Tom Roche

What role do drums play in Rock? Should that be keeping the beat or leading from the front? Who are some of the greatest drummers in rock music? The beat goes on as Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot focus on the contributions of drummers to rock music with drummer Joe Wong. Wong also hosts a podcast on drummers called The Trap Set. Support Sound Opinions: soundopinions.org/support

In the previous part, I showed how I can make Git add information about the commit in every file I want it to in such a way that it is updated every time I Git-archive the project. Actually, I have written an Elisp function to do this for me; it prepares a zip file with git archive and then writes a boilerplate email in mu4e, with the recipients’ addresses, attachment and a minimal body already in place.

Neoliberalism and human rights are often portrayed as standing in opposition to each other, with the fat cats at the big end of town pulling the economic levers. But neoliberalism and the discourse of modern human rights can actually be seen as close philosophical cousins.

Five years ago this week Edward Snowden absconded to Hong Kong with a trove of documents detailing the extent of the U.S. government's global and domestic surveillance programs. Snowden’s leaks helped expose the astonishing reach of the U.S. government's global and, crucially, domestic surveillance programs. More recently we’ve discovered it isn’t just big government that poses a massive threat to our privacy, but also big tech. On this week’s episode of Deconstructed, Edward Snowden joins Mehdi Hasan from Russia to discuss surveillance, tools that can help protect people’s privacy, and the likelihood of a Trump-Putin deal to extradite him.

 

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Learn how Python is being used in research to understand the inner workings of the Earth.

We all know that protectionism is bad. If someone proposes a 20 percent tariff on steel or cars the news pages will be filled with economists and other serious sounding people hyperventilating about how this tax will devastate the economy. Unfortunately, these voices are completely absent from discussions of the much more costly protectionism that allows our broken health care system to rip us off for hundreds of billions annually, and cost lives.

NPR and ProPublica gave us a fascinating account of how our broken health care system operates. The basic story was that Aetna had a contract with a major hospital that allowed it to charge grossly excessive fees for some procedures. Apparently, Aetna didn't mind the overbilling since it is able to pass its costs on to patients in a largely uncompetitive market. 

The piece is fascinating since the protagonist, Michael Frank, was an actuary with three decades of experience working with insurance companies. It describes in detail the effort he went through to try to get a clear explanation of why his bill was two or three times as high as the normal billing for a procedure he had done.

If anyone involved in the health care debate was committed to free trade, we would have a discussion of how this sort of abuse could be avoided if we facilitated foreign medical travel. If patients were routinely offered the opportunity to have this sort of procedure in high-quality facilities in other countries, with patients splitting the tens of thousands of dollars in savings (net of travel costs for themselves and a family member), it is likely that hospitals and insurers that engaged in this sort of price rigging would go out of business.

However, medical travel never features in discussions of trade. One can speculate on the reason, but it is almost certainly true that the reporters, economists, and political actors involved in trade debates have many more friends and relatives who benefit from the bloated health care system than work in manufacturing jobs.

 

Addendum

The International Federal of Health Plans has some data on relative prices. To take an example, it reports an average price for bypass surgery in the United States of $78,300. This compares to $24,100 in the U.K. and $14,600 in Spain. This sort of gap would leave plenty of room to cover airfare and hotel stays, and still leave plenty of money to put in the bank.

Legislators from both parties came together this week to put the finishing touches on a sweeping measure to weaken bank regulations put in place to respond to the 2008 financial crisis.

In a shock to some observers, 33 House Democrats and 17 Senate Democrats ultimately joined with nearly every Republican to send the bill to President Donald Trump’s desk. Only one GOP legislator, Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., voted against it. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., a co-author of the bill, stood next to Trump at the signing ceremony on Thursday.

The repeal bill was a major priority for industry. As The Intercept has reported, the bill loosens an array of regulations, including reporting requirements used to counter racial discrimination in lending practices. The bill also crucially shrank the amount of capital reserve banks must maintain and raised the threshold at which banks are required to comply with heightened risk-management regulations — all of it with the consequence of introducing more risk into the system.

Though touted as a bill narrowly tailored to benefit small and community banks, it also includes a provision that could allow banks, such as Citigroup and JP Morgan, to add more debt-fueled risk to their balance sheet, a change advocated by Citigroup’s lobbyists.

The House Democrats who backed the bill are broadly a coalition of New Democrats and Blue Dogs, who are self-consciously pro-business, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who have been the target of focused lobbying campaigns by Wall Street.

The Intercept spoke to two of the New Democrats who voted in support of the bill, one of which previously worked at Goldman Sachs, while the other made his fortune launching two commercial lending start-ups.

Rep. John Delaney, D-Md., one of the Democrats to vote for the repeal bill, said the measure was “entirely about community banks.”

Asked about large regional banks, such as SunTrust Bank, that stand to directly benefit from the bill, Delaney shrugged off the issue. “Yeah,” he said, “but they’re much more like community banks.”

Delaney is not running for re-election to the House, but said he instead plans to run for president. He is one of the only former chief executives of a publicly traded corporation to serve in Congress. He founded two commercial banks, one of which, CapitalSource, was later acquired by PacWest Bancorp, a bank with over $24 billion in assets.

The suggestion that SunTrust is akin to a community bank might strike some as odd. SunTrust currently holds $201.6 billion in assets, making it roughly the same size as Countrywide, the failed subprime lender that originated 1 out of every 5 mortgages in the country at its peak, helping to trigger the global financial crisis.

The banking lobby, Delaney continued, had no influence over his vote. “I didn’t have anyone come and see me,” he said. The Maryland representative said the bill contained consumer protections targeted for veterans, and that Barney Frank, one of the original drafters of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, had supported the repeal bill. (Frank has praised aspects of the repeal bill, but has said if he were in Congress, he would have voted against the measure.)

Questioned about Frank’s new role as board member to Signature Bank, Delaney did not respond.

“I think when people misrepresent what things are, it makes it really hard for our democracy to work. I gotta go,” Delaney said.

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., another supporter of the repeal effort, stood by his vote, though he argued that the bill wasn’t ideal. In particular, he thought the bill was too generous in expanding the threshold for enhanced regulatory scrutiny to $250 billion.

“If I were writing the bill, I wouldn’t have gone to $250 billion; I might have sort of landed at $100 to $150 billion. But, you know, on balance, this bill wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t the bill I would have written, but we don’t get to vote on perfect bills,” said Himes.

Himes, whose district in Connecticut is home to a sizable population of financial industry types, did concede that the banking lobby had pushed the bill, but said his vote was based on a consideration of all sides of the issue. “Obviously the lobbyists weigh in,” said Himes.

Himes is a former Goldman Sachs banker, and many of the supporters of the repeal bill have received significant financial support from the banking lobby. Himes bristled at the suggestion that the banks had significant influence over the vote, and when his former career in the industry was brought up, said it made no difference. “If you oppose a bill, you say this is a Wall Street bill. But this is not a Wall Street bill. This was a bill about providing relief to small- and medium-sized community banks. No, but they are not big Wall Street banks,” Himes argued.

The banking lobby mobilized scores of lobbyists to influence the vote. As we’ve reported, bankers mobilized public support for the bill through targeted advertising, letter writing, and a concentrated lobby effort designed to sway moderate Democrats.

In one unusual twist, the American Bankers Association decided to use a 501(c)(4) nonprofit to air a campaign-style television advertisement in support of Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., one of the leading sponsors of the repeal measure, who is facing a tough re-election this year. The decision to use such a nonprofit to air the ad conceals the source of the funding, a strategy commonly referred to as “dark money.”

Both Delaney and Himes are members of the New Dem caucus, a group of business-centric Democrats. Of the 33 House Democrats voting in support of the repeal bill, 27 are members of the New Dems. Himes is the chair of the group. The New Dem PAC, which has worked to recruit more moderate Democrats as candidates for Congress this year, receives significant funding from the banking industry.

Other Democrats who spoke to The Intercept expressed concern that Congress was moving to give the financial industry another policy victory, just 10 years after the crisis that sparked the Great Recession.

“The truth is the American people are sick and tired of government working for somebody other than them,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., an avowed opponent of the repeal bill. “We’re rolling back rules under the guise of helping community banks and small banks. But you can fix that with a scalpel, you don’t need to take a sledgehammer to the Dodd-Frank regulation overall. I think, again, I think they tried to hide behind this community bank thing. This is couching small banks in order to give big banks relief from these necessary regulations,” she added.

House Democratic Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said she was “very proud of our vote against this” when The Intercept asked about the repeal bill. In regards to the 33 House Democrats who voted for it, she said, “They have an issue about community banks, that we share their concern about, but, overwhelmingly, we voted against it.”

Trump, at the bill-signing ceremony, gloated about receiving support from the Democratic Party, a voting bloc that made passage possible in the Senate. “Dodd-Frank was something they said could not be touched and, honestly, a lot of great Democrats knew that it had to be done,” he said.

Top photo: President Donald Trump signs into law S.2155, the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, during a ceremony in the White House on May 24, 2018.

The post How Two House Democrats Defended Helping the GOP Weaken Dodd-Frank Financial Regulations appeared first on The Intercept.

Last week, the California Democratic Party announced an unusual agreement between two candidates in the 39th Congressional District, Gil Cisneros and Andy Thorburn, who had been tearing each other apart for weeks, using their self-funded war chests to unveil attack websites and negative mailers.

In a formal truce, the candidates agreed to not denigrate one another between now and the June 5 primary. Both took down the hit websites about their opponent. They even took a Sadat-Begin, Camp David Accords-style picture to consummate the deal.

California Democratic Party chair Eric Bauman, who mediated the Cisneros-Thorburn cease-fire, said in a statement that the flood of first-time candidates in suddenly winnable districts across California was encouraging. But he feared that “the competition in the Primaries can become so heated and divisive it impedes our ability to unite behind the person chosen by the voters to represent our Party in the fall campaign.” The nonaggression pact, Bauman concluded, would allow the Democrats to focus on their Republican opponents, and avoid the “corrosive and divisive attacks that have hurt Democratic candidates in the past.”

But just across Orange County, in the 45th Congressional District, corrosive and divisive attacks have characterized the last couple weeks of campaigning. Dave Min, the California Democratic Party’s endorsed candidate in the race, has gone hard negative against two of his opponents, accusing them of lying about their records and being funded by special interests. Min’s allegations are in some cases factually questionable at best, based on an analysis of the claims.

Though both of the Democrats being attacked — Katie Porter and Brian Forde — have asked the state party to step in like it did in the 39th, the party has yet to do so. California Democratic Party spokesperson John Vigna said the main difference was that the party didn’t endorse a candidate in the 39th District but did in the 45th, so they couldn’t serve as an honest broker in any negotiations: “In a contest where we’ve made an endorsement, we obviously wouldn’t be seen as neutral.”

But there’s another difference between the two races. The 39th District could represent the ultimate failure for Democrats. Because of California’s “top-two” primary, in which the two leading vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of party, Democrats could get locked out of the race in November. With three credible Republicans and four Democrats running, having two Democrats whale on each other for a month could depress turnout and let two Republicans slip through.

But that problem doesn’t exist in California’s 45th. Only one Republican — incumbent Rep. Mimi Walters — is in the race. A Democrat is effectively ensured participation in the general election. So, it’s bombs away for Min against his Democratic rivals.

Unusually, Vigna did express some discomfort with the actions of the party’s endorsed candidate. “As a general rule, we certainly think the voters are best served by candidates who promote themselves and their vision of service, regardless of whether there’s a chance we could be shut out by the ‘top-two’ rules,” Vigna said. “It’s possible to run a spirited but respectful contest that leaves the party, and our nominee, stronger in the fall, and that’s an approach we believe all of our endorsed candidates should do their best to emulate.”

Min, an assistant professor at University of California, Irvine, and former Chuck Schumer staffer, earned the state party endorsement in February. His chief rivals are Porter, also a law professor at University of California, Irvine, who has the endorsements of Sens. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren; and Forde, a senior adviser in the Office of Science and Technology Policy under former President Barack Obama. There has been scant public polling on the primary, most of which shows Porter with a slight lead on Min for the top two; polling from End Citizens United shows Porter leading Walters in a head-to-head matchup.

The Min campaign started airing the negative TV ads last week. The first hits Porter and Forde for taking “special interest” dollars. Walters, the Republican, appears on screen but is not mentioned.

Had to grab it so here. pic.twitter.com/VbRZA04qR1

— David Dayen (@ddayen) May 21, 2018

“Washington insiders have spent over $100,000 to elect Katie Porter,” the narrator says. “And Brian Forde’s big donors? Bitcoin speculators that oppose cracking down on drug deals and human trafficking.”

A second ad dispenses with showing Walters at all, accusing Porter and Forde of lying about their credentials. Porter listed “consumer protection attorney” as her ballot designation, but according to the ad, “does not have a California law license and never even passed the state bar.” Forde, the ad states, was a registered Republican until last year.

Forde told Vice that the bitcoin attacks “are sensationalist, wildly inaccurate, and in line with my opponent’s lack of understanding of the technology.” But, though Forde has raised the most money among Democrats, the attacks do appear to be more targeted at Porter, who has higher-profile backing. A mailer Min sent out doesn’t mention Forde at all, solely attacking Porter for exaggerating her role in combating the foreclosure crisis, as well as taking money from “hedge fund managers and Wall Street executives,” while he does not receive bank lobbyist or corporate PAC donations.

The attacks sit in between being somewhat legitimate and really shaky.

The “Washington insiders” in the first ad refer to EMILY’s List, a Porter endorser, as well as the End Citizens United political action committee. These two entities have, in other races, been allied with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, though the DCCC has not been involved in this race. The claim about hedge fund donors also appears to be correct: Porter received $5,400 from Paloma Partners CEO Selwyn Donald Sussman and $2,700 from Baupost Group’s Seth Klarman, the notorious hedge fund manager who hid his holdings in Puerto Rican debt.

Overall, however, the picture is more cloudy. Porter campaign manager Erica Kwiatkowski said Porter has received over 23,000 individual donations from 15,000 individuals, and “over half of those contributions have been for $5 or less.” About $286,000 of Porter’s fundraising has come from donations under $200, according to campaign finance disclosures. Min, by contrast, has raised $160,000 in low-dollar donations. Both have raised about the same amount in high-dollar contributions.

While Min claims to have not raised any money from bank lobbyists, his fourth-largest donor in terms of employer is Goldman Sachs. Asked about this at a recent candidate forum, Min said, “A friend of mine is an employee at Goldman Sachs. That’s different than accepting money at a big bank. Everyone in this room has taken money from employees of financial institutions, financial lobbyists, and the like.”

Also in Min’s top five are Google’s parent company Alphabet and the Washington lobbying law firm WilmerHale (whose attorneys have represented the likes of Paul Manafort, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner). He also has received $1,000 from the PAC of the New Democrat Coalition, the moderate Democratic bloc in Congress which supplied 27 votes in the House for the bipartisan bank deregulation bill which passed this week. Three of Min’s Congressional endorsers — Lou Correa, Ami Bera, and Scott Peters — voted for that bill.

The ballot designation attack is far stranger. Min asserts that Porter has “falsely claimed” that she is a consumer protection attorney, because she hasn’t passed the California state bar. But Porter has an active law license in Oregon, obtained in 2002; she practiced bankruptcy law in Portland, making her, well, a consumer protection attorney. Min did not challenge Porter’s ballot designation when it was introduced. In fact, his own ballot designation of “law professor” could be up for debate, because Min is actually an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, law school. Porter is a full professor.

In the mailer, Min accuses Porter of exaggerating when she said in a TV ad, “I won $18 billion for homeowners and helped thousands of families keep their homes.” It is true that Porter did not negotiate the National Mortgage Settlement for foreclosure fraud, accomplished by 49 state attorneys general and the federal government. But considering how weak that settlement was, that’s to her eternal credit.

What Porter did before and after the settlement makes her as responsible as anyone for whatever scraps of relief came out of the foreclosure disaster. In 2007, Porter, then teaching law at the University of Iowa, wrote a prescient paper titled “Misbehavior and Mistake in Bankruptcy Mortgage Claims.” She examined public court records in 1,733 bankruptcy cases, finding that in a majority of them, mortgage servicers lacked one or more pieces of documentation required to establish the validity of the debt. That included the note, which was missing over 40 percent of the time. This was an early warning of the breakdown in foreclosure processes, with companies eventually papering over the lack of proof with fictitious mortgage assignments and records. Porter’s study caught the eye of the initial activists who uncovered and exposed Wall Street’s fraudulent foreclosure schemes; she was central to its unmasking.

In 2012, Porter was made independent monitor for the California portion of the settlement. While the national oversight monitor did little but rubber-stamp that banks fulfilled their consumer relief obligations, Porter took a thankless job and transformed it into an activist position. She intervened personally in individual foreclosure cases, responding to over 5,000 complaints from California borrowers. She rewrote communications to homeowners from banks to maximize response rates. She authored half a dozen reports that showed how banks were gaming the system, calling out the cruel practice of dual tracking (when banks negotiate loan terms and pursue foreclosure at the same time) and the “completed” application scam (where banks would capitalize on one missing document to nullify a modification and move to foreclose instead). Nearly 40 percent of the total 83,000 first-lien principal reductions in the settlement, the most sustainable type of modification, happened in California.

So if Porter wants to take credit for winning relief for homeowners and helping families keep homes, she has plenty of evidentiary support.

Meanwhile, Min, while running the Center for American Progress’s Mortgage Finance Working Group in 2011, issued a report calling for “reform” of secondary mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by replacing them with fully privatized firms that purchase and pool mortgages and sell them to investors. Under the plan, banks could share an ownership stake in the new firms, and the investors would be equipped with a government guarantee against losses. The proposal mirrored the recommendation of the Mortgage Bankers Association, the trade group for the nation’s largest banks.

In other words, the report Min co-authored would have given Wall Street banks the chance to create the same kind of mortgage securities that nearly crashed the economy in 2008, while taxpayers took on all the risk.

Min’s negative barrage seems unusual for someone with the state party endorsement and the support of 13 members of Congress. But political conventional wisdom suggests that candidates attack when they fall behind. A Porter campaign volunteer claims that they received a phone survey testing these negative attacks, along with positive information about Min, a couple weeks before the ads were released.

The Min campaign would not confirm the push poll, and when presented with a list of questions, forwarded a press release with more detailed information about the attack ads.

That press release suggests that Min’s opponents started the cycle of negativity. “Katie Porter and Brian Forde have been making outrageous and false personal attacks against Dave Min for months, even going so far as to say he physically assaulted women,” writes Min campaign manager Paige Hutchinson, as opposed to Min’s “positive agenda.”

This appears to refer to allegations that Min’s campaign intimidated Forde and Porter staffers who were trying to collect signatures to derail Min’s state party endorsement at the February convention. The Intercept covered those allegations here; Min’s campaign has denied them.

Min’s campaign also brings up a Huffington Post article where Porter recounted her harrowing history as a victim of domestic violence, including getting a restraining order against her ex-husband. Porter alleged that this had become the subject of a whisper campaign in the race initiated by Min’s campaign, with rumors passing among state party delegates that “something in her divorce records might disqualify her in the general election.” A tweet from a Min donor referring to the candidate as “Restraining Order” Porter seemed to provide an example of this. Min has strongly denied any involvement in a whisper campaign.

The timing of the negative ads suggest that they were in motion well before the Huffington Post story. That story was published Friday, May 11, and the ads were out the following Monday, May 14. “When you place TV, you have to ship and place the Thursday before the ad starts running,” said Porter campaign manager Erica Kwiatkowski.

Porter has demanded that Min take down the negative ads. “This type of campaigning has no place in the Democratic party,” she wrote in a statement, calling the questioning of her consumer protection attorney ballot designation “a sexist attack that is all too common in politics.”
Min has been criticized within the district for lashing out at Democrats. At a candidate forum in the district this week, Min responded to questions about the negative attack ads. “None of the claims we’ve made are untrue, they’re all factually correct, they’re not personal attacks,” Min said to a chorus of boos and shouts. “It’s not factual to claim that I am assaulting people, that I am starting whisper campaigns.”

Top photo: From left, Dave Min, Katie Porter, Brian Forde and Kia Hamadanchy, the Democrats running for California’s 45th Congressional district seat in Congress, participate in the DEMOC PAC’s candidate forum in Irvine, Calif., on May 22, 2018.

Update: May 25, 2018, 10:30 a.m.
This piece was updated to include campaign fundraising amounts from newly released Federal Election Commission reports for California’s 45th Congressional District. The piece also was updated to include a photo of a mailer from Dave Min’s campaign.

The post In a California House Race, the Democratic Party’s Candidate Is Going to War Against Elizabeth Warren’s appeared first on The Intercept.

In what ways do middle class students obtain advantages in schools? In her new book, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (Oxford University Press, 2018), Jessica McCrory Calarco uses ethnographic data to elaborate on what she…

Welcome to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Glen Ford, along with my co-host Nellie Bailey. Coming up: Israel’s massacre of unarmed Palestinians has once against shocked the sensibilities of the world, unless, of course, you are a U.S. Democrat or Republican, in which case, whatever Israel does is fine; And, the Move 9 have been imprisoned for nearly 40 years, but the struggle to free them, continues.

Rev. Edward Pinkney, the activist from Benton Harbor, Michigan, was exonerated, this month, of election tampering charges that put him prison for two and a half years. Rev. Pinkney is back pursuing his old nemesis, the Whirlpool Corporation, which has dominated the poor, Black town for decades. Rev. Pinkney is set to disrupt Whirlpool’s pet project, the local PGA senior golf tournament.

Israel has once again shocked the world, methodically slaughtering Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza. Scores of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli snipers, and literally hundreds more wounded and maimed, as they demanded the right to return to their ancestral lands that were seized by the apartheid Zionist state. We spoke with journalist and educator Vijay Prashad, and asked him what the Gaza massacres show about Israel.

Protesters inhave been trying in vain to stop the Philadelphia Orchestra from going on trip to Israel. Susan Abulhawa is with the Philly Don’t Orchestrate Apartheid Coalition.

President Donald Trump delighted the Israeli regime, by recognizing Jerusalem as the apartheid state’s capital, in clear violation of international law. But Black Agenda Report’s Bruce Dixon says the Democrats are just as guilty of coddling the Israelis as the Republicans.

Black Agenda Radio producer Kyle Fraser spoke with Mike Africa Jr, of the Philadelphia MOVE Family, whose father and mother, Mike Africa senior and Debbie Africa, and other MOVE members have been locked up for four decades in the death of a policeman. Supporters of the MOVE 9 have recently been organizing on behalf of Puerto Rican relief, as well as raising money for legal defense. Mike Africa Jr says

Behind the News, 5/24/18 - guest: Richard Walker - Doug Henwood

An extremely strange episode that has engulfed official Washington over the last two weeks came to a truly bizarre conclusion on Friday night. And it revolves around a long-time, highly sketchy CIA operative, Stefan Halper.

Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.

Over the past several weeks, House Republicans have been claiming that the FBI during the 2016 election used an operative to spy on the Trump campaign, and they triggered outrage within the FBI by trying to learn his identity. The controversy escalated when President Trump joined the fray on Friday morning. “Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president,” Trump tweeted, adding: “It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a “hot” Fake News story. If true – all time biggest political scandal!”

In response, the DOJ and the FBI’s various media spokespeople did not deny the core accusation, but quibbled with the language (the FBI used an “informant,” not a “spy”), and then began using increasingly strident language to warn that exposing his name would jeopardize his life and those of others, and also put American national security at grave risk. On May 8, the Washington Post described the informant as “a top-secret intelligence source” and cited DOJ officials as arguing that disclosure of his name “could risk lives by potentially exposing the source, a U.S. citizen who has provided intelligence to the CIA and FBI.”

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, who spent much of last week working to ensure confirmation of Trump’s choice to lead the CIA, Gina Haspel, actually threatened his own colleagues in Congress with criminal prosecution if they tried to obtain the identity of the informant. “Anyone who is entrusted with our nation’s highest secrets should act with the gravity and seriousness of purpose that knowledge deserves,” Warner said.

But now, as a result of some very odd choices by the nation’s largest media outlets, everyone knows the name of the FBI’s informant: Stefan Halper. And Halper’s history is quite troubling, particularly his central role in the scandal in the 1980 election. Equally troubling are the DOJ and FBI’s highly inflammatory and, at best, misleading claims that they made to try to prevent Halper’s identity from being reported.

To begin with, it’s obviously notable that the person the FBI used to monitor the Trump campaign is the same person who worked as a CIA operative running that 1980 Presidential election spying campaign.

It was not until several years after Reagan’s victory over Carter did this scandal emerge. It was leaked by right-wing officials inside the Reagan administration who wanted to undermine officials they regarded as too moderate, including then White House Chief of Staff James Baker, who was a Bush loyalist.

The NYT in 1983 said the Reagan campaign spying operation “involved a number of retired Central Intelligence Agency officials and was highly secretive.” The article, by then-NYT reporter Leslie Gelb, added that its “sources identified Stefan A. Halper, a campaign aide involved in providing 24-hour news updates and policy ideas to the traveling Reagan party, as the person in charge.” Halper, now 73, had also worked with Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Alexander Haig as part of the Nixon administration.

When the scandal first broke in 1983, the UPI suggested that Halper’s handler for this operation was Reagan’s Vice Presidential candidate, George H.W. Bush, who had been the CIA Director and worked there with Halper’s father-in-law, former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline, who worked on Bush’s 1980 presidential campaign before Bush ultimately became Reagan’s Vice President. It quoted a former Reagan campaign official as blaming the leak on “conservatives [who] are trying to manipulate the Jimmy Carter papers controversy to force the ouster of White House Chief of Staff James Baker.”

Halper, through his CIA work, has extensive ties to the Bush family. Few remember that the CIA’s perceived meddling in the 1980 election – its open support for its former Director, George H.W. Bush to become President – was a somewhat serious political controversy. And Halper was in that middle of that, too.

In 1980, the Washington Post published an article reporting on the extremely unusual and quite aggressive involvement of the CIA in the 1980 presidential campaign. “Simply put, no presidential campaign in recent memory — perhaps ever — has attracted as much support from the intelligence community as the campaign of former CIA director Bush,” the article said.

Though there was nothing illegal about ex-CIA officials uniting to put a former CIA Director in the Oval Office, the paper said “there are some rumblings of uneasiness in the intelligence network.” It specifically identified Cline as one of the most prominent CIA official working openly for Bush, noting that he “recommended his son-in-law, Stefan A. Halper, a former Nixon White House aide, be hired as Bush’s director of policy development and research.”

In 2016, top officials from the intelligence community similarly rallied around Hillary Clinton. As The Intercept has previously documented:

Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell not only endorsed Clinton in the New York Times but claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” George W. Bush’s CIA and NSA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, pronounced Trump a “clear and present danger” to U.S. national security and then, less than a week before the election, went to the Washington Post to warn that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin” and said Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

So as it turns out, the informant used by the FBI in 2016 to gather information on the Trump campaign was not some previously unknown, top-secret asset whose exposure as an operative could jeopardize lives. Quite the contrary: his decades of work for the CIA – including his role in an obviously unethical if not criminal spying operation during the 1980 presidential campaign – is quite publicly known.

And now, as a result of some baffling choices by the nation’s largest news organizations as well as their anonymous sources inside the U.S. Government, Stefan Halper’s work for the FBI during the 2016 is also publicly known

Last night, both the Washington Post and New York Times – whose reporters, like pretty much everyone in Washington, knew exactly who the FBI informant is – published articles that, while deferring to the FBI’s demands by not naming him, provided so many details about him that it made it extremely easy to know exactly who it is. The NYT described the FBI informant as “an American academic who teaches in Britain” and who “made contact late that summer with” George Papadopoulos and “also met repeatedly in the ensuing months with the other aide, Carter Page.” The Post similarly called him “a retired American professor” who met with Page “at a symposium about the White House race held at a British university.”

In contrast to the picture purposely painted by the DOJ and its allies that this informant was some of sort super-secret, high-level, covert intelligence asset, the NYT described him as what he actually is: “the informant is well known in Washington circles, having served in previous Republican administrations and as a source of information for the C.I.A. in past years.”

Despite how “well known” he is in Washington, and despite publishing so many details about him that anyone with Google would be able to instantly know his name, the Post and the NYT nonetheless bizarrely refused to identity him, with the Post justifying its decision that it “is not reporting his name following warnings from U.S. intelligence officials that exposing him could endanger him or his contacts.” The NYT was less melodramatic about it, citing a general policy: the NYT “has learned the source’s identity but typically does not name informants to preserve their safety,” it said.

In other words, both the NYT and the Post chose to provide so many details about the FBI informant that everyone would know exactly who it was, while coyly pretending that they were obeying FBI demands not to name him. How does that make sense? Either these newspapers believe the FBI’s grave warnings that national security and lives would be endangered if it were known who they used as their informant (in which case those papers should not publish any details that would make his exposure likely), or they believe that the FBI (as usual) was just invoking false national security justifications to hide information it unjustly wants to keep from the public (in which case the newspapers should name him).

In any event, publication of those articles by the NYT and Post last night made it completely obvious who the FBI informant was, because the Daily Caller’s investigative reporter Chuck Ross on Thursday had published an article reporting that a long-time CIA operative who is now a professor at Cambridge repeatedly met with Papadopoulos and Page. The article, in its opening paragraph, named the professor, Stefan Halper, and described him as “a University of Cambridge professor with CIA and MI6 contacts.”

Ross’ article, using public information, recounted at length Halper’s long-standing ties to the CIA, including the fact that his father-in-law, Ray Cline, was a top CIA official during the Cold War, and that Halper himself had long worked with both the CIA and its British counterpart, the MI6. As Ross wrote: “at Cambridge, Halper has worked closely with Dearlove, the former chief of MI6. In recent years they have directed the Cambridge Security Initiative, a non-profit intelligence consulting group that lists ‘UK and US government agencies’ among its clients.”

Both the NYT and Washington Post reporters boasted, with seeming pride, about the fact that they did not name the informant even as they published all the details which made it simple to identify him. But NBC News – citing Ross’ report and other public information – decided to name him, while stressing that it has not confirmed that he actually worked as an FBI informant:

The professor who met with both Page and Papadopoulos is Stefan Halper, a former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations who has been a paid consultant to an internal Pentagon think tank known as the Office of Net Assessment, consulting on Russia and China issues, according to public records.

“The professor who met with both Page and Papadopoulos is Stefan Halper, a former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations who has been a paid consultant to an internal Pentagon think tank known as the Office of Net Assessment.” https://t.co/8Jdu8XqtbI

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) May 19, 2018

There is nothing inherently untoward, or even unusual, about the FBI using informants in an investigation. One would expect them to do so. But the use of Halper in this case, and the bizarre claims made to conceal his identity, do raise some questions that merit further inquiry.

To begin with, the New York Times reported in December of last year that the FBI investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia began when George Papadopoulos drunkenly boasted to an Australian diplomat about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was the disclosure of this episode by the Australians that “led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired,” the NYT claimed.

But it now seems clear that Halper’s attempts to gather information for the FBI began before that. “The professor’s interactions with Trump advisers began a few weeks before the opening of the investigation, when Page met the professor at the British symposium,” the Post reported. While it’s not rare for the FBI to gather information before formally opening an investigation, Halper’s earlier snooping does call into question the accuracy of the NYT’s claim that it was the drunken Papadopoulos ramblings that first prompted the FBI’s interest in these possible connections. And it suggests that CIA operatives, apparently working with at least some factions within the FBI, were trying to gather information about the Trump campaign earlier than had been previously reported.

Then there are questions about what appear to be some fairly substantial government payments to Halper throughout 2016. Halper continues to be listed as a “vendor” by websites that track payments by the federal government to private contractors.

Earlier this week, records of payments were found that were made during 2016 to Halper by the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment, though it not possible from these records to know the exact work for which these payments were made. The Pentagon office that paid Halper in 2016, according to a 2015 Washington Post story on its new duties, “reports directly to Secretary of Defense and focuses heavily on future threats, has a $10 million budget.”

It is difficult to understand how identifying someone whose connections to the CIA is a matter of such public record, and who has a long and well-known history of working on spying programs involving presidential elections on behalf of the intelligence community, could possibly endanger lives or lead to grave national security harm. It isn’t as though Halper has been some sort of covert, stealth undercover asset for the CIA who just got exposed. Quite the contrary: that he’s a spy embedded in the U.S. intelligence community would be known to anyone with internet access.

Equally strange are the semantic games which journalists are playing in order to claim that this revelation disproves, rather than proves, Trump’s allegation that the FBI “spied” on his campaign. This bizarre exchange between CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and the New York Times’ Trip Gabriel vividly illustrates the strange machinations used by journalists to justify how all of this is being characterized:

Despite what Halper actually is, the FBI and its dutiful mouthpieces have spent weeks using the most desperate language to try to hide Halper’s identity and the work he performed as part of the 2016 election. Here was the deeply emotional reaction to last night’s story from Brookings’ Benjamin Wittes, who has become a social media star by parlaying his status as Jim Comey’s best friend and long-time loyalist to security state agencies into a leading role in pushing the Trump/Russia story:

Wittes’ claim that all of this resulted in the “outing” of some sort of sensitive “intelligence source” is preposterous given how publicly known Halper’s role as a CIA operative has been for decades. But this is the scam that the FBI and people like Mark Warner have been running for two weeks: deceiving people into believing that exposing Halper’s identity would create grave national security harm by revealing some previously unknown intelligence asset.

Wittes also implies that it was Trump and Devin Nunes who are responsible for Halper’s exposure but he almost certainly has no idea of who the sources are for the NYT or the Washington Post. And note that Wittes is too cowardly to blame the institutions that actually made it easy to identify Halper – the New York Times and Washington Post – preferring instead to exploit the opportunity to depict the enemies of his friend Jim Comey as traitors.

Whatever else is true, the CIA operative and FBI informant used to gather information on the Trump campaign in the 2016 campaign has, for weeks, been falsely depicted as a sensitive intelligence asset rather than what he actually is: a long-time CIA operative with extensive links to the Bush family who was responsible for a dirty and likely illegal spying operation in the 1980 presidential election. For that reason, it’s easy to understand why many people in Washington were so desperate to conceal his identity, but that desperation had nothing to do with the lofty and noble concerns for national security they claimed were motivating them.

The post The FBI Informant Who Monitored the Trump Campaign, Stefan Halper, Oversaw a CIA Spying Operation in the 1980 Presidential Election appeared first on The Intercept.

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Nearly a decade has passed since Scott Walker took on teachers and other public employees in America’s Dairy Land, virtually eliminating their right to engage in collective bargaining. So what’s the state of the state today? The Have You Heard mobile heads to the Heartland and discovers that the conversation in Wisconsin sounds a lot like what’s happening in states from West Virginia to North Carolina. Public education and the question of how to fund it has emerged as a potent political issue and is driving what could be a big shift in the state’s political makeup. Transcript of the episode available here.

If you’re a fan of Have You Heard, consider supporting the podcast on Patreon. Your support will help us do more on-the-ground reporting (Arizona here we come!). And a small donation gets you extra stuff – like this episode’s extended interview with Randy Bryce, aka Iron Stache, who is running to “repeal and replace” Paul Ryan.

What lessons can we learn from previous progressive movements? Long-time activist Mary Frances Berry shows how protest is an essential ingredient of politics.

Data from the New Horizons mission revolutionises our understanding of our solar system.

If we could understand how the infant mind develops, it might help every child reach their full potential. But seeing them as learning machines is not the answer • Read the text version here

There are 13,000 business schools on Earth. That’s 13,000 too many. And I should know – I’ve taught in them for 20 years • Read the text version here

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(Photo: Jean-Paul Laurens, Le Pape Formose et Étienne VII ("Pope Formosus and Stephen VII"), 1870.)

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During the Northern Song Dynasty: The Birth of the West: 1 of 6: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century by Paul Collins.

https://www.amazon.com/Birth-West-Germany-Creation-Century/dp/1610393686/ref=sr11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526870390&sr=1-1&keywords=birth+of+the+west

From Booklist Under the Carolingian rulers, and especially under Charlemagne, medieval western Europe enjoyed a period of relative political stability and a modest cultural renaissance. After the death of Charlemagne, in 814, much of the area reverted to internecine internal wars while Viking raiders plundered both coastal and inland regions. Collins, an ordained Catholic priest and radio and TV presenter, asserts that the tenth century brought order out of this chaos, transformed the basic institutions of medieval society, and laid the foundations for the future nation-states of western Europe. Although the apogee of the temporal power of the Papacy would come two centuries later, Collins illustrates how the church played an essential role in the achievements of the tenth century, which included forming a largely successful working relationship with Germanic kings. Collins provides a broad panorama of the age, presenting characters great and small, including kings, magnates, popes, and peasants. This is a well-done study suitable for both scholars and general readers. --Jay Freeman Review Stephen O'Shea, Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada) “The Birth of the West offers a refreshing breather from the ambient buzzkill of our era.… [Collins] is not your usual Western-civ cheerleader, jumping up and down about the glory that was Greece … his is a wider tour d'horizon, encompassing also Mulsim Spain, Ireland, Briatin, Poland, and Hungary.… Stimulating, encyclopedic, and often downright funny, this is a book worth remembering.”

Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In her recent book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Katharine …

The Western concept of democracy has a lineage dating back to the classical world. Paul Cartledge’s book Democracy: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2016) details its origins in ancient Greece and its evolution of it as a theory over…

During the 2016, journalist Salena Zito, who is based in Western Pennsylvania, sensed a brewing conservative populist in the white working-class when many thought the election would be determined by other demographic groups. Her dispatches from the back roads…

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” The rule of law: the #resistance has construed it to be a cornerstone of opposition to Trump. It is certainly alarming to live under a president who flirts with operating in a permanent and near-total state of exception. But it's the rule of law as we've known it that has blessed the wide-open floodgates of corporate money into American politics, looked the other way in the face of unchecked national-security-state abuses, christened separate and unequal schools and, of course, rubber-stamped the rise of mass incarceration. The law has no transcendent moral basis. Rather, it is shaped by political economy.

Dan’s guest is Amy Kapczynski, professor of law at Yale Law School, and a co-convenor of LPEblog.org.

Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police

And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig!

 

Behind the News, 5/17/18 - guests: Carol Graham, Kristen Ghodsee - Doug Henwood

Tim Visher, who used to produce the popular VimGolf in Emacs Videos, has a couple of useful tips about using dired:

#emacs: In dired, `w` copies the file to the kill ring (and clipboard if you have that set up), `M-0 w` copies the absolute path to the file, and `C-u w` copies the relative path to the file based no the dired buffer's default-directory.

— Tim Visher (@timvisher) April 25, 2018

As a clarification, note that w copies the file name not the file itself into the kill ring. You can do several files at once by marking them.

I don’t think I’ve seen any of them before and they certainly aren’t on the dired cheat sheet that comes with Emacs. You can, of course, find the ‘w’ command in the dired help buffer but as far as I can see you have to check the documentation for dired-copy-filename-as-kill to get the information on the prefixes.

We explore the reasons why the Bulgarians never became Romans.

 

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The maps commonly used in books and the internet give a misleading impression of the Byzantine occupation of Bulgaria. We tour the Balkans and discuss the reality on the ground.

 

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Blacklisted academic Norman Finkelstein discusses his meticulous, scholarly documentation of the collective punishment of Gaza, “the largest concentration camp in the world.” The son of two Nazi concentration camp survivors, Finkelstein is an incendiary academic whose work has infuriated the Israeli government for decades. His latest book, "Gaza: An Inquest Into its Martyrdom," has not been reviewed in a single U.S. newspaper. He talks about the latest massacre in Gaza, the history of US support for Israel’s war crimes and why he believes Iran is out-maneuvering Netanyahu. 

Sen. Ron Wyden, a longtime member of the Intelligence Committee, blasts the CIA propaganda campaign in support of Haspel and accuses the Republicans of engaging in a secret confirmation process. Jeremy also asks Wyden if he believes CIA personnel involved with torture should be criminally prosecuted, what he thinks of Edward Snowden and why James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, was never charged with perjury. 

Plus, Jared Kushner speaks a little too much truth at the Jerusalem embassy.

 

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In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new interactive USA Supercomputing Map from Hyperion Research.

 "The mapped sites include government, academic and industrial HPC data centers, along with HPC vendors. This powerful tool can be used to identify the economic impact of HPC in a user-defined area (state, Congressional district, et al.) or for the United States as a whole, or to understand where HPC jobs are located, as well as who the Congressional district representatives are."

As part of the discussion, Rich recaps Hyperion's recent HPC User Forum in Tucson. The event featured an extended session on Quantum Computing with presentations by D-Wave Systems, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NIST, and Rigetti Computing. You can watch them all right here on insideHPC.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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Most people know that slavery was foundational to the economic development of the United States in the antebellum period. Fewer people are aware that slavery was also important for American foreign policy in the period. In his book This Vast …

Can a love of certainty lead to nationalism, xenophobia and fundamentalism?