Are Senate Republicans Setting the Stage for Dictatorship?

Watching Senate Republicans in the impeachment proceeds makes it clear that one thing is nowhere in their thoughts, namely living up to their oaths of office and defending the constitutional order.  Indeed, they seem poised to say that a president is above the law and can do literally whatever he/she wants. Even if the nation survives the Trump regime, the precedent may well come back to haunt Republicans should the Democrats capture the White House with an equally narcissistic, megalomaniac.  Sadly, Republican senators have put their own re-election and avoidance of upsetting Trump's white supremacist, Christian extremist base above the interest of the nation and the constitutional order.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Senate Republicans' abandonment of the oaths and concern for the nation.  Here are highlights:

[Trump's] The president’s lawyers this week floated their catch-all impeachment defense, one tailor-made for President Trump. It is, in essence, that a narcissistic president can do no wrong.

Like most of [Trump's] the president’s arguments, it’s erroneous. But no argument could have presented the issue more starkly to Republican senators: Will they follow their oaths to defend the Constitution and to do impartial justice? Or will they once again show fealty to Trump personally, thereby accepting his conflation of his personal interests with those of the nation?

Leave it to Alan Dershowitz to drive the point home with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.  If “a president does something which he believes will get himself elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” Dershowitz contended.

For a president psychologically incapable of distinguishing between his own personal interests and the nation’s, that amounts to the ultimate get-out-of-impeachment-free card. Trump already believes that “I have an Article II” — Article II of the Constitution — “where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” This self-described very stable genius, he of “I alone can fix it,” is convinced that his reelection, achieved by whatever means necessary, serves the interests of the country. In short, anything goes.

But the argument is a lie. It’s another example of how Trump corrupts all around him. Following the lead of the political aides and allies who came before them, during the past two weeks it has been the lawyers who have debased themselves. Defying their own obligations of candor to the tribunals before which they appear, they’ve lied to and misled the court of impeachment about the House proceedings and underlying facts, peddled conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation, and of course about Ukraine and the Bidens. Their legal position is likewise false. It’s just not true that good motives, when mixed with bad ones, compel acquittal under the law. If a politician takes a bribe to do what he thinks would have been best for the public anyway, he still goes to jail. If he’s president, under a Constitution that refers to impeachment specifically for “bribery,” as well other “high crimes and misdemeanors,” he should still be removed.

It’s also not true that “abuse of power” is not impeachable, or that a statutory crime is necessary for impeachment. And it’s not true, as Dershowitz argued Wednesday, that the Framers’ rejection of “maladministration” as a basis for impeachment means that abuse of power isn’t impeachable. The Framers rejected the word “maladministration” because it covered mistakes and incompetence, not because it also could mean abuse of power. In fact, they swapped “high crimes and misdemeanors” into the final document precisely because it does cover such abuse.

[I]f a president conditions another official act — releasing security assistance to a foreign country — on a requirement that the foreign country smear the president’s political opponent. That’s not politics; that’s corruption. And corruption, for all the Trump lawyers’ attempt to muddy the waters with tortured interpretations of the Constitution, is what this impeachment is all about. Trump acted with corrupt intent to damage a political opponent. Testimony from former national security adviser John Bolton seems certain to underscore that point. 

Which is precisely why Republican senators seem so desperate not to hear it and so willing to entertain a false reading of the Constitution that would effectively render the impeachment clause a nullity. Should they do that, they will have sacrificed their own oaths to protect their own electoral prospects, and the country and the Constitution will have been saddled with a terrible precedent. The Senate will have told Trump that, indeed, he can do whatever he wants.

Is China Heading for Crisis?

With America's current political crisis sucking up most of the media attention, even as Trump strives to be an authoritarian ruler above the law, it is easy to forget that even dictatorships seem to have a maximum life expectancy and that nations like China, which seeks to hold a hegemony of Asia, have their own perils to face. While the Chinese regime is not as fossilized as that of the Soviet Union on the eve of its collapse, political strains are growing and not just in Hong Kong, a city state that exists as a sharp reminder of a dictatorial regimes limitations. Yes, China's leadership has a vision of where it wants the country to go in terms of economic power and influence, but the very prosperity that this will bring undermines dictatorial rule.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the growing difficulty China is experiencing in holding conflicting goals and desires under control.  How it all ends is anyone's guess.  Here are column excerpts:

China — or, rather, the Chinese regime — is in trouble. Tuesday’s gigantic parade in Beijing to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic looked like something out of the late Brezhnev era: endless military pomp and gray old men. Hong Kong is in its fourth straight month of protests, marked and stained by this week’s shooting of an unarmed teenage demonstrator. The Chinese economy is growing at its slowest rate in 27 years, even when going by the overstated official figures.

Meantime, capital is fleeing China — an estimated $1.2 trillion in the past decade — while foreign investors sour on Chinese markets. Beijing’s loudly touted Belt-and-Road initiative looks increasingly like a swamp of corruption, malinvestment and bad debt. Its retaliatory options in the face of Donald Trump’s trade war are bad and few. And General Secretary Xi Jinping has created a cult-of-personality dictatorship in a style unseen since Mao Zedong, China’s last disastrous emperor.

Remember the “Chinese Dream” — Xi’s vision of China as a modern, powerful, and “moderately well-off” state? Forget it. The current task for Chinese leadership is to avoid a full-blown nightmare of international isolation, economic decline, and domestic revolt.

The question is whether that’s still possible.

China’s presumptive trajectory once seemed clear. In domestic affairs: rapid economic reform; slow political opening. Lather, rinse, repeat. In international affairs: peaceful rise; burgeoning clout. It was to be a model of managed development, a Middle Kingdom fit for the 21st century.

That’s not what happened, for reasons that Chang and others saw coming long ago. Rapid growth is easy when labor and capital are plentiful and cheap. But most developing countries inevitably fall into what’s called the middle-income trap, when they no longer have the cost advantages of poor countries but haven’t yet acquired the legal, educational, or technological advantages of rich ones.

Beijing’s dilemmas go deeper. Economic reforms generate sudden riches that are ripe targets for extravagant graft, particularly by powerful state actors. Graft creates incentives for further self-dealing, which distorts economic decision-making and breeds public cynicism. . . . The result: more corruption, more cynicism, more repression. How long that can keep going is an open question.

[S]cholars such as Larry Diamond and Minxin Pei have noted that dictatorships tend to have a roughly 70-year lifespan. At some point, the revolutionary fervor that sustains the first generation of leaders and the will to power that sustains the second gives way to the policy failures, mounting discontents, outside shocks and inner doubts that prove the undoing of the third.

Especially when the regime experiences some kind of blunt trauma, either in the form of a foreign-policy fiasco, an economic shock, or a moral outrage. In its attempts to respond to Hong Kong’s protests, Beijing risks all three.

Accommodating the protesters’ demands, above all the granting of genuine universal suffrage, is the right thing to do, but introduces a democratic principle fatal to the regime’s self-preservation.

Hence the looming crisis. It could be defused, if Beijing guarantees amnesty for all nonviolent protesters and removes the troops it has brought in from the mainland in exchange for a meaningful process of negotiation. Or it could be “solved” through some form of hyper-aggressive policing that stops short of an outright massacre. But that only puts a lid on discontents that will continue to boil.

A policy of hoping the protesters discredit themselves or simply run out of steam shows no sign of working. A Tiananmen-style crackdown would underscore the regime’s brutishness and incompetence, destroy Hong Kong as a global financial capital, and spur China’s neighbors to arm to the teeth and draw closer to Washington.

But if the regime’s travails prove anything, it’s that China’s current despot is no more enlightened than despots elsewhere, and China’s people are no less eager to have what people have elsewhere: justice, fairness, rights, freedom from fear, freedom itself. In China’s looming crisis, the human condition shines through.

Virginia Joins Federal Court Challenge to Trump's Muslim Travel Ban

As the legal challenges to and wide spread condemnation of Donald Trump, a/k/a, Der Fuhrer's continue to grow, especially in the wake of Trump's firing of the acting Attorney General for refusing to enforce his illegal action, the Commonwealth of Virginia has now joined the expanding number federal court challenges.  Both Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring (pictured above) and Governor Terry McAuliffe back Virginia's challenge which is adversely impacting Virginia businesses, university faculty members, and, of course, university students.  The Washington Post looks at this development and the manner in which the rights of those already holding valid visas have been trampled.  Here are article highlights:

The Commonwealth of Virginia intervened Tuesday in a lawsuit filed by attorneys for two Yemeni brothers who arrived at Dulles International Airport on Saturday and were quickly put on a return flight to Ethiopia in response to President Trump’s ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

Tareq and Ammar Aqel Mohammed Aziz had been approved for permanent residence status in the United States, where they planned to join their father. Their attorneys say they were coerced, with no legal counsel present, to sign papers they didn’t understand, giving up visas they had worked for years to secure.

Fifty or sixty other legal residents were similarly detained at Dulles, the attorneys allege, saying that many were likewise unfairly persuaded to sign away their right to stay. A lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in California reported similar scenarios at Los Angeles International Airport.

The lawsuit, in federal court in Virginia, is among several filed across the country challenging the president’s ban.

At a news conference Tuesday, Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) called Trump’s executive order “sweeping, poorly understood and chaotically implemented,” and said it “led to the violation of the constitutional and statutory rights of numerous residents of Virginia.”

He justified Virginia’s interest in joining the lawsuit by saying the executive order affects “numerous” residents of the state, especially students and staff at colleges and universities. As a result, he said, the state would face difficulty in attracting students and faculty, and would suffer financial damage.

Herring said that more than 100 students at Virginia Commonwealth University alone are either unable to leave to visit their families or return to campus from overseas.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), who stood beside Herring for the announcement, said he had been “receiving calls from folks throughout the commonwealth” since the executive order last Friday. “I have been notified by scores of companies who are now worried about their employees,” he said. “This is not the United States of America that we know.”

[W]hen [Tareq and Ammar Aqel Mohammed Aziz] they arrived at Dulles, the brothers were handcuffed and their immigration paperwork was seized, their attorneys said. They were given documents to sign and allegedly told that if they did not, they would be removed from the country and barred from coming back for five years. They were not allowed to see legal counsel.

Under pressure, their attorneys said, they signed the documents without realizing that by doing so they had renounced their legal U.S. status. Agents stamped “canceled” on their visas and told them to get on a flight at their own expense to Ethi­o­pia, where they had stopped on their way from Yemen, the attorneys said.

On Saturday night, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema issued an order guaranteeing access to attorneys for all legal permanent residents detained at Dulles and barring the removal of those residents for seven days. But the Aziz brothers had already been sent to Ethi­o­pia. And in their most recent court filing, their attorneys said that after the judge’s order was issued, customs officials at the airport continued to bar access on the grounds that the people they had stopped were in “processing,” not “detention.”

“The full impact of President Trump’s ban remains unclear because the government has not complied fully and transparently with a valid temporary restraining order issued by a federal court,” Herring said. 

I continue to feel like I am watching things unfold much as 1930's Germans who opposed Hitler observed their nation descend into dictatorship and the trampling on civil rights become the norm.   

Is China the New Spanish Empire?

One thing that politicians seem to rarely do is look at and learn from history - much of America's Middle East debacle could have been avoided had any serious thought been given and delusions of "American exceptionalism" not blinded both military and media leaders not to mention George W. Bush, idiot-in0chief- and Emperor Palapatine Cheney.  A piece in Politico makes the case that the current market instability in China might well be understood through the lens of history if westerners - and the Communist leadership - were to learn lessons from the past.  Most specifically, that a centralized dictatorship over times cannot control the economy and events despite huge efforts to do so.  Here are highlights that suggest that China's future could be quite different that what some expect:

The Chinese turmoil roiling markets right now presents a fresh and profound challenge to the world economy: For the first time, a giant, non-European superpower threatens world financial stability and the powers that be seem at a loss.  If the IMF and World Bank have stumbled with Greece, how are they going to get a hold on the stock market travails of Communist China? What tools do we even have to affect how it plays out?

But if the particulars are novel, in the bigger sense this is a movie we’ve seen before. Though China has been the global economic star of the last low-growth decade, it remains a totalitarian dictatorship, with its economy shrouded in state secrecy.  What we’re encountering in this crisis is the spectacle of a closed society colliding with the forces of complex, free-market capitalism. If we look beyond China, we can find a long history of these collisions, dating back hundreds of years, as both closed societies and capitalism evolved and became more complex. And the history has a clear but unsettling lesson to offer: When such a collision happens, it’s a moment to genuinely worry.

Since the dawn of capitalism, closed societies with repressive governments have—much like China—been capable of remarkable growth and innovation. Sixteenth-century Spain was a great imperial power, with a massive navy and extensive industry such as shipbuilding and mining. One could say the same thing about Louis XIV’s France during the 17^th century, which also had vast wealth, burgeoning industry and a sprawling empire.

But both countries were also secretive, absolute monarchies, and they found themselves thrust into competition with the freer countries Holland and Great Britain. Holland, in particular, with a government that didn’t try to control information, became the information center of Europe—the place traders went to find out vital information which they then used as the basis of their projects and investments.  The large empires, on the other hand, had economies so centrally planned that the monarch himself would often make detailed economic decisions.  As these secretive monarchies tried to prop up their economies, they ended up in unsustainable positions that invariably led to bankruptcy, collapse and conflict.

In Spain, the result was a slow collapse, which has left it and its former empire suffering from perpetual economic crisis and political instability. In France, an open society would eventually be born through monarchial bankruptcy that pulled down banks around Europe, and ended in violent revolution and the vastly destructive Napoleonic wars.

More recently, Germany long struggled with the mix of modern industry, capitalism and authoritarianism.  Throughout the 19^th century, and into the 20^th, Germany experienced massive economic growth under the hand of Bismarck’s central political authority; the result was a period of great strength, followed by crisis, war, political upheaval and the geopolitical and moral catastrophe of WWII. 

And though we tend to forget this now, the Soviet Union experienced massive economic expansion for half a century.  America feared it not only for its m military, but for the industrial might, expanding GDP and technological achievements that added heft to its ideological challenge around the world.  Only after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 did we fully understand what was really going on behind the curtain. In financial terms, Soviet secrecy was very effectively shrouding the massive liabilities of the state. 

China is a new case, for it has mixed capitalism and totalitarianism in a unique way.  Unlike the USSR, there are privately owned companies and public investment.  And yet behind banks, companies and the stock market still lies the heavy hand of the state.  The Chinese government forces investment in the stock market and bolsters banks, companies and state entities with secretive cash infusions; it and hides toxic assets in its enormous and completely secretive sovereign wealth funds.

As in imperial Spain, or Cold War Russia, there is neither transparency nor trust.  There is no question that China has massive growth potential until its population curve starts to turn, but what we are seeing in this current financial crisis is likely to be only the beginning of the political and societal crisis brought about by a dictatorship’s efforts to simulate the performance of a capitalist economy—but one that only grows.  The stock market is not real; government financial statistics are fake and obscured.

There is no historical example of a closed imperial economy facing large capital-driven, open states and sustainably competing over the long term. That is not to say that China isn’t an economic powerhouse and a remarkable site of energy and potential. It is certainly both. But we also know Chinese debt—as secret as the state likes to keep it—is enormous, and that its financial system is like any other bubble. 

The great “Beijing Consensus,” China’s absolute commitment to showing 8% growth every year, is unsustainable, at least through legitimate means. And without it, China is beginning to look like an enormous totalitarian ponzi scheme—a phenomenon common enough in world history, but extremely dangerous to be near in the long run.

It’s tempting to look for quick policy solutions, or—for some political candidates—to wave around threats as a way to gain leverage. But almost by definition, a society like China is immune to our efforts . . . In the short term, the best goal to push for is more transparency, in the hope that sunlight helps mitigate whatever shock is still coming. And until then, a healthy skepticism might be the best protection we can offer ourselves.

Will A Regime Change Occur in Russia?

This blog often looks at the parallels between the misrule of Russian dictator and would be tsar, Vladimir Putin, and the lies and tactics used by Adolph Hitler in the lead up to World War II and the Holocaust.  Like Hitler, Putin uses claims of encirclement by a hostile west to play to the fears and xenophobia of the Russian people while seizing increased dictatorial powers for himself.  He has used the claim of protecting Russians living beyond Russia's borders as an excuse to invade Crimea and Ukraine akin to what Hitler did to justify invading Poland and Czechoslovakia.  And he has demonized gays much as Hitler demonized Jews.  While some fear that Putin may push the world to war, others think that Putin's demise may be approaching - a welcome prospect.  Here are excerpts from a op-ed in the New York Times:

Graham Allison, director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Dimitri K. Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest, warned of a growing risk of nuclear war. But they offered a contrasting explanation.

“When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia was on its knees,” they wrote. “But since Vladimir Putin took over in 1999, he has led a recovery of Russia’s sense of itself as a great power.”

These two strands of the Kremlin narrative — recovery on one hand; encirclement on the other — have been fashioned to appeal to the Russian people and used to justify more than 15 years of authoritarian rule. But both strands are suspect. In the early 1990s, Russians rose up against Soviet authoritarianism. The first — and last — popularly and fairly elected president, Boris N. Yeltsin, had a mandate to pursue the true national interest of catching up with the advanced, democratic West.

The situation in Ukraine now, after a popular uprising against a corrupt, authoritarian regime, resembles Russia then.

Tragically for Russia, from the mid-’90s an oligarchic bureaucracy monopolized oil and gas exports and has used the profits to purchase luxuries and homes in the West. The general population, meanwhile, has remained under the custody of a K.G.B.-style state security and propaganda apparatus.

For a decade, the rising price of oil provided soaring growth and veiled the inherent deficiency of the regime. In reality, Russia’s government is simply incompatible with the reforms needed for sustainable economic development, which demands liberalization and competitiveness.

When the petrodollar windfall dried up, that reality reasserted itself. Today, the nation is truly on its knees — beneath a leader who cannot be changed, and as hostage to the capricious price of oil and a gluttonous military-security complex.  

Sooner or later, economic hardship will awaken the people, too.

This year alone, Russians have suffered a 3 percent loss in real disposable income (6.4 percent year on year). In the 12 months to April, exports — vital for providing foreign currency — fell 33.9 percent, and imports shrank 40.8 percent. The outlook is very poor.

Like their Soviet predecessors, the Kremlin’s present rulers see the example of the democratic West, above all the United States, as a threat. Instead of preaching a Communist-style supremacy, most realize that their regime will be uncompetitive in the long run. Yet the oligarchs cling to power as long as possible through intimidation and disinformation, seeking to undermine Western norms, from human rights to business transparency and international law.

 

[T]he potential of American soft power and leadership, together with a strong response from European countries and Ukraine, is far from exhausted. Economic sanctions have bitten, magnifying the regime’s inefficiency.

The firmness of the West in protecting the sovereignty of Ukraine and restoring its territorial integrity is a prerequisite not only to rein in the Kremlin’s aggressive impulses, but also to engage Russia in a constructive dialogue on a broad agenda.

Regime change in Russia is inevitable, maybe imminent. But the West should not bet on that eventuality or make it a policy goal. The Russian people will rise up again, but the path to a sustainable democracy and stable economy will be challenging. The West should be ready to help then.

What the Western democracies must do now, for Russia and for themselves, is prove that they will defend their values and international law.

I hope the author is correct and that Putin's days in power will soon end - for the good of Russia and the world.  Putin is but the latest in Russia's failed dictators who have held the country back and harmed the Russian people.

Putin Continues to Expand His Hitler Like Policies

One of the key tools used by Adolph Hitler and the Nazi regime in their rise to power in the early 1930's was the muzzling of the press and organizations that questioned the official Nazi propaganda machine.  Newspapers were closed, editors and reporters were threatened and arrested any organization that questioned Nazi brutality was shut down.  So far we have seen Putin reprise Hitlers performance at the 1936 Olympic Games with his spectacle at Sochi.  We have also seen him use Hitler's claims of protecting Germans outside of Germany for his blue print for meddling in and likely invading eastern Ukraine.  And, of course, we have seen Putin impose anti-gay laws reminiscent of what the Nazis did to the Jews.  Now we see Putin engaging in another Hitler tactic: closing down any organization that might help everyday Russians of the dangers a regime like Putin's poses to not just freedom, but one's life.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Putin's move to shut down an organization that reminds Russians of the brutality of a regime that Putin in some ways seeks to restore.  Here are highlights:

The letters revealed the love story of Lev and Svetlana Mishchenko, a couple separated by Lev’s imprisonment in the Soviet gulag after World War II. What made the letters extraordinary is that they were uncensored, smuggled back and forth from the Pechora prison camp in the far north. The letters became the basis for Orlando Figes’s moving book, “Just Send Me Word,” published in 2012.

What makes this relevant today is that the Mishchenko trove of letters was found by Figes at Memorial, a Russian organization formed in the dying days of the Soviet Union to ensure that the story of Stalinist repression would not be forgotten. Memorial has also, separately, been at the forefront of human rights work, determined not to let the brutality of the past be repeated. Now Memorial is facing demands by President Vladimir Putin’s government that the organization be closed. This would represent a loss beyond description.

In its archives, Memorial has preserved stories of the suffering inflicted upon millions of people by the Soviet police state. The Mishchenkos survived and were reunited; many others met a worse fate. The only way a society can begin to heal from such wounds is to preserve the lessons of history for future generations.

But Mr. Putin, a scion of the Soviet KGB that inflicted so much of the suffering, has no use for Memorial. On Friday, news services reported that the Russian Justice Ministry had filed a petition with the Supreme Court to force Memorial to close. A hearing is set for Nov. 13.

As if to twist the knife, Mr. Putin’s loyalists unleashed a smear campaign against Memorial on the NTV television channel, accusing the group of supporting extremists and terrorists. 

Earlier, the Kremlin’s pressure on Memorial included attempts to force it to accept the status of a “foreign agent” under a new Russian law that has been used to harass groups that receive funding from abroad. Memorial has resisted the insulting label, which is redolent of Soviet-style accusations of disloyalty and treachery.

No one should underestimate the power of the Russian state to crush a person or organization. Mr. Putin has done it repeatedly to silence his critics. But the squelching of Memorial would be an especially grievous blow to the Russian people and their ability to understand, and shape, their history.

Russia's Curse of Bad Leaders - Putin, the Latest Chapter

Some time back I noted that I had read the book "Red Fortress - History and Illusion in the Kremlin," which had been given to me as a Christmas gift.  The book traced the history of the Kremlin and by extension the history of Russia from the founding of the Muscovy state through the near present.  The take away from the book: (i) much of Russia's "curse" has been bad leaders who has squandered Russia's future and acted to the detriment of the Russian people, (ii) too often, Russians have found themselves struggling to over come the backwardness and societal regression arising from brutal regimes and squandered opportunities, and (iii) Russia continues to have a love-hate relationship with western Europe.  Fast forward to the present day and a piece in Time looks at why modern day Russians are allowing their future to be harmed by Russia's latest bad ruker, Vladimir Putin.  Here are article highlights:

But in all of it there was an undercurrent of aggrievement; a sense of having to restart after seven decades of the Soviet State, having to retrace steps back to the path the rest of the world had been on—and then struggle to catch up; a feeling that the chance for Russia to remake itself had been hampered by the hegemony of the West; a knowledge that the county was less than it could be, should be, that their individual lives were lessened too; or maybe just a knowledge—especially among the populace in poorer towns and villages outside of Moscow—that what wealth and success has come to the county has come only to a very few.

That’s a feeling a great number of Americans can relate to: not only the frustration with growing inequality, but the sense that our country is also somehow becoming smaller than it should be. Here, when our sense of self is threatened, we turn to historical mythology that buttresses our belief in who we are: The American Dream, our forefathers wrestling with what that would be, the presidents who, through our beloved democracy, shaped how we understand it now—FDR, JFK, Reagan. We look for the next in that mold.

But Russians don’t have that history. Theirs is one in which revolutionary uprisings led to instability before being channeled by a system of control; one in which democracy is associated with a time of devastating economic collapse. We all know the long history of Russian strongmen—from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin—but can you imagine having that history as our own, having those leaders to look back on? Can you imagine our own country collapsed, our own inequality increased, our own dreams squeezed? Maybe you can, all too well. Now imagine that we had a leader who not only gave us hope, promised us change, but delivered.

But what has Putin really delivered?  Unfettered political and economic corruption; staggering wealth disparities that rival or exceed those of Imperial Russia; a growing status as a international pariah; a return to a dictatorship; media censorship and  the arrest of political opponents of trumped up charges.  The list goes on and on.  Posturings of military strength and cow towing to the Orthodox Church which has throughout its history backed autocrats does not equal delivering on changes.  Rather, it is merely a repackaging of the worse aspects of Russia's past.  The ultimate irony?  Had the 1917 Bolshevik revolution never occurred and trends under the last phase of the Romanov dynasty continued, Russia might well have been wealthier and more powerful and more cultural prominent than it is today.  Bad leaders being replaced by those even worse is not delivering on promises of change.

Hope needs to be based on substance, not just a controlled media and endless propaganda.  In some ways nothing has changed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.

 

Is Vladimir Putin Setting the Stage for His Own Self-Destruction?

One of the problems with dictatorships is that eventually they believe their own propaganda even as their subjugated public often begins to recognize that they have been spoon fed lies while news outlets disseminating the truth are stifled.  It happened under some of the Tsars, most certainly in the later days of Nazi Germany, obviously under the regime that ruled the former Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent in China today.  The problem is that sooner or later, objective reality and inconvenient facts - the truth, if you will, show the lie that has been perpetrated on the subjugated public.  The reckoning can be severe and fatal.  Ask Mussolini.   Andrew Sullivan speculates that Vladimir Putin has created a nightmare scenario for himself that offers no gracious exit notwithstanding Putin's pandering to right wing extremists in Russia and to the leaders of the Orthodox Church (I hope Sullivan is correct) .  Here are highlights:

 

There’s always a moment – sooner or later – when a regime propped up by lies will have to account for an empirical reality that refutes it and threatens to bring the entire edifice down. That’s the potentially game-changing significance of MH17, it seems to me.

Here’s Putin’s strange 13 minute address to Russians today on foreign policy – after his deeply weird televised address at 2 am. He’s visibly panicking; and the faces of his colleagues are quite a study: . . . .   Notice the petulant raging at Ukraine and then the litany of paranoia and isolation: “we know what’s really going on.” No wonder the Russian population had to be talked down from widespread panic at the thought of an imminent invasion by the West! That’s how far Putin had ratcheted up the hysteria – a very dangerous place for a leader with nukes to be in. A reader who has been monitoring the Russian Internet writes:

As you can imagine, the last few days have been a rollercoaster ride on the runet. The first reaction to the downing of MH17 was panic. They were trying to shoot down Putin’s plane! Two doubles took off from Amsterdam at the same time, one filled with corpses who all had new passports and totally new Facebook pages!

The second wave of the pro-Putinists was despair – “It is all over now! The only thing standing between us and slavery to Western interests is our beloved Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin!”

Now, already, it seems that they are quickly realizing that “everything has changed.” The anti-Putin journalists and posters are becoming much more courageous than they have been in recent months about opposing Putin directly. Here is a piece from Slon.ru, the Russian version of Salon:

“The nighttime address to the nation was something unprecedented, and even more unprecedented was its content, in the sense that there was no content in this speech at all. Why did Putin call up his press service, cameramen, make-up artists, and internet site workers and many others at 2 in the morning? Just to repeat once more that there would have been no tragedy if there hadn’t been any war in the Donbass, to call for peace negotiations and inviting ICAO aviation experts to the site of the crash? Couldn’t these two and a half points waited until the morning?”

The pro-Putin people have seen their arguments fall to pieces against the reality of the situation. Putin is being portrayed as in a total panic. The anti-Putin forces are worried about what he might do in such a state, but he is no longer being seen as the magician in control.

Today, the Europeans finally approved of a host of new sanctions, yet to be implemented. That may give Putin some room to climb down. But it won’t be easy. That’s the look on Putin’s face. It’s called rattled.

In his own dangerous way, Putin is just as insane as Adolph Hitler and one does need to worry about what he might do now that his little adventure in Ukraine is unraveling.  Meanwhile, if the Russian people want the future that they deserve, the first step is to drive Putin and his cronies from office and replace him/them with people who give a damn about average Russian instead of enriching themselves, stashing money in secret foreign bank accounts and satiating their own megalomania.
 

Vladimir Putin's Games

While Vladimir Putin has satisfied his immense ego with the spectacle of the Sochi Winter Olympics - which so far have escaped any of the violence feared by many - things have been going to hell next door in the Ukraine where Viktor F. Yanukovych, Putin's puppet, has fled from the capital of Kiev (which was the first capital of what became the Russian empire) in the face of a popular uprising.  And interestingly enough among the things that has shocked the populace is the opulence with which Yanukovych lived  - e.g., private golf course, private zoo, antique car collection, restaurant in the form of a pirate ship - while many Ukrainians struggled to merely survive.  It's a scene that would likely be replayed if everyday Russians were ever allowed to see Putin's many residences. A column in the New York Times looks at Putin's megalomania and what appears to be his attempt to recast himself as a new Tsar and a protector of tradition as a vehicle to remain in power and carter to reactionary regimes around the world, including those using religion to dupe the citizenry and making war on gays. The sole defect of the column is that it gives too little reference to American Christofascists who have jumped on the Putin band wagon . Here are excerpts:

Today the Olympics are on Russian soil, and violence is convulsing another nation in Moscow’s traditional orbit. But the crisis in Ukraine is sending a rather different message. So far, events in Kiev have been a lesson in the limits of Russian influence, and the implausibility of Putin’s claim to offer a rival civilizational model to the liberal democratic West. 

That such a rivalry is Putin’s goal seems clear enough. After a century in which Russia styled itself a revolutionary power fighting the West’s reactionary capitalists, the former K.G.B. man has sought a return to the ideological role his nation played under the czars — as a conservative bulwark against the West’s revolutionary liberals. 

As The Week’s Michael Brendan Dougherty has pointed out, this back flip has been visible across the post-9/11 era. But it’s been thrown into relief by Putin’s recent domestic gambits — the blasphemy trial for Pussy Riot, the crackdown on gay rights, the rhetoric contrasting Russia’s “traditional values” with American and Western European relativism.

Crucially, this rhetoric isn’t just for domestic consumption: it’s also pitched to the developing world. In the British Spectator, Owen Matthews argues that just as it did in the Communist era, “Moscow is again building an international ideological alliance,” with Putin offering himself up as a potential leader for “all conservatives who dislike liberal values,” no matter what country they call home.

But there is a vast difference between Putin’s grand strategy and both its Czarist and its Soviet antecedents. 

The czars sought a “Holy Alliance” to defend a still-extant ancien régime — a rooted, hierarchical system that still governed many 19th-century European societies. But today’s Russia, brutalized by Communism and then taken over by oligarchs and grifters, is not a traditional society in any meaningful sense of the term, and the only thing it has in common with many of its potential developing-world allies is a contempt for democratic norms. In the Romanov era, the throne-and-altar idea still had a real claim to political legitimacy. But there is no comparable claim Putin can make for his own authority, and no similar mystique around his client dictators, be they Central Asian strongmen or Bashar al-Assad. 

A few voices on the American right have praised his traditionalist rhetoric — but only a few. As beleaguered as America’s social conservatives sometimes feel, we’re a long distance from signing up as useful idiots for a thuggish, obviously opportunistic “family values” crusade.

Which is not to say that Putin’s geopolitical approach is all folly. On the contrary, he often plays the great game far more effectively than his European and American counterparts. 

But the weakness of Russia, its government’s corruption and the unattractiveness of its alleged traditionalism all combine to foreclose his grandest ambitions.

This is basically what we’re watching happen in Ukraine. Despite the blunders of the European Union — which courted Kiev without seeming to realize that Russia might make a counteroffer — Putin is struggling to win a battle for influence in a country that both the Romanovs and the Soviets dominated with ease. 

For an interesting parallel to Putinism’s problems, consider what’s happening halfway around the world, in Venezuela, where the laboratory Hugo Chávez built for “Bolivarian Revolution” is descending into the same kind of violence as in Ukraine. 

The lesson in both cases is not that late-modern liberal civilization necessarily deserves uncontested dominance.  But 25 years after the Cold War, from Kiev to Caracas, there is still no plausible alternative.

More Government Spying - XKeyscore: NSA Collects "Nearly Everything One Does on the Internet'

In yet another bombshell article, The Guardian has a piece that suggests that U.S. government spying on American citizens is even more pervasive than previously thought.  Indeed, nearly everything one does online can be collected and used for whatever nefarious purpose the government bureaucrats.  For all I know, I may have a dossier on me at NSA given some of my criticisms of Barack Obama and other parts of the U. S. government.  Naturally, "preventing terrorism" and "national security" are the excuses thrown out to justify such pervasive spying - the same excuses used by communist dictators in China and other dictators past and present in countries around the globe.  Is there any proof of this other than statements by government officials?  Of course not.  The information is all classified and secret.  Here are article highlights:

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian's earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight.

The files shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

"I, sitting at my desk," said Snowden, could "wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email".

US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden's assertion: "He's lying. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do."

But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.

XKeyscore provides the technological capability, if not the legal authority, to target even US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst.

In a second Guardian interview in June, Snowden elaborated on his statement about being able to read any individual's email if he had their email address. He said the claim was based in part on the email search capabilities of XKeyscore, which Snowden says he was authorized to use while working as a Booz Allen contractor for the NSA.

Beyond emails, the XKeyscore system allows analysts to monitor a virtually unlimited array of other internet activities, including those within social media.  An NSA tool called DNI Presenter, used to read the content of stored emails, also enables an analyst using XKeyscore to read the content of Facebook chats or private messages.

In a letter this week to senator Ron Wyden, director of national intelligence James Clapper acknowledged that NSA analysts have exceeded even legal limits as interpreted by the NSA in domestic surveillance.   Acknowledging what he called "a number of compliance problems", Clapper attributed them to "human error" or "highly sophisticated technology issues" rather than "bad faith".

Reading all of this, it really is no surprise that the lack of personal freedom from surveillance in America landed in the same category as that of Russia and China.     So much for privacy and freedom from big brother watching your every move.

What Role Jorge Bergoglio(Pope Francis I) Play in Argentina's "Dirty War" and the Murder of Thousands?

The college of cardinals sure know how to pick popes of late.  The last go round that brought us Pope Benedict XVI, a former Hitler Youth who seemed to continue a fascist mentality to the throne of St. Peter.  Now, by selecting Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the replacement for Benedict XVI, the cardinals have again selected a man with some possibly ugly ties to a dictatorial regime credited with kidnappings and the murder of possibly thousands of Argentine citizens deemed to be "subversives."  The Guardian, Reuters, and NPR all have some coverage that raises very serious questions about Bergioglio's complicity and cooperation with the military dictatorship that brutally ruled  Argentina from 1976 to 1983 when democracy and free elections were restored.   During the dictatorship's rule it closed the Congress, removed the members of the Supreme Court, and banned political parties, unions, student unions, etc.  You get the idea.  First these highlights from The Guardian which ironically were published two years ago:

To the judicious and fair-minded outsider it has been clear for years that the upper reaches of the Argentinian church contained many "lost sheep in the wilderness", men who had communed and supported the unspeakably brutal western-supported military dictatorship that seized power in that country in 1976 and battened on it for years. Not only did the generals slaughter thousands unjustly, often dropping them out of aeroplanes over the River Plate and selling off their orphan children to the highest bidder, they also murdered at least two bishops and many priests. Yet even the execution of other men of the cloth did nothing to shake the support of senior clerics, including representatives of the Holy See, for the criminality of their leader General Jorge Rafael Videla and his minions.

As it happens, in the week before Christmas [2011] in the city of Córdoba Videla and some of his military and police cohorts were convicted by their country's courts of the murder of 31 people between April and October 1976, a small fraction of the killings they were responsible for. The convictions brought life sentences for some of the military. These were not to be served, as has often been the case in Argentina and neighboring Chile, in comfy armed forces retirement homes but in common prisons.

What one did not hear from any senior member of the Argentinian hierarchy was any expression of regret for the church's collaboration and in these crimes. The extent of the church's complicity in the dark deeds was excellently set out by Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina's most notable journalists, in his book El Silencio (Silence). He recounts how the Argentinian navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship's political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio's name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to chose the successor of John Paul II. 

A Reuters piece has these passages:

Bergoglio's career coincided with the bloody 1976-1983 military dictatorship, during which up to 30,000 suspected leftists were kidnapped and killed -- which prompted sharp questions about his role.
The most well-known episode relates to the abduction of two Jesuits whom the military government secretly jailed for their work in poor neighborhoods.

According to "The Silence," a book written by journalist Horacio Verbitsky, Bergoglio withdrew his order's protection of the two men after they refused to quit visiting the slums, which ultimately paved the way for their capture.

Verbitsky's book is based on statements by Orlando Yorio, one of the kidnapped Jesuits, before he died of natural causes in 2000. Both of the abducted clergymen suffered five months of imprisonment.

"History condemns him. It shows him to be opposed to all innovation in the Church and above all, during the dictatorship, it shows he was very cozy with the military," Fortunato Mallimacci, the former dean of social sciences at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, once said.

His actions during this period strained his relations with many brother Jesuits around the world, who tend to be more politically liberal.

And then there are these highlights from an NPR story:

His preference to remain in the wings, however, has been challenged by rights activists seeking answers about church actions during the dictatorship after the 1976 coup, often known as Argentina's "Dirty War."

Many Argentines remain angry over the church's acknowledged failure to openly confront a regime that was kidnapping and killing thousands of people as it sought to eliminate "subversive elements" in society. It's one reason why more than two-thirds of Argentines describe themselves as Catholic, but fewer than 10 percent regularly attend Mass.

Under Bergoglio's leadership, Argentina's bishops issued a collective apology in October 2012 for the church's failures to protect its flock. But the statement blamed the era's violence in roughly equal measure on both the junta and its enemies.

"Bergoglio has been very critical of human rights violations during the dictatorship, but he has always also criticized the leftist guerrillas. He doesn't forget that side," said the biographer Rubin.
The statements came far too late for some activists, who accused Bergoglio of being more concerned about the church's image than about aiding the many human rights investigations into the junta era.

[R]ights attorney Bregman said Bergoglio's own statements proved church officials knew from early on that the junta was torturing and killing its citizens, and yet publicly endorsed the dictators.  "The dictatorship could not have operated this way without this key support," she said.

Bergoglio also was accused of turning his back on a family that lost five relatives to state terror, including a young woman who was five months' pregnant before she was kidnapped and killed in 1977. The De la Cuadra family appealed to the leader of the Jesuits in Rome, who urged Bergoglio to help them; Bergoglio then assigned a monsignor to the case. Months passed before the monsignor came back with a written note from a colonel: The woman had given birth in captivity to a girl who was given to a family "too important" for the adoption to be reversed.

Despite this written evidence in a case he was personally involved with, Bergoglio testified in 2010 that he didn't know about any stolen babies until well after the dictatorship was over.

The new pope may like to put forth a simple and humble facade, but these reports raise serious questions about his true morality - or lack thereof.    Personally, the selection of Bergoglio as the new pope seems only too appropriate for an institution that has orchestrated a worldwide criminal conspiracy to protect sexual predators and avoid paying just compensation to victims of sexual abuse by priests.  Morally bankrupt is the term that first springs to mind.   Thus my question remains: how can moral and decent individuals remain members of the Catholic Church.