Chris Hedges's Blog, page 58

Video of Jeffrey Epstein’s Suicide Attempt Is Lost, Attorneys Say

NEW YORK—Video footage of the area around Jeffrey Epstein’s jail cell on a day he apparently tried to kill himself “no longer exists,” federal prosecutors told a judge Thursday.

Officials at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York believed they had preserved footage of guards finding Jeffrey Epstein after he appeared to have attempted suicide, but actually saved a video from a different part of the jail, prosecutors said.

The FBI also has determined that the footage does not exist on the jail’s backup video system “as a result of technical errors,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Maurene Comey and Jason Swergold wrote in a court filing.

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The revelation came despite assurances prosecutors made that jail officials were preserving the footage at the request of a defense attorney for Nicholas Tartaglione, a former police officer who shared a cell with Epstein in July when the wealthy financier was after discovered with bruises on his neck and then placed on suicide watch.

Epstein later hanged himself on Aug. 10 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, officials said.

Tartaglione’s defense attorney, Bruce Barket, told The Associated Press he intends to ask U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas to hold a hearing with “live testimony” to determine what happened to the missing video.

“The various and inconsistent accounts of what happened to that video are deeply troubling,” Barket said in an email.

Tartaglione is charged in what prosecutors have described as the “gangland-style” killings of four men who disappeared during a cocaine-related dispute.

Barket said the jailhouse video would have supported his position that Tartaglione “acted appropriately” on the day in question, alluding to questions about whether Epstein had been attacked.

A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation.

One of Epstein’s attorneys, Marc Fernich, said the missing video “only adds to the unanswered questions and deepens the air of mystery surrounding (Epstein’s) death, feeding the perception that the public will never really know what happened — and that the powers that be aren’t really interested in finding out.”

“Nothing about Jeffrey Epstein’s prosecution and death in federal custody surprises or could surprise me at this point,” Fernich added.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan said in Thursday’s court filing that jailhouse officials had preserved video for the “correct date and time” but captured the wrong part of the jail. They said the jail’s computer system listed a “different, incorrect cell” for Tartaglione.

“The Government further understands from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that it has reviewed that backup system as part of an unrelated investigation and determined that the requested video no longer exists on the backup system and has not since at least August 2019 as a result of technical errors,” the prosecutors wrote.

The footage in question involves a July 23 episode in which correctional officers say they found Epstein on the floor of his cell with a strip of bedsheet around his neck. Michael Thomas, one of the officers charged with falsifying records the night Epstein died, was one of the officers who responded to that scene.

Epstein was moved out of that cell and placed on suicide watch. He was transferred back to the jail’s special housing unit July 30, meaning he was less closely monitored but still supposed to be checked every 30 minutes. He was also required to have a cellmate, but he was left with none after his cellmate was transferred out of the jail Aug. 9, the day before his death, authorities have said.

Prosecutors charged the two officers responsible for guarding Epstein the night he died with falsifying prison records to conceal they were sleeping and browsing the internet during the hours they were supposed to be keeping a close watch on prisoners.

The falsification of records has been a problem throughout the federal prison system. The federal Bureau of Prisons, which for years has been plagued by extensive staffing shortages, chronic violence and serious misconduct, has come under increased scrutiny since Epstein’s death in August.

Staffing shortages within the bureau are so severe that guards are regularly forced to work mandatory overtime, sometimes day after day, and violence leads to regular lockdowns at prison compounds across the nation. A congressional report also found that “bad behavior is ignored or covered up on a regular basis” within the bureau.

After Epstein’s death in August, Attorney General William Barr said the financier’s ability to take his own life inside one of most secure jails in America raised “serious questions that must be answered.” Barr removed the agency’s acting director in the wake of Epstein’s death and named Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, the prison agency’s director from 1992 until 2003, to replace him.

Barr told the AP in November that the investigation revealed a “series” of mistakes made that gave Epstein the chance to take his own life and that his suicide was the result of “a perfect storm of screw-ups.”

Barr told the AP he had personally reviewed security footage from the night Epstein took his own life, which confirmed that no one entered the area where Epstein was housed on the night he died.

___

Balsamo reported from Washington.

The War in Afghanistan Is a Fraud (and Now We Have Proof)

Bombs have numbers. Humans have names. Our American military boasts a skill and passion for using numbers to turn names into yet more numbers. But these numbers have grown so gargantuan and out of control that one struggles to comprehend them.

In just 10 months in 2018—the latest numbers made available—our military dropped 5,982 munitions on Afghanistan, turning many thinking, living and loving names into cold, lifeless numbers. Over the span of the war, 43,000 Afghan civilians have been numberized. We, as Americans, essentially never even notice when it happens. Statistically speaking, it will happen again many times today, and no one in America will really care. (At least not while the game is on.

64,000 Afghan security forces have been numberized since 2001.

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Our government has known for years that the war in Afghanistan is a jaw-dropping disaster on the level of “Cats”: the movie. How do we know they knew? The Washington Post actually just published some impressive reporting, taking a step back from its lust for pro-war propaganda. (The last time it achieved such a feat was during the O.J. Simpson trial. The first one. The one with the glove.) The Post unearthed a trove of thousands of internal government documents that expose the catastrophic war. And it turns out there are Tinder dates between a young neo-Nazi and an old Jewish lady that have gone better than this war.

“[The document trove] reveals that senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable,” the paper reported.

Let me translate The Washington Post’s fancy-pants language: U.S. officials didn’t “fail to tell the truth”; they fucking lied. The phrase “failed to tell the truth” oozes around the brain’s neural pathways, strategically dodging the anger receptors. “Failed to tell the truth” sounds like veracity is a slippery fish U.S. officials just couldn’t catch.

424 humanitarian aid workers have been numberized.

Let’s take a moment to consider the motivations and goals of the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. ostensibly invaded the country to stop al-Qaida from attacking us in any way, namely by flying large planes into our buildings. We achieved this goal within the first couple months. With al-Qaida essentially decimated, it seems logical that we should have left the country, reserving the right to return if any other big passenger airplanes came after us.

But we didn’t leave. We never leave. Rule No. 1 of the American empire is “Never Truly Leave a Country After Invading.” In order to explain our continued presence, we had to move the goal post. To what? We weren’t sure. We’re still not sure. Nearly 20 years later, if you ask a U.S. general or president (any of them) what the goal is in Afghanistan, they’ll feed you a word salad so large it’ll keep you regular for months. In fact, we now know that even during some of the earliest years of the war, the Pentagon and the Bush administration didn’t know who the bad guys were. (Right now you’re thinking it’s rather juvenile and uninformed of me to refer to enemy forces as “bad guys,” but, as you’ll see in a moment, our government literally spoke about them in those terms. Side note: This is because murderous rampages by war criminals are always juvenile. Murder, by definition, is unevolved.)

According to the Post’s Afghanistan Papers, an unnamed former adviser to an Army Special Forces team said, “They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live. It took several conversations—[a]t first, they just kept asking: ‘But who are the bad guys, where are they?’”

Yet we Americans were instructed in the early years that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had everything under control. To imply otherwise was to make a mockery of tens of millions of yellow ribbons. But in reality, Rumsfeld, too, had a sizable bad-guy problem.

“I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” he said behind closed, locked, soundproof doors. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld publicly and boldly led the nation in a well-defined and decisive victory in the land of the Afghans.

In 2003, he said, during a press conference alongside Afghan President Hamid Karzai, “General Franks and I … have concluded that we’re at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction and activities.”

Yep, no more major combat—just 17 years of reconstruction (and activities). Apparently, most U.S.-backed “reconstruction” is done from the air, via bombs. Let that be a lesson to you, rest of the world: You better not screw with us or we’ll reconstruct you and your whole family!

67 journalists have been reconstructed during the war in Afghanistan.

Is two decades too long for an utter, unmitigated disaster? Maybe we can stretch it to three? We’ve been funding warlords and extremist jihadis and hoping they will play nice. Yet American presidents have continually told us we’re making progress. “Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as Afghanistan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015, ‘What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.’”

I imagine that quote particularly upsets many Americans, because if there’s one thing we’re good at, it’s having a foggy idea of what we’re doing.

Vietnam: foggy idea.

Iraq: very strong foggy idea.

Libya: one hell of a foggy idea.

Unfettered capitalism: the foggiest idea.

To put it simply, we are the best at bad ideas. But these Afghanistan Papers unveil a pretty terrible picture. One we need to confront as a nation and not just sweep under the rug (and not just because the rug would have to be the size of the Pacific Rim).

Upon hearing these revelations, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer did his best impersonation of someone who gives a shit. He said:

A bombshell series of investigative reports from The Washington Post exposing heartbreaking truths about the U.S. war in Afghanistan, which has claimed some 2,400 U.S. lives and cost nearly a trillion dollars. The Post says … officials routinely lied to the American people about the war. … This is truly a bombshell.

Yes, it’s a bombshell—despite the fact that much of the information in the Afghanistan Papers has been known for a decade or more. Back in 2012, I myself was doing poorly written standup comedy bits about how our government funded both sides of the war in Afghanistan. This goes to show that the mainstream media has two priorities—one is to spout the U.S. government’s talking points, and the other is to distract us all from the whitewashing of history.

They help Americans believe that we just found out about the failures in Afghanistan; that we just started McCarthyism, and it didn’t happen before in the 1950s to horrific consequences; that we just now discovered the breathtaking environmental consequences of factory farming. (I’m kidding—corporate media will never report on that. You could have a CNN anchor tied up in a sack in Gitmo, and he would still refuse to admit factory animal farming is killing the planet at an aggressive pace.)

But Blitzer wasn’t content pretending to be shocked that the Afghanistan War isn’t going well, so he put his acting chops to the test by further postulating that there also might be flaws with the war in Iraq. He said, “I can only imagine and brace for a similar report about the long U.S. war in Iraq as well. I suspect that could be some horrifying news as far as that is concerned also.”

That’s right: As of last month, Blitzer thinks there might be some problems with the war(s) in Iraq. (Blitzer strikes me as the type of guy who wouldn’t notice if you stole his pants off him in negative-10-degree weather.) Yes, Wolf, not only has there been similar mismanagement and mass war crimes committed in our invasion of Iraq, but you, in fact, helped manufacture consent for that war as well. You are complicit in the deaths of millions of people who will never come back from numberization.

Throughout the past 20 years, the mainstream media reiterated the lies told by our various presidents. They beat those lies into our heads with impressive frequency. Lies like those told by President Obama, when, in 2012, he said on national television: “Over the last three years, the tide has turned. We broke the Taliban’s momentum. We’ve built strong Afghan security forces. … Our troops will be coming home. … As our coalition agreed, by the end of 2014 the Afghans will be fully responsible for the security of their country.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty thrilled for the war to be over in 2014—whenever 2014 may come.

3,800 contractors have died in Afghanistan for these lies.

The Afghanistan Papers show that not only has the 20-year war been wasteful of human life, it’s also been wasteful of money. Of course, this is the point when you think, “The military— wasteful?! Well, paint my nipples and call me Phyllis Diller; that’s the damnedest thing I ever did hear!”

Yes, this is hardly shocking, since $21 trillion has gone unaccounted for at the Pentagon over the past 20 years. That’s two-thirds of the amount of money wrapped up in the entire stock market. Money has been flowing into Afghanistan so fast that officials aren’t even able to waste it quick enough! (I wish that were a joke.)

From the Post’s report, again: “One executive at USAID guessed that 90 percent of what they spent was overkill: ‘We lost objectivity. We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason.’ … One contractor said he was expected to dole out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district roughly the size of a US county.”

The contractor said he couldn’t conceive of how to spend $3 million a day for people literally living in mud huts. Well, I guess USAID should start handing out furniture built out of blocks of shrink-wrapped hundred-dollar notes. Maybe fill bean bag chairs with small bills. (If you aren’t yet outraged enough, please keep in mind that, according to The New York Times, adjusting for today’s dollars, it would take less than eight days of the Pentagon’s stated budget to give the entire world clean water for a year, thereby saving millions of lives and turning the U.S. into the most beloved nation on earth.)

But rather than accept our own corruption and war profiteering, our military placed the blame squarely on the Afghan people. Per The Washington Post, “The U.S. military also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries—paid by U.S. taxpayers—for tens of thousands of ‘ghost soldiers.'”

Although ghost soldiers sound like an incredible and tough-to-defeat resource, I think they meant the Afghan commanders claimed they had a certain number of soldiers, but most weren’t real. So America can’t fund the health care of our own goddamn real soldiers who get home and wait in line for months to secure any semblance of care, but we can fund ghost soldiers half a world away?!

Donald Trump just cut food stamps to 700,000 people, impacting more than a million children, but we’re funding fucking ghosts? Maybe we could start a campaign asking the ghost soldiers to donate some of their supper to the starving kids of America.

Ghosts seem to be an ongoing difficulty for the U.S. In the same issue of The Washington Post containing the Afghanistan Papers, there was an unrelated article titled, “The U.S. Wasted Millions on Charter Schools” that said, “A report found that [during the Obama Administration] 537 “ghost schools” in America never opened but received more than $45.5 million in federal start-up funding.”

Apparently we’re funding ghost schools and ghost soldiers, and almost nobody in our government seems to give a shit! I guess you could say they give a ghost shit—it’s not really there.

Yet the problems in our forever war don’t stop at the walking dead. The Post says, “The US has spent $9 billion to fight the problem [of opium] over the past 18 years, but Afghan farmers are cultivating more opium poppies than ever. Last year, Afghanistan was responsible for 82 percent of global opium production.”

But what The Washington Post doesn’t tell you is that a lot of that opium was for use inside the U.S., to fuel our opioid epidemic.

An American becomes a number every 11 minutes from an opioid overdose.

So how does our government respond when revelations like the Afghanistan Papers come out? A few senators pause in the middle of their T-bone steaks and red wine to say, “This needs to be looked into, I daresay.” But then a few days pass and they just give the Pentagon more money to sink into a black hole.

The spending bill just passed by Congress sends $738 billion to the Pentagon. And, as RootsAction stated, it contains “almost nothing to constrain the Trump administration’s erratic and reckless foreign policy. It is a blank check for endless wars, fuel for the further militarization of U.S. foreign policy, and a gift to Donald Trump.”

To put it mildly, asking the Democrats to stand up against endless war is like asking Anne Hathaway to bench-press a Chevy Tahoe. It’s not going to happen, and she has no interest in even trying.

42,000 Taliban and insurgents have been numberized.

That may sound like a successful war to some, but keep in mind that the U.S. military likes to categorize anyone it kills “an insurgent.” The Pentagon goes by the theory that if it kills you, then you’re an insurgent—because if you weren’t an insurgent, then why did it kill you? A great many of the 42,000 were truly innocent civilians.

If there’s one thing we should learn from the Afghanistan Papers, which the mainstream corporate media have already ceased talking about, it’s that ending these immoral, illegal, repulsive wars cannot be left to our breathtakingly incompetent and corrupt ruling elite, who have provably been lying to us about them for decades. So it’s up to you and me to stop them.

Lee Camp’s new book “Bullet Points and Punch Lines” with a foreword by Chris Hedges is available for pre-sale at LeeCampBook.com .

This column is based on a monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show “ Redacted Tonight .”

The End of American Empire Won’t Be Pretty

Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country’s a nightmare of inequality, and there’s a self-promoting madman in the White House, so isn’t it time to take pride in the rare institutional victories America has had in this century? Arguably, none has been more striking than the triumphal success of the American war system.

Oh, you’re going to bring that up immediately? Okay, you’re right. It’s true enough that the U.S. military can’t win a war anymore. In this century, it’s never come out on top anywhere, not once, not definitively. And yes, just to get a step ahead of you, everywhere it’s set foot across the Greater Middle East and Africa, it seems to have killed startling numbers of people and uprooted so many more, sending lots of them into exile and so unsettling other parts of the world as well. In the process, it’s also had remarkable success spreading failed states and terror groups far and wide.

Al-Qaeda, whose 19 suicidal hijackers so devastatingly struck this country on September 11, 2001, was just a modest outfit then (even if its leader dreamt of drawing the U.S. into conflicts across the Islamic world that would promote his group big time). Nineteen years later, its branches have spread from Yemen to West Africa, while the original al-Qaeda still exists. And don’t forget its horrific progeny, the Islamic State, or ISIS (originally al-Qaeda in Iraq). Though the U.S. military has declared it defeated in its “caliphate” (it isn’t, not truly), its branches have multiplied from the Philippines deep into Africa.

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And the Afghan War, that original American invasion of this century, remains hell on Earth more than 18 years later. In December, the Washington Post broke a story about interviews on that conflict conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction with 400 key insiders, military and civilian, revealing that it was a war of (well-grasped) error. As that paper’s reporter, Craig Whitlock, put it: “Senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

Many of those generals and other officials who had claimed, year after year, that there was “progress” in Afghanistan, that the U.S. had turned yet another “corner,” admitted to the Inspector General’s interviewers that they had been lying to the rest of us. In truth, so long after the invasion of 2001, this wasn’t exactly news (not if you had been paying attention anyway). And it couldn’t have been more historically familiar. After all, U.S. military commanders and other key officials had, in a similar fashion, regularly hailed “progress” in the Vietnam War years, too. As U.S. war commander General William Westmoreland put it in an address to the National Press Club in 1967, “We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view,” a sentiment later boiled down by American officialdom to seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel.”

In fact, half a century later, these, too, have proved to be tunnel years for the U.S. military in its global war on terror, which might more accurately be called a global war of error. Take Iraq, the country that, in the spring of 2003, President George W. Bush and crew so triumphantly invaded, claiming a connection between its autocratic ruler, Saddam Hussein, and al-Qaeda, while citing the dangers of the weapons of mass destruction he supposedly possessed. Both claims were, of course, fantasies propagated by officials dreaming of using that invasion to establish a Pax Americana in the oil-rich Middle East forever and a day. (“Mission accomplished!”)

So many years later, Americans are still dying there; American air and drone strikes are still ongoing; and American troops are still being sent in, as Iraqis continue to die in significant numbers in a country turned into a stew of displacement, poverty, protest, and chaos. Meanwhile, ISIS (formed in an American prison camp in Iraq) threatens to resurge amid the never-ending mess that invasion created — and war with Iran seems to be the order of the day.

And just to continue down a list that’s little short of endless, don’t forget Somalia. The U.S. military has been fighting there, on and off, with strikingly negative consequences since the infamous Blackhawk Down disaster of 1993. Last year, American air strikes rose again to record levels there, while — no surprise — the terror outfit Washington has been fighting in that country since 2006, al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda offshoot, seems only to be gaining strength.

Hey, even the Russians got a (grim) win in Syria; the U.S., nowhere. Not in Libya, a failed state filled with warring militias and bad guys of every sort in the wake of a U.S.-led overthrow of the local autocrat. Not in Niger, where four American soldiers died at the hands of an ISIS terror group that still thrives; not in Yemen, yet another failed state where a Washington-backed Saudi war follows perfectly in the U.S. military’s footsteps in the region. So, yes, you’re right to challenge me with all of that.

How to Run a War of Error

Nonetheless, I stand by my initial statement. In these years, the American war system has proven to be a remarkable institutional success story. Think of it this way: in the military of the twenty-first century, failure is the new success. In order to grasp this, you have to stop looking at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and the rest of those embattled lands and start looking instead at Washington, D.C. While you’re at it, you need to stop thinking that the gauge of success in war is victory. That’s so mid-twentieth century of you! In fact, almost the opposite may be true when it comes to the American way of war today.

After more than 18 years of what, once upon a time, would have been considered failure, tell me this: Is the Pentagon receiving more money or less? In fact, it’s now being fed record amounts of tax dollars (as is the whole national security state). Admittedly, Congress can’t find money for the building or rebuilding of American infrastructure — China now has up to 30,000 kilometers of high-speed rail and the U.S. not one — and is riven by party animosities on issue after issue, but funding the Pentagon? No problem. When it comes to that, there’s hardly a question, hardly a dispute at all. Agreement is nearly unanimous.

Failure, in other words, is the new success and that applies as well to the “industrial” part of the military-industrial complex. That reality was caught in a Washington Post headline the day after a CIA drone assassinated General Qassem Suleimani: “Defense stocks spike after airstrike against Iranian commander.” Indeed, the good times clearly lay ahead. In the age of Trump, when the last secretary of defense was a former Boeing executive and the present one a former lobbyist for arms-maker Raytheon, it’s been weapons galore all the way to the bank. Who cares if those weapons really work as advertised or if the wars in which they’re used are winnable, as long as they’re bought at staggering prices (and other countries buy them as well)? If you don’t believe me, just check out Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet fighter, the most expensive weapons system ever (that doesn’t really work). Hey, in 2019, that company got a $2.43 billion contract just for spare parts for the plane!

And this version of a success story applies not just to funding and weaponry but to the military’s leadership as well. Keep in mind that, after almost two decades without a victory in sight, if you check any poll, you’ll find that the U.S. military remains the most admired institution around (or the one Americans have most “confidence” in). And under the circumstances, tell me that isn’t an accomplishment of the first order.

For just about every key figure in the U.S. military, you can now safely say that failure continues to be the order of the day. Consider it the twenty-first-century version of a military insurance policy: keep on keeping on without ever thinking outside the box and you’ll be pushed up the chain of command to ever more impressive positions (and, sooner or later, through Washington’s infamous “revolving door” onto the corporate boards of weapons makers and other defense firms). You’ll be hailed as a great and thoughtful commander, a genuine historian of war, and a strategist beyond compare.  You’ll be admired by one and all.

Americans of another age would have found this strange indeed, but not today. Take, for instance, former Secretary of Defense and Marine General James “” Mattis who led troops into Afghanistan in 2001 and again in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2004, as commander of the 1st Marine Division, he was asked about a report that his troops had taken out a wedding party in western Iraq, including the wedding singer and his musicians, killing 43 people, 14 of them children. He responded: “How many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?”

And then, of course, he only rose further, ending up as the head of U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees America’s wars in the Greater Middle East (and you know how that went), until he retired in 2013 and joined the corporate board of General Dynamics, the nation’s fifth largest defense contractor. Then, in 2016, a certain Donald J. Trump took a liking to the very idea of a general nicknamed “mad dog” and appointed him to run the Department of Defense (which should probably be renamed the Department of Offense). There, with full honors, the former four-star general oversaw the very same wars until, in December 2018, deeply admired by Washington journalists among others, he resigned in protest over a presidential decision to withdraw American troops from Syria (and rejoined the board of General Dynamics).

In terms of the system he was in, that may have been his only genuine “error,” his only true “defeat.” Fortunately for the Pentagon, another commander who had risen through the same dead-end wars, four-star Army General Mark Milley, having been appointed head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knew just what to whisper in the president’s ear — the magic word “oil,” or rather some version of protect (i.e. take) Syrian oil fields — to get him to send American troops back into that country to continue the local version of our never-ending wars.

By now, Milley’s rise to glory will seem familiar to you. In announcing his appointment as Army chief of staff in 2015, for instance, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called him “a warrior and a statesman.” He added, “He not only has plenty of operational and joint experience in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and on the Joint Staff, but he also has the intellect and vision to lead change throughout the Army.” Exactly!

Milley had, in fact, fought in both the Afghan and Iraq wars, serving three tours of duty in Afghanistan alone. In other words, the more you don’t win — the more you are, in a sense, in error — the more likely you are to advance. Or as retired General Gordon Sullivan, president of the Association of the United States Army and a former chief of staff himself, put it then, Milley’s command experience in war and peace gave him “firsthand knowledge of what the Army can do and of the impact of resource constraints on its capabilities.”

In other words, he was a man ready to command who knew just how to handle this country’s losing wars and keep them (so to speak) on track. Once upon a time, such a crew of commanders would have been considered a military of losers, but no longer. They are now the eternal winners in America’s war of error.

In September 2013, Milley, then an Army three-star general, typically offered this ludicrously rosy assessment of Afghanistan’s American-trained and American-supplied security forces: “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day.”

As Tony Karon wrote recently, “Either Milley was dissembling or he was deluded and therefore grotesquely incompetent.” One thing we know, though: when it comes to public military assessments of the Afghan War (and the global war on terror more generally), he was typical. For such commanders, it was invariably “progress” all the way.

Just in case you don’t quite see the pattern yet, after the Washington Post‘s Afghanistan Papers came out last December, offering clear evidence that, whatever they said in public, America’s commanders saw little in the way of “progress” in the Afghan War, Milley promptly stepped up to the plate. He labeled that report’s conclusions “mischaracterizations.” He insisted instead that the endlessly optimistic public comments of generals like him had been “honest assessments… never intended to deceive either the Congress or the American people.”

Oh, and here’s a final footnote (as reported in the New York Times last year) on how Milley (and top commanders like him) operated — and not just in Afghanistan either:

“As Army chief of staff, General Milley has come under criticism from some in the Special Operations community for his involvement in the investigation into the 2017 ambush in Niger that left four American soldiers dead. He persuaded Patrick M. Shanahan, who was acting defense secretary, to curtail a broader review, and also protected the career of an officer who some blamed for the ambush. General Milley’s backers said he prevented the officer from leading another combat unit.”

Whatever you do, in other words, don’t give up the ghost (of error). Think of this as the formula for “success” in that most admired of institutions, the U.S. military. After all, Milley and Mattis are just typical of the commanders who rose (and are still rising) to ever more prestigious positions on the basis of losing (or at least not winning) an endless series of conflicts. Those failed wars were their tickets to success. Go figure.

Where Defeat Culture Leads

In other words, the men who fought the twenty-first-century equivalents of Vietnam — though against right-wing Islamists, not left-wing nationalists and communists — the men who never for a second figured out how to win “hearts and minds” any better than General William Westmorland had half a century earlier, are now triumphantly running the show in Washington. Add in the corporate types who endlessly arm them for battle and lobby for more of the same while raking in the dough and you have a system that no one involved would want to change. It’s a formula for success that works like a dream (even if someday that dream is sure to end up looking like a nightmare).

Once upon a time, in the early 1990s, I wrote a book called The End of Victory Culture. In it, I traced how a deeply embedded American culture of triumph evaporated in the Vietnam War years, “its graveyard for all to see,” as “the answers of 1945 dissolved so quickly into the questions of 1965.” Speaking of the impact of that war on American culture, I added: “There was no narrative form that could long have contained the story of a slow-motion defeat inflicted by a nonwhite people in a frontier war in which the statistics of American victory seemed everywhere evident.”

Little did I know then how deeply a version of what might be called “defeat culture” would embed itself in American life. After all, Donald Trump couldn’t have been elected to “make America great again” without it. From the evidence of these years, nowhere was that culture more deeply absorbed (however unconsciously) than in the military itself, which has, in our time, managed to turn it into a version of the ultimate success story.

Afghanistan has, of course, long been known as “the graveyard of empires.” The Soviet Union fought Islamic militants (backed by the Saudis and the United States) for nine years there before, in 1989, the Red Army limped home in defeat to watch a drained empire implode two years later.  That left the U.S. as the “sole superpower” on Planet Earth and its military as the uncontested greatest one of all.

And it took that military just a decade to head for that same graveyard. In this century, Americans have lost trillions of dollars in the never-ending wars Washington has conducted across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, wars that represent an eternal reign (rain?) of error. I’ve long suspected that the Soviet Union wasn’t the only superpower with problems in 1991. Though it was anything but obvious at the time, I’ve since written: “It will undoubtedly be clear enough… that the U.S., seemingly at the height of any power’s power in 1991 when the Soviet Union disappeared, began heading for the exits soon thereafter, still enwreathed in self-congratulation and triumphalism.”

The question is: When will the far more powerful of the two superpowers of the Cold War era finally leave that graveyard of empires (now spread across a significant swath of the planet)? Still commanded by the losers of those very wars, will it, like the Red Army, limp home one day to watch its country implode? Will it leave a world of war, of the dead, of countless refugees and rubblized cities, and finally return to see its own society disintegrate in some fashion?

Who knows? But keep your eyes peeled in 2020 and beyond. Someday, the U.S. military’s war of error will come to an end and one thing seems certain: it won’t be pretty.

Canadian, U.S. Officials Agree That Iran Likely Shot Down Jet

WASHINGTON—Evidence indicates it is “highly likely” that an Iranian anti-aircraft missile downed a Ukrainian jetliner near Tehran late Tuesday, U.S. and Canadian officials said Thursday. They said the strike, which killed all 176 people on board, could well have been a mistake amid intentional airstrikes and high tensions throughout the region.

The crash came just a few hours after Iran launched a ballistic attack against Iraqi military bases housing U.S. troops amid a confrontation with Washington over the U.S. drone strike that killed an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general. Four U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence, said they had no certain knowledge of Iranian intent and the airliner could have been mistaken for a threat.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose country lost at least 63 citizens in the downing, said in a Thursday press conference in Toronto: “We have intelligence from multiple sources including our allies and our own intelligence. The evidence indicates that the plane was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile,.”

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Earlier Thursday, President Donald Trump suggested he believed Iran was responsible for the shootdown but wouldn’t directly blame the Iranians. He dismissed Iran’s initial claim that it was a mechanical issue.

“Somebody could have made a mistake on the other side.” Trump said, noting the plane was flying in a “pretty rough neighborhood.”

“Some people say it was mechanical,” Trump added. “I personally don’t think that’s even a question.”

The U.S. officials wouldn’t say what intelligence they had that pointed to an Iranian missile. But they acknowledged the existence of satellites and other sensors in the region, as well as the likelihood of communication interceptions and other similar intelligence.

Two additional U.S. officials said the intelligence pointing to likely Iranian responsibility became clearer overnight into Thursday.

It was not immediately clear how the U.S. and its allies would react to the downing of the airliner. At least 63 Canadians and 11 Ukrainians were among the dead.

Despite efforts by Washington and Tehran to step back from the brink of possible war, the region remained on edge after the killing of the Iranian general and Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes. U.S. troops were on high-alert.

The latest assessment comes just a day after Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said they hadn’t had a chance to review the intelligence on the incident. Both spent much of the day at the White House and on Capitol Hill briefing the administration on on the killing of Soleimani and the resulting attacks by Iran.

A preliminary Iranian investigative report released Thursday said that the airliner pilots never made a radio call for help and that the aircraft was trying to turn back for the airport when the burning plane went down. Ukraine, meanwhile, said it considered a missile strike as one of several possible theories for the crash, despite Iran’s early denials.

The Iranian report suggests that a sudden emergency struck the Boeing 737 operated by Ukrainian International Airlines late Tuesday, when it crashed, just minutes after taking off from Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran.

Investigators from Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization offered no immediate explanation for the disaster, however. Iranian officials initially blamed a technical malfunction for the crash, something backed by Ukrainian officials before they said they wouldn’t speculate amid an ongoing investigation.

Before the U.S. assessment, Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency quoted Hasan Rezaeifa, the head of the of civil aviation accident investigation commission, claiming that “the topics of rocket, missile or anti-aircraft system is ruled out.”

The Ukrainian International Airlines took off at 6:12 a.m. Wednesday, Tehran time, after nearly an hour’s delay at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport, the main airport for travelers in Iran. It gained altitude heading west, reaching nearly 8,000 feet, according to both the report and flight-tracking data.

Then something went wrong, though “no radio messages were received from the pilot regarding unusual situations,” the report said. In emergencies, pilots reach out to air-traffic controllers to warn them and to clear the runway for their arrival, though their first priority is to keep the aircraft flying.

Eyewitnesses, including the crew of another flight passing above, described seeing the plane engulfed in flames before crashing at 6:18 a.m., the report said. The crash caused a massive explosion when the plane hit the ground, likely because the aircraft had been fully loaded with fuel for the flight to Kyiv, Ukraine.

The report also confirmed that both of the “black boxes” that contain data and cockpit communications from the plane had been recovered, though they sustained damage and some parts of their memory was lost.

Hours before the plane crash the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration had issued an emergency flight restriction barring U.S. carriers and pilots from flying over areas of Iraqi, Iranian and some Persian Gulf airspace warning of the “potential for miscalculation or misidentification” for civilian aircraft due to heightened political and military tensions.

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s Security Council, told Ukrainian media that officials had several working theories regarding the crash, including a missile strike.

“A strike by a missile, possibly a Tor missile system, is among the main (theories), as information has surfaced on the internet about elements of a missile being found near the site of the crash,” Danilov said. He did not elaborate on where he saw the information on the internet.

Ukrainian investigators that arrived in Iran earlier on Thursday currently await permission from Iranian authorities to examine the crash site and look for missile fragments, Danilov said.

The Tor is a Russian-made missile system. Russia delivered 29 Tor-M1s to Iran in 2007 as part of a $700 million contract signed in December 2005. Iran has displayed the missiles in military parades as well.

Iran did not immediately respond to the Ukrainian comments. However, Gen. Abolfazl Shekarchi, the spokesman of the Iranian armed forces, denied a missile hit the airplane in a comments reported Wednesday by the semiofficial Fars news agency. He dismissed the allegation as “psychological warfare” by foreign-based Iranian opposition groups.

Ukraine has a grim history with missile attacks, including in July 2014 when one such strike downed a Malaysian Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard.

Danilov also said other possible causes under consideration included a drone or another flying object crashing into the plane, a terrorist attack or an engine malfunction causing an explosion. However, no terror group has claimed responsibility for the attack and the plane was only 3½ years old.

The plane was carrying 167 passengers and nine crew members from several countries, including 82 Iranians, at least 63 Canadians and 11 Ukrainians, according to officials. Many of the passengers were believed to be international students attending universities in Canada; they were making their way back to Toronto by way of Kyiv after visiting with family during the winter break.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he planned to call Iranian President Hassan Rouhani about the crash and the investigation.

“Undoubtedly, the priority for Ukraine is to identify the causes of the plane crash,” Zelenskiy said. “We will surely find out the truth.”

The crash ranked among the worst losses of life for Canadians in an aviation disaster. The flag over Parliament in Ottawa was lowered to half-staff, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed to get to the bottom of the disaster.

The British government said Thursday it is investigating “very concerning” reports about the crash.

The U.S. accident investigator, the National Transportation Safety Board, is talking to the State Department and the Treasury Department about traveling to Iran to inspect the U.S.-built aircraft and working with Iranian authorities despite U.S. economic sanctions against that country. Federal officials are concerned about sending employees to Iran because of the heightened tensions.

Ralph Nader: Impeach Trump for His Illegal War on Iran

Many Americans have forecasted that the outlaw Donald Trump will commit even more illegal acts to increasing his support in the 2020 presidential year. Remember Wag the Dog, a film about using a fabricated war to draw attention away from presidential misdeeds. Those Americans have been proven right by Donald Trump’s attempt to provoke an unlawful war with Iran. Likewise, Trump has illegally ordered his staff or ex-staff to ignore Congressional subpoenas to testify and provide documents.

As the most impeachable president in American history, Trump continues to shred our Constitution and its critical separation of powers. Trump has repeatedly, brazenly seized Congressional authority in an attempt to turn the presidency into a monarchy.  Trump once went so far as to say, “I am the chosen one.”

Unlike Nixon, who slinked away because of the Watergate scandal, every day Trump is providing more evidence to the Congress about his impeachability. He never stops. He never expresses remorse or apologizes for violating the Constitution or federal criminal statutes, such as the Antideficiency Act. Likewise, Trump has shown no respect for international treaties to which the U.S. is a solemn signatory.

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Trump’s mantra of usurpation is clear. He declared that because of Article II of the Constitution, “I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” Trump seems to have neglected Article I, which gives Congress the exclusive authority to declare war, to appropriate funds, and to conduct investigations of the Executive branch with the plenary authority, i.e. issue and enforce subpoenas. Congress is the primary branch of government, not a co-equal branch.

Trump has refused to turn over his tax returns, unlike previous presidents who released them every year. Trump has much to hide in terms of entanglements with foreign entities. He is a walking violation of the Emoluments Clause (Article I, section 9, paragraph 8), which prohibits any president from profiting from foreign interests. Trump profits when foreign dignitaries patronize his hotels and other properties.

The Constitution requires Trump to faithfully execute the law. Instead he is destroying health, safety, workplace, and environmental laws through his corrupt henchman. The Trump regime is dismantling congressionally mandated federal agency law enforcement programs and, in so doing, is removing lifesaving protections. At the same time, Trump is corruptly raising money from the corporate interests that want to dismantle these agencies, from Wall Street to Houston’s oil barons.

The most morally distinguishing impeachable offenses come under the heading of what Alexander Hamilton called “abuse of the public trust.”

Consider these abuses of the public trust:

Trump’s chronic, obsessive, pathological lying and falsifications (he has made over 15,000 false or misleading claims since January 21, 2017);
Trump’s history of being a serial sexual predator working to delay numerous court cases and escape demands for depositions under oath by many victims;
Trump’s endless racism and bigotry in words and deeds. Since becoming president, Trump has backed voter suppression aimed at minorities; and
Trump’s incitement of violence on more than one occasion.

Trump should be impeached and convicted. If the supine Republican-controlled Senate fails to convict Trump, the voters should landslide him in November.

It is almost as if Trump looks to setting records in how many parts of the Constitution he can violate. He interceded with the Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu to prevent two members of Congress visas to Israel. Trump’s actions prevented these members of Congress from exercising their oversight responsibilities under the Speech and Debate Clause (Article I, section 6, clause 1). No president has ever dared such an intervention.

For the elaboration of twelve impeachable counts under one major Article, see the letter by me, constitutional law experts Bruce Fein, and Louis Fisher in the Congressional Record (December 18, 2019, page H 12197).

Speaker Pelosi must add some of these impeachable offenses, backed by constitutional law specialists, or Trump will trumpet that though she had the votes to do so, she didn’t because they are “fake, lies.” Exonerating him will prove to be a devastating precedent for future presidents behaving similarly, as the standards for presidential behavior keep dropping lower and lower into lawless immunity and impunity.

Conservative Fox News commentator, constitutional law scholar, and former Judge Andrew Napolitano has said if he were the Democrats, he would reopen the impeachment case “on the basis of new evidence. That would justify holding onto the articles of impeachment [from the Senate] the articles of impeachment [abuse of power and contempt of Congress] because there’s new evidence and perhaps new articles.”

Pelosi can strengthen her hand constitutionally by enlarging the impeachment case against Trump. This move would give millions of Americans a stake in impeachment because it would directly relate to protections and services they lost because of lawless Trump.  In addition, more articles of impeachment would make the Senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell far less able to hold a hasty kangaroo court trial without witnesses.

Fein, Fisher, and I have written Speaker Pelosi and Senator McConnell urging that the trial’s procedures should be established by Chief Justice John Roberts, subject to Senate majority repeal, to assure not only fairness, but the perception of fairness (See the letter here). Right now in the Senate there is too much bias, prejudgment, and conflict to avoid a farce.

Moreover, when will the American Bar Association, with over 194,000 lawyer-members, insist on constitutional observance and the rule of law? When will all those original members of Trump’s cabinet, whom he fired in favor of “yes men,” stand up patriotically for America? When will Colin Powell, George Shultz, and other leading figures from past administrations stand tall and speak out? When will former President Barack Obama stand up to Donald Trump? All of these people are privately worried sick over what Trump is doing and will do to our country.

These are very dangerous times for our Republic, its democratic processes, and our freedoms. Trump is going to “wave the flag” and try to intimidate and bully his opponents and the citizenry. Don’t fall for it America!

Robert Reich: America Has Failed Its Millennials

The same forces that are driving massive inequality between the top 1 percent and the rest of us are creating a vast generational wealth gap between baby boomers — my generation — and millennials.

Millennials aren’t teenagers anymore. They’re working hard, starting families and trying to build wealth. But as a generation, they’re way behind.

They’re deeper in debt, only half as likely to own a home, and more likely to live in poverty than their parents.

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Number one: Stagnant wages. Median wages grew by an average of 0.3% per year between 2007 and 2017, including the Great Recession – just as millennials were beginning their careers. Before that, between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, wages grew at three times that rate.

Second: As wages have stagnated, the costs of essentials like housing and education have been going through the roof. Millennials own fewer homes, the most common way Americans have built wealth in the past.  Education costs have soared. Adjusted for inflation, the average college education in 2018 cost nearly three times what it did in 1978.

Third: As a result of all of this, Debt.  That expensive college education means that the average graduate carries a whopping $28,000 in student loan debt. As a generation, millennials are more than one trillion dollars in the red.  In addition, the average young adult carries nearly $5,000 in credit card debt, and this number is growing.

Fourth: Millennials are finding it harder than previous generations to save for the future. Among Fortune 500 companies, only 81 sponsored a pension plan in 2017, that’s down from 288 twenty years ago. Employers are replacing pensions with essentially “do-it-yourself” savings plans.

All of this means that fewer millennials are entering the middle class than previous generations.  Most have less than $1,000 in savings. Many young people today won’t be able to retire until 75, if at all.

If we don’t start trying to reduce this generational wealth gap — through policies like debt relief, accessible health insurance, paid family leave, affordable housing, and a more equitable tax code for renters — millions of young Americans will struggle to find financial security for the rest of their lives.

Trump Proposal Would Roll Back Environmental Oversight

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump on Thursday proposed rolling back enforcement of a landmark environmental law, reducing federal oversight of many major projects, from pipelines to commercial development, to speed the approval process.

He said the United States cannot compete “if a bureaucratic system holds us back from building what we need.”

Trump outlined the proposed overhaul of the half-century old National Environmental Policy Act at the White House. That law changed environmental oversight in the country by requiring federal agencies to consider the impact of major building projects on the land and on wildlife.

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He called the law “big government at its absolute worst” and said the changes would speed up the process of approving projects that received major federal funding.

Anne Bradbury, head of an independent oil and gas producers trade group, said among the proposed changes are ones that will hasten the permitting of oil projects, including pipelines, on federal lands. The Trump administration has pushed hard for pipeline building to move ahead despite local challenges, along with calling for shortening the time and length of environmental reviews for projects.

Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups say the changes will exempt polluters from public scrutiny of their projects.

President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law on Jan. 1, 1970, as public outrage over the 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara, California, and other pollution of the country’s air, water and land spurred creation of the country’s major environmental protections.

Defiant Fugitive Ex-Nissan Boss Vows Fight to Clear His Name

BEIRUT — Nissan’s fugitive ex-boss Carlos Ghosn made his first public appearance Wednesday since being smuggled out of Japan last week, saying he fled a “nightmare” that would not end and vowed to defend his name wherever he can get a fair trial.

Ghosn spoke to a room packed with journalists for more than two hours in the Lebanese capital, where he arrived after jumping $14 million bail despite supposedly rigorous surveillance — a bold and improbable escape that embarrassed Japanese authorities and has allowed him to evade trial on charges of financial misconduct.

Combative, spirited, and at times rambling, he described conditions of detention in Japan that made him feel “dead … like an animal” in a country where he asserted he had “zero chance” of a fair trial.

“For the first time since this nightmare began, I can defend myself, speak freely and answer your questions,” Ghosn said. “I didn’t run from justice, I left Japan because I wanted justice.”

But he made clear the question most on the minds of the gathered reporters would remain unanswered: An account of the daring international escape that saw him spirited from Japan to Turkey and from there to Beirut.

Media reports have said that he slipped out of his Tokyo residence alone, despite being under 24-hour surveillance. He met two men at a hotel, and then took a bullet train to Osaka before boarding a private jet hidden inside a musical equipment case. He flew to Istanbul and was then transferred onto another plane bound for Beirut, where he arrived Dec. 30.

With big gestures and a five-part slide presentation, Ghosn brought his case to the global media in a performance that at times resembled a corporate presentation. His one thought before fleeing, he said: “You are going to die in Japan or you are going to get out.”

Ghosn said he knew the escape attempt would be “disastrous” if it didn’t work. But “there was a little chance I succeed. I played it, and I’m very happy for making that choice,” he told French TF1 TV.

He asserted he was a victim of “persecution” by a rigged Japanese justice system and described the decision to escape as “the most difficult in his life,” even though he said he was used to “mission impossible.”

He said he made up his mind when —aside from denying him evidence, visits from his wife and holding him in solitary confinement for over 130 days— the judges kept postponing his trial. It was set to begin in April, but he was told it would be postponed again.

Ghosn portrayed his arrest in late 2018 as a plot linked to a decline in the financial performance of Nissan Motor Co. as the Japanese automaker resisted losing autonomy to French partner Renault. Ghosn had been in favor of an alliance between Nissan and industry ally Renault, of which he was also chairman. He denied Wednesday he was seeking a full merger.

Ghosn also attacked Japanese prosecutors, saying they were “aided and abetted by petty, vindictive and lawless individuals” in the government, Nissan and its law firm. He said it was them, not him, “who are destroying Japan’s reputation on the global stage.”

He went on to dismiss all allegations of financial wrongdoing against him as “untrue and baseless.”

“I should never have been arrested in the first place,” he said. “I’m not above the law and I welcome the opportunity for the truth to come out and have my name cleared.”

In a swift reply, the Tokyo public prosecutor’s office said: “Defendant Ghosn’s allegations that the prosecution was conspired by Nissan and Public Prosecutors Office is categorically false and completely contrary to fact.”

Ghosn, who holds Lebanese, French and Brazilian citizenship, said he would be ready to stand trial “anywhere where I think I can have a fair trial.” He declined to say where that might be.

He thanked the Lebanese authorities for their hospitality and defended its judicial system, which has long faced accusations of corruption and favoritism.

The French government initially appeared to stand by Ghosn — as did Renault when it kept him on before finally choosing a replacement in January 2019. But in recent days French officials have hardened their stance, calling Ghosn a “defendant like any other” and saying he should face justice in a court of law.

Ghosn said Wednesday he didn’t need anything from France, but when asked if he felt abandoned by it, he responded: “How would you feel if you were in my place?”

There was no reaction from the French government or Renault to Ghosn’s remarks.

However, union members at Renault, which has seen its market value tumble over the past year, said Ghosn “did not produce any factual, verifiable evidence for his defense.”

Fielding reporters’ questions as he switched from English to French to Arabic to Portuguese, Ghosn appeared at times bitter and at others relaxed as he joked with the roomful of journalists and some friends.

Lebanon last week received an Interpol-issued wanted notice — a non-binding request to law enforcement agencies worldwide that they locate and provisionally arrest a fugitive.

Lebanon and Japan do not have an extradition treaty, and the Interpol notice does not require Lebanon to arrest him. Lebanese authorities have said Ghosn entered the country on a legal passport, casting doubt on the possibility they would hand him over to Japan.

At the request of the Japanese government, Interpol published the notice on its website Wednesday as Ghosn was giving his news conference.

Signaling that Ghosn’s legal troubles may not be over, Lebanon’s chief prosecutor summoned the ex-auto executive to his office Thursday over the Interpol notice. Separately, he faces possible legal action over a visit to Israel in 2008 after two Lebanese lawyers submitted a report to the Public Prosecutor’s Office saying the trip violated Lebanese law. The two neighboring countries are technically in a state of war.

At Wednesday’s news conference, Ghosn apologized to the Lebanese, saying he never wished to offend anyone when he traveled to Israel as a French national after Nissan asked him to announce the launch of electric cars there.

On Tuesday, Tokyo prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant for Ghosn’s Lebanese wife, Carole, on suspicion of perjury, a charge unrelated to his escape. However, Japanese justice officials acknowledge that it’s unclear whether the Ghosns can be brought back to Japan to face charges.

Nissan, meanwhile, said it was still pursuing legal action against Ghosn despite his escape. And in France, Renault alerted French authorities after an investigation found that Ghosn personally benefited from “an exchange worth 50,000 euros” related to a philanthropic accord signed with the Palace of Versailles. Prosecutors are investigating but Ghosn is not charged with any wrongdoing in France.

Earlier in the day, Tokyo prosecutors raided a Japanese lawyer’s office Ghosn had visited regularly before he fled. Japanese media reports said prosecutors had likely seized the computer to track down how Ghosn escaped and who might have helped him.

Of the trajectory that brought him from house arrest in Tokyo to a reunion with his family in Beirut, the fallen auto industry executive told reporters Wednesday: “The nightmare started with when I saw the face of the prosecutor and ended with the face of my wife.”

___

Associated Press writers Angela Charlton and Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed to this report.

The Fed Protects Gamblers at the Expense of the Economy

Although the repo market is little known to most people, it is a $1-trillion-a-day credit machine, in which not just banks but hedge funds and other “shadow banks” borrow to finance their trades. Under the Federal Reserve Act, the central bank’s lending window is open only to licensed depository banks; but the Fed is now pouring billions of dollars into the repo (repurchase agreements) market, in effect making risk-free loans to speculators at less than 2%.

This does not serve the real economy, in which products, services and jobs are created. However, the Fed is trapped into this speculative monetary expansion to avoid a cascade of defaults of the sort it was facing with the long-term capital management crisis in 1998 and the Lehman crisis in 2008. The repo market is a fragile house of cards waiting for a strong wind to blow it down, propped up by misguided monetary policies that have forced central banks to underwrite its highly risky ventures.

The Financial Economy Versus the Real Economy

The Fed’s dilemma was graphically illustrated in a Dec. 19 podcast by entrepreneur/investor George Gammon, who explained we actually have two economies – the “real” (productive) economy and the “financialized” economy. “Financialization” is defined at Wikipedia as “a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production.” Rather than producing things itself, financialization feeds on the profits of others who produce.

The financialized economy – including stocks, corporate bonds and real estate – is now booming. Meanwhile, the bulk of the population struggles to meet daily expenses. The world’s 500 richest people got $12 trillion richer in 2019, while 45% of Americans have no savings, and nearly 70% could not come up with $1,000 in an emergency without borrowing.

Gammon explains that central bank policies intended to boost the real economy have had the effect only of boosting the financial economy. The policies’ stated purpose is to increase spending by increasing lending by banks, which are supposed to be the vehicles for liquidity to flow from the financial to the real economy. But this transmission mechanism isn’t working, because consumers are tapped out. They can’t spend more unless their incomes go up, and the only way to increase incomes, says Gammon, is through increasing production (or with a good dose of “helicopter money,” but more on that later).

So why aren’t businesses putting money into more production? Because, says Gammon, the central banks have put a “put” on the financial market, meaning they won’t let it go down. Business owners say, “Why should I take the risk of more productivity, when I can just invest in the real estate, stock or corporate bond market and make risk-free money?” The result is less productivity and less spending in the real economy, while the “easy money” created by banks and central banks is used for short-term gain from unproductive financial investments.

Existing assets are bought just to sell them or rent them for more, skimming profits off the top. These unearned “rentier” profits rely on ready access to liquidity (the ability to buy and sell on demand) and on leverage (using borrowed money to increase returns), and both are ultimately underwritten by the central banks. As observed in a July 2019 article titled “Financialization Undermines the Real Economy”:

When large highly leveraged financial institutions in these markets collapse, e.g., Lehman Brothers in September 2008, central banks are forced to step in to salvage the financial system. Thus, many central banks have little choice but to become securities market makers of last resort, providing safety nets for financialized universal banks and shadow banks.

Repo Madness

That is what is happening now in the repo market. Repos work like a pawn shop: the lender takes an asset (usually a federal security) in exchange for cash, with an agreement to return the asset for the cash plus interest the next day unless the loan is rolled over. In September 2019, rates on repos should have been about 2%, in line with the fed funds rate (the rate at which banks borrow deposits from each other). However, repo rates shot up to 10% on Sept. 17. Yet banks were refusing to lend to each other, evidently passing up big profits to hold onto their cash. Since banks weren’t lending, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York jumped in, increasing its overnight repo operations to $75 billion. On Oct. 23, it upped the ante to $165 billion, evidently to plug a hole in the repo market created when JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest depository bank, pulled an equivalent sum out. (For details, see my earlier post here.)

By December, the total injected by the Fed was up to $323 billion. What was the perceived danger lurking behind this unprecedented action? An article in The Quarterly Review of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) pointed to the hedge funds. As ZeroHedge summarized the BIS’ findings:

[C]ontrary to our initial take that banks were pulling from the repo market due to counterparty fears about other banks, they were instead spooked by overexposure by other hedge funds, who have become the dominant marginal – and completely unregulated – repo counterparty to liquidity lending banks; without said liquidity, massive hedge fund regulatory leverage such as that shown above would become effectively impossible.

Hedge funds have been blamed for the 2008 financial crisis, by adding too much risk to the banking system. They have destroyed companies by forcing stock buybacks, asset sales, layoffs and other measures that raise stock prices at the expense of the company’s long-term health and productivity. They have also been a major factor in the homelessness epidemic, by buying foreclosed properties at fire sale prices, then renting them out at inflated prices. Why did the Fed need to bail these parasitic institutions out? The BIS authors explained:

Repo markets redistribute liquidity between financial institutions: not only banks (as is the case with the federal funds market), but also insurance companies, asset managers, money market funds and other institutional investors. In so doing, they help other financial markets to function smoothly. Thus, any sustained disruption in this market, with daily turnover in the U.S. market of about $1 trillion, could quickly ripple through the financial system. The freezing-up of repo markets in late 2008 was one of the most damaging aspects of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC).

At $1 trillion daily, the repo market is much bigger and more global than the fed funds market that is the usual target of central bank policy. Repo trades are supposedly secured with “high-quality collateral” (usually U.S. Treasuries). But they are not risk-free, because of the practice of “re-hypothecation”: the short-term “owner” of the collateral can use it as collateral for another loan, creating leverage – loans upon loans. The IMF has estimated that the same collateral was reused 2.2 times in 2018, which means both the original owner and 2.2 subsequent re-users believed they owned the same collateral. This leveraging, which actually expands the money supply, is one of the reasons banks put their extra funds in the repo market rather than in the fed funds market. But it is also why the repo market and the U.S. Treasuries it uses as collateral are not risk-free. As Wall Street veteran Caitlin Long warns:

U.S. Treasuries are … the most rehypothecated asset in financial markets, and the big banks know this. … U.S. Treasuries are the core asset used by every financial institution to satisfy its capital and liquidity requirements – which means that no one really knows how big the hole is at a system-wide level.

This is the real reason why the repo market periodically seizes up. It’s akin to musical chairs – no one knows how many players will be without a chair until the music stops.

ZeroHedge cautions that hedge funds are the most heavily leveraged multi-strategy funds in the world, taking something like $20 billion to $30 billion in net assets under management and levering it up to $200 billion. According to The Financial Times, to fire up returns, “some hedge funds take the Treasury security they have just bought and use it to secure cash loans in the repo market. They then use this fresh cash to increase the size of the trade, repeating the process over and over and ratcheting up the potential returns.”

ZeroHedge concludes:

This … explains why the Fed panicked in response to the GC repo rate blowing out to 10% on Sept 16, and instantly implemented repos as well as rushed to launch QE 4: not only was Fed Chair Powell facing an LTCM [Long Term Capital Management] like situation, but because the repo-funded [arbitrage] was (ab)used by most multi-strat funds, the Federal Reserve was suddenly facing a constellation of multiple LTCM blow-ups that could have started an avalanche that would have resulted in trillions of assets being forcefully liquidated as a tsunami of margin calls hit the hedge funds world.

 “Helicopter Money” – The Only Way Out?

The Fed has been forced by its own policies to create an avalanche of speculative liquidity that never makes it into the real economy. As Gammon explains, the central banks have created a wall that traps this liquidity in the financial markets, driving stocks, corporate bonds and real estate to all-time highs, creating an “everything bubble” that accomplishes only one thing – increased wealth inequality. Central bank quantitative easing won’t create hyperinflation, says Gammon, but “it will create a huge discrepancy between the haves and have nots that will totally wipe out the middle class, and that will bring on MMT or helicopter money. Why? Because it’s the only way that the Fed can get the liquidity from the financial economy, over this wall, around the banking system, and into the real economy. It’s the only solution they have.” Gammon does not think it’s the right solution, but he is not alone in predicting that helicopter money is coming.

Investopedia notes that “helicopter money” differs from quantitative easing (QE), the money-printing tool currently used by central banks. QE involves central bank-created money used to purchase assets from bank balance sheets. Helicopter money, on the other hand, involves a direct distribution of printed money to the public.

A direct drop of money on the people would certainly help to stimulate the economy, but it won’t get the parasite of financialization off our backs; and Gammon is probably right that the Fed lacks the tools to fix the underlying disease itself. Only Congress can change the Federal Reserve Act and the tax system. Congress could impose a 0.1% financial transactions tax, which would nip high-frequency speculative trading in the bud. Congress could turn the Federal Reserve into a public utility mandated to serve the productive economy. Commercial banks could also be regulated as public utilities, and public banks could be established that served the liquidity needs of local economies. For other possibilities, see Banking on the People here.

Solutions are available, but Congress itself has been captured by the financial markets, and it may take another economic collapse to motivate Congress to act. The current repo crisis could be the fuse that triggers that collapse.

The Devastating Figures Behind Australia’s Bushfires

The new decade has opened with a sobering and scary climate change reality. The state of New South Wales is in a designated state of emergency because of fires. At least 25 people have died as a result of those fires. Thousands of people have been displaced. Wildfires have destroyed more than 12 million acres of land across the Australian continent—an area almost seven times the size of the 2018 California wildfires (the worst in state history). And in the time it took to write this article, the estimated number of animals killed has jumped from a conservative 480 million to a full 1 billion.

Diagram comparing surface area burned in Australia to other 2019 fire catastrophes.

Climate change, scientists say, is the driving force behind the historically horrific wildfire season.

“Australians need only wake up in the morning, turn on the television, read the newspaper or look out the window to see what is increasingly obvious to many – for Australia, dangerous climate change is already here,” wrote Michael Mann, a climate scientist who teaches at Penn State University, in an article published by The Guardian. “It’s simply a matter of how much worse we’re willing to allow it to get. Australia is experiencing a climate emergency. It is literally burning.”

In New South Wales alone, home of the country’s largest city of Sydney, 136 fires are still burning and 69 are still uncontained. The year 2019 was also the hottest and driest on record in Australian history.

“When the vegetation is just dry, it will burn,” Crystal Kolden, a wildfire researcher at the University of Idaho, told The New York Times. “But when you add this extreme heat, it magnifies the effect allowing it to burn that much more intensely.”

The situation is so dire that Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a climate change denier, has ordered 3,000 military reservists to help battle fires and evacuate stranded individuals along the New South Wales coast.

Yet Morrison, who brought a lump of coal to Parliament in 2017 while defending that industry’s greenhouse gas footprint, has denied that the country’s greenhouse gas emissions have (metaphorically) provided a spark for the fires. Australia is the world’s top exporter of coal, the most intensive carbon emitting fossil fuel on the planet, and the third largest exporter of fossil fuels behind Russia and Saudi Arabia.

“The suggestion that in any way shape or form that Australia—accounting for 1.3 percent of the world’s emissions—are impacting directly on specific fire events, whether it is here or anywhere else in the world, that doesn’t bear up to credible scientific evidence,” Morrison recently told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.

In the past year, Australian diplomats deployed an emissions accounting loophole regarding the United National global climate agreement. Instead of abiding by the Paris agreement from 2015, the country has chosen to use a carbon accounting loophole from the 1997 Kyoto protocol. The loophole, according to an article published by The Guardian, offers carbon credits to Australia that are eight times the current greenhouse emissions numbers for smaller Pacific island countries. It is the only country in the world to still use that accounting trick.

This is big! Australian Gov admitting it is going it alone in the world in trying to use 367 million tonnes of controversial Kyoto credits to cut its climate efforts. #auspol #climatestike

Will have to defend this loophole solo at #COP25

@p_hannam @adamlmorton @OBenPotter https://t.co/bOmH7Tv0gJ

— Richie Merzian (@RichieMerzian) October 21, 2019

Mann, the Penn State climate scientist, criticized Morrison’s leadership on climate change.

“…[Prime Minister] Scott Morrison appears remarkably indifferent to the climate emergency Australia is suffering through, having chosen to vacation in Hawaii as Australians are left to contend with unprecedented heat and bushfires,” he wrote. “Morrison has shown himself to be beholden to coal interests and his administration is considered to have conspired with a small number of petrostates to sabotage the recent UN climate conference in Madrid.”

Scientists say Australia’s fires could still burn for months to come, and peak fire season has yet to begin.

“The fires over the last three months are unprecedented in their timing and severity, started earlier in spring and covered a wider area across many parts of Australia,” David Karoly, an Australian government climate scientist, told The Washington Post. “The normal peak fire season is later in summer and we are yet to have that.”