Tag Archives: Congress

Saudi Arabia Wants You To Vote Republican

Some analysts I trust have gotten a little too complex on this topic. Yes, there are many concrete reasons why Saudi Arabia’s intervention in the oil market at the beginning of this month makes sense. The fact that prices have not risen much since the announcement is an indication of just how quickly the world recession is destroying oil and gas demand. But the fact remains that Saudi Arabia decided to make this cut a month before the November mid-term elections. This is a calculated slap in the face to Joe Biden and the Democratic party. It is not, however an insult to the United States as a whole, as I explain in today’s video.

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/12/1036389448/biden-declassifies-secret-fbi-report-detailing-saudi-nationals-connections-to-9-
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/jared-kushner-saudi-investment-fund.html
https://www.propublica.org/article/9-11-investigation-saudi-connections-operation-encore-fbi

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3 Ways Biden Can Stop Trump…

I have been meaning to get this, and its follow on videos, out there since November. It’s pretty clear to me what Biden has to do to ensure that Donald Trump does not find his way back to the white house. I’m sure it’s not surprising that I think foreign policy is key to this. I’m biased for sure. But it really does seem clear to me that ending the forever wars isn’t just the right thing to do, but it’s also the best way for Biden to achieve political success. It’s just such low-hanging fruit politically speaking.

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Biden’s Presidency Will Succeed or Fail in Georgia January 5th | Election 2020 14

It’s interesting how far my politics have evolved. If you had told me in 2014 that this channel would include a full-throated call for more stimulus spending, even after a year with a near 4 trillion dollar US budget deficit, I would have been appalled. I’m in surprisingly strong company. The inflation hawks and bond vigilantes on Wall Street have mostly retired in failure. The new generation is now just as eager for a big spending government as I am. What happened to all of us was… events. An under-appreciated aspect of Donald Trump’s presidency is the way that he sort of blew up the argument for fiscal conservatism. The Republicans let him do all the economic stimulus that they denied Obama, and the economy really did kick into higher gear. The threatened inflation never happened, and while people are a little less eager to buy our debt, the Federal Reserve seems to have stepped into the breach without consequences.

The only thing standing in the way of the emerging “magic money” era is the Republican Senate. And they’re only standing in the way until they can put a Republican back in power. Which is way I think we shouldn’t let them do that, as I lay out in today’s video on Georgia’s January 5th elections. As I briefly note in this video, however, I still suspect that those failed bond vigilantes and Republican Senators may actually be right. The British Empire fell because it ran out of people willing to give them money, and I think it’s likely that will be the case with us as well. We just don’t know the time scale. And as Keynes pointed out, “In the Long run, we’re all dead”. 2021 is not the year to try to solve the national debt.

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Turkey Exposes The NATO Lie | S-400 | MIC 26

It really is amazing how committed Washington, DC can be to utterly fantastical narratives. If Turkey experiences real consequences for turning on the S-400 missile system it has purchased from Russia, it will be because of the damage this choice has done to US defense contractors who feel left out. But that won’t be the story that US congresspeople use to explain the collapse of the 70 year old relationship with Turkey. No, they’ll blame it on Turkey’s choosing to side with Russia.

DC has been trying to sell this idea for years. Despite the fact that Turkey shot down a Russian jet in 2015. Despite the fact that Russia and Turkey are involved in the most serious cold war between great powers that Western Eurasia has seen since the 1980s. Today’s video lays out how Russia and Turkey are now facing off against each other in not one but three separate regions. Today’s video also explains the real reason Turkey could be about to fall out of NATO.

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Ilhan Omar Is Winning | Everybody’s Lying About Islam 40

I like this video, but it also reminds me of some missed opportunities. For over two years now I’ve been putting out this “Everybody’s Lying About Islam” series, but I think I’ve been falling down on one of the most central points I was trying to make. I am grateful to Ilhan Omar for giving me the opportunity to make that point more forcefully. Throughout the series I vaguely allude to the ways that Islamophobia serves the US government, even as the US government’s most prominent figures preach peace and tolerance.

In this video, I make the connection crystal clear, in ways that I should have done long ago. Islamophobia allows the US government to shield their Saudi partners from blame for 9-11, while also providing an endless series of countries to be lucratively bombed and destroyed. Ilhan Omar is the subject of extraordinary hate and vilification because she points out the facts of Islamophobia, and the ways it is used by our government. I adore her for it. Her outspoken presence in congress, and the fact of her presence alone, is a sign that the US public is tiring of this old Islamophobic ploy, which is inspiring a high degree of panic in Washington, DC.

It’s becoming clear, also, that Ms. Omar may be quite the fallible human being. The questions surrounding immigration fraud she may have committed remain. I looked at those allegations, and why the statute of limitations means they won’t prove to be Omar’s kryptonite the way many in the swamp hope in a tweet storm back when I published this video. It has since been fairly credibly alleged that Omar may be getting a little bit Trumpy with her personal behavior. Her supposed seduction of (by?) a married, very non-Muslim campaign consultant doesn’t fit with the “fanatical jihadist” slurs we find on right wing radio, but it could present an interesting, and very current campaign finance challenge. With growing rumors of petty illegality, campaign finance irregularities, and moral failings, Ilhan Omar sounds a lot like… a congress person. In the world before Trump, who knows, perhaps I’d be bothered by all this. In 2019, I’m not. Let whatever proceedings are appropriate proceed, but I don’t yet see anything that’s likely to derail this vitally important voice in Congress.

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Mike Pompeo Reveals The Truth About Yemen | Yemen 13 | MIC 17

I’ve said this before, but I think it’s definitely worth highlighting again: WE NEED THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA. I’m not talking about the opinion pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal. I’m certainly not talking about CNN or Fox News. Most cable news could probably disappear tomorrow with little loss. But without the old print media titans, we’d know essentially nothing. Living on the ground in Istanbul, I could tell that almost everything the US government said about the war in Syria was a lie. But what gave me the confidence to finally put together my series on the topic was reporting from the New York Times.

It’s frustrating that the narratives that these institutions push often take no notice of the great reporting these institutions do. You can still find the New York Times pushing the idea that “We Didn’t Do Enough In Syria!!!”, even though the New York Times’s own reporting contradicts that story completely. Independent media is tremendously important. The world needs people like me to trumpet what’s really going on. We’re allowed to make the arguments that real reporters can’t. But independent media can’t fund real reporting. Most of what we do is just sifting through the real reporting that’s out there. Both branches are necessary. Today’s video would not have been possible without great reporting done by the Wall Street Journal.

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Why The Democrats Should Win Big In 2018 | Congress 6

So What, am I a Democrat now?!?! Hell no. But, as I mention in today’s video, I definitely want them to win big in the mid-term elections this November. This may be surprising to some of you. Though I certainly changed my tune in 2016 and became a very reluctant Clinton supporter, long-term viewers know that I’m a pretty hardcore third party guy. In fact I’ve never voted for a Democrat or Republican in a national election. (In 2016 I was registered in Washington, DC, a super Democratic jurisdiction, so my vote didn’t matter). In fact, when I started doing this channel full time in 2014, I intended to use it to agitate for third parties in 2016.

Trump changed my calculus, obviously. I was convinced that Trump posed a unique threat to US politics, and nothing about his presidency has changed that conviction. I’m no Democrat, and it’s hard to imagine my ever becoming one, but Trump makes for strange bedfellows.

And my support for the Democrats this time around is actually quite consistent with my old school Libertarian views. Divided government, one where different parties control different branches, is always better from a Libertarian perspective. It means that less gets done. I’d be perfectly happy for the next two years of Trump’s presidency to be completely gridlocked. It’d be better than what we’ve got now.

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How To End The Forever War | Yemen 9 | AUMF

Occasionally I’ll embark on the 15-20 hour process of making a video, and then something happens that throws things in a new light. I still stand 100% behind today’s video, but if I’d known that Secretary of Defense James Mattis was going to weigh in, I probably would have incorporated a response. He’s a serious guy. I’ll have to respond here.

Secretary Mattis sent a letter to Congressional leaders yesterday afternoon, March 14th, objecting to the Sanders/Lee/Murphy resolution that the Senate will vote on next week. Today’s video advocates for that resolution pretty hard. I stand by that.

It’s easy for me to dismiss a lot of Mattis’s letter due to some pretty fundamental strategic and philosophical differences I have with him that regular viewers of this channel will be familiar with. Mattis believes that Saudi Arabia is a worthwhile partner in counter-terrorism. I do not believe that. Mattis believes that Iran is more of a threat to the US and the world than Saudi Arabia is. I do not believe that. Because Mattis believes these things I do not believe, he presents a narrative for the Yemeni war that strikes me as deeply flawed. If you’ve got a half hour or so, I set out a counter-narrative, that actually reckons with Yemeni history, unlike the standard Iran-Saudi proxy war fairy tale we’re told.

But there’s one concern that Mattis brings up that I can’t dismiss. He claims that ending US cooperation with Saudi Arabia in Yemen will make the humanitarian situation worse. I’m worried about this as well. Taking the US out of the equation is likely to degrade Saudi Arabia’s ability to continue the war long term, but I suspect it is also likely to make the Saudis more brutal. The 5,295 civilians that have been killed so far (Human Rights Watch), are probably the result of fairly targeted bombing. Saudi bombing is likely to have killed most of these civilians, but US expertise has probably put a bit of a cap on the body count. I’m no expert on warfare, but I was already worried about this. Having Mattis, one of the world’s greatest experts on warfare, express this opinion makes me more worried. But it does not give me pause.

More people may die by bombing, but Saudi Arabia’s ability to besiege the country will be seriously degraded. Millions are less likely to be at risk of starvation or cholera. And if Saudi Arabia’s attack on Yemen becomes more brutal it will also become less sustainable. A key point that I neglected to include in this video, and rarely gets included in the standard litany (“refueling, targeting, intelligence”) of goods the US provides to Saudi Arabia is diplomatic cover. It is a profoundly weird thing that Saudi Arabia is doing. Saudi Arabia is invading and destroying its neighbor. This sort of thing doesn’t happen much in the 21st century, or even in the second half of the 20th century. Most wars are civil. The few examples of cross-border invasion I can think of post Cold War are only possible because of US support. If the resolution passes in the Senate next week, and gets through the House, Saudi Arabia won’t just lose technical support, it will lose that diplomatic cover.

Without US support the war in Yemen will instantly become exponentially more cancerous for the Saudi re-branding effort than it already is. MBS and the Saudi government desperately need investors for their oil company’s years-delayed IPO, and that new tech city they announced last fall. Try doing that when US media and government are no longer covering up the war in Yemen.

I’m afraid that Mattis may be right about the immediate humanitarian costs of cutting off US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. But continuing on the way we have for another two years would be much, much worse.

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Yemen Shows How Weak The US Congress Has Become | Congress 4 | Yemen 7

What few people recognize is how far the US Congress has fallen, and how quickly. US pop culture, almost from the beginning, has featured a high degree of skepticism about Congress. They’ve always been known as a bunch of corrupt, pompous windbags. That’s a healthy attitude to take towards one’s government. But I think this constant attitude of contempt has served to hide Congress’s fall.

With the one two punch of Newt Gingrich’s “reforms” in the 1990’s (discussed here) and the expansion of the government after 9/11, Congress has lost the plot almost entirely. It’s only by looking at the power and principle that Congress could stand on just a few short decades ago, that we can get the full picture. That’s what this week’s video comparing Congress’s abdication of responsibility for Yemen to their treatment of Nicaragua in the 1980’s is intended to do.

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State Tax And The Death of the Republic | SALT | Congress 3

One of the biggest problems with our impoverished media sector is the fact that nobody covers anything that matters anymore. We’ve got a lot of outrage, and a lot of time and effort spent on simple compelling stories. But if you’re truly interested in what’s going on in the world, or the direction that our government is going in, these stories are largely useless. What matters is almost always a lot more complex.

This channel’s first big hit dealt with one of those issues. We were the only folks looking at the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) who didn’t expect to make millions off of it. So we were able to show what the ramifications of the legislation were to a wide audience. I’m beginning to think that the elimination of the State and Local Tax Deduction (SALT) is a similarly important issue. Sounds boring, but the implications are immense. This video attempts to lay out that story.

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