David Guyatt Wrote:You always need to support your claims and allegations. DPF is a researchers forum and evidencing what you claim has been a central feature of this place since it started.
On the subjects I listed above I don't believe you've ever posted once protesting the suspension of your rights (not my rights mind you, we're discussing your rights), and it comes as little surprise to me that you're unable to do so again today. Every time I've asked you to evidence your opinions in this thread you've been unable to.
C'est la vie.
Oh, the irony! You and others here sound like Vincent Bugliosi with your constant refrains of "no evidence, no evidence." You have posted no evidence whatsoever - nothing but editorials from leftists still stuck in a knee-jerk, reflexive Cold War mentality ("Russia good, America bad"). Unlike you, I have no emotional or ideological investment in this. I don't first make up my mind about an event based on a political bias, and then go searching for the facts to support my views. Which is exactly what you and others on this forum did when this story first appeared. Your minds are already closed to any other possible conclusion other than "Deep State did it, media lies, Russia is always blameless." What preposterous childishness!
If you think I haven't posted about other subjects, or criticized the Obama regime, then I suggest you look through the other sub-forums a little. I posted much more frequently in the first couple of years after I joined. Frankly, one reason my participation has dropped off has been because of disappointment in the often shallow (or even non-existent) analysis I see from many members here (not to mention the way certain people are allowed to endlessly troll parts of the forum with self-indulgent crap).
So I will leave you all to play in your sandbox.
Since you'll still here then you'll be able to provide links Tracy - specifically on the subjects I cited above please. Third time of asking and all that...
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
Quote:When the uninitiated think of the "Deep State," they tend to imagine a group of men getting together in a room, smoking cigars and plotting world domination. But the Deep State is not one coordinated network of people controlling the government from the shadows.
Instead, it refers to individuals and groups that have the resources to shape the direction of the world to their benefit and don't hesitate to make use of them. At times, the interests of different factions of the Deep State collide. That often happens when the direction of the world is rapidly changing, as is the case now after the election of Donald Trump.
Nobody knows this better than Peter Dale Scott, the foremost expert on the US Deep State. Below, you will find a new introduction to the paperback version of The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Struggle for U.S. Democracy, Updated Edition (copyright 2017), (with permission of the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved). This is Part 1 of a two-part series.
Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat, Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at Berkeley, poet, and 2002 recipient of the Lannan Poetry Award.
His political books include Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (2010), The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (2014) and Dallas '63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House (2015). A complete bibliography can be found on his website at http://www.peterdalescott.net.
***
On February 3, 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported President Trump's plans to pave the way for a broad rollback of the recent financial reforms of Wall Street.[1] Although no surprise, the news was in ironic contrast to the rhetoric of his campaign, when he spent months denouncing both Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton for their links to Goldman Sachs, even when his campaign's Financial Chairman was a former Goldman Sachs banker, Steve Mnuchin (now Trump's Treasury Secretary).
Trump was hardly the first candidate to run against the banking establishment while surreptitiously taking money from big bankers. So did Hitler in 1933; so did Obama in 2008. (In Obama's final campaign speech of 2008, he attacked "the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street."[2] But it was revealed later that Wall Street bankers and financial insiders, chiefly from Goldman Sachs, had raised $42.2 million for Obama's 2008 campaign, more than for any previous candidate in history.)[3]
However, Trump's connections to big money, both new (often self-made) and old (mostly institutional) were not only more blatant than usual; some were also possibly more sinister. Trump's campaign was probably the first ever to be (as we shall see) scrutinized by the FBI for "financial connections with Russian financial figures," and even with a Russian bank whose Washington influence was attacked years ago, after it was allegedly investigated in Russia for possible mafia connections.[4]
Trump's appointment of the third former Goldman executive to lead Treasury in the last four administrations, after Robert Rubin (under Clinton) and Hank Paulson (under Bush), has reinforced recent speculation about Trump's relationship to what is increasingly referred to as the deep state. That is the topic of this essay.
But we must first see what is really meant by the deep state".
What Is Meant by the Deep State?
.
Since 2007, when I first referred to a "deep state" in America, the term has become a meme, and even the topic of a cautious essay in The New York Times.[5] Recently it has been enhanced by a new meme, "the 'deep state' versus Trump," a theme that promoted Donald Trump as a genuine outsider, and entered the electoral campaign as early as August 2016.[6]
Trump reinforced this notion when he expressed opposition to America's international defense alliances and trade deals that both traditional parties had long supported, as well as by his promise to "drain the Washington swamp." It was encouraged again post-election by Trump's longtime political advisor Roger Stone, formerly of the Washington lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, once a major feature of that swamp.[7]
But those who saw the election as a contest between outsider Trump and a "deep state" tended to give two different meanings to this new term. On the one hand were those who saw the deep state as "a conglomerate of insiders" incorporating all those, outside and inside the traditional state, who "run the country no matter who is in the White House…and without the consent of voters."[8] On the other were those who, like Chris Hedges, limited the "deep state" to those perverting constitutional American politics from the margin of the Washington Beltway "the security and surveillance apparatus, the war machine."[9]
But both of these simplistic definitions, suitable for campaign rhetoric, omit the commanding role played by big money what used to be referred to as Wall Street, but now includes an increasingly powerful number of maverick non-financial billionaires like the Koch brothers. All serious studies of the deep state, including Mike Lofgren's The Deep State and Philip Giraldi's Deep State America as well as this book, acknowledge the importance of big money.[10]
It is important to recognize moreover, that the current division between "red" and "blue" America is overshadowed by a corresponding division at the level of big money, one that contributed greatly to the ugliness of the 2016 campaign. In The American Deep State (p. 30), I mention, albeit very briefly, the opposition of right-wing oilmen and the John Birch Society "to the relative internationalism of Wall Street."[11] That opposition has become more powerful, and better financed, than ever before.
It has also evolved. As I noted in The American Deep State, (p. 14), the deep state "is not a structure but a system, as difficult to define, but also as real and powerful, as a weather system." A vigorous deep state, like America, encompasses dynamic processes continuously generating new forces within it like the Internet just as a weather system is not fixed but changes from day to day.
The Current Divisions in America and Its Wealth
.
Three days before the inauguration of Donald Trump, "Frontline" on PBS began a two-part program, "Divided States of America," documenting how the polarization of American public opinion has contributed to both stagnation in Washington and widespread popular anger, on both the left and the right, against the traditional two-party system.
The Frontline show failed to address the major role played by money in aggravating this public division. For example, it followed many popular accounts in tracing the emergence of the tax-revolt Tea Party to the apparently spontaneous call on February 19, 2009, by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli in Chicago, for a "tea party," in response to President Barack Obama's expensive bailouts.[12]
However, this event (on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, a deep state institution) was not only staged, it had been prepared for in advance. A domain name, chicagoteaparty.org, had been registered for it in 2008, before Obama had even been elected.[13] Jane Mayer has conclusively demonstrated the role in the funding groups behind the Tea Party played by the brothers Charles and David Koch, who in 2014 were two of the ten richest people on earth, worth a combined $32 billion as owners of the largest private oil company in America.[14] (Today their wealth is estimated at $84 billion.)
More important, as Mayer pointed out, the Tea Party was not "a new strain" in American politics. The scale was unusual, but history had shown that similar reactionary forces had attacked virtually every Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt. Earlier business-funded right-wing movements, from the Liberty League [of the 1930s] to the John Birch Society to [Richard Mellon] Scaife's [anti-Clinton] Arkansas Project, all had cast Democratic presidents as traitors, usurpers, and threats to the Constitution. The undeniable element of racial resentment that tinged many Tea Party rallies was also an old and disgracefully enduring story in American politics.[15]
The Kochs' lavish funding of the Tea Party, along with anti-tax candidates and climate-change deniers, was only one more phase in what I described in 1996 as an enduring struggle between "America Firsters" and "New World Order" globalists, pitting, through nearly all of this [20th] century, the industry-oriented (e.g. the National Association of Manufacturers) against the financial-oriented (e.g. the Council on Foreign Relations), two different sources of wealth.[16]
A decade later Trump has revived the slogan of "America First!", and vowed to reconsider both NATO and multilateral trade. Both factions are still there today; but, as we shall see, both now have international connections.
American Politics and the Increase in Wealth Disparity
.
Mayer's helpful overview overlooks the alarming increase in wealth disparity since 1980 and especially in the last decade. Ten years ago, when I published The Road to 9/11, I noted that 225 billionaires owned as much as the bottom fifty percent of people in the world, and I repeated Kevin Phillips' warning that
"As the twenty-first century gets underway, the imbalance of wealth and democracy in the United States is unsustainable…. Either democracy must be renewed, with politics brought back to life, or wealth is likely to cement a new and less democratic regime plutocracy by some other name."[17]
In 2010, only three years later, that indicator of disparity had risen up the pyramid from 225 billionaires to 43; and today the figure has shrunk still further to eight.[18]
As The New York Times reported in October 2015, just 158 families supplied half of the early money that had already poured into the 2016 campaign, and 138 of these families supported Republican candidates. Sixty-four of these 138 families made their fortunes in finance, mostly in hedge funds, private equity or venture capital. A further seventeen families were wealthy from energy, mostly oil and gas. What both these two groups were seeking was lower taxes and also deregulation: repeal of the Dodd-Frank Act reforming Wall Street, and (according to the Times) a lifting of the 40-year-old ban on export of US oil.[19]
Many were also "tied to networks of ideological donors who, on the left and the right alike, have sought to fundamentally reshape their own political parties" on the one hand the twice-yearly anti-tax seminars hosted by the Kochs, and on the other "the Democracy Alliance, a network of liberal donors who have pushed Democrats to move aggressively on climate change legislation and progressive taxation."[20]
Once again, a division in the American public was being fomented and funded by an old division within Big Money roughly speaking, between those Trilateral Commission progressives, many flourishing from the new technologies of the global Internet, who wish the state to do more than at present about problems like wealth disparity, racial injustice and global warming, and those Heritage Foundation conservatives, many from finance and oil, who want it to do even less.
We see this ideological split even among the top eight US super billionaires in 2016, four of whom (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison) have made their fortunes from the Internet and want the present US to progress more or less along its recent course. Warren Buffett (once number one, now number three) endorsed Hillary Clinton early on, "while calling for increased taxes on the country's highest wage earners."[21] Deeply dissatisfied with the status quo were numbers seven and eight, the Koch brothers, who "have fortunes largely drawn from fossil fuels," and have "poured money into fighting solar."[22]
The Kochs assembled a donor network of fellow mavericks, many of whom were distinguished by private ownership of their businesses, and many (Jane Mayer pointed out) "had serious past or ongoing legal problems."[23] In early 2015 their organization revealed that it would spend $889 million leading up to the 2016 presidential contest. As USA Today reported, this unprecedented sum, "unrivaled for an outside organization, represents more than double the nearly $400 million the Republican National Committee (RNC) raised and spent during the 2012 presidential election cycle."[24] This huge organized flow of outside funds has contributed greatly to the weakening of party discipline in Congress, especially among Republicans.
Throughout the campaign, the Kochs and Trump (whose chief backer was another maverick billionaire, Robert Mercer) were apparently at arm's length from each other. Vanity Fair suggested in September that at that time the Kochs were "in direct opposition to the Mercers," in a "civil war that threatens to tear the party apart" even though, starting around 2011, the Mercers had been donating "at least $1 million a year to the Koch network."[25]
Whatever the tensions, it was clear after the election that Trump in his transition team had "surrounded himself with people tied to the Kochs."[26] Soon the Trump nominee for Education Secretary was Betsy DeVos, another major billionaire contributor to the Koch donor list. (Betsy's brother Erik Prince, famous as the founder and owner of the notorious private army Blackwater, was quietly advising the Trump transition team on matters related to intelligence and defense.)[27]
And Trump's CIA Director is Mike Pompeo, formerly a Koch-sponsored congressman "who was so closely entwined with the climate-change denying Koch brothers that he was known as the congressman from Koch."[28] (The new administration has reportedly instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website.)[29]
Since his election, Trump has attacked the U.S. intelligence agencies for leaking information, and reporters as being among "the most dishonest human beings on Earth." But while attacking the Washington establishment, he is clearly reflecting the dissident big money faction of the deep state, no longer as marginal as it was in the era of the John Birch Society and later Goldwater.[30]
As the campaign and pre-inaugural preparations progressed, it became clearer that Trump, no stranger to the world of big money, had brought the old big money camp into his campaign, as well as the new. In January 2017 Trump nominated to be his SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, a Sullivan & Cromwell partner who in the past has represented Goldman Sachs and other big banks in Wall street superdeals.[31]
Clayton is the fourth former Goldman-related Trump nominee for the new administration, all of them chosen under the eyes of Trump's chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, himself a former Goldman banker who moved on to become a Tea Party coordinator and executive director at the alt-right Breitbart News. (Bannon once promised to build "an insurgent, center-right populist movement that is virulently anti-establishment."[32] It took only 10 days in the White House to make it clear that Bannon had "rapidly amassed power in the West Wing, eclipsing chief of staff Reince Priebus.") [33]
Undoubtedly Trump entered politics as a maverick real estate investor and TV star, funding the early stages of his campaign himself. But as his campaign grew, he came to reach out more and more to Wall Street financing, notably from Robert Mercer, the co-CEO of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies,[34] Then Trump named as his campaign's Finance Chairman Steve Mnuchin, formerly of Skull and Bones and Goldman Sachs.[35]
As many predicted, Mnuchin later became Trump's nominee for Treasury Secretary, which could make him the third former Goldman executive to lead Treasury in the last four administrations, after Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson. In addition, Trump has named Gary Cohn, former president of Goldman Sachs, as his chief economic advisor and Director of the National Economic Council.[36]
In short, Trump did not challenge but preserved the status of what Jeffrey Sachs has called the Wall Street-Washington complex, which has steered the financial system toward control by a few politically powerful Wall Street firms, notably Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and a handful of other financial firms.[37]
Meanwhile, just as Trump expanded his financial base to all elements of big money, so Wall Street, as it always does, ensured it had good connections to both of the final candidates. After Mnuchin joined the Trump campaign, Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs announced in October 2016 his support of Hillary Clinton.[38]
All of this complexity calls for further reflection on the nature of the deep state.
Turkey and the International Deep State
.
To survey the more serious accounts of the "deep state in the United States," it is useful to begin with their summary in Wikipedia under this title: as a "state within a state, which [authors] suspect exerts influence and control over public policy, regardless of which political party controls the country's democratic institutions."
Citing five different authors, (including myself) Wikipedia expands this definition to include the militaryindustrial complex, intelligence community, Wall Street, plutocrats, "big oil," the mainstream media, national security officials, and Silicon Valley.[39]
All five authors see two essential components to the deep state. On the one hand is big money. On the other are the extra-constitutional Washington Beltway agencies like CIA that Wall Street originally campaigned for and staffed, along with the government-oriented industries that these agencies and the Pentagon work with and outsource to.[40]
Besides myself, Philip Giraldi and Mike Lofgren have also recognized that "the term was actually coined in Turkey, and is said to be a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary, and organized crime."[41] A more precise definition is that of Hugh Roberts:
The notion of the deep state … originated in Turkey, where it connoted not merely the secretive apparatuses of the state such as the police and intelligence services but above all the shady nexus between them, certain politicians and organised crime.[42]
But I may be the only author showing the extent to which the Turkish deep state, when first exposed in 1996, both overlapped with the American deep state and revealed its dark underside.
The Turkish term "deep State" (deren devlet) was coined after the so-called Susurluk incident, a 1996 car crash whose victims included the deputy chief of the Istanbul Police Department, a Member of Parliament, and Abdullah Çatlı, an international heroin trafficker and killer recruited by the Turkish police for "special missions" and paid in heroin while he was officially being sought by the Turkish authorities for murder.[43]
We see in the Susurluk incident three features of the Turkish deep state, unmentioned by Lofgren, that not only resemble the American deep state but are actually a significant component of it (and still of major importance today).
The first is that it was partly international: Abdullah Çatlı was part of a death squad chiefly recruited from the ranks of the Turkish OHD (Ozel Harp Dairesi Special Warfare Department). The OHD had originally been set up with US encouragement as the Turkish branch of NATO's Operation Gladio, a stay-behind force in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion. Diverted and renamed Counter-Guerrilla to suppress the Kurdish resistance movement, the OHD troops continued to be trained in the US and to use US counterinsurgency manuals.[44]
The second is that the international deep state connection revealed at Susurluk was partly criminal: the sanctioned para-state activities with Çatlı were financed by billions of dollars in profits from drug smuggling; just as the CIA in Laos and elsewhere utilized a protected drug traffic to finance its covert operations in Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Afghanistan.[45] Çatlı, a convicted drug trafficker with a special Turkish passport, was himself part of this post-Gladio international network:
Çatlı, according to Yalçın and Yurdakal, visited Miami in 1982 in the company of a known Gladio agent (and Italian neo-Nazi) and was considered to be "under the protection" of the CIA.[46]
(The Gladio agent was Stefano delle Chiaie, who had his own connections to state-sponsored terrorist activities in Italy, to the World Anti-Communist League or WACL, and more specifically to death squads working for the Operation Condor murder operation in Latin America, sponsored by the right-wing dictatorships in the region.[47] The CIA had its own shadowy connections to all three, as well as to Gladio.)
The third feature of the Susurluk event is that it was and remains a largely inscrutable intelligence-related event, or what in this book I call a "deep event," like similar events in the United States, such as the John F. Kennedy assassination. Nearly all western accounts of the car crash overlook the claim that it was not an accident but an intended assassination.[48] Moreover the Turkish deep state was later suspected in the Turkish coup attempt of Ergenekon in 2007,[49] and its one-time parent, the US deep state, in the failed military coup of July 2016.[50] Both of these coup attempts reveal elements of what I mean by deep events.
Not just in Turkey, but also in the United States, respected authors have linked the deep state to what I call (pp. 98, 119) "structural deep events," unsolved mysterious events that affect the political system of the country.[51] As I write, there have been a series of charges that, if substantiated, would seem to link Trump not only to an element of the American deep state, but also to an element of the Russian deep state.
[5] Anand Giridharadas, "Examining Who Runs the United States," New York Times, September 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/us/ex....html?_r=0. I believe the first to apply the Turkish term "deep state" (derin deret) to U.S. politics was the Swedish writer Ola Tunander (Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], x, 244, 270, 384).
[6] Michael Covel, "The Deep State V. Trump," Daily Reckoning, August 25, 2016, https://dailyreckoning.com/deep-state-v-trump/: "Donald Trump has the establishment scared out of their establishment minds."
[7] Ryan Lizza, "Roger Stone Versus the Deep State'", New Yorker, January 20, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/...deep-state. Stone has been described as a "political provocateur" who "helped choreograph the… riot which shut down the Bush v. Gore recount in Miami-Dade County" (Jeffrey Toobin, "Bad Old Days," New Yorker, May 2. 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/0...alks-trump. During the campaign, Stone and fellow provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart together promoted the divisive notion "how the general election will almost certainly be hijacked by acts of voter fraud" by Democrats (Ken Meyer, :Roger Stone Says There Will Be a Bloodbath' if Election is Stolen From Trump," Medaite.com, August 2, 2016, http://www.mediaite.com/online/roger-sto...rom-trump/. Their politics of division is shared by Steve Bannon, who "is so dominated by a desire to wage war and vanquish his enemy that he cannot think clearly about damage wrought by his destructive, polarizing approach" (Conor Friedersdorf, "The Radical Anti-Conservatism of Stephen Bannon," Atlantic, August 25, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arch...on/496796/).
[8] Covel, "The Deep State V. Trump." Cf. John W. Whitehead, "The Deep State: The Unelected Shadow Government Is Here to Stay," Rutherford Institute, November 10, 2015, https://www.rutherford.org/publications_...e_to_stay: "The Deep State…is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now."
[9] "Chris Hedges on How the Deep State' Will Influence the Trump Presidency," Truthdig, Jan 17, 2017, http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chr...y_20170117. In this camp are Glenn Greenwald, who equates the "deep state" with "the intelligence community," and Eric Margolis, who equates it with "the massed national security apparatus" (Glenn Greenwald, "The Deep State Goes to War with President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer," The Intercept, January 11, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/01/11/the-...ms-cheer/; Eric Margolis, "Trump Versus the Deep State," The Unz Review, January 13, 2017, http://www.unz.com/emargolis/trump-versu...eep-state/.
[10] Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking, 2016); Philip Giraldi, "Deep State America," The American Conservative, July 30, 2015, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/a...e-america/.
[11] Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 30. I later wrote in Dallas '63: "In The American Deep State I devoted only a few lines to the oppositional faction of right-wing Texas oilmen and the John Birch Society, opposed to the relative internationalism of Wall Street. In this [book] we shall see that under Kennedy their opposition was so deeply embedded that America was, for a while, ruled by a dyadic deep state" (Peter Dale Scott, Dallas '63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House [New York: Open Road Media, 2015], 191).
[12] "Divided States of America," Part 1, Frontline, PBS, January 17, 2017. Cf. Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2015), 165-68.
[14] Jane Mayer, "Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama," New Yorker, August 30, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/0...perations; Mayer, Dark Money, 167-68, 193. In 2014 the Koch brothers were tied for sixth place among the world's wealthiest, with $40.7 billion each. Combined, their net worth is $81.4 billion, which was higher than the highest-ranking individual on the list Microsoft founder Bill Gates, at $77.8 billion (Louis Jacobson, "Harry Reid says Koch brothers are richest family in the world," Politifact, April 2, 2014, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/...-family-w/). Chris Douglas observes, "Until the Bush tax cuts, the estate tax stood at 55%. As a result of the tax cuts initiated by the Bush administration, by 2010, it was zero. Unless Congress acts, it will return full-force to 55% in 2011. To understand the impact on the Koch family, consider that some reports place the wealth of the Koch brothers at $36 billion dollars [in 2010; four years later Forbes estimated it at $81 billion], their company second at times only to Cargill as the largest privately held company in America. To the Koch family, a 55% estate tax means they must contemplate a corporate re-organization, the result of which would conceptually be to go public and sell off 55% of their shares in order to pay the tax or, more likely, that they would donate the majority of shares to a charitable foundation. Either way, the estate tax at 55% would entail a transformation of Koch Industries and a diversification of ownership, with ramifications for the family's long term control" (Chris Douglas, "The Tax That Started the Tea Party").
[15] Mayer, Dark Money, 167. Cf, Nella Van Dyke and David S. Meyer, eds., Understanding the Tea Party Movement (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub. Company, 2014), 100.
[16] Peter Dale Scott, "Bringing It All Together: The New Releases and How They Help Us Converge on the Heart of the Case," The Fourth Decade, Vol. 4, #1, November, 1996; republished at http://www.assassinationweb.com/scotte.htm. Of the eleven businessmen at the 1958 founding meeting of the John Birch Society, many, including the founder Robert Welch, were former members of the National Association of Manufacturers (Terry Lautz, John Birch: A Life [New York: Oxford University Press, 2016]. 225). One was William J. Grede, who served as president of the National Association of Manufacturers in 1952. Still another was Fred Koch, father of Charles and David Koch (Jeff Nesbit, Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP [New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016], 30; Van Dyke and Meyer, Understanding the Tea Party Movement, 100). Charles and David Koch also joined the John Birch Society.
[17] Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). 422; quoted in Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], 3, cf. 254.
[22] Sarah Jaffe, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 265. None of the eight endorsed Trump, who pointedly distanced himself from the Kochs during the campaign.
[27] Jeremy Scahill, "Notorious Mercenary Erik Prince Is Advising Trump from the Shadows," The Intercept, January 17 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/01/17/noto...-shadows/: "In July [2016], Prince told Trump's senior adviser and white supremacist Steve Bannon, at the time head of Breitbart News, that the Trump administration should recreate a version of the Phoenix Program, the CIA assassination ring that operated during the Vietnam War, to fight ISIS."
[30] On page 5 of this book, I refer to a formerly "minority element in our political economy [that now] finances and dominates both parties, and indeed is now also financing threats to both parties from the right, as well as dominating our international policy. As a result, liberal Republicans are as scarce in the Republican Party today as Goldwater Republicans were scarce in that party back in 1960." Today I would no longer define this element as "the military-industrial complex," but the trend has become even more clear.
[31] Matt Taibbi, Trump Nominee Jay Clayton Will Be the Most Conflicted SEC Chair Ever,' Rolling Stone, January 5, 2017, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/fea...er-w459289. Clayton's wife Gretchen is a wealth management advisor at Goldman Sachs.
[32] Conor Friedersdorf, "The Radical Anti-Conservatism of Stephen Bannon," Atlantic, August 25, 2016.
[35] Bloomberg BusinessWeek, August 31, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/artic...sinessweek When Mnuchin was Financial Chairman of the Trump campaign, his counterpart at the RNC was Lew Eisenberg, his father's old partner at Goldman Sachs.
[40] Scott, The American Deep State, 14-15, 30-35, etc.) The Pentagon, unmentioned by Wikipedia, is hard to classify. Although the Department of Defense is part of the official state and headed by a cabinet member, it contains within it the NSA, which simultaneously reports to the Director of National Intelligence. Other Pentagon agencies, such as DIA and JSOC, also deserve to be classified with the deep state.
[41] Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking, 2016), 5. I see no further references in Lofgren's book to organized crime; his notion of the deep state focuses primarily on the Beltway agencies.
[42] Hugh Roberts, The Hijackers." London Review of Books, July 16, 2015, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n14/hugh-roberts/the-hijackers, a review of Jean-Pierre Filiu, From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-revolution and Its Jihadi Legacy (Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2015]).
[44] Desmond Fernandes and Iskender Ozden, "United States and NATO inspired psychological warfare operations' against the Kurdish communist threat' in Turkey". Variant. 12, https://web.archive.org/web/200606140804...ndes.html; Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (New York: Frank Cass, 2005), 241.
[45] Hakan Aslaneli and Zafer F. Yoruk, Traffic Monster' reveals state-mafia relations". Hürriyet, November 7, 1996; Scott, American War Machine, 4-6, etc.
[46] Ryan Gingeras, Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 228; citing Soner Yalçın and Doğan Yurdakul, Reis: Gladio'num Türk Teriçisi (Istanbul: Doğan Kitapeilik, 2007), 152-56.
[47] Scott, American War Machine, 20; cf.p.30: In Italy "Stefano delle Chiaie was eventually accused of involvement in the Piazza Fontana and Bologna bombings as well as the Borghese coup." The Condor Operation (about which I will say more) was responsible for the 1976 murder in Washington of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier.
[48] HRFT Human Rights Foundation of Turkey Human Rights Report TİHV, en.tihv.org.tr/wp-content/uploads/2015/…/Ra1998HumanRigthsReport.pdf, 39. In addition, no one has yet fully explained why one of the fake passports found in Çatlı's possession was in the name "Mehmet Özbay", an alias used fifteen years earlier by Mehmet Ali Ağca, the Turk who in 1081 attempted to kill Pope John Paul II (Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010], 19; Ryan Gingeras, Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 228.
[49] Dexter Filkins. "The Deep State," The New Yorker, March 12, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/0...eep-state: "Prosecutors maintain that Ergenekon is the deep state itselfnot merely a cabal of reactionary officers within the military but a shadow government that aims at making Turkish democracy permanently unstable."
[51] On page 47 I speak of "a deep event, by which I mean an event predictably suppressed in the media and still not fully understandable."
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Quote:Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko and his regime are frantically trying to repair relations with President Donald Trump after banking everything on his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
That's the conclusion of a report from Vesti News - a report which names names.
Not only did Ukraine support Hillary, but its operatives were active participants in her campaign, and were intimately involved in the efforts to smear Trump in the mass media as Putin's stooge.
Did Russia try to rig US elections, or did Ukraine?
Now it's clear why the United States is going through a security services reform. It was simply indecent to work as before. There was no time for the Ukrainian president in Donald Trump's working week schedule. It wasn't the White House on the call with Poroshenko, but a private club Mar-a-Lago in Florida, where the US president went to for the weekend. The first quote published by Trump's press office was indicative. Not a hint of disapproving Russia. We will cooperate with Ukraine, Russia, and all other parties concerned in order to help restore peace along the border.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Our previous articles concerning President Trump have caused some fierce reactions from our readers. Some of them have been wondering about the naïvety apparently displayed by Thierry Meyssan despite the warnings issued by the international Press and the accumulation of negative signals. Here is his response, well-reasoned as always.
Quote:Two weeks after his investiture, the Altantist Press continues with its work of disinformation and agitation against the new President of the United States of America. Trump and his new collaborators are multiplying declarations and gestures which are apparently contradictory, so that it is difficult to understand what is going on in Washington.
The anti-Trump campaign
The bad faith of the Atlantist Press can be verified for each of these four main themes.
- 1. Concerning the beginning of the dismantling of Obamacare (20 January), we are obliged to report that, contrary to what is being announced in the Atlantist Press, the underprivileged classes who should have benefited from this system have avoided it en masse. This form of «social security» turned out to be too expensive and too directive to attract them. Only the private companies who manage this system have been truly satisfied by it.
- 2. Concerning the prolongation of the Wall at the Mexican border (23 to 25 January), there is nothing xenophobic about it - the Secure Fence Act was signed by President George W. Bush, who began its construction. The work was continued by President Barack Obama with the support of the Mexican government of the time. Beyond the fashionable rhetoric about «walls» and «bridges», reinforced border systems only work when the authorities of both sides agree to make them operational. They always fail when one of the parties opposes them. The interest of the United States is to control the entry of migrants, while the interest of Mexico is to prevent the import of weapons. None of that has changed. However, with the application of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), transnational companies have delocalised, from the United States to Mexico, not only non-qualified jobs (in conformity with the Marxist rule of «the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF)», but also qualified jobs which are performed by under-paid workers («social dumping»). The appearance of these jobs has provoked a strong rural exodus, destructuring Mexican society, on the model of what happened in 19th century Europe. The transnational companies then lowered wages, plunging part of the Mexican population into poverty which now only dreams of being correctly paid in the United States itself. Since Donald Trump has announced that he intends to remove the US signature from the NAFTA agreement, things should return to normal in the years to come, and satisfy both Mexico and the United States [1].
- 3. Concerning the abortion issue (23 January), President Trump has forbidden the payment of federal subsidies to specialised associations which receive funds from abroad. By doing so, he has warned those specific associations that they must choose between their social objective to help women in distress or being paid by George Soros to demonstrate against him as was the case on 21 January. This decree therefore has nothing to do with abortion, but with the prevention of a «colour revolution».
- 4. Concerning the anti-immigration decrees (25 to 27 January), Donald Trump announced that he was going to apply the law - inherited from the Obama era in other words, to expel the 11 million illegal foreigners. He has suspended federal aid to those cities which announced that they would refuse to apply the law where will we get our cleaning ladies if we have to declare them? He specified that among these illegal immigrants, he would begin by expelling the 800,000 criminals who have been the object of criminal proceedings, in the United States, Mexico or elswhere. Besides this, in order to prevent the arrival of terrorists, he has suspended all the authorisations for immigration to the United States, and has placed a three-month ban on people from countries where it is impossible to verify their identity and their situation. He did not draw up the list of such countries himself, but referred to a previous text from President Obama. For example, here in Syria, there is no longer a US embassy or Consulate. From the point of view of the administrative police, it is therefore logical to put Syrians on this list. But this can only concern a minimal number of people. In 2015, only 145 Syrians managed to obtain the US «green card». Aware of the numerous special cases which might arise, the Presidential decree allows all liberty to the State Department and Homeland Security to issue dispensations. The fact that the application of these decrees was sabotaged by civil servants opposed to President Trump, who applied them with brutality, does not make the President either a racist or an Islamophobe.
The campaign led by the Atlantist Press against Donald Trump is therefore unfounded. To pretend that he has opened a war against Muslims, and to evoke publicly his possible destitution, even his assassination, is no longer simply bad faith it's war propaganda.
Donald Trump was the first personality in the world to contest the official version of the attacks of 9/11, on television that very day. After having noted that the engineers who built the Twin Towers were now working for him, he declared on New York's Channel 9 that it was impossible that Boeings could have burst through the steel structures of the towers. He continued by stating that it was also impossible that Boeings could have caused the towers to collapse. He concluded by affirming that there had to be other factors of which we were as yet unaware.
From that day on, Donald Trump has never ceased to resist the people who had committed those crimes. During his inaugural speech, he emphasised that this was not a passage of power between two administrations, but a restitution of power to United States citizens, who had been deprives of it [for sixteen years] [2].
During his electoral campaign, once again during the transitional period, and again since he took office, he has repeated that the imperial system of these last years has never benefited US citizens, but only a small clique of which Mrs. Clinton is the emblematic figure. He declared that the United States would no longer attempt to be the «first», but the «best». His slogans are - « Make America great again» and «America first»
This 180° political turn has shaken a system which has been implemented over the last 16 years, and has its roots in the Cold War, which, in 1947, only the United States wanted. This system has gangrened numerous international institutions, such as NATO (Jens Stoltenberg and General Curtis Scaparrotti), the European Union (Federica Mogherini), and the United Nations (Jeffrey Feltman) [3].
If Donald Trump is to reach his objective, it will take years.
Towards a peaceful dismantling of the United States Empire
In two weeks, many things have begun, often in the greatest discretion. The booming declarations of President Trump and his team deliberately spread confusion and enabled him to ensure that the nominations of his collaborators were confirmed by a partially hostile Congress.
We must understand that it's a fight to the death between two systems that has just begun in Washington. Let's leave the Atlantist Press to comment on the often contradictory and incoherent statements by this one or that, and look at the facts on their own.
Before anything else, Donald Trump made sure that he had control over the security apparatus. His first three nominations (National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly) are three Generals who have contested the «continuity of government» since 2003 [4]. Next, he reformed the National Security Council to exclude the inter-army Chief of Staff and the director of the CIA [5]
Even though the latter decree will probably be revised, it still has not been. Let us note in passing that we announced the intention of Donald Trump and General Flynn to eliminate the post of Director of National Intelligence [6]. However, this post has been maintained and Dan Coats has been nominated for it. It transpires that talk of its supression was a tactic to demonstrate that the presence of the Director of National Intelligence in the Council was enough to justify the exclusion of the Director of the CIA.
The substitution of the word «best» for «first» leads to the engagement of partnerships with Russia and China, rather than a tentative to crush them.
In order to hobble this policy, the friends of Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Nuland have relaunched the war against the Donbass. The important losses they have experienced since the beginning of the conflict have led the Ukrainian army to withdraw and put paramilitary Nazi militia in the front line. The combats have inflicted heavy civilian casualities on the inhabitants of the new popular Republic. Simultaneously, in the Near East, they have managed to deliver tanks to the Syrian Kurds, as planned by the Obama administration.
In order to resolve the Ukrainian conflict, Donald Trump is looking for a way to help to eject President Petro Porochenko. He therefore received at the White House the head of the opposition, Ioulia Tymochenko, even before he accepted a phone call from President Porochenko.
In Syria and Iraq, Donald Trump has already begun operations in common with Russia, even thought his spokesperson denies it.The Russian Minister for Defence, who had imprudently revealed it, has ceased to say anything on the subject.
Concerning Beijing, President Trump has put an end to US participation in the Trans-Pacific Treaty (TPP) - a treaty which had been conceived in order to inhibit China. During the period of transition, he received the second richest man in China, Jack Ma (the businessman who confirmed - «No-one has stolen your jobs, you spend too much on war»). We know that their discussions touched on the possible adhesion of Washington to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). If this were to be the case, the United States would agree to cooperate with China rather than hindering it. They would participate in the construction of two Silk Roads, which would make the wars in Donbass and Syria pointless.
In matters of finance, President Trump has begun the dismantling of the Dodd-Frank law which attempted to resolve the crisis of 2008 by averting the brutal collapse of the major banks («too big to fail»). Although this law has some positive aspects (it's 2,300 pages long), it establishes a guardianship of the Treasury over the banks, which obviously hinders their development. Donald Trump is also apparently preparing to restore the distinction between deposit banks and investment banks (Glass-Steagall Act).
Finally, the clean-up of international institutions has also begun. The new ambassador to the UNO, Nikki Haley, has requested an audit of the 16 «peace-keeping» missions. She has made it known that she intends to put an end to those which seem to be inefficient. From the point of view of the United Nations Charter, all such missions will be audited without exception. Indeed, the founders of the Organisation had not foreseen this type of military deployment (today, more than 100,000 men and women). The UNO was created to avert or resolve conflicts between states (never intra-state conflict). When two parties conclude a cease-fire, the Organisation may deploy observers in order to verify the respect of the agreement. But on the contrary, these «peace-keeping» operations are aimed at enforcing the respect of a solution imposed by the Security Council and refused by one of the two parties involved in the conflict - in reality, it is the continuation of colonialism.
In practice, the presence of these forces only makes the conflict last longer, while their absence changes nothing. So the troops of the United Nations Interim Force (UNIFIL) deployed at the Israëlo-Lebanese border, but only on Lebanese territory, do not prevent either Israëli military operations or military operations by the Lebanese Resistance, as we have already seen many times. They serve only to spy on the Lebanese on behalf of the Israëlis, thus prolonging the conflict. In the same way, the troops of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, or UNDOF, deployed at the demarcation line in the Golan have been chased away by Al-Qaïda, without that changing anything at all in the Israëlo-Syrian conflict. Putting an end to this system means returning to the spirit and the letter of the Charter, renouncing colonial privileges, and pacifying the world.
Behind the media controversy, the street demonstrations, and the confrontation between politicians, President Trump is holding his course.
Translation Pete Kimberley
[1] "Behind the bipartisan wall", by Manlio Dinucci, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Il Manifesto (Italy) , Voltaire Network, 28 January 2017.
[2] "Donald Trump Inauguration Speech", by Donald Trump, Voltaire Network, 21 January 2017.
[3] "Germany and the UNO against Syria", by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Al-Watan (Syria) , Voltaire Network, 28 January 2016.
[4] "Trump enough of 9/11!", by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 24 January 2017.
[5] "Donald Trump winds up "the" organization of US imperialism].]", by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 31 January 2017.
[6] "General Flynn's Proposals to Reform Intelligence", by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, ContralÃnea (Mexico) , Voltaire Network, 1 December 2016.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Quote:In January, 1961, just days before he handed over the US presidency to John F. Kennedy, outgoing Republican president Dwight Eisenhower delivered one of the most powerful and ominous not to say puzzling valedictory speeches of any departing American leader.
The former five-star general and victorious military commander from World War II, Eisenhower was, in some ways, a contradiction: a career soldier with an abiding belief in peace. Early in his presidency, in 1953, he had said: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
The fateful 1960 election, which saw youthful Democrat Kennedy narrowly defeat Eisenhower's vice-president, Richard Nixon, is seen as a turning point: the oldest American president in a century was about to hand over to the youngest elected president. In popular culture depiction, the greying war veterans and Cold War activists mired in the past were making way for a bright, youthful, energised world focused on a glorious and boundless future.
Yet, as time passes, the cautious Eisenhower is increasingly seen as a wise and justifiably worried leader who steered the country through a tense period, avoiding many potential conflicts that could so easily have ignited another world war. He was also uncannily prescient.
In his televised farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961, Eisenhower ranged over his eight years in office, but it was his reference to "the military-industrial complex" a term he's credited with coining for which that speech is remembered. He warned that the growth of the armaments industry and its influence posed a threat to public policy being subverted to serving the industry's interests rather than the public interest. While acknowledging the very real needs for national security, Eisenhower was concerned that this new military-industrial complex could weaken or destroy the very institutions and principles it was designed to protect. (Interestingly, he had originally intended calling it the military-industrial-congressional complex signalling a concern about penetration of the legislature by lobbyists but had been persuaded against it.)
His words were blunt: "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence economic, political, even spiritual is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognise the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes ..."
The idea came as a shock to many Americans, and Eisenhower was criticised in some quarters for being too negative. But to some long-term observers, growing domestic threats to American democracy and its institutions had long been apparent, but not necessarily from the source identified by Eisenhower. In a classic example of what historian Richard Hofstadter would later label the paranoid style in American politics, a Republican senator from Indiana, William Jenner, warned in 1954: "Outwardly, we have a constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system, another body representing another form of government, a bureaucratic elite which believes our constitution is outmoded and is sure that it is the winning side ... All the strange developments in foreign policy agreements may be traced to this group, who are going to make us over to suit their pleasure ..." Jenner was hinting at communist subversion.
The "military-industrial complex" of Eisenhower didn't disappear; on the contrary, it expanded exponentially, embracing the oil industry, the intelligence community, the national security agencies, Wall Street and, more recently, the strategically crucial Silicon Valley, morphing into what has been called "the deep state" an officially unacknowledged second order of government behind the public or constitutional state that has grown significantly stronger since World War II. Unelected, unaccountable and, to all intents and purposes, utterly unconstrained.
While the notion, scope and reach of the deep state have long occupied the minds of conspiracy theorists of widely varying degrees of credibility and across the political spectrum, there has nevertheless been mounting evidence to suggest that certain elements of what constitutes the deep state have engaged in unlawful, even criminal, activities.
The 'military-industrial complex' of Eisenhower didn't disappear; on the contrary, it expanded exponentially ... Unelected, unaccountable and, to all intents and purposes, utterly unconstrained.
In the years immediately after World War II, the newly-formed Central Intelligence Agency joined forces with Corsican criminal syndicates in the French port of Marseille in efforts to dislodge communists from key trade unions. According to the respected historian, Alfred W. McCoy, who taught at the University of NSW in the 1970s, the CIA supplied the Corsicans with arms, money and disinformation. In his The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, McCoy describes how the Corsicans gained political influence and control over the docks ideal conditions for cementing a long-term partnership with mafia drug distributors, eventually turning Marseille into the postwar heroin capital of the Western world. Marseille's first heroin laboratories were opened in 1951, only months after the Corsicans took over the waterfront.
Into the 1960s, with the Vietnam War, the CIA airline, Air America, flew opium and heroin throughout the region, with many service personnel becoming addicts. A laboratory built at CIA headquarters in northern Laos was used to refine heroin. After a decade of American military intervention, South-East Asia had become the source of 70 per cent of the world's illicit opium and the major supplier of raw materials for America's booming heroin market.
Australia was not untouched, with the shadowy Nugan Hand Bank in Sydney a CIA bank in all but name. Jonathan Kwitny, in his 1987 book, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money and the CIA, details how Nugan Hand financed drug trafficking, money laundering and international arms dealings, before collapsing in 1980, amid several mysterious deaths, and $50 million in debt. Among its officers were a network of US generals, admirals and CIA men, including former CIA director William Colby, who was also one of its lawyers.
From the Iran-Contra deals of the 1980s, through the various conflicts in Latin America and the Middle East, the CIA continued unchecked. In 1989, the United States invaded Panama, deposing General Manuel Noriega, who had been giving military assistance to Contra groups in Nicaragua at the US's request which, in exchange, allowed him to continue his drug-trafficking activities which they had known about since the 1960s. According to Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair in their 1998 book, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, when the US Drug Enforcement Administration tried to indict Noriega in 1971, the CIA prevented it from doing so.
In 1989, a Senate inquiry into America's involvement in the drug trade chaired by John Kerry, recently US secretary of state, found the US State Department had paid drug traffickers with funds authorised by Congress for "humanitarian assistance to the Contras", although little came of it.
Interest in the deep state continued to intensify, with a focus shifting to domestic activities. According to a series of reports by the San Jose Mercury News, for the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring, comprised of CIA and US Drug Enforcement Agency agents and informants, sold tonnes of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles. Millions of dollars in drug profits were then funnelled to the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force), the largest of several anti-communist groups collectively known as the Contras.
Last year, a former Republican staffer, Mike Lofgren, published a book that quickly became a best seller, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government. He wrote: "[T]he deep state is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change ... If there is anything the deep state requires, it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past."
Also last year, another book, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on US Democracy, by political analyst Peter Dale Scott, traces America's increasing militarisation, restrictions on constitutional rights, and income disparity since the Vietnam War. Scott argues that a major role in what he calls "this historic reversal" was the intervention of a series of structural deep events, ranging from the assassination of Kennedy to the September 11 attacks. While he doesn't try to resolve the controversies surrounding these events, he shows they share significant points in common, ranging from overlapping personnel and modes of operation to shared sources of funding.
The existence of the deep state, it can be assumed, has been known to all American presidents, some of whom have benefited politically. From Kennedy to Barack Obama, a tacit set of constraints has limited a president's scope for action. But where does Donald Trump, the outsider who pledged to drain the Washington swamp, sit in relation to the deep state? What was really behind the FBI's intervention in the campaign that was seen to benefit Trump?
Just where Trump stands on key issues and how malleable he might be is as intriguing to those who became insiders as well as everyone else. Steve Bannon, the right-wing Breitbart News chief who headed Trump's campaign and has since become the chief White House strategist and, more controversially, a member of the powerful National Security Council, told Vanity Fare magazine last year that Trump was, in terms of a right-wing agenda, a "blunt instrument for us ... I don't know whether he really gets it or not". (The comment carries echoes of the story, possibly apocryphal, circulating at the time of George W. Bush's candidacy for the Republican nomination for the 2000 election, when he was vetted by a group of influential neoconservatives seeking to further their influence. "He is perfect," one was quoted as saying, in reference to Bush's ignorance.)
Two conflicting hypotheses suggest themselves. The first is that Trump is largely ignorant of the deep state, believing that he, as President, can run the US, and possibly much of the world, as he wishes, just like he runs his business empire. Such a scenario doesn't augur well for his presidency. The second hypothesis is that he's very much the deep state's man; that he's willing to do its bidding, and facilitate and not hinder its actions in any way a scenario that spells global trouble.
If he's not yet part of the deep state, did he signal his willingness to co-opt it in his first act as President, when he made the pilgrimage to the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, just outside Washington? His words to the assembled spooks extraordinary even for hyperbole-addicted Trump were part pep talk, part declaration of love and, frighteningly, part blank cheque.
"Nobody feels stronger about the CIA and the intelligence community than Donald Trump. Nobody. I am so behind you. You're going to get so much backing, you're going to ask: 'Please Mr. President don't give us so much backing.' We're gonna do great things. We have not used the real abilities we have, we've been restrained. We have to get rid of ISIS. Radical Islamic terrorism has to be eradicated off the face of the earth. It is evil. This is a level of evil that we haven't seen. You're going to do a phenomenal job, but you're going to end it. This is going to be one of the most important groups towards making us safe, toward making us winners again, toward ending all of the problems, the havoc and fear that this sick group of people has caused. I am with you 1000 per cent! I love you, I respect you, and you will be leading the charge."
Because Trump's approach to foreign policy used in a loose sense is both confused and opaque, it's difficult to project what his unrestraining (whatever that means) of the CIA will mean for the world.
On January 27, Trump visited the Pentagon, raising with his comments there just the sort of concerns that Eisenhower had talked about almost six decades ago, hinting at preparation for permanent war. He issued an executive action calling for stepped-up military action in Syria and a vast expansion of the US military, including its nuclear arsenal, to prepare for war with "near-peer competitors" a reference to nuclear-armed China and Russia and "regional challengers", such as, presumably, Iran. Eisenhower's ghost would have blanched to a whiter shade of nuclear pale at Trump's words: "I'm signing an executive action to begin a great rebuilding of the armed services of the United States," he said during the signing of the document titled Rebuilding the US Armed Forces.
Key players in the military-industrial complex/deep state constellation are well-represented in the Trump cabinet, most notably James Mattis (military) at the Pentagon, Steve Mnuchin (Wall Street) at the Treasury and Rex Tillerson (big oil) at the State Department. Certainly, Trump's favourite, White House chief of Staff Reince Priebus, is known to have close CIA connections, with former CIA operative Robert Steele going so far as to name him as a CIA mole. To what extent these and others in the inner circle influence the President in his relationship with the deep state remains to be seen but predictions on likely courses of action at this stage remain difficult.
Jessica Mathews, a former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Department official, wrote in this week's The New York Review that "a dangerous moment" has arrived, with Trump appearing to dismiss the very fundamentals that have been shared by all three contendings school of international relations: the neoconservatives, liberal internationalists and realists. These are:
a recognition of the immense value to the security of the US provided by its allies and associated military and political alliances;
the belief that the global economy is not a zero-sum competition but rather a mutually beneficial growth system built on open trade and investment; and
that dictators need to be tolerated, managed or confronted, but not admired.
While conceding that Trump's foreign policy often seems to be a mixture of impulsiveness and ignorance, Mathew points to an underlying consistency, citing his 1987 open letter, as a paid announcement in major newspapers, headed: "There's nothing wrong with American foreign defence policy that a little backbone can't cure." In it, Trump complained that other nations "have been taking advantage of the United States", convincing the US to pay for their defence while "brilliantly" managing weak currencies against the dollar.
Had Western leaders paid attention to the rantings in Mein Kampf, they would have found out just what Adolf Hitler was thinking and planning to do long before he did it. Trump's thinking, for want of a better term, must be taken more seriously than it has.
He fails to realise, or even understand, how America's global interests have been defended and furthered by its alliances; they have not weakened Uncle Sam so much as enabled him to become such a global colossus. For example, NATO, first and foremost, was an anti-Soviet alliance designed to protect American interests and American capital stemming initially from the Marshall plan. It is a gross distortion and fanciful in the extreme to represent it as some sort of benevolent organisation. As that ultimate realist, Napoleon, once observed, only two levers move men: fear and self-interest.
The only thing that is certain is that nothing is certain any more. A favourite Trump tactic, which he has acknowledged in his accounts of his business career, is to use negotiating tactics that involve taking off the table issues that have previously been dealt with and renegotiating them to his advantage. Translating this into diplomacy will, almost certainly, have devastating consequences, especially so for a world already beset by seemingly intractable problems including slowing growth climate change, rogue nuclear states, terrorism, displaced populations and the fracturing of Europe.
An unrestrained and rampant deep state under a pliant president operating from an isolationist Fortress America is truly the stuff of nightmare.
Dr Norman Abjorensen is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University's Crawford School of Public Policy, and the author of The Manner of Their Going: Prime Ministerial Exits from Lyne to Abbott. He is currently writing a history of democracy. norman.abjorensen@anu.edu.au
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
The Globalist proto-autocracy dominated by the Wall St. culture of feral acquisition, and the Dominionist proto-autocracy dominated by Christian fascism.
In order to enact a Christian fascist takeover of the USA Trump needs to provoke war to provide a rationale for a crackdown on domestic dissent.
There are plenty of Dominionists in the national security state eager for war, and plenty of Globalists who won't go along.
The American deep state is at civil war.
The anti-autocratic Resistance has two dragons to slay, but the Dominionist threat is by far the more pernicious.
Quote:"There are a lot of killers," President Trump replied when Fox News host Bill O'Reilly described Trump's friend Vladimir Putin as a killer.
"Do you think our country is so innocent?" Trump stated, looking like a newcomer at the Tony Soprano Poker Tournament.
"Take a look at what we have done too," he went on. "We've made a lot of mistakes. I've been against the war in Iraq from the beginning."
When O'Reilly tried to make a distinction between mistakes and murder, Trump wouldn't have it.
"A lot of mistakes, okay?" the president went on. "But a lot of people were killed. So, a lot of killers around, believe me."
Trump was referring, once again, to the CIA's erroneous 2002 finding on Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction that were used to justify the U.S. invasion. He was, once again, baiting the agency. The CIA was not mistaken; they were murderers.
The message: Lay off my friend Putin, already. He's no different than we are.
CIA Scorned
Trump's tough guy pose betrayed some hard political realities.
The president's hostility to the CIA is a mixed bag. He disdains the factuality of the Agency's work. He dismisses the value of the Agency's daily briefings. He doesn't care for the Agency's findings on the Muslim Brotherhood or Iran's nuclear program.
Trump doesn't much care about the morality of the CIA's work. He says he would approve of torture of suspected terroristsa violation of standing Agency policy and U.S. and international lawbecause he believes that "torture works."
As a conspiracy theorist, Trump is more interested in demonizing and discrediting the CIA, a $15 billion-a-year agency and a possible check on his power. As an aspiring autocrat, Trump regards the Agency (whether it is liberal or illiberal or both) as a rival and a threat. Therefore the CIA must be humiliated.
Trump Card
When Trump likened CIA officials to "Nazis" even before he had been inaugurated, Americans wondered what the man could possibly be thinking.
The 45th president was thinking like a man at war. Not since Richard Nixon has there been a president so hostile to the CIA, but Trump is much more public than Nixon was. The president, of course, is correct that the U.S. government has its killers too. Some of them have worked for the CIA. This blunt truth can serve Trump as a blunt instrument in his war on the Agency.
To use a different metaphor, when it comes to playing the CIA, Trump has a trump card: the JFK card.
President Trump, like Natalie Portman and Oliver Stone, understands that the JFK storyhow a president could be killed in broad daylightstill resonates in American culture, at least for the Baby Boomers. It never quite goes away. It is still with us in 2017, in the movie Jackie and in the politics of the Trump White House.
A federal law passed in 1992 requires the CIA and the FBI to release thousands of still-secret JFK files in October of this year. Time magazine and The Economist have flagged this upcoming data dump as one of the biggest expected news events of 2017.
For the older generation, JFK's assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, was a Shakespearean tragedy that shaped everyone's political consciousness. JFK was a popular liberal cruising toward reelection when he was shot and killed as his motorcade passed through a friendly crowd in Dallas. First Lady Jackie Kennedy, in her bloody pink suit, cradled her husband in her arms as he died on the way to the hospital. No one was ever brought to justice for the crime.
As a conspiracy theorist, Trump gravitates to the JFK story precisely because of its mass appeal and the way it evokes fear, especially fear of secret power. When rival Ted Cruz refused to drop out of the Republican presidential race last May, Trump smeared him with the JFK conspiracy brush, saying Cruz's father had associated with accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald a few months before JFK was killed.
Needless to say, Trump had no evidence to support this claim. It was a lie. But the talismanic power of the words "JFK conspiracy" and an old photograph of Oswald drove a cable news cycle or two, spurred massive internet traffic, and drove poor Ted Cruz right out of contention for power.
Now Trump has a JFK trump card to play with the CIA, andthis may come as some surpriseit is not conspiratorial flimflam, a bald-faced lie, a Cruz-like smear, or an Alex Jones Special. When it comes to JFK, Trump actually has real leverage over the Agency.
The Law
The 1992 JFK Records Act allows the CIA to continue keeping some or all of the most sensitive JFK secrets beyond this year, but only if the president agrees in writing. In other words, the CIA needs the president's signature to keep some of its dirtiest linen out of public view.
There is probably no "smoking gun" revelation in the JFK files to come later this year, but there are hundreds of pages of secret material on CIA-linked killers such as Oswald, David Phillips and Bill Harvey. The current leaders and rank and file of the CIA would prefer some of this ancient material not be made public, for reasons of "national security."
If Hillary Clinton had been elected, the CIA would have received a sympathetic hearing from the White House. In the language of Washington policymakers, the Agency's "equities" would have been protected. The CIA's last JFK secrets probably would have stayed secret.
Not so with Donald Trump. This president would love to see the Agency's dirtiest secrets in his Twitter feed. So would his friend Putin, the former Russian intelligence officer.
The CIA is not likely to get any favors this fall, not from Trump, not when the president can bludgeon the liberal smartypants of Langley with the biggest conspiracy theory of them all. When it comes to JFK, the Agency is vulnerable, and Trump has the advantage.
The CIA is legally obliged to disgorge all of its JFK files for public viewing on Oct. 26, 2017. The president can't wait.
Jefferson Morley is AlterNet's Washington correspondent. He is the author of Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 and Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Quote:In a recent column, I explained how the still-forming Trump administration is already doing serious harm to America's longstanding global intelligence partnerships. In particular, fears that the White House is too friendly to Moscow are causing close allies to curtail some of their espionage relationships with Washingtona development with grave implications for international security, particularly in the all-important realm of counterterrorism.
Now those concerns are causing problems much closer to homein fact, inside the Beltway itself. Our Intelligence Community is so worried by the unprecedented problems of the Trump administrationnot only do senior officials possess troubling ties to the Kremlin, there are nagging questions about basic competence regarding Team Trumpthat it is beginning to withhold intelligence from a White House which our spies do not trust.
That the IC has ample grounds for concern is demonstrated by almost daily revelations of major problems inside the White House, a mere three weeks after the inauguration. The president has repeatedly gone out of his way to antagonize our spies, mocking them and demeaning their work, and Trump's personal national security guru can't seem to keep his story straight on vital issues.
That's Mike Flynn, the retired Army three-star general who now heads the National Security Council. Widely disliked in Washington for his brash personality and preference for conspiracy-theorizing over intelligence facts, Flynn was fired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency for managerial incompetence and poor judgmentflaws he has brought to the far more powerful and political NSC.
Flynn's problems with the truth have been laid bare by the growing scandal about his dealings with Moscow. Strange ties to the Kremlin, including Vladimir Putin himself, have dogged Flynn since he left DIA, and concerns about his judgment have risen considerably since it was revealed that after the November 8 election, Flynn repeatedly called the Russian embassy in Washington to discuss the transition. The White House has denied that anything substantive came up in conversations between Flynn and Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador.
That was a lie, as confirmed by an extensively sourced bombshell report in The Washington Post, which makes clear that Flynn grossly misrepresented his numerous conversations with Kislyakwhich turn out to have happened before the election too, part of a regular dialogue with the Russian embassy. To call such an arrangement highly unusual in American politics would be very charitable.
In particular, Flynn and Kislyak discussed the possible lifting of the sanctions President Obama placed on Russia and its intelligence services late last year in retaliation for the Kremlin's meddling in our 2016 election. In public, Flynn repeatedly denied that any talk of sanctions occurred during his conversations with Russia's ambassador. Worse, he apparently lied in private too, including to Vice President Mike Pence, who when this scandal broke last month publicly denied that Flynn conducted any sanctions talk with Kislyak. Pence and his staff are reported to be very upset with the national security adviser, who played the vice president for a fool.
It's debatable whether Flynn broke any laws by conducting unofficial diplomacy with Moscow, then lying about it, and he has now adopted the customary Beltway dodge about the affair, ditching his previous denials in favor of professing he has "no recollection of discussing sanctions," adding that he "couldn't be certain that the topic never came up." That's not good enough anymore, since the IC knows exactly what Flynn and Kislyak discussed.
In pretty much every capital worldwide, embassies that provide sanctuary to hostile intelligence services are subject to counterintelligence surveillance, including monitoring phone calls. Our spy services conduct signals intelligenceSIGINT for shortagainst the Russian embassy in Washington, just as the Russians do against our embassy in Moscow. Ambassadors' calls are always monitored: that's how the SpyWar works, everywhere.
Ambassador Kislyak surely knew his conversations with Flynn were being intercepted, and it's incomprehensible that a career military intelligence officer who once headed a major intelligence agency didn't realize the same. Whether Flynn is monumentally stupid or monumentally arrogant is the big question that hangs over this increasingly strange affair.
Prominent Democrats in Congress are already calling for Flynn to be relieved over this scandal, which at best shows him to be dishonest about important issues. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has bluntly asked for the national security adviser's ouster. Republicans on the Hill who would prefer that the White House stop lying to the public about its Kremlin links ought to get behind Schiff's initiative before the scandal gets worse.
In truth, it may already be too late. A new report by CNN indicates that important parts of the infamous spy dossier that professed to shed light on President Trump's shady Moscow ties have been corroborated by communications intercepts. In other words, SIGINT strikes again, providing key evidence that backs up some of the claims made in that 35-page report compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence official with extensive Russia experience.
As I've previously explained, that salacious dossier is raw intelligence, an explosive amalgam of fact and fantasy, including some disinformation planted by the Kremlin to obscure this already murky case. Now SIGINT confirms that some of the non-salacious parts of what Steele reported, in particular how senior Russian officials conspired to assist Trump in last year's election, are substantially based in fact. This is bad news for the White House, which has already lashed out in angry panic, with Press Secretary Sean Spicer stating, "We continue to be disgusted by CNN's fake news reporting."
That is hardly a denial, of course, and I can confirm from my friends still serving in the IC that the SIGINT, which corroborates some of the Steele dossier, is damning for the administration. Our spies have had enough of these shady Russian connectionsand they are starting to push back.
There are pervasive concerns that the president simply isn't paying attention to intelligence.
How things are heating up between the White House and the spooks is evidenced by a new report that the CIA has denied a security clearance to one of Flynn's acolytes. Rob Townley, a former Marine intelligence officer selected to head up the NSC's Africa desk, was denied a clearance to see Sensitive Compartmented Information (which is required to have access to SIGINT in particular). Why Townley's SCI was turned down isn't clearit could be over personal problems or foreign tiesbut the CIA's stand has been privately denounced by the White House, which views this as a vendetta against Flynn. That the Townley SCI denial was reportedly endorsed by Mike Pompeo, the new CIA director selected by Trump himself, only adds to the pain.
There is more consequential IC pushback happening, too. Our spies have never liked Trump's lackadaisical attitude toward the President's Daily Brief, the most sensitive of all IC documents, which the new commander-in-chief has received haphazardly. The president has frequently blown off the PDB altogether, tasking Flynn with condensing it into a one-page summary with no more than nine bullet-points. Some in the IC are relieved by this, but there are pervasive concerns that the president simply isn't paying attention to intelligence.
In light of this, and out of worries about the White House's ability to keep secrets, some of our spy agencies have begun withholding intelligence from the Oval Office. Why risk your most sensitive information if the president may ignore it anyway? A senior National Security Agency official explained that NSA was systematically holding back some of the "good stuff" from the White House, in an unprecedented move. For decades, NSA has prepared special reports for the president's eyes only, containing enormously sensitive intelligence. In the last three weeks, however, NSA has ceased doing this, fearing Trump and his staff cannot keep their best SIGINT secrets.
Since NSA provides something like 80 percent of the actionable intelligence in our government, what's being kept from the White House may be very significant indeed. However, such concerns are widely shared across the IC, and NSA doesn't appear to be the only agency withholding intelligence from the administration out of security fears.
What's going on was explained lucidly by a senior Pentagon intelligence official, who stated that "since January 20, we've assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM," meaning the White House Situation Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. "There's not much the Russians don't know at this point," the official added in wry frustration.
None of this has happened in Washington before. A White House with unsettling links to Moscow wasn't something anybody in the Pentagon or the Intelligence Community even considered a possibility until a few months ago. Until Team Trump clarifies its strange relationship with the Kremlin, and starts working on its professional honesty, the IC will approach the administration with caution and concern.
I previously warned the Trump administration not to go to war with the nation's spies, and here's why. This is a risky situation, particularly since President Trump is prone to creating crises foreign and domestic with his incautious tweets. In the event of a serious international crisis of the sort which eventually befalls almost every administration, the White House will need the best intelligence possible to prevent war, possibly even nuclear war. It may not get the information it needs in that hour of crisis, and for that it has nobody to blame but itself.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he's also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He's published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Quote:At the end of his administration Obama implemented a series of anti-Russian moves. The most obvious was the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats over unfounded allegation of Russian interference in the U.S. elections. Other moves included the launching of an Ukrainian offense against the Russian supported resistance in the east Ukraine.
These moves were designed to impede the incoming Trump administration in its announced plans towards more friendly relations with Russia. The incoming Trump administration countered Obama's sanction move. Its designated National Security Advisor Flynn phoned up the Russian ambassador in Washington. He did not promise to immediately lift the sanctions but indirectly asked him to refrain from any harsh response:
The transcripts of the conversations don't show Mr. Flynn made any sort of promise to lift the sanctions once Mr. Trump took office, the officials said. Rather, they show Mr.Flynn making more general comments about relations between the two countries improving under Mr. Trump, people familiar with them said.
This was arguably a sensible move in line with a smooth transition of government.
In the end the Russian government refrained from any in kind reaction to the Obama sanctions.
This was blow to the promoters of hostilities with Russia. It did not stop their meddling. The effort moved towards kicking Flynn out of his new position as NSC. A concerted media campaign was launched to insinuate an early Flynn failure and to press for his dismissal.
Bradd Jaffy @BraddJaffy
Within the last 30 mins NYT, WashPost, WSJ and Politico each dropped pieces that have to be alarming for your future if you're Mike Flynn
5:51 PM - 12 Feb 2017
Keep in mind that some 95% of the U.S. media was hostile to Trump during the election campaign. They all peddled the nonsense of "Russian hacks" when an insider leaked emails from the Democratic National Council. They are all willing to support any move that might hinder the Trump administration.
Thus this morning news was filled with these headlines:
NYT - Turmoil at the National Security Council, From the Top Down
WaPo - As Flynn falls under growing pressure over Russia contacts, Trump remains silent
WSJ - Mike Flynn's Position as National Security Adviser Grows Tenuous in White House
Politico - Trump reviews top White House staff after tumultuous start
All these stories are based on "inside views" from multiple "former and current officials". All are build around the baseless allegations against Flynn of somehow colluding with the Russian government. All are likely more wishful thinking than fact.
It would be astonishing if Trump falls for this obviously well organized campaign against his administration. Should he fire Flynn or give in to such pressure his enemies will smell blood, find a new target within his administration and intensify their fire.
Indeed a second well coordinated assault on an announced Trump policy, a change of course in Syria, is already in the making. This one aims at further maligning the Syrian government in an effort to make it impossible to argue for cooperation in the fight against the Islamic State.
A few days ago Amnesty International published an unfounded report about alleged executions in Syrian prisons.
Today Human Rights Watch claims that the Syrian government systematically used Chlorine in the fight over Aleppo. The sources are solely opposition supporters.
Based on similar vague "facts" the Atlantic Council, a NATO lobby with financial ties to Gulf governments, launches a huge propaganda report (large pdf) about the "war crime" of liberating Aleppo from Jihadis.
None of these "humanitarian" organization is concerned about the current devastating situation in Aleppo. For 40 days the water has been cut off by the Islamic State at the Euphrates pumping stations. There is no electricity. Fuel is sparse. Medications are difficult to find.
Their hypocrisy stinks to high heaven. These organizations all assert that the Syrian government, for example, attacked hospitals in east-Aleppo solely to hit civilians. At the same time they all applaud a much bigger assault on the Islamic State held Mosul by U.S. and Iraqi troops. There, the head of Human Rights Watch asserts, the hospitals are used by the Jihadis and thus attacks on them are justified:
Kenneth Roth @KenRoth
As battle for Mosul proceeds, ISIS is regularly occupying hospitals & medical facilities, endangering patients/staff bit.ly/2kqXuUR
The anti-Flynn campaign as well as the bad-Assad campaign are aimed at Trump policy changes. These changes move away from the course the borg implemented throughout the Obama reign.
Meanwhile the Trump administration implements regressive economic and social policies without any noticeable resistance in the media, in Congress or from so called Non-Government-Organizations:
President Trump has embarked on the most aggressive campaign against government regulation in a generation, joining with Republican lawmakers to roll back rules already on the books and limit the ability of federal regulators to impose new ones.
The borg or deep state is way more concerned with keeping up its plans of uncontested global dominance than with the welfare of the citizens within the empire.
Trump promised to put "America first", to prioritize the inner well being of the States over the quest for global hegemony. His voters elected him for that purpose. Should he fall for the organized campaigns against his plans predictable foreign policy disasters will dominate his presidency. He will then lose any chance for reelection.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
