Georgia, South Carolina And Tennessee vs Argentina

Yesterday afternoon, three gubernatorial fools-- gubers for short-- announced that they're prematurely opening their states up for the pandemic-- although none of their states were very closed down to begin with. The 3 imbeciles are Brian Kemp (R-GA), Bill Lee (R-TN) and Henry McMaster (R-SC). Let's start by looking at some numbers-- total cases and cases per million.

• Georgia- 18,947 (1,840 per million)
• Tennessee- 7,238 (1,088 per million)
• South Carolina- 4,377 (883 per million)

Remember those numbers, because by Memorial Day weekend they're all going to be much higher. On Good Morning America yesterday, Dr. Fauci made it clear that this is a big mistake that will steepen the curve and cause the nation's efforts to banish the pandemic to slow down. He said that "this is something that is hurting from the standpoint of economics, from the standpoint of things that have nothing to do with the virus... unless we get the virus under control, the real recovery economically is not gonna happen. So what you do if you jump the gun and go into a situation where you have a big spike, you’re gonna set yourself back... it’s gonna backfire. That’s the problem."




Wire Train was a band on my indie label, 415 Records. The original drummer, was Federico Gil-Sola, a kid from Argentina, who has since moved back there. Last night he suggested I read a piece in The Nation by Jacob Sugarman about how Argentina is handling the pandemic, Argentina Is Showing the World What a Humane Covid-19 Response Looks Like. "In December of 2019," wrote Sugarman, "the Peronist-progressive coalition party Frente de Todos (Everyone’s Front) swept into power after four years of neoliberal mismanagement. Now that it had begun enacting a social democratic agenda, against the backdrop of an unprecedented public health crisis, the forces of reaction were making their voices heard. Indeed, their demonstration began shortly after Minister of Labor Claudio Moroni ordered the country’s largest steel manufacturer, Techint, to pause the firing of 1,450 temporary workers. (President Alberto Fernández has since issued an emergency decree banning layoffs for a period of two months.) “Muchachos, les tocó la hora de ganar menos,” Fernández told the country’s business leaders at the time. “Boys, it’s time for you to earn less.”

Herein lies the challenge not just for Argentina but also for countless other liberal democracies across the West. While the outlines of our global crisis are only beginning to emerge, it is clear that Covid-19 demands that these nations reimagine the role of the state after decades of free-market hegemony. New possibilities have presented themselves that seemed unimaginable as recently as February. Even the editorial board of the Financial Times recently conceded that more radical reforms like a wealth tax and a universal basic income will have to be put on the table. Fernández, whose conservative predecessor, Mauricio Macri, reduced the Minister of Health to a non-cabinet position, understands this intuitively, implementing a pandemic response that, if not offering an exemplar for the Americas, stands in stark contrast to the region’s more overtly authoritarian regimes.

“I was concerned that the Argentine state apparatus wouldn’t be up to the task, but the response [has been] good,” says Marcelo Leiras, a political scientist and adviser to Argentina’s minister of the interior, Eduardo “Wado” de Pedro. “The Minister of Health [Ginés González García], at the beginning, thought that this epidemic would not strongly effect Argentina. For good reasons, I think. We didn’t know how contagious this thing was. The president was wise enough to widen his circle of advisers and heed the most prudent, conservative advice. He was [also] bold in choosing a strong quarantine policy, which in economic terms was incredibly risky.”

“We have to keep in mind how inarticulate the international response has been to the [coronavirus],” he adds. “It’s reflective of the political disarray of the West in domestic and international terms. I think the president sensed that and reacted very quickly and consistently.”

Whereas U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro have abdicated responsibility for their nations’ pandemic responses, with each openly flouting epidemiologists and sniping at the governors of their respective states and provinces, Fernández issued a nationwide shelter-in-place order on March 20. At the time, Argentina had only 128 official cases nationwide, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. As with the Argentinian president’s prior decisions to close the country’s borders and place visitors from global hot spots in a two-week quarantine, the aim was simple: to flatten the curve before a swell in cases could overwhelm the country’s latticework of trade union clinics, public hospitals, and private health care providers. It is far too early to call the measures a success, but early returns suggest that they are working. Infections have come in well below initial projections, and as of April 12, Argentina’s death rate stood at two per 1 million habitants. Chile’s, by contrast, was four, and Brazil’s was five. The United States’ was 62.

“Argentina has acted very quickly in comparison with other countries,” says Rodrigo Quiroga, a bioinformatician at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council. “[That includes] the rapid closure of the border, the mandatory isolation of those who came from countries with high rates of infections and the closing of schools. These measures, along with the quarantine, have reduced the number of cases in this first stage of the pandemic.”

Fernández’s economic actions have been no less audacious, especially when considering that his administration inherited a $311 billion debt that includes a record $57 billion loan in 2018 from the International Monetary Fund-- the institution that imposed punishing austerity measures after the country’s crash in 2002. Argentina has invested as much as 2 percent of its gross domestic product in an economic and social relief package-- among the highest within the G20-- while an executive order issued last month has ensured that no essential services be cut for retirees, social welfare recipients and households earning less than a combined 33,750 pesos (about $520) due to a lack of payment. These services include electricity, gas, water, mobile, and fixed landlines, as well as Internet and cable television. The Fernández administration has also suspended evictions and frozen all rent hikes through September, in addition to absolving “monotributistas,” the country’s bottom tax bracket, of penalties for failing to make their March tax payments.

More significantly, the president has created via executive order a 10,000-peso (about $150) Ingreso Familiar de Emergencia (Emergency Family Income) for domestic workers and other low-income earners, giving first priority to those who qualify for Asignación Universal por Hijo (Universal Child Allowance) and Asignación para Embarazadas (Allowance for Pregnant Women). Nearly 8 million Argentines will receive subsidies beginning April 21. The administration has further made every employer, regardless of trade and size, eligible for a Programa de Asistencia de Emergencia al Trabajao y la Producción (Emergency Assistance Program for Work and Production), postponing or reducing the tax commitments of small businesses by up to 95 percent and paying out between 50 and 100 percent of a monthly minimum wage salary for each of their employees. Meanwhile, the federal government has compelled banks to extend hundreds of millions of dollars in loans at a reduced interest rate in an effort to keep the economy afloat.

Although Argentina has declined to nationalize its private hospitals as Spain has done, it has secured their cooperation during the crisis so that its health care system doesn’t face a shortage of hospital beds. Fernández has likewise activated the armed services to build a number of triage centers in the event of a surge in cases. Taken together, these actions amount to a mass mobilization of the Argentinian state.

...Fernández has investigated relaxing quarantine restrictions in order to stimulate the economy, but the challenges will be immense. While the government maintains that its testing of Covid-19 is proportionate to the country’s low rate of infection (2,142 official cases as of April 12), it had administered just 19,758 tests-- 437 per million habitants-- two weeks before quarantine was tentatively set to end April 26. As the country attempts to ramp up the numbers of ventilators and test kits after years of funding cuts to the Administración Nacional de Laboratorios e Institutos de Salud “Dr. Carlos Malbrán” (the Malbrán Institute), and amid supply chain disruptions that have hampered much of Latin America, it may be all but impossible to control the virus’s spread in the more impoverished suburbs of Buenos Aires, where population density is high, access to quality health care is limited, and few enjoy the luxury to self-isolate. At the same time, a 2019 poll from Argentina’s Catholic University finds that nearly half of the country’s labor force (49.3 percent) works off the books, with 81.7 percent of that segment in low-quality jobs.

“The response has ultimately been reflective of the strengths and weaknesses of the Argentinian state,” says Leiras. “The Argentinian state is strong in dialogue and politics but bad in terms of infrastructure, in its ability to go to places and do things, to reach people with health services [for example]. In that respect, it’s like an octopus with very short tentacles.”

Yet, despite its deficiencies, Argentina has thus far managed to avoid the kinds of catastrophes emerging in countries like Ecuador, where bodies have piled up in the streets of Guayaquil, and Brazil, whose president now faces impeachment calls for his homicidal denialism. More recently, Fernández has encouraged the congress to pass a tax on the country’s biggest fortunes-- a response to his political opposition’s calls for government officials to reduce their salaries by 30 percent. The tax, which targets, among others, those who were granted immunity by the prior administration for hiding their wealth overseas, signals the president’s desire to fundamentally reorder Argentinian society as much as it aims to ameliorate the worst economic effects of the crisis. Fernandez grasps what many of his counterparts on the world stage have not: that our fates are intrinsically bound together, and that the historical epoch we’ve been thrust into demands a new social contract.

“For many years, Argentinians have been led to believe that politicians and union leaders were the source of all their problems,” the president mused in late March. “The real problem is those who believe that there are too many people, that this [isn’t] a country where we all have a place…. After the pandemic, everything will be different. We’ll live in another world. I believe that ours is a time of reflection, in which we can recover something that postmodernity has robbed of us.”

“Postmodernity has led us to believe that individualism was the secret and that success meant earning money,” he continued. “[We’ve seen] a microscopic bug lay waste to vast fortunes and destroy accumulated wealth. Microscopic. This same bug can kill [the rich] as easily as it can kill any one of us. What was the purpose then of accumulating so much?”

Leaving The Trump Regime And Heading To Prison Are Two Different Balls Of Wax

Nancy Ohanian sees Kushner-in-law

It's like a Kinks song from the '60s, but who will the next be to leave the crumbling Trumpanzee Regime? Everyone was saying it was going to be McMaster-- and before April Fools Day. Then this morning Ben White reported for Politico that Gary Cohn-- still fuming he didn't get the Fed Chair-- would quit over the tariffs. Cohn, he wrote, "has been rumored to be on the brink of leaving the White House for months but stayed for one main reason: to stop the president from imposing steep tariffs. By Thursday afternoon, Cohn had lost the fight. In a meeting with steel industry executives, Trump announced plans for a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports. The decision came after a frantic 24 hours in which Cohn and others tried to talk Trump off the ledge. At one point, aides were sure Trump would make the announcement. Then they said he wouldn’t. Finally, sitting alongside steel executives, he did. The Dow promptly tanked over 500 points, and Cohn’s allies began wondering if this would be the final insult sending the director of the National Economic Council to the exit. One person close to Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive, said he wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually left the chaotic and deeply exhausting administration as a result of the decision. A second person close to Cohn described it as a brutal blow that violated one of the NEC director’s core beliefs—that protectionism is economically backward and won’t lead to increased prosperity."

But the tariffs and a peeved Gary Cohn aren't going to end Trump's Regime and McMaster will just be reshuffled into another slot. It's Hope Hicks, basically a sexy secretary, and her diary + Ivanka and Kushner-in-law who could do Trump in... Putin-Gate!! Earlier today the news came fast and furious but no one could forget the NY Times story about how Señor Trumpanzee is so frustrated with Kushner-in-law that even he finally recognizes him as "a liability because of his legal entanglements, the investigations of the Kushner family’s real estate company and the publicity over having his security clearance downgraded, according to two people familiar with his views. In private conversations, the president vacillates between sounding regretful that Mr. Kushner is taking arrows and annoyed that he is another problem to deal with." And this seems newsworthy: "Privately, some aides have expressed frustration that Mr. Kushner and his wife, the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump, have remained at the White House, despite Mr. Trump at times saying they never should have come to the White House and should leave. Yet aides also noted that Mr. Trump has told the couple that they should keep serving in their roles, even as he has privately asked Mr. Kelly for his help in moving them out." And here I though Kelly was moving against Kushner as a way of committing political suicide!

The Washington Post:

They were the ascendant young couples of the Trump White House: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and Rob Porter and Hope Hicks. They enjoyed rarefied access to the president and special privileges in the West Wing. Glamorous and well-connected, they had an air of power and invincibility. They even double-dated once.

But an unlikely cascade of events-- set in motion by paparazzi photos of Porter and Hicks published Feb. 1 in a British tabloid-- crashed down on Kushner this week. The shortest month of the year delivered 28 days of tumult that many inside and outside the White House say could mark the fall of the House of Kushner.

Once the prince of Trump’s Washington, Kushner is now stripped of his access to the nation’s deepest secrets, isolated and badly weakened inside the administration, under scrutiny for his mixing of business and government work and facing the possibility of grave legal peril in the Russia probe.

Ryan Grim painted an even grimmer picture-- for Kushner-- at The Intercept early, early this morning. Kushner's family firm "made a direct pitch to Qatar’s minister of finance in April 2017 in an attempt to secure investment in a critically distressed asset in the company’s portfolio, according to two sources. At the previously unreported meeting, Jared Kushner’s father Charles, who runs Kushner Companies, and Qatari Finance Minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi discussed financing for the Kushners’ signature 666 Fifth Avenue property in New York City." Charles! Wouldn't it be funny if he wound up back in his old prison cell? With his son down the cell block? I wonder who leaked this to the press:

The failure to broker the deal would be followed only a month later by a Middle Eastern diplomatic row in which Jared Kushner provided critical support to Qatar’s neighbors. Led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a group of Middle Eastern countries, with Kushner’s backing, led a diplomatic assault that culminated in a blockade of Qatar. Kushner, according to reports at the time, subsequently undermined efforts by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to bring an end to the standoff.

The Gulf crisis involving Qatar and its neighbors will likely be Kushner’s defining foreign policy legacy. The crisis followed a May visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, by Kushner and President Donald Trump, who subsequently took credit for Saudi Arabia and its allies’ efforts against Qatar. The fallout has reshaped geopolitical alliances in the region, splitting the Gulf Cooperation Council and pushing Qatar, home to the Middle East’s largest U.S. military base, closer to Turkey and Iran.

...The news of Kushner Companies’ direct pitch to the Qatari government puts a Wednesday report from the Washington Post into broader context. U.S. intelligence services, the paper reported, had determined that officials in four countries-- the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel, and Mexico-- had been privately discussing how to use Jared Kushner’s real-estate investments as a way to gain leverage over him in order to influence official U.S. policy.

Kushner has divested from a small portion of Kushner Companies, but has retained substantial ownership. A balloon payment due in 2018 on the badly underwater property at 666 Fifth Avenue has been a ticking clock on the fortunes of the Kushner family, precipitating the global hunt for capital. The Washington Post reported earlier this year that the father-son pair, Jared and Charles Kushner, speak on a daily basis.

The New York Times reported last month that just prior to Jared Kushner’s visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia in May 2017, his family real estate company “received a roughly $30 million investment from Menora Mivtachim,” described as one of Israel’s largest financial institutions.

You don't think the Kush is in over his head-- and possibly headed for a very bad ending? Pay more attention. Watch a lovable, self-described "middle-aged, pot-bellied lesbian" who may have a new career as a crossword puzzle designer. And... read Axios on your cell while crossing the street. Jim VandeHei: Destroying Jared Kushner: a five-part play. "It’s no secret a lot of people inside and outside the White House want Jared Kushner gone. They think he’s too inexperienced, too compromised by conflicts of interest and the Russia probe, and too ineffective. Their revenge against him this week has been brutal, sustained, at times brilliant, and potentially lethal. What has unfolded is not the work of coincidence: it is the slit-by-slit slow bleed of a top adviser and son-in-law to the president." Is this Shakespeare? Or just more reality TV, playing for tawdry ratings?

Act I: The knee-capping

The public humiliation of losing his top security clearance was telegraphed and then executed by Chief of Staff John Kelly. It was promptly leaked. Kushner, who fancied himself a de facto Secretary of State and peacemaker, lost access to the power of information.

• White House staff instantly turned unafraid to leak against Jared to reporters. He’s no longer seen as untouchable. Actually now seen as almost frail. They say he’s naive and has dim political insights.
• At the same time, he lost his top image-shaper Josh Raffel, just when he needs him most. (Kushner has known for a while Raffel is leaving, but that doesn’t make the blow any easier.)

Act II: The humiliation

Nothing’s worse for ego and perception than to be seen as easy prey.  Cue the leak to the Washington Post: Foreign governments reportedly discussed ways to manipulate Kushner, "current and former U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports on the matter" told the paper. They said his business dealings left him vulnerable.

Act III: The Godfather turns

Rupert Murdoch, the master of Fox and the Wall Street Journal, has advised Kushner for years. They are allies, friends, mentor and mentee. There was nothing friendly about the lead editorial in Murdoch's paper politely suggesting the “knives are out” and it’s time for Jared to skip town. “Giving up their White House positions would be a bitter remedy, but Mr. Kushner and first daughter Ivanka could still offer advice as outsiders.”

Act IV: The plot

You can’t execute family without cause. The whispers, which turned into constant conversation, which turned into screaming headlines, is that Kushner mixed too much personal business with official governmental work.

• Kushner, the New York Times revealed on its front page, took White House meetings with private equity billionaires and his family business benefited from their loans afterward. There is "little precedent for a top White House official meeting with executives of companies as they contemplate sizable loans to his business."

Act V: Tortured Trump

One thing Jared and Trump have in common: they read Maggie Haberman and the New York Times. Nothing says family love and I’ve-got-your-back like this: 

“Mr. Trump is also frustrated with Mr. Kushner, whom he now views as a liability because of his legal entanglements, the investigations of the Kushner family’s real estate company and the publicity over having his security clearance downgraded, according to two people familiar with his views. In private conversations, the president vacillates between sounding regretful that Mr. Kushner is taking arrows and annoyed that he is another problem to deal with.”

The End?

Well, let's hope so... but maybe a long drawn-out and very tortured ending? How about that? Gloria Borgia Friday morning: "Not since Richard Nixon started talking to the portraits on the walls of the West Wing has a president seemed so alone against the world. One source-- who is a presidential ally-- is worried, really worried. The source says this past week is 'different,' that advisers are scared the President is spiraling, lashing out, just out of control. For example: Demanding to hold a public session where he made promises on trade tariffs before his staff was ready, not to mention willing. 'This has real economic impact,' says the source, as the Dow dropped 420 points after the President's news Thursday. 'Something is very wrong.' Even by Trumpian standards, the chaos and the unraveling at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are a stunning-- and recurring-- problem. But there's an up-against-the-wall quality to the past couple of weeks that is striking, and the crescendo is loud, clear, unhealthy, even dangerous." Uh oh... batten down the hatches. We all like the entertainment part... but the danger? Not so much. And it's coming; you knew it would.

In Washington Everyone Hates The Most Toxic Swamp Creature Of All, Donald J. Trump

Poor Trumpanzee. Everyone knows what an incompetent imbecile he is-- and Republicans in high positions increasingly are forced to bite their tongues to pretend otherwise. Some just can't do it any longer. Yesterday, BuzzFeed's Joseph Bernstein reported that last July National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster just couldn't take it any longer and let Oracle CEO Safra Catz know what he thinks of the orange pile of amorphous dung he works for. Five second-hand witnesses are all saying the same thing, namely that McMaster told Catz Trump is an "idiot" and a "dope" with the intelligence of a "kindergartner." There are people who don't already know that. Maybe back in July there were.

A sixth source who was not familiar with the details of the dinner told BuzzFeed News that McMaster had made similarly derogatory comments about Trump’s intelligence to him in private, including that the president lacked the necessary brainpower to understand the matters before the National Security Council... [T]hree of the sources said that McMaster disparaged multiple members of the administration to Catz, including Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner. Of Kushner, one source told BuzzFeed News, McMaster said he had no business being in the White House and should not be involved in national security issues... Catz was so alarmed by the tenor of McMaster’s comments about President Trump and Israel that she confided her concerns to several administration officials, as well as Adelson.

Reaction to Trump is far worse in Congress where, according to multiple sources, "most" Capitol Hill Republicans "hate him enough to wish he would drop dead." One top Senate staffer told me today that Senate Republicans generally think Trump "is destroying the party and maybe the country." In one of his deranged, Adderall-fueled Twitter rants over the weekend, Trump lashed out, foolishly, at Jeff Flake:

When I read it to him, a Republican congressman wouldn't believe me and said he would call me back. After he read it himself, he said he would give me an official version and an off-the-record version of his reaction. Then he changed his mind and just gave me the off-the-record version, saying he didn't want a "bunch of Trump ghouls" coming to his office in the district and bothering his staffers. "Who writes something like this? Not even a 14 year old like that cocksucker Moore molested. This sounds like someone in the 3rd grade. Or someone mentally impaired. I think he has early stage Alzheimer's. I hope it kills him fast so we don't get dragged though years of excruciating loss of cognition in public... I voted for Hillary, first time in my life I voted for a Democrat... if you ever connect me to that I'll deny it. I didn't like her either but she's a fully-functioning adult. He's not."

Jeff Flake was more circumspect. As Roll Call pointed out Monday morning, "Losing Flake would put the bill in serious jeopardy of failing, robbing Trump of a year-end legislative victory."

Flake was caught on an open microphone Saturday saying if Republicans "become the party of Roy Moore and Donald Trump, we are toast."

The tweet raised eyebrows in Washington, with congressional observers and reporters firing off their own tweets noting Flake had not previously announced how he intends to vote on a tax overhaul bill that cleared the Finance Committee late Thursday evening.

Several White House officials had not responded to an inquiry seeking more information about Trump’s prediction, including the basis of his prediction. Several hours after the president’s 6:22 p.m. post, a Flake aide disputed Trump’s prediction.

“Sen. Flake is still reviewing the tax reform bill on its merits. How he votes on it will have nothing to do with the President,” the aide said.

But the president’s tweet introduces another new dramatic twist in his and Senate GOP leaders’ efforts to score their first shared legislative victory since Trump was sworn in on Jan. 20.

That’s because Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., already has signaled his opposition unless changes are made to benefit small businesses. If both Flake and Johnson oppose the measure, it would leave no margin for further defections for GOP leaders and the White House. And several other Republicans have expressed skepticism over the measure, including about its projected impact on the federal deficit.

If Flake and Johnson are serious about not voting for the bill, there are several other Republicans, including McCain, Bob Corker, Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Oklahoma conservative James Lankford, who, for one reason or another, could provide that 3rd vote to kill Trump's little victory. Collins, for example, who was on CNN's State of the Union Sunday, told Jake Tapper that she's a NO vote unless changes are made to the bill. She's unhappy about how the bill dumps the individual mandate for healthcare, and she opposes the elimination of the federal deduction for state and local taxes and she opposes the steep drop in the corporate tax rate.

Trumpanzee's Jews Aren't Anything Like Normal Jews

I wonder if all the vehement anti-Semitism on display from a newly empowered fascist movement-- they call it "alt-right" these days-- is making the modern day Bugsy Siegal-- Vegas mob boss Sheldon Adelson-- just a little nervous. If the Steve Bannon wing of the Republican power ever gains ultimate power, I'm sure there's a gas chamber that even someone as grossly rotund as Adelson can be stuffed into. Maybe that's why he's getting a little nervous about the fascist campaign to demonize H.R. McMaster. Normal people don't hear much about it, but the Bannon vs McMaster brawl is center stage in the fever swamps of the far right and inside TrumpWorld. Adelson weighing in is a big deal since he routinely funnels millions of dollars annually into the Republican Party from the Mafia, from interests in China and from interests in Israel.

Writing for Axios yesterday, Jonathan Swan reported that the virulently anti-union billionaire "has disavowed a campaign against National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, which is being pushed by a group Adelson funds, the Zionist Organization of America. Andy Abboud, who represents Adelson, tells me: 'Sheldon Adelson has nothing to do with the ZOA campaign against McMaster. Had no knowledge of it. And has provided zero support, and is perfectly comfortable with the role that McMaster is playing.'"

Since then Adelson has updated his position with a telephone clarification to Axios which emphasizes that Adelson doesn't know McMaster and hasn't developed an opinion about him. Adelson doesn't want his intervention to be interpreted as a political endorsement; but rather that he has had nothing to do with, and doesn't support, the campaign against McMaster.

This is of interest and some import because Adelson is one of the biggest financial contributors "in Republican politics, and his influence over national security and Israel-related matters is substantial. His is a voice listened to by President Trump and other senior White House officials like Jared Kushner." Not by serious policy experts, of course, but by grifters like Trump and Kushner. Zionist Organization of America represents the far right of Israeli politics in America and the Adelsons give them immense sums of money. Somewhat ironically, they have thrown their lot in with the alt-right, the center of American anti-Semitism and their completely deranged crackpot president, Mort Klein, is about one step away from buying a tiki torch and waving a swastika banner at shuel. Klein is very tight with Trump's neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who accuses McMaster of being "soft on Israel and unserious about the threat of radical Islamic terrorism. He's called for Trump to 'reassign' McMaster 'to another position where he can do no further harm on these critical national security issues.' Klein is increasingly isolated in his opposition to McMaster. His only senior ally inside the White House is Bannon; the rest of the senior staff has united in disgust at the outside campaign against McMaster. David Friedman, Trump's staunchly pro-Israel ambassador, is vouching for McMaster, though he was unable to convince Klein."

David Frum noted on Twitter this morning that his rabbi had posted this comment (above) on his Facebook page. It's from a Charlottesville resident. Did Señor Trumpanzee think these were some of the "very fine people" marching around Friday and Saturday with Nazi and KKK symbols and waving "Elect Trump-Pence" signs? Virginia's governor certainly didn't think they were very fine.

As Emma Green pointed out for Atlantic readers yesterday, Trump's very fine Charlottesville marchers were obsessed with Jews. Trumpanzee can insist all he wants that the "Unite the Right" activities were about protecting their cultural heritage and the Robert E. Lee statue, but what does that have to do with "Jews will not replace us?" She wrote that "Marchers displayed swastikas on banners and shouted slogans like 'blood and soil,' a phrase drawn from Nazi ideology. 'This city is run by Jewish communists and criminal niggers,' one demonstrator told Vice News’ Elspeth Reeve during their march. As Jews prayed at a local synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, men dressed in fatigues carrying semi-automatic rifles stood across the street, according to the temple’s president. Nazi websites posted a call to burn their building. As a precautionary measure, congregants had removed their Torah scrolls and exited through the back of the building when they were done praying... [T]he connection between African Americans and Jews is clear. In the minds of white supremacists like David Duke, there is a straight line from anti-blackness to anti-Judaism. That logic is powerful and important. The durability of anti-Semitic tropes, and the ease with which they slide into all displays of bigotry, is a chilling reminder that the hatreds of our time rhyme with history and are easily channeled through timeless anti-Semitic canards... [T]he violence in Charlottesville was part of a broader political context. The fringe right is reacting to other political movements with nostalgia, Feld said-- a yearning for people, including minorities like Jews and blacks, to 'know their place.'"

And while normal people were horrified by Trump trying to equate Nazis and the Klan with those protesting Nazis and the Klan, actual Nazis and the Klan applauded their president. KKK leader David Duke tweeted his gratitude to Trump: "Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa." A Nazi leader (Tim Gionet) of the Unite the Right movement who goes by the nom de guerre "Baked Alaska" tweeted that "President Trump is right! One side had a permit to speak, one side charged with clubs & weapons! Look at the facts people." So that's their crazy world. All these people really, really deserve each other. But the country doesn't. I'm sensing an uptick in the number of Americans who now think Trump needs to be impeached.

Bannon Is STILL Colluding With The Kremlin To Undermine America

On Saturday, Israel's Haaretz reported, with a sense of irony, that Trump National Security chief H.R. McMaster is under intense attack from the Bannon wing of the GOP by being "controlled by rich Jews" and "hostile to Israel." This coordinated attack, Haaretz reports, "is coming from media outlets and writers affiliated with Steve Bannon, President Trump's senior political adviser, who has been accused in the past of making anti-Semitic comments. The campaign against McMaster intensified after he fired a number of mid-level officials from the National Security Council, who were considered loyal to Bannon and to the former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn... The driving force behind the campaign has been far-right blogger Mike Cernovich, who started sharing links to a website called, McMaster Leaks, which is devoted to attacks on McMaster, on social media."

The website featured a brazen anti-Semitic caricature depicting McMaster and retired General David Petraeus, who is considered close to a number of senior NSC officials-- as two puppets being controlled by Jewish billionaire George Soros, who himself is being controlled by "the Rothschilds," the famously rich Jewish family of bankers. After the caricature was mocked on social media, the website edited it, replacing the word "Rothschilds" on the top of the pyramid with the word "Saudis," but keeping in Soros depiction in place.

The New York Times' Peter Baker, went a little deeper into the anti-McMaster campaign and seems to have found where Bannon is getting his on-line army for the campaign: the Kremlin. For real.

Conservatives have been dubious about General McMaster since the start, but opened up a concerted assault on him this week after he pushed out Ezra Cohen-Watnick, his senior director for intelligence, the latest of at least four hard-liners to leave the National Security Council staff in recent weeks.

They seized on a conservative website’s report that General McMaster had renewed the security clearance of Mr. Obama’s last national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, amid questions about her handling of intelligence eavesdropping on Russians that overheard Trump associates. And they blamed him when The Washington Post obtained leaked transcripts of phone conversations between Mr. Trump and the leaders of Mexico and Australia.

“General McMaster has to be fired because he is the captain of the ship and he has allowed that ship to get out of control and he can no longer be trusted with that responsibility,” Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government, an advocacy group, said in an interview.

Frank Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy, another group on the conservative right, said on a radio program on Friday that General McMaster was “insubordinate to his commander in chief” on matters including Syria and Islamic radicalism.

The ferocity of the attacks coming from the faction of the party allied with Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, had General McMaster’s associates convinced that it was no coincidence. At one point on Friday, Breitbart News, formerly run by Mr. Bannon, had close to a dozen headlines on its home page about General McMaster, like “McMaster ‘Deeply Hostile to Israel and to Trump.’”

The #FireMcMaster hashtag was tweeted more than 50,000 times since Wednesday. Echoing the drumbeat were social media organs tied to the Russian government. According to the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan group created to focus attention on Russian interference in the West, the top hashtag among 600 Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations at one point on Thursday was #FireMcMaster.

In an ostensibly unrelated OpEd for the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum tackled the non-response from the U.S. government to the aggressive Russian cyber war being waged against America. She pointed out that "conspiracy theories can be passed along by networks of bots and trolls in seconds... America’s reputation abroad has plunged in many countries. Conspiracy theories have never been easier to create and pass on, both abroad and at home. A part of the U.S. population right now believes that Russian President Vladi­mir Putin is a “Christian” leader fighting against the Islamic State in Syria. In fact his government represses religion and is not particularly interested in the battle against the Islamic State at all."

Yet at the moment, there is no systematic U.S. or Western response to Russian, Chinese or Islamic State disinformation. Attempts to keep track of it are uneven. There is no group or agency inside the U.S. government dedicated solely to this task. And, thanks to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, it looks like there won’t be anytime soon.

Despite a congressional decision allocating $80 million for this purpose, Tillerson has refused to spend the money. This is most certainly not, as Tillerson’s aide R.C. Hammond has claimed, because there is no plan to spend the money: Officials at State have told me that discussions on the issue are well advanced. Nor is it because State doesn’t have the capacity to spend it, or because the department has too many bureaucrats. From the beginning, the plan was always to create a small internal group to spend a large chunk of the money outside the department and outside the government, for example supporting Russian-language media, which can debunk myths told in the Russian media far better than outsiders could.

The real reason is because we don’t have a president like Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan or, frankly, even Jimmy Carter in the White House. We don’t have a president, and therefore we don’t have a secretary of state, who wants to stop conspiracy theories, promote democracy, bolster alliances and defend America’s reputation abroad. Instead of a president who identifies foreign disinformation as a problem that needs a solution, we have a president who thinks it serves his interests. If this were the Cold War, in other words, we would be poised to lose.

​Wilkerson on Impeachment, Pence, Destabilizing the State, and War with Iran

by Gaius Publius

We've written recently about the destabilization of the State under the pressure of the current situation (see "A Nation in Crisis, Again"). Lawrence Wilkerson, retired U.S. Army colonel, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, and frequent commenter on U.S. foreign policy, adds more. In the wake of Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey, Wilkerson gave a fascinating interview to Paul Jay at The Real News Network (click the video above to listen).

I want to present a few comments and send you to the video, or over to the transcript, for the rest. (I've edited the transcript slightly. All emphasis mine.)

On chaos, the American elites, the "permanent state," and Mike Pence. The first comments are from the interviewer.

PAUL JAY: ... I think we have far more to fear from a functional Trump administration than one in disarray, but with the firing of FBI head James Comey, the craziness has crossed a line. ...

The firing threatens the system of power in Washington where the permanent state, the deep state as some like to call it, can directly assert systemic power, and no president can defy it. The permanent state represents the basic interests of the billionaire class as a whole, and it's their job to maintain the empire. ... Even a president cannot be above it. He has to work within it. ...

If Trump continues this path, this chaos and megalomania will burn down his presidency, and rising from the ashes will be a phoenix. The face of this dangerous creature will be Mike Pence. Whether it's by impeachment, resignation, or simply de facto, Pence will be the real power in the White House. ...

The dysfunction, the clowniness, [has] within it the seeds, I think, of a lot of danger. What do you think?

LARRY WILKERSON: I think one of the things you just said in your lead-in, most of which I agree with — that the elite want or don't want a government that is unlimited in its power — is a little bit off. I think what they [the elite] want is a government that doesn't operate — either through chaos or design, and it's looking more like chaos — against their interests.

What we have here, of course, I think, is a display, repeatedly a display, of the potential, if not the actual already, [for] actions against that interest [of the elites].

You're right in the sense that this group is probably going to be the most formidable foe ultimately that Trump is going to face, and that it [the elite] might in some of its parts be more comfortable with a Pence than a Trump [presidency], and that that might be even more dangerous [to us] than the chaos we're seeing from Trump, is a worrisome point. The Comey debacle, as it were, sort of illustrates how profound that can be, even to the point of perpetrating a constitutional crisis, out of which one wonders what would come. ...

[T]he lunacy of the Trump administration, and the uncertainty and unpredictability which it emanates, is inimical to their interests any way you look at it. If you don't know what your clown, your puppet, is going to do in day-to-day operations, with the enormous power at his fingertips, then it becomes of grave concern [to them].

On the "systemic decay" of the American republic, which for Wilkerson, preceded Trump but is greatly exacerbated by his administration:

You have institutional decay, and that's systemic. You have the decay of diplomacy in the State Department. You have the decay of the government and its meritocracy, if you will, in general. You have the decay of the very republic that we supposedly represent, and ultimately the decay of democracy and liberty.

That's all happening at the same time we have this clown, this lunacy, in the White House, and as you pointed out, the prospect of something even more nefarious perhaps standing in the shadows behind it [a Pence reference].

No matter who I was as a billionaire, no matter if I were Charles and David Koch, or I were Robert Mercer, or anyone else interested in the goose continuing to lay my golden eggs, I would have some grievous concern over this bunch.

On the role of the Republican and Democratic parties in what's going on:

...you have two political parties, both in, I would argue, complete disarray. You have the Republicans in possession of the White House and both houses of the legislature, and just excited as hell about that, salivating over it, and yet beginning to realize they're not going to get anything done because of the lunatic in the White House and what they've done to themselves in dividing up into this suicidal arrangement of parties within a party.

[And] you have the Democrats who are still stunned by their electoral loss and can't seem to get their act together, and could never be as ruthless and as strategic as the Republicans are. This is a disaster taking place in front of our eyes. And you have 300+ million Americans who are not aware of this disaster in any real way that they could do anything about.

You have the recipe here for a real problem in governance, a real problem in the continuation of this republic in any sort of significant and meaningful way.

The reaction of foreign leaders to what's happening now in the U.S.:

What you have big time right now, is leaders all around the world, including those of our allies, who are thinking hard about the United States in the way of it being distrustful [I think he means "untrustworthy"], mistrustful, even no longer reliable, questioning their [America's] commitments to things they've been committed to since World War II, thinking about what they [foreign leaders] might do to join forces [with each other] and balance the hegemon [U.S.] gone amok.

And increasingly, you're going to see signs of that actually happening. You're not going to just see Prime Minister Abe in Japan trying to grow Japan up as fast as it can to be its own security element. You're going to see other leaders all across the globe, both friendly and opposed, who are going to be doing things that are inimical to our interests and increasingly going to be doing them together.

On the military in Trump's cabinet:

The war power has devolved almost entirely to the executive branch. The cowardice of the Congress, the incompetence of the Congress, the fundamental interests of the Congress in fueling those who contribute to their campaigns from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Grumman, Boeing, you name it, that is very conducive to what you just suggested.

And the one power that the president has that is unlimited in that regard is the war power. That this president would use that to ultimately try to resurrect what is increasingly a failed administration is something to be worried about, something to be concerned about, and that the military, from H.R. McMaster to Jim Mattis, within his Cabinet would be supportive of that, if he picked the right place — and believe me they'll help him pick the right place — is also worrisome.

It could put us on a trajectory of even more war after 17 years and $2-3 trillion and so forth which could be empire-ending.

On Iran as the ultimate target:

Iran is the ultimate target [of our increased presence in the Middle East]. I have to think that. I have to feel that, because I know that's the strategic viewpoint of the military.

And if Iran is the ultimate target and we're talking about doing something, precipitating something, making something happen that either shows Iran as the culprit in violating the current nuclear agreement or that sort of approximates that in a way that they can excuse themselves as we did in 2003 when we invaded Iraq and start something. And that's very worrisome.

Of all the things that are out there right now from the South China Sea, Taiwan and China, to Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere, to North Korea and so forth, the Iran business concerns me the most, because it offers probably the most satisfying and most immediate and most in-your-face sort of area for them to do this. And that's concerning.

On the Pentagon's search for new money and a "first-class war":

When you're on the money train [referring to the Pentagon], when you've got to have the money, and you need justification for that money, the tendency to search for a little conflict to make that money flow a little more abundantly is strong, very strong.

It's been some time since major troops were committed in Iraq, and we really don't have 8,900, 9,000, whatever the figure is now, that much committed in Afghanistan. We're going to beef it up a little bit. We've got some 24-30,000 contractors there. As I've said before, I think we're in Afghanistan to stay, but still, that is not a real satisfying commitment schedule, if you will, for lots of more dollars.

When I say lots of more dollars, I mean many more dollars, not the 54 or 60 billion or so plus up. I mean 100 or 200 billion dollar plus up. If you're going to get that, you're going to have to have a war. It's going to have to be a first-class war.

The role of Israel in the current push for war:

This affection for war with Iran is all about Israel. It's all about this strategic approach that Netanyahu and Lieberman and others like him have developed, and that Schumer and others have bought into. And that is that destabilizing all of Israel's enemies — and mind you, this includes ultimately Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt — destabilizing them and keeping them destabilized, and even maybe breaking them up into statelets or less, is a good strategy for Israel's security.

This has been bought into by much of the American sycophantic approach in the Congress and elsewhere to Israel's security, and it's certainly been bought into and even designed ... [the] principal architect of it is Netanyahu.

Their best guesses on what's coming:

PAUL JAY: This is the danger of people in "the resistance" against Trump, that if you let people like Schumer and Clinton into the resistance, then wait till this thing with Iran comes! Because these people are going to be for the war. ... Then where is the resistance going to be? ...

WILKERSON: Maybe you get the impeachment proceedings after the midterms in 2018, and you get the [big] war and you get Pence in the middle of all that. Let's just worry about where we go from there.

Huh.

GP
  

Honeymoon of the Generals in the Age of Trump: Wolfowitz on McMaster, Mattis

 “Cry Havoc! and let slip the dogs of war" (image source).

by Gaius Publius

“What I do is I authorize my military. We have given them total authorization..."

—Donald Trump, April 2017

The war strain is strong in both parties.

—Yours truly

Short and impossibly bitter. In all the talk of the multiple domestic disasters that the Age of Trump will usher in — health care destruction, assaults on immigrants, a new surge in death-by-lying-cop, a breaking broken climate, and all the rest — Americans have conveniently forgotten one of the worst, the loosing of our generals and their weapons of war upon the poor and brown of the world.

In short, Donald Trump, with what looks to me like bipartisan consent, has unleashed the dogs of war. That's my first point in this brief piece. My second point is this: There will be a price, and no one in this country will want to pay it.

The Dogs of War

Tom Englehardt considers my first point in a much longer piece, "The Honeymoon of the Generals." Near the middle he writes (my emphasis):

Institutionalizing War and Its Generals

Above all, President Trump did one thing decisively. He empowered a set of generals or retired generals—James “Mad Dog” Mattis as secretary of defense, H.R. McMaster as national security adviser, and John Kelly as secretary of homeland security—men already deeply implicated in America’s failing wars across the Greater Middle East. Not being a details guy himself, he’s then left them to do their damnedest. “What I do is I authorize my military,” he told reporters recently. “We have given them total authorization and that’s what they’re doing and, frankly, that’s why they’ve been so successful lately.”

As the 100-day mark of his presidency approaches, there’s been no serious reassessment of America’s endless wars or how to fight them (no less end them). Instead, there’s been a recommitment to doing more of the familiar, more of what hasn’t worked over the last decade and a half. No one should be surprised by this, given the cast of characters—men who held command posts in those unsuccessful wars and are clearly incapable of thinking about them in other terms than the ones that have been indelibly engrained in the brains of the U.S. military high command since soon after 9/11.

That new ruling reality of our American world should, in turn, offer a hint about the nature of Donald Trump’s presidency. It should be a reminder that as strange… okay, bizarre… as his statements, tweets, and acts may have been, as chaotic as his all-in-the-family administration is proving to be, as little as he may resemble anyone we’ve ever seen in the White House before, he’s anything but an anomaly of history. Quite the opposite. Like those generals, he’s a logical endpoint to a grim process, whether you’re talking about the growth of inequality in America and the rise of plutocracy—without which a billionaire president and his billionaire cabinet would have been inconceivable—or the form that American war-making is taking under him.

And lest anyone be confused, the dogs of war have bipartisan masters:

When it comes to war and the U.S. military, none of what’s happened would have been conceivable without the two previous presidencies.  None of it would have been possible without Congress’s willingness to pump endless piles of money into the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex in the post-9/11 years; without the building up of the national security state and its 17 (yes, 17!) major intelligence outfits into an unofficial fourth branch of government; without the institutionalization of war as a permanent (yet strangely distant) feature of American life and of wars across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa that evidently can’t be won or lost but only carried on into eternity. None of this would have been possible without the growing militarization of this country, including of police forces increasingly equipped with weaponry off America’s distant battlefields and filled with veterans of those same wars; without a media rife with retired generals and other former commanders narrating and commenting on the acts of their successors and protégés; and without a political class of Washington pundits and politicians taught to revere that military.

In other words, however original Donald Trump may look, he’s the curious culmination of old news and a changing country. Given his bravado and braggadocio, it’s easy to forget the kinds of militarized extremity that preceded him.

The piece is good; I strongly recommend clicking through to read the rest. Get ready for more war; lots and lots of it. Why? Read on.

Paul Wolfowitz, "Mad Dog" Mattis, General McMaster

By his own admission, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the primary neocon architects and prosecutors of George W. Bush's disastrous Iraq War, has had a long relationship with both Mattis and McMaster and approves of them both. At the moment, both have primary roles in Trump's foreign war policy, especially in the Middle East, Mattis as Pentagon chief and McMaster as National Security Advisor.

The Mattis and McMaster ties to Paul Wolfowitz go back a long way. From an interview conducted by Politico here's Wolfowitz talking about Trump's foreign policy (my emphasis):

Glasser: ... You know, there’s no one particular guide except the quirky personality of Donald Trump at times, it seems. How do you navigate understanding who this guy is when it comes to foreign policy?

Wolfowitz: Well, it’s certainly unpredictable, as an understatement. But at the same time you have in his national security team two individuals who are nearly the opposite, who have a long consistent record of thinking clearly, strategically. I’m talking about McMaster and Mattis.

[...]

Glasser: Have you talked with anyone in his White House since they have been set up and trying to figure things out?

Wolfowitz: I have some. I know McMaster quite well from before. And Mattis actually was my senior military assistant when I first came to the Pentagon in 2001, and I worked with him quite a bit later on in his various later capacities, including in Iraq. So I know them pretty well, but I haven’t—I’ve occasionally emailed them, but I have not had direct contact with them.

Wolfowitz later describes Mattis as a "peace through strength" advocate ... whatever that means. For me, a recommendation from Paul Wolfowitz, who thinks President Obama was not warlike enough, is the Neocon Seal of Approval. Later in the interview, Wolfowitz says of Obama: "Look, my big reservation about Trump, and I said it, was that he was sort of like Obama on steroids, particularly with respect to Russia and Ukraine."

In other words, weak. Wolfowitz hasn't changed his stripes. And there's certainly no question, based on the rest of the interview, that Wolfowitz still wants regime change in Syria, and also that he thinks McMaster and Mattis will bring it.

By the way, General McMaster is the author of the obviously false White House Intelligence Report that justified, after the fact, his Tomahawk attack on Syria. Details here and here. He's off to a fine Wolfowitzian start.

The War Will Come Home

To my second point, that America's endless war — and seemingly endless love of war — will come home at last, consider two points.

First, the war strain is strong in both parties. In modern times it runs nearly unchecked through the last three generations, starting with the immediate aftermath of WWII and Truman deciding to "scare the hell out of the American people" and not stand down the war machine. Or even earlier, when according to Gore Vidal, Truman dropped the bomb on Japan despite the fact the Japanese were actively trying to surrender, because he wanted to "send a message to Joe [Stalin]."

​​Americans experienced one moment of revolt against the well-greased, well-glorified, bipartisan war machine​​ — during the Vietnam War, when almost everyone knew someone whose life was at risk due to the draft. In those years, the war "came home" in the sense that people feared for their personal future or the future of those in their immediate circle. Since then, with the all-volunteer army, nada.

But second, what if these wars "come home" in spades via bombings at home, followed by the typical American response, self-righteous "muscular security" in the frighteningly named "homeland"? We will likely never recover from that twin blow.

For example, imagine the Mall of America blown up at Christmas, along with two or three others. What does security look like in every mall in the country after that? Does going to the mall look like going to the airport, or worse? And if malls in America do look like the airport, will Americans grow to hate their new life or accept it? Will they stand down their international violence or launch even more of it, retaliating with a literal vengeance?

Whatever the response, for the second time in this still-new century the country will have turned a corner it can never turn back to, and life in America will once more never be the same. If we don't stop these wars, we will soon be in them in full, the way Europe is in them, with a battlefield locally, not just overseas.

As I said above, there will be a price for America's endless war, and no one in this country will want to pay it.

By then, of course, it will be too late. We'll have eaten the meal; all that will be left is the bill. Or to change the metaphor, the generals will have had their honeymoon. The rest of will be left to live in the marriage they created.

GP