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Monday, August 20, 2018

Here's a lead story for the week: Kofi Annan, former UN secretary general, has died at 80. Annan had the misfortune of being Secretary General at a time when the US decided to stop giving lip service to international institutions and go its own way with its own ad hoc "coalitions of the willing." He is remembered for consistently and presciently warning the US against Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq. Nor was that the last time Annan failed tragically in the cause of peace. In 2012, the Arab League appointed him to mediate in Syria's civil war, but the US refused to participate, letting the war continue another six-plus years. See, e.g., Michael Hirsh: The Syria Deal That Could Have Been:

Former members of Annan's negotiating team say that after then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on June 30, 2012, jointly signed a communique drafted by Annan, which called for a political "transition" in Syria, there was as much momentum for a deal then as Kerry achieved a year later on chemical weapons. Afterward, Annan flew from Geneva to Moscow and gained what he believed to be Russian President Vladimir Putin's consent to begin to quietly push Assad out. But suddenly both the U.S. and Britain issued public calls for Assad's ouster, and Annan felt blindsided. Immediately afterward, against his advice, then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice offered up a "Chapter 7" resolution opening the door to force against Assad, which Annan felt was premature.

Annan resigned a month later. At the time, the soft-spoken Ghanaian diplomat was cagey about his reasons, appearing to blame all sides. "I did not receive all the support that the cause deserved," Annan told reporters in Geneva. He also criticized what he called "finger-pointing and name-calling in the Security Council." But former senior aides and U.N. officials say in private that Annan blamed the Obama administration in large part. "The U.S. couldn't even stand by an agreement that the secretary of State had signed in Geneva," said one former close Annan aide who would discuss the talks only on condition of anonymity. "He quit in frustration. I think it was clear that the White House was very worried about seeming to do a deal with the Russians and being soft on Putin during the campaign." One of the biggest Republican criticisms of Obama at the time was that he had, in an embarrassing "open mike" moment, promised Moscow more "flexibility" on missile defense after the election.

Philip Gourevitch: Kofi Annan's Unaccountable Legacy is far more critical of Annan, especially for the international failure to intervene in the Rwanda genocide. I don't doubt that Annan tended to blame the peacekeeping failures that plagued the UN during his tenure (and long before and ever since) on the members, who left the UN with few options. Still, one can counter that US interventions in Somalia and Kosovo fared no better, and probably made matters even worse.

Some scattered links this week:

• Franklin Foer: How Trump Radicalized ICE: This is an interesting story. "When Donald Trump was elected, Thomas Homan, the acting director of ICE until his retirement in June, said that the new president was 'taking the handcuffs off' the agency." Same concept here as Cheney's unshackling the CIA to set up their torture sites and populate them with "renditions." Both agencies were evidently seething with latent criminality, which their new political masters unleashed and actively encouraged. So it's not surprising that ICE agents have become more aggressive and heavy-handed since Trump took over, but the fact is they were pretty brutal before. Indeed, they have this theory, called "self-deportation," which dramatizes their brutality and injustice in hopes of terrorizing immigrants into leaving the country. Actually, when you read the details, a more accurate and scandalous term comes to mind: ethnic cleansing.

  By the way, Foer credits Kris Kobach with the theory behind "self-deportation":

  The work undertaken by Sessions, Hamilton, Miller, and their ilk is based to some degree on a theory first developed by Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state. Over the past year, Kobach has emerged as a prime bête noire of the left because of his ferocious, ultimately doomed attempts to stamp out a phantom epidemic of voter fraud. But for many years, he served as a lawyer for an offshoot of the Federation for American Immigration Reform -- the loudest and most effective of the groups pressing for restrictive immigration laws. In that position, he helped write many of the most draconian pieces of state-level immigration legislation to wend their way into law, including Arizona's S.B. 1070.

  Kobach set out to remake immigration law to conform to a doctrine he called self-deportation or, more clinically, attrition through enforcement -- a policy that experienced a vogue in 2012, when Mitt Romney, campaigning for president, briefly claimed the position as his own. The doctrine holds that the government doesn't have the resources to round up and remove the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the nation, but it can create circumstances unpleasant enough to encourage them to exit on their own. As Kobach once wrote, "Illegal aliens are rational decision makers. If the risks of detention or involuntary removal go up, and the probability of being able to obtain unauthorized employment goes down, then at some point, the only rational decision is to return home." Through deprivation and fear, the government can essentially drive undocumented immigrants out of the country.

• Shadi Hamid: Trump Made Socialism Great Again: Title is way too cute, not least because it's getting hard to see anything good in "great." But there has been a public rehabilitation and resurgence of socialism in America, and Trump has made a minor contribution to that. I see four reasons for this. By far the most important is that inequality has reached unprecedented levels in the United States, with profound effects not just on most folks' living standards but even more so on their prospects for the future. Needless to say, this realization is much more pressing for young people than it is for people my age. Second, socialism today is exemplified by the social democracies of Western Europe, which are democratic, allow individual freedom and private enterprise, but also provide not just a "safety net" for the unfortunate but broad support for an expansive middle class. We see in Europe that broadly equitable societies are realistic options. Indeed, Americans can look back to their own past -- the Progressives, the New Deal, the Great Society -- for similar options, which were only recently thwarted by concerted right-wing political corruption. Third, the Cold War propaganda hysteria against socialism has lost its credibility -- partly because bogeymen like Stalin have vanished into the dustbin of history, and partly because the rabid anti-socialists always got more worked up over liberal reformers like FDR and MLK. (One example of their overkill: in early 2009 we hired a guy to lay some tile, and he insisted on listening to Rush Limbaugh as he worked. That's when I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Obama is a socialist.) As for Trump's contribution, the key thing he did was to discredit the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party, mostly by showing that they couldn't even beat the most ridiculous politician in American history. Of course, his contributions don't end there. He's also pushing objective conditions over the precipice of what most Americans can stand. And he's making billionaires look as venal and incompetent as the last Romanovs.

  Paul Krugman, who's far from my idea of a socialist, weighs in on Something Not Rotten in Denmark:

  Should Democrats simply ignore Republican slander of their social-democratic ideas, or should they try to turn the "socialist" smear into a badge of honor?

  But these aren't very deep divisions, certainly nothing like the divisions between liberals and centrists that wracked the party a couple of decades ago.

  The simple fact is that there is far more misery in America than there needs to be. Every other advanced country has universal health care and a much stronger social safety net than we do. And it doesn't have to be that way.

• Umair Irfan: Ryan Zinke's claim that "environmental terrorists" are to blame for wildfires, explained.

  If Zinke is looking for someone to blame, he may want to look at his own boss. For the second year in a row, the Trump White House proposed eliminating the Joint Fire Science Program, a research initiative across six agencies, including the Interior Department, to improve forest management and help firefighters. It's especially alarming given that fire seasons are getting longer and conflagrations are becoming more destructive.

  Also: Ryan Zinke Uses Climate-Fueled Wildfires to Boost the Timber Industry -- and It's Not the First Time.

• Jason Johnson: Is Trump a racist? You don't need an n-word tape to know. Talk about points that should be obvious, but after decades of "gotcha" journalism feeding into (and ushered along by) the bloodlust of expecting "zero tolerance" punishments, the isolated forbidden word is about the only thing the media can trust themselves to recognize. Late night, in particular, is thrilled with Omarosa because she's practically handing them the prefab jokes. The only interesting question about her is when exactly did she decide to double cross Trump, and to what extent did she then engineer her self-serving revelations? Most people who get trampled on don't have the foresight or wherewithal to tape their villains, but clearly she did.

• Ellen Knickmeyer: US Says Conserving Oil Is No Longer an Economic Imperative: Just one of a bunch of recent Trump initiatives that go way beyond stupid -- in this case, probably three or four dimensions of stupid. There are several reasons for conserving oil: the world's supply is finite, and at present consumption rates that means we will run out in much less time than we can expect our progeny to survive; as the supply declines, it becomes more expensive to get at reduced quantities; oil is a commodity, which means we can replace domestic losses with imports, but at increasing costs (e.g., trade deficits); even if we did have infinite resources, a major by-product of burning oil is global warming, which has already altered the climate and at some point may do so catastrophically. All of this used to be common sense. For instance, oil-poor countries like Germany have long taxed oil heavily to suppress demand and imports. Back in the 1950s, a geologist named Hubbert came up with the concept of peak oil, which said that oil production will increase up to a peak point, then decline steadily thereafter. Oil production in the US peaked in 1969, but the industry was able to replace lost production and satisfy growing demand with imports -- the US trade balance turned negative in 1970, and increased steadily after that. Every oil field goes through such a boom-and-bust cycle. When a national government owns its oil, it tends to think about how to conserve that resource for a relatively long period, but with indidivual owners (as in the US) there is an active race to exhaust the supply as quickly as possible. (The famous Spindletop field in Texas was pumped dry in three years.)

  You heard a lot about peak oil back in 2000-04, when world oil production was plateauing amid much turbulence. You don't hear much about it now because over the last decade secondary extraction (e.g., fracking) has improved enough to temporarily reverse the post-1969 production decline. A normal person would be pleased at this turn of events (provided that the environmental costs of fracking aren't too onerous, which is hardly proven), but still recognize that there are other compelling reasons to conserve oil. But oilmen aren't normal: their only concern is to extract as much money from the ground as fast as possible. So, of course they're lobbying Trump to bring back gas guzzlers. And of course, that's what Trump's doing, because in Trump's world only now matters, and the only thing now matters for is making obscene amounts of money.

• Andy Kroll: Inside Trump's Judicial Takeover: Not just the Supreme Court, but all of them, and all Trump has to do is to pick names off a pre-screened list:

  If Republicans retain control of the Senate this fall -- to say nothing of Trump in 2020 -- McGahn and Leo and McConnell could have as much as 20 percent of the American judicial system to fill. As Heritage's Malcolm puts it, "This is the president's legacy."

• Micah Lee: NSA Cracked Open Encrypted Networks of Russian Airlines, Al Jazeera, and Other "High Potential" Targets. Also: Alleen Brown/Miriam Pensack: The NSA's Role in a Climate-Changed World: Spying on Nonprofits, Fishing Boats, and the North Pole.

• Jennie Neufeld: Trump's $92 million military parade is postponed -- for now.

• Michael Peck: How Russia, China or America Could Accidentally Start a Nuclear War: Several scenarios here, including escalations from cyberattacks and/or anti-satellite defense. Part of the problem here is that the line between conventional and nuclear weapons systems is more often blurred than people realize. Indeed, all sorts of tricky lines are continually being set and tested. The fact that no one has yet responded to a cyberattack with conventional military force doesn't mean that no one ever would. Indeed, every time a country gets away with a cyber caper, they grow more confident that they can do so with impunity, meaning they can take on greater risk. This sort of "defense" gaming is inherently unstable. Yet things like Trump's Space Force are almost certain to push it over the brink. Russia's efforts to hack US elections are dangerous not so much because they might tip a close election in favor of a dangerous imbecile (although that's been super unfortunate for most of us) but because they set a baseline for ever greater mischief.

• Richard Silverstein: Israeli Attempts to Overthrow Corbyn and Other Foreign Leaders: No other country is so brazen in its attempts to influence foreign political systems as Israel. Even Russia has to work in the dark, buying influence where it can (as with Manafort and Flynn). Israel, on the other hand, can tape into long-standing supporters in the US and UK.

• Emily Stewart: Donald Trump's sudden interest in quarterly earnings reports, explained: Someone told Trump that it would be better for businesses if instead of having to file quarterly reports to the SEC they could wait six months, so he's having the SEC "look into it." The most obvious impact is that it would be harder for investors to make informed valuations of companies. It would also increase the value of insider information, and make it easier for management to obfuscate (or downright fudge) results. As Stewart notes, this wouldn't affect the Trump Organization, which doesn't file SEC reports because it is privately owned. But as you can see, reduced scrutiny often means increased fraud. You can see why Trump might think that's a good idea.

• Emily Stewart: Trump reportedly plans to strip more security clearances to distract from the news cycle: Former CIA director John Brennan was the first, and evidently Bruce Ohr (of the Justice Department) is on deck. Part of the idea may be that Brennan's loss of his security clearance will make it easier to cast doubt on his criticism of the Trump administration, although the notion that this is just a play for the news cycle is a simpler and more Trumpish explanation. It also plays up a false issue: instead of talking about why so much of what the government does in our name is classified secret, we wind up arguing over which past and future insiders are entitled to know. As for Brennan, no matter how much delight you might take in him bashing Trump, he's so much a creature of the dark recesses of the state that we have no reason to trust him anyway. Indeed, the world would be a better place if fewer people like him had top secret clearances. Of course, Trump has no intention of helping us here. He's just following his own petty, spiteful ego.

  Still, one interesting question is raised by John Cassidy: How Important Is the Protest Against Trump From the National-Security Establishment? While the ins and outs of security clearances mean nowt to you and me, no less than seven ex-CIA directors have signed a letter objecting to Trump's dis of Brennan. Cassidy thinks this may be a "have you no shame" moment as the responsible establishment finally turns against Trump's juvenile antics. However, while it's not surprising that all those ex-CIA directors should stick together, I seriously doubt that any of them have any real popular standing -- in large part because the CIA hasn't done anything deserving of popular respect in its seventy-year history. The most astonishing thing I've ever seen Trump do was to stand up at one of his rallies and make fun of Obama saying "God bless America" -- the most unobjectionable thing any American can say, but also, as Trump's cynical fans understand perfectly, the most pointless. After Helsinki, lots of politicos tried to shame Trump for not believing the leaders of "America's intelligence community" on Russian interference. But, really, why should anyone believe anything those characters have to say? Especially when they can declare their evidence top secret, so it can't even be examined.

• George F Will: Another epic economic collapse is coming: Yes, I know, smart people lie Nomi Prins have been saying this for some time. But what are we to make of someone like Will, who (if memory serves) sure didn't have the vaguest clue of the recession coming ten years ago? Helps that he's reading Robert Schiller this time. (Schiller's done a wide range of important economics, but his specialty was housing bubbles, and he identified that one 4-5 years before it burst.) On the other hand, there's no evidence that he understands him, or much of anything else either. Will's worried a lot about public debt/GDP levels. The real problem there has less to do with the ratio but the fact that under Trump increasing deficits are the result of tax cuts for the rich and more military waste, neither of which contribute to growth or any other useful investment or spending.

• Matthew Yglesias: Elizabeth Warren has a plan to save capitalism: She's introduced a bill called the Accountable Capitalism Act, which "would redistribute trillions of dollars from rich executives and shareholders to the middle class -- without costing a dime." As I understand it, this is mostly effected by changing the balance of corporate governance and responsibility. Over the last 30-50 years, corporations have been able to act solely to maximize shareholder value, which has turned them into giant machines for sucking up value and wealth and channeling it to financial investors, with a large slice reserved for the CEO. This has caused a lot of bad things to happen, both to the hollowed out corporations and to the society at large. One real world example of how this could have been done differently comes from Germany, where corporations are required to distribute board seats to employee representatives (co-determination). With employees on the board, even if strictly in a minority role, corporations are less inclined to bust unions and to ship jobs abroad. Workers, in turn, are more productive and produce higher value products. One result is that Germany runs trade surpluses, whereas the US runs massive deficits. There are lots of things like this that can be done -- some in the private sector (like Warren is proposing), some public -- and any real plan is going to take a lot of tinkering with, but it is refreshing to see any Democrat actually getting serious about inequality, coming up with anything more than mere band-aids or platitudes.

  Needless to say, the closer we get to being able to implement some of these things, the more the rich are going to go ape-shit over the threat to their privilege. Yglesias offers an example: Kevin Williamson's unhinged attack on Elizabeth Warren's corporate accountability bill, explained. Also on Warren's bill: Ganesh Sitaraman: We must hold capitalism accountable. Elizabeth Warren shows how.

• Matthew Yglesias: Democrats are nominating an unprecedented number of women to run for Congress: "So far across the 41 states that have held their primaries, 41 percent of all Democratic Party nominees -- and 48 percent of all non-incumbent nominees -- are women, a level that simply obliterates all previous records." Needless to say, this seems perfectly appropriate given who the figurehead of the Republican Party is. Also: Ed Kilgore: GOP's Fate in the Midterms Is in the Hands of Women.

• Julian E Zelizer: The New Enemies List: More about Nixon's famous Enemies List than the one Trump is compiling, but this fits in with Trump's efforts to purge those he suspects of disloyalty, especially in the Justice Department, as well as his broader propaganda campaign to inoculate his fan base from the outside chance that the media might start reporting real news. Especially note his tweet that White House Counsel Don McGahn is not a "John Dean type 'RAT'," adopting the gangsta voice he assumes is his right.

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