Majorityrights News > Category: Geopolitics

Background Briefing recently interviewed Johathan Taplin about his book, Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermine Democracy, and his op-ed at The New York Times, Google’s Disturbing Influence Over Think Tanks.

Some highlights: The New America Foundation funded a group called The Open Markets Group, which was headed by a guy named Barry Lynn; and they were the most important group of scholars looking at monopoly in America. When the EU sanctioned Google with a 2.7 billion dollar fine, The Open Markets Group put out a statement applauding the EU and saying American anti-trust regulators should follow their example. Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google, who provides most of the financing for the New American Foundation, was incredibly angry about this and essentially told the leader of New America, Ann Marie Slaughter, that she had to get rid of the Open Markets Group. She then wrote Barry Lynn an email saying that they had to leave by September 1, and essentially fired them. This is exactly the kind of political pressure that Google plies all over the world in terms of not just academic institutions, but think tanks and others in order to keep the political narrative in their favor and not have people who oppose them.

They pay off academics and think tanks, getting them to write favorable articles (totaling a hundred from each) about Google and denying their monopoly. This is how Google curries influence by dominating the communications channels of Washington D.C.

Eric Schmidt, who is the biggest funder of the New American Foundation and who is one of the top executives at Google, was the number one visitor during the Obama administration. He was logged in more times visiting the White House than any other single person in the entire eight years of the administration.

Google’s regulatory capture: not only was Schmidt the most frequent White House visitor, more than any other CEO, by a long shot. But then Schmidt was able to put people from Google into the various agencies in the Obama administration. So, the person who ran the Patent Office was formerly the person who ran Google’s patent practice; the person who was the Assistant Attorney General for anti-trust in the Obama administration was the person who had been Google’s anti-trust attorney. Google had people high-up in The Federal Communications Agency. It was pernicious, it was everywhere…

One could say “Eric Schmidt is a liberal” and “he’s helping Hillary Clinton”, but literally the day after Clinton lost he was out there communicating with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the hopes of getting in bed with Trump. Not only did he extend invitations to them to come to his conference in Italy; but he also went to the White House and railed on about how Trump was going to be a great help to the economy with his new initiatives; so, its very clear that he has very little political conscience what-so-ever; he’s just going to go where the money is.

People from all sides are recognizing the Google has too much money and power to frame narratives, to shape and influence culture; its platforms such as Facebook and Youtube are not only the way 3/4 of Americans get real news, but also conduits of propaganda: e.g., Steve Bannon and the Mercers used market targeting in their campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton, used social media very skillfully with fake news, used Russian bots to amplify their effect. An interesting note along with that, the intelligence community observes that Eric Schmidt’s daughter worked for SCL, the company that controlled Cambridge Analytica - the company that Mercer owns and that Steve Bannon’s on the board of.

They couldn’t have done what they did if there hadn’t been these two open platforms, Facebook and Youtube, which you could totally manipulate; there was nobody at the control of these platforms to block fake news in favor of Trump. However, there is no pornography on Youtube, which means that Youtube has very sophisticated technology which could filter out fake news, propaganda, etc., if desired.

Google’s market capture is profound, its users provide content and profiles (which marketers value, of course) which competitors cannot match. Google is not just a virtual monopoly, not just one of the most wealthy companies, it is the richest company and perhaps the most powerful monopoly ever. More:

New York Times, “Is It Time to Break Up Google?”, 22 Aug 2017:

By Johathan Taplin

In just 10 years, the world’s five largest companies by market capitalization have all changed, save for one: Microsoft. Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup and Shell Oil are out and Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon and Facebook have taken their place.

They’re all tech companies, and each dominates its corner of the industry: Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising, Facebook (and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) owns 77 percent of mobile social traffic and Amazon has a 74 percent share in the e-book market. In classic economic terms, all three are monopolies.

We have been transported back to the early 20th century, when arguments about “the curse of bigness” were advanced by President Woodrow Wilson’s counselor, Louis Brandeis, before Wilson appointed him to the Supreme Court. Brandeis wanted to eliminate monopolies, because (in the words of his biographer Melvin Urofsky) “in a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power is dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people.” We need look no further than the conduct of the largest banks in the 2008 financial crisis or the role that Facebook and Google play in the “fake news” business to know that Brandeis was right.

While Brandeis generally opposed regulation — which, he worried, inevitably led to the corruption of the regulator — and instead advocated breaking up “bigness,” he made an exception for “natural” monopolies, like telephone, water and power companies and railroads, where it made sense to have one or a few companies in control of an industry.

Could it be that these companies — and Google in particular — have become natural monopolies by supplying an entire market’s demand for a service, at a price lower than what would be offered by two competing firms? And if so, is it time to regulate them like public utilities?

Consider a historical analogy: the early days of telecommunications.

In 1895 a photograph of the business district of a large city might have shown 20 phone wires attached to most buildings. Each wire was owned by a different phone company, and none of them worked with the others. Without network effects, the networks themselves were almost useless.

The solution was for a single company, American Telephone and Telegraph, to consolidate the industry by buying up all the small operators and creating a single network — a natural monopoly. The government permitted it, but then regulated this monopoly through the Federal Communications Commission.

AT&T (also known as the Bell System) had its rates regulated, and was required to spend a fixed percentage of its profits on research and development. In 1925 AT&T set up Bell Labs as a separate subsidiary with the mandate to develop the next generation of communications technology, but also to do basic research in physics and other sciences. Over the next 50 years, the basics of the digital age — the transistor, the microchip, the solar cell, the microwave, the laser, cellular telephony — all came out of Bell Labs, along with eight Nobel Prizes.

In a 1956 consent decree in which the Justice Department allowed AT&T to maintain its phone monopoly, the government extracted a huge concession: All past patents were licensed (to any American company) royalty-free, and all future patents were to be licensed for a small fee. These licenses led to the creation of Texas Instruments, Motorola, Fairchild Semiconductor and many other start-ups.

True, the internet never had the same problems of interoperability. And Google’s route to dominance is different from the Bell System’s. Nevertheless it still has all of the characteristics of a public utility.

We are going to have to decide fairly soon whether Google, Facebook and Amazon are the kinds of natural monopolies that need to be regulated, or whether we allow the status quo to continue, pretending that unfettered monoliths don’t inflict damage on our privacy and democracy.

It is impossible to deny that Facebook, Google and Amazon have stymied innovation on a broad scale. To begin with, the platforms of Google and Facebook are the point of access to all media for the majority of Americans. While profits at Google, Facebook and Amazon have soared, revenues in media businesses like newspaper publishing or the music business have, since 2001, fallen by 70 percent.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newspaper publishers lost over half their employees between 2001 and 2016. Billions of dollars have been reallocated from creators of content to owners of monopoly platforms. All content creators dependent on advertising must negotiate with Google or Facebook as aggregator, the sole lifeline between themselves and the vast internet cloud.

It’s not just newspapers that are hurting. In 2015 two Obama economic advisers, Peter Orszag and Jason Furman, published a paper arguing that the rise in “supernormal returns on capital” at firms with limited competition is leading to a rise in economic inequality. The M.I.T. economists Scott Stern and Jorge Guzman explained that in the presence of these giant firms, “it has become increasingly advantageous to be an incumbent, and less advantageous to be a new entrant.”

There are a few obvious regulations to start with. Monopoly is made by acquisition — Google buying AdMob and DoubleClick, Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp, Amazon buying, to name just a few, Audible, Twitch, Zappos and Alexa. At a minimum, these companies should not be allowed to acquire other major firms, like Spotify or Snapchat.

The second alternative is to regulate a company like Google as a public utility, requiring it to license out patents, for a nominal fee, for its search algorithms, advertising exchanges and other key innovations.

The third alternative is to remove the “safe harbor” clause in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows companies like Facebook and Google’s YouTube to free ride on the content produced by others. The reason there are 40,000 Islamic State videos on YouTube, many with ads that yield revenue for those who posted them, is that YouTube does not have to take responsibility for the content on its network. Facebook, Google and Twitter claim that policing their networks would be too onerous. But that’s preposterous: They already police their networks for pornography, and quite well.

Removing the safe harbor provision would also force social networks to pay for the content posted on their sites. A simple example: One million downloads of a song on iTunes would yield the performer and his record label about $900,000. One million streams of that same song on YouTube would earn them about $900.

I’m under no delusion that, with libertarian tech moguls like Peter Thiel in President Trump’s inner circle, antitrust regulation of the internet monopolies will be a priority. Ultimately we may have to wait four years, at which time the monopolies will be so dominant that the only remedy will be to break them up. Force Google to sell DoubleClick. Force Facebook to sell WhatsApp and Instagram.

Woodrow Wilson was right when he said in 1913, “If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government.” We ignore his words at our peril.

Sun “KIM’S COMING FOR EUROPE Japan’s PM warns North Korea will soon target EUROPE with nuke missiles as he hails Theresa May’s ‘smooth Brexit”, 31 Aug 2017:

Mrs May said Japan’s investment in Britain was “a powerful vote of confidence in the strength of the UK’s long-term economy” - The comments hint that the two countries could move quickly to strike a free-trade deal as soon as we quit the EU in 2019.

Japan and the UK pledged to work together to face down Kim Jong Un.

JAPAN’S prime minister today warned that North Korea could soon send nuclear missiles to Europe as he hailed Theresa May’s plan for a “smooth Brexit”.

Shinzo Abe called for the UK and other European countries must play a part in the fight against Kim Jong Un, saying the danger would not be confined to Asia.

Speaking ahead of a state banquet in honour of the PM, the leaders of Britain and Japan said they had discussed the threat from North Korea, which this week launched a missile over Japan in a new show of strength.

They agreed the threat is “unprecedented” and pledged to hold joint military exercises in a bid to show dictator Kim Jong Un that his crimes cannot go unpunished.

Mr Abe said: “That threat is felt not only by our country or Asia alone, it has become a global threat including Europe.

“North Korea will launch an ICBM [inter-continental ballistic missile] and the range would include almost the entire region of Europe.”

Mrs May demanded Kim’s ally China do more to restrain him, saying: “We need to ensure it’s not just words of condemnation, but that action is taken.”

READ MORE...

Michael Cohen, liaising with the Russian Federation.

Washington Post, “Top Trump Organization executive asked Putin aide for help on business deal”, 28 August, 2017:

A top executive from Donald Trump’s real estate company emailed Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s personal spokesman during the U.S. presidential campaign last year to ask for help advancing a stalled Trump Tower development project in Moscow, according to documents submitted to Congress on Monday.

The request came in a mid-January 2016 email from Michael Cohen, one of Trump’s closest business advisers, who asked longtime Putin lieutenant Dmitry Peskov for assistance in reviving a deal that Cohen suggested was languishing.

“Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower-Moscow project in Moscow City,” Cohen wrote to Peskov, according to a person familiar with the email. “Without getting into lengthy specifics, the communication between our two sides has stalled.

“As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon,” Cohen wrote.

Click to page showing Trump-Russian links

Cohen’s email marks the most direct outreach documented by a top Trump aide to a similarly senior member of Putin’s government.

Cohen told congressional investigators in a statement Monday that he did not recall receiving a response from Peskov or having further contact with Russian government officials about the project. The email, addressed to Peskov, appeared to have been sent to a general Kremlin press account.

The note adds to the list of contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials that have been a focus of multiple congressional inquiries as well as an investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III exploring Russian interference in the 2016 election. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the Kremlin intervened to help elect Trump.

Cohen’s email to Peskov provides an example of a Trump business official directly seeking Kremlin assistance in advancing Trump’s business interests.

Cohen told congressional investigators that the deal was envisioned as a licensing project, in which Trump would have been paid for the use of his name by a Moscow-based developer called I.C. Expert Investment Co.

Cohen said that he discussed the deal three times with Trump and that Trump signed a letter of intent with the company on Oct. 28, 2015. He said the Trump company began to solicit designs from architects and discuss financing.

However, he said that the project was abandoned “for business reasons” when government permission was not secured and that the matter was “not related in any way to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.”

Cohen’s request to Peskov came as Trump was distinguishing himself on the campaign trail with warm rhetoric about Putin.

Cohen said in his statement to Congress that he wrote the email at the recommendation of Felix Sater, a Russian American businessman who was serving as a broker on the deal.

In the statement, obtained by The Washington Post, Cohen said Sater suggested the outreach because a massive Trump development in Moscow would require Russian government approval.

READ MORE...

When considering that the population of North Korea has virtually the same genetics as South Korea (demographic “twins” - not all that different from Japan, either) an interesting case study is presented for the influences of social construction, as the contrasts of North Korean and South Korean society are vast despite indiscernible genetic differences. Nevertheless, let us not lose site of the obviously important evidence and factors of biological determinism either: the high i.q. of North Korea (like the south) can account for their capability to rapidly develop full nuclear capacity on their own.

DT, “North Korea shows Guam attack in new video as it warns of ‘merciless revenge’ against US over drills”, 22 Aug 2017:

North Korea has unveiled a propaganda video of its threat to fire missiles near the US territory of Guam as it threatened the US with “merciless revenge” for ignoring Pyongyang’s warnings over annual military drills with South Korea.

Displaying images of Donald Trump staring at a cemetery filled with crosses and Vice-President Mike Pence enveloped by flames, the nearly 4 minute video showed the island of Guam being targeted by intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

“Americans should live with their eyes and ears wide open. They will be tormented day and night by the Hwasong-12 rockets without knowing when they will be launched,” the caption reads, according to Yonhap. “They will be in jitters.”

“(We) just wish US policymakers should seriously think twice ahead of an obvious outcome (of a war),” another caption says, showing a photo of US Defence Secretary James Mattis. “Time is not on the US side.”

With the exercises continuing on Tuesday,  North Korea upped its rhetoric, saying it would be a misjudgment for the US to think that Pyongyang would “sit comfortably without doing anything,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said, citing an unidentified military spokesman.

The ongoing drills and visits of US military officials to South Korea create the circumstances for a “mock war” on the Korean peninsula, KCNA said.

The comments represent a more belligerent tone after a war of words between the US and North Korea appeared to have subsided.

Mr Trump praised North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last week for waiting to launch missiles over Japan into waters near Guam, after previously warning of “fire and fury” if he continued to threaten the American homeland.

Tensions increased in July after North Korea conducted two intercontinental ballistic missile tests. Mr Trump has said military force is an option to prevent Mr Kim from gaining an ICBM that could deliver a nuclear weapon to the US.

Missile launch shown in new North Korean propaganda video, which threatens the US generally and Guam specifically.

North Korea targets Guam in propaganda video

Unperturbed street scene in Seoul, South Korea.

“Garden of Morning Calm”, South Korea.

Robert Kuttner revealed his conversation with Bannon: “To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything.” ... “Ethno-nationalism—it’s losers. It’s a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more.” ...“These guys are a collection of clowns,” he added.

Democracy Now, “American Prospect Editor Robert Kuttner on His Extraordinary Interview with Steve Bannon”, 22 Aug 2017:

Democracy Now, Juan Gonzalez: Bannon’s departure came after a series of meetings last week with billionaire funder Robert Mercer who funds Breitbart and funded Trump’s campaign. Bannon met with Mercer on Wednesday and Trump met with Mercer on Thursday. Bannon departed the White house the following day.

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now: Just before he was ousted, Steve Bannon granted an extraordinary interview to Bob Kuttner, co-editor and co-editor of the liberal magazine the American Prospect

American Prospect Editor Robert Kuttner on His Extraordinary Interview with Steve Bannon:

Robert Kuttner: “Every once in a while you get lucky as a journalist, and he never bothered to put the conversation off the record. As you know in journalism if a high public official or anybody calls you and doesn’t bother to say that its off the record it’s the default is that its on the record ...and he proceeded to say a bunch of staggeringly incuatious things; on the assumption because I had also criticized America’s China policy as having been dominated by corporations at the expense of workers; and because that sort of overlapped his critique that we were sort of old buddies and soul-mates…and he spent to first few minutes of the interview kind of ingratiating himself with me, telling me what a thrill it was to meet me after all these years, he’s been reading my stuff…

It was one part naivete (which is an odd word to use for Bannon), it was one part bravado, it was one part recklessness, and it was weird, because if he knew that he he was on thin ice, what’s he doing reaching out to me? Can you imagine Bannon trotting into a meeting of the National Security Council saying, “you’ll never guess who agrees with my analysis, Bob Kuttner’ ...that would push him over the edge and in fact it kind of did.”

... (the best explanation is that) he was on the ropes and he was negotiating with General Kelley and Trump to postpone his departure to after labor day and he thought he could rally his forces on let’s get tough with China….

....if he’d already been fired it would have been completely bizarre that he would have called me and said, ‘hey won’t you come to the White house?’ because that would have been complete fantasy land.

...this is not the world’s most stable person; on the other hand he has a very strategic analysis of how you connect ‘neo-Nazi’, ‘White supremacy’ nationalism to economic nationalism. What’s interesting here is that he’s been able to sell his boss, Trump, on the get in bed with the White supremacist parts of nationalism but he hasn’t been able to sell the rest of the administration on economic nationalism because of course they’re in bed with the corporations; its complete fake populism:

The most recent example of that is the idea that he would use crony capitalism, hiring these private armies and masquerade as isolationism. Who does he think pays for those private armies? It’s the US taxpayer and expensive as the pentagon is, these private armies are even more wasteful and more expensive; so he’s all over the map on a lot of stuff.

But on one thing he’s quite coherent and that came through in the interview: he thinks the winning strategy is, you connect racist nationalism, anti-immigrant nationalism, to economic nationalism.

The other interesting question going forward is whether Bannon is going to play a kitchen cabinet role, where he talks to Trump in the middle of the night, coaches him; Trump is famous for these midnight phone calls.

Or is he going to join a Breitbart who right now is kicking the president in the shins as kind of a sell-out.

....and in that interview with The Weekly Standard he was kind of on both sides of the question, he said that the Trump presidency that we fought for was over….so, even Bannon can’t have that both ways, especially because Trump hates being upstaged by his advisors. That’s what did in Bannon, its what did in Scaramucci.”

Amy Goodman: Talk about the other issues he addressed with you, for example, Charlottesville. ...with Charlottesville his brand of White supremacy, neo-Nazi, the whole issue of The Confederacy, he suddenly comes front and center…and this is when he’s talking to you ...in the midst of this catastrophic news conference on Friday…in fact what was the timing and Trump saying both sides were responsible on Saturday…

Kuttner: He called me about 20 minutes before the press conference started and its pretty clear that his finger prints were all over Trump’s strategy of doubling down on the racism.. there was a kind of a war between the people like Jared and Ivanka, who wanted him to back off, General Kelley, and Bannon who wanted him to double down, which makes the timing of the phone call even weirder.

Goodman: He said to you ‘the Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ‘em; I want them to talk about racism every day; if the left is focused on race and identity and we go with economics we can crush the Democrats.’

Kuttner: Yeah, and I pushed him very hard on that in the interview. I said look, even if we agree that our China policy is basically selling-out to a combination of Bejing’s economic nationalism and our own corporations who are happy to take the subsidies, happy to take the slave labor in China and then re-export back to the United States, that really does hurt American industry, hurts American workers; but, I said, even if we agree on that, why do you have to get in bed with neo Nazis on order to take a harder line on China on behalf of American workers? And that’s when he kind of drew this picture of a grand strategy where you connect the economic nationalism and the racism to the idea you box in the Democrats by forcing the Democrats to defend people of color.

You know, I was listening before we went on, Amy, to the fellow who was talking about pulling down the statue of Columbus, because it all started with Columbus. If that’s the strategy that the left adopts, it almost plays into Bannon’s hands…  I think if you took a vote and asked people do you agree that we ought to pull down the statue of Columbus because the racism and the anti-native peoples all started with Columbus, most people would side with Bannon; so he’s very astutely playing off of liberals and decent people against this idea that the White working class is beleaguered; he does this much more deftly than his boss does. You get the feeling that Trump’s default setting is now just pure racism, pure jingoism, nativism and even getting in bed with Neo-Nazis; whereas Bannon at least (((has a grand theory))) about what he’s doing.

There are two ways to look at what’s going to happen going forward, either with Bannon out Trump becomes even more unhinged, left to his own devices, or he decides to pull back and make more (((an alliance with the mainstream - laughs - far right, otherwise known as the Republican Party.)))

I think we’ll get an indication of this in Phoenix, if he does pardon Sheriff Arpaio, that’s doubling down on the Bannon recipe, because Bannon was the buy who really coached him, using Breitbart, about the genius of going after Mexicans as rapists, and going after anti-immigrants and building a wall, that was pure Bannon.

Juan Gonzalez: I would like to ask you about his remarks on North Korea?

Kuttner: He made it very clear that he completely disagreed with his boss and on this point Bannon was actually right, he said unless someone can explain to me how ten million South Koreans in greater Seoul are not going to be killed by conventional weapons in the first thirty minutes, this talk of war is not sensible, and of course that directly contradicted what his boss had said just days earlier.

Bannon’s view is that because the Chinese are not really helping us out with the North Koreans, they just go through the motions of that, it’s the logic of mutually assured destruction that prevents Kim from launching a nuclear attack on The United States, even Kim is not that crazy. And because that’s the reality, says Bannon, and I agree with him on this one point, we could be taking a much harder line on China. But State Department, Defense Department, U.S. Trade Rep. are all backing off on China on the belief that China is going to pull its chestnuts out of the fire with regard to North Korea.

That’s a shrewd analysis, this is not a stupid man. But its a hundred degrees opposite to what his boss says.

And iterestingly, both Trump and Kim have pulled back in the last few days and that’s also classic Trump, ‘oh, that was yesterday, never mind.’

Goodman: In fact, after pulling back on North Korea, Trump said he was going to bomb Venezuela.

Kuttner: Yeah, and what’s really interesting about bombing Venezuela is that he’s given a free pass dictators from the Philippines to Turkey to Hungary, to Moscow… but somehow..

Goodman: to Saudi Arabia

Kuttner: to Saudi Arabia, we could go on, but somehow he picks Venezuela to go after, so if you have a left wing regime violating human rights you go after them, if you have right wing dictatorships going after human rights, god bless them.

Goodman: So, he talked about the White supremacists at Charlottesville as clowns; can you talk about his evaluation of what took place there?

Kuttner: I think that was another effort in his part, completely insincere to ingratiate himself with a progressive journalist..  ...it’s like the guy who’ll say anything to get a woman to got o bed with him, so he starts improvising, ‘oh, they’re clowns, we don’t take them seriously, we’ve got to crack down on them’ ...you don’t think he believes that for ten seconds and his base knows he doesn’t believe that for ten seconds.

....it’s very encouraging to see the upsurge of activism on the anti-racist side. What is tricky is that most Americans who are not well defined left or well defined far right...

Goodman: Interestingly, the White nationalists have just cancelled a bunch of rallies after getting trounced in these organizing counter measures from Boston on…

Kuttner: I was very proud of Boston. We had upwards of 40,000 demonstrators.

The far right people who called for this rally were revealed to be the pitifully small group that they really are. And that’s what we need to show them up for.

....at the end of the day, there are not that many Neo-Nazis.

Part of the way that the way this is playing out makes it look as if a lot of American sympathize with neo-Nazis, they don’t. And they need to be contained, and the fact that decent Americans all over the spectrum are willing to come out, demonstrate, contain them, that’s fantastic.

Related article: Bannon’s disregard of ethno-nationalism is “leaked.”

        ...purposefully leaked or not, apparently kissing-up to YKW

Robert Kuttner revealed his conversation with Bannon: “To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything.” ... “Ethno-nationalism—it’s losers. It’s a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more.” ...“These guys are a collection of clowns,” he added.

American Prospect, “Steve Bannon, Unrepentant”, by Robert Kuttner, 16 Aug 2017:

Trump’s embattled strategist phones me, unbidden, to opine on China, Korea, and his enemies in the administration.

You might think from recent press accounts that Steve Bannon is on the ropes and therefore behaving prudently. In the aftermath of events in Charlottesville, he is widely blamed for his boss’s continuing indulgence of white supremacists. Allies of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster hold Bannon responsible for a campaign by Breitbart News, which Bannon once led, to vilify the security chief. Trump’s defense of Bannon, at his Tuesday press conference, was tepid.

But Bannon was in high spirits when he phoned me Tuesday afternoon to discuss the politics of taking a harder line with China, and minced no words describing his efforts to neutralize his rivals at the Departments of Defense, State, and Treasury. “They’re wetting themselves,” he said, proceeding to detail how he would oust some of his opponents at State and Defense.

Needless to say, I was a little stunned to get an email from Bannon’s assistant midday Tuesday, just as all hell was breaking loose once again about Charlottesville, saying that Bannon wished to meet with me.

Needless to say, I was a little stunned to get an email from Bannon’s assistant midday Tuesday, just as all hell was breaking loose once again about Charlottesville, saying that Bannon wished to meet with me. I’d just published a column on how China was profiting from the U.S.-North Korea nuclear brinkmanship, and it included some choice words about Bannon’s boss.

“In Kim, Trump has met his match,” I wrote. “The risk of two arrogant fools blundering into a nuclear exchange is more serious than at any time since October 1962.” Maybe Bannon wanted to scream at me?

I told the assistant that I was on vacation, but I would be happy to speak by phone. Bannon promptly called.

Far from dressing me down for comparing Trump to Kim, he began, “It’s a great honor to finally track you down. I’ve followed your writing for years and I think you and I are in the same boat when it comes to China.  You absolutely nailed it.”

“We’re at economic war with China,” he added. “It’s in all their literature. They’re not shy about saying what they’re doing. One of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it’s gonna be them if we go down this path. On Korea, they’re just tapping us along. It’s just a sideshow.”

Bannon said he might consider a deal in which China got North Korea to freeze its nuclear buildup with verifiable inspections and the United States removed its troops from the peninsula, but such a deal seemed remote. Given that China is not likely to do much more on North Korea, and that the logic of mutually assured destruction was its own source of restraint, Bannon saw no reason not to proceed with tough trade sanctions against China.

Contrary to Trump’s threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.” Bannon went on to describe his battle inside the administration to take a harder line on China trade, and not to fall into a trap of wishful thinking in which complaints against China’s trade practices now had to take a backseat to the hope that China, as honest broker, would help restrain Kim.

“To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”

Bannon’s plan of attack includes: a complaint under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act against Chinese coercion of technology transfers from American corporations doing business there, and follow-up complaints against steel and aluminum dumping. “We’re going to run the tables on these guys. We’ve come to the conclusion that they’re in an economic war and they’re crushing us.”

But what about his internal adversaries, at the departments of State and Defense, who think the United States can enlist Beijing’s aid on the North Korean standoff, and at Treasury and the National Economic Council who don’t want to mess with the trading system?

“Oh, they’re wetting themselves,” he said, explaining that the Section 301 complaint, which was put on hold when the war of threats with North Korea broke out, was shelved only temporarily, and will be revived in three weeks. As for other cabinet departments, Bannon has big plans to marginalize their influence. “I’m changing out people at East Asian Defense; I’m getting hawks in. I’m getting Susan Thornton [acting head of East Asian and Pacific Affairs] out at State.”

But can Bannon really win that fight internally?

“That’s a fight I fight every day here,” he said. “We’re still fighting. There’s Treasury and [National Economic Council chair] Gary Cohn and Goldman Sachs lobbying.” “We gotta do this. The president’s default position is to do it, but the apparatus is going crazy. Don’t get me wrong. It’s like, every day.”

Bannon explained that his strategy is to battle the trade doves inside the administration while building an outside coalition of trade hawks that includes left as well as right. Hence the phone call to me.

There are a couple of things that are startling about this premise. First, to the extent that most of the opponents of Bannon’s China trade strategy are other Trump administration officials, it’s not clear how reaching out to the left helps him. If anything, it gives his adversaries ammunition to characterize Bannon as unreliable or disloyal.

More puzzling is the fact that Bannon would phone a writer and editor of a progressive publication (the cover lines on whose first two issues after Trump’s election were “Resisting Trump” and “Containing Trump”) and assume that a possible convergence of views on China trade might somehow paper over the political and moral chasm on white nationalism.

The question of whether the phone call was on or off the record never came up. This is also puzzling, since Steve Bannon is not exactly Bambi when it comes to dealing with the press. He’s probably the most media-savvy person in America. I asked Bannon about the connection between his program of economic nationalism and the ugly white nationalism epitomized by the racist violence in Charlottesville and Trump’s reluctance to condemn it. Bannon, after all, was the architect of the strategy of using Breitbart to heat up white nationalism and then rely on the radical right as Trump’s base.

He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in cultivating it: “Ethno-nationalism—it’s losers. It’s a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more.”

“These guys are a collection of clowns,” he added.

From his lips to Trump’s ear. “The Democrats,” he said, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

I had never before spoken with Bannon. I came away from the conversation with a sense both of his savvy and his recklessness. The waters around him are rising, but he is going about his business of infighting, and attempting to cultivate improbable outside allies, to promote his China strategy. His enemies will do what they do.

Either the reports of the threats to Bannon’s job are grossly exaggerated and leaked by his rivals, or he has decided not to change his routine and to go down fighting. Given Trump’s impulsivity, neither Bannon nor Trump really has any idea from day to day whether Bannon is staying or going. He has survived earlier threats. So what the hell, damn the torpedoes. The conversation ended with Bannon inviting me to the White House after Labor Day to continue the discussion of China and trade. We’ll see if he’s still there.

Venezuela, a back door against sanctions and a foothold in the Caribbean in the face of America once again: Venezuela’s Maduro selling oil to Putin.

Venezuela tried to build their economy the wrong way, by selling oil and other natural resources rather than developing the infrastructure by which they might process the oil and other resources in order to sustain and advance their economy.

Venezuela is one of the pariah states along with Belarus and North Korea that the Russian Federation likes to play games with; the RF is now swooping-in for a foothold, for what could be increasing geopolitical control over the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.

Breitbart, “Report: Moscow Takes Control of Venezuelan Oil Assets amid Socialist Meltdown”, 14 Aug 2017:

Venezuela needs cash, and Russia has it. Venezuela has oil, and Russia wants it. According to a special report at Reuters, the socialist meltdown in Venezuela is likely to end with Moscow controlling a good deal of that tormented country’s most valuable asset: its oil fields.

According to Reuters, Russia’s giant state-owned oil company Rosneft has been holding secret negotiations with its opposite number in Venezuela, PDVSA, to purchase “ownership interests in up to nine of Venezuela’s most productive petroleum projects.”

The number of Venezuela projects Russia would have substantial or ownership stakes in would jump from five to 14 if these deals go through. The new acquisitions would include projects in some of Venezuela’s richest oil and natural gas fields.

The article goes on to note that Rosneft has already floated a billion dollars to PDVSA for promised future oil shipments, and the regime of socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro used Russian money to avoid defaulting on bonds at least twice. Russia announced one of these seemingly risky advance payments immediately after the United States announced a new round of sanctions against Maduro at the beginning of August.

Barron’s explains that Russia’s advance payments for Venezuelan crude are essentially a stealth strategy for buying the oil fields themselves. Russia writes huge checks for barrels of oil, Venezuela is unable to deliver the product or pay the debt, and Russia swaps the debt for equity in the oil projects.

New York Times, “Is Putin Getting What He Wanted With Trump?” 10 June 2017:

In the Senate last week, Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, asked the fired F.B.I. director James Comey if he had “any doubt that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 elections.” Mr. Comey responded with a single word: “None.”

Indeed, he went on to tell the American public that the Russians “did it with purpose, they did it with sophistication, they did it with overwhelming technical efforts.” And he warned: “They will be back,” adding, “they are coming after America.”

Vodka shots in the Kremlin, right? Not exactly.

Doubtless Vladimir Putin continues to derive satisfaction from having assaulted American democracy and embarrassed Hillary Clinton. But the Russian president had one paramount priority: to lift Western sanctions.

As MR has noted, the parasite “federation” that is the Russian Federation, works with rogue nations such as North Korea and Belarus. The Times article adds -

[ibid]

According to one estimate, a quarter of Russia’s global weapons exports in 2015 were to rogue Venezuela, in transactions predominantly effected via loans. Last week, Moscow cut $1 billion from projected state budget revenues.

The Express -

Express, “TRUMP’S NEW THREAT? US President urged to act as Venezuela forges closer links to RUSSIA”, 8 April 2017:

DONALD Trump could be forced to step in to save Venezuela amid fears the failing South American country could be about to turn to Russia or Iran for support.

The Trump administration in Washington is already dealing with a string of crises across the globe - including deadly conflict in Iraq and Syria and the fight against Islamic extremism.

But improving relations with Russia, who today claimed its relationship with the US was in “tatters”, could prove to be the government’s biggest challenge to date.

Russia has not been a threat to America since the Cold War era - yet Moscow could now have found a sneaky way to stir up new tensions with the US without even lifting a finger.

Venezuela has always enjoyed warm relations with Russia, purchasing more than £3.2billion worth of arms from the former Soviet state since 2005.

And in 2009, Russia approved a whopping £1.6bn loan for the Latin American nation as it struggled with an inflation crisis that has left thousands of people struggling to afford food.

However, experts in the US have now warned there could be more to the ‘friendship’ than meets the eye.

Speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee, a US top military official warned Venezuela could be a “destabilising” factor in Latin America - claiming a “regional response” could be needed following the country’s growing humanitarian crisis.

But he also warned the relationships fostered by Venezuela could pose a real threat to the US in the future.

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At a press conference at Trump Tower in New York to declare his loyalty to the Republican Party, Donald Trump was flanked by guests from Indonesia, and made a big show of announcing one very special guest, Setya Novanto.

“He wants it big, and overlooking the sacred Tanah-Lot.”

Trump deal in Indonesia imposes Islamic compradors over ethno-nationalism and his hotel and business upon what is sacred to Indonesian ethno-nationalists.

FOUR CORNERS, 3 July 2017:

While running for President, Trump was courting the Indonesians over lucrative resort deals in Bali and Java; and lobbying Indonesian MP’s to expedite a toll road that would benefit his development.

The secretive dealings raise new questions about Trump’s corporate interests abroad and about the unholy business and political alliances he’s forged.

While at home, Trump rails against Muslim extremists, in the world’s largest Muslim country, his allies are cozying-up to Islamists who are posing a direct threat the country’s ethno-nationalism.

Donald Trump has entered into two huge deals in Indonesia, and the first of them will land here, on the southern edge of Bali almost on top of one of the Island’s most sacred religious sites, Tanah Lot - an hour or two away from the main tourist areas, the Balanese have fought for decades to protect this temple and its surrounds.

“Not much is known of Trump’s plans but what is known that he wants it big, the biggest in Bali he says,  he wants a tower on an island that bans them, and he wants it over looking the sacred Tahan Lot.”

“It’s one of the island-wide temples that are sacred to the Balanese, its the land, pana, and lot, which means ocean.”

Donald Trump makes deal with Islamic compradors in Indonesia, imposing them against the native stasis of Left ethno-nationalism, and his hotel and business upon what is sacred to native ethno-nationalists.

80,000 Indonesians were killed by Suharto on that beach in 1965, the victims were accused of being Leftists….

When President Suharto exited power in 1998, he took three decades of loot with him, estimated at 30 billion dollars.

Trump’s business partner in the deal, Harry Tanno, was a close friend of Suharto.

Tanno welcomes Trump and Sharia

Hizb-ut-Tahrir’s man is on screen talking after 37 minute mark - his appearance was the biggest thing in the whole video:

“Is it your ambition to impose Sharia Law in Indonesia?” “It is not our ambition, but our duty.”

An abstract kind of wild quid pro quo white America has going on there.

All imagery and story, THE COMPANY HE KEEPS: FOUR CORNERS, 3 July 2017.

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