Mendocino County Today: Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2022

Cold | 60 New Cases | Skunk Challenge | Vax Clinic | CEO Pension | 1904 Parade | Albion Railroad | Sirillion | MCHCD Meeting | McSorley Arrested | Alley Artists | Ed Notes | Yesterday's Catch | Register | War Biz | Chopper Toss | Founding Realtor | Ella/Dizzy | LaTrail Again | Gotdang Russkies | Whale Chopper | Bean Boxing | Unusual Threat | Great Job | Server | Corporate Crime | Plum Blossoms | Stehr Crisis | Privacy Protection | Gardeners | Face Cut | Cannabis Meeting | Rollerville Flume | Russia Sanctions | Shipwreck | Power Grab | Circus Performers

A COLD AND DRY AIR MASS will persist across the region through Saturday afternoon. Rain and snow will then return Saturday night into Sunday. Additional bouts of precipitation are expected early to mid next week.

HARD FREEZE WARNING remains in effect until 9 am PST this morning. Hard Freeze Watch in effect from late tonight through Thursday morning. For the Hard Freeze Warning, sub-freezing temperatures as low as 23. For the Hard Freeze Watch, sub-freezing temperatures as low as 21 possible. Frost and freeze conditions will kill crops, other sensitive vegetation and possibly damage unprotected outdoor plumbing. Take steps now to protect tender plants from the cold. To prevent freezing and possible bursting of outdoor water pipes they should be wrapped, drained, or allowed to drip slowly. Those that have in-ground sprinkler systems should drain them and cover above-ground pipes to protect them from freezing. (NWS)

THIS MORNING'S LOWS: Boonville 26°, Yorkville 28°

60 NEW COVID CASES (since last Friday) reported in Mendocino County yesterday afternoon.

SKUNK EXEMPTION CLAIMS: ‘IT DEPENDS…’

by Chris Calder

Last October, the City of Fort Bragg filed a lawsuit challenging Mendocino Railway's status as a Class III railroad and a public utility, with power of eminent domain - that the railroad used last year to complete its purchase of Fort Bragg's oceanfront millsite - and exemption from state and local regulation in some cases.

The City of Fort Bragg v. Mendocino Railway could have broad implications for how development can proceed on Fort Bragg's millsite, and for what say local government — and by extension the local community — has about what happens there. The case is still in pre-trial hearings — one to consider a notice of demurrer and motion to strike filed by Mendocino Railway is scheduled for 2 p.m. Feb. 24 in Mendocino Superior Court in Ukiah.

But a number of documents received as part of a public records request to the City of Fort Bragg, asking for all material related to Mendocino Railways' activities and plans on the millsite over the past two years, shed light on many of the issues the court will likely be considering.

All the documents responding to the request can be viewed on the City of Fort Bragg's website (Public Records Request section, Request No. 21-277).

The basic questions involving state and local jurisdiction on the millsite are: is the Skunk Train a Class III railroad, commonly defined as freight-carrying and part of the interstate rail system, and therefore regulated as a public utility by the State of California, with powers of eminent domain and exemption in some cases from state and local regulation?

Second, if it is considered a Class III railroad, how would it be regulated and which of its activites would be considered “railroad operations” and therefore exempt from state local oversight?

The only document that relates directly to the Skunk Train's rail status is a letter from California Transportation Commission Utilities Engineer David Stewart dated Dec. 7, 2018, in response to a request for clarification by Skunk Train President Robert Pinoli. Stewart states in the brief letter “Mendocino Railway is regarded as a Class III railroad by the California Public Utilities Commission,” citing state code and a website.

There is a lot more material — mostly in the form of correspondence between attorneys and officials for Sierra Energy, Mendocino Railway, the City of Fort Bragg and the California Coastal Commission — on the question of the Skunk Train's status and what activities on the millsite would be exempt from state and local regulation. 

A key letter that addresses many of the particulars and sheds light both on the Coastal Commission's view of the issues, and the consternation those issues have caused officials so far, is worth quoting at length.

On Dec. 21, 2018, Cristin Kenyon, Coastal Commission Supervising Analyst, wrote to Marie Jones, then Fort Bragg's Community Development Director, about Mendocino Railway’s request for an exemption from a Coastal Development Permit for a lot line adjustment while buying property from Georgia-Pacific: 

”It is our understanding,” Kenyon writes “the Mendocino Railway (also referred to in this letter as the Skunk Train) is claiming that the contemplated lot line adjustment does not need a CDP (Coastal Development Permit) because Mendocino Railway intends to purchase one of the resultant lots and extend railroad operations onto that resultant lot, and Mendocino Railway's status as a railroad subject to Surface Transportation Board regulation exempts Mendocino Railway from state and local regulation (i.e. a claim of federal pre-emption).

”However, there is no existing railroad service, facilities or operations on the subject property. It is our understanding that the STB [Federal Surface Transportation Board] has not authorized any railroad activities on the property. The property is the site of a former lumber mill and is largely vacant except for a 67,500 square foot structure known as Dry Shed #4. Dry Shed #4 was used for storage, drying and curing of timber for several decades and is currently vacant. Further, the property in question, including all the parcels implicated in the lot line adjustment, is owned by the Georgia-Pacific Corporation. None of the property is owned by Mendocino Railway or any other railroad, nor do we know of any legal right, entitlement or any other entitlement the railroad has to use the property.

”I received an email from you on Nov. 28, 2018 stating it was the city attorney's opinion that the subject lot line adjustment requires a CDP. The email stated in relevant part, ‘The Skunk Train is a local tourism train and is claiming exemption from the Coastal Act under the Interstate Commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. Our attorney maintains that as a local serving tourist train, they are not engaged in interstate commerce and thus are not exempt from…land use regulations including the Coastal Act and the LCP.’

“On Dec. 19, 2018, I received another email from you with a contrary decision. The email stated that the city's attorney had determined that the Skunk Train is exempt from the requirement to obtain a CDP to process a lot line adjustment on the millsite. The email stated in relevant part, ‘The city's attorney has determined that the Skunk Train as a public utility is exempt from the process to obtain a CDP to process a LLA adjustment for the transfer of property between G-P and the Skunk Train.’

“A subsequent email from you yesterday indicated that you are ‘not at liberty to share the city's legal opinion at this time.’

“This letter officially requests that the City justify, in writing, its basis for 1) revising its Nov. 28, 2018 decision that the proposed LLA requires a CDP, and 2) instead taking the position that the contemplated lot line adjustment would not require a CDP from the City, including providing the specific basis for any determination that the City would be pre-empted by federal law from requiring a CDP in this case.”

Russell Hildebrand, then Fort Bragg's City Attorney, answered a month later, on Jan. 17, 2019. His three page letter basically states that the city got a statement from the California Public Utilities Commission that the Skunk is legally considered a Class III (freight) railroad. That, Hildebrand argued, along with a California State Supreme Court ruling in the case ‘Friends of the Eel River v. North Coast Rail Authority,’ settled whether the Skunk Train was subject to federal regulation and exemption in the case.

The exchange was prompted by another letter two months earlier from Thomas Cregger of Cregger and Chalfant LLP, a Sacramento law firm, to Torgny Nilsson, Chief Operating Officer of Sierra Energy, sister company to Sierra Railroad. Both Sierra Energy and Sierra Railroad are owned by Mike and Chris Hart. Sierra Railroad is parent company of Mendocino Railway. The letter was forwarded to the City of Fort Bragg.

In it, Cregger lays out the basic legal arguments for the claim that the Skunk Train is exempt from state and local land use and environmental regulation when its activities relate to “railroad operations.”

“As to the question of whether Mendocino (Railway) is required to comply with the Subdivision Map Act, the answer is no,” Cregger writes. “Mendocino's status as a railroad corporation and public utility, and Mendocino's intended use of the property to extend Mendocino's track and develop related rail facilities (considered to be rights of way) specifically exempts Mendocino from any requirement under the Subdivision Map Act regarding filling of a parcel map.

“The related, and more complex issue, raised by both the City and the surveyor, is whether the City can require that Mendocino submit to the approval process of a CDP, under the California Coastal Act…

“Under the Interstate Commerce Commission Termination Act…the STB exercises jurisdiction over the operation and regulation of railroads, such that in many instances state and local regulation of railroads is pre-empted by federal law. See, generally, Friends of the Eel River v. North Coast Rail Authority (2017).”

Summarizing the pre-emptive effect of the ICCTA with regard to environmental regulation, the California Supreme Court observed:

“More specifically, the rule seems well accepted in federal courts that the ICCTA preempts state and local environmental regulation requiring private railroad companies to acquire permits or preclearance as a condition to operating the railroad, as well as remedies that would prohibit the conduct of railroad business pending compliance with state or local environmental requirements.”

The matter was not resolved by Feb. 11, when Anthony LaRocca, counsel for Mendocino Railway, wrote John Ainsworth, Executive Director of the California Coastal Commission. LaRocca seems to argue that any confusion about Mendocino Railway's federal status was just a mistake by City Hall staff: “In subsequent discussions with the City, Mendocino learned that the City has not changed its view on fedeeal preemption of the permit requirement in this case, but it is now reluctant to allow the sale to proceed, given the possibility of litigation arising between the City and the Commission over this matter.”

This was answered on June 11, 2019 with a 14-page brief from Ann Cheddar, the Coastal Commission's senior legal counsel. Cheddar does not say whether a Coastal Development Permit should be required in that particular case. Basically, she writes, it depends on what the land would be used for, and her opinion was that Mendocino Railway hadn't given enough information to show that it would be for “railroad operations.”

Cheddar, though, rejected the idea of any blanket exemption from state and local oversight “including for a land division that does not appear to be undertaken as part of the interstate rail network. Federal regulation of railroads is not limitless.”

Cheddar's (and presumably the Coastal Commission's) overall position was: “both caselaw and STB (Surface Transportation Board) decisions support the continuing application of Coastal Act requirements prior to engaging in development in situations where the ICCTA does not preempt the Coastal Act, including the expansion of intrastate transportation that is not part of the interstate rail network and the implementation of federal law that preserves state power.”

Later on, Cheddar states “Mendocino Railway's Skunk Train is not being operated as part of the interstate rail network,” a position she argues is supported by a 2007 Surface Transportation Board decision — “The 2007 STB decision also states that the line has been severed from, and is no longer linked to, and part of, the Interstate rail system.” Cheddar takes issue with applying the State Supreme Court decision allowing exemption from state environmental regulation under the Interstate Commerce clause, saying the court “expressly cautioned that their opinion ‘should not be read to suggest the ICCTA preemption clause is so sweeping as to displace other state powers preserved under other federal provisions’.”

After stating that “we are unable to conclude that the ICCTA results in preemption of Coastal Act permitting requirements for the contemplated railway development, including a land division that does not appear to be undertaken as part of the interstate rail network.”

Cheddar concludes: “Also, before conducting any development in the Coastal Zone, we request that Mendocino Railway coordinate with Coastal Commission staff (and local government, as applicable) to determine if the particular action may require either a CDP or a CZMA (Coastal Zone Management Act) Review.”

BEFORE WE SAY FAREWELL to CEO Angelo we should also note how much money she stands to make off of Mendocino’s precarious pension fund. We know of two ways to calculate pensions for County employees which Ms. Angelo’s contract says she’s qualifed to benefit from. 

The first method is 2.5% of final salary for each year worked. 

That would mean .025 x $220,000 x 30 = $165,000 per year pension.

The second method comes from California Government Code which says that “the fraction of one-fiftieth of the member’s final compensation set forth opposite the member’s age at retirement, taken to the preceding completed quarter year, in the following table [of age multipliers] multiplied by the number of years of current service or years of current and prior service with which the member is entitled to be credited at retirement, but in no event shall the total retirement allowance exceed the member’s final compensation.”

The table says that since Ms. Angelo is 65 or older the factor is 1.3093

$220,000 / 50 = $440 

and $440 x 30 x 1.3093 = $172,800 per year

Essentially, CEO Angelo stands to gross around $170k per year from Mendocino County in perpetuity, although since she worked for Mendocino County for 12 of her 30 years employment, it’s possible that some percentage of that $170k will come from San Diego County’s pension fund. We are unable to find any applicable data on that score.

According to Transparent California for 2020, that $170k pension is still more than any other County employee. 

We briefly thought that CEO Angelo might try applying for some kind of stress disability retirement claim based on the AVA’s frequent stress-inducing criticism. But as far as we can tell, unless the disability is the direct cause of the retirement, it cannot make someone eligible for a disability pension.

(Mark Scaramella)

ALBION’S LOST RAILROAD

by Katy Tahja

Questions about the Albion Lumber Company’s miles of railroad on the Mendocino Coast have been popping up at the Kelley House Museum recently. Here’s a review of how this little-known railroad came to be, what it did, where it went, and what remains for us to see.

Albion’s first steam sawmill was built in 1854. It burned in 1867 and was rebuilt. It burned again in 1879 and was rebuilt, again. To bring logs out of the woods and down to the mill, the sawmill owners built a narrow-gauge railroad in 1881 with rails forty inches apart. The cars were loaded in the woods, then pulled along the rails by horses to the riverbank, where they were dumped and eventually floated downriver to the mill when sufficient seasonal rains allowed.

Steam locomotives replaced horses in 1885 and railroads for log transport were extended three miles upriver to Brett, then on to Railroad Gulch. In 1889 a 1,200-foot-long wharf brought the rails right to the ocean’s edge. A few years later the lines reached Keene Summit in Comptche eleven miles inland. The mill burned down yet again in 1900 but was immediately rebuilt.

By 1902 it was the owner’s intention to continue the tracks on to Boonville to bring lumber, freight and passengers from the interior of the county to the coast. The railroad was then named the Albion and Southeastern. A mill at Wendling (now called Navarro), twenty miles inland, wanted to be a customer. In 1904 a branch from the South Fork to the North Fork of the river was completed to Clearbrook. 

In another name change the Albion and Southeastern became the Fort Bragg and Southeastern in 1905. Then in 1907 everything was sold to Southern Pacific Railroad, to supply materials for their railroad expansion in Mexico. Tiny locomotives were replaced by bigger ones because loads became heavier and roadbeds steeper. Track was extended as Navarro Lumber and Stearns Lumber along today’s Highway 128 made use of the rail line.

In 1908 tracks reached Comptche. Expansion continued and by 1921 there were twenty-five miles of track now administered by Northwestern Pacific Railroad on the coast and in Anderson Valley. 

In 1922 seven more miles of track were built on the North Fork, tracks extended from Keene Summit to Dutch Henry Creek, and spur lines stretched toward Dunn. But the dream of building the rail line on to Healdsburg and connecting to the outside world never happened. 

Once Southern Pacific’s railroad expansion was done there was less demand for materials and the Albion mill sawed its last log in 1928. The railroad also ended service that year. By 1930 the mill and railroad were gone, and everything was scrapped by 1937. 

Today, rail enthusiasts can park about eight miles out the Comptche Ukiah Road at a wide spot on the south side of the road and see the road down to Clearbrook Junction beyond the lumber company’s gate. Other old railroad grades can be seen at the Keene Summit gate on Flynn Creek Road; along Comptche Ukiah Road from Tom Bell Flat on both sides of the river driving east towards Comptche; and along Flynn Creek Road south of Keene Summit on the west bank of the creek. 

The one and only publication on the Albion Railroad was written by Stanley Borden in 1961 and appeared as Vol. 24, No. 12, Issue No. 264 of “The Western Railroader.” This booklet’s thirty-two pages contain details about the railroad’s equipment and locomotives, maps, and excellent photos. 

Read it here: mendorailhistory.org/downloads/Western-Railroader_Albion.pdf

(Visit the Kelley House Museum Thursdays through Sundays from 11am to 3pm. 45007 Albion Street, Mendocino. 707/937-5791. Historic walking tours can be booked at our website kelleyhousemuseum.org.)

HEALTH CARE MEETING TOMORROW

The Mendocino Coast Health Care District will hold a Regular Meeting on Thursday, February 24th.

Closed Session at 5 PM; Open Session at 6 PM.

Join the meeting at: us06web.zoom.us/j/82238573704?pwd=WG9ta2tTcnNnYjIxUUdjNXNZMjJGdz09

or phone to: +12532158782,,82238573704#,,,,*978702# US (Tacoma)

LOADED WHILE LOADED

On Saturday, February 19, 2022 at approximately 11:53 p.m., Officers of the Fort Bragg Police Department conducted a traffic enforcement stop, on a red Chevrolet in the 500 block of S. Franklin Street. Officers contacted the driver who was identified as Michael McSorley, 39, of Elk. 

Throughout the course of the investigation, Officers determined McSorley was possibly driving under the influence of an alcoholic beverage. Prior to asking McSorley to exit his vehicle, it was determined he was in possession of an unregistered concealed firearm with a high capacity magazine and a concealed dirk/dagger. Officers safely removed the firearm from McSorley and rendered it safe without incident. 

McSorley declined to participate in any of the field sobriety tests and was subsequently placed under arrest for driving under the influence. Prior to storing McSorley’s vehicle, Officers conducted an inventory for any valuable items. Officers located a .45 caliber handgun that was loaded and concealed in the glovebox of the vehicle. Upon further investigation, it was determined that this .45 caliber handgun was not registered to McSorley. Officers also located a glass pipe with a bulbous end inside the Chevrolet. 

A search of McSorley’s person revealed a white crystalized substance which is consistent with the appearance of methamphetamine. McSorley was arrested and charged for DUI, concealing a dirk or dagger, carrying a concealed weapon, carrying a loaded firearm, carrying a concealed weapon in a vehicle, carrying a loaded handgun that’s not registered, possession of a high capacity magazine, possession of unlawful paraphernalia, possession of a controlled substance while armed with a firearm, and possession of a controlled substance. 

Questions regarding this press release may be forwarded to Officer Jarod Frank at 707-961-2800 ext. 139 or jfrank@fortbragg.com. 

ED NOTES

BIDEN, tottered on-stage Tuesday afternoon for a no-questions announcement that he has applied some financial sanctions on Russia. “Yesterday Vladimir Putin recognized two regions of Ukraine as independent states and he bizarrely asserted that these regions are no longer part of Ukraine and they are sovereign territory. To put it simply, Russia just announced that it is carving out a big chunk of Ukraine. Who in the Lord's name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called ‘countries’ on territory that belonged to his neighbors?” Biden spoke for about 9 minutes, tottering off camera as the media pack shouted questions at his back. Biden said he will “begin to impose sanctions” that go “far beyond the steps we and our allies and partners implemented in 2014. And if Russia goes further with this invasion, we stand to go further with sanctions.”

THE SIR FRANCIS DRAKE hotel, an institution on Powell in San Francisco for nearly a hundred years, has been renamed as The Beacon Grand following a large-scale re-do. While circumnavigating the globe between 1577 and 1580, Drake landed in Marin where he was well-received by Native Americans when he dropped anchor at what became known as Drake's Bay. The historical re-write brigades have decided Drake's life as a state-sanctioned, sea-going brigand disqualifies him from having his name attached to landmarks and institutions like high schools and hotels. I was just thinking about that famously binary oppression represented by Adam and Eve. Let's re-write it all, right back to the beginning!

FROM SPY ROCK to rock millionaire. One day some years ago, I was standing in Boont Berry Farm chatting with Karen Espeleta who’d just introduced me to her teenage daughter, a very pretty girl even beneath what seemed like several pounds of nose rings and, as I recall, a purple Mohawk. As a right minded youngster, the fashionably-accoutered lass had about as much interest in me as in any other tiresome adult acquaintance of her mother’s, until Karen mentioned that I was a good friend of Lawrence Livermore a regular contributor to the AVA. The kid stared at me. “You, you know Lawrence Livermore? she stammered at the pure improbability of the relationship. That was my first awareness that LL had become a truly famous person, known to avant garde teens everywhere. Now I pick up the Sunday Chron and there he is denying that he’s just sold his record company for thirty million dollars! Out of the parched hills of Laytonville to big time show biz, and whaddya know? Livermore, for those of you deliberately out of the know like me, brought us the Green Day band and several other lucrative punk bands that generate millions of dollars in sales to young people. LL lives in New York these days, far from the hostile venue of the North County where he put out the pioneering and uncompromising ‘zine, the Lookout.

IN THIS PARTICULAR branch of the media it’s prudent to maintain enough upper body strength to repel the occasional reader who, as has happened, strides into the editorial offices prepared for ultra-vi. Or to waylay the editor at assemblies of semi-leftwing idealists sworn to “Ghandian non-violence.” The non-violent are always the most violent people any journalist encounters. One turbulent night in Garberville a gaggle of eco-hags gathered in a circle to pray that I died on my trip back to Boonville. God has made no creature so terrible as an old hippie gone mean.

SO I STAY in good enough shape to physically repel other octogenarians. Younger guys I just say, “Scaramella wrote that, not me.” Last time in the doctor’s office, he said, “You’ve got the metabolism of a 16-year-old,” peering skeptically at me as if restraining the impulse to add, “and the mind to match.” I’d attempted a little joke as he slipped on the rubber glove for an expedition up Proctology Canyon. “No matter how beautiful, don’t linger please,” I’d quipped. “I’ve never heard that one,” the medical man said. “But wait,” I fairly shouted, "why bother to take the trip at my age?” He agreed, and that was that forever for that particular indignity.

CATCH OF THE DAY, February 22, 2022

ANTHONY AGUILAR JR., Ukiah. Domestic battery, damaging communications device.

DEREK CLEEK, Ukiah. Burglary. (No photo available.)

CALEB DEVINE-GOMES, Ukiah. Battery on peace officer.

ANGELA DURAZO, Covelo. DUI.

JACINTO FLOTA, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

NICHOLAS HUNTER, Ukiah. Domestic battery, witness intimidation, controlled substance for sale, probation revocation.

DALLAS LYONS, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

MICHAEL MCSORLEY, Elk. DUI, concealed dirk-dagger, concealed firearm in vehicle with prior, loaded firearm in public, concealed weapon, paraphernalia, loaded handgun not registered owner, large capacity magazine, controlled substance while armed with loaded firearm, controlled substance.

STEVEN RICH SR., Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, parole violation.

JONATHAN YOUNG, Ukiah. Brandishing deadly weapon other than a gun in a threatening, rude, or angry manner, criminal threats.

BOB DYLAN & THE UKRAINE CRISIS

by Norman Solomon

Red-white-and-blue chauvinism is running wild. Yet there are real diplomatic alternatives to the collision course for war.

Fifty-nine years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio for a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:

I've learned to hate the Russians

All through my whole life

If another war comes

It's them we must fight

To hate them and fear them

To run and to hide

And accept it all bravely

With God on my side

In recent days, media coverage of a possible summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has taken on almost wistful qualities, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse are already out of the barn.

Fatalism is easy for the laptop warriors and blow-dried studio pundits who keep insisting on the need to get tough with “the Russians,” by which they mean the Russian government. Actual people who suffer and die in war easily become faraway abstractions. “And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”

During the last six decades, the religiosity of U.S. militarism has faded into a more generalized set of assumptions—shared, in the current crisis, across traditional political spectrums. Ignorance about NATO’s history feeds into the good vs. evil bromides that are so easy to ingest and internalize.

On Capitol Hill, it’s hard to find a single member of Congress willing to call NATO what it has long been: an alliance for war (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya) with virtually nothing to do with “defense” other than the defense of vast weapons sales and, at times, even fantasies of regime change in Russia.

The reverence and adulation gushing from the Capitol and corporate media (including NPR and PBS) toward NATO and its U.S. leadership are wonders of thinly veiled jingoism. About other societies, reviled ones, we would hear labels like “propaganda.” Here the supposed truisms are laundered and flat-ironed as common sense.

Glimmers of inconvenient truth have flickered only rarely in mainstream U.S. media outlets, while a bit more likely in Europe. “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized—NATO enlargement—there has been no American diplomacy at all,” Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Financial Times as this week began. “Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

As Sachs noted, “Many insist that NATO enlargement is not the real issue for Putin and that he wants to recreate the Russian empire, pure and simple. Everything else, including NATO enlargement, they claim, is a mere distraction. This is utterly mistaken. Russia has adamantly opposed NATO expansion towards the east for 30 years, first under Boris Yeltsin and now Putin…. Neither the U.S. nor Russia wants the other’s military on their doorstep. Pledging no NATO enlargement is not appeasement. It does not cede Ukrainian territory. It does not undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

Whether or not they know much about such history, American media elites and members of Congress don’t seem to care about it. Red-white-and-blue chauvinism is running wild. Yet there are real diplomatic alternatives to the collision course for war.

Speaking Monday on Democracy Now!, Katrina vanden Heuvel—editorial director of The Nation and a longtime Russia expert—said that implementing the Minsk accords could be a path toward peace in Ukraine. Also, she pointed out, “there is talk now not just of the NATO issue, which is so key, but also a new security architecture in Europe.”

Desperately needed is a new European security framework, to demilitarize and defuse conflicts between Russia and U.S. allies. But the same approach that for three decades pushed to expand NATO to Russia’s borders is now gung-ho to keep upping the ante, no matter how much doing so increases the chances of a direct clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers.

The last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union before it collapsed, Jack Matlock, wrote last week: “Since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.”

But excluding Russia from security structures, while encircling it with armed-to-the-teeth adversaries, was a clear goal of NATO’s expansion. Less obvious was the realized goal of turning Eastern European nations into customers for vast arms sales.

A gripping chapter in “The Spoils of War,” a new book by Andrew Cockburn, spells out the mega-corporate zeal behind the massive campaigns to expand NATO beginning in the 1990s. Huge Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin were downcast about the dissolution of the USSR and feared that military sales would keep slumping. But there were some potential big new markets on the horizon.

“One especially promising market was among the former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact,” Cockburn wrote. “Were they to join NATO, they would be natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had inherited from General Dynamics. There was one minor impediment: the [George H. W.] Bush administration had already promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of the settlement ending the Cold War.”

By the time legendary foreign-policy sage George F. Kennan issued his unequivocal warning in 1997—“expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era”—the expansion was already happening.

As Cockburn notes, “By 2014, the 12 new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons.”

If you think those weapons transactions were about keeping up with the Russians, you’ve been trusting way too much U.S. corporate media. “As of late 2020,” Cockburn’s book explains, NATO’s collective military spending “had hit $1.03 trillion, or roughly 20 times Russia’s military budget.”

Let’s leave the last words here to Bob Dylan, from another song that isn’t on radio playlists. “Masters of War.”

Let me ask you one question

Is your money that good?

Will it buy you forgiveness

Do you think that it could?

(Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" (2006) and "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State" (2007).)

OUR FOUNDING REALTOR

by Mark Scaramella

As we celebrate President’s Day , it’s useful to look beneath the blizzard of conventional admiration for George Washington, the nation’s founding realtor. 

America’s founders were eloquent in their speeches about liberty and “the pursuit of happiness” and the rest. They deserve credit for putting their considerable wealth on the line (much of it obtained by smuggling) which they freely admitted in last sentence of their Declaration of Independence:

“…And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Devine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor.”

We’ve dabbled in obscure American history before, writing about the the ugly underbelly of war profiteering that accompanied the Revolutionary War, typified by a little known affair known to historians as “The Silas Deane Affair,” exposed by Thomas Paine at great personal cost to himself, but since known only to a few arcane historians who uncover the scraps from buried archives and records of these underhanded and uncomfortable to acknowledge dealings.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2007/02/01/our-founding-war-profiteers/

We’ve also written previoiusly about how most of America’s founding Congress profited handsomely by Alexander Hamilton’s scheme to create the Founding Treasury Department, a scheme which James Madison privately complained about at the time by observing, “Of all the shameful circumstances of this business, it is among the greatest to see the members of this legislature who were most active in pushing this job openly grasping its emoluments.”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2004/03/30/the-founding-scam/

And about George Washington’s $500k (in 1780) Post-war Founding Expense Account

https://www.theava.com/archives/76207#22

So we probably should not be surprised to learn that Washington took significant financial advantage of his high office as President to enrich himself and his family and friends by private land deals accompanying the creation of Washington [sic] DC.

In combining his public service with personal gain, Washington unwittingly set a founding precedent which has been followed in one way or another by most of America’s subsequent elected officials. 

This latest “revelation” (known to a few reluctant historians who do their best to launder the uncomfortable historical facts with offsetting patriotic packaging) can be found buried in the otherwise mundane recent book by Nathaniel Philbrick, “Travels With George.” 

Philbrick is author of the much more interesting “In The Heart of the Sea” about the whaleship Essex and the real incident that inspired Herman Melville’s classic “Moby Dick.”

In Philbrick’s recent knock off of John Steinbeck’s much better written “Travels With Charlie,” Philbrick writes about his personal attempt to retrace Washington’s inaugural trip around the Colonies-turned-United States in his uncreatively titled “Travels with George”:

“Washington’s long-held obsession with the Potomoc blinded him to the impropriety of a president overseeing the construction of a city in the virtual backyard of his home — a city built with slave labor on land bought and sold by his friends and relatives. Washington didn’t want to be king, but there was a truly monarchical sense of privilege about the making of Washington DC. As John Adams later wrote, ‘George Washington profited from the creation of a the federal city on the Potomac by which he raised the value of his property and that of his family a thousand percent at an expense to the public of more than his whole fortune.’ … Until the end of his life, Washington, a man who prided himself on his impartiality, remained convinced that the construction of the capitol on the Potomac was in the nation’s best interests. And yet as a [unidentified] congressman at the time wisely commented concerning the President’s preoccupation with what became Washington DC, ‘almost all men form their opinions by their interest without always knowing the governing principle of their motives or actions’.”

“Men” in this case meaning the unidentified congressman’s colleagues in “governing” public office, not those who were not privileged enough to get themselves elected to an office where they could arrange certain things for their own personal enrichment.

BAY AREA MAN RECENTLY CHARGED WITH OAKLAND MURDER Was Part Of The Stick-Up Crew That Targeted A Laytonville Cannabis Operation In 2020

27-year-old Bay Area man LaTrail White is suspected of murdering a man on an Oakland street on July 24, 2021. He currently sits in a Solano County jail awaiting his preliminary hearing. However, in September of 2020, he played a role in a violent cannabis robbery in Laytonville that shook the Black Oak Ranch community. Less than two years later, he could be going away for good. …

kymkemp.com/2022/02/23/bay-area-man-recently-charged-with-oakland-murder-was-part-of-the-stick-up-crew-that-targeted-a-laytonville-cannabis-operation-in-2020/

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Vlad attacks – 22:22 02/22/22. SloJoe wakes up and says, “Gotdang them Russkies, I knew it. Bring me a double scoop of Double Dunker on a sugar cone, and get me that football fella with the skirt.”

KNOCKED OUT IN 95 SECONDS!

Today in Old-West History -- On today’s date 126 years ago, Friday, February 21, 1896, the famous “Fitzsimmons-Maher Prizefight,” the unofficial World Heavyweight Championship of 1896, occurred on a sandbar on the Méxican side of the Río Grande near the town of Langtry, Texas, in which state the professional practice of pugilism was prohibited by law during that time.

This famous Victorian-Era prizefight was staged by famously eccentric Old-West saloon-keeper & justice of the peace Judge Phantly Roy Bean, Jr., the self-proclaimed “Law West of the Pecos.”

The following is an excerpt from the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas Online: 

On this day in 1896, colorful lawman Roy Bean staged a heavyweight championship fight on a sandbar just below Langtry, on the Méxican side of the Rio Grande. Bean, known as the “Law West of the Pecos,” was appointed justice of the peace for Pecos County in 1882. He settled at Eagle’s Nest Springs, which acquired a post office & a new name, Langtry, in honor of the English actress Lillie Langtry, whom Bean greatly admired. Bean soon became known as an eccentric & original interpreter of the law. When a man killed a Chinese laborer, for example, Bean ruled that his law book did not make it illegal to kill a Chinese. And when a man carrying forty dollars & a pistol fell off a bridge, Bean fined the corpse forty dollars for carrying a concealed weapon, thereby providing funeral expenses. He intimidated & cheated people, but he never hanged anybody. He reached his peak of notoriety with his staging of the match between Peter Maher of Ireland & Bob Fitzsimmons of Australia. The fight was opposed by civic & religious leaders such as Baptist missionary Leander Millican, & both the Méxican & the U.S. governments had prohibited it. Bean arranged to hold it on the Méxican side of the Rio Grande, knowing the Méxican authorities could not conveniently reach the site, & that Woodford H. Mabry's Texas Rangers would have no jurisdiction. The spectators arrived aboard a chartered train; after a profitable delay contrived by Bean, the crowd witnessed Fitzsimmons’s defeat of Maher in less than two minutes. Among the spectators was another somewhat disreputable lawman & boxing promoter, Bartholomew “Bat” Masterson.

ACCORDING TO JOE BIDEN’S EXECUTIVE ORDER imposing sanctions on the Donbass republics on Monday "the Russian Federation’s purported recognition of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) or Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) regions of Ukraine...constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States."

LETTER TO MY BOSS

I have enjoyed working here these past several years. You have paid me very well and given me benefits beyond belief. I have 3 to 4 months off per year, and a pension plan that will pay my salary till the day I die and then pay my estate one year's salary death bonus and then continue to pay my spouse my salary with increases until she or he dies along with a health plan that most people can only dream of having.

Despite this, I plan to take the next 12 to 18 months to find a new position. During this time I will show up for work when it is convenient for me. In addition, I fully expect to draw my full salary and all the other perks associated with my current job. Oh yes, if my search for this new job proves fruitless, I will be coming back with no loss in pay or status. 

Before you say anything, remember that you have no choice in this matter. I can, and I will do this.

Sincerely,

Every Member of Congress running for Re-Election

(via Irv Sutley)

CALIFORNIA ADVOCATES COUNTERATTACK CORPORATE CRIME CONTROL

by Ralph Nader

Want to unite conservatives and liberals in the Red and Blue states? Just mention those unreadable computer-generated bills we all get online or in the mail. Overflowing with abbreviations and codes, they are inscrutable, especially health care bills.

If you call the vendors for an explanation, be prepared to wait and wait and wait for any human being to answer or call back, even after you’ve pushed all the required buttons to leave a voice mail message. The vendors are counting on you to surrender, mumbling that you’ve got better things to do with your time.

If you’re lucky enough to get a human and you disagree about the bill, you know that if you persist against their assurances of accuracy, your credit score can go down. Algorithms can be made to work so impersonally.

A few months ago, the syndicated consumer columnist for the Washington Post, Michelle Singletary, tried to correct errors in her credit bureau’s file. She called trying to get through a “hellish nightmare,” a “journey to automation hell.” Service by algorithm doesn’t differentiate between ordinary and prominent customers. Everyone gets the same shaft.

One of the worst companies in not getting back to customer inquiries or complaints is the Bank of America. Sources tell us the Bank has algorithms that measure how long they can keep customers waiting so as to have fewer workers needed to answer the calls.

The very design of computerized bills is a premeditated endeavor by the cheaters. The nation’s expert, applied mathematician Malcolm Sparrow – a Harvard professor – wrote an entire book on this subject titled “License to Steal” in which he conservatively estimated that the billing fraud in the health care industry is 10% of all expenses or about $360 billion this year alone!

The anonymous cheaters, hiding behind the corporate web of complexity, keep getting bolder. They bill you for things you never bought or wanted. The Wells Fargo Bank did this to millions of their customers over the years. The bank opened unwanted credit card accounts and billed for auto insurance, for example, imposing sales quotas on their employees. The media caught the bank, finally. Wells Fargo had to pay out money in fines and restitution. The company easily absorbed the payments as part of the cost of doing business. No executive was criminally prosecuted; a few resigned. The Board of Directors was not replaced. And Wells Fargo is flying high today, pretty much unscathed.

Many consumers don’t even look at their bills anymore. They just give up and let the sellers, such as the utilities, get direct electronic payments from their bank accounts.

On July 30, 2014, Senator Jay Rockefeller’s consumer subcommittee held hearings on “cramming.” Here customers are billed for things on their telephone bill they never ordered by firms that somehow got the phone companies to add their charges. The testimony described what has to be seen as criminal billing. Members of Congress turned their backs on the proposed legislation to end this scam while keeping their pockets open to campaign contributions from the wrongdoers.

Credit scores, credit ratings, and grossly one-sided fine print contracts are resulting in the financial and contractual incarceration of the American consumer. In many instances, the corporate lawyers who create these contractual handcuffs make sure that you’ve “consented” to your “jailing,” to your rip-offs, to your giving up your rights to go to court to challenge marketplace abuses. They point to some deeply buried sentence in these contracts that you have never even seen.

Maybe someday such deceit by these lawyers, who are deemed “officers of the court,” will be considered legal malpractice.

Well, someone cares! In a groundbreaking report accompanied by a comprehensive proposed model act for state legislatures to enact, California consumer advocates Harvey Rosenfield and Laura Antonini document the thousand and one “non-stop thefts of our money, safety, time and privacy.”

If you read through the waves of documented corporate rip-offs, billing frauds, and deceptive promotions, you’ll be nodding so much, from your own experience, that you may have to stop and rest your neck.

The authors don’t just expose the fraudsters, however. They have drafted legislation to stop the corporate crooks and to protect and empower you in the perilous marketplace of corporate crime, fraud, and abuse.

Read the report (four years in the making) for yourself by visiting the Represent Consumers website. You will see how the eroded civil justice system can be toughened across the board to represent you.

Those of you who wish to listen to Harvey and Laura talk about their battle for American consumers, turn to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour where their interview will be available as a podcast on Saturday, February 26, 2022.

You’ll want to take your righteous fury straight to your state legislator with the model statute in hand.

CRAIG STEHR IN CRISIS

MARCO HERE. I just got frantic email from Craig Stehr. I literally cannot leave where I am to help him now even if I knew where to drive him to. Isn't there someone to call in Mendocino County services whose job is to help people like him? He's in his late 70s and has far overstayed his welcome at the last place he could; now he's somewhere they kicked him out of a long time ago. He'll be out in the cold with nothing but the clothes on his back. He has S.S. money coming, and he has food stamps. See Craig's email below:

Everything Changes

I am at Chester's at 2304 Rancheria Road off of West Road in Redwood Valley....Chester does not want me to be here!! I am trying to stay alive right now!!!!! Please call through What'sApp +32474791298 and speak with Jonas immediately who is taking care of the place while Chester is in Belize....I NEED YOU TO COME AND GET ME IMMEDIATELY!!!!! 1:07PM Tuesday February 22nd...or call Chester and ask him to let me stay for a day or two in order to stay alive...(707) 513-3590.

ED NOTE: I referred him to the homeless sort out center on South State, Ukiah. Last I heard from him he was on his way there where, at a minimum, he should be able to get a voucher for a motel room. Marco is correct; Mendocino County's 31-agency "continuum of care" provides well for the people paid to care but offer no care for people who desperately need it.

MIKE J COMMENTS:

The last posted update from Craig was when he checked into the Voll a few days ago. With his laptop needing repair to enable the battery being recharged, we have not since then heard from him. His last message indicated that he would check out today. He didn’t have adequate funds to pay for anymore sheltered nights, it seems, so he may now be “outside” or at the shelter on south State Street.

Last night I was briefed on the project homekey site on Orchard from a sober/sane person (formerly the onsite manager of the apartment complex where I live, but living now, for 2 years, in his car). He tells me that there are some vacancies there and troubles with meth users too. We need a status update on that in order to get suitable people like this guy, and people like Craig, sheltered.

Over $20 million dollars is budgeted for services that are largely directed to the homeless population. It doesn’t seem that adequate funds are alloted to sheltering people. Bay Area counties are building tiny home communities and buying motels to house homeless. Our politicians here need to get their act together and direct funds this way. There also needs to be a revival of the use of conservatorship laws directed to housing and treating tweakers and chronic drunks via involuntary commitment.

MARCO UPDATE:

I emailed Craig. I called the Willits Adult Protective Service and got a message that their voicemail was full and could not record. I called the Adult Protective Service number for Ukiah, left my email address, they got back to me pretty fast, we talked on the phone so they have all the info I have, and Sharon McCutcheon said she'd contact Craig and try to see what could be done.

LABEBA ALKHATTAT:

I hope you are having a fantastic Winter. My family and I are currently looking for a new place to homestead where we can live in a sustainable way, garden, farm and steward land in an eco-conscious way. We have many years experience as organic farmers and gardeners including family ancestry connected to agriculture. I grew up in a multi-generational ranching family. Agriculture has always been a part of my life. It is the roots of living in harmony with nature. We have photographs of previous gardens available, resumes and references. We are ready to continue farming growing healthful food for both our family and community. Our skill set includes: Planting, harvesting orchard care, farmers market experience, farm to table cuisine, small scale farming and backyard kitchen gardening, animal husbandry, bees wax candles, making ceramics, fiber, land crafts and more.

All the Best,

The Roots Gardeners- L&J

rootsgardens@yahoo.com

WEEKLY CANNABIS MEETING - FEBRUARY 25, 2022

The County of Mendocino Cannabis Program will be holding its weekly public meeting on Friday, February 25, 2022 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. (PST). If you'd like to send questions or comments regarding vegetation modification ahead of the meeting, you can do so by emailing the questions or comments by noon on Thursday, February 24, to cannabisprogram@mendocinocounty.org

Agenda:

• Program Updates
• Vegetation Modification 
• Future Agenda Items

Meeting Invitation Details:

To join via zoom please use the following link: https://mendocinocounty.zoom.us/j/87694156954

If you would prefer to call in please use one of the following numbers and the meeting code listed below (for higher voice quality, dial a number based on your current location):

• 1-669-900-9128 (San Jose)
• 1-253-215-8782 (Tacoma)
• 1-346-248-7799 (Houston)
• 1-646-558-8656 (New York)
• 1-301-715-8592 (Washington DC)
• 1-312-626-6799 (Chicago)

Webinar ID: 876 9415 6954

If you would prefer to watch the meeting, but not participate, you may do so utilizing the following YouTube link: https://youtu.be/K42EwGH-PR0

If you'd like to send questions or comments regarding vegetation modification ahead of the meeting, you can do so by emailing the questions or comments to cannabisprogram@mendocinocounty.org by noon on Thursday, February 24, 2022.

Sincerely, 

Mendocino Cannabis Program Staff

AS SANCTIONS START, RUSSIA'S TRADE FLOW SHIFTING TOWARDS CHINA

by David Lawder and Jason Lange

The United States is poised to unleash a wider array of sanctions against Russia if Moscow escalates the conflict in Ukraine, denying key Russian financial institutions and companies access to U.S. dollar transactions and global markets for trade, energy exports and financing.

But the United States and its allies have never before attempted to cut a $1.5 trillion economy out of global commerce, and it is unclear how much pressure even unified Western sanctions can put on Moscow.

A review of World Bank and United Nations trade data shows that since lesser sanctions were imposed in 2014 after Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea, China has emerged as its biggest export destination.

New sanctions could prompt Russia to try to deepen its non-dollar denominated trade ties with Beijing in an effort to skirt the restrictions, said Harry Broadman, a former U.S. trade negotiator and World Bank official with China and Russia experience.

"The problem with sanctions, especially involving an oil producer, which is what Russia is, will be leakage in the system," Broadman said. "China may say, 'We're going to buy oil on the open market and if it's Russian oil, so be it.'"

Under an executive order signed by President Joe Biden on Monday, any institution in Russia's financial services sector is a target for further sanctions, the White House said, noting that more than 80% of Russia's daily foreign exchange transactions and half its trade are conducted in dollars.

Biden, in announcing an initial raft of sanctions on Tuesday to penalize Russia for ordering troops into two separatist regions in eastern Ukraine, said he would "take robust action to make sure the pain of our sanctions is targeted at the Russian economy, not ours."

That may be easier said than done, with Russia among the world's top exporters of oil, natural gas, copper, aluminum, palladium and other important commodities. Oil prices hit new highs not seen since 2014 on Tuesday. read more

Russia accounted for 1.9% of global trade in 2020, down from 2.8% in 2013, according to the World Bank data. Its 2020 GDP ranked 11th globally, between Brazil and South Korea.

A review of Russian trade data in the World Bank's World International Trade Solution database shows that Russia's dependence on trade has declined over the past 20 years.

Russia's export destinations have changed as well. The Netherlands was the top export destination a decade ago, due to oil trade, but it has been supplanted in that role by China. Germany and Britain's purchases from Russia have held largely steady, while Belarus' imports have risen.

China remains Russia's top supplier of imports, with mobile phones, computers, telecommunications gear, toys, textiles, clothing and electronics parts among top categories. Its share of Russian imports has risen since 2014, while those from Germany have declined markedly. Ukraine's exports to China fell markedly over the past decade, while Belarus' shipments have changed little.

Ukraine's top exports to Russia in 2020 were aluminum oxide, railway equipment, coal, steel and uranium, according to the World Bank data.

(reuters.com)

WHEN BORING PEOPLE TURN DANGEROUS: Canada's Insane Power Grab

The Canadian government's decision to freeze bank accounts in the trucker protests is a mad leap toward bureaucratic dystopia

by Matt Taibbi

On Christmas Eve, 2018, New York Times writer Andrew Ross Sorkin published, “How Banks Unwittingly Finance Mass Shootings.” Chronicling the credit card history of the man who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida Sorkin noted Omar Mateen had not merely spent $26,532 on weapons and ammo in the eight months before the 2016 attack, but had wondered if his doing so had raised red flags:

“Two days before Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 more at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, he went on Google and typed “Credit card unusual spending…” His web browsing history chronicled his anxiety: “Credit card reports all three bureaus,” “FBI,” and “Why banks stop your purchases.”

“He needn’t have worried. None of the banks, credit-card network operators or payment processors alerted law enforcement officials about the purchases he thought were so suspicious.”

Sorkin’s piece ended up being an argument in favor of credit-card companies, payment processors, banks, and others working together to bring about a Minority Report-style panacea in which society’s dangerous folk could be cyber-identified and stopped before they commit horrific acts. At one point he quoted George Brauchler, the District Attorney who prosecuted the Century 16 movie shooter in Aurora Colorado, James Holmes:

“Do I wish someone from law enforcement had been able to go to his door and knock on his door and figure out a way to talk their way into it or to freak him out?” he said of Mr. Holmes. “Yeah, absolutely.”

I’ve never owned a gun and have been sympathetic to gun control ideas for as long as I can remember. Sorkin, however, was not talking about gun control. He was theorizing a quasi-privatized vision of social control that would bypass laws by merging surveillance capitalism and law enforcement.

In a rhetorical trick that’s since become common, he described how the failure of companies like Visa to block Mateen’s purchases made them “enablers of carnage.” Clearly, someone made the mistake of letting Sorkin see Sam Raimi’s Spiderman, and Cliff Robertson now whispers from the beyond to him too. If those with power to act don’t stop wrongdoing, aren’t they just shirking their great responsibility?

By the way, this same Sorkin once suggested he wouldn’t stop at arresting Edward Snowden, but go after the reporter who broke his story, too. “I would arrest him and now I’d almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, the journalist… he wants to help him get to Ecuador,” he said, on CNBC’s Squawk Box. It’s amazing how selective one can be in one’s authoritarian leanings. After Goldman, Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein appeared to commit perjury in 2011 when he told the Senate, “We didn’t bet against our clients,” Sorkin rushed an apologia into print saying “Mr. Blankfein wasn’t lying,” failing to remind audiences that his Dealbook blog at the Times was sponsored by… Goldman, Sachs.

Sorkin’s Visa piece is suddenly relevant again, after fellow former finance reporter Chrystia Freeland — someone I’ve known since we were both expat journalists in Russia in the nineties — announced last week that her native Canada would be making Sorkin’s vision a reality. Freeland arouses strong feelings among old Russia hands. Before the Yeltsin era collapsed, she had consistent, remarkable access to gangster-oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, who appeared in her Financial Times articles described as aw-shucks humans just doing their best to make sure “big capital” maintained its “necessary role” in Russia’s political life. “Berezovsky was one of several financiers who came together in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Communists out of the Kremlin” was typical Freeland fare in, say, 1998.

Then the Yeltsin era collapsed in corrupt ignominy and Freeland immediately wrote a book called Sale of the Centurythat identified Yeltsin’s embrace of her former top sources as the “original sin” of Russian capitalism, a “Faustian bargain” that crippled Russia’s chance at true progress. This is Freeland on Yeltsin’s successor in 2000. Note the “Yes, Putin has a reputation for beating the press, but his economic rep is solid!” passage at the end:

“It looks as if we're about to fall in love with Russia all over again…

“Compared to the ailing, drink-addled figure Boris Yeltsin cut in his later
years, his successor, Vladimir Putin, in the eyes of many western observers,
seems refreshingly direct, decisive and energetic… Tony Blair, who has already paid
Putin the compliment of a visit to Russia and received the newly installed
president in Downing Street in return, has praised him as a strong leader
with a reformist vision. Bill Clinton, who recently hot-footed it to Russia,
offered the equally sunny appraisal that “when we look at Russia today . . .
we see an economy that is growing . . . we see a Russia that has just
completed a democratic transfer of power for the first time in a thousand
years.”

“To be sure, some critics have lamented Putin’s support for the bloody second
war in Chechnya, accused him of eroding freedom of the press… and
worried aloud that his KGB background and unrepenting loyalty to the honor
of that institution could jeopardize Russia’s fragile democratic
institutions. But many of even Putin's fiercest prosecutors seem inclined to
give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the economy…”

Years later, she is somehow Canada’s Finance Minister, and what another friend from our Russia days laughingly describes as “the Nurse Ratched of the New World Order.” At the end of last week, Minister Freeland explained that in expanding its Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) program, her government was “directing Canadian financial institutions to review their relationships with anyone involved in the illegal blockades.”

She went on to describe the invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act in the dripping-fake tones of someone trying to put a smile on an insurance claim rejection, with even phrases packed with bad news steered upward in the form of cheery hypotheticals. As in, The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets? Have been shared? By the RCMP with financial institutions? And accounts have been frozen? As she confirmed this monstrous news about freezing bank accounts, Freeland burst into nervous laughter, looking like Tony Perkins sharing a cheery memory with “mother”:

Steve Saretsky: “Regardless of your political views, this is rather disturbing. Next up, CBDC.” 

Politicians have long insisted their hands are tied when it comes to punishing the type of crime that led to, for instance, the 2008 financial crisis. Whether it was Barack Obama’s corporate-defense-lawyer turned Attorney General Eric Holder talking about the systemic importance of banks having an “inhibiting influence” on prosecutions, or his top deputy Lanny Breuer saying thoughts of lost jobs “literally keep me up at night” as he ponders corporate enforcement actions, there was always an excuse.

When HSBC got caught laundering over $800 million for groups like the mass-murdering Sinaloa drug cartel, no government official asked any financial companies to “review their relationships” with Europe’s largest bank. Nobody leaned on any firms to stop doing business with Too Big to Fail scumlords who laundered money for terrorists, gouged customers in a foreign exchange scam, manipulated energy prices in California, or did any of a thousand other serious things.

If anything, the pattern has been opposite. Here in the U.S., Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup were repeatedly busted for violating federal fraud statutes, but authorities showered all three with billions in cash and logistical aid to help them acquire Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia, respectively, making their “inhibiting influence” even bigger. Because it’s awesome? To help rich crooks? Get even richer?

Freeland appeared with me on a long Bill Moyers segment once to discuss this very issue of non-enforcement of large-scale corporate wrongdoing. She did a good job evincing concern for all this unchecked corruption, recalling themes of Sale of the Century. Yet here she is now, deciding the moment to break glass and deploy incredibly dangerous emergency powers is, of all things, a protest of the great unwashed.

Deciding to seize funds is a major leap in the manic progression of a certain type of disordered authoritarian personality who’s suddenly everywhere. They’re coming out of decades-long disguises as milquetoast center-left careerists, and they all seem to believe now that all things on earth happen or don’t because of them. It’s as if Raskolnikov’s madness seized a generation of Western yuppies simultaneously.

It started after 9/11, when a sizable portion of the West’s intellectual class — even some who protested initially — accepted the idea that in the face of a big enough threat, everything is permitted. It started with small things like allowing the government to access library records, progressed to the shrugging acceptance that “We tortured some folks,” and moved quickly to the secret mass-surveillance programs that Sorkin wanted Greenwald and Snowden arrested for exposing.

For certain kinds of people, for the McKinsey consultants and Ivy League lobbyists and corporate lawyers and diplomats and Senate aides who get aroused watching the deskbound exploration of moral gray areas on shows like The Good Wife, the Giant Database we ostensibly built to fight Islamic terrorists long ago stopped being a terrifying super-tool of the kind Promethean legend warned humanity against. Instead it began to represent, to them, the righteous power that properly redounded to them for being so much smarter, wiser, and better educated than everyone else. They were put in charge of it for a reason!

We saw hints of what was coming after Brexit and around the time of Donald Trump’s election, via op-eds with headlines like, “Bring Back the Smoke-Filled Room.” The people needed saving from themselves. Leaving democracy in their hands was like letting a macaque run loose with a hammer. There was a significant heightening of “Democracy is overrated” rhetoric after Trump’s election, but the “No More Screwing Around” bugle-call didn’t really sound until the coordinated removal of Alex Jones from Internet platforms in August, 2018. This move was celebrated almost universally because Jones is a demented lunatic, but it was still a deeply un-American kind of move. Jones was a perfect fit for the old-school “Even a goddamned werewolf is entitled to legal counsel” defense of civil liberties, but Facebook, Apple, and YouTube put a very public kibosh on that, and it proved a turning point.

Once the Good Thinkers realized all it took was a few phone calls to a few pals in a few Silicon Valley boardrooms to eliminate a major social irritant, they immediately began looking around and asking (I predicted this at the time) what other public annoyances might need disappearing. In their minds, the fact that they had the power to remove purveyors of extremist rage and “It makes the frogs gay!” conspiracism at any time essentially made it their fault that any of those people were still on the air.

This is when you started to hear previously liberal intellectuals use language like, Why are we allowing this? A perfect recent example is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wondering aloud “why Tucker Carlson is allowed” to be an asshole on television, or Washington Post media writer Margaret Sullivan asking how Joe Rogan dodged “accountability” for his unacceptable vaccine views. Sullivan’s column reads like a confessional monograph on the authoritarian mind, implying Rogan was to blame for the death of her unvaccinated former Buffalo News colleague Miguel Rodriguez, even though “I have no idea whether he had ever listened to Joe Rogan’s podcast.”

It couldn’t be that Rodriguez simply came to his own decision, perhaps even a wrong decision, about getting vaccinated. To Sullivan, Rodriguez died because Rogan was allowed to speak, and because Spotify, which “enables him,” didn’t crack down on his BadThink before it reached Rodriguez’s apparently childlike mind.

Abroad, we’ve seen the mania for control in the refusal to leave Afghanistan (as GoodThinkers refused to accept they couldn’t force the cooperation of the local population), in the “Yats is our guy” intervention of our diplomats to prevent a common boxer like Vitali Klitschko from assuming too big a role in Ukraine’s post-Maidan government, and in our constant scrambling to intervene militarily everywhere from Niger to Syria to Libya and beyond. At home, we see it in Facebook hiring intelligence officials to “disrupt ideologies underlying extremism,” in efforts to make sure Amazon doesn’t sell Irreversible Damage, in PayPal teaming with the ADL to disallow transfers to and from “evil people,” and in countless other campaigns to use credit-card companies and processors and Internet platforms and other bureaucratic tools to stop “illegitimate” activity. People like writer C.J. Hopkins saw this coming years ago, but mainstream pundits were silent when it came to the possibility of overreach, so long as a threat such as Trump existed.

The more furiously they played at speech Whac-a-Mole, the more BadThink they found, usually in the form of people protesting their crackdowns. Disallowing all discussion of Stop the Steal somehow didn’t prevent people from believing the election was stolen, nor did removing Donald Trump from Twitter, but these people kept pushing harder. Maybe, Sullivan and others wondered, Fox should be banned, even if Fox had actually called the election for Biden? Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe is currently arguing Fox broadcasts are treason; sooner or later, there will be a serious effort to yank the channel from the air, because these people are delusional enough to think an extreme move like that would change hearts and minds. The situation long ago passed the point of absurdity. A recent example of how preposterous this has all gotten is TikTok locking Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti’s “Breaking Points” account for “hate speech,” the “hate” being a defense of Rogan:

Saagar Enjeti: “Our Breaking Points @tiktok account which amassed 50k followers in just 3 weeks has been locked for "hate speech" violation. To be clear the clip is a defense of Joe Rogan from 2 weeks ago which includes ZERO hate speech.”

Virtually any media figure who doesn’t work for a major corporate outlet and who has unconventional ideas about anything long ago had to accept that their Internet presences — which in some cases double as businesses — can be shut down at any time, for any reason, without any real right to explanation or appeal. That’s been troubling enough. This development in Canada takes this to a new level. We’re already seeing reports that people with family members in the “Freedom Convoy” are having “difficulty banking”:

Mackenzie Gray: “A senior police sources tells our @grahamctv, that they expect to break the back of the protest today and that some family members of convoy folks have had difficulty banking because a family member has been involved in the protest.”

This Soviet concept of guilt by association will now put it in the minds of everyone — not just in Canada but everywhere, since we’ve already seen these efforts reach into the pockets of American GoFundMe donors — that not only speech but their money might be disappeared, or frozen, because of their views, or the views of someone they know. This is madness, the kind of thing that sparks revolutions. It also forces a second look at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s much-panned remarks from 2013 about having a “level of admiration” for “the basic dictatorship” of China.

What Trudeau said he admired back then was China’s speed in turning its economy around, but it’s starting to seem like the admiration ran deeper. For years now Western thought leaders have been moving toward a Chinese-style social credit system, with labor more and more stripped of political rights and citizens algorithmically scored for financial and, now, political correctitude.

Remember at the outset of the pandemic, when a pair of Harvard professors wrote in The Atlantic, “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong”? That was no blip. What the likes of Trudeau, and the Harvard profs, and Sorkin, and Freeland, and all the rest are saying is no different from George W. Bush’s infamous “If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier, he he he... just so long as I’m the dictator, he he he.”

We killed Bush for saying that out loud, and rightfully so. But in the age of Trump, Brexit, January 6th, and Covid, we’re more and more being asked to sympathize with the authoritarian urges of the Trudeau set. How hard they have it, surrounded by Rogans and Honkers and other saboteurs, while tasked with stopping Covid, Putin, and white supremacy. If only we’d just shut up and give them more tools!

Because these dingbats don’t recognize the legitimacy of alternative beliefs, they can’t see that the trucker protests, for whatever else they are — according to some reports, annoying, costly, and inspiring a growing number of detractors — are grounded in fears of exactly this kind of bureaucratic credit system, where you need a stamp of social approval to travel or order a cheeseburger. This kind of thinking is supposed to be an anathema to Western democracy, even in Canada. The basic tensions between viewpoints came out in a bail hearing for Tamara Lich, the Alberta woman charged with “counseling to commit mischief” for organizing the $10 million GoFundMe campaign.

CBC described a confrontation at the hearing, when Lich’s husband Dwayne made the mistake of citing an American rights concept to the incredibly named Judge Julie Bourgeois:

“Honestly? I thought it was a peaceful protest and based on my first amendment, I thought that was part of our rights,” he told the court.

“What do you mean, first amendment? What’s that?” Judge Julie Bourgeois asked him.

“I don't know. I don’t know politics. I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t supportive of the blockade or the whatever, but I didn't realize that it was criminal to do what they were doing. I thought it was part of our freedoms to be able to do stuff like that.”

“Can you tell me if what they did is really legal?” Lich asked. “If this is something that they can be doing?” he said. Meanwhile, news came out that Trudeau was announcing the Emergencies Act would need to stay in place for a while, because of potential “future blockades.” Open-ended preventive autocracy, in Canada. Who had that on a Bingo card? Justin Trudeau? Chrystia Freeland? Christ, it’s like waking up to learn the cast of The Office has declared the Fourth Reich. Boring people are dangerous, too.