Ann Coulter - Bannon Was Trump's Brain

Ann Coulter is unleashing her flying monkeys on her ex-fave, the Mango Mussolini, Donald J. Trump.

In case you've missed it, Donnie has been having a non-stop senior's moment lately on everything from domestic surveillance of Americans to immigration and the "shithole countries" these people are coming from. First he's for, then he's against, and soon he's for again. Maybe his prostate is acting up or, yes, he's really senile. Perhaps both.


In order to prove he doesn’t have dementia, as alleged in a recent book, President Trump called a meeting with congressional leaders on Tuesday — and requested that it be televised.

Ivanka: Show them at your best, Daddy!

He then proceeded to completely sell out the base and actually added to his problems by appearing senile.

In a half-dozen exchanges — which, again, he wanted televised — Trump responded to remarks as if he had no clue what the person was saying. One senator would talk — he’d agree. Someone else would say the exact opposite — he’d agree with that, too.

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Trump was more than willing to sell out the base to solve a personal problem of his — the Michael Wolff book — but managed to not convince a single American that he’s articulate, bright or a good leader.

On MSNBC, the hosts didn’t say, “You know, we saw a new side of Trump today …” Instead, they could barely suppress their giggles over the great negotiator being rolled.

Oh well, Ann, think of better, happier days.

Could Hackers Launch a Nuclear Attack?

Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, has released a study of cyber security risks posed to US, British and other countries' nuclear arsenals.

The threat has received scant attention so far from those involved in nuclear military planning and the procurement of weapons, the report said.

It blames this partly on failure to keep up with fast-moving advances, lack of skilled staff and the slowness of institutional change.

“Nuclear weapons systems were developed before the advancement of computer technology and little consideration was given to potential cyber vulnerabilities. As a result, current nuclear strategy often overlooks the widespread use of digital technology in nuclear systems,” the authors of the study said.

Nuclear weapons systems are at threat from hostile states, criminal groups and terrorist organisations exploiting cyber vulnerabities.

“The likelihood of attempted cyber-attacks on nuclear weapons systems is relatively high and increasing from advanced persistent threats from states and non-state groups,” the report said.

It cited examples such as a report the US could have infiltrated the supply chain of North Korea’s missile system that contributed to a test failure in April last year. The silos of US nuclear-tipped Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles “are believed to be particularly vulnerable to cyber attacks”.

Here's the summary taken verbatim from the report:

Nuclear weapons systems were first developed at a time when computer capabilities were in their infancy and little consideration was given to potential malicious cyber vulnerabilities. Many of the assumptions on which current nuclear strategies are based pre-date the current widespread use of digital technology in nuclear command, control and communication systems.

There are a number of vulnerabilities and pathways through which a malicious actor may infiltrate a nuclear weapons system without a state’s knowledge. Human error, system failures, design vulnerabilities, and susceptibilities within the supply chain all represent common security issues in nuclear weapons systems. Cyberattack methods such as data manipulation, digital jamming and cyber spoofing could jeopardize the integrity of communication, leading to increased uncertainty in decision-making.

During peacetime, offensive cyber activities would create a dilemma for a state as it may not know whether its systems have been the subject of a cyberattack. This unknown could have implications for military decision-making, particularly for decisions affecting nuclear weapons deterrence policies.

At times of heightened tension, cyberattacks on nuclear weapons systems could cause an escalation, which results in their use. Inadvertent nuclear launches could stem from an unwitting reliance on false information and data. Moreover, a system that is compromised cannot be trusted in decision-making.

Possible cyber resilience measures include taking a holistic approach in creating trustworthy systems based on rigorous risk assessments. These should incorporate an analysis of a combination of threats, vulnerabilities and consequences.

It is the responsibility of nuclear weapons states to incorporate cyber risk reduction measures in nuclear command, control and communication systems. Although some information is publicly available on US weapons systems, there is very little information regarding other nuclear weapons states. Academia and civil society should be encouraged to bring this issue to the attention of their government.

As a confidence booster, the report features a photo of a threadworn control panel from a Minuteman missile silo.  Nice, eh?

Well, That's the Pot Calling the Kettle Black

Donald Trump doesn't like illegal immigrants and he doesn't like the countries those little brown buggers come from either.  The Cheeto Benito likes his immigrants white, preferably Nordic too.

President Donald Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they floated restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to two people briefed on the meeting.

"Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" Trump said, according to these people, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met yesterday.

The Assange Follies

Ecuador really wants Julian Assange out of its London embassy. It's been trying to work out some deal for the Brits to just let him go somewhere, perhaps to another country, but British authorities insist Assange must answer to their courts for breaching bail. They're looking to put Julian in HMP Greybar Hotel for a stretch, especially given that he's caused the Brits to rack up a police bill of some 18 million pounds to keep the scofflaw holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy.

The Ecuadoreans want him gone badly enough they granted Assange citizenship last week and then tried to get him accredited diplomatically but, again, the Brits said no deal. That's not the way diplomatic accreditation works.

A Eulogy for "The West." It Is No More and Will Be Missed.

Most of us were brought up seeing ourselves and our nation as members in good standing of this political, social, and economic entity we liked to call "the West." We formed the Western World.

It's over. We blew it.

Guardian columnist, Rafael Behr, writes that the West that won the cold war no longer exists.

The post-cold war realignment has now lasted almost as long as the confrontation itself. The Berlin Wall has now been down for longer than it was up. The period is politically definitive for those who grew up in it, and strangely remote to those who came after. The generation that occupies most positions of power in “western” countries has a crisp sense of what it means to be “the west”, but it is vaguer in their children and nebulous to their grandchildren.

The term can be very problematic. It is too often used to conflate democracy, civilisation and whiteness. But in the context of a strategic rivalry with Berlin as its epicentre, “the west” accurately described one side. So the label stuck.

Measuring political virtue by longitude has also been given fresh impetus by Vladimir Putin’s neo-Soviet statecraft and the emergence of populist governments in countries of the former Warsaw Pact. The power-hoarding habits of Poland’s Law and Justice party and Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, give some coherence to the idea of a liberal “western style”. It means civil liberties upheld by independent courts, a free press, opposition parties unmolested by the state, and a credible prospect of incumbents losing power.

But the lines are blurred by Polish and Hungarian membership of the EU. Their accession in 2004 was supposed to require the highest standards of political pluralism. The deal was liberal reform in exchange for promotion to the economic premier league. Transition was meant to be a one-way street. More established EU states are alarmed by easterners’ sliding back to bad habits.

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Austria avoids equivalent censure despite the far-right Freedom party joining its ruling coalition last month. When the same party, whose roots go back to the Nazi apparatus, joined the government in 2000, Vienna was ostracised by fellow EU members. The charge was legitimising extremism. The Freedom party was then beyond the pale. The pale has moved.

Heinz-Christian Strache, the party’s leader, now Austrian vice-chancellor, is not Eurosceptic in the style of Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage. He nonetheless leads a party with an aggressive fixation on Islam – but Austria is a “western” EU member, and that unofficial senior status seems to confer privileges in the club that survive having xenophobes in high office.

Which brings us to Donald Trump. The US president makes a parody of the idea of the west as a beacon of moral authority. It is true that his despotic urges are hemmed by law in a way that lesser countries might not manage. But it is some downgrade of the system to boast that it might withstand assault by a venal, nepotistic maniac. America used to aim higher than constitutional kleptocracy.

In such times it is easy to forget that the “western” model is still the best way to organise people into peaceful, prosperous societies. The benefits of liberal democracy are routinely taken for granted by people who live in one, but not by those who don’t. Millions vote with their feet, migrating across continents in search of a better life. That movement flatters the achievements of democratic societies, although our politics rarely casts it in those terms. It took a generation to get from the idealism of tearing down the wall to the backlash and pulling up the Brexit drawbridge.

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Meanwhile, on both sides of the divide, the case for political liberalism cruised in the slipstream of market capitalism. Western intellectuals and eastern dissidents pleaded for democracy on principle for years before brute economics settled the matter. Worryingly, liberalism doesn’t have as good a record of winning by argument alone as its advocates like to imagine. Fascism, its deadliest enemy, wasn’t debated into submission or outrun in an economic race: it was beaten by military force in a fight to the death, started by the fascists.

Now, as illiberal forces arise in democracy’s heartlands, liberals find themselves frighteningly short of rhetorical tools to defend their cause. There is no eastern bloc peering enviously over our fences, testifying to the superiority of our methods. The fences are down, and those we once pitied are treated as interlopers, snaffling scarce resources. And while Britain, the US and western Europe are still among the richest places on Earth, millions who live there do not take it as a blessing. They feel insecure, disenfranchised, cheated.

We still produce the best TV and the softest toilet paper. But those weren’t ever irrefutable arguments for liberal democracy: they were advertisements for something called the west. And that product, sold on those terms, doesn’t exist any more.

El Presidente Strangelove

In 2016 then candidate Donald Trump was given a briefing on the vexing issue of nuclear weapons.  According to his then buddy and confidante, Joe Scarborough, three times Trump asked the briefer why America had nuclear weapons if it couldn't use them.

Well in Trumpland, America is getting closer to using nukes than it has been in decades. It's a two-pronged approach - lowering the threshold for the use of nukes and development of smaller, more "usable" nuclear devices.

Arms control advocates have voiced alarm at the new proposal to make smaller, more “usable” nuclear weapons, arguing it makes a nuclear war more likely, especially in view of what they see as Donald Trump’s volatility and readiness to brandish the US arsenal in showdowns with the nation’s adversaries.

The NPR also expands the circumstances in which the US might use its nuclear arsenal, to include a response to a non-nuclear attack that caused mass casualties, or was aimed at critical infrastructure or nuclear command and control sites.

The nuclear posture review (NPR), the first in eight years, is expected to be published after Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech at the end of January.

[Jon] Wolfsthal, who has reviewed what he understands to be the final draft of the review, said it states that the US will start work on reintroducing a sea-launched nuclear cruise missile, as a counter to a new ground-launched cruise missile the US has accused Russia of developing in violation of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty.

Trump doesn't do "nuance" and there's no area as nuanced as nuclear weapons policy.

2018, the Year of America's Congressional Khmer Rouge

This could be a transformative year for the Republicans. Their tax deal passed, many Congressional Repugs are hitting the silk, bailing out, just as Joy Reid foretold before Christmas. As Reid said at the time, they've done their dirty work for the oligarchs and they're "cashing out."

NBC News' Howard Fineman says there's a Republican exodus underway that will usher in a new, more radical GOP.

In a city obsessed with "Fire and Fury" and Oprah Winfrey, Rep. Ed Royce, the 66-year-old Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, made no waves on Monday when he announced that he would not seek another term in his Southern California district after 25 years in office.

But in the real political world — the one that writes the nation's laws and has to work with the administration of President Donald Trump — Royce's decision was a potent sign of three crucial facts:

Republicans are increasingly worried that they could lose the House in the 2018 midterm elections and many think they are getting out while the getting is still good;

They have reason to worry, especially about the House, and especially since a series of prominent retirements can further hurt the party's chances in the fall and;

No matter what happens in November, a more militant rump parliament of younger Freedom Caucus radicals will have much more clout in what's left of the GOP ranks in the House.

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Whether the GOP keeps the majority or loses it, the departure of this GOP chairman and others will leave a new brand of Republicans in the House: less traditional, more confrontational, less respectful of Washington and closer to the Tea Party of 2010.

"The House GOP leadership that is now in place is hardly a bunch of moderates," [Norm] Ornstein said. "But they tend to want to work within the rules and the institutions that exist. That is not going to be a true for those who succeed them after this year."

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

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

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

Well now Bannon has been turfed from Breitbart too.

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

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

Hedges Hears America's Death Rattle

We're witnessing many things unfold this century that would have been unimagineable except to a small few just decades ago. Climate change, the contamination of our atmosphere, the incremental destruction of our oceans, the exhaustion of resources vital to our survival, the loss of all forms of life - terrestrial and aquatic. We have become acclimated to permawar - wars unwinnable from the outset fought, it seems, for little more than the sake of fighting. Now, according to some scientists - no, make that many scientists - we are embarked on a major mass extinction event, one of our own making. Is it beginning to feel just a little crazy in here, inside your mind? Are you beginning to feel the inescapable nature of what's happening, that feeling you get as you trip and stumble.

In his column this week, Chris Hedges writes of America's sounding death knell.

“In every civilization its most impressive period seems to precede death by only a moment,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote. “Like the woods of autumn, life defies death in a glorious pageantry of color. But the riot of this color has been distilled by an alchemy in which life has already been touched by death. Thus man claims immortality for his spiritual achievements just when their mortal fate becomes apparent; and death and mortality are strangely mixed into, and potent in, the very pretention of immortality.”

Our capitalist elites have used propaganda, money and the marginalizing of their critics to erase the first three of philosopher John Locke’s elements of the perfect state: liberty, equality and freedom. They exclusively empower the fourth, property. Liberty and freedom in the corporate state mean the liberty and freedom of corporations and the rich to exploit and pillage without government interference or regulatory oversight. And the single most important characteristic of government is its willingness to use force, at home and abroad, to protect the interests of the property classes. This abject surrender of the state to the rich is expressed at this moment in the United States in the new tax code and the dismantling of environmental regulations. This degradation of basic democratic ideals—evidenced when the Supreme Court refuses to curb wholesale government surveillance of the public or defines pouring unlimited dark money into political campaigns as a form of free speech and the right to petition the government—means the society defines itself by virtues that are dead. The longer this illusion is perpetuated, the more an enraged public turns to demagogues who promise a new utopia and then, once in power, accelerate the assault.

All of our institutions are corrupted by a neoliberal ideology. It has contaminated the press, the academy, the arts, the courts and religious institutions. Christian theology has ingested the toxic brew of American exceptionalism, the myth of American virtues and the conflation of freedom with unfettered capitalism. The liberal church, like the bankrupt liberal class, holds up multiculturalism and identity politics as an ethical imperative and ignores the primacy of economic justice. It tolerates the intolerant, giving credibility to those who peddle the heretical creed of the “prosperity gospel,” a creed that says God showers divine favors in the form of wealth and power on the Christian elect. This idea makes Trump one of God’s favorites. It is also an idea that is a complete inversion of the core message of the Christian Gospels.

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The single-minded pursuit of happiness, with happiness equated with wealth and power, creates a population consumed by anxiety and self-loathing. Few achieve the imagined pinnacle of success, and those who do are often psychopaths. Building a society around these goals is masochistic. It shuts down any desire for self-knowledge because the truth of our lives is unpleasant. We fill the spiritual vacuum with endless activities, entertainment and nonstop electronic hallucinations. We flee from silence and contemplation. We are determined to avoid facing what we have become.

Is He Dumb, Stupid or Is It Cultivated Ignorance? Robert Reich Thinks It's All That - and More.

Robert Reich doesn't dispute that the 45th president of the United States is both stupid and ignorant. He's not as accomplished as he pretends. In fact, he would have done better clipping coupons.  Writing in TruthDig, Reich says Trump is really just an accomplished hustler, a con man.


He knows how to manipulate people. He has an uncanny ability to discover their emotional vulnerabilities – their fears, anxieties, prejudices, and darkest desires – and use them for his own purposes.

To put it another way, Trump is an extraordinarily talented conman.

He’s always been a conman. He conned hundreds of young people and their parents into paying to attend his near worthless Trump University. He conned banks into lending him more money even after he repeatedly failed to pay them. He conned contractors to work for them and then stiffed them.

Granted, during he hasn’t always been a great conman. Had he been, his cons would have paid off.

By his own account, in 1976, when Trump was starting his career, he was worth about $200 million, much of it from his father. Today he says he’s worth some $8 billion. If he’d just put the original $200 million into an index fund and reinvested the dividends, he’d be worth $12 billion today.

But he’s been a great political conman. He conned 62,979,879 Americans to vote for him in November 2016 by getting them to believe his lies about Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all the “wonderful,” “beautiful” things he’d do for the people who’d support him.

Not for nothing did I coin the term "Gullibillies" to refer to Trump's then loyal and still loyal supporters. In its colloquialism it may sound pejorative but it's really quite accurate. It's an expression that reflects the combined destructive power of ignorance and naivete. It implies a wholesale abandonment of critical thought in favour of faith- or belief-based thinking sometimes magical thinking. And it is proving to be almost unshakable among Trump's true believers.

Studies show that the Trump legion is the most likely to be harmed by the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. Likewise it is their children who'll be saddled with the 1.5 trillion dollar burden of tax breaks for the ultra-rich financed entirely on government borrowing. They're like the vivisectionist's dog lovingly licking the hand that wields the scalpel. It's stomach-churning to watch.

Reich concludes:

And he’s still conning most of them.

Political conning is Trump’s genius. It’s this genius – when combined with his utter stupidity in every other dimension of his being – that poses the greatest danger to America and the world.

While All Eyes Have Been On That Idiot in the White House or Our Suffocating Oceans

One thing you have to say for Donald Trump. He manages to suck all the oxygen out of a room.

This post happens to be about oxygen and it isn't about Trump, not directly. It's a report that came out last week that, as these studies tend to do, is about to vanish down the memory hole. It's a horror story or it should be if we had our wits about us. We don't.

The report is about oxygen, specifically how it is disappearing from our oceans and creating dead zones.  The study finds that the number of these dead zones has quadrupled since 1950. These anoxic waters have expanded by millions of square miles in just our lifetimes.  But wait, there's more. Along our coasts these dead zones have increased ten times. Not four, ten.

"Oxygen is fundamental to life in the oceans," said Denise Breitburg, lead author and marine ecologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. She's part of the GO2NE (Global Ocean Oxygen Network), which was founded in 2016 to tackle this problem.

"The decline in ocean oxygen ranks among the most serious effects of human activities on Earth's environment."

While scientists have long been aware of these dead zones, this is the first review paper to take such a broad, global view of the issue. And the results aren't pretty.

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As Earth's climate continues to warm, the team predicts that the oceans will continue to lose oxygen at a rapid pace.

And, as the paper in the journal Science points out: "Major extinction events in Earth's history have been associated with warm climates and oxygen-deficient oceans."

So what's causing these dead zones?

Climate change is a huge part of the problem, especially for the open ocean. Because warm water holds less oxygen, as surface water temperatures warm up, it makes it harder for oxygen to get down into the depths of the ocean.

Closer to shore, nutrient pollution - such as the runoff from agricultural practises - is also playing a big role.

Nutrients like phosphorous from fertiliser can easily end up in rivers and estuaries, which creates algal blooms that drain oxygen from the water as they die and decompose.

It's no surprise then that scientists are worried about the algae bloom the size of Mexico in the Arabian Sea.

Unfortunately, as the oceans get warmer, marine life actually needs more oxygen to survive, not less. The result is huge patches of bleached coral and dead marine life.

Here's a chart depicting our suffocating oceans.

And what is our political response to this? Close to nil. The oceans, with their ability to suck vast quantities of heat and CO2 from the atmosphere and as the handy dumping ground for our waste, including agricultural chemical runoff, are a political "get out of jail free" card, for now.

Unfortunately, our oceans bat last. In recent decades prevailing wind patterns have caused the oceans to absorb enormous amounts of heat energy that has been carried into the depths. That's where the first law of thermodynamics comes into play, the one that tells us that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just converted from one form into another. So all that heat carried into the depths of the ocean, well it's coming back up and it will be returned to the atmosphere.

Climate change is like a prize fight. It's not how you take a punch but how you absorb a flurry of punches. The ocean is absorbing what we're dealing out - the extra heat, the acidification, the chemical contamination - but we are not prepared for its counter-punching. You can be hundreds, thousands of miles from the ocean, drylanders in Toronto or Winnipeg or Calgary. It makes no difference. The ocean will reach you.

Paleontologist Peter Ward of the University of Washington in his book, "Under a Green Sky," has a one-paragraph description of what happens when absorbed CO2  crosses the oceanic tipping point:

First, the world warms over short intervals of time because of a sudden increase of carbon dioxide and methane... The warmer world affects the ocean circulation systems and disrupts the position of the conveyor currents. Bottom waters begin to have warm, low-oxygen water dumped into them. Warming continues, and the decrease of equator-to-pole temperature differences reduces ocean winds and surface currents to a near standstill. Mixing of oxygenated surface waters with the deeper, and volumetrically increasing, low-oxygen bottom waters decreases, causing ever-shallower water to change from oxygenated to anoxic. Finally, the bottom water is at depths were light can penetrate, the combination of low oxygen and light allows green sulfur bacteria to expand in numbers and fill the low-oxygen shallows. They live amid other bacteria that produce toxic amounts of hydrogen sulfide, and the flux of this gas into the atmosphere is as much as 2,000 times what it is today. The gas rises into the high atmosphere, where it breaks down the ozone layer, and the subsequent increase in ultraviolet radiation from the sun kills much of the photosynthetic green plant phytoplankton. On its way up into the sky, the hydrogen sulfide also kills some plant and animal life, and the combination of high heat and hydrogen sulfide creates a mass extinction on land. These are the greenhouse extinctions.

Well, Jeebus, if we knew that we would deal with it, wouldn't we? Surely we would never let that happen, not if we knew better. It's time for that godawful reality check. We do know. We know better. It's all good, old-fashioned, evidence based, tested and verified science. It's all there at the fingertips of every government on Earth. And no, we aren't going to deal with it. We are letting it happen. We are unleashing this fate on future generations. 

Additional reading:

Five Ways We're Killing Our Oceans

Those Shellfish Are Talking to You. Can You Hear Them?

New Research Reveals How Quickly Climate Change Impacts Set In

Ocean Dead Zones Growing (2008) 

How Agri-Business is Poisoning our Lakes and Rivers 

And So It Goes

Well, Kids, It'll Be a Kindle Day - er - Weekend

When I awoke this morning I interrupted my normal routine to fire up my Kindle and, sure enough, there it was, my copy of Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury,"  mine for the reading. I was already aware from the Amazon Echo news briefs delivered before I threw off the covers that the publisher, Holt & Company, had succeeded in releasing the book despite the demands of White House lawyers that it be withdrawn - or else.

Kindle informs me that it's an 8 hour read which, given my limited ability to digest all things rancid, will probably mean days of drifting through the pages (do e-books really have "pages"?). However, given everything I've learned about this creep (full disclosure, I've never watched "The Apprentice") and the number of hours I've spent writing about the ogre Bill Maher calls the "man baby" I'll probably be unable to put it down for very long.

Then by about June, when the market is saturated, I'll head over to Abe Books and pick up a "very good" quality, second-hand copy in hard cover for a few bucks to put on my bookshelf for future reference.

Will "Fire and Fury" be a 'giant killer'? It's hard to imagine but I haven't read the book yet.  It's bound to have repercussions in the world community, among the members of Congress from both parties but especially Republicans, among the American people and, of course, within the Trump White House. Least impacted, I'm guessing, will be Trump's base, the Gullibillies, a group that has shown itself so insensate they'll probably dismiss it as a pack of lies. If Trump told them the sky was the same colour as his spray tan, orange, they would tell you it's orange. That's why he loves them so.

The real question is how the release of this book will affect Donald Trump and his fragile psyche. The man is obviously intellectually and emotionally impaired. He's been exhibiting signs of senility. The best thing Trump has going for him is that he doesn't read. Yet the book is said to be full of candid remarks that to Trump, or perhaps anyone, would smack of disloyalty, betrayal. The guy is already paranoid. He craves adulation and instant gratification.

Trump is in a bind. No, make that a vice. He knows he can't sue Wolff or Holt. That would bring Wolff's tapes into evidence. The best he can do is denounce it as sheer lies. Meanwhile he's got Robert Mueller breathing down his neck and an anxious Republican caucus worried about the mid-term elections and an angry public that loathes their president.

A more seasoned, informed, aware and competent man might weather this storm but Trump is none of those things. He's a balloon waiting to burst and, when that happens, people will discover there's nothing inside except wind. And yet this guy still commands the most powerful and deadly military apparatus in human history. If he does go off his nut we could all be in a world of trouble.

Must run.

E.J. Dionne Calls It. Trump and America Have Crossed the Point of No Return.

E.J. Dionne has a lot of credibility. In addition to writing a column for the Washington Post, he's a Brookings Institution fellow and a professor of the foundations of democracy at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. In short, he's about the best guy to make sense of what's happened to the White House - and America - over just the past two weeks.

Can our government function normally when President Trump tweets about his “button”being bigger than that of an armed adversary? Can there be business as usual when the word “insane” is being applied with increasing frequency to his actions, and when one of his most loyal supporters has called a meeting between Russian operatives and Trump campaign officials “treasonous”?

Only a few days into the new year, there is a striking disconnect in the nation’s capital between the ordinary and the mind-boggling — between the sorts of transactions politicians routinely make to keep the country running and displays of the irrational, the abusive and the menacing emanating from the White House.

There has been an inclination over the past year in both politics and journalism to separate Trump’s tweets and other outbursts from the realities of governing. The idea is that his eruptions are either (a) largely irrelevant forms of his letting off steam or (b) signs of a brilliance beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. What looks to most of us like madness is cast as genius in setting up enemies, signaling his base or distracting us from one thing or another.

But we are past the time when we can believe any of this. Trump is, without question, doing enormous damage to the United States’ standing in the world, and his strategy for political survival is rooted in a willingness to destroy our institutions.

While the news on Wednesday understandably focused on Stephen K. Bannon’s treason comments in a new book by journalist Michael Wolff, 2018 has already produced two remarkable essays explaining the genuine threat the president poses to the nation’s foreign policy interests.

Susan Glasser, writing in Politico, offers frightening detail about how Trump’s stunning lack of knowledge and his indifference to his own obliviousness have led diplomats to label him “insane,” “catastrophic,” “terrifying,” “incompetent” and “dangerous.” Glasser concludes: “When it comes to Trump and the world, it’s not better than you think. It’s worse.”

And Evan Osnos’s carefully reported and much-discussed article in the New Yorker demonstrates how Trump’s policies — but also his pathological focus on himself, his ignorance, and his astonishing susceptibility to flattery — have profoundly weakened the United States’ position in Asia and played into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s reach for international power.

Osnos cites a Chinese think tank’s observation that the Trump administration is a collection of hostile “cliques,” the most powerful of which is the “Trump family clan.” And its analysis uses a term from feudal China, “jiatianxia,” to define Trump’s approach. It means “to treat the state as your possession.”

This insight cuts to the heart of the peril the president represents to our democracy and the rule of law.

On the second day of the year, Trump called on the Justice Department to “finally act” against Huma Abedin, a Hillary Clinton aide, and also against James B. Comey, the FBI director he fired. And by referring not to the Justice Department but to the “Deep State Justice Dept,” Trump continued to push back against all others investigating him, treating them as if they were a band of spies and traitors.

Directing the prosecution of political enemies is a habit of autocrats. As Benjamin Wittes, my Brookings Institution colleague, wrote recently, Trump is “normalizing for an entire political movement the politicization and weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence.” Is this the legacy the Republican Party wants?

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The United States does have extraordinary gifts for self-correction. But we must face the fact that Trump is accelerating us toward the breaking point. No matter how confident we are in our resilience, we should not imagine otherwise. Not even Mueller has a button on his desk he can press to get us out of this without scars.

You Might Want to Wait for the Audio Book

Fire and Fury, the kiss and tell book on the Trump campaign and its first year in office, is set for release on January 9.  Trump and his minions at this point have little choice but to dismiss it as fanciful bullshit but now there's word that author, Michael Wolff, has most of the many hours of the many interviews on tape.

Wouldn't that make a lovely audio book? A neatly written narrative interspersed with clips of the voices of Trump's former "nearest and dearest." It would lend a certain je ne sais quoi to the whole sordid business.

Hell, I might even buy both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If You Want a Preview to the New Trump Book, It's Here.

Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff's soon to be released book about the first year of Donald Trump's presidency, already has the Mango Mussolini in knots. If you want a taste of what's to come, check out Wolff's piece published today in New York magazine.

It's Time that Justin Got Off His Arse and Worked for Canadians

It's a problem but it's not here. It's an American problem, a European problem. It happens in other countries, not ours.

"It" is the waning of liberal democracy. You know, the very problem that electoral reform was intended to address. Yet, around the world, political leaders are finding the notion of liberal democracy expendable, an impediment in the age of increasing authoritarianism.

Another roadblock to authoritarianism is the whole idea of a free press so vital to the notion of informed consent by the governed, the voter. We know how to dismember a free press. The Davey and the Kent commissions sorted that out. Simply allow the corporate sector a free hand and they'll snap up every news outlet they can get their hands on, eliminating competition, and serving the plebs a very predictable and predictably pointed product that quickly turns to messaging rather than information. Why should the public have access to the greatest number of voices presenting the broadest range of information and opinion from across the political spectrum when they would only use it to cast informed ballots? Why not just dish up a narrow corporate message in its stead?

As Justin Trudeau betrayed the Canadian public on electoral reform so too he shows no interest in the restoration of a genuinely free press. Can't be bothered. Junior has trade deals to ink. Which brings us to a timely article by Marc Edge, author of "The News We Deserve" published in the latest Tyee.



When the country’s two largest chains swapped 41 newspapers in Ontario a few weeks ago and announced that almost all would be closed, they basically thumbed their noses at Canada’s competition laws.

Monopoly is much better for business than competition, and for years the Competition Bureau has proved powerless — or unwilling — to stop Big Media from growing even bigger.Why wouldn’t they?

In the November deal, Postmedia Network and the Torstar Corp. divided up large swaths of the southern Ontario community newspaper market and dared the Competition Bureau to do something about it.

Postmedia, 98 per cent owned by U.S. hedge funds despite supposed limits on foreign ownership of Canadian newspapers, pointed out the deal was “not subject to the merger notification provisions of the Competition Act and no regulatory clearance is required to close the transaction.”

That is technically correct given the dollar value of the deal (although no money actually changed hands), but it doesn’t mean the Competition Bureau can’t review matters after the fact, which it promised to do when pressed by reporters.

It could even roll the deal back, but don’t hold your breath, because Postmedia and Torstar have the precedent of regulatory inaction on their side.

The same thing, after all, has been going on for years mostly unnoticed in B.C., well out of the national media glare. The two largest provincial chains, Black Press (no relation to Conrad Black) and Glacier Media, have been buying, selling and trading titles since 2010 and then often closing them to create more lucrative local monopolies.

...

As a result of these dealings, Black Press now owns every newspaper on Vancouver Island, which has a size and population similar to New Brunswick, except for Glacier Media’s daily Victoria Times Colonist.

...

You might think that newspapers are dying and should be allowed to do these kinds of competition-killing deals in order to survive.

My research suggests otherwise.

I studied the annual reports of all publicly traded newspaper companies in Canada and the United States from 2006 to 2013 for my 2014 book Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers and found that not one recorded an annual loss on an operating basis during that time, despite an historic downturn in advertising revenues.

Postmedia had operating earnings of $54.6 million on revenues of $754 million in its 2017 fiscal year ended Aug. 31, for a profit margin of 7.2 per cent.

Fully 60 per cent of its earnings, however, went to pay the interest on Postmedia’s massive debt, most of which is held by its own hedge fund overlords, which are skimming their take right off the top in a nifty piece of financial engineering.

Torstar’s community newspaper division, Metroland, reported earnings of $21.2 million on revenue of $272 million in the first nine months of 2017 for a profit margin of 7.8 per cent.

...

The Liberal government ordered hearings into media and local communities in 2016 after Postmedia merged the newsrooms of its duplicate dailies in four of Canada’s six largest cities.

 Postmediad had promised to maintain separate newsrooms before it got Competition Bureau approval for its 2014 takeover of the Sun Media chain.

The hearings, chaired by B.C. MP Hedy Fry, resulted in a report in June calling for the Competition Bureau to be given more power to stop news media mergers and takeovers, as well as other measures to boost local journalism.

So far its recommendations have also been ignored.

The Trudeau government’s continued fiddling while the country’s news media disappear will soon constitute negligence of the highest order.

Justin Trudeau is really great at doing the symbolic stuff - teary-eyed apologies for residential schools and affronts to the LGBT community a prime example - but he's a dead loss at dealing with the hard stuff that will shape the future of our country - how we elect our representatives, how we hold them accountable, climate change, democratic restoration and the return of a genuinely free press.

The Emperor Strikes Back

That didn't take long. Donald Trump has lashed out at his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, over revelations in a new book in which the Breitbart boss says many unflattering things about Trump, his kids and the White House administration.

Trump denounced Bannon in a statement claiming that "he not only lost his job, he lost his mind."

Trump disavows Steve Bannon: 'He not only lost his job, he lost his mind' from CNBC.

On Wednesday, excerpts from an upcoming Michael Wolff book showed that Bannon called a June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer "treasonous" and "unpatriotic." Bannon, who did not join the Trump campaign until August 2016, also said there was "zero" chance that then-candidate Trump did not meet with the attendees.

In a statement Wednesday, the president said Bannon — the nationalist firebrand — "had very little to do" with his electoral victory in 2016. Trump added that "Steve is learning that winning isn't as easy as I make it look."

Rock on, Don. You're going down, pal.

Storm Warning. Brace Yourself. This One is Global.

The New York based risk consultancy, Eurasia Group, warns the world is facing a "big, unexpected crisis" in 2018.

"In the 20 years since we started Eurasia Group, the global environment has had its ups and downs," Eurasia President Ian Bremmer and Chairman Cliff Kupchan wrote in the outlook. "But if we had to pick one year for a big unexpected crisis -- the geopolitical equivalent of the 2008 financial meltdown -- it feels like 2018. Sorry."
Eurasia sees five ill winds driving the storm: China, miscalculation (Korea), protectionism, a technological cold war and, given Trump's obsession with it, Iran.

Sounds like this might not be the year to bet the farm on that one big risk.

Steve Bannon - Don Jr. Committed Treason

Every despot has a Rasputin and Donald Trump's is named Steve Bannon.  The ousted chief political adviser has now turned on Trump's namesake, Don Jr., accusing the son, who is sometimes referred to as "Fredo," of treason.


Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon has described the Trump Tower meeting between the president’s son and a group of Russians during the 2016 election campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”, according to an explosive new book seen by the Guardian.

Bannon, speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, reportedly based on more than 200 interviews with the president, his inner circle and players in and around the administration, is one of the most eagerly awaited political books of the year. In it, Wolff lifts the lid on a White House lurching from crisis to crisis amid internecine warfare, with even some of Trump’s closest allies expressing contempt for him.

Bannon, who was chief executive of the Trump campaign in its final three months, then White House chief strategist for seven months before returning to the rightwing Breitbart News, is a central figure in the nasty, cutthroat drama, quoted extensively, often in salty language.
...

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.

Bannon added: “You never see it, you never know it, because you don’t need to … But that’s the brain trust that they had.”
...

Bannon has criticised Trump’s decision to fire Comey. In Wolff’s book, obtained by the Guardian ahead of publication from a bookseller in New England, he suggests White House hopes for a quick end to the Mueller investigation are gravely misplaced.

“You realise where this is going,” he is quoted as saying. “This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner … It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”

Last month it was reported that federal prosecutors had subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank, the German financial institution that has lent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Kushner property empire. Bannon continues: “It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They’re going to go right through that. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me.”

Scorning apparent White House insouciance, Bannon reaches for a hurricane metaphor: “They’re sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five.”

The fallout from this should be fascinating. Team Trump has gone to great lengths to keep a lot of this stuff in house, out of the public eye. Trump's massive ego and his volatile temper may have difficulty with Bannon's remarks and criticisms. This is, after all, the same Steve Bannon instrumental in the Roy Moore fiasco in Alabama when Trump had already endorsed Moore's Republican rival, Luther Strange. That insubordination cost the Republicans a badly needed Senate seat.

This may also make it far more difficult for Trump to fire special counsel, Robert Mueller, now that Bannon has virtually pronounced Kushner, Don Jr. and Paul Manafort guilty of serious crimes including, apparently, money laundering and a path straight to "fucking Trump" himself. It almost seems that this is Bannon's Night of the Long Knives, White House-style.

One Thing Climate Change Is Not - Boring

Deadly, sure. Destructive, yep. Punishing, in some ways. Scary, big time. Climate change, the early onset stuff unfolding before our eyes, is all of those things but it's almost never boring. At times it can be more like a horror movie provided, of course, that you're watching it from a safe distance. If you're in the script it's usually not so much fun. Oh, and did I mention that this is just the early onset stuff. Just getting started, so to speak.

We had a helluva summer this year on the Wet Coast. Massive forest fires from Mexico all the way up into Alaska. Smoke everywhere, even out to sea. Then there were floods here, droughts there and who can forget those impressive hurricanes in the Gulf and Eastern Seaboard. Plus those apres season wildfires that swept California.

Now it's Climate Change, Eastern-style, the dreaded Polar Vortex and hasn't it been a real Duesenberg (SJ LaGrande Dual Cowl Phaeton depicted here) this year? But wait, there's more. This week is bringing a "bomb cyclone" to the eastern part of North America from Florida all the way on up.


First, a monster storm will hammer coastal locations from Georgia to Maine with ice and snow. By Thursday, the exploding storm will, in many ways, resemble a winter hurricane, battering easternmost New England with potentially damaging winds in addition to blinding snow.

Forecasters are expecting the storm to become a so-called “bomb cyclone” because its pressure is predicted to fall so fast, an indicator of explosive strengthening. The storm could rank as the most intense over the waters east of New England in decades at this time of year. While blizzard conditions could paste some coastal areas, the most extreme conditions will remain well out over the ocean.

It looks like most of Nova Scotia is in for a real pummeling.

“Some computer models are projecting a minimum central air pressure of below 950 millibars at its peak, which would be nearly unheard of for this part of the world outside of a hurricane,” wrote Mashable’s Andrew Freedman. “For comparison, Hurricane Sandy had a minimum central pressure of about 946 millibars when it made its left hook into New Jersey in 2012.”

Winds will crank in response to this pressure drop, howling to at least 30 to 50 mph along the coast. Winds will be considerably stronger over the ocean — exceeding hurricane force — where enormous waves will form.

And then, behind the storm comes the cold. That means -42F in the Sault, -40F for Toronto, -30F in Montreal. As I recall it, "40 below" Fahrenheit equals minus 40 Celsius. That's cold, damned cold. That's horrible cold, deadly cold for the homeless and people who can't afford heat or just about anyone if the storms take down the power grid.

At least the authorities know it's coming. They know the storm is on its way. They know the deadly cold snap that will appear in its wake. They know the risk of power outages at this worst possible moment. They know the people who are vulnerable, their lives in peril. They know the resources they must mobilize to respond to this. Let's hope they know that leaving it until the storm hits is leaving it much too late.

What Are the Top Three Things You Expect From the Trudeau Government in 2018?

As the government of Justin Trudeau sails into the third year of its mandate this would be a good time to reflect on the most important expectations we have of this government for 2018.

I'm asking you to outline your priorities. I'm not being facetious when I admit that I've come up empty-handed. Oh I supposed they're going to legalize pot but that was last year's business, wasn't it?

I had plenty of hopeful expectations of Team Trudeau when they took office. Those were reasonable given the solemn promises young Trudeau made on the campaign trail in 2015. We've learned a lot since then.

Lately there hasn't been a lot of wind in Justin's sails. The ship of state is becalmed but, fortunately for Cap'n Selfie, the passengers in steerage class don't seem to mind as one month blurs into the next.

So please, lift my spirits with your enthusiasms. What do you expect from JT and his orchestra this year?

And, without wanting to put a damper on your ponderings, you may want to have a look at Konrad Yakabuski's take on our "disengaged prime minister."


Mr. Trudeau's managerial style suggests a leader somewhat disengaged from the job he was elected to perform. After Stephen Harper's frigid personality, Canadians wanted likeability and empathy from their Prime Minister and Mr. Trudeau scores highly on both.

But no one could ever accuse Mr. Harper of being disengaged from his job. He inhabited it, often to excess. He was intimate with the "details" of government business, but his administration was largely a one-man show. And there was no room for opinions that did not mesh with his own.

Unlike Mr. Harper, Mr. Trudeau did not enter politics on a mission to undo decades of statist Liberal policy. He clearly prefers the "ceremonial" aspects of his job to the actual exercise of power. He has moved decisively to banish MPs and staffers who appear to have contravened his feminist values.

But he is no policy wonk, allowing PMO staffers and bureaucrats to work out the details of government decisions. He seems to view his job as one of brand-building and selling the final product.

This yields the results we have come to know. Can anyone imagine the torturous Bill Morneau affair enduring this long under Mr. Harper, Jean Chrétien or Brian Mulroney? Granted, each of these previous prime ministers had very different managerial styles. But no one can argue they did not assume the full weight of their responsibilities. It showed in their faces.

Someone needs to write Mr. Trudeau his own mandate letter.

Yeah, amen to that.

Ralph Nader's Post-Mortem for America

An increasing number of progressives have been coming forward lately to pronounce the "of the people, by the people, for the people" America dead.  What had been criticisms now become eulogies, bitter remembrances of what once was and what might have been. Now it's Ralph Nader's turn.

Chris Hedges summarizes a recent call he had with Nader.

Imagine yourself in early 2019. The Democrats, despite never articulating a political vision other than not being Donald Trump and refusing to roll back Republican legislation such as the 2017 tax bill, have regained the House of Representatives by a slim majority. They vote articles of impeachment. The Senate Republicans, pressured by many within their own party to abandon Trump because of his ineptitude, increasingly erratic behavior and corruption, call on the president to resign. Trump refuses. He uses the megaphone of his office to incite violence by his small, fanatic base. The military, whose deployment as a domestic police force is authorized by Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, is called into the streets to quell unrest. The United States, by the time the violence is snuffed out, is a de facto military dictatorship.

That such a scenario is plausible to public figures such as Ralph Nader is a sign of the deep decay of democratic institutions. The two major political parties lack a coherent vision. They are subservient to corporate power. They have abandoned the common good. They have turned politics into burlesque. They have rendered the citizenry impotent. The press, especially the electronic press, has transformed news into a grotesque reality show filled with trivia, gossip and conjecture. The elites in both parties, along with the rich and corporations, profit from a naked kleptocracy. Everything is for sale, from public lands to public education. And the juggernaut of corporate power impoverishes the people as it willfully destroys the facade of the hollowed-out democratic state.

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The Democrats have never called for an audit of the Pentagon’s massive and bloated military budget. They do not address corporate crime, champion consumer protection, promote the rights of workers or demand a living wage or full Medicare for all. And because they stand for nothing other than the politesse of identity politics and high-blown liberal rhetoric they have been unable to protect the country from the worst generation of the Republican Party in the nation’s history.

“They don’t even know how to have sonorous political language,” Nader said. “They’re stealing from you—my fellow Americans. A handful of corporate, greedy bosses controlling your government on this national stage and local level, gouging out whole communities, sending industries to fascist communist regimes abroad. They have no loyalties to this country. They have no allegiance to communities other than to exploit them, abandon them. They rose to power on the backs of you, the workers. They were subsidized by Washington and state capitals, by you the taxpayer. The Marines bailed them out when they got into hot water, palling around with dictators and monarchs. Why do you allow them to rule you?”

Nader said the ruling elites have “lost the fear of the people.” This has given rise to “a multifaceted dictatorial government indentured to the plutocratic class symbolized by Wall Street.”

Nader said the ruling elites have “lost the fear of the people.” This has given rise to “a multifaceted dictatorial government indentured to the plutocratic class symbolized by Wall Street.”

Corporations, enjoying a new tax code that reduces corporate income taxes to 21 percent while individuals pay up to 37 percent, have been awarded the constitutional rights of individuals while individuals have been stripped of their rights.

“The Constitution is increasingly a dead letter,” Nader said.

...

Nader said he feared that the population was so effectively anesthetized by mass culture that it might not rise up against the elites. “The U.S. has developed a society with an almost indeterminate absorptive capacity for injustice, abuse and degradation,” Nader said. “There is no civic education in the schools. They don’t know what the Constitution is. They don’t know what the law of torts is. They don’t know where the town hall is. They’re living in virtual reality, swinging between big screen TV and their cellphones. They’re wallowing in text messages. To an extent, they’re excited by the workings of the minds symbolized by Wall Street and Silicon Valley. That’s the young generation. Great changes start with people in their 20s. But look what you’ve got now. You’ve got 10 years of internet connection, cellphones available to any child. That’s one. The second is 24/7 entertainment. The third is the abandonment by the elderly generation. They’ve sort of given up. They don’t know the gadgetry. They don’t know the language. They have their own economic insecurity. They’re not extending any kind of historical experience to the young which contains severe warnings. Watch out. You don’t think it can happen again, [but] it can happen again and again. There’s no verbal, oral tradition between the generations. Less and less. Then you have the political system, which is deep-sinking the society. How are people going to mobilize themselves? Is there a strong union, a labor movement? No. A strong consumer movement? No. They’re losing their privacy. They’re losing their ability to use legal tender. The corporate coercion is, to a degree, now getting rid of cash. Marx never believed that could happen. Why do they want to get rid of cash? They want to drive everybody into an incarcerated penitentiary that is surrounded by mobile payments, credit cards, credit scores, credit ratings, debit cards, constant debt, invasion of privacy, and the ability to assess penalties, charges and unwanted purchases because they control people’s money. That’s Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo got away with 3 million forced, unknown and unwanted credit card sales, auto insurance sales, repairing their ratings. Some people lost their cars and their homes. They’re flipped over into bankruptcy. Nobody has been prosecuted yet.”

Compounding the decay is the collapse of the legal profession, a problem exacerbated by Trump’s stacking of the federal courts with incompetent and far-right judges selected by groups such as The Federalist Society. The courts, he said, have already destroyed the freedom of contract and the law of torts. They have repeatedly revoked constitutional rights by judicial fiat, ruling, for example, that unlimited campaign contributions by corporations is a form of free speech and the right to petition the government.

Wall Street and the big banks, bailed out in 2008, have returned to the games of speculation that led to the global financial collapse. And when the next collapse comes, the banks and Wall Street will again descend on the U.S. Treasury for trillions more in bailouts.

“The banks are making huge profits,” Nader said. “Therefore, they’re taking bigger risks. The consumer dollars are being transferred to corporate profits, which are now being transformed into stock buybacks in order to meet the criteria for higher compensation even if it’s against the interest of their own company.”

“From 2005 to 2014, you had $3.9 trillion of stock buybacks, 50 percent of all corporate net profits,” he said. “Fifty percent of the top 500 corporations profited in that decade with stock buybacks. Not to better salaries or shoring up pension plans, not to dividends, not to research and development, not to productive capital and job creation. It’s to stock buybacks. The biggest story untold, or minimally told, in the American economy today. With all this money repatriating from overseas and more corporate offices, they’re planning more stock buybacks. It’s like burning money.”...

The speculation, which is trashing the country’s economy, will continue, Nader said, until the financial system collapses and the U.S. defaults on its bonds.

Nader worries that as long as “10 to 15 percent of the American people are well-off” the elites will have enough support to continue the assault.

“Societies have been repressed by far smaller members of well-instituted upper classes,” he said. “That’s what we forget. Eighteenth-, 19th-, 20th-century Europe. A tiny clique controlled them. When there’s any problem it flips over to dictatorship. As long as the contented classes are not upset, the system of control is in lock, like connecting gears.”

...

“Living wage, taxes, universal health insurance, that have 70 percent support or higher,” Nader said in listing campaign issues. “Breaking up big banks, 90 percent support. Cracking down on corporate crime, similar. People need to give corporate crime a face. This is what happens to your credit. This is what happens to your home. This is what happens to your job. This is what happens to you if you have cancer. This is what happens in the hospital. This is what happens when you’re denied health insurance; you can’t cover your kids. It’s pretty crazy when you can’t make this kind of a pitch to a large audience.”

The greed of the corporate state leaves us unprepared for the ravages of climate change, he warned. And by the time the elites respond it may be too late.

“It’s a race,” Nader said. “Once Miami gets inundated, especially Fisher Island, it might bring the wealthy class to their senses. The problem with solar is it needs a network. Solar panels are fine, but if you’re going to have solar electricity you need a different type of grid system. That requires infrastructure investment.”

“Justice needs money,” he concluded, calling on enlightened elites to spend a billion dollars to fund resistance movements outside the Democratic Party. “The abolition movement needed money. The suffrage movement needed money. They got it from wealthy people. Civil rights movement. The Curry family. The Stern family. The early 1950s, 1960s. Environmental movements got money from rich people. Don’t wait for the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is an instrument. On the first round you’ve got to use it and control it. On the third round, when you’re mobilized, you can throw it aside. It’s a hollowed feature that is a part of the duopoly. But it’s there. These parties are very vulnerable. They’re shells that rest on money and television ads that nobody likes. Unrebuttable right-wing talk radio. All these can be circumvented neighborhood by neighborhood, but you’ve got to have money. Labor halls are unoccupied. Veteran halls are unoccupied. Libraries are unoccupied. There are a lot of meeting places around. A lot of empty stores can be rented.”

It's Called "Climate Gentrification"

The term is used to differentiate coastal properties by their elevation above sea level. After all, there aren't many homeowners keen to share their livingroom with the ocean, right? Particularly low-lying and, hence, flood prone properties are already seeing prices wane. As America is forced to accept the reality of sea level rise and coastal storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration, insurance will become harder to get and costlier, further suppressing prices. The smart money types are already getting antsy, looking for high ground.

The poor are also getting antsy. They're the first victims of any sort of gentrification. They're the miners' canary in places such as low-lying Miami.


Research from Harvard shows a link between elevation and price appreciation in Miami neighborhoods. Properties at higher elevations in Miami-Dade County have been increasing in value since 1971. For the most part, that’s been due to non-climate factors. But since 2000, the correlation has grown stronger.

That could be a sign of preference for properties that are more resilient to flooding. Florida has certainly seen more than its fair share of rising seas and climate-fueled storms. And nationwide, coastal homes at risk of inundation are beginning to lose value.

Climate gentrification — a new phrase to describe climate change’s transformation of real estate markets — could have huge repercussions. If real estate values start to decrease rapidly for high-risk properties, we could be on the cusp of a foreclosure crisis, Harvard researchers say.

In addition, wealthy people might crowd mixed-income areas, pushing out longtime residents. “People’s lives, their livelihoods, and their culture” are at stake, Mustafa Santiago Ali, senior vice president of the Hip Hop Caucus, told CBS.

Meanwhile, if you've had your fill of the Polar Vortex and would prefer more balmy conditions, why not try Alaska?

Climate scientist Daniel Swain attributes the cold in the east and the warmth out west to a continent-wide weather pattern similar to the one that ushered in California’s megadrought a few years ago. There’s evidence that shrinking Arctic ice is making extreme patterns like this more likely.

Speaking of shrinking ice, December has been downright balmy in Alaska. Frozen rivers — the highways of the North during winter — still haven’t frozen. The sea ice is in “shockingly bad” condition for native hunters.

Parts of 40 states, including Arizona, have been colder than Anchorage so far. And earlier this month, Sitka, Alaska, set a new record for the warmest low temperature ever recorded in Alaskan wintertime: 53 degrees.