There’s something happening that the unelected oligarchs I like to call The Davos Crowdhate more than anything else. They can’t seem to buy people off anymore…
When we look around the world today at the plethora of popular/populist uprisings both peaceful and unruly we see the same thread running through them at their core.
The people simply don’t believe that the system works for them anymore. Whatever the catalyst was that got them off their couches and into the streets was the proverbial last straw.
And they can’t be bought.
We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of the Gilet Jaunes protests in France. The original €0.25 tax on diesel fuel died a long time ago. President Macron of France though he could just throw the unruly peasants some scraps, not take their final piece of bread from their tables and that would placate people bereft of not only their future but, more importantly, their dignity.
We’re three and a half years from the Brexit vote and Nigel Farage is still fighting the establishment in the U.K. who are dead set against it. This week he stood down 317 candidates to stave off a Remainer-heavy hung parliament and the Tories responded by trying to buy off even more of his candidates.
The big scandal wasn’t that the Tories tried to buy off Farage, they’ve been trying to do that for years and it hasn’t worked. Now, they are brazenly trying to buy off the people around him to deny the Brexit Party any seats in Westminster to pave the way for the ultimate Brexit betrayal.
This goes far beyond putting party before country. This is all about protecting the political establishment from all threats domestic, but not foreign since they’re all committed neoliberal globalist scumbags.
Farage knows this and that’s why he went public with this information. The jury is still out whether the voters will respond to this and reward Farage’s people with seats in Westminster to finally change the dynamic in the heart of the old imperial capital of Europe.
Because it’s a lot easier to bribe a dozen or so candidates than it is to bribe the hundreds of thousands they could represent. This is the fundamental reason why representative governments don’t work.
It’s why they are just as bad as top-down unelected oligarchies regardless of the type — secular, religious, technocratic, communist, democratic.
It’s reached a boiling point in Iran where protests have broken out again like in 2009, and just like in France, over a hike in fuel prices. Governments can have all the extra territorial ambitions they want but at some point they have to provide the basic services the people expect of them.
Just wait until the cost of living here in the U.S. rises to the point where government handouts here can’t cover the costs of the basics. We haven’t quite reached that point nationally, and we won’t in the next couple of years as capital flees into the U.S. in a massive safe-haven trade, but we will.
Because while that safe-haven trade is occurring our government masters won’t get the hint about how much we don’t like them. They will keep the gravy train running on-time just often enough to maintain the illusion of control until things get so expensive here the people revolt.
In Chile, the protesters there are fed up with the fake, corporatist privatization and rampant corruption of the country’s basic infrastructure. Again, a real revolt over a This is a revolt against false liberation of nationalized businesses. It’s the same thing we see all over the West.
It will spark a push in Chile back towards the Left and socialist nationalizations which will give rise to adolescent criticisms of capitalism from the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.
And the sad part is, they’ll be right. It’s what they’ve been doing with health care in the U.S. for decades, purposefully destroying the marketplace for health care while allowing the worst excesses of the private portion of it to thrive in a captured market of regulatory nightmares and obscene wealth extraction.
These systems become so cocked up that even reasonable people scream for a nationalized solution to make things better, at least in the short run.
Why do you think the big tech firms are acting like openly evil overlords? Because they’re stupid? No. It’s because the longer-term goal is complete centralized regulation of speech in the public forum.
And the only way to get there and have it be sustainable is if the people scream for it themselves. Conservatives are being gaslit into pushing for oversight into Facebook and Google because they are being treated with such obvious bias.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that while we’re still falling for a lot of these false dichotomies, these Hobson’s choices, at the electoral level we are fundamentally aware of who the enemies to civil society are.
And that’s why The Davos Crowd is getting nervous. That’s why they are bribing Brexit Party members to stand down. It’s why they are ramping up the Project Fear on the economic costs of Brexit, Climate Change, Private Health Care and decrying tax cuts as tyrannical.
While at the same time they continue to try and buy us off with cheap money, rising stock markets and easier credit terms to buy depreciating junk like new cars which cost more than many have equity in their homes.
But we’re not for sale anymore.
If we were we wouldn’t keep voting for these populist reformers from the left, right and center. We wouldn’t be descending into the kind of toxic political discourse that is only interested in scoring points against the other side to validate our own anger and dispossession.
We would be looking for solutions. But we’re not ready for that yet. We may not be for sale anymore but we’re not ready to take on the responsibility of fixing what’s broken.
It’s why we keep hearing stories about Millennials making peace with living like rats in cages for $800 a month rather than building enough wealth to *gasp* find a mate and *gasp* start a family.
But they know, deep down, this isn’t sustainable. It’s inhuman. But curling up in a rat’s nest and calling it home is better than taking to the streets, for now. And their depression will turn to nihilism, if it hasn’t already, and eventually will explode in the ugliest ways.
People are capable of selling themselves on the virtues of a terrible life only for so long, of putting up with suffering because there’s still a small comparative advantage to going along versus striking out.
There is little to no direct cost for voting against the system that is bankrupting you financially, emotionally and spiritually. That’s why we see things like Trump, Brexit, Catalonia and Italy.
But eventually voting isn’t enough, especially when it’s obvious that if voting changed anything they would have outlawed it years ago… only they pretty much have.
Over and over we’re being told we voted wrong, that our betters will fix our mistakes for us. But it’s not working anymore. And as the inherent inconsistencies of these institutions take center stage over the next few years, we’ll see even more uprisings around the world.
Let’s hope it stays peaceful. That enough people like Farage and his ilk simply say, “No. I’m not for sale.” And the voters, cynical as they are, believe them.
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Germany Should Immediately Stop Training Chinese Soldiers: Amnesty International
Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has called on Germany to stop training Chinese soldiers “in light of the human rights situation in China and the general role of the military there,” according to the group’s arms and human rights expert, Mathias John.
“…there is no justifiable reason for Germany to help train the Chinese military,” John told German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, adding that in light of the current situation in Hong Kong, “the German government should send a clear sign and immediately cease any military cooperation,” per DW.
Hong Kong has been gripped by increasingly violent protests over the past several months, stemming from a now-withdrawn extradition bill which would allow suspects to be deported to mainland China to face trail in communist courts. Much like France’s Yellow Vest protests, the original issue has expanded to a general anti-goverment movement.
Bild said it had seen a top-secret military report that lists 62 countries, including China, whose soldiers are expected to participate in training exercises with the German military in 2020. German soldiers are pegged to train foreign soldiers in the areas of management, logistics, and press and public relations.
Responding to Amnesty’s demand, a spokesperson for the Defense Ministry said that Chinese soldiers regularly participate in educational events organized by the German military, the newspaper reports. These include international officer courses as well as officer training courses offered at military schools, universities and military leadership academies.
“Our goal is to share our democratic values with citizens of other countries,” said the spokesperson. –DW
So, Germany gets their gas from Russia and trains Chinese soldiers. And how much are they kicking into NATO?
How a fuel-tax protest turned into a full-blown revolt against the elites…
One year ago, 288,000 protesters took to the streets in over 2,000 locations across France. Dressed in their unmistakable hi-vis jackets, the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) blockaded highways and petrol stations, occupied roundabouts and toll booths, and marched through town centres. The protests were initially sparked by a hike in fuel tax but they quickly came to embody a wider resentment towards the status quo. This weekend will be the yellow vests’ acte 53 – the 53rd consecutive week of protest to mark the anniversary of the movement.
Just a year-and-a-half after the election of President Macron, which was hailed by liberals across the West as a turning point against the populist wave of 2016, the yellow-vest movement staged what would become the most significant revolt in France since les événements of May 1968. The French working classes, who had for so long been marginalised economically, politically and culturally, were finally making their voices heard.
A proposed hike in fuel tax was the spark that lit the fuse. Priscilla Ludovsky, an entrepreneur who sells cosmetics online, started a Change.org petition back in May calling for fuel prices to be lowered. Initially, it only had a small amount of traction. But it was picked up by local radio and in a local newspaper article, which went viral on Facebook. By October the petition had gained over 800,000 signatures. Truck drivers Eric Drouet and Bruno Lefevre created a Facebook event calling for people to block roads on 17 November. But this only gives a tiny glimpse of what was happening online – all kinds of viral videos, petitions and Facebook groups were springing up. Though some figures, like Drouet, emerged as unofficial spokespeople, suddenly finding themselves invited on to TV debates with politicians, the movement began without leaders and has remained leaderless to this day.
Peripheral France
The causes of the yellow-vest revolt go far deeper than the fuel tax. Nevertheless, the tax is a useful prism through which to understand the movement, and, in particular, the chasm between the elites who make decisions and the people on the receiving end of them.
On a purely technocratic basis, the fuel tax makes sense. The French government is committed to meeting its international obligations to reduce CO2 emissions. The fuel-price hike would be used to finance renewable-energy projects and would discourage the use of diesel and petrol cars.
But then the actual politics kick in. The fuel-tax hike was implemented at a time when the price of diesel had already risen by 23 per cent in a single year. While only 13 per cent of people in Paris drive cars, people who live outside the major cities rely heavily on their cars and they were being hammered by the policy. A carbon tax that disproportionately affected the working class was only ever going to add insult to injury. As one oft-repeated yellow-vest slogan goes:
‘The government talks about the end of the world. We are talking about the end of the month.’
Another source of irritation was the government’s decision to cut the speed limit on rural roads from 90km/h to 80km/h (around 50mph) in early January. Perhaps a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but again, this was experienced by many people as a needless imposition from an aloof and indifferent elite. Many saw it as an excuse to make money out of speeding tickets. In response, the yellow vests managed to take nearly 60 per cent of the country’s speed cameras out of operation, usually by covering them in tape, painting them black, or smashing them up.
These measures came against a broader backdrop of widening regional inequality. More than 10 years ago, geographer Christophe Guilluy foresaw a backlash to these developments when he came up with the concept of ‘peripheral France’. This described the France of post-industrial towns, urban sprawl, villages and suburbs that have been left behind – or actively excluded – from the modern globalised economy.
Police clash with the yellow vests near the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, on 8 December 2018.
As Guilluy points out in Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, Periphery and the Future of France, ‘peripheral France’ actually encompasses the majority of citizens – around 60 per cent of the population according to Eurostat figures. Despite this, government policy for the past four decades has consistently favoured larger metropolitan areas. Because the lion’s share of state funding for transport, health and education goes to the cities, people are having to drive further and further afield to access basic services. Between 2000 and 2010, 75 per cent of growth occurred in France’s metropolitan areas, and the GDP of these areas is now 50 per cent higher than the rest of the country. Across the West, working-class people are living further and further away from where their country’s wealth is being generated.
According to Guilluy, the French working class has effectively been decommissioned. Its members are surplus to requirements in the globalised economy. The prospects for peripheral France are gloomy. People who live in these areas suffer high rates of unemployment and many who are employed live precariously. A gilet jaune could be earning anything between 1,000 and 2,000 euros per month. He or she could be unemployed or even middle class. But as Guilluy explained to spiked: ‘[The gilet jaunes] know that even if they have a job today, they could lose it tomorrow and they won’t find anything else.’ Meanwhile, admission to the big cities to find work has become nigh-on impossible as housing costs soar beyond reach. Over recent years, these regional disparities have started to express themselves through new political divides. The story of Paris vs the France of the yellow vests is also true of London vs Brexit Britain, or Milan vs the rest of populist Italy.
A revolt of the ignored
As the French working class has been economically marginalised, it has been sidelined from politics, too. The denial of democracy has forced people to find new and innovative – sometimes insurrectional – ways of making their voices heard.
The most blatant attempt by the elites to deny democracy came after the 2005 referendum on the European Constitution. Just before the vote, leading pollster Roland Cayrol noted the ‘clear division between a well-off, confident France and an anxious, struggling France’, with blue and lower-grade white-collar workers, the self-employed and farmers firmly in the No camp. In the end, 55 per cent of the French electorate voted No. But the political class in France and in the EU all agreed that the message from the No vote was insufficiently clear, and just a few years later the rejected constitution was simply repackaged as the Lisbon Treaty and signed into law.
The French are, of course, famous for protesting and going on strike. But this noisy engagement disguises the way the French political system militates against democracy. The French presidency is one of the most powerful offices in the democratic world. This makes France, in effect, a ‘republican monarchy’. Parliament, on the other hand, is toothless. It was rendered even more so by reforms in 2001 that changed the electoral calendar to align parliamentary elections with presidential ones. Although the reforms shortened the presidential term, they also entailed the removal of midterm elections that could put an electoral check on presidents. For historian Robert Tombs, the monarchical nature of the presidency makes it prone to political failure:
‘Policies are frequently decided by the president without significant consultation, then, in the absence of an effective legislative body to channel criticism within the system, are instead abandoned in the face of public outcry, including strikes and resistance in the streets.’
The political parties must also take responsibility for failing to give voice to the concerns of working-class people. Nearly three-quarters of French people think that politicians are ‘corrupt’ and 87 per cent feel that governments (of the left and the right) take no interest in ‘people like them’. Consequently, the centre parties have been reduced to rumps. In the 2015 regional elections, the centre-right Republicans, the centre-left Socialist Party, the Left Front and the Greens were voted for by just 18 per cent of the working-class electorate.
Working-class voters had been slowly drifting away from the Socialists since the 1980s, when Francois Mittérand’s government quickly abandoned its planned socialist reforms in order to embrace European integration. By the time of the 2017 presidential election, just five years after its first presidential victory in decades, the Socialist Party had slumped to just 6.36 per cent of the first-round vote.
The 2017 election was supposed to be a watershed moment. France had rejected populism and had instead embraced a new centrist politics. Emmanuel Macron was held up as a liberalising reformer, an adept technocrat and a popular anti-populist. The former Rothschild banker was to be the saviour of France and of the EU. The Economist, the bible of liberal centrists, celebrated his election victory by depicting him as a modern-day Jesus: literally walking on water.
But beneath the headlines, disenchantment with the political class was clear. Some 10million people expressed their anger by voting for Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Front National (re-named National Rally in 2018). According to IPSOS polling, the only socioeconomic category to back Le Pen over Macron was blue-collar workers. Among voters who said they found it ‘very difficult’ to cope financially at their current income level, 69 per cent voted for Le Pen.
Though many voters might have relished giving the establishment a bloody nose, clearly Le Pen’s unpalatable politics was not a price worth paying. Abstentionism was perhaps a more acceptable outlet for voters’ frustrations. In the second round of the presidential election, there was a record three million votes blancs (expressing a preference for neither candidate). The legislative elections that followed had the lowest turnout in the history of the Fifth Republic.
It took the emergence of the gilets jaunes to galvanise members of forgotten France. Around the time of the first yellow-vest protests, just 25 per cent of French voters said they approved of President Macron. In contrast, 73 per cent told pollsters they supported the gilets jaunes.
Experiments in democracy
Despite having no leader and no official manifesto, the gilets jaunes have coalesced around popular demands for better living conditions and for a greater say in political life. Democratic reform is high on the agenda. Many protesters have the letters ‘RIC’ scrawled on their jackets or on placards, which stand for référendum d’initiative citoyenne (citizens’ initiative referendum). They are calling for a referendum to be triggered on any proposal that can gather 700,000 signatures or more. They argue that this would allow the public to veto laws, withdraw from treaties and amend the constitution.
Of course, the problem with referendums alone is that the political class can simply ignore or frustrate any results it dislikes, as happened in France in 2005 and as has been the story of Brexit since 2016. Real, lasting change needs real representation. Attempts to set up formal political parties have, however, been unsuccessful. Ingrid Levasseur, a care worker, set up a gilets-jaunes party in January, based around the referendum demand to contest the EU elections. Early polls put the party at 13 per cent – just behind Macron’s La Republique En Marche and Le Pen’s Rassemblement National or National Rally. But just three weeks later, Levasseur quit. Lots of gilets jaunes were angry at what they saw as a use of the movement for personal political gain. Another prominent campaigner, Jacline Mouraud – who became famous for a viral video attacking Macron – also set up a party in January, Les Émergents, to contest the local elections in 2020. But by April, a number of members resigned from the party, not wanting to be part of a ‘cult of personality’.
Emmanuel Macron addresses supporters after winning the French Presidential Election, at The Louvre, 7 May 2017.
Others have experimented with other forms of direct democracy. In Commercy, a small north-eastern town which has faced two decades of industrial collapse, a group of yellow vests have started their own citizens’ popular assembly. They constructed a wooden hut in the town square – nicknamed the Chalet of Solidarity – to hold meetings and to organise (though it has since been demolished by the mayor). From these regular meetings they have elected delegates to attend national assemblies, meeting with other delegates involved with similar initiatives across France. Some 600 yellow-vest delegates from 200 groups gathered in Montpellier earlier this month to discuss plans for the big anniversary on 17 November.
The revenge of the elites
Almost as soon as the first yellow vests emerged, members of the liberal establishment felt the need to denounce them. President Macron was quick to decry the protests as ‘shameful’. Ministers immediately briefed the press that the yellow vests had links to the far right. Macron’s strongest rebuke was made in his New Year’s message, which he used to brand the yellow vests a ‘hate-filled crowd’, who attack ‘elected representatives, the forces of law and order, journalists, Jews, foreigners, homosexuals’.
The centre-left daily Libération noted that following the first weekend of protests, commentators were divided between those who saw the protesters as representing the ‘just anger of the people’, and those who saw them as a ‘band of polluting oafs, addicted to their cars, who need to be dealt with by the police’. One prominent Brussels correspondent tweeted that the yellow vests were simply a ‘movement of hicks’.
The script could have almost been written in advance. The dismissal of working-class grievances or any challenge to the status quo as ‘fascist’ or ‘racist’ has become a tragic feature of politics common to almost all Western nations. Much of the same hysteria that followed the Brexit vote appeared in France in reaction to the yellow vests. The gilets jaunes are, in class terms, the French equivalent of the ‘deplorables’ or ‘gammon’. Only in France, the elite backlash took a violent turn.
There have, of course, been many acts of violence from yellow-vest protesters. The third weekend, for instance, was one of the most violent, as protests in Paris turned into full-blown riots. In Paris, the Arc de Triomphe was vandalised, daubed with graffiti. A bust of Napoleon was smashed. Over 100 cars were set on fire. In early January, protesters broke into a government ministry with a forklift truck. On many weekends, the day began peacefully as protesters from the provinces marched up and down the Champs Élysées. But by the early evening, a different crowd had joined the fray, often among them some black-bloc agitators, some donning a yellow vest, others not.
Nevertheless, the violence from the police has been extraordinary and out of all proportion. Between November 2018 and June 2019, according to figures compiled and verified by independent journalist David Dufresne and Médiapart, 860 protesters were injured by the police – 315 suffered head injuries; 24 lost the use of an eye; and five had hands torn off. Among these victims are not only protesters but also journalists and medics. Police have been filmed beating elderly and disabled people, as well as using tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets against peaceful protesters. The main source of injuries has been ‘Flashball’ rubber bullets. This non-lethal weapon has been banned in every EU country except France.
The supposedly ‘liberal’ Macron has also presided over a wider climate of authoritarianism in response to the gilets jaunes. In January, French MPs passed draconian measures to ban unauthorised protests. In March, prime minister Édouard Philippe even instituted a blanket ban on protest in some of the areas most hit by vandalism, including the Champs Élysées, as well as certain parts of Bordeaux, Toulouse and Nice. Faced with running the gauntlet of tear gas, rubber bullets and possible arrest, protesting became less and less attractive as the months passed, leading to an ever-dwindling turnout.
The search for solidarity
The gilets jaunes have won some important victories, even if the establishment has won the war overall. The fuel-tax hike was put on hold, and, just three weeks into the protests, President Macron unveiled a €10 billion package of wage increases and tax cuts for low earners and pensioners. Companies were also encouraged to give out Christmas bonuses, which would be tax free up to 1,000€.
But perhaps the most important consequences have been less tangible. The hi-vis jackets became the defining symbol of a movement that made a very simple but important statement: ‘We exist.’ Those who had been long forgotten could be ignored no more. The fact that these yellow jackets are owned by all French drivers – it is a legal requirement to carry one in your car in case you break down at night – made it easy for people to identify themselves with the movement. And it did something else, too: it fostered a new and necessary solidarity in an otherwise atomised society. Long may the revolt continue.
Andrew Bacevich rightly rejects the idea that there was ever a Pax Americana in the Middle East:
“It took many decades to build a Pax Americana in the Middle East,” X writes. Not true: it took only a handful of hours – the time he invested in writing his essay. The Pax Americana is a figment of X’s imagination.
Defenders of U.S. hegemony like to make what they think is a flattering comparison between the U.S. and the Roman Empire, but where the Romans made a desert and called it peace the U.S. has gone to war in the desert again and again with no end in sight.
Not only has the U.S. not brought peace, but there is little reason to think that our government is capable of doing so. More to the point, the U.S. has no right to keep meddling in the affairs of these nations. It would also be accurate to say that the more American involvement there has been in the region, the less pax there has been there. There is nowhere else in the world where our foreign policy is as intensely militarized, and it is no accident that it is also where our foreign policy is most destructive. If the U.S. genuinely desired stability and the security of energy supplies, it would not be waging an economic war on Iran, and it wouldn’t be fueling a disgraceful war on Yemen. The author of that piece, William Wechsler, notably has nothing to say about either one of those policies.
Opponents of U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East make two major claims: that withdrawal would harm U.S. interests and that it would make the region worse off than it already is.
The second point is wrong but debatable, and the first one depends on an absurdly expansive definition of what U.S. interests are. The piece that Bacevich is answering asserts that “it would be a terrible mistake and deeply harmful to the United States” to withdraw from the region, but the author does not show that current troop levels of more than 50,000 people are necessary or even useful for securing U.S. interests. The U.S. didn’t have and didn’t need a large military presence in the Middle East for the entire Cold War, and it doesn’t need to have one now. Having a military presence in the region has directly contributed to increased threats to U.S. security through terrorism, and it made the Iraq war debacle possible. The greatest harm to U.S. security has come from our ongoing extensive military involvement in this part of the world.
Neither does the author demonstrate that U.S. foreign policy up until now has actually been doing the job he thinks it has. For instance, he mentions “supporting a delicate balance of power that promotes regional stability and protects our allies,” but looking back over just the last twenty years of U.S. foreign policy in the region there is no evidence that the U.S. has been supporting a balance of power or promoted regional stability. On the contrary, to the extent that there was a balance of power at the start of this century, the U.S. set about destroying it by overthrowing the Iraqi government, and it has further contributed to the destabilization of at least three other countries through direct or indirect involvement in military interventions. The clients that the U.S. has in the Middle East aren’t allies and we aren’t obliged to protect them, but the U.S. hasn’t done a terribly good job of protecting them, either. The U.S. has managed to indulge its clients in reckless and atrocious behavior that has also made them less secure and undermined our own security interests. Support for the war on Yemen is a good example of that. Enabling the Saudi coalition’s war has bolstered Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), devastated and fractured Yemen, and exposed Saudi Arabia to reprisal attacks that it had never suffered before.
The other major flaw with the Wechsler piece is that he is warning against something that isn’t happening:
As campaign promises tend to become governing realities for American foreign policy, the prospect of a full U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East now stands before us.
If only that were true. The U.S. has more troops in the region than it did at the start of this year. There is no sign that those numbers will be reduced anytime soon. Support for the war on Yemen continues, and the president has gone out of his way to keep arming the Saudi coalition. Even in Syria, there will still be an illegal U.S. military presence for the foreseeable future. Full withdrawal is nowhere in sight right now. The U.S. is heading in the opposite direction. The author pretends that withdrawal is in the offing and then urges the next president to “reverse this course,” but there is nothing for the next president to reverse. So why rail against something that hasn’t happened and isn’t likely to occur? This is an old tactic of making the option of withdrawing from the region seem so extreme and dangerous that it has to be rejected out of hand, but these scare tactics are less and less effective as we see the mounting costs of open-ended conflict and deep entanglement in the affairs of other countries.
The author wants the next administration “to reestablish American leadership in the Middle East, restore deterrence with our adversaries, and begin renewing trust with our partners and allies,” but he has not made a persuasive case that “American leadership” in the region is worth “reestablishing” even if it were possible to get back to the way things were before the Iraq war. Many of the “partners and allies” in question are themselves unreliable and have become liabilities, and many of the adversaries do not really threaten the U.S. Bacevich concludes that there needs to be a radical overhaul of U.S. foreign policy in the region on account of its colossal failures:
Given the dimensions of that failure, the likelihood of resuscitating X’s illusory Pax is essentially zero.
There is no going back to an imagined Golden Age of American statecraft in the Middle East. The imperative is to go forward, which requires acknowledging how wrongheaded U.S. policy in region has been ever since FDR had his famous tete-a-tete with King Ibn Saud and Harry Truman rushed to recognize the newborn State of Israel.
Once we acknowledge those errors, the next step is not to fall into the same patterns out of a misguided desire for “leadership” and domination. Instead of chasing after a fantasy of imposing peace in some other part of the world, we need to stop our destabilizing and destructive policies that perpetuate conflict and make new wars more likely.
Meet The Man In Charge Of Building Elon Musk’s “Boring” Las Vegas Tunnel
So you’ve officially won the contract from Las Vegas to build a “subterranean transit system” by undercutting the bids of established players in the engineering space.
Now what?
Well, now comes the hard part: the Boring Company is going to actually have to prove that they have the technology and the talent to take on a large scale commercial project, instead of a test run using a go-kart on skates in 50 feet of tunnel near Tesla headquarters.
And who better to be in charge of the project than former restaurant owner and Boring Company President Steve Davis, according to Bloomberg. Davis’ former bar, not unlike the Boring Company, was a bit odd. It sold “Ring Pops, kept a Bedazzler on the premises and gave 10% off to anyone who dressed up as Carlton from the TV show Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”
And now he’s going to be drilling a hole through Las Vegas. Perfect.
Now, Davis will be on site on Friday to mark the beginning of tunnel drilling under the Las Vegas convention center. The $48.7 million project is the first, and only, major project so far for the Boring Company. Pit construction and other preliminary work on the project began two months ago.
The plan is for Las Vegas convention center attendees to be able to board Teslas running along a throughway underground and be moved half the distance of the complex in just 1 minute.
Mike Wongkaew, who was a Boring Co. engineer until late last year, said of Davis: “He has the ability to inspire people. He also rolls up his sleeves and helps out.”
Wongkaew said Davis was among those helping the Boring Company finish its Hawthorne test tunnel. He has been called a “sharp engineer” by colleagues.
Juan Reyes, former acting administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration said: “He’s a technical guy. They really count on him to resolve issues.”
But there are apparently “no shortage of issues” at the Boring Company today. Two major projects – one in Washington and one in Chicago – have both been put on hold. In Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel’s successor, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, called Musk’s promise to build the tunnel without city money “a total fantasy”.
Additional critics have called into question the safety of the company’s tunnels and its lack of experience with large scale project. But the company believes that it is their new, disruptive thinking that is going to allow it to develop technology to build tunnels “faster and cheaper”.
Yeah, just like the alien dreadnaught was going to revolutionize auto manufacturing. Now, we’re building cars in a tent.
Davis has been working for Musk since 2003, when he was hired at SpaceX. He has two master’s degrees – one in particle physics and the other in aerospace engineering. Being with Musk for almost two decades definitely makes him one of Musk’s longest standing employees.
One SpaceX engineer said of him: “He’s been working 16 hours a day every day for years. He gets more done than 11 people working together.”
He has also performed major feats of engineering for Musk. For instance, Musk once assigned him with the task of making a $120,000 part for just $5,000. Davis worked on it for months and figured out a way to make the part for just $3,900.
While working for SpaceX, he also decided to get into the frozen yogurt industry:
At SpaceX, Davis spent a few years working in different locations, including Omelek Island in the Marshall Islands, where the company once had launch facilities, as well as its Southern California headquarters. Then, a little over a decade ago, he moved to Washington to open the company’s D.C. office. There, missing the type of frozen yogurt he’d grown accustomed to in California, he decided to learn to make it himself via trial and error, according to an interview with a local radio station.
As a side project, he opened his own yogurt store, Mr. Yogato, in the city’s Dupont Circle neighborhood, three months before the first successful launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 1 vehicle in 2008. Mr. Yogato customers who answered trivia questions correctly got 10% off, as did anyone who could stump Davis on a Seinfeld question, according to the “Rules of Yogato” posted on the shop’s website. Those who came dressed as tennis star Bjorn Borg got 25% off.
Davis also started working on a PhD while at SpaceX, pursuing a degree in economics at George Mason University. There, he wrote his 2010 dissertation at U.S. currency debasement. In the preface to his dissertation, as one does, he noted that he “one day hoped to open a restaurant called ‘Little Yohai,’ perhaps finding inspiration in Morrie Robert Yohai, inventor of the Cheez Doodle.”
He has since sold his bar in 2015 and sold his yogurt shop for $1, after holding a contest to select the new owner. Davis has also “served as a member of the board of advisers of the Atlas Society,” a group dedicated to exploring the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
In 2016, when Musk started Boring Company, he brought Davis on stage with him and joked with him about their plans for using the company’s waste products to sell “Boring Bricks”. Davis seemed to have a good rapport with Musk, which is probably why he has stayed on board with him for so long.
But not everyone is enthused about this friendship. Las Vegas’ mayor, Carolyn Goodman, has taken a stance against the project, citing “the company’s track record of completing zero commercial projects so far.”
But when Davis spoke about the project this spring at a Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority meeting, the group outvoted Goodman and approved the project. An integral part of Davis’ job has been convincing local officials, something he was familiar with at SpaceX, too.
Reyes said: “He was always trying to adjust things so the government would ultimately approve it.”
And now the future of the Boring Company may hinge on it. Other cities that are considering tunnel projects, like San Jose, will be watching closely to see if Davis can pull off the Vegas project without a hitch.
Davis said during his presentation with Musk: “Flying cars … they don’t really exist. Tunnels do exist. And are very buildable.”
Trump Trounces Krugman: “He’s Been Wrong About Me From The Start”
President Trump has been very active on Twitter recently but time away from impeachment attacks to blast another establishment puppet – The New York Times’ Paul Krugman – slamming the nobel prize winner:
“[Krugman] has been wrong about me from the very beginning. Anyone who has followed his “words of wisdom” has lost a great deal of money. Paul, just concede the game, say I was right, and lets start a brand new game!”
This Thursday, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell told the House Budget Committee that there was “no reason to think, that I can see, that the probability of a downturn is at all elevated.” Not every economic indicator is perfect, but wages are rising (especially on the lower end), unemployment is still at historic lows, and markets are booming.
You might remember that only a couple of months ago, there was a torrent of stories cautioning us about the imminent downturn. Some of the scary coverage, as Robert Shiller warned, consisted of “self-fulfilling prophecies.” Some seemed almost giddy about the political prospects of a downturn. Others just said what they felt. “I feel like the bottom has to fall out at some point,” Bill Maher explained at the time. “And by the way, I’m hoping for it because I think one way you get rid of Trump is to crash the economy. So please, bring on the recession.”
One of the nation’s leading doomsayers has been the New York Times’ perpetually mistaken Paul Krugman, who warned shortly after the 2016 election that Trump’s victory would trigger a global recession “with no end in sight.”
We could file that under “post-election hysteria,” but as late as April of this year he was still telling crowds that the bond-market signals predicted “a pretty good chance of a recession sometime in the next year or so.” And he has kept this going all year:
February 11: Paul Krugman expects a global recession this year, warns “we don’t have an effective response.”
August 1: “Why Was Trumponomics a Flop?”
August 15: “From Trump Boom to Trump Gloom”
September 5: “Trumpism Is Bad for Business”
October 3: “Here Comes the Trump Slump”
October 24: “The Day the Trump Boom Died”
A couple of weeks after the Trump Boom expired, CNBC reported that “October job creation comes in at 128,000, easily topping estimates even with GM auto strike.” This cycle has been going on for three years.
(My favorite Trump-era Krugmanism, though, is when the esteemed economist explains away his bad predictions by claiming that the economy’s successes are really just driven by instances of his own political preferences playing out — “Impeaching Trump Is Good for the Economy,” “The Economics of Donald J. Keynes,” and so on.)
At some point, of course, doomsayers such as Krugman are going to be right. In the past 60 years the United States has been hit with recessions in 1960–61, 1969–70, 1973–75, 1980, 1981–82, 1990–91, 2001, and 2007–09. History says we’re probably due for another one soon. When it hits, Krugman will blame tax cuts, unfettered capitalist greed, a dearth of regulations — and maybe climate change, or whatever hobbyhorse he’s riding at the time. MSNBC hosts will hail him as a seer.
Much like most economists, I have no clue what the future holds. But I do know that Barack Obama, who oversaw the slowest recovery in American history, was constantly being given credit for averting disaster by adopting smart policies (read: spending).Years after the bailouts – which is to say years of D.C. gridlock in which the former president, by his own admission, couldn’t enact any of his preferred economic policies – Democrats were still claiming that short-term first-year spending fixes were the impetus for growth.
There’s a more rational explanation: Washington stopped helping.
Voters vastly overestimate the role that presidents play in economic growth, to be sure. But Trump-era job creation was a far tougher task, since he was operating with less room for job growth than his predecessor. And considering the (self-inflicted) trade wars, political turmoil, and foreign-policy concerns that have dominated much of his first term, conventional wisdom tells us we should be struggling. Yet it’s clear that we’ve had a pretty resilient economy.
What has Trump done? The two things Paul Krugman hates most: Regulatory rollbacks and tax cuts. And yet here we are.
China Quietly Bails Out Another Bank With 620 Billion Yuan In Assets
Late last week, we argued that one could ignore China’s sinking retail sales, industrial production, capital expenditures, record low and declining sub-6% GDP and even its fading monthly credit injections and impotent credit impulse, and instead what matters most for the world’s second biggest economy with the world’s biggest financial system (at around $40 trillion, roughly double that of the US) is the following chart showing the market cap to total assets ratio for the four largest commercial banks in China, which as Saxo Bank found, hit a new all-time low of 5.8% in Q3 as total assets grew an annualized 8% in Q3 while market cap of the four banks declined.
This means that Chinese investors – who happen to know best what is truly going on behind the scenes – are not valuing these new assets as high quality, and the dynamic in China right now is that the current credit expansion is just offsetting the surge in bad loans, whose real amount Beijing has been keeping under wraps ever since the great bank debt for equity swap of 1999, but which we know is far higher the propaganda number of around 1.5% The net effect is zero credit transmission to the real economy in China constraining economic growth, which in turn makes banks especially vulnerable to failure as a result of even modest capital outflows.
Confirming that there is something fundamentally broken with China’s debt transmission mechanism and that, by implication, Chinese bad loans are soaring, two weeks after we reported that there was a bank run at Henan Yichuan Rural Commercial Bank which brought the bank to the verge of collapse, the WSJ reported that Harbin Bank, a politically-linked midsize Chinese lender based in the capital of northeast Heilongjiang province, became the latest Chinese financial institution to get a state bailout after its key private shareholders were replaced by government investors.
Total consideration for the shares involved came to almost 15 billion yuan, or around $2.1 billion, the bank said, though it described the transactions as transfers rather than stock sales, which is to be expected if the bank was being bailed out instead of actually selling a viable stake.
As has been the customary case, the bank didn’t provide any reason for the transactions in the statement, and Chinese bank regulators made no comment on the action.
And, as was the case with at least one previous bank “rescue”, Harbin Bank was connected to a former oligarch who disappeared not that long ago amid allegations of massive fraud. Indeed, as the WSJ reports, the bank is among a handful of financial businesses in China linked to once-powerful tycoon named Xiao Jianhua who in early 2017 disappeared amid a wave of prosecutions of big private investors. Businesses owned by some of those people, including Wu Xiaohui’s Anbang Insurance Group Co., have also since become government-owned.
Xiao Jianhua
Incidentally, the first of the year’s bailouts of a troubled small lenders was that of Baoshang Bank, which as we reported at the time, was also linked to Xiao. Its government takeover in May sparked a funding crisis for many other small banks in China and helped send Harbin Bank’s shares sharply lower. The stock has fallen more than 16.5% in 2019. Incidentally, when discussing the failed lender, China’s PBOC said that Baoshang was being restructured and that the takeover was designed to “stop bleeding” at the bank and contain risks to the financial sector.
So why did Harbin Bank fail?
In its financial report for H1 2019, Harbin Bank cited deteriorating asset quality – read surging bad loans – as well as intensified competition for deposits and higher borrowing costs in money markets as China’s economy slows. Yet, paradoxically, the near-insolvent lender also said it recorded a profit of 2.18 billion yuan, or about $311.1 million, though that was off about 16% because of, drumroll, more-aggressive write-offs of bad debts. Which goes to show that corporate earnings reports in China are as “credible” as all other Chinese economic “data.”
As for the oligarch behind not one but two bank failures in the country so far this year, Chinese authorities have publicly said nothing about Xiao since he abruptly left Hong Kong and entered mainland China in early 2017. He has made no public comment and can’t be reached.
Another curious fact: a little over a year ago, Harbin Bank, which in March 2018 had abandoned plans to list its shares in China, announced it would raise over $2 billion in perpetual bonds to replenish its capital after regulators in early 2018 allowed lenders to sell such instruments to bolster their balance sheets. Incidentally, a perpetual bonds is effectively the same thing as equity, but for some bizarre reason sells much better in China where the investing population is apparently stupid enough to be fooled by the clever change in designation. As such, Harbin Bank was the first Chinese lender to announce its intention to sell perpetual bonds to increase its Additional Tier 1 (AT1) capital. We now know what prompted the bank’s rush.
Harbin Bank’s exiting shareholders are business entities owned by a number of individuals, according to the company’s latest annual report. The biggest holder among them, Heilongjiang Keruan Software Technologies owned a 6.55% stake and is identified in the annual report as the subsidiary of another business primarily owned by two individuals.
Who are the bank’s new owners?
Under the transactions disclosed Friday, an entity controlled by Harbin city’s financial bureau, Harbin Economic Development & Investment, will control 29.63%, compared with 19.65% at the end of June. A second, new shareholder will have a 18.55% stake: Heilongjiang Financial Holdings Group Co., which was established in January by the province of Heilongjiang. Combined, these state-owned enterprises would own nearly 50% of the bailed out bank.
Meanwhile, since the PBOC refuses to admit or acknowledge that it has an unprecedented bad loan problem, and thus nothing can be done to address the underlying cause at the heart of China’s failing bank problem, expect more and ever bigger Chinese bank bailouts until eventually a bank fails and its depositors are impacted, sparking a furious scramble by Chinese depositors across the country to redeem their roughly $27 trillion (190 trillion yuan) in bank deposits, which as a reminder, is more than double the total amount of US commercial bank deposits.
The entrance of the former Massachusetts governor into the presidential race is more proof the party has no clue where the votes are…
Deval Patrick, former governor of Massachusetts and newly-resigned executive of Mitt Romney’s private equity firm Bain Capital, has entered the Democratic primary race, which is shaping up to be the biggest ensemble-disaster comedy since Cannonball Run.
Patrick’s entry comes after news that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg put himself on the ballot in Alabama and Arkansas. It also comes amid word from Hillary Clinton that “many, many, many” people are urging her to run in 2020, and whispers in the press that an “anxious Democratic establishment” has been praying for alternate candidacies in a year that had already seen an astonishing 26 different people jump in the race.
A piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago suggested Democratic insiders, going through a “Maalox moment” as they contemplated possible failure in next year’s general election season, were fantasizing about “white knight” campaigns by Clinton, Patrick, John Kerry, Michelle Obama, former Attorney General Eric Holder (!), or Ohio’s Sherrod Brown.
The story described “concern” that “party elites” have about the existing field:
With doubts rising about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s ability to finance a multistate primary campaign, persistent questions about Senator Elizabeth Warren’sviability in the general election and skepticism that Mayor Pete Buttigieg, of South Bend, Ind., can broaden his appeal beyond white voters, Democratic leaders are engaging in a familiar rite: fretting about who is in the race…
LOL at the non-mention of Bernie Sanders in that passage. If Bernie wins the nomination, “Buttigieg Finishes Encouraging Fourth” is going to be your A1 Times headline.
Patrick in announcing voiced a similar set of “concerns,” basically saying he’s proud to enter this deep, richly experienced field that sucks just enough to force his emergency entrance:
“I admire and respect the candidates in the Democratic field. They bring a richness of ideas and experience and a depth of character that makes me proud to be a Democrat. But if the character of the candidates is an issue in every election, this time is about the character of the country.”
The Times said Patrick’s policy prescriptions place him “closer to the ideological center than to the left.” In another story about Patrick and Bloomberg, the Times explained that both men “believe there is room in the race for a more dynamic candidate who is closer to the political middle than Mr. Biden’s two most prominent challengers, Ms. Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders.”
People like Bloomberg and Patrick seem to believe in the existence of a massive electoral “middle” that wants 15-point plans and meritocratic slogans instead of action. As befits brilliant political strategists, they also seem hyper-concerned about the feelings of the country’s least numerous demographic, the extremely rich. A consistent theme is fear (often described in papers like the Times as “concern”) that the rhetoric of Warren and Sanders might unduly upset wealthy folk.
“I don’t think that wealth is the problem. I think greed is the problem,” Patrick told CBS This Morning.
He added that “taxes should go up on the most prosperous and the most fortunate,” but “not as a penalty.”
What does that mean? Should we impose higher taxes on the rich but include a note from the IRS saying, “It’s not because we don’t love you”?
Along with an alarmingly high number of press figures, politicians like Patrick seem to be trapped in an “electability” concept that hasn’t made sense since the Reagan-Bush years. Outside of a few spots on the Upper East Side and in Georgetown and L.A., the “center” has been gone a long time.
From Donald Trump to Sanders to Warren, the politicians attracting the biggest and most enthusiastic responses in recent years have run on furious, throw-the-bums-out themes, for the logical reason that bums by now clearly need throwing out.
America’s political establishment has created vast inequities not only in the economy, but in criminal justice (where street crime is heavily punished, but white collar crime is not), war (it’s mostly not the sons and daughters of politicians and CEOs getting killed in overseas conflicts), health care (where much of the population lives in fear that getting sick will trigger bankruptcy), debt forgiveness (Wall Street bailout recipients got to write off losses, but people suffering foreclosures and student loan defaults are ruined), and other arenas.
You can’t capture the widespread discontent over these issues if you’re running on a message that the donor class doesn’t deserve censure for helping create these messes. It’s worse if you actually worked — as Patrick did — for a company like Ameriquest, a poster child for the practices that caused the 2008 financial crisis: using aggressive and/or predatory tactics to push homeowners into new subprime mortgages or mortgage refis, fueling the disastrous financial bubble.
If we count Bloomberg, Patrick marks the 28th person to run in the 2020 Democratic race. Pundits from the start have hyped a succession of politicians with similar/familiar political profiles, from Beto O’Rourke to Kamala Harris to Buttigieg to Amy Klobuchar to John Delaney, and all have failed to capture public sentiment, for the incredibly obvious reason that voters have tuned out this kind of politician.
They’ve heard it all before. Every time a long-serving establishment Democrat gets up and offers paeans to “hope” and “unity” and “economic mobility,” all voters hear is blah, blah, blah. They’re not looking for what FiveThirtyEight.com calls a “Goldilocks solution,” i.e. “Buttigieg, but older,” or “Biden, but younger” (or, more to the point in the case of this Bain Capital executive, “Mitt Romney, but black”); they’re looking for something actually different from what they’ve seen before.
The party’s insiders would have better luck finding a winning general election candidate if they randomly plucked an auto mechanic from Lansing, Michigan, or a nail salon owner from Vegas, or any of a thousand schoolteachers who could use the six months of better-paid work, than they would backing yet another in the seemingly endless parade of corporate-friendly “Goldilocks solutions.” That’s assuming they can’t see past themselves long enough to at least pretend they can support someone with wide support bases like Sanders or Warren.
If what the Times calls the “Anxious Democratic Establishment” remains stuck in the same doomed, outmoded “centrist” strategy, next year’s general election season will almost certainly be a miserable repeat of 2016. It seems like everyone sees this but the people with the most money to fund challenges to Trump. Watching people like Patrick talk themselves into running into the populist wood-chipper is a cringe-worthy spectacle, like watching a relative who can’t sing at all talk himself into going on The Voice.Can someone tell these people the bad news?
Epstein’s Prison Guards Could Face Criminal Charges
While the political and financial elites across the globe (and certainly in the UK) are doing everything in their power to bury the Epstein scandal – so to speak- both literally and metaphorically, CBS reports that such efforts face a hurdle as Federal prosecutors in New York are considering bringing criminal charges against the two correctional officers responsible for guarding Jeffrey Epstein on the night of his death.
As a reminder, Epstein, who was 66 at the time of his death, was found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10.
The official explanation for Epstein’s death was suicide, although skeptics have suggested that Epstein’s sudden death was all too convenient as it also buried the toxic secrets of countless implicated “luminaries” and Wall Street and Beltway VIPs across all sectors of US life.
As a reminder, Epstein, who had been charged with sexually abusing a number of underage girls, was placed on suicide watch the month before his death after he was found on his cell floor with bruising on his neck. But multiple sources said that Epstein had been taken off suicide watch after about a week, and placed into a high-security housing unit where he was supposed to be checked on every 30 minutes.
At the end of October, prominent forensic expert Michael Baden refuted the official narrative, stating at the end of October that Epstein was “strangulated.”
More recently, a viral meme claiming that “Epstein did not kill himself” has taken America by storm…
… culminating with an interview involving Matt Taibbi and outspoken radio host Joe Rogan, in which the viral phrase “Epstein was died” was born.
Prosecutors offered the officers the opportunity to plead guilty to the charges, but the officers declined the offer, the source added. And while the CBS source said it was not a plea deal, CNN’s reporting suggested otherwise, noting that “at least one federal prison worker on duty the night before Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his prison cell was offered a plea deal in connection with the multimillionaire’s death.” As CNN elaborated, plea deal negotiations between prosecutors and attorneys indicate forthcoming charges by the Department of Justice relating to Epstein’s death.
The two prison staff members who are allegedly the target of a criminal probe were guarding the unit where Epstein died by apparent suicide failed to check on him that night for about three hours, even though they were supposed to check on detainees in the special housing unit every 30 minutes.
Of the two officers who had the responsibility to monitor Epstein, one was not a detention guard but was temporarily reassigned to that post, according to CNN reporting. The guard, a man not identified by officials, had previously been trained as a corrections officer but had moved to another position. Rules at the Federal Bureau of Prisons allow people who work in other prison jobs, such as teachers and cooks, to be trained to fill in for posts usually manned by regular guards.
The second staff member on Epstein duty was a woman fully trained as a guard, according to the person briefed on the matter. Both guards were working overtime shifts, but it’s unclear whether that was mandatory.
As questions about how such a high-profile prisoner could have died on the correctional center’s watch, both the FBI and the Justice Department’s inspector general investigating the death.
Meanwhile, as reported earlier, in the latest scandal to emerge from Epstein’s death – and life – the attempt by the UK’s Prince Andrew – the second son of Queen Elizabeth II – to explain away his friendship with the pedophile financier in a high-profile TV interview “degenerated into a farce“, which as Bloomberg notes, threatens to be the British royal family’s biggest public relations disaster since its handling of the death of Princess Diana in 1997.
It is so bad, in fact, that Prince Andrew’s PR Adviser Jason Stein resigned over his catastrophic interview:
Sky News confirms Prince Andrew’s PR adviser Jason Stein resigned over the Duke’s decision to agree to the interview with the BBC
So yes, some embarrassment for the Queen and her immediate circle, but will there be any long-term consequences? Hardly: we are confident the royal family will spend enough PR money to put this scandal to bed in the coming days and weeks, meanwhile all those people whose secrets could have been exposed had Epstein “talked” will be delighted that their skeletons will remain forever in the closet with Epstein’s murder suicide, because whoever ordered the Epstein hit was hardly dumb enough to leave any “fingerprints.”
As such, any criminal probe into Epstein’s guards will, sadly, end with them.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is now hemorrhaging evidence that the US and its allies deceived the world once again about yet another military intervention, which should be a front-page story all over the world.
Yet if you looked at American news media headlines you’d think the only thing that matters right now is indulging the childish fantasy that Donald Trump might somehow magically be removed from office via supermajority consensus in a majority-Republican Senate.
If you haven’t been following this story you can click here for a timeline of events to fully appreciate the significance of these new revelations about the Douma incident, but just to quickly recap, in April of last year reports surfaced that dozens of civilians had been killed in that city by chemical weapons used by the Syrian government under President Bashar al-Assad. This immediately drew skepticism from people who’ve been paying attention to the narrative manipulation campaign against Syria, since Assad had already won the battle for Douma and had no strategic reason to employ banned weapons there knowing that there would be a military strike in retaliation from western powers. True to form, a few days later the US, France and the UK launched airstrikes on the Syrian government.
The OPCW released its final report on Douma in March of this year, but that report has been contradicted by two separate whistleblowers from the Douma investigation. The first surfaced in May of this year with a leaked Engineering Assessment claiming the chlorine cylinders found at the crime scene were unlikely to have been dropped from the air, and that it was far more likely that they were manually placed there, i.e. staged, by the occupying opposition forces in Douma. The second whistleblower came forward last month with a day-long presentation in Brussels before a panel of experts assembled by the whistleblowing defense group Courage Foundation, the findings of which were published by WikiLeaks.
This new report by Steele focuses on information provided to him by the second whistleblower, who is going by the pseudonym “Alex” out of fear for his safety. The information provided by Alex has turned out to be far more incendiary even than the leaked Engineering Assessment. Here are seven major highlights (hyperlinks go to the relevant article text they reference):
1- US government officials attempted to pressure OPCW investigators into believing that the Assad government was responsible for the Douma incident. The officials were placed in the same room as the investigators by the OPCW’s then-cabinet chief Bob Fairweather, which the investigators of course felt was a grossly inappropriate breach of the OPCW’s commitment to impartiality. For the record the US government already has a known history of bullying the OPCW, an ostensibly independent and international body, to force it to allow the advancement of pre-existing regime change agendas.
2- Alex reports that internal dissent on the OPCW’s official publications on the Douma incident was far more ubiquitous than previously known, saying “Most of the Douma team felt the two reports on the incident, the Interim Report and the Final Report, were scientifically impoverished, procedurally irregular and possibly fraudulent.”
3- All but one member of the team agreed with the Engineering Assessment that it was far more likely that the chlorine cylinders were manually placed on the scene by people on the ground.
4- Ian Henderson, the South African ballistics expert whose name was signed on the leaked Engineering Assessment, seems to have been responsible for leaking it. The identity of the leaker was not previously known to the public.
5- Investigators experienced pressures against saying anything about their mounting findings that no chemical attack occurred, with Alex calling it “the elephant in the room which no-one dared mention explicitly”.
6- The OPCW’s Final Report on the Douma incident explicitly claimed the investigation found “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.” Yet according to Alex the levels of chlorinated organic chemicals found on the scene “were no higher than you would expect in any household environment” and were in fact “much lower than what would be expected in environmental samples”, comparable to or even lower than the World Health Organisation’s recommended chlorine levels for drinking water. This extremely crucial fact was actively and repeatedly omitted from the OPCW’s public reporting in a way Alex describes as “deliberate and irregular”.
7- Steele mentioned last month that he’d unsuccessfully reached out to the OPCW for comment on the second OPCW whistleblower’s revelations, and in his new article he confirms that the organisation is still dodging him, with both Fairweather and the OPCW’s media office refusing to respond. La Repubblica’s Stefania Maurizi has also been reporting that the OPCW is dodging the press on this important matter. The OPCW did respond to press inquiries after the first whistleblower surfaced in May, but it appears that someone has given the order to cease doing so with the claims of this second whistleblower.
This story — 2 whistleblowers accusing OPCW of suppressing evidence, under US pressure, to reach a conclusion that justified US strikes on Syria —
should be a global scandal. Instead it’s widely ignored, except for a principled few like @caitoz who’ve called it from the start: https://t.co/hGSMVAan0d
If there were any correlation between newsworthiness and actual news coverage, the OPCW scandal would be making front-page international headlines today. Instead, the mounting evidence that the US and its allies committed a war crime based on false information and that a supposedly independent watchdog organisation helped them cover it up barely registers. Why is that?
If you ask Syria narrative managers like The Guardian’s George Monbiot or The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan, this isn’t a big story because even if Assad wasn’t responsible for the Douma incident, it doesn’t matter because he’s still a very bad man. But this is an extremely intellectually dishonest obfuscation on their part, because this has nothing to do with whether or not Bashar al-Assad is a nice person. The OPCW covering up its findings exculpating the Syrian government on Douma wouldn’t be significant because it would mean that Assad is a good person, it would be significant because it would mean the US deceived the world about yet another military intervention. And it would make it much harder for the US to manufacture public support for other military interventions in the future.
Which is of course the real reason the political/media class is ignoring the OPCW scandal. Military violence is the glue that holds the US-centralized empire together, which means it is of utmost strategic importance that that empire retain the ability to manufacture consent for military violence going forward. Because plutocrat-controlled news media outlets are set up in such a way that their employees know their careers depend on protecting the empire upon which the plutocratic class is built, the OPCW scandal is an obvious no-go for anyone who wishes to remain in the business.
The only way this story will get mainstream coverage is if it goes viral without the assistance of the mainstream media, at which point the propagandists will be forced to report on it to save face and begin the near-impossible task of trying to regain control of the narrative. This will only happen if enough of us work together to shove the OPCW scandal into mainstream attention. I think this would end up being a very good thing for the world.
