Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[PassedOut]

The Kurds did have a state in the 1920s. Given that it was conquered by the British and returned to Iraqi control by the (American dominated) League of Nations, one could understand if they were somewhat distrustful of the Allied side during WWII.

The 1920 Treaty of Sevres was never ratified. It was replaced by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which was ratified and contained no reference to Kurdistan, accepting the reality that Ataturk then controlled the territory. The US was never a member of the League of Nations, although Wilson dearly wanted it to be.

[y66]

From Trump’s betrayal of Kurds hastens waning of US power by Ed Luce at FT:

 

Forget for a moment the manner in which Donald Trump has sold out the Kurds during an admiring late-night call with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s strongman; his US troop withdrawal, which caught White House advisers by surprise: the bombastic tweets that followed. All these were vintage Mr Trump. But we should not let the noise obscure the signal. America has been trying to extricate itself from the Middle East for years. Mr Trump is only following in the footsteps of Barack Obama.

 

It used to be said it was better to be Britain’s enemy than its friend; Britain made deals with its enemies and betrayed its friends. The Kurds might feel the same way about the US. As long ago as 1975, after Washington withdrew CIA support from an Iraqi Kurd uprising, Henry Kissinger said: “F**k the Kurds if they can’t take a joke.” Mr Trump’s decision to abandon America’s most important ally in Syria is reckless — not least because it opens the way for an Isis resurgence. But his betrayal is hardly original.

 

The difference is that the US is now paying a higher price for its mistakes. Mr Trump’s come in two forms. The first mistake is the way in which he makes them. It is one thing to catch your allies by surprise. It is another to wrongfoot your own staff. That produces confusion and demoralisation. Has Mr Trump given Mr Erdogan the green light to squash the Syrian Kurds? Nobody working for Mr Trump knows because he keeps contradicting himself. Mr Erdogan is probing the answer to that question.

 

The second is the nature of Mr Trump’s mistakes. As America’s global power wanes, its need for allies grows. Back in 1975, the US could afford bad wars and a crooked president. Richard Nixon was driven from office. The war in Vietnam was many times more costly and bloody than any US engagement since then. Today’s margin for error is slimmer. Mr Trump has a death wish for America’s alliances. This includes the formal ones, such as Nato, and the informal ones, such as that with the Syrian Kurds.

 

The more he pokes America’s friends in the eye, the less likely they are to remain steadfast. This poses a particularly unwelcome dilemma for allies in Asia, which are militarily tied to the US but increasingly dependent on China for their prosperity. In the Middle East, the Syrian Defence Forces, which are made up mostly of Kurdish fighters, lost an estimated 10,000 soldiers fighting Isis, which is one of Mr Trump’s priorities. The US lost five soldiers. The next time Washington needs the Kurds, they will demand more US skin in the game.

 

Yet Mr Trump is not alone in his mistakes. To judge by the Democratic uproar, you would think that he had sold the Syrian Kurds into slavery. Mr Obama cut the Iraqi Kurds loose when he pulled out of Iraq in 2011. He then enlisted the Syrian Kurds to help fight Isis, which had rushed to fill the vacuum created by America’s departure. The gap between Mr Obama and Mr Trump on foreign wars is mostly about style. On substance, Mr Trump represents continuity.

 

The outrage from Republicans is even more myopic. Mr Trump’s most loyal defenders, including Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, have condemned his withdrawal as catastrophic to US power. This is awkward since betrayal of the Kurds has a long history. Republican fury sits even more oddly with their silence over Ukraine. As a friendly democracy bordering Russia, Ukraine’s survival is more strategically important to the US than the Kurds.

 

The difference, of course, is that Mr Trump faces impeachment over “Ukrainegate”. To govern is to choose. Confronted with a choice between supporting a US friendship in Russia’s backyard, and backing Mr Trump, almost all Republicans have gone for the latter. Their fury about the Kurds betrays bad conscience. It comes in part as overcompensation for leaving Ukraine in the lurch.

 

All of which is bad news for America’s friends. Mr Trump, to be sure, presents an irresistible target: his tweet extolling his own “great and unmatched wisdom” should end up as his epitaph. The lesson for America’s allies is more durable. The US is not the rock it used to be. Mr Trump is only part of the reason why.

[johnu]

The Kurds did have a state in the 1920s. Given that it was conquered by the British and returned to Iraqi control by the (American dominated) League of Nations, one could understand if they were somewhat distrustful of the Allied side during WWII. To some extent it is therefore perhaps surprising that they were not fighting on the side of the Axis powers.

Since WWII was 1939-1945, the Kurds had no separate country, they were a small minority in various other sovereign countries, and they had no say in Iraq or Syria WWII involvement. Now if the Manchurian President has a beef about countries not fighting with the Allies in WWII, Syria and Iraq should be his target.

[hrothgar]

Next time you see Graham defending the Kurds, remember the following

 

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/10/lindsey-graham-trump-hoax-call-043991

[y66]

Speaking of economists getting it wrong, here's my favorite economist talking about what he and others got wrong about the effects of globalization on wages and employment in the manufacturing sector.

[Winstonm]

This is interesting. Bloomberg yesterday reported that in 2017 Trump pushed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to try to get the DOJ to drop charges against a Turkish-Iranian businesman named Reza Zarrab. In April of 2017, The New Yorker had an article about Zarrab in which it was pointed out that he was trading as much as 1 ton of gold daily with Iran in exchange for oil and natural gas, a scheme to go around U.S. sanctions agasint Iran, a sheme in which it is thought Erdogan may have been part of or at least condoned.

 

But Zarra was arrested for money laundering by the FBI in Miami, and he arranged for two high-powered New York attorneys. After failing to get bail arranged, he fired those attorneys and hired Rudy Guiliani.

 

The U.S. attorney who was prosecuting Zarrab was Preet Bharara. One week after Zarrab hired Guiliani, Trump fired Bharara. Guiliani is said to have tried to work out a diplomatic solution to the arrest.

 

And now Trump abandons the Kurds and fails to sanction Turkey for the purchase of a missile defense system from Russia. What does Erdogan have on Trump, I wonder? Is all this corruption interrelated?

[Winstonm]

Oops. Big trouble for Guiliani or Trump or all of the above?

[Winstonm]

Rudy Guiliani as Vincent Vega and Donald Trump as Lance in Pulp Factions:

 

Vincent is driving reckless in his convertible. A body slumps against the passenger door. He is on this cell phone.

 

Vincent (Guiliani): It's Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, they're OD'd on me from jet lag, man!

 

Lance (Trump): Well don't bring them to the White House! Bite the bullet and take them to the hospital!

 

Vincent (Guiliani): No can do! They're dyin' to meet you, man!

 

Lance (Trump): Are you calling me on the cellular phone? I don't know you. Who is this? Don't come here, I'm hanging up the phone! Prank caller, prank caller!

[y66]

From the small world department: The mug shots for Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas appeared in the evening news stamped with "Alexandria Sheriff's Office". I used to play golf with the former sheriff. His jail has hosted quite a few high profile defendants over the years including Robert Hanssen, a spy, Zacarias Moussaoui, a 9/11 terrorist, Aldrich Ames, a spy, Harold Nicholson, a spy, Judith Miller, an NYT reporter, Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and Paul Manafort. We once played in a rain storm with a group of 20 or so friends all of whom, except me and the sheriff, quit before finishing the front nine. On the back nine, the sun came out and we were like two kids playing like we had the world to ourselves, hitting a few memorable shots even, and feeling about as far away from the day-to-day world as you could get.

[MrAce]

Hi all.

 

I am writing this from Turkey now, came to visit my family. Most of you know how much I hate Trump and Erdogan from my previous comments in BBF. But to be honest saying Turks attacking to Kurds is equal to saying USA is attacking to Islam just because they fight against ISIS or Al-Qaeda. Please do not let your judgement be blind due to how you feel about Trump and/or Erdogan.

 

Turkey is in war with PKK and 2 other Kurdish groups that has very strong ties with PKK for 3 decades. They killed many civilian Turks and soldiers. I have to admit Turkish government was never fair to Kurds regarding their minority rights and we would never have these issues had Turkish government taken a different approach in the past. But todays problem is totally different. We are talking about a group that has been trying to earn their rights by guns. Not only that, in case of a peace most of them can not even hold a job. This has been their life style. As long as this conflict continues they will be given big money and arms by many countries just like Palestanians are being armed against Israel mostly by European countries. Peace in this region will take many out of the only job they know, that they are trained for, which is nothing but to create terror. Look at the bigger picture. Who feeds them? Who benefits most from this chaos? Then you will have better understanding of mıddle east where I was born and raised, slept with AK-47 concert in the background always.

 

Back to the current issue. All this so called media and politicians want you to forget some of the basic facts about this group of Kurds. Who your ally is and misinform you about who was betrayed. Forget what Timo or Turkey says about these people and watch for yourself from AMERICAN inteligence and Senator what they really are (about 2 mins video). And please tell me is this the same Lindsey Graham in video who says the things he says today?

 

Your ally is Turkey, a NATO country and hosts very strategical geography and hosts 2 of your biggest bases in the region. Not a bunch of terrorists which you paid to fight against ISIS and can easily fight against you if others pay more. Again do not let your feelings about Trump cloud your judgement. He did the right thing on this one. Despite my strong opposition to Erdogan.

 

[y66]

From How to Tax Our Way Back to Justice by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman:

 

America’s soaring inequality has a new engine: its regressive tax system. Over the past half century, even as their wealth rose to previously unseen heights, the richest Americans watched their tax rates collapse. Over the same period, as wages stagnated for the working classes, work conditions deteriorated and debts ballooned, their tax rates increased.

 

Stop to think this over for a minute: For the first time in the past hundred years, the working class — the 50 percent of Americans with the lowest incomes — today pays higher tax rates than billionaires.

 

The full extent of this situation is not visible in official statistics, which is perhaps why it has not received more attention so far. Government agencies like the Congressional Budget Office publish information about the distribution of federal taxes, but they disregard state and local taxes, which account for a third of all taxes paid by Americans and are in general highly regressive. The official statistics keepers do not provide specific information on the ultra-wealthy, who although few in number earn a large fraction of national income and therefore account for a large share of potential tax revenue. And until now there were no estimates of the total tax burden that factored in the effect of President Trump’s tax reform enacted at the end of 2017, which was particularly generous for the ultra-wealthy.

 

To fill this gap, we have estimated how much each social group, from the poorest to billionaires, paid in taxes for the year 2018. Our starting point is the total amount of tax revenue collected in the United States, 28 percent of national income. We allocate this total across the population, divided into 15 income groups: the bottom 10 percent (the 24 million adults with the lowest pretax income), the next 10 percent and so on, with finer-grained groups within the top 10 percent, up to the 400 wealthiest Americans.

 

Our data series include all taxes paid to the federal, state and local governments: the federal income tax, of course, but also state income taxes, myriad sales and excise taxes, the corporate income tax, business and residential property taxes and payroll taxes. In the end, all taxes are paid by people. The corporate tax, for example, is paid by shareholders, because it reduces the amount of profit they can receive in dividends or reinvest in their companies.

 

You will often hear that we have a progressive tax system in the United States — you owe more, as a fraction of your income, as you earn more. When he was a presidential candidate in 2012, Senator Mitt Romney famously lambasted the 47 percent of “takers” who, according to him, do not contribute to the public coffers. In reality, the bottom half of the income distribution may not pay much in income taxes, but it pays a lot in sales and payroll taxes. Taking into account all taxes paid, each group contributes between 25 percent and 30 percent of its income to the community’s needs. The only exception is the billionaires, who pay a tax rate of 23 percent, less than every other group.

 

The tax system in the United States has become a giant flat tax — except at the top, where it’s regressive. The notion that America, even if it may not collect as much in taxes as European countries, at least does so in a progressive way, is a myth. As a group, and although their individual situations are not all the same, the Trumps, the Bezoses and the Buffetts of this world pay lower tax rates than teachers and secretaries do.

 

This is the tax system of a plutocracy. With tax rates of barely 23 percent at the top of the pyramid, wealth will keep accumulating with hardly any barrier. So too will the power of the wealthy, including their ability to shape policymaking and government for their own benefit.

 

The good news is that we can fix tax injustice, right now. There is nothing inherent in modern technology or globalization that destroys our ability to institute a highly progressive tax system. The choice is ours. We can countenance a sprawling industry that helps the affluent dodge taxation, or we can choose to regulate it. We can let multinationals pick the country where they declare their profits, or we can pick for them. We can tolerate financial opacity and the countless possibilities for tax evasion that come with it, or we can choose to measure, record and tax wealth.

 

If we believe most commentators, tax avoidance is a law of nature. Because politics is messy and democracy imperfect, this argument goes, the tax code is always full of “loopholes” that the rich will exploit. Tax justice has never prevailed, and it will never prevail.

 

For example, in response to Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax proposal — which we helped develop — pundits have argued that the tax would raise much less revenue than expected. In a similar vein, world leaders have become convinced that taxing multinational companies is now close to impossible, because of international tax competition. During his presidency, Barack Obama argued in favor of reducing the federal corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent, with a lower rate of 25 percent for manufacturers. In 2017, under President Trump, the United States cut its corporate tax rate to 21 percent. In France, President Emmanuel Macron is in motion to reduce the corporate tax in 2022 to 25 percent from 33 percent. Britain is ahead of the curve: It started slashing its rate under Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2008 and is aiming for 17 percent by 2020. On that issue, the Browns, Macrons and Trumps of the world agree: The winners of global markets are mobile; we can’t tax them too much.

 

But they are mistaken. Tax avoidance, international tax competition and the race to the bottom that rage today are not laws of nature. They are policy choices, decisions we’ve collectively made — perhaps not consciously or explicitly, certainly not choices that were debated transparently and democratically — but choices nonetheless. And other, better choices are possible.

 

Take big corporations. Some countries may have an interest in applying low tax rates, but that’s not an obstacle to making multinationals (and their shareholders) pay a lot. How? By collecting the taxes that tax havens choose not to levy. For example, imagine that the corporate tax rate in the United States was increased to 35 percent and that Apple found a way to book billions in profits in Ireland, taxed at 1 percent. The United States could simply decide to collect the missing 34 percent. Apple, like most Fortune 500 companies, does in fact have a big tax deficit: It pays much less in taxes globally than what it would pay if its profits were taxed at 35 percent in each country where it operates. For companies headquartered in the United States, the Internal Revenue Service should collect 100 percent of this tax deficit immediately, taking up the role of tax collector of last resort. The permission of tax havens is not required. All it would take is adding a paragraph in the United States tax code.

 

The same logic can be applied to companies headquartered abroad that sell products in America. The only difference is that the United States would collect not all but only a fraction of their tax deficit. For example, if the Swiss food giant Nestlé has a tax deficit of $1 billion and makes 20 percent of its global sales in the United States, the I.R.S. could collect 20 percent of its tax deficit, in addition to any tax owed in the United States. The information necessary to collect this remedial tax already exists: Thanks to recent advances in international cooperation, the I.R.S. knows where Nestlé books its profits, how much tax it pays in each country and where it makes its sales.

 

Collecting part of the tax deficit of foreign companies would not violate any international treaty. This mechanism can be applied tomorrow by any country, unilaterally. It would put an end to international tax competition, because there would be no point any more for businesses to move production or paper profits to low-tax places. Although companies might choose to stop selling products in certain nations to avoid paying taxes, this would be unlikely to be a risk in the United States. No company can afford to snub the large American market.

 

These examples are powerful because they show, contrary to received wisdom, that the taxation of capital and globalization are perfectly compatible. The notion that external or technical constraints make tax justice idle fantasy does not withstand scrutiny. When it comes to the future of taxation, there is an infinity of possible futures ahead of us.

 

Are these ideas for greater economic justice realistic politically? It is easy to lose hope — money in politics and self-serving ideologies are powerful foes. But although these problems are real, we should not despair. Before injustice triumphed, the United States was a beacon of tax justice. It was the democracy with the most steeply progressive system of taxation on the planet. In the 1930s, American policymakers invented — and then for almost half a century applied — top marginal income tax rates of close to 90 percent on the highest earners. Corporate profits were taxed at 50 percent, large estates at close to 80 percent.

 

The history of taxation is full of U-turns. Instead of elevating some supposedly invincible and natural constraints — that are often invincible and natural only in terms of their own models — economists should act more like plumbers, making the tax machinery work, fixing leaks. With good plumbing — and if the growing political will to address the rise of inequality takes hold — there is a bright future for tax justice.

[Winstonm]

From How to Tax Our Way Back to Justice by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman:

 

I believe Elizabeth Warren has a plan to address these problems.

[y66]

From Sharon LaFraniere and Nicholas Fandos at NYT:

 

Marie L. Yovanovitch, who was recalled as the American ambassador to Ukraine in May, testified to impeachment investigators on Friday that a top State Department official told her that President Trump had pushed for her removal for months even though the department believed she had “done nothing wrong.”

 

In a closed-door deposition that could further fuel calls for Mr. Trump’s impeachment, Ms. Yovanovitch delivered a scathing indictment of how his administration conducts foreign policy. She warned that private influence and personal gain have usurped diplomats’ judgment, threatening to undermine the nation’s interests and drive talented professionals out of public service. And she said that diplomats no longer have confidence that their government “will have our backs and protect us if we come under attack from foreign interests.”

 

According to a copy of her opening statement obtained by The New York Times, Ms. Yovanovitch said she was “incredulous” that she was removed as ambassador “based, as far as I can tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives.”

 

Ms. Yovanovitch, a 33-year veteran of the foreign service and three-time ambassador, spoke to investigators on Capitol Hill even though the State Department had directed her not to late Thursday and in defiance of the White House’s declaration that administration officials would not cooperate with the House impeachment inquiry. Democrats leading the inquiry said that order amounted to obstruction of their inquiry and quietly issued a subpoena Thursday morning with the understanding that Ms. Yovanovitch would then cooperate.

 

Not long after, she arrived at the Capitol with a lawyer and entered the secure basement rooms of the House Intelligence Committee, where she was expected to take questions from congressional staff and lawmakers for much of the day.

 

Her searing account, delivered at the risk of losing her job, could lend new momentum to the impeachment inquiry that imperils Mr. Trump. The inquiry centers on the president’s attempts to use his power and the foreign policy apparatus to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, an endeavor in which Rudolph W. Giuliani, his personal lawyer, was a central player. The shadowy effort by Mr. Giuliani grew to drive the United States policy toward Ukraine, at times appearing to sideline the State Department in the process.

 

Ms. Yovanovitch said in her deposition that the undermining of loyal diplomats at the State Department would embolden “bad actors” who would “see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system” and serve the interests of adversaries of the United States, including Russia.

 

“Today we see the State Department attacked and hollowed out from within,” she said. She called upon the department’s leaders, as well as Congress, to defend it, saying “I fear that not doing so will harm our nation's interest, perhaps irreparably.”

 

And she spoke of her “deep disappointment and dismay” about the events that led to her removal, describing a sense of betrayal of the “sacred trust” she and other diplomats once had with their government.

 

Ms. Yovanovitch dismissed as “fictitious” the allegations that she had been disloyal to Mr. Trump, which were circulated by allies of Mr. Giuliani.

 

“I do not know Mr. Giuliani’s motives for attacking me,” she said, adding that people associated with him “may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.”

 

Ms. Yovanovitch’s opening statement revealed no new details about Mr. Trump’s effort to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, to investigate Hunter Biden, the son of Joseph R. Biden Jr. It also offered no details about Lev Parnas or Igor Fruman, two businessmen who helped Mr. Giuliani mount a campaign for her removal. Both were arrested late Wednesday on charges of campaign finance violations.

 

The indictment charged that they were working for one or more unnamed Ukrainian officials who wanted her out of Kiev.

But she provided new details about her abrupt ouster just as Ukraine had elected a new president, when continuity in American policy was critical, she argued.

 

Less than two months after the State Department asked her to extend her tour as ambassador until 2020, she said, she was abruptly told in late April to return to Washington “on the next plane.”

 

She said that John Sullivan, the deputy secretary of state, told her later that she had “done nothing wrong and that this was not like other situations where he had recalled ambassadors for cause.” Other foreign diplomats say they know of no parallel to her case.

 

Mr. Sullivan told her that Mr. Trump had “lost confidence in me and no longer wished me to serve as his ambassador,” she said. “He added that there had been, a concerted campaign against me and the department had been under pressure from the president to remove me since the summer of 2018.”

 

That account contradicts what the State Department told reporters at the time, that Ms. Yovanovitch was merely completing her assignment “as planned.”

 

Even as she was being questioned behind closed doors on Friday, Mr. Trump nominated Mr. Sullivan to be the next ambassador to Russia. The timing appeared to be coincidental.

 

Ms. Yovanovitch said that she had never inhibited any legitimate efforts by Ukraine to combat corruption; instead, she tried to bolster them to help Ukraine combat Russia’s influence.

 

She was not involved in discussions about the suspension of $391 million in American security aid to Ukraine this summer; those took place only after she left Ukraine in May, she said.

 

She said she feared that the administration’s failure to back its diplomats would harm American interests, including Ukraine’s attempts to reform its government and defend against a hostile Russia.

 

“That harm will come not just through the inevitable and continuing resignation and loss of many of this nation’s most loyal and talented public servants,” she said, according to the prepared remarks.

 

“It also will come when those diplomats who soldier on and do their best to represent our nation face partners abroad who question whether the ambassador truly speaks for the president and can be counted upon as a reliable partner. The harm will come when private interests circumvent professional diplomats for their own gain, not the public good,” she said.

 

Ms. Yovanovitch said she had met Mr. Giuliani only a few times, and at least in her prepared remarks, offered no details about his efforts to freelance foreign policy in Ukraine and to press Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. Mr. Giuliani’s role is now at the center of the House’s impeachment inquiry into whether the president withheld military aid and a White House meeting in effort to gin up an foreign investigation that would damage the elder Mr. Biden, one of his foremost political rivals.

 

That Ms. Yovanovitch appeared at all was remarkable and raised the possibility that other government officials would follow suit in defiance of the administration’s orders. Caught between the conflicting and equally forceful demands of two branches of government, she chose Congress, raising the possibility that other government officials with little loyalty to Mr. Trump could follow suit

 

Three House committees conducting the investigation hope to tick through a roster of additional witness depositions next week, when lawmakers return to Washington from a two-week recess. Among them are Fiona Hill, who until this summer served as senior director for Europe at the National Security Council, and is scheduled to appear Monday; George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state and Ukraine expert, whose appearance is set for next Tuesday; and Gordon D. Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union whose scheduled appearance on Tuesday was blocked by the State Department hours before he was to arrive on Capitol Hill.

 

Mr. Sondland has now agreed to comply with a House subpoena and testify on Thursday, despite the State Department’s instruction that he not appear, although he would not hand over documents unless the department did, his lawyer said on Friday.

 

The White House or State Department could try to block those depositions, but like Ms. Yovanovitch and Mr. Sondland, each witness may make his or her own choice. Democrats leading the inquiry warned the Trump administration that attempts to stonewall their work could itself be impeachable conduct.

 

“Any efforts by Trump administration officials to prevent witness cooperation with the committees will be deemed obstruction of a coequal branch of government and an adverse inference may be drawn against the president on the underlying allegations of corruption and cover-up,” wrote the chairmen of the House Intelligence, Oversight and Reform and Foreign Affairs committees.

Keep moving, people, nothing to see here either.

[Winstonm]

I didn't know Trump could hit those high notes like this.

[Winstonm]

President Trump suffered defeats in three major court rulings Friday that address the limits of his executive authority: Business records, Denying green cards and visas to low-income immigrants, and Wall funding. What we need is a new presidential 3-strikes law: You're out!

[pilowsky]

From Citizens for Responsibility for Ethics in Washington aka CREW:

 

 

A gombeen man's man if ever there was one.

[pilowsky]

America is a late-comer to the ways of the Murdoch Family. They have been doing this to politics for many decades. First in Adelaide, then Australia then the UK and now America. It is simply the Murdoch family making money. Enjoy

[johnu]

America is a late-comer to the ways of the Murdoch Family. They have been doing this to politics for many decades. First in Adelaide, then Australia then the UK and now America. It is simply the Murdoch family making money. Enjoy

Maybe a little later than some, but Fox Propaganda has been around since 1996 and Murdoch bought the New York Post way back in 1976

[Winstonm]

This is the guy who Trump and Guiliani were trying to get reinstated as Prosecutor General in Ukraine:

 

A classified State Department assessment concluded in 2018 that Ukraine’s former Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko—who is at the center of the impeachment inquiry of President Trump—had allowed a vital potential witness for Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Konstantin Kilimnik, to escape from Ukraine to Russia, beyond the reach of the United States, after a federal grand jury in the US charged Kilimnik with obstruction of justice.

 

If Kilimnik had been available for questioning, he had the potential to provide invaluable information to investigators that might have shed light on one of the most consequential unresolved questions that the American people deserve an answer to: whether the former chairman to President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Paul Manafort, and perhaps other aides to then presidential candidate Trump, conspired with Russia to aid Russia’s covert operations to intervene in the election to defeat Hillary Clinton and elect Trump. By allowing Kilimnik to escape to Russia, Lutsenko foreclosed any possibility that Kilimnik would ever be questioned by US law enforcement and intelligence agents.

[johnu]

Please do not let your judgement be blind due to how you feel about Trump and/or Erdogan.

Erdogan and his men are thugs who don't respect the rule of law. If he wasn't the leader of a recognized country, he might well be regarded as a terrorist.

 

Turkish bodyguards kicked him to the point of brain damage. Now he’s furious President Erdogan is coming back to DC

 

The scene was a stunning sight on American soil – Turkish bodyguards beating U.S. protesters, on the streets of D.C.

 

The May 17, 2017 clash between peaceful demonstrators and security personnel for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan marked a dramatic and illegal escalation, the likes of which the District has never seen.

The Manchurian President is a pathological liar and whose career has been marred by a blatant disregard for the law.

 

A pox of both of them. As for Turkey, they nearly killed some American soldiers in their indiscriminate bombing campaign. For the record, ordinary Kurdish civilians are not terrorists.

[MrAce]

Erdogan and his men are thugs who don't respect the rule of law. If he wasn't the leader of a recognized country, he might well be regarded as a terrorist.

 

Turkish bodyguards kicked him to the point of brain damage. Now he's furious President Erdogan is coming back to DC

 

 

The Manchurian President is a pathological liar and whose career has been marred by a blatant disregard for the law.

 

A pox of both of them. As for Turkey, they nearly killed some American soldiers in their indiscriminate bombing campaign. For the record, ordinary Kurdish civilians are not terrorists.

 

You are right about Erdogan and his men. We agree with you. Say all this to Orange haired idiot not to me. He is the one who seems to not understand this.

 

You are wrong that YPG is ordinary Kurdish civilians. They are ordinary civilians as much as ISIS and AL-Qaeda are ordinary Islamic people. They are NOT! Your own people saying it, watch the video I provided.

[Winstonm]

You are right about Erdogan and his men. We agree with you. Say all this to Orange haired idiot not to me. He is the one who seems to not understand this.

 

You are wrong that YPG is ordinary Kurdish civilians. They are ordinary civilians as much as ISIS and AL-Qaeda are ordinary Islamic people. They are NOT! Your own people saying it, watch the video I provided.

 

I don't dispute that the PKK terrorize Turkey but are you claiming that if all PKK are Kurds then all Kurds are PKK? I would have to have a lot more proof of that claim.

 

I'm not trying to belittle your views and the points you made, but personally, I've always had a problem with labeling oppressed "terrorists" - what then do you label the oppressors?

 

The real terrorists (to my thinking) are those who try by force to impose their belief system on others.

[Winstonm]

Hard to keep church and state separate when the top law officer is an arrogant priest:

 

Attorney General William Barr on Friday faulted the “ascendancy” of secularism in America for mental illness, violence and drug abuse.

 

“Virtually every moral pathology has gained ground,” he said in a speech at the University of Notre Dame’s law school. (See the video above beginning at 21:48.)

 

The speech revealed how deeply the top lawman in the nation is tied to his Catholicism as he lashed a recent New Jersey law requiring LGBTQ curriculum in public schools to support civil rights. He complained that laws are being “used as a battering ram to break down traditional moral values.”

No mention, I notice, of the all-time high in inequality of wealth as a contributing factor. No, just the moral hierarchy of the fundamentalist right wing:

God

White men

Everything else

 

Here is why Barr is so dangerous; he takes an accurate fact (the US constitution provides that the government cannot establish a religion) and expands that to fit his own personal beliefs that the rights of Christians supercedes others' rights, saying this:

 

“I can assure you that as long as I am attorney general, the Department of Justice will be at the forefront of this effort, ready to fight for the most cherished of all American liberties – the freedom to live according to our faith,” said Barr.

my emphasis

 

There is no such guarantee in the U.S. constitution. The U.S. AG should know that.

[y66]

Jane Fonda was in my neighborhood this morning to talk about her lobbying campaign for the Green New Deal. I was impressed by her conviction, her sense of humor and her straight talk about the need to address jobs lost in the carbon sector. Can't believe she's 81.

[y66]

From Lawrence Summers at FT:

 

New IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva’s first speech makes bracing reading for the global financial community as it gathers this coming week in Washington for the annual IMF and World Bank meetings. Ms Georgieva noted that while two years ago growth was accelerating in 75 per cent of the world, the IMF now expects it to decelerate in nearly 90 per cent of the global economy in 2019 to the lowest level in a decade.

 

This shift into reverse comes as central banks in Europe and Japan have embraced negative interest rates and investors expect further rate cuts from the US Federal Reserve. Bonds worth more than $15tn are trading with negative yields.

 

If the primary problem were on the supply side, one would expect to see upward price pressure. Instead, despite loose fiscal and monetary policy, central banks in the industrialised world have as a group fallen well short of their inflation targets for a decade and markets project that this will continue.

 

Europe and Japan are engaged in black hole monetary policy. Without a major discontinuity, there is no prospect of policy rates returning to positive territory. The US appears to be one recession away from entering the same black hole. If so, the whole industrialised world would be providing at best negligible and often negative returns to risk-free savings and falling short of growth and inflation targets. It would also have to maintain financial stability amid increased incentives for leverage and risk-taking.

 

All this requires new thinking and new policies, much as the rapid inflation of the 1970s forced a reset back then. Once economies are in the monetary black hole, central banks that focus on inflation targeting will be ineffectual in hitting their immediate goal and unable to stabilise output and employment. The policy action has to shift elsewhere.

 

Today’s core macroeconomic problem is profoundly different from the problem any living policymaker has seen before. As I have been arguing for some years now, it is a version of the secular stagnation — chronic lack of demand — that terrified Alvin Hansen during the Depression. In today’s global economy, private investment demand is manifestly unable to absorb private savings even with negative real interest rates and limited restraints on financial markets. That is why even with burgeoning government debt and unsustainable lending, growth remains sluggish and below target.

 

Since 2013, when I first argued that we were seeing more than simple “economic headwinds”, interest rates have been much lower, fiscal deficits have been much larger, and leverage and asset prices have been much higher than expected. Yet growth and inflation have fallen short of forecasts. That is exactly what one would expect from secular stagnation: a chronic shortage of private sector demand.

 

What is to be done? To start it would be helpful if policymakers acknowledged this week that the policy problem is not smoothing cyclical fluctuations or preventing profligacy. Rather the fundamental issue is assuring that global demand is sufficient and reasonably distributed across countries.

 

The place to start is by dampening down trade wars — deeds, threats and rhetoric. Trade warriors think they are participating in zero-sum games globally with one country gaining demand at the expense of another by opening markets or imposing protection. In fact trade conflicts are negative-sum games because there is no winner to offset the demand that is lost when uncertainty inhibits and delays spending decisions.

 

Given the risk of a catastrophic deflationary spiral, central banks are probably right to attempt to ease monetary conditions. But diminishing returns have surely set in with respect to monetary policy and there is risk of doing real damage to the health of the banks and other financial intermediaries.

 

Most important governments need to rethink fiscal policy. Government debt or government support for private debt is needed to absorb savings flows. With real rates near zero or even negative, the cost of debt service is very low and low rates can be locked in for decades. That means that the debt levels that were prudent when rates were at 5 per cent no longer apply in today’s zero interest rate world. Governments that run chronic surpluses are failing to do their part to support the global economy and should be the object of international scrutiny.

 

There are other possible interventions. Increasing pay-as-you-go public pensions would reduce private saving without pushing up deficits. Public guarantees could spur private green investments. New regulations that prompt businesses to accelerate their replacement cycles will increase private investment. Measures to create more hospitable environments for investment in developing countries can also promote the absorption of global saving.

 

Spurring sound spending is the antidote to secular stagnation and monetary black holes. It should be an easier technical problem to solve and much easier to sell politically than the austerity challenges of earlier eras. But problems cannot be solved until they are properly diagnosed and the global financial community is not there yet. Hopefully that will change this week.