Move Over SNC-L. It's Bombardier's Turn in the Corruption Spotlight.

The World Bank is fingering Bombardier for bribery to win a $339 (US) railway contract with Azerbaijan.  The project was 85 per cent financed by the World Bank and it seems the bank is now hopping mad - again

Bombardier Inc. allegedly used corruption and collusion to win a contract in Azerbaijan – then obstructed an investigation of the deal – according to a World Bank audit that could lead to the Montreal-based transportation giant being blacklisted from projects funded by the international financial institution. 

The findings of the audit, which were obtained by The Globe and Mail, accuse the company of colluding with senior officials at Azerbaijan Railways to win a 2013 contract worth US$339-million to install rail-signalling equipment in the country, which is located between Russia and Iran. The deal was 85-per-cent financed by the World Bank. 

The audit, conducted by the bank’s Integrity Vice Presidency, also found that Bombardier used an intermediary firm to “funnel bribes” worth millions of dollars to Azerbaijani officials and routed tens of millions more through a network of Russian-controlled shell companies.

Anyone see a pattern emerging here? Is it time for a Deferred Prosecution Agreement?

Why the Brits Ignored How 'Leave' Rigged the Brexit Referendum

The Leave campaign had its thumb on the scales in the Brexit referendum. Through various devices it was a rigged outcome. Now the national crime agency is investigating some of the culprits. The list of suspects includes a number of shady Brits but also a few prominent Americans and perhaps even a Russian or two.

Last week, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Canadian computer whiz Chris Wylie, put it bluntly:

“The thing is that there was such a huge weight of evidence which has now all been proven,” says Wylie. “Vote Leave broke the law. I can say that out loud now. Vote Leave broke the law. But nothing happened. It’s insane to me that people get more upset by doping in the Olympics, when the consequence of this is an irreversible change to the constitutional settlement of the country.”

It is insane but why, how?

The best answer I've come up with is from an article in the Irish Times from July, 2018. Everyone, the Conservative government, the opposition Labour Party, the media including the vaunted BBC, even the British public simply chose to ignore it. Evidence of criminality and other wrongdoing - mountains of it - doesn't matter. The country is tearing itself apart, its parliament a hopeless shambles, over a rigged vote - and the corruption doesn't matter.

In a stinging report, the Electoral Commission found that Vote Leave had broken the law by failing to include Grimes’s spending in their return. 

The official Leave campaign breached spending limits by almost half a million pounds. That’s a significant amount in British politics, especially in a knife-edge referendum like Brexit. 

Nor is this the first time that the British elections regulator has found serious irregularities in how the campaign to leave the EU was won.
In May, another pro-Brexit campaign, Leave.EU, was fined £70,000, again for breaking electoral law. Leave.EU was bankrolled by Arron Banks, a controversial businessman who emerged from obscurity to become the biggest donor in British political history, giving more than £8 million to pro-Brexit groups. 

Russian ambassador 

The extent and source of Banks’s fortune has been under discussion, as have his political connections. Recent reports revealed that Banks had extensive, previously undisclosed meetings with the Russian ambassador in London in the run-up to the Brexit vote. 

Then, on the night of the referendum former Ukip leader Nigel Farage twice conceded defeat live on British television. When the results came in sterling’s value collapsed, and a number of prominent pro-Brexit hedge fund managers made millions.

So, what has been the response in Britain to all this? A parliamentary inquiry? Politicians on all sides demanding changes to electoral law to protect the democratic processes?

Not exactly. On Tuesday, Conservative MP Nadine Dorries accused the Electoral Commission – an independent regulator – of being biased. 

News that the largest Brexit campaign broke the law has provoked hardly a peep from the party of government. 

The opposition benches have scarcely been much louder. With a few honourable exceptions, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has been largely silent, no doubt wary of being seen to oppose “the will of the people”.

...But it is not just Britain’s parliament that has been incapacitated by Brexit. Almost every aspect of British public life is now refracted through the simplistic slogans of June 2016. 

Take the media. Ordinarily news that the largest campaign in British political history had broken the law would be met with headlines excoriating Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – both senior figures in Vote Leave – and calling for full investigations. 

But these are not ordinary times. In a climate where some newspaper front pages have declared judges “the enemies of the people” and called on May to “crush the saboteurs”, there is a marked reluctance to pose awkward questions about how the referendum was won.

Democratic poverty 

Brexit has revealed the poverty of the system that regulates British democracy. The Electoral Commission itself only looked in depth at Vote Leave after internal emails released under Freedom of Information legislation showed that the watchdog was deeply uneasy about the campaign’s spending but was wary of launching a full investigation.

...Remarkably, unlike a general election, the victory in the referendum cannot be challenged in an election court because the vote was not legally binding. 

Brexit means Brexit. But does Brexit mean ignoring mounting evidence that the democratic process was compromised during the 2016 referendum? If that’s the case, then Britain could be living with the consequences of the vote to leave the EU long, long after March 2019.

Bear in mind that everything you've read from this Irish Times report was before the UK's National Crime Agency launched a criminal investigation into the Leave campaign and its officials, an investigation that's still underway.

Add it all up. 1. Brexit was a "non-binding" referendum. There was nothing carved in stone. At best it was a loose effort at testing the waters. By virtue of being non-binding there must have been many people who simply gave voting a pass, content to leave the issue to parliament. 2. Evidence surfaced of financial chicanery by the Leave campaign that was confirmed by the country's Electoral Commission. 3. Evidence emerged of the covert role played by an American-owned Cambridge Analytica, a company developed to manipulate public opinion for electoral purposes.  A company that was owned by American far right billionaire, Robert Mercer, and directed by noneother than Steve Bannon. A company that was exposed by hidden camera video promising to rig an African election. A company that was thrown into liquidation quickly upon being exposed. 4. With all this evidence of corruption, Leave won the non-binding referendum by a very narrow, 52-48 margin, hardly a conclusive result. Nobody went to the polling station believing such a result could plunge Britain into a deal that even today cannot be defined that could plunge the UK and the EU into a no-deal "hard Brexit."

Despite all of these problems, 1, 2, 3, and 4 above, the Tories treated this dodgy result as a binding obligation to tear the UK out of the European Union and the opposition Labour leader and his caucus went along with it.

Hard as this is to believe, nobody in Britain is willing to defend the country's democracy and its institutions. They would rather sweep the dirt under the carpet and get on with leaving the European Union, even if that wrecks their economy.

The Fox and the Hen House - Trudeau Hands Industry the Keys

It's not unfair to say that, when the Trudeau government talks about balancing resource development and the environment you can expect a giant thumb on the scale. When the two interests clash, the environment comes away with the shit end of the stick.

Even by Ottawa standards, Tuesday’s meeting of the House environment committee was a long and rancorous affair. 

Running more than 13 hours when it finally adjourned after midnight, the marathon session was the committee’s fourth and final day to vote on hundreds of proposed amendments to Bill C-69, the Trudeau government’s effort to overhaul Canada’s environmental laws. 

Few are happy with the result, including scientists who say the bill puts too little emphasis on the scientific rigour and independence of impact assessments.

...The omnibus bill includes separate acts on impact assessment, energy regulation and navigable waters, and is intended to replace the controversial rewriting of federal environmental regulations under Stephen Harper in 2012. ...But experts say the weaknesses in the bill mean that it is unlikely to improve impact assessment or strengthen public trust.

Harper environmentalism lives on.

“When you look at the actual legislative language, there’s very little change,” said Martin Olszynski, a lawyer and University of Calgary professor who was among the more than 100 expert witnesses selected to appear before the committee. 

Given that none of those experts were research scientists, Prof. Olszynski opted to focus his ten minutes of testimony on adding language to the bill that would require decision-makers to adhere to principles of scientific integrity. An amendment to that effect was later introduced by Green Party Leader Elizabeth May and passed by the committee.

Yet even that step amounts to a half measure, said Aerin Jacob, an ecologist with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. Dr. Jacob was among those who sought, unsuccessfully, to speak to the committee in an effort to strengthen the science underpinnings of the bill. 

She said that while all persons involved in carrying out any part of an impact assessment should fall under the scientific-integrity provision, the amendment that the committee actually voted on only includes federal officials. 

“By and large that’s not the problem,” Dr. Jacob said, since the data that support an impact assessment is typically gathered and interpreted not by government scientists but by private consultants paid for by industry proponents. “The problem is that the fox is watching the hen house.” 

Petr Komers, a Calgary-based consultant, agreed that the bill does nothing to help those who are trying to provide a fair reading on the environmental impacts of proposed projects when they know that their clients are looking for a green light. “That makes our job really difficult,” he said. 

Jonathan Wilkinson, parliamentary secretary for the Environment Ministry and a non-voting member of the committee, said that the government had considered but ultimately rejected a more hands-on approach to environmental assessments.  

“The answer that we came to is it’s better for [industry proponents] to do the initial work, but of course government must have the resources and the capacity to effectively assess that work,” he said. “That’s the better way of doing it.”

Kai Chan, a scientist who specializes in environmental policy at the University of British Columbia, said experience suggests otherwise. 

In a paper published in March in Environmental Management, a research journal, Dr. Chan and colleagues examined 10 recent assessments and found that assessors typically underplayed the significance of environmental impacts and sought to rationalize why projects should proceed. Government officials were unlikely to questions their findings, even for controversial assessments such as the Northern Gateway pipeline, which was later cancelled. 

Dr. Chan added that stronger oversight and co-ordination of the assessment process by federal authorities would fix the problem. “It’s really a shame they were so quick to dismiss that,” he said.

Remember that we're talking about the Trudeau government whose own officials were caught out rigging the government assessment of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity with National Observer, [senior federal officials] say a high-ranking public servant [a Harper government holdover, Erin O'Gorman] instructed them, at least one month before the pipeline was approved, “to give cabinet a legally-sound basis to say ‘yes’” to Trans Mountain. These instructions came at a time when the government claimed it was still consulting in good faith with First Nations and had not yet come to a final decision on the pipeline. 

Legal experts interviewed by National Observer say these instructions could be a significant matter reviewed by the courts to determine if the government’s approval of Trans Mountain was valid. 

The government would neither confirm, nor deny that public servants were given these instructions to find a way to approve the project. But it described the allegation as “unsubstantiated” information.

Elizabeth May contends it's not just the National Energy Board that's in the bag for the fossil fuelers. National Resources Canada and Environment Canada are also aboard the petro-train.

“I think NRCAN has become the Department of Oil and Gas and I think Environment Canada was converted under Harper from a public service agency to a corporate concierge service to speed along the approval of oil sands projects,” says [Elizabeth] May.

Nothing quite says "regulatory capture" better than letting the regulated industries provide government with the research and analysis on matters being regulated, especially when the government has its own internal fixers telling senior public servants what they need to report to their bosses.

If this skulduggery was Harper's doing, we'd be tearing him to shreds. But Stepford wife Liberals seem to prefer to look the other way when it's their boy doing the very same thing.

It Wasn't Just a Crazed Kid with an Assault Rifle At that Parkdale High School Yesterday. He had Company, America's "Bought and Paid For" Congress Were In That School At His Side..

I watched Lawrence O'Donnell interview a father whose 15-year old daughter was at the Parkdale, Florida high school where 17 people, mainly students, were gunned down yesterday. The man's daughter had not been harmed but he was visibly upset by the event and what she had gone through as she and her classmates huddled to the sound of rapid gunfire.

O'Donnell asked the dad what he wished to say to America's senators and representatives. It was pretty blunt. "Stop taking the blood money." He wanted them to stop taking money from the gun lobby, especially the National Rifle Association.

Poll after poll have shown that the American people support gun control by a solid margin but the public will and the public interest cannot overcome the powerful combination of the gun lobby, particularly the NRA, and a "bought and paid for" Congress that wallows at the nadir of moral and ethical corruption.

Last night Jimmy Kimmel looked at a few congressmen and the NRA cash they have pocketed over the years.  Here are a few:  Richard Burr, R., senator North Carolina, $6,986,620; Roy Blunt, R., Mo., senator, first elected 2011, $4,551,146; Marco Rubio, R., Fla, $3,303,355; and my favourite, Joni "Cut their Balls Off" Ernst, R., Iowa, and just into her third year in the Senate, a whopping $3,124,273. That's a million NRA clams a year for reformer Joni. Not bad for a girl who boasts that she grew up on a farm castrating hogs. You go girl.

Now that's not to say that Rubio hasn't done well from the NRA and yesterday, as his state ran red with the blood of his dead highschool constituents, Rubio fended off demands for gun control with the now standard, "it's too soon to be having this conversation."

It was just two weeks ago that The Economist released a survey of the world's true democracies. The United States didn't make the cut.

The US was downgraded from a "full democracy" to a "flawed democracy" in the same study last year, which cited the "low esteem in which US voters hold their government, elected representatives, and political parties."

The study has five criteria: Whether elections are free and fair ("electoral process and pluralism"), governments have checks and balances ("functioning of government"), and whether citizens are included in politics ("political participation"), support their government ("political culture"), and enjoy freedom of expression ("civil liberties").

Let's put it this way. The Economist reviewers obviously bent over backwards to give the U.S. even a "flawed democracy" rating.  "Free and fair elections." Really, are you kidding? Political participation?  No, no, no. The NRA politically participates. The Koch brothers politically participate. The people? Not a chance.

Political culture, popular support for the government? Trump's numbers are in the ditch. Public support for Congress is in the toilet. Did they even look at the rise of extremist, fringe politics in America?

America is not a democracy. It was founded as a republic, not a democracy. While it developed pretty strong democratic aspirations during the 20th century, Reagan and his successors collectively put that nonsense back in the box, in part by ushering in the age of neoliberalism. America is a plutocracy and the popular vote doesn't matter, not until those voters throw out their vile, corrupted government. And, until they do, rivers of blood will continue to roll down the hallways of their kids' schools.

N.B. That pink AR above? That's a little girl's toy. However - wait for it - you can also buy the real thing, a fully functional AR-15 in hot pink. God Bless Amerika.

A Fitting End to a Country Grown Too Old

Remember when North America was called the New World? Well, in some ways, it's rather old, very old. The United States boasts of being the world's oldest constitutional democracy and, even if that means brushing a few other nations such as Switzerland under the carpet, it clings to that claim.

These are, however, technicalities. The United States has not been a functioning democracy for a good many years. The gang that launched this enterprise, the Founding Fathers, weren't fond of democracy. (see Louise Isenberg's, "White Trash, the 400 Year Untold History of Class in America.") And it's not surprising that today's Ruling Fathers are following so closely in their footsteps.

In 2014 two American professors, Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Ben Page (Northwestern) published a paper entitled, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens." Their study, published by Princeton, revealed how America's Congress had fallen under the control of narrow, monied interests to the exclusion of the public interest. Congress no longer served the American people. It served the emerging oligarchy, the Donor Class. Democracy, at least liberal democracy, was over, extinguished.

Even senator Lindsey Graham recently exhorted his Republican colleagues to back the hopelessly corrupted tax bill by openly warning that if it failed, "the financial contributions will stop."  In other words, Congressional Republicans had taken the King's shilling, had grown dependent on these wealthy donors, and now must do their bidding. That is nothing less than a blatant confession of utter corruption.

In yesterday's New York Times, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote of how America was now broken, perhaps irreparably, by the Republican Party.

If in 2006 one could cast aspersions on both parties, over the past decade it has become clear that it is the Republican Party — as an institution, as a movement, as a collection of politicians — that has done unique, extensive and possibly irreparable damage to the American political system.

Trump is the culmination of a rancid corruption that goes back several years.  I can remember when then Republican House leader John Boehner strolled the floor of the house depositing white envelopes on the desks of his party's members. Inside were cheques from the tobacco industry and they arrived just as the House prepared to take up that year's tobacco subsidies.

Since Boehner's walk on the House floor we've had the US Supreme Court decision in Citizen's United, as fine a piece of corporatist corruption as perhaps any in America's history, and now the culmination of the America's transition to transactional government, the Republican tax bill.

In an act of sublime stupidity, Trump's Gullibillies believed they were voting to "drain the swamp." The stupid fools could not see they were instead electing a government of swamp creatures who would strip them of everything from their democracy to their health care and burden them with even more debt that they and their kids and grandkids will be left to shoulder. Fools, damned fools.

In today's Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli sees the same moral and intellectual perversion in the Republican tax gambit as in the GOP's policy on climate change.

The parallels between the Republican Party positions on taxes and climate change are striking. Both are morally appalling and reject the available evidence and expert opinion.

The Initiative on Global Markets’ panel of economic experts was recently asked about the Republican tax plan. Among the experts who took a position either way, there was a 96% consensus that the plan would not substantially grow the economy more than the status quo, and a 100% consensus that it would substantially increase the national debt.

...

Economists also agree that we should be paying down the debt when the economy is going strong. When the next recession inevitably strikes, governments need monetary flexibility to respond. That’s when it makes sense to run a deficit (for example, see the 2009 stimulus package, which helped pull the US out of the Great Recession and cost less than the Republican tax plan).

These Republican economic contradictions make no sense, but they’re familiar to those of us who follow climate change news. The only consistency in climate denial is in its contradictions – deniers claim global warming isn’t happening, but it’s a natural ocean cycle, and caused by the sun, and galactic cosmic rays, and Jupiter’s orbital cycles, and it’s really just a Chinese hoax, and in any case it’s not bad.

And the Gullibillies, fed a rich diet of lies, keep faith with the faithless. They're taking it up the arse and they don't even realize it.

A 2012 survey found that Americans who only watch Fox News are less informed than Americans who watch no news at all. At the time, 55% of Americans including 75% of Republicans reported watching Fox News. The network is powerful – a recent study found that Fox News might have enough influence to tip American elections – and on the whole it prioritizes ideological messaging over factual accuracy.

Trump’s attacks on the so-called “fake news” media have further eroded Republicans’ trust of news sources that lack a conservative bias. As David Roberts wrote for Vox:

The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening … the right has created its own parallel set of institutions, most notably its own media ecosystem … “conservative media is more partisan and more insular than the left.”

Because so many conservatives rely on right-wing media sources for their news, it’s easy to misinform them through a constant stream of lies.

For example, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin promised that his department would produce an analysis showing that the tax cuts will pay for themselves. One economist in the department leaked to the New York Times that such an analysis doesn’t exist and Treasury staffers weren’t even asked to study the issue. It was a lie. Mnuchin also claimed the plan would only raise taxes on Americans who earn more than $1 million a year – the exact opposite of reality and another blatant lie. In fact, the entire Republican case for their tax plan was based on lies.

Similarly, climate denial is based on endless myths and misinformation – Skeptical Science has catalogued and debunked about 200 of them. And recent research showed that these myths are quite effective at misinforming their audience.

This brings to mind Kevin Phillips' 2005 book, "American Theocracy." In one chapter of the book, Phillips explores how previous global hegemons rose to dominance and then fell again.

...conductors of the orchestra of American hubris wave star-spangled batons and the chorus resounds: Washington rules, the world manufactures for the United States, and our current-account deficit reflects nothing more than global anxiety to invest in U.S. prosperity. Who knows, the Treasury may even be planning a statue of an American consumer supporting the world on his back.

However, if pride goeth before a fall, cocksureness about the manageability of U.S. public and private indebtedness may as well, given threats that range from debt crises to currency humiliation. Crippling indebtedness is like the ghost of leading world economic powers past, a familiar Shakespearean villain come to stalk the current hegemon.

...None of these hegemons [Holland, Spain and Britain] started with well-developed finance. They began with simpler vocations. Castile, the heart of Spain, was a culture of high-plateau wool growers and skilled soldiers who had spent centuries reconquering the Iberian peninsula from Muslim emirs before conquistadores found gold and silver in Central and South America. The Dutch, as we have seen, had a unique talent for vocations having to do with ships, seas and winds. The English pioneered coal development and superseded the Dutch as masters of the seas. But after several generations of success in soldiering, seafaring, or manufacturing, these peoples, in their respective heydays, were drawn farther in the direction of globalism, financial services and capital management.

...Excluding the unusual case of Spain, the leading economic powers have followed an evolutionary progression: first, agriculture, fishing and the like, next commerce and industry, and finally finance. Several historians have elaborated this point. Brooks Adams contended that 'as societies consolidate, they pass through a profound intellectual change. Energy ceases to vent through the imagination and takes the form of capital.'

In 1908, ...Winston Churchill, then president of the British Board of Trade, vented a similar historical interpretation in finding 'the seed of imperial ruin and national decay' in 'the unnatural gap between the rich and the poor' and 'the swift increase of vulgar jobless luxury.'

...The word "rentier" - meaning a person living off unearned income - comes from the French, as do so many other words connected with money and plunder: financier, profiteer, buccaneer. Over the last four centuries, however, it was first Spain, then Holland and Great Britain, and now the United States that created the most notable rentier cultures. Each ultimately became vulnerable as a result.

...Because intermittent high debt ratios were so central to the evolution of each of the leading world economic powers, each became comfortable - too comfortable - with debt as a long-standing experience, practice, and tactic. Particular overconfidence was instilled by memories of how often previous debt problems had been surmounted, even at extreme levels (100 to 200 percent) of GDP or GNP.

...Understandable as this cockiness might be, history teaches a crucial distinction: nations could martial the necessary debt-defying high-wire walks and comebacks during their youth and early middle age, when their industries, exports, capitalizations, and animal spirits were vital and expansive, but they became less resilient in later years. During these periods, as their societies polarized and their arteries clogged with rentier and debt buildups, wars and financial crises stopped being manageable. Of course, clarity about this develops only in retrospect. However, even though war-related debt seems to have been part of each fatal endgame, the past leading world economic powers seem to have made another error en route. They did not pay enough attention to establishing or maintaining a vital manufacturing sector, thereby keeping a better international balance and a broader internal income distribution than financialization allowed."

This history was written, repeatedly, over several centuries. Phillips, a Republican stalwart, penned these passages in 2005. Here we are on the eve of 2018 with America staring down this very same gun barrel. The insanely stupid Gullibillies don't realize their predicament or that it's the Republicans' finger on the trigger.

America is Broken, Probably Beyond Repair

The sad fact that America's Congress is "bought and paid for" is well known. America has long lost any notion of "government of the people, by the people, for the people." It is instead government of the people by a few people acting for the benefit of a select, privileged and small segment of the people.

The corruption that is so rank within the House and Senate is something that the Republicans don't even bother to hide any more. The Republican tax reform law was a consummate act of political corruption. Even stalwart senator Lindsey Graham tweeted last month admitted that the "donor class" now gets what it has so richly paid for.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Thursday became the latest Republican to admit the GOP is trying to ram through massive tax cuts for the rich to satisfy its wealthy donors, telling a journalist that if the party’s tax push fails, “the financial contributions will stop.”

Lindsey Graham says “the financial contributions will stop” if tax reform fails.

— Alan Rappeport (@arappeport) November 9, 2017

David Sirota, reporter with the International Business Times, responded by noting that it is both “laudably honest for Graham to admit this” and “a repulsive glimpse of how politicians see so many public policies as private financial transactions between them and their donors.”

In today's New York Times, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein lament how the Republicans "broke Congress."

What is astounding, and still largely unappreciated, is the unexpected and rapid nature of the decline in American national politics, and how one-sided its cause. If in 2006 one could cast aspersions on both parties, over the past decade it has become clear that it is the Republican Party — as an institution, as a movement, as a collection of politicians — that has done unique, extensive and possibly irreparable damage to the American political system.

Even today, many people like to imagine that the damage has all been President Trump’s doing — that he took the Republican Party hostage. But the problem goes much deeper.
...

First, beginning in the 1990s, the Republicans strategically demonized Congress and government more broadly and flouted the norms of lawmaking, fueling a significant decline of trust in government that began well before the financial collapse in 2008, though it has sped up since. House Republicans showed their colors when they first blocked passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Plan, despite the urgent pleas of their own president, George W. Bush, and the speaker of the House, John Boehner. The seeds of a (largely phony) populist reaction were planted.

Second, there was the “Obama effect.” When Mr. Bush became president, Democrats worked with him to enact sweeping education reform early on and provided the key votes to pass his top priority, tax cuts. With President Barack Obama, it was different. While many argued that the problem was that Mr. Obama failed to schmooze enough with Republicans in Congress, we saw a deliberate Republican strategy to oppose all of his initiatives and frame his attempts to compromise as weak or inauthentic. The Senate under the majority leader Mitch McConnell weaponized the filibuster to obstruct legislation, block judges and upend the policy process. The Obama effect had an ominous twist, an undercurrent of racism that was itself embodied in the “birther” movement led by Donald Trump.

Third, we have seen the impact of significant changes in the news media, which had a far greater importance on the right than on the left. The development of the modern conservative media echo chamber began with the rise of Rush Limbaugh and talk radio in the late 1980s and ramped up with the birth of Fox News. Matt Drudge, his protégé Andrew Breitbart and Breitbart’s successor Steve Bannon leveraged the power of the internet to espouse their far-right views. And with the advent of social media, we saw the emergence of a radical “alt-right” media ecosystem able to create its own “facts” and build an audience around hostility to the establishment, anti-immigration sentiment and racial resentment. Nothing even close to comparable exists on the left.

Mr. Trump’s election and behavior during his first 10 months in office represent not a break with the past but an extreme acceleration of a process that was long underway in conservative politics. The Republican Party is now rationalizing and enabling Mr. Trump’s autocratic, kleptocratic, dangerous and downright embarrassing behavior in hopes of salvaging key elements of its ideological agenda: cutting taxes for the wealthy (as part of possibly the worst tax bill in American history), hobbling the regulatory regime, gutting core government functions and repealing Obamacare without any reasonable plan to replace it.

This is a far cry from the aspirations of Republican presidential giants like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, as well as legions of former Republican senators and representatives who identified critical roles for government and worked tirelessly to make them succeed. It’s an agenda bereft of any serious efforts to remedy the problems that trouble vast segments of the American public, including the disaffected voters who flocked to Mr. Trump.

The failure of Republican members of Congress to resist the anti-democratic behavior of President Trump — including holding not a single hearing on his and his team’s kleptocracy — is cringe-worthy. A few Republican senators have spoken up, but occasional words have not been matched by any meaningful deeds. Only conservative intellectuals have acknowledged the bankruptcy of the Republican Party.

The "Bought and Paid For" Tax Reform Bill

The menacing face of Congressional corruption is being exposed in the Republican's tax reform bill. They can't hide it any longer. They've stopped even trying to deny it. They're bought and paid for, have been for some years, and now they have to do their patrons' bidding.

Even Senator Lindsey Graham admits the Republicans are at a 'fish or cut bait' moment with their affluent owners.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Thursday became the latest Republican to admit the GOP is trying to ram through massive tax cuts for the rich to satisfy its wealthy donors, telling a journalist that if the party’s tax push fails, “the financial contributions will stop.”

Lindsey Graham says “the financial contributions will stop” if tax reform fails.

— Alan Rappeport (@arappeport) November 9, 2017

David Sirota, reporter with the International Business Times, responded by noting that it is both “laudably honest for Graham to admit this” and “a repulsive glimpse of how politicians see so many public policies as private financial transactions between them and their donors.”

As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) has made a similar comment recently, complaining that his donors are pressuring him to pass tax cuts or “don’t ever call me again.”
Critics had the same response to Graham as they did to Collins: “Dude, you’re not supposed to actually admit that out loud.”


It’s nice to see Republicans in Congress looking out for the people who really matter: their wealthy donors. pic.twitter.com/BfS5TyaTGt

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) November 9, 2017


This is
(A) true
(B) an incredible thing for so many Republican lawmakers to say out loud this week. https://t.co/jTmHzYxyDA

— Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) November 9, 2017


In a heroic effort to save the middle class, @GOP will pass #TrumpTaxScam because their wealthy donors will stop bankrolling their campaigns if they don’t. https://t.co/j3zIGb797Q

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) November 9, 2017


They keep saying the quiet part out loud https://t.co/VjJ4ohBsA7

— Sam Stein (@samstein) November 9, 2017


Republicans are literally out here warning each other that their big donors will stop writing checks if they don’t do their bidding. https://t.co/7kheh52bzA

— Matt Ortega (@MattOrtega) November 9, 2017

Will this ever sink in with Republican voters. These guys are saying, "We're on the take, we're on the pad, we're on the payroll and we're not working for the voting public. We're in service to the guy with the chequebook."

It's interesting that the decline and collapse of Rome and its empire were also marked by the rise of transactional democracy. If you were rich enough you could buy pretty much whatever you wanted from the Senate. Today, if you're rich enough, you get to buy pretty much what you want from the Congress of the United States of America. And one of the things those rich folks expect for their money is that tax reform bill that will see 80 per cent of the benefits flow to the top 1 per cent.

Is It Time We Chaperoned Our Politicians

Where Alberta Fossil Fuelers Go to Shop

Yes, Christy, this is about you - and the rest.

Christy Clark, Canada's  Queen of Cash has been known to be a grateful recipient of campaign contributions from those friendly funsters known as the Calgary Petroleum Club but, of course, that doesn't mean that her government's acceptance of the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion had anything to do with cheque-stuffed envelopes.  Still, the skeptical might just wonder.

Hell, even the New York Times has taken notice of Grifty Clark and splashed her around on the pages of The Grey Lady.

It's fair to say that Canada is a nation of petro-pols. Our House of Commons is chock full of them save, perhaps, for that little lady way over there in the corner. And provincial legislatures from Newfoundland to British Columbia are also sinking under the weight of their own petro-pols.

It's timely help then from a friendly Deutscher,  Arne Jungjohann, an energy analyst from Germany.  His message - if Canada wants to make progress on climate change, if Canada's governments are remotely serious about that, they have to get fossil fuel money out of politics (and, I might add, government subsidies out of the fossil fuel industry).

There are no two ways about it, according to German political scientist Arne Jungjohann: if you want to make meaningful progress on climate change, you have to get big money out of politics.

“Then you get fossil fuel money out of politics,” said the author and energy analyst. “It’s very, very important to make this a non-partisan issue, otherwise you cannot create this stability and certainty that is needed for the investment people.”

Hold on a minute, Arnie. Fossil energy is already a non-partisan issue. Did you ever hear of the industry's latest Alberta champion, Rachel Notley? The Tories are in the fossil fuelers' bag.  So too is environmental hypocrite extraordinaire and Liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau. This is already a non-partisan issue and that is the problem. 

Jungjohann offered “lessons" from the German clean energy story, also called the Energiewende. It’s the German word for the country’s clean energy transition, and Jungjohann co-wrote a book about it: Energy Democracy — Germany’s Energiewende to Renewables.

If Canada has anything to learn from Germany's Energiewende, he said, it's that corporate money must exit the equation, citizens must be involved early on, and clean energy must become non-partisan. He called it the "democratization" of clean energy.

What works in Germany won't work in Canada. At the federal and the provincial level our fossil energy corruption is now institutionalized, embedded.

Just Because They're Hopelessly Corrupt That Doesn't Make Them Real Liberals

We've got an election campaign underway out here on the Left Coast and John Horgan's New Democrats are in hot pursuit of Christy Clark's B.C. Liberal government.

Something about Horgan seems to have crawled up the ass of the guy I think of as the Liberal Loudmouth. He does not like the cut of Horgan's jib and he's racing to the defence of Christy Clark. Perhaps he imagines Crusty as a Liberal. It says as much right on the party's letterhead yet there are damned few B.C. Liberals who harbour any instincts remotely liberal. No, in every way and every day, they show that their roots are deeply conservative.

Now you would have thought that LL, being steeped in all things Liberal, would have realized there is no liberal party in British Columbia. And, besides, just because you're utterly corrupt, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're Liberal although I can understand the confusion.

I'll not defend Horgan for some unfortunate remark that somehow sent LL spinning. In this race I'm not backing either Clark or Horgan. I'm a Green living in the bastion of the Green Party, Vancouver Island. The Greens are polling quite well on the island something that inevitably pisses off the B.C. Libs and the NDP with their grinding crap about vote splitting.

So, just a heads up to all you out-of-province Liberals who may imagine that Christy Clark is one of you. Don't be fooled. Just because her government is mired in corruption, that doesn't make them real Liberals.

The Big Easy - Easy On Rapists. Police Execution in El Paso.

There's always been a seedy undercurrent to New Orleans - everything from street hustlers to corrupt politicians.  It's part of the flavour of the place.

Now it turns out the Big Easy has been going easy on rapists thanks to a municipal detective squad that couldn't care less.

... a city inspector general’s report claims five detectives failed to do substantial investigation of more than 1,000 cases of sex crimes and child abuse — with one detective being cited for stating a belief that simple rape should not be considered a crime.

The US Justice Department previously investigated the scandal-plagued police force and in 2012 the city agreed to a host of changes in its policies. Among the federal probe’s major findings were that the police force was rife with corruption and had numerous instances of excessive use of deadly force, discrimination and problems with its sex crimes unit. A federal monitor is overseeing compliance.

The latest city report charged that a detective handling child abuse failed to investigate a case involving a three-year-old brought to an emergency room due to an alleged sexual assault, closing the case without any charges even though the child had a sexually transmitted disease. The same detective closed the book with minimal or no investigation, and again with no charges, on two cases involving children brought to the emergency room with fractured skulls, the report said.

Another detective, this one assigned to handle sex crimes, allegedly told several people that simple rape should not be considered a crime, the report charged. Simple rape happens when a person has sex with someone without their consent.

When you consider the number of officials, other than these detectives themselves, who must have had some notion of what was going on or not going on, it makes you wonder if this isn't a sign of a general descent into chaos.  

Vice News brings this story of an El Paso cop shown on video as executing a handcuffed man.



The relevant part of the video begins around the 18:00 mark.  To compound this blatant police killing, the department set up a wall of obfuscation.

 The bullet went through Saenz's left shoulder and into his chest, piercing his heart. The authorities called it an accident. They said that the guard knocked Flores as he pointed his drawn weapon, causing it to fire. They said that Saenz could have moved his cuffs to the front of his body and, with his strength, use them as a weapon. They said a taser would not suffice to subdue him. 

A Government Corrupted

There's no trace of hyperbole in denouncing Stephen Harper as the Great Corrupter.  He is corrupt and he corrupts whatever he touches whenever and however it suits him.

The proof is pretty much everywhere but a shining example is the National Energy Board.   Take it from Marc Elieson, an energy executive and former CEO of BC Hydro.

Marc Eliesen  ...has quit his role as an intervenor in the federal review of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline and oil tanker expansion project, calling the National Energy Board "a truly captured regulator."

Eliesen has worked in the nation's energy sector for 40 years. In addition to running the nation's largest hydro utilities, he served in a variety of senior positions in both federal and provincial governments of all stripes, including as Ontario's deputy minister of energy.

Now retired and living in Whistler, B.C., the 73-year-old Eliesen resigned from his intervenor responsibilities after the board repeatedly demonstrated what he called a "lack of respect for hearing participants," as well as a disregard for "the standards and practices of natural justice that previous boards have respected."

Today's National Energy Board is bent.  It's a stacked deck, utterly corrupt.  It more closely resembles the courts that tyrants like to establish to do their dirty business.  It makes ruling after ruling barring relevant evidence and excluding unwelcome participation.   It sees only what it wants to see, it hears only what suits its predisposition.  

Let's put it this way: you don't go to these lengths to cheat if you have any chance of winning fairly.  A national regulator should not be a den of skulduggery, a rubber stamp of perfidy.

Why on Earth then should British Columbians accept the perverse rulings of this "truly captured" regulator or its soiled process?  Why should we take it as anything less than an admission that we're being set up so that out-of-province interests can have their way with our coast?

Read Mr. Elieson's letter of resignation.

If We're Already Seen as the Government's Enemies, Why Do We Think They Might Listen to Us?

Of the many dark farces of the Harper government, the best one is that there'll be a full and fair environmental assessment of the Northern Gateway pipeline initiative and the claim that the government remains open-minded.   The Victoria Time Colonist pundit, Jack Knox, writes that's sheer bollocks:

Emails released this week show a cosy relationship in which CSIS, a section of the RCMP, our pro-pipeline federal government, the National Energy Board and energy companies are inside the club, while those who oppose Enbridge’s proposal are treated like woolly headed radicals working against the national interest.

Which leads to the obvious question: If that’s what Ottawa thinks of British Columbians who worry about oil tankers doing an Exxon Valdez in the tricky inside waters of our coast, how seriously will it listen to them?

The emails came to light through an access to information filing initially reported in the online Vancouver Observer. They showed communications between the RCMP, CSIS, the National Energy Board and its security chief before and during the regulatory hearings into Enbridge’s proposal to pipe Alberta bitumen to a tanker terminal at Kitimat.

The messages talk of using social media and other sources to monitor everything from the Idle No More movement to the Victoria-based Dogwood Initiative to the annual all-native basketball tourney in Prince Rupert. One of the emails, a security summary prior to January’s hearings in Kelowna, refers to a gathering at which Elizabeth May — the Saanich-Gulf Islands MP and Green Party leader — and Victoria-Swan Lake MLA Rob Fleming were to speak.

Those revelations follow a series of stories in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which reported that the Canadian government has an extensive spying program aimed at domestic environmental organizations. Since 2005, twice-a-year meetings involving energy companies, police, CSIS and other federal agencies have been convened to discuss threats to the energy sector, including challenges from green groups. The Guardian produced the agenda for one such meeting in May: sponsored by Natural Resources Canada, it was held at CSIS headquarters in Ottawa, with breakfast, lunch and coffee provided by Enbridge and a networking mixer paid for by Bruce Power and Brookfield Renewable Energy Partners.

...security arrangements bordered on the absurd when the regulatory road show came to the Delta Victoria Ocean Pointe for eight days in January. Hotel doors were guarded by a contingent of Victoria police officers working on overtime (the bill was ultimately paid by Enbridge, as the applicant was responsible for all costs related to the pipeline review). Members of the public could only watch online or on a big screen at the Ramada three kilometres away. Even the people scheduled to testify (they had to wait at least 15 months for the privilege) were herded into a holding room down the hall from the hearing room. Never mind that they looked less like wild-eyed anarchists than a United Church prayer circle, a bunch of grey-haired retirees in fleece vests and Gore-Tex.

That betrays a troubling mindset by a federal government that starts with the assumption that anyone who disagrees with the Northern Gateway plan is by definition a kook, a fringe character hiding behind a balaclava or one of those moustachioed Occupy Everything masks. Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver infamously ranted about “environmental and other radical groups” blocking pipeline proposals. The feds poured $8 million into a witch hunt targeting environmental charities that it blamed for bogging down the approval process. In Ottawa, green is the new black.

Here's the thing.  When your government treats you as an enemy of the state, no good will come from ignoring that warning.  That's when you have to start asking if the state hasn't become your enemy.

Mitt Romney - Class Warrior

Mitt Romney wouldn't be the first really rich man to enter the White House.   But, as Robert Reich points out, he'd certainly be a lot different.

America has had hugely wealthy presidents before — think of Teddy Roosevelt and his distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt; or John F. Kennedy, beneficiary of father Joe’s fortune.

But here’s the difference. These men were champions of the working class and the poor, and were considered traitors to their own class. Teddy Roosevelt railed against the “malefactors of great wealth,” and he busted up the oil and railroad trusts.

FDR thundered against the “economic royalists,” raised taxes on the wealthy, and gave average working people the right to form unions — along with Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and a 40-hour workweek.

But Mitt Romney is not a traitor to his class. He is a sponsor of his class. He wants to cut their taxes by $3.7 trillion over the next decade, and hasn’t even specified what “loopholes” he’d close to make up for this gigantic giveaway.

And he wants to cut benefits that almost everyone else relies on — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and housing assistance.

He’s even a warrior for his class, telling his wealthy followers his job isn’t to worry about the “47 percent” of Americans who won’t vote for him, whom he calls “victims” and he berates for not paying federal incomes taxes and taking federal handouts.

...Money means power. Concentrated wealth at the top means extraordinary power at the top. The reason Romney pays a rate of only 14 percent on $13 million of income in 2011 — a lower rate than many in the middle class — is because he exploits a loophole that allows private equity managers to treat their income as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent.

...So much wealth and power have accumulated at the top of America that our economy and our democracy are seriously threatened. Romney not only represents this problem. He is the living embodiment of it.

It's time Americans busted this myth of the "self-made man" Romney and his clan steadfastly hide behind.   Nobel laureate economist Joe Stiglitz in his recent book, "The Price of Inequality", traces how government policies, not normal market forces, have created the inequality that plagues today's America and has resulted in the undeserved transfer of wealth and power from the middle classes to the richest of the rich.   The government "of the people, by the people, for the people" turned its back on the people, lining its pockets richly in the process.


The frightening thing is that there a great many Americans, especially the prominent and affluent, who don't think this is corrupt.

The Treacherous Prime Minister

Douglas Channel

Steve Harper's environmental assessment of the Northern Gateway bitumen pipeline proposal is an utter sham.   Steve says the fate of the pipeline will be decided by science but, after so many years, anyone who puts stock in what Steve says is, well, let's say cognitively impaired.

The fact is that the Harper regime is doing everything in its power to ensure that science doesn't intrude on the assessment travesty.   It wouldn't do to thwart its pre-ordained conclusion.

Documents filed with the National Energy Board show the environmental review panel studying the Northern Gateway project asked Fisheries and Oceans Canada for risk assessments for the bodies of water the proposed pipeline will cross. The pipeline is to traverse nearly 1,000 streams and rivers in the upper Fraser, Skeena and Kitimat watersheds.

The department didn't have them.

The department doesn't have them and there's no chance in hell it will have them by the short-fuze deadline Harper has imposed on the hearing process.

Earlier this month, Harper told reporters in Vancouver that "decisions on these kinds of projects are made through an independent evaluation conducted by scientists into the economic costs and risks that are associated with the project, and that's how we conduct our business."

...But the federal government recently sent letters to 92 habitat staff members within Fisheries and Oceans in B.C., telling them that their positions will be cut. Thirty-two of them will be laid off outright.

The cuts will mean the department in B.C. has half the habitat staff it had a decade ago.

All but five of the province's fisheries field offices will be cut as part of a $79 million — 5.8 per cent — cut to the department's operational budget, including the offices in Prince George and Smithers that would have had the lead in monitoring pipeline effects.

The marine contaminant group that would have been involved in a spill in B.C. has been disbanded and the fisheries and environmental legislation gutted, said Otto Langer, a retired fisheries department scientist.

"He (Harper) says the science will make the decision. Well he's basically disembowelled the science," said Langer. "It's a cruel hoax that they're pulling over on the public."

Harper, the grand corrupter, has obviously done a job on the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.  Even though the DFO hasn't done the studies necessary for the Northern Gateway assessment, it has nonetheless given the project the "all clear."

 "Fisheries and Oceans Canada has provided its assessment and is of the view that the risk posed by the project to fish and fish habitat in the freshwater and marine environments can be managed by the proponent through appropriate mitigation and compensation measures," said the email, which echoed the response sent to the panel.

"The Department notes in its submission that the proponent has conducted a reasonable ecological risk assessment and provided useful information on the risks that an oil spill (in either marine or freshwater) would pose to fisheries resources."

Some experts smell a rat.

"It (the response from Fisheries to the panel) implies that the request to the joint review panel will not be answerable until after a decision has been made, until after the project has been approved," said Jeffrey Hutchings, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University.

"This seems, from a science perspective, a rather indefensible position in so far as a key part of the environmental review process is to evaluate the degree to which the pipeline will affect fish habitat."

..."Well, how can you make that judgment when you have not yet conducted a complete review of all proposed crossings?" he said. "Again, from a science perspective, I don't see how it's possible to be able to draw that conclusion."

This is treachery and nothing but treachery that begins in Ottawa in the prime minister's office and reaches all the way to Kitimat, the Douglas Channel, the Hecate Strait and Dixon Entrance.   But Harper's Potemkin Village environmental assessment isn't fooling the people of British Columbia and we're a force the Great Fixer can't begin to reckon with.

The Continuing Corporatism of America's Bought & Paid For Congress

Sometimes you know it but you still have to see it to believe it.  That's where the Center for Public Integrity comes in.   It has published a look at the 25 senior GOP lawmakers expected to move into power positions in the U.S. House.   The expose details each man's direct financial bonds with the companies they're going to be representing in the new year.   Take a look, find a face, click and see for yourself.

Wow, We're Right Up There With the Northern European Welfare States

According to Transparency International, Canada is right up there with the northern European welfare states when it comes to corruption.   In fact, we're supposedly the 6th least corrupt country in the world.   Denmark topped the charts at 9.3 out of a possible 10 points.  Finland and Sweden came in at 9.2.  Canada scored 8.9.   Norway was 8.6 and debt-ridden Iceland trailed at 11th place for 8.5.

Stephen Harper has open contempt for the northern European nations but, by gosh, they're remarkably decent, honest and open.

Steve's American Idol slipped out of  the top-20 for the first time since the index was created 15-years ago.  The U.S. fell to 22nd with 7.2 points thanks to its financial scandals and the "influence of money in [U.S.] politics" which seems like an awfully nice way to refer to America's bought and paid for Congress.

Meanwhile those countries that Washington has spent most of the past decade invading, conquering and supposedly rebuilding, Iraq and Afghanistan, were right at the bottom.  Afghanistan tied with Myanmar for second-last with 1.4 and Iraq placed fourth from last with 1.5.

Particularly worrisome are countries that scored 5 or less.   They're the bottom three-quarters of the 178-country rankings.   Their ranks aren't getting any smaller either.

Canada Lags on Fighting Corruption

Transparency International reports that 18 of 34 OECD countries get failing grades on enforcement of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's 2007 Anti-Bribery Convention.

Countries cited for having "little or no enforcement" of the convention included Britain, Japan and Canada. From The Guardian:

The UK and Japan were two of three G7 countries "showing a lack of sufficient commitment". The third was Canada.

TI said Canada had an "inadequate definition of foreign bribery". It recommended "greater efforts within government agencies involved in foreign countries or with foreign trade initiatives to report up the line and ultimately to enforcement agencies about allegations of bribery".

The full list of countries showing little or no enforcement was: Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey and the United Kingdom."

Dying to Support Afghan Freedom to Die

Is this what Canadian soldiers are dying to save? The Guardian reports that an Afghan journalist has been sentenced to death for insulting Allah:

"An Afghan journalist sentenced to death for distributing an article "violating Islam" is actually being punished for his brother's writing detailing abuses by northern warlords, a media group claimed today.
Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, 23, was sentenced to death yesterday by a three-judge panel in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

It was said he distributed a report he printed off the internet to fellow journalism students at Balkh University.

The judges said the article humiliated Islam, and members of a clerics' council had pushed for Kambakhsh to be punished."

But Jean MacKenzie, country director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which helps train Afghan journalists, said Kambakhsh is being punished for stories written for IWPR by his brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi.

"We feel very strongly that this is a complete fabrication on the part of the authorities up in Mazar, designed to put pressure on Parwez's brother Yaqub, who has done some of the hardest-hitting pieces outlining abuses by some very powerful commanders in Balkh and the other northern provinces," MacKenzie said.

"So we feel that what is happening with Parwez is not a very veiled threat against Yaqub Ibrahimi," MacKenzie said.

Ibrahimi wrote stories for IWPR late last year quoting villagers accusing Afghan member of parliament Piram Qul of being behind murders and kidnappings.

Qul - a former commander in the militant and political group Jamiat-e-Islami and a current parliamentarian from Takhar province - denied the allegations.

Yeah, this sounds like a government worth saving, eh? We're paying an open ended blood price for these goons. It's about time our government took Karzai by the lapels and told him to damn well clean up that nest of vipers he calls a parliament.

Why We're Losing in Afghanistan

I've written at length as to why we're not going to win in Afghanistan but sometimes it's good to hear from an expert. Michael Scheuer is an expert - on al-Qaeda and Afghanistan. He retired from the US Central Intelligence Agency in 2005. From 1996 to 1999 he was the chief of the Bin Laden Unit at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center.

Scheuer recently wrote an article published in the journal of the Jamestown Foundation describing how we're mismanaging the campaign in Afghanistan:

"Afghanistan is again being lost to the West, even as a coalition force of more than 5,000 troops launches a major spring offensive in the south of the country. The insurgency may drag on for many months or several years, but the tide has turned. Like Alexander's Greeks, the British and the Soviets before the US-led coalition, inferior Afghan insurgents have forced far superior Western military forces on to a path that leads toward evacuation. What has caused this scenario to occur repeatedly throughout history?

Scheuer writes that Western forces keep making the same mistakes: "...the West has not developed an appreciation for the Afghans' toughness, patience, resourcefulness and pride in their history. Although foreign forces in Afghanistan are always more modern and better armed and trained, they are continuously ground down by the same kinds of small-scale but unrelenting hit-and-run attacks and ambushes, as well as by the country's impenetrable topography that allows the Afghans to retreat, hide, and attack another day." Gee, remember when Rick Hillier was swaggering around, boasting that we were shipping out to Afghanistan to kill a "few dozen scumbags"?

"The latest episode in this historical tradition has several distinguishing characteristics. First, Western forces - while better armed and technologically superior - are far too few in number. Today's Western force totals about 40,000 troops. After subtracting support troops and North Atlantic Treaty Organization contingents that are restricted to non-combat, reconstruction roles - building schools, digging wells, repairing irrigation systems - the actual combat force that can be fielded on any given day is far smaller, and yet has the task of controlling a country the size of Texas that is home to some of the highest mountains on Earth.

"Second, the West underestimated the strength of the Taliban and its acceptability to the Afghan people. When invading in 2001, the West's main targets were al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and Taliban leader Mullah Omar and their senior lieutenants, and because the operation specifically targeted a group of top leaders, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was not sealed, and so not only did the pursued troika escape, so did most of their foot soldiers.

"Those escapees are now returning in large numbers, and are better armed, trained and organized than on their exit. It seems likely, in fact, that the force being fielded by the Taliban and their allies - al-Qaeda, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, among others - is at least equal in number to the coalition.

"Furthermore, the membership of the force is not just a few Taliban remnants and otherwise mostly new recruits; rather, they are the veteran fighters that the coalition failed to kill in 2001 and early 2002. The Taliban forces are not new; they are the seasoned, experienced mujahideen who are - like former president Richard Nixon in 1972 - tanned, rested and ready to wage the jihad.

"Western leaders in Afghanistan are also finding that many Afghans are not unhappy to see the Taliban returning. Much of the reason lies in the fact that the US-led coalition put the cart before the horse. Before the 2001 invasion, the Taliban regime was far from loved, but it was appreciated for the law-and-order regime it harshly enforced across most of Afghanistan. Although women had to stay home, few girls could go to school and the odd limb was chopped off for petty offenses, most rural Afghans could count on having security for themselves, their families and their farms and/or businesses.

"The coalition's victory shattered the Taliban's law-and-order regime and, instead of immediately installing a replacement - for which there were not enough troops in any event - coalition leaders moved on to elections, implementing women's rights and creating a parliament, while the bulk of rural Afghanistan returned to the anarchy of banditry and warlordism that had prevailed before the first Taliban era.

"Now in the sixth year of occupation, Western leaders are confronted not only by a stronger-than-2001 enemy, but also by the resurgent insularity and anti-foreign inclinations of the Afghan people.

"Today, the Afghans perceive themselves to be doubly ruled, and doubly badly ruled, by foreigners: the US-led coalition and the pro-Western, nominally Islamic, detribalized and corruption-ridden government of President Hamid Karzai. This perception of a "foreign yoke", along with spreading warfare, little reconstruction and endemic banditry, has created a fertile nationalistic environment for the Taliban and their allies to exploit.

"The future for the West in Afghanistan is bleak, and it is made more discouraging by the fact that much of the West's defeat will be self-inflicted because it did not adequately study the lessons of history."

Why are we hearing no discussion of these problems, nothing from Harpo, Gordo and Hillier? Why isn't the opposition raising these issues? Have we succumbed to "stay the course" and "support the troops" because no one has the courage to take a stand? If you really want to support the troops, don't waste their lives on a bungled cause.