Quote:In the days leading up to the inauguration of Donald Trump, the streets in one wealthy corner of northwest Washington, D.C., were draped with flags almost from one end to the other. They recalled Monet's painting of the Rue Montorgueil that hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, or the oils that the American impressionist Childe Hassam painted of street parades towards the end of World War I. These, however, were not national flags but the rainbow-striped banners of the gay rights movement. They were directed, in embitterment rather than celebration, at an audience of one: Indiana Governor Mike Pence, the vice president-elect. Pence had done two things to offend the flag-wavers. As Indiana governor in the days after gay marriage became law in 2015, he had signed a bill defending freedom of religion. Worse, after November 8 he had rented a house on nearby Tennyson Street for the presidential transition. Now up and down his street the yard signs jostled, some reading "I Stand With Planned Parenthood," others "This Neighborhood Respects Women." Particularly popular was a peacock-blue sign reading "Hate Has No Home Here" and "El odio no tiene hogar aquí," which must be Spanish for "Stay out of our neighborhood, Hoosier."

Regrettable though it may be that political passions would lead a whole neighborhood to act inhospitably, it is only human. It was a bitter contest, after all. Trump's win was a shock. What is more worrisome is the estrangement of ruling-class neighborhoods like this one from the part of the country that voted for Trump, their near-unanimous incomprehension of, and contempt for, the democracy movement that just said "Enough!" to the politics of recent decades. In an election that Democrats lost at virtually every level, the capital city gave Hillary Clinton 93% of its votes, and Trump 4%. All the country's grand, modern, and cultured places followed suit. Pence's neighbors seemed to assume he did not realize there was any such thing as homosexuality or abortion or the Spanish language. Merely alerting him that such things existed might therefore be a satisfying way to wound him. And why not wound him? It was impossible that Trump and Pence could be legitimate occupants of the White House because it was impossible to believe that 60 million people would vote for such boobs.

A robust enthusiasm for American democracy is unlikely to survive where such sentiments prevail. Michael Tomasky of the New York Review of Books described Trump as laboring under "suspicions about his legitimacy far greater than those faced by any modern president," partly because he lost the popular vote by more than two million votes. On the other hand, President Trump arrives in power with more of the country behind him than either Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton had. His victory was, of course, a close-run thing. But looked at closely, it leaves a political situation resembling those that have followed some of the great landslides in American history. Conflict awaits.

The Democratic Archipelago

Here is a trivia question for you: Ohio has only one city with more than 400,000 people. Name it.

Strangers to the Buckeye State might well tick through Cleveland (388,000), Cincinnati (299,000), Toledo (280,000), and even Akron and Dayton before they get the answer. It is Columbus, the capital, which, at 850,000, is more than twice as populous as any other city in the state. It is the 15th-largest city in the country. It grew, in part, because energies that used to go into building and selling now go into managing and administering. Fortunes and family lives now depend on how regulations get drawn up and how problems get defined. It is only natural that political "polarization" should be on the rise: The stakes of governing are rising.

Any place that has political power becomes a choke-point through which global money streams must pass. Such places are sheltered from globalization's storms. They tend to grow. Austin, Texas, adds tens of thousands of residents a year, and is now the country's 11th-largest city. The four richest counties in the United States are all in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Resources are sucked from almost everywhere into political capitals and a few high-tech centers and university towns allied with them, where ambitious people settle and constitute a class. The Democratic Party is the party of that class, the class of the winners of globalization.

There are now just three regions of the country in which Democrats dominateNew England, California, and the Pacific Northwest. Otherwise, the party's support comes from the archipelago of powerful New Economy cities it controls. Washington, D.C., with its 93-to-4 partisan breakdown, is not that unusual. Hillary Clinton won Cambridge, Massachusetts, by 89 to 6 and San Francisco by 86 to 9. Here, where the future of the country is mapped out, the "rest" of the country has become invisible, indecipherable, foreign.

And the rest of the country belongs to Trump. Pretty much all of it. Trump took 85% of America's counties; Hillary Clinton took 15%. Trump even won a third of the counties that voted for Barack Obama twice. In November the New York Times had the idea of drawing up a topographical map for each candidate that showed won counties as land and lost counties as water. Trump's America looks almost exactly like the actual United States, diminished a bit on the coasts and with a couple of new "lakes" opened up in urban areas. Hillary's looks like the Lesser Antilles. It is possible to travel coast to coastfrom, say, Coos Bay, Oregon, to Wilmington, North Carolinawithout passing through a single county that Hillary Clinton won. Indeed there are several such routes. This is the heart of the country and it is experiencing a kind of social decline for which American history offers no precedent. (The economic crises of the 1870s and 1930s were something different.) Here people fall over, overdosed on heroin, in the aisles of dollar stores, and residential neighborhoods are pocked with foreclosures. This country, largely invisible to policymakers until the 2016 election, is beginningonly just beginningto come into view. Trump was the first candidate to speak directly to the invisible country as something other than the "everyplace else" left over when you drive away from the places that are powerful, scenic, or sophisticated.

We have no idea what forces Trump has unleashed. They look mighty in some lights and meager in others. It was a very unfashionable thing to vote for Trump, and Americans are, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted, an emulative people. Even a person who desperately wants to change his society would never expose himself to the scorn and retribution of his shift manager or his fiancée's parents, if he thought the chances of change were zero. When pundits spoke during the campaign of the two candidates having the lowest approval ratings of any pair in history, they were comparing different things. Hillary Clinton was the candidate of the culture. She represented what people were supposed to believe. When she rose in the polls, the newspapers filled up with speculation about her cabinet. Donald Trump stood against what people were supposed to believe. When he rose in the polls, the papers were full of anxious reflections on how ignorant and hateful Americans had become. Once Trump had won, and it was no longer embarrassing or socially dangerous to declare one's support, his approval began to drift towards its natural levelfrom 38% on Election Day to 47% in mid-December. It may drift higher still. Voters can dissemble a long time before they show their hand. On November 8, 2016, they showed their hand.

Tribalism, Not Ideology

Trump understood something no Republican had understood in decades. The partisan division in the United States was less about ideology than about sociology. Ideology was there, of course, but it arose from the sociology: you look at life differently when you write the rules than when you have to submit to them.

Republican consultants thought exclusively in ideological terms. After their defeat in 2012, they assumed they just needed nicer "messaging." Led by RNC chairman Reince Priebus, now President Trump's chief of staff, they composed a 100-page "Growth and Opportunity" report, which urged the party to be less "scary" by taking more liberal positions on gay marriage and immigration. This was an insult to Republicans, Democrats, and interest groups of all sorts, and a misunderstanding of how politics works. Politicians need to do considerably more than be nice to win a following, ethnic or not. Voters rally to a politician who delivers rights, privileges, and services. Over decades, Democrats had earned the allegiance of minorities by fighting for real gainsaffirmative action, funding for women's athletics, gay marriage, delayed deportation. Democrats occasionally pursued these rights at a cost to their careers, and often at a cost to democracy. They had gone so far as to devise new categories of minority to whom rights, privileges, and services could be promised and delivered"transgender" people, most recently. If you appreciated the new rights, as most minorities came to, you would have to be crazy to vote for a Republican just because your opinions overlapped on this or that issue. Republicans were auditioning for a role as the second-best civil rights party, which they planned to add to their portfolio as the second-best (because too far from power to deliver favors) capitalist party. Every Republican candidate for president in 2016, except Trump, swallowed this strategy whole.

Trump intuited that the difference between Republicans and Democrats was a tribal one. Feminism and anti-racism had become successful policies not because they convinced voters logically or struck them as sensible, although in many cases they did, but because they conveyed loyalty viscerally. "Breaking the glass ceiling," for instance, was supposed to be the theme of Hillary Clinton's victory party on election night at New York's Javits Center. Her staff chose that venue because it literally has the largest glass ceiling surface in New York. Glass-ceiling rhetoric was not an ethical argument but a war-cry. It was not about women but about our women. When, shortly after the election, Trump named his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway a White House counselor, his press release announced she was "the first female campaign manager of either major party to win a presidential general election,"which indeed she was! Had ideological feminism rather than tribal loyalty been at issue, this would have been considered an achievement worthy of extensive coverage. It was not.

The Democrats appeared to be overwhelming old Republican redoubts through sheer force of demographics. Almost all the networks had begun hiring young, hip, metropolitan quipsters to explain the "America of Tomorrow" or the "Next America" that residents of the Democratic Archipelago had charted out for everyone else. CNN had L.Z. Granderson, whom the website Queerty described as "breaking barriers for black gay men in journalism." In 2014, Granderson had surely spoken for many progressives when he gave his idea of what he would like to see traditional American culture do in this increasingly diverse age:

We often talk openly about the different generational views when it comes to same-sex marriages and how we cavalierly say, as the older generation die off, so does that hatred and perspective die off in our country as well. And it needs to be said, the same thing about race. When it comes to certain aspects of talking about people of different races, certain ideas and perspectives, it's time to die off. I'm not saying people need to die off, but those attitudes need to die off.
Unfortunately actual white people, particularly in rural areas, did happen to be dying off. Their life expectancy was falling sharply, even as those of other ethnic groups was rising. At three o'clock in the morning on Election Night, as Donald Trump was making his way through the crowd to deliver his victory speech to the sound of the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want," a shocked Granderson, commenting on a show called "Your Voice, Your Vote," implied that the white death rate had been the bedrock of Democratic Party strategizing all along:

For quite some time now Democrats have been hemorrhaging white male votes. And the assumption was that, because of the changing demographics of the nation, that that would not hurt them in a general election…. This is a huge slap in the face in terms of all the people who thought that this white part of the population was dying off and that all you had to do was appeal to minorities.
Culture of Corruption

The archipelago of constituencies loyal to Democrats is small geographically. But it has lately set close to 100% of the agenda, and did so even in the 2016 election. Even Trump dared offer only minor dissents from it. The important cultural innovations of the Obama Administration can fairly be said to have been introduced without debate, or at least in disregard of what debate had been going on. Gay marriage was this way, as was the complex of issues surrounding transgender bathrooms. Where did the anti-police movement Black Lives Matter come from, with its mix of street violence and campus political correctness? Who was funding it? Why didn't it halt its protests when five police were massacred at one of them in Dallas? Why was no one in authority talking about the heroin and opioid epidemic, even as it was killing more Americans than any drug wave in American history, more even than car accidents? Perhaps the main thing voters were trying to do in 2016 was to restore democratic scrutiny to actors who had long managed to evade it. We will never know, because for many years Americans have felt unable to talk about such things in public at all. The morning after the election, President Obama said to Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, "The most important thing that I'm focused on is how we create a common set of facts." That was the problem of his whole presidency. Political rhetoric doesn't create facts. There was something Soviet about this whole approacha tendency to mistake dissent for psychosis or hallucination. In a 93-to-4 world, no other grounds for dissent could be imagined.

Never in American history had a ruling class been more poorly equipped to take the moral high ground against a candidate who played fast and loose with the facts. One need not have supported Trump to see that he did not do an extraordinary number of the things he was alleged to have done. It is not true, as New Yorker editor David Remnick alleged, that "Trump began his campaign declaring Mexican immigrants to be rapists.'" What he said was:

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
It is not true, as PBS alleged, that Trump was "urging a foreign government to meddle in American politics." Any human being with a sense of humor could see that Trump was joking when he tweeted, in response to an allegation that files had been stolen from DNC servers, "If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton's 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!"

Those who couldn't understand Trump were even less likely to understand Trump's people. Hillary Clinton's remark, at a gay-rights fundraiser, that half of Trump voters were a "basket of deplorables" has been understood as one of the major blunders of the campaign. That is clear only in retrospect. It is not as if Clinton was appearing on Candid Camera. She herself had opened the event to the press. It is likely she was trying to shame a public that was proving reluctant to vote for her, to show them that if they persisted in backing Trump they would be laughed at by their social betters. Why not try such a strategy? It had worked in Tocqueville's time, and for as long as Clinton had been in politics. The whole press embraced it. A headline from Dana Milbank of the Washington Post in late October read: "Trump can't just be defeated. He must be humiliated." Another, ten days later, over an article by Dean Obeidallah of the Daily Beast, read: "Donald Trump Can't Merely Be DefeatedHe and His Deplorables Must Be Crushed." After the election, Jamelle Bouie of Slate was undaunted: "There's No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter," the headline ran.

This harmony of views was the result not of co-ordination, at least not in most cases, but of a common culture that rested on naïveté about, or indifference to, how life is lived outside of the urban archipelago. A moment that defined Trump to the country, cleaving his potential supporters from sworn enemies, came on February 23 as he was trying to brag about how broad-based was the victory he had just won in the Nevada Republican caucuses:

We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.

It is hard to recall a single journalist in any major venue who thought that last sentiment was anything but a disgrace. Who the heck loves the poorly educated? Being poorly educated was a culpability. It was not a compensable status, like being tempest-tost or lacking health insurance. No one thought to say that Jesus loved the poorly educated, or that the poorly educated were no less citizens of the republic than the tenured faculty at Oberlin. No, Trump's remark was considered not just awkward but appalling. He seemed to have forgotten who America was for.

We now know he was the only candidate who hadn't. The key to Trump's victory was his interpretation of the cultural elite as a class in the strongest sense of the word, a set of people who used government as a means of expanding their privileges and imposing their values. Democrats, again, were the party of this class.

As his campaign had been, his presidency was thus a standing insult to his opponents. He treated them as if they were propping up some kind of racket. He didn't even do them the honor of disagreeing with them. Most of the people who flew the rainbow flag against Mike Pence in northwest Washington are not gay, and most of the people who displayed the signs reading "El odio no tiene hogar aquí" do not speak enough Spanish to order a burrito. They simply have, as they see it, a more highly elaborated sense of the public good than Trump and Pence do. Trump answered their orotund earnestness with Tweets. He hit practitioners of identity politics at the core of their identity, implying they said these things not because they were more virtuous but because they were, like him, members of the One Percent.

Back to Jackson

The victory that Trump won was about more than applying the epithet "Crooked" to the Democratic opposition. It was also an acknowledgment that essential parts of so-called "movement conservatism"not just George W. Bush's wars but also Ronald Reagan's economic philosophyhad failed. The 1980s was a time of many Republican successes. It was also the decade when the Right broke the Left's monopoly on making stupid generalizations about capitalism. Over the past generation, while Republicans have been dreaming their dreams of pure free markets, more and more of the American economy has been regulated into conformity with government administrators' wishes. A lot of this process has been driven by the very corporations Republicans champion. It is extraordinary how much liberty has been extinguished since Republicans brought the libertarians to Washington.

Trump saw Republicans not as Democrats' foes but as their sidekicks and enablers. The system needed, as Trump saw it, to be reformed in a much deeper way than Republicans had ever thought necessary. Ronald Reagan, however vivid and appealing his diagnosis of government inefficiency, had underestimated the wiliness and tenacity that an administrative ruling class would bring to the defense of its prerogatives. Running in 2012, Mitt Romney could not conceive of such a thing. In speeches and in debates with Barack Obama over favoritism towards the Obama-connected green energy firm Solyndra, Romney had said he didn't think government should be "chasing fads and picking winners and losers." But his differences with the Obama Administration were purely a matter of efficiency, never of fairness or self-government. Cronyism was not the problem at Solyndra:

Programs like NASA develop technologies that ultimately can be commercialized. But for the government to say "oh, we think the world should make this kind of car" or "that kind of solar panel," that's almost certain to fail. Now and then there will be a winner, but overwhelmingly they're going to be losers. Let the private market work.

Republicans like Romney have traditionally warned that the government was being run by incompetents. Trump did something different. He implied the government is being run by crooks. The New York Times was puzzled by Trump's cabinet picks, looking at them in terms of policy subtleties, and finding that "a picture is emerging of an administration with little ideological cohesion and no single animating purpose." In fact there has never been a cabinet picked on simpler or more coherent grounds. Namely, that the agencies as they are now constituted are terminally corrupt. "Drain the swamp," as much as any policy suggestion about trade or immigration, appears to be the message at the core of the early Trump presidency. Almost all his nominees are skeptics or opponents of the agencies they have been brought in to run. He has nominated Andy Puzder, a fast-food entrepreneur skeptical about union rights, as Labor secretary. Georgia congressman Tom Price, who wants an end to Obamacare, has been nominated to run Health and Human Services. Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a skeptic about climate change, was tapped for EPA. Lawyer Robert Lighthizer, a free trade skeptic, is his pick for U.S. trade representative.

Certain parallels are emerging between President Trump and Andrew Jackson, another wealthy and capable conservative (of a sort) who was nonetheless thought a barbarian by many of his peers, and who overturned a good deal of what in his time was considered conservatism. Daniel Webster alleged that Thomas Jefferson had said of Jackson: "He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place…. [H]e is a dangerous man." Jackson, too, came to power a decade after a major banking panic, from which the malefactors appeared to have escaped with impunity. In fact, what had happened over that decade was that the broad public undertook a slow, autodidactic reassessment of the economic and social system they had been living under.

Much the same process made the election of Trump possible. Americans like capitalism a lot less than they did at the end of the George W. Bush Administration. It can be not just an antidote to, but a variety of, cronyism. Just as Jackson found his symbol of corruption in the Second Bank of the United States, so has Trump in Nafta and other free trade agreements. Just as defenders of the status quo in the 1830s warned that not rechartering the National Bank would lead to local abuses, today's argue that scrapping the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as Trump has done, will allow China to strengthen its trade position in the Western Pacific. Triumphant pundits prove that Trump "can't bring back" the jobs that fled the country 40 years ago. Of course he can't. In the same way he can't un-fight the Vietnam or Iraq wars or un-inflate the credit bubble of the 2000s. But that doesn't mean that citizens of the Republic are not entitled to hold accountable those who have blundered them into such predicaments.

Reassessment and Renewal

In our time, as in Jackson's, the ruling classes claim a monopoly not just on the economy and society but also on the legitimate authority to regulate and restrain it, and even on the language in which such matters are discussed. Elites have full-spectrum dominance of a whole semiotic system. What has just happened in American politics is outside of the system of meanings elites usually rely upon. Mike Pence's neighbors on Tennyson Street not only cannot accept their election loss; they cannot fathom it. They are reaching for their old prerogatives in much the way that recent amputees are said to feel an urge to scratch itches on limbs that are no longer there. Their instincts tell them to disbelieve what they rationally know. Their arguments have focused not on the new administration's policies or its competence but on its very legitimacy.

Thus, activists called for recounts in three statesPennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michiganwhere there was no cause for a recount beyond the fact that losing those states cost Clinton the election. Hollywood hipsters tried to suborn the Electoral College with a video promising Republican loyalists that history would remember them as great heroes if they would only undermine the country's democratic verdict. Progressives in the high-tech states introduced the concept of "fake news"false stories, usually generated in obscure corners of the internet, which, whether connected to Trump or not, were supposed to have led well-meaning citizens astray in illegitimate ways. The New York Times even devoted a front-page story to an Englishman named James Dowson, "a far-right political activist who advocated Britain's exit from the European Union and is a fan of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia," and whose postings had been shared "tens of thousands of times in the United States." Some internet surfers, it turned out, were even insulting Hillary Clinton on social media.

January saw the extraordinary turn to blaming Putin himself for having tried to influence the election by hacking the computers of the Democratic National Committee. As of mid-January, these allegations were backed up by assurancesbut no hard evidencefrom senior intelligence sources in the Obama Administration. The hack having taken place at the DNC, the sources cited included CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the Democrats, along with those who served on a secret anti-hacking committee the party convened, including former party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and party lawyer Michael Sussmann of the Washington firm Perkins Coie. Increasingly dire warnings appeared of a "rift" between Trump and his intelligence agencies. "Donald Trump Fuels Rift With CIA Over Russian Hack," headlined the Wall Street Journal. The strange and erroneous implication was that there is something improper about such a rift, some looming constitutional crisis, as if the administrative state were a fourth co-equal branch of government, rather than a part of the executive.

More need for reform has accumulated in the American system than almost anyone seemed to realize a year ago. Barack Obama was first nominated by his party in the boom days before the financial crashhe is a figure of the old regime. In a similar way, the Republican majorities that have just arrived in both houses of Congress were nominated under their own old regime of New Economy glad-handers, which Republican voters repudiated in the presidential primaries. President Trump is the only new element in a system crying out for renewal. Government itself has been rendered vulnerable by various irregularities of the Obama yearsin particular the administration's overreliance on judicial manipulation, executive orders, and ad hoc rule-writing. The new president arrives, alas, well-armed with occasions for saying, "Well, you did it too!" His scope for action will depend on just what reassessments Americans have made in their own minds over eight years of dashed economic dreams, lost global influence, and wobbling social stability. Since the people who elected Trump have gone unheard for a long time, we don't know what these reassessments are. But we are about to find out. It may take years before we can tell whether Trump's election hastened America's decline or provided the last possible means of escaping it.

Quote:We need to understand, and so does President Trump, that the hoax "war on terror" was used to transform intelligence agencies, such as the NSA and CIA, and criminal investigative agencies, such as the FBI, into Gestapo secret police agencies. Trump is now threatened by these agencies, because he rejects the neoconservative's agenda of US world hegemony that supports the gigantic military/security annual budget.

Our secret police agencies are busy at work planting "intelligence" among the presstitute media that Trump is compromised by "Russian connections" and is a security threat to the United States. The plan is to make a case in the media, as was done against President Nixon, and to force Trump from office. To openly take on a newly elected president is an act of extraordinary audacity that implies enormous confidence, or else desperation, on the part of the police state agencies.

Here you can see CNN openly cooperating with the CIA in treating wild and irresponsible speculation that Trump is under Russian influence as if it is an established fact. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46476.htm
The "evidence" provided by CNN and the CIA is a "report" by the New York Times that, with little doubt, was planted in the NYT by the CIA.

This is so obvious that it is clear that CNN and the CIA regard the American people as so gullible as to be completely stupid.

Glenn Greenwald explains to Amy Goodman that the CIA is after Trump, because Trump's announced policy of reducing the dangerous tensions with Russia conflicts with the military/security complex's need for a major enemy.

"The deep state, although there's no precise or scientific definition, generally refers to the agencies in Washington that are permanent power factions. They stay and exercise power even as presidents who are elected come and go. They typically exercise their power in secret, in the dark, and so they're barely subject to democratic accountability, if they're subject to it at all. It's agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the world's worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads. This is who not just people like Bill Kristol, but lots of Democrats are placing their faith in, are trying to empower, are cheering for as they exert power separate and apart fromin fact, in opposition tothe political officials to whom they're supposed to be subordinate.

"And you gothis is not just about Russia. You go all the way back to the campaign, and what you saw was that leading members of the intelligence community, including Mike Morell, who was the acting CIA chief under President Obama, and Michael Hayden, who ran both the CIA and the NSA under George W. Bush, were very outspoken supporters of Hillary Clinton. In fact, Michael Morell went to The New York Times, and Michael Hayden went to The Washington Post, during the campaign to praise Hillary Clinton and to say that Donald Trump had become a recruit of Russia. The CIA and the intelligence community were vehemently in support of Clinton and vehemently opposed to Trump, from the beginning. And the reason was, was because they liked Hillary Clinton's policies better than they liked Donald Trump's. One of the main priorities of the CIA for the last five years has been a proxy war in Syria, designed to achieve regime change with the Assad regime. Hillary Clinton was not only for that, she was critical of Obama for not allowing it to go further, and wanted to impose a no-fly zone in Syria and confront the Russians. Donald Trump took exactly the opposite view. He said we shouldn't care who rules Syria; we should allow the Russians, and even help the Russians, kill ISIS and al-Qaeda and other people in Syria. So, Trump's agenda that he ran on was completely antithetical to what the CIA wanted. Clinton's was exactly what the CIA wanted, and so they were behind her. And so, they've been trying to undermine Trump for many months throughout the election. And now that he won, they are not just undermining him with leaks, but actively subverting him. There's claims that they're withholding information from him, on the grounds that they don't think he should have it and can be trusted with it. They are empowering themselves to enact policy.

"Now, I happen to think that the Trump presidency is extremely dangerous. You just listed off in your newsin your newscast that led the show, many reasons. They want to dismantle the environment. They want to eliminate the safety net. They want to empower billionaires. They want to enact bigoted policies against Muslims and immigrants and so many others. And it is important to resist them. And there are lots of really great ways to resist them, such as getting courts to restrain them, citizen activism and, most important of all, having the Democratic Party engage in self-critique to ask itself how it can be a more effective political force in the United States after it has collapsed on all levels. That isn't what this resistance is now doing. What they're doing instead is trying to take maybe the only faction worse than Donald Trump, which is the deep state, the CIA, with its histories of atrocities, and say they ought to almost engage in like a soft coup, where they take the elected president and prevent him from enacting his policies. And I think it is extremely dangerous to do that. Even if you're somebody who believes that both the CIA and the deep state, on the one hand, and the Trump presidency, on the other, are extremely dangerous, as I do, there's a huge difference between the two, which is that Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls, as these courts just demonstrated and as the media is showing, as citizens are proving. But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They're barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity. That is a prescription for destroying democracy overnight in the name of saving it. And yet that's what so many, not just neocons, but the neocons' allies in the Democratic Party, are now urging and cheering. And it's incredibly warped and dangerous to watch them do that." http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46476.htm

The United States is now in the extraordinary situation that the liberal/progressive/left is allied with the deep state against democracy. The liberal/progressive/left are lobbying for the impeachment of a president who has committed no impeachable offense. The neoconservatives have stated their preference for a deep state coup against democracy. The media obliges with a constant barrage of lies, innuendos and disinformation. The insouciant American public sits there sucking its thumb.

What can Trump do? He can clean out the intelligence agencies and terminate their license granted by Bush and Obama to conduct unconstitutional activities. He can use anti-trust to breakup the media conglomerates that Clinton allowed to form. If Bush and Obama can on their own authority subject US citizens to indefinite detention without due process and if Obama can murder suspect US citizens without due process of law, Trump can use anti-trust law to break up the media conglomerates that speak with one voice against him.

At this point Trump has no alternative but to fight. He can take down the secret police agencies and the presstitute media conglomerates, or they will take him down. Dismissing Flynn was the worse thing to do. He should have kept Flynn and fired the "leakers" who are actively using disinformation against him. The NSA would have to know who the leakers are. Trump should clean out the corrupt NSA management and install officials who will identify the leakers. Then Trump should prosecute the leakers to the full extent of the law.

No president can survive secret police agencies determined to destroy him. If Trump's advisers don't know this, Trump desperately needs new advisers.

Paul Rigby Wrote:The Stakes for Trump and All of Us

Paul Craig Roberts

February 18, 2017

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/02/18/stakes-trump-us-paul-craig-roberts/#.WKipSkvKIbk.facebook

Quote:We need to understand, and so does President Trump, that the hoax "war on terror" was used to transform intelligence agencies, such as the NSA and CIA, and criminal investigative agencies, such as the FBI, into Gestapo secret police agencies. Trump is now threatened by these agencies, because he rejects the neoconservative's agenda of US world hegemony that supports the gigantic military/security annual budget.

Quote:Major-General John A. Drx,

Commanding at New York:

Whereas there has been wickedly and traitorously printed and published this morning in the New York World and New York Journal of Commerce, newspapers printed and published in the city of New York, a false and spurious proclamation purporting to be signed by the President and to be countersigned by the Secretary of State, which publication is of a treasonable nature, designed to give aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States and to the rebels now at war against the Government and their aiders and abettors, you are therefore hereby commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison in any fort or military prison in your command the editors, proprietors, and publishers of the aforesaid newspapers, and all such persons as, after public notice has been given of the falsehood of said publication, print and publish the same with intent to give aid and comfort to the enemy; and you will hold the persons so arrested in close custody until they can be brought to trial before a military commission for their offense. You will also take possession by military force of the printing establishments of the New York World and Journal of Commerce, and hold the same until further orders, and prohibit any further publication therefrom.

A. LINCOLN.

Note: On the morning of May 18, 1864, a forged proclamation was published in the World, and Journal of Commerce, of New York. The proclamation named a day for fasting and prayer, called for 400,000 fresh troops, and purposed to raise by an "immediate and peremptory draft," whatever quotas were not furnished on the day specified.

Citation: Abraham Lincoln: "Executive OrderArrest and Imprisonment of Irresponsible Newspaper Reporters and Editors," May 18, 1864. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=70018.

Cliff Varnell Wrote:

Paul Rigby Wrote:The Stakes for Trump and All of Us

Paul Craig Roberts

February 18, 2017

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/02/18/stakes-trump-us-paul-craig-roberts/#.WKipSkvKIbk.facebook

Quote:We need to understand, and so does President Trump, that the hoax "war on terror" was used to transform intelligence agencies, such as the NSA and CIA, and criminal investigative agencies, such as the FBI, into Gestapo secret police agencies. Trump is now threatened by these agencies, because he rejects the neoconservative's agenda of US world hegemony that supports the gigantic military/security annual budget.

::::cuckoo::

The neo-cons have hungered for a war with Iran since the fall of the Shah.

Quote:U.S. may have had role in shah's fall

Records suggest Nixon, Ford aimed to weaken Iran's ruler. Islamic takeover was a result.


October 17, 2008|Borzou Daragahi | Times Staff Writer

BEIRUT A new report based on previously classified documents suggests that the Nixon and Ford administrations created conditions that helped destabilize Iran in the late 1970s and contributed to the country's Islamic Revolution.

A trove of transcripts, memos and other correspondence show sharp differences over rising oil prices developing between the Republican administrations and Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in the mid-1970s, says a report to be published today in the fall issue of Middle East Journal, an academic journal published by the Washington-based Middle East Institute, a think tank.

The report, after two years of research by scholar Andrew Scott Cooper, zeros in on the role of White House policymakers -- including Donald H. Rumsfeld, then a top aide to President Ford -- hoping to roll back oil prices and curb the shah's ambitions, despite warnings by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that such a move might precipitate the rise of a "radical regime" in Iran.

Snip...

Quote:slamic Revolution in Iran: Cultivating, then Arming the Ayatollah

February 1, 2017

Snip...

Iran's Islamic revolution and the emergence to power of Ayatollah Khomeini came to pose the biggest challenge to British and US power in the oil-rich Gulf region and wider Middle East since the rise of Arab nationalism in the 1950s. But the record shows that Britain dropped its support for the shah before the revolution and sought to insure itself with the Iranian opposition, led by Khomeini. Once the latter was in power, Whitehall initially sought good relations with the Islamic regime, and connived with it, seeing it as a counter to the Soviet Union.

Snip...

Quote:Q. So, in the Intelligence community, how chaotic is the atmosphere now?

A. In my 34 years of Governmental service, I have never seen anything like it. It's the bifurcation of the entire intelligence apparatus.

Q. It seems the intel community has it in for Trump is this your feeling?

A. There are many Trump supporters within the FBI. The CIA, however, is against Trump because Trump threatens to ruin their game in the middle east.

Q. Can you elaborate?

A. CIA and Mossad work in tandem with British intel. The goal for the CIA was to replace Assad with a puppet and to topple Iran so we could access their oil. Israel works closely with it's "sister", Saudi Arabia, to help this dark cause.

Q. So it seems like the intel community has it in for Trump. How can he protect himself?

A. Trump has a tremendous opportunity here, but needs to circle wagons. The travel ban included 7 countries chosen by both Jared Kushner and Rudy. Why did it not include Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan, or Turkey or other countries that hate us? The seven nations mentioned were chosen by Israel, that's why. And the unspoken alliance of Israel and Saudi Arabia should be exposed. They are brother and sister. Jared Kushner needs to be careful with what he says and to whom. But, the biggest thing Trump can do is expose PedoGate via Sessions. Big names will go down hard, and it gets the blood suckers drained from the swamp. There are as many pedophiles on the Republican side as there is with democrats, but Trump is in a unique position to truly "clean up Dodge", so to speak. I can tell you that what is in Anthony Weiner's hard drive, and what videos exist via Jeffery Epstein, WILL BRING massive arrests in time. Trump's legacy could be truly great if he was to purge the CIA, stop the extortion, prosecute the pedophiles and reinstate the death penalty for pedo's convicted a second time. Pedogate is his path to greatness.

Q. How does Russia fit into all this?

A. The CIA and Israel are responsible for the creation of Isis. Isis was created specifically to weaken Iran and destabilize Syria. It worked for awhile until Putin shored up Assad and bolstered Iranian Qud forces. The real reason you see such anti-Russian fever from both Schumer and McCain, Graham and Feinstein, is because the operation has blown up in our faces.

Q. Is Israel behind the anti Russian sentiment?

A. Yes. Israeli intelligence is furious with Trump, and will do anything to keep Trump from working with Putin. Understand that if Trump and Putin work together to defeat Isis, they are actually defeating a CIA/Mossad creation, and furthermore, Syria and Iran grow stronger, which the Saudis and the Israeli's fear. Their goal was to divide Syria and ultimately destroy Iran's regime. It is not just an oil grab, but a much bigger attempt at moving the chess pieces to allow Israel and Saudi Arabia to dominate the entire Middle East.

Q. So they demonize Putin and try to tarnish the Trump administration?

A. The Deep State is at war with both Trump and Putin. Understand that when Israeli intelligence hears "America first" from Trump, they go apeshit. Israel has bribed, extorted and intimidated our politicians for decades and suddenly this upstart billionaire threatens to ruin everything.

Q. You mention the word extort. Does that relate to Pizzagate?

A. PedoGate is only a modern term associated with a long history of Pedo-blackmail connected to both Israel and the Intel community. There is a full court press to stop PedoGate from being looked at because if people knew the true motives behind the pedophilia epidemic, they would do more than march on Washington. They could actually seed a revolution, with the spark coming from decent American parents who want to protect their kids. Our politicians are compromised. The senior analyst nicknamed "FBI Anon" alluded to this in his exchange with folks on 4chan and with you.

Q. What do you mean compromised?

A. Do you notice 2 central themes running through the MSM lately? Those themes are "Fear the Russians" and "#PizzaGate is fake news". Both tropes come from the same place.

Q. Can you explain?

A. How do we exert power? Via fear. Do you ever wonder why both Democrats and Republicans fall all over themselves to kiss up to Israel? Odd, since Israel is the size of Rhode Island… The fact is, many of our politicians on both sides have been compromised by CIA and Mossad for years. It's actually not admiration they are expressing for Israel, but fear. Notice Lindsay Graham and Chuck Schumer repeating the same salute when it comes to Israel. How does that even happen? The American people are finally seeing that there is no two-party system, but one big shadow Government pretending we have political dichotomy.

Q. So PedoGate is real and "they" have to get Americans to disbelieve it?

A. Let me explain how threatening PedoGate is… Who wins? Trump. Putin. Americans. Russians. The world…. Who loses? Israel, since they no longer can blackmail our politicians, the same goes for the CIA. The Shadow Government loses. But, the people win.

Q. Can you give me specific instances of politicians being compromised by Israel?

A. Sure. Lolita Island. Jeffery Epstein, a billionaire convicted of pedophilia received a soft sentence. His island was rigged with video recorders. Many politicians have been compromised. It was a Mossad/CIA operation. Contact ex-senior CIA CCS, Robert David Steele. Bob knows and has even spoken about this with numerous reporters.

Q. So an ex-CIA senior agent named Robert Steele is on record saying Epstein's island was a honey trap to lure our most powerful politicians into a extortion scheme?

A. Yes. There are videos of some of the most powerful players in the most humiliating positions. If this gets out, not only are the politicians ruined, but the extortion game is over and suddenly, the influence CIA and Mossad wield over Washington, is gone.

Q. Wow ! Now its all making sense.

A. Yes. lets continue this conversation later.

The interview resumes

Q. So I checked out Robert David Steele, and he mentions Chuck Schumer being on Lolita Island. So does FBI anon. Is that why Schumer is targeting Trump's cabinet picks?

A. Connect the dots.

Q. How many other politicians have been secretly extorted?

A. One in three, roughly. It's not just the Island, its all of their activities. The reason #Pedogate terrifies the media, the CIA, the Israel Lobby, is because they are all part of this "shadow swamp"

Q. Former CIA agent, Robert Steele, says Mossad operated Lolita Island and CIA worked with them. That's treason on all levels.

A. Yes, and its espionage. Just as these leaks from the intel community regarding Flynn. I expect that at some later moment, Trump will leak some of these videos

Q. Wait. Trump has videos of politicians in delicate" situations?

A. No, But the Intel community has them, and Trump has strong support among certain players in the community. Trump has said he wants to "throw a spotlight on the cockroaches".

Q. But Trump just met with Netanyahu and pledged the usual unbreakable bond with Israel.

A. Theatre. Netanyahu is desperate to both play Trump into attacking Syria,and hate Putin, and to convince him PedoGate is a conspiracy theory.

Q. That is what Robert Steele says, as well. So, exposing the Pedophiles diminishes Israel's influence in American politics and also changes the map in a critical mass way?

A. The same media screaming "The Russians are coming" is the same media who says "Pizzagate is fake news" That's CIA and Mossad talking points.

Q. How do social media giants like Facebook and Google fit in?

A. Facebook and CIA are literally the same petri-dish. Google became a Deep State organ courtesy of Eric Schmidt.

Q. Getting back to the Pedo stuff, FBI anon said in July of last year, that the Clinton Foundation sold secrets to foreign nations. Did they also engage in PizzaGate?

A. There are videos of WJC that would destroy him. FBI anon leaked weeks ago, on purpose. There was a reason.

Q. Ok, FBI anon gave Schumers initials, and Barnet Frank and others, but so far we have only seen low level arrests.

A . FBI anon did a "bank shot". That's a pool hall term we use. Ask Bob about it. FBI Anon rattled their cages as other DHS and local authorities rounded up all sorts of street-level human traffickers. The big arrests will come in time, but first the small fish are interrogated, and provide information that leads to larger fish. FBI Anon was firing a shot across the bow, much like you shake a beehive to infuriate the bees. Notice how blatantly hostile McCain, Schumer, Graham, and others are? It was what we call a "targeted trigger".

It worked. By long-kniving Flynn, they exposed their hand. Now, Trump has full executive powers to investigate the CIA and Mossad. Notice how there is sound and fury about "Russian influence" and utter silence on "Mossad" influence in our power structure?

When FBI anon leaked in early July, the whole idea was to expose the Clinton Foundation,and to hint at the sale of "people" i.e. Pedogate. Look back at his exchange on 4chan. He is a gifted analyst, and knows just what stone to throw at Goliath's noggin. By triggering the shadow Government, he helps citizen journalists ask the right questions and follow the right breadcrumbs, not the rabbit holes the Elite scum want you to follow.

Now, PedoGate victims are speaking out on their experiences! You just had a story on some lady who went through having her family abused by California-Deep-State-sponsored terrorism. If folks knew that CPS in California is tied into a huge racket that kidnaps children from parents, they would realize just how sick this is. Foster homes, CPS, etc… all get paid well to jail parents and then snatch their kids away. These kids suffer abuse, and perpetuate the growing cancer called pedogate. Politicians who have pedophile tendencies are groomed for power, because they can be later extorted and controlled. Meanwhile, victims have no voice- until now. Suddenly, we have citizen journalism, and it will end up saving the people, in the end.

I have to go, but please contact Robert David Steele, the former CIA agent we discussed. I am sure he would appear on your channel. You are providing a real service to the people and we hope you will continue to speak up for the regular folks who are concerned, rightfully, as to the state of our nation. Take care.

Quote:"We see the government of God over the world is hidden," Francis Bacon wrote in 1605, describing the deepest of deep states: the lord's reign over us, which Bacon thought a good model for earthly rule. "Obscure and invisible" was how Bacon thought government worked best, and King James I agreed, instructing, in 1624, a too inquisitive subject that none shall "meddle with anything concerning our Government, or deep Matters of State."

Until recently, the phrase "deep state" had been mostly consigned to the bowels of the conspiratorial deep web, but over the past few weeks, since Donald Trump decided to take his fight with the intelligence community public, it has witnessed a remarkable florescence. The "deep state" apparently has Trump in its sights, at least according to former NSA intelligence analyst John Schindler, who tweeted that a friend in the "intelligence community" told him that Trump "will die in jail."

What is the "deep state"? The New York Times has given us an explainer on the concept, which doesn't explain much. Things are bad, but not as bad as Turkey or Egypt, the Times says, which really do have deep states; and besides, leaks from the deep state will save us from the deep state.

If you do a search on a scholarly database, like Jstor, for the term, you'll get lots of returns having to do with hypnosis, psychology, and spiritualism. This, in a way, is appropriate, since these activities have to do with the "obscure" interior life of individualsthat is, the opposite of collective categories such as the "public" and the "social," realms that are presumed in modern democracies to be subject to procedural scrutiny and "freedom of information."

But what we call modernity didn't just create the public realm subject to public law. It created the private sphere, centered on the ideal of the property-owning individual and private corporation, and which during our modern times have enshrined Bacon's and King James I's ideal. "Good luck researching a private firm," writes the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. (Even the dogged Seymour Hersh didn't have much luck when he tried to investigate "the private sector," as opposed to his métier, the national security state: "The abuse of private power" proved "a much dicier subject for many editors even than the CIA." Hersh gave up, and wrote his book on Henry Kissinger instead.)

So at least as long as there has been private property, there has been private plotting, and talk of a "deep state" has been a vernacular way of describing what political scientists like to call "civil society," that is, any venue in which powerful individuals, either alone or collectively, might try to use the state to fulfill their private ambitions, to get richer and obtain more power. The first use of the exact phrase I managed to find is this: In 1817, John Fitzgerald Pennie's "The Varangian, or Masonic Honor," offered this dialogue of two servants working a large banquet hall filled with contriving earls and knights.

Second servant: "Oh, could I but pry into these deep state secrets! I would give my very head to

Third servant: "Thus mayst, for aught 'tis worth.… Would I could pry into a venison pasty…. I will see what cheer the buttery yields."

Second servant: "Then art thou come in right good time: there's glorious feasting here. But thou, dull fellow, hast no great regard for plots and state affairs."

Third servant: "No; but I have for the sad state of my deserted bowels."

Trump might not have control of the deep state, but he does preside over a very sad state.

The problem with the phrase "deep state" is that it is used to suggest that dishonorable individuals are subverting the virtuous state for their private ambitions. A good Marxist, and even an intelligent liberal, however, knows that under capitalism, ambition is considered a virtue, not a vice, and that the whole point of government is to collectively organize subversion. What do you think the "pursuit of happiness" means? It's this public virtue/private vice false opposition that makes so much of the "deep state" writing slide into, if not noxious Bilderberg anti-Semitism, then "we are a republic, not an empire" idiocy.

But the concept resonates, especially since the modern state is not just an instrument to execute elite ambition but a site of popular demands and class struggle. The private, organized backlash to those demands and struggles is often understood as a "deep state" conspiracy, and that understanding is more often than not correct. The Koch brothers know this, at least according to Jane Mayer's Dark Money. Kevin Ovenden tells me the term "deep state" was regularly used to discuss Turkish politics in the 1990s, especially the secretive power exercised by the military, bureaucracy, and courts against democratic action.

Over the last few decades, with the concurrent rise of finance capitalism and the privatization of many facets of national security associated with what we call neoliberalism, "deep state" conspiracies have grown. Some of them are nutty and only add to the fetish, as described (three years before 9/11) by Fredric Jameson: "conspiracy, one is tempted to say, is the poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter's system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content." Slippage between theme and content seems like a nice way of describing the hope held by many liberals that a CIA program of domestic destabilization will save us all from Donald Trump.

By my count, the current usage of "deep state," as it supposedly relates to Trump's troubles, entails three overlapping understandings: The first has to do with war, militarism, and intelligence, the secret institutions that have deep roots but were fused together in a powerful way under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama (Marc Ambinder's book, Deep State, along with this recent essay in Foreign Policy, are good guides); the second with private corporate power, especially associated with finance, the arms trade, and fossil fuels; and the third with the many embedded bureaucrats of the US government's many administrative agencies, who, we hope, are leading a passive resistance to Trump's program of privatization and deregulation. "When the great lord passes the peasant bows deeply and silently farts"and then tweets about it from a rogue NASA account.

There's a fourth way the term is used, to refer to an almost hereditary covert caste, running from the men who in the early days of the Cold War set up the modern national security state to the elite who make up today's "intelligence community." In 1964, Random House published the bestselling The Invisible Government, by journalists David Wise and Thomas Ross (here's the CIA's declassified review of the book, which takes exception to its thesis). More recently, Michael Glennon's National Security and Double Government updated the argument. Peter Dale Scott was the first, as far as I know, to use the phrase "parapolitics" and "deep politics" to discuss what is now described as the deep state, and he's the author of numerous books on the dense connections between illegal drugs, covert action, and finance. I've always been a bit agnostic about Scott's work, overwhelmed by the sheer detail, but then I remember that Iran-Contra really did happen. As Michael Parenti likes to point out, conspiracies do in fact exist, both in legal theory and in politics: Watergate, Iran-Contra, the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s/90s, "described by the Justice Department as a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,' the greatest financial crime in history" (that we know of).

Much of the writing frames the question as Trump versus the Deep State, but even if we take the "deep state" as a valid concept, surely it's not useful to think of the competing interests it represents as monolithic, as David Martin in an e-mail suggests. Big Oil and Wall Street might want deregulation and an opening to Russia. The euphemistically titled "intelligence community" wants a ramped-up war footing. High-tech wants increased trade. Trump, who presents as pure id wrapped in ambition motived by appetite, wants it allwhich makes him both potentially useful and inherently unstable, simultaneously a product and target of the deep state. In 1956, C. Wright Mills wrote that "the conception of the power elite and of its unity rests upon the corresponding developments and the coincidence of interests among economic, political, and military organizations." If nothing else, the "Trump v. Deep State" framings show that unity is long gone.

The literature on the "deep state" is overwhelming, and includes many of the books that were the production of the first generation of New Left investigative journalists, including those found in Mark Lombardi's library. Here's a very small starting bibliography, based on a Facebook survey. Apologies for omissions. Let's first, however, start with this caution by Richard Hofstadter, which Mills cites in The Power Elite: "There is a great difference between locating conspiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy, between singling out those conspiratorial acts that do on occasion occur and weaving a vast fabric of social explanation out of nothing but skeins of evil plots."

David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Radical Right

Tom Engelhardt, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (Tom is the editor of the invaluable tomdispatch.com)

Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Volume 2 (The historian Brad Simpson writes that the first 185 pages of the second volume of this book is terrific at explaining the onset of the Korean War. Simpson is critical of the concept of "deep state"; he argues that it is "a way for people on the left to try and pathologize or render conspiratorial the normal workings of exec branch agencies and power vis-a-vis the foreign policy apparatus more generally. There are policy currents and social constituencies (in industry, finance, etc.) that find expression in particular agencies and factions of particular agencies, and whose views are not all that hard to discern, even if they are idiosyncratic." )

Engelbrecht and F.C. Hanighen, Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industryfrom 1934!

Michael Glennon's National Security and Double Government

Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade

Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press

Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America

Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

Robert Parry, Secrecy and Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq (Parry was one of the best reporters on Iran-Contra, for which he paid a high professional price)
Gary Sick, October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan (See also Parry's reporting on the 1980 October Surprise.)

Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Quote:WASHINGTON A wave of leaks from government officials has hobbled the Trump administration, leading some to draw comparisons to countries like Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where shadowy networks within government bureaucracies, often referred to as "deep states," undermine and coerce elected governments.

So is the United States seeing the rise of its own deep state?

Not quite, experts say, but the echoes are real and disturbing.

Though leaks can be a normal and healthy check on a president's power, what's happening now extends much further. The United States, those experts warn, risks developing an entrenched culture of conflict between the president and his own bureaucracy.

Issandr El Amrani, an analyst who has written on Egypt's deep state, said he was concerned by the parallels, though the United States has not reached authoritarian extremes.

The growing discord between a president and his bureaucratic rank-and-file, he warned, "is dangerous, it encourages deep divisions within society, it creates these constant tensions."

"As an American citizen I find it really quite disheartening to see all these similarities to Egypt," Mr. El Amrani said.

What Makes a Deep State?

Though the deep state is sometimes discussed as a shadowy conspiracy, it helps to think of it instead as a political conflict between a nation's leader and its governing institutions.

That can be deeply destabilizing, leading both sides to wield state powers like the security services or courts against one another, corrupting those institutions in the process.

In Egypt, for instance, the military and security services actively undermined Mohamed Morsi, the country's democratically elected Islamist president, contributing to the upheaval that culminated in his ouster in a 2013 coup.

Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has battled the deep state by consolidating power for himself and, after a failed coup attempt last year, conducting vast purges.

Though American democracy is resilient enough to resist such clashes, early hints of a conflict can be tricky to spot because some push and pull between a president and his or her agencies is normal.

In 2009, for instance, military officials used leaks to pressure the White House over what it saw as the minimal number of troops necessary to send to Afghanistan.

Leaks can also be an emergency brake on policies that officials believe could be ill-advised or unlawful, such as George W. Bush-era programs on warrantless wiretapping and the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq.

"You want these people to be fighting like cats and dogs over what the best policy is, airing their views, making their case and then, when it's over, accepting the decision and implementing it," said Elizabeth N. Saunders, a George Washington University political scientist. "That's the way it's supposed to work."

"Leaking is not new," she said, "but this level of leaking is pretty unprecedented."

Institutional conflicts under Mr. Trump, she worried, had grown into something larger and more concerning.

Mr. Trump, apparently seeking to cut the intelligence community, State Department, and other agencies out of the policy-making process almost entirely, may have triggered a conflict whose escalation we are seeing in the rising number of leaks.

Culture of Conflict

Officials, deprived of the usual levers for shaping policies that are supposed to be their purview, are left with little other than leaking. And the frenetic pace of Mr. Trump's executive orders, which the agencies would normally review internally over weeks or months, has them pulling that lever repeatedly.

They have leaked draft executive orders, inciting backlashes that led the orders to be shelved. And they have revealed administration efforts to circumvent usual policymaking channels, undermining Mr. Trump's ability to enact his agenda.

Mr. Trump's moves to consolidate power away from those agencies under his own authority also has them struggling to keep what they see as their crucial role in governance.

"We're in a world now where the president is playing to the edge of his powers, and I think there are real concerns about the constitutional implications of some of the actions he's taken," said Amy Zegart, the co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

That has forced officials in agencies to ask how far they will go themselves. As each side begins to perceive itself as under attack and the other as making dangerous power-grabs, it will justify more and more extreme behavior.

"In President Trump, you have a president whose behavior shocks even more than the content of his policies," Mr. El Amrani said.

"This was very much the case with Morsi," he said, which led the civil service to "leak aggressively" to oppose Morsi's disregard for bureaucratic norms and procedures. "You're seeing the same thing now."

Tit for Tat

Mr. Trump's tendency to treat each leak as an attack rather than an attempt to influence policy has created an atmosphere in Washington of open institutional conflict.

Some leaks appear motivated by more than mere policy disagreements, such as the revelations concerning conversations between Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser, and Russia's ambassador to the United States, Sergey I. Kislyak, which led on Monday to Mr. Flynn's resignation.

This came after months of worsening relations between Mr. Trump and the intelligence agencies, which he frequently criticized during his campaign.

Mr. Trump, in rejecting intelligence assessments that Russia intervened in the election to help him win, has risked implying that he will only accept intelligence bent to his political interests.

Mr. Trump has said he might appoint Stephen A. Feinberg, a finance executive who was an early supporter of his campaign, to review the intelligence agencies.

"It looks, sounds and feels like a political witch hunt," said Ms. Zegart. "It's like pouring gasoline on the fire."

"What's happening here is that the president doesn't even want to hear intelligence that he doesn't agree with, and jumps to the conclusion that it must be politicized, and must be the result of people conspiring against him," Ms. Zegart said.

By creating the perception of conflict, Mr. Trump may have made it more likely.

Crossing the Line

Mr. Flynn, in his short tenure, exemplified the breakdown between the president's inner circle and career civil servants. He kept the National Security Council largely shut out of policy-making and sought sweeping changes in foreign policy.

For concerned government officials, leaks may have become one of the few remaining means by which to influence not just Mr. Flynn's policy initiatives but the threat he seemed to pose to their place in democracy. That has fueled speculation that details of Mr. Flynn's contact with the Russian ambassador could have been leaked as much to undermine Mr. Flynn as out of concern for impropriety.

Even if that was not the case, such practices are a hazard of officials' growing reliance on leaks and other tools of bureaucratic resistance. This risks entrenching a culture of bureaucratic warfare that is adversarial and dysfunctional by default not quite a Turkish-style deep state, but not a healthy democracy either.

Officials are stuck in a difficult position: Even if each individual leak is justifiable, as insubordination becomes more sustained and overt, it inches deeper into the gray zone of counter-democratic activities.

The distinction between deep-state meddling and acceptable protest is difficult to draw in the United States, Ms. Zegart said, because this degree of opposition is so unusual.

"I don't think you can say in advance what inappropriate deep-state activity would look like, because we haven't seen this before," she said.

In countries like Egypt, Mr. El Amrani said, the line is much clearer.

There, "the deep state is not official institutions rebelling," he said, but rather "shadowy networks within those institutions, and within business, who are conspiring together and forming parallel state institutions."

Mr. Trump, by treating these institutions as if they are already his political enemies, makes that harder to avoid.

Bad for Everyone

As that gulf widens, it becomes more likely that mutual mistrust will lead the president and government bureaucracy to actively undermine one another.

A lesson of deep states: Even minor decisions become the subject of political infighting, making basic governance difficult. "We saw in Egypt in 2013 that the result is complete decision-making paralysis," Mr. El Amrani said.

That is one of the milder outcomes. But when institutions with vast power to eavesdrop, fine, harass and detain see themselves as locked in a zero-sum struggle for survival, it is often basic civil liberties and democratic rights that end up in the crossfire.

Mr. El Amrani does not believe those worst-case scenarios are likely to come to pass in the United States. But there is still a risk that bureaucratic resistance against the president could become an enduring feature of American politics. Once trust is broken, it is difficult to rebuild.

Ms. Zegart agreed. "There are no good long-term consequences here," she said. "This war between the intelligence community and the White House is bad for the intelligence community, bad for the White House, and bad for the nation's security."