Saturday, December 16, 2017

(Special Ops Rules Over All?)  Bye Bye Reliable Internet & Monitor WSJ for Reporting by Comcast & Spectrum?  (WAR! What/Who Is It Good For?)  Analysis-Suppressing Mental Munchkin  (Flim-Flammery of Tax Cuts)  Leda & the Swan Redux?  (How It All Happened) Dubya Is Still Either the Dummy or the Smarty (The Enemy of One's Enemy Is . . .?)  


Donald Trump's First Year Sets Record for US Special Ops

Ambassadors of the traditional kind?  Who needs them?  Diplomats?  What a waste!  The State Department?  Why bother?  Its budget is to be slashed and its senior officials are leaving in droves ever since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office.  Under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, hiring is frozen, which means those officials are generally not being replaced.  (Buyouts of $25,000 are being offered to get yet more of them to jump ship.)  Dozens of key positions have gone unfilled, while the secretary of state reportedly focuses not on global diplomacy or what, in another age, was called “foreign policy,” but on his reorganization (downsizing) of the department and evidently little else.  Across the planet, starting with the A’s (Australia), American embassies lack ambassadors, including South Korea, a country that has been a focus of the Trump administration.  Similarly, at the time of the president’s inflammatory Jerusalem announcement, the U.S. had no ambassadors yet in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, among other Middle Eastern states.  It’s quite a tale and it’s being covered as the news story it certainly is.
All of this could be seen, however, not just as the foibles of one president surrounded by “his” generals, but as the culmination of a post-9/11 process in which American policymaking has increasingly been militarized. In this context, as the State Department shrinks, don’t think this country has no ambassadors across the planet. America’s Special Operations forces increasingly act as our “diplomats” globally, training and bolstering allies and attempting to undermine enemies more or less everywhere. We’ve never seen anything like it and yet, unlike the slashing of the diplomatic corps, it’s a story barely noted in the mainstream. Nick Turse has, however, been covering it for "TomDispatch" in a groundbreaking way since 2011. In these years, he’s focused on what should have been seen as one of the major developments of our era:  the phenomenal growth and historically unprecedented deployment of this country’s special operators in an atmosphere of permanent war in Washington. 
In the post-9/11 years, the once “elite” units of the U.S. military, perhaps a few thousand Green Berets and other personnel, have become a force of approximately 70,000. In other words, that secretive crew cocooned inside the U.S. military has grown as large as or larger than the militaries of countries such as Argentina, Canada, Chile, Croatia, South Africa, or Sweden. Now, imagine that those Special Operations forces, as Turse has again been reporting for years, are not only being dispatched to more countries annually than ever before, but to more countries than any nation has ever deployed its military personnel to. Period. 
Shouldn’t that be a humongous story? We’re talking, as Turse points out today, about the deployment of special ops teams or personnel to 149 of the 190 (or so) nations on this planet in 2017. You can, of course, find articles about our special operators in the media, but over the years they’ve generally tended to read like so many publicity releases for such forces.

That Net Neutrality Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal Was Written By a Comcast Attorney


In the face of widespread opposition, the Federal Communications Commission rolled back net neutrality protections that prevented internet service providers from charging websites for faster download speeds. The vote fell along party lines. But one Democrat, Barack Obama’s former Federal Trade Commission chief Jon Leibowitz, dismissed net neutrality repeal as no big deal in the pages of the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. He celebrated that the FTC would get restored authority to aggressively police the internet for anti-competitive or unfair conduct.
The op-ed contained an unusual disclaimer:

Mr. Leibowitz was a Democratic commissioner at the FTC from 2004-13 and chairman beginning in 2009. As a partner at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, he represents both technology companies and broadband providers.
The reference to both industries reads as an effort to be upfront about any potential conflict of interest, but also to suggest that Leibowitz has clients on both sides of the issue, so his argument is dispassionate. Tech companies, historically, support net neutrality, while broadband providers oppose it.
But it’s not entirely clear what “technology companies” Leibowitz himself represents. When asked, he directed "The Intercept" to the Davis Polk website, which lists a fair number of tech companies for which the corporate law firm has done business.
However, we do know Leibowitz’s primary broadband client:  Comcast, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the net neutrality repeal.

And for all the holiday excitement provided by women coming forward with their stories of decades-long sexual harassment (and many times outright rape) by bosses, colleagues, and potential employers, we learn why none of them involve the financial industry. At least not yet.

New data suggests that, along with Hollywood, the media, and the restaurant industry, finance might deserve a new turn under the hot lights. A new report from the Government Accountability Office finds that women have made no progress increasing their ranks in management in the financial industry since 2007, with women in New York, home to Wall Street’s power center, faring worst in the country.

Whoops!

Mouse Swallows Fox

And our beloved (/snark) departing Fed chair raises the rates once again by one-quarter point for a month or two before the markets rebel and it is lowered (quietly) again.

The outgoing Chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, held her last press conference yesterday following the Federal Open Market Committee’s decision to hike the Feds Fund rate by one-quarter percentage point, bringing its target range to 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 percent.
Given the growing reports from market watchers that the stock market has entered the bubble stage and could pose a serious threat to the health of the economy should the bubble burst, CNBC’s Steve Liesman asked Yellen during the press conference if there are “concerns at the Fed about current market valuations.”
“So let me start Steve with the stock market generally. Of course the stock market has gone up a great deal this year and we have in recent months characterized the general level of asset valuations as elevated. What that reflects is simply the assessment that looking at price-earnings ratios and comparable metrics for other assets other than equities we see ratios that are in the high end of historical ranges. And so that’s worth pointing out.
“But economists are not great at knowing what appropriate valuations are. We don’t have a terrific record. And the fact that those valuations are high doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily overvalued.
. . . Yellen makes at least one unassailable admission in this statement:  her economist predecessors at the Fed certainly “don’t have a terrific record” in calling out bubbles – Alan Greenspan being the worst offender.
After presiding over the worst subprime mortgage and derivatives bubble in history on the belief that Wall Street was fully capable of policing itself, former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan had this to say at a House Oversight Committee hearing on October 23, 2008 after his blunder had helped usher in the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression:
“So the problem here is something which looked to be a very solid edifice. And, indeed, a critical pillar to market competition and free markets, did break down. And I think that, as I said, shocked me. I still do not fully understand why it happened and, obviously, to the extent that I figure out where it happened and why, I will change my views. If the facts change, I will change.”
In the same hearing, Henry Waxman, the Chair of the Committee, had no problem understanding “why it happened.” It was, plain and simple, regulatory capture. Waxman explained:
“In each case, corporate excess and greed enriched company executives at enormous cost to shareholders and our economy. In each case, these abuses could have been prevented if Federal regulators had paid more attention and intervened with responsible regulations…
“For too long, the prevailing attitude in Washington has been that the market always knows best. The Federal Reserve had the authority to stop the irresponsible lending practices that fueled the subprime mortgage market, but its long-time chairman, Alan Greenspan, rejected pleas that he intervene. The SEC had the authority to insist on tighter standards for credit rating agencies, but it did nothing, despite urging from Congress.
. . . “The Treasury Department could have led the charge for responsible oversight of financial derivatives. Instead, it joined the opposition. The list of regulatory mistakes and misjudgments is long, and the cost to taxpayers and our economy is staggering.
“The SEC relaxed leverage standards on Wall Street, the Offices of Thrift Supervision and the Comptroller of the Currency preempted State efforts to protect home buyers from predatory lending. The Justice Department slashed its efforts to prosecute white-collar fraud.
. . . How can it be that just a mere nine years since the second greatest financial collapse in U.S. history, the Federal Reserve, the Federal regulator that oversees the largest bank holding companies on Wall Street with a seat on the Financial Stability Oversight Council, has learned nothing about bubbles.

Read the entire essay here.

Huzzah:  Alabama’s black voters stood up for Doug Jones in a big way, and now the Democratic Party must remember what it owes them, Jamelle Bouie writes. The Republican Party, on the other hand, should see this as a reckoning, but Reihan Salam doubts it will. And Isaac Chotiner proposes — only half in jest — that Doug Jones, a candidate who won in a red state without compromising his blue positions, should consider a run for president.
That was quick:  Jim Newell predicted today that the GOP would push to pass the tax bill before Doug Jones is seated. And this afternoon, Jordan Weissmann reports, House and Senate Republicans reached a deal and announced they were ready to move forward.


Fifty years ago, Otis Redding died in a plane crash at 26. What a waste.

Still sitting and watching the tide roll away. Thanks for the memories, Big O.



And exactly who is receiving those tax cuts? Don't overthink this.

And don't look to the Treasury Secretary for any valid information.

On Monday the Treasury Department released a one-page report claiming that tax cuts would pay for themselves. The document was a shameless attempt to fool the public — carefully worded to imply that economic experts at Treasury (they’re still in there somewhere, maybe locked in a closet) had actually done an analysis to that effect, without explicitly saying so. In fact, there was no economic analysis; Trump officials just made up numbers that would give them the result they wanted.
Even reporters hardened to Trump administration lies seemed shocked by the brazenness of this bait-and-switch. What made Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, think he could get away with it?
Well, one answer is that similar scams on the part of congressional Republicans, Paul Ryan in particular, have generally received highly respectful treatment from the news media. Why shouldn’t Mnuchin imagine he can pull off the same trick?
Actually, he probably can’t. But the truth is that on economic policy, as in other areas, the Trump administration isn’t much of a departure from recent Republican norms. There’s a fundamental continuity in the con jobs:  Mnuchin is basically trying to do a Paul Ryan; he just lacks the acting skills to pull it off.
About that Treasury report:  The department has an Office of Tax Policy, or O.T.P., which provides “economic and legal policy analysis” for tax policy decisions. Normally we’d expect this office to carry out a full analysis of the effects of Republican tax bills, similar to those conducted by Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation and by independent, nonpartisan organizations like the Tax Policy Center.
But either O.T.P. didn’t do that, or it did an analysis that Mnuchin is suppressing. (The department’s inspector general is investigating what actually happened, because Mnuchin repeatedly claimed to have such an analysis in hand.) If the experts actually did do an analysis, they probably found what everyone else has found — namely, that tax cuts come nowhere near to paying for themselves.
. . . In other words, this “analysis” is a sick joke. Why would Mnuchin think he can pull off this scam?
As I said, he probably can’t. But he may be inspired by the example of Paul Ryan, who pulled off similar scams a few years back, fooling much of the news media and even receiving an award for fiscal responsibility from several deficit-scold organizations.
The details of Ryan’s scam were a bit different, but the basic principle was the same. First, tell budget experts to make obviously unrealistic assumptions and estimate what those assumptions would mean for future budget deficits. Then tout the resulting estimates as validation of your plan.  
. . . Oh, and the howling mess that is the current G.O.P. tax plan shows what happens when Ryanesque pretense meets reality.
Yet Ryan’s scam worked. He received years of media adulation; that adulation is the main reason he’s now speaker of the House. Even now, news analyses tend to depict the irresponsibility and incompetence of Republican tax plans as some kind of deviation from Ryan’s past behavior, not its natural continuation.
In fact, you almost have to feel sorry for Mnuchin:  Yes, he’s an obvious buffoon, but his scam isn’t really any worse than Ryan’s. Why can’t he pull it off?
The larger point is that the dishonesty and dysfunctionality of current Republican efforts at tax “reform,” the party’s evident inability to govern in a serious way, didn’t come out of nowhere. Republicans have been heading in this direction for years. Anyone who didn’t see this coming either wasn’t paying attention or was engaged in willful self-delusion, pretending that the G.O.P. was a normal party long after it should have been obvious that it had gone off the deep end.

Think there's even a small chance that the "tax cut" (NOT) bill being readied for President Trump's signature into law might give you a decent amount of money from that "tax cut" to help you get ahead of the present quicksand and expected future calamities?

Good luck!

When Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin claimed that more than 100 people in his department were “working around the clock” on forthcoming analysis regarding the G.O.P.’s tax plan, those he credited with “running scenarios” on the bills were surprised, given that such analysis did not, in fact exist. Their time had been spent, they told "The New York Times," running models on “individual provisions or policy ideas” — a far cry from the detailed, thorough analysis that Mnuchin had repeatedly promised was right around the corner, and would definitively prove that the cuts paid for themselves. With the clock running down and the Inspector General digging into the mysterious case of the missing Treasury analysis, the former Goldman partner turned foreclosure mogul pulled through on Monday with a report clocking in at a single page and fewer than 500 words that says the Senate plan will totally pay for itself — assuming a set of circumstances that are about as likely as Jared Kushner bringing peace to the Middle East.
For real-li(f)e economists and tax experts, Mnuchin’s “analysis” is an infuriating disgrace. “The Treasury’s one-page note is a pathetic joke,” Jason Furman, a professor of Practice at Harvard Kennedy School and former Chairman of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me. “I feel awful for the dozens of talented Treasury economists who have worked for years developing sophisticated models for dynamic analysis and dynamic scoring only to be completely shut out of this process. Instead of doing an analysis, the Treasury Department assumed a can opener, using an assumption they made about growth in the budget they put together long before they even had a tax-reform plan. Then they mechanically calculated the consequences of that growth assumption for the budget finding that the tax cuts pay for themselves, a result that a consensus of top economists in the recent Booth survey rejected.”
As David Kamin, a professor at N.Y.U. law school, put it:  “This is not an analysis of the legislation. It tells us nothing about what this legislation would actually do.” To economist Ernie Tedeschi, the one-pager “reads like it was done over the weekend . . . this report should not be taken seriously. It is not a score. It is not an economic analysis.“ Furman and Tedeschi both echoed the idea that the meager one-pager shouldn’t be viewed as a black mark on Treasury staffers, but as an indication that they were pressured into putting something out that is not backed by economic evidence. “It’s a pathetic excuse for a study,” former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told me. “I suspect the current staff are not happy that the relevant data has been suppressed in the administration’s attempts to obscure the truth.”
How did Mnuchin & Co. arrive at such a singular conclusion? First, they used the Trump administration’s projections of a 2.9 percent real G.D.P. growth rate over 10 years cited in its 2018 budget. As a reminder, no one, including the the Congressional Budget Office, actually believes that this sort of growth is at all in the realm of possible. As Summers tweeted on Monday, “Why would anyone think it relevant to project tax revenues from a forecast that is outside the range of professional consensus?

If I can assume I could serve at 150 mph, I could derive the conclusion that I could compete with Roger Federer.” Then there’s the even bigger asterisk, which relies on one line about “a combination of regulatory reform, infrastructure development, and welfare reform” and literally no further details. In other words, Mnuchin, et al., feel comfortable saying that the Senate tax plan would raise $1.8 trillion over 10 years through savings derived from plans that — wait for it — do not, and may never, exist. Remember “Infrastructure Week”? The Treasury might as well be saying, “This tax plan will 100 percent work if a million other things that are little more than ideas scribbled on a cocktail napkin happen first.”
Perhaps even more disturbing than Mnuchin‘s declaration that the tax plan will pay for itself presupposing X, Y, and Z, is that line about welfare reform. The administration may not have come up with much on the infrastructure front beyond some prop comedy involving Trump picking up a binder and dropping it on the floor, but it is currently laying the groundwork to hamstring the social safety net. Now, the Treasury is saying that lawmakers must make deep cuts to things like Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps in order to lower taxes on corporate America without blowing out the deficit.
It’s not totally clear why, at the eleventh hour, when both the House and Senate tax plans have passed through the first ring of fire and are inching closer to Trump’s desk by the day, Mnuchin decided to release this report — probably to get the Inspector General off his back. It’s also not clear if he thinks people will actually believe it, or if he cares either way. As a former Treasury staffer told me, “Tim Geithner used to have a saying, ‘There are people who are here for the scene, there are people who are here for the cause, and there are people who are here for the craft.’ Mnuchin is clearly a scene guy.” In other words, he’s in it for the photo ops with money.

The whole schmear reminds one that this is what you get when you allow rich people to appoint (by allowing them to make almost unlimited campaign donations) the representatives of the citizenry.

They obviously remember how Bush's tax cuts blew a monster of a hole in the budget and got away with it by ensuring that someone else (Obama) would come along after him to repair the damage (out of the lower class' pocketbooks).

One only hopes that Bush's wars will not continue from Obama's clever stewardship to Trump's.

Although, perhaps, that next boom may be the end point of this ownership aversion.


Unlike many, I've always found quite a bit of comfort and enlightenment from the work of Julian Assange. He cuts to the quick, and then gives one the opportunity to bind the gaping wound with stitches of comprehension of how a different approach may bring much better results for all.



Max and Stacy explain the flim-flammery going on with the tax cuts and the FED's Fund Rates and Funny Money.



Our man on the front lines, Lee Camp (did you see him demonstrating against the killing of "Net Neutrality" in front of the FCC?), interviews Richard Wolff about the coming crash as well as exposing the 1% who are just waaiitting for you to die.


As the Trump years continue, we should remember that many of the "Deplorables," designated as such by Hillary Clinton during a presidential debate, believed that they had some good reasons to vote for Trump, who was largely unknown to them outside of his rhetoric (which has proved by now to be just about 180 degrees from truthful).


A classic story may be needed to set our current scene.

The same year that the Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed, William Butler Yeats published a collection of poems called "The Tower." It contains what many consider his masterpiece, the harrowing sonnet “Leda and the Swan.” In it, Yeats recreates the moment in Greek myth when Zeus, the ruling god of Olympus, having taken the form of a swan, rapes the helpless human woman Leda, leaving her pregnant with a daughter.  That daughter became Helen of Troy, whose abduction was the casus belli for the Trojan War.
The poet begins with the victim’s shock and awe:

“A sudden blow:  the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, 
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
In the final stanza, Yeats writes:
“A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower 
And Agamemnon dead.” 

In those brief words can be read an entire history of war and death, recounted more fully in the 15,693 lines of the "Iliad," all somehow encapsulated in that first act of violence.

I apologize for telling this twice, but don't doubt that those classic tales aren't full of future wonder and aren't classically important.

Tomgram:  Rebecca Gordon, The Annals of Rehabilitation

Posted by Rebecca Gordon, November 21, 2017
Who even remembers that, back in September 2002, Lawrence Lindsey, then President George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser, offered an upper limit estimate on the cost of a future war in Iraq at $100 billion to $200 billion?  He also suggested that the “successful prosecution” of such a war “would be good for the economy.” That December, Mitch Daniels, director of the Office of Management and Budget, contradicted Lindsey, indicating that the real costs of such a war might be only $50 billion to $60 billion. And the top officials of the Bush administration weren’t particularly worried about paying for the occupation that was slated to follow since, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz put it in May 2003 after Baghdad had been taken by the U.S. military, Iraq was floating “on a sea of oil.”
Of course, by that pre-invasion September, President Bush and his top officials had already decided to invade, take out Saddam Hussein, and turn Iraq into a bastion of American power in the oil heartlands of the Middle East.  It was just a matter of how and when to make the case to the American people.  (As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card put it that month, “'From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.”)
That was a decade and a half ago.  Just recently, the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute offered a new estimate of what America’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan will cost the country through fiscal year 2018 and it’s a figure -- $5.6 trillion - that should make your head spin.

It certainly leaves Lindsey’s and Daniels’s estimates in a ditch somewhere on the road to Baghdad.  Put another way, we’re talking at a bare minimum about a cost per American taxpayer since September 12, 2001, of more than $23,000.  Good for the economy?  Hmmm.  And the Costs of War report's estimate doesn’t even include interest on the borrowing that’s taken place to pay for those wars, which, it suggests, is “projected to add more than $1 trillion dollars to the national debt by 2023.”

Worse yet, these days America’s 16-year-old set of wars only seems to be expanding and is now regularly referred to in the Pentagon and elsewhere as a “generational struggle.”  Translation:  we’re still going to be at it in 2027, maybe even in 2037, or 2047, pouring down the black hole of war trillions more in taxpayer dollars that might have gone into the American economy and our crumbling infrastructure.

Isn’t this, then, an appropriate moment to offer a small tip of the cap to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of the crew for imagining a world in which such invasions and occupations would lead to the American domination of this planet until the end of time?  It’s in this context that TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, considers the favor Donald Trump has done Bush and the rest of his former administration.  He’s made them look good at a moment when they should look truly terrible.  Ah, Donald, how thoroughly big league of you! Tom
Little League.

Bet that hurts.

On the Rehabilitation of George W. Bush

Say It Again:  The Enemy of Our Enemy Is Still a War Criminal
By Rebecca Gordon
He received a prestigious award from the West Point Association of Graduates. He published a “runaway” bestselling autobiography. Last February, a lavishly produced book celebrating his paintings of Americans who served in the military was, as "Time" put it, “burning up the Amazon charts.”

Still, the liberal media wasn’t ready to embrace George W. Bush - not at least until he made some oblique criticisms of the current tenant of his old position, suggesting that, in the present political climate, “bigotry seems emboldened.” Seems? Have you been to Charlottesville lately, Mr. Bush?

The former president was less tentative on the main subject of his address to a conference on “democracy” he’d organized in New York City:  the importance of free trade and the need for a large American footprint in the world. “We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and international trade,” he said, “forgetting that conflict, instability, and poverty follow in the wake of protectionism.” More on that speech later.

Not the First Rehab Job

George W. Bush is hardly the first disgraced Republican president and war criminal to worm his way back into American esteem. Richard Nixon remains the leader in that department.  He spent his later years being celebrated as an elder statesman and a master of realpolitik in international relations. In the process, he managed to shake off the dust of Watergate.

In those years, few even remembered that his was the first administration in which both the president and vice president resigned. In 1973, that disgraced vice president, Spiro Agnew, pled guilty to a felony count of tax evasion, but not before he’d bequeathed the English language a few of its most mellifluous sobriquets, among them the “nattering nabobs of negativism” and the “effete corps of impudent snobs” (aimed at those who opposed the Vietnam War).

Nixon’s rehabilitation not only reduced the Watergate scandal in American memory, but also essentially obliterated his greater crimes, among which were these:

* while still a presidential candidate in 1968, he opened a secret back channel to the South Vietnamese government to keep it out of peace talks with the North that might have benefited his Democratic opponent;

* in the war itself, he oversaw the expansion of the CIA’s Phoenix Program of torture and assassination in which, as historian Alfred McCoy has described it, “the formalities of prosecution” of suspected Viet Cong were replaced “with pump and dump - pumping suspects of information by torture and then dumping the bodies, more than 20,000 of them between 1968 and 1971”;

* he also oversaw an expansive, illegal, and undeclared war in Cambodia (which, when it was about to come to light, he described as a brief “incursion” into that country);

* he oversaw the saturation or “carpet” bombing of the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, and that country’s major port, Haiphong;

* and he presided over the “first 9/11,” the 1973 military coup that murdered Chile’s elected president, Salvador Allende, ushering in years of terror and torture under General Augusto Pinochet.

And don’t think that Richard Nixon is the only other example of such a post-presidential rehabilitation. Ronald Reagan is now remembered by friend and foe alike as a kind, folksy president and a wily strategist who ended the Cold War by forcing a cash-strapped Soviet Union to keep up with U.S. defense spending and then negotiated directly with Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev. When he died in June 2004, the "New York Times" was typical in the largely fawning obituary it ran, describing him as “the man who restored popular faith in the presidency and the American government.”

That obituary did at least mention the Iran-Contra conspiracy in which President Reagan approved the (illegal) sale of arms to Iran to fund his (illegal) support of the Nicaraguan Contras, the murderous rebel force that sought to overthrow that country’s leftist Sandinista government. “The deception and disdain for the law,” commented the obituary, “invited comparisons to Watergate, undermined Mr. Reagan's credibility, and severely weakened his powers of persuasion with Congress.” An odd set of observations about a man being hailed for restoring faith in the presidency, but consistent with the contradictions inherent in any lionization of Reagan.

Lest we forget, he was also the president who began his first term by attacking unions, starting with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, a move which so many years later still results in regular flight delays, thanks to a 27-year low in the number of air controllers. Reagan also inaugurated the mania for deregulation that led to the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and ultimately to the subprime mortgage crisis and financial meltdown of 2007-2008. His presidency reinforced what would become a never-ending slide in the value of real wages and his tax policies were the starting point for what has, in our own time, become not an inequality gap but an inequality chasm that has now left three men with the same amount of wealth as 160 million Americans. (Not surprisingly, depending on who’s calculating it, the United States either has the world’s highest or perhaps fourth-highest Gini score, a measurement of economic inequality.)

Nixon had to wait many years for his rehabilitation and Reagan’s was largely posthumous.  At a vigorous 71, however, Bush seems to be slipping effortlessly back onto the national stage only nine years after leaving office essentially in disgrace.  He will evidently have plenty of time to bask in history’s glow before the first of those nostalgic obituaries are written.  And for that, he can thank Donald Trump.

W. Redux?

During that October 17th speech in which he criticized Trump without mentioning his name, George W. Bush touted the “Spirit of Liberty:  At Home, in the World." There, he bemoaned the degradation of political discourse by “casual cruelty,” noting that “bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone, provides permission for cruelty and bigotry, and compromises the moral education of children.” Like the rest of his family, Bush does not share Trump’s aversion to immigrants, so he added that this country seems to be forgetting “the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America.”

Articles in the "New York Times," the "Washington Post," and even the "Guardian" eagerly reported Bush’s implicit criticisms of the president as a hopeful sign of resistance to Trumpism from the “responsible” Republican right. "Politico" simply labeled the event a “George W. Bush Speech on Trumpism,” although much of it was about the decline of democracy in Europe and the value of free trade.

It’s certainly true that his speech included oblique critiques of the man who repeatedly insulted his brother Jeb as “a very low-energy kind of guy” and knocked him out of the race to be the third Bush to sit in the Oval Office, but it’s worth reading the whole address. It’s vintage W. - that is, vintage W. - as a war criminal. He began, for instance, by reprising the lie that “since World War II, America has encouraged and benefited from the global advance of free markets, from the strength of democratic alliances, and from the advance of free societies.”

As Alfred McCoy demonstrates in his recent book, In the Shadows of the American Century, that is a particularly disingenuous description of a 70-year history in which Washington supported and, in a remarkable number of cases was directly involved in, the destruction of free societies. A list of examples would perhaps begin with the 1953 British and U.S.-backed coup against the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh that would install the despotic Shah in power in that country.

It would certainly continue with the 1954 U.S. and United Fruit Company coup against Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala (an early instance of Washington’s post-World War II “encouragement” of anything-but-free-trade); the 1960 CIA-backed coup against, and the murder of, Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba; and the 1973 military coup in Chile. An honest history would also include the active “encouragement” of societies that were anything but free, including those run by juntas, dictators, or military governments in Greece, Brazil, Argentina, the Philippines, Indonesia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Uruguay, Iraq, and South Korea, to name just a few. Of course, George W. Bush is hardly the first president to lie about the post-World War II record of the United States.  Nor is he the first to suggest that “American security is directly threatened by the chaos and despair of distant places,” which he attributed in his speech to the lack of the democracy Washington put so much effort into destroying in more than 70 countries across the planet.

And don’t forget that it was precisely the pretext of a direct threat to American security that led to the most criminal lie of his career:  the insistence that Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and that the U.S. invasion of his country was justified by a (legally questionable) case of preemptive self-defense. By initiating a war of aggression, by loosing “shock and awe” on the capital of a nation that had not attacked ours, President Bush committed a war crime. Indeed, it was the first in the list of crimes for which the leaders of Nazi Germany were indicted at Nuremberg after World War II:  the ultimate crime against peace.

Few Americans have ever heard of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, but in 1928 the United States signed it and the Senate ratified it by a vote of 85-1. The 50 signatories of that treaty renounced war as a means of settling international disputes and, as the authors of The Internationalists:  How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World have argued, by implication made aggressive war a violation of international law. The U.S. Constitution states in Article 6 that “all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” By invading Iraq, Bush broke both international and U.S. law.

In addition to his crimes against peace, Bush and his administration were also the authors of such traditionally recognized war crimes as torture and the use of chemical weapons. One of the uglier aspects of the U.S. military’s battle for the Iraqi city of Fallujah was its use of white phosphorus, an incendiary munition. Phosphorus ignites spontaneously when exposed to air.  If bits of the chemical attach to human beings, skin and flesh burn away. The burning continues as long as there is oxygen available, sometimes right into the bone.

In short, isn’t it a little early to begin rehabilitating the man responsible for indefinite detention at Guantánamo, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and at least 150,000 Afghans - not to mention the trillions of U.S. dollars shoved down the memory hole in pursuit of the futile wars that followed?

Leda and the Swan

The same year that the Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed, William Butler Yeats published a collection of poems called "The Tower." It contains what many consider his masterpiece, the harrowing sonnet “Leda and the Swan.” In it, Yeats recreates the moment in Greek myth when Zeus, the ruling god of Olympus, having taken the form of a swan, rapes the helpless human woman Leda, leaving her pregnant with a daughter.  That daughter became Helen of Troy, whose abduction was the casus belli for the Trojan War.

The poet begins with the victim’s shock and awe:

“A sudden blow:  the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

In the final stanza, Yeats writes:

“A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.”

In those brief words can be read an entire history of war and death, recounted more fully in the 15,693 lines of the "Iliad," all somehow encapsulated in that first act of violence.
In his poem, Yeats implies that Zeus knows full well the final outcome of his act. Similarly perhaps, the “swans” of Washington in 2003, which was at that time the planet's own imperial Olympus, had more than an inkling of the broken walls, the burning roofs and towers their invasion of Iraq might engender.

As early as 1996, future Vice President Dick Cheney’s fellow hawks Richard Perle and Douglas Feith - who would later join the Bush administration as adviser on the Defense Policy Board and under secretary of defense for policy - helped write a report for Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then running the Israeli government for the first time. Titled “A Clean Break:   A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” it urged the leaders of Israel’s right-wing Likud party to leave behind the nation’s previous geopolitical strategy by abandoning peace negotiations with the Palestinians and using military means to actively restructure the Middle East in their favor.

“Israel,” the authors argued, “can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.” Such a campaign would begin by “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right - as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.” The ultimate goal was a realignment of power in the region, with Syria destabilized, a monarchy in Iraq, and a new regional alliance among Turkey, Jordan, and Israel.

It would prove to be the geopolitical equivalent of a movie preview. In the wake of 9/11, the same cast of characters would take a similar path in Washington and, in the end, that “rolling back” operation would shake or destroy country after country from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya and Yemen. Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Syria has certainly been destabilized in ways almost impossible to imagine, through the rise of ISIS (born in an American military prison) and a vicious, multi-sided civil war that, by early 2016, had left more than a tenth of its population killed or injured.  In the process, more than 10 million people, including untold numbers of children, were turned into internal or external refugees.
Netanyahu, in fact, would reject the “clean break” proposal (perhaps because it also suggested that Israel make a clean break with its dependence on U.S. aid), but the neocons were undeterred. In 1998, they resurrected the plan as part of a new pressure group they formed, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), and presented it to Bill Clinton in a letter encouraging him to direct “a full complement of diplomatic, political, and military efforts” to “remove Saddam Hussein from power.”
Nor were they overly concerned about the legality of such a move, writing that “American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the U.N. Security Council.” In other words, the country should not be “crippled” by adherence to the U.N. Charter, whose Article 51 prohibits unilateral war making without Security Council approval, except in cases of immediate “individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.”
Like Netanyahu, Clinton ignored their suggestion. However, the signatories of the letter included many figures who would become key players in the Bush administration, among them Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Undersecretaries of State John Bolton and Richard Armitage, Reagan hold-over Elliott Abrams, and Zalmay Khalilzad, who among other roles served as Bush’s special envoy and ambassador at large for free Iraqis. And it included, of course, Cheney adviser and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who had prepared a draft of a 1992 Defense Planning Guidance document for President George H.W. Bush in which he argued for the importance of U.S. readiness to take unilateral military action, whether approved by the United Nations or not.

In other words, the top officials of the Bush administration took office already planning to attack Iraq. It only awaited 19 mostly Saudi terrorists hijacking four American commercial airliners on September 11, 2001. That would be the pretext to launch what has become a “generational struggle” that would eventually destroy Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen (and almost as a side dish, Afghanistan), and which now threatens to engulf the entire Greater Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia, from Afghanistan to the Philippines, in a set of never-ending wars and spreading terror movements.

All that suffering sprang from the actions of one feckless president and his crew. So what if - after 16 years of fruitless war, 16 years of disintegrating American infrastructure, 16 years of almost unprecedented inequality -- George W. Bush does find Trump’s rhetorical style distasteful? Is that really any reason to turn a presidential war criminal into a liberal hero?
(Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg:  The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include "Mainstreaming Torture:  Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States" and "Letters from Nicaragua.")



The "Big O."

A true product of American freedom.



Posted by Cirze at 4:57 AM

2 comments:

Phil said...

Merry Christmas to you and yours Cirze.
;)

December 25, 2017 at 3:14 AM
Cirze said...

Yours as well, Phil!

Hope everything's going well up there in your neck of the woods.

Watch out for Trumpists!

December 25, 2017 at 10:00 PM

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