Washington’s political crisis over the Comey firing: A harbinger of revolutionary uph

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/05/12/pers-m12.html


Washington’s political crisis over the Comey firing: A harbinger of revolutionary upheavals

12 May 2017

The political crisis gripping Washington has far-reaching consequences and implications for both the United States and the entire world. The state apparatus in the center of world capitalism, the main imperialist power, is visibly breaking apart, torn by conflicts and mutual recriminations.

With the furor over the firing of FBI Director James Comey, a crisis that has been developing since the inauguration of Trump nearly four months ago is reaching a new stage.

The immediate issue at stake in the conflict within the ruling class is clear. During the election and in its aftermath, powerful sections of the military-intelligence apparatus that backed the campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton have been concerned that the Trump administration would not aggressively pursue the war in Syria and the campaign against Russia. Hence the charges of Russian “hacking” of the election and of Trump’s “softness” toward Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s cruise missile attack on Syria in early April was greeted with universal support from Democrats and the media, but this did not last long. There were immediate demands that Trump back up this act of aggression with a “comprehensive strategy” to overthrow Assad.

There are, however, deeper issues involved. While the Trump administration speaks for and personifies the American financial aristocracy, it also poses significant problems for the ruling class. More than any other presidency in American history, it is rife with corruption and nepotism. The billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star has imported into the White House the personal interests of his entire extended family, which sees possession of the executive office as an opportunity for moneymaking on a grand scale.

For the ruling class, the persona of the occupant of the White House is not an insignificant matter. Trump is seen as erratic and uncontrollable, unwilling or incapable of subordinating his actions and tweets to the demands of the “deep state.” In the weeks leading up to his ouster, Comey is said to have called Trump “crazy” (in relation to Trump's tweets about the Obama administration ordering him to be wiretapped during the election campaign) and “outside the realm of the normal.”

This has serious consequences for the interests of the American ruling class. Internationally, the US is increasingly seen as a “rogue state,” undermining the global domination of American imperialism. Domestically, the Trump administration is broadly despised. While he was able to exploit social anger during the election campaign, he nevertheless took office having lost the popular vote, with approval numbers close to or exceeding all-time lows for new presidents.

The New York Times, which has served as a mouthpiece for those within the intelligence establishment opposed to the Trump administration, expressed the concerns of sections of the ruling class in its “open letter” to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein published Thursday. The newspaper called on Rosenstein to act quickly to dispel the “dark cloud of suspicion surrounding this president” by appointing a “special counsel who is independent of both the [Justice] department and the White House.”

The Times appealed to Rosenstein to exercise his “reputation for probity” and recognize Trump’s “contempt for ethical standards of past presidents.” Trump has “mixed his business interests with his public responsibilities. He has boasted that conflict-of-interest laws do not apply to him as president. And from the moment he took office, Mr. Trump has shown a despot’s willingness to invent his own version of the truth and to weaponize the federal government to confirm that version…”

Contrary to the narrative of the Times, however, Trump is not an aberration, an inexplicable departure from the high “ethical standards” of past presidents. As the WSWS has noted previously, he is not some interloper in the Garden of Eden of American democracy. He is the product and culmination of a deeper, more fundamental crisis that has been decades in the making.

What “ethical standards” is the Times referring to? The past half-century has been a story of political decay and degeneration. Is the Times referring to Lyndon Johnson, who lied to justify the expansion of the war in Vietnam, which resulted in the deaths of millions of people? Or Nixon, brought down by the Watergate scandal and revelations of criminal activities within the United States and around the world? Or Carter, who initiated the policy of financing Islamic fundamentalist organizations in Afghanistan to stoke a proxy war against the Soviet Union?

Perhaps the Times is referring to Ronald Reagan, the former actor turned politician, who led a government throughout the 1980s characterized by criminality, including the Iran-Contra crisis of 1986, which arose out of the administration’s violation of laws passed by Congress. Or George W. Bush, whose administration, coming to power through the theft of an election, manufactured its own “version of the truth”—aided and abetted by the New York Times itself—to justify an illegal war of aggression against Iraq, and which seized on the events of September 11 to eviscerate the constitution under the banner of the “war on terror.”

Then there is Obama, marketed by the media and the Times as the candidate of “change,” who spent eight years overseeing a historic transfer of wealth to the rich and will go down in history as the president who institutionalized the assassination of US citizens without due process. Since leaving office, he is doing his best to “mix his business interests with his public responsibilities” by leveraging his status as a former president into a multimillion-dollar payout.

The protracted decay and unspeakable corruption of American politics is an expression of broader social processes: a quarter-century of unending war, four decades of escalating social inequality, an economic system that is rooted in parasitism and dependent on the inflation of one financial bubble after the next.

Underlying everything is a deep popular alienation, artificially suppressed by the trade unions and what passes for the political “left.”

It is necessary to stress again the deeply reactionary character of the Democratic Party’s campaign against Trump. The Democrats are terrified, more than anything else, of the prospect that mass disaffection will break out in an uncontrolled fashion. They speak for sections of the corporate-financial elite and the US intelligence agencies, allied with privileged upper-middle class layers to which they appeal on the basis of identity politics.

Their orientation is not to working class opposition to the right-wing policies of the Trump administration, but to the CIA, FBI and military, with unstated agendas worked out behind the scenes, in the hopes that perhaps some sort of rearrangement can be organized to create a more stable government, and particularly one that will pursue aggression against Russia.

For the Democratic Party, the anti-Russia hysteria is not only about foreign policy and the interests of American imperialism. It is also about finding some way to contain, redirect and if necessary repress domestic opposition. Hence, the unending denunciations of Russia for engaging in “information warfare,” for stoking up social unrest, as if the collapse in the vote for Clinton in key manufacturing states, or the decline in voter turnout in urban centers, was due to Russian propaganda and not the right-wing policies of the Democratic Party itself.

Whatever medicine the Democrats try to administer, they are dealing with a terminal disease, of which they themselves are a symptom. The very attempt to find a cure will only deepen the crisis. The crisis in Washington could itself become the catalyst for an economic meltdown. Trump, seeking to maintain his position, could respond by launching a new war. And if a change in regime were organized, any new government would be no less committed to war abroad and social counterrevolution within the United States.

The political crisis has all the characteristics of a prerevolutionary situation. The ruling class is not able to rule in the old way, and the working class is not able to live in the old way.

For the working class, the critical question is to intervene politically with an independent program and organization. Within the framework of the Democratic and Republican parties and the bourgeois political system, there cannot be any settlement of a democratic character or one that offers a way out of the catastrophe into which capitalism is leading the population of the entire world.

“The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historical events,” the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote in the preface to his History of the Russian Revolution. It is this direct interference that is now above all else required. The working class cannot remain on the sidelines, allowing policy to be set by the cabal of ruling class representatives. It must advance its own solution—the reorganization of economic life, in the United States and internationally, on the basis of equality, peace and socialism.

Joseph Kishore

Copyright © 1998-2017 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/05/12/come-m12.html


Mounting contradictions as Trump, aides defend firing of FBI director

By Patrick Martin

12 May 2017

The Trump White House plunged deeper into political crisis Thursday, as President Trump and top aides gave conflicting accounts of how and why Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, and FBI and Justice Department officials flatly contradicted the White House version of events.

As the Trump administration scrambled to defend the decision to fire Comey, Democrats have seized on the firing to intensify their campaign against Trump, focused not on his right-wing social and economic policies, but on criticism for being insufficiently aggressive against Russia.

The focal point of the day was Trump’s interview with Lester Holt of NBC News, conducted at the White House and excerpted in news broadcasts all afternoon and evening. Trump vilified Comey, calling him a “showboat” and a “grandstander,” strange language coming from the former host of “Celebrity Apprentice.”

Most remarkable was Trump’s description of what he claimed were three separate conversations with Comey in which the FBI director reassured Trump that he personally was not a target of the FBI investigation into possible collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian intelligence agencies.

Trump claimed the first such conversation took place over dinner at the White House, which he said Comey requested to press his case to be retained as FBI director in the new administration. (The FBI director serves a fixed ten-year term, but can be removed at will by the president.)

During this meeting, Trump says he asked whether he was personally a target of the FBI investigation into alleged Russian intervention into the 2016 US elections, and Comey assured him he was not. FBI officials, speaking with the press anonymously, have denied this account, pointing out that to pass such information on to someone involved in an investigation would violate longstanding protocols.

The exchange as described by Trump is extraordinary: the president as employer was interviewing Comey as a potential employee, asking to be assured that Comey as policeman was not targeting him for investigation. The implied quid pro quo is obvious: you don’t target me, and I agree to keep you on as FBI director.

The allegations of Russian intervention into the 2016 US elections are both completely unsubstantiated and politically motivated. But Trump’s efforts to influence or suppress the FBI investigation could become a basis for impeachment charges.

In his interview with NBC, Trump rolled out a new account of how and when he decided to fire Comey, the third or fourth version of the events leading up to Tuesday’s surprise announcement that the FBI director had been removed.

Contradicting the accounts given by his own spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump said he had already decided to fire Comey when he met Monday with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and asked for their recommendation. Regardless of how they responded, “I was going to fire Comey,” he insisted.

Huckabee Sanders has already given conflicting accounts of the events leading up to Comey’s firing, after Rosenstein reportedly threatened to resign if the White House did not withdraw its first version, which placed the entire responsibility for firing Comey on Rosenstein and suggested that Trump had merely acted on the recommendations of Justice Department officials.

On Thursday morning, the acting director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, appeared before a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee alongside other top US intelligence officials, for a long-scheduled review of supposed threats to US national security. He was asked about the claims by White House aides that Comey had lost the confidence of rank-and-file FBI agents, and he flatly denied it. He praised Comey effusively and pledged the FBI would continue its investigation into alleged Russian intervention in the US elections.

The Senate hearing became an occasion for Democratic and Republican Senators to denounce Russia. Prompted by Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the committee, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats warned of “Russian interference” in the US and throughout Europe. “The Russians have upped their game using social media and other opportunities,” which he called a “great threat to our democratic process.”

On Wednesday, Rosenstein and Sessions were scheduled to interview four possible choices to head the FBI as interim director—in addition to McCabe. All four are career FBI officials, although one is currently serving as head of counterintelligence for the Director of National Intelligence. An interim director does not require Senate confirmation, but would be limited to six months’ service, pending the selection and confirmation of a permanent replacement for Comey.

Hearings on the nomination of a new FBI director would undoubtedly become the occasion for further demands from Senate Democrats for the naming of an independent counsel to oversee the investigation into the charges of Russian interference in the US elections. Warner, who had previously opposed such a move, declared that the Senate should refuse to confirm a new FBI director until Trump agreed to the appointment of an independent counsel.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for financial information on Trump and some of his supporters relating to the Russian investigation. The request was co-signed by Warner and the committee’s Republican chairman, Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina. And the two have invited Comey to appear at a secret session of the committee next Tuesday, in what would be his first occasion to address his firing before an official body, albeit behind closed doors.

In another breach in the wall of all-out support for Trump by the congressional Republican leadership, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell acceded Thursday to the demand by Democrats that Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein be invited to brief all 100 senators on the Comey firing at a closed-door session next week. Rosenstein has not yet responded to the invitation.

Another top Republican, House Government Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, called for the Justice Department’s inspector general to examine the circumstances surrounding Trump’s decision to fire Comey, sending a letter to Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is already investigating Comey’s handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.

Copyright © 1998-2017 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-stocks-idUSKBN1881JN

https://news.google.com/


Wall Street falls as losses in bank stocks drag

BUSINESS NEWS | Fri May 12, 2017 | 2:24pm EDT

Wall Street falls as losses in bank stocks drag

http://s1.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20170512&t=2&i=1184359416&w=780&fh=&fw=&ll=&pl=&sq=&r=LYNXMPED4B122
Traders gather at the post where Snap Inc. is traded, just before the opening bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., May 11, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

By Yashaswini Swamynathan

U.S. stocks edged lower on Friday and were on track to book losses for the week as weak economic data weighed on financial shares.

A risk-off sentiment gripped Wall Street this week after President Donald Trump unexpectedly fired his FBI chief, the potential fallout of which could delay Trump's pro-growth policy.

Gold prices rose by the most in one month, while the dollar fell for the second straight day.

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Soft retail sales and monthly inflation data also affected the dollar, raising questions about whether the Federal Reserve could maintain its hawkish outlook for interest rates this year.

Federal funds futures implied a 49 percent chance of two more rate hikes this year, compared with 54 percent shortly before the release of the data, CME Group's FedWatch tool showed.

Banks, which typically benefit from higher interest rates, were the biggest drags on all three major indexes. The S&P 500 financial sector .SPSY fell 0.7 percent, while industrials .SPLRCI were off 0.8 percent.

Wall Street has been trading in a tight range in the past two weeks, with the S&P 500 not moving more than 0.4 percent in either direction and VIX, the fear gauge, hovering near two-decade lows.

"It is notable that no matter what happens on the news, that might have otherwise resulted in some fear factor, has not really affected the market," said Thomas Martin, senior portfolio manager at Globalt Investments.

"I think complacency is a big part of that."

At 12:31 p.m. ET (1631 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI was down 34.15 points, or 0.16 percent, at 20,885.27, the S&P 500 .SPX was down 4.96 points, or 0.20 percent, at 2,389.48 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC was up 2.42 points, or 0.04 percent, at 6,118.38.

ALSO IN BUSINESS NEWS

U.S., China agree to first trade steps under 100-day plan
U.S. retail sales rise broadly; consumer prices rebound
Retail stocks were under pressure yet again after J.C. Penney (JCP.N) reported lower-than-expected comparable store sales, sending its shares down nearly 10 percent.

GE (GE.N) was the top percentage loser on the Dow, down 2.7 percent after Deutsche Bank downgraded its shares to "sell" from "hold".

Declining issues outnumbered advancers on the NYSE by 1,563 to 1,254. On the Nasdaq, 1,581 issues fell and 1,159 advanced.

The S&P 500 index showed 26 52-week highs and nine lows, while the Nasdaq recorded 70 highs and 52 lows.

(Reporting by Yashaswini Swamynathan in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva)

© 2017 Reuters. All Rights Reserved. Site Feedback Corrections Advertising Guidelines Cookies Terms of Use Privacy Policy

[Jimmie Higgins]

I'm curious about people's opinion about this. I was kind of a jerk to my coworkers who were outraged by this move by Trump haha. But I was dismissive more due to their liberal catastrophism about, and exclusive focus on all-things Trump. They think that the FBI might be a savior that could reveal the glen-beck-like grand Trump-Putin conspiracy and that the dismissal meant that we'll never find out the truth about 9/11... err, I mean the 2016 election.

But I would like to hear what people think the significance of this is in terms of infighting among or splits in the US political establishment.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[ckaihatsu]

Trump picks Al Capone of Vote Rigging


GregPalast.com


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Trump picks Al Capone of Vote Rigging
To investigate Federal Voter Fraud

by Greg Palast for Alternet

Kris Kobach is the GOP mastermind behind a secretive system that purged 1.1 million Americans from the voter rolls.

https://gallery.mailchimp.com/33e4ec877eed6a43863a4a92e/images/ca34419d-abec-4e48-af9c-22f56b318eaf.png
Kobach screams at Greg Palast while eating ice cream

Kris Kobach was spooning down vanilla ice cream when I showed him the thick pages of evidence documenting his detailed plan to rig the presidential election of 2016.

The Secretary of State of Kansas, sucking up carbs at a Republican Party Fundraiser, recognized the documents – and yelled at me, "YOU'RE A LIAR!" and ran for it while still trying to wolf down the last spoonful.

But documents don't lie.

That was 2015 (yes, the ballot heist started way back). Today this same man on the run, Kris Kobach, is now Donald Trump’s choice to head the new “Voter Integrity Commission.”

It’s like appointing Al Capone to investigate The Mob.

How did Kobach mess with the 2016 vote? Let me count the ways—as I have in three years of hunting down Kobach’s ballot-box gaming for Rolling Stone and Al Jazeera.

Just two of Kobach’s vote-bending tricks undoubtedly won Michigan for Trump and contributed to his “wins” in Ohio, North Carolina and Arizona.

First, Interstate Crosscheck.

Kobach is the GOP mastermind behind this secretive system which purged 1.1 million Americans from the voter rolls.

When Trump said, “This election’s rigged,” the press ignored the second part of his statement: “People are voting many, many times.” Trump cited three million votes illegally cast.

The White House said Trump got this information from Kobach. Indeed, it specifically comes from a list of 7 million names—or, as Kobach describes it, a list of 3.5 million “potential double voters.” How did Kobach find these three million double voters?

He matched their names, first and last. And that’s it.

Here’s an unedited screen-shot of a segment of his list:

https://gallery.mailchimp.com/33e4ec877eed6a43863a4a92e/images/2dd73a7a-4686-4711-8ba9-9ae190f556e1.jpg (http://gregpalast.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=33e4ec877eed6a43863a4a92e&id=92b558f8f7&e=9dee5d6b03)

James Edward Harris Jr. of Richmond, Virginia, is supposed to be the same voters as James R. Harris (no Jr.) of Indianapolis, Indiana. Really? Note that not one middle name matches.

And here’s the ugly part. Both James Harris (in fact, hundreds of them) are subject to getting scrubbed off the voter rolls.

And these are Kobach’s lists, tens of thousands of names I showed Kobach, falsely accused of the crime of double voting.

And that’s why Kobach was stunned and almost dropped his vanilla, because he and his GOP colleagues kept the lists of the accused strictly confidential. (The first of the confidential lists was obtained by our investigative photojournalist, Zach D. Roberts, through legal methods—though howling voting officials want them back.)

In all, about 1.1 million voters on that list have been scrubbed already—and they don’t know it. They show up to vote and they’re name has simply vanished. Or, the voter is marked “inactive.” “Crosscheck” is not marked on the victim voter’s record. It’s a stealth hit.

And it’s deadly. Doubtless, Crosscheck delivered Michigan to Trump who supposedly “won” the state by 10,700 votes. The Secretary of State’s office proudly told me that they were “very aggressive” in removing listed voters before the 2016 election. Kobach, who created the lists for his fellow GOP officials, tagged a whopping 417,147 in Michigan as potential double voters.

And not just any voters. Mark Swedlund, a database expert who advises companies such as Amazon and eBay on how not to mis-match customers was “flabbergasted” to discover in his team’s technical analysis, that the list was so racially biased that fully one in six registered African-Americans were tagged in the Crosscheck states that include the swing states of Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona and more.

The effect goes way beyond the Trump v. Clinton count. I spoke to several of the targeted voters on the list in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional district where the Democratic candidate fell just short of the margin to win a special election. Especially hard hit in the northern Atlanta suburbs were Korean-Americans, like Mr. Sung Park, who found he was tagged as voting in two states in 2012 simply because he had a name that is as common in Korea as James Brown.

And Kobach, in fact, tagged 288 men in Georgia named James Brown on his Crosscheck blacklist.

As Crosscheck spreads—and it was just signed into law in New Hampshire in the last days of a lame-duck Republican governorship—it will undoubtedly poison the count in the fight for Congress in 2018.

And that’s why Trump needs Kobach on his “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity (http://gregpalast.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=33e4ec877eed6a43863a4a92e&id=d385a9f050&e=9dee5d6b03)”: To spread Crosscheck with an official federal endorsement and, likely, Congressional legislation.

And if Crosscheck isn’t enough to scare you, Kobach is also pushing Trump to require voters to prove their citizenship.

At first blush, it seems right to demand people prove they are US citizens to vote. But here’s the rub: We are not Red China and don’t carry citizenship cards. Resident Aliens holding Green Cards have, indeed are required to have, Social security cards and drivers’ licenses, if they drive or work.

The readiest proof of citizenship is a passport. And what is the color of the typical passport holder, their income—and the color of their vote?

The other form of proof, besides naturalization papers, is your original birth certificate.

And there’s the rub: the poor, minorities and especially new young voters do not have easy access to a passport or their birth certificates. Kobach took his citizenship proof requirement out for a test drive in Kansas. The result: 36,000 young voters were barred from voting… that is, until a federal judge, citing the National Voter Registration Act, told Kobach that unless he could produce even one alien among those 36,000, she was ordering him to let them vote.

Kobach’s response: a private meeting with Trump at Trump Tower where he proposed changing the Act.

All of this to eliminate a crime which does not occur. Besides Trump’s claims of alien voters swimming the Rio Grande to vote for Hillary, I have found only two verified cases of votes cast by aliens in the US in the last decade. (One, an Austrian who confessed to voting for Jeb Bush in Florida.)

Don’t laugh. The threat of “alien voters” – long a staple claim by Kobach on his appearances on Fox TV – will be the Kobach Commission’s hammer to smash the National Voter Registration Act’s protections. Based on the numbers from Kansas, and its overwhelming effect on young – read “Democratic” – voters, this shift alone could swing the election of 2018.

Indeed, Kobach’s Crosscheck con together with his “alien” voter attack, could mean the choice of the electorate in 2020 may already be trumped.


Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie (http://gregpalast.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=33e4ec877eed6a43863a4a92e&id=03b8d36756&e=9dee5d6b03).

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http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/05/15/pers-m15.html


Trump’s firing of Comey: A breakdown of constitutional government

15 May 2017

The political crisis brought to a head by President Donald Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey is rapidly intensifying, with calls for Trump’s impeachment and threats by the White House to go even further in attacking democratic rights and constitutional norms.

Trump provoked further recriminations from within the political establishment with his tweeted threat Friday, warning that Comey should be careful what he says to the media and to Congress about his private discussions with the president, because tapes of their conversations might exist. This led to immediate responses from both Democrats and Republicans that any tapes could be subpoenaed as part of the ongoing investigations into the conduct of the 2016 elections.

There were unconfirmed press reports of an impending purge within the White House staff, with Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Stephen Bannon and press spokesman Sean Spicer all potential targets. As more than one media commentator noted, this would leave the White House staff under the direction of “Ivanka and Jared,” the president’s daughter and son-in-law, making even more extreme the personalist and quasi-dictatorial character of the Trump administration.

Trump fueled such speculation by suggesting that daily White House press briefings might be canceled, to be replaced by infrequent press conferences by the president himself. He refused to allow any White House spokespeople to appear on the Sunday television interview programs after the networks rejected demands that they refrain from asking questions about the Comey firing and its aftermath.

The Washington Post published an editorial Sunday warning that Trump’s conduct “threatened the independence of federal law enforcement and sullied key institutions of U.S. democracy,” adding that “The president injected himself into an investigation where he has absolutely no right to interfere.” While demanding that congressional and FBI investigations into alleged Russian interference in the US election be stepped up, the newspaper published an op-ed column by Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe calling for Trump’s impeachment.

Even more extraordinary were the remarks of retired Gen. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence under President Obama. Interviewed Sunday morning on the CNN program “State of the Union,” Clapper had the following exchange with host Jake Tapper after Tapper asked for his response to the firing of Comey:

Clapper: I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault, both externally—and that’s the big news here, is the Russian interference in our election system. And I think as well our institutions are under assault internally.

Tapper: Internally from the president?

Clapper: Exactly.

Clapper is no friend of democracy or accountability. By rights, he should be serving a prison sentence for perjury, having denied under oath, during congressional testimony in 2013, that there was widespread US government spying on the communications of Americans. A few weeks later, the revelations of Edward Snowden exposed him as a liar.

If the retired general, who until January 20 stood at the head of 17 agencies with more than 100,000 spies, analysts and agents, now declares that Trump, the nominal commander-in-chief, is a threat to the institutions of the American state, that is a sign of a state machine at war with itself. This is only one step removed from advocating that the military-intelligence apparatus step in to “preserve order,” the pretext invariably given in country after country for coups and military takeovers.

No one should believe that “it can’t happen here.” Both sides in the conflict within the ruling elite are turning to the military as the final arbiter. Trump himself has filled his cabinet with former and currently serving generals in an effort to strengthen his ties with the military. He has repeatedly addressed military audiences while offering his top commanders free rein to order more aggressive battlefield tactics and troop buildups, and promising police similar leeway within the United States.

The Democratic Party is incapable of raising a single democratic principle in opposition to Trump. It has chosen to oppose the president on the basis of the completely reactionary and bogus claim that he owes his presidency to alleged Russian intervention into the 2016 campaign. Its media supporters have followed suit: two New York Times columnists (Nicholas Kristof and Tim Egan) yesterday suggested that Trump may be guilty of treason, while a third (Thomas Friedman) appealed openly to the military last month to carry out a palace coup.

The world is confronting a crisis of historic dimensions in the center of global capitalism. Decades of social and political reaction, unending war and the artificial suppression of class conflict are coming to a head. Wealth and power have been concentrated to an extraordinary degree in the hands of a narrow oligarchy, while the vast majority of the population is driven into increasingly desperate economic straits and deprived of any political influence.

The dysfunctionality of American society is everywhere in evidence. Crumbling roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, deepening poverty and social misery, collapsing schools, the slashing of social spending and private pensions are in their totality the consequence of the subordination of all rational consideration of the public interest to a manic drive for profit.

Social anger among working people—who see the government shutting them out from any access to decent health care, poisoning the water supply in cities such as Flint to enrich speculators and their bribed politicians—is reaching the boiling point. Both parties and all of the official institutions—Congress, the Supreme Court, the media—are discredited. What is unfolding is a breakdown of the entire framework of constitutional government.

If Trump is a rogue president who accepts no legal or constitutional limits on his actions, he only mirrors the conduct of the corporate CEOs, bankers and hedge fund moguls who crashed the world economy in 2008 with impunity, and now reap untold profits while working people suffer the consequences.

There is no way out of this crisis through the existing political framework. If Trump is replaced through the machinations of the Democrats or its allies in the military-intelligence apparatus, the result will be a further turn to the right, an acceleration of militarism and reaction, and potentially a US nuclear war with Russia. Trump himself can prevail only through the mobilization of ultra-right and fascistic elements, both within the military and outside it, with the most ominous consequences for the social interests and democratic rights of working people.

The only way to resolve the political crisis on a progressive and democratic basis is through the political mobilization of the working class. Only the working class, fighting on the basis of a socialist program, independently and in opposition to the two parties of big business and their stooges in the trade unions, can open a new road forward.

Patrick Martin

Copyright © 1998-2017 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

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http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/05/16/russ-m16.html


Media claims Trump revealed classified information to Russian visitors

By Patrick Martin

16 May 2017

A sensationalized report published on the web site of the Washington Post Monday afternoon claims that President Trump conveyed classified information to two high-ranking Russian officials during their well-publicized meeting last Wednesday at the White House.

The article, headlined, “Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian diplomats,” claims that Trump discussed possible terrorist attacks by ISIS using laptops carried on passenger aircraft during a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

According to the Post report, Trump disclosed information obtained from “a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the US government, officials said. The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said that Trump’s decision to do so risks cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State.”

The newspaper claimed that after the meeting, recognizing the potential damage, White House officials called the CIA and the National Security Agency, which were in contact with the government that was the source of the information on ISIS.

The incident, assuming it is accurately reported and not a piece of deliberate disinformation from the US intelligence apparatus, suggests, among other things, that at least one country allied with Washington still maintains friendly relations with ISIS. Both Saudi Arabia and Qatar come to mind.

Washington itself played a role in the creation of the Islamic fundamentalist group, initially built up as part of the US regime-change operation in Syria directed at the government of Bashar al-Assad, Russia’s only ally in the Middle East. ISIS only came into direct conflict with the US after it sent forces across the Syria-Iraq border in 2014, and particularly after its rout of the Iraqi Army in the capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June 2014.

ISIS has been sustained since then with supplies and new recruits who have been able to reach its landlocked territory either through Turkey—a NATO ally of the United States—or through Saudi Arabia and Iraq, both non-NATO allies of the US. Any one of these countries, as well as the sheikdom of Qatar, which has heavily financed Sunni fundamentalist groups like ISIS, could be the “U.S. partner” described in the Post report.

In terms of US domestic politics, the Post report is clearly aimed at providing another boost for the anti-Russian campaign alleging that the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russian intelligence agencies in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.

No significant evidence has yet been produced to substantiate claims that the Russian government was responsible for the hacking of materials subsequently published by WikiLeaks. Nor has there been any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion. The anti-Russia campaign has been launched in opposition to Trump’s initial suggestions of a more cooperative relationship with Moscow, including a pullback from efforts to overthrow Assad in Syria, to focus more military resources on China and East Asia.

The nature of the security breach alleged in the Post article hardly justifies the screaming headlines in the newspaper, the breathless reports that led the Monday evening news broadcasts on ABC and CBS, and the hours of cable television coverage that have ensued.

Trump’s major blunder, if the report is accurate, is to share information about potential ISIS terrorism with Russia without having permission to do so from the “U.S. partner,” an action that “jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State,” according to the Post.

From the standpoint of the deepening US political crisis, the main question raised by the Post report is how details of a closed-door meeting in the Oval Office made its way to the newspaper. The most likely sources are the CIA and NSA. The two spy agencies were either represented at the meeting or informed of Trump’s comments afterwards by White House homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert.

In other words, the Post report is another shot fired in the internecine war within the American state apparatus, initially focused on foreign policy, particularly in relation to Syria and Russia, but more generally provoked by the personalist, authoritarian character of the Trump administration, and Trump’s role as a loose cannon in both domestic and foreign policy.

White House officials flatly rebuffed the Post claims that Trump released information inappropriately. “The president and the foreign minister reviewed common threats from terrorist organizations to include threats to aviation,” H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser said in a statement. “At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly.”

The Post claims that Trump revealed to Lavrov and Kislyak the name of a city in ISIS territory where the details of the new terrorist threat had been learned, but the newspaper would not reveal this name to its readers, “at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.”

In other words, the newspaper chose to enlist in the ranks of the military-intelligence officials waging political warfare against Trump.

The reported blurting out of classified information to the Russians led several Democratic congressmen to recall Republican criticism of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for being “extremely careless” with classified information that was found on the private email server she used while secretary of state.

Copyright © 1998-2017 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

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http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/05/17/trum-m17.html


Trump White House in disarray amidst charges it sought to block FBI investigation into Flynn

By Patrick Martin

17 May 2017

The Trump White House was under mounting pressure Tuesday in the wake of a report in the New York Times that Trump had met with FBI Director James Comey in February seeking to shut down the federal investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

It was the second media bombshell to explode in two days, following the report Monday afternoon by the Washington Post that Trump shared classified information about ISIS with two visiting Russian officials, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

In both instances, the media “exposés” actually represent attacks on Trump from within the military-intelligence apparatus. The Times report is based on material supplied by high-ranking FBI officials, while the Post article voices the concerns of officials in the CIA or National Security Agency.

The political motivation for these attacks was suggested by a question directed to White House spokesman Sean Spicer at an off-camera press “gaggle” on Tuesday, when one reporter asked him, “Sean, do you believe that this is a case of the intelligence community or elements in the intelligence community actively seeking to undermine the President and his foreign policy as he seeks to build a closer relationship with Russia?”

Spicer did not answer the question, but it has been evident for months that the driving force of the political warfare between the White House and the intelligence agencies is opposition to Trump’s moves to pull back from the CIA-led campaign to undermine and overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, as well as the broader effort to confront Russia.

The Democratic Party has chosen to spearhead this campaign, attacking the Trump administration from the right, rather than focus on Trump’s attacks on democratic rights, immigrants, environmental and safety regulations and social services, along with the overall policy of military aggression.

The highly-orchestrated character of this offensive against the Trump White House is demonstrated by the article posted on the web site of the New York Times Tuesday, just in time to be the lead item on the network television news programs that evening.

The Times report claims that after meeting with Trump February 14 in the Oval Office, the day following the forced resignation of Flynn, Comey drafted a memo for his files documenting the conversation he had with the president. According to this third-hand report (the Times citing a memo read to them by an “associate” of Comey’s detailing what Comey wrote down about what Trump said to him), Trump asked him to drop any further investigation into Flynn now that he had quit his position as national security adviser.

“I hope you can let this go,” Trump allegedly said to Comey, describing Flynn as “a good guy.” Trump added that Flynn had done nothing wrong.

The Times posted its report under a banner headline, while declaring, in the text of the article, “The existence of Mr. Trump’s request is the clearest evidence that the president has tried to directly influence the Justice Department and F.B.I. investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia.” Without using the term, the newspaper was suggesting that Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice, an impeachable offense.

The article had an additional revelation, that “The memo was part of a paper trail Mr. Comey created documenting what he perceived as the president’s improper efforts to influence a continuing investigation.” In other words, Comey, an experienced political operator in the national security bureaucracy, was preparing a dossier to be used against Trump in the event that he moved against Comey—as he did May 9, firing the FBI director summarily.

Comey shared the memo of the February 14 conversation—and no doubt other documents—with “senior FBI officials and close associates,” according to the Times. One week after Comey’s firing, almost to the minute, the Times article based on the leaked Comey memo was posted on the newspaper’s web site.

The Trump White House flatly denied Comey’s version of the February 14 meeting, declaring in a statement, “The president has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end any investigation, including any investigation involving General Flynn … This is not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation between the president and Mr. Comey.”

The White House statement also referred to testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week by acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, previously Comey’s top deputy, who said, “There has been no effort to impede our investigation to date.” McCabe was being questioned about the investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the presidential election, not about the separate investigation into whether Flynn lied to the FBI in January 2017.

The Times report came only 24 hours after the Washington Post report that threw the Trump White House into disarray. The Post article said that Trump had revealed highly classified information about ISIS plans to attack airliners with bombs concealed in laptops during a meeting May 10 in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and Ambassador Kislyak.

The source of the classified information was an unnamed “U.S. partner,” and there was much press commentary to the effect that this partner might now be unwilling to share intelligence information with Washington. On Tuesday afternoon, the “partner” was revealed to be the state of Israel, and Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer issued an official reassurance that there would be no damage to US-Israeli collaboration on “anti-terror” operations.

The Post report set off a media frenzy, with claims that the revelation confirmed allegations of an illicit Trump-Russia connection, and calls from media pundits, including conservative Republicans, for the appointment of an independent counsel or even the initiation of impeachment proceedings.

In a vain effort to stem the tide, the White House brought General H. R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, before television cameras on Tuesday morning to denounce the Post article and subsequent reports, and declare that Trump had done nothing to endanger US national security.

The other two US officials present at the meeting with the Russians—deputy national security adviser Dina Powell and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—also issued statements in support of the president. The crisis atmosphere within the administration was reflected in the fact that State Department officials were unaware of the Tillerson statement when contacted by the press.

At one point Monday evening, several reporters could overhear a stormy meeting involving Spicer, his deputy Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House Communications Director Michael Dubke, and chief White House strategist Stephen Bannon. The shouting was so loud that White House staffers turned up the TV volume in the press room to drown it out.

As in the controversy last week over the firing of Comey, Trump undermined his own political defenders with statements on Twitter that contradicted the official explanations of his conduct. Trump declared that he had every right as president to divulge classified information—on this he is legally correct—and that Russia could be a valuable ally in the conflict against ISIS.

The statements from the White House did nothing to quiet the media clamor and the mounting criticism on Capitol Hill, not only from virtually all Democrats, but from leading congressional Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “We could do with a little less drama from the White House on a lot of things so that we can focus on our agenda.”

Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said of the Trump White House, “Obviously, they are in a downward spiral right now and have got to figure out a way to come to grips with all that’s happening. The chaos that is being created by the lack of discipline is creating an environment that I think makes—it creates a worrisome environment.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan, in a statement issued through a spokesman, said, “We have no way to know what was said, but protecting our nation’s secrets is paramount. The speaker hopes for a full explanation of the facts from the administration.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain gave vent to the anti-Russian sentiment of a section of the Republicans and all the Democrats. “Regrettably,” he declared, “the time President Trump spent sharing sensitive information with the Russians was time he did not spend focusing on Russia’s aggressive behavior, including its interference in American and European elections, its illegal invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, its other destabilizing activities across Europe, and the slaughter of innocent civilians and targeting of hospitals in Syria.”

Several right-wing Republicans from the neo-conservative wing of the party joined Democrats in calling for action to remove Trump from the presidency. Eric Edelman, a former Bush administration State Department official, said that McMaster and other top officials should resign immediately, or else delay “until a resignation becomes part of a push to either force a resignation or the invocation of the 25th Amendment.”

Another Bush administration foreign policy adviser, Eliot Cohen, said of Trump’s communication of classified information to Russian officials, “If deliberate, it would be treason.” He called on congressional Republicans “to get off the Trump train and name a select committee whose job it will be to determine whether Congress should move ahead to impeachment.”

Copyright © 1998-2017 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

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Wednesday’s events underscore the depth of the crisis gripping official political circles in the United States, the heart of world capitalism. The bitter conflicts that have erupted to the surface express the interests of rival factions of the US financial oligarchy that are both totally corrupt and reactionary.

The intensity of the conflict is ultimately an expression of the fact that neither faction has any solution to the economic and geopolitical crises facing US capitalism, expressed most directly in the staggering and endless growth of social inequality.
The force that has yet to be heard from is the working class, which must intervene in the deepening political crisis on the basis of its own, socialist, political program.




http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/05/18/trum-m18.html

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Republican States Send Voter Files to Kobach, While Claiming They Will “Resist” His Demand

By Greg Palast for The Progressive

http://mailchi.mp/gregpalast/v3tjxbfkb4-172605?e=9dee5d6b03