Sergei Lavrov: Russia-Africa Relations

mid.ru  |  On the eve of my visits to several African countries, I would like to share my reflections on the prospects for Russia-Africa relations in the current geopolitical context with esteemed readers.

Today, African states play an increasingly important role in the global politics and economy, take an active part in solving key modern-day problems. Their solidarity voice sounds more and more harmoniously in world affairs.

Russia has consistently advocated Africa’s strengthened position in the multipolar architecture of a world order which should be based on the principles of the UN Charter and take the world’s cultural and civilizational diversity into account. In this context, we welcome the successful development of such integration structures as, for example, the African Union, East African Community, Southern African Development Community, Economic Community of Central African States, Economic Community of West African States and Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). We consider the launch of the African Continental Free Trade Area as an important step towards the true economic independence of the continent, its final liberation from any manifestations of discrimination and coercion.

Russia-Africa ties are based on the time-tested bonds of friendship and cooperation. Our country who has not stained itself with the bloody crimes of colonialism, has always sincerely supported Africans in their struggle for liberation from colonial oppression, provided practical and often gratuitous assistance to the peoples of the continent in the formation of their statehood, creation of the foundations of national economies, defense capabilities build up, and training of qualified personnel. Today we stand in solidarity with the African demands to complete the process of decolonization and support relevant initiatives on the UN platform.

The development of a comprehensive partnership with African countries remains among the top priorities of Russia's foreign policy. We are willing to contribute to its further growth - in line with the strategic decisions taken in late October 2019 at the first Russia-Africa Summit in Sochi.

At the same time, I would specially emphasize: our country does not impose anything on anyone or tells others how to live. We treat with great respect the sovereignty of the States of Africa, and their inalienable right to determine the path of their development for themselves. We are firmly committed to the "African solutions to African problems" principle. Such an approach to developing inter-State ties dramatically differs from the "master – slave" logic imposed by former metropolitan countries, which reproduces the obsolete colonial model.

We know that the African colleagues does not approve of the undisguised attempts of the US and their European satellites to gain the upper hand, and to impose a unipolar world order to the international community. We appreciate the considered African position as to the situation in and around Ukraine. Although unprecedented by its scale the pressure from beyond has not brought our friends to join the anti-Russian sanctions. Such an independent path deserves deep respect.

For sure, the current geopolitical situation requires certain adjustment of the mechanisms of our interaction: first of all, there is a question of ensuring seamless logistic and tuning the system of financial settlements to make them secure from the outer interference. In cooperation with its partners, Russia takes steps to enhance the use of national currencies and payment systems. We are working to gradually reduce the share of dollar and euro in mutual trade. We stand generally for establishing an efficient financial system that is proof against the potential impact from the unfriendly States.

The task of bringing Russian and African economic operators to each other’s markets and encouraging them to participate in large-scale infrastructure projects also comes to the fore. We assume that, as conducted, the second Africa - Russia summit will facilitate settling those and other tasks. Together with our African friends, we have got down to working through its content.

Food security issues are currently high on the international agenda. We are well aware of the importance of Russian supplies of socially important commodities, including food, to many countries around the world. We are mindful that these supplies play an important role in preserving social stability as well as in achieving the benchmarks of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

I would like to emphasize that the speculations of Western and Ukrainian propaganda that Russia allegedly "exports hunger" are completely unfounded. In fact, these are yet another attempt to shift the blame to others. It is well known that already during the time of "coronacrisis" the collective West, using the mechanism of currency issuance, "absorbed" commodity and food flows, worsening the situation in the developing countries dependent on food imports. That is when the grave situation on the food market began to take shape. Western sanctions imposed on Russia in recent months have further exacerbated negative trends.

It is essential that all our African friends understand that Russia will continue to fulfill in good faith its obligations under international contracts with regard to exports of food, fertilizers, energy and other goods vital for Africa. Russia is taking all measures to this end.

Moscow will continue to pursue a peace-loving foreign policy and play a balancing role in international affairs. We are in favor of broad interstate cooperation based on the provisions of the UN Charter, first of all the principle of the sovereign equality of states. We will continue to strengthen productive interaction with foreign partners who in their turn are willing to cooperate with us.

In this context, we assume that relations between Russia and Africa, whether political, humanitarian or trade and investment, are of an intrinsic value and do not depend on fluctuations in the international environment. It is good to see that our African friends have a similar understanding. Together we will be even stronger.

Get Your Spanish Right Young Fellas - "We" Fitna Do MAD Democracy-Building In Latin America

southcom.mil |  General Laura J. Richardson is a native of Northglenn, Colorado and a graduate of Metropolitan State University of Denver, Colorado. She was commissioned into the U.S. Army and trained as an Army Aviator. She holds a Master of Science in National Resource Strategy from the National Defense University’s Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy.

U.S. SOUTHCOM Commander:"This region is so rich in resources.. it's off the charts rich."

"60% of the world's lithium is in the region; you have heavy crude, you have light sweet crude, you have rare earth elements, you have the Amazon.." pic.twitter.com/33dQ6EXKAo

— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) July 20, 2022

General Richardson previously served as the Commanding General of U.S. Army North (Fifth Army) at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, which is the Army Service Component Command for U.S. Northern Command. Other assignments as a General Officer include Deputy Commanding General of U.S. Army Forces Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Chief of Army Legislative Liaison to the U.S. Congress in Washington D.C.; Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications at Headquarters International Security Assistance Force in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, Kabul, Afghanistan; Deputy Commanding General of the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas; and Commanding General of the U.S. Army Operational Test Command at Fort Hood, Texas.

Over her career General Richardson has commanded from the Company to Theater Army level. She commanded an Assault Helicopter Battalion in combat in the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), deploying her unit from Fort Campbell, Kentucky to Iraq 2003-04, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. She has also served in numerous staff assignments at a myriad of locations, including Military Aide to the Vice President at the White House in Washington, D.C., the Army’s Legislative Liaison to Congress at the U.S. Capitol, and at the Pentagon as an Army Campaign Planner.

General Richardson’s awards and decorations include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, Distinguished Service Medal (with Oak Leaf Cluster), Defense Superior Service Medal (with Oak Leaf Cluster), Legion of Merit (with three Oak Leaf Clusters), Bronze Star Medal, Meritorious Service Medal (with four Oak Leaf Clusters), and the Air Medal (with Numeral 7). She also has various unit, service and campaign awards, and numerous badges, including the Combat Action Badge, Parachutist Badge, Air Assault Badge, Senior Army Aviator Badge, Vice-Presidential Service Badge and the Army Staff Identification Badge.

She is married to Lieutenant General Jim Richardson and they have one daughter and a grandchild.

Meanwhile CIA Director Burns Says "Putin Entirely Too Healthy"

euronews  |  The director of the CIA has dismissed persistent rumours that Russian President Vladimir Putin is gravely ill, perhaps suffering from cancer, by saying Putin is "entirely too healthy." 

Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, William Burns stressed that this was "not a formal intelligence assessment," but given his expertise with Russia - Burns served as America's ambassador in Moscow from 2005 to 2008 - it will certainly give pause to those Putin opponents who hoped for signs that he could soon die from an undisclosed disease. 

"There's lots of rumours about President Putin's health and as far as we can tell he's entirely too healthy," adding "that's not a formal intelligence judgment."

Burns said that Putin's own views about Ukraine, and especially the will of the Ukrainian people to resist the Russian invasion, were based on "some profoundly flawed assumptions." 

"Putin really does believe his rhetoric, and I've heard him say this privately over the years, that Ukraine is not a real country. He believes that it's his entitlement, Russia's entitlement, to dominate Ukraine."

Giving an update on Russian casualty figures, the CIA director said that around 15,000 Russian troops had been killed so far, with roughly 45,000 wounded and described them as "quite significant" losses. 

"The Ukrainians have suffered as well, probably a little less than that, but significant casualties." 

Director Burns said that the Russian military has adapted after significant tactical failures at the start of the invasion and that one Ukrainian contact had told him "the dumb Russians are all dead", meaning the Russians on the ground who made battlefield errors had paid the ultimate price, and the Russian military had since learned to adapt. 

Russian forces had been concentrating on the eastern Donbas region over the last 90 days, said Burns, advancing between six and 10 miles in that time. 

"But it's come at great cost, and it's been very painful to both sides," he added.

 

 

Does Brandon Have The Covefefe Or Cancer?

 

whitehouse |  This morning, President Biden tested positive for COVID-19.  He is fully vaccinated and twice boosted and experiencing very mild symptoms.  He has begun taking Paxlovid. Consistent with CDC guidelines, he will isolate at the White House and will continue to carry out all of his duties fully during that time.  He has been in contact with members of the White House staff by phone this morning, and will participate in his planned meetings at the White House this morning via phone and Zoom from the residence. 

Consistent with White House protocol for positive COVID cases, which goes above and beyond CDC guidance, he will continue to work in isolation until he tests negative.  Once he tests negative, he will return to in-person work.

Out of an abundance of transparency, the White House will provide a daily update on the President’s status as he continues to carry out the full duties of the office while in isolation.

Per standard protocol for any positive case at the White House, the White House Medical Unit will inform all close contacts of the President during the day today, including any Members of Congress and any members of the press who interacted with the President during yesterday’s travel.  The President’s last previous test for COVID was Tuesday, when he had a negative test result.

The Range Of The HIMARS Will Determine The Geographic Scope Of The Special Military Operation

ria.novosti |   If Ukraine receives long-range weapons from Western countries, then the geographical tasks of the special operation of the Russian troops will change, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT and the Rossiya Segodnya media group.

"The President said very clearly, as you quoted him, - denazification, demilitarization in the sense that there are no threats to our security, military threats from the territory of Ukraine , this task remains," the minister stressed.

At the same time, he recalled that during the meeting of the negotiators in Istanbul at the end of March, the situation on this issue was significantly different.

"Now the geography is different. It is far from being only the DPR and LPR, it is also the Kherson region, the Zaporozhye region and a number of other territories, and this process continues, and continues consistently and persistently," the head of Russian diplomacy added.

He pointed out that as the West, in impotent rage or in a desire to make the situation as bad as possible, pumps more and more long-range weapons into Ukraine, for example, HIMARS, the geographical objectives of the special operation will move even further from the current line.

“Because we cannot allow the part of Ukraine that Zelensky will control or whoever replaces him to have weapons that will pose a direct threat to our territory and the territory of those republics that have declared their independence, those who want their future decide for yourself," he concluded.

Note to Washington: If you deliver HIMARS missile to Ukraine with an extended (300km instead of 80km) range, Russia will have to move further into Ukraine to secure its own and the Donbas republics borders.

This comes after calls in Ukraine to hit the bridge over the Kerch street that connects Crimea with Russia with extended range HIMARS missiles. The nearest point of the area which the Ukraine still holds is some 260 kilometer away from the bridge.

 

Declaration On Allied Interaction In The Heartland

indianpunchline |  If the metaphor of the “Great Game” can be applied to the Ukrainian crisis, with the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) at it core, it has begun causing reverberations across the entire Eurasian space. The great game lurking in the shade in the Caucasus and Central Asian regions in recent years is visibly accelerating. 

The edge of the game is above everything else the targeting of Russia and China by the United States. This unfolding game cannot be underestimated, as its outcome may impact the shaping of a new model of the world order. 

Starting with the Caspian Summit in Ashgabat on June 29, the inter-connected templates of the great game in the Caucasus began surfacing. The fact that the summit was scheduled at all despite the raging conflict in Ukraine — and that Russian President Vladimir Putin took time out to attend it — testified to the high importance of the event. 

Basically, the presidents of the 5 littoral states — Kazakhstan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Russia — synchronised their watches, based on the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea — the Constitution of the Caspian Sea — that was signed at their last summit in 2018. While doing so,  they considered the current international situation and geopolitical processes worldwide. 

Thus, one of the key points of the Final Communiqué of the Ashgabat Summit was the reiteration of a fundamental principle regarding the total exclusion of the armed forces of all extra-regional powers from  the Caspian Sea (which primarily meets the geopolitical interests of Russia and Iran.) The fact that the heads of the Caspian countries confirmed this in writing can be regarded as the main result of the Summit. Secondly, the leaders focused on the Caspian transport communications and agreed that the region could become a hub for the East-West and North-South corridors. 

The Caspian Summit was held just 5 weeks after Russian forces  gained control of Mariupol port city (May 21), which established its total supremacy over the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait in eastern Crimea. Kerch Strait has a strategic role in Russian policies, being the narrow maritime gateway (5 kms in length and 4.5 km. wide at the narrowest point) which links the Black Sea via the Sea of Azov to Russia’s major waterways including the Don and the Volga. 

In effect, it is yet to sink in that in the geopolitics of the entire Eurasian landmass, the liberation of Mariupol by Russian forces  was a pivotal event in the great game, since the Kerch Strait ensures maritime transit from the Black Sea all the way to Moscow and St Petersburg, not to mention the strategic maritime route between the Caspian Sea (via the Volga-Don Canal) to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

 

United Deep Waterway System of European Russia linking Sea of Azov and  Caspian Sea to Baltic Sea and the Northern Sea Route

Now, to get the “big picture” here, factor in that Volga River also links the Caspian Sea to the Baltic Sea as well as the Northern Sea Route (via the Volga–Baltic Waterway). Suffice to say, Russia has gained control of an integrated system of waterways, which connects the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea to the Baltic and the Northern Sea Route (which is a 4800 km long shipping lane that connects the Atlantic with the Pacific Ocean, passing along the Russian coasts of Siberia and the Far East.) 

No doubt, it is a stupendous consolidation of the so-called “heartland” — per Sir Halford Mackinder’s theory (1904) that whoever controls Eastern Europe controls the Heartland and controls the “world island.” 

Looking back, therefore, there is no question that the reunion of Crimea with the Russian Federation in 2014 was a major setback for the US and NATO. Putin caught Washington and its allies by total surprise. It complicated their objective to integrate Ukraine into the NATO.

Betcha $1.00 Russia Doesn't Suffer A Monkeypox Epidemic

• No documented community transmission until 6th May 2022 
• Outbreak mainly (96%) been in homosexual and bisexual men (without history of travel to endemic countries) 
• Cases, history of a sexually transmitted infection (STI) in the last year (54.2%), and 10 or more sexual partners in the last 3 months (31.8%) 
• Monkeypox is being transmitted in interconnected sexual networks that sustain STI transmission
  

nakedcapitalism  |  From IM Doc at the start of the week:

Today a gay patient in his 30s showed up in the office. He is healthy and very athletic. He is a “boy” to another older gay man.

They travel the world and are into serious gay fetish play. Spanking, bondage, discipline etc.

Patient has had fever and chills and horrible headache for 3 days. A reticulonodular rash has developed but no vesicles yet. They have been playing in clubs, parties, and orgies in 4 major cities the past 2 weeks.

There are so many things in that diagnostic differential but of course monkeypox is right up there.

And of course NO TESTING IS AVAILABLE. I called all levels of health department and even CDC today. The CDC is voice mail hell. Never talked to a human. It took several hours for a health dept human but by then the patient was already gone potentially spreading the wealth everywhere. They are acting as if I was talking about the Martian Flu. Again, we have known about this two months now, and it was like I was asking for the Holy Grail. Testing? “I need to call so and so……not sure…..but I’ll get right back to you……..”. And don’t get me started about their handling of the quarantine.

I have no idea if he is really a case. Multiple tests are pending. But not monkeypox. There is apparently no blood test for that. You have to swab the vesicles. But what if we do not have vesicles yet? Or if a patient may be past the vesicular stage? Crickets.

I would like to think there is a baseline competence. But that is too much an ask right now.

Again two months all over the news and this is what we have.

We are a completely unserious nation.

Remember that IM Doc is in a wealthy destination in Flyover. Apparently the local public health officials not only think that monkeypox is exclusively a gay STD, but also that they can’t have it locally because there are no gay men in their part of the world. Did they miss Brokeback Mountain? Or the private jet landing schedule?

On top of that, the local public health officials appear unable to use a search engine. In fact, there are monkeypox tests, but as IM Doc did correctly infer, they can’t be used before the vesicles stage, which is 2-4+ days after lesions start forming. Oh, and monkeypox patients are contagious as soon as they start having lesions and potentially also during the prodome period, before rash starts.

FUKUS Will Be Broke, Cold And Hungry This Winter - Just To Spite Russia

nakedcapitalism  |  The Military Summary channel has observed that once Russia secures Donbass, there are no major lines of defense to the west until the Dnieper. That may also explain the claim he made in his latest report (at 12:50), that Zelensky told the troops in Donass that the US told him if they lose the so-called Zaluzny defense line (Kramatorsk and Sloviansk are on this line) that it would be considered to be the total collapse of Ukraine forces and no more Western support would be forthcoming. I doubt that politically that the US can totally abandon Ukraine but they can certainly send only eyewash, and more importantly, stop funding the Ukraine government, which has become a money pit.

tThe remaining major troop concentration is around Kiev. The question is what Russia does next.

My belief is still that Russia will give priority to taking Odessa unless there are logistical considerations that argue against that. The Ukraine military is so close to collapse that Russian forces going to Odessa sooner rather than later is a real possibility. It’s the psychologically most important target for the Russian people, and economically more valuable than Kiev. The West would recognize that Russia getting control of what was Ukraine’s entire Black Sea coast as an enormous loss.

I suspect what Russia decides to do with or about Ukraine to the west of the Dnieper is event dependent. However, the West has decided to tie itself even more tightly to the Ukraine albatross. I had said to Lambert that it was not impossible for Russia to have decisively won (as in taken Odessa) by sometime in October, but even with the Western forces clearly unable to rout Russia, that Europe and the US would keep its citizens cold and hungry this winter just to spite Russia.

It’s already official. From TASS:

The EU will not withdraw the sanctions, imposed on Russia over the situation in Ukraine, if Moscow and Kiev sign peace treaty on Russia’s terms, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in his article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagzeitung, published Sunday.

“The part of the new reality is that the EU has also consolidated. It has reacted to the Russian aggression quite unanimously and imposed unprecedentedly harsh sanctions,” Scholz said. “We knew it from the start that we will potentially have to keep these sanctions for a long time.”

“And it is also clear that not a single one of these sanctions will be withdrawn in case of peace, dictated by Russia,” he continued. “There is no other path for an agreement with Ukraine for Russia than the one that could be accepted by the Ukrainians.”

It does not seem to occur to Sholtz that even Ukrainians who are not that keen about Russia would choose having Russian or Russian-lite rule over the West’s plan of fighting to the last Ukrainian. It also seems likely that Russia will hold referendums, again to legitimate its actions in the court of non-collective-West opinion. But of course those will be deemed to be bogus even if the most reputable independent observers say otherwise.

So this is not going to end well for the West. But you knew that already if you were paying attention.

According To Foreign Affairs - It's Time For NATO Soldiers To Volunteer To Die In Ukraine

foreignaffairs |  As the world looks on while Ukrainians fight for their lives and their freedom, many feel a burning desire to do more to support them. The problem is not a lack of forces or resources—it is fear of provoking a wider, perhaps nuclear, war with Russia. That fear is why U.S. President Joe Biden and other NATO leaders have consistently made clear that they will not intervene directly in the conflict, instead limiting their help to weapons, money, intelligence, and sanctions. As devastating as events in Ukraine are today, a nuclear war with Russia could kill more people than Ukraine’s entire population of roughly 44 million.

NATO leaders understand that they must walk this fine line between aiding Ukraine and risking war with Russia, but they have no theory of how to do it. The German and French governments hem and haw about whether to provide Ukraine with tanks. When Poland proposed a plan to transfer MiG-29 fighter aircraft to Ukraine, the United States refused. U.S. Defense Department spokesperson John Kirby warned that it “raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance” and therefore was not “tenable.” Yet the United States was already shipping Javelin antitank missiles and Stinger surface-to-air missiles. Soon after, it began sending other weapons, including M777 howitzers and now HIMARS multiple-rocket launchers. What is the difference? Those weapons do more to strengthen Ukraine’s combat power than MiG-29s, so the theory cannot be that Russia reacts more strongly to policies that do more harm to its interests. Why, then, missiles and artillery but not planes? The answer is that there is no answer. It is simply arbitrary.

NATO needs a strategy predicated on a theory of what it can do to aid Ukraine without widening the war to a direct conflict between it and Russia. Lessons from past crises point to the principles that should guide such a strategy. History shows that NATO would recklessly risk war only by crossing two Russian redlines: openly firing on Russian forces or deploying organized combat units under NATO-member flags into Ukraine. As long as NATO stops short of unmistakably crossing those lines, it can do more to help Ukraine at an acceptable risk of war.

Arms transfers and sanctions are both wholly consistent with this approach, so it is tempting to conclude that NATO members are doing all they can. They are not. They should build on current policies by dispensing with arbitrary limits on the types of conventional weapons they are providing Ukraine and expanding sanctions. Moreover, there is a third way to support Ukraine besides arms and sanctions—one that NATO is neglecting. It is time for NATO to encourage, organize, and equip its soldiers to volunteer to fight for Ukraine.

Adam Schiff's "Don't Tell Can't Ask" Amendment

amgreatness  |  Rep. Adam Schiff tucked an amendment into the National Defense Authorization Act that would prohibit any evidence collected in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act from being used in investigations. Why?

But if the military engaged in any civilian law enforcement activity, including surveillance or intelligence collection, before or during January 6, it would represent an egregious violation of the military’s code of conduct and federal law. Under the Posse Comitatus Act, military personnel cannot be used as local cops or investigators: “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, or the Space Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” (Certain exclusions, such as the president’s invocation of the Insurrection Act and any use of the National Guard, apply.)

The law is both vague and specific at the same time—which brings us to Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). Irrefutably the least trustworthy member of Congress, Schiff tucked an amendment into the massive National Defense Authorization Act that would prohibit any evidence collected in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act from being used in a number of proceedings, including criminal trials and congressional investigations.

The amendment’s timing, like everything else related to the infamous Russian collusion huckster, evidence forger, and nude photo seeker (to name a few of Schiff’s special talents), is highly suspect. Why would Schiff need to outlaw evidence collected unlawfully? Why is Schiff relying on this relatively arcane statute passed during Reconstruction that is rarely, if ever, enforced? 

“No one has ever been convicted of violating PCA to my knowledge,” Dr. Jeffrey Addicott, a 20-year member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and director of the Warrior Defense Project at St. Mary’s College, told American Greatness last week.

What is Adam Schiff, on behalf of the Biden regime and Trump foes in the U.S. military, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, trying to hide?

It is not a coincidence that Schiff introduced the amendment just a few months before a predicted Republican landslide in November, which will give control of Congress back to the GOP. House Minority Leader and presumptive Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is planning to conduct multiple investigations into the Biden regime next year including of the deadly and distrasrous withdrawal from Afghanistan; the Daily Caller reported this week that Republican lawmakers are “flooding the Biden administration with ‘hundreds of preservation notices’ asking that relevant documents be preserved.”

But one can easily see how Schiff’s amendment could be used as legislative cover to prevent production of any materials from Biden’s Department of Defense. After all, according to a 2018 congressional analysis of Posse Comitatus, “compliance [of the act] is ordinarily the result of military self-restraint.” So, too, is enforcement: “The act is a criminal statute under which there has been but a handful of known prosecutions,” the same report explained.

Nixon Had CIA Spooks Do Watergate Breakins - HRC Had Access To NSA Databases

theconservativetreehouse |  The FISA court identified and quantified tens-of-thousands of search queries of the NSA/FBI database using the FISA-702(16)(17) system. The database was repeatedly used by persons with contractor access who unlawfully searched and extracted the raw results without redacting the information and shared it with an unknown number of entities.

The outlined process certainly points toward a political spying and surveillance operation.  When the DOJ use of the IRS for political information on their opposition became problematic, the Obama administration needed another tool.  It was in 2012 when they switched to using the FBI databases for targeted search queries.

This information from Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz had the potential to be extremely explosive.  However, the absence of any follow-up reporting, or even debunking from the traditional guardians of the DC swamp is weird.  What’s going on?

I wrote about these suspicions in depth throughout 2017, 2018 and eventually summarized in 2019:

SEE HERE.

theconservativetreehouse | I am going to explain how the Intelligence Branch works: (1) to control every other branch of government; (2) how it functions as an entirely independent branch of government with no oversight; (3) how and why it was created to be independent from oversight; (4) what is the current mission of the IC Branch, and most importantly (5) who operates it.

The Intelligence Branch is an independent functioning branch of government, it is no longer a subsidiary set of agencies within the Executive Branch as most would think. To understand the Intelligence Branch, we need to drop the elementary school civics class lessons about three coequal branches of government and replace that outlook with the modern system that created itself.

The Intelligence Branch functions much like the State Dept, through a unique set of public-private partnerships that support it. Big Tech industry collaboration with intelligence operatives is part of that functioning, almost like an NGO. However, the process is much more important than most think. In this problematic perspective of a corrupt system of government, the process is the flaw – not the outcome.

There are people making decisions inside this little known, unregulated and out-of-control branch of government that impact every facet of our lives.

None of the people operating deep inside the Intelligence Branch were elected; and our elected representative House members genuinely do not know how the system works. I assert this position affirmatively because I have talked to House and Senate staffers, including the chiefs of staff for multiple House & Senate committee seats. They are not malicious people; however, they are genuinely clueless of things that happen outside their silo. That is part of the purpose of me explaining it, with examples, in full detail with sunlight.

Roe vs. Wade Didn't Usher In The Conservative Christian Movement, School Integration Did...,

msn  |  Sen. Josh Hawley predicts the overturning of Roe v. Wade will cause a 'major sorting out across the country' and allow the GOP to 'extend their strength in the Electoral College'

• Sen. Josh Hawley predicted that the overturning of Roe v. Wade will help Republicans in the long run.
• He argued the decision would polarize the country in a way that benefits Republicans in the Electoral College.
• He also said the alliance between big business and social conservatives that underpins the GOP is now "over."

On the heels of a 6-3 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and revoking the constitutionally protected right to an abortion in America, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri predicted a dramatic shift in the country's political fabric.

"I really do think that this is going to be a watershed moment in American politics," he said on a call with reporters on Friday. "The first decision — the 1973 Roe decision —  fundamentally reshaped American politics, it ushered in the rise of the Christian conservative movement, it led to the forming of what became the Reagan coalition in 1980."

Affirmative Action - Civil Rights - White Women

Time |   While people of color, individually and as groups, have been helped by affirmative action in the subsequent years, data and studies suggest women — white women in particular — have benefited disproportionately. According to one study, in 1995, 6 million women, the majority of whom were white, had jobs they wouldn’t have otherwise held but for affirmative action.

Another study shows that women made greater gains in employment at companies that do business with the federal government, which are therefore subject to federal affirmative-action requirements, than in other companies — with female employment rising 15.2% at federal contractors but only 2.2% elsewhere. And the women working for federal-contractor companies also held higher positions and were paid better.

Even in the private sector, the advancements of white women eclipse those of people of color. After IBM established its own affirmative-action program, the numbers of women in management positions more than tripled in less than 10 years. Data from subsequent years show that the number of executives of color at IBM also grew, but not nearly at the same rate.

wikipedia |  As chairman of the United States House Committee on Rules starting in 1954,^[5] Smith controlled the flow of legislation in the House. An opponent of racial integration, Smith used his power as chairman of the Rules Committee to keep much civil rights legislation from coming to a vote on the House floor.

He was a signatory to the 1956 Southern Manifesto that opposed the desegregation of public schools ordered by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). A friend described him as someone who "had a real feeling of kindness toward the black people he knew, but he did not respect the race."^[6]

When the Civil Rights Act of 1957 came before Smith's committee, Smith said, "The Southern people have never accepted the colored race as a race of people who had equal intelligence and education and social attainments as the whole people of the South."^[7] Others noted him as an apologist for slavery who used the Ancient Greeks and Romans in its defense.^[6]

Speaker Sam Rayburn tried to reduce his power in 1961, with only limited success.

Smith delayed passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. One of Rayburn's reforms was the "Twenty-One Day Rule" that required a bill to be sent to the floor within 21 days. Under pressure, Smith released the bill.

Two days before the vote, Smith offered an amendment to insert "sex" after the word "religion" as a protected class of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Congressional Record shows Smith made serious arguments, voicing concerns that white women would suffer greater discrimination without a protection for gender.^[8] Reformers, who knew Smith was hostile to civil rights for blacks, assumed that he was doing so to defeat the whole bill.^[9][10] In 1968, Leo Kanowitz wrote that, within the context of the anti-civil rights coalition making "every effort to block" the passage of Title VII, "it is abundantly clear that a principal motive in introducing ["sex"] was to prevent passage of the basic legislation being considered by Congress, rather than solicitude for women's employment rights."^[11] Kanowitz notes that Representative Edith Green, who was one of the few female legislators in the House at that time, held that view that legislation against sex discrimination in employment "would not have received one hundred votes," indicating that it would have been defeated handedly.

House Rules Committee clerk's record of markup session adding "sex" to bill.

In 1964, the burning national issue was civil rights for blacks. Activists argued that it was "the Negro's hour" and that adding women's rights to the bill could hurt its chance of being passed. However, opponents voted for the Smith amendment. The National Woman's Party (NWP) had used Smith to include sex as a protected category and so achieved their main goal.^[12]

The prohibition of sex discrimination was added on the floor by Smith. While Smith strongly opposed civil rights laws for blacks, he supported such laws for women. Smith's amendment passed by a vote of 168 to 133.^[10][13][14]

Smith expected that Republicans, who had included equal rights for women in their party's platform since 1940, would probably vote for the amendment. Some historians speculate that Smith, in addition to helping women, was trying to embarrass Northern Democrats, who opposed civil rights for women since labor unions opposed the clause.^[8]

It Would Have Gone Down Differently Had LBJ Been In Office From 1968-1972

Conservative Antipathy To American Public Education

therealnews |  So 64 years ago, Brown vs. Board of Education found that separate and unequal education systems for African Americans was unconstitutional. You argue that many Virginians initially actually accepted this decision, but a public campaign was launched to sway public opinion against it. Can you talk about that? You start off the first chapter of your book with this history, talking about how students and teachers in Virginia, led by students, weren’t organized to be part of Brown. And then the public response against it.

NANCY MACLEAN: Yeah, in the state of Virginia in 1951 there was an extraordinarily inspiring event that is really, in a way, a precursor to some of what we’re seeing now with the teachers strikes, and student and teacher mobilizations for good public education. In that strike in 1951 in Prince Edward County, Virginia, a young woman named Barbara Rose Johns joined with her favorite teacher, and the two of them worked together, kind of strategized for a strike, a student strike, to demand a better high school for the black children of Prince Edward County. At that point many of the students were taking classes in tar paper shacks. They did not have indoor plumbing, in many cases, while the white school was the extraordinary state of the art facility. And so the 200 students in this high school went out on a 100 percent solid students strike for a better high school.

It was an incredibly inspiring event with the support of over 90 percent of their parents, the local black clergy, and NAACP. And what they wanted was a chance to learn, to grow, to have the same opportunities as other children in their cohort and their era and their community. And they only went back to school when the NAACP agreed to take their course. I’m sorry, to take their case against discrimination to the courts. And at that point the students went back to school, and this case from Prince Edward County became one of the five eventually folded into Brown vs. Board of Education.

Fast forward a bit, and after the Brown decision was issued by the court, Virginia’s extremely conservative white elite began in 1955 and ’56 to do everything it could to undermine the success of that decision, and to deny black children and communities the constitutional rights that had just been recognized by the court. The way that they did this was through a program called massive resistance, and they led the program of massive resistance and goaded the wider white South onto it. And one element of that massive resistance was state-funded tuition grants, what we today would call vouchers, to enable white parents to pull their children from public schools to private schools that would be beyond the reach of the Federal Court’s ruling that segregation was unconstitutional.

So that’s actually how I got into this story, and it was a story that led me to the surprising discovery that essentially the entire American right, and particularly of interest, this free market fundamentalist right that was just beginning to get organized in those years, supported these tax-funded school vouchers. And even, in many cases, supported the school closures in Prince Edward County to prevent the Brown decision from being implemented.

So that was fascinating to me. And I discovered that Milton Friedman, the Chicago school free market economist, had issued his first manifesto for such vouchers in 1955 in the full knowledge of how it could be used by the white segregationists of the South. And then I also stumbled onto a report by this James McGill Buchanan that we were discussing earlier, who essentially tried to pull the segregationist chestnuts out of the fire in early 1959, when a massive mobilization of moderate white parents had come together to try to save the schools from these school closures, and the bleeding of these tax monies out to private schools. And after the courts had ruled against school closures of schools that were planning to desegregate in Virginia. So that’s how Buchanan got on my radar. But what I realized was that this was a much deeper story about the right’s radical antipathy to public education precisely because it was public.

And here I think it’s important to point out that when this was happening in the late 1950s, American schools were the envy of the developed world. We lead the world in the efficacy of our public education system. Our schools were a model for the wider world. And yet this right was attacking public education even then. And as important, teachers were not organized then. There were no recognized teachers unions. There was no collective bargaining structure for teachers in those years. The right was attacking public education as a monopoly, saying that it denied choice, all the kinds of things that they say now against public education, and they were doing this at a time when teachers had no collective power.

So the antipathy that we see on the right toward teachers unions today, toward public education, is not really because of any failing on their part. It is ideological. It is dogmatic. It is an antipathy to public education precisely because it is public.

why when you hit a bibtard with a rock a racetard is liable to squeal....,

politico |  In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero. 

In  Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.

Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening. 

In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes. 

“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.” 

But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990. 

The  Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.” 

One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans. 

Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus. 

Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit  unmarried African-Americans. The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated interracial dating, would be expelled.

The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax exemption. 

For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since  Green v. Connally, Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger, longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview, the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school community about what could happen with government interference” in the affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue that got us all involved.”

The Nixon Piece Concrete-Specifically Completed The Jigsaw Puzzle Of Our Current Predicament

chrishedges |  The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.

Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d'état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of “national security.” The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide.

There were three restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the permanent war economy that no longer exist. The first was the old liberal wing of the Democratic Party, led by politicians such as Senator George McGovern, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator J. William Fulbright, who wrote The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. The self-identified progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress today, from Barbara Lee, who was the single vote in the House and the Senate opposing a broad, open-ended authorization allowing the president to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else, to Ilhan Omar now dutifully line up to fund the latest proxy war. The second restraint was an independent media and academia, including journalists such as I.F Stone and Neil Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour Melman, author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War. Third, and perhaps most important, was an organized anti-war movement, led by religious leaders such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil and Dan Berrigan as well as groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They understood that unchecked militarism was a fatal disease.

LBJ Not Seeking A Second Term Was THE Defining Moment In Contemporary American Politics

newstatesman |  The tendency to treat political struggles and disagreements as forms of conspiracy is not only a polarising feature of the current moment, but also, paradoxically, a stabilising one. American political development over the past several decades has not merely been divided into opposing camps, around, for example, questions of race and gender equality, reproductive rights, or gun ownership; it has also been locked into a dynamic of partisan competition that encourages threat inflation, yielding important contributions from both parties to expansively coercive institutions, in the name of collective security. From the early Cold War, US partisanship revolved around which party was better prepared to fight communism, leading to covert actions, proxy wars and full-scale military invasions, culminating in a disastrous, immoral war in Vietnam. By the 1970s, this morphed into a question of which party was tougher on crime – a policy orientation that delivered a regime of mass incarceration unprecedented in world history. The attacks of 9/11 raised the question of which party would keep the American “homeland” safe from foreign predators, leading to two more decades of fruitless war in the Middle East and west Asia, and a deportation delirium that has swept up millions. What if the banal revelation at the end of the US wars on communism, crime and terror is simply that Americans are their own worst enemies?

The spectre of civil war might be better understood as a metaphor for waning confidence in the (liberal) US empire. The breakdown of the “rules-based international order” as a regulative ideal is part of an attrition of what Raymond Geuss has called the “sheltered internal space of… Homo liberalis” fashioned during the post-1945 golden age of American pluralism, rising affluence, increasing tolerance and expanding civil rights. The “Great Society”, the name that was given to the effort to institute social democratic liberalism inside the US, and the civil rights revolution that made the country a formal multi-racial democracy for the first time in its history, was its high watermark. With the war in Vietnam raging, and the protests of impoverished black residents and rising crime roiling American cities, however, President Lyndon Johnson concluded that the US now faced a “war within our own boundaries”, before abdicating instead of pursuing a second full term. Americans have been talking about civil war ever since.

Why did the NGO borg pivot to niche identities? Because the cause of substantive black equality is so much harder than declaring the gender binary defunct through acts of bureaucratic stipulation and language change

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) July 15, 2022

In these same years, a conception of politics as civil war by other means captured the imagination of the modern US right on its ascent to power. The politician and GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater laid down the gauntlet in the 1960s with a famous declaration that “extremism in defence of liberty is no vice”. Ronald Reagan was his successful heir, rising to the presidency while declaring himself a “state’s righter” against an overweening federal government. Shrinking the welfare state would go hand in hand with expanding the carceral state: “running up the battle flag”, as Reagan put it, against a feral, drug-abusing, black “underclass”. In 1994, forging the first GOP majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in four decades, Newt Gingrich made these inner war analogies explicit. Our politics is a “war [that] has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars”, he argued. “While we are lucky in this country that our civil wars are fought at the ballot box, not on the battlefield, nonetheless, it is a true civil war.” Trump’s “American carnage” was something of a belated echo.

The modern GOP has avidly fought Gingrich’s version of civil war at the ballot box and in the courts, leveraging counter-majoritarian institutions and using the individual states as laboratories for reactionary politics: advancing model legislation against public regulations; periodically mobbing local school boards; gerrymandering congressional districts; undermining public unions; funnelling federal spending on health, welfare and police via block grants to maximise state discretion; defending a right of foetal personhood that trumps a woman’s right to bodily autonomy; making it more difficult to register to vote and to cast a vote; stimulating white revanchism and moral outrage against expressions of public disorder and anti-normative behaviour at every opportunity.

In the process, they successfully captured the commanding heights of the judiciary, and have now successfully rolled back landmark, 50-year-old national civil rights gains: striking down federal voting-rights protections, ending a national right to abortion and overturning legal protections for criminal suspects in police custody. Winning two of the last five national presidential elections with a minority of the popular vote, and deploying the Senate filibuster during periods in the congressional minority, the GOP has pursued civil war by other means as a well-honed and effective strategy.

In the face of this challenge, it is difficult to judge the Democratic Party as anything more than a feckless, mildly recalcitrant partner. Over the past 40 years, it has alternatively sought to ratify, in gentler tones, GOP-driven projects and demands to lower corporate taxes, get tough on crime, end welfare as we know it, expand the ambit of deportation and sustain open-ended military authorisations. It has sought to placate vulnerable constituents with forms of symbolic recognition and modest regulatory action, often undergirded by weak executive authority and moral sentiment. It is the undeniably saner and more constructive of the two electoral options Americans are forced to choose between. But it also operates an effective pincer movement against alternatives further to the left that seek to transform skewed imbalances in the power of capital and labour, police authority and public safety. When constituents choose to fight, for example, against police abuse, or for labour rights, Democrats are missing in action, or else warning against unpopular opinions that will awaken the monster on the right. Forever counselling that we choose the lesser evil, they have instead grown habituated to living with the fox inside the chicken coop.

Nixon Is Remembered For Petty Scandal Not His Transformative Corporate Capture Of Government

nplusonemag |   Turning points in history require distance to understand their full complexity. For Watergate, the initial arrests of which mark their fiftieth anniversary this summer, there is yet no similar judgment on the magnitude of Woodward’s telling in The Origins of the New South. The historical insights of one era have been lost to the journalistic instincts of another. Whereas we understand how a growing country in the late 19th century could be brought together by open collusion of business interests, we give little attention today to how changing commercial opportunities during the Vietnam War might have torn apart the political accommodations that followed World War II.  Watergate’s place in this history today is but a hairline fracture to the New Deal Order; a symbol rather than a decisive moment. This is a serious misinterpretation that leaves unexamined the universal business consensus behind Richard Nixon in both 1968 and 1972.

Watergate was nothing less than the visible manifestation of a hypogeal realignment. A basic continuity in American trade and financial policy has persisted ever since the Nixon–Ford Administrations. In foreign policy, the historian Bruce Cummings faithfully describes the period after Watergate as “Nixonism without Nixon.” Most potently for a present reacquainted with the discomforts of inflation, planned recessions and stagnation remain the preferred tool among policy experts for regulating growth since our trust in price freezes and direct controls on wages and prices has never recovered from the Nixon scandal. The narrowing of our understanding of the import of the investigations that followed the 1972 campaign to the quirky personality and outrageous private pronouncements of Richard Nixon himself leaves these legacies unexplained.

The break-in’s fiftieth anniversary marks a new occasion for taking stock. Alongside a fiftieth anniversary edition of Bob Woodward (no relation) and Carl Bernstein’s canonical account of the investigation at the Washington Post, Washington journalists Garrett M. Graff and Jefferson Morley each published their own updated investigations into the presidential entanglements of the early 1970s this year. Yet to the disappointed eye of the trained historian there is no semblance of a synthesis on the horizon: the basic contours of interpretation remain those set during the spectacle itself, in the Senate hearings and their exclusions. If there is debate about the subject of these books, it will unfold on those vintage terms of 1973 and 1974—the pliability of patriotic fervor and its tendency towards fascism; the roles of fear and vanity in political leadership; the importance of the CIA and its exact role in the burglary and the cover-up. In its narrow focus on process—the motions by which the 37th President violated civil liberties, extorted donors, lied to Congress, and obstructed justice—Watergate’s prevailing interpretation also invites an easy analytic leap to Donald Trump. The neat portability of this historical analogy obscures not only the historical significance of the Nixon helmsmanship at a critical moment of capitalist transformation, but our own understanding of economic interests today and their relationship to modern party politics. Woodward and Bernstein give this reductive interpretation of the present their own authorial imprimatur: “Both Nixon and Trump have been willing prisoners of their compulsions, to dominate, and to gain and hold political power through virtually any means.”

Yet the burglaries were never the story. Control of the executive branch remained critical at a moment of global shift: détente, the end of the gold-dollar standard, the rise of government economic planning across the global south and its threat to corporate autonomy at home, and the challenge to the material basis of organized labor’s power in the old manufacturing industries of the US Northeast and Midwest. The money from Nixon’s election campaigns that paid for the Plumbers was, after all, donated by blue-chip corporations, intent on ensuring their man remained at the wheel to steer the nation through the moment’s economic dislocations and the ascendant social pressures to transform the American welfare state into something more capable of ensuring stability on popular terms. For all this, the Democrats’ media spectacle failed to alter the course of economic development or fundamentally challenge the emerging social order—a historic failure for which the ablutions of impeachment hearings have never quite absolved American democracy.

Finance Won The Darwinian Struggle On The Corporatist Evolutionary Threshing Floor

theatlantic |  Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world’s most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.

In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin, once the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as Treasury secretary under Clinton, and later became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee. Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury secretary under George W.Bush. John Snow, Paulson’s predecessor, left to become chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan Greenspan, after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant to Pimco, perhaps the biggest player in international bond markets.

These personal connections were multiplied many times over at the lower levels of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the ties between Washington and Wall Street. It has become something of a tradition for Goldman Sachs employees to go into public service after they leave the firm. The flow of Goldman alumni—including Jon Corzine, now the governor of New Jersey, along with Rubin and Paulson—not only placed people with Wall Street’s worldview in the halls of power; it also helped create an image of Goldman (inside the Beltway, at least) as an institution that was itself almost a form of public service.

Wall Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an air of power. Its executives truly believe that they control the levers that make the world go round. A civil servant from Washington invited into their conference rooms, even if just for a meeting, could be forgiven for falling under their sway. Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.

A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Alan Greenspan’s pronouncements in favor of unregulated financial markets are well known. Yet Greenspan was hardly alone. This is what Ben Bernanke, the man who succeeded him, said in 2006: “The management of market risk and credit risk has become increasingly sophisticated. … Banking organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to measure and manage risks.”

Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t. AIG’s Financial Products division, for instance, made $2.5 billion in pretax profits in 2005, largely by selling underpriced insurance on complex, poorly understood securities. Often described as “picking up nickels in front of a steamroller,” this strategy is profitable in ordinary years, and catastrophic in bad ones. As of last fall, AIG had outstanding insurance on more than $400 billion in securities. To date, the U.S. government, in an effort to rescue the company, has committed about $180 billion in investments and loans to cover losses that AIG’s sophisticated risk modeling had said were virtually impossible.

Wall Street’s seductive power extended even (or especially) to finance and economics professors, historically confined to the cramped offices of universities and the pursuit of Nobel Prizes. As mathematical finance became more and more essential to practical finance, professors increasingly took positions as consultants or partners at financial institutions. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, Nobel laureates both, were perhaps the most famous; they took board seats at the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1994, before the fund famously flamed out at the end of the decade. But many others beat similar paths. This migration gave the stamp of academic legitimacy (and the intimidating aura of intellectual rigor) to the burgeoning world of high finance.