It's time to reclaim Syria's road to recovery

https://www.asiatimes.com/2020/02/article/its-time-to-reclaim-syrias-road-to-recovery/?_=1557029




Pepe Escobar




Recep Tayyip Erdogan, neo-Ottoman extraordinaire, is not exactly inclined to commit seppuku, the Japanese act of ritual suicide.

But if not through the perspective of neo-Ottomanism, how to explain the fact he is de facto supporting al-Qaeda remnants in Syria while facing two unsavory options – a humiliating retreat from or total war against the Syrian Arab Army?

Everything about the slowly evolving, messy chessboard in Idlib hinges on highways: the imperative for the government in Damascus to control both the M5 highway between Damascus and Aleppo and the M4 highway between Latakia and Aleppo. Fully reclaiming these two crucial axes will finally turbo-charge the ailing Syrian economy.

Very few players nowadays remember the all-important Sochi memorandum of understanding signed between Russia and Turkey in September 2018.

The Western spin was always about whether Damascus would comply. Nonsense. In the memorandum, Ankara guaranteed protection of civilian traffic on both highways. It’s Ankara that is not complying, not only in terms of ensuring that “radical terrorist groups” are out of the demilitarized zone, but especially on point number 8: “In the interests of ensuring free movement of local residents and goods, as well as restoring trade and economic ties, transit traffic along the routes M4 (Aleppo-Latakia) and M5 (Aleppo-Hama) will be restored before the end of 2018.”

Vast stretches of Idlib are in fact under the yoke of Hayat Tahrir al Shams (HTS), shorthand for al-Qaeda in Syria. Or “moderate rebels,” as they are known inside the Beltway – even though the United States government itself brands it as a terror organization.

For all practical purposes, the Erdogan system is supporting and weaponizing HTS in Idlib. When the SAA reacts against HTS’s attacks, Erdogan goes ballistic and threatens war.

The West uncritically buys Ankara propaganda. How dare the “Assad regime” take back the M5, which “had been under rebel control since 2012”? Erdogan is lauded for warning “Iran and Russia to end the support for the Assad regime.” NATO invariably condemns “attacks on Turkish troops.”

The official Ankara explanation for the Turkish presence in Idlib hinges on bringing reinforcements to “observation posts.” Nonsense. These posts are not meant to go away. On top of it, Ankara demands that the SAA should retreat to the positions it held months ago – away from Idlib.

There’s no way Damascus will “comply” because these Turkish troops are a de facto occupation body-protecting “moderate rebels” fighting for “democracy” who were decisively excluded by Moscow – and even Ankara – from the Sochi memorandum. One can’t make this stuff up.
Got airpower, will travel

Now let’s look at the facts on the ground – and in the skies. Moscow and Damascus control the airspace over Idlib. Su-34 jets patrol all of northwest Syrian territory. Moscow has warships – crammed with cruise missiles – deployed in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The whole SAA offensive for these past few months to liberate national territory has been a graphic demonstration of top Russian intel – planning, execution, logistics.

What’s being set up is a classic cauldron – a Southwest Asia replica of the cauldron in Donbass in 2014 that destroyed Kiev’s army. The SAA is encircling the Turks from the north, east and south. There will be only one way out for the Turks: the border crossing at Bab al-Hawa. Back to Turkey.

Facing certified disaster, no wonder Erdogan had to talk “de-escalation” with Putin on Tuesday. The red lines, from Moscow’s side, are immutable: the highways will be liberated (according to the Sochi agreement). The neo-Ottoman sultan can’t afford a war with Russia. So, yes: he’s bluffing.

But why is he bluffing? There are three main possibilities. 1) Washington is forcing him to, pledging full support to “our NATO ally.” 2) The Turkish Armed Forces cannot afford to lose face. 3) The “moderate rebels” don’t give a damn about Ankara.

Option 1 seems the most plausible – even as Erdogan is being actually forced to directly confront a Moscow with which he has signed extremely important economic/energy contracts. Erdogan may not be a General Zhukov, but he knows that a bunch of jihadis and only 6,000 demoralized Turkish soldiers stand no chance against the SAA and Russian airpower.

It’s enlightening to compare the current Turkish predicament with the Turk/Free Syrian Army (FSA) proxy gang alliance when they were fighting the Kurds in Afrin.

Ankara then had control of the skies and enormous artillery advantage – from their side of the border. Now Syria/Russia rules the skies and Turkish artillery simply cannot get into Idlib. Not to mention that supply lines are dreadful.
Neo-Ottomanism, revisited

So what is Erdogan up to? What’s happening is Erdogan’s Muslim Brotherhood network is now managing Idlib on the ground – a fascinating repositioning gambit able to ensure that Erdogan remains a strongman with whom Bashar al-Assad will have to talk business when the right time comes.

Erdogan’s partial endgame will be to “sell” to Assad that ultimately he was responsible for getting rid of the HTS/FSA jihadi nebulae. Meanwhile, circus prevails – or, rather, a lousy opera, with Erdogan once again relishing playing the bad guy. He knows Damascus has all but won a vicious nine-year proxy war – and is reclaiming all of its sovereign territory. There’s no turning back.

And that brings us to the complex dynamics of the Turkish-Iranian puzzle. One should always remember that both are members of the Astana peace process, alongside Russia. On Syria, Tehran supported Damascus from the start while Ankara bet on – and weaponized – the “democratic freedom fighter” jihadi nebulae.

From the 16th century to the 19th, Shi’ite Iran and the Sunni Ottoman empire were engaged in non-stop mutual containment. And under the banner of Islam, Turkey de facto ruled over the Arab world.

Jump cut, in the 21st century, to Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who codified neo-Ottomanism. Davutoglu came up with the idea that eastern Anatolia did not end with the borders with Armenia and Iran but extended to the western coast of the Caspian Sea. And he also came up with the idea that eastern Anatolia did not end at the borders with Iraq and Syria – but extended all the way to Mosul.

Essentially, Davutoglu argued that the Middle East had to be Turkey’s backyard. And Syria would be the golden gate through which Turkey would “recover” the Middle East.

All these elaborate plans now lie in dust. The Big Picture, of course, remains: the US determined by all means necessary to prevent Eurasian unity, and the Russia-China strategic partnership from having access to maritime routes, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean through Syria via Iran.

The micro-picture is way more prosaic. It comes down to Erdogan making sure his occupying troops do not get routed by Assad’s army. How the mighty (neo-Ottoman) have fallen.

The Siren Call of a ‘System Leader’

https://www.globalresearch.ca/siren-call-system-leader/5703344




The United States may be destined for a shorter historical existence than the Mongol era established by Genghis Khan

By Pepe Escobar

Global Research, February 11, 2020
Region: Middle East & North Africa, USA
Theme: History



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A considerable spectrum of the liberal West takes the American interpretation of what civilization consists of to be something like an immutable law of nature. But what if this interpretation is on the verge of an irreparable breakdown?

Michael Vlahos has argued that the US is not a mere nation-state but a “system leader” – “a civilizational power like Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire.” And, we should add, China – which he did not mention. The system leader is “a universalistic identity framework tied to a state. This vantage is helpful because the United States clearly owns this identity framework today.”

Intel stalwart Alastair Crooke, in a searing essay, digs deeper into how this “civilizational vision” was “forcefully unfurled across the globe” as the inevitable, American manifest destiny: not only politically – including all the accouterments of Western individualism and neo-liberalism, but coupled with “the metaphysics of Judeo-Christianity, too”.

Crooke also notes how deeply ingrained the notion that victory in the Cold War “spectacularly affirmed” the superiority of the US civilizational vision among the US elite.

Well, the post-modern tragedy – from the point of view of US elites – is that soon this may not be the case anymore. The vicious civil war engulfing Washington for the past three years – with the whole world as stunned spectators – has just accelerated the malaise.

Remember Pax Mongolica

It’s sobering to consider that Pax Americana may be destined to a shorter historical existence than Pax Mongolica – established after Genghis Khan, the head of a nomad nation, went about conquering the world.

Genghis first invested in a trade offensive to take over the Silk Roads, crushing the Kara-Kitais in Eastern Turkestan, conquering Islamic Khorezm, and annexing Bukhara, Samarkand, Bactria, Khorasan and Afghanistan. The Mongols reached the outskirts of Vienna in 1241 and the Adriatic Sea one year after.

The superpower of the time extended from the Pacific to the Adriatic. We can barely imagine the shock for Western Christendom. Pope Gregory X was itching to know who these conquerors of the world were, and could be Christianized?

In parallel, only a victory by the Egyptian Mamluks in Galilee in 1260 saved Islam from being annexed to Pax Mongolica.

Pax Mongolica – a single, organized, efficient, tolerant power – coincided historically with the Golden Age of the Silk Roads. Kublai Khan – who lorded over Marco Polo – wanted to be more Chinese than the Chinese themselves. He wanted to prove that nomad conquerors turned sedentary could learn the rules of administration, commerce, literature and even navigation.

Yet when Kublai Khan died, the empire fragmented into rival khanates. Islam profited. Everything changed. A century later, the Mongols from China, Persia, Russia and Central Asia had nothing to do with their ancestors on horseback.

A jump cut to the young 21st century shows that the initiative, historically, is once again on the side of China, across the Heartland and lining up the Rimland. World-changing, game-changing enterprises don’t originate in the West anymore – as has been the case from the 16th century up to the late 20th century.

For all the vicious wishful thinking that coronavirus will derail the “Chinese century”, which will actually be the Eurasian Century, and amid the myopic tsunami of New Silk Roads demonization, it’s always easy to forget that implementation of myriad projects has not even started.

It should be in 2021 that all those corridors and axes of continental development pick up speed across Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, Southwest Asia, Russia and Europe, in parallel with the Maritime Silk Road configuring a true Eurasian string of pearls from Dalian to Piraeus, Trieste, Venice, Genoa, Hamburg and Rotterdam.

For the first time in two millennia, China is able to combine the dynamism of political and economic expansion both on the continental and maritime realms, something that the state did not experience since the short expeditionary stretch led by Admiral Zheng He in the Indian Ocean in the early 15th century. Eurasia, in the recent past, was under Western and Soviet colonization. Now it’s going all-out multipolar – a series of complex, evolving permutations led by Russia-China-Iran-Turkey-India-Pakistan-Kazakhstan.

Every player has no illusions about the “system leader” obsessions: to prevent Eurasia from uniting under one power – or coalition such as the Russia-China strategic partnership; ensure that Europe remains under US hegemony; prevent Southwest Asia – or the “Greater Middle East” – from being linked to Eurasian powers; and prevent by all means that Russia-China have unimpeded access to maritime lanes and trade corridors.

The message from Iran

In the meantime, a sneaking suspicion creeps in – that Iran’s game plan, in an echo of Donbass in 2014, may be about sucking US neocons into a trademark Russian cauldron in case the regime-change obsession is turbocharged.

There is a serious possibility that under maximum pressure Tehran might eventually abandon the JCPOA for good, as well as the NPT, thus openly inviting a US attack.

As it stands, Tehran has sent two very clear messages. The accuracy of the missile attack on the US Ayn Al-Asad base in Iraq, replying to the targeted assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani, means that any branch of the vast US network of bases is now vulnerable.

And the fog of non-denial denials surrounding the downing of the CIA Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN) – essentially an aerial spook shop – in Ghazni, Afghanistan also carries a message.

CIA icon Mike d’Andrea, known as ‘Ayatollah Mike’, The Undertaker, the Dark Prince, or all of the above, may or may not have been on board. Irrespective of the fact that no US government source will ever confirm or deny that Ayatollah Mike is dead or alive, or even that he exists at all, the message remains the same: your soldiers and spooks are also vulnerable.

Since Pearl Harbor, no nation has dared to stare down the system leader so blatantly, as Iran did in Iraq. Vlahos mentioned something I saw for myself in 2003, how “young American soldiers referred to Iraqis as ‘Indians’, as though Mesopotamia were the Wild West”. Mesopotamia was one the crucial cradles of civilization as we know it. Well, in the end, that $2 trillion spent to bomb Iraq into democracy did no favors to the civilizational vision of the ‘system leader’.

The Sirens and La Dolce Vita

Now let’s add aesthetics to our “civilizational” politics. Every time I visit Venice – which in itself is a living metaphor for both the flimsiness of empires and the Decline of the West – I retrace selected steps in The Cantos, Ezra Pound’s epic masterpiece.

Last December, after many years, I went back to the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, also known as “The jewel box”, which plays a starring role in The Cantos. As I arrived I told the custodian signora that I had come for “The Sirens”. With a knowing smirk, she lighted my way along the nave to the central staircase. And there they were, sculpted on pillars on both sides of a balcony: “Crystal columns, acanthus, sirens in the pillar head”, as we read in Canto 20.

These sirens were sculpted by Tullio and Antonio Lombardo, sons of Pietro Lombardo, Venetian masters of the late 15th and early 16th century – “and Tullio Romano carved the sirens, as the old custode says: so that since then no one has been able to carve them for the jewel box, Santa Maria dei Miracoli”, as we read in Canto 76.

Well, Pound misnamed the creator of the sirens, but, that’s not the point. The point is how Pound saw the sirens as the epitome of a strong culture – “the perception of a whole age, of whole congeries and sequence of causes, went into an assemblage of detail, whereof it would be impossible to speak in terms of magnitude”, as Pound wrote in Guide to Kulchur.

As much as his beloved masterpieces by Giovanni Bellini and Piero della Francesca, Pound fully grasped how these sirens were the antithesis of usura – or the “art” of lending money at exorbitant interest rates, which not only deprives a culture of the best of art, as Pound describes it, but is also one of the pillars for the total financialization and marketization of life itself, a process that Pound brilliantly foresaw, when he wrote in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley that, “all things are a flowing, Sage Heracleitus says; But a tawdry cheapness, shall reign throughout our days.”

La Dolce Vita will turn 60 in 2020. Much as Pound’s sirens, Fellini’s now mythological tour de force in Rome is like a black and white celluloid palimpsest of a bygone era, the birth of the Swingin’ Sixties. Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) and Maddalena (Anouk Aimee), impossibly cool and chic, are like the Last Woman and the Last Man before the deluge of “tawdry cheapness”. In the end, Fellini shows us Marcello despairing at the ugliness and, yes, cheapness intruding in his beautiful mini-universe – the lineaments of the trash culture fabricated and sold by the ‘system leader’ about to engulf us all.

Pound was a human, all too human American maverick of unbridled classical genius. The ‘system leader’ misinterpreted him; treated him as a traitor; caged him in Pisa; and dispatched him to a mental hospital in the US. I still wonder whether he may have seen and appreciated La Dolce Vita during the 1960s, before he died in Venice in 1972. After all, there was a little cinema within walking distance of the house in Calle Querini where he lived with Olga Rudge.

“Marcello!” We’re still haunted by Anita Ekberg’s iconic siren call, half-immersed in the Fontana di Trevi. Today, still hostages of the crumbling civilizational vision of the ‘system leader’, at best we barely muster, as TS Eliot memorably wrote, a “backward half-look, over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.”

Netanyahu Boasts That He Destroyed Free Speech in America

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/netanyahu-boasts-he-destroyed-free-speech-in-america/



Juan Cole




Israeli caretaker prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been indicted for corruption and is facing an election soon, just boasted that his ministry of strategic affairs has managed to undermine First Amendment protections for free speech in the United States by lobbying state legislatures to pass laws forbidding the boycott of Israel.

Anti-boycott laws of the Old South were used against Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists in the civil rights movement to keep African Americans subordinate and segregated. The right to boycott establishments over civil rights was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1982 in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware.


It was also not for nothing that the American administration has taken this step together with us. In recent years, we have promoted laws in most US states, which determine that strong action is to be taken against whoever tries to boycott Israel.


— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) February 12, 2020




Some 28 U.S. states have passed laws prohibiting the boycott of Israel and are attempting to punish this action by denying such individuals state contracts.

Gilad Erdan is the head of the ministry of strategic affairs, which has spearheaded the attempt to undermine the U.S. Constitution and make criticizing Israeli policy illegal in the United States. This effort is allegedly being aided by Mossad, Israeli intelligence. Mossad intensively spies on Washington, D.C., and may have compromising information on U.S. politicians.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is the main instrument of such Israeli policy pushes in the United States, and has never been forced to register as the agent of a foreign state, as U.S. law requires.




It should be noted that the anti-boycott laws do not only punish companies. Most states treat individuals providing them services as companies categorized as “sole proprietors.” University professors invited to speak on campus in the states with these horrid laws have been asked to sign statements saying they don’t boycott Israel before being allowed to speak. These procedures are the most dangerous assault on free speech in the United States since the McCarthy era.

Journalist Abby Martin has just launched a lawsuit against the University of Georgia for cancelling her speaking appearance when she declined to sign a pledge saying she would not boycott Israel.

I wrote recently that “in the past 23 months, Palestinians in Gaza have been demonstrating weekly, and Israeli army snipers have shot down over 8,000 them, leaving many crippled for life and killing over 200. Most of those shot were peaceful demonstrators posing no danger, who simply came into a zone the Israeli army arbitrarily declared off limits, even though it was inside Gaza. Victims include children, women, medics, journalists and other nonviolent noncombatants.




Criticizing these policies, which everyone concerned with human rights in the world does, is not equivalent to disliking Jews. The only reason the question even comes up is that the Israel lobbies and the organized-crimelike Likudniks have attempted to deflect any obstacle to their colonization drive by smearing human rights activists as bigots for daring oppose their monstrous plans.

As I have noted, “not only are no sanctions being placed on Israel for these naked war crimes, but the lawmakers in the U.S. are willing to take large scissors to the U.S. Constitution on behalf of the Likud Party, protecting it from any civil society attempt to hold it accountable.”

In response to such war crimes, including the Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank, civil society around the world has adopted the tactics of boycott, sanctions and divestment (BDS) against Israel. It has especially resorted to these tactics precisely because powerful world governments refuse to intervene to stop Israeli crimes against humanity.

I earlier reported that “Ben Kesslen at NBC News reported that the University of Arkansas-Pulaski Technical College cancelled their ads with Little Rock’s Arkansas Times because owner Alan Leveritt won’t sign a pledge that his business does not boycott Israel. Leveritt doesn’t boycott Israel, but he considers a state law passed by Arkansas and 27 other states to be unconstitutional and he would rather risk his business than surrender his First Amendment rights.”

The loss of the state contract was devastating to the newspaper. It is important to underline that Alan Leveritt does not boycott Israel. He simply refuses to sign a pledge that restricts his freedom of speech and which is imposed by the state government, on First Amendment grounds. The Arkansas Times is a centrist newspaper in a conservative state, so that Netanyahu has actually managed to reach into the heart of America and strike at its media diversity by shredding the U.S. Constitution (on which state constitutions are based when it comes to freedom of speech).




In a disgusting miscarriage of justice, the anti-boycott law was upheld by a lower court in Arkansas on the grounds that a boycott is neither expressive nor speech, which contradicts the precedent of NAACP vs. Claiborne Hardware (1982). The appeal is now before the 8th Circuit Court.

Economic boycotts have been part and parcel of American political striving for liberty from the beginning. I have three words for you: Boston Tea Party. What do you think the American colonists were doing when they tossed 342 chests of British tea into the harbor? They were boycotting, divesting and sanctioning the injustice of King George III.

Several federal judges have already found state laws that attempt to punish companies or individuals for boycotting Israel unconstitutional, in Kansas, Arizona and Texas.

When Kansas fired Mennonite school teacher Esther Koontz from a program to train other teachers over her refusal to certify that she doesn’t boycott Israel (she does), the ACLU took the case to court and a federal judge struck down the Kansas statute. The state legislature then reformulated it so that it only affected big businesses under certain circumstances, which is also unconstitutional, but made it a little unlikely that the law would affect anyone.

Netanyahu tried to deny a Mennonite school teacher her job.

The anti-boycott laws are unconstitutional. They are also racist, aimed at keeping brown Palestinians down.















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Matt Taibbi: Democrats Are Unwittingly Handing Sanders the Nomination

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/matt-taibbi-democrats-are-unwittingly-handing-sanders-the-nomination/



Natasha Hakimi Zapata






With both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary behind us, one thing is abundantly clear: the establishment still cannot stomach a Bernie Sanders nomination. Writing in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi points out how corporate media fell all over itself on Wednesday to undercut the Vermont senator’s win in New Hampshire, just as it fabricated Pete Buttigieg’s victory in Iowa just a week ago.


Four years ago, after New Hampshire, it was crystal clear that Donald Trump was not only going to win his party’s nomination, but that his path was being actively cleared by the Republican Party establishment and the national news media, whose half-baked efforts to stop him were working in reverse. I wrote this in February 2016: Establishment Democrats are throwing everything—and everyone–they’ve got into the primary race to stop or at least slow the Vermont senator’s ascendance. Ironically, it is precisely this eagerness to nominate anybody but Sanders that is leading Democrats into the same trap Republicans fell into in 2016. From Taibbi’s latest column:


The [Republicans] sent forth to take on Trump have been so incompetent, they can’t even lose properly. One GOP strategist put it this way: “Maybe 34 [percent] is Trump’s ceiling. But 34 in a five-person race wins…” The numbers simply don’t work, unless the field unexpectedly narrows before March.

Early mixed results guaranteed that Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio would not drop out soon enough to give any of the others a chance. As a result, the following was obvious at this time four years ago: “Trump will probably enjoy at least a five-horse race through Super Tuesday.”

In hindsight, those Republican challengers were so villainously terrible that none would have beaten Trump in a two-person race. Still, Bush’s backers knew their man was roadkill by New Hampshire, yet didn’t pull the plug. Kasich, who in a rare moment of self-awareness was ready to bail after Iowa (“If we get smoked up there, I’m going back to Ohio,” he fumed in New Hampshire), let himself be fooled by one surprise second-place finish.

All pledged to be committed to stopping Trump but accelerated his victory by staying in too long. Popular disgust was also enhanced by delusional news-media hype surrounding a succession of would-be “real” candidates.

All of this is happening all over again, only this time it’s Democrats who are committing ritualistic self-abuse, seemingly in a conspiracy with one another and the news media to push as many votes as possible to a hated outsider.

The journalist goes on to list the many ways Republicans paved the path for Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee four years ago, comparing how the media gushed over Pete Buttigieg to the rapturous reporting of Marco Rubio’s short-lived “Marcomentum” after Iowa. These outlets are even regurgitating the same awful puns. (“Petementum”? “Klomentum”? Who comes up with these?)

“These constant mercurial shifts in ‘momentum’ — it’s Pete! It’s Amy! Paging Mike Bloomberg!,” writes Taibbi, “have eroded the kingmaking power of the Democratic leadership. They are eating the party from within, and seem poised to continue doing so.”

Taibbi admits that “no one could have predicted that even the idiosyncratic particulars of the 2016 and 2020 races would be so alike.” But unlike the electoral nightmare of 2016, this particular horse race won’t end with the “horrifying” nomination of a neo-nazi sympathizer. And if Sanders becomes the Democratic nominee and bests Trump—as most polls predict he will—the U.S. will have elected a democratic socialist who can deliver “a future to believe in,” as Sanders’ campaign slogan goes.

As for the Berniecrats, Taibbi advises them to simply keep asking themselves, “Are you bought off, or not?” and hang tight while their man crosses the finish line, much to the dismay of an increasingly inept establishment.









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Elites Turn to Bloomberg and Remove Their Masks

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/panicked-over-sanders-elites-turn-to-bloomberg/






Sonali Kolhatkar






Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York and Democratic presidential candidate, is having a moment. After polling at only a few single digits last year, he is now emerging as a top-tier candidate, pushing past former Vice President Joe Biden to claim a spot far closer to the top of the polls. One could attribute this rise to the insane amount of cash he has spent on his campaign — more than $200 million so far — out of his own bottomless pockets to blast commercials on every platform as he sells himself to the public. Now, liberal pundits are contemplating things like, “It is time to earnestly consider the possibility that Bloomberg will be the Democratic nominee for president.” But are we honestly considering him a serious candidate?

Bloomberg’s main stint with politics was as mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013, during which time he pushed aggressively to criminalize and racially profile people of color under the guise of the “stop and frisk” policing model. The idea was simple: Preemptively arrest poor Black and Latino men, and crime rates would magically drop. Thousands of men were ruined in Bloomberg’s dragnet, and the policy persisted until legal challenges forced the city to end the program with a judge declaring it unconstitutional. In launching his bid for the White House last year, Bloomberg stood in front of black congregants at a church and said, “I want you to know that I realize back then I was wrong.”


Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city. And that’s where the real crime is. … You want to spend the money, put a lot of cops in the streets. Put the cops where the crime is, which means minority neighborhoods. And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them.Perhaps the billionaire candidate simply expected that his money would wash the stench of racism away. But then, this week, the audio of a speech he gave just five years ago at the Aspen Institute defending “stop-and-frisk” became public. The recording, posted by independent journalist Benjamin Dixon, reveals Bloomberg saying:


Bloomberg likely knew soon after he said this that his comments were unconscionable — he asked the Aspen Institute not to distribute the video footage of his speech. The words are on par with the type of racism President Donald Trump has spewed and shows a shocking disdain for the Constitution on par with that of a radical right-wing extremist (after all, Bloomberg won his self-funded race for mayor of New York City as a Republican). As part of the damage control over the devastating audio clip, Bloomberg said in a statement, “I inherited the police practice of stop-and-frisk, and as part of our effort to stop gun violence it was overused. By the time I left office, I cut it back by 95%, but I should’ve done it faster and sooner.” But Bloomberg left his mayoral office in 2013. Two years later, he was still defending his racist policy in public. The Intercept’s Lee Fang delved into the actual numbers and found that, far from cutting back the program by 95%, Bloomberg actually increased arrests by seven times during his tenure. Bloomberg has been caught in a lie. Aren’t we done electing liars?

Perhaps Bloomberg hopes white liberals can set aside any misgivings about his racism simply because they are fantasizing about the unlimited access to his campaign cash to defeat Trump. Bloomberg is currently the ninth richest person on the entire planet. In a sincere sounding op-ed in the New York Times, he explained how “the rewards of the economy are far too concentrated at the top,” and that he is “making the system fairer and more progressive, including by increasing taxes on wealthy people like me.” But only three years ago, Bloomberg — in a conversation with the then-head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine La Garde — explained that he was in favor of regressive taxation because it helped socially engineer poor people’s habits:


Taxes are regressive, yes they are. That’s the good thing about them because the problem is in people that don’t have a lot of money and so higher taxes should have a bigger impact on their behavior and how they deal with themselves. So I listen to people saying, ‘Oh we don’t want to tax the poor.’ Well, we want the poor to live longer so that they can get an education and enjoy life. And that’s why you do want to do exactly what a lot of people say you don’t want to do…. If you raise taxes on full sugary drinks, for example, they will drink less and there’s no question that full sugared drinks are one of the major factors in obesity and obesity is one of the major factors to heart disease.

While this clip has not received as much attention as Bloomberg’s defense of “stop-and-frisk,” it is just as instructive about his attitude toward low-income people. A multibillionaire’s opinion of those on the bottom rung of society is — unsurprisingly — utterly distorted by his obscene wealth.

How exactly can a racist, classist billionaire be favored by Democrats? As Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders continues to build momentum, the liberal establishment is in full panic mode. All of the superficial criticism they have cast at Sanders — that he’s an old white man who has been a Democrat for barely a minute — apply just as equally to Bloomberg. But what is most critically important to Bloomberg’s backers is that his politics are the polar opposite of Sanders. Just days after the disastrous Iowa caucuses, the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson bizarrely declared Bloomberg “the biggest winner,” even though he skipped the caucuses. Robinson’s reasoning was that “the chaos in the Democratic Party and Trump’s White House are making Bloomberg’s argument for him.”

The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman this week opined that Bloomberg “has the best chance to carry the day” in a match-up against Trump and that he is “a moderate progressive with a heart of gold but the toughness of a rattlesnake.” The words “moderate progressive” are code for “not a Democratic Socialist like Bernie Sanders.” Defenders of the establishment are terrified that in a bid to sweep away Trump and his policies, too many Americans will want to strip wealthy liberals of their power and money as well.

For all the fears that Democrats have about a Sanders’ nomination, the worst that Trump could accuse Sanders of doing is sticking to a set of economic, racial and gender justice principles for 40 years. He could harp on Sanders’ avowed socialism, but polls show Americans are actually quite receptive to socialism. He could lie and call Sanders a communist, but the Senator could retort, as he has already done, “Obviously I am not a communist,” even if Trump “maybe doesn’t know the difference.”

In demonizing Sanders and all he represents, Trump is siding with the likes of former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who is so terrified of Sanders he worried the senator would “ruin the economy” as president. By that comment, Blankfein of course means that Sanders plans to upend an economy that is working very well for him and terribly for the rest of us. Trump, Wall Street executives and wealthy elites like Blankfein and Bloomberg are all arrayed against threats to the corporate stranglehold on America. They are all part of the same team, and yet establishment Democrats claim there is a difference between Trump and Bloomberg.

As Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren dip in the polls, Bloomberg’s numbers are rising. In a head-to-head matchup with Trump, one poll showed him beating the president by the widest margin of all Democratic candidates. But Bloomberg has so far benefitted from scant media coverage and as journalists dig deeper, his many skeletons are tumbling out of the closet. He has also not yet faced his challengers on a debate stage. If he does cinch the nomination, picture Trump ripping him apart over his comments about crime in minority neighborhoods and his patronizing attitudes toward poor people.

Sanders surrogate Nina Turner, in a recent interview on MSNBC, dared to call Bloomberg an “oligarch” and raised the ire of liberal pundits. But the word “oligarch” is defined as a member of a nation’s economic elite unfairly using their status and money to wield power. Former Labor secretary and popular progressive author Robert Reich explained that, yes, at this stage, anyone is better than Trump and that “[o]ligarchy is better than tyranny.” But, he added, “neither is as good as democracy.”

Bloomberg’s immense wealth allows him to bypass the traditional reins of accountability that the public has over a candidate running for election. Bloomberg doesn’t need the public to donate to his campaign, and therefore there is no guarantee that as president he would care about serving the public. Already with Trump in the White House, we are suffering the ill effects of an unaccountable wealthy person who cares more about his money than his country. How can anyone who wants to defeat Trump want to replace him with someone not unlike him?






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COMMENTS




Carlos Osorio / AP


Billionaire Republican-turned-Democrat Presidential Candidate Michael Bloomberg was hit with two damaging front-page headlines Saturday.

The Washington Post reported, “Bloomberg for years has battled women’s allegations of profane, sexist comments.”

“Now, as Bloomberg is increasingly viewed as a viable Democratic candidate for president and the #MeToo era has raised the profile of workplace harassment, he is finding that his efforts to prevent disclosure are clashing against demands that he release former employees and complainants from their nondisclosure agreements.”

“The allegations that he tolerated a hostile office culture could undercut his ability to criticize President Trump’s alleged sexual misconduct and efforts to keep such claims private.”


And in a headline titled “Bloomberg’s Billions: How the Presidential Candidate Built His Influence”the New York Times exposes the corruption of two faux-progressive DNC-affiliated organizations, EMILY’s List and the Center for American Progress who sold out their organization’s missions in return for millions of Bloomberg’s influence buying:


“In the fall of 2018, EMILY’s List had a dilemma. With congressional elections approaching and the Supreme Court confirmation battle over Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh underway, the Democratic women’s group was hosting a major fund-raising luncheon in New York. Among the scheduled headline speakers was Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor, who had donated nearly $6 million to EMILY’s List over the years.”

“Days before the event, Mr. Bloomberg made blunt comments in an interview with The New York Times, expressing skepticism about the #MeToo movement and questioning sexual misconduct allegations against Charlie Rose, the disgraced news anchor. Senior EMILY’s List officials seriously debated withdrawing Mr. Bloomberg’s invitation, according to three people familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.”

“In the end, the group concluded it could not risk alienating Mr. Bloomberg.”

And the Times on the Center for American Progress:

“In interviews with The Times, no one described being threatened or coerced by Mr. Bloomberg or his money. But many said his wealth was an inescapable consideration — a gravitational force powerful enough to make coercion unnecessary.”

“They aren’t going to criticize him in his 2020 run because they don’t want to jeopardize receiving financial support from him in the future,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at the good-government group Common Cause.

“That chilling effect was apparent in 2015 to researchers at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group, when they turned in a report on anti-Muslim bias in the United States. Their draft included a chapter of more than 4,000 words about New York City police surveillance of Muslim communities; Mr. Bloomberg was mentioned by name eight times in the chapter, which was reviewed by The Times.”

“When the report was published a few weeks later, the chapter was gone. So was any mention of Mr. Bloomberg’s name.”

“Yasmine Taeb, an author of the report, said in an interview that the authors had been instructed to make drastic revisions or remove the chapter, and opted to do the latter rather than “whitewash the NYPD’s wrongdoings.” She said she found it “disconcerting” to be asked to remove the chapter “because of how it was going to be perceived by Mayor Bloomberg.””


Glenn Greenwald
✔@ggreenwald
· Feb 15, 2020



The establishment wing of the Democratic Party - its elite think tank and lobbying institutions - are indescribably corrupt. That's what Bloomberg is counting on.

And, as usual, the Center for American Progress, led by @NeeraTanden, leads the sleaze. Just look at this: https://twitter.com/alexburnsNYT/status/1228712023489466368 …
Alex Burns
✔@alexburnsNYT
Replying to @alexburnsNYT @nkulish

In 2015, Center for American Progress researchers wrote a report on U.S. Islamophobia, w/a 4300-word chapter on the Bloomberg-era NYPD.

When the report was published, the chapter was gone.

By then, Bloomberg had given CAP ~$1.5mm. That number has grown.https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/15/us/politics/michael-bloomberg-spending.html …


Glenn Greenwald
✔@ggreenwald


For more on CAP's grotesque corruption - remember they only stopped accepting millions from the despots of the UAE last year under pressure - see here:https://mobile.twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/1228744584261513216 …
Ken Klippenstein
✔@kenklippenstein






669
12:16 PM - Feb 15, 2020
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francesca fiorentini
✔@franifio



We now know that the PAC Emily’s List, which confirmed it was affiliated with an attack ad against Sanders (despite his 100% pro choice record), has taken $6M from Bloomberg. We deserve better feminism. Meet Matriarch, helping progressive working-class women run for office: https://twitter.com/matriarchorg/status/1228195034006114304 …
Matriarch@MatriarchOrg
Replying to @MatriarchOrg

We’re a coalition of progressive women dedicated to supporting working class women running for Congress.

Our 2020 class is working class, progressive and powered by the people.

Help us prove our model to win: Use this https://bit.ly/2Sr3IoO
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aaron j@afoolsaaron
· Feb 15, 2020



Michael Bloomberg buying off what's left of the sclerotic Democratic Party elite network is the most accelerationist shit I could ever conceive of.

Socialism (Sanders) or Barbarism (Trump, Bloomberg)


aaron j@afoolsaaron


https://twitter.com/alexburnsnyt/status/1228715585988648960?s=21 … https://twitter.com/alexburnsnyt/status/1228715585988648960 …
Alex Burns
✔@alexburnsNYT
Replying to @alexburnsNYT @nkulish

Top Dems say Bloomberg is already their most important donor. His campaign makes plain the financial incentive it is presenting for 2020.

"If Mike Bloomberg is the nominee, he will ensure that the Democratic Party has the greatest funding in its history."https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/15/us/politics/michael-bloomberg-spending.html …
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Alex Kotch
✔@alexkotch



Consider that the most prominent liberal think tank scrubbed its report that made Bloomberg look bad *at the expense of honestly analyzing Islamophobia.*

The report whitewashed massive wrongs in the biggest city in the US at the expense of the people who were wronged. https://twitter.com/rowaida_abdel/status/1228770265225670656 …
Rowaida Abdelaziz
✔@Rowaida_Abdel


In case you need a refresher what happened to Muslims under Bloomberg and that lifelong trauma they’re still recovering from: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/michael-bloomberg-muslim-surveillance-nypd_n_5df40e1de4b03aed50ee4685 … https://twitter.com/alexburnsnyt/status/1228712023489466368 …
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Common Dreams Staff / Common Dreams

Centrist Democrats Have Already Lost the Most Important Battle

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/centrist-democrats-already-lost-the-most-important-battle/



Jim Hightower / OtherWords






With dozens of Democratic candidates, scores of televised debates, and swarms of reporters and pundits descending on the tiniest blip in polls, this campaign already feels never-ending. But at long last, we’re beginning what matters: Voting!

This year, in addition to decisions about candidates, voters will be making a decision about the future of our society. The question we face is whether we will continue the same-old politics of enriching and empowering the few at the expense of the rest of us, or will we pivot to implement transformative structural changes.

As you would expect, Trump and his sycophantic congress critters are howl-at-the-moon opponents of Medicare for All, the wealth tax, tuition-free college and trade school, the Green New Deal, universal child care, and the full package of populist policies that would begin reversing the scourge of inequality that continues spreading throughout our land.



But what about Democrats? Sadly, many of them are opposed, too.

Not grassroots Dems, of course — not the hard-hit, workaday people who need these reforms. But there’s a gaggle of don’t-rock-the-corporate-boat Democrats (mostly old-line pols, consultants, high-dollar donors, and other Washington insiders) who are declaring that the party must abandon proposals for big systemic changes.

Why? Because, they exclaim, being so progressive, so plainspoken, so insistent — so, well, democratic — is frightening voters.

They warn that proposing major new policies to benefit everyone will let the Trumpeteers paint their candidates as scary socialists. They lecture that the proper course is to draw back to the corporate-centered, Clintonesque approach of incremental minimalism: small, technocratic and legalistic tweaks that won’t disrupt the system itself.

This is the responsible path, they assure us, for winning over America’s moderate middle, particularly independent Republicans and white, middle-class swing voters. Never mind that the white middle class is not by and large made up of squishy moderates, but of millions of mad-as-hell, downwardly mobile middle classers who feel abandoned by both political parties.

Still, the establishment is trying to push the party’s candidates to surrender their progressive ideals and just tinker around the edges of actual change.

For example, rather than offering full-fledged health coverage for every man, woman, and child, these minimalists say the safe political route is simply to criticize Republicans for tampering with Obamacare and leave the current profiteering system of “corporate care” untouched — thus leaving millions of our families with poor to zero coverage.

It is simply a lie that people will be scared off by candidates who propose decent health care as a right for every American. As a December New York Times poll reported, 81 percent of Democrats (and two-thirds of independents) support the idea of Medicare for All legislation as proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal.

Hello — apple pie doesn’t get an approval rating that high!

Or take Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for a tiny wealth tax on mega-fortunes above $50 million — a tax that would finance education, infrastructure expansion, and other crucial programs. In the Times December poll, 77 percent of Democrats, 55 percent of independents, and — check this — 57 percent of Republicans favored Warren’s tax on superfortunes.

Thank goodness such squeamish Dems weren’t able to nullify big public solutions that Americans desperately needed in the past, such as:

● FDR’s Social Security, labor protections, and farm security measures

● Ike Eisenhower’s interstate highway infrastructure

● LBJ’s Civil Rights, Medicare, Title IX, and anti-poverty programs

● and even Nixon’s EPA and OSHA.

As a South Texas saying puts it: “A grandes males, grandes remedios”: for big problems, get big solutions. Obviously, our society’s problems today — from rampant inequality to climate change — are beyond huge. But how big will Democrats go in addressing these challenges?












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