Despite Pain and Record Death, 

Why Is the Stock Market So High?

How did rich corporations and finance capitalists come out of the pandemic in very good health in contrast to the general population?

by

Rajko Kolundzic

tPublished on Sunday, January 17, 2021 

by

Common Dreams

Citizens wearing protective masks form lines to receive free food from a food pantry run by the Council of Peoples Organization on May 8, 2020 in Brooklyn, New York. (Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

On November 24, 2020, the S&P 500 hit a record, "defying” the pandemic the Wall Street Journal notes. The Journal added that stocks’ stellar year defied the virus and economic slump—describing it as dazzling and as a “euphoria.”

At the same time, the rich are getting wealthier. Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and now second richest man in the world, became richer by 13 billion dollars in just one day (while denying his workers paid sick leave at the same time). The richest American family, the Walton’s, increased their account balance by $21 billion within 20 weeks. Elon Musk became the second richest person in the world and has since overtaken Bezos as the world’s richest person on the planet. In fact, this is a defining trend for the rich since the start of the pandemic.

As of December 8th, the Institute for Policy Studies calculates that U.S. billionaire wealth has increased by $1 trillion since March 18th. The numbers are eye popping: the total net worth of their wealth has increased by billions per day.

Indeed, the stock market finished the year near all-time highs, “enriching” the wealthy despite a deadly pandemic that has witnessed nearly 350,000 US deaths (and rising) while millions are unemployed. As the coronavirus crisis lingers on, we are once again reminded that there is a clear divergence amongst the two sides of society and the economy: the rich and the poor.

So how did we get here? How did rich corporations and finance capitalists come out of the pandemic in very good health in contrast to the general population? Why is there such a major stock market-economy disconnect?  Why have the fortunes of the rich been completely detached from the issues experienced by the rest of society?

Firstly, it is important to recall that the stock market is not the economy. As economist Dean Baker has noted multiple times, the stock market is a measure of expected future corporate profits. In other words, the stock market can be in great shape while the economy is reeling because investors anticipate higher profits.

Yet more importantly, as part of the CARES Act bill passed by Congress, on March 23, 2020, the Federal Reserve, in a first-time move, announced that it will directly buy corporate debt as part of its emergency lending programme. That was all it took in creating profound effects across markets. The reason is clear: its announcement was all that was needed to stabilise corporate stocks and bond markets causing them to surge because it sent the message that if corporations are in trouble, they need not worry because once again they have the “free market” government to rescue them. Furthermore, this massive corporate rescue helped secure further corporate bonds that wouldn’t have been possible without this Fed guarantee as it allows corporations to take on more bonds without its negative consequences. Needless to say, this had its intended effects. Many companies, such as Apple, explicitly noted that its bond issuance will be used for “share buybacks and dividends.” Corporations like Boeing secured $25 billion while Exxon got $9.5 billion on the bond market.

In addition to buying corporate debt directly, the Federal Reserve pumped massive amounts of new money by setting rock-bottom interest rates in which subsequently little of this actually flowed into productive investments that could have put the economy on a progressive track and could have helped millions in dire need of assistance. Rather, this new money went where returns are rapidly rising: the stock market. This perpetuated the cycle and gave us a “euphoric” year. Through another major intervention by the state, corporations, financial intuitions, and rich investors used most of this new money to buy more stocks driving up stock prices. Hence, this is why we constantly read news of a record-breaking stock market.

Of course, there weren’t any set of conditions such as worker retention leveraged in the Fed schemes. As a report from the Center for American Progress notes: “Importantly, none of these large corporate bailout facilities include any conditions for the companies receiving government support, such as restrictions on share buybacks and dividends, limits on executive compensation, or payroll maintenance requirements.” So, it was perfectly legal if corporations chose to fire their workers during an ongoing pandemic. This was, in fact, what Boeing did for example. It cut thousands of jobs even though it secured tens of billions in bonds—only made possible through the Fed scheme.

In addition, on December 18, 2020, the Fed gave a green light for banks in 2021 to resume share buybacks in another move that will balloon the stock market. The banks wasted no time with this gift—just 10 minutes after the announcement, JPMorgan Chase announced a new $30 billion share buyback program. It shares climbed 5 per cent the same day.

At the same time, government support for the general population has been inadequate, slow, and too little to what should have been done. Many had to desperately wait for a one-time ‘stimulus’ check or $600 a-week supplemented unemployment insurance from Congress that had several issues—which eventually dried out months later, and then were forced to wait nearly 5 months for another insufficient Congressional relief bill. Amidst all of this, millions are barely getting by and are living in profound misery. To highlight one example, according to Feeding America, more than 50 million people have experienced food insecurity by the end of 2020 while millions are in lining up breadlines. Yet, the latest relief package signed in December does not include direct state and local aid, threatening neoliberal austerity cuts onto millions while including a significant tax cut for the wealthy. The Economic Policy Institute forecasts a dire picture if federal aid to state and local governments isn’t secured: over 5 million jobs will be lost by the end of 2021.

As Matt Tabibi opines: “the financial markets are getting the World War II-style ‘whatever it takes’ financial commitment, based upon the continuing fallacy that “wealth creators” must be the first in line for rescue in any crisis. This was a wrong assumption on the decks of the Titanic, a wrong assumption after 2008, and a criminally wrong assumption now”.

Recently, United States Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin declined to extend the CARES Act’s Federal Reserve lending programmes. The reasoning he gave is openly honest and indeed true: the lending programmes have “achieved their objectives.” Undeniably, he noted that credit markets, which nearly halted during the start of the pandemic prompting a financial shock, have been rehabilitated. Amidst this, millions are in dire need of unemployment benefits and state budgets face massive shortfalls amid a looming austerity crisis which will produce disastrous effects on millions of lives. As with the Great Recession, Wall Street is saved once again at the expense of the general population.

Rajko Kolundzic is an American university student at the University of Essex in the UK, studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

 

 

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One Group Who Knew All Along How Dangerous Trump Was: Mental Health Experts

From the perspective of his psychopathology, Trump's coup attempt last week was wholly predictable.

by

Bandy X. Lee, Jeffrey D. Sachs

Published on Sunday, January 17, 2021 

by

Boston Globe

Of course, the media environment was set up for the likes of Trump. America is filled with racism, sexism, and hatred, and with mass media outlets like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News that have no responsibility to the truth. The Fairness Doctrine, which used to protect us, was repealed decades ago by the Federal Communications Commission under Ronald Reagan, and in place of fairness jumped right-wing extremism. Social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Parler, also played a major role.

Yet Trump posed a special challenge. Into the brew of hatred and racism came a mentally disordered individual with a knack for self-promotion. Trump was not merely conniving, and that’s the point. He suffers from severe impairments, including characteristics of sociopathy, pathological narcissism, and sadism. A mentally disordered leader in a country filled with inequalities and a mass media environment promoting extremism led to a terrifying situation.

"Trump was not merely conniving, and that’s the point. He suffers from severe impairments, including characteristics of sociopathy, pathological narcissism, and sadism. A mentally disordered leader in a country filled with inequalities and a mass media environment promoting extremism led to a terrifying situation."

Mental health professionals started to warn Americans about Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, but they were shut down by none other than a professional organization of their own, the American Psychiatric Association. The APA was unique among mental health associations to adopt the so-called Goldwater Rule, which resulted from Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, when some psychiatrists questioned Goldwater’s mental health fitness for office. After that, the APA decreed that it was unethical for mental health professionals to diagnose public figures without a personal examination and without consent.

With the arrival of the Trump administration, however, the APA expanded the Goldwater rule dramatically. Originally, the rule applied to diagnoses. Now, according to the APA, any offer of professional comment regarding the mental health of a public figure was deemed to be unethical. When some mental health professionals started to warn specifically about Trump, the APA pushed back hard, invoking the Goldwater Rule. There were reports that the APA may have acted to protect its federal funding. Whatever was the actual motivation, the APA revisions under the Trump administration troubled many mental health professionals.

Several psychiatrists convened at Yale School of Medicine in early 2017 and published the proceedings in a book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” which raised the topic of Trump’s mental unfitness in public discussion.

The mental health experts correctly predicted that the dangers of Trump’s presidency were greater than the public and the politicians suspected, that the dangers would grow over time, and that they would possibly become uncontainable. Of course, these experts did not predict the coronavirus pandemic, but they recognized right away that the US death toll from COVID-19 — now at nearly 390,000 — would depend more on the president’s mental state than on characteristics of the virus. Well before the 2020 election, they warned that Trump would refuse to concede, declare the results a fraud, and refuse to leave office. They warned that the post-election transition would be the most dangerous days of this presidency. Though they were correct in these predications, many political leaders continued to treat Trump as a normal, albeit highly manipulative and unprincipled politician, not as dangerously disordered.

Trump’s coup attempt last week was predictable from the perspective of Trump’s psychopathology. Convicting him in the upcoming Senate impeachment trial is also important to keep Trump from running for office again. Yet we must draw further lessons.

We must find formal ways to incorporate psychological insights into political discourse. This would involve, among other measures, correcting the Goldwater Rule, adjusting the 25th Amendment to ensure that it can be applied to dangerous psychological disorders, and taking steps to reduce the powers of the presidency so that the nation is not vulnerable to the whims of one mentally unbalanced individual.

Bandy X. Lee is an internationally recognized expert on violence. Trained in medicine and psychiatry at Yale and Harvard Universities, and in medical anthropology as a fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health, she is currently on the faculty of Yale School of Medicine's Law and Psychiatry Division.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Sachs is the author, most recently, of "A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism" (2020). Other books include: "Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable" (2017)  and “The Age of Sustainable Development," (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

© 2020 Boston Globe

Denial of American Fascism Has Cost Us Dearly

The inconvenient truths about fascism, like learning about the climate and health crises, could lead us to actually shift our beliefs and lives.

by Zoltán Grossman

Published on
Sunday, January 17, 2021
by
Common Dreams

Proud Boys march in support of President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, December 12, 2020. (Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)


For too long, our country and our communities have been in denial about the rise of far-right authoritarianism and the enabling of fascism. For how many months and years have anti-fascist researchers and activists been warning that an attempted coup against democracy would happen, in some form? How many times have we seen eyes glaze over, hearing only condemnations of “both sides,” or dismissive comments minimizing serious fascists as merely “patriot conservatives,” cosplay “clowns,” or stupid “rednecks”? We heard it when Trump was elected, we heard it the next year when far-right militants and death threats besieged our college, and last year when three far-right paramilitaries roamed and held rallies in Olympia.

Our own police and city leaders hyped the threat of antiracist protesters, and turned a blind eye to three paramilitaries armed with semi-automatic rifles, bear spray, and zip ties, even rewarding a cop who had her photo taken with them. There was less government and media reaction to two far-right shootings in December than to earlier Black Lives Matter protests. There were clear cases of a biased double standard, in both Washingtons, and we saw the results last week.

"If four years ago, our country leapt from the frying pan of neoliberal corporate rule into the fire of enabling fascism, on January 20 we’re leaping back from the fire into the same old frying pan. Unless we see deeper changes, we’ll be back in the fire before long."

As Olympia city council member Renata Rollins just said, “Locally we’ve had a collective delusion that the violent alt right would go away if the racial justice protestors would just tone it down … It was convenient to believe that right-wing violence was coming from a desire for 'law and order.' That if we didn’t say anything, at least maybe they’d leave us alone.” In other words, if we ignore them, and decide not to counterprotest, they won’t go away.

Fascism Denial

What we're now seeing is the consequences of years of “Fascism Denial” by conservatives, liberals, and many progressives. As I wrote after the 2018 Pittsburgh Massacre: “Just as climate change has gradually crept into our lives, and we notice it only when a major storm, drought, or flood dramatically announces its presence, fascism has gradually crept out from under its racist rocks that have long been embedded in our society, and we only notice when it erupts in violence. We try to deny the crisis, or explain it away as part of some other, more easily grasped issue, rather than facing the realities head on.

In 2020, the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that far-rightists carried out 67% of the year’s domestic terror attacks, and that in the previous decade far-rightists had killed 117 people. Only one was killed by an anti-fascist, who then became an American assassinated on American soil, next door to Olympia.

There’s a long historical pattern of western powers downplaying the rise of fascist movements, focusing their wrath instead on leftist movements. In the 1930s Depression, they mainly feared socialist revolutions and union strikers, and they enabled a fascist rebellion to overthrow a leftist democratic republic in Spain. Leftists from around the world, who had warned their own countries about fascism, volunteered to fight in Spain, but were defeated, paving the way for World War II. In effect, the western powers left the gates of civilization unlocked, for the fascists to take over. Only when Pearl Harbor was attacked did the U.S. finally wake up that fascism was the real global threat. Even then, the leftists who had fought in Spain were officially persecuted as “premature antifascists.”

Now the liberals and conservatives are so damned surprised by last week’s far-right “Pearl Harbor.” The police literally left the gates to the U.S. Capitol and Governor’s Mansion unlocked and open to the fascists, and were unprepared and slow to deploy forces, in contrast to their advance overreactions to many BLM protests. The D.C. mob was so unused to police pepper spray that they used water to wash it out of their eyes, which BLM protesters know not to do.

Our leaders may finally wake up far-right paramilitaries and QAnon cultists are a literal threat to democracy, and there’s no “dialogue” or “conversation” possible with their leaders. Even then will they continue to ignore those of us who repeatedly warned them, and dismiss us as “premature antifascists”? Or will they start to listen to the fact that without deep, systemic social and economic change, the fascist cancer will continue to metastasize? It is not just enabled by Trump in the U.S., but is in the global context of the rise of right-populist authoritarianism, from Hungary and Turkey to Brazil and the Philippines. Fascism shouldn’t just be a label we put on meanies we don’t like, but represents a specific violent ideology, and a reaction of deep-seated local nationalisms against the impersonal placelessness of corporate globalization.

Our wars abroad and the wars at home mirror and reinforce each other. In our foreign policy, the Pentagon and CIA under both parties have backed coups of far-right dictators and death squads, to maintain elite rule and corporate profits. In many parts of the world, this is who we are. They called any dissent from below an “insurgency” or “insurrection” that has to be put down, one of the reasons I don’t use those terms to describe the attempted coup from above in D.C. Americans think that coups have to always involve soldiers and shooting. But there have been right-wing political coups against leftist governments, like in Honduras in 2009 and Bolivia in 2019, more successful versions of Trump’s failed attempt to steal the election. On 1/6, just like on 9/11, U.S. leaders were so shocked when the goons that they backed to stop their enemies carried out a violent blowback against democracy, biting the hand that fed them.

Not your grandparents’ fascists

If the rise of fascism is a global pandemic, then white nationalism is the main U.S. variant of the virus. But today’s American fascists don’t fit the old simple stereotype of Nazis and Klansmen. Their organizers often hook recruits first with legitimate grievances such as opposing corporate trade deals and Big Tech, Pentagon militarism, and even sex trafficking and pollution, and only later reveal their true agendas. Far-right conspiracy theories are not just influencing Trumpian rednecks, but our own friends and families. Most of the groups are mainly motivated by white nationalism, but others are motivated by Christian nationalism (against Muslim or Jews), so-called “libertarian” reactions to gun rights, health measures, and public lands, so-called “Patriot” opposition to immigration and Indigenous rights, or cis het supremacy and misogyny.

Northwest far-right groups (such as Patriot Prayer) recruit token people of color through these other ideologies, and love to showcase them, or even use pro-gay rhetoric to oppose Muslim immigration. Not all fascists are white supremacists (remember that Japan was an Axis Power), and more importantly, not all white supremacists are fascists. So we can’t fool ourselves that defeating far-right shock troops is all we have to do to confront the much larger and pervasive, deeply rooted institutional power of white supremacy.

I’d caution anyone who assumes last week’s violence will discredit and demoralize the far-right. I did notice that they took the stickers off many of their vehicles parked near the January 10 Capitol protest in Olympia. I remember when the so-called militias declined dramatically after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and it took them some years to recover. But there wasn’t the QAnon cult or social media back then, so I think they’ll step up their irrationality and regroup more quickly this time.

We might also assume that the far-right and Republicans dividing or splintering from each other will make things safer. But our experience in the Midwest was the opposite--the far-right is even more dangerous when they're down to the hard core, and remember that in the Mideast, ISIS was formed in a split away from Al Qaeda, whom they saw as softies. So smaller crowds does not necessarily mean the far-right is less of a threat in the short term, but it does mean they have less of a social base to persevere in the long term (much like ISIS). The good news is that rightists usually hate and fight each other even more than leftists do.

Some of us might also assume that the far-right threat will decline with Trump leaving office. That may be the case, but losing power could also unleash them untethered to any restraints, as we’ve seen in Michigan. We cannot assume Biden will adequately meet the challenge. If we simply try to “return to normal,” we forget that the normality of social and economic inequalities is what gave us Trump in the first place.

If four years ago, our country leapt from the frying pan of neoliberal corporate rule into the fire of enabling fascism, on January 20 we’re leaping back from the fire into the same old frying pan. Unless we see deeper changes, we’ll be back in the fire before long.

Instead of effectively meeting the challenge of far-right militancy, proposed federal legislation against "domestic terrorism" or "extremism” is so vague and broad that I fear it will be used against dissenters who are practicing and defending democracy (like Black Lives Matter protesters and water protectors blocking oil pipelines), rather than against those trying to impede and shut down democracy.

Local responses

What can we do at this point in our history, on a more local scale where we can make a difference?

We can hold socially distanced rallies for a peaceful transition, as one is being held on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Olympia, to make clear that the opposition to anti-democratic forces is broad-based in our communities, not just among highly politicized leftists.

There is now state legislation against openly carrying arms at demonstrations, Senate Bill 5038. In Olympia for the past six years, it’s almost exclusively right-wing demonstrators who have carried these weapons. I hope the bill covers not only the immediate area but also armed harassment or visible snipers farther away. There are also existing state laws against unauthorized militias and brandishing weapons to intimidate that have not been enforced.

Many Pacific Northwest county sheriffs have been refusing to enforce mask laws or gun laws, and Oregon sheriffs enabled rural militia checkpoints to find ghost Antifa arsonists during the wildfires. Law enforcement is racist enough, and now we have to worry that they could de facto deputize armed paramilitaries. After the attempted coup, we have to build a firewall to “separate Cult and State.”

Instead of being intimidated by the recent crises, we can be encouraged by the longer-term trends in U.S. society. The future looks bright, it's just the present that sucks. In a temporal demographic shift, the U.S. is becoming more racially diverse, and younger voters back social equality and environmental sustainability. We’ve also seen a spatial shift of progressive rallies emerging in smaller cities and towns, in red and purple counties, where the battle for American hearts and minds is really taking place.

The Georgia election could be a tipping point both in time and space, starting a rollback of Nixon/Reagan’s racist “Southern Strategy” that solidified Republican rule in the South, so may portend deeper changes than the presidential election. We may look back on Trump and his coup as the last gasp of the dinosaurs, trying to hold back inevitable change, and the upsurge of social movements as the comet that wiped them out.

In the longer term, white people can take responsibility to support counterrecruitment of middle and high school students who may be drawn to far-right messages, or work with fellow soldiers and veterans, or in our work and social circles. By writing off large swaths of the country as cultural-political wastelands, we’re leaving a vacuum that the far-right has filled.

Community organizers have done some amazing work in rolling back far-right harassment and violence in red and purple counties, such as the Rural Organizing Project in Oregon, Love Lives Here and Not In Our Town in Montana, the Hate Free Schools Coalition in North Carolina, and many more. Research groups such as the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights in Seattle, Political Research Associates, Three Way Fight and Southern Poverty Law Center have provided valuable information on the far-right.

Widening our circles

No matter what our personal opinions, we spend too much time talking with people we feel are right for the right reasons, and railing against people who are wrong for the wrong reasons. We need to enlarge our discussions, that’s where new connections can be made and crises can be reframed.

There are lots of people who are wrong for the right reasons. Their hearts in the right place but they’ve been attracted to false propaganda. As I stated in my book, "Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands," some white fishers who scapegoated Native treaty fishers for declining fish stocks, started working with the tribes to protect the fish from habitat destruction.

If you have friends really concerned about sex trafficking of kids, but are taken in by false conspiracy QAnon theories about Hollywood Satanists drinking kids’ blood, tell them about the real factual crisis of trafficking, such as the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls.

There are also people who are right for the wrong reasons, such as opposing billionaires like George Soros or Bill Gates, but because they supposedly want to overwhelm the West with immigrants or track us through vaccines. We can redirect some of these people toward the plenty of other reasons to dislike billionaires.

Similarly, some people dislike Big Tech for its censorship, but only objected when Trump’s Twitter was shut down. There are plenty of problems we can identify with Big Tech shaping opinion, in fact facebook abetted the rise of the far right. When our friends or family have a poor information diet, we can start to fill that vacuum with more factual, nutritious information, but more importantly by connecting to their emotions of anger and hope.

Like in facing the climate crisis and the pandemic, confronting the threat of fascism cannot be based on passively waiting for government action from above, or the results of the next election, but starting to form a patchwork of models from below, at the local, grassroots level. Learning the inconvenient truths about fascism, like learning about the climate and health crises, could lead us to actually shift our beliefs and lives, in order for democracy to survive, recover, and grow.

Zoltán Grossman is a Professor of Geography and Native Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He is author of Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands, and co-editor of Asserting Native Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis. His website is here.

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Here We Go Again, But Now the Target Is Iran

Two decades after invading Iraq for alleged links to al-Qaeda, the US now says Iran is the armed group's 'new home.'

by

Belén Fernández

Friday, January 15, 2021

Al-Jazeera English

Outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo presented this final hallucination in a speech on Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington, DC: "Al-Qaeda has a new home base. It is the Islamic Republic of Iran." (Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)

In September 2002, United States President George W Bush began a speech in Nashville with some typically eloquent charm: "There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."

This was exactly six months before the launch of the war on Iraq in all of its carnage, which the US endeavoured to fool the world into thinking was justified by Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda. In reality, there were no weapons, and al-Qaeda only came to flourish in Iraq as a result of—what else?—the US invasion.

Fast forward nearly two decades, and the current US administration appears determined to debunk Bush's dictum that "you can't get fooled again."

Now, of course, the target is Iran—but the argument is exactly the same.

While we've already spent the past four years of the Donald Trump presidency hearing about Iran's diabolical nuclear ambitions, Trump & Co have, on the eve of their departure from power, decided to gift us one last hallucination—which they undoubtedly hope will swiftly contaminate the public mind and thereby convert itself into accepted fact.

Outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo presented this final hallucination in a speech on Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington, DC: "Al-Qaeda has a new home base. It is the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Never mind that al-Qaeda and Iran are, you know, mortal enemies. The truth matters not in matters of national security.

Indeed, Pompeo asserted, al-Qaeda has found an even "safer haven" than Afghanistan: "Unlike in Afghanistan, when al-Qaeda was hiding in the mountains, al-Qaeda today is operating underneath the hard shell of the Iranian regime's protection."

Thanks to the cushy arrangement, he claimed, al-Qaeda now have access to plenty of money and "new tools for terror," and are able to kick back their feet in Tehran and plot global attacks. Iran "permits Al-Qaeda to communicate freely with exponents of hatred abroad," he added.

Naturally, Pompeo did not provide any evidence in support of his grand vision—but that did not stop the Secretary of State from calling on "every country [to] recognise that this unholy collusion is dramatically increasing the risk of terror attacks against their people."

Anyone missing the old Axis of Evil rhetoric will meanwhile be heartened to hear that there is now officially an "Iran-al-Qaeda Axis" that is a "massive force for evil all across the world."

Of particular concern to Pompeo is that this axis "threatens the progress" of the peace accords Israel is busily signing with opportunistic Arab nations, and that al-Qaeda could use regional terror attacks to "blackmail" the remaining nations into refraining from jumping on the bandwagon.

Israel, for its part, is free to continue terrorising the Palestinians and other regional inhabitants, without the risk of finding itself on any "axis."

To conclude his speech, Pompeo took a little trip down memory lane—back to 1983, when he was in his sophomore year at the US Military Academy at West Point, and picked up the newspaper one day to read that an explosives-laden vehicle had careened into the US Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 "American warriors."

Explaining that his life "wouldn't be the same after that", Pompeo went on to remind his audience that the Marine barracks terrorists were part of an "early incarnation of Hezbollah."

And the smoking gun, delivered with self-satisfied gusto: "It had the support of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Were history and context considered to be of import—rather than a hindrance to the dissemination of propaganda—Pompeo might have recalled that Hezbollah itself is a result of none other than the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed some 20,000 Lebanese citizens and Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians.

Perhaps picking up the paper to read that Israel has massacred thousands of people just is not that life-changing. Nor, presumably, is learning that the USS Vincennes, a guided-missile cruiser, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in 1988, ending 290 lives.

And the US continues to this day to end Iranian lives, whether by illegal military attack—as in the assassination of general Qassem Soleimani last year—or by effectively sanctioning them to death.

To be sure, projecting the "terrorist" label onto the so called "Iran-al-Qaeda Axis" is a helpful distraction from the fact that the US has spent recent history bombing, mutilating, irradiating, and otherwise tormenting populations from Afghanistan to Iraq to Syria and beyond. But populations on the receiving end of torment do not easily forget their victimisers.

It remains to be seen whether Pompeo's sensational revelations are the prelude to some calamitous Trumpian military undertaking—a parting shot, as it were—or are simply meant to force the discourse in a certain direction and potentially tie the hands of the incoming administration.

Near the end of his performance, the Secretary pointedly wondered whether the terror plots allegedly being hatched by the "Iran-al-Qaeda Axis" did not constitute the "next form of blackmail to pressure countries back into a nuclear deal."

And as the US takes blackmail to impressive new levels, there's no time like the present to recall that old saying from Tennessee… or Texas.

Belén Fernández is the author of  "Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World" and "The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work." She is a member of the Jacobin Magazine editorial board, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, Al Akhbar English and many other publications.

© 2021 Al-Jazeera English

How to Counter the Secretary of Sabotage

Secretary of State Pompeo is setting political traps in his final days, but an emboldened Biden can avoid them.


BY JONATHAN GUYER

JANUARY 17, 2021




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HANI MOHAMMED/AP PHOTO


The deadliest emergency will be in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been waging a brutal war.

The craziest thing Mike Pompeo did this past week wasn’t even touting links between Al-Qaeda and Iran.

As President Donald Trump rages his way out the door, his sabotage-minded secretary of state has worked hard to ensure that Biden’s foreign-policy options will be limited long after Trump is gone. Among the fires Pompeo set during a hectic week: enraging China, choking diplomacy with Cuba, and enacting policies that will escalate the already dire famine in war-torn Yemen.

For Biden, the immediate priority of piloting the nation through a COVID-19 recovery was always going to take precedence over his foreign-policy pledges. During the presidential debates, he laid out a formidable list of action items globally, promising to repair the partnerships that Trump savaged, re-prioritize the climate crisis, and replace Trump’s militaristic policies with a much-needed battery of diplomacy. But before Biden’s diplomats can swing into action, they’ll now have to diffuse, as best they can, the ticking time bombs that Pompeo is setting on his way out. “The first 100 days are going to be pretty wild,” Rachel Rizzo of the Truman National Security Project told me. “There’s just going to be a lot of clean up.”

Pompeo began by throwing away decades of established diplomatic protocol, hastily upgrading relations with Taiwan. The U.S. had avoided officially recognizing the country in order to maintain a complex equilibrium with China. The only reason Pompeo abruptly ended America’s “One China” policy was to force Biden to have to walk it back upon assuming office. Now, no matter what the next administration says or does, it will appear weak, either by kowtowing to China or caving to Trump policy. Then Pompeo aggravated China even further by hitting it with new sanctions aimed at state-run companies and officials operating in the South China Sea.

Even tough-on-China Republicans found the moves to be foolish. “Why are we doing this in the last five days?” a former senior Trump White House official told me. “We could inadvertently get into a conflict.”

These escalations are just the latest in the smoldering pile of crises that form Pompeo’s legacy.

Even worse for Biden, Pompeo has sabotaged any hope of repairing our relationship with Cuba. On Monday, the State Department designated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, the fourth country on a list that only includes Iran, North Korea and Syria. It’s the final blow of Pompeo’s array of attacks on the tenuous diplomatic progress that Barack Obama achieved in Latin America. Obama had to appeal to Congress to remove Cuba from the terror list in 2015, and now if Biden wants to do the same, he’ll have to take the political hit again, just to get back to where things stood six years ago. The optics will be bad either way. Biden will have to provoke Cuban-Americans early in his term to return to a policy that most Americans want, or give up a decade of progress to appease the right wing.

The deadliest emergency, however, will be in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been waging a brutal war against a rebel group known as the Houthis. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has doubled down on his much-criticized friendship with these autocratic powers. They’ve rushed $23 billion of advanced fighter jets and drones to the Emirates and $290 million of Boeing-made bombs to Saudi Arabia. (Pompeo was already under investigation for weaseling through an $8 billion weapons sale to the Saudis, in defiance of Congress.)

While Pompeo is fast-tracking another sweetheart arms deal, he’s also deepening the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. On Monday, the State Department designated Yemen’s Houthis as a foreign-terror group as a favor to the Saudis. Given that the Houthis effectively run the country, humanitarian groups will now find it impossible to get civilians the aid they so desperately need; more than half of Yemenis will go hungry this year.

Rob Malley, the head of the International Crisis Group, is appalled by all of Pompeo’s recent mischief, Yemen most of all. “The most pressing, critical issue is the Yemen decision because of its immediate, catastrophic humanitarian implications and its costly diplomatic repercussions,” he told me.

Finally, there was Pompeo’s speech on Tuesday, where he peddled “The Iran–Al-Qaeda Axis.” Former intelligence officials might have dismissed this as a joke, except that Pompeo’s language suggested that the Trump administration was eager to order a lame-duck strike on Iran.

These escalations are just the latest in the smoldering pile of crises that form Pompeo’s legacy. He proudly trashed multilateral diplomacy by exiting the Paris Climate Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. He helped Trump strangle and demean NATO. He emboldened Arab autocrats through pacts with Israel that were more arms deals than peace deals. In November, he officially redefined human-rights groups critical of Israel as anti-Semitic, another policy that will be nearly impossible politically for Biden to roll back. Little wonder that Israeli settlers have named a wine after Pompeo.

Malley, a former senior Obama official, foresees the Biden team running into what he calls an “inbox problem.” There are simply too many crises that require a response. And while undoing these knots may be technically feasible, each one is more politically thorny than the last, by design.

The Democrats’ toughest challenge won’t be reversing Pompeo’s vandalism, but avoiding all of the political traps he’s laid. Democrats too often talk about Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East on their opponents’ terms. They so frequently dilute their own agenda trying to act more hawkish than Republicans. But Biden can’t risk seeming defensive. Facing so many emergencies, the new president must conjure the almost mythical Biden from campaign ads who transcends party to rescue the country.

Biden’s team must find ways to address the climate crisis, get arms and nukes under control, and do everything possible to end the Yemen war. A source familiar with the transition’s internal dynamics told me that Pompeo’s actions, culminating a term of destruction, are motivated by nothing more than domestic politics. Biden is preparing to undo them from Day One.

Biden’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken will also have to repair a tattered State Department. During the first set of impeachment hearings last winter, Blinken said, “President Trump has weaponized the State Department in service of his reelection … by putting his foreign policy at the service of his own politics and personal ambition.”

Pompeo has carried this on in his waning days. He used tax dollars to politick with fancy donors in the vaunted secretary’s ballroom, including a maskless, indoor Christmas party. His wife treated aides as hired help, forcing them to fetch holiday gifts and do airport pick-ups. When an inspector general began investigating these improper acts, Pompeo fired him. He would rather kibitz with far-right talk show hosts like Ben Shapiro than engage journalists, as we saw recently when he had a Voice of America correspondent fired for trying to pose a question to him. He uses his official government Twitter feed to share Bible quotes (#SundayScripture).

Pompeo followed his boss’s lead in refusing to recognize Biden as the winner in November, and instead teased a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” On January 6, Pompeo tweeted a bland denunciation of the rioters who attacked the Capitol and no more. “Secretary Pompeo has put out stronger statements against journalists,” a State Department official who resigned last week in protest told me.

Pompeo’s last-minute maneuverings had no purpose but to cause chaos for the incoming administration, a fact that Biden’s team will have to remind the media of as they set about undoing the damage. Biden can’t do much about the traps that have been set except defuse them as best he can, but he should use this moment as the impetus to take a strong stand against the havoc he’s inheriting. At a minimum, he should reinvigorate Congressional and State Department investigations into various improprieties, which Pompeo tried to shut down. But everything should be on the table when it comes to holding Trump and his appointees accountable for corrupting and degrading America’s most vital institutions. Deterrence is the only way to deal with Pompeo’s treachery and to ensure that future saboteurs never again gain a foothold in the executive branch.

Turns Out That the Oil Industry Wasn’t Interested in the Arctic Refuge After All

The Trump administration’s Arctic Refuge oil lease auction was a total bust.

by

Adam Federman

Saturday, January 16, 2021

by

Sierra Club Blog

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (Photo by Shelley Wales/iStock)

On the afternoon of Wednesday, January 6—as many Americans were transfixed by the violent insurrectionists laying siege to the US Capitol—the Department of the Interior was undertaking what some conservationists have likened to another kind of plunder: the first ever oil and gas lease sale in one of North America’s most iconic wilderness landscapes.

For more than 40 years, environmentalists and Republicans in Congress have battled over the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain, a 1.6 million-acre stretch of fragile tundra at the edge of the Arctic sea. In 2017, with a two-page provision tucked into the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Donald Trump achieved what no other Republican president had been able to: opening up the refuge to oil and gas exploration and development. The lease sale was, in a way, the culmination of one of the defining environmental struggles of the last half-century.

Not surprisingly, the Trump administration considered Arctic Refuge drilling among its biggest accomplishments, as Interior Secretary David Bernhardt told the Conservative Political Action Conference last year. The Alaska Congressional delegation viewed it as a major triumph. Industry boosters and the Congressional Budget Office claimed that the lease sales—the Tax Act requires two over the course of the next decade—would be a windfall for the US Treasury and the state of Alaska and that it would help to replenish the dwindling life-blood of the Trans Alaska Pipeline.

But, ultimately, the first lease sale was a flop. Only half of the parcels attracted a bid, many of them at bare minimum prices. The Alaska Wilderness League called the lease auction an "epic failure."

Even before last Wednesday’s sale, there were signs that this idea was largely a fantasy. In 2019 British Petroleum sold off all of its assets on the North Slope, including the closely guarded results of the single test well drilled on refuge lands, in what many viewed as a sign of the inevitable long-term decline of Alaska’s oil and gas industry. Meanwhile, more than a dozen banks in the US, Canada, and Europe pledged not to finance development projects in the Arctic. The rush to lease in the refuge was unfolding without a very clear understanding of the coastal plain’s resource potential, making any investment that much more risky. To top it all off, Joe Biden’s presidential election victory ensured that the incoming administration would do everything in its power to protect the region. 

That’s where things stood when DOI’s Deputy Secretary Kate MacGregor, who had traveled to Anchorage for the lease sale, approached the lectern and began opening bids. “It is my honor to preside over this momentous occasion,” she said before thanking those who had worked for decades to promote domestic energy production and job creation in Alaska.

But in less than ten minutes the sale was over. There were only 13 bids on 11 of 22 tracts. Most bids were at or just above the minimum of $25/acre and the sale netted only $14.4 million, a far cry from what the CBO had estimated. Even the pro-industry website Petroleum News described the results as “somewhat disappointing.”

Perhaps most surprising and controversial was that nearly all of the bids—9 of the 11 awarded—were submitted by a state-owned investment corporation, not the oil and gas industry. The Alaska Investment Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) was created by the state legislature in 1967 to help foster economic growth largely by partnering with banks to provide low cost loans to businesses. Board members are appointed by the governor and profits are pumped back into the corporation or shared with the state. In recent years, however, AIDEA has come under fire for its lack of transparency and what many view as ill-advised investments in energy development projects.

The decision to bid on refuge leases was no exception. AIDEA made a cryptic announcement on Friday, December 18 that it would be meeting in executive session two days before Christmas to discuss “confidential matters” and vote on a resolution related to the Arctic Infrastructure Development Fund. The following Monday, under pressure from activists and journalists, AIDEA finally released the resolution on whether to spend up to $20 million on the lease sale. Despite an outpouring of criticism from the public, it passed unanimously.   

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has always been a larger than life symbol, both to the environmentalists and Indigenous Gwich’in who have sought to protect it and the politicians who have tried for decades to open it to development.

Rick Steiner, a conservation biologist in Anchorage who tracks AIDEA closely, believes that the authority not only violated Alaska’s public meeting law by not providing proper notice but also may not qualify as an eligible bidder. Because the state of Alaska receives half of the lease sale revenue, AIDEA has a competitive advantage, Steiner says. In addition the authority has presented no clear investment plan for the leases, which Steiner says is required by the corporation’s own by-laws. Finally, the authority’s board members have not been confirmed by the Alaska legislature adding another layer of legal uncertainty. 

“AIDEA is clearly out of control,” Steiner told me. “And they know it.” Steiner filed a complaint with the Department of the Interior’s inspector general in December alleging that the corporation is an ineligible bidder under federal law and that all of its bids should be rejected. According to Steiner, the inspector general’s office has told him that they are hoping to issue a decision or referral before the end of this week. 

A spokesperson with the Inspector General’s office said the complaint is going through the standard intake process. AIDEA did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Land Management is moving quickly to finalize the leases before Trump leaves office, which would make it more difficult for the incoming administration to delay or possibly invalidate them. An antitrust review coordinated with DOJ, and which usually takes up to two months, has been completed in just days according to an email obtained by Steiner and bid acceptance letters were sent out last week. AIDEA has 15 days to respond.

Larry Persily, who served on the AIDEA board from 1999 to 2002 and now owns a weekly print newspaper in Wrangell, said that bidding on refuge leases is not the first bad investment AIDEA has made. He points to the authority’s decision in the late 1990s to finance a “value added” seafood processing plant in Anchorage that went bust. AIDEA ended up losing about half of the $50 million it had invested in the project. “That was their biggest boondoggle I can remember,” Persily said. “It definitely gave them a black eye.”

More recently, the authority put $70 million into financing a North Slope oil and gas operation, since purchased by a Singapore-based petroleum company, which has struggled to make its quarterly loan payments. They agency has also been criticized (and sued) for backing the Ambler Road project, a more than 200-mile mining access road through pristine wilderness lands including part of Gates of the Arctic National Park. Two days after the lease sale, AIDEA and DOI signed a 50-year right-of-way permit for the project.

“The [Arctic Refuge] thing was sort of their sticking their toe back into the waters of dumb ideas,” Persily said.

Even if AIDEA is deemed to be an eligible bidder and the leases are signed before Biden takes office, the path forward for the state of Alaska is not a promising one. The leasing program will be tied up in courts for months if not years and a judge could send DOI back to square one, forcing the agency to redo the environmental impact statement. In theory a Democratic controlled Congress could vote to permanently protect the coastal plain, though the party’s slim majority in the Senate will make this difficult. (See: Manchin, Joe; Senator from West Virginia.) Either way, AIDEA will be stuck with the leases and ultimately the legal fees required if they challenge whatever decisions the Biden administration makes.

It would be foolish to read too much into a single lease sale, held during a pandemic and at a time of historically low oil and gas prices. After all there’s plenty of new oil and gas development on Alaska’s North Slope, much of it on state land and to the west of the refuge in the National Petroleum Reserve.

But the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has always been a larger than life symbol, both to the environmentalists and Indigenous Gwich’in who have sought to protect it and the politicians who have tried for decades to open it to development. How badly industry wanted it, however, was always a bit of a mystery. Now, it seems, we have our answer: industry didn’t want it very much.

During the livestreaming of the lease sale, DOI’s MacGregor said that developing the refuge would “reinvigorate” the Trans Alaska Pipeline, which Alaska’s politicians have long promised. But the outcome of the sale presages a different future, one that by necessity doesn’t rely so heavily on oil and gas extraction. And this is something the state may have no control over. 

“If they had held the sale 20 years ago it would have turned out much differently,” Persily said. “Regardless of whether it was a good idea then, its time has passed.”

Adam Federman, a former Russia Fulbright Fellow, has written for the Nation, Columbia Journalism Review, Earth Island Journal, Gastronomica, and Adirondack Life, and other publications. You can find more of his work at adamfederman.com.

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