USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Printable Version

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USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 06-02-2017

USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 06-02-2017

Trump's newly appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, has begun to attack net neutrality rules and other consumer protections. In a series of actions last week, Pai blocked nine companies from providing affordable high-speed internet to low-income families, withdrew the FCC's support from an effort to curb the exorbitant cost of phone calls from prison, and said he disagrees with the 2015 decision to regulate the internet like a public utility.

Trump's Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch has scheduled more than a dozen meetings with senators on Capitol Hill this week. The meetings come as more information is emerging about Gorsuch, including his right-wing writings and political views from his time as a student at Columbia University in the mid-1980s. While on campus, Gorsuch co-founded the right-wing campus newspaper the Federalist Paper. The Associated Press reports that in Gorsuch's writing both for the Federalist Paper and the Columbia Daily Spectator, he criticized anti-apartheid protests, saying divestment could hurt the university's endowment. He also criticized racial justice protests and black-led movements on campus, while he defended the Reagan administration during the Iran-Contra scandal.

USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 06-02-2017

USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 07-02-2017

USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 07-02-2017

February 6, 2017 | Peter Dale Scott

Donald J. Trump and the Deep State, Part 1

[Image: Deep_State_Gears_1088x725-700x470.jpg]

[Image: Deep_State_Gears_1088x725-700x470.jpg]

Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from geralt / Pixabay, US Government / Wikimedia, Ipankonin / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0), Geek3 / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0), MesserWoland / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0), Unknown / Wikimedia and US Government / Wikimedia.
When the uninitiated think of the "Deep State," they tend to imagine a group of men getting together in a room, smoking cigars and plotting world domination. But the Deep State is not one coordinated network of people controlling the government from the shadows.
Instead, it refers to individuals and groups that have the resources to shape the direction of the world to their benefit and don't hesitate to make use of them. At times, the interests of different factions of the Deep State collide. That often happens when the direction of the world is rapidly changing, as is the case now after the election of Donald Trump.
Nobody knows this better than Peter Dale Scott, the foremost expert on the US Deep State. Below, you will find a new introduction to the paperback version of The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Struggle for U.S. Democracy, Updated Edition (copyright 2017), (with permission of the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved). This is Part 1 of a two-part series.
Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat, Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at Berkeley, poet, and 2002 recipient of the Lannan Poetry Award.
His political books include Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (2010), The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (2014) and Dallas '63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House (2015). A complete bibliography can be found on his website at http://www.peterdalescott.net.
***
On February 3, 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported President Trump's plans to pave the way for a broad rollback of the recent financial reforms of Wall Street.[1] Although no surprise, the news was in ironic contrast to the rhetoric of his campaign, when he spent months denouncing both Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton for their links to Goldman Sachs, even when his campaign's Financial Chairman was a former Goldman Sachs banker, Steve Mnuchin (now Trump's Treasury Secretary).
Trump was hardly the first candidate to run against the banking establishment while surreptitiously taking money from big bankers. So did Hitler in 1933; so did Obama in 2008. (In Obama's final campaign speech of 2008, he attacked "the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street."[2] But it was revealed later that Wall Street bankers and financial insiders, chiefly from Goldman Sachs, had raised $42.2 million for Obama's 2008 campaign, more than for any previous candidate in history.)[3]
However, Trump's connections to big money, both new (often self-made) and old (mostly institutional) were not only more blatant than usual; some were also possibly more sinister. Trump's campaign was probably the first ever to be (as we shall see) scrutinized by the FBI for "financial connections with Russian financial figures," and even with a Russian bank whose Washington influence was attacked years ago, after it was allegedly investigated in Russia for possible mafia connections.[4]
Trump's appointment of the third former Goldman executive to lead Treasury in the last four administrations, after Robert Rubin (under Clinton) and Hank Paulson (under Bush), has reinforced recent speculation about Trump's relationship to what is increasingly referred to as the deep state. That is the topic of this essay.
But we must first see what is really meant by the deep state".
What Is Meant by the Deep State?

.

Since 2007, when I first referred to a "deep state" in America, the term has become a meme, and even the topic of a cautious essay in The New York Times.[5] Recently it has been enhanced by a new meme, "the 'deep state' versus Trump," a theme that promoted Donald Trump as a genuine outsider, and entered the electoral campaign as early as August 2016.[6]
Trump reinforced this notion when he expressed opposition to America's international defense alliances and trade deals that both traditional parties had long supported, as well as by his promise to "drain the Washington swamp." It was encouraged again post-election by Trump's longtime political advisor Roger Stone, formerly of the Washington lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, once a major feature of that swamp.[7]
But those who saw the election as a contest between outsider Trump and a "deep state" tended to give two different meanings to this new term. On the one hand were those who saw the deep state as "a conglomerate of insiders" incorporating all those, outside and inside the traditional state, who "run the country no matter who is in the White Houseâ€¦and without the consent of voters."[8] On the other were those who, like Chris Hedges, limited the "deep state" to those perverting constitutional American politics from the margin of the Washington Beltway "the security and surveillance apparatus, the war machine."[9]
But both of these simplistic definitions, suitable for campaign rhetoric, omit the commanding role played by big money what used to be referred to as Wall Street, but now includes an increasingly powerful number of maverick non-financial billionaires like the Koch brothers. All serious studies of the deep state, including Mike Lofgren's The Deep State and Philip Giraldi's Deep State America as well as this book, acknowledge the importance of big money.[10]
It is important to recognize moreover, that the current division between "red" and "blue" America is overshadowed by a corresponding division at the level of big money, one that contributed greatly to the ugliness of the 2016 campaign. In The American Deep State (p. 30), I mention, albeit very briefly, the opposition of right-wing oilmen and the John Birch Society "to the relative internationalism of Wall Street."[11] That opposition has become more powerful, and better financed, than ever before.
It has also evolved. As I noted in The American Deep State, (p. 14), the deep state "is not a structure but a system, as difficult to define, but also as real and powerful, as a weather system." A vigorous deep state, like America, encompasses dynamic processes continuously generating new forces within it like the Internet just as a weather system is not fixed but changes from day to day.
The Current Divisions in America and Its Wealth

.

Three days before the inauguration of Donald Trump, "Frontline" on PBS began a two-part program, "Divided States of America," documenting how the polarization of American public opinion has contributed to both stagnation in Washington and widespread popular anger, on both the left and the right, against the traditional two-party system.
The Frontline show failed to address the major role played by money in aggravating this public division. For example, it followed many popular accounts in tracing the emergence of the tax-revolt Tea Party to the apparently spontaneous call on February 19, 2009, by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli in Chicago, for a "tea party," in response to President Barack Obama's expensive bailouts.[12]
However, this event (on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, a deep state institution) was not only staged, it had been prepared for in advance. A domain name, chicagoteaparty.org, had been registered for it in 2008, before Obama had even been elected.[13] Jane Mayer has conclusively demonstrated the role in the funding groups behind the Tea Party played by the brothers Charles and David Koch, who in 2014 were two of the ten richest people on earth, worth a combined $32 billion as owners of the largest private oil company in America.[14] (Today their wealth is estimated at $84 billion.)
More important, as Mayer pointed out, the Tea Party was not "a new strain" in American politics. The scale was unusual, but history had shown that similar reactionary forces had attacked virtually every Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt. Earlier business-funded right-wing movements, from the Liberty League [of the 1930s] to the John Birch Society to [Richard Mellon] Scaife's [anti-Clinton] Arkansas Project, all had cast Democratic presidents as traitors, usurpers, and threats to the Constitution. The undeniable element of racial resentment that tinged many Tea Party rallies was also an old and disgracefully enduring story in American politics.[15]
The Kochs' lavish funding of the Tea Party, along with anti-tax candidates and climate-change deniers, was only one more phase in what I described in 1996 as an enduring struggle between "America Firsters" and "New World Order" globalists, pitting, through nearly all of this [20[SUP]th[/SUP]] century, the industry-oriented (e.g. the National Association of Manufacturers) against the financial-oriented (e.g. the Council on Foreign Relations), two different sources of wealth.[16]
A decade later Trump has revived the slogan of "America First!", and vowed to reconsider both NATO and multilateral trade. Both factions are still there today; but, as we shall see, both now have international connections.
American Politics and the Increase in Wealth Disparity

.

Mayer's helpful overview overlooks the alarming increase in wealth disparity since 1980 and especially in the last decade. Ten years ago, when I published The Road to 9/11, I noted that 225 billionaires owned as much as the bottom fifty percent of people in the world, and I repeated Kevin Phillips' warning that
"As the twenty-first century gets underway, the imbalance of wealth and democracy in the United States is unsustainableâ€¦. Either democracy must be renewed, with politics brought back to life, or wealth is likely to cement a new and less democratic regime plutocracy by some other name."[17]
In 2010, only three years later, that indicator of disparity had risen up the pyramid from 225 billionaires to 43; and today the figure has shrunk still further to eight.[18]

Left to right: Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Photo credit: Oracle PR / Flickr (CC BY 2.0), National Museum of American History Smithsonian Institution / Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0), JD Lasica / Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0) and US Department of the Treasury / Flickr.

As The New York Times reported in October 2015, just 158 families supplied half of the early money that had already poured into the 2016 campaign, and 138 of these families supported Republican candidates. Sixty-four of these 138 families made their fortunes in finance, mostly in hedge funds, private equity or venture capital. A further seventeen families were wealthy from energy, mostly oil and gas. What both these two groups were seeking was lower taxes and also deregulation: repeal of the Dodd-Frank Act reforming Wall Street, and (according to the Times) a lifting of the 40-year-old ban on export of US oil.[19]
Many were also "tied to networks of ideological donors who, on the left and the right alike, have sought to fundamentally reshape their own political parties" on the one hand the twice-yearly anti-tax seminars hosted by the Kochs, and on the other "the Democracy Alliance, a network of liberal donors who have pushed Democrats to move aggressively on climate change legislation and progressive taxation."[20]
Once again, a division in the American public was being fomented and funded by an old division within Big Money roughly speaking, between those Trilateral Commission progressives, many flourishing from the new technologies of the global Internet, who wish the state to do more than at present about problems like wealth disparity, racial injustice and global warming, and those Heritage Foundation conservatives, many from finance and oil, who want it to do even less.
We see this ideological split even among the top eight US super billionaires in 2016, four of whom (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison) have made their fortunes from the Internet and want the present US to progress more or less along its recent course. Warren Buffett (once number one, now number three) endorsed Hillary Clinton early on, "while calling for increased taxes on the country's highest wage earners."[21] Deeply dissatisfied with the status quo were numbers seven and eight, the Koch brothers, who "have fortunes largely drawn from fossil fuels," and have "poured money into fighting solar."[22]

Warren Buffett. Photo credit: Fortune Live Media / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The Kochs assembled a donor network of fellow mavericks, many of whom were distinguished by private ownership of their businesses, and many (Jane Mayer pointed out) "had serious past or ongoing legal problems."[23] In early 2015 their organization revealed that it would spend $889 million leading up to the 2016 presidential contest. As USA Today reported, this unprecedented sum, "unrivaled for an outside organization, represents more than double the nearly $400 million the Republican National Committee (RNC) raised and spent during the 2012 presidential election cycle."[24] This huge organized flow of outside funds has contributed greatly to the weakening of party discipline in Congress, especially among Republicans.
Throughout the campaign, the Kochs and Trump (whose chief backer was another maverick billionaire, Robert Mercer) were apparently at arm's length from each other. Vanity Fair suggested in September that at that time the Kochs were "in direct opposition to the Mercers," in a "civil war that threatens to tear the party apart" even though, starting around 2011, the Mercers had been donating "at least $1 million a year to the Koch network."[25]
Whatever the tensions, it was clear after the election that Trump in his transition team had "surrounded himself with people tied to the Kochs."[26] Soon the Trump nominee for Education Secretary was Betsy DeVos, another major billionaire contributor to the Koch donor list. (Betsy's brother Erik Prince, famous as the founder and owner of the notorious private army Blackwater, was quietly advising the Trump transition team on matters related to intelligence and defense.)[27]
And Trump's CIA Director is Mike Pompeo, formerly a Koch-sponsored congressman "who was so closely entwined with the climate-change denying Koch brothers that he was known as the congressman from Koch."[28] (The new administration has reportedly instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website.)[29]

David Koch and Charles Koch Photo credit: Gage Skidmore / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) and Fortune Brainstorm TECH / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Since his election, Trump has attacked the U.S. intelligence agencies for leaking information, and reporters as being among "the most dishonest human beings on Earth." But while attacking the Washington establishment, he is clearly reflecting the dissident big money faction of the deep state, no longer as marginal as it was in the era of the John Birch Society and later Goldwater.[30]
As the campaign and pre-inaugural preparations progressed, it became clearer that Trump, no stranger to the world of big money, had brought the old big money camp into his campaign, as well as the new. In January 2017 Trump nominated to be his SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, a Sullivan & Cromwell partner who in the past has represented Goldman Sachs and other big banks in Wall street superdeals.[31]
Clayton is the fourth former Goldman-related Trump nominee for the new administration, all of them chosen under the eyes of Trump's chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, himself a former Goldman banker who moved on to become a Tea Party coordinator and executive director at the alt-right Breitbart News. (Bannon once promised to build "an insurgent, center-right populist movement that is virulently anti-establishment."[32] It took only 10 days in the White House to make it clear that Bannon had "rapidly amassed power in the West Wing, eclipsing chief of staff Reince Priebus.") [33]
Undoubtedly Trump entered politics as a maverick real estate investor and TV star, funding the early stages of his campaign himself. But as his campaign grew, he came to reach out more and more to Wall Street financing, notably from Robert Mercer, the co-CEO of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies,[34] Then Trump named as his campaign's Finance Chairman Steve Mnuchin, formerly of Skull and Bones and Goldman Sachs.[35]
As many predicted, Mnuchin later became Trump's nominee for Treasury Secretary, which could make him the third former Goldman executive to lead Treasury in the last four administrations, after Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson. In addition, Trump has named Gary Cohn, former president of Goldman Sachs, as his chief economic advisor and Director of the National Economic Council.[36]
In short, Trump did not challenge but preserved the status of what Jeffrey Sachs has called the Wall Street-Washington complex, which has steered the financial system toward control by a few politically powerful Wall Street firms, notably Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and a handful of other financial firms.[37]
Meanwhile, just as Trump expanded his financial base to all elements of big money, so Wall Street, as it always does, ensured it had good connections to both of the final candidates. After Mnuchin joined the Trump campaign, Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs announced in October 2016 his support of Hillary Clinton.[38]
All of this complexity calls for further reflection on the nature of the deep state.

Photo credit: takomabibelot / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Turkey and the International Deep State

.

To survey the more serious accounts of the "deep state in the United States," it is useful to begin with their summary in Wikipedia under this title: as a "state within a state, which [authors] suspect exerts influence and control over public policy, regardless of which political party controls the country's democratic institutions."
Citing five different authors, (including myself) Wikipedia expands this definition to include the militaryindustrial complex, intelligence community, Wall Street, plutocrats, "big oil," the mainstream media, national security officials, and Silicon Valley.[39]
All five authors see two essential components to the deep state. On the one hand is big money. On the other are the extra-constitutional Washington Beltway agencies like CIA that Wall Street originally campaigned for and staffed, along with the government-oriented industries that these agencies and the Pentagon work with and outsource to.[40]
Besides myself, Philip Giraldi and Mike Lofgren have also recognized that "the term was actually coined in Turkey, and is said to be a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary, and organized crime."[41] A more precise definition is that of Hugh Roberts:
The notion of the deep state â€¦ originated in Turkey, where it connoted not merely the secretive apparatuses of the state such as the police and intelligence services but above all the shady nexus between them, certain politicians and organised crime.[42]
But I may be the only author showing the extent to which the Turkish deep state, when first exposed in 1996, both overlapped with the American deep state and revealed its dark underside.
The Turkish term "deep State" (deren devlet) was coined after the so-called Susurluk incident, a 1996 car crash whose victims included the deputy chief of the Istanbul Police Department, a Member of Parliament, and Abdullah Ã‡atlÄ±, an international heroin trafficker and killer recruited by the Turkish police for "special missions" and paid in heroin while he was officially being sought by the Turkish authorities for murder.[43]
We see in the Susurluk incident three features of the Turkish deep state, unmentioned by Lofgren, that not only resemble the American deep state but are actually a significant component of it (and still of major importance today).
The first is that it was partly international: Abdullah Ã‡atlÄ± was part of a death squad chiefly recruited from the ranks of the Turkish OHD (Ozel Harp Dairesi Special Warfare Department). The OHD had originally been set up with US encouragement as the Turkish branch of NATO's Operation Gladio, a stay-behind force in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion. Diverted and renamed Counter-Guerrilla to suppress the Kurdish resistance movement, the OHD troops continued to be trained in the US and to use US counterinsurgency manuals.[44]

Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Minestrone / Wikimedia, David Benbennick / Wikimedia and Abdullah Ã‡atli / Twitter.

The second is that the international deep state connection revealed at Susurluk was partly criminal: the sanctioned para-state activities with Ã‡atlÄ± were financed by billions of dollars in profits from drug smuggling; just as the CIA in Laos and elsewhere utilized a protected drug traffic to finance its covert operations in Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Afghanistan.[45] Ã‡atlÄ±, a convicted drug trafficker with a special Turkish passport, was himself part of this post-Gladio international network:
Ã‡atlÄ±, according to YalÃ§Ä±n and Yurdakal, visited Miami in 1982 in the company of a known Gladio agent (and Italian neo-Nazi) and was considered to be "under the protection" of the CIA.[46]
(The Gladio agent was Stefano delle Chiaie, who had his own connections to state-sponsored terrorist activities in Italy, to the World Anti-Communist League or WACL, and more specifically to death squads working for the Operation Condor murder operation in Latin America, sponsored by the right-wing dictatorships in the region.[47] The CIA had its own shadowy connections to all three, as well as to Gladio.)
The third feature of the Susurluk event is that it was and remains a largely inscrutable intelligence-related event, or what in this book I call a "deep event," like similar events in the United States, such as the John F. Kennedy assassination. Nearly all western accounts of the car crash overlook the claim that it was not an accident but an intended assassination.[48] Moreover the Turkish deep state was later suspected in the Turkish coup attempt of Ergenekon in 2007,[49] and its one-time parent, the US deep state, in the failed military coup of July 2016.[50] Both of these coup attempts reveal elements of what I mean by deep events.
Not just in Turkey, but also in the United States, respected authors have linked the deep state to what I call (pp. 98, 119) "structural deep events," unsolved mysterious events that affect the political system of the country.[51] As I write, there have been a series of charges that, if substantiated, would seem to link Trump not only to an element of the American deep state, but also to an element of the Russian deep state.
References

.

[1] Michael C. Bender and Damian Paletta, "Donald Trump Plans to Undo Dodd-Frank Law, Fiduciary Rule," Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-moves-to-undo-dodd-frank-law-1486101602. Cf.

[2] R.G. Ratcliffe, "Obama's final campaign speech of 2008," Houston Chronicle, October 27, 2008, http://blog.chron.com/texaspolitics/2008/10/obamas-final-campaign-speech-of-2008/.

[3] Eugene Kiely, "Obama, "White House Full of Wall Street Executives'?" Factcheck.org, March 1, 2012.

[4] Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers, "Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia," New York Times, October 31, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-trump.html (FBI); "Cheney Firm Won $3.8bn Contracts from Government," Observer, July 21, 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jul/21/globalisation.georgebush. See below.

[5] Anand Giridharadas, "Examining Who Runs the United States," New York Times, September 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/us/examining-who-runs-the-united-states.html?_r=0. I believe the first to apply the Turkish term "deep state" (derin deret) to U.S. politics was the Swedish writer Ola Tunander (Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], x, 244, 270, 384).

[6] Michael Covel, "The Deep State V. Trump," Daily Reckoning, August 25, 2016, https://dailyreckoning.com/deep-state-v-trump/: "Donald Trump has the establishment scared out of their establishment minds."

[7] Ryan Lizza, "Roger Stone Versus the Deep State'", New Yorker, January 20, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/roger-stone-versus-the-deep-state. Stone has been described as a "political provocateur" who "helped choreograph theâ€¦ riot which shut down the Bush v. Gore recount in Miami-Dade County" (Jeffrey Toobin, "Bad Old Days," New Yorker, May 2. 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-political-provocateur-roger-stone-talks-trump. During the campaign, Stone and fellow provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart together promoted the divisive notion "how the general election will almost certainly be hijacked by acts of voter fraud" by Democrats (Ken Meyer, :Roger Stone Says There Will Be a Bloodbath' if Election is Stolen From Trump," Medaite.com, August 2, 2016, http://www.mediaite.com/online/roger-stone-says-there-will-be-a-bloodbath-if-election-is-stolen-from-trump/. Their politics of division is shared by Steve Bannon, who "is so dominated by a desire to wage war and vanquish his enemy that he cannot think clearly about damage wrought by his destructive, polarizing approach" (Conor Friedersdorf, "The Radical Anti-Conservatism of Stephen Bannon," Atlantic, August 25, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/the-radical-anti-conservatism-of-stephen-bannon/496796/).

[8] Covel, "The Deep State V. Trump." Cf. John W. Whitehead, "The Deep State: The Unelected Shadow Government Is Here to Stay," Rutherford Institute, November 10, 2015, https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_deep_state_the_unelected_shadow_government_is_here_to_stay: "The Deep Stateâ€¦is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now."

[9] "Chris Hedges on How the Deep State' Will Influence the Trump Presidency," Truthdig, Jan 17, 2017, http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_the_deep_state_will_influence_the_trump_presidency_20170117. In this camp are Glenn Greenwald, who equates the "deep state" with "the intelligence community," and Eric Margolis, who equates it with "the massed national security apparatus" (Glenn Greenwald, "The Deep State Goes to War with President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer," The Intercept, January 11, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/01/11/the-deep-state-goes-to-war-with-president-elect-using-unverified-claims-as-dems-cheer/; Eric Margolis, "Trump Versus the Deep State," The Unz Review, January 13, 2017, http://www.unz.com/emargolis/trump-versus-the-deep-state/.

[10] Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking, 2016); Philip Giraldi, "Deep State America," The American Conservative, July 30, 2015, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/deep-state-america/.

[11] Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 30. I later wrote in Dallas '63: "In The American Deep State I devoted only a few lines to the oppositional faction of right-wing Texas oilmen and the John Birch Society, opposed to the relative internationalism of Wall Street. In this [book] we shall see that under Kennedy their opposition was so deeply embedded that America was, for a while, ruled by a dyadic deep state" (Peter Dale Scott, Dallas '63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House [New York: Open Road Media, 2015], 191).

[12] "Divided States of America," Part 1, Frontline, PBS, January 17, 2017. Cf. Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2015), 165-68.

[13] Rick Ames and Yasha Levine, "Exposing The Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC's Rick Santelli Sucking Koch, The Exiled, February 27, 2009, http://exiledonline.com/exposing-the-familiar-rightwing-pr-machine-is-cnbcs-rick-santelli-sucking-koch/; Chris Douglas, "The Tax That Started the Tea Party," FrumForum. September 3, 2010, http://www.frumforum.com/the-tax-that-started-the-tea-party/. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, "POEM: To the Tea-Party Patriots: A Berkeley Professor says Hello!," GlobalResearch, November 2, 2010, http://www.globalresearch.ca/poem-to-the-tea-party-patriots-a-berkeley-professor-says-hello/21727; reprinted in Peter Dale Scott, Tilting Point (San Luis Obispo, CA : Word Palace Press, 2012), 42.

[14] Jane Mayer, "Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama," New Yorker, August 30, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations; Mayer, Dark Money, 167-68, 193. In 2014 the Koch brothers were tied for sixth place among the world's wealthiest, with $40.7 billion each. Combined, their net worth is $81.4 billion, which was higher than the highest-ranking individual on the list Microsoft founder Bill Gates, at $77.8 billion (Louis Jacobson, "Harry Reid says Koch brothers are richest family in the world," Politifact, April 2, 2014, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/apr/02/harry-reid/harry-reid-says-koch-brothers-are-richest-family-w/). Chris Douglas observes, "Until the Bush tax cuts, the estate tax stood at 55%. As a result of the tax cuts initiated by the Bush administration, by 2010, it was zero. Unless Congress acts, it will return full-force to 55% in 2011. To understand the impact on the Koch family, consider that some reports place the wealth of the Koch brothers at $36 billion dollars [in 2010; four years later Forbes estimated it at $81 billion], their company second at times only to Cargill as the largest privately held company in America. To the Koch family, a 55% estate tax means they must contemplate a corporate re-organization, the result of which would conceptually be to go public and sell off 55% of their shares in order to pay the tax or, more likely, that they would donate the majority of shares to a charitable foundation. Either way, the estate tax at 55% would entail a transformation of Koch Industries and a diversification of ownership, with ramifications for the family's long term control" (Chris Douglas, "The Tax That Started the Tea Party").

[15] Mayer, Dark Money, 167. Cf, Nella Van Dyke and David S. Meyer, eds., Understanding the Tea Party Movement (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub. Company, 2014), 100.

[16] Peter Dale Scott, "Bringing It All Together: The New Releases and How They Help Us Converge on the Heart of the Case," The Fourth Decade, Vol. 4, #1, November, 1996; republished at http://www.assassinationweb.com/scotte.htm. Of the eleven businessmen at the 1958 founding meeting of the John Birch Society, many, including the founder Robert Welch, were former members of the National Association of Manufacturers (Terry Lautz, John Birch: A Life [New York: Oxford University Press, 2016]. 225). One was William J. Grede, who served as president of the National Association of Manufacturers in 1952. Still another was Fred Koch, father of Charles and David Koch (Jeff Nesbit, Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP [New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016], 30; Van Dyke and Meyer, Understanding the Tea Party Movement, 100). Charles and David Koch also joined the John Birch Society.

[17] Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). 422; quoted in Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], 3, cf. 254.

[18] "World's Eight Richest as Wealthy as Half Humanity, Oxfam Tells Davos." Reuters, January 16, 2016, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-inequality-idUSKBN150009.

[19] "From Fracking to Finance, a Torrent of Campaign Cash," New York Times, October 10, 2015,
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/us/politics/wealthy-families-presidential-candidates.html#donors-list. Much of the petroleum wealth was probably also aimed at preventing climate change regulations.

[20] "From Fracking to Finance, a Torrent of Campaign Cash," New York Times, October 10, 2015.

[21] Amy Chosick, "Warren Buffett Endorses Hillary Clinton and Calls for Higher Taxes on Wealthy," New York Times, December 16, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/16/warren-buffett-endorses-hillary-clinton-and-calls-for-higher-taxes-on-wealthy/?_r=0.

[22] Sarah Jaffe, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 265. None of the eight endorsed Trump, who pointedly distanced himself from the Kochs during the campaign.

[23] Mayer, Dark Money, 17.

[24] Fredreka Schouten, "Koch brothers set $889 million budget for 2016, USA Today, January 27, 2015, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/01/26/koch-brothers-network-announces-889-million-budget-for-next-two-years/22363809/.

[25] Abigail Tracy, "The Brewing Billionaire Feud at the Heart of the G.O.P.," Vanity Fair, September 7, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/robert-rebekah-mercer-charles-david-koch-republican-party.

[26] Kenneth P. Vogel and Eliana Johnson, "Trump's Koch Administration," Politico, November 28, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/trump-koch-brothers-231863

[27] Jeremy Scahill, "Notorious Mercenary Erik Prince Is Advising Trump from the Shadows," The Intercept, January 17 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/01/17/notorious-mercenary-erik-prince-is-advising-trump-from-the-shadows/: "In July [2016], Prince told Trump's senior adviser and white supremacist Steve Bannon, at the time head of Breitbart News, that the Trump administration should recreate a version of the Phoenix Program, the CIA assassination ring that operated during the Vietnam War, to fight ISIS."

[28] Mayer, Dark Money, 15, 276.

[29] Valerie Volcovici, "Trunp Administration Tells EPA To Cut Climate Page from Website: Sources," Reuyers, January 25, 2017, http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN15906G?feedType=RSS&feedName=politicsNews.

[30] On page 5 of this book, I refer to a formerly "minority element in our political economy [that now] finances and dominates both parties, and indeed is now also financing threats to both parties from the right, as well as dominating our international policy. As a result, liberal Republicans are as scarce in the Republican Party today as Goldwater Republicans were scarce in that party back in 1960." Today I would no longer define this element as "the military-industrial complex," but the trend has become even more clear.

[31] Matt Taibbi, Trump Nominee Jay Clayton Will Be the Most Conflicted SEC Chair Ever,' Rolling Stone, January 5, 2017, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/trump-pick-jay-clayton-to-be-most-conflicted-sec-chair-ever-w459289. Clayton's wife Gretchen is a wealth management advisor at Goldman Sachs.

[32] Conor Friedersdorf, "The Radical Anti-Conservatism of Stephen Bannon," Atlantic, August 25, 2016.

[33] Josh Dawsey, Eliana Johnson and Annie Karni, "The man behind Trump? Still Steve Bannon," Politico, January 29, 2017, http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/donald-trump-steve-bannon-234347.

[34] "How One Family's Deep Pockets Helped Reshape Donald Trump's Campaign By Nicholas Confessore Aug. 18, 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/us/politics/robert-mercer-donald-trump-donor.html?_r=0

[35] Bloomberg BusinessWeek, August 31, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-08-31/steven-mnuchin-businessweek When Mnuchin was Financial Chairman of the Trump campaign, his counterpart at the RNC was Lew Eisenberg, his father's old partner at Goldman Sachs.

[36] Pam Martens and Russ Martens, "Here's How Goldman Sachs Became the Overlord of the Trump Administration," Wall Street on Parade, January 9, 2017, http://wallstreetonparade.com/2017/01/heres-how-goldman-sachs-became-the-overlord-of-the-trump-administration/

[37] Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity (New York: Random House, 2011), 117.

[38] Zeke Faux, "Goldman CEO Blankfein Supportive' of Clinton for Pragmatism,"
Bloomberg, October 22, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-10-22/goldman-ceo-blankfein-supportive-of-clinton-for-pragmatism.

[39] "Deep state in the United States," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state_in_the_United_States. The five authors are Philip Giraldi, Bill Moyers, David Talbot, Mike Lofgren, and myself.

[40] Scott, The American Deep State, 14-15, 30-35, etc.) The Pentagon, unmentioned by Wikipedia, is hard to classify. Although the Department of Defense is part of the official state and headed by a cabinet member, it contains within it the NSA, which simultaneously reports to the Director of National Intelligence. Other Pentagon agencies, such as DIA and JSOC, also deserve to be classified with the deep state.

[41] Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking, 2016), 5. I see no further references in Lofgren's book to organized crime; his notion of the deep state focuses primarily on the Beltway agencies.

[42] Hugh Roberts, The Hijackers." London Review of Books, July 16, 2015, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n14/hugh-roberts/the-hijackers, a review of Jean-Pierre Filiu, From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-revolution and Its Jihadi Legacy (Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2015]).

[43] Jean-Louis Briquet; Gilles Favarel-Garrigues; Roger Leverdier, eds. Organized Crime and States: The Hidden Face of Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 43-44; Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010), 19-20. Ã‡atlÄ± "is reckoned to have been one of the main perpetrators of underground operations carried out by the Turkish branch of the Gladio organisation and had played a key role in the bloody events of the period 1976-80 which paved the way for the military coup d'Ã©tat of September 1980" ("Turkey's pivotal role in the international drug trade, Le Monde diplomatique, July 1998).

[44] Desmond Fernandes and Iskender Ozden, "United States and NATO inspired psychological warfare operations' against the Kurdish communist threat' in Turkey". Variant. 12, https://web.archive.org/web/20060614080445/http://www.variant.randomstate.org/12texts/Fernandes.html; Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (New York: Frank Cass, 2005), 241.

[45] Hakan Aslaneli and Zafer F. Yoruk, Traffic Monster' reveals state-mafia relations". HÃ¼rriyet, November 7, 1996; Scott, American War Machine, 4-6, etc.

[46] Ryan Gingeras, Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 228; citing Soner YalÃ§Ä±n and DoÄŸan Yurdakul, Reis: Gladio'num TÃ¼rk TeriÃ§isi (Istanbul: DoÄŸan Kitapeilik, 2007), 152-56.

[47] Scott, American War Machine, 20; cf.p.30: In Italy "Stefano delle Chiaie was eventually accused of involvement in the Piazza Fontana and Bologna bombings as well as the Borghese coup." The Condor Operation (about which I will say more) was responsible for the 1976 murder in Washington of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier.

[48] HRFT Human Rights Foundation of Turkey Human Rights Report TÄ°HV, en.tihv.org.tr/wp-content/uploads/2015/â€¦/Ra1998HumanRigthsReport.pdf, 39. In addition, no one has yet fully explained why one of the fake passports found in Ã‡atlÄ±'s possession was in the name "Mehmet Ã–zbay", an alias used fifteen years earlier by Mehmet Ali AÄŸca, the Turk who in 1081 attempted to kill Pope John Paul II (Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010], 19; Ryan Gingeras, Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 228.

[49] Dexter Filkins. "The Deep State," The New Yorker, March 12, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/12/the-deep-state: "Prosecutors maintain that Ergenekon is the deep state itselfnot merely a cabal of reactionary officers within the military but a shadow government that aims at making Turkish democracy permanently unstable."

[50] Tim Arango and Ceylan Yeginsu, "Turks Can Agree on One Thing: U.S. Was Behind Failed Coup," New York Times, August 2, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/world/europe/turkey-coup-erdogan-fethullah-gulen-united-states.html?_r=0.

[51] On page 47 I speak of "a deep event, by which I mean an event predictably suppressed in the media and still not fully understandable."

-------
February 7, 2017 | Peter Dale Scott

Donald J. Trump and the Deep State, Part 2

Photo credit: Amanjeev / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Peter Dale Scott , is a former Canadian diplomat, Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at Berkeley, poet, and 2002 recipient of the Lannan Poetry Award.
His political books include Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (2010), The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (2014) and Dallas '63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House (2015). A complete bibliography can be found on his website at http://www.peterdalescott.net.
The following is Part 2 of a two-part series, excerpted from The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Struggle for U.S. Democracy, Updated Edition (copyright 2017) (paperback); by Peter Dale Scott with permission of the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved. Please go here to see Part 1.
***

Trump and the International Deep State

.

The first charge against Trump was the CIA-backed claim that Russian intelligence agencies hacked organizations affiliated both with Hillary Clinton and with the Democratic Party, and that the hacks were apparently "designed to benefit Donald Trump's presidential aspirations in one fashion or another."[52] (Politico also reported that "Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office.")[53]

A second charge against Trump, closely related, was that
as major banks in America stopped lending him money following his many bankruptcies, the Trump organization was forced to seek financing from non-traditional institutions. Several had direct ties to Russian financial interests in ways that have raised eyebrows. What's more, several of Trump's senior advisors have business ties to Russia or its satellite politicians.[54]
In May 2016 the Washington Post and Buzzfeed charged specifically that
Trump's top adviser, Paul Manafort, has spent much of his recent career working for pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, and doing complex deals for an oligarch with close ties to Putin.â€¦ Manafort â€¦ has, according to court documents, managed tens of millions of dollars for Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch denied entry to the U.S. reportedly for ties to organized crime, but so close to Vladimir Putin that top Russian officials fought (unsuccessfully) to get him a visa.[55]
On the eve of the new Trump presidency The New York Times reported that
American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafortâ€¦ and Roger Stone.[56]

Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Photo credit: Disney | ABC Television Group / Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

In January 2017 Buzzfeed leaked the source of these charges: a private intelligence report transmitted by the CIA to Trump.[57] This report, by former British intelligence Christopher Steele, did not as released mention Deripaska at all, but contained instead an unexplained discussion of Deripaska's bankers, the Alfa Group, along with its founders Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven.
Just before the election The New York Times reported that
For much of the summer, the F.B.I. â€¦ scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, â€¦ and even chased a lead which they ultimately came to doubt about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bankâ€¦.
F.B.I. officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank. â€¦ But the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.[58]
The next day the Jewish paper Forward raised a question, not yet answered, about Alfa Bank's principal owner, the philanthropist oligarch Mikhail Fridman, listed as #73 on the Forbes list of the world's billionaires in 2016 (once #20), and the second wealthiest Russian:
Is a Russian Jewish oligarch with Israeli citizenship and close ties to both Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu running a secret cyber-communications channel between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russian authorities? [59]
The various speculations about the Trump link to Alfa and Fridman, whether innocuous or shady, justify a closer look at the charges about Alfa's influence two decades ago, when Alfa's dubious clout in Washington included protection from both senior Democrats like Richard Burt of Kissinger McLarty Associates and also senior Republicans like Dick Cheney.[60] As The Guardian reported in 2002, Alfa's 1990s clout in Washington was demonstrated when its oil company, Tyumen,
was loaned $489m in credits by the US Export-Import Bank after lobbying by Halliburtonâ€¦. The [Clinton] White House and State Department tried to veto the Russian deal. But after intense lobbying by Halliburton the objections were overruled on Capitol Hill [which then was Republican controlled]â€¦. The State Department's concerns were based on the fact that Tyumen was controlled by a holding conglomerate, the Alfa Group, that had been investigated in Russia for mafia connections.[61]
Veteran newsman Knut Royce (a major contributor to three Pulitzer Prize-winning stories) reported the details:
Under the guidance of Richard Cheney, a get-the-government-out-of-my-face conservative, Halliburton Company over the past five years has emerged as a corporate welfare hog, benefiting from at least $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans.
One of these loans was approved in April by the U.S. Export-Import Bank. It guaranteed $489 million in credits to a Russian oil company [Tyumen, owned by Alfa] whose roots are imbedded in a legacy of KGB and Communist Party corruption, as well as drug trafficking and organized crime funds, according to Russian and U.S. sources and documents.
[Two reports, one by "a former U.S. intelligence officer," and one by the Russian FSB] claim that Alfa Bank, one of Russia's largest and most profitable, as well as Alfa Eko, a trading company, had been deeply involved in the early 1990s in laundering of Russian and Colombian drug money and in trafficking drugs from the Far East to Europeâ€¦.
The FSB report, too, claimed that the Alfa Group's top executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven, "allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast Asia through Russia and into Europe."[62]
This impression is reinforced by the statements and actions of Michael Flynn, Trump's new national security advisor. Flynn has made several appearances on Russia's RT network, where he has often argued "that the US and Russia should be working more closely together on issues like fighting ISIL and ending Syria's civil war." In June 2016 Flynn attended an RT gala dinner in Moscow, seated just two seats away from Putin. [63] And in December Flynn reportedly met with far-right Austrian political party leader Heinz-Christian Strache, whose Freedom Party had recently signed a cooperation deal with Putin's United Russia Party. [64]

President Vladimir Putin, Igor Sechin, Chairman of the Board of Rosneft (left) and Rex Tillerson, Chairman of ExxonMobil signed an agreement on joint development of petroleum reserves in Western Siberia, June 2012. Photo credit: President of Russia / Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0)

An even closer friend of Putin in Trump's team, ironically, is former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, his Secretary of State.[65] In fact Tillerson, through Exxon's development of Russian oilfields, "has deep ties to Russia, dating back to the Boris Yeltsin administration."[66] As Julian Borger told the Guardian,
Putinâ€¦ bestowed the Order of Friendship on Tillerson in 2013. The Wall Street Journal reported: "Friends and associates said few US citizens are closer to Mr. Putin than Mr. Tillerson."[67] The 64-year-old Texas oilman spent much of his career working on Russian deals, including a 2011 agreement giving Exxon Mobil access to the huge resources under the Russian Arctic in return for giving the giant state-owned Russian oil company, OAO Rosneft, the op

USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 07-02-2017

Make America Ungovernable

Posted on Feb 5, 2017

By Chris Hedges
[Image: CheckMate_590.jpg]

Mr. Fish / Truthdig

Donald Trump's regime is rapidly reconfiguring the United States into an authoritarian state. All forms of dissent will soon be criminalized. Civil liberties will no longer exist. Corporate exploitation, through the abolition of regulations and laws, will be unimpeded. Global warming will accelerate. A repugnant nationalism, amplified by government propaganda, will promote bigotry and racism. Hate crimes will explode. New wars will be launched or expanded.
And, as this happens, those Americans who remain passive will be complicit.
"We don't have much time," Kali Akuno, the co-director ofCooperation Jackson and an organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, told me when I reached him by phone in Jackson, Miss. "We are talking two to three months before this whole [reactionary] initiative is firmly consolidated. And that's with massive resistance."
Flurries of executive orders and memorandums are being issued to demolish the anemic remnants of our bankrupt democracy. Those being placed in powersuch as Betsy DeVos, who if confirmed as secretary of education will defund our system of public education and expand schools run by the Christian right, and Scott Pruitt, who if confirmed as head of the Environmental Protection Agency will dismantle itare agents of destruction. In the eyes of the Christian fascists, generals, billionaires and conspiracy theorists around Trump, the laws, the courts and legislative bodies exist only to silence opponents and swell corporate profits. It is impossible to know how long this transformation will takeit may be longer than the two or three months Akuno fearsbut unless we mobilize quickly to stop the Trump regime the end result is certain.
"The forces around Trump have a plan to roll this [attack on democracy] out," said Akuno, who was the coordinator of special projects and external funding for the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson. "They have a strategy. They have a timeline. They know whom they need to divide and whom they need to recruit. They are consolidating their base. Those who try and chalk this up to Trump's pathology miss the intentionality, the strategic aims and the objectives. We will do ourselves a great disservice if we underestimate this regime and where it is going."
Stephen Bannon, the president's chief counselor, was behind the ban on Muslims entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority countriesa ban you can expect to see extended if the Trump administration is successful in removing a stay issued by a district court. He was behind the order to the Department of Homeland Security to draw up lists of Muslim organizations and individuals in the United States that, in the language of the executive action, have been "radicalized" and have "provided material support to terrorism-related organizations in countries that pose a threat to the United States." Such lists will be used to criminalize Muslim leaders and the institutions and organizations they built. Then, once the Muslims are dealt with domestically, there will be new Homeland Security lists that will allow the government to target the press, activists, labor leaders, dissident intellectuals and the left. It is the beginning of a fascist version ofLeon Trotsky's "permanent revolution."
"Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal too,"Bannon told writer Ronald Radosh in 2013. "I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment."
The Trump regime's demented project of social engineering, which will come wrapped in a Christianized fascism, can be implemented only if it quickly seizes control of the bureaucratic mechanisms, an action that Max Weber pointed out is the prerequisite for exercising power in industrial and technocratic societies. Once what the historian Guglielmo Ferrero calls the "silken threads" of habit, tradition and legality are gone, the "iron chains" of dictatorship will impose social cohesion.
"This problem is not going to be solved in the 2018 elections," warned Akuno, the author of the organizing handbook "Let Your Motto Be Resistance" and the former executive director of the New Orleans-based People's Hurricane Relief Fund. "That hope is an illusion. The democratic apparatus will be completely gutted by then. We have to look beyond Trump. We have to look at the consolidation on the state level of these reactionary forces. They are near the threshold of being able to call for a constitutional convention because of the number of governorships and state legislatures where they hold both chambers. They can totally reorder the Constitution, if they even continue to abide by it, which they may not. We are facing a serious crisis. I don't think people grasp the depth of this because they are focused on the president and not the broader strategy of these reactionary forces."
"We have to encourage a broad noncompliance strategy of ungovernablity," Akuno said. "Not complying. Not consenting. We have to struggle on every front. We have to expect that the courts will not protect us. We are going to get less and less protection from the police. The slightest act of civil disobedience will mean jail. We have to mentally prepare for that. We have to build serious organizations, drawing upon the examples of forces that fought authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Europe. Either we submit to not having any protection as workers, women, queers, blacks, Latinos or indigenous or we fight back. These forces [arrayed against us] are not willing to compromise. I hope it does not come to violence, but we know the proclivities of the society and the forces that run it."
If nonviolent protest is met with violence, we must never respond with violence. The use of violence, including property destruction, and taunting the police are gifts to the security and surveillance state. It allows the state to demonize and isolate a mass movement. It drives away the bulk of the population. Violence against the state is used by the authorities to justify greater forms of control and repression. The corporate state understands and welcomes the language of force. This is a game the government will always win and we will always lose. If we are perceived as a flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob that embraces violence, we will be easily crushed.
We can succeed only if we win the hearts and minds of the wider public and ultimately many of those within the structures of power, including the police. When violence is used against nonviolent protesters demanding basic forms of justice it exposes the weakness of the state. It delegitimizes those in power. It prompts a passive population to respond with active support for the protesters. It creates internal divisions within the structures of power that, as I witnessed during the revolutions in Eastern Europe, paralyze and defeat those in authority. Martin Luther King Jr. held marches in Birmingham, Ala., rather than Albany, Ga., because he knew Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner "Bull" Connor would overreact and discredit the city's racist structures.
The Trump regime is populated with blind fanatics. They believe in one truth, which is whatever they proclaim at the moment (any such declaration may contradict what they said a few hours before). They are possessed with one ideaconflict. They venerate a demented hypermasculinity that includes a sacralization of violence, misogyny, a disdain for empathy, and the self-appointed right to engage in bouts of frenzied rage. These characteristics, they believe, are a sign of masculinity. The highest aesthetic is militarism, violence and war. Without conflict, without enemies real or imagined, their ideological structures and racism collapse into a heap of contradictions and absurdities. They will attempt to thwart nonviolent, nationwide resistance with force. And they will attempt to stoke counterviolence, including through the use of agents provocateurs, as a response. If we speak back to them in the language of violence, we will fail. We will be transformed into the monsters we seek to defeat.
Bannon and his followers on the "alt-right," self-declared intellectuals, ferret out facts and formulas that buttress their peculiar worldview and discard truths that contradict their messianic delusions. They mouth a few clichÃ©s and quote a few philosophers to justify bigotry, chauvinism and governmental repression. It is propaganda masquerading as ideology. These pseudo-intellectuals are singularly incurious. They are linguistically, culturally and historically illiterate about the Muslim world, and about most other foreign cultures, yet blithely write off one-fifth of the world's populationMuslimsas irredeemable.
The inability of white supremacists like Trump and Bannon to recognize the humanity of others springs from their spiritual impoverishment. They mistake bigotry for honesty and ignorance for innocence. They cannot separate fantasy from reality. Such people are, as author James Baldwin said, "moral monsters."
Evil, for them, is embodied in the dehumanized other. Once the human personification of evil is eradicated, evil itself is supposed to disappear. Except, of course, that as soon as one group of human beings is annihilated, another human embodiment of evil rises to take its place. The Nazis began with Jews. Our fanatics are beginning with Muslims. History has shown where they will go from here.
"The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus," the Yugoslav writerDanilo Kis said. "Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that's to say national, that's to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hellit's other people (other nations, another tribe). They don't even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own imagesas nationalists."
Like all utopian dreamers they believe their authoritarianism is being implemented for our benefit. They are like Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who oversaw the burning of Giordano Bruno at the stake and who argued that eradicating heretics does them a favor because it saves them from their own damnation. It is impossible to have a rational dialogue with people who view reality through the binary lens of black and whiteus and them. They do not recognize the right of dissent. Dissent is at best obstruction and probably treason. Fanatics, in power, always become inquisitors.
The acts of resistanceincluding the massive street protests the day after the inauguration and later the demonstrations that grew out of the ban on Muslims, the Department of Energy's refusal to give the Trump administration a list of employees that worked on climate change, acting Attorney General Sally Yates' refusal to enforce the travel ban and hundreds of State Department staff members' signing of a memo opposing the immigration restrictionsterrify those around Trump. These reactionaries do not trust the old elites and their bureaucrats and courtiers, including the press, which Bannon has called "the opposition party."
Akuno, who supports the appeal for nationwide general strikes, cautioned that such a call might be premature "because unions don't know if a general strike is called how many members would comply, given how many voted for Trump." He also noted that because the Trump regime is carrying out assaults on so many fronts, resistance will tax the resources of the left.
"This shotgun assault effectively divides the left," he said. "Do I defend Chicago if, as Trump says, he puts tanks in the streets or do I go to Standing Rock if I am black? These are the kinds of choices we will be forced to make."
"We are going to have to bring this society to a standstill," he said. "We are going to have to disrupt the flow of commerce. We are going to have to disrupt the nodal points of distribution. We will not only have to figure out how to get on the highways, but disrupt Amazon.com and UPS. We have to get workers there, even though they are not unionized, to see these acts as in their long-term interests. And we have to build strong, fortified bases locally and link them together."
Trump loyalists are counting on enough support from the police, the military, private contractors and the organs of internal security such as Homeland Security and the FBI, along with newly empowered white vigilante groups, to physically crush those who defy them. They will attempt to use fear and even terror to paralyze the population into acquiescence.
"It is not accidental that the Trump regime immediately went after the water protectors at Standing Rock," Akuno said. "Standing Rock forced the wider society to look at itself, its history and its origins. It raised serious questions. Do we want human civilization to survive? Are we willing to destroy ourselves for short-term profit? Standing Rock exposed the U.S. colonial project and challenged capitalist logic. It showed us that we have to make a choice between oil and water. It asked us which will take priority for human beings."
We have the power to make the country ungovernable. But we do not have much time. The regime will make it harder and harder to organize, get into the streets and carry out the nationwide strikes, including within the federal bureaucracy. Resistance alone, however, is not enough. It must be accompanied by an alternative vision of a socialist and anti-capitalist society. It must reject the Democratic Party's attempt to ride anti-Trump sentiment back into power. The enemy is, in the end, not Trump or Bannon, but the corporate state. If we do not dismantle corporate power we will never stop fascism's seduction of the white working class and unemployed.
"The evil which you fear becomes a certainty by what you do," Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in his play "Egmont."
Now is the time not to cooperate. Now is the time to shut down the systems of power. Now is the time to resist. It is our last chance. The fanatics are moving with lightning speed. So should we.

USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Cliff Varnell - 07-02-2017

It's time for a General Strike!

USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 08-02-2017

On the surface, I find this hard to believe and think there might be some hidden subtext we don't know about.
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Julian Assange confirms he is willing to travel to US after Manning decision

WikiLeaks founder says Obama's decision to free whistleblower means he could submit to extradition request

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Robert Booth and Alice Ross
Thursday 19 January 2017 19.26 GMTLast modified on Tuesday 31 January 2017 15.31 GMT

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said he stands by his offer to travel to the US following Barack Obama's decision to release whistleblower Chelsea Manning from prison.

Speaking from the Ecuadorian embassy in London during a web broadcast on Thursday, Assange said there were many discussions about his future that could happen before Manning left prison in May, adding: "I have always been willing to go to the United States provided my rights are respected."
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Assange has been living in the embassy since claiming asylum there in 2012. He has refused to meet prosecutors in Sweden, where he remains wanted on an allegation of rape, which he denies, and has repeatedly said he fears extradition to the US on espionage charges if he leaves the embassy. At the moment, the only public extradition ruling against him comes from Sweden.
WikiLeaks tweeted last week that Assange would agree to US extradition if Obama granted Manning clemency. Asked during a web broadcast on Thursday if he would now leave the embassy, Assange said: "I stand by everything I said, including the offer to go to the United States if Chelsea Manning's sentence was commuted."
Assange said there had been a seven-year-long attempt to build a prosecution against him and WikiLeaks in the US and his name was on several warrants and subpoenas. "As of this year, it is active and ongoing," he said.
"If it takes me going to United States to somehow flush out this case and get the DoJ [Department of Justice] to either make a charge or extradition or to drop it, then we are interested in looking at that as well."

He said it remained to be seen whether the DoJ under Donald Trump would treat his case differently from Obama's administration.
The US justice department has never announced any indictment of Assange and it is not clear that any charges have been brought without becoming a matter of public record. The department, in refusing to turn over investigative documents sought by Manning under the Freedom of Information Act, has acknowledged that the FBI is continuing to investigate the publication of national security information on WikiLeaks arising from Manning's disclosures.

The government's refusal to confirm or deny the existence of charges is a "deliberate attempt by the Department of Justice to keep me and WikiLeaks in a state of uncertainty, abusing the process for psychological gains," Assange said.
Earlier this week, the White House insisted that Assange's offer to submit to extradition if Obama granted Manning clemency had no bearing on the US president's action. "I have no insight into Mr Assange's travel plans," a White House official said. "I can't speak to any charges or potential charges he may be facing from the justice department."
Obama used his final hours in the White House to allow Manning to go free nearly 30 years early. The 29-year-old transgender former intelligence analyst in Iraq was sentenced in 2013 after a military court convicted her of passing more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to WikiLeaks. She said she did so to raise awareness about the impact of war.
During Thursday's web broadcast, Assange said Trump's impact on global relations was "very interesting" adding: "His behaviour is [that of] someone who's not a diplomat at all, making inflammatory statements about what he really thinks â€¦ From WikiLeaks' perspective, we like to see this churn and invigoration and everything being reconsidered."

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Republicans voice disdain after Trump tweets support for Julian Assange

The president-elect's tweets approvingly repeated WikiLeaks founder's claim that the Russian state was not the source of the hacked emails from the DNC

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Trump's spokesman said the president-elect was stating what Assange is stating publicly and looking forward to a briefing to discuss all of these matters'.Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PAJulian Borger in Washington
Thursday 5 January 2017 14.31 GMTFirst published on Wednesday 4 January 2017 18.41 GMT

Leading Republicans broke with Donald Trump on Wednesday after the president-elect appeared to put more faith in WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange than in US intelligence agencies.

The sharp differences on a highly charged national security issue are the latest sign that matters of intelligence and policy towards Russia reflect a deep fault line in Trump's relationship with the Republican party establishment.
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Julian Assange gives guarded praise of Trump and blasts Clinton in interview

Read more

The House speaker, Paul Ryan, called Assange "a sycophant for Russia" on a conservative radio show and GOP Senator Tom Cotton told MSNBC that he had "a lot more faith in our intelligence officers serving around the world â€¦ than I do in people like Julian Assange ".

The comments followed tweets from Trump on Wednesday morning in which he approvingly repeated Assange's claim that the Russian state was not the source of the hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, published by Wiki Leaks during the election.

"Julian Assange said a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta ' why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info! " one Trump tweet said. Another quoted Assange as describing US media coverage on the issue as "very dishonest". Trump added: "More dishonest than anyone knows."
The tweets referred to an interview with Assange conducted by Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, a vocal Trump supporter, in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where the Australian computer expert and transparency advocate has been living for more than four years, since sexual assault allegations were made against him in Sweden. He denies the allegations and has not been charged with any crime.

Julian Assange tells Sean Hannity: Russia was not our sourceAssange is also under US criminal investigation for the publication of large numbers of classified US documents by WikiLeaks, an act characterised for many years by Republican and many Democrat leaders as an act of aggression against the US.
In the interview, Assange said: "Our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party." US intelligence agencies have suggested that Russia passed the hacked material to WikiLeaks through intermediaries.
Asked about the Trump tweets, the president elect's spokesman, Sean Spicer said the president-elect "was stating what Assange is stating publicly and looking forward to [a forthcoming intelligence] briefing to discuss all of these matters."
Last month Obama deported 35 Russian diplomats in response to the election hacking, in a move criticised as premature by the Trump team. The president elect praised Vladimir Putin for not taking retaliatory measures, saying: "I always knew he was very smart!"
Trump has said he would make public new facts over election hacking known only to him either on Tuesday or Wednesday this week.
The spat is being played out at a time when one investigation into Russian hacking of the US election is nearing completion and another is just beginning. Both have the potential to undermine the legitimacy of the Trump presidency.
An intelligence community review of the evidence is expected to be delivered to Obama on Thursday and will form the basis for a briefing for Trump from top intelligence officials on Friday. Meanwhile, hearings begin on Russian cyber-attacks on Thursday in the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by John McCain, a Republican with hardline views on Russia.
McCain called the alleged Russian cyber-attacks "an act of war" on Wednesday.
"I'm not saying it's an atomic attack," he said. "I'm just saying that when you attack a nation's fundamental structure, which they are doing, then it's an act of war."
Trump's support for Assange has not led to break with all his Republican allies. Sarah Palin said on Wednesday that she now regretted her attacks on Assange in 2010 after he published leaked documents from her time as governor of Alaska.

"He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban," she said at the time.
"Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?"
Palin now says she has changed her mind since WikiLeaks published Democratic Party emails.
"The media collusion that hid what many on the Left have been supporting is shocking. This important information that finally opened people's eyes to democrat candidates and operatives would not have been exposed were it not for Julian Assange," she wrote on Facebook.
The Republican foreign policy establishment however, has been more resistant to such whiplash changes in views and allegiances. Many senior figures are uneasy about Trump's open feud with the US intelligence community.
On Tuesday, the president elect trolled the US agencies, going so far as putting the word intelligence in quote marks.
"The Intelligence' briefing on so-called Russian hacking' was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!" he said on Twitter.
In response, intelligence officials briefed correspondents that the plan had always been for the Russian briefing to take place on Friday, and referred to his remarks as "adversarial".

USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 08-02-2017

JUAN GONZÃLEZ: We turn now to look at President Trump's emerging foreign policy. Last week, Trump reportedly abruptly ended a call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull after complaining about the terms of a refugee deal between the U.S. and Australia. Meanwhile, during a call with Mexican President Enrique PeÃ±a Nieto, Trump reportedly threatened to send U.S. troops to Mexico. Speaking last week, the president urged Americans not to worry.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: When you hear about the tough phone calls I'm having, don't worry about it. Just don't worry about it. They're tough. We have to be tough. It's time we're going to be a little tough, folks. We're taken advantage of by every nation in the world, virtually. It's not going to happen anymore. It's not going to happen anymore.

JUAN GONZÃLEZ: In another foreign policy development, the Middle East, Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, announced the United States was putting Iran "on notice"but it's not clear what that means. Meanwhile, Trump's first covert operation in Yemen went disastrously wrong: One U.S. Navy SEAL and as many as 23 Yemeni civilians died as a result. Leaders in Europe are openly expressing concern about Trump's actions, including his apparent close ties to Russia. Last week, the president of the European Council warned Trump was a potential threat to the European Union.
AMY GOODMAN: And Trump is facing opposition even in Britain. On Monday, the speaker of the commons said he would refuse to invite Trump to address the British Parliament during Trump's upcoming state visit, citing Trump's racism and sexism.
To talk more about Trump's foreign policy, we're joined by Stephen Walt, international relations professor at Harvard University. His recent piece in Foreign Policy is headlined "Trump Has Already Blown It."
How, Professor Walt? How has he blown it?
STEPHEN WALT: Well, I think you could argue that Trump had an opportunity, when he was elected, to move American foreign policy in a somewhat different directionand there would actually have been substantial public support for thataway from military interventionism, trying to get a more even distribution of labor with some of our key allies, working for economic arrangements that benefited Main Street as much as they benefited Wall Street. So he could have done that. Of course, he's done the exact opposite. He has been picking fights with some of our traditional allies, and doing that to no good purpose, with no real end in mind. He's inexplicably continued to defend the bad behavior of Vladimir Putin. And he's got a completely contradictory approach to the Middle East that isn't likely to accomplish any of the objectives we might have there. Now, that's a lot to do in two weeks, and it's possible, of course, that there will be some quick corrections, and they'll get us back on an even keel. But so far, this does not appear to be a foreign policy that's very promising, even for people who might have supported him.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: And, Professor Walt, in this clip we just played, his emphasis on being able to talk tough and this notion that the rest of the world is taking advantage of the United States, how has that played in the rest of the world?
STEPHEN WALT: As you might expect, very badly. I mean, these initial phone calls are sort of "get acquainted" opportunities with some key world leaders. And for Trump to pick a fight, essentially, and to treat the prime minister of Australiaremember, this is one of our closest allies in Asia. This is a country whose soldiers fought with ours in World War II, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and, in fact, still have soldiers in Iraq today. This is one of our closest allies. And to treat the prime minister there, in their initial phone call, with a certain degree of contempt played very badly in Australia, as you might expect.
AMY GOODMAN: One of the firstI want to turn to Fox host Bill O'Reilly's Super Bowl interview with President Trump.

BILL O'REILLY: You talked to Putin last week. You had a busy week last week.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: A busy week, yeah. Busy week and a half.

BILL O'REILLY: Do you respect Putin?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I do respect him. But when I

BILL O'REILLY: Do you? Why?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I respect a lot of people, but that doesn't mean I'm going to get along with them. He's a leader of his country. I say it's better to get along with Russia than not. And if Russia helps us in the fight against ISIS, which is a major fight, and Islamic terrorism all over the world

BILL O'REILLY: Right.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: major fight, that's a good thing. Will I get along with him? I have no idea. It's very possible I won't.

BILL O'REILLY: He's a killer, though. Putin is a killer.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. What? You think our country is so innocent? You think our country is so innocent?

BILL O'REILLY: I don't know of any government leaders that are killers in America.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, take a look at what we've done, too. We've made a lot of mistakes. I've been against the war in Iraq from the beginning.

BILL O'REILLY: Yeah, mistakes are different than

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We've made a lot of mistakes. OK, but a lot of people were killed. So

BILL O'REILLY: All right.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: a lot of killers around, believe me.

AMY GOODMAN: "We've got a lot of killers. You think our country is so innocent?" Professor Stephen Walt, your response?
STEPHEN WALT: Well, first of all, Trump is, in fact, correct that the United States has made a lot of mistakes in its foreign policy, and some of those mistakes have had real human consequences. So that's correct.
The problem here is that, first of all, he's equating Russian behavior with our behavior, and I think there are some clear differences. But more importantly, he's using our mistakes to excuse what Russia may be doing today. My mom used to tell me that two wrongs don't make a right. And for him to essentially say, "Well, it's OK what Russia is doing. It's OK to prosecute, persecute, possibly murder journalists. It's OK to destabilize other countries. It's OK to invade the sovereign territory of other countries, etc., because, after all, we've done similar things," is not, it seems to me, a constructive way to approach our relationship with Russia. And it's certainly not a way to try and improve our relations with other countries. If we've made mistakes in the past, then what we should be doing is learning from them and not repeating them, as opposed to using them as a way to excuse the behavior of countries that, you know, we have to deal with. And we have to establish a reasonably constructive relationship, but one that's also based on mutual respect.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: Well, Professor Walt, I wanted to ask you about the situation with Mexico, because, as you mentioned, Trump did say often during the debates and in his campaign that he was against nation building, against so many foreign adventures, but yet, in one of his first phone calls with the president of Mexico, he warns that if Mexico doesn't handle its situation, its crime situation, he may have to send in troops to do it for them.
STEPHEN WALT: Yeah, I haveyou know, they later claimedthe White House claimed that this was merely a joke. But again, this is not the kind of joke, it seems to me, you want to make with a leader you don't know particularly well and where the long historic relationship with Mexico has been troubled occasionally by American military intervention. It shows a certain ignorance. It shows a real insensitivity. And I think it also gets back to this really quite absurd situation that Trump got himself into by claiming he was going to build this wall and he was somehow going to get Mexico to pay for it. This was a great applause line on the campaign trail, but it makes absolutely no sense as a foreign policy position. Mexico doesn't want the wall. Mexico has no interest in the wall. And the idea that you're going to get another country to pay for something it doesn't want and has no interest in having just suggests that you don't understand how foreign policy works. And I'm afraid that's what we're dealing with with our current president.
AMY GOODMAN: On the question of Israeli settlements, last Thursday, the White House said, quote, "While we don't believe the existence of settlements is an impediment to peace, the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders may not be helpful in achieving that goal." This might have surprised many, considering President Trump's choice of the IsraeliU.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, his bankruptcy lawyer, who actually heads up a fundraising effort for one of the settlements, has raised millions of dollars. Your response?
STEPHEN WALT: Well, first of all, I think the statement itself is just a lot of double-talk. Everyone understands that the settlement project is an impediment to peace. It's one of the most important reasons why it's hard to create a viable Palestinian state. And, of course, the fact that the settler movement in Israel is dead set against any possibility of a Palestinian statea position, by the way, I think, also shared by the Netanyahu governmentjust reaffirms this. So, to argue that existing settlements aren't a problem, but new settlements might be a problem, just doesn't add up, doesn't make sense.
I also think that what we see here is that the Trump administration hasn't really figured out what its position is on Israeli-Palestinian peace or even its relationship with Israel. Yes, they're going to be very supportive, probably more pro-Netanyahu than any other previous American president has been, but I don't actually believe they want to get involved in the peace process at all. A couple of times Trump has said that he was going to turn his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, over and put him this problem, and that he would solve it. Of course, this is someone with no foreign policy experience, no diplomatic experience, as well. I think the bottom line here is the Trump administration is likely to be very bad for the Palestinians, but also very bad for Israel itself, because, in effect, they're going to allow Israel to continue to create an apartheid state in greater Israel, and that is not in Israel's long-term interest.
JUAN GONZÃLEZ: And, Professor Walt, I'd like to ask you about the growing tensions with Iran. Obviously, the ban on the seven Muslim nations, the one that's most affected, Iran, with some 12,000 foreign students here in the United States, but also now National Security Adviser Flynn putting Iran "on notice" in terms of its missile testing. What does "on notice" mean?
STEPHEN WALT: Well, nobody knows what that means. Obviously, Iran knew we cared about their missile program. We have a contentious relationship with Iran. There are groups in the United States and in Iran who would like to try and improve the relationship, to try and build on the successful agreement to cap Iran's nuclear program. But there are also groups, both in Iran and here in the United States, who want to maintain a relationship that's highly conflictual, and maybe want to go beyond that. And it seems to me that the Trump administration is aligning itself with those groups, as well, wants ato raise the temperature with Iran.
I think this is playing with fire in a number of respects. One thing we know about Iran is they don't particularly respond well to American pressure. If we start threatening them militarily, if we start taking military action against them, that will give them an obvious incentive to try and restart their nuclear program. And that then places the United States in the position of whether or not it genuinely wants to go to war to try and prevent that. I think the Obama administration understood that that path was not the path we wanted to go down. I think we have to worry now, given the attitude of Mr. Trump and some of his closest advisers, that they actually see a conflict with Iran as being in the United States' interest. The big problem, of course, is they also seem to want to have a conflict with almost the entire Islamic world, while at the same time getting some of the members of the Arab or Islamic world to help us with ISIS. Again, this is just an example of where their policies are deeply contradictory and, therefore, are unlikely to succeed.

Donald J. Trump and the Deep State, Part 2

Trump and the International Deep State

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On the surface, I find this hard to believe and think there might be some hidden subtext we don't know about. ----------------- Julian Assange confirms he is willing to travel to US after Manning decision

Republicans voice disdain after Trump tweets support for Julian Assange

Julian Assange gives guarded praise of Trump and blasts Clinton in interview

On the surface, I find this hard to believe and think there might be some hidden subtext we don't know about.
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Julian Assange confirms he is willing to travel to US after Manning decision