Trump Family Corruption-- Unprecedented

 

Who didn't know that the presidential election would devolve into a question about whose family is more corrupt and disgusting/ Democrats don't want to consider that Biden's family is hideous and Republicans don't want to consider that Trump's family is far more hideous-- and I'm certainly not talking about Ivanka being a closeted lesbian, which is so awesome and the least hideous thing I've ever heard about her. [Although I do want more information about why Donald, Jr. hates Barron. That seems beyond the pale, doesn't it?] No, what I'm talking about is the familial corruption. The video above is useful and so is this Dan Alexander piece in Forbes, Forbes Estimates China Paid Trump At Least $5.4 Million Since He Took Office, Via Mysterious Trump Tower Lease. There are so many bits and pieces, deciphering them all and weaving them into an overall narrative will be a journalist-- and, more importantly, a judicial-- cottage industry for years to come.

And who didn't know that Jared was a beard?

It should have been a warning to every viewer of the Thursday debate when Trump asserted that "I don’t make money from China," that hand his spawn were no doubt on the take. And I have no doubt that it goes way beyond Alexander's revelation that he "collected millions of dollars from government-owned entities in China since he took office. Forbes estimates that at least $5.4 million has flowed into the president’s business from a lease agreement involving a state-owned bank in Trump Tower.

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China signed a lease for space in 2008, years before the president took office, paying about $1.9 million in annual rent. Trump is well-aware of the deal. “I’ll show you the Industrial Bank of China,” he told three Forbes journalists touring Trump Tower in 2015. “I have the best tenants in the world in this building.”

Trump moved from the skyscraper to the White House in 2017, but he held onto ownership of the retail and office space in the building, through his 100% interest in an entity called Trump Tower Commercial LLC. That put him in an unusual position, given that government-owned entities in China hold at least 70% of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. Suddenly, a routine real estate deal became a conduit for a foreign superpower to pay the president of the United States.

The arrangement posed legal concerns, since the U.S. Constitution prohibits federal officials from accepting “any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state” without Congressional approval. Ethics experts, who have often focused on the president’s hotel in Washington, D.C., argued that the president would be in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause from the moment he took office.

On January 11, 2017, Trump and his team held a press conference inside Trump Tower, not far from the office of the Chinese bank. Trump’s lawyer, Sheri Dillon, claimed that routine business transactions are not violations of the so-called Emoluments Clause. But she also said the president planned to donate all foreign government profits at his hotel to the U.S. Treasury. The next month, first son Eric Trump, who had just taken over day-to-day operations of his father’s business, told Forbes the donations would come from “all the properties.”

Perhaps Eric Trump meant all hotel properties, because it sure doesn’t seem like the Trump Organization handed over all their profits from the deal with the Chinese. The Trump Organization reportedly donated a total of $343,000 to the U.S. Treasury in 2017 and 2018, Trump’s first two years as president. Yet, a document connected to Trump Tower suggests that over those same two years, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China was set to pay about $3.9 million in rent. Operating profit margins inside the building are an estimated 42%, which would suggest that the deal yielded $1.6 million of earnings over those two years. Even if you only count roughly 70% of that money as coming from the Chinese government, it still adds up to $1.2 million-- or more than three times what the Trump Organization reportedly gave to the Treasury.

The lease was set to expire on October 31, 2019, according to a debt prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2018, the state-owned bank agreed to a new lease in a different office building nearby, suggesting it might leave Trump Tower. But then, the bank decided to stay in the president’s building anyway. “They are keeping a couple of floors,” Eric Trump confirmed onstage at a business conference in October 2019.

The new arrangement is somewhat murky. Contacted Friday morning, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization initially said that the bank had “consolidated with their other offices in New York.” When told that Forbes might publish that statement, the spokesperson then seemed to confirm that the Chinese bank was in fact maintaining space in the building: “They’ve exited the vast majority of their space in Trump Tower.” The website for the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China still lists an address inside Trump Tower.

Trump has other financial connections to China. The New York Times revealed Tuesday that the U.S. president has a bank account in China. His daughter, Ivanka Trump, received 41 Chinese trademarks from the time she was appointed a White House adviser in March 2017 to April 2019, according to an analysis of documents. The review also showed that the trademarks Ivanka applied for after her father’s inauguration got approved about 40% faster than those she sought out beforehand.

You want to see the swamp drained for real?

Remember when Trump campaigned on draining the swamp? That was a joke then because Trump is and has always been the swamp. Yesterday Josh Dawsey, Rosalind Helderman and David Farenthold reminded Washington Post readers that we're living through the most corrupt presidency ever. They noted that "during his four years in office, Trump has taken few steps to clean up Washington. He has instead presided over a norm-shattering expansion of private interests in government. The government has had to spend money at Trump’s private hotels as his family has traveled around the globe. Trump sidestepped rules that had been designed to prevent nepotism, allowing his son-in-law to serve in a top government role. He has touted companies run by supporters and allies who received government contracts. His administration has allowed former lobbyists to serve in jobs in which they have oversight of policies that affect their former employers... [T]he president has worsened Washington’s profiteering culture in nearly every way."

“The whole administration has taken Trump’s tone-- self-dealing, self-enriching, enriching your friends and families-- that’s smart, if you listen to Trump,” he said.

...Rich contributors have long had access to elected officials in Washington, but as president, Trump has dropped any pretense that they should not be afforded special treatment.

Donors and others seeking access appear routinely at his private clubs in Florida and New Jersey, where they have buttonholed the president on the patio or golf course.

The ability of outside favor-seekers to influence Trump has at times worried administration officials. A group of Mar-a-Lago members sought to shape the direction of the Department of Veterans Affairs, as the former VA secretary detailed in a book. Donors attending fundraisers at his Bedminister club weighed in on the GOP tax bill, according to people familiar with internal discussions.

Meanwhile, lobbying firms that can claim access to Trump’s inner circle have thrived.

Barry Bennett, a 2016 Trump campaign adviser and lobbyist for foreign interests, said business for him was booming before the coronavirus pandemic.

The president’s attacks on the swamp have been effective in one way, he said: “To the extent that Washington is less popular, and people are more angry at their government, that’s been the effect of the Trump presidency.”

When Trump launched his presidential bid, he distinguished himself from rivals for the Republican nomination by saying he would fund his own campaign, eschewing the support of donors who he said corrupted the political system by seeking favors in exchange for their contributions. The argument proved powerful with voters.

“I will say this--  [the] people [who] control special interests, lobbyists, donors, they make large contributions to politicians and they have total control over those politicians,” he said at a Republican primary debate in March 2016. “And frankly, I know the system better than anybody else and I’m the only one up here that’s going to be able to fix that system, because that system is wrong.”

He likewise termed super PACs, which can accept unlimited amounts of money, a “disaster.” “They’re a scam,” he said at a debate in October 2015. “They cause dishonesty.”

Trump unveiled the phrase “drain the swamp” in a speech in Green Bay, Wis., in October 2016, wielding it as a weapon against Democrat Hillary Clinton, who was benefiting from a network of wealthy donors that she and former president Bill Clinton had cultivated over four decades.

“There were a lot of Democrats that Trump may not have beaten with that message,” said Charles R. Black Jr., who has worked as a Republican lobbyist and consultant for nearly five decades. “The message worked-- but it worked especially because of who she was.”

It was quickly a hit with Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, entering the lexicon of call-and-response cries at his signature rallies. It remains one of the most popular chants and resonant messages, campaign aides say.

“We’re going to go to Washington. We’re going to drain the swamp,” Trump said at a North Carolina rally in 2016. As the crowd picked up the chant-- “Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp!”-- Trump explained that when he first heard the phrase, he hated it. He thought it was “hokey.” But then he said he noticed how crowds responded.

“The place went crazy,” he said, adding: “Now I love the expression. I think it was genius.”

By then, Trump’s original promises to use his own wealth to power his campaign had crumbled.

He ultimately reported spending $66 million of his own money on his winning campaign, only a small portion of the more than $564 million he raised by the end of 2016. By July 2016, he began appearing at fundraisers for a super PAC supporting his election.

Trump made no pretense of self-funding his 2020 campaign. Instead, he spent four years attending closed-door events for his wealthiest supporters, raising millions of dollars for his campaign and the America First super PAC.

Some of the country’s most powerful individuals have lent their properties for Trump’s gilded fundraising events, from the California hillside mega-mansion of Oracle founder Larry Ellison to the Hamptons beachfront palace of hedge fund manager John Paulson. The entry fee for some: as high as $580,600 a person, with much of the money flowing to the Republican National Committee, which as a party committee can accept large contributions. Many of the events are at Trump’s private clubs or hotels, where donors both contribute to his campaign and stay or dine at his properties.

Donors have gotten access not just to Trump at these events, but also to a range of senior Cabinet officials such as Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and Trump advisers such as Peter Navarro, Kellyanne Conway, Bill Stepien and Corey Lewandowski, invitations show.

While his predecessors typically kept their remarks at donor events short and scripted, Trump speaks loosely and profanely-- even discussing sensitive military operations and vulgarly describing political foes.

...The ability of high-dollar donors to shape Trump’s views was put into sharp relief earlier this year, when onetime Trump supporter Lev Parnas released recordings of events.

In the recordings, one donor could be heard proposing the president hold a summit meeting with Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, at a South Korean golf course he owned. Another donor, who owns a Canadian steel company, pushed Trump to limit steel imports to the United States.

Parnas and his business partner Igor Fruman, who were working with Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, urged the president to recall the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, whom they viewed as unfriendly to interests of a new natural gas company they had formed.

“Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow,” Trump could be heard immediately instructing an aide after the two made the request.

Parnas, now a sharp critic of Trump, has been charged with campaign finance violations and defrauding investors in his company. He has denied wrongdoing. Parnas said it was widely understood by donors that they were paying for face time with Trump.

“Everyone knew that about Trump-- all it took was that one minute, if he liked it,” he said. “It was okay to spend a million dollars on a dinner. Because that dinner could make your whole life.”

...Overall, Trump has largely failed to fulfill the pledges he made in his Green Bay “drain the swamp” speech. He had promised he would push Congress to pass a five-year lobbying ban into law so it could not be lifted by a future president. But he never proposed such legislation. Nor did he ask Congress to impose a similar five-year lobbying ban on its members, as he had promised he would in 2016.

In addition, he never tried to seek to “close all the loopholes” used by former government officials who get around registering as lobbyists by calling themselves “consultants” and “advisers.” And he never acted on his pledge to stop foreign lobbyists from campaign fundraising-- and in fact, has benefited from their financial support.

As his promises to curtail lobbying have faded, Trump allies who can offer insight to private interests have flourished.

“People who know how Washington and the administration works, those people are always going to be valuable,” Bennett said.

...[A] report compiled by Public Citizen in March 2018-- only 14 months into the administration-- found that 133 former lobbyists had been appointed to the Trump administration. They included 60 who had lobbied within two years of joining government and 35 of those former lobbyists were appointed to oversee the specific topics about which they had previously lobbied.

Last year, ProPublica found that at least 33 former Trump administration officials had found ways to essentially lobby after leaving government, despite the supposed five-year ban on such activities. Some styled themselves consultants and advisers-- the kind of end run around the rules that Trump once railed against.

“It’s a meaningless piece of paper that was just put out to live up to the ‘drain the swamp’ promise,” Holman said of the executive order. “No one takes it seriously.”

The Donald Is A Ticking Time Bomb-- But Let's Hope It Isn't A Nuclear one

 

Opposition Research by Nancy Ohanian

Did you watch the "loyalty dinner" scene in Billy Ray's excellent mini-series, The Comey Rule? Writer-director Ray and actor Brendan Gleeson portray Trump as a repulsive mob boss demanding personal loyalty from an very uncomfortable James Comey. Comey made a half-assed attempt to placate Trump but Trump wasn't buying it and it led to Trump's smear campaign against him and eventual humiliating firing.

Something tells me Trump's animus towards Dr. Anthony Fauci is even greater than his hatred for Comey was-- but, for whatever reason, Trump has felt he couldn't fire him before the election. No doubt Fauci will get his walking papers in November.





On Monday Fauci told Jake Tapper that the Trump campaign should stop running a misleading ad that implies Fauci:

a- thinks Trump did a good job on the pandemic
b- is endorsing or even voting for Trump

Neither a nor b is true and Fauci said he thinks "it’s really unfortunate and really disappointing that they did that. It is so clear that I am not a political person and I have never either directly or indirectly endorsed a political candidate. To take a completely out-of-context statement and put it in what is obviously a political campaign ad, I thought, was really very disappointing."

Here's the deceitful ad in question, which Trump refuses to stop running, even though it has been debunked as completely false and even though Fauci doesn't want to be associated with Trump's campaign:





Fauci's official statement to the media: "The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public health officials."

Fauci replied to a question from Tapper about the safety of Trump's super-spreader campaign events. More of what Trump will absolutely see as disloyalty to himself: "We know that is asking for trouble when you do that. We’ve seen that when you have situations of congregate settings where there are a lot of people without masks, the data speak for themselves. And now is even more so a worse time to do that... It's going in the wrong direction right now, so if there's anything we should be doing, we should be doubling down in implementing the public health measures that we've been talking about for so long, which are keeping a distance, no crowds wearing masks, washing hands doing things outside as opposed to inside, in order to get those numbers down... We’re entering into the cooler months of the fall and ultimately the cold months of the winter and that's just a recipe of a real problem. If we don't get things under control before we get into that seasonal challenge."

And Fauci's not the only insider unhappy with the way things are going pandemic-wise. A startling-- but not unpredictable-- NY Times piece yesterday, Trump’s Virus Treatment Revives Questions About Unchecked Nuclear Authority. This is something Ted Lieu has been talking about for several years because, as David Sanger and William Broad reported "Even before the president was given mood-altering drugs, there was a movement to end the commander in chief’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons." Doctors say the steroids he's on can produce delusions, euphoria, bursts of energy "and even a sense of invulnerability."

Trump’s long rants and seemingly erratic behavior last week-- which some doctors believe might have been fueled by his use of dexamethasone, a steroid, to treat Covid-19-- renewed a long-simmering debate among national security experts about whether it is time to retire one of the early inventions of the Cold War: the unchecked authority of the president to launch nuclear weapons.

Mr. Trump has publicly threatened the use of those weapons only once in his presidency, during his first collision with North Korea in 2017. But it was his decision not to invoke the 25th Amendment and turn control over to Vice President Mike Pence last week that has prompted concern inside and outside the government.

Among those who have long argued for the need to rethink presidents’ “sole authority” powers are former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, considered the dean of American nuclear strategists, who has cited the fragility of a nuclear-weapons control chain and the fear that it can be subject to errors of judgment or failure to ask the right questions under the pressure of a warning of an incoming attack.

A Culture Of Violence by Nancy Ohanian

 

Mr. Trump’s critics have long questioned whether his unpredictable statements and contradictions pose a nuclear danger. But the concerns raised last week were somewhat different: whether a president taking mood-altering drugs could determine whether a nuclear alert was a false alarm.

...Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and former government arms scientist, said few things better illustrated the confused nature of the American effort to prevent a single individual from launching a nuclear strike than the “two-man rule” in nuclear silos, submarines, bombers and the nation’s coast-to-coast atomic complex.

The rule requires the presence of two authorized people for any step involving access to the armaments or the launching of a nuclear strike. “No unaccompanied person ever approaches a nuclear weapon,” Dr. Zimmerman wrote in a 2017 opinion essay. “It’s a basic precaution against theft, misuse or sabotage.”

But it does not apply to the commander in chief, whether in the Oval Office or at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

A president could misjudge the situation or become impulsive, Dr. Zimmerman noted in an interview. “And the consequences,” he said, “would be horrendous.”

I asked Ted Lieu about the bill he introduced several times seeking to deal with this problem before it becomes a catastrophe. "No one should have the sole authority to start a nuclear war-- least of all Donald Trump," he told me this morning. "That is why Senator Ed Markey and I have introduced the 'Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act' for the past three congressional terms. We believe that a nuclear first strike constitutes an act of war and thus requires congressional authorization. It is important to note that our legislation does not prevent a president from responding to a nuclear threat in kind-- it just prevents a president from unilaterally starting a nuclear war. There are a myriad of risks associated with not having clear restrictions on a nuclear first strike. There is a risk of miscalculation or misunderstanding escalating to an all-out nuclear war. And there is also the risk that a president becomes completely unhinged and orders a nuclear strike on a whim. We all recall hearing the terrifying stories of the end of the Nixon presidency. I believed in 2016 what I still believe now: launching a weapon that has the power to kill millions of people is an obvious act of war. Regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, Congress has the constitutional duty to decide when a nuclear first strike is warranted."

Arresting National Decline

Desolation, from Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire series

-by Haydar Khan

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.
-Arnold J. Toynbee

What causes national and civilizational decline? Can such decline be reversed? Is the U.S, which currently exhibits multiples signs of national senescence, ranging from its failed response to the Covid–19 pandemic to a longer-running pandemic of prescription drug overdoses to infrastructure decay, truly an exception to this seemingly inevitable force of historical decline? Does the U.S. face a real-world version of Galadriel’s test in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga? Galadriel, an elf-like queen who is offered and resists the One Ring, a magical device that corrupts and eventually destroys any wielder, states: “I pass the test... I will diminish, and pass into the West and remain Galadriel.” What is our American “One Ring”? It is the myth of American Exceptionalism to all forms of decline.

The phenomenon of national and civilizational decline has been examined by historians and intellectuals for centuries. The most prominent account of decline comes from English historian Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This six-volume series, published from 1776-1789, largely attributed Roman decay to a decline in civic virtue and the influence of a rising Christianity. Oswald Spengler, the German historian and philosopher active in the early decades of the last century, studied the life cycle of human societies and offered his thoughts in his two-volume The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1923. In Spengler’s view, there were two phases in human societies: a Culture phase, characterized by creativity and growth, and a decline phase of stifling practicality in lieu of creativity, which Spengler called the Civilization phase. Arnold Toynbee, the noted British historian, devoted immense penmanship to the life cycles of human civilizations. A Study of History is a twelve-volume work written over three decades (1934–1961). In this vast endeavor, Toynbee developed a model to explain the beginnings and ends of civilizations. For Toynbee, growth is led by a creative minority and decline is caused by the inability of the creative minority, to continue innovating. Philosopher Henri Bergson, we may note, had earlier explored the same themes in Creative Evolution and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, his final two books.

Gibbon, Spengler, and Toynbee provide descriptions of decline and explanations for it, but none of these men offer specific prescriptions for halting decline. (Only Bergson makes such an attempt.) In our time, however, there are two thinkers given to systematic design who have compelling, technically accomplished, and somewhat overlapping explanations as to the root nature of our twenty-first century decline. At the same time, each has proposed solutions that are, for the most part, in stark contrast to each other. These contemporary American thinkers are Professor James K. Galbraith, the progressive economist, and Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and entrepreneur.

Professor Galbraith’s explanation of U.S. decline is nothing if not comprehensive. He finds the root cause in the economic sphere, generated by a set of interlinking factors. Galbraith accompanies his exploration of the economics of decline with a short set of measured, New Deal-style, risk-averse prescriptions for reversing it. All this is laid out in The End of Normal, a work focused primarily on the U.S. case.

Peter Thiel’s focus is on U.S. and (more broadly) Western decline. He, too, offers an economic explanation for America’s condition. Reflecting his background as a venture capitalist, Thiel’s thesis is rooted primarily in technological stagnation. But his proposal for reversing America’s decline transcends the economic and technological spheres to incorporate cultural and psychological considerations. This is a strength. It is a common error to treat economics as divorced from cultural, historical, and psychological considerations. It is Thiel’s move beyond economics that, I contend, will earn his solutions acceptance in lieu of Galbraith’s. What is the specific advantage that Thiel’s movement has? It lies in his resort to the scapegoat mechanism of Thiel’s intellectual mentor, the late Réne Girard.

Let us explore the analyses and proposals of Galbraith and Thiel, two formidable theorists in the Toynbee tradition, and consider carefully the insights of Réne Girard, the French social critic, historian, and philosopher, who professed at Stanford for many years before his death in 2015.

● ● ●

James Galbraith is a public intellectual with numerous articles and books to his credit on an impressive variety of topics. His investigations range from income inequality and financial corruption to militarism. Galbraith has argued in the past, most notably in The Predator State (2008) that the U.S. government has been captured by oligarchs and has been repurposed from serving the public good to enriching said oligarchs. Assailing wealthy, powerful elites and fighting for the public purpose is a tradition that Galbraith inherits from his father, the late John Kenneth Galbraith, a prominent economist and Rooseveltian New Dealer. In this context, it may surprise those familiar with Galbraith père et fils that six years ago the younger man published The End of Normal, a pessimistic book about America’s poor growth prospects.





In Normal, Galbraith argues that there are four fundamental and interacting components to the economic decline of the U.S. The first is a choke-chain effect on economic growth, when demand for natural resources (primarily hydrocarbons) exceeds available supply. The Covid–19 crisis has altered this imbalance, but only temporarily, not structurally. As is well-known, the U.S. emerged from World War II an undamaged industrial colossus relative to a devastated Western Europe and an exhausted Soviet Union. It was awash in its abundant oil resources and able to secure access to foreign resources by way of, among other things, the efforts of U.S. intelligence services. These factors allowed America to embark on a path of stable economic growth that endured until the first oil shock of the 1970s. But the scale and efficiency the U.S achieved due to these circumstances came with a tradeoff: The increase in economic size meant a larger proportion of total production costs would be fixed: expenses, such as infrastructure and pensions, that are inelastic because they are not dependent on the level of goods or services produced.

These fixed costs skyrocketed with the first oil shock and brought stable economic growth in the U.S. to a very abrupt halt. The two oil shocks thus induced a period of economic uncertainty due to the decline of cheap, steady oil supplies. This was structural, as against situational disruption, which is what the spread of Covid–19 faces us with today. Increased financialization and speculation characterized the economic system that evolved to cope with this reduction in opportunity for “honest profit.” Here we find the choke-chain effect: The shift toward finance capital inflated the price of scarce resources, so slamming the lid on future growth.

This transformation of the U.S. economy into a financialized/speculative mode is Galbraith’s second factor to explain U.S. economic decline. Here he considers the “financial casino” induced by the unstable nature of commodity prices and de- regulation. This, he argues, has resulted in chicanery not only in the commodities markets but also in the information-technology sector. Out of this came the dot.com crash in 2000 and subsequently the collapse of the once-stable U.S mortgage market, which led to the great financial crisis of 2008. As Galbraith excellently puts it: “Fraud is a response, in short, to the failure of lenders to adjust to a decline in real possibilities.”

The third of Galbraith’s decline factors is the changing nature of warfare. This leaves the once-preeminent U.S. military incapable of projecting power in a transformed geopolitical environment and securing dependable access to cheap resources (linking into the aforementioned factor of rising resource costs).

Galbraith goes on to identify other shifts that render the U.S. military unable to conduct war effectively: the increasingly urban nature of conflict zones, the evolution of asymmetric technologies (drones, explosives), an ever-present media and readily available internet access to facilitate rapid reporting that reveals the carnage of war, short tours of duty that are insufficient in establishing stable long- term occupations, the decline in duration of military occupations, and the immense cost of training and maintaining soldiers.

Galbraith’s fourth and final factor is the rate of “creative destruction” in the digital technology sphere. This is destroying more jobs than it is creating, he argues. The growth-dampening effect of this “digital storm” is two-pronged, as Galbraith explains: “First, the price of the equipment required to make the new digital products—measured per unit of output-- falls rapidly over time, reducing the value of business investment in the GDP. Second, the products themselves replace marketable output.”

What to do about these four impediments to economic growth? This is Galbraith’s question, and his replies are as follows: reduce military spending, decentralize banking, regulate and reduce the size of influential financial institutions, strengthen existing public-insurance programs, temporarily lower age requirements for Social Security, increase the minimum wage, and increase estate and gift taxes to reduce dynastic wealth and encourage philanthropy. The purpose of these modest proposals is to achieve a sustainable, slow-growth economic model. Galbraith’s proposals to combat decline are at their core redistributionist in the New Deal tradition, but they are rather tame next to the New Deal Keynesians of the 20 th century. The reason for this intellectual caution? Galbraith states his case clearly: “The institutional, infrastructure, resource basis, and psychological foundations for a Keynesian revival no longer exist.”

From the vantage point of 2020, Galbraith’s case seems amply supported by evidence. Barak Obama, instead of ushering in a New Deal 2.0 in response to the 2008 financial crisis, bailed out Wall Street, failed to punish speculators, delivered only moderate economic stimulus, and pushed for lobbyist-friendly medical reform legislation that failed to correct the many defects of the U.S. health-care system. When Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders ended his second presidential bid on April 8, it marked another failure to bring a program of fundamental reforms-- a program intended at its core to reverse the trend toward decline-- into the White House. The Covid–19 crisis, despite its severity and urgency, does not appear to be prompting any new efforts in this direction.

● ● ●

Peter Thiel made his initial fortune by co-founding (and then selling) the electronic-payments service PayPal. Since that time, Thiel has created various other enterprises, ranging from venture-capital firms such as Founders Fund to a data-analysis firm named Palantir. In addition to his success as a venture capitalist, Thiel is member of the steering committee of the Bilderberg meetings, an annual conference where European and American elites discuss how to maintain and promote free-market capitalism. He was a supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, a highlight of which was Thiel’s delivery of a pro–Trump speech at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. In that speech, Thiel explained Trump’s rise as a response to national decline resulting from the damaging consequences of free trade, out-of-control militarism, increasingly expensive health care, rising student loan debt, and stagnant wages. Galbraith, of course, shares many of these concerns.





Thiel’s explanation for our national decline has been delivered, with much more detail, in various other formats over recent years. An essay Thiel wrote for the National Review (2011) elaborates his declinist viewpoint. In The End of the Future, Thiel argues that technological and scientific progress, the basis for economic growth, have stalled out. The lack of innovation in energy, agricultural, medicine, and science in general, he contends, have cut into standards of living that can no longer be attenuated by accumulation of consumer debt and cheap goods from free-trade partners, particularly China. Even gains in the digital tech sector, where Thiel made his initial fortune, are explained as having stalled out and now amount to illusory productivity.

So far, Galbraith and Thiel seem to be traversing similar paths, especially as regards the impediments to growth of rising resource costs and increased digitization. However, Thiel diverges from the progressive Galbraith and speculates that the decline in technological innovation has been concealed by battles over identity politics. It is here Thiel begins to bring questions of culture and psychology into his inquiry. As he puts it: “Today’s aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere.” Thiel has recently fleshed out his proposal for dealing with this decline in a speech delivered at the first National Conservativism Conference in July 2019. In “The Star Trek Computer Is Not Enough,” he retraces the ground covered in his earlier National Review essay while also exploring new themes. He assails Silicon Valley for its lack of innovation and its too-close-for-comfort relationship with China, while also attacking China for its unfair trade practices.

Later in the speech, Thiel also delivers a jeremiad against higher education for handing out overrated, grade-inflated educations and saddling students with debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. He claims that, as mentioned in the National Review piece, the American left ignores national decline by obsessing over identity politics, while the right is in a state of denial about national decline as it insists that the U.S. is “exceptional” and immune to such decay. This is Thiel’s argument for registering a psychological component in any effort to achieve the national solidarity necessary to channel government resources into reversing decline. Indeed, Thiel, who is known for his adherence to libertarian philosophy, acknowledges that government in the past was capable of achieving amazing feats, such the Manhattan Project and the Interstate Highway System. Its shambolic response to the Covid–19 pandemic stands as tragic testimony to the lapse of “can- do” America.

What, then, is this psychological factor that can reverse our national decline, so overcoming the hurdles on right and left? This is Thiel’s question. His reply appears to be the use of Girard’s famous scapegoat mechanism to break a societal bottleneck.

● ● ●

Réne Girard was a French polymath who made intellectual contributions to a wide variety of fields, ranging from philosophy to anthropology. He is best known for his theories of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism. Mimetic desire is the theory that mimicry (imitation) is fundamental for human society. It is necessary to acquire skills, as in an apprenticeship, but left unchecked, unrestricted mimesis causes us to covet what others have. This Girard calls mimetic desire. Desire of this kind can escalate and lead to conflict and violence. In essence, a contradictory conflict of societal messaging (mimicry is necessary and mimicry is dangerous), results in what fellow polymath Gregory Bateson called a double bind.

Girard’s solution to nullifying this double bind is his other well-known intellectual contribution: the just-mentioned scapegoating mechanism. According to Girard, society nullifies the Batesonian double bind by committing what is called a Logical Types error (a member of a group taken to represent the entire group) and assigning blame to an innocent victim called a scapegoat. Consequently, if the scapegoat is sacrificed, the potential for violence can be discharged and societal cohesion maintained. A good example of scapegoat theory is Christianity itself. Jesus represents a vessel of sorts, taking upon himself the sins of mankind and extinguishing them upon his death on the cross.

Peter Thiel has acknowledged Girard’s impact on his life and way of thinking (here and here) and even spoke at a memorial service for Girard after he died.

Although Thiel does not acknowledge doing so, it appears he has taken Girard’s insights and applied them to the political realm. In effect if not by conscious design, he has selected as collaborative scapegoats Google, the politically correct “left,” and China. It appears that Thiel, and fellow travelers such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, want to rally the fractious American people (as FDR did in is time) by focusing their anger on enemies, foreign and domestic, to generate unity and get the populace to consent to great technological innovations underwritten by the government while being distracted from the true sources of our inability to progress technologically and economically. If the culprits above are scapegoats in the Girardian sense, to what degree is the blame laid upon them false, and what true culprit is Thiel distracting from?

As Galbraith pointed out in The End of Normal, the era of solid economic growth from the end of World War II to the oil shock of the 1970’s has been over for quite a while. What we in the U.S. experience now is a consequence of the end of that solid growth era: a country ruled by corporate elites who have captured the machinery of government to enrich themselves at the expense on non-elites. This is what Galbraith calls the predator state. These predatory oligarchs and their rule of the country are what Thiel, a billionaire, seems to want to distract from while simultaneously drumming up anger against his coalition of scapegoats to make possible great technical and scientific projects underwritten by the government. What about Thiel’s scapegoats?

Thiel has made the accusation that Google is committing treason by working for the Chinese government on AI research, spurning working with the U.S. government, and should be investigated by the FBI and the CIA. It appears, however, that Thiel, as a libertarian, has ideological opposition to AI and is ideologically and personally given to cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin in particular. As Thiel said in an interview with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman: “Crypto is decentralizing, AI is centralizing. Or, if you want to frame it more ideologically, crypto is libertarian and AI is communist." There is a further irony, in that Thiel’s company Palantir, is utilized by various U.S. government agencies for data collection and surveillance, a seeming contradiction for an ideological libertarian.

What of the PC left and its obsession with identity politics? There may be a kernel of truth to Thiel’s accusation that the American left’s obsession with identity politics conceals the lack of material progress in the U.S. since the end of the era of solid growth. Intellectuals on the left, such as the American literary theorist Walter Benn Michaels and political scientist Adolph Reed, have long criticized leftist obsessions with identity politics as a neoliberal weapon to distract from issues of class and economic inequality. Thiel has taken this issue, grounded in reality, and intertwined it with his dislike of his ideological enemies, Google and China. As he stated in an interview with conservative TV personality Tucker Carlson: “There’s probably a broad base of Google employees that are ideologically super left wing, sort of woke, and think that China’s better than the U.S. or that the U.S. is worse than China.”

We arrive at the dominant scapegoat in Thiel’s playbook: China. Like Thiel’s accusation against the left, his scapegoating of China has kernels of truth in it. There were warnings about the dangers of free-trade agreements such as GATT in the early 1990’s. Sir James Goldsmith, financier and politician, cautioned about the dangers in his books The Trap and The Response. In particular, Goldsmith was concerned about the negative effects of labor arbitrage on the fabric of Western societies and even had a prescient warning about China’s ability to provide Western corporations with a massive reservoir of cheap labor and run large trade surpluses: “China is determined to recapture its preeminence in Asia and to make itself so strong that it will never again be subjected to perceived slights or indignities from the West. If it keeps itself together, it will become a great world superpower, geopolitically, militarily and economically.” Goldsmith published this thought in 1995. Fast forward to 2020: China is by some measures the world’s largest economy, the world’s leading manufacturing economy, and largest exporter of goods. It has ambitious plans (Made in China 2025) to move beyond dominance in manufacturing cheap goods and dominate high-tech industries such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology.

So it appears Thiel’s focus on China is not without merit. But he seems to want take a highly competitive rival and convert it into an enemy of the U.S., as evidenced his numerous speeches and interviews about China. Adversary and competitor are two different things. There is a bit of blame deflection here, as it was U.S. corporations and their owners who chose (and were not forced) to engage in free trade with China, taking advantage of its massive army of cheap labor and nonexistent safety standards for profit-- and thus abetting China’s growth into a formidable economic powerhouse.

● ● ●

If we are to accept Galbraith or Thiel in their respective explanations for decline and their propositions for reversal, then the U.S. has two paths before it: a moderate approach using New Deal Lite economic mechanisms to achieve a slow yet growing economy, or a bold, risk-taking approach to governance that relies on the primordial scapegoating mechanism described by Réne Girard.

The major issue with Galbraith’s progressive approach is that the solidarity needed to achieve even the slow-growth approach he advocates is notoriously absent. This is the missing psychological factor that Galbraith acknowledged was necessary for another full-blown New Deal and is a critical limiting factor in this weaker case as well. Indeed, it was only the threat of the rising fascist tide that united the citizenry and enabled FDR to ramp spending to levels that ended the Great Depression in America, not the New Deal. The looming threat of environmental devastation from climate change would seem to have the necessary properties needed to unify the populace but the abstract nature of such a collective action problem (“the enemy is us”) seemingly puts such an approach out of reach.

The current divide between the American left and right appears to be an unbridgeable, ever-widening gap, making bipartisan electoral support for Galbraithian reform measures extremely unlikely. Indeed, even among what passes for the left in the U.S. is caught up in internecine battles over class issues (evinced by Bernie Sanders populism) versus culture and identity issues. The consequences of this battle were on full display in the results of the 2020 Super Tuesday elections. Bernie Sanders, standard bearer of a class focused American progressivism, was trounced by corporatist Democrat Joseph Biden, who dominated him among African–American voters and female voters. This autumn’s election, however it is fought amid the Covid–19 crisis, could well deliver Biden to the White House. Unfortunately, Biden is far less likely to attempt Galbraithian reforms than Sanders, as Biden is a defender of the Obama status quo. Indeed, as this essay is being finalized, an Obama alumnus, former Secretary of the Treasury, Lawrence Summers, is apparently advising Biden on his post-Covid-19 economic revival plan. Therefore, due to partisan divisions and lack of a unifying threat, it seems that the Galbraithian approach is doomed to fail.

It appears that Thiel notes this weakness in collective psychology and goes on to exploit the left’s fractious state. In brilliant, Aikido-like fashion, he converts it into a domestic scapegoat (part of what his ally Hawley calls the “cosmopolitans”) to unite the right and political moderates-- and distract, essential to note, from the corporate oligarchy. In addition to taking advantage of the left’s division by employing the scapegoat mechanism, Thiel targets China, bundled together with the ineffective left and technical rival Google, as a replacement for the old Cold War scapegoat, the defunct Soviet Union. The Soviet threat, however formidable or otherwise, induced a level of domestic political cooperation and national unity that allowed for great endeavors such as the aforementioned Interstate Highway Program, so this method has a proven track record.

One flaw in Thiel’s approach is that, as Galbraith points out, the material conditions that allowed for ambitious, Manhattan Project-level investments are no longer present. What government programs might have to be sacrificed to achieve such endeavors? Thiel himself states in the aforementioned “The End of the Future” essay: I am not aware of a single political leader in the U.S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research-- or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects. This connects to another potential flaw in Thiel’s scheme: Will the psychological advantage of Thiel’s strategy be sustainable if, say, what remains of the social safety net is sacrificed for such purposes? Why not reroute spending from a wasteful (and ineffective, as argued by Galbraith) military to bolster industrial R&D ambitions. Perhaps Thiel ironically needs to reject another sacred tenet of free-market orthodoxy, fear of national debts and deficits. Thiel has already demonstrated his capacity to reject herd thinking, as he has rejected the aversion to government supported industrial policy. This would allow preservation of the social safety net while simultaneously embarking on an expansion of what economists call the Production Possibilities Frontier. However, an embrace of a heterodox school of thought like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) may be beyond the pale, even for Thiel. In addition to backlash from shredding the social safety net, what civil liberties might be sacrificed in the name of waging a new Cold War against China? Right now (March 2020), the U.S. and much of the world is under threat of the virus Covid–19, which seemingly originated in China. Senator Hawley has used this as a springboard to drum up support for an investigation into a coverup by China and, along with others, has even implied that China owes the U.S. and the world reparations for the virus. At the same time, many countries (Israel, China, UK) are implementing harsh measures to quash the virus. Will the protections of the U.S. Constitution be shredded to stop the growth of the viral infections and simultaneously be weaponized to quell dissent against a war with China?

Does Thiel nurse mimetic desire for what China-- with its social cohesion, manufacturing capacity, and ability to plan-- is able to accomplish and the U.S. cannot any longer? The connections Thiel makes between economics and other factors are astute, as are the connections that Galbraith makes. But as they stand, neither position is likely to make headway by itself. There are numerous reasons for this, as I have suggested. It begins to look as though the way out of our national impasse lies in a system beyond that of the purely Schumpetarian approach of Thiel and the purely Rooseveltian approach of Galbraith, a synthesis that takes the best of both positions and provides a way forward for the U.S.

A special thanks to P.L., J.G., and I.W. for their feedback and assistance.

THE LANCET Praises Chinese Model For Coronavirus Policies

-by Eric Zuesse

The Lancet, which is perhaps the world’s most influential medical journal and is the one that concentrated immediately on, and has concentrated the longest on, the coronavirus-19 pandemic, headlined an editorial on July 25th, “COVID-19 and China: lessons and the way forward”, and they opened:

China has largely controlled COVID-19. A country of 1.4 billion people and a size similar to Europe or the USA now reports only clusters of cases rather than widespread community transmission. China has been widely criticised for its role and responsibilities during the pandemic because of censorship, transparency, and human rights concerns. But the rest of the world can still learn from China's successes in bringing its outbreak under control.

They said that the first lesson to be learned from China’s remarkably successful response to the Covid-19 challenge is "China’s response shows the importance of domestic research and public health capacity." The Chinese Government has devoted "huge investments" to public health, which left the nation "much better prepared."

A second lesson is that a robust foundation of research cannot guarantee effective control without strong top-level political commitment to use science to tackle the outbreak decisively. Governments and their leaders must respect science, understand its value, and act on it in a way that is best for society. China’s National Health Commission sent three groups of national infectious disease experts to Wuhan at the beginning of the outbreak to investigate the risks and transmission of COVID-19, and their recommendations informed the decision to lockdown Wuhan on Jan 23. When Chen Wang, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and colleagues saw the need for Fangcang shelter hospitals, the government was quick to respond.

Third, achieving rapid and effective implementation of control measures for COVID-19 requires broad community engagement. Community solidarity has been unprecedented during the COVID-19 outbreak in China. Control measures that could sacrifice individual freedom, like mandatory mask-wearing in public areas, were accepted readily by the public.

They conclude: “China is facing legitimate questions in many areas of its domestic and foreign policy, but when it comes to COVID-19, scapegoating China for the pandemic is not a constructive response.”

Nothing is said there about the performance of other countries.

According to the available statistics, here are the world’s most-successful countries at dealing with the coronavirus-19 crisis. Some of these nations are in civil wars which cause few people to want to visit them; some aren’t much participating in international trade and therefore have little traffic with foreigners; some are terribly poor and therefore have almost no tourist industry, others might soon burst out with soaring increases in cases or deaths. But some of these countries are just doing a spectacularly outstanding job of protecting their populations, vastly better than are countries such as the United States, which has 12,763 coronavirus-19 cases per million inhabitants and 447 coronavirus-19 deaths per million inhabitants, thus far. ONLY COUNTRIES WITH 5 MILLION+ PEOPLE ARE BEING CONSIDERED HERE:

lowest cases per million inhabitants: Laos=3, Papua=4, Vietnam=4, Myanmar=6, Tanzania=9, Cambodia=12, Taiwan=19, Uganda=14, Angola=27, Burundi=29, Syria=35, Niger=46, Thailand=47, Burkina Faso=51, Mozambique=51, Chad=56, Yemen=56, China=58, DRC=98, Togo=100, Ethiopia=110, Jordan=112, Tunisia=120, Mali=123, Sri Lanka=129, Rwanda=132, Benin=140, Zimbabwe=143, Malawi=177, Nigeria=189, S. Sudan=200, Zambia=209, Japan=214, Cuba=218, Sierra Leone=219, Liberia=224, Sudan=257, S. Korea=273, Malaysia=274, Kenya=302, N.Z.=311, Madagascar=315, Hong Kong=316, Libya=336, Indonesia=349, Slovakia=388, Greece=397, Hungary=455, Venezuela=479, Lebanon=499, Morocco=510, Guinea=518, Nicaragua=519, Australia=533, Congo=550, Senegal=562, Ivory Coast=568, Uzbekistan=573, Paraguay=576, Algeria=596, Cameroon=629, Nepal=630, Haiti=631, Philippines=697, Tajikistan=744, Egypt=883, Afghanistan=923, India=968, Ghana=976.

lowest deaths per million inhabitants:

0=Cambodia, Laos, Papua, Vietnam
0.02=Uganda
0.08=Burundi
0.1=Myanmar
0.3=Taiwan
0.4=Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania
0.5=Sri Lanka
0.8=Thailand
1=Angola, Jordan
2=DRC, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, Nepal, Syria, Togo, Zimbabwe
3=Benin, Burkina Faso, China, Guinea, Madagascar, Niger, Uzbekistan
4=Malawi, Malaysia, Ivory Coast, N.Z., Nigeria, S. Sudan, Tunisia
5=Australia, Chad, Ghana, Kenya, Paraguay, Singapore, Slovakia, Venezuela
6=Mali, Somalia, S. Korea, Tajikistan
7=Lebanon, Zambia
8=Cuba, Japan Libya, Morocco, Sierra Leone
9=Congo
10=Uruguay
11=Senegal
13=Haiti
14=Liberia, Palestine
16=Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Sudan, Yemen
17=Bangladesh, Indonesia, Philippines
19=Greece
23=India
26=Algeria, Pakistan
31=Afghanistan, Kazakhstan
34=Czechia

How Many Books Will Trump Try To Censor Before The Election?

Trump isn't suing [UPDATE: oops!]  his niece and isn't that worried about the harrowing and salacious book, Too Much and Never Enough, that's being released next month (July 28). (Pre-sales drove it into the best seller list already.) But he-- or at least Barr on his behalf-- is suing his former national security advisor, John Bolton, to prevent the release of his memoir, The Room Where It Happened. It's not salacious but from what I'm hearing it is absolutely devastating.

Martha Raddatz taped an interview with Bolton for ABC News this Sunday. It's supposed to be top secret but an old friend of mine who did watch it (the whole show, not this), on the down low-- and who is not given to hyperbole, told me that it will be "the most damning report in American politics ever." Oo; can't wait.


In fact, at least in part, we don't have to. Some of the best parts started leaking out today. Writing for the Washington Post earlier, Josh Dawsey noted that, according to Bolton, during a one-on-one meeting at the June 2019 Group of 20 summit in Japan, Xi "Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win the 2020 U.S. election, telling Xi during a summit dinner last year that increased agricultural purchases by Beijing from American farmers would aid his electoral prospects... [having] turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win." Bolton further wrote that "I would print Trump’s exact words but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise." Maybe it was just a coincidence, but Trump gave Xi the thumbs up on China's policy of building concentration camps for the Uighurs... Bolton says he was so alarmed by Trump’s determination to do favors for autocrats such as Erdogan and Xi that he scheduled a meeting with William Barr in 2019.





Too bad the DNC isn't as nimble and quick on its feet as the Lincoln Project appears to be. I guess the DNC is too busy undermining progressives to bother with Trump, though.

ABC New reported yesterday that the Trumpist Justice Department's 27page filing "also requests that a judge order Bolton to take any actions 'within his power' to stop the publication of his book as it's currently drafted and 'retrieve and dispose' of any copies that may have been sent out to third parties. The DOJ additionally requests for Bolton to be ordered not to further disclose information he wrote about in the book or release details 'in any form or media... without first obtaining written permission. The United States is not seeking to censor any legitimate aspect of Defendant's manuscript; it merely seeks an order requiring Defendant to complete the prepublication review process and to take all steps necessary to ensure that only a manuscript that has been officially authorized through that process-- and is thus free of classified information-- is disseminated publicly,' the filing says."

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this week, Bolton's lawyer Chuck Cooper said White House attempts to accuse Bolton of violating his non-disclosure agreement were merely an attempt to "censor Bolton."

"This last-minute allegation came after an intensive four-month review, after weeks of silence from the White House, and-- as Mr. Eisenberg admits in his letter-- after press reports alerted the White House that Mr. Bolton's book would be published on June 23," Cooper said. "This is a transparent attempt to use national security as a pretext to censor Mr. Bolton, in violation of his constitutional right to speak on matters of the utmost public import."

The filing Tuesday offers insight into the process behind the pre-publication review, acknowledging that the National Security Council's senior director for records Ellen Knight had completed her review of the book and "was of the judgment that the manuscript draft did not contain classified information."

The next person to take up the review was a deputy legal adviser for the NSC Michael Ellis, who according to the filing "was concerned that the manuscript still appeared to contain classified information, in part because the same administration that the author served is still in office and that the manuscript described sensitive information about ongoing foreign policy issues."

The DOJ alleges in the filing that in its current form, the manuscript "contains certain passages, some up to several paragraphs in length-- that contain classified national security information."

"In fact, the NSC has determined that information in the manuscript is classified at the Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret levels," the filing says.

In the event the judge rejects the request from the DOJ, both Bolton and his publisher could still face potentially significant financial and even criminal jeopardy, legal experts argue, by moving forward in publishing a book that the White House claims contains classified information.

Reacting to the filing Tuesday, attorney Mark Zaid, an expert in national security law who has previously represented multiple individuals through the pre-publication review process, noted the suit stops short of what would have been a more extraordinary step in filing for an injunction to halt publication of the book altogether.

"This is a routine civil action for breach of contract for (Bolton) violating his non-disclosure agreement, which his own lawyer has admitted he did," Zaid said. "Absent something extraordinary happening, Bolton should be prepared to take out his check book and may never see a dime in profit. The lawsuit also asserts Bolton has released classified information which potentially subjects him to criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act."

"I think that Bolton faces real risk to the extent he publishes material that a reasonable person could describe as classified," said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. "Presumably, he has taken care to scrub the book of anything that could plausibly be described as classified information, but we have that this administration that takes extraordinarily broad view of its classification power."

On Monday, in fact, President Donald Trump, in an exchange with reporters, argued his view that "every conversation with me as president highly classified," garnering significant skepticism among those who have previously been involved with such pre-publication reviews.

"That is not something that any Executive Branch has responsibly said let alone any court has ever said," said Joshua Geltzer, a visiting law professor at Georgetown who previously served as the NSC's senior director for counterterrorism. "That legal theory would get them laughed out of court."

But, Geltzer noted that it's true the president does have broad classification authorities. And in the event that a judge were to agree that the book contained classified material after its publication, Bolton could face potential prosecution under the Espionage Act-- though such cases are rare.

However, Bolton's most imminent legal danger, according to Zaid, could be the open violation of his non-disclosure agreement as alleged by DOJ in the Tuesday filing.

"Bolton is in serious trouble with at least a breach of contract, which is literally a hands-down winner for the government," Zaid said. "Bolton has an obligation before publication to receive approval from the government-- a lack of approval breaches his contractual obligation and that has nothing to do with whether or not there's one word of classified information in the book."

The problem is that Trump-- and Barr-- insist that by exposing Trump as an ignorant and foolish old man-- he once asked Bolton, for example, if Venezuela was ever part of the U.S.-- national security has been breached. He also asked if Finland, which he visited and where he had his infanmous meeting with Putin, is part of Russia. He insists he is the state, the way Louis XIV used to do.

Even If Trump Doesn't Die Of COVID, His Presidency Will

Trump is old and senile and doesn't understand the world around him. Yesterday, he said "If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any." If that's not enough to trigger the 25th Amendment, why did we even both to pass it? Maybe he should read John Pavlovitz's new post, You Know You Can’t Wish Away A Pandemic, Right?. "This is a dire global disaster that we are in the devastating middle of," he wrote, "not blissfully emerging from-- despite what people who benefit financially or politically from the latter might want you to believe. Many states in this country (most stewarded by governors beholden to this president and needing the narrative he is perpetuating to be true), have thrown caution and science and sense to the infected wind, and made a decision to fight this ruthless, merciless, murderous health crisis-- by simply ignoring it. Even as the new cases and hospitalizations spike sharply, they are doubling down on turning their heads."

Warmer weather, willful ignorance, contempt for Science, mistrust of media,  sycophantic idolatry, and a coming election are the creating a perfect storm of reckless disregard for humanity-- and it seems to be a decidedly American affliction.

Surveying the planet right now, other nations aren’t acting like this. We aren’t seeing armed protests against further restrictions, and violent refusals to wear masks at the grocery store, and coffeeshop rants against beleaguered employees enforcing distancing rules—and we aren’t seeing national leaders choosing to combat a catastrophic public health emergency with the strategy of an annoyed five-year old: to tightly close their eyes, plug their ears, and shout “Nah, nah, nah, nah, I-am-not- listening-to-you!” This is seemingly the sole intellectual property of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. I suppose that’s what happens when fierce individualism eclipses interdependent community.

Hey, America-- you know you can’t just wish away a pandemic, right?

Khristian Right by Nancy Ohanian-- Trump's true believers

Some states are seeing rates of new cases fall dramatically while others are seeing rates going up just as dramatically. Here are half a dozen states with huge improvement:

• New York +669
• New Jersey +363
• Massachusetts +87
• Illinois +473
• Michigan +31
• Connecticut +147

And. on the other end of the continuum, here are half a dozen states spiking big:

• California +2,719
• Texas +2,138
• Florida +1,758
• Arizona +1,014
• North Carolina +850
• Georgia +733

Monday morning Barron's tried fathoming something few people have been able to wrap their heads around: what's up with China and the pandemic? Although yesterday, China reported 40 new cases, on most days they report 3 or 4. Is it possible-- even with the kind of authoritarian approach to shutdowns they take? Barron's Tanner Brown wrote that "Beijing’s coronavirus resurgence is giving a glimpse into how the country that first dealt with the epidemic is handling it a second time-- both in its public health response and in enforcing a lockdown without grinding the economy to a halt. China largely brought the nationwide spread of the virus under control more than three months ago, though there have been spurts of imported and domestic cases across the country since-- all of which were caught early and did not appear to spread. But the outbreak last week tied to one of Beijing’s largest wholesale food markets has caught observers’ attention for a number of reasons. Foremost is that it occurred in what has been an extremely cautious capital throughout the crisis, one that did not experience many cases early on but that nevertheless was locked down tighter than anywhere outside of Hubei province, where the virus emerged. The flare-up of about 80 cases has also proven to be larger than initially thought. Beijing reported 36 new cases on Saturday and Sunday, the city’s highest daily tally since the National Health Commission began releasing numbers months ago."

Beijing’s response has been swift. Tens of thousands have been tested in the past 48 hours, offices and apartment complexes in affected neighborhoods have reinstated entrance and exit screenings, and sports and tourism-related events in the city have been cancelled. But officials were quick to stress that the lockdown would be smarter and more targeted than before, displaying a savvier approach built upon China’s initial experience with the epidemic.

“The outbreak can be better controlled because of the speed and intensity of the response,” Zhang Wenhong said in the Chinese media interview. He contrasted the longer length of time the virus was able to spread when it quietly first emerged versus the current spate, which he said was caught within a week of its initial infection. Therefore, he said, this current “targeted” lockdown represents a refined approach that will be effective but have minimal impact on social and economic life outside areas as narrowly focused as neighborhoods and even residences.

Yet, some steps remained unclear or poorly coordinated. Several provinces and cities outside of Beijing issued notices saying they would be re-implementing mandatory 14-day quarantines for anyone arriving from the capital. But many of those online postings-- some on official municipal social media accounts-- have been removed without explanation.

Similarly, confusion emerged after Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters on Saturday that viral gene sequencing of the current Beijing strain does not resemble the type that had circulated in the country previously. The comment, along with the absence of recent deaths, caused some observers to ask if the alleged mutated strain was less fatal.

But Zhang Wenhong countered that, saying the new cases had been caught early and were not in older or vulnerable patients.

“It can’t be said that the virulence of the virus has weakened.”

A new poll by YouGov for Yahoo News shows that significant majorities now understand that Señor Trumpanzee is a racist (52-34%), and rate him as "below average" or a "failure" (54%). Trump's failed response to the pandemic is certainly signaling the death knell for his presidency. State polls released this morning showed Trump losing Florida by 11 points and losing Michigan by 16 points. Presumably, he's still strong in Wyoming. Another poll this morning shows that Americans are more unhappy today than they've been in nearly 50 years. Just 14% of respondents said they're very happy, down from 31% who said the same in 2018. "The public is less optimistic today about the standard of living improving for the next generation than it has been in the past 25 years. Only 42% of Americans believe that when their children reach their age, their standard of living will be better. A solid 57% said that in 2018. Since the question was asked in 1994, the previous low was 45% in 1994."