Chris Hedges's Blog, page 129

Private Hospitals Use Dark Money to Smear Medicare for All

Support for expanding access to health care—whether a Medicare for All plan or a public option for health insurance—is growing in public opinion polls, particularly among Democrats. Many of the Democratic candidates for president support it. This trend is bad news for the for-profit health care industry, and according to an investigation by The Intercept and Maplight, these companies are turning to dark money to fight it.

According to a Politico-Morning Consult poll from August, 65% of Democratic primary voters said they would support a candidate who implemented a single-payer, Medicare for All health insurance system. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released in September found 77% of Democrats and independents who lean Democrat support such a plan. Even Republicans are slowly warming up to the concept; a survey from Real Clear Opinion Research in May found 65% of respondents, from both parties, were in support.

Investor-owned hospitals may not have public opinion on their side, so instead, they’re using money and influence to plead their case, as writer Andrew Perez found after reviewing corporate filings. He explains:

Tenet Healthcare, the nation’s third-largest investor-owned operator of hospitals, has donated nearly $630,000 to the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, or PAHCF, a dark-money organization created last year to erode public support for Medicare for All, a government-run plan that would provide health care for all Americans.

PAHCF’s incorporation records list a lobbyist for the Federation of American Hospitals, a trade organization that represents Tenet and other investor-owned hospitals, as one of its authorized representatives.

Chip Kahn, who created the infamous anti-Clinton administration health care ad “Harry and Louise,” took credit for starting PAHCF.

Perez also points out that while much of the fight against Medicare for All, or any plans to build a government health care system, has focused on private insurance and pharmaceutical companies, private hospitals are just as responsible for procedures, and the ensuing bills, that are plaguing so many Americans.

That includes the practice of “surprise billing,” which Perez explains “ occurs when a person visits a facility that’s included in their insurance network and is treated by an out-of-network provider. The massive bill, of course, is only a surprise to the patient.”

Private insurance is also lucrative for for-profit hospitals. Medicare covers just 87% of the actual cost of patient care. By contrast, a RAND study found, Tenet Healthcare, who has been funding anti-Medicare for All campaigns, charges 210% of what Medicare does.

Tenet CEO Ron Rittenmeyer, who is also the chairman of the Federation of American Hospitals, told attendees at an October health care conference that Medicare for All would be too expensive for private hospitals like his, because the reimbursement rate would be too low. At the same event, Rod Hochman, the chief executive of Providence St. Joseph Health, another large hospital company, called single-payer health care “idiocy,” according to ThinkAdvisor, a trade publication for investment advisers.

Former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, who just so happens to serve on Tenet’s board of directors, called Medicare for All a “delusion,” in an op-ed in Omaha World-Herald.

Read the full story here.

The Supreme Court Could Spell the End of American Democracy

It has almost gone unnoticed, but amid the daily Sturm und Drang of the Trump impeachment inquiry, the Supreme Court has begun another term. In any other year, the reconvening of the court would be headline news. However, like everything else in the Trump era, the court has taken a back seat to the chaos surrounding our 45th commander in chief.

Nonetheless, the nine justices who constitute our most powerful judicial body are set to decide a bevy of politically charged cases that could impact the 2020 elections and profoundly affect the lives of each and every American. It’s always tricky to predict outcomes in the Supreme Court, but with its five-member conservative majority now firmly entrenched, the panel is poised to swing further to the right as it grapples with issues on LGBT rights, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, abortion, the Second Amendment and “religious liberty.”

It is also likely that the justices will be called on to address at least some aspects of the burgeoning constitutional crisis triggered by the impeachment inquiry and Donald Trump’s continued defiance of Congress.

Here are the potential blockbusters in waiting:

LGBT Rights: Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia; Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda; R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of race, national origin, religion or sex. Three cases argued last week ask whether the act also bans discrimination because of sexual orientation.

The cases were filed by two gay men and a transgender woman, who claim they were improperly discharged. They are represented by a number of prominent lawyers, including Stanford University law professor Pamela Karlan, and David Cole, the American Civil Liberties Union’s national legal director.

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In sum and substance, the plaintiffs contend that sexual orientation, correctly understood, is a subset of sex, and is therefore entitled civil rights protection. Their argument squarely pits the court’s conservative justices, who typically adhere to narrow “textualist” readings of statutes, against the tribunal’s liberals, who often favor more expansive interpretations.

During the oral arguments, Justice Samuel Alito articulated the conservative position with his customary belligerence. Noting that the term “sexual orientation” isn’t mentioned in Title VII, Alito charged that the plaintiffs are asking the court to assume a power best left to Congress. “[W]hether Title VII should prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is a big policy issue,” he remarked, “different from the one that Congress thought it was addressing in 1964. … And if this Court … interprets the 1964 statute to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, we will be acting exactly like a legislature.”

Alito’s concerns were echoed by Chief Justice John Roberts, who suggested that the plaintiffs want the court to “update” the law. Roberts also worried that such an update would unduly impact “religious organizations” whose doctrines preach against homosexuality.

U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco also participated in the arguments, appearing on behalf of the Trump administration and in support of the employers. In August, Francisco filed a brief with the court, confirming that the Justice Department has reversed its Obama-era policy of giving Title VII protections to gay and transgender workers.

As expected, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pushed back against the conservatives, observing that the court has held that sexual harassment is outlawed under Title VII, even though that term isn’t listed in the act. “No one ever thought sexual harassment was encompassed by discrimination on the basis of sex back in ’64,” she said. “And now we say, of course, harassing someone, subjecting her to terms and conditions of employment she would not encounter if she were a male, that is sex discrimination, but it wasn’t recognized [until later].”

If there is a possible swing vote in the litigation, it might be cast by Justice Neil Gorsuch. In an animated give-and-take with Cole, Gorsuch conceded that whether Title VII should be read to cover sexual orientation was “really close.” He warned, however, of the “massive social upheaval” a victory for the plaintiffs would cause, adding that changes of that magnitude should be “an essentially legislative decision.”

DACA: Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California; Trump v. NAACP; McAleenan v. Vidal

Next month, the court will hear arguments in three consolidated cases that will determine whether the Trump administration’s executive order terminating the DACA program is lawful.

As a bit of background, the program was implemented because Congress was unwilling to ratify the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would have provided a pathway to citizenship for a large class of young people (1.3 million, according to some credible estimates) who had been brought into the U.S. as children without the intent to violate American law.

In response to this congressional gridlock, President Obama ordered then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to introduce the program by way of a formal memorandum, which was published on June 12, 2012. Obama followed up on Napolitano’s memo three days later with an official Rose Garden announcement.

In essence, DACA was designed as an exercise of prosecutorial discretion aimed at reordering the nation’s deportation priorities. Under the program, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—the cabinet-level department that sets deportation policies and oversees the operations of both Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—offers renewable two-year periods of relief from deportation and work authorization to those who meet the program’s eligibility criteria.

In September 2017, the Trump administration announced its intention to end DACA after a six-month grace period. The repeal, however, was subsequently blocked by three federal circuit courts, largely on procedural grounds.

The Trump administration wants a decision on the merits. It contends that the president has the power to repeal DACA because the program lacks congressional authorization.

Nothing is more central to Trump’s nativist agenda than his crackdown on immigration. Ultimately, the Supreme Court could well defer to the president, just as it did in upholding his Muslim travel ban in 2018. If it does, it could turn the dreams of DACA beneficiaries into mass deportation nightmares.

Second Amendment: New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, New York

It’s been a long time since the Supreme Court considered a major Second Amendment case. Eleven years ago, the court delivered a landmark triumph to the gun-rights lobby in District of Columbia v. Heller—a 5-4 majority decision written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia that held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own and bear firearms.

Heller broke with the great weight of prior scholarship and legal precedent, including the Supreme Court’s 1939 decision in United States v. Miller, which reasoned that the Second Amendment protects gun ownership only in connection with service in long-since antiquated state militias. And while Heller was technically limited to gun ownership in the nation’s capital and other federal venues, the court extended its individual-rights analysis to the states two years later in McDonald v. Chicago, via a 5-4 opinion authored by Alito.

In December, the court will hear the case of the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, which has the potential to rival or surpass Heller for its impact on gun rights and gun regulation.

At issue is a New York City ordinance adopted in 2001 that bars residents from taking their guns outside city limits. The ordinance was challenged in a federal lawsuit filed by the National Rifle Association’s New York affiliate and three city residents, who argued that the regulation was unconstitutional in light of Heller.

The plaintiffs lost at both the district court level and before a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which issued a unanimous decision in February 2018, concluding that the ordinance withstood Second Amendment scrutiny under the decision. The Supreme Court agreed in January to review the case.

What made Heller and McDonald attractive to the gun-rights lobby as test cases is that each concerned near-total bans on gun possession by private citizens. Outright prohibitions are rarely easy to justify, and the five-member conservative Supreme Court majority in each instance reinterpreted the Second Amendment to invalidate the prohibitions involved.

Like Heller and McDonald, the New York City case presents an outright ban—not on ownership, but on the right to bear arms beyond the home. Realizing it could easily lose in the Supreme Court, New York City announced in June that it has amended the ordinance and will henceforth permit licensed gun owners to take their firearms to second homes, businesses or shooting ranges outside city limits. In July, the city filed a formal motion with the Supreme Court, requesting that the case be dismissed as moot because the ordinance is no longer in effect. The court denied the city’s motion earlier this month, setting the stage for a Second Amendment showdown.

Abortion: June Medical Services LLC v. Gee

In 2014, Louisiana enacted a law that requires doctors who perform abortions in the state to have active admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of any clinic where they provide abortion services. Currently, there are only three abortion clinics in Louisiana. If allowed to take effect, abortion-rights proponents charge, the law would put at least one and possibly two of the clinics out of business.

On its face, the Louisiana statute appears unconstitutional in light of the Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, in which the court struck down a nearly identical Texas law. By a 5-3 margin reached after the death of Scalia, the court held that the Texas statute placed an undue burden on women seeking abortions in violation of both Roe v. Wade and the court’s 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which affirmed Roe’s validity.

Nonetheless, in 2018, the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Louisiana law. In February, the Supreme Court stayed (i.e., temporarily blocked) the circuit court’s ruling from taking effect, allowing the state’s abortion providers to seek Supreme Court review. Earlier this month, the court agreed to hear the appeal.

Although the case has not yet been set for oral arguments, abortion-rights groups understandably fear the worst. The Supreme Court today is very different from the panel that decided Whole Woman’s Health. Gorsuch has succeeded Scalia, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh has replaced Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion in Whole Woman’s Health and retired in 2018. Both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are known for their anti-abortion views.

When the dust settles on the June Medical case, Whole Woman’s Health could easily be overturned. Worse still, even if Roe technically survives, it could be gutted as a meaningful legal precedent.

Religious Liberty: Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue

In 2015, the Montana Legislature enacted a tax-credit scholarship program for families who send their children to private schools, including religious institutions. In 2018, the Montana Supreme Court struck the law down, declaring that it violates the First Amendment because the program aids religious organizations. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up the case.

The high court under Roberts has been especially supportive of “religious liberty,” or as the court’s critics allege, religious intolerance. In 2013, the court held in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. that closely held private corporations with “sincere religious beliefs” can lawfully deprive female employees of health-insurance coverage for contraception. In 2017, in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia Inc. v. Comer, the court struck down Missouri’s policy of denying cash grants to schools owned and operated by churches and other religious institutions.

If the trend continues this term, the court will strike yet another blow to the separation of church and state, and hand another victory to Trump’s fanatical evangelical followers. Oral argument has not yet been scheduled.

The Constitutional Crisis: Cases to be Determined.

In April, Trump took to Twitter, threatening to petition the Supreme Court to intervene in the event House Democrats moved to impeach him. The threat was entirely idle, and the House has initiated impeachment proceedings all the same.

The Constitution vests the House of Representatives with the “sole power of impeachment.” As a result, the House’s decision to impeach isn’t subject to judicial review. We know this beyond any reasonable doubt not only because of the text of the Constitution, but because of the Supreme Court’s 1993 ruling in Walter Nixon v. United States, involving a federal judge who insisted that he had received an unfair impeachment trial in the Senate. The court unanimously rejected the judge’s argument, holding that impeachment presented a nonjusticiable political question. Judge Nixon was convicted and removed from office.

But while the court will not intervene to stop Trump’s impeachment, we also know—courtesy of United States v. Nixon (1974), involving President Richard Nixon—that it will review such impeachment-related matters as the president’s refusal to comply with properly issued subpoenas. In a unanimous decision written by then-Chief Justice Warren Burger, the court ordered Nixon to turn over secret audio tapes made in the Oval Office to Watergate special counsel Leon Jaworski, rejecting Nixon’s claims of executive privilege.

It is doubtful that the Supreme Court wants to get dragged into Trump’s impeachment drama. But like it or not, it may be compelled to examine Trump’s blanket refusal to comply with congressional subpoenas. When and if it does, it will have to determine whether Trump is above the law, or if he, like Nixon, must be held accountable for his actions. The future of American democracy literally could hang in the balance.

A Staggering Number of Lobbyists Have Worked in the Trump Administration

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

At the halfway mark of President Donald Trump’s first term, his administration has hired a lobbyist for every 14 political appointments made, welcoming a total of 281 lobbyists on board, a ProPublica and Columbia Journalism Investigations analysis shows.

With a combination of weakened rules and loose enforcement easing the transition to government and back to K Street, Trump’s swamp is anything but drained. The number of lobbyists who have served in government jobs is four times more than the Obama administration had six years into office. And former lobbyists serving Trump are often involved in regulating the industries they worked for.

Even government watchdogs who’ve long monitored the revolving door say that its current scale is a major shift from previous administrations. It’s a “staggering figure,” according to Virginia Canter, ethics chief counsel for the D.C.-based legal nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It suggests that lobbyists see themselves as more effective in furthering their clients’ special interests from inside the government rather than from outside.”

We tracked the lobbyists as part of an update to Trump Town, our database of political appointees. We’ve added the names of 639 new staffers with the administration and the financial disclosures of 351 political appointees who have filled different positions over the past year, and we tracked the careers of 338 who departed government during the same period.

The full extent of the lobbying industry’s influence is hard to measure because federal agencies decline to share details of recusals granted to officials who disclose potential conflicts with their new government roles.

Consider Colin Roskey. Days after leaving a two-decade career as what one former employer called the “smartest” health care lobbyist, he joined the Department of Health and Human Services in January. As deputy secretary for legislation for mandatory health, he headed the portfolio that he tried to influence for most of his career.

HHS declined to reveal any recusals he signed while appointed. A spokesman said that “all employees are expected to abide by the ethics rules.”

Just days before joining HHS, Roskey listed among his clients major dialysis providers that receive federal payments through Medicare, including Fresenius Medical Care — an industry juggernaut, with more than 330,000 patients in thousands of dialysis clinics in the U.S. A third of the company’s billion-dollar revenue comes from Medicare. A recent revamp in the dialysis industry ordered by Trump, expected to shift millions of dollars from dialysis centers to cheaper home-based options, put Roskey’s office at the heart of regulating how much profit or loss some of his former clients will see in coming years. Roskey said in an interview that he recused himself from this matter.

Public records show that Roskey lobbied for at least 27 clients between January 2017 and December 2018 on an array of issues other than dialysis involving public health care programs, from prescription drugs to palliative care.

In early October, Roskey stepped out of government and went straight back to work for his old lobbying firm, Lincoln Policy Group, which specializes in health care policy. “Spending time at HHS will make [Roskey] even more valuable to our team — and we are so excited to have him back,” the lobbying firm announced in a statement.

Roskey said he had no knowledge of how the new kidney care regulations will be implemented.

After his monthslong stint with the Health Department, Roskey said he plans to lobby the legislative branch, which is not prohibited by the current ethics rules. “While working with the government I gained knowledge and background, intellectually and professionally, and I intend to unapologetically utilize those skills for my employer and clients,” he said.

The senior-level appointment of a key lobbyist raises concerns for ethics experts like Canter. “There’s no way [he would’ve been hired under Obama] because Trump dropped a key provision of the Obama ethics pledge,” she said.

Indeed, an Obama-era ethics pledge clause absent in Trump’s prevented registered lobbyists from seeking or accepting employment with any executive agency that they lobbied the two years prior.

Federal laws forbid government employees who have served as registered lobbyists in the two years prior to their appointment from handling the particular matters or the specific issue areas that they used to lobby. Similarly, after leaving the government, all appointees-turned-lobbyists are barred from seeking to influence their former agencies and engaging in behind-the-scenes work with other senior officials across the administration.

The revolving door, of course, has been spinning since well before the Trump administration. In 2009, after President Barack Obama took office, ProPublica built a smaller version of Trump Town. During his administration, government watchdog groups also decried the conflicts of interest brought by some political appointees, and The Washington Post tallied 65 lobbyists among Obama’s ranks in five years.

One Obama-era alum, for instance, has gone on to lobby for the nation’s largest pharmaceutical industry trade group, according to public records. Bridgett Taylor, who occupied Roskey’s position until Trump took office, left the government to lobby Congress and federal agencies on matters related to those she oversaw at HHS. Taylor declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Taylor’s employer, said that although Taylor was listed as a lobbyist and HHS as a contacted agency, “that does not mean that she lobbied them,” but that her colleagues did.

If it’s certainly not new, the enforcement of ethics provisions has lagged under Trump. In governmentwide surveys conducted by the Office of Government Ethics, federal agencies reported only 106 registered lobbyists who joined the administration. In their answers, ethics officers argued that they “don’t know” how many registered lobbyists had been hired or that they didn’t “track the number of individuals who fell into this category.” When asked about referrals for further enforcement of ethics violations, an officer admitted that they “don’t maintain a centralized database of the bases of proposed disciplinary actions.”

Jeff Hauser, who heads the Revolving Door Project at the nonpartisan Center for Economic and Policy Research, contends that “Trump has organized the executive branch as a mechanism to reward allies and their political power. Lobbyists are hired not because they’re great at the specific matter that they lobby for but because their specialty is delivering political results.”

Corporations also see value in hiring former government staffers, as they bring connections within the agencies and exceptional knowledge about regulation. Among the staffers who recently left their administration positions, 29 went to work for K Street firms — as registered lobbyist or not. At least 59 former employees have done so over the past three years.

One is Laura Kemper, a former HHS senior official who, within days of leaving her post in March, was hired by Fresenius. Now vice president for government affairs, Kemper heads the company’s policy group.

According to lobbying records, she is listed among the in-house lobbyists who have visited Congress, the White House and HHS since March, pushing everything from reimbursement for dialysis services to home dialysis. The records show Fresenius shelled out more than $2.2 million for lobbying activities during the first half of the year.

Kemper had also spent years lobbying Congress and federal agencies on behalf of health care companies before joining HHS in March 2017.

Her pass through the revolving door tests the boundaries of ethics rules. Indeed, Trump’s pledge prohibits staffers-turned-registered lobbyists from advocating for the special interests of their corporate bosses before the agencies where they used to work for at least five years. It also restricts former employees from behind-the-scenes lobbying with any senior federal official for the remainder of Trump’s presidency. Kemper signed that pledge.

Kemper declined to comment. In a statement, Fresenius said Kemper “has strictly followed her legal and ethical obligations and has not been involved in lobbying the administration or anything related to the Executive Order.” Disclosure forms filed by Fresenius “cite the general activity of a team and do not ascribe any particular lobbying activity,” according to its statement.

Recently, during an earnings call to investors, Fresenius CEO Rice Powell said that the company has talked to the “appropriate people in Washington,” without naming any particular Fresenius or government staffer. “We are in the midst of commenting and asking questions” with HHS officials, he added.

As ProPublica has reported, political appointees who return to lobbying have found ways to tiptoe around ethics rules. Some register as lobbyists but limit their interactions to Congress, leaving colleagues to lobby the executive branch. Ethics restrictions don’t apply to congressional lobbying.

One such case is Geoffrey Burr, a lobbyist who joined the Labor Department early in the Trump administration. More recently, he was chief of staff to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. He left the Transportation Department in January and soon became policy director at one of the nation’s largest lobbying firms.

According to records, Burr now lobbies for clients with a stake in transportation issues, including The Northeast MAGLEV, the company behind what would be the first high-speed train in the U.S. A January press release announcing his hiring praised Burr’s “high-level involvement with Transportation and Labor [that will] provide clients with the strategic guidance they need to navigate business issues with the administration.”

Burr signed the ethics pledge and, according to records, lobbies only Congress, abiding by the rule of not contacting the executive branch. Other partners at his firm lobby the Transportation Department and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

The Transportation Department didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Burr declined to talk.

There are also former Trump administration staffers who go back to K Street but don’t register as lobbyists — the Lobbying Disclosure Act only requires those who spend 20% or more of their time lobbying to register.

Rebecca Wood and Brooke Appleton held senior Trump administration positions for more than a year at the Food and Drug Administration and the Agriculture Department, respectively. Both left the administration and returned to their former employers — this time, in more senior positions.

Wood now leads the food and drug practice at Sidley Austin, a powerful law and lobbying firm in Washington, where her colleagues lobby the FDA for various clients. Appleton went from being director to vice president for public policy for the National Corn Growers Association; she leads at least six people lobbying the Agriculture Department and other federal agencies.

Appleton declined to comment. Wood said she “advises clients on FDA-related issues and, in doing so, complies with all applicable ethics requirements.”

There is nothing illegal about returning to an old employer or being hired by a new one. Nor is there anything wrong with having colleagues who lobby the federal government. But the revolving door does present the possibility of conflicts of interests.

“The most important commodity in D.C. is information,” Hauser said. “Former insiders have rare access to strategic intelligence, which is of significant value to corporate entities, and they can do so without registering as a lobbyist.”

With the new data just released, Trump Town grew to include 3,859 names, 2,319 financial disclosures and hundreds of other records for Trump’s staffers. Our original goal remains intact: shining a light on the people in charge of running the government and how their career histories might influence their decisions.

David Mora is a reporting fellow for Columbia Journalism Investigations, a team of reporters, faculty and postgraduate fellows who examine issues of public interest. Funding for CJI’s work on this project is provided by the Investigative Reporting Resource, the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation at the Columbia Journalism School.

The IMF Is Utterly Indifferent to the Pain It’s Causing

Each year, the board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gathers at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. This year, the IMF will meet under the leadership of a new chief, Kristalina Georgieva, who crossed the street from the World Bank to take over this post from Christine Lagarde. Lagarde, as it happens, is getting ready to cross the Atlantic Ocean to take over the European Central Bank. There is a game of musical chairs at the top. A handful of bureaucrats seem to waltz in and out of these jobs.

For the past 40 years, the IMF has had the same agenda: to make sure that developing countries adhere to the rules of globalization set by the advanced capitalist states. Sovereignty of these developing countries has become irrelevant, as their governments have to accede to pressure from the IMF on fiscal and monetary policy as well as their trade and development agenda. Any attempt to break the orthodoxy of the IMF is met with a ferocious array of sanctions, including a nod from the IMF toward international creditors not to lend to the country that they determine is a scofflaw. Funds will only flow to distressed countries if they accept the full policy slate developed for them not by their lawmakers, but by the IMF economists in Washington, D.C.

Over these four decades, fires have burned on the streets of the countries that have gone to the IMF and then forced austerity upon their populations. In the 1980s, these uprisings used to be called “IMF riots.” It was clear to everyone that the IMF’s policies had provoked desperate people to take to the streets. The name given to these riots was precise. The emphasis had to be on the IMF and not on the riots themselves. The most famous of these riots took place in Venezuela—the Caracazo of 1989—which opened up a process that brought Hugo Chavez to power and that created the Bolivarian Revolution. It is reasonable to call the Arab Spring of 2011 an IMF riot because it was provoked by IMF austerity policies combined with rising food prices. The current unrest from Pakistan to Ecuador should be filed under IMF riot.

In response to these riots, the IMF has used new language to describe the same old policies. We hear of “social compacts” and of Structural Adjustment 2.0 and then the bizarre “expansionary austerity.” Discussions of gender and environmentalism within the IMF are all to the good, but these are merely words that adorn an entrenched regime of austerity that defines the IMF Article IV Consultations and the IMF Staff Papers. Beneath the smiles lies the skull—a terrible reliance upon policies that are framed by wage cuts and the shrinking of the public sector, by handcuffs on public spending and liberalization for corporations. Sweeter rhetoric does nothing to make the policy framework less harsh.

Ecuador’s people rose up against President Moreno’s deal with the IMF. He had to go back on the cuts on fuel subsidies. Moreno had no choice. The protests would simply have unseated him if he held the line. But now Moreno must return to the IMF. If democratic norms prevailed, then the IMF would have to honor the “referendum” of the Ecuadorian people. But there is no democracy in the IMF. It marches to the drum of its main funder. Currently, the United States with 16.52 percent of the voting shares has the largest bloc of votes on the board. Following far behind are Japan (6.15 percent), China (6.09 percent), Germany (5.32 percent) and then the UK and France, each with 4.03 percent. By “convention,” the IMF head is a European, but the Europeans do not control the IMF. In 1998, the New York Times let slip that the IMF “acts as the United States Treasury’s lap dog.” The U.S. has an effective veto on IMF policy. When it suits U.S. interests, IMF orthodoxy is suspended (as against Mubarak’s Egypt in 1987 and 1991). When it suits the U.S. to put the screws on a country, that is precisely what the IMF does. Democracy for the people of Ecuador is irrelevant; what is relevant is that they—by hook or by crook—bow before what the IMF, and behind them the United States, says. Moreno withdrew the cuts on subsidies. But it is likely that in the dark he will return these cuts under another name. The IMF will not stand for anything less than that.

The consequences of IMF orthodoxy are often deadly, with the Malawi case as one very painful episode. In 1996, the IMF staff pushed the government of Malawi to privatize its agricultural development and marketing corporation. This body held Malawi’s grain stock, and it regulated the price for the sale of grain in the country. Privatization of the corporation in 1999 left Malawi’s government without a means to protect its population in case of an emergency. Between October 2001 and March 2002, the price of maize shot up by 400 percent. Flooding in 2000-2001 and a year of drought set the food production in the country into distress. People began to die of starvation—as many as 3,000. The IMF did not relent. Malawi had to continue to service its debt. In 2002, it spent $70 million on its debt service payments, which was 20 percent of its national budget (more than Malawi spent on health, education, and agriculture combined). There was no lifeline through to Malawi, whose food crisis continues till today. Malawi’s president at that time—Bakili Muluzi—said, “The IMF is to blame for the biting food crisis.” What happened to Malawi in 2002 is precisely what happened to so many countries that went under the knife of the IMF.

No one within the IMF meeting will raise the question of democracy, both in terms of the IMF’s own functioning and in terms of the IMF’s relationship with sovereign countries around the world. Ecuador’s streets rejected the IMF deal. Argentina’s electorate will do the same in a few weeks. Will there be room to start a conversation now about the divergence between IMF policy and democracy? The main lesson of these uprisings is not only that the people want fuel subsidies or a stable currency; what they want more than anything is democratic control over their own economy.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün.

Hunter Biden: Role at Ukraine Firm Wasn’t ‘Improper’ but a ‘Mistake’

WASHINGTON — Hunter Biden, acknowledging that his family name created business opportunities, rejected assertions by President Donald Trump that he did anything wrong by engaging in foreign work in Ukraine and China.

But Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, conceded that he failed to take into account potential implications for his father’s political career.

“Did I make a mistake? Maybe in the grand scheme of things,” Hunter Biden said in an ABC News interview that aired on Tuesday. “But did I make a mistake based on some ethical lapse? Absolutely not.”

Joe Biden is a front-runner in the 2020 Democratic presidential contest, and the interview with his son aired hours before the fourth Democratic presidential debate.

Hunter Biden said he did not discuss his foreign business dealings with his father. He served on the board of an energy company in Ukraine, a fact he said his father learned from press reports.

The younger Biden was a lawyer at a top Washington law firm with expertise in corporate governance. But he acknowledged on Tuesday that he probably would not have been asked to serve on the board if not for his name.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden,” he said.

Trump and his Republican allies have targeted Hunter Biden for his work in Ukraine and China, making baseless claims of corruption.

Trump’s July 25 phone call pressuring Ukraine’s leader to investigate the Bidens is the focus of a whistleblower complaint that triggered the formal House impeachment inquiry into Trump. Trump has denied wrongdoing.

Hours after Hunter Biden’s interview aired, Trump said in a tweet that the former vice president’s son was “really bad” in the ABC interview and that “Sleepy Joe has real problems.”

Hunter Biden recently said he would step down from the board of directors of a Chinese-backed private equity firm because his service had become a “distraction.”

“That’s why I have committed that I won’t serve on any board or work on any foreign entities when Dad becomes president,” he said. “That’s the rule I’m going to adhere to.”

Joe Biden said on Sunday that if he’s elected: “No one in my family will have an office in the White House, will sit in meetings as if they’re a Cabinet member, will in fact have any business relationships with anyone that relates to a foreign corporation or foreign country.”

On Tuesday, Biden’s deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said in a statement “Hunter was forceful and spoke with conviction,” and after “an unprecedented smear campaign by the president of the United States, who is engulfed in a scandal of his own making.”

In 2014, then Vice President Joe Biden was at the forefront of American diplomatic efforts to support Ukraine’s fragile democratic government as it sought to fend off Russian aggression and root out corruption. President Barack Obama’s White House said there was no conflict with Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian gas company because the younger Biden was a private citizen.

Besides Trump’s July 25 phone call to Ukraine’s leader pressing for investigations, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, began reaching out to Ukraine’s president and his aides to press for a government investigation into the company, Burisma, and Hunter Biden’s role.

Hunter Biden blamed his father’s political opponents, including Trump, for spreading a “ridiculous conspiracy theory.”

“I gave a hook to some very unethical people to act in illegal ways to try to do some harm to my father. That’s where I made the mistake,” he said. “So I take full responsibility for that. Did I do anything improper? No, not in any way. Not in any way whatsoever.”

He added: “What I regret is not taking into account that there would be a Rudy Giuliani and a president of the United States that would be listening to this ridiculous conspiracy idea.”

“Being the subject of Donald Trump’s ire is a feather in my cap,” he said. “It’s not something that I go to bed nervous about at night at all. The reason I’m able to do that is because I am absolutely enveloped in love of my family.”

In recent weeks, Trump has relentlessly mocked Hunter Biden, to the point that his presidential campaign began selling shirts that say, “Where’s Hunter?” highlighting that the former vice president’s son had been out of the public spotlight for weeks. At a recent political rally, Trump noted that Hunter Biden had been thrown out of the Navy.

Hunter Biden was discharged from the Navy Reserve in 2014 after failing a drug test and has struggled with alcohol and drug abuse. He told ABC News that, “like every single person that I’ve ever known, I have fallen and I’ve gotten up.”

“I’ve done esteemable things and things that are — have been in my life that I regret. Every single one of those things has brought me exactly to where I am right now, which is probably the best place I’ve ever been in my life. I’ve gone through my own struggles.”

The Legal Biden Family Corruption Democrats Refuse to Acknowledge

This piece originally appeared on The Grayzone. 

With its relentless focus on corruption in Russia and Ukraine, the Atlantic Council has distinguished itself from other top-flight think tanks in Washington. Over the past several years, it has held innumerable conferences and panel discussions, issued a string of reports, and published literally hundreds of essays on Russia’s “kleptocracy” and the scourge of Kremlin disinformation.

At the same time, this institution has posed as a faithful partner to Ukraine’s imperiled democracy, organizing countless programs on the urgency of economic reforms to tamp down on corruption in the country.

But behind the curtain, the Atlantic Council has initiated a lucrative relationship with a corruption-tainted Ukrainian gas company, the Burisma Group, that is worth as much as $250,000 a year. The partnership has paid for lavish conferences in Monaco and helped bring Burisma’s oligarchic founder out of the cold.

This alliance has remained stable even as official Washington goes to war over allegations by President Donald Trump and his allies that former Vice President Joseph Biden fired a Ukrainian prosecutor to defend his son’s handsomely compensated position on Burisma’s board.

As Biden parries Trump’s accusations, some of the former vice president’s most ardent defenders are emerging from the halls of the Atlantic Council, which featured Biden as a star speaker at its awards ceremonies over the years. These advocates include Michael Carpenter, Biden’s longtime foreign policy advisor and specialist on Ukraine, who has taken to the national media to support his embattled boss.

Even as Burisma’s trail of influence-buying finds its way into front page headlines, the Atlantic Council’s partnership with the company is scarcely mentioned. Homing in on the partisan theater of “Ukrainegate” and tuning out the wider landscape of corruption, the Beltway press routinely runs quotes from Atlantic Council experts on the scandal without acknowledging their employer’s relationship with Hunter Biden’s former employer.

This case of obvious cronyism has not been overlooked because the Atlantic Council is a bit player, but because of its success in leveraging millions from foreign governments, the arms and energy industries, and Western-friendly oligarchs to bring its influence to bear in the nation’s capital.

NATO’s think tank in Washington

The Atlantic Council functions as the semi-official think tank of NATO in Washington. As such, it cultivates relationships with well-established policymakers who take a hard line against Russia and support the treaty organization’s perpetual expansion.

Biden has been among the think tank’s most enthusiastic and well-placed allies.

In 2011, then-Vice President Biden delivered the keynote address at the Atlantic Council’s distinguished leadership awards. He returned to the think tank again in 2014 for another keynote at its “Toward A Europe Whole and Free” conference, which was dedicated to expanding NATO’s influence and countering “Russian aggression.” Throughout the event, speakers like Zbigniew Brzezinski sniped at Obama for his insufficiently bellicose posture toward Russia, while former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright fretted over polls showing low public support for US interventionism overseas.

In his own comments, Biden emphasized the need to power Europe with non-Russian sources of natural gas. This provided a prime opportunity to Ukrainian suppliers like Burisma and US energy titans. Many of these energy companies, from Chevron to Noble Energy, also happen to be top donors to the Atlantic Council.

“This would be a game-changer for Europe, in my view, and we’re ready to do everything in our power to help it happen,” Biden promised his audience.

Biden at the 2011 Atlantic Council distinguished leadership awards ceremony

At the time, the Atlantic Council was pushing to ramp up the proxy war against pro-Russian forces in Ukraine. In 2015, for instance, the think tank helped prepare a proposal for arming the Ukrainian military with offensive weaponry like Javelin anti-tank missiles.

Give that the Atlantic Council has been funded by the two manufacturers of the Javelin system, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, this created at least the appearance of a conflict of interest. In fact, the think tank presented its Distinguished Business Leadership Award to Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson that same year.

Dubious arrangements like these are not limited to arms manufacturers. Anders Aslund, a neoliberal economist who helps oversee the Atlantic Council’s programming on Russia and Eastern Europe, was quietly paid by a consortium of Latvian banks to write an October 2017 paper highlighting the supposed progress they had made in battling corruption.

Aslund was asked to write the piece by Sally Painter, a longtime lobbyist for Latvian financial institutions who was appointed to the Atlantic Council board in 2017. At the time, one of those banks was seeking access to the US market and facing allegations that it had engaged in money laundering.

Pay-for-play collaborations have helped grow the Atlantic Council’s annual revenue grow from $2 million to over $20 million in the past decade. In almost every case, the think tank has churned out policy prescriptions that seem suited to its donors’ interests.

Government contributors to the Atlantic Council include Gulf monarchies, the US State Department, and various Turkish interests.

In May 2017, Turkish President Recep Erdogan was filmed watching as his personal guards brutalized Kurdish protesters in Washington DC; lost in the headlines was the fact that he was on his way into an event at the Turkish ambassador’s residence hosted by the Atlantic Council.

#Erdoğan‘ın korumaları kavgaya karıştı https://t.co/gsi1iQ68Ye #amerikaninsesi pic.twitter.com/Jv3g5E7AVA

— Amerika’nın Sesi (@VOATurkish) May 17, 2017

Among the think tank’s top individual contributors is Victor Pinchuk, one of the wealthiest people in Ukraine and a prolific donor to the Clinton Foundation. Pinchuk donated $8.6 million to the Clintons’ non-profit throughout Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

Asked if Pinchuk was lobbying the State Department on Ukraine, his personal foundation told the Wall Street Journal, “this cannot be seen as anything but a good thing.”

Obama’s “point-person” on Ukraine

In mainstream media reports about the Bidens, scarcely any attention is given to the critical role that Joe Biden and other Obama administration officials played in the 2013-2014 Maidan revolt that replaced a fairly elected, Russian-oriented government with a Western vassal. In a relatively sympathetic New Yorker profile of Hunter Biden, for example, the regime change operation was described by reporter Adam Entous as merely “public protests.”

During the height of the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” that played out in Kiev’s Maidan Square, then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland boasted that the US had “invested $5 billion” since 1991 into Ukrainian civil society. On a December 2013 tour of the Maidan, Nuland personally handed out cookies to protesters alongside then-US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt.

In a phone conversation that leaked two months later, the two US diplomats could be heard plotting out the future government of the country, discussing Ukrainian politicians as though they were chess pieces. “I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience,” Nuland said, essentially declaring Arseniy Yatsenyuk the next prime minister. Frustrated with the European Union’s reluctance to inflame tensions with Moscow, Nuland exclaimed, “Fuck the EU.”

By Feb. 2014, the Maidan revolt had succeeded in overthrowing Yanukovich with the help of far-right ultra-nationalist street muscle. With a new, US-approved government in power, Biden assumed a personal role in dictating Ukraine’s day-to-day affairs.

“No one in the U.S. government has wielded more influence over Ukraine than Vice President Joe Biden,” Foreign Policy noted. The Atlantic Council also described Biden as “the point person on Ukraine in the Obama administration.”

“Ukraine was the top, or one of the top three, foreign policy issues we were concentrating on,” said Carpenter, Biden’s foreign policy advisor. “[Biden] was front and center.”

Biden made his first visit to the post-Maidan government of Ukraine in April 2014, just as Kiev was launching its so-called “anti-terrorist operation” against separatists who broke off from the new, NATO-oriented Ukraine and its nationalist government and formed so-called people’s republics in the Russophone Donbass region. The fragmentation of the country and its grinding proxy war flowed directly from the regime-change operation that Biden helped oversee.

Addressing the parliament in Kiev, Biden declared that “corruption can have no place in the new Ukraine,” stating that the “United States has also been a driving force behind the IMF, working to provide a multi-billion package to help Ukraine..”

That same month, Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of Burisma.

Hunter Biden starred at one of Burisma’s energy conferences in Monaco, which are today co-sponsored by the Atlantic Council
Burisma recruits Hunter Biden

The ouster of Yanukovych put the founder and president of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, in a delicate spot. Zlochevsky had served as the environment minister under Yanukovych, handing out gas licenses to cronies. Having watched the president flee Ukraine for his life, currying favor with the Obama administration was paramount for Zlochevsky.

He was also desperate to get out of legal trouble. At the time, a corruption investigation in the UK had resulted in the freezing of $23 million of Zlochevsky’s assets. Then, in August 2014, the oligarch was forced to follow Yanukovych into exile after being accused of illegally enriching himself.

The need to refurbish Burisma’s tattered image, as well as his own, prompted Zlochevsky to resort to a tried and true tactic for shadowy foreign entities: forking over large sums of money to win friends in Washington. Hunter Biden and the Atlantic Council were soon to become two of his best friends.

Hunter Biden was no stranger to trading on his father’s name for influence. He had served on the board of Amtrak, the train line his father famously rode more than 8,000 times, earning himself the nickname “Amtrak Joe.” Somehow, he also rose to senior vice president at MBNA, the bank that was the top contributor to Joe Biden’s senate campaigns.

Moreover, the vice president’s son reaped a board position at the National Democratic Institute, a US-funded “democracy promotion” organization that was heavily involved in pushing regime change in Ukraine. And then there was Burisma, which handed him a position on its board despite his total lack of experience in the energy industry and in Ukrainian affairs.

Hunter Biden tried to repay the $50,000-a-month gig Zlochevsky had handed him by enlisting a top DC law firm, Boies, Schiller, and Flexner, where he served as co-counsel, to help “improve [Burisma’s] corporate governance.” By the following January, Zlochevsky’s assets were unfrozen by the UK.

Back in Washington, the arrangement between the son of the vice president and a less than scrupulous Ukrainian oligarch was raising eyebrows. During a May 13, 2014 press conference, Matt Lee of the Associated Press grilled State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki about Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board.

“Does this building diplomatically have any concerns about potential perceptions of conflict or cronyism – which is what you’ve often accused the Russians of doing?” Lee asked Psaki.

“No, he’s a private citizen,” Psaki responded, referring to Hunter Biden.

In a December 2015 op-ed, the editorial board of the New York Times took both Bidens to task for the unseemly business arrangement: “It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.”

For a paper that had firmly supported the installation of a US-aligned government in Kiev, this was a striking statement.

Hunter Biden maintained that he had only a brief conversation with his father about his work at Burisma. “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do,’” Hunter recalled to the New Yorker.

Despite his constant focus on Ukraine, the elder Biden claimed this September that he never spoke to his son about his business dealings in the country.

A disaster for Ukrainians, a boon for the Bidens

On January 12, 2017, the criminal probes of Zlochevsky and Burisma were officially closed under the watch of a new Ukrainian prosecutor.

Less than a week later, Biden returned to Ukraine to make his final speech as vice president. By this point, three years after the Maidan uprising overthrew Yanukovych, it was clear that the national project the vice president personally had presided over was a calamitous failure.

As even the Atlantic Council’s Aslund was willing to admit, Ukraine had become the poorest country in Europe. The country had also become the top recipient of remittances in Europe, with a staggering percentage of its population migrating abroad in search of work.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International stated: “Ukraine is descending into chaos of uncontrolled use of force by radical [far-right] groups. Under these conditions, no person in Ukraine may feel safe.” As the country’s proxy conflict with pro-Russian separatists dragged on, it transformed into a supermarket for the international arms trade.

Meanwhile, Biden’s son Hunter was making a small fortune by simply warming a seat on Burisma’s board of directors.

During his 2017 press conference in Kiev, Biden seemed oblivious to the trends that were driving Ukraine into ruin. He encouraged Ukraine’s leadership to continue on an IMF-led path of privatization and austerity.

He then urged Kiev to “press forward with energy reforms that are eliminating Ukraine’s dependence on Russian gas,” once again advancing policy that would serve as a boon to the energy firms plowing their cash into the Atlantic Council.

Mykola Zlochevsky, former employer of Hunter Biden and current partner of the Atlantic Council
Burisma recruits the Atlantic Council

Even with Hunter Biden on his company’s board, Zlochevsky was still seeking influential allies in Washington. He found them at the Atlantic Council in 2017, literally hours after he was cleared of corruption charges in Ukraine.

On January 19, 2017 – just two days after the investigation of Zlochevsky ended – Burisma announced a major “cooperative agreement” with the Atlantic Council. “It became possible to sign a cooperative agreement between Burisma and the Atlantic Council after all charges against Burisma Group companies and its owner [Mykola] Zlochevskyi were withdrawn,” the Kyiv Post reported at the time.

The deal was inked by the director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia program, a former US ambassador to Ukraine named John Herbst.

Since then, Burisma helped bankroll Atlantic Council programming, including an energy security conference held this May in Monaco, where Zlochevsky currently lives.

“[Zlochevsky] invited them purely for whitewashing purposes, to put them on the façade and make this company look nice,” Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, said of the Monaco event to the Financial Times.

At one such conference in Monaco, then-Burisma board member Hunter Biden declared, “One of the reasons that I am proud to be a member of the board at Burisma is that I believe we are trying to figure out the way to create a radical change in the way we look at energy.” (Hunter Biden left Burisma with $850,000 in earnings when his father launched his presidential campaign this year).

While the Atlantic Council was bringing Burisma in from the cold, the company was still too toxic for much of the business world to touch.

As the Financial Times noted, the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine had rejected Burisma’s application for membership. “We’ve never worked with them for integrity reasons. Never passed our due diligence,” a Western financial institution told the newspaper.

“The company just does not pass the smell test,” a businessman in Ukraine commented to the Financial Times. “Their reputation is far from squeaky clean because of their baggage, the background and attempts to whitewash by bringing in recognizable Western names on to the board.”

In fact, a year before the Atlantic Council initiated its partnership with Burisma, the think tank published a paper describing Zlochevsky as “openly on the take” and deriding board members Hunter Biden and former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski as his “trophy foreigners.” (Kwasniewski is today a member of the Atlantic Council’s international advisory board).

For Herbst, however, Burisma’s generosity seemed too hard to resist.

“If there are companies that want to support my work, if those companies are not doing anything that I know to be illegal or unethical, I’ll consider their support,” Herbst stated in reply to questions about the Burisma partnership from the Ukrainian news site, Hromadske.

“They’ve been good partners,” he added.

Men of integrity

The Atlantic Council has provided more than just a web of influence for figures like Biden and Zlochevsky. It extended into the Trump administration, through a former employee who served as the president’s lead envoy to Ukraine.

On the sidelines of a September 2018 Atlantic Council event in New York City, Burisma advisor Vadym Pozharskyi held a meeting with Kurt Volker, then the State Department Special Liaison to Ukraine. A former senior advisor to the Atlantic Council and national security hardliner, Volker had earned praise from Biden as a “solid guy.”

At the time, Volker also served as the executive director of the McCain Institute, named for the senator, John McCain, who authored the congressional provision requiring the US to budget 20 percent of all aid to Ukraine for offensive weapons. As I reported in 2017, the McCain Institute’s financial backers included the BGR group, whose designated lobbyist, Ed Rogers, was a lobbyist for Raytheon – the company that produced the Javelin missiles that both Volker and the Atlantic Council wanted sold to Ukraine.

Following his abrupt resignation this September, Volker was called to testify before the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs on the so-called Ukrainegate affair. There, he defended Biden as “a man of integrity and dedication to our country” who would never be “influenced in his duties as Vice President by money for his son…”

Biden’s chief advisor on Ukraine goes to work for Burisma’s favorite DC think tank

Throughout Biden’s tenure as the “point person” on Ukraine, one figure was constantly by his side: Michael Carpenter, a former Pentagon specialist on Eastern Europe who became a key advisor to Biden on the National Security Council. When Carpenter traveled with Biden to Ukraine in 2015, he helped provide the Vice President with talking points throughout his trip.

Once Trump was inaugurated, Carpenter followed fellow members of the Democratic foreign policy apparatus into the think tank world. He accepted a fellowship at the Atlantic Council, and assumed a position as senior director of newly founded Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which provided office space to Biden when he was in Washington.

At the January 23, 2018 Council on Foreign Relations event where Biden made his now-notorious comments about threatening the Ukrainian government with the withdrawal of a one billion dollar loan if it did not fire Shokin – “well son of a bitch, he got fired!” Biden exclaimed – Carpenter was by his side, rattling off tough talking points about Russian interference.

On stage at @CFR_org right now, Joe Biden pushing a distinctly neocon line on Russia. A blunt defense of his role in pushing NATO expansion, dismissal of its role in antagonizing Russia and calls for encouraging/backing internal opposition to Putin. https://t.co/SfogBggWk6 pic.twitter.com/t5QPxYMulP

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 23, 2018

Since then, Carpenter has remained engaged in Ukrainian politics, throwing his weight behind some of the country’s most hardline elements. In July 2018, for instance, he helped welcome Andriy Parubiy, the speaker of the Rada (the Ukrainian parliament), to a series of meetings on Capitol Hill.

Parubiy is the founder of the Social-National Party, which the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson described as “openly neo-fascist.” In fact, Parubiy appeared in a Nazi-style uniform, packing a pistol beneath a Wolfsangel symbol on the cover of his Mein Kampf-style memoir, “A View From The Right.”

After the Senate meeting with Parubiy, I challenged Carpenter over bringing the far-right politician to Capitol Hill. “Andriy Parubiy is a conservative nationalist who is also a patriot who cares about his country,” Carpenter remarked to me. “I don’t think he has any neo-Nazi inclinations, nor background.” He went on to dismiss the basis of my question as “mostly Russian propaganda.”

Months later, Carpenter staged a meltdown on Twitter over the incident, fabricating quotes by me, branding me as a “sleeze” [sic] and “pro-Asad and pro-Putin scumbag,” while falsely and baselessly claiming I “enlist[ed] RT,” the Russian-backed news network, “to do an exposé on him.”

Asked by The Grayzone about Carpenter’s work for a think tank funded by Burisma while simultaneously involving himself in Biden’s political machine, Atlantic Council media relations deputy director Alex Kisling stated, “Council staff and fellows are free to participate in election activity as individuals and on their own time, provided they do so in a way that could not be seen as acting as a representative of the Council or implying Council endorsement of their activity or views. Michael’s affiliations and previous service are on our website. (He is not part of our full time staff).”

The Penn Biden Center did not respond to a question on whether it supported Carpenter’s work at the Burisma-backed Atlantic Council.

The Beltway press scrubs Burisma’s ongoing influence-buying

As the scrutiny of Biden’s dealings in Ukraine intensifies, Carpenter has thrust himself into the media limelight to defend his longtime boss.

In an October 7 Washington Post op-ed denouncing Trump’s “smear campaign” against Biden, Carpenter insisted that Biden had gone to great lengths to remove the Ukrainian prosecutor, Shokin, for his failure to take action against Burisma. That evening, Carpenter took to Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC to reinforce the message that Biden moved against “corrupt players” in Ukraine, presumably referring to Burisma.

At no point did he mention that Burisma was funding the think tank that hosted him as a senior fellow.

In publishing an “explainer” purporting to debunk the charges against Biden, the Atlantic Council also failed to mention its ongoing relationship with Burisma. Atlantic Council media relations deputy director Kisling dismissed the non-disclosure, telling The Grayzone, “The Council discloses its funding from Burisma on its website and whenever asked.” (Ironically, the Atlantic Council has pushed for greater transparency in political advertising on Facebook, one of the top donors to the think tank).

Perhaps the most absurd omission took place in a GQ article about Ukrainegate by reporter and Russia-watcher Julia Ioffe. In painting Ukraine – the largest nation entirely located in Europe – as a “small country” drowning in corruption, Ioffe noted, “the best way to launder one’s shady reputation and shine for international investors is to hire big-name Western consultants – as Burisma did.”

In the very next paragraph, Ioffe quoted Daniel Fried, a former State Department official now serving as a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “It’s a country where there’s a lot of freelance money and a lot of competing interests,” Fried remarked.

Revealingly, Ioffe failed to acknowledge that Fried was one of those “big-named Western consultants” helping to launder Zlochevsky and Burisma’s “shady reputation” through the Atlantic Council.

In fact, Fried was photographed in a one-on-one meeting with Burisma advisor Vadim Pozharskyi at a September 2018 Atlantic Council conference in New York City.

As the furor over “Ukrainegate” continues, Biden and his allies are soldiering ahead, insisting that scrutiny of his activities in Ukraine constitute nothing more than a vast right-wing conspiracy.

Meanwhile, the Beltway press shrugs at Burisma’s buying of influence at a powerful think tank intertwined with Biden’s political operation.

Russia might be a “kleptocracy” and Ukraine might endemically corrupt, but in Washington, this is all business as usual.

#MeToo Writings Are About a Lot More Than Stories

“Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings From the Me Too Movement” 

A book edited by Shelly Oria

“Indelible: Writings From the Me Too Movement” is not just a collection of nonfiction essays, short stories, and poems about the Great Reckoning edited by award-winning novelist Shelly Oria. “Indelible”’s writings also strive to create a forum for litigating sexual violence claims outside of the failed state. In a society where only one out of four rapes are reported — often because victims understand that police are unlikely to believe the allegations of accusers who do not resemble the “real rape victim” archetype — the book’s relentless archive of victims’ stories also functions as a series of alternative police reports, witness statements, prosecutorial complaints, convictions, and, in one case, executions.

“When I was seven, a teenage relative showed me his dick twitching in his jeans […] [but my guardian kept] the assault secret,” begins writer and musician Jolie Holland in the numbly denunciative essay “What Does ‘Forgiveness’ Mean?” She goes on:

When I was nine, my stepparent’s brother tried to take off my pants. I didn’t tell anyone because there was no one to trust. At the age of twelve, a substitute teacher asked if I had a boyfriend and acted surprised when I said I didn’t. […] When I was thirteen […] [my doctor] made snide sexual comments to me. My mother said nothing about it. […] About the same time, a teenage neighbor boy sent my legal guardian a letter telling her he was jerking off at my bedroom window. […] As far as I know, [she did not act on this information.] On another occasion, a strange man cornered me while I was walking through my neighborhood in the evening and held a gun to my head. […] [I never told] any adults what had happened.

Holland is not the only writer in “Indelible” to construct her essay as a dual-function evidentiary exhibit and multiple-count indictment. But her contribution helps to set the tone for the book as a whole. It also highlights the mental “trials” that other women find themselves privately enduring after experiencing assaults, a process that often lasts their entire lives.

“Indelible in the Hippocampus,” of course, takes its title from Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against now-sitting Justice Brett Kavanaugh, wherein Dr. Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a party in the 1980s, when she was 15 years old and he was 17. Ford acknowledged that she never reported the attack to her parents or any authority, in part because she “was too afraid and ashamed to tell anyone the details.” In lieu of a police report, a witness, or a video that could verify the attack, Dr. Ford could only offer her memories of Kavanaugh “push[ing her] onto the bed and […] running his hands over [her] body and grinding his hips into [her]” as proof of Kavanaugh’s crime. Her use of the term “indelible” sought to impress upon her interlocutors the permanent heft those memories imposed upon her psyche (the hippocampus is involved with processing long-term memory), so they would understand that her recall was as tangible a piece of evidence as something physical — a gun, a stained dress, scars. But the majority of the Senate did not see her memory that way, or simply didn’t care whether she was telling the truth or not.

“Indelible in the Hippocampus” shows us that memory is what most women retain of their rapes, assaults, and harassments. These recollections form the cornerstone of a legal proceeding that they must plead and contest in their imaginations in place of an official prosecution. When the state fails women and other victims of sexual violence by not believing them and not filing charges against their attackers, these victims must undergo DIY mental trials in an effort to resolve their traumas with any measure of justice. This psychological process involves reporting the offense to oneself or another person, naming it as a cognizable crime, establishing fault, and conceiving of a proper punishment.

In novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge’s “Your Story Is Yours,” Greenidge affirms that the decision of whether and how to report remains firmly in the hands of the victim: “[N]o one is entitled to your story. You can tell it or not tell it.” But, in “How Did It All Begin?” poet and essayist Syreeta McFadden clarifies that race will shape the decision to speak out. Sometimes a woman of color may decline to say anything because her attacker is of her same minority race, and the victim may “fear[] for him.” On other occasions, women of color may stay quiet because they know they are more likely to be disbelieved, as historically, “Black women were not to be afforded protection or humanity.”

In “Bye, Baby,” memoirist Melissa Febos teaches us that even “small” sexual invasions can count as serious wrongdoing that affect a survivor’s larger life. In this story, a sixth-grade girl is accosted in the bathroom by an adult man named Vega. The episode seems to only take a few seconds, but to her it feels like death: “I can feel the outline of his body in the aura of its warmth. Its heat is an image reflected on me. My body could wither in an instant, extinguished, a streak of smoke in the air. […] I know I will never tell anyone about this.” Similarly, in “Hot for Teacher,” essayist Courtney Zoffness reveals how seemingly minor incidents (“Maybe I was overreacting”) can connect in survivors’ minds to past offenses, a phenomenon that increases the events’ felt severity. Zoffness recalls how a student in her creative writing class read out loud a first-person narrative about how he “could and would push aside the pile of ungraded papers and take her passionately atop her desk.” Zoffness’s resulting “confusion/fury” spurs her to contemplate the then-recent Virginia Tech massacre and a time when she was involuntarily digitally penetrated in a dance club.

In the story “Glad Past Words,” professor and writer Mecca Jamilah Sullivan reveals how concepts like consent, desire, and even the mandate for “fresh reporting” are slippery when it comes to sexual harm. In this short fiction, 17-year-old Shaniece, having recently shed so much baby fat that she can now “almost pass for a video dancer,” has sex with her best friend’s father. At first, the encounter doesn’t read like rape or another variant of sexual assault, as “[t]here was no no and there was no yes, and what there was was feeling, but if you asked her what the feelings were, she probably couldn’t tell you, which didn’t matter anyway ‘cause it’s not like anyone asked.” But later, as Shaniece observes herself, she realizes that something bad has happened to her. “She found it hard to focus on even simple things […] soon it became a problem. […] It messed with her, messed her up. […] There was no one she could talk to about this.”

In Caitlin Delohery’s blindingly frightening “Lakes,” the writer/editor tries to tell the story of how she was sexually used by her cousin, Danny, who later shot his girlfriend to death in 2006. “Lakes” confronts the reader with the problems of memory and details how, even if a survivor doesn’t recall an assault with the kind of clarity that Dr. Ford exhibited (to no avail) at the 2018 hearings, that doesn’t mean that a rape did not occur. Delohery seeks to understand what Danny did to her without any assistance from the justice system that abandoned her and her cousin’s other’s victim. Bereft of support and protection, she must name the abuse herself through the painful work of writing it down:

I can’t draw you a diagram of what my cousin did to me a couple decades before he killed a woman. I can’t name all of what I saw or was made to touch or do or accept. I can’t tell you how many years it went on, list the number of times. I can’t tell you how my kid body responded, recoiled, or how it didn’t. Often, the clearest way I can understand myself, now, at thirty-seven, at twenty-seven when I first started writing this story, and at four years old, when I think this story began for me, is to remind myself, aloud or in writing, just: something happened.

With “But We Will Win,” Oria closes the book with an incendiary piece of fiction that finalizes the essays’ metaphorical prosecutions with a sentencing and punishment phase. Part Charlize Theron in “Monster,” and part social justice crusader à la the Women’s March, Oria tells the story of an unnamed protagonist whose former love, Roxie, was killed when driven into traffic by a sexual harasser. The hero responds first by distributing pamphlets and then beating an innocent white man to death, a murder that her current girlfriend covers up by burning her clothes (then they have sex). “But We Will Win” is a freaky document of rage — even in its surrealism, it makes a very large claim of what kinds of retributive action are warranted in response to a whole human history of the sexual exploitation of women and other vulnerable people.

It’s worth noting that the death penalty is not permitted for the crime of rape of an adult woman in the United States, as per the 1977 Supreme Court decision Coker v. Georgia. Even if it were, it would be unequally imposed, and, in any system, Oria’s protagonist has committed an unwarranted, cold-blooded murder. I am sympathetic to the feelings of ferocity limned in “But We Will Win,” but the story doesn’t really stand with the rest of the collection, whose authors take a clear-eyed view of the cascades of sex crimes withstood in silence. Nevertheless, in an age when justice is withheld by racist and sexist organs of government and pursued through unreliable social media canceling, the question of punishment is real and immediate, and one that we desperately need to think through.

Together, the works assembled in “Indelible in the Hippocampus” offer us the complex products of the state’s neglect to deter and prosecute sexual violence. A common misconception of survivors of sexual assault and harassment is that their emotional responses are disjointed and muddled, which is why the concept of “rape trauma syndrome” (RTS) was developed in the first place. RTS is a diagnosis of a rape victim’s post-trauma that is often used in rape trials to explain why victims act “counterintuitively” — for example, when they don’t immediately report, or when they can’t describe their assaults in ways that the police or prosecutors find sufficiently coherent. One of the key strengths of the book is that it reveals how survivors’ silence and supposed confusion are rational responses to an uncaring power structure that requires sexual assaults to bear certain rigid hallmarks, such as a clear “no,” or some evidence of physical force. The writers in “Indelible” prove that where the government (and patriarchy) sees only disorganized emotionality in a victim’s response, she may actually be engaged in a sophisticated psychological process that charges, prosecutes, deliberates, and even punishes her attacker. The tragedy is that she is all too often forced to do this by herself, and only within her own imagination, because our criminal justice system has failed her.

This article originally appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books .

Trump Orders Turkey Sanctions as U.S. Scrambles for Syria Exit

WASHINGTON—Targeting Turkey’s economy, President Donald Trump announced sanctions Monday aimed at restraining the Turks’ assault against Kurdish fighters and civilians in Syria — an assault Turkey began after Trump announced he was moving U.S. troops out of the way.

The United States also called on Turkey to stop the invasion, and Trump is sending Vice President Mike Pence to the region in an attempt to begin negotiations. Pence said Trump spoke directly to Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“President Trump communicated to him very clearly that the United States of American wants Turkey to stop the invasion, implement an immediate ceasefire and to begin to negotiate with Kurdish forces in Syria to bring an end to the violence,” Pence said.

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The Americans were scrambling for Syria’s exits, a move criticized at home and abroad as opening the door to a resurgence of the Islamic State group whose violent takeover of Syrian and Iraq lands five years ago was the reason American forces came in the first place.

Trump said the approximately 1,000 U.S. troops who had been partnering with local Kurdish fighters to battle IS in northern Syria are leaving the country. They will remain in the Middle East, he said, to “monitor the situation” and to prevent a revival of IS — a goal that even Trump’s allies say has become much harder as a result of the U.S. pullout.

The Turks began attacks in Syria last week against the Syrian Kurdish fighters, whom the Turks see as terrorists. On Monday, Syrian government troops moved north toward the border region, setting up a potential clash with Turkish-led forces.

Trump said Turkey’s invasion is “precipitating a humanitarian crisis and setting conditions for possible war crimes,” a reference to reports of Turkish-backed fighters executing Kurdish fighters on the battlefield.

The Kurdish forces previously allied with the U.S. said they had reached a deal with President Bashar Assad’s government to help them fend off Turkey’s invasion, a move that brings Russian forces deeper into the conflict.

In his sanctions announcement, Trump said he was halting trade negotiations with Turkey and raising steel tariffs. He said he would soon sign an order permitting sanctions to be imposed on current and former Turkish officials.

“I am fully prepared to swiftly destroy Turkey’s economy if Turkish leaders continue down this dangerous and destructive path,” Trump said.

American troops consolidated their positions in northern Syria on Monday and prepared to evacuate equipment in advance of a full withdrawal, a U.S. defense official said.

The official, who was not authorized to be quoted by name, said U.S. officials were weighing options for a potential future counter-IS campaign, including the possibility of waging it with a combination of air power and special operations forces based outside of Syria, perhaps in Iraq.

The hurried preparations for a U.S. exit were triggered by Trump’s decision Saturday to expand a limited troop pullout into a complete withdrawal.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Monday he would travel to NATO headquarters in Brussels next week to urge European allies to impose “diplomatic and economic measures” against Turkey — a fellow NATO ally — for what Esper called Ankara’s “egregious” actions.

Esper said Turkey’s incursion had created unacceptable risk to U.S. forces in northern Syria and “we also are at risk of being engulfed in a broader conflict.”

The only exception to the U.S. withdrawal from Syria is a group of perhaps 200 troops who will remain at a base called Tanf in southern Syria near the Jordanian border along the strategically important Baghdad-to-Damascus highway. Those troops work with Syrian opposition forces unrelated to the Kurdish-led fighters in northern Syria.

Esper said the U.S. withdrawal would be done carefully to protect the troops and to ensure that no U.S. equipment was left behind. He declined to say how long that might take.

In a series of tweets Monday, Trump defended his gamble that pulling U.S. forces out of Syria would not weaken U.S. security and credibility. He took sarcastic swipes at critics who say his Syria withdrawal amounts to a betrayal of the Kurds and plays into the hands of Russia.

“Anyone who wants to assist Syria in protecting the Kurds is good with me, whether it is Russia, China, or Napoleon Bonaparte,” he wrote. “I hope they all do great, we are 7,000 miles away!”

Trump has dug in on his decision to pull out the troops, believing it fulfills a key campaign promise and will be a winning issue in the 2020 election, according to White House officials.

This has effectively ended a five-year effort to partner with Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters to ensure a lasting defeat of the Islamic State group. Hundreds of IS supporters escaped a holding camp amid clashes between invading Turkish-led forces and Kurdish fighters, and analysts said an IS resurgence seemed more likely, just months after Trump declared the extremists defeated.

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, normally a staunch Trump supporter, said he was “gravely concerned” by events in Syria and Trump’s response so far.

Withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria “would re-create the very conditions that we have worked hard to destroy and invite the resurgence of ISIS,” he said in a statement. “And such a withdrawal would also create a broader power vacuum in Syria that will be exploited by Iran and Russia, a catastrophic outcome for the United States’ strategic interests.”

However, Trump got quick support from Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who had lambasted his withdrawal decision last week as “shortsighted,” ”irresponsible” and “unnerving to its core.” On Monday, echoing Trump, Graham said on Fox News Channel that the current situation was Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s fault and Turkey would face “crippling sanctions” from the U.S. on its economy.

Pence said the sanctions announced Monday were only the beginning “unless Turkey is willing to embrace a ceasefire, come to the negotiating table and end the violence.”

The Kurds have turned to the Syrian government and Russia for military assistance, further complicating the battlefield.

The prospect of enhancing the Syrian government’s position on the battlefield and inviting Russia to get more directly involved is seen by Trump’s critics as a major mistake. But he tweeted that it shouldn’t matter.

“Others may want to come in and fight for one side or the other,” he wrote. “Let them!”

New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Trump is weakening America. ‘To be clear, this administration’s chaotic and haphazard approach to policy by tweet is endangering the lives of U.S. troops and civilians,” Menendez said in a statement.

__

AP writer Jonathan Lemire contributed to this story.

Facebook CEO Cozies up to Conservatives at Private Dinners

For a company that’s come under congressional and public scrutiny from all sides of the political spectrum, including for influencing the 2016 presidential election, it’s unsurprising that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would dedicate time to damage control with leaders who might be involved in investigating and regulating the platform. A new report from Politico, however, suggests that Zuckerberg may be if not outright favoring conservatives, than at least giving them more attention and access.

Zuckerberg has been inviting prominent conservative pundits, reporters and at least one lawmaker to his house for a series of casual, off-the-record meetings and dinners to discuss free speech and potential partnerships, Politico reported Monday. He’s being doing so since July.

The gatherings, write Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippman, “are part of Zuckerberg’s broader effort to cultivate friends on the right amid outrage by President Donald Trump and his allies over alleged ‘bias’ against conservatives at Facebook and other major social media companies.”

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Revelations of these meetings have heightened concerns on the left that Zuckerberg “is trying to appease the Trump administration by not cracking down on right-wing propaganda,” a cybersecurity researcher and former government official who asked to remain anonymous told Politico.

The implication of appeasement is a sharp contrast to how Zuckerberg has responded to concerns from Democratic politicians and non-right-wing media.

When he heard about presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren’s plan to break up Facebook, Zuckerberg threatened to sue if she tried, according to transcripts from internal company meetings obtained by The Verge.

Even as the company was facing criticism for its actions during the 2016 elections, Facebook not only concealed Russian influence on its platform, but hired a conservative opposition research company to dig up dirt on critics, implying that they were paid by liberal billionaire George Soros, according to a 2018 New York Times investigation.

After the Times report was published, Zuckerberg told CNN Business: “It is not clear to me at all that the report is right.” Zuckerberg was more blunt in an internal meeting, calling the article “bullshit,” according to 2018 article in The Wall Street Journal, which also reported that he told Facebook executives that “some of the reaction to the Cambridge Analytica controversy amounted to ‘hysteria.’”

By contrast, when the Republican president accused Facebook of being too friendly toward liberals and Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson said the platform is contributing to “the death of free speech in America,” the company commissioned a conservative bias audit.

“I’m under no illusions that [Zuckerberg is] a conservative, but I think he does care about some of our concerns,” a person familiar with the dinners told Politico.

Among the attendees have been Tucker Carlson of Fox News, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, CNN’s Mary Katherine Hahn, Guy Benson, editor of Town Hall and contributor to Fox News, Byron York of The Washington Examiner and Brent Bozell, who founded the Media Research Center.

According to Politico:

Each dinner has been hosted at one of Zuckerberg’s homes in California, and at least one lasted around two-and-a-half to three hours. The conversations center around “free expression, unfair treatment of conservatives, the appeals process for real or perceived unfair treatment, fact checking, partnerships, and privacy,” the source familiar with the meetings said.

The same source also called Zuckerberg “receptive and thoughtful.”

When asked for comment, a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement “For years, Mark Zuckerberg has met with elected officials and thought leaders all across the political spectrum.”

Read the full Politico report here.

The Sudden Martyrdom of the Government Whistleblower

This piece originally appeared on The American Conservative. 

Few see the irony in the corporate mainstream media’s love affair with the anonymous whistleblower in President Trump’s alleged Ukraine-gate affair. Yet everyone should.

The whole impeachment charade, and that’s what it is, rests on the paradoxical and ahistorical assertions that 1) the president’s phone call with Ukraine’s leader is Trump’s worst crime, and 2) the “liberal” press has always supported government whistleblowers. Both are absurd claims, though fitting for this partisan political moment.

The inconvenient reality is that Trump and both his predecessors have committed far worse crimes against the Constitution by engaging in illegal wars. Certainly this is more serious than the shady Ukraine/Biden incident. And the mainstream media has a rather poor track record when it comes to whistleblowers, often demonizing leakers who expose nefarious government actions.

The only reason the Left—which historically has distrusted U.S. intelligence activities—has canonized this anonymous CIA whistleblower is that he or she, and the entire clandestine apparatus, has implicated Trump, the reflexive archenemy of the liberal elite. Trump’s actual crime, contrary to the prevailing yarn, was not his overriding of Congress on war policies (which he largely copied from Obama and Bush II), but that he dared to attack a longtime Democratic insider: Joe Biden.

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Sure, Trump’s apparent threat to use aid as a cudgel to pressure the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden, and his son Hunter, is a serious matter. Far be it for me, or anyone else, to dispute that. Whether that meets the threshold for impeachment is debatable—and by the way, Hunter Biden’s $50,000 a month, unqualified position on a foreign corporate gas company’s board while his father was vice president doesn’t exactly pass the smell test either. But I’ll table that for now.

Notice that the Democratic leadership in Congress has declined to investigate the fact that this president, and others before him, overrode congressional authority to wage all sorts of military operations outside the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed after 9/11, including the current assistance we are giving Saudi Arabia in its attacks on Yemen.

President Obama, for example, dropped 26,171 bombs on at least seven countries using an AUMF that has been extended well beyond those who attacked America on 9/11. He even executed American citizens overseas without due process. Meanwhile, Trump abets legitimate war crimes in Yemen to the tune of 100,000-plus dead—without evident remorse. But Obama started that war, providing U.S. aerial refueling, targeting support, and deadly munitions to the Saudis back in 2015. So the Democratic leadership stands down on the issue of Yemen, not wanting to implicate their hero in the process of impeaching The Donald.

Mainstream liberal hypocrisy runs even deeper, unfortunately. I’m just old enough to remember when the Left railed against the CIA, NSA, and spooks in general. And rightfully so. That, however, was before Mr. Trump shocked coastal elites and got himself elected president of their America. It was impressive watching media and Democratic insiders immediately turn on a dime. Suddenly every Obama- and Bush-era national security staffer and intelligence super-sleuth—John Brennan, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, etc.— was regularly appearing on CNN and MSNBC to attack Trump and pine for the status quo of U.S. military hyper-interventionism. It was as though all their sins—mass surveillance, drone assassination, illegal rendition, torture—had been collectively pushed down the memory hole, the entire intel apparatus born again as agents of truth and honor. The whole masquerade was bizarre, and beyond duplicitous.

A Weak Whistleblower, a Ridiculous Impeachment
Political Journalism is Dead

The final insult was the recent canonization of the anonymous Ukraine-gate whistleblower(s). Even the language is instructive. They aren’t “leakers,” “traitors,” or “criminals,” but whistleblowers, surging with moral courage and exposing ostensibly unthinkable presidential wrongdoing. That’s funny: where were these folks when other, far more profound whistleblowers uncovered criminality during the Bush and Obama years? Either crickets or pejorative attacks were all they proffered back then.

Edward Snowden exposed the most extensive illegal domestic surveillance system in the history of man, a genuine “hacker state.” He was demonized, labeled treasonous, and forced to flee to Hong Kong and then Moscow. Chelsea Manning unmasked serious war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and proved that senior Pentagon officials and generals had lied about the Iraq civil war as it unfolded. Her thanks was one of the longest federal prison sentences for a government leaker in American history. Meanwhile, Obama utilized the archaic 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined. The liberal press and most Democratic legislators barely made a peep. Barack was their guy, one of their own—the “leakers” must have been in the wrong, enemies, so to speak, of the people.

So while Trump is by no means without serious flaws, the Beltway elites and media personalities stuffing impeachment down our throats are hypocritical and dishonest enough to make one believe in a “deep state.” Ultimately it will amount to nothing. Each side remains entrenched. Either the Dem elites will hand Trump a second term with this impeachment charade, or, maybe just as likely, President Biden will take the helm. When he does, whistleblowers will revert, once again, to being traitors.

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army Major whose writing has appeared in The American Conservative, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation and Tom Dispatch. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq war, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter @SkepticalVet.