Russia a friend? Follow the spies.

Many Americans like to think that when the Soviet Union dissolved on Christmas 1991,  Russia became a friend.  The man who led Russia for the next decade, its first freely elected leader, Boris Yeltsin, seemed to be friendlier to the United States.  He privatized state-run businesses and adopted free-market principles, promoted a free press, and promoted democratic measures in governance.  History.com gives a succinct summary of his  reign:  "But although a select few oligarchs became shockingly wealthy, many Russians lapsed deeper into poverty due to rampant inflation and the rising cost of living. Yeltsin’s Russia also struggled with the taint of being an ex-superpower and with corruption, lawlessness, decreased industrial output and falling life expectancies."

Americans have been conditioned to think of free-market capitalism as equated with honest, democratic government.  After almost a decade, Yeltsin resigned the presidency of Russia and turned it over to Putin.  Putin forged an alliance with some of the oligarchs who owned Russia and re-established a totalitarian government that often rules with savage violence that characterized the Soviet days.  As has happened in the U.S., a few people have garnered ownership and control of Russia.  Putin, the ex-KGB officer, has returned to tactics characteristic of the Soviet Kremlin.  Many thought that once Russia rid itself of communist rule,  it would join westerns democracies.  But communism is not the factor that made Russia our prime enemy in the Cold War.  Other social attitudes and political ambitions  were at work, and they prevailed after communism was abandoned.  In Russia today, capitalism rules with a vengeance;  Putin's greatest source of power is his alliance with the capitalist oligarchs.

In fact, as Russia moved from a communist state to the federation it terms itself now,  its attitude toward the United States never changed.  In 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev was Secretary General of the Communist Party and was making nice with Ronald Reagan, the KGB recruited two moles in the top U.S. spy agencies.  They recruited Aldrich Ames in the CIA and Robert Hanssen in the FBI.  Both men continued their work for Russia through the transition and beyond as if no regime change had taken place.  Ames was caught in February 1994, and Hannsen in February 2001.  Both man supplied the Russians with names of moles who spyied on Russia for the U.S., which led to their execution by the Russian spy agency.  While Americans felt that the Cold War had ended on Christmas 1991, the Russians did not think so.

Many American businesses and executives exploited the Cold War detente with Russia to further their own agendas.  Typical is the case of current Secretary of State Rex Tillerson while he served as CEO of Exxon Mobil.  He helped the oligarch friends of Vladimir Putin make profitable deals in oil and received Russia's Order of Friendship.  Russian oligarchs have created a network with American corporate executives which can be exploited by Putin to achieve his agenda,  which is to regain the power the Soviet Union once held equal to,  if not surpassing America's.

Russian interference in America's election of 2016 is not the only case in which Russia tries to destabilize countries and influence their politics.  The Czech Republic, which has become a member of the European Union, claims Russia's spying on it is worse that it was during the height of the Cold War.  European nations say that Russian espionage against them is booming.  

Americans do not understand that the inequality they experience with the U.S.  one percent owning and controlling a preponderant percentage of the nation's wealth is a global trend of which Russia is a part.  Giant global corporations recognize no matters of national security or loyalty when it comes to acquiring and controlling the world's wealth and its distribution.

During the Cold War,  Americans were conditioned to fear a Marxist takeover.  When the Cold War ended the takeover of the world's wealth by corporate interests and their cronies, such as the Russian and Chinese oligarchs proceeded apace.  They have achieved an infiltration and takeover of America that died-in-the-wool Marxists could not.

If you want to know who our enemies are,  identify who is spying on us most vigorously.  Many are citizens of other countries,  and many are "citizens" of corporations.  They all aim to exploit America and make it vulnerable to their designs.  One such person and his billionaire and millionaire cronies operate out of the White House.  As with Russia, before and after the Soviet dissolution,  their aim is to weaken America and bend it to their purposes.  

Being a resident expatriate

In the 1920s, America's most important writers, artists, and thinkers left the  United States to live in other places, predominantly Paris.  Gertrude Stein is attributed for labeling these expatriates the "lost generation."  She said America was her country, but Paris was her home.  An expatriate is one who withdraws from residence in  or allegiance to his or her country.

By that definition,  I am an expatriate. I cannot bear allegiance to a country that has embraced the moral and intellectual degradation of Donald Trump.  I am by no means alone.


The expatriates of the 1920s left their country for a complex of reasons, one of which was captured in a post-World War I song "How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Paree?"  But there were more profound reasons for the sense of alienation in the United States that went beyond the experience of a less restrictive and more tolerant style of life that Paris represented. While many white Americans gathered in Europe to  pursue the arts,   the Harlem Renaissance was blossoming for African Americans in New York City and providing a beacon for those living under Jim Crow.  Art, literature, and music provide alternative ideas and the stuff out of which an alternative culture can be constructed.  The 1920s was laying the cultural foundation with which America faced the Great Depression, another world war, and the need for civil rights.  Called the Jazz Age,  the 1920s was a time when black culture was adopted by the larger culture through music.  It was a time of intense literary activity when the moral implications of the premise of the nation were under examination.  It was the time when the character of what Tom Brokaw has called The Greatest Generation was formed.  

Expatriates found that they needed a distant perspective from which to judge the values of their country.  Some did it from the vantage point of Europe; others did it through the vantage point of disengagement from American society.  I have seen a parallel movement to social disengagement at work in South Dakota.   There are many people who reside in South Dakota but find their home in other places.  A number of people I know center their "home life" in the Twin Cities.  They subscribe to the Minneapolis and St. Paul newspapers and organize their social and cultural lives around events and reources in the those cities.  And over the years, many South Dakota friends have relocated their residences when they found the opportunity.  

For many people, the dominant culture of South Dakota has nothing to offer them.  Once when  i was teaching college,  a nationally prominent person from South Dakota was in the state for a speaking engagement.  Some of we professors were able to combine our classes and have him speak to our students.  A student asked him if he ever considered returning to South Dakota to live.  The man replied that the last he thing he could do is live in a state where the ultimate activity is "to blast away at the world's dumbest bird with shotguns or sit in a boat by the world's biggest stock dams fishing for the world's dumbest fish."  The students understood that the response was humorous hyperbole, but nevertheless reflected a cultural fact of life.  

For many Americans, the nation has come to represent the kind of cultural deficiency that South Dakota had for that man.  While the nation fusses over old conservative and liberal arguments,  many people see that other nations in the world have in fact surpassed the U.S. in social progress.  The election of Donald Trump represents a giant leap backward into a world of small mindedness and petty resentments.  America is no longer the shining city on the hill. It is the cultural shanty town near the dump. 

As an Army veteran who served in Germany during the Cold War,  I find that the country I was once proud to defend no longer exists.  During that time,  our radars and intelligence gathering antennae were trained on the Soviet Union, but the battle being fought was an internal one.  In 1948, President Truman signed the order to desegregate the armed forces but that did not purge them of racist attitudes and Jim Crow practices.  We dealt with racial incidents constantly, and did not eliminate racism,  but we did make progress in seeing that racial oppression and discrimination would not be tolerated.  

The election of Barack Obama as our first black president was more than many people could bear, and dormant racial attitudes were revived.  Pundits spend much time talking about mistakes by Democrats that resulted in the election of Donald Trump, but few have the courage to admit that Jim Crow won the election.  And people who endorse Jim Crow are not people with whom there is any possible reconciliation.  Despite the fact that Trump has a record of astounding business failures, bankruptcies, and a history of ripping off people who work for him,  people keep saying that they voted for him because he's a business man and can get things done.  With his actual business record, an 18-month display of acting out like a fifth-grade bully, and his anti-science, anti-fact, anti-decency agenda,  supporters still insist that they voted for change.  The change they voted for was to halt and reverse all the progress the country has made in extending the benefits of freedom, equality, justice, and over all health and well-being to the nation.  These are people who cannot be engaged in fact-based reasoning.  And so, there is a nation of expatriates.  The expatriates are that majority who voted for someone else.  

The expatriates step back and take a long view and visualize what a genuine America looks like.  And think about where it can be built.  

How to take a leak

Trump's administration resembles a sieve.  It has so many  leaks.  The media abound with accounts of leaks streaming out of the White House. And there are accusations of leaks from the intelligence community.   As an old news dog,  I dealt with leaking in the past.

First, when an official tells a reporter something on the condition of anonymity,  that is not a leak.  That is a contact which can be attributed to someone who is in a position to know something.  Nevertheless,  when an anonymous source is quoted,  the news medium still has the responsibility to verify the information with other sources.   In the story on the resignation of Michael Flynn and the revelation that Trump's campaign had regular contact with Russian officials,  The Washington Post took pains to show how the story broke and was verified by major media.  

My assigned duties as a journalist did not cover government primarily, although in covering agriculture, the USDA and the extension services and colleges of agriculture were a major part of the  coverage.  There wasn't much occasion for leaking coming from those quarters.  The biggest outpouring of leaks came from my coverage of business.  And that included the coverage of government agencies such as the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other agencies that regulate business.

As the news accounts of leaks flowing from Trump point out,  there are many motives.  One is that in a highly competitive contest for gaining attention and power,  people will piss on each other.  Another is resentment toward the people in charge, in which case the pissing is on the bosses.  A reporter has to learn how to identify those kinds of leakers because their information is not reliable.  

Another kind of leak is that of people who are genuinely concerned that something is wrong with the situation in which they are working.  That seems to be the case in many of the Trump leaks.  People around him are finding that he is not all there.  He is not capable of perceiving and understanding real situations.  He lives in self-delusion.  And he is a dedicated liar.  

As a business editor, I had many such  leaks that came from a major farm equipment corporation for which I once worked.  The people who leaked to me were ones I had worked with.  At the time I worked for the company, it was a large global corporation headquartered in Chicago.  When I worked there, many employees used to meet a bar nearby on Friday nights to cash their paychecks and transition into the weekend with a brew or two.  The conversations often involved dumb things that the management did.  On many occasions, some of the bosses joined us to show that they knew when bad decisions were being made.  The conversations tended toward predicting how the company would fail.  It eventually did,  much in the way predicted by those disgruntled Friday night commentaries.

When I was a business editor and received calls or had conversations with former fellow-employees,  it was because people in the company were worrying about the future of their jobs and witnessed the company doing things that jeopardized its future.  The company's response to consumer complaints was a constant source of information that I kept getting from employees.  Executives were getting reports of problems with the equipment and denied that there could be problems with the products. At one time while working for the company, I was assigned to a team that investigated customer and dealer complaints.   We found that the company produced a good product,  but that manufacturing flaws were getting past the inspection department.  Those flaws could easily have been eliminated by adjustments in the manufacturing process.  But the company's response was to take the investigative team out of the field.  

As an editor, I received constant updates from my friends in the company,  but they were seldom the kind of thing that could be used in reporting business news.  They were the personal observations of people seeing mistakes being made up  close.  They were informing but could not be used in a journalistic context.  One evening, I encountered one of my former bosses in a restaurant.  He was one who joined those Friday night sessions in which company mistakes were discussed.  I commented that I was in touch with some employees who kept me posted on what was going on with the company, but that the personal anecdotes were not useful for news coverage.  My former boss suggested that I look more deeply into sources that covered stock shares,  markets, engineering developments, and product news--specialty publications that only people involved in highly technical aspects of business are familiar with.  Some of these publications did comparisons of the products and services delivered, while others tracked personnel decisions.  I found that the company decided to farm out engineering to research and development organizations rather than hire engineers.  This policy was the opposite of the company's main competitor,  which recruited engineers from Big Ten universities, givng them summer jobs and internships to help them through school.  This information was verified by my sources within the company, who supplied me with stories about the problems being caused by the lack of in-house engineers to address issues as they came up.    I was able to use the leaks to illustrate the general news reported in the technical press. 

Eventually, the company got sued when it was discovered that a main component of its corn harvesting machines infringed on a patent held by its major competitor.  It was the killing blow after the company had been brought to the edge of bankruptcy by a grandstanding CEO who  took an anti-union stance  in cost-cutting that resulted in the longest strike against the company in its history.  When the company failed and closed down,  all its local plants were shuttered   More than 12,000 people lost their jobs.  The employees of the company saw the failure coming long before shareholders, executives, and the business press did.  

One of the incidents related to me involved a man who ran a huge dealership for the company.  This dealer also flew his own airplane.  He had sold a machine that failed in the field and he gave a farmer a new machine off his sales floor so that the harvest could be finished.  The dealer and his mechanics tore apart the failed machine and found the cause to be a matter of hasty assembly in the factory.  In reducing costs, an order had been put out to speed up the assembly  line and to "provide a greater tolerance"  in the inspection department that examined finished machines for problems.  The company personnel did not respond to the dealer's telephone calls satisfactorily, so the dealer wrapped the failed parts in a greasy gunny sack,  put it in his airplane, and flew them up to the town where the plant was located.  He strode into the plant offices, barged into the plant manager's office, and dumped the greasy sack with the parts on the manager's desk.  

This was a great story, but the company, of course, would not acknowledge it and the dealer did not want to jeopardize his relationship with the company by commenting on the incident. So, the story remained a matter of a leak circulated among employees.  However, the story was a rather precise illustration of management practices and company attitudes that eventually brought the company down.  The leak identified and explained a problem within the company, but that information never reached the people who could make use of it--stockholders, customers, or the general public.  That leak was more prescient about the company's future than anything that could be verified, given attribution, and printed.  

Leaks are often the important news.  They do have to be analyzed to see if they are motivated by people using them as competitive weapons  to gain advantage or as vengeful weapons against disliked bosses.  But leaks that are motivated by the need to tell someone what is really going on are important.  In states such as South Dakota where there is a network of laws that give officials the power to withhold information,  leaks are often the only accurate and genuine news about how government is performing.  Leaks have to be taken seriously.   They are often the closest thing to truth that you'll ever get.