Poison Tag

We are watching a game of "poison tag" being played out in Washington.

Poison tag being a game we played as kids. One kid is poison, and if he tags you you are poison too, or you are poisoned, depending on how it's being played. Shrieks and running around are involved. In the DC game of poison tag the game begins when the Republican Party declares someone is poison and everyone runs from them. Anyone who touches this person or is touched is out of the game. The Republicans have declared Christopher Steele poison. Why? First, it isn't a game. It's very serious national security business and Steele is one of America's most reliable friends. Why make Steele a pariah for everyone to shun?

Steele ran the Russia desk for MI6, the intel agency of our closest ally. A serious professional who did serious work for many years keeping the free western democracies like Britain and the U.S. and our NATO allies free of interference from the Russian spies we all grew up fearing because of James Bond novels. Russia is no longer communist but it is now ruled by a former KGB boss, Vladimir Putin. Steele has a well-earned dislike of Putin having seen what he does. Example: since the Russian involvement in hacking our election became known several witnesses to it, western sources of information and Putin critics, have wound up suddenly violently dead. One of them was poisoned twice––not a game––and survived to talk about it.

The reason Steele is being maligned and shunned by half of Washington is simple. He saw an alarming pattern of contacts and business dealings and involvements, some of them possibly very compromising, between the Republican candidate for president of the United States and the Russian government and its spy agencies and President Putin's closest allies, the oligarchs. He did what any friend would do: he told the FBI about this. He did so knowing it would not be a good thing for America to have a president who was on the hook to the Russians. Steele discovered this in 2016, and the more he looked the more he discovered, and the more worrying it was. Why was he looking? He was hired by a research firm, FusionGPS, a respected firm founded and led by former Wall Street Journal investigative journalists.

Full disclosure: the Wall Street Journal is a very right wing newspaper, but it has a highly respected newsroom. Did this make observers concerned that FusionGPS might have a right wing bias? Apparently Fusion was hired by Republicans during the Republican primary to find out more about Donald Trump. Republicans were worried about Trump. Let's face it, he is a dodgy character, with longtime mob ties, multiple bankruptcies, suspicious sources of financing, a long history of sexual misbehavior, etc. Who wouldn't be concerned. Republicans were concerned, but as soon as Trump won the nomination they dropped their research and let FusionGPS go.

FusionGPS was subsequently hired by the Democrats who were running against this dodgy character named Trump. It was at this point that the Fusion research team realized they needed fuller information about Trump's Russian connections, and who better to hire than a former MI6 Russia desk chief named Christopher Steele. Steele had gone into private business after he was thrown out of Russia by Putin for treading on Putin's toes. Spy career over. At least Putin didn't assassinate him the way he does others who tread on his toes.

Why is Steele "poison" today? Don't we like James Bond? In the Bond movies there are lots of characters who are operating illegally or dangerously in the Russian orbit. America doesn't usually run one of them for president. In fact that would make a great Bond novel. (I would cast Christopher Walken in the movie.) Why is James Bond now the bad guy? Why is this Bond villain being run by the Kremlin the hero?

This is a bizarre game of poison we're playing. What is right is wrong. What is legal is illegal. What is patriotic is treason and what used to be treason is now the urgent instruction coming from the party. In this case it's the Republican Party, the least likely group to be suspected of favoring the Russians in a war with the FBI.

Everything is upside down.

A trusted former counterespionage official from Britain calls American law enforcement and reports a possible crime in progress. Because he is a professional in these matters it's more than a possible crime, it's likely, and he is deeply concerned. He shares information with the FBI. He shares all he knows, suspicions that have been confirmed and those bits that are just raw intel. He does not edit out the worrisome salacious bits because the Russians have a long history of using honey traps to lure Americans into compromising situations for blackmail purposes. The FBI listens. They listen with greater interest because Steele's "dossier" overlaps with much of what the FBI has learned in its own investigations. The FBI began investigating on their own, having heard from their Australian counterparts that a member of the Trump campaign was boasting about having important and useful connections with the Russian government.

This kind of broadly corroborated information is not the sort of thing a counterintelligence agency discards out of prudery. They don't stop following the trail because it gets embarrassingly close to a major party presidential candidate, but that is what the Republicans are saying they ought to have done. Apparently, by Republican standards, NO information that shows a Republican presidential candidate––god forbid a Republican president––has become a puppet of the Russians should EVER be believed or disseminated.

Such information should be disbelieved at once! Anyone who discovers such a crime in progress must be shunned and discredited at all costs! Even if the person with this urgent information about a crime in progress is a career professional in counterintelligence from our oldest ally, Great Britain, he must be shut out! He is poison! Don't listen to him!

The Republicans are saying that the reliable friend who is reporting this ongoing crime against America is himself the criminal. This is the game of "poison" the Republicans are playing.

Republicans are upending various kinds of illogic to peddle this poison. They are not saying that a Democrat phoned in the crime report, they say a professional investigator of good standing hired by a company that was paid by a Democrat phoned in the crime report. If being hired by a company hired by Republicans but now paid by a Democrat discredits you, we have a problem. It discredits an awful lot of people. It means more than half of all Americans cannot expect to be believed when they call law enforcement, either because they are Democrats or because they know someone who is. And if they have their neighbor phone the FBI for them the FBI will be expected to hang up––because if the FBI believes the crime report or seeks to verify it they will be complicit in a crime, so the Republican argument goes.

The FBI believed Steele (Republicans hadn't called him poison yet) because his information corroborated much of their own information discovered in an investigation begun independently. But the Republicans are saying that the FBI's investigation is fatally biased and all its warrants are fatally biased because the FBI answered the phone when Steele phoned in the warning that Russians were involved in multiple ways with the Republican presidential candidate. The warrants the FBI obtained required something called "probable cause", but the Republicans are discrediting those warrants because they say "probable cause" means the FBI was biased against Donald Trump. Finding credible evidence of wrongdoing, the Republicans say, creates a fatal bias in the investigating agency. Oddly this is not something Republicans charge when Arizona sheriffs count the brownness of a suspect's skin as probable cause.

What this all means is this: if you want to commit a crime and avoid investigation and prosecution the safest thing to do is be a Republican candidate for president or a member of his campaign, because these things make you immune to all suspicion and invalidates any investigation that might be opened or may have already been ongoing into your dodgy business practices that look like money laundering or fraud or conspiracy, especially your pattern of conspiring with Russian spies. Probable cause to seek evidence of crime means you are too biased to investigate. Only law officers who swear everlasting fealty and loyalty to the Leader are to be trusted. Everybody else must be fired.

James Bond supposedly had a license to kill. Not really true but it made a good story. He did have a license to investigate Russians, though, and he knew how to do this. But Bond's license to investigate Russian conspiracies is hereby suspended because he had the gall to investigate a Republican. Mr. Bond is persona non grata. Poison. Nobody should talk to him or listen to him or believe what he says. If you do nobody will believe you either. The crimes Bond is reporting are not crimes at all. Mr. Bond is a criminal. The Russians do issue licenses to kill and without any friends in America Bond, I mean Steele, had better not come here anymore because the president who used to be very "mobbed up" is now very "Russianed up" and you never know when they might arrange for someone to fall out of a high window or meet with an accident on the sidewalk. All of this sounds like something dreamed up by Ian Fleming (too bizarre for John LeCarré) but it's now true. Because false is now true.

Good is now evil. Bad is good. Criminal is legal and the crime-fighters are now the criminals. Treason is now patriotism and what used to be patriotism is now treason. Republicans sleep with Russians and this is a good thing. If you oppose the surrender of American sovereignty to the man in Moscow you are unAmerican, because that is what Trump has done and what Trump does is now the rule. It doesn't even matter if Russian prostitutes were filmed doing strange things with Mr. Trump in Moscow because the American Evangelicals, our highest authorities on superChristianity, have given President* Trump a license to do strange things with prostitutes or wives of his friends or complete strangers exactly as he sees fit. God help us all.

Trump is our first Caudillo

I learned a new word today. Revolutionary periods breed lots of new words. Actually this is an old word from a bad old time. Most of Trump's ideas are bad old ideas.

The word is Caudillo.

In the Spanish colonies of South and Central America the caudillo was a militarized landowner who exercised authoritarian power in his locality. A tinpot tyrant. A strong-man.

"The root of caudillismo lies in Spanish colonial policy of supplementing small cadres of professional, full-time soldiers with large militia forces recruited from local populations to maintain public order. Militiamen held civilian occupations but assembled at regular times for drill and inspection. Their salary from the Crown was a token; their reward was in prestige, primarily because of the fuero militar ("military privilege"), that exempted them from certain taxes and obligatory community work assignments, and more significantly, exempted them from criminal or civil prosecution. Away from colonial capitals, the militias were at the service of the criollo (white, European) landowners." ~Wikipedia

A caudillo is a petty dictator, but often one of them would rise to the top in a country becoming a tinpot dictator. This was usually accomplished through force, always through threat of force, often with the kind of violent reprisal and butchery we saw in the newspapers. Note the caudillo was always white, whiter certainly than the peasants he butchered. When this brand of politics prevailed we used to refer to South American countries as 33 or 45 or 78 r.p.m. (revolutions per minute).

Political instability is something the U.S. has never been familiar with. We may need to get used to it now. The tinpot/caudillo/brownshirt/mafioso-style leader has never risen this far in the U.S.

I thank James Fallows of the Atlantic for enriching my vocabulary and improving my understanding of what is happening. His Atlantic article can be read here.

The title of his Atlantic article refers to Trump’s habit of treating people in any way he pleases because his power allows him to. “With Such People You Can Then Do What You Please,” i.e. grab them by their genitals. This is how Trump referred to women in his notorious conversation with Billy Bush. Treating women as things he can abuse by a kind of divine right, as if they are possessions or domestic pets. This also echoes the caudillo tradition in various places (not just in former Spanish colonies) where the strong-man had access to any woman who struck his fancy. Sometimes this extended to the prior right to every young bride, prior to her husband. Saddam Hussein exercised this kind of power. Putin’s harem is joked about in bars and now, no doubt, in the White House. Dictators have behaved in this way for as long as there have been dictators. The tales of the Arabian Nights are full of this, as are the tales from the Brothers Grimm. It is a medieval throwback.

Fallows explains how leaders of this type demonize and attack all critics and opponents using all the powers they hold. The president we elect has many powers, but those powers are checked by our system. Trump and his apparatchiks have stated loud and clear that Trump will not accept any checks on his powers. Judges who stop him are illegitimate. Reporters who "ask hard questions" are mean and unfair and "enemies of the people." That is the talk of a strong-man, a tinpot dictator, a mobster, a caudillo with an armed militia behind him. Those who oppose him are put on notice. They are told to expect armed men might come for them in the night. We don't take this seriously because we have never experienced it.

This is a reversion to an earlier time, a less evolved time, a tribal society before there was democracy. Fallows says that the threats against journalists are especially troubling. It sounds like his hero, Putin, who routinely liquidates reporters and editors who disagree with him.

"...what Trump has said about the press and all other institutional buffers on his power reflects a simpler calculus, not institutional but tribal. These other centers of power are either for him, or they are against him. If they are for him, they are good—from foreign leaders who congratulate him...to polls that show results to his liking, to "very honorable" news shows like Fox and Friends. Or they are against him, and if the latter they are “so-called,” “phony,” “failing,” “cheating,” “crooked,” or otherwise to be discredited."

The news media, especially long-form journalism, print journalism, are the guardians of our democracy. They will be the first to go when we are hustled into a dictatorship.

Galloping Fascism

"Donald Trump Is Becoming an Authoritarian Leader Before Our Very Eyes"

In the New Republic

"Donald Trump [henceforth to be called Dear Leader] on Friday issued a proclamation declaring January 20, 2017, the day of his inauguration, a “National Day of Patriotic Devotion.” The decree was uploaded to the Federal Register on Monday…”

In the Daily Beast

"The White House has shut down its public comment line, instead telling callers, with an automated message, that they should contact the new administration via Facebook Messenger instead. There’s only one problem: Neither the White House nor President Donald Trump seem to currently maintain an active Facebook Messenger account."

In Variety

"A provision tucked into the defense bill guts the Voice of America board, stoking fears that Trump could wield a powerful propaganda arm."

In Politico

In his rambling angry speech at the CIA on Saturday [President] Trump said America should reinvade Iraq and take their oil. The words were different, but the rationale is the same as the one that Germany used when they invaded Eastern Europe in 1939-1941.

Reported by Juan Cole

Newt Gingrich, a familiar proxy for [President] Trump, said something the other day that sounded disturbingly fascist and authoritarian. Speaking of employees of the federal government, Gingrich said “All those bureaucrats overwhelmingly voted for Clinton. There won’t be any real cooperation until we change federal law so we can fire them.”

In Salon

A Cunning Plan To Make America Fail

The GOP Plan Looks Like A Conspiracy To Make America Fail

97 of the 100 poorest counties in the US are in Red States. True? Certainly factual. (PolitiFact) The interpretation might depend on your politics. Rural tends to mean poor. It also tends to mean Republican. Why? That is very hard to understand. Which doesn’t make it untrue nor does it make the voting habits of those poor counties seem rational. But it does supply a rationale for the leaders who like to have stupid people under their supervision, in their electorate.

Republican hero Scott Walker has led Wisconsin toward the worst end of the economic spectrum (National Memo). Why do Republicans admire that? The money men admire it because it means they’re sucking the maximum amount of wealth and income away from the majority who work for a living. Their spare change can persuade the victims that it’s a great thing for them.

This kind of outright stupidity and greed and bad planning may explain why America’s worst enemy is America itself. (New Yorker article)

The Republicans’ (and their rich clients’) uniting principals are 1. kicking the working poor off healthcare and 2. keeping unregistered immigrants outside the law so they can go on hiring them for slave wages. There is an really cruel, greedy, heartless beauty to this. (New York magazine article explaining the GOP plan to replace Obamacare.)

This is only a winning strategy because they have all the money and money buys advertising and advertising creates fear.

How The Confederacy Hopes to Win the Civil War. Finally.

In this taped speech Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell outlines how it will unfold if they win in November. How he will shut down the government, something Obama has been able to prevent them from doing thus far. EPA, gone. Affordable Care Act, gone. SEC? Gone. All regulations of corporations and banks and industries and trade fairness? Gone. Workers' rights? Gone. Consumer protections? Gone. Wind the clock back to 1860, to that halcyon period before working people had weekends off and paid vacations and health insurance and retirement, back to a time when children worked six or seven days a week.

Think of it this way…

Lincoln faced a determined, well armed, intractable enemy who wanted to bring down our national government once and for all. The government shaped by the U. S. Constitution. This enemy was called The Confederacy.

Today that Confederacy controls one house of Congress and the Supreme Court.

If they win in November they will control both houses of Congress and the Confederacy will finally have won the Civil War.

The Long Con

This excellent article in Rolling Stone sorts out the myth from the history giving a very good picture of what amounts to a Long Con. A fraud that's required decades of planning and patience on the part of the Republican Party, and patient investment by its rich friends. A bit like Madoff's ponzi scheme, except for the rich friends who are walking away with trillions, much of it in taxpayer dollars.

I miss Eisenhower. I wish a lot more Republicans missed Eisenhower too. By modern Republican standards Eisenhower was a Marxist and Reagan himself was a Socialist on the Swedish model. This economy we are experiencing is the economy the Republicans want. It's the one they planned for.

"Goldman Sachs rules the world"

Stock trader Alessio Rastani had a moment of remarkable candor on the BBC last week.

"For most traders we don't really care about having a fixed economy, having a fixed situation, our job is to make money from it. Personally, I've been dreaming of this moment for three years. I go to bed every night and I dream of another recession. When the market crashes... if you know what to do, if you have the right plan set up, you can make a lot of money from this."

"This is not a time right now for wishful thinking that governments are going to sort things out. The governments don't rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world," said Rastani.

He expressed an eager hope that the economy would crash in the next year because it was going to make him very rich. These are the people who will control events. Unless we restore some of the regulations removed by the last four presidents prior to Obama. One good idea would be to place a tiny transaction tax on share trading.

"...a tax of just 0.05 percent (one twentieth of one percent) levied on each stock, bond, derivative or currency transaction would be aimed at financial institutions’ casino-style trading, which helped precipitate the economic crisis. Because these markets are so vast, the tax could raise hundreds of billions of dollars a year globally for cash-strapped governments and could increase development aid."

It might also help limit the large financial speculators who buy thousands of shares for split seconds and then sell them, forcing the markets quickly up or down in massive computer driven gyrations. Those gyrations are making traders rich because they earn fees for every transaction. These traders profit from a panicked market. They profit from inadequate public information, from their own prior information or inside information, from asymmetries of information and from broad insecurities and public worries.

Barbara Ehrenreich has a very good piece in the Washington Post. How strange it is to live in a country where most people are hurting, worried and living at their limits but the rich are treated like a special protected class. It's worth reading and sharing.

"...consider Daphne Guinness, profiled at length in this past week’s New Yorker, who is apparently best known for wearing clothes, which she draws from a wardrobe of 2,500 garments, 450 pairs of shoes and 200 handbags. On the day she was interviewed, she wore a high-collared, presumably bespoke shirt by uber-designer Alexander McQueen, “a pave diamond brooch,” silver sheaths on two of her fingers and “custom-made sparkly silver Mary Janes, with a three inch platform under the toe” — not the heel, the toe. Well, to each her own, but she might as well walk around Manhattan wearing a sign saying “My husband stole your pension.”" The super rich are flaunting again because they've been rebranded by the Republicans as "Job Creators"––without creating any jobs. Their money isn't invested in factories or employees but luxury goods.

But anyone or any party that takes the side of the poor against the rich or the powerless many against the powerful few will find he has powerful enemies. Money puts people in office and guess where the money is. Meanwhile we have a large powerful political and media apparatus devoted to the aid and protection of the very rich: the Republican Party, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the entire Murdoch operation, and most of talk radio.

High and Low

Why is our economy so miserable right now? Americans work harder, longer, for less money. Where have the fruits of increased productivity gone? Look up.

As this article in the Guardian reports, CEOs are getting paid big money. It's even bigger when they fire more people (and pay less––or nothing––in taxes.)

Which may explain what's happening to the people in the middle. Middle class workers are becoming extinct. How do we know? Corporate planners are no longer planning for the middle class consumer. New products are aimed at the rich and the poor. High and low. The Guardian has noted this trend, as has the Wall Street Journal.

The middle class is a shrinking market, and it's shrinking because of policies pushed by business and their political allies. For the past twenty years companies have been offshoring jobs––helped by "conservatives" in Washington. For thirty years they've been killing unions. Corporations with cash are buying out competitors and firing their workforce. It's a downward spiral. What's strange is the way millions of American workers are collaborating with their own degradation. And how is it good for business for consumers to have less money to spend?

We are becoming Mexico, Columbia, Nigeria. We are becoming a "Banana Republic", thanks mostly to Banana Republicans. And it isn't the store. It's much less pleasant.

Look at Rick Perry's Texas. The job growth he's touting has a worrisome pattern. The Guardian has a story today on the nature of those new jobs. They pay poverty wages.

The other jobs Rick Perry "created" in Texas, the ones paying a decent livable wage, are government jobs, the kind of jobs Republicans normally hate.