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Honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up. How do you respond to a rampaging bull of a billionaire in the political arena?  In America in 2016, the answer is obvious. You send in not the clowns, but the matador: another billionaire, of course. So Michael Bloomberg is now threatening to enter the race as a third-party candidate. According to the New York Times, he’s considering spending at least $1 billion of his $36 billion (or is it almost $49 billion?) fortune if it looks like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (just about the only candidate in the race not backed by billionaires and so an obvious threat to any billionaire around) might truly be nominated for president. Of course, if he wanted to, Bloomberg could dump billions into an election run, since he may be worth 11 or more Donald Trumps.  (And he could potentially tip the election to the Republicans or, if no one ends up with a majority in the Electoral College, even put it in the House of Representatives, making Paul Ryan the equivalent of the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore.)

In the post-Citizens United era, after the Supreme Court let a flood of plutocratic money pour through a super PAC darkly, the billionaires began to run rampant.  Soon enough, new informal “primaries” were set up in which potential candidates on bended knee toured the resorts and luxury locales those billionaires preferred, auditioning for their support.  And yet transformation has come so quickly to American politics that those may soon be considered the good old days of twenty-first-century democracy before the billionaires realized that, when it came to candidates, they didn't have to buy them, they could be them.

Donald Trump was the first to take that aperçu to the bank big time (though Ross Perot in 1992 and Steve Forbes in 1996 and 2000 broke the ground).  Now, as TomDispatch regular Nomi Prins, author of All the Presidents' Bankers, points out (offering the dollars and sense to back it up), the American electoral system is a genuine billionaire’s playground -- and ever more literally so.

And here, from the 1% point of view, is the heartwarming aspect to it all.  Once upon a time being a billionaire came with a certain taint, but in this great land of ours, such deficits can be overcome. Today -- talk about equality at the top -- you can be a billionaire, run for president, and stand a chance to win!  Think of this country in 2016 as a billionaire’s field of dreams. Tom

Democracy of the Billionaires
The Most Expensive Election Ever Is A Billionaire’s Playground (Except for Bernie Sanders)
By Nomi Prins

Speaking of the need for citizen participation in our national politics in his final State of the Union address, President Obama said, “Our brand of democracy is hard.” A more accurate characterization might have been: “Our brand of democracy is cold hard cash.”

Cash, mountains of it, is increasingly the necessary tool for presidential candidates. Several Powerball jackpots could already be fueled from the billions of dollars in contributions in play in election 2016. When considering the present donation season, however, the devil lies in the details, which is why the details follow.

With three 2016 debates down and six more scheduled, the two fundraisers with the most surprising amount in common are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Neither has billionaire-infused super PACs, but for vastly different reasons. Bernie has made it clear billionaires won’t ever hold sway in his court. While Trump... well, you know, he’s not only a billionaire but has the knack for getting the sort of attention that even billions can’t buy.

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Water drips from a leaky roof. The heat brings on a “moldy, rancid odor.” A child volunteer is tasked with killing giant roaches. Welcome to the Detroit public school system, which, according to a recent New York Times report, is “run down after years of neglect” and “teetering on the edge of financial collapse.” And yet, last Thursday, this was the closest thing to a “good news” story about Michigan on the front page of that newspaper. A companion piece covered the even more dismal “water crisis in the poverty-stricken, black-majority city of Flint,” a penny-pinching state “austerity” measure turned public health emergency that has left children there with elevated levels of lead in their blood, putting them at risk of lifelong adverse health effects.

How did it come to this? An America dotted with feral cities left to decay into ruin? Man-made catastrophes spawned by harebrained austerity schemes? A country of crumbling roads, unsafe bridges, failing schools, a woefully neglected mental health system whose ample slack has been taken up by a disastrous criminal justice system? Take your pick when it comes to rotten institutions and rotting infrastructure, since the list goes on and on. Presidential candidates are vowing to “make America great again” or talking about “reigniting” its “promise,” but perhaps a counterfeit, sepia-tinged trip to the beginning of the road that got us here isn’t really the solution to twenty-first-century America’s problems. TomDispatch regular Ann Jones has a different idea. In her latest piece, a joint TomDispatch/Nation article which will appear in print in the new issue of that magazine, Jones takes a welcome detour to a place where welfare isn’t a dirty word, the social safety net isn’t the preferred place for budget cuts, and axe-wielding children are -- believe it or not -- fostered, not feared: Scandinavia.

A world citizen who has journeyed across Africa, spent years living in the Afghan war zone, and was most recently a Fulbright Fellow in Norway, Jones examines how a couple of Nixon-era decisions led the U.S. down the road to ruin, while Scandinavian nations charted a different course, embracing principles of uplift, equality, and humanity. Yes, some American-esque values seem to be seeping into the Scandinavian scene of late, from the rise of anti-immigration sentiment in Sweden to a Danish town attempting to stick it to Muslims by way of pork meatballs in school lunches. But even far-right parties in these Nordic nations champion a robust welfare state and a generous social safety net. So let Jones, an intrepid journalist whose latest book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars -- The Untold Story, is already a classic of Iraq and Afghan War reporting, help explain why Norway, Denmark, and Sweden invariably top global indexes when it comes to affordable housing, education, health, life expectancy, and overall citizen satisfaction, while the United States has ended up with failing cities, crumbling schools, and poisoned water. Nick Turse

American Democracy Down for the Count
Or What Is It the Scandinavians Have That We Don’t?
By Ann Jones

[This is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and appears in print in slightly shortened form in the new issue of the Nation magazine.]

Some years ago, I faced up to the futility of reporting true things about America’s disastrous wars and so I left Afghanistan for another remote mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good life, on the job and in the family.

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It was the grisliest of stories: a decade and a half ago a former KGB man, Alexander Litvinenko, defected to England and turned on the powers-that-be in his own country, accusing its leader of both acts of assassination and, among other things, pedophilia.  Litvinenko died in 2006 thanks to a highly toxic radioactive isotope, Polonium 120, evidently slipped into his tea at a meeting with two Russian agents in a ritzy London bar.  That Polonium left a “trail” traced by British investigators from airplane seats to hotel rooms to that bar and finally pinned on the two Russians, one of whom was later elected to parliament and awarded a medal by the very man suspected of ordering the hit: Russian President Vladimir Putin.  So says a long-awaited British official inquiry into the death by a respected retired judge.

In other words, it’s quite a tale of state-sponsored horror, the kind of morally dark act you’d expect from an autocrat with Putin’s reputation and, when the report came out recently, it was significant news here.  The New York Times editorial page concluded: “Mr. Putin has built a sordid record on justice and human rights, which naturally reinforces suspicions that he could easily have been involved in the murder. At the very least, the London inquiry, however much it is denied at the Kremlin, should serve as a caution to the Russian leader to repair his reputation for notorious intrigues abroad.”

If Putin actually did such a thing, and it remains only a supposition, those comments are on the mark indeed.  A state-sponsored, extrajudicial act of assassination should appall us all and it’s the sort of subject that you can expect to be discussed in future election 2016 debates here -- as long as the president in question is Russian.  (When, last December, Donald Trump suggested in passing some possible equivalency between Putin’s reputed killings and Obama administration ones, he was roundly taken to task.)  Let me guarantee you one thing, no mainstream columnist, pundit, or reporter questioning presidential candidates will ever put Putin’s putative act in the same context as the extrajudicial, state-sponsored assassinations regularly ordered by another well-known president.  I’m speaking, of course, of the White House campaign of drone killings of “terror suspects,” including American citizens, across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa that began in 2002 and has never ended.  This despite the fact that, whatever doubt there may be about Putin’s order, there is none when it comes to those presidentially approved drone killings.

In fact, President Obama took on the role of assassin-in-chief with evident enthusiasm years ago (as will whoever enters the Oval Office in 2017).  He has overseen a years-long drone assassination spree based on a White House “kill list” of candidates chosen in what are called “terror Tuesday” meetings.  Keep in mind that that government-planned assassinations were officially banned in 1976.  Keep in mind as well that Putin’s order, if true, was directed at a single figure and only he died (though the Russian president is sometimes accused of being behind the deaths of Russian journalists and opposition figures, too).  Notoriously enough, however, the American assassination program regularly knocks off not only its intended targets but also a range of “collateral” figures, including in one case much of a wedding party in Yemen.

The likelihood that the role of the president in the drone campaigns will be seriously discussed in any future debate in campaign 2016 is essential nil.  And that’s just one of a myriad of subjects that, as TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of the much-anticipated book, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (due this April), points out today, are out of bounds for media questioners and candidates alike in an election in which so many words are being spoken and so little is truly being spoken about. Tom

Out of Bounds, Off-Limits, or Just Plain Ignored
Six National Security Questions Hillary, Donald, Ted, Marco, et al., Don’t Want to Answer and Won’t Even Be Asked
By Andrew J. Bacevich

To judge by the early returns, the presidential race of 2016 is shaping up as the most disheartening in recent memory. Other than as a form of low entertainment, the speeches, debates, campaign events, and slick TV ads already inundating the public sphere offer little of value. Rather than exhibiting the vitality of American democracy, they testify to its hollowness.

Present-day Iranian politics may actually possess considerably more substance than our own. There, the parties involved, whether favoring change or opposing it, understand that the issues at stake have momentous implications. Here, what passes for national politics is a form of exhibitionism about as genuine as pro wrestling.

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Failed States and States of Failure
“We Destroyed the Cities to Save Them” and Other Future Headlines
By Tom Engelhardt

One of the charms of the future is its powerful element of unpredictability, its ability to ambush us in lovely ways or bite us unexpectedly in the ass. Most of the futures I imagined as a boy have, for instance, come up deeply short, or else I would now be flying my individual jet pack through the spired cityscape of New York and vacationing on the moon. And who, honestly, could have imagined the Internet, no less social media and cyberspace (unless, of course, you had read William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer 30 years ago)? Who could have dreamed that a single country’s intelligence outfits would be able to listen in on or otherwise intercept and review not just the conversations and messages of its own citizens -- imagine the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century -- but those of just about anyone on the planet, from peasants in the backlands of Pakistan to at least 35 leaders of major and minor countries around the world?  This is, of course, our dystopian present, based on technological breakthroughs that even sci-fi writers somehow didn’t imagine. 

And who thought that the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street were coming down the pike or, for that matter, a terror caliphate in the heart of the former Middle East or a Donald Trump presidential run that would go from success to success amid free media coverage the likes of which we’ve seldom seen? (Small career tip: don’t become a seer. It’s hell on Earth.)

All of this might be considered the bad but also the good news about the future.  On an increasingly grim globe that seems to have failure stamped all over it, the surprises embedded in the years to come, the unexpected course changes, inventions, rebellions, and interventions offer, at least until they arrive, grounds for hope.  On the other hand, in that same grim world, there's an aspect of the future that couldn’t be more depressing: the repetitiveness of so much that you might think no one would want to repeat.  I’m talking about the range of tomorrow’s headlines that could be written today and stand a painfully reasonable chance of coming true.

I’m sure you could produce your own version of such future headlines in a variety of areas, but here are mine when it comes to Washington’s remarkably unwinnable wars, interventions, and conflicts in the Greater Middle East and increasingly Africa.

What “Victory” Looks Like

Let’s start with an event that occurred in Iraq as 2015 ended and generated headlines that included “victory,” a word Americans haven’t often seen in the twenty-first century -- except, of course, in Trumpian patter.  ("We're going to win so much -- win after win after win -- that you're going to be begging me: 'Please, Mr. President, let us lose once or twice. We can't stand it any more.' And I'm going to say: 'No way. We're going to keep winning. We're never going to lose. We're never, ever going to lose.’")  I’m talking about the “victory” achieved at Ramadi, a city in al-Anbar Province that Islamic State (IS or ISIL) militants seized from the Iraqi army in May 2015.  With the backing of the U.S. Air Force -- there were more than 600 American air strikes in and around Ramadi in the months leading up to that victory -- and with U.S.-trained and U.S.-financed local special ops units leading the way, the Iraqi military did indeed largely take back that intricately booby-trapped and mined city from heavily entrenched IS militants in late December. The news was clearly a relief for the Obama administration and those headlines followed.

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Iraq and Afghanistan are separated by more than 1,000 miles and, although they both exist in what is now known as the Greater Middle East, they had little in common -- at least until March 2003, when the Bush administration followed up its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by invading Iraq.  Since then, they’ve had quite a bit in common, including vast infusions of U.S. funds and the massive levels of corruption that accompany them, as well as the way refugees from both countries have been joining the same flow of the desperate and dispossessed heading for Europe.  These days, with the spread of an Islamic State franchise to Afghanistan, even their insurgents are becoming part of the same “brand.” And there’s one other thing they’ve had in common in these years: ghosts.

In both countries, the U.S. military has built, on paper, vast local security forces from scratch to the tune of at least $65 billion in Afghanistan and at least $25 billion in Iraq.  Their armies and police forces have, however, both turned out to be remarkably spectral in nature.  They are filled with “ghost soldiers” and “ghost policemen” who are being paid salaries but don’t exist.  In some cases, they are quite literally already dead and wandering in the world of spirits.  Their U.S.-funded salaries are, in turn, being pocketed by commanders and other senior military officials in an operation that couldn’t be more profitable or "successful" -- at least until their ranks, sometimes thinned to nonexistence, are attacked by flesh-and-blood enemy forces.  In Iraq, in 2014, after significant parts of that country’s American-built army had abandoned its weaponry and fled its posts in the country’s northern cities in the face of modest numbers of Islamic State fighters, the prime minister announced that there were at least 50,000 “ghost” troops in his military.  (That figure was widely believed to be an underestimate.)

In Afghanistan more recently, as Taliban attacks have ramped up, similarly undermanned units have found themselves hard-pressed and have retreated, fled, or been defeated.  The number of ghosts in the ranks of the Afghan security forces (as in its police) is unknown.  Recently, however, the head of the provincial council of Helmand Province, a key area in the Taliban’s southern heartland, estimated that 40% of the Afghan soldiers there might, in fact, be ghosts.  Whatever the specific numbers, what’s striking is the Pentagon’s strange skill when it comes to creating, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, spectral security forces of a remarkably similar kind in two such, until recently, disparate countries.  Make of that knack what you will while reading TomDispatch Managing Editor Nick Turse’s epic saga of how the Pentagon made special “progress” and racked up “success” after “success” over the last 12 years building Iraq’s spectral forces. Tom

The Pentagon’s Progress
Will American “Successes” Lead to More Iraqi Military Failures?
By Nick Turse

There’s good news coming out of Iraq... again. The efforts of a 65-nation coalition and punishing U.S. airstrikes have helped local ground forces roll back gains by the Islamic State (IS). 

Government forces and Shiite militias, for example, recaptured the city of Tikrit, while Kurdish troops ousted IS fighters from the town of Sinjar and other parts of northern Iraq. Last month, Iraqi troops finally pushed Islamic State militants out of most of the city of Ramadi, which the group had held since routing Iraqi forces there last spring.

In the wake of all this, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter touted “the kind of progress that the Iraqi forces are exhibiting in Ramadi, building on that success to… continue the campaign with the important goal of retaking Mosul as soon as possible.”  Even more recently, he said those forces were “proving themselves not only motivated but capable.”  I encountered the same upbeat tone when I asked Colonel Steve Warren, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, about the Iraqi security forces.  “The last year has been a process of constructing, rebuilding, and refitting the Iraqi army,” he explained. “While it takes time for training and equipping efforts to take effect, the increasing tactical confidence and competence of the ISF [Iraqi security forces] and their recent battlefield successes indicate that we are on track.”

“Progress.”  “Successes.”  “On track.”  “Increasing tactical confidence and competence.”  It all sounded very familiar to me.

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