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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Jacob Laksin</title>
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		<title>Damning the Koch Bros.</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/jacob-laksin/damning-the-koch-bros/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=damning-the-koch-bros</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Oct 2011 04:35:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bloomberg Markets]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Koch Brothers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[libertarianism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[occupy wall street]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=108783</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Did the libertarian businessmen break American laws in Iran?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_108785" style="width: 385px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Picture-33.gif"><img class="size-full wp-image-108785" title="Picture-33" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Picture-33.gif" alt="" width="375" height="295" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Image publicized by Think Progress</p></div>
<p>The recent headline in <em>Bloomberg Markets</em> magazine was nothing if not sensational: “Koch Brothers Flout Law Getting Richer with Secret Iran Sales.” Those would be the billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David Koch, whose support for libertarian, small-government causes and sponsorship of the Tea Party has turned them into bêtes noires for the Left and a foil for much of the mainstream media.</p>
<p><em>Bloomberg Markets</em>’ article was almost precisely calculated to fuel left-wing contempt for the Koches, with its account of an alleged pattern of unethical and illegal business practices by Koch Industries Inc., the brothers’ Wichita, Kansas, based oil company. As depicted in the report, Koch Industries Inc. was the very personification of corporate greed and profit-first amorality, a notoriously secretive company that regularly disregarded U.S. laws and regulations in order to do business, including with America’s enemies like Iran.</p>
<p>The Left instantly seized on the sinister-sounding storyline. Left-wing blogs raged at the Koch brothers&#8217; supposed “Iranian treason” and insisted that all the causes supported by the Koch brothers, from groups like Americans for Prosperity to the Tea Party, were tainted by association with them. Not to be outdone, <em>Mother Jones</em> demanded that Rick Perry, who had received funding from the Koch brothers while running for Texas governor, return all donations and renounce any and all ties to the Koches. <em>New York </em>magazine chimed in that, as a result of Bloomberg’s report, the Koch brothers “seem to be resembling more and more the left&#8217;s caricature of them” as evil right-wingers bent on doing the country ill. What more proof could be needed of the Koch brothers’ malevolence?</p>
<p>For all the hyper-partisan outrage it generated on the Left, however, there was significantly less to the <em>Bloomberg Markets</em> report than met the eye. As journalism, the hit-piece was shoddy at best. For example, to back up its claims about Koch Industries&#8217; disregard for American laws in dealing with Iran, the magazine relied primarily on two sources, both disgruntled former employees. One of the sources, Ludmila Egorova-Farines, had been fired by the company for failing to show up to work. And the sources contradicted each other. Thus, to support its claims about Koch&#8217;s dealings in Iran, the magazine relied on the say-so of one George Bentu, who was identified as a sales engineer for a subsidiary of Koch Industries based in Germany. “Every single chance they had to do business with Iran or anyone, else, they did,” Bentu was quoted as saying. Nowhere mentioned in the report was that Bentu’s account was dismissed by Ergorova-Farines, the other main source for the story, while she was still with the company. After investigating Bentu’s concerns, she found that they were “contradictory” and had “insufficient or no substantiation.” Clearly, the magazine had not chosen the most credible sources on which to base its indictment of Koch Industries.</p>
<p>But the problem with the story exceeded its dubious sources. <em>Bloomberg Markets</em> reported that between 2001 and 2007, a French subsidiary of Koch sold petrochemical equipment to Iran. Yet the magazine declined to highlight a highly critical point: the deals were perfectly legal. Although U.S. law banned American multinational companies from doing business in Iran, these companies’ foreign subsidiaries were allowed to operate under certain conditions. That exception is the reason that 74 corporations have done business in Iran over the last decade, according to the <em>New York Times</em>.</p>
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		<title>Democrats’ Dangerous Allies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/jacob-laksin/democrats%e2%80%99-dangerous-allies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=democrats%25e2%2580%2599-dangerous-allies</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Oct 2011 04:42:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=108586</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the group that stands to gain from the Wall Street protests is the Tea Party.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-Robert-S.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-108596" title="occupy-wall-street-Robert-S" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-Robert-S.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a></p>
<p>President Obama’s plummeting approval ratings have made him an unlikely candidate to revive the Left, but Democrats think they’ve found a new savior: the angry and unwashed crowds of the Occupy Wall Street campaign.</p>
<p>The <em>New York Times</em> reported this week that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democrats’ fund-raising organ, is currently circulating a petition that aims to get 100,000 Democratic supporters to sign a pledge that “I stand with the Occupy Wall Street protests.” Top Democratic fundraisers, including those close to Obama, are also said to be seeking ways to make common cause with the Occupy Wall Street protesters. The thinking seems to be that Occupy Wall Street represents the Left’s emerging answer to the Tea Party. As such, it is exactly the boost the party needs as it heads into an election year led by an unpopular president and backed by an unenthusiastic base.</p>
<p>Overt support for the Occupy Wall Street protests is a risky strategy, however. For one thing, while Democrats may appreciate what the protesters represent, the feeling is not mutual. Though the Occupy Wall Street campaign lacks an organized agenda, its one consistent message has been that the political establishment, including Democrats, is to blame for the country’s grim economic prospects. Indeed, one of their main objections is to the government bailouts for Wall Street that the Obama administration pushed through. If what the protesters really want is a reckoning for those who presided over these taxpayer-funded transfers to hated Wall Street, Democrats and President Obama will have a hard time exploiting the protests for political gain.</p>
<p>Bringing the Occupy Wall Street protesters into the Democratic fold is also problematic because they seem unwilling to play the role that Democrats want them to. That role is primarily in fueling the mild class-warfare rhetoric that is the party’s perennial favorite and which President Obama has trumpeted in recent weeks. This explains why Democrats have tried to present the protesters’ concerns as primarily about economic disparities and, in Obama’s words, a general “frustration” with the economic situation in which only the rich benefit. That rationale may be convenient for Obama’s plans to raise taxes on the upper income brackets, but all evidence suggests that the demands of Occupy Wall Street are far more extreme. What a sizable contingent of them seem to want, if their “abolish capitalism” signs are any indication, is the wholesale elimination of the financial industry and the dismantling of the free market. Whatever else can be said of this radical message, it is not one primed to win over the American public, let alone Democrats’ generous Wall Street donors. Not for nothing was Goldman Sachs the largest contributor to President Obama’s election campaign.</p>
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		<title>Van Jones&#8217; Tea Party Envy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/jacob-laksin/van-jones-tea-party-envy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=van-jones-tea-party-envy</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Oct 2011 04:16:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=107901</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Radical power brokers moving fast to manufacture a movement. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/aaar-VAN-JONES-WALL-STREET-REBUILD-THE-DREAM-large570.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-107914" title="aaar-VAN-JONES-WALL-STREET-REBUILD-THE-DREAM-large570" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/aaar-VAN-JONES-WALL-STREET-REBUILD-THE-DREAM-large570.gif" alt="" width="375" height="251" /></a></p>
<p>Of all that the Tea Party has accomplished, perhaps the movement’s most unlikely achievement to date is the admiration it has inspired on the activist Left. Disillusioned with President Obama and the rapid dissipation of a long-term left-wing dominance that Obama’s victory was supposed to usher in, left-wing activists and commentators have come to look upon the Tea Party as a model to revive their faded political fortunes.</p>
<p>Speaking for many on the Left, <em>Washington Post</em> columnist Richard Cohen recently acknowledged, “I suffer from Tea Party envy.” Similarly, the disgruntled twenty-somethings taking part in the Occupy Wall Street campaign have styled their protests as a left-wing and anti-capitalist version of the Tea Party. The latest left-wing admirer of the Tea Party is none other than Van Jones, the disgraced former Obama administration official who was ousted from his post as green jobs czar following revelations of his radical past, which included signing a 9/11 “Truther” petition. Time off from professional politics has afforded Van Jones an opportunity to reflect, and like many on the Left he has concluded that in order to regain their relevance, progressives must take a page from the Tea Party’s playbook.</p>
<p>Van Jones made his appreciation of the Tea Party’s success clear on Monday, when he was the keynote speaker at the Take Back the American Dream Conference in Washington D.C. The conference, featuring a number of prominent left-wing groups, was intended as a first step in the left’s attempt to build a cohesive national movement as a progressive counterpart to the Tea Party.</p>
<p>That is clearly how Van Jones sees it. In his remarks, he chastised the Left for its lack of organization and urged activists to imitate the Tea Party’s strategy. The Tea Party “talks individualism,” Van Jones observed, “but they act collectively.” If progressives wanted the Tea Party’s influence, they would have to stop looking to Obama for leadership and create their own national movement. As his own contribution to movement building, Van Jones announced the creation of his new group, which is called Rebuild the American Dream. According to Jones, Rebuild the American Dream will be a “support center” for the Left as it works to build its own movement. Van Jones also praised the protestors of the Occupy Wall Street campaign, which he hailed as a forerunner of the movement that is supposedly emerging on the Left.</p>
<p>At a time when the leading grassroots movement in the country is the Tea Party, Van Jones’s emphasis on structure and cohesion has obvious appeal on the Left. In this account, the problem is not with the left’s political agenda but with its organization. All progressives need to do to rival the Tea Party’s influence is to coordinate their efforts more effectively and accept that, campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, Obama will not be their savior.</p>
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		<title>The Left&#8217;s Tea Party?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/jacob-laksin/the-lefts-tea-party/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-tea-party</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Oct 2011 04:54:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[agenda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal income taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fiscal conservatism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income earners]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[percent]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tea]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=107569</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Occupy Wall Street campaign is destined to fail.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Wall-Street-protest-200921.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-107574" title="Wall-Street-protest-20092" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Wall-Street-protest-200921.gif" alt="" width="375" height="246" /></a></p>
<p>Move over Tea Party, there’s a new populist movement in town. Such has been the hype that has greeted the nascent “Occupy Wall Street” campaign, whose youthful partisans most recently made headlines when, for no obvious reason, some 700 of them were arrested this past weekend for blocking the Brooklyn Bridge.</p>
<p>So, what is the cause for which these protestors are willing to defy the NYPD and inbound traffic? That depends on who you ask. According to sympathetic media accounts, Occupy Wall Street represents an emerging strain of left-wing economic populism, one that will become a counterweight to the fiscal conservatism of the Tea Party cadres. Media accolades apart, though, Occupy Wall Street is unlikely to replicate the Tea Party’s success.</p>
<p>One problem is the campaign&#8217;s agenda. In short, it doesn’t really have one. Click through the Occupy Wall Street website and you find grandiose invocations of &#8220;using the Arab Spring to achieve our ends,&#8221; but little edification about what precisely those ends are. Participants in the campaign have been no more helpful on this point. As one protestor at this weekend&#8217;s rally instructed another, “It doesn’t matter what you’re protesting. Just protest.”</p>
<p>Occupy Wall Street&#8217;s existential unclarity is in stark contrast to the Tea Party&#8217;s raison d&#8217;être. While it took time for the Tea Party to become an organized political force, from the very beginning it set itself against a clear problem and culprit: the ballooning federal debt and the irresponsible political class that had made it possible. Occupy Wall Street’s driving narrative is much more dubious. The campaign declares that it &#8220;will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.&#8221; Exactly who makes up the 1% is not explained. Presumably, though, it&#8217;s the top one percent of income earners, who also happen to pay 38 percent of all federal income taxes. Whatever one makes of that fact, it&#8217;s hard to muster outrage about the &#8220;greed&#8221; of the country&#8217;s most-taxed bracket.</p>
<p>But perhaps the &#8220;1%&#8221; is intended to be a metaphor for Wall Street and the financial industry. If their signs are any guide, the Occupy Wall Street protestors seem to think that Wall Street&#8217;s elite have committed some crime in “stealing” the billion-dollar taxpayer-funded bailouts. Whatever one&#8217;s view about the wisdom of these bailouts, though, it&#8217;s absurd to claim that they were in any way stolen by Wall Street. If anyone is to blame for misallocating taxpayer money, it’s the Bush administration that passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Obama administration that extended, and the Congress that approved it.</p>
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		<title>The Libyan Muddle</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/jacob-laksin/the-libyan-muddle/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-libyan-muddle</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Mar 2011 04:55:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=89135</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama’s confused speech sheds little light on America’s incoherent intervention.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Picture-19.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-89139" title="Picture-19" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Picture-19.gif" alt="" width="375" height="304" /></a></p>
<p>President Obama faced a difficult task on Monday night as he delivered his much-belated address on the war in Libya: to convince not only a skeptical nation that the intervention is warranted, but also his own secretary of defense, who caused a panic in the administration over the weekend when he announced that Libya did not constitute a “vital interest” for the United States.</p>
<p>The president was at his most persuasive in arguing that the intervention was justified on humanitarian grounds. Muammar Qaddafi had vowed that he would show “no mercy” to his own people and, as Obama noted, there were compelling reasons to believe him. Forces loyal to Qaddafi had shelled rebel towns and cities, while “military jets and helicopter gunships were unleashed upon people who had no means to defend themselves against assault from the air.” Given the dictator’s history of brutality, his professed bloodlust and the imminent cutoff in food and fuel to rebel-held cities made a mass slaughter a real possibility, one that the bombing campaign has at least for now forestalled.</p>
<p>Beyond the war’s strictly humanitarian component, however, the president’s address raised more questions than it answered. What, for instance, were America’s military objectives in Libya and how would they be achieved? The president’s answers were as confused as those offered by his surrogates in recent days. Thus, he stressed that the objective was primarily to provide humanitarian aid to the Libyan people and to assist NATO’s mission of maintaining a No Fly Zone to protect civilians. But he did not explain how such theoretically narrow aims could be reconciled with NATO’s actual mission, which has included airstrikes on Qaddafi’s forces around cities like Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte, where those forces not only pose no threat to civilians but also reportedly enjoy broad local support.</p>
<p>And what of Qaddafi himself?  U.S. policy has been incoherent in this regard: notionally committed to his ouster yet unwilling to see it through. The president offered little clarity. He stressed several times that Qaddafi would have to go, explaining that “there is no question that Libya – and the world – will be better off with Gaddafi out of power,” and stressing that he had “embraced that goal, and will actively pursue it through non-military means.” Yet he did not elaborate why measures like political isolation and economic pressure could be expected to work on a pariah regime that reportedly has hoarded billions in cash in order to weather a crisis just like the one it currently faces. Moreover, having committed the United States to regime change in Libya, could the administration really accept an outcome that saw Qaddafi remain in power, a symbol of defiance to the American power and a living testament to the failure of the president’s leadership? If the president has taken a long term view of the conflict and its consequences, his speech showed little evidence of it.</p>
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		<title>Who Carried out the Dubai Assassination?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jacob-laksin/who-carried-out-the-dubai-assassination/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=who-carried-out-the-dubai-assassination</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:05:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al quds]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=53214</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[New evidence casts doubt on Israel’s involvement.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/duabai1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-53221" title="duabai1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/duabai1.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="253" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/">Newsreal</a></strong></p>
<p>For those familiar with the stellar reputation of Israel’s clandestine services, the recent hit on a Hamas operative and arms dealer in Dubai seems oddly atypical. It was, to the outside observer, an embarrassingly sloppy effort: The agents who allegedly carried out the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh  in his luxury hotel room made what appear to be a series of rookie mistakes, for instance allowing themselves to be caught on video surveillance cameras and using the stolen passports of Israeli citizens. Hardly the kind of work one would associate with the Israeli Mossad, whose efficiency in covert operations is the stuff of cloak-and-dagger legend.</p>
<p>Indeed, even Hamas is starting to have doubts. Having initially pointed the finger at Israel, Hamas <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1153316.html">now suspects</a> that the security services of another Arab state – possibly Jordan or Egypt – could have been behind the assassination.</p>
<blockquote><p><em>Hamas suspects the security forces of an Arab state were behind the assassination of a senior group operative in Dubai earlier this year, the Al-Quds Al-Araby daily reported on Tuesday. </em><em> </em></p>
<p><em>Mahmoud Nasser, a member of Hamas’ political bureau, told the newspaper that slain commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was likely being tracked by agents from Jordan and Egypt prior to the January 19 killing.</em></p>
<p><em>Nasser said he had been given information regarding such efforts to kill Mabhouh, adding that the evidence indicated that the assassination was carried out earlier than the alleged agents had planned. </em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em>According to Nasser, Mabhouh was in possession of “dangerous” information seen as dangerous to particular Arab elements seeking to topple Islamist resistance.</em></p></blockquote>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>That tracks with the reporting of the <em>Washington</em><em> Times’</em> Eli Lake, who <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/25/dubai-hit-did-not-upset-israeli-counterterror-ties/print/">noted</a> last week that despite widespread assumptions about Israel’s role in the assassination<em> </em></p>
<blockquote><p><em>…some details have emerged that do not track with traditional Israeli intelligence tradecraft. The Dubai authorities this week said two of the operatives fled to Iran. </em></p>
<p><em>Michael Ross, a retired officer for the Mossad’s covert-operations division, said it would be a breach of Israeli protocol for an operative to flee to another target country like that after an operation. </em></p>
<p><em>He also said that it was unlikely that Israel would use 26 people for a job that would require far fewer people. “The Mossad believes if two people can do something instead of three people, then send two.” </em></p></blockquote>
<p>I’m not sure the last point is a strong one. As former CIA field officer Robert Baer <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704479404575087621440351704.html">pointed out</a> in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> last weekend, 26 people is just about the right number for this kind of operation. The logic is that it takes a lot of people to provide the reconnaissance and observation required for the hit to succeed without alerting the authorities. Nevertheless, the abject failure of those involved in the assassination scheme to cover their tracks while bringing almost immediate scrutiny to bear on Israel may well be the strongest reason to question whether Israeli intelligence was in fact responsible. After all, Hamas has long been on the receiving end of Israel’s superlative ability to carry out clean and precise assassinations. If even they are having their doubts about Israel’s involvement, the emerging conventional wisdom about what really happened in Dubai may yet be proven wrong.</p>
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		<title>Exile and the New Russia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jacob-laksin/exile-and-the-new-russia-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=exile-and-the-new-russia-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Mar 2010 05:01:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[american expatriates]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[angry mob]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Boris Yeltsin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[country]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[era]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[exile]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fair]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[graphic account]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kevin McElwee]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mark Ames]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Matt Taibbi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Michael McFaul]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Moscow]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[moscow correspondent]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[moscow prostitutes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ninth anniversary]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Paper]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[President Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[russian immigrant]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Vanity Fair]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The life and death of a now-defunct, Moscow-based English language newspaper that upset a lot of people. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/exile.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-52410" title="exile" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/exile.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="277" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/">Newsreal</a></strong></p>
<p>The latest <em>Vanity Fair</em> carries an amusing and <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/02/exile-201002?printable=true">appropriately graphic account</a> of the life and death of <em>Exile,</em> a now-defunct, Moscow-based English language newspaper run by American expatriates that managed to piss off a lot of people – usually, but not always, for bad reasons – in its short and mostly obscure decade-long existence. As a Russian immigrant myself, I occasionally read the paper’s online version, finding it mostly crass and vulgar, which, in fairness, was rather the idea. If nothing else, the <em>Vanity Fair</em> piece is worth reading for the antics of <em>Exile</em>’s editors, the now estranged pair of Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (pictured above), and its cast of colorful contributors. Not for the squeamish:</p>
<blockquote><p>Writer Kevin McElwee, an American expatriate, had both legs broken when he was torn from the side of a building he was scaling to escape an angry mob of Muscovites, an incident that had nothing to do with anything he’d written—McElwee, <em>The Exile’</em>s film reviewer, was just a rambunctious drunk. On another occasion, a deranged and slighted man sent a letter promising to kill the “frat boy” Ames. Ames in turn published an editorial urging the loon to instead off his co-editor, Matt Taibbi. True, the many death threats Ames received took less of a physical toll on him than loading up on Viagra and attempting to bed nine Moscow prostitutes in nine hours, which he wrote about to commemorate <em>The Exile’</em>s ninth anniversary, but that was only because Ames approached the assignment with a rigor befitting a <em>Consumer Reports</em> exposé—“There really was no other way to tell whether these drugs actually worked,” he recalls with sincerity and audible exhaustion.</p></blockquote>
<p>You don’t even want to know what they did to the <em>New York Times’</em> Moscow correspondent.</p>
<p>Seen as a kind of pseudo-journalistic lark, <em>Exile </em>might be considered a raunchy footnote in the history of pre-internet independent media. Alas, the paper could also be militantly self-righteous about its politics, an embarrassing combination of uniquely American self-loathing, moral relativism, free-floating cynicism, and a crude anarcho-leftism that raged against free-markets and capitalism as the root of all evil – and, more specifically, the cause of Russia’s disintegration in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse.</p>
<p>Examples abound, but one in particular comes to mind: <em>Exile </em>editor Matt Taibbi’s long-running and astonishingly petty smear campaign against Stanford University’s Russia scholar Michael McFaul, <a href="http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/01/16/transition_rumint_names_for_the_weekend">currently an advisor</a> to President Obama on Russia. McFaul’s grave sin was to lament the rise of Russian autocracy under Vladimir Putin and compare the current era of Russian politics unfavorably with the transition of the 1990s presided over by the late Boris Yeltsin. For all its flaws, and they were substantial, the Yeltsin era at least saw the country make some halting strides towards openness and democracy, progress that has long since been arrested under Putin’s nakedly corrupt and corporatist rule. Yeltsin was an imperfect democrat, McFaul pointed out, but the government he lead was “unquestionably more democratic than the Russian regime today.”</p>
<p>The point seems inarguable, but it was too much for <em>Exile</em>, which mocked McFaul as a clueless “hackademic” peddling myths about a past that never was. (Taibbi, with typical tastelessness, also took to falsely claiming in the paper’s pages that he had slept with McFaul’s wife.) In a country that was rapidly losing what few civil liberties it had managed to gain in the 90s, the McFaul feud might seem like a sleazy distraction from more substantive concerns. But it was <em>Exile</em>’s way to direct more – or at least equal – ire at Western critics of Russia’s relapse into authoritarianism as at the ex-KGB thugs who were leading the country down that darkly familiar path.</p>
<p><em>Exile</em>’s editors realized that only too late. In one of its final issues, the paper lampooned the “election” of Putin’s handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, by reporting the voting results in advance – a good gag that was not appreciated by the powers that be. Last June, the paper was visited by a Russian media regulator – one example of many of Soviet-style recidivism under Putin – and warned that it may have run afoul of Article Four of the country’s new media law. <em>Exile</em>’s few backers got the message, and withdrew funding. The paper closed shortly thereafter. As Mark Ames put it in an <a href="http://www.robertamsterdam.com/2008/06/wall_street_journal_on_the_exi.htm">interview</a> with the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> at the time:</p>
<blockquote><p>“If this had happened 10 years ago, people would not have been afraid to fight it. Now there’s a fear that all the power is in the hands of a few scary people who might do something very bad to you.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The Yeltsin era, apparently, wasn’t so bad after all.</p>
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