President Donald Trump said Sunday that he has demanded about seven countries send warships to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, but his appeals have brought no commitments as oil prices soar during the Iran war.
The president declined to name the countries heavily reliant on Middle East crude that the administration is negotiating with to join a coalition to police the waterway where about one-fifth of the world’s traded oil normally flows.
“I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their own territory,” Trump said about the strait, claiming the shipping channel is not something the United States needs because of its own access to oil. Trump spoke while answering reporters’ questions as he flew back to Washington from Florida aboard Air Force One.
The gist is that after weeks of crowing how victorious he's been blowing up Iran, his handlers have finally gotten him to understand that angering Iran to the point of shutting down the Strait of Hormuz was a really bad idea.
Germany’s defense minister on Monday rebuffed calls from U.S. President Trump to send ships to unblock the Strait of Hormuz, telling reporters “this is not our war.”
Trump has called on allies, including those in NATO, for military support to keep the vital shipping route open. Iran has effectively closed the strait for the past two weeks in response to the U.S.-Israeli war on Tehran, using missiles, drones and mines to attack oil tankers trying to get through.
“What does … Donald Trump expect a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to do in the Strait of Hormuz that the powerful U.S. Navy cannot do?” Boris Pistorius said in Berlin, as reported by Reuters. “This is not our war, we have not started it.”
This isn't post-9/11, when most of Western civilization came to our nation's aid to stamp out Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan (and more reluctantly invade Iraq over WMD lies and deception). trump and his lackeys - Rubio and whomever hasn't been fired from the State Department yet - may want other nations to sacrifice their own people and resources to rescue trump from this debacle, but they don't have the genuine skills of diplomacy - compromise, long-term planning, honesty, commitment to shared objectives - to recover from this.
The world may be facing economic turmoil if oil prices keep going up, but all of the other nations seem willing to suffer the pain momentarily if it means trump and the chickenhawk Far Right get humiliated and broken by their own idiocy and hubris.
An entire Far Right ideology of toxic masculinity is getting punched in the face right now. It's the only good news we have in all this death and fire.
Addendum: I hope this BlueSky skeet stays up. Thank you Dr. SkySkull!
Europeans when being asked to unblock the strait of Hormuz
The self-identified misogynist, 36, tweeted at 19-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg for some reason about the 33 cars he owns. “Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” he wrote, attaching a photo of himself filling up one of his aforementioned many cars presumably to prove his immense wealth and unmatched masculinity...
Thunberg provided the only sane response:
yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com https://t.co/V8geeVvEvg
The celebrations of Greta's victory were kind of like this
It gets sicker/funnier from here:
A badly burned Tate responded to Thunberg’s tweet with only, “How dare you!?,” and then started furiously retweeting the few fans of his insisting he won the battle he started for no reason...
The former professional kickboxer and 2016 Big Brother contestant has been raising eyebrows for some time for spewing a seemingly endless stream of sexist hatred, but things reached a head earlier this year when his online misogyny was seeping into classrooms and affecting young boys’ behavior all over the world. Since then, Tate has been banned from most social media platforms, including Twitter. In late November, Elon “Free Speech Absolutist” Musk reinstated Tate’s Twitter account shortly after taking over the company, which seemed at the time to be a horrific move. But it turns out Musk did the internet a favor, because we all got to witness this sad excuse of a man get the dragging he deserves in real time before the year’s end...
Well, Tate did follow up with a few more mocking tweets. One of those tweets was a video of him sitting in a kitchen, eating pizza and lighting up a cigar like he was the lord of his dominion.
A Twitter spat that misogynist social media personality Andrew Tate started with 19-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg over his masculinity led Romanian authorities to arrest him and his brother, Tristan, for human trafficking and rape on Thursday, according to local media and police.
Tate had taunted Thunberg on Twitter about his 33 cars, to which Thunberg replied with a joke about “small dick energy” that racked up millions of likes. Tate then posted a humiliating two-minute video of himself smoking a cigar in a robe and insisting that he was not owned at all by teen girl. But he seems to have really fucked up there: A local pizza shop listed on the box in the video reportedly tipped off authorities as to his whereabouts.
Police raided his villa and detained the Tates on suspicions of sex trafficking. Semafor reports that the suspects “allegedly used a ‘loverboy method’ to lure victims into marriages and then sexually and mentally abused them to perform in exploitative videos, authorities said.”
If Tate ends up in prison because Greta Thunberg bodied him on Twitter with a small dick joke, it will be the most chef’s kiss ending to his story the world has ever seen...
This story starts off creepy, with a known misogynist (33 years old) sending tweets to a woman almost half his age (Greta is now 19, but still way too young for him) in one of those "oh god, he's being a perv towards her" kind of vibes. She gets her revenge in public by labeling his faux Alpha Male BS as "small dick energy," which clearly knee-groined Tate in his pride, angering him enough to respond... only to have that response condemn himself with arrest on rape and trafficking charges.
The schadenfreude is too delicious, more tasty than pizza.
While we're coping with pandemic horrors here in the United States, we have to cope with the horror of our foreign policies failing as our decades-long military and political intervention into Afghanistan falls apart.
Watching the rapid deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan—the Taliban have captured a third of the country’s provincial capitals in the weeks since the U.S. military pulled its troops out—has evoked a feeling of déjà vu for me.
In 2005, I was an adviser to an Iraqi infantry battalion conducting counterinsurgency operations in and around Baghdad, one of the most violent parts of Iraq during one of the most violent periods in that conflict. It was difficult to have any hope at the time. I returned to Iraq in 2009, this time in Mosul, where my unit advised and supported two Iraqi-army divisions, one Iraqi-federal-police division, and thousands of local police officers. This time, I sensed more progress: Leaving Iraq in 2010, I felt we had done a great job, turning a corner and building a capable and competent security force. A year later, I found myself in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, recruiting and training Afghan police units and commandos. After nine months there, I again rotated home thinking we had done some good.
I would be proved wrong on both counts. In 2014, by then stationed at the Pentagon, I watched in dismay as the Iraqi divisions I’d helped train collapsed in a matter of days when faced with the Islamic State. Today, as the Taliban seizes terrain across Afghanistan, including in what was my area of operations, I cannot help but stop and reflect on my role. What did my colleagues and I get wrong? Plenty...
What is happening right now in Afghanistan is horrifying. It’s awful. Tens of thousands of people will be slaughtered, the women and children of the area will be sent backwards in history hundreds of years, chaos and brutality and backwards ass theology will rule the day, and it will be awful for a long time to come. And it was all entirely predictable and completely inevitable...
We’ll see a lot of blame thrown at Joe Biden over the next couple of months, and no doubt right-wingers will blame him for “losing” Afghanistan, but most of it is bullshit. Are there some things that could possibly have been done better? Sure. Much of the bitching by our warrior class is focused on the timing of the withdrawal (often ignoring the fact that it was Trump who set the original date), saying we should have waited until the winter when the majority of the Taliban will be at home and it won’t be “the fighting season,” the name for what you and I know as summer and fall. And I suppose he could have. And then we would be reading all of these headlines next spring and summer instead of right now. That’s the thing about delaying the inevitable, it is, in fact, just a delay. This was going to happen no matter when we left and there is nothing anyone can say that will convince me otherwise...
So what the hell went wrong with American intervention in Afghanistan?
If you ask me, it all went wrong at the beginning when we charged into Afghanistan back in 2001.
We went into Afghanistan not for any humanitarian reason, not to stop the Taliban's horrific abuse of women. We went in because September 11 happened, Osama Bid Laden pulled off his big attack on the United States and wounded us far worse than any enemy nation ever could. And so wounded, and angry, and vicious, and blind, we charged into the country that was giving him safe haven in order to hunt him down and punish his extremist allies.
We went into Afghanistan out of revenge.
We didn't go in with a grand objective, and we certainly didn't go in with a coherent plan on how we were going to get out of Afghanistan in a timely fashion. We had no exit strategy in the first place.
Oh, our political leadership - George W. Bush's administration at the time - thought they had a plan: clear out the Taliban, kill Bin Laden, install a puppet regime that would perform like a westernized democracy (but really leave in place a corrupt autocrat), and get out.
As for our nation-building efforts to stabilize a nation that had been literally The Graveyard of Empires for 1000 years, let's refer back to Mike Jason:
From the very beginning, nearly two decades ago, the American military’s effort to advise and mentor Iraqi and Afghan forces was treated like a pickup game—informal, ad hoc, and absent of strategy. We patched together small teams of soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen, taught them some basic survival skills, and gave them an hour-long lesson in the local language before placing them with foreign units...
But from my tours in Iraq through to my time in Afghanistan, larger systemic problems were never truly addressed. We did not successfully build the Iraqi and Afghan forces as institutions. We failed to establish the necessary infrastructure that dealt effectively with military education, training, pay systems, career progression, personnel, accountability—all the things that make a professional security force. Rotating teams through tours of six months to a year, we could not resolve the vexing problems facing Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s armies and police: endemic corruption, plummeting morale, rampant drug use, abysmal maintenance, and inept logistics. We got really good at preparing platoons and companies to conduct raids and operate checkpoints, but little worked behind them...
Over these past 20 years, there have been many failings. We checked the box when it came to saying that we had trained our partners, spun a rosy narrative of progress, and perhaps prioritized the safety and well-being of our troops over the mission of buttressing partner capacity... We didn’t send the right people, prepare them well, or reward them afterward. We rotated strangers on tours of up to a year and expected them to build relationships, then replaced them. We were overly optimistic and largely made things up as we went along. We didn’t like oversight or tough questions from Washington, and no one really bothered to hold us accountable anyway. We had no capacity or experience with some of our tasks, and we stumbled...
In short: We failed to nation-build in Afghanistan because nobody at the political level - not in Washington DC and not in corrupt Kabul - took it serious enough to follow through. We got stuck going through the motions, posing for the cameras, cheering on the minor successes while sweeping the major disasters under the rugs.
Even shorter: We had no exit strategy.
Unspoken in all of this was how Bush the Lesser shifted focus away from Afghanistan onto the more "glorious" and desired target of overthrowing Saddam in Iraq. While we were still engaged on the ground in Afghanistan, our military under Rumsfeld - and pushed along by Dick Cheney (aka Halliburton's Best Bud) and other neoconservatives eager for war as a profiteering scam - pursued an invasion of Iraq that was under-manned and under-planned, and ended up becoming a quagmire just like Afghanistan did. But where the disasters in Iraq made the front pages - thanks to the Big Lies of WMDs that turned out to be fake - the disasters in Afghanistan got shunted to Page 16 of the newspapers and rarely talked about on the cable pundit shows: It all turned into a forgotten Shadow War that nobody cared about.
Leading up to trump taking over in 2016. A blustering amateur at foreign policy and nowhere near being "smarter than the generals," trump made the big show of figuring out a ceasefire plan with the Taliban in 2020... which was so full of loopholes that the Taliban are exploiting in 2021 as they retake most of the major cities. The peace deal was more trump's attempt to win a Nobel Peace Prize and win over voters for 2020 than it was a serious attempt to broker a lasting peace in a part of the world that's known only war for generations.
Again, we had no exit strategy.
We were blinded by rage when we invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and we are now stumbling out blind and drunk 20 years later with nothing to show for it but the tears and blood of the Taliban's victims.
Are we doing enough now to help evacuate the thousands of Afghanis - especially women - who are going to suffer under Taliban rule? Because we can't stop them from retaking that nation. It's no longer a question of "If" but of "When."
...There is a reason terms like “mission creep” exist. There is a reason when I was a young E-3 my tank commander and Troop CO gave me reading lists, and included on those lists were books like Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy and A Bright Shining Lie and All Quiet on the Western Front and About Face and so many others that sit on my bookshelf to this day. There were lessons to be learned. And we didn’t learn them, myself included. I will grapple with my own culpability the rest of my life.
And I know that my seeming nonchalant writing here about this can seem smarmy and irritating, and I hope that is not what you are taking from this. It’s horrible. I feel terrible for all those innocents. I feel terrible for all our guys who served there and are dealing with trauma and injuries, barely getting their lives back together finally, only to turn on the tv, stare at the horrible images unfolding while glancing at the scarred stumps where their legs and arms used to be, realizing everything they gave everything for has turned out to be nothing.
But while this horror is occurring right now, we can still take advantage of the opportunity to learn this lesson once more. Maybe this will save us a couple generations of needless military adventurism, like Vietnam did before we went and fucked up our memories in Gulf War I and thought war was easy again. Stop listening to the war pigs. Ignore them. Stop listening to the Kagans and Ledeens and the Cheneys and the Kristols and the Tom Cottons and the Friedmans and that one curly hair young twat name Michael something or other who was all over the tv in the late aughts. Don’t let this happen again...
It's all tragic, there's nothing we can do - other than to continue pumping in more bodies and spilling more blood - to stop it, and we're likely setting ourselves up for the next cycle of international terrorism that will drive us back into roaring rampages flattening the countryside and solving nothing.
Even Charlie Wilson saw this coming and nobody else cared enough to stop it coming.
So yesterday was a crazy day - ain't it always down this Darkest Timeline - but this was something that stood out. Via the Navy Times but based on a report from the Wall Street Journal (firewalled):
A May 15 email obtained by the Wall Street Journal revealed instructions from White House staff in preparation for the president’s planned speech to about 800 sailors and Marines aboard the Japan-based amphibious assault ship Wasp, which is based in the same port as the McCain.
The email, which was reportedly shared between a U.S. Indo-Pacific Command official, Air Force officials and the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet, featured two instructions pertaining to the logistics of the president’s speaking engagement.
It was the third and final instruction that came as a surprise.
“USS John McCain needs to be out of sight,” the email stated, according to the WSJ. “Please confirm #3 will be satisfied.”
The orders may not have come directly from trump, but I'm willing to bet he's expressed enough anger towards John McCain the person to make it clear to trump's handlers that the Navy vet/POW hero/Congressman/Senator was persona non grata and it included the ship named in McCain's honor. And that led to trump's people going out of their way to be as petty and vindictive as their bad boss.
I'm not angry at the Navy for how they handled this - by blocking McCain crewmembers from even attending trump's appearances if they wanted to - I'm angry at trump. I'm angry at the environment he creates around himself, one of vanity and arrogance and petty viciousness. I'm angry at his lackeys, all so eager and willing to suck up to a man whose hatred for other people is on constant display.
What was it about McCain that seems to drive trump to such vindictive acts? trump had insulted and dismissed McCain for years ever since trump's campaigning in 2015. trump mocked the fact that McCain's heroism was mostly due to getting shot down and caught as a POW during Vietnam.
trump continually acts as though he honestly doesn't understand why everyone else revered McCain in ways they will never worship himself.
A lot of it has to do with trump's World View. To him, everything is Winners and Losers. And trump himself must never be a Loser, he must always project himself as a Winner because that's how people will admire you.
And yet there's McCain. Not the top of his graduation class from the Naval Academy, who got much of his early breaks because - like trump - his family was connected (Admirals all). Not the best politician, who got caught up in the S&L scandals of the 1980s. Someone who tried to run for President in 2000 and got stomped by Dubya. Someone who ran for President as the Republican nominee and got stomped by Obama.
And yet everybody loved him, revered him. McCain was a darling of the Beltway media. Even Centrist Democrats (and even a few Progressives) applauded him from time to time for any "honorable" stances he would commit every so often to keep his statesman cred going.
That was the thing, what trump could never comprehend. The thing about McCain that drives him mad to this day.
McCain, for all his political partisanship, was still a genuinely honorable American. Given an opportunity as a POW to leave the prison - as a PR stunt by the North Vietnamese - McCain refused because his honor told him the prisoners ahead of him should go first. Given opportunities when campaigning for President, McCain always played to a broad consensus, trying to present himself as a reformer and bipartisan figure (he still voted the GOP line more often than not, obviously).
But there will be moments that stick out for me, the moments when he tried to speak to our better angels during a bitter 2008 campaign, when the Far Right media was going out of its way to fearmonger about Obama. In a place and in front of people who could have turned against him, McCain spoke well of his Democratic opponent, tried to speak to a "respectful" position that tried to make it clear that while Republican and Democrat may be on opposite sides of an argument we were all still Americans...
McCain campaigned against Obama as a liberal, McCain campaigned against Obama as a "weak and inexperienced" figure, but McCain NEVER campaigned against Obama as a human being.
That was something trump will never, can never do. trump simply can't comprehend "honor" as a personal habit. There has never been anything honorable in trump's entire career as a bankrupt businessman, con artist, and foreign stooge.
And so McCain sticks like a spur under trump's skin, probably far more than anyone else save for Hillary and Obama.
And so trying to hide McCain's very memory becomes the only thing trump's lackeys can do.
If trump were an honest man, he would express his displeasure at the things McCain did to hamper trump's plan to nuke Obamacare but then move on. (trump also wouldn't have cheated with Russia's help to steal the 2016 elections) If trump were merely calculating, he'd figure out more subtle ways to commit his revenge in less public ways. If trump were savvy, he'd play the role of respectful rival, try to co-opt some of McCain's personal touch to gain support among those who still honor him.
But trump is none of those things. trump is a vain, petty, insufferable bully who can never respect anyone who can lose and roll on to other accomplishments in life. trump is an unthinking mite who thinks himself mighty because he cheats and steals his way to victory.
It will be telling to history that the USS McCain will continue sailing on while the best trump can hope for is getting a garbage scow named after himself.
The only shocking thing about Scott Walker dropping out tonight from the Republican 2016 Race To Trump is the timing. Could have sworn the guy would at least try to last until Iowa made it official he wasn't winning.
We're talking about a candidate who started off with a lot of press coverage and cheerleading by the media elites and news channels. Someone working with a double-digit percentage in the polls near equal to the Establishment front-runner in Jeb! Bush in around March to July. Someone with an inside line to the deepest pockets in the SuperPAC environments with the Koch Brothers, who had a solid chance to ride free money all the way to Cleveland (even if he was losing).
Part of me is wondering, by the way, if all this Citizens United super-funding isn't working the way people feared it would. Or are we looking at the wrong numbers...?
Walker was loved by the punditry. The likes of Bill Kristol sang his praises. Larry Sabato's blog ranked him at the top of their candidates for awhile. A lot of it had to do with how Walker fit their need for an "outsider" candidate - which Governors can be - who was still experienced as an elected official - again, which Governors can be. Walker won a contested governorship in a Purple state (one that voted twice for Obama and can vote Democratic as well as Republican on how the state's fortunes are going), survived a recall effort that boosted his prestige among the Republican insiders, and fit the desired profile of a Midwestern "straight-talker" that the East Coast elites want in a boyfriend uh President.
However, as the pundits fell in love with Walker's resume, none of them really did the research on the guy to determine if he could win over, you know, the actual voters outside of his own comfort zone.
We're learning now about a weakness regarding Governor candidates in this particular Presidential election cycle. Most of them benefited from winning Governorships in states and situations that were too easy for Republicans to win.
Let Jeb!? Bush be an example. He may have won office in Florida in 1998 and 2002, but this was when the state was solidly conservative and likely to vote Republican in local elections no matter who or what was on the ballot. When he ran a genuine contest against a popular and effective Democrat like Lawton Chiles in 1994, Jeb lost. Winning in 1998 on the second try was such a gimme that he'd have had to actively campaign against himself to lose: not because he was popular but because Democrats just don't show up for the damn non-Presidential cycles. We're talking about a state of Florida that freaking voted a goddamn MEDICARE FRAUD into the governor's seat. Twice. /headdesk
Okay, I digress.
Thing is, these "popular" governor figures that the Republican-leading media elites think are winners are only doing so in places where it'd have to take real effort to actually lose. Governors in solid Red states - especially in the Deep South - benefit from skewed turnouts and enough voter support for the party line rather than any actual love by said voters. Governors from Solid Red States like Louisiana (Hi, Bobby!) and Texas (Hi, Rick!), or Traditional Republican States like Ohio (Hi, Kasich!), or Purple-Toss Up States that they're catching on a rebound from a bad Democratic relationship like Joisey (Hi, Christie!) are finding to their horror that a laid-back campaign style in "safe" states that focus on limited issues does not translate to a more intense campaign style nationwide that requires more extreme pandering to the party base than they even expect at a state level.
And I'm not even mentioning the likes of Gilmore and Pataki who aren't even earning a percent of a percent worth caring about.
These Governors exist in a comfort zone - a bubble of their own at the state capitals - where they get their egos boosted into thinking "oh yeah, I'm good enough to win Florida/Wisconsin/Ohio/Texas/Louisina" that it makes them a winner nationwide. Getting ego-stroked on the Fox Not-News channel by a punditry eager to find another "star" like Reagan to attach their fortunes to doesn't help.
When you look at how the Governor candidates for the Democrats are doing - Martin O'Malley is polling as bad as Walker was (which is close to zero), and about nobody is talking about Jim Webb or Lincoln Chafee - the same seems to go for them.
This isn't because it's a weak cycle for Governors. That type of candidate tends to fare well running for President (I count off the top of my head about sixteen Presidents with governor experience).
This is because the candidates that are Governors from our modern political system are weak. Benefiting from a polarized partisan environment that doesn't teach them such things as genuine office management, attention to details on the issues, and ability to connect with voters. Those things used to matter at the state level to get voter turnout and good Governors. Today...
Well today, we're seeing the quality of these Governors when they get outside their comfort zone. It ain't pretty.
As another thought, the question with Walker departing is "wow, who benefits?" Considering how few voters Walker is giving up, that part is moot. What is up for grabs is the media attention from the GOP-friendly pundits: now that their horse is out of the race, which one are they betting on now?
What's really at stake - which remaining Establishment candidate in Jeb?, Rubio, Christie or Kasich can beat the Trump Anti-Establishment momentum - is still so. Because the polling for Jeb* and Rubio and Christie and Kasich combined cannot put a dent in Trump right now.
Oh, and for Jeb no longer having an ! emphasizing his enthusiasm, until he can actually stump on the road with that level of oomph, he doesn't deserve an exclamation mark for his musical aspirations.
In the meantime, enjoy the schadenfreude.
P.S. It's incredible how the United Kingdom could come up with a single news cycle that could temporarily knock Trump off the news headlines for even a day. But I guess something like having your Prime Minister get accused of oh I can't even write it here, it's too NSFW even for me would do it. THAT, my friends, is how you serve the schadenfreude...
UPDATE: Digby's take on Walker's collapse in Salon this morning conveys exactly the problem the Republicans have with their punditry. This constant desire to resurrect a new Reagan, a Rust Belt Midwestern figure whose genetic code hails from the blue-collar middle class of the mythic 1950s. Even though that legend about Reagan - an Illinois-born actor whose ideology bore more relation to the West Coast conservatism - wasn't real to begin with. As Digby notes:
...But while it’s true that the modern electoral map is very daunting for the GOP, they seem peculiarly fixated on this (Great Lakes/Midwest) region. Walker took the early lead in the Midwestern savior race, but for months people were also talking up Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Indiana Governor Mike Pence as similarly excellent choices to lead the GOP out of the wilderness...
The sad fact is that Walker has been the most overrated politician in the country based largely upon the Republicans’ quixotic desire to find a leader who can put a respectable face on its increasingly disreputable base — and the media’s odd willingness to not believe what their eyes were telling them: that Walker was a terrible candidate. Like Pawlenty and Thompson before him, he may have looked good on a Power Point presentation, but in reality he showed few signs of life on the debate stage or on the stump...
And as Digby notes, the Republican elites still have a chance to indulge in this fetish: Kasich out of Ohio is still on the dead pool of non-Trump candidates.
Update to the UPDATE: Going back and re-reading my own analysis of what Walker would be like as a nominee, even I bought into the myth of him being a potentially effective candidate. I considered he'd be vulnerable on scandal charges, but I honestly thought Walker could appeal to the base as he had been polling near-even or above Jeb? before Trump entered the equation as a serious force.
FIFA, the notoriously corrupt and yet seemingly invincible governing body of world soccer, has finally landed itself an indictment that some would say is worthy of its reputation. The charges against a handful of senior FIFA officials include money laundering, racketeering, bribery and fraud. In short, the federal lawsuit alleges what millions of soccer fans have suspected all along: that FIFA officials have been using the organization's massive influence to line their pocketbooks.
It's not enough to note how long this has been a problem: for decades, FIFA has been raking in millions and then billions of questionable money using the bidding wars between nations to host World Cup games, making decisions less on quality and availability and more on how much the host nation is willing to sell out. The recent turmoil in Brazil - where FIFA profited at the expense of the impoverished nation - is the latest set of newsworthy reports to follow. The fate of all those quickly, poorly built stadiums highlights the waste FIFA insisted on (and still does) when creating locations for their games.
FIFA had gotten to where they could dictate to host nations laws to make their organization more powerful and profitable. They refused any transparency in their internal affairs. Any dissent inside and outside stifled as the men in power remained in power (until their individual bad habits got to be too much even for FIFA to hide under the rug).
And for decades no-one fought it, no-one questioned it. Because of national pride: soccer (international football) crazy nations could not say No, could not question the demands, out of fear of retribution or embarrassment. Nations still pandered for the opportunity to be host country every four years. Teams pined for the opportunity to win on the field. Fans still traveled to rickety stadiums in poor urban (and in Brazil's case rural) zones and spent money to FIFA's delight.
Is it any surprise an organization would turn corrupt so fast, so deep?
The news punditry seems to be caught between awe and surprise that any charges at the level of FIFA's top offices were ever brought. But we shouldn't be: sooner or later this much corruption collapses on itself. The sin of pride by other nations got swamped by the pride and arrogance of the men who stayed in power too long. Sepp Blatter has been in charge of FIFA since 1998, pretty much a turning point in how corrupt that organization became, and remains the most obvious problem in that organization that hadn't been arrested (yet). Let this Slate article document the atrocities (of which I'll list a few):
...listing the seemingly unending litany of corruption allegations against the organization Blatter has run since 1998 and has been an official at since 1975. ...with this just-ended World Cup and the police allegations of an illegal ticket sales scheme by FIFA’s ticketing and hospitality partner, a company in which Blatter’s nephew has a minority stake. Blatter presided over the decision to hand the £342 million contract to his nephew’s company back in 2007, and it wasn’t the first time he was alleged to have funneled cash to that particular family member...
...In 2002, Blatter was accused by FIFA’s then secretary general and erstwhile ally Michel Zen-Ruffinen of losing the organization $500 million through financial mismanagement, corruption, and cronyism. Zen-Ruffinen also testified that Blatter had paid a FIFA referee named Lucien Bouchardeau $25,000 and promised him $25,000 more for information on a Somali soccer official, Farah Addo, who had accused Blatter of bribery in his first election bid...
...FIFA’s corruption has direct consequences in the real world. In South Africa, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on white elephant stadiums that have rarely been used following the 2010 World Cup in a country where more than half of its children were living in poverty as of 2012. Multiple local officials in that country were reported to have been murdered, allegedly for whistle-blowing or other involvement in stadium fraud. In Brazil, a $300 million, 40,000-plus seat stadium was built in the middle of the Amazon rainforest where potential post-Cup audiences of that size just don’t exist. That’s probably one reason why a majority of Brazilians opposed hosting this World Cup, saying the more than $11 billion price tag could be better spent on public services...
And we haven't even gotten to the part where everything tipped against FIFA, when the stench of greed became too noxious to bear: the awarding of the World Cups for 2018 and 2022 to Russia and Qatar. While Russia is a prominent nation with enough major cities to effectively host games, it's also one of the better-documented kleptocracies on the planet with a list of human rights abuses and current border issues with Ukraine.
And Qatar has been a disaster since Day One. There were open questions about having a nation right on the equator hosting summer games in high heat environments, with each new question poorly answered than the last. The games have to be moved to winter months, conflicting with other nations' scheduled football seasons. Qatar simply does not have the infrastructure - the major cities of hotels, restaurants, transit service, communication hubs - needed to host so many games at once, and some places designated as locales don't even exist on the maps.
And in order to build these non-existent places to house insanely expensive stadiums, Qatar has resorted to a criminally bloody system of exported workers working overtime and in hostile conditions to the point of exhaustion and DEATH. From Vox's report:
Working conditions are, in many cases, horrendous. Multiple reports from Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the International Trade Union Confederation, and even a contractor employed by the Qatari government have come to basically the same conclusion: migrant workers frequently don't get paid for months at a time, are prevented from leaving the company or the country, and are forced to work in impossibly hot weather and conditions that virtually guarantee some will die.
In one migrant worker labor camp Amnesty researchers visited, "sewage was leaking from the ground — apparently from the camp's septic tank — and flowing down into the street, where it had collected in a large stagnant pool. Piles of rubbish were mounting up at the camp, apparently because the company had not paid for them to be collected, and the piles of rubbish attracted swarms of insects."
There was no electricity or running water. When Amnesty informed the Qatari authorities of this, they provided a small generator — and then took it away three days later.
And the death toll is already beyond the measure of other comparable mass projects:
But reading between the lines of the indictment against Hastert suggests a darker story than political corruption. In or about 2010, according to the indictment, Hastert—a former high-school teacher and coach—met with an unnamed individual from Yorkville, Hastert’s hometown. They “discussed past misconduct by defendant against Individual A that had occurred years earlier.” In effect, Hastert fell victim to blackmail, the indictment alleges: He “agreed to provide Individual A $3.5 million in order to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against Individual A.” (Since leaving the House, Hastert has become a highly paid lobbyist.)
Guessing games about who Individual A is should dot the blogosphere / twitterverse for the next two days. And who's got $3.5 million to throw around like that to pay off a blackmail demand?! Oh, right. Insider Lobbyists.
Hastert then allegedly began withdrawing cash from his bank accounts to pay to the individual. But federal laws require financial institutions to report transactions greater than $10,000, and Hastert made a series of them. In April 2012, the indictment alleges, employees of Hastert’s bank questioned him about the withdrawals, and he promptly reduced his withdrawals to smaller amounts, to escape the requirement. Authorities were already watching, however, and they began investigating Hastert for structuring currency transactions to evade federal requirements—itself a crime.
"Can't get away with nothing" is probably what Hastert was thinking when he tried to hide transactions that were illegal to hide in the first place. So why was Hastert acting like that in the first place? Committing acts of desperation that were bound to draw attention and investigation?
Because he thought he could get away with it. He was an ex-Speaker with political and financial connections up the wazoo. He thought he could lie to investigators and have his own identity protect him from further inquiry. Because power got to his head long ago, and with that power came pride and arrogance and recklessness. It may not be on the scale of evil and corruption that FIFA leader Sepp Blatter is still committing at this moment, but it still reeks of damage and hypocrisy.
Let justice be done. It would be nice to think Sepp Blatter will lose Friday's election for the Presidency - his incumbency has gone longer than FDR's - in the wake of the arrests and public outcry over Qatar, but that organization's system is so rigged in his favor I doubt it. If he wins, he still faces the possibility the EUFA - the European leagues and the most prestigious part of the world football organization - will threaten to leave, destroying FIFA's very existence (A World Cup without Germany or Italy is no World Cup). More likely is that the recently arrested are in position to turn testimony in exchange for saving their skins, any one of them close enough to Blatter to hopefully reveal a key link to justify slapping handcuffs on the corrupt SOB.
As for Hastert, it's got to come out just what the hell he was paying Individual A to keep secret. Whoever it is has got to be on the run or planning his own deal to avoid charges of blackmail. Either way, Hastert is toast: it's merely a question if the sin he's hiding is his own... or someone else's.
The thing that always surprises me is how a bad story - someone being violent, someone being inept, someone being greedy - goes from minor league to nuclear catastrophe within a heartbeat of the story getting out.
It's not even when a revelation about a minor crime turns into an expose of a major conspiracy, like Watergate. It's just in any situation where there's a powerful person or an organization suddenly confronted with a problem he/she/they just doesn't know how to handle it, and then BOOM the entire structure of that person's powerbase implodes or that organization's impressive administrative order collapses.
I'm bringing this up in the wake of the NFL's (and commissioner Goodell's) Very Bad PR Week of mishandling the Ray Rice incident. What went from a horrifying interpersonal assault in an Atlantic City casino back in February - that could have been calmly handled in the courts and through massive amounts of counseling - instead degraded into a months-long argument over how poorly the NFL handles domestic violence cases overall (in short: not well).
When Goodell handed down a mere (!) two-game suspension on Rice in July, it opened up the arguments about how tone-deaf the sports league was towards how domestic violence literally destroys women. That the punishment for assaulting a women was less than a punishment doled out to a player caught with marijuana in his possession or his biosystem (and while pot is illegal, so is assault: and you can forge a strong argument that assault is a more serious crime than pot). You could see in real-time the scrambling and back-pedaling that the NFL Front Office went through looking to come up with a stronger punishment code...
And then this past Monday just as Week One of the regular season kicked in, the media got ahold of the full video of what Ray Rice really did to his fiancee-now-wife Janay.
By that afternoon Ray Rice had been kicked off his Ravens team and the NFL had banned him indefinitely (although he could always get re-instated).
But this was getting worse and not better for the NFL and Goodell. Because it begged the question: how the hell could a powerful organization like the NFL - an organization known to have its own army of investigators, and had months to get it - fail to see this video?
Each explanation - each excuse - that Goodell tried to offer came up more hopeless and inept and ill-advised than any of the earlier ones. Reports kept cropping up that the NFL did get a copy of the video, that at least one executive did see the video, that all the league had to do was ask the casino for it and not the police or prosecutors' offices. It wasn't helping that other players in the league facing the same legal issues as Rice - Greg Hardy, Ray MacDonald are two - are still playing without suspension... even though Hardy especially has been convicted in court of assaulting and threatening his ex-girlfriend.
The hypocrisy. The sloppiness. The willful ignorance of a powerful, money-driven organization.
How could the NFL - an organization that can successfully bully communities into building multi-billion-dollar jeweled stadiums for them even while generating profits from massive TV and marketing deals - be so clumsy, stupid and tone-deaf now over something like this?
Because of one simple, universal constant that happens to those in power: they lose any perspective about things like accountability and honesty.
It's not so much that power corrupts, it's that power puts people on a different level of authority and responsibility. It's at a level where things like accountability - where you answer to a higher power than yourself - fade away, because you no longer have as many bosses or overseers watching your mistakes and correcting what you did wrong (either through training or dismissal).
That lack of accountability in high places creates a void of sorts: it creates an environment where the people in power believe themselves infallible, untouchable. All because they rose to a level of prominence that makes them seemingly superior to all other mere mortals.
That's what happened, is happening here. Goodell and the NFL - the owners, the players' union, the networks and corporations co-thriving with it all - view themselves akin to Gods On Earth: rich and powerful men (it's mostly men) who make life-and-death decisions about a money-generating sport/entertainment that enough people can't look away from. Why should their judgment be questioned or their values argued? Why are we blowing something like this out of proportion? Don't we know who they are?
It's the same in politics and their media bubble, it's the same in any church of size and power, it's the same in any organization with money in its coffers and power to its name. They simply can't comprehend why we'd raise a fuss over something they think they've already solved.
So they do the next step in the process of self-immolation. The person/organization of power begins to lie about what they did. He/She/They begin to claim "oh well we did X so therefore we're blameless", or "well it was someone else's fault". They make up a half-truth story that slides into flat-out lying as the need to shift the blame elsewhere grows.
This is from the knee-jerk reaction: the self-defense. The refusal to admit wrong-doing as that somehow looks worse than the growing web of lies to cover up the earlier mistake(s). The person of power, the organization of power dare not consider the slight possibility of "OOPS that's on me," because such sloppiness and failure does not belong in "my" world.
And then those in power wonder why they fall. They're compounding earlier mistakes with fresh ones. Because lying at that level of responsibility and power is reckless: because there's bound to be someone out there with the evidence to prove you are lying. Because the more you try to cover it up, the more people and resources you are dragging into the mess: people who may not want to lie to cover your ass; resources that may not fit the gaping holes in your faltering stories.
That's why scandals get worse. The people in power refuse to hold themselves accountable and refuse to make genuine efforts to fix the problems that arise. They'd rather lie, blame someone else, and let the problem fade away.
What's sad is why those in power already think that way: because that's how they acted on their way up the chain of command to the high seat they now hold... because they made all that money and gained all that influence through lying and blaming others in the first place. Because there's a broken system of accountability in place already: they're merely profiting from the status quo.
We are as a nation and as a culture in dire need of reform. Of bringing accountability and truth-telling back, of ending the fraud and spiritual wickedness in high places.
