Nepotism Rising -

Is Prince Jared of Kushner the pin in the grenade about to devastate Donald Trump's Oval Office?

Kushner is now Trump's "go to" guy and, in the process, he seems to be elbowing out Trump's in-house Fenian, Steve Bannon. The Daily Beast claims Bannon, recently turfed from Trump's national security council, is losing his shit over Kushner's rise to dominance.

The fighting between Kushner and Bannon has been “nonstop” in recent weeks, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity. It’s been an “open secret” that Bannon and Kushner often clash “face-to-face,” according to senior officials.

One official said Bannon has lately complained about Kushner trying to “shiv him and push him out the door” and likened him to a fifth column in the White House.

“[Steve] recently vented to us about Jared being a ‘globalist’ and a ‘cuck’…He actually said ‘cuck,’ as in “cuckservative,’” the administration official told The Daily Beast.

“Cuckservative,” a portmanteau of “cuckold” and “conservative,” has become a favorite slur on the right, used like a sexually and racially charged version of “RINO,” a Republican In Name Only. “Globalist” is a term typically used by nationalist, pro-Trump right-wingers against political opponents; however, the term has also come under fire for at times carrying anti-Semitic tones. (Kushner is Jewish.)

The BBC has this "war room" photo of the Trump gang during the cruise missile attack on Syria.

It shows Trump, Tillerson and Kushner at the "big boys" table with all the electronics while Bannon (and Miller) sits by the wall competing for space with a lamp shade.

On Wednesday, Politico and The New York Times reported that things had gotten so heated and tense that Bannon was even considering tendering his resignation. Bannon told Politico this was “total nonsense.”

However, it’s clear that Kushner has been expanding his reach and level of influence in Trump’s core circle of advisers, and that the two men are essentially working against one another as they attempt to keep the president’s ear and affections.

“I love a gunfight,” Bannon told his associates and allies since Wednesday, according to Axios.

The Times also reported that “Bannon’s Svengali-style reputation has chafed on a president who sees himself as the West Wing’s only leading man,” and that “several associates said the president had quietly expressed annoyance over the credit Mr. Bannon had received for setting the agenda—and Mr. Trump was not pleased by the ‘President Bannon’ puppet-master theme promoted by magazines, late-night talk shows and Twitter.” 

Swatting Flies

My brother called around dinnertime yesterday to tell me that Trump had launched a cruise missile attack against Syria.

I told him that they almost certainly gave the Russians a heads up which meant the Syrians probably had some time to get ready. I went back to binge-watching Fargo into the wee hours of the morning.

As expected, the Americans did notify the Russians and it appears they passed along the warning to Assad's people. This morning I had a look at some video of the airbase the Americans targeted. Some aircraft shelters were hit but many more seemed to have been unaffected, their 60s vintage Sukhoi 17s sitting inside apparently intact. A little bit of runway damage but nothing that can't be readily fixed. 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles for that? I would have expected the place to have been flattened.

Back when the Sovs were building those Su-17s there was a term popular with the anti-Vietnam War crowd - "reactionary." It was used to describe rightwing responses, reactions to events that seemed independent of established policy. Collectively, it amounted to a basketful of incoherence. Donald Trump is nothing if not reactionary.

There’s a lot to be said for moral clarity after the Assad regime’s disgusting chemical attacks that murdered so many civilians in northern Syria this week. But that’s not what Trump represents. His moral certainty was nowhere to be found in 2013, after the first large-scale chemical attacks that crossed Obama’s infamous red line. “President Obama, do not attack Syria,” tweeted Trump. “There is no upside and tremendous downside.”

Now Trump himself is upside down on Syria. He initially blamed Obama and his red line for the chemical attacks this week, insisting that the overblown rhetoric had hurt the United States. This from a man who told this gem to reporters aboard Air Force One yesterday: “I think we’ve had one of the most successful 13 weeks in the history of the presidency.”

Yes, Donald Trump is a great big bag of contradictions and he just swaggered his way into the single most complex civil war in living memory. A war that is even more complicated than raising a high-rise hotel in a foreign capital.

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There will be more human rights abuses and more massacres. And Trump will be forced to decide between bombing regime targets or bombing targets belonging to its biggest rebels: the Isis forces Trump has already condemned as the most evil group on the face of the planet.

This was the kind of quandary Obama couldn’t resolve. Could they launch effective strikes without triggering a full war with the Assad regime and its Russian supporters? What would all those strikes do to the very civilians the US was supposedly concerned about?

A cynical mind could question whether the attack was just a massively frustrated Trump blowing off steam - doing something, anything to look decisive, powerful.

The big question is what now? Is this an impulsive one-off reaction to a gas attack? Will the White House develop some Trump Doctrine? Will Putin find some way to play Trump?

UPDATE - BBC offers an interesting look at Trump's "war room" photo from Mar a Lago in contrast to Obama's photo during the operation to kill bin Laden.

Buying Time

America, the land of inequality. Where everybody gets to play life's little lottery. A recent article noted that Canadians live three years longer on average than our American cousins. But wait, there's more.

Health care in the States has become something of a political football. The Republicans just don't want too many Americans on public health care. During the presidential campaign, the Cheeto Benito promised the world - better health care, cheaper premiums, everyone would be covered - A, B, and C.

Once in office, he handed the job to Paul Ryan who did exactly the opposite. Fewer services, higher costs and upwards of 24-million of his countrymen to be turfed from the health care rolls. Rightwing Republicans argued that wasn't enough. Moderate Republicans dug in, fearful of getting bounced by angry voters in the 2018 mid terms.

Tossing a little more fuel on the fire is a new study into the role of inequality and longevity in the United States of Trumpland that finds America's rich live a staggering fifteen years longer than America's poor.

Increasing inequality means wealthy Americans can now expect to live up to 15 years longer than their poor counterparts, reports in the British medical journal the Lancet have found.

Researchers said these disparities appear to be worsened by the American health system itself, which relies on for-profit insurance companies, and is the most expensive in the world.

America, once known as the "land of opportunity" has become the "land of inequality" where poor, even working poor people pay for their poverty with their lives.

Flying the Lumpy Skies

Most of us have flown at some point and most of us who have flown have had some experience of air turbulence. Some have experienced severe air turbulence events of the sort known to throw stuff around and injure passengers. Flight attendants are particularly susceptible.

The good news is that modern commercial airliners are built to withstand much higher stresses than the standards in effect 40-years ago. The bad news is that the turbulence problem is about to get a lot worse.

Turbulence strong enough to bounce unbuckled passengers around an aircraft cabin could become three times more common as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rise, experts predict.

Sudden up and down movements as an aircraft travels through rough air are part of the normal experience of flying.

But occasionally passengers and flight crew are subjected to white-knuckle levels of turbulence with the potential to cause serious injury, especially when it occurs unexpectedly in cloudless “clear air”.

Dr Paul Williams, from the University of Reading, who led the research, said: “Our new study paints the most detailed picture yet of how aircraft turbulence will respond to climate change.

“For most passengers, light turbulence is nothing more than an annoying inconvenience that reduces their comfort levels, but for nervous fliers even light turbulence can be distressing.

“However, even the most seasoned frequent fliers may be alarmed at the prospect of a 149% increase in severe turbulence, which frequently hospitalises air travellers and flight attendants around the world.”

The study, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, predicts that doubling CO2 levels will increase light turbulence by 59%, light-to-moderate turbulence by 75%, moderate turbulence by 94%, moderate-to-severe turbulence by 127%, and severe turbulence by 149%.

How Long Can Trudeau Look the Other Way?

Israel and its Palestinian captives are approaching the 50th anniversary of the occupation of the Palestinian territory. Israel, as the maps above illustrate, has been a cancer on the Palestinian homeland, steadily dissolving it into nothingness. The graphic, you may note, hasn't been updated since 2005. More Palestinian land has been stolen since then.

Canada not only accepts this but our Liberal prime minister, just like his Conservative predecessor, wholeheartedly supports the government of Netanyahu, especially in votes in the UN General Assembly.

As Israel descends into a radical rightwing state, one which overtly rejects democracy, Canada, the United States and a handful of bought-off island states in the central and south Pacific are Israel's sole backers abroad.

Two former heads of Israel’s powerful domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet, have made an impassioned and powerful intervention ahead of events to mark the 50th anniversary of the country’s occupation of the Palestinian territories in June.

One of the pair warned that the country’s political system was sunk in the process of “incremental tyranny”.

Ami Ayalon and Carmi Gillon were speaking ahead of a public meeting at a Jerusalem gallery which is threatened with closure for hosting a meeting organised by the military whistleblowing group Breaking the Silence, one of the main targets of the rightwing government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Incremental tyranny [is a process] which means you live in a democracy and suddenly you understand it is not a democracy any more,” Ayalon told a small group of journalists, including the Guardian, ahead of the event. “This is what we are seeing in Israel. The tragedy of this process is that you only know it when it is too late.”

Ayalon cited recent moves by ministers in the Netanyahu government to change the laws to hit groups such as Breaking the Silence by banning them from events in schools and targeting their funding, while also taking aim at the country’s supreme court and independence of the media.

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The comments by Ayalon and Gillon come amid a growing and heated debate between the right and opponents of the occupation over the historic meaning of the six-day war, in June 1967, which marked the beginning of the occupation. Rightwing ministers celebrated the occupation on Thursday as the “liberation” of the occupied territories.

That's right, folks. As far as those in control of Israel's government are concerned, the West Bank is "liberated" as in the Palestinians are never, ever getting it back, international law be damned. And that is what Justin Trudeau, in the name of Canada, is backing whether he pretends to see it or not.

Ayalon suggested an Orwellian dynamic that supported Israelis in a state of fear for political ends. “What is necessary to pave the way for this concept of incremental tyranny is an ongoing war. It is like 1984. There is always an enemy.”

Just days ago Regev, a controversial rightwing minister, said that Breaking the Silence and others who supported it “had no place in Israel”.

The two former Shin Bet chiefs were speaking as it was revealed that one of Israel’s main official ceremonies to mark the anniversary of the six-day war would controversially take place in the settlement of Gush Etzion in the West Bank.

The two ministries will spend a total of 10m shekels ($2.74m) on events marking the anniversary of what the education minister, Naftali Bennett, and Regev described as “Israel’s glorious victory in the six-day war, and the liberation of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley”.

 

It's Not Populists that Working Class People Need. What They Need Are Progressives.

The populist rabble regularly spout terms such as "bankster" or "deep state" to attack dark forces they blame for all society's ills. Rarely do they exhibit much understanding of what a contradictory and flawed concept they're embraced. Trump seduced them with visions of prairie populism but what he's dishing up is Wall Street Populism.

Even Noah Millman, writing in The American Conservative, has the measure of Trump's "Pro-Wall Street Populism."

On the campaign trail, Trump did regularly attack Wall Street — and hedge funds in particular. But he also attacked the Dodd-Frank regulatory structure, and blamed it for the fact that “so many people … who have nice businesses” can’t borrow money. And indeed, it’s quite true that after the financial crisis banks got far more cautious in their lending — which led to the growth of non-traditional lenders who typically demand more aggressive financial terms than banks historically had.
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Dodd-Frank regulates especially large financial institutions more heavily precisely because they pose a systemic threat that creates a moral hazard: Confident that the government couldn’t afford not to bail them out, these institutions have an incentive to run more risk than would otherwise be sensible, because if the risks pay off they keep the profits but if they don’t the government is left holding the bag. Moreover, the legislation also gives the FDIC Orderly Liquidation Authority (OLA) to unwind failed firms in a controlled manner.

But from a populist perspective, giving special treatment to some firms because they are “too big to fail” looks like a way of institutionalizing the problem rather than solving it. Even if that special treatment is described as greater oversight, the mere fact that such a status exists implies that finance and government are formally enmeshed in a way that a populist is bound to see as leading to favoritism — which is precisely what the Tea Party types argued when they said that OLA was a kind of “permanent bailout” and that banks that take big risks that go bad should simply be allowed to fail.

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Populists don’t like bureaucrats any more than they like bankers. So if the problem of Wall Street malfeasance is framed as “give the government more power to restrain the evil banksters” — which is the standard progressive framing — it’s not completely surprising that the government will lose about as often as the banksters. You saw a somewhat similar dynamic with health care, where Obamacare was vilified as a big-government sell-out to insurers. I have little doubt that, in the fulness of time, taking Wall Street off the leash will prove exceedingly unpopular, just as taking away people’s health insurance has proven to be. But in the short term, I understand why plenty of people may be more inclined to say a plague on both your houses, and financial interests know perfectly well how to take advantage of that attitude.

The populist alternative to growing government power to counterbalance big finance is to structurally reduce the power of big finance and enable individuals and communities to have more control over their economic circumstances. The question genuine populists need to answer is how they propose to do that without impoverishing the country. “Break up the banks” may or may not be a necessary part of the answer, but it is surely not sufficient.

The Leader of the Free World Has No Clothes.

There's coherent policy for you. On Monday the President of the United States of America was dismissive of his Syrian counterpart, Bashar Assad. Trump dismissed Assad saying the murderous tyrant was none of America's concern.

Two days after the most powerful man on Earth gave him a pass, Assad launched a nerve gas attack on Syrian civilians, killing scores, many of them children. The Great Orange Bloat rose up on his hind legs to bellow that it was all Obama's fault. Now he's said to be planning punitive air strikes against Assad.

We're witnessing what Elizabeth Drew, writing in The New York Review of Books, calls Trump's "substance free approach to governing" in action, yet again.

Drew cites Trump's ill-fated health care reform bill, a piece of legislation drafted by Paul Ryan that would have broken every Trump campaign promise for health care. Trump had promised better coverage, cheaper premiums and that every American would be covered. Ryan's proposal turned those promises into a sham and yet Trump bought it, made it his own.

Trump was clearly unaware of and unperturbed by what was in the bill; he wanted to win. He told his aides that he simply wanted to sign a bill, that it would make him look presidential.

Trump’s first great legislative defeat threatens to define his presidency. He came across as blundering and incompetent. He is the first modern president to lose his first major piece of legislation. This came on top of other unfortunate firsts: Trump is the first president whose approval ratings began to go down after he won the election and then after the inauguration, and that have kept doing so since. Recent polls show his approval ratings to be from 35 percent to 42 percent, not enough to form a governing majority.

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There’s been a great deal of speculation about shifting alliances among Trump’s White House staff—it’s virtually a daily exercise—but in the end Donald Trump defines his administration. Trump has a mediocre staff, whom he doesn’t treat well. They’re hesitant to give him news he won’t like for fear of being screamed at, a frequent event. Experienced potential aides haven’t been keen to work in a Trump White House and though it’s not widely known by the outside world many of those who are there are unhappy. As one close observer put it to me, “They came to work for the president but found themselves working for Donald Trump.” The moody man at the top is strongly affected by what’s in the news.

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Yet despite the weakness and disorder of the president’s staff, and though previous White House staffs have tried it (if not as thoroughly but without success), Trump and his top aides seem particularly determined to hold power throughout the government. This is why even more than halfway into the first hundred days most of the Cabinet officers are home alone. It’s not accidental that few of them have a deputy, not to mention the legally established complement of assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries—some 550 appointments the president makes and the Senate confirms.

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Yet the thinness of the ranks of officials to propose and implement the laws is actually also how Trump and his top aides want it. “A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint someone because they’re unnecessary to have,” Trump said in late February. “In government, we have too many people.” Trump, Bannon, and son-in-law Jared Kushner have been particularly keen to keep control of the government in the White House. Kushner now has more assignments than any single figure known of in a modern White House and shows no inclination to devolve power. These people may well be taking on the impossible, and this would be true even if they’d had any government experience. ...Kushner is in over his head. But Trump, as inexperienced in government as his son-in-law is, does not seem to realize that, and so he keeps loading new responsibilities on him, apparently as the only person inside the White House he’s been able to trust.

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When the subject comes up, as it does incessantly in Washington, of whether in fact Trump will end up serving as president for four years, a major argument against his somehow having to leave office (for reasons other than health) is that he has a strong base. Richard Nixon also did, until he didn’t. Gradually, Nixon’s onetime backers became disenchanted for one reason or another; he still had support at the end, but it wasn’t strong enough to save him. How long will Trump’s base stick with him even in the face of seeing their hopes betrayed? This isn’t a fanciful question: a recent poll by Geoffrey Garin for Priorities USA, showed a ten-point drop in support among Trump voters in the third week in March (the week the health care bill failed).

A lot of Republicans who had deep misgivings about Trump went along with him before and after the election because they assumed that he could produce legislation dear to their hearts. But what if it turns out that he can’t? Politicians are highly pragmatic people; they will support a president as long as he isn’t too costly to them. But if he becomes too expensive to their own reelection, all bets are off. The discontent with Donald Trump on Capitol Hill runs very deep and also very wide. I’ve been told that upwards of two-thirds of the Senate Republicans, in particular, discuss—in the gym and in clusters on the Senate floor—their desire to see him gone. These senators talk rather openly—even with their Democratic colleagues—about their fear of Trump’s recklessly getting the country into serious danger, about the embarrassment he causes it in the world (his petulantly refusing to shake hands with Angela Merkel was just one example of his mishandling of foreign leaders), about his overall incompetence.

Whether or not anything is ever proved, most members of Congress, including Republicans, think something was amiss in the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia, or Russians, including plutocrats who owe much to Vladimir Putin. No one thinks that FBI Director Comey would have opened, much less announced, a counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with the Russian government in its attempt to sway the election if he didn’t have serious evidence. On the Senate floor the other day, a cluster of Republicans jocularly made a pool on the way in which they think Trump will be forced to leave office.

h/t Dana

LA Times, Day Five - "Conspiracy Theorist in Chief"

The Los Angeles Times continues its marathon editorial evisceration of the Cheeto Benito, Donald J. Trump. Today the paper's editorial board dishes up the "Conspiracy Theorist in Chief."



Most people know by now that the new president of the United States trafficks in untruths and half-truths, and that his word cannot be taken at face value.

Even more troubling, though, is that much of his misinformation is of the creepiest kind. Implausible conspiracy theories from fly-by-night websites; unsubstantiated speculations from supermarket tabloids. Bigoted stories he may have simply made up; stuff he heard on TV talk shows.
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His engagement with, to put it politely, out-of-the-mainstream ideas has attracted some strange bedfellows. It may not be fair to attribute to his senior aide, Steve Bannon, all the views that were published on the controversial alt-right site Breitbart.com, of which Bannon was the executive chairman. But it is certainly fair to wonder why Trump has elevated to a senior West Wing position a man who has trafficked in nonsense, bigotry and rank speculation.

Of course it was widely hoped that when Trump came into office he would put the conspiracy theories and red-meat scare stories behind him. Perhaps the “lock her up” mantra and the fear-mongering about Mexican rapists and the racial dog whistles and the assertions about Ted Cruz’s father’s connection to Lee Harvey Oswald — perhaps all that was just part of a cynical bid for votes, and it would go away when the election was over.

But there’s no sign of that. Trump seems as willing to mouth off today as he was on the campaign — about wiretaps, inauguration crowds, fraudulent voters, you name it. And the problem with that is that he is no longer a blowhard TV personality or a raunchy guest on Howard Stern or a self-promoting real estate magnate or even a long-shot candidate for the Republican nomination. He’s now the president of the United States, and he is allowing the credibility of his unimaginably powerful office to be exploited and wasted on crackpot ideas that have been rightly discredited by politicians from both parties.

The sixth, and apparently final, instalment is scheduled for tomorrow.

Neil Macdonald Has the Long And the Short of Americans and Their Healthcare Quandry

The CBC's Neil Macdonald has picked up a lot during his years working in the United States. Among other things he's gotten a pretty good handle on Americans and their love-hate relationship with health care.

America's conservative establishment, particularly in rural and poor states, has done a superb job of convincing the people who most need government's help that asking for it is shameful — it's socialism and it's evil — and that they should effectively vote against their own economic self-interest.
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Americans are raised to believe that anything is possible in America if you are pure of heart and willing to work hard, which is nonsense, and that anyone can become president, which is even more foolish, and that free markets always make the right decision, which is nuts.

They are told that rugged individualism is the American way, which it isn't, and that government is never the solution, which it sometimes most definitely is.

Eventually, these national myths cross over into outright delusion; large segments of the populace, people who are dependent on all manner of government programs, come to believe they are not, and freely vote for wealthy politicians who make no secret of their intention to defund or dismantle those programs in the name of Americanism, and Jesus Christ our Lord (see: Planned Parenthood).

Anyone who's ever attended a Tea Party rally has seen that phenomenon in operation. People on Medicaid-supplied wheelchairs, living on social security disability or supplementing their income with food stamps, demanding radical cuts to government.

Which brings us to Donald Trump. In states such as Oklahoma and Arkansas and Louisiana, where working-class people overwhelmingly bought the idea that a Manhattan billionaire would champion them, those people are now slowly, groggily realizing that he surrounded himself with other billionaires, and is intent on cutting all sorts of government programs they like to pretend they don't depend on, but do.

Not that Trump voters want to keep Obamacare. They don't. They hate Obamacare. But many of them have come to depend on the Affordable Care Act, and would rather it not be changed (The ACA is Obamacare, of course, but in the cognitive dissonance of Trump Nation, that's beside the point).

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That, of course, is fine to say in the abstract, while Trump's proposed cuts are still being negotiated with Congress, and haven't yet begun to bite.

But they will, presumably. And the desire of working class conservative Americans to teach the damned liberals a lesson will collide with their grocery list and ability to pay the mortgage or rent, while Trump's planned tax cuts make America's affluent even more affluent.

It'll be interesting to watch how Republicans sell it all. As proud citizens doing their part for America, most likely. And for Jesus.

Whaaat? Steve Bannon Booted Off National Security Council

Well this is certainly awkward. White House ventriloquist and Trump puppeteer-in-chief, Steve Bannon, has lost his seat on Trump's National Security Council. Loose lips sink ships, perhaps? Stay tuned.

Putting Equal Pay Day In a New Light

Equal for whom, when?

Tuesday will be Equal Pay Day. On a global basis, it's the day on which the average woman has to work to equal the pay the average guy earned over the previous year. In other words, it takes an extra three months, two weeks or fifteen months and a bit for the average woman to earn what the average man earned in just twelve months.

However not all women are average and certainly not if they're black or brown. The American numbers tell a much different tale.

The official Equal Pay Day statistics are based on 2015 census data. But Mic updated those figures using Bureau of Labor Statistics figures on median weekly earnings for full-time workers in 2016. Using those numbers, the actual Equal Pay Day for U.S. women of all races would technically be March 22.

If you're a white woman, your equal pay day already came and went: You'd "only" have to work until March 12 — plus all of 2016 — to earn the same as a man did in 2016 alone.

Black women in the United States, on the other hand, wouldn't have their equal pay day until June 5. And if you're a Hispanic or Latina woman, you're going to have to wait until July 25 for your equal pay day.

Four Won't Do It? LA Times Editorial, Part IV

Today is Day Four of the Los Angeles Times' four part editorial on Donald Trump. It began on Sunday with "Our Dishonest President," then on Monday it was "Why Trump Lies." Yesterday's installment was "Trump's Authoritarian Vision" and today it's "Trump's War on Journalism." All four parts can be accessed from the given link.

Only today something's different. Now it appears the LAT editorial board has chosen to add a Part V tomorrow and a Part VI on Friday. Seems four isn't enough for what they've got to say.

Trump’s strategy is pretty clear: By branding reporters as liars, he apparently hopes to discredit, disrupt or bully into silence anyone who challenges his version of reality. By undermining trust in news organizations and delegitimizing journalism and muddling the facts so that Americans no longer know who to believe, he can deny and distract and help push his administration’s far-fetched storyline.

It’s a cynical strategy, with some creepy overtones. For instance, when he calls journalists “enemies of the people,” Trump (whether he knows it or not) echoes Josef Stalin and other despots.

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To do the best possible job, and to hold the confidence of the public in turbulent times, requires constant self-examination and evolution. Soul-searching moments — such as those that occurred after the New York Times was criticized for its coverage of the Bush administration and the Iraq war or, more recently, when the media failed to take Trump’s candidacy seriously enough in the early days of his campaign — can help us do a better job for readers. Even if we are not faultless, the news media remain an essential component in the democratic process and should not be undermined by the president.

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Given the very real dangers posed by this administration, we should be indefatigable in covering Trump, but shouldn’t let his bullying attitude persuade us to be anything other than objective, fair, open-minded and dogged.

The fundamentals of journalism are more important than ever. With the president of the United States launching a direct assault on the integrity of the mainstream media, news organizations, including The Times, must be courageous in our reporting and resolute in our pursuit of the truth.

The World's "Most Complex Bilateral Relationship" Under Strain

Beijing locks horns with Washington this week at a gaudy Palm Beach golf resort in Florida as Xi Jinping comes calling on Donald Trump at TrumpWorld, a.k.a. Mar a Lago.

Tension fills the air.

So interesting is the state of ties between Washington and Beijing that there appears to be a swelling bipartisan consensus that there is a growing risk of the relationship becoming, as one current state department official put it, “unhinged.”

“Just look at the scope of the problem,” said a current senior Pentagon official, who declined to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. “How can Washington and Beijing sort through so many areas of contention all at the same time? There are so many possible places where the relationship could not only end up on the rocks, but where both sides … could start shooting at each other.”

“I am glad I am out of there,” said a senior former member of the Obama administration’s White House team. “Relations with Beijing are going to get tense in the months and years to come … They are going to continue to press more and more. And now that trade is a sticking point, the one thing we always both pointed to in times of peril, well, we don’t have that luxury anymore.”

A senior Trump administration official was blunt: “We aren’t friends, us and China. That is just a downright and dirty fact that we can’t escape. But we can work together. We can cut some deals. They must know North Korea can’t continue to be a global maniac. They must know that they can’t conquer the South China Sea. And they will know soon we mean business.”

LA Times Editorial, Part III, "Trump's Authoritarian Vision"

The third and latest installment of the Los Angeles Times four-part editorial on Donald Trump focuses on their president's "authoritarian vision."

He swooped into politics, he declared, to subvert the powerful and rescue those who cannot defend themselves. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”

To Trump’s faithful, those words were a rallying cry. But his critics heard something far more menacing in them: a dangerously authoritarian vision of the presidency — one that would crop up time and again as he talked about overruling generals, disregarding international law, ordering soldiers to commit war crimes, jailing his opponent.

Trump has no experience in politics; he’s never previously run for office or held a government position. So perhaps he was unaware that one of the hallmarks of the American system of government is that the president’s power to “fix” things unilaterally is constrained by an array of strong institutions — including the courts, the media, the permanent federal bureaucracy and Congress. Combined, they provide an essential defense against an imperial presidency.

Yet in his first weeks at the White House, President Trump has already sought to undermine many of those institutions. Those that have displayed the temerity to throw some hurdle in the way of a Trump objective have quickly felt the heat.

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What’s uniquely threatening about Trump’s approach, though, is how many fronts he’s opened in this struggle for power and the vehemence with which he seeks to undermine the institutions that don’t go along.

It’s one thing to complain about a judicial decision or to argue for less regulation, but to the extent that Trump weakens public trust in essential institutions like the courts and the media, he undermines faith in democracy and in the system and processes that make it work.

Trump betrays no sense for the president’s place among the myriad of institutions in the continuum of governance. He seems willing to violate long-established political norms without a second thought, and he cavalierly rejects the civility and deference that allow the system to run smoothly. He sees himself as not merely a force for change, but as a wrecking ball.

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Remember that Trump’s verbal assaults are directed at the public, and are designed to chip away at people’s confidence in these institutions and deprive them of their validity. When a dispute arises, whose actions are you going to consider legitimate? Whom are you going to trust? That’s why the public has to be wary of Trump’s attacks on the courts, the “deep state,” the “swamp.” We can’t afford to be talked into losing our faith in the forces that protect us from an imperial presidency.

If Hillary was President, Trump Would be Blaming Her for This

Just days after DJ Trump announced that America was taking Bashar Assad off the hook, that regime change was no longer a matter of Washington's concern, Syrian government jets launched a chemical weapons attack against civilians in rebel-held Idlib province.

Rescuers and medics report the gas killed dozens of civilians, many of them children, and sickened scores of others.

A few hours later, according to several witnesses, another airstrike hit one of the clinics treating victims, who had been farmed out to smaller hospitals and maternity wards because the area's largest hospital had been severely damaged by an airstrike two days earlier.

It was the first major atrocity attributed to the Syrian government since President Donald Trump took office. Only on Friday, administration officials stressed that ousting Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, is no longer a priority, and that Washington's main goal is to fight the Islamic State group.

On Tuesday, the White House blamed the Syrian government for the attack, which it called a "reprehensible" act "that cannot be ignored by the civilised world", but also lashed out at the former Obama administration.

Monbiot - Speaking Truth to Power

It's hard not to respect the Guardian's enviro-scribe and social commentator, George Monbiot, although he can play hell with one's blood pressure. His latest missive concerns how Trump and Brexit are "freeing up the rich to exploit the poor."

Propaganda works by sanctifying a single value, such as faith, or patriotism. Anyone who questions it puts themselves outside the circle of respectable opinion. The sacred value is used to obscure the intentions of those who champion it. Today, the value is freedom. Freedom is a word that powerful people use to shut down thought.

When thinktanks and the billionaire press call for freedom, they are careful not to specify whose freedoms they mean. Freedom for some, they suggest, means freedom for all. In certain cases, this is true. You can exercise freedom of thought, for instance, without harming others. In other cases, one person’s freedom is another’s captivity.
...

Above all, billionaires and the organisations they run demand freedom from something they call “red tape”. What they mean by red tape is public protection. An article in the Telegraph last week was headlined “Cut the EU red tape choking Britain after Brexit to set the country free from the shackles of Brussels”. Yes, we are choking, but not on red tape. We are choking because the government flouts European rules on air quality. The resulting air pollution frees thousands of souls from their bodies.

Ripping down such public protections means freedom for billionaires and corporations from the constraints of democracy. This is what Brexit – and Donald Trump – are all about. The freedom we were promised is the freedom of the very rich to exploit us.

...

The same ethos, with the same justification, pervades the Trump administration. The new head of the environmental protection agency, Scott Pruitt, is seeking to annul the rules protecting rivers from pollution, workers from exposure to pesticides, and everyone from climate breakdown. It’s not as if the agency was overzealous before: one of the reasons for the mass poisoning in Flint, Michigan, was its catastrophic failure to protect people from the contamination of drinking water by lead: a failure that now afflicts 18 million Americans.

...

You don’t need to listen for long to the very rich to realise that many see themselves as the “independents” Friedrich Hayek celebrated in The Constitution of Liberty, or as John Galt, who led a millionaires’ strike against the government in Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged. Like Hayek, they regard freedom from democracy as an absolute right, regardless of the costs this may inflict on others, or even themselves.

When we confront a system of propaganda, our first task is to decode it. This begins by interrogating its sacred value. Whenever we hear the word freedom, we should ask ourselves, “Freedom for whom, at whose expense?”

Ralph's Orphans

Think of it as Alberta's self-inflicted wound or Ralph Klein's lasting legacy. Ralph's Orphans are the 79 thousand abandoned oil wells that now litter the province and represent a multi-billion dollar clean up bill that Ralph deftly put on the taxpayers' tab.

... in 2000, the Klein government had freed oil executives from liability. As further demonstration of their gross negligence, Alberta regulators made this gob-smacking admission in 2004:

“During the last 15 years, property sales were very high and many of these inactive wells were transferred numerous times. With the sale of these wells, knowledge of wellbore conditions, and in some cases even knowledge of the well’s existence, was lost.”

What Goes Up...

Is Canada headed for a major airline disaster? Apparently the odds of a major aviation accident in our country are worsening.

Cuts to Transport Canada have been eating away at its civil aviation flying program, according to the Canadian Federal Pilots Association, leading 81 per cent of licensed pilots surveyed to conclude that a “major aviation accident in the near future is likely.”

“Having aviation inspectors who do not know how to fly the aircraft that they’re inspecting, is like having a traffic cop who doesn’t know how to drive a car,” said Greg McConnell, national chair of the CFPA, which commissioned the survey by Abacus Data.

The association also blamed a new federal system that it says has left inspectors spending most of their time in offices reviewing paperwork, rather than being out in the field doing active inspections, and warned airports won't be subject to full safety assessments.

...

The association’s data shows that the civil aviation flying program has been cut from almost $8 million in 2008-09 to a low of $3.5 million in 2016-17, while flying hours have dropped from over 10,000 to just under 4,000 in this time period.

The number of aircraft used in training has dropped as well, from 42 aircraft to 14 in this time period.

The department suffered several rounds of full-time equivalent job cuts during the Harper government, losing over 100 positions between 2009-10 and 2014-15.

I have trouble buying the claim that aviation inspectors need to be pilots, that they need to know how to fly the aircraft they're inspecting. After all, the people who keep these aircraft in the sky, the ground crew, the mechanics, engine techs and such aren't likely to know how to fly the aircraft they work on nor would anyone expect that of them.

Still, if 81% of licensed pilots believe a major aviation accident in Canada in the near future is "likely" something probably should be done about that.

Who is Bugging Ottawa?

Somebody has Parliament Hill under surveillance. Nobody knows who it is.

CBC Ottawa has discovered that there's an IMSI at work.

The devices, sometimes known by the brand name of one model, StingRay, work by mimicking a cellphone tower to interact with nearby phones and read the unique ID associated with the phone — the International Mobile Subscriber Identity, or IMSI.

That number can then be used to track the phone and by extension the phone's user. In some instances, IMSI catchers can even be used to gain access to a phone's text messages and listen in on calls.

...

Because IMSI catchers have a radius of about half a kilometre in an urban setting, the IMSI catchers CBC detected could reach territory including Parliament Hill, the Prime Minister's Office in Langevin Block, National Defence headquarters, as well as the U.S. and Israeli embassies.

We then used even more sophisticated equipment called an Overwatch Sensor that confirmed the presence of an IMSI catcher close to Parliament Hill.

CBC took its data to Les Goldsmith, CEO of a company that provides counter-surveillance services.

As for who might be behind it, Goldsmith says IMSI catchers are used by law enforcement, federal agencies as well as organized crime and foreign intelligence.

Based on the configurations suggested by CBC's results, he believes the IMSI catchers detected in Ottawa could be foreign made.

"We're seeing more IMSI catchers with different configurations and we can build a signature. So we're seeing IMSI catchers that are more likely Chinese, Russian, Israeli and so forth," he said.

"Somebody could be listening to calls right now and [the phone owners] have no idea," he said.

If You Were a Gambling Man

What are the odds? What are the odds that Donald Trump will be impeached or that he'll serve his full first term or that he might be re-elected to a second term?

The gaming houses are running these lines. Ladbrokes is offering even money on DJT completing his first term, 4/5 odds on impeachment and a 20 to 1 longshot on Trump winning the Nobel Peace Prize. If he is impeached the best odds, 2/1, are on 2017. If he survives 2017 Trump's odds improve.

The sports book, Monmouth Park, has the odds of Trump resigning during this first term at 11/8, a 42% chance.

Paddy Power has impeachment at 10/11 odds. The book offers side bets on what Trump would be impeached for. In descending order are tax evasion, treason, bribery and perjury.

Why Trump Lies

The Los Angeles Times doesn't think much of America's newly minted president. Just two months into Trump's first and only term, the paper is publishing a four-part editorial. The second part, Why Trump Lies, is scathing.

He is dangerous. His choice of falsehoods and his method of spewing them — often in tweets, as if he spent his days and nights glued to his bedside radio and was periodically set off by some drivel uttered by a talk show host who repeated something he’d read on some fringe blog — are a clue to Trump’s thought processes and perhaps his lack of agency. He gives every indication that he is as much the gullible tool of liars as he is the liar in chief.

He has made himself the stooge, the mark, for every crazy blogger, political quack, racial theorist, foreign leader or nutcase peddling a story that he might repackage to his benefit as a tweet, an appointment, an executive order or a policy. He is a stranger to the concept of verification, the insistence on evidence and the standards of proof that apply in a courtroom or a medical lab — and that ought to prevail in the White House.

Let's Give Trump a Break

Maybe it's not all bad. Maybe he's doing about as well as could have been expected.

Trump is no Barack Obama. He's not even up to George w. Bush snuff. He's no Clinton or Reagan either. He's sure as hell no John Kennedy or Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Think about all the deficiencies, the baggage, Donald Trump brought to the Oval Office from Day One.

He's the oldest guy ever to be sworn in as president. 70-years old. Reagan hit 70 only when he began his second term.

Those of us who go back a few decades can attest to the toll a presidency seems to exact. We saw what two terms did to Bill Clinton, George w. Bush and Barack Obama. They sure looked a lot older on the last day than they did on the first and they were a lot younger than Trump is today.

Trump's predecessors were more physically fit (even Kennedy) but, more importantly, they were all far more emotionally, mentally fit for presidential service. Okay, let's be blunt, they were sane. They didn't have Trump's psychological issues - his chronic narcissism or his pathological dishonesty. They were more or less reality based. Trump is, in several ways, mentally infirm.

They all had reasonable experience of elected office either on Capitol Hill or in some state house. Congressmen, senators or governors. Trump walked into the top job and he got it cold. That's pretty tough for a such a slow study, with a loose hold on reality, various mental infirmities, an imperious but incurious nature, a disposition toward conspiracy theories, and facing geriatric onset.

Given his own deficiencies, drawbacks and issues, Trump needed an A-List cabinet far more than any of his predecessors. Trump has no James Baker, he has no Henry Kissinger, no Leon Panetta, no George Schultz. No, he's got Stephen Bannon, KellyAnne Conway, Stephen Miller. He's had to govern by executive fiat because, even with his party holding majorities in the House and Senate, Trump can't get Congressional support.  He has tried and failed to make Congressional Republicans fear and obey him. That's a failure that leaves scars.

Other incoming presidents have benefitted considerably from the loyal support of America's core allies.  Trump has largely pissed that away, an act as stupid as it was reckless. It was as though he couldn't wait to get into office to offend them and give them cause to doubt his honesty and reliability. He couldn't even show the basic courtesies of presidential protocol to the Chancellor of Germany.

Unlike all of his presidential predecessors, Trump came into office under scrutiny from the FBI and his intelligence community. If the pillars of your administration don't trust their president at the outset, if they suspect their new president and his associates of criminal subterfuge, chances are there won't be a tranquil term in office.

It's too bad Trump's "ivy league" education didn't include ancient Greek mythology.  Those Greeks understood that the goddess Nemesis exacts retribution from those who succumb to Hubris. If he senses a presence over his shoulder, it's probably her.

Lockheed's Never Ready Warplane

There has been a spate of feel good stories about the F-35 over the past few months. Stories about how the warplane was already in combat service with the Israeli air force or how Norway would soon be using its 35s to keep the Russian bear at bay or the deployment of U.S. F-35s to Japan just in case the White House decides enough is enough with Kim Jong Un. With each report the airplane's critics seemed to melt away. Except one.

Before Dr. John Gilmore retired from his post as the Pentagon's Director of Test and Evaluation he left a parting gift - a 62 page report on the state of Lockheed's F-35 light attack bomber. It seems like someone has been telling some pretty big whoppers about this never-ready warplane.

Dr. Gilmore's conclusion - the F-35 is barely fit to fly.

Here are the highlights of the report:

Electronics Used to Justify Cost Not Delivering Capabilities
Ineffective as a Fighter
Ineffective as an Interdiction Bomber
Ineffective as a Close Air Support Platform
Navy’s F-35 Unsuitable for Carrier Operations
Price Tag Is the Only Thing Stealthy about the F-35
Combat Effectiveness at Risk
Can the F-35 Be Where It’s Needed, When It’s Needed?
F-35 Reliability Problems
Officials Hiding Truth about F-35’s Problems and Delays from Taxpayers

 The F-35 is being sold to the American people based in no small part on its mission systems, the vast array of sophisticated electronics on board the jet. ...Based on the actual test performance of these systems during developmental testing, however, it appears the electronics actually interfere with the pilot’s ability to survive and prevail.

Overall, problems with the F-35’s sensors, computers, and software, including creating false targets and reporting inaccurate locations, have been severe enough that test teams at Edwards Air Force Base have rated them “red,” meaning they are unable to perform the combat tasks expected of them.

One system, the Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS), was singled out by pilots as inferior in resolution and range to the systems currently being used on legacy aircraft.  ...But the limitations of EOTS, including image degradation with humidity, force pilots to fly in closer to a target than they had to when using earlier systems just to get a clear enough picture to launch a missile or take a shot. The report says the problem is bad enough that F-35 pilots may need to fly in so close to acquire the target that they would have to maneuver away to gain the distance needed for a guided weapon shot. Thus, the system’s limitations can force an attacking F-35 to compromise surprise, allowing the enemy to maneuver to a first-shot opportunity. Surrendering the element of surprise and enabling an opponent to shoot first is what we want to force the enemy to do, not ourselves.

The report lays to rest the USAF and Lockheed's claims that the new plane is as maneuverable as the old jets it's intended to replace. Nope. 

All three variants “display objectionable or unacceptable flying qualities at transonic speeds, where aerodynamic forces on the aircraft are rapidly changing.” One such problem is known as wing drop, where the jet’s wingtip suddenly dips during a tight turn, something that can cause the aircraft to spin and potentially crash.

Transonic speeds, just below the sound barrier, are the most critical spot of the flight envelope for a fighter plane. These are the speeds where, historically, the majority of aerial combat takes place. And it is at these speeds where the F-35 needs to be the most nimble to be an effective fighter.

The air force and Lockheed have been quick to praise the F-35's stealthiness but curiously reluctant to put it to the test.

The 2016 DOT&E report describes some official foot-dragging that has delayed putting the F-35’s penetrating ability to the test. For instance, the program is only now starting to receive the critical ground radar simulator equipment, which mimic enemy radar systems, that are needed to conduct robust testing of the F-35’s effectiveness in highly contested, near-peer, scenarios. It’s only receiving that equipment because it was sought and procured by DOT&E when it became clear that the Services and the JSF Program Office were not going to pursue a test infrastructure adequate for replicating the near-peer threats the F-35 is expected to be able to counter. Deliveries of this equipment have begun but will not complete until early 2018. The JPO has not planned or budgeted for developmental flight-testing against it.

In other words they were going to ship these supposedly stealthy warplanes out the door without realistically testing that the stealth systems worked. "You pays your money and you takes your chances" seems like an odd way to market an uber-costly warplane. Caveat Emptor.

As for the close support role, defending friendly troops under hostile fire, the F-35 is a dud.

An effective cannon is essential for many CAS missions where any size bomb, guided or unguided, would pose a danger to friendly troops on the ground or where there are concerns about collateral damage, such as in urban environments. The cannon is even more crucial when our troops are being ambushed or overrun by enemies only meters away, in “danger close” situations where only pinpoint effects delivered by the most highly accurate fire can help our side and kill or disperse the enemy.

None of the three F-35 models in the current fleet can use cannons in combat. In fact, none of them are even close to completing their developmental flight tests—much less their operational suitability tests—for airframe safety, accuracy, and target lethality. Even worse, based on preliminary test experience, it appears that the severe inaccuracy of the helmet-mounted gunsight on all three F-35 versions that makes the cannon ineffective in air-to-air combat will also make it ineffective in CAS—and that the helmet’s accuracy problem may be technically inherent and incurable. Note that the cannon accuracy requirements for CAS are considerably more stringent than for air combat: when shooting in close proximity to friendly troops, even minor accuracy problems can have tragic consequences.

...

Due to its small, overloaded wings, the F-35 cannot maneuver adequately at the slow speeds that searching for concealed and camouflaged targets requires—and being completely unarmored and highly flammable, it would suffer catastrophic losses from just the small rifle and light machinegun hits inevitable at the low altitudes and slow speeds required. In sharp contrast, the A-10 was specifically designed for excellent low and slow maneuverability and, by design, has unprecedented survivability against those guns, and even against shoulder-fired missiles.

Due to having to pack everything on the inside to maintain any degree of stealth, F-35 designers had to find creative ways to stow fuel. One was to develop a large fuel bladder that is draped around the engine hot section. That fuel bag gets hit that warplane is going down, in a fireball. Ask yourself if that's a confidence builder for the pilot who has to fly that plane up to and over enemy troops?

Then there's the cost problem. The air force has said the price for the basic model, the one being sold to most of America's allies, has come under $100 million but that seems as dodgy as all the other boasts and promises. The US government's figure is closer to $120-million a copy. That's a bare bones, drive it off the lot today, number. It doesn't include any of the support costs or the major upgrade costs to retrofit fixes for the lengthy lists of already discovered deficiencies. You can get the airplane but it's going to cost a tonne of dineros to fix and upgrade it.

DOT&E reports that there are “17 documented failures to meet specification requirements for which the program acknowledges and intends to seek contract specification changes in order to close out SDD [System Development and Demonstration].” That means there are 17 key combat capabilities the F-35 program can’t yet deliver and that the program office is attempting to give Lockheed Martin a pass on delivery until the later in the advanced development process.

Although no one has publicly stated which 17 combat capabilities won’t be included now, they were all functions the F-35 was supposed to have, and for which the American people are paying full price. So we will be paying more money in the future to upgrade F-35s purchased now so they can perform the functions we already paid for.

The $119.6 million unit cost for the F-35A in 2016 is a gross underestimate, and the additional costs will not be fully known for years. Those who pretend the cost in 2016 is somewhere below $100 million each are simply deceiving the public.

Pilots will have trouble staying at the top of their game when assigned to the F-35.

In every first-rate air force, turning out superior fighter pilots requires them to fly at least 30 hours a month to hone and improve their combat skills. Here lies the single largest cause of the F-35’s lack of combat effectiveness: because of the plane’s unprecedented complexity and the corresponding reliability and maintenance burdens, pilots simply cannot fly them often enough to get enough real flying hours to develop the combat skills they need.

Pilot skills atrophy if the pilots can’t get enough flight hours. Even with superior technology, less skilled pilots could be outmatched in the sky by highly trained pilots flying less sophisticated aircraft. ...Given its inherent complexity and the associated cost, it is highly unlikely the F-35 will ever be able to fly often enough to turn out winning pilots.

Reliability is another documented nightmare. The F-35 is currently running at 60% availability. On a "fully mission capable" basis, that number plummets to 29%.  In one test it took ground crews 55-hours to remove and replace an F-35 engine, a task that on a legacy fighter takes 6-8 hours.

This airplane was supposed to be in operational testing in 2008. It won't be there until at least 2020. And, once it clears all the difficult tests that remain (so far they've been doing the easy stuff) these airplanes will have to go back for repairs to the litany of defects still being logged.

So much money is being sucked into the F-35 black hole that the warplanes America has that do work have been getting old - and neglected. Nearly two-thirds of the Navy and Marines' F-18s are down waiting for overdue maintenance and parts. The Air Force is in somewhat better condition.

"40 Second Boyd" and Pierre Sprey to the rescue. From the outset, the F-35s biggest critics have been the old "fighter mafia" who brought the USAF the massively successful, lightweight, and (relatively) cheap F-16 and the potent A-10.

Sprey has been ridiculed widely by American generals and Lockheed for his criticisms but Dr. John Gilmore, the Pentagon's own Director of Test and Evaluation, has vindicated Sprey's views. Dr. Gilmore may just be America's biggest whistleblower of all time.

So what are the options? First is an emergency programme to extend the life of America's old fighters that the F-35 is nowhere near ready to replace. This means the fleet of F-18s and F-16s. They also need to rebuild the aging A-10.

The Americans have to concede that the F-35 has no place in close support, defending friendly troops under fire. Everything about it - payload, range, loiter time, survivability - is inadequate. 

Above all else, it's past time for Lockheed and the Air Force to come clean. John Gilmore's report proves that. This has been a stacked deck. They haven't been honest. 

As for Canada, it's time Trudeau went back to his initial posture - no F-35. If he still intends to have the F-35 compete with other aircraft, hold a realistic fly-off competition that will include testing in air superiority, air defence (interception), interdiction (bombing) and close support with multiple missions daily over a 5-day test run. Test the planes for range, speed, agility as well as readiness, reliability and maintainability.

Tell the bidders to assemble with their aircraft at Cold Lake and put them through a gruelling test regime. If Trudeau did that, I know of one airplane that wouldn't show up. 

What's Lurking in the Shadows of Washington?

We've been having a discussion in the previous post about this thing - or supposed thing - the "Deep State." It's become the favourite whipping boy of the politically engaged, from left to right and everything in between. It's this mysterious cabal of backroom types who truly pull the levers of power.

To Donald Trump, they're the guys who run the intelligence/security apparatus. They're the fuel for Trump's paranoia, forever leaking information that usually refutes his favourite communication technique - lying.

To the left wingers such as Greenwald, the Deep State quests for nothing less than control and, as such, represents a grave threat to American democracy. John Light of BillMoyers.com offers this less than entirely helpful synopsis.

I don't buy much of this Deep State business. Here's why. Yes there are senior people in the US government who have little good will toward Trump. Yet the oath they have taken is to the country, its Constitution, not the president. America has no monarch. If they see their country imperiled, even by its president, they're sworn to defend it. They're caught up in a situation never confronted before.

There has never been a president whose loyalty to the country was questioned and so obviously. Trump is damaging the United States in several serious ways. He's undermining America's alliances. He's left Washington's intelligence partners, the 5 Eyes, doubting his integrity. He could be putting America on course for a major war. Domestically and internationally he's untrustworthy, unreliable, sometimes less than rational.

The intelligence/security community released two open letters, one during the primary campaign, the other during the election campaign. Those letters were signed by prominent officials, recently retired, almost entirely Republicans. They didn't pull any punches. They declared Trump a grave threat to American security and to world peace. I think those are conclusions they could easily come to in good faith. When you have reached those beliefs what do you do when you then see your expressed fears being played out?

In our system of Parliamentary democracy, we've always had this top bureaucrat class, sometimes called "mandarins," who soldier on from one government to the next. They're the keepers of the keys, the "institutional memory" gleaned from their mentors as they climbed the civil service ladder. Think of the BBC series "Yes, Minister."

Sure they have a history of sometimes turning on their masters. Documents get leaked, tales are told.  Harper was utterly paranoid of their power. However they're not some gang of shadow warriors. They're pretty much upfront.

Trump has triggered an exodus of these mandarins from the State Department and, with them, some chunks of the department's institutional memory have been lost. That has had a seismic effect on the foreign policy community who understand what it means to America when diplomacy is taken over by neophytes such as Jared Kushner. In the process the White House has destabilized America's relationships with allies, rivals and adversaries alike.

Unfortunately today the term Deep State is used as a handy way of setting up straw men and they're always shaped to suit the immediate need and circumstance.

The other part of the premise that troubles me is this supposed mortal threat to American democracy. What democracy? When did America last have a functioning democracy?

The question was thoroughly hashed out by two professors, Gilens (Princeton) and Page (Northwestern) in a paper released by Princeton in 2014. If you're not interested in wading through an academic paper, here's the BBC's report on it. The authors' conclusions were challenged in various media outlets prompting them to issue this persuasive rebuttal defending their conclusions.

I think they make a compelling argument. The United States has become a land not just of massive economic inequality but of comparable political inequality. It's an autocracy. 

Worse yet, in this digital era of data mining, consent is today manufactured as never before, not even back when votes were bought with cash and liquor. See here, here and here.

It's become a Potemkin democracy, something apparently lost on Greenwald and company. It's a rotten business beginning with a "bought and paid for" Congress, proof positive of political capture. That now extends to regulatory capture where the composition of boards and bureaus of regulators are packed with representatives of the very industries being regulated. The voice of corporatism alone will be heard.

Teddy Roosevelt mused over the constant struggle between labour and capital and how government had to regulate these competing interests. Well that's over. Labour is out, capital has won, not just a battle or two but the war itself. America is an autocracy, one very much in the service of capital.

So what's all this "threat to democracy" business? What democracy? If anything the Deep State appears to be a grave threat only to the current order, the post-democratic American state for there is no other state for them to threaten. Only if you overlook these things - political capture, regulatory capture, the truly insidious manufacturing of consent and the confounding of the electorate - could the fanciful notion of the Deep State as a threat to democracy be anything but laughable.

Why Trump's Days Are Numbered.

I've spent the past couple of days in online searches of people I’d never heard of before and a couple that I had. What they have in common is that they’re all associates of or friends or friends of friends of America’s president, Donald J. Trump, and most of them are or have been career criminals or their close associates.

If, like me, you’ve wondered about the FBI director, James Comey’s curious behaviour in the run up to the November election – why he twice announced criminal investigations into candidate Clinton but stood mute about the ongoing FBI investigation into Trump, his campaign and various shady Russians – it seems there’s an answer. It’s laid out, complete with searchable links, in an article entitled, “Why FBI Can’t Tell All on Trump, Russia.” A big h/t to friend, Dana, for passing along that link.

It’s a long article, replete with links. At first I thought “this is more conspiracy theory garbage, fake news nonsense” but then I went through the links, all of them. They ranged from court documents to reports from the New York Times, Washington Post, the Observer, and web sites including The Smoking Gun, Mother Jones and such. From there I went through my own online searches of the named individuals. I’m still not finished. What I have concluded, based on the article, the linked documents and reports and my own due diligence, that the article or at least most of it seems accurate and credible.

The media are closing in on Trump, his seemingly unending ties to Russian oligarchs and their dodgy money (apparently about a trillion dollars U.S. has been stripped out of the country since Putin took over) and their thugs in the United States. This was the guy who boasted on the campaign trail of how he loved to sue people, especially those who defamed him. If that’s the case he has the suits of his lifetime and they’re stacking up – fast. Even USA Today is getting in on the action.

Do you remember when the Trump campaign started the “lock her up, lock her up” chant about Clinton and her crime against humanity, using an unsecure email account? That was a horrific crime, one for the books, wasn’t it? Now, as the evidence mounts of Trump’s collaboration with the Russians to undermine the 2016 election and American democracy, Hillary’s alleged misconduct looks petty.

Then there's the people who serve and associate with the Cheeto Benito. Trump's campaign, transition and administration teams, at the highest levels, are heavily represented, if not dominated, by people with Russian connections.  Trump himself, his son Don Jr., his daughter Ivanka, her husband Jared Kuchner, secretary of state Rex Tillerson, secretary of Justice Jeff Sessions, former national security advisor Mike Flynn, commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, Paul Manafort (big time), Felix Sater, Carter Page and Roger Stone.

I'm sure that's sheer, unimaginable coincidence. Maybe not. Take the most senior cabinet post, secretary of state. America's diplomat. Enter Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson. We don't hear much from Tillerson. He doesn't hold press conferences. On his travels sometimes the press pool stands at just one.

Before he clammed up, in perhaps an unguarded moment, Tillerson let slip something that he hasn't repeated - how he became secretary of state.  He said that, out of the blue, he was summoned to Washington. He'd never met Trump. They had never communicated.  Tillerson thought he was going for a chat on energy policy. Instead he was offered the crown jewel of the cabinet, secretary of state. You're offering that plum post to someone with no government experience, no diplomatic record of any sort, a person you've never met before but someone who is intensely connected to the Russians.

In my legal career I did a fair number of fraud cases. I got good enough that I wrote a guide book, manual if you like, on legal remedies and investigative approaches.  The one case I used, perhaps almost as much as every other case, was the 1915 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Koop v. Smith.

Trump has done a masterful job of trying to lie his way out of his misdeeds – he lies as effortlessly as he breathes - but the facts are catching up with him. This isn’t Hillary-grade scandal, this is genuine corruption on a big scale. The stare decisis of the case is that, while fraud, being quasi-criminal in nature, must always be strictly proved the demonstration of certain conditions can change that. Koop shiufted that burden of proof. It looked at "badges of fraud" and said when they were shown to exist, the onus shifted back to the defendant.

Trump's is a Koop case. It more than satisfies the "if it looks like a duck, and waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck - it's a duck," test. The ball, at this point is in Trump's court.

Trump’s “honeymoon” ratings are now at a staggering 35% – lower than Richard Nixon’s in the closing days of Watergate. His legislative agenda is in shambles. He’s at war with congressional Republicans who have suddenly learned not to fear him.

The Orange Bloat won’t even be able to build his wall. Congress isn’t inclined to write him a blank cheque and, better yet, his new Interior Secretary has discovered that nearly 900-miles of the US-Mexican border is the Rio Grande where, to build a wall, would be to give the river over to the Mexicans.

Anyway, it’s the weekend. Read the article, “Why FBI Can’t Tell All on Trump, Russia,” check out the links and then spend some fascinating time with Google searching about the miscreants and the events unveiled. It’s easy to imagine that, this time next year, Mike Pence will be POTUS and the Republicans will be bracing for trouble in the mid-terms.

By the way, if you do some independent searching, see if you can find something, anything that explains something that seems inexplicable to me. This information is pouring out now. It's a deluge. Yet a lot of it was known during or even well before last year's election campaign. Not obscure stuff either - court records, stories in America's major newspapers, that sort of thing.

What troubles me is why, back when Trump was in the "lock her up, lock her up" mode, the Dems, like the FBI, stood down, mute. Major parties pay people to dig up every ounce of dirt to be found about their presidential rival. Even Christopher Steele, the former MI6 operative, was dishing up the goods on Trump and his Russian contacts. Yet the Dems didn't say "boo."


Why?

The Death Throes of a Newspaper (or Two)

Vancouver's two venerable dailies, the Vancouver Sun and the Province, are succumbing to a potentially terminal case of Paul Godfrey's PostMedia-itis.

The Tyee's founding editor and now journo prof, David Beers, has written a compelling piece on the end times of print journalism in Vancouver.