Month: June 2018

The so-called marea rosa, or ‘pink tide’, of allied leftist governments which held sway across Latin America in previous years is being rolled back. Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff was removed from power in a right-wing coup, co-conspirators of which have now managed to imprison the current presidential frontrunner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno has stabbed his former leader Rafael Correa in the back by barring him from seeking re-election, while seemingly purging his cabinet of remaining Correa loyalists and beginning the process of allowing the US military back into the country.

Meanwhile in Argentina, the former President is also under criminal investigation.

This all seems, well, “they did bad things, they should be prosecuted,” but somehow other politicians, often clearly more corrupt, aren’t prosecuted. The prosecution of Lula, in particular, was clearly a way to stay in power, since all polls show he would have won the election.

The norms are breaking down in many nations, including the United States. What is done to win is illegitimate, as with Republican vote manipulation and the 2000 Supreme court decision; what is done afterwards to opponents is also often illegitimate, and if the wrong person wins, they are gone after legally.

Americans will immediately think of the efforts to get Trump, and some will assume it is in the same vein. To some extent it seems to be, in others it isn’t (again, he’s clearly in violation of Emoluments.) But it didn’t start with Trump, it started with Clinton, who had clearly done nothing that affected him as President. (That said, he and Newt Gingrich had an agreement in place to gut Social Security and Medicare, which impeachment sidetracked, so I’m not crying too much. Clinton was a right-winger in every important way.)

Corruption is bad, and should be purged, but when I see corruption investigations which are clearly aimed at one side and not both (as with Xi’s anti-corruption drive in China, which was overall good but somehow took out the other major power blocs in China) I suspect that it isn’t primarily about corruption.

And in Brazil, where most seem to agree that those attacking Dilma were, in fact, more corrupt than her, it’s more than hmmm.

This is an ugly game. In Latin America it is bi-partisan with respect to the US. Having Latin America be left-wing was something neither Democrats nor Republicans wanted.

Meanwhile Argentina is inking an agreement with the IMF for 50 billion in exchange for structural adjustments and the Ecuadoran President is clearly moving towards forcing Assange out of Ecuador’s London embassy. (Yes, yes, you may hate Assange for a variety of reasons, some legitimate, but he is not being targeted because he is not a nice man, but because both Democrats and Republicans, on record, want to punish him various leaks, especially Collateral Murder.)

This is a very dirty game, and left-wingers keep treating it as if it is not; as if there are rules, and both sides play by them. Increasingly, in the US that is not the case, and it is clearly not the case many other places. If your enemies win, they will destroy you by any means. You should think long and hard about what you will do to them if you get into power, because they know what they will do to you.

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Canada’s Trump Now Premier of Canada’s Largest Province

By Ian Welsh

On June 8, 2018

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So, Doug Ford, brother of the Toronto’s crack-Mayor Rob Ford, is now Premier of Ontario.

It wasn’t particularly close: 41% to 34%, although polls had shown it neck and neck. At a guess, youngsters didn’t show up at the polls, which always a risk. Without a Corbynite rock star politician who they actually believe in, they tend to vote less than they intend. Horwath, the NDP leader, is no Corbyn, but a relatively left-centrist pol with little charisma.

Doug Ford is accused of having stole from his brother’s wife, of driving his business into the ground, and was a drug dealer when younger. He didn’t bother to put out a costed platform, about a third of his candidates are under criminal investigation, and etc, etc…

He’s a stupid buffoon, and his policies, such as they were, don’t even make as much sense as Trump’s did (because he has no Bannon). However, what we can know for sure is that they will involve a lot of privatization and budget cuts, fire sales to cronies and so on.

Given the percentages, caveats about proportional voting and first past the post aside, it’s hard to say this isn’t what the most committed plurality of Ontarians want. I notice that Liberals don’t appear to have strategically voted all that much, as they always want NDPers to do (and as about a third of NDPers generally do do in close elections.)

Oh well, gonna be a sucky 4 years in Ontario, but that’s what a plurality of us voted for. And, yeah, Canadians, willing to vote for really shitty people, just like Americans. (Trudeau, by the way, has run a terrible policy regime in many ways. He just knows how to look good doing it.)

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Why Republicans Are Unlikely To Impeach Trump

By Ian Welsh

On June 6, 2018

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This is why the bar for impeachment is so high.

In Alabama, GOP voters delivered a rebuke to incumbent Rep. Martha Roby, who is headed for a runoff against former congressman Bobby Bright — whom Roby defeated in 2010 when Bright held office as a Democrat.

Roby angered constituents by un-endorsing then-candidate Donald Trump after the 2016 release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in which he bragged about groping women. In TV ads, Bright accused Roby of “[turning] her back on President Trump when he needed her the most.”

The Access Hollywood tape was the “grab them by the pussy” tape.

The base supports Trump. You have to get past the base in primaries to be a candidate in the general. This is why the fact that Democratic primary voters are basically ok with Democrats makes change from the left hard: they did mostly vote for Hillary, Bernie’s won independents.

The right did take over the Republican party, and they did it by winning primaries. Every recent attempt by the left to do the same in the Democratic party has failed.

Trump has very consistently acted to frame Mueller’s investigation as partisan, so that whether to impeach him becomes a political decision. In any Congress where Republicans have enough votes to stop impeachment, it will be very hard for Republicans to vote to impeach Trump: doing so will mean a serious primary challenge they may well lose.

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The Yemeni Holocaust

By Ian Welsh

On June 4, 2018

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We often ask, what would we do if there was another Holocaust? Surely we would do something? Surely, at least, we would not be complicit?

The question might have been answered in Rwanda, where the UN commander begged the UN for orders to intervene, orders which never came. The general, Romeo Dallaire, has spent the rest of his life curled around his failure to act despite orders.

Meanwhile, we have the blockade of Yemen, which despite claims, continues:

Mark Lowcock, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, expressed his concern regarding the “recent decline of commercial food imports through the Red Sea ports” — adding that, if conditions do not improve, the number of Yemenis at the brink of starvation would rise from the current figure of 8.4 million to 18.4 million by this December. Given that there are approximately 28 million people in Yemen, a continuation of the Saudi-led blockade would mean that nearly two-thirds of the entire country’s population will soon face starvation.

Not sure how many of those who face starvation will starve to death, rather than simply sit on the edge of death, but millions of lives are at risk, this is deliberate, it is happening in slow motion, and the rest of the world is doing nothing.

Well, if they aren’t helping the mass murder, like America (and America was helping under Obama, so no, this isn’t a partisan issue.)

America could stop Saudi Arabia cold if it wanted to; and it certainly could at least not participate.

But, of course, we all know that in the run up to World War II no one cared what was happening to the Jews: we refused to let in Jewish refugee ships, after all. If all Hitler had done was the Holocaust, no one would have gone to war with him over that.

Not that the US needs to go to war; the simple credible threat of sanctions would bring Saudi Arabia to its knees. Nor does the US, post shale oil, need Saudi Arabia’s oil, but the Saudis, in any case, are no longer in a position to not sell. Their own society would implode in months.

Europe could do this too: SWIFT is located in Europe and subject to European law. Apparently Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons program, which Netanyahu has stated was 5 years from a nuclear bomb since the early nineties, was worth Europeans forcing SWIFT to cut them off (SWIFT objected), but not millions of Yemeni deaths.

Since Europe = Germany (no, don’t pretend, if Germany wants it, it happens), that means the Germans, having done the Holocaust are now sitting aside when they could stop millions of deaths, and doing nothing.

Lovely.

Well, I guess we’ll just watch.

And no, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince is not a good guy even if he has decided to let Saudi women drive.

The only bright lining on all this is that Saudi Arabia will be in civil war itself by 2030, I suspect.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer country.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: June 2018

The Destruction of Latin America’s Left and Lessons for Everyone

Canada’s Trump Now Premier of Canada’s Largest Province

Why Republicans Are Unlikely To Impeach Trump

The Yemeni Holocaust