The collapse of Republican attempts in the House to pass repeal and replace legislation leaves the Affordable Care Act standing, but for how long? Major insurers have dropped out across the last year and a half, citing the low enrollment of the young leaving them with the high cost of paying for the old. That accounts for the premium price increases for 2017 that averaged 22% for insurance bought on the federal and state exchanges.
Fixes could have and still can be made to elements of the Affordable Care that need adjustment, but since its inception, Republicans have refused to consider any repairs, preferring instead to vote for repeal in the House some sixty times. Their objection has always been ideological: that the subsidies and Medicaid expansion are yet another entitlement; that no one should be required to pay for something they don’t want. The problem is that these conservative principles leave the people prey to the staggering costs of health care in the United States. The poorer enter hospitals through the emergency room, the hospitals recover their costs by charging more to patients who have insurance, the insurers raise their rates. Thus, as a practical matter, this leaves the wealthier to pay for the poorer anyway, just by a different route. Better — a system.
The Act was a huge experiment never before undertaken. Criticizing it for not being perfect right out of the gate has been senseless. Perhaps some of the Republicans who could not agree even on their much simpler version may have come to that realization. Donald Trump did, although not aware that he was speaking only for himself when he said, “Nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated”, when everyone knows how complicated it is.
Having tried to force through repeal and replace in less than three weeks, whereas the Affordable Care Act took a year and a half, Trump looked to blame everyone else:
But of concern is his attitude that he seems content to watch Obamacare “explode”:
Between insurance subsidized and bought on the exchanges, and the expansion of Medicaid in those non-Republican governed states that opted for it, over 20 million people currently benefit from the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Many of them from his “base”, and they would be harmed by the irresponsible inaction of letting it “explode”.
In fact, we may see this administration take a number of steps to hasten Obamacare’s end. On his first full day in the White House, Donald Trump signed an executive order that effectively told all federal agencies to be lax on enforcing provisions of the ACA. That could lead to expanded waivers exempting people from having to pay penalties for not buying insurance. It coud mean slowing the acceptance of applicants to Medicaid. Slowing the approval of subsidy processing.
Perhaps it was only a gesture by Trump to prove to his following that he will deliver on his promise “to minimize the unwarranted economic and regulatory burdens”, as his order says, on the road to dismantling Obama’s major achievement. But that having failed, the executive order is the one thing left standing. Given language that is more than a suggestion, telling them to “waive, defer, grant exemptions from or delay”, the agencies may think they had better take action or have to answer to Trump why they did not.
starve the beast
As Congress moves to tax reform, it is sure to rescind the ACA’s extra taxes on individuals — the 0.9% extra Medicare impost on incomes over $250,000 for marrieds, and the 3.8% surtax on investment gains. In the process they are likely to get rid of all the other Obamacare taxes — the tax on the health insurance industry that will otherwise bring in an estimated $144.7 billion over 10 years, the $19.6 billion tax on medical devices — there’s a list of some 21 taxes meant to help pay for Obamacare subsidies that help people pay for health insurance.
These rollbacks, barely apparent to the public, will make the highly visible cost of the ACA all the more untenable and made to appear part of Obamacare’s intrinsic failings and, of course, the Democrats’ fault.
To listen to the President, premium costs will rise again by double digits next year, but the unrepaired fault is that the penalties to people who wouldn’t buy into the pool didn’t take effect until 2014, were set far too low, and have now reached their maximum at only $2,085 for a family of three or more. Sounds like a lot, but given the runaway cost of health care in these United States and the insurance prices that must keep pace, the penalties are a bargain. Moreover, they do not rise as premiums rise, making it ever more advantageous — financially — to pay the penalty rather than buy insurance.
coup de grâce
Looming in the background is a lawsuit that would extinguish Obamacare for certain. In May of last year a federal judge ruled in favor of a House of Representatives suit against the government that says the subsidies the health act provides to help people buy insurance are illegal because the House never appropriated the money. The suit argues that funds meant for other purposes were misappropriated. The subsidies continue pending appeal, but the Justice Department is under new management and may decide not to defend against the suit. If allowed to go forward, without subsidies, Obamacare’s insurance market will vanish.
Our earlier suspicion proved true: that Donald Trump’s White House orchestrated the plot for Devin Nunes, the House intelligence committee chairman, to discover documents that would prove — although they did nothing of the sort — that former President Obama “wiretapped” Trump Tower during the transition.
The clumsy plot, that had Nunes rush to the White House to warn President Trump that he had been surveilled, fell apart when Nunes revealed he had got the documents from none other than the White House itself the night before, and became comical when Trump got the timing wrong and revealed that he knew about the documents before he was supposed to.
The New York Times then discovered that the documents weren’t from “a whistleblower type”, as Nunes had reported to House Speaker Paul Ryan, but had come directly from two White House National Security Council staffers (a third was later identified) evidently assigned to find something to validate the President’s mendacious tweet accusing Obama.
Nunes had not told his own committee that he had seen secret documents, had gone directly to the media instead, and now that the caper has been exposed, refuses to recuse himself from the committee’s investigation into Russia’s infiltration into the U.S. election, and has cancelled all further hearings.
here’s how it began
A Monday session of the House Intelligence Committee on March 13 had been a bad day for the President. FBI Directory James Comey had confirmed that the Bureau was not only conducting an investigation into Russia’s assault on the American democratic process but that they were also looking into possible collusion with the Russians by the Trump campaign. And with NSA (National Security Agency) chief Adm. Mike Rogers at his side and concurring, Comey said:
“With respect to the President’s tweets about wiretapping by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets, and we have looked carefully inside the FBI. The Department of Justice has asked me to share with you that the answer is the same in all its components. The department has no information that supports those tweets.”
The Director had confirmed as a lie Trump’s series of tweets claiming that President Obama had wire-tapped him, culminating in this one:
Something had to be done. As he had done so successfully in the preceding weeks, Trump had to counter and deflect to draw the attention away from this serious setback.
Two days later, like a deus ex machina deliverance in a Greek tragedy, the California Republican and Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes swooped before cameras and microphones at two locations to tell us of documents he had seen that confirmed that surveillance of foreign nationals by U.S. agencies resulted in the “incidental collection” of members of the Trump transition team. “The President needs to know that these intelligence reports are out there and I have a duty to tell him that”.
Congress is an independent branch of the government and the intelligence committees of the House and Senate are to conduct uncompromised oversight of the executive branch’s intelligence agencies and their activities. For the chairman of the House committee to serve as a conduit to the President of what the committee learns seemed a stunning breach of the separation of powers.
Nunes didn’t believe he had the duty to tell anyone else on his committee, particularly its ranking Democratic member, California’s Adam Schiff. Nor was his perceived duty restricted to reporting to the President. He first went to House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had the opportunity to at least sternly advise him that not to make a serious mistake, but evidently did not. Nor was there any urgency to report to the President. Nunes thought the priority was to let the world know. Before going to the White House he spoke at some length to the press at the Capitol and even lingered for questions.
clairvoyance
It had all the markings of a carefully staged pre-planned event. But Trump stepped on the planned timeline and turned to fiction the claim that did not already know what Nunes was about to bring him. Time magazine was conducting an interview with the President while Nunes was still talking to reporters at the Capitol. Overly eager to get what he fancied was Nunes’ proof of his Obama accusation into the Time story, the President brought it up to the interviewer, saying “so that means I’m right”.
Maybe Nunes gave the President a preview when he called to make the appointment? Except, he didn’t make that call. “My staff had talked Intelligence committee chairman Devin Nunes heads for the press microphones at the White House
to the White House earlier that day to request a meeting with the President, and I had not talked to the President before that”, he said in response to a reporter’s question. He would not have handed off to the staff such a plum to offer up to the President. It was a charade; Trump already knew.
Congresswoman and intelligence committee member Jackie Speier (D-Ca) is one who is of the opinion that the White House engineered the plot. She points to what Trump said in the March 15 interviews with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson:
“We will be submitted things before the committee very soon that hasn’t been submitted as of yet”, and again (grammatically), “I think you are going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks”.
Knowing about the public hearing with Comey and Rogers a few days ahead, the plan appears to have been to hold those “items” until afterward so as, once again, to change the subject away from what he feared Director Comey might have to say about FBI probes.
Asked in the Oval Office, “do you feel somewhat vindicated by Chairman Nunes, Trump replied, “I somewhat do. I must tell you I somewhat do. I very much appreciated the fact that they found what they found. I somewhat do”.
well wide of the mark
Before moving on to the White House, Nunes he said to the media:
“I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition, details about U.S. persons associated with the incoming administration…”
It was irresistible for every news account to point out that Nunes, who regularly assails journalists’ use of anonymous sources, refused to say who allowed him access to the reports. Two things disturbed Nunes: he somehow knows the reports were “widely disseminated”, and names of Trump transition members had been “unmasked” in the reports, although that contradicted what he had earlier said and what he had told to Adam Schiff after his meeting with the President — that the names were masked but he could tell from context who they are.
What was arranged for Nunes to hand to Mr. Trump — misdirection away from his unprecedented accusation levied at Obama — was the epiphany that the U.S. now spies on everyone. Nunes made a great show of running to the President to deliver the startling fact that even he and his transition team were caught up in this dragnet.
In fact, the “incidental collection” decried by Nunes is not Obama’s doing but a law passed by none other than Nunes’ own Congress. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 was amended in 2008 to allow warrantless mass collection of phone calls of foreign targets. That includes ambassadors and embassy personnel and can incidentally include conversations with Americans at the other end. The notorious Section 702 permits NSA to sweep up phone conversations, instant messages, e-mail, posts to Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp — you name it. The names of Americans are then “masked” or “minimized” to conceal identity. But former NSA head Gen. Michael Hayden told Newsmax that even low-level employees can unmask conversants.
NSA is accused of taking maximum advantage of the “back door search loophole” or “reverse targeting” whereby they target particular foreign sources in order to get at the Americans with whom they communicate. Or, according to Rand Paul, a staunch critic of NSA abuse, they can “type Donald Trump into their vast resources of people they are tapping overseas, and they get all of his phone calls”. According to Sen. Paul, they eavesdropped on President Obama 1,227 times.
Nunes was himself on the transition team, so closely allied with Trump is he. The irony is that he was head of the national security transition that was porously eavesdropped by U.S. intelligence universal snooping that may have incidentally collected Nunes himself.
There has been no apology forthcoming from Donald Trump for what can only be called a contemptible libel of the former president (after his assisting Trump with a fastidiously conducted transition) nor to redress the breach with our closest ally, Great Britain, whose own intelligence agency, GCHQ, Trump accused of spying on him, and which they called “utterly ridiculous”.
high noon for nunes?
The question now is whether the Republicans who control the committee will recognize that Nunes cannot be viewed as impartial in its Russia investigation and cannot continue as chair if the committee hopes its work is to be taken as truthful and objective.
This is not the first incident to cast doubt. When the Trump administration improperly enlisted the intelligence community to contact news organizations in its extraordinary attempt to challenge their reporting on the Trump campaign’s connections with Russia, Nunes was a willing participant. To say that for a member, much less its chairman, of an investigative committee to take sides is “inappropriate”, to use that overly delicate word, is to dumb down the English language.
In a heated defense of Nunes on Sunday’s “Face the Nation”, South Carolina Republican Trey Goudy, who had conducted the Benghazi investigation, made the point that…
“The chairman of House intel briefed the commander-in-chief on something that has nothing to do with the Russian investigation, so if the command-in-chief cannot be briefed by the chairperson of the House intel committee on a matter that has nothing to do with the FBI investigation , then I don’t know what they can talk about.”
Schiff doesn’t agree. He had said earlier in the week that Nunes’ action “casts quite a profound cloud over our ability to do the work,” and like others, such as John McCain, called for an independent investigation:
“If the chairman is going to continue to go to the White House rather than his own committee, there’s no way we can conduct this investigation…We can’t have our chairman acting as a surrogate for the administration. He has to either have the surrogate role or the chairman role but he can’t do both…”
Nunes then apparently chose the former roll. At end week, he peremptorily cancelled the following Tuesday’s open meeting in which former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former acting Attorney General Sally Yates had been scheduled to testify. Shall we hazard a guess where that order came from? Schiff isn’t guessing. Also on “Face the Nation” he said, “perhaps this is something the White House did not want to see” calling the cancellation a second “serious blow” to the committee’s integrity. The cancellation has infuriated the Democratic members of the committee.
John McCain called for either a select committee or an independent commission to look into the Russia matter. “No longer does the Congress have credibility to handle this alone, and I don’t say that lightly,” McCain said on MSNBC.
On departing the White House, President Obama warned President-elect Trump that North Korea had become the number one national security threat. With the Trump administration preoccupied with banning entry of people from six Muslim nations, there’s little sign so far that the advice has been taken. Trump has said ISIS is his first priority. There was no mention of North Korea in his address to Congress.
North Korea would not be ignored. First came the missile launch that made for indigestion at the President’s Mar-a-Lago restaurant where he was hosting Japan’s Four North Korean missiles leave their launch pads simultaneously.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Days later, the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un staged a synchronous launch that sent four mid-range missiles into the Sea of Japan, three of them violating Japan’s exclusive-use economic zone. The shoot was a warning to the U.S. and South Korea; it was timed for the sixth day of their joint military exercises that Pyongyang believes are a rehearsal for invasion.
But one action has been taken by the U.S., the sort that persuades Mr. Kim that he is right. The U.S. has just begun installing THAAD missile batteries in South Korea. This line of defense was ordered up not by Trump, but by former president Obama.
cyber not enough
As the launchers were Globemaster’d in, The New York Times broke a story it had begun researching last spring but held back for national security reasons: much like the malware introduced into Iran’s centrifuges that had sent them of spinning out of control, the U.S. has used cyber and electronic tools to disrupt — they think — and delay progress in North Korean missile technology. Suggestively, all five tests across several months of the Musudan, a missile intended to target American bases as far as Guam, exploded seconds after takeoff or crashed into the sea. That had prompted Mr. Kim to order an investigation to determine if sabotage was at play, leading to the execution of senior security officials, the Times reported.
But the uncertainty of whether the cyber strategy had worked — design errors could have been the cause of missile failure — and North Korea’s progress nonetheless, caused Obama and his advisers to recognize that we have not been able to stop Kim’s headlong rush to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles and their nuclear warheads. Hence Obama’s warning to Trump.
Gordian knot
What to do about North Korea admits of no easy solution. A tangle of interests has the allies — the U.S., South Korea, Japan and a reluctant China — in a stalemate. The THAAD installation has angered the Chinese enough to boycott South Korea’s imports and block its television shows and pop stars, but it is in a furor that the move is encirclement by the U.S., with the system’s X-band radar that accompanies the THAAD battery able to peer deep across its border.
The THAAD system (Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense) exists only to shoot down the North’s missiles. Its rockets have no payload; they destroy U.S. THAAD missile destroyer by collision at high velocity. As the “Terminal” in THAAD indicates, the system only intercepts projectiles in their “terminal” phase or as they’re hurtling towards the earth in descent. It can stop 90% of what comes at it, but if just one nuclear warhead slips through, an estimated 420,000 in Seoul could be killed or injured.
Offers by the Obama administration as early as a year ago of technical talks on THAAD to assure the Chinese of its limitations and limited intent have gone begging. Instead, it prompted a Chinese general to write in the Global Times that his military “could conduct a surgical hard-kill operation” to destroy the THAADs .
South Korea is relieved to have the THAADs in addition to the American troops stationed there since the end of the Korean War over 60 years ago — 28,500 is the current count. Mr. Kim frequently threatens to ignite Seoul in “a sea of fire” or at least destroy much of the city, which lies close to the border, with thousands of artillery pieces arrayed in position for years along the demarcation buffer zone established at the end of that war. Last September, the South Korea Defense Ministry said it has plans to take out North Korea missile sites and “flatten the capital, Pyongyang with artillery and ballistic missiles if the North shows any signs that it might fire a nuclear weapon”.
And yet, with the South Korea president just now removed from office over corruption charges, and elections likely to happen sooner than their scheduled December date, a progressive faction wants the U.S. out, thinking that talks will bring unification of the split country and peace.
no thanks, says china
China has no interest is seeing that happen. The two communist countries — China and North Korea — were formed within a year of each other. They fought side-by-side against the U.S. and South Korea in the three-year war of the early 1950s. China views the North as a buffer against the South and its ally, the U.S. — a buffer that must not be allowed to break, because China’s greatest worry is that pressure against the North — the United Nations sanctions made still more stringent, for example — could lead to a possible collapse of the Kim Jong-un regime that would send millions of desperate North Korean refugees streaming across the border into China.
So North Korea is treated as a kind of ward of the Chinese state. About 90% of North Korea’s trade is with China, about $6 billion annually, which keeps the North supplied with almost all its oil, food and consumer goods. China treads carefully, fearful of destabilizing relations with its capricious and unpredictable neighbor. That has led to a gaping loophole in the sanctions: there are exemptions meant to protect the “livelihood” of North Koreans that 18-wheelers regularly drive through. Inspection of the trucks at Dandong, China, the main border crossing, is limited. A U.N. Security Council study released at the end of February revealed a matrix of false identity North Korea companies fronting an international smuggling network that supplies cash, technologies and materials for the weapons program. China looks the other way.
Don’t blame us for not taking the lead, say the Chinese. “North Korea isn’t aiming its missiles at us”, they effectively say. They blame the U.S. for the current predicament. We refused “to sign a peace treaty with Pyongyang” after the war; it is still only an armistice, leaving the North paranoid in its isolation. In a Global Times of China editorial,
“The Americans have given no consideration to the origin and the evolution of North Korea’s nuclear issue or the negative role Washington has been playing over the years. Without the reckless military threat from the US and South Korea and the US’s brutal overthrow of regimes in some small countries, Pyongyang may not have developed such a firm intent to develop nuclear weapons as now.
Still, China is not enthusiastic about having an erratic nuclear power as its next door neighbor. It lost patience after a series of nuclear and ballistic missile tests in 2016, agreed to Washington’s appeals, and signed on to tough U.N. sanctions that, in addition to expanding the list of North Koreans subject to asset freezes and travel bans, more crucially bans import of North Korean coal, a $1.6 billion a year lifeline to Mr. Kim’s regime. Having canceled coal, China says it has done its part. The rest is up to the U.S.
Donald Trump disagrees. “China has control, absolute control, over North Korea”, he said. “And they should make that problem disappear”.
China wants us to engage directly with the Kim regime in talks that allay the North’s security anxieties. The last attempt, with North Korea, South Korea, the U.S., Japan and Russia at the table in 2009, ended when the North walked out.
There is no trust on either side. The U.S. can point to the North Koreans secretly cheating in defiance of agreements, such as during the moratorium on weapons development negotiated by the Clinton administration. The North Koreans see the U.S. as entirely deceitful, with our conduct providing examples for why they should never consider winding down their nuclear and missile programs. They see what we did in Libya after Gaddafi gave up nuclear; they see what we did to Iraq despite Hussein insisting he had quit his nuclear program. And they see in a democracy a political system where a new administration can do the opposite of the old one and rip up prior agreements.
Moving THAAD into South Korea presumably confirms Kim’s belief in an American threat, defensive though its rockets be. After a New Year’s Day speech in which he said North Korea had reached a “final stage” in preparing to test an intercontinental ballistic missile, Kim saw Trump tweet “It won’t happen”, which he could only interpret as a military threat that enforces his fear of invasion. It doesn’t help that Trump has called Mr. Kim “a maniac” (“If you look at North Korea, this guy, I mean he’s like a maniac. OK?”).
We find ourselves in a kind of fatal embrace in which America, which has no desire to attack, must nevertheless be poised to do so because North Korea, out of fear of attack, has built an arsenal to attack us that we must defend against.
preemption anyone?
In fact, military options are dim. North Korea now uses mobile launchers in place of fixed sites. Mobile launch vehicles can be hidden in tunnels in the country’s mountainous terrain, making for an insurmountable targeting problem. The North has just now learned how to produce solid fuel for its missiles. When they leave their bunkers, a retinue of liquid fuel tankers visible to satellites no longer trails behind, and in constrast to the hours needed to load liquid fuel, solid fuel rockets can be readied for take-off in minutes.
Moreover, any perceived military threat from the U.S. would strengthen Kim Jong-un’s hand, spurring national patriotism and a stiffening acceptance by his people of the hardships they endure in his brutally repressive regime. A ground attack would trigger war with North Korea’s 1.2 million man army. The country would have China’s support.
talks
The question is whether Donald Trump will grasp that the situation is so far along that the U.S. needs to realize that Kim Jong-un has us in check and we had best negotiate a draw.
How does one deal with him? He is spoken of as volatile and unstable, known to binge on food and alcohol. In the paranoid world of his and his family’s own creation — three generations of the one family have now ruled the North for seven decades — Kim reportedly is obsessed with the fear that he will be overthrown, assassinated. To head that off, he has executed scores of officials, even his uncle in 2013, whom he thought might challenge his power, and weeks ago his half-brother in the airport at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. International security analyst Alexandre Mansourov of the Nautilus Institute warns that if he believes he is about to be attacked, he might “rush to use nuclear weapons out of fear of losing them to allied preemption”.
What does Kim Jong-un want? The highest-ranking defector from North Korea said that Kim does want to negotiate. Some of his objectives seem remarkably banal — and easy to satisfy. More than once the media has reported that one of his wants is to roll back sanctions that ban import of luxury items — gems, yachts, sports cars — that he needs to buy the loyalty of his high-ranking officials. In return for suspension of missile and nuclear tests he wants an end to joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises.
But the biggest carrot would be to offer a heavy and long-term package of economic rehabilitation and an opening to the world. That would surely please China, to see its invalid ward find its own legs, so China’s monetary support should be required equal to ours. If all this looks like perpetual and probably ascending blackmail, it is, but that’s the consequence of paying so little attention to a growing menace.
squeeze play
To add force to any such talks, the U.S. should maximize economic pressure on Mr. Kim and his regime. China may urge us to go to the bargaining table to solve its problem with North Korea for them, but is unhelpful. We know from the U.N. of dozens of Chinese firms trading with blacklisted North Korea entities that we want shut down with so-called “secondary sanctions”, but China has not cooperated out of its destabilization worries.
Also, about 50,000 to 60,000 North Koreans work abroad, mostly in China, and send money to families at home — half of which the North Korean regime pockets. If refused entry to China, that could deprive the North’s government of some $300 million annually.
If we demand this cooperation from China, they may demand that we relax our objections to their fortifying the South China Sea as their private lake. That could factor into our negotiations with the North Koreans as well. Our ships and aircraft getting into firefights with China would say to the North Koreans that we have no intention of letting go of control in the Far East.
In return, we cannot accept mere suspension of North Korea’s nuclear and missile development. But given the deep and decades-long paranoia of a closed nation, it would be hopeless to expect that North Korea would agree to dismantlement. Our minimum would have to be mothballed facilities with unlimited and permanent on-site inspections by resident crews.
Will Donald Trump realize that talks appear to be the only path left? The Wall Street Journal reported that there has been an internal White House review of the North Korean problem but that the leanings, with Trump now surrounded with generals as advisers, and with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson left out of the loop, appear instead to be toward military force and attempted regime change. Stay tuned.
Over the past year, North Korea has made remarkable strides toward its goal to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads to the West Coast of the United States. There follows a timeline, and at its conclusion a devastating assessment that North Korea may already have far worse — a doomsday weapon:
In January 2016, North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test, claiming it was a hydrogen bomb, although that was doubted.
In February a year ago, Pyongyang successfully put a satellite into orbit with a three-stage rocket. Their ministry claimed a range of 7,400 miles and a payload of as much as 1,300 pounds, both exceeding the missile it tested in 2012 and enough to reach West Coast if reconfigured as a missile.
This violation led in March to further sanctions imposed by the United Nations that included cargo inspections and a cutoff of aviation fuel.
Meanwhile, according to U.S. intelligence, North Korea had expanded its uranium-enrichment facility and reactivated plutonium production at secret underground sites that would be difficult to target with airstrikes in North Korea’s mountainous terrain.
In March of last year, North Korea announced a successful ground test of a solid fuel rocket engine of new design.
In April came a successful ground test of a newly designed intercontinental ballistic missile engine. And North Korea launched three tests of its Musudan missile, intended to reach targets of American bases as far as Guam, but all crashed into the sea or exploded seconds after takeoff (see “Cyber Not Enough” in companion story).
In May, American and South Korean intelligence concluded that North Korea can now mount small nuclear warheads on short- to medium-range missiles and strike much of Japan and South Korea.
In June, two more Musudan failures, but an intermediate-range ballistic missile was sent to 878 miles of altitude that was interpreted as work on mastering the technology needed to keep a nuclear warhead from burning up on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. At a normal angle a U.S. analyst said it could have reached 2,480 miles.
In September, North Korea conducted its fifth nuclear test and three missile tests, totaling about 20 for the year. Pyongyang said it tested a miniaturized nuclear warhead that could be placed on a missile. The U.S. expressed belief that North Korea already has small enough warheads to fit on short-range missiles aimed at South Korea. The North also launched a missile from a submarine, showing it now possesses second strike capability. Obama promised, “additional significant steps, including new sanctions to demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences to its unlawful and dangerous actions” to which a Wall StreetJournal editorial answered, “Yada, yada, yada”.
In October, the Musudan failed again.
This February, North Korea showed it has learned how to produce solid fuel, introducing it aboard the Pukguksong-2, a nuclear-capable ballistic missile that was sent on a high trajectory into space indicating another re-entry test. This is the flight that interrupted the dinner at Mar-a-Lago with the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the table.
In March — we’re now up to date — North Korea, ordered by Kim Jong-un, simultaneously launched four mid-range missiles 620 miles into the Sea of Japan, three of them falling in Japan’s exclusive use economic zone.
getting it wrong
In May, less than a year ago, The New York Times said experts were confident that North Korea is years away from deploying an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking the mainland of the United States with a nuclear payload. Progress is making those experts look foolish, with Pyongyang now pledging such a launch this year.
A more troubling assessment in a Journal op-ed co-authored by former CIA chief James Woolsey that says North Korea has the missiles KN-08 and KN-14, both mobile launched, probably nuclear–tipped, and already capable of striking the U.S. mainland. The second author, Peter Pry is chief of staff of the Congressional EMP commission, and he has far worse news to convey. EMP stands for electromagnetic pulse, “the most dangerous weapons known to man”, and he says North Korea may already have this technology. A low-yield nuclear device adapted for EMP and detonated over North America could send gamma rays to earth that could permanently fry the U.S. and Canada grid as well as all electronics, leading to death by starvation of 90% of our populations and bringing both nations to an end.
The Trump administration rescinded its original executive order that would have blocked ingress by the people of seven Seven countries originally banned are in red. Iraq has since been removed from the ban.
Muslim nations, and substituted a new six-country version with the rough edges that the Ninth Circuit court objected to filed down.
It is still problematic, is still in violation of a Supreme Court ruling that entry to the U.S. cannot be based on nationality. The state of Hawaii filed suit. So have California, Minnesota, New York and Oregon. A Hawaiian judge has ruled a halt to the ban, the second time the courts have stopped it. President Trump says he will take it all the way to the Supreme Court, by which time, with extreme vetting long since installed to his satisfaction, a 90-day ban will make no sense whatsoever.
Let’s step back to ask again what this ban is for. Its stated purpose — unchanged, unless in secret — is to pause admissions to the country for 90 days (120 for Syria) while the administration works out what should constitute extreme vetting. Let’s momentarily set aside that there is and has been extreme vetting in place for some time, a fact that the administration perversely ignores and which raises suspicion as to whether there is some other motive. For the moment what is interesting is that the original ban was declared a week after Donald Trump took office and the new ban was to start March 16. That’s an interval of 43 days. Dreaming up extreme vetting policy does not require the silence of closed airport gates with no one entering, which means the administration by the 16th had 43 days to work on vetting procedures. Why then does the new ban need to be 90 days? Why not 47? Has the administration done nothing to further their vetting objectives during those 43 days? How can they now justify 90?
The court stoppage will delay the ban further, so we could well find that most or all of those 47 days will slide by just as did the 43 days, totaling the 90 days the administration said were needed.
So with so few days left, just what is the point of the administration staging a fight with the courts other than sheer obstinacy? What is the point of disgracing the United States with so crude and prejudicial a policy that it offends entire countries — even unbelievably Iraq originally, putting in danger our troops who are in country fighting ISIS, a country that we must continue to work with? Why shatter our historical image of being welcoming to immigrants? Is this just Donald Trump insisting on having his way? Or was it fraud — an intention of extending the ban indefinitely, once another diversion is set loose to make people forget the original 90 days.
getting it wrong
Is there a media outlet that hasn’t reported that none of the terrorists in the U.S. have come from the original seven countries and that 15 of the 9/11 killers came from a country mysteriously (winks all around) not among the banned — Saudi Arabia?
The President’s own Homeland Security Department just came out with two reports, the first saying that nationality is a poor basis for blocking terrorists. The second — and much more consequential — concluding that the terrorists we’ve experienced have been radicalized here, in the United States. They didn’t come in covertly from elsewhere. That slick ISIS propaganda using American social media has done the job, is an excellent bet.
And why hasn’t it occurred to the Washington solons that banning Muslim countries is sure to radicalize that many more Muslims living peaceful lives in this country but now stirred to a martyrdom of outraged killing by this blanket insult to their religion.
going to extremes
One of Trump’s campaign lies was that tens of thousands of Syrians — mostly young men — were entering the U.S. and “we don’t know who they are, because we have no system to vet them”. He would institute “what I call EXTREME VETTING“, he tweeted and repeated at every campaign stop.
The vetting, which Trump thinks does not happen at all, typically takes 18 to 24 months. All refugees are first interviewed repeatedly by the United Nations to learn the details of their lives, and from that process emerge only 1% who are then recommended to the United States for additional vetting. For that 1% the next step is a State Department resettlement center in Amman, Jordan, “for a background check led by specially trained Department of Homeland Security interrogators”, reported a recent piece on CBS’s “60 Minutes”.
“Mostly we focus on victims of torture, survivors of violence, women-headed households, a lot of severe medical cases. [There are] so many interviews, so many intelligence screenings, so many checks along the way. They are questioned at least three times by interviewers looking for gaps or inconsistencies in their stories”.
Additionally, their use of social media is searched. The data collected is passed through U.S. intelligence databases looking for any red flags.
But don’t take our — or their — word for it. Here is Reuel Marc Gerecht, a Middle East expert and contributing editor of The Weekly Standard, which calls itself the “#1 conservative weekly magazine”:
The difficulties for Muslim Middle Easterners to obtain visas or refugee status have exponentially increased…The Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security, and even State Department consular officers ruthlessly profile those seeking entry. For al Qaeda or the Islamic State to plan terrorism inside the United States using non-American, non-green-card-holding, and non-European Muslim agents would require enormous luck and patience.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was mocked for years by Republicans for saying about the Affordable Care Act, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it”. How comical therefore to see Republicans doing the same. What we’ll call the Ryan bill — created as much or more by the new Health & Human Services chief, Tom Price — was kept in a locked room in the House with only a limited roster allowed to read it. Not even Republican senators were allowed to see it. It’s being pushed through the requisite House committees with great haste despite roaring dissension from within Republican ranks. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he will take the House bill straight to the floor for vote with no debate.
But now, all its secrets are out. The bill is being challenged by industry and medical groups for depriving people of access to care, by extreme right factions for being too liberal, by a public that is slowly understanding what it is about to lose with Obamacare repeal, and President Trump thinks it’s moving too fast and needs negotiation, having found that “Nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated”, when everyone knows how complicated it is.
Former Speaker John Boehner is now free to speak his mind: “In the 25 years that I served in the United States Congress, Republicans never ever one time agreed on what a health care proposal should look like. Not once.”
Ryan is ramming the bill through the House refusing any changes. He is rigid in the face of the critical ferment. “It really comes down to a binary choice”, he said. “This is the chance, and the best and only chance we’re gonna get”.
But Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton has been sounding an alarm: “Do not walk the plank and vote for a bill that cannot pass the Senate and then have to face the consequences of that vote”.
The House bill was approved by two of the requisite committees even without “scoring” by the Congressional Budget Office (scoring estimates how many will buy insurance and how much the plan will cost) which has just been released. The CBO forecasts a drop in the number of insured of 14 million in the Republican plan’s first year alone, rising to 24 million by 2026, but that the plan will see savings of $337 billion.
Before the announcement, the White House had bad-mouthed the CBO, pointing out how wide of the mark its estimates have been in the past. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney actually said, “I love the folks at CBO…but sometimes we [sic] have to do stuff we’re not capable of doing and estimating the impact of a bill of this size probably isn’t the best use of their time”.
Press secretary Sean Spicer joined in: “If you’re looking at the CBO for accuracy, you’re looking in the wrong place”. Two days later, pleased at the dollar estimates, Spicer repeated that the CBO is no good at estimating people but is very good at estimating cost.
Donald Trump calls the Affordable Care Act “the very, very failed and failing Obamacare law”, and a “disaster”, but throwing more confusion into the mix, counsels Ryan and Price to wait a year and let the country watch Obamacare implode. Otherwise, “people aren’t going to see the truly devastating effects of Obamacare”. Otherwise, “if we end it, everyone’s going to say, oh, remember how great Obamacare used to be”.
Well, yes, of course it is imploding, and the Republican zeal for repeal is the cause. With the mandate that requires everyone to buy insurance or pay a penalty gone or unenforced under one of the president’s first executive orders, insurers believe they will be left with only the ill, requiring the costliest care, so they are dropping out of the exchanges.
schism
Agreement looks beyond reach. The American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association and AARP, which represents older persons — all are alarmed that when millions lose insurance under repeal, the providers will lose the revenue needed to provide care. Governors from the 31 states states that opted for expanded Medicaid, which has given some 11 million of their citizens access to healthcare they never had but will disappear come 2020, are lobbying the Senate. Republican Congress members brave enough to stage town hall sessions during the recent one-week break were met with raucous crowds shouting their outrage at losing the insurance they finally gained under the Affordable Care Act. Hard-right Republicans that still haven’t heard that Obamacare is now more popular than ever said those must have been Democrats bused in from elsewhere. No sign of buses, however.
At the other end of the spectrum, the extreme right, with backing by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, the Club for Growth and Heritage Action for America, is against the bill primarily because, in place of the subsidies that helped people buy insurance, the replacement bill offers refundable tax credits — “Obamacare-lite” they call it, because, like the subsidies, to them it’s just another entitlement.
What especially bothers them is that the tax credit will be an outright payment to the over 40% of Americans who make so little in income that they pay no income tax from which to deduct their credit. Trump had said some time ago, “if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it [is] not going to happen with us”.
Mark Meadows, Chairman of the Freedom Caucus, and representing a safely gerrymandered district in western North Carolina ironically filled with churches teaching Christian principles, and backed by the district’s overabundance of unaffected Medicare retirees who safely exercise their ideological purity at the expense of others, says he wants a “clean repeal” with evidently little concern for any replacement. He leads the fight against the Ryan plan, would strip away the tax credit, and cancel the federal government funded Medicaid expansion, in combination leaving around 20 million Obamacare subscribers with nothing. What would be left to be called replacement? Insurance. Buy some if you have the money. Health savings accounts. Start one if you have the money.
The president is faced with the task of bringing these factions together, or see the enterprise fail. He says he intends to hold the stadium-size rallies that worked in his campaign to pressure the way-right faction to come to terms.
“a thing of beauty”
So says Trump. Try to find the beauty in this: Insurers price their products based on the age of the client, as one might expect. Under the Affordable Care Act, they are limited to charging the oldest age group three times what they charge the youngest. In the Ryan/Price package the ratio is 5 to 1. Extraordinarily prejudiced against older people, this huge difference is sure to price their millions out of the market, leaving them in their later years hoping nothing goes wrong before reaching Medicare age.
The tax credits to help pay for that insurance are also geared to age. What has critics dumbfounded is that the credits’ ratio is only 2 to 1; the oldest will get a maximum of only $4,000, just twice the $2,000 that the youngest would receive, to pay for insurance that costs five times as much as what the young would pay.
More bafflement: Why are the credits based only on age? Because insurers price their products based on age. A customer’s income is irrelevant to insurers. But how can the government justify handing out taxpayer money based on what makes sense for the insurance business and to people who don’t need the money?
Of course, the amounts are so low that this becomes an academic quibble. The credits don’t begin to pay the tab for America’s expensive health insurance, which derive from America’s out of control health care costs. Whereas the Wall Street Journal celebrates the “Historic Health-Care Moment” and avoids making comparisons, the New York Times gives several examples of the complete inadequacy of the subsidy Republicans are offering. Here’s one:
A 60-year-old earning $20,000 in Lincoln, Neb., currently gets a subsidy of $18,470 [!] to help her buy insurance, with extra subsidies to help her pay deductibles and co-payments, according to calculations made by Kaiser [Family Foundation, a health research group]. Under the new legislation, she would get a subsidy of $4,000, and no help with cost sharing.
Note that we’re in Lincoln, Nebraska, because the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies are attuned to the different insurance costs across the nation. The replacement plan pays no attention to that.
Here’s more: Individuals earning more than $75,000 a year get no tax credit. For couples the cutoff is $150,000. The hard limits make the same mistake of Obamacare’s requiring that companies with over 50 employees pay for health insurance for those working over 30 hours a week. Companies began shifting to part-time to stay under the 50-employee bar. With the Ryan plan credits, where’s the fairness of an all or nothing cliff at those two thresholds instead of a gradual phase out based on income? It’s an inducement for people with income near the cutoffs to cheat.
Recall that Trump said, “Insurance for everybody”. But those over the thresholds will not even get the plan’s paltry assistance. Price, in his Senate confirmation hearings, constantly used the code word “access” to health insurance. After hearing it once too often, Bernie Sanders interrupted with, “I have access to buy a ten million dollar house, but I don’t have the money”.
And there’s this: The Affordable Care Act greatly expanded Medicaid by raising eligibility to those making 138% of the government’s poverty line and paying 100% of the cost for three years and 90% thereafter. Unbelievably, before the Affordable Care Act, the median income for working parents to qualify for Medicaid had to be less than 61% percent of the poverty line. The reform plan continues Obamacare coverage until 2020, but will admit no one new thereafter, excluding anyone whose income newly drops below the poverty line.
Health care costs vary widely by region and state. Obamacare’s Medicaid pays the going local rates. But just as their tax credit is $2,000 to $4,000 no matter the local cost of insurance, Messrs. Ryan and Price prize simplicity no matter how ill it fits reality. Beginning in 2020 their plan will pay to the states a fixed rate per capita for those enrolled in Medicaid, no matter the costs regions and states are experiencing, no matter health care cost inflation. The far right is angered by this plan for a different reason. They can’t believe the plan doesn’t kill Medicaid expansion immediately.
Moreover, no new applicant — new adults or families who fall below the poverty level — would be admitted to the federal rolls beginning the next decade. Persons or families who lose Medicaid eligibility owing to rising incomes, but then drop again below the poverty line, would not be allowed back in. It will be left to the states to pick up the tab over and above the federal fixed amount per person for any new enrollees, and for the fluctuating needs of their citizens. That is a formula for the gradual extinction of federal involvement in Medicaid, as Republicans intend. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that $370 billion in cost would be handed to the states over 10 years. The states won’t have the money.
Donald Trump had flirted with the notion of running for president in the past, but mostly drawn by the aggrandizement of self-image it would convey, one assumes, given how remarkably little he had done to prepare himself for the job. What could make that any clearer than, 20 months into the political arena, he just said, “Nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated”, when everyone knows how complicated it is.
When he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in June of 2015 to announce his candidacy, his only apparent motivation was more and better jobs for American workers — jobs taken away by trade on terms that made us fools, and by immigrants pouring across the southern border who took away what jobs were left. He would fix that by imposing a 45% tariff on goods entering the country from China, by tearing up NAFTA, and by building a “beautiful” wall to shut out Mexicans. That was about it.
Stephen Bannon had taken over the Breitbart News Network after the death of its eponymous founder. While there, he hosted a radio call-in show and often had Donald Trump as a guest. The media speaks of their shared views, but the knowledge imbalance had to be vast. Trump had simplistic attitudes supported, often as not, by “facts” he makes up. He disparaged other countries and people along with Bannon — an all-inclusive list — but was vacuously short on knowledge and specifics. Trump has in the past been back and forth, registering as Republican or Democrat, which says he had evolved nothing that could be called a political philosophy. He reads almost not at all. His ghost writer says he never once saw a book in the vast apartment in Trump Tower during the entire 18 months he spent interviewing for “The Art of the Deal”.
In this empty vessel, Bannon, brimful of revolutionary zeal, had found his man.
Bannon reportedly told a writer for the Daily Beast who met him at a party that he was “a Leninist” because, like the Russian revolutionary he “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too”. Bannon was eager to “bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment”.
So who do we now find installed in the Oval Office? Nothing less than a President Trump who is all in for an agenda of “deconstruction of the administrative state”, in Bannon’s words, veritably feeding the country into a shredder. Trump runs the country by executive order, has rolled back recent regulations, cancelled the major Pacific trade pact, and deliberately appointed to cabinet posts people of a mindset the opposite of what the departments they will lead have worked toward. “If you look at these cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction,” says Bannon.
Alarms went off when Trump brought Bannon into the White House, a man acting as confidant to the president who had come from what the Southern Poverty Law Center called, “a white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill” — anti- immigration, anti-gay marriage, slandering Muslims and Jews. Under Bannon, Breitbart had became “the platform for the alt-right”, which
Bannon defines as “younger people who are anti-globalist, very nationalist, terribly anti-establishment”. Others would say his re-working of Breitbart made it a platform for those who celebrated white nationalism. “I’ve never been a supporter of ethno-nationalism”, says Bannon, aiming to divorce himself from his Breitbart past.
So who is he, really, and where do his unorthodox beliefs come from?
Once an investment banker and a somewhat accidental part-owner of the unceasing residuals from the television series “Seinfield”, Stephen Bannon has no need for money; he is in this to change history. “What we are witnessing now is the birth of a new political order poorly understood by cosmopolitan élites in the media”, he emailed to The Washington Post.
His partner in a Beverly Hills firm that did entertainment deals was quoted in Time saying, “He’s a sponge. He’s very bright. He listens. He’s a strategic thinker, about three or four steps down the road” and unwilling to take no for an answer. Others, like conservative talk radio host Dana Loesch, who had worked at Breitbart, calls him “One of the worst people on God’s green earth”. She is seconded by former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro, who said to a Time reporter, “He is legitimately one of the worst people I’ve ever dealt with”.
Bannon likes to thinks of himself as a honey badger, an animal undeterred from killing its food by hordes of stinging bees and snake bites. For getting the election so wrong, he told The New York Times that the media “should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while”, to which he added, “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still don’t understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States”. Of like mind, Trump, in addition to calling the media “dishonest” and bearers of “fake news”, would brand the media as “the enemy of the American people”. That last caused Sen. John McCain to say, “that’s how dictators get started”.
Born to a blue collar, Irish Catholic family, Bannon developed the view that the country’s cultural and political élites are contemptuous of ordinary Americans. He has called himself “the patron saint of commoners”. The 2008 crash, which saw the bailouts of Wall Street’s investment banks, while the common folk, like his father, once a telephone lineman, took the hit in their savings plans and reduced paychecks, infuriated Bannon, who blasted “crony capitalists” in Washington for failing to prosecute bank executives, none of whom went to prison for engineering the financial crisis.
Bannon’s thesis is that the “enlightened capitalism” and the values embedded in the culture of mid-20th Century America — the entrepreneurial spirit that simultaneously cared for one’s fellow man — an ethos strongly held by a people that had endured the hardships of the Great Depression and the Second World War — have since become corrupted by immorality and rampant greed. The generation that followed indulged in the counter-culture of the 60s and 70s and was spoiled by the prosperity built by their parents’ generation, leading to dependency and socialism at one end of the economic spectrum and the rampant materialism of the wealthy at the other, with those in the middle left to pay for the wreckage of American lives left behind. He calls the generation in question — the baby boomers — “the most spoiled, the most self-centered, most narcissistic generation the country’s ever produced”.
“a country dominated by white Christians, not “cosmopolitans”; where no one spoke Spanish at the grocery store; where America’s biggest C.E.O.s weren’t named Satya or Sundar; where every worker could have a high-wage middle-skilled job; and where trade walls and the slow pace of automation meant you didn’t have to be a lifelong learner.”
In place of enlightened capitalism has come the globalism of the élites that has so hurt working class Americans. His disgust for Republicans, whom he calls “the party of Davos”, is as hot as his animus for liberals, both camps having arrogated to themselves wealth and power and left the middle class deprived of reward for the work that gave them those riches. Clearly Trump was reading Bannon’s words in his inaugural address when he said:
“One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world”.
Bannon calls the corruption that awards the power élite with wealth far beyond what their efforts have earned “socialism for the very wealthy” as ruinous to the social structure as the “socialism for the very poor” which is unsupportable and become a crisis.
Bannon describes himself as an economic nationalist. An America first guy. “I have admired nationalist movements throughout the world, have said repeatedly strong nations make great neighbors”, he told The Wall Street Journal‘s Kimberly Strassel. For him, the president’s withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership is “one of the most pivotal moments in modern American history”, signifying America’s withdrawal from the world, the importance of which the media cannot grasp. At CPAC, the annual conservative gathering, Bannon lashed out at the “corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has”. In his inaugural address Trump said, “We’ve made other countries rich, while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon”. Again surely Bannon’s words. Trump does not write like that.
Pulling against nationalism is the globalism that Bannon decries. “I could see this when I worked at Goldman Sachs — there are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado”, he said at a speech given to a conference on poverty at the Vatican.
influences
Bannon’s thinking runs counter to the current liberal emphasis on multiculturalism, gender mixtures, secularism. It sides with the Irish 18th-Century political thinker Edmund Burke, who posited that what binds a society are traditions handed down from parent to child including most particularly, for Bannon, nationalism and religion. “These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron”, Burke said.
The religious component of the Burkean traditions that should be handed down according to Bannon is the Judeo-Christian heritage that formed the country, an essential underpinning of principled capitalism in which workers share in its benefits. It is the values bestowed by those religions, not their practice, that Bannon is advocating, not the abandonment of the First Amendment and a Constitution that got us this far. Nevertheless, “Torchbearer”, a documentary he wrote and directed, does declare “God’s teaching” as “the ultimate check on the power of the state”. The state falls apart and leads to tyranny when the secular get to decide what is right and wrong.
That emphasis on Judeo-Christian teachings carries over to nationalism — and nativism. Those not imbued in these values, those who would bring into this country alien beliefs such as the Sharia law of Islam, those who do not have Judeo-Christian values in their DNA, would pollute core principles that hold society together. “These are not Jefferson democrats”, Bannon has said. And some might argue that the Judeo portion of Judeo-Christian is window-dressing. His ex-wife has said he made anti-Semitic comments about students at his daughter’s school, that they were raised as whiny brats. Bannon pushed back hard against that allegation, telling Strassel last fall, “Breitbart is the most pro-Israel site in the United States of America” with 10 reporters in Jerusalem, a leader in stopping the BDS movement — boycott, divestment, sanctions — in the United States, and more.
Bannon holds no truck for multiculturism, which splits us into groups often quarreling among themselves. America has not always — and you could even say seldom — welcomed immigrants despite Emma Lazarus’ stirring words under Miss Liberty, but those immigrants have always folded in, learned the language and the customs, and assimilated. That has worked. For Bannon, segmentation drives groups away from adopting Americanism, which is fully inclusive, inviting people of diverse origins to merge into a unified single sense of self that leaves minority separateness behind. Otherwise, how can we all come together?
turning point
Bannon has been swayed by theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe whose book “The Fourth Turning”, argued that American history repeats in cycles that work out to 80 years long — the approximate gaps between the Revolution, the Civil War, World War II — which brings us to now, and Bannon’s rationalizations for breaking everything and the proclamation in Trump’s inaugural address that, “You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before”. Bannon based his 2010 film “Generation Zero” on the Strauss-Howe book in the belief that with the 2008 financial crisis, the moment of upheaval was upon us.
More ominously, Bannon believes that the fourscore year convulsion doesn’t end with simply throwing out political parties and deconstruction. He believes that war makes for the essential transformative cataclysm, massive war at that, making the point in talking to the two authors that the Civil War was bigger than the Revolutionary War and World War II was bigger than the Civil War, suggesting, although not said by him, that the time has come for nuclear. Was it Bannon, filling Trump with his vision of the future, that caused Donald Trump to ask a friend of MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough about nuclear weapons, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?”. He speaks of the confrontation with radical Islam as against “Islamic fascism” being “a global existential war”, of a looming war with China, and had said when still with Breitbart that “one of our central organizing principles…is that we’re at war”.
In the Vatican talk, Bannon mentioned an Italian artist and political theorist named Julius Evola, a supporter of the traditionalist movement that seems to have influenced Vladimir Putin. It was striking that Bannon had heard of someone as obscure as Evola — he died in 1974 — and that led researchers to dig further to find who Evola was and what he espoused and how Bannon, an avid reader, could have come upon him. They found that there were already references in Breitbart articles, such as one written by the controversial and now defrocked Milo Yiannopoulos that said Evola’s writings influenced the “origins of the alternative right”. Another admirer of Evola was Benito Mussolini.
One can see Bannon’s inspiration when Evola argues that change is “not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up”. Reacting against the decadence of modernity and materialism, democracy and individual liberty, Evola would substitute a society ideally ordered by “hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual”. Bannon’s list would doubtless be different, but the traditionalist philosophy of a firm structure, a continuity handed down generation-to-generation, is what Bannon also found in Burke.
And so, paces from the president, we find this extraordinary disheveled figure who rocketed to walk-in privileges to the Oval Office, where he unquestionably molds the thinking of the president. This is who Trump has given a permanent seat on the National Security Council and the principals’ committee, neither being a place for a political strategist, as exemplified by George W. Bush’s chief of staff Joshua Bolten banning the president’s political adviser, Karl Rove. Sitting on that National Security Council council is someone who, as we have just reviewed, thinks we have reached an apocalyptic 80-year moment and for whom history says that massive war is needed to effect the next transformation.
Discoveries leading to the firing of Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser three weeks into his presidency have exposed a much wider story alleging extensive and mystifying contacts with Russia by not just Former National Security Adviser, Gen. Mike Flynn his adviser, General Mike Flynn, but also by members of his campaign across all of last year. Even if a case can be made that familiarization contacts with other countries by a candidate’s staff is sensible, why only Russia? And why Russian intelligence? Clearly, something is very wrong with this picture.
The administration has tried to deflect attention away from the Russia connection by making it a problem of leaks. In his lengthy news conference two days after Flynn was discharged, President Trump put forth the baffling contradiction that “classified information was given illegally” to the media, implicitly endorsing the validity of the information, yet the reporting of the leaked information about “Russia is fake news; this is fake news put out by the media”.
He continued his campaign to discredit the media as dishonest, a crusade that probably succeeds among those who don’t read or watch that media to know how much more persuasive are its facts compared to his tweets. They only hear him say to reporters sitting before him about “This whole Russia scam that you are building so that you don’t talk about the real subject which is the leaks”.
the story so far
The daily revelations tumbling out from that media can make for a confused picture. The first job is to lay out the story:
On January 12th, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius revealed that on December 28th Gen. Flynn had called the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak. That was the day before President Obama was about to impose new sanctions on Russia and expel 35 of its diplomats in retaliation for Russia’s trying to influence the American elections.
Reuters followed the Post a day later to say there had been five phone calls between Flynn and Kislyak.
The timing was suspect. Was Flynn calling to assure the Russian that, once president, three weeks forward, Trump would make the sanctions go away? And, looking back to December, wasn’t it curious that Putin uncharacteristically said he would not retaliate against the sanctions? Trump had immediately tweeted, “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) — I always knew he was very smart!”.
The intelligence agencies — all 17 — were already entirely convinced that it was the Russians who had hacked the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta’s emails, with President-elect Trump strangely refusing to accept their verdict and smearing their competence, reaching back 15 years to the Iraq War for his only evidence. Why was he shielding the Russians, claiming it could have been any country or “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds”? And now it has been revealed that his national security adviser designate was secretly in contact with the Russian ambassador while Trump was still not yet president.
In the days immediately following the Post‘s story, both Vice President Mike Pence and Press Secretary Sean Spicer assured the public that Flynn had not discussed the sanctions and was merely making arrangements for a phone call after the inauguration between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Then came the Washington Post‘s February 10th bombshell reporting that acting Attorney General Sally Yates (Sen. Jeff Sessions was awaiting confirmation) had two weeks earlier, on January 26th, contacted the White House counsel to advise that a National Security Agency (NSA) intercept had recorded a phone call between Gen. Flynn and the Russian ambassador and that Flynn had indeed discussed sanctions. It was a “heads-up”, as Spicer put it, that Vice President Pence’s contrary assurances to the public were therefore incorrect. Moreover, said Yates, Flynn may have rendered himself vulnerable to blackmail.
Flynn was already a controversial figure, not only for a sharp temper that brooked no dissent and a conspiratorial worldview, but for his unconventional connection to Russia. He had accepted an unexplained, expenses-paid trip to the Kremlin in December, 2015, where he had even dined with Putin. The transcripts of the phone calls to the ambassador have not been released, but it is far from outlandish to suppose that private citizen Flynn was undermining the policy just enacted by the still-sitting president, Barack Obama.
When the Post story broke on the 10th, the President was questioned aboard Air Force One:
Question: Mr. President what do you make of reports that General Flynn had conversations with the Russians about sanctions before you were sworn in?
Trump: I don’t know about it. I haven’t seen it. What report is that?
Question: (Repeated)
Trump: I haven’t seen that. I’ll look at that.
deciphering
In the two weeks between Yates contacting the White House and the Post exposé, Trump did not tell his vice president, leaving him to think he was right to tell the country that Flynn never discussed sanctions with the Russian envoy. What does that say about the president’s relationship with Pence? Three weeks after inauguration, has he already been cast adrift? He was certainly manipulated, possibly because, told the truth, the upright Pence might well have refused to continue to advance the lie.
How are we to imagine that Gen Flynn was free-lancing — contacting the Russian ambassador on his own, without the knowledge of the president; indeed, without the instruction of the president to do so? Are we expected to think that Flynn did not tell the president what he and Kislyak had spoken about the moment Flynn hung up?
The White House counsel informed the president immediately about Sally Yates’ knowledge that Flynn had discussed sanctions. We’ll surmise that only told the president that others now knew what he had clearly known all along.
As for Flynn, when only the phone calls had been revealed and not the content, it seems clear that the president hoped to ride that out, to let the matter die as just innocent calls around Christmas. He had no intention of firing Flynn. Why would he? He’d been key in the plot to mollify the Russians. Then along came Sally Yates.
out like Flynn
The White House tried to shift the narrative: Flynn was let go because he misled the vice-president. And the White House, with Spicer taking the lead, then shifted to making the real problem the leaks of sensitive information. Translation: we the public should never have learned of any of this.
It was Flynn who was hung out to dry for not telling Pence, not the president for keeping silent, of course. Flynn had equivocated, claiming that he couldn’t quite remember what he had talked about with Kislyak, a waffling believed by no one. There was nothing wrong, nothing illegal about his talking to the ambassador; that was “immediately determined” by the White House counsel, said Spicer.
Question: That is not a problem, that General Flynn discussed sanctions with the Russians?
Spicer: No, there is — as I — I can’t say it clearly enough. There was nothing in what General Flynn did in terms of conducting himself that was an issue. What it came down to, plain and simple, was him misleading the vice president and others and not having a firm grasp on his recollection of that.
Nothing illegal? It is an outright felony under the Logan Act for a private citizen, which Flynn was in December, to conduct foreign policy for the United States.
The day after Spicer’s insistence that trust was the only issue, The New York Times reported that the FBI had questioned Flynn back in January,
Flynn leads the “Lock her up” chant against Hillary Clinton during the campaign. Trump says the media has now been “so unfair” to Flynn.
probably taking their cue from Ignatius’ Post reporting. The Washington Post has now reported that Flynn denied to the FBI that he had discussed with the Russian ambassador the lifting of sanctions. Lying to the FBI is a felony. Will Flynn really take a bullet for the president?
year-long contacts
Then came the Times story that blew the lid off any pretense the White House was trying to maintain. On February 14th, the Times reported:
“Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.”
In his press conference two days later Trump said about the “big, long front page story. It’s a joke”.
In our story, “Putin Would Like You to Forget About Russia’s Election Hacks“, we had told of the FBI coming upon what they assumed to be Russian attempts to hack the Democratic National Committee, the Times being the source. The latest Times report says that it was that same intercepting work by the FBI and the intelligence agencies that had uncovered the DNC hacks that found the communications with Russian intelligence by Trump campaign staff and others.
The Times article says no evidence has been found of the campaign colluding with the Russians to affect the election — so far — but says the FBI is sifting through a “larger trove of information” and has obtained bank and travel records and conducted interviews.
David Ignatius, who broke the story of Sally Yates warning the White House, said that the Post knows that FBI Director James Comey “was worried about her turning over this information, afraid that the White House would interfere with the FBI`s ongoing
investigation”. The bright side of that hints that, with a thorough and unflinching investigation, Comey may be out to resurrect his reputation after his harmful finger placed on the scale to Hillary Clinton’s detriment in the final days before the election; the dark side says Comey views Trump as someone whose power has already corrupted absolutely and would not stop short of trying to halt the investigation. It is hard to imagine that Trump supporter Jeff Sessions, running the Justice Department, would object.
fake news
We are witnessing two great newspapers doing some of the best and most important investigative reporting in years, reminding us of how indispensable is the press if we are ever to know the truth of what goes on in government. Meanwhile the idiot class yammers about fake news, believing a president who clearly wants to eliminate freedom of the press, and thinking that truth is to be found in his tweets.
In our adjacent story on the front page, we take up the question of where this will lead.
