The Cold Civil War Has Started- POST-ELECTION HANGOVER (continued)

POST-ELECTION HANGOVER (continued)

LEARNING FROM TRUMP IN RETROSPECT

There are a lot of reasons Clinton lost. There was some made-up wishful thinking in retrospect: her unfavorables were “priced-in”, I heard, which isn’t a thing. What I haven’t seen an answer for is that for all the money and tech, they didn’t know their blue wall was much less safe fromthe people on the ground than the polling numbers in Brooklyn HQ would see. Something broke down there and it’s urgent to understand why. But even without that loss there would have been a need to reboot. As Ezekiel Kweku writes in an excellent article, “The lesson we should draw from Clinton’s loss is not that white supremacy is unbeatable at the polls, but that it’s not going to beat itself…If the Democratic Party would like to keep more Donald Trumps from winning in the future, they are going to have to take the extraordinary step of doing politics.” Politics is informed by analysis and policy, and though it is clear we need policy to move beyond neoliberalism, that is only the first step. The journey to find this new path is just beginning.   More

If You want to get a sense of Trump’s populist message, watch this 2-minute ad by clicking on the photo at left.

Trump Makes America Goldman’s Again!

At the Republican convention, a man who seemed to take Trump’s twitter attacks on Goldman seriously screamed “Goldman Sachs!” at Ted Cruz’s banker wife as she fled the convention floor. Trump’s own final campaign video declared that he would do battle against the “global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations” — as personified on screen by Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.  But that was then. As Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge fund manager and top adviser to Trump, as well as a former Goldman Sachs banker himself, put it Thursday: “I think the cabal against the bankers is over.”  … Of course, a Hillary Clinton win would have been a victory for Goldman Sachs too. She was paid $675,000 by Goldman for three speeches, had previously received large campaign donations from Blankfein, and her son-in-law runs a hedge fund whose investors include Blankfein.  Goldman also won the election in 2008 and 2012. Barack Obama received more money from Goldman Sachs employees than any other corporation.   More

LESSON FOR DEMOCRATS: BACK TO CLASS

After Barack Obama won the 2008 election as an “agent of change,” he renewed the Wall Street-Democrat alliance, persisting in the trade policies that had decimated the Democratic base in the industrial Midwest.  America’s globalized capitalism can live with the politics of race, gender, and sexual identity. But it is implacably hostile to organized labor. The neoliberal Democrats got the message. As the unionized factories closed and labor’s membership dwindled, the Democratic Party—while it happily took union members’ dues and votes by arguing that Republicans would be worse—did virtually nothing to help. History, the Democrats discovered, was about demography, not class. Democrats would assemble a coalition of the growth sectors—minorities, women, and professional white men. Like their Wall Street funders, the coalition’s implicit antagonist, if not enemy, was the white male worker—the “loser” in the New Economy. Ignored in this politics of social and cultural identity was that organized labor, for all its flaws, kept the white working class in the Democratic Party, and was a firewall against white racism. This was especially true for industrial unions. Moreover, factory jobs, along with government jobs, were the most important ladders of upward mobility for minorities and immigrants. In election after election, the best indicator that a white worker would vote Democratic was union membership.  More

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WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

War Culture, Militarism and Racist Violence Under Trump

With Donald Trump's election as president of the United States, the scourge of authoritarianism has returned not only in the toxic language of hate, humiliation and bigotry, but also in the emergence of a culture of war and violence that looms over society like a plague. War has been redefined in the age of global capitalism: it has expanded its boundaries and now shapes all aspects of society. As Ulrich Beck observes, "the distinctions between war and peace, military and police, war and crime, internal and external security" have collapsed. As violence and politics merge to produce an accelerating and lethal mix of bloodshed, pain, suffering, grief and death, American culture has been transformed into a culture of war… Trump's appointment of warmongering, right-wing military personnel to top government posts and his ongoing rhetoric suggesting the need for a vast expansion of the military-industrial complex signal a further intensification of America's war culture, one that inspired an article to be published in Forbes with the headline: "For The Defence Industry, Trump's Win Means Happy Days Are Here Again."  … Meanwhile, in a particularly worrisome appointment, Trump has chosen retired Gen. Michael Flynn to become his National Security Advisor. Flynn was fired for abusive behavior, has been accused of mishandling classified information, and is a firm supporter of Trump's pro-torture policies.  More

MAKING RUSSIA ‘THE ENEMY’

The rising hysteria about Russia is best understood as fulfilling two needs for Official Washington: the Military Industrial Complex’s transitioning from the “war on terror” to a more lucrative “new cold war” – and blunting the threat that a President Trump poses to the neoconservative/liberal-interventionist foreign-policy establishment…   All of this maneuvering also is delaying the Democratic Party’s self-examination into why it lost so many white working-class voters in normally Democratic strongholds, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.  Rather than national party leaders taking the blame for pre-selecting a very flawed candidate and ignoring all the warning signs about the public’s resistance to this establishment choice, Democrats have pointed fingers at almost everyone else – from FBI Director James Comey for briefly reviving Clinton’s email investigation, to third-party candidates who siphoned off votes, to the archaic Electoral College which negates the fact that Clinton did win the national popular vote – and now to the Russians.   More

Rising inequality has crushed the dream of upward mobility

A child born in 1940 had an extremely good chance of growing up to earn more money than his parents did. Due to regression to the mean, children of the very, very wealthy were somewhat less likely to out-earn their parents (if your dad is Jeff Bezos, it’s hard to beat that no matter how many advantages you have in life). But from the bottom of the income distribution all the way up to the 95th percentile or so, families were extremely likely to experience upward mobility.  For kids born in 1980, that’s much less true. The very most disadvantaged kids are, fortunately, pretty likely to grow up to be somewhat less disadvantaged than their parents. But for people born into the broad middle 60 percent or so of the income distribution, experiencing upward mobility relative to your parents has become a crapshoot.  More

Seattle dumps Wells Fargo over investment in Dakota Access pipeline

On Monday, December 12, the Seattle City Council introduced legislation that would effectively sever the city’s relationship with Wells Fargo. The bank currently manages the city’s $3 billion operating account, which includes the $30 million biweekly employee payroll, reports Frank Hopper of ICTMN.  The city will stop all business with the bank until their contract expires at the end of 2017. Under the proposed legislation the city’s current contract with Wells Fargo, which ends in one year, on December 31, 2017, would not be renewed. In the meantime, the city would “enter into a voluntary debarment agreement with Wells Fargo Bank for a period of at least one year, and refrain from conducting banking, investment, or other business with Wells Fargo Bank for a period of at least one year when it is in the City’s discretion.”  More

North Dakota oil pipeline spill estimated at 176,000 gallons

Belle Fourche Pipeline Co. estimates that 130,200 gallons of oil spilled into a tributary of the Little Missouri River last week and another 46,200 gallons leaked into a hillside, the North Dakota Department of Health said Monday, Dec. 12.  The spill discovered by a landowner on Dec. 5 was not detected by monitoring equipment on the pipeline, which is owned by of True Companies of Wyoming.  The spill has contaminated 5.4 miles of Ash Coulee Creek but does not appear to have reached the Little Missouri River, said Bill Suess, spill investigation program manager for the health department.  The spill estimate of 4,200 barrels, or 176,400 gallons, is a “rough estimate” provided by the company, Suess said. Cleanup crews had recovered 878 barrels, or 36,876 gallons, of oil as of Sunday night.  More

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Rep. Gabbard Introduces Legislation to Stop Arming Syrian Terrorists

The legislation would prohibit the U.S. government from using American taxpayer dollars to provide funding, weapons, training, and intelligence support to groups like the Levant Front, Fursan al Ha and other allies of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, al-Qaeda and ISIS, or to countries who are providing direct or indirect support to those same groups.  The legislation is cosponsored by Reps. Peter Welch (D-VT-AL), Barbara Lee (D-CA-13), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA-48), and Thomas Massie (R-KT-04), and supported by the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) and the U.S. Peace Council. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said, “Under U.S. law it is illegal for any American to provide money or assistance to al-Qaeda, ISIS or other terrorist groups. If you or I gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaeda or ISIS, we would be thrown in jail. Yet the U.S. government has been violating this law for years, quietly supporting allies and partners of al-Qaeda, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.  More  (Video of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s speech on the House floor is available here)

“Our Side,” Syria 2016

Our “Freedom Fighters,” Afghanistan 1980’s

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ALEPPO MEDIA FAIL

The MSM “news” coming out of Aleppo (and Syria in general) continues to be disgracefully one-sided and misleading.  This Globe op-ed is a perfect example: Aleppo’s fall is our shame, too.  It whitewashes US actions that set the Middle East on fire (the illegal attacks on Iraq and Libya) and erases the years of US involvement, with its allies, in spending billions to destabilize Syria by arming rebel factions, many of them extremist and sectarian – and bombing Syrian territory repeatedly.

In the MSM pro-rebel “activists” are routinely quoted as “journalists” and reliable sources, while alternative views are almost never quoted – or if they are, dismissed as “Syrian regime” or “Russian.” Opposition-linked “human rights” organizations – The Syrian-American Medical Society, The White Helmets, Syrian Network for Human Rights, and a host of others -- are never identified as such, nor is it noted that they form part of a very well-funded public information war financed by the US or UK governments, or by petro-tyrannies in the Arabian/Persian Gulf.  Human Rights Watch has also been intensely partisan, including the circulation of “fake news” and unverified second or third-hand reports.

Certainly this has been an atrocious war, with many crimes committed on all sides, while Syrian civilians are indeed suffering.  But there is a bias and a double standard applied consistently, as though there are only civilians on the rebel side – you hardly ever see scenes of armed opposition fighters in our MSM – or that there are only soldiers on the government side; you hardly ever hear about the suffering of civilians there, or the daily deaths of civilian in West Aleppo from indiscriminate rebel rocket fire.

It is understandable that many peace activists are confused or taken in by this campaign.  Who, except for the very assiduous, has seen videos of thousands of Syrians celebrating what they viewed as the liberation of Aleppo, or of newly rescued civilians held hostage by the “rebels” in East Aleppo blessing and thanking the Syrian Arab Army for their deliverance?  Or noted the fact that the largest number of besieged civilians are in Syrian government held Deir ez-Zour and in the Shi’a minority villages of al-Fu’ah and Kafriya.  The Syrians and the Russians have made efforts to allow civilians to escape from East Aleppo, but the opposition have prevented that whenever they could.  Elsewhere, if civilians were allowed to leave besieged rebel towns the Syrian government is accused of “ethnic cleansing.”

For starters, I urge people to read this article I wrote for the last MAPA newsletter:

WHAT DO SYRIANS WANT? WHAT SHOULD WE DO?

CONTROLLING THE NARRATIVE ON SYRIA

One of the many fallacies that predominate in this prevailing narrative is that the West has not intervened in the conflict in Syria.  For instance, Amnesty International has recently described the UK as "sit[ting] on the sidelines" of the conflict.  This fundamentally false position ignores several years of the West and its regional allies (primarily Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar) arming, funding and training rebel groups, the crippling economic sanctions imposed against the Syrian Government, ongoing airstrikes, special forces operations, and a host of other diplomatic, military and economic measures that have been taken.  Not only has the West (primarily the US) intervened, it has done so on a very large scale.  For instance, in June 2015, it was revealed that the CIA's involvement in Syria had become "one of the agency's largest covert operations" in which it was spending roughly $1bn a year (about $1 for every $15 in the CIA's announced budget). 

PATRICK COCKBURN: Why everything you've read about Syria and Iraq could be wrong

Experience shows that foreign reporters are quite right not to trust their lives even to the most moderate of the armed opposition inside Syria. But, strangely enough, the same media organisations continue to put their trust in the veracity of information coming out of areas under the control of these same potential kidnappers and hostage takers. They would probably defend themselves by saying they rely on non-partisan activists, but all the evidence is that these can only operate in east Aleppo under license from the al-Qaeda-type groups.  It is inevitable that an opposition movement fighting for its life in wartime will only produce, or allow to be produced by others, information that is essentially propaganda for its own side. The fault lies not with them but a media that allows itself to be spoon-fed with dubious or one-sided stories…  None of this is new. The present wars in the Middle East started with the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 which was justified by the supposed threat from Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Western journalists largely went along with this thesis, happily citing evidence from the Iraqi opposition who predictably confirmed the existence of WMD.   More

THE FORGOTTEN WAR IN YEMEN

Along with a deeply divided country, the worst income inequality since at least the 1920s, and a crumbling infrastructure, Trump will inherit a 15-year-old, apparently never-ending worldwide war. While the named enemy may be a mere emotion (“terror”) or an incendiary strategy (“terrorism”), the victims couldn’t be more real, and as in all modern wars, the majority of them are civilians.   On how many countries is U.S. ordnance falling at the moment? Some put the total at six; others,seven. For the record, those seven would be Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and, oh yes, Yemen.  The United States has been directing drone strikes against what it calls al-Qaeda targets in Yemen since 2002, but our military involvement in that country increased dramatically in 2015 when U.S. ally Saudi Arabia inserted itself into a civil war there. Since then, the United States has been supplying intelligence and mid-air refueling for Saudi bombers (many of them American-made F-15s sold to that country).  More

Banned by 119 Countries, U.S. Cluster Bombs Continue to Orphan Yemeni Children

Saudi Arabia began bombing Yemen in March 2015, seven months after Houthi rebels overran the capital city Sanaa and deposed the Saudi-backed leader, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The U.S. has been a silent partner to the war ever since, supplying targeting intelligence, flying refueling missions for Saudi aircraft, and authorizing more than $20 billion in new weapons transfers. Since the beginning of his administration, President Barack Obama has sold $115 billion in weapons to the Saudis, more than any of his predecessors. Saudi Arabia is dependent on the U.S. in its bombing campaign, explained Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and 30-year CIA officer, at an event in April. “If the United States and the United Kingdom, tonight, told King Salman [of Saudi Arabia] ‘this war has to end,’ it would end tomorrow. The Royal Saudi Air Force cannot operate without American and British support.”   More

U.S. Blocks Arms Sale to Saudi Arabia Amid Concerns Over Yemen War

The Obama administration has deepened its rift with its Gulf allies over the ongoing conflict in Yemen, blocking a transfer of precision munitions to Saudi Arabia because of concerns about civilian casualties that administration officials attribute to poor targeting.  Administration officials said on Tuesday that the White House had made the decision to block the sale by Raytheon of about 16,000 guided munitions kits, which upgrade so-called dumb bombs to smart bombs that can more accurately hit targets. The kits, if purchased over the life of the proposed contract, are valued around $350 million.  But administration officials said that upgrading the bombs would not help targeting if the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen did not choose its targets properly, an ongoing concern since the start of bombing campaign. This year, the United States blocked a sale of cluster munitions to Saudi Arabia because of similar concerns. The administration’s decision is a setback for Raytheon, which officials say pushed hard for approval of the sale.  More