‘Diamond Princess’ Reports 66 New Coronavirus Infections, Bringing Total Onboard To 136
The nightmare cruise from hell just got even worse for the thousands of passengers still aboard.
The Diamond Princess, the cruise ship that has been quarantined off the coast of Yokohama, Japan for roughly a week now, saw the total number of confirmed nCoV infections climb to 136 on Monday, cementing its position as the host of the largest outbreak outside China.
Japanese health authorities have been extremely careful in dealing with the ship, which has become a massive albatross for the government of PM Shinzo Abe. While Hong Kong let a cruise ship sail yesterday following a 4-day quarantine (the ship was reportedly found to be free of viral infections), the ‘Diamond Princess’, and the 2,500+ remaining passengers and crew, will be stuck in place until mid-February. The NYT chronicled the growing sense of unease and paranoia aboard the ship, which we cited yesterday.
The ship’s captain Stefano Ravera announced Monday that 66 new cases of the virus had been confirmed, bringing the infection total of passengers and crew to 136, roughly equal to all the other cases in Asia outside China. Media reports have claimed more than 2,500 passengers and crew remain aboard the ship.
According to CNBC, the nationalities of the newly infected are Japanese (45), American (11), Australian (four), Filipino (three), Canadian (one), English (one) and Ukrainian (one). Notably, all of these infections occurred person to person, since they were all spread from ‘patient zero’ to others aboard the ship.
Princess Cruises, the Carnival Japan unit that owns the ship, told NBC News that it was continuing to follow guidance from Japan’s health ministry regarding plans for providing medical care and passengers ultimately disembarking. Meanwhile, one passenger told the NYT yesterday that those aboard the ship are being left in the dark, and have resorted to tracking the comings and goings of ambulances to try to keep abreast of what’s going on. Many suspect the virus has been spread through the ship’s ventilation system.
The ship was quarantined for two weeks after a passenger who disembarked in Hong Kong on Jan. 25 tested positive for the virus six days after leaving. After initially finding no cases aboard the ship, the cruise line copped to the first ten cases, prompting more intense scrutiny by the Japanese government. Princess Cruises said it didn’t expect new cases to be confirmed after the beginning of the quarantine, though that has clearly happened.
So far, it doesn’t look like the virus has made the jump from the ship to the surrounding area. If that happens, expect Japanese authorities to resort to the same types of draconian quarantine measures that have been imposed in China.
The Amsterdam city leadership is greatly concerned about the safety of girls and women in Amsterdam. But the mayor does not want the real perpetrators to be blamed.
According to Mayor Femke Halsema, girls and young women are being confronted with sexual intimidation or violence in increasing numbers. Therefore, she is announcing measures, Dutch daily De Telegraaf reported.
Research shows that 51 percent of women in Amsterdam have been confronted with street intimidation. For the ages 15 to 34, the percentage is 81 percent. Many reports come especially from the region around the Central Station, by the red-light district, around the Leidseplein, Bijlmer, Jan Evertsenstraat and the Mercatorplein. Also online there has been a large increase in sexual harassment and violence. These areas happen to be populated by immigrants.
Halsema claims that for a smaller group of girls and women the situation in Amsterdam is “really alarming and almost hopeless due to a negative spiral of abuse and violence, sometimes extended over several generations”. The most unsafe place for women is at home; many perpetrators are ex-partners or family members. In Amsterdam, for example, the number of registered violent incidents went up by 7 percent: from 6 183 in 2017 to 6 608 in 2018.
The figures have been a reason for Halsema to launch a campaign, the focus of which is victims of sexual intimidation and violence, on the street or online. One of the aims is to create a greater readiness to report such incidents, so that the police and the Public Prosecution Service can conduct investigations. A personal approach is also being launched for girls who have repeatedly been victims of sexual violence.
Halsema is also entering into talks with the hotel-restaurant and night club industry because personnel are likely to see the practices of pinching, intimidation and abuse. “Most do not count this as one of their responsibilities.”
For victims, safe places to live have become the most sought after, even outside the city. Social workers are also encouraged to work differently.
“Social workers and parents often have little control, and there also seems to be a professional inability whereby the problems are not recognized or cases where people do not communicate properly,” says the mayor.
In addition, the existing area ban that the mayor proposed on notorious nuisance offenders will also be put in place for people who annoyingly hang around near a shelter for vulnerable girls, or who are demonstrably sexually intrusive on the street.
The causes of sexual intimidation and violence, just like the situations in which the victims find themselves, are diverse, writes Halsema. Along with classical patterns of power inequality, based on tradition or physical strength, in Amsterdam, “reactionary ideas about the equality of men and women have reappeared”.
She refers to a study in which it is alleged that rising religious fundamentalists as well as “secular extreme-right movements” encourage and justify hate toward women.
“Under the mask of a restoration of traditional role patterns, whereby women are subordinate to the demands and wishes of men, a woman’s ‘no’ is openly doubted or ignored. With the presence of religious fundamentalism in our local society, there is even talk of the re-entry of age-old and forbidden phenomena such as forced marriages and female circumcision.”
Femke Halsema represents the party GroenLinks, which has never questioned immigration as the only possible reason for the surge of crimes targeting women and girls. Instead, she is trying to blame men in general and in particular conservative men. The irony was not lost on Geert Wilders, who tweeted in response: “How did that happen?” with a picture of Muslim men verbally harassing a Dutch girl.
Halsema writes that almost all woman in Amsterdam have felt unsafe, either in public spaces or in the private domain.
“The same goes for LGBHQ people. Walking hand in hand can be risky. Being alone can put your safety and physical integrity at risk. Not only on the street, but also behind closed doors, in houses, hotels and schools, the security and freedom of a portion of Amsterdamers cannot always be guaranteed. This is not only sad, it is also unacceptable.”
Amsterdam earlier introduced a ban on street intimidation, but it is not enforced in the capital city because the court in the Hague earlier ruled that the similar Rotterdam provision is not legally valid. According to the judges, such a ban can only be introduced by the Second and First Chambers of Parliament.
Gen Z feels like the most isolated generation, according to a survey conducted by insurance provider Cinga. For the past two years they have measured loneliness through the U.S. Loneliness Index. In 2019, the insurance company polled more than 10,000 U.S. adults over the summer.
79 percent of Gen Z, or adults in the 18 to 22 age group, said they felt alone, and as Statista’s Maria Vultaggio notes,Millennials aren’t too far behind them, with 71 percent saying they’re lonely. At 50 percent, Boomers felt the least alone. At 46 percent versus 45, men felt a little more cut off than women.
The new information suggests overall that Americans might be getting lonelier. There was a 7 percent rise: 54 percent said they were lonely in 2018 and 61 percent—or three in five people—said they felt isolated in 2019.
Social media could be to blame, and it makes sense since Gen Z is most connected to online networking.
“We had a hypothesis that society—the U.S. specifically—was dealing with an elevated level of loneliness, disconnection,” Cigna CEO David Cordani told CNBC in a January report.
“We can start to see those disconnections manifest themselves in other health issues showing up for individuals … whether you think about it through the lens of depression, stress … or more heavy, complex behavioral issues.”
Despite climate concerns and environmentalist backlash against exploration for oil and gas in pristine sensitive regions of the Arctic, companies continue to explore for hydrocarbon resources in the Arctic Circle, in Russia and Norway in particular.
The largest Russian energy companies are looking to explore more Arctic oil and gas resources on and offshore Russia, while Norwegian and other Western oil firms are digging exploration wells in Norway’s Barents Sea.
Those companies lead the development efforts to tap more Arctic oil and gas resources as legacy oil and gas fields both offshore Norway and onshore Russia mature.
Russia’s biggest energy firms Gazprom, Rosneft, Novatek, and Lukoil, and Norway’s oil and gas giant Equinor, as well as Aker BP and ConocoPhillips, are the top oil and gas producers in the Artic region, data and analytics company GlobalData said in a new report. Gazprom is the undisputed leader in Arctic oil and gas production, followed, at a long distance, by two other Russian firms, Rosneft and Novatek, GlobalData’s estimates show.
Russian firms are ramping up exploration in Russia’s Arctic, while Equinor and other Western companies drill exploration wells in Norway’s Barents Sea, hoping for a significant discovery that could add to the Johan Castberg oilfield—a massive discovery which was made in 2011, but which hasn’t been replicated in the Barents Sea so far.
Yet, both Russia and Norway face specific challenges in getting the most out of their respective Arctic oil and gas resources.
In Russia, the government has made Arctic oil and gas development a key priority and offers tax breaks for firms exploring in the area.
Energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft dominate the exploration and development efforts in Russia’s Arctic. Offshore, Gazprom’s Prirazlomnoye field is currently the only producing Russian oil and gas project on the Arctic Shelf.
But even with tax breaks, Russia may find it hard to develop its offshore Arctic resources, due to the U.S. sanctions banning collaboration on Russian deepwater, Arctic offshore, or shale projects with Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, Lukoil, Surgutneftegas, and Rosneft. These are the largest energy firms in Russia and they don’t have access to capital at western banks to develop such projects. In the wake of the sanctions, many Western oil firms withdrew from joint ventures with Russian companies, which are now left without partnerships in technology needed to explore, drill, and potentially produce and process hard-to-extract oil and gas resources.
Although Russian firms downplay the effects of the U.S. sanctions on their development plans, and although domestic companies are focused on developing in-house technology solutions to replace foreign-sourced tech, analysts believe that 100-percent local content technology in challenging projects would likely take years to implement.
Financing for large onshore projects in the Arctic is not easy either. Rosneft, which wants to develop the Vostok Oil project, to “implement a complex development program for a new oil and gas province in the north of the Krasnoyarsk Territory,” is looking east to gather funding for the US$157 billion project—to Japan, India, and China.
Russia’s largest private natural gas producer, Novatek, is one of the success stories of Arctic resource development. Novatek—which already exports liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Yamal LNG plant—gave last year the go-ahead to its second LNG project, Arctic LNG 2 on the Gydan Peninsula. Novatek’s partners in the ventures are France’s Total with a minority stake as well as Chinese and Japanese companies.
Last year, Russian officials said that the Arctic area could become the key driver of Russia’s natural gas production in less than two decades, as it has the potential to produce 90 percent of all the gas produced in Russia by 2035.
Norway’s Arctic areas open to exploration are parts of the Barents Sea, where companies are struggling to finally make a large-size discovery after Johan Castberg. Norwegian authorities say that the Barents Sea holds 64 percent of the yet to be discovered resources on the Norwegian Continental Shelf, while the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea each are estimated to hold 18 percent of the undiscovered resources.
Last year, just five wells were drilled in the Barents Sea, fewer than in 2018. In 2019, a total of 17 new discoveries were made offshore Norway, of which only one was in the Barents Sea.
Norway’s Equinor says that it continues to explore in the Barents Sea because more oil will be needed in the world just to maintain supplies.
“Discoveries in the Barents Sea can lead to significant economic development, nationally and locally. Based on our understanding of the geology, we hope to find high quality light oil that’s in demand—and better for the climate. The wells we drill in the Barents Sea are cheaper than many others, thanks to the geology and shallower waters,” says the Norwegian giant.
In 2020, Equinor will focus on exploration in the western part of the Barents Sea, Tim Dodson, Executive Vice President, Exploration at Equinor, told Reuters in November.
Norway and Russia are leading Arctic oil and gas development, but they both face challenges in making the Arctic the next oil hotspot.
Iran Fails For Fourth Time In A Row To Put A Satellite Into Orbit
Iran’s attempt to jump start and advance its space program has suffered yet another hit, after on Sunday state television confirmed the latest attempt of an Iranian rocket to put a satellite into orbit has failed.
The launch operation at Imam Khomeini Spaceport, about 145 miles southeast Tehran, initially succeeded but then ultimately failed due to the Simorgh or “Phoenix” rocket’s low speed, resulting in the Zafar 1 communications satellite not reaching orbit, according to the AP.
A prior satellite launch by Iran a year ago that also ended in failure, via Fars/AP.
“Stage-1 and stage-2 motors of the carrier functioned properly and the satellite was successfully detached from its carrier, but at the end of its path it did not reach the required speed for being put in the orbit,” Defense Ministry space program spokesman Ahmad Hosseini said on state TV.
Sunday’s failure now makes four recent space launch operations in a row ending in failure, after the attempted launches of the Payam and Doosti satellites failed last year, as well as a launchpad explosion in August.
This has raised suspicions and accusations by Iran’s leaders that Israel or the United States could be behind sabotaging the program.
Last September, Washington imposed sanctions on Iran’s space agency, its space research center, as well as astronautics research institute — given all of these are seen as assisting development of technology related to Iran’s ballistic missiles capability.
The Trump administration has consistently charged that Iran’s space program is geared toward advancing its banned ICBMs.
#Iran plans to fire off Space Launch Vehicles with virtually same technology as ICBMs. The launch will advance its missile program. US, France, UK & Germany have already stated this is in defiance of UNSCR 2231. We won’t stand by while the regime threatens international security.
Over the past decade Iran has successfully put several short-lived satellites into orbit, but has been unable to advance beyond this.
Despite yet another embarrassing setback for the program, Iran’s Defense Ministry still praised Sunday’s launch as “remarkable” given the progress up to the point of failing to get the satellite into orbit.
A new report by the recently established Centre for the Future of Democracy at the University of Cambridge has found that dissatisfaction with democracy has reached an all-time global high. Westminster-style democracies (the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US) typically fare particularly badly in terms of democratic faith, with the proportion of citizens dissatisfied with the performance of their democracy doubling since the 1990s. In the UK, this proportion increased by around a fifth since then.
The global financial and economic crisis and growing within-country regional inequality are of course important factors behind decreasing satisfaction with democracy. But the Centre’s report also suggests that ‘satisfaction with democracy is lower in majoritarian “winner-takes-all” systems than in consensus-based, proportionally representative democracies’. The antagonistic and adversarial mentality inherent in the outdated First Past the Post voting system found in majoritarian, Westminster-style democracies contributes to polarisation and tribalism, making citizens less willing to compromise and to accept the mandate of rival political parties or viewpoints. By contrast, New Zealand is the only Westminster-style democracy to have avoided the trend of ever-increasing public discontent, likely as a result of having introduced a fairer voting system in the 1990s.
These findings highlight the perilous state of our democracy, with ever-deepening citizen dissatisfaction and disengagement
These findings highlight the perilous state of our democracy, with ever-deepening citizen dissatisfaction and disengagement, but sadly they do not come as a surprise. Edelman’s annual trust barometer found that trust in institutions is the lowest it’s ever been in the UK – we’re penultimate in their league table of trust, just one spot ahead of Russia. Similarly, a BMG poll for the ERS in December 2019 found that 85 per cent of people thought democracy could be improved ‘quite a lot’ or ‘a great deal’, with 80 per cent of people feeling they have ‘not very much’ or ‘no influence’ over decision-making. Just 16 per cent of the public believe politics is working well in the UK – and only two per cent feel they have a significant influence over decision-making.
Indeed, why shouldn’t they? The 2019 general election saw the views of almost 14.5 million voters (45.3% of all electors) go unrepresented, while unelected legislators continue to be appointed to the House of Lords, without a mandate from, and no accountability to, citizens.
Our broken Westminster system – with its power-hoarding tendencies, over-centralisation and short-term policy-making – combined with decades of institutional failure and lack of reform, are at the root of most of this dissatisfaction and lack of trust.
To quote Edelman’s own findings: ‘How did the birthplace of parliamentary democracy, the “mother of parliaments,” and a respected voice of sense on the world stage find itself in such an unaccustomed place?’ Our broken Westminster system – with its power-hoarding tendencies, over-centralisation and short-term policy-making – combined with decades of institutional failure and lack of reform, are at the root of most of this dissatisfaction and lack of trust.
We need to renew our democracy wholesale before it’s too late – shifting away from the centralised ‘Westminster model’ of governance, towards a consensus model which would include a move towards proportional elections for both chambers; decentralising power and sharing it across our nations and regions; and ensuring that citizens are engaged and empowered with a genuine voice over their democracy.
Westminster needs an ambitious, democratic overhaul to bring it into the 21st century. Only by switching to a fair, proportional voting system for Westminster and replacing the House of Lords with a PR-elected second chamber representing all parts of the UK, we can bring power closer to voters, while putting into practice the fundamental values of cooperation and equality – all of which are fundamental to ensuring that citizens once again are satisfied with democracy and trust their institutions.
To revitalise our democracy, the Electoral Reform Society is calling for:
Proportional representation: The UK remains the only country in Europe to use First Past the Post. To end the disaster of winner-takes-all voting, the ERS advocates the use of the Single Transferable Vote (STV), which maintains both proportionality and a constituency link.
House of Lords reform: The ERS proposes a second chamber elected on a territorial basis to serve as a forum in which the four nations (including English regions, depending on how they choose to be represented at the national level) can work together in the 21st century, and scrutinise and revise the work of the government and the House of Commons.
A national Constitutional Convention led by citizens: A Convention should consider constitutional issues (including devolution), building upon the work of local citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative democratic processes to give people a say on how they are represented.
Local Citizens’ Assemblies: We need to bring politics closer to people and foster bottom-up citizen involvement at the local level to ensure trust in our democracy. Citizens’ assemblies should be used at the local level in a systematic and embedded manner to deal with complex and contested issues.
The botched Iowa caucuses have raised many legitimate questions about the Democratic establishment, but to understand the point we’re at now, it’s necessary to think back several years. According to Grayzone journalist and editor Max Blumenthal, Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer’s guest on the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” part of the backlash Bernie Sanders is currently experiencing as he attempts to transform the Democratic Party dates back to Bill Clinton’s presidency.
“[Bill and Hillary Clinton] set up a machine that was really a juggernaut with all this corporate money they brought in through the Democratic Leadership Committee,” says Blumenthal.
“It was a very different structure than we’d seen with previous Democratic candidates who relied heavily on unions and the civil rights coalition.
“And that machine never went away,” the journalist goes on.
“It kept growing, kind of like this amoeba that began to engulf the party and politics itself. So that when Bill Clinton was out of power, the machine was passed to Hillary Clinton, and the machine followed her into the Senate. And the machine grew into the Clinton Global Initiative.”
Speaking of his personal experience with the Clintons, Blumenthal tells Scheer he once met Chelsea Clinton and thought of her as an “admirable figure at that time” who had undergone humiliation and bullying on a national scale as she went through an “awkward phase” as a child. His memory of the child he once met made what followed all the more devastating to watch, Blumenthal laments.
“I’ve watched her grow into adulthood and become a complete kind of replication of the monstrous political apparatus that her family has set up, without really charting her own path,” he says.
“She just basically inherited the reign of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. She does paid talks for Israel. Her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, he gambled on Greece’s debt along with Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs.
“I mean, as a young person,” Blumenthal adds, “seeing someone of my generation grow up and follow that path, do nothing to carve out her own space — it just absolutely disgusts me.”
The conversation between Blumenthal and Scheer centers largely on two subjects that overlap with the current presidential election and primaries: the rightward shift of the Democratic Party and Israeli politics. Partly the two subjects converge in talking about Sanders, the man who could very well become the first Jewish president of the United States. Scheer asks Blumenthal to draw on his experiences growing up close to the Clintons, due to the ties of his parents, Sidney and Jacqueline Blumenthal, to the administration, and is linked to Blumenthal’s most recent book, “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, Isis, and Donald Trump.”
“It seems to me [there is] a real contradiction [in] the Democratic Party, which you know quite a bit about,” when it comes to Israel, says Scheer.
“There’s this great loathsome feeling about Donald Trump. And many of these people don’t really like [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. You know, the polling data shows that Jews are, you know, just about as open to the concern for the Palestinians as any other group. And Bernie Sanders, the one Jewish candidate, is the one who dared to bring up the Palestinians — that they have rights also, that they’re human beings. He’s being attacked for it as, like you, a self-hating Jew.”
Blumenthal, whose 2013 book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel,” touches upon many questions absent in the American conversation about Israel, points out how the Vermont senator’s own position on Palestine has shifted over time.
“Bernie Sanders [is] better than most of the other [Democratic] candidates on this issue,” says the Grayzone reporter. “After we put a lot of pressure on him in the left-wing grassroots — I mean, I personally protested him at a 2016 event for his position on Palestinians, and we shamed him until he took at least a slightly better position, where you acknowledge the humanity of Palestinians.”
The two journalists discuss what some of the main reasons are that Sanders is facing so much resistance within the Democratic Party, in addition to his views on Palestine. Blumenthal believes there will be a repeat of what happened in 1972 when George McGovern ran for president.
“I think that if Bernie Sanders gets the nomination, there will be an effort to ‘McGovern’ him,” he posits. The Democratic Party will “hope that Bernie Sanders gets destroyed by Donald Trump, and then wag their fingers at the left for the next 20 years until they get another Bill Clinton.
“I think that they don’t know how to stop him at this point, but they’re willing to let him be the nominee and go down to Donald Trump, because Bernie Sanders threatens their interests, and the movement behind him particularly, more than Donald Trump does.”
Listen to the full discussion between Blumenthal and Scheer, which took place aptly on the eve of the Iowa caucuses that, at the time, Blumenthal assumed would be a landslide win for Sanders. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.
ROBERT SCHEER: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case Max Blumenthal, who I must say is one of the gutsiest journalists we have in the United States, and have had for the last five years or so. He’s, in addition to having considerable courage and [going] out on these third-rail issues — like Israel, being one of the more prominent ones — and challenging some of the major conceits of even liberal politics in the United States about our virtue, our constant virtue, he’s done just great journalism. I really loved his book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel,” which came out in 2013, because it was based on just good, solid journalism of interviewing people and trying to figure out what’s going on.
I’d done something a half century earlier, or not quite that long ago, during the Six-Day War in Israel, where I went over when I was the editor of Ramparts. And I know how difficult it is to deal with that issue, because I put Ramparts into bankruptcy over the controversy about it. [Laughter] So maybe that’s a good place to begin. You know, you dared touch this issue of Israel, and it didn’t help that you are Jewish. I guess you are Jewish, right? Do you have a background, did you practice any aspect of Judaism? Literature, culture, religion?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I’m a Jew who had a bar mitzvah, and I even had a bris.
RS: Oh. [Laughs]
MB: And you know, I’ve continued to pop in in synagogues here and there on High Holy Days. I guess you could say, you know, when the rabbi asked, you know, asked me to join the army of God, I tell him I’m in the Secret Service. But I’m definitely Jewish, you know, and it’s a big part of who I am and why I do what I do.
RS: Well, and I thought your writing on that, and your journalism, was informed by that. Because after all, a very important part of the whole experience of Jewish people as victims, as people forced into refugee status, living in the diaspora, was to develop a sense of universal values, and of decency and obligation to the other. And I think your reporting reflected that. However, my goodness, you got a lot of heat over it. And it’s the heat I want to talk about. I want to talk about the difficulty, in this post-Cold War world, of actually writing about the U.S. imperial presence, or writing critically about what our government does, and some of its allies.
And I think Israel is a really good case in point, because we have one narrative that said in the last election we had foreign interference, mostly coming from Russia. And we talk about Russia as if it’s the old communist Soviet Union, with a top-down, big, organized party — forgetting that [Vladimir] Putin actually defeated the Communist Party, and even though he had been in the KGB, and most Russians had been in some kind of official connection with society or another. Nonetheless, Russia really has gotten very little out of whatever interference it did. Israel, that is very rarely talked about, interfered in the election in a very open, blatant way in the presence of Netanyahu, who denounced Barack Obama’s major foreign policy achievement, the deal with Iran, and has focused U.S. policy mostly against the enemy being Iran, and ignoring Saudi Arabia and everything else.
And the interesting thing is that Israel’s interference in the election, and Netanyahu, has been rewarded over and over — the embassy got shifted, the settlers got more validation, now there’s a big peace plan that gives the hawks in Israel everything they want. So why don’t we begin with that, and your own writing about U.S.-Israel relations. It’s kind of odd that there’s — or maybe not odd, maybe it’s just because it is the third rail — that there’s been so little discussion about Donald Trump’s relation to Israel and his payoff to Netanyahu.
MB: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to chew on there. I would first start with just an observation, because you mentioned that we’re in a post-Cold War world — well, we’re not in a post-Cold War world anymore, we’re in a new Cold War. And for all the attacks I got over Israel, which were absolutely vicious, personalized, you know, framed through emotional blackmail, attacking my identity as a Jew, calling me a Jewish anti-Semite — the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is this right-wing racket over there in L.A., made me the No. 4 anti-Semite of 2015. You know, I was right behind Ayatollah Khomeini. But you know, the worst attacks, the most vicious attacks I’ve received have actually been from centrists and liberal elements over my criticism of the Russiagate narrative that they foisted on the American public starting in 2016, and also on the dirty war that the U.S. has been waging on Syria, and how we at the site that I edit, the Grayzone, started unpacking a lot of the deceptions and lies that were used to try to stimulate support among middle-class liberals in the west for this proxy war on Syria, for regime change in Syria. This was absolutely forbidden, and that attack actually turned out to be more vicious and is ongoing.
With Israel, you have a situation where you have, not maybe a plurality, but maybe a majority of secular Jewish Americans, progressive Jews, who have completely turned their back on the whole Zionist project. And it has a lot to do with Netanyahu. Netanyahu is someone who came out of the American — out of American life. He went to high school in suburban Philadelphia, he went to MIT, he was at Boston Consulting with Mitt Romney. His father ended his life in upstate New York as Jabotinsky’s press secretary, the press secretary for the revisionist wing of the Zionist movement that inspired the Likud party. So Netanyahu is really kind of an American figure, number one; number two, he’s a Republican figure. He’s like a card-carrying neoconservative Republican.
So a lot of Jews who’ve historically aligned themselves with the Democratic Party, who see being a Democrat as almost synonymous with being Jewish in American life, just absolutely revile Netanyahu. And here he is, basically the longest-serving prime minister in Israel; he’s completely redefined the face of Israel and what it is. And he’s provoked — I wouldn’t say provoked, but he’s accelerated the civil war in American Jewish life over Zionism. And what I did was come in at a time when it wasn’t entirely popular, to not just challenge Israel as a kind of occupying entity, but to actually challenge it at its core, to challenge the entire philosophy of Zionism, and to analyze the Israeli occupation as the byproduct of a system of apartheid which has been in place from the beginning, since 1948, which was a product of a settler colonial movement.
That really upset a lot of people who kind of reflect the same elements that I’m getting, who are attacking me on Syria or Russia. People like Eric Alterman at The Nation. He wrote 11 very personal attack pieces on me when my book “Goliath” came out in 2013. Truthdig, you, Chris Hedges, it was a great source of support. And you, you know, you opened up the debate at Truthdig, you allowed people to come in and criticize the book, but kind of in a principled, constructive way. Whereas Eric Alterman was demanding that The Nation censor me, blacklist me, ban me for life, and was comparing me to a neo-Nazi by the end, and claiming I was secretly in league with David Duke. And that was because he had simply no response to my reporting and my analysis of the kind of, the inner contradictions of Zionism.
And so to me, it was really a sign of the success of the book, that someone like Alterman was sort of dispatched, or took it upon himself to wage this really self-destructive attack. And in the end, he really had nothing to show for himself; he wasn’t arguing on the merits. And that’s just what I find time and again with my reporting is, you know, you get these personal attacks and people try to dissuade you from going and touching these third-rail issues, but ultimately there’s no substance to the attacks. I mean, if they really wanted to nail me and take me down, they would address the facts, and they really haven’t been able to do that.
RS: Right. But Max, if I can, let’s focus on the power of your analysis in that book, which is that it is a settler colonialism. And Netanyahu actually is — we can talk about the old labor Zionists, you know, and what was meant by progressive Zionism and so forth. Even at the time of the Six-Day War when I interviewed people like Moshe Dayan and Ya’alon and these people, they all were against a full occupation of the West Bank. They didn’t act on that, unfortunately. But they were aware of the dangers of a colonial model. But right now you have a figure in Israel in Netanyahu, who is, very clearly embodies a racialized view, a jingoistic view of the other, which is really, you know, very troubling. And he’s embraced by this troubling American figure.
And so what your book really predicted is that the settler colonialism was a rot at the center of the Israeli enterprise — and historically, one could justify that enterprise. I don’t know if you would agree. But even the old Soviet Union, I think, was the second, if not the first country to recognize Israel. There was vast worldwide support for some sort of refuge for the Jewish people after such horrible, you know, genocidal policies visited upon them. But what we’re really talking about now is something very different. And that is whether political leadership, and interference and so forth comes mainly for Democrats, very often; obviously, for republicans and Bible-belters and all that, who seem to like this image of the end of time coming in Israel. But really what’s happening — and it’s not discussed in this election, except to attack Bernie Sanders, who dared make some criticisms of Israel in some of these debates — you have a very weird notion of the Jewish experience, as identified with a very hardline, as you say, sort of South African settler colonialist mentality.
And so I want to ask you the question as someone–and we’ll get to it later — you grew up sort of within the Democratic liberal establishment in Washington. Your parents both worked for the Clinton administration, were close to it. How do you explain this blind eye toward Trump’s relationship to Netanyahu? And ironically, for all the Russia-bashing, Netanyahu and Putin seem to get along splendidly, you know. And that doesn’t bother people as far as criticizing Netanyahu. So why don’t we visit that a little bit, and forget about Eric Alterman for a while.
MB: [Laughs] Well, he’s already forgotten, so we don’t have much work to do there. But there’s a lot, again, a lot to chew on, a lot of questions packed into that. You know, just starting with your mention of Moshe Dayan — who is a seminal figure in the Nakba, the initial ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population in 1948 to establish Israel — he was the southern commander of the Israeli military. And he later kind of became a kind of schizophrenic figure in Israeli politics; he would sometimes offer some kind of left-wing opinions, and then be extremely militaristic. But you know, when it came down to it, Moshe Dayan — like every other member of the Israeli Labor Party — was absolutely opposed to a viable Palestinian state. He even said that we cannot have a Palestinian state because it will connect psychologically, in the minds of the Palestinian public who are citizens of Israel — that 20% of Israel who are indigenous Palestinians — it will connect them to Nablus in the West Bank, and it will provide them with a basis for rebelling against the Israeli state to expand the Palestinian state.
The other labor leaders spoke in terms of the kind of, with the racist language of the demographic time bomb that, you know, we need to give Palestinians a state, otherwise we will be overwhelmed demographically. And so the state that they were proposed was what Yitzhak Rabin, in his final address before the Israeli Knesset, the Israeli parliament, called “less than a state.” He promised Israel that at Oslo, he would deliver the Palestinians less than a state. And if you look at the actual plan that the Palestinians were handed at Oslo — which Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority chairman, didn’t even review before signing — the map was not that different from the map that Donald Trump has offered with the “ultimate deal.” And they’d say, oh, you get 97% of what was, you know, offered in U.N. Resolution 242 in 1967. But it really just isn’t the case when you get down to the details. What the strategy has been with the Labor Party, and with successive Israeli administrations — and with Netanyahu until he got Trump in — was to kind of kick the can down the road with the so-called peace process, so that Israel could keep putting more facts on the ground.
So it was actually Ehud Barak of the Labor Party, Yitzhak Rabin’s successor, who moved more settlers into the West Bank, by a landslide, than Netanyahu did. Ehud Barak actually campaigned on his connection to the settlers. And then Netanyahu capitalizes on the strength of the settlement movement to build this kind of Titanic rock of a right-wing coalition that’s kept him in power for so long. And if you look at who the leading figures are in Israeli life — Naftali Bennett, who was from the Jewish Home Party, he comes out of the Likud party and he’s someone who was an assistant to Netanyahu. Avigdor Lieberman, who was for a long time the leader of the Russian Party. Yisrael Beiteinu, this is someone who came out of the Likud Party, who helped Netanyahu rustle up Russian votes. It’s a Likud one-party state — but then you have, culturally, a dynamic where starting with 1967, the public just becomes more infused with religious Messianism.
The West Bank is the site of the real, emotionally potent Jewish historical sites, particularly in a city like Hebron. And the public becomes attached to it and attains its dynamism through this expansionist project, and the public changes. A lot of people from the kind of liberal labor wing became religious Messianists, started wearing kippot, wearing yarmulkes, the kind of cloth yarmulkes that the modern orthodox settlers where.
RS: OK, but —
MB: Today you not only have that, you have a new movement called the temple movement, which aims to actually replace Jewish prayer at the Western Wall with animal sacrifice, as Jews supposedly practiced thousands of years ago, and to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque, and practice Jewish prayer there. This is not just a messianic movement, but an apocalyptic movement that is actually gaining strength in the Likud party. So when you mentioned Donald Trump’s “ultimate deal,” there’s one detail that everyone seems to have missed there, which is prayer for all at the Dome of the Rock, at Al-Aqsa. That means there will be Jewish prayer there, officially, that Palestinians must be forced to accept that and destroy the status quo, which has prevailed since 1967.
RS: I know, but Max, before I lose this whole interview here — because I think that’s all really interesting; people should read your book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.” That’s not the focus of this discussion I want to have with you.
MB: OK.
RS: And I want to discuss, in this aspect, the whole idea of Israel as a third-rail issue for American politics.
MB: Yeah.
RS: American politics. And the reason I want to do that is there’s obviously a contradiction in the Jewish experience, because Jews — as much or more so than any other group of people in the world — understand what settler colonialism does. They understand what oppression does, they’ve been under the thumb of oppressors. And so I would argue the major part of the Jewish experience was one of revolt against oppression, and recognition of the danger of unbridled power. And that represents a very important force in liberal politics in the United States: a fear of coercive power, a desire for tolerance, and so forth. And we know that Jews have, in the United States and elsewhere in the world, been a source of concern for the other, and tolerance, and criticism of power.
And the reason I’m bringing that up is it seems to me it’s a real contradiction for the Democratic Party, which you know quite a bit about. And in this Democratic Party, there’s this great loathsome feeling about Donald Trump. And many of these people don’t really like Netanyahu. You know, the polling data shows that Jews are, you know, just about as open to the concern for the Palestinians as any other group. And Bernie Sanders, the one Jewish candidate, is the one who dared to bring up the Palestinians — that they have rights also, that they’re human beings. He’s being attacked for it as, like you, a self-hating Jew. And so I want to get at that contradiction. And, you know, full confession, as a Jewish person I believe it’s an honorable tradition of dissent, and concern for the others, and respect for individual freedom. And I think it’s sullied by the identification of the Jewish experience with a colonialist experience. It is a reality that we have to deal with, but that’s not the whole tradition. And I daresay your own family, whatever your contradiction — and I should mention here your father and mother both were quite active in the Clinton administration, right.
And your father, a well-known journalist, Sidney Blumenthal, and your mother, Jacqueline Blumenthal, was I think a White House fellow or something in the Clinton administration? I forget what her job was, but has been active. And they certainly come out of a more liberal Jewish experience, as do most well-known Jewish writers and journalists in the United States. That’s the contradiction that I don’t see being dealt with here. Because after all, it’s easy to blast Putin and his interference, but as I say, Netanyahu interfered very openly, but in a really unseemly way, in the American election by attacking a sitting American president in an appearance before the Congress, and attacking his major foreign-policy initiative. And there’s hardly a word ever said about it. It doesn’t come up in the democratic debates. You know, and the — as I say, there was this incredible moment where Netanyahu, after coming over here and praising Trump for his peace deal, as did his opponent, then he goes off and meets with Putin. And so suddenly it’s OK, and yet the Democrats who want to blast Putin don’t mention Netanyahu, and they don’t mention his relation to Trump.
MB: Well, yeah, I was trying to illustrate kind of the reality of Israel, which just, it’s gotten so extreme that it repels people who even come out of the kind of Democratic Party mainstream. And the Democratic Party was the original bastion in the U.S. for supporting Israel. So my father actually held a book party for my book, “Goliath,” back in 2013. It’s the kind of thing that, you know, a parent who had been a journalist would do for a son or daughter who’s a journalist. And he was harshly attacked when word got out that he had held that party in a neoconservative publication called the Free Beacon, which is kind of part of Netanyahu’s PR operation in D.C. You know, it was like my father had supported, provided material support for terrorism by having a book party for his son.
But the interesting part about that party was who showed up. I didn’t actually know what it was going to be like, and it was absolutely packed. I mean, they live in a pretty small townhouse in D.C, and there just was nowhere to walk, there was nowhere to move. And I found myself in the corner of their dining room shouting through the house to kind of explain what my book was about and answer questions. And a lot of the people there were people who were in or around Hillary’s State Department, people who worked for kind of Democratic Party-linked organizations — just a lot of mainstream Democrat people. And they were giving me a wink and a nod, shaking my hand, giving me a pat on the back, and saying thank you, thank God you did this. Because they cannot stand the Israel lobby, they despise Netanyahu, and they’re disgusted with what Israel’s become.
And we had reached a point by 2013 where it was pretty obvious there was not going to be a two-state solution, and that whole project, the liberal Zionist project, wasn’t going to work out. You know, and the fact that they just could give me a wink and a nod shows also how cowardly a lot of people are in Washington. They weren’t even stepping up to the level my father had, where when his emails with Hillary Clinton were exposed, it became clear that he was sending her my work. And he was actually trying to move people within the State Department toward a more, maybe you could say a more humanistic view, but also a more realistic view of Israel, Palestine and the Netanyahu operation in Washington. Working through [Sheldon] Adelson, using this fraud hack of a rabbi, Shmuley Boteach, has kind of their front man. They ran like a full-page ad in the New York Times painting me and my father as Hillary Clinton’s secret Middle East advisers.
And then one day in the middle of the campaign, Elie Wiesel died. You know, someone who is supposed to be this patron saint of Judaism and the kind of secular theology of Auschwitz, who had spent the last years of his life as part of Sheldon Adelson’s political network. Basically, he had lost all his money to Bernie Madoff, and so he was getting paid off by Adelson. He got half a million dollars from this Christian Zionist, apocalyptic, rapture-ready fanatic, Pastor John Hagee. He was going around with Ted Cruz giving talks. And so when he died, I went on Twitter and tweeted a few photos of Elie Wiesel with these extremist characters.
And I said, you know, here are photos of Elie Wiesel palling around with fascists. And the kind of Netanyahu-Adelson network activated to attack me. And ultimately it led — I actually, within a matter of a few days, it led to Hillary Clinton’s campaign officially denouncing me and demanding that I cease and desist. And so, you know, I looked at the debate on Twitter, and a lot of people were actually supporting me. And it was clear Elie Wiesel, this person who was supposed to be a saint, was actually no longer seen as stainless, that the whole debate had been opened up by 2016.
And now when we look at the Democratic Party and we look at the Democratic field, you know, Bernie Sanders — he’s better than most of the other candidates, or the other candidates, on this issue. After we put a lot of pressure on him in the left wing-grassroots — I mean, I personally protested him at a 2016 event for his position on Palestinians, and we shamed him until he took at least a slightly better position, where you acknowledge the humanity of Palestinians. But what we’re hearing, even from Bernie Sanders, doesn’t even reflect where the grassroots of the Democratic Party — particularly all those young people who are coming out and delivering him a landslide victory tonight in Iowa — are. The Democratic Party is not democratic on Israel, but it’s no longer a third-rail issue. You can talk about it, and the only way that you can be stopped is through legislation, like the legislation we see in statehouses to actually outlaw people who support the Palestinian boycott of Israel. So we’re just in an amazing time where all of the contradictions are completely out in the open.
RS: OK, let me just take a quick break so public radio stations like KCRW that make this available can stick in some advertisements for themselves, which is a good cause. And we’ll be right back with Max Blumenthal. Back with Max Blumenthal, who has written — I mean, I only mentioned one of his books. He wrote a very important book on the right wing in America that was a bestseller; he has been honored in many ways, and yet is a source of great controversy. And I must say, I respect your ability to create this controversy, because it’s controversy about issues people don’t want to deal with. You know, they want to deal with them in sort of feel-good slogans, and it doesn’t work, because people get hurt. And including Jewish people, in the case of Israel. If you develop a settler, colonialist society, and that stands for the Jewish position, and you’re oppressing large numbers of people, be they Palestinian or others, that’s hardly an advertisement for what has been really great about the Jewish experience, which I will argue until my death.
It was represented by people like my mother, who were in the Jewish socialist bund, and two of her sisters were killed by the Czar’s police in Russia. And they believed in Universalist values, an idea of being Jewish as standing for the values of the oppressed, and concern for the oppressed. And most of their experience in the shtetls, and out there in the diaspora, had been being oppressed.
And so I don’t want to lose that there. But I wanted to get now to the last part of this, to what I think is the hypocrisy of the liberal wing of American politics, or so-called. And now they call themselves more progressive. And it really kind of centers around Hillary Clinton. And whatever you want to say about Bernie Sanders — you know, Hillary Clinton’s recent attack on Bernie Sanders, that no one likes him and he stands for nothing and he gets nothing done. And I think this is a, you know, a person that I thought, you know, at one point — despite her starting out as a Goldwater girl and being quite conservative — I thought was, you know, somewhat decent.
And I’m going to make this personal now. I was brought to a more favorable view of Bill and Hillary Clinton, in considerable measure, by your father, as a journalist at the Washington Post, and then working in the administration. And I respect your father and mother, you know, and Sidney Blumenthal and Jacqueline Blumenthal, I think are intelligent people. And I once, you know, went through a White House dinner; I think I only got in because your father put me on the list, and Hillary Clinton said I was her favorite columnist in America — no, the whole world — and it was very flattering. But I look back on it now — Hillary Clinton has really represented a kind of loathsome, interventionist, aggressive, America-first politics that in some ways is even more offensive than Trump. When Trump said he’s going to make America great again, Hillary Clinton said, America’s always been great. What?
MB: Yeah.
RS: What? Slavery, segregation, killing the Native Americans — always been great? You grew up with these people, right? You were in that world. What — so yes, they can come up to you at a book party and say, yes, it’s about time somebody said that. But what are they really about? That they — you know, you mentioned Syria. You know, their great achievement, they created a mess of that society. And she’s the one who went to, said about Libya, oh, we came, we saw, and he’s dead. You know, sodomized to death. So take me into the heart of the so-called liberal experience.
MB: Well, first of all, since you invoke Sidney Blumenthal so frequently, he has a — I think his fourth book in a five-part series on Abraham Lincoln out. And you know, these books address Lincoln almost as if he were a contemporary politician. It’s a completely new contribution to the history of Lincoln, and if you invite him on, be sure —
RS: I’m familiar with it, and I’ll endorse it —
MB: If you invite him on, you can ask him, I would love to hear that debate —
RS: I certainly would, and I have — as I said, I have a lot of respect for your father and mother. I’m asking a different question. Why do good people look the other way? Or how does it work? Just, you know, to the degree you can, take me inside that Washington culture. And where there’s a certain arrogance in it, that they are always, even when they do the wrong things, they’re just always accidents. They’re always mistakes. You know, it never comes out of their ideology, their aggression. So I want to know more about that.
MB: I mean, I saw all these — so many different sides of Washington. And so — and I was always supported by my parents, no matter what view I took. So I don’t feel like I have to live in my father’s shadow or something like that. They remain really supportive of me. I have a new book out — it’s not really new, it came out last April. It’s called “The Management of Savagery,” and it deals substantially with my view of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, but particularly the Hillary State Department, the Obama foreign policy team, and the destruction they wrought in Libya and Syria. So, you know, I put everything I knew about Washington and foreign policy into that book. And so I really would recommend that as well.
But, you know, how does it work with the Clintons? They were — they set up a machine that was really a juggernaut with all this corporate money they brought in through the DLC, the Democratic Leadership Committee. It was a very different structure than we’d seen with previous Democratic candidates who built — who relied heavily on unions and, you know, the civil rights coalition. And that machine never went away. It kept growing like this — kind of like this amoeba that began to engulf the party and politics itself. So that when Bill Clinton was out of power, the machine was passed to Hillary Clinton, and the machine followed her into the Senate. And the machine grew into the Clinton Global Initiative, which was this giant influence-peddling scam that just cashed in on disasters in Haiti, brought in tons of money, tens of millions of dollars from Gulf monarchies, and big oil and the arms industry — everything that funds all the repulsive think tanks on K Street through the Clinton Foundation.
And everyone who was trying to get close to the Clinton Foundation, whether they were in Clinton’s inner circle or not, was just trying to gather influence. That’s why you saw at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, behind her, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was basically Jeffrey Epstein’s personal child sex trafficker, just trying to cultivate influence with people who have this gigantic political machine.
So that’s why so many people, I think, have stayed loyal to this odious project, and have looked the other way as entire countries were destroyed under the direct watch of Hillary Clinton. Libya today — where Hillary Clinton took personal credit for destroying this country, which was at the time before its destruction, I think the wealthiest African nation with the highest quality of life — is now in, still in civil war. We’ve seen footage of open-air slave auctions taking place, and large parts of the country for years were occupied by affiliates of Al Qaeda or ISIS, including Muammar Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte. It was immediately transformed into a haven for the Islamic State.
This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton. There would have been no Benghazi scandal if she hadn’t gone into Libya to come, see, and kill, as she bragged that she did. And in Syria, she attempted the same thing; fortunately failed, thanks to assistance from Iran and Russia. But this was, it consisted of a billion dollars, multibillion-dollar operation to arm and equip some of the most dangerous, psychotic fanatics on the face of the planet in Al Qaeda and 31 flavors of Salafi jihadi. Hillary Clinton said we can’t be negotiating with the Syrian government; the hard men with guns will solve this problem. She said that in an interview, and that’s her legacy.
Beyond that, you know, I in Washington grew up in a very complex situation. I don’t know what view people have of me, but I grew up in what was – D.C. when D.C. was known as C.C., or Chocolate City. It was a mostly black city, run by a local black power structure with a strong black middle class, and I grew up in a black neighborhood. And I kind of saw apartheid firsthand, where I saw how a small white minority actually controlled the city from behind the scenes. And then, you know, and I saw that reality, and then I went to school across town in the one white ward to a private school, and I got to know some of the children of the kind of mostly Democratic Party elite. And so I saw both sides of the city. And it was through that other side, and also my parents’ connection to the Clintons, that I — I mean, I barely interacted with the Clintons. I’ve had very minimal interaction with them ever.
But I did get to meet Chelsea Clinton once. And you know, for all my reservations about the Clintons or what they were, I thought you know, she was kind of an admirable figure at that time. She was a — she was a kid, she was an adolescent who was being mocked on “Saturday Night Live” because she was going through an awkward phase. She went to school down the street at Sidwell Friends, and I met her at a White House Christmas party; she was really friendly and personable. And you know, since then, I’ve watched her grow into adulthood and become a complete kind of replication of the monstrous political apparatus that her family has set up, without really charting her own path. She just basically inherited the reign of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. She does paid talks for Israel. Her husband Marc Mezvinsky, he gambled on Greece’s debt along with Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. You know, the squid fish. I mean, there’s just — I mean, as a young person, seeing someone of my generation grow up and follow that path, do nothing to carve out her own space — it just absolutely disgusts me.
And now Hillary Clinton is still there! She won’t go away! She’s not only helped fuel this Russiagate hysteria that’s plunged us into a new Cold War, but she’s trying to destroy the hopes and dreams of millions of young people who are saddled with endless debt by destroying Bernie Sanders. And it’s because she sees her own legacy being smashed to pieces, not by any right-wing, vast conspiracy, but by the electorate, the new electorate of the Democratic Party. And I absolutely welcome that. I think, you know, tonight in Iowa, a landslide Bernie victory, one of the takeaways is this will be the end of Clintonism. It’s time to move on and hand things over to a new generation. They had their chance, and they not only failed, they caused disasters across the world.
RS: So this is — we’re going to wind this up, but I think we’ve hit a really important subject. And I want to take a little bit more time on it. And I thought you expressed it quite powerfully. But the error, if you’ll permit me, is to center it on the personality, or the family. And I don’t think Clintonism is going to go away. Because what it represents — and I know you —
MB: It could be become Bloombergism, you know?
RS: Well, that’s where I’m going. I think what Clintonism represents is this triangulation, this new Democrat. And I interviewed him when he was governor, just when he was campaigning. And I did a lot of writing on the Financial Services Modernization Act and on welfare reform, and all of these ingredients of this policy. And what it really represents — no wonder they’re rewarded by the super wealthy. But the Democratic Party lost its organizational base with the destruction of the labor movement and weakening of other sources of progressive class-based politics, concern about working people and ordinary people.
And what Clinton did is he came along, and he had a sort of variation of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, how he got the Republicans to be so important in the South. And it was this new politics, this redefinition. And it’s not going away, because it’s the cover for Wall Street. It’s the cover for exploitation. And the main thing that happened from when you were young — or born, actually; you’re 42 years — it’s 42 years of, since Clinton really, and you can blame Reagan, you can blame the first President Bush, you can blame other people, and certainly blame the whole bloody Republican Party. I’m not going to give them a pass.
But the fact is, what the Clinton revolution did was it made class warfare for the rich fashionable, in a way that no one else was able to do it, no other movement. And it said these thieves on Wall Street, these people who are going to rip you off 20 different ways to Sunday — they’re good people, and they support good causes. And you mentioned Lloyd Blankfein, you know; “government” Goldman Sachs, you know. Robert Rubin came from Goldman Sachs; he was Clinton’s treasury secretary. And the whole thing of unleashing Wall Street and getting, destroying the New Deal — that was a serious program to basically betray the average American and betray their interest. And that’s why we’ve had this growing income inequality since that time. That’s the Clinton legacy in this world, really, is the billionaire coup, the billionaire culture.
MB: Yep, the oligarchy was put on fast-forward by the new politics of the Clintons. What they promised wasn’t, you know, a break from Reaganism, although there was certainly a cultural difference. They promised continuity, and that’s what we saw through the Obama administration. Obama presided over the biggest decline in black home ownership in the United States since, I think, prior to World War II. You mentioned Glass-Steagall; this set the stage for the financial crisis; NAFTA, destroyed the unions, shipped American jobs first to Mexico and then to China, and destabilized northern Mexico along with the drug war that Clinton put on overdrive, creating the immigration crisis that helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump.
Welfare reform — all of these policies were just, were odious to me and so many people at the time, but there was just this desire to just beat the Republicans and out-triangulate them. Now that we’ve seen the effects on them and so many people have felt the effects, you have an entire generation that sees no future, that realizes they’re living in an oligarchy, realizes that the alternative to Bernie Sanders is a literal oligarch, this miniature Scrooge McDuck in Mike Bloomberg, and they’re just not having it.
I don’t know if Hillary Clinton understands this history; I don’t think she sees it in context. She just blames Russian boogeyman and fake news for everything. But the rest of us who’ve lived through it really do, and it’s the continuity that is so dangerous, especially on foreign policy. I mean, the Libya proxy war and the Syria proxy war, the stage was set in Yugoslavia with NATO’s war that destroyed a socialist country and unleashed hell on a large part of its population. And we still don’t debate that war. The stage for the Iraq invasion was set in 1998 with Bill Clinton passing the Iraqi Liberation Act, which sent $90 million into the pocket of the con-man Ahmed Chalabi and made regime change the official policy of the United States.
It’s tragic that Bernie Sanders voted for that. But we have to see the cause and the effect to understand why so many people are in open revolt against that legacy. And you’re right, it goes well beyond the Clintons. It’s a program that markets right-wing economics and a right-wing foreign policy in a sort of progressive bottle. Now what they’re trying to do with the label on that progressive bottle, the way they’re trying to preserve it — we see it a lot through the [Elizabeth] Warren campaign — is through a kind of neoliberal identity politics that divorces class from race and gender, and attempts to basically distract people with needless arguments about Bernie Sanders saying a woman couldn’t have gotten elected in a private conversation that only Elizabeth Warren was party to.
So I’m really encouraged, I guess, by the results that we’re seeing. We’re talking tonight on the eve of the Iowa caucus. I’m encouraged by those results, just because I see them as a repudiation of the politics that have just dominated my life as a 42-year-old, and just been so absolutely cynical and destructive at their core. But I would just remind anyone who is supporting Bernie Sanders and listening to this — he’s not just running for president. He’s running for the next target of a deep state coup, and the deep state exists, and will respond with more force and viciousness than it did to Donald Trump, who actually has much more in common with them than Bernie Sanders.
RS: I didn’t quite get the grammar of that last paragraph, not any fault of yours. You said he’s not just running — can you —
MB: He’s running for the next target of a deep state coup, the forces of Wall Street. You know, the —
RS: Oh, you mean he will be the target.
MB: He will be the target.
RS: Yeah, you know, it’s — you just said something really — OK, I know we have to wrap this up, but it’s actually just getting interesting for me. [Laughs]
MB: Sorry about that.
RS: No, no, no, come on, come on. [Laughter] What I mean is, I do these things because I learn, and I think, and you know, my selfish interests. And really the question right now, I did a wonderful interview with Chomsky on this podcast, and he took me to school for not appreciating the importance of the lesser evil. And I’ve lost sleep over it since. You know, well — and we always fall for that, you know. On the other hand, some of the things you’ve been talking about, you know — and this is going to get me in big trouble — but you know, Trump is so blatant. He’s so out there in favor of greed and corruption.
He’s so obnoxious. And actually, in terms of his policy impact — not his rhetoric, but his policy impact — is he really that much worse? Well, for instance, you mentioned NAFTA. The rewrite of NAFTA, even before, you know, some progressives got involved in it, it was a substantially better trade agreement than the first NAFTA. You know, he hasn’t gotten us into Syria-type, Iraq-type wars.
He actually — so I’m not — you know, yes, I consider him a neofascist; rhetoric can be very dangerous. He’s obviously spread very evil, poisonous ideas about immigrants and what have you, you know, I can go down the list. But the people that you’ve been talking about, that–you know, and I voted for all of them, and I’ve supported them — are they really the lesser evil? You know, or are they a more effective form of evil?
MB: I mean, to understand Trump, we just have to see him as the apotheosis of an oligarchy. In its most unsheathed, unvarnished form, he’s just lifted the mask off the corruption, the legal corruption that’s prevailed, and been completely unabashed about it. Donald Trump was targeted with this kind of Russiagate campaign, which was partly run by Clintonite dead-enders who wanted to blame Russia for her loss, and to attack Donald Trump with this kind of McCarthyite rhetoric. But it was also being influenced by the intelligence services — figures like John Brennan and James Comey, and neoconservative hardliners who could easily jump back into the Democratic Party. And they were just seeking a new Cold War, to justify the budgets of the intelligence services, and the defense budget and so on.
But at his core, Donald Trump, what he’s actually done, especially domestically, I think outside of the immigration stuff, is he’s been kind of a traditional Republican. And he won a lot of consent from Republicans in Congress when he passed a trillion-dollar tax cut. He’s given corporate America everything he wanted after kind of campaigning with this populist, Bannonite tone. So in a lot of ways, Donald Trump does share more in common with the Democratic Party elite — with a lot of the figures who’ve been nominated to serve on the DNC platform committee, who are just from the Beltway blob and the Beltway bandits — than they do with Bernie Sanders.
And I think that if Bernie Sanders gets the nomination, there will be an effort to McGovern him. To just kind of turn him — turn this whole process into McGovern ’72, hope that Bernie Sanders gets destroyed by Donald Trump, and then wag their fingers at the left for the next 20 years until they get another Bill Clinton. I think that they don’t know how to stop him at this point, but they’re willing to let him be the nominee and go down to Donald Trump, because Bernie Sanders threatens their interests, and the movement behind him particularly, more than Donald Trump does.
RS: You know, they will stop Bernie Sanders, and they will do it by the argument of lesser evilism. And you see the line developing —
MB: But who is the lesser evil, Bob? I mean, Joe Biden is like this doddering wreck. There is no other candidate who seems even remotely viable against Trump.
RS: No, no, no — I understand that. I’m telling you what — well, it seems to me there’s — you know, you want to talk about fake news, the, misreporting of Bernie Sanders — in fact, the misreporting of what democratic socialism is. I mean, he’s now branded in the mainstream media as some hopeless fanatic because he dared to defend democratic socialism. Democratic socialism has been the norm for the most successful economies in the world, even to a degree when we’ve been successful. That was the legacy of Roosevelt, after all, is to try to save capitalism from itself. That’s why you had some enlightened government programs, you know, right down the list, and that’s what saved Germany after the war, and that’s what France and England and so forth, that’s why they have health care systems.
But the mainstream media has actually taken a very moderate figure, Bernie Sanders, and demonized him as some kind of hopeless ideologue, right? And as you point out, Bernie Sanders is hardly a radical thinker on issues — particularly, as you mentioned, about the Mideast and so forth. What he is, is somebody who actually is honoring the best side of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: you can’t let these greed merchants control everything, you have to worry about some compensation for ordinary people. That’s what Bernie Sanders is all about. And it should be an argument that has great appeal to people of power, otherwise they’re going to come after you with the pitchforks. Instead the mainstream media, in its hysteria, you know, has taken this word “democratic socialist” and used it to vilify him.
But the point that I want — and we will end on this, but I’d like to get your reaction — that came up in my discussion with Chomsky, who I have great admiration for. But it is this lesser evilism. And I think while, yes, people in their vote can think about that, they can vote that way — I’ve done it much of my life; I’ve voted for all sorts of evil people because they were lesser. But as a journalist — and I want to end about your journalism — as a journalist, I think we have to get that idea out of our head. And it means being able to be objective about a Donald Trump when he comes up with his NAFTA rewrite, and say hey, there are some good things in it, including the fact that you have to pay $16 an hour to people in Mexico who are working on cars that are going to be sold in the United States, OK. And what the liberal community has been able to do in the mainstream media, MSNBC, is Trumpwash everything.
Which brings us back to your critique. They’ve been able to say — they’ve made warmongering liberal and fashionable. They’ve taken the — they’ve made the CIA now a wonderful institution, the FBI a wonderful institution, [John] Bolton a wonderful hero. And I want to take my hat off to your journalism, because you have — and I do recommend that people go to your website, the Grayzone. Because you have had the courage to say, wait a minute, what’s called a lesser evil can’t be given a pass. Because in fact, maybe in some ways, or in many ways, it’s a more effective evil. We know what Trump is; he stands exposed every hour of every day.
But you know, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton — and I’m not trying to pick on them, but you know, they represented this embrace of the Wall Street center — they were much more effective in redistributing income to the rich. You know, you can talk about Trump’s tax break, but the real redistribution came with letting Wall Street do its collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps that caused the destruction of 70% of black wealth in America, 60% of brown wealth in America, according to the Federal Reserve. So really, in this election, people have to think — you know, yes, I’ll hold my nose and I’ll vote for the lesser evil. But what’s that going to get us? Does it get us a more effective evil, a better-packaged evil? Last word from you?
MB: Well, I mean, one of the things that we do at the Grayzone.com, our mission is to oppose this policy of regime change that the U.S. imposes across the world against any state that seeks some independence from the U.S. sphere of influence that wants to craft its own economic policies in a socialist way, like Venezuela, Nicaragua. We, you know, we exposed a lot of the deceptions that were trying to stimulate public support for regime change in Syria, that would have been absolutely disastrous. And in all of these situations, we don’t stand alone, but we stand among a really, really small group of alternative outlets who don’t play the lesser-evil game on regime change.
Where we say, well, this leader or that leader are horrible, and they are evil dictators, but we should also be kind of suspicious of the, you know, of the war that the U.S. might wage. Or we should be critical of these brutal economic sanctions that have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans through excess deaths. We say — we actually look at the alternative to the current government and show that there actually isn’t the lesser evil, that the alternative is far worse. In Syria it was Al Qaeda and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood; in Venezuela it’s Juan Guaidó’s right-wing, white collar mafia, which is a front for Exxon Mobil. Same thing in Nicaragua.
And you know, as much as I respect and I’ve learned from Noam Chomsky, he plays that lesser-evil game on regime change. He’s trashed all of the, all of these governments. He celebrated the collapse of the Soviet Union, and we saw what happened to Russia after that. So it’s important to look at lesser evilism through a historical context, and then we can apply it to the United States as well. Look at who’s been sold to us as the lesser evil that we had to support. Well, we’ve been talking about them, Bob, for the last half hour, and they’ve subjected Americans to the same evil the Republican Party has, for the most part. Maybe they’ve limited it to some degree. But now there’s actually an option for something that I’d say is moderate in the United States.
You’re right — Bernie Sanders does nothing, and proposes nothing, outside the framework of the New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. I don’t even think he’s a democratic socialist. I don’t know what that term really means. He’s a social democrat. And he is someone who at least offers a change from the consensus where the government actually starts to intervene to prevent people from dying excess deaths across the country, from the opioid crisis, from poverty, from homelessness. Eighty percent of new homes that have been built in the U.S. in the past two years are luxury housing. And you know who else is supporting Bernie Sanders besides all these debt-saddled youth? Active duty U.S. military veterans who are sick of permanent war. $160,000 in campaign contributions have been given to Bernie by active duty vets. That’s something like eight times more than have gone to Joe Biden, who is involved at the forefront of almost every American war since Gulf War I.
And we’re really capitalizing on that at the Grayzone. We understand the American public and the western public are sick of being lied into war, and they’re sick of being pushed into lesser evilism, whether it’s abroad in countries that are targeted by the U.S., or at home. And so we’re just there providing balance and exposing whatever the lie is of the day.
RS: Let me, as an older person, end with a little editorial about what — and I agree with the thrust of what you’ve been saying — but why I think this word “democratic socialism” is important, not just social democrat. Because it acknowledges the vast harm that has been done by the left in human history. It’s not just the right, it’s not just the corporate elite, and it’s not just the oligarchs. That people got hold of a message of concern for the ordinary person. It happened in religion too, after all, you know; structures were developed, people who claimed they were following the message of Christ, and they ended up building edifices to the exploitation of ordinary people.
I think what Bernie Sanders represents — and I’ll ask your response, but what I think he represents, the reason he’s so authentic — he actually believes in the grassroots. He actually believes that an ordinary person in Vermont can make intelligent decisions about the human condition, and about justice and freedom. And I think the reason Bernie Sanders can survive the rhetorical assaults on his leftism or his socialism, is that what people of power in the capitalist world have managed to do is identify this cause of social justice, a notion of democratic socialism with totalitarianism, with elitism. And Bernie Sanders — and this is a good night to celebrate Bernie Sanders, if it’s true; I hadn’t caught up with the news, but if he’s really doing that well in Iowa. Because I thought he would get 1% of the vote four years ago when he started; I never thought this would happen.
I think what makes Bernie Sanders authentic is his respect for the ordinary person. He is the opposite of that leftist elitist–and you have them as well as rightist elitists — who thinks they have to distort history to protect the average person from reality. And Bernie Sanders is — he speaks truth about what’s going on. And at a time when people on the right and the left have nothing but contempt for most of the politicians, and journalistic leaders and everything else, for having betrayed them. So I think Bernie Sanders is a ray of hope. I wish he would be around a lot longer, but then again, I wish I’d be around a lot longer. But it’s nice to run into Max Blumenthal, who’s half my age and has all of that spirit that I’d like to see in journalism. So thanks, Max, for doing this.
MB: Thank you, Bob. It’s a real honor.
RS: And by the way, I ignored that last book of yours. Could you give the title again and how people get it?
MB: It’s called “The Management of Savagery.” And let me pull it off the shelf so I can actually read the subheader. You can edit this. It’s called “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump.” And it’s really kind of my look at the, sort of how the politics of my lifetime and my generation has been shaped by foreign policy disasters that an unelected foreign-policy establishment has subjected us to.
RS: Full disclosure, I actually have not read it, and I will get it as soon as I can.
MB: I’ll send you a copy —
RS: No, no, no, you got — it’s hard enough to make a living as a writer. I don’t think you should give these things away for nothing. I’ll get myself a copy. And I want to thank you again. I’ve been talking to Max Blumenthal, check out his work, check out the Grayzone. These podcasts are done basically for KCRW, the public radio station in Santa Monica, where Christopher Ho is the engineer who gets it up on the air.
At Truthdig, Natasha Hakimi Zapata writes the brilliant intros and overview of these things and posts them up there. Here at USC, Sebastian Grubaugh, the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, really gets the whole thing going and hooks up everyone, thanks to him. And finally, there’d be no “Scheer Intelligence” without the main Scheer, Joshua Scheer, who’s the show’s producer. And we’ll see you next week with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence.”
Which Stock Sector Has The Highest Revenue Exposure To China
Earlier this week, when discussing Goldman’s latest downgrade to global GDP which the bank now expects to be cut as much as 2% in Q1 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, only to rebound in subsequent quarters as the spread of the virus is contained…
… we asked why Goldman ignored the hit to corporate profitability, saying that “we are curious why Goldman did not account for the crunch that global supply chains are already sustaining: while Chinese tourism and exports are certainly important economic pathways, we wonder what will happen to both vendors and customers of intermediate goods that rely on Chinese factory tolling for output and for downstream products. Or perhaps that will be the topic of a subsequent Goldman report looking at how badly corporate earnings will be hit as the GDP hit impacts the corporate top and bottom line. We eagerly await such a report not only from Goldman but the other banks who have been oddly mute on the topic. Perhaps they are just waiting for the wave of guidance cuts that will inevitably be unleashed in the coming weeks by S&P500 member companies.”
Well, we didn’t have long to wait, because just two days later, Goldman’s chief equity strategist, David Kostin did a report looking at the “fundamental impacts of the coronavirus” on US companies.
Clearly, this was long overdue, because as we remarked earlier, “the crisis in China is creating havoc in global business: when commerce is interrupted, slowed or idled completely company revenues and profits drop hard. Analysts and investors have been viewing the developments in China as if business is merely deferred, not lost. That might be true for some of the businesses that deal with large-scale products, but for a number of businesses a large portion of sales are lost forever. For example, a lot of regular business and leisure travel that has been postponed is probably lost, so too are the sales at a number of consumer-related companies – there is no pent up demand for a hotel room, a coffee or a burger. And no one is considering the loss of labor income – due to the idling of production lost travel as well as the complete closure of sales offices – on all sides of the ocean that could reduce consumer spending in current and coming quarters.”
Indeed, the list of companies that so far have indicated that Q1 business operations will be impacted cut across a number of industries, and includes Delta, American, United, GM, Ford, Tesla, Google, Starbucks, McDonalds, Boeing, Nike, Wynn Resorts, Hilton Hyatt and Marriott – and the list will undoubtedly grow in coming months.
So what does Goldman think?
Well, curiously, to Kostin the coronavirus’s main impact on the US equity market will come through valuation changes rather than earnings, which is bizarre because if there is one thing that China’s economy grinding a halt in Q1 will do, is send earnings in free fall as copper producers around the globe have already found out. And while we think this is ludicrous, to Kostin what matters is just the multiple, specifically he writes that “S&P 500 NTM P/E peaked at 18.7x on January 17, traded down to a low of 18.1x (January 31) as coronavirus concerns intensified, and has rebounded to 19.1x as the market has become more sanguine on the economic reverberations of the spreading illness.”
Paradoxically, Kostin ignores all the evidence to the contrary and predicts that “the impact of lower global and US economic activity on 2020 S&P 500 EPS will be limited.” Well, that’s now timestamped, and we will certainly revisit it in three months time. In any case, Kostin justifies his cheerful prediction based on Goldman’s forecast that the overall impact on full-year global GDP growth is expected to be -0.1 to -0.2 pp, which would result in a $0.30 to $0.60 reduction in the bank’s full-year EPS estimate of $174 (20 to 40 bp decline in 2020E growth of 6%).
While Goldman’s big picture assessment is suspiciously optimistic, the bank does note – correctly – that the impact of coronavirus on US equities will likely be focused on select firms with the most exposure to China (which is obvious in a day and age when virtually every firm has some exposure to China).
It also goes without saying, that those most exposed to China are Chinese firms: since January 13, Chinese stock indices have plummeted: CSI 300 has declined by 7% and Shanghai Shenzhen Composite by 8%. During that same period, a basket of US firms with high China sales exposure has underperformed the S&P 500 by 5 pp (-3% vs. +2%). Basket constituents with the highest sales exposure to Greater China are YUMC (100%), WYNN (75%), and QRVO (74%).
Here are some additional observations from Kostin on which sectors will be hit the hardest:
Many consumer-facing US firms have halted operations in select Chinese locations. For example, CCL and RCL temporarily suspended cruise operations in China. SBUX has closed more than half of stores in China, which amounts to more than 13% of its global, company-operated storefronts. MCD closed hundreds of restaurants in the Hubei province, a small portion of the firm’s 37,000 global restaurants. Major airlines AAL, UAL, and DAL announced that they would suspend all flights to and from mainland China through March 27, March 28, and April 30, respectively. After reporting promising results from its new streaming service, DIS announced that it would close its parks in both Shanghai and Hong Kong. The expected income headwind of $175 million from those closures represents over 30% of the firm’s annual operating income from international parks.
Airlines and Gaming are among the industries that will be most affected by the coronavirus. GS airlines analysts highlighted that UAL had more than two times the capacity exposure to China than AAL or DAL. The coronavirus will also have a significant impact on the gaming industry. Many US casinos have operations in Macau, which will be affected by venue closures and by potential extended travel restrictions even after the casinos reopen. According to their most recent annual filings, WYNN has the largest exposure to Greater China (75% of revenues; 46% of assets), followed by LVS (62%; 54%) and MGM (22%; 20%). For the profitability of these firms, the halt in operations comes at an inopportune moment because the Chinese New Year is typically the most lucrative time of year for Macao gaming.
Amusingly, even as it lays out its confusingly bullish take on how modest the Coronavirus impact will be, Goldman admits that nobody really knows anything, and that managements have given only limited guidance regarding the likely impact of coronavirus on business activity. And while most managements elected not to provide guidance due to the uncertainty surrounding the virus – and the longer the pandemic goes on, the greater the guidance cut will eventually be – a few firms with significant exposure to China estimated the potential impact to 1Q 2020 results. And here is where things start to make some sense, because of the 58 S&P 500 firms that guided on 1Q 2020 EPS, 67% provided EPS guidance below the prevailing consensus expectations, roughly in line with the historical average. Firms including ALGN, AVY, NKE, PH, and ITW explicitly cited the coronavirus as a factor contributing to reduced EPS guidance.
What are Goldman’s recommendations? According to Kostin, investors who believe the economic consequences of the coronavirus will be limited should increase exposure to cyclicals and value stocks. Despite above-average dividend yields, the bank’s Dividend Growth basket has declined sharply alongside cyclicals and currently trades with depressed valuations. The sector-neutral basket of 50 stocks offers an annualized dividend yield of 3.5% (vs. 1.9% for S&P 500) and is expected to grow dividends 9% annually during the next several years (compared with 5% for the S&P 500). The median constituent currently trades at a nearly 40% discount to the market (forward P/E of 12x vs. 19x for S&P 500).
In short, if fears of global pandemic are allayed, the basket should outperform. Basket constituents with the highest market betas are SWKS (1.77), DXC (1.74), WYNN (1.57), AVGO (1.55), and CAT (1.49).
On the other hand, if Goldman – which is legendary for its irrational bullishness and in Dec 2018 predicted 4 rate hikes, even as the Fed ended up cutting rates 3 times – is once again wrong, and the coronavirus breakout is more serious than expected, then all bets are clearly off not just for the dividend growth basket, but all stocks, although one sector stands out. As we wrote last week in “Is Tech About To Suffer A “Dot Com” Bubble Collapse? It’s Suddenly All In China’s Hands”, the one sector with the greatest exposure to Greater China and Asia Pacific in general, is also the sector that has outperformed the most in recent months. Tech.
Barely into the New Year, 2020 vision has brought many revelations into better focus, making several ongoing observations perfectly clear. Although there are those who’ve been watching the dots of The Matrix assemble into the big picture for decades now, the election of Donald Trump has increasingly exposed what was hidden in plain sight for so long.
The awakening for many Americans could be compared to that of actor Jim Carrey’s character in the 1998 film “The Truman Show”. In that narrative, the unsuspecting star of a global reality television program came to the realization his entire worldview was formed within a bubble; a literal bubble that generated bubblevision in Carrey’s character as all of those around (and above) him performed right on cue.
Truly, it feels like that now in America. The times have become surreal.
And there is a great percentage of Americans who still live within the bubble. They are everywhere: In the workplace, in schools and colleges and at restaurants and in bars. They vigorously debate each other on who would make a better president between Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang, or Joe Biden. They LOVE the fact that Trump was impeached and consider Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, and the Devil’s butler (Chuck Schumer) to be American heroes.
Those in the bottom of the bubble are also concerned about Syria’s chemical weapons and patriotically desire bombs to fall on Iran. Of course the pundits and politicians cajoling these played plebeians are all part of the act. The Establishment’s middle managers know exactly what they are doing, and they know they’d have zero leverage if not for the dupes. It’s why they use carefully crafted language to conceal their motives and lies.
There also remains the possibility of an even grander deception that involves Donald J. Trump directly, or indirectly. This prospect has caused many, including this skeptical blogger, to question if everything we are now witnessing in American politics is occurring naturally or if is there something else going on. In any event, it seems the ongoing left-right dialectics have become a diversion as the Surveillance State expands unabated.
Furthermore, it appears the Democratic Party is fracturing down the middle, with moderates to the left of us and socialists to the even further left. The warfare was front and center during the recent Iowa Caucuses. For the first time in 76 years, the Des Moines Register canceled the release of its “gold-standard” Iowa Poll after a respondent “raised concerns”. Then an app caused a coding error that tarnished the Democratic Party results in Iowa on the day of the nation’s first caucus. What were the odds of both of these occurrences happening right on cue? And the tech-firm behind the “screw-up” on Iowa’s caucus day was run by “former staffers for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Obama’s presidential campaign, as well as Google, Apple and former DNC employees”.
Obviously, the Iowa Caucus fiasco was rigged to diminish Bernie Claus while raising Joe Biden’s stake to the minimum viability – because, just like in 2016, the Democratic National Committee will attempt to steal the election away from Sanders. Evidently, the Democratic Party elites still don’t trust a socialist to win the U.S. Presidency.
Pass the popcorn.
And, by the way, isn’t the following interesting:
– A gay guy who is running for president has the word “butt” in his name.
– Operation Ukraine/Impeachment CIA “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella’s surname contains the letters C-I-A and in the correct order.
– The name of the tech firm who “botched” the Iowa Caucus results (and run by former Clinton and Obama staffers) is called “Shadow, Inc”
– While, at every turn, a former reality TV star will “Trump” them all
It isn’t ALL just made for TV, right? Because it really is happening, right?
Right?
In any event, like true versus false, or life versus death, or cold versus hot, perhaps Conservative versus Swamp Rat is a valid ideological construct upon which we can expound.
With that in mind, here are seven (7) facts that have become completely obvious since Trump’s election in 2016:
1.) The Swamp Prefers Power over Justice
If The Swamp could be defined as the political establishment, the corporatocracy, globalists, elite bankers, and unelected bureaucrats or the Military-Industrial Complex – then those aligned with The Swamp currently would include RiNOs (Republicans in Name Only), Neocons, the Democratic Party, the Mainstream Media, the Loony Left, social media propagandists and censors, Marxists, liberals, globalists, elderly hippies, welfare moochers, unicorn chasers, transgendered bathroom rights crusaders, rabid feminists, rainbow chasing socialists, Black Lives Matter racists, Antifa agitators, Never Trumpers, Millennial snowflakes, and ALL who subvert the U.S. Constitution for their taxpayer-subsidized paychecks.
Indeed. The value systems of conservative Americans are quite different than those of The Swamp. This is why words like “liberty” and “equality” and “fairness” hold separate meanings for each. In the example of the former, these concepts are the result of natural law. In the latter, they derive more from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Will to Power”; an idea for which the German philosopher also claimed was demonstrated in Darwinism as the “Will to Survive”.
Accordingly, the survival instinct can add entirely new dimensions to the consequences of political power and its inherently fictitious exculpation: “The ends justify the means”. It’s why The Swamp propagates the illusions of narratives over facts; and, in so doing, they have constructed a veritable panopticon of power – a literal bubble where We the People are constantly surveilled, enslaved by debt, and fed a steady diet of falsehoods and opiates; while being selectively censored on YouTube and Twitter, no less.
Pursuant to being tricked by FBI agents, Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to a process crime during Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation in 2017. Just then former FBI Director James Comey tweeted the following Bible scripture:
“But justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”
– Amos 5:24
Paradoxically, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer cited the same verse in the well of the U.S. Senate during the closing arguments of Trump’s impeachment trial. Of course, James Comey and Chuck Schumer referencing Biblical justice is a joke because they know full well what they have done. But, to them, it’s an act put on for the bubbleheads who swallow it all because they believe Trump to be a xenophobic, misogynistic, and racist hater.
Truly, The Swamp has manufactured its own “reality” in the bubble. It’s why race and gender and sexual preference are prioritized over such lofty conceptions of constitutional law and due process. It’s also why open borders and the phony presidential impeachment debacle have taken precedence over routing out corruption from the highest offices of American government.
For over three years, the public has been told President Trump is an illegitimate president because he colluded with the Russians to win in 2016. It was not true, but, in spite of the fact that Democrats actually DID conspire with foreign agents in the 2016 Presidential Election, the Russiagate falsehood was used by the same Democrats to win the U.S. House in the 2018 Midterm Elections so they could, in turn, launch a sham impeachment of the president in order to hack the 2020 Election.
Sadly, today, most Americans are more concerned regarding abortion rights, climate change, and racism than constitutional law and the collapse of longstanding American institutions.
Social Justice and Political Correctness are codes of faux justice that has subverted genuine law and impartiality in the bubble; it is how the New Morality empowers those at the top of the pyramid while enslaving those below. The system will never fix itself. Why would it?
2.) Deception, Legal Gimmicks, and Political Chicanery are Tools The Swamp Uses as Means to its Ends
As witnessed during the Mueller investigation following the 2016 Presidential Election, the Kavanaugh hearings before the 2018 Midterm Elections, and the recent Ukrainegate Impeachment circus prior to the 2020 Presidential Election, the Swamp Rats will say or do anything to achieve political leverage.
Just as a dirty-dossier was used to launch Operation Russiagate against Trump and his supporters, a “whistleblower” was used to launch the Operation Ukrainian Impeachment. Furthermore, Operation Ukraine’s whistleblower complaint was most certainly crafted by Lawfare, LLC. – the same firm that has successfully indicted Team Trump for process crimes while successfully defending the likes of Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Rice, Lynch, Strzok, Page, the Ohr’s, Bill & Hill, et al.
Just as The Swamp delivered Judge Kavanaugh’s alleged rape victims right on cue, so, too did they have Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, served up on a platter for a subpoena surprise in the waning days of their fading impeachment.
To be sure, the impeachment process in the U.S. House was a wholly politically partisan affair, and quite unfair – even to the point of refusing witnesses on behalf of Team Trump. Still, coordinated efforts to sustain the initiative were persistently availed: The Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled that Trump illegally withheld aid to Ukraine as the House Democrats additionally released a “cache of notes and texts from Lev Parnas, a former associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
In fact, President Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon called for an investigation into “coordination between Congressional Democrats and members of the media” regarding the timely release of various last-minute impeachment “bombshells”.
And just days before the final impeachment vote in the U.S. Senate, George Conway, the husband of presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway, projected the bias and fears of Lawfare, LLC onto Senate Republicans for not allowing John Bolton to testify. In an opinion piece, he wrote:
Fear of Trump drives the actions of the spineless GOP caucus, as does fear of the truth, and fear of a partisan base to which none dare speak the truth.
Yet, in Conway’s brazenly partisan advocacy for the US Constitution, and truth, he failed to equally demand the testimonies of faux whistleblower Eric Ciaramella or unofficial Ukrainian lottery winner Hunter Biden.
See how that works? The Swamp remains consistently and completely shameless even as We the People are perfectly captivated by high slimes and intervenors.
3.) There are No Moderates in The Swamp
When all elected politicians represent bipartisan constituencies to varying degrees, then why are the Democrats always unified while a percentage of Republicans consistently strive to reach across the political aisle? Why? Perhaps because only some U.S. Republicans and ALL U.S. Democrats solely serve The Swamp. And, although the myth of moderates in The Swamp continues inside the bubble, the truth is that there are none.
Consider the recent impeachment trial of President Trump: The Senate Democrats, and Republican Mitt Romney, fully understand the high crimes of the Obama administration in Ukraine that were projected onto President Trump. They cannot deny the FISA abuse as outlined within Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report, the fact that House Manager Adam Schiff’s office colluded with the “whistleblower” and then submitted weakly contrived articles of impeachment after a third-world sham process in the U.S. House.
Yet every single Democrat senator voted to overturn the presidency of Donald J. Trump. In so doing, they demonstrated their willingness to disenfranchise over 60 million American voters via illicit articles advanced by a kangaroo court.
Indeed. The allegorical curtain has been torn away, the wizards have been completely exposed, and, Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Even Minnesota’s first elected female U.S. Senator, Amy Klobuchar, as a Democratic Party presidential candidate, claims to be a Midwestern moderate – but she voted in the U.S. Senate to honor and uphold the impeachment fraud. And, certainly, that came as no surprise because she once fooled Judge Brett Kavanaugh when, early in his Supreme Court nomination process, he “expressed appreciation for the way Klobuchar asked probing but respectful questions”; just before she voted to ruin his life without evidence, of course. This, from a University of Chicago Law School graduate who later become a county attorney. But, obviously, not a moderate.
Because there are no moderates in The Swamp.
4.) The Swamp Desires to Disarm the American Public
As established in the paragraphs above, The Swamp seeks power over justice with certain fanaticism. In so doing, the Swamp Rats utilize deception, illusions, and political chicanery. Then what, you may ask, stands in the way of their ultimate goal of global tyranny?
One way to address that question would be to consider what has stalled their nefarious plans for America during the past two centuries. The answer, so far, has been the United States Constitution. Although it’s been badly twisted and bent into its current shape, it has not yet been entirely broken. And why is that? Because the Second Amendment has, by and large, secured constitutional liberties against would-be tyrants and their encroaching totalitarianism.
So far.
But know this: The wolves are in the house.
In his 1991 book, “Behold a Pale Horse”, former United States Naval Intelligence Briefing Team member William Cooper warned of a secret initiative by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency whereby drugs and hypnosis were to be used on mental patients coerced into shooting children in schools.
The government encouraged the manufacture and importation of military firearms for the criminals to use. This is intended to foster a feeling of insecurity, which would lead the American people to voluntarily disarm themselves by passing laws against firearms. Using drugs and hypnosis on mental patients in a process called Orion, the CIA inculcated the desire in these people to open fire on schoolyards and thus inflame the antigun lobby. This plan is well under way, and so far is working perfectly. The middle class is begging the government to do away with the 2nd amendment.
– Cooper, Milton William. (1991). “Behold a Pale Horse”, Light Technology Publications, page 225
Years later Cooper was shot and killed at his home in Eagar, Arizona while resisting arrest.
Now consider the United Kingdom where, for more than a century, various laws restricting firearms were passed until handguns were completely banned in the wake of the 1996 Dunblane School Massacre. After 16 children were shot in that mass shooting, the U.K. passed the Firearms Act 1997 in order to save the children. Except, now, those same children can be knifed at whim in London and even incarcerated for verbally challenging the false precepts of the foreign religion behind such medieval barbarism.
And over the decades in America, mass shootings have continued to occur with certain similarities: First, there is some sort of an active drill, either scheduled or ongoing, and then shots are fired, followed by eyewitness accounts of more than one shooter. Soon, the YouTube videos of those reporting on multiple attackers are scrubbed from the internet. Within hours, the murderer is reported to be extremely troubled, if not insane, and likely on psychotropic drugs, as several people claim they all “saw it coming”, or, in some instances, saying they are completely surprised that the person they knew could massacre so many.
Accordingly, manifestos and/or prophetic postings on social media by the shooter are revealed and, sadly, they are always discovered too late. Most commonly, of course, an AR-type weapon, handgun, or other semi-automatic firearm will have been used with the necessary large-capacity magazines. It is all quite convenient because these are highly coveted targets in the sites of politicians and globalists convening behind armed security on Capitol Hill or at the United Nations.
Finally, like the sun rising after a long dark night, the political establishment crows like roosters about “doing something” so “it never happens again”.
In the aftermath of the Sandyhook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, President Obama issued 23 executive actions and proposed 19 legislative actions. After the Virginia Tech shooting new rules were passed that allowed the Social Security Administration to provide information to the gun background check system of people with “mental disabilities”. After Vegas and Parkland, it was bump-stocks and Red Flag Laws.
Following more recent mass events, such as the Isla Vista California, Gilroy Garlic Festival, El Paso, and Dayton Ohio shootings, the push for federal Red Flag Gun legislation has gained increasing bipartisan support. And if one wants to understand where it’s all going, look no further than what is being proposed and passed in the Democratic-Party-controlled state of Virginia: Universal background checks, gun registry, limitations of AR-type rifles and large-capacity magazines, limits on the number of guns purchased over specific periods of time, and suppressor bans.
All of these measures are labeled as “common sense” initiatives by those deciding how We the People might defend our families in the bottom of the bubble. Common sense? For The Swamp, maybe.
In truth, incremental gun control measures are a spider’s web of encroaching tyranny constructed by The Swamp and prosecuted by Lawfare, LLC; all in accordance to #’s 1, 2, and 3 above.
5.) The Mainstream Media Promotes the Propaganda of The Swamp
Be assured the deception, illusions, and political chicanery utilized by The Swamp would NOT be possible without the complicity of the handful of corporations that comprise the Orwellian Media. Not only does the Mainstream Media misinform the public, but it blatantly deceives the entire world. Truly, the election of Donald Trump has exposed the activist media to all but the most moronic of the morons stumbling around in the bubble.
Undeniably, The Swamp could be drained if not for the endless propagandic spin spewed forth by the modern-day purveyors of bubblevision. Just as the fictional Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s book “1984” rewrote history to realign it with Swamp doctrine and make The Swamp look infallible, it also promoted war hysteria designed to manufacture consensus; and unite citizens against whatever, or whomever, The Swamp deemed culpable.
Orwell’s writings proved prophetic. Because, not only did the corporate media most recently promote The Swamp’s false narratives behind the Russiagate and Ukraine political operations, it specifically targeted Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin as modern-day incarnations of Orwell’s infamous scapegoat, Emmanuel Goldstein. In fact, it has been reported that television networks spent “more than twice as much airtime on the Ukraine probe as they did on the Russia probe” and with “93% negativity toward President Trump”.
Additionally, just before American patriots rallied in Virginia’s capital to protest Democrat Governor Ralph Northam’s draconian gun control proposals, the activist media breathlessly reported on the FBI arresting “three alleged members of a white-supremacist group on federal gun and alien-harboring charges, amid growing concerns about safety surrounding planned gun rights protests in Virginia’s capital…”
Furthermore, as the propagandic press promoted “Hail Mary” bombshells meant to “jolt” Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, it also memory-holed portions of the president’s address to the nation after the airstrike that killed Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani.
Mr. Trump didn’t propose negotiations with Iran and fanned partisan fires in Washington by blaming the Obama administration for signing onto a 2015 nuclear deal that freed up Iran’s access to billions of dollars, asserting those funds paid for weapons used in the attack [on Iraqi bases housing American and allied military forces].
Yet many Americans who didn’t see the address live, will never know.
The Orwellian Media’s mission is NOT to inform the public, but, instead, its purpose is to propagandize the people. Its false narratives are undeniably designed to expedite the downfall of the republic.
6.) Identity Politics and Climate Change are the Twin Pillars of the New Religion
If Trump was elected on the twin platforms of immigration and trade, The Resistance has countered back with melanin, genitalia, and the weather.
Identity politics and the legislation of social justice policies have stifled the rights of free speech and freedom of association throughout the democratic nations of the western world. And they materialized as the result of language manipulation. Remember when gender used to represent male or female? Yet, in that example, the word “identity” was added after “gender” thus opening a verifiable Pandora’s Box of Orwellian Newspeak.
Today in formerly free societies, men and women are forced to navigate Genderqueer and Non-Binary Identities, consisting of an entirely new lexicon including neo-designations such as Agender, Cisgender, Ceterosexual, Ceteroromantic, Demigender, Enby, and Epicene; just to name a few.
Political Correctness is a means of thought control in the bubble, designed to protect imaginary victims from the societal sins of xenophobia, sexism, homophobism, and racism.
And climate change is a means for global regulation and taxation.
The Swamp has implemented both schemes in order to unite the world via social justice and open borders illegal immigration. It works because many people in the bubble acknowledge the wisdom of loving others while caring for Mother Earth. Moreover, many others must believe in the new morality as atonement for their guilt.
It is a new religion. Or, perhaps, an old one with new names.
Nevertheless, the new morality has NOT waned since the election of Donald Trump. On the contrary, The Swamp has translated Trump into a veritable orange-haired devil in order to agitate the bubbleheads, thus breathing new life into the social justice movement. It’s why Deplorables now think twice before wearing MAGA caps in public and why climate change has a new prophetess in Greta Thunberg®.
Advertising works best when emotions run high; because all consensus is manufactured in a bubble.
7.) The Technocratic Surveillance State Grows Unabated
In the wake of September 11, 2001, the passing of the Patriot Act, and the revelations of former government contractor, Edward Snowden, the concerns of Americans regarding violations to the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution have not mattered to The Swamp.
As a result of what became known as Edward Snowden’s 2013 Global Surveillance Disclosures, American and British initiatives were exposed including PRISM and Tempora that revealed cooperation with governments around the world working in connection with multi-national corporations including Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google, British Telecommunications, and Verizon. Moreover, backdoor data-gathering programs such as XKeyscore were unveiled along with other various ways by which government spooks could intercept phone calls, text messages, and private data from commonly used internet platforms like Yahoo.
Just as technological breakthroughs in computing and the proliferation of “smart” communication and entertainment devices gave rise to government spying, it was not a very large leap of understanding to see how easy it would be to blackmail and control not only citizens, but government administrators, politicians, officials, and even judges, around the world.
This is why Senator Chuck Schumer said the following in an MSNBC interview on January 3rd, 2017:
Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you.
Although Donald Trump appears to have survived attempts by the Five Eyes to take down his presidency, his administration has not slowed the development of the Surveillance State. Not in the least. There is no denying that “Big Tech is bigger than ever” and “the five most valuable U.S. tech companies now account for over 17% of the S&P 500, up from 11% in 2015”.
To the sounds of mouse-clicks, once free people have “accepted” the “terms” of their surrender and have forfeited their liberty in the name of convenience. Like buzzing insects, the citizens of modern societies are caught in silicon honey traps mortgaged with plastic and electronically powered via USB cable nooses wrapped tightly around their collective throats.
The Technocratic Powers That Be wield weapons far more powerful than any time prior in history and soon, people will wake up to realize the electronic buzzing sound ringing in their ears was not emanating from their own wings, but rather, it was merely the sound of drones over their heads.
And it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to see where the trends are leading:
In truth, the charade is that all political theater plays out on a stage constructed by the surveillance state. It means, over time, selective pressure can be applied, at will, during the show.
And it is the best show on earth.
When Trump tweeted that we’d be on World War 6 if he listened to his disgruntled former national security advisor, John Bolton, it was quite brilliant on several levels – the least of which was putting the Democrats in the position of defending a warmongering Neocon they used to hate; a civil-war era appearing Caucasian who the president fired, no less.
It was riveting bubblevision. No doubt.
And now, top GOP Senators have claimed the Horowitz Report actually misled the public and are demanding Attorney General William Barr declassify some footnotes. But, sadly, it will likely make little difference because television has programmed our generation into sheep. And social media has further progressed a percentage of plebes into robotic puppets in the bubble. They’ve been psychologically programmed for one world under power.
Although Trump may appear invincible at the time of this writing, ask yourselves who controls the helium to the biggest economic balloons. The stock market is the pressure release valve. But when the bond market blows, the USD is toast. And, as supply chains snap and the bankers foreclose on the world, there will be ever-expanding pain for everyone to varying degrees, as the earth exhales.
Therefore, all current global trends, including especially Coronavirus®, are about establishing control prior to the advent of a new order. Although the immediate future will be anarchy, out of that chaos will come order administered by technological switches and gates. And the future will be cashless because slavery is rooted in economics.
Until then, expect The Swamp to continuously spin electronic and digital visions like dreamweavers casting a cabled web of anima mundi over the earth. Be assured, they will propagandize the orthodoxies of human secularism and social justice on behalf of Earth’s children as they anxiously await the arrival of Bernie Claus riding on his glorious unicorn down a vibrantly shining rainbow.
Ford’s Lending Arm Does The Dirty Work For Parent Company, Generating More Profit Now Than Ever
At a time when the global automotive market is mired in deep recession – and things likely aren’t going to be getting any better, with China in the midst of an epidemic – Ford’s lending arm is acting as the profit backbone for the company, generating more profit now than it ever has for the company.
Amid an epic loss, and the resignation of the company’s president, Ford credit now generates a remarkable half of the automaker’s profit, according to Bloomberg, which is up from 15% to 20% in the past. The company’s credit arm makes loans to dealers stocking vehicles and then the consumers who buy them. Ford is relying on its financing unit to help it fund “multi-billion outlays on electric and self-driving cars” now.
The parent corporation, however, is dealing with $11 billion in charges from a restructuring that “could take years”.
Lawrence Orlowski, an analyst at S&P Global Ratings said of Ford’s credit arm: “It’s like the ballast that keeps the ship steady. It’s a balancing act.”
The amount of vehicles that Ford has been selling has been on the decline for the last three years and the company is losing money in China.
But the company would be “far worse off” without its Ford Motor Credit unit, which is paying for the company’s capex by borrowing in the debt markets and paying a dividend back to the parent company. Expectations are for the credit arm to contribute nearly $3 billion annually to Ford over the next 2 years. In 2017, that contribution was just $400 million.
The company’s credit arm borrowed about $10 billion in the U.S. investment grade bond market over the last 12 months. Meanwhile, it has been over 3 years since Ford itself has issued bonds. Moody’s downgraded Ford to junk in September and S&P cut its rating on the company to its lowest investment grade rating in October. Another downgrade from S&P could remove Ford out of some major indices, which has weighed on the minds of investors for the better part of the last year.
All eyes are on the credit division now, especially, as the global automotive market continues to falter. Ford is going to be rolling out a new line of SUVs and redesigning its F-150 as part of its recent restructuring, as well.
Analysts are wary of both cost risk and execution risk.
David Whiston, an equity strategist with Morningstar said: “It’s quite clear Ford is not where it should be, but the finance arm is a bright spot. Obviously you want the whole company operating at full power, which you don’t have right now.”
Ford credit is also responsible for protecting the parent company’s dividend. The $2.4 billion it paid back to its parent in 2019 may be “unsustainable” in the future, analysts say, because Ford’s dividend consumers a much greater percentage of its cash flow than peers.
In fact, Bloomberg notes how further important the credit arm would become/is during a recession:
In a recession, Ford Credit’s role becomes even more important. It doesn’t play much in the subprime market, so the ratio of its losses to total customer bills outstanding stayed below 2% during the Great Recession, a low level. Its repossession rate never got higher than 3.2%.
Those strong metrics allowed Ford’s captive finance unit to generate a dividend for the parent even in 2009, when U.S. auto sales slumped to a 27-year low.
Tim Stone, Ford’s chief financial officer, said during a November interview: “With a healthy portfolio, a captive balance sheet in an economic downturn actually starts generating and kicking off a bunch of cash flow. We take a very thoughtful approach to that business.”
Ford Credit has sent $28 billion over the last two decades to Ford.
