Round Two Democratic Presidential Debate Post-Mortem

There is only one takeaway from last night's debate. Joe Biden is not a viable presidential candidate. He's too old. While he has yet to succumb to full-blown dementia, he is greatly diminished; one might say "addled." He spent most of last night spaced-out, his speech almost slurred. In the ballyhooed heated exchange with Kamala Harris over his fond memories of palling around with Old South segregationists in the U.S. Senate, Biden seemed agitated to the point of muttering gibberish.

The bottom line here is that Biden belongs in assisted living not the White House. If he's this bad now, what's he going to be like in two years?

The mainstream media is predictably booming Kamala Harris' performance. She was better than I expected. Less canned than a Beto, Buttigieg or a Booker. But she is what she is: A shill for oligarchy.

Even if Democratic voters come to their senses and start to abandon Biden, all will not transfer their allegiance to the same candidate, let's say, Kamala Harris. Some will migrate to Buttigieg, some Beto, some Elizabeth Warren; some even to Bernie.

Biden's candidacy was meant to solve the problem of the splintered Democratic field. He's an old familiar face that, it was thought, most Democrats would turn to in uncertain times. If Biden's poll numbers come back down to earth, the problem of a splintered base returns. A brokered convention becomes more likely.

Bernie is positioned better than other candidates because his core support is much more solid.

Round One Democratic Presidential Debate Post-Mortem

The two obvious takeaways from last night's Democratic presidential debate are 1) Elizabeth Warren was head and shoulders above all the other candidates, and 2) Cory Booker was lavished with attention by NBC. Apparently the post-debate buzz is also that Julian Castro was a big winner. I thought he was better than most, but still second tier; Bill de Blasio's performance was more noteworthy, if you ask me.

Warren is believable, which is something of a miracle given how saturated in corporate cash the Democratic Party is. As Warren whaled away on corruption and the concentration of wealth in the U.S. body politic, the puckering of assholes in corporate suites was almost audible during the NBC telecast; hence the necessity for the debate's moderators to lob one softball after the next to Wall Street's Cory Booker.

That's the big picture here. The Democrats running for president understand that to beat Trump next year you cannot let him get to your left. That's why the first 15 minutes of the debate sounded like a Socialist Alternative meeting. World Socialist Web Site rightly points out the ludicrous hypocrisy of this; nonetheless, the millionaires and billionaires who fund the political class are uncomfortable by this type of rhetoric. Recall the thunderous lamentations over Obama's increase of the top marginal income tax rate.

Expect the television networks to continue to boost Biden, Booker, Harris, Klobuchar, et al. -- all the representative of business as usual.

Also expect Trump to raise a record breaking amount of cash if somehow the gatekeepers in the mainstream fail and a Sanders or a Warren manage to make it to the general.

The Warren Boom

UPDATE: If you want a sample of the staleness of faux-hipster establishmentarian analysis read FiveThirtyEight's round table discussion "What We’re Watching For In The First Democratic Debates."

There are a couple of interesting takeaways though: 1) Despite the month-long Warren boom in the pages of The New York Times, the Massachusetts senator is not nearly as high in the polls as I imagined. FiveThirtyEight lists her combined polling average as 8.7%. That's 20-points south of Biden's combined polling average, and ten points behind Bernie. 2) Democratic operatives fear and hate Tulsi Gabbard more than any other primary candidate. What does that tell you about the Democratic Party's commitment to the war machine? I'd say it's at least 69% pure.

****

Tonight is the first Democratic presidential debate; it can be streamed on NBC News. Elizabeth Warren headlines a crowd of also-rans, and I include Booker and Beto in that group. I'm interested to see if Tulsi Gabbard can spotlight, however briefly, the suicidal nature of the U.S. perpetual war machine; also, if New York City mayor Bill de Blasio can distinguish himself from the pack.

The story of the last month is definitely Elizabeth Warren. The amount of attention she has been receiving in the "newspaper of record" is noteworthy. She graced the cover of the Magazine this past Sunday, and in yesterday's national edition there was Sabrina Tavernise's (a reporter I like)
"How Elizabeth Warren Learned to Fight" (the photo -- a pre-cultural revolution 1960s high school Betsy clutching her debate trophies -- alone is worth a bounty of votes).

It's hard to say at this point whether The New York Times is boosting Warren because the paper's cognoscenti realize that Biden is another putrid cadaver of the Hillary type who needs to be incinerated before fouling the general election and ushering in a second term for Trump or if the paper is using Warren as a cat's paw to dash Bernie's hopes.

Given Warren's penchant for a modest redistribution of wealth, my bet is that it is the latter.

Covert War Planned for Iran

The morning begins with news that Iranian president Hassan Rouhani has called the Trump administration "mentally retarded" for its new round of sanctions announced yesterday, sanctions which include Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The United States is a nation out of sorts, to put it mildly. It has no clear path forward other than a crack-up. No "Let's get our house back in order" swing to the left appears to be possible.

Take the response to last week's aborted attack on Iran. In a remarkable article by Julian Barnes, Eric Schmitt and Thomas Gibbons-Neff (see "White House Is Pressing for Additional Options, Including Cyberattacks, to Deter Iran") the message coming from Washington, D.C. is that Iran must be punished; it's just that the punishment has to be covert instead of public. Cue the CIA:

Intelligence and military officials have told White House policymakers, including Mr. Trump, that without an additional American response, Iran will continue to destabilize the region.

Some divisions of opinion in the administration remain. A number of senior national security officials agree that further action against Iran is needed, but they are divided about how public that action needs to be.

Officials did not provide specifics about the secret operations under consideration by the White House. But they could include a wide range of activities such as additional cyberattacks, clandestine operations aimed at disabling boats used by Iranians to conduct shipping attacks, and covert operations inside Iran aimed at fomenting more unrest. The United States might also look for ways to divide or undermine the effectiveness of Iranian proxy groups, officials said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive, confidential administration planning.

The C.I.A. has longstanding secret plans for responding to Iranian provocations. Senior officials have discussed with the White House options for expanded covert operations by the agency, as well as plans to step up existing efforts to counter Iran’s efforts, according to current and former officials.

Something like Timber Sycamore seems to be in store for Iran. But that's nothing new. (It is odd to me that the article didn't mention the Ahvaz military parade attack last September.)

The interesting takeaway from the story is the acknowledgement that the global hyper-power is reduced to fighting covert, asymmetrical wars. That's all it can manage at this point.

Trump will not be reelected if he initiates overt war on Iran. The electorate will not tolerate any casualties in this war of choice. The fluidity of the situation is that Trump's funders might demand such war nonetheless.

Trump is Trapped

Reuters is reporting this morning of Iran's openness to new talks with the U.S. if Trump is willing to lift sanctions and sweeten the JCPOA (so basically a non-starter). Pompeo is in Saudi Arabia conferring with the administration's closest ally, likely apologizing for Trump's aborted strike. The definitive write-up of last week's almost-war with Iran is Andre Damon's "Minutes to disaster: Lessons to be learned from the confrontation with Iran":

The strikes against Iran would likely have been carried out by the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and its associated battle group, consisting of at least three destroyers and one cruiser. But under these conditions, the US military was forced to see these ships not just as military assets, but as liabilities. What would be the consequences of Iran sinking a $2 billion destroyer and killing a substantial portion of its nearly 300 crew?

If Iran sank the Nimitz-class carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, with 5,000 sailors and airmen aboard, the consequences would be incalculable.

As a former member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards told the Times, “What happened in the past 48 hours was extremely important in showing Iran’s strength and forcing the U.S. to recalculate… No matter how you look at it, Iran won.”

As Mohammad Marandi explained on Democracy Now! Friday:

But also, I’d like to point one other thing out. And that is, if indeed a military conflict is inevitable between the United States and Iran, I think there are two important things that have to be kept in mind. First, if there is a war, then, in my opinion, all of the oil and gas facilities, as well as the tankers in the Persian Gulf region, will be destroyed. This will not be just the issue of closing the Strait of Hormuz. This will be something very long-term. And that will lead to a global economic catastrophe unlike anything we’ve seen in contemporary history. In addition to that, Iranian allies across the region will engage U.S. forces and U.S. allies militarily, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. And then you would have the Saudi and Emirati regimes collapse immediately, because they’re completely dependent on oil. And millions of people will be on the move. So, that’s a scenario that is just something that people should not even contemplate.

The second is that the United States may carry out a small strike. Here, I think, is almost equally dangerous, because I think that there are some so-called Iran experts in the United States that are telling the U.S. government that if you carry out a limited strike, Iran will do nothing in response, or there will be just some token response. That is a major miscalculation. The Iranians will be relentless in their response. They will probably be very disproportionate, as well. And they will also strike those regional countries that are allowing—that would allow the Americans to attack. And the reason why the Iranians would respond so severely is that they want to make sure that the United States does not come to any conclusion that they could repeatedly attack Iran. And this, of course, could lead to further and further escalation. So, it would be against the interests of the whole of the international community, as well as the people of the United States, to even contemplate any strike, even limited.

Trump figured this out in the nick of time. Iran is not going to be a static target like Syria. Iran will escalate. The country is being suffocated with sanctions.

There are other vital issues in play here, Trump's hope for reelection for one. Initiating a war with Iran at the behest of unpopular allies and neocons guarantees Trump's defeat. He knows that. Bannon was quoted saying as much. This means that Pompeo is likely in the kingdom telling the royal family that it is going to have to be sanctions and cyber war until Trump's reelection. Al-Saud is not going to like this.

Another problem for the administration is Yemen. Sunday there was another drone attack on a Saudi airport by the Houthis. (For a list of the recent Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia, see Caleb Weiss's story.)

The Saudis and Israelis, who are guiding U.S. policy through the administration's neocons, don't want a renegotiated JCPOA; they want regime change. The problem is that Trump will not be reelected if war with Iran is launched now. Trump is boxed. He can't deliver regime change for his paymasters and win reelection, and, as Houthi hostilities in Saudi Arabia increase and the U.S. Senate blocks armament transfers to al-Saud, Trump is forced to use his veto on behalf of an enormously unpopular war, spotlighting his abject servitude to the sheikhs.

Trump is trapped.

Saudi Arabia is in Trouble

The U.S. Navy MQ-4C Triton shot down yesterday by Iran had its transponder turned off, according to a Reuters story which quoted the IRGC:

A Revolutionary Guards statement said the drone’s identification transponder had been switched off “in violation of aviation rules and was moving in full secrecy” when it was downed, Iranian state broadcaster IRIB reported.

Iran is saying the drone was brought down in its southern province of Hormozgan; the U.S., crying foul, in the international air space over the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran is to be believed here. A strong tell of U.S. duplicity is Central Command's initial denial that the drone had been shot down.

The New York Times story devoted to the downed drone emphasizes its possible connection to a recent increase in Houthi attacks on Saudi territory:

In Yemen, the Houthis’ television channel reported on Wednesday evening that one of their missiles had hit a water desalination plant in the Saudi city of Jizan, on the Red Sea near the Yemeni border. Saudi officials said the missile had landed near the plant, but did not hit it.

The Houthis have stepped up strikes on Saudi Arabia, which has been accused by international groups of indiscriminate bombing in Yemen, but it is unclear what connection there is between the increase and the regional strife involving Iran. Recently, the Houthis have fired projectiles that damaged a Saudi airport and oil pipelines and caused some injuries.

Jizan, which is also the site of a Saudi military headquarters, has been a frequent target of Houthi attacks with missiles and drones over the course of a war that has become the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Saudi Arabia and its partner, the United Arab Emirates, have been fighting for four years in a military intervention in Yemen, seeking to roll back a Houthi takeover of much of the country. The Arab monarchies of the Gulf view Iran as their chief regional rival and consider the fight in Yemen a part of a broader struggle against Iran around the region.

In connection with the war in Yemen, news out of the UK is a court ruling that the government broke the law by supplying weapons to Saudi Arabia:

“The decision of the court today does not mean that licenses to export arms to Saudi Arabia must immediately be suspended,” the British judge said.

“It does mean that the UK government must reconsider the matter, must make the necessary assessments about past episodes of concern, allowing for the fact that, in some cases, it will not be possible to reach a conclusion.”

The Campaign Against the Arms Trade welcomed the judgment.

“The Saudi Arabian regime is one of the most brutal and repressive in the world, yet, for decades, it has been the largest buyer of UK-made arms,” said Andrew Smith from the organization. “The arms sales must stop immediately.”

The opposition Labour Party said ministers had wilfully disregarded the evidence that Saudi Arabia was violating international humanitarian law in Yemen, while nevertheless continuing to supply them with weapons.

“What we now need is a full parliamentary or public inquiry to find out how that was allowed to happen, and which Ministers were responsible for those breaches of the law,” said Emily Thornberry, the party’s foreign affairs spokeswoman.

Saudi Arabia is in trouble. The UN is calling for sanctions against the kingdom for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The Houthis, for years at war with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and all their Western allies, have actually increased their offensive capabilities, regularly penetrating Saudi territory.

The U.S. and its client states have one standard reaction when things aren't going their way. Make the problem bigger. That's what we're seeing now as we climb the ladder to war with Iran.

Biden Loves Wall Street and Vice Versa

Shane Goldmacher's "Wall Street Donors Are Swooning for Mayor Pete. (They Like Biden and Harris, Too.)" is an illuminating story that appeared in the national edition of The New York Times on Monday. The super-rich are out of touch. Kamala Harris is plummeting in the polls. Buttigieg is kept afloat by free, never-ending fawning coverage in the mainstream media. And Joe Biden has a huge glass jaw.

Goldmacher provides this gem:

Mr. Biden made explicit at a fund-raiser last Monday in Washington that he does not plan to demonize the financial industry like some rivals have, saying that “Wall Street and significant bankers” can “be positive influences in the country.” (As a senator for Delaware, Mr. Biden was regarded as an ally of financial institutions in the state, such as the credit card industry.)

I'm undecided at this point how Biden would perform against Trump. Early indications are that Biden would do well. The story of the last month is Elizabeth Warren. She has gone from dead on arrival to out-polling Bernie Sanders in several battleground states. It seems to me to be a ruse to bleed Bernie, to muffle the populist outrage on the left by splitting its vote. Democratic voters in the end will be left with Biden as a fait accompli.

The Inevitability of War with Iran

As the Trump administration readies the U.S. for a military attack on Iran, there is little in the way of street heat (is there any?) or much discernible action in congress. The glide path to war seems plain at this point: "an aerial bombardment of an Iranian facility linked to its nuclear program." Trump will say congressional approval is unnecessary because the 9/11 AUMF gives him all the authority he needs.

The Iranians, sophisticated players, must know that Europe, just like the U.S. Congress, is incapable of counteracting Trump. Their calculation at this point must be that a military assault is inevitable. Better to frame it in such a way that the United States cannot somehow avoid being labeled the aggressor.

As usual, when it comes to capturing just how lost we are, Craig Murray is a prophet:

This brief review of current issues reveal that not only do western governments lie and fake, they have really given up on trying to pretend that they do not. The abuse of power is naked and the propaganda is revealed by the lightest effort to brush away the veneer of democracy.

I find it hard to believe that I live in times where Assange suffers as he does for telling the truth, where a dedicated anti-racist like Corbyn is subjected to daily false accusations of racism and to US and security service backed efforts to thwart his democratic prospects, where the most laughable false flag is paraded to move us towards war with Iran, and where there is no semblance of a genuinely independent media. But, starkly, that is where we are. This is not unrelated to the massive and fast growing inequality of wealth; the erosion of freedom is the necessary precondition that allows the ultra-wealthy to loot the rest of us. It remains my hope there will eventually come a public reaction against the political classes as strong as the situation demands.

Hong Kong Extradition Protests

China is presented as Public Enemy #2 by the U.S. mainstream media (Public Enemy #1 being Russia). But in terms of the actual number of stories devoted to bogeymanness, China has Russia beat (which says a lot about who the U.S. governing elite really fear). A reader must therefore exercise great caution when it comes to stories tarring the Chinese government as an odious malefactor (i.e., the Xinjiang re-education camps). I must say though that when it comes to the recent protests in Hong Kong over a proposal to allow criminal extradition to mainland China, I find myself in that anti-China camp and on the side of the citizens in the street.

This was not the case during the Umbrella Revolution. Then I thought what the protesters were demanding -- open elections for Hong Kong's chief executive -- while fine in theory was a standard of democracy that citizens of the "indispensable nation" did not even enjoy, since our choices are filtered by the completely corrupt two-party system, and therefore not meriting the high dudgeon displayed in the Western media.

On Saturday Hong Kong's chief executive Carrie Lam announced that she was pulling the unpopular extradition bill. But this failed to mollify the protesters, who turned out two-million strong yesterday. Their demands are (see "Hong Kong Protesters Return to the Streets, Rejecting Leader’s Apology" by Keith Bradsher and Daniel Victor):

[T]he complete withdrawal of the bill, not just an indefinite suspension; an impartial investigation into the police use of force during Wednesday’s clashes with protesters; and the rescinding the official description of that protest as an illegal riot, which could expose anyone arrested during the violent demonstration to long jail terms.

Talk now is that Beijing is going to ax chief executive Lam, but it doesn't want to go through the public process for selecting her replacement. So she'll probably be kept around until the protests die down.

Another False Flag

Craig Murray thinks it ludicrous that Iran would have attacked the tankers -- one Japanese owned; the other, "50% Russian crewed" -- in the Gulf of Oman, and Caitlin Johnstone lists "Seven Reasons To Be Highly Skeptical Of The Gulf Of Oman Incident." One positive for the reigning neocons in the Trump administration is that arms sales to the Gulf sheikhdoms are now zipping through the U.S. Senate.

A problem for the Western and Gulf states blaming Iran is that part of the attack apparently came from the air:

“Our crew said that the ship was attacked by a flying object,” said Yutaka Katada, the president of the operator, Kokuka Sangyo.

The U.S. case against Iran is based on the use of limpet mines. Iran does have drones, but so do the Americans, Saudis, Israelis -- even the jihadists.

Skullduggery in the Gulf of Oman

Interestingly Moon of Alabama thinks that Iran might indeed be behind the mysterious attacks of two tankers in the Gulf of Oman this morning:

The keyword here is "petrochemical". The tankers hit today were loaded with naphta from the UAE and methanol from Saudi Arabia. Both are petrochemical products and not simply crude oil. Last Friday, June 7, the U.S. sanctioned all trade with Iran's biggest petrochemical producer. These sanction will seriously hurt Iran. 

When the Trump administration began to sanction Iran's oil export last year, Iran announced new rules of the game. It said that it would retaliate against other Persian Gulf producers should Iran be unable to export its goods.

But after reading The New York Times dispatch (see "Tankers Attacked Again in Gulf of Oman, Raising Fears of Wider Conflict" by Richard Pérez-Peña, Stanley Reed and David D. Kirkpatrick) my first thought is that it is an Israeli-led operation, possibly in alliance with the MEK:

It was not immediately clear how the most recent attacks were carried out or by whom, just as the circumstances of last month’s attacks remain murky. The two ships that were struck on Thursday appeared to have been more seriously damaged than those hit in May. 

On a visit to the U.A.E. about two weeks ago, John Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser, said without disclosing any evidence that Iran was “almost certainly” responsible for the attacks in May, which Iranian officials denied. “Who else would you think is doing it?” Mr. Bolton asked. 

But other American officials and Iran’s regional adversaries have been more cautious about publicly assigning blame. Emirati officials described the attacks as state-sponsored, but did not specify a state.

The incident appears to be part of the expanding conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis of Yemen.

The Times story makes it sound as if the crew of one of the tankers attempted to fend off the attackers, which would lead one to believe that these attackers were glimpsed, and possibly recorded:

The other tanker, the Panamanian-flagged Kokuka Courageous, was carrying methanol, and the Iranian state news media reported that it, too, was on fire. It was reportedly headed from the Saudi port of Al Jubail to Singapore. Both the ship’s owner and its operator said that all 21 crew members had abandoned ship and were later rescued by a nearby vessel.

“We received a report that our ship was attacked,” Yutaka Katada, the president of the ship’s operator, Kokuka Sangyo, said at a news conference. The crew, all Filipinos, “kept trying to avoid the attacks, but again received an attack three hours later. So crew members left the ship by lifeboats.”

Drone vs. Drone

The latest from the war in Yemen is a cruise missile strike on Abha International Airport in Saudi Arabia's 'Asir Province. Vivian Yee reports in "Houthis Strike Airport in Saudi Arabia, Injuring Travelers" that 

In May, Houthi drones hit two pumping facilities along a Saudi oil pipeline and forced the Saudis to shut the pipeline temporarily, soon after a mysterious sabotage attack damaged four oil tankers outside the Emirati port of Fujairah, two of them Saudi. On Sunday, Houthi drones targeted Saudi drone facilities at another airport near Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen, a Houthi TV channel said. 

The projectile in the most recent attack landed at the arrivals terminal of Abha International Airport, about three hours’ drive north of the kingdom’s border with Yemen, a Saudi spokesman, Col. Turki Al-Maliki, said in a statement, adding that military authorities were still investigating the incident.

It's drone vs. drone. A glimpse of the future in the here and now. Yee doesn't include in her list of recent belligerent events the Houthi blitz into Saudi Arabia's Najran Province (see last week's "Yemen’s Houthis Cross into Saudi Arabia, Seize 20 Positions").

Clearly hostilities are accelerating in the Yemen war. If you're relying on the U.S. mainstream media it's hard to form a coherent picture of the conflict because it is not reported as a conflict per se but as a proving ground for weapons supplied by the West as well as the leadership ability of the young crown prince Mohamed bin Salman. Millions near famine because of the war is mentioned as boilerplate.

In any event, the Saudis appear to be in more trouble than the mainstream media lets on.

U.S. Pledges to Prevent Corbyn's Election

In a recording leaked to the Washington Post, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promises that the United States will "push back" against the election of Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister of the United Kingdom, noting that “It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”

According to Robert Stevens of the World Socialist Web Site,

Pompeo didn’t outline what would be required to prevent Corbyn from being elected and what a “push-back” against him would involve. But senior figures in the UK military have already made clear what they are prepared to carry out: a coup d'état along the lines of that which the CIA engineered in Chile in 1973 that ended with the murder of elected social-democrat leader Salvador Allende and thousands of his supporters.

Just a week after being elected Labour leader [September 12, 2015], with the backing of hundreds of thousands of Labour members and supporters, the Sunday Times carried comments from a “senior serving general” that in the event of Corbyn becoming prime minister, there would be “the very real prospect” of “a mutiny.”

The general revealed that the military would be prepared to use “whatever means possible, fair or foul.” He warned, “You would see a major break in convention with senior generals directly and publicly challenging Corbyn over vital important policy decisions such as Trident [nuclear weapons], pulling out of NATO and any plans to emasculate and shrink the size of the armed forces.” 

Just a few months later, Britain’s then Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Nicholas Houghton, asked by the BBC’s Andrew Marr about Corbyn’s statement that he would never authorise the use of nuclear weapons, replied, “Well, it would worry me if that thought was translated into power.”

[snip]

The forces attacking Corbyn fear that if he won office—under conditions of growing social polarisation set to escalate under Brexit—millions of workers and youth would demand he make good on previous pledges to oppose austerity, militarism, war and attacks on democratic rights.

Corbyn is important because he acts as sort of a canary in the coalmine. Both Bernie Sanders and Corbyn are anti-war social democrats, a political orientation entirely within the mainstream but now no longer allowed for someone in a leadership position of a mainstream party.

The fraying Washington Consensus will brook no challenge to its neoliberal orthodoxy and its waging of perpetual warfare. The problem is that market fundamentalism and permanent warfare don't garner much support at the polls. Hence, the necessity for intelligence agencies, that serve at the behest of elites who remain fully committed to the Washington Consensus, to fiddle about and find ways to distract and divide the electorate: The Russian bogeyman, the Chinese demon dragon, the anti-Semitic peacenik social democrat.

Trump Capitulated

Trump announced a deal with Mexico late Friday afternoon that averts the imposition of tariffs on all Mexican goods that were scheduled to begin today. The deal -- though Trump promises there is more to it than has been revealed so far -- boils down to an expansion of the program to warehouse Central American asylum-seekers in Mexico and to an increase in Mexican National Guard troops along Mexico's border with Guatemala. Reuters reports that

The agreement would expedite a program known as the Migration Protection Protocols, which sends people seeking asylum in the United States to wait in Mexico as their cases are processed.

That program, announced in December, would be expanded across the entire U.S.-Mexico border under the terms of the agreement, according to the State Department.

The deal would also send the Mexican National Guard police force to its own southern border, where many Central Americans enter Mexico.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Trump administration over the legality over the Migration Protection Protocols.

Trump is on the defensive because The New York Times reported on Saturday (see "Mexico Agreed to Take Border Actions Months Before Trump Announced Tariff Deal" by Michael Shear and Maggie Haberman) that Mexico had already agreed to take these steps back in March.

The press, at the same time, is heaping scorn on Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), for capitulating to blackmail. The bilateral deal will be evaluated in 90 days. In September expect to be right back where we were prior to Friday.

Given that Trump is trying to package the deal agreed on months ago as a breakthrough, conventional wisdom is that this is Trump's modus operandi -- bully and bluff and then brag about a fictitious win.

Something else is going on here. I think Trump really wanted to begin climbing the tariff ladder on Mexico. I think Mitch McConnell impressed upon him though that he was looking at a rebellion of the GOP caucus; that he was going to be overridden by the U.S. Senate. So Trump capitulated. A shrewd move politically, but not the triumph that he is making it out to be.

The Coming Collapse of the Conservative Party

What's interesting about Stephen Castle's "Labour Ekes Out a Win Over Brexit Party in a Local U.K. Vote" is the contortionist nature of the piece. The headline should read "Tory Collapse Continues at the Polls," but, per usual, Castle, for the most part, buries the onrushing collapse of the Conservative Party beneath a narrative of the Brexit Party's Golem-like rise and Labour's dissipation.

Fortunately, the facts manage to shine through the burlap of Castle's reporting:

In a closely watched by-election that was narrowly won by the opposition Labour Party, Mrs. May’s Conservatives were pushed into third place, behind the Brexit Party, led by Nigel Farage.

The result follows the Conservative Party’s disastrous performance in elections for Europe’s parliament last month. Mrs. May’s Tories finished fifth, with just 9 percent of the vote, one the worst performances in their long history.

The defeat in the Peterborough constituency marks another low point for Mrs. May as she ends her leadership of a Conservative Party that has been deeply wounded by her failure to extricate Britain from the European Union, as she had promised to do by the end of March. The election took place on Thursday and the results were declared early Friday.

Peterborough is 75 miles north of London. A majority of its constituents supported Brexit in 2016. The Labour MP who had held the seat was forced to vacate it because she was jailed for lying about a traffic offense. According to Castle,

For Mrs. May’s Tories, there was little to cheer because, under normal circumstances, they would have expected to do well in Peterborough, as Labour and the Conservatives have competed closely there in recent elections.

In the general election in 2017, the Conservative candidate lost by just 607 votes and, given the circumstances of Ms. Onasanya’s departure, the by-election would normally have been an ideal opportunity for the Conservatives to recapture the seat.

All in all, the Tories were well placed for a pick-up. The fact that they ended up third augurs ill for the party headed into a leadership struggle to replace Theresa May.

Who is going to win the Tory poll to succeed May? Boris Johnson is running as the crash-out candidate. Michael Gove is running as a May clone (fudge Brexit). Rory Stewart is running as a Remain Tory. I don't know about Jeremy Hunt. Probably another May clone.

Whoever ends up winning the contest, the Conservative Party is going to be totally fractured and absolutely incapable of delivering any version of Brexit.

The principal purpose of the party at this point is to avoid a general election because in any general election the Tories are going to lose and lose big. I think avoiding a general election becomes impossible now. That's the importance of May's resignation.

The question is when is a general election going to happen. Before or after October 31? Probably after. Does that mean crash-out is inevitable? No, I think the EU grants another postponement pending the outcome of a general election.

Trump Must be Impeached for Waging an Undeclared War in Yemen

The story is a week old, but Conor Friedersdorf's "Saudi Arabia First" is worth checking out. A bevy of constitutional scholars, not to mention congressional representatives, want Nancy Pelosi to sue the White House over the U.S. waging war in Yemen, or, better yet, begin impeachment proceedings:

On its own, waging war after an official call from Congress to stop doing so ought to be regarded as a violation of the Constitution that warrants impeachment.

[snip]

Perhaps a lawsuit of the sort urged by some legal scholars who believe votes against wars cannot be constitutionally vetoed by the president would prove effective.

“I’m confident these new arms sales provides new momentum for pursuing legal action and legislation that would end U.S. involvement in the war,” Democratic Representative Ro Khanna stated on Twitter. “The lawsuit is important to uphold Congress’ constitutional War Powers & challenge President Trump’s veto of our Yemen WPR.”

But there is a more direct remedy available to Congress. So long as some of its members are invoking alleged obstruction of justice to justify impeachment proceedings, they ought to invoke abuse of the war power, too. The prospect of being removed from office is far more likely than even a successful lawsuit to deter this president and his successors from usurping the legislature’s authority.

This is What a Dictatorship Looks Like

Some pleasing noise is emanating from the U.S. Senate. Coalitions are forming to block Trump's planned trade war with Mexico and his arm sales to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In both cases Trump is using a declaration of a national emergency to get what he wants.

The problem for congress is that Trump can simply veto whatever block the Senate comes up with, as he did with the War Powers Resolution on Yemen and the motion of disapproval for building a wall on the Mexican border. 

Trump is showing how a U.S. president can govern as a dictator. Invoke national emergencies and veto the congressional response.

As we taxi on the runway to the 2020 presidential election campaign, my guess is that we'll see more emergency decrees and more vetoes.

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Catie Edmondson, "Senators Look to Force 22 Votes Blocking Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia": 

The coalition of senators is hoping to leverage a provision in the Arms Export Control Act that allows lawmakers to introduce what is known as a privileged joint resolution of disapproval against a proposed sale of arms, in essence forcing a debate and a vote. Their plan is to introduce 22 such resolutions, one for each proposed arms sale. A simple majority of lawmakers would need to vote to allow the debate to proceed — and if the measures advanced, the group of senators could monopolize hours of floor time as soon as mid-June.

Winning such support from Republican lawmakers is not out of the question. Members of Congress from both parties were livid early this year when the White House missed a congressional deadline to submit a report detailing whether the administration found Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally responsible for Mr. Khashoggi’s death.

And the Senate voted 54 to 46 in March to end American military assistance for the kingdom’s war in Yemen and to curtail presidential war powers, with seven Republican senators breaking ranks to join the resolution and the Democratic conference united in support.

To actually block the arms sales, however, backers of the resolutions would almost certainly need a veto-proof majority, and whether the measures could muster that is another question.

[snip]

New outrage emerged Tuesday, when Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, a Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, disclosed that the Energy Department had approved nuclear technology transfers to the kingdom on two occasions after Mr. Khashoggi’s killing in October in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul — including one approved two weeks after his death.

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"Senate Republicans Warn White House Against Mexico Tariffs" by Catie Edmondson and Maggie Haberman

If Mr. Trump were to declare an emergency to impose the tariffs, the House and the Senate could pass a resolution disapproving them. But such a resolution would almost certainly face a presidential veto, meaning that both the House and the Senate would have to muster two-thirds majorities to beat Mr. Trump.

Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, said he warned the lawyers that the Senate could muster an overwhelming majority to beat back the tariffs, even if Mr. Trump were to veto a resolution disapproving them. Republicans may be broadly supportive of Mr. Trump’s push to build a wall and secure the border, he said, but they oppose tying immigration policy to the imposition of tariffs on Mexico.

[snip]  

Opponents of the tariffs would use the same motion of disapproval that they tried to use to block the president from grabbing federal money for a border wall that was not appropriated for that purpose. That motion did pass Congress with significant Republican support, but not enough to overcome Mr. Trump’s veto.

Will a Pedophile Turn Russiagate into UAEgate?

Burbling right below the surface of the Mueller probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election is the actual meddling foreign power (or one of them at least), the United Arab Emirates (UAE). David Kirkpatrick had a lengthy article, "The Most Powerful Arab Ruler Isn’t M.B.S. It’s M.B.Z.," in the Sunday paper on the de facto ruler of the UAE, Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.

This morning comes the delightful news that George Nader, a bagman for Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, was arrested at Kennedy International Airport yesterday on child pornography charges. (See "Witness in Mueller Inquiry Is Arrested on Child Pornography Charges" by Mark Mazzetti.)

Mazzetti writes that

After the election, Mr. Nader helped set up a meeting in the Seychelles Islands off the coast of eastern Africa between Mr. Dmitriev, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates and Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater who was serving as an unofficial adviser to the Trump transition.

Months earlier, Mr. Nader and Mr. Prince had met Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower. During that meeting, in August 2016, Mr. Nader told the younger Mr. Trump that both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were eager to help his father be elected president.

As an adviser to Prince Mohammed, Mr. Nader used his patron’s vast fortune to try to influence foreign policy during the early months of the Trump administration. Working with Elliott Broidy, a top Republican fund-raiser seeking Emirati and Saudi contracts for his security firm, Mr. Nader helped steer the White House to take a hard line against Qatar — the small Persian Gulf nation engaged in a bitter dispute with Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.

Kirill Dmitriev, head of a Russian investment fund purportedly close to Vladimir Putin, is the red herring here. Most of the smoking guns in the 2016 election are of Saudi, Emirati and Israeli origin.

Cui bono? It's certainly hasn't been the Russians. On the other hand, Trump's foreign policy is pretty much dictated by the Saudis, Emiratis and Israelis. 

Don't Be Surprised if You're Paying More for Strawberries Soon

If you go to the supermarket with any frequency, and you purchase produce while there, it is hard not to notice that Mexico is where most of the berries, tomatoes, green onions and avocados come from. According to the AP's "Mexicans Launch Friendly Defensive to Deflect US Tariffs,"

Mexico overtook Canada to become the top trade partner for the U.S. in April.

[snip] 

Mexico is the top export market for U.S. corn and pork, and Mexico supplies one out of three fresh fruits and vegetables consumed in the United States. Tariffs on Mexican agricultural exports are seen raising the cost of avocados, tomatoes and berries for U.S. consumers.

Beginning next Monday, Trump has threatened to increase import tariffs by 5% on all goods coming from Mexico. Those tariffs will increase 5% every month, topping off at 25% in October, or until Trump is satisfied that the Mexico government has addressed the White House's concerns over illegal immigration.

A high-level delegation of Mexican officials is in Washington today to meet with counterparts in the Trump administration. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has responded to Trump's threats by calling for amity and good faith.

It's hard to say exactly what the Trump administration's goals are here because it hasn't defined what sort of illegal immigration reduction it is looking for. Mexico freezing its border with Guatemala has been mentioned, as has Mexico signing a "Safe Third Country" agreement, "which would designate Mexico as an adequate waiting spot for migrants wishing to claim asylum in the U.S." (What Turkey does for the EU.)

AMLO has problems of his own without being drawn into a trade war with the U.S. behemoth. He has powerful allies though in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and U.S. Congress. Mexico not only feeds the United States, it is a key part of the American industrial supply chain.

On the other hand, Trump has a way of getting what he wants. Don't be surprised if you're paying more for strawberries in July.