Americans can spot election meddling because they’ve been doing it for years

Owen Jones in The Guardian

As I write, president-elect Donald Trump – soon to become the most powerful individual on Earth – is having a tantrum on his Twitter feed. Losing the popular vote can have devastating consequences for a bigoted plutocrat’s ego, and accusations that Vladimir Putin’s regime intervened to his advantage are getting him down. “The ‘intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday,” he claims (falsely, apparently), “perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!”

Did Putin intervene in the US election? It is entirely plausible, although evidence from the CIA (with its dubious record) and the FBI needs to be carefully scrutinised, whatever our feelings on Trump. And if the Democratic establishment pin the supposedly unthinkable calamity of Trump’s triumph on a foreign power, they will fail to learn the real lessons behind their defeat.

That doesn’t mean alleged interference by the Russian regime shouldn’t be taken seriously. Putin heads a hard-right, kleptocratic, authoritarian government that persecutes LGBT people, waged a murderous war in Chechnya, and has committed terrible crimes in Syria in alliance with Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship. It is a pin-up for populist rightwingers across the west, from Trump to Ukip, from France’s Front National to Austria’s Freedom party. Its undemocratic manoeuvres should be scrutinised and condemned.

But while Americans feel justifiably angry at alleged interference with their political process, they have also been handed a mirror, and the reflection should disturb them.

For the US is a world leader in the field of intervening in the internal affairs of other countries. The alleged interference is far more extensive than hacking into emails belonging to unfavoured political parties. According to research by political scientist Dov Levin, the US and the USSR/Russia together intervened no less than 117 times in foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, or “one out of every nine competitive, national-level executive elections”.

Indeed, one cannot understand US-Russian relations today without acknowledging America’s role in the internal affairs of its defeated cold war foe. As Stephen Cohen puts it, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the approach of US advisers “was nothing less than missionary – a virtual crusade to transform post-communist Russia into some facsimile of the American democratic and capitalist system”.

As soon as Bill Clinton assumed the White House in 1993, his experts discussed “formulating a policy of American tutelage”, including unabashed partisan support for President Boris Yeltsin. “Political missionaries and evangelists, usually called ‘advisers’, spread across Russia in the early and mid-1990s,” notes Cohen: many were funded by the US government. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, talked of Russia “increasingly passing into de facto western receivership”.

The results were, to put it mildly, disastrous. Between 1990 and 1994, life expectancy for Russian men and women fell from 64 and 74 years respectively to 58 and 71 years. The surge in mortality was “beyond the peacetime experience of industrialised countries”. While it was boom time for the new oligarchs, poverty and unemployment surged; prices were hiked dramatically; communities were devastated by deindustrialisation; and social protections were stripped away.

To the horror of the west, Yeltsin’s popularity nosedived to the point where a communist triumph in the 1996 presidential elections could not be ruled out. Yeltsin turned to the oligarchs, using their vast resources to run an unscrupulous campaign. As Leonid Bershidsky puts it, it was “a momentous event that undermined a fragile democracy and led to the emergence of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorial regime”. It is even alleged that, in 2011, Putin’s key ally – then-president Dmitry Medvedev – privately suggested the election was rigged. In the run-up to the election, Russia was granted a huge US-backed IMF loan that – as the New York Times noted at the time – was “expected to be helpful to President Boris N Yeltsin in the presidential election”.

Yeltsin relied on US political strategists – including former aides to Bill Clinton – who had a direct line back to the White House. When Yeltsin eventually won, the cover of Time magazine was “Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win”.

Without the chaos and deprivations of the US-backed Yeltsin era, Putinism would surely not have established itself. But it’s not just Russia by any means, for the record of US intervention in the internal affairs of foreign democracies is extensive.

Take Italy in 1948: as the cold war unfolded, the US feared that a socialist-communist coalition would triumph in Italian elections. It barred Italians who “did not believe in the ideology of the United States” from even entering the country; funded opposing parties via the CIA; orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign, including millions of letters from Americans of Italian origin; and made it quite clear, via the State Department, that there was “no further question of assistance from the United States” if the wrong people won. Its efforts were a success. This was the first of many Italian elections featuring US interference.

CIA concludes Russia interfered to help Trump win election, say reports



Take the CIA’s self-professed involvement in the military coup that overthrew democratically elected secular Iranian president Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953: it was “carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government”, as the agency later confessed. The nature of the 1979 Iranian revolution cannot be understood without it. Or what of CIA backing for Augusto Pinochet’s murderous overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973?

There are more recent examples too. Take the military overthrow of Honduras’ Manuel Zelaya in 2009. The then secretary of state – a certain Hillary Clinton – refused to describe the toppling of Zelaya as a “military coup”, which would have required the suspension of US aid, including to the armed forces. Rather than call for Zelaya’s reinstatement, Clinton called for new elections. US assistance – including military aid – continued as dissidents were treated brutally; as death squads re-emerged; as violence against LGBT people surged; and as widely boycotted unfair elections took place.

Allegations of Russian interference in the US elections are undoubtedly alarming, but there’s a double standard at play. Meddling in foreign democracies only becomes a problem when the US is on the receiving end. The US has interfered with impunity in the internal affairs of so many other countries. The day that all such interference is seen for what it is – a democratic outrage, unworthy of any great nation – will be a great day indeed.

A vote for the Labour leader? That'll cost you £25 - even if you're a member. So much for anti-austerity politics

'The ridiculous charge is an attempt to keep the most working class, marginalised people from voting for Corbyn. It's an insult to anyone in a difficult financial situation and an attempt to stifle their political voice.' 

Kirsty Major in The Independent


According to the Labour Party website: “As a democratic, socialist party we welcome people to join… from all walks of life, to have their say and influence policy. We welcome membership applications from individuals, families, young people, students, workers, unemployed, older people – anyone with an interest in building a better Britain.”

It also states: “To newcomers, working out how everything fits together can seem a bit of a maze” - and they’re not wrong there. New members, including those young and unemployed supporters, have been left wondering why some members of the National Executive Committee (NEC) have voted to retrospectively disenfranchise them. Following a decision taken last night, the 130,000 members who joined in the last six months are no longer able to vote and will have to re-register and pay a whopping £25 registration fee if they wish to vote in the upcoming Labour leadership election.

£25 is an outstanding amount of money for the young, the unemployed, workers on low wages, and older people – the very groups the party purports to represent. A person looking for work, unable to work because of illness, or a person who is pregnant, a carer, or a single parent on low income and working less than 16 hours per week is given between £57.90 and £73.10 per week to live on. So if you are on benefits, becoming a supporter of the Labour Party will cost you between 34 per cent and 45 per cent of your weekly income. Being a member of the Labour Party then starts to look like an opportunity for the privileged few, rather than one available to all.

The move was supposedly an attempt to prevent a split in the party, but by bringing these measures in, members of the NEC who voted in favour of the motion have already ripped up their supporters’ trust. Many new members joined following Brexit, feeling motivated to engage with politics after seeing figures like Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage exploit the concerns of working class communities worn down by years of Tory-led austerity. They joined Labour in the hope of becoming involved in their local branch and voting for a leader - be it Angela Eagle or Jeremy Corbyn - who would create a credible alternative to the Conservative Party.

Instead, the NEC have decided to financially and democratically exclude members, who they suspect are largely Corbyn supporters, to further their own party goals of winning at any cost. Furthermore, some in the NEC have been accused of gerrymandering after the vote was taken on the motion which was not included on the agenda, and after Corbyn and other pro-Corbyn members had left the room. So much for restoring trust in the Labour Party.

This move only serves to exacerbate the social exclusion of those who need more than ever to be given a voice within mainstream parties. If you needed proof of their anger, the damning protest vote against parliamentary politics during the EU referendum was pretty hard evidence. Amina Gichinga, 26, a recent Labour Party member and community organiser in Newham, told me recently, “The ridiculous £25 charge is an attempt to keep out the most working class marginalised people from voting because they know it'll amount to a landslide vote for Corbyn. £25 is some family's weekly shopping money - it is an insult to anyone in a difficult financial situation and an attempt to stifle their political voice.”

Criminal bankers have brazenly milked the system. Let’s change it

Will Hutton in The Guardian

 

 Traders colluded in online chatrooms to time the buying and selling of huge amounts of currency. Photograph: Ruben Sprich/REUTERS

The world’s biggest banks had been steeling themselves for months before the US Department of Justice’s rulings on manipulation in the foreign exchange markets. Last week’s announcement was, if anything, less tough than expected; £3.7bn of fines were levied on top of those announced last autumn, to bring the grand total to an astounding £6.3bn. Crucially, the banks also admitted that what they had done was criminal. The US attorney general, Loretta Lynch, declared that foreign exchange traders had exhibited“breathtaking flagrancy” in setting up a group they called “the cartel” to manipulate the market between 2007 and the end of 2013. The fine was “commensurate with the pervasive harm done. And it should deter competitors in the future from chasing profits without regard to fairness, to the law, or to the public welfare”.


Put bluntly, the world’s most prestigious banks had brazenly and systematically ripped off their clients. It was the crime of the decade. Yet the markets had been expecting worse. Only a month ago, Deutsche Bank had paid a record £1.6bn fine for manipulating and rigging prices in the currency and money markets. If this was the benchmark, thought the markets, the fines for other banks would be higher. As it was, £3.7bn seemed almost modest and the share prices of Barclays, RBS, Citigroup and JP Morgan rose sharply in relief.

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The hope in the banking world is that the worst may be over. The combination of modestly increased regulation, stronger internal compliance and clawing back pay and bonuses if there has been malpractice – together with genuine determination at board level to root out criminal practice in dealing rooms – should begin to make a difference.


Yet will it be enough? Our grandparents, less in hock to today’s ruling doctrines – that markets can be presumed to be infallible and egoism is always beneficial – were wiser about how to organise markets than today’s economists and regulators. It is striking, despite record fines and the sacking of the Bank of England’s head of foreign exchange operations, who knew about the collusion but never drew it to the authority’s attention (on the grounds that whistleblowing was not part of his duties), that the British approach is still softly, softly.


Minouche Shafik, deputy governor of the Bank of England, expressed her horror at the casual “misconduct” among traders and the language they used to justify what they did in a speech to the London School of Economics last autumn. (Shafik is in charge of the fair and effective market review that will propose changes to the foreign exchange markets.) She conceded that no one can talk any more of a few bad apples – the barrel is rotten. But while recognising that deep change was necessary, her proposed areas for potential remedial action are largely technical. Tonally, her comments reminded me of the infamous Bischoff report into the banking system in 2008/9, which, despite the narrowly averted banking collapse, recommended as little as possible should be done to reform the City.


In fairness, Shafik spoke before last week’s admissions of criminality. The US Justice Department has raised the stakes. What everyone has to confront is that the banks have been party to an organised, global criminal conspiracy to defraud their clients. Traders colluded in secret online chatrooms to time the buying and selling of huge amounts of foreign currency to benefit each other. As one said: “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.” The entire framework, and the economic philosophy that supported it, has been found wanting.


In terms of structure, the foreign exchange markets are the closest to a Thatcherite nirvana that has ever been devised. Governments do not manage rates to comply with an internationally agreed system, as they did after the war. The price of a pivotal financial asset is determined wholly by private supply and demand. The market makes its rules. There has been close to zero public regulation. Banks buy and sell on their account freely and for their clients. Conflicts of interest abound. The pursuit of profit is the only hallowed value.


The argument in favour of this is that it is vital for the promotion of world trade and prosperity, but daily turnover on the foreign exchange markets dwarfs the volume of world trade. To paraphrase Adair Turner when chair of the now-abolished Financial Services Authority, much of this turnover is plainly neither socially useful nor promotes public welfare. It does, however, enrich those who trade in it and, as we see, criminally.


For 30 years, the doctrine has been that state involvement would be counterproductive. Modern companies, of which banks are a sub-set, have been encouraged to define themselves not as organisations delivering economic and social good, but as profit-making machines for anonymous, tourist shareholders. Managers did not question their trading teams too hard: they knew how important the profit was to their bonuses and to the bank. As for the teams, they were prepared to trade themselves – moving from bank to bank, depending on whoever paid them best. They were not an integral part of great organisation: they were, and are, boys on the make.


In a letter to all the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, Larry Fink, head of BlackRock Asset Management, the biggest in the world, deplored the short-term financial priorities of modern corporations, which he said had lost their way and urged a refocusing. What has happened in our currency dealing rooms is part of that story. Addressing it requires a new deal between shareholders, companies and their workforces, and between the public and the private. We need a reshaping of company law and the way companies are owned so that managers pursue less fevered, short-term amoral strategies. And we need an acceptance that in market after market there is a co-dependence between state and business.


Rather than imposing swingeing fines after the event, the state has an obligation to create, with the banks, a financial architecture in which such practices cannot happen. Conflicts of interest and opportunities for price rigging should be outlawed. Criminal currency traders should be prosecuted All bonuses should be capable of being clawed back. Currency trading should be licensed on organised, accountable exchanges.


Those rules and systems that the world’s free marketeers considered so antediluvian turn out to be wise and friendly to honest-to-god businesses. Mark Carney’s Bank of England has been quietly re-regulating mortgage finance, abandoning the free-market zealotry of the 1980s and 1990s. It should do the same in the foreign exchange markets. Our grandparents were not so stupid after all.

If we're going to cry foul over Fifa, then we should at least hold our banks to the same standard

Mary Dejevsky in The Independent

Modern life provides many opportunities for bafflement, but the continuing capacity of the British to regard themselves collectively as paragons of public virtue never ceases to amaze.

This week we have seen the lid taken off two prominent areas of our national life – banking (again) and football – to reveal something quite unpleasant beneath. But the response has been – in the first case – to insist yet again on “just a few bad apples” and – in the second – to attack a report that was so misguided as to exonerate Qatar and Russia over their World Cup bids, while fingering England (how dare they?) for being economical with its observance of the rules.

I remember vividly my response to the first reports that bankers in the City of London were suspected of fiddling the Libor rate. I was horrified. Was Libor – the London inter-bank offered rate – not the benchmark for international banking? The standard-setter? If Libor was being manipulated, what did this say about the soundness of UK banking generally? How and why had anyone been able to cook the books for so long? With something as fundamental as Libor, why were there no fail-safe mechanisms for checking?

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The two questions that I asked most often, though, were the most basic. How come the only remedies being mooted were fines on the institutions – fines that would ultimately be paid to a large extent by you and me, the taxpayers, seeing as how we had rescued these banks by taking them into public ownership? And even more basically, why had the reputation of the City of London not been tarnished beyond recall? The Prime Minister and the Chancellor were still, it seemed, lavishing time and energy trying to secure some arrangement with Brussels that would minimise the damage to the City from tighter eurozone regulation. Frankly, why bother? Let City banking lie on the bed it has made.

It then transpired that not only Libor was being rigged, but the foreign-exchange market, too, with gung-ho bankers exchanging jocular emails about what they were doing. And not only doing, but getting away with, until last year. What was the price for such cynical profiteering? More fines on the institutions, no doubt plea-bargained down, and again likely to be paid, one way or another, by you and me. Is it not passing strange that the offending emails could be cited verbatim, but that those who sent them remain unnamed? Even stranger, that there are apparently no criminal charges yet being brought? Oh yes, the Serious Fraud Office is apparently looking into that possibility, but such a tentative response hardly inspires confidence.

 

As a journalist, I find it hard to believe that hacking someone’s voicemail warrants something akin to a show trial and a prison sentence, but swindling the country out of millions of pounds isn’t treated as a crime – at least not one that anyone shows much eagerness to prosecute. Are there frauds that are too big or too brazen to punish? Even the reputational damage seems limited. Far from being diverted to Frankfurt or New York, the money, it seems, continues to roll in. Or is this perhaps a reflection of the sort of money that now flows through London; a quality of money and banking that deserve each other? 

And so to the “national game”. When Fifa published its report into allegations of corruption during the most recent bidding process, and essentially absolved Qatar and Russia, the initial reaction here in Britain seemed to veer between disbelief and resignation. After all, Qatar’s bid had succeeded despite summer temperatures that are now requiring the whole global football schedule for 2022 to be rewritten, while questions over Russia’s capacity for bad behaviour are hardly new. When it emerged, however, that Fifa had put someone in the dock for rule-bending, and that someone was England, the response was apoplectic. Righteous indignation hardly begins to describe it.

The fury was palpable, with MPs talking about a “whitewash” and the English FA categorically rejecting charges that it had tried to “curry favour” with the former Fifa vice-president, Jack Warner, despite a list of actions that at least permitted such an interpretation. The former English FA chairman, Lord Triesman, accepted the findings as “legitimate” and “embarrassing”, while also insisting that the report reflected Fifa’s “dislike” of England.

Already turbid waters were further muddied when the US lawyer, Michael Garcia, who actually conducted the inquiry, complained that the report contained “incomplete and erroneous representations”. There is now pressure for his findings to be released in their entirety. But the self-justifying anger the report prompted in London leaves a sour taste and suggests a verb that can be conjugated “I entertain; you offer encouragement; he/she/it gives bribes”.

One consequence could be that the next time the UK casts aspersions on the probity of an Arab state or Russia, the polite response will cite pots and kettles.

What I fail to understand is why the same seems not to apply to the City of London and its banks.