Elite [Dominance] Theory and the Revolt of the Elite
(Silent Coup, or Revolt of the Rich under Neoliberalism)

• Introduction
• Classic Elite theory
• The idea of "The Revolt of the Elites" and "The Quiet Coup" by financial oligarchy
  • "The Revolt of the Elites" by Christoper Lasch
  • The Quiet Coup of Financial Oligarchy by Simon Johnson
  • Revolt of the Rich by Mike Lofgren
  • Neo-classical economics smoke screen in Yves Smith’s Econned
• Amorality and psychopathic tendencies
• Shaming the poor as a new sport for the transnational elites and subservient politicians
• To what extent new transnational elite is monolithic ?
• The problem of degeneration of elite

Introduction

In political science and sociology, elite [dominance] theory is a theory of the state which seeks to describe the power relationships in contemporary society. The theory posits that a small minority, consisting of members of the economic elite, policy-planning networks (which include not only think tanks, but also part of academia, see Econned) and selected members of "professional class", holds the most political power. They acquire this power bypassing the democratic elections process and are able to hold into it for a long time (see Two Party System as polyarchy).

This, in a way, is close to position of "classic" or paleo conservatives (not to mix them with neocons). Their position has never been simply that a hierarchical society is better than an egalitarian one; it always has been that an egalitarian, genuinely democratic  society is impossible. That every society includes rulers and ruled, and it is rulers(the elite) who make critical decisions, no matter under which sauce: democratic republic, communist dictatorship, authoritarism  or some other variant.  The central question of politics, therefore is how to select the rulers in an optimal way so that those at the bottom of food chain were not mercilessly squeezed or wiped out.

Extremes meet and in fact Bolsheviks were early adopters of the same "elite dominance" vision as paleoconservatives. Lenin’s classic  question “who, whom?” is an essence of Bolshevism. While Bolsheviks promised that a classless society would one day emerge as a variant of Christ Second Coming, in the meantime, however, they were open and enthusiastic practitioners of brutal power politics which they shrewdly called "dictatorship of proletariat", while in reality it was a dictatorship of the Party elite and state bureaucrats (so called "Nomenklatura").  Neoliberalism borrowed a lot from Bolshevism and also created "New Class" out of financial elite, modules of Silicon Valley and military industrial complex.  It falsely promoted the idea that the rising tide lift all boats, while in reality middle class sinks under neoliberalism lower and lower and lost both its standard of living and some privileges.

Under neoliberalism any democracy even theoretically is impossible and to claim otherwise is to engage in open and blatant propaganda. Even revolt of people, which is the past was a powerful control mechanism of the elite,  now is very unlikely due to the power and sophistication of repressive apparatus and advances in communications, power at which functionless of Stasi could only dream.. Through positions in corporations and corporate boards, as well as the influence over the policy-planning networks through financial support of foundations`` or positions with think tanks or policy-discussion groups, members of the "elite" are able to exert dominant power over the policy decisions of the corporations in their own favor (outsized bonuses of top executives in large corporations is just one example here) and subdue the national governments to the interests of those corporations due to financial levers that corporate wealth provides in influencing  politics of the society.

A recent example of this can be found in the Forbes Magazine article [1] (published in December 2009) entitled The World's Most Powerful People, in which Forbes lists the 67 people, which the editors consider to be the most powerful people in the world (assigning one "slot" for each hundred million of humans).

The initial variant of this theory was proposed In 1956, C Wright Mills. In his book The Power Elite he described how political, corporate and military leaders in the US made policy with minimal, if al all, control, or even just consideration of preferences or concerns of ordinary citizens.

The majority of Americans now feel they are ruled by a remote, detached from their needs elite class.  As Robert Johnson noted "Oligarchy now is audacious. They don't really care if they are legitimate. Their slogan is: "Legitimate if you can, coerce if you have to, and accommodate if you must."  That creates  as Christopher Hayes  noted "national mood of exhaustion, frustration and betrayal" at the "near total failure of each pillar institution of our society."

As soon as we understand the dominance of elite is inevitable several fundamental questions arise:

1. To what extent democracy as a political organization is a utopian ideal?  Or smoke screen for [often brutal] elite rule. Elite theory stands in opposition to pluralism in suggesting that democracy is a utopian ideal. It also stands in opposition to state autonomy theory. It provokes serious rethinking about the real meaning of the term "democracy" in any modern society (as in "democracy for whom?"). And to what extent it serves as just as "opium for masses" then a recipe for the society organization and recruitment of elite. It also rases an important question about the role of money in politics.
2. What is proper level of upward mobility/forced rotation of the elite in the given society? Stagnation and degeneration of the elite is a problem which contributed to the collapse of the USSR and now is continuing to the collapse of the neoliberalism in the USA. And what are mechanisms that ensure that? There can be some institutional measures (like no more then two consecutive terms for the US president) that help.
3. How to keep the elite greed (and first of all greed of financial elite) in check. The brief historical period after WWII when the USSR existence kept the USA elite from appropriating the lion share of profits is now gone and no other countervailing forces are seen on the horizon...
4. Is the modern transnational elite really interested in the stability and well-being of a given society, or it represents a parasitic element which can eventually destroy the host.
5. To what extent the elite, especially the US elite, include a special class on individuals called sociopaths.
6. How to prevent degeneration of the elite (Epstein, Madoff, Bill Clinton and company) and ensure the rotation of the elite)
7. How internal struggle within the ruling elite destabilizes the society (Russiagate is one revealing examplee repalted to the USA elte, when one faction wasted to kick neoliberal can down the road, while another wanted some changes and destruction of the neoliberal status qui, especially its globalization aspect)
8. To what extent powerful intelligence agencies (with the top brass which are the part of the elite) try to control the elite. It is clear that they systematically seek "kompromat" on politically powerful individuals and in certain cases try to satisfy their most low desires to obtain it (Epstein connection to intelligence agencies; they also served as "kingmakers" in 2016 election helping to derail Sanders and thus ensuring Trump victory)

Elite dominance theory postulates that there are powerful barriers that exist for citizens  participation in the control of government. Rulers are always detached form ruled and pursue the set of interests that only partically if at all overlaps with the interest of the public at large. In less "politically correct" terms we can state that outside rare moments when ideology collapses,  "rank-and-file" citizens are politically powerless. Still the stability of the society depends on the ability of the most capable members of the society, no matter in what strata they were born, to rise to the top.  Equal opportunities in education in this sense are of paramount importance and represent a real "safety valve" in the society. 

As for the question whether the elite is interested in stability and well-being of the given society, the key problem is to determine about which society we are talking. Elite low operates in transnational categories and can value stability of "transnational world" higher then stability and well-being of a given society. The idea that the national elite acts in the interest of the nation is now under review. Dissolution of the USSR, when the elite (aka nomenklatura)  singlehandingly decimated and "privatized" the whole country to get their "fair share" of wealth is a telling example, a textbook example of self-centered and destructive behavior of  new "transnational" elites.

It has shown that modern elites are not anymore connected with their country of origin and social background and roots. Paradoxically, the KGB elite actively participated in dismantling of the USSR, and Gorbachov was put in power mostly by efforts of Andropov, the guy who was the head of KGB.  Here is one telling comment:

IHaveLittleToAdd, Aug 28, 2014 9:03:13 AM

Considering the non-elite citizens of the US have effectively no say in policy, what would happen if all of a sudden our government and media began shooting straight? Seems to me, pretty much nothing. It's not that most of the people I know don't realize we are being deceived to advance an altogether hidden agenda, it's that they simply don't care and are unaware of even the fabricated story.

In other words, the world's ruling elites are abandoning their host countries. They have a global vision and ambitions, their families often live in countries other are then their native country (and the country of main business), and they do not accept any constraints (such as level of taxation) and limits (such as local laws) in the pursuance of their egotistical interests, which are basically money oriented.

They move their money to offshore zones to avoid taxation. They break with impunity local laws to increase profits. It is now common for the leaders and members of the ruling elite to base self esteem upon material success, accumulation of raw wealth, emphasize Randian positivist philosophy and downplay humanistic ideals such as respect and tolerance. They no longer feel in the same boat as the rest of the society and openly worship on the altar of unlimited, pathological greed. This is especially noticeable among the US and GB financial elite.  In the USA they also morphed both Republican party and Democratic party into a single party of  rent-seekers on behalf of the wealthier members of society.

Marx would turn in his grave, if he saw how his idea of international unity of workers mutated into the actual international unity of elites. And how elites instead of workers implement a version of socialism, "socialism for rich", or "corporate welfare society". And they do it much more effectively then communists ever managed to implement "socialism for working class" (which actually was never a real goal, just a convenient slogan).  And like Bolsheviks they also practice redistribution of profits. In the same direction toward "nomenklatura", but much more effectively (also under Stalin regime position in nomenklatura was a precarious, as Stalin practiced "purges" as a method for rotation of the elite)

With NAFTA as a prominent example, Jeff Faux had shown how national elites are morphing into a global governing class ('The Party of Davos') and are shaping the new global economy alongside the lines of their neoliberal gospel. Their long arms are the IMF, the WTO, transnational corporations and transnational economic agreements. Being transnational the US elite does not care that the technological engine of the 20th century, the USA, is fatally wounded. That its high-tech industry, which was envy of the whole world is now outsourced, education way too expensive and outside several top universities is quite mediocre, and its scientific power is waning.

In other words they no longer believe in a Benjamin Franklin's dictum: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Classic Elite theory

Classic Elite [Dominance] Theory is based on several ideas:

1. Power lies in the positions of authority in key economic and political institutions.  
2. The Iron Law of Oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his book 1915 Political Parties. Michels was an anarcho-syndicalist at the time he formulated the Law. He later became an important ideologue of Mussolini's fascist regime in Italy. The simplest formulation of the 'Iron Law of Oligarchy': "Who says organization, says oligarchy." In essence Iron law of oligarchy postulate that any complex organization self-generate its own elite, an oligarchy that has disproportional influence on the decisions made in the organization and is pretty autonomous from "rank-and-file" members and is little affected by elections. As such Iron law of oligarchy stands in stark opposition to pluralism and suggests that "participatory democracy" is a utopian ideal and that democracy is always limited to very narrow strata of existing oligarchy (top 0.01% in the USA). It also stands in opposition to state autonomy theory. 
3. Pareto principle is related to the original observation was in connection concentration of the wealth in top 20% of the population. Pareto noticed that 80% of Italy's land was owned by 20% of the population. He then carried out surveys on a variety of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied. Due to the scale-invariant nature of the power law relationship, the relationship applies also to subsets of the income range. Even if we take the ten wealthiest individuals in the world, we see that the top three (Carlos Slim Helú, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates) own as much as the next seven put together. A chart that gave the inequality a very visible and comprehensible form, the so-called 'champagne glass' effect, was contained in the 1992 United Nations Development Program Report, which showed the distribution of global income to be very uneven, with the richest 20% of the world's population controlling 82.7% of the world's income.

   Distribution of world GDP, 1989^[8]

   Quintile of population	Income
   Richest 20%	82.70%
   Second 20%	11.75%
   Third 20%	2.30%
   Fourth 20%	1.85%
   Poorest 20%	1.40%

   The Pareto principle has also been used to attribute the widening economic inequality in the United States to 'skill-biased technical change'—i.e. income growth accrues to those with the education and skills required to take advantage of new technology and globalization. 

4. The psychological difference that sets elites apart is that they have personal resources, for instance intelligence and skills, money, and a vested interest in the government; while the rest are relatively incompetent and do not have the capabilities of governing themselves and are deprived of money. That means that once in power the elite are resourceful and will strive to sustain its rule. 
5. The elite have the most to lose if government or state failed as Russian elite discovered twice in the last century. So there are some natural limits of plundering of the state by the elite. 
6. The simple plurality voting system is a single-winner voting system also called  winner-takes-all or  first-past-the-post. The latter term is an analogy to horse racing, where the winner of the race is the first to pass a particular point (the "post") on the track, after which all other runners automatically lose. Elections in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada belong to this category. In this voting there is no requirement that the winner gain an absolute majority of votes. Duverger's law is a principle which asserts that any plurality voting system elections naturally impose a two-party system  That means that single-winner voting system essentially hand all the power to the elite as it is elite that controls the electability of candidates from both parties. The discovery of this tendency is attributed to Maurice Duverger, a French sociologist who observed the effect and recorded it in several papers published in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of further research, other political scientists began calling the effect a "law" or principle. Duverger's law suggests a nexus or synthesis between a party system and an electoral system: a proportional representation (PR) system creates the electoral conditions necessary to foster party development while a plurality system marginalizes smaller political parties, resulting in what is known as a two-party system.

The top twelve classical elite theorists include

1. Karl Marx  is typically cited, along with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science. Although the key postulate of Marxism about liberating role of proletariat proved wrong, Marxism made a tremendous contribution into understanding of power structure of the society, pointing that all power is concentrated directly or indirectly in owners of capital hands: a sociological theory of class domination. Marxism teaches that all societies progress through the dialectic of class struggle: a conflict between an ownership class which controls production and a lower class which produces the labor for goods. He called the current socio-economic form of society (capitalism) "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" that is run by the wealthy elite purely for own benefit, and predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, it would inevitably produce internal tensions within different faction of the elite. He first understood that political class represents a powerful force that is somewhat independent from economic foundations, especially if it is organized as a political party (and state can even be dominated by a fervent ideological network like USSR, China, Saudi Arabia,  Iran since 1979).  and that the current political elite is vary to redistribute this power with other factions of the elite even if relative balance of power within various factions changed.  What Marx give to the world is the understanding is that of Western history from the disintegration of Roman Empire was about the deadly conflict between rising factions of economic elite (industrial, landed, banking, etc) and existing political elite, with an occasional and temporary coalitions with peasants or artisans who tried to take advantage of the divisions in elite circles. So what Marx incorrectly called class struggle was actually a deadly struggle between economic and political elites within a society. In the 17th and 18th centuries it begins to make sense to describe the state -- paraphrasing Marx -- as an executive committee for managing the common affairs of the elite.  Generally speaking, Marx overstated the importance of industrial capitalists as compared to landed elites within the ruling circles of the 19th century, and of urban workers as compared to other urban dwellers and peasants (Hamilton, 1991). 
2. Thorstein Veblen combined sociology with economics in his masterpiece The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) where he argued that there was a basic distinction between the productiveness of "industry", run by engineers manufacturing goods, vis-à-vis the parasitism of "business" that exists only to make profits for elite that he called  a leisure class. The chief activity of the elite was "conspicuous consumption", and their economic contribution is "waste," activity that contributes nothing to productivity. The American economy was thereby made inefficient and corrupt though Veblen never made that claim explicit. He believed that technological advances were the driving force behind cultural change, but, unlike many contemporaries, refused to connect change with progress. Although Veblen was sympathetic to state ownership of industry, he had a low opinion of workers and the labor movement. He pointed out that the new industrial processes created a conflict between businessmen and engineers, with businessmen representing the older order and engineers as the innovators of new ways of doing things. In combination with the tendencies described in The Theory of the Leisure Class, this conflict resulted in waste and “predation” that served to enhance the social status of those who could benefit from predatory claims to goods and services. 
3. Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto emphasized the psychological and intellectual superiority that the Elites obtained, he believed that the elites were the highest accomplishers in any field and he discussed how there were two types of Elites
   1. governing elites
   2. non-governing elites

   He also extended on the idea that a whole elite can be replaced by a new one and how one can circulate from being elite to non-elite. 

4. Gaetano Mosca. Mosca emphasized the sociological and personal characteristics of elites. He said elites are an organized minority and that the masses are an unorganized majority. The ruling class is composed of the ruling elite and the sub-elites. He divides the world into two groups:
   1. ruling class
   2. class that is ruled

   Mosca asserts that elites have intellectual, moral, and material superiority and/or other qualities that is highly esteemed and influential. 

5. Robert Michels.  German sociologist Robert Michels developed The Iron Law of Oligarchy in his book  Political Parties published in 1915.  The Iron Law of Oligarchy  asserts that social and political organizations are run by few individuals, and social organization and labor division are the key. He believed that all organizations are elitist and that existence of elites is based on several factors that come into play in the bureaucratic structure of any large political organization:
   1. Need for leaders, as well as for specialized staff and facilities.
   2. The relative scarcity of the people with the psychological attributes of the leaders
   3. Natural monopolization of the their position by elected leaders within any sizable organization and related subversion of the democratic process even in organizations devoted to the promotion of democracy.

   Michels stressed several factors that underlie the 'Iron Law of Oligarchy'.

   • Problems of coordination in large organizations can be solved only by creating a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy, by design, is hierarchically organized to achieve efficiency--many decisions that have to be made every day cannot be made by large numbers of people in an efficient manner. The effective functioning of an organization therefore requires the concentration of much power in the hands of a few people.[2]
   • Delegation is necessary in any large organization, as thousands (or hundreds of thousands) members cannot make decisions using participatory democracy;
     • this has been dictated by the lack of technological means that would allow large number of people to meet and debate,
     • also the issues related to the crowd psychology.

     The delegation leads to specialization: the development of bases of knowledge, skills, and resources among a leadership, which further serves to alienate the leadership from the 'mass and rank' and entrenches the leadership in office. 

   • Bureaucratization and specialization  create a specialized group of administrators in a hierarchical organization. Which, in turn, leads to the rationalization and routinization of authority and decision-making, a process first and perhaps best described by Max Weber, and to a lesser and more cynical extent, by the Peter Principle.

   In other words rule by an elite (aka "oligarchy") is inevitable within any large organization and society as a whole because both  "tactical and technical necessities".  As Michels stated:

   "It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy".

    He went on to state that "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy." That means that the official goal of democracy of eliminating elite rule is impossible, and any "democracy" is always just a façade legitimizing the rule of a particular elite. What is important is the level of mobility of "non-elite" to the elite and the rotation of the elite.  

6. C. Wright Mills. Mills published his book The Power Elite in 1956, which provided a new sociological perspective on structure of power in the United States. He identified a triumvirate of power groups - political, economic and military - which form a distinguishable, although not unified, power-wielding body in the United States. This theory later was enhanced by Michael Mann who proposed that the power structures within Western civilization, and probably other civilizations, too, are best understood by determining the intertwining and relative importance at any given time of the organizations based in four "overlapping and intersecting sociospatial networks of power" (Mann, 1986, p. 1). These networks are ideological, economic, military, and political. This view is called "The IEMP model".  Simultaneous crisis in several of those networks, the phenomenon we observe now in the USA and previously in the USSR represent a social crisis.

   Mills proposed that those groups emerged through a process of rationalization at work that occurs in all advanced industrial societies. And in all of them power became concentrated at the very top (0.01%), funneling overall control into the hands of a very small, somewhat corrupt group.  This tendency is reflected in a decline of politics as an arena for debate about social change and relegation it to a merely formal level of discourse about non-essential issues, a smokescreen for backroom dealings of the oligarchy,

   This macro-scale analysis sought to point out that the degradation of democracy in "advanced" societies in not accidental. It reflects the fact that real power generally lies outside  of the elected representatives. A main influence on the emergence of this views on politics was Franz Leopold Neumann's book, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944 , a study of how Nazism came to power in the German democratic state.

   It provided the tools to analyze the structure of a political system and served as a warning of what could happen in a modern capitalistic democracy. 

7. Floyd Hunter. The elite theory analysis of power was also applied on the micro scale in community power studies such as that by Floyd Hunter (1953). Hunter examined in detail the power relationships evident in his "Regional City" looking for the "real" holders of power rather than those in obvious official positions. He posited a structural-functional approach which mapped the hierarchies and webs of interconnection operating within the city – mapping relationships of power between businessmen, politicians, clergy etc.

   The study debunks current mythology about the level of ‘democracy’ is present within urban politics.

   This type of analysis was also used in later, larger scale, studies such as that carried out by M. Schwartz examining the power structures within the corporate elite in the USA. 

8. G. William Domhoff. In his book Who Rules America?, G. William Domhoff researched local and national decision making process networks in order to illustrate the power structure in the United States. He asserts, much like Hunter, that an elite class that owns and manages large income-producing properties (like banks and corporations) dominate the American power structure politically and economically.  
9. James Burnham. Burnham’s early work The Managerial Revolution sought to express the movement of all functional power into the hands of appointed managers rather than the owners – separating ownership and control. Many of these ideas were adapted by paleoconservatives Samuel T. Francis and Paul Gottfried in their theories of the managerial state. Burnham's thoughts on Elite Theory were elucidated more specifically in his book The Machiavellians which discusses the thoughts of, among others, Pareto, Mosca, and Michels; in it he attempts to analyze of both elites and politics generally from his background as a former Trotskyite. 
10. John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) proposed the term technostructure in his book "The New Industrial State" (1967) to describe the group of managers within an enterprise (or an administrative body) with considerable political influence (especially true for financial brass) and the level of control on nation's economy. It usually refers to so called managerial capitalism where top managers, scientists, or lawyers acquire more power and influence than the shareholders in the corporation. They are the de-facto the owners of the corporation, while shareholders (outside a few large one) are generally powerless to influence the way the corporation develops and do business. 
11. Robert D. Putnam

    Putnam saw the development of technical and exclusive knowledge among administrators and other specialist groups as a mechanism by which power is stripped from the democratic process and slipped sideways to the advisors and specialists influencing the decision making process.^[7]

    "If the dominant figures of the past hundred years have been the entrepreneur, the businessman, and the industrial executive, the ‘new men’ are the scientists, the mathematicians, the economists, and the engineers of the new intellectual technology."

12. Thomas R. Dye. Dye in his book Top Down Policymaking, argues that U.S. public policy does not result from the "demands of the people," but from quite opposite phenomenon -- the Elite consensus found in Washington. It is a consensus between key non-profit foundations, think tanks, special-interest groups, and prominent lobbyists and law firms. Dye's thesis is further expanded upon in his works: The Irony of Democracy, Politics in America, Understanding Public Policy, and Who's Running America?

The idea of "The Revolt of the Elites" and "The Quiet Coup" by Financial Oligarchy

Previous consensus was that elite generally shares the idea that the society in which they live works best when all members of society can engage in upward mobility and improve their status via education and entrepreneurship. If there is significant upward mobility channels then members of society perceive themselves as belonging to the same team and care about ensuring that that team succeeds.

But in new" internationalized" world dominated by transnational corporations, the notion that a company or corporate executive of transnational corporation or professional (for example, IT professional) working is such a corporation is bound by an allegiance to their country of origin and work for its benefit is passé. The elites  of today are bound to their corporations, one another, not to the countries. And their greed is just overwhelming and decimates all other considerations such as patriotism and moral obligations. Amorality became a norm. 

People outside the elite became just tools, not compatriots and their standard of living means nothing.  This new generation of transnational elite are running the country like a regular for profit corporation in which they are both the members of the board and the controlling shareholders.

Not all elites are created equal. In the last half-century we have witnessed a dramatic expansion of American corporate power into every corner of the world, accompanied by an equally awesome growth in U.S. military power. The means the US elite is higher on pecking order then elites of other countries. That does not make it less transnational.  And this new power of the USA as a sole superpower state  is not used in traditional way to conquer and plunder the countries (like the USA did in Philippines, Mexico and other countries in the past). Instead it is used to support subservient regimes that favor business interests of transnational companies, putting those interests above interest of the country and its people. And if necessity remove non-complaint regimes by force The USA foreign policy now is essentially based on the coercive use of economic, political, and military power to expropriate other nations land, labor, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets in the interests of transnational corporation, not in the interest of the American people. Now the decisive factor in the selection of allies and foes is the respective actors' position on "free market policies" like trade liberalization, privatization and deregulation, that favor international corporations and related transnational part of elite. In fact, the USA recent "patterns of intervention" reveal no or little correlation between democratic ideals and the role the US plays in the affairs of other nations. Globalization that is very successfully enforced by the USA foreign policy establishment (which contrary to its critics proved to be very apt and competent in achieving its goals) amounts to a Quiet coup d'état by transnational capital over the peoples of the world, subverting democracy and national autonomy everywhere including the USA itself, while ushering in a new stage of international expropriation of resources in the interest of elite and sending the US citizens to die for the benefit of transnational corporations. the blowback for the US people includes a national security state, an inviolable Pentagon budget, and rampant PTSD among military personnel.  From this point of view the popular but simplistic notion that a neoconservative cabal headed by George W. Bush has somehow 'hijacked' the U.S. government looks extremely naive.

In effect the transnational elite behaves as an occupying  power, although less brutal, toward the US population as well.  In a way America  is just another casualty of the new transnational elite. Cutbacks in social programs, decaying infrastructure, declining wages, massive unemployment, and the rise of municipalities facing bankruptcy means not only that a republic in decline, but that unchecked appetites of transnational elite fit classic Marxist scenario -- to expropriate as much above minimum subsistence level as possible. 

An important additional factor is the a new elite despise commoners. As Christoper Lasch pointed out in his groundbreaking book: "The new elites, the professional classes in particular, regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension."

Playing with financial flows as if they are computer game lead to high levels of unemployment, which can no longer be regarded as aberrational, but due to labor arbitrage and dramatically improved communications became a necessary part of the working mechanisms of  modern capitalist mode of production.

Oligarchy became really audacious. They don't really care if they are legitimate. "Legitimate if you can, coerce if you have to, and accommodate if you must." Crass materialism and accumulation of excessive wealth became the primary goal. Privatization and sell of public assets -- the mean to achieve those goals.

They have what Dr. John McMurtry has termed "The Ruling Group Mind"  when reality is warped to  conform to manufactured delusions submerging the group and its members within a set of  hysteria, denials and projections...

The USA still has a privileged position in this "new world order" but no my much. As Napoleon Bonaparte observed

"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes.

Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain." 

"The Revolt of the Elites" by Christoper Lasch

Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) was a historian and penetrating social critic. He was the first who promoted the idea  that the values and attitudes of elites and those of the working classes have dramatically diverged to the extent that elite became a natural "fifth column" within the state and generally hostile to the nation-state well-being and especially to the well-being of lower strata of the population. 

In 1994, Lasch had come to believe that the economic and cultural elite of the United States, who historically has insured the continuity of a culture had lost faith in the traditional values (which that organized the country culture since its inception), and replaced then with unrestrained greed . He saw a threat to the continuation of Western civilization was not a mass revolt as envisioned by the pro-communist New Left of the 1960's, but a rejection of its liberal and pluralistic values by the educated elite. (see Ayn Rand and Objectivism Cult)

In the process of throwing off  elements of traditional morality, transnational elite adopted Nietzschean "Übermensch" mentality (typically in the form of Objectivism).  They also have mastered the art of the shameless transgression of authority for their own enrichment. This tendency became possible because of computer revolution. Computers dramatically increased the capability of transnational corporation making possible growth far beyond that was possible before them. They also enabled "hacking" on monetary system to the extent that was not possible in 1920, although financial elite were always capable to find a sure way to a huge crash to be bailed out by the state again and again. . 

Here is a couple of insightful reviews from Amazon:

According to Lasch, contrary to the thesis advanced by Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses, the revolt of the masses is over ending in the defeat of communism and is to be followed by a revolt of the cultural elite. Lasch advances arguments showing how we have reached a new stage of political development in America where the elite have become increasingly detached from the concerns of the common man. Unlike the elite of past ages, the former aristocracy of wealth and status, the new elite constitutes an aristocracy of merit. However, unlike in past ages, the new elite have increasingly alienated themselves from the common man. Lasch demonstrates how an increasing division between rich and poor, in which the working class has become alienated from the intellectual class of "symbolic analysts", has led to an utter sense of apathy among the American people.

In addition, the values of the new intellectual class are utterly different from the values of the man in the street. While the working class is fundamentally culturally conservative (a fact which Lasch has certainly latched onto) demanding moral certainties on such issues as homosexual rights, abortion, feminism, patriotism, and religion, the intellectual class demands political correctness advocating affirmative action, feminism, homosexual liberation, and promoting a radical (or rather, pseudo-radical) agenda.

Lasch seems to sympathize with the populists of old, who sought a sort of third way between the horrors of monopoly capitalism and the welfare state. Populists promoted the values of the common man, thus maintaining a cultural conservativism, while at the same time demonstrating an innate fear of bigness and far off bureaucracy. In addition, Lasch sees in communitarianism which seeks to emphasize the role of community, neighborhoods, and organic connectedness (contrary to libertarianism which emphasizes the individual at the whim of market forces and cultural pluralism) a new hope for the working class and cultural conservativism. Those who are opposed to communitarianism argue that based on previous experiments with small close knit communities (particularly emphasizing cases such as Calvin's Geneva and the New England Puritans but also small towns and neighborhoods) that these are oppressive. Obviously a balance needs to be struck; nevertheless, a re-emphasis on community and traditional values is obviously an important way to achieve improvement in human conditions. Unlike many right wing libertarians who may give lip service to "family values" but who then place the family at the whim of unfettered markets and corporate interests, Lasch argues for a restraint in order to facilitate family and community growth. Lasch shows how class remains an important division with equality of opportunity being merely a further means to oppress the working class. In addition, Lasch shows how the left uses the issue of race (extended arbitrarily to include all minorities and underprivileged - as defined by them, particularly so as to include whites) to create further difficulties for the common man, who is utterly alienated by political correctness. Lasch also argues that feminism remains an important force for the new class, because by allowing more women to enter the workforce they have achieved a situation whereby they perpetuate themselves. Lasch also turns his attention to education, showing how the modern system of compulsory education has failed, emphasizing the failures of such individuals as Horace Mann, who sought to eliminate politics from education. In addition, Lasch turns his attention to the university system, a hotbed of political correctness, multiculturalism, and postmodernist philosophies. Lasch shows how these philosophies have totally alienated any contact that universities may have with ordinary citizens, becoming more and more jargon-laden and specialized while at the same time promoting values completely contrary to those of the common man. Lasch refers to this as "academic pseudo-radicalism" to show how it differs distinctly from true radicalism, how it is fundamentally elitist, and how it further denies opportunities to the very minorities that it claims to so valiantly protect. However, unlike many of the other right wing critics of the university system, Lasch argues that corporations have continued to play a large role in the development of departments leading to a weakening of humanities programs. I found Lasch's criticisms of political correctness in the university system to be particularly cogent. While economically Lasch is opposed to unfettered capitalism, nevertheless he finds room to criticize the welfare state and government bureaucracy which promotes dependency and a culture of victimization. Lasch also shows how respect and shame have been misunderstood by the modern age. In addition, Lasch shows how a culture of narcissism has developed in this country, in which individuals have become excessively self interested and rely heavily on psychotherapies which promote self esteem and "happiness" as the highest good. Lasch also argues for a return to traditional religious values as a means for achieving hope and providing an inoculation against otherwise difficult times.

As a cultural conservative, I found Lasch's brand of populism/communitarianism to be particularly interesting. Lasch's analysis of the elites seems to make sense in light of their lack of contact with everyday reality, their lack of respect for common sense and the average person, and their lack of ties to nation and place. Our country is increasingly controlled by political elites in both parties who serve merely as tourists with little interest in America beyond what makes them money. In this respect, I believe Lasch's arguments to be particularly well thought out.

caroline miranda "caroline miranda" (los angeles) -

The aristocratic elitism of modern society's version of royalty--well-educated liberals, university administrators, race and class baiters and political elites who fear accusations of being insufficiently sophisticated and sensitive--are tossed off their thrones by Christopher Lasch. Lasch gives a clear and comprehensive overview of the social and political upheaval of the last 40 years that occurred under the noses of a bland and uncaring populace.

He explains the changes in America that led to morality becoming a code word for judgmentalism, standards becoming a code word for racism, multiculturalism becoming a code word for denigrating an evil European culture, the loss of family and neighborhood hailed as necessary for individual freedom, and the death of social cohesiveness, which never was mourned. "Most of our spiritual energy is devoted precisely to a campaign against shame and guilt, the object of which is to make people 'feel good about themselves.' The churches themselves have enlisted in this therapeutic exercise...," he notes.

Lest one think this is a Bill Bennett-type bromide, Lasch's observations extend far beyond the ain't-divorce-and-latchkey-children-terrible speech and extends to the paradox of modern society in which people have never been better off materially because of capitalism but so in danger of losing the core of their souls and their society's democratic values.

Individuality without community connection and the disintegration of unstated but commonly understood traditional rules and obligations that neighbors and a community once believed they owed other threaten democracy, Lasch believes.

When multiculturalism is seen from a limited tourist-type approach of folk dances and exotic food, when crime and violence in ethnic neighborhoods replace social cohesiveness, when impersonal malls and fast food restaurants displace informal gathering spots where people once discussed ideas and experiences, and when intimidation and name-calling replace reasoned debate, the country is deeply troubled, he notes. Worse yet, no one seems to find these developments alarming, so enmeshed they are in their structured public work worlds and isolated private home worlds.

Lasch pessimistically regrets the faltering of the foundation of a culture lost the very core of its democratic ideals: reasoned governance by an informed populace with a sense of community and ethics. He decries the usurpation of cultural norms instigated by elites, who rarely venture outside their smug circle of we-know-best-for-you compatriots and who refuse to acknowledge a need for individual responsibility and rather see the average, ordinary working person as a spigot for unending social spending and an unsophisticated inferior.

"...Identity politics has come to serve as a substitute for religion--or at least for the feeling of self-righteousness that is so commonly confused with religion," he says, while meanwhile decrying the modern tendency to use religion as a way to achieve personal happiness instead of as a guide to rightful living.

Lasch's clear and flowing writing style and his insights into the disorder and straying of modern society from its historical anchor make the book a timely and informative expose of many of the ills of modern society.

The Quiet Coup of Financial Oligarchy by Simon Johnson

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management. He wrote an influential piece in the Atlantic Magazine titled The Quiet Coup.  While in reality translation elite is much broader, he concentrated on financial elite (or financial oligarchy) as the dominant player among them and provided an interesting perspective on how they got dominant power position and fully control government of a particular country (in this case the USA was an example):

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders.

When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

In Russia, for instance, the private sector is now in serious trouble because, over the past five years or so, it borrowed at least $490 billion from global banks and investors on the assumption that the country’s energy sector could support a permanent increase in consumption throughout the economy. As Russia’s oligarchs spent this capital, acquiring other companies and embarking on ambitious investment plans that generated jobs, their importance to the political elite increased. Growing political support meant better access to lucrative contracts, tax breaks, and subsidies. And foreign investors could not have been more pleased; all other things being equal, they prefer to lend money to people who have the implicit backing of their national governments, even if that backing gives off the faint whiff of corruption.

But inevitably, emerging-market oligarchs get carried away; they waste money and build massive business empires on a mountain of debt. Local banks, sometimes pressured by the government, become too willing to extend credit to the elite and to those who depend on them. Overborrowing always ends badly, whether for an individual, a company, or a country. Sooner or later, credit conditions become tighter and no one will lend you money on anything close to affordable terms.

The downward spiral that follows is remarkably steep. Enormous companies teeter on the brink of default, and the local banks that have lent to them collapse. Yesterday’s “public-private partnerships” are relabeled “crony capitalism.” With credit unavailable, economic paralysis ensues, and conditions just get worse and worse. The government is forced to draw down its foreign-currency reserves to pay for imports, service debt, and cover private losses. But these reserves will eventually run out. If the country cannot right itself before that happens, it will default on its sovereign debt and become an economic pariah. The government, in its race to stop the bleeding, will typically need to wipe out some of the national champions—now hemorrhaging cash—and usually restructure a banking system that’s gone badly out of balance. It will, in other words, need to squeeze at least some of its oligarchs.

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.

Eventually, as the oligarchs in Putin’s Russia now realize, some within the elite have to lose out before recovery can begin. It’s a game of musical chairs: there just aren’t enough currency reserves to take care of everyone, and the government cannot afford to take over private-sector debt completely.

He lays out the threat that the American society faced now -- capture of the government by the finance industry:

"The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight—a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity was able to offer an effective response. But that first age of banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent."

"The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time."

In his NPR interview with Terry Gross he demonstrated that he does not understand the fact that the mousetrap is closed and that financial oligarchy the ruling elite of the country without any significant countervailing forces. So he dispensed a pretty naive advice (Fighting America's 'Financial Oligarchy):

"We face at least two major, interrelated problems," Johnson writes. "The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support."

Johnson insists the U.S. must temporarily nationalize banks so the government can "wipe out bank shareholders, replace failed management, clean up the balance sheets, and then sell the banks back to the private sector." But, Johnson adds, the U.S. government is unlikely to take these steps while the financial oligarchy is still in place.

Unless the U.S. breaks up its financial oligarchy, Johnson warns that America could face a crisis that "could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression — because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big."

A good discussion of his key ideas can be found at Jesse's Café Américain Sep 02, 2012 post  Reprise -- Simon Johnson On the Quiet Coup d'Etat in the Anglo-American Financial System

In an interview with MIT economist Simon Johnson which was posted here in February, 2009.

Have we heeded Simon Johnson's warning? Has he proven to be prescient? Is crony capitalism and the kleptocracy becoming bolder, more aggressive, ever more demanding?

"I think I'm signaling something a little bit shocking to Americans, and to myself, actually. Which is the situation we find ourselves in at this moment, this week, is very strongly reminiscent of the situations we've seen many times in other places.

But they're places we don't like to think of ourselves as being similar to. They're emerging markets. It's Russia or Indonesia or a Thailand type situation, or Korea. That's not comfortable. America is different. America is special. America is rich. And, yet, we've somehow find ourselves in the grip of the same sort of crisis and the same sort of oligarchs...

But, exactly what you said, it's a small group with a lot of power. A lot of wealth. They don't necessarily - they're not necessarily always the names, the household names that spring to mind, in this kind of context. But they are the people who could pull the strings. Who have the influence. Who call the shots...

...the signs that I see this week, the body language, the words, the op-eds, the testimony, the way they're treated by certain Congressional committees, it makes me feel very worried.

I have this feeling in my stomach that I felt in other countries, much poorer countries, countries that were headed into really difficult economic situation. When there's a small group of people who got you into a disaster, and who were still powerful. Disaster even made them more powerful. And you know you need to come in and break that power. And you can't. You're stuck....

The powerful people are the insiders. They're the CEOs of these banks. They're the people who run these banks. They're the people who pay themselves the massive bonuses at the end of the last year. Now, those bonuses are not the essence of the problem, but they are a symptom of an arrogance, and a feeling of invincibility, that tells you a lot about the culture of those organizations, and the attitudes of the people who lead them...

But it really shows you the arrogance, and I think these people think that they've won. They think it's over. They think it's won. They think that we're going to pay out ten or 20 percent of GDP to basically make them whole. It's astonishing....

...these people are throughout the system of government. They are very much at the forefront of the Treasury. The Treasury is apparently calling the shots on their economic policies.

This is a decisive moment. Either you break the power or we're stuck for a long time with this arrangement."

Bill Moyer's Journal - Interview with Simon Johnson, February, 2009.

Johnson also wrote a piece in the Atlantic Magazine titled The Quiet Coup. It may be worth re-reading.

Here is the introduction to this in The Fall of the American Republic: The Quiet Coup d'Etat in August 2010.

"I am not so optimistic that this reform is possible, because there has in fact been a soft coup d'etat in the US, which now exists in a state of crony corporatism that wields enormous influence over the media and within the government.

Let's be clear about this, the oligarchs are flush with victory, and feel that they are firmly in control, able to subvert and direct any popular movement to the support of their own fascist ends and unshakable will to power.

This is the contempt in which they hold the majority of American people and the political process: the common people are easily led fools, and everyone else who is smart enough to know better has their price. And they would beggar every middle class voter in the US before they will voluntarily give up one dime of their ill gotten gains.

But my model says that the oligarchs will continue to press their advantages, being flushed with victory, until they provoke a strong reaction that frightens everyone, like a wake up call, and the tide then turns to genuine reform."

As far as I can tell, we are right on track for a very bad time of it. And you might be surprised at how far a belief in exceptionalism and arrogant superiority can go before it finally ends, or more likely, falls.

Revolt of the Rich by Mike Lofgren

An interesting variation of the quiet coup theory was advanced by Mike Lofgren in his influence article Revolt of the Rich (TAC, August 27, 2012)

It was 1993, during congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican congressmen who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. To this day, I remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens.”

That was only the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness, so at the time it seemed like a striking and novel statement.

At the end of the Cold War many writers predicted the decline of the traditional nation-state. Some looked at the demise of the Soviet Union and foresaw the territorial state breaking up into statelets of different ethnic, religious, or economic compositions. This happened in the Balkans, the former Czechoslovakia, and Sudan. Others predicted a weakening of the state due to the rise of Fourth Generation warfare and the inability of national armies to adapt to it. The quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan lend credence to that theory. There have been numerous books about globalization and how it would eliminate borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.

I do not mean secession by physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens from time to time—for example, Erik Prince, who was born into a fortune, is related to the even bigger Amway fortune, and made yet another fortune as CEO of the mercenary-for-hire firm Blackwater, moved his company (renamed Xe) to the United Arab Emirates in 2011. What I mean by secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot.

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?

Being in the country but not of it is what gives the contemporary American super-rich their quality of being abstracted and clueless. Perhaps that explains why Mitt Romney’s regular-guy anecdotes always seem a bit strained. I discussed this with a radio host who recounted a story about Robert Rubin, former secretary of the Treasury as well as an executive at Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup. Rubin was being chauffeured through Manhattan to reach some event whose attendees consisted of the Great and the Good such as himself. Along the way he encountered a traffic jam, and on arriving to his event—late—he complained to a city functionary with the power to look into it. “Where was the jam?” asked the functionary. Rubin, who had lived most of his life in Manhattan, a place of east-west numbered streets and north-south avenues, couldn’t tell him. The super-rich who determine our political arrangements apparently inhabit another, more refined dimension.

To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than $500 billion dollars in annual federal, state, and local education funding into private hands — meaning themselves and their friends. What Halliburton did for U.S. Army logistics, school privatizers will do for public education. A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.

In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an army pack. Now the military is for suckers from the laboring classes whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to get Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. The sentiment among the super-rich towards the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse.

Stephen Schwarzman, the hedge fund billionaire CEO of the Blackstone Group who hired Rod Stewart for his $5-million birthday party, believes it is the rabble who are socially irresponsible. Speaking about low-income citizens who pay no income tax, he says: “You have to have skin in the game. I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”

But millions of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes do pay federal payroll taxes. These taxes are regressive, and the dirty little secret is that over the last several decades they have made up a greater and greater share of federal revenues. In 1950, payroll and other federal retirement contributions constituted 10.9 percent of all federal revenues. By 2007, the last “normal” economic year before federal revenues began falling, they made up 33.9 percent. By contrast, corporate income taxes were 26.4 percent of federal revenues in 1950. By 2007 they had fallen to 14.4 percent. So who has skin in the game?

... ... ...

Since the first ziggurats rose in ancient Babylonia, the so-called forces of order, stability, and tradition have feared a revolt from below. Beginning with Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre after the French Revolution, a whole genre of political writings—some classical liberal, some conservative, some reactionary—has propounded this theme. The title of Ortega y Gasset’s most famous work, The Revolt of the Masses, tells us something about the mental atmosphere of this literature.

But in globalized postmodern America, what if this whole vision about where order, stability, and a tolerable framework for governance come from, and who threatens those values, is inverted? What if Christopher Lasch came closer to the truth in The Revolt of the Elites, wherein he wrote, “In our time, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy, not the masses”? Lasch held that the elites—by which he meant not just the super-wealthy but also their managerial coat holders and professional apologists — were undermining the country’s promise as a constitutional republic with their prehensile greed, their asocial cultural values, and their absence of civic responsibility.

Lasch wrote that in 1995. Now, almost two decades later, the super-rich have achieved escape velocity from the gravitational pull of the very society they rule over. They have seceded from America.

Mike Lofgren also authored the book The Party Is Over How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. Here is quote from one of Amazon reviews:

Over time, that sense of entitlement insensibly changed Democrats into what we in the Pentagon would call ENABLERS of Republicans. The Democratic enablers unwittingly played a crucial role in the demolition of the American dream, not unlike that played by infiltration troops in blitzkrieg. Infiltration troops soften up the front by slipping through defenses to find or create holes and weak areas for the tanks to roar thru to reap chaos and destruction deep in the enemy's rear area. Only in this case, the rear area being ruined is the American middle class, and the flood of tanks is taken up by the flood money supplied by the oligarchs who feather their nests by buying Democrats as well as Republicans in one seamless auction.

Put bluntly, to protect a sense of hereditary entitlement to the power that accompanied the coattails of FDR and the New Deal, Democrats abandoned their heritage and moved to Wall Street, Big Pharma, Defense, etc., and in so doing, insensibly mutated into faux Republicans. If you doubt this, look at the enervating, quasi-neoliberal bloviating by the self-inflating Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) or the cynical triangulations and warmongerings of Messrs. Clinton and Obama. The abdication of traditional Democratic principles gave Republican crazies more room to get even crazier, and together the faux Republicans and the real crazy Republicans reinforced each other to create a rightward shift in the American political dynamic that unleashed the emergence of a new gilded age, together with the emergence of a legalized plutocracy that criminal Russian oligarchs would envy. And this mutation came about in a remarkably short time of 30 to 40 years.

In so doing, the Democrats sold out their most important constituency, i.e., John Q. Average American, and colluded in the historic swindle that brought the great American middle class to the brink of impoverishment and debt peonage, a condition some times referred to chillingly in the tone-deaf salons of Versailles on the Potomac as the "new normal."

If you think collusion is too strong a term, I would urge you to think about Bill Clinton's (the DLC's choice for president in the 1992 election) collusion with Republicans in 1999 to nullify of the Depression era Glass-Steagle Act -- one of monuments of reform in the New Deal. This nullification was one of the main deregulatory "initiatives" that unleashed the greedy excesses that led to the 2007-8 financial meltdown. When he left office, Bill Clinton, by the way, did not pick up his grips and retire to a modest house in Independence Missouri like Harry Truman; he chose instead to join the plutocratic elite, where he is now well on his way to becoming a card-carrying member of the one-tenth of one-percent club of the mega rich. The bottom line: the Democrats' sense of entitlement and the consequent corruption of their principles have been a necessary, if not sufficient, condition in the emergence of the current political-economy that is destroying what is left of the middle class in our good ole USA. The reader would make a great mistake if he or she allowed the hilariously disgusting Republican hijinks described by Lofgren to brand his book as an anti-Republican polemic written by a convert, and miss his main message.

Mike, of course, states clearly in his title that his subject is how the madness of the Republicans and the uselessness of the Democrats reinforced each other over the last 30 to 40 years to hose the American People. It is the degenerate nature of their symbiotic relationship that is his thesis and should be the Left's call to arms.

I do not count on this happening, however. The faux Republicans are far more likely to try to exploit the embarrassment of riches in Mike's book for their narrow short-term political advantage, in yet another demonstration of the hypocrisy and opportunism that are central pillars propping up their losing mentality.

Neo-classical economics smoke screen in Yves Smith’s Econned

Chicago neoclassical economics school is a well known pseudo-science school, one of the pillars of Economic Lysenkoism (along with  Supply Side Economics).  This is an economic cult, an ideology of financial oligarchy. So it is more proper to it not neoclassical, but as aptly suggested by Bill Black “theoclassical”   or  Chicago Ponzinomics.  It is a neoliberal phenomenon, not neoclassical. Like in Lysenkoism, and high demand sects anybody who strays from the cult is in danger of being ostracized. As Mark Thoma observed:

Some years ago, when I first presented an empirical paper questioning some of the conventional views on trade to a high profile economics conference, a member of the audience (a very prominent economist and a former co-author of mine) shocked me with the question "why are you doing this?" 

There is a useful part of neoclassical economy related to thinking about an aggregate social phenomena in terms of costs and benefits of individual participants, and that can be sometimes (but not always) as a useful supplementary approach. Bastartized version of this notion which tries to imply cost-benefit motives in all human interactions is called Freakonomics. Still you can view some choices people make as tradeoffs between desired goals and social constraints (which can interpreted as costs). 

Still neoclassical economics as practiced by Chicago school  is driven by ideology and financed by financial oligarchy.

And like Trofim Lysenko and his followers those people are as close to criminals as one can get.  Like Rabbies and Catolic Priests can be criminals, the same is true about people in academic mantles. Corruption of academics is nothing new, but corruption of economists is a very dangerous mass form of  white-collar crime as close to Madoff  and his associates as one can get. This is the way we should look at the Chicago schools: kind of incarnation of Lysenko henchmen or, if you wish, Chicago mafia in a university environment. Actually similar way of thinking can be applied to Harvard (see Harvard Mafia, Andrei Shleifer and the economic rape of Russia ).

Is neoclassical economics a mafia? Sort of, says Christopher Hayes in a very well-written and very interesting piece in The Nation. He says orthodox economists are a close-knit group and are quick to penalize those among them or from outside who overstep the boundaries. Here is an excerpt:

So extreme is the marginalization of heterodox economists, most people don't even know they exist. Despite the fact that as many as one in five professional economists belongs to a professional association that might be described as heterodox, the phrase "heterodox economics" has appeared exactly once in the New York Times since 1981. During that same period "intelligent design," a theory endorsed by not a single published, peer-reviewed piece of scholarship, has appeared 367 times.

It doesn't take much to call forth an impressive amount of bile from heterodox economists toward their mainstream brethren. John Tiemstra, president of the Association for Social Economics and a professor at Calvin College, summed up his feelings this way: "I go to the cocktail parties for my old schools, MIT and Oberlin, and people are all excited about Freakonomics. I kind of wince and go off to another corner or have another drink." After the EPI gathering, Peter Dorman, an economist at Evergreen State College with a gentle, bearded air, related an e-mail exchange he once had with Hal Varian, a well-respected Berkeley economist who's moderately liberal but firmly committed to the neoclassical approach. Varian wrote to Dorman that there was no point in presenting "both sides" of the debate about trade, because one side--the view that benefits from unfettered trade are absolute--was like astronomy, while any other view was like astrology. "So I told him I didn't buy the traditional trade theory," Dorman said. "'Was I an astrologer?' And he said yes!"

Please note that some of the most close to Lysenkoism figures at Chicago, such as Cochrane and Fama, are in the business school rather than the econ department.   And they were key enablers of  Goldman Sacks and Co. looters. Deregulation wave was promoted by right wing extremists who recruited corrupted academicians like Milton Friedman to perform specific role of Trojan horse to undermine New Deal.  He managed to made the "invisible hand" a prefect pocket picker!  And the method of spreading influence was essentially borrowed from the Lysenko book: control the economic department and those who went to college and studied those theories in the 70’s and 80’s would then go to Wall St and Government and enact them. Control the key academic magazines and conferences and any aspiring economists need either to conform or leave the field.

Here is one telling comment about corruption of those modern day Lysenkoists in the blog Crooked Timber

ogmb 09.18.09 at 12:01 pm

...Cochrane is the AQR Capital Management Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth [formerly Graduate] School of Business. Which incidentally also makes his whining that Krugman ‘accuses us literally of adopting ideas for pay, selling out for “sabbaticals at the Hoover institution” and fat “Wall street paychecks”’ a bit malnourished in the introspection department, coming from someone who holds a chair sponsored by a quantitative trading firm at a school sponsored by the founder of an EMH investment firm. (Nevermind that Krugman never, literally or otherwise, accused Cochrane and his peers of selling out to Wall Street…)

In this ideology Milton Friedman is playing the role of false prophet and lesser "giants" producing continued steam of detached from reality papers and speeches. It also includes several clown who as Krugman noted have some qualities of irritable adolescents, but actually are proper heirs of Academician Trofim Lysenko:

And that same adolescent quality was evident in the reactions to the Obama administration’s attempts to deal with the crisis — as Brad DeLong points out, people like Robert Lucas and John Cochrane (not to mention Richard Posner, who isn’t a macroeconomist but gets his take from his colleagues) didn’t say that when serious scholars like Christina Romer based policy recommendations on Keynesian economics, they were wrong; the freshwater crowd declared that anyone with Keynesian views was, by definition, either a fool or intellectually dishonest. So the freshwater outrage over finding their own point of view criticized is, you might think, a classic case of people who can dish it out but can’t take it.

But it’s actually even worse than that.

When freshwater macro came in, there was an active purge of competing views: students were not exposed, at all, to any alternatives. People like Prescott boasted that Keynes was never mentioned in their graduate programs. And what has become clear in the recent debate — for example, in the assertion that Ricardian equivalence rules out any effect from government spending changes, which is just wrong — is that the freshwater side not only turned Keynes into an unperson, but systematically ignored the work being done in the New Keynesian vein. Nobody who had read, say, Obstfeld and Rogoff would have been as clueless about the logic of temporary fiscal expansion as these guys have been. Freshwater macro became totally insular. And hence the most surprising thing in the debate over fiscal stimulus: the raw ignorance that has characterized so many of the freshwater comments. Above all, we’ve seen the phenomenon of well-known economists “rediscovering” Say’s Law and the Treasury view (the view that government cannot affect the overall level of demand), not because they’ve transcended the Keynesian refutation of these views, but because they were unaware that there had ever been such a debate. It's a sad story. And the even sadder thing is that it’s very unlikely that anything will change: freshwater macro will get even more insular, and its devotees will wonder why nobody in the real world of policy and action pays any attention to what they say.

The proper label for neo-classical economics might be "theological voluntarism", the term which has some academic aura... There are several issues here:

1. Excessive dependence or even open prostitution to the financial oligarchy. It's deplorable but probably unavoidable as the grip of financial community of economic profession does not requires any additional commentary. Also there are always exceptions to the rule.
2. Mathematical masturbation instead of science. When, for example, a paper that propose even a linear equation (or God forbid differential equation) does not provide any estimate of errors of input data such a paper in a narrow sense can be called mathematical masturbation. Classic example here would be any paper that has inflation as an input variable. In a more broad sense this occurs when research paper contains results or mathematical model which rely on idealized, with little connections to reality postulates about the structure of economic activities. Many supply/demand models belong to this category as they rely on existence of equilibrium between supply and demand and/or are ignoring Minsky instability hypothesis. Most neo-classical economics can be called a theory in a desperate search for suitable reality.
3. Relying on discredited and openly anti-scientific assumptions or hypothesis. Examples include, but not limited to "supply side voodoo", "monetarism", "Taylor rule", "permanent equilibrium fallacy", "invisible hand" (both as a postulate about absence of manipulation of the markets and the idea that "free markets lead to efficient outcomes" disregarding the role of government and almost permanent government intervention as well as issues of economic rent and taxation of participants to support an aristocracy or oligarchy).

Chicago (or as some called it freshwater) school specializes in deification of the market (often in the form of "invisible hand" deification, see The Invisible Hand, Trumped by Darwin - NYTimes.com). 

Econned

Yves Smith’s in her book Econned, How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism discussed the role of corrupted economics professor in establishing and supporting the rule of financial oligarchy. Here is one Amazon review

kievite:

 Neoclassical economics as a universal door opener for financial oligarchy, September 25, 2010

There are many good reviews of the book published already and I don't want to repeat them. But I think there is one aspect of the book that was not well covered in the published reviews and which I think is tremendously important and makes the book a class of its own: the use of neoclassical economics as a universal door opener for financial oligarchy. I hope that the term "econned" will became a new word in English language.

Neoclassical economics has become the modern religion with its own priests, sacred texts and a scheme of salvation. It was a successful attempt to legitimize the unlimited rule of financial oligarchy by using quasi-mathematical, oversimplified and detached for reality models. The net result is a new brand of theology, which proved to be pretty powerful in influencing people and capturing governments ("cognitive regulatory capture"). Like Marxism, neoclassical economics is a triumph of ideology over science. It was much more profitable though: those who were the most successful in driving this Trojan horse into the gates were remunerated on the level of Wall Street traders.

Economics is essentially a political science. And politics is about perception. Neo-classical economics is all about manipulating the perception in such a way as to untie hands of banking elite to plunder the country (and get some cramps from the table for themselves). Yves contributed to our understanding how "These F#@king Guys" as Jon Steward defined them, economics professors from Chicago, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and some other places warmed by flow of money from banks for specific services provided managed to serve as a fifth column helping Wall Street to plunder the country. The rhetorical question that a special counsel to the U.S. Army, Joseph Welch, asked Senator McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency?" applies.

The main effect of neoclassical economics is elevating unregulated ( "free" in neoclassic economics speak) markets into the key mechanism for distribution of the results of economic activity with banks as all-powerful middlemen and sedating any opposition with pseudo-mathematical mumbo-jumbo. Complexity was used as a powerful smoke screen to conceal greed and incompetence. As a result financial giants were able to loot almost all sectors of economics with impunity and without any remorse, not unlike the brutal conquerors in Middle Ages.

The key to the success of this nationwide looting is that people should be brainwashed/indoctrinated to believe that by some alchemical process, maximum level of greed results in maximum prosperity for all. Collapse of the USSR helped in this respect driving the message home: look how the alternative ended, when in reality the USSR was a neo-feudal society. But the exquisite irony here is that Bolsheviks-style ideological brainwashing was applied very successfully to the large part of the US population (especially student population) using neo-classical economics instead of Marxism (which by-and-large was also a pseudo-religious economic theory with slightly different priests and the plan of salvation ;-). The application of badly constructed mathematical models proved to be a powerful tool for distorting reality in a certain, desirable for financial elite direction. One of the many definitions of Ponzi Scheme is "transfer liabilities to unwilling others." The use of detached from reality mathematical models fits this definition pretty well.

The key idea here is that neoclassical economists are not and never have been scientists: much like Marxist economists they always were just high priests of a dangerous cult -- neoliberalism -- and they are more then eager to stretch the truth for the benefit of the sect (and indirectly to their own benefit). All-in-all this is not unlike Lysenkoism: state support was and still is here, it is just working more subtly via ostracism, without open repressions. Look at Sheller story on p.9.

I think that one of lasting insights provided by Econned is the demonstration how the US society was taken hostage by the ideological views of the neoclassical economic school that has dominated the field at least for 30 or may be even 50 years. And that this ideological coup d'état was initiated and financed by banking establishment who was a puppeteer behind the curtain. This is not unlike the capture of Russia by Bolsheviks supported by German intelligence services (and Bolsheviks rule lasted slightly longer -- 65 years). Bolsheviks were just adherents of similar wrapped in the mantle of economic theory religious cult, albeit more dangerous and destructive for the people of Russia then neoclassical economics is for the people of the USA. Quoting Marx we can say "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce".

That also means that there is no easy way out of the current situation. Ideologies are sticky and can lead to the collapse of society rather then peaceful evolution.

Amorality and psychopathic tendencies

It might well be that for certain part of this new transnational elite with their "cult of greed" can be characterized by a callous disregard for other people feelings typical for psychopaths. Moreover for new, first generation members of this elite those psychopathic tendencies (which does not mean that the person is an outright psychopath, or sociopath)  might be a powerful engine in climb to the top and can play a important, if not decisive role in their success. They look more like "well compensated" sociopaths. See Authoritarians and Corporate Psychopaths as Toxic Managers for more information about typical traits that define this condition.

 There’s a section in the book The Psychopath Test, in which British journalist Jon Ronson  does the psychopath test on "Chainsaw Al" Dunlop, the former CEO of Sunbeam who was notorious for gleefully laying off thousands of workers to make more money.  And he redefines a great number of the items on the checklist as business positives. He turned the psychopath test into “Who Moved My Cheese?” The thing that’s so startling about his story is that the more ruthlessly and remorselessly psychopathically he behaved when he was heading up Sunbeam and the company before Sunbeam — Scott — the more he was rewarded. As Times reported on 2011/09/20:

One in 25 bosses may be psychopaths — a rate that’s four times greater than in the general population — according to research by psychologist and executive coach Paul Babiak.

Babiak studied 203 American corporate professionals who had been chosen by their companies to participate in a management training program. He evaluated their psychopathic traits using a version of the standard psychopathy checklist developed by Robert Hare, an expert in psychopathy at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Psychopaths, who are characterized by being completely amoral and concerned only with their own power and selfish pleasures, may be overrepresented in the business environment because it plays to their strengths. Where greed is considered good and profitmaking is the most important value, psychopaths can thrive.

Just look at the at their grandiosity, their pathological lying, their lack of empathy, their lack of remorse of the financial elite demonstrated during the crisis of 2008.  I know there’s a danger in seeing psychopaths everywhere, but sometimes in this case it’s just impossible not to see some alarming correlations. Look at the apostils of deregulation in the USA such as:

• Ronald Reagan 
• Alan Greenspan
• Phil Gramm
• Robert Rubin
• Larry Summers
• Bush II
• Bill Clinton
• Sandy Weill

Shaming the poor as a new sport for the transnational elites and subservient politicians

Amorality and psychopathic tendencies of new transnational elite and a special breed of corrupted politicians who serve them are perfectly demonstrated in the new sport for crooked politicians, especially from the part of the US Republican Party which can be called neo-confederates.

Barbara Ellen in her Guardian column (Guardian March 2, 2013) pointed out that the Methodists, the United Reformed Church, the Church of Scotland and the Baptist Union have joined forces to publish a study called The Lies We Tell Ourselves. It highlights myths surrounding people and poverty, including Iain Duncan Smith's much trumpeted "families out of work for three generations" line (which, it turns out, has never been backed up by data).

The report argues that the government is "deliberately misrepresenting" the poor, blaming them for their circumstances while ignoring more complex reasons, including policy deficiencies. Moreover, they feel that this scapegoating is the result of collusion between politicians, the media and the public.

Increasingly, the shame is being taken out of poor-shaming. It didn't seem so long ago that most people would think twice about denigrating fellow citizens who were having a hard time. These days, it appears to have been sanctioned as a new sport for the elites. A politician is one thing but these attitudes are spreading and hardening among ordinary people too. Indeed, poverty seems a trigger to inspire hate speech that would be quickly denounced if it related to race or gender.

Is this our new default setting – that the needy are greedy? This chimes with a slew of government policies that appear to be founded on notions of bulletproof self-reliance, making no allowances for circumstances or sheer bad luck, and which many would require huge amounts of help to put into practice, never mind sustain. Meanwhile, the more fortunate are invited to pour scorn upon anyone who fails.

While there are people whose problem are self-inflicted for many this is not true. In reality substantial number of poor are former people of modest means hit by a serious disease and who run out of options.

And shaming poor is a pretty safe sport. The poor are poor. They have no money, no voice, no representatives, and no means to defend their interests. Poverty is a like collapse of domino – once the first domino falls, all others follow the suit. In such circumstances, if a group of people are "deliberately misrepresents" the real situation with the poor, then there's precious little they can do about it. The churches got it right – if anything, the truth seems so much worse that it must surely be time to put the shame back into poor-shaming.

Poor-shamers are bullies, and right now they're getting away with it.

To what extent new transnational elite is monolithic ?

State interests and interest of large social groups are "projected" on the elite making is less monolithic then otherwise it might be. Here is come to a complex question of "national elite" vs. "transnational elite". This question is often discussed under the banner of  "Fifth column".  In this sense   Color revolutions  can be viewed as attempts to "harmonize" elite with the requirements of international corporations plus geostrategic interests of the counties which "home" those corporations.  See for example Russian experience in "white Revolution" of 2011-2012

In this sense Civil war can be viewed as a condition in which two parts of the elite in the same country can't reconcile their differences with peaceful means. That's definitely true about the US Civil War. 

Existence of "ideologically charged" and openly nationalistic parties which periodically come to power in various countries somewhat undermines the thesis about international elite dominance, unless you assume that such parties represent "blowback" of internationalization of capital and come to power to protect the interest of some parts of the national elite threatened by "more international" (aka comprador) part of the elite. Which is historically  true for NDSP (with military-industrial complex as the main supported of them as a tool against communists as well as against Jewish financial oligarchy) as well as for Bolsheviks in Russia (if we assume the theory that the initial core of Bolsheviks movement before Stalin purges was Russian Jewish intelligencia supported by the USA (via Trotsky connections) and some other countries (paradoxically Germany during the period of WWI; it was Germany that "delivered" to Russia by via a special train  Bolshevik leaders caught at the beginning of WWI in various European countries including Germany, in violation of the their status as "interned" nationals for the duration of the First World War )).

"Resource nationalism" is another close, but more modern phenomenon

Nationalism is probably the most potent force for undermining the unity of international elite.

The problem of degeneration of elite

The elite in most European countries and the USA consists not of the "best of the breed". It became more like the result of adverse selection.  Conversion to neoliberalism just made this problems more acute. At this point the problem of degeneration of elite comes to the forefront. George Bush II was clear a warning in the respect. Obama might well be the second bell. In criticizing the degeneration of the current US or GB elite, we should not forget that such processes are not new and in the past were the cause of several revolutions. Financial oligarchy of the neoliberal society is only a new name for aristocrats. And in the past the self-serving, decadent and corrupted upper class was the important source of instability in the society.  level of degeneration  of European elite which clearly demonstrated the fact the Cameron managed to came to power in GB in many respects makes the situation even more fragile than in the USA. Here is one telling quote (The EU's ugly kindergarten of intellectually challenged clowns):

It is generally accepted that "politics is the art of the possible" and yet the EU leaders are clearly engaged in the art of the absolutely impossible. The fact that they are all pretending like this is going to have some useful impact is truly a sign of how much the EU leadership has degenerated over the years. Can you imagine Helmut Schmidt, Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand or Francisco Franco engaging in that kind of infantile nonsense? All these leaders had their bad aspects, but at least none of them were clowns, whereas when I look at the current EU leadership, especially Van Rumpey, Adners Fogh Rasmussen or José Manuel Barroso I get the feeling that I am looking at some ugly kindergarten of intellectually challenged clowns and, frankly, I can understand Mrs Nuland's feelings.

Degeneration of elites lead the denunciation of the elites, when to a large body of civil population became clear that the upper class is no longer fulfill their function, do not care about the people, and, in case of neoliberal elite, is not even the part of the same society -- it acquired features of a foreign, parasitizing on the national body occupation force.

If the elite is not regenerates itself, catastrophic crisis in Society became more likely.  The state itself became a “quasi-state”: endowed with juridical statehood, yet lacking the political will, institutional capacity, and organized authority to protect human rights and provide socioeconomic welfare for the population. In this case a parallel political authority -- a shadow state replaces the "regular" stat – whose defining characteristic is the change of the role of security services in the governance of the state. See National Security State. Dissolution of the USSR was particularly connected with such a level of degeneration of the elite as well as betrayal of security services with KGB brass changing sides and adopting neoliberalism as a new ideology. 

Here is one telling comment from Moon of Alabama discussion:

jayc | Aug 29, 2014 3:12:01 PM | 13

When Cameron started taking selfies at Mandela's funeral it undermined any remaining notion that he was some kind of leader, he was rather revealed as a mediocre middle-management suckup.

Western political leadership is chock full of these types. Policy is being developed at another level than elected representatives and middle-management is there to sell the policy.

I'm not sure NATO wants a full shooting proxy war - they don't care much about Ukraine or its people and would be content with new bases and new weapons programs.

The intent, it seems, is to isolate Russia from Europe and hope that the effects from sanctions could produce some sort of regime change or fracture the country into territories It seems that the Kiev regime has done just about everything possible to provoke a Russian invasion.

Western politicians and media, by their open hysteria and constant insistence that Russia has "invaded" and shot down a passenger plane, are invoking a sort of nostalgia for the Afghanistan invasion of 1978 or the KAL007 shoot down, when the evil empire stood revealed and the brave middle managers could rush to the barricades.

Unfortunately for them, Russia hasn't played that game and because they are mediocre the West's political leadership cannot summon the imagination for what to do next.

Crest | Aug 29, 2014 6:26:49 PM | 47 

@jayc 13

"Russia hasn't played that game and because they are mediocre the West's political leadership cannot summon the imagination for what to do next."

This is a great line. Western elites have no imagination, because of a generation of brutally purging all dissent from the neoliberalism/financialist imperalism paradigm.

If you don't believe in the Washington consensus, you don't exist.

They simply can't think of anything better, and they won't allow themselves to try.

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• 20200703* I don't think we can assume that even now Trump actually has control of the FBI; it is still in hands of Obama faction ( Jul 03, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20200701 : The elites have two or three passports, own businesses overseas, own houses. ( Jul 01, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200626 : Gaslighting Nobody, The Blob Struggles for Primacy by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos ( Jun 24, 2020 , www.theamericanconservative.com )
• 20200624 : Orwell called this "newspeak". That's now the language of libtards. ( Jun 24, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200622 : At the root of America's economic crisis lies a moral crisis: the decline of civic virtue among America's political and economic elite ( Jun 22, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20200619 : Nixon-Trump vs. the Strategy of Tension by Pepe Escobar ( Jun 19, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200616 : The American elites wanted and, after the revolution got, the power to enrich themselves. Hence the birth of lobbyists simultaneous with the birth of the American nation state. IMO the constitution was about as meaningful to the leaders of the revolution as campaign promises are to contemporary politicians ( Jun 16, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20200616* "That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it." by George Carlin ( Jun 16, 2020 , www.youtube.com ) [Recommended]
• 20200616* Krystal Ball: The American dream is dead, good riddance ( Jun 12, 2020 , www.youtube.com ) [Recommended]
• 20200616 : Neoliberalism and the USA: Americans are no longer a moral and religious people even though they present the trappings of such ( Jun 16, 2020 , www.zerohedge.com )
• 20200616 : Isn't that how it was always done throughout history? The rich control the less-rich who control the less-rich - using his matryoshka example ( Jun 16, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20200615* Full Special Investigation - Donald Trump vs The Deep State ( Jun 15, 2020 , www.youtube.com ) [Recommended]
• 20200614* Jeane J. Kirkpatrick 30 Years Unheeded ( Jun 14, 2020 , nationalinterest.org ) [Recommended]
• 20200614 : Extracts from Kunstler's "Nemesis Rising!" concerning pedophile Jeffrey Epstein ( Jun 14, 2020 , www.serendipity.li )
• 20200613 : David Stockman on How the Deep State Really Works ( Jun 13, 2020 , www.serendipity.li )
• 20200612 : HARPER THE REAL TERROR THREAT THAT TOO FEW UNDERSTAND - Sic Semper Tyrannis ( Jun 12, 2020 , turcopolier.typepad.com )
• 20200609 : 07 June 2020 at 07:35 PM ( Jun 09, 2020 , turcopolier.typepad.com )
• 20200609 : A member of neoliberal elite as a snob -- the issue of terminology ( Jun 09, 2020 , www.theamericanconservative.com )
• 20200608 : The Systemic Collapse Of The US Society Has Begun by the Saker ( Jun 08, 2020 , www.zerohedge.com )
• 20200608 : Why do the empires or at least very successful countries collapse? The answer is actually very simple. Because the elites of such successful entities lose touch with reality. ( Jun 08, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200603* The first rule of political hypocrisy: Justify your actions by the need to protect the weak and vulnerable ( Jun 26, 2019 , www.unz.com ) [Recommended]
• 20200603* The difference between old and new schools of jounalism: old-school journalism was like being assigned the task of finding out what "1+1 =?" and the task was to report the answer was "1." Now the task would be to report that "Some say it is 1, some say it is 2, some say it is 3." ( Jun 20, 2019 , www.counterpunch.org ) [Recommended]
• 20200603* Requiem to Russiagate: this was the largest and the most successful attempt to gaslight the whole US population ever attempted by CIA and Clinton wing of Dems by CJ Hopkins ( Apr 02, 2019 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20200602 : As elections come and go, it is simply about one group of elites replacing the other. The intertwined interests between the two groups are much greater than those between the victorious one and the electorate who vote for them ( Jun 02, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20200531 : Russiagate is a clash between the old-guard/money represented currently by Trump and allied with him anti-globalist nationalists, and, on the other side, garden-variety globalists and neolibs including the new-money represented by big-tech billionaires, investment banks, private equity, CIA, the State Department and a part of MIC as well as the dominant in Democratic party Clinton wing ( May 31, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20200523 : Neoliberal ideology is often presented as a natural state. This deception is a central feature of neoliberalism, acting as a way of abdicating responsibility for harmful and selfish actions of financial oligarchy, and to prevent challenges to the financial oligarchy rule and debt slavery ( May 23, 2020 , discussion.theguardian.com )
• 20200522 : Is the US form of government a bribery via political parties, masquerading as democracy to keep the proles in line? ( May 22, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20200515 : America has a surveillance state but it refuses to use it to save lives. Instead, it uses it to save Wall Street and protect the extractive elite from any TRUE REAL threat. ( May 15, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200514 : The Deep State doesn't care about the unimportant internecine squabbles of the two parties as long as their important issues (wealth and power) are advanced. ( May 14, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200506 : Welcome to the era of the Great Disillusionment by Jonathan Cook ( May 06, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200505 : How the Dems have cancelled democracy and decency ( May 05, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20200502 : Michael Flynn case should be dismissed to preserve justice ( Apr 30, 2020 , www.informationclearinghouse.info )
• 20200501 : Deep State as Deep Corruption. ( May 01, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200424 : How the ruling elite switches from unity to "spiders in the can" type of fights ( Apr 24, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200424 : Last, but most certainly not least, the Europeans will find out (and some already have), that the US literally does not give a damn about not only regular Europeans, but even about the European ruling classes ( Apr 24, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200417* Barr just said the Russia collusion probe was a travesty, had no basis and was intended to sabotage Trump. ( Apr 17, 2020 , turcopolier.typepad.com ) [Recommended]
• 20200414* The media has been largely taken over by a criminal gang (Operation Mockingbird), and the same gang has taken over the Democrat party ( Apr 14, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20200405 : Hegemonic ideologies tend to naturalize socioculturally-generated pathologies, often dismissing them as "human nature." ( Apr 05, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20200403 : Elites who are not aligned with the actual productive activities of society and are engaged primarily in activities which are contrary to production, are decadent. ( Apr 03, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20200402 : Pelosi now looks completely idiotic with her impeachment trial ( Apr 02, 2020 , thehill.com )
• 20200329 : 2020 election are the ultimate US Presidential election: the election in which people really have no one to vote for. Not even for fake choice like Trump and Hillary like in 2016. Absolutely none. It is "Perfect Election" ( Mar 29, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200329 : Its somewhat bemusing that we discuss American politics ad nauseam, when it's been amply demonstrated that voters in the USA cannot make changes to government policy through their electoral process. ( Mar 29, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200328* Neoliberal priorities: plenty of USG resources for Pentagon and to run pandemic war games but no money to create the most basic stockpiles (thermometers, face masks, gloves) ( Mar 21, 2020 , caucus99percent.com ) [Recommended]
• 20200322* Mask piracy among neoliberal nations: Wonderful show of world-wide solidarity ( Mar 21, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20200322 : In essence, the misnamed "intelligence community" is a distillation of the gravest intellectual flaws in contemporary neoliberal academia ( Mar 22, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20200322* Intelligence agencies and the virus ( Mar 22, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20200319 : No doubt global elites present a united front to protect their common interest in maintaining the petrodollar and international banking system, insofar as it supports their individual interests. However, other than that shared interest, the elite are rife with factions -- both domestically and especially internationally. ( Mar 19, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200319 : I am having a bit of difficulty with the currently popular theory that a unified, omnipotent and near infallible global elite is behind everything single thing that happens on the world stage ( Mar 19, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200319 : Much of the US elite is sinecured in the media, foreign policy, and national security state establishments ( Mar 19, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200313 : This virus is revealing just how ineffective the neoliberal social Darwinist "every man for himself" ethos is and how deeply in denial and out of touch with reality these societies are ( Mar 13, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20200310* Neoliberalism the ideology at the root of all our problems by George Monbiot ( Apr 16, 2016 , www.theguardian.com ) [Recommended]
• 20200309* The Politics of Privatization How Neoliberalism Took Over US Politics by Brett Heinz ( Sep 08, 2017 , www.faireconomy.org ) [Recommended]
• 20200304 : In Defense of Elitism Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy Thi ( Mar 04, 2020 , www.amazon.com )
• 20200301* Countering Nationalist Oligarchy by Ganesh Sitaraman ( Dec 31, 2019 , democracyjournal.org ) [Recommended]
• 20200229* Secret Wars, Forgotten Betrayals, Global Tyranny. Who s Really In Charge Of The US Military by Cynthia Chung ( Jan 21, 2020 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20200228 : What Is The Deep State ( Feb 28, 2020 , www.zerohedge.com )
• 20200226* A serious US politician has to demonstrate a large capacity for betrayal. ( Feb 26, 2020 , www.unz.com ) [Recommended]
• 20200226 : U.S. Intelligence Is Intervening In The 2020 Election by Jefferson Morley ( Feb 26, 2020 , www.zerohedge.com )
• 20200226 : America is an oligarchy (Deep State) for a long time. The only struggle is to continue the present facade/charade that we are a democracy/democratic republic. ( Feb 26, 2020 , www.unz.com )
• 20200225 : Russiagate II: Return of the Low Intelligence Zombies ( Feb 25, 2020 , www.theamericanconservative.com )
• 20200223* Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler The Last General To Criticize US Imperialism by Danny Sjursen ( Feb 23, 2020 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20200123* An incredible level of naivety of people who still think that a single individual, or even two, can change the direction of murderous US policies that are widely supported throughout the bureaucracy? ( Jan 23, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20200120* Fake Investigations... Designed To Fool by Bryce Buchanan ( Jan 20, 2020 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20200119* Not Just Hunter Widespread Biden Family Profiteering Exposed ( Jan 19, 2020 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20200118* The inability of the USA elite to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite is connected with the fact that the real goal is to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world ( Jan 18, 2020 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20200111* Atomization of workforce as a part of atomization of society under neoliberalism ( Apr 18, 2017 , www.nakedcapitalism.com ) [Recommended]
• 20200104* Critical thinking is anathema to the neoliberal establishment. That s why they need to corrupt the language, to make the resistance more difficult and requiring higher level of IQ ( Jan 17, 2019 , discussion.theguardian.com ) [Recommended]
• 20191220* Intelligence community has become a self licking ice cream cone ( Dec 20, 2019 , off-guardian.org ) [Recommended]
• 20191220* The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc ( Dec 20, 2019 , www.unz.com ) [Recommended]
• 20191219* Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny. ( Dec 19, 2019 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20191209 : The Interagency Isn t Supposed to Rule in Foreign Policy ( Dec 09, 2019 , www.wsj.com )
• 20191207* Impeachment does not require a crime. ( Dec 07, 2019 , economistsview.typepad.com ) [Recommended]
• 20191201* Neoliberalism Tells Us We're Selfish Souls How Can We Promote Other Identities by Christine Berry, ( Nov 01, 2019 , www.nakedcapitalism.com ) [Recommended]
• 20191128 : Times change and we change with them ( Nov 28, 2019 , www.theamericanconservative.com )
• 20191122 : Listening to our "world's best diplomats" convinced me that the deep state is real ( Nov 22, 2019 , www.theamericanconservative.com )
• 20191121* How Neoliberal Thinkers Spawned Monsters They Never Imagined ( Nov 21, 2019 , www.nakedcapitalism.com ) [Recommended]
• 20191121* The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests ( Nov 21, 2019 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20191114* Neoliberalism Paved the Way for Authoritarian Right-Wing Populism by Henry A. Giroux ( Sep 26, 2019 , truthout.org ) [Recommended]
• 20191107* Rigged Again Dems, Russia, The Delegitimization Of America s Democratic Process by Elizabeth Vos ( Nov 07, 2019 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20191106* Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket [of the financial oligarchy], but it rapidly became one ( Nov 06, 2019 , crookedtimber.org ) [Recommended]
• 20191104* Postmodernism The Ideological Embellishment of Neoliberalism by Vaska ( OffGuardian ) [Recommended]
• 20191027 : What can we conclude about Trump? ( Oct 27, 2019 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20191026 : The Blob Strikes Back by Hunter DeRensis ( Oct 23, 2019 , nationalinterest.org )
• 20191025* Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America s Institutions, WSJ s Strassel Says ( Oct 24, 2019 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20191023* The Pathocracy Of The Deep State Tyranny At The Hands Of A Psychopathic Government ( Oct 23, 2019 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190930* Stephen Miller calls whistleblower a 'partisan hit job' in fiery interview ( Sep 30, 2019 , www.youtube.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190922* More Americans Questioning Official 9-11 Story As New Evidence Contradicts Official Narrative by Whitney Webb ( Sep 22, 2019 , www.unz.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190917* The reincarnation of the idea of Soviet Nomenklatura on a new level in a different social system ( Sep 17, 2019 , economistsview.typepad.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190910* How Deep Is the Rot in America s Institutions by Charles Hugh Smith ( Sep 09, 2019 , www.oftwominds.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190902* Where is Margaret Thatcher now? ( Sep 02, 2019 , www.nakedcapitalism.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190902* Questions Nobody Is Asking About Jeffrey Epstein by Eric Rasmusen ( Sep 02, 2019 , www.unz.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190821* Solomon If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed ( Aug 21, 2019 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190818* IV- MICHELS: THE IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY by Dr. Mustafa Delican ( Aug 18, 2019 , dergipark.org.tr ) [Recommended]
• 20190816* Ministry of truth materialized in XXI century in a neoliberal way by Kit Knightly ( Aug 16, 2019 , off-guardian.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190814* Charge of anti-Semitism as a sign of a bitter factional struggle in UK Labor Party between neoliberal and alternatives to neoliberalism wings ( Aug 14, 2019 , averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190814* The Citadels of America s Elites Fractured and At Odds with Each Other by Alastair Crooke ( Aug 03, 2019 , www.strategic-culture.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190814* There is little chance that Western elites will behave any differently than a street corner drug dealer ( Apr 12, 2019 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190812 : If the authorities and the Ministry of Truth say that Epstein is dead I go to my Orwellian dictionary and it states that he is alive . ( Aug 12, 2019 , www.unz.com )
• 20190812* New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has called Epstein's death "way too convenient." ( Aug 12, 2019 , www.rt.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190811* One weak spot of the conspiracy theory that Epstein was killed: Why not terminate him overseas before his return? No mess, no fuss ( Aug 11, 2019 , turcopolier.typepad.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190805 : Something about Department of Homeland Security ( Aug 05, 2019 , www.unz.com )
• 20190804* We see that the neoliberal utopia tends imposes itself even upon the rulers. ( Aug 04, 2019 , jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190729* The hidden control mechanism of what the late Paul A. Samuelson called our "democratic oligarchy". ( Jul 29, 2019 , www.unz.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190727* Russia interfered on a massive scale ($3,684 was spends on ads on which $1932 on promoting Trump) and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind! ( Jul 27, 2019 , consortiumnews.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190727* Understanding the Roots of the Obama Coup Against Trump by Larry C Johnson ( Jul 27, 2019 , turcopolier.typepad.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190725 : Everybody complains about politicians. ( Jul 25, 2019 , www.nakedcapitalism.com )
• 20190725* The Epstein Case Is A Rare Opportunity To Focus On The Depraved Nature Of America s Elite ( Jul 25, 2019 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190721* Breaking: Clinton Just Got Devastating News ( Aug 12, 2016 , beforeitsnews.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190714* MODELS OF POWER STRUCTURE IN THE UNITED STATES Political Issues We Concern ( Sep 07, 2011 , politicalissues.blog.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190709* Ex-FBI, CIA Officials Draw Withering Fire on Russiagate by Ray McGovern ( Jul 08, 2019 , consortiumnews.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190702* Yep! The neolibs hate poor people and have superiority complex ( Apr 10, 2018 , www.theguardian.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190627* Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time Such 'Error' Happens ( Jun 27, 2019 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190623 : Theory and practice of neoliberalism ( Mar 06, 2012 , discussion.theguardian.com )
• 20190623* These submerged policies obscure the role of government and exaggerate that of the market. As a result, citizens are unaware not only of the benefits they receive, but of the massive advantages given to powerful interests, such as insurance companies and the financial industry. ( Jun 23, 2019 , discussion.theguardian.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190622* Use of science by the US politicians: they uses science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination. ( Jun 16, 2019 , www.theamericanconservative.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190605* Taking a long view it was very astute and cleverly conceived plan to to present counter-revolution as revolution; progress as regress; the new order 1980- (i.e., neoliberalism) was cool, and the old order 1945-1975 (welfare-capitalism) was fuddy-duddy. ( Jun 05, 2019 , off-guardian.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190602* Somer highlights of Snowden spreach at Dalhousie University ( Jun 02, 2019 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190530* Whatever you may think of Trump, the people who set out to 'get him' are the scum of the Earth ( May 30, 2019 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190516 : A Polyarchy is a system in which power resides in the hands of self-selected elite. The rest of the population is to be fragmented and distracted. They are allowed to participate every couple of years by voting. That's it. ( May 16, 2019 , www.zerohedge.com )
• 20190513* Not Just Ukraine; Biden May Have A Serious China Problem As Schweizer Exposes Hunter s $1bn Deal ( May 13, 2019 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190512* Is rabid warmonger, neocon chickenhawk Bolton a swinger? That is a mental picture that s deeply disturbing yet funny at the same time ( May 12, 2019 , www.unz.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190428* Tit For Tat: Why Did Mueller Let Trump Off the Hook by Mike Whitney ( Apr 28, 2019 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190427* Why despite widespread criticism, neoliberalism remains the dominant politico-economic theory amongst policy-makers both in the USA and internationally ( Apr 27, 2019 , angrybearblog.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190421* Even if we got a candidate against the War Party the Party of Davos, would it matter? Trump betayal his voters, surrounded himself with neocons, continues to do Bibi's bidding, and ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down? ( Apr 21, 2019 , turcopolier.typepad.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190421* Muller report implicates Obama administration in total and utter incompetence, if not pandering to the foreign intervention into the USA elections. The latter is called criminal negligence in legal speak. ( Apr 21, 2019 , angrybearblog.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190421* John Brennan's Police State USA ( Oct 22, 2017 , www.unz.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190421* Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares ( Oct 28, 2017 , ronpaulinstitute.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190417 : Putin's remark about people with breifcases and impotent US presidents ( Apr 17, 2019 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20190417 : Haspel revelation sheds a whole new light on the death of those two poor little hamsters, or was it guinea pigs, said to be starved while the police was investigating the premises of Skripal. ( Apr 17, 2019 , www.moonofalabama.org )
• 20190417* Haspel is not the "underling". Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy. ( Apr 17, 2019 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190417* Deep State and the FBI Federal Blackmail Investigation ( Feb 23, 2018 , www.strategic-culture.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190416* The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran. ( Apr 15, 2019 , www.theamericanconservative.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190416* CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump ( Apr 16, 2019 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190410* Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times ( Apr 08, 2019 , www.wsws.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190404* How Brzezinski's Chessboard degenerated into Brennan's Russophobia by Mike Whitney ( Apr 04, 2019 , www.unz.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190329* Trumps billionaire coup détat: Donald Trump is about to break the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history ( Mar 22, 2017 , failedevolution.blogspot.gr ) [Recommended]
• 20190324* The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian. ( Mar 24, 2019 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190324* The accountability that must follow Mueller's report ( Mar 24, 2019 , turcopolier.typepad.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190324* "Russia Gate" investigation was a color revolution agaist Trump. But a strnge side effect was that Clintons have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug to the status of some kind of martyr. ( Mar 24, 2019 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190324* With RussiaGate Over Where's Hillary ( Mar 24, 2019 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190318* Journalists who are spies ( Mar 03, 2006 , www.nytimes.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190318* The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq? ( Oct 10, 2014 , The Guardian ) [Recommended]
• 20190305* The Shadow Governments Destruction Of Democracy ( Feb 19, 2017 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190227* Their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy ( Feb 27, 2019 , www.unz.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190226* Neoliberalism by Julie Wilson ( Oct 09, 2017 , www.amazon.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190226* THE CRISIS OF NEOLIBERALISM by Julie A. Wilson ( Oct 08, 2017 , www.amazon.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190218* Do You Believe in the Deep State Now by Robert W. Merry ( Feb 18, 2019 , www.theamericanconservative.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190217* Was Trump was a deep state man from day one, just like Obama, Bush, Clinton and all the rest? ( Mar 23, 2018 , www.unz.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190217* Trump is Russian asset memo is really neocon propaganda overkill ( Jan 23, 2019 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190129* The Language of Neoliberal Education by Henry Giroux ( Dec 25, 2018 , www.counterpunch.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190129* Guardian became Deep State Guardian ( Dec 22, 2018 , off-guardian.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190126* Can the current US neoliberal/neoconservative elite be considered suicidal? ( Jan 20, 2019 , www.theamericanconservative.com ) [Recommended]
• 20190120 : Dear [neoliberal] elites ( Jan 20, 2019 , www.theamericanconservative.com )
• 20190119* According to Wolin, domestic and foreign affairs goals are each important and on parallel tracks ( Jan 19, 2019 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20190102* That madness of the US neocons comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of groupthink, and manipulating the language. Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. ( Jan 02, 2019 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20181207* Brexit Theresa May Goes Greek! by Brett Redmayne ( Dec 07, 2018 , www.unz.com ) [Recommended]
• 20181130* US Warlords now and at the tome Miill's Poer Elite was published ( May-June 1 1999, , prospect.org ) [Recommended]
• 20181127* terms that carry with them implicit moral connotations. Investment implies an action, even a sacrifice, undertaken for a better future. It evokes a future positive outcome. Another words that reinforces neoliberal rationality is "growth", Modernization and ( Nov 27, 2018 , discussion.theguardian.com ) [Recommended]
• 20181127* The Argentinian military coup, like those in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Nicaragua, was sponsored by the US to protect and further its interests during the Cold War. By the 1970s neoliberalism was very much part of the menu; paramilitary governments were actively encouraged to practice neoliberal politics; neoliberalism was at this stage, what communism was to the Soviet Union ( Nov 27, 2018 , discussion.theguardian.com ) [Recommended]
• 20181124* Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda ( Nov 23, 2018 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20181124* British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns ( Nov 24, 2018 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20181124* When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also. ( Nov 24, 2018 , www.zerohedge.com ) [Recommended]
• 20181114 : Bolton Vows to 'Squeeze' Iran, Escalating Sanctions - News From by Jason Ditz ( Nov 13, 2018 , news.antiwar.com )
• 20181112* The Democratic Party long ago earned the designation graveyard of social protest movements, and for good reason ( Nov 02, 2018 , www.wsws.org ) [Recommended]
• 20181109* Globalism Vs Nationalism in Trump's America by Joe Quinn ( Nov 08, 2018 , www.sott.net ) [Recommended]
• 20180929* The Schizophrenic Deep State is a Symptom, Not the Disease by Charles Hugh Smith ( Jul 31, 2018 , russia-insider.com ) [Recommended]
• 20180929* Trump Surrenders to the Iron Law of Oligarchy by Dan Sanchez ( May 02, 2017 , original.antiwar.com ) [Recommended]
• 20180927* Hiding in Plain Sight Why We Cannot See the System Destroying Us ( Sep 27, 2018 , www.counterpunch.org ) [Recommended]
• 20180927* The power elites goal is to change its appearance to look like something new and innovative to stay ahead of an electorate who are increasingly skeptical of the neoliberalism and globalism that enrich the elite at their expense. ( Sep 27, 2018 , www.moonofalabama.org ) [Recommended]
• 20180907* Neomodernism - Wikipedia ( Sep 07, 2018 , en.wikipedia.org ) [Recommended]
• 20180824* The priorities of the deep state and its public face the MSM ( Aug 24, 2018 , thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com ) [Recommended]
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Old News ;-)

For the list of top articles see Recommended Links section

[Jul 03, 2021] The Descent Into (Utter) Orwellian Madness

Jul 03, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Stephen Karganovic via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Little wonder that here and there sanity nostalgia is gripping the Western world, at least those isolated portions of it that are not internalising the sinister "new normal." But it is seemingly to no avail. All commanding positions are firmly in the hands of lunatics, who are determined to turn a once great and exemplary civilisation into an asylum.

As George Orwell has taught us, language manipulation is at the frontline (yes, I have just broken one of the cardinal rules of his " Politics and the English Language ," but not his final injunction to "break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous") of politicised mind-bending. The sort of language we are permitted to use circumscribes the thinking that we shall be allowed to engage in. The assault on language is, therefore, an integral component of the unrelenting warfare being waged for the conquest and control of the mind. Word elimination and reassignment of meaning, as Orwell also presciently noted, are essential elements of the campaign to reformat the mind and eventually to subjugate it.

A breath-taking example of how this process works was recently unveiled by the thoroughly brain-washed students of the once prestigious Brandeis University who, this time without prompting from their faculty elders and betters, voted to ban from their campus such odious words and phrases as "picnic" and "you guys," for being "oppressive". "Picnic" is prohibited because it allegedly evokes the lynching of Blacks.

The precocious young intellectuals took pains to produce an entire list of objectionable words and phrases, shocking award-winning novelist Joyce Carol Oates who tweeted in bewilderment: "What sort of punishment is doled out for a faculty member who utters the word 'picnic' at Brandeis? Or the phrase [also proscribed – S.K.] 'trigger warning'? Loss of tenure, public flogging, self-flagellation?"

All three punishments will probably be applied to reactionary professors who go afoul of the list's rigorous linguistic requirements.

Not to be outdone by the progressive kids on the East Coast, avant-garde California legislators have passed a law to remove the pronoun "he" from state legal texts. The momentous reform was initiated by California's new attorney general, Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, who after looking up the job requirements made the shocking discovery that the law assumed that the attorney general would be a man.

Upon review, it turned out that the state code and other legal documents were enabling unacceptable concepts by using pronouns "he," "him" and "his" when referring to the attorney general and other state-wide elected officials. Appalled, Ms. Bauer-Kahan denounced these linguistic lapses for not representing "where California is and where California is going." She inarguably was right on that score at least, which has perhaps also something to do with the massive exodus of California residents to less complicated parts of the country.

When lawmakers of a state which is rapidly turning into a North American Calcutta have no concerns more pressing than to revise the use of pronouns in official documents, that sends a clear message where that state is going, exactly as the smart and thoroughly up-to-date woman said.

But as a Pakistani immigrant father in Seattle, state of Washington, discovered to his chagrin, the linguistic clowning can have very serious personal and political consequences. After checking in his 16-year-old autistic son for treatment in what he thought was a medical facility, Ahmed was shocked to receive a telephone call where a social worker explained to him that the child he had originally entrusted to the medical authorities as a son was actually transgender and must henceforth, under legal penalty of removal, be referred to and treated as a "daughter."

Coming from a traditional society still governed by tyrannical precepts of common sense and not accustomed to the ways of the asylum where in search of a better life he and his family inadvertently ended up, the father (a title that like mother, now officially "number one parent," is also on the way out ) was able to conceive his tragic predicament only by weaving a complex conspiracy theory:

"They were trying to create a customer for their gender clinic . . . and they seemed to absolutely want to push us in that direction. We had calls with counsellors and therapists in the establishment, telling us how important it is for him to change his gender, because that's the only way he's going to be better out of this suicidal depressive state."

Since in the equally looney state of Washington the age when minors can request a gender-change surgery without parental consent is 13, the Pakistani parents saw clearly the writing on the wall and, bless them, they came up with a clever stratagem to outwit their callous ideological tormentors. Ahmed "assured Seattle Children's Hospital that he would take his son to a gender clinic and commence his son's transition. Instead, he collected his son, quit his job, and moved his family of four out of Washington."

Perhaps feeling the heat from the linguistic Gestapo even in his celebrity kitchen, iconic chef Jamie Oliver has come on board. Absurdly, Jamie vowed fealty to the ascendant normal by dropping the term "Kaffir lime leaves" from his recipes , in fear that the alleged "historically racist slur" would offend South Africans. No evidence at all has been furnished or demanded of complaints from South Africa in that regard. But it speaks volumes that someone of Jamie's influence and visibility should nevertheless deem it prudent to anticipate such criticism even though, should it have materialised, it of course would not originate from South Africa but from white Western political correctness commissars.

Jamie is now busy, but not just cooking. He is going over his previously published recipes in order to expunge all offensive references to kefir leaves. Orwell aficionados will recall this precious passage from 1984 : "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered." And now every recipe as well. The dystopia fits, does it not, to a tee even something as seemingly trivial as a cooking show?

But it is not just recipes. Children's fairy tales are also fair game for 1984 revision. Hollywood actress Natalie Portman ( Star Wars , The Professional , Thor ), inspired apparently by the new cultural normal, has taken it upon herself not to write, but to re-write, several classic fairy tales to make them "gender-neutral," so "children can defy gender stereotypes." Predictably, pronouns were again a major target:

"I found myself changing the pronouns in many of their books because so many of them had overwhelmingly male characters, disproportionate to reality," quoth Natalie as she put her linguistic scalpel to such old favourites as The Tortoise and the Hare , Country Mouse and City Mouse and The Three Little Pigs .

Need we go on, or does the sharp reader already get the general drift? How about State University of New York student Owen Stevens , who was suspended and censured for pointing out on his Instagram the ascertainable biological fact that "A man is a man, a woman is a woman. A man is not a woman and a woman is not a man." (Owen was snitched on by fellow students, readers from the former Eastern bloc will be amused to learn.) Or the Nebraska university basketball coach who was suspended for using in a motivational speech the mysteriously offensive word "plantation"? Or the hip $57,000-a-year NYC school that banned students from saying "mom" and "dad" , from asking where classmates went on vacation or wishing anyone "Merry Christmas" or even "Happy Holidays"? Or female university student Lisa Keogh in Scotland who said in class "women have vaginas" (who would be better informed than she on that subject?) and are "not as strong as men", who is facing disciplinary action by the university after fellow classmates complained about her "offensive and discriminatory" comments? Or Spanish politician Francisco José Contreras whose Twitter account was blocked as a warning for 12 hours after he tweeted what some would regard as the self-evident truth that "men cannot get pregnant" because they have "no uterus or eggs"?

As Peter Hitchens noted recently "the most bitterly funny story of the week is that a defector from North Korea thinks that even her homeland is 'not as nuts' as the indoctrination now forced on Western students."

One of Yeonmi Park's initial shocks upon starting classes at Colombia University was to be met with a frown after revealing to a staff member that she enjoyed reading Jane Austen. "Did you know," Ms. Park was sternly admonished, "that those writers had a colonial mind-set? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you."

But after encountering the new requirement for the use of gender-neutral pronouns, Yeonmi concluded: "Even North Korea is not this nuts North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy." Devastatingly honest, but not exactly a compliment to what once might have been the land of her dreams.

Sadly, Hitchens reports that her previous experience served Yeonmi well to adapt to her new situation: "She came to fear that making a fuss would affect her grades and her degree. Eventually, she learned to keep quiet, as people do when they try to live under intolerant regimes, and let the drivel wash over her."

Eastern European readers will unfailingly understand what it is that Hitchens meant to say.

ay_arrow

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Plus Size Model 9 hours ago

No worries! We're talking about two different things. You explicitly mentioned meanings of words in your initial post. Now you're also alluding to what a psyop officer would describe as manipulating the cognitive environment of a target group. Cognitive manipulation is a much larger toolbox and involves things like perception management, information management, memory retrieval, what old timers refer to as symbol manipulation, etc.

In psychological warfare literature, symbols are somewhat of a mental bookmark. You can really mess people up by altering the bookmarks slightly or changing around the files they reference in a prolonged campaign.

The Nazi swastika is probably the most successful symbol manipulation campaign ever. It means different things to different people and these meanings have evolved substantially over time. Each new generation and is indoctrinated with different presentations of the swastika. The wide latitude of interpretation and extreme views associated with it have consistently created huge social flash points over the past 90 years.

Lorenz Feedback 9 hours ago

I think somethings are being overlooked on this point, Semantic prosody concerns itself with the way unusual combinations of words can create intertextual 'resonance' and can suggest speaker/writer attitude and opinion. Consider the difference with using very powerful versus utterly compelling when presenting an argument. Some words shape narratives better than others and trigger a response well known to advertisers and propagandists...and help shape public opinion.

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/55272357.pdf

Lordflin 9 hours ago

Yes... changing the context of words has a huge impact...

ie the word white is now seen in the context of numerous pejoratives...

Cautiously Pessimistic 10 hours ago

I fit in here in America less and less with each passing year. I feel like a stranger in my own country at times. I am sure that is by design.

Max Power 9 hours ago

On the other hand, as soon as people encounter real problems like hunger, bankruptcy, or homelessness, all this ivy league brainwashing evaporates in an instance. Just a stupid game played by wealthy white libtards believing in fairytales.

[Jun 26, 2021] Secrecy is the ultimate entitlement program for the Deep State.

Jun 23, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by James Bovard via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

"The Trump""Deep State clash is a showdown between a presidency that is far too powerful versus federal agencies that have become fiefdoms with immunity for almost any and all abuses," I wrote in an FFF article a year ago.

Since then, Donald Trump lost the 2020 election by fewer than 50,000 votes in a handful of swing states that determined the Electoral College result. There were numerous issues that could drive that relatively small number of votes. But machinations by the Deep State probably cost Trump far more votes than it took to seal his loss.

... ... ...

The first three years of Trump's presidency were haunted by constant accusations that he had colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. The FBI launched its investigation on the basis of ludicrous allegations from a dossier financed by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. FBI officials deceived the FISA Court to authorize surveilling the Trump campaign. A FISA warrant is the nuclear bomb of searches, authorizing the FBI "to conduct simultaneous telephone, microphone, cell phone, e-mail and computer surveillance of the U.S. person target's home, workplace and vehicles," as well as "physical searches of the target's residence, office, vehicles, computer, safe deposit box and U.S. mails," as a FISA court decision noted. The FISA court is extremely deferential, approving 99 percent of all search warrant requests.

Leaks from federal officials spurred media hysteria that put Trump on the defensive even before he took his oath of office in January 2017. A 2018 Inspector General (IG) report revealed that one FBI agent labeled Trump supporters as "retarded" and declared, "I'm with her" (Clinton). Another FBI employee texted that "Trump's supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS." One FBI lawyer texted that he was "devastated" by Trump's election and declared, "Viva la Resistance!" and "I never really liked the Republic anyway." The same person became the "primary FBI attorney assigned to [the Russian election-interference] investigation beginning in early 2017," the IG noted.

FBI chief James Comey leaked official memos to friendly reporters, thereby spurring the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Trump. A 2019 Inspector General report noted that top FBI officials told the IG that they were "shocked," "stunned," and "surprised' that Comey would leak the contents of one of the memos to a reporter. The IG concluded, "The unauthorized disclosure of this information" information that Comey knew only by virtue of his position as FBI Director" violated the terms of his FBI Employment Agreement and the FBI's Prepublication Review Policy." The IG concluded that by using sensitive information "to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees" and the many thousands more former FBI employees" who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information." The IG report warned that "the civil liberties of every individual who may fall within the scope of the FBI's investigative authorities depend on FBI's ability to protect sensitive information from unauthorized disclosure."

But the only penalty that Comey suffered was to collect multimillion-dollar advances for his book deals.

The Steele dossier

In December 2019, another Inspector General report confirmed that the FBI made "fundamental errors" to justify surveilling the Trump campaign. The FBI refrained from launching a FISA warrant request until it came into possession of a dossier from Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent. The Steele dossier played "a central and essential role in the decision by FBI [Office of General Counsel] to support the request for FISA surveillance targeting Carter Page, as well as the FBI's ultimate decision to seek the FISA order," the IG report concluded. The FBI "drew almost entirely" from the Steele dossier to prove a "well-developed conspiracy" between Russians and the Trump campaign. The IG found that FBI agents were "unable to corroborate any of the specific substantive allegations against Carter Page" in the Steele dossier but the FBI relied on Steele's allegations regardless.

The FBI withheld from the FISA court key details that obliterated the dossier's credibility, including a warning from a top Justice Department official that "Steele may have been hired by someone associated with presidential candidate Clinton or the DNC [Democratic National Committee]." The CIA disdained the Steele dossier as "an internet rumor," one FBI official told IG investigators.

Many if not most of the damning details involving Russiagate have still not been disclosed. But the occasional disclosures are doing nothing to burnish the credibility of the key players. On January 12, 2017, Comey attested to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court that the Steele dossier used to hound the Trump campaign had been "verified." But on the same day, he emailed the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, "We are not able to sufficiently corroborate the reporting." That email was revealed this past February, thanks to a multi-year fight for disclosure by the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

If the FBI's deceit and political biases had been exposed in real time, there would have been far less national outrage when Trump fired Comey. Instead, that firing was quickly followed by the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Russian charges. In April 2019, Mueller admitted there was no evidence of collusion. Conniving by FBI officials and the veil of secrecy that hid their abuses had roiled national politics for years.

Not one FBI official has spent a single day in jail for the abuses. In January, former FBI assistant general counsel Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced after he admitted falsifying key evidence used to secure the FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. A federal prosecutor declared that the "resulting harm is immeasurable" from Clinesmith's action. But a federal judge believed that a wrist slap was sufficient punishment" 400 hours of community service and 12 months of probation.

The Deep State defeated Trump in part because the president appointed agency chiefs who were more devoted to secrecy than to truth. Bureaucratic barricades were reinforced by judges who repeatedly defied common sense to perpetuate iron curtains around federal agencies.

Syria

Trump's failure to extract the United States from the Syrian civil war was one of his biggest foreign policy pratfalls. Each time he sought to exit that quagmire, the Washington establishment and Deep State agencies pushed back.

When Trump tried to end CIA assistance to Syrian terrorist groups in July 2017, a Washington Post article portrayed his reversal in apocalyptic terms. Trump responded with an angry tweet: "The Amazon Washington Post fabricated the facts on my ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad." That disclosure spurred a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the New York Times for CIA records on payments to Syrian rebel groups. The CIA denied the request and the case ended up in court.

CIA officer Antoinette Shiner warned the court that forcing the CIA to admit that it possessed any records of aiding Syrian rebels would "confirm the existence and the focus of sensitive Agency activity that is by definition kept hidden to protect U.S. government policy objectives." Of course, "kept hidden" doesn't apply to the CIA when it was engaged in "not for attribution" bragging to reporters. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius proudly cited an estimate from a "knowledgeable official" that "CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years."

Federal judges, unlike Syrian civilians slaughtered by U.S.-funded terrorist groups, had the luxury of pretending the program didn't exist. In a decision last July, the federal appeals court of the Second Circuit stressed that affidavits from CIA officials are "accorded a presumption of good faith" and stressed "the appropriate deference owed" to the CIA. The judges omitted quoting former CIA chief Mike Pompeo's description of his agency's modus operandi: "We lied, we cheated, we stole. It's like we had entire training courses."

Since Trump's tweet did not specifically state that the program he was seeking to terminate actually existed, the judges entitled the CIA to pretend it was still top secret. The judges concluded with another kowtow, stressing that they were "mindful of the requisite deference courts traditionally owe to the executive in the area of classification." Judge Robert Katzmann dissented, declaring that the court's decision put its "imprimatur to a fiction of deniability that no reasonable person would regard as plausible."

On February 9, another federal appeals court shot down a FOIA request from BuzzFeed journalist Jason Leopold who had sought the same records on the basis of Trump's tweet. But the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia unanimously blocked Leopold's request: "Did President Trump's tweet officially acknowledge the existence of a program? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. And therein lies a problem." The judges proffered no evidence that Trump had tweeted about a program that didn't exist. The judges reached into an "Alice in Wonderland" bag of legal tricks and plucked out this pretext: "Even if the President's tweet revealed some program, it did not reveal the existence of Agency records about that alleged program." Since Trump failed to specify the exact room number where the records were located at CIA headquarters, the judges entitled the CIA to pretend the records didn't exist.

Only a federal judge could shovel that kind of hokum. Well, also members of Congress and editorial writers, but that's a story for another month.

* * *

In his final months in office, Trump repeatedly promised massive declassification which never came.

Was the president stymied by persons he had unwisely appointed, such as CIA chief Gina Haspel and FBI chief Christopher Wray? Or was that simply another series of empty Twitter eruptions that Trump failed to follow up? Instead, his legacy is another grim reminder of how government secrecy can determine political history.

Have Deep State federal agencies become a Godzilla with the prerogative to undermine elections? Unfortunately, there's no chance that federal judges would permit disclosure of the answer to that question.

Former CIA and NSA boss Michael Hayden proudly proclaimed,

""Espionage is not just compatible with democracy; it's essential for democracy."

And how can we know if the Deep State's espionage is actually pro-democracy or subversive of democracy? Again, don't expect judges to permit any truths to escape on that score.

Secrecy is the ultimate entitlement program for the Deep State. The federal government is creating trillions of pages of new secrets every year. The more documents bureaucrats classify, the more lies politicians and government officials can tell. Federal judge Amy Berman Jackson warned in 2019, "If people don't have the facts, democracy doesn't work."

Actually, it is working very well for the FBI, CIA, and other Deep State agencies.

---

capsrule 8 minutes ago

Not much of a clash. Trump had his *** handed to him because he was a moron who handicapped himself by filling his cabinet with horrible people that sabotaged him and his agenda at every turn - including his incompetent son in law and daughter. Not once did he go on offense. He was reduced to pathetic Twitter rantings begging DOJ to "Do something!"

No_Pretzel_Logic 16 minutes ago

The USA is a captured nation and has been for quite awhile.

Little is as it seems to be. Good luck...

Wise Limit 18 minutes ago (Edited)

Donald Trump was a jester. A reality TV actor to give the masses the appearance they got what they wanted while they pacified conservatives and spent four years to plan and strategize the next steps in the infiltration, takeover and destruction of the country. Voting is a sham.

... ... ...

Wise Limit 11 minutes ago (Edited) remove link

Remember all those promises from Trump and the GOP if they "just got the majority" in 2016?

1. Dreamers will be gone.

2. Obamacare will be gone.

3. Hillary will be gone.

4. Mexico will pay for the wall.

Politicians are the greatest actors. Politics is done. Time to fight for secession of Southern conservative states.

No_Pretzel_Logic 12 minutes ago remove link

It seems that there is merit to what you say but, I cannot square all the overblown attempts to nail him and to impeach him on bogus grounds. Then to try again a second time.

The Dems and Deep Staters (incl media) could have just kept-up the usual partisan fighting, sniping, etc.

Trump was obviously a true threat to many. I'll bet Ric Grenell and John Radcliffe acquired ALOT of valuable info about important people.

Wise Limit 5 minutes ago (Edited)

This is all that needs to be squared right here. This was after the election, after the "she would be in jail" rhetoric.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEHNF1TsjV8

I got played too. I just didn't figure it out until 2018 when I saw Trump and the GOP lied again, the Democrats took the House and suddenly "Q" appeared to distract the masses from the fact they didn't fulfill any of their promises.

Gospel According To Me 6 minutes ago (Edited)

The Deep State is a threat to our very existence as a mostly peaceful oligarchy. They will stop at NOTHING to destroy anyone who attempts to stop them. Trump could never defeat them alone and everyone he hired was quickly cotrrupted by those Deep State actors. They became close allies with our own communists and the CCP. These sick individuals probably had a role in the plandemic and were happy to see all the business failures, etc, as a path to keeping power. If Trump wins in 2024 he must get rid of thousands of government SES employees in every agency or they will destroy his presidency again.

Unfortunatley, the best hope to turn things around is complete economic collapse, which is likley. The leftists will continue to buy votes, but when the cities burn it won't be enough. Trump's team better understand it takes money to fight the globalists and a real dirty campaign like the Dems run. No holds barred...tell Americans what a s***hole the leftists have made America into. Wide open borders with millions pouring across and jobs drying up. Rampant crime and soaring inflation.

Allow legal voters only with ID! It will work! Pray for a leader to get us out of this perverse woke mess.

zod 6 minutes ago

trump was the most entertaining, in a long line of the same, 'illusion of choice' we've always had.

2pac 12 minutes ago

Don't worry - Durham investigation should be done any day now.

[May 28, 2021] Attorney General Bill Barr threatened to quit last year over Trump's attempts to fire FBI Director Chris Wray

Once Deep State always Deep State... So Barr was essentially Trump handler from the Deep State.

May 09, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

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CheapBastard 39 minutes ago (Edited) remove link

(Coward) Attorney General Bill Barr threatened to quit last year over Trump's attempts to fire FBI Director Chris Wray

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/attorney-general-bill-barr-threatened-to-quit-last-year-over-trump-s-attempts-to-fire-fbi-director-chris-wray/ar-BB1gxWEQ?li=BB141NW3&ocid=mailsignout

Should never have appointed these swamp creatures to begin with.

[May 18, 2021] Us elite factions is a nuanced and complex structure, not monolithic.

May 18, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Max , May 17 2021 19:15 utc | 37

Trump represented a FACTION of the establishment. Which one? He did their bidding and in the process alienated other factions. The other factions worked together to get him replaced. There are factions within neocons, neoliberals and establishment. It is a nuanced and complex structure, not monolithic. It is misleading to state, "he publicly broke away from the American oligarchy's class interests".

Trump's biggest MISTAKE was that he didn't build a good sounding board of advisors. He surrounded himself with his family members and believed his orders will be implemented like a corporate president. Jared Kushner is a Bilderberg. So Trump was connected to the global syndicate and part of the swamp.

The unipolar order ended in 2014/15 and the multipolar order is establishing. The U$A or NATO can't launch a foreign war like they did in Libya. Russia and China have warned the Financial Empire and defined the redlines. This is the reason behind Trump not launching a new major foreign war. Will Biden launch a new war? However, Trump did launch hybrid wars in Venezuela, Bolivia, Belarus,... Trump didn't break from FOREIGN adventures.

During Trump's term:
– How many bombs were dropped?
– How much new DEBT was created?
– How much did the money supply increase by?
– What happened to the trade deficit?

[May 12, 2021] No doubt the US/UK deep state, now more than ever, are busy trying to sow conflict and division in Eurasia

May 12, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Canadian Cents , May 13 2021 0:38 utc | 76

An interesting read from Pepe Escobar at Saker's site, related to the comments by Max @24 and JB @25:
https://thesaker.is/insider-view-the-tragedy-of-the-us-deep-state/

No doubt the US/UK deep state, now more than ever, are busy trying to sow conflict and division in Eurasia, to divide-and-rule Mackinder's "World Island" and hence the world.

[Apr 27, 2021] The United States Extensive Knowledge of the 1976 Planned Military Coup in Argentina " Strategic Culture

Notable quotes:

"... While the released documents portray the U.S. as having knowledge of the coup as opposed to intervening overtly or covertly, the aftermath shows U.S. involvement was considerable. ..."

Apr 27, 2021 | www.strategic-culture.org

While the released documents portray the U.S. as having knowledge of the coup as opposed to intervening overtly or covertly, the aftermath shows U.S. involvement was considerable.

Last March, on the 45 ^th anniversary of Argentina’s descent into dictatorship, the National Security Archive posted a selection of declassified documents revealing the U.S. knowledge of the military coup in the country in 1976. A month before the government of Isabel Peron was toppled by the military, the U.S. had already informed the coup plotters that it would recognise the new government. Indications of a possible coup in Argentina had reached the U.S. as early as 1975.

A declassified CIA document from February 1976 describes the imminence of the coup, to the extent of mentioning military officers which would later become synonymous with torture, killings and disappearances of coup opponents. Notably, the coup plotters, among them General Jorge Rafael Videla, were already drawing up a list of individuals who would be subject to arrest in the immediate aftermath of the coup.

One concern for the U.S. was its standing in international diplomacy with regard to the Argentinian military dictatorship’s violence, which it pre-empted as a U.S. State Department briefing to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger shows. “An Argentine military government would be almost certain to engage in human rights violations such as to engender international criticism.â€

After the experience of Chile and U.S. involvement in the coup which heralded dictator Augusto Pinochet’s rise to power, human rights violations became a key factor. Kissinger had brushed off the U.S. Congress’s concerns, declaring a policy that would turn a blind eye to the dictatorship’s atrocities. “I think we should understand our policy-that however unpleasant they act, this government is better for us than Allende was,†Kissinger had declared .

Months after expressing concern regarding the forthcoming human rights abuses as a result of the dictatorship in Argentina, the U.S. warned Pinochet about its dilemma in terms of justifying aid to a leadership which was becoming notorious for its violence and disappearances of opponents. “We have a practical problem to take into account, without bringing about pressures incompatible with your dignity, and at the same time which does not lead to U.S. laws which will undermine our relationship.â€

In the same declassified document from the Chile archives of 1976, Pinochet expresses his concern over Orlando Letelier, a diplomat and ambassador to the U.S. during the era of Salvador Allende and an influential figure among members of the U.S. Congress, stating that Letelier is disseminating false information about Chile. Letelier was murdered by car bomb in Washington that same year, by a CIA and National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) agent Michael Townley.

However, the Argentinian coup plotters deepened their dialogue with the U.S. over how human rights violations would be committed. Aware of perceptions regarding Pinochet’s record, military officials approached the U.S. seeking ways to minimise the attention which Pinochet was garnering in Chile, while at the same time making it clear to U.S. officials to “some executions would probably be necessary.â€

Assuming a non-involvement position was also deemed crucial by the U.S. To mellow any possible fallout, the coup plotters were especially keen to point out that the military coup would not follow in the steps of Pinochet. One declassified cable document detailing U.S. concern over involvement spells out how the U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Robert Hill planned to depart the country prior to the coup, rather than cancel plans to see how the events pan out. “The fact that I would be out of the country when the blow actually falls would be, I believe, a fact in our favor indicating non- involvement of Embassy and USG.†The main aim was to conceal evidence that the U.S. had prior knowledge of the forthcoming coup in Argentina.

While the released documents portray the U.S. as having knowledge of the coup as opposed to intervening overtly or covertly, the aftermath shows U.S. involvement was considerable. The Chile experience, including the murder of a diplomat on U.S. soil, were clearly not deterrents for U.S. policy in Latin America, as it extended further support for Videla’s rule. The Videla dictatorship would eventually kill and disappear over 30,000 Argentinians in seven years, aided by the U.S. which provided the aircraft necessary for the death flights in the extermination operation known as Plan Condor.

[Apr 27, 2021] The Puppet Masters- Is There Really a Deep State- " Strategic Culture

Notable quotes:

"... The danger posed by the Deep State is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable, Phil Giraldi writes. ..."

Apr 27, 2021 | www.strategic-culture.org

The danger posed by the Deep State is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable, Phil Giraldi writes.

As a former intelligence officer, I find it amusing to read articles in the mainstream media that blithely report how the latest international outrages are undoubtedly the work of CIA and the rest of the U.S. government’s national security alphabet soup. The recurring claim that the CIA is somehow running the world by virtue of a vast conspiracy that includes the secret intelligence agencies of a number of countries, using blackmail and other inducements to corrupt vulnerable politicians and opinion makers, has entered into the DNA of journalists worldwide, frequently without any evidence that the current crop of spies is capable to doing anything more complicated than getting out of bed in the morning.

One problem with the theory about total global dominance through espionage is the sheer logistics of it all. Directing political and economic developments in two hundred nations simultaneously must require a lot of space and a large staff. Is there a huge office hidden in Langley? Or the Pentagon? Or in the White House West Wing itself? Or is it in one of the secure facilities that have been popping up like mushrooms just off of the Dulles Toll Road in Herndon Virginia?

To provide evidence that intelligence agencies extend their tentacles just about everywhere, the other claim that is nearly always made is that all former spooks are part of the conspiracy, as once you learn the secret handshake to join CIA, NSA or the FBI you never stop being “one of them.†Well, that might be true in some cases but the majority of former spooks are quite happy to be “former,†and one might also observe that many voices in the anti-war movement, such as it is, come from intelligence, law enforcement or military backgrounds. Of course, the conspiracy theorists will explain that away by claiming that it is a conspiracy within a conspiracy, making the dissidents little better than double agents or gatekeepers who are put in place to make sure that the opposition doesn’t become too effective.

Given the fact that how the so-called American “Deep State†actually gets together and plots is unknown, one would have to concede that it is an organization without much structure, unlike the original Turkish Deep State (Derin Devlet), which coined the phrase, that actually met and had centralized planning. I would suggest that the problem is one of definitions and it also helps to know how the national security state is structured and what its legitimate mission is. The CIA, for example, employs about 20,000 people, nearly all of whom work in various divisions that collect information (spying), analysis, technology and also are divided into staffs that work transnationally on issues like terrorism, narcotics, and nuclear proliferation. The overwhelming majority of those employees have political views and vote but there is a consensus that what their work entails is apolitical. The actual politics of how policy comes out the other end is confined to a very small group at the top, some of whom are themselves political appointees.

To be sure, one can and probably should oppose the policies of regime change that the Agency is engaged in worldwide but there is one important consideration that has to be understood. Those policies are set by the country’s civilian leadership (president, secretary of state and national security council) and they are imposed on CIA by its own political leadership. The Agency does not hold referenda among its employees to determine which foreign policy option is preferable any more than soldiers in the 101 ^st Airborne are consulted when they receive orders to deploy.

Nearly all current and former intelligence officers that I know are, in fact, opposed to the politics of U.S. global dominance that have been pretty much in place since 9/11, most particularly as evidenced by the continued conflict with Russia, the ramping up of aggression with China, and the regime change policies relating to Syria, Iran and Venezuela. Those officers often consider the invasions and exercise of “maximum pressure†to have been failures. Those policies were supported by truculent language, sanctions and displays of military readiness by the Trump Administration but it now appears clear that they will all be continued in one form or another under President Joe Biden, likely to include even more aggression against Russia through proxies in Ukraine and Georgia.

The officers engaged in such operations also observe that regime change has basically come out of the closet since 2001. George W. Bush announced that there was a “new sheriff in town†and the gloves would be coming off. Things that the intelligence agencies used to do are now done right out in the open, using military resources against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria while the biggest change of all, in Ukraine in 2014, was largely engineered by Victoria Nuland at the State Department. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was also active in Russia supporting opposition parties until the Kremlin forced them to leave the country.

So, it is fair to say that the Deep State is not a function of either the CIA or the FBI, but at the same time the involvement of John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey in the plot to destroy Donald Trump is disturbing, as the three men headed the Agency, the Office of National Intelligence and Bureau. They appear to have played critical leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own. Almost certainly what they may have done would have been either explicitly or implicitly authorized by the former President of the United States, Barack Obama, and others in his national security team.

It is now known that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan created a secret interagency Trump Task Force in early 2016. Rather than working against genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to this day. Working with Clapper, Brennan fabricated the narrative that “Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.†Brennan and Clapper promoted that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the United States have carried out a broad array of covert actions against each other, including information operations, for the past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively and substantively different even though the “evidence†produced to support that claim is weak to nonexistent.

I would, nevertheless, argue that their behavior, though it exploited intelligence resources, was not intrinsic to the organizations that they led, that the three of them were part and parcel of the real Deep State, which consists of a consensus view on running the country that is held by nearly all of the elements that together make up the American Establishment, with its political power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City. It should come as no surprise that those government officials who are complicit in the process are often personally rewarded with highly paid sinecure jobs in financial services, which they know nothing about, when they “retire.â€

The danger posed by the Deep State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. Even though it does not actually meet in secret, it does operate through relationships that are not transparent and as the media is part of it, there is little chance that its activity will be exposed. One notes that while the Deep State is mentioned frequently in the national media there has been little effort to identify its components and how it operates.

Viewed in that fashion, the argument that there exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country and are even able to coopt those who are ostensibly dedicated to keeping the country safe becomes much more plausible without denigrating the many honest people who are employed by the national security agencies. The Deep State conspirators don’t have to meet to plot as they all understand very well what has to be done to maintain their supremacy. That is the real danger. The Biden Administration will surely demonstrate over the next several months that the Deep State is still with us and more powerful than ever as it operates both inside and outside the government itself. And the real danger comes from the Democrats now in charge, who are if anything more given to playing with consensus politics that involve phony threats than were the Republicans.

[Mar 24, 2021] General Outline of the Shadow Governmen

You should ignore UFO crap for this outline...

Mar 24, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

---

JGResearch 1 hour ago remove link

General Outline of the Shadow Government: Part 1

1.(CFR) includes George Bush, Bill Clinton, all modern CIA Directors, most modern Joint Chiefs of Staff, most modern Cabinet and top Executive Branch appointed officeholders, etc.

2. The Trilateral Commission: Zbignew Brzezinski, John D. Rockefeller, Alan Greenspan, Anthony Lake, John Glenn, David Packard, David Gergen, Diane Feinstein, Jimmy Carter, Adm. William Crowe, etc.

3. The Bilderberg Group: Prince Hans-Adam of Liechtenstein, Prince Bernhard of Netherlands, Bill Clinton, Lloyd Bentsen, etc.

4. (NSC), the military and intelligence policy-making and control group for national and international security, which reports directly to the President, its secret 5412 Committee (which directs black [covert] operations), and its PI-40 Subcommittee

5. (JCS)'s Special Operations compartment, the operations directorate which implements the orders of the NSC's 5412 Committee, utilizing the U.S. Special Forces Command.

6. (NPO), which operates the Continuity of Government Project (COG), an ongoing secret project to maintain command, control, communication and intelligence executive centers during an extreme National Emergency by operating clandestine, secure, underground cities staffed by surrogates for above ground national leaders.

7. FEMA's black projects compartment, which operates federal preventive-detention camps [often located on military bases or Federal Bureau of Land Management lands], secure underground shelters for the elite during cataclysms, etc.

*********************************************************************************************

JGResearch 1 hour ago (Edited)

Part two of Shadow Government :

Intelligence Branches

1. (NSA), monitors and screens all telephone, telegraph, computer modem, radio, television, cellular, microwave, and satellite communications, and electromagnetic fields "of interest" around the world, and orchestrates information-control and cover-up activities related to UFO secrecy and surveillance of extra-terrestrial operations, Fort Meade, MD.

2. National Reconnaissance Office. ... controls and collects information from global spy satellites...

3. (CIA), commands, often controls, and sometimes coordinates, the gathering of secret overseas information gathered by spies (HUMINT), electronic surveillance (SIGINT), and other means; carries out covert unconstitutional paramilitary counterinsurgency operations and preemptive political pacification projects in violation of international law, as well as counter-intelligence sting operations against foreign agents; engages in domestic surveillance, and manipulation of the U.S. political process, "in the National interest" in direct violation of its congressional charter; operates proprietary "false front" companies for profit; conducts a major share of international trans-shipment of illegal drugs, using National Security cover and immunity; and cooperates with NSA's UFO cover-up operations, Langley, VA, and worldwide branches.

4. (FBI) The branch which investigates, surveilles and neutralizes foreign Intelligence agents operating within the U.S....

5. (DOE-INTEL), which conducts internal security checks and external security threat countermeasures, often through its contract civilian instrumentality, the Wackenhut Corporation

6. (INSCOM) whose assignments include psychological and psychotronic warfare (PSYOPS), para-psychological intelligence (PSYINT), and electromagnetic intelligence (ELMINT), Ft. Meade, MD. - U.S Army Intelligence and Security Command

7. (ONI), which gathers intelligence affecting naval operations, and has a compartmented units, Office of Navy Intelligence......................

8. AFOSI), which gathers intelligence affecting aerospace operations, and has a compartmented unit involved in investigating IAC [Identified Alien Craft] surveillance, and coordination with NRO interdiction operations, Bolling Air Force Base, MD.

9. (DIA), which coordinates the intelligence data gathered from the various Armed Services intelligence branches (Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard and Special Forces), and provides counter-threat measures, (which include providing security at ultra-classified installations by the deployment of U.S. "Thought Police".

10. NASA: Which gathers intelligence data relating to space flights, sabotage threats, astronaut and reconnaissance satellite encounters with UFOs and ETs, and coordinates the transfer of alien technology to U.S. and allies' aerospace operations.

11. Which is an NSA/USAF joint intelligence operations unit dealing with possible threats to aerospace operations from foreign powers, terrestrial or otherwise.

12. (DISCO), which conducts intelligence operations within and on behalf of the civilian defense contractor corporations engaged in classified research, development, and production, Defense Industry Security Command

13. (DIS), which conducts investigations into people and situations deemed a possible threat to any operation of the Department of Defense, Defense Investigative Service

14. Which conducts surveillance and interdiction of threats to the security of Air Force electronic transmissions and telemetry, and to the integrity of electronic countermeasure (ECM) warfare equipment, Air Force Electronic Security Command.

15. DEA: Which conducts surveillance and interdiction of drug smuggling operations, unless exempted under "National Security" waivers .

16. Federal Police Agency Intelligence: Which coordinates intelligence relating to threats against federal property and personnel.

17. Defense Electronic Security Command: Which coordinates intelligence surveillance and countermeasures against threats to the integrity of military electronic equipment and electronic battlefield operations, Fort Worth, TX.

18. Naval Investigative Services: (NIS), which conducts investigations against threats to Naval operations.

JGResearch 1 hour ago

Part 3:

War Department: Military industrial Complex

1. CIA's Directorate for Science and Technology :

Which gathers information with promise for scientific and technological developments which present a superiority advantage for, or a threat against, the National Security.

2. Strategic Defense Initiative Office(SDIO) and Ballistic Missile Defense Org.(BMDO)

Which coordinates research, development and deployment of ... advanced technology aerospace weapons.

3. Department of Energy :

(DOE) which, besides its cover story of researching cleaner-burning coal and gasoline and more solar power, is principally involved in research and development of: more specialized nuclear weapons; compact, self-sustaining, fusion powered, particle and wave weapons, including electromagnetic pulse, gravitational/anti-gravitational, laser, particle beam and plasmoid applied weapons research; high energy invisibility "cloaking" technology, etc.

4. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories Sandia National Laboratories-West

(SNL-W):

Which are involved in nuclear warhead "refinements", development of new transuranic elements for weapons and energy applications, development of anti-matter weapons (the Teller Bomb: 10,000 times the force of a hydrogen bomb), laser/maser technology applications, and, reportedly, successful teleportation experiments, among other projects, at this Russian nicknamed "City of Death", Livermore, CA.

5. Idaho National Engineering Laboratories : (INEL), which houses numerous underground facilities in an immense desert installations complex larger than Rhode Island, has security provided by its own secret Navy Base, is involved in nuclear, high energy electromagnetic, and other research, and includes Argonne National Laboratory, West), Arco, ID

6. Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) Phillips Air Force Laboratory:

Which are sequestered on Kirtland Air Force Base/Sandia Military Reservation, and conduct the translation of theoretical and experimental nuclear and Star Wars weapons research done at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories into practical, working weapons, Albuquerque, NM.

7. Haystack (Buttes) USAF Laboratory, Edwards AFB, CA : A 30 levels deep, extreme security facility reportedly engaged in alien technology retro-engineering.

8. Area 51, Groom Lake, (USAF/DOE/CIA) Base) and S-4 (Papoose Lake Base)

Ultra-secure "non-existent" deployment bases where extremely classified aerospace vehicles are tested and operationally flown, including the Aurora hypersonic spyplane, the Black Manta [TR-3A] stealth fighter follow-on to the F-117A, the Pumpkinseed hyper-speed unmanned aerospace reconnaissance vehicle, and several variants of anti-gravitational craft (U.S.-UFOs).

9. Los Alamos National Laboratories : The premier research lab for nuclear, subatomic particles, high magnetic field, exometallurgical, exobiological and other exotic technologies research, Los Alamos County, NM.

10. U.S. Special Forces Command: Hurlburt Field, Mary Esther, Fl, along with its Western U.S. Headquarters, Special Forces Command, Beale AFB, Marysville, CA, coordinating:

• U.S. Army Delta Forces (Green Berets)

• U.S. Navy SEALs (Black Berets), Coronado, CA.

• USAF Blue Light (Red Berets) Strike Force

JGResearch 1 hour ago (Edited)

Part 4:

11. (DARPA), which coordinates the application of latest scientific findings to the development of new generations of weapons.

12. The Jason Group: Elite weapons application scientists, developing cutting-edge science weapons for DARPA, and operating under the cover of the Mitre Corporation.

13. Aquarius Group: Technology application scientists, reportedly working under the guidance of the Dolphin Society, an elite group of scientists privy to extremely classified science and technology findings.

14. Defense Science Board: Which serves as the Defense Department's intermediary between weapons needs and the physical sciences.

15. Defense Nuclear Agency: Currently concentrating on fusion powered, high energy particle beam, X-ray laser, and EM forcefield weapons development and deployment.

16. U.S. Space Command : Space War Headquarters for operating "the next war, which will be fought and won in space", Falcon AFB, CO

17. (NORAD), operating the nuclear survivable space surveillance and war command center deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs, CO.

18. Air Force Office of Space Systems: Which coordinates the development of future technology for operating and fighting in space.

19. NASA's Ames Research Center : SDI weapons research - Classified

20. Project MILSTAR: Development and deployment of WWIII [space war] command, control, communication and intelligence satellites.

21. Project Tacit Rainbow: Stealth drones/pseudo-UFO's.

22. Project Timberwind : Nuclear powered space vehicles.

23. Project Code EVA: Space walk based technology.

24. Project Cobra Mist: SDI energy -beam (plasmoid?) weapon research.

25. Project Cold Witness: SDI weapons - Classified

[Mar 21, 2021] The Puppet Masters: Is There Really a Deep State

Mar 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Mar 21 2021 16:04 utc | 223

William Gruff, Lurk, Oldhippy

Just as every racist incident is waived away by the right, Empire apologists/deniers wave away any notion of Deep State operatives.

The Empire apologists/deniers want us to believe that there is no political manipulation, no media manipulation, and no organization to achieve Empire-level objectives. Some apologists/deniers will admit that money is very important in politics but the extent of that influence is only traced to amorphous oligarchs and business interests NEVER to Deep State Empire managers. Others blame "Zionism" despite its being more than a symptom than a cause.

<> <> <> <> <>

Phillip Giraldi's recently described the Deep State Empire Managers in a way that comports with my understanding: The Puppet Masters: Is There Really a Deep State?

... the real Deep State, which consists of a consensus view on running the country that is held by nearly all of the elements that together make up the American Establishment, with its political power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City....

The danger posed by the Deep State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. Even though it does not actually meet in secret, it does operate through relationships that are not transparent and as the media is part of it, there is little chance that its activity will be exposed . One notes that while the Deep State is mentioned frequently in the national media there has been little effort to identify its components and how it operates.

Viewed in that fashion, the argument that there exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country and are even able to coopt those who are ostensibly dedicated to keeping the country safe becomes much more plausible ...

(emphasis is mine)

IMO when you see people that have been in very powerful positions for a long period of time, you can assume that they are "Deep State". Possible examples: Bush family, Hillary Clinton, John McCain (until he died), Robert Mueller, etc. And, IMO when you see someone that pretends to oppose "the powers that be" but have deep connections to them, then you can expect that they are controlled opposition. Possible examples: Bernie, Max B.

!!

[Mar 06, 2021] Both major parties work according the the scheme of a pyramidal control

Mar 06, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Piotr Berman , Mar 6 2021 14:01 utc | 101

Both major parties work according the the scheme of a pyramidal control. To control a company A, you need to get majority of voting shares. Which belong to company B that owns, say, 60%. In turn, 60% or shares of B belongs to C which controls A while having 60% x 60% = 36% of capital. After adding D, E etc., you can get away with the following: you start with actual majority of shares, and the company prospers. Time to realize gains. But that would deprive you of control. Thus you organize company B and sell 40% of its shares. Control preserved. Wash and repeat.

In a similar spirit, a narrow circle can control a major party. Of course, the rules are different and more hidden. On the bottom level, the equivalent of B controlling A, it was observed that rational arguments are boring, and the wide masses have hard time following them and following what (itself controlled) B advocates. So you invent easy to remember [expletive deleted] like "Obama birth's certificate", "Russian collusion" etc. An energetic group with group solidarity needs its tribal spirit and shibboleths.

[Mar 06, 2021] The Democratic Party civil war between the 'progressive anti-war socialist' and 'neocon Wall Street beltway' wings

Mar 06, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

---

Kreditanstalt 1 hour ago (Edited) remove link

Haha. IT BEGINS...

The Democratic Party civil war between the 'progressive anti-war socialist' and 'neocon Wall Street beltway' wings. It will go on for at least two years

TBT or not TBT 1 hour ago

Oh hogwash. The minute Obama took over from Bush Cindy Sheehan and the rest disappeared from the news. There was no real push back within the Dem electorate against the foreign wars because they all support the Democrat War on America above all. They only pretend to give a rip about some backward misogynist theocratic craphole people when Republicans are in office.

King of Kalifornia 1 hour ago

It's been going on for years. The socialists keep falling for it, and the neoliberals (in the mold of their heroes, Reagan and Thatcher) have forced their compliance.

[Jan 25, 2021] The illusion of democracy will return and the booboise will once again be permitted their panem et circenses sportsball matches, concerts, pubs, as long as GloboCap feels convinced that those things will no longer be fertile ground for spreading populism.

Jan 25, 2021 | www.unz.com

Hockeyguy , says: January 25, 2021 at 9:27 pm GMT • 5.4 hours ago

I suspect that GloboCap will eventually – and in a very controlled fashion – allow some normalcy to resume, once they're finished with the lesson of Covid lockdowns and once they're convinced that the "domestic terrorist" propaganda is sufficiently internalized by enough people to sustain a subtle but pervasive level of distrust, paranoia, and suppression of dissent.

Thus, the illusion of democracy will return and the booboise will once again be permitted their panem et circenses – sportsball matches, concerts, pubs, in-person schooling, and art fairs – as long as GloboCap feels convinced that those things will no longer be fertile ground for spreading populism.

The carrot will return, but the stick will now always be hanging like the sword of Damocles.

[Jan 21, 2021] Sometimes you drain the swamp sometimes the swamp drains you

Highly recommended!

Notable quotes:

"... "We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved", ..."

"... "We will never give up. We will never concede, it just doesn't happen." ..."

"... " Biden's America Would Be A Dystopian Hellhole ", ..."

"... Trump has not signed the Insurrection Act. ..."

"... 'trust the plan' is a never ending story psyop ..."

"... 'best is yet to come' .. ..."

"... to beam back to the mothership. ..."

"... the humans are out to get them ..."

"... it happening you watch just donate ..."

"... without symptoms. ..."

"... Amnesty run by US State Department representatives, funded by convicted financial criminals, and threatens real human rights advocacy worldwide. ..."

"... Yes yes yes – as if we didn't fucking know! ..."

"... YOU MEAN TO DESTROY THE NHS AND YOU WILL REPEAT THIS OVER AND OVER AND OVER UNTIL IT IS DONE! ..."

Jan 21, 2021 | off-guardian.org

THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF CAPITULATES

The Trump Era is over after the incumbent announced in the day after Wednesday's storming of the US Capitol that "My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power", which was widely interpreted by friends and foes alike as the tacit concession that he previously promised never to provide a little more than 24 hours prior during his speech at the Save America Rally .

At that event, he literally said that "We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved", yet completely changed his tune following the day's tumultuous events and after mysteriously "going dark" for over 24 hours, during which time some speculate that he was forced by his enemies in the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (" deep state ") to give up the fight.

BETRAYING HIS BASE

This totally devastated his supporters who elected him primarily for the purpose of executing his chief promise to "drain the swamp" that all of them so deeply despise. They truly believed that he could irreversibly effect significant long-term change to the way that America is run, something which Trump himself also sincerely thought he could do as well, but he ultimately lacked the strength time and again to take the decisive steps that were necessary in order to do so.

Thus, he ended up getting swallowed by the same "swamp" that he attempted to drain, which is licking its lips after feasting on the political carcass that he's since become as a result of his capitulation. For as much hope as he inspired in his supporters and the respect that many of them still have for him, most of them are profoundly disappointed that he gave up and didn't go down fighting.

That's not to say that the vast majority of them expected him to forcefully resist Biden's impending inauguration, but just that they never thought they'd see the day where he publicly capitulated after carefully cultivating such a convincing reputation among them as a fighter who literally said a little more than 24 hours prior that "We will never give up. We will never concede, it just doesn't happen."

This prompted an ongoing soul-searching process among the most sober-minded of them who aren't indoctrinated with the cultish Q-Anon claims that Trump still has a so-called "master plan" that he's preparing to implement after this latest "5D chess" move. It's over, the Trump Era has ended, and the "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) movement that he inspired is now at risk of being declared a " domestic terrorist " organization in the coming future.

TRUMP'S MOST FATAL POLITICAL MISCALCULATION

" Biden's America Would Be A Dystopian Hellhole ", like the author predicted a few months ago, and all of Trump's supporters know that. Some had already resigned themselves to its seeming inevitability after his efforts to legally reverse the contested results of the latest elections failed for a variety of reasons that most of them attribute to the "swamp's" corruption, but they nevertheless remained as positive as possible after having believed that their hero would go down with them to the end.

None ever thought twice about his promise to "never give up, never concede", and they even expected him to have to be escorted from the White House on 20 January, yet his tacit concession is forcing many of them to re-evaluate their views about him in hindsight. Not only is he going out with a whimper on the "deep state's" terms, but he never fully "drained the swamp".

Trump's most fatal political miscalculation is that he thought that he could change the system from the "inside-out" after symbolically -- yet importantly, not substantively -- taking control of it as America's first modern-day "outsider" President. He immediately switched from an "outsider" to an "insider" shortly after his inauguration by capitulating to the "deep state's" demands that he fire former National Security Advisor Flynn, which was his "original sin" that paved the way for all that would later follow.

Trump the self-professed "deal-maker" thought that he could strike a "compromise" with his enemies through these means, but all that he did was embolden them to intensify their fake news-driven efforts to oust him and continue sabotaging him from within through many of the same "swamp" creatures that he naively continued to surround himself with.

RINOS + MSM = TRUMP'S DEFEAT

The most reviled among them in the eyes of his base is "Javanka", the popular portmanteau of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka. He continued listening to these "Republicans In Name Only", or RINOs as many MAGA members describe them, as well as many others such as those who still sit in Congress but pretended to be his friend just to win re-election.

Furthermore, the influence that his former reality TV career had on him resulted in Trump remaining obsessed with how his enemies might malign him in the Mainstream Media (MSM) for any decisive moves that he took to smash the "deep state". This weakness of character proved to be his greatest personal flaw since he should have followed his instincts instead of submitting to the egoistic desire to be "liked" by his foes.

So influenced was he by the MSM that his enemies were able to employ the most basic "reverse-psychology" tricks to manipulate him into "playing it safe" in his struggle against the "deep state". They fearmongered since even before he entered office that he'd turn into a so-called "dictator", yet he never seriously contemplated any such authoritarian moves in that direction despite always having the possibility of utilizing the immense powers vested in him by the Constitution to do so if he sincerely wanted.

His MAGA supporters passionately pleaded that he should have turned into his enemies' worst nightmare by declaring at least limited martial law in response to the decades-long Hybrid War of Terror on America finally going kinetic last summer after Antifa and "Black Lives Matter" (BLM) orchestrated nationwide riots to oust him.

TRUMP'S THREE GREATEST FAILURES

Bewildering his base, Trump also failed to revoke Article 230 despite now-proven fears that it would empower Big Tech to censor him and his supporters , nor did he thwart the Democrats' mail-in ballot and Dominion voting system schemes which they argue ultimately led to them stealing the election.

Just as concerning was his decision to not stop the Democrat Governors from locking down their populations for political reasons under the convenient pretext of COVID-19. The author addressed all of these issues in his analysis published shortly after the election about why " The Anti-Trump Regime Change Sequence Is Worthwhile Studying ". Trump could have legally exercised near-"dictatorial" powers to avert all of this and thus save America as his supporters see it, yet time and again he failed to gather the strength needed to do so due to his deep personal flaws.

THE HYBRID WAR ON AMERICA IS OVER

While Trump was unquestionably victimized by the "deep state" during his entire time in office, he's no longer as much of a martyr as he used to be after suddenly giving up the fight following Wednesday's storming of the US Capitol. He surrendered to the shock of his base, was subsequently swallowed by the "swamp", and is now being mercilessly destroyed in an ominous sign of what awaits the rest of the MAGA movement in the Biden-Kamala era.

Had he gone down fighting to the end and "never gave up" like he promised, then it would be an altogether different story, but instead his over-hyped "deal-making" instincts got the best of him at the very last minute and he foolishly thought that he could save himself by capitulating to their demands. The "deep state" is now showing their "thanks" by censoring him from social media and pushing for his impeachment.

The MAGA movement always believed that the country has already been at "war" for years even though most couldn't articulate the hybrid nature of it like the author did in his piece last summer about how " The Hybrid War Of Terror On America Was Decades In The Making ".

They truly felt that Trump shared their threat assessment after he was viciously attacked by the "deep state" from the second that he stepped onto the campaign trail, but it turned out that he underestimated the threat even though his enemies never did. To the "deep state" and their public Democrat proxies, this was always a "war" in its own way, which they never shied away from expressing.

The supreme irony is that while Trump lambasted the "weak Republicans" in his Save America Rally speech, he himself ultimately epitomized that very same weakness by later surrendering.

THE "DEEP STATE" WON

His opponents know no limits and believe in classic Machiavellian fashion that "the ends justify the means", whereas he thought that he could play by the rules -- and not even all of them as was early explained by pointing out his refusal to employ the near-"dictatorial" powers vested in him by the Constitution -- and still come out on top.

His naïveté will go down in history since it's what's most directly responsible for him failing to fully recognize the seriousness of the "deep state's" no-holds-barred war on him and the rest of America.

As a born-and-raised New Yorker, Trump perfected the art of slick talking, so much so that he even managed to dupe his base into believing that he shared their threat assessment about the decades-long Hybrid War of Terror on America. They fell for this charade since they desperately wanted to believe that there was still some hope left.

There isn't, though, since the war is over and the "deep state" won once and for all. The " Great Reset "/" Fourth Industrial Revolution " brought about by World War C is barreling forward at full speed ahead, and practically every domestic accomplishment that Trump has to his name will likely be reversed by Biden-Kamala during their first year in office, especially since the "deep state's" Democrat proxies control all branches of government now (remembering that the Supreme Court's supposed "conservative supermajority" really just consists of RINOs as was proven by their refusal to hear his team's convincing election fraud cases).

After " Analyzing The MAGA Movement's Democratic Security Failure " on Wednesday, it's clear that whatever "master plan" he and/or the MAGA movement might have had backfired and was actually exploited by their opponents.

THE REAL "MASTER PLAN"

In fact, the only real "master plan" was that of the "deep state", which effectively thwarted every one of Trump's moves and ultimately turned his supporters' "last hurrah" of a mostly peaceful rally into the nail that'll now be hammered into the MAGA movement's coffin.

It's extremely suspicious that the US Capitol was so poorly defended despite there being an ongoing session of Congress on such an historic day and after weeks of preparation to ensure the site's safety ahead of Trump's long-planned Save America March.

It's even more baffling that some of the police officers removed the barricades and even opened the doors to some of the protesters, which in hindsight suggests that the "deep state" wanted to tempt the most "overly passionate" among them (to say nothing of suspected provocateurs) into storming the site as the pretext for what followed.

The whole point in passively facilitating this scenario through the masterful exploitation of crowd psychology was to lay the basis for a comprehensive nationwide crackdown against the MAGA movement on the grounds that it's now "proven" to be a "domestic terrorist" group.

That explains the push behind impeaching Trump less than two weeks before he himself acknowledged just the other day that he'll be leaving office after ensuring the "transition of power".

Had he not surrendered, then he probably would still be a martyr to most of the MAGA movement, but now he's just a palace hostage awaiting his highly publicized political execution as the opening salvo of the "deep state's" Democrat-driven reprisals against his supporters in the name of "defending against domestic terrorism". That, not whatever Q-Anon imagines, is the real "master plan", and it succeeded.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Trump was swallowed by the "swamp" because he lacked the strength to drain it. Every MAGA member needs to accept this harsh truth no matter how painful it might be. Time and again, he failed to muster up the strength needed to meaningfully fulfill what many sincerely believed to be his destiny.

This was due to his fatal political miscalculation of transforming from an "outsider" into an "insider" in a doomed-to-fail attempt to change the system from within. He continued relying on RINOs despite their proven unreliability. Trump's obsession with how his foes portrayed him in the MSM also led to him never seriously countenancing the use of the near-"dictatorial" powers vested in him by the Constitution to save America.

He pathetically surrendered after the "deep state's" "master plan" succeeded, and now he can't even go down in history as a martyr.

Originally published on One World Press Jan 20, 2021 2:08 PM

Trump was part of the show nothing more nothing less. They had the goods on him for decades. He made Izzrail grate again. That was about it. Notice Jizzlaid Maxwell, the Mossad kiddy victim procurer watching her mark in the background of the video below from 92 as the king of bankruptcy eyes the broads and "struts" his stuff.

Meanwhile Kill Bill Gates gets to poison Planet Sheeple and nobody ever questions his association with Mossad kiddy porn snuff director, Epstein or Kill Bill's sojourns on Pedovore Island. Anyone remember the CIA Operation Brownstone"? It's global and it's Satanic.

King of Bankruptcy and King Pedovore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUDr_c2PalI&ab_channel=TODAY

Kill Bill and King Pedovore

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fg4nK4u8vuU?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent 0 0 Reply

---

Malatok , Jan 20, 2021 2:10 PM Reply to Malatok

https://www.youtube.com/embed/AUDr_c2PalI?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

Jams O'Donnell , Jan 13, 2021 6:47 PM

How could Trum 'drain the swamp' when he lives in the swamp. contributes to the swamp and essentially is part of the swamp.

This story is sh!te. Trump is a swamp dweller.

Trump is just the same as all the other oligarchs and would be oligarchs. He is a rich, privileged, white entrepreneur. His propaganda campaign in which he claimed to be on the side of the poor and unemployed whites is just about the biggest lie which has been swallowed wholesale since Goebbles was whitewashing the Nazi regime.

How you fools here can fall for this tripe has me absolutely beat.

Aethelred , Jan 13, 2021 10:17 AM

Trump in his political ineptitude resembles Jimmy Carter, an idealist incapable of wielding power. Neither man had the gumption, nor the charisma (much the same thing) to win over the apparatchiki. Both vain and selfish men (like all politicians), neither inspired sufficient love nor fear to gather support, unlike Reagan or Clinton, both of whom exuded calm confidence. Trump differs from Carter in that Trump's social incapacity manifests in bombast, and Carter's in staged humility. Neither could convince the ruling classes, and so were ushered away.

The elevation of Biden, an aged hack, is a signal the republic is finally overturned. The feds not only can convict but now can elect and govern through a ham sandwich.

Blather , Jan 13, 2021 8:21 AM

Does the author know how to read Trump's speech or is he so BIAS as not to see?

Trump DID NOT capitulate. Read careFOOLY. It can go both waze.

ZenPriest , Jan 12, 2021 8:50 PM

Trump was never going to drain the swamp. He was a clown put in place by America's masters, to keep an endless supply of material for their media and to stir up hatred among citizens.
It's funny because citizens should be uniting against the puppeteers. Or they would be if they knew they even existed, or knew they were being played.

S Cooper , Jan 13, 2021 2:47 AM Reply to ZenPriest

"Quite a number already know this. That number keeps growing with each passing day. Got Debs?"

https://www.youtube.com/embed/rsL6mKxtOlQ?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&listType=playlist&list=FLnnoDlrP9jUXGwJPoM_f7sg

https://www.tumblr.com/search/v%20debs

captain spam , Jan 12, 2021 7:32 PM

F**k Twitter.
#Boycott Twitter.

niko , Jan 12, 2021 7:24 PM

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Remember that line? That was Ronnie Raygun back in 1986, with one of his (or his ghost writers') versions for 'draining the swamp' then, getting government off our backs, and blah, blah, blah. Agitprop thrown the masses so the corporate state could get down to bizzness as usual in dispossessing 'we the people' by rolling back government programs for social welfare and building up wealth and power for elites via the MIC and Wall Street (complementary to Iron Bitch Thatcher's neoliberal programs for a greater fascism in Britain).

Hardly anything original, such marketing ads. Politricking fronts of the ruling class have been campaigning before and after getting into office with noble lies of populism covering for their brands of treachery as long as the fraudulence of capitalist democracy and representative government have been around. In the post-WWII era of Pox Americana, the U$ CEOs for the Fortune 500 routinely have disguised their institutional role in managing the empire under cover of brands of reform that keep promising power to the people with one hand while taking it away with the other.

But when it comes to the greatest show on earth, it's the words attributed to P.T. Barnum that there's a sucker born every minute (or at least every election season) which ring truest. So now we've got the ringmasters retiring the Donald and installing good ole Creepy Joe to 'build back better' on behalf of the Great Reset. That's after Swamp Thang has played his part as dictator of distraction overseeing such achievements as the greatest robbery of the commons in human history and launch of technofascism under Operation Warp(ed) Speed, all thanks to a global coup with which he's been entirely complicit. And his manufactured base of true believers still carry on with the covidiocy as much as the controlled opposition of the faux left.

The more things change, the more they stay the same (only worse!).

Chris , Jan 12, 2021 5:14 PM

The Q group are patriots with access to a quantum computer able to untangle timelines from a possibility/probability vortex.
Their movement was designed to awaken many individuals with key roles to play in the real Operation Warpspeed.

The majority of these folks had some connection to the military or other branches of government including the police.

Chris , Jan 12, 2021 7:34 PM Reply to Chris

In 2012 nearly all technology, ancient or more modern, was suddenly rendered non functional.
The Mayans were obviously dead right with their calender.
The race was on to gain absolute supremacy in the prediction game.
All major stakeholders have access to quantum computing, but the US has the upper hand.
The true value of quantum computers lies not in the task of pure number crunching, but in its ability to predict probabilities of complex situations.

The quantum computer exposes the most probable timelines and delivers the results in numerical form that correspond to actual events and dates/times .

Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 3:43 PM

"The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you're going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins."
― I.F. Stone

Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 12:42 PM

President Trump has declared a State of Emergency in the District of Columbia.
White House

Waldorf , Jan 12, 2021 2:00 PM Reply to Laurence Howell

Not reported anywhere else that I can see.

Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 7:00 PM Reply to Waldorf

Try the Whitehouse website

Moneycircus , Jan 12, 2021 2:20 PM Reply to Laurence Howell

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-approves-district-columbia-emergency-declaration/

Strange that it is reported by overseas news outlets, ignored by domestic.

Strange also that U.S. Capitol Police officer commits suicide days after riots Saw something he didn't oughta? Stepped out of the thin blue line?

Cyd , Jan 12, 2021 3:01 PM Reply to Moneycircus

Witness protection?

Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 12:21 PM

To everyone that believes in the rule of law congratulations President trump has won.

Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 7:03 PM Reply to Laurence Howell

Correction, President Trump has not signed the Insurrection Act.

My error.

REvail , Jan 13, 2021 5:18 PM Reply to Laurence Howell

OW look the fruitcakes and cult follower spent another new moon being juiced , Trump has not signed the Insurrection Act. BUT BUT BUT
Cult of BIG disclosure keep watching.donate huge Arrests and stay tuned keep watching
it happening – keep watching- it happening soon, BIG disclosure huge Arrests . it Happening soon psyop AND distraction

Simple simon and Q nonsense told another lie to the sheep

Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 12:16 PM

President Trump has signed the Insurrection Act.

YouDontCareAboutGrandma , Jan 12, 2021 12:47 PM Reply to Laurence Howell

Proof? And don't link to Simon Parkes' YouTube channel. He's provided no evidence whatsoever for his claims. He says he talks to aliens and "Q" on the telephone.

REvail , Jan 13, 2021 5:20 PM Reply to YouDontCareAboutGrandma

comment is above

Sgt_doom , Jan 12, 2021 3:04 PM Reply to Laurence Howell

Please stop spreading Q-propaganda -- they originate out of Asia and are a silly, cartoonish disinfo outlet of the CCP!

Sgt_doom , Jan 12, 2021 3:07 PM Reply to Sgt_doom

When a serious traceroute is done on the Q lines it tracks back to a Filipino Maoist group.

Moneycircus , Jan 12, 2021 10:12 AM

Capitol Riot: 10 Questions -- James Tracy's Memory Hole Blog

https://www.youtube.com/embed/mEyUmL0_KR0?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

Sgt_doom , Jan 12, 2021 6:59 AM

Gosh, evrn more baffling and scarey and reminescent of 1963, never seen footage of the murder of Ms. BABBIT showing collusion between police and antifa agitators, taken by an independent Japanese reporter!

https://youtu.be/5nvqvvsqJ_s

.
!nd this is the real plan begun almost 50 years ago:

https://21stcenturywire.com/2016/12/31/us-middle-class-still-suffering-from-rockefeller-kissinger-industrial-transfer-scheme-to-china/

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-china-class-fights-trump

Great article but consider how many thousands of people the Islamist extremist, Erdogan of Turkey, had to fire and imprison, to dismantle the positive Deep State structure Attaturk put in place to keep that country secular? Functioned admirably for many years.

DimlyGlimpsed , Jan 12, 2021 1:06 AM

Dems enthusiatically voted from Bill Clinton, Obama, Hillary and Biden. All corrupt and compromised. Repubs voted for Bush Jr., Romney, and Trump. All corrupt and compromised. Both accuse the other of corruption, dishonesty and hypocrisy. Both are right, of course.
Reality, though, is not possible to perceive when limited to a diet of mainstream news. Neither is it a trivial task to navigate the rough seas online disinformation.'
Unless one is privy to big-picture high-level (and secret) information, one is left to attempt to identify and assemble a complex jigsaw puzzle using one's own sleuthing and intuition skills.
Common people without inside knowledge can still interpret the world, however. War is evil, and those who advocate war have been seduced by evil. Kindness and generosity are among the highest values. On the other hand, those who are selish and cruel pollute our world. Etc,, etc.
Let us keep in mind that the most evil cloak themselves in the garb of peace, kindness and generosity, in order to dine on sheep who wishfully and willfully refused to judge behavior rather than be seduced with addictive slogans. Let us also keep in mind that no leaders can remain in power without the compliance of the rest of us.
Any of should be able to recognize Joe Biden as evil. His "track record" is one of corruption, budget cutting, war and authoritarian legislation. And Trump? One of the great mysteries of human civilization is that Trump, the ultimate swap creature, was elected by promising to "clean the swamp".

Julia , Jan 12, 2021 8:52 AM Reply to DimlyGlimpsed

I literally want to copy and paste this comment and send it to as many people as I can. You capture it precisely.

Sgt_doom , Jan 12, 2021 3:11 PM Reply to DimlyGlimpsed

That is fairly accurate but Trump did push back against America's China Class and the CCP -- more than you can say for commies like the Bidens, Obamas, Clintons, Bushes, etc.

REvail , Jan 12, 2021 5:35 PM Reply to Sgt_doom

Trump's America First Hoax: Trump is an Israeli agent. He put #Mossad asset #JaredKushner in charge of infiltration of US Intelligence and Defense. Bidens are Chinese agents? Charles Kushner (Jared's father), is an agent of #AnbangInsurance, a Chinese Communist front group.

Jams O'Donnell , Jan 13, 2021 6:54 PM Reply to REvail

All US presidents, vice-presidents, chiefs of staff, etc are Israeli agents, or more accurately, are in effect the same thing.

Jams O'Donnell , Jan 13, 2021 6:53 PM Reply to Sgt_doom

"commies like the Bidens, Obamas, Clintons, Bushes, etc."

If you think that the above mentioned capitalist clowns are "commies", then you really, REALLY, need to get an education, because clearly you don't know your arse from your elbow.

Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 3:46 PM Reply to DimlyGlimpsed

"Trump, the ultimate swap creature " I do not think you have any idea what the 'swamp' is to make such a claim.

Otherwise, a great post.

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 12, 2021 12:40 AM

Note: I drafted this as a response, but the person is not worthy of a reply, so I'll post it here instead.
--

I've always said that Q is a deep-state operation. It's the NSA, military intelligence, etc. It's just a different deep state to the CIA/MI6 deep state. And I've always said that people should at least know what "the plan" is. They should know what it is because it's by far the most coherent explanation for what is happening now, and for what has happened over the last four years.

A couple of years ago I thought a deal had been struck between the opposing factions, and it was all going to be wound down. But I changed that view after the Covid911, attempted colour revolution. The overwhelming view on this site, from contributors and posters, was that Trump would fall in June 2020. I was one of only a handful of people saying Trump would survive.

I can't predict the details of what's happening now, but I think Trump will survive this because:
a) he has the ammunition
b) it would make no sense to go this far and not see it through
c) even though it seems to be going to the precipice, it still fits a coherent plan

For some time now, the best rolling updates have been provided by X22 Report:
https://rumble.com/c/X22Report

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 12, 2021 2:35 AM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

I've only recently started following Simon Parkes, but in his latest update he claims to have spoken to the real Q. Of course, as anybody who's been following Q posts would know, this would breach the "no outside comms" principle.

https://www.simonparkes.org/post/11th-january-third-update

Moneycircus , Jan 12, 2021 10:20 AM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

I'm not at all impressed. Appeared on the scene coincidental with Gen McInerney and all the misinformation about "hammer and scorecard" which was a blatant distraction from clear and convincing evidence of election fraud.

Parkes does far too much, "I could have told you beforehand but then I'd have had to kill you."

REvail , Jan 12, 2021 5:37 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

Your on the ball wow from 1 psyop to another Now your following simon charlatan parkes.
HE gets excepted into the Q nonsense and trump Savior psyop and becames one of there star leaders over night.
Do you not do basic checks on who you start to worship?? or do they have to say code words like Q and trump maga and its like there chosen to lead you.

Sgt_doom , Jan 12, 2021 3:13 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

Negative, far too silly and cartoonish and tracks back to a Filipino Maoist group directed by the CCP!

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 7:34 PM

We've been manipulated into fighting against each other over trivial differences to divert us from the fact that we're all in the same boat.

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 11, 2021 6:33 PM

Andrew Korybko: "That, not whatever Q-Anon imagines, is the real "master plan", and it succeeded."

Okay, I'm trying to figure this out. With regard specifically to this thread, are we allowed to post direct links to Q posts? For instance, Q has stated explicitly that there is no "Qanon" (#4881). Instead, there is Q and there are anons. I personally think this is debatable, and that Qanon is a collective name for a highly amorphous movement and method of enquiry. Furthermore, that movement and method predates Q and was to some extent co-opted by Q. The movement will also outlive Q, though it may retain the name. As a movement, Qanon stands in opposition to the hierarchical, hive-mind vacuity of the Rationalists and Neo-Platonists. In short, Qanon is Blakean. Welcome to Jerusalem!

We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just & true to our own imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live forever; in Jesus our Lord.
– William Blake
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Milton_(excerpts)/Preface

Sophie - Admin1 , Jan 11, 2021 7:25 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

Oh please

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 11, 2021 7:40 PM Reply to Sophie - Admin1

So what happened to my other posts?

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 12, 2021 9:17 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

Q Alerts is back up so I'll try again. The following is a critical part of "the plan".
--

Q (Oct 17, 2020):
I'm going to bring the whole diseased, corrupt temple down on your head. It's gonna be Biblical.
Enjoy the show!
https://qalerts.app/?n=4884

https://www.youtube.com/embed/LUsLDzXWUU4?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

Marion Reynolds , Jan 11, 2021 6:01 PM

Please – can we have more of Andrew Karybko. I've seen him on Peter Lavelle. For such an acutely well informed young chap about international politics, he demonstrates an equally rigorous understanding about Trumps psyche.

Loverat , Jan 12, 2021 6:28 PM Reply to Marion Reynolds

Andrew Korybko is probably one of the best geo-political analysts I've come across and his depth of knowledge across all continents shines through. A very warm and engaging person.

He runs a site called OneWorld Press. Recently accused by mainstream media and The Daily Beast of being GRU agents. Well if it is, they are most measured and balanced in the history of intelligence services.

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 11, 2021 5:18 PM

The best is yet to come.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ozWZYbYfkp4?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

REvail , Jan 11, 2021 11:50 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

Your be saying that on the way to the concentration camps!!!
'trust the plan' is a never ending story psyop
Similar to the 'best is yet to come' ..
you trumpsters have your own Down Syndrome language.
WWG1WGA, another bunch of devotees similar to a cult who will not except there guru is a oppressor

mikael , Jan 11, 2021 1:09 PM

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."Reinhold Niebuhr

Pardon moi for the lenght.

I dont know whats with people this days, the shere avalange of bollocks is baffling, the inability to conect the dots to what was, the past, to the present is making me think there must be something, hehe, with the narrative, or should we say in this uh . conpiracy tinfoil hat wearing days, in the tap water, and the rethotic, about Trump, I have my issues, and I have never been quiet about them, but then to whine about things when most of it have been inplace before Trump came into the WH, incl children in gages to wars, Obamalama started more wars than any other American president ever, with Hitlary the Beast from Little Rock beside, after Her husband stole Social sec and now, witch could be massive, is completely eradicated out of existence, and the sactions, etc, most of them are just continuations of existing systems, we can always blame Trump for something, but please, do know the difference and dont just throw bollocks because of the people whom wanted change, when Obamalama said it, you belived, and what happened, again, he pissed upon you all, and have since laughed all the way to the bank, the economic crashes, the insane austeritys, the bailins and outs, you name it to color revolutions.
This isnt to defend Trump, for me, He was more an castrat, singing but otherwise balless, but also tied, unable to move, and been relentlessly attacked by those that defenses the past witch in no way was better.

Then we have the eh .. storming?, and if you look at videos, what sticks out is, what storming, some gass clouds, yea, means what, an Cop throving an gass can, but take an look for your self, it was never in any way what the MSM wants you to belive, and the army of people crawling all over the sites wants you to persive, along with profanitys about people whom did suported Trump, because they hoped for change, you cant attack them, maybe for been a bit naive, but one thing shal be the thing Trump did, exposed them all, in an way witch is unpresedented despite His flaws, nobody have done that in this level, He exposed them all, and if you havent gotten it yet, you have an problem, nobody else, incl the people whom did their duty as free citizens of the USA, did the protesting.
Rioting, again, what riot, the worst thing I can come up with, after watching some videos, is minore, a window, probably by the AntiFags/BLMs/eh leftards?, and one man whom ran off with an piece of the furiture, nothing else, and if I drag that further, maybe the stormers should have wiped their shoos off before entering the Hill, stepping on the fine carpets on the floor in the hallway, what an horrible crime, right.
What storming, do you see anything, do enlighten us.

So, I know I am pushing the attention span to the limit.
BUT, I have thru the years found out that Americans, not that I want to call em stupid, but regarding world poltics, more infantile, naive, brainwashed to such an extent thru the decades/centurys of propaganda, where the various Gov always have had an enemy, it have variated, from muslims etc to what it have become to day, domestic terrorism aka conservatives whatever that means, and not only in the MSM but also thru an army of so called Alternative MSM, witch have feed upon this narratives and played upon this, but overall, gone the same erant as the Gov wanted them to go, and witch have resulted in wars upon wars, and stil some want more wars, like the broad attack line on Iran, just to give you one ex to the strangling of others, like western sahara to the Palestinians.
Then we have the new enemy, in mainly the so called alternative ugh .. rightwinged? whatever whom sommehow manages to blame everything on socialism, yea, apart from the weather because thats Putins fault, despite that, I found Putin to be an scoundrel, the Russian Gov rotten to its core, that dont mean I hate Russians but there will always be those that cant differentiate at all.
Whom is the "enemy" Americans, socialism, China, Russia, Iran, huh.

I have saxed this from P. L. Gonzalez.
Social media networks, payment processors, airlines, hotels, streaming services, and online vendors are strangling people based on ideology but TPUSA is still complaining about "socialism." Burn your money or donate it to TPUSA, it's the same thing.

Yup, briliantly summarised everything in some few lines, and why, do you refuse to see them when they are right infront of your very own eyes, and yet, you blame some imaginary enemy witch have nothing to do with this coup, its an class war, its the oligarcs, the robber barons, witch have an army of buttspreaders in the capitol Hill to their abuse, and this bitches do whatever they are told, do notice how the RepubliCONs threw you under the buss, is that to the Chines fault.

So, I hope the Americans whom stil have some parts of their bran fuctional, can notice the difference, in Norway we have the same problem, but we are an so called socialistic nation, but we are held hostages by the same pack of scums that is plundering your nation and resources, and have nothing but contempt for everyone of us, and an Gov that do whatever they want and whom are we then to blame, the Hottentots, Maoris, communism is an tool for social unrest, and when they have done their job, thrown under the buss, because the PTB wants us to fight each others, as long we do, they will win.
Unite and you have an chanse, if not, well, I am old, and my life span expectanse isnt that long anymore and I will not have to live in the totalistaian regime that comes, but the sole reason for me to even bother, is for our children, and their children.
And to all of you whom went to the protest, you have my deepest respect.
It truly is an war, against the dark forces.
You all need to take an stand.
Be the light.

peace

Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 3:53 PM Reply to mikael

We have the same problem worldwide. Singling out and scorning the Americans is simply divisive. It has always been the People against the Oppressors. The Americans are people and have Oppressors bearing down on them like the rest of us. There is a cancer that needs to be removed lest it devour us all.

Chris , Jan 11, 2021 10:57 AM

The overtone of Korybko's writing is excessively defeatist. When the "Deep State" applies such overt tools to steal the U.S. election, imposes censorship, labels millions of American citizens as potential "domestic terrorists", silences the still incumbent U.S. President, resorts to provocation, deprives Americans of essential liberties through Covid, curfews or other bogus emergencies, then it means that the establishment behind the "Deep State" is scared. Scared not as much of Donald Trump as scared of You – the People. I know it since I live in a central European country with a very bitter experiences with dicatorship. When the power starts to resort to an open forgery and uses coercion or force it reveals its weakness, not strength. Its power derives only from the passive attitude of majority of population, nothing more. What this so called 'liberal elite' in America hopes for is to return to the good old days, when the whole Middle America remained voiceless, silent, isolated, without any leadership or political representation. Now it is their objective to 'legally' separate the 'progressive America' from the 'populist' one and they might even inspire separation, violence or secessionist moves to achieve it. But MAGA movement must not play this delusional vision of retreat to entrench in false sense of local security. That's what the 'Deep State' wants to achieve – to herd the popular opposition into their home arrests and their privacy soon to be possibly separated by walls, sanitary wards, wired fences or a new Indian reservation. Americans would never win their Independence by acting in defense only, by retreating to 'wait and see' tactics as Korybko suggests. What must be done is to recapture Your state institutions that have been stolen and turned into a travesty of American political tradition. Before that happens a common awareness is needed that those who appear to rule as a new 'government' are just a tiny bunch of criminals who try to impress the whole world that their power has no limits, that they monopolised the mass media and economy, that they are invincible. Do not let this delusion of 'Deep State' victory to dominate Your outlook. Yes, I agree that Trump failed as a leader in a time of crisis but MAGA (or however we call it) but all the people who really care for America need to maintain representation, authority and leadership. They shouldn't accept a comfortable fantasy that sooner or later the 'Deep State' would crumble under its own weight and then by some miracle a new movement would be born. If Trump indicates that 'its only the beginning' then his supporters should join him in any action he offers. All Republican politicians, conservative or libertarian societies, local communities, state legislatures or any other active group must be engaged in this action. Struggle for political freedom always involves risk and mistakes. Trump certainly made a lot of them. But it is the People who are sovereign, not any office, institution or technological dicatorship. When the Constitution, the congressional debate and civil liberties are ruined by 'elite' it is the responsibility of the People to act in emergency to restore law, order and liberty. The 'Deep State' perfectly understands that after the four years of Trump and the emergence of trumpism as a social-political fact there can not be any turning back to the business as usual. Not under normal and peaceful circumstances. That's why they are so frightened and act in panic. That's why they impose health and security 'emergencies' to incapacitate the population, to make it superfluous and useless. We saw it in totalitarian regimes.
The world needs the U.S. not as an imperial power but as an example of well established social contract, human liberty and hope for a better future. The European 'elites' are in revolt against their people too but here we won't have a chance for any anti-establishment president to support us. That's why in Europe we still believe that not all has been lost in America.

Laurence Howell , Jan 11, 2021 12:17 PM Reply to Chris

Lt. General Thomas Mcinerney,

"special forces imbedded in Antifa rioters have Nancy Pelosi's laptop"

Panic in DC would ban understatement.

Bring it on

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 2:56 PM Reply to Laurence Howell

laptop always the laptop it on the laptop he/she left the laptop at
it etc etc et was found there# etc etc etc bullshit
laptop psyop used as much as the immaculate passport psyop found at the scene of crime in a burning inferno it aimed at idiots

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 7:24 PM Reply to Asylum

Laurence Howell , Jan 12, 2021 10:37 AM Reply to Asylum

Are you saying that Hunter Biden's laptop and the released information that it contains is of no value?

Conflating 911 with the current conspiracies is not helpful. This would need an article of longer length and written by an unbiased observer which you are not.

Instead of saying etc. etc. bullshit, why not explain why this is your position?
Or does this not fit in with your soundbite posting?

Jacques , Jan 11, 2021 9:41 AM

Historically speaking, the problem with the "deep state" is essentially that the current system has corrupted itself to a point where it is so far from what is claimed, or perhaps appears to be, that there is no way to fix it from within by rebuilding it, by "draining the swamp".

Klaus "Cockroach" Schwab et al understand this, hence the Great Reset, a new vision for the future. Of course, they want a future for themselves, but that's another story.

Even if Trump were entirely sincere in his effort to "drain the swamp", he had nothing to offer apart from some vague anachronistic concept of Making America Great Again. What the fuck is that supposed to mean anyway, eh? The only thing he had behind him was populism which in itself is an empty concept.

Like it or not, a change will only come if people formulate a new philosophy, ideology, and if the new ideology is proposed and embraced on a broad scale. Ideally in a non-violent fashion.

Right now, there is fuck all, people are still stuck on all sorts of left-right bullshit dichotomies, (fake) democracy, the games that have been played for decades if not hundreds of years.

If you ask me, it would be nice if the ideology of the future was loosely based on Hayek's spontaneous order.

Thom1111 , Jan 11, 2021 3:03 PM Reply to Jacques

If Trump can pull something off this week or early next, the new plan is already waiting in the wings. It's called Nesara/Gesara. It's a new economic system not based on a debt based system.

rechenmacher , Jan 12, 2021 3:45 PM Reply to Thom1111

Heard that one before. Fraud.

Thom1111 , Jan 12, 2021 7:09 PM Reply to rechenmacher

It's a real framework plan, it's just whether it can be implemented is the question.

Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 3:57 PM Reply to Jacques

"Like it or not, a change will only come if people formulate a new philosophy, ideology, and if the new ideology is proposed and embraced on a broad scale. Ideally in a non-violent fashion."

Sure. So we the people have had centuries or more to figure the answer out. Repeating the dilemma is not enlightening. Idealism has no voice with tyrants.

ZenPriest , Jan 11, 2021 8:53 AM

All this talk of the 'deep state' yet no one can name them. Lol.

Thom1111 , Jan 11, 2021 3:04 PM Reply to ZenPriest

you must have been born yesterday. In America it's the alphabet agencies but obviously all runs back to Rothschild and the Vatican.

gordan , Jan 11, 2021 7:48 PM Reply to Thom1111

eustace mullins
book

the curse of canaan

old names
very old
and new ones

written in the 1980s
still up to date

ZenPriest , Jan 12, 2021 2:44 PM Reply to Thom1111

If you think it stops at the Vatican and Rothschilds, maybe you were born yesterday.

Thom1111 , Jan 12, 2021 7:11 PM Reply to ZenPriest

well actually no, it goes off planet or interdimensionally if you want to go that deep.

Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 4:02 PM Reply to ZenPriest

https://www.corbettreport.com/?s=deep+state

Start here.

ZenPriest , Jan 12, 2021 5:02 PM Reply to Igby MacDavitt

Corbett is owned like almost everyone else. Gives you everything but the source.

Joerg , Jan 11, 2021 8:50 AM

ARCHBISHOP VIGANÒ: OPEN LETTER TO DONALD TRUMP, WARNS ABOUT 'GREAT RESET' PLOT TO 'SUBDUE HUMANITY,' DESTROY FREEDOM
https://counterinformation.wordpress.com/2021/01/10/archbishop-vigano-open-letter-to-donald-trump-warns-about-great-reset-plot-to-subdue-humanity-destroy-freedom-2/

Ashley , Jan 11, 2021 6:11 AM

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Researcher , Jan 11, 2021 2:13 PM Reply to Ashley

Look. Your spam filter, didn't catch the SPAM.

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 2:59 PM Reply to Researcher

but it does catch certain comments funny that

aspnaz , Jan 10, 2021 11:47 PM

The 6 January protest march clearly shows that the majority of Trump voters had already given up on Trump so did not join the protest. There was originally talk of a possible one million people attending, it didn't get anywhere close. If half the nation was still behind Trump, this was a very puzzling showing.

Trump just did not have what it takes, or was not really trying, to ruthlessly cut out the cancer of corruption in government. History will show that he was a weak leader who allowed the deep state to distract him to the extent that he never did anything of note other than to reveal, through no action of his own, how extreme is the corruption that he had promised to drain.

The Democrat distractions, paid for by their oligarch owners, showed the world that extreme corruption is running the USA. Even the most loyal Democrats must be puzzled by the current purges and threats of extreme centralised thought control, the arrogance of the swamp now that it has gotten rid of the peoples' man.

To his credit, I am still willing to believe that Trump tried to do the right thing.

Although the author is trying to place Trump as a coward who resigned, going back on his word, I think this is not how his original supporters see him. From what I can see, the majority of his original supporters still support him and see him as a figurehead, but they recognise that he doesn't have the skills to do the job. He is not a coward, he did not cave in, he recognised, probably because of the low protest numbers, that he did not have what is takes to continue the fight, he could see that his base had already given up on him. He is still a figurehead in the patriot movement. He may have lost the far right, but he still has a lot of centre-ground supporters.

MaryLS , Jan 11, 2021 4:47 AM Reply to aspnaz

I disagree with your claim that the majority of supporters had already given up on him. It was the middle of the week. People have jobs. It was a significant turn out. People understand what is at stake. I would not place the blame for failure on Trump. He is amazing in so many ways.

Carmpat , Jan 12, 2021 8:39 AM Reply to MaryLS

I just don't understand here how anybody can believe Trump was sincere in wanting to change anything: he's a narcissistic bully in it for his own benefit and that of his offspring. Fighting corruption??? Come on!

Igby MacDavitt , Jan 12, 2021 4:06 PM Reply to Carmpat

The mere fact that hundreds and hundreds of treasonous actors throughout government and business have been clearly and openly revealed through the process started by Trump is a damn good start.

S Cooper , Jan 11, 2021 5:53 AM Reply to aspnaz

"What is going in DC right now is like what went on at Jonestown after Jim Jones went crackers. Except instead of cyanide laced Kool-Aid they are going to use 'Doc' Billy Eugenics EUTHANASIA DEATH SHOT to off the 'faithful'. If only Billy and they would just off themselves and leave the rest of the World out of it."

" EUTHANIZE the World! Corporate Fascism and Eugenics forever."

S Cooper , Jan 11, 2021 4:24 PM Reply to S Cooper

"Time now for Na n zi Pelosi, Chuckie 'Upchuck' Schumer and all the rest of the war criminal gang of CORPORATE FASCIST FABIAN EUGENICISTS to beam back to the mothership. They see insurrections, rebellions and conspiracies everywhere. They believe the humans are out to get them . They are going full Jim Jones. "

https://giphy.com/gifs/alien-they-live-john-caenter-3og0IUd5D9Y77EXtRK

S Cooper , Jan 11, 2021 6:40 PM Reply to S Cooper

"Also Nasty Na n zi should lay off the hooch. It is beginning to have a deleterious and harmful effect upon the sad thing's cognitive faculties and behavior."

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 10:35 PM

I *Hope* they name the next Carrier after him – USS Donald J. Trump – CVN 83

😉

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 10:38 PM Reply to Sgt Oddball

- Nickname: – 'Big Don'

Voxi Pop , Jan 10, 2021 9:57 PM

https://worldchangebrief.webnode.com INSURRECTION ACT "PROBABLY" SIGNED –
Military In Control of the US, Under Commander In Chief Trump/
Updates Will Follow Throughout The Day

Cal , Jan 10, 2021 9:56 PM

.

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 9:26 PM

"Captain America's been torn apart,
Now he's a court jester with a broken heart,
He said, "Turn me around and take me back to the start",
"I must be losing my mind!" Are you blind?!
– I've seen it all a *Million Times* "

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 9:02 PM

Situation Update Jan 8th – Trump fighting from secure location, did NOT concede
https://www.hangthecensors.com/487773.html?fbclid=IwAR2Na1XhGeff0jKFmZWBWrQnd5hjKgFEsSqwJOjQIqZFFkzN7flG-FcGG_s

Sukma Dyk , Jan 10, 2021 8:50 PM

You are going to be very surprised. See what happens.

David Meredith , Jan 10, 2021 9:08 PM Reply to Sukma Dyk

I was just about to post a comment saying: It's not over yet, but you beat me to it! Well done.

John Smith , Jan 11, 2021 6:17 PM Reply to Sukma Dyk

Why the secrecy? If you know summit then spill.

Jacques , Jan 10, 2021 8:49 PM

I don't know what Trump's intentions were, and I couldn't care less.

From where I'm standing, it appears that he was elected on a wave of populism, which seemed to be an alternative to the "liberal democracy" fakery, the swamp. An interesting presentation of that was here ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA50BE7d1X8 ). IMHO, Bannon kicked Frum's butt in that debate.

It would appear that populism was a big enough threat for the "swamp" to unleash four years of a hate campaign against Trump, possibly, probably culminating with COVID. Hard to believe that it was a coincidence.

Be it as it may, and allowing for the possibility that this or that or the other thing has been staged this way or that way, Trump's presidency has certainly set things in motion, woken up people. Had somebody more slick been elected, the transition to the dystopia that seems to be in the pipeline would probably have been less noticeable, perhaps not noticeable at all. With the shitshow that has been going down since last February, all of a sudden there is a public debate. Perhaps misinformed, perhaps mislead, but there is a debate nevertheless. Will it result in something positive? Hard to say, hopefully.

Bottom line, Trump's presidency has been historically a good thing.

YouTube_censors_unfortuna , Jan 11, 2021 10:05 AM Reply to Jacques

Covid19 was decided in 2010 and earlier.

Jacques , Jan 11, 2021 10:37 AM Reply to YouTube_censors_unfortuna

So what? What sort of relevance does it have to what I said?

First understand the bigger picture, then worry about details.

Carmpat , Jan 12, 2021 8:43 AM Reply to Jacques

Covid 19 was DECIDED? But of course, yes, it's just a detail .. lol

Researcher , Jan 10, 2021 8:45 PM

Turns out the Viking Guy aka QAnon Shaman aka Jake Angeli aka Jacob Anthony Chansley aka Actor and self proclaimed "Super Soldier" pals around with Bernard Kerik and Rudy Giuliani when he takes time off from memorizing the latest NSA script:

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 10, 2021 9:42 PM Reply to Researcher

Oh look, a photo at some sort of book-signing type event. I'll file it alongside the one of Oswald and Mother Teresa.

Researcher , Jan 10, 2021 11:32 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

Where's the book? Nowhere. Not a book signing.

Freemason handshake tho, Lost_In_Your_Tiny_Mind

Lost in a dark wood , Jan 11, 2021 4:37 PM Reply to Researcher

BTW: if that's what Bernard Kerik looks like when he's "palling around", you definitely wouldn't want to fall out with him!

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 10:10 PM Reply to Researcher

Haven't you figured out yet that QAnon is an intelligence agency psyop based in the type of magical thinking that will get you killed and lose the nation? If not, you really aren't qualified to participate in what is currently hitting us. The enemy has your number. This is obviously a photo op staged by the security state to feed the false narrative created around QAnon.

Researcher , Jan 10, 2021 11:23 PM Reply to James Meeks

Can you read? Read what I wrote again. Read it enough times until you understand.

QAnon = Q Group NSA

Nothing is hitting you except the Democrats and Republicans together against the citizens. That's not new.

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 6:30 PM Reply to Researcher

S Cooper , Jan 11, 2021 10:25 PM Reply to Asylum

"If there was a non WAR RACKETEER CORPORATE FASCIST in SHAM DEMOCRACY USA for whom to vote and the REPUBLICRATS did not FAKE the counts and rig the SHAM elections WE THE PEOPLE might. Where is a Eugene Victor Debs when the world needs one?"

"Soon that is not going to be an issue, however. There will be no need for SHAM ELECTIONS after Billy EugenIcs and the CORPORATE FASCIST FABIAN EUGENICISTS cull all the untermenschen and useless eaters with their EUTHANASIA DEATH SHOT."

https://www.deviantart.com/redamerican1945/art/Eugene-V-Debs-Republican-Democratic-Party-674343047

https://www.youtube.com/embed/rsL6mKxtOlQ?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&listType=playlist&list=FLnnoDlrP9jUXGwJPoM_f7sg

REvail , Jan 11, 2021 11:42 PM Reply to S Cooper

it was a compliment and joke on others who still be lie ve in what you eloquently posted

S Cooper , Jan 12, 2021 12:23 AM Reply to REvail

"Just can not give up the opportunity for a good lead up (segue'). In good faith and in all seriousness, thanks for providing it."

Cmiller , Jan 12, 2021 5:27 AM Reply to Researcher

Masonic handshake

Dayne , Jan 10, 2021 8:40 PM

Peasants in 19th-century Russia clung to a notion of the Czar as a benevolent, fatherly figure. Even when he rained misery and oppression down on them, it was only because he was "misinformed", "surrounded by bad guys", etc.

It makes sense: Those were desperate, illiterate people living in misery. Hoping against hope was all they had. But why would anyone in 2021 think of Trump in essentially the same way is beyond me. An entrenched military-industrial-media-psychiatric-intelligence system, hundreds of years in the making and with untold trillions in funding, just stood by as a Robin-Hood-type hero and people's champion rose to take the Oval Office? Sorry. Trump might as well sprout wings and fly.

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 10:10 PM Reply to Dayne

Thanx for your comment, Dayne – I've been trying to put this into words, and as I'm autistic, I could frankly, literally *Sperg'-out* over this, right now

- TL:DR version is this, tho': – Ever wonder why 'Populism' is such a dirty word for the establishment and their MSM bullhorn? – The argument I've heard thus far generally goes like the South Park underpants gnome's plan for world domination: – Phase 1: Popular Uprising (aka: 'Civil Unrest') Phase 2: ? . Phase 3: Fascist 'Strongman' Dictatorship – Why is that?

- Also that we're *Too Stoopid*(/ie: Self-Absorbed) – Like the Mud-Pickin' peasants in Monty Python' Holy Grail

- I would suggest 2 reasons for this:

- 1.) The Davostanis (Global Banksters/Oligarchs) never *merely* back the *winning horse* in the race, – In fact they back *every* horse that they *allow* to run (ergo: Trump was an Establishment-groomed *Stalking Horse* )

- 2.) The Davostanis (again), have *long since* seen to it that *most everyone*, from birth onwards, is psychologically conditioned, first with childhood myths and fairy-tales about Charming Princes and Fair Princesses, then with religio-spiritual 'adult' myths and fairy-tales about (In Judeo-Christian terms) Messianic, White-Knight champion/rescuer types who, if *we would only* put our lives and our *Utmost Faith* in their holy, heaven-sent hands, would *Save Us All* from all the terrible, terrible *Mess We've All Made* for ourselves down here on Earth, by collectively *Shitting The Bed*

*Obviously*, this is *All* just so much *Childish Nonsense*, and, more to the point, a *Writ-Large Con-Job*

- Cutting to the chase: – The 'Great-Man' theory of history is *Bunk* – Always *Has Been*, always *Will Be*

If you're still "Holding Out For A Hero", I invite you to stare *Long And Hard* into the nearest available mirror, *Take A DEEP Breath*, and then go out and *Elect Yourself* to the office – *Better Yet*, elect your family, elect your friends, elect your neighbors, elect *Everyone*

- And then let's *Do This Shit* – *Together*!

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 10:23 PM Reply to Dayne

It could have something to do with the fact that Biden is backed by every billionaire member of the Davos gang of criminals getting ready to use this event, coupled with medical martial law, to stage the "great reset" scheme. A wet dream of Malthusian eugenecists like Faucci & Gates, since it includes a drastic reduction in world population aka genocide of the elderly, vulnerable, poor and non compliant. This Globalist Technocracy will be led by un-elected bankers and corporate CEO's effectively ending any form of Democracy planet wide. MSM mockingbirds are completing the programming of the public to make Casey's statement to Reagan ring true" We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is wrong."

janmarsh , Jan 10, 2021 8:16 PM

Insurrection Act signing brought forward.
Scroll down to 10th. January update:
https://www.simonparkes.org/

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 3:31 PM Reply to janmarsh

Ow look Simon one trick pony parkes been laughed at and ridiculed and busted for his many many many many lies and it happening you watch just donate psyop
gets excepted into the Q nonsense and trump Savior psyop and became s one of there leaders!!!

doesn't anyone go back 5 years and do basic check on thsoes they watch and then make idols of them.

fools follow fools

Mike , Jan 10, 2021 8:15 PM

Trump was never going to be Ameica's hero. He was played to depict America as a fascist, racist, neo-nazi country that needs to be saved by the Left aka Joe Biden/Kamala Harris. The Left can now "save us all" from the "damage" caused by the MAGA movement and Trump. They can do this through heavily increased mass surveillance and what is essentially imprisonment, to make sure that we don't fall victim to the "domestic terrorism" that is represented by Trump and his fan base.

David Meredith , Jan 10, 2021 9:10 PM Reply to Mike

saved by the left? The left has been selling out the US to the globalist agenda for the last 20 years (in power or out). Trump is not finished restoring America to a country that doesn't sell out to China.

S Cooper , Jan 10, 2021 9:32 PM Reply to David Meredith

"Left-Center-Right" seems that paradigm is a tad askew. It is more like a top to bottom pyramid [scheme/racket]. The CORPORATE FASCIST OLIGARCH MOBSTER PSYCHOPATH SLAVE MASTERS sitting on their gold platinum thrones at the very top of the tower/pyramid and all their prole slave victims, WE THE PEOPLE (HUMANITY) in the mud at the base. The PSYCHOS will say or do anything to get the prole slaves at each others throats. IF WE ARE FIGHTING AMONG OURSELVES WE ARE NOT FIGHTING THEM."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/rsL6mKxtOlQ?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&listType=playlist&list=FLnnoDlrP9jUXGwJPoM_f7sg

https://www.tumblr.com/search/v%20debs

Mike , Jan 10, 2021 11:12 PM Reply to David Meredith

Well, being saved by the left was a sarcastic comment. And Trump is clearly done with "restoring America" because it was never his to restore, let alone him conceding to the left after the Capitol "riots".

falcemartello , Jan 11, 2021 3:53 AM Reply to David Meredith

@ David
The left is as left as my right GONAD

Martin Usher , Jan 10, 2021 10:12 PM Reply to Mike

Biden/Harris "the left"? Surely you're joking? These two are conservatives, in another timeline they'd be Republicans. What they have going for them is they, like many Americans, believe in the Constitution of the United States, about what the country is and what its trying to acheve. It strives to build "a more perfect union".

This the fundamenal error many people made about the Deep State. I've no doubt that there's a fom of Deep State out there, an ingrained conservative streak in the bureaucracy, because there is in all bureaucracies. But the real Deep State is all of us, its every last person who believes in the system, in the American form of democracy and the principles upon which the nation was founded. There are innumerable personal interpretations of exactly what this means but the sum total is the United States.

Trump, MAGA and the modern GoP represent 'capture', the idea that the capture of the state can be turned to personal profit. In doing so Trump and his enablers degraded the notion of what the US is and why it exists. This is what's caused the backlash, its not 'the left' or 'socialism'.

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 10:54 PM Reply to Martin Usher

"Biden/Harris "the left"? Surely you're joking?"

- The proverbial 'Overton Window' has, at this point, collapsed to a quantum singularity, about a nothingth of a planck length wide

- Prepare for *Teh Great Suck*!

Peanut butter wolf , Jan 10, 2021 8:11 PM

You seriously think Trump was genuinly elected? All the points you make show obviously he was a puppet and psy-op of the deepstate from the very beginning.
The deepstate won because they never had an enemy, they created him from the start, with or without him knowing we dont know, but anyone on that level is on a need to know basis anyway. It's clear that his every move is steered with the goal to bring down rogue antiestablishment sentiments.

And it worked very well. Radical left antiestablishment is suddenly prodemocrats and radical right antiestablishment is totally disillusioned and just became domestic terrorists.

David Meredith , Jan 10, 2021 9:12 PM Reply to Peanut butter wolf

you spelled Biden incorrectly on your fourth word in.

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 10:57 PM Reply to Peanut butter wolf

- *Divide and Conquer* Churn, same as it ever was

BTW, My condolences for MF Doom

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 3:07 PM Reply to Sgt Oddball

ironic dont you think a artist MF Doom who is known for wearing a mask gets sacrifices sorry dies on the usual astro constellation
zzzzzzzz

Thom1111 , Jan 11, 2021 3:15 PM Reply to Peanut butter wolf

Trump wasn't supposed to win in 2016. The deep state probably wanted liberal Jeb Bush or Rubio or Cruz in there. Trump destroyed all the competition in the GOP primaries. Remember, Trump wasn't picked by the deep state to be their guy. He financed his own campaign. He was a major burr in their saddle. The Trump phenomenon is real and he proved it with a landslide victory that was stolen.

Martin Usher , Jan 12, 2021 6:16 PM Reply to Thom1111

What 'landslide'? The numbers tell a very different story. Trump should have won a second term but he didn't because of two things, one being the grass roots efforts of Democrats to motivate voter groups despite systematic road blocks being placed in those groups' path and the other -- a important one -- being that there's quite a lot of life long Republicans out there that cannot stand Trump.

Trumpism is like a cult in many ways. One feature is that those who 'believe' find it difficult to come to grips with the fact that they might hold a minority view. They're used to being embattled, that's a signature feature of such groups (they're always fighting for something against an implacable enemy, preferably an unseen one) but its just inconceivable that they're really a fringe group. The events of last Wednesday have probably done more to promote Democrat candidates than anything else this cycle; fortunately for the most part the election was over so all they lost were the two Senate seats.

PS -- May I draw your attention to an old Beatles song -- "Revolution"? (I'd also suggest an even old song "Trouble Coming" from the Mothers of Invention.)

Voz 0db , Jan 10, 2021 7:58 PM

Under the CURRENT MAIN SYSTEM – The Monetary System – there is no "drain the swamp"!

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 10:29 PM Reply to Voz 0db

Then you're going to love the technocrats "social credits" scheme such as China currently imposes on it's population.

Voz 0db , Jan 11, 2021 10:43 AM Reply to James Meeks

China developed that system with the HELP of the Western Corporations, so that in a near future the tech will be deployed in the western Plantations. OPERATION COVIDIUS is just the 1st of many operations that will create the FEAR & PANIC conditions among the herds of modern western moron slaves, that will make it really easy for THEM to deploy that tech.

Why do you think China was the chosen one to practice a "city lockdown" during EVENT 201 planning?

Why do you think China was on the news of western countries while they were executing the lockdown and then no more China news?

China is also under the Shadow of the SRF & Billionaires at least for now. The only thing China is trying to achieve is to shift the POWER of the SRF into Chinese Families, nothing more.

maxine , Jan 10, 2021 7:48 PM

What has Off-G come to? .One must be truly mad to imagine that D. tHRUMP
"SINCERELY" thought ANYTHING EVER, let alone "changing the way America is run" .He's incapable of comprehending what the word "SINCERITY" means .Sorry the author has lost his hero.

wardropper , Jan 10, 2021 8:24 PM Reply to maxine

OffG publishes articles and anybody who wants to can comment on them.

It does not push, or imagine, any group philosophy other than to support us all in a deep distrust of what the mainstream media ram down our throats every day, and to give us space to express our personal disgust in our own way.

We are not going to imagine what you would like us to imagine merely on your say-so either, although you are quite free to tell us what your personal recommendations are.

OffG has never been pro-Trump, and we are all aware that the alternative is far from being any better.

Perhaps you would like to tell us what is really bugging you, given that you have never been under any pressure even to show up here At the very least, you could stay on topic:
So, what about the swamp, and who you think is most likely to succeed in draining it ?

Carol Jones , Jan 10, 2021 8:53 PM Reply to wardropper

Hear Hear!

Gezzah Potts , Jan 10, 2021 10:26 PM Reply to wardropper

Spot on W👍

YouTube_censors_unfortuna , Jan 10, 2021 7:40 PM

Trump's racist fan base supported America's bogus War of Terrorism against blameless Muslim countries, did they not? What goes around, comes around.

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 10:40 PM Reply to YouTube_censors_unfortuna

I think you are getting fan bases mixed up. Trump inherited these conflicts from Bush, Iraq 2002 invasion & Obama's 2015 invasion of Syria and it was Trump that threatened to end the propping up of the endless war industry. In fact that played the major role in why Trump had to be removed at all costs including selling treason and vote rigging as Democracy to be defended against "domestic terrorists".

YouTube_censors_unfortuna , Jan 11, 2021 9:45 AM Reply to James Meeks

Did America's white patriots oppose the demonisation of Muslims as being terrorists who did 9/11 or did they participate in this US government fiction?

Thom1111 , Jan 11, 2021 3:17 PM Reply to YouTube_censors_unfortuna

No, at least half of the patriots are and were aware that 9/11 was an inside job.

Geoffrey Skoll , Jan 10, 2021 7:25 PM

Right! The Donald was too weak and too stupid. A smarter president got shot for his troubles, but the rulers knew they didn't have to resort to that against the Donald. He was obsessed with his mirror. All those meeting between Ike and JFK, what do you think they were talking about?

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 11:01 PM Reply to Geoffrey Skoll

- Please also note the *Extreme* copypasta, every other sentence, in the article – Who *Actually Is* this guy?

DM: , Jan 11, 2021 12:22 AM Reply to Sgt Oddball

A fifty-center.

Lisa , Jan 10, 2021 7:09 PM

Fuck Trump and his knuckle dragging moron supporters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_P-0I6sAck

Mr Y , Jan 10, 2021 7:21 PM Reply to Lisa

Now tell us what *you* like.

David Meredith , Jan 10, 2021 9:14 PM Reply to Lisa

hey, my knuckles don't drag – how dare you suggest such a thing.

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 10:44 PM Reply to Lisa

Sounds like you came to Off Guardian thinking it was the Guardian and expected to find a group of like minded consumers of security state propaganda in a Trump bashing fest.

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 11:02 PM Reply to Lisa

"Oook, Oook, Oook!!! "

*Flings Monkey-Poop *

sue , Jan 10, 2021 6:55 PM

A premature judgement. Time will tell.

MANUEL , Jan 10, 2021 6:55 PM

Do u relly guys think Trump was a hope for all pf us? I am still amazed that people(including off-guard) still thinks in terms of left vs right, good vs bad, and all that narrative. I am afraid that nnarrativ has never been true. It is part of the game of "the matrix" to keep us entertained in shows programmed for tth masses, division, polarizaiomn, saviours and "heros". In my opinion it is time for a deep shift. Continuing to hope that some guy will save us all, it is just seeing a tree but not being able to see the woods. While some keep waiting for somebody to save us, they are moving forward with their plans really fast. But no problem guys. Sooner or later the rrality will knock on you door, and you will have to decide if you are going to be a slave or a free human. And it will be all about what you decide. No american hero or any messiah will do it for you.

Sophie - Admin1 , Jan 10, 2021 9:50 PM Reply to MANUEL

We have warned against accepting the Left/Right paradigm many times. This is NOT an editorial and therefore is not 'the voice of OffG'.

Some visitors here need to up their sophistication level to the point they understand we publish a SPECTRUM of dissident opinion that we consider merits discussion or a wider audience, without necessarily agreeing with all of it.

Sgt Oddball , Jan 10, 2021 11:15 PM Reply to Sophie - Admin1

"Some visitors here need to up their sophistication level to the point they understand we publish a SPECTRUM of dissident opinion "

- Yep, well that's as may be, but Andrew Korybko's position is *Lame As All Hell* – Every establishment talking point *Covered* – just from the 'Contrarian' side

- Trump was an 'Outsider' who 'Became' an 'Insider'?! – Aww Puh-lease! – He was a *Stalking Horse

- "He didn't have the *'Strength'* to 'Drain The Swamp'(tm)"??!?! – *No-One* *Indivudal* in all Creation could've

- Do you think we're *Children*?!

Asylum , Jan 11, 2021 3:26 PM Reply to Sgt Oddball

been on this site a whole while now not seen any articles discussing trump failures

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 11:06 PM Reply to MANUEL

We are all aware that we are the playthings of the rich and powerful but all you're doing is stating what most of us already know. What is your solution? So tell us please what you are doing to that makes you feel free and not a slave? Are you living off the grid? Not using currency? What is it you're doing that makes you different from those of us you claim are not facing reality? I think many people, myself included, who have no love for Trump see that he is being denounced by every billionaire member of the Davos gang of criminals as a threat to world order and the economy while they shut down the planet with medical martial law and create an authoritarian Globalist Technocratic dictatorship ending Democracies worldwide and targeting "domestic terrorists" who oppose them.

George Mc , Jan 10, 2021 6:35 PM

The steps on how to destroy all of the services, public and private though focussing on the NHS:

Seize on a moderate flu variant. Build it up to be the blackest death since the black death. Seize on all the old people who die anyway and claim their numbers as an indication of the carnage. For anyone still hesitant, introduce hypocritical emotional blackmail about "the most vulnerable" in our society to shame everyone into the game On the basis of those appropriated death figures, endlessly circulate fear porn – enhanced by the fact that the symptoms of this apocalyptic virus are indistinguishable from the regular flu or even the common cold. Get everyone to steer clear of everyone else. Close down all "inessential" work plus communal gathering places to ensure everyone is isolated before the droning monolithic message you are pumping out. Introduce even more draconian measures for anyone who "has" the bug – effectively barring them even (especially) from care work. Prioritise the new bug cases so that they have access to hospital facilities – while anyone with other (real) illnesses are barred to "protect" them! This fills up the hospitals with hypochondriacs with the common cold. Introduce the notion that some may carry the bug without symptoms. Introduce a new test which can determine who has the symptomless bug. On the basis of those magical symptomless bug test kits, bar the essential workers from supporting the vulnerable – in order to "protect the vulnerable"! Constantly report on how the NHS is collapsing – which it is, being filled up with folks with the cold and turning everyone else away, and also being deprived of essential workers who tested positive for the symptomless bug. Just stand back and watch it all collapse whilst continuing to report on it with increasing horror!

George Mc , Jan 10, 2021 6:41 PM Reply to George Mc

PS the list is not exhaustive. I didn't even touch on the phony Left/Right divide.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL , Jan 10, 2021 7:18 PM Reply to George Mc

EXCERPTS FROM THE AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL REPORTS INTO COVID-19 AND CARE HOMES.

A must read.

The Department of Health and Social Care . adopted a policy, that led to 25,000 patients, including those (known to be) infected (with Covid-19, and also those who were) possibly infected with Covid-19 (but) had not been tested, being discharged from hospital into care homes between 17 March and 15 April -- exponentially increasing the risk of transmission to the very population most at risk of severe illness and death from the disease. (This, while being denied) access to testing, (being denied) personal protective equipment, (while having) insufficient staff, and limited (and confusing) guidance.

(As expected) care homes were overwhelmed.

http://www.preearth.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1184

James Meeks , Jan 10, 2021 11:10 PM Reply to AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

Amnesty International is US State Department Propaganda Amnesty run by US State Department representatives, funded by convicted financial criminals, and threatens real human rights advocacy worldwide.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/amnesty-international-is-us-state-department-propaganda/32444

DM: , Jan 11, 2021 12:30 AM Reply to George Mc

Who the hell down-voted this. I want a name, address, and employment details.

Teresa , Jan 10, 2021 6:27 PM

No, the entire "game" hasn't played out yet. Hold back on your final conclusions for now. Watchful waiting at the moment.

Moneycircus , Jan 10, 2021 6:21 PM

Computah sez. I mean computer is science, right? And you gotta trust the science Just Google it, OK?

So, AI sez BABY FILTER!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/qUm2KWPmnHg?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

George Mc , Jan 10, 2021 6:04 PM

The tackiest of plays unfolding with the most tedious predictability: "And the NHS can't take much more as .."

Yes yes yes – as if we didn't fucking know!

YOU MEAN TO DESTROY THE NHS AND YOU WILL REPEAT THIS OVER AND OVER AND OVER UNTIL IT IS DONE!

[Jan 20, 2021] Are You Ready for Total (Ideological) War by CJ Hopkins

Notable quotes:

"... Oh, yes, you really did it this time! You stormed the goddamned US Capitol. You and your racist, Russia-backed army of bison-hat wearing half-naked actors have meddled with the primal forces of GloboCap, and now, by God, you will atone! ..."

"... No, do not try to minimize your crimes. You entered a building without permission! The building where America simulates democracy! You walked around in there waving silly flags! You went into the Chamber, into people's offices! One of you actually put his filthy populist feet up on Pelosi's desk ON HER DESK! This aggression will not stand! ..."

Jan 12, 2021 | off-guardian.org

So, welcome to 2021! If last week was any indication, it is going to be quite an exciting year. It is going to be the year in which GloboCap reminds everyone who is actually in charge and restores "normality" throughout the world.

or at least attempts to restore "normality," or the "New Normality," or the "Great Normal Reset," or "The New Normal War on Domestic Terror" or whatever they eventually decide to call it.

In any event, whatever they call it, GloboCap is done playing grab-ass. They have had it with all this "populism" malarkey that has been going on for the last four years.

Yes, that's right, the party is over, you Russian-backed white supremacist terrorists! You Trump-loving, anti-mask grandmother killers! You anti-vax, election-fraud-conspiracy theorists! You deviants who refuse to follow orders, wear your damn masks, vote for who they tell you, and believe whatever completely nonsensical official propaganda they pour into your heads!

Oh, yes, you really did it this time! You stormed the goddamned US Capitol. You and your racist, Russia-backed army of bison-hat wearing half-naked actors have meddled with the primal forces of GloboCap, and now, by God, you will atone!

No, do not try to minimize your crimes. You entered a building without permission! The building where America simulates democracy! You walked around in there waving silly flags! You went into the Chamber, into people's offices! One of you actually put his filthy populist feet up on Pelosi's desk ON HER DESK! This aggression will not stand!

OK, before I go any further with this essay, I need to explain to my regular readers (in case it wasn't already clear) that I've decided to forswear every word I've ever written, and all my principles, and my common sense, and join the remainder of my old leftist and liberal friends in the orgy of online hate and outrage they are currently mindlessly indulging in.

Yes, I realize this comes as a shock, but I have seen the GloboCap writing on the wall, and I don't want to you know, get ideologically "cleansed," or charged with " extremism ," or " insurrectionism ," or " domestic terrorism ," or " populism ," or whatever.

I'm already in enough trouble as it is for not playing ball with their " apocalyptic plague ," and whatever else I am, I am certainly no martyr, and I have a career in the arts to consider, so I have decided to listen to my inner coward and join the goose-stepping global-capitalist mob, which is why this column sounds slightly out of character.

See, back in the old days, before my conversion, I would have made fun of my liberal friends for calling this "storming" of the Capitol a "coup," or an "insurrection," and for demanding that the protesters be prosecuted as "domestic terrorists."

I probably would have scolded them a bit for taking to the Internet and spewing their hatred at the unarmed woman shot dead by the police like a pack of soulless, totalitarian jackals.

I might have even made a reference to that infamous scene in Schindler's List where the crowd of "normal" German citizens all laugh and jeer as the Jews are marched away to the ghetto by the Nazi goons.

But, now that I have seen the light, I see how bad and wrong that would have been. Clearly, trespassing in the US Capitol is a crime that should be punishable by death. And comparing contemporary American liberals to the "good Germans" during the Nazi era is so outrageous that well, it should probably be censored.

So, good thing I decided not to do that!

Plus, the woman was a "devoted conspiracy theorist," so she got what she deserved, right? ( "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes" was the official liberal shibboleth, I believe.)

In fact (and I hope my liberal friends are still reading this), the police should have shot the entire lot of them! All these Russian-backed Nazi insurrectionists should have been gunned down right there on the spot, preferably by muscle-bound corporate mercenaries and CIA snipers in Black Hawk helicopters with big Facebook and Twitter logos on them!

Actually, anyone who trespassed in the Capitol Building (which is like a cathedral), or just came to the protest wearing a MAGA hat, should be hunted down by federal authorities, charged as a "domestic white-supremacist terrorist," frog-marched out onto Black Lives Matter Plaza, and shot, in the face, live, on TV, so that everyone can watch and howl at their screens like the Two Minutes Hate in 1984 . That would teach these "insurrectionists" a lesson!

Or they could shoot them in one of those corporate-branded stadiums! We could make it a weekly televised event. It's not like there is any shortage of Trump-supporting "domestic terrorists." They could use a different stadium every week, deck the place out with big "New Normal" banners, play music, make speeches, the whole nine yards. Everyone would have to wear masks, of course, and strictly adhere to social distancing. Folks could bring the kids, make a day of it.

How am I doing so far, leftist and liberal friends? No? Not fanatical and hateful enough?

OK, so what is it going to take to convince you that I have changed my tune, got my mind right, and am totally on board with the New Normal totalitarianism? Trump? Sure, I can do Trump. I hate him! He's Hitler! He's Russian Hitler! He's Russian White Supremacist Hitler!

Yes, I know I've spent the last four years pointing out that he isn't actually Hitler, or a Russian agent, and that he's really just the same ridiculous, narcissistic ass clown that he has always been, but I was wrong. He's definitely Hitler, and a Russian agent! He is certainly not just a pathetic old huckster without a single powerful ally in Washington who could not stage an actual coup if Putin nuked every blue state on the map.

No, I soil myself in fear before his awesome power. Never mind that he's just been banned by Facebook , Twitter , and numerous other corporate platforms , and made a fool of by the corporate media, the international political establishment, the Intelligence agencies, and the rest of GloboCap since the day he took the oath of office.

Forget the fact that, although he holds the nuclear launch codes in his tiny little hands and is Commander in Chief of the US military, the most he could do to challenge his removal was file a buttload of hopeless lawsuits and sit around in the Oval Office eating cheeseburgers and tweeting into the night.

No, none of that means a thing, not when he still has the power to "embolden" a few dozen pissed-off Americans to storm ( or calmly walk ) into the Capitol and take selfies sitting in the Vice President's Chair!

Look, the point is, I hate him. And I hate his supporters. I hate everyone who doesn't hate him and his supporters. I hate everyone who won't wear a mask. I hate the Republicans. I hate the Russians. I hate everyone who won't get the vaccine. My God do I hate them! I am so full of hatred and mindless rage that it is making me crazy. I am so consumed with self-righteous hatred, propaganda, and manufactured hysteria that, if Rachel Maddow, or Chris Hayes, or whoever, told me that it was time to round them all up, these "domestic terrorists," these "insurrectionists," these "conspiracy theorists," these "anti-mask extremists" (and anyone else who won't obey us), and put them on trains and send them to camps, I'd probably be OK with that.

How am I doing, liberals? Am I back in the club? Because, I get it. I swear! I'm cured! Praise God! I'm ready to pitch in and do my part. I believe in GloboCap's final victory! I'm willing to work, if our leaders order me, ten, twelve, or fourteen hours a day, and give all I have for GloboCap victory! I am ready for total ideological war an ideological war more total and radical than anything I can even imagine!

Sure, our imaginary enemies are formidable (and this war will probably last forever or at least until the end of global capitalism), but, in the words of one our greatest liberal heroes, George W. Bush, "bring it on!"

*

CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volume I of his Consent Factory Essays is published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .

[Jan 19, 2021] Few sights in Washington are more familiar than an intellectual urging "total war" from the safety of the keyboard

Highly recommended!

In a way neocon jingoism serve as a smoke scree to sitrct "depolables" from the decline of the standard of living under neoliberalism.

Jan 19, 2021 | www.nybooks.com

Orthodoxy of the Elites - by Jackson Lears - The New York Review of Books

By 2016 the concept of "liberal democracy," once bright with promise, had dulled into a neoliberal politics that was neither liberal nor democratic. The Democratic Party's turn toward market-driven policies, the bipartisan dismantling of the public sphere, the inflight marriage of Wall Street and Silicon Valley in the cockpit of globalization -- these interventions constituted the long con of neoliberal governance, which enriched a small minority of Americans while ravaging most of the rest.

Jackson Lears is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers, Editor in Chief of Raritan, and the author of ­Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920, among other books. (January 2021)

[Jan 18, 2021] What if Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are both controlled opposition?

Notable quotes:

"... After winning the 2016 election Trump caved early and caved often and governed like a neocon, while Sanders let himself get cucked by the DNC in 2016 and folded like a cheap suit during his 2020 campaign. ..."

"... So both of these clowns proved they are no threat to the establishment but it's in the establishment's interest to portray them as dangerous interlopers who threaten the stability of the nation. Why? Because it keeps the "rebellion" in house. As long as the electorate believes a Democrat or Republican POTUS can address their grievances the establishment can sigh in relief knowing that they are still in control. ..."

Jan 18, 2021 | www.unz.com

Squarebeard , says: Next New Comment January 13, 2021 at 11:38 pm GMT • 4.7 days ago

...Fact is, Trump was never the savior you wanted him to be. Had president Trump respected candidate Trump's promises he'd at least be a man of his word. But he didn't do that of course. Trump is a rhetorician (or a windbag, take your pick) and if you focus intently on his words only while downplaying his actions, you might be able to convince yourself into believing he is more than a prolific bullshitter.

Fox News is the "conservative" MSNBC. It swings from the GOP's nutsack (as you have apparently just discovered) and in fact pioneered that style of outrage "journalism." The American elite need to keep people believing in the two-party duopoly. Fox plays its roll by keeping its viewers in the Republican fold. Hate the Democrats? Vote GOP! is the message. If you think MSNBC is trash, why would you cut Fox News any slack? They perform the same function.

Here's a conspiracy theory for you. What if Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are both controlled opposition? Start with their affiliation. The supposedly "independent" Sanders is effectively a Democrat and the supposedly "insurgent" Trump is effectively a Republican. The media has been in TDS mode for four years and when it looked like Sanders might have some bipartisan appeal he was quickly slapped down by liberal pundits and commentators.

But what if all that outage is mostly theater designed to get voters believing that Trump/Sanders are antiestablishment insurgents who present a "real difference" from stale Democrat/Republican politics? The outrage and slap downs gives the impression that the establishment really really hates these guys and lets the people who support them think that they are supporting principled antiestablishmentarians.

The establishment may not like Trump or Sanders very much but as long as they are controllable they are preferable to a strong third party candidate or a mass revolt against the duopoly. After winning the 2016 election Trump caved early and caved often and governed like a neocon, while Sanders let himself get cucked by the DNC in 2016 and folded like a cheap suit during his 2020 campaign.

So both of these clowns proved they are no threat to the establishment but it's in the establishment's interest to portray them as dangerous interlopers who threaten the stability of the nation. Why? Because it keeps the "rebellion" in house. As long as the electorate believes a Democrat or Republican POTUS can address their grievances the establishment can sigh in relief knowing that they are still in control.

I don't know if Trump and Sanders are deliberately controlled opposition. But as a theory it's more plausible than The Saker's undying trust in Trump as a principled POTUS who was derailed by crafty internal and liberal opposition. If only Trump had been left alone to govern without undue interference he would be a real hero and America would be saved. Give me a break, The Saker, you can't have it both ways. Either the Empire and everything it stands for is rotten, in which case supporting anyone running on a GOP/Democrat ticket is a fool's errand, or it's not, in which case you can trust the system, roll up your blog and find a new hobby.

What The Saker and other commentators that serve up predictable and unchallenging opinions tailored for a specific audience do is provide entertainment. It's stuff for the faithful to read and collectively reaffirm their beliefs while tsk-tsking at all the fools who "just don't get it." Occasionally they provide comedic interludes like this piece where The Saker discovers that Fox News is actually a corporate outlet that supports an established political party and promotes the sanctity of the American duopoly. lol Thanks for the midweek chuckle, my dude.

The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagence, they have two of them.
– Julius Nyerere (former socialist president of Tanzania)

[Jan 18, 2021] Biden is clearly an enforcer for a faction of what we might call the permanent establishment, the hidden real government that runs on automatic imperial pilot regardless who is nominal US President.

Jan 18, 2021 | journal-neo.org

http://journal-neo.org/2016/09/27/joe-biden-is-washington-troublemaker-in-chief/

Biden is clearly an enforcer for a faction of what we might call the permanent establishment, the hidden real government that runs on automatic imperial pilot regardless who is nominal US President.
That "permanent establishment" is currently becoming "dis-established" everywhere in the world. It sees with horror that its grip on the entire world is crumbling.

It does only what it has always tried in such cases -- war, war, war. Only of late, those wars -- war against Russia over Ukraine, war against Assad's Syria, an attempted war against Erdogan in Turkey, a war against the growing economic muscle in the world of China -- have been impotent flops.

Biden, a dutiful servant of those interests, carries the flag of war to where he is sent, much like the character in Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks.

[Jan 15, 2021] The leaders of Transition Integrity Project (TIP) believe that a mass mobilization will help them to achieve what Russiagate could not, that is, the removal Donald Trump via an illicit coup conjured up by behind-the-scenes powerbrokers and their Democrat allies. by Mike Whitney

Notable quotes:

"... "A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself." ..."

"... Gatestone Institute ..."

"... The Transition Integrity Project ..."

"... Unlimited Hangout ..."

"... Paul Craig Roberts ..."

Sep 17, 2020 | www.unz.com

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself."

Marcus Tullius Cicero

The Transition Integrity Project (TIP) is a shadowy group of government, military and media elites who have concocted a plan to spread mayhem and disinformation following the November 3 presidential elections. The strategy takes advantage of the presumed delay in determining the winner of the upcoming election. (due to the deluge of mail-in votes.) The interim period is expected to intensify partisan warfare creating the perfect environment for disseminating propaganda and inciting street violence. The leaders of TIP believe that a mass mobilization will help them to achieve what Russiagate could not, that is, the removal Donald Trump via an illicit coup conjured up by behind-the-scenes powerbrokers and their Democrat allies. Here's a little more background from an article by Chris Farrell at the Gatestone Institute:

"In one of the greatest public disinformation campaigns in American history -- the Left and their NeverTrumper allies (under the nom de guerre: "Transition Integrity Project") released a 22-page report in August 2020 "war gaming" four election crisis scenarios: .The outcome of each TIP scenario results in street violence and political impasse.

Is it possible that the leadership of the American Left, along with their NeverTrumper allies, are busy talking themselves into advocating and promoting street violence as a response to a presidential election?

The answer is: Yes . expect violence in the aftermath of the election, because now that is the new 'normal." (" How to Steal an Election", Gatestone Institute )

Farrell is right. As we can see from the many articles that have recently popped up in the media, the American people are being prepared for a contested election that will fuel public anxiety and revolt. This all fits with the overall strategy of the TIP. Selected journalists will be used to provide bits of information that serve the interests of the group while the people will be told to expect a long and drawn-out constitutional crisis. Meanwhile, the media, the Democrat leadership, trusted elites and elements in the Intelligence Community will put pressure on Trump to step down while firing up their political base to take to the streets. TIP's 22-page manifesto makes it clear that mass mobilization will be key to any electoral victory. Here's an excerpt from the text:

"A show of numbers in the streets-and actions in the streets-may be decisive factors in determining what the public perceives as a just and legitimate outcome." ( "Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition" The Transition Integrity Project )

In other words, the authors fully support demonstrations and political upheaval to achieve their goal of removing Trump. Clearly, this scorched earth approach did not originate with Joe Biden, but with the cynical and bloodthirsty puppetmasters who operate behind the curtain and who will do anything to advance their agenda.

This is a full-blown color revolution authored and supported by the same oligarchs and deep-state honchoes that have opposed Trump from the very beginning. They're not going to back down or call off the dogs until the job is done and Trump is gone. And when the dust settles, Trump will likely be charged, tried, sentenced and imprisoned. His fortune will be seized, his family will be financially ruined, and his closest advisors and allies will be prosecuted on fabricated charges. There's not going to be a "graceful transition" of power if Trump loses. He will face the full wrath of the scheming mandarins he has frustrated for the last 4 years. These are the men who applauded when Saddam and Ghaddafi were savagely butchered. Will Trump face the same fate as them?

Trump has less than two months to rally his supporters, draw attention to the conspiracy that has is presently underway, and figure out a way to defend himself against the coup plotters. If he is unable to derail the impending junta, his goose is cooked.

It's worth noting, that the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) has no legal authority to meddle in the upcoming election. They were not appointed by any congressional committee nor did any government entity approve their intrusive activities. This is entirely a "lone wolf" operation designed to exploit loopholes in campaign laws in order to undermine public confidence in our elections and to express their unbridled hostility towards Donald Trump. That said, there analysis will probably influence those who share their views. In the first page of their "Executive Summary" they say:

"We assess with a high degree of likelihood that November's elections will be marked by a chaotic legal and political landscape. We also assess that the President Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto power. " (Ibid )

This short statement provides the basic justification for the group's existence. It presents the participants as impartial observers performing their civic duty by objectively analyzing exercises (war games?) that indicate that Trump will challenge the election results in a desperate attempt to hold on to power. Not surprisingly, the group provides no evidence that the president would react the way they think he would. In fact, their hypothesis seems extremely far-fetched given the fact that Trump has no militia, no private army, and very few allies among the political class, the Intelligence Community, the FBI, the military or the deep state. Who exactly does the group think would help Trump hold on to power: Bill Barr, Larry Kudlow, Melania??

There is nothing "impartial" about this analysis. It is partisan gibberish aimed at discrediting Trump while creating a pretext for launching a coup against him. Here is another sample of TIP's "objective analysis" from page 1 of the manuscript:

"The Transition Integrity Project (TIP) was launched in late 2019 out of concern that the Trump Administration may seek to manipulate, ignore, undermine or disrupt the 2020 presidential election and transition process. TIP takes no position on how Americans should cast their votes, or on the likely winner of the upcoming election; either major party candidate could prevail at the polls in November without resorting to "dirty tricks." However, the administration of President Donald Trump has steadily undermined core norms of democracy and the rule of law and embraced numerous corrupt and authoritarian practices. This presents a profound challenge for those –from either party –who are committed to ensuring free and fair elections, peaceful transitions of power, and stable administrative continuity in the United States." (Ibid )

Got that? In other words (to paraphrase) "Trump is a corrupt dictator who hates democracy and the rule of law, but that is just our unbiased opinion. Please, don't let that influence your vote. We just want to make sure the election goes smoothly."

As we noted, the hatred for Trump permeates the entire 22-page document and that, in turn, undermines the credibility of the author to portray his project as an impartial examination of potential problems in the upcoming election. There is nothing evenhanded in the approach to these issues or in the remedies that are recommended. This is a partisan project concocted by malicious elites who despise Trump and who plan to remove him from office by hook or crook.

So, do we know who the leaders of this (TIP) group are?

Well, we know who their two main spokesmen are: Rosa Brooks– Georgetown law professor and co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project, and Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William & Mary, and chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to an article by Whitney Webb:

" (Rosa) Brooks was an advisor to the Pentagon and the Hillary Clinton-led State Department during the Obama administration. She was also previously the general counsel to the President of the Open Society Institute, part of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), a controversial organization funded by billionaire George Soros. Zoe Hudson, who is TIP's director, is also a former top figure at OSF, serving as senior policy analyst and liaison between the foundations and the U.S. government for 11 years .

OSF ties to the TIP are a red flag for a number of reasons, namely due to the fact that OSF and other Soros-funded organizations played a critical role in fomenting so-called "color revolutions" to overthrow non-aligned governments, particularly during the Obama administration. Examples of OSF's ties to these manufactured "revolutions" include Ukraine in 2014 and the "Arab Spring" ..

In addition to her ties to the Obama administration and OSF, Brooks is currently a scholar at West Point's Modern War Institute, where she focuses on "the relationship between the military and domestic policing" and also Georgetown's Innovative Policing Program. She is a currently a key player in the documented OSF-led push to "capitalize" off of legitimate calls for police reform to justify the creation of a federalized police force under the guise of defunding and/or eliminating local police departments. Brooks' interest in the "blurring line" between military and police is notable given her past advocacy of a military coup to remove Trump from office and the TIP's subsequent conclusion that the military "may" have to step in if Trump manages to win the 2020 election, per the group's "war games" described above.

Brooks is also a senior fellow at the think tank New America . New America's mission statement notes that the organization is focused on "honestly confronting the challenges caused by rapid technological and social change, and seizing the opportunities those changes create." It is largely funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, including Bill Gates (Microsoft), Eric Schmidt (Google), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Jeffrey Skoll and Pierre Omidyar (eBay) . In addition, it has received millions directly from the U.S. State Department to research "ranking digital rights." Notably, of these funders, Reid Hoffman was caught "meddling" in the most recent Democratic primary to undercut Bernie Sanders' candidacy during the Iowa caucus and while others, such as Eric Schmidt and Pierre Omidyar, are known for their cozy ties to the Clinton family and even ties to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign." (" "Bipartisan" Washington Insiders Reveal Their Plan for Chaos if Trump Wins the Election ", Unlimited Hangout )

Is it safe to say that Rosa Brooks is a Soros stooge overseeing a color revolution in the United States aimed at toppling Trump and replacing him with a dementia-addled, meat-puppet named Joe Biden?

Political analyst Paul Craig Roberts seems to think so. Here's what he said in a recent post at his website:

"I have provided evidence that the military/security complex, using the media and the Democrats, intends to turn the November election into a color revolution The evidence of a color revolution in the works is abundantly supplied by CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, NPR, Washington Post and numerous Internet sites funded by the CIA and the foundations and corporations through which it operates.. All of these media organizations are establishing the story in the mind of Americans that Trump will not leave office when he loses or steals the election and must be driven out.

With Antifa and Black Lives Matter now experienced in violent protests, they will be unleashed anew on American cities when there is news of a Trump election victory. The media will explain the violence as necessary to free us from a tyrant and egg on the violence, as will the Democrat Party. The CIA will be certain that the violence is well funded .

What is a reelected President Trump going to do when the Secret Service refuses to repel Antifa and Black Lives Matter when they breach White House Security?

American Democracy is on the verge of being ended for all times, and the world media will herald the event as the successful overthrowing of a tyrant." ( "America's Color Revolution" , Paul Craig Roberts )

Another of the leading spokesmen for TIP is Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson who made this revealing statement in a recent interview:

"Let me just say some of the things that we're putting out there. Among those things, one that is very important is the media, particularly the mainstream media. They cannot act as they usually act with regard to elections. They have to play a coup on election night. They can't be declaring some state like Pennsylvania for one candidate or the other. When Pennsylvania probably has thousands upon thousands of votes yet to come in and count. So, the media has to get its act in order and it has to act very differently than it normally does."

(NOTE: In other words, Wilkerson does not want the media to follow the normal protocols for covering an election, but to adjust their reporting to accommodate the aims of the coup-plotters. Does that sound like someone who is committed to evenhanded coverage of events, or someone who wants reporters to shape the news to meet the specifications of his own particular agenda? Here's more from Wilkerson:)

"Second, .we also have learned that poll workers have to be younger. And we've started a movement all across the country to train young people. And we've had really good luck with the volunteers to do so , to be poll workers. Because we found out in Wisconsin, for example, poll workers are mostly over 60. And many of them didn't show up because they were afraid of COVID-19. And so Wisconsin went from about one 188 polling places, to about 15. That's disastrous." (" This 'War Game' Maps out what happens if the President contests the Election" , WBUR )

Why is Wilkerson so encouraged by the young people he's trained to act as poll workers? Doesn't that sound a bit fishy, especially from a dyed-in-the-wool partisan who's mixed up with a group whose sole aim is to beat Trump? And why are the authors of the TIP manifesto so eager to reveal their true intentions. Take a look:

"There will likely not be an "election night" this year; unprecedented numbers of voters are expected to use mail-in ballots, which will almost certainly delay the certified result for days or weeks. A delay provides a window for campaigns, the media, and others to cast doubt on the integrity of the process and for escalating tensions between competing camps. As a legal matter, a candidate unwilling to concede can contest the election into January. .."( Ibid)

So, that's the GamePlan, eh? The coup plotters want a contested election that drags on for weeks, deepens divisions among the population, undermines confidence in the electoral system, instigates ferocious street fighting in cities across the country, and gives the Biden camp time to mobilize its political resources in Congress to mount a Constitutional attack on Trump.

Can we at least call this treachery by its proper name: Treason– "the crime of betraying one's country by trying to overthrow the government?"

If the shoe fits ..

[Jan 13, 2021] This is the very first time in recent US history that a small cabal of "deep insiders" have achieved such total control of all the real instruments of power.

Jan 13, 2021 | www.unz.com

Miro23 , says: January 12, 2021 at 10:28 pm GMT • 5.8 hours ago

This is the very first time in recent US history that a small cabal of "deep insiders" have achieved such total control of all the real instruments of power. The bad news is that they know that they are a small minority and they realize that they need to act fast to secure their hold on power.

I would take this as the key phrase.

When the small minority if Bolshevik radicals forced their way into power in Russia 1917, they were also very aware that they were a small cabal of "deep insiders" and immediately set out to arrest or simply shoot their opponents (ethnic Russians) to fortify their dictatorship. Plus ASAP they turned this into a process of mass transportation and imprisonment .

I would expect the new Woke US ZioGob regime to do exactly the same, and move fast against the "deplorables".

How that works out is the big question.

[Jan 13, 2021] The Mob Did Not Win!, by The Saker

Highly recommended!

Notable quotes:

"... I have, for some time, been mis-naming the Nomenklatura as the Politburo, with the commune being the many tentacled international banking cartel. ..."

Jan 13, 2021 | www.unz.com

FoxNews finally showed its true face during the election steal when it declared that Trump had lost the election long before any evidence in support of this thesis materialized. It is now abundantly clear that with a few exceptions (notably Tucker Carlson), FoxNews is very much on the same page as CNN and the rest of them. So what just happened and what is taking place now?

Americans have been brainwashed into calling things they don't like, or don't understand, as "Socialist" or even "Marxist". The sad reality is that most Americans sincerely believe that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders are "socialists", and when they see modern movies ridiculously filled with "minorities" and gender fluid freaks – this is a case of "cultural Marxism" (a totally meaningless term, by the way!). This is all utter nonsense, neither Marxism nor Socialism have anything to do with BLM, Antifa, Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer (in fact, Marxism places a premium on real law and order!). I can't take the time and space here to discuss Marxism, but I do believe that there is one analytical tool which we can borrow from Marxist thought to try to make sense of what just happened in the USA. Let's begin by asking a simple question:

If "the mob" did not win, who did?

Most certainly not the abstract concept of "law and order". For one thing, it is now abundantly clear that some cops deliberately let a (rather small) subset of protestors not only across police lines but even inside the Capitol Building itself. That is not exactly law and order, now is it? Furthermore, it is now also clear that Ashli Babbitt was very deliberately shot by an (apparently black) cop who was then quickly hidden away from sight by the authorities. Not exactly law and order either.

Neither did the abstract concept of "democracy" win anything that day. Many protesters were recorded saying that the Capitol building belonged to the people, not to the people working in it on behalf of the people. They are right. But even if we accept the notion that those who entered the building were trespassing, the massive crackdown on free speech which immediately followed the events at the Capitol is a clear sign that "democracy" did not win that day. More about that later.

So who won?

Well, look who is celebrating and who is now demanding that punitive and even repressive measures be taken against Trump supporters:

here and here ) The Russia-hating Lobby Antifa/BLM/etc The many freaks of nature leading various "minorities" Big Tech megacorporations a la Google and Amazon

The list is longer, of course, and it includes pretty much all the folks afflicted with the now famous Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).

Our list looks like a cocktail of very different actors, but is that really the case?

I submit that if we look closely at this list of possible "winners" we can quickly see that we are dealing with a single social category /group whose "diversity" is only apparent. Here is what all these groups have in common:

They are numerically small, definitely a minority They are very wealthy They are very close to the real centers of power They share the same narcissistic (Neocon) ideology of self-worship They are driven by the same hate-based ideology of revenge They don't care about the people of the USA They want to dismantle the US Constitutional order

On the basis of these common characteristics, I believe that we can speak about a social class united by a common ideology .

Now, of course, in the plutocratic oligarchy (which the United States in reality is), the notion of "class" has been declared heretical and it has been replaced by identity politics – the best way for a ruling class to (a) hide behind a fake illusion of pluralism and (b) to divide the people and rule over them.

I have already written about what I consider to be a US version of the Soviet Nomenklatura , a special ruling class which was official in the (comparatively much more honest) Soviet system but which is always hidden from sight by the rulers of the United States.

The actual word we use are not that important: Nomenklatura , class, caste, establishment, powers that be, deep state, etc. – they all approximate the reality of a small gang of self-declared "elites" (as opposed to the "deplorables") ruling with total impunity and no checks and balances mitigating their de facto dictatorship. Some well-intentioned people began speaking about the "1%" – which is not bad, even if the actual figure is even smaller than just one percent. Others used "Wall Street" (as in the "occupy WS" movement), again – not a bad attempt to describe the problem. Whatever the terms you chose, what is certain is that this entity has what Marx would call a " class consciousness " which produces a single " class ideology " characterized by an extremely strong sense of "us versus them" .

By the way, while I disagree with any notion that the US Nomenklatura is Marxist or Socialist in any way, I very much agree that these "elites" are displaying an ideological zeal very similar to what Trotskysts or Nazis typically exhibit, especially when confronted with the "deplorables" or, like FoxNews says, the "mob" (the Polish word " bydło " – cattle – very accurately renders this contempt for the masses).

In fact, they see us all as their "class enemy" . And they are quite correct, by the way.

Their ideology is messianic, racist, violent and hate filled while the members of this US Nomenklatura see themselves as the cream of the crop, the "chosen people", whose "destiny" is to rule over the "dark and primitive" "mob".

This contempt for the "mob" is something which self-described "liberals" always try to conceal, but which always comes out, be it in 1917 Russia or in 2021 USA. There is a weird logic to this, by the way. It goes something like this: " we are clearly superior to the plebes, yet these plebes seem to reject that notion, these plebes are therefore a "dark mob" which absolutely needs to be strictly ruled by us ". The underlying assumption is that plebes are dangerous, they can always riot and threaten "us". Hence the need for a police state. QED.

We all remember how the Clinton gang was mega-super-sure that Hillary would easily defeat Trump. And just to make darn sure that the US "plebes" don't do anything stupid, the US legacy corporate ziomedia engaged in probably the most hysterical candidate bashing propaganda operation in history only to find out that the "deplorables" did not vote as they were told to, they voted for "Trump The New Hitler" instead.

What a truly unforgivable affront of these serfs against the masters which God, or Manifest Destiny, placed above them!

And just as their pseudo-liberal colleagues from the past, the US liberals decided that this vote was a slap in their face which, of course, is quite correct (I still believe that most votes for Trump where not votes for Trump, but votes against Hillary); it was, so to speak, a gigantic "f**k you!" from the revolting serfs against their masters. And class consciousness told the US Nomenklatura that this was an anti-masters pogrom , a US " Jacquerie " if you wish. This "revolt of the serfs" had to be put down, immediately, and it was: Trump caved to the Neocons in less than a month (when he betrayed General Flynn) and ever since the US Nomenklatura has been using Trump as a disposable President who would do all the crazy nonsense imaginable to please Israel, and who would then be disposed off. And yet it is now quite clear that the US "deplorables" voted for the "wrong" candidate again! Hence the need for a (very poorly concealed) "election steal" followed by a "test of loyalty" (you better side with us, or else ) which eventually resulted in the situation we have today.

What is that situation exactly?

Simply put, this time the US Nomenklatura has truly achieved total power. Not only do they control all three of the official branches of government, they now also fully control the 4th one, the "media space", courtesy of the US tech giants which now are openly silencing anybody who disagrees with the One And Only Official Truth As Represented By The Propaganda Outlets. This is the very first time in recent US history that a small cabal of "deep insiders" have achieved such total control of all the real instruments of power. The bad news is that they know that they are a small minority and they realize that they need to act fast to secure their hold on power. But for that they needed a pretext.

It is hardly surprising that after successfully pulling off the 9/11 false flag operation, the US Nomenklatura had no problems whatsoever pulling off the "Capitol" false flag.

Think about it: the legally organized and scheduled protest of Trump supporters was announced at least a week before it had to take place. How hard was it for those in charge of security to make sure that the protesters stay in one specific location? At the very least, those in charge of security could have done what Lukashenko eventually did in Mink: place military and police forces around all the important symbolic buildings and monuments and say "you are welcome to protest, but don't even think of trying to take over any government property" (that approach worked much better than beating up protesters, which Lukashenko initially had tried). Yet what we saw was the exact opposite: in DC protesters were invited across police lines by cops. Not only that, but even those protesters which did enter the Capitol were, apparently, not violent enough, so it had to be one of the cops to shoot an unarmed and clearly non-dangerous woman, thereby providing the "sacrificial victim" needed to justify the hysterics about "violence" and "rule of law".

And the worst part is that it worked, even Trump ended up condemning the "violence" and denouncing those who, according to Trump, did not represent the people.

The hard truth is much simpler: the "stop the steal" protestors did not commit any real violence! Yes, they broke some furniture, had some fights with cops (who initially were inviting people in, only to then violently turn against them with batons, pepper sprays and flash-bang grenades). Some reports say that one cop was hit by a fire extinguisher. If true, that would be a case of assault with a deadly weapon (under US law any object capable of being used to kill can be considered a deadly weapon when used for that purpose). But considering the nonstop hysteria about guns, the NRA and "armed militias", this was clearly not a planned murder. Finally, a few people died, apparently from natural causes, possibly made worse by the people trampling over each other. In other words, the Trump supporters did not kill anybody deliberately, at most they can be accused of creating the circumstances which resulted in manslaughter. That was not murder. Not even close. Want to see what a planned murder looks like? Just look at the footage of the Ashli Babbitt murder by some kind of armed official. That is real murder, and it was committed by a armed official. So which side is most guilty of violating laws and regulations?

Furthermore, no moral value can be respected unless it is universally and equally applied. Which, considering that the US deep state has engaged in a full year of wanton mass violence against hundreds of innocent US citizens makes it unbelievably hypocritical for the US liberals to denounce "the mob" now. Frankly, the way I see it, all the US liberals should now "take a knee" before the pro-Trump protestors and declare that this was a "mostly peaceful" event which, objectively speaking, it was .

Won't happen. I know.

What will happen next is going to be a vicious crackdown on free speech in all its forms . In fact, and just to use a Marxist notion, what comes next is class warfare .

We have all seen Pelosi and the rest of them demanding that Trump either be removed by Pence and the Cabinet (25th A.), or they will unleash another impeachment. First, if impeached, Trump won't be able to run in 2024 (which the liberals fully realize is a major risk for them). But even more important, is to humiliate him, make him pay, show him once and for all "who is boss"! These people thrive on revenge and victory is never enough to appease them, they simply hate anybody who dares oppose them and they want to make an example of any and every serf who dares to disobey them. That is why they always send "messages", no matter how inchoate: they want to bully all the deplorables on the planet into total subservience.

But they won't stop with just Trump. Oh no! They will also go after all those serfs who dared defy this Nomenklatura and who objected to the wholesale repudiation of the US Constitution. For example, in a truly Orwellian move, the NY State Bar now wants to disbar Giuliani for acting as Trump's lawyer (not a joke, check here ). Which, considering that Trump already lost several lawyers to such tactics should not come as a surprise to anybody: apparently, in the "new 2021 Woke-USA", some are more entitled to legal representation than others.

Don't expect the ACLU to protest, by the way – equal protection under the law is not a topic of interest to them. Here are a few screenshots take off their website , so see for yourself.

Clearly, the priority for the folks at the ACLU is to destroy Trump and anybody daring to take up his defense.

One one hand, this is truly an absolute disaster, because when the US ruling Nomenklatura agrees to drop any past pretenses of objectivity, or even decency, things will definitely get ugly. On the other hand, however, this immense "coming out" of the US Nomenklatura is, of course, unsustainable (just look at history, every time these folks thought that they had crushed the "plebes", the latter ended up rising and showing their supposed "masters" to the door; this will happen here too).

Last, but not least, let's keep another crucial thing in mind: even if you absolutely hate Trump, you really should realize that it is not just "the vote" which was stolen, it was the entire US Constitutional order . While we often focus on the SCOTUS, we should not remember the many lower courts which showed a total absence of courage or dignity and which caved in to the hysterical demands of the US Nomenklatura . It is impossible to have a country under the rule of law when the courts shy away from their obligation to uphold the said rule of law and, instead, place political expediency above the letter and spirit of the law.

Furthermore, when concepts such as "legal" and "illegal" lose any objective meaning, how can any action be considered illegal or punishable?

Here is, just as an example, the Oath of Office taken by all Supreme Court Justices: (emphasis added)

"I, [NAME], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich , and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as [TITLE] under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God."

And this is what each member of the US Armed Forces swears: (emphasis added)

"I, (state name of enlistee), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic ; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (So help me God)."

It does not take a genius to figure out that the SCOTUS is now in the hands of a small cabal of people who clearly are "domestic enemies" of the US Constitution.

Finally, here is what the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence states: (emphasis added)

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,–That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it , and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

I don't think that there is any need to further beat this dead horse and I will simply summarize it as so:

The regime which will soon replace the Trump Administration is an illegal occupation government, with strong ties to foreign interests (and I don't mean China or Russia here!), which all those who served in the US military have taken an oath to oppose; this is precisely the kind of occupation regime which the Founding Fathers foresaw in their Declaration of Independence . Furthermore, the rule of law has clearly collapsed, at least on the federal level, this should give the states more freedom of movement to resist the decrees of this new regime (at least those states still willing and able to resist, I think of TX and FL here). The leaders of this US Nomenklatura understand this, at least on some level, and we should expect no decency from them; neither should we expect any mercy. Revenge is what fuels these ideology- and hate-filled people who loathe and fear all the rest of humanity because nobody is willing to worship them as our "lords and masters ". But this is also the beginning of their end.

Conclusion: now we are all Palestinians!

True, no "mob" won on the Capitol, unless we refer to the (disgraced, hated and useless) Congress as "the mob". And, of course, neither did "the people" or the protesters. The only real winner in this entire operation was the US deep state and the US Nomenklatura . But they did not win any war, only the opening battle of a war which will be much longer than what they imagine in their ignorance.

I have said it many times, Trump really destroyed the USA externally, in terms of world politics. The Dems have done the same thing, only internally. For example, Trump is the one who most arrogantly ignored the rule of law in international affairs, but it was the Dems who destroyed the rule of law inside the USA. It was Trump who with his antics and narcissistic threats urbi et orbi who destroyed any credibility left for the USA as a country (or even of the the AngloZionist Empire as a whole), but it was the Dems who really decided to sabotage the very political system which allowed them to seize power in the first place.

What comes next is the illegal rule of an illegitimate regime which came to power by violence (BLM, Antifa, Capitol false flag). This will be a Soviet-style gerontocracy with senile figureheads pretending to be in power (think Biden vs Chernenko here). Looking at the old, Obama-era, names which are circulated now for future Cabinet positions, we can bet on two things: the new rulers will be as evil as they will be grossly incompetent, mostly due to their crass lack of education (even Nuland and Psaki are back, it appears!). The Biden admin will be similar to the rule of Kerensky in "democratic" Russia: chaos, violence, lots and lots of speeches and total social and economic chaos. The next crucial, and even frightening, question now is: what will replace this US version of a Kerensky regime?

It is way too early to reply to this question, but we should at least begin to think about it, lest we be completely caught off guard.

But until then, "domestic terrorism" will, once again, become the boogeyman we will be told to fear. And, as all good boys and girls know, the best way to deal with such a horrible "domestic terrorism" threat is to dismantle the First and Second Amendments of the Constitution. Having corrupt kangaroo courts on all levels, from the small claims level to the Supreme court, will greatly help in this endeavor. Of course, there will be resistance from the deplorables who still love their country and their Constitution.

But no matter how long this takes (might be decades) and how violent this confrontation becomes (and, it will, if only because the regime vitally needs more false flags to survive!), what will happen with this occupation regime is what happened to all of them throughout history (could that be the reason why history is not taught anymore?).

As the Russian poet and bard, Vladimir Vissotski, wrote " it is impossible to trample upon souls with boots " (сапогами не вытоптать душу). Now we are all Palestinians. And we, like they, will win!

---

obwandiyag , says: January 12, 2021 at 3:36 am GMT • 1.0 days ago

Read this again, boneheads:

"Americans have been brainwashed into calling things they don't like, or don't understand, as "Socialist" or even "Marxist". The sad reality is that most Americans sincerely believe that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders are "socialists", and when they see modern movies ridiculously filled with "minorities" and gender fluid freaks – this is a case of "cultural Marxism" (a totally meaningless term, by the way!). This is all utter nonsense, neither Marxism nor Socialism have anything to do with BLM, Antifa, Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer (in fact, Marxism places a premium on real law and order!)."

anonymous [400] Disclaimer , says: January 12, 2021 at 5:11 am GMT • 23.1 hours ago

"class" has been declared heretical and it has been replaced by identity politics – the best way for a ruling class to (a) hide behind a fake illusion of pluralism and (b) to divide the people and rule over them

It's a neat bait and switch scheme, identity being substituted for class. Billionaires can now be hailed as people's champions by instituting 'gender-fluid' toilets and forcing their peons to kneel. Who knows how much force they'll be willing to use against the deplorables but probably it would know no limit. The shock and awe unleashed against foreign countries could now be instituted domestically with things like the Phoenix Program being tried here, among other things. Anything but relinquish power.

The old war-lovers are coming back in. Although he was considered belligerent the new regime will be worse. War is probably part of the future agenda. Solidifying it's grip upon the domestic population may be the precursor to embarking upon an unpopular and certain to be costly war against Iran or perhaps even some clash with Russia.

Faihtful , says: January 12, 2021 at 5:28 am GMT • 22.8 hours ago

The mob never wins. It is always led by the nose by well organised agents provocateur. See Epoch time video:

https://www.bitchute.com/embed/FrE27FTf11Q/

Old Man Turtle , says: January 12, 2021 at 5:40 am GMT • 22.6 hours ago

From the I Ching: "Large ambitions coupled with meager talent will seldom escape disaster."

The fervid machinations of the current crop of "self"-glorifying wannabes will not, as The Saker reminds us here, be any exception to the rule, either. They're hardly the first bunch of feckless opportunists to take a run at "full spectrum dominance" .aiming to trap Life Herownself within the suffocating CONfines of their own little nut'shell.

The rampant insanity symptomatic of their virulent "self"-sickness, as it runs its inevitable course, looks like being somewhat more than usually trying for the rest of us, though .given all the electro-mechanical and institutional enhancement available to them, for intensifying the degenerative effects of their folly. At the same time, our best response will be just what we all know is always organically and in all Ways imperative for our Kind, anyhow. All our precious attention is best devoted to taking care of the Earth and each other. Our unconditional affection is best lavished on this Living Creation, all our Relations, and The Great Spirit whose gift it is.

Mefobills , says: January 12, 2021 at 4:25 pm GMT • 11.9 hours ago

Nomenklatura is a bad analogy.

It is an Oligarchy of bond holders. I'm using the word bond as an stand-in for debt instruments, or any sort of claim on productivity. Bond/Bondage/Debt are all closely related concepts.

The entire Western World is inter-connected double-entry balance sheets.

One side of the balance sheet is "assets" and the other is "liabilities." One person's liability is another persons asset.

It is best to view the western world as a balance sheet, especially as private bank credit is the dominant money type of the west. Private banking and debt spreading has metastasized like a cancer, and is now consuming the host. Debt instruments and finance paper are being serviced in the finance sector with QE and 'CARES' act shenanigan's, which pays these finance "assets."

If you want to call the bond holders in finance and elsewhere as a nomenklatura, go ahead – but it obscures reality. These people are a class, a class of usurers, who are "taking" wealth in sordid ways by gaming the system.

All through history, plutocracy has arisen out of the population because debts were not annulled, or land was enclosed.

Oligarchs of various types are harvesting the world through various means, including the growth of debt claims. These claims grow exponentially, and outside of nature's ability to pay. The derivative bubble wants to be paid. What cannot go on, will not.

The balance sheet is not really balanced, one side (the debt instrument holder) is making exponential claims on debtors.

https://michael-hudson.com/2016/07/socrates-debt-and-the-cyclical-rise-and-fall-of-societies/

Moritz Hinsch from Berlin collected what Socrates (470-399 BC) and other Athenians wrote about debt, and the conference's organizer, Prof. John Weisweiler, presented the new view of late imperial Rome as being still a long way from outright serfdom. The 99 Percent were squeezed, but "the economy" grew – in a way that concentrated growth in the hands of the One Percent . In due course this bred popular resentment that spread in the form of debtor revolts, not only in the Roman Empire but that of Iran as well, leading to religious reforms to limit the charging of interest and self-indulgent greed in general.

By now Nazi references are getting thread-bare. We actually need to examine how the national socialists operated because their situation is analogous to today.

I very much agree that these "elites" are displaying an ideological zeal very similar to what Trotskysts or Nazis typically exhibit

National Socialism arose as a reaction to finance capitalism's excesses. The very things we are seeing today, were present in Weimar Germany. The country was being bought up, and the people were being denied their birthright. Self-indulgent greed of an arising Oligarchy was smashed by the National Socialists to then re-balance German civilization.

Nazi zeal restoring civilizational balance is quite something different than leftist bolshevism.

Curmudgeon , says: January 12, 2021 at 5:04 pm GMT • 11.2 hours ago

@Biff

I have, for some time, been mis-naming the Nomenklatura as the Politburo, with the commune being the many tentacled international banking cartel. It's the same crowd that funded the original Bolsheviks.
IMO they are only "Neo" by virtue of the old ones having died, but I'm not going to split hairs. We all know it is those whose loyalty is to a shitty little country on the Mediterranean.

Mefobills , says: January 12, 2021 at 5:47 pm GMT • 10.5 hours ago

@Anonymous ties extract, which makes politicians whores for their donor class. The donor class is the "holders of debt instruments" as I explained earlier. Or, they can be part of the military industrial complex, to then whore for more taxpayer dollars. In all cases it is for self aggrandizement. By the same reasoning, press-titutes are whores for their paymasters.

The easy money is taken in by usury or other sordid schemes; then donated/recycled into politicians, to then keep the game going. Average laboring people don't have this surplus wealth to donate.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fD6wxH5gIk8?start=2&feature=oembed

[Jan 11, 2021] It is inconceivable that any political party can survive in the US without the backing of the 'deep state' and first of all FBI and CIA.

Jan 11, 2021 | thesaker.is

John Hagan on January 11, 2021 , · at 5:49 am EST/EDT

Hi Ah,
That the US deep state has been terrorising parts of the world for many years my reaction before the election was to hope that Biden would win as I believed that would be the quickest destruction of the terrorist deep state rather than with Trump where I believed it would survive some time longer. It is inconceivable that any political party can survive in the US without the backing of the 'deep state'.

Of course this makes the nuclear option more likely yet democrats are more attached to their lives than many others since the profit motive looms larger.

Secondly the US owes the pension and social security systems so much money they do not have unless they print, print and more print and hope someone will buy their bonds (over 100 trillion for the next 'x' years). That is not going to happen. That is why both political parties will not endorse medicare for all or any further social security programmes. Those with money insurance industries et al will run away to Australia that has more gold than it knows what to do with the Chinese are now trying to buy Aussie gold mines. Wonder why?

https://youtu.be/_uxJ8JYnwAQ

To sum up the US population will experience some of the same terrorism tacticts the deep state exported to the rest of the world while the same population will wonder why it is happening to them just like some of the middle east countries wondered the same for the last 20 years. That the deep state and the army offer pensions and heathcare will not matter if the funds are not there.
What are the options for the citizens that always believed in capitalism and Jesus and were the single moral compass for the rest of humanity? After living in a Buddist country for many years I am not so certain.

[Jan 10, 2021] A Coup of Pelosi's Own

Notable quotes:

"... Mrs. Pelosi's call to Gen. Milley is itself a violation of the separation of powers by seeking to inject herself into an executive-branch military decision. She can offer advice all she wants, but this call at this time has the sound of an order. It might even be construed by some as its own little coup -- conniving with the military to relieve of command the person who remains the elected President. ..."

Jan 10, 2021 | www.wsj.com

Mrs. Pelosi's call to Gen. Milley is itself a violation of the separation of powers by seeking to inject herself into an executive-branch military decision. She can offer advice all she wants, but this call at this time has the sound of an order. It might even be construed by some as its own little coup -- conniving with the military to relieve of command the person who remains the elected President.

What if an adversary leaps on the news and decides this is the moment to stage some military action when the U.S. is consumed with internal conflict? Does Gen. Milley now have to consult with the Speaker before he acts in America's defense? How anyone thinks her intervention would restore good constitutional order to government or some modicum of sanity to politics is a mystery.

Mr. Trump failed his constitutional test on Wednesday. But Mrs. Pelosi showed awful judgment with her grandstanding over the nuclear launch codes. Late Friday she announced that she's also revving up the impeachment machinery. So much for calming political tempers.

[Jan 10, 2021] The Congress Has No Clothes: The "people," whom they love to claim they represent, went from being an ideological abstraction to an angry mob after they felt cheated and decided to take matters into their own hands by John Morgan

Notable quotes:

"... What struck me was the behavior of most of the House's invaders: they for the most were pranksters. For them it was Halloween; not the storming of the Bastille! ..."

"... This is all pretty mild stuff. Useful to see that Washington is not so different to Kiev. With the Biden presidency you can certainly add the USA to the list of countries ruled by governments put in place by colour revolutions ..."

"... The images that arise from this event will remain iconic. It possibly was a shaperoned event, but the plan, that anger would be wide-spread and destruction abundant did not materialize. This is evident in the bizarre, concocted, pre-written M5M media reports. It was a trap, but it backfired. ..."

"... The French police official said they believed that an investigation would find that someone interfered with the deployment of additional federal law-enforcement officials on the perimeter of the Capitol complex; the official has direct knowledge of the proper procedures for security of the facility. ..."

"... someone interfered with the proper deployment of officers around Congress ..."

"... I was surprised but pleased to see Americans demonstrating their contempt for the hostile elite government we live under. Assault against Democracy? BS. ..."

"... But nobody should delude themselves into thinking that Donald Trump is a patriot who will die for the cause. Hell, he already threw the people risking their lives and liberty protesting the fraudulent election under the bus. It is long past time the whores in Washington become acutely aware of the contempt sane Americans have for them. I do not support violent protests, but I do support a mass demonstration of people expressing their total and absolute contempt for the traitorous whores who rule over us. ..."

Jan 10, 2021 | www.unz.com

But for me, I was no less happy to see the Republicans on the run. After all, it is they who have been stoking the anger and resentment of populist Americans, secure in their belief that they had conjured a monster they completely controlled and that they could endlessly exploit for their own purposes no matter what they did. Well, that monster turned around and bit them on their fleeing asses on Wednesday. The "people," whom they love to claim they represent, went from being an ideological abstraction to an angry mob after they felt cheated and decided to take matters into their own hands. It's important to remember that, according to reports , what first inspired the protesters to descend on the Capitol was when word reached them that Pence had refused to challenge the certification of the Electoral College result. They weren't just angry at the Democrats; they were angry at the whole lot of them.

... For me, the Capitol occupation was a spontaneous and dramatic expression of the white working class' frustration with the Washington establishment and an indication that they won't tolerate a return to business as usual. The Democrats -- and more than a few Republicans -- blocked and worked against Trump's agenda from the day he took office. Stealing the election was merely the final prong in their assault on him and on the wishes of ordinary Americans. If Washington doesn't begin to take populist demands seriously, violence is inevitable.

... This means they have to stop attributing the fact that working-class whites aren't on board with their agenda to the influence of scapegoats like Trump or conspiracy theories and instead finally recognize that our nation's yeomanry have legitimate grievances that won't go away just because Trump does.

For its part, the American Left, which now has Biden as its figurehead, really has no moral authority whatsoever to condemn the Capitol occupation given that they've been bending over backward to excuse the violence of BLM and Antifa for years now. Remember "punch a Nazi"?

Not that these are in any way comparable to what happened in the Capitol; BLM and Antifa violence has resulted in dozens of deaths , rapes, other violence, and untold billions in property damage across the United States. The Capitol protesters, by contrast, were mostly peaceful and caused very little serious damage (if there had been extensive damage it seems unlikely the House would have been able to reconvene so quickly). Most importantly, they were not attacking innocent bystanders' private property. There also doesn't seem to have been much looting apart from a few items taken as pranks; compare this to the scenes we witnessed from Minneapolis last spring , when we saw black rioters stripping entire shopping centers down to their frames.

The Left, of course, will never accept this logic; for them, the occupation was the next Charlottesville, if not the next 9/11 -- but we have to never cease from reminding them of their hypocrisy. In looking at the photos of politicians scurrying for cover as the protesters began to break into the House chamber, I was reminded of the mockery that Trump took from Democratic politicians back in May when word got out that he had been briefly sent to the emergency bunker beneath the White House after it had been besieged by BLM rioters . There's also a delicious irony in the fact that some of the politicians who have been calling for police departments to be defunded were hiding behind these very same police when their constituents came calling.

On Wednesday, the world heard the voice of American populism. It wasn't Trump's voice; it was that of the American people. And perhaps, just perhaps, the people are beginning to rule. This isn't about Trump anymore -- it didn't start with Trump and it certainly won't end with him. As for myself, all I can say is that, for the first time in a while, on that day I actually felt proud to be an American.

---

Roacheforque , says: Website January 8, 2021 at 11:27 pm GMT • 1.1 days ago

Mostly some good and correct points in this article. Yes, Antifa was there, and Capital police expected them. Yes, Washington's corrupt Capital police also did welcome surprised Trump supporters into the building and even to the area where Ashli was assassinated. How do you think there were no less than 5 videos of the murder from 4 angles? Trump supporters were flabbergasted, nonviolent and wondering for the most part how they got so far.

But the END RESULT was a bizarre attempt to REMOVE TRUMP IMMEDIATELY – by any means (25th or impeach – neither will succeed). Do you really think that end result is the product of chance or circumstance? Do you really think Pelosi is foaming at the teeth because she truly believes Trump is ready to enter the launch codes (give me a break)?

In point of fact, because the civilized legal process has been completely exhausted, we now reach the military option, as in executive order on foreign interference in US elections. This means, in the end, a military tribunal convened to prosecute treason. This is the reason certain conspirators are soiling their Depends undergarments.

But how it will end when you have the global banking interests of "the Guardians" as a foe, with their 10 trillion in play? This is a 5th generation world war unlike any before it. Humanity is at stake.

https://roacheforque.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-cards-will-be-shown.html

anonymous [342] Disclaimer , says: January 8, 2021 at 11:51 pm GMT • 1.1 days ago

Congress hasn't had any clothes for years. It was difficult to imagine anything that could make Americans despise congress more. But look at this.

(You need Tor Browser Bundle to see it, and if you don't have it, Why the fuck not?)

Physically cowering in fear of the people they've fucked for all these years.

This is the single most compelling evidence for CIA LIHOP. This quirky peasant uprising and its public happiness scared congress much more than CIA's anthrax attacks. Now congress will do what they're told, take their AIPAC bribes and hide behind high walls.

It's the USA [neoliberlaism] that has no clothes...

Priss Factor , says: Website January 9, 2021 at 5:09 am GMT • 21.0 hours ago

Congress has no clothes because it's the best little whorehouse in America.

By the way, Twitter banning Trump is a great thing. Mass purge is actually better for us.

The problem with limited purges was that most cons and patriots still stuck with Big Tech because there was still enough freedom and conservative material available. But when Big Tech goes whole hog and censors so many people, it will force a Techession(tech-secession or techxodus) among millions and millions of people, and this will make Alt Tech far more viable. Indeed, Alt Tech can turn into counter-tech and the Big Other Tech.

People who were too lazy to get off their butts and join Alt Tech will now have no choice.

Big Tech could maintain monopoly as long as they just banned people like Alex Jones. But when they ban the president and so many of his followers, they are forcing the creation of the Big Other Tech, and that will end the monopoly.

Anonymous [263] Disclaimer , says: January 9, 2021 at 5:31 am GMT • 20.6 hours ago

The people's anger is real. Trump is a false prophet. He's nothing but a Jew loving blowhard, a con man with a below average IQ. He campaigned on draining the swamp but staffed his entire cabinet with nothing but swamp creatures, because he *is* the swamp. He's just been cast aside because the puppet masters have found an even more corrupt puppet that they can extort. The patriots who have been protesting the election deserve someone better, a real deal like Kris Kobach.

This election exposes just how corrupt this country has become, from top to bottom, not just the Executive branch and the legislative branch, but even the judiciary branch is now completely corrupt from the very top, the Chief Justice of SCOTUS. Jews now have firm control on every institution of import in this country, from Wall Street to Hollywood, DC to SV and everywhere in between, media, academia, publishing industry, healthcare, everything. Patriots now have our backs against the Wall. There's no place else to turn to. We either fight our way out or die.

The Roman empire lasted 1,000 years, from 500BC to 500AD. In the first half, Rome was ruled by elected emperors, and in the second half, by unelected emperors. Rome ruled for 500 years, peaked for 200, and fell for 300 years. It was a long, slow death. America was on the ascendance for 300 years, peaked for 50 years (1945-1995), and has been on a decline the last 25 years. The next 75 will be a long, slow, increasingly painful death as we eventually get swallowed whole by huns and visigoths.

Garliv , says: January 9, 2021 at 5:37 am GMT • 20.5 hours ago

"But the END RESULT was a bizarre attempt to REMOVE TRUMP IMMEDIATELY – by any means (25th or impeach – neither will succeed). Do you really think that end result is the product of chance or circumstance? Do you really think Pelosi is foaming at the teeth because she truly believes Trump is ready to enter the launch codes (give me a break)?"

Strange they are unable to wait for less than two weeks for inauguration. These people are truly evil. It's like what did Trump ever do to them that is so personal?

Dan Hayes , says: January 9, 2021 at 5:44 am GMT • 20.4 hours ago

What struck me was the behavior of most of the House's invaders: they for the most were pranksters. For them it was Halloween; not the storming of the Bastille!

Majority of One , says: January 9, 2021 at 5:50 am GMT • 20.3 hours ago

Were I an investor I'd be buying up stocks in private security firms. Just today I viewed a video of that hideous old quean, Lindsay Graham plodding and plunging through an airport passageway on the way (presumably) to his home in South Carolina. All the way he was being harassed, shouted at and called a "traitor" for his RINO collusion in the takedown of the Trumpster.

Then there is the case of Mike Pence. After his refusal to call the question on the Constitutional approach to denying any confirmation of electors from either party, making way for either a compromise (as was reached in a similar kerfuffle in the 1876 showdown between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherfraud Hayes) or to call for new elections in the challenged and conflicted swing states; Pence has been broadly excoriated as a traitor who weaseled his way out of supporting the president's back-up plan.

Next, we fast-forward to those photos of Congressional prostiticians cowering behind their seats as the "deplorables" streamed into the sacred chambers of the people's house. A lot of guilty consciences in that zoo. They well know they either sold out for hefty campaign contributions and money under the table or are being blackmailed through the workings of Epstein, Maxwell and Wexner on behalf I$rael's Mo$$ad or maybe a dozen other intel agencies, most specifically Britain's MI-6 and the shot-callers (think 11-22-63 in Dallas) who rule through other deep state organs, the CIA.

Private security agencies will be getting a.lot of calls from terrified prostiticians and many others who have been working for the enemies of WE THE PEOPLE. Consider those talking heads on boobtoob noose who are paid handsomely for constant repetition of a false reality paradigm which has entrapped all those suburban soccer moms who were mind-controlled into voting for the Kamala's Foote/Biden ticket. Awakeners by the millions have been curing themselves of the boobtoob noose habit. Do you think the teevee presenters are sleeping peacefully these days and soon about to enjoy high times at fancy resorts and pricey restaurants?

How about professors and other academics who get the call to appear as talking-heads on PB$ and spread erudite sounding barf and garbage as fast as they spread their legs for all those shekels and the public recognition?

Are gated communities with patrolling guards and cameras galore, places where powerful movers and shakers tend to live will those havens (or those high-rise apartment suites surrounding Central Park -- or placid neighborhoods in Georgetown or Bel-Air–) likely to feel safe from now on?

Private Security services. That's where I'd invest. The "Deplorables" are pissed off at the stolen election and even more so at the political duopoly constituting government of the prostiticians, by the deep $tate bureaucratic Administrators and for the plutocratic oligarchs.

As of January 6th, 2021 the status of our country devolved into a totally ruptured republic. Democracy? Fuggidaboutit.

Twodees Partain , says: January 9, 2021 at 5:51 am GMT • 20.3 hours ago

An Open Letter to Politicians:

https://ussanews.com/News1/an-open-letter-to-every-damned-american-politician-on-the-election-corruption-all-of-it/

globalist deepstate , says: January 9, 2021 at 6:07 am GMT • 20.0 hours ago

About 95% of the US media, and about 70% of US politicians are corrupt deep-state globalists (which makes them implicitly treasonous). The source of their deep-state globalist power is central banking, usury, and enslaving us goyim with debt and "the love of money". The last president who was not a treasonous globalist was Reagan (although most of his cabinet were globalists including VP Bush). President Trump has been constantly under attack by this deep-state globalist cult because he is not an obedient member of their club and has been irreverently exposing their hand.

Nothing will change: the US and the rest of the western civilization will eventually succumb to this cancerous globalist corruption unless the cancer is removed. This is not about politics: it's about removing the cancerous corruption before the cancer destroys its host.

Thank God President Trump has exposed their hand and has got the ball rolling. Now it is up to us: to step up and continue the populist movement that he started.

Dick French , says: January 9, 2021 at 7:01 am GMT • 19.1 hours ago

Beautiful take.

This truly is the end of the Banana Empire. I say "God bless Trump" only because he set into motion the end of this tyranny; like Kerensky he was largely clueless as to the extent of the rot.

This is the beginning of the end. Best case scenario the United States returns to democracy.

Exiled off mainstreet , says: January 9, 2021 at 7:21 am GMT • 18.8 hours ago

No matter what the cause, there was evidence of agents provocateurs present who inflamed the violence, and the reaction, calling those who opposed the regime candidate "terrorists" is going to lead to more serious unrest, particularly if as appears likely, kangaroo courts begin rounding up people for trial. The thing is, close to a majority already suspect that the fix was in in November, and the fact the same methods of fraud were successfully employed in Georgia's senate races inflamed the anger. Proof of agents provocateurs is abundant. Even the guy dressed up in a viking suit whose photograph is run with the article apparently was an antifa figure.

Since the regime's coordinated reaction is attempting to turn this into a sort of Reichstag fire to eliminate opposition to a consolidated deep state fascist regime, we are in for turbulent times. I suspect the tacticians, despite what the author says, actually are hoping for a serious response before the opposition can effectively organize, and the regime operatives are too arrogant to care about the economic consequences, and the likelihood that the numerous vassal states may use the instability as a means of securing a greater degree of independence from the yankee imperium.

Leander Starr , says: January 9, 2021 at 9:05 am GMT • 17.0 hours ago

This is all pretty mild stuff. Useful to see that Washington is not so different to Kiev. With the Biden presidency you can certainly add the USA to the list of countries ruled by governments put in place by colour revolutions

The best way for Trumps place in history to be magnified and consolidated would be for them to imprison him and take away all of his assets (he'd become like a mini Jesus), though I am guessing this is the only reason he has not been assassinated, yet.

hip, hip, hooray (x3) for the alleged rioters

9nope9 , says: January 9, 2021 at 9:19 am GMT • 16.8 hours ago

The images that arise from this event will remain iconic. It possibly was a shaperoned event, but the plan, that anger would be wide-spread and destruction abundant did not materialize. This is evident in the bizarre, concocted, pre-written M5M media reports. It was a trap, but it backfired. I for one likely would have ransacked the place. I must admit I am impressed with their disinterest in marauding. It was an important event, cherish its iconic imagery, for darkness, subversion and false flags will take our guns away and reduce the flame of patriotism to pilot size soon.

Anonymous [661] Disclaimer , says: January 9, 2021 at 10:49 am GMT • 15.3 hours ago

I've seen at least two videos of the Capitol police opening steel fences at one point and doors at another point only two stand aside and calmly allow protesters to pour in. Looked more like an invitation than an invasion. Obviously they had orders to stand back at those points.

What a wonderful moment to see all the Congressional rabble hitting the decks.

Next time the protesters should bring a guillotine!

Ugetit , says: January 9, 2021 at 10:55 am GMT • 15.2 hours ago

if anything dramatic would happen

Key word, there, "dramatic." And it apparently makes no difference how corny it is (goofball with the horns and even Trump himself) or how idiotic, (the masked moron response to COVID and installing senile Joe on the throne).

Drama is a force that gives empty heads meaning, or at least a bit of entertainment while our owners mock and manipulate us at their adolescent pleasure.

Enjoy the carnival and carry on.

GMC , says: January 9, 2021 at 11:28 am GMT • 14.6 hours ago

I would have enjoyed it more – had 2 million armed Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Libyans, Yemenis, Ukrainians, and others , that have had their countries wasted by the USA , storm the Capital and get even with those that voted and supported those murderous invasions.

Lee , says: January 9, 2021 at 11:57 am GMT • 14.2 hours ago

@Craig Nelsen

CN said:

If he's out in 11 days anyway, why the push to impeach? Pure spite?

It has been suggested that if the Dems could get DT impeached before his time is up then they could attach legislation to his verdict stating that he could never run for any office again.

Some on the Left are terrified that he will come back in 2024 and the same 75M Maga people will be waiting to sweep him back in office.

IMO in 2024 KH as Prez is a sure thing -- -people will be shamed into voting for her to avoid being called a racist AND a sexist.

St-Germain , says: January 9, 2021 at 11:58 am GMT • 14.1 hours ago

Realizing that not only his political but also his personal future might be in jeopardy, Trump was quick to concede the election and promise a peaceful transition of power -- showing that when things get tough, it's his own hide that he's thinking of.

"Trump was quick to concede the election" -- That's the part I somehow missed hearing over here in central Europe, perhaps because not all the relevant news is reported here. Would the author quote the words the president used to do that?

Conceding the election, as I understand it, is something he could have done any time since Nov. 3, making our shadow government very happy. Since mainstream media spent the next two months loudly demanding that he "concede the election", they must also have missed those magic words.

Conceding the election not only acknowledges a valid election was held but also makes monkeys out of the skeptical people who voted for Trump and answered his call to rally in Washington Jan. 6. Are you saying that?

Or does conceding a U.S. election now equate to saying the election was rigged and it looks like not a damned thing we can do about it?

cranc , says: January 9, 2021 at 12:54 pm GMT • 13.2 hours ago

@Dan Hayes te>

A fitting end to the Trump movement, seeing as there was never anything in terms of a structure to organise the political base except for a ludicrous conspiracy prank (i.e. 'Qanon'). The whole thing has been a diversionary venture to corral dissent and neutralise it. It might 'feel good to see patriots in the Capitol Building' but -shorn of any genuine movement, all that really amounts to is .well feelings .
Real populism looks quite different surely, and so do real insurrections. There was no 'invasion', the security was stepped down and they opened the doors for the crowd to walk in. A spectacle to advance an agenda.

Moi , says: January 9, 2021 at 12:58 pm GMT • 13.1 hours ago

@Roacheforque

Trump bans Muslims–no problem
Trump hands over Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to Israel–no problem
Trump murders Gen. Soleimani–no problem

Trump goads on his useful idiots to take over the Capitol–impeach the bastard

PS: the US is effed, no matter who's in charge.
PS: it's now China's turn to be #1, and lead a more peaceful world.

The Alarmist , says: January 9, 2021 at 1:00 pm GMT • 13.1 hours ago

I must admit as an American abroad that I felt a little Schadenfreude -- having watched the left burn America through the summer, it was about time the populists got a crack at it -- but I had this nagging feeling this would end very unpleasantly for all; there's an old adage that if you take a shot at the crown, you'd better not miss. That feeling was confirmed as CNN started trumpeting this as being an insurrection, which was picked up by the politicos in short order. It's hard to dismiss out of hand that this was a false flag because the leftists almost immediately had the language and narrative and an action plan in hand to finally put the populist genie back in the bottle. Then again, maybe they're just quick on their feet.

If this was planned, as some above suggest, then I'm really disappointed at the lack of thought given to this. Taking the Capitol was never going to seriously result in a change of government in a country that has been practising Continuity of Government exercises for three-quarters of a century, and at best would only be a symbolic protest. Having taken the Capitol, this was never going to end well for those participating in the frolic, as we will see in the coming weeks as more average Joes and Janes are dragged into court (do you think Buffalo-boy will stand in the dock?). So why not make the best of what was going to be a shit sandwich anyway?

Instead of walking through the halls of the Capitol, taking selfies, and then going home when "asked" to leave, they should have taken a page out of Occupy Wall Street and settled in for the long hall. The left would have shown up with pre-printed signs, some of which would have looked amateurish enough to seem authentic. Where were these guys' signs?

They should have filled every seat in "the Peoples' House" with real people holding signs saying "We are the People" with a few thousand more people sitting peacefully in all the corridors and steps and waiting passively for the the police or military to carry them away. That would have taken days, if not weeks, and would have put a serious damper on the inevitable inauguration.

Truly a missed opportunity.

elmerfudzie , says: January 9, 2021 at 1:01 pm GMT • 13.1 hours ago

Politicians and their fellow bureaucrats have opened the door to the real barbarians; corporate fascism, influence of special interest lobbies in Congress, foreign entanglements (Israel) , endless war, unaccountable government within the ever expanding sixteen Intelligence Agencies, secrecy in place of democracy, the authority to print currency handed over to oligarchs at the Federal Reserve Board, who are, in reality a collection of banksters and financiers- not an agency of the federal government as the organizations' name would have all of us believe.

If there ever was a time for revolution and dissolution of a thoroughly corrupted government (for every western Occident country) the time is now.

The corporate-fascist infection began under Ford the stumbler, he opened the door to The NeoCons followed by Reagan the Union buster who did everything he could to dismantle FDR's social democracy programs such as the CCC (infrastructure support), the social security safety net. Reagan had a close association with the barbarism of Thatcher, she had a set of horns much larger than that, so called "insurrectionist" buffoon who's face was plastered all over newsprint today. Chavez was correct and I add, that a waft of sulfurous odor behind Thatcher was shared by both Bushes. Strategies dedicated to endless war, endless predation(s) for dwindling resources rather than embracing a philosophy that nourishes support for human ingenuity and mutual trust between nations. Instead, adopting long range and global domination plans outlined by Admiral Cebrowski and his assistant, Thomas P. M. Barnett, who announced a new map of our world-according to the Pentagon that is. Visit Dr Henry Gaffney Jr of the CNA Corporation.

ASIDE: This is what happens when an entire people allowed a post World War II dream to die. The Kennedy Brothers dream of a new demilitarized era, and Western European style Marshal Plan for third world countries who desired to attach themselves to the tail of our kite (voluntarily) -Rest in peace John and Robert, I'll never let their guilt, control freakishness or rapacity to go free !

Rusting bridges, potholed autobahns, with an emphasis on who owns them, not when maintenance or repairs will be forthcoming-by extortion no doubt. Gaunt, vitamin deficient citizenry, homelessness, epidemic drug addictions, who needs "society" haven't you heard? Thatcher said there's no such thing as society!

Verymuchalive , says: January 9, 2021 at 1:04 pm GMT • 13.0 hours ago

Thus it seems improbable to me that the Deep State was willing to sacrifice the sense of American invulnerability it projects across the globe simply in order to discredit the populist movement when there are many other, less self-harming methods it could use instead.

America's aura of invulnerability has been gone since September 11th 2001. Civil airliners flown by a ragtag crew of "Islamists", if you believe the official story, smashed into the WTC and the Pentagon. No fighter aircraft made any attempts to intercept them: they were completely unhindered in their actions. The Deep State were willing to let thousands of civilians die in order to achieve its own purposes.
Letting a couple of hundred people occupy the Capitol building for a short period of time seems very minor in comparison.

Robert Dolan , says: January 9, 2021 at 1:33 pm GMT • 12.6 hours ago

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2021/01/08/i-was-at-the-washington-d-c-save-america-rally/

KMAC shares some observations on the rally.

As to the aftermath, I always ask, "Who benefits?"

theMann , says: January 9, 2021 at 1:35 pm GMT • 12.5 hours ago

Surely one of the first rules of the exercise of Power is to scrupulously avoid demonstrating that you are a low grade coward. Now that the entire US Congress has been videoed cowering in craven fear before an unarmed crowd, whose only "crime" is to seek redress for a stolen election, there are going to be serious consequences.

How many foreign agents, and foreign powers, are now coming to the realization "hey, these guys are bunch of pussies?" How many criminal organizations, in the USA or abroad, formerly operating with some restraint, will now be freed from any restraint? And how many citizens of the Republic, formerly circumspect to the Public Offices in our country, will now proceed to operate with complete contempt of sniveling cowards in Public Office who seek to rule us?

The absolute lowest level of Degeneracy demonstrated by the Political Class is not in their systematic sexual degeneracy, nor their relentless and despicable Negroaltry, nor their thievery of anything they can steal, nor their relentless, pervasive, and relentless dishonesty even when they would be much better served by the truth, but precisely in their pervasive fear of everything Decent, including decent Americans.

So here we are, in the land of the Zoo Monkey Shit-eaters, faced with the only choice that will ever have any real meaning for the rest of our lives:

Bravery, or Cowardice?

Realist , says: January 9, 2021 at 2:14 pm GMT • 11.9 hours ago

@mocissepvis

ANTIFA and BLM are cowards. Why would patriots want to "learn" anything from them? Why would they want any comparison to them at all?

Antifa and BLM are not in prison patriots are that's the reason.

Ugetit , says: January 9, 2021 at 2:50 pm GMT • 11.3 hours ago

@Dan Hayes

What struck me was the behavior of most of the House's invaders: they for the most were pranksters. For them it was Halloween; not the storming of the Bastille!

True.

Just another PR stunt that benefits nobody except the globalists.

Davidoff , says: January 9, 2021 at 2:53 pm GMT • 11.2 hours ago

The US have no clothes After decades and decades of warmongering & murdering innocent people around the globe in the name of "democracy" (what a hypocritical sick joke!!!) to steal and loot other nation's territories and resources now the true face of the USA is visible to All: the face of a horrendous tyrannical evil monster serving not the american people but the interests of a few billionnaires, master puppeteers in the dark. We knew it all along: u are not a democracy and you are not an example to anyone.

All the contrary, you are an example of what not to be or what not to become.

You are and always have been a kleptocracy or something worse.

(wikypedia: Kleptocracy (from Greek κλέπτης kléptēs, "thief", κλέπτω kléptō, "I steal", and -κρατία -kratía from κράτος krátos, "power, rule") is a government whose corrupt leaders (kleptocrats) use political power to appropriate the wealth of their nation, typically by embezzling or misappropriating government funds at the expense of the wider population.)

_dude , says: January 9, 2021 at 4:45 pm GMT • 9.4 hours ago

@globalist deepstate

About 95% of the US media, and about 70% of US politicians are corrupt deep-state globalists

I think you're being very generous.

BannedHipster , says: Website January 9, 2021 at 5:05 pm GMT • 9.0 hours ago

I didn't vote for Trump and I never supported him.

But I loved seeing the Congress hiding under their seats in fear of Americans storming the gates. It was beautiful.

http://bannedhipster.home.blog/2021/01/09/trump-maga-post-mortem/

Johnny Walker Read , says: January 9, 2021 at 5:10 pm GMT • 8.9 hours ago

One of the few among us who still is in possession of a functioning brain..

What should we expect in 2021?

So far, it looks like this year is going to be plagued by more of the same brand of madness, mayhem, manipulation and tyranny that dominated 2020.

Frankly, I'm sick of it: the hypocrisy, the double standards, the delusional belief by Americans at every point along the political spectrum that politics and politicians are the answer to what ails the country, when for most of our nation's history, politics and politicians have been the cause of our woes.

Consider: for years now, Americans, with sheeplike placidity, have tolerated all manner of injustices and abuses meted out upon them by the government (police shootings of unarmed individuals, brutality, corruption, graft, outright theft, occupations and invasions of their homes by militarized police, roadside strip searches, profit-driven incarcerations, profit-driven wars, egregious surveillance, taxation without any real representation, a nanny state that dictates every aspect of their lives, lockdowns, overcriminalization, etc.) without ever saying "enough is enough."

https://www.technocracy.news/technocrats-have-turned-america-into-ship-of-fools/

ChuckOrloski , says: January 9, 2021 at 6:12 pm GMT • 7.9 hours ago

@Mr. X.

The Zionist establishment vets & selects US presidential candidates...

Jus' Sayin'... , says: January 9, 2021 at 6:22 pm GMT • 7.7 hours ago

@Realist black shirt thugs never went to prison. Antifa/blm are the shock troops for elitists like George Soros, who are seeking to impose a new order, a global, neo-feudal system run solely by them and solely for their benefit.

Antifa/blm are part of the machinery for achieving this neo-feudal vision, as are the USA's Democrat-Republican establishment, DSMIC, and MSM. They will be dealt with when the new order is achieved, just as Hitler dealt with the SA when they had served their purpose. All populists, especially Trump supporters are an immediate threat to our would-be feudal masters. Their eradication is a compelling necessity. There will be no mercy.

anon [157] Disclaimer , says: January 9, 2021 at 6:24 pm GMT • 7.7 hours ago

The French police official said they believed that an investigation would find that someone interfered with the deployment of additional federal law-enforcement officials on the perimeter of the Capitol complex; the official has direct knowledge of the proper procedures for security of the facility.

someone interfered with the proper deployment of officers around Congress

It is routine for the Capitol Police to coordinate with the federal Secret Service and the Park Police and local police in Washington, DC, before large demonstrations. The National Guard, commanded by the Department of Defense, is often on standby too.
On Wednesday, however, that coordination was late or absent.

The National Guard, which was deployed heavily to quell the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, did not show up to assist the police until two hours after the action started on Wednesday, according to The Associated Press.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-attempted-coup-federal-law-enforcement-capitol-police-2021-1

This is coordinated among different levels . ( think of 911 and lack of responses preparedness and abuses of the drill )

Trump is a psycho who has convinced the low IQ white of him being a savior facing off deep state which is against the poor white and which doesn't want Trump get elected . So the election must be stolen .

And what's not good about fighting a thief or stealing ?

Zarathustra , says: January 9, 2021 at 6:46 pm GMT • 7.3 hours ago

@Goddard

This article has even more clarity. (Some kind of writer called Nebojsa)
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/511963-american-empire-capitol-resistance/

lavoisier , says: Website January 9, 2021 at 6:55 pm GMT • 7.2 hours ago

Excellent essay.

I was surprised but pleased to see Americans demonstrating their contempt for the hostile elite government we live under. Assault against Democracy? BS. Perhaps there is some fight left in the American people?

But nobody should delude themselves into thinking that Donald Trump is a patriot who will die for the cause. Hell, he already threw the people risking their lives and liberty protesting the fraudulent election under the bus. It is long past time the whores in Washington become acutely aware of the contempt sane Americans have for them. I do not support violent protests, but I do support a mass demonstration of people expressing their total and absolute contempt for the traitorous whores who rule over us.

Kolya Krassotkin , says: January 9, 2021 at 8:14 pm GMT • 5.9 hours ago

@follyofwar

Pelosi, Schumer et al. want to pretend this was the burning of the Reichstag, so they can take "appropriate" measures. They want to act with haste.

Pelosi and Schumer fear that people will realize, after looking at how for years Obama and the left stoked racial hatred, which resulted in riots, murder and arson causing billions in damage, this is, by comparison, a nothing-burger. Thus, haste is the order of the day.

Robert Dolan , says: January 9, 2021 at 9:13 pm GMT • 6.2 hours ago

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/flashback-storming-us-capitol-ok-2018-democrats-communists/

[Jan 09, 2021] And Parler now is to be deplatformed from apple phones I hear. And the techs continue to align themselves with antifa

Jan 09, 2021 | www.rt.com

---

Freedom4185 5 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 04:55 PM

This was a good article, nice job. Yes, the powers-that-be run with the "democracy" rhetoric while in reality we are facing full on fascism; the danger zone.

skizex Freedom4185 2 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 08:00 PM

And Parler now is to be deplatformed from apple phones I hear. Full on fascism is unfolding before our eyes. And the techs continue to align themselves with antifa. Why anyone continues to support FB, Twitter, Instagram, etc when they are scrubbing any opposing discourse is beyond me.

Eviscerate 5 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 05:19 PM

This makes me so happy I have stayed completely away from social media. I understood early on what they really were.

Katnip302 Eviscerate 40 minutes ago 8 Jan, 2021 10:11 PM

Yes, and to say they are more powerful than any government, means nothing. All they do is sit there and push a button, boom credibility and trust gone. Cannot be undo the damage. Big tech is effectively dead. People will move on to other platforms.

Gerald Newton 7 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 03:31 PM

Today I find better independent news at rt than at most US sites. Journalism in the USA has gone to heck. News mangers run stories for profit in the US. It is all about ratings, professionalism be darned.

butterfly123 8 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 02:44 PM

Big Tec is indeed part of the Deep...

RonThePatriot 3 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 07:27 PM

Parler is being threatened with a shutdown and Twitter actually banned our President from using their app. Facebook is worse. We are in a police state set up by Dorsey and Zuckerberg at the request of the democratic party. They are FRIGHTENED of the organization that we have built that is called the Patriot Party. They are trying to impeach Trump at this late stage because if he is impeached, he cannot run again. He is not the only person the PATRIOTS favor so they are foolish. The american people were hoping that our soldiers would come home, but now you will see an escalation in fighting due to the warmongers and war profiteers in Washington on both sides of the aisle who are reaping rewards from war. Biden will be perfect for this. Our children are sent to fight...not their children. So now we depend on RT, since I do not believe that big tech and our govt can silence you. Fingers crossed. Thank you.

AMstone 4 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 06:30 PM

The 🇺🇸 has always been an ultra-immoral country. Hence, they are addicted to fabricating ultra-demoralizing social constructs. All efforts toward morality and decency are anathema and to be ridiculed and crushed with extreme prejudice. Big tech is only the latest iteration of this abstract practice.

athineos 2 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 08:49 PM

The big tech is already a branch of the "Shadow Government/Deep state" that has complete control of Congress overall. The big tech social media have been infiltrated by the CIA just like the major corporate news have been for some time now. Read the book "Press-titutes Embedded in the Pay of the CIA"(2019), by Udo Ulfkoette. Stay away from Facebook, Twitter and such. I have never used them. Find other alternatives. We cannot allow freedom to perish.

Yarskiy 8 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 03:01 PM

A conglomerate of ultra-wealthy capitalist have more power then the State that they corrupt. Why is RT acting like this is some kind of unknown revelation

Babb123 6 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 04:48 PM

And this will not last! Facebook, Twitter, Google and others are acting as publishers. Nobody elected these people! The chickens will come home to roost! Bank on it!

steve1135117 47 minutes ago 8 Jan, 2021 10:14 PM

Nonsense, Trump has only 13 days left in his term and he is terribly isolated. Far weaker than a "normal" president. This is more the behavior of a pack of predators who hunt very large prey, like lions on water buffalo. Once the victim is weakened and wounded, all the predators feel safe in moving in more closely for the final attack. Of course, Trump is most definitely NOT deserving of any sympathy. He does nothing but betray and abandon everyone who first helps him. Find someone else to go weep over, please.

leman_russ 3 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 07:40 PM

Why do Americans have this wierd block in their world view. Facebook and Twitter are PRIVATE COMPANIES as long as they follow the law they can do whatever the hell they want. Yes they are huge companies but they have the same rights and obligations as every other company. Among those rights.."championed by the Republicans doing the whining" is the right to choose their customers. Remember how you celebrated the bakery that was found to be legally allowed to discriminate...this is the flip side. Not much fun when you are on the recieving end is it?

PolitcsInc leman_russ 3 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 07:57 PM

None of these companies are private, they were created by DARPA and are staffed by DARPA. They are government owned and run entities masquerading as private to fool the people into believing that the government has co control over them.

JIMI JAMES 3 hours ago 8 Jan, 2021 07:26 PM

You could look at it this way,cia tech to trump 1-0 next!

Gaius_Marius JIMI JAMES 1 hour ago 8 Jan, 2021 09:29 PM

Try 1% oligarchy are succeeding in decimating the rest.

JollyGoodShow JIMI JAMES 1 hour ago 8 Jan, 2021 09:26 PM

You could look at it this way: If Trumps' concern for truth and transparency was that important why not pardon the emmisaries of truth and transparency, Snowden & Assange? (just sayin......from a friend)

[Jan 03, 2021] Humans of the GREAT RESET- What the future MIGHT look like in 2021 if the controlling elites have their way -- RT World News

Jan 03, 2021 | www.rt.com

With vaccine rollouts underway, humanity looks set to win the fight against the coronavirus. But some elites planning a post-coronavirus 'Great Reset' don't want to go back to normal. Here's what they have planned instead.

As lockdowns and mask mandates became a part of daily life over the last year, politicians the world over asked their citizenry to accept "The New Normal." The phrase became ubiquitous, but as vaccines inched closer to deployment, that phrase was replaced with a new one, "The Great Reset," used to describe the monumental changes to human society needed in a post-coronavirus world.

Unveiled in May by Britain's Prince Charles and the World Economic Forum's Klaus Schwab, the 'Great Reset' is an ambitious plan to create a more equal, cashless, integrated and sustainable global society. World leaders have seemingly signed up to the plan, with its catchphrase, "Build Back Better" featured prominently in incoming US President Joe Biden's campaign messaging.

ALSO ON RT.COM An elite-led 'Great Reset' post-Covid? No, what we need first is to get rid of the globalist approach that got us into this mess

Overdue liberalization, or technocratic New World Order? Opinion on the plan is divided between those who think it's the shot in the arm the world needs, and those who think it will make Cyberpunk 2077 look like a utopian dreamworld. Whatever your opinion, here's a look at the 'New Normal' that awaits in 2021 and beyond.

Vaccine passports for everyone

Even the World Economic Forum (WEF) has acknowledged that issuing citizens with immunity passports, or certificates of vaccination, could prove "controversial." That hasn't stopped governments toying with the idea though. Britain is "exploring" the idea of creating a digital "freedom passport" database that would only grant access to public places to people who can prove a negative Covid test, while Ireland and Israel have discussed banning the unvaccinated from certain spaces. France may ban the unvaccinated from public transport .

ALSO ON RT.COM Why I fear the introduction of Covid-19 vaccination cards will lead seamlessly to us being forced to carry 'immunity passports'

Such moves have been fiercely criticized by civil liberties advocates, but those pushing them don't care. "Prepare for a form of health passport now," former British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote last week. "I know all the objections, but it will happen. It's the only way the world will function and for lockdowns to no longer be the sole course of action."

Governments may not be able to force citizens to take a rushed and side-effect-riddled jab at gunpoint, but they won't have to. The air travel industry has already said it will require proof of vaccination to fly this coming year, leaving wannabe travelers with a simple choice: take the jab or stay at home. Budget airline Ryanair boiled the idea down to a blunt catchphrase : "Jab & go!"

ALSO ON RT.COM 'Health passports' for air travel mean mandatory Covid-19 vaccines cloaked in the illusion of choice Digital IDs and social credit scores

Your vaccination record is just one facet of your identity that the architects of the Great Reset want access to. In a post on Christmas eve, the WEF set out an ambitious plan to create a digital identity app aimed at giving an official identity to more than a billion people worldwide said to be without one. Registering the world's population is a goal shared by the United Nations , and the WEF's proposed app would enable users to link up with 'smart cities,' healthcare and financial services, travel and shopping providers, and government departments.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1342570826516860932&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fnews%2F510860-great-reset-future-society-predictions%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Together with the idea of health passports, one can easily imagine a world where the unvaccinated could be excluded from these vital services. The International Monetary Fund has gone one step further, however, proposing this month that AI algorithms could be used to scan a person's social media posts to determine their credit score.

Made too many anti-vax posts on Facebook? Sorry, pal, loan denied.

ALSO ON RT.COM IMF researchers propose to have AI use ONLINE history to determine credit rating, in name of 'inclusion' Inequality on steroids

Proponents of the Great Reset talk about building a more equal, equitable economy after Covid. But if current trends are anything to go by, that economy looks more like medieval feudalism, with a tiny group of billionaires on top and the rest of us on the bottom.

Lockdowns have been disastrous for small business owners. San Francisco, for example, has seen half of its small businesses close, while New Orleans, heavily dependent on tourism and hospitality, has lost 45 percent of its small businesses. The situation is the same the world over, with countries like Ireland that implemented a second lockdown this winter seeing more businesses fail .

The world's billionaires, however, are doing spectacularly well. America's three-comma titans grew their wealth by nearly a trillion dollars since the pandemic began. Amazon achieved blowout second-quarter results in 2020, earning $89 billion in that period and growing CEO Jeff Bezos' fortune to $200 billion. The combined wealth of the 12 richest Americans – including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO and vaccine evangelist Bill Gates – grew by a staggering 40 percent.

ALSO ON RT.COM Billionaires' 'pandemic profits' alone could pay for $3K stimulus checks to EVERY American – report

With lockdowns continuing into 2021, there is no indication that this trend will be reversed any time soon.

All of this bodes well for the world imagined by the WEF. According to the notorious promotional video by the organization, by 2030 the average person will "own nothing and be happy." Goods and services will instead be rented from corporations and delivered by drone, a setup only the likes of Amazon will be in a place to provide.

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fwatch%2F%3Fv%3D10153982130966479&width=500&show_text=true&height=610&appId A new push for environmentalism

Before Covid hit, climate change – a real, but heavily politicized problem – was the pet issue of governments worldwide, as leaders fell over each other to announce closer dates for the phase-out of fossil fuels. The proponents of the Great Reset are no different, and foresee a global carbon tax system in place by 2030, with citizens eating meat as "an occasional treat, not a staple. For the good of the environment."

World leaders will likely kick off 2021 by renewing their commitments to a carbon-free future, whatever the cost. Joe Biden, for one, has promised to sign the US back up to the Paris climate agreement immediately upon taking office.

While the average person may pay a little more for the privilege of driving a car or eating a steak in the coming months and years, the real change, according to the WEF, will be felt by 2030, when climate change displaces a billion people, creating an unprecedented wave of refugees. Under the terms of the Great Reset, "we'll have to do a better job at welcoming and integrating refugees."

ALSO ON RT.COM The Greta Reset: Welcome to the UK 2030 - the no petrol, no transport, no freedom of movement Net Zero future

For the west, a wave of climate refugees means more competition for jobs and a growing underclass in the countries that take them in. However, they'll also get the opportunity to "own nothing and be happy," just like the rest of us.

And the WEF can count on legions of 'grassroots' activists to push these policies on the masses. It's youth wing – the Global Shapers Community – was involved in last year's climate marches, and the community's leaders have been trained by the Climate Reality Project , an activist organization run by WEF trustee Al Gore. Expect these activists to demand climate action when the WEF meets in Davos, Switzerland, in January.

The real and unreal blur – discussion is censored

With WEF members literally funding their own activist movements, it's going to be tough to discern top-down from grassroots change. In the case of the WEF's push for a new environmentalism, Greta Thunberg and British Petroleum are on the same team . When it comes to reimagining capitalism, Pope Francis and Mastercard are working together to give corporations a greater say in cultural and political issues. Regarding health policy, the WEF and indeed much of the world's media, seems okay with letting Bill Gates decide the future of medicine and disease prevention.

Discuss any of the contradictions and problems inherent in these post-Covid predictions, however, and you're labeled a conspiracy theorist. With the world's social media giants all cracking down on conspiracy content, it remains to be seen where the line between "dangerous" misinformation and legitimate critique will be drawn in 2021.

ALSO ON RT.COM Canada's Trudeau calls Great Reset a CONSPIRACY THEORY after video of him promoting the globalist initiative went viral

However, it is no stretch to say that in 2021, Silicon Valley will have more say over what's not to discuss. In 2020 alone, Twitter censored the president of the United States and banned a national newspaper for reporting damaging information on his opponent. When it comes to content branded as "conspiracy theory," discussion will in all likelihood be more, not less, restricted from here on out.

Amid the global upheaval brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, it's easy to imagine world leaders and corporations taking advantage of the chaos to impose more controls over the populace. Prince Charles himself even described our turbulent times as a "golden opportunity" to make good on "big visions of change."

However, the movers and shakers who travel every year to the World Economic Forum's summit in Davos have boasted about their "great" plans before, from 2009 's "Shaping the Post-Crisis World," to 2012 's "The Great Transformation." The actual implementation of the 'Great Reset' will depend on the imagination and ambition of governments and their corporate partners, and how well this squares against economic necessity and public resistance.

The most likely outcome is that the reset gets rolled out in a piecemeal fashion. Regardless, the WEF's suggestions will surely continue to shape discussion long after the threat of the coronavirus subsides.

ALSO ON RT.COM 'Not a conspiracy theory': Alberta Premier Kenney issues dire warning about impending 'Great Reset' (VIDEO)

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[Jan 02, 2021] The old sclerotic leaders would never get out of the way

Jun 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

brabantian , says: Show Comment June 16, 2020 at 10:03 am GMT

Even communism had the generational problem, though their system of distributing privileges and goodies was different

Young people chafed for decades at the lack of upward mobility in the communist hierarchies

The old sclerotic leaders would never get out of the way, and so by the 1980s eastern european communism was quite geriatric, symbolised by how two of the Soviet Leaders – Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko – died quickly after taking office

The class issue doesn't 'transcend' the ethnic issues, as the author suggests, it is all packed in with it Bernie Sanders was a white-kid favourite, a dud with minorities

In a 4chan cartoon, a white kid with a Bernie Sanders hat is trying to argue blacks into voting for him: 'Free college! Free health care!' says the white kid. The blacks reply, 'That shite is already free for us, white boy.'

The strong child-support benefits in Western Europe, seem to have quickly become utilised as an accelerant for migration and the rapid expansion of immigrant-heritage populations

Karl Marx himself was opposed to manipulated migration, which he denounced as an oligarch tool against workers

A pro-young-family culture is striking indeed, and ironically it seems to have been a prominent aspect of fascist authoritarians

It's ultimately an issue of social engineering, which is usually controlled by oligarchs, and what those oligarchs seem to have often sought is the decline of european-heritage middle-class families, the breeding ground of 'dangerous dissident' individuals who cannot be so easily controlled

[Jan 02, 2021] Proposed House Rules Seek To Erase Gendered-Terms Such As 'Father', 'Mother', 'Son', 'Daughter'

The neoliberal "identify wedge" that gone way too far ;-)

In any case this is looks like an important stage in the development of Neoliberal Newspeak

Jan 02, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times,

Leaders in the House of Representatives announced on Friday a rules package for the 117th Congress that includes a proposal to use " gender -inclusive language" and eliminate gendered terms such as "'father, mother, son, daughter," and more.

James McGovern (D-Mass.) speaks during a meeting at the Capitol in Washington, on Dec. 21, 2017. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Terms to be struck from clause 8(c)(3) of rule XXIII , the House's Code of Official Conduct, as outlined in the proposed rules ( pdf ), include "father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, first cousin, nephew, niece, husband, wife, father-in-law, mother-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, stepfather, stepmother, stepson, stepdaughter, stepbrother, stepsister, half brother, half sister, grandson, [and] granddaughter."

Such terms would be replaced with "parent, child, sibling, parent's sibling, first cousin, sibling's child, spouse, parent-in-law, child-in-law, sibling-in-law, stepparent, stepchild, stepsibling, half-sibling, [and] grandchild."

According to the proposed rules, "seamen" would be replaced with "seafarers," and "Chairman" would be replaced with "Chair" in Rule X of the House.

... ... ...

The rules package will be introduced and voted on once the new Congress convenes.

---

bloostar 1 hour ago remove link

What gender was the pig's head? Is it correct to refer to it as a pig?

researchfix 1 hour ago

Well, my father and mother are dead already. So they will never know, that they are not my father and mother.

Al Gophilia 1 hour ago

These idiots should no longer be honorably idenified with the noun Represtenative.

judgement put 29 minutes ago

Actually, 'repressed-tentative' isn't so bad.

Ms No PREMIUM 1 hour ago

I think it was Lenin that said "The last enemy of Marxism is the family"

Et Tu Brute 1 hour ago (Edited)

When politicians cannot deliver a $2K stimulus that affects 30%+ of the population but have time to promote laws representing the interest of less than 0.6%* but still affecting the over 95% who do or will have a family, you know it's not just a matter of ineffective governance and culture wars, it is deliberate Psychological Warfare, coordinated through Mainstream Media, aimed at dividing and demoralising the population.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States

DefendYourBase5 1 hour ago remove link

americans will receive 600$ and pakistan will get 10 million for Homosexual Studies :D

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/531589-congress-served-its-own-interests-rather-than-ours-with-the-relief-bill

PGR88 1 hour ago (Edited)

"*******" is an appropriate non-gendered term referring to all the Democrats in Congress.

St. TwinkleToes 1 hour ago

So now we're supposed to appease 1% of the population who are gender confused freaks by removing thousands of years of family relationships?

RocketPride PREMIUM 1 hour ago remove link

Democratic Congress continues to endear themselves to true American values. F-ing idiots, I hope they are all voted out in 2022

sgt_doom 1 hour ago remove link

On Dominion voting machines?????

sgt_doom 2 hours ago (Edited) remove link

Exactly why there should be laws against geriatric dementia-suffering twits who once were financially connected to Saddam Hussein in congress.

The twitch Pelosi wants to destroy the family unit: Job #1 of the Maoist agenda!

Itinerant 1 hour ago (Edited) remove link

Just look at how much they are improving the world, fueling inclusive economic growth !!!

In France they've already moved to force you to fill in parent1 and parent2 instead of mother and father.
Medical Experts are now saying that boy/girl should be removed from birth certificates as clinically irrelevant.

Right, no need to check for descended testicles or abdominal hernia in little boys, or anything else.
What you circumcise, may as well be your thumb, right?

I just had an operation on my testicle, of course it is clinically irrelevant to find the right doctor for anything to do with your prostrate or testicles, or any gynecological issues, for that matter.

We are going insane ... we are already in the lemmings rushing to the cliff stage.

[Jan 02, 2021] To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it

Jan 02, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

lay_arrow

---

Im4truth4all 4 minutes ago

You are talking about the democrat/marxists manifesto and its philosophy which was so perfectly described by George Orwell and is as follows:

"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it ( ) To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality" - George Orwell

chunga 31 minutes ago

I suspect the primaries are also completely rigged. It's bugging me now that it's really setting in. The US is a failed state, bankrupt in every imaginable way.

Im4truth4all 24 minutes ago

"Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them." - George Orwell

"Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it." - George Santayana

"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history." - George Orwell

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right." - George Orwell

"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth." - George Orwell

[Dec 29, 2020] The Demise of American Exceptionalism by David Bromwich

Notable quotes:

"... Perils of Dominance ..."

"... standard maxim ..."

"... bear any burden ..."

"... David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of ..."

Dec 29, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

Before our national self-inquest on Donald Trump has run its course, we will be prompted to remember again that the world exists. President-elect Joe Biden's appointments at the departments of defense, state, and the national security council are likely to include some combination of Michele Flournoy, Jake Sullivan, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and others of the globalization group around Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. These people believe in the rightness of a world with the United States at its center, deploying commercial strength, trade agreements, diplomatic suasion, and military alliances in a judicious synthesis. Armed intervention, preferably multilateral, is held in reserve. They take on trust the global politics of neoliberalism. For them, the Trump presidency, though unanticipated, was merely a disagreeable hiatus. They have never stopped planning for their return.

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They did not study the catastrophe of Vietnam, and they have not learned from it. As Gareth Porter showed in Perils of Dominance , that war, whose atrocities the world remembers more vividly than Americans do, was protracted not from morbid credulity regarding the domino theory but rather a primitive fear of losing face. It was carried forward through presidencies in both parties with a maximum of deception. The War in Afghanistan has similarly extended over three presidencies; and yet, to the neoliberal establishment, Afghanistan in 2020 is a good deal like Vietnam in 1971. It must not be "abandoned." A recent New York Times story praised some generals for "tempering" the rashness of Donald Trump's attempt to withdraw once and for all.

For reasons of personality that hardly bear looking into, Trump in foreign policy represented a break from the militarized globalism the United States had adopted with the fall of the Soviet Union and the coming of a unipolar world. The laboratory for this approach was the Yugoslavia intervention commandeered by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The madness under the idealism was revealed in the bombing, invasion, and occupation of Iraq in 2003. That seems a long generation ago, to the short memory of Americans. Even more thoroughly forgotten has been the Libya War -- President Obama's disastrous bid to show support for the Arab Spring -- with all the destruction it wrought: the civil war that followed, the swollen mass migrations from North Africa to South Europe, the opening of slave markets in Libya itself. After Libya came Syria, in which the United States supported an Al Qaeda offshoot in another humanitarian cause. After Syria came the Obama-Trump support for the Saudi obliteration of Yemen.

The United States has long faced the peculiar choice -- messianic on both sides -- of serving the world as an exemplary nation or as an evangelical one. The former image was best drawn by Abraham Lincoln when he said that the proposition "all men are created equal" was meant as "a standard maxim for free society," which would be "constantly approximated" in the United States itself, "constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere." By contrast, the evangelical image was epitomized by John Kennedy's eloquent and dangerous inaugural address: "we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Lincoln's standard maxim meant the force of our example. Kennedy's bear any burden meant the force of our weapons.

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A new Cold War with Russia was dragged onto center stage in 2013–2014. The process began at the Sochi Olympics and was locked in by the American reaction to the Russian reaction to the coup in Ukraine. The neoliberal elite is deciding, at this moment, whether to prefer Russia or China as the number-one U.S. enemy on the horizon. But must we have one? "Faith in a fact can help create the fact," said William James. A named expectation of trouble creates the conditions for that trouble. And yet, informed citizens today in the United States, in China, and in Russia all know that such a return to the inveterate habits of the old Great Powers would be supremely irresponsible. Our most dire confrontation now is with the natural world, which, in the form of climate change, is taking its revenge on humanity for a century of abuse.

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If the fires and floods of the last many years, in Australia and California, in Prague and Houston, have nothing to say to you, it is not clear what planet you are fit to live on. The best thing the policy elite could do, for the United States and the world, would be to put themselves out of business. Begin a series of international agreements to cooperate in slowing the progress of climate change, and in anticipating and defending against the worst of its effects. Practically speaking, as a matter of course, this will require a new ethic of international cooperation. Not war, not even an enhanced trade war, and not with China and Russia most of all.

David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of American Breakdown:

[Dec 01, 2020] psychohistorian

Dec 01, 2020 | www.lettinggobreath.com

| Dec 1 2020 1:32 utc | 148

[Nov 28, 2020] Deep state as organization that executes strategic policies arbitrarily decided by ruling elite Interests actually created the USA Inc., and its institutions embodiments of no enforcement of no obligation of ruling elite to the people while peddling myth of popular legitimacy of ruling elite autocratic power.

Nov 28, 2020 | off-guardian.org

---

Kalen , Nov 26, 2020 9:51 PM

Deep state as organization that executes strategic policies arbitrarily decided by ruling elite Interests actually created the USA Inc., and its institutions embodiments of no enforcement of no obligation of ruling elite to the people while peddling myth of popular legitimacy of ruling elite autocratic power. And embodied in American psyche Obligation to meaningless voting in systemically rigged elections.

Heailed as revolutionary and enlightened Liberal concept political liberty of supposedly allowing people to decide who rules them by voting turned immediately in democratic mockery and nightmare as in US independent from power elites Election candidates were threatened or killed, armed local militia or local power mafia were guarding polling stations checking every vote beating up every voter who voted wrongly, or was Indian or freed black and destroying ballots before and after voting, of course charging voter with poll tax.

American, progressive liberal politics of freedom was from the beginning nothing but a veneer covering up system of oligarchic privileges and governance by Anglo American elites, where all political agendas and politicians are vetted by Deep state.

JFK or Nixon, like Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump etc., all of them faithfully executed policies of ruling elites as far as strategic attacks on long term interests of working people and assurance of deep state expansion of stringent control, surveillance and growth of wealth of financial ruling elite was concerned.

if those vetted politicians attempted to sabotage or by negligence threatened effectiveness of those strategic policy guidelines they were harshly dealt with including threats of assassination or removal from office under variety of public cover stories, leaks, investigations or rumors or since 1980s NGOs color revolutions that came finally to US.

There can be no legitimate moral position defending any of them from the point of view of people who work for living as their policies were policies that strategically served oligarchic ruling elites not we the people who have unalienable right to self governance and set priorities that includes total elimination FED, MIC political power , eliminatIon of power of Wall Street, SV in determining socioeconomic policies, eliminate power of near monopolies in media, medical and food industry, establishment of universal healthcare and pension funds run locally which takes away financial burden from families of sick and from small business, and stopping mass surveillance and to elevate power of local self governance deciding about fate of local community and economy by the people directly impacted by It.

COVID is a blatant example of Trump's public emasculation as POTUS by annoyed Deep State as his open air incoherence on COVID was a direct result of deep state agents' threats as he expressed his reasonable doubt about phony pandemic threat only to sharply reverse his position toward delusional policies of fear mongering and preprogrammed destruction of people's economy while bailing out and nurturing Wall Street Chieftains and SV parasites.

We know that Trump was not brainwashed to believe that COVID was ever existential threat to humanity but still he "reacted" absurdly peddling Deep State nonsense

Making Trump a unprecedented villain by MSM was primarily Deep State operation aimed to sow division and discourse on irrelevant subjects while leaving unprecedented attack on US population by elites beyond reproach. Trump fit perfectly into Deep State plans, and the fact that he is still alive proves it.

Obama did the same in 2008+ crisis taking back his criticism of record bonuses paid to executives of bailout by taxpayers big banks. Later he avoided pissing off deep State by reopening Guantanamo, continuing old wars and creating new ones, giving away cool $trillion to MIC for revamping of nukes, reneging on Medicare for all Healthcare and Public Option health Insurance to name few corrections to Obama's electoral agenda made by overall friendly to him Deep State.

No single one is better than the rest of them stooges of oligarchy, who one way or another want up enslaved or dead.

Kalen , Nov 27, 2020 6:49 PM Reply to Dave Patterson

Nobody expected Trump to cure cancer. That is not his failure. What I am talking about is systemic failure of all political and state institutions like POTUS or Congress as they become puppets of Deep State.

As any President Trump was powerless to do things he promised in his campaign but "powerful" to do what ruling elite wanted him to do. He did not refuse as he would have been severely punished.

Any POTUS is simply a Deep State puppet playing in political puppet show for infantilized electorate.

Not electing vetted puppets of Deep State but rejection of entire system, destruction of American imperial institutions of power and oligarchy who run them is the first step to effectively ending American democratic charade.

Henry , Nov 26, 2020 9:13 PM Reply to Lost in a dark wood

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

US media Corporations benefited greatly from Trump as president. $1.8 trillions in tax cut and more recently $5 trillions in bailouts. Trump has overseen the largest upward transfer of wealth in world history

John Ervin , Nov 27, 2020 5:16 AM Reply to Henry

"Trump has overseen the largest upward transfer of wealth in world history."

Thank you. Surely it's been said before, but that little sacred factoid seems to have been ignored recently, apparently swamped by the vast online outpouring of support for the Orange One as being unduly put-upon.

Joerg , Nov 26, 2020 7:18 PM

Please watch: "HOW TRUMP WINS" – http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=220872
(direct upload from Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/embed/F18PaMzwG81I/ )

You can think of Brother Nathanael what you want. But he makes several interesting points:
He says that – relating especially to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin – " these state legislators have their OWN right to appoint their OWN slate of electors INSTEAD of the electors selected to award Biden the win "

And: " If the US House rejects Pence's choice it goes to a House vote on January 6th . Each state gets only one vote. 31 state have a Republican majority in the House – 19 states have Democratic majority ".

Brother Nathanael also gives a very good reason, why Sidney Powell simply couldn't be part of the Trump legal team.
Also as Trump now pardoned Michael Flynn. He did so, because his because the judicial system in the US is as corrupted as in my country and a lot of other countries. And it is not sure that Flynn gets acquitted under a Biden-regime. So it was important that Sidney Powell, attorney of Michael Flynn, did not also work for the president at the same time.

richard , Nov 26, 2020 7:04 PM

Even if BIden wins they have a shed load of problems ahead. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/04/statehouse-elections-2020-434108

Jill , Nov 26, 2020 6:53 PM

I am not sure what is going on in the US. It is clear there was massive election fraud in favor of Biden. I do not think Biden won this election. On the other hand, I am not willing to say that Trump isn't in on the whole thing. I need to see a lot more evidence before I credit a president that has committed multiple war crimes, is a good friend of Jeff Epstein and the Clintons and has appointed one deep state swamp monster after another to run his cabinet and departments. And did I mention what he has done to our economy and will do to our people with Operation Warp Speed? A person who has done those things would easily collaborate w/Biden.

My feeling is that things have gotten out of control of this deep state operation. People are really angry. Notice that it is ordinary people who have come forward with the election fraud affidavits. For this, they have been threaten as have their children. These are not powerful people with protection. These are people of great courage who are standing up saying, ENOUGH!

I don't know what side Sidney Powell is truly on as she accuses all of America's favorite nations to go to war with of interfering in our election. However, last night she reported that Mort and ggoogle have given out nearly as much money to all levels of this election to rig it for Biden. That is one of the most important revelations I have seen in this whole mess. They spread around nearly as much money as USG itself to fix the election. Of course the tech companies have censored, censored and censored again. Is this for really for ruining Trump? I don't know. It will certainly create mass chaos and likely violence. That chaos serves the NWO.

I don't know what the real plan is. I do feel that the people who made this plan are losing control over where things are going. I hope that is what is happening with all my heart.

Sgt Oddball , Nov 27, 2020 12:28 AM Reply to Jill

In Kabuki theatre there is a term called 'Mie', meaning a summative gesture/pose evocative of a state of extreme/intense emotion – This, sadly, is how the various legal challenges seem to me right now – Although I wish Rudy, Jenna, Sidney and the rest, *All Power* to their collective elbows, since this is all *Clearly* an American constitutional crisis and High Felony, not to mention some *Truly* Robert Mugabe-level shit in the making, I'm begining to wonder just what the *Fuck* they think they're actually playing at (Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, China?! – *SERIOUSLY*?!?!!)

- Oh well, *Ho-Hum*, Davostani's got their hard-on for USA Civil War 2.0(tm), and *Both* teams doing their bit, as usual, I guess

[Nov 26, 2020] The doublethink phenomenon.

Nov 26, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Eric Newhill , 26 November 2020 at 02:41 PM

David Hasakkuk,
I'd love to hear you what deeper psychological analysis you may have to offer on the doublethink phenomenon.

Someone, a hardcore democrat, recently lectured to me that conservatives have no principles evidenced by support for Trump. I responded that her party should not be lecturing given their near worship of Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and apparent lust for killing the unborn. She went psychotic on me. It seems like it's the same spell that people in cults fall into - and I've seen some people that I thought were fairly smart and worldly fall into it.

Symptoms appear to include a lack of ability to appreciate irony, lack of self-reflection, loss of ability to reason, loss of all perspective and a tendency to see choices as between an exaggeration of the ugliness of the reality that exists and a fantastical utopia or idealized person that doesn't exist and never will.

[Nov 26, 2020] The Ruling Elite's War on Truth by Chris Hedges

Notable quotes:

"... Trump and Giuliani are vulgar and buffoonish, but they play the same slimy game as their Democratic opponents. The Republicans scapegoat the deep state, communists and now, bizarrely, Venezuela; the Democrats scapegoat Russia. The widening disconnect from reality by the ruling elite is intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by predatory global corporations and billionaires. ..."

"... Silicon Valley billionaires, including Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, donated more than $100 million to a Democratic super PAC that created a torrent of anti-Trump TV ads in the final weeks of the campaign to elect Biden. The heavy infusion of corporate money to support Biden wasn't done to protect democracy. It was done because these corporations and billionaires know a Biden administration will serve their interests. ..."

"... Democratic Senator Chris Murphy told CNN during this campaign that Russian disinformation efforts are "more problematic" than in 2016. He warned that "this time around, the Russians have decided to cultivate U.S. citizens as assets. They are attempting to try to spread their propaganda in the mainstream media." ..."

"... This will be the official mantra of the Democratic Party, a vicious redbaiting campaign without actual reds, especially as the country spirals out of control. The reason I have a show on Russia-funded RT America ..."

"... Voice of America ..."

"... World Socialist Web Site, ..."

"... We let these companies get this monopolistic share of the distribution system. Now they're exercising that power. ..."

"... In the Soviet Union the truth was passed, often hand to hand, in underground samizdat documents, clandestine copies of news and literature banned by the state. The truth will endure. It will be heard by those who seek it out. It will expose the mendacity of the powerful, however hard it will be to obtain. Despotisms fear the truth. They know it is a mortal threat. If we remain determined to live in truth, no matter the cost, we have a chance. ..."

"... The New York Times, ..."

"... The Dallas Morning News ..."

"... The Christian Science Monitor ..."

Nov 23, 2020 | scheerpost.com

40 Comments on Chris Hedges: The Ruling Elite's War on Truth American political leaders display a widening disconnect from reality intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by global corporations and billionaires. By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

Joe Biden's victory instantly obliterated the Democratic Party's longstanding charge that Russia was hijacking and compromising US elections. The Biden victory, the Democratic Party leaders and their courtiers in the media now insist, is evidence that the democratic process is strong and untainted, that the system works. The elections ratified the will of the people.

But imagine if Donald Trump had been reelected. Would the Democrats and pundits at The New York Time s , CNN and MSNBC pay homage to a fair electoral process? Or, having spent four years trying to impugn the integrity of the 2016 presidential race, would they once again haul out the blunt instrument of Russian interference to paint Trump as Vladimir Putin's Manchurian candidate?

Trump and Giuliani are vulgar and buffoonish, but they play the same slimy game as their Democratic opponents. The Republicans scapegoat the deep state, communists and now, bizarrely, Venezuela; the Democrats scapegoat Russia. The widening disconnect from reality by the ruling elite is intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by predatory global corporations and billionaires.

... ... ...

The two warring factions within the ruling elite, which fight primarily over the spoils of power while abjectly serving corporate interests, peddle alternative realities. If the deep state and Venezuelan socialists or Russia intelligence operatives are pulling the strings no one in power is accountable for the rage and alienation caused by the social inequality, the unassailability of corporate power, the legalized bribery that defines our political process, the endless wars, austerity and de-industrialization. The social breakdown is, instead, the fault of shadowy phantom enemies manipulating groups such as Black Lives Matters or the Green Party.

"The people who run this country have run out of workable myths with which to distract the public, and in a moment of extreme crisis have chosen to stoke civil war and defame the rest of us – black and white – rather than admit to a generation of corruption, betrayal, and mismanagement," Matt Taibbi writes.

These fictional narratives are dangerous. They erode the credibility of democratic institutions and electoral politics. They posit that news and facts are no longer true or false. Information is accepted or discarded based on whether it hurts or promotes one faction over another. While outlets such as Fox News have always existed as an arm of the Republican Party, this partisanship has now infected nearly all news organizations, including publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post , along with the major tech platforms that disseminate information and news. A fragmented public with no common narrative believes whatever it wants to believe.

... ... ...

The flagrant partisanship and discrediting of truth across the political spectrum are swiftly fueling the rise of an authoritarian state. The credibility of democratic institutions and electoral politics, already deeply corrupted by PACs, the electoral college, lobbyists, the disenfranchisement of third-party candidates, gerrymandering and voter suppression, is being eviscerated.

Silicon Valley billionaires, including Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, donated more than $100 million to a Democratic super PAC that created a torrent of anti-Trump TV ads in the final weeks of the campaign to elect Biden. The heavy infusion of corporate money to support Biden wasn't done to protect democracy. It was done because these corporations and billionaires know a Biden administration will serve their interests.

The press, meanwhile, has largely given up on journalism. It has retreated into competing echo chambers that only speak to true believers. This catering exclusively to one demographic, which it sets against another demographic, is commercially profitable. But it also guarantees the balkanization of the United States and edges us closer and closer to fratricide.

When Trump leaves the White House millions of his enraged supports, hermetically sealed inside hyperventilating media platforms that feed back to them their rage and hate, will see the vote as fraudulent, the political system as rigged, and the establishment press as propaganda. They will target, I fear, through violence, the Democratic Party politicians, mainstream media outlets and those they demonize as conspiratorial members of the deep state, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci. The Democratic Party is as much to blame for this disintegration as Trump and the Republican Party.

The election of Biden is also very bad news for journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley, Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey St. Clair or Robert Scheer who refuse to be courtiers to the ruling elites. Journalists that do not spew the approved narrative of the right-wing, or, alternatively, the approved narrative of the Democratic Party, have a credibility the ruling elite fears.

The worse things get – and they will get worse as the pandemic leaves hundreds of thousands dead and thrusts millions of Americans into severe economic distress –the more those who seek to hold the ruling elites, and in particular the Democratic Party, accountable will be targeted and censored in ways familiar to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, now in a London prison and facing possible extradition to the United States and life imprisonment.

Barack Obama's assault on civil liberties, which included the repeated misuse of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, the passage of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to permit the military to act as a domestic police force and the ordering of the assassination of U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists in Yemen, was far worse than those of George W. Bush. Biden's assault on civil liberties, I suspect, will surpass those of the Obama administration.

The censorship was heavy handed during the campaign. Digital media platforms, including Google, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, along with the establishment press worked shamelessly as propaganda arms for the Biden campaign. They were determined not to make the "mistake" they made in 2016 when they reported on the damaging emails, released by WikiLeaks, from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta. Although the emails were genuine, papers such as The New York Times routinely refer to the Podesta emails as "disinformation." This, no doubt, pleases its readership, 91 percent of whom identify as Democrats according to the Pew Research Center. But it is another example of journalistic malfeasance.

Following the election of Trump, the media outlets that cater to a Democratic Party readership made amends. The New York Times was one of the principal platforms that amplified Russiagate conspiracies, most of which turned out to be false. At the same time, the paper largely ignored the plight of the disposed working class that supported Trump. When the Russiagate story collapsed, the paper pivoted to focus on race, embodied in the 1619 Project. The root cause of social disintegration -- the neoliberal order, austerity and deindustrialization -- was ignored since naming it would alienate the paper's corporate advertisers and the elites on whom the paper depends for access.

Once the 2020 election started, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets censored and discredited information that could hurt Biden, including a tape of Joe Biden speaking with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which appears to be authentic. They gave credibility to any rumor, however spurious, which was unfavorable to Trump. Twitter and Facebook blocked access to a New York Post story about the emails allegedly found on Hunter Biden's discarded laptop.

Twitter locked the New York Post out of its own account for over a week. Glenn Greenwald, whose article on Hunter Biden was censored by his editors at The Intercept, which he helped found, resigned. He released the email exchanges with his editors over his article. Ignoring the textual evidence of censorship, editors and writers at The Intercept engaged in a public campaign of character assassination against Greenwald. This sordid behavior by self-identified progressive journalists is a page out of the Trump playbook and a sad commentary on the collapse of journalistic integrity.

The censorship and manipulation of information was honed and perfected against WikiLeaks. When WikiLeaks tries to release information, it is hit with botnets or distributed denial of service attacks. Malware attacks WikiLeaks' domain and website. The WikiLeaks site is routinely shut down or unable to serve its content to its readers. Attempts by WikiLeaks to hold press conferences see the audio distorted and the visual images corrupted. Links to WikiLeaks events are delayed or cut. Algorithms block the dissemination of WikiLeaks content. Hosting services, including Amazon, removed WikiLeaks from its servers. Julian Assange, after releasing the Iraqi war logs, saw his bank accounts and credit cards frozen. WikiLeaks' PayPal accounts were disabled to cut off donations. The Freedom of the Press Foundation in December 2017 closed down the anonymous funding channel to WikiLeaks which was set up to protect the anonymity of donors. A well-orchestrated smear campaign against Assange was amplified and given credibility by the mass media and filmmakers such as Alex Gibney. Assange and WikiLeaks were first. We are next.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy told CNN during this campaign that Russian disinformation efforts are "more problematic" than in 2016. He warned that "this time around, the Russians have decided to cultivate U.S. citizens as assets. They are attempting to try to spread their propaganda in the mainstream media."

This will be the official mantra of the Democratic Party, a vicious redbaiting campaign without actual reds, especially as the country spirals out of control. The reason I have a show on Russia-funded RT America is the same reason Vaclav Havel could only be heard on the US-funded Voice of America during the communist control of Czechoslovakia. I did not choose to leave the mainstream media. I was pushed out. And once anyone is pushed out, the ruling elite is relentless about discrediting the few platforms left willing to give them, and the issues they raise, a hearing.

"If the problem is 'American citizens' being cultivated as 'assets' trying to put 'interference' in the mainstream media, the logical next step is to start asking Internet platforms to shut down accounts belonging to any American journalist with the temerity to report material leaked by foreigners (the wrong foreigners, of course – it will continue to be okay to report things like the 'black ledger')," writes Taibbi , who has done some of the best reporting on the emerging censorship. "From Fox or the Daily Caller on the right , to left-leaning outlets like Consortium or the World Socialist Web Site, to writers like me even – we're all now clearly in range of new speech restrictions, even if we stick to long-ago-established factual standards."

Taibbi argues that the precedent for overt censorship took place when the major digital platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Spotify, YouTube – in a coordinated move blacklisted the right-wing talk show host Alex Jones.

"Liberal America cheered," Taibbi told me when I interviewed him for my show, " On Contact ":

They said 'Well this is a noxious figure. This is a great thing. Finally, someone's taking action.' What they didn't realize is that we were trading an old system of speech regulation for a new one without any public discussion. You and I were raised in a system where you got punished for speech if you committed libel or slander or if there was imminent incitement to lawless action, right? That was the standard that the Supreme Court set, but that was done through litigation. There was an open process where you had a chance to rebut charges. That is all gone now.

Now, basically there's a handful of these tech distribution platforms that control how people get their media.

They've been pressured by the Senate, which has called all of their CEOs in, and basically ordered them, 'We need you to come up with a plan to prevent the sowing of discord and spreading of misinformation.' This has finally come into fruition. You see a major reputable news organization like the New York Post -- with a 200-year history -- locked out of its own Twitter account.

The story [Hunter Biden's emails] has not been disproven. It's not disinformation or misinformation. It's been suppressed as it would be suppressed in a Third World country. It's a remarkable historic moment. The danger is that we end up with a one-party informational system. There's going to be approved dialogue and unapproved dialogue that you can only get through certain fringe avenues. That's the problem. We let these companies get this monopolistic share of the distribution system. Now they're exercising that power.

In the Soviet Union the truth was passed, often hand to hand, in underground samizdat documents, clandestine copies of news and literature banned by the state. The truth will endure. It will be heard by those who seek it out. It will expose the mendacity of the powerful, however hard it will be to obtain. Despotisms fear the truth. They know it is a mortal threat. If we remain determined to live in truth, no matter the cost, we have a chance.

---

[Chris Hedges writes a regular original column for ScheerPost every two weeks. Click here to sign up for email alerts.]

Chris Hedges Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News , The Christian Science Monitor , and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. paul easton NOVEMBER 23, 2020 AT 10:28 AM

It seems like the masters are just as deluded as the slaves. But the situation is unsustainable. When many millions of slaves become homeless and hungry that reality will become unavoidable. Who will they blame? Will they attack one another or will they revolt against the system? Soon we will see. Carolyn L Zaremba NOVEMBER 24, 2020 AT 10:30 AM

I share only alternative media since I don't trust "mainstream" media one iota. I post articles from the World Socialist Web Site, Consortium News, the Grayzone, Caitlin Johnstone and others all the time. I am a socialist. I was only banned from posting on FB once, for criticizing Israel. No surprise there. But I suspect FB of shadow banning, i.e., making it look like you've posted an article but making it invisible to others in their news feeds. I first learned of this practice from Craig Murray, another whose articles I post regularly. paul easton NOVEMBER 25, 2020 AT 1:35 AM

That is a chilling thought. I was shadow banned by medium.com a few years ago. It appeared to me that my posts and comments went in, but no one else could see them. At least with them I could tell something was wrong because I had regular conversations with some people. With FB I don't know if you could ever be sure. R Zwarich NOVEMBER 25, 2020 AT 5:37 AM

Mr. Easton is indeed correct. It is VERY chilling, especially if people would imagine what THEY would do, if they had our Enemy's morally depraved motivations, and if they had the control our Enemy has over ALL our communications switches.

There are three basic types of mass communications. One to many. Many to one. And many to many.

The Enemy has complete access to 'one to many' communications, and complete control over anyone's else's access to same. Many to one communications are ineffective for intrinsic reasons. Many to many communications offer myriad methods of cunningly creative control.

If we send out group emails, for example, in simple old-fashioned list-serves, they who control the switches could easily 'filter', to determine who among addressees gets any message, and who doesn't.

I used to write comments in the Boston Globe, the wholly owned plaything of a VERY weird old Billionaire and his proud and beautiful young trophy wife. (Less than half his age, of course). At first I thought the Globe NEVER censored. I could write anything, and it would post. Ahh but then I learned that the Globe is a HEAVY handed censor, but was clever enough to put a 'cookie' in your browser folder to tell their server to let you see your own comments, so you would not even know that no one else could see them. It was 'stealth censorship'.

We should try to remember that these people are morally depraved, in their constant paroxysms of raw Greed and raw Lust. No force exists any longer in our nation to restrain them. Anything we can 'see' that they CAN do, we can pretty much figure they already DO do, or else sooner or later will. Carol Shapiro NOVEMBER 23, 2020 AT 1:44 PM

While I don't agree with you, Chris Hedges, all the time, I believe you are our one. true. journalist. Thankful for your honesty. Insight. Huge intellect. Global experience. I am an "unenrolled" voter -- an extremely disillusioned former Bernie Sanders supporter. Truly, I feel like he would have been our closest attempt to achieving a real "citizen government". What a laughable term that is these days. Bernie never would have had a chance running as a Democrat – absurd. He should have walked out of that convention four years ago and taken his supporters with him. Oh wait- you said that. Never NOVEMBER 23, 2020 AT 2:59 PM

Don't forget that the selective coverage by the NY Times in this campaign didn't start when Biden became the nominee. Up to that time, the Times ran one or two articles on Sanders it seems. Whatever the number, it was miniscule. They almost completely ignored one of the most significant campaigns in modern history, thus helping to ensure it died on the vine. And when they did cover it one or two times, it was always negative.

Thank you, Chris, for your tireless work in defense of our stolen democracy. yuri NOVEMBER 23, 2020 AT 4:37 PM

US liberals more fascist than conservatives–long observed by historians/social philosophers
"amerikans do not converse as Tocqueville wrote, amerikans entertain each other. amerikans do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. the problem w amerikans is not Orwellian–it is huxleyan: amerikans love their oppression: Neil Postman Stephen Morrell NOVEMBER 24, 2020 AT 1:18 AM

Glenn Greenwald's points need stressing: (i) some of the most vociferous proponents of online censorship are mainstream and 'alternative' 'journalists' who on repeated occasions have egged on the carriers to shut sites, pages, accounts or postings; (ii) these 'journalists' aren't just serving the narrowest band of oligarchic media empires in history, but also are ivy-league bourgeois brats with no interest at all in exposing the injustices or malfeasance of bourgeois society, unlike many journalists of the past; and (iii) that it's not in the immediate material interests of the carriers to conduct the censorship, especially in the longterm, since it consumes resources and lowers traffic and profits. They'd much rather the government do it and for them to be compensated at taxpayer expense.

To avoid future potential government antitrust measures or nationalisation (heaven forbid!), Zuckerberg and his ilk have been censoring in heavyhanded and hamfisted ways that aren't so 'autonomous' but for the moment at least can be traced along the usual Democrat-controlled thinktank and CIA/FBI lines, which of course also are beyond public scrutiny. Despite the prospects for freedom of reach (and reach is what it's really about) apparently growing dimmer with each senate committee appearance by the carrier oligarchs, ways and means will be found to circumvent their draconian measures. While alternative non-censoring platforms have yet to gain significant traction, it likely won't take much for one to catch on, perhaps sparked by an outrageous event of suppression, that turns Facebook, Twitter, etc, into museum pieces. One might imagine, for instance, Wikileaks-style YouTube, Facebook, Twitter equivalents that act as true carriers, purely machine-based and devoid of human interference, that precludes them becoming the 'moral guardians' that Twitter, Facebook etc, are quickly metamorphising into.

As increasing swathes of the population appear not to be aligning within the bourgeoisie's preset ideological 'tribal' boundaries, there's a certain schadenfreude in seeing the rulers in dread of the truth getting out and spreading uncontrollably. Their tailored counter-narratives simply are too enfeebled and slight to square with the hard reality that's hitting everyone, from the most educated and brainwashed to the least. That ivy-league stenographers are being pressed into the service of censorship gives some indication of the desperation of the rulers. We all know, as do they but can never admit it publicly, that censorship and repression are frank admissions that they've lost all 'arguments' for their very existence.

To an extent, Trump has been responsible for letting the genie out of the bottle, as the first president probably since before Andrew Jackson to have failed, repeatedly, to put lipstick on the racist, capitalist imperial pig. The efforts by the ruling class at censorship and naked suppression of freedom of reach and of access to sources of truthful information will only increase in desperation as their myth-making narratives become ever more unable to rationalise a crisis that's they're beginning to see as intractable and endangering their rule.

[Nov 14, 2020] What are major parts of the Deep State other then CIA

Nov 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

elkern , Nov 13 2020 18:06 utc | 61

"Deep State" is a vague term, more useful in propaganda than in the rigorous analysis that I come here for. Trump & US Right Wingnuts use it as code for, well, not exactly sure, but maybe something like imaginary "Socialists funded by George Soros to take away our guns and let the UN cut off our dicks and force us to eat broccoli" or something like that. Unfortunately, this confused usage obscures a very real set of problems, where people "deep" in US Government Departments often promote agendas contrary to the best interests of our country.

IMO, we need to distinguish between different groups inside US Bureaucracies (in no particular order):

1). Inertial Bureaucrats
- primarily concerned with maintaining & increasing their own power within the bureaucracy
- tend to do things "the way we've always done it"
- try to protect their bureaucracy & it's functions from meddling and oversight by elected politicians

2). Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex
- huge problem in DoD
- not fixable (shy of Green Wave election, lol)
- being paid well tends to reinforce people's conviction that they're Doing The Right Thing

3). OSS/CIA(/Illuminati?)
- "The Company" has metastasized beyond control of US Gov't
- network of shadow Corps gives it independent sources of money ("endowments"?)
- probably willing to manipulate US politics "for the good of the country"
- might be fixable, but that could get bloody

4). Regulatory Capture
- Corporations control agencies designed to regulate them
- big problem in Domestic policy Departments, less so for FP/Military
- should be fixable, but has Congressional protection like MIC

5). Groupthink
- Smart People blinded by each others' brilliance
- linked to Inertial Bureaucrats, above
- Think Tanks, where Rich People pay Smart People to write BS
- in FP, NGO's influence policy by pretending that their preferences are the only option (Atlantic Council, etc)

6). AIPAC
- most/only prominent force on US Gov't primarily motivated by the strategic interests of other Country
- Other countries try, but none come close to AIPAC influence
- influence on FP NGO's is used to enforce Groupthink, above ("we've always been at war with...")
- focused almost entirely on FP/Mil/Intel agencies

7). Political Parties
- GOP & Dems each have patronage havens (left tit/right tit, pardon the crass metaphor)
- GOP/NeoCons dominate Security agencies, especially (federal) Police groups
- Dems are more concentrated in domestic regulatory agencies

IMO, it would be more accurate - though politically dangerous - to describe Amb Jeffrey as "AIPAC" rather than "deep state".

ricardo2000 , Nov 13 2020 18:07 utc | 64

To call anything Trump did or said as 'realpolitik' merely underlines that term's self-serving stupidity. The official is merely congratulating himself for promoting policies to which Trump made passing reference, without understanding or supporting the reality or reasons behind them.
'Deep state' is a term with similar intellectual pretensions. I doubt the author has read the seminal work in the field by Col. Chester Prouty, The Secret Team. Prouty was President Eisenhower's and Kennedy's liaison with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA. If the CIA wanted military assets for an operation they had to go through Prouty. If Prouty was in a meeting everyone knew they were speaking to the President, the JCS, and the CIA. The Secret Team had every copy purchased the day it was published and then went out of print for 20 years. It describes CIA penetration of government offices.

H.L. Mencken: "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

[Nov 12, 2020] Which groups of the USA elite played major role in 2020 elections

Notable quotes:

"... The grouping is thus; 1) Coastal Elites/Wall Street/City of London/Private Banking/Atlantacism/Libertarian Free Market Economics aka finance capitalism ..."

"... The middle of America is land power, and is opposed to Atlantacism, rim theory, blue water navy power projection, importation of third world people, and export of jobs and factories. ..."

Nov 12, 2020 | www.unz.com

Mefobills says: November 11, 2020 at 4:30 pm GMT • 7.2 hours ago 300 Words ↑

Indeed, one can't help but wonder whether the historic American nation would fare better under outright foreign occupation than a hostile elite which considers itself our rulers and treats us with open contempt, if not hatred.

Russia or China would not flood the historic American nation with "third world people" in order to chase after a dollar. A good argument could be made that China or Russia would be a better government for Heartland America than the "international" coastal elites.

The coastal elites are wedded to finance capitalism. This group of people want a thin veneer of Oligarchs (themselves) controlling a mixed race, or brown population in their factories. Finance Capital wants to make illicit gains. Finance capital could care less about improving labor ability of the native population.

The grouping is thus; 1) Coastal Elites/Wall Street/City of London/Private Banking/Atlantacism/Libertarian Free Market Economics aka finance capitalism . (In short, the coastal elites are for an "international world order" with them in charge, with them making their finance nut with usury, rents, and unearned income. Lying and cheating is ok, because only money matters. Their capital is fungible, meaning it can fly anywhere in the world to make gains, and to them labor has legs and is also fungible, to then lower prices – to make gains.)

Land Powers, such as China and Russia are not "international" in their thinking. Although they do some power projection into blue water as a form of defense. They are interested in improving their sovereign population.

The middle of America is land power, and is opposed to Atlantacism, rim theory, blue water navy power projection, importation of third world people, and export of jobs and factories.

The American system of economy of the founders was the first industrial capitalism, and the "credit of the nation" went toward infrastructure, public health, and improving the commons.

The Jew and English finance capitalism method, first combined together in 1694, and has always been at war with heartland America. The parasite is dug in deep.

[Nov 09, 2020] Biden victory in some ways looks like Catch 22 for neoliberal Dems

Highly recommended!

Notable quotes:

"... But while they now have the power, globalists do not have solutions to the country problems, and the crisis of neoliberalism (which started in 2008) will continue, the far-right nationalism will stay and may even gain strength. This suggests that in 2024 is somebody like Tucker Carlson will lead the ticket. And Tucker is a more dangerous opponent to neoliberal Dems than Trump ever been. "Trumpism without Trump" will live, so to speak. ..."

Nov 09, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

Hidari 11.08.20 at 8:20 pm

Interesting piece by Beinart about the obvious question that isn't being asked: Why did Trump lose? After all he had the advantages of incumbency, until February the stock market was booming, wages were rising, things were going great.

Answer: because he was not nearly radical enough. Because he was a weak leader who was captured by the Republican elite (not the other way round). Also (rather ironic this) because he was and is a terrible negotiater. He continually caved into the likes of Mitch McConnell, and, well the rest is history.

Question: will 'super Trump' in 4 or 8 years time manage to follow the Eastern European template and create a genuine populist party? (economically social democratic, particularly concentrating on pensioners: extremely hostile to immigration, skeptical of environmental issues, culturally conservative?). If so the future is the Republicans' but it's a big if.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/11/07/how-trump-lost/

likbez 11.09.20 at 4:20 pm (no link)

@Hidari 11.08.20 at 8:20 pm

...he was a weak leader who was captured by the Republican elite (not the other way round). Also (rather ironic this) because he was and is a terrible negotiator. He continually caved into the likes of Mitch McConnell, and, well the rest is history.

All true. But Biden victory in some ways looks like Catch 22 for neoliberal Dems (Will the Democrats Ever Make Sense of This Week? – New Republic):

In sum, if the results we have hold, Joe Biden will win the election and preside over a divided Congress. A chastened and anxious Democratic caucus will continue to hold the House.

A triumphant Senate Republican caucus will obviously destroy his major legislative agenda. Biden will assuredly turn to policy by executive action, just as Barack Obama did late in his legislatively stymied administration.

When he does, Republicans will do all they can to send those actions to a 6–3 conservative Supreme Court Biden will be unable to pack or meaningfully reform.

In defeating Trump, Democrats will have avoided their worst-case scenario. Instead, they will have won the worst possible Biden victory, a political situation that will be a nightmare all its own.

Trump, with his "national neoliberalism," was an anomaly in its own right. And such things do not last long. So this is a kind of "return to normal" -- return to power of the "internationalist" faction of Oligarchy who is linked to globalization (and constitutes the majority of the US oligarchy), which was unexpectedly defeated in 2016 and since then foght tooth and nail for the return to power. And such "normalization" is the most logical outcome of the 2020 elections and is to be expected.

But while they now have the power, globalists do not have solutions to the country problems, and the crisis of neoliberalism (which started in 2008) will continue, the far-right nationalism will stay and may even gain strength. This suggests that in 2024 is somebody like Tucker Carlson will lead the ticket. And Tucker is a more dangerous opponent to neoliberal Dems than Trump ever been. "Trumpism without Trump" will live, so to speak.

That may spell troubles for the well-being of the PMC (professional and management class) to which we all belong.

I would add that the fact that Biden victory legitimized Russia-gate and abuse of their power by intelligence agencies is also a problem. I suspect that Neo-McCarthyism, in the long run, might backfire.

[Nov 08, 2020] Gridlock -- Biden May Or May Not Win, But Trump Remains 'President' Of Red America by Alastair Crooke

Notable quotes:

"... Mike Lind, the American academic and author has observed , around the idea of America moving toward a 'managed' society -- based on 'science' -- that would be essentially finessed and controlled by a managerial, expert class. ..."

"... The notion however, of what America -- as Idea -- now constitutes, has fractured into two tectonic plates, moving apart in very different directions -- and likely to move even further apart as each 'plate' remains convinced that 'it won' -- and the sweetness of victory has been stolen. ..."

"... The fact remains that the election has produced a result in which it is abundantly clear that one half of the American electorate precisely voted to oust the other half. ..."

"... A President may emerge, but it will not be, as it were, a settled one: He or she cannot make claim to the 'will of the majority'. ..."

Nov 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

One clear outcome of the U.S. election was the collapse of the promised 'Blue Wave' -- an implosion that marks the 'beginning of the end' to a powerful spell enthralling the West. It was the delusion which Ron Chernow, the acclaimed U.S. presidential historian, gave credence, as he contemptuously dismissed America's "topsy-turvy moment" as purely ephemeral, and a "surreal interlude in American life": No longer can it be said that there is one 'normal'. Win or lose the White House, Red Trumpism remains as 'President' for half America.

Biden, by contrast, served as the prospect for Restoration -- a return to a hallowed consensus in American politics -- to a reassuring 'sanity' of facts, science and truth . Biden, it was hoped, would be the agency over-lording a crushing electoral landslide that would terminate irrevocably Trump's rude interruption of the 'normal'. Biden supporters were rallied, Mike Lind, the American academic and author has observed , around the idea of America moving toward a 'managed' society -- based on 'science' -- that would be essentially finessed and controlled by a managerial, expert class.

Over time, Lind suggests, American society would begin to depart more, and more easily, from its republican roots, through a process already underway: via attempts to alter the Constitutional order, and other rules, to bring about a change in the way America is governed.

The notion however, of what America -- as Idea -- now constitutes, has fractured into two tectonic plates, moving apart in very different directions -- and likely to move even further apart as each 'plate' remains convinced that 'it won' -- and the sweetness of victory has been stolen.

The fracturing of the 'One Normal', by contrast, provides some kind of respite to much of the globe.

The fact remains that the election has produced a result in which it is abundantly clear that one half of the American electorate precisely voted to oust the other half. It is gridlock -- with the Supreme Court and Senate in the hands of one party, and the House of Representatives and White House (possibly) in the hands of the other. As Glenn Greenwald warns :

No matter what the final result, there will be substantial doubts about its legitimacy by one side or the other, perhaps both. And no deranged conspiracy thinking is required for that. An electoral system suffused with this much chaos, error, protracted outcomes and seemingly inexplicable reversals will sow doubt and distrust even among the most rational citizens.

Though the maths and maps suggests Biden will likely reach 270 Electoral votes, the old saying 'It ain't over 'till it's over', holds true. The electoral vote scenarios in the key 'swing states' would only apply if there is no litigation, fraud or theft. However all three are in play -- If you are stuffing the ballot box, you first wait to see what the regular vote is, so that you know how many votes you 'need' ( mathematical anomalies aside) to push your candidate over the top. Trump, somewhat rashly, gave out the GOP vote calculations at 02.30 on Wednesday, and hey-presto, loads of absentee ballots suddenly arrived at certain polling stations at around 04.00. That seems to have happened in Wisconsin, where over 100,000 Biden votes appeared seemingly out of nowhere on a flash drive delivered by hand from a Democratic district. That put Biden ahead in Wisconsin -- but litigation is in process. Likewise, it appears that a huge "absentee ballot" dump appeared in Michigan that heavily favored Biden.

This is just the beginning of a new and more uncertain phase that could go on for weeks . It may be that ultimately Congress will have to certify and make the final determination in late January. Meanwhile, there are some things we know with much higher certainty: The Republican majority in the Senate may hold until the 2024 election. So, even if Biden wins, his agenda will not hold through 2024.

A President may emerge, but it will not be, as it were, a settled one: He or she cannot make claim to the 'will of the majority'. Whomsoever is certified by Congress cannot truthfully say they represent 'the nation'. Consensus is fractured, and it is difficult to see any leadership that can bring Americans together as a 'united people'.

"There is not a single important cultural, religious, political or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pushing us apart," David French notes in a new book Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation . French -- an anti-Trump conservative -- argues that America's divisions are so great, and the political system so poorly designed to handle them, that secession may eventually be the result: "If we keep pushing people and pushing people and pushing people, you cannot assume that they won't break", he writes. (A 2018 poll found that nearly a quarter of each party -- Democrat and Republican -- characterized the opposing party as "evil").

An ideological split, and the concomitantly contested America as Idea has huge geo-political implications, reaching well beyond America itself -- and principally for Europe's élites . European leaders did not see it coming when Trump was elected in 2016. They misjudged Brexit. And this year, they misread U.S. politics once again. They yearned for a Biden win, and they (still) fail to see the connection between the popular rebellion of Red under Mr. Trump, and the angry protests occurring across Europe against lockdown.

Separating tectonic plates -- more strategically -- usually signal a kind of dualism that betokens civil conflict. In other words, their separation and moving apart turns into an ideological struggle for the nature of society and its institutional fabric.

Historian, and former War College Professor, Mike Vlahos warns (echoing Lind), that, "there is, here: more of a hidden -- and thus in a sense, occult struggle -- by which over time, societies begin to depart more, and more easily, from their roots. The western dominant élites presently are seeking to cement their hold over society [moving towards a 'managed' society]: To have full control over the direction of society, and, of course, a framework of rule that protects their wealth."

"Quite to the surprise of everyone, and given that the Republicans are being represented by a billionaire who has a great many friends in Manhattan -- the Wall Street donors to the two campaigns, outnumber Trump's donors for Biden by 5-to-1".

Why, Vlahos asks, would Wall Street invest in a man -- Biden -- and in a Party, ostensibly seeking to move America toward this 'managed' progressive society? Is it because they are convinced of a need radically to restructure the world's economy and geopolitical relations? Is this then Vlahos' occult struggle?

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Many of the élite hold that we are at that monumental inflection point at this moment -- In a nutshell, their narrative is simply this: the planet is already economically and demographically over-extended; the infinite economic expansion model is bust; and the global debt and government entitlement expenditure bubble too, is set to pop at the same moment.

Mike Vlahos notes that in a curious way this American story mirrors that of ancient Rome in the last century of the Republic -- with on the one hand, the élite Roman class, and on the other, the Populares , as Red Americans' equivalent:

"This is in fact the dual story of Rome in the last century of the Republic, and it tracks very well -- with the transformation going on today [in the U.S.] -- and it is a transformation The society which emerged at the end of the Roman Revolution, and civil war had too, a totally dominant élite class.

"This was a new world, in which the great landowners, with their latifundia [the slave-land source of wealth], who had been the 'Big Men' leading the various factions in the civil wars, became the senatorial archons that dominated Roman life for the next five centuries -- while the People, the Populares, were ground into a passive -- not helpless -- but generally dependent and non-participating element of Roman governance: This sapped away at the creative life of Rome, and eventually led to its coming apart.

" today American inequality is as great as in the period right before the French Revolution, and is mirrored in what was happening to Rome in that long century of transformation. The problem we have right now, and which is going to make this revolution more intense, is I think, the cynical conclusion and agenda of Blue to just leave behind the Americans they do not need [in the New Economy] -- which is to say all of Red America, and to put them into a situation of hardship and marginalization, where they cannot coalesce, to form a rival -- as it were -- Popular Front.

"What I think what we are seeing here [in the U.S.] is profound: American society -- emerging from this passage, is going to be completely different. And frankly, it already feels different. It already feels -- as it has felt for the past four years -- that we are in a rolling civil war norm now, in which deep societal strife is now the normal way in which we handle transfers of power. Issues will be [momentarily] resolved, with the path of society [painfully] staked out through violent conflict. That is likely to be our path for decades ahead.

"The problem with that in the shorter term, is that there is still enough of the nation aroused and ready to fight this process. The problem: Can the last energies of the Old Republic still be harnessed against this seemingly inevitable, transformation?"

A 'fourth industrial revolution' is the only way by which to 'square this circle', according to this mindset. The Reset is purposefully aimed to disrupt all areas of life, albeit on a planetary scale. Shock therapy, as it were, to change the way we humans think of ourselves, and our relationship with the world . The Great Reset looks to a supply-side 'miracle', achieved through full-spectrum automation and robotics. A world where the money is digital; the food is lab-grown; where everything is counted and controlled by giant monopolies; and everyday existence is micromanaged by ever-monitoring, ever-nudging AI that registers thoughts and feelings before the people even get a chance to make those thoughts.

---

LVrunner , 2 hours ago

Traitorous Mittens Romney took to Twitter to congratulate sleepy joe today. He’s such an epic douchebag!

PGR88 , 2 hours ago

He reminds me of some kind of aging gay Mormon **** star

LVrunner , 2 hours ago

His kid was in business with bidens, not much of surprise. Just disgusted.

Roacheforque , 1 hour ago

I find it amazing that pundits can describe the detailed evidence of the fraudulent activities of democratic operatives, along with the understanding that no such activities took part on the republican front, and simply dismiss this legal and moral contrast with a broad stroke finding that "the nation is divided".

Simply. *******. Amazing.

Who writes this ****?

I am no Trump sycophant, but the contrast in "division" is law abiding vs. fraudulent, anarchy vs civilized order, constitutional vs. totalitarian. Trump's personality flaws are immense, but I contend that a solid majority of Americans voted for president in accordance to the red wave downvote, and that a gross misrepresentation of living human Biden voters does not constitute an equal division.

Thank God!

Fizzy Head , 2 hours ago

Funny how there is no evidence of fraud with the Dems, but it was all Russian meddling in the last election...

#palletsofballotsisfraud

Chemical_Engineer_IT_Analyst , 2 hours ago

Remember Republicans you are the ones who have the real power!

It's not a good idea to bully the productive class. Without the conservative workers the country would starve in the cold and dark. Who are not needed are the parasitic class of politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, Deep State workers, incompetent teachers and Marxist professors. And we would all be better off without Facebook and Twitter. We also don't need NBC CNN, ABC, and other alphabet media, Washington Post, New York Times and other propaganda outlets.

SurfingUSA , 2 hours ago

Biden, by contrast, served as the prospect for Restoration – a return to a hallowed consensus in American politics – to a reassuring ‘sanity’ of facts, science and truth .

Give me a break. He served as a prospect of a Chinese sock puppet.

not dead yet , 1 hour ago

Selected facts, selected science, selected truth. Better known as cherry picking. If that isn't working turn fiction into fact and truth to legitimize junk science. Better known as man made climate change.

tk8565 , 2 hours ago

If you like your fraud, you can keep your fraud.

This will happen repeatedly from every election on, as they learn and improve.

If it isnt fixed now in court it will never be.

Election laws must be fixed.

If unsuccessful the only plan left is to ((censored))

ClusterF , 2 hours ago

No thank you, and yes I care damn well enough to fight about it. The founders rebelled over a miniscule tea tax for gods sake!!!! This is about subversion of the entire race to a globalist over class.

pluto the dog , 1 hour ago

https://m.facebook.com/watch/?v=730452901154616&_rdr

George Galloway says it's a COUP.

This will upset a lot of leftards

Barnacles , 1 hour ago

the idea of America moving toward a ‘managed’ society – based on ‘science’ – that would be essentially finessed and controlled by a managerial, expert class.

Managed society sounds a heck of a lot like communism. That is, one-party "management" of people and resources by elites unaccountable to the people via free and fair elections.

ChetRoman , 2 hours ago

"Biden, by contrast, served as the prospect for Restoration – a return to a hallowed consensus in American politics – to a reassuring ‘sanity’ of facts, science and truth "

Who writes this horse****? Biden was a senile placeholder for the next puppet of the "ruling class" or "deep state" that has only contempt for working Americans, the deplorables. Biden will formalize Big Tech's and MSM domination of what we can say and think. They have censored 95% of the media to keep the public from seeing how thoroughly corrupt and incompetent Biden is. Trump has his faults but he is the only one, in at least the last 30 years, that even mentioned the downward spiral of the working Americans. What we have is a Color Revolution and the Bolsheviks are a major part of it.

Patmos , 1 hour ago

Technocracy is just another form of tyranny, and once the global economy inevitably collapses technocracy will only end up proving the saying that when the blind follow the blind they both end up in a ditch.

Deplorable , 1 hour ago

I'm actually happy that Biden won and will continue with the lockdown ********. It keeps me working from home until I decide to officially retire. As a govt contractor I can get away with working less than half the time while still getting paid for a 40 hour workday.

Added bonus, I can drink beer all day long and day trade on the side.

hoytmonger , 2 hours ago

Nothing will change with Biden as President,

Except for the rhetoric.

Nexus789 , 2 hours ago

They will spend their time enriching themselves. Biden, according to Forbes is worth ten million. How does a career politician do that.

RozKo , 2 hours ago

A world where the money is digital; the food is lab-grown; where everything is counted and controlled by giant monopolies; and everyday existence is micromanaged by ever-monitoring, ever-nudging AI that registers thoughts and feelings before the people even get a chance to make those thoughts.

Oh boy, lots of fun, maximum security prison with a twist, you'll be getting screwed by robot bubba and he be in your head too.

Onthebeach6 , 2 hours ago

Rupert Murdoch said a couple of months ago that he expected Trump to lose in a landslide.

Looks like he worked overtime to achieve this outcome.

3-fingered_chemist , 2 hours ago

Trump should just give the Left what it wants. Total lockdown of the country until we have 6 months straight of zero cases of coronavirus. That means no new President can be sworn in until that time is reached. Have fun! The next two years will be hilarious as the Dems further implode. You already can see it with Pelosi wanting to be Speaker again. The Progressives will think that they have some mandate, but the Old Guard is going to throw them under the bus yet again. ANTIFA and BLM will be burning down the Dem cities not because of Trump but because they aren’t getting their way. Biden won’t even be allowed to make decisions, but the Progressives won’t be calling the shots either. This will be the de facto Hillary Presidency. The irony is that Mitch is likely to be the most powerful person in Washington.

monero_123 , 2 hours ago

Even though I do agree with some conservative principals, I probably lean more blue than red overall.

Unfortunately, I still don't get the opinion on getting mad at the "blue" states for making some of these very commentators' life worse. The computer you are using, the phone you have in your pocket, the internet you are browsing, the webhost that hosts Zerohedge, etc, etc is all from the advancements of companies/talent that are in those states.

But, at the same time, the more people are angry at the invisible boogeyman, the easier it is for myself to advance in society while others just sit and complain.

OK Boomer , 16 seconds ago

It's not that complicated. The US has had for many decades an entrenched "Deep State" running much of the govt. Republican and Democrat parties are the two hands of this Deep State. When an establishment Democrat president replaces an establishment Republican (or vice versa), no actual power is transferred. It's just the Deep State passing the baton from one hand to the other. The enduring power is in the un-elected govt. The process of electing a president is normally just a symbolic ritual which serves to generate consent by allowing the masses to feel as though they actually chose their govt.

Trump was the unicorn president. He was never supposed to be elected. And even as president his power has been very limited. The Justice Dept, CIA, FBI, all conspired against him. The only prosecutions by "his" Justice Department were against members of his own administration. The purpose of the US president is to act as a figurehead and a rubber stamp for the wishes of the dominant un-elected govt. Biden fits the bill perfectly--a complete non-entity.

N2M , 1 hour ago

Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press Kindle Edition

by Alexander Cockburn (Author), Jeffrey St. Clair (Author)

Conspiracy Theory in America (Discovering America Book 6) Kindle Edition

by Lance deHaven-Smith (Author)

War and Empire: The American Way of Life Kindle Edition

by Paul L. Atwood (Author)

Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq First Edition, Kindle Edition

by Stephen Kinzer (Author)

The Propaganda Project Kindle Edition

by Phil M. Williams (Author)

[Nov 08, 2020] Was it an election, or a coup detat?

Highly recommended!

Notable quotes:

"... Moreover, Biden administration probably will quickly abandon all its election promises in domestic policy area and will kick the neoliberal can down the road. After all Biden is a classic neoliberal and he is as far from Warren and Sanders, as one can get. ..."

"... And legitimacy of election is much bigger question than the silly question about who among two factions of neoliberal oligarchy won. Because this is an important factor that holds the society together. ..."

"... A President may emerge, but it will not be, as it were, a settled one: He or she cannot make claim to the 'will of the majority'. Whomsoever is certified by Congress cannot truthfully say they represent 'the nation'. Consensus is fractured, and it is difficult to see any leadership that can bring Americans together as a 'united people'. ..."

"... If Dems really abuse ballot harvesting to the extent Trump supporters suspect, that will be very detrimental to the USA as a society. And that's much bigger negative factor than any positive effect from Biden's victory. ..."

"... Marc Elias , the lawyer for Dems in Nevada, efforts to expand mail-in voting and revoke prohibition of ballot harvesting in Nevada look really suspicious. ..."

"... Unprincipled pursuit of power is utterly characteristic of the Democrats and their media allies in recent years, and it would not be at all surprising to learn that there was some kind of a "Plan B" already decided on before the election. ..."

"... When you fill up the mail in ballot for your demented grandmother this is a fraud though on a micro scale. But multiply it by thousand. Do it in nursing homes. Then do it in community centers in minority areas and ghettos for people who would never vote. You incentivize them and twist their arms. This is no different than ballot stuffing but impossible to be proven as a fraud, yet everybody knows about it... ..."

"... While I do not believe that election fraud changed the outcome (see above), the real question now is "Was it an election, or a coup detat?" ..."

Nov 08, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

likbez,

Run75441,

You are simply naive.

I am firmly in "anybody but Trump" camp. IMHO Trump lost 5% of his share among white male voters. Because he betrayed his election promises to them. That's why he lost. As for Trump personally, all else are details.

But I see huge issues with how 2020 elections was conducted. And not only I.

You need also to understand that the actual difference between Biden administration and Trump administration will be positive, but pretty small. Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss And in some areas on foreign policy (Ukraine) Biden will be definitely worse. Another negative factor is that Biden victory legitimized Russia-gate. Which means that his win legitimized neo-McCarthyism.

Moreover, Biden administration probably will quickly abandon all its election promises in domestic policy area and will kick the neoliberal can down the road. After all Biden is a classic neoliberal and he is as far from Warren and Sanders, as one can get.

But all this are gory details.

What really matter now is whether the elections legitimized the return to power of globalists, or this is yet another scam similar to Russia-gate.

And legitimacy of election is much bigger question than the silly question about who among two factions of neoliberal oligarchy won. Because this is an important factor that holds the society together.

That's why all color revolutions start with the frontal assault on the legitimacy of elections in the first place. Now Trump campaign will be doing that. And this is hugely negative. As Alastair Crooke noted:

A President may emerge, but it will not be, as it were, a settled one: He or she cannot make claim to the 'will of the majority'. Whomsoever is certified by Congress cannot truthfully say they represent 'the nation'. Consensus is fractured, and it is difficult to see any leadership that can bring Americans together as a 'united people'.

If Dems really abuse ballot harvesting to the extent Trump supporters suspect, that will be very detrimental to the USA as a society. And that's much bigger negative factor than any positive effect from Biden's victory.

For example in Nevada many workers moved out of state due to the collapse of casino industry. But formally you cannot vote if you moved out of the state over 30 days prior to the balloting. Absent of a system of authentication of residency and identification, we have essentially a honor system – an approach that no casino would allow even at the nickel slots section. In this sense Marc Elias , the lawyer for Dems in Nevada, efforts to expand mail-in voting and revoke prohibition of ballot harvesting in Nevada look really suspicious.

Unprincipled pursuit of power is utterly characteristic of the Democrats and their media allies in recent years, and it would not be at all surprising to learn that there was some kind of a "Plan B" already decided on before the election.

When you fill up the mail in ballot for your demented grandmother this is a fraud though on a micro scale. But multiply it by thousand. Do it in nursing homes. Then do it in community centers in minority areas and ghettos for people who would never vote. You incentivize them and twist their arms. This is no different than ballot stuffing but impossible to be proven as a fraud, yet everybody knows about it...

Charges of ballot harvesting are extremely difficult to prove, but indirect signs suggests that it did have place much in Chicago major Daley fashion.

While I do not believe that election fraud changed the outcome (see above), the real question now is "Was it an election, or a coup detat?"

[Nov 07, 2020] Tramp role in Syria and Iraq

Nov 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Nov 7 2020 15:08 utc | 56

RSH's warning that Trump could still start a war should be taken very seriously. Trump has vowed that he will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Will he leave office without ENSURING that they cannot?

Israel Warns Of Coming War With Iran If Biden Wins As Trump Calls

I don't think for a minute think that Zionist Biden will do anything to upset Israel. But the election of Biden is a convenient excuse for Trump to start a war (probably based on a false flag of some sort) that Biden (or Kamala-Hillary) will "inherit".

!!

---

Don Bacon , Nov 7 2020 15:14 utc | 57

@ pnyx #43
. . .on Biden. Just think of the warmongering role he played for the Iraq war. The Neocons would have an easier time with Biden than with Tronald
Yes. Biden is a Clintonite, Trump was anti-Clinton.
The US war in Iraq - Operation Iraqi Freedom - with its death, destruction and displacement has been rightly called the worst US foreign policy move ever.
The Clintons started it, and then promoted it with Biden's assistance as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act into law on October 31, 1998.
On December 16, 1998, President Bill Clinton announces he has ordered air strikes against Iraq because it refused to cooperate with United Nations (U.N.) weapons inspectors.

David , Nov 7 2020 15:35 utc | 66

Trump's foreign policies were remarkably different? How? He assassinated an Iranian general, which nearly had the US enter into a hot war with Iran, bombed Syria twice, put additional sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, Russia and the DPRK. Trump's State Department has successfully enacted regime change in Zimbabwe, Sudan, El Salvador, Chile, Honduras, Bolivia (Mike Pompeo congratulating Luis Arce on his win -- very suspicious), and is trying regime change in Hong Kong, Belarus, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, Eritrea, and Zimbabwe again, and as of late, Nigeria.

You could argue that Trump wants Iran to be somewhat stronger so he can sell more weapons to his MIC buddies and profit that way, therefore he pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, and the weapons import/export sanctions on Iran expired. But that's a different and more brash method of managing Empire. It's different from Biden's "strategic de-escalation" policy with Iran via the Iran nuclear deal, but not that one that necessarily yields better results for Iran in the long term.

dave , Nov 7 2020 15:35 utc | 67

Calm down folks, the elected officials in the US have been puppets of the elite for the entire history of the country.
The problem we're facing is within the elite community and far above any government's control.

They didn't legalize drone striking "terrorists" any where on the globe by accident.
This means the elite are terrified of the fact that the internet and Trump both have exposed them for the morally bankrupt, greedy, mass murdering psychopaths they truly are.

The accidental presidency of Trump made them realize that their useful idiots(elected officials) where more idiots than useful and that they had to use the state sponsored monopolies in the press as well as their privately controlled publicly funded covert community to steer the narrative away from actual reality into their alternative commoditized version of reality.

Trump was never trying to defend America from the elite for the common man. He was trying to exploit the elite who had rejected him and his father for decades as well as cash in on their predicament in order to pay off his debts and start his own reality TV network.

I agree Trump was useful and informative but in the end he, like us is just along for the ride.

Don't do anything rash and don't for one second think a regime change in America is a rare occurrence. Remember the Kennedy's ?

The only way to win is to not become one of the elite's useful idiots by lashing out against another citizen. Poor and middle class only get the illusion they help decide policy.
The policy is decided and auctioned off within the billionaire funded think tanks and sent to the useful idiots in DC to be rubber stamped in order to trick you into thinking the legislative branch is legitimate. These people could f*ck up a two car parade and prove it over and over again.

Stay sane folks, the motives haven't changed in centuries and the elite are far more scared of us than they are the other elite's because they all know they're all cowards.

David , Nov 7 2020 15:37 utc | 69

In addition, considering Trump was supposedly a Russian puppet, Congress under his admin passed a bill which allowed the US to arm Ukraine against Russia even more.

GeorgeV , Nov 7 2020 15:39 utc | 70

Wonderful and thought provoking analysis of current political affairs b. However I would like to add that Biden and Trump are the products of political trends that have deep roots in modern US and world political affairs that have been ongoing for some 100 years or more. Biden and Trump did not occur in a vacuum. Both are products of the two world wars that were fought in the last century. More recently, the US since 1940 and continuing to the present day, has been actively preparing or fighting a major war somewhere on this planet. This development has in turn created a vast military and civilian bureaucracy that constantly needs to be fed a diet of real or imagined threats in order to survive.

[Nov 07, 2020] Supporters of the Democratic Party are mainly demotic elites who benefit from globalization and liberalization of the global economy, and those who support the Republican Party are middle- and lower-class people, and religious conservatives

Nov 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Nov 6 2020 18:58 utc | 113

Wow! Today's Global Times editorial about the election and its outcome is very perceptive in its entirety making it very hard to determine an excerpt. I decided on the center 4 paragraphs as they're a coherent whole:

"Every society has internal divergences and contradictions. The design of the US system indulges and even encourages the fermentation of contradictions. Mechanisms help maintain the balance between interests and power. For a long time, this performed relatively well, but new challenges are changing the conditions of US mechanisms, and changing relations between the effectiveness of US mechanisms and the difficulties US society faces.

"The fundamental change is that the US has been consuming its accumulated advantages against the backdrop of globalization. Its pattern of interests has been fixated, and the overall competitiveness of the country has been sliding. The welfare it has made for the people cannot match people's demands and expectations. The mechanism that distributes interests solidifies and further erodes social ability of promoting unity.

"In the internet era, identity politics is rising. People can easily feel that their rights are deprived because they are from a certain social class. Maintaining social unity has become an increasingly arduous and sensitive task. Obviously, the US needs political reforms more than many other countries to enhance its ability to promote unity.

"But in the past four years, the Trump administration, incited by the US election system, has pushed the country into a risky path where it enhances division to boost the existing pattern of political interests. There are so many social woes in US society, be it between different races and classes, between new immigrants and old ones, and between different regions, let alone partisan. But now the objective of society has been cast on Trump's reelection. This objective has to a great extent squeezed the room of US society to pursue maximum common interests."

But I really insist reading the entire editorial.

In an op/ed by a professor at the Center for American Studies of Fudan University, we learn what some close observers from outside see as the primary contradictions within the Outlaw US Empire:

"There are two main contradictions in the US. First, contradictions between the whites and ethnic minorities. The advantageous position of the whites continues to decrease and they would lose their dominance over the country in the future. This makes their tolerance and confidence in ethnic minorities decrease as well. The ratio of the population of ethnic minorities is rising. This increases their demand for equality and rights.

"It is normal for ethnic minorities to demand for corresponding political, social, economic and cultural positions, but this will pose a severe challenge to the cultural, religious and racial nature of the US. As the US population continues to lose balance, related conflicts will break out or even become a periodic and escalating crisis.

"Second, contradictions between elites and ordinary people. Supporters of the Democratic Party are mainly demotic elites who benefit from globalization and liberalization of the global economy, and those who support the Republican Party are middle- and lower-class people, and religious conservatives. This is very clear in the county-based electoral maps. Trump-supporting counties that are vast, under populated and economically backward, surround cities and counties that support the Democratic Party, while Democrat-dominated counties and cities use their economic and population advantages to lead the political pattern in some states. The contradictions between elites and ordinary people will not end with the election."

Not stated clearly IMO is that these contradictions are Centrifugal in their affects on the overall society thus impeding attempts to reform the polity and gain control over the forces exerting actual control that are beyond government.

[Nov 06, 2020] "What drives the empire's engine is essentially bipartisan, even in its own way, apolitical, existing as it does as a form of leaderless shadow government that functions as a community-of-interest rather than a bureaucracy. It is inclusive and reflective of the real centers of power in the country, namely the national security state and Wall Street."

Nov 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Nov 5 2020 19:57 utc | 140

Read Giraldi's essay , and he echoes what many of us have written about the Outlaw US Empire:

"What drives the empire's engine is essentially bipartisan, even in its own way, apolitical, existing as it does as a form of leaderless shadow government that functions as a community-of-interest rather than a bureaucracy. It is inclusive and reflective of the real centers of power in the country, namely the national security state and Wall Street."

Which is to say that Imperial Policy isn't really controlled from the Oval Office, and to that I'll add much of domestic policy too. As Hudson has said numerous times, we have a centrally planned economy controlled by the FIRE sector that operates on the very short term which completely ignores any sort of long term planning, which is what's really required for an Industrial Capitalist Economy . In this podcast , Hudson admits what we're governed by what ought to be termed Financialized Fascism, the Constitution is broken beyond repair and only a Great Revolt can rewrite and rebuild the USA. But as myself and others note, to do that, citizen solidarity is a sine qua non, and this election proves that's far from happening. So, what might we expect between now and 2024? A continuance of Bad Governance at the federal level will be mirrored in many states and anarchy will escalate regardless Biden or Trump. Continued erosion of living standards. A heightened threat of war with either China, Russia or both, and or with Iran. The replacement of Biden with Harris, quite possibly by his own party via 25th Amendment. In other words, more stumbling down the paths begun by Reagan in 1980 and GHW Bush in 1990.

[Nov 06, 2020] The elites may control who gets nominated but no matter how flawed or repugnant their candidate is or how obvious that the candidate was chosen for them the flocks that follow the candidates act as if they did the choosing.

Nov 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

jinn , Nov 5 2020 13:48 utc | 27

The elites may control who gets nominated but no matter how flawed or repugnant their candidate is or how obvious that the candidate was chosen for them the flocks that follow the candidates act as if they did the choosing.

Trump was given 10 times the free advertising than all the other primary candidates combined and yet his followers think they picked him.

And Biden will go down in history as the candidate who got more popular votes than any other candidate ever has and yet he is about as popular as a hemorrhoid.

[Nov 06, 2020] Here's Your Historical Analogy Menu- Rome, The USSR, Or Revolutionary France

Notable quotes:

"... One camp within the elites recognizes the danger and seeks reforms , but the reforms are too little, too late, and in any event, the elites who cling most ardently to the past stability fight the reform movement to a standstill. ..."

"... So take your pick, America: what's the closest analogy? A sclerotic Politburo of elders living in the past, an elite fiddling while the nation disintegrates, or an elite so out of touch with reality that it claims inflation is zero while the populace can no longer afford bread? ..."

Nov 05, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Rome, the USSR and Revolutionary France are all compelling analogies due to the hubristic cluelessness of their fractured elites as the pretensions of stability collapsed around them. Even though Nero didn't actually fiddle while Rome burned and Marie Antoinette didn't gush "Let them eat brioche" when notified that the peasants had no bread (or more accurately, could no longer afford it), these myths are handy encapsulations of the disconnect from reality that infested the elites in the last years before the deluge of non-linear chaos overwhelmed the regimes.

While historians gather evidence of tipping points such as pandemics, ecological damage, invasions, droughts, inflation, etc., the core dynamic is ultimately the loss of social cohesion within the ruling elites and in the social order at large.

As a generality, the permanence of the status quo is taken for granted by elites, who then feel free to squabble amongst themselves over the spoils of wealth and power. Distracted by their own infighting, the elites are blind to the erosion of the foundations of their power.

As coherence in the elites unravels, the ties uniting the elites with the masses unravel as well.

One camp within the elites recognizes the danger and seeks reforms , but the reforms are too little, too late, and in any event, the elites who cling most ardently to the past stability fight the reform movement to a standstill.

As social cohesion unravels, systems that once seemed immutable (i.e. linear ) suddenly display non-linear dynamics in which modest changes that would have made little difference in the past now unleash regime-shattering disorder.

So take your pick, America: what's the closest analogy? A sclerotic Politburo of elders living in the past, an elite fiddling while the nation disintegrates, or an elite so out of touch with reality that it claims inflation is zero while the populace can no longer afford bread?

They all lead to the same destination.

---

richsob , 1 hour ago

I know a lot of history and I think we will go the route of Rome. We will have a slow slide into total failure from a debased currency, an over extended military, tax revolts, unmanageable immigration and an internal war among the elites.

HRH of Aquitaine 2.0 , 1 hour ago

My name is an indirect reference to France and the French Revolution.

When Pelosi was photo'd in front of two massive Sub Zero fridges with gourmet ice cream, that was the equivalent of "let them eat brioche." She is fvucking clueless. A tool that is barely coherent, much like Joe.

People see through it. The greed of the politicians, and their apparatchiks, the bureaucrats, is obvious to anyone willing to look. FFS apparatchiks can retire with six fixure salaries after being a government employee! People are sick to death of their arrogance, their greed, their out-and-out abuse of the taxpayer!

The other analogy, which I think is valid, is to ancient Rome. I was a philosophy major / Latin minor so took quite few courses involving the classes, reading the classics, or translating them. I also spent a semester in Rome, tramping through the Forum and walking underground and overground. In 1997 Rome was a beautiful city, mostly safe.

Anyhow, ancient Rome ended up debasing their currency, literally. Which the US (and other central banks) are doing with excessive money printing.

Excessive taxation drove away the tax base of ancient Rome. The first jingle keys event was there. Why? Taxes were too high. People will work hard if there is a profit incentive and they are able to earn a good return from their labor. Once that incentive was gone, people abandoned their farms and property and left. Where did they go? Away. Away from the tax collectors, which were richly rewarded for any taxes they were able to collect. I suppose at the end, the collection methods became quite brutal. At that point, when it is your money or your life, you throw the tax collector your money and flee with your life. You walk away from land that you love and start over.

Never an easy choice to abandon one's land and home. But that is exactly what happened.

Central bankers and governments, along with the common citizen, would do well to heed historical precedents.

MAOUS , 31 minutes ago

I see it more like The Godfather Part I & II. We were betrayed by the stupidest simpletons of our own family (citizenry) that sold us out for trinkets, false promises of grandeur and propaganda from Rival Mafia Families who wanted to rub our family out, kill our leader and take over. "I didn't know until today, it was Barzini all along." Yeah, but Fredo was the turn coat that made it all possible. Meet the simpletons of our Family known as your fellow American voter. "A Republic, if you can keep it." We lost it, kiss it goodbye. Say hello to the new Black Hand on the block.

Omega Point , 1 hour ago

One of the best articles on ZH in a while. The elites are so full of hubris, they behave as if the state of affairs since the post-WWII era has always been the state of affairs throughout history and are immutable. They believe that they are cause of America's dominance, not the individuals who built this country on whose goodwill they are now quickly draining.

I think we're like Rome. Currency debasement, no border security, massively corrupt politicians, most of population on welfare, and games and circuses to distract from the rot.

The elites will soon be surprised how quickly things will decline, just as shocked as the Romans when the Visigoths came through the city walls and looted the Imperial City in 410 AD.

play_arrow

sbin , 1 hour ago

The USSR was very similar with decrepit old party hacks ruining everything.

Unfortunately American exceptional lunatics will try to destroy the world before excepting reality.

Never been a group so corrupt and delusional with so much destructive weaponry.

Dr Strangelove is more appropriate.

RKKA , 1 hour ago

In the summer of 1941, the 4th Panzer Division of Heinz Guderian, one of the most talented German tank generals, broke through to the Belarusian town of Krichev. Parts of the 13th Soviet Army were retreating. Only one gunner, Nikolai Sirotinin, did not retreat - very young, short, thin.

On that day, it was necessary to cover the withdrawal of troops. “There will be two people with a cannon here,” said the battery commander. Nikolai volunteered. The second was the commander himself.

On the morning of July 17, a column of German tanks appeared on the highway.

Nikolai took up a position on the hill right on the field. The cannon was sinking in the high rye, but he could clearly see the highway and the bridge over the river. When the lead tank reached the bridge, Nikolai knocked it out with the first shot. The second shell set fire to the armored personnel carrier that closed the column.

We must stop here. Because it is still not entirely clear why Nikolai was left alone at the cannon. But there are versions. He apparently had just the task - to create a "traffic jam" on the bridge, knocking out the head car of the Nazis. The lieutenant at the bridge and adjusted the fire, and then, disappeared. It is reliably known that the lieutenant was wounded and then he left towards the withdrawing positions. There is an assumption that Nikolai had to move away, having completed the task. But ... he had 60 rounds. And he stayed!

Two tanks tried to move the lead tank off the bridge, but they were also hit. The armored vehicle tried to cross the river not across the bridge. But she got stuck in a swampy shore, where another shell found her. Nikolai shot and shot, knocking out tank after tank ...

Guderian's tanks rested on Nikolai Sirotinin, like the Chinese wall, like the Brest fortress. Already 11 tanks and 6 armored personnel carriers were on fire! For almost two hours of this strange battle, the Germans could not understand where the gun was firing from. And when we reached the position of Nikolai, he had only three shells left. The Germans offered him to surrender. Nikolai responded by firing at them with a carbine.

This last battle was short-lived ...

11 tanks and 7 armored vehicles, 57 soldiers and officers were lost by the Nazis after the battle, where they were blocked by the Russian soldier Nikolai Sirotinin.

The inscription on the monument: "Here at dawn on July 17, 1941 entered into combat with a column of fascist tanks and in a two-hour battle repulsed all enemy attacks, senior artillery sergeant Nikolai Vladimirovich Sirotinin, who gave his life for the freedom and independence of our Motherland."

"After all, he is a Russian soldier, is such admiration necessary?" These words were written down in his diary by Chief Lieutenant of the 4th Panzer Division Henfeld: “July 17, 1941. Sokolnichi, near Krichev. An unknown Russian soldier was buried in the evening. He alone stood at the cannon, shot a convoy of our tanks and infantry for a long time, and died. Everyone was amazed at his courage ... Oberst (Colonel) before the grave said that if all the soldiers of the Fuehrer fought like this Russian soldier, they would have conquered the whole world! Three times they fired volleys from rifles. After all, he is a Russian soldier, is such admiration necessary? "

Ordinary people were ready to defend and die for the USSR. And who is Gorbachev, who destroyed the USSR. A traitor who betrayed everything and everyone. A stupid dilettante who imagines himself a world-class politician. The main drawback of the USSR was that the power was too concentrated in the hands of one person, who was trusted without question. But when people realized where he was leading the country, it was too late.

Max21c , 2 hours ago

It's a mix between Nazi Germany and its criminality and thievery and persecution machinery, and Bolshevist Russia and its criminality and thievery and persecution machinery and many third world banana republics and their criminality and thievery and political persecution machinery.

Face it Washingtonians are evil.

ZeroTruth , 1 hour ago

Americuck in and of its entirety is just a criminal organization. I know a restaraunteur that started his business in the Bay Area selling drugs using a fleet of vehicles that had hidden compartments everywhere. Each vehicle was capable of holding up to half a key of yay and powdered molly already grammed up. Drivers were issued burner phones and given orders via dispatcher.

Last I checked, he had 7 restaurants that did amazing business and those vehicles were still on the road providing the other service. That's just one of the many I know of and it's small time compared to what the US government is doing.

ZeroTruth , 1 hour ago

Americuck in and of its entirety is just a criminal organization. I know a restaraunteur that started his business in the Bay Area selling drugs using a fleet of vehicles that had hidden compartments everywhere. Each vehicle was capable of holding up to half a key of yay and powdered molly already grammed up. Drivers were issued burner phones and given orders via dispatcher.

Last I checked, he had 7 restaurants that did amazing business and those vehicles were still on the road providing the other service. That's just one of the many I know of and it's small time compared to what the US government is doing.

DeeDeeTwo , 2 hours ago

The elites, Big Tech, Media and Deep State threw the kitchen sink at this election and did not move the needle. Regardless of who is next President, nothing changes. This is a tribute to the stability of the American system. In fact, the pendulum is swinging against the subversives who are becoming increasingly reckless and discredited.

TBT or not TBT , 2 hours ago

What did Huxley call the future country depicted in Brave New World?

[Nov 05, 2020] Understanding the Tri-fold Nature of the Deep State -- Strategic Culture

Nov 05, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Not that long ago the United States came close to total dissolution.

The financial system was bankrupt, speculation had run amok, and all infrastructure had fallen into disarray over the course of 30 years of unbroken free trade. To make matters worse, the nation was on the verge of a civil war and international financiers in London and Wall Street gloated over the immanent destruction of the first nation on earth to be established not upon hereditary institutions, but rather on the consent of the governed and mandated to serve the general welfare.

Although one might think that I am referring now to today's America, I am in fact referring to the United States of 1860.

The Trifold Deep State

In my past two articles in this series, I discussed how a new system of political economy was established by Benjamin Franklin and his disciples in the wake of the war of independence driven by protectionism, national banking and internal improvements.

I also demonstrated that the rise of the thing known as today's "deep state" can also be understood as a three-headed beast which arose in its earliest incarnation under the leadership of arch traitor Aaron Burr who established Wall Street, killed Alexander Hamilton and devoted his life to the cause of dissolving the union. After having been caught in the act of sabotage, Burr escaped arrest in 1807 by running off to England where he live in Jeremy Bentham's mansion for 5 years, only to return to oversee a new plot to break up the union that eventually boiled over in 1860.

The three prongs of the operation that Burr led on behalf of British intelligence and which remains active to this very day, can loosely be described as follows:

• The Anglo-Canadian establishment that arose in the wake of the "United Empire Loyalists" who left the rebelling colonies in 1776 to found English speaking Canada and who were soon labelled as the "Family Compact" by republican revolutionary William Lyon Mackenzie and which ultimately managed the eventual creation of the Rhodes Trust under George Parkin and his heirs.
• The Eastern Establishment families sometimes known as the Essex Junto who took control of Hamilton's Federalist Party. These were Empire Loyalists who remained within the USA under the illusion of loyalty to the constitution, but always adherent to a British Imperial world order and devoted to eventually undermining it from within. These were the circles that brought the USA into Britain's Opium trade against China as junior partners in crime and who promoted the dissolution of the union as early as 1800 under the leadership of Aaron Burr.
• The "Virginia Junto", slave owning aristocracy which also worked with Aaron Burr in his 1807 secessionist plot and whose alliance with the British Empire was instrumental in its rise to power from 1828-1860. This was the structure that soon returned to power, after the civil war, under the guiding hand of such Mazzini-connected "Young Americans" as KKK founder Albert Pike and the Southern establishment that later executed nationalist presidents in 1880, 1901 and in 1963.

Some Uncomfortable Questions

The story has been told of Lincoln's murder in tens of thousands of books and yet more often than not the narrative of a "single lone gunman" is imposed onto the story by researchers who are either too lazy or too corrupt to look for the evidence of a larger plot.

How many of those popular narratives infused into the western zeitgeist over the decades even acknowledge the simple fact that John Wilkes Boothe was carrying a $500 bank draft signed by Ontario Bank of Montreal President Henry Starnes (later to become Montreal Mayor) when he was shot dead at Garrett Farm on April 26, 1865?

How many people have been exposed to the vast Southern Confederacy secret service operations active throughout the civil war in Montreal, Toronto and Halifax which was under the firm control of Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin and his handlers in British intelligence?

How many people know that Boothe spent at least 5 weeks in the fall of 1864 in Montreal associating closely with the highest echelons of British and Southern intelligence including Starnes, and confederate spy leaders Jacob Thompson and George Sanders?

Demonstrating his total ignorance of the process that controlled him, Booth wrote to a friend on October 28, 1864: "I have been in Montreal for the last 3 or 4 weeks and no one (not even myself) knew when I would return".

On The Trail of the Assassins

After Lincoln was murdered, a manhunt to track down the intelligence networks behind the assassination was underway that eventually led to the hanging of four low level co-conspirators who history has shown were just as much patsies as John Wilkes Boothe.

Days later, President Johnson issued a proclamation saying : "It appears from evidence in the Bureau of Military Justice that the murder of Abraham Lincoln [was] incited, concerted, and procured by and between Jefferson Davis, late of Richmond, Va., and Jacob Thompson, Clement C. Clay, [Nathaniel] Beverly Tucker, George N. Sanders, William C. Cleary, and other rebels and traitors against the government of the United States harbored in Canada."

Two days before Booth was shot, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton wrote : "This Department has information that the President's murder was organized in Canada and approved at Richmond."

Knowledge of Canada's confederate operations was well known to the federal authorities in those days even though the majority among leading historians today are totally ignorant of this fact.

George Sanders remains one of the most interesting figures among Booth's handlers in Canada. As a former Ambassador to England under the presidency of Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), Sanders was a close friend of international anarchist Giuseppe Mazzini – the founder of the Young Europe movement. Sanders who wrote "Mazzini and Young Europe" in 1852, had the honor of being a leading member of the southern branch of the Young America Movement (while Ralph Waldo Emerson was a self-proclaimed leader of the northern branch of Young America ). Jacob Thompson, who was named in the Johnson dispatch above, was a former Secretary of the Interior under President Pierce, handler of Booth and acted as the top controller of the Confederacy secret service in Montreal.

As the book Montreal City of Secrets (2017), author Barry Sheehy proves that not only was Canada the core of Confederate Secret Services, but also coordinated a multi pronged war from the emerging "northern confederacy" onto Lincoln's defense of the union alongside Wall Street bankers while the president was fighting militarily to stop the southern secession. Sheehy writes: "By 1863, the Confederate Secret Service was well entrenched in Canada. Funding came from Richmond via couriers and was supplemented by profits from blockade running."

The Many Shapes of War from the North

Although not having devolved to direct military engagement, the Anglo-Canadian war on the Union involved several components:

Financial warfare: The major Canadian banks dominant in the 19 ^th century were used not only by the confederacy to pay British operations in the construction of war ships, but also to receive much needed infusions of cash from British Financiers throughout the war. A financial war on Lincoln's greenback was waged under the control of Montreal based confederate bankers John Porterfield and George Payne and also JP Morgan to "short" the greenback.

By 1864, the subversive traitor Salmon Chase had managed to tie the greenback to a (London controlled) gold standard thus making its value hinge upon gold speculation. During a vital moment of the war, these financiers coordinated a mass "sell off" of gold to London driving up the price of gold and collapsing the value of the U.S. dollar crippling Lincoln's ability to fund the war effort.

Direct Military intervention Thwarted: As early as 1861, the Trent Crisis nearly induced a hot war with Britain when a union ship intervened onto a British ship in international waters and arrested two high level confederate agents en route to London. Knowing that a two-fold war at this early stage was unwinnable, Lincoln pushed back against hot heads within his own cabinet who argued for a second front saying "one war at a time". Despite this near miss, London wasted no time deploying over 10 000 soldiers to Canada for the duration of the war ready to strike down upon the Union at a moment's notice and kept at bay in large measure due to the bold intervention of the Russian fleet to both Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the USA . This was a clear message to both England and to Napoleon III's France (who were stationed across the Mexican border) to stay out of America's war.

Despite Russia's intervention, Britain continued to build warships for the Confederacy which devastated the Union navy during the war and which England had to pay $15.5 million to the USA in 1872 under the Alabama Claims.

Terrorism: It is less well known today than it was during the 19 ^th century that confederate terror operations onto the north occurred throughout the civil war with raids on Union POW camps, efforts to burn popular New York hotels, blowing up ships on the Mississippi, and the infamous St Albans raid of October 1964 on Vermont and attacks on Buffalo, Chicago, Sandusky, Ohio, Detroit, and Pennsylvania. While the St Albans raiders were momentarily arrested in Montreal, they were soon released under the logic that they represented a "sovereign state" at conflict with another "sovereign state" with no connection with Canada (perhaps a lesson can be learned here for Meng Wanzhou's lawyers?).

Assassination: I already mentioned that a $550 note was found on Boothe's body with the signature of Ontario Bank president Henry Starnes which the failed actor would have received during his October 1864 stay in Montreal. What I did not mention is that Booth stayed at the St Lawrence Hall Hotel which served as primary headquarters for the Confederacy from 1863-65. Describing the collusion of Northern Copperheads, anti-Lincoln republicans, and Wall Street agents, Sheehy writes: "All of these powerful northerners were at St. Lawrence Hall rubbing elbows with the Confederates who used the hotel as an unofficial Headquarters. This was the universe in which John Wilkes Booth circulated in Canada."

In a 2014 expose , historian Anton Chaitkin, points out that the money used by Boothe came directly from a $31,507.97 transfer from London arranged by the head of European confederate secret service chief James D. Bulloch. It is no coincidence that Bulloch happens to also be the beloved uncle and mentor of the same Teddy Roosevelt who became the president over the dead body of Lincoln-follower William McKinley (assassinated in 1901).

In his expose, Chaitkin wrote:

"James D. Bulloch was the maternal uncle, model and strategy-teacher to future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. He emerged from the shadows of the Civil War when his nephew Teddy helped him to organize his papers and to publish a sanitized version of events in his 1883 memoir, The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe. Under the protection of imperial oligarchs such as Lord Salisbury and other Cecil family members, working in tandem with Britain's military occupation of its then-colony Canada, Bulloch arranged English construction and crewing for Confederate warships that notoriously preyed upon American commerce."

The Truth is Buried Under the Sands of History

While four low level members of Booth's cell were hanged on July 7, 1865 after a four month show trial (1), the actual orchestrators of Lincoln's assassination were never brought to justice with nearly every leading member of the confederate leadership having escaped to England in the wake of Lincoln's murder. Even John Surrat (who was among the eight who faced trial) avoided hanging when his case was dropped, and his $25 000 bail was mysteriously paid by an anonymous benefactor unknown to this day. After this, Surrat escaped to London where the U.S. Consuls demands for his arrest were ignored by British authorities.

Confederate spymaster Judah Benjamin escaped arrest and lived out his days as a Barrister in England, and Confederate President Jefferson Davies speaking to adoring fans in Quebec in June 1867 encouraged the people to reject the spread of republicanism and instead embrace the new British Confederation scheme that would soon be imposed weeks later . Davies spoke to the Canadian band performing Dixie at the Royal Theater: "I hope that you will hold fast to their British principles and that you may ever strive to cultivate close and affectionate connections with the mother country".

With the loss of Lincoln, and the 1868 death of Thaddeus Stevens, Confederate General Albert Pike established restoration of the southern oligarchy and sabotage of Lincoln's restoration with the rise of the KKK, and renewal of Southern Rite Freemasonry. Over the ensuing years, an all out assault was launched on Lincoln's Greenbacks culminating in the Specie Resumption Act of 1875 tying the U.S. financial system to British "hard money" monetarism and paving the way for the later financial coup known as the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (2).

While the Southern Confederacy plot ultimately failed, Britain's "other confederacy operation launched in 1864 was successfully consolidated with the British North America Act of July 1, 1867. The hoped-for extension of trans continental rail lines through British Columbia and into Alaska and Russia were sabotaged as told in the Real Story Behind the Alaska Purchase of 1867.

Instead of witnessing a new world system of sovereign nation states under a multipolar order of collaboration driven by international infrastructure projects as Lincoln's followers like William Seward, Ulysses Grant, William Gilpin and President McKinley envisioned , a new age of war and empire re-asserted itself throughout the 20 ^th century.

It was this same trifold Deep State that contended with Franklin Roosevelt and his patriotic Vice President Henry Wallace for power during the course of WWII, and it was this same beast that ran the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. As New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison demonstrated in his book On the Trail of the Assassins (1991 ), Kennedy's murder was arranged by a complex assassination network that brought into play Southern secret intelligence assets in Louisiana, and Texas, Wall Street financiers, and a strange assassination bureau based in Montreal named Permindex under the leadership of Maj. Gen. Louis Mortimer Bloomfield. This was the same intelligence operation that grew out of MI6's Camp X in Ottawa during WWII and changed its name but not its functions during the Cold War. This is the same British Imperial complex that has been attempting to undo the watershed moment of 1776 for over 240 years.

It is this same tumor in the heart of the USA that has invested everything in a gamble to put their senile tool Joe Biden into the seat of the Presidency and oust the first genuinely nationalist American president the world has seen in nearly 60 years.

The author can be reached at [email protected]

[Nov 02, 2020] The deep state is not a single minded hierarchical organization in the sense of being ruled over by one group, nor does it control both parties resulting in fights between them being fake. The deep state is comprised of lots of different influences.

Nov 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Kali , Nov 1 2020 21:12 utc | 36

#5 Jackrabbit

Your take that the battle between Trump and the Dems is fake (kayfabe) looks like last year when you said the "deep state" would choose Tulsi as VP for Biden because the Dem elite attack on Tulsi is also kayfabe fakeness. Lol. No, they dislike Tulsi. The MSM and a lot of the Alt Media were instructed to attack Tulsi, how is it not obvious that they dislike her?

The deep state is not a single minded hierarchical organization in the sense of being ruled over by one group, nor does it control both parties resulting in fights between them being fake. The deep state is comprised of lots of different influences. Some politicians and people in the deep state are devoted to making money above all else, others to religious convictions, others to ego and power, others to political ideology, and others to doing the right thing, etc. The GOP is closer to the Catholic Church and Evangelical Christian power structure and on the foreign policy they are close to the Saudis and the Likud party in Israel who do not like the Dems. While the Dems are closer to the Anglosphere and the European oligarchy who do not like the GOP. The culture war is real and epitomizes a real fight between rival elites.

That doesn't mean that what we see in the world in general is not controlled by the same power structure, it is all controlled on one level , but the battle between American elites is not fake.

Jackrabbit , Nov 1 2020 22:36 utc | 47

Kali @Nov1 21:12 #36

Your take that the battle between Trump and the Dems is fake (kayfabe) looks like last year when you said the "deep state" would choose Tulsi as VP for Biden because the Dem elite attack on Tulsi is also kayfabe fakeness... how is it not obvious that they dislike her?

My October 2019 prediction of a Biden-Gabbard ticket was half wrong.

It appears to me that Tulsi now picks up the Sanders mantle ... as the next sheepdog? We shall see.

=
The deep state is not a single minded hierarchical organization ...

Well, there are competing interests among what is referred to generically as "the elites". But my definition of the "the Deep State" is the powerful people at the top if the food chain where military/intelligence interests dominate with the help of finance/tech/media/political assets. At that level, the group-think is stark as one isn't accepted without passing ideological litmus tests.

=
While the Dems are closer to the Anglosphere and the European oligarchy who do not like the GOP. The culture war is real and epitomizes a real fight between rival elites.... the battle between American elites is not fake.

It is real at the lower levels. But IMO strings are pulled by the upper levels to keep people divided.

!!

[Nov 01, 2020] Which two wings of the USA oligarchy Biden and Trump represents

Nov 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Down South , Nov 1 2020 7:04 utc | 122

I keep on reading this narrative that there is no difference between Trump and Biden and no matter who you vote for the blob wins. That the effort to unseat Trump and overturn the 2016 election results, to derail his 2020 campaign is all some elaborate game of 52D chess that we are too stupid to understand.

Here is my problem with that narrative.

The political scene in the US is split between two factions 1) the US globalists (Democrats/Establishment Republicans/Deep State/Big Tech/MSM/WallStreet) and on the other side 2) US Nationalists (Trump/the deplorables).

When Trump was campaigning in 2016 he made it clear that he intended to bring back the supply chain to the US. All those manufacturing jobs that were outsourced to third world countries to maximise the profits of the large corporations we're going to be brought back and the way he intended on doing that was to exit free trade agreements that harmed US national interest and introduce protectionist policies (tariffs/ low corporate taxes etc) which would entice/induce/force manufacturers to open factories in the US again.

This horrified the globalists as they have for the past decades been implementing a controlled disintegration of the US

The great "liberalization" of world commerce began with a series of waves through the 1970s, and moved into high gear with the interest rate hikes of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in 1980-82, the effects of which both annihilated much of the small and medium sized entrepreneurs, opened the speculative gates into the "Savings and Loan" debacle and also helped cartelize mineral, food, and financial institutions into ever greater behemoths. Volcker himself described this process as the "controlled disintegration of the US economy" upon becoming Fed Chairman in 1978. The raising of interest rates to 20-21% not only shut down the life blood of much of the US economic base, but also threw the third world into greater debt slavery, as nations now had to pay usurious interest on US loans.

https://thesaker.is/what-the-great-reset-architects-dont-want-you-to-understand-about-economics/

What is the eventual end goal of the globalists ?

false solutions to a crisis of global proportions are being promoted in the form of a "Great Global Reset" which aims at creating a new economic order under the fog of COVID. This emerging "new order", as it is being promoted by Mark Carney, George Soros, Bill Gates and other minions of the City of London is shaped by a devout commitment to depopulation, world government and master-slave systems of social control.

By attempting to tie the new system of "value" to economic practices which are designed to crush humanity's ability to sustain itself in the form of "reducing carbon footprints", "sustainable green energy", cap and trade, carbon taxes and green infrastructure bonds, humanity is being set up to accept a system of governance onto our children and grandchildren which will subject them to a dystopic world of fascism the likes of which even Hitler could not have dreamed.

https://thesaker.is/one-last-chance-to-revive-americas-forgotten-constitutional-traditions-and-avoid-wwiii/

Exiting NAFTA, implementing protectionist measures, lowering corporate taxes, starting a trade war with China (that is where the majority of the outsourced jobs went) he is trying to undo the controlled disintegration of the US. That is why the globalists hate him so much.

[Oct 20, 2020] Big Tech goes all in- Silicon Valley launches $100 million anti-Trump ad blitz

Another face of iron law of oligarchy: money as the way to misinform and lure the voters ;-)

Oct 20, 2020 | www.rt.com

The $100-plus million blitz includes at least $22 million from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, according to an exclusive report from Recode, a subdivision of Vox. Another Democratic megadonor involved is former Google and Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt, currently advising the Pentagon on technology innovation. Home USA News Big Tech goes all in: Silicon Valley launches $100 million anti-Trump ad blitz – report 20 Oct, 2020 20:08 Get short URL FILE PHOTO © AFP / Getty Images ; SCOTT OLSON 121 3 Follow RT on A super PAC bankrolled by Silicon Valley moguls is preparing a massive TV advertising campaign to help boost Democratic candidate Joe Biden against President Donald Trump in the final days before the 2020 US election.

The $100-plus million blitz includes at least $22 million from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, according to an exclusive report from Recode, a subdivision of Vox. Another Democratic megadonor involved is former Google and Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt, currently advising the Pentagon on technology innovation.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1318588732585422853&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fusa%2F504061-silicon-valley-biden-donations%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Called Future Forward, the super PAC has filed federal paperwork on Tuesday disclosing that it has raised $66 million between September 1 and October 15. It has contracted for $106 million of TV ads between September 29 and November 3, according to media tracking firm Advertising Analytics. This makes it the largest Biden booster outside the Democrats' campaign itself, already a fundraising juggernaut.

Recode also reported that Future Forward "has been recommended in private communications by the team of Reid Hoffman." He is the LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic megadonor previously caught funding a disinformation campaign during the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, in which a company called New Knowledge created a Twitter army of 'Russian bots' pretending to back the Republican candidate. It was unclear from the Recode story whether Hoffman had contributed any funding to Moskovitz's super PAC.

[Oct 20, 2020] Treason In America- An Overview Of The FBI, CIA, And Matters Of -National Security- -

Oct 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Treason In America: An Overview Of The FBI, CIA, And Matters Of "National Security"

---

by Tyler Durden Mon, 10/19/2020 - 23:40 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by Cynthia Chung via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

"Treason doth never prosper; what is the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."

– Sir John Harrington.

As Shakespeare would state in his play Hamlet , " Something is rotten in the state of Denmark ," like a fish that rots from head to tail, so do corrupt government systems rot from top to bottom.

This is a reference to the ruling system of Denmark and not just the foul murder that King Claudius has committed against his brother, Hamlet's father. This is showcased in the play by reference to the economy of Denmark being in a state of shambles and that the Danish people are ready to revolt since they are on the verge of starving. King Claudius has only been king for a couple of months, and thus this state of affairs, though he inflames, did not originate with him.

Thus, during our time of great upheaval we should ask ourselves; what constitutes the persisting "ruling system," of the United States, and where do the injustices in its state of affairs truly originate from?

The tragedy of Hamlet does not just lie in the action (or lack of action) of one man, but rather, it is contained in the choices and actions of all its main characters. Each character fails to see the longer term consequences of their own actions, which leads not only to their ruin but towards the ultimate collapse of Denmark. The characters are so caught up in their antagonism against one another that they fail to foresee that their very own destruction is intertwined with the other.

This is a reflection of a failing system.

A system that, though it believes itself to be fighting tooth and nail for its very survival, is only digging a deeper grave. A system that is incapable of generating any real solutions to the problems it faces.

The only way out of this is to address that very fact. The most important issue that will decide the fate of the country is what sort of changes are going to occur in the political and intelligence apparatus, such that a continuation of this tyrannical treason is finally stopped in its tracks and unable to sow further discord and chaos.

When the Matter of "Truth" Becomes a Threat to "National Security"

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When the matter of truth is depicted as a possible threat to those that govern a country, you no longer have a democratic state. True, not everything can be disclosed to the public in real time, but we are sitting on a mountain of classified intelligence material that goes back more than 60 years.

How much time needs to elapse before the American people have the right to know the truth behind what their government agencies have been doing within their own country and abroad in the name of the "free" world?

From this recognition, the whole matter of declassifying material around the Russigate scandal in real time , and not highly redacted 50 years from now, is essential to addressing this festering putrefaction that has been bubbling over since the heinous assassination of President Kennedy on Nov. 22nd, 1963 and to which we are still waiting for full disclosure of classified papers 57 years later.

If the American people really want to finally see who is standing behind that curtain in Oz, now is the time .

These intelligence bureaus need to be reviewed for what kind of method and standard they are upholding in collecting their "intelligence," that has supposedly justified the Mueller investigation and the never-ending Flynn investigation which have provided zero conclusive evidence to back up their allegations and which have massively infringed on the elected government's ability to make the changes that they had committed to the American people.

Just like the Iraq and Libya war that was based off of cooked British intelligence (refer here and here ), Russiagate appears to have also had its impetus from our friends over at MI6 as well. It is no surprise that Sir Richard Dearlove, who was then MI6 chief (1999-2004) and who oversaw and stood by the fraudulent intelligence on Iraq stating they bought uranium from Niger to build a nuclear weapon, is the very same Sir Richard Dearlove who promoted the Christopher Steele dossier as something "credible" to American intelligence.

In other words, the same man who is largely responsible for encouraging the illegal invasion of Iraq, which set off the never-ending wars on "terror," that was justified with cooked British intelligence is also responsible for encouraging the Russian spook witch-hunt that has been occurring within the U.S. for the last four years over more cooked British intelligence, and the FBI and CIA are knowingly complicit in this.

Neither the American people, nor the world as a whole, can afford to suffer any more of the so-called "mistaken" intelligence bumblings. It is time that these intelligence bureaus are held accountable for at best criminal negligence, at worst, treason against their own country.

When Great Figures of Hope Are Targeted as Threats to "National Security"

The Family Jewels report , which was an investigation conducted by the CIA to investigate itself , was spurred by the Watergate Scandal and the CIA's unconstitutional role in the whole affair. This investigation by the CIA reviewed its own conduct from the 1950s to mid-1970s.

The Family Jewels report was only partially declassified in June 25, 2007 (30 years later). Along with the release of the redacted report included a six-page summary with the following introduction:

" The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots , and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s. " [emphasis added]

Despite this acknowledged violation of its charter for 25 years, which is pretty much since its inception, the details of this information were kept classified for 30 years from not just the public but major governmental bodies and it was left to the agency itself to judge how best to "reform" its ways.

On Dec. 22, 1974, The New York Times published an article by Seymour Hersh exposing illegal operations conducted by the CIA, dubbed the "family jewels". This included, covert action programs involving assassination attempts on foreign leaders and covert attempts to subvert foreign governments, which were reported for the first time . In addition, the article discussed efforts by intelligence agencies to collect information on the political activities of U.S. citizens.

Largely as a reaction to Hersh's findings, the creation of the Church Committee was approved on January 27, 1975, by a vote of 82 to 4 in the Senate.

The Church Committee's final report was published in April 1976, including seven volumes of Church Committee hearings in the Senate.

The Church Committee also published an interim report titled "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders", which investigated alleged attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of Zaire, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and Fidel Castro of Cuba. President Ford attempted to withhold the report from the public, but failed and reluctantly issued Executive Order 11905 after pressure from the public and the Church Committee.

Executive Order 11905 is a United States Presidential Executive Order signed on February 18, 1976, by a very reluctant President Ford in an attempt to reform the United States Intelligence Community, improve oversight on foreign intelligence activities, and ban political assassination.

The attempt is now regarded as a failure and was largely undone by President Reagan who issued Executive Order 12333 , which extended the powers and responsibilities of U.S. intelligence agencies and directed leaders of the U.S. federal agencies to co-operate fully with the CIA, which was the original arrangement that CIA have full authority over clandestine operations (for more information on this refer to my papers here and here ).

In addition, the Church Committee produced seven case studies on covert operations, but only the one on Chile was released, titled " Covert Action in Chile: 1963–1973 ". The rest were kept secret at the CIA's request.

Among the most shocking revelation of the Church Committee was the discovery of Operation SHAMROCK , in which the major telecommunications companies shared their traffic with the NSA from 1945 to the early 1970s. The information gathered in this operation fed directly into the NSA Watch List. It was found out during the committee investigations that Senator Frank Church, who was overseeing the committee, was among the prominent names under surveillance on this NSA Watch List.

In 1975, the Church Committee decided to unilaterally declassify the particulars of this operation, against the objections of President Ford's administration (refer here and here for more information).

The Church Committee's reports constitute the most extensive review of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Much of the contents were classified, but over 50,000 pages were declassified under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.

President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22nd, 1963. Two days before his assassination a hate-Kennedy handbill (see picture) was circulated in Dallas accusing the president of treasonous activities including being a communist sympathizer.

On March 1st, 1967 New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested and charged Clay Shaw with conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy, with the help of David Ferrie and others. After a little over a one month long trial, Shaw was found not guilty on March 1st, 1969.

David Ferrie, a controller of Lee Harvey Oswald, was going to be a key witness and would have provided the "smoking gun" evidence linking himself to Clay Shaw, was likely murdered on Feb. 22nd, 1967, less than a week after news of Garrison's investigation broke in the media.

According to Garrison's team findings, there was reason to believe that the CIA was involved in the orchestrations of President Kennedy's assassination but access to classified material (which was nearly everything concerning the case) was necessary to continue such an investigation.

Though Garrison's team lacked direct evidence, they were able to collect an immense amount of circumstantial evidence, which should have given the justification for access to classified material for further investigation. Instead the case was thrown out of court prematurely and is now treated as if it were a circus. [Refer to Garrison's book for further details and Oliver Stone's excellently researched movie JFK ]

To date, it is the only trial to be brought forward concerning the assassination of President Kennedy.

The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was created in 1994 by the Congress enacted President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated that all assassination-related material be housed in a single collection within the National Archives and Records Administration. In July 1998, a staff report released by the ARRB emphasized shortcomings in the original autopsy.

The ARRB wrote , "One of the many tragedies of the assassination of President Kennedy has been the incompleteness of the autopsy record and the suspicion caused by the shroud of secrecy that has surrounded the records that do exist." [emphasis added]

The staff report for the Assassinations Records Review Board contended that brain photographs in the Kennedy records are not of Kennedy's brain and show much less damage than Kennedy sustained.

The Washington Post reported :

" Asked about the lunchroom episode [where he was overheard stating his notes of the autopsy went missing] in a May 1996 deposition, Finck said he did not remember it. He was also vague about how many notes he took during the autopsy but confirmed that "after the autopsy I also wrote notes" and that he turned over whatever notes he had to the chief autopsy physician, James J. Humes.

It has long been known that Humes destroyed some original autopsy papers in a fireplace at his home on Nov. 24, 1963. He told the Warren Commission that what he burned was an original draft of his autopsy report. Under persistent questioning at a February 1996 deposition by the Review Board, Humes said he destroyed the draft and his "original notes."

Shown official autopsy photographs of Kennedy from the National Archives, [Saundra K.] Spencer [who worked in "the White House lab"] said they were not the ones she helped process and were printed on different paper. She said "there was no blood or opening cavities" and the wounds were much smaller in the pictures [than what she had] worked on

John T. Stringer, who said he was the only one to take photos during the autopsy itself, said some of those were missing as well. He said that pictures he took of Kennedy's brain at a "supplementary autopsy" were different from the official set that was shown to him. " [emphasis added]

This not only shows that evidence tampering did indeed occur, as even the Warren Commission acknowledges, but this puts into question the reliability of the entire assassination record of John F. Kennedy and to what degree evidence tampering and forgery have occurred in these records.

We would also do well to remember the numerous crimes that the FBI and CIA have been guilty of committing upon the American people such as during the period of McCarthyism. That the FBI's COINTELPRO has been implicated in covert operations against members of the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s. That FBI director J. Edgar Hoover made no secret of his hostility towards Dr. King and his ludicrous belief that King was influenced by communists, despite having no evidence to that effect.

King was assassinated on April 4th, 1968 and the civil rights movement took a major blow.

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In November 1975, as the Church Committee was completing its investigation, the Department of Justice formed a Task Force to examine the FBI's program of harassment directed at Dr. King, including the FBI's security investigations of him, his assassination and the FBI conducted criminal investigation that followed. One aspect of the Task force study was to determine "whether any action taken in relation to Dr. King by the FBI before the assassination had, or might have had, an effect, direct or indirect, on that event."

In its report , the Task Force criticized the FBI not for the opening, but for the protracted continuation of, its security investigation of Dr. King:

" We think the security investigation which included both physical and technical surveillance, should have been terminated in 1963. That it was intensified and augmented by a COINTELPRO type campaign against Dr. King was unwarranted; the COINTELPRO type campaign, moreover, was ultra vires and very probably felonious. "

In 1999, King Family v. Jowers civil suit in Memphis, Tennessee occurred, the full transcript of the trial can be found here . The jury found that Lloyd Jowers and unnamed others, including those in high ranking positions within government agencies, participated in a conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King.

During the four week trial, it was pointed out that the rifle allegedly used to assassinate King did not have a scope that was sighted, which meant you could not have hit the broad side of a barn with that rifle, thus it could not have been the murder weapon .

This was only remarked on over 30 years after King was murdered and showed the level of incompetence, or more likely, evidence tampering that was committed from previous investigations conducted by the FBI.

The case of JFK and MLK are among the highest profile assassination cases in American history, and it has been shown in both cases that evidence tampering has indeed occurred, despite being in the center of the public eye. What are we then to expect as the standard of investigation for all the other cases of malfeasance? What expectation can we have that justice is ever upheld?

With a history of such blatant misconduct, it is clear that the present demand to declassify the Russiagate papers now, and not 50 years later, needs to occur if we are to address the level of criminality that is going on behind the scenes and which will determine the fate of the country.

The American People Deserve to Know

Today we see the continuation of the over seven decades' long ruse, the targeting of individuals as Russian agents without any basis, in order to remove them from the political arena. The present effort to declassify the Russiagate papers and exonerate Michael Flynn, so that he may freely speak of the intelligence he knows, is not a threat to national security, it is a threat to those who have committed treason against their country .

On Oct. 6th, 2020, President Trump ordered the declassification of the Russia Probe documents along with the classified documents on the findings concerning the Hillary Clinton emails. The release of these documents threatens to expose the entrapment of the Trump campaign by the Clinton campaign with help of the U.S. intelligence agencies.

The Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe released some of these documents recently, including former CIA Director John Brennan's handwritten notes for a meeting with former President Obama, the notes revealing that Hillary Clinton approved a plan to "vilify Donald Trump by stirring up scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service."

Trey Gowdy, who was Chair of the House Oversight Committee from June 13th, 2017 – Jan. 3rd, 2019, has stated in an interview on Oct. 7th, 2020 that he has never seen these documents. Devin Nunes, who was Chair of the House Intelligence Committee from Jan. 3rd, 2015 – Jan. 3rd, 2019, has also said in a recent interview that he has never seen these documents.

And yet, both the FBI and CIA were aware and had access to these documents and sat on them for four years, withholding their release from several government-led investigations that were looking into the Russiagate scandal and who were requesting relevant material that was in the possession of both intelligence bureaus. Do these intelligence bureaus sound like they are working for the "national security" of the American people?

The truth must finally be brought to light, or the country will rot from its head to tail.

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play_arrow FreemonSandlewould , 22 minutes ago

Problem here is when you suggest that killing a president is justified you eliminate any possibility of democracy / republic whatever you name it. You are installing being ruled at the wrong end of a barrel.

Miffed Microbiologist , 27 minutes ago

I have to agree with you. My mother was an investigative reporter who worked for Pierre Salinger. She told me some pretty interesting things that were going on in the White House during Camelot which the press shielded from the public. However to be fair, I honestly think this was nothing unusual. Truth and politics rarely go together.

Miffed

Duke6 , 13 minutes ago

LOL. Compared to the globalist animals running the country after his death , the above is poor at attempt at deflection.

https://youtu.be/FnkdfFAqsHA

MrBoompi , 27 minutes ago

If JFK flopped it was because he was taken out. He was also too promiscuous for his own good. He really pissed some people off, which is the reason behind the gruesome public assassination.

USGrant , 3 minutes ago

"Some people" was the MIC. His reluctance to fight a war in Vietnam and the firing of Allen Dulles in the spring of 1962 set the stage. Johnson OKed it and the first full day as president had a meeting with the military chiefs to ramp up the war. The red seal ones and fives issued directly by the Treasury with no debt backing may have gotten the old money in Europe involved as well.

[Oct 19, 2020] The Emails Are Russian- Will Be The Narrative, Regardless Of Facts Or Evidence by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!

Oct 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via CaitlinJohnstone.com,

Fight it all you want, but there's nothing you can do. "The emails are Russian" is going to be the official dominant narrative in mainstream political discourse, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Resistance is futile.

Like the Russian hacking narrative, the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, the Russian bounties in Afghanistan narrative, and any other evidence-free framing of events that simultaneously advances pre-planned cold war agendas, is politically convenient for the Democratic party and generates clicks and ratings, the narrative that the New York Post publication of Hunter Biden's emails is a Russian operation is going to be hammered and hammered and hammered until it becomes the mainstream consensus. This will happen regardless of facts and evidence, up to and including rock solid evidence that Hunter Biden's emails were not published as a result of a Russian operation.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1317449899860951040&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Femails-are-russian-will-be-narrative-regardless-facts-or-evidence&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

This is happening. It's following the same formula all the other fact-free Russia hysteria narratives have followed. The same media tour by pundits and political operatives saying with no evidence but very assertive voices that Russia is most certainly behind this occurrence and we should all be very upset about it.

"To me, this is just classic textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work," Russiagate founder and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is heard assuring CNN's audience .

"Joe Biden – and all of us – SHOULD be furious that media outlets are spreading what is very likely Russian propaganda," begins and eight-part thread by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who claims the emails are "Kremlin constructed anti-Biden propaganda."

"It's not really surprising at all, this was always the play, but still kind of head-spinning to watch all the players from 2016 run exactly the same hack-leak-smear op in 2020. Even with everyone knowing exactly what's happening this time," tweets MSNBC's Chris Hayes.

about:blank

about:blank

me title=

"How are you all circling the wagons instead of being embarrassed for peddling Russian ops 18 days before the election. It's not enough that you all haven't learned from your atrocious handling of 2016 -- you are doubling down," Democratic Party think tanker Neera Tanden tweeted in admonishment of journalists who dare to report on or ask questions about the emails.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1317307227963678721&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Femails-are-russian-will-be-narrative-regardless-facts-or-evidence&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Virtually the entirety of the Democratic Party-aligned political/media class has streamlined this narrative of Russian influence into the American consciousness with very little inertia, despite the fact that neither Joe nor Hunter Biden has disputed the authenticity of the emails and despite a complete absence of evidence for Russian involvement in their publication.

This is surely the first time, at least in recent memory, that we have ever seen such a broad consensus within the mass media that it is the civic duty of news reporters to try and influence the outcome of a presidential general election by withholding negative news coverage for one candidate. There was a lot of fascinated hatred for Trump in 2016, but people still reported on Hillary Clinton's various scandals and didn't attack one another for doing so. In 2020 that has changed, and mainstream news reporters have now largely coalesced along the doctrine that they must avoid any reporting which might be detrimental to the Biden campaign.

"Dem Party hacks (and many of their media allies) genuinely believe it's immoral to report on or even discuss stories that reflect poorly on Biden. In reality, it's the responsibility of journalists to ignore their vapid whining and ask about newsworthy stories, even about Biden," tweeted The Intercept 's Glenn Greenwald recently.

"You don't even have to think the Hunter Biden materials constitute some kind of earth-shattering story to be absolutely repulsed at the authoritarian propaganda offensive being waged to discredit them -- primarily by journalists who behave like compliant little trained robots ," tweeted journalist Michael Tracey.

Last month The Spectator 's Stephen L Miller described how the consensus formed among the mainstream press since Clinton's 2016 loss that it is their moral duty to be uncritical of Trump's opponent.

"For almost four years now, journalists have shamed their colleagues and themselves over what I will call the 'but her emails' dilemma," Miller writes. "Those who reported dutifully on the ill-timed federal investigation into Hillary Clinton's private server and spillage of classified information have been cast out and shunted away from the journalist cool kids' table. Focusing so much on what was, at the time, a considerable scandal, has been written off by many in the media as a blunder. They believe their friends and colleagues helped put Trump in the White House by focusing on a nothing-burger of a Clinton scandal when they should have been highlighting Trump's foibles. It's an error no journalist wants to repeat."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-2&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1316900508775280642&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Femails-are-russian-will-be-narrative-regardless-facts-or-evidence&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

So "the emails are Russian" narrative serves the interests of political convenience, partisan media ratings, and the national security state's pre-planned agenda to continue escalating against Russia as part of its slow motion third world war against nations which refuse to bow to US dictates, and you've got essentially no critical mainstream news coverage putting the brakes on any of it. This means this narrative is going to become mainstream orthodoxy and treated as an established fact, despite the fact that there is no actual, tangible evidence for it.

Joe Biden could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and the mainstream press would crucify any journalist who so much as tweeted about it. Very little journalism is going into vetting and challenging him, and a great deal of the energy that would normally be doing so is going into ensuring that he slides right into the White House.

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If the mainstream news really existed to tell you the truth about what's going on, everyone would know about every questionable decision that Joe Biden has ever made, Russiagate would never have happened, we'd all be acutely aware of the fact that powerful forces are pushing us into increasingly aggressive confrontations with two nuclear-armed nations, and Trump would be grilled about Yemen in every press conference.

But the mainstream news does not exist to tell you the truth about the world. The mainstream news exists to advance the interests of its wealthy owners and the status quo upon which they have built their kingdoms. That's why it's so very, very important that we find ways to break away from it and share information with each other that isn't tainted by corrupt and powerful interests.

* * *

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of my sweet merchandise , buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I'm trying to do with this platform, click here . Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I've written) in any way they like free of charge.

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[Oct 18, 2020] The main reason corporate Dems want so desperately to beat Trump in this election cycle

Notable quotes:

"... Corporate Democrats' anxiety and fear that they could lose control over the party became quite evident during latest party convention, as they tried hard to "bury" their own progressives while gave plenty of time to neoliberal Republicans and war criminals to speak. ..."

Oct 07, 2020 | failedevolution.blogspot.com

globinfo freexchange
As we explained previously, what we see now in the United States with Trump, is a counter-attack by the part of the American capital against the globalist faction. The faction that is primarily consisted by the liberal plutocracy. Therefore, as the capitalist class splits, the capitalists around Trump are now taking with them the most conservative part of the American society, as they need electoral power. They have the money and their own media network. Their first big victory was Trump in the US presidency and this explains why the liberal media attack him so hard and so frequently.

The COVID-19 pandemic added more chaos in the ongoing civil war between capitalists and (as always), the working class is paying the price for the additional mess.

The DNC establishment fought hard, one more time, to get rid of Bernie Sanders in order to impose its own - fully controllable and fully dedicated to the neoliberal status quo - Joe Biden/Kamala Harris duo. Obviously, this was an attempt by the corporate Democrats to challenge and beat Trump without harming neoliberal order through a Socialist like Sanders in the leadership of the Democratic Party. Still, the DNC establishment couldn't take full control of the whole situation as the most popular progressives, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, renewed their position in the party through big victories in the 2020 primaries. Furthermore, the progressive army came out stronger through significant additional victories like Cori Bush's.

Corporate Democrats' anxiety and fear that they could lose control over the party became quite evident during latest party convention, as they tried hard to "bury" their own progressives while gave plenty of time to neoliberal Republicans and war criminals to speak.

And, actually, this is the main reason that the corporate Democrats want so desperately to beat Trump in November's election.
With a potential Biden victory the corporate Dems will re-establish their position in the party against progressives, as they will be able to play the Trump-scare card for four more years.

During that time, they will get all the help they want from the liberal media to bury forever the most popular Socialist policies. Simply by claiming that the Trump nightmare could return in 2024. Therefore, they will demand "unity" from all party members under their own terms, in short, under full restoration of the neoliberal status quo. Under these circumstances, corporate Democrats will have plenty of time to assist the liberal plutocrats to take over directly the party in 2024.

On the contrary, with a potential Trump victory the Trump-scare card will be burned for good and corporate Democrats won't be able to use it as Trump won't be able to have another term in 2024.

In that case, corporate Democrats will receive additional pressure from the progressive wing and progressive voters, as these will demand radical changes inside the party towards popular policies. The liberal capitalist faction will face the serious threat to be left without political power, which by 2024, will be restricted to some moderate Republicans who are dedicated to the neoliberal doctrine. The dream of the liberal plutocrats to take over political power directly will die forever.

And this could be proved decisive for the outcome of the endo-capitalist war between the liberal plutocrats and the Trump-affiliated capitalists.

...

[Oct 15, 2020] At this point American politics is a dispute among two Jewish factions, Trump is a pawn of the Zionist faction and was targeted for destruction by the Cosmopolitan faction.

Oct 15, 2020 | www.unz.com

Hugo Silva , says: October 13, 2020 at 6:30 pm GMT

@Ghali

At this point American politics is a dispute among two Jewish factions, Trump is a pawn of the Zionist faction and was targeted for destruction by the Cosmopolitan faction. Whoever wins, we loose!

TRM , says: October 13, 2020 at 7:41 pm GMT

@Ghali ary. The Israeli/Zionist elites care about their constituents opinions about as much as the elites in any group. ZERO. There's a big club and we ain't in it.

The Israeli/Zionist elites wanted war with Iran or slapping them back economically to the middle ages. Hillary was going to leave the Iran deal in place and Trump was going to tear it up.

Trump paid for his re-election by murdering Solemani. Trump felt he couldn't start a war in his first term so offered that up to get their support. He will be re-elected in big part because he solidified his position with them as the anti-Iran candidate.

[Oct 15, 2020] Trump Vs Deep State- Will Trump Upend Neocolonial World Order- -

That's naive. Trump is part of Neocolonial world order. He just belong to a different faction then Hillary and friends.

Oct 15, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Submitted by Nauman Sadiq,

Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released an extraordinary statement on Tuesday, decrying a political scene he said "has moved away from spirited debate to a vile, vituperative, hate-filled morass, that is unbecoming of any free nation." "The world is watching America with abject horror," he added.

Romney tweeted his statement under the title "My thoughts on the current state of our politics." "I have stayed quiet," he said, "with the approach of the election." "But I'm troubled by our politics," the sole Republican to vote to impeach Trump added in his statement.

"The president calls the Democratic vice-presidential candidate 'a monster'. He repeatedly labels the Speaker of the House 'crazy.' He calls for the justice department to put the prior president in jail. He attacks the governor of Michigan on the very day a plot is discovered to kidnap her. Democrats launch blistering attacks of their own, though their presidential nominee refuses to stoop as low as others," Romney, a Utah senator who was the 2012 Republican nominee for president, complained in the statement.

Though superficially trying to appear "fair and balanced" in the didactic sermon patronizingly delivered by the only adult in the room full of political upstarts, Romney's perceptible bias in the polemical diatribe was hard not to be noticed.

It defies explanation if he didn't watch the presidential debate or consciously elided over the sordid episode where the Democratic presidential nominee contemptuously sneered at his political rival with derogatory epithets such as "a clown, a racist and Putin's puppy."

I'm not sure if Biden was high on meth during the debate, as Trump had repeatedly been insinuating, or he lacks basic etiquette to act like a dignified statesman, but only amphetamines could make a person take leave of his senses and insolently yell at the president of the US, "Will you shut up, man," while ironically complaining, "This is so unpresidential."

Though a longtime Republican senator, Mitt Romney's loyalty to the GOP was compromised due to a personal spat with Trump. In the Republican primaries of the 2016 US presidential elections, Romney severely castigated Trump, calling him "a phony and a fraud."

After Trump was elected president, he dangled the carrot of the secretary of state appointment to Romney, invited him to a dinner in a swanky New York restaurant, made him eat his words and fawn all over Trump like a servile toady. But later, he gave one of the most coveted appointments in the US bureaucratic hierarchy to oil executive Rex Tillerson.

Romney felt humiliated to the extent that in Trump's vulnerable moment, after impeachment proceedings were initiated against him in the Senate in February, Romney became the only US senator in the American political history who voted against his own Republican Party president.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

Though lacking intellect and often ridiculed for frequent spelling errors on his Twitter timeline, such as "unpresidented" and "covfefe," implying he gets his news feed from television talk shows and rarely reads book and articles, Donald Trump is street smart and his anti-globalization agenda and down-to-earth attitude appeal to the American working classes.

Nevertheless, it's quite easy for the neuroscientists on the payroll of the national security establishment to manipulate the minds of such impressionable politicians and lead them by the nose to toe the line of the deep state, particularly on foreign policy matters. No wonder national security shills disparagingly sneer at the president as the "toddler-in-chief."

In 2017, a couple of caricatures went viral on social media. In one of those caricatures, Donald Trump was depicted as a child sitting on a chair and Vladimir Putin was shown whispering something into Trump's ears from behind. In the other, Trump was portrayed sitting in Steve Bannon's lap and the latter was shown mumbling into Trump's ears, "Who is the big boy now?" And Trump was shown replying, "I am the big boy."

The meaning conveyed by those cunningly crafted caricatures was to illustrate that Trump lacks the intelligence to think for himself and that he was being manipulated and played around by Putin and Bannon. Those caricatures must have affronted the vanity of Donald Trump to an extent that after the publication of those caricatures, he became ill-disposed toward Putin and sacked Bannon from his job as the White House Chief Strategist in August 2017, only seven months into the first year of the Trump presidency.

Bannon was the principal ideologue of the American alt-right movement. Though the alt-right agenda of the Trump presidency has been scuttled by the deep state, Trump's views regarding global politics and economics are starkly different from the establishment Democrats and Republicans pursuing neocolonial world order masqueraded as globalization and free trade.

Besides the Trump supporters in the United States, the far-right populist leaders in Europe are also exploiting popular resentment against free trade and globalization. The Brexiteers in the United Kingdom, the Yellow Vest protesters in France and the far-right movements in Germany and across Europe are a manifestation of a paradigm shift in the global economic order in which nationalist and protectionist slogans have replaced the free trade and globalization mantra of the nineties.

Donald Trump withdrawing the United States from multilateral treaties, restructuring trade agreements and initiating a trade war against China are meant to redress, at least cosmetically, the legitimate grievances of the American working classes against the wealth disparity created by laissez-faire capitalism and market fundamentalism.

Michael Crowley reported for the New York Times last month that American allies and former US Officials fear Trump could seek NATO exit in a second term. According to the report, "This summer, Mr. Trump's former national security adviser John R. Bolton published a book that described the president as repeatedly saying he wanted to quit the NATO alliance. Last month, Mr. Bolton speculated to a Spanish newspaper that Mr. Trump might even spring an 'October surprise' shortly before the election by declaring his intention to leave the alliance in a second term."

The report notes, "In a book published this week, Michael S. Schmidt, a New York Times reporter, wrote that Mr. Trump's former chief of staff John F. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, told others that 'one of the most difficult tasks he faced with Trump was trying to stop him from pulling out of NATO.' One person who has heard Mr. Kelly speak in private settings confirmed that he had made such remarks."

Crowley adds, "Donald Trump now relies on 'a team of inexperienced bureaucrats' and has grown more confident and assertive, as he has already sacked seasoned national security advisers, including John F. Kelly; Jim Mattis, another retired four-star Marine general and Trump's first defense secretary; and H.R. McMaster, a retired three-star Army general and Trump's former national security adviser."

In fact, the Trump administration announced plans in July to withdraw 12,000 American troops from Germany and sought to cut funding for the Pentagon's European Deterrence Initiative. About half of the troops withdrawn from Germany were re-deployed in Europe, mainly in Italy and Poland, and the rest returned to the US.

Similarly, although full withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan was originally scheduled for April next year, according to terms of peace deal reached with the Taliban on February 29, President Trump hastened the withdrawal process by making an electoral pledge this week that all troops should be "home by Christmas." "We should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas," he tweeted last week.

Even the arch-foes of the US in Afghanistan effusively praised President Trump's peace overtures. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told CBS News in a phone interview last week, "We hope he will win the election and wind up US military presence in Afghanistan."

The militant group also expressed concern about President Trump's bout with the coronavirus. "When we heard about Trump being COVID-19 positive, we got worried for his health, but it seems he is getting better," another Taliban senior leader confided to reporter Sami Yousafzai.

Moreover, Iran-backed militias recently announced "conditional" cease-fire against the US forces in Iraq on the condition that Washington present a timetable for the withdrawal of its troops. The US-led coalition has already departed from smaller bases across Iraq and promised to reduce its troop presence from 5,200 to 3,000 in the next couple of months, though Iraq's parliament passed a resolution urging the full withdrawal of US troops in January.

There is no denying the fact that the four years of the Trump presidency have been unusually tumultuous in the American political history, but if one takes a cursory look at the list of all the Trump aides who resigned or were otherwise sacked, almost all of them were national security officials.

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In fact, scores of former Republican national security officials recently made their preference public that they would vote in the upcoming US presidential elections for Democrat Joe Biden instead of Republican Donald Trump against party lines.

What does that imply? It is an incontrovertible proof that the latent conflict between the deep state and the elected representatives of the American people has come to a head during the Trump presidency.

Although far from being a vocal critic of the deep state himself, the working-class constituency that Trump represents has had enough with the global domination agenda of the national security establishment. The American electorate wants the US troops returned home, and wants to focus on national economy and redress wealth disparity instead of acting as global police waging "endless wars" thousands of miles away from the US territorial borders.

Addressing a convention of conservatives last year, Trump publicly castigated his own generals, much to the dismay of neoliberal chauvinists upholding American exceptionalism and militarism, by revealing: "I learn more sometimes from soldiers what's going on, than I do from generals. I do. I hate to say it. I tell the generals all the time."

At another occasion, he ruffled more feathers by telling the reporters: "I'm not saying the military's in love with me. The soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren't because they want to do nothing but fight wars so all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy."

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[Oct 10, 2020] Woke crowd acts as the agent provocateur of the Deep State

Notable quotes:

"... The hatred of Donald Trump, which certainly to some extent is legitimate if only due to his ignorance and boorishness, has driven a feeding frenzy by the moderate-to liberal media which has made them blind to their own faults. ..."

"... Just as the Israel Firsters in Congress and in the state legislative bodies have had great success in criminalizing any criticism of the Jewish state, the mainstream media's "fake news" in support of the "woke" crowd agenda has already succeeded in forcing out many alternative voices in the public space. ..."

"... This type of "thought control" has been most evident in the media, but it is beginning to dominate in other areas where conversations about policy and rights take place. Universities in particular, which once were bastions of free speech and free thought, are now defining what is acceptable language and behavior even when the alleged perpetrators are neither threatening or abusive. ..."

"... Recently, a student editor at the University of Wisconsin student newspaper was fired because he dared to write a column that objected to the current anti-police consensus. ..."

"... The worst aspect of the increasing thought control taking place in America's public space is that it is not only not over, it is increasing. To be sure, to a certain extent the upcoming election is a driver of the process as left and right increasingly man the barricades to support their respective viewpoints. If that were all, it might be considered politics as usual, but unfortunately the process is going well beyond that point. The righteousness exuded by the social justice warriors has apparently given them the mandate to attempt to control what Americans are allowed to think or say while also at the same time upending the common values that have made the country functional. It is a revolution of sorts, and those who object most strongly could well be the first to go to the guillotine. ..."

Oct 10, 2020 | www.unz.com

Once upon a time it was possible to rely on much of the mainstream media to report on developments more or less objectively, relegating opinion pieces to the editorial page. But that was a long time ago. I remember moving to Washington back in 1976 after many years of New York Times and International Herald Tribune readership, when both those papers still possessed editorial integrity. My first experience of the Washington Post had my head spinning, wondering how front-page stories that allegedly reported the "news" could sink to the level of including editorialized comments from start to finish to place the story in context.

Today, Washington Post style reporting has become the norm and the New York Times , if anything, might possibly be the worst exponent of news that is actually largely unsubstantiated or at best "anonymous" opinion. In the past few weeks, stories about the often-violent social unrest that continues in numerous states have virtually disappeared from sight because the mainstream media has its version of reality, that the demonstrations are legitimate protest that seek to correct "systemic racism." Likewise, counter-demonstrators are reflexively described as "white supremacists" so they can be dismissed as unreformable racists. Videos of rampaging mobs looting, burning and destroying while also beating and even killed innocent citizens who are trying to protect themselves and their property are not shown or written about to any real extent because such actions are being carried out by the groups that the mainstream media and its political enablers favor.

The hatred of Donald Trump, which certainly to some extent is legitimate if only due to his ignorance and boorishness, has driven a feeding frenzy by the moderate-to liberal media which has made them blind to their own faults. The recent expose by the New York Times on Donald Trump's taxes might well be considered a new low, with blaring headlines declaring that the president is a tax avoider. It was a theme rapidly picked up and promoted by much of the remainder of the television and print media as well as "public radio" stations like NPR.

But wait a minute. Trump Inc. is a multi-faceted business that includes a great number of smaller entities, not all of which involve real estate per se. Donald Trump, not surprisingly, does not do his own taxes and instead employs teams of accountants and lawyers to do the work for him. They take advantage of every break possible to reduce the taxes paid. Why are there tax breaks for businesses that individual Americans do not enjoy? Because congress approved legislation to make it so. So who is to blame if Donald Trump only paid $750 in tax? Congress, but the media coverage of the issue deliberately made it look like Trump is a tax cheater.

And then there is the question how the Times got the tax returns in the first place. Tax returns are legally protected confidential documents and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is obligated to maintain privacy regarding them. Some of the files are currently part of an IRS audit and it just might be that the auditors are the source of the completely illegal leak, but we may never know as the Times is piously declaring "We are not making the records themselves public, because we do not want to jeopardize our sources, who have taken enormous personal risks to help inform the public." Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation wryly observes that when it comes to avoiding taxes "I'll bet that the members of the Times ' editorial board and its big team of reporters and columnists do the same thing. They are just upset that they don't do it as well as Trump."

Just as the Israel Firsters in Congress and in the state legislative bodies have had great success in criminalizing any criticism of the Jewish state, the mainstream media's "fake news" in support of the "woke" crowd agenda has already succeeded in forcing out many alternative voices in the public space. The Times has been a leader in bringing about this departure from "freedom of speech" enshrined in a "free press," having recently forced the resignation of senior editor James Bennet over the publication of an op-ed written by Senator Tom Cotton. Cotton's views are certainly not to everyone's taste, but he provided a reasonable account of how and when federal troops have been used in the past to repress civil unrest, together with a suggestion that they might play that same role in the current context.

This type of "thought control" has been most evident in the media, but it is beginning to dominate in other areas where conversations about policy and rights take place. Universities in particular, which once were bastions of free speech and free thought, are now defining what is acceptable language and behavior even when the alleged perpetrators are neither threatening or abusive.

Recently, a student editor at the University of Wisconsin student newspaper was fired because he dared to write a column that objected to the current anti-police consensus. Washington lawyer Jonathan Turley observes how the case was not unique, how there has been " a crackdown on some campuses against conservative columnists and newspapers, including the firing of a conservative student columnist at Syracuse , the public condemnation of a student columnist at Georgetown , and a campaign against one of the oldest conservative student newspapers in the country at Dartmouth. Now, The Badger Herald , a student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin Madison, has dismissed columnist Tripp Grebe after he wrote a column opposing the defunding of police departments." Ironically, Grebe acknowledged in his op-ed that there is considerable police-initiated brutality and also justified the emergence of black lives matter, but it was not enough to save him.

The worst aspect of the increasing thought control taking place in America's public space is that it is not only not over, it is increasing. To be sure, to a certain extent the upcoming election is a driver of the process as left and right increasingly man the barricades to support their respective viewpoints. If that were all, it might be considered politics as usual, but unfortunately the process is going well beyond that point. The righteousness exuded by the social justice warriors has apparently given them the mandate to attempt to control what Americans are allowed to think or say while also at the same time upending the common values that have made the country functional. It is a revolution of sorts, and those who object most strongly could well be the first to go to the guillotine.

[Oct 06, 2020] Can Full Transparency Save The CIA And FBI?

Opinion of experts differ. While agencies do what they want.

Oct 06, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Only Full Transparency Will Save The CIA And FBI Now - Zero Hedge

---

NoDebt , 9 minutes ago

The title to this article has to be one of the most darkly funny ones I've ever read on ZH: "Only Full Transparency Will Save The CIA And FBI Now"

It's not just that they will never be transparent because obfuscation and opacity are their stock-in-trade. It's that the idea that somehow becoming the opposite of what they are (and were born to be) would "save" them.

That's like saying that auditing The Fed would "save" them. Or that fish should get out of the water so they can breathe better. It's ridiculous in the extreme. It would kill them. Which is why they don't do it. And never will.

2banana , 23 minutes ago

obama wesponized the FBI, CIA, DOJ, IRS and EPA to go after political enemies and those who just had different viewpoints.

spam filter , 8 minutes ago

Is a community organizer synonymous with organized crime boss? Obama will go down as the most corrupt potus in history.

[Oct 05, 2020] Neoliberal Newspeak dictionary: "tensions rising", "without evidence" and "US intelligence sources" (

Oct 05, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Don Bacon , Oct 4 2020 13:55 utc | 3

The new buzz-phrase "tensions rising" is in full news-play as seen here .

librul , Oct 4 2020 14:19 utc | 5

Good one Don B. @3

A buzz-phrase I keep noticing is the use of "without evidence". For example, when Trump, or anyone the MSM wants to target, makes an accusation and the MSM has to discuss that accusation it is unsurprising to encounter the phrase "without evidence"
as seen here

If only the anonymous "US intelligence sources" (here)
that the Mouthpiece Media echo so frequently were qualified with "without evidence".

I tried combining the two phrases and instead of receiving thousands of results I received
three .

[Oct 05, 2020] The first man put at the helm will be a good one. Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards. The executive will be always increasing here, as elsewhere, till it ends in a monarchy

Oct 05, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Richard Steven Hack , Oct 5 2020 4:25 utc | 96

Posted by: snake | Oct 5 2020 4:02 utc | 93 430,000,000 virgin Americans

Thought the population as of this year was 331 million? Typo?

True, dissatisfaction with states appears to be on the rise world-wide. The problem is that people still are still thoroughly brainwashed into believing the problem is *their* state, not "state" in the abstract. And because of that, *any* change they make is likely to be for the worse, a la National Socialism. The likelihood of some form of "Chinese Communism" in this country is next to zero - not that I would welcome that, either, but some here would. France might swing toward some form of "council socialism", given their previous history with left revolutions, but I don't see that spreading anywhere else; maybe Spain given their anarchism history. No, I don't see any evidence that the state itself is under any significant threat anywhere. States may collapse, even in the US, but they will reform almost immediately. Any positive changes will be unlikely and even if implemented will quickly be eroded.

The *only* solution is extermination of the ruling class. "The world will only be free when the last politician is strangled with the guts of the last priest." And even then, without some kind of "re-education" of everyone else, it won't last. A new ruling class will simply arise.

Just looked up that Ben Franklin quote:

First reported by James McHenry, a Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention. This is what he wrote: "A lady asked Dr. Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy. A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it." Another of his famous quotes from that era comes just after Washington had been elected the first president. "The first man put at the helm will be a good one. Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards," he said. But that isn't the full quote. He continued, "The executive will be always increasing here, as elsewhere, till it ends in a monarchy."

Well, here we are. We didn't keep it. And here we are: a lunatic in office who thinks he's King George.

[Oct 01, 2020] Why say riot when you can be vague and sensitive instead, AP Stylebook urges in newest Orwellian guidelines by Nebojsa Malic

Highly recommended!

Notable quotes:

"... AP is hardly the Ministry of Truth, dictating Newspeak under the penalty of torture. As it turns out, it doesn't have to be. A bit of updated style – and thought – guidance announced on Twitter from time to time will do. ..."

Oct 01, 2020 | www.rt.com

Used as the journalism Bible by most English-language media, the AP Stylebook has updated its guidance for employing the word 'riot,' citing the need to avoid "stigmatizing" groups protesting "for racial justice."

While acknowledging the dictionary definition of riot as a "wild or violent disturbance of the peace," AP said the word somehow "suggests uncontrolled chaos and pandemonium."

Worse yet, "Focusing on rioting and property destruction rather than underlying grievance has been used in the past to stigmatize broad swaths of people protesting against lynching, police brutality or for racial justice " the Stylebook account tweeted on Wednesday.

The claim that something has been used in the past in a racist way has already led to banishing many English terms to the Orwellian "memory hole." It certainly appears the AP is trying to do the same with "riot" now.

Instead of promoting precision, the Stylebook is urging reporters to use euphemisms such as "protest" or "demonstration." It advises "revolt" and "uprising" if the violence is directed "against powerful groups or governing systems," in an alarming shift in focus from what is being done towards who is doing it to whom .

READ MORE: CBS News whitewashes Kenosha destruction as mostly 'peaceful protests' as city smolders in aftermath

There is even a helpful suggestion to use "unrest" because it's "a vaguer, milder and less emotional term for a condition of angry discontent and protest verging on revolt."

Translated to plain English, this means a lot more mentions of "unrest" and almost no references to "riot," in media coverage going forward, regardless of how much actual rioting is happening.

Mainstream media across the US have already gone out of their way to avoid labeling what has unfolded since the death of George Floyd in May as "riots." Though protests in Minneapolis, Minnesota turned violent within 48 hours, before spreading to other cities across the US – and even internationally – the media continued calling them "peaceful" and "protests for racial justice."

Yet in just the first two weeks of the riots, 20 people have been killed and the property damage has exceeded $2 billion , according to insurance estimates – the highest in US history.

AP is no stranger to changing the language to better comport to 'proper' political sensitivities. At the height of the riots in June, the Stylebook decided to capitalize "Black" and "Indigenous" in a "racial, ethnic or cultural sense."

We're in a sinister new era of totalitarianism, where PC combat units use social media to destroy anyone who disagrees with them

A month later, the expected decision to leave "white" in lowercase was justified by saying that "White people in general have much less shared history and culture, and don't have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color."

Moreover, "Capitalizing the term 'white,' as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs," wrote AP's vice-president for standards John Daniszewski.

The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, as its full name goes, has effectively dictated the tone of English-language outlets around the world since it first appeared in 1953. It is also required reference material in journalism schools.

So when it embraces vagueness over precision and worrying about "suggestions" and "subtly conveying" things over plain meaning, that rings especially Orwellian – in both the '1984' sense of censoring speech and thought and regarding the corruption of language the author lamented in his famous 1946 essay 'Politics and the English language.'

AP is hardly the Ministry of Truth, dictating Newspeak under the penalty of torture. As it turns out, it doesn't have to be. A bit of updated style – and thought – guidance announced on Twitter from time to time will do.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic

[Sep 30, 2020] Angry Bear " The 2020 Presidential and Senate nowcast- not a good week for Biden

Sep 30, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

1. September 29, 2020 6:30 pm

   Yeah I think it was an okay week for Biden because we are one week closer to November 3. Not seeing any dramatic changes and there are very few undecideds. Barring something like either candidate dying of a stroke or heart attack, tonight is probably the MIC's last best chance to derail Biden's victory march and he has no control over it. If Biden does not stumble badly it is going to be very hard for the MIC to drag him down like he did with Hillary.

2. Likbez , September 30, 2020 12:12 am

   Instead of those maps I would like to have a map that provides some level of understanding of positioning of key groups of the US neoliberal elite (one candidate, neutrality/both candidates as there is not real difference for them) in each state.

   We can probably distinguish between at least five key groups with distinct, albeit overlapping interests as for the future direction of the country (for example more or less neoliberal globalization, and the desirable level of hostility in relations with China)

   1. MIC
   1.1. Intelligence agencies
   1.2. Defense contractors
   1.3 Officer corp
   2.FIRE sector
   2.1 Large banks
   2.2 Insurance companies
   2.3.Credit card mafia
   3. Neo-liberal tech mafia
   3.1 Internet/social sites giants
   3.2 Software giants (actually intersects with 3.1 -- for example Microsoft is both)
   4. Traditional manufacturing
   4.1 Oil/gas
   4.2 Heavy machinery
   4.3 Chemical industry
   4.4. Big pharma
   4.5. Agro business
   5. Entertainment industry including MSM

   NOTE: I am not sure the MIC is pro-Trump and anti-Biden. Biden has a proven record as a staunch militarist and neocon, so why would they prefer one over another ? In 2016 key two intelligence agencies were definitely pro-Hillary (who was a known chickenhawk ) with NSA and DIA probably on the fence, but while intelligence agencies are important part of MIC they are not all MIC which is a much bigger and complex entity.

   But, for example, tech giants are firmly in neoliberal Dems camp and IMHO will stay in it. So they will definitly support Biden in 2020 and that will influence the voting results in state where they dominate political machinery.

   Other states are, for example, dominated by credit card and Insurance companies like Delaware with Biden often called a senator from MBNA. ( https://www.nationalreview.com/2008/08/senator-mbna-byron-york/ )

   Similar Lieberman was called a senator from General Dynamics, and Schumer -- from Goldman Sachs ( https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-did-chuck-schumer-hire-an-ex-goldman-sachs-lobbyist/ )

[Sep 28, 2020] Ruling class consists of two strata: (a) the highest stratum; and (b) second stratum. The highest stratum is the core of the ruling class but it could not sufficiently lead and direct the society unless the second stratum helps.

Sep 28, 2020 | dergipark.org.tr

Formation of the ruling classes has a close relation with the level of civilization and the type of society. Ruling class under every condition try to reproduce itself particularly by domination on political forces like power, wealth and the ruling class tends to be come hereditary. In fact, descents of ruling class members have a high life chances to have the traits necessary to be a ruling class member (Mosca 1939, pp. 60-61). In general, prior to democracy, membership of ruling class was not only de facto but also de jure. In democracy, de jure transfer of political possession to descendants of ruling class members impossible and not legitimized but it is now de facto.

According to Mosca, historically, ruling class try to justify its existence and policies by using some universal moral principles, superiority etc., lately, scientific theory and knowledge like Social Darwinism, division of labor is also employed for the same purposes. Mosca particularly rejects these two theses to use in political purposes. To Mosca, at a certain level of civilization, ruling classes do not justify their power exclusively by de facto possession of it, but try to find a moral and legal basis for it. This legal and moral basis or principles on which the power of the political class rests is called "political formula" by Mosca. The formula has a unique structure in all societies.

"lTjhe political formula must be based on the special beliefs and the strongest sentiments of the current social group or at least upon the beliefs and sentiments of the particular portion of that group which hold political preeminence"(Mosca 1939, p.71,72).

In fact ruling class like Pareto's elite strata consist of two strata: (a) the highest stratum; and (b) second stratum. The highest stratum is the core of the ruling class but it could not sufficiently lead and direct the society unless the second stratum helps. Second stratum is the larger than the higher stratum in number and has all the capacities of leadership in the country. Even autocratic systems do have it. Not only political but also any type of social organization needs the second stratum in order to be possible (Mosca 1939, p.404, 430).

The members of the ruling class are recruited almost entirely from the dominant, majority group in the society. If the society has a number of minorities and if this rule is not followed due to weaknesses of dominant group, political system can meet serious political crisis. The same thing occurs when there are considerable differences between in the culture, and in customs of the ruling class and subject classes (Mosca 1939, p.l05,106-7).

Weaknesses of dominant group in society and isolation of lower classes from the ruling classes can lead to political upheaval in the country and as a result of this upheaval subject classes' representatives can have places in the ruling class. Because when isolation takes place, another ruling class emerges among the subject classes that often hostile to the old ruling class (Mosca 1939, pp. 107- 8). Furthermore, due to reciprocal isolation of classes, the character of upper classes change, they become weak in bold and aggressiveness and richer in "soft" remissive individuals. On the same track, when there is fragmentation in the society, new groups form and each one of them makes up of its own leaders and followers. In fact, revolutions are another source of replacement of ruling class (Mosca 1939, p.163, 199).

When Mosca compares the political systems, he says that communist and socialist societies would beyond any doubt managed by officials and he sees these regimes as utopia. On democracy, he says, although gradual increase of universal suffrage, actual power has remained partly in wealthiest and the middle classes. At the same time, for Mosca, middle class is necessary for democracy, and when middle class declines, politic regimes in democratic countries turns to a plutocratic dictatorship, or bureaucratic dictatorship. (Mosca 1939, p.391).

According to Mosca, ruling class has a responsive character to social change in the society and there is a close relation between level of civilization and character of ruling classes. According to these two complementary proposition, it can be said that ruling class is subject of social change rather than actor of it. For example, change in division of labor from lower to higher and change in political force from military to wealth have changed the type of state from federal to bureaucratic state (Mosca 1939, p. 81, 83 ). There it seems that Mosca admits a linear social change in history, as opposite to Pareto.

As seen, Mosca's theory is basically based on organized minorities' superiority over unorganized majority. This organized minority consists of ruling class, but for Mosca it is not necessarily mean that always interest of ruling class and subject classes are different. To him ,in contrast they coincide many times. He saw the future of socialist system by saying that it will be governed by officials.

This feature of socialist system is well documented by Milovon Dijilas in his work: New Classes. But Mosca failed to see that one day, majority will also be able to organize. As C. W. Mills pointed put, democratic western societies have experienced important transformations: (1) from the organized minority and unorganized majority to relatively unorganized minority and organized majority, and (2) from the elite state to an organized state.( Mills 1965, pp. 161-162).

Therefore minorities and elites in today's society are less powerful than majorities. Elites have relatively lost their privileges, and more importantly, their monopoly over society.

[Sep 28, 2020] Peter Turchin Intra-Elite Competition- A Key Concept for Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Societies by Peter Turchin

Pictures removes. See the original for full text.

Notable quotes:

"... Elites are a small proportion of the population (on the order of 1 percent) who concentrate social power in their hands (see my previous post and especially its discussion in the comments that reveal the complex dimensions of this concept). In the United States, for example, they include (but are not limited to) elected politicians, top civil service bureaucrats, and the owners and managers of Fortune 500 companies (see Who Rules America? ). ..."

"... As individual elites retire, they are replaced from the pool of elite aspirants . There are always more elite aspirants than positions for them to occupy. Intra-elite competition is the process that sorts aspirants into successful elites and aspirants whose ambition to enter the elite ranks is frustrated. Competition among the elites occurs on multiple levels. ..."

"... Excessive elite competition, on the other hand, results in increasing social and political instability. The supply of power positions in a society is relatively, or even absolutely, inelastic. For example, there are only 435 U.S. Representatives, 100 Senators, and one President. A great expansion in the numbers of elite aspirants means that increasingly large numbers of them are frustrated, and some of those, the more ambitious and ruthless ones, turn into counter-elites . In other words, masses of frustrated elite aspirants become breeding grounds for radical groups and revolutionary movements. ..."

"... Intense intra-elite competition, however, leads to the rise of rival power networks, which increasingly subvert the rules of political engagement to get ahead of the opposition. Instead of competing on their own merits, or the merits of their political platforms, candidates increasingly rely on "dirty tricks" such as character assassination (and, in historical cases, literal assassination). As a result, excessive competition results in the unraveling of prosocial, cooperative norms (this is a general phenomenon that is not limited to political life). ..."

"... Because the supply of power positions is relatively inelastic, most of the action is on the demand side. Simply put, it is the excessive expansion of elite aspirant numbers (or "elite overproduction") that drives up intra-elite competition ..."

"... There are two main "pumps" producing aspirants for elite positions in America: education and wealth. On the education side, of particular importance are the law degree (for a political career) and the MBA (to climb the corporate ladder). Over the past four decades, according to the American Bar Association, the number of lawyers tripled from 400,000 to 1.2 million. The number of MBAs conferred by business schools over the same period grew six-fold (details in Ages of Discord ). ..."

"... It's contradictory to bemoan the spread of the 'neoliberal' ethos, and simultaneously talk about elite fragmentation. The evidence Turchin marshalls for elite fragmentation is basically the bimodal distribution of lawyers' incomes, and the degree of legislative polarisation. He ignores the much wider evidence of capitalist unity and concentration in support of 'neoliberal' policies. ..."

"... while elites have colluded to capture the political process we might not expect them to all agree on what to do with the political process once it has been captured. ..."

"... There is no intra-capitalist unity. Some elites shouldn't even be called capitalists because the monopoly power they seek completely eliminates the free market. Other elites who want to control the political process do want a free market. They are in conflict. ..."

"... The concept of "ecological overshoot and collapse" applies to human ecology too. We're certainly in overshoot, so some form of collapse is coming (even if a technological miracle occurred, like cheap energy from nuclear fusion, it would only postpone the day of reckoning). ..."

"... As to "intra-elite competition", it is well underway in much of the upper middle class and the 1%, according to the statistics documented by Peter Turchin above. But it is just revving up among the super-elites – the billionaire class, with Trump being the first really visible eruption. ..."

"... When an imperial economy can longer expand easily, all of Peter's dynamics come into play with greater force, not just the elite competition, but the increasing exploitation of the common people in order to maintain elite expansion. The latter has been going on since Reagan in the form of escalating economic inequality. = popular immiseration. ..."

"... I liked the intra-elite discussions in "Ages of Discord" and it made me an even more strident believer in term limits. At least moving people out of the Congress after eight years will "free up" some space for other elite aspirants. ..."

"... Political elites are the proxies PT uses as evidence for his theory, but as he himself says, "American power holders are wealth holders". And I believe the definition I have effectively used here, "owners of capital", is consistent with his concept of elites or magnates in Secular Cycles -- a book I admire tremendously. ..."

"... Your average Congressman is not as powerful today as he was 100 years ago. Cabinet members used to do something of substance and now act more like front men, while policy making is centralized in the White House. You have more and more aspirants for fewer and fewer positions of substance. That ramps up intensity of competition even more than just over-production of JDs and MBAs. ..."

"... Agreed, the overproduction of elites developed in parallel with the change in social norms that extolled competition and downplayed cooperation. But these two dynamics may be causally related -- it's not a pure coincidence that the two trends developed in parallel. ..."

"... It seems to me that one of the most important factors in intra-elite competition, is the degree of skill of the frustrated aspirants. If there are lots of people who want to be elite but can't crack the system to get in, that may not be a problem if those frustrated aspirants aren't particularly good at organization, motivation, leadership, etc. ..."

"... If, on the other hand, the frustrated aspirants are nearly as good at this sort of thing as those actually in power, and especially if they are better at it than the incumbents (who somehow through tradition or family connections or what-have-you remain on top), then you have a much better chance of the frustrated aspirants being able to kick up trouble. ..."

"... I wonder if any of the commentators here have considered that the [neoliberal] cabal now in power in the US (not elsewhere) are not in power to "take power" except for a temporary period. They don't want to run the federal government, they want to destroy it, except for the police state and the military. ..."

Dec 30, 2016 | peterturchin.com

elites , norms , social change , structural-demographic 72 Comments

Intra-elite competition is one of the most important factors explaining massive waves of social and political instability, which periodically afflict complex, state-level societies. This idea was proposed by Jack Goldstone nearly 30 years ago . Goldstone tested it empirically by analyzing the structural precursors of the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and seventeenth century's crises in Turkey and China. Other researchers (including Sergey Nefedov, Andrey Korotayev, and myself) extended Goldstone's theory and tested it in such different societies as Ancient Rome, Egypt, and Mesopotamia; medieval England, France, and China; the European revolutions of 1848 and the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917; and the Arab Spring uprisings. Closer to home, recent research indicates that the stability of modern democratic societies is also undermined by excessive competition among the elites (see Ages of Discord for a structural-demographic analysis of American history). Why is intra-elite competition such an important driver of instability?

Elites are a small proportion of the population (on the order of 1 percent) who concentrate social power in their hands (see my previous post and especially its discussion in the comments that reveal the complex dimensions of this concept). In the United States, for example, they include (but are not limited to) elected politicians, top civil service bureaucrats, and the owners and managers of Fortune 500 companies (see Who Rules America? ).

As individual elites retire, they are replaced from the pool of elite aspirants . There are always more elite aspirants than positions for them to occupy. Intra-elite competition is the process that sorts aspirants into successful elites and aspirants whose ambition to enter the elite ranks is frustrated. Competition among the elites occurs on multiple levels. Thus, lower-ranked elites (for example, state representatives) may also be aspirants for the next level (e.g., U.S. Congress), and so on, all the way up to POTUS.

Moderate intra-elite competition need not be harmful to an orderly and efficient functioning of the society; in fact, it's usually beneficial because it results in better-qualified candidates being selected. Additionally, competition can help weed out incompetent or corrupt office-holders. However, it is important to keep in mind that the social effects of elite competition depend critically on the norms and institutions that regulate it and channel it into such societally productive forms.

Excessive elite competition, on the other hand, results in increasing social and political instability. The supply of power positions in a society is relatively, or even absolutely, inelastic. For example, there are only 435 U.S. Representatives, 100 Senators, and one President. A great expansion in the numbers of elite aspirants means that increasingly large numbers of them are frustrated, and some of those, the more ambitious and ruthless ones, turn into counter-elites . In other words, masses of frustrated elite aspirants become breeding grounds for radical groups and revolutionary movements.

Another consequence of excessive competition among elite aspirants is its effect on the social norms regulating politically acceptable conduct. Norms are effective only as long as the majority follows them, and violators are punished. Maintaining such norms is the job for the elites themselves.

Intense intra-elite competition, however, leads to the rise of rival power networks, which increasingly subvert the rules of political engagement to get ahead of the opposition. Instead of competing on their own merits, or the merits of their political platforms, candidates increasingly rely on "dirty tricks" such as character assassination (and, in historical cases, literal assassination). As a result, excessive competition results in the unraveling of prosocial, cooperative norms (this is a general phenomenon that is not limited to political life).

Death of Gaius Gracchus (François Topino-Lebrun) Source

Intra-elite competition, thus, has a nonlinear effect on social function: moderate levels are good, excessive levels are bad. What are the social forces leading to excessive competition?

Because the supply of power positions is relatively inelastic, most of the action is on the demand side. Simply put, it is the excessive expansion of elite aspirant numbers (or "elite overproduction") that drives up intra-elite competition. Let's again use the contemporary America as an example to illustrate this idea (although, I emphasize, similar social processes have operated in all complex large-scale human societies since they arose some 5,000 years ago).

There are two main "pumps" producing aspirants for elite positions in America: education and wealth. On the education side, of particular importance are the law degree (for a political career) and the MBA (to climb the corporate ladder). Over the past four decades, according to the American Bar Association, the number of lawyers tripled from 400,000 to 1.2 million. The number of MBAs conferred by business schools over the same period grew six-fold (details in Ages of Discord ).

On the wealth side we see a similar expansion of numbers, driven by growing inequality of income and wealth over the last 40 years. The proverbial "1 percent" becomes "2 percent", then "3 percent" For example, today there are five times as many households with wealth exceeding $10 million (in 1995 dollars), compared to 1980. Some of these wealth-holders give money to candidates, but others choose to run for political office themselves.

Elite overproduction in the US has already driven up the intensity of intra-elite competition. A reasonable proxy for escalating political competition here is the total cost of election for congressional races, which has grown (in inflation-adjusted dollars) from $2.4 billion in 1998 to $4.3 billion in 2016 ( Center for Responsive Politics ). Another clear sign is the unraveling of social norms regulating political discourse and process that has become glaringly obvious during the 2016 presidential election.

Analysis of past societies indicates that, if intra-elite competition is allowed to escalate, it will increasingly take more violent forms. A typical outcome of this process is a massive outbreak of political violence, often ending in a state collapse, a revolution, or a civil war (or all of the above).

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72 Comments

1. Gene Anderson December 30, 2016 at 5:43 pm

   Works for China too. One can see two main sources: The Imperial family, which with vast-scale polygyny grew inordinately in a short time; and the examination system, producing more and more successful candidates over time (this was a problem mainly after Song greatly expanded the exams). The poor Imperial family deserves some pity–toward the end of a dynasty you had all these 13th cousins 10 times removed starving to death on the Russian frontier. (I exaggerate only slightly. By the end of the empire in 1911, there were tens of thousands of Imperial relatives.) Naturally the competition got pretty fierce late in the dynasties. When the empire thrived, the system could blot all these people up, and find places for them. When the empire was going down hill, or conflicted, it meant trouble.
   

2. pseudoerasmus December 30, 2016 at 5:51 pm

   I believe Peter Turchin is deeply mistaken about elite competition in modern societies. I repeat my comment on intra-elite competition from a previous post:

   In an agrarian society, elite wealth was based on land, more specifically, on extracting a fraction of the output of the commoners working the land. When there was a demographic crisis (land-labour ratio fell and immiseration set in), elite incomes fell, and elites sought to maintain their lifestyles by increasing the rate of extraction. But squeezing peasants even more when there's already a demographic crisis only exacerbates popular immiseration. At some point the only way for elites to increase, or even just preserve, their incomes was at the expense of other elites. Thus you have elite fragmentation and internecine competition. And thus sociopolitical instability. Makes a lot of sense. It fits a lot of historical cases.

   However, this theory makes no sense in modern industrial societies.

   (1) Wealth is no longer fixed in the long run. Modern economies reliably grow at 1-2% rates. Much of that growth is concentrated at the top, even when measured income inequality is relatively low. So the competitive pressure within elites is much less than in any agrarian society governed by Malthusian-Ricardian-Brennerian-Goldstone-Turchin cycles.

   (2) Besides, in a modern society, you need *more*, not less, intra-elite cooperation (a) in order to increase economic inequality; (b) in order for the elites to capture a greater share of the economic growth; (c) in order for capitalists reduce the bargaining power of labour; and (d) in order for elites to capture the state.

   In fact, politics in a modern society is a pretty small part of the field in which elites can play compared with anti-competitive practices -- i.e., collusion, mergers, monopolies, trusts, and other ways of reducing competition and concentrating power in the supply of goods and the demand for labour. These are all acts of elite cooperation. Capitalists are, right now, in unprecedented unity. They agree on unions, immigration, wages, trade, regulations, etc. That unity is necessary to generate the inequality in the first place.

   Therefore, state capture and rent-seeking are now *cooperative*: conspiracies to rig the rules and increase markups against the public interest require collusion. Owners of one mobile telephony operator don't have to clash with the owners of another mobile telephony operator: they can band together to lobby the government. Compared with the rise of monopoly concentration, elites wrangling over Trump or Brexit is a sideshow.

   Almost everybody who is concerned about rising inequality implicitly recognises this: from Krugman to Stiglitz to Milanovic to even Turchin's friends at Evonomics, they have argued that inequality stems in great measure from anti-competitive practises.

   It's contradictory to bemoan the spread of the 'neoliberal' ethos, and simultaneously talk about elite fragmentation. The evidence Turchin marshalls for elite fragmentation is basically the bimodal distribution of lawyers' incomes, and the degree of legislative polarisation. He ignores the much wider evidence of capitalist unity and concentration in support of 'neoliberal' policies.

   • Fernando E.Mora December 31, 2016 at 4:05 am

     I think you must read Fred Hirsch's "Social Limits to Growth" to understand the difference between the always possible growth in MATERIALl wealth and the (no-)growth of POSITIONAL wealth in which Peter's point can also be solidly (and perhaps more accurately) based.

     • pseudoerasmus December 31, 2016 at 8:16 am

       I would certainly agree that if economic growth were zero or negative, PT's elite competition theory might make more sense. Which is why I think SD theory is still quite applicable to many contemporary developing countries, such as those in the Arab world. Also, the collapse into civil wars in many African countries in the 1980s and 1990s was preceded by a large expansion of educated people at the same time economic growth more or less came to a halt.
       

   • Peter Turchin January 1, 2017 at 7:17 pm

     This comment requires a lengthier rebuttal, but for now just two points:

     1. In the blog post I specifically used the political elites to illustrate my major point. Your response, unfortunately, is a standard economic one that measures everything in money. As I said, I will probably have to write another post to explain why this is wrong-headed.

     2. Why do you assume that the "capitalist class" will be automatically able to cooperate to impose their will on the rest of the society? There is, after all, the problem of collective action.

     • Stephen Morris January 1, 2017 at 8:04 pm

       Speaking as a former investment banker involved in the privatisation of public assets – who has seen at first hand generations of politicians captured by business interests – I suggest that anyone with direct experience of this matter would realise that any collective action problem faced by the capitalist class in negligible in comparison which the collective action problem faced by citizens under the non-democratic system of purely "elective" goverrnment (i.e. "government-by-politicians').
       

     • pseudoerasmus January 1, 2017 at 8:04 pm

       Re #1 -- No, I do not measure everything in money, so please do not write a whole post as though that's what I argued. I said that elites now *collude* to capture the political process, which they do. They don't need to compete for political positions because they cooperate in capturing it. Goldman Sachs has access to the Treasury department whether the party in power is Republican or Democratic. (Besides, you also use some money proxies for intra-elite competition/cooperation: the distribution of lawyers' salaries, or the Great Merger Movement.)

       Re #2 -- I do not assume it. The evidence is overwhelming that concentration is increasing, markups are rising, monopoly power is expanding. All of that is evidence of intra-capitalist cooperation and unity.
       

     • pseudoerasmus January 1, 2017 at 8:11 pm

       Peter Turchin frequently cites the work of Martin Gilens, who has repeatedly shown that public policy largely reflects the preferences of the very richest of US society. That's not elite competition. That's elite cooperation in capturing of the political process. The problem with Turchin's framework is that he sees even modern societies through the Roman framework of Optimates v. Populares.

       • edwardturner January 2, 2017 at 11:52 am

         pseudoerasmus, I pretty much agree with what you say. However, while elites have colluded to capture the political process we might not expect them to all agree on what to do with the political process once it has been captured.

         There is no intra-capitalist unity. Some elites shouldn't even be called capitalists because the monopoly power they seek completely eliminates the free market. Other elites who want to control the political process do want a free market. They are in conflict.

         The common thread here is the presence of powerful elites who cooperate. Historically the monopoly power elites have cooperated without much resistence but the free market elites have begun to cooperate against them and have had success in the election of Donald Trump.

         If it is people power we want then the general trend will look like cooperation as whoever wins the conflict will be cooperating economic elites.

   • Steve Roth January 2, 2017 at 9:41 am

     I question whether there is a qualitative difference today. It's still about the claims embodied by "wealth," and the power those claims impart to wealthholders. The mechanisms are different, but the wealth/power relationships are pretty much the same.

     The crux, in my view, is concentration of wealth (hence power). Which has the virtue of being nicely quantifiable, in concept if not necessarily in practice.

     My favorite graph of this:

     http://www.asymptosis.com/household-net-worth-by-quintile-62-09-be-prepared-to-scroll.html

     As concentration increases and the "elite" gets smaller, the rope-ladder hanging down from the elite gets shorter and rattier. eg: The 90% were always excluded. Now the 2%-10% are. That change could result in a different type or intensity of social conflict.

     On the other hand that intra-"elite" competition might just be a by-product and analytical distraction. The elite vs "the rest" is the issue, and all we need to look at is the size of the elite. That could be nicely encapsulated in a "wealth concentration" metric.

     Problem is getting a consistent measure of that wealth concentration. Hell, the U.S. national accounts didn't even tally wealth until 2006, and still don't even touch on wealth distribution.

     http://evonomics.com/economists-dont-know-think-wealth-profits/

     Assembling such a (validly consistent) measure across historical societies would be tough. Atkinson, Wolff, Piketty&Co, etc. have managed over recent decades to assemble data on richer countries going back a century or so. Perhaps one could do similar for the Roman Empire, at least roughly? But across many societies and millennia? Tough.

     • pseudoerasmus January 2, 2017 at 10:39 am

       In agrarian societies, the wealth that conferred status -- land and state offices -- were fixed in the long run. In modern societies, the supply of status positions is not fixed and is in fact highly elastic.

       • Steve Roth January 2, 2017 at 11:10 am

         Yes the quantity of wealth was fixed. But I'm talking about the concentration of wealth and power. Compare a society in which the 1% has all the wealth and (real) power, compared to one where it's more broadly distributed among the 10%.

         IOW, whaddaya mean by "elite," buster?

         • >the supply of status positions is not fixed and is in fact highly elastic

         Totally agree. Increasing wealth does not mean that the quantity of status positions is increasing. The absolute or percentage count of "the elite" could shrink (wealth could concentrate) even as wealth increases.

         Increasing wealth might be presumed to give more entree to aspirants than a fixed-wealth scenario, but I just have no idea whether that is actually the case.
         

3. Dick Burkhart December 30, 2016 at 6:47 pm

   You claim that "wealth is no longer fixed in the long run", yet that claim is the most fundamental fallacy of contemporary economics. "Limits-to-growth" is not a choice but a fact of science. Already the global economy is stagnating, mostly for this reason, and it is headed toward contraction sometime during the coming generation, despite all the hype about new technologies.

   The concept of "ecological overshoot and collapse" applies to human ecology too. We're certainly in overshoot, so some form of collapse is coming (even if a technological miracle occurred, like cheap energy from nuclear fusion, it would only postpone the day of reckoning).

   As to "intra-elite competition", it is well underway in much of the upper middle class and the 1%, according to the statistics documented by Peter Turchin above. But it is just revving up among the super-elites – the billionaire class, with Trump being the first really visible eruption. In fact, Donald Trump's election is the perfect example of how this competition plays out once it hits the main stage. So don't confuse tactical cooperation among increasingly greedy factions of the elites with the kind of yawning political fractures that are now opening up as unscrupulous opportunists like Trump discover that they can exploit a disgruntled part of the populace to "trump" the more conventional elites. And as "limits-to-growth" blocks the customary relief valve of expansion, then elite exploitation and popular revolt will increase until something there is some kind of show stopper.

   • • Dick Burkhart December 30, 2016 at 8:29 pm

       Like most economists, you've got it totally backward: The non-material part is completely dependent on cheap resources, especially cheap, and compatible ecosystem conditions. Those resources only seem to disappear from the economy, because they are so cheap. But, as in the rest of nature, all that complexity comes from the surplus of energy and other resources.

       After all, we could not live without good air. Yet it costs nothing most of the time, so doesn't even enter into conventional economics.

       • pseudoerasmus December 30, 2016 at 9:04 pm

         Well, Dick Burkhart, as I said earlier, even if ecological exhaustion and collapse were coming, (a) that is not related to current economic problems; and (b) it's also not part of Peter Turchin's diagnosis.

         • Dick Burkhart December 31, 2016 at 9:19 pm

           In fact climate change is already taking an increasing economic toll – from extreme weather events, ocean acidification, desertification in some areas, etc. These costs could increase rapidly if certain tipping points are reached.

           But, yes, the larger immediate effects are coming from resource depletion, especially the peaking of conventional oil in 2006. Unconventional oil, like tar sands and fracked oil, is much more expensive, hence produces less wealth, less economic growth. Even much of the newer conventional oil is less productive, as it is often harder to find or requires tertiary methods of recovery. Similar dynamics apply to coal, natural gas, and many other resources, except that depletion may not be as far advanced as for oil. Economic growth has slowed dramatically even in China, despite their phony growth numbers, and I expect increasing political turmoil there, too, over the next decade or two.

           When an imperial economy can longer expand easily, all of Peter's dynamics come into play with greater force, not just the elite competition, but the increasing exploitation of the common people in order to maintain elite expansion. The latter has been going on since Reagan in the form of escalating economic inequality. = popular immiseration.
           

     • Paolo Ghirri December 31, 2016 at 2:34 pm

       "current problems have nothing to do with anything ecological or resource constraints."

       yes they have: for a pre industrial civilization what is vital is energy surplus, energy surplus that came from agriculture production. so as an example 18 have to work to produce food and 2 can live as soldier, priest and so on.

       for a industrial civilization energy surplus came from oil. from 1973 to 2016 the energy surplus pro-capita is falling: in a developed country the pro capita surplus now is 75% lower than in 1973.

       the gap is covered with debt. so in the short run we have: 1) energy price escalation (in real term the 2016 average oil price is the double of 2000) 2) agricultural stress: more frequent spike in food price, combined with food shortfall in the most vulnerable country (arab spring: food price in 2011 are 229% higher than the 2000-2004 average) 3) energy sprawl: investment in energy infrascructure will absorb rising proportion 4) economic stagnation: fail to recover from setbacks as robustly as it has in the past 5) inflation
       with the single exception of inflation (but if we check only necessary to live item i'm not so sure) all of the above features has already become firnly established in recent years, wich underlines the point that energy-surplus economy has reached its tipping point

4. Terry Lowman December 30, 2016 at 7:20 pm

   The reason the elites cooperate is to get a leg up in the competition. It recently occurred to me that the Forbes 400 list of America's wealthiest families gives people a rank, a competitor. Without the list, one might be complacent with a mere $3 billion, but knowing others have tens of billions, makes you a "just ran". Better tune up your capitalist machine so you can outshine everyone else, right?

   • Peter Turchin January 1, 2017 at 7:19 pm

     The supply of "status" is by its nature inelastic. There is only one top person in anything, and only ten in the Top 10.

     • edwardturner January 2, 2017 at 11:57 am

       True but people who cannot be the king of general things will be happy to be known as the king of their specialism.

       The more specialisms that exist for people to get to the top of the more stable a society will be.

     • edwardturner January 2, 2017 at 12:02 pm

       you could say that the king of the military is the king of kings but in the age of nuclear buttons it's simply boring. you can't blow anything up without getting blown up yourself. you can use non-nuclear military power but non-nuclear power in the age we are living in only wins you the war, it doesn't win you the war and the peace. to win the peace today you need to be king of something other than the military.

5. Rick Derris December 30, 2016 at 9:50 pm

   I liked the intra-elite discussions in "Ages of Discord" and it made me an even more strident believer in term limits. At least moving people out of the Congress after eight years will "free up" some space for other elite aspirants. I don't care if your politics are on the side of Strom Thurmond or Ted Kennedy – both were in the Congress for far too long.

   Of course, term limits did nothing to keep a 2nd Cuomo out of the NY Governor's mansion, but at least it means we only have to watch one Cuomo on CNN.
   

6. Rich December 31, 2016 at 1:09 am

   Pseudoerasmus, good arguments. The consolidation of money, as well as markets, is very large right now and it does seem like that would take coordination of an ownership class or at least similar lines of thinking among those elites. But, are we talking about a different set of elites? There may be different populations of elites: capitalist and political. Personally, I think the proxies Peter use describe a political elite population rather than a capitalist elite population. The two combine for many, but there may be distinct capitalist and political populations with each having distinct behavior patterns. The worrisome insight for me is that it's the political elites that end up bringing us to our knees.

   • pseudoerasmus December 31, 2016 at 7:43 am

     "Personally, I think the proxies Peter use describe a political elite population rather than a capitalist elite population.

     Political elites are the proxies PT uses as evidence for his theory, but as he himself says, "American power holders are wealth holders". And I believe the definition I have effectively used here, "owners of capital", is consistent with his concept of elites or magnates in Secular Cycles -- a book I admire tremendously.

     Note also that PT uses the Great Merger Movement in US history (1895-1905) as evidence of the beginnings of elite cooperation. Well, another wave of capital concentration has existed now for decades, since the 1980s.

     • Rich Howard December 31, 2016 at 4:40 pm

       Political elites may be more likely to be rich, but the rich is a larger population with only a fraction politically aspirant. PT'S model relates political aspirants to political breakdown. And because it works so well, in so many cases, it suggests there is a more universal social process at work than rich/poor, unemployment rates, too many weapons, resource depletion etc.
       

7. Jason December 31, 2016 at 7:42 am

   I like the theory but isn't there more to the story. On one side you have elite aspirant overproduction. On the other side, you have increasing concentration of power -- the iron law of oligarchy (in the sense of this wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy )

   Your average Congressman is not as powerful today as he was 100 years ago. Cabinet members used to do something of substance and now act more like front men, while policy making is centralized in the White House. You have more and more aspirants for fewer and fewer positions of substance. That ramps up intensity of competition even more than just over-production of JDs and MBAs.

   Plus the barriers to entry for competition has lowered too. Now celebrities fight with JDs for political positions. Rap stars compete with MBAs for business tycoon success.

   At all levels of society, you have greater and greater competition for fewer and fewer rewards. Hyper-competition all around. Now perhaps the competition at the gateway to the elite is particularly important because elites are important, and failure to get in makes them the aspirants powerful disgruntled people, but I think the mechanism is more than just over-production of JDs and MBAs.

   I think it might have started as a well intentioned project to increase the quality of our elites by introducing competition and lowering barriers to entry. And at the the same time, increasing the rewards to winners (incentivizing max effort). Result though is brutal intra-elite fighting. Particularly in times of overall lowered growth.

   • Peter Turchin January 1, 2017 at 7:24 pm

     Agreed, the overproduction of elites developed in parallel with the change in social norms that extolled competition and downplayed cooperation. But these two dynamics may be causally related -- it's not a pure coincidence that the two trends developed in parallel.
     

8. Ross Hartshorn December 31, 2016 at 1:43 pm

   One point I haven't seen discussed much is that the number of "powerful" positions is fixed, by law, but not unchangeable. For example, in the 19th century it was arguably more important to be a city councilman or state legislator than a Congressmen, because more actual decisions were being made at the city and state level and the percentage of the economy under the control of the federal government was smaller. If there is less federal largesse to distribute, then there is less power in helping to decide how it is distributed. It is somewhat analogous to why being a U.S. Senator now is more important than being a U.N. functionary; the United Nations may represent a larger domain, but it has a lot less control over that domain than a national government.

   Thus, one would expect that the more centralized control of a region is, the more intra-elite competition there will be, because there are fewer positions which really matter. A modern example of this might be that the transfer of power from national to European Union administration would result in more intra-elite competition. On the other hand, devolving power back down to a lower level would result in more positions that have some power, and less competition for each.

   • Jason January 1, 2017 at 12:49 am

     That's exactly what I was getting at too, Ross. The number of good positions available depends on the power gradient of the society. How much power is centralized vs distributed. The whole Iron Law of Oligarchy developed in recognition that over time, power tends to centralize, so it's not fixed by law and unchangeable for all time. It's not so much inequality between ordinary people and the elite, but among elites.

     Plus it ossifies, in that these enhanced elite positions are then passed out patrilineally, which results in fewer actual positions being open to aspirants.

     The net result is heightened competition for entry and promotion within the elite, with more and more of the victories happening by methods outside the norm, e.g. dirty tricks, patronage, fake news etc.

     This probably happens in all societies, but growth (creating more opportunities), wars (resetting the table), inefficiency (placating the failed aspirants with consolation prizes) keep internal collapse at bay. It's when you have a dynamic of High Inequality, Low Growth, High Efficiency / Lean, No Wars that Elite Competition starts getting out of hand.

     (I say this despite hating wars, but you can't argue with their effect on resetting the table. Hate bribes/corruption too, but things like congressional pork barrels kept congressman feeling important and in-line. Efficiency is also a self evident good, but that means no consolation prizes for failure. Growth may eventually run into limits due to carrying capacity of ecosystem .).

     To me, it resembles a game of musical chairs with too few chairs, and when the music is playing much too fast. As Chuck Prince famously said in the Global Financial Crisis: "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." Whether or not dancing is destructive, elites have to keep dancing to keep their chair.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Prince

     • Ross Hartshorn January 1, 2017 at 6:00 pm

       I also hate wars, but I am reminded of Mancur Olson's theory that nations recovering from a major disaster or a major military defeat usually have above-average growth for a few decades. The idea is that when, as with the South in the U.S. after the Civil War or with Germany and Japan after WWII, the elite in society have suffered a setback so severe that their hold on society is disrupted, there will be a period during which they are less able to set government policy in their favor rather than the collective welfare.

       SDT would have a somewhat different explanation of this. I agree with you that rapid growth would be another way to reduce the intra-elite competition; it seems the most likely explanation for the "missing" peak in non-governmental violence in the U.S. in the 1820's that Peter Turchin pointed out earlier.

       • Peter Turchin January 1, 2017 at 7:32 pm

         Historically, rapid growth coupled with equitable redistribution of its gains is typically associated with peaceful and internally stable periods. But you need both (growth and equity).
         

9. Ross Hartshorn December 31, 2016 at 1:52 pm

   This idea is kind of half-formed, but I'll put it out there. It seems to me that one of the most important factors in intra-elite competition, is the degree of skill of the frustrated aspirants. If there are lots of people who want to be elite but can't crack the system to get in, that may not be a problem if those frustrated aspirants aren't particularly good at organization, motivation, leadership, etc.

   If, on the other hand, the frustrated aspirants are nearly as good at this sort of thing as those actually in power, and especially if they are better at it than the incumbents (who somehow through tradition or family connections or what-have-you remain on top), then you have a much better chance of the frustrated aspirants being able to kick up trouble.

   Of course, part of being good at leadership is getting the opportunity to practice, and a post-secondary education almost always includes some practice at a more professional set of social skills. But if the people getting spots in power remain better at political organization than the people who don't, it is less likely to result in disruption, I think. It seems that trouble would come when the ruling elite is either not especially good at leading (e.g. they inherited their position or bought their way in with somebody else's money), or they were good at leading in a previous time, and changes in society or technology have changed what skills are necessary for leadership.

   In all these cases, I think "good at leadership" would be a relative term, which is to say the current elite relative to the frustrated aspirants. How you could measure such skill, of course, is the key question about which I have as of yet nothing to say (I did say the idea was half-formed).
   

10. steven t johnson January 1, 2017 at 8:10 am

    Although intra-elite competition and inter-elite competition are conceptually distinct, is that true in practice? Is Carlos Slim an intraelite competitor with Jeff Bezos, in the form of rivalry between the New York Times and the Washington Post? If this is interelite competition, how does structural-demographic theory address the issues of how external factors impinge on the cycle? (I'm a little shaky on how interior and exterior are defined in the first place. As for example, was there a cycle for Burgundy?)

    • Peter Turchin January 1, 2017 at 7:34 pm

      Unlike "intra-elite competition", "inter-elite competition" is not a concept in SDT (and like you I would be hard put to think what it could refer to).

11. edwardturner January 1, 2017 at 12:34 pm

    The supply of power positions in a society is relatively, or even absolutely, inelastic. For example, there are only 435 U.S. Representatives, 100 Senators, and one President.

    This is not quite true. The supply of power positions can be elastic to a point.

    How about the growth in number of CEOs and NGOs and the heads of INGOs over the last 50 years? So-called non-state actors have become powerful as they influence the law-making processes in a variety of ways.

    These big chiefs are positions of power and influence. In many cases, they call the shots and Presidents and Prime Ministers are only the PR guys.

    The US President is not the most powerful person in the world. He doesn't have the highest security clearance in the United States. He is not allowed to know everything.

    The idea the US President is the most powerful man is a claim based on a theory of how the US political system works in idealised sense, and on simple US nationalism.

    The fact that the supply of power positions is elastic – that there has been a flouresence of alternative power structures to the state hierarchy – suggests that wealth can to a degree put off or delay elite competition.

    It is only when the rug is pulled from under the alternative prestigious hierarchies and the state tries to dominate all on its own – that is when problems will begin. Keep the funding going, maintain non-state avenues for prestige and create even more, the fluoresence will continue.

    • edwardturner January 1, 2017 at 12:36 pm

      interested readers might like to read my report for Cliodynamics: Why Has the Number of International Non-Governmental Organizations Exploded since 1960?

      http://escholarship.org/uc/item/97p470sx

12. Nikhil ns January 1, 2017 at 4:12 pm

    A point made in arthashastra, that fight among princes is more dangerous than fight among commoners. However, I wud like to ask what predictions are u unable to do. There is no real knowledge which doesnt admit what its limitations are, or admits inability to explain something. Even in physics, where humans have gained incredible knowledge, there is much to know. Also, on issue of religion, could one argue that but for christianity & islam world wud have devekped faster as information in math/science wud have gathered pace, exchanged between different lands easily.Thank you.

13. Peter Turchin January 1, 2017 at 7:43 pm

    Interesting that Arthashastra foresees a major message of the SDT.

    On the role of religion there are a lot of recent books from the cultural evolutionary perspective, including David Wilson, Ara Norenzayan, and Dominic Johnson (I might also mention my own Ultrasociety).

14. • Dick Burkhart January 1, 2017 at 11:16 pm

      Even direct democracy is not a cure-all. Here in Washington State, our initiative and referendum process has been corrupted at times by big money interests: First put together a sophisticated campaign around some catch phrases that will have popular support on a topic where the opposition, even if widespread, is likely to be diffuse. Then sneak in some coded language that privileges a wealthy special interest. Then use paid signature gatherers. Then assemble a massive advertising campaign, one that will outspend the likely opposition, maybe even by 10 to 1.

      Certain people get very good at this and quickly learn to sell their services to the highest bidder. The current master of such campaign here is a guy named Tim Eyman, and he has been quite successful. But some companies, like Costco, have done the same thing all by themselves.

      Moral: You need to get "money out of politics" in all ways, and it's a never ending battle until you've eliminated concentrated wealth and power itself.

    • Peter Turchin January 2, 2017 at 10:01 pm

      Stephen Morris: you will find my response in an old post:

      http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-pipe-dream-of-anarcho-populism/

15. Jason January 2, 2017 at 9:35 am

    Prof Turchin, is there any data on the Supply of Elite Positions in Historic Societies?

    It doesn't feel instinctively right that it's inelastic, but perhaps there's really the case. It feels slightly more likely to be right to say that it's capped somehow (inelastic as to upside, more elastic as to downside).

    But it seems like the sort of thing you should be able to answer with a History Database. Has there been any attempts to measure this?

    • Peter Turchin January 2, 2017 at 10:06 pm

      In fact, your are in luck, because we provide such statistics for a number of historical societies in Secular Cycles
      http://peterturchin.com/secular-cycles/

      Note, I didn't say it was inelastic. In most cases, it's relatively inelastic, so that the growth in the number of aspirants greatly overmatches the growth in the supply of the positions. Only in few instances the supply is absolutely inelastic (only one POTUS).

16. Jonathan January 6, 2017 at 1:21 pm

    Deficiencies in the concept of elite competition
    Let's start with the definition of elite: "small proportion of the population that concentrates power in their hands"
    His theory lacks an aspect that must be fundamental before even proceeding in a discussion on the "dynamics" of the elites and is that it is not able to explain in a satisfactory way the origin of the so-called "elites". According to its definition it seems that the elites are rather the manifestation of a particular phenomenon that is "concentration of power"; A phenomenon that manifests itself socially in the form of the so-called "elite", which hereafter I call the ruling class (I think it is a terminology in which we can all agree).
    But if we assume that the dominant classes are only a manifestation of the phenomenon of the concentration of power, our attention must first be fixed in that aspect so we try to break it down into its fundamental parts
    . Apparently the concept of power gives to understand the concept of dominion (some will have other words in mind but as surely they closely resemble the concept of domain I think that it suffices to refer us to this one) and we do not refer to any type of domain but to a domain Of social nature, a social domain. We will now say that this social domain manifests itself in the form of economic and political dominion, I think we will agree on this point.
    Now let us collect the fruits of these arguments. We have a different and more precise definition, which in no way invalidates the original, and we say: The ruling class is that small proportion of the population that concentrates economic and political dominion in their hands. I believe that we will agree that economic dominance is nothing but greater possession of capital and that political dominance is but a major influence on a state structure (the word "state" is used in a modern sense).
    Now we have: the ruling class is that small proportion of the population that concentrates the greatest possession of capital and the greatest influence within a state structure in their hands. The last part of " in your hands" is understood by what we can eliminate it and we have the following:
    The ruling class is that small proportion of the population that concentrates the greatest possession of capital and the greatest influence on a state structure.
    Now the possession of capital depends on its production or of the association with someone who produces capital. And it is revealed to us that the ruling class, apart from having influence in a state structure, needs to produce capital or be associated with someone who produces capital directly or indirectly.
    Thanks to this we see clearly that competition between elites is a competition for economic benefits and influence. Obviously the economic aspect is more significant than the aspect of influence. It follows that a fall in economic profits, ie a fall in capital production (a crisis), would directly or indirectly exacerbate the competition for greater economic benefits, that is, increase the number of aspirants to elitist . The competition of elites is not the cause of the crisis is one of the consequences of the crisis.

    • Jonathan January 6, 2017 at 2:40 pm

      I must make a small correction in my analysis. By capital I wanted to let you understand profit, so the use of that term in this argument is actually inappropriate because I wanted to use the word capital in a Marxist sense.

17. Federico January 8, 2017 at 5:23 pm

    Hello Dr Turchin, I was wondering if you are familiar with Richard Lachmann's "elite conflict theory". It is a verbal theory, but one that he has successfully used to explain fiscal crises, hegemonic cycles, and the rise of modern capitalist economies. What do you think about it?
    Best,
    Federico

18. Shaun Bartone February 27, 2017 at 3:47 pm

    I wonder if any of the commentators here have considered that the [neoliberal] cabal now in power in the US (not elsewhere) are not in power to "take power" except for a temporary period. They don't want to run the federal government, they want to destroy it, except for the police state and the military.

    They want to eliminate the EPA, vacate the State Dept and many other Depts, except for a few high-placed cronies, wipe all financial, labour, consumer and environmental regulations off the books; eliminate or reduce to a bare minimum federal health insurance, medicaid, medicare and Social Security, crush public education, privatize everything they can sell, and so on. They are not in power to "govern" but to destroy government. This is all being done with a fairly unified agenda: to free "the market" from any restrictions whatsoever, so that they -- global elites -- can make as much money as possible. It's a cabal of global corporations, militarists, Christian sovereign white supremacists, fossil fuel giants and bankers, and I think there's a high degree of cooperation for the agenda. The revolution is the cabal run by Trump/Bannon who are more extreme and ideological than any previous faction, who have no tolerance for compromise. They have an apocalyptic vision of grinding it all down to a bare minimum police state.

[Sep 25, 2020] Secret Report Exposes CIA's Brennan Overruled Dissenting Analysts Who Concluded Russia Favored Hillary by Paul Sperry

When intelligence honchos became politicians the shadow of Lavrentiy Beria emerge behind them. while politization of FBI create political police like Gestapo, politization of CIA is much more serious and dangerous. It creates really tight control over the country by shadow intelligence agency. In a sense CIA and the cornerstone of the "deep state"

Sep 25, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClearInvestigations.com,

Former CIA Director John Brennan personally edited a crucial section of the intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and assigned a political ally to take a lead role in writing it after career analysts disputed Brennan's take that Russian leader Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump clinch the White House, according to two senior U.S. intelligence officials who have seen classified materials detailing Brennan's role in drafting the document.

John Brennan, left, with Robert Mueller in 2013: The CIA director's explosive conclusion in the ICA helped justify continuing Trump-Russia "collusion" investigations, notably Mueller's probe as special counsel. AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews

The explosive conclusion Brennan inserted into the report was used to help justify continuing the Trump-Russia "collusion" investigation, which had been launched by the FBI in 2016. It was picked up after the election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in the end found no proof that Trump or his campaign conspired with Moscow.

The Obama administration publicly released a declassified version of the report -- known as the "Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections (ICA)" -- just two weeks before Trump took office, casting a cloud of suspicion over his presidency. Democrats and national media have cited the report to suggest Russia influenced the 2016 outcome and warn that Putin is likely meddling again to reelect Trump.

The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham's ongoing investigation into the origins of the "collusion" probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were juiced for political purposes.

RealClearInvestigations has learned that one of the CIA operatives who helped Brennan draft the ICA, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, financially supported Hillary Clinton during the campaign and is a close colleague of Eric Ciaramella, identified last year by RCI as the Democratic national security "whistleblower" whose complaint led to Trump's impeachment, ending in Senate acquittal in January.

John Durham: He is said to be using the long-hidden report on the drafting of the ICA as a road map in his investigation of whether the Obama administration politicized intelligence. Department of Justice via AP

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The two officials said Brennan, who openly supported Clinton during the campaign, excluded conflicting evidence about Putin's motives from the report , despite objections from some intelligence analysts who argued Putin counted on Clinton winning the election and viewed Trump as a "wild card."

The dissenting analysts found that Moscow preferred Clinton because it judged she would work with its leaders, whereas it worried Trump would be too unpredictable. As secretary of state, Clinton tried to "reset" relations with Moscow to move them to a more positive and cooperative stage, while Trump campaigned on expanding the U.S. military, which Moscow perceived as a threat.

These same analysts argued the Kremlin was generally trying to sow discord and disrupt the American democratic process during the 2016 election cycle. They also noted that Russia tried to interfere in the 2008 and 2012 races, many years before Trump threw his hat in the ring.

"They complained Brennan took a thesis [that Putin supported Trump] and decided he was going to ignore dissenting data and exaggerate the importance of that conclusion, even though they said it didn't have any real substance behind it," said a senior U.S intelligence official who participated in a 2018 review of the spycraft behind the assessment, which President Obama ordered after the 2016 election.

He elaborated that the analysts said they also came under political pressure to back Brennan's judgment that Putin personally ordered "active measures" against the Clinton campaign to throw the election to Trump, even though the underlying intelligence was "weak."

Adam Schiff: Soon after the Democrat took control of the House Intelligence Committee, its review of the drafting of the intelligence community assessment was classified and locked in a Capitol basement safe. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

The review, conducted by the House Intelligence Committee, culminated in a lengthy report that was classified and locked in a Capitol basement safe soon after Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff took control of the committee in January 2019.

The official said the committee spent more than 1,200 hours reviewing the ICA and interviewing analysts involved in crafting it, including the chief of Brennan's so-called "fusion cell," which was the interagency analytical group Obama's top spook stood up to look into Russian influence operations during the 2016 election.

Durham is said to be using the long-hidden report, which runs 50-plus pages, as a road map in his investigation of whether the Obama administration politicized intelligence while targeting the Trump campaign and presidential transition in an unprecedented investigation involving wiretapping and other secret surveillance.

The special prosecutor recently interviewed Brennan for several hours at CIA headquarters after obtaining his emails, call logs and other documents from the agency. Durham has also quizzed analysts and supervisors who worked on the ICA.

A spokesman for Brennan said that, according to Durham, he is not the target of a criminal investigation and "only a witness to events that are under review." Durham's office did not respond to requests for comment.

The senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said former senior CIA political analyst Kendall-Taylor was a key member of the team that worked on the ICA. A Brennan protégé, she donated hundreds of dollars to Clinton's 2016 campaign, federal records show. In June, she gave $250 to the Biden Victory Fund.

Andrea Kendall-Taylor: A Brennan protégé, she donated hundreds of dollars to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, and recently defended the ICA in a "60 Minutes" interview . "60 Minutes"/YouTube

Kendall-Taylor and Ciaramella entered the CIA as junior analysts around the same time and worked the Russia beat together at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. From 2015 to 2018, Kendall-Taylor was detailed to the National Intelligence Council, where she was deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. Ciaramella succeeded her in that position at NIC, a unit of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that oversees the CIA and the other intelligence agencies.

It's not clear if Ciaramella also played a role in the drafting of the January 2017 assessment. He was working in the White House as a CIA detailee at the time. The CIA declined comment.

Kendall-Taylor did not respond to requests for comment, but she recently defended the ICA as a national security expert in a CBS "60 Minutes" interview on Russia's election activities, arguing it was a slam-dunk case "based on a large body of evidence that demonstrated not only what Russia was doing, but also its intent. And it's based on a number of different sources, collected human intelligence, technical intelligence."

But the secret congressional review details how the ICA, which was hastily put together over 30 days at the direction of Obama intelligence czar James Clapper, did not follow longstanding rules for crafting such assessments. It was not farmed out to other key intelligence agencies for their input, and did not include an annex for dissent, among other extraordinary departures from past tradecraft.

Eric Ciaramella: The Democratic national security "whistleblower," whose complaint led to President Trump's impeachment, was a close colleague of Kendall-Taylor. It's not clear if Ciaramella also played a role in the drafting of the January 2017 assessment. whitehouse.gov

It did, however, include a two-page annex summarizing allegations from a dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. His claim that Putin had personally ordered cyberattacks on the Clinton campaign to help Trump win happened to echo the key finding of the ICA that Brennan supported. Brennan had briefed Democratic senators about allegations from the dossier on Capitol Hill.

"Some of the FBI source's [Steele's] reporting is consistent with the judgment in the assessment," stated the appended summary, which the two intelligence sources say was written by Brennan loyalists.

"The FBI source claimed, for example, that Putin ordered the influence effort with the aim of defeating Secretary Clinton, whom Putin 'feared and hated.' "

Steele's reporting has since been discredited by the Justice Department's inspector general as rumor-based opposition research on Trump paid for by the Clinton campaign. Several allegations have been debunked, even by Steele's own primary source, who confessed to the FBI that he ginned the rumors up with some of his Russian drinking buddies to earn money from Steele.

Former FBI Director James Comey told the Justice Department's watchdog that the Steele material, which he referred to as the "Crown material," was incorporated with the ICA because it was "corroborative of the central thesis of the assessment "The IC analysts found it credible on its face," Comey said.

Christopher Steele: His dossier allegations were summarized in a two-page annex to the ICA, but dissenting views about the Kremlin's favoring Hillary Clinton over Trump were excluded. Victoria Jones/PA via AP

The officials who have read the secret congressional report on the ICA dispute that. They say a number of analysts objected to including the dossier, arguing it was political innuendo and not sound intelligence.

"The staff report makes it fairly clear the assessment was politicized and skewed to discredit Trump's election," said the second U.S. intelligence source, who also requested anonymity.

Kendall-Taylor denied any political bias factored into the intelligence.

"To suggest that there was political interference in that process is ridiculous," she recently told NBC News.

Her boss during the ICA's drafting was CIA officer Julia Gurganus. Clapper tasked Gurganus, then detailed to NIC as its national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, with coordinating the production of the ICA with Kendall-Taylor.

They, in turn, worked closely with NIC's cybersecurity expert Vinh Nguyen, who had been consulting with Democratic National Committee cybersecurity contractor CrowdStrike to gather intelligence on the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer system. (CrowdStrike's president has testified he couldn't say for sure Russian intelligence stole DNC emails, according to recently declassified transcripts.)

Durham's investigators have focused on people who worked at NIC during the drafting of the ICA, according to recent published reports.

No Input From CIA's 'Russia House'

The senior official who identified Kendall-Taylor said Brennan did not seek input from experts from CIA's so-called Russia House, a department within Langley officially called the Center for Europe and Eurasia, before arriving at the conclusion that Putin meddled in the election to benefit Trump.

"It was not an intelligence assessment. It was not coordinated in the [intelligence] community or even with experts in Russia House," the official said. "It was just a small group of people selected and driven by Brennan himself and Brennan did the editing."

The official noted that National Security Agency analysts also dissented from the conclusion that Putin personally sought to tilt the scale for Trump. One of only three agencies from the 17-agency intelligence community invited to participate in the ICA, the NSA had a lower level of confidence than the CIA and FBI, specifically on that bombshell conclusion.

The official said the NSA's departure was significant because the agency monitors the communications of Russian officials overseas. Yet it could not corroborate Brennan's preferred conclusion through its signals intelligence. Former NSA Director Michael Rogers, who has testified that the conclusion about Putin and Trump "didn't have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources," reportedly has been cooperating with Durham's probe.

The second senior intelligence official, who has read a draft of the still-classified House Intelligence Committee review, confirmed that career intelligence analysts complained that the ICA was tightly controlled and manipulated by Brennan, who previously worked in the Obama White House.

N

Brennan's tight control over the process of drafting the ICA belies public claims the assessment reflected the "consensus of the entire intelligence community." His unilateral role also raises doubts about the objectivity of the intelligence.

In his defense, Brennan has pointed to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report that found "no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community's conclusions."

"The ICA correctly found the Russians interfered in our 2016 election to hurt Secretary Clinton and help the candidacy of Donald Trump," argued committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va.

"Our review of the highly classified ICA and underlying intelligence found that this and other conclusions were well-supported," Warner added.

"There is certainly no reason to doubt that the Russians' success in 2016 is leading them to try again in 2020, and we must not be caught unprepared."

Brennan, ex-Obama homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco and ex-national intelligence director James Clapper, interviewed by Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC, right, at a 2018 Aspen Instutute event. Aspen Institute

However, the report completely blacks out a review of the underlying evidence to support the Brennan-inserted conclusion, including an entire section labeled "Putin Ordered Campaign to Influence U.S. Election." Still, it suggests elsewhere that conclusions are supported by intelligence with "varying substantiation" and with "differing confidence levels." It also notes "concerns about the use of specific sources."

Adding to doubts, the committee relied heavily on the closed-door testimony of former Obama homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, a close Brennan ally who met with Brennan and his "fusion team" at the White House before and after the election. The extent of Monaco's role in the ICA is unclear.

Brennan last week pledged he would cooperate with two other Senate committees investigating the origins of the Russia "collusion" investigation. The Senate judiciary and governmental affairs panels recently gained authority to subpoena Brennan and other witnesses to testify.

Several Republican lawmakers and former Trump officials are clamoring for the declassification and release of the secret House staff report on the ICA.

"It's dynamite," said former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, who reviewed the staff report while serving as chief of staff to then-National Security Adviser John Bolton.

"There are things in there that people don't know," he told RCI.

"It will change the dynamic of our understanding of Russian meddling in the election."

However, according to the intelligence official who worked on the ICA review, Brennan ensured that it would be next to impossible to declassify his sourcing for the key judgment on Putin. He said Brennan hid all sources and references to the underlying intelligence behind a highly sensitive and compartmented wall of classification.

He explained that he and Clapper created two classified versions of the ICA – a highly restricted Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information version that reveals the sourcing, and a more accessible Top Secret version that omits details about the sourcing.

Unless the classification of compartmented findings can be downgraded, access to Brennan's questionable sourcing will remain highly restricted, leaving the underlying evidence conveniently opaque, the official said.

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  NoDebt , 1 hour ago

  The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham's ongoing investigation into the origins of the "collusion" probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were juiced for political purposes.

  No, you think? We fought all of WWII in less time than it takes to make the first indictments of these ******* traitors. And that assumes they will happen EVENTUALLY, which they won't.

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  NoDebt , 1 hour ago

  Used to be it would take somewhere from a couple months to a couple years for conspiracy theory to be proven conspiracy fact around here.

  Now it's four years and counting. Pretty soon it will be a decade or more. Then.... who really cares? Once you've successfully stretched something out that long who really gives a **** anyway?

  If the government finally admitted that Oswald didn't really shoot JFK and that it was some CIA ***** from the grassy knoll, would you really care at this point? If the government admitted that there really were aliens in Area 51, would your world really be rocked by that revelation at this point? Something a little more contemporary, you say? Fine. What about WTC 7? If conspiracy theories were all confirmed on that one would you really have a hard time sleeping tonight?

  On a long enough timeline everyone stops giving a **** about the truth.

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  Md4 , 2 hours ago

  " The explosive conclusion Brennan inserted into the report was used to help justify continuing the Trump-Russia "collusion" investigation, which had been launched by the FBI in 2016. It was picked up after the election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in the end found no proof that Trump or his campaign conspired with Moscow."

  While wasting thirty million dollars...and two focking years of our lives...

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  NoDebt , 1 hour ago

  It's not even done yet, man. Clock is still running. Four years and counting, end to end. If Trump gets a second term, eight years, minimum. And as he leaves office they will still be threatening indictments "any day now". And nobody will even remember why any of this started, nor care.

  I already don't care.

  
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  Politinaut , 46 minutes ago

  Brennan and all of those involved, must pay.

  z530 , 57 minutes ago

  Unless the classification of compartmented findings can be downgraded, access to Brennan's questionable sourcing will remain highly restricted, leaving the underlying evidence conveniently opaque, the official said.

  Complete 100% ********. Trump can declassify anything he wants, at anytime, for any reason. If I were him, I would order everything related to Crossfire declassified tomorrow, sit back and watch the fireworks.

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  wee-weed up , 1 hour ago

  Brennan is TRUE deep-state scum.

  My most fervent desire is to see that holier-than-thou...

  lyin' Obozo-Hitlery protector, frog marched...

  straight to prison on national TV...

  And then forced to sing like a Canary.
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  Md4 , 1 hour ago

  "He explained that he and Clapper created two classified versions of the ICA – a highly restricted Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information version that reveals the sourcing, and a more accessible Top Secret version that omits details about the sourcing.

  Unless the classification of compartmented findings can be downgraded, access to Brennan's questionable sourcing will remain highly restricted, leaving the underlying evidence conveniently opaque, the official said."

  One of the most important objectives going forward from all this... has to be the dismantling of the whole apparatus of security classification.

  All of it must be overhauled and restructured.

  We simply cannot have a regime of intelligence security so rigorous, as to be clearly used as a means of tyrannizing the very nation it's supposed to serve.

  No enemy on earth is worth that...

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  bkwaz4 , 1 hour ago

  Rational people have always understood that any Russian or Chinese meddling in the 2016 election was done to get Hillary elected so that influence could be purchased through the Clinton Foundation.

  The criminals involved need to be executed.

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  Max21c , 1 hour ago

  So its the usual situ of all lies and distortions and more lies on top of still more lies... all more lies made up by the secret police and Washington Gestapo...

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  St. TwinkleToes , 1 hour ago

  It's a small circle of friends at CIA with Brennan protégé, Andrea Kendall-Taylor and NSA with Eric Ciaramella, the Democratic national security "whistleblower," who are sleeping with their bosses for advancement and or given head service to closet LGBTiQNPWXYZ government heads.

  Their job literally "sucks" in order to exist.

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  mikka , 2 hours ago

  When this sort of thing happens in Russia, China etc., there is a purge, because the country is more important than its actors. Not in USSA: because of the so called "democracy", the usurpers get away with it, allowing them not only to survive but also to try again when conditions improve.

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  Max21c , 31 minutes ago

  It is interesting to see some of the criminal activities of the rats, vermin, and scum in the CIA Gestapo & FBI Gestapo and Pentagon Gestapo possibly coming to light... One or two rays of light and all the cockroaches in the criminal gangs of "national security" and the state security apparatus of the banana republic and police state start scurrying about in a frenzy for awhile...

  
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  Max21c , 47 minutes ago

  Notice how all these Nazis and NeoNazis such as Brennan, Steele, Clapper, Schiff, Warner, Lisa Monaco, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Eric Ciaramella, James Comey, Julia Gurganus, Vinh Nguyen, Obama, Biden, Clinton are all elite gangsters, crooks, criminals and hoodlums with ties to the Ivy League, CNN, MSNBC, CBS 60 Minutes, the Aspen Institute, the secret police community, the Gestapo community, the intelligence community, the CFR, Elite Think Tanks, the puppet press and official media and numerous other parts of the criminal underworld of Washingtonian and their secret police & NeoNazi Gestapo...

  They're all just gangsters like in any third world banana republic and police state... just like all the rest of the goons and thugs and criminals in Washington DC..

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  GoldHermit , 58 minutes ago

  If Brennan is not public enemy number one, he's certainly in the top 5.

  Max21c , 45 minutes ago

  Washington DC runs thick with animals and gangsters just like Brennan... he's common to the criminal culture of the US government and the criminal culture and criminal nature of US government officials and Washingtonians... They're all the same and they're all Nazis and NeoNazis... US elites and Washingtonians are no different than the Soviet KGB, East German Stasi, Nazi Gestapo or Nazi Waffen SS... just a pack of criminals the rob, terrorize and persecute people... US government is just one big criminal network and crime syndicate... all they do is rob people, cheat people, persecute people and terrorize people... It's a Washingtonian thing and a US government thing...

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  rtb61 , 1 hour ago

  Of course the Russian government favoured the Clintons, they had a ton of evidence of corruption on them, they released that tape to prove it to them. They know every single little thing the Klinton Krime Klan did in the Ukraine, everything, they had them cold, anything they wanted the Clintons would have complied, they still would of course have demanded to be paid.

  Right now both China and Russia prefer the Clinton Corporation Party, they are much easier to pay off. Too many heads in the Republican Party, too many pay offs, much easier with the Clinton Foundation Party, the party the Klinton Krime Klan sold to the corporations, calling it the Democrats is a lie, it is the Clinton Foundation Party, selling governments to the highest bidder not just yours but with regime change any country you choose.

  It all keeps coming out for political theatre but yet, no even a hint of an arrest let alone an actual prosecution. Good for votes from the stupids I suppose.

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  williambanzai7 , 1 hour ago

  Brennan is a moron. A moron who takes orders from a gaggle of Marxists and a Former Nazi.

  TahoeBilly2012 , 1 hour ago

  His little fake aristocratic tone is hilarious. As if a muslim Irish American was some sort of delicate flower.

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  Patmos , 14 minutes ago

  Tragically ironic how the CIA has in large part become the thing it was at least in theory supposed to help protect against: Tyranny.

  
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  Soloamber , 34 minutes ago

  Isn't it ironic that a report covering a political coup on a presidential campaign and subsequent attack on an

  elected President can't be divulged because it is considered "political ".

  Durham reports to Barr and they know the truth will never come to light if Biden wins .

  What they choose to ignore is they work for and are obligated to protect the public interest .

  Not the Democrats , not the Republicans .

  It's either that or they are just protecting their old boy netwirk .

  Take your pick .

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  Md4 , 2 hours ago

  "The Obama administration publicly released a declassified version of the report -- known as the "Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections (ICA)" -- just two weeks before Trump took office, casting a cloud of suspicion over his presidency. Democrats and national media have cited the report to suggest Russia influenced the 2016 outcome and warn that Putin is likely meddling again to reelect Trump.

  The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham's ongoing investigation into the origins of the "collusion" probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were juiced for political purposes."

  Or... outright lies known by Blo to be lies?

  Sounds like conjured red meat deliberately fed to the leftist House machine...

  
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  ComradePuff , 10 minutes ago

  When I was getting my masters in 2017 at MGIMO, my instructors were as often diplomats and politicians as they were professors. One, a member of Duma, told us that it was funny they way the Americans were spinning the collusion angle, because the general consensus at the Kremlin was that Clinton was preferable to Trump as she was known and they understood how to deal with her, while Trump seemed like a loose cannon. I was the only American in the class (in the whole school at that point) and he was not even talking to me, so clearly this was just general knowledge here.

  edit: The CIA must suck at their jobs if there was disagreement, because I learned that in the first week without using a single bribe, rent boy, honey trap or fake mustache. That or the CIA just lies, as they do with everything else. Most likely a mix of both.

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  amanfromMars , 40 minutes ago

  Have you ever thought on what kind of vital explosive intelligence, on the extremely precarious state of the certainly not United States of America, the likes of a Russia or a China receives whenever they can freely read, listen and see any/all of the fabricated tales and phantom trails fed to media main streams ...... for, of course, they would know immediately whenever such is reported and widely shared, it be wilfully untrue and decidedly designedly false ..... and they be confronted by weak pathological liars in international executive offices of a failed state, or a rapidly failing state in well self-publicised terminal decline ..... for a fast approaching resulting death by suicide ‽ .

  And what does it also tell one and all about the equally perverse and parlous state of the national intelligence quotient of Five Eyes allies, whenever they be by virtue of either their unquestioning support or deafening silence on such matters, no more than co-conspirators on a similar sinister path.

  Are they themselves incapable of better thinking for greater tinkering? Do they need it to be freely provided by ..... well, what would they be? Private Contractors/Pirate Operations/Alien Facilities/Out of this World Utilities?

  You can surely be in no doubt that they certainly need something radically different, considering the plain enough, destructive path that they be currently on, using what they presently have.

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  Soloamber , 48 minutes ago

  Clintons . They already had a business relationship .

  Clintons pay to play was well known .

  Strange how "donations " have dropped 90% after she blew the election .

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  Mini-Me , 2 hours ago

  When does Durham get off his arse and do his damn job?