There's Just Something About Mayo Pete... And It Goes Beyond Icky

During the debate Thursday there were times I nearly shut the TV off. Those times were when the corporate conservatives on the stage were speaking: Status Quo Joe, Amy Klobuchar and Mayo Pete. The feeling drove me to run a quickie twitter poll. Participants liked Mayo least-- and by a lot. They sure seem to want to vote him right off the island:

I wonder why. As Bernie pointed out, Biden-- who's old and creepy and a clumsy liar who seems to think feigning indignation and screaming make people less likely to recognize what he's saying as lies-- has more billionaires backing him-- 44-- while Mayo only has 39 billionaires. Biden is disgusting enough for me to absolutely not vote if he's the nominee. But Mayo... is he even worse? Read this report from Max Blumenthal. It's scary and hard to believe but...

Wait, wait... we'll get there is a second. First I want to take issue with Max's first sentence: "In his quest for front-runner status in the 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg has crafted an image for himself as a maverick running against a broken establishment." I don't think so. That image was crafted and perpetrated by, the same person who's been doing his press for years-- Lis Smith, publicist extraordinaire, up against random novices who don't understand the power of publicity and image crafting. Lis is the best. I would have hired her to work in the music business. There are virtually no other political publicists I would say that about. Too bad she's working for Mayo. Max's assertions about Mayo though, run far, far darker than a magical publicist.

Max asserts that the real Mayo is "a neoliberal cadre whose future was carefully managed by the mandarins of the national security state since almost the moment that he graduated from Harvard University." Literally?

After college, the Democratic presidential hopeful took a gig with a strategic communications firm founded by a former secretary of defense who raked in contracts with the arms industry. He moved on to a fellowship at an influential D.C. think tank described by its founder as “a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s.” Today, Buttigieg sits on that think tank’s board of advisors alongside some of the country’s most accomplished military interventionists.

Buttigieg has reaped the rewards of his dedication to the Beltway playbook. He recently became the top recipient of donations from staff members of the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and the Justice Department-- key cogs in the national security state’s permanent bureaucracy.

His Harvard social network has been a critical factor in his rise as well, with college buddies occupying key campaign roles as outside policy advisers and strategists. One of his closest friends from school is today the senior adviser of a specialized unit of the State Department focused on fomenting regime change abroad.

That friend, Nathaniel “Nat” Myers, was Buttigieg’s traveling partner on a trip to Somaliland, where the two claimed to have been tourists in a July 2008 article they wrote for the New York Times.

Their contribution to the paper was not any typical travelogue detailing a whimsical safari. Instead, they composed a slick editorial that echoed the Somaliland government’s call for recognition from the U.S. government. It was Buttigieg’s first foreign policy audition before a national audience.

Under public pressure for more transparency about his work at the notoriously secretive McKinsey consulting firm, the Buttigieg campaign released some background details this December. The disclosures included a timeline of his work for various clients that stated he “stepped away from the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time with a Democratic campaign for governor in Indiana.”

How Buttigieg’s “full-time” role on that gubernatorial campaign took him on a nearly 8,000-mile detour to Somaliland remains unclear.

Buttigieg and Nathaniel Myers spent only 24 hours in the autonomous region of Somaliland. In that short time, they interviewed unnamed government officials and faithfully relayed their pro-independence line back to the readers of the New York Times in a July 2008 op-ed.

The column read as though crafted by a public relations firm on behalf of a government client. In one section, the two travelers wrote that “the people we met in Somaliland were welcoming, hopeful and bewildered by the absence of recognition from the West. They were frustrated to still be overlooked out of respect for the sovereignty of the failed state to their south.”

Since declaring its independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland has campaigned for recognition from the U.S., EU, and African Union. It even offered to hand its deep water port over to AFRICOM, the U.S. military command structure on the African continent, in exchange for U.S. acceptance of its sovereignty.

Several months after Buttigieg traveled to the autonomous region, Al Jazeera reported, “The Somaliland government is trying to charm its way to global recognition.”

And just a few weeks before Buttigieg’s visit, the would-be republic inked a contract with an international lobbying firm called Independent Diplomat, presumably to help oversee that charm offensive.

Founded by a self-described anarchist named Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat represents an array of non and para-state entities seeking recognition on the international stage. Ross’s client list has included the Syrian Opposition Coalition, which tried and failed to secure power through a Western-backed war against the Syrian government.

Independent Diplomat did not respond to questions from The Grayzone about whether it had any role in facilitating the trip Buttigieg and Myers took to Somaliland.

According to John Kiriakou, a former CIA case officer, ex-senior investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and celebrated whistleblower, Somaliland is an unusual destination for tourism.

“There really is nothing going on in Somaliland,” Kiriakou told The Grayzone. “To say you go to Somaliland as a tourist is a joke to me. It’s not a war-torn area but nobody goes there as a tourist.”

Kiriakou visited Somaliland in 2009 as part of an investigation for the Senate Intelligence Committee on what he described as the phenomenon of “blue-eyed” American citizens converting to Islam, traveling to Somalia and Yemen for training with Salafi-jihadist groups, then returning home on their U.S. passports.

To reach Somaliland, Kiriakou said he took an arduous seven-hour journey from the neighboring state of Djibouti. His junket was coordinated by the U.S. ambassador to Djibouti, a regional security officer of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service and an embassy attaché.

“It is not the easiest place to reach and there’s no business to do there,” Kiriakou said.

Whether or not Buttigieg’s trip was coordinated without the assistance of lobbyists, the trip offered him and Myers an opportunity to weigh in on international affairs on the pages of the supposed newspaper of record-- and on an absolutely non-controversial issue.

In his bio, Nathaniel Myers identified himself simply as a “financial analyst based in Ethiopia.” According to his resume, which is available online at Linkedin, he was working at the time as a World Bank consultant on governance and corruption.

By 2011, Myers had moved on from that neoliberal international financial institution to a specialized government at the center of U.S. regime change operations abroad.

Nathaniel Myers’ relationship with the presidential hopeful began at Harvard University. There, they formed two parts of “The Order of Kong,” a close-knit group of political junkies named jokingly for the Chinese restaurant they frequented after intensive discussion sessions at the school’s Institute of Politics.

Like most members of the college-era “order,” Myers and Buttigieg have remained close. When the mayor married his longtime partner in 2018, Buttigieg chose him as his best man.

Myers currently works as a senior advisor for the United States Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives (USAID-OTI) in Washington, D.C. The OTI is a specialized division of USAID that routinely works through contractors and local proxies to orchestrate destabilization operations inside countries considered insufficiently compliant to the dictates of Washington.

Wherever the U.S. seeks regime change, it seems that USAID’s OTI is involved.

In a 2015 op-ed arguing for a loosening of bureaucratic restraints on USAID’s participation in counter-terror operations, Myers revealed that he had “specialized in programming in places like Yemen and Libya”-- two conflict zones destabilized by U.S.-led regime-change wars. (Myers was working as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations at the time, but would return to USAID’s OTI the following year.)

...To Syracuse University professor of African American studies Horace Campbell, youthful cadres like Myers were a symptom of the American university’s transformation into a neoliberal training ground.

“Many idealistic graduates from elite centers such as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Maxwell School of Citizenship of Syracuse University or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University among others had been seduced” into careers with USAID contractors like Creative Associates, Chemonics, and McKinsey, Campbell lamented in a lengthy 2014 survey of the OTI’s sordid record.

“It has been painful,” the professor wrote, “to see the ways in which the so called NGO initiatives have been refined over the past twenty years to support neoliberalism and to depoliticize idealistic students.”

Campbell’s comments painted a clear portrait of Myers, who earned his master’s degree at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School on his way towards becoming a “hard aid” specialist at USAID.

They also captured the psychology of Buttigieg, who celebrated Bernie Sanders as a hero when he was a high school senior, and spoke out against the Iraq war as a Harvard junior before being absorbed into the culture of McKinsey and D.C. institutions like the Truman Center.

When Pete Buttigieg made his journey to Somaliland in 2008, he had just earned a fellowship at the Truman Center, a Washington-based think tank that provided a steppingstone for national security-minded whiz kids like him to leadership positions in the Democratic Party.

Buttigieg likely earned the fellowship after answering an ad like the one the Truman Center published on the website of the Harvard Law School Student Government in 2010. Soliciting applicants for its security fellowship, the center declared that it was seeking “exceptionally accomplished and dedicated men and women who share President Truman’s belief in muscular internationalism, and who believe that strong national security and strong liberal values are not antagonistic, but are two sides of the same coin.”

This was not the first time Buttigieg had dipped his toes into Washington’s national security swamp. After graduating from Harvard, he worked at the Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen that maintained an extensive client list within the arms industry. (As The Grayzone reported, the Cohen Group has been intimately involved in the Trump administration’s bungling regime change attempt in Venezuela).

But it was Buttigieg’s fellowship at the Truman Center that placed him on the casting couch before the Democratic Party’s foreign policy mandarins.

A Tablet Magazine profile of Truman Center founder Rachel Kleinfeld described her as a “gatekeeper and ringleader” whose network of former fellows spanned Congress and the Obama administration’s National Security Council. Her career trajectory mirrored Buttigieg’s.

She had earned degrees at elite institutions (Yale and Oxford, where Buttigieg pursued his Rhodes scholarship) before accepting a job at a private contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, that performed an array of services for the U.S. military and  private spying for intelligence agencies.

Kleinfeld’s boss at the company was James Woolsey, the neoconservative former CIA director who has lobbied aggressively for U.S. military assaults on Iraq and Iran.

...To fill the center’s board of advisers, Kleinfeld assembled a cast of Democratic foreign policy heavyweights whose accomplishments included the devastation of entire countries through regime change wars.

Not enough Democrats know Mayo yet to hate him, but neither do they like him much either-- other than billionaires in Napa Valley wine caves

Among the most notable Truman advisors were Madeleine Albright, the author of NATO’s destruction of Yugoslavia and president of an influence-peddling operation known as the Albright Stonebridge Group; the late Council on Foreign Relations President Les Gelb, who once proposed dividing Iraq into three federal districts along sectarian lines; former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who oversaw record levels of migrant deportations; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department policy planning director who conceived the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) doctrine deployed by the Obama administration to justify NATO’s disastrous intervention in Libya and drum up another one against Syria.

“The Truman Project mobilizes Democrats who serve the conventional interventionist agenda,” journalist Kelly Vlahos wrote. “Beyond that, they are part of a broader orbit of not so dissimilar foot soldiers on the other side of the aisle.”

Buttigieg listed his fellowship at the Truman Center as one of the credentials that qualified him for Indiana State treasurer when he ran for the position in 2010.

Though he lost in a landslide, Buttigieg won election as mayor of South Bend the following year. “Mayor Pete” had not only secured his future in the Democratic Party, he had won a place in its foreign policy pantheon with a seat on the Truman Center’s advisory board.

This July 11, Buttigieg rolled out his foreign policy platform in a carefully scripted appearance at Indiana University. Introduced by Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman who was a fixture on the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees, Buttigieg blended a call to “end endless wars” with Cold War bluster directed at designated enemies.

Before an auditorium packed with the national press, he rattled off one of the more paranoid talking points of the Russiagate era, blaming President Vladimir Putin for fueling racism inside the U.S. He then attacked Trump for facilitating peace talks in Korea, slamming the president for exchanging “love letters” with “a brutal dictator,” referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

More recently, Buttigieg’s campaign pledged to “balance our commitment to end endless wars with the recognition that total isolationism is self-defeating in the long run.” This was the sort of Beltway doublespeak that defined the legacy of Barack Obama, another youthful, self-styled outsider from the Midwest who campaigned on his opposition to the Iraq war, only to sign off on more calamitous wars in the Middle East after he entered the White House.

On the presidential campaign trail, “Mayor Pete” has done his best to paper over the instincts he inherited from his benefactors among the national security state. But as the campaign drags on, his interventionist tendencies are increasingly exposed. Having padded his resume in America’s longest and most futile wars, he may be poised to extend them for a new generation to fight.

A couple of significant new stats passed by this week. One is that millionaires as a class support conservative candidates, not progressives, especially not progressives advocating for substantive change. In match-ups, millionaires prefer Status Quo Joe to Trump 48-41%. And the only other Democratic candidate who beats Trump among millionaires is Mayo Pete, who edges past Trump 46% to 43%. Obviously, Trump would easily beat either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren among millionaires. Millionaires want a candidates who isn't going to threaten the status quo-- Biden, Mayo or Trump.

Perhaps more important in terms of what Blumenthal reported above was Susan Page’s report for USA Today in Monday, namely that more than 200 foreign policy and national security professionals, including dozens of veterans of the Obama administration prefer Mayo Pete over Biden. Yep… Mayo is the candidate of the chief purveyors of the security state and the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about.

The text of their joint letter targets President Donald Trump, but the subtext is aimed at former Vice President Joe Biden, who touts his foreign policy experience during the Obama administration as a major asset in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. The endorsements are designed to burnish Buttigieg's credentials as a potential commander in chief and portray him as the leader of a new generation.

…The list of 218 names also includes Anthony Lake, national security adviser for President Clinton; Peter Galbraith, former deputy U.N. envoy to Afghanistan; Virginia Rep. Don Beyer; a dozen former U.S. ambassadors; and former officials from the State Department, Pentagon, CIA, NSC and elsewhere.

"Over the course of the past year, we have watched the emergence of a young leader who shares our belief in America's leadership role and values," the letter says, citing Buttigieg's "intelligence, steadiness, demeanor and understanding of the forces now shaping the world." It praises "his long-term approach to the generational consequences of near-term decisions."

…Buttigieg's ability to command robust support among those who work on national security and foreign policy issues helps him make a key case: that at age 37 and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, he can be entrusted with the presidency and all that involves. Buttigieg is also a former Navy intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan.