Campaign Finance Laws, John Edwards, Donald Trump, IOKIYAR

Every time I mention IOKIYAR (It's OK if you are Republican) someone tells me that there is no such thing.

Well, I have another case for you to consider.

Donald Trump's former fixer Michael Cohen just admitted in court that he was asked to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.

The purpose was to prevent any electoral damage stemming from these stories.

Do you remember John Edwards?

The senator from North Carolina? John Kerry's running mate in 2004, presidential candidate in 2007 primaries?

He was the Democratic rising star, a great trial lawyer, with good looks and charismatic presence.

Do you remember what happened to him?

He had an affair with a campaign staffer called Rielle Hunter and paid her some hush money to cover up the affair.

He was indicted by the Justice Department for having violated the same campaign finance laws Donald Trump is accused of breaking.

At the time you could not believe the shitstorm this caused. Everybody was up in arms, Democrats and Republicans stepped on each other to vilify Edwards.

He was an immoral person, the cause of decline in national moral standards, the worst human being imaginable. People were outraged and enraged. You would think that he was the first politician to have an affair.

As a result, his political career was ruined and he could not show his face in public. No one would vote for him for the lowliest position.

Fast forward to today. Trump has done exactly the same thing. He had affairs and paid to cover them up. Just like Edwards, he lied about them, he changed positions many times as did the people around him.

The reaction? Nothing.

No senior Republican leader would comment on it.

A spokesperson for the House of Representatives speaker, Paul Ryan, issued an abrupt statement, saying: “We are aware of Mr Cohen’s guilty plea to these serious charges. We will need more information than is currently available at this point.”

Leslie Graham said there was no collusion with Russia and Mitch McConnell didn't even bother issuing a statement of tweeting.

The Guardian ran a hilarious piece highlighting the various hypothetical reactions if Trump had actually shot Michael Cohen in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

Then they asked Tumpkins as they always do after such revelations. Unsurprisingly, they were unanimous and categorical. They couldn't care less if he paid off a porn star and broke the law.

When Edwards or Gary Hart has an affair pearl clutching ensues, evangelicals faint. When they lie that is the worst crime.

When Trump has affairs, no big deal. If he lies, who cares?

That's IOKIYAR.

On a related note I wish people stopped speculating about impeachment. It is simply impossible even if Democrats win the House back in November. The Senate trial requires two thirds majority. It is a pipedream that makes look like a martyr to the Trumpkins.

As I said many times, Trump made a mistake by attacking National Security Apparatus. Those folks don't take that sort of thing lying down. They will come up with irrefutable evidence of financial crimes, like money laundering for Russian mafia types.

The crimes will be so obvious and staggering that even Hannity will be unable to defend them. 

Until then, Democrats should work on getting people to vote in large numbers.

Did Tillerson Stop the Invasion of Qatar?

I don't know if you've heard the news.

According to a new expose by The Intercept, Rex Tillerson lost his job because he prevented the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ?) from invading Qatar.

Mohammed bin Salman

Qatari intelligence agents working inside Saudi Arabia discovered the plan in the early summer of 2017, according to the U.S. intelligence official. Tillerson acted after the Qatari government notified him and the U.S. embassy in Doha. Several months later, intelligence reporting by the U.S. and U.K. confirmed the existence of the plan. 

The plan, which was largely devised by the Saudi and UAE crown princes and was likely some weeks away from being implemented, involved Saudi ground troops crossing the land border into Qatar, and, with military support from the UAE, advancing roughly 70 miles toward Doha. Circumventing the U.S. air base, Saudi forces would then seize the capital.

As the former CEO of Exxon Mobil who had very close ties to the Qatari royal family, it is no surprise that Tillerson placed dozens of calls to both United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia governments right away to defuse the situation.

Rex Tillerson

He understood the stakes and the risks. There is a large American military base in the country and Qatar is the largest producer of natural gas in the world.

The piece suggests that Tillerson was successful because he enlisted the help of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and together they stopped the plot.

I don't think so.

Jim "Mad Dog" Mattis was fun for Trump initially until he sided with "the grown ups." And Rex "he is a fucking moron" Tillerson was doomed when he never denied the actual quote.

Trump did not pay any attention to them once they looked like they thought they were more intelligent than him.

Sure, I concur that there was a plan to invade Qatar. As I've written many times, Saudi Arabia was and is essentially bankrupt.

But I don't think it was Tillerson's efforts that stopped the invasion.

Allow me refresh your memory.

White House and Trump were in on it from the get go.

When the Saudis and Emiratis were about to launch the blockade of Qatar in June, then-US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones got a call in the middle of the night from UAE Ambassador Otaiba to inform him of the impending action. Jones’ reaction was “extremely harsh. ‘What are you guys doing? This is crazy,’” a former US ambassador to the region told Al-Monitor. “And … Yusuf [sic][Otaiba]'s response was, ‘Have you spoken to the White House?’”

You see how cool and confident that riposte is?

"Have you spoken to the White House?"

Al-Otaibi

The next day Trump was in the Rose Garden accusing Qatar of "funding terrorism at a very high level".

He did so just as Tillerson was intensely urging the Gulf countries to stop the embargo and ease the tensions.

As I reported at the time, that line about Qatar was scripted by the UAE Washington ambassador Yousef al-Otaibi who is a very close friend of Jared Kushner and was inserted by Kushner in Trump's speech.

It should also be said that Kushner was and is very close to MBS and MBZ, you know, the Crown Princes.

And for Kushner, this was a payback for Qatari investment company Al-Mirqab pulling out of a deal involving 666 Fifth Avenue (which itself might have been a payback by HBJ for losing his position after the previous Emir's forced abdication).

With both Trump and Kushner on the side of Saudi Arabia, nothing would have stopped MBS from invading his tiny neighbor.

Besides, given his financial woes, he had no other choice. The war in Yemen has been depleting the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund at an alarming rate. Qatar's SWF has $320 billion in it, not to mention the country's continuous natural gas revenues.

In fact, getting his hands on a substantial amount of money was so critical that, when he couldn't do the invasion, he had to round up his relatives in a posh hotel and extort $100 billion from them.

In short, it was too important for MBS to back down on the strength of Tillerson's opposition. Especially if Trump and Kushner were on board. And they were.

But Qataris are not stupid. As I explained before, they bought themselves three great insurance policies right away.

In fact, they later bought a fourth one that made them pretty invincible, much to the chagrin of MBS.

First, they enlisted Iran's help right off the bat and the Islamic Republic made it clear that they would not allow such an invasion.

By itself, it would not have been enough to stop MBS, especially if he assumed that Trump would come to his help against Iran. In fact, he might have seen as a bonus. But it still gave him pause.

The second policy was to enlarge Turkish military base in Qatar and sign a mutual defense agreement with Turkey. Again, this might have given MBS pause but if Trump was firmly on his side, his thinking would have been, well, how far would or could Turkey go to defend Qatar's sovereignty.

The best policy was the third one and it is also the one that stopped Trump from siding with the Saudis at the time.

As you can see in that post, Qatar's SWF purchased a 19.5 percent stake in Russian oil and gas giant Rosneft just after the US presidential elections. The deal was put together, during the campaign, by Carter Page, a Trump advisor, in August and was announced immediately after Trump was elected.

Critically, the deal had a secret clause which stipulated that Russia could buy that stake back any time. Essentially Qatar's Emir was lending $11.5 billion to Russia making it look like a commercial transaction.

A Saudi invasion would have made that stake permanent as MBS had no reason to honor it.

That's when Putin reached out to his poodle and whispered the magic words.

I know you don't believe me. But do you know what happened next?

Trump stopped saying that Qatar funded terrorists.

Just like that.

Then he hosted the Emir at the White House like nothing happened and praised him for combating terrorism financing.

[O]n Tuesday he praised Sheikh Tamim Al Thani for becoming a "big advocate" of combating terrorist financing. 

He also said the emir was a "great gentleman" and a "friend of mine".

There is one more wrinkle to the story and that is the fourth insurance policy bought after the fact by Qatar.

As I said, they are not stupid.

As soon as they realized that Kushner was siding with the MB playboys because their former Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs HBJ (Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani) refused to pay for the albatross on Kushner's neck, they moved to correct that mistake.

666 Fifth Avenue loan payment is due in six months (February 2019) and Javanka do not have the money.

So it needs to go away and if it does, they know that Trump White House will make MBS and MBZ go away.

Good thinking, you say. Like foreign dignitaries making a point of staying at Trump's Washington Post Office Hotel.

Obviously by then, Qataris were fully cognizant that they could not openly invest in that doomed property. Too on the nose. Anbang did that and got burned. Their CEO is still in jail.

What Qataris did was to find a clean and nice third party in which they had a massive stake and move through them.

Enter the nice and clean Canadian real estate company Brookfield. Even the name sounds nice and innocuous.

Well, they have just leased the property for 99 years and agreed to invest $700 billion US dollars for upgrades.

They also bought the shares of Vornado Realty. And interestingly, they succeeded even though nobody thought Vornado would sell.

One more thing.

And, this is unheard of in the real estate annals, Brookfield agreed to pay the totality of 99 years lease upfront.

Not annually as it is required. Everything.

Which will allow Kushner to pay back its lenders in full in February 2019. And the Kushner family will get the building back in 99 years.

By now you might have guessed who is behind such a sweetheart deal.

The Qatar Investment Authority is the second-largest shareholder in Brookfield Properties, ranking only behind Brookfield’s former parent company. And the Qatar fund and Brookfield have teamed up on several real-estate deals in the United States and elsewhere in recent years, including Brookfield’s retail and apartment complex, Manhattan West, now under construction on the West Side. Brookfield and Qatar also control the Canary Wharf office complex in London.

This took place three days ago and other than the Canadian Globe and Mail not many mainstream news outlets covered it.

As I say it often, we live in interesting times.
_____________

UPDATE:

A friend told me that other mainstream news outlets covered the transaction.

Well, if you Google "Brookfield Kushner" this is what you get. None mentions Qatar's involvement.

Don't you think that's amazing?

Fake news and liberal media

The Globe and Mail piece is the only one you get if you add Qatar to the search.

A #MeToo Moment for the United Nations?

As we all know, the #MeToom movement swept all male bastions and went through power structures like a Category 5 hurricane.

Hollywood studios, high tech companies, Wall Street banks, large corporations all had to face the music.

There were two exceptions.

One was the conservative politicians, as exemplified by the indifference accorded to Donald Trump by his own party, his supporters and the corporate media.

If a Democratic president (and God forbid if it was Obama) had asked his personal lawyer to cover up his affair with a porn star with a $130,000 hush money or did this to hide another affair with a Playboy model all hell would have broken loose.

Tellingly, the linked expose was signed Ronan Farrow, the man who single handedly brought down industry titans like Harvey Weinstein or Les Moonves.

With Trump, nothing.

After his denials, his former lawyer's secret recordings showed he was in on it. Still nothing.

IOKIYAR.

The second exception was the United Nations.

There, we already knew that peacekeeping operations had turned into double victimization of women and girls. But recently, we found out that sexual abuse and harassment was also the norm at UN civilian agencies as well.

And the modus operandi was not very different in either cases.

Peacekeepers or Sex Ring Operators?

Since 2001, thousands of sexual misconduct allegations surfaced against UN peacekeepers in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Central African Republic (CAR).

Yet not much has been done about it.

In early June, the New York-based Code Blue Campaign, dedicated to ending impunity for crimes of sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers, released an internal UN memo that showed no action had been taken against the Congolese troops in CAR, despite multiple complaints about their behaviour.

In fact, the problem has gotten worse and sexual exploitation increased over the years. UN's own chart summarizes the incidents between 2010 and 2016.


Through it all, the UN managed to maintain the stories in check and to hide the true scope of the problem.

Of the 2000 cases of sexual misconduct reported to the UN over the past 12 years, 700 emanate from the DRC. Another report shows that 300 of these 2000 cases involve children. This geographic and demographic spread is however impugned by the fact that UN statistics on this issue (while steadily improving) are notoriously inaccurate. Record collection is impeded by under-reporting and chronically bad record-keeping by the UN.

I know what some people might be thinking. They might be attributing these incidents to developing country soldiers. Without touching on the implicit racism of this assumption, let me tell you that while in African situations this might be largely true (due to the composition of the troops), the misconduct known as SEA (Sexual Exploitation and Abuse) was quite prevalent in the Bosnia and Kosovo cases and there, the bulk of the UNPROFOR soldiers and commanders were from European countries.

With one Swedish, three French and one Indian Commanding Officer, this is what happened:

A Kosovo victims support group reported that of the local prostitutes, a third were under 14, and 80% were under 18. Amnesty said the victims were routinely raped "as a means of control and coercion" and kept in terrible conditions as slaves by their "owners"; sometimes kept in darkened rooms unable to go out

In any event, dwelling on the identity of the perpetrators is a futile exercise in racism. Sri Lankan soldiers might have ran a child sex in Haiti but they did it under UN command and they couldn't have done it if the top echelons had not turned a blind eye.

If anything, the UN largely ignored the problem and actively tried to cover it up.

In fact, when you look at the behavior of senior managers in other UN agencies you realize this is not a peacekeeping issue and the same nonchalance about sexual abuse exists in the organization's civilian institutions.

Sexual Abuse and Harassment in UN Agencies

In January 2018, the Guardian published an article about rampant sexual harassment, abuse and rape in UN agencies. It was an eye opener.

It showed that women who reported sexual misconduct usually lost their jobs while the perpetrators were promoted to higher positions.

Three women who reported sexual harassment or sexual assault, all from different offices, said they had since been forced out of their jobs or threatened with the termination of their contract in the past year. The alleged perpetrators, who include a senior UN official, remain in their posts.

A woman who was raped by a senior staff member had this experience:

She said that despite medical evidence and witness testimonies, an internal investigation by the UN found insufficient evidence to support her allegation. Along with her job, she says she has lost her visa and has spent months in hospital due to stress and trauma. She fears she will face persecution if she returns to her home country.

The system was stacked against the victim who were constantly told not to report such incidents.

One woman allegedly assaulted while working for the UN says she was told by her agency’s ombudsman that there was nothing more he could do to help her pursue a complaint, because he was being threatened by senior UN staff. Seven other alleged victims who spoke to the Guardian were told by an ombudsman or colleague that they should not try to pursue a complaint.

Another victim who was raped was not offered any medical assistance or counseling and the rapist suffered no consequences. In one case, "a man accused of sexual harassment was allowed to interview the woman who brought the complaint against him."

In fact, it is a systemic problem and the people who were supposed to investigate these crimes were explicitly instructed not to do their jobs.

Peter Gallo, a former OIOS investigator who left the UN in 2015, said he witnessed evidence being routinely ignored and facts skewed. “As an investigator I was told I should ‘never ask questions just to satisfy my curiosity,’” he said. “The only rule is not to publicly embarrass the organisation.”

So it is not surprising that,

An internal UNAids staff survey found that almost 10% of 427 respondents had experienced sexual harassment. Only two had reported it.

Malaya Harper, the general secretary of the World YWCA, says that while she was working at UNAids she was sexually harassed and assaulted by the deputy executive director of the agency Luiz Loures. She didn't reported because she knew nothing was going to be done about it.

Two women told the Observer they had warned the agency’s executive director, Michel Sidibé, about Loures’s alleged behaviour. One former employee, who left in 2015, said: “I had an exit interview with Michel when I left and the first words out of my mouth were, ‘your deputy director is a sexual predator and everybody knows it. I’m telling you because you really have to do something about it.’”

After multiple sexual misconduct allegations Loures announced that he was not going to seek the renewal of his contract at the end of last March and he was allowed to retire without any negative consequences.

And he was not alone:

The announcement of Loures’s departure follows news that Justin Forsyth has stepped down as deputy executive director of Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency, after accusations of inappropriate behaviour toward female staff while working for Save the Children.

There is also the case of Ruud Lubbers, the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, who "was eased from his post 12 years ago, following multiple allegations of sexual offenses against female staff."

And Frank La Rue of UNESCO who also retired with full benefits while being investigated for sexual misconduct.

Feel free to Google Tero Varjoranta of IAEA (he was in charge of the Iran nuclear deal, known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) and his protector Yukio Amano.

I can go on as these are only the most senior and most visible cases.

You may rightly ask the question whether the UN is doing something about this endemic problem.

Is Anything Being Done?

The short answer is "not really."

UN's position had always been to sweep the dirt under the rug, as illustrated by the egregious case of Luiz Loures:

An internal investigation report said Sidibé had attempted to settle the assault allegation informally, despite the matter being under official investigation by the World Health Organisation’s investigations team, Internal Oversight Services.

What was Antonio Guterres' reaction, the Secretary General who was elected over a group of highly qualified and deserving women candidates by claiming his feminist credentials?

Officially, this is what the UN said:

In a statement, the UN pledged to “look at strengthening our capacities to investigate reports and to support victims”. The organisation said Guterres has appointed a victims’ rights advocate and established a high-level taskforce on sexual harassment, to review policies and strengthen investigations. The UN will also carry out a survey to measure the extent of the issue, and introduce a helpline for people seeking advice.

Another task force, you may say but this is not any old task force, this one is special:

Its members will be drawn the Chief Executives Board, which includes 31 top UN officials, just 26% of whom are female. That task force will be chaired by Jan Beagle, who also held the title of Deputy Executive Director at UNAIDS throughout much of the Luiz Loures scandal and did nothing and said nothing. Ms. Beagle was promoted last year by Secretary-General Guterres to the most senior and visible management position in the UN system. The identities of the other members of the sexual harassment task force of "senior leaders" are the Secretary-General's carefully guarded secret.

A internal task force which largely consisted of men whose identity would be unknown and chaired by a colleague of Luiz Loures who did nothing to stop a sexual predator while she was a senior executive at UNAids.

That's the best the Secretary General of the United Nations could do to change the oppressive culture of sexual abuse and harassment.

Unless member states give UN agencies a wake up call about this problem, I doubt that the institution would move to clean house.

And given the largely conservative profile of member state politicians who love their male privileges don't expect any concerted effort in the regard.

As I said before, "women are the last group in the world about whom discriminatory practices and sexist speech are widely tolerated."

And unfortunately, it will continue to be the case with UN being a special case.

Why Is Donald Trump Afraid of Putin

After the Helsinki spectacle where Donald Trump almost gave Vladimir Putin a public foot massage, the usual suspects rose again with their "this is it, the straw that will break the Orange Camel" cries.

They hollered Trump's subdued performance was treasonous and it was proof that Putin had some compromising tape on him and he was Putin's poodle.

There were also, to my eye, homophobic depictions of their relationship.

What I don't understand is how long will this "I can't believe his base is not deserting him" discourse go on. After ever scandalous tweet they rush to quiz the Trumpkins and they all gleefully say that they love the Man.

Neither do I understand the liberal conviction that Putin has something on Trump, which is why the Orange Man is behaving in a strangely decile manner.

This time, I didn't bother with another "nothing will derail Donald Trump" post.

There is no point in repeating the axiomatic truth that there is virtually nothing Trump can do that will turn his evangelical, white privileged, racist and affluent base off.

You can show that he colluded with Russia to win the elections and his folks will say, good for him.

However, there is one thing Trump is afraid of and it is why he is extremely cautious in dealing with Putin. It has to do with my prediction about how his presidency will likely to end. And as one of my most popular posts, it is still on the right hand margin.

My view is that, nothing other than financial fraud, money laundering and associated crimes can bring Trump down. But those crimes, when revealed, will almost certainly force him to resign.

As I explained in that post in some detail, in mid-2000s, after six bankruptcies, Trump was toxic and no financial institution would lend him money. So, to develop residences, hotels and golf courses, he began working with Russian, Kazakh, Georgian and Azeri businessmen, like Felix Sater, Tevfik Arif, Alexander Shnaider, Tamir Sapir and the Mammadov family.

There is a long list of dubious development projects here and you can click on them to see the problem in each instance.

The people whose name I mentioned are all shady characters with extensive links to criminal groups and in my opinion it is very likely that they used the Trump Organization to launder hundreds of millions of dollars. They financed properties, Trump slapped his name on them, the units got sold, hotels and golf courses managed and fresh smelling money came out from the other end.

Financial fraud would be problematic for Trump for two reasons: One, unlike sex allegations, which are of "he-said-she-said" narratives, money laundering is easily proven and him helping some foreign criminals clean up their ill-gotten gains would give pause even the staunchest Trumpkin.

There are some hard-to-believe projects.

As the New Yorker's Adam Davidson put it:

Although we cannot say that Trump himself knowingly engaged in money laundering, we do know with certainty that much of his business in the past decade was in the industries most known for money laundering, in the locations most conducive to money laundering, and with people who bear the key hallmarks of money launderers.

Moreover, associated crimes like tax evasion could become a serious headache for him. And it would be difficult for Fox News to claim bothsideism as there is nothing like this on the Democratic side.

But perhaps more importantly, such a scandal would destroy the Trump brand and make it impossible for him to profit from the presidency and his business model (putting his name on other people's properties and getting a license fee) would vanish overnight.

Faced with such a situation, Trump would make a deal and simply resign.

As you might remember, I maintained throughout that this outcome was more or less inevitable because of Trump's stupid feud with intelligence agencies. They know where the bodies are buried and they will unearth them when it is appropriate.

It turns out your humble soapbox operator was on to something.

Credit

Recently, an editor at the New Yorker concurred with the general outline of this analysis.

According to several Russia experts "kompromat" does not necessarily refer to a compromising video clip that can be used for blackmailing.

You know the apocryphal pee-tape.

Instead, it should be thought of pieces of information being held by different players within the "sistema" or system, which is an informal structure of hierarchy where the players constantly shift position relative to others.

In this case "kompromat" is about Trump's past business dealings with these guys.

If there truly is damaging kompromat on Trump, it could well be in the hands of Trump’s business partners, or even in those of their rivals. Trump’s Georgian partners, for example, have been in direct conflict with other local business networks over a host of crucial deals involving major telecommunications projects in the country. His Azerbaijani partners were tightly linked to Iranians who were also senior officers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. 

And the reason why Trump is being nice to Putin is this:

The scenario that, to my mind, makes the most sense of the given facts and requires the fewest fantastical leaps is that, a decade or so ago, Trump, naïve, covetous, and struggling for cash, may have laundered money for a business partner from the former Soviet Union or engaged in some other financial crime. This placed him, unawares, squarely within sistema, where he remained, conducting business with other members of a handful of overlapping Central Asian networks. Had he never sought the Presidency, he may never have had to come to terms with these decisions. But now he is much like everyone else in sistema. He fears there is kompromat out there—maybe a lot of it—but he doesn’t know precisely what it is, who has it, or what might set them off.

Hence the reluctance to release tax returns and insistence that his business dealings are off-limits to Mueller.

And of course his super nice guy routine with Putin.

Because he doesn't know how much Putin knows and he is worried.

And he will do anything to make sure that it is not a problem.

Turkish Elections: How Did Erdogan Win?

Turkey's pugnacious president Recep Tayyip Erdogan won the most important election of his political career.

Erdogan Campaigning

And he did so decisively.

He became president in the first round and he preserved his majority in Parliament, albeit through an electoral alliance.

He achieved all that at a time when the Turkish economy was looking into an abyss with foreign currency and corporate debt and inflation are all at an all-time high.

Anyone else in anywhere else would have seen his wings clipped. Not him.

Erdogan's GOP Strategy

He was facing an elactoral alliance composed of:

a) Republican People's Party (CHP) a secular social democratic party,
b) The Good Party (IP), an ultra-nationalist party led by a charismatic and pious conservative woman,
c) Felicity Party (SP) an Islamist party led by a life-long political Islamist and an early collaborator of Erdogan.

What is important to note is the fact that the alliance removed the need for each party to clear the 10 percent threshold to get their votes turned into seats. This was done in order to encourage hard core Islamists to vote for SP without worrying that they might be wasting their ballot.

The idea behind bringing together a staunchly secular party, a conservative, ultra-nationalistic party and an Islamist party was to convince disgruntled AKP voters to consider voting for this new formation.

And it resonated with many of them. Poll after poll showed that Erdogan would be forced to go to the second round and he would very likely lose his legislative majority.

Herein lies a twist.

As I posted a couple of week before the elections, one opinion poll found that both Turks and Kurds were more inclined to support IP and its leader Meral Aksener than CHP and its presidential candidate Muharrem Ince.

In fact, that poll indicated that Aksener would force Erdogan to a second round and could then win the presidency.

While an outlier, the poll made sense because a very large portion of the Turkish electorate has always had an intense dislike for the CHP.

Some associate it with a zealous prosecution of Islamist population (it was illegal to wear a hijab or niqab until AKP came to power and women could not wear a headscarf of any kind in schools and universities or government buildings).

Others hate the party for its long association with the army (the only two times it formed a government were after military coups). And its tacit role in the country's four coups.

Others see it as a rigid and shallow agents of Western influence with no specific outlook or platform.

I can go on.

The fact remains that a significant majority of the Turkish electorate would vote for anyone before they considered CHP.

Hence the Erdogan strategy.

Muharrem Ince

He methodically ignored the nationalist conservative Aksener and IP and the Islamist Felicity Party. He solely focused on CHP and its candidate. Since he controls almost all the media outlets they followed suit.

You could see Ince on many talk shows on in the news bulletins, Aksener, not so much. Mind you, even then the balance between Erdogan - Ince media exposure was very much in favor of the former but Aksener was nowhere to be found.

In the May 1-25 period, the country’s two main news channels, NTV and CNN Turk, dedicated a combined 70 hours of coverage to Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its election ally, the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), according to a report by the two opposition-nominated members of Turkey’s media watchdog RTUK. The report was made available to Al-Monitor. The CHP and Ince got 22 hours, while the Good Party and its presidential candidate, Meral Aksener, got 17 minutes and the HDP received no coverage at all.

In other words, he transformed the elections from being between a coalition of conservative, nationalist, Islamist and secularist parties and Erdogan's AKP into a bipolar Us and Them race.

Us being the Sunni conservatives, Them being the Western-minded secularists.

Essentially, Erdogan was saying if it is between me and CHP, who you're gonna call?

And the electorate chanted "Ghostbusters" as they were expected to.

Erdogan's message contained the threat that if CHP came to power, despite Ince's reassurances, they would bring back all those anti-Islamist laws. They could force the removal of headscarves, reduce the number of religious schools and go back to Kemalist days of early republic.

And his base ate it up. After all, candidate Ince might be relatable with his mother and sister both wearing a headscarf, but he is not the leader of CHP.

Charismnatically challenged Kilicdaroglu

Since Ince committed himself to going back to the previous system of a ceremonial president with an executive prime minister, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of CHP could soon become prime minister in a new government.

He is an Alevi, which is an offshoot of Shia Islam and most Sunnis consider them heretic infidels.

That was Erdogan's message. I know Ince seems nice but you elect him, you will be governed by a secular Alevi. Me or them?

It is like the GOP telling their base if it is not them, then it is Nancy Pelosi, abortion at every clinic, socialist health care and probably another black president.

Who cares if Trump is a twice divorced, pussy-grabbing idiot. He is what stands between, conservative, evangelical and racist GOP voters and Pelosi at Co.

Erdogan has also used GOP's voter suppression techniques.

Many voting districts were redefined. They changed voting stations in the Kurdish region removing them from pro-Kurdish villages. This made voting for many rural Kurds very difficult.

There was also some evidence of ballot stuffing.

Officers resorted to firing their guns into the air to stop the threesome in the country’s southeastern province of Urfa from delivering four sacks stuffed with fake voting cards to the Bilge Primary School, which was being used as a polling station.

Ballot stuffing is not widespread in Turkey but this incident was not a one-off situation either. I assume ballot stuffing was part of Erdogan's Plan B or C or D, something that can be used, on a limited basis, to alter an undesirable outcome.

For instance, in the 2017 referendum, the Organisation  for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) alleged that up to 2.5 million votes might have been manipulated. Out of 55 million voters 2.5 million vote is not a big deal perhaps but if you won the referendum with 1.5 percent, it is a huge deal.

Which brings me to the other parties and especially the surprising MHP win.

Other Parties and the Mystery of MHP?

Kilicdaroglu, the beleaguered leader of CHP lost nine consecutive elections but has no intention to resign. In fact, he criticized Ince's performance and said that he did not get as many vote as he should have.

He is counting on the fact that, despite reducing the party's electoral support from 25.32 percent to 22.64 percent he was rewarded with more seats (146) than the previous election (131). Most of that was due to the fact that the number of MPs went up from 550 to 600.

In any event, Turkey's electoral laws and CHP's bylaws are such that it is almost impossible to remove a party leader through regular democratic means. To give you an idea, since 1923 the CHP has had only five leaders. Can you find another such example in the world?

Meral Aksener, the leader of the nationalistic and conservative Good Party (IP) passed the 10 percent threshold and will have 43 seats in the new assembly.

The case of her former party the proto-fascist Nationalist Action Party (MHP) is very interesting. Devlet Bahceli, the leader of MHP fought off Aksener's leadership bid tooth and nail and expelled her from the party. She went on to form IP and Bahceli entered into an electoral alliance with Erdogan and AKP.

Interestingly, between 1 May and 25 June only a single polling company placed MHP above the 10 percent threshold. Fourteen others predicted that it would never go over.

There is a good reason for that. The ceiling of MHP's support is around 5.5 to 6 million votes.  It once hit 7.5 million (for the June 2015 hung parliament) but contemporaneous opinion polls clearly showed that the additional votes came from disgruntled AKP supporters. And the next time around, in November 2015, the party's vote went back to 5.7 million.

But let's stipulate, for the sake of the argument that 7.5 million votes is the true potential support level for ultra-nationalistic parties in Turkey.

In 24 June 2018 elections MHP and IP, which share the same identical electoral base received 10,555,227 votes. That's almost double the regular MHP vote.

How could MHP get to preserve its share of the vote when half of its base went to support an offshoot party? Even the one opinion poll that gave MHP 10.5 percent found that IP was going to be stuck at 7.4 percent. Yet they received collectively 21 percent of the vote.

You could argue that since AKP's vote went from 49.5 to 42.5 percent, a significant percentage of AKP voters went to ultra-nationalistic parties.

The problem with that argument is that no opinion poll showed such a drastic move away from AKP to ultra-nationalist parties. And why should they?

With his Afrin excursion, his Syrian adventures in Al-Bab and Manbij and his genocidal tactics in Southeast Turkey Erdogan showed his bone fide as the most nationalistic leader in Turkey. Why would such voters desert him at this juncture?

In other words, there is no explanation for this 21 percent ultra-nationalistic vote either arithmetically or politically.

And curiously no one tried to explain this odd result.

Unless of course, these three guys caught with fake ballot bags were part of a larger effort to get MHP over the 10 percent threshold.

Where is OSCE when you need them.

Is Separating Children From Their Parents Trump's Katrina Moment?

After weeks of horrible pictures and video clips about ICE thugs torturing migrant families and kidnapping their children, the Orange Man relented.

Well, sort of.

But can we claim that this was a big deal for his base, as did the former New York Times editor and current Guardian columnist Jill Abramson, that the new policy of taking away children and toddlers from their families and putting them in metal cages was Donald Trump's Katrina moment.

She is adamant about it.

I, on the other hand, don't think so.

There is absolutely nothing Donald J. Trump could do that would turn his base against him.

Nothing.

He famously said:

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters”

And he was right.

You could have a clip of him having sex with a minor and the evangelicals would rush to call him a man of God.

You could show him in that Moscow hotel with some sort of golden shower situation, Republicans would applaud him for his unconventional hair growth techniques.

You could prove that he is milking the presidency for personal economic gain and his base will praise him for his business acumen.

Well, they are already doing that last one.

There are two reasons for that.

First, that's because for the Republican party voters Trump is the Savior.

He is the man who put black and brown people down (literally and figuratively), put women in their place and restore the good old days when blacks were called with the n-word, Mexicans were wetbacks and women knew that the kitchen was their sole domain.

Plus and perhaps most importantly, in a polarized society, he knows how to ridicule libturds and kick them in the teeth.

Did I mention that the Republican base is racist? They are.

African Americans and Hispanics are not really human in their eyes. Remember, for them, the elegant and brilliant and supremely accomplished Michelle Obama (Princeton and Harvard Law School alumnus) was an ape on heels.

Forced separation of Mexican toddlers from their mothers is nothing to them.

Trump's first campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was on Fox News recently and when they mentioned a ten year old girl with Down syndrome was separated from her parents, his response was "womp, womp."

Hilarious, right? A frightened, handicapped child is so funny when they are Mexican.

There is more.

In recent days, abuse claims have surfaced about how migrant children have been detained at two centres. 

Juveniles held in a detention centre in Virginia say they were handcuffed, beaten, left nude in concrete cells and locked in solitary confinement, the Associated Press reported.
Some have said guards strapped them to chairs with bags over their heads.

Can you say, Vel" d'Hiv Roundup?

I sense you disagree with my characterization of GOP voters.

Well, according to the most recent Gallup poll as reported by FiveThirtyEight,

Trump does have near-ironclad support (close to 90 percent approval, according to Gallup) among self-described Republicans nationally.

See what I mean? 90 percent.

More importantly, a clear majority of Republicans approve of the separation of children from their parents.

A strange thing happened on the way to a predicted universal condemnation of Mr Trump's policy of separating children from parents who cross the US-Mexico border without documentation. It turns out Republican voters like it. 

According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, while 91% of Democrats and 68% of independents oppose separating asylum-seekers and others in the US illegally from their children, 55% of Republicans support it. 

Far from being Trump's Katrina moment, this is his victory lap.

Trump voters adore him because he got rid of the dog-whistle.  He was the first openly racist presidential candidate and Republicans love him for that.

That is why the GOP will never abandon him, He is their wet dream.

The second reason is the media coverage of all things Trump.

Trump voters get their news from Fox. Fox is an echo chamber. They don't mention children chained to walls or sleeping on concrete floors or the fact that none of the kidnapped 2300 kids will ever be returned to their parents.

If you watch Fox News they are on a cushy summer camp having fun.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham called the detention centres "essentially summer camps", and praised Mr Trump for "doing what we should have been doing all along, prosecuting all border crashers". 

Conservative author Ann Coulter called the children "child actors weeping and crying" on TV networks.

But it is not just Fox News. The so called liberal media is guilty of helping the Trump agenda by not challenging his lies.

For weeks, Trump claimed that this cruel policy was a legacy of the Democrats and he was helpless to change it. Everybody knew that this was a huge lie as it was something enacted by his KKK-loving garden gnome Attorney General Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions.

But you wouldn't know this if you were reading about it on BBC News. This was a Trump tweet.

This is how BBC explained it.

There is no law that mandates separating children from parents who cross the border illegally. 

In 1997, Democratic President Bill Clinton signed the Flores Settlement law that required unaccompanied minors who arrive in the US to be released to their parents, a legal guardian or an adult relative, If no relatives are available then the relevant government agency can appoint an appropriate adult to look after the child. 

And in 2008, Republican President George W. Bush signed an anti-trafficking statute that requires unaccompanied minors to be transferred out of immigration centres within 72 hours. Neither of these recommends separating families.

Basically, anything and everything except to say that Trump is not telling the truth. And the piece was entitled "Reality Check."

Right.

You so care don;t U 

Another excellent example is the jacket Melania chose to wear to visit a children detention center.

I Really Don't Care, Do U? said her vetement.

Somehow, most media outlets pondered whether this was a hidden message.  This was so hard to decipher.

What could it mean?

BBC provided five different explanations.

I am not kidding.

Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi, questioned in an article entitled "the great Melania mystery, does she really care?"

Who could tell? The message was so scrambled.

The Independent was equally perplexed. They wondered "Why didn't someone stop Melania Trump from wearing that 'I really don't care' jacket?"

Well, can you imagine the shitstorm if Michelle Obama went to a similar event with this outfit?

On his late-night show, comedian Stephen Colbert asked a version of the question reverberating around political Washington: “How many people would get fired for this at a normal White House? One? Five? The entire executive branch? ... People who were supposedly on her side let her get on a plane with a jacket that said, ‘I really don’t care, do you?’”

In Melania's case, her spokespeople said there was no hidden message and most media outlets reported that.

Now, can you see the message?

If you can, you are are so biased.

Shame on you.

It is just a jacket.

Donald Trump is what you get when you put together a rabidly racist electorate with a meak media.

So, no, this is not his Katrina moment.

And he will never have a Katrina moment as long as Fox News exists and the rest of the media will give him a free pass on every lie.

Turkish Elections and Why the Opposition Should Hope for an Erdogan Win

It's not for nothing that I am your resident contrarian.

My Turkish friends are furious about this statement. Especially now that some analysts seem to believe that Erdogan might lose these elections.

They keep reminding me that Tayyip Erdogan is a corrupt bully who destroyed the country's institutions to pave the way for an unchallenged one-man rule and ask me why they should hope for him to win again.

There are three very good reasons.

The first one is the fact that Erdogan would never relinquish power and would do anything, including killing scores of people, to remain president. He had done it before, ask the Kurds.

The second reason is the looming economic crash from which there is no escape. Any government will be sitting on a ticking time bomb.

Thirdly, Erdogan destroyed all the major institutions of the country and filled them up with his poorly educated and unqualified supporters. Essentially, Turkey is ungovernable.

This is the end of the Erdogan model and I would rather that he stayed in power to face the consequences of his policies and the major upheaval that will ensue. Besides, this is the only way to avoid a future Erdogan.

Let me explain my thinking.

A Revolutionary Guard Called SADAT

As I said, Erdogan will never relinquish power willingly. If his private polling is in line with the outlier poll I mentioned in my previous post (indicating that Erdogan would lose against Good Party leader Meral Aksener in the second round) he would never allow the elections to take place.

To do so is very easy.

Adnan Tanriverdi

Erdogan has been building up a private militia called SADAT. It was created by Adnan Tanriverdi, a retired brigadier general who was expelled from the army in 1997 for his Islamist views. The organization promotes itself as a defense consultancy but it is much more than that.

SADAT is fashioned after Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) i.e. unlike the military which is loyal to the state, SADAT is loyal to the Dear Leader and his regime. For instance, there are eyewitness accounts about SADAT snipers killing people during the botched coup attempt on 15 July 2016.

Tanriverdi is Erdogan's principal military adviser and reportedly he has more influence than the Chief of General Staff. There are credible allegations that SADAT was training ISIS and other terror groups in Syria. They are also quite active in agitating Turks in Europe and they seem to have a hand in recruitment for radical Islamist groups.

If Erdogan's internal polling shows that he might lose, all he needs to do is to direct SADAT goons to start some  street violence in pro-opposition districts in large cities and to have them kill a large number of people.  You may be surprised to learn that extrajudicial killings are no longer a crime  in Turkey.

Next thing you know, he declares that the elections are suspended.

Erdogan is fully cognizant that if his opponents ever get the opportunity, they will uncover all his corrupt dealings and punish him, his family and his entourage very severely. He simply cannot afford to let go of power.

But let's, for the sake of the argument, envisage a scenario where he lost the elections and agreed to step away.

I can categorically tell you that, regardless of its composition, the new government is doomed to fail.

A Crumbling Economy

Turkish economy is about to collapse as it is facing a perfect storm.

The economy is built on borrowed money and a lot of it is short term capital. In a global economy where the Feds increase interest rates (as they are expected to so again later in the year) the dollar is rushing back home, creating a liquidity crisis for the so called emerging markets.

Within that category, Turkey is the worst hit because of its exceptionally weak economic fundamentals.

To begin with, it has a huge corporate debt. As of April 2018, corporate debt was 70 percent of the GDP.

A little over half of that is in foreign currency. Turkish Lira has lost 20 percent of its value since the beginning of the year (40 percent in 2 years and 124 percent in 5 years). As one brokerage put it "each 1 cent depreciation in the currency adds about 5 billion liras to the cost of Turkey’s foreign borrowings."

Very few companies can withstand that kind of profit erosion. As a result, companies that are previously considered too-big-to-fail, began to default or ask banks to restructure their debts. Two recent examples:

On Saturday, Hurriyet newspaper revealed that Dogus Holding, one of Turkey’s largest conglomerates, was in talks with several banks to restructure TL23.5bn ($5.81bn) in debt. Just in September last year, Turkey was still dealing with its largest debt default, Otas, on a $4.75bn loan.

There is also Yildiz Holding, the owner of Godiva chocolates and McVitie's biscuits looking for a $7 billion loan, the largest ever in Turkey.

Turkish food giant Yildiz Holding is to restructure $6.5 billion of its $8.5 billion in debt and the refinancing could be completed by the end of next week, two people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

In global markets, Turkish banks are seen as high risk institutions and they are having a hard time raising funds. Fitch has just placed 25 Turkish banks on watch negative citing risks to performance, asset quality and liquidity.

Moreover, the banking sector is holding its breath about the fine to be imposed on Halkbank. If, as predicted, the fine is $30 billion and over, you can forget about Turkish banks being able to raise funds for a good while.

This is happening at a time when there is not much money in Turkey's coffers.

Currently, Turkey's foreign debt is a little over $450 billion and to service it, it needs $188 billion in the next 12 months. Add to that $50 billion to finance a current account deficit of 6.5 percent of GDP (which shot up by 35.6 percent last April to hit almost $7 billion for the month) and you can see the enormity of the problem.

Ostensibly Turkey's Central Bank has roughly $100 billion in its foreign currency reserves. But that might be a major overestimate. Some of that money is in gold and a good chunk of it is commercial bank reserves deposited there. Analysts from UBS and other banks estimated (in 2017) that the real figure is closer to $35 billion and I know some analysts who put it even lower.

There is one more threat to the Turkish banking sector and that is the real estate bubble. Turkey's economic growth was largely fuelled by construction. With increased demands, construction companies rushed to build residential and non-residential buildings and banks happily provided financing. As long as prices went up and interest rates stayed flat, the formula worked.

One of the ways banks kept interest rates flat was to raise their funds abroad. With both the Dollar and Euro having a low interest rate, they could charge a higher domestic rates and make a healthy margin. In fact, they were so confident that things would stay the same, they sold long term (10-15 years) fixed rate interest mortgages. That encouraged further demand and led to even more construction.

When foreign currency interest rates started to creep up (and domestic rates shot up) those long term loans became a major liability. The banks saw their margins disappear and started losing money.

But now the construction sector is in deep trouble. One analyst is expecting serial bankruptcies. This is partly because construction companies are unable to fund their projects and have a hard time collecting the money they are owed. Currently, they survive with a barter system -a percentage of the building in exchange for materials to build it- but it is not tenable and industry insiders warn against a serious implosion in the second half of the year.

When construction sector loans start defaulting Turkish banks will be in serious jeopardy.

And that is not all.

Inflation hovers around 12 percent (and this is despite changing the measuring basket in an effort to get a lower figure) and it is rising.

[A]n inflation report showed consumer prices rose 12.15 percent in May from a year earlier, with the worst core reading on record and producer prices advancing more than 20 percent.

Normally, faced with similar situations, Central Banks hike up interest rates. That cools off the economy, reduces demand and gets inflation under control. And it also supports the currency.

However the Turkish Central Bank has been unable to do that because Erdogan is opposed to raising interest rates. He summoned the Chair of the supposedly independent Central Bank to his party headquarters to dress him down about "interest rates [being] the mother and father of all evil"

He is convinced that the best way to fight inflation is to lower interest rates. When he recently shared this rather unconventional axiom to money managers in London they laughed him off.

Still, when the Lira hit 4.92 against the Dollar in May the Bank had to move in to prevent the psychologically traumatic 5 Lira barrier and raised interest rates by 300 points. Which meant  a hike from 13.5 percent to 16.5 percent. It wasn't enough: four days ago, the Bank raised it again by 125 basis points to reach 17.75 percent.

But it was too late. Despite a initial rally, the Lira did not recover and the Dollar is still hovering around 4.52 and Moody's just threatened to lower Turkey's credit rating again (last downgrade was in March to Ba2, which is "junk" category).

That would force Turkey to pay a significant risk premium for any money coming into its banks.

In fact, the situation is so bad that more than one analyst warned that Turkey will be the ground zero for the next global debt crisis. Famed economic historian Russell Napier made the same prediction recently. And famous Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff admitted the plausibility of that scenario. The fear is not that about the $330 billion foreign bank exposure in Turkey. They worry that a Turkish default could trigger a chain reaction involving Argentina, Brazil and even Italy.

In any event, whoever wins the elections, they will have two options. They will either hike up interests rates dramatically or let inflation soar.

If they choose the first solution, that would destroy the construction sector which is sitting on a glut of unsold buildings and they will bring down the banks that financed them. Moreover, higher rates would make credit very expensive, severely slowing down economic activity. That in turn will raise the already double digit unemployment to new heights.

If they choose the second solution, that is keep rates low and let inflation go crazy, this will lead to rapidly increasing prices and will decimate people's purchasing power. Turkey already went through 100 percent inflation rates in the 1980s  and people will not take this lying down. High inflation will also push foreign currency up making imports prohibitively expensive.

If the opposition wins and they choose one or the other option they will be blamed for people's economic woes. I can easily foresee major street protests (helped by SADAT) to clamor for new elections. Erdogan will return triumphant and that will be that.

An Ungovernable Country

Turkey's economic problems are well known. What is not generally discussed is the dismal shape of its institution.

Erdogan's early success was largely credited to the technocrats belonging to Fethullah Gulen's Hizmet movement. They ran the economy and staffed the senior positions in state enterprises.  For instance, the incredible success of Turkish Airlines owed a lot to their managerial know how. The carrier maintained an annual 10 percent growth for a decade and remained profitable. It was elected Europe's best airline for many years and had the lowest cost profile among large carriers.

Since 2013, Erdogan has been removing these technocrats and replacing them with his own pitifully underqualified supporters. Just to use the same example, 8,000 people were fired or pushed to early retirement at Turkish Airlines. The new managers reversed the trend the airline went "from big profit to big loss."

The same thing happened with the army, judiciary, general state bureaucracy, schools and universities and any institution you can name as Erdogan got rid of anyone who could represent a challenge to his rule.

A new government will have to run the country without the participation of these institutions. And that is not a tenable position.

Replacing Erdogan's cronies would take a long time and in many cases, the previous staffers either left the country or are too broken up about their treatment to be able to make a reasonable come back.

So, while seeing Erdogan defeated would put a smile on my face, I would much rather have him dealing with the inevitable chaos after the elections.