"Just Another Scumbag"

That's how former Trump right-hand man, Steve Bannon, says Donald Trump will be remembered - "just another scumbag."

The former White House adviser Steve Bannon has described the Trump Organization as a criminal entity and predicted that investigations into the president’s finances will lead to his political downfall, when he is revealed to be “not the billionaire he said he was, just another scumbag”.

The startling remarks are contained in Siege: Trump Under Fire, the author Michael Wolff’s forthcoming account of the second year of the Trump administration. The book, published on 4 June, is a sequel to Fire and Fury: Trump in the White House, which was a bestseller in 2018. The Guardian obtained a copy. 

In a key passage, Bannon is reported as saying he believes investigations of Donald Trump’s financial history will provide proof of the underlying criminality of his eponymous company.

Living With Trump in the Age of Entropy. We Have to Figure This Out and Soon.

The Washington Post carried this message of warning from Steve Bannon in February, 2017:

Bannon dismissed the idea that Trump might moderate his positions or seek consensus with political opponents. Rather, he said, the White House is digging in for a long period of conflict to transform Washington and upend the world order. 

“If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken,” Bannon said in reference to the media and opposition forces. “Every day, it is going to be a fight.” 

Bannon says that the post-World War II political and economic consensus is failing and should be replaced with a system that empowers ordinary people over coastal elites and international institutions.

Bannon's warning came to mind following the fractious G7 meeting in Quebec over the weekend. This too seems to be borne out in an analysis piece in Foreign Policy, "The West Will Die So That Trump Can Win."

...it is not surprising that a U.S. administration no longer sees an overriding political need to restrain itself from pushing allies into making trade concessions. The Soviet Union no longer exists. To the extent that the administration’s detractors argue that its demands are unreasonable, or that the United States has bigger fish to fry — like maintaining solidarity in the face of Russian aggression — Trump’s response would presumably be twofold. First, a better deal is always better — “reasonable” is for chumps. Second, if geopolitics stand in the way of the United States getting better trade deals, then geopolitics should give way. Americans don’t care about Crimea; they don’t care about the abstractions of democracy. They care about winning trade wars. 

To the extent that these two things are true, at least to the average American, Canada and the EU have a bigger problem than they realize. Their strategy at the moment, reflected in tempered responses to Trump, is to wait him out — on the assumption that he will be gone in two and a half years, or less, and that the United States will then go back to normal. But Trump may be the new normal — not in the sense that future presidents will be as crude and loose with the facts, but in the sense that they, reacting to a seismic shift in U.S. public sentiment, will no longer recognize the constraints of solidarity with fellow free-market democracies. Those days are, perhaps, as Bolton would say, “no more.”

In the same issue, Daniel Sargent writes of, "The Slow Rise and Sudden Fall of the G7."

The end times have come and gone for the West over 70-odd years, but it is difficult these days, to escape the sensation that the dusk really is falling.

...After showing up late and interrupting a forum on gender equality, President Donald Trump scowled his way through sessions before departing early for Singapore. And as he headed out, Trump insulted his host and neighbor, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, and retracted his signature from the G-7’s communique, ending a 42-year run of choreographed collegiality. Then, over the past 24 hours, Trump has showcased his preference for the company of a callow despot, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, over engagement with what used to be considered America’s closest allies and peers.

...On the most urgent dilemmas of our times — economic inequality, sustainable development, and the looming peril of ecological catastrophe — the G-7 has been irrelevant. The G-7 has not evolved into a directorate capable of offsetting a historic slippage in U.S. hegemonic capabilities, as political scientists like Robert Keohane once hoped it might. To call Donald Trump’s Canadian temper tantrum an assault on the West’s governing framework is to overstate, by a mile, the G-7’s institutional significance. 

Trump’s assault is no death knell; as a project in global leadership, the G-7 was already dead. Its supersession by the G-20 during the global financial crisis confirmed its obsolescence as a framework for governance. The G20, not the G7, functioned as the forum for the coordination of fiscal stimulus efforts in the nadir of 2009. The same goes for the current GDP data. In 1980, the G-7 countries constituted about 51 percent of global production on a purchasing power parity basis; today, the G-7 claims just over 30 percent. The G-7 can no longer maintain a plausible pretension to run the world — it has become a niche organization. 

And herein lies the real significance — and the real tragedy — of Trump’s petulant behavior. The point of the G-7, as Schmidt, Pompidou, and Ford all grasped, was to foster unity in a historical phase when geopolitical trends were corroding the West. Dialogue on common economic problems, all hoped, would offer an alternative source of cohesion. Or, as Kissinger explained in 1975: “The trick in the world now is to use economics to build a world political structure. 

...Today, it is the sense of unity the G-7 has cultivated that is imperiled. Configurations of power and interest are an insufficient basis for durable order among nations, as diplomatic historians well understand. The West cohered after 1945 not only because of shared enmities but also because its elites cultivated sociability and common values. From the Bilderberg Group to the Trilateral Commission, sociability proved both a source of cohesion and a salve for disagreements. 

Functioning at the most elite level of all, the G-7 nurtured unity among the world’s liberal democracies through economic crises and geopolitical transition. Its debasing by a feckless U.S. president will serve only to tear the West’s fraying bonds of commonality still further asunder. In Beijing and in Moscow, the West’s rivals are cheering.

If Trump is not simply a perverse aberration but the "new normal" of the United States, it seems foolish, even reckless, for Ottawa to imperil Canada by pretending that it's still business as usual.

Maybe there is, finally, a real "Axis of Evil." Maybe there is an emerging alliance of despotism, strongman rule that see lesser, weaker nations as prey for the picking. Look at the leaders Trump is so obviously drawn to - Putin, Xi, Kim, the House of Saud, Erdogan, Orban - just about every murderous thug on the planet.

Don't forget it wasn't that long ago that another gang of thugs sought to carve up the nations of the world among themselves. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and the government of the Sun God, Emperor Hirohito. Why should today's thugs be much different?

The world today is vastly different than the world of the 1930s. It is a world that is massively overpopulated; rapaciously consumptive and rapidly running out of resources of all descriptions; and just beginning to become battered by the early onset impacts of climate change and environmental degradation. It would not be rash to think of it as pre-dystopian.

Recently Britain's prestigious think tank, Chatham House, warned that Trump is intent on taking down the World Trade Organization, a precursor to creating a world without rules in which the large economies can pillage lesser economies.

In a world where there are no internationally predictable rules, most countries faced with protectionist actions, crudely, have two options – retaliate or concede. If they choose to retaliate, the optimal strategy is to cause enough pain to the political leadership of the protectionist country that they will back down. This is the course of action that the EU and China have so far taken, with the hope that powerful political constituencies in the US will successfully lobby the administration to change course. 

However, this can only be effective for large economies that the US exports to significantly. For smaller countries without significant leverage, the alternative is to concede and try to negotiate a favourable settlement, which will still be asymmetrical.

In 2014, before Trump declared he was running for president, political scientist R. Schweller described how the world had already embarked on an "age of entropy."

It increasingly seems that the world will no longer have a single superpower, or group of superpowers, that brings order to international politics. Instead, it will have a variety of powers -- including nations, multinational corporations, ideological movements, global crime and terror groups, and human rights organizations -- jockeying with each other, mostly unsuccessfully, to achieve their goals. International politics is transforming from a system anchored in predictable, and relatively constant, principles to a system that is, if not inherently unknowable, far more erratic, unsettled, and devoid of behavioral regularities. In terms of geopolitics, we have moved from an age of order to an age of entropy. 

Entropy is a scientific concept that measures disorder: the higher the entropy, the higher the disorder. And disorder is precisely what will characterize the future of international politics. In this leaderless world, threats are much more likely to be cold than hot; danger will come less frequently in the form of shooting wars among great powers than diffuse disagreements over geopolitical, monetary, trade, and environmental issues. Problems and crises will arise more frequently and, when they do, will be resolved less cooperatively.

During the Occupy movement there were many warnings about America falling into class warfare. That prompted billionaire investor, Warren Buffet, that America had already gone through a class war and his class, the wealthiest, had won it. The poor and the working class, by the time they woke up, they had already lost.

Perhaps what we should be focusing now is on whether our government, the Trudeau Liberals, have the measure of these seismic shifts in the world order. Do they understand the uncertainties we face and our vulnerabilities? Why do they keep acting as though we're still in the 80s? Why do they keep dreaming that Donald Trump could ever be our friend?

The Slippery Slope of Privacy

Those implicated in the Cambridge Analytica/AggregateIQ scandal inevitably contend that their uninvited intrusions and targeted messaging may have been unethical but they dispute that their acts were illegal and close with the assertion that there is no proof that their skulduggery actually changed anything, that it manufactured any votes for the client or suppressed voting for the adversary.

It was, in their parlance, a giant "nothingburger".

Okay, so Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, John Bolton, the Trump campaign and the cash-conscious Brexit Leave campaign thought it looked pretty and decided to take a flyer on it.

We still don't know what uber-rightwing US billionaire, Robert Mercer, paid for his 90 per cent interest in Cambridge Analytica but it would be useful to find out. At its core this targeted advertising/brainwashing technology is a function of algorithms who had to learn long division and did our calculations with slide rules is probably a bit out there. They're not to Robert Mercer. He was an algorithm wizard. It's how he amassed his billions. When it came to shelling out for control of Cambridge Analytica, Mercer was what you might call an informed buyer. He knew what it was, how it worked, what it could achieve and what it was worth - to a buyer, a guy just like him.

To Mercer it probably meant this technology could generate + or - this many thousand votes in this state and + or - this many thousand votes in that state and + or - this many tens, perhaps thousands of votes for Donald J. Trump overall.

Illegal? Hard to say. It's certainly unethical and, in such matters, we often set limits, conditions in which the merely sordid passes into the realm of criminality. 

Should this stuff, cyber ratf@cking, be illegal. I vote yes. I expect most would. But we would have to find a government willing to enact a pretty major overhaul of our election laws to outlaw this sort of thing and impose adequate penalties for those who flout them.

That might begin by clearly stating that a citizen's vote is something not to be messed with. You can't get a voter liquored up by capture his vote. You can't put a wad of cash in his shirt pocket either. You shouldn't be permitted to target that voter online with sophisticated messages the purpose of which is to manipulate his or her free will. That sort of thing ought to be an indictable offence. It should earn the perpetrators a stretch in the Greybar Hotel. And the political parties and their campaigns if found culpable should also pay a hefty price. It's "the buck stops here" thing.

Unfortunately electoral problems aren't a great priority with the government of the day. This is, after all, the same Justin who told us to get stuffed when he reneged on his promise of electoral reform. Indeed there are indications that the Liberal campaign had some sort of dealings with these cyber ratf@ckers in 2015.

These days, when you're faced with an upset victory, be it Brexit, or Trump, or Trudeau, you have reasonable cause to question just what happened. Did Mulcair really lose his lead all by himself or were voters perhaps assisted in switching from the NDP to someone else? I don't know only now I really, really want to.

We are in an era of widespread decline in liberal democracy. In America, money is free speech. Elsewhere we don't state it so openly. Ours is a world in which the political power of the citizenry and their votes has become discounted, degraded.

It is not alarmist to say we are on a slippery slope. We've seen what this can lead to elsewhere - Hungary, Turkey, Poland, the populist uber-right in France, Britain, Germany and elsewhere; the rise of the corporatist state where legislators, regulators and even heads of state can be captured and harnessed into service not to the public interest but to narrow, private interests. And, as we have seen in America, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere, these things they will do right in front of your face.

Be aware that the only way to stop this slide is to take matters in our own hands - at the ballot box. No matter how loyal you may feel to a party, do not vote for any candidate representing any party that you cannot trust to enact electoral reform. And, yes, that means in 2019 refusing to vote for the Trudeau Liberals. They've had their chance. You don't have to vote Tory. Vote Green, vote NDP. We've survived worse.

Steve Bannon - "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"

He described himself as a Leninist. For a while he was Trump's Rasputin, the dark wizard devoted to bringing down the apparatus of the American state.

Then Trump's chief of staff, John Kelly, had enough of the Bannon insurgency and Stevie was shown the door, heading back to Breitbart from where he pledged to continue the alt.right revolution.

Well now Bannon has been turfed from Breitbart too.

According to The New York Times, “Mr. Bannon’s departure, which was forced by a onetime financial patron, Rebekah Mercer, comes as Mr. Bannon remained unable to quell the furor over remarks attributed to him in a new book in which he questions President Trump’s mental fitness and disparages his elder son, Donald Trump Jr.” Mercer rebuked Bannon last week following his public feud with Trump over the comments—a feud that resulted in the president publicly nicknaming his ex-strategist “Sloppy Steve.” In a statement, Bannon said he is “proud of what the Breitbart team has accomplished.”

Well, Steve, cheer up. Here's a parting gift from the legendary Alberta Hunter.

Will Trump Sue Bannon? Don't Hold Your Breath.

It would be a real Punch & Judy show.  Trump wailing away on his former campaign CEO and chief political strategist, using a confidentiality agreement to bludgeon both Bannon and the vaunted First Amendment to the American Constitution.  I'd pay a buck and a quarter to see that, wouldn't you?

Only it's not going to happen. Nobody is getting sued especially not by the 45th president of the United States of America.

Why not? Trump has a well earned reputation for being litigious. There was a time he'd sue anybody, almost everybody. That time, era if you like, was when he was DJT the private citizen. Nobody paid much attention to those law suits save for the occasional item buried on page six of the morning paper.  Now he's POTUS and his every allegation would be scrutinized, dissected, probed, day after day right up there on page one, in the court of public opinion which, these days, is already hostile enough to the Mango Mussolini.

Remember during the election campaign when Trump vowed to sue those dozen plus women who came forward to accuse him of sexually molesting them? Once the election was over he was going to give them what for. He'd take them into court and make them pay for their vile lies. Only that hasn't happened either. That's looking a lot like another empty threat. Because it always was. After all, those women mainly said things that Trump himself has boasted doing to women, total strangers.

Then there's the whole raft of problems associated with trying to enforce a confidentiality agreement. A lot of what Bannon has said that most irks Trump alleges that, in Bannon's opinion, certain conduct by members of the campaign may have been criminal acts. Bannon didn't say they were. He said in his opinion they were. There's a difference. And Don Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort weren't ordinary citizens. They were senior officials of a presidential campaign and that surely transforms them into public figures. Ask Bob Mueller about that point.

Imagine Team Trump having to contest an individual's right to speak out on an apparent crime all due to a confidentiality agreement, a gag order. There are limits as to what can be protected by a confidentiality agreement. Bannon knows that. So does Trump. You can bet the team of lawyers retained by Michael Wolff's publishers know that extremely well.

My guess is what really pulled the pin on Trump's cranial grenade were the references to money laundering.  That is Trump's Achilles' Heel and it always has been. That's the glue that sticks him to Russian money and ties the collusion business together. Anyone imagine Trump wants that evidence laid out before a court - and the public - in a civil action?

Finally there's Trump himself. He's about the worst client any lawyer could have. The top guns won't go near him because he won't listen, he won't control his impulses and he lies gratuitously and constantly. He's a nutter. He's showing signs of mental impairment, possibly senility.  At this point I don't think Dershowitz would touch him.

So, what is Trump's next move? His now standard practice is to stage some diversion, something outrageous. I don't know, bombing Iran maybe? A pre-emptive strike on North Korea? Hard to say but it's a safe bet that the war departments in capitals around the world are busy gaming this one.

Steve Bannon - Every Demagogue Has One

Think of him as the guy who will toss the red meat to the Gullibillies. Steve Bannon, Trump's lead strategist designate and former Breitbart chief, has a lot of people very, very nervous.



Vice News calls Bannon a right-wing Rottweiler. The Bannon/Breitbart juggernaut has inroads to the radical right across Europe and Israel, pretty much any place capable of supporting white supremacists. Breitbart's London organization is considered to have played an instrumental role in nudging Farage's UKIP to an upset victory in the Brexit vote.

Let's Not Be Under any Illusions. Alt.Right Lives and It Will Have a Voice in Trump's White House.

I've been using the word "AmeriKa" to refer to Trumpland. Now it seems I might be infringing on somebody else's intellectual property rights.

Kinsella found this handbill plastered on what appears to be a light post near his neighbourhood.

I was a bit surprised to see the URL for amerika.org. I was drawn to explore the website. I wasn't totally surprised by what I found but it is troubling. We all need to take a hard look at this contagion now that Trump has appointed Breitbart's Steve Bannon as his political strategist. Take a look.