Socialism in U.S. isn’t an outrage, it’s the sublime
Milwaukee of my youth | READER COMMENTARY
FOR THE BALTIMORE SUN |
MAR 05, 2020 | 3:55 PM
Democratic
presidential candidates, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., left, and former Vice
President Joe Biden, right, participate in a Democratic presidential primary
debate at the Gaillard Center, Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2020, in Charleston, S.C.,
co-hosted by CBS News and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute. (AP
Photo/Patrick Semansky) (Patrick Semansky/AP)
Like
David Zurawik, I was astonished to hear Chris Matthews rant about Sen. Bernie
Sanders (“Matthews only part of larger
failure," March 4). I, too, grew up in Milwaukee
during the ’50s and early ’60s, and I can remember my mother talking politics
and being delighted with our socialist Mayor Frank P. Zeidler and his policies.
As youngsters
in the 1950s, we kids had our choice of parks. In the summer, my cousins and I
learned chess, played volleyball, baseball and four-square at nearby Pulaski
Park where we also learned new songs and with great delight took in our first
play with songs from the traveling theater wagon.
Although our
family didn’t have enough money for tennis lessons, I used to watch the games.
My younger brothers got to play in the shallow pool just for the little kids.
Once or twice a season, the whole neighborhood showed up for dancing on the
baseball field with a live band under the stars.
Sometimes,
we’d go to Jackson Park on Sundays when it was warm so we could swim in the
huge pool. Fourth of July’s were spent here because we got free ice cream and
my sister and I always won silver dollars in the races. Porches were filled
with cousins and neighbors as we watched the fireworks.
Socialist
Mayor Zeidler’s parks and the care of our clean and lovely tree-lined streets
gave us a treasured childhood. We also enjoyed going to the socialist library
and using the post office. It was democratic socialism at its finest.
Janice
Sevre-Duszynska, Towson
Copyright © 2020, Baltimore Sun
Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Rudy’s Coup at
Foggy Bottom
Bob
Dreyfuss
March
5, 2020
Tom
Dispatch
Imagine, just for
the sake of argument, that the president of the United States was an arrogant,
information-challenged, would-be autocrat with a soft spot for authoritarian
leaders from China, Russia, and North Korea to Egypt (“my favorite dictator”),
Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. And then, suppose that very president, while
hollowing out the State Department and slamming its diplomats as “Deep State”
troublemakers, were to name a voluble wheeler-dealer attorney as his
unofficial, freelance White House go-between with shady characters worldwide.
Imagine further that the president would do an end run around the professionals
of the U.S. intelligence community — more Deep Staters, natch — and rely
instead on conspiracy theories trundled back to Washington in that attorney’s
briefcase.
Now, one last
unimaginable thing, but humor me: accept that the attorney in question went by
the name of Rudy Giuliani.
That, of course,
is a reasonable description of the state of America in 2020. Three-plus years
into Donald Trump’s misshapen presidency, as the “adults” fled the room one by
one or were pushed to the exits, the president was left with a rump collection
of family loyalists and third-tier yes-people around him.
Rarely, if ever,
do mainstream media types take a step back to survey the classic Star Wars
bar-like crew of know-nothings, Bible-thumpers, and connivers who’ve been
assembled as Trump’s “team” and their breathtaking incompetence and perfidy.
Luckily, with Giuliani in the mix, there’s at least one figure so wildly
over-the-top that analysts and pundits have heaped scorn or ridicule on his
head, and often his alone, as a person so outrageously unfit, so borderline
deranged, so nakedly in it for profit that it’s impossible to consider him
without marveling at the tragicomedy of it all.
Since 2017, however,
Rudy Giuliani has emerged as Trump’s shadow secretary of state with his hands
in American foreign policy and politics from Iran to Russia, Turkey to Ukraine
and beyond. That means anyone, anywhere in the world, with a few million bucks
to proffer and an angle to pursue in Washington can avoid Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo, the Christian-right uber-hawk from Kansas, and sidle up instead to
the former U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York and mayor of
New York City.
During most of
2019, as is well known to anyone who even casually followed the impeachment
proceedings in Congress, Giuliani had a starring role in President
Trump’s conspiracy-laden efforts to prove that Ukraine, not
Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and that Joe Biden and his son, Hunter,
were mixed up in something nefarious there. (To those in the reality-based
world, of course, it was Russia, not Ukraine that meddled massively in 2016.
And the Bidens, it’s clear, did nothing illegal in Kyiv.)
As we shall see,
the Trump-Giuliani conspiracy theory about that country originated with and was
“fertilized” by three individuals who’d earlier been caught up in Robert
Mueller’s special counsel investigation of the White House: Lieutenant General
Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security advisor in the White
House; Paul Manafort, who chaired Trump’s election campaign; and Manafort’s
Ukraine partner and ally, an apparent operative for Russia’s GRU
intelligence service, Konstantin Kilimnik. In other words, the Trump-Giuliani
Ukraine adventure did indeed get a boost from Vladimir Putin’s secret service
and Moscow’s propaganda machine.
You’ll remember,
perhaps, or maybe you’ve forgotten, that before Mike Pompeo was secretary of
state, before his predecessor Rex (“Rexxon”) Tillerson even took the job, it
looked for a while like Giuliani was going to get it. He and Donald
Trump had been political friends-with-benefits since the mid-1990s, as
evidenced by a cringe-worthy 2000 video of Trump placing his lips
unbidden on Giuliani-in-drag’s “breast.” The former mayor had quietly sought to
reposition himself as the reincarnation of Roy Cohn, the mob-connected lawyer
who had been a mentor to the up-and-coming New York real estate
tycoon. (“Where’s my Roy Cohn?”) It’s hardly surprising then that, following
Trump’s surprise victory in November 2016, Giuliani began lobbying hard for the
secretary of state job. At the same time, he was fervently urging the
president-elect not to select never-Trumper Mitt Romney for it. (Giuliani did,
however, also endorse John Bolton, Washington’s warmonger-in-chief,
for the job.)
Back in 2016, a
week or so after the election, a New York Times editorial drily
noted that the appointment of Giuliani as secretary of state “would be a dismal
and potentially disastrous choice,” that he lacked “any substantive diplomatic
experience and has demonstrated poor judgment throughout his career,” appeared
“unhinged,” and would come with a “flurry of potential conflicts of interest.”
And keep in mind that, back then, Giuliani was only getting started.
In recent years,
much has been written, and accurately so, about
the exodus of veteran diplomats — ambassadors to
toilers in the ranks — from a gutted Foggy Bottom and its global outposts under
both Tillerson and Pompeo. Writing last October for Foreign Affairs,
for instance, former diplomat William Burns noted that fewer people took the
department’s entrance exam in 2019 than in any year in previous decades.
“Career diplomats,” wrote Burns, “are sidelined, with only one of 28 assistant
secretary-rank positions filled by a Foreign Service officer, and more
ambassadorships going to political appointees in this administration than in
any in recent history.” He added: “One-fifth of ambassadorships remain
unfilled, including critical posts.”
At the State
Department, as one ambassador told the Hill, morale “is
at a new low, although I am not sure it could fall much lower than where it has
been for the past three years.” And that decline only accelerated after the
humiliating dismissal of the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch,
whose ouster was orchestrated by Giuliani.
To be sure, the
State Department was never a progressive bastion, not during the Cold War years
nor in the era when America was the global hyperpower. It is, nonetheless, the
main vehicle for any president wishing to use the levers of diplomacy rather than
the oft-chosen military option. Now, with the adults gone and the diplomats
increasingly neutered, we’re left with Trump and Giuliani. Neither hawks nor
doves, they’re vultures, viewing every country as part of a vast veldt where
they can pick at carcasses of every sort for their own business or political
gain.
How to Become a
Shadow Secretary of State
Giuliani’s foreign
policy portfolio extends far and wide, though it was in Ukraine — specifically
with that country’s many corrupt, Russian-leaning oligarchs — that he rocketed
to world attention and helped trigger the president’s impeachment. In his world
travels, Giuliani has combined his roles as businessman, security consultant,
political fixer, and the president’s personal attorney into a mishmash of overlapping
identities. He has, in other words, become a kind of walking, talking
conflict-of-interest machine.
Before zeroing in
on Ukraine, however, let’s consider just a few of Giuliani’s other foreign
ventures. Since leaving office as New York’s mayor, through Giuliani
Partners, the Bracewell & Giuliani law partnership, and (after
2016) the giant law firm of Greenberg Traurig, along with Giuliani
Security & Safety and Giuliani Capital Advisers, the former mayor
has pulled in millions of dollars working on behalf of foreign clients,
including highly controversial ones. Among those deals, contracts, and
maneuvers, before and after Trump became president and hired his old friend
Rudy to serve as his personal attorney in 2018, Giuliani has been involved in a
far-flung series of deals: he’s been a paid lobbyist in Romania;
had a cybersecurity contract in Qatar; had deals in
Colombia, Argentina, and El Salvador; worked shadow diplomacy (with a
business angle) with Venezuela’s President Nicolas
Maduro; operated in Japan, Serbia, and Guatemala; and that only
begins to tell the story.
Consider Turkey,
starting in 2017. Back then, when Lieutenant General Michael Flynn was forced
to resign after just a few weeks as national security advisor, it turned out
that he had quietly (and without reporting it)
been working on behalf of Turkey’s autocratic government,
led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during the 2016 election campaign.
Erdogan was disturbed by the presence of a dissident, Fethullah Gulen, in the
United States. As an unregistered advocate for Turkey, Flynn lobbied
in 2016 to have the United States expel Gulen and send him back to Turkey.
Early the next year, Flynn was gone, but no fear, Rudy Giuliani promptly took
up the same cause. He began urging President Trump to extradite Gulen
to Turkey, where Erdogan was accusing him of having plotted an attempted coup
d’état. (In the end, Gulen wasn’t expelled.)
Given Giuliani’s
ability to mix policy with business, you won’t be surprised to learn that he
was also enmeshed in more lucrative efforts in Turkey. At around the same time,
he was lobbying Trump to endorse a prisoner swap involving one of his clients,
an Iranian-born Turkish gold trader named Reza Zarrab whom the FBI
had arrested in 2016 on charges of money laundering and trying to do an end run
around economic sanctions on Iran. According to the New York
Times, Zarrab had been working with Halkbank, a major Turkish bank with
close ties to Turkish Finance Minister Berat Albayrak who is also President
Erdogan’s son-in-law, to “funnel more than $10 billion in gold and cash to
Iran.”
At first blush, it
might seem odd for Giuliani to offer his services on behalf of an Iranian expat
accused of trying to break U.S. sanctions whose family, it turned out, had
close ties to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Curious, yes, but
for Giuliani, business is business and there were bucks to be made. That he
would use his connections to the Oval Office in an ultimately unsuccessful
appeal for his client is even odder, given that Giuliani is otherwise a
militant hardliner when it comes to demanding the overthrow of the Iranian
government.
Case in point: his
long-time affiliation with the People’s Jihadists, otherwise known as the
Mujaheddin-e-Khalq, or MEK. Like many of Giuliani’s escapades abroad, his
efforts with MEK were a money-making project. Along with John Bolton, the late
Senator John McCain, former National Security Advisor Jim Jones, and former
Attorney General Mike Mukasey, Giuliani has for years been affiliated with the
MEK, making perhaps a dozen appearances, mostly paid speeches, at its
conventions and rallies.
The MEK has almost
no support inside Iran, not only because it’s conducted a terror campaign
against that country’s top officials since 1981, but because it operated with
the backing of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein during and after the Iran-Iraq war
of the 1980s. It’s also widely regarded as a cult. Last
year, in the midst of his anti-Joe Biden skullduggery in Ukraine, in his 11th
appearance at a MEK confab, Giuliani traveled to Albania, of all places,
where the group has established a military and political base. There, he called
Trump “heroic” for “doing away with the reckless nuclear agreement and putting
[Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] on the terrorist list.”
In 2018, this
reporter attended one of the MEK’s large-scale events, held at a hotel in
midtown New York City. General Jim Jones, who became an ultra-hawk after being
ousted as President Obama’s national security advisor in 2010, spoke to the
gathering first, noting proudly that he is supposedly on a list of people the
government in Tehran plans to assassinate.
Rising to speak
after Jones, Giuliani seemed jealous. “I hope I say enough offensive things
that they’ll put me on that list to kill me,” he commented. Needless to say,
both Jones and Giuliani are still alive and kicking, and there’s no evidence
that either one is on any Iranian kill list. However, thanks in part to
Giuliani’s hardline, anti-Iran advice to the president, that country’s top
general, Qassem Soleimani, was indeed placed on a presidential kill list and
drone assassinated as 2020 began.
And Then There Was
Ukraine
It was, of course,
in connection with Ukraine that Giuliani’s freelancing came to the world’s
attention. In the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence’s impeachment report, his name is mentioned about 160 times.
He’s cited, first and foremost because, in that infamous “perfect” July 2019
phone call of his, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work
through him; because the former mayor was the primary organizer of the smear
campaign against the actual ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was
subsequently fired; and because it was he who, starting as early as May 2019,
masterminded a months-long political witch hunt against the Bidens, demanding
over and over that Ukraine carry out an ersatz investigation of the man the
president then expected to be his chief 2020 election opponent.
Numerous figures,
including Ambassador Bill Taylor, who succeeded Yovanovitch at the U.S. embassy
in Kyiv, would express dismay over Giuliani’s role as the “irregular” channel
for the Trump administration’s Ukraine policy — the “Giuliani factor,” as
Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker called it. The story of how all this led to the
president’s impeachment is too well known to be rehashed here.
The Joe
Biden/Hunter Biden part of the Ukraine story was straightforward enough in its
own way. Far more complicated and troubling was the adherence of the president
and Giuliani to a weird conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, used its
intelligence service to try to sway the 2016 election. According to various
official reports and in the opinion of virtually every expert who’s studied the
matter, it was Russia that intervened to boost Trump’s election campaign.
According to Trump and Giuliani, however, Ukraine meddled in 2016 on behalf of
Hillary Clinton and indeed, they argue, the actual Democratic National
Committee server somehow found its way to Kyiv, thanks to a computer security
firm called CrowdStrike, which Trump claimed was owned by a wealthy
Ukrainian. (It is not.)
Naturally enough,
this Trump-Giuliani theory was nonsense, but according to the Washington
Post, it had its origins — perhaps not surprisingly — in
propaganda generated in Moscow. The Post reported that Paul
Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Manafort’s partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, “played a
role in convincing Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016
U.S. presidential election, despite what both Mueller and the U.S. intelligence
community have concluded, and that it was actually Ukraine.”
According to Rick
Gates, Manafort’s deputy, the Ukraine conspiracy theory originated with his
boss who “parroted” the line from Kilimnik. And both Manafort and Kilimnik —
who was indicted by Mueller — had ties to Moscow operatives and
pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, while Kilimnik himself
was identified by Mueller and the FBI as part of Russia’s GRU.
As the Post concluded:
“So we have two men [Manafort and Flynn] who have been convicted of offenses
related to their Russia ties, have both lied to investigators about their
interactions with Russian interests, and who apparently played a significant
role in pushing a theory to Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the
2016 election. They instead pointed the finger at Russia’s nemesis, Ukraine,
and that has apparently stuck with Trump for more than three years.”
And it was that
line that would be spread eagerly by pro-Trump writers like the Hill’s
John Solomon. In a review of Solomon’s pieces, released this month,
the Hill’s editors analyzed 14 of his columns with titles like “As
Russian collusion fades, Ukraine plot to help Clinton emerges.” In doing so,
they found numerous troubling facts about Solomon, his sources, and his overall
reporting. As the Hill report put it:
“Giuliani has
indicated he was a key source of information for Solomon on Ukraine, telling
the New York Times in November 2019 that he turned over
information about the Bidens earlier in the year to Solomon. ‘I really turned
my stuff over to John Solomon,’ Giuliani said.
“The former New
York City mayor later told the New Yorker he encouraged
Solomon to highlight information on the Bidens and Yovanovitch, stating, ‘I
said, “John, let’s make this as prominent as possible,”’ adding, “‘I’ll go on
TV. You go on TV. You do columns.’”
Two colorful
characters who acted as Giuliani’s Ukraine go-betweens, Lev Parnas and Igor
Fruman, have been indicted on conspiracy charges and, according to Fortune,
Giuliani, too, could be indicted in that case. As CNN noted in
January, it’s nearly unheard of for a U.S. Attorney’s office — in this case the
one for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) — to end up indicting a former
U.S. attorney who led the same district. CNN added: “The SDNY community has
watched in disbelief as Giuliani continues to seek the spotlight even as the
investigation has unfolded and expanded into new fronts on a nearly weekly
basis. The impeachment inquiry has also unleashed new evidence regarding his
role performing shadow diplomacy on behalf of President Donald Trump as
recently as [mid-January].”
Indeed, Giuliani
is still at it. In concert with a collection of corrupt ex-prosecutors in
Ukraine and in his ongoing role as shadow secretary of state-cum-intelligence
chief, Giuliani is still gathering conspiracy-riddled information on the Bidens
in Kyiv — and Attorney General William Barr has obligingly created an
“intake process in the field” to absorb Giuliani’s work product straight into
the Department of Justice. One thing is guaranteed: “Secretary of State”
Giuliani will have a clear field in Kyiv, since Ambassador Taylor
was unceremoniously fired on January 1st of this year.
Bob Dreyfuss, an
investigative journalist and TomDispatch regular, is a contributing
editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling
Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic,
and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United
States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
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Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John
Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2020 Bob
Dreyfuss
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