It’s been quite the week if you enjoy grinding your molars into powder. Donald Trump’s new deal to replace the nuclear agreement negotiated with Iran by the Obama administration and five other nations is to give the Iranians a totally free hand if they choose to develop a nuclear weapon. John Bolton must be pouting since he thought his deepest desire was finally going to come to pass, with Iran’s nuclear facilities and a bunch of military bases bombed in response to Tehran’s launching of missiles. Such a move could still happen, obviously, and I’ll wager at even odds that it will.
Something you can always count on when a foreign policy crisis pops up is that a bunch of instant experts will also spring up to deliver superficialities they seem to have picked up mostly from Wikipedia entries.
One of these Thursdays I’m going to have to have to devote an entire APR to instant experts among pundits, of whom, despite the dwindling venues for such writing, are legion. The most irksome make their latest firm assertions without acknowledging the misfires of their past assertions. This, of course, is something many politicians and bloggers do with alacrity. But pundits aren’t supposed to be politicians and are by their own reckoning count as a superior breed to bloggers.
But that peeve is for a later APR. On to today’s assortment:
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—My Journey to Radical Environmentalism. It’s never too late to take action aimed at protecting our planet:
I can’t quite remember the moment when I became radicalized about protecting the environment and the planet, but it happened last year. That’s late in life, I know. At 49 years old, it is very possible and even likely that I have more years behind me than in front of me, but that is when it happened.
Before that, I didn’t do more than was required by law. [...]
But something happened to me last year.
Maybe it was Greta Thunberg’s advocacy, and hearing her impassioned United Nations speech in which she blasted world leaders, saying:
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying; entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” [...]
Amanda Marcotte at Salon writes—Having antiwar déjà vu? That's understandable, but it's not 2003 anymore.
As the 2020s kick off, there is much reason to despair. Donald Trump is doing what many of us feared he would, rushing the U.S. into possible war with Iran with an impulsive decision to assassinate Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Understandably, many of us are having flashbacks to 2002 and 2003, when the George W. Bush administration was rushing into a disastrous war with Iraq, based on false evidence.
The parallels are, admittedly, uncanny: An administration that is shamelessly lying to bamboozle the public into supporting the war. Neocons fanning out over cable news, arguing against all common sense (and all available evidence) that the citizens of a sovereign Middle East nation will applaud our military assault on them. A war effort spearheaded by a bunch of overconfident dummies who seem to think this whole thing will be a breeze, when it's all too likely to be a disaster. A media that, all too often, lets lying administration officials go unchallenged when they flog their lies.
Yet as terrible as this situation is, there is one striking difference between now and 2003: Antiwar voices aren't just being taken seriously, but are central to the conversation. If there's any chance of our country pulling out of this nosedive, this difference between now and then is going to be critical.
I think she’s mostly right in that piece. But I’ll go a bit further than she does. While the big media have certainly failed to do as much challenging as they should about Trump’s shipload of lies and bad policies, they are less supine than they were in 2003 and the years immediately afterward, when, for instance, reporters at The Washington Post and The New York Times acted as uncritical conduits for White House war propaganda—one of them, Judith Miller, notoriously so. Or when the Times delayed for a year telling Americans what it had learned about the illegal surveillance the Bush administration had been engaged in since 9/11. This time, more questions are being asked in print, and more answers are being given a written eye-roll or head-shake. I’m not suggesting there isn’t plenty of room for improvement or that other arenas where these media are engaged aren’t still deeply problematic. But a hurrah-and-a-half for steps in the right direction.
David Dayen at The American Prospect writes—Goldman Sachs’s Shell Game: The mega-bank has created 61 different off-balance-sheet corporations with help from companies based in the Cayman Islands. That looks in no way shady!
Tyson Slocum has embarked on a crusade the past few months that would make I.F. Stone jealous. The director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program has stumbled into some genuinely novel evidence about how mega-banks cloak their entry into commodity markets.
First, Slocum found associations between JPMorgan Chase and an allegedly non-affiliated entity buying a power station in El Paso, Texas, links that the bank would eventually acknowledge. But Slocum’s discovery regarding Goldman Sachs seems even more revelatory. The banking giant has set up at least 61 different off-balance-sheet entities controlling various investment assets, all of which have the same three-member panel of “independent” directors.
The directors were all leased from “rent-a-director” firms based in the Cayman Islands, a notorious tax haven. “They’re almost like a dating site, choose your director,” says Slocum, who is protesting one of the entities as it requests regulatory approvals at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
These transparently affiliated shell corporations enable Goldman Sachs to avoid FERC limitations on sales of electric power, bank regulatory requirements around participating in pooled investment funds, merchant banking restrictions, and requirements to add capital in case of losses. “Goldman Sachs has enormous financial and regulatory incentives to keep these entities off the books,” Slocum says. The sham directors fulfill corporate governance rules without having to put the fate of the shell companies in the hands of anyone with independent thought. In other words, it’s a useful and lucrative fiction, manipulating the securities laws to conceal the truth.
Gail Collins at The New York Times writes—President Mitch McConnell. He’s in charge of everything but shooting at Iran:
Dark, suspicious minds wondered if the president had started the whole Iran crisis to get Americans to stop thinking about the impeachment story. Certainly possible. This is a guy who knows how to distract. He golfs, he tweets, he creates crises.
If Trump thought there was any chance of actually getting kicked out of office, God knows what he’d do. Invade another country? Arrest Nancy Pelosi? Pretend to adopt a pet?
Fortunately for him — if not for us — Mitch McConnell is running everything. The House impeachment vote is, of course, a done deal. The bill is going to reach the Senate sometime soon, and the majority leader has been dropping tiny hints that he’s leaning toward giving Trump a pass. (“I’m going to take my cues from the president’s lawyers.”)
During their deliberations, the senators apparently won’t be hearing from John Bolton, who’s now jumping up and down and waving his hand in an effort to volunteer to serve as a witness. Bolton would be the ideal person to ask about Trump’s plan to trade military aid to Ukraine for political dirt on Joe Biden. Granted, he’s a little late out of the gate. Probably been busy searching his conscience. Can’t possibly have anything to do with having a book coming out.
Doesn’t matter. McConnell has expressed zero enthusiasm for the idea of letting Bolton come — unless Donald Trump decides that the Senate’s top priority should be an unconstrained search for the truth. Hehehehe.
Jamelle Bouie at The New York Times writes—The Trump We Did Not Want to See When are we going to stop trying to rationalize the irrational?
Much of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, an American horror and science fiction writer who worked during the first decades of the 20th century, is defined by individual encounters with the incomprehensible, with sights, sounds and ideas that undermine and disturb reality as his characters understand it. Faced with things too monstrous to be real, but which exist nonetheless, Lovecraftian protagonists either reject their senses or descend into madness, unable to live with what they’ve learned.
It feels, at times, that when it comes to Donald Trump, our political class is this Lovecraftian protagonist, struggling to understand an incomprehensibly abnormal president. The reality of Donald Trump — an amoral narcissist with no capacity for reflection or personal growth — is evident from his decades in public life. But rather than face this, too many people have rejected the facts in front of them, choosing an illusion instead of the disturbing truth.
The past week has been a prime example of this phenomenon.
James Carden at The Nation writes—Will This Billionaire-Funded Think Tank Get Its War With Iran?
Consider the following scenario: A Washington, DC–based, tax-exempt organization that bills itself as a think tank dedicated to the enhancement of a foreign country’s reputation within the United States, funded by billionaires closely aligned with said foreign country, has one of its high-ranking operatives (often referred to as “fellows”) embedded within the White House national security staff in order to further the oft-stated agenda of his home organization, which, as it happens, is also paying his salary during his year-long stint there.
As it happens, this is exactly what the pro-Israel think tank the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) reportedly achieved in an arrangement brokered by former Trump national security adviser John Bolton.
The FDD senior adviser on the National Security Council was Richard Goldberg. And the think tank, the FDD, funded by prominent American billionaires such as the financier Paul Singer and Home Depot magnate Bernard Marcus, has relentlessly pushed for a recklessly militaristic US policy against Iran and in the Middle East generally.
The Washington Post Editorial Board concludes that Proclaiming Trump victorious in Iran is shortsighted and premature. Trump must begin serious negotiations with the Islamic republic:
In his White House address Wednesday, Mr. Trump asserted that he would “never let” Iran acquire a nuclear weapon. But, having scrapped the deal that curtailed Iran’s program and plunged into confrontation with the regime, he has articulated no coherent strategy for stopping additional Iranian enrichment of uranium — other than calling on European allies and Russia to give up their attempts to save the pact.
Mr. Trump ought to embrace the pause in hostilities as an opportunity to begin serious negotiations with the Islamic republic. That is the course favored not only by a majority of Americans but also by Mideast allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have been pressing for restraint. Though he nodded to the idea, saying the United States was “ready to embrace peace,” Mr. Trump also said he would intensify already-massive sanctions on Iran. That campaign of “maximum pressure” has failed to bring about the new nuclear negotiations Mr. Trump says he wants, much less the regime collapse or capitulation his more hawkish advisers hope for. But it virtually ensures that Iranian responses like last year’s attacks on Persian Gulf shipping and Saudi oil fields will continue.
Kate Aronoff at The Guardian writes—Republicans preach fiscal conservatism, yet they always find money for war:
If you know who Sean Hannity is, you probably know that he is no fan of the Green New Deal. The proposal has blanketed Fox News since it debuted in November 2018, with Hannity and fellow hosts on the network narrowing in a particular line of attack, summarized during a radio spot he did last year: “What they are proposing is so outrageously expensive and cost prohibitive even they acknowledge that if we confiscated all the billionaires’ wealth, it still wouldn’t be able to pay for this mess of theirs.” Along similar lines, Republicans circulated a bogus study from the industry-funded American Action Forum claiming a Green New Deal would cost $93tn, elevating the number into something of a meme among rightwing talking heads and politicians. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell told his colleagues it would be more than enough to “buy every American a Ferrari”.
Hannity and McConnell, along with most of the rest of the Republican party, have more recently been heaping praise onto Trump for assassinating Iranian Gen Qassem Suleimani. “This is a huge victory for American intelligence, a huge victory for our military, a huge victory for the state department, and a huge victory and total leadership by the president,” Hannity boasted after the killing. Without consulting Congress, the president kicked long-simmering US-Iran tensions up to a boil that now threatens to spill over into another full-blown war in the Middle East. His threats to bomb cultural sites throughout the country – in violation of international law – make that even more likely. So why aren’t Republicans asking how the government would pay for it?
A recent study from Brown University’s Watson Institute found that, since 2001, wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Pakistan have cost the US $6.4tn – $2tn more than all federal spending in 2018. The trouble with a prospective new war in Iran, of course, isn’t that it would cost too much money.
Osita Nwanevu at The New Republic writes—Our Frightening Moment Was Years in the Making. It's comforting to think that 2020's first week of chaos is the fruit of the Trump era, but this has been a long time coming:
It is notable that most mainstream criticisms of Soleimani’s assassination have been centered around questions of strategy—the wisdom of taking out a monster the way Trump did at the time he chose to do it. The questions of prerogative have been all but settled, the last administration having already established that the U.S. can summarily kill almost anyone abroad that the president considers sufficiently dangerous, up to and including American citizens. Similarly, while Trump’s threat to bomb cultural sites in Iran has been denounced widely, easily, and rightfully as a threat to commit war crimes prohibited by international law, that phrase has only ever been fitfully applied to our torture and abuse of military detainees or our efforts to materially aid Saudi Arabia’s ongoing slaughters of civilians in Yemen. There has long been bipartisan ambivalence, overall, about the legal limits of American military activity and aid, and the present tensions have been crafted not only by Trump but by members of the American political establishment. This is why it was unsurprising to hear, as The New York Times has reported, that the killing of Soleimani was pushed aggressively by Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—two men who were fairly ordinary Republicans before the Trump administration and will be ordinary Republicans again when it ends.
The great fear taking hold as Americans watch events in Iran and Iraq unfold is that history might repeat or outdo itself. Pence’s dishonest invocation of 9/11 in defense of the assassination, for instance—the Vice President falsely claimed in a tweet that Soleimani had helped the hijackers travel to Afghanistan—echoes for many the period before the Iraq War, when toppling Saddam Hussein was justified on similar grounds, and enthusiasm for a large, meaningful conflict wholly eclipsed skepticism and reason. But it is estimated by military experts that it would take about 1.6 million troops to capture Tehran—a number that outstrips our current military capacity and could well demand the conscription that was the subject of perhaps thousands of half-ironic social media posts in the immediate wake of Soleimani’s death. This is a political impossibility.
Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Harvard Law School and a constitutional scholar. At The Washington Post, he writes—Don’t allow McConnell to swear a false oath. A nation governed by the rule of law cannot let a senator flout it.
Among the senators who will have to take an oath in the trial of President Trump is the majority leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Yet McConnell has openly declared that he is “not impartial about this at all.” “Impeachment,” the senator has opined, is a “political process. This [sic] is not anything judicial about it.”
But however one characterizes the process of impeachment, an oath is an oath. Even a majority leader — like a president — is not privileged to swear an oath falsely. And whereas most politicians are careful to avoid language that expressly declares the opposite of their pledge, McConnell has openly flouted the Constitution’s clear command to “do impartial justice.” If others follow, it would corrupt the Senate’s role in fairly adjudicating the charges.
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) has called on McConnell to recuse himself. But the issue is far more serious. The real question is for the chief justice, who presides over the president’s trial: Can he accept an oath that he knows is false? Can he seat a juror who he knows has pledged not to be impartial?
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Hey Republicans, demagoguery won’t hide Trump’s incoherence:
President Trump’s incoherent recklessness is not the only problem for U.S. foreign policy dramatized this week. Also troubling is the eagerness of Republicans to fall in behind whatever he does and turn to demagoguery to paint his political opponents as traitors, a term Trump regularly deploys himself.
The surprise winner of the prize for the most mendacious and shameful partisan attack is former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley for her statement on the Democratic response to the killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Many Republicans — and some outside the party’s ranks — once praised her for a certain measured independence and civility.
Not this time. “The only ones that are mourning the loss of Soleimani are our Democrat leadership and our Democrat presidential candidates,” Haley told Fox News. “No one else in the world.”
Wow. Clearly this is a politician who has decided there is no future in GOP politics for anyone but a Trumpian distorter of reality and divider of the American people, even at a moment of crisis.
Greg Shupak at Jacobin writes—Stop the War. Stop US Empire:
Let there be no doubt: if the US-Iranian antagonism explodes, it will be because of this lengthy record of US aggression. Iran hasn’t overthrown what passes for American democracy, forced a dictatorship on it, aided an invasion of the country, participated in chemical warfare against the United States, or destroyed the US economy. The American military has fifty-three military bases and, as of September, between sixty thousand to seventy thousand troops on Iran’s doorstep; at last check, Iran has no bases or soldiers in Canada or Mexico.
It is clear, therefore, who needs to be fought to stop the fighting.
The signs that the United States’ long-running war on Iran will become a larger-scale military conflict are ominous: the Trump administration is sending three thousand more soldiers to the Middle East, on top of the 650 it announced it was deploying on New Year’s Day. It has urged all of its citizens to leave Iraq. Oil prices have surged, and the stocks of Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and other war profiteers have rallied.
What’s at stake in the present moment is full-scale regional conflagration.
Rev. William J. Barber II at The Guardian writes—Evangelicals using religion for political gain is nothing new. It is a US tradition:
Last Friday the Trump 2020 campaign held its first rally at a megachurch. King Jesus international ministries, located outside of Miami, Florida, hosted the Evangelicals for Trump Coalition kick-off. Before boasting about his commitment to fight for the religious right’s agenda, the president bowed his head to receive prayers from prosperity preacher Paula White and other religious nationalists who offer spiritual cover for a corrupt and immoral administration.
As a bishop of the church, I am troubled anytime I see Christianity used to justify the injustice, deception, violence and oppression that God hates. Even if Donald Trump had a perfect personal moral résumé, his policy agenda is an affront to God’s agenda to lift the poor and bless the marginalized. The distorted moral narrative these so-called Evangelicals for Trump have embraced is contrary to God’s politics, which have nothing to do with being a Democrat or Republican. But this misuse of religion is not new. It has a long history in the American story.
When the segregationist George Wallace faced the moral challenge of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights movement in 1960s Alabama, he also called upon religious leaders to vouch for him. “By no stretch of the imagination is George C Wallace a racist,” Dr Henry L Lyon, the pastor of Montgomery’s Highland Avenue Baptist church, testified. “He has shown fairness to all people, regardless of race or color,” the Rev RL Lawrence, a Methodist minister, concurred. They were vouching for the same Wallace who had infamously declared in his inaugural address: “Segregation yesterday, segregation today, segregation forever!” But they had adopted a false morality that framed King as an “agitator” and Wallace as a fair-minded defender of tradition and God’s good order.