v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Why Democracies Fail

 

From The Intercept:

The Spanish observers included members of the left-leaning Podemos party; EH Bildu, a Basque nationalist coalition; and a senator from Esquerra Republicana, a Catalonian leftist party. The observers were in the Kurdish-majority city of Siirt when they were arrested and taken to a police station on Sunday, the day of the election. Officers then went to the hotel where the observers were staying and arrested the remaining members of the delegation, who joined their comrades in detention at the police station. They were held until Monday morning and released on the condition they leave the country, escorted to the airport and flown back to Spain on Monday and Tuesday. 

Ismael Cortés, a national congressional deputy with Podemos, and Miriam Ojeda, a representative of the International Secretariat of Podemos, were among those detained. Spain and Turkey are both members of NATO.

“The situation of the retention and expulsion as a delegation that we have experienced is just one example of the greater context of repression and persecution of the opposition that has been experienced for years in Turkey and that has the Kurdish people as a special objective,” said Cortés. “We are concerned about the situation of the members and supporters of the YSP and HDP party and the respect for their fundamental, civil, and political rights.”

The observers also said in a statement to The Intercept that several members of the Kurdish YSP party were also arrested. Their fate is not known, and the Erdogan government did not respond to requests for comment. “This new and intolerable example of repression demonstrates the authoritarian drift of the regime of Erdogan, which undermines the democratic principles and fundamental rights of the Turkish citizenry and, especially, of the peoples present in this territory, such as the Kurdish,” the observers said in the statement.

This is Very Dangerous

From an article in Reutors from 2019 on Turkey and their lax building codes:

A Turkish government amnesty on unregistered construction work is endangering lives, engineers and architects warned after an illegally extended residential building collapsed in Istanbul and killed 21 people.

Three floors of the eight-story building had been built illegally, but owners of the property were able to register it under the amnesty that has brought in billions of dollars of revenue for the government.

Experts say the ruins of the building, which crumpled two weeks ago in Istanbul’s Asian district of Kartal, highlight the dangers of approving unregulated construction work in a city of 15 million people that is prone to earthquakes.

Some work has started to address safety concerns, but they say it is concentrated in wealthier neighborhoods, rather than highest risk areas, and the amnesty has exacerbated the peril.

“It will mean transforming our cities, notably Istanbul, into graveyards and result in coffins emerging from our homes,” said Cemal Gokce, the chairman of the Chamber of Civil Engineers.

“Whether it is completely unlicensed, or has more floors than the original plan, they gave an amnesty to all buildings. This is very dangerous,” he said.

Some 10 million people applied to benefit from the amnesty and 1.8 million of the applications were accepted.

Property owners pay to register the buildings, which are then subject to various taxes and levies. The amnesty had brought 16.5 billion lira ($3.1 billion) in property taxes and registration fees into government coffers, the urbanization minister said in December.

His ministry did not respond to Reuters questions about criticism of the property amnesty, which was set to expire at the end of 2018 but has been extended until June. . .

Istanbul Chamber of Architects head Esin Koymen said the chamber had warned the government about the consequences of the amnesty bill when it was debated in parliament.

“We told them to withdraw it. We said people will pay for this with their lives. But they did not listen,” she said, adding that the focus had been on the revenues it would generate rather than architectural, planning or engineering issues.

 

President Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party has put great emphasis on construction, which has helped drive growth during its 16 years in power.

But more than half of Turkey’s building stock, or 13 million buildings, contravenes housing regulations, according to Environment and Urbanisation Ministry data, and many Istanbul residents worry about potential damage from a major earthquake.

A quake in the Izmit region, some 70 km (45 miles) east of the city, killed more than 17,000 people in August 1999.

Erdogan said on Saturday he was “scared” by the prospect of another big earthquake. In an interview with CNN Turk, he blamed the Istanbul building collapse on illegal construction, which he said constituted a threat in all major cities.

According to figures from TSKB Real Estate Appraiser general manager Makbule Yonel Maya, around 32 percent of buildings in Turkey since 2002 were not built in line with legal regulations.

 

The Fibs

For headache relief, start a war. . . .

From George Packer at The Atlantic:

Yesterday Vladimir Putin went to Stalingrad. It was the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in the city once named after the Soviet dictator. The current Russian dictator solemnly bowed his head and knelt before a wreath laid to honor the heroes of the battle that turned the tide of World War II. The day before the ceremony, a bronze bust of Joseph Stalin had been unveiled in the city, whose name was changed to Volgograd in 1961. By then Stalin, perhaps the 20th century’s greatest mass murderer, was out of favor. But for Putin, the city is still Stalingrad, the year is still 1943, Nazis are still waging a scorched-earth war, and the heroic Russian people are still fighting a far stronger enemy in defense of the motherland. Only it’s 2023, and the enemy is the independent, democratic, much smaller nation of Ukraine, led by a Jewish president and armed by Western democracies—including Germany.

Putin’s purpose in going to Stalingrad was to connect the past war to the present one, and in doing so to rouse Russian pride and warn his enemies of their coming doom. “Unfortunately, we see that the ideology of Nazism in its modern form and manifestation again directly threatens the security of our country,” he declared in a speech to a military audience. “Again and again we have to repel the aggression of the collective West. It’s incredible but it’s a fact: We are again being threatened with German Leopard tanks with crosses on them.”

To grasp the enormity of this lie—the foundational lie of Russia’s war against Ukraine—it helps to know something about the history of World War II. During Putin’s visit to Stalingrad, I was rereading the classic Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer, a CBS radio correspondent who had been based in Berlin in the 1930s. So it was fresh in my mind how Adolf Hitler, in his first move of conquest, annexed Austria in March 1938, claiming it as a historical part of the German Reich, and then held a plebiscite in which 99.75 percent of Austrians officially voted to join Germany. Putin’s first move in this war was to annex Crimea in March 2014, claiming it as a historical part of the Russian Empire, and then hold a plebiscite in which 97 percent of Crimeans officially voted to join Russia.

Next for Hitler in 1938 came the annexation of the Sudetenland, the German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia, where local Nazis, on orders from Berlin, instigated phony pretexts for a German takeover. Relentless Nazi propaganda transformed Czechoslovakia, a progressive democracy, into a hellish aggressor, and charged its president, Edvard Benes, with a litany of made-up crimes. “It is unbearable for a world power to know there are racial comrades at its side who are constantly being afflicted with the severest suffering for their sympathy or unity with the whole nation, its destiny and Weltanshauung,” the Fuhrer roared. “To the interests of the German Reich belong the protection of those German peoples who are not in a position to secure along our frontiers their political and spiritual freedom by their own efforts.”

It isn’t all that hard to replace the German Weltanshauung with Ruskiy Mir, or “Russian world”; Hitler the protector of oppressed German speakers with Putin the liberator of oppressed Russian speakers; Edvard Benes with Volodymyr Zelensky; the Sudetenland with the Donbas; Berlin-backed Sudeten Nazis with Moscow-backed Ukrainian separatists. In both cases, incidents in the breakaway regions were ginned up on orders from the neighboring empire, giving it an excuse to invade. In the Reich Chancellery then, as in the Kremlin now, every gesture toward peace negotiations was a sham to buy more time for war. Within six months of the September 1938 Munich Conference where the Sudetenland was surrendered to Germany, Hitler swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia—and he was just beginning. Eight years after starting a war in Crimea and the Donbas, Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, bringing destruction, murder, rape, occupation, annexation, deportation, threats of annihilation, and many more lies.

More

Most Pernicious Abuse of Power

As the Trump security scandal rolls out I've been wondering why no one is speaking about it in terms of why he was keeping all this information and the context in which he was doing this. This, instead of looking at this issue in isolation which the media often wants you to do as ultimately if it goes to trial they'll need to prove something and not everything. But here it is, the first article that puts things in true perspective. From David Rothkopf at the Daily Beast:

The seizure of documents at Mar-a-Lago—and what we have learned about the former president’s apparent violation of federal laws by keeping them, mishandling them, and obstructing the efforts to return them—must not be seen as an isolated incident. Trump’s disregard for U.S. national security and in particular his contempt for and struggle with the U.S. intelligence community, has been a theme since he first publicly sought the support of an American enemy to help him win the 2016 presidential campaign.

We now know that Trump and his closest advisers were told many times, even before they left office, that the law required them to return all documents to the U.S. government. We know they were informed repeatedly about their legal obligations with regards to the treatment of classified material. We know they ignored that guidance and removed documents illegally. We know they then were asked to return them. Multiple times.

We know they did not comply. We know that when they were forced to comply, they returned some but not all the documents, and that among these were highly sensitive documents—the mistreatment of which could threaten U.S. national security. We know that these documents were stored at Mar-a-Lago, which had been targeted for years—and penetrated—by foreign intelligence organizations. And we know that even after all this, Trump’s lawyers misrepresented that all documents had been returned.

Subsequently, we know that when all efforts to retrieve the remaining documents failed, the Department of Justice sought a subpoena to reclaim them—and that among what they found were more highly classified documents. Since then, we have also heard Trump claim he declassified the documents, the documents were his, the search was illegal, and that he was the victim. We also heard members of his party support him, despite the fact that Trump’s disregard for the law and his recklessness could well have put the lives of members of the U.S. intelligence community and their sources at risk.

I spoke to several national security veterans about Trump’s latest—and one of his most pernicious—abuses of power.

Former CIA Director General Michael Hayden said of the Mar-a-Lago revelations, “Literally, it’s unbelievable.” He described the kind of secrets that appeared to be in Trump’s possession as the core elements—essential to protect. “It’s the bread and butter of intelligence,” Hayden said.

Former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) General James Clapper observed, “The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago—an obvious target of adversary foreign intelligence—is stunning, but not surprising; it seems entirely consistent with the former president’s apparent disdain for the intelligence community and its rules for protection of sensitive information.”

More

Order & Law

From Charles Blow at the NYT:

The criminal justice system — including law enforcement — is not meant to regulate the wealthy, it is meant to regulate the poor. In this way, the police are a tool of control wielded by the powerful rather than a means of controlling the powerful.

Perhaps no one illustrates this dynamic better than Donald Trump. He pitched himself as Mr. Law and Order to get elected, and he ratcheted up his rhetorical support for the police when people complained about police misconduct and brutality, particularly as it was aimed at Black people and those protesting in support of Black lives.

To Trump, the police were exerting pressure on populations that people like him thought needed to be controlled.

However, when Trump’s mob stormed the Capitol, injuring and even leading to the deaths of police officers, Trump fell silent. For days after the riots, he didn’t acknowledge the death of officer Brian Sicknick, who suffered two strokes in the wake of the violence at the Capitol.

Not only did Trump not reach out to Sicknick’s family, he also didn’t send a letter of condolence.

The only thing he did was to sign a proclamation that flags be flown at half-staff a week after the riots “as a sign of respect for the service and sacrifice of United States Capitol Police Officers Brian D. Sicknick and Howard Liebengood, and all Capitol Police Officers and law enforcement across this great Nation.” The proclamation made no mention of the fact that they died after the riots, riots he helped incite, riots that he continues to defend.

Trump has consistently minimized the insurrection, and indirectly, minimized the trauma inflicted on the officers.

The officers protecting the Capitol were, in the minds of people like Trump, trying to control the wrong population.

But the entire episode exposes the lie that people like that tell about supporting the police out of principle. In fact, they only appreciate the knife when they hold the handle and the blade is pointed away from them.

 

After Trump failed to mention Sicknick in the days following his death, one top Trump campaign aide, Matthew Wolking, texted another, Tim Murtaugh: “That’s enraging to me. Everything he said about supporting law enforcement was a lie.”

Of course it was a lie. Much of the so-called Blue Lives Matter movement was a lie. It was simply a retort to Black Lives Matter. It was an attempt at silencing rather than solidarity.

This week, Trump returned to Washington for the first time since he left office. And the speech he gave was another law and order speech, returning to the theme of empowering the police, calling for the execution of drug dealers, and describing the country as a “cesspool of crime.”

In all this, he encouraged cities to reinstate racialized stop-and-frisk policies, because “it works,” and called on them to flood the streets with more officers and pull back on accountability for those officers’ actions.

Trump said, “There is no longer respect for the law, and there certainly is no order.”

Clearly, irony escapes the man.

Criminal Conspiracy in Any Language

 

From the NYT, Andrew Weissmenn writes:

The evidence gathered in the hearings describes a multiprong conspiracy — what prosecutors term a “hub and spoke” conspiracy — in which the Ellipse speech by President Trump and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were just one spoke of a grander scheme.

This broader approach would avoid the thorny debate that has emerged as to whether Mr. Trump could be criminally culpable for inciting the riot during his Ellipse speech, or if, on the contrary, his speech is protected under the First Amendment and the evidence too ambiguous to justify the extraordinary step of indicting a former president. Building a criminal case that looks solely at the riot itself is far more complex legally and factually for those who weren’t at or in the Capitol. These challenges of the current bottom-up approach have led to criticism of the slow pace of the narrow Justice Department approach.

Instead, what the hearings have revealed is evidence of a plot orchestrated by Mr. Trump and his allies in the White House and elsewhere — including players from the Mueller investigation like Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani as well as new players like Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman. The “spoke” of the Jan. 6 riot should be seen and investigated simultaneously with the other “spokes”: orchestrating fake electors in key states, pressuring state officials like those in Georgia to find new votes, plotting to behead the leadership of the Justice Department to promote a lackey who would further the conspiracy by announcing a spurious investigation into election fraud, and pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to violate the law.

Investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection in the context of the other means by which Mr. Trump appears to have sought to undermine the transfer of power serves to strengthen any future case by presenting the complete evidence of the perpetrators’ actions and intent. And it undermines possible defenses.

For instance, the evidence that Mr. Trump lied in a statement about Mr. Pence’s agreeing that he had the power to reject electors undermines the defense that Mr. Trump was acting in good faith and honestly believed he had won the election. And Mr. Trump’s conduct in the White House after his speech at the Ellipse and during the Jan. 6 attack, which includes remarks, reported from testimony by the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, in which Mr. Trump condoned the chants calling for hanging of the vice president of the United States, is strong evidence of his intent for a plan to upend a democratic election.

There are signs that the department, spurred on by the committee, has begun to look into some of these other spokes. Unsurprisingly, the spoke involving the Justice Department itself has attracted acute interest. Recently, federal agents conducted a search of the home of Mr. Clark, whom Mr. Trump considered elevating to be acting head the Justice Department, and seized the phone of Mr. Eastman, a lawyer who advised Mr. Trump on efforts to overturn the election.

But other signs are not so encouraging: Department prosecutors were reportedly surprised by the testimony of Ms. Hutchinson. That is not a sign of a robust investigation into the facts. The department has more tools than Congress does to learn the truth. It could have interviewed Ms. Hutchinson long ago, as well as many others whose evidence is relevant — indeed, Ms. Hutchinson alone provided investigators numerous leads to pursue.

More

Take the Fucking Mags Away

From Lawfare this week:

Until Tuesday, we had both publicly stated that the Department of Justice had insufficient evidence to indict former President Trump for his conduct on Jan. 6. Our conclusion, which we each came to independently, was largely grounded in First Amendment concerns about criminalizing purely political speech.

But Tuesday’s explosive testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, changed our minds. In particular, Hutchinson testified to hearing Trump order that the magnetometers (metal detectors) used to keep armed people away from the president be removed: “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags [magnetometers] away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here; let the people in and take the mags away.” 

Admittedly, Hutchinson is only one witness, and it is true that some of her testimony would, in the context of a criminal trial, constitute hearsay. But Hutchinson—unlike many of her detractors who have contested certain details of her testimony—testified under oath and, contrary to the sneering commentary of the House Judiciary Committee GOP Twitter account, not all of Hutchinson’s second-hand remarks were introduced to establish the truth of the matter asserted. Even much of that portion of her testimony that did constitute hearsay might still be admissible under the relevant evidentiary rules. 

These utterances by Trump (as alleged by Hutchinson) were not political speech. They serve as additional proof of intent and context, and—crucially—a material act to increase the likelihood of violence. This easily distinguishes Trump’s speech at the rally from other kinds of core political speech that should never be criminalized.

More

Who Provided the Funding for January 6th?

From  Wall Street on Parade:

The House Select Committee did an excellent job last evening of providing the big picture on the plot to shred U.S. democracy in service to Donald Trump’s megalomaniac desires. But the question that any good investigator of an unsolved crime scene must ask is this: who benefits from this crime? And to understand who, besides Donald Trump, would be the chief beneficiaries of a coup that installed Trump for an illegitimate second term as President, one has to follow the money trail. That money trail leads to Charles Koch, the billionaire Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the world.

Along with the heirs of his late brother, David, Charles Koch is a majority owner of Koch Industries, a global conglomerate which has interests in fossil fuels, refineries, chemicals, paper products and extensive trading operations.

For more than four decades, Charles Koch has also been involved in a shadowy network of front groups that seek to gut the federal government of its regulatory powers over corporations – particularly those involving fossil fuels. To further Koch’s anti-regulatory goals, Charles Koch and Koch Industries were heavily vested in making sure that Trump had another four years as President.

One of the Koch front groups that played a major role in the 2016 election that put Donald Trump in the White House in the first place was Freedom Partners. (It quietly shut down in 2019 after the press started reporting on its role.) When the group was still active in 2018, we had taken a hard look at its Board of Directors. We found that all but one of its Board Members was a current or former Koch company employee. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, Freedom Partners ended up with 12 of its former employees working in the Trump Administration.

Freedom Partners Action Fund, a related organization that ran attack ads against Democrats, had received at least $14 million from Charles Koch and his trust before it shuttered its operations.

Freedom Partners outlined their marching orders for the Trump administration in a formal memo. Their well-placed toadies in the Trump administration delivered: the Trump administration quickly withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord. It passed a massive tax cut for corporations. It gutted federal regulations and put industry lobbyists and straw men in charge of the very federal agencies that oversaw those industries.

To handle any legal pushback, Koch Industries’ law firm, Jones Day, sent 12 of its law partners to staff up key positions in the Trump administration on the very day Trump was inaugurated. Jones Day has since removed the press release it issued at the time but you can read the reporting on it at the American Bar Association Journal.

The Cold Civil War

From Michele Goldberg at the NYT:

These days, it’s barely remarkable when Republicans issue what sound like threats against those who’d dare curtail their private arsenals. “I have news for the embarrassment that claims to be our president — try to take our guns and you’ll learn why the Second Amendment was written in the first place,” Randy Fine, a state representative in Florida, tweeted on Wednesday.

It will be impossible to do anything about guns in this country, at least at a national level, as long as Democrats depend on the cooperation of a party that holds in reserve the possibility of insurrection. The slaughter of children in Texas has done little to alter this dynamic.

Republicans have no intention of letting Democrats pass even modest measures like strengthened background checks, and as long as the Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refuse to amend the filibuster, Republicans retain a veto over national policy. Victims of our increasingly frequent mass shootings are collateral damage in a cold civil war, though some Democrats refuse to acknowledge it, let alone fight it.

Fine’s words echoed Donald Trump’s during the 2016 election, when he said that “Second Amendment people” might be able to stop a President Hillary Clinton from appointing Supreme Court justices. What was once a barely concealed insinuation of violence has morphed, especially since Jan. 6, into an even more forthright menace. As ProPublica has reported, dozens of members of the Oath Keepers militia were arrested in connection with the attack on the Capitol, but that hasn’t stopped the organization from “evolving into a force within the Republican Party.”

In Shasta County, a conservative part of rural Northern California, a militia-aligned faction has secured a majority on the board of supervisors, in what members of the movement see as a blueprint that can be deployed nationally. Throughout the country, reported The New York Times, “right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him” — meaning Trump — “from power.” Expecting those same Republicans to collaborate with Democrats on public safety is madness.

Murdochs and Money

Eric Alterman writes:

…this three-part, multimedia deep dive from Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, also in the Times back in 2019: here, here, and here (with a cheat sheet here). That one illustrated the global machinations of the Murdoch family. It demonstrated the manner in which its members have poisoned political discourse in countless countries simultaneously, increasing racism, promoting violence, destroying any hopes for saving the planet, and worsening life for the most vulnerable people everywhere, purely because it makes the Murdochs more and more money, when they already have more money than any group of people their size could spend in a dozen lifetimes. These pieces are in some ways more remarkable than the Tucker Carlson series because of the (mostly realized) ambition of their reach. These articles should most definitely be treated as prerequisites for the Carlson pieces, the way English 101 is a prerequisite for English 10