So all that mundane par-for-the-course-for-DC-elites financial funny business is alleged to be Putin's fault, too? I mean, really - how much FBI manpower did Mueller spend digging that up? [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort]Manafort[/url] is a classic DC elite grifter whose affections are clearly highly negotiable, get any halfway decent accountant to look at the financials of just about any of these guys & gals and you're likely to find plenty of [i]Schmutz[/i]. Call me profoundly underwhelmed.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;480336]So all that mundane par-for-the-course-for-DC-elites financial funny business is alleged to be Putin's fault, too?[/QUOTE]
Mundane financial funny business? Really? From Count 1 of the [url=https://www.justice.gov/file/1007271/download]October 27, 2017 indictment[/url]:

[quote]1. Defendants PAUL J. MANAFORT, JR., (MANAFORT) and RICHARD W. GATES III (GATES) served for years as political consultants and lobbyists. Between at least 2006 and 2015, MANAFORT and GATES acted as unregistered agents of the Government of Ukraine, the Party of Regions (a Ukrainian political party whose leader Victor Yanukovych was President from 2010 to 2014), Yanukovych, and the Opposition Bloc (a successor to the Party of Regions that formed in 2014 when Yanukovych fled to Russia). MANAFORT and GATES generated tens of millions of dollars in income as a result of their Ukraine work. In order to hide Ukraine payments from United States authorities, from approximately 2006 through at least 2016, MANAFORT and GATES laundered the money through scores of United States and foreign corporations, partnerships, and bank accounts.[/quote]

So, the indictment alleges that they worked for Putin's puppet leader of Ukraine and his party, and laundered the proceeds to evade taxes. I don't consider working as unregistered foreign agents to be "routine," or laundering the proceeds to evade taxes.

Even VP Agnew had to resign when the IRS found out he hadn't paid taxes on the bribe money he'd garnered as Governor of Maryland.

The latest thing about Manafort concerns stuff that came to Mueller's attention after the bail hearing. And [i]that[/i] "financial funny business," though more mundane that the matters covered in the indictment, bears directly on the value of assets being offered as security for bail. My guess is, the judge will not be amused.

For elite DC influence peddlers like Manafort, yes, it is mundane, in the sense of being par for the course. How is any of what you cite more eyebrow-raising than the shenanigans in the Uranium One scandal, or any of a number of various Clinton Foundation pay-for-play schemes involving foreign governments? If Team Mueller were charged with investigating this sort of stuff and were indicting lots of the other such lobbyist-grifters who've gotten rich this way, fine - but what does any of the Manafort stuff have to do with the wild claims of Russia "hacking out democracy"? And where are the similar task forces investigating Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc, "hacking out democracy"? Still waiting for actual *evidence* - not evidence-free intelligence-complex 'assessments' (i.e. opinions), or bogus 'digital breadcrumb trails' which pretend that hacking-related cyberattribution is easy and spoofing does not happen - that indicate that all this hysteria is something other than a neo-McCarthyite witch hunt ginned up by the Clintonites and their pals in the DC establishment and the media. I don't know about you, but the thought of giving the folks running the nation's dangerously metastasizing spook complex veto power over election results terrifies me much more than another 3 years of the clusterf*ck that is the Trump white house. Because once you go down that road, you abandon any pretense to living in a constitutional republic and there's no return not involving very high odds of bloody nation-ending catastrophe.

Why ‘Russian Meddling’ is a Trojan Horse -by Rob Urie
 

[URL]https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/09/why-russian-meddling-is-a-trojan-horse/[/URL]

I lean more toward a "Red" Herring descriptor, myself.
[QUOTE]The decision to blame Russian meddling for Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss [URL="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/shattered-jonathan-allen/1125489884"]was made[/URL] in the immediate aftermath of the election by her senior campaign staff. Within days the [URL="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/08/donald-trump-illegitimate-president-rebecca-solnit"]received wisdom[/URL] amongst Clinton supporters was that the election had been stolen and that Donald Trump was set to enter the White House as a pawn of the Russian political leadership. Left out was the history of U.S. – Russian relations; that [B]the largest voting bloc in the 2016 election was eligible voters who didn’t vote and that domestic business interests substantially control the American electoral process. [/B](Emphasis added.)

[I]Graph: The Democrats’ choice to blame external forces, e.g. Russian meddling, for their electoral loss in 2016 ignores evidence of that none-of-the-above is the people’s choice. The largest voting bloc in the 2016 election was eligible voters who chose not to vote. In contrast to the received wisdom in political consultant circles, choosing not to vote is a political act. The U.S. has the lowest voter turnout in the ‘developed’ world for a reason. Source: [/I][URL="http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout-data"][I]electproject.org[/I][/URL][I].[/I][/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=ewmayer;480394]How is any of what you cite more eyebrow-raising than the shenanigans in the Uranium One scandal, or any of a number of various Clinton Foundation pay-for-play schemes involving foreign governments?[/QUOTE]
Let's see. The sale was approved by The Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, consisting of

the Secretary of the Treasury
the Secretary of State
the Secretary of Defense
the Secretary of Homeland Security
the Secretary of Commerce
the Secretary of Energy
the Attorney General
a representative from the office of the United States Trade Representative
a representative from the Office of Science and Technology Policy

If you have any evidence that HRC interfered with the Committee's deliberations, I suggest you get in touch with the two House committees investigating it. Because AFAIK, no such evidence has come to light or even been claimed to exist.

The sale also had to be approved by, e.g. the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Oh, and the sale could only have been stopped by the President.

If you have any evidence HRC influenced either the Commission or the President, bring it.

What there [i]does[/i] seem to be good evidence for is, investors in Uranium One donated millions to the Clinton Foundation, which the Foundation failed to disclose publicly in a timely manner, which it should have done as per prior agreement with the White House.

Also, after the Rosatom-Uranium One merger was announced, but before the Committee approved it, Bill Clinton spoke on June 29, 2010 at a conference in Moscow organized by the Russian-based company Renaissance Capital Group, for which he received a cool half mil.

None of which comes anywhere close to acting as unregistered agents for a foreign power, let alone laundering the proceeds to evade income taxes.

Oh, and BTW, if there were anything to all this, please explain why the Republicans weren't raising hell about it in time for the 2012 campaign.

Millions of Americans Demand $130,000 for Not Having Sex With Trump
 

[URL]http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/48534-millions-of-americans-demand-130000-for-not-having-sex-with-trump[/URL]
[QUOTE]“Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for Stormy Daniels,” Tracy Klugian, a florist in Santa Rosa, California, said. “I just want my check, too.”[/QUOTE][SPOILER]Carol Foyler, of Tallahassee, Florida, took a different view. “Never having sex with Donald Trump should be a reward in itself,” she said.[/SPOILER]

Oh, boy! Using a legal provision enabling the President to impose tariffs in the name of "National Security," [i]Il Duce[/i] seems intent on starting a trade war. But that's OK, because [i]Il Duce[/i] decrees, in this story dated Friday March 2,

[url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/03/02/trump-insists-trade-wars-are-good-and-easy-to-win-after-vowing-new-tariffs/]Trump insists ‘trade wars are good, and easy to win’ after vowing new tariffs[/url]
[quote]Over the past 24 hours, Trump has drawn the blueprints for the most protectionist U.S. trade policy in roughly 100 years. The White House has provided no information or details about how these trade practices would go into effect. Instead, they’ve been sketched out in rough terms in off-the-cuff remarks after a meeting with steel and aluminum executives and in a series of social media posts that many trade experts said grossly misrepresented how trade works.[/quote]

And, gee, protectionist trade policies have worked out so well in the past 100 years!

Historically, the Republican party has favored protectionist trade policies. This was true at the party's founding, when they favored a tariff to protect the US railroad industry, still a-borning. Protecting new fledgling industries is a reasonable use of tariffs; a good argument can be made that it is in the national interest for the US to have its own e.g. railroad industry, rather than relying on foreign powers for supplies and equipment, which would initially be cheaper from an already-established industry abroad than from a developing industry at home. It is reasonable to expect that, once our own industry is up and running, it can compete on equal terms, and the protective tariff can be discontinued.

In theory, a tariff can also be used to restrict the import of foreign goods made cheaply by dint of convict labor by political prisoners, or cheap labor due to social stratification, slavery, etc.

Protectionist policies designed to shield domestic industries from the consequences of their own unwise practices, however, are more problematic.

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;481547]And, gee, protectionist trade policies have worked out so well in the past 100 years![/QUOTE]

Your quip-line would benefit from some actual data examining its truth, falsity or in-between-ness. For example, China is highly protectionist when it comes to their domestic manufacturing industries, and its mercantilist policies seem to be serving it well in terms of growing its industrial base and attracting overseas capital and offshored-from-elsewhere manufacturing. The all-too-frequent invocation of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and their connection to the Great Depression is also problematic because the US's balance of trade then (net exporter) was drastically different to now.

Also see a lot of 'experts' trotting out the highly dubious claim that 'free trade benefits everyone' as a kind of unassailable settled-issue shibboleth. First off there is no such thing as 'free trade', there is only 'managed trade' with the attendant issue of 'managed by whom and for whose benefit?' Second, what is now beyond dispute is that while 'free trade' has been fabulous for global GDP[sup]*[/sup] and corporate profits, said profits have been wildly unequally shared. Please explain to us how now-unemployed rust belt manufacturing workers 'benefit' from the (alleged - in many cases the savings are illusory due to quality reductions and the human and environmental costs associated with the rock-bottom low-bidder nature of the places the jobs move to) lower prices of the products they once made? Do you think a raging nationwide epidemic of deaths of despair so extreme that US average lifespan has been *falling* precipitously is unconnected to this?

As far as I can tell, 'free trade' as practiced in recent decades is all about letting the global mobile-capital looter elite enrich themselves in historically nigh-unprecedented fashion by engaging in ruthless environmental and labor-law arbitrage at the cost of global environmental despoliation and the immiseration of millions, both in the countries whose manufacturing bases get gutted and those to which the industries in question get moved. Is 'free trade' a net societal benefit if only a tiny elite sliver of said society actually benefits?

So, please, we could use less sound-bitey MSNBC-echoing snark and more actual reasoned and data-backed discussion. But that sort of stuff doesn't go viral on Twitter nor feed the nightly "two minutes' hate"-style outrage-fest on the MSM, does it?

---------------
[sup]*[/sup] Itself a deeply flawed measure, e.g. if I as CEO of GlobalMegaCorp switch from paying a domestic worker $1 per produced item X to paying a foreign sweatshop laborer $.05, burning another $0.45 in fossil fuels to ship X back to here, and skimming off the $0.50 cost difference as added profit to myself, total GDP is unaffected but its distribution and the environmental and human impacts of production have drastically changed.

Trump apparently said he wishes the USA had a for life president, it's happened before and if my history serves me correct most saw assasinations. [url]https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/trump-says-maybe-u-s-will-have-a-president-for-life-someday-1.3827827[/url]

[QUOTE=ewmayer;481593]Your quip-line would benefit from some actual data examining its truth, falsity or in-between-ness. [/QUOTE]
Although not quite within the 100-year limit, the US tariffs after World War I were awkward. It's been a long, long time since I took US History class in grade school, and I'm afraid my grade-school history texts, being clay tablets, have probably long since crumbled to dust. But as I recall, the cunieform said that, after the war, the good ol' USA was a creditor nation, and the tariffs made it hard for other countries to sell to us. This is mentioned in a page from the Office of the Historian, [url=https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/protectionism]Protectionism in the Interwar Period[/url]. It also gives some figures for the contraction in trade after the enactment of Smoot-Hawley.

Of course, the Great Depression was already in progress; the "Black Tuesday" stock market crash was on October 29, 1929. The Tariff Act of 1930 (Smoot-Hawley) was signed into law on June 17, 1930 by President Herbert Hoover, despite his own personal opposition, and the pleas of Henry Ford, chief executive Thomas W. Lamont of J.P. Morgan, and others. Significantly, though, the new law touched off a trade war:

[quote]It quickly became a symbol of the "beggar-thy-neighbor" policies of the 1930s. Such policies, which were adopted by many countries during this time, contributed to a drastic contraction of international trade. For example, U.S. imports from Europe declined from a 1929 high of $1,334 million to just $390 million in 1932, while U.S. exports to Europe fell from $2,341 million in 1929 to $784 million in 1932. Overall, world trade declined by some 66% between 1929 and 1934.[/quote]

So although it obviously didn't [i]cause[/i] the Great Depression, Smoot-Hawley certainly made things worse. I'm not sure who [i]Il Duce[/i] thinks won [i]that[/i] trade war.

In other trade news: According to a February 27 [url=https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/us/politics/mnuchin-tpp-trans-pacific-partnership-trump.html]NYT story[/url],

[quote]WASHINGTON — More than a year after President Trump abruptly pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, saying it was a bad deal for the United States, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Tuesday that the United States is discussing rejoining the multilateral trade agreement.[/quote]

[QUOTE=ewmayer;481593]So, please, we could use less sound-bitey MSNBC-echoing snark and more actual reasoned and data-backed discussion.[/QUOTE]

It seems quite clear that your president hasn't read Smith nor Nash.

But, then, this isn't all that surprising considering all evidence suggests he doesn't read anything....