Macron Urges European Nuclear Arms Control Initiative To Combat “Unrestrained Arms Race”
At a moment major arms control treaties remain on the brink of collapse, all eyes were on French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday for a key speech in Paris unveiling the future of France’s nuclear weapons. The EU country is one of the five “Nuclear Weapons States” under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and is now the only post-Brexit EU nuclear power.
Macron warned of a new arms race impacting Europe, especially after last Spring both Russia and the United States formally suspended their participation in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) ahead of its expiration. Europe “cannot remain spectators” in any new arms race, he said. He proposed that the Europeans step up with “an international agenda of arms control” at a moment of heightened proliferation fears.
Getty Images via Daily Express
“Europeans must realize collectively that in the absence of a legal framework, they could rapidly face a new race for conventional weapons, even nuclear weapons, on their own soil,” Macron warned in his speech, and further urged “strategic dialogue” with European partners centered on France’s nuclear arsenal and its future.
While emphasizing France’s strategy of nuclear deterrence, he touted Paris’ example of seeking to reduce its nuclear warhead arsenal, recently bringing it to “under 300” – though we should note it’s hovered at 300 or just above for quite some time – which according to the president gives France “the legitimacy to demand concrete moves from other nuclear powers toward global disarmament that is gradual, credible and can be verified.”
Macron further addressed the often strained relationship with the United States at a moment the Trump administration appears to be going its own way on arms proliferation amid heightened tensions and a looming “arms race” with Russia, which has sparked fears of a “Cold War 2.0” of sorts. Last year President Macron personally urged Trump not to axe the INF Treaty with Russia.
“France is convinced that long-term security in Europe is possible through a strong alliance with the United States,” Macron said. “But our security is also achieved, inevitably, through a larger capacity for autonomous action in Europe.”
Macron at the Ecole Militaire in Paris on Friday, via AFP.
However, he also underscored France’s national sovereignty over its nuclear arsenal after prior calls from some corners of the EU, notably German politicians, to bring French warheads under NATO or collective EU control.
He warned of “the possibility of a pure and unrestrained military and nuclear competition, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the end of the 1960s.”
“The vital interests of France now have a European dimension,” Mr Macron said.
European nations should also insist on being signatories of any new deal to limit the development of new intermediate-range weapons,” he added.
“Let us be clear: if negotiations and a more comprehensive treaty are possible … Europeans must be stakeholders and signatories, because it’s our territory” that is most at risk. — The National
His speech also addressed strained ties with Moscow following the years-long standoff over events in Ukraine. He called for efforts aimed to “restore trust” with Russia.
“There can be no defense and security project for European citizens without a political vision that seeks to progressively restore trust with Russia,” Macron said. “We cannot accept the current situation, where the chasm deepens and talks diminish even as the security issues that need to be addressed with Moscow are multiplying.”
Elsewhere he proposed a budget of around €37 billion to modernize the county’s nuclear stockpile, which it should be noted remains the only European Union nuclear power after Brexit.
Britain left the EU on the last day of January and is an independent nation once more. The new Johnson government is confident that Britain will do well outside the EU. Free trade will be embraced, and a no-deal outcome, now dubbed an Australian trade relationship, holds no fears for the British government.
This article summarises the political and economic consequences of this historic moment. The fly in the ointment is there is no sign that Britain’s government understands the importance of sound money, which will be crucial in the event a global economic and financial credit crisis materialises.
Independence and trade negotiations
Having given independence to all its colonies, now it’s Britain’s turn. On 1 February the UK became politically independent and entered an eleven-month transition period while trade terms with the EU and other trading nations are negotiated, with the objective of entering 2021 with freedom to trade without tariffs with as many nations as possible. If Britain succeeds in its initial objectives these trade agreements will include not only the EU but also America, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the other trans-Pacific Partnership nations and a host of sub-Saharan African nations in the Commonwealth. It amounts to about two-thirds of the world measured by nominal GDP, of which only 21% is with the EU.
Additionally, an analyst looking at market substitution must allow for the relative dynamism of economies. Britain’s trade in goods with the EU has been declining, and today represents about 45% of Britain’s exports, having slipped from 55% in 2006. Despite the penalty of WTO terms with nearly all of Britain’s other trading partners, British exports are gaining more traction in trade outside Fortress EU. The future is brighter elsewhere.
Furthermore, the EU’s trade covers physical goods affecting only 8% of Britain’s GDP, with services a separate issue negotiated on a case-by-case basis. Being predominantly wholesale, most trade in financial services is excluded (though the EU is trying to claim it is not), and those at the retail level are delivered through British-owned subsidiaries based in Luxembourg and Dublin. Attempts to force EU standards on British financial services have a long history of failure, and the most recent suggestion, that the EU will seek to maintain access to British fishing waters in exchange for continued access for financial services to the EU, is an empty bargain.
Trading one issue off against another is a long-standing EU tactic which is no longer relevant. Having secured a good working majority in the House of Commons with every new Conservative MP required to unconditionally support Brexit as a condition of their selection, Britain’s trade need not be compromised in negotiations on political grounds. Furthermore, the new leadership recognises that unilateral free trade is the best outcome for the British economy and is now being overtly championed by Boris now Brexit is done. Boris Johnson realised free trade is the central economic issue when he broke with the establishment before the 2016 referendum.
Before Brexit and Boris, with the all-powerful establishment controlling the post-referendum agenda this could never be admitted, until now. Parliament specifically legislated to remove the no-deal option, not just to emasculate British negotiators and thus for Britain to remain within the EU’s customs union, but because the Westminster and Whitehall establishments did not understand trade, let alone free trade, and are subjugated by their socialising instincts.
That is now history, and if the new Conservative government cares to do so, it can play hardball as hard as it likes in the upcoming negotiations. So far, in doing so it has been careful not to appear in favour of free trade, but that is changing. The issue was camouflaged by Boris in socialist ideals: more hospitals, more schools, more police, and promoting the climate change agenda. But make no mistake, an understanding of the benefits of free trade and the true cost of a socialising establishment are at the heart of this government’s policy, now publicly admitted and declared by Boris Johnson.
How it leaves the EU
The people and their 27 remaining governments in the EU have been watching the UK’s escape from their Hotel California with interest. There is widespread discontent, but no other nation has raised seriously the possibility of following the UK out of the EU. Instead, the mantra has been to get more handouts or promote reform. Good luck with that. And we can blame the Americans for this dysfunctional project.
Once upon a time (all fairy stories start with this way) some senior bigwigs at the CIA decided to set up a committee. ACUE sounds like a sneeze, but it actually stood for the American Committee for United Europe. In the late 1940s, ACUE funded, and therefore chose the direction of fledgling pan-European movements in a plan to keep Germany pacified and the Soviets out of Western Europe. It was something Britain had no desire to be part of, content with its role in the British sector of Germany and the newly-formed NATO.
While ACUE set the direction for European integration, Britain was busy trashing her economy with post-war nationalisation and the kneejerk socialism that followed the war years. In 1957, having become Prime Minister after Eden’s Suez disaster, Harold Macmillan found he had been dealt a poor hand: a vanquished Germany was powering ahead, and De Gaulle’s France was hitched to the German wagon. The Common Market was busy protecting itself from foreign imports with tariffs and import restrictions, disadvantaging Britain’s trade. These were similar policies to those of President Trump today.
Macmillan’s droopy, rheumy eyes were an apt metaphor for a tired post-war Britain. With what money it had left from socialist partying, Britain faced being excluded from trading with her European neighbours. De Gaulle said non, twice, and it was only when he was replaced by Georges Pompidou that France relented and eventually let Britain in. Protected from outrageous fortune by a fortress of tariffs and having ditched her empire, Britain contented herself with further decline, earning the soubriquet of being the sick man of Europe.
Then Margaret Thatcher happened. Britain was revitalised. Exchange controls were abandoned, and even German businessmen envied Britain in her leadership. But it was clear that with Thatcher came revived British nationalism and political confidence. It was as if Lazarus had risen from his sickbed. Maggie restored the nation’s desire for independence, which took thirty years after her premiership to finally realise.
Brussels will console itself that without Britain it will be free to pursue other objectives. It is assembling an EU army out of its members’ military resources, having already established a network of embassies around the world. It seeks tax harmonisation, and an additional federal tax cannot be far away. It will miss the UK’s annual contribution of about £11bn, funding which will be made up by the other members.
In truth its bureaucratic, undemocratic model is outdated and inflexible. Its ethos has become a paralysing mixture of big business cronyism and socialism. Free markets are a threat and despised. Its central bank, the ECB, has got the inflation bug, financing spendthrift member governments and undercapitalised big banks. And its new head, Christine Lagarde wants to fund climate change, all by printing euros.
More nations are bound to abandon this out of date political project. Ordinary Germans have had their hard-earned savings trashed, most recently with negative interest rates. The mittelstand, the backbone of Germany’s engineering and technology, is being sacrificed on the alter of climate change. The Mediterranean nations have their hands out for more subsidies. As Mrs Thatcher once said, the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money, a truth which hapless EU residents will learn the hard way. It’s a lucky escape for Britain.
The trade negotiations ahead
Trade negotiations will not start until March, because the EU’s negotiators are consulting with all member states to gain support for its negotiating strategy. In effect, it means the EU will come to the table with its red lines confirmed and will use them in an attempt to stop the UK thinking the EU will concede ground on trade, regulations and the supervision of the European courts over trade disputes. It seeks continual access to British fisheries, and instead of using the Irish border issue to stymie negotiations, the EU intends to drive a wedge between Britain and Gibraltar.
Meanwhile, Britain has made a strong start on the novation of existing EU trade agreements with Japan, South Korea and Canada; the only issue being Britain’s desire to make agreements even more comprehensive than the existing ones with the EU. At the same time, new trade agreements are being fast-tracked with the US, Australia, New Zealand and all other countries keen to sign up, predominantly members of the Commonwealth and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The principal sticking point in these negotiations is movement of people. Countries like India, Pakistan and the states of South-East Asia, some with large UK diasporas are seen to be an immigration problem which could become a trade negotiating issue. Doubtless, new immigration controls based on the Australian system will be modified to alleviate these problems, on the basis that there is an ambition for Britain with its top universities to become the pre-eminent educator for the world.
While these difficulties must not be belittled, by the time the UK and EU start talking turkey in March, the British should be in a position to announce tangible progress on a number of trade deals. Furthermore, the abandonment of the EU’s import tariffs will reduce consumer prices, without directly affecting output prices, and increased competition between domestic and foreign manufacturers are likely to have a beneficial effect on consumer prices as well.
The benefits to the consumer of tariff-free trade have received little mention so far. But given Keynesian economists are likely to see them as deflationary it must raise in their minds an awful dilemma. For a Keynesian, it is impossible to argue convincingly in favour of tariffs yet at the same time have an unquestioned belief that higher prices are a stimulant to consumption and deflation of them a tool of the devil. Consequently, the establishment is likely to be confused on this issue. Nevertheless, the free traders in government will need to drive hard the British response to the EU’s red lines and ensure change is so rapid that critics in the establishment and lobbying industry will always be left arguing yesterday’s issue.
As the backstop to trade negotiations, free traders see no problem with no deal, but the EU does in two respects. Firstly, the whole ethos of the EU is protectionism and secondly, it fears that the UK will use a trade agreement to undercut EU trade if it is freed from EU bureaucracy. From the EU’s standpoint, this was their means of control embedded in Mrs May’s Withdrawal Agreement, and subsequently in the toned-down version which was eventually passed under Boris Johnson.
But it seems that Boris has worked a blinder. Details of the final agreement are open to interpretation, and the Political Declaration was to set the tone for what is fair. In reality, the political declaration is meaningless, or will be rendered so. No doubt, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings knew this at the outset and will simply disregard it. The first challenge will be on access to UK waters for fishing, due to be agreed by 1 July to be implemented at the end of the implementation period. This is where the Political Agreement is likely to break down.
As mentioned above, there is a view that in order for EU fishing vessels to be permitted to have access to British waters, they are prepared to concede something on financial services. Quite possibly the French, who face pressures from their fishing industry, will be behind an attempt to rob Peter to pay Paul, as will the Spanish, wanting Britain to give ground on Gibraltar if they are to be excluded from British waters.
This negotiating tactic, if deployed by the EU, cuts across the compartmentalised Political Declaration and can be ignored by the British. Interestingly, Brexiteers who initially opposed Johnson’s agreement with the EU (being the Withdrawal Agreement and the Political Declaration combined), including members of the European Research Group of free-trade Conservative MPs and even Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, have now accepted it. Were they briefed that the Political Declaration was actually as watertight as a sieve, and bound Britain to nothing?
Added pressure has come from Boris Johnson himself, refusing to consider any extension of the transition period beyond the end of this year. He is now openly talking about being prepared to settle for an Australian solution, for which we should read WTO terms.
As has been the case since the referendum campaign, Dominic Cummings will almost certainly be a background figure in the negotiations. His success in working with Michael Gove in Education (now de facto deputy Prime Minister), his success in managing the Vote Leave campaign, and his success in managing Johnson’s election strategy will all ensure that more than anyone else on the British side, he will set negotiation strategy. For him, his work is not yet done, and he gives no quarter.
The future for Britain’s trade outside the EU
There is every reason to be optimistic for the UK economy in the coming years. Freed from the EU’s restrictive tariff regime, Britain can become a competitive global supplier of goods and services and an entrepôt. Assuming the government does not make the mistake of introducing new tariffs to replace those of the EU, the full benefits of comparative advantage will also apply. Comparative advantage refers to the competitive benefits of allowing individuals and businesses full access to the cheapest, best or most suitable goods and services irrespective of by whom and where they are produced. It was, besides a monetary gold standard, the reason why Britain became the most powerful trading nation on earth in the seventy years before the First World War.
In his speech last Monday at the Painted Hall in Greenwich, Johnson even championed Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, which tells us that he understands its importance, and he further confirmed his ambition for Britain to become the driving force behind global free trade, referring to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. As noted above, immediate negotiations will encompass almost two-thirds of the world measured by GDP.
But that has to be only Phase One. Absent from his recent speeches has been mention of trade with China and Russia. Putting Russia to one side, China cannot be ignored, and before America upped the anti on China’s trade, Britain was developing a leading role, in conjunction with Hong Kong, in offshore markets for the yuan.
As an Anglophile and a disparaging critic of the EU’s protectionism, President Trump is personally committed to negotiating a fast-tracked trade agreement with the UK, which means free trade with China will have to be on the back burner for now. China will have to wait, but there must be no doubt that in the fullness of time Johnson will embrace a free trade agreement with China, and possibly with the full membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
Only, there is an overriding problem. While Johnson understands the economics of free trade, as yet, there is no evidence he understands the importance of sound money. Nor, perhaps, does Dominic Cummings, if his recent advertisement for new talent to work with him and his team of special advisers, including mathematical economists, is any guide.
Another financial crisis is in the wings
In common with other jurisdictions, the financial crisis twelve years ago was countered by an explosion in outstanding government debt, financed by quantitative easing. Subsequently, the UK government has achieved a return to a balanced budget. As long as there is not a repeated credit crisis, the UK government’s finances are in good shape. The intention is to improve them further by cutting bureaucratic waste and eliminating political grandstanding.
But another crisis is due, and no substantive preparation for it has been made, other than some wishy-washy stress tests on the banks. Not only has there been little preparation, but the Keynesians at the Bank are clearly out of their depth. Unless it is being secretly done, the Bank has made no attempt to rebuild its gold reserves, if only as a vague insurance policy against the day some sort of reset is required. In common with other central banks, a state-issued cryptocurrency and blockchain technology are being examined instead, a solution to future monetary challenges that owes more to fashion than reality.
Realistically, the Bank and the Johnson government will have no alternative to inflationary solutions to the next crisis. While nearly everyone sees London’s financial and banking dominance as a good thing, it will mean the cost of rescuing it will fall disproportionately on the UK in the event of a global financial and systemic crisis. And one is now due.
The point about understanding the importance of sound money in this febrile environment is not that it will somehow improve the UK’s response to a credit and financial crisis. It is more about how the government stops it undermining the currency. With America’s Fed and virtually all other major central banks tying in their currencies to continually rising financial asset values, a systemic crisis threatens to undermine both financial asset values and unbacked fiat currencies, perhaps entirely. It is only by understanding why this is the case and avoiding the trap that second line currencies such as sterling faces that it will survive a currency holocaust. But with an understanding of free markets, at least the Johnson government should have a head start in its dealings with the aftermath of the next financial crisis.
However, the UK is still tied financially into the EU, paying into its coffers until the transition period is over. There will also be a monetary settlement to be finally agreed, but that is thought to be just under £30bn, less than the £40bn touted under Mrs May’s proposed withdrawal agreement. What’s more concerning is the cost likely to arise from a financial and systemic crisis in the EU, which the UK might still be required to backstop.
Academic historians reject anything smacking of inevitably. Instead they emphasize the contingency of events as manifested through the inherent agency of human beings and the countless decisions they make. On the merits, such scholars are basically correct. That said, there was something – if not inevitable – highly probable, almost (forgive me) deterministic about the two cataclysmic world wars of the 20th century. Both, in retrospect, were driven, in large part, by collective – particularly Western – nations’ adherence to a series of geopolitical philosophies.
The first war – which killed perhaps nine million soldiers in the sodden trench lines (among other long forgotten places) of Europe – began, in part, due to the continental, and especially maritime, competition between Imperial Great Britain, and a new, rising, and highly populous, land power, Imperial Germany. Both had pretensions to global leadership; Britain’s old and long-standing, Germany’s recent and aspirational – tinged with a sense of long-denied deservedness. Political and military leaders on both sides – along with other European (and the Japanese) nations – then pledged philosophical fealty to the theories of an American Navy man, Alfred Thayer Mahan. To simplify, Mahan’s core postulation – published from a series of lectures as The Influence of Sea Power Upon History – was that geopolitical power in the next (20th) century would be inherently maritime. The countries that maintained large, modern navies, held strategic coaling stations, and expanded their coastal, formal empires, would dominate trade, develop the strongest economies, and, hence, were apt to global paramountcy. Conversely, traditional land power – mass armies prepared to march across vast land masses – would become increasingly irrelevant.
Mahan’s inherently flawed, or at least exaggerated, conclusions – and his own clear institutional (U.S. Navy) bias – aside, key players in two of the major powers of Europe seemed to buy the philosophy hook-line-and-sinker. So, when Wilhelmine Germany took the strategic decision to rapidly expand its own colonial fiefdoms (before the last patches of brown-people-inhabited land were swallowed up) and, thereby necessarily embarked on a crash naval buildup to challenge the British Empire’s maritime supremacy, the stage was set for a massive war. And, with most major European rivals – hopelessly hypnotized by nationalism – locked in a wildly byzantine, bipolar alliance system, all that was needed to turn the conflict global was a spark: enter the assassin Gavrilo Princip, a pistol, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and it was game on.
The Second World War – which caused between 50-60 million deaths – was, of course, an outgrowth of the first. It’s causes were multifaceted and complicated. Nonetheless, particularly in its European theater, it, too, was driven by a geopolitical theorist and his hypotheses. This time the culprit was a Briton, Halford John Mackinder. In contrast with Mahan, Mackinder postulated a land-based, continental power theory. As such, he argued that the “pivot” of global preeminence lay in the control of Eurasia – the “World Island” – specifically Central Asia and Eastern Europe. These resource rich lands held veritable buried treasure for the hegemon, and, since they lay on historical trade routes, were strategically positioned.
Should an emergent, ambitious, and increasingly populated, power – say, Nazi Germany – need additional territory (what Hitler called “Lebensraum“) for its race, and resources (especially oil) for its budding war machine, then it needed to seize the strategic “heartland” of the World Island. In practice, that meant the Nazis theoretically should, and did, shift their gaze (and planned invasion) from their outmoded Mahanian rival across the English Channel, eastward to the Ukraine, Caucasus (with its ample oil reserves), and Central Asia. Seeing as all three regions were then – and to lesser extent, still – dominated by Russia, the then Soviet Union, the unprecedentedly bloody existential war on Europe’s Eastern Front appears ever more certain and explainable.
Germany lost both those wars: the first badly, the second, disastrously. Then, in a sense, the proceeding 45-year Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union – the only two big winners in the Second World War – may be seen as an extension or sequel to Mackinder-driven rivalry. The problem is that after the end of – at least the first – Cold War, Western, especially American, strategists severely miscalculated. In their misguided triumphalism, US geopolitical theorists both provoked a weak (but not forever so) Russia by expanding the NATO alliance far eastward, but posited premature (and naive) theories that assumed global finance, free (American-skewed) trade, and digital dominance were all that mattered in a “Post” Cold War world.
No one better defined this magical thinking more than the still – after having been wrong about just about every US foreign policy decision of the last two decades – prominent New York Timescolumnist, Thomas Friedman. In article after article, and books with such catchy titles as The World is Flat, and The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman argued, essentially, that old realist geopolitics were dead, and all that really mattered for US hegemony was the proliferation of McDonald’s franchises worldwide.
Friedman was wrong; he always is (Exhibit A: the 2003 Iraq War). Today, with a surprisingly – at least with his prominent base – popular president, Donald J. Trump, impeached in the House and just acquitted by the Senate for alleged crimes misleadingly summed up as “Ukraine-gate,” a look at the real issues at hand in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, demonstrate that, for better or (probably) worse, the ghost of Mackinder still haunts the scene. For today, I’d argue, the proxy battle over Ukraine between the U.S. and its allied-coup-empowered government – which includes some neo-nazi political and military elements – and Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east, reflects a return to the battle for Eurasian resource and geographic predominance.
Neither Russia nor the United States is wholly innocent in fueling and escalating the ongoing Ukrainian Civil War. The difference is, that in post-Russiagate farce, chronically (especially among mainstream Democrat) alleged Russia-threat-obsessed America, reports of Moscow’s ostensible guilt literally saturate the media space. The reporting from Washington? Not so much.
The truth is that a generation of prominent “liberal” American, born-again Russia-hawks – Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the whole DNC apparatus, and the MSNBC corporate media crowd – wielded State Department, NGO, and economic pressure to help catalyze a pro-Western coup in Ukraine during and after 2014. Their opportunism seemed, to them, simple, and relatively cost-free, at the time, but has turned implacably messy in the ensuing years.
In the process, the Democrats haven’t done themselves any political favors, further sullying what’s left of their reputation by – in some cases – colluding with Ukrainians to undermine key Trump officials; and consorting with nefarious far-right nationalist local bigots (who may have conspired to kill protesters in the Maidan “massacre,” as a means to instigate further Western support for the coup). What’s more, while much of the conspiratorial Trump-team spin on direct, or illegal, Biden family criminality has proven false, neither Joe nor son Hunter, are exactly “clean.” The Democratic establishment, Biden specifically, may, according to an excellent recent Guardian editorial, have a serious “corruption problem” – no least of which involves explaining exactly why a then sitting vice president’s son, who had no serious diplomatic or energy sector experience, was paid $50,000 a month to serve on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
Fear not, the “Never-Trump” Republicans, and establishment Democrats seemingly intent on drumming up a new – presumably politically profitable – Cold War have already explanation. They’ve dug up the long ago discredited, but still publicly palatable, justification that the US must be prepared to fight Russia “over there,” before it has no choice but to battle them “over here” (though its long been unclear where “here” is, or how, exactly, that fantasy comes to pass). First, there’s the distance factor: though several thousands of miles away from the East Coast of North America, Ukraine is in Russia’s near-abroad. After all, it was long – across many different generational political/imperial structures – part of the Soviet Union or other Russian empires. A large subsection of the populace, especially in the East, speaks, and considers itself, in part, culturally, Russian.
Furthermore, the Russian threat, in 2020, is highly exaggerated. Putin is not Stalin. The Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union; and, hell, even the Soviet (non-nuclear) military threat and geopolitical ambitions were embellished throughout Cold War “Classic.” A simple comparative “tale-of-the-tape” illustrates as much. Economically and demographically, Russia is demonstrably an empirically declining power – its economy, in fact, about the size of Spain’s.
Nor is the defense of an imposed, pro-Western, Ukrainian proxy state a vital American national security interest worth bleeding, or risking nuclear war, over. As MIT’s Barry Posen has argued, “Vital interests affect the safety, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and power position of the United States,” and, “If, in the worst case, all Ukraine were to ‘fall’ to Russia, it would have little impact on the security of the United States.” Furthermore, as retired US Army colonel, and president of the restraint-based Quincy Institute, Andrew Bacevich, has advised, the best policy, if discomfiting, is to “tacitly acknowledge[e] the existence of a Russian sphere of influence.” After all, Washington would expect, actually demand, the same acquiescence of Moscow in Mexico, Canada, or, for that matter, the entire Americas.
Unfortunately, no such restrained prudence is likely, so long as the bipartisan American national security state continues to subscribe to some vague version of the Mackinder theory. Quietly, except among wonky regional experts and investigative reporters on the scene, the US has, before, but especially since the “opportunity” of the 9/11 attacks, entered full-tilt into a competition with Russia and China for physical, economic, and resource dominance from Central Asia to the borderlands of Eastern Europe. That’s why, as a student at the Army’s Command and General Staff College in 2016-17, all us officers focused almost exclusively on planning fictitious, but highly realistic, combat missions in the Caucasus region. It also partly explains why the US military, after 18+ years, remains ensconced in potentially $3 trillion resource-rich Afghanistan, which, not coincidentally, is America’s one serious physical foothold in land-locked Central Asia.
Anecdotally, but instructively, I remember well my four brief stops at the once ubiquitous US Air Force way-station into Afghanistan – Manas Airbase – in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Off-base “liberty” – even for permanent party airmen – was rare, in part, because the Russian military had a mirror base just across the city. What’s more, the previous, earlier stopover spot for Afghanistan – Uzbekistan – kicked out the US military in 2005, in part, due to Russian political and economic pressure to do so.
Central Asia and East Europe are also contested spaces regarding the control of competing – Western vs. Russian vs. Chinese – oil and natural gas pipeline routes and trade corridors. Remember, that China’s massive “One Belt – One Road” infrastructure investment program is mostly self-serving, if sometimes mutually beneficial. The plan means to link Chinese manufacturing to the vast consumerist European market mainly through transportation, pipeline, diplomatic, and military connections running through where? You guessed it: Central Asia, the Caucasus, and on through Eastern Europe.
Like it or not, America isn’t poised to win this battle, and its feeble efforts to do so in these remarkably distant locales smacks of global hegemonic ambitions and foolhardy, mostly risk, nearly no reward, behavior. Russia has a solid army in close proximity, a hefty nuclear arsenal, as well as physical and historical connections to the Eurasian Heartland; China has an even better, more balanced, military, enough nukes, and boasts a far more powerful, spendthrift-capable, economy. As for the US, though still militarily and (for now) economically powerful, it lacks proximity, faces difficult logistical / expeditionary challenges, and has lost much legitimacy and squandered oodles of good will with the regional countries being vied for. Odds are, that while war may not be inevitable, Washington’s weak hand and probable failure, nearly is.
Let us table, for the purposes of this article, questions regarding any environmental effects of the great powers’ quest for, extraction, and use of many of these regional resources. My central points are two-fold:
first, that Ukraine – which represents an early stage in Washington’s rededication to chauvinist, Mackinder geostrategy – as a proxy state for war with Russia is not an advisable or vital interest;
second, that Uncle Sam’s larger quest to compete with the big two (Eur)Asian powers is likely to fail and symptomatic of imperial confusion and desperation.
As the U.S. enters an increasingly bipolar phase of world affairs, powerful national security leaders fear its diminishing power. Washington’s is, like it or not, an empire in decline; and, as we know from history, such entities behave badly on the downslope of hegemony. Call me cynical, but I’m apt to believe that the United States, as perhaps the most powerful imperial body of all time, is apt, and set, to act poorest of all.
The proxy fight in Ukraine, battle for Central Asia in general – to say nothing of related American aggression and provocations in Iran and the Persian Gulf – could be the World War III catalyst that the Evangelical militarist nuts, Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, unwilling to wait on Jesus Christ’s eschatological timeline, have long waited for. These characters seemingly possess the heretical temerity to believe man – white American men, to be exact – can and should incite or stimulate Armageddon and the Rapture.
If they’re proved “right” or have their way – and the Mikes just might – then nuclear cataclysm will have defied the Vegas odds and beat the house on the expected human extinction timeline. Only contra to the bloody prophecy set forth in the New Testament book of Revelations, it won’t be Jesus wielding his vengeful sword on the back of a white horse, but – tragic and absurdly – the perfect Antichrist stooge, pressing the red button, who does the apocalyptic deed.
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Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. His forthcoming book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, is available for preorder on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet. Check out his professional website for contact info, scheduling speeches, and/or access to the full corpus of his writing and media appearances.
Truth in Accounting has released its 2020 Financial State of Cities report, highlighting the fiscal health of America’s 75 most populous cities. Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that the study found that this year, 63 cities do not have enough money to pay their bills and total municipal debt now stands at $323 billion.
It ranked the cities according to their taxpayer burden or surplus which is the amount each taxpayer would have to pay to clear municipal debt with nothing, such as benefits and services, in exchange.
New York has $62.7 billion available to pay $249.4 billion worth of bills which breaks down to a burden of $63,100 per taxpayer.
In Chicago, each taxpayer would have to pay $63,100 in future taxes without anything in return while Hononulu has the third-highest burden at $26,400.
Some cities are run better than others with Irvine, California and Washington D.C. notable examples. The former has a surplus of $4,100 per taxpayer while D.C. has a surplus of $3,500.
The rest of the world is laughing at us. After what just took place in Iowa, we certainly do not have any right to lecture other nations about how to run their elections. It was a dumpster fire of epic proportions, and the entire globe is talking about it. Apparently the Democrats have decided to run their elections the same way that they run their cities. The Iowa Democratic Party had just one job to do, and they failed in spectacular fashion.
Collecting voting results and reporting them to the public shouldn’t be complicated, but these days incompetence has become the norm. From one end of the country to the other it seems like people are competing to see who can be the most incompetent, and our population is becoming more “dumbed down” with each passing day.
The debacle in Iowa is being blamed on a faulty app, and I suppose that we shouldn’t be surprised.
After all, just about everything that we put on our phones and computers these days must be constantly “fixed” or “patched” due to endless errors.
This app that the Democrats were using did not have to be complicated. It simply needed to accurately relay data from the precincts to the Iowa Democratic Party, but thanks to “a coding error” that did not happen…
Due to a coding error, the app, created by a company called Shadow Inc., wasn’t reporting the correct data, according to the Iowa Democratic Party. The error resulted in the Democrats delaying all public reporting of the results of Monday’s caucuses, and has sown chaos and confusion in a hotly contested and deeply important primary.
After all of the hot air that the Democrats have been blowing around about “the integrity of our elections”, you would think that they would have their act together for the 2020 election.
But instead they just showed the rest of the world what not to do.
And it isn’t as if this was a complete surprise. According to CNN, it was clear well in advance that the app “was not working properly”…
Precinct captains from across Iowa began realizing days before the caucuses that the app was not working properly. Some complained to their county party leadership, others said nothing and hoped it would work at the needed moment and some just planned to call in their results, as has been done in the past. And most county party chairs openly worried about the lack of training on the reporting system.
Only a quarter of nearly 1,700 precinct chairs even successfully downloaded the app, according to a Democrat familiar with the matter.
“I couldn’t get it to work,” said Jane Podgorniak, the Worth County party chair. “I tried and tried.”
There never was any training for the precinct chairs, and there was mass confusion among local party officials. In Polk County, the chairman of the Democratic Party told his precinct chairs to simply call in the results, but that didn’t work either. The following comes from the New York Times…
So last Thursday Mr. Bagniewski, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Iowa’s most populous county, Polk, instructed his precinct chairs to simply call in the caucus results as they had always done. But during Monday night’s caucuses, those precinct chairs could not connect with party leaders via phone. Hold times stretched past 90 minutes. And when Mr. Bagniewski had his executive director to take pictures of the results with her smartphone and drive over to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters to deliver them in person she was turned away without explanation.
Some precinct chairs were on hold with headquarters for two or three hours on Monday night, and it is still not clear why Iowa Democratic Party officials were not more responsive.
Needless to say, this was a complete and utter embarrassment for the national Democratic Party, and DNC Chair Tom Perez is pledging that such a debacle will never happen again…
“What happened last night should never happen again,” Perez wrote in the statement. “We have staff working around the clock to assist the Iowa Democratic Party to ensure that all votes are counted. It is clear that the app in question did not function adequately. It will not be used in Nevada or anywhere else during the primary election process. The technology vendor must provide absolute transparent accounting of what went wrong.”
Hopefully they can get their issues ironed out, but the truth is that the Democratic Party has a long history of complete and utter incompetence.
Of course the Republican Party is not much better. In fact, I could tell you stories about Republicans in my area that would make your hair stand on end.
Sadly, the truth is that we have become a raging “idiocracy” where people can’t seem to do much of anything right. At one time we were a shining example to the rest of the world, but today we are a horde of entertainment-addicted zombies that never learned what it means to grow up and act like adults. For example, just consider what is happening at one of our most prestigious universities…
Students at Yale University are being encouraged to participate in a variety of programs offered by the Chaplain’s Office, including a weekly “Cookies and Coloring” hour and a campus “Bouncy Castle” during nice weather.
The children’s activities are promoted as opportunities for adult students to relieve anxiety and disconnect from technology at the Ivy League institution.
The more mindless our entertainment, the more we like it. The number of alcohol-related deaths has doubled over the past 20 years, the suicide rate has soared to a record high, and we are taking more legal and illegal drugs than ever before. And in just about every category of immorality that you can possibly imagine we are either leading the world or we are in very close contention for the top spot. We are a complete and utter mess, and we on a road that inevitably leads to national ruin.
Of course if anyone dares to offend our snowflake sensibilities by confronting us with the truth, many of us instantly melt down and start throwing a temper tantrum.
Needless to say, what I have just said does not apply to everyone. But overall our society is rapidly degenerating all around us, and our nation has no future if we stay on this path.
Netflix Reveals It Removed These 9 Films At Foreign Government Requests
The world’s top streaming service Netflix revealed in a new internal report it calls Environment Social Governance that it has taken down nine pieces of content around the world in response to written complaints and demands from governments.
The 23-year old company began conforming to such controversial censorship requests after 2015, in order to better conform to various countries’ laws and societal norms, according to Axios. It’s the first such revelation of active censorship admitted by the company.
The majority of government requests for removal came from the religiously diverse but staunchly morally conservative island city-state of Singapore. Other movies or series were taken down at the request of New Zealand, Vietnam, Germany, Brazil and Saudi Arabia— the latter instance for politically embarrassing and sensitive jokes about crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
“Full Metal Jacket”. Warner Bros. Taken off Netflix in Vietnam.
Netflix conformed, for example, to a Saudi government request last year for the 2019 removal of comedian Hasan Minhaj “Patriot Act” standup special, related to references to the state-sponsored murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings had defended the controversial move by saying, “We’re not in the truth to power business, we’re in the entertainment business.”
In another instance, a Brazilian court ordered Netflix to remove the comedy special “The First Temptation of Christ,” after complaints from conservative Catholic groups over it’s portraying Jesus as gay and other issues seen as sacrilegious. But the ruling was recently overturned by Brazil’s Supreme Court. Singapore has, however, removed the film for its viewers.
Also of note is that in 2017 Netflix complied with the removal of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket at the request of the government of Vietnam.
“In 2015, we complied with a written demand from the New Zealand Film and Video Labeling Body to remove The Bridge from the service in New Zealand only. The film is classified as ‘objectionable’ in the country.”
2) “Full Metal Jacked” – removed by Vietnam in 2017
“In 2017, we complied with a written demand from the Vietnamese Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information (ABEI) to remove ‘Full Metal Jacket’ from the service in Vietnam only.”
3) “Night of the Living Dead” – removed by Germany in 2017
New Line
“In 2017, we complied with a written demand from the German Commission for Youth Protection (KJM) to remove ‘Night of the Living Dead’ from the service in Germany only. A version of the film is banned in the country.”
4, 5, & 6) “Cooking on High,” “The Legend of 420,” and “Disjointed” – removed by Singapore in 2018
“In 2018, we complied with a written demand from the Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) to remove ‘Cooking on High,’ ‘The Legend of 420,’ and ‘Disjointed’ from the service in Singapore only.”
7) “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj” episode titled “Saudi Arabia” – removed by Saudi government request in 2019
“In 2019, we complied with a written demand from the Saudi Communication and Information Technology Commission to remove one episode—’Saudi Arabia’—from the series ‘Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj’ from the service in Saudi Arabia only.”
8) “The Last Temptation of Christ” – removed by Singapore in 2019
“In 2019, we received a written demand from the Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) to remove ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ from the service in Singapore only. The film is banned in the country.”
9) “The Last Hangover” – removed by Singapore in 2020
Netflix
“In 2020, we complied with a written demand from the Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) to remove ‘The Last Hangover’ from the service in Singapore only.”
One of the more interesting aspects of the nauseating impeachment trial in the Senate was the repeated vilification of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin.
To hate Russia has become dogma on both sides of the political aisle, in part because no politician has really wanted to confront the lesson of the 2016 election, which was that most Americans think that the federal government is basically incompetent and staffed by career politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell who should return back home and get real jobs.
Worse still, it is useless, and much like the one trick pony the only thing it can do is steal money from the taxpayers and waste it on various types of self-gratification that only politicians can appreciate. That means that the United States is engaged is fighting multiple wars against make-believe enemies while the country’s infrastructure rots and a host of officially certified grievance groups control the public space.
It sure doesn’t look like Kansas anymore.
The fact that opinion polls in Europe suggest that many Europeans would rather have Vladimir Putin than their own hopelessly corrupt leaders is suggestive. One can buy a whole range of favorable t-shirts featuring Vladimir Putin on Ebay, also suggesting that most Americans find the official Russophobia narrative both mysterious and faintly amusing. They may not really be into the expressed desire of the huddled masses in D.C. to go to war to bring true U.S. style democracy to the un-enlightened.
One also must wonder if the Democrats are reading the tea leaves correctly. If they think that a slogan like “Honest Joe Biden will keep us safe from Moscow” will be a winner in 2020 they might again be missing the bigger picture. Since the focus on Trump’s decidedly erratic behavior will inevitably die down after the impeachment trial is completed, the Democrats will have to come up with something compelling if they really want to win the presidency and it sure won’t be the largely fictionalized Russian threat.
Nevertheless, someone should tell Congressman Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, to shut up as he is becoming an international embarrassment. His “closing arguments” speeches last week were respectively two-and-a-half hours and ninety minutes long and were inevitably praised by the mainstream media as “magisterial,” “powerful,” and “impressive.” The Washington Post’s resident Zionist extremist Jennifer Rubin labeled it “a grand slam” while legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called it “dazzling.” Gail Collins of the New York Timesdubbed it “a great job” and added that Schiff is now “a rock star.” Daily Beast enthused that the remarks “will go down in history” and progressive activist Ryan Knight called it “a closing statement for the ages.” Hollywood was also on board with actress Debra Messing tweeting “I am in tears. Thank you Chairman Schiff for fighting for our country.”
Actually, a better adjective would have been “scary” and not merely due to its elaboration of the alleged high crimes and misdemeanors committed by President Trump, much of which was undeniably true even if not necessarily impeachable.
It was scary because it was a warmongers speech, full of allusions to Russia, to Moscow’s “interference” in 2016, and to the ridiculous proposition that if Trump were to be defeated in 2020 he might not concede and Russia could even intervene militarily in the United States in support of its puppet.
Schiff insisted that Trump must be removed now to “assure the integrity” of the 2020 election. He elaborated somewhat ambiguously that “The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.”
Schiff also unleashed one of the most time honored but completely lame excuses for going to war, claiming that military assistance to Ukraine that had been delayed by Trump was essential for U.S. national security. He said “As one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”
Schiff, a lawyer who has never had to put his life on the line for anything and whose son sports a MOSSAD t-shirt, is one of those sunshine soldiers who finds it quite acceptable if someone else does the dying. Journalist Max Blumenthal observed that “Liberals used to mock Bush supporters when they used this jingoistic line during the war on Iraq. Now they deploy it to justify an imperialist proxy war against a nuclear power.” Aaron Mate at The Nationadded that “For all the talk about Russia undermining faith in U.S. elections, how about Russiagaters like Schiff fear-mongering w/ hysterics like this? Let’s assume Ukraine did what Trump wanted: announce a probe of Burisma. Would that delegitimize a 2020 U.S. election? This is a joke.”
Over at Antiwar Daniel Lazare explains how the Wednesday speech was “a fear-mongering, sword-rattling harangue that will not only raise tensions with Russia for no good reason, but sends a chilling message to [Democratic Party] dissidents at home that if they deviate from Russiagate orthodoxy by one iota, they’ll be driven from the fold.”
The orthodoxy that Lazare was writing about includes the established Nancy Pelosi/Chuck Schumer narrative that Russia invaded “poor innocent Ukraine” in 2014, that it interfered in the 2016 election to defeat Hillary Clinton, and that it is currently trying to smear Joe Biden. One might add to that the growing consensus that Russia can and will interfere again in 2020 to help Trump. Absent from the narrative is the part how the U.S. intervened in Ukraine first to remove its government and the fact that there is something very unsavory about Joe Biden’s son taking a high-paying sinecure board position from a notably corrupt Ukrainian oligarch while his father was Vice President and allegedly directing U.S. assistance to a Ukrainian anti-corruption effort.
On Wednesday, Schiff maintained that “Russia is not a threat … to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again.” Not surprisingly, if one substitutes the “United States” for “Russia” and “Kremlin” and changes “Ukraine” to Iran or Venezuela, the Schiff comment actually becomes much more credible.
The compulsion on the part of the Democrats to bring down Trump to avoid having to deal with their own failings has brought about a shift in their established foreign policy, placing the neocons and their friends back in charge. For Schiff, who has enthusiastically supported every failed American military effort since 9/11, today’s Russia is the Soviet Union reborn, and don’t you forget it pardner! Newsweek is meanwhile reporting that the U.S. military is reading the tea leaves and is gearing up to fight the Russians. Per Schiff, Trump must be stopped as he is part of a grand Russian conspiracy to overthrow everything the United States stands for. If the Kremlin is not stopped now, it’s first major step, per Schiff, will be to “remake the map of Europe by dint of military force.”
Donald Trump’s erratic rule has certainly dismayed many of his former supporters, but the Democratic Party is offering nothing but another helping of George W. Bush/Barack Obama establishment war against the world. We Americans have had enough of that for the past nineteen years. Trump may indeed deserve to be removed based on his actions, but the argument that it is essential to do so because of Russia lurking is complete nonsense. Pretty scary that the apparent chief promoter of that point of view is someone who actually has power in the government, one Adam Schiff, head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.
We Are Wall-E – Cali Gov. Newsom Wants To Halt School Physical Education Tests
California’s Governor Gavin Newsom wants to turn a generation of kids into obese adults, that by the time 2050 rolls around, these hopeless folks will be wheeled around in self-balancing strollers, first popularized in the animated film Wall-E.
Newsom plans to cancel physical education tests for students for three years over new concerns of bullying and discrimination against disabled and non-binary students.
The move to cancel physical education tests comes as annual test results suggest California’s youth is becoming obese.
H.D. Palmer, the spokesman for the Department of Finance, told Bay Area KPIX 5 that the current measurement of body mass index (BMI) is discriminatory to some students, most notably to non-binary students, as BMI screenings require students to select “male” or “female,” he said.
AP News noted that annual state physical education reports show that around the 2014/15 period, health scores of students started to decline.
Students’ scores in “aerobic capacity,” which can be described in layman’s terms as the one-mile run, have dropped over the years. Tests for push-ups and sit-ups have also declined.
“In the last five years, the percentage of fifth-graders scoring healthy in the aerobic category has dropped by 3.3 percentage points. In seventh and ninth grades, the drops are 4.4 percentage points and 3.8 percentage points, respectively. Meanwhile, the percentage of students identified as “needing improvement” and having a “health risk” went up: by 3.3 percentage points among fifth-graders, 4.4 for seventh graders and 3.8 among ninth-graders,” KPIX 5 said.
During the three-year suspension of tests, Newsom and school officials will review whether to modify or completely withdraw the health exam.
Physical education classes will continue for the duration of the suspension, though the government won’t be able to track the health of kids.
Palmer told KPIX 5, “the issue of BMI screening plays a role in the issues of both body shaming and bullying.”
Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s spokesman Daniel Ketchell said, “whether the state uses fitness tests or not, Governor Schwarzenegger believes that the most important thing is that our students have access to daily physical education classes to promote a healthy and fit lifestyle.”
With a staggering 75% of Americans already overweight or obese – California’s suspension of the obese test could lead to a continuation of deteriorating health trends for youth in the state, eventually lead to unhealthy lifestyles, that by the time this future generation hits retirement, they might be rolling around in self-driving chairs.
Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman funded the creation of ACRONYM, the group that sabotaged the Iowa caucus results, after bankrolling voter manipulation campaigns including the notorious online “false flag operation” in Alabama’s 2017 senate race.
At the time of publication, February 6, the winner of the Iowa’s Democratic Party caucus is still unknown. Senator Bernie Sanders, the clear winner in virtually every exit poll, is currently ahead in votes. Yet somehow Pete Buttigieg, a favorite of the party establishment who was unknown to most voters until last year, has claimed victory.
The force accused of sowing the confusion and disarray surrounding the first Democratic Party contest of the 2020 election season is a dark money nonprofit called Acronym. It was Acronym that launched Shadow Inc, the mysterious company behind the now-infamous, unsecured, completely unworkable voter app which prevented precinct chairs from reporting vote totals on caucus night.
The exceptionally opaque Acronym was itself created with seed money from a Silicon Valley billionaire named Reid Hoffman who has financed a series of highly manipulative social media campaigns.
The billionaire founder of LinkedIn, Hoffman is a top funder of novel Democratic Party social media campaigns accused of manipulating voters through social media. He is assisted by Dmitri Mehlhorn, a corporate consultant who pushed school privatization before joining Hoffman’s political empire.
One of the most consequential beneficiaries of Hoffman’s wealth is Acronym CEO Tara McGowan, a 33-year-old former journalist and Obama for America veteran.
Acronym CEO Tara McGowan with Barack Obama, her former boss
Once touted as “a weapon of a woman whose innovative tactics make her critically important to the Democratic Party,” McGowan’s name is now synonymous with the fiasco in Iowa. She also happens to be married to a senior advisor to Pete Buttieg’s presidential campaign.
Back in December 2018, McGowan personally credited Hoffman and Mehlhorn’s “Investing in US” initiative for the birth of her dark money pressure group, Acronym.
“I’m personally grateful and proud to be included in this group of incredible political founders + startups @reidhoffman and his team, led by Dmitri [Mehlhorn], have supported and helped to fund over the past two years,” she declared on Twitter in December 2018.
I’m personally grateful and proud to be included in this group of incredible political founders + startups who @reidhoffman and his team, led by Dmitri, have supported and helped to fund over the past two years. https://t.co/o0QApPbHWY
Hoffman and Mehlhorn have also faced scrutiny for their alleged operation of a series of deceptive pages which attempted to manipulate center-right users into voting for Democrats. Today, Acronym’s McGowan oversees a massive Facebook media operation that employs similarly deceptive techniques to sway voters.
Through youthful, tech-centric operatives like McGowan, Hoffman and Mehlhorn are constructing a massive new infrastructure that could supplant the party’s apparatus.
As Vanity Fair reported, “Hoffman and Mehlhorn, after all, are not just building a power base that could supplement traditional Democratic organizations, they are, potentially, laying the groundwork to usurp the D.N.C. entirely.”
‘Laying the groundwork to usurp the D.N.C. entirely’
Having fostered friendships with nationally known Silicon Valley oligarchs like right-wing libertarian Trump supporter Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, is now making his name as a top sugardaddy of the Democratic anti-Trump resistance.
Following Trump’s election in 2016, Hoffman plowed his money into an array of new Democrat-aligned social media groups through a funding hub he founded called Investing in US.
To run Investing in US on a day-to-day basis, Hoffman tapped Dmitri Mehlhorn, a venture capitalist and political strategist accustomed to walking the line between the corporate world and Democratic Party.
“There was no risk-capital or growth-capital arm of the resistance, and so that is what we’ve tried to build,” Mehlhorn told Vanity Fair.
“Now, in terms of what that implies, that implies that we are backing founders, so people who we think have big, potentially game-changing ideas.”
Mehlhorn’s career path tracked closely with neoliberal party favorites like Pete Buttigieg and Cory Booker. He studied at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, launched his career at McKinsey Associates, and became a leading advocate for school privatization as the chief operating officer of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst.
According to Mehlhorn’s bio, he sits on the board of American Prison Data Systems, a company that claims to reduce recidivism by giving prisoners tablets to study coding for five hours a day.
In a 2018 Medium post, announcing the “founders” that Investing in US planned to back, Mehlhorn resorted to distinctly neoconservative talking points to emphasize the mission of his organization.
After quoting Ronald Reagan, he declared, “Trump and his movement, borrowing heavily from other authoritarian criminals such as Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin, promised to hollow out America’s principles in favor of his own personal enrichment.”
Pledging to “inoculate our politics and our economy against corruption, white nationalism, and mass deceit,” Mehlhorn announced major donations to “diverse groups” with names like Woke Vote, PushBlack, and an “anti-Nazi” organization known as Integrity for America.
Among the top recipients of support from Investing in US was McGowan’s Acronym, which Mehlhorn described merely as a “media group.”
As The Grayzone reported, Acronym has ballooned since its founding into a massive dark money operation, even launching a Super PAC dubbed Pacronym that has raked in money from hedge fund billionaires like Seth Klarman and Donald Sussman.
What Mehlhorn and Hoffman never disclosed to the public, however, was their support for a Democrat-aligned group that waged a covert online disinformation campaign which aimed to influence the outcome of the 2017 special senate election in Alabama.
Project Birmingham: From New Knowledge to no knowledge
The 2017 senate election in Alabama was one of the most dramatic races of President Donald Trump’s first term in office. Treated by national media as a referendum on Trump in a red state, it pitted a far-right Republican, Roy Moore, against Doug Jones, a moderate Republican who ran as a Democrat. In the end, Jones won an upset victory in a deep red state, thrilling Democrats across the country.
As Dan Cohen wrote in a series of reports for The Grayzone, the outcome of the 2017 Alabama race was heavily influenced by an online disinformation operation. The campaign, which was unknown to voters at the time, was called Project Birmingham.
Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman provided $100,000 to the architects of this black ops campaign. His money was pipelined through American Engagement Technologies (AET), a company run by Obama administration veteran and Democrat tech operative Mikey Dickerson. Through AET, another firm comprised of Obama campaign veterans and national security state operatives called New Knowledge was contracted to carry out the secretive voter manipulation project.
In internal documents first covered by the New York Times, Project Birmingham’s architects described the scheme as an “elaborate false flag operation” which aimed to convince voters that the Kremlin was supporting Moore through thousands of fake Russian bots.
Project Birmingham went to absurd lengths to drive voters away from Moore. Its architects deployed a phony Facebook page encouraging Alabamians to vote for an obscure write-in Republican candidate, arranged interviews for the candidate in major newspapers, and even sought to arrange SuperPAC funding for his dark horse campaign.
The deeply un-democratic campaign was overseen by a cast of characters remarkably similar to those who bungled the 2020 Iowa caucus count. Like the staff of Acronym and Shadow Inc., the New Knowledge operatives who carried out Project Birmingham were 30- and 40-something techies who had worked in the Obama administration and on various Democratic campaigns. (New Knowledge was rebranded as Yonder after the scandal was exposed in national media.)
The devious tactics they waged in Alabama likely influenced the outcome of the election. A leaked “Project Birmingham Debrief” claimed that New Knowledge’s black operations “moved enough votes to ensure a Doug Jones victory.”
After the scheme was exposed, Hoffman issued a public apology and claimed he had no knowledge of the New Knowledge disinformation project. He said nothing about the Investing in US employee who worked directly on Project Birmingham, however.
This was hardly the first time Hoffman and Mehlhorn’s finger prints were discovered on a deceptive voter manipulation campaign.
Aiming to ‘mirror’ the tactics of Russia’s Internet Research Agency
Following the 2018 midterm congressional election, Reid Hoffman and his henchman Dmitri Mehlhorn faced further scrutiny in national media, this time for operating a fake news-style organization called News for Democracy.
This shady outfit managed an array of community Facebook pages initially focusing on sports, Christianity, patriotism, and other topics that were likely to generate interest from right-wing voters in swing states.
Yet the seemingly locally-branded cultural pages took a decisively political turn as election night approached. After racking up millions of likes, News for Democracy slipped in ads for Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke on a Facebook page targeting evangelical Christians, and attacked a Republican candidate, Senator Marsha Blackburn, on a page focused on local Tennessee sports.
While Hoffman’s right-hand man, Mehlhorn, claimed to reject the spread of misinformation, he told the Washington Post that through projects like News for Democracy, he aimed to “mirror” the tactics of the notorious Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm.
Tech billionaire Reed Hoffman funded the @NewKnowledgeAI Alabama black op. His advisor, Dmitri Mehlhorn, has called for efforts to “mirror” the tactics of the Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm. This IRA Facebook ad is clearly worth emulating. https://t.co/rh90K8WND7pic.twitter.com/yq7cuOLPWQ
Facebook eventually launched an investigation into the insidious manipulation ploys of Hoffman and Mehlhorn’s News for Democracy.
The very tactics that landed the two in hot water are remarkably similar to those that Tara McGowan, the Acronym founder who disrupted the Iowa caucuses, has put on display.
McGowan recently founded Courier Newsroom, a seemingly journalistic initiative that appeared to take on a more overtly partisan role with time. Like News for Democracy, Courier Newsroom has opened local news pages on Facebook with unassuming names like “The Virginia Dogwood” or “Arizona’s Copper Courier.” After seeding the pages with folksy local stories, Courier Newsroom bombards users with pro-Democrat political messaging.
As Bloomberg reported, McGowan used “her sizable war chest and digital advertising savvy to pay to have her articles placed into the Facebook feeds of swing-state users.” McGowan then used “that feedback to find more people like them.”
One of McGowan’s dubious news pages, the Virginia Dogwood, spent a whopping $275,000 on Facebook ads during the 2018 midterm elections.
“We’ll try it, see if we can make it work, and hopefully become a permanent piece of the new infrastructure,” McGowan told Bloomberg.
Tara McGowan’s shenanigans in Iowa could be seen in the light of a wider string of manipulations by the Silicon Valley-backed neoliberal network behind her. While Democratic Party elites blame incompetence for the fiasco in Iowa, the history of Acronym and its billionaire backers casts a disturbing shadow over the whole episode.
Smaller Restaurants Forced Into Bankruptcy As Foot Traffic Collapses
While the big names in eating out – McDonald’s, Popeye’s, Chick-Fil-A and Olive Garden, to name a few – are all working diligently to get customers through the door at a time when the American eater is staying home more, lesser known restaurants are bearing the brunt of not being able to find new customers.
Names like Bar Louie and American Blue Ribbon Holdings, which owns Village Inn and Bakers Square, both filed for bankruptcy earlier this week, according to Bloomberg. Both cited lower foot traffic in the U.S. as the reason for their downfall.
Michael Halen a senior restaurant analyst at Bloomberg, said: “The business is just over-built, especially casual dining and full-service dining. There are too many restaurants.”
American Blue Ribbon also said that competition, rising labor costs and unprofitable restaurants were all reasons for facilitating its bankruptcy. The company owns and operates 97 restaurants after closing 33 stores prior to filing Chapter 11.
The company’s majority owner, Cannae Holdings, Inc., has agreed to provide a $20 million loan to maintain the company during bankruptcy. Cannae generates about 30% of its revenue from various restaurant companies it is invested in and has said that American Blue Ribbon will focus on strategic options in bankruptcy.
Bar Louie has been opening new locations over the last few years which has grown its top line, but the increase in debt necessary to open new stores has suffocated the company.
Chief Restructuring Officer Howard Meitiner said: “This inconsistent brand experience, coupled with increased competition and the general decline in customer traffic visiting traditional shopping locations and malls, resulted in less traffic at the company’s locations proximate to shopping locations and malls.”
Bar Louie has 110 locations, 38 of which have “seen their sales and profits decline at an accelerating pace” since the company began a strategic review in 2018. Those locations expected a staggering same store sales drop of 10.9% in 2019 and were closed prior to the company filing for bankruptcy. Lenders are providing a loan of as much as $22 million to keep the company operating during the proceedings.
Other restaurant names like The Krystal Co., Houlihan’s Restaurants Inc., Kona Grill Inc. and Perkins & Marie Callender’s all filed for bankruptcy last year as well.
Halen concluded: “We need to see a correction in the restaurant industry. We’ve seen a lot in the last few months, and I think this is just the beginning. Once the economy softens, you’ll see this getting worse.”
