How The Billionaires Control American Elections-- A Guest Post From Eric Zuesse

-by Eric Zuesse

The great investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald gave an hour-long lecture on how America’s billionaires control the U.S. Government, and here is an edited summary of its opening twenty minutes (the best part of it), with key quotations and assertions from its opening-- and then its broader context will be discussed briefly:

The Intercept, 9 July 2020

2:45: There is “this huge cleavage between how members of Congress present themselves, their imagery and rhetoric and branding, what they present to the voters, on the one hand, and the reality of what they do in the bowels of Congress and the underbelly of Congressional proceedings, on the other. Most of the constituents back in their home districts have no idea what it is that the people they’ve voted for have been doing, and this gap between belief and reality is enormous.” Four crucial military-budget amendments were debated in the House just now, as follows:

1. to block Trump from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
2. to block Trump from withdrawing 10,000 troops from Germany
3. to limit U.S. assistance to the Sauds’ bombing of Yemen
4. to require Trump to explain why he wants to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty

On all four issues, the pro-imperialist position prevailed in nearly unanimous votes-- overwhelming in both Parties. Dick Cheney’s daughter, Republican Liz Cheney, dominated the debates, though the House of Representatives is now led by Democrats, not Republicans.

Greenwald (citing other investigators, which I shall link to below) documents that the U.S. news-media are in the business of deceiving the voters to believe that there are fundamental differences between the Parties. “The extent to which they clash is wildly exaggerated” by the press (in order to pump up the percentages of Americans who vote, so as to maintain, both domestically and internationally, the lie that America is a democracy-- actually represents the interests of the voters).

16:00: The Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee-- which writes the nearly $750B annual Pentagon budget-- is the veteran (23 years) House Democrat Adam Smith of Boeing’s Washington State. “The majority of his district are people of color.” He’s “clearly a pro-war hawk” a consistent neoconservative, voted to invade Iraq and all the rest. “This is whom Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats have chosen to head the House Armed Services Committee-- someone with this record.” He is “the single most influential member of Congress when it comes to shaping military spending.” He was primaried by a progressive Democrat, and the “defense industry opened up their coffers” and enabled Adam Smith to defeat the challenger.

That’s the opening.

Greenwald went on, after that, to discuss other key appointees by Nancy Pelosi who are almost as important as Adam Smith is, in shaping the Government’s military budget. They’re all corrupt (campaign-financed by the megacorporations that sell billions to the ‘Defense’ Department). And then he went, at further length, to describe the methods of deceiving the voters, such as how these very same Democrats who are actually agents of the billionaires who own the ‘defense’ contractors and the ‘news’ media etc., campaign for Democrats’ votes by emphasizing how evil the Republican Party is on the issues that Democratic Party voters care far more about than they do about America’s destructions of Iraq and Syria and Libya and Honduras and Ukraine, and imposing crushing economic blockades (sanctions) against the residents in Iran, Venezuela and many other lands that those billionaires also want to control. Democratic Party voters care lots about the injustices and the sufferings of American Blacks and other minorities, and of poor American women, etc., but are satisfied to vote for Senators and Representatives who actually represent ‘defense’ contractors and other profoundly corrupt corporations, instead of represent their own voters. This is how the most corrupt people in politics become re-elected, time and again-- by deceived voters. And-- as those nearly unanimous committee votes display-- almost every member of the U.S. Congress is profoundly corrupt.

Furthermore: Adam Smith’s opponent in the 2018 Democratic Party primary was Sarah Smith (no relation) and she tried to argue against Adam Smith’s neoconservative (pro-U.S.-imperialism) voting-record, but the press-coverage she received in her congressional district ignored that, in order to keep those voters in the dark about the key reality. Whereas Sarah Smith received some coverage from Greenwald and other reporters at The Intercept who mentioned that “Sarah Smith mounted her challenge largely in opposition to what she cast as his hawkish foreign policy approach,” and that she “routinely brought up his hawkish foreign policy views and campaign donations from defense contractors as central issues in the campaign,” only very few of the voters in that district followed such non-mainstream national news-media, far less knew that Adam Smith was in the pocket of ‘defense’ billionaires. And, so, the Pentagon’s big weapons-making firms defeated a progressive who, if elected, would have helped to re-orient federal spending away from selling bombs to be used by the Saudis to destroy Yemen, and instead toward providing better education and employment-prospects to Black, brown and other people, and to the poor, and everybody, in that congressional district, and all others. Moreover, since Adam Smith had a fairly good voting-record on the types of issues that Blacks and other minorities consider more important and more relevant than such things as his having voted for Bush to invade Iraq, Sarah Smith really had no other practical option than to criticize him regarding his hawkish voting-record, which that district’s voters barely even cared about. The billionaires actually had Sarah Smith trapped (just like, on a national level, they had Bernie Sanders trapped). (Furthermore, she campaigned against the billionaires, but many Democrats-- even lower-income ones who struggle to make ends meet-- respect billionaires and are not opposed to voting for billionaire-backed candidates; many of these people simply don’t even want to know how corrupt the system is. They want to believe that the only political problem is bigoted individuals-- not the entire crony economic system in which they are embedded and which provides them their ‘news’, and which systematically promotes all types of bigotry. So, campaigning against the system drives away more voters than it attracts.) (After all, the system itself is supremacist: it supports any type of supremacism.)



Of course, Greenwald’s audience is clearly Democratic Party voters, in order to inform them of how deceitful their own Party is, against themselves. However, the Republican Party operates in exactly the same way, though using different deceptions against its voters, because Republican Party voters have very different priorities than Democratic Party voters do, and so they ignore and allow different types of deceptions and atrocities than Democratic voters do. Each Party plays the “good cop, bad cop” routine against the other: “Vote for me because my opponent is so bad (on the things you really care about).”

Numerous polls (for examples, this and this and this) show that American voters (except for the minority of them that are Republican) want “bipartisan” government (Republicans are the exception: they tend to view their opponents as enemies that must be conquered instead of compromised with); but the reality in America is that this country actually already does have that: the U.S. Government is actually bipartisanly corrupt, and bipartisanly evil. (This is the reason why members of Congress, even of opposite Parties, get along very well together, amongst themselves: it’s “us against them” and the “them” is the voters, who need to be controlled; and the “us” are the rulers.) In fact, it’s almost unanimous, it is so bipartisan, in reality. That’s the way America’s Government actually functions, especially in the congressional votes that are nearly unanimous and that the ‘news’-media don’t publicize (except to fudge what the bill was actually about). However, since it lies so much, and its media (controlled also by its billionaires) do likewise, and since they systematically cover-up instead of expose the deepest rot, the public don’t even know about this bipartisanship. They don’t know the reality. They don’t know how corrupt and evil their Government actually is. They just vote and pay taxes. That’s the extent to which they actually ‘participate’ in ‘their’ Government. They tragically don’t know the reality. It’s hidden from them. It is censored-out, by the editors, producers, and other management, of the billionaires’ ‘news’-media. These are the truths that can’t pass through those executives’ filters. These are the truths that get filtered-out, instead of reported. No democracy can function this way-- and, of course, none does. But the voters can’t figure that out for themselves. And the media they receive don’t explain it to the public, because their owners require them to hide it from the public. In fact, this is what they require their media to hide above all else. And that’s why they hide this fact 100%, not only 99%, but actually 100%-- totally hide it, won’t even allow it to be discussed in their media. (Incidentally: this article is being submitted to virtually all English-language media for publication free of charge. If you don’t see it being published in places such as CNN, the New York Times, or The Atlantic, then you might want to watch the remainder of the complete presentation by Greenwald there, in order to understand in more depth how billionaires control America. Greenwald’s discussion focuses only on the imperialism issue, but in a recent article I explained the mechanism by which the billionaires police the censorship, on all issues.)

Crackdown On A Free Press Is A Symptom Of Fascism-- And Brazil Has Just Filed A Criminal Complaint Against Glenn Greenwald For Exposing Government Corruption

Roland is always suggesting countries with shady right-wing governments as place for us to visit, like Egypt (Abdel el-Sisi), Poland (Mateusz Morawiecki), China (Xi Jinping), Brazil (Jair Bolsonaro), Austria (Brigitte Bierlein), Hungary (Viktor Orbбn,)... and I always explain I don't want to go to fascist-ruled countries. Still... here I am living in Trumpland. But we haven't gone to Brazil, one of the ones on my bucket list and where I have lots of relatives. A good example of why came Tuesday when the Brazilian government filed criminal charges against an old friend, Glenn Greenwald, who lives there now. Glenn, an attorney, civil libertarian, author and journalist, as well as the co-founder of The Intercept has exposed widespread misconduct and corruption among Brazilian prosecutors and a former judge. This is one of several tweets sent out by Ro Khanna (D-CA) today.

Progressive congressional candidates were quick to defend freedom of the press in this regard as well. Iowa's J.D. Scholten understood exactly how far right authoritarians target the press-- primarily because he's running against one of them. "Steve King," he said, "routinely rails against the press, discrediting their accurate work, and demanding apologies for his own actions. His words and his actions have deep ramifications-- they work to undermine the freedom of the press and encourage violence against journalists here at home and around the world. He believes the press should be beholden to him, but that’s wrong. The press has an incredibly important job to shine a light on our public officials (whether it’s flattering or not), inform our citizens, and keep us safe. An attack on the press is an attack on all of us and our Constitution, which King claims to care deeply about. I support our journalists here and abroad, especially those like Glenn who put their lives on the line for the truth, and will always stand up for the freedom of the press."

Mike Siegel, a Texas attorney who is best known for his epic battles against right-wing Texas government officials on behalf of the city of Austin wrote this morning that "We must condemn the Brazilian government’s attack on journalist Glenn Greenwald, which is an attack on democracy itself. We need press freedom to shine a light on government corruption, at home and abroad. I’m ashamed that my Republican opponent, Rep. McCaul, has supported Bolsonaro’s push towards fascism. We must do everything we can to protect civil society in Brazil, and to stop authoritarian regimes whenever they arise."

Tom Winter, a state legislator in Montana, running for Congress now, explained to voters in his state that "Freedom of the press isn't optional-- it's in the First Amendment. I'm running to replace a Congressman that would rather body slam a journalist than answer his questions. This should not be a partisan issue. What's happening in Brazil is troubling, anything less than our government's full support for Mr. Greenwald's rights is shirking our oaths to defend the Constitution. We can not allow a vacuum of leadership to embolden further attacks on our free press, at home and abroad."

Eva Putzova, and immigrant to Arizona from Eastern Europe, which has seen its share of tyrannical rule, said "I am appalled at the Bolsonaro government’s attempt to silence Glenn Geeenwald by filing a criminal complaint against him for his reporting in government corruption. This is a threat to freedom of the press everywhere. Bolsonaro is an ally of Trump so this effort to bully a reporter shouldn’t surprise anyone. All members of Congress should stand with Greenwald and the freedom of the press. Period."

No one doubts that this is an assault on both journalism and free speech. A friend of mine asked that we remember the quote attributed to Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" and asserted, correctly that there is no chance that it is virtually impossible that the Brazilian government would have moved this way against an American citizen without first clearing it with the Trump regime.

Michael Franken, a retired admiral running for the Iowa Senate seat occupied by Trump puppet Joni Ernst noted that it is "strange that President Bolsonaro would investigate, try, convict, and sentence a U.S. citizen with his statement, 'may do jail time.' May as well toss a dead goat down the well of jurisprudence."

Mark Gamba, the mayor of Milwaukie, Oregon, is running for Congress now. He told us, "A free and independent press dedicated to informing the public with in-depth factual reporting is the third leg that democracy stands on. Without it democracy is doomed. Ronald Regan began the process of the erosion of this critical institution when he vetoed a bill that protected it from a bad FCC decision. As a former photojournalist for National Geographic I have a deep and abiding belief that the institution of journalism must be protected at all costs and the journalists themselves allowed to do their jobs without fear of prosecution. As a congressman I will work to restore journalism to its former glory and thereby forestall our continuing slide into dysfunctional polarization."

A Cure for the Mueller Hangover

Robert Mueller: Into the Swamp by Nancy Ohanian

by Skip Kaltenheuser

If you haven’t seen it, the long version of Matt Taibbi’s critique of journalism over Russia-gate, LOADED with supportive sub-links, is worth your time as an exercise in grappling with media herd instinct and the folly of putting our grand papers of record at the head of the herd. It’s also a great contemplation of the journalistic ethics and cautions that have been cut adrift, the sort the Columbia Journalism Review and journalism schools across the country might take note of. Matt Taibbi: It’s Official – Russiagate is This Generation’s WMD.

For this slow reader, it was worth hanging-in, as it’s much more richly detailed than this still worthwhile summation Taibbi recently published in Rolling Stone. The one encouraging item is that the median age for CNN viewers is 60 and the median for MSNBC is 65, so I feel more youthful just for not having cable.

Coming after his piece on unaccountable media that enabled the WMD con that waltzed us into invading Iraq, I think Taibbi ought to earn a Pulitzer or some such for media criticism.

If you didn’t catch the Democracy Now! debate between Glenn Greenwald and David Cay Johnston, it’s also sobering. It does come with the guilty pleasure of sideswiping MSNBC and Rachel Maddow who’ve used their hot pursuits of Russia collusion to challenge FOX in taking up the task of proving Orwell’s enduring wisdom on propaganda.

I’m now bracing under forty lashes administered by this Intercept podcast which includes Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada, Taibbi and Naomi Klein, a good wrap-up perspective with a transcript option, if the unseen voices of a Beckett play are unsettling.

I’ve certainly had my fun with Trump, such as Inauguration Day Weather Forecast: 54 Degrees, Cloudy, Light Wind, Chance of Golden Showers. But like many who’ve dipped into journalism, I know the comforts of having it both ways, so I also took such occasions to work in skepticism over the Russian election collusion narrative. I’ve always been of the mindset that even if true, I didn’t care what snake hands me an apple off the Tree of Knowledge as long as it gives me the straight poop. Other than interesting intrigues, I don’t much care if truth comes via a hack or a walkaway thumb drive. After all, which more greatly damaged our Eden’s already fractured democracy, the DNC’s anti-democratic thumb on the scales during the 2016 presidential primaries, or providing the public with proof confirming the weight of the thumb? I’m picking door number one. If media had been doing its job, no such choice need apply. Instead we were left to wonder at mainstream media’s devotion to the Divine Right of Queens, and if it went so far as to grease the skids for the ratings-meister who was conveniently also the opponent Hillary most desired.

If something later comes along regarding explorations I’ve long thought had greater potential, such as if there were violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or, as Howie has often underscored, potential money laundering via real estate portals and other foreign players, etc…, then great, to the ramparts. But should they occur, most enlightenments would be better left to the remedy of elections, not coveting President Mike “End of Days” Pence.

American Gothic Revisited 2 by Nancy Ohanian

Meanwhile, I hope the Democrats can now fully focus on explaining the dangers of galloping venality in this godforsaken presidency, of which Howie has supplied a cornucopia. Topping the list is the risk that the financial sector is again exposing the country to after those trusted with oversight again willfully take their eyes off the ball. Catch up on that queasy feeling by perusing the topics at Wall Street on Parade, I’m pleased to note that after a brief absence that site has fired up again. It is not a cure for insomnia.

Revolving Door by Nancy Ohanian

After the invasion of Iraq, the current drumbeat on Iran by the usual suspects and the weird alliances with Saudi Arabia (which 60 Minutes alleged uses Israeli spy technology to monitor dissidents like murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi), I’ve always thought Israel’s and Saudi Arabia’s influence more of a fright than Russia’s. But we’ll not likely see either party’s leadership seriously push investigations of those actors. The bipartisan piling on Rep. IIhan Omar at the AIPAC conference was as disgusting and as disheartening a political spectacle as I’ve ever seen. Stop it. Apart from the injustice of it, it looked like a parade of frightened fools.

Who Murdered Jamal Khashoggi? by Nancy Ohanian

By the way, last Friday there was a uniquely contrarian conference, on the Israeli lobby’s influence on American policy, for which video and audio are now available, with transcripts coming along. Which is a great thing, because you won’t hear a peep out of mainstream media. I scribbled on it here. Take a breath and consider that in adjusted dollars we’ve spent far more on foreign aid to Israel than we spent under the Marshall Plan rebuilding Europe after WWII . Now tell me it’s not all about Benjamins flowing freely.

Beyond her undeniable cat-wrangling skills, one of the big selling points for Rep. Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker was her fundraising ability with big donors. For me her fundraising prowess was a red flag about whom she might be quietly mortgaging worthy Democratic Party values to, from Big Money to Big Tech to those looking to gloss over America’s soul-numbing complicity in the plight of the Palestinians. And what can one say about Chuck Schumer, Wall Street’s Manchurian Senator? For too many Democratic politicians, and for those in the growing military-industrial-fundraising-consulting complex that enables them, Russia was a great distraction from attending to issues on which those politicians and enablers are as for-sale as Trump. Trump is not Washington’s only distraction artist.

The silver lining is that maybe Russia’s creaky ship and the poisoner/kleptocrat at its helm will now stop sucking the air out of the room. That will enable Bernie and the like-minded to better spotlight their critical issues and keep coaxing the party to sail on better currents. And as important, they can now step out of the background noise to make their case to the independent voters they will have to win over to succeed at the ballot box. That goes hand in hand with beating back America’s worst impulses as embodied by Trump and the Republicans, now busy about the game of whittling down health care and all aspects of government that diminish inequality and the wealth gap. Highlighting the contrast has always been the best route to take Trumpster to the dumpster. It’s the cure for the Mueller hangover.

So bon voyage, Russia, and for now, good riddance.

King of Diamonds by Nancy Ohanian

Who Would Hillary Rather See Win In 2020-- Bernie Or Her Old Friend Trumpanzee?

In June of 2017, Democracy Fund put out a post election study: Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond-- Tensions Between and Within the Two Parties. Among the key findings two standouts were:

1- among populists who voted for Obama, Clinton did terribly. She held onto only 6 in 10 of these voters (59%). Trump picked up 27% of these voters, and the remaining 14% didn’t vote for either major party candidate.

2- In both parties, the donor class is both more conservative on economic issues and more liberal on social issues, as compared to the rest of the party

The author, Lee Drutman noted that "Although there was a bitter fight between Sanders and Clinton, it turns out that their voters are not all that different on most issues." Bernie voters were less enthusiastic about trade agreements.

The donor class loomed way larger in Clinton-world than in Bernie-world and, as Drutman found, the donor class is far more conservative on economic issues than the rest of the party, Today we find people identifying as Hillary backers to be the most skeptical among Democrats about progressive policies like Medicare-For-All, the Green New Deal, free state college, Job Guarantee, living wage, etc. Is that at the heart of the vicious anti-Bernie jihad by Clintonites this cycle? They reject that if you ask them. But the evidence is glaring. Last week, reporting for Vox, Tara Golshan wrote that former Clinton aides want the American public to know that they’re still mad about Bernie and they spend a lot more time whining about him-- everything about him-- rather than uniting against Trump. The really deranged Clinton die-hards-- the Neera Tandens of the political landscape-- hate Bernie far more than they want to beat Trump. They hate Bernie but they also hate his progressive vision for America.

Golshan is convinced that "At the core of their frustrations is a belief that Clinton beat Sanders fair and square and that Sanders was a sore loser. These attacks are their way of warning the American public it could happen again, leaving a divided Democratic party in the general election against Trump... These former Clinton aides aren’t tearing apart Sanders’s current policy agenda (probably because most major Democratic candidates have essentially adopted it). They’re just saying, here’s a bunch of dirt we had and we would like Sanders to have to deal with if he’s going to run again."

“I’m not necessarily an anti-Bernie guy, especially not when it comes to his policies,” another ex-Clinton staffer, who worked on her campaign’s research team, said. “But he has this self-righteous attitude to himself. If you are not with him you are against him, and I think we are seeing that kind of behavior in the White House, to be honest. And that style is not what we need.”

But in the machinations of the Sanders-Clinton rivalry, in which both camps purport each others’ teams engaged in nefarious tactics to ultimately deny Democrats the White House, one statistic is often forgotten: as best as we can tell, more Sanders primary supporters voted for Clinton in the general election than Clinton supporters voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

And while Clinton’s aides say they are trying to even the playing field in 2020, this relitigation of 2016 is doing more to reopen past wounds than heal them.

The 2016 primary was bitter.

Clinton had been preparing for her moment for eight years through Barack Obama’s presidency. Then Sanders came close to winning in Iowa and handily won the New Hampshire primary, throwing Clinton’s presumptive nomination into question. He mounted a long and serious challenge, staying in the race through every single primary-- even after it was mathematically impossible for him to clinch the nomination.

In the end, Sanders lost because Clinton won 34 primary contests, whereas Sanders only won 23, giving Clinton a 3 million popular vote lead and the Democratic nomination.

But throughout it all, a frustration grew over the fairness of the 2016 election. It’s understandable: Democrats were dealt a devastating blow in 2016, and everyone involved feels slighted. Clinton even wrote an entire book about it, where Sanders landed among the factors she has come to blame for her loss.

The bitterness hasn’t gone away.

Sanders’s supporters maintain the 2016 primary was rigged; Clinton was the establishment candidate, lifted by the entirety of the Democratic Party apparatus, from the way the Democratic National Committee scheduled debates to fundraising-- and besides, she had the support of the Party’s superdelegates before the primaries even began.

This all came to a head in July 2016, when the DNC’s then-chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to abruptly resign just as the party’s nominating convention began. The central issue was leaked emails (now believed to be hacked by Russians) showed Democratic leaders disliked Sanders. After the election, Donna Brazile, who was appointed to replace Schultz, revealed that the DNC, deeply in debt at the start of the 2016 cycle, had struck a deal with Clinton in 2015, essentially trading some of its autonomy for Clinton’s fundraising help. To Sanders supporters, this was all evidence that the primary was rigged from the beginning.

But Clinton’s team says Sanders was just a sore loser. Sanders didn’t concede the primaries even when there was no path to the nomination, saying he wanted to see his “political revolution” to the end. His campaign manager told Bloomberg Politics at the time that their campaign “would like to get to a place where we could very actively support the nominee,” hinting that Clinton would first have to adopt a more progressive vision.

Sanders endorsed Clinton in July of 2016. But tensions remained. Recently asked whether he would seek advice from Clinton’s team, Sanders said “I think not,” giving Clinton surrogates more fodder to say Sanders was never on their side.

“The one difference between Clinton people and Bernie people is we would vote for Bernie if he got the nomination,” the former Clinton research staffer said. Exit polling tells a different story; there wasn’t a massive Bernie Bro defection in 2016.

There aren't that many truly deranged Clinton die-hards; but they have a lot of mass media access. Their Democratic Party is the socially liberal, economically conservative Democratic Party. They're the identity politics people who fear real systemic change. No way Trump can be reelected? Just watch the Hillary hard core in action.

I don't know where Glenn Greenwald stands politically anymore. I lost track of him years ago and largely stopped trying to figure him out. But when he's right, it's worth taking him at face value and a week or so ago he pointed to the dishonesty at one of the mainstays of the Democratic Party establishment: MSNBC programming. He called them "a dishonest political operation, not a news outlet. It systematically and deliberately refuses to adopt a defining attribute of a news outlet: a willingness to acknowledge factual errors, correct them, and apologize. That they not only allow their lies to stand uncorrected but reward their employees who do it most frequently-- especially when those lies are directed at adversaries of the Democratic Party-- proves that they are, first and foremost, a political arm of the Democratic establishment. The most recent example is as glaring as it is malicious. On Saturday in Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders delivered his first speech for his 2020 presidential campaign in front of thousands of people. MSNBC broadcast the speech live, and anyone can watch the full two-hour event, or just Sanders’s full 35-minute speech, on YouTube":

As a result, there’s no confusion possible about what was said. Everyone can see it with their own eyes.

Before Sanders spoke, he was introduced by a series of speakers including three African-Americans: South Carolina state Rep. Terry Alexander (who spoke of Sanders’s lifelong commitment to equal justice and opportunity), former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner (who heralded Sanders’s long-time commitment to racial justice and his status as “only one of two white elected officials” who supported Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign run in 1984), and racial justice activist (and Intercept columnist) Shaun King (who described in detail Sanders’s history as an anti-racist and civil rights activist in the 1960s and his decadeslong devotion to issues of racial equality).

After Sanders’s speech, MSNBC immediately asked its panel for reactions. The first person they turned to was Zerlina Maxwell, who the host identified only as an “MSNBC analyst.” What the host omitted, but which Maxwell herself acknowledged, was that she was a paid official for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Sanders: that, revealingly, is the first person MSNBC had opine on Sanders’s speech.

After the host noted that Maxwell was making gestures of disapproval throughout Sanders’s speech and asked her what the cause was, Maxwell proceeded to state demonstrable lies about that speech. She said:

To be very serious about it, I clocked it. He did not mention race or gender until 23 minutes into the speech. And just for point of comparison, I went back and looked at Elizabeth Warren’s opening speech, for example. She mentions race and discrimination in the first paragraph. So that’s a big difference.

That is a big difference. It’s also a total lie. Sanders mentioned race, gender, and discrimination multiple times at the beginning of his speech and long before the 23-minute mark, as anyone who actually watched it — which presumably includes all the MSNBC personalities on that panel who sat silently as this lie was broadcast — obviously knew was a lie.

...All one needs to do to prove this is an obvious lie is look at the video of Sanders’s speech-- which the MSNBC panel had just done as it allowed Maxwell to deceive its audience this way.

Before Sanders even began the substance of his speech, he thanked those who introduced him, saying of Shaun King’s anti-racist activism: “All over this country-- and I’m going to say a few words about it today and more tomorrow-- people understand that we have a broken criminal justice system, and there are few people in America fighting more than Shaun to change that system.”

In the very first sentence Sanders spoke to define his 2020 campaign-- which came, at the latest, at the five-minute mark even if one counts all the cheering, chanting, and obligatory acknowledgments that preceded the substance of the speech-- Sanders proclaimed that the core message of his campaign is that “the underlying principles of our government” will “not be racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and religious bigotry.” He then vowed, “This campaign is going to end all of that.”

In the very next passage of Sanders’s speech-- at most six minutes into it-- the senator vowed that “the principles of our government will be based on justice: on economic justice, on social justice, on racial justice, on environmental justice.”

Sanders then devoted several minutes to denouncing the inequities, unfairness, and destructive effects of America’s criminal justice system and the drug war, contrasting the severe punishment meted out to low-level marijuana and other small-time offenders to the full-scale protection and even bailout for the Wall Street tycoons who crashed the economy in 2008. His other principal policy focus during that part of the speech was what he regards as the evils of Donald Trump’s immigration policies and the xenophobia that drives it.

The disparate treatment of the criminal justice system, as I documented in my 2011 book on that topic, is racially motivated at its core, and while Sanders did not explicitly use the word “race” in discussing it, he did so-- again-- immediately after when, at the 20-minute mark, he said Trump “wants to divide us up based on the color of our skin, based on where we were born, based on our gender, based on our religion or sexual orientation.” The Sanders campaign at its core, he said, is about doing “exactly the opposite. We’re going to bring our people together: black and white, Latino, Asian-American, Native American, gay and straight, men and women.”

At the 22-minute mark, Sanders, as he’s been reluctant to do for most of his political career, shared his personal experiences that shaped his political ideology, including not only his working-class background but also his father’s experience as an immigrant from Poland fleeing not just “crushing poverty” but also “widespread anti-Semitism,” a decision that saved his father, since “virtually his entire family was wiped out by Hitler and Nazi barbarism.”

In sum, Sanders did not just mention race and gender once in his speech before the 23-minute mark Maxwell claimed, but did so repeatedly. It was not only the major theme of the speakers who introduced him, but a primary theme of his own speech from the start: both explicitly railing against the evils of “racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and religious bigotry” and vowing to usher in “social justice and racial justice,” but also launching full-scale, vehement attacks on the policies-- inequities in the criminal justice system and immigration abuses-- that have as their primary targets racial and religious minorities.

...Despite all this, there is no correction from MSNBC or Maxwell-- par for the course for this Democratic National Committee operation masquerading as a news outlet.

Indeed, as is almost always true for MSNBC, all of these pleas that they correct their false claim have been steadfastly ignored-- no correction issued-- because, as I’ve repeatedly documented, lying about adversaries of the Democratic establishment is not merely tolerated or permitted at MSNBC, but is encouraged and rewarded. That’s why they purposely had the very first person to comment on Sanders’s kickoff campaign speech be a paid Clinton 2016 campaign official highly embittered toward Sanders, and it’s why MSNBC does not correct lies no matter how loudly, clearly, or indisputably you document those lies to them.

News outlets correct lies. Slimy political operations deliberately use lies to advance their agenda and smear their adversaries. MSNBC has proven over and over again that they are decisively in the latter category. This is just the latest but by no means the only or even worst example.

How Cynical Is the Democratic Party's Support for Identity Politics? (Plus a Note on the Ocasio-Crowley Contest)

Albright: "Younger women, Hillary Clinton will always be there for you" ... plus that other thing she said.

by Gaius Publius

How cynical is the Democratic Party's support for identity politics? To this observer, it seems impossible not to notice that those in control of the Democratic Party care about "identity politics" — about supporting more women, more people of color, more LGBTQ candidates, etc. — only when it suits them. Which means, if you take this view, that their vocal support for the underlying principles of "identity politics" is both cynical and insincere.

As I said, this has been apparent for some time. I've never seen it documented so well in one place, however, until this recent piece by Glenn Greenwald.

For example, Hillary Clinton supporters in 2016 not only encouraged a vote for Clinton because men and women had a duty to support her as a woman, yet they attacked support for Sanders as specifically misogynist:

The 2016 presidential election was the peak, at least thus far, for the tactics of identity politics in U.S. elections. In the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton’s potential status as the first female candidate was frequently used not only to inspire her supporters but also to shame and malign those who supported other candidates, particularly Bernie Sanders.

In February 2016 — at the height of the Clinton-Sanders battle — former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright introduced Hillary Clinton at a New Hampshire rally by predicting a grim afterlife for female supporters of Sanders, while Clinton and Cory Booker cheered: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” she announced.

Though Albright apologized in the New York Times for her insensitive phrasing after a backlash ensued, she did reaffirm her central point: “When women are empowered to make decisions, society benefits. They will raise issues, pass bills and put money into projects that men might overlook or oppose.”

At roughly the same time, Clinton supporter Gloria Steinem said female supporters of Sanders were motivated by a primitive impulse to follow “the boys,” who, she claimed, were behind Sanders. Just this week, the Clinton loyalist and Salon writer Amanda Marcotte said Trump won “because some dudes had mommy issues,” then clarified that she was referring to left-wing misogynists who did not support Clinton: “I also have those moments where I’m like, ‘Maybe we need to run Bland White Guy 2020 to appease the fake socialists and jackass mansplainers.'”

Greenwald notes in passing that no one was making the case for supporting Sanders because he would be the first Jewish president, and he doesn't expect that case to be made in 2020 should Sanders run again.

He concludes from this that "despite the inconsistencies, one of the dominant themes that emerged in Democratic Party discourse from the 2016 election is that it is critically important to support female candidates and candidates of color, and that a failure or refusal to support such candidates when they present a credible campaign is suggestive evidence of underlying bigotry."

The Past as Prologue: Cynthia Nixon

Apparently, however, Democratic Party interest in electing strong progressive women (Hillary Clinton includes herself on that list) has dissipated in the smoke of the last election. As Greenwald notes, "Over and over, establishment Democrats and key party structures have united behind straight, white male candidates (including ones tainted by corruption), working to defeat their credible and progressive Democratic opponents who are women, LGBT people, and/or people of color. Clinton herself has led the way."

The article is replete with examples, from the Brad Ashford–Kara Eastman battle in Nebraska, to the Bob Menendez–Michael Starr Hopkins–Lisa McCormick three-way contest in New Jersey,  to the Ben Cardin–Chelsea Manning primary in Maryland. In all cases, the Party backed the white male candidate (or in Menendez's case, the whiter male candidate) against the woman, the person of color, and the LGBTQ candidate. Not even the smoke of 2016's identity fire remains.

Which brings us to the 2018 candidacies of Cynthia Nixon and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

Let's start with Cynthia Nixon, running against corrupt, anti-progressive NY Governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo sides with Republicans to defeat progressive measures, rules with an iron hand, is white and male. Yet he's also supported and endorsed by almost every national Democrat who matters:

In New York state, Cynthia Nixon is attempting to become the first female governor, as well as the first openly LGBT governor, in the state’s history. She’s running against a dynastic politician-incumbent, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whom the New York Times denounced this year for being “tainted” by multiple corruption scandals.

But virtually the entire Democratic establishment has united behind the white male dynastic prince, Cuomo, over his female, LGBT challenger. That includes Clinton herself, who enthusiastically endorsed Cuomo last month, as well as Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who — despite starting a political action committee with the explicit purpose of supporting women running for office — also endorsed Cuomo over Nixon in March. [emphasis mine]

To make the main point again: How cynical and insincere is the Democratic Party's support for identity politics? Very.

A Local Race with National Consequences: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vs. Joe Crowley

This cynical drama is also playing out in the race between corrupt Joe Crowley, the likely next Democratic leader of the House (if he survives this election) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The same dynamic is now driving the Democratic Party primary campaign in New York’s 14th Congressional District, a district that is composed of 70 percent nonwhite voters. The nine-term Democratic incumbent, Joe Crowley, is a classic dynastic machine politician. His challenger, a 28-year-old Latina woman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has generated nationwide excitement for her campaign after her inspiring introduction video went viral. At a fundraising event, Crowley accused his opponent of playing identity politics, saying she was trying to make the campaign “about race.”

Despite all that, virtually the entire Democratic establishment has united behind the white male incumbent, and virtually none is supporting the woman of color who is challenging him. Yesterday, the very same Gillibrand who has a PAC to support female candidates and who endorsed Cuomo over Nixon announced that she was supporting Crowley over Ocasio-Cortez. [emphasis added]

Note that these are not low-profile, low-consequence races. Both are positions of enormous power — in Nixon's case, due to the office; in Crowley's case, due to his position as the Dauphin to Nancy Pelosi's soon-to-step-down monarch.

These are races with exponentially greater consequences than usuals. And where is the Democratic Party in this? With the (corrupt) white male and against the woman, as always these days.

"Identity Politics" Is Not a Cookie-Cutter Solution to Electoral Choices

I'd like to make two additional points. First, by any intelligent standard, candidates "identities" should only be one factor only in considering support for them. Only the right wing and 2016 Clinton advocates like Madeleine Albright, quoted above, make the most simplistic argument about "identity" support — and even then, the simplistic argument seemed to apply only to support for Clinton herself and never to other women.

For example, would even Clinton supporters have supported Carly Fiorina against a male Democrat for president? Obviously not. And Clinton herself, a former New York senator, did not support Zephyr Teachout in 2014 when Teachout ran against Andrew Cuomo for governor. Nor did then-Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton campaign for Zephyr Teachout in her 2016 race for the the  NY-19 House seat.

Ideological concerns also drive decisions like these, as in fact they should. Fiorina would likely be too far right for Clinton to support, and Teachout too far left. This is a fair basis on which to decide. It was also a fair basis on which to decide support for Clinton as well.

The Ocasio-Crowley Battle Is a Very High-Leverage Fight

A second point: I recently wrote about the importance of progressives involving themselves heavily in high-leverage races — like the Bernie Sanders 2016 race, for example — where the payoff would have been huge relative to the effort. (You can read that piece and its argument here: "Supporting Aggressive Progressives for Very High-Leverage Offices".)

The Ocasio-Crowley contest is similarly high-leverage — first, because he's perceived as vulnerable and acting like he agrees, and second because it would, to use a chess metaphor, eliminate one of the most powerful (and corrupt) anti-progressive players from House leadership in a single move.

Again, Crowley is widely seen as the next Democratic Speaker of the House. He would be worse by far than Nancy Pelosi, and he's dangerous. He has blackmailed, as I see it, almost all of his colleagues into supporting him by the implicit threat of, as Speaker, denying them committee assignments and delaying or thwarting their legislation. He also controls funding as Speaker via the leadership PAC and the DCCC. Even Mark Pocan, co-chair of the CPC and normally a reliable progressive voice and vote, is reportedly whipping support for Crowley among his colleagues.

Crowley plays for keeps. Taking him off the board entirely, removing him from the House for the next two years, would produce a benefit to progressives far in excess of the effort involved.

Progressives, were they truly smart, would have nationalized this race from the beginning and worked tirelessly to win it. The payoff from a win like this is huge.

GP
 

How Many Democratic Senators Will Approve Gina Haspel For CIA Chief?

The face of torture. Gina Haspel has been nominated for CIA chief. Which Democrats will support her? (source)

by Gaius Publius

An interesting vote will be coming up in the Senate, the confirmation vote on Trump nominee Gina Haspel as Director of the CIA. Make no mistake; this will be a torture vote, a yes or no to confirm the CIA's role in systematic torture of our "enemies" abroad (see below for details).

The last time a pro-torture Trump nominee came to the Senate — Mike Pompeo for the same job in January 2017 — the Senate confirmed him 66-32-2. The motion to bring his nomination to the floor, called the "motion to proceed" (MTP), passed by an overwhelming 89-8-3. (For what it's worth, Bernie Sanders was one of the few No votes on that motion.)

Democratic Party votes to confirm Pompeo included "progressives" Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Amy Klobuchar (MN), and Brian Schatz (HI). In all, 16 Democrats said yes to pro-torture Mike Pompeo, after which one of them, Whitehouse, got an earful at a town hall.

Gina Haspel for CIA Chief

Now comes Trump nominee Gina Haspel for CIA chief. She's not just pro-torture, she's an actual torturer. Will Democrats take a stand against her? If so, in what numbers?

Will they campaign publicly, in the press and elsewhere, against her torture background with the same vigor they campaigned against the travel ban and Obamacare repeal?

Or will most, as they did with Pompeo, quietly vote No knowing that enough of their Democratic colleagues will vote Yes to get the job done without them. Recall again the vote to bring Pompeo's nomination to the floor. That vote, the motion to proceed, was the only vote that mattered. No one serious about stopping a nomination votes Yes to on the motion to proceed, and it passed with overwhelming Democratic support.

Most of those we torture are dark-skinned and Muslim — an identity-politics gotcha for the gotcha-inclined. These are the same people targeted by Trump's widely hated travel ban, which Democrats came out strongly against. Of course, as Yahoo News points out, "If confirmed, 61-year-old Gina Haspel would become the first female head of the CIA," so there's that. 

Who will play hypocrite for the CIA? Which Democratic senators? Watch for that vote.

Gina Haspel's Torture Background

A fair amount has been written about Gina Haspel's background with the CIA, but this 2017 Glenn Greenwald piece is seminal. Bottom line — Haspel, as a CIA agent stationed abroad, ran a torture site.

Greenwald (emphasis mine):

In May 2013, the Washington Post’s Greg Miller reported that the head of the CIA’s clandestine service was being shifted out of that position as a result of “a management shake-up” by then-Director John Brennan. As Miller documented, this official — whom the paper did not name because she was a covert agent at the time — was centrally involved in the worst abuses of the CIA’s Bush-era torture regime.

As Miller put it, she was “directly involved in its controversial interrogation program” and had an “extensive role” in torturing detainees. Even more troubling, she “had run a secret prison in Thailand” — part of the CIA’s network of “black sites” — “where two detainees were subjected to waterboarding and other harsh techniques.” The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture also detailed the central role she played in the particularly gruesome torture of detainee Abu Zubaydah.

Beyond all that, she played a vital role in the destruction of interrogation videotapes that showed the torture of detainees both at the black site she ran and other secret agency locations. The concealment of those interrogation tapes, which violated multiple court orders as well as the demands of the 9/11 commission and the advice of White House lawyers, was condemned as “obstruction” by commission chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Keane. A special prosecutor and grand jury investigated those actions but ultimately chose not to prosecute.

The name of that CIA official whose torture activities the Post described is Gina Haspel.

Keep in mind, the first purpose of torture is to please the torturer. She's the worst of the worst.

By the way, the John Brennan named above is the same person now passing as "hero of the anti-Trump resistance" John Brennan. That's who the mainstream #resistance is in bed with.

Think Brennan and those around him have an agenda? Do you think getting rid of Trump is their only goal?

GP
 

Thomas Friedman-- The Bride Stripped Bare

Robert Naiman, Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, recently described NY Times proud neo-liberal columnist Thomas Friedman as "the U.S.-affiliated atrocity apologist columnist of last resort. In case of emergency, break glass. Can't get anyone else to be an apologist for this U.S.-affiliated atrocity? Call Thomas Friedman. That Time Tom Friedman said the Iraq War was All About Telling Muslims "To Suck. On. This.. Thomas Friedman, Iraq war booster... Thomas Friedman Can't Stop Comparing Afghanistan to a "Special Needs Baby".

The guy has always been a fucking idiot-- but, like Paul Ryan until the last couple of years-- the Beltway punditocracy has created a myth that he has a clue what he's talking about. His new column, romanticizing Saudi Arabia's newest despot, is beyond contemptible. Kidding ass in Riyadh, he wrote that he never thought he’d "live long enough to write this sentence: The most significant reform process underway anywhere in the Middle East today is in Saudi Arabia. Yes, you read that right. Though I came here at the start of Saudi winter, I found the country going through its own Arab Spring, Saudi style." I knew I should have turned the page at that point but... you know how hard is to take your eyes off a smoldering car wreck. Everything he wrote about one of the most corrupt places on earth is just flat out wrong-- to the point that almost makes me wonder if the Saudis gave him something (cash? a drug? a night in a harem?)

Unlike the other Arab Springs-- all of which emerged bottom up and failed miserably, except in Tunisia-- this one is led from the top down by the country’s 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and, if it succeeds, it will not only change the character of Saudi Arabia but the tone and tenor of Islam across the globe. Only a fool would predict its success-- but only a fool would not root for it.

To better understand it I flew to Riyadh to interview the crown prince, known as “M.B.S.,” who had not spoken about the extraordinary events here of early November, when his government arrested scores of Saudi princes and businessmen on charges of corruption and threw them into a makeshift gilded jail-- the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton-- until they agreed to surrender their ill-gotten gains. You don’t see that every day.

We met at night at his family’s ornate adobe-walled palace in Ouja, north of Riyadh. M.B.S. spoke in English, while his brother, Prince Khalid, the new Saudi ambassador to the U.S., and several senior ministers shared different lamb dishes and spiced the conversation. After nearly four hours together, I surrendered at 1:15 a.m. to M.B.S.’s youth, pointing out that I was exactly twice his age. It’s been a long, long time, though, since any Arab leader wore me out with a fire hose of new ideas about transforming his country.

We started with the obvious question: What’s happening at the Ritz? And was this his power play to eliminate his family and private sector rivals before his ailing father, King Salman, turns the keys of the kingdom over to him?



It’s “ludicrous,” he said, to suggest that this anticorruption campaign was a power grab. He pointed out that many prominent members of the Ritz crowd had already publicly pledged allegiance to him and his reforms, and that “a majority of the royal family” is already behind him. This is what happened, he said: “Our country has suffered a lot from corruption from the 1980s until today. The calculation of our experts is that roughly 10 percent of all government spending was siphoned off by corruption each year, from the top levels to the bottom. Over the years the government launched more than one ‘war on corruption’ and they all failed. Why? Because they all started from the bottom up.”

So when his father, who has never been tainted by corruption charges during his nearly five decades as governor of Riyadh, ascended to the throne in 2015 (at a time of falling oil prices), he vowed to put a stop to it all, M.B.S. said:

“My father saw that there is no way we can stay in the G-20 and grow with this level of corruption. In early 2015, one of his first orders to his team was to collect all the information about corruption-- at the top. This team worked for two years until they collected the most accurate information, and then they came up with about 200 names.”

When all the data was ready, the public prosecutor, Saud al-Mojib, took action, M.B.S. said, explaining that each suspected billionaire or prince was arrested and given two choices: “We show them all the files that we have and as soon as they see those about 95 percent agree to a settlement,” which means signing over cash or shares of their business to the Saudi state treasury.

“About 1 percent,” he added, “are able to prove they are clean and their case is dropped right there. About 4 percent say they are not corrupt and with their lawyers want to go to court. Under Saudi law, the public prosecutor is independent. We cannot interfere with his job-- the king can dismiss him, but he is driving the process... We have experts making sure no businesses are bankrupted in the process”-- to avoid causing unemployment.

“How much money are they recovering?” I asked.

The public prosecutor says it could eventually “be around $100 billion in settlements,” said M.B.S.

There is no way, he added, to root out all corruption from top to the bottom, “So you have to send a signal, and the signal going forward now is, ‘You will not escape.’ And we are already seeing the impact,” like people writing on social media, “I called my middle man and he doesn’t answer.” Saudi business people who paid bribes to get services done by bureaucrats are not being prosecuted, explained M.B.S. “It’s those who shook the money out of the government”-- by overcharging and getting kickbacks.

The stakes are high for M.B.S. in this anticorruption drive. If the public feels that he is truly purging corruption that was sapping the system and doing so in a way that is transparent and makes clear to future Saudi and foreign investors that the rule of law will prevail, it will really instill a lot of new confidence in the system. But if the process ends up feeling arbitrary, bullying and opaque, aimed more at aggregating power for power’s sake and unchecked by any rule of law, it will end up instilling fear that will unnerve Saudi and foreign investors in ways the country can’t afford.

But one thing I know for sure: Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days expressed anything other than effusive support for this anticorruption drive. The Saudi silent majority is clearly fed up with the injustice of so many princes and billionaires ripping off their country. While foreigners, like me, were inquiring about the legal framework for this operation, the mood among Saudis I spoke with was: “Just turn them all upside down, shake the money out of their pockets and don’t stop shaking them until it’s all out!”

But guess what? This anticorruption drive is only the second-most unusual and important initiative launched by M.B.S. The first is to bring Saudi Islam back to its more open and modern orientation-- whence it diverted in 1979. That is, back to what M.B.S. described to a recent global investment conference here as a “moderate, balanced Islam that is open to the world and to all religions and all traditions and peoples.”

I know that year well. I started my career as a reporter in the Middle East in Beirut in 1979, and so much of the region that I have covered since was shaped by the three big events of that year: the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Saudi puritanical extremists-- who denounced the Saudi ruling family as corrupt, impious sellouts to Western values; the Iranian Islamic revolution; and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

These three events together freaked out the Saudi ruling family at the time, and prompted it to try to shore up its legitimacy by allowing its Wahhabi clerics to impose a much more austere Islam on the society and by launching a worldwide competition with Iran’s ayatollahs over who could export more fundamentalist Islam. It didn’t help that the U.S. tried to leverage this trend by using Islamist fighters against Russia in Afghanistan. In all, it pushed Islam globally way to the right and helped nurture 9/11.

M.B.S. is on a mission to bring Saudi Islam back to the center. He has not only curbed the authority of the once feared Saudi religious police to berate a woman for not covering every inch of her skin, he has also let women drive. And unlike any Saudi leader before him, he has taken the hard-liners on ideologically. As one U.S.-educated 28-year-old Saudi woman told me: M.B.S. “uses a different language. He says, ‘We are going to destroy extremism.’ He’s not sugar-coating. That is reassuring to me that the change is real.”

Indeed, M.B.S. instructed me: “Do not write that we are ‘reinterpreting’ Islam-- we are ‘restoring’ Islam to its origins-- and our biggest tools are the Prophet’s practices and [daily life in] Saudi Arabia before 1979.” At the time of the Prophet Muhammad, he argued, there were musical theaters, there was mixing between men and women, there was respect for Christians and Jews in Arabia. “The first commercial judge in Medina was a woman!” So if the Prophet embraced all of this, M.B.S. asked, “Do you mean the Prophet was not a Muslim?”

Then one of his ministers got out his cellphone and shared with me pictures and YouTube videos of Saudi Arabia in the 1950s-- women without heads covered, wearing skirts and walking with men in public, as well as concerts and cinemas. It was still a traditional and modest place, but not one where fun had been outlawed, which is what happened after 1979.

If this virus of an antipluralistic, misogynistic Islam that came out of Saudi Arabia in 1979 can be reversed by Saudi Arabia, it would drive moderation across the Muslim world and surely be welcomed here where 65 percent of the population is under 30.

One middle-age Saudi banker said to me: “My generation was held hostage by 1979. I know now that my kids will not be hostages.” Added a 28-year-old Saudi woman social entrepreneur: “Ten years ago when we talked about music in Riyadh it meant buying a CD-- now it is about the concert next month and what ticket are you buying and which of your friends will go with you.”

Saudi Arabia would have a very long way to go before it approached anything like Western standards for free speech and women’s rights. But as someone who has been coming here for almost 30 years, it blew my mind to learn that you can hear Western classical music concerts in Riyadh now, that country singer Toby Keith held a men-only concert here in September, where he even sang with a Saudi, and that Lebanese soprano Hiba Tawaji will be among the first woman singers to perform a women-only concert here on Dec. 6. And M.B.S told me, it was just decided that women will be able to go to stadiums and attend soccer games. The Saudi clerics have completely acquiesced.

The Saudi education minister chimed in that among a broad set of education reforms, he’s redoing and digitizing all textbooks, sending 1,700 Saudi teachers each year to world-class schools in places like Finland to upgrade their skills, announcing that for the first time Saudi girls will have physical education classes in public schools and this year adding an hour to the Saudi school day for kids to explore their passions in science and social issues, under a teacher’s supervision, with their own projects.

So many of these reforms were so long overdue it’s ridiculous. Better late than never, though.

On foreign policy, M.B.S. would not discuss the strange goings on with Prime Minister Saad Hariri of Lebanon coming to Saudi Arabia and announcing his resignation, seemingly under Saudi pressure, and now returning to Beirut and rescinding that resignation. He simply insisted that the bottom line of the whole affair is that Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, is not going to continue providing political cover for a Lebanese government that is essentially controlled by the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militia, which is essentially controlled by Tehran.

He insisted that the Saudi-backed war in Yemen, which has been a humanitarian nightmare, was tilting in the direction of the pro-Saudi legitimate government there, which, he said is now in control of 85 percent of the country, but given the fact that pro-Iranian Houthi rebels, who hold the rest, launched a missile at Riyadh airport, anything less than 100 percent is still problematic.

His general view seemed to be that with the backing of the Trump administration-- he praised President Trump as “the right person at the right time”-- the Saudis and their Arab allies were slowly building a coalition to stand up to Iran. I am skeptical. The dysfunction and rivalries within the Sunni Arab world generally have prevented forming a unified front up to now, which is why Iran indirectly controls four Arab capitals today-- Damascus, Sana, Baghdad and Beirut. That Iranian over-reach is one reason M.B.S. was scathing about Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran’s “supreme leader is the new Hitler of the Middle East,” said M.B.S. “But we learned from Europe that appeasement doesn’t work. We don’t want the new Hitler in Iran to repeat what happened in Europe in the Middle East.” What matters most, though, is what Saudi Arabia does at home to build its strength and economy.

But can M.B.S. and his team see this through? Again, I make no predictions. He has his flaws that he will have to control, insiders here tell me. They include relying on a very tight circle of advisers who don’t always challenge him sufficiently, and a tendency to start too many things that don’t get finished. There’s a whole list. But guess what? Perfect is not on the menu here. Someone had to do this job-- wrench Saudi Arabia into the 21st century-- and M.B.S. stepped up. I, for one, am rooting for him to succeed in his reform efforts.

And so are a lot of young Saudis. There was something a 30-year-old Saudi woman social entrepreneur said to me that stuck in my ear. “We are privileged to be the generation that has seen the before and the after.” The previous generation of Saudi women, she explained, could never imagine a day when a woman could drive and the coming generation will never be able to imagine a day when a woman couldn’t.

“But I will always remember not being able to drive,” she told me. And the fact that starting in June that will never again be so “gives me so much hope. It proves to me that anything is possible-- that this is a time of opportunity. We have seen things change and we are young enough to make the transition.”

This reform push is giving the youth here a new pride in their country, almost a new identity, which many of them clearly relish. Being a Saudi student in post-9/11 America, young Saudis confess, is to always feel you are being looked at as a potential terrorist or someone who comes from a country locked in the Stone Age.

Now they have a young leader who is driving religious and economic reform, who talks the language of high tech, and whose biggest sin may be that he wants to go too fast. Most ministers are now in their 40s-- and not 60s. And with the suffocating hand of a puritanical Islam being lifted, it’s giving them a chance to think afresh about their country and their identity as Saudis.

“We need to restore our culture to what it was before the [Islamic] radical culture took over,” a Saudi woman friend who works with an N.G.O. said to me. ”`We have 13 regions in this country, and they each have a different cuisine. But nobody knows that. Did you know that? But I never saw one Saudi dish go global. It is time for us to embrace who we are and who we were.”

Alas, who Saudi Arabia is also includes a large cohort of older, more rural, more traditional Saudis, and pulling them into the 21st century will be a challenge. But that’s in part why every senior bureaucrat is working crazy hours now. They know M.B.S. can call them on the phone at any of those hours to find out if something he wanted done is getting done. I told him his work habits reminded me of a line in the play Hamilton, when the chorus asks: Why does he always work like “he’s running out of time.”

“Because,” said M.B.S., "I fear that the day I die I am going to die without accomplishing what I have in my mind. Life is too short and a lot of things can happen, and I am really keen to see it with my own eyes-- and that is why I am in a hurry.”

Even if the torture allegations turn out to be false, this whole operation appears to be part of a Trump, Kushner-in-law, Erik Prince operation. What does that tell you? What should it have told that numbskull Friedman? The "royal" family's corruption is written into the "constitution" and that family just arrested the two richest men in the kingdom, Alwaleed bin Talal and Mohammed Hussein al-Amoudi, and are squeezing them-- shaking them down-- to sign over their wealth to the "government" (i.e., M.B.S.' branch of the family). I'm surprised Friedman didn't cite Steve Mnuchin telling CNBC "I think that the Crown Prince (Mohammed bin Salman) is doing a great job at transforming the country."

Adam Johnson was laughing at the western media's naïveté (or collusion?) yesterday as well.

Two weeks ago, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman carried out a brutal crackdown on his political opponents, arresting dozens of high-ranking relatives, kidnapping the prime minister of Lebanon, and seeing eight of his political rivals die in a convenient helicopter crash. The “consolidation of power” by the de facto Saudi ruler comes as his government ramps up its siege of Yemen and gets even closer to its US sponsor, thanks to a Trump’s dopey love affair with-- and direct assistance of-- the regime.

The cynical plan has been met, in some media quarters, with condemnation, but for many in the Western press, Mohammed’s self-serving power grab is the action of a bold “reformer,” a roguish bad boy doing the messy but essential work of “reforming” the kingdom—the “anti-corruption” pretext of the purge largely repeated without qualification. The most prominent sources for this spin were two major newspapers, the New York Times and Guardian.

...With Guardian editors again painting Mohammed as a populist hero by insisting he “upended” “previously untouchable ultra-elite,” one is left to wonder why they don’t consider the absolute-monarch-in-waiting-- who just bought a $590 million yacht-- part of the “ultra elite.” It’s a curious framing that reeks more of PR than journalism.

This was a trope one could see emerging over the past few months. Similar “bold reformer” frames were used in New York Times editorials (“The Young and Brash Saudi Crown Prince,”) and straight reporting (“Saudi Arabia’s Grand Plan to Move Beyond Oil: Big Goals, Bigger Hurdles”). Everything’s new and exciting. The brutal, routine functions of the Saudi state are seen as laws of nature-- and those in charge of it are the reformers of the very oppression they initially authored.