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Zanjani's wealth has been estimated at $14 billion, The Associated Press reports, and Iran's Oil Ministry says the businessman owes more than $2.25 billion for oil sales he made on behalf of the Iranian government.

The number of those caught in 2015 was released during China's annual parliamentary session - no doubt to remind delegates gathered in Beijing, that China's ruling communist party will continue pursuing corrupt officials, our correspondent says.

McClanahan said it’s unclear how Grenell could have already gotten a clearance as an ambassador. The House Oversight Committee is investigating whether the Trump administration has overruled career officials in granting security clearances to political appointees.

“The reality is he’s pro-himself and nothing more,” Valeriu Pașa, who leads a prominent civil society group in Moldova called WatchDog.MD, said of Plahotniuc. “He was playing both sides for 15 years at least.” Plahotniuc lost power in 2019 and fled Moldova. His current whereabouts are unknown.

“In his official capacity, Plahotniuc was involved in corrupt acts that undermined the rule of law and severely compromised the independence of democratic institutions in Moldova,” the State Department said in its announcement. “Today’s action sends a strong signal the United States does not tolerate corruption and stands with the people of Moldova in their fight against it.”

Mr. Gertler has been doing business in Congo for more than two decades, securing a series of contracts to export diamonds, gold, oil, cobalt and other minerals. The Treasury Department said in 2018 that he had “amassed his fortune through hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of opaque and corrupt mining.”

Mr. Gertler was issued the license after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin directed the acting head of the agency’s Office of Foreign Assets Control to take the step, even though several Trump-era State Department officials in charge of United States relations with Africa told The New York Times that they had been unaware that such a move was about to be taken and that they opposed it.

“If well-connected international billionaires like Gertler think there is a chance they can get away with their corrupt actions, then they will not be deterred from doing them,” Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement.

Four years into Trump’s presidency, it’s impossible to catalogue a full list of all the norms and laws he has gleefully broken. But he has argued, again and again, that he’s not the only person to disregard these guardrails

This rhetoric is effective in getting Trump off the hook for his wrongdoing, at least insofar as it helps his allies justify their support. But it is also a manifestation of his inability to empathize, to understand that other people might hold different values — or any values at all. It is literally inconceivable to him that Obama and Holder might really have taken law enforcement independence seriously

This failure to fully conceptualize the existence of other minds may be a fundamentally Trumpian trait. But the resulting insistence on the ubiquity of corruption has also been fueled by a right-wing media ecosystem that focuses outsize attention on supposed violations of norms by those in the Democratic Party.

The same dynamic is at play in the obsession of Trump, and the right-wing media, with Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured private email server — which, for them, became such an iconic example of supposed corruption and impunity that it functioned as an effective rebuttal to more or less anything Trump did during the 2016 campaign.

s far as Trump is concerned, these scandals are evidence that everyone else is as corrupt as he is — so his own corruption and misbehavior are no big deal. 

And so Meadows insisted to Politico that the blurring of lines between government and campaign at the Republican National Convention was fine, because people “outside of the Beltway . . . expect that Donald Trump is going to promote Republican values and they would expect that Barack Obama, when he was in office, that he would do the same for Democrats.”

The Republican National Convention was a natural place to display this gleeful cynicism. It was a television spectacle, and television, as the novelist David Foster Wallace once argued, is a cynical medium. As Wallace explained, the television screen is a perfect canvas for displaying “sights that undercut what’s said”: Consider, for example, the spectacle of former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi speaking at the convention about the evils of nepotism, while the chyron below announced speeches that evening by Trump’s wife and two of his children. Yet, in Wallace’s view, the cynicism and irony of television tend to overpower any criticism.

This has always been Trump’s real skill: pulling everyone around him down into the current of his cynicism. To paraphrase Meadows, Trump’s 2020 campaign slogan might as well be, “Nobody cares.”

Republicans in the Trump years have gotten used to competing under rules biased in their favor. They have come to fear that unless the rules favor them, they will lose. And so they have learned to think of biased rules as necessary, proper, and just—and to view any effort to correct those rules as a direct attack on their survival.

What I wrote in 2017 has only become more true since: “We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered.”

“No one could do anything to stop him.” No one has stopped Trump from directing taxpayer dollars to his personal businesses.

Trump’s clemency to Stone reminded others who might hold guilty knowledge—people like Paul Manafort and Ghislaine Maxwell—of the potential benefits to them of staying silent about Trump.

How did Trump get away with using a public power for personal advantage in this way? There’s nothing to stop him. The Constitution vests the pardon power in the president.

a second-term Trump could demand that associates break the law for him—and then protect them when they are caught and face punishment. He could pardon his relatives—and even try to pardon himself.

Abuse of Government Resources for Personal Gain

Mr. Trump’s aides said he enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by holding a political event on the South Lawn of the White House, shattering conventional norms and raising questions about ethics law violations. He relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him,

No one has stopped him from defying congressional subpoenas looking into whether he was violating tax and banking laws. No one has stopped him from hiring and promoting his relatives.

Trump has a lot to hide, both as president and as a businessman. The price of his political and economic survival has been the destruction of oversight by Congress and the discrediting of honest reporting by responsible media

No one has stopped him from using government resources for partisan purposes. No one has stopped him from pressuring and cajoling foreign governments to help his reelection campaign.

No one has stopped him from using his power over the Postal Service to discourage voting that he thinks will hurt him.

The Hatch Act forbids most uses of government resources for partisan purposes. By long-standing courtesy, however, enforcement of that law against senior presidential appointees is left to the president. It’s just assumed that the president will want to comply. But what if he does not? The independent federal agency tasked with enforcing the Hatch Act, the Office of Special Counsel, has found nine senior Trump aides in violation of the law, and has recommended that Trump request their resignation. He has ignored that recommendation.

“No one could do anything to stop him.” In his first term, Trump purged the inspectors general from Cabinet departments and punished whistleblowers. In a second Trump term, the administration would operate ever more opaquely to cover up corruption and breaches in national security.

The Justice Department would be debauched ever more radically, becoming Trump’s own law firm and spending taxpayer dollars to defend him against the consequences of his personal wrongdoing. The hyper-politicization of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments would spread to other agencies.

Directing Public Funds to Himself and His CompaniesIn the 230-year history of the United States, no president before Trump had ever tried to direct public dollars to his own companies—so no Congress had ever bothered to specifically outlaw such activity.

Trump’s superpower is his absolute shamelessness. He steals in plain view. He accepts bribes in a hotel located smack in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. His supporters do not object. His party in Congress is acquiescent. This level of corruption in American life is unprecedented.

A willingness to line the Trump family’s pockets has become a mark of obeisance and identity, like wearing cowboy boots during the George W.  Bush administration

The result of this almost-universal Republican complicity in Trump’s personal corruption has been the neutering of Congress’s ability to act when corruption is disclosed.

Republicans in the House cheerfully support Trump when he defies subpoenas from Democratic chairs, setting a precedent that probably will someday be used against them.

Abuse of the Pardon PowerOn July 10, 2020, Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone. As Stone’s own communications showed, he had acted as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks in 2016. Had Stone cooperated with federal investigators, the revelations might have been dangerous to Trump. Instead, Stone lied to Congress and threatened other witnesses.Just as Stone was supposed to go to prison, Trump commuted his sentence. Commutation was more useful to the cover-up than an outright pardon. A commuted person retains his Fifth Amendment right not to testify; a pardoned person loses that right.

In a second Trump term, radical gerrymandering and ever more extreme voter suppression by Republican governors would become the party’s only path to survival in a country where a majority of the electorate strongly opposes Trump and his party. The GOP would complete its transformation into an avowedly antidemocratic party.

Inciting Political ViolenceTrump has used violence as a political resource since he first declared his candidacy, in the summer of 2015. But as his reelection prospects have dimmed in 2020, political violence has become central to Trump’s message. He wants more of it

“The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order,” Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway said on Fox & Friends on August 27. Two nights later, a 600-vehicle caravan of Trump supporters headed into downtown Portland, Oregon, firing paintball guns and pepper spray, driving toward a confrontation during which one of them was shot dead.

The people best positioned to regulate the level of political violence in the country are local police, whom Trump has again and again urged to do their work in ways that support him, no matter how “tough” that requires them to be. The police are represented by unions often aligned with the Trump campaign

“I can tell you,” Trump said in a March 2019 interview with Breitbart News, “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

Trump’s appeal is founded on a racial consciousness and a racial resentment that have stimulated white racist terrorism in the United States and the world, from the New Zealand mosque slaughter (whose perpetrator invoked Trump) to the Pittsburgh synagogue murders to mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Gilroy, California. In recent weeks, political violence has caused those deaths in Kenosha and Portland

It’s a trick of authoritarian populists like Trump to proclaim themselves leaders of “the people,” even as large majorities of the electorate reject them. The authoritarian populist defines “the people” to exclude anyone who thinks differently. Only his followers count as legitimate citizens.

Legend has it that in the 1870s, “Boss” William Tweed, the famously corrupt New York City politician, taunted his critics by saying, “What are you going to do about it?”* Trump’s relentless defiance of law and decency does the same. Congress has done nothing. So it’s up to voters.

precious few people want to be part of a movement that’s merely “less evil.” They don’t want to be or do anything evil at all. They want to be proud of their president. They want to be proud of their movement.

while it might be easy to reconcile a one-time action (like a vote) as less evil, it becomes far more difficult when your political affiliation is part of your identity. 

Many millions of Republicans aren’t just Republicans on Election Day, they’re Republicans every day. And Donald Trump placed every-day Republicans in a constant dilemma. Did you point it out when he did evil things? Or did you mainly remain silent, trusting in the notion that no matter how bad Trump was, his opponents were worse?

even worse, did the tension between Trump’s actions and your own morality grow so great that you started to redefine morality itself?

How many people made the migration from supporting Trump in spite of his character to supporting him because of who he was? I can think of countless folks, in both public and private life. 

That’s what discipling looks like.

Ted Cruz says his pronouns are “kiss my ass’ not just because he corrupted himself for Trump but because the crowd is corrupt as well. The same analysis goes for Josh Hawley’s refusal to apologize for his fist salute or his election challenge. He is morally corrupt. That cheering crowd is morally corrupt. 

Why? Because they’ve absorbed the lessons Trump taught. Fight the left with profane anger. Never apologize.

In 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention passed one of the most prescient and important resolutions in the denomination’s history. Its Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials

First, he’s the undeniable front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination, and there are reports he might even announce his candidacy before the 2022 midterms.

Second, the January 6 Committee is doing an extraordinary job using the words of Trump’s own officials to fully expose to anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear that Trump corruptly and likely criminally engineered an American coup.

Third, Axios reported this week on potential Trump plans for a second term, including a radical civil service reform that could lead to the government being stocked not with thousands of Trumpist officials, but with tens of thousands—discipled by Trump, imitating Trump, devoted to Trump. 

We should expect Trump to fill the government with his most loyal servants, and the January 6 hearings have taught us that loyalty to Trump sometimes requires lawlessness.

hy write about Trump and Christianity again? Three reasons.

“Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”

Over the weeks, the months, and the years, when the price of calling out actual evil—even an alleged lesser evil—is ostracization and alienation, then it’s often only a matter of time before your mind turns “lesser evil” into “not evil at all.” 

There is no binary choice. Republican Christians can say to Trump, right now, that there is no case for him over other Republicans—men or women who can choose better judges than Democrats, pursue better policies than Democrats, and defeat Joe Biden without resorting to lies and conspiracy theories and without corrupting the conscience of the church.

American Christian political leaders behave in public more like Trump than like Christ. American Christian families are torn apart by MAGA members who behave—the instant the topic turns to politics—more like Trump than like Christ.

They’d been discipled by Trump.

What if a segment of the population actually supported, or at least tolerated, the CCP? And even if that segment involved both myth and fact, it behooves the CCP to keep the myth alive.

How does the CCP garner popular support in an information era? How does a dictatorship explain to its population that its unchallenged rule is wise, just, and socially beneficial?

All of this takes place against a backdrop of family and social developments in which we can explore household dynamics, dating habits, and professional aspirations—all within social norms for those honest party members and seemingly violated by those who are not so honest.

watch the television series Renmin de Mingyi (“In the Name of the People”), publicly available with English subtitles.

In the Name of the People is a primetime drama about a local prosecutor’s efforts to root out corruption in a modern-day, though fictional, Chinese city. Beyond the anti-corruption narrative, the series also goes into local CCP politics as some of the leaders are (you guessed it) corrupt and others are simply bureaucratic time-servers, guarding their own privileges and status without actually helping the people they purport to serve.

the series boasts one of Xi’s other main themes, “common prosperity,” a somewhat elastic term that usually means the benefits of prosperity should be shared throughout all segments of society.

The historical tools used to generate support such as mass rallies and large-scale hectoring no longer work with a more educated and communications-oriented citizenry.

the central themes are quite clear: The party has brought historical prosperity to the community and there are a few bad apples who are unfairly trying to benefit from this wealth. There are also various sluggards and mediocrities who have no capacity for improvement or sense of public responsibilities.

So we see government officials pondering if they can ever find a date (being the workaholics that they are), or discussing housework with their spouses, or sharing kitchen duties, or reviewing school work with their child.

The show makes clear that the vast majority of party members and government officials are dedicated souls who work to improve peoples’ lives. And in the end, virtue triumphs, the party triumphs, China triumphs, and most (not all) of the personal issues are resolved as well.

The show’s version of the CCP eagerly and uncynically supports Chinese culture: The same union leader from the wildcat strike also writes and publishes poetry. Calligraphy is as prized as specialty teas. And all of this is told in a lively style, similar to the Hollywood fare Americans might watch.

n the Name of the People was first broadcast in 2017 as a lead-up to the last Communist Party Congress, China’s most important decision-making gathering, held every five years. The show’s launch was a huge hit, achieving the highest broadcast ratings of any show in a decade.

Within a month, the first episode had been seen over 350 million times and just one of the streaming platforms, iQIYI, reported a total of 5.9 billion views for the show’s 55 episodes.

All of this must come as good news for the prosecutors featured so favorably in the series—for their real-life parent government body, the Supreme People’s Protectorate, commissioned and provided financing for the show.

At a minimum, these shows illustrate a stronger self-awareness in the CCP and considerable improvement in communication strategy.

Most important, it provides direction to current party members. Indeed, in some cities viewing was made obligatory and the basis for “study sessions” for party cadres

Second, the enormous public success of the series and acknowledging deficiencies of the party allows the party to control the criticism without ever addressing the fundamental question of whether a one-party system is intrinsically susceptible to corruption or poor performance.

As communication specialists like to say, There is already a conversation taking place about your brand—the only question is whether you will lead the conversation. The CCP is leading in its communications strategy and making it as easy as possible for Chinese citizens to support Xi.

it is not difficult to see that in this area, as in many others, China is breaking with tactics from the past and is playing its cards increasingly well. Whether the CCP can renew itself, reestablish that social contract, and live up to its television image is another question.

The corpse of this monster, which had annihilated tens of millions of its own citizens and thrown its country back 70 years into the past, was propped up in a corner: it’ll rot on its own, they thought. But it turned out not to be dead.

Our medieval pyramid has stood tall for all that time, its surface changing, but never its fundamental form. And it’s always been a single Russian ruler sitting at its peak: Pyotr I, Nicholas II, Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov… Today, Putin has been sitting at its peak for more than 20 years.

The Pyramid of Power poisons the ruler with absolute authority. It shoots archaic, medieval vibrations into the ruler and his retinue, seeming to say: “you are the masters of a country whose integrity can only be maintained by violence and cruelty; be as opaque as I am, as cruel and unpredictable, everything is allowed to you, you must call forth shock and awe in your population, the people must not understand you, but they must fear you.”

Judging by recent events, the idea of restoring the Russian Empire has entirely taken possession of Putin.

Yeltsin and the other creators of Perestroika surrounding him not only didn’t destroy the vicious Pyramid of Power, they didn’t bury their Soviet past either – unlike the post-war Germans who buried the corpse of their nazism in the 1950s

Putin didn’t manage to outgrow the KGB officer inside of him, the officer who’d been taught that the USSR was the greatest hope for the progress of mankind and that the west was an enemy capable only of corruption. Launching his time machine into the past, it was as if he were returning to his Soviet youth, during which he’d been so comfortable. He gradually forced all of his subjects to return there as well.

After the war with Georgia and the seizure of its territories, the “peacemaker” Obama offered Putin … a reset of their relations! Which is to say, c’mon, Vladimir, let’s forget all of that and start from scratch. The result of that “reset” was the annexation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine.

The ideology of Putinism is quite eclectic; in it, respect for the Soviet lies side by side with feudal ethics, Lenin sharing a bed with Tsarist Russian and Russian Orthodox Christianity.

Putin’s favorite philosopher is Ivan Ilyin – a monarchist, Russian nationalist, anti-Semite, and ideologist of the White movement, who was expelled by Lenin from Soviet Russia in 1922 and ended his life in exile

In his articles, Ilyin hoped that, after the fall of Bolshevism, Russia would have its own great führer, who would bring the country up from its knees. Indeed, “Russia rising from its knees” is the preferred slogan of Putin and of his Putinists.

“Under Putin, Russia has gotten up from its knees!” his supporters often chant. Someone once joked: the country got up from its knees, but quickly got down onto all fours: corruption, authoritarianism, bureaucratic arbitrariness, and poverty. Now we might add another: war.

A lot has happened in the last 20 years. The president of the Russian Federation’s face has turned into an impenetrable mask, radiating cruelty, anger, and discontent

Merkel admitted that, in her opinion, Putin lives in his own fantasy land. If that’s so, what’s the point of seriously engaging with such a ruler?

For 16 years, Merkel, who grew up in the GDR and should therefore understand Putin’s true nature, “has established a dialogue”. The results of that dialogue: the seizure of certain territories in Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, the capture of the DPR and LPR, and now: a full-scale war with Ukraine.

Paradoxically, the principle of Russian power hasn’t even remotely changed in the last five centuries.

It was also cultivated by the approval of irresponsible western politicians, cynical businessmen, and corrupt journalists and political scientists.

I met many admirers of Putin in Germany, from taxi drivers to businessmen and professors. One aged participant in the student revolution of ’68 confessed:

“I really like your Putin!”“And why exactly is that?”“He’s strong. Tells the truth. And he’s against America. Not like the slugs we’ve got here.”“And it doesn’t bother you that, in Russia, there’s monstrous corruption, there are practically no elections or independent courts, the opposition is being destroyed, the provinces are impoverished, Nemtsov was murdered, and TV’s become propaganda?”

“No. Those are your internal affairs. If Russians accept all of that and don’t protest, that must mean they like Putin.”Ironclad logic. The experience of Germany in the ’30s didn’t seem to have taught such Europeans anything.

Now, one thing has become clear: with this war, Putin has crossed a line – a red line. The mask is off, the armor of the “enlightened autocrat” has cracked. Now, all westerners who sympathize with the “strong Russian tsar” have to shut up and realize that a full-scale war is being unleashed in 21st-century Europe.

The aggressor is Putin’s Russia. It will bring nothing but death and destruction to Europe. This war was unleashed by a man corrupted by absolute power, who, in his madness, has decided to redraw the map of our world.

If you listen to Putin’s speech announcing a “special operation”, America and Nato are mentioned more than Ukraine. Let us also recall his recent “ultimatum” to Nato. As such, his goal isn’t Ukraine, but western civilization, the hatred for which he lapped up in the black milk he drank from the KGB’s teat.

Who’s to blame? Us. Russians. And we’ll now have to bear this guilt until Putin’s regime collapses

People have finally understood this today. He attacked a free and democratic country precisely because it is a free and democratic country. But he’s the one who’s doomed because the world of freedom and democracy is far bigger than his dark and gloomy lair.

There were at times more than 100,000 contractors in Iraq, including nearly 50,000 "soldiers," many making $1,000 a day, far more than active-duty military, with the money coming from American taxpayers. Conveniently for politicians, if these "soldiers" died, they were not counted in the official death toll of Americans killed in the war.

If multiple public functions are privatized, or partially privatized, government employees have huge incentives to curry favor with potential private employers by granting them rich contracts or consulting fees, and then subsequently getting jobs paying multiples of their government salaries -- or just giving nice perks to one's former colleagues and friends who left for the private sector

Antigovernment ideologues demonize government and government employees, cutting their pay and their programs and finding other ways to undercut them. That makes recruiting top-flight people much more difficult, especially in areas such as computer science or engineering. Government responds not by providing incentives to recruit and keep the best and brightest, but by going through the back door of privatizing and letting private firms pay far more to do essentially the same work.

Economists differ as to what this all means, but one professor of literature has coined a term for it: “the economics of corrupt officialdom.”

Corrupt officials generally do not spend the huge sums they acquire from kickbacks, and are loath to deposit their money in banks for fear it will be discovered. So they hide their money instead. The professor estimates that as much as 50 percent of the surplus money supply may have been taken out of circulation for this reason.

The professor’s estimate that half of the money supply surplus has been salted away by corrupt officials is a calculation based more on poetic license than empirical evidence, but I have no doubt that the total of stolen cash is big enough to play a role in curbing price inflation at a time of monetary expansion. Like most Chinese, I am sure that those officials who have been brought to justice represent the tip of an iceberg of kickbacks and bribes.

There are crucial differences between Trump’s and Sanders’s solutions to the problems they’ve identified, of course. Trump says our elites are weak, stupid, and corrupt. Sanders says our elites are being corrupted

Trump says the elites are cheating ordinary Americans by helping illegals, major corporations, and China, and vows to break this corrupt system over his knee and get it working again, because he’s not one of those elites

Trump is not making a sustained argument for political and campaign finance reform; he’s just saying he’s not a member of the class that is cheating you, and he will come in and bust up that class’s party

Sanders, by contrast, is making a sustained argument for political and campaign finance reform. For him, the culprit is not an elite that is actively trying to help illegals and China and allowing the country to slide into ruin out of national security weakness and ineffectiveness. Rather, it’s an oligarchy that has enriched itself by rigging the economy to effect a massive transfer of wealth upwards and to paralyze our political system from doing anything about it, thus corrupting our political classes.

While Clinton tends to focus on incremental solutions aimed at boosting wages and opportunity, and mitigating people’s economic difficulties on the margins, Sanders wants to rid the system entirely of its dependence on big money in order to actively reverse the upward redistribution of wealth

What both Trump and Sanders share is that they treat the problem as one of political economy, in which both the economic and political systems are rigged in intertwined ways, thus speaking directly to people’s understandable intellectual assessment of what is deeply wrong with our system and why it no longer works for them.

The Trump/Sanders indictment of our political economy may end up not having long term potency, after all. But this is the account that both Trump and Sanders have offered for their success, so maybe it’s worth taking seriously.

But McCain’s party was already well along in the process of becoming what it is today — a party that is not only completely dominated by climate deniers, but is hostile to science in general, that demonizes and tries to destroy scientists who challenge its dogma.

Oh, and what is supposed to be motivating the thousands of scientists perpetrating this hoax?

Take Trump’s dismissal of all negative information about his actions and their consequences as either fake news invented by hostile media or the products of a sinister “deep state.” That kind of conspiracy theorizing has long been standard practice among climate deniers, who began calling the evidence for global warming — evidence that has convinced 97 percent of climate scientists — a “gigantic hoax” 15 years ago.

What was the evidence for this vast conspiracy? A lot of it rested on, you guessed it, hacked emails.

In fact, when you review the history of Republican climate denial, it looks a lot like Trumpism. Climate denial, you might say, was the crucible in which the essential elements of Trumpism were formed.

The truth is that most prominent climate deniers are basically paid to take that position, receiving large amounts of money from fossil-fuel companies.

But after the release of the recent National Climate Assessment detailing the damage we can expect from global warming, a parade of Republicans went on TV to declare that scientists were only saying these things “for the money.”

climate scientists have faced harassment and threats, up to and including death threats, for years. And they’ve also faced efforts by politicians to, in effect, criminalize their work

There are three important morals to this story.

First, if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with catastrophic results — which seems all too likely — it won’t be the result of an innocent failure to understand what was at stake. It will, instead, be a disaster brought on by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy theorizing and intimidation.

Second, that corruption isn’t a problem of “politicians” or the “political system.” It’s specifically a problem of the Republican Party

Third, we can now see climate denial as part of a broader moral rot. Donald Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s the culmination of where his party has been going for years. You could say that Trumpism is just the application of the depravity of climate denial to every aspect of politics.

And there’s no end to the depravity in sight.

Trump has clearly been a catalyst: The sense of moral crisis created by his ascent, the sense of moral outrage felt by women, especially, and the finger-pointing within a divided, freaked-out establishment has made it easier to acknowledge rot in meritocracy, and to purge the grossest examples from our entitled class.

In fact our elite is rotten and deserves judgment, yet Trump’s mix of kleptocracy and kakistocracy is worse. So the question of how you replace a bad elite with a better one, not just with something more corrupt, is what both left and right should be pondering while this particular purgation runs its course.

Several developments over the past week seemed to add fuel to the protests: Wildfires ravaged parts of the country, but two firefighting helicopters were deemed inoperable because of government negligence; the minister of information announced plans to enforce a 20-cents-a-day fee for Internet phone calls, including on WhatsApp and Facebook; and there was a proposal to raise the value-added tax to 15 percent by 2022.

Thousands rushed to the streets, filling the capital, Beirut, with bonfires, destroying construction sites and advertisement boards, and tearing down politicians’ banners.

At least two prominent Lebanese politicians have publicly asked Hariri to resign. In his televised address, Hariri said that although the people have given the government many chances over the past three years, complacency and internal politics continued to stymie efforts to solve the country’s economic problems.

He suggested that anyone with a solution for the economic crisis should step up. But he did not offer any himself.

In short, the report demonstrates that Trump’s profiting off Russian sabotage last time, and his efforts to extort Ukraine into helping him again, are the same story — one that will continue.

On top of this, the report demonstrates how numerous cabinet officials and extensive government resources — and the conditioning of multiple official acts — were placed at the disposal of the whole corrupt scheme.

Trump hasn’t been duped into spreading it. He explicitly recognizes an alliance of his own interests with those of Russia in doing so (and in procuring whatever other outside help he can) in corrupting U.S. liberal democracy for his own malevolent self-interested purposes.

we should think about “Putinism” as a “worldwide movement” that allies various ethno-nationalist and illiberal authoritarian leaders against Western liberal democracy, the rule of law, international institutions and the commitment to empiricism in the face of disinformation.

“Trump, his administration and the GOP have made a conscious choice to align themselves with Putinism,” Rothkopf told me. “It is not unwitting.”

it’s obvious that Trump — and, increasingly, many of his GOP defenders — are to some untold degree operating in sync with Putinism and are acting against the interests of our liberal democracy.

party leaders must argue that the GOP’s “embrace of the Ukraine fiction” is not merely a matter of domestic political expediency. Rather, it’s time to ask whether we’re seeing the beginnings of a “realignment” with this global right wing movement against the values and even the interests of “the United States and the West.”

In that election, awful as the choices were, it was necessary to support Edwards. Bumper stickers read “Vote For The Crook: It’s Important.”

Reed used this example to show why voting for Clinton was so necessary in a race against Donald Trump, regardless of Clinton’s long record of terrible policies. “Vote for the lying neoliberal warmonger,” Reed said. “It’s important.”

He, and many other famous leftists like Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, and Cornel West, are saying the same thing this time around. “An anti-fascist vote for Biden is in no way an affirmation of Neoliberal politics,” West commented.

Some people on the left find this argument very difficult to stomach, though. In a recent conversation on the Bad Faith podcast, Briahna Joy Gray and Virgil Texas debated Chomsky about his stance.

In response to the “vote Biden to stop Trump” argument, they and others ask questions like the following:  But if we are willing to vote for the Democrat no matter how awful they are, what incentive will the Democratic party have to ever get better? How are we ever going to get better candidates if we don’t have some standards? Is there really no one we wouldn’t support, if they were the “lesser evil”?

Isn’t supporting “the lesser of two evils” still supporting evil? Why should I help someone get into office who has shown no willingness to support my policies, who feels entitled to my vote, who is not going to do anything to woo me?

It’s also a mistake to think that the decision about whether or not to vote for Democrats in a general election can operate as an effective form of political pressure on Democrats. The mainstream Democratic Party does not see losing elections as a sign that it needs to do more to excite its left flank. John Kerry did not look at the 2000 election and think “My God, I need to work hard to appeal to Nader voters.”

The answers to these questions are: (1) maybe, but it doesn’t matter in the situation we’re currently in (2) yes (3) no, because if he declines to stop being corrupt, you’re still going to have to give him your vote, because the alternative is putting a Klansman in office, and “do unlikely thing X or I will help white supremacists win, or at least not work to stop them” is an insane threat to make.

The easy way to avoid being troubled by having to vote for people you loathe is to give less importance to the act of voting itself. Don’t treat voting as an expression of your deepest and truest values

Don’t let the decision about who to vote for be an agonizing moral question. Just look at the question of which outcome out of the ones available would be marginally more favorable, and vote to bring about that outcome

if faced with two bad candidates, forget for the moment about the virtues of the candidates themselves and look only at the consequences for the issues you care about.

Voting can have immensely important consequences—the narrow 2000 election put a warmongering lunatic in power and resulted in a colossal amount of unnecessary human suffering.

The mainstream (I would call it “propagandistic”) view of political participation is that you participate in politics through voting. But instead, we’re better off thinking of voting as a harm-reduction chore we have to do every few years.

(Reed compares it to cleaning the toilet—not pleasant but if you don’t hold your nose and get on with it the long-term consequences will be unbearable.) Most of our political energy should be focused elsewhere. 

Reed used an illuminating comparison to explain why it was so important in 2016 to vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. In the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial primary, the Republican candidate was former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. The Democratic candidate was the infamously corrupt Edwin Edwards, who would ultimately end his career in prison on charges of racketeering, extortion, money laundering, mail fraud, and wire fraud. It’s hard to imagine anyone you could possibly trust less in public office than Edwin Edwards… except David Duke.

Noam Chomsky’s view of electoral politics is, I believe, a sensible one. In fact, it’s not his; as he says, it’s the “traditional left view,” just one that we’ve lost clarity on

the general election vote itself is not how we effectively exercise pressure, in part because it would be unconscionable to actually go through with anything that made Donald Trump’s win more probable. The threat not to vote for Biden is either an empty one (a bluff) or an indefensible one (because it’s threatening to set the world on fire).

The conversation between Chomsky, Gray, and Texas frustrated everyone involved, as these conversations often do. Essentially, for most of the hour, Gray and Texas asked variations of the same question, and Chomsky offered variations of the same answer. They appeared to think he was ignoring the question and he appeared to think they were ignoring the answer.

The question that is on the ballot on November third,” as Chomsky said, is the reelection of Donald Trump. It is a simple up or down: do we want Trump to remain or do we want to get rid of him? If we do not vote for Biden, we are increasing Trump’s chances of winning. Saying that we will “withhold our vote” if Biden does not become more progressive, Chomsky says, amounts to saying “if you don’t put Medicare For All on your platform, I’m going to vote for Trump… If I don’t get what I want, I’m going to help the worst possible candidate into office—I think that’s crazy.” 

In fact, because Trump’s reelection would mean “total cataclysm” for the climate, “all these other issues don’t arise” unless we defeat him. Chomsky emphasizes preventing the most catastrophic consequences of climate change as the central issue, and says that the difference between Trump and Biden on climate—one denies it outright and wants to destroy all progress made so far in slowing emissions, the other has an inadequate climate plan that aims for net-zero emissions by 2050—is significant enough to make electing Biden extremely important.

This does not mean voting for Biden is a vote to solve the climate crisis; it means without Biden in office, there is no chance of solving the crisis.

TEXAS: If these capitalist institutions result in recurring ecological crisis, and existential ones, as they do, then isn’t the real fight against those institutions instead of a reform that maybe gets us over the hump in 30 years

CHOMSKY: Think for a second. Think about time scales. We have maybe a decade or two to deal with the environmental crisis. Is there the remotest chance that within a decade or two we’ll overthrow capitalism? It’s not even a dream, okay? So the point that you’re raising is basically irrelevant. Of course let’s work to try to overthrow capitalism. It’s not going to happen *snaps fingers* like that. There’s a lot of work involved. Meanwhile we have an imminent question: are we going to preserve the possibility for organized human society to survive?

The important point here is that the question is not whether we attack capitalist institutions “instead of” reforms. The reforms are necessary in the short term; you fight like hell to force the ruling elite to stop destroying the earth as best you can even as you pursue larger long-term structural goals.

Gray and Texas note to Chomsky that for people who are struggling in their daily lives, climate may seem a somewhat abstract issue, and it may be hard to motivate them to get to the polls when the issue is something so detached from their daily reality. Chomsky replied that “as an activist, it is your job to make them care.”

Some have pointed out a tension in Chomsky’s position: on the one hand, he consistently describes voting as a relatively trivial act that we should not think too much about or spend much time on. On the other hand, he says the stakes of elections are incredibly high and that the future of “organized human life” and the fate of one’s grandchildren could depend on the outcome of the 2020 election.

There’s no explicit contradiction between those two positions: voting can be extremely consequential, and it can be necessary to do it, but it can still be done (relatively) briefly and without much agonizing and deliberation.

However, if the presidential election is so consequential, can we be justified in spending only the time on it that it takes to vote? Surely if we believe Trump imperils the future of Earth, we should not just be voting for Biden, but be phone-banking and knocking doors for him. Well, I actually think it might well be true that we should be doing that, reluctant as I am to admit it.

I actually asked Chomsky about this, and he said that he does believe it’s important to persuade as many people as possible, which is why at the age of 91 he is spending his time and energy trying to convince people to “vote against Trump” instead of sitting by a pool and hanging out with his grandkids

one thing is evident: if we want to look toward electoral strategies for change, it had better be mass-based oppositional models like the Bernie campaign, not third-party protest candidacies or the threat of nonvoting

The question of how to win power does not have easy answers. What to do from now until November 3rd is, however, easy; what to do afterwards is much, much more complicated no matter who wins. But political activism is not an untested endeavor. We can study how social movements set goals and win them.

it overemphasizes the role of “deciding who to vote for in the general election” as a tool of politics. One way to get better Democrats in general elections is to run better candidates and win primaries. Another would be to build an actually powerful left with the ability to coordinate mass direct action and shape the political landscape

People mistakenly assume that by saying “vote against Trump,” Chomsky is putting too much stock in the power of voting and is insufficiently cynical about the Democratic Party. In fact, it’s completely the opposite: he puts very little stock in voting and is perhaps even more cynical about the Democrats than his critics, which is why he doesn’t think it’s surprising or interesting that Biden is offering the left almost nothing and the party is treating voters with contempt.

Earlier this year, Senate Republicans decided to tie their fates inextricably to Trump, including “an apparent end to public disagreements for the next six months until the party is past the election.”

Lewis evidently thinks so because the alternative would be so much worse. He cites the Lincoln Project’s broadside against Trump’s Senate enablers, noting that it is “a compelling ad.” But, he asks, “is this a smart strategy for conservatives who want to restore the Party of Ronald Reagan and not empower the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?”

“Just because you think Trump is horrible doesn’t mean you should cheer a 180-degree backlash,” he writes. “Losing the Senate would leave Republicans with little power to block a progressive, pro-abortion Supreme Court Justice nominee. . . . And when President Biden is trying to raise the top marginal tax rate north of 50 percent, I want enough Republicans in the Senate to be there to stop it.”

All of this has elements of truth, but isn’t it also the sort of transactional argument that gave us Trumpism in the first place? It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . but for marginal tax rates?

saving the party means voting for Lindsey Graham, Kelly Loeffler, John Cornyn, Martha McSally, Thom Tillis, Mitch McConnell, Cory Gardner, and Joni Ernst. What kind of salvation is that?

The story of Marsha Blackburn is merely one small chapter in the long book cataloguing the many ways that Trumpism corrupts everything.

On issue after issue—the deficit, impeachment, racial justice, corruption, the assault on the rule of law, and basic oversight—Senate Republicans have distinguished themselves by failing to uphold their most basic constitutional responsibilities. Some have simply fallen silent, while others have turned themselves into low-rent internet trolls.

Worse: they have squandered their credibility

Of course, we need to be realistic: If Senate Republicans are defeated en masse, they will not necessarily be replaced by angels or statesmen, and the policy implications will not be pleasant for conservatives. There are, however, no permanent victories or defeats. Parties can renew themselves in the wilderness.

But if the GOP does not somehow renew itself—by purging the foul air of its current corruption—it will find itself in the wilderness for the next 40 years as it tries to explain its history of Vichy Trumpism.

Where does that leave us? I have nothing but respect for Mitt Romney, and if I lived in Nebraska, I would probably come around to voting for Ben Sasse this year. And throughout the nation, there are smart, principled, competent Republican governors like Larry Hogan, Charlie Baker, and Phil Scott. As for the rest of them: Burn it all down.

The court also ​ruled that Mr. Lee, a former ​executive of Hyundai, disguised his ownership of a lucrative auto parts maker under the names of relatives and embezzled 24 billion won from the company between 1995 and 2007.

The presidential pardon of Lee Kun-hee was criticized at the time as an example of how collusion between politics and business has often allowed top businessmen found guilty of serious white-collar crimes in South Korea to walk free with light punishment.

Almost all of South Korea’s former presidents, as well as many of its business tycoons, have been implicated in recurring corruption scandals

Mr. Lee​ won the presidency by promising to use his business skills to help rejuvenate the South Korean economy. But he was dogged by allegations of corruption before and after his election.

With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

SIGAR departed from its usual mission of performing audits and launched a side venture. Titled “Lessons Learned,” the $11 million project was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country or tried to rebuild a shattered one.

the reports, written in dense bureaucratic prose and focused on an alphabet soup of government initiatives, left out the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews.

“We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians,” read the introduction to one report released in May 2018.

To augment the Lessons Learned interviews, The Post obtained hundreds of pages of previously classified memos about the Afghan war that were dictated by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld between 2001 and 2006.

Together, the SIGAR interviews and the Rumsfeld memos pertaining to Afghanistan constitute a secret history of the war and an unsparing appraisal of 18 years of conflict.

With their forthright descriptions of how the United States became stuck in a faraway war, as well as the government's determination to conceal them from the public, the Lessons Learned interviews broadly resemble the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's top-secret history of the Vietnam War.

running throughout are torrents of criticism that refute the official narrative of the war, from its earliest days through the start of the Trump administration.

At the outset, for instance, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had a clear, stated objective — to retaliate against al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Yet the interviews show that as the war dragged on, the goals and mission kept changing and a lack of faith in the U.S. strategy took root inside the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department.

Fundamental disagreements went unresolved. Some U.S. officials wanted to use the war to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Others wanted to transform Afghan culture and elevate women’s rights. Still others wanted to reshape the regional balance of power among Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia.

The Lessons Learned interviews also reveal how U.S. military commanders struggled to articulate who they were fighting, let alone why.

Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists, let alone the warlords on the CIA’s payroll? According to the documents, the U.S. government never settled on an answer.

As a result, in the field, U.S. troops often couldn’t tell friend from foe.

The United States has allocated more than $133 billion to build up Afghanistan — more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.

As commanders in chief, Bush, Obama and Trump all promised the public the same thing. They would avoid falling into the trap of "nation-building" in Afghanistan.

U.S. officials tried to create — from scratch — a democratic government in Kabul modeled after their own in Washington. It was a foreign concept to the Afghans, who were accustomed to tribalism, monarchism, communism and Islamic law.

During the peak of the fighting, from 2009 to 2012, U.S. lawmakers and military commanders believed the more they spent on schools, bridges, canals and other civil-works projects, the faster security would improve. Aid workers told government interviewers it was a colossal misjudgment, akin to pumping kerosene on a dying campfire just to keep the flame alive.

One unnamed executive with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) guessed that 90 percent of what they spent was overkill: “We lost objectivity. We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason.”Lessons Learned interview | 10/7/2016Tap to view full document

The gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to historic levels of corruption.

In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers — allies of Washington — plundered with impunity.

Christopher Kolenda, an Army colonel who deployed to Afghanistan several times and advised three U.S. generals in charge of the war, said that the Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai had “self-organized into a kleptocracy”Christopher Kolenda | Lessons Learned interview | 4/5/2016Tap to view full document by 2006 — and that U.S. officials failed to recognize the lethal threat it posed to their strategy.

By allowing corruption to fester, U.S. officials told interviewers, they helped destroy the popular legitimacy of the wobbly Afghan government they were fighting to prop up. With judges and police chiefs and bureaucrats extorting bribes, many Afghans soured on democracy and turned to the Taliban to enforce order.

None expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, a casualty rate that U.S. commanders have called unsustainable.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries — paid by U.S. taxpayers — for tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers.”

an army and national police force that can defend the country without foreign help.

Year after year, U.S. generals have said in public they are making steady progress on the central plank of their strategy: to train a robust Afgh

From the beginning, Washington never really figured out how to incorporate a war on drugs into its war against al-Qaeda. By 2006, U.S. officials feared that narco-traffickers had become stronger than the Afghan government and that money from the drug trade was powering the insurgency

throughout the Afghan war, documents show that U.S. military officials have resorted to an old tactic from Vietnam — manipulating public opinion. In news conferences and other public appearances, those in charge of the war have followed the same talking points for 18 years. No matter how the war is going — and especially when it is going badly — they emphasize how they are making progress.

Two months later, Marin Strmecki, a civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, gave the Pentagon chief a classified, 40-page report loaded with more bad news. It said “enormous popular discontent is building” against the Afghan government because of its corruption and incompetence. It also said that the Taliban was growing stronger, thanks to support from Pakistan, a U.S. ally.

Since then, U.S. generals have almost always preached that the war is progressing well, no matter the reality on the battlefield.

he Lessons Learned interviews contain numerous admissions that the government routinely touted statistics that officials knew were distorted, spurious or downright false

A person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said there was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary.

Even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the senior NSC official said, the White House and Pentagon would spin them to the point of absurdity. Suicide bombings in Kabul were portrayed as a sign of the Taliban’s desperation, that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat. Meanwhile, a rise in U.S. troop deaths was cited as proof that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy.

“And this went on and on for two reasons,” the senior NSC official said, “to make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the troops and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would cause the country to deteriorate.”