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Chernobyl Is About What Happens When Citizens Believe Telling the Truth Is Futile

“You think the right question will get you the truth?  There is no truth,” Anatoly Dyatlov tells Ulana Khomyuk in last week’s penultimate episode of Chernobyl. “Ask the bosses whatever you want. You will get the lie, and I will get the bullet.”

It’s a scene that perfectly captures the essence of HBO’s a five-part miniseries, which concludes Monday night, about the aftermath of the 1986 nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union. Khomyuk, the scientist who is trying to solve the mystery at the center of the story—why did the nuclear reactor at the titular power plant seemingly inexplicably explode during a routine safety test—has been stonewalled by the Soviet government and most of the eyewitnesses have already died. Dyatlov, who was in charge of the plant on the night of the accident, is perhaps the only person who can connect the dots for her.

He’s unwilling to talk. It’s not self-preservation—though he is paranoid that she is helping the Soviet government pin the blame for accident solely on him, he also figures he’s doomed one way or the other. It’s hopelessness. The truth doesn’t matter and won’t be heard. Why risk telling it?

Chernobyl is a story about the cost of lies. Big ones like the flaw in the design of the plant’s reactor that was left unfixed because admitting a mistake would make the USSR seem less technologically awesome. Smaller ones like the deliberately inaccurate radiation measurements that the Soviet government published to make the accident look less serious, but that ended up putting more people in harm’s way. But the strength of the story—and the true horror at the center of Craig Mazin’s gripping script—is how it examines the political and social rot that occurs when individuals become convinced that telling the truth is futile.

“The official position of the state,” Boris Shcherbina, the Soviet official sent to Chernobyl to oversee the clean-up, remarks at one point, “is that global nuclear catastrophe is not possible in the Soviet Union.”

Shcherbina, played masterfully by Stellan Skarsgård, is perhaps the character most affected by seeing that rot up close. At the outset, he’s deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers and the ultimate party yes-man. He’s sent to Chernobyl, essentially, to keep a lid on the clean-up effort and make sure the scientists brought in solve the crisis stick to the party line. By the end of the fourth episode, he’s so frustrated with his own government that he’s screaming at his superiors over the phone one minute and smashing the phone with his bare hands the next.

In other words, he evolves from someone who could deliver the “official position of the state” with a straight face to someone who, when he does utters that phrase, delivers it with all the wryness it deserves.

Chernobyl is a powerful indictment of the Soviet state—and, indeed, even Mikhail Gorbachev has claimed that the nuclear disaster was partially responsible for the collapse of the USSR. A system built on lies about equality and prosperity collapsed once enough people, like Shcherbina, became disillusioned with the state-sanctioned truth.

To be sure, all governments lie and engage in cover-ups. The Soviet Union may have been more ruthlessly efficient at it than most, but America covered up details about the Challenger disaster, for example, in part to save face after a technologically humiliating disaster, much like the Soviets did after Chernobyl. The United States tried to hide inhumane medical testing conducted on African Americans, covered up the testing of chemical weapons on an urban neighborhoods in St. Louis, and concocted a fictional rationale for a war that destabilized the entire Middle East and killed hundreds of thousands.

If you’re looking for the cost of governmental lies, history is full of them and their associated body counts. If the Soviet Union had a monopoly on those sorts of lies, Chernobyl wouldn’t strike the same chord. It would be a historical drama, not a parable. It works as a warning about how a government dedicated to telling untruths can succeed, even at great cost, when there is no free press or open internet to contradict that narrative.

Still, the bleakest and most memorable moments in Chernobyl are rooted in a hopelessness that grows from decades of authoritarianism. The fourth episode, the best one in the series so far, opens with an old woman milking her single cow while being told by a Soviet soldier that she has to evacuate.

Decades of lies weigh heavily on her. “No,” she says, repeatedly. After a lifetime that included close calls with Bolshevik revolutionaries, German soldiers, and Stalin’s famines, each bringing their own lies to her doorstep. Why should she believe that the state is looking out for her best interest now? There will always be “more soldiers, more famine, more bodies.”

In the end, her cow gets the bullet.

The soldier is actually right, of course, that she should evacuate to save her life, but the old woman—like Dyatlov, and like so many of her countrymen—is worn down by the absence of truth.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2EOLzKx
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“Trade War Has Not Made America Great Again”: China Lashes Out At US Which Is “Solely To Blame”

China’s media propaganda campaign against the US in the increasingly dirty trade war between the two superpowers can be roughly divided into five parts. As the Economist’s Simon Rabinovitch broke down the various phases, these can be grouped roughly as follows: 1) quiet optimism; 2) reassessment; 3) put the theory to the test; 4) US failure is inevitable.

And, as of this weekend, we now appear to be in the “despondent acceptance” phase (unlike the Kubler-Ross model, acceptance precedes anger and nuclear war), because as Xinhua reported overnight, China is now laying the blame squarely on the US for the breakdown of trade talks between the world’s two biggest economies, but hinted at its willingness to resume stalled negotiations with Washington while rejecting any attempt to force concessions from Beijing.

In a white paper on China’s official position on the trade talks released by the State Council Information Office on Sunday, Beijing made it clear the US government “should bear the sole and entire responsibility” for the current stalemate, and hit back at allegations that Beijing had backtracked from its earlier promises.

The trade war has not “made America great again,” the white paper said, but has done serious harm to the U.S. economy by increasing production costs, causing higher prices hikes, damaging growth and people’s livelihoods, as well as creating barriers to U.S. exports to China.

“It is foreseeable that the latest U.S. tariff hikes on China, far from resolving issues, will only make things worse for all sides,” according to the white paper, which also listed details of what it described as U.S. backtracking.

“The Chinese government rejects the idea that threats of a trade war and continuous tariff hikes can ever help resolve trade and economic issues,” according to the white paper. “Guided by a spirit of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit, the two countries should push forward consultations based on good faith and credibility in a bid to address issues, narrow differences, expand common interests, and jointly safeguard global economic stability and development,” it said, according to Bloomberg.

As Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen, who led the working-level team in the negotiations, said China is willing to work with the US to find solutions, but the latter’s strategy of maximum pressure and escalation can’t force concessions from China: “When you give the U.S. an inch, it takes a yard”, he said.

Of course, that ignores the fact that it was China that reneged on the terms of the agreement in the first days of May, at least according to Washington. Instead, on the allegation that China significantly changed the text under negotiation after the latest round of talks, the white paper said it was “common practice” to make new proposals and adjustments as the talks progressed, something the US had done consistently.

At a press conference in Beijing on Sunday, Shouwen accused the US of being “irresponsible” in accusing Beijing of backtracking on its promises. “Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” he said in English, the only time he strayed from his native tongue.

Meanwhile, the white paper said that Beijing remained “committed to credible consultations based on equality and mutual benefit”, but would “not give ground on matters of principle”.

When asked what the US side needed to do for the negotiations to continue, Wang referred to a preliminary agreement made by Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump in Argentina in December.

“The consensus then was to not raise tariffs, and work towards cancelling them,” he said.

Despite the presidents’ efforts, Beijing’s white paper came just a day after it introduced new tariffs on goods imported from the US.

Sunday’s document also accused the US of insisting on “mandatory requirements concerning China’s sovereign affairs”. Though it did not elaborate, the Post reported earlier that Washington had asked Beijing to “completely open its internet” as part of the trade deal. And at a seminar in Beijing on Friday, a group of former Chinese officials accused the US of using the trade talks to undermine China’s national security on issues like Taiwan and the South China Sea.

The latest propaganda escalation, which will not go by unnoticed by the trade hawks in the Trump administration, comes as Beijing has been increasingly critical of Washington over the breakdown of the trade talks and its treatment of Chinese technology giant Huawei. On Friday it said it planned to publish a list of “unreliable” foreign entities deemed to have damaged the interests of Chinese firms, based on anti-monopoly and national security grounds. A day later, Beijing announced an investigation into US logistics company FedEx for the “wrongful delivery of packages”, after Huawei accused FedEx of re-routing of its packages from China to the US.

Wang tried to play down concerns that a planned list of unreliable entities that China announced last week will be used to target foreign companies as a retaliation tool in the trade war. That might be an “over-interpretation,” Wang said, adding that China welcomed foreign firms that operate within the law. “There’s no grounds to blame China” for starting an investigation into FedEx Corp. mis-routing some packages from Huawei Technologies Co.

Meanwhile, when asked about US firms’ complaints that customs clearance was taking longer since the start of the trade war, he advised companies to contact the relevant authorities. “If certain firms are faced with specific issues, they can talk to local commerce departments,” he said.

On the increasingly touchy matter of exports of rare earth minerals, Wang repeated Beijing’s comments of the past week. “With the world’s richest rare earth resources we are willing to satisfy the normal needs of other countries,” he said. “But it’s unacceptable if other countries use rare earths imported from China to suppress China’s development.”

But in what could be the worst news for bulls who are clutching at any straw now to indicate an improvement in diplomatic relations, when asked about the possibility of a summit between Xi and Trump on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan later this month – as suggested by the American president in May – Wang said he had no information on the matter, according to the SCMP.

Shi Yinhong, an adviser to China’s State Council and a specialist in US affairs at Renmin University in Beijing, said that despite the pressure from the US, Beijing had shown restraint in its efforts to fight back… which it has indeed, suggesting that Trump’s read of the calculus – one according to which China has more to lose than gain from taking trade war to the next level – is the correct one.

“In the areas of trade and technology, China has less leverage than the US, but it has kept its retaliatory measures within these areas,” he said. “If it extended its efforts to areas like North Korea and Iran, it could do much greater damage to Trump.”

The punchline: when addressing the chances of the two sides achieving a breakthrough in their trade negotiations by the time of the G20 summit, Shi said: “The difference is too wide and would be impossible for them to bridge in a month.”

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IjnOuO Tyler Durden

Chernobyl Is About What Happens When Citizens Believe Telling the Truth Is Futile

“You think the right question will get you the truth?  There is no truth,” Anatoly Dyatlov tells Ulana Khomyuk in last week’s penultimate episode of Chernobyl. “Ask the bosses whatever you want. You will get the lie, and I will get the bullet.”

It’s a scene that perfectly captures the essence of HBO’s a five-part miniseries, which concludes Monday night, about the aftermath of the 1986 nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union. Khomyuk, the scientist who is trying to solve the mystery at the center of the story—why did the nuclear reactor at the titular power plant seemingly inexplicably explode during a routine safety test—has been stonewalled by the Soviet government and most of the eyewitnesses have already died. Dyatlov, who was in charge of the plant on the night of the accident, is perhaps the only person who can connect the dots for her.

He’s unwilling to talk. It’s not self-preservation—though he is paranoid that she is helping the Soviet government pin the blame for accident solely on him, he also figures he’s doomed one way or the other. It’s hopelessness. The truth doesn’t matter and won’t be heard. Why risk telling it?

Chernobyl is a story about the cost of lies. Big ones like the flaw in the design of the plant’s reactor that was left unfixed because admitting a mistake would make the USSR seem less technologically awesome. Smaller ones like the deliberately inaccurate radiation measurements that the Soviet government published to make the accident look less serious, but that ended up putting more people in harm’s way. But the strength of the story—and the true horror at the center of Craig Mazin’s gripping script—is how it examines the political and social rot that occurs when individuals become convinced that telling the truth is futile.

“The official position of the state,” Boris Shcherbina, the Soviet official sent to Chernobyl to oversee the clean-up, remarks at one point, “is that global nuclear catastrophe is not possible in the Soviet Union.”

Shcherbina, played masterfully by Stellan Skarsgård, is perhaps the character most affected by seeing that rot up close. At the outset, he’s deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers and the ultimate party yes-man. He’s sent to Chernobyl, essentially, to keep a lid on the clean-up effort and make sure the scientists brought in solve the crisis stick to the party line. By the end of the fourth episode, he’s so frustrated with his own government that he’s screaming at his superiors over the phone one minute and smashing the phone with his bare hands the next.

In other words, he evolves from someone who could deliver the “official position of the state” with a straight face to someone who, when he does utters that phrase, delivers it with all the wryness it deserves.

Chernobyl is a powerful indictment of the Soviet state—and, indeed, even Mikhail Gorbachev has claimed that the nuclear disaster was partially responsible for the collapse of the USSR. A system built on lies about equality and prosperity collapsed once enough people, like Shcherbina, became disillusioned with the state-sanctioned truth.

To be sure, all governments lie and engage in cover-ups. The Soviet Union may have been more ruthlessly efficient at it than most, but America covered up details about the Challenger disaster, for example, in part to save face after a technologically humiliating disaster, much like the Soviets did after Chernobyl. The United States tried to hide inhumane medical testing conducted on African Americans, covered up the testing of chemical weapons on an urban neighborhoods in St. Louis, and concocted a fictional rationale for a war that destabilized the entire Middle East and killed hundreds of thousands.

If you’re looking for the cost of governmental lies, history is full of them and their associated body counts. If the Soviet Union had a monopoly on those sorts of lies, Chernobyl wouldn’t strike the same chord. It would be a historical drama, not a parable. It works as a warning about how a government dedicated to telling untruths can succeed, even at great cost, when there is no free press or open internet to contradict that narrative.

Still, the bleakest and most memorable moments in Chernobyl are rooted in a hopelessness that grows from decades of authoritarianism. The fourth episode, the best one in the series so far, opens with an old woman milking her single cow while being told by a Soviet soldier that she has to evacuate.

Decades of lies weigh heavily on her. “No,” she says, repeatedly. After a lifetime that included close calls with Bolshevik revolutionaries, German soldiers, and Stalin’s famines, each bringing their own lies to her doorstep. Why should she believe that the state is looking out for her best interest now? There will always be “more soldiers, more famine, more bodies.”

In the end, her cow gets the bullet.

The soldier is actually right, of course, that she should evacuate to save her life, but the old woman—like Dyatlov, and like so many of her countrymen—is worn down by the absence of truth.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2EOLzKx
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Major Israeli Airstrikes Kill Up To 10 Pro-Assad Forces In Pre-dawn Raid

Israel has admitted responsibility in a significant overnight attack on Syria which reportedly killed up to ten pro-Assad forces, including possibly seven of what the Israeli media is claiming were Iranian and Hezbollah “foreign fighters”.

The predawn raid took place south of Damascus in Quneitra province and unlike prior Israeli attacks appeared to included a multi-pronged sustained offensive of warplanes and helicopters on artillery and intelligence facilities. Syrian state media confirmed the attack, saying its anti-air defenses were active and successful over Quneitra and over the capital of Damascus, but put its early casualties as three killed and seven among the wounded. 

Prior file photo of Syria-Israel exchange of fire from earlier this year, via the AP

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) via its official media accounts said it responded to “2 rockets launched from Syria to Israel, 1 landing withing Israeli territory,” according to a statement, but without specifying who the IDF believes actually fired the rocket. The “seven foreign fighters” number originated with the Syrian opposition source Syrian Observatory for Human Rights based in the UK. 

The IDF further noted that it “sees the Syrian regime as responsible for all attacks against Israel from Syrian territory.” The Times of Israel provided the following details based on IDF official statements: 

Beginning at 4:10 a.m., Israel Defense Forces helicopters and planes attacked several targets connected to the Syrian army, including two artillery batteries, several observation and intelligence outposts, and an SA-2 type air defense unit, the IDF said in a statement.

Syrian media reported that Israel also struck several targets connected to Iran and is proxy militias in Syria, in the area of al-Kiswah, south of Damascus. These strikes reportedly targeted weapons caches and a military training facility.

The report added that the intelligence posts struck were located near the contested Golan Heights border and the artillery sites were just south of Damascus. It is unclear whether the exchange resulted in any material damage on the Israeli side. 

Meanwhile Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday morning that Israel would continue to respond “with great force” against attacks and threats, something he’s consistently identified with pro-Iran forces. 

“We are not prepared to tolerate firing into our territory and we react with great force against any aggression against us,” he said. “This is a consistent policy that I lead and so we will continue to do for the sake of Israel’s security.”

Concerning the claimed initial rocket fired from the Syrian side, the Israeli report had the following details: 

Saturday night’s rockets appeared to be a relatively long-range variety, reportedly fired from the Damascus area, some 35 kilometers (22 miles) away, similar to an attack earlier this year aimed at Mount Hermon. Mount Hermon is located in the northern tip of Israel’s Golan Heights. In addition to a popular ski resort, the area is also home to a number of military installations.

In January, Iranian troops in Syria fired a medium-range, Iranian-made missile at Mount Hermon in what the IDF said at the time was a “premeditated” attack aimed at deterring Israel from conducting airstrikes against the Islamic republic’s troops and proxies in Syria.

Syria has consistently denied that it allows Iranian forces to run its own such operations inside the country, while a number of Middle East analysts have expressed doubt over the IDF’s past version of events involving claims of Iran firing rockets into Israeli territory, with the level of Iran’s troop presence in Syria subject of fierce debate. 

But it remains that Syria and Israel are in an active state of war along the Golan border region. As Damascus-based journalist Danny Makki stated in the aftermath of Israel’s predawn strikes, it is “Important to note that after a lengthy period of mock air attacks over the last few months, there have been three relatively important incidents/attacks in the space of a few weeks alone on the Israel-Syria front.”

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2W8rAvS Tyler Durden

U.K. Hits “Open Borders” Highs – 600,000 Migrants Arrive In Just One Year

Authored by Jon Hall via Free Market Shooter blog,

On the heels of the Lyon terrorist attack that happened last Friday, with Mohamed Hichem M. confessing to the crime and pledging allegiance to ISIS, new statisticsshow that over a quarter million migrants entered Britain than refugees that left.

On top of that, The U.K. granted asylum or resettlement to 17,304 people – an increase over the previous year.

According to the ONS report:

Since 2016, the pattern of migration to the U.K. for work has been changing. Long-term immigration to the U.K. for work has fallen, mainly driven by the decline in EU arrivals. Despite this, 99,000 EU citizens still came to the U.K. long-term to work in 2018, a level similar to 2012. We are also seeing the number of skilled work visas for non-EU citizens increasing, although overall non-EU work-related immigration has remained broadly stable.

Vice chairman of Migration Watch U.K. Alp Mehmet claims that net migrationremains at more than a quarter of a million, very abnormal and high. During 2018, nearly 75,000 more people entered than departed. The trend continues to rise and increase with each passing year. Mehmet says “The clear message in these figures for the next Prime Minister is that they must make it a priority to deliver on the government’s pledge to reduce immigration levels by a lot, in line with the public’s wishes”.

Although the Conservative party has won three elections under the promise of reducing net migration “from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands”, nothing of the such has been done. In 2010, Theresa May, who was Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016, railed against the previous Labour government’s inaction, detailing that “over Labour’s time in office net migration totaled more than 2.2 million people – more than double the population of Birmingham. We can’t go on like this.”

Even with a win for the Conservative government in the election, nothing was done to curb the number of refugees entering the country with the same number of people arriving each year as before.

The British government still buries their heads in the sand regarding the dangers of unfettered migration, even after public opinion shows them the clear message of average citizens yearning for their countries to be secure and safe again.

It will be only up to the citizens of their respective countries to protect themselves and their land as more and more problems and issues arise from refugees and migrants infiltrating and desecrating their culture. Real authority figures in Europe have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they do not bear the best interests of their own people in mind.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Wzoo0T Tyler Durden

Pompeo Again Threatens Germany: Drop Huawei Or Intelligence Sharing Blocked

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has again put Germany and the rest of Europe on notice regarding China’s controversial telecom giant Huawei, warning they could be cut off from crucial US intelligence sharing over Huawei’s 5G networks now being built.

Pompeo issued the ultimatum following a meeting with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on Friday, saying the decision on whether to allow Huawei equipment would have severe consequences, according to Reuters. His words came at the start of a five-day European tour: “They [Germany] will take their own sovereign decisions, [but we] will speak to them openly about the risks… and in the case of Huawei the concern is it is not possible to mitigate those anywhere inside of a 5G network,” Pompeo said.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. File photo via RFERL

Germany, alongside the UK and France, has refused to budge amidst the ratcheting pressure from the US over worries that China’s intelligence is using its next generation networks as “back door” for aggressive telecommunications eavesdropping.

Pompeo told the news conference further: “(There is) a risk we will have to change our behavior in light of the fact that we can’t permit data on private citizens or data on national security to go across networks that we don’t have confidence (in).”

As we reported previously the Trump administration first notified its Berlin counterparts of the intelligence sharing concerns in early March, when US Ambassador to Germany Richard A. Grenell told Germany’s economics minister in an official letter that the European ally and intelligence partner “wouldn’t be able to keep intelligence and other information sharing at their current level if Germany allowed Huawei or other Chinese vendors to participate in building the country’s 5G network.”

It was noted at the time the warning is “likely to cause alarm among German security circles” amid persistent terror threat, largely the result of Merkel’s disastrous “Open Door” policies which allowed over 1 million middle eastern immigrants into he country. And yet it appears Germany’s national security state establishment has remained unmoved, or at least unable to prevail over Merkel’s government. 

Meanwhile on Thursday a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman responded to the White House position at a moment Pompeo keeps up the pressure campaign on European allies, saying, the US has not offered proof that Huawei’s products present a security risk.

“We hope that the United States can stop these mistaken actions which are not at all commensurate with their status and position as a big country,” said spokesman Geng Shuang, according to Reuters. 

And Huawei, for its part, is reportedly taking steps to block its employees from taking part in technical meetings with American contacts, which has even included sending home American employees that were based at its Chinese headquarters in Shenzen.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2XnuMFs Tyler Durden

Grenfell, Windrush, & Skripal: Theresa May’s Tainted Legacy

Authored by Johanna Ross via InfoRos,

The next UK prime minister inherits a divided nation, a reduced standing in the world and one of the worst periods in British-Russian relations…

UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s political career officially ended in tears last Friday, as the woman who declared that she would provide “strong and stable” leadership when she came to power three years ago, but who proved in the end to be not quite so strong or stable as she broke down in front of the press outside 10 Downing Street.

She had in fact, arguably one of the most disastrous records of a UK prime minister to date. A total of 50 cabinet resignations since she took office, far more than any of her recent predecessors; together with scandals such as the Grenfell Tower disaster, Windrush scandal, hostile environment policy and record levels of homelessness and poverty.  And that’s not to mention her inability to deliver Brexit, which effectively led to her demise.

Indeed however tempting it may be to feel sorry for May — she has been surrounded by political vultures all vying for her position for months now — one is minded of the words of British political commentator Owen Jones who, when asked recently if he felt sorry for the prime minister, noted that May’s tears were simply those of self-pity and were absent at times when they would have been appropriate, such as in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, which claimed 72 lives.

‘Permanent Crisis’

One may be inclined to think that if she was so unsuccessful on the domestic front, then perhaps in the area of foreign policy May could have had a better record. No such luck. We only have to look at the considerable deterioration in relations with Russia to understand that under her leadership, Britain’s standing in the world has diminished. Prominent British journalist Patrick Cockburn has even gone as far to say that Britain is now “entering a period of permanent crisis not seen since the 17th century.”

Grenfell Tower burning. (Natalie Oxford, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

But arguably back in the 17th century the U.K. was more competent in the art of diplomacy than it is now.  May’s defense minister, Gavin Williamson, with his comment that Russia should “go away and shut up” epitomized the extraordinary lack of finesse and savoir-faire the May government had when dealing with Russia. 

His bellicose tone unfortunately went hand-in-hand with a completely misplaced notion of Russia presenting to the UK some kind of genuine threat, as he argued earlier this year that the UK had to “enhance its lethality” against such well-resourced states, as opposed to concentrating its energies on Islamic terror groups. He was then accused by fellow politicians of “sabre-rattling” in what were widely seen as misguided and provocative statements.

However, Williamson was not alone in his anti-Russian stance. It was under May’s leadership that the controversial government-funded Integrity Initiative program really began to flourish. Designed to “counteract Russian propaganda” it instead deceptively engaged in spreading disinformation about Russia and even the UK Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, by hiring journalists, academics and commentators who would all sing from the same hymn sheet when it came to discourse about Russia in the press.

What was most chilling about the revelations in the Integrity Initiative hacked documents was the extent to which policy makers within the inner workings of the establishment are apparently obsessed about an imminent “Russian threat” and are prepared to go to considerable lengths to persuade the British population of this.

May with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hangzhou, China, 2016. (Wikimedia Commons)

Uncanny Timing

Even more unnerving was the discussion that there was need for some event to be staged in order to heighten the U.K. population’s awareness of a Russian threat. The timing was uncanny: this was not long before the poisoning took place of ex-double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, which has, along with multiple discrepancies in the British narrative, led some analysts to ask whether the whole incident was indeed orchestrated by British secret services. 

Staged or not, May’s handling of the Skripal incident left much to be desired. Even her experience of handling the Litvinenko affair as home secretary hadn’t taught her a great deal. Before any concrete evidence was produced to implicate the Russian government in the poisoning, May was already issuing ultimatums to the Russian president. Her infamous phrase that the government concluded it was “highly likely” Russia was responsible for the poisoning even entered itself into the Russian vocabulary and became something of a household joke in Russia.

The decision to publicly accuse another state of attempting murder on British soil with evidence that only amounted to “a nerve agent of a type produced by Russia,” was utterly reckless, not only deeply harming relations with Russia, but undermining the credibility of the U.K. as a whole. And despite it being an attempt to bolster the PM’s position at a time when desperately needed to generate support for her upcoming Brexit white paper – this itself, given a delayed Brexit and divided country, proved fruitless.

So what can we expect from the next prime minister of the not-so-Great Britain? Whoever it is has their work cut out not only to unite the Conservative party, but the country. In terms of improving relations with Russia — as long as the Tories remain in power, and the “deep state” or civil service continues to push its aggressive anti-Russian agenda —, we are unlikely to see any significant change in policy.

One could hope that a certain Boris Johnson, himself named after a Russian émigré, and the leading candidate to replace May, could seek to build bridges in this regard, but his record on the Skripal case leaves room for doubt. The PM is after all a figurehead, and the UK civil service remains a driving force of policy-making.

As former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair once said:

“You cannot underestimate how much they [the civil service] believe it’s their job to actually run the country and to resist the changes put forward by people they dismiss as ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ politicians. They genuinely see themselves as the true guardians of the national interest, and think that their job is simply to wear you down and wait you out.”

 Says it all really.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2WFTHXU Tyler Durden

Brett Kavanaugh Flunks His First Test as an Originalist

In his 2018 confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was asked by Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) whether or not he considered himself to be an originalist. “Originalism refers to basically textualism applied in the constitutional sphere, with an eye toward identifying the original public meaning of the constitutional text at issue,” Lee observed. So “for our purposes today, you’re an originalist?” “That’s correct,” Kavanaugh promptly replied.

Unfortunately for fans of originalism, Kavanaugh flunked his first big test as an originalist on the Supreme Court.

That test came in the case of Timbs v. Indiana. Tyson Timbs was arrested in 2013 on drug charges and sentenced to one year of home detention and five years on probation. A few months after his arrest, the state of Indiana also moved to seize Timbs’ brand new Land Rover LR2, a vehicle worth around $40,000. But a state trial court rejected that civil asset forfeiture on the grounds that it would be “grossly disproportionate to the gravity of [Timbs’] offense” and therefore in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids the imposition of “excessive fines.”

The Indiana Supreme Court later reversed that judgment, concluding that “the Excessive Fines Clause does not bar the State from forfeiting Defendant’s vehicle because the United States Supreme Court has not held that the Clause applies to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The 14th Amendment says, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The issue in Timbs, then, boiled down to this: Given that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment applies against the states as well as the federal government, the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment deserves the same treatment.

The Supreme Court agreed with that assessment and ruled unanimously in favor of Timbs. But the majority opinion, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and joined by Kavanaugh and several others, held that the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment is “incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

That is a problem for many originalists, who argue that the framers and ratifiers of that amendment understood the Privileges or Immunities Clause to be the principal protector of fundamental rights against the states.

Writing separately, as he has done before, Justice Clarence Thomas made the case for citing privileges and immunities in such matters—and he now has a bit of company on the bench. “I acknowledge, the appropriate vehicle for incorporation may well be the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause, rather than, as this Court has long assumed, the Due Process Clause,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his own solo Timbs concurrence. But because “nothing in this case turns on that question,” he said he was willing to go along with the majority this time around.

Thomas and Gorsuch are both self-avowed originalists, so it is fitting that they would explain and acknowledge, respectively, their heterodox views in a major constitutional case. Originalist judges are fighting an uphill battle, and one of the best ways to gain ground is by writing a persuasive opinion, typically penned in concurrence or dissent. How else are you going to change minds and set the foundation for winning future cases?

Which brings us back to the Court’s newest addition, who did not bother to weigh in at all. If Kavanaugh is a committed originalist, you would never know it based on his complacent behavior in Timbs v. Indiana.

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Brett Kavanaugh Flunks His First Test as an Originalist

In his 2018 confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was asked by Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) whether or not he considered himself to be an originalist. “Originalism refers to basically textualism applied in the constitutional sphere, with an eye toward identifying the original public meaning of the constitutional text at issue,” Lee observed. So “for our purposes today, you’re an originalist?” “That’s correct,” Kavanaugh promptly replied.

Unfortunately for fans of originalism, Kavanaugh flunked his first big test as an originalist on the Supreme Court.

That test came in the case of Timbs v. Indiana. Tyson Timbs was arrested in 2013 on drug charges and sentenced to one year of home detention and five years on probation. A few months after his arrest, the state of Indiana also moved to seize Timbs’ brand new Land Rover LR2, a vehicle worth around $40,000. But a state trial court rejected that civil asset forfeiture on the grounds that it would be “grossly disproportionate to the gravity of [Timbs’] offense” and therefore in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids the imposition of “excessive fines.”

The Indiana Supreme Court later reversed that judgment, concluding that “the Excessive Fines Clause does not bar the State from forfeiting Defendant’s vehicle because the United States Supreme Court has not held that the Clause applies to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The 14th Amendment says, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The issue in Timbs, then, boiled down to this: Given that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment applies against the states as well as the federal government, the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment deserves the same treatment.

The Supreme Court agreed with that assessment and ruled unanimously in favor of Timbs. But the majority opinion, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and joined by Kavanaugh and several others, held that the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment is “incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

That is a problem for many originalists, who argue that the framers and ratifiers of that amendment understood the Privileges or Immunities Clause to be the principal protector of fundamental rights against the states.

Writing separately, as he has done before, Justice Clarence Thomas made the case for citing privileges and immunities in such matters—and he now has a bit of company on the bench. “I acknowledge, the appropriate vehicle for incorporation may well be the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause, rather than, as this Court has long assumed, the Due Process Clause,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his own solo Timbs concurrence. But because “nothing in this case turns on that question,” he said he was willing to go along with the majority this time around.

Thomas and Gorsuch are both self-avowed originalists, so it is fitting that they would explain and acknowledge, respectively, their heterodox views in a major constitutional case. Originalist judges are fighting an uphill battle, and one of the best ways to gain ground is by writing a persuasive opinion, typically penned in concurrence or dissent. How else are you going to change minds and set the foundation for winning future cases?

Which brings us back to the Court’s newest addition, who did not bother to weigh in at all. If Kavanaugh is a committed originalist, you would never know it based on his complacent behavior in Timbs v. Indiana.

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Clubs, Cartels, And Bilderberg

Authored by Binoy Kampmark via Oriental Review,

“After decades of neoliberalism, we are at the mercy of a cluster of cartels who are lobbying politicians hard and using monopoly power to boost profits.”

Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (2012)

The emergence of think tanks was as much a symptom of liberal progress as it was a nervous reaction in opposition to it.  In 1938, the American Enterprise Association was founded by businessmen concerned that free enterprise would suffer at the hands of those too caught up with notions of equality and egalitarianism.  In 1943, it dug into the political establishment in Washington, renamed as the American Enterprise Institute which has boasted moments of some influence in the corridors of the presidential administrations.

Gatherings of the elite, self-promoted as chat shops of the privileged and monstrously well-heeled, have often garnered attention.  That the rich and powerful chat together privately should not be a problem, provided the glitterati keep their harmful ideas down to small circulation.  But the Bilderberg gathering, a transatlantic annual meeting convened since 1954, fuels speculation for various reasons, not least of all because of its absence of detail and off-the-record agendas. 

C. Gordon Tether, writing for the Financial Times in May 1975, would muse that,

“If the Bilderberg Group is not a conspiracy of some sort, it is conducted in such a way as to give a remarkably good imitation of one.”

Each year, there are hushed murmurings and ponderings about the guest list.  Politicians, captains of industry, and the filthy rich tend to fill out the numbers.  In 2018, the Telegraph claimed that delegates would chew over such matters as “Russia, ‘post-truth’ and the leadership in the US, with AI and quantum computing also on the schedule.”  This time, the Swiss town of Montreux is hosting a gathering which has, among its invitees, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The Bilderberg Summit begins at the driveway – this year in Switzerland, at the hotel “Montreux Palace”.

Often, the more entertaining assumptions about what happens at the Bilderberg Conference have come from outsiders keen to fantasise. The absence of a media pack, a situation often colluded with by media outlets themselves, coupled with a general holding of attendees to secrecy, have spawned a few gems.  A gathering of lizard descendants hatching plans for world domination is an old favourite.

Other accounts are suitably dull, suggesting that little in the way of importance actually happens.  That man of media, Marshall McLuhan, was appalled after attending a meeting in 1969 by those “uniformly nineteenth century minds pretending to the twentieth.” He was struck by an asphyxiating atmosphere of “banality and irrelevance”.

The briefings that come out are scripted to say little, though the Bilderberg gathering does come across as a forum to trial ideas (read anything significantly friendly to big business and finance) that may find their way into domestic circulation.  Former Alberta Premier Alison Redford did just that at the 2012 meeting at Chantilly, Virginia.  In reporting on her results after a trip costing $19,000, the Canadian politician proved short on detail. 

“The Premier’s participation advanced the Alberta government’s more aggressive effort to engage world decision makers in Alberta’s strategic interests, and to talk about Alberta’s place in the world.  The mission sets the stage for further relationship-building with existing partners and potential partners with common interests in investment, innovation and public policy.”

One is on more solid ground in being suspicious of such figures given their distinct anti-democratic credentials.  Such gatherings tend to be hostile to the demos, preferring to lecture and guide it rather than heed it.  Bilderberg affirmed that inexorable move against popular will in favour of the closed club and controlling cartel.  “There are powerful corporate groups, above government, manipulating things,” asserts the much maligned Alex Jones, whose tendency to conspiracy should not detract from a statement of the obvious.  These are gatherings designed to keep the broader populace at arms-length, and more.

The ideas and policies discussed are bound to be self-serving ones friendly to the interests of finance and indifferent to the welfare of the commonwealth.  A Bilderberg report, describing the Bürgenstock Conference in 1960, saw the gatherings as ones “where arguments not always used in public debate can be put forth.”  As Joseph Stiglitz summarises from The Price of Inequality,

“Those at the top have learned how to suck the money out of the rest in ways that the rest are hardly aware of.  That is their true innovation.  Policy shapes the market, but politics has been hijacked by a financial elite that has feathered its own nest.” 

A nice distillation of Bilderbergism, indeed.

Gauging the influence of the Bilderberg Group in an empirical sense is not a simple matter, though WikiLeaks has suggested that “its influence on postwar history arguable eclipses that of the G8 conference.”  An overview of the group, published in August 1956 by Dr. Jósef H. Retinger, Polish co-founder and secretary of the gathering, furnishes us with a simple rationale: selling the US brand to sceptical Europeans and nullifying “anxiety”.  Meetings “unofficial and private” would be convened involving “influential and reliable people who carried the respect of those working in the field of national and international affairs”.

Retinger also laid down the rationale for keeping meetings opaque and secret.  Official international meetings, he reasoned, were troubled by those retinues of “experts and civil servants”.  Frank discussion was limited for fear of indiscretions that might be seen as rubbing against the national interest.  The core details of subjects would be avoided.  And thirdly, if those attending “are not able to reach agreement on a certain point they shelve it in order to avoid giving the impression of disunity.”

A security guard is seen May 29 above the entrance of the Fairmont Le Montreux Palace hotel in the Swiss town of Montreux, which is set to host the annual Bilderberg Meeting.

Retinger was already floating ideas about Europe in May 1946 when, as secretary general of the Independent League for European Co-operation (ILEC), he pondered the virtues of federalism oiled by an elite cadre before an audience at Chatham House.  He feared the loss of “big powers” on the continent, whose “inhabitants after all, represent the most valuable human element in the world.”  (Never mind those of the dusky persuasion, long held in European bondage.)  Soon after, he was wooed by US Ambassador W. Averell Harriman and invited to the United States, where his ideas found “unanimous approval… among financiers, businessmen and politicians.”

The list of approvers reads like a modern Bilderberg selection, an oligarchic who’s who, among them the banker Russell Leffingwell, senior partner in J. P. Morgan’s, Nelson and David Rockefeller, chair of General Motors Alfred Sloan, New York investment banker Kuhn Loeb and Charles Hook, President of the American Rolling Mills Company.  (Unsurprisingly, Retinger would establish the Bilberberg Group with the likes of Paul Rijkens, President of the multinational giant Unilever, the unglamorous face of European capitalism.)

Retinger’s appraisals of sovereignty, to that end, are important in understanding the modern European Union, which continues to nurse those paradoxical tensions between actual representativeness and financial oligarchy.  Never mind the reptilian issues: the EU, to a modest extent, is Bilderbergian, its vision made machinery, enabling a world to be made safe for multinationals while keeping popular sovereignty in check.  Former US ambassador to West Germany, George McGhee, put it this way: “The Treaty of Rome [of 1957], which brought the Common Market into being, was nurtured at Bilderberg meetings.”

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2JQTriP Tyler Durden