54°40' or Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Seriously, the fact that senior members of the Trump administration are having secret conversations with representatives of radical Albertan separatist organizations, with the quite obvious goal of creating civil disorder in Canada is a complete mind-fuck.

I guess that Trump was serious about wanting Canada, or at least the oil rich parts of it. 

The Trump administration has held covert meetings with fringe separatists from Canada’s oil-rich province of Alberta as a rift deepens between Washington and Ottawa.

Leaders of the Alberta Prosperity Project, a group of far-right separatists who want the western province to become independent, met US state department officials in Washington three times since April last year, according to people familiar with the talks.

They are seeking another meeting next month with state and Treasury officials to ask for a $500bn credit facility to help bankroll the province if an independence referendum — yet to be called — is passed.

“The US is extremely enthusiastic about a free and independent Alberta,” Jeff Rath, APP legal counsel, who attended the meetings, told the FT.

He claimed he had a “much stronger relationship” with the Trump administration than Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

………

British Columbia premier David Eby described the FT’s report of the meeting as alarming because Trump is “not particularly respectful to Canada’s sovereignty”.

“To go to a foreign country and to ask for assistance in breaking up Canada, there’s an old-fashioned word for that. And that word is treason,” he told reporters in Ottawa on Thursday.

Seriously, these jamokes make the Bay of Pigs invasion look like an episode of Mission Impossible.

This Is Not a Surprise

Trump has a plan to eliminate Social Security.

It's simple, they believe that if they gut the Social Security Administration, the resulting poor performance will undermine support for the program.

They put it in a memo, and the memo got leaked:

An internal Social Security Administration (SSA) memo, sent on March 13 and obtained by Popular Information, details proposed changes to the claims process that would debilitate the agency, cause significant processing delays, and prevent many Americans from applying for or receiving benefits.

The memo, authored by Acting Deputy SSA Commissioner Doris Diaz, purports to be motivated by a desire to mitigate "fraud risks."

 

Elon Musk has pushed several false claims about the nature and scope of Social Security fraud. In a recent interview on Fox Business, Musk suggested that 10% of federal expenditures were related to Social Security fraud. This is false. Social Security fraud does exist, but "improper" Social Security payments amounts to about $9 billion annually — less than 1% of total Social Security benefits paid and 0.1% of the federal budget. Most improper payments are not criminal fraud but the result of beneficiaries or the SSA failing to update records.

The biggest change contemplated by Diaz's memo is to require "internet identity proofing" for "benefit claims… made over the phone." When an SSA customer is "unable to utilize the internet ID proofing, customers will be required to visit a field office to provide in-person identity documentation."

When this is juxtaposed with thousands of layoffs at field offices, and dozens of field office closures, it means that people will not be able to get their benefits.

With wait times for face to face appointments exceeding a month before the cuts, it is no stretch of the imagination to see wait times of 6 months to a year to address even the most basic issues.

When people don't get their benefits, or they are forced to jump through ridiculous hoops to get them, the popularity of the program will tank, and at that point, Trump and his  Evil Minions™ can gift wrap social security and give it to Wall Street.

An Old Classic Sees New Interested

During WWII, the OSS, the progenitor of the CIA came up with a manual explaining how to disrupt and sabotage organizations.

Basically, it came down to being an officious asshole.

It is seeing a lot more popular these days:

A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.”

Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks. It is also the fifth most popular ebook on the site over the last 30 days, having been accessed nearly 60,000 times over the last month (just behind Romeo and Juliet).

………

Because it was written during active wartime, the book includes various suggestions for causing physical violence and destruction, such as starting fires, flooding warehouses, breaking tools, etc. But it also includes many suggestions for how to just generally be annoying within a bureaucracy or office setting. Simple sabotage ideas include:

• “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”
• “Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate ‘patriotic’ comments.”
• “Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”
• “Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.”
• “‘Misunderstand’ orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.”
• “In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.”
• “To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.”
• “Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.”
• “Multiply paperwork in plausible ways.”
• “Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses.”
• “Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job”
• “Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions.”
• “Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.”

I know what some of you are thinking, "These techniques were developed to fight Nazis who occupied their countries.  Is this really necessary?"

The answer is YES.

The Stupid, it Burns

The state of Louisiana has forbidden the state health department from supporting Influenza, Covid, and Mpox vaccines.

This means that they are forbidden from even mentioning that they have the vaccines available at their facilities.

A group of high-level managers at the Louisiana Department of Health walked into a Nov. 14 meeting in Baton Rouge expecting to talk about outreach and community events.

Instead, they were told by an assistant secretary in the department and another official that department leadership had a new policy: Advertising or otherwise promoting the COVID, influenza or mpox vaccines, an established practice there — and at most other public health entities in the U.S. — must stop.

NPR has confirmed the policy was discussed at this meeting, and at two other meetings held within the department's Office of Public Health, on Oct. 3 and Nov. 21, through interviews with four employees at the Department of Health, which employs more than 6,500 people and is the state's largest agency.

According to the employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear losing their jobs or other forms of retaliation, the policy would be implemented quietly and would not be put in writing.

Yeah, "Not put in writing," for when you told to do something illegal or incredibly stupid.

Staffers were also told that it applies to every aspect of the health department's work: Employees could not send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccine events, give presentations or create social media posts encouraging the public to get the vaccines. They also could not put up signs at the department's clinics that COVID, flu or mpox vaccines were available on site.

 These folks are doing the level best, by means fair and foul, to kill as many of us as possible.

About F%$#ing Time

When he was Pope, John Paul II, when he wasn't covering up priest abuse and canonizing pedophiles, spent his time purging progressive clerics, even when they were dutifully obedient.

Well it appears that Pope Francis has finally had enough outright insubordination, and relieved Joseph Strickland of his position as head of the Dioceses for Tyler, Texas.

Given that there had already been an Apostolic Visitation, the Catholic equivalent of what HR in businesses call a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP), and he continued to accuse the Pope of undermining Catholic faith, and running a Latin mass in direct contravention of Papal decrees, this is long overdue:

Pope Francis fired on Saturday a bishop in Texas who was one of his loudest American critics within the Catholic Church, a highly rare dismissal that appeared to reflect the growing rift between the Vatican and a more conservative wing of the church.

The Vatican did not cite a reason for the dismissal of the bishop, Joseph Strickland, saying in a statement only that the pope “relieved” Bishop Strickland from the governance of his diocese in Tyler, Texas.

Bishop Strickland had significant ideological differences with Pope Francis. He was arguably the most prominent figure representing traditionalist American Catholics who see Francis as dangerously liberal on social issues like divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage, and on theological issues including his discouragement of the Latin Mass. Ultraconservatives in the United States have emerged as the financial center and media megaphone of the resistance to Francis’ papacy.

In the past year, Bishop Strickland has accused the pope of undermining the Catholic faith, questioned whether Vatican officials even qualified as Catholics and warned that the global meeting of bishops and laypeople that the pope convened last month was a vehicle to threaten “basic truths” of Catholic doctrine.

………

Supporters of Francis, who considered Bishop Strickland’s frequent salvos against the pope beyond the pale and indicative of views that were too extreme, were likely to welcome the firing.

For some observers, the bishop’s jeremiads often went too far, even in a role whose duties include proclaiming truth.

“I don’t remember when a bishop had become so violent in his public attacks against the pope,” said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Villanova University. “He had become a real embarrassment for the church.”

Bishop Strickland, 65 and well below the age of automatic resignation, tested the limits of that tolerance. On Oct. 31, he addressed the Rome Life Forum, a conference hosted by LifeSiteNews. He read what he described as a letter from an anonymous friend that suggested that Francis was a “usurper” in the role of pope, one who has “endangered souls by proclaiming that they are justified before God as they are, with no need of repentance.”

The speech shocked Rev. Timothy Kelly, the pastor of Holy Spirit Catholic Church in the diocese of Tyler. “How can you leave him in office after that?” he asked. “You can’t.”

The reason that I feel compelled to comment on this, even though as a Jew it does not personally effect me, is because it shows a weakness of progressives generally.

When conservatives come to  control of an institution, their first order of business is to purge progressives, while when progressives achieve power with that institution, they tolerate active sabotage of their own organization by their right wing.

The fact that Francis tolerated this sort of behavior in what is one of the few feudal monarchies on earth, is a mark of dysfunction, and not tolerance.

That's the bigger picture here.

Another Day, Another Nord Stream Narrative

Sy Hersch reports that the CIA acting with Norwegian authorities blew up the Nord Stream pipelines.

And then the CIA started leaking.

First, it was the Russians who blew up their own pipeline, because ………  The Aristocrats?

Then it was persons unknown operating ships who had their transponders turned off.

Then it was a group of random Ukrainians not involved with the government who rented a (way too small for the operation) yacht in Germany and sailed out to bomb the pipeline.

Then it was them plus maybe some Polish involvement.

And today it's anonymous sources at the CIA telling their pet reporters that they had got wind of Ukrainian plans to sabotage the pipeline and told them to back off.

Sy Hersh's reporting is still the most coherent narrative out there, and it is clear given the profligate and panicked leaking from Langley that if the CIA did not do this, then they are concerned that one of their non-Agency assets might be involved.

The Central Intelligence Agency told Ukrainian officials last summer that it had learned of what it thought was an aborted plot by the Ukrainians to attack the Nord Stream pipelines, and the agency reinforced its objection to any such operation, U.S. officials said.

In June 2022, Dutch intelligence officials shared information with the C.I.A. that they had learned the Ukrainian military had been planning an operation using divers to blow up one of the pipelines, according to U.S. and European officials. But the original tip by the Dutch, according to U.S. officials, was that Ukraine had already reconsidered and canceled the operation.

In reality, American officials now believe, the operation was not aborted but delayed, potentially with a different Ukraine-aligned group carrying out the attack.

Even if this was an action taken by the Ukrainian government, they could not have done so alone.

Simply put, the Ukrainians do not have the expertise to execute a deep saturation diving operation in the Baltic, which has a very different environment from the Black Sea.

On the other hand, I'm not so sure that the CIA, the Yale educated whiz kids who gave us the Bay of Pigs, missed the first Indian nuclear tests, signed off on WMDs in Iraq, led the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Iran, (leading to the theocracy there) a string of coups in Latin America, (leading to much of our migration problem), helping to create the Taliban and the Khmer Rouge, etc.

Whoever did this got it right, and getting things right is really not the CIA's joint.

On the other hand, this is something that the JSOC would be well positioned to execute.

We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

Not a likely platform

It looks like the earlier suggestion that some random Ukrainian group blew up the Nord Stream pipelines from using a rented yacht is being dropped, not the least of this is because the boat is not large enough to accommodate a full setup for deep diving, nearly a ton of explosives and related equipment, a decompression chamber, and related support equipment.

At the very least, the whole, "Rented Yacht," thing is now being dismissed, even though there are reports that explosive residues were found on board.

It appears that the investigators were thinking that those residues were an attempt to throw off investigators.

After saboteurs severely damaged the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines last September, German officials zeroed in on a rented sailboat that appeared to have taken part in planting explosive devices deep below the surface of the Baltic Sea.

But after months of investigation, law enforcement officials now suspect that the 50-foot yacht, the Andromeda, was probably not the only vessel used in the audacious attack. They also say the boat may have been a decoy, put to sea to distract from the true perpetrators, who remain at large, according to officials with knowledge of an investigation led by Germany’s attorney general. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details about the active inquiry, including doubts about the Andromeda’s role that haven’t been previously reported.

Officials hope that the true purpose of Andromeda in the deep-sea demolition will provide further insight in a high-stakes, international whodunnit that could eventually lead to those responsible and explain their motives, which remain unclear.

……….

Such an operation would have taken multiple dives, exposing the Andromeda to detection from nearby ships. The mission would have been easier to hide and pull off using remotely piloted underwater vehicles or small submarines, said diving and salvage experts who have worked in the area of the explosion, which features rough seas and heavy shipping traffic.

The German investigation has determined that traces of “military-grade” explosives found on a table inside the boat’s cabin match the batch of explosives used on the pipeline. Several officials doubted that skilled saboteurs would leave such glaring evidence of their guilt behind. They wonder if the explosive traces — collected months after the rented boat was returned to its owners — were meant to falsely lead investigators to the Andromeda as the vessel used in the attack.

“The question is whether the story with the sailboat is something to distract or only part of the picture,” said one person with knowledge of the investigation.

They found residues on the table?  They were making bombs with over 100kg of explosives on the dining room table of a yacht? Seriously?

If they were making, or assembling, bombs on the boat, residues would be everywhere, and if they were simply transporting the bombs, the residue would be nowhere.

No wonder investigators are skeptical.

………

The German investigation has linked the yacht rental to a Polish company, which is in turn owned by a European company that’s connected to a prominent Ukrainian, fueling speculation from Berlin to Warsaw to Kyiv that a deep-pocketed partisan may have financed the operation. The identity of the Polish company and the Ukrainian individual, as well as his potential motive, remains unclear.

………

Suspicion also has turned toward Ukraine as the culprit behind the Nord Stream bombings, based in part on intercepted communications of pro-Ukraine individuals discussing the possibility of carrying out an attack on the pipelines before the explosions, The Washington Post previously reported.

Only the Ukraine lacked the means to conduct such an operation.  Even if they found a way to transport their divers to the Baltic Sea with the requisite deep diving experience, they would have had deep sea experience in the far warmer, and far more docile, Black Sea, and so the entire team would have needed weeks or months of training. 

They might possibly have been able to hire people able to do this, but not without the knowledge and tacit assent of the United States, particularly given the economic reporting that would doubtless have to be otherwise made in order to comply with US sanctions.

………

For all the intrigue around who bombed the pipeline, some Western officials are not so eager to find out.

At gatherings of European and NATO policymakers, officials have settled into a rhythm, said one senior European diplomat: “Don’t talk about Nord Stream.” Leaders see little benefit from digging too deeply and finding an uncomfortable answer, the diplomat said, echoing sentiments of several peers in other countries who said they would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or allies were involved.

This level of diplomatic omerta is not about the Ukraine, who would continue to get support if they were found to be culpable, or the Poles, who are generally viewed with alarm by the other members of NATO.

Said diplomats are concerned that a serious investigation would point to the United States or the UK, and if that were the case, the repercussion would likely shatter the increasingly fragile consensus on the Ukraine war.

This is not evidence that the US or UK were involved, after all, the CIA was not involved in the JFK assassination, but they spent months worrying that someone that they supported was involved, but it says a lot about the current state of mind within the alliance.

My Rules to Live By

Here are some of mine:

• Don't tug on Superman's cape.
• Don't piss into the wind.
• Don't pull the mask off that old lone ranger.
• Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
  
• Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!
• Never dismiss Seymour Hersh's reporting out of hand.

Obviously, this could be construed as an appeal to authority, but Hersh is arguably the best investigative reporter ever.  He broke the My Lai massacre, CIA spying on Americans, Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia, the Abu Ghraib torture scandals, US chemical warfare activities in the 1960s. among other major stories.

The reason that I am mention this is because Sy Hersh has written an article detailing how the US and Norway allegedly collaborated to sabotage the Nord Stream 1 & 2 pipelines. (Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames have confirmed that this is indeed Hersh, and not some random on Substack pretending to be him)

Certainly the circumstances, numerous statements by American officials before the fact carrying implied threats over the pipelines, the opening of the Baltic Pipe from Norway to Germany and Poland the day after the bombing, and the end zone celebrations by senior American officials after the blasts, (also here) would seem to confirm this.

I would note that there has been some criticism, most prominently from (CIA linked thru National Endowment for Democracy funding) Bellingcat, stating that Hersh based this on a single report, but this is a deliberate misreading of the article.

The problem is that while Hersh mentions that he got this information from asingle  source, Hersh has been clear throughout his career, and in his memoir, that he does not write a story based on a single source.  He always confirms with other contacts, though the report of the initial source is frequently the catalyst to get those sources talking. (In the audio interview after the break with the War Nerd, he refuses go into detail about his confirming sources, though he does imply that he vetted what his initial source said.  See also here.)

The short version is that US Navy divers prepared the site of the explosions during the  BALTOPS 22 exercises with the cooperation of Norway, and that the eventual explosion was from a sound signal from a Sonar buoy.

I'm inclined to believe this, and I would even if it were not Seymour Hersh.  

The only nations to benefit from the bombing are the US and Norway.

The level of detail is high, though that is not in itself confirmation.

What is confirmation are multiple reports, most notably a Wired report of "Dark Ships" around the pipeline at the time of the explosions, and reports from some admittedly sketchy websites that an anonymous whistle blower reported to them bizarre operations (Heliox setups for shallow water operations and no metal detectors) by Navy divers.  (here [Google Translate] and here [YouTube from October] are reports from an anonymous whistle blower to some rather sketchy web sites.)

What mitigates against this story is that this has the CIA and the Pentagon engaging in an operation with a level of competence and secrecy that is belied by by the history of both organizations.

One of the more interesting criticisms of the Hersh article comes from long-time Moscow based reporter John Helmer, comes from the opposite side of the ideological spectrum from the mainstream media in the US and UK, who maintains that the operation to blow up the pipelines involved far more nations than just the US and Norway. 

Certainly the story is internally consistent, and if they could provide "Plausible Deniability", the risks of such an operation are small, and the rewards great.

Gee, You Think?

I understand that the first casualty of war is the truth, but the assertions from anonymous sources that Russia blew up the Nord Stream 1 & 2 pipelines has always been bullsh%$.

All they needed to do to cut off Europe was to shut the valve on their end.

People who promulgated this, the anonymous, "Five European officials with direct knowledge of security discussions," lie are either liars, stupid, or both: (Truth is always the first casualty of war)

After explosions in late September severely damaged undersea pipelines built to carry natural gas from Russia to Europe, world leaders quickly blamed Moscow for a brazen and dangerous act of sabotage. [This link has the anonymous quote above] With winter approaching, it appeared the Kremlin intended to strangle the flow of energy to millions across the continent, an act of “blackmail,” some leaders said, designed to threaten countries into withdrawing their financial and military support for Ukraine.

But now, after months of investigation, numerous officials privately say that Russia may not be to blame after all for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.

“There is no evidence at this point that Russia was behind the sabotage,” said one European official, echoing the assessment of 23 diplomatic and intelligence officials in nine countries interviewed in recent weeks.

Some went so far as to say they didn’t think Russia was responsible. Others who still consider Russia a prime suspect said positively attributing the attack — to any country — may be impossible.

 Again, why would Russia blow up a pipeline when it could simply shut off the supply, and had, in fact already shut off much of the supply, is laughable.

………

Given the relatively shallow depth of the damaged pipelines — approximately 80 yards at the site of one explosion — a number of different actors could theoretically have pulled off the attack, possibly with the use of submersible drones or with the aid of surface ships, officials said. The list of suspects isn’t limited only to countries that possess manned submarines or deep-sea demolitions expertise.

While a depth of 80 meters is roughly twice the depth one would normally see with recreational divers, you can reach depths of over 120 meters with various alternative gas mixtures, and even then, there are plenty of remotely operated ROVs that could deliver an explosive to that depth.

It should be noted that the warhead weight for a heavyweight torpedo is 200-300 kg, and a lightweight torpedo has a warhead in the 50-100  kg range, an ROV with a warhead of this range would not require any particularly difficult design or manufacturing work.

Tweet of the Day

lol pic.twitter.com/RCUk7OGMfQ

— Alex Press (@alexnpress) September 25, 2022

This is an unsurprising consequence of a race to the bottom for workers. It shows up in the assembly line, or at the cashier's counter, or on the phone as subtle slacking and sabotage.

The First Casualty of War

Is the truth.

The Wall Street Journal, with a tip from Bellingcat, the "Independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists," reported that members of the Ukrainian negotiating team were poisoned, and they pointed at Russia.

Well now, US intelligence sources are denying it.

My guess is that this is not the same people in US intelligence who are big on regime change in Russia, these people, are the ones feeding the "Collective" bullsh%$ about poisoning because they want to sabotage the negotiations.  (According to Bellingcat's "About" page, the group has received grants from the CIA cutout the National Endowment for Democracy.)

I'm not saying that the Bellingcat is a CIA cutout, but it's certainly CIA cutout adjacent:

A U.S. official said on Monday that intelligence suggests the sickening of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators was due to an environmental factor, not poisoning.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal and investigative outlet Bellingcat reported that Abramovich and the negotiators had suffered symptoms of suspecting poisoning earlier this month after a meeting in Kyiv.

While I am certain that there are elements of the US State Security Apparatus who are not insane, and so want the war to end as soon as possible, there are also elements of the US State Security Apparatus who are eager to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, even if this increases the risk of nuclear war.

Needless to say, the second group are completely insane.

My Family Just Got Tickets to the Defend The Majority Rally Featuring Vice President Mike Pence in Augusta Georgia

We aren't going, so if someone wants to download the PDF and go in our place, you can download the PDF here.

You can also get a ticket at Evenbrite for yourself. It's free. 

My suggestion is that if you go, you wear a K-Pop T-shirt, and when Mike Pence walks onto stage, start chanting, "How'd you launder the Saudi kickback money, Vice President Pence."

A Feature Not a Bug

The Baltimore post office sat on 65,000 pieces of political mail for at least 5 days before the primary.

Not ballots, mind you, but this is just the dress rehearsal.

It's a great way to depress turnout at the (overwhelmingly Democratic) Baltimore City:

An audit of U.S. Postal Service performance during this year’s primary election season has found 68,000 pieces of political mail sat untouched at a Baltimore mail processing facility for five days ahead of the June 2 primary.

The audit published Monday says the mail, sent May 12, “sat unprocessed” for five days before being discovered by management at the facility.

Baltimore was in the midst of several contentious political races at the time, including those for mayor, comptroller and City Council president. Numerous candidates for those offices spent thousands of dollars on campaign mailers in an attempt to sway voters in close primaries.

Ballots destined for those voters also were in the mail stream during the window when the political mail sat at the facility, but the audit specifically stated the delayed pieces were not ballots. “This was First-Class campaign mail from a political candidate,” according to a footnote in the report.

 I'm going to drop off my ballot this year.

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

Donald Trump has now definitively stating that he is blocking US Post Office funding in an attempt to sabotage vote-by-mail:

President Donald Trump said on Thursday he was blocking Democrats’ effort to include funds for the U.S. Postal Service and election infrastructure in a new coronavirus relief bill, a bid to block more Americans from voting by mail during the pandemic.

Congressional Democrats accused Republican Trump of trying to damage the struggling Postal Service to improve his chances of being re-elected as opinion polls show him trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Trump has been railing against mail-in ballots for months as a possible source of fraud, although millions of Americans - including much of the military - have cast absentee ballots by mail for years without such problems.

Trump said his negotiators have resisted Democrats’ calls for additional money to help prepare for presidential, congressional and local voting during a pandemic that has killed more than 165,000 Americans and presented logistical challenges to organizing as large an event as the Nov. 3 elections.

“The items are the post office and the $3.5 billion for mail-in voting,” Trump told Fox Business Network, saying Democrats want to give the post office $25 billion. “If we don’t make the deal, that means they can’t have the money, that means they can’t have universal mail-in voting.”

Trump later said at a news briefing that if a deal was reached that included postal funding, he would not veto it.

So, he is admitting that he wants to squelch vote by mail, but it's too much of a wimp to veto a relief bill.

In any case this will not prevent Trump and his Evil Minions^™ from actively sabotaging Post Office operations:

The United States Postal Service is removing mail sorting machines from facilities around the country without any official explanation or reason given, Motherboard has learned through interviews with postal workers and union officials. In many cases, these are the same machines that would be tasked with sorting ballots, calling into question promises made by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy that the USPS has “ample capacity” to handle the predicted surge in mail-in ballots.

Motherboard identified 19 mail sorting machines from five processing facilities across the U.S. that either have already been removed or are scheduled to be in the near future. But the Postal Service operates hundreds of distribution facilities around the country, so it is not clear precisely how many machines are getting removed and for what purpose.

Even to local union officials, USPS has not announced any policy, explained why they are doing this, what will happen to the machines and the workers who use them. Nor has management provided a rationale for dismantling and removing the machines from the facility rather than merely not operating them when they’re not needed.

………

While the consequences of this new policy are mostly unclear for now, it neatly fits with the sudden, opaque, and drastic changes made by DeJoy, a longtime Republican fundraiser and Trump donor, in the less than two months he’s been postmaster general. Like his other changes, including the curtailing of overtime resulting in the widespread mail delays and sudden reorganization of the entire USPS, it is possible to see some semblance of corporate logic while second-guessing the decision to make drastic changes on the eve of the presidential election in which the USPS will play a critical role.

This is literally page 1 of the despot's play book, and if it were happening in Venezuela Mike  Pompeo would be condemning this as an affront to democracy.

Chaos is Job Won

The new Postmaster General is a Trump toady, and he is doing his best to destroy the post office in order to kill postal voting:

The new head of the U.S. Postal Service established major operational changes Monday that could slow down mail delivery, warning employees the agency would not survive unless it made “difficult” changes to cut costs. But critics say such a philosophical sea change would sacrifice operational efficiency and cede its competitive edge to UPS, FedEx and other private-sector rivals.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told employees to leave mail behind at distribution centers if it delayed letter carriers from their routes, according to internal USPS documents obtained by The Washington Post and verified by the American Postal Workers Union and three people with knowledge of their contents, but who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

“If the plants run late, they will keep the mail for the next day,” according to a document titled, “New PMG’s [Postmaster General’s] expectations and plan.” Traditionally, postal workers are trained not to leave letters behind and to make multiple delivery trips to ensure timely distribution of letters and parcels.

………

The Trump administration has consolidated control over the Postal Service, traditionally an apolitical institution, during the pandemic by making a financial lifeline for the nation’s mail service contingent upon the White House political agenda. President Trump in April called the agency “a joke” and demanded it quadruple package rates before he’d authorize any emergency aid or loans.

………

“This is framing the U.S. Postal Service, a 245-year-old government agency, and comparing it to its competitors that could conceivably go bankrupt,” said Philip Rubio, a professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University and a former postal worker. “Comparing it to U.S. Steel says exactly that ‘We are a business, not service.’ That’s troubling.”

The changes also worry vote-by-mail advocates, who insist that any policy that slows delivery could imperil access to mailed and absentee ballots. It reinforces the need, they say, for Congress to provide the agency emergency coronavirus funding.

These changes achieve 2 goals of Trump and his Evil Minions^™:  Shafting Amazon, and suppressing the vote to boost his own reelection chances.