Quote:The chattering classes have officially lost it. On both sides of the Atlantic. Of course they'd been teetering on the cliff edge of sanity for a while, following the bruising of their beloved EU by 17m angry Brits and Hillary's loss to that orange muppet they thought no one except rednecks would vote for. But now they've gone over. They're falling fast. They're speeding away from the world of logic into a cesspit of conspiracy and fear. It's tragic. Or hilarious. One or the other.

Exhibit A: this week's New Yorker. It's mad. It captures wonderfully how the liberal-left has come to be polluted by the paranoid style of McCarthyist thinking since Trump's victory. It's a New Yorker for a future, dystopian America that's been captured by the Evil Empire. The mag's masthead is in Cyrillic and its famous dandy mascot Eustace Tilley has morphed into Putin. It's now Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley'. Inside the mag it's even more feverish. A 13,000-word report, Trump, Putin and the New Cold War', is accompanied by a drawing of a deep-red, UFO-style Kremlin hovering over the White House and firing lasers into it. It's CGI Hollywood meets House Un-American Activities in an orgy of liberal dread over Ruskies ruining the nation.

https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/837328687125184512/photo/1

It used to be right-wingers who fretted over Russians and Reds and pinkos colonising Westerners' lives and minds. Now it's lefties. Trump is regularly called Putin's puppet'. He's an unwitting agent' of Moscow, we're told. The New York Times even called him The Siberian Candidate', echoing the title of the 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate, in which an American is brainwashed by Korean Communists to become an assassin. That's how some seriously view Trump: a Putin-moulded footsoldier of Russian interests who'll assassinate the American way of life, if not American citizens. I mean, Vanity Fair actually asks: Is Trump a Manchurian Candidate?' These people need a lie down. You have to get deep into the New Yorker's prolix report to discover that US officials still haven't provided evidence for their claim that Putin ordered the hacking of Democrat emails in order to hurry Trump to power: The declassified report [on Putin's meddling] provides more assertion than evidence.'

But that hasn't stopped the left McCarthyists, these Reds on the Web fearmongers, from buying into all kinds of claptrap about Putin putting Trump in the White House. In December, a YouGov survey of Democratic voters found that 50 percent of them think Russia tampered with vote tallies to help Trump'. That is, White House-eyeing Putinites actually meddled with voting machines or ballot counts. There's no evidence whatever for this. In YouGov's words, it's an election day conspiracy theory'. A kind of delirium is spreading.

The spectre of Putinite meddling is now blamed for everything that doesn't go the liberal elite's way. Ben Bradshaw said it is highly probable' Russia interfered in the EU referendum. Here, highly probable' is code for I don't have a solitary shred of evidence for this but I feel it in my waters'. Even the concern over fake news', which is a problem, is being bent to this broader, swirling fear of malevolent foreigners waging war on our apparently pristine politics and media. It always uses the lingo of invasion. Meet the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media,' said a Guardian report at the weekend, about a rich bloke who's setting up various news websites.

The Guardian piece talks about the war of the bots', including Russian bots' (organised by who?', it asks, menacingly). Apparently these automated bots' on Twitter and other social-media sites a bot being a computer programme designed to say the same stuff over and over are pumping out political messages and hashtags that have helped to change the conversation' and boost support for the likes of Trump and Brexit. What's really being said here is that my mind, your mind and the mind of anyone who doesn't love the EU or think Hillary would have made a good president have been invaded by Russian bots organised by who?' You know who! and made to believe certain things. Richard Dawkins summed it up in a tweet about the Guardian piece: Terrifying. Sinister social-media bots read minds & manipulate votes. Explains mystery of Trump & Brexit.'

Dear, dear me. What has become of these people? They really believe Putin made Brexit happen? That Ruskies tampered with vote counts in the US? That Russian computer bots read minds'? They've lost it. They've gone. The very people who for years talked about the problem of conspiracy theories have become the keenest spreaders of conspiracy theories. The people who spent the past few months banging on about the post-truth' politics of Brexit and Trump have shown they don't have the first clue what truth is. The people who posed as champions of logic have revealed themselves as peddlers of paranoia.

In his seminal 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics', written in the aftermath of McCarthyism, Richard Hofstadter nailed the two elements of the fearful, fact-lite political mind: first, the obsession with patterns' of behaviour that might point to a conspiracy; and second, the conviction that the entire political order is under threat from some external force. He noted that McCarthy often talked about the baffling pattern' of certain politicians' antics, which seemed to compliment, at least, the wellbeing of the Kremlin'. And he described how political paranoiacs always think civilisation itself is being menaced: The paranoid spokesman traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders.'

This beautifully describes the situation today. Those opposed to the current political order now scrabble about for evidence of Putin-friendly patterns' of behaviour among Trumpites, tying together every fleeting phone call or dinner engagement into proof that the White House is primarily concerned with the wellbeing of the Kremlin'. And they, too, wring their hands over the end of America or the end of Europe the death of whole worlds', the end of everything. They have vacated the world of reason. They're in the land of the paranoid now, and they don't even know it.

Has the Left lost its marbles over Russia? Freddy Gray and Michael Brendan Dougherty discuss:

https://soundcloud.com/user-930249450/has-the-anti-trump-media-lost-its-mind-over-russia

Quote:The chattering classes have officially lost it. On both sides of the Atlantic. Of course they'd been teetering on the cliff edge of sanity for a while, following the bruising of their beloved EU by 17m angry Brits and Hillary's loss to that orange muppet they thought no one except rednecks would vote for. But now they've gone over. They're falling fast. They're speeding away from the world of logic into a cesspit of conspiracy and fear. It's tragic. Or hilarious. One or the other.

Paul Rigby Wrote:From the same class that brought us Oswald-did-it-and-you're-a-loon-if-you-think-otherwise...

Cliff Varnell Wrote:All well and good. But the suspicions Trump is deeply tied to Putin are stoked by the continual lying by Trump, Sessions, Flynn, Page and Manafort.

Why does Trump lie about "not calling Russia in 10 years?"

Why did Sessions lie about not meeting any Russian officials when he met the Russian ambassador three times?

Why did Flynn lie about not discussing US sanctions in his many phone calls with said Ambassador?

Carter Page had a meltdown on MSNBC sort-of-not-denying meeting with said Ambassador.

Why did Ambassador Kislyak lie about meeting any Trump operatives during the campaign?

If all these meetings were benign why are these guys acting guilty of something?

Cliff Varnell Wrote:

Paul Rigby Wrote:From the same class that brought us Oswald-did-it-and-you're-a-loon-if-you-think-otherwise...

This bit I agree with and add the following nuance -- the same Globalist Proto-Autocracy (a/k/a the WASP Eastern Liberal Establishment) that orchestrated the murder of JFK in the capital of the Dominionist Proto-Autocracy Dallas TX.

Hell, W. Averell Harriman put Jackie and the kids up that night, the sinister bastard.

Peter Lemkin Wrote:

Cliff Varnell Wrote:All well and good. But the suspicions Trump is deeply tied to Putin are stoked by the continual lying by Trump, Sessions, Flynn, Page and Manafort.

Why does Trump lie about "not calling Russia in 10 years?"

Why did Sessions lie about not meeting any Russian officials when he met the Russian ambassador three times?

Why did Flynn lie about not discussing US sanctions in his many phone calls with said Ambassador?

Carter Page had a meltdown on MSNBC sort-of-not-denying meeting with said Ambassador.

Why did Ambassador Kislyak lie about meeting any Trump operatives during the campaign?

If all these meetings were benign why are these guys acting guilty of something?

While it is not [yet] clear what the ties/meetings/plans were/are all about, I think Trumps ties to Russia are more financial than political. He has has apparently gotten big loans from Russian Oligarchs and does business with them - and not small business either. His friends and their companies do or want to do business with Russia - and not small business either. They know that the concept of 'Russia' is anathema in the US, so have kept their contacts hidden because of that and the fact IMO that they have nothing to do with bilateral relationships of nations, but personal business on both sides. Russia is largely a kleptocracy at the top and Trump wants that in the USA too. While I have no problem with Russian and the USA getting along and not being enemies for no sane reason, I don't like his [Trump's] view of the Presidency as first good for his bottom line and last good for the People of the US and World. Yes, it would be nice to know what the meetings/talks were about, but only by a truly independent investigation - not one controlled by the two parties which have private political axes to grind. I think Trump has done much worse things at this point no matter how one wishes to paint the 'Russia thing'....and that this is a reversion to 'Cold War' thinking - as that 'reflex' is still present in US thinking. Russia has done not nice things, but the US has also done so in spades. Putin and his Oligarch friends are very much like Trump and his Oligarch friends - natural friends I'd say and already known to have done some business deals and planning to do others. In this there is good and bad - the bad being that it is Oligarch to Oligarch and not people to people rapprochement.

David Guyatt Wrote:

Peter Lemkin Wrote:

Cliff Varnell Wrote:All well and good. But the suspicions Trump is deeply tied to Putin are stoked by the continual lying by Trump, Sessions, Flynn, Page and Manafort.

Why does Trump lie about "not calling Russia in 10 years?"

Why did Sessions lie about not meeting any Russian officials when he met the Russian ambassador three times?

Why did Flynn lie about not discussing US sanctions in his many phone calls with said Ambassador?

Carter Page had a meltdown on MSNBC sort-of-not-denying meeting with said Ambassador.

Why did Ambassador Kislyak lie about meeting any Trump operatives during the campaign?

If all these meetings were benign why are these guys acting guilty of something?

While it is not [yet] clear what the ties/meetings/plans were/are all about, I think Trumps ties to Russia are more financial than political. He has has apparently gotten big loans from Russian Oligarchs and does business with them - and not small business either. His friends and their companies do or want to do business with Russia - and not small business either. They know that the concept of 'Russia' is anathema in the US, so have kept their contacts hidden because of that and the fact IMO that they have nothing to do with bilateral relationships of nations, but personal business on both sides. Russia is largely a kleptocracy at the top and Trump wants that in the USA too. While I have no problem with Russian and the USA getting along and not being enemies for no sane reason, I don't like his [Trump's] view of the Presidency as first good for his bottom line and last good for the People of the US and World. Yes, it would be nice to know what the meetings/talks were about, but only by a truly independent investigation - not one controlled by the two parties which have private political axes to grind. I think Trump has done much worse things at this point no matter how one wishes to paint the 'Russia thing'....and that this is a reversion to 'Cold War' thinking - as that 'reflex' is still present in US thinking. Russia has done not nice things, but the US has also done so in spades. Putin and his Oligarch friends are very much like Trump and his Oligarch friends - natural friends I'd say and already known to have done some business deals and planning to do others. In this there is good and bad - the bad being that it is Oligarch to Oligarch and not people to people rapprochement.

I think that is a fair summing up, Pete. However, the MSM drums of war with Russia are beating beaten so hard now with contrived Russian responsibility for anything that suits their agenda that it has turned heads. Americans I have known for decades who hitherto have been insightful and knowledgeable on US elite and Intelligence Community artfulness and deceits are in psychological free fall; they've lost all sense of balance and common sense on the Russia issue. It's sad to see - and completely pointless arguing with them about it. I suspect they would be cheerleaders if the US went to war with Russia.

We live in perilous times...

Quote:Steve Bannon's Apocalyptic Unravelling'
March 9, 2017

Donald Trump's upbeat slogan is "Make America Great Again," but his chief strategist Steve Bannon sees apocalyptic days ahead, a harsh winter before society's renewal, writes ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke.




By Alastair Crooke


Steve Bannon is accustomed to start many of his talks to activists and Tea Party gatherings in the following way: "At 11 o'clock on 18 September 2008, Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke told the U.S. President that they had already stove-piped $500 billions of liquidity into the financial system during the previous 24 hours but needed a further one Trillion dollars, that same day.




Steve Bannon, White House strategist for President Donald Trump. (Photo from YouTube)
"The pair said that if they did not get it immediately, the U.S. financial system would implode within 72 hours; the world's financial system, within three weeks; and that social unrest and political chaos could ensue within the month." (In the end, Bannon notes, it was more like $5 trillion that was required, though no one really knows how much, as there has been no accounting for all these trillions).


"We (the U.S.) have", he continues, "in the wake of the bailouts that ensued, liabilities of $200 trillions, but net assets including everything of some $50-60 trillion." (Recall that Bannon is himself a former Goldman Sachs banker).


"We are upside down; the industrial democracies today have a problem we have never had before; we are over-leveraged (we have to go through a massive de-leveraging); and we have built a welfare state which is completely and totally unsupportable.


"And why this is a crisis … the problem … is that the numbers have become so esoteric that even the guys on Wall Street, at Goldman Sachs, the guys I work with, and the Treasury guys … It's so tough to get this together … Trillion dollar deficits … etcetera."


But, Bannon says in spite of all these esoteric, unimaginable numbers wafting about the Tea Party women (and it is mainly led by women, he points out) get it. They know a different reality: they know what groceries now cost, they know their kids have $50,000 in college debt, are still living at home, and see no jobs in prospect: "The reason I called the film Generation Zero is because this generation, the guys in their 20s and 30s: We've wiped them out."


And it's not just Bannon. A decade earlier, in 2000, Donald Trump was writing in a very similar vein in a pamphlet that marked his first toying with the prospect of becoming a Presidential candidate: "My third reason for wanting to speak out is that I see not only incredible prosperity … but also the possibility of economic and social upheaval … Look towards the future, and if you are like me, you will see storm clouds brewing. Big Trouble. I hope I am wrong, but I think we may be facing an economic crash like we've never seen before."


And before the recent presidential election, Donald Trump kept to this same narrative: the stock market was dangerously inflated. In an interview on CNBC, he said, "I hope I'm wrong, but I think we're in a big, fat, juicy bubble," adding that conditions were so perilous that the country was headed for a "very massive recession" and that "if you raise interest rates even a little bit, (everything's) going to come crashing down."


The Paradox


And here, precisely, is the paradox: Why if Trump and Bannon view the economy as already over-leveraged, excess-bubbled, and far too fragile to accommodate even a small interest rate rise has Trump (in Mike Whitney's words) "promised … more treats and less rules for Wall Street … tax cuts, massive government spending, and fewer regulations … $1 trillion in fiscal stimulus to rev up consumer spending and beef up corporate profits … to slash corporate tax rates and fatten the bottom line for America's biggest businesses. And he's going to gut Dodd-Frank, the onerous' regulations that were put in place following the 2008 financial implosion, to prevent another economy-decimating cataclysm."




President Donald Trump delivering his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)
Does President Trump see the world differently, now that he is President? Or has he parted company with Bannon's vision?


Though Bannon is often credited though most often, by a hostile press, aiming to present Trump (falsely) as the "accidental President" who never really expected to win as the intellectual force behind President Trump. In fact, Trump's current main domestic and foreign policies were all presaged, and entirely present, in Trump's 2000 pamphlet.


In 2000, Bannon was less political, screenwriter Julia Jones, a long-time Bannon collaborator, notes. "But the Sept. 11 attacks," Ms. Jones says, "changed him" and their Hollywood collaboration did not survive his growing engagement with politics.


Bannon himself pins his political radicalization to his experience of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. He detested how his Goldman colleagues mocked the Tea Party's "forgotten" ones. As Ms. Jones sees it, a more reliable key to Bannon's worldview lies in his military service.


"He has a respect for duty," she said in early February. "The word he has used a lot is dharma.'" Mr. Bannon found the concept of dharma in the Bhagavad Gita, she recalls. It can describe one's path in life or one's place in the universe.


There is no evidence, however, that President Trump either has changed his economic views or that he has diverged in his understanding of the nature of the crisis facing America (and Europe).


Tests Ahead


Both men are very smart. Trump understands business, and Bannon finance. They surely know the headwinds they face: the looming prospect of a wrangle to increase the American $20 trillion "debt ceiling" (which begins to bite on March 15), amid a factious Republican Party, the improbability of the President's tax or fiscal proposals being enacted quickly, and the likelihood that the Federal Reserve will hike interest rates, "until something breaks." If they are so smart, what then is going on?




The run-down PIX Theatre sign reads "Vote Trump" on Main Street in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. July 15, 2016. (Photo by Tony Webster Flickr)
What Bannon has brought to the partnership however, is a clear articulation of the nature of this "crisis" in his Generation Zero film, which explicitly is built around the framework of a book called The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, written in 1997 by Neil Howe and William Strauss.


In the words of one of the co-authors, the analysis "rejects the deep premise of modern Western historians that social time is either linear (continuous progress or decline) or chaotic (too complex to reveal any direction). Instead we adopt the insight of nearly all traditional societies: that social time is a recurring cycle in which events become meaningful only to the extent that they are what philosopher Mircea Eliade calls reenactments.' In cyclical space, once you strip away the extraneous accidents and technology, you are left with only a limited number of social moods, which tend to recur in a fixed order."


Howe and Strauss write: "The cycle begins with the First Turning, a High' which comes after a crisis era. In a High, institutions are strong and individualism is weak. Society is confident about where it wants to go collectively, even if many feel stifled by the prevailing conformity.


"The Second Turning is an Awakening,' when institutions are attacked in the name of higher principles and deeper values. Just when society is hitting its high tide of public progress, people suddenly tire of all the social discipline and want to recapture a sense of personal authenticity.


"The Third Turning is an Unravelling,' in many ways the opposite of the High. Institutions are weak and distrusted, while individualism is strong and flourishing.


"Finally, the Fourth Turning is a Crisis' period. This is when our institutional life is reconstructed from the ground up, always in response to a perceived threat to the nation's very survival. If history does not produce such an urgent threat, Fourth Turning leaders will invariably find one and may even fabricate one to mobilize collective action. Civic authority revives, and people and groups begin to pitch in as participants in a larger community. As these Promethean bursts of civic effort reach their resolution, Fourth Turnings refresh and redefine our national identity." (Emphasis added).


Woodstock Generation


Bannon's film focuses principally on the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, and on the "ideas" that arose amongst the "Woodstock generation" (the Woodstock musical festival occurred in 1969), that permeated, in one way or another, throughout American and European society.




The Wall Street bull statue by Arturo Di Modica
The narrator calls the Woodstock generation the "Children of Plenty." It was a point of inflection: a second turning "Awakening"; a discontinuity in culture and values. The older generation (that is, anyone over 30) was viewed as having nothing to say, nor any experience to contribute. It was the elevation of the "pleasure principle" (as a "new" phenomenon, as "their" discovery), over the puritan ethic; It celebrated doing one's own thing; it was about "Self" and narcissism.


The "Unravelling" followed in the form of government and institutional weakness: the "system" lacked the courage to take difficult decisions. The easy choices invariably were taken: the élites absorbed the self-centered, spoilt-child, ethos of the "me" generation. The 1980s and 1990s become the era of "casino capitalism" and the "Davos man."


The lavish taxpayer bailouts of the U.S. banks after the Mexican, Russian, Asian and Argentinian defaults and crises washed away the bankers' costly mistakes. The 2004 Bear Stearns exemption which allowed the big five banks to leverage their lending above 12:1 and, which quickly extended to become 25:1, 30:1 and even 40:1 permitted the irresponsible risk-taking and the billions in profit-making. The "Dot Com" bubble was accommodated by monetary policy and then the massive 2008 bailouts accommodated the banks, yet again.


The "Unravelling" was essentially a cultural failure: a failure of responsibility, of courage to face hard choices it was, in short, the film suggests, an era of spoilt institutions, compromised politicians and irresponsible Wall Streeters the incumbent class indulging themselves, and "abdicating responsibility."


Now we have entered the "Fourth Turning": "All the easy choices are back of us." The "system" still lacks courage. Bannon says this period will be the "nastiest, ugliest in history." It will be brutal, and "we" (by which he means the Trump Tea Party activists) will be "vilified." This phase may last 15 20 years, he predicts.


Greek Tragedy


The key to this Fourth Turning is "character." It is about values. What Bannon means by "our crisis" is perhaps best expressed when the narrator says: "the essence of Greek tragedy is that it is not like a traffic accident, where somebody dies [i.e. the great financial crises didn't just arise by mischance].




President Barack Obama
The Greek sense is that tragedy is where something happens because it has to happen, because of the nature of the participants. Because the people involved, make it happen. And they have no choice to make it happen, because that's their nature."


This is the deeper implication of what transpired from Woodstock: the nature of people changed. The "pleasure principle," the narcissism, had displaced the "higher" values that had made America what it was. The generation that believed that there was "no risk, no mountain they could not climb" brought this crisis upon themselves. They wiped out 200 years of financial responsibility in about 20 years. This, it appears, captures the essence of Bannon's thinking.


That is where we are, Bannon asserts: Stark winter inevitably follows, after a warm, lazy summer. It becomes a time of testing, of adversity. Each season in nature has its vital function. Fourth turnings are necessary: they a part of the cycle of renewal.


Bannon's film concludes with author Howe declaring: "history is seasonal and winter is coming,"


And, what is the immediate political message? It is simple, the narrator of Bannon's film says: "STOP": stop doing what you were doing. Stop spending like before. Stop taking on spending commitments that cannot be afforded. Stop mortgaging your children's future with debt. Stop trying to manipulate the banking system. It is a time for tough thinking, for saying "no" to bailouts, for changing the culture, and re-constructing institutional life.


Cultural Legacy


And how do you re-construct civic life? You look to those who still possess a sense of duty and responsibility who have retained a cultural legacy of values. It is noticeable that when Bannon addresses the activists, almost the first thing he does is to salute the veterans and serving officers, and praise their qualities, their sense of duty.




A sign supporting Donald Trump at a rally at Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in Phoenix, Arizona. June 18, 2016 (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
It is no surprise then that President Trump wants to increase both the veterans' and the military's budget. It is not so much a portent of U.S. military belligerence, but more that he sees them as warriors for the coming "winter" of testing and adversity. Then, and only then does Bannon speak to the "thin blue line" of activists who still have strength of character, a sense of responsibility, of duty. He tells them that the future rests in their hands, alone.


Does this sound like men Bannon and Trump who want to ramp up a fresh financial bubble, to indulge the Wall Street casino (in their words)? No? So, what is going on?


They know "the crisis" is coming. Let us recall what Neil Howe wrote in the Washington Post concerning the "Fourth Turning":


"This is when our institutional life is reconstructed from the ground up, always in response to a perceived threat to the nation's very survival. If history does not produce such an urgent threat, Fourth Turning leaders will invariably find one and may even fabricate one to mobilize collective action. Civic authority revives, and people and groups begin to pitch in as participants in a larger community. As these Promethean bursts of civic effort reach their resolution, Fourth Turnings refresh and redefine our national identity."


Trump has no need to "fabricate" a financial crisis. It will happen "because it has to happen, because of the nature of the participants (in the current system'). Because the people involved, make it happen. And they have no choice to make it happen, because that's their nature."


It is not even President Obama's or Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's fault, per se. They are just who they are.


Trump and Bannon therefore are not likely trying to ignite the "animal spirits" of the players in the financial "casino" (as many in the financial sphere seem to assume). If Bannon's film and Trump's articulation of crisis mean anything, it is that their aim is to ignite the "animal spirits" of "the working-class casualties and those forgotten Americans" of the Midwest, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.


At that point, they hope that the "thin blue line" of activists will "pitch in" with a Promethean burst of civic effort which will reconstruct America's institutional and economic life.


If this is so, the Trump/Bannon vision both is audacious and quite an extraordinary gamble …


Alastair Crooke is a former British diplomat who was a senior figure in British intelligence and in European Union diplomacy. He is the founder and director of the Conflicts Forum.