The Trump/Putin Threat to the West

When he had his blog, The Dish, I was a daily reader.  Now, Andrew Sullivan is back with a weekly "conversation" at New York Magazine.  As he was want to do on his blog, he again gets to the heart of matters from a moderate conservative perspective.  He is horrified at the spectacle of Der Trumpenführer and the twin menace that he and Vladimir Putin pose to the West as we have known it for my entire lifetime.  Frighteningly, Sullivan gets to the reality that Trump wants to be the American equivalent of Putin and to rule and loot the nation as Putin has done to Russia.  His attacks on the media and constant bleating about fake news is a critical first step in his authoritarian agenda. Meanwhile, I continue to feel as if the country is living a Tom Clancy or David Baldacci novel. Can America's institution defeat this foul effort?  Here are excerpts from Sullivan's latest column:

The question that remains, of course, is the motive.

Why on Earth would any campaign for president be in constant, secret touch with the intelligence agents of a hostile foreign power?

I cannot know. Maybe Flynn is a rogue loner. It’s also possible, I guess, that the Trump campaign just wanted to keep in touch with the intelligence services of one of this country’s nemeses, if only to wish them Merry Christmas — five times in one day. It’s also conceivable that Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort’s deep ties to the Putin regime were utterly irrelevant to the sudden amendment, this past summer, to the GOP party platform that removed a call to send arms to Ukraine. It’s also possible, I suppose, that deep down I’m straight.

But there’s one explanation that chills me even more than a foreign power’s potential blackmail over an American president. And it is that Trump and Putin are natural allies in their fight against the postwar, U.S.-led international order that has kept the peace for 70 years. Putin and Trump, after all, share a Bannonite foreign policy: a robust defense of nationalism; a view that NATO is obsolete; support for far-right parties throughout Europe; and the goal of smashing the European Union so that Russia can once again extend its tentacles into Eastern Europe, and the U.S. can play one European power off another. I have no idea if Putin has kompromat on the president, but Trump’s actions need no such motivation. Trump and Putin want to form a pincer movement to destroy what we have known for a long time as the West.

Their domestic politics also have disturbing parallels. Trump would love nothing more, it seems to me, than to be an American Putin, treating the country as he long treated his own corporate fiefdom. He once explained he admired the autocrat because Putin has “great control over his country.” Like Putin, Trump would love to control the media. Like Putin, he has developed a leadership cult, devoted to the masses. Like Putin, he believes in a government that has “killers.” Like Putin, he threatens his geographic neighbors. Like Putin, he has cultivated an alliance of convenience with reactionary religious conservatives, to shore up his power. Like Putin, he believes there’s no moral difference between American democracy and Russia’s. Like Putin, he is enriching himself by public office. And, like Putin, he has targeted a minority as a scapegoat — Putin targeted the gays to gin up support while Trump targets the Muslims and Mexicans. And as Putin has RT as his conduit, so Trump has the Murdoch empire.

Steve Bannon, on the other hand, is quite something. I’ve read and reread his 2014 speech at the Vatican to see if I can find any coherence in it, and I confess I failed. It’s a hodgepodge of melodrama, hysteria, and a defense of some kind of “enlightened capitalism” along Judeo-Christian lines, in the face of an imminent Islamist takeover of the planet. It’s the 1950s versus jihad, an attempt to convey the gist of the entire Drudge Report every day and turn it into a thesis. He argues that we are just “at the very beginning stages of a global conflict” that could eradicate 2,000 years of Western civilization. It reads like the apocalyptic, paranoid fantasies of someone who writes letters to the editor, single-spaced, in all caps.

Be very afraid if Trump and Putin are not stopped.

Putin Took Credit for the Boom. Now There’s a Bust.

As noted many times, Russia has been plagued throughout the centuries with a curse: failed leaders who have put personal ambition and/or ideology ahead of the best interests of the Russian people.  This curse continues to persist under Vladimir Putin who sees himself as a new tsar and who, with his cronies, has raped the Russian economy of assets.   Now, with oil prices falling and economic sanctions for his illegal invasions of Crimea and parts of Ukraine also taking a toll, the question is whether or not the Russian people will rightly blame Putin's years of mismanagement for their plight.  The answer to this question is still out, but some Russians seem to be finally opening their eyes and not being duped by Putin's foreign adventures and anti-gay efforts that were always meant to be a distraction from his failed leadership on the economic front.  Here are highlights from a piece in the New York Times:

Today, the economic troubles that Mr. Putin came here to make a big show of solving are back, only worse and involving far more intractable problems than just the “trivial greed” of tycoons that Mr. Putin blamed for Pikalevo’s tumult in 2009.

Pikalevo, about three hours east of St. Petersburg, and the rest of Russia are now mired in the country’s longest recession since Mr. Putin came to power at the end of 1999, with the World Bank warning last month that the nation’s poverty rate would increase this year to 14.2 percent of the population, “undoing nearly a decade’s worth of gains.”

Russia’s current crisis, though largely caused by market forces beyond the Kremlin’s control, notably a slump in the prices of oil and gas, has pushed Mr. Putin into a corner. After years of taking credit for a booming economy, which also had little to do with his actions, and casting himself as a can-do leader capable of untying the toughest economic and political knots, he faces a crisis that has exposed the stark limits of his power and prowess.

A recent rebound in oil prices has lifted hopes in the Kremlin that the worst of Russia’s economic storm has passed, but it has also highlighted just how much Mr. Putin’s fortunes depend on unpredictable and uncontrollable outside forces like the energy market or the economic sanctions imposed by Europe and the United States.

[T]hroughout his 16 years in power, whether as president or prime minister, Mr. Putin has presented an image of an omniscient and omnipresent leader interested in and capable of addressing his country’s most microscopic concerns.

[C]ost-cutting maneuvers, which keep workers off the unemployment register but in some cases reduce their income to almost nothing, are increasingly popular with Russian businesses hit hard by the downturn. But they are deeply unpopular with a population that had grown accustomed to rising salaries under Mr. Putin.

The downturn seems to be taking a toll on Mr. Putin’s standing, or at least on faith in his policies, as Russians’ fascination and delight with his foreign ventures wanes and pocketbook issues increasingly dominate public worries. Around half of those polled this year by the independent Levada Center said they thought Russia was moving in the “right direction,” compared with 64 percent last summer.

[T]he Kremlin’s current nightmare: With low global energy prices and Western sanctions over the Ukraine conflict crimping Russia’s prospects of recovery, the economy has hit a wall. It simply cannot compete with China, the United States or even the European nations that Russian state media constantly portray as fading has-beens. The easy and popular fixes the Kremlin used in the past to resuscitate the economy — or at least to placate the public — have all been exhausted.

There are few signs, however, that Russians will take to the streets in protest or flock to the banner of a divided and feeble opposition. 

Why Putin's Bubble Has Burst

I have noted before that throughout the centuries, Russia has been plagued by bad rulers.  Those who bear the worse consequences of such misrule are typically the Russian people.  With Russia's economy imploding and its currency in a free fall, all of Vladimir Putin's misrule is catching up with him and the picture is not a pretty one.  Putin, of course blames the west for Russia's woes rather than look in the mirror for the ultimate cause of that nation's misfortune.  Like Adolph Hitler, who Putin seems to be trying to emulate in many ways, the fault is never his or that of his corrupt cronies.  A column in the New York Times looks at how Putin and company have brought Russia to this point.  Here are excerpts:

If you’re the type who finds macho posturing impressive, Vladimir Putin is your kind of guy. Sure enough, many American conservatives seem to have an embarrassing crush on the swaggering strongman. “That is what you call a leader,” enthused Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, after Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine without debate or deliberation.

But Mr. Putin never had the resources to back his swagger. Russia has an economy roughly the same size as Brazil’s. And, as we’re now seeing, it’s highly vulnerable to financial crisis — a vulnerability that has a lot to do with the nature of the Putin regime.

The proximate cause of Russia’s difficulties is, of course, the global plunge in oil prices, which, in turn, reflects factors — growing production from shale, weakening demand from China and other economies — that have nothing to do with Mr. Putin. And this was bound to inflict serious damage on an economy that, as I said, doesn’t have much besides oil that the rest of the world wants; the sanctions imposed on Russia over the Ukraine conflict have added to the damage.

But Russia’s difficulties are disproportionate to the size of the shock: While oil has indeed plunged, the ruble has plunged even more, and the damage to the Russian economy reaches far beyond the oil sector. Why?

Actually, it’s not a puzzle — and this is, in fact, a movie currency-crisis aficionados like yours truly have seen many times before: Argentina 2002, Indonesia 1998, Mexico 1995, Chile 1982, the list goes on. The kind of crisis Russia now faces is what you get when bad things happen to an economy made vulnerable by large-scale borrowing from abroad — specifically, large-scale borrowing by the private sector, with the debts denominated in foreign currency, not the currency of the debtor country.

When the nation’s currency falls, the balance sheets of local businesses — which have assets in rubles (or pesos or rupiah) but debts in dollars or euros — implode. This, in turn, inflicts severe damage on the domestic economy, undermining confidence and depressing the currency even more. And Russia fits the standard playbook.

Russia’s elite has been accumulating assets outside the country — luxury real estate is only the most visible example — and the flip side of that accumulation has been rising debt at home.

Where does the elite get that kind of money? The answer, of course, is that Putin’s Russia is an extreme version of crony capitalism, indeed, a kleptocracy in which loyalists get to skim off vast sums for their personal use. It all looked sustainable as long as oil prices stayed high. But now the bubble has burst, and the very corruption that sustained the Putin regime has left Russia in dire straits.

It’s quite a comedown for Mr. Putin. And his swaggering strongman act helped set the stage for the disaster. A more open, accountable regime — one that wouldn’t have impressed Mr. Giuliani so much — would have been less corrupt, would probably have run up less debt, and would have been better placed to ride out falling oil prices. Macho posturing, it turns out, makes for bad economies.

I feel bad for average Russians suffering because of Putin's misrule.  The ultimate solution?  Rise up and drive Putin from power and take back the wealth stolen by Putin and his cronies.

World Bank Suspends $90 Million Loan to Uganda Over Anti-Gay Law

Uganda douche bag President Museveni

Actions need to have consequences and thankfully some nations and some international organizations are making Uganda's passage of an American Christofascist backed draconian anti-gay law have consequences.  Particularly because the law violates international treaties to which Uganda is a signatory.  I've made it clear that I would like to see every penny of aid provided to Uganda by western nations stop completely.  Would it cause harm to average Ugandans?  Likely yes.  But perhaps a rapid decline in conditions might wake these people up to the fact that it is not gays who are a threat to them but instead it is their corrupt and grossly incompetent political leaders.  Even if such a revelation did not occur, at least modern democracies would no longer be financially underwriting the foul government of Uganda and similar horrible nations.  The Guardian reports on the World Bank's decision to freeze an aid loan to Uganda.  Here are excerpts:

The World Bank on Thursday postponed a $90m (£54m) loan to Uganda's health system over a law that toughened punishment for gay people, an unusual move for an institution that typically avoids wading into politics.

"We have postponed the project for further review to ensure that the development objectives would not be adversely affected by the enactment of this new law," World Bank spokesman David Theis said in an email.

The World Bank, a poverty-fighting institution based in Washington, usually refrains from getting involved in countries' internal politics or in issues such as gay rights to avoid antagonising any of its 188 member countries.

World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, however, sent an email to bank staff saying the bank opposes discrimination, and would protect the safety of all employees.

He said passage of the Ugandan law was not an isolated incident, as 83 countries outlaw homosexuality and more than 100 discriminate against women.

"In the coming months, we will have a broad discussion about discrimination with staff, management, and our board on these issues," Kim said in the email. "Now is the right moment for this conversation."

The loan postponement follows the announcement by Norway and Denmark that they would hold back donations to Uganda because of the law. Other donors have also threatened to follow suit, and the United States said it was reviewing ties.

Western anger over the law has triggered a sharp fall in Uganda's shilling currency, leading the central bank to intervene for two days in a row.

Uganda is one of the rectums of the world largely due to the ignorance, corruption and utter incompetence of the Ugandan government, including douche bag in chief, President Museveini.  Uganda was not always like this - it was prosperous under British rule.  So-called self-governance has been a disaster for Uganda and most of its citizens.  For a brief overview of what self-rule has wrought, see this Wikipedia article.

Fools Errand in Afghanistan: $861 Million Spirited Out of Country

Warlords, constant civil strife and utter corruption and graft have been the way of life in Afghanistan for centuries, if not several millennium.  These facts ought to have been apparent to anyone who bothered to make the slightest amount of due diligence before throwing billions of dollars and thousands of American lives down a proverbial rat hole.  Such minimal due diligence would be expecting too much from the cretinous George W. Bush, the power mad Dick Cheney and the hubris filled senior American military leadership.  The examples of the magnitude of America's fools errand in Afghanistan just continue to grow despite the disingenuous, face saving lies and bullshit by the senior military leadership and politicians who refuse to admit that they made a huge and deadly error.  The Virginia Pilot is reporting today that $861 million in foreign aid/loans was spirited out of Afghanistan by corrupt Afghan bankers and officials.  Realistically, the amounts of money stolen is likely much higher. Here are highlights:

Hundreds of millions of dollars from Kabul Bank were spirited out of Afghanistan - some smuggled in airline food trays - to bank accounts in more than two dozen countries, according to an independent review released on Wednesday about massive fraud that led to the collapse of the nation's largest financial institution.

The report, which was financed by international donors, offers new details about how the men at Kabul Bank and their friends and relatives got rich off $861 million in fraudulent loans in what the International Monetary Fund has called a Ponzi scheme that used customer deposits and operated under nascent banking oversight in the war-torn country.

The report describes Kabul Bank as a sophisticated operation with one set of books for the eyes of regulators and another in the back room that logged how those running the bank and others were fattening their wallets.

Loans were made, but rarely repaid. Borrowers took out loans to pay back loans. Company documents and financial statements were fabricated. The bank's credit department used more than 100 corporate stamps for fake companies to make documents look authentic. The bank operated some of its more than 100 branches without a permit from the government.

The 87-page report, which was conducted to satisfy one of several benchmarks the IMF asked the Afghan government to meet in cleaning up the scandal, points to poor oversight by Afghan banking regulators, political interference in the criminal investigation and activities by a special judicial tribunal hearing the case that it said were "well outside the legal norms of criminal procedure."

The Kabul Bank scandal is a saga about money-grabbing, weak banking oversight, lax prosecution, nepotism, political contributions and fraud. The cast of characters includes a poker-playing bank chairman, an Afghan central bank chairman who feared his life was endangered and fled to the U.S., the wealthy brothers of the Afghan president and vice president, and bank shareholders - some who bought posh properties in Dubai and spent lavishly on themselves and their circle of friends and relatives.

There's much more in the lengthy story and little of it is good.  Meanwhile, another American has lost his life in this fiasco:

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.  Cpl. Christopher M. Monahan Jr., 25, of Island Heights, N.J., died Nov. 26 while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to Combat Logistics Battalion 2, Combat Logistics Regiment 2, 2nd Marine Logistics Group, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

When will the American public demand that this idiocy stop?  And if the congressional GOP is serious about cutting the budget deficit, an immediate end to all funding for Afghanistan would be a good starting point. 

Eight Years of Madoffs

Eight Years of Madoffs - That's how Frank Rich most appropriately describes the eight years of the Chimperator's nightmare regime. When interviewed during his last press conference the Chimperator made it clear that he's neither apologetic or remorseful over the havoc he has wrought on the nation and world. The man truly is a cretin and, in my view, mentally disturbed. Waste and incompetence, torture, and the trashing of the nation's image around the world are the hallmarks of the Bush/Cheney years. The biggest crime is that Bush and Cheney will likely escape prosecution for war crimes. Here are some highlights from Rich's column:

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THREE days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to American taxpayers. That was our collective contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction — a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad.

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The source for this news was a near-final draft of an as-yet-unpublished 513-page federal history of this nation-building fiasco. . . . . It pinpoints, among other transgressions, a governmental Ponzi scheme concocted to bamboozle Americans into believing they were accruing steady dividends on their investment in a “new” Iraq. The report quotes no less an authority than Colin Powell on how the scam worked.

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The $50 billion also pales next to other sums that remain unaccounted for in the Bush era, from the $345 billion in lost tax revenue due to unpoliced offshore corporate tax havens to the far-from-transparent disposition of some $350 billion in Wall Street bailout money. In the old Pat Moynihan phrase, the Bush years have “defined deviancy down” in terms of how low a standard of ethical behavior we now tolerate as the norm from public officials.

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It took 110 pages for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan research organization, to compile the CliffsNotes inventory of the Bush wreckage last month. It found “125 systematic failures across the breadth of the federal government.” That accounting is conservative.

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There are still too many unanswered questions. . . . . How high up were the authorities who ordered and condoned torture and then let the “rotten apples” at the bottom of the military heap take the fall? Who orchestrated the Pentagon’s elaborate P.R. efforts to cover up Pat Tillman’s death by “friendly fire” in Afghanistan? And, for extra credit, whatever did happen to Bush’s records from the Texas Air National Guard?

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While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can’t be merely forgotten or finessed. . . . . we must also “resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists.”

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The more we learn about where all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever-it-takes New Deal.