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Authored by Tony Walker via The Conversation,

2019 may well go down as the most disrupted year in global politics since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the subsequent implosion of the former Soviet Union.

However, the likelihood is that 2020 will be worse, and bloodier.

Conditions that spawned global unrest on every continent in 2019 are unlikely to recede. Rather, they are likely to worsen in the face of a slowing global economy and little sign of causes of disaffection being addressed.

Washington as disruptor

In a word, the world is in a mess, made more threatening by the retreat of the Trump administration from America’s traditional role as a stabilising force.

President Donald Trump has moved the US away from its traditional role of global stabilising force. AAP/EPA/Kevin Dietsch

If anything, Washington is a disruptor in its abandonment of international agreements. These include: the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans Pacific Partnership, previously the Trans Pacific Partnership, aimed at liberalising Asia-Pacific trade. The US has also withdrawn from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that froze Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Washington’s defenestration of the JCPOA and its reimposition of tough sanctions on Iran has further destabilised the world’s most volatile region.

All this and more, including an unresolved trade conflict between the US and China, virtually guarantees 2020 will stretch the sinews of a fragile global order.

An evolving US-China technology war and risks of a technological decoupling add to the gloom.

The world is in worse shape than during the GFC

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08 was a period of intense uncertainty as a global financial system buckled. But, for the most part, that distress was confined to governments, boardrooms and the offices of international lending institutions.

The GFC did not fuel widespread global unrest as a shell-shocked financial world came to terms with the reality of a regulatory framework that had failed.

In 2019, the story has shifted dramatically.

Mass protests over the skewed benefits of globalisation accompanied by faltering confidence in a democratic model are challenging the assumptions on which a Western liberal capitalist system has rested. Local grievances are fuelling protests against an established order in places as far apart as La Paz in Bolivia and Beirut in Lebanon. Endemic corruption is looming larger.

If there is a defining issue that is driving popular unrest more or less across the board, it is that people do not feel they are sharing the benefits of an extended period of global economic expansion.

In January, Oxfam reported that the world’s 26 richest individuals owned as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population.

Billionaires grew their combined fortunes by US$2.5 billion (A$3.66 billion) a day in 2018, while the relative wealth of the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people declined by US$500 million a day.

A rich-poor gap is widening across the world to the point where it is no longer possible to argue that an economic growth model that advantages the few is lifting all boats.

Inequality and anger

Something had to give.

Professor Henry Carey of Georgia State University acknowledges differences in causes of localised unrest now sweeping the world, but he also identifies shared characteristics. He writes:

Each protest in this worldwide wave has its own local dynamic and cause.

But they also share certain characteristics: fed up with rising inequality, corruption and slow economic growth, angry citizens worldwide are demanding an end to corruption and the restoration of the democratic rule of law.

Carey makes the useful point that, as the world becomes more urbanised, overcrowded cities are staging points in a global wave of unrest.

In 1950, there were only two mega-cities with populations of 10 million or more – the New York metropolitan area and Tokyo. Today, there are 25 such megacities.

Of a world population of 7.7 billion people, 4.2 billion, or 55%, live in cities and other urban settlements. Another 2.5 billion will move into cities in poor countries by 2050, according to the United Nations.

In other words, poverty, gang crime, drug trafficking and all the other ills associated with an impoverished urban environment will become less manageable as overcrowding gets worse in cities, parts of which have become urban slums. Carey writes:

Ignored by the municipal government, [overcrowded urban settlements] usually lack sanitation, clean drinking water, electricity, health care facilities and schools […] The injustices of this daily life underlie the anger of many of today’s protesters. From Quito to Beirut, extreme marginalisation of so many people living in big dysfunctional and dangerous places has boiled over into deadly unrest.

In these circumstances, it is no accident that Latin America, with the world’s slowest economic growth and most glaring inequality, has exploded in the longest-lasting violent protests.

In Chile, where economic grievances boiled over into days of mass protests, an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum summit was abandoned because of security concerns.

In Bolivia, the long-serving populist president, Evo Morales, was forced out of office and the country by days of urban unrest.

In Haiti, protests over corruption, lack of employment and extreme poverty have paralysed the functioning of the state for months.

In countries such as Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, unrest is barely contained in the face of endemic corruption and government failures to provide basic services.

In the Middle East, it is a similar story.

In Lebanon, riven by protests for months, Prime Minister Saad Hariri was forced to step down amid growing anger about rising living costs, lack of job opportunities, stagnant wages and corruption.

In Iraq, bloody protests over government failures to address inequality led to the resignation of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi amid risks of a resumption of a civil war between the country’s Shia and Sunni populations.

In Iran, days of protests over economic austerity were put down brutally by a regime that is battling crippling sanctions.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, the Egyptian regime of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is under immense pressure from an exploding and impoverished population. Jordan has witnessed its own protests recently over economic hardship.

Libya is riven by civil war that is both driving and facilitating an asylum-seeker exodus across the Mediterranean, principally to Italy. This is, in turn, fuelling anti-immigrant tensions in that country.

In France, mass protests over President Emmanuel Macron’s attempts to address the country’s economic malaise show little sign of easing.

Elsewhere in Europe, unrest is barely contained. In Spain, tens of thousands of Catalonian independence protesters have taken to the streets of Barcelona in a tense standoff with Madrid.

In Russia, sporadic demonstrations against official corruption have become a feature, as they have elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.

In Eastern Europe, authoritarian regimes such as those in Poland and Hungary carry with them their seeds of confrontation with a disaffected population.

In Africa, all the ills mentioned above are present in spades.

South Africa is struggling to cope with huge economic challenges posed by an influx of refugees and a vast underclass camped in townships on the fringes of its major cities.

In Hong Kong, a proposed extradition law that would have facilitated the removal of those accused of crimes or misdemeanours to the mainland might have prompted mass protests. But at the heart of the demonstrations are economic grievances. Hong Kong’s wealth disparities are obscene.

Climate unrest

Across the globe, unrest over climate change is a common denominator and is likely to become more – not less – challenging to governments.

In Australia, in the midst of what may well prove to be the worst bushfires since white settlement, agitation over climate is exerting enormous pressure on the government of the day.

Whether this is fair or not, the government is perceived to be indifferent to climate concerns.

In a study of protest movements, the Brookings Institution found multilateralism flourished, global GDP rose and the percentage of people living in absolute poverty declined steadily after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Paradoxically, this was an era that also sowed the seeds of present challenges. Advances in technology and globalisation, spurred by lower trade barriers, boosted global GDP but also led to the dislocation of middle-class livelihoods in many Western societies. The study concludes:

Now, in the wake of the global financial crisis, two critical dynamics have unfolded: first, the powerful democracies of the trans-Atlantic community (the bulwark of the Western-led order) are facing political turmoil at home and setbacks in the liberal quality of their own governments.

Second, the democracies find themselves losing ground internationally to authoritarian powers bent on breaking the hold of these democracies on the character of the international order.

This is not helped by an administration in Washington that has yielded ground to authoritarian dictatorships at a time of global unrest in which stable Western leadership has hardly been more necessary.

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Axios certainly has the best intro to today’s bombshell development: “Internationalists have always dreamed of a court with jurisdiction over all the countries of the world. In 1995, the World Trade Organization was created — allowing the world’s countries to press claims against one another for the first time.” 

But it won’t survive the Trump presidency as on Tuesday his administration has effectively brought it to an end, neutering its ability to intervene in trade wars, having blocked all new appointments to its dispute-resolution court.

Starting two years ago the US administration began blocking appointments, and now Trump has run out the clock as the now paralyzed WTO’s Appellate Body over that period declined from seven judges to three, and with two more terms expiring Tuesday, only one judge remains, thus without the ability to issue a binding ruling. 

Also per Axios:

Donald “Tariff Man” Trump (his words) can now impose whatever tariffs he likes, without fear that the WTO might find them to be illegal.

However, there’s widespread perception that the WTO has been rendered obsolete until it undertakes major reforms — for example criticisms that it frequently fails to abide by its own rules, has an inconsistent appeals mechanism, and its rules fail to account for state-controlled enterprises.

Viewed as among the foremost hindrances to Trump’s “America First” program, he’s already long bulldozed past WTO rules amid the trade war with China, including punitive levies on Chinese goods (and another tariff increase set for this upcoming weekend), and imposing metal tariffs on allies like Europe, Canada and Japan.

Via the Peterson Institute for International Economics: The World Trade Organization (WTO) resolves trade disputes through its dispute settlement process, a system that the United States helped design to ensure all countries follow negotiated trading rules. Since 1995, a total of 575 cases have been brought to the WTO, and the United States has been either a complainant or respondent in 275 of them. 

* * *

And now the question of China and “a very unfortunate Plan B” initiative, as described in Bloomberg:

China is in preliminary talks to support the European Union’s backup plan for settling international trade disputes as President Donald Trump’s administration gets closer to scuttling the World Trade Organization’s role in refereeing cross-border commerce.

On Tuesday, China’s Ambassador to the WTO Zhang Xiangchen told Bloomberg News that Beijing is actively working to support the EU’s vision of an appeal-arbitration model, which essentially replicates the work of the WTO’s soon-to-be defunct appellate body.

So far such a Europe-based alternative has drawn interest from current WTO members Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Japan and Turkey, as noted in the report.

Data for year 2018. You will find more infographics at Statista

Meanwhile, internationalists fear a return to the law of the jungle:

“The WTO is facing its deepest crisis since its creation,” Phil Hogan, the European trade commissioner, told members of the European Parliament this year. If the rules governing international trade can no longer be enforced, “we’d have the law of the jungle.”

And one former appellate body member James Bacchus, told Bloomberg: “There has been a gradual support for this as a very unfortunate Plan B.”

He concluded, “Now it seems to be the best option, given all the lousy options we have left.”

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,

On November 15, a wave of protests engulfed over 100 Iranian cities as the government resorted to an extremely unpopular measure: a fuel tax hike of as much as 300%, without a semblance of a PR campaign to explain the reasons.

Iranians, after all, have reflexively condemned subsidy removals for years now – especially related to cheap gasoline. If you are unemployed or underemployed in Iran, especially in big cities and towns, Plan A is always to pursue a second career as a taxi driver.

Protests started as overwhelmingly peaceful. But in some cases, especially in Tehran, Shiraz, Sirjan and Shahriar, a suburb of Tehran, they quickly degenerated into weaponized riots – complete with vandalizing public property, attacks on the police and torching of at least 700 bank outlets. Much like the confrontations in Hong Kong since June.

President Rouhani, aware of the social backlash, tactfully insisted that unarmed and innocent civilians arrested during the protests should be released. There are no conclusive figures, but Iranian diplomats admit, off the record, that as many as 7,000 people may have been arrested. Tehran’s judiciary system denies it.

According to Iran’s Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, as many as 200,000 people took part in the protests nationwide. According to the Intelligence Ministry, 79 people were arrested in connection with the riots only in Khuzestan province – including three teams, supported by “a Persian Gulf state,” which supposedly coordinated attacks on government centers and security/police forces.

The Intelligence Ministry said it had arrested eight “CIA operatives,” accused of being instrumental in inciting the riots.

Now compare it with the official position by the IRGC.

The chief commander of the IRGC, Major General Hossein Salami, stressed riots were conducted by “thugs” linked to the US-supported Mujahedin-e Khalq (MKO), which has less than zero support inside Iran, and with added interference by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Salami also framed the riots as directly linked to “psychological pressure” from the Trump administration’s relentless “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran. He directly connected the protests degenerating into riots in Iran with foreign interference in protests in Lebanon and Iraq.

Elijah Magnier has shown how Moqtada al-Sadr denied responsibility for the burning down of the Iranian consulate in Najaf – which was set on fire three times in November during protests in southern Iraq.

Tehran, via government spokesman Ali Rabiei, is adamant:

“According to our information, the attack on the consulate was not perpetrated by the Iraqi people, it was an organized attack.”

Predictably, the American narrative framed Lebanon and Iraq – where protests were overwhelmingly against local government corruption and incompetence, high unemployment, and abysmal living standards – as a region-wide insurgency against Iranian power.

Soleimani for President?

Analyst Sharmine Narwani, based on the latest serious polls in Iran, completely debunked the American narrative.

It’s a complex picture. Fifty-five percent of Iranians do blame government corruption and mismanagement for the dire state of the economy, while 38% blame the illegal US sanctions. At the same time, 70% of Iranians favor national self-sufficiency – which is what Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has been emphasizing – instead of more foreign trade.

On sanctions, no less than 83% agree they exerted a serious impact on their lives. Mostly because of sanctions, according to World Bank figures, Iranian GDP per capita has shrunk to roughly $6,000.

The bad news for the Rouhani administration is that 58% of Iranians blame his team for corruption and mismanagement – and they are essentially correct. Team Rouhani’s promises of a better life after the JCPOA obviously did not materialize. In the short term, the political winners are bound to be the principlists – which insist there’s no possible entente cordiale with Washington at any level.

The polls also reveal, significantly, massive popular support for Tehran’s foreign and military policy – especially on Syria and Iraq. The most popular leaders in Iran are legendary Quds Force commander Gen. Soleimani (a whopping 82%), followed by Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (67%) and the head of the Judiciary Ebrahim Raisi (64%).

The key takeaway is that at least half and on some issues two-thirds of Iran’s popular opinion essentially support the government in Tehran – not as much economically but certainly in political terms. As Narwani summarizes it, “so far Iranians have chosen security and stability over upheaval every time.”

‘Counter-pressure’

What’s certain is that Tehran won’t deviate from a strategy that may be defined as  “maximum counter-pressure” – on multiple fronts. Iranian banks have been cut off from SWIFT by the US since 2018. So efforts are intensifying to link Iran’s SEPAM system with the Russian SPFS and the Chinese CIPS – alternative interbank paying systems.

Tehran continues to sell oil – as Persian Gulf traders have repeatedly confirmed to me since last summer. Digital tracking agency Tankertrackers.com concurs. The top two destinations are China and Syria. Volumes hover around 700,000 barrels a day. Beijing has solemnly ignored every sanction threat from Washington regarding oil trading with Iran.

Khamenei, earlier this month, was adamant:

“The US policy of maximum pressure has failed. The Americans presumed that they can force Iran to make concessions and bring it to its knees by focusing on maximum pressure, especially in the area of economy, but they have troubled themselves.”

In fact “maximum counter-pressure” is reaching a whole new level.

Iranian Navy Commander Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi confirmed that Iran will hold joint naval drills with Russia and China in the Indian Ocean in late December.

That came out of quite a significant meeting in Tehran, between Khanzadi and the deputy chief of the Chinese Joint Staff Department, Major General Shao Yuanming.

So welcome to Maritime Security Belt. In effect from December 27th. Smack on the Indian Ocean – the alleged privileged territory of Washington’s Indo-Pacific policy. And uniting the three key nodes of Eurasia integration: Russia, China and Iran.

Khanzadi said that, “strategic goals have been defined at the level administrations, and at the level of armed forces, issues have been defined in the form of joint efforts.” General Yuanming praised Iran’s Navy as “an international and strategic force.”

But geopolitically, this packs a way more significant game-changing punch. Russia may have conducted naval joint drills with Iran on the Caspian Sea. But a complex drill, including China, in the Indian Ocean, is a whole new ball game.

Yuanming put it in a way that every student of Mahan, Spykman and Brzezinski easily understands:

“Seas, which are used as a platform for conducting global commerce, cannot be exclusively beneficial to certain powers.”  

So start paying attention to Russia, China and Iran being quite active not only across the Heartland but also across the Rimland.

Little has been revealed in terms of precise statements or any potential diplomatic breakthroughs following Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s closed-door, no press admitted meeting with President Trump on Tuesday. 

But the predictable outraged frenzy given the timing didn’t disappoint, with CNN pointing out “the extraordinary spectacle of President Donald Trump consulting with Moscow on the day House Democrats unveiled articles of impeachment underpinned partly by Trump’s unusual relationship with Russia.”

On that note, Lavrov did punch back on the ‘Russiagate’ narrative in general as well as the notion that a mere diplomatic meeting would suggest a ‘compromised’ White House, saying in a joint press conference with Secretary of State Pompeo that his county’s alleged election interference is “baseless” and any level of proof “simply does not exist”.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov: “We have highlighted once again that all speculation about our alleged interference in domestic processes in the US are baseless. There are no facts that would support that …no one has given us this proof because it simply does not exist” pic.twitter.com/LiUItaj1Ch

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 10, 2019

This after Rep. Adam Schiff slammed the high level meeting as “a success of the Russian propaganda” while lamenting that supposedly “adversaries” were “invited in” but with “allies locked out.”

Trump is meeting with Russia’s Foreign Minister in the Oval Office — again.

Adversaries invited in. Allies locked out.

Last time, they laughed about Trump’s firing of Comey. Today, they can celebrate the success of Russian propaganda.

Reagan wouldn’t recognize this GOP. pic.twitter.com/iHiksPXMbM

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) December 10, 2019

“There was no press at our meeting, American or Russian. If Schiff can describe the ministerial-level contacts normal to any country and my meeting with the president in such a way, then I believe that they will soon accuse our diplomats, just as they have our athletes, of doping and call for criminal punishment,” Lavrov said mockingly.

In a tweet President Trump said he had a “very good” meeting with the top Russian diplomat and listed items discussed as including trade, Iran, North Korea, the INF Treaty, Nuclear Arms Control, and election meddling (on this last topic, Lavrov denied receiving a “warning” from Trump regarding interference).

Just had a very good meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and representatives of Russia. Discussed many items including Trade, Iran, North Korea, INF Treaty, Nuclear Arms Control, and Election Meddling. Look forward to continuing our dialogue in the near future! pic.twitter.com/tHecH9a9ck

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2019

A White House statement indicated the potential for greater trade with Russia was also a focus on the meeting.

Speaking of trade and ongoing sanctions Lavrov boasted before reporters that trade between the two countries has actually grown during the Trump administration. 

“Regardless of the sanctions – which obviously hurt everyone – the trade between our two countries has grown during the Trump presidency from $20 billion, to which it was reduced under President Obama, to $27 billion this year,” Lavrov said.

A further highlight of the late Tuesday press conference came when one reporter sought to “trap” the Russian foreign minister by asking whether he had again received any classified information during this Oval visit, based on prior allegations from their initial May 2017 meeting.

“I can only find that out based on what you report,” Lavrov replied, and then appeared to again mock the assumptions behind the question:

“We talked about what I openly and literally told you. If you find some secrets there, feel free to make that sensational.”

Also of note is that Lavrov said he again extended a personal invitation from Putin to Trump to be in attendance for Moscow’s Victory Day celebrations in May. The president is said to be “considering it”. 

Authored by Anes Alic via OilPrice.com,

They control the vast majority of the world’s oil and gas assets, yet the average person has never even heard of them, outside of those that are famous for things like getting attacked by missiles or becoming embroiled in a high-profile corruption scandal. 

State-owned oil and gas companies (aka, the national oil companies, or NOCs) control at least US$3 trillion in oil and gas assets, compared to around $2.5 trillion as of 2017, and hold an estimated 90% of all known reserves–considerably more than publicly listed companies such as BP, ExxonMobil and Shell. Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco leads the pack as the world’s most profitable company. 

That means that NOCs control about as much wealth as all U.S. billionaires or roughly twice the assets of global multilateral development banks. 

Source: Resourcegovernance.org

If we go by annual revenue alone, China’s state-run Sinopec—explorer, producer, refiner, marketer and distributor—was the biggest oil and gas company in the world at the end of 2018. By net income, that title goes to Saudi Aramco, which reported net income in 2018 of $111.1 billion, compared to Sinopec’s $9.1 billion. 

These numbers may seem a bit wild, but no one really ever knows where they come from or how they are derived. 

By annual revenue metrics, by year-end 2018, four of the top 10 oil and gas companies in the world were state-owned: Sinopec, Aramco, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and Russian Gazprom. The other six Top 10 titles went to Shell (4th), BP (5th), Exxon (6th), Total (7Th) Valero (8th) and Phillips 66 (10th).

Despite their economic importance, most of these 71 NOCs are notoriously secretive–Norway’s Equinor being one of the few exceptions. For the remainder of the NOCs, their opacity poses a significant fiscal and governance risk, especially when they carry huge debts.

Source: IMF.Org

Massive Fiscal Players

The National Oil Company Database has listed at least 19 NOCs with assets in excess of $50 billion. 

At least 25 NOCs account for 20% or more of government revenues, with Nigeria’s national oil company, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), collecting about half the general government revenues through oil and gas sales. 

The database also reveals a pattern of weak public reporting by many NOCs, with only 20 of 71 NOCs revealing sufficient information for the 10 most critical indicators. More than half of the NOCs fail to publish financial statements audited by independent auditors, with some like the Republic of Congo’s SNPC failing to even disclose a balance sheet at all. 

It’s often only when their debt loads become unsustainable that their true extent is revealed to the public, pushing the governments that had guaranteed the debts into a financial crisis.

NOCs frequently borrow funds to finance new investments, maintain large discretionary expenditures or fulfill certain political agendas. The borrowings may take the form of loans from other oil companies (e.g., Nigeria’s NNPC), from banks (e.g., Ghana’s GNPC), from another government entity (e.g., Sonatrach which borrows from the Algerian Central Bank), by issuing corporate bonds (e.g., Russia’s Rosneft) as well as oil-backed loans from other traders or NOCs (e.g., Kazakhstan’s KazMunayGas). 

NOC borrowing does have its benefits. The need to borrow can incentivize these oil and gas companies to develop healthy corporate governance practices in a bid to improve their credit ratings. A good case in point is Saudi Aramco’s recent bond issuance, which provided a rare peek into its financial performance.

Excessive debt can, however, create significant risks. 

Some NOCs such as Venezuela’s PDVSA and Angola’s Sonangol have debts exceeding 20% of the country’s GDP. Other NOCs are highly leveraged, such as Russia’s Rosneft and the UAE-headquartered TAQA. Mexico’s Pemex has negative equity.

Source: IMF.Org

Source: Brooking.edu

Nevertheless, maintaining healthy levels of debt and equity are not always enough. Consider Venezuela’s PDVSA, which despite holding 335 billion barrels of oil-equivalent reserves–the largest reserves of any NOC– is still unable to service all of its $35 billion of debt.

All those riches are mostly locked underground, yet the company is unable to access them after years of mismanagement as well as the impact of sanctions and the economic crisis. Public debt figures of Venezuela and Mexico include debts by their NOCs, though debts by Brazil’s Petrobras or Bolivia’s YPFB are not included in their national debts.

Some NOCs such as Norway’s Equinor and Colombia’s Ecopetrol and have consistently delivered strong returns on public investment. Yet in too many countries NOCs have struggled to develop into commercially efficient actors, and in extreme cases have actively contributed to large-scale corruption, not to mention that they largely remain unaccountable for the role they play in climate change.

So, NOCs may control $3 trillion in oil and have the luxury of being entirely opaque and, in some cases, thoroughly corrupt, but their non-state-owned international oil company (IOC) brethren still tips the scales overall on revenue and income. 

Where the IOCs lose out is politically because NOCs aren’t always about doing good business; sometimes, there about establishing a foothold somewhere even when it doesn’t make economic sense. That can equate to enormous power over time.  

With Bloomberg News now banned from Trump campaign events, after openly admitting its political bias, and with the likes of Harwood and Todd now fully paid up members of the resistance, there has been one voice from the establishment media that has remained quietly ‘balanced’, quietly not-activist, and quietly reporting the news.

The Wall Street Journal has lambasted President Trump for his trade war, anguished over his manner, and criticized many of his actions as President; but, unlike the rest of the mainstream media, they have also acknowledged his successes, reported the facts about various left-wing conspiracies (as opposed to amplified them), and has not been afraid to stand alone as a quasi voice of reason amid the most-polarized environment this nation has known since the Civil War.

All of which is background for what The Journal did tonight as its Editorial Board dared to go after two ‘untouchables’ – Rep. Adam Schiff and the Washington press corps.

In a stunning rebuke of both, an op-ed details how the Horowitz report exposes the Democrat’s many distortions. They begin with a jab-jab-cross…

“Monday’s Justice Department Inspector General report on the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe is illuminating in many ways, not least the light it casts on the previous claims by politicians when they were telling the public about what they saw in classified documents.

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff in particular has been exposed for distortions and falsehoods.”

And after exposing the lies, distortions, and falsehoods that Schiff again and again promoted on any TV screen that would have him, The Journal concludes with a Tyson-esque upper-cut to end the battle…

“Mr. Schiff had access to the same documents as Mr. Nunes.

His decision to misrepresent the FBI’s actions shows he is willing to distort the truth for political purposes.

He gets away with this because he has a willing echo chamber in the Washington press corps.”

Once again, Schiff has been exposed for undertaking exactly the kind of partisan lying and manipulation that he claims – falsely – the Republicans (and particularly Mr. Nunes – who has been ultimately vindicated) have been doing all along.

The only question America must have now is simple – where is the accountability?

Read the full WSJ op-ed here…