The Flynn Pardon Is The Right Thing To Do + Mishandling Russia

There are a great number of tragedies in US foreign affairs under Trump, though less tragic than under Obama or Bush Jr (no Libya, no Iraq).

Essay question: Which is worse? Igniting or reigniting regional conflicts as crap proxies or because we can, or a small hurricane of nasty, mean, spiteful and flat-out stupid gestures? Show your metrics.

PS IIRC it isn\’t a crime to lie to cops, per se-and they get to lie to you too, so there. But it may be a crime to lie to the FBI in the course of an investigation. (Like most of those who comment my pixels are only tangentially related to the actual post.)

PA vote certification blocked by a Federal Judge: https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-pa-election-certification-process-blocked-by-judge/

With Arizona’s blocked by the Governor, just one more state blocking or flipping means Biden doesn’t get 270 and 12th Amendment kicks in.

Likely to be Nevada as one local race is getting thrown out, problem is those ballots had the Presidential Race on them and Trump is arguing if they are thrown out, he wins, and legally he is right. Whether the Nevada Governor or State Congress agrees is another matter as Nevada Canvassing Board certified yesterday.

“Hatred of Trump or Russia is not a good reason to . . . apply a double standard . . .”

Partisanship applies double-standards in the absence of genuine principles.

That was the tragedy of the Obama Presidency: that bad results from Bush II engendered a general consensus in favor of reversing course from the Bush Administration, resulting in two successive wave elections that gave the Democrats the power of the Congress and the Executive and then . . . crickets.

Policy and consequences ceased to matter to either party, the elites of both Parties inert and deaf to the views and concerns of ordinary people or, generally, the interests of the country. Hillary Clinton went into 2016 completely insensitive to the consequences of the previous 25 years of policy choice. Politics was no longer about taking care of the country or making prudent and humane choices for the state.

Trying to prove that Trump colluded with Russia to win election was a form of psychotic delusion. “Clueless” hardly covers it. Biden had his 78th birthday the other day. Very few that old would be capable of carrying out the duties of the office and Biden is certainly not one of those few, and people who gave him the nomination cannot possibly have thought he could do the job. That kind of cynical disregard for the importance of the office seems to me to simply be a continuation of the recklessness that has typified governance and politics since roughly 1990.

Invading Iraq on a false premise was completely reprehensible on principle and we let it go. Failing to prosecute rampant financial fraud at the root of the 2007-8 GFC was evil and stupid. Failing to reverse the ill-conceived war on terror, end by prosecution official torture and murder — well that was the end of principle in American politics. Clinton circumventing campaign finance law (well, really she violated the law, but since there is no possibility of prosecution, her scheme becomes circumvention) was just a lame coda, just as Obama ignoring his responsibility for declining life expectancy was. (Remember when we thought Reagan’s reluctance to acknowledge AIDS was a scandal of irresponsibility?)

There are no genuine principles in play in American politics, at least insofar as mainstream political media are concerned.

I think I agree with almost everything in this little essay. Though I know little about Flynn, it’s my opinion he was actively pursued by the FBI, and probably unjustly. Talking to the FBI without the presence of both a lawyer and your own tape recorder is a really dumb thing to do.

They have a smaller economy than California and one-third the population of the EU.

I can’t really dispute this, but it sure makes me uncomfortable. An internet search suggests a person can substitute Texas, Spain, or Italy in the “smaller economy than” role. Mostly it just doesn’t seem reasonable. A search did turn up this at what appears to be a Russia-friendly site:

Russia VS America: Real Income Comparison

To compare the salaries you must do a series of adjustments. First step is to determine what is the net salary after taxes. In Chicago, pay-roll taxes charged to the worker would amount to 25% for the above mentioned salary (federal and state personal income taxes plus FICA, i.e. social security and medical charges to the worker). In Russia the corresponding taxes amount to 13%. (13% is the flat personal income tax and there are no personal taxes on social security). Further, we have netted the average health care costs from the salary, which in the US would amount to $11,600 while in Russia with universal healthcare they would be zero. We also considered paid vacation and holidays, which were imputed as 7 days for Chicago and 22 for Russia. (In reality the difference could be bigger in Russia’s favor, as much – and a growing number – of the population does not get paid vacation in the US).

Finally, I don’t really trust GDP numbers. Does a bunch of Wall Street computers selling securities to each other really equal “wealth”. I’m inclined to doubt it.

https://www.awaragroup.com/blog/russia-vs-america-real-income-comparison/

Sad to say, our governments are neither particularly moral nor just. It is the nature of the beast. It’s part of why we must always be fighting those governments for justice and some sense of moral purpose. It’s never-ending.

There are too many cases more egregious than Flynn’s.

Flynn didn’t exactly cover himself in glory — actually he brought most of his problems on himself, first by pleading guilty when he thought he was innocent (cowardly) and also lying to Pence (why he got fired). But “lying to the FBI”? What a joke. The FBI doesn’t even record the interview, but their agent writes notes after the fact, and then *other FBI employees can edit the notes* (this happened) — then they accuse you of lying based on their doctored notes. When Trump’s DOJ went to drop the case on that basis, the judge refused, effectively appointing himself prosecutor, and had been stalling for months as of the pardon. A total farce all around — a pardon was the obvious way to put it out of its misery.

Trump’s DOJ would be that political POS Bill Barr. And Flynn pled guilty twice to what BOO implies were evidenceless charges.

As for the Russia Thing, I never put much stock in it, though the claim that it was entirely fabricated is simply wrong.

It was an outgrowth of the ill-advised reanimation of the Red Scares of previous eras. Who came up with this stupid idea, I don’t know, but for reasons that have never been clear, the notion of Russia today as the equivalent “enemy” as the Soviet Union and Putin as some sort of Stalinesque figure to be feared and loathed took hold in the internationalist and neo-imperialist factions of the foreign policy establishment, and we were off to the races. This happened way before the Trump campaign. And it sucked in dozens if not hundreds of agents in numerous departments. Frankly, it was crazy.

It’s yet another form of scapegoating as distraction. Flynn and Trump and a whole bunch of others got caught up in it, and the not-so-bright take anti-Soviet… er… Russia propaganda as some kind of gospel. Anti-communist drums beat constantly on all sides of the political spectrum. It’s nonsense. It’s a distraction.

That Flynn was oblivious or thought he could ignore the reality of the imaginary Soviet Threat is remarkable, to say the least. Perhaps he was persuaded the Trump was God and His desire would override anything else. I don’t know. Whatever the case, he was engaged in risky business in his contacts with the Russian state apparatus. As were numerous other Trump loyalists.

He should have known. I’m pretty certain he did. If he’d been smart, he could have kept these contacts at arm’s length but no. He’s not too bright, is he?

Russia’s interest and involvement in the 2016 election was real enough, as was the interest and involvement of numerous other nations (including Oh, Canada and several snotty Middle Eastern countries), but it did not lead directly to the election of Trump or the failure of the Clinton campaign. It could not have done so. So far as I know, the Clinton campaign never claimed Russia was responsible for Trump’s election. They claimed it was a factor in it. Yes, it was, but not even remotely the deciding factor. That was no doubt she herself. But I digress.

Back to the question of whether lying to the FBI “should be” a criminal offense. In some people’s eyes — not Ian’s I’m sure — the answer depends on your status and political persuasion. If you’re a high-status individual with popular political backing, say like Flynn, then no, lying to the Lying FBI trying to entrap you should not be a crime (though it is.) If you’re a low status con man or high status of the wrong political persuasion, then absolutely lying to the FBI should be criminal. See how that works?

As a practical matter, there is no moral absolute about lying, as society functions or doesn’t based on whole categories of acceptable and unacceptable lies, who tells them, when and why. The absurdity of the FBI claiming some kind of moral absolute high ground was apparent generations ago during the Hoover era. Yet here we are facing the same hypocritical demands from a falsely “moral” agency supported by criminal law.

So many important well-connected people were so concerned about the poor privileged thug Carlos Vignali. Here’s another.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whos-hugh/

In 1995, Rodham was invited to join the Castano group, a team of attorneys pursuing a federal class-action suit. When that suit fell through in 1996, the group allied itself with several state attorneys general and their suits against tobacco companies. It was during this time that the lawyers met several times with deputy White House counsel Bruce Lindsey. (Lindsey, by the way, is who Rodham reportedly lobbied about the Carlos Vignali prison commutation case.)

Critics charged that Rodham was underqualified to join the lawyers’ group and was only invited because of his White House ties. Republicans attacked him on the floor of the Senate for his role, his connections to Clinton and his potential financial windfall from a settlement.

They’re ALL crime families, are they not? It’s all about self-dealing and it transcends political parties. It’s a mandatory prerequisite to political power, in fact, or to power period, political or otherwise. Thou must self-deal is one of the holy commandments of their perverse religion.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, involved in Vignali’s commutation and who covered for Horacio, should be executed and that includes Hugh Rodham and Bill & Hillary Clinton. Think how egregiously malevolent this is considering Clinton’s harsh, nay brutal, crime bill. This is as heinous as anything the Trump Crime Family has done, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

This is an excellent article. True investigative reporting. A rare find these days.

https://www.laweekly.com/las-underground-power-broker/

Father Vignali’s friends in politics — who wrote letters on Carlos Vignali’s behalf — have backed away from him. Pardongate, it seems, left too much of a stigma for its survivors to handle. After all, Congressman Xavier Becerra still holds office. So does Supervisor Gloria Molina. Former Councilman Richard Alatorre, a recovering cocaine addict once banished from City Hall by a graft conviction, has been reborn as a consultant. Former Councilman Mike Hernandez, who also admitted to abusing coke, found new life as a deputy to council members Bernard Parks and Jan Perry. Former state Senator Richard Polanco retired from politics amid scandal talk but as a consultant can be expected to exert influence at City Hall. Mayoral candidate Bob Hertzberg could play a role in Villaraigosa’s administration. Cardinal Roger Mahony is still cardinal. And while former U.S. Attorney Alejandro Mayorkas resigned in shame after lobbying for the younger Vignali’s release from prison, Sheriff Baca is up for re-election next year. With too much to lose, current and former officials avoid questions and act as if the Vignalis are irrelevant.

The two Minnesota officers at the center of the Vignali case remain bewildered by the media’s portrayal of the father as a lovable advocate for his son’s freedom. Only after Pardongate was over did the White House “inadvertently” produce DEA documents that revealed startling allegations about Horacio Vignali. The allegations flashed on the L.A. Times’ front page for a day but never gained traction. Adams and Wehr still have trouble swallowing the image of Vignalis’ money and charm being enough to move elected officials, including the county’s top law enforcer and the region’s top federal prosecutor, to extraordinary and inappropriate lengths. Their police sense is offended.

They are not alone. Current and former federal prosecutors and a federal judge in Minneapolis suggest something else was going on — perhaps something more consistent with the give and take of big-time drug enforcement. Having shared their unvarnished opinions with their counterparts in Los Angeles and talked to reporters at the Times to no avail, they are astonished at the city’s ability to avoid airing its dirty laundry.

I hope this is not too Q-Anonish for some people’s tastes.

“What really happened” is buried under a mountain of tailings left from mining the fool’s gold of Russiagate.

It is a case of weaponized narratives spun up out of a near total disregard of factual or moral truth. The manipulation of public opinion in an expedient way — a “means” — becomes its own “end” and no one looks back. The quality of public deliberation is completely lost in this way of conducting the political discourse.

As Ian points out, continued hostility to Russia, as if it were the Soviet Union, is unrealistic and unwise foreign policy. But, that is never considered. David “axis of evil” Frum asserts baldly from Twitter and the pages of Mrs Steve Jobs’ Atlantic that Russia made Trump President and Trump is pardoning Flynn to reward Flynn for concealing that Truth.

Once you are lost in this sea of agnatology — and that is what these processes create: an unfathomable depth of indeterminant and conflicting assertions with no hard foundation of undisputable fact visible — you cannot possibly sort it out with confidence. An honest person does not want to sacrifice brain cells contending with manipulative disinformation and conflicting speculative, counterfactual interpretations of imaginaries and looks for a trustworthy narrator and finds . . . David Frum or Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity or the self-impressed worthies of the New York Times or Washington Post. Not one of whom is the least bit trustworthy. So, Google or Facebook or Twitter is going to “help” by making sure that the lies of the great and good (not!) are featured and the marginalized witnesses remain marginalized and the truth — if it is out there — never goes viral except possibly as an incredible conspiracy theory. (Does Hillary enjoy chopped baby on her pizza? Prove she doesn’t! Meanwhile ignore her banal amoral corruption to assert she was the lesser-evil messiah who would have saved us with her “qualifications”.)

Flynn was, in the original contretemps over his contacts with the Russian ambassador, caught in the meat grinder of contested narrative construction.

The FBI was interviewing him for the sole purpose of entrapping him and they succeeded. They did not in their interview with him ask him a single question about his conversation with Kislyak with the purpose of learning a fact they did not already know. That Kislyak’s communication with Moscow and his interview with Flynn were recorded was disclosed with strangely little concern about sources and methods.

Elsewhere Pence had been manipulated into asserting that no substantive communications with the Russians had taken place, as Obama imposed sanctions for the alleged election interference and other sins. Sessions, not the brightest bulb, was manipulated into asserting he had never met the Russian ambassador and MSNBC bobbleheads confidently asserted that it was very strange for incoming Administration officials to encounter ambassadors.

Thanks for the conversation, all.

I just had a terrible thought:

Pence 2024.

I fully agree with whoever said that Trump was done.
But Pence could easily be that more disciplined evil.

“The Russians are only a threat to the West if they are pushed into a corner” This has been largely true since Gorbachev and definitively true for the last 30 years but, we keep shoving them into the open arms of China anyway because the anti-Russian narrative suited the needs of the 3-letter agencies.

As for Flynn,

1] His original lawyers had a VERY LARGE CONFLICT OF INTEREST that deserves prosecution in it’s own right. The Covington attorneys were threatened by Mueller’s team with prosecution of their FARA filing, they could/should have been witnesses in the case itself and they did not disclose this to Flynn, instead they urged him to take a guilty plea to sweep their “mismanagement” of the FARA filing under the rug.

2] The original notes from the interview did not indicate the General lied, only the notes as amended by disgraced political apparatchik Strzok did and even when altered by Strzok, the infraction was the use of law that had been used in 200 years, pretty weak tea. Indeed, when the FBI moved to clear Flynn due to a lack of ‘Derogatory Information’ texts with Lisa Page show Strzok lied to keep the investigation against Flynn open.

3] FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe text “FUCK FLYNN AND THEN WE FUCK TRUMP” should reveal to the most clueless that this was not an investigation, it was a operation to ruthlessly eliminate opposition to the Deep-State, an operation that any Gestapo officer would be proud of.

No, it’s the FBI that lied, that concealed evidence, that offered perjured testimony, not Flynn.

Anyone who supports what the FBI did in the Flynn case is not a liberal, not a lefty, not a progressive. No, people who support what happened to Gen. [Ret.] Flynn are hard core fascists and should addressed correctly as an enemy of the US Constitution.
_____________________________________

Finally it’s worth recalling that in 2014[?] then Gen Flynn, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, documented that the Obama Administration was funding, training and arming terrorists [in contravention to US law] to kill Syrian civilian populations in order to overthrow Assad.

Now I know, so many here are so imbued with unquestioning Party loyalty that, like loyal Gestapo adherents, you support the funding, training and arming of terrorists [in contravention to US law] to kill civilian populations. Fine, let’s just be clear then, that is who you are and that is why you support the show-trial of Flynn. Gen. [Ret.] Flynn falls into the same category as all truth tellers and that is why he was persecuted.

Much larger political interference of a country like Israel through AIPAC and a Sheldon Edelson is treated as normal

Been my contention all along Putin is a pawn in a grander game but … (1 Cassandra’s grandson, nobody listens and 2) such tends to draw out crazies that make the malcontents around here look positively polite. Someone else mentioned “snotty little Middle-East countries” and that pretty much nails it: even though they’re all cousins they’ve nothing if not a three, perhaps five thousand year history of refusing to get along with each other. The Sauds, Israel, are as sophisticated at doing what we invented as the Ruskies, they’re all stirring the pot, and I’ve no doubt they’re all pawns in a grander game.

‘Bout a year into this I made the observation that if it were the Ruskies, then by all accounts they ran the perfect con. Pulled the perfect one over, pulling one over of course one of America’s great national pastimes. But for the mark. But for the rube.

They only perfected what we invented.

There’s the crux of the matter: what does Flynn have on Trump?

“C team guys, like Flynn” – Hugh

Yeah sure, General Flynn, the Directer of Defense Intelligence Agency, is dismissed is a loser…spoken by our anonymous DNC waterboy. Okay Rambo, let’s see your Service medals and campaign ribbons. Oh that’s right, you may love war but..uh…just couldn’t find the recruiting station..could you?

@Hugh — the A-team guys have not been looking good for some time now.

That makes building a narrative on the bargain-basement quality of many of Trump’s appointments hard to sustain. Flynn does not seem any great prize it is true, but the effort to persecute him — and that is what it was, your legalisms notwithstanding — is impossible to justify.

If Putin wasn’t trying to affect U.S. elections, his own people should be impeaching him. It’s part of a head of government’s duty to create the best situation for his country and its people. When there’s a hegemon like the U.S., that means most foreign governments should be working on it.

If we want straightforward, fair elections, we need to set them up. I don’t care whether it’s Charles Koch or Benjamin Netanyahu or Vladimir Putin doing something dastardly to our elections (which are plenty dastardly on their own). Our elites insist on keeping the means of manipulating the vote and then try to make the use of those means by anyone but themselves illegal. It can’t work. It’s also wrong.

Freedom of speech has become a special privilege of Americans rather than the human right specified in the constitution. So they say that if a Russian pays for it, it’s criminal. If a corporation pays for it it’s free speech. We are allowed to hear only what our rulers approve of.

“the idea that the lower levels of a cesspool should somehow be better than the top ones because they are even kookier and more criminally inclined I don’t buy.”

And, I am saying the thesis that the lower levels of said cesspool are actually and objectively “kookier and more criminally inclined” is unsustainable. Kooky and criminally inclined, yes, but more??! That looks indistinguishable from falling for the better PR of the top levels.

Constantly reducing everything to a false equivalence is unlikely to lead to either understanding or solutions, bruce. Flynn gets a pass from you because anyone and anything that touches on Russia gets a pass from you.

“a false equivalence” ?!!

No, dear Hugh — simply a plea for persistent standards reasonably related to objective fact and prudent expectation.

The following is the kind of thing I personally try to avoid lapsing into.

Trump is not loyal, pretty much the opposite. So while Flynn was Trump’s kind of hustler and crook, you have to wonder what Flynn has on Trump for Trump not to forget or turn on him. Or maybe the pardon was one way for Trump to give the finger to that part of the Establishment so triumphal over Biden’s win. In which case, can the pardon of Manafort followed by the Trump family be far behind?

You probably do not see what is wrong with this “form of reasoning”, with its counterfactual speculation run rampant.

“Putin is a dictator” does not come with much information attached. Putin is a masterful politician in an office with immense authority, in a country with a long, sordid history of authoritarian and totalitarian government. What he does to address various problems, domestic and international is of potential interest to me, but of no apparent intetest to you. That leaves little to discuss.

Putin is many things, dictator included, a politician he is not. Biden is a politician. Clinton is a politician. Obama is a politician. None of the above Americans are leaders, but they are consummate politicians parading as leaders. Putin is a leader, but not a “good” leader. Josip Broz Tito is an example of a “good” leader, and he was no politician either. Putin is no Marshal Tito. He could never fill such prominent shoes. I’d consider Castro a “good” leader, all things considered, and like Putin and Tito, Castro was no politician.

Again Hugh I offer this reciprocation of factual information to refute your conjectural ad hominem, lies and self delusions:

Ref; Flynn

1] His original lawyers had a VERY LARGE CONFLICT OF INTEREST that deserves prosecution in it’s own right. The Covington attorneys were threatened by Mueller’s team with prosecution of their FARA filing, they could/should have been witnesses in the case itself and they did not disclose this to Flynn, instead they urged him to take a guilty plea to sweep their “mismanagement” of the FARA filing under the rug.

2] The original notes from the interview did not indicate the General lied, only the notes as amended by disgraced political apparatchik Strzok did and even when altered by Strzok, the infraction was the use of law that had been used in 200 years, pretty weak tea. Indeed, when the FBI moved to clear Flynn due to a lack of ‘Derogatory Information’ texts with Lisa Page show Strzok lied to keep the investigation against Flynn open.

3] FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe text “FUCK FLYNN AND THEN WE FUCK TRUMP” should reveal to the most clueless that this was not an investigation, it was a operation to ruthlessly eliminate opposition to the Deep-State, an operation that any Gestapo officer would be proud of.

No, it’s the FBI that lied, that concealed evidence, that offered perjured testimony, not Flynn.

Putin is many things, dictator included, a politician he is not.

I think moral judgments are important, but moral judgments preliminary to judgment of facts and circumstances tend to obscure rather than produce insight. I have scarcely any idea what you mean by ” ‘good’ leader”, let alone why you would deny Putin the dishonor of being acknowledged a politician. Party politics plays a central part in how he has achieved, wielded and maintained power and party politics is more or less how “politician” is defined.

I have seen Cuba and it is not as happy or well-organized a society or economy as Russia. Yugoslavia did not work out, either. I do not know if that is relevant to your idea of leadership.

Hugh thinks Putin is “a screwup” because of the pattern of stalemate with neighbors over the fate of enclaves in places like Moldova (Russian Bessarabia, a slice of Romania reclaimed by the Soviet Union after WWII) and Georgia. The frozen conflicts all have a history going back to the Soviet Union, which often required its constituent states to grant autonomy to regions of contrasting ethnicity. They became open conflicts with the fall of the Soviet Union in the form of competing claims to independence, before Putin’s time in the highest offices. They have become issues, because of attempts by Western powers to alter the balance of power along Russia’s border and Putin has used these conflicts as points of leverage against NATO expansion. As far as I can tell, he has been fairly successful in inhibiting NATO expansion. I, personally, think NATO expansion or even continuation is foolish, and certainly I can see his point-of-view.

As for Putin as leader of the oligarchs or their pawn, I think that mistates his relation to the oligarchs. Russia uses state-sponsored enterprises in key sectors to counter the power of the oligarches and has made an example of other oligarchs. Would that a U.S. President went after the Kochs or Google or Apple or JPMorgan Chase.

Hugh, this comment of yours shows what an ignoramus you are:

“Flynn provided his Covington and Burling lawyers bad information when they made his Foreign Agents Registration Act filings.” –

If this was true, Covington and Burling lawyers would have even a greater conflict of interest. You are such a stupid git, you never show any signs of thinking ahead two steps.

After reading that line I couldn’t even be bothered to read the rest of your 2nd rate propaganda. Your sole contribution here is to pull stuff out your ass and throw it at the wall to see if it can stick. Every time your wild accusations are disproved you simply reach behind you to throw another handful.

Speaking of which… Trumpers also have this problem of it’s the story, not the facts that count. If you don’t call them out on their lies, they say you can’t. If you do, they just blow up and call names. There is no possibility of debate or conversation. They are useful as illustrations of modern American fascism but otherwise really aren’t worth the bother.

@ Plague Species, Hugh

I have no difficulty calling Fidel Castro a dictator. He maintained himself at the center of national political authority for a long time, but more than that he shaped a polity in which political power was highly centralized in service of communist ideology and still is to a remarkable extent. It can be very hard to take initiative outside the narrow bounds set out from the center, though some things do seem to happen and a few people, at least, are able to realize large ambitions. “Castro is a dictator” is a statement, therefore, as much about the political economy and how it is structured and what it permits as it is about a charismatic individual. Everything economic one might want to do requires a permit; a farmer would need a permit to slaughter a cow. Where the attention of the center is focused, sustained and fully rationalized, things move forward, but lots of solveable problems seem to go unsolved a long time, waiting for the center to figure something out and when those problems are addressed, the results can be oddly inflexible in their standardization. For years, Cuba was short of soap. Now soap is not particularly difficult to make, but the system seemed to make it hard for anyone to get the job done. Embarassed, the government eventually contracted with an Italian firm to set up a chain of oddly modern and attractivd soap stores. It is still hard to find a decent ball point pen or proper guitar strings in a country where every third person is a well-trained musician.

In Florida, the Batista exiles always took the attitude that the Castros were corrupt and living a high life. Can’t say, Raul ever invited me to lunch, so I cannot say how well he lived. In Cuba, people complain about the petty annoyances and, of course, their own poverty and certain bits of government stupidity are scorned. But, people think the government is earnest, not particularly corrupt.

The hostility between the U.S. and Cuba is very real and consequential for Cuba. I do not pretend to know what the bounds of possibility there are. But, the difficulties for Cuba are in some large part due to the impositions made to realize a radical egalitarianism, quite apart from official U.S. hostility to other aspects of that ideological program.

21st century Russia presents a very different picture. The violence that erupts from elite competition among oligarchs for property is hard to fathom. Decades of communist propaganda followed by collapse seems to have left a major deficit in concepts of business ethics and judicial integrity. “Putin is a thug” is an inaccurate label for a man trained as a lawyer and a political economy with a still seriously dysfunctional political culture. “Putin is a dictator” is not quite right for a vast country with local bases of power and an economy featuring some large-scale enterprises run by the infamous oligarchs. How Putin deals with other centers of power and who he chooses to pacify or ally with as either crony oligarchs or local political powers may be questionable. But, that he has to make such deals with, say, the Russian Orthodox or some local power undermines the “Putin is not a politician” story. Putin entrusted Chechnya to a thoroughly awful local warlord, for example, and that compromise regularly reverberates thru Russian politics as the man does terrible things to gays and the status of women as well as drains the Federal treasury, but that was also a finely calculated realpolitik deal typical of Putin’s apparent instinct to suppress hot conflicts. Chechnya was an extremely ugly situation and I cannot say the suppression of hot war and terrorism was not progress of a sort.

In both Russia and Cuba, national politics are clearly focused on attempts to devise programs to address the country’s manifest economic problems. Cuba has a national strategy, which makes calculated compromises with its egalitarian ideology, compromises that are rapidly undermining the ideological legacy as generational change has completed. Putin talks constantly about the country’s various attempts to get itself out of the middle-income trap enveloping all of eastern Europe, develop a full complement of industrial and high-tech capabilities and generally infill its economy. The Russians are very conscious of the risks of being dependent on commodity exports, for example — that is part of common political awareness.

I would contrast that with the U.S., where the very real problems of advanced neoliberal de-industrialization and financialization are ignored for the Trump clown show and Democrats shouting about racism and Trump.