What Comey Left Out

Former FBI director, James Comey, has been getting well deserved comeuppance from the American left for not taking responsibility for the Hillary email fiasco, late campaign, that may have cost her the White House. The standard complaint is that Comey was playing Republican politics when he announced the email investigation while not disclosing the investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. How do you rationalize the two?

Here's my guess. Comey was trapped by agents at the FBI's New York field office who were cooperating with Trump campaign ally and former New York mayor, Rudi Giuliani.

Giuliani was all over the Hillary email scandal. One night I saw a clip of Giuliani appearing on CNN. He was grinning like the Cheshire Cat when he let slip some details of the New York FBI investigation into Clinton. At the time I wondered how Giuliani could possibly have access to that information? FBI investigations are not open for inspection to outsiders. Before long it seemed to dawn on Giuliani that he had just put himself and his FBI collaborators in a terrible spot and he desperately but unconvincingly tried to back peddle.

In the days and weeks that followed, reports came out about some rogue agents in the New York field office who were determined to get Hillary and hints that Giuliani might have been orchestrating their efforts.

Did those New York guys have something on Comey? Who knows? Did he announce the Clinton email investigations to head them off at some pass? Is he to be believed when he claims he kept silent about the Trump campaign investigation into Russian ties because he assumed Hillary would win in November?

One thing I've been hoping for is that Mueller will, at some point, find the evidence needed to indict Giuliani. Perhaps that's too much to hope for.

The Neoliberal Racket

George Monbiot traces the origins of neoliberalism and how to seized control of political and economic thought in the West eventually leading to the election of Donald Trump.

At a meeting a few months after Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party, one of her colleagues, or so the story goes, was explaining what he saw as the core beliefs of conservatism. She snapped open her handbag, pulled out a dog-eared book, and slammed it on the table. “This is what we believe,” she said. A political revolution that would sweep the world had begun.

The book was The Constitution of Liberty by Frederick Hayek. Its publication, in 1960, marked the transition from an honest, if extreme, philosophy to an outright racket. The philosophy was called neoliberalism. It saw competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. The market would discover a natural hierarchy of winners and losers, creating a more efficient system than could ever be devised through planning or by design. Anything that impeded this process, such as significant tax, regulation, trade union activity or state provision, was counter-productive. Unrestricted entrepreneurs would create the wealth that would trickle down to everyone.

[Hayek] begins the book by advancing the narrowest possible conception of liberty: an absence of coercion. He rejects such notions as political freedom, universal rights, human equality and the distribution of wealth, all of which, by restricting the behaviour of the wealthy and powerful, intrude on the absolute freedom from coercion he demands.

Democracy, by contrast, “is not an ultimate or absolute value”. In fact, liberty depends on preventing the majority from exercising choice over the direction that politics and society might take.

...The ultra rich are “scouts”, “experimenting with new styles of living”, who blaze the trails that the rest of society will follow. The progress of society depends on the liberty of these “independents” to gain as much money as they want and spend it how they wish. All that is good and useful, therefore, arises from inequality. There should be no connection between merit and reward, no distinction made between earned and unearned income, and no limit to the rents they can charge.

Inherited wealth is more socially useful than earned wealth: “the idle rich”, who don’t have to work for their money, can devote themselves to influencing “fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs”. Even when they seem to be spending money on nothing but “aimless display”, they are in fact acting as society’s vanguard.

...Thatcherism and Reaganism were not ideologies in their own right: they were just two faces of neoliberalism. Their massive tax cuts for the rich, crushing of trade unions, reduction in public housing, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services were all proposed by Hayek and his disciples. But the real triumph of this network was not its capture of the right, but its colonisation of parties that once stood for everything Hayek detested.

...As I warned in April, the result is first disempowerment then disenfranchisement. If the dominant ideology stops governments from changing social outcomes, they can no longer respond to the needs of the electorate. Politics becomes irrelevant to people’s lives; debate is reduced to the jabber of a remote elite. The disenfranchised turn instead to a virulent anti-politics in which facts and arguments are replaced by slogans, symbols and sensation.

...Trump, who has no coherent politics, is not a classic neoliberal. But he is the perfect representation of Hayek’s “independent”; the beneficiary of inherited wealth, unconstrained by common morality, whose gross predilections strike a new path that others may follow. The neoliberal thinktankers are now swarming round this hollow man, this empty vessel waiting to be filled by those who know what they want. The likely result is the demolition of our remaining decencies, beginning with the agreement to limit global warming.

Monbiot thinks that man's better nature will be awakened by the excesses of
Trump and his handlers and that we will finally rise up to resist the neoliberal juggernaut. I wonder if he had to say that. After all, what is the alternative?

So Many Emails, So Little Time.

It's the favourite food of conspiracy theorists and their zookeeper, Donald J. Trump. "The fix is in." The proof - the massive number of emails the FBI would have had to read in order to clear Hillary Clinton of any criminal conduct.

By some accounts there were upwards of 650,000 emails. In standard copy paper that would be a stack of emails just over 400 feet in height. Yes, there are online calculators for this sort of thing.

Clinton was secretary of state for almost four years which, at 650,000 emails, would mean a hundred foot stack of paper generated each and every year. Busy lady. That would mean writing a rough average of 160,000 emails each year. If she was really, really diligent that would mean about 440 emails Hillary would have to write each and every day, 7 days a week, 12 months a year, year upon year. She would probably have to read at least as many more. Hmm, that doesn't sound right.

But that's the number that Trump & Shills bandy about so let's go with it. How do you go through a 400 foot high stack of emails in just over a week? Easy. You don't. That's the magic of emails, they're electronic. They're made up of computer food commonly known as data. Which means computers can digest them about as fast as the programmers can unleash them to the job.

They can quickly identify which emails were sent by Clinton, which came from her server, and those gosh darn amazing computers can scan those emails can use search parameters to scour the messages for critical words or phrases. Sort of like those TV shows where a mystery fingerprint is fed into a computer and, within minutes, the match is found.

This is a good time to recall the theory of the crime. Hillary was thought to have acted carelessly, recklessly endangering government information by using a less than secure email server. No one has ever said that she set out to harm the US government, just that she was unacceptably insecure. That's still a crime when, through conduct in the range of careless to reckless, secret information is leaked even if inadvertently.

So the computers, and a dedicated brigade of FBI specialists, did their work, pored over the emails, and came up with nothing approaching criminal culpability. Easy, peasy. Which is why the beached whale and his coterie were left with nothing to say except the investigation was rigged, the results pre-ordained and Hillary is still a crook who got away with the greatest crime perpetrated on the United States since the secrets of the atom bomb were leaked to Stalin.

So, I'm sorry Trumpeteers, but you're left with the cold reality that you're supporting a narcissist, misogynist, fascist, racist, lecher with a serial sexual assault history (self-admitted), no experience of government, a sterling record (Cheney standard, no less) of ducking military service in his time, and an unrivalled record of massive financial disasters from which he alone walked away with pockets of cash leaving his fellow investors, suppliers and creditors to feast on his ruins. Oh, did I mention that he's also a sociopath and a pathalogical liar? Yeah, he's the guy who stands for everything you believe in. I'm not sure who's creepier, you or him.

Now They Tell Us. The FBI Says Latest Clinton Email Controversy Much Ado About Nothing.

Hillary Clinton is off the hook, again. The FBI, whose director sprang a late election surprise by revealing a further investigation into Clinton emails, now has given the "all clear" to the Democratic nominee.

From The New York Times: "James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, said in a letter to members of Congress that “based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.'”

Let the conspiracy theories continue, apace.

UPDATE:

The FBI announcement threw the Trump camp into an apoplectic tizzy.  Trump's campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, turned on FBI director Comey claiming he had "mishandled the investigation" from the outset.

Moments before the FBI announcement, Trump running mate Mike Pence was heaping praise on the FBI:
I'm confident that they'll handle the investigation in a timely and professional manner."

Cornel West Nails America's Electoral Catastrophe

The headline in the Boston Globe says it all: "Spiritual Blackout in America: Election 2016."

THE MOST FRIGHTENING feature of the civic melancholia in present-day America is the relative collapse of integrity, honesty, and decency — an undeniable spiritual blackout of grand proportions. The sad spectacle of the presidential election is no surprise. Rather, the neofascist catastrophe called Donald Trump and the neoliberal disaster named Hillary Clinton are predictable symbols of our spiritual blackout.

...In short, the rule of Big Money and its attendant culture of cupidity and mendacity have led to our grand moment of spiritual blackout. The founder of Western philosophy, Plato, foresaw this scenario. In “The Republic” — history’s most profound critique of democratic regimes — Plato argues that democracies produce citizens of unruly passion and pervasive ignorance, manipulated by greedy elites and mendacious politicians. The result is tyranny — the rule of a strong man driven by appetites, corruption, and secrecy. There is no doubt that Trump meets this description more so than Clinton. Yet neoliberals like Clinton bear some responsibility for the anger and anguish of Trump’s followers — especially those white male working and middle-class citizens who have been devastated by neoliberal economic policies of deregulation, NAFTA, and Wall Street protection. The vicious xenophobia toward women, Mexicans, the disabled, gays, Muslims, Jews, and blacks are the sole fault of the Trump campaign. Yet the rule of Big Money in capitalist USA downplays the catastrophic effects of global warming, of poverty, and of drones killing innocent people — all the common ground of Trump and Clinton.


For over a century, the best response to Plato’s critique of democracy has been John Dewey’s claim that precious and fragile democratic experiments must put a premium on democratic statecraft (public accountability, protection of rights and liberties, as well as personal responsibility, embedded in a fair rule of law) and especially on democratic soulcraft (integrity, empathy, and a mature sense of history). For Plato, democratic regimes collapse owing to the slavish souls of citizens driven by hedonism and narcissism, mendacity and venality. Dewey replies that this kind of spiritual blackout can be overcome by robust democratic education and courageous exemplars grounded in the spread of critical intelligence, moral compassion, and historical humility. The 2016 election presents a dangerous question as to whether Dewey’s challenge to Plato’s critique can be met.

Yet Clinton is not a strong agent for Dewey’s response. There is no doubt that if she becomes the first woman president of the United States — though I prefer Jill Stein, of the Green Party — Clinton will be smart, even brilliant, in office. But like her predecessor, Barack Obama, she promotes the same neoliberal policies that increase inequality and racial polarization that will produce the next Trump. More important, she embraces Trump-like figures abroad, be they in Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Israel, or Syria — figures of ugly xenophobia and militaristic policies. The same self-righteous neoliberal soulcraft of smartness, dollars, and bombs lands us even deeper in our spiritual blackout. Instead we need a democratic soulcraft of wisdom, justice, and peace — the dreams of courageous freedom fighters like Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Joshua Heschel, Edward Said, and Dorothy Day. These dreams now lie dormant at this bleak moment, but spiritual and democratic awakenings are afoot among the ripe ones, especially those in the younger generation.

What Now? What If the US Senate Scuttles the Iran Nuclear Deal?

All 54 Republicans in the US Senate will vote against ratification of the Iran nuclear pact negotiated between Tehran and the P6 nations.  They'll need 13 Democrats to vote with them and the deal is effectively stillborn.  Democratic senator Chuck Schumer could deliver the Republicans the votes they need.

Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has shamelessly lobbied Congress to reject the deal, arguing it leaves Israel in peril.  No surprise there. But what if Netanyahu gets his way and his US minions sabotage the deal?  James Traub from the Center for International Cooperation says failure at this point could wreck relations between Israel and the Democrats for a generation to come.

Netanyahu threw down the gauntlet with the Obama administration a long time ago; perhaps he thinks he has nothing left to lose. But that’s almost certainly not true. If 13 Democrats heed the Israeli siren song and the nuclear deal collapses, only a fantasist can believe that Iran will come back for a new and harsher deal or that the United Nations and the European Union will hang tough on sanctions. Instead, Iranian centrifuges will start spinning once again, while Pakistani scientists carrying nuclear blueprints will make clandestine visits to Saudi Arabia. Netanyahu will then take the game one step further by calling for airstrikes against Iranian facilities. If he succeeds — which I doubt — Americans will never forgive Israel for its role in a catastrophic decision.

Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear that he is perfectly prepared to pay that price. Can Chuck Schumer say the same? I would suggest that his higher obligation would be to protect Israel from its own worst instincts.

Traub believes the relationship between Israel and the Democrats wouldn't survive a veto override.

...if Congress overrides Obama’s veto — thus destroying the signal foreign-policy achievement of his tenure, humiliating the president before the world, and triggering a race for nuclear weapons capacity in Iran and across the Middle East — ...Democrats will blame Netanyahu and Israel. And it won’t just be the American left, which already regards Israel as an occupying power. The fraying relationship between Israel and the Democratic Party will come apart altogether. Pro-Israel Democrats like Hillary Clinton will have to begin calculating how high a price they’re prepared to pay for their continued support.

Consider the geopolitical math. Until recently, critics of the proposed nuclear deal could claim that “our allies in the region” believed that it threatened their security. But last week, the Saudi foreign minister blessed the deal, if rather halfheartedly. The president of the United Arab Emirates and the emir of Kuwait sent congratulatory notes to Iran, though that still falls short of an endorsement. “Our allies” will not continue to lobby against the deal; only Israel will.

You'll Never See Vlad Putin the Same Way Again

If there's one guy who doesn't get any slack from the Western media, it's Russian strongman, Vlad Putin.  We vilify Putin at every turn and, while he certainly brings some of it down on himself, we make sure to depict ourselves as the guys in the white hats while we heap scorn on him.

It's time to reset our compass and there's no one better to do that than Princeton prof Stephen F. Cohen who has been involved with post-Soviet Russia since he served as an advisor to George H.W. Bush during the fall of East Germany. According to Cohen, Putin is as much our creation as his own.

As Russia’s leader, Putin has changed over the years, especially in foreign policy but also at home. His first impulse was toward more free-market reforms, anti-progressive taxes. He enacted a 13 percent flat tax—Steve Forbes would’ve been ecstatic, right? He offers [George W.] Bush what Clinton never really offered Yeltsin: a full partnership. And what does he do? On September 11, 2001, he called George and said, Whatever you want, we’re with you. Bush says, Well, I think we’re going to have to go to war in Afghanistan. And Putin said, I can help you. We’ve got major resources and assets in Afghanistan. I even have an army over there called the Northern Alliance. I’ll give it to you! You want overflight? It’s all yours!

How many American lives did Putin save during our land war in Afghanistan? And do you know what a political price he paid in Russia for that? Because his security people were completely against it.

...Oh, yeah. You think they minded seeing America being brought to its knees? They’d been invaded so often; let America get a taste of it! But Putin assumes he’s achieved what Yeltsin couldn’t and that this benefits the Russian state. He has a real strategic partnership with America. Now, remember, he’s already worried about his radical Islamic problem because Russia has nearly 20 million Muslim citizens of its own. Russia sits in the East and in the West; it’s on the front lines.

What does Bush give him in return? He expands NATO again and he unilaterally withdraws the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the bedrock of Russia’s nuclear security— it’s a complete betrayal. Is that how you repay somebody who’s helped you save the lives of your citizens? This is where the word “betrayal” begins to enter into the discourse.

...I’ve heard him called, among right-wing Russian intellectuals, an appeaser of the West. Soft. You can hear this today: Mariupol? Odessa? Should’ve taken them a year ago; they belong to us. What’s he thinking? Why is he discussing it? [Mariupol and Odessa are two contested cities in the southeastern region of Ukraine.]

So Putin sets his course, and then comes this famous speech he gives in 2007 in Munich, with McCain sitting in the front row. Putin says just what I told you. He says, Look, we want to be your partner; this is what we’ve wanted to be since Gorbachev. We believe in the common European home. But every time we turn to you or we negotiate with you or we think we have an agreement with you, you act like a hegemon and everybody has to do exactly what you say if they want to to be on your side.

Putin has come to tell them that America is risking a new Cold War with more than a decade of bad behavior towards post-Soviet Russia. John McCain interprets this as the declaration of a new Cold War.

Cohen argues that America is massively damaging its own national security by its bellicose approach to Putin over Ukraine.

I think the Ukranian crisis is the greatest blow to American national security— even greater than the Iraq war in its long-term implications— for a simple reason: The road to American national security still runs through Moscow. There is not a single major regional or issue-related national security problem we can solve without the full cooperation of whoever sits in the Kremlin, period, end of story.

Name your poison: We’re talking the Middle East, we’re talking Afghanistan, we’re talking energy, we’re talking climate, we’re talking nuclear proliferation, terrorism, shooting airplanes out of the sky, we’re talking about the two terrorist brothers in Boston.

Look: I mean American national security of the kind I care about—that makes my kids and grandkids and myself safe—in an era that’s much more dangerous than the Cold War because there’s less structure, more nonstate players, and more loose nuclear know-how and materials…. Security can only be partial, but that partial security depends on a full-scale American-Russian cooperation, period. We are losing Russia for American national security in Ukraine as we talk, and even if it were to end tomorrow Russia will never, for at least a generation, be as willing to cooperate with Washington on security matters as it was before this crisis began.

Therefore, the architects of the American policy towards Russia and Ukraine are destroying American national security—and therefore I am the patriot and they are the saboteurs of American security. That’s the whole story, and any sensible person who doesn’t suffer from Putin-phobia can see it plainly.

...The truth is, not everything depends on the president of the United States. Not everything, but an awful lot does, and when it comes to international affairs we haven’t really had a president who acted as an actual statesman in regard to Russia since Reagan in 1985-88. Clinton certainly didn’t; his Russia policy was clownish and ultimately detrimental to U.S. national security interests. Bush’s was reckless and lost one opportunity after another, and Obama’s is either uninformed or completely out to lunch. We have not had a statesman in the White House when it comes to Russia since Reagan, and I am utterly, totally, 1000 percent convinced that before November 2013, when we tried to impose an ultimatum on Yanukovych—and even right now, today—that a statesman in the White House could end this in 48 hours with Putin. What Putin wants in the Ukraine crisis is what we ought to want; that’s the reality.

Maybe it's time we realized that the West, led by an increasingly bellicose Permanent Warfare State, has some fence-mending to do for our sake as much as anyone's.  

Justin, Tommy - Here's Your Talking Points

Look, if you can't nail Harper on this ISIS business, you're not fit to govern anything much less our country.

What you need to do is pry the lid off ISIS.  Show Canadians what lies beneath, who stands behind.

Start with the notion that this seemingly well-organized, well-trained, well-equipped and obviously well-funded ISIS army didn't rise magically from the sands of the Arabian deserts.

ISIS is an armed force that was quite carefully and skillfully manufactured. Somebody, with a lot of money and know-how, raised ISIS.  That sort of undertaking leaves traces - all over the place.

Western intelligence scours that region.  We know the Dr. Frankenstein who created the ISIS monster that now rampages through Syria and Iraq.  We've known all along.  Why not name the fiends?

When Obama refused the Saudis' orders to attack Assad, their chief of skulduggery, prince Bandar bin Sultan vowed to raise an army in the deserts of Jordan to attack Syria. He did precisely as he'd promised. We did nothing to stop him.  We watched him recruit, train, arm and fund an army of religious extremists that would become ISIS.

Let's name the countries we're really up against while we're trying to "degrade" ISIS - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar.  Those are the states who created and funded and armed ISIS.  They're the states that will create and fund and arm the next ISIS too.

It's called "state sponsored terrorism."    We're very, very familiar with that term. We've been using it since the Reagan era as a justification to bomb people we don't like.  Regan used it, so did GHW Bush and Clinton.  Shrub Bush used it big time when he castigated Saddam for being in league with al Qaeda.

This time it's our supposed allies that are the states sponsoring this most diabolical terrorism of all.  This isn't their first kick at the can and, judging by the past, it likely won't be their last either.

Ask Harper, straight up, who created ISIS?  Where did it come from?  Who raised this army?  Who trained it?  Where was it trained?  Who equipped and armed it?  Where did the weapons originate?  Who funded it and who directed it?

Ask Harper how we're going to prevent the people who created the ISIS monster and the monsters that preceded it from creating the next monster?  What will that be?  Where are we going to be fighting next?

A decade ago Canada got swept up in the fight against al Qaeda.  Now we're getting swept up in the fight against ISIS.  What iteration of this same degenerate monstrosity are we to fight ten years from now?

Ask Harper how a conventional force, especially an air force, can ever make a real dent in an unconventional force that can morph at will from a conventional, fighting force into an insurgency or even dissolve into gangs and individuals to be reconstituted somewhere else into the next al Qaeda or the next ISIS?

Ask Harper if it's worth attacking the snake, wouldn't it be even more worthwhile to cut off its head and end this once and for all?

We're never going to wipe out the legions of extremists willing to enlist in outfits like ISIS.  They're a dime a thousand.   In fact, the more of them we kill the more of them we recruit to their cause.

We can, however, wipe out the directing minds who stand behind the curtain pulling the levers.  We've been doing their dirty work and covering up for them for way too long and look where that's brought us.

Granted they're the same bunch that just placed a juicy 15-billion dollar order with us for armoured vehicles but, hey, we castigated the French for agreeing to sell helicopter carriers to Vlad Putin during the Ukraine fiasco.  It would be more than slightly hypocritical for us to deliver weapons of war to the Saudis, wouldn't it?

So Justin and Tommy, start asking Harper a few pointed questions.  Then ask him why we keep getting dragged into inconclusive wars fighting Frankenstein's monsters when we could be going after the evil doctor himself?