadow of wildflowers, at the lawn mower blades set high enough to harm no snakes or nesting cottontails, at the recycle bins and the worm composter, at the nest box for the bluebirds and the nest box for the house wrens and the nest box claimed this year by a red wasp — and it all strikes me as puny, laughable, at best a way to feel better about myself. How is any of this a solution? Or even the path to a solution?

Renkl concludes that seemingly meager, personally virtuous acts are better than nothing; that absent systemic change, it's better to compost and keep your backyard free from chemicals than succumbing to despair.

It reminds me of the end of Voltaire's Candide. "Tend your (organic) garden!"

What's interesting are all the comments readers have attached to Renkl's column. They're mostly very good; a common one is that Renkl's prescriptions for solitary commitment are no substitute for government action. There are even a few comments that mention capitalism as the culprit.

The sixth mass extinction underway requires a radical paradigm shift, and every indication is that the elite who govern the planet are fulsomely attached to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism needs to be cracked before we can even consider governments working together to address the extinction crisis.

Trade Negotiations with China are About Trump's Reelection

Trump followed through on his threat to increase tariffs 25% (see "Trump Increases China Tariffs as Trade Deal Hangs in the Balance" by Ana Swanson and Alan Rappeport):

Mr. Trump’s decision to impose 25 percent tariffs on nearly one-third of all Chinese products is the biggest trade action that Mr. Trump has taken so far. The higher tax hits many consumer products that Americans rely on from Beijing, like seafood, luggage and electronics, raising prices for American companies and their customers across a large portion of sectors.

[snip]

The new 25 percent rate went into effect at 12:01 a.m. Friday. But the higher tariffs will hit only products that leave China after that time, not those already in transit. That could provide some additional time for the two sides to reach an agreement. Mr. Trump may also be able to rescind the tariffs once a deal is reached, retroactively reversing the higher rates.

The reporting is oddly conflicted. Stories quote analysts that say a deal is in the offing and then in the next paragraph there is another analyst or former government official asserting that a trade war is now inevitable.

That's why I have steered clear of this topic for the last year. It seems to me almost impossible to divine where this headed.

If it's true, as Nick Beams asserts this morning, that Trump's goal is to upend Chinese industrial policy (a.k.a., Made in China 2025), then a major trade war is inevitable:

These issues have been at the centre of the conflict, which began last May when the Trump administration set out its base position, essentially demanding that China end its efforts to develop hi-tech industries and assume a semi-colonial status with regard to the US.

Shi Yinhong, an adviser to China’s State Council, told the South China Morning Post the US had pressed China to make changes on structural issues such as subsidies for state-owned industries. Beijing it found difficult to accept these demands but did not reject them outright.

“China wanted to offer some smaller concessions, hoping the US would accept,” Shi said. “But Trump would not allow it.”

The newspaper cited an unnamed professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also a senior adviser to the Chinese leadership, who said some of the US demands, especially those on cancelling subsidies, would be “suicidal.”

“It means that China has to give up its development pattern,” he said. “China would rather accept the US raising the tariffs to 25 percent. China will not give up its bottom line just for the sake of reaching a deal.” China could “bear the consequences” and was “prepared for failure.”

My sense is that Trump's goal in these trade negotiations is primarily reelection in 2020. He needs to find a big issue that everyone understands where he can get to the left of the Democrats. He really can't do that anymore on issues of war and peace, as he did in 2016, because he's threatening a hot war in both Iran and Venezuela. Trade with China is a place where he can. Biden already put his foot in his mouth by saying China isn't a peer competitor.

How Will China Respond?

It does seem as if the year-long trade negotiations between China and the United States are at impasse (see Nick Beams' "China to hit back if new US tariff threat goes ahead"). We'll find out shortly. As Keith Bradhser notes:

President Trump said on Sunday that American tariffs of 10 percent on $200 billion in Chinese goods, imposed last September, would rise to 25 percent on Friday. The tariffs would take effect just after midnight on Thursday, meaning the United States could wake up on Friday to an even more damaging trade war. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Monday that the tariffs might be reconsidered if Beijing restored what the United States regards as previous Chinese commitments, and made progress beyond them. 

The president also threatened to put tariffs on another $325 billion in Chinese goods, without specifying when.

Based on Beams' write-up, Team Trump wants the finalized trade deal enshrined in Chinese law rather than merely a set of regulations:

The character of the negotiations has undergone a qualitative change. They had been intended to wrap up the months-long negotiations and come to a final deal, which would then be presented to US President Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping for signing.

That perspective has been cast to the winds. It is extremely doubtful if anything like it can be put together again, given the US actions and demands.

The US has claimed that China backtracked on previous agreements to write its concessions into Chinese law but then retreated, saying the measures would be carried out by regulations that carry less weight.

According to reports in the Wall Street Journal, the US is demanding China submit an inventory of laws and regulations that it would enact to guarantee that it was complying with any agreement. In other words, the US would effectively dictate economic policy to the Chinese government.

Beijing appears to have rejected this demand, regarding it as an infringement on its national sovereignty.

The Chinese decision to attend the talks is based on the hope that negotiations will be able to continue in some form and so prevent, or at least delay, a rapid escalation of the trade conflict.

Even that limited prospect is under a cloud given that the position of both sides is hardening.

Yesterday Trump posted a further inflammatory tweet: “The reason for the China pullback and attempted renegotiation of the trade deal is the HOPE that they will be able to ‘negotiate’ with Joe Biden or one of the very weak Democrats, and thereby continue to ripoff the United States ($500 billion a year) for years to come.”

With Pompeo jetting around the globe issuing diktats and making threats, it seems, with 18 months until the 2020 general election, that the Trump administration has assessed that its best -- if not only -- hope of a second term is by going to war. Take your pick: China, Venezuela and/or Iran. It's a smorgasbord. Add that to the wars the U.S. is already managing and it's more slop than the most gluttonous war-pig could ever hope to devour.

The Chinese are not without retaliatory options. Bradsher notes that a nuclear option would be for the Chinese to disrupt the global corporate supply chain. "China makes a huge amount of the parts and components that American companies need to produce their finished products."

But my guess is that Trump is right: China sees him as a one-term president. So rather than going nuclear, Beijing will again stop buying American soybeans, purchases which resumed in December when it looked like a trade deal was within reach, and tariffs will be reimposed on American automobiles.

Aircraft Carrier Kabuki

The excuse provided by the Trump administration for the movement of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to the Persian Gulf apparently is based on intelligence that some of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces were preparing to attack U.S. troops (see David Sanger's "Iran Will Stop Complying With Some Parts of Nuclear Deal" and Alissa Rubin's "Iraq’s Militias, Accused of Threatening U.S., Pose a Quandary for Iraq").

Putting aside reports from the Navy that this is a regularly scheduled deployment, what is clear is that if the U.S. did attack Iran it would also have to go to war with Iraq again.

The Popular Mobilization Forces saved Iraq from ISIS. Some are aligned with Iran, some not. But the idea that the U.S. can dictate the terms of their composition is absurd. As Rubin says,

[S]oon after the United States Treasury Department announced in March it was listing one of the Popular Mobilization groups, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, as a foreign terrorist organization, the Iraqi government made clear it disagreed.

Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi did not defend the group by name — al-Nujaba has proved difficult for the Iraqi military to work with at times — but he did support the Popular Mobilization groups.

“The Americans can make the decisions they want, but the Americans see things differently from the way we do, and our attitude toward the Popular Mobilization is well known and clear,” he said in March. “We respect all of the groups of the Popular Mobilization that made sacrifices.” 

The sacrifices he was alluding to were largely made from 2014 through 2016, when the Islamic State swept across northern Iraq with little resistance and was moving fast toward the capital. Urged by a call in June 2014 from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s influential Shiite spiritual leader, for volunteers to defend their nation, young men and old formed a pickup army.

That pickup army truly liberated Iraq, even if U.S. troops are still stationed there. The days when the U.S. can exact compliance via aerial bombardment are over. This bit of aircraft carrier kabuki is going nowhere.

The State of Western Censorship of the Internet

An extremely helpful article appeared on the front page of Monday's national edition of The New York Times, Adam Satariano's "Europe Is Reining In Tech Giants. But Some Say It’s Going Too Far." The main focus is European efforts to censor the internet, but Satariano takes in the entire globe, noting that

The debate in Europe illustrates the difficulties that governments face as they try to regulate the most corrosive material on the internet without choking off individual expression. That is set to flare up elsewhere as other countries also move to pass new laws or impose restrictions on online material.

In Sri Lanka, authorities shut off access to social media sites after coordinated terrorist attacks last month left hundreds dead. New Zealand and Australia have put forward restrictions on tech companies after the March massacre of 50 people at two mosques in New Zealand, where the accused gunman used social media to amplify his message. Singapore has also proposed a law to curtail false or misleading information, which critics warned could be used to silence dissent. And India is considering giving itself new powers to suppress digital content.

Tech companies themselves are asking for more regulation, rather than delegating enforcement responsibility to their platforms. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive officer, invited Congress in March to set rules for the social network, adding it “would be useful to spell out clearly what the responsibilities that we want companies and people and governments to have.” On Thursday, Facebook added to the censorship debate when it proactively barred several extremists, including the Infowars founder Alex Jones, from its platform.

Germany and Spain have tough internet censorship laws. In Germany it is based on the regulation of hate speech; in Spain, terrorism. Also

The move to regulate internet platforms in Europe has been gathering momentum. Last month, the European Parliament passed a law requiring companies to remove terrorist-related content within one hour or risk fines of up to 4 percent of global revenue. The measure must go through several more legislative steps before being enacted.

Critics said the proposed law doesn’t clearly define what constitutes objectionable content and delegates too much responsibility to tech companies. In December, United Nations representatives warned the proposed rule “may lead to infringements to the right to access to information, freedom of opinion, expression, and association, and impact interlinked political and public interest processes.”

And in Britain, the government last month proposed sweeping new powers to remove “harmful” content from the internet, including material supporting terrorism, inciting violence, encouraging suicide, disinformation, cyberbullying and inappropriate material accessible to children.

Human rights groups warn the public backlash against tech companies is being used as a pretext to censor speech. At least 17 countries including Malaysia, Egypt and Kenya have cited the spread of “fake news” when adopting or proposing new internet restrictions, according to Freedom House, a pro-democracy group tracking government internet policies.

Julie Owono, executive director of Internet Without Borders, a group tracking internet freedom globally, said Europe’s activities normalize the removal of content.

“Freedom of expression,” she said, “relies solely on the possibility your content won’t be suppressed arbitrarily.”

Satariano, in a mild statement, introduces the notion that the West is forfeiting its soft-power advantage as an open society:

With the growing body of European legislation, “there will be a lower standard for protection of freedom of expression,” said David Kaye, a University of California, Irvine, law professor whom the United Nations appointed to spotlight government efforts to restrict free speech. He added that Europe’s rules erode what had been a shared belief among the United States and other Western democracies to avoid censoring social media posts, YouTube videos, discussion forums and other internet content.

I suppose Western leaders will continue to insist that their society is more open than China's. But it might be better to say "less closed" than "more open."

Local UK Elections, or How 84 = 1,300 in the Pages of the Gray Lady

The UK held local elections last Thursday. What's bizarre about the mainstream coverage is that a loss of 84 council seats by Labour is being reported, in a defiance of basic arithmetic, as equivalent to the Conservative Party's loss of 1,300 council seats.

Take Stephen Castle's "A Brexit Backlash in Local Elections: Main Parties Lose Seats":

LONDON — For months, there has been little doubt that the British electorate is disgusted, disillusioned and furious with the political dysfunction and the chaos of Brexit. But there hadn’t been an outlet for the public to vent that anger — until now.

Across much of England, election results for around 8,400 local seats, tabulated on Friday, delivered a vicious backlash against the country’s two main political parties, the governing Conservatives and the Labour opposition. The Conservatives lost more than 1,300 seats, while Labour lost around 80.

“What the voters have been saying is, ‘A plague on both your houses,’” Britain’s leading polling expert, John Curtice, a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, told the BBC.

How can a loss of 84 seats be weighted somehow equally with the loss of 1,300? The mainstream media is so wedded to a rancid neoliberal consensus that it will purvey outright poppycock.

The Liberal Democrats were the big winners, adding 704 seats, in what has to be a sign of increased support for remaining in the EU.

Craig Murray on Tuesday's Failed Coup in Venezuela

It is strange how the urgent installation of liberal democracy by force correlates so often with oil reserves not aligned to the USA, as in Libya, Iraq or Venezuela, while countries with massive oil reserves which permit US military domination and align with the West and Israel can be as undemocratic as they wish, eg Saudi Arabia. Venezuela is an imperfect democracy but it is far, far more of a democracy than Saudi Arabia and with a much better human rights record. The hypocrisy of Western media and politicians is breathtaking.

Craig Murray, "Venezuela and Binary Choice"

The Jig is Up for the Ghani Government in Afghanistan

There was once a time when the puppet government in Afghanistan convened a loya jirga it was front-page news. No longer. You have to wade seven-paragraphs deep into David Zucchino's "Taliban and U.S. Start New Round of Talks in Qatar" to learn that

Mr. Ghani on Monday convened a traditional grand council assembly, known as a loya jirga, to discuss peace for Afghanistan. About 3,000 delegates from around the country, selected in a process dominated by Mr. Ghani’s supporters, are meeting this week to reach a consensus on peace and a postwar Afghanistan. Their decisions are not legally binding.

Zucchino reported on a bombshell the day prior (see "U.S. Military Stops Counting How Much of Afghanistan Is Controlled by Taliban"). The U.S. military will no longer report how much territory it controls in the country. These assessments, sanguine to begin with, were really the only way for the casual observer to gauge how the war was going. Forums like The Long War Journal would use the same data and come up with a different picture, one more favorable to the Taliban.

The best statement concerning this turn events is provided by John Sopko:

The decision to end the assessments, which have been produced in various forms since at least 2010, was published in the latest quarterly report by the American special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.

“We’re troubled by it,” the inspector general, John F. Sopko, said in an interview. “It’s like turning off the scoreboard at a football game and saying scoring a touchdown or field goal isn’t important.”

I'd say that when the scoreboard goes dark the game is over.

Combine this with Zalmay Khalilzad statement that "he hopes to reach a final peace agreement before the elections" in September and it's a pretty safe bet that the jig is up for the Ghani government in Kabul.

“Operation Liberty” a PSYOP?

So miserable a failure was yesterday's coup attempt in Venezuela (see Bill Van Auken's "Guaidó launches abortive military coup in Venezuela") it's hard to imagine the Trump administration could have convinced itself that it was going to work; unless the failed coup, dubbed “Operation Liberty,” was never meant to succeed but merely a rouse to promote the PSYOP that the Maduro government was on the verge of collapse.

As Nicholas Casey explains in "Venezuelan Opposition Leader Steps Up Pressure, but Maduro Holds On":

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer,” said Mr. Maduro and senior leaders in his government had been prepared to fly to Cuba on Tuesday morning, with “an airplane on the tarmac,” but that Russia, a powerful ally of Mr. Maduro’s, had “indicated he should stay.” Mr. Pompeo offered no evidence.

John R. Bolton, the White House national security adviser, said top officials in Mr. Maduro’s government had committed to transitioning power to Mr. Guaidó. He identified them as Vladimir Padrino López, the defense minister, Maikel Moreno, the head of the Supreme Court, and Rafael Hernández Dala, the commander of Mr. Maduro’s presidential guard.

“All agreed Maduro had to go,” Mr. Bolton said. But Mr. Padrino and Mr. Moreno both came out publicly in defense of Mr. Maduro on Tuesday.

But it is crediting Trump, Bolton and Pompeo too much to think they have any developed long-term plan for taking control of Venezuela. The fact remains that Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López and their "extreme right-wing political party Voluntad Popular" have a small base of support, and it is among the country's wealthy elite. The members of the military who participated in yesterday's shenanigans were duped into doing so:

Dozens of other Venezuelan soldiers told the country’s news media that they had been tricked into participating in the provocation staged outside the La Carlota air base, awakened at three in the morning and told to grab their rifles and turn out for an important event where they would receive medals.

The only plan that works for the United States is to stage a provocation and then bomb a country from above. But as we know from Syria (how many bombing raids has Israel made in the last six years?) that isn't much a plan either.

Trump is following the Neocon logic of "If at first you don't succeed, make the problem bigger" by blaming Cuba for Venezuela's problems.

It's hard to imagine that Maduro will continue to allow Guaidó to scurry around staging provocations. On the other hand, Guaidó is such a clown, giving him his freedom to serially embarrass himself is perhaps Venezuela's greatest defense.