Failed Coup in Turkey: Not the Usual U.S. Color Revolution

As Erdogan rounds up his opponents following the failed coup of Friday night/Saturday morning (for a particularly good synopsis read this morning's Foreign Policy Situation Report by Paul McLeary and Adam Rawnsley), it is worthwhile to question the level of support the putschists received from the United States. According to McLeary and Rawnsley:

How does this end? The Turkish government is lashing out in all directions, with a high-ranking member of the Erdogan government accusing Washington of directly helping to foment the putsch. Turkish Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu bluntly claimed over the weekend that “the U.S. is behind this coup attempt.” The comments “come on top of the long-standing U.S. criticism of Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies, which include opening roughly 2,000 legal cases against political opponents, journalists, comedians, and ordinary Turks accused of insulting the president,”  FP’s Yochi Dreazen writes.

Judging from the reaction to the coup's failure in the U.S. opinion pages, the labor minister appears to be on the money. The Gray Lady's unsigned editorial today calls Erdogan's reaction to the coup attempt a "countercoup" (see "The Countercoup in Turkey").

If the U.S. was involved it must have been in a passive role. The favored U.S. method of regime change after the shelving of "shock and awe" during the Obama administration is the color revolution format witnessed in Kiev's Maidan or the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. In a color revolution there has to be a mass of protesters to act as a foil for the coup plotters. The scheme is to have the protesters elicit a crackdown by security forces. The police overreaction ignites the rebellion. But there was no popular uprising here. There were no Gezi Park protests of three years earlier.

In order for this to work the coup plotters had to take out Erdogan. When they failed to do this the coup could not succeed. Consider this from McLeary and Rawnsley:

Commando raids, F-16s. Some critical details of the scope of the insurrection emerged on Sunday, which included a daring special operations raid on the coastal resort where Erdogan had been staying which just failed to nab the leader, and a harrowing incident where two rebel-flown F-16 fighters followed the president’s plane on its way to Istanbul, locking radars on the jet, but failing to fire.

As the purge of the military continued on Sunday, one of those arrested was Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, the chief of Incirlik Air Base, from which the U.S. military flies missions over Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State. Reports have emerged claiming Van asked U.S. officials at the base for asylum, but was refused. The Greek government also finds itself in a tough spot after eight Turkish officers flew a helicopter to Greece in a bid for asylum. Turkey has demanded their extradition.

An attempt is being made to rewrite the U.S. reaction to the coup as one of immediate and fulsome support for the Turkish government. This is not how it went down in real time. Obama and Kerry were mum until it was clear that Erdogan would survive. Then they expressed their support.

It Can Happen Here

One thing I noticed over the holiday, because I found myself in front of a television with cable, is that the latest CNN poll shows Donald Trump with a stable and commanding lead -- more than double -- over his nearest challenger. Yet why is it that most mainstream commentators persistently deny that Trump will win? Yesterday conservative columnist Ross Douthat, in an otherwise interesting op-ed, "Cracks in the Liberal Order," flat out says "Trump will not be the Republican nominee (yes, really)."

Do these commentators see something that we are missing or are they just singing for their supper? The easy answer is the latter. Clearly a circling of the wagons is going on. Trump is perceived as a threat by the elites who sit atop a crumbling order. No analyst or commentator wants to catch the baleful eye of his boss for trumpeting the Donald.

But maybe conservatives like Douthat and liberals like Nate Silver have the sagacity to look past the obvious. If the neoliberal order survived not only intact but with an even greater distribution of pie for the 1% after the Lehman Brothers meltdown and Obama's two progressive landslides, what real threat does a populist challenge from the right pose or really any of the myriad threats from whatever quarter? To pick up Douthat where he left off with Trump:

Bernie Sanders won’t beat Hillary. Far-left antics at Amherst and Oberlin and Claremont McKenna and Yale are not as significant as elite college graduates like to think.

In Europe, Jeremy Corbyn probably won’t be Britain’s next prime minister, Marine Le Pen probably won’t be France’s next president, Sweden probably isn’t about to turn fascist, the E.U. probably isn’t about to break apart. Houellebecq’s vision of an Islamified Europe, like ISIS’s vision of a new Islamic empire or Putin’s Stalinist nostalgia, is more a resonant fantasy than a plausible atlas of the future. 

It’s still wise to bet on the current order, in other words, and against its enemies and rivals and would-be saboteurs. 

But after liberalism’s year of living dangerously, for the first time in a long time it might make sense to hedge that bet.

Conservative Douthat is making much the same argument as Marxist Tariq Ali made in his book The Extreme Centre: A Warning (2015) -- neoliberalism still has a lot of juice left. At least Douthat allows that it might be wise to start looking for a hedge.

Next year should be very interesting. Depending on how the GOP primary unfolds, Republican power brokers will likely try to block Trump at the convention. Barring that, there will be moves made in the background to make sure a wounded Hillary wins the general election.

Either way, Trump unbowed or Trump beaten into the dust, the political system after Obama is stressed, its legitimacy in doubt.

Given that the Joint Chiefs worked against the Commander in Chief in order to prevent the Middle East from descending into even greater chaos, and recognizing the fact that the armed forces are the recipient of an enormous, ongoing public relations campaign, one can imagine a situation like that which unfolded in Egypt or Thailand happening here in the not-too-distant future.

NYPD: This is What the U.S. Police State Looks Like

I always thought it was interesting that the day before the December 20 murder of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos by Ismaaiyl Brinsley Juan Gonzalez appeared on Democracy Now! to tell the show's leftist listeners that NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio is the real deal. Here is the blurb that accompanies Gonzalez's December 19 segment:

Democracy Now! co-host Juan González discusses his exclusive year-end interview with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. "The list of his accomplishments in just one year has shocked even me — a total skeptic after more 35 years of covering urban politics in this country," writes González in his latest column. "And it’s not just the big issues like education, affordable housing, reform of police-community relations, or new contracts and pay raises for city workers. It’s also a host of less publicized but important measures affecting ordinary New Yorkers. Things like paid sick leave and a living wage for low-income workers. Like the lowest rent increase in memory for 800,000."

So what we have to consider is that the ongoing quasi-"sit down" strike that the NYPD is engaged in (see yesterday's "For Second Week, Arrests Plunge in New York City" by J. David Goodman and Al Baker) is a politically reactionary statement, a coup d'état of sorts. It is reminiscent of the situation in Cairo right before the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces removed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in a coup. Policing had effectively ceased.

Vivian Yee sums up the precipitous drop off in policing in New York City in today's "Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities":

In a city of more than eight million people and 33 million subway rides a week, police officers arrested or ticketed just 22 people for jumping the turnstile last week. In the same period a year ago, nearly 1,400 fare-beaters were caught. 

Tuesday morning’s alternate-side parking period found 25 cars on the wrong side of one block in Park Slope, Brooklyn, still occupying the spaces they were required to leave an hour earlier, without a single ticket in sight. None of this appeared to faze the street sweeper moving down the block — or the police cruiser just behind it, which did not stop. 

At New York City housing projects from the Bronx to Staten Island, residents said they had seen fewer officers patrolling their hallways and streets, leaving some people relieved and others frightened for their safety. 

And on Burnside Avenue in the Bronx on Tuesday morning, Leyni Soto relished sipping from a Red Bull in a brown paper bag. When he did the same thing two months ago, an officer asked him what was in the bag.

But this time was different. “They slowed down their pace, they looked at me, they looked at the bag and they kept going,” said Mr. Soto, 28, an assistant manager of a cellphone store. “It felt really good.” 

If the Police Department’s own statistics are any indication, Mr. Soto was not simply getting a lucky break. For two consecutive weeks, New York City police officers have seemed to sit back, ignoring minor offenses and parking transgressions so completely that only 347 criminal summonses were written in the seven days through Sunday, down from 4,077 in the same period a year ago. 

Such startling numbers reflect a continuing conflict between rank-and-file officers and Mayor Bill de Blasio, on whom they have literally turned their backs. But for the New Yorkers in the middle, the slowdown has not appeared to translate to a spike in serious crime so much as in a fading, for good or ill, of the blue line that keeps the city’s streets in order.

The question is whether the collapse in "broken windows" enforcement is necessarily a bad thing. There will certainly be a loss of city revenue from all those unwritten tickets. But major violent crime will most likely be unaffected. My experience of having lived five years in New York City at a time when it posted the highest numbers of homicides annually is that I had more to fear from the police than from any criminals. And I lived and moved about on the street in Washington Heights' 34th police precinct, one of the more dangerous places in New York City.

One thing is for sure. The Gray Lady thinks the police rebellion is a very bad thing. While originally stoking police ressentiment by publishing numerous stories connecting the Black Lives Matter protests and the murders of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos with a return to the social upheaval and "white flight" decline of the Big Apple in the early 1970s, The New York Times has published several hard-hitting unsigned editorials blaming the NYPD for fascistic overreach. Today's iteration is quite good, "No Justice, No Police." I'm going to quote the whole thing:

Mayor Bill de Blasio has been in office barely a year, and already forces of entropy are roaming the streets, turning their backs on the law, defying civil authority and trying to unravel the social fabric. 

No, not squeegee-men or turnstile-jumpers. We’re talking about the cops. 

For the second straight week, police officers across the city have all but stopped writing tickets and severely cut down the number of arrests. The Times reported that in the week ending Sunday, only 347 criminal summonses were issued citywide, down from 4,077 over the same period last year. Parking and traffic tickets were down by more than 90 percent. In Coney Island, ticketing and summonses fell to zero. 

The city has been placed in an absurd position, with its police commissioner, William Bratton — a pioneer of “broken windows” policing who has just written a long, impassioned defense of that strategy as an essential crime-fighting tool — leading a force that is refusing to carry it out. 

Police union officials deny responsibility for the mass inaction. But Edward Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, said officers had talked among themselves and “it became contagious,” apparently like the flu. 

Call this what it is: a reckless, coordinated escalation of a war between the police unions and Mr. de Blasio and a hijacking of law-enforcement policy by those who do not set law-enforcement policy. This deplorable gesture is bound to increase tension in a city already rattled over the killing by the police of an unarmed man, Eric Garner, last summer, the executions of two officers in Brooklyn last month, and the shootings on Monday of two plainclothes officers in the Bronx. 

Mr. Bratton spoke delicately at a news conference on Monday. He said there could be other explanations, like officers being too busy handling police-reform demonstrations and attending funerals. He promised to investigate — and to “deal with it very appropriately, if we have to.” 

Mr. de Blasio’s critics foretold doom when he was elected a year ago. They said graffiti, muggings and other crime would rush back with a vengeance. They were dead wrong — crime rates continued to decline to historic lows in 2014 — but now it seems the cops are trying to help prove them right. 

The madness has to stop. The problem is not that a two-week suspension of “broken windows” policing is going to unleash chaos in the city. The problem is that cops who refuse to do their jobs and revel in showing contempt to their civilian leaders are damaging the social order all by themselves. 

Mr. de Blasio, who has been cautious since the shootings, found his voice on Monday, saying for the first time that the police officers’ protests of turning their backs at the slain officers’ funerals had been disrespectful to the families of the dead. He was right, but he needs to do more. 

He should appeal directly to the public and say plainly that the police are trying to extort him and the city he leads. 

If the Police Department’s current commanders cannot get the cops to do their jobs, Mr. de Blasio should consider replacing them.

He should invite the Justice Department to determine if the police are guilty of civil rights violations in withdrawing policing from minority communities. 

He should remind the police that they are public employees, under oath to uphold city and state laws. 

If Mr. de Blasio’s critics are right and the city is coming unglued, it is not because of what he has done. He was elected by an overwhelming vote, because he promised action on police reform, starting with the end of stop-and-frisk tactics that corralled so many innocent New Yorkers into the criminal-justice system. The city got the mayor it wanted — and then, because of Mr. de Blasio, it got Mr. Bratton. 

Mr. Bratton’s faith in “broken windows” needs rethinking. But nothing will be fixed as long as police officers are refusing to do their jobs. 

A video emerged this week of a New York cop, apparently with nothing better to do, horsing around on the hood of a squad car, falling off and hitting his head. It would hard to invent a more fitting image of the ridiculous — and dangerous — place this atmosphere of sullen insubordination has taken us.

De Blasio will not "throw down" with the NYPD, as helpfully outlined by the Gray Lady. He is a shrewd politician. He knows the police are doing more damage to themselves than he could ever do by firing police commanders or demanding a DOJ investigation. This is an educable moment. People are aroused and alert because of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the Black Lives Matter movement. Now here comes the NYPD acting like a bully throwing a tantrum, arguing that police safety trumps public safety, comporting themselves as if risk, sometimes deadly, is not part of their job description. (Get a building trades guy talking about whose job is more dangerous, his or the police, and you will find out what he thinks about the risk of police work compared to construction.)

The educable moment that the NYPD is treating us to is on the nature of fascism. We must genuflect to and honor the authority of a violent, privileged, corrupt gang that rules over us with impunity, regardless of any code of ethics or set of laws. Those of us who have a certain skin color, mental illness, or come from a particular ethnic group can be slaughtered. This is the police state within which we reside. It is now on full display in the cultural capital of the United States.

Kiev Coup Revisited by The New York Times: Who is Viktor Dubovik?

All of yesterday the story that occupied the choice spot on the Gray Lady's homepage was a piece by veteran reporters of last year's coup in Kiev -- Andrew Higgins and Andrew Kramer, "Ukraine Leader Was Defeated Even Before He Was Ousted" -- revisiting the fateful events of February 20 through February 22 that led to the downfall of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

There is much that is unusual about this story. For one, it is infrequent that a story occupies the upper-left column -- the premiere slot -- on The New York Times homepage for the entire day. Usually there is some sort of rotation. So that it is a "tell" right there. Readers are being told to pay attention.

Then there is that headline: "Ukraine Leader Was Defeated Even Before He Was Ousted." What is this supposed to mean?

In line with the U.S. State Department, the Gray Lady insists that what happened in Kiev last year was not a coup; rather, it was a mass uprising by young, tech-savvy urban professionals and babushka ladies, a democratic convergence, a spontaneous plebiscite, wholly legitimate, that the venal Yanukovych abdicated to when he fled Ukraine. In this fantastical retelling, the Right Sector neo-Nazi shock troops that did the street fighting and sent Yanukovych scurrying for his life are merely fringe figures. Higgins and Kramer are reprising this narrative slightly to include the collaboration of people within Yanukovych's own government:

Russia has attributed Mr. Yanukovych’s ouster to what it portrays as a violent, “neo-fascist” coup supported and even choreographed by the West and dressed up as a popular uprising. The Kremlin has cited this assertion, along with historical ties, as the main justification for its annexation of Crimea in March and its subsequent support for an armed revolt by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s industrial heartland in the east.

Few outside the Russian propaganda bubble ever seriously entertained the Kremlin’s line. But almost a year after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych’s government, questions remain about how and why it collapsed so quickly and completely. 

An investigation by The New York Times into the final hours of Mr. Yanukovych’s rule — based on interviews with prominent players, including former commanders of the Berkut riot police and other security units, telephone records and other documents — shows that the president was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by his own allies, and that Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone else.

Higgins and Kramer, reporting last year from Kiev during the coup, placed heavy emphasis on the looting of an armory in Lviv in hastening the demise of Yanukovych. In that story from last February, "As His Fortunes Fell in Ukraine, a President Clung to Illusions," Higgins and Kramer note the role of a mysterious deputy interior minister in ordering the Yanukovych security forces to stand down and vacate the city:

Using a member of Parliament as an intermediary, Mr. Levus [deputy head of the Maidan “self-defense” forces] opened a line of communication with a deputy interior minister, whom he declined to name. It appeared that Mr. Yanukovych, perhaps sensing that his security forces were reluctant to press the crackdown, was inclined to turn to the army for help. He had fired the armed forces chief of staff, Col. Gen. Volodymyr Zamana, on Monday. 

“We understood they had a few hundred fanatical riot police, but the rest of the police would not fight,” Mr. Levus said. 

Several street fighters who were on the barricades early Thursday morning said that they saw police officers walking away from their positions, and that this emboldened them. Some protesters fired hunting rifles and shotguns. Police lines crumpled. 

“Our people are ideologically motivated, and on the contrary, they were demoralized,” Mr. Levus said. “They did not want this fight. And he understood that our people were ready to run against gunfire.” 

Mr. Levus said he received a call on his cellphone around noon on Thursday from the deputy interior minister. “I told him, ‘We will guarantee the safety of the police if they leave the city,’ ” he said.

The deputy minister agreed first to a cease-fire until 3 p.m., when Parliament was set to meet. With support from some members of Mr. Yanukovych’s quickly disintegrating Party of Regions, Parliament voted to support the protesters’ demand that the police demobilize.

In their report yesterday, Higgins and Kramer name the deputy interior minister, Viktor Dubovik, who played the critical role in the coup, ordering security forces to leave Kiev

Security forces were also thrown into a panic by rumors, fanned by the protesters themselves, about the whereabouts of hundreds of guns seized on the night of Feb. 18 in Lviv, a bastion of pro-European fervor 300 miles west of Kiev near the Polish border. The weapons were said to be on their way to Kiev to add to an already growing arsenal of hunting rifles, pistols, Molotov cocktails and metal clubs.

Continue reading the main story

According to the chief of police in Lviv, Dmytro D. Zagariya, around 1,200 weapons, mostly pistols and Kalashnikov rifles, were seized in raids on five district police stations and the headquarters of the Interior Ministry’s western command. Only 300 of these, he said, were recovered by the authorities. He said there was no evidence that any of the missing guns had been used in or even reached Kiev.

Western diplomats in Kiev, including the American ambassador Geoffrey R. Pyatt, also heard about the guns grabbed in Lviv and worried that, if brought to Kiev, they would turn what had begun as a peaceful protest movement that enjoyed wide sympathy in the West into an armed insurrection that would quickly lose this good will.

As the foreign ministers of Germany and Poland and a senior French diplomat met Mr. Yanukovych to negotiate a truce on the evening of Thursday, Feb. 20, at the presidential offices, Mr. Pyatt and several European envoys met at the German Embassy with Andriy Parubiy, the chief of the protesters’ security forces, and told him to keep the Lviv guns away from Kiev.

“We told him: ‘Don’t let these guns come to Kiev. If they come, that will change the whole situation,’ ” Mr. Pyatt recalled telling Mr. Parubiy, who turned up for the meeting wearing a black balaclava.

In a recent interview in Kiev, Mr. Parubiy denied that the guns taken in Lviv ever got to Kiev, but added that the prospect that they might have provided a powerful lever to pressure both Mr. Yanukovych’s camp and Western governments.

“I warned them that if Western governments did not take firmer action against Yanukovych, the whole process could gain a very threatening dimension,” he said.

Andriy Tereschenko, a Berkut commander from Donetsk who was holed up with his men in the Cabinet Ministry, the government headquarters in Kiev, said that 16 of his men had already been shot on Feb. 18 and that he was terrified by the rumors of an armory of automatic weapons on its way from Lviv.

“It was already an armed uprising, and it was going to get worse,” he said. “We understood why the weapons were taken, to bring them to Kiev.”

Around 2 p.m. that Friday, just as European diplomats were gathering for the signing ceremony at the nearby presidential administration building, Mr. Tereschenko received a call from a deputy interior minister, Viktor Dubovik, with an order to leave the city. Mr. Dubovik, he said, put him in touch with the opposition lawmaker Mr. Pashinsky, who escorted the Berkut commander and his 60 or so men to the edge of town, from where they drove overnight by bus to Donetsk.

Mr. Dubovik, who the authorities say has since fled Ukraine, could not be located for comment.

Mr. Pashinsky estimated that in all, he arranged escorts out of the city for more than 5,000 officers from the riot police, Interior Ministry forces and other security units, like the special operations unit, Alfa. He said Mr. Dubovik was just one of the officials he worked with on the mass evacuation, but added that he did not know where the order to retreat had originated.

Giving Up on a Leader

Inna Bogolovskaya, a longtime ally of Mr. Yanukovych who broke with him over his November decision not to sign the trade deal with the European Union, said the retreat was merely a response to a resolution adopted late Thursday that week by the Ukrainian Parliament that ordered all Interior Ministry troops and police officers to return to their barracks.

Ms. Bogolovskaya said that the Thursday night vote sent an emphatic message to Mr. Yanukovych and his last backers that Parliament, dominated by the governing Party of Regions and previously a bastion of loyal support, had given up on him.

“This was the moment that Yanukovych realized that he no longer had even Parliament on his side,” she said, adding that the president had no choice after this but to respect its resolution and order security forces off the streets. 

But Mykhalo V. Dobkin, a Party of Regions baron who had for years worked closely with Mr. Yanukovych, said the president did not give the order and had no knowledge of it until security forces suddenly vanished.

Mr. Dobkin, who met with Mr. Yanukovych late Friday night after he fled Kiev for the eastern city of Kharkiv, said he spoke with a senior presidential official whom he declined to name and was told that the sudden departure of security forces on Friday afternoon had taken the president and his entourage entirely by surprise.

The official, Mr. Dobkin said, had looked out of his window in the presidential administration building on Friday afternoon and, shocked to see the police “laying down their shields and getting on buses,” rushed to see the president to ask what was going on. Told by Mr. Yanukovych that he had issued no order for a withdrawal, the official, according to Mr. Dobkin, then left the building, never to return.

So there you have it. All clearly laid out. Not a mass democratic uprising, but a coup, or putsch, plain and simple. U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt powwowing with neo-Nazi leader Andriy Parubiy on coup strategy, and, when it looked like things were going to get really hot in Kiev, an order is issued by deputy interior minister Viktor Dubovik, without Yanukovych's knowledge, for the security forces to leave the city.

Dubovik was certainly bought off. Why can't he be located by the Higgins and Kramer?

This begs the question, "Why does The New York Times insist in denying the Russian explanation of Yanukovych's ouster when its own reporting basically confirms there was a coup in Kiev last February?"

My guess is that the Gray Lady wants to get out front because things are soon to grow even worse for the junta in Kiev; The New York Times doesn't want to find itself with another Judith Miller "weapons of mas destruction" canard on its hands . Oliver Stone, someone with chops (his 1991 movie JFK led to the creation of the 1992 Assassination Records Act), is working on a documentary that will delve into last year's Kiev coup. Here is Stone's Facebook entry from December 30:

Excuse my absence these past weeks. A combination of overwork, prepping the Snowden movie in Germany & England, a side trip to Moscow, and a devastating head cold have laid me low. Recovering over Christmas in California; winter sun helps.

Interviewed Viktor Yanukovych 4 hours in Moscow for new English language documentary produced by Ukrainians. He was the legitimate President of Ukraine until he suddenly wasn’t on February 22 of this year. Details to follow in the documentary, but it seems clear that the so-called ‘shooters’ who killed 14 police men, wounded some 85, and killed 45 protesting civilians, were outside third party agitators. Many witnesses, including Yanukovych and police officials, believe these foreign elements were introduced by pro-Western factions-- with CIA fingerprints on it.

Remember the Chavez ‘regime change’/coup of 2002 when he was temporarily ousted after pro and anti-Chavez demonstrators were fired upon by mysterious shooters in office buildings. Also resembles similar technique early this year in Venezuela when Maduro’s legally elected Government was almost toppled by violence aimed at anti-Maduro protestors. Create enough chaos, as the CIA did in Iran ‘53, Chile ‘73, and countless other coups, and the legitimate Government can be toppled. It’s America’s soft power technique called ‘Regime Change 101.’

In this case the “Maidan Massacre” was featured in Western media as the result of an unstable, brutal pro-Russian Yanukovych Government. You may recall Yanukovych went along with the February 21 deal with opposition parties and 3 EU foreign minsters to get rid of him by calling for early elections. The next day that deal was meaningless when well-armed, neo-Nazi radicals forced Yanukovych to flee the country with repeated assassination attempts. By the next day, a new pro-Western government was established and immediately recognized by the US (as in the Chavez 2002 coup).

A dirty story through and through, but in the tragic aftermath of this coup, the West has maintained the dominant narrative of “Russia in Crimea” whereas the true narrative is “USA in Ukraine.” The truth is not being aired in the West. It’s a surreal perversion of history that’s going on once again, as in Bush pre-Iraq ‘WMD’ campaign. But I believe the truth will finally come out in the West, I hope, in time to stop further insanity.

For a broader understanding, see Pepe Escobar’s analysis “The new European ‘arc of instability,’” which indicates growing turbulence in 2015, as the US cannot tolerate the idea of any rival economic entity http://bit.ly/1yBmpHa. You might also see “Untold History” Chapter 10 where we discuss the dangers of past Empires which did not allow for the emergence of competing economic countries.

The current situation in Kiev is growing more unstable. Sabrina Tavernise, a Gray Lady reporter who was in the Donbass last year, wrote in the Sunday Review section of the paper yesterday ("The Next Battle for Ukraine") that

One immediate problem is cash. The country is running on fumes in terms of hard currency reserves, in part a result of a large payment recently to Russia for its gas debt. Without a substantial cash infusion from the International Monetary Fund, the country is likely to suffer an economic meltdown, with far-reaching consequences for its currency, banking system and its new government’s reputation. Russia’s wobbly finances do not help — about a quarter of Ukraine’s exports go to Russia.

One big test for the new government will be Igor Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian oligarch whose PrivatBank, one of the largest commercial banks in the country, is at the center of a murky web of financial transactions, symbolizing much of what is wrong with the Ukrainian banking industry. Taking him on will be complicated: He is a friend of the new government and the revolution that put it there. He is governor of the eastern region of Dnepropetrovsk. He also has his own militia.

The odds are overwhelmingly against the reformers. Change is hard, war is distracting and history is difficult to overcome.

Don't Think It Can't Happen Here: How the Police State is Shaping Up

There was a terrific, terrifying story published yesterday in the Gray Lady by Matt Apuzzo, "War Gear Flows to Police Departments," detailing the massive militarization of local police forces in the U.S. It is a must-read:

[A]s President Obama ushers in the end of what he called America’s “long season of war,” the former tools of combat — M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers and more — are ending up in local police departments, often with little public notice. 

During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft. 

The equipment has been added to the armories of police departments that already look and act like military units. Police SWAT teams are now deployed tens of thousands of times each year, increasingly for routine jobs. Masked, heavily armed police officers in Louisiana raided a nightclub in 2006 as part of a liquor inspection. In Florida in 2010, officers in SWAT gear and with guns drawn carried out raids on barbershops that mostly led only to charges of “barbering without a license.”

With crime declining throughout the country, what excuse is there for a municipality to load up on MRAPs?

Military Equipment for Local Police

As the nation’s wars abroad wind down, many of the military’s surplus tools of combat have ended up in the hands of state and local law enforcement. Totals below are the minimum number of pieces acquired since 2006 in a selection of categories.

MRAPS BY STATE

WA

ME

432

= 1 vehicle

ND

MT

VT

MN

MRAPs

OR.

MA

ID

NY

WI

WY

Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles

MI

CT

NE

IA

NJ

PA

NV

OH

UT

MD

CA

IL

IN

CO

WV

VA

KS

KY

MO

NC

TN

AR

AZ

OK

NM

SC

GA

AL

LA

TX

FL

HI

435

44,900

533

93,763

180,718

Other armored

vehicles

Night vision

pieces

Aircraft

Machine guns

Magazines

Source: Department of Defense

The answer supplied by one police officer is that the war overseas can come home:

“You have a lot of people who are coming out of the military that have the ability and knowledge to build I.E.D.’s and to defeat law enforcement techniques,” Sgt. Dan Downing of the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department told the local Fox affiliate, referring to improvised explosive devices, or homemade bombs. Sergeant Downing did not return a message seeking comment.

And that is how it works. The nation spends a profligate amount in blood and treasure to send its sons and daughters abroad -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa -- to protect the homeland, and lo and behold! We have to arm up, turning our constabulary into Navy SEALs wannabes, to protect our communities from those very same sons and daughters when they come home.

The idea of rogue enlisted men wreaking havoc on Main Street is bullshit, of course. The real reason, though unacknowledged, for all those 100-round M-16 ammunition clips is to have the firepower at hand when the citizenry goes native. Unrest is coming, and it won't be just to a theater near you.

Militarization of the local police is one ominous sign of an impending crackdown. New articulations of a sophisticated police state are another. First, note how the Thai military is managing dissent after its recent coup. The story, "In Thailand, Growing Intolerance for Dissent Drives Many to More Authoritarian Nations," is by Thomas Fuller and it appeared this past Saturday:

The curfew imposed after the coup has been lifted in tourist areas and is loosely enforced from midnight to 4 a.m. in other parts of the country. Of the scores detained in the early days of the coup, most have been freed, including former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra. 

But freedom of expression has been sharply curtailed. Thailand’s cacophonous news media has been partly silenced by the military junta, which closely monitors television news and has released detained journalists only under the condition that they not speak out. 

The junta has also banned gatherings of five people or more — a rule that does not apply to its own attempts to manage the public mood, which have included staging performances in Bangkok titled “Return Happiness to the People.” The shows, which feature women dancing and singing in camouflage miniskirts, were organized by specialists in psychological warfare, according to the Thai news media. 

Nearly every evening, the military announces on television the names of people summoned for questioning or detention. Democracy advocates, academics and anyone who speaks publicly about politics watch with anxiety to see if their names have been added to the list of more than 350 people already summoned. Those released from detention are forced to sign an agreement that bars them from taking part in “political movements.” 

“If I violate these conditions or support political activities, I consent to face legal action immediately and consent to the suspension of my financial transactions,” says the military’s document, which the coup makers posted on their Facebook page. The army has threatened to try dissenters in military courts.

Then there is Egypt, another prime example of how to implement a coup (brutal, bloodthirsty ruthlessness adorned with a display of popular support and a patina of constitutional legitimacy). Before handing over the scepter of government to president-elect Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, interim president Adly Mansour, former head of the Supreme Constitutional Court (to which he is returning), issued seven decrees, foremost of which was a new election law. According to David Kirkpatrick, "Egyptian Election Law Helps to Block Opposition":

The election law was the most significant new measure because it appeared designed to produce a compliant legislature instead of to promote political pluralism or a balance of power. 

The measure allows election authorities to bar the candidacy of any supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that dominated Egypt’s free elections after the 2011 uprising but has been outlawed. Election authorities can disqualify any candidate who is deemed to support a religiously-based or religiously discriminatory organization — both criteria could apply to the Brotherhood. The law also allows the authorities to exclude candidates who support an organization that has been involved in violence; the government has already decreed the Brotherhood a terrorist group. 

The GOP is already hard at work at the state level trying to prevent people from voting. The next step is legislation, like that decreed by interim president Mansour on his way out the door, to block certain candidates from running. Already onerous filing requirements are the norm in most parts of the U.S. It is not a stretch to imagine something like what Egypt has popping up here.

What I'm saying is that it would not be prudent to believe it can't happen here.

Add Thai Coup to Egypt's Last Year -- See What's Coming?

The Sisi coup in Egypt last July represented a turning point. As I said before on this page, I thought a lot of power elite sat up and took note. The trumpeted Arab Spring democracy movement of aspiring youth could be rolled back. All that was required was the requisite amount of ruthlessness.

Today the announcement by Thomas Fuller reporting from Bangkok on the military coup there, "Thailand’s Military Stages Coup, Thwarting Populist Movement," says that the generals in charge have learned their lesson; they're not going to skimp when it comes back to paring back democratic rights:

It was the second time in a decade that the army had overthrown an elected government, but there were signs that this takeover could be more severe and include sharp curbs on Thailand’s freewheeling news media. 

The coup was seen as a victory for the elites in Thailand who have grown disillusioned with popular democracy and have sought for years to diminish the electoral power of Thaksin Shinawatra, a former prime minister who commands support in the rural north. Unable to win elections, the opposition has instead called for an appointed prime minister, and pleaded with the military for months to step in.

As soldiers spread out throughout Bangkok on Thursday, the generals issued a series of announcements, declaring most of the Constitution “terminated,” banning gatherings of more than five people, imposing a curfew and shutting schools. 

The coup was at least the 12th military takeover since Thailand abandoned the absolute monarchy in 1932. But unlike many previous coups, which involved infighting among generals, Thursday’s military takeover had as a subtext the political awakening among rural Thais who have loyally supported Mr. Thaksin and benefited from patronage and policies such as universal health care and microloans.

*** 

After deposing Mr. Thaksin in 2006, the generals put in place an administration that was widely seen as a failure. 

“The lesson they learned the last time was that the medicine they prescribed after the coup was not strong enough,” said Thongchai Winichakul, a former student activist in Thailand who is now a professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin. “There’s a high possibility of very drastic measures and suppression this time.”

In the same national edition of the Gray Lady today there is more information of the extent of the national security state monitoring the Occupy Wall Street protest movement of fall 2011, "Officials Cast Wide Net in Monitoring Occupy Protests":

[C]ommunications, distributed by people working with counterterrorism and intelligence-sharing offices known as fusion centers, were among about 4,000 pages of unclassified emails and reports obtained through freedom of information requests by lawyers who represented Occupy participants and provided the documents to The New York Times. They offer details of the scrutiny in 2011 and 2012 by law enforcement officers, federal officials, security contractors, military employees and even people at a retail trade association. The monitoring appears similar to that conducted by F.B.I. counterterrorism officials, which was previously reported.

The U.S. political system is just about as completely captured as one can imagine. There is occasionally a spot of sunshine, like the vote the other day in Jackson County, OR to ban GMOs. But on the national level, nothing of the sort.

An Occupy movement is going to have to reappear to rejuvenate the system. Know that when it does there will be "no more water but fire next time."

Brooks Considers Thai Solution for U.S.

The political impasse in Thailand has been frozen in place today. The military announced that it was taking power. Thomas Fuller has the story, "Thai Army Declares Coup, Citing Need to ‘Reform’ Nation":

BANGKOK — Two days after declaring martial law the Thai military on Thursday seized full control of the country, the second time in a decade that the army has overthrown an elected government. 

The military, which had invited political leaders Thursday for a second day of talks on how to resolve the country’s political deadlock detained the meeting participants instead. The head of the army, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha then announced the coup on national television, saying it was “necessary to seize power.” 

Mr. Prayuth said the coup was launched “in order to bring the situation back to normal quickly” and to “reform the political structure, the economy and the society.”

Six months of debilitating protests in Thailand have centered on whether to hold elections. The governing party dissolved Parliament in December in an attempt to defuse the crisis and set the election for February. The opposition Democrat Party, which has not won a national election since 1992, refused to take part. Protesters called for an appointed prime minister and blockaded polling stations, leading to a court ruling that the election was unconstitutional.

The country’s democracy was in deadlock.

This has been a long time coming. The speculation has always been why the shyness from the Thai Army. I bring up the Thai coup this morning because of how nicely it dovetails with a David Brooks column published Monday, "The Big Debate." In it Brooks floats a proposal that is identical to the key demand of the Bangkok-based protest movement that has stymied the populist Shinawatra government -- small groups of appointed elites ruling by fiat:

At the national level, American politics has become neurotically democratic. Politicians are campaigning all the time and can scarcely think beyond the news cycle. Legislators are terrified of offending this or that industry lobby, activist group or donor faction. Unrepresentative groups have disproportionate power in primary elections. 

The quickest way around all this is to use elite Simpson-Bowles-type commissions to push populist reforms. 

The process of change would be unapologetically elitist. Gather small groups of the great and the good together to hammer out bipartisan reforms — on immigration, entitlement reform, a social mobility agenda, etc. — and then rally establishment opinion to browbeat the plans through. But the substance would be anything but elitist. Democracy’s great advantage over autocratic states is that information and change flow more freely from the bottom up. Those with local knowledge have more responsibility.

If the Guardian State’s big advantage is speed at the top, democracy’s is speed at the bottom. So, obviously, the elite commissions should push proposals that magnify that advantage: which push control over poverty programs to local charities; which push educational diversity through charter schools; which introduce more market mechanisms into public provision of, say, health care, to spread power to consumers.

If it turns out that the Tea Party backbenchers are too unruly to govern when the GOP controls the White House and the Senate as well as the House, know that the Thai solution is being seriously considered.

Ukraine: a Fascist Putsch?

A tentative agreement has been announced, an agreement that was apparently brokered with assistance from Russia, Poland, France and Germany. The U.S., EU and the opposition apparently have secured what they want -- new elections and a commitment to curtail presidential power. But will now everyone pack up and go home?

What is a putsch? It is an attempt to violently overthrow a government by a small group. When we think of "putsch" we usually think of the Beer Hall of Putsch of Hitler and Ludendorff. A putsch is like a coup d'état with the difference being that we usually associate a coup d'état with the capture of the state by the military or a branch of the military.

What we saw last July in Cairo was a coup d'état. Chairman of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces Abdul Fatah el-Sisi ousted the elected President Mohamed Morsi, abolished Morsi's government and installed a new one. What we are seeing in Kiev is a putsch. Street fighters from the western part of Ukraine are attempting to topple the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych.

In both Egypt and Ukraine the popular element in opposition to the elected presidents cannot be discounted. At the same time it is important to recognize that without the intervention of the military in Egypt or the mobilization of far-right, pro-fascist goon squads in Ukraine the people-power uprisings would have amounted to nothing more than another "Occupy Wall Street"-type non-violent protest.

The role of the media in the West is to do all it can to obscure the fact that what we are witnessing in Kiev is a putsch. To achieve this goal the Gray Lady's two reporters, Andrew Kramer and Andrew Higgins, aided by their editors, have mustered all their talents to obscure the fact that the escalation of the violence this week in Kiev is due to the actions of the organized street fighters of the far right.

First, on Tuesday, street fighters attacked security forces in front of Parliament after opposition members were unsuccessful in passing measures to limit presidential power. This caused a spike in violence and many fatalities. Then, after a truce had been struck, street fighters broke the truce and attacked police lines, which led to another spike in violence and even more fatalities.

In neither case has the New York Times been honest in its reporting. In both instances, the Yanukovych government is blamed for a lack of restraint and for the use of excessive force. The esteemed Gray Lady is indistinguishable from any run-of-the-mill administration press secretary who must sing for her supper.

Sensing that their credibility might be tarnished, Higgins and Kramer publish a piece today where they acknowledge the role played by the far right in the uprising. Titled "Converts Join With Militants in Kiev Clash," it is, as one would expect, a mostly tendentious portrayal of right-wing Ukrainian nationalism that airbrushes away its roots in the fascism of ultra-nationalist Stepan Bandera.

Higgins and Kramer fail to mention the Nazi connection, something odd since comparisons to Hitler and Nazi crimes are a favorite theme in the Western media, but they do allow a small window on a reality they are struggling to obscure:

Many Ukrainians, who doggedly oppose the government, look with horror at the use of firebombs, rocks and, on occasion, guns to oust the president, who was democratically elected in 2010 and whose future is scheduled to be decided at the ballot box in 2015. 

Revulsion is particularly strong in the east of the country, where Mr. Yanukovych first made his career in politics, where most people speak Russian rather than Ukrainian, and where Ukrainian nationalist heroes like Stepan Bandera are viewed as fascist traitors. 

“We have a genetic memory of fascism here,” said Anatoly Skripnik, a businessman in the eastern city of Dnepropetrovsk.