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Month: August 2018

The “war” between the Kochs and the Trumpies

The “war” between the Kochs and the Trumpies

by digby


My Salon column this morning:

The last we heard of Trump’s former “populist” muse Steve Bannon, he was across the Atlantic, plotting with Britain’s recently departed foreign secretary Boris Johnson about plans to challenge Prime Minister Theresa May and enact a “hard Brexit” plan. He’s turned up all over Europe the last few months, talking up far-right politicians and lending his support to anti-immigrant platforms. He’s even started an official nationalist movement which he’s cleverly called “The Movement.

Bannon’s just following through on what many of us assumed was his long-term goal after Donald Trump’s likely defeat in the 2016 presidential election. When Bannon and his team unexpectedly pulled off the win, he was elevated to one of the most powerful jobs on earth and then, months later, was banished for speaking out of turn about the president. That has not stopped him from pursuing his own agenda, which is global “disruption” on a grand scale to usher in the “Fourth Turning,” described by the authors of the book that dramatically shaped Bannon’s thinking this way:

Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, one commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II. The risk of catastrophe will be high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule.

That sounds a bit like the premonition of a doomsday cult, but Bannon thinks it’s a good thing. The political movement he sees as the instrument of this necessary destruction is right-wing white nationalism, which is an emerging force in Western Europe and already has a foothold in the rest of the world. He’s been over in Europe learning from these emerging political forces, and let’s just say they have a long and relevant history from which to take lessons.

Now Bannon’s back home, road-testing a bunch of new ideas and sharpening up the old ones. According to Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair, he’s slowly worming his way back into favor by running an informal outside advisory group consisting of Trump campaign veterans who still have the president’s ear. Unsurprisingly, he’s recommending a scorched-earth strategy focusing on bringing out the Trump base to save their hero from the threat of impeachment. He has named Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, along with (inexplicably) former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, as the targets for Trump’s ire. Oh, and also Nancy Pelosi, whom Bannon notes is as close as they can get to Hillary Clinton.

This week Bannon found a different enemy: the Koch brothers, who have expressed consternation at Trump’s trade war and immigration policies, which do not mesh with their laissez-faire, libertarian philosophy. At the annual gathering of Koch donors, Charles Koch said they may hold back support from some Republican candidates who back the president’s policies.

As Salon’s Matthew Rozsa reported on Tuesday, Bannon responded angrily, saying: “What they have to do is shut up and get with the program, OK? And here’s the program: Ground game to support Trump’s presidency and program; victory on Nov. 6.” Later, on CNBC, he warned Republican candidates:

You take Koch money, it’s going to be toxic. We are going to let people know that if you take Koch money there’s a punishment. If you take money from people who are against the president and are looking to put a knife in the back of the president, you are going to pay.

That threat came on the heels of a couple of presidential tweets earlier in the day. Note the word “globalist,” which is not a term Trump has often used but is a major Bannon epithet:

Trump is lying as usual. The Kochs were hugely responsible for Trump and other Republican victories in 2016, even if they had to hold their noses to do it. As Adele Stan pointed out in the American Prospect two years ago:

If you’re a politician in the brothers’ orbit, you’re likely dependent on the ground operation of Americans for Prosperity — or other Koch astroturf outfits, such as Libre Initiative or 60 Plus — to get your voters to the polls. If you’re an employee of any of the multitudes of Koch­-linked organizations that dot the Republican landscape, you’re dependent on them for your paycheck. And if you’re the Koch brothers, seeking to hold onto your congressional majority, you’re dependent on your people seeing to it that Republican voters are not so turned off by Donald Trump that they fail to show up to vote for your favored candidate for either the House or the Senate.

The Koch brothers’ operation is the Republican turnout operation, and Steve Bannon knows it.

Bannon’s threats are based on nothing but hot air, as far as we know. But it sounds as though Trump is truly miffed by the Kochs’ unwillingness to toe his line, and Bannon sees bashing them as a good cover for Trump’s crude anti-immigration, white-nationalist policies. After all, Trump’s populism so far consists of a massive tax cut for the wealthiest Americans (with another one potentially on the way), along with an incoherent trade war that even his supporters are struggling to understand. Maybe hitting some vastly wealthy Republicans could be just the ticket to get the MAGA crowd out to the polls.

It’s hard to believe that the Kochs will actually pull the plug on Republican candidates in more than a small handful of races. They don’t like Trump and never did, but they know their interests will not be as well served by Democrats. Indeed, this whole thing may be nothing more than Kabuki theater, designed to give Trump some rich guys to “feud” with. Meanwhile, the rich guys can pretend to care about their principles even as their mountains of cash keep piling up from Republican tax cuts.

Steve Bannon’s goals, however, are not identical with Republican goals, Donald Trump’s goals or the Koch brothers’ goals. He wants to blow up the system altogether. Any kind of dissension and disorientation works toward that end, no matter who comes out on top. With the help of some foreign actors and right-wing media, along with the walking disaster that is President Donald J. Trump, his plan is working out pretty well.

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Hackers gonna hack by @BloggersRUs

Hackers gonna hack
by Tom Sullivan

Facebook can’t keep the Bear(?) out of it picnic baskets. Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy, wrote in a blog post that the company has been working with Congress, law enforcement, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab to stop abusive practices on its platform. “About two weeks ago we identified the first of eight Pages and 17 profiles on Facebook, as well as seven Instagram accounts, that violate our ban on coordinated inauthentic behavior,” Gleicher wrote.

* In total, more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of these Pages, the earliest of which was created in March 2017. The latest was created in May 2018.

* The most followed Facebook Pages were “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being,” and “Resisters.” The remaining Pages had between zero and 10 followers, and the Instagram accounts had zero followers.

It’s an arms race, Gleicher explains:

It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past. We believe this could be partly due to changes we’ve made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder.

Axios summarizes some of the fronted content:

* One post released by Facebook was posted by a page called “Resisters” and featured an image of President Trump with the text: “If Trump wants to beat Barack Obama’s Twitter record for most liked tweet he only needs to tweet 2 words ‘I resign.'”

* The same page also created an event for a counter-protest to the upcoming ““Unite the Right” rally in Washington. “Inauthentic admins of the ‘Resisters’ Page connected with admins from five legitimate Pages to co-host the event,” said Gleicher.

* Though the company released some sample posts from the pages, Facebook officials said on a call with reporters that it would not get into the broad details of the content — beyond what it had released publicly — but were working with researchers to evaluate it.

But while Facebook said it could not directly attribute new “inauthentic” accounts to Russia, Sen. Mark Warner, Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was not reluctant to assign blame:

“Today’s disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in a statement.

What’s caveat emptor in Russian?

Check out Fivethirtyeight’s collection of 3 Million Russian Troll Tweets.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Space cadets FTW

Space cadets FTW

This is not good:

Within months, DoD will start standing up a new combatant command, a new space-procurement agency, and a new Space Operations Force.

The U.S. Defense Department this week will take the first steps to create the Space Force, a new branch of the military ordered up by President Trump but not yet fully backed by Congress.

In coming months, Defense Department leaders plan to stand up three of the four components of the new Space Force: a new combatant command for space, a new joint agency to buy satellites for the military, and a new warfighting community that draws space operators from all service branches. These sweeping changes — on par with the past decade’s establishment of cyber forces — are the part the Pentagon can do without lawmakers’ approval.

Creating the fourth component — an entirely new branch of the military with services and support functions such as financial management and facilities construction — will require congressional action. Defense officials plan to spend the rest of 2018 building a “legislative proposal for the authorities necessary to fully establish the Space Force.” That would go to Congress early next year as part of the Trump administration’s 2020 budget proposal.

This plan, developed for execution by Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, the Pentagon’s No. 2 civilian, is laid out in a 14-page draft report slated to go to lawmakers on Wednesday. Defense Onereviewed a draft of the report dated July 30.
Related: What Trump’s Space Force Announcement Means
Related: The US Air Force Is Reorganizing to Fight in Space

“The Department of Defense is establishing a Space Force to protect our economy through deterrence of malicious activities, ensure our space systems meet national security requirements and provide vital capabilities to joint and coalition forces across the spectrum of conflict,” says the draft report. “DoD will usher in a new age of space technology and field new systems in order to deter, and if necessary degrade, deny, disrupt, destroy and manipulate adversary capabilities to protect U.S.interests, assets and way of life…This new age will unlock growth in the U.S. industrial base, expand the commercial space economy and strengthen partnerships with our allies.”

The Military Industrial Complex is obviously thrilled by this new money pit and they’re gearing up for some sensationally wasteful grift.

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