A plan to tap reserves on the far-flung northern coast of Alaska is expected to produce about 80 million tons of liquid natural gas (LNG) over the next 20 years—but thanks to a protectionist shipping law, it’s likely that Americans won’t have access to a single drop.
There are no pipelines serving the Arctic coast of Alaska, where a joint effort by ExxonMobil and Qilak LNG, an Alaska-based subsidiary of a Dubai-based energy firm, will be extracting the gas. Instead, the companies plan to use ships to get LNG to market.
That’s where the Jones Act comes into play. Passed nearly a century ago to protect U.S. shipbuilders, the law requires that ships carrying goods from one American port to another must be American-built, must be American-flagged, and must have a crew that’s at least 75 percent American. Right now, no icebreaking, LNG-carrying freighters in the entire world meet the Jones Act’s archaic requirements. As a result, it will be perfectly legal for ships from other countries to pick up liquid natural gas from the new production facility in northern Alaska—as long as they don’t stop at any other American ports to unload.
There’s nothing wrong with exporting energy, of course, but it’s ridiculous to cut off Alaskans from the resources found in their own backyards. Indeed, the Jones Act jacks up the price of almost everything in Alaska, because it artificially inflates the cost of shipping—the American-built ships mandated by the Jones Act are between three and eight times as expensive as foreign-built vessels, according to a 2017 report from the Congressional Research Service.
That’s why, despite a wealth of energy resources in their state, Alaskans pay higher-than-average energy prices. The state’s largest city, Anchorage, is the 21st most expensive city in the U.S. by cost of living.
The Jones Act “creates large cost inefficiencies by protecting the shipbuilding industry—a tiny economic sector in the U.S.—at the expense of other U.S. industries with enormous economic potential,” researchers for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development concluded in a report released earlier this year. Abolishing the Jones Act, the group found, would lower the cost of shipping between U.S. ports by as much as 50 percent.
The Jones Act is still on the books because of old-fashioned protectionism. “The average Alaskan may only be vaguely aware of the law and its costs,” says Colin Grabow, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute. “But rest assured maritime workers and union members,” who personally benefit from the requirements, “maintain a much keener interest and vote accordingly.”
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One of the greatest moral dilemmas that has been creeping into the everyday activities of specialists working with coal, oil and in some cases even gas (despite its being perceived a natural bridge to a low-carbon future) could be phrased in the following way: how do you stop producing fossil fuels when you still have cheap ample reserves?
In this context coal stands out – its relative inferiority in terms of environmental pollution prompted governments in developed economies to ban its future usage. Yet whenever its production is not curtailed by government-mandated cuts, producers simply continue to extract as much coal as possible. Straight in the middle of the so-called European approach to coal lies Germany, an erstwhile bulwark of the coal industry. Can it eventually survive without coal?
In stark contrast to oil and gas – of which Germany has traditionally been a major net importer and in both cases looking back to a more than 50-year history of depending on primarily Russian hydrocarbon riches – Europe’s leading economy has substantial reserves of coal, lignite in particular. In fact, Germany remains the world’s largest producer of lignite and burns most of it for power generation, accounting for some 22 percent of the nation’s gross electricity output. Ironically, lignite production is more CO2 intensive than hard coal as it is done by extracting coal from open-cast pits, nevertheless, its mid-term future looks a lot better than that of hard coal mining in Germany.
Whilst lignite remains economically competitive, Germany’s hard coal production went downhill after the government ended its subsidy schemes. The last hard coal mine closed its gates in December 2018, ending a 200-year history of the Ruhr Region and potentially starting a new development phase of Westphalia, a geographical phenomenon inextricably intertwined with coal.
Yet even though Germany ceased to extract hard coal itself, it continues to use it. Around 12 percent of power generation is coming from hard coal, imported primarily from Russia, Canada and the United States. Once Germany’s flagship industry, the steel sector consumes almost 40 percent of the nation’s hard coal.
If Germany is to remain an industrial powerhouse, it would need to keep on importing hard coal as it remains an indispensable element of steel-making. This would in turn compel it to rely on imports from Russia (Murmansk and Ust-Luga, to be precise), thereby creating a triple dependence on Russian hydrocarbons. If one is to take monthly statistics in the past 3 years they would find that 53 percent of all imported coal came from Russia, a dependence which has palpably deepened in the past 24 months thanks to the vicinity of large coal-handling ports in the Russian Baltics. Oil, gas and coal – in all three instances Germany imports more than a third of its needs from Russia; in the case of gas it will be significantly higher very soon with NordStream-2 being slated for a mid-2020 commissioning and Groningen going to a government-mandated halt.
(Click to enlarge)
Graph 1. Germany’s Coal Imports in 2017-2019 / German Dependence on Russia (in million tons).
Source: Thomson Reuters.
It would be also interesting to see how the German government will resolve the issue of compensated closures, especially for lignite mines. Hard coal is an easier nut to crack – economically unviable, operationally underutilized (only some 6GW of the existing 20GW hard coal capacity was used in 2019) and widely unpopular due to a lack of serious lobbying effort. For hard coal, the 8GW set as target for 2030 does seem fairly manageable. Yet the government’s efforts to fix the first lignite closures by 2022 are still subject to discussion with mine operators, not to speak of its flaunted intention to launch enforced closures from 2027 which currently seems to be a task too complex to effectuate this quickly.
Interestingly, running somewhat counter to the general narrative as heard from advocates of wider renewables usage, the drop in German coal consumption is not fully supplanted by the mix of gas and renewables. Let’s look at 2019 a bit closer. Both lignite and hard coal usage dropped a whopping 20 percent year-on-year, coming from debilitating (and mandatory) carbon emissions prices and renewables being prioritized in terms of grid access, whilst renewables grew by 3 percent in 2019. In absolute terms the situation is even clearer – coal usage dropped by 20.5 million tons of coal equivalent, whilst renewables only rose by 3 million tons of coal equivalent (natural gas increased by almost 4 mtce).
The ramifications of Germany’s coal exit are truly manifold – on the one hand, Berlin is one of the few coal-producing nations to take its CO2 emission commitments seriously and has managed to decrease its carbon dioxide emissions by some 7 percent y-o-y in 2019 alone. It has spearheaded the European Union drive to decrease the continent’s emissions regardless of the platform. The 2038 phase out of German coal seems like a fairly feasible objective, buttressed by a draft bill which will seemingly soon be signed into law. Replacing lignite will be a tough call as it is cheap and located next to massive urban conglomerations – burning imported gas which also carries in it additional transportation costs might not be always the best option.
On the other hand, the decline of coal is happening concurrently with an unprecedented drop in Germany’s primary energy usage (the 2019 level plummeted to levels unseen since the early 1970s) and the nation’s industrial output might suffer as a result. Moreover, the general view on the coal exit presupposes that Germany’s States will compensate for the end of coal mining by creating new business opportunities and reshaping people’s skills to better suit the needs of the 21st century. However, that is happening only in a fragmented fashion – unemployment rates in major coal-producing hubs like Gelsenkirchen or Dortmund still amount to roughly double of the German average.
Turkey Behind Major ‘State-Backed Cyber-Espionage’ Targeting Europe & Middle East
After prior widespread state cyber-espionage operations were revealed connected to both Iran and Saudi Arabia in the past months, a new bombshell Reutersinvestigation has exposed a new alleged Turkish government-linked hacking operation which has targeted organizations across Europe and the Middle East for the past two years.
Citing multiple senior Western defense and security officials as well as public internet records the new report concludes at least 30 organizations ranging from government ministries to embassies to international companies have been targeted by hackers who appear to be doing the bidding of Turkey. Notably the Greek and Cypriot governments and their state email services have topped the list of targets.
File image via Arab Weekly news.
The Cypriot government confirmed it was targeted as part of the operation but did not give details. Iraq’s government, specifically national security offices, were also identified in the report as a prime target.
Security officials said that infrastructure registered in Turkey was used in the hacks, but did not reveal further details related to confidential intelligence assessments.
But interestingly, at least one entity inside Turkey itself was allegedly hacked – a Turkish chapter of the Freemasons said to have ties to US-based Turkish opposition cleric Fethullah Gulen.
The DNS-hijacking campaign is said to be similar in methodology detailed in separate prior reporting related to Iran known as DNSpionage. Reuters explains and summarizes the alleged Turkish hackers’ methods as follows:
The hackers used a technique known as DNS hijacking, according to the Western officials and private cybersecurity experts. This involves tampering with the effective address book of the internet, called the Domain Name System (DNS), which enables computers to match website addresses with the correct server.
By reconfiguring parts of this system, hackers were able to redirect visitors to imposter websites, such as a fake email service, and capture passwords and other text entered there.
Reuters reviewed public DNS records, which showed when website traffic was redirected to servers identified by private cybersecurity firms as being controlled by the hackers. All of the victims identified by Reuters had traffic to their websites hijacked – often traffic visiting login portals for email services, cloud storage servers and online networks — according to the records and cybersecurity experts who have studied the attacks.
The new hacking revelations also come as tensions between Turkey and its longtime enemies Greece and Cyprus are soaring over Turkey oil and gas exploration and drilling in the eastern Mediterranean, which the EU says has illegally cut into both countries’ Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ).
Investigators took particular note of the victims and targets — all who appeared to be geopolitical enemies of Turkey, and in the case of Turkish-related groups targeted, they happened to be linked to the exiled Fethullah Gulen and/or his supporters.
Gulen has remained an official enemy of the Turkish state under President Erdogan, who has consistently put pressure on Washington to arrest and transfer the opposition cleric back to Turkey.
The Oakland, California, city council has unanimously voted to ban landlords from performing criminal background checks of potential renters. They will also no longer be legally able to turn down renters because of a criminal conviction. The California Apartment Association opposed the law but says it will not challenge it in court.
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The Oakland, California, city council has unanimously voted to ban landlords from performing criminal background checks of potential renters. They will also no longer be legally able to turn down renters because of a criminal conviction. The California Apartment Association opposed the law but says it will not challenge it in court.
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There was real fear in Europe over what could have happened this weekend in Italy. Regional elections in Emilia-Romagna and Calabria could have been terrible for the tenuous ruling coalition between PD and Five Star Movement.
But the center-left held serve against the insurgent campaign of Matteo Salvini and his Lega-led coalition.
Emilia-Romagna is the birthplace of Italian Communism and has been a stronghold for the political left for decades. Even though Salvini et.al. failed to win the day this is a clear case of failing falling forward.
It’s a massive improvement for the center-right in Italy and will effect how the region is governed. But the big story here is Five Star.
It is also clear that Five Star is now in complete collapse as an opposition party, garnering only 3.5% in E-M and just 7.3% in Calabria.
Nationally, Five Star is now polling between 15-17%, flirting with political irrelevance if the numbers drop much lower than this. But, where will those voters go?
Five Star was born as an opposition party to entrenched and corrupt Italian political elites. It was decidedly Euroskeptic and it’s not handled the transition from outsider gadfly channeling voter frustration into an effective governing force at all.
Five Star originally emerged (and remained until 2018) as an anti-system party that rejected cooperation with the other parties in the system and presented itself as a separate pole in opposition to both the centre-right and centre-left. At that time, it declared that it would only cooperate with the other parties on a strict issue-by-issue (and law-by-law) basis. The M5S rejected the legitimacy of the other parties in the strongest terms and fully-fledged cooperation was out of the question.
However, anti-system parties often eventually integrate into the system they previously opposed. This is especially true for populist parties as they are the ‘new normal‘ in European party systems and governments today. The integration and legitimation of populist parties can be a long or short process, according to the various incentives of the political system and electoral results, and is usually accompanied by a series of programmatic and organisational reforms.
The zenith of the integration of populist parties is represented by their eventual entry into national office. In many cases, populist parties are indeed able to survive office, and even to gain votes in subsequent elections. Italy’s Lega is a case in point. After a first disastrous experience in office (1994), the Lega, over time, benefited from a ‘learning process’. It now has a long record of government participation and dominates the Italian agenda. According to all the polls, the party led by Matteo Salvini is by far the strongest in the country today (estimated at 32%).
This is why Lega’s support in E-M has steadily risen over the course of the last three elections there and was nearly capable, in just a three-year time horizon to unseat the establishment there. Only a bitter fight driving massive turnout, nearly 59%, kept E-M from turning “blue.”
Previous elections saw turnout drop as low as 30%. Who turns up to vote when the outcome is predetermined?
Look at the results closely and you’ll see the thing disquieting the Italian plutocrats. Five Star and PD’s support dropped a combined twenty points. Not only is Five Star in freefall but it looks like PD may be as well. The next government in E-M will not take the voters for granted like they have been.
Lega and the Brothers of Italy scooped up the 7 seats in the government lost by PD, who no longer rule with a massive majority.
The results for Calabria were even worse. The Center-Left coalition lost more than thirty-two points over the 2014 election. And while that outcome wasn’t in doubt beforehand it shouldn’t be discounted either. Like Umbria’s election last fall, these results are telling everyone that big change is on Italy’s horizon.
The markets today are breathing a sigh of relief. Salvini has been beaten back for a bit. But for how long? Yes, the ruling coalition survives another day. Yes, it’s a little stronger than it was yesterday. But, Five Star as a party is in the early stages of collapse and the infighting among its high-ranking members will continue until such time as the coalition breaks.
Salvini was right back in August to dissolve the coalition. As Italy sinks economically and politically he is in the position to rally the populists, secure their support and gain support while the government takes all the blame.
And, as Zulianello suggests, since Lega is a properly constituted and functional organization, when it returns to government it will do so with a clear mandate and clearly-defined goals.
These are two things Five Star could never deliver on.
Elon Musk At War With German Environmentalists Protesting His New Gigafactory
It was just a couple of days ago that we first reported that Tesla would need to cut down “thousands of trees” in order to build its Gigafactory 4 in Germany.
In that article, we noted that the company needed to clear so much forest space to put up its factory that dozens of protesters recently organized a gathering known as a “Forest Walk” to protect against Tesla’s tree removal activities at the site, according to Teslarati.
The protesters were dressed in yellow vests, replicating the “Yellow Vest Movement” in France and are also concerned about what the deforestation may do to the drinking water in the area.
This past weekend, in a fit of hilarious and ironic virtue signalling cognitive dissonance, Musk responded to the criticism, saying on Twitter “this is not a natural forest — it was planted for use as cardboard & only a small part will be used for GF4.”
Oh, well in that case, just cut down as many trees as you want, Elon.
Musk also responded to criticisms about water usage at Gigafactory 4, lying saying “Tesla won’t use this much net water on a daily basis. It’s possibly a rare peak usage case, but not an everyday event.”
Company planning documents, however, estimate that the factory would need about 98,000 gallons of water per hour.
The company remains in the process of “jumping through hoops” to get the plant up and running, according to Bloomberg.
One of those hoops included clearing the area of wartime bombs. Disposal officers carried out controlled detonations of seven wartime bombs on Sunday at the site.
The next step will be “harvesters and trucks” rolling in to clear those thousands of trees…
…or as Elon Musk put it on Twitter: “The net environmental impact will be extremely positive!”
For sure. Giga Berlin will build sustainable energy vehicles using sustainable energy, so net environmental impact will be extremely positive!
In 2014 the government of Turkey’s strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan banned YouTube and Twitter, fearing that millions of young Turks could otherwise read “dangerous content” on social media. The Constitutional Court declared the bans unconstitutional. In 2017, the Turkish government banned Wikipedia. That ban was removed only recently, after two and a half years. It is not that Wikipedia is a reliable source of information. Banning it altogether is a rogue state behavior. It is not, however, only about Wikipedia: in Turkey, truth, regardless of its source, is feared and often banned.
The World Report 2020, released by the Human Rights Watch, drew a realistic yet gloomy picture of civil liberties in Turkey:
“Executive control and political influence over the judiciary in Turkey has led to courts systematically accepting bogus indictments, detaining and convicting without compelling evidence of criminal activity individuals and groups the Erdoğan government regards as political opponents. Among these are journalists, opposition politicians, and activists and human rights defenders…
“Authorities continue to block websites and order the removal of online content while thousands of people in Turkey face criminal investigations, prosecutions, and convictions for their social media posts. There has been a dramatic rise in the number of prosecutions and convictions on charges of ‘insulting the president’ since Erdoğan’s first election as president in 2014…
“An estimated 119 journalists and media workers at time of writing are in pretrial detention or serving sentences for offenses such as “spreading terrorist propaganda” and ‘membership of a terrorist organization.’ Hundreds more are on trial though not in prison. Most media, including television, conforms to the Erdoğan presidency’s political line.”
Hence the nationwide lack of confidence in the judiciary as a constitutional institution, a sad reality that even Erdoğan’s government had to admit. Vice President Fuat Oktay said that only 38% of Turks had confidence in judiciary. The problem of trust is probably much worse than portrayed by the vice president. A survey by the Turkish pollsters ORC revealed that only 11.7% of Turks fully trusted the judiciary.
The ways through which the Turkish state silences dissent are typical of the unfree world.According to the findings of the Monitoring and Advocating Media Freedom project, the Erdoğan government resorted to three most frequently used ways to target journalists in 2019:
“Vexatious charges: Journalists were repeatedly charged with ‘insulting a public official’ or ‘insulting the president’ under Articles 125 and 299 respectively of the Turkish penal code…
“Physical attacks: Physical attacks on journalists took place throughout 2019… The violence was largely attributed to political divisions, specifically between nationalists and conservatives…
“Internet restrictions: The government continued to obstruct freedom of expression online… On 1 August, a regulation mandating online content providers, including all online news outlets, to obtain a broadcasting license from the radio and television watchdog RTUK, was published…”
(According to the left-wing Birgün newspaper, 5,223 people — including 128 children — stood trial on the charge of “insulting the president” in 2018, with journalists often being singled out and the charge being especially damaging.)
Part of the problem is the Turks’ notorious indifference to undemocratic practice — not that they are unaware of the rights violations; it is just that Erdoğan controls most media.
A recent survey released jointly by the Amnesty International’s Turkey chapter and Metropoll, a polling company, revealed the bitter truth about Turkish attitudes.
According to the survey 82.3% of Turks believe fundamental rights and liberties are violated in Turkey. In addition, only a third of them think that someone detained by the police is likely a criminal. Worse, only 37.7% of Turks think everyone is equal before the state.
A clear majority of Turks think that their rights are systematically violated and that they are not equal before law. Then half of them keep voting for Erdoğan (and his allies). These two facts point to a third, and unpleasant conclusion: Millions of Turks know that their country is not free and just, but they keep voting for the leader who is responsible for the gross democratic deficit Turkey has undergone over the past 18 years.
This is a bad message to Erdoğan: You will keep winning votes no matter how maliciously you crush dissent. We are with you and your undemocratic rule.
It was another bad year for Turkish democracy. A worse one may be in the offing.
Assange Case Exposes UK’s Solitary Confinement ‘Torture’ Loophole
Up until last week, Julian Assange had been held in unofficial solitary confinement inside of the Belmarsh prison healthcare unit – a loophole which the UK government began using in May, according to 21st Century Wire‘s Nina Cross.
Thanks to outcry by fellow inmates and Assange’s legal team, Assange was moved out of the Belmarsh healthcare unit – which has been “weaponized to arbitrarily isolate and punish a prisoner.”
Prisoners’ revolt and pressure from legal team and campaigners forces Belmarsh to move Assange out of solitary. WikiLeaks statement: pic.twitter.com/9Af9y3zC93
Of note, more than 100 Yellow Vest protesters traveled from France on Saturday to join a demonstration outside of Belmarsh in support of Assange.
Up until now, UK authorities had denied Assange has been held in solitary confinement – or that it’s even practiced in British prisons at all.
Until now, Assange has been locked in a cell alone for over 22 hours a day and deprived of association with other prisoners for several months. This is in breach of both the European Prison Rules and the British government’s own prison inspectorate human rights standards …
…
In an attempt to mitigate growing public outrage, Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) has been sending out letters in response to the influx of complaints it has been receiving regarding the abuse of Assange. In its response it refuses to address his case and produces a list of standards and laws written for the protection of prisoners as evidence he is in ‘safe hands.’ However, anyone who has followed the continued arbitrary detention of Assange in Belmarsh will know he has been placed effectively outside the reach of laws and standards; even access to his lawyers and legal documents, normally preserved by statutory prisoner rights – has been harshly restricted, all of which has had a crippling effect on preparation for his defence in a case of historical significance. –21st Century Wire
I asked the Prison and Probation Service why Julian #Assange doesn’t have enough access to documents and lawyers despite that being a fundamental right and received an answer pic.twitter.com/vbzygEzz9R
Meanwhile, the Brits are completely dismissing statements by UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, when they claim that “prisoners are not detained in solitary confinement.”
UN Standard Minimum Rules 43&44:
“Solitary confinement”: 22 or more hrs/day without meaningful human contact.
If “prolonged” (15+ consecutive days) it amounts to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment & is always prohibited!https://t.co/dxe5z9A2bY
Moreover, Cross notes that the UK’s laughable statement that they care for all prisoners clearly ignores the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which says that Assange is being arbitrarily detainedin violation of international law.
“What’s more, the British state’s dismissing out of hand any accusations of ‘solitary confinement’ as a falsehood or public misconception – must surely undermine the work of prison charities and scholarship in law and prison systems which exists to shed light on the consequences of solitary confinement including ill-health and suicide,” writes Cross.
Hence, the HMPPS letter can be viewed as a public relations exercise designed to promote the image of good governance, a facade designed to mask the institution’s deployment of the very same strategy practised by the government when called upon to answer for its abuse of Assange: denial and silence.
Solitary confinement, technically speaking, is described by the prison charity Penal Reform as “… when a prisoner is confined to a cell for 22 hours or more, that constitutes solitary confinement, regardless of the reason for this confinement or its name,” while the prison ombusdman confirms that the definition has nothing to do with where it is.
“Segregated conditions are also sometimes applied outside of segregation units. Prisoners can be kept on the wing, but locked in their cells for the most of the day, and taken to shower and exercise separately from other prisoners on the wing.”
So what was Belmarsh doing? While official prisoner segregation is allowed under rule 45, holding Assange in the medical wing allowed them to ignore several associated laws.
“45.—(1) Where it appears desirable, for the maintenance of good order or discipline or in his own interests, that a prisoner should not associate with other prisoners, either generally or for particular purposes, the governor may arrange for the prisoner’s removal from association accordingly.
(2) A prisoner shall not be removed under this rule for a period of more than 3 days without the authority of a member of the board of visitors or of the Secretary of State. An authority given under this paragraph shall be for a period not exceeding one month, but may be renewed from month to month”
By holding Assange in unofficial segregation, he was excluded from ‘the rules’ and therefore may have been worse off than if he had been officially segregated:
“The regime for segregated prisoners (under Prison Rule 45 (YOI 49)) should be as full as possible and only those activities that involve associating with mainstream prisoners should be curtailed.” – SEG PSO
I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I’m a little worried about Donald Trump. I’m worried he may be on the verge of a sudden, major heart attack, or a stroke, or a fatal golfing accident.
Food poisoning is another possibility.
Or he could overdose on prescription medication.
A tanning bed mishap is not out of the question.
He could accidentally hang himself during autoerotic asphyxiation, or get shot by a lone-wolf white supremacist terrorist trying to start the RaHoWa.
The Russians could spray him with that Novichok perfume.
There are any number of ways he could snuff it.
I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but the Resistance is running out of non-lethal options for removing Donald Trump from office.
Here they are, in no particular order…
RESISTANCE NON-LETHAL OPTION NO. 1
Resistance Non-Lethal Option No. 1 is winning the 2020 election, which isn’t looking very promising. The Democratic Party is in shambles. According to the polls, their current front-runner is a senile, hair-sniffing, finger-sucking freak who never met a credit card company or a healthcare lobbyist he didn’t like, and who rivals even Donald Trump when it comes to incoherent babbling.
Yes, that’s right, folks, it’s “Smilin’ Joe” Biden, vanquisher of the razor-wielding, swimming-pool-gangster “Corn Pop” to the rescue!
As far as I’ve been able to gather, the plan is for Joe to out-“crazy” Trump (and thus win back the “bull goose loony” demographic) by going completely off his medication and having a series of scary-looking petit mal seizures on national television.
He’s out there, in the heart of the American darkness, like a geriatric Colonel Kurz, operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct.
According to the latest reconnaissance, he is building another “revolutionary” army of fanatical, doped-up, hacky-sacking “socialists” that he will lead into the convention in July and deliver to Biden, or Elizabeth Warren, or whichever soulless corporate puppet the party honchos eventually nominate, and then obsequiously stump for them for the next five months. (Or, who knows, maybe Michael Bloomberg will put the Democrats out of their misery and just buy the party and nominate himself.)
The “Crush Bernie” movement is just getting started, but you can tell the Resistance isn’t screwing around. Hillary Clinton just officially launched her national “Nobody Likes Bernie” campaign at the star-studded 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
MSNBC anchor Joy Reid brought on a professional “body language expert” to phrenologize Sanders “live” on the air … and, as I said, they’re just getting started.
In any event, no matter who they nominate, they have no chance of winning in November.
How could they, given the total stranglehold the Russians now have on American democracy?
As Adam Schiff just reminded everyone, unless Donald Trump is removed from office, “we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won,” because at any moment Putin could order Trump to pressure the Ukrainian president into investigating Biden’s son’s corruption by refusing to fund the Ukrainian military’s resistance to Putin’s secret plot to occupy the entire Ukraine and use it as a covert base from which to launch an all-out thermonuclear war against the United States(which Putin already controls through his puppet, Trump, and his network of nefarious Facebook bots, which, according to this expert on NPR, are already brainwashing gullible Black people into voting for Bernie Sanders this time, or at least refusing to vote for Biden, like they refused to vote for Hillary last time … which, OK, I know, that sounds kind of racist, but we’re talking NPR here, folks. These people aren’t racists. They’re liberals!)
OK, I got a little lost there… the point is, if the election goes ahead, and Trump doesn’t have an embolism or something, odds are, we’re looking at four more years of Putin-Nazi occupation. Which brings us to…
NON-LETHAL OPTION NO. 2
Resistance Non-Lethal Option No. 2 is, of course, the current impeachment circus. I don’t even know where to start with this one.
After three and a half years of corporate-media-manufactured mass hysteria and Intelligence Community propaganda designed to convince the American public that Donald Trump is a “Russian asset” (and possibly Putin’s homosexual lover) and also literally the Resurrection of Hitler, the Democrats are trying to impeach the man for something that most Americans either (a) believe is common practice among members of the political class, (b) don’t entirely understand, or (c) do, but don’t give a shit about.
Seriously, it’s like they held a contest to see if anyone could think of something that would out-anticlimax the Mueller report, and this is what the winner came up with … an over-acted, sanctimonious snooze-fest, the stakes of which could not possibly be lower.
Sure, the corporate media are doing their best to cover every twist and turn of the “drama” as if the fate of democracy were hanging in the balance, but everybody knows it’s a joke … or, all right, almost everybody.
So we’re down to…
NON-LETHAL OPTION NO. 3
Resistance Non-Lethal Option No. 3 is to whip up so much mass hysteria over “white supremacist terrorism,” “the sudden resurgence of anti-Semitism,” “the imminent Putin-Nazi Apocalypse” (which has been imminent since the summer of 2016), and other iterations of Hitler hysteria, that people can’t really even think anymore, and will join the Resistance and pour into the streets in their millions and demand Trump resign.
The Resistance has been at this for over three years now, i.e., casting the neo-Nazi subculture that has always been part of the political landscape as a powerful, worldwide fascist movement that is going to rise up any minute and Hitlerize the entire Western world.
It isn’t working. People aren’t buying it. OK, sure, some liberals are still buying it. But most people aren’t, not anymore.
For example, the hysteria leading up to the recent gun rights rally in Richmond, which according to the corporate media had been infiltrated by “Nazi terrorists” who were plotting to publicly mass murder each other in a desperate attempt to finally launch the “Boogaloo,” or the “RaHoWa” … or whatever.
Apparently, a few days before the rally, the FBI got some neo-Nazis to agree to conspire to murder some people and then violently overthrow the U.S. government with their arsenal of homemade machine guns.
These neo-Nazi masterminds were allegedly members of “the Base,” i.e., one of these little neo-Nazi clubs that we’re all supposed to live in mortal fear of now … this one, as it turns out, run by a former (and possibly current) “security contractor.”
The governor declared a state of emergency. Anti-Terror forces were put on alert. A “no-fly zone” was implemented, presumably to prevent the Russians from dropping a division of Putin-Nazi paratroopers onto the lawn of the Capitol. The corporate media warned that it was probably going to be a bloodbath.
Well, the day came and went, and no Boogaloo. No bloodbath. No Putin-Nazi Apocalypse. Just a lot of gun owners and militia types parading around with their guns and gear. Antifa didn’t even show up this time … or, rather, the few “anti-fascists” that did were also armed and supporting the rally.
And that’s the problem with Non-Lethal Option No. 3… there are only so many times you can have the corporate media scream, “THE NAZIS ARE COMING!” and then not produce any actual Nazis. The Resistance has exceeded that allotment.
Which brings me back to where I started, and my concerns about Donald Trump, and his health, and the assorted tragic accidents that could befall him before we get to November. Because, unless you believe that the Intelligence Community (and the transnational empire it is part and parcel of) is prepared to sit by and allow Donald Trump to serve another four years as president … well, I wouldn’t be sharing any Diet Cokes or riding in any motorcades with him.
I don’t know, maybe I’ve been reading too much of that “conspiracy theory” stuff on the Internet, but Senator Schumer’s warning to Trump back in 2017 keeps playing in my head:
Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
Relax, folks. I’m just kidding, of course. The Intelligence Community would never dream of doing anything … you know, illegal.
In reality, they would never assassinate a president, especially not one they had been telling everyone is a “Russian asset,” and “literally Hitler,” and a “traitor,” and a “dictator,” for over three years.
OK, those are pretty harsh words, but they probably don’t really mean all that stuff. Odds are, they’re just horsing around.
They’re a notorious bunch of jokesters, those CIA guys.
