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www.nakedcapitalism.com
VatchroadriderJKF? I didn't know that the historian John King Fairbank was assassinated.
skkThen I guess you have solid evidence to account for the actions of Allen Dulles, David Atlee Phillips, William Harvey, David Morales, E. Howard Hunt, Richard Helms, James Angleton and other CIA personnel and assets who had
1) perhaps the strongest motives to murder Kennedy
2) the means to carry out the crime, namely, their executive action (assassination) capability and blackmail the government into aiding their cover up and
3) the opportunity to carry out such a plan given their complete lack of accountability to the rest of the government and their unmatched expertise in lying, deceit, secrecy, fraud.
Because if you actually took the time to research or at least read about their actions in this matter instead of just spouting bald assertions that you decline to back up with any facts you would find their behavior nearly impossible to explain other than having at, the very least, guilty knowledge of the crime.
skkRuby claimed he was injected with cancer in jail, which ultimately rendered his second trial (after winning appeal overturning his death sentence) moot. It sounded crazy, but so did the motive proffered at his first trial-- that he wanted to save Mrs. Kennedy the anguish...
that is such an amazing story.. i've yet to watch the video of Lyndon Johnson's swearing in - where Marr states he's seen to be winking and smiling etc -
Jim Marrs - Kennedy Assassination Lecturethose who wish - Pick it up at around 12 minutes. actually in that lecture he may well be showing videos of it - I wdn't know cos just listen to the audio.
JFK is the one 'safe' conspiracy to talk about without getting the extreme whacko label.
fascinating "lectures" - British Humanist Society and all - still you gotta listen to everything especially the other side:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/V6s_Jw3RU9g?feature=oembed&wmode=opaque&list=PL44BEE83ED9D841A8Make a note of the names - rising stars in the I'm "left" but I'm not a conspiracist gaggle - ist a standard gaggle - Chomsky, Monbiot are in it ( to win it of course - their fabled "socialist" kingdom" ) - yeah yeah its BritLand so yeah why I care I suppose.
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Economist's View
Friction is now between global financial elite and the rest of us, The Guardian:
... ... ...
But the standard explanation, as well as the standard debate, overlooks the increasing concentration of political power in a corporate and financial elite that has been able to influence the rules by which the economy runs. ...
Dan Kervick said...
"This means that the fracture in politics will move from left to right to the anti-establishment versus establishment."
I think this is probably right, but the established parties are doing their best to prevent it. Each of them has an interest in continuing to divide people along various cultural, religious and ethnic identity lines in order to prevent them from achieving any kind of effective solidarity along class lines.
Anyway, I fear we may be headed toward a turbulent and very unpleasant future.
Kenneth D said...
"Rethinking the Global Political Economy" By Jeff Faux April 24, 2002
In most cases, international agreements are negotiated by elites that have more in common with each other than with working people in the countries that they represent. As a retired U.S. State Department official put it to me bluntly a few years ago, "What you don't understand," he said, "is that when we negotiate economic agreements with these poorer countries, we are negotiating with people from the same class. That is, people whose interests are like ours – on the side of capital."
Accordingly, the fundamental purpose of the neo-liberal polices of the past 20 years has been to discipline labor in order to free capital from having to bargain with workers over the gains from rising productivity.
But labor is typically at a disadvantage because it usually bargains under conditions of excess supply of unemployed workers. Moreover, the forced liberalization of finance and trade provides enormous bargaining leverage to capital, because it can now threaten to leave the economy altogether.
Moreover, unregulated globalization in one stroke puts government's domestic policies decisively on the side of capital. In an economy that is growing based on its domestic market, rising wages help everyone because they increase purchasing power and consumer demand – which is the major driver of economic growth in a modern economy. But in an economy whose growth depends on foreign markets, rising domestic wages are a problem, because they add to the burden of competing internationally.
Both the international financial institutions and the WTO have powers to enforce protection of investors' rights among nations, the former through the denial of financing, the latter through trade sanctions. But the institution charged with protecting workers' rights – the International Labor Organization (ILO) – has no enforcement power.
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derinsular.com
This paper argues that Mancur Olson's theory of distributional coalitions largely explains this network's raison d'être. The paper first outlines the main tenets of the theory, and then examines the historical roots of the Turkish deep state, as well as the paradigm shift its exposure caused in the public opinion. The network's
- exclusive character,
- impacts on the workings of the Turkish society, and finally
- efforts to sustain its dominating influence, which is manifested especially in its attempts to reverse the country's democratization process,
demonstrate that the emergence, influence, and the incentives of the Turkish deep state confirm the fundamental assumptions of Olson's theory.
The Theory of Distributional Coalitions Mancur Olson's theory of distributional coalitions holds that, as societies establish themselves, group interests become more identifiable, and subsets of the society organize in an effort to secure these interests. Since these interests are best served by coordinated action, institutions emerge. Yet, such institutions tend to be exclusive by nature, and pursue only the interests of their own members, who account to a very small minority.
This exclusivity factor is of special importance in the way these rent-seeking (or special-interest) groups operate, since, unlike highly-encompassing organizations, exclusive organizations do not have an incentive to increase the productivity of the society. This is due to the disproportion between the sizes of the exclusive organization and the population. To use Olson's idiom, such organizations are in a position either to make larger the pie the society produces or to obtain larger slices for their members.
"Our intuition tells us," Olson says, "that the first method will rarely be chosen."2 Because, on the one hand, it is very costly to increase the productivity of society as a whole, and on the other, even if this is achieved, the The Rise and Decline of the Turkish "Deep State": The Ergenekon Case 101 members of the minuscule organization will accordingly reap only a minuscule portion of the benefits.
Therefore, exclusive groups aim to present their own interests as being the interests of their constituencies, and to use all of their organizational power for collective action in that direction.
That is still the case even when the organization's cost to the society is significantly more than the benefits it seeks for its members. Such behavior is not at all unexpected of exclusive organizations, since it is the very policy of exclusion itself that enables the group to distribute more to its members.In that respect, disproportional allocation of resources goes hand in hand with barriers to entry into the favored areas of the special-interest group.
Yet the existence of barriers to entry further damages the society by reducing the economic growth.
When coupled with the interferences of the special-interest groups with the possibilities of change in the existing state of affairs, the level of the reduction in economic growth can be large.
In order to achieve their goals, special-interest groups engage in lobbying activities and collusion – both of which, by creating special provisions and exceptions, further increase not only inefficiency but also (1) the complexity of regulation, (2) the scope of government, and (3) the complexity of understandings.
The Formation and the Evolution of the Turkish Deep State The genesis of the Turkish deep state is traceable to the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti), a secret society founded in Istanbul in 1889 by a group of medical students who had a passion for reform in the Ottoman Empire.3 The CUP organized so extensively that, in less than two decades, it became a revolutionary political organization with branches inside and outside the Ottoman Empire.4 Within the organization existed numerous factions, and the body of membership was ethnically and even ideologically diverse.
Yet it was the commonly-shared goal of changing the regime rather than conformity that bound the members together, and they successfully achieved that goal with the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which restored the Constitution of 1876 (Kanun-ı Esasi) that restricted the powers of the Sultan, and made the Ottoman Empire a constitutional monarchy again after 32 years of absolutism.
The genesis of the Turkish deep state is traceable to the Committee of Union and Progress, a secret society founded in Istanbul in 1889 by a group of medical students who had a passion for reform in the Ottoman Empire SERDAR KAYA 102 What makes the CUP extraordinary as a case is that it never fully transformed into a genuine political party even after the revolution it brought about.
Instead, it continued to operate as the secret committee it always was.5 Back then, in reference to this fact, some of the critics of the CUP had coined the phrase "invisible people" (rical-i gayb).6 In the end, this code of conduct rendered the committee as a clandestine force that exerted influence by informal means in order to change the course of affairs the way it saw fit.
The reflections of that proclivity are traceable in many of the major occurrences of the time.
In what is today commonly referred to as the coup of 1913, for example, a group of CUP operatives broke into the Sublime Porte as the Cabinet was in session, murdered the minister of defense and two prominent government officials, and forced the Grand Vizier, the head of the Cabinet, to resign immediately.
The coup of 1913 is also important in that it set a precedent in the country for military interventions and ultimatums, the latest of which occurred on April 27, 2007.
A second example to the code of conduct of the CUP may be the clandestine activities of the Special Organization7 (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa).
Although the CUP established the Special Organization in 1913, ten months after the coup of 1913, it was in fact the continuation of the Fedaiin, the secret organization the CUP established in 1905 – that is, before the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.
The CUP used the Fedaiin to have its political opponents assassinated, among other things, and later on, employed the Special Organization in the mass killings of the Ottoman- Armenians in 1915.8 The CUP disbanded in 1918, a year that also marked the beginning of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.
However, many of its members as well as the political culture it created survived within the Republic of Turkey.
To this day, "Unionism" (İttihatçılık) has persisted in the political culture of Turkey, and has manifested itself primarily in (1) ultranationalism, (2) military involvement/ intervention in politics, and (3) justification of extrajudicial activities and violence in the name of the fatherland (vatan).
Nevertheless, different aspects of this political culture have gained primacy in different periods, and with the influence of the changes in the domestic and international conjuncture, it more or less evolved. For example, during the One Party Era (1925-45), the influence of interwarperiod fascism further radicalized the nationalist ideology of the ruling cadre. Then, in the 1960s, variations of the same Unionist background found expression The Rise and Decline of the Turkish "Deep State": The Ergenekon Case 103 in the rightist and leftist political movements, which, unsurprisingly, entered into violent conflict in the 1970s.
In the mid-1980s, the Kurdish question reemerged with the terrorist activities of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the separatist guerilla group, which became a source of instability in the southeast region of the country, and in so doing, provided a new fertile ground for the clandestine operations of the Turkish deep state.
Of particular importance among these clandestine operations were those by the Gendarmarie Intelligence and Counter-terror Unit (JİTEM, Jandarma İstihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele), which is allegedly responsible for thousands of extrajudicial executions and assassinations of PKK sympathizers and supporters.
Yet the same decade also marked the time period in which Turkey opened its borders and started to integrate with the rest of the world. As a result, after the 1980s, new social, political and economic perspectives started to emerge. However, this new West that Turkey came to closer contact with during and after the 1980s was fundamentally different from the West of the interwar period in that the former was democratic, and the latter fascist.
The increasing interaction with the West did not instantly trigger the demands for democratization in the country. It was the Susurluk scandal and a combination of other events that occurred approximately a decade later that started to dramatically shift the prevalant paradigms. On the one hand, these experiences created a more profound societal cognizance of questioning authority, and on the other, in line with these experiences, people came to attach new meanings to the nature of the state-society relations in Turkey in a manner which provided a more convenient ground for the democratization process in the country.
Apparently, these paradigm shifts also coincided with the developments since the Helsinki European Council of 1999, where the European Union (EU) formally referred to Turkey as a candidate and thus invigorated the country's accession process.
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February 21, 2014 | billmoyers.com
Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo.
– The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade (1871)
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. [1]
During the last five years, the news media has been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On one level, the critique is self-evident: In the domain that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.
Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country…As I wrote in The Party is Over, the present objective of congressional Republicans is to render the executive branch powerless, at least until a Republican president is elected (a goal that voter suppression laws in GOP-controlled states are clearly intended to accomplish). President Obama cannot enact his domestic policies and budgets: Because of incessant GOP filibustering, not only could he not fill the large number of vacancies in the federal judiciary, he could not even get his most innocuous presidential appointees into office. Democrats controlling the Senate have responded by weakening the filibuster of nominations, but Republicans are sure to react with other parliamentary delaying tactics. This strategy amounts to congressional nullification of executive branch powers by a party that controls a majority in only one house of Congress.
Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented - at least since the McCarthy era - witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called "Insider Threat Program"). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions - with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either - even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.
These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi's regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country's intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.
Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an "establishment." All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State's protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude. [2]
How did I come to write an analysis of the Deep State, and why am I equipped to write it? As a congressional staff member for 28 years specializing in national security and possessing a top secret security clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the world I am describing, if neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by psychological disposition. But, like virtually every employed person, I became, to some extent, assimilated into the culture of the institution I worked for, and only by slow degrees, starting before the invasion of Iraq, did I begin fundamentally to question the reasons of state that motivate the people who are, to quote George W. Bush, "the deciders."
Reactions: Andrew Bacevich on Washington's Tacit Consensus
Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called "groupthink," the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town's cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. Government life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it's 11:00 in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of takeout pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one's consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: "You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?" No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes: Unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, growing immune to the curiousness of one's surroundings is easy. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn't know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it.
The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State's emissaries.
I saw this submissiveness on many occasions. One memorable incident was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. This legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration's illegal and unconstitutional surveillance first revealed by The New York Times in 2005 and indemnified the telecommunications companies for their cooperation in these acts. The bill passed easily: All that was required was the invocation of the word "terrorism" and most members of Congress responded like iron filings obeying a magnet. One who responded in that fashion was Senator Barack Obama, soon to be coronated as the presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. He had already won the most delegates by campaigning to the left of his main opponent, Hillary Clinton, on the excesses of the global war on terror and the erosion of constitutional liberties.
As the indemnification vote showed, the Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called "private enterprise" is an integral part of its operations. In a special series in The Washington Post called "Top Secret America," Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which it has metastasized after the September 11 attacks. There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances - a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: Since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons - about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community's budget goes to paying contracts. And the membrane between government and industry is highly permeable: The Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government's largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell, is the current vice chairman of the same company; Booz Allen is 99 percent dependent on government business. These contractors now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings.
Reactions: Danielle Brian on Legalized Corruption
Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater. Should the politicians forget their lines and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own best interests. The executives of the financial giants even have de facto criminal immunity. On March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder stated the following: "I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy." This, from the chief law enforcement officer of a justice system that has practically abolished the constitutional right to trial for poorer defendants charged with certain crimes. It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice - certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee. [3]The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a well trodden highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and many others. Not all the traffic involves persons connected with the purely financial operations of the government: In 2013, General David Petraeus joined KKR (formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) of 9 West 57th Street, New York, a private equity firm with $62.3 billion in assets. KKR specializes in management buyouts and leveraged finance. General Petraeus' expertise in these areas is unclear. His ability to peddle influence, however, is a known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus, the military commanders of the Deep State do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword. Petraeus also obtained a sinecure as a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The Ivy League is, of course, the preferred bleaching tub and charm school of the American oligarchy. [4]
Petraeus and most of the avatars of the Deep State - the White House advisers who urged Obama not to impose compensation limits on Wall Street CEOs, the contractor-connected think tank experts who besought us to "stay the course" in Iraq, the economic gurus who perpetually demonstrate that globalization and deregulation are a blessing that makes us all better off in the long run - are careful to pretend that they have no ideology. Their preferred pose is that of the politically neutral technocrat offering well considered advice based on profound expertise. That is nonsense. They are deeply dyed in the hue of the official ideology of the governing class, an ideology that is neither specifically Democrat nor Republican. Domestically, whatever they might privately believe about essentially diversionary social issues such as abortion or gay marriage, they almost invariably believe in the "Washington Consensus": financialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and the commodifying of labor. Internationally, they espouse 21st-century "American Exceptionalism": the right and duty of the United States to meddle in every region of the world with coercive diplomacy and boots on the ground and to ignore painfully won international norms of civilized behavior. To paraphrase what Sir John Harrington said more than 400 years ago about treason, now that the ideology of the Deep State has prospered, none dare call it ideology. [5] That is why describing torture with the word "torture" on broadcast television is treated less as political heresy than as an inexcusable lapse of Washington etiquette: Like smoking a cigarette on camera, these days it is simply "not done."
Reactions: Heidi Boghosian on Mass Surveillance
After Edward Snowden's revelations about the extent and depth of surveillance by the National Security Agency, it has become publicly evident that Silicon Valley is a vital node of the Deep State as well. Unlike military and intelligence contractors, Silicon Valley overwhelmingly sells to the private market, but its business is so important to the government that a strange relationship has emerged. While the government could simply dragoon the high technology companies to do the NSA's bidding, it would prefer cooperation with so important an engine of the nation's economy, perhaps with an implied quid pro quo. Perhaps this explains the extraordinary indulgence the government shows the Valley in intellectual property matters. If an American "jailbreaks" his smartphone (i.e., modifies it so that it can use a service provider other than the one dictated by the manufacturer), he could receive a fine of up to $500,000 and several years in prison; so much for a citizen's vaunted property rights to what he purchases. The libertarian pose of the Silicon Valley moguls, so carefully cultivated in their public relations, has always been a sham. Silicon Valley has long been tracking for commercial purposes the activities of every person who uses an electronic device, so it is hardly surprising that the Deep State should emulate the Valley and do the same for its own purposes. Nor is it surprising that it should conscript the Valley's assistance.
Still, despite the essential roles of lower Manhattan and Silicon Valley, the center of gravity of the Deep State is firmly situated in and around the Beltway. The Deep State's physical expansion and consolidation around the Beltway would seem to make a mockery of the frequent pronouncement that governance in Washington is dysfunctional and broken. That the secret and unaccountable Deep State floats freely above the gridlock between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the paradox of American government in the 21st century: drone strikes, data mining, secret prisons and Panopticon-like control on the one hand; and on the other, the ordinary, visible parliamentary institutions of self-government declining to the status of a banana republic amid the gradual collapse of public infrastructure.
The results of this contradiction are not abstract, as a tour of the rotting, decaying, bankrupt cities of the American Midwest will attest. It is not even confined to those parts of the country left behind by a Washington Consensus that decreed the financialization and deindustrialization of the economy in the interests of efficiency and shareholder value. This paradox is evident even within the Beltway itself, the richest metropolitan area in the nation. Although demographers and urban researchers invariably count Washington as a "world city," that is not always evident to those who live there. Virtually every time there is a severe summer thunderstorm, tens - or even hundreds - of thousands of residents lose power, often for many days. There are occasional water restrictions over wide areas because water mains, poorly constructed and inadequately maintained, have burst. [6] The Washington metropolitan area considers it a Herculean task just to build a rail link to its international airport - with luck it may be completed by 2018.
It is as if Hadrian's Wall was still fully manned and the fortifications along the border with Germania were never stronger, even as the city of Rome disintegrates from within and the life-sustaining aqueducts leading down from the hills begin to crumble. The governing classes of the Deep State may continue to deceive themselves with their dreams of Zeus-like omnipotence, but others do not. A 2013 Pew Poll that interviewed 38,000 people around the world found that in 23 of 39 countries surveyed, a plurality of respondents said they believed China already had or would in the future replace the United States as the world's top economic power.
The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to "live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face." "Living upon its principal," in this case, means that the Deep State has been extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion.
We are faced with two disagreeable implications. First, that the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change. Second, that just as in so many previous empires, the Deep State is populated with those whose instinctive reaction to the failure of their policies is to double down on those very policies in the future. Iraq was a failure briefly camouflaged by the wholly propagandistic success of the so-called surge; this legerdemain allowed for the surge in Afghanistan, which equally came to naught. Undeterred by that failure, the functionaries of the Deep State plunged into Libya; the smoking rubble of the Benghazi consulate, rather than discouraging further misadventure, seemed merely to incite the itch to bomb Syria. Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human and material capital, is slowly exhausted? The dusty road of empire is strewn with the bones of former great powers that exhausted themselves in like manner.
Reactions: Henry Giroux on Resisting the Neoliberal Revolution
But, there are signs of resistance to the Deep State and its demands. In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the House narrowly failed to pass an amendment that would have defunded the NSA's warrantless collection of data from US persons. Shortly thereafter, the president, advocating yet another military intervention in the Middle East, this time in Syria, met with such overwhelming congressional skepticism that he changed the subject by grasping at a diplomatic lifeline thrown to him by Vladimir Putin. [7]Has the visible, constitutional state, the one envisaged by Madison and the other Founders, finally begun to reassert itself against the claims and usurpations of the Deep State? To some extent, perhaps. The unfolding revelations of the scope of the NSA's warrantless surveillance have become so egregious that even institutional apologists such as Senator Dianne Feinstein have begun to backpedal - if only rhetorically - from their knee-jerk defense of the agency. As more people begin to waken from the fearful and suggestible state that 9/11 created in their minds, it is possible that the Deep State's decade-old tactic of crying "terrorism!" every time it faces resistance is no longer eliciting the same Pavlovian response of meek obedience. And the American people, possibly even their legislators, are growing tired of endless quagmires in the Middle East.
But there is another more structural reason the Deep State may have peaked in the extent of its dominance. While it seems to float above the constitutional state, its essentially parasitic, extractive nature means that it is still tethered to the formal proceedings of governance. The Deep State thrives when there is tolerable functionality in the day-to-day operations of the federal government. As long as appropriations bills get passed on time, promotion lists get confirmed, black (i.e., secret) budgets get rubber-stamped, special tax subsidies for certain corporations are approved without controversy, as long as too many awkward questions are not asked, the gears of the hybrid state will mesh noiselessly. But when one house of Congress is taken over by tea party Wahhabites, life for the ruling class becomes more trying.
If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda. But recent congressional antics involving sequestration, the government shutdown and the threat of default over the debt ceiling extension have been disrupting that equilibrium. And an extreme gridlock dynamic has developed between the two parties such that continuing some level of sequestration is politically the least bad option for both parties, albeit for different reasons. As much as many Republicans might want to give budget relief to the organs of national security, they cannot fully reverse sequestration without the Democrats demanding revenue increases. And Democrats wanting to spend more on domestic discretionary programs cannot void sequestration on either domestic or defense programs without Republicans insisting on entitlement cuts.
So, for the foreseeable future, the Deep State must restrain its appetite for taxpayer dollars. Limited deals may soften sequestration, but agency requests will not likely be fully funded anytime soon. Even Wall Street's rentier operations have been affected: After helping finance the tea party to advance its own plutocratic ambitions, America's Big Money is now regretting the Frankenstein's monster it has created. Like children playing with dynamite, the tea party and its compulsion to drive the nation into credit default has alarmed the grown-ups commanding the heights of capital; the latter are now telling the politicians they thought they had hired to knock it off.
The House vote to defund the NSA's illegal surveillance programs was equally illustrative of the disruptive nature of the tea party insurgency. Civil liberties Democrats alone would never have come so close to victory; tea party stalwart Justin Amash (R-MI), who has also upset the business community for his debt-limit fundamentalism, was the lead Republican sponsor of the NSA amendment, and most of the Republicans who voted with him were aligned with the tea party.
The final factor is Silicon Valley. Owing to secrecy and obfuscation, it is hard to know how much of the NSA's relationship with the Valley is based on voluntary cooperation, how much is legal compulsion through FISA warrants and how much is a matter of the NSA surreptitiously breaking into technology companies' systems. Given the Valley's public relations requirement to mollify its customers who have privacy concerns, it is difficult to take the tech firms' libertarian protestations about government compromise of their systems at face value, especially since they engage in similar activity against their own customers for commercial purposes. That said, evidence is accumulating that Silicon Valley is losing billions in overseas business from companies, individuals and governments that want to maintain privacy. For high tech entrepreneurs, the cash nexus is ultimately more compelling than the Deep State's demand for patriotic cooperation. Even legal compulsion can be combatted: Unlike the individual citizen, tech firms have deep pockets and batteries of lawyers with which to fight government diktat.
This pushback has gone so far that on January 17, President Obama announced revisions to the NSA's data collection programs, including withdrawing the agency's custody of a domestic telephone record database, expanding requirements for judicial warrants and ceasing to spy on (undefined) "friendly foreign leaders." Critics have denounced the changes as a cosmetic public relations move, but they are still significant in that the clamor has gotten so loud that the president feels the political need to address it.
When the contradictions within a ruling ideology are pushed too far, factionalism appears and that ideology begins slowly to crumble. Corporate oligarchs such as the Koch brothers are no longer entirely happy with the faux-populist political front group they helped fund and groom. Silicon Valley, for all the Ayn Rand-like tendencies of its major players, its offshoring strategies and its further exacerbation of income inequality, is now lobbying Congress to restrain the NSA, a core component of the Deep State. Some tech firms are moving to encrypt their data. High tech corporations and governments alike seek dominance over people though collection of personal data, but the corporations are jumping ship now that adverse public reaction to the NSA scandals threatens their profits.
The outcome of all these developments is uncertain. The Deep State, based on the twin pillars of national security imperative and corporate hegemony, has until recently seemed unshakable and the latest events may only be a temporary perturbation in its trajectory. But history has a way of toppling the altars of the mighty. While the two great materialist and determinist ideologies of the twentieth century, Marxism and the Washington Consensus, successively decreed that the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the market were inevitable, the future is actually indeterminate. It may be that deep economic and social currents create the framework of history, but those currents can be channeled, eddied, or even reversed by circumstance, chance and human agency. We have only to reflect upon defunct glacial despotisms such as the USSR or East Germany to realize that nothing is forever.
Throughout history, state systems with outsized pretensions to power have reacted to their environments in two ways. The first strategy, reflecting the ossification of its ruling elites, consists of repeating that nothing is wrong, that the status quo reflects the nation's unique good fortune in being favored by God and that those calling for change are merely subversive troublemakers. As the French ancien régime, the Romanov dynasty and the Habsburg emperors discovered, the strategy works splendidly for a while, particularly if one has a talent for dismissing unpleasant facts. The final results, however, are likely to be thoroughly disappointing.The second strategy is one embraced to varying degrees and with differing goals, by figures of such contrasting personalities as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle and Deng Xiaoping. They were certainly not revolutionaries by temperament; if anything, their natures were conservative. But they understood that the political cultures in which they lived were fossilized and incapable of adapting to the times. In their drive to reform and modernize the political systems they inherited, their first obstacles to overcome were the outworn myths that encrusted the thinking of the elites of their time.
As the United States confronts its future after experiencing two failed wars, a precarious economy and $17 trillion in accumulated debt, the national punditry has split into two camps. The first, the declinists, sees a broken, dysfunctional political system incapable of reform and an economy soon to be overtaken by China. The second, the reformers, offers a profusion of nostrums to turn the nation around: public financing of elections to sever the artery of money between the corporate components of the Deep State and financially dependent elected officials, government "insourcing" to reverse the tide of outsourcing of government functions and the conflicts of interest that it creates, a tax policy that values human labor over financial manipulation and a trade policy that favors exporting manufactured goods over exporting investment capital.
Mike Lofgren on the Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight All of that is necessary, but not sufficient. The Snowden revelations (the impact of which have been surprisingly strong), the derailed drive for military intervention in Syria and a fractious Congress, whose dysfunction has begun to be a serious inconvenience to the Deep State, show that there is now a deep but as yet inchoate hunger for change. What America lacks is a figure with the serene self-confidence to tell us that the twin idols of national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas that have nothing more to offer us. Thus disenthralled, the people themselves will unravel the Deep State with surprising speed.
[1] The term "Deep State" was coined in Turkey and is said to be a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary and organized crime. In British author John le Carré's latest novel, A Delicate Truth, a character describes the Deep State as "… the ever-expanding circle of non-governmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of Whitehall and Westminster." I use the term to mean a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.
[2] Twenty-five years ago, the sociologist Robert Nisbet described this phenomenon as "the attribute of No Fault…. Presidents, secretaries and generals and admirals in America seemingly subscribe to the doctrine that no fault ever attaches to policy and operations. This No Fault conviction prevents them from taking too seriously such notorious foul-ups as Desert One, Grenada, Lebanon and now the Persian Gulf." To his list we might add 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
[3] The attitude of many members of Congress towards Wall Street was memorably expressed by Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, in 2010: "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."
[4] Beginning in 1988, every US president has been a graduate of Harvard or Yale. Beginning in 2000, every losing presidential candidate has been a Harvard or Yale graduate, with the exception of John McCain in 2008.
[5] In recent months, the American public has seen a vivid example of a Deep State operative marketing his ideology under the banner of pragmatism. Former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates - a one-time career CIA officer and deeply political Bush family retainer - has camouflaged his retrospective defense of military escalations that have brought us nothing but casualties and fiscal grief as the straight-from-the-shoulder memoir from a plain-spoken son of Kansas who disdains Washington and its politicians.
[6] Meanwhile, the US government took the lead in restoring Baghdad's sewer system at a cost of $7 billion.
[7] Obama's abrupt about-face suggests he may have been skeptical of military intervention in Syria all along, but only dropped that policy once Congress and Putin gave him the running room to do so. In 2009, he went ahead with the Afghanistan "surge" partly because General Petraeus' public relations campaign and back-channel lobbying on the Hill for implementation of his pet military strategy pre-empted other options. These incidents raise the disturbing question of how much the democratically elected president - or any president - sets the policy of the national security state and how much the policy is set for him by the professional operatives of that state who engineer faits accomplis that force his hand.
Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His book about Congress, The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, appeared in paperback on August 27, 2013.
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- Anonymous
Another attribute of the "Deep State" is that is highly nepotistic. Entry into it relies on connections rather than skill. Many positions within it exist simply to provide suitably lucrative work for the children of the ruling class.
- Nisswapaddy
Lofgren has certainly provided a good overview of the situation, although what he postulates is by no means original thinking. However, it is particularly heartening to have this analysis come from a fellow who could easily have sold his soul like David Petraeus, to name just one in an endless line of the well connected who have cashed in. Yet I believe our situation is more dire than even Lofgren suggests. As the philosopher John Ralston Saul characterized it, we have undergone a coup d'etat in slow motion and now live, not in a constitutional democracy but 'Democracy Inc.' (described in detail in a book by the same name by Prof. Sheldon Wolin). LIke Lofgren, neither of these thinkers sees some carefully contrived conspiracy at work. It is merely the inevitable result of following a rigid ideology that allows unfettered corporate capitalism to have its way unopposed and essentially unregulated. Now that massive corporation have taken control of all the levers of power (as Lofgren summarizes above) it will be very, very difficult for 'the people' to take them back. Remember what Upton Sinclair observed over 100 years ago:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him NOT understanding it."
I give you men like Dave Petraeus, or Jamie Dimon or (fill in the blank) who are subject to this 'lack of understanding'. They are not co-conspirators, at least not in any active, conscious sense. However, the corporations they work for, whose only function is to maximize profits for the benefit of their shareholders and investors and to 'externalize' any and all costs and expenses possible, are, by definition, sociopaths. And those corporations, run by men and women simply doing their jobs and going home to a loving family, also have a 'lack of understanding'. When the corporation you work for has only reason for being, to make a profit 'come heck or high water', and that corporation and hundreds of others with the she mission, control the executive, congress, the judiciary and their regulators (who are now required to call the corporations they supposedly regulate "their customers" ) it doesn't take much imagination to see how we got where we are. Nor how it is that corporations get what they need, the rest of us be dammed. In short, the 'deep state' Lofgren shines a light on is much deeper than he indicates. And it will take more than spats between large corporations to bring it to an end.
- William Jacoby
Good essay but everybody should know this by now. In the next elections, in which good candidates will by definition not be viable because they won't be bankrolled by the Deep State, we must use the alternative media to coalesce around a few non-negotiable demands. Things like prosecuting Clapper for lying, immediate prohibition of the intelligence community's revolving door, nationalization of companies like Booz Allen, creation of public banks as suggested by Ellen Brown and nationalization of banks too big to fail, a student loan debt strike, and a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United. Failure to grant these demands must be met with withdrawal from the two-party system; go Green or go Libertarian, whichever you prefer, but put a monkey wrench in the system. Keep using the alternative media, defend them from the Deep State, educate yourself, network with the growing numbers of people who are onto the Deep State, or the National Security State, or whatever you want to call it. But get over talking about how the Constitution is in danger; it's dead, and if there's anything you liked about it, you'll have to bring it back from the graveyard. Take action, and support others who do.
- cross1242
Unfortunately, I don't see anything changing the Deep State or the government in Washington until there is some kind of revolution. That revolution might be bloodless but nothing guarantees that. If the Deep State ultimately feels threatened, it will defend itself with all the national security forces at its command.
Yes. An example. Paper granted PhD's are "promised" suitably lucrative work in academia. So it's not just corporate.
- http://twilightirruption.blogspot.com/ abbeysbooks
Time for you to read Foucault's Discipline and Punish and all the rest of his work. Include Virilio, Baudrillard and the rest of Continental Philosophy. Lofgren is just catching up with a long way to go. Check out Zizek.
- Kibik
Look up "Bohemian Club" too.
- Peter Michaelson
The fact that an invisible government of elites is in charge of our democracy is entirely predictable. This political arrangement simply depicts the state of our psychological development. We have a "Deep State" within our unconscious mind. Our thoughts, desires, aspirations, and beliefs are all under the influence of this inner "Deep State." Through our ego we're each like a puppet prince, thinking we're in charge of the show. Both liberals and conservatives have too much invested in self-image and are afraid of facing what amounts to an inner tyranny. We're too egotistical and narcissistic; we don't want to be humbled by inner truth. We've produced superficial psychologies (behavioral, positive, cognitive, etc.) that refuse to face the inner reality. We'll have real democracy in America and the world when we establish inner democracy. It can be done, and it needs to be done soon. Start by tossing out all the so-called "scientific psychology" that academic psychologists are pedaling. Go back to Freud and understand what he's really saying, that we'll go on generating suffering and self-defeat until we become more conscious of our inner conflicts, psychological defenses, and entanglements in negative emotions.
- Anonymous
As has been mentioned the greatest power is the people. Without the cooperation of the people none of the pathological behavior described would be possible. The West Coast Strike of 1934 is an example of what can be done. A major way that the 1% control the 99% is through debt. That control could actually be reversed. What would happen if only 10% of the 99% decided to no longer to pay their debts? A movement like that could rapidly escalate once people realize that there is no system that could cope with massive non payment of debt.
What would happen if the pilots, truck drivers, rail workers and dock workers decided to strike? or the telecommunication workers? All or any of those could be implemented peacefully. No need to hit the streets. Just stay home and contribute nothing to the deep state. Imagine how long it could survive the massive non cooperation of the 99%. There is a multitude of possibilities.- Charles Shaver
'How can I thank thee [Bill Moyers], let me count the ways…' and now, too, Mike Lofgren. For some time I've been thinking that vastly superior aliens from deep space might be holding the U.S. Government hostage and causing all of the recent illegal, immoral, unconstitutional and just plain stupid national self-destruction. What a relief to learn it is only too-typical low IQ humanity that is responsible. Seriously, now, that which gives me the audacity and courage to comment on these things about which I personally know so little, is my lay acquired understanding of the basics. To me, in early 2014, these are mere, obvious, matters of the hierarchy of law, relevant laws and violations thereof.
Ignoring most of the basics and my personal lack of qualifications, suffice it to say for now that above and beyond the laws of man are those self-evident in nature. Insightfully, since August of 1975, I have observed not only do the higher laws apply to both machine and man but the U.S. Constitution is imbedded with them, intentionally or not. So, to finally get to the point, when Mike Lofgren says 'Groupthink' I think of The Universal Law of Order: "Whenever two or more individuals unite to form an organization the survival of the organization becomes paramount to the survival of the individual." and how the Constitution was ignored again. When someone says 'there's nothing I can do' I think of The Third Rule of Human Behavior: "Self-determination shall prevail." and how the Constitution was ignored again. Deep space, or 'Deep State,' it 'don't look good' for us when a vast majority keeps enabling a selfish minority to impose rule. Now, it will probably take a paradigm shift to fix what's broke but, fortunately, naturally, 'shift happens.'
- http://leisureguy.wordpress.com Leisureguy
Magnificent article-greatly extends the range of my awareness, since I was just starting to get a glimpse of this.
It should definitely be noted in the article that Senator Barack Obama pledged and promised that he would vote against telecom immunity and then he voted in favor of it. That did not auger well, albeit accurately.
- http://leisureguy.wordpress.com Leisureguy
This is why bloody revolutions happen: the course of last resort would certainly be violence, which hurts everyone. Elections were supposed to allow an orderly way to bring about change without violence, but once that mechanism is jammed and will no longer respond, violence is lapping at our heels.
- http://leisureguy.wordpress.com Leisureguy
I have the same feeling. We thought we had a mechanism that would enable us to respond to the need for revolutionary change in an orderly way, but that mechanism has been deliberately broken. That is very, very bad.
Although one must allow that much of this is driven by our deep nature: social animals acting as social animals do, with all sorts of social-driven instincts and responses. Biology is destiny?
- rleighton27
I am not part of the hallelujah chorus greeting this article. Some, if not most of it, smacks of the apologia of a professional bureaucrat who suddenly has found a conscience. Also, his claim that President Obama was itching to start a war in Syria, but was only held back from doing so by "overwhelming Congressional skepticism"…as if that wasn't a daily occurrence to be dealt with from day one of his tenure. I am convinced that it was part of his strategy from the outset…to rattle sabres loudly enough to frighten a bellicose Putin, who knew his own military prowess was hampered by an ill-trained and poorly equipped manpower pool, into making his lapdog Assad stop playing nasty with his population–and it worked. I agree with much of the article's commentary about the "boys in the back room" who, in fact, have commandeered the running of the country out of the hands of elected officials, but condemn it's tone of "it really doesn't matter who's in charge." It does matter. Articles of this type just encourage voter apathy, and that plays into the schematic laid out by the Powell Memorandum for the usurping of Democracy, placing it into the hands of the ALEC/Koch consortium of Plutocratic traitors.
- http://leisureguy.wordpress.com Leisureguy
This helps me understand why such an intensive effort is underway to destroy our educational system and the low value we seem to place on education. I'm thinking of privatization, charter schools, constant pressure to pay public money to religious schools, defunding of higher education, closures of departments of humanities and non-applied science and art-that sort of thing. And now I get it: the last thing the corporate state wants is people "wasting" time and effort on a bunch of abstract principles and reasoning and critical thinking, especially since it just causes trouble in the workplace and makes people question orders. Better to do away with that: turn the focus to what will make the most money, and your problem's solved. And then you can cut costs-always the imperative-by closing departments that seem to create the most troublemakers. Two birds, one stone.
- Bob Baldock
Peter Dale Scott articulated this first, and has it deeper and darker. Check his website.
- Anonymous
As I read the final sentence,
"What America lacks is a figure with the serene self-confidence to tell us that the twin idols of national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas that have nothing more to offer us. Thus disenthralled, the people themselves will unravel the Deep State with surprising speed."
I remembered the demise of individuals who fit "figure with serene self-confidence"…..
John F. Kennedy
Martin Luther King
Robert Kennedy
Malcolm X
Paul Wellstone- Joan Harris
It's been awhile since I have had anyone refer to Freud. Never mind the "new age" psychology. Defenses have always been the problem. In a perfect world we would all live consciously and greed and prejudices would give way to peace and harmony. In the meantime we must address all the ills, if for no other reason then to prevent us from becoming complacent. I shall retain a little healthy cynicism until the world is healthy.
- I. Spoke Umbra
Let's be clear about what the "group-think" means when speaking about the NSA:
As someone who was once in the bowels of the NSA beast, I observed a number of disturbing traits permeate every nook and cranny of the operation. If those traits were applied to an individual, they would be considered a very serious characterological disorder, perhaps warranting hospitalization:
1. Paranoid
2. Obsessive compulsive
3. Sociopathic
4. Grandiose
5. Narcissistic (self-rationalizing)
6. Uber-patriotic (self-justifying)The groupthink scenario in that place is as toxic as it can get for a human enterprise. It is a clear and present danger to the security of Democracy as we know it.
- Pamela Zuppo
This was no stroke of genius, this was Greenspan, Reagan, and the Bush clan. The better term for contemporary capitalism is "disaster capitalism" as coined by Naomi Klein. The big question is what are we to do about this? Do what Kiev has done? Due to "group think", or brain-washing of the masses who have lost their own control via their televisions, it seems the zombies outnumber the enlightened. It's clear to me something must be done.
- SufferinSuccotash,Pivoting
Randolph "War is the Health of the State" Bourne is also worth a read. Not to mention Jack London's The Iron Heel. These All-American doods had the National Security-Oligarchy State pretty much nailed down a century ago. Why people concerned with our current predicament skip over these Progressive Era radicals in favor of Continental Philosophy (which reminds me of a skimpy breakfast) is beyond me. I've been watching the emancipatory elements in this country floundering around for the past four decades now and it's pretty depressing, especially the seemingly chronic inability to connect with the USA's radical past. No historical knowledge=no sense of history=no political judgement=the Bad Guys keep on winning.
Ukrainians are my favorite people at the moment and you can bet that their sense of history is pretty sharp.
This concludes this Sunday morning rant.- Joseph Brant
It is commendable to preserve hope among reformers, but hopes do not solve problems.
While security agencies can serve democracy when better regulated, the failure to regulate is the result of failed democratic institutions which have not themselves been "vulnerable to a vigilant public." The dark state invisible power corrupts invisibly, but gold is the invisible power which had already corrupted the visible institutions.
We need more than a "self-confident figure" to tell us that "national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas" so that "the people themselves will unravel the Deep State." The "deep…hunger for change" was deeper in 2008 when so easily destroyed by its self-confident Obama by simply not mentioning what "outworn dogmas" he would change. The hawkish Hillary is not about to "unravel the Deep State" and mere self-confidence will not finance campaigns or buy media support to do more than split the vote of reformers. The media and elections must first be freed of gold, and the people cannot do that without free media and free elections.
While history is full of surprises, the succession of cold-war fearmongering by global war upon diffuse "terrorist" backlash and political opposition to half-witted right wing imperialism does not suggest a passing reaction, nor that any lesson was learned from three generations of failed military adventures with no relationship to the declared national principles. The cancerous dark state has grown in proportion to the failure of right wing foreign policy, the failure of its own rationales. It is the triumphant institution of right wing tyranny as the immune sovereign over a failed democracy.
Democracy may make further ultimate progress in China than in the US, or may survive only in micropowers of no interest to the right wing. But we must have faith in the power of the people, or we lose hope and take no action.
- Barbara Mullin
I call it vulture capitalism.
- jrdel
Since the People of United States overthrew British ruling class government of our country and after the revolution, through wise government, and luck we got out from under the thumb of any rulers whether clerics, nobility, landlords, businessmen, political dictators, banks, etc. etc. these forces have been working to reestablish their control over our lives and by gradual steps have done so. Great Americans turned back the tide here and there for a while, Jackson ended the national bank, T. Roosevelt broke up monopoly corporations, F. Roosevelt supported efforts for economic democracy, etc. but the enemies of liberty never rest and always find new ways to undermine it.
So every few generations the People are faced with another fight if they are to keep their liberties. This time the odds look particularly bad, Enemies stronger, richer, more devious, more insidious, more corrupt; the People weaker, more divided, confused, distracted. What the hell do we do? Voting just doesn't do much. Big money floods the media with their point of view. The People, relatively poorer than ever; don't have enough money to reply.
Petitions, reforms, protests, revolution? All impractical, or impossible (imagine a revolution in the streets against the power of the U.S. military.) The days when we can grab our muskets and go out and make a revolution have long gone folks.
I think humanity will have to wait for another age, and another nation to see real liberty and real democracy in control of the world again.- SufferinSuccotash,Pivoting
Given that back in his day "merchants" were often interchangeable with "bankers" Smith certainly scored a bulls-eye with that one. The perfect Horrible Example in the 1770s was the East India Company, which couldn't govern Bengal without trashing its economy and couldn't keep off the financial rocks either. Eventually the British government put the Company on a shorter leash and still later the Company lost its monopoly over East Indian trade. But one short-term measure to bail out the Company was to give it a monopoly over selling tea to the dumb colonists over in America. Oops. That was a real "tea party", not some bogus affair staged by geezers in funny hats.
- SufferinSuccotash,Pivoting
Of course. I spent quite a few years rationalizing and pretending that Everything Was Pretty Much OK In These Here United States myself. The problem with being a history teacher–at least in this case–is that the past, which as William Faulkner famously said wasn't only not dead but not even past, can catch up with you. This country is paying and will continue to pay pretty heavily for decades of folly which anyone with a sense of history could have predicted at least 40 years ago.
- joanne
We have had millenia to "cage the beast", tame the beast, train, heal, and/or defang the beast. Predatory behavior is mediated, never extinguished. The Deep State is both institutionalized predation and paradoxically, a grotesque attempt to protect itself from itself.
- Anonymous
The ideology is hinted at throughout the article. Capitalism; The premise that money is a form of commodity and the winner is whomever has the most. Unfortunately money is a contract and while such notional promises seemingly can be manufactured to infinity, through the creation of the other side of the ledger, debt, their underlaying value is dependent on the increasingly precarious solvency of those taking on that debt. It is what is referred to in hindsight as a bubble. If you want to see the future of the US in about fifty years, it will likely be in the states and regions.
- J Timothy
The US military-intelligence-industrial aparatus is filled with loyal American patriots who love this country and have sworn to uphold the US Constitution. Unfortunately, they don't seem to understand that the system is extremely expensive and is impoverishing the middle class of America. We have nine air craft carrier groups while the next closest military has just two. Air craft carriers are incredibly expensive.
In my opinion, the next revalation to hit the mainstream media will be that SOME of the covert, clandestine, black budget projects have been financed via securities fraud. They've done it before. Arms for hostages, Hmong drug running in Vietnam, etc, are examples of this. Catherine Austin Fitts has also made a great point that HUD, of all agencies, has funded some black budget procurements.
Clearly, either the CIA or the NSA are at the center of the cabal. So, what is the justification for all of this secracy? What is soooo important that the adult eagle scout christians of America can't tell us? What could it be? Terrorism? Russians? Soverign citizens? Shoe bombers?
Here is where i will lose most people over 50 years old. IN MY OPINION, a the core of the military industrial aparatus and its wall street enablers is a desperate race to achieve near technological parity with….(pregnant pause) (dramatic pause) other entities, species, e.t. collectives, etc, who are visiting sol 3 (earth). This effort is extremely expensive and involves spending trillions of dollars covertly to build spacecraft and weapons systems based on both advanced human originated technology and also technology from the reverse engineering of recovered alien vehicles.
Many people belive that securities fraud funds this effort. It sounds crazy, but, YES, building trillion dollar weapon systems and spaceships is at the core of the secrecy cult. Nothing else makes sense. What else could possibly require siphoning trillions out of the US economy? Many many authors are written on the subject and it is most definitely NOT a joke. Yes, Bill, lets ask the awkward questions.
Is there a secret space program funded via securities fraud? Have we received help from ET visitors?
One man who asked the awkward question was Congressman Steve Schiff of New Mexico. He asked the Congressional General Accounting Office to inquire about the alleged Roswell alien craft recovery. He got the USAF to give us a third story – (first was a disc, second a weather baloon and third was project mogul) This all took place in the mid 90's.
He was only about 50 yrs old when he caught agressive skin cancer. He resigned from congress and was dead soon after. He was 51.
- aTomsLife
I disagree that Mr. Lofren's article provokes apathy. It sheds light on the duopoly that is the two-party system and encourages voters to seek an alternative, namely a more libertarian, decentralized form of government.
"Overwhelming Congressional skepticism" to Syria included party-line Democrats as well: Unlike the usual D vs. R bickering, it was D's and R's forced to contradict the military industrial complex. It was a powerful moment.
Syria proved the American people - and perhaps only the American people - are capable of muzzling the Deep State. The only reason we didn't intervene there was because constituencies throughout the country stood united, not because of potential international condemnation. The irony of Putin's victory is that he achieved it because he had the backing of the American people. He morphed into our de-facto representative.
Even for the plutocrats, Putin represented the the lesser of two evils. It would have been a catastrophic loss of face to have to admit that D.C. remains beholden to the American people when, united, we're unwilling to follow the script.
Until there's meaningful campaign finance reform, "it really doesn't matter who's in charge." That's the simple truth. But it's a reason to become more engaged in politics, not less.
- J Timothy
One of the problems with dealing with the intelligence services is that they have people embeded within the media to get their point of view across. So, when Moyers talks about asking "Awkward Questions" he underestimates how difficult this is.
Ed Bernays and Walter Lippman were the gentleman geniuses who showed us that marketing and propaganda could be used to manage public opinion without limits.
Yes, lets ask the awkward questions. What is so important to the military-industrial-complex that it needs to siphon, literally, trillions of dollars out of the US economy?
One man asked an awkward question. His name was Congressman Steve Schiff. After he asked his question, he died of agressive skin cancer. He was 51 years old. Sure. It cold have been coincidence. But he was the only one asking awkward questions at the time and he was the only one who got agressive skin cancer. Meanwhile, the CIA's top spooks like George HW Bush and Kissinger are still alive into their 90's. Go figure.
- http://daybrown.org Dale H. (Day) Brown
Mother Nature bats last. When we look at the list of empires crashed because bad weather ruined crops, we see it includes all of them. People will put up with appalling corruption- until they are hungry. The Deep State has not picked up on the risk of unusual weather on agriculture, altho the price of crop insurance rose dramatically. Agribusiness will do fine with govt checks, but people cant eat insurance.
Part of the problem is that ag policy is set to reduce the cost of the hobby operations of politicians, like Bush's ranch, but failing to support the backbone of American agriculture, the family farm. The average age of farmers now is over 60, and because of land speculation by friends of elected representatives, the next generation cant afford to buy farms. The result is land owned by absent aristocracy and worked by men whose only interest is their immediate benefit and not the condition of land to be inherited by sons.
Another of the many reasons we need a Gnu Party not run by lawyers.
- Thomas Milligan
Can't blame you for feeling ripped off. You have been. We all have been, except for those in the very top income brackets. Lofgren does a pretty good job of detailing the forces that have perpetrated the heist. I've come to call it The Money; it includes the actors Lofgren details, plus billionaire types like the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife, plus the mainstream media (even much of PBS, unfortunately), which has become the Ministry of Propaganda for The Money. All Is Well. The USA Is Number 1. The Government Is Keeping Us Safe from Terrorism. Buy More Stuff. Whistleblowers Are Traitors. The Economy Is Recovering. Buy More Stuff. If Things Aren't Getting Better for You It's Because You're a Loser. So Buy More Stuff.
Don't romanticize the '50's too much. The discontent that exploded in the 60's was just under the surface even then. To the extent that it was "better" then it was because the prosperity of the nation *was* more broadly shared. A single "breadwinner" (usually Dad) could feed a family, with enough left over to save for old age, and Mom was available to nurture the kids. Do you know *any* families for whom that could be true today? And the mainstream media was populated by actual journalists rather than mouthpieces for The Money who look good in suits and understand what their owners want said. Bill Moyers, obviously, is an exception to this rule. One of the few.
I'm surprised you're not angry. You have every reason to be.
- Thomas Milligan
Mr. Lofgren does a pretty good job of detailing the forces that have perpetrated the sad parody of self-government into which our nation has devolved, but he left out a couple. I've come to calling the whole thing "The Money." It includes the actors Lofgren details, plus billionaire types like Scaife and the Koch brothers, plus the mainstream media (even much of PBS, unfortunately), which has become the Ministry of Propaganda for The Money and the so-called "Washington Consensus." Where once we had journalists, now we have (with the almost-sole exception of Bill Moyers) pretty people who look good in suits and like to be on TV, reading the scripts they're given.
- Anonymous
Well, that's rather a 'rose colored glasses' view of the Tea Party given their current platform position. While I agree there are some redeeming qualities – not because I deem them to be but because they do contribute to the discussion – But, by-n-large the solutions offered by the Tea Party platform will only serve to weaken any hopes of salvaging the Democracy. One such example is this meme that 'all Govt. is bad' which only someone disingenuous would suggest does not prominently inhabit the TP. Another would be the position on so called 'entitlements'. Yet another would be the Tea Party backing of the likes of Ted Cruz or Rand Paul who adopt a position on health care that is antithetical toward a robust Democracy. (And spare me the notion that private enterprise provides better health care etc. – it's simply untrue and there's no evidence to support these fictions.).
One has to examine a few things about the Tea Party – It is quite clear why individuals such as the Koch brothers have gone to great lengths to fund the Tea Party because it is the entrenched Plutocrats and Corporate elite who benefit the most from a weakened Govt. Many TP members see their quality of life eroding and have chosen to go after the wrong entity why? Well, those reasons are numerous – for some it is fear, for others racism, others an inability to grasp the weight of their decisions, etc. and Irrespective of their reasons the actions of the party, quite ironically, will only strengthen the grasp of the very problems you wish to suggest they will address. While a nice sentiment to feel the Tea Party could work with others the reality is much different.
- Anonymous
Wow, how do you create such a canvas of revisionist history? I also found it quite tragic that you espouse 'we need to stop this R vs L' dichotomy but you make every effort to assault the left – exclusively. While that would be with merit if it were true (indeed both parties have played a role in where we now sit) it becomes quite another matter when viewed against, oh idk, the backdrop of reality. A.) Historically it is regulation that keeps corporate interests in check and deregulation promotes the 'crony capitalism' you mention. It's hysterical to assume the inverse. B.) Progressive policies have, again in reality, led to the greatest moments of growth and prosperity in this country. I"m sorry you don't believe those facts. And, why didn't you mention the inequality gap on steroids since Reagan? or the Bush tax cuts that benefitted the richest Americans? Or the subsidization of big pharma. and big oil? Both parties have no interest in representing people without money and every incentive not to. But, don't prattle on this nonsense about the dangers of progressivism. it's ill-thought and smells of ideological belief hungering to trump facts and history; it smells.
- Anonymous
It is quite disheartening and the road forward most uncertain. I'm fairly confident those you allude to will not act from a position of reason and evidence that is fact based. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine circumstances in which those guided by fantasy, belief, and hate (one or all) will shift ideological positions and address the problems that inhabit this country by the corporate state. Individuals like Ted Cruz, Jamie Dimon (more subtly), the Koch brothers are gifted in their cunning ability to take advantage of these, what Thom Hartmann calls 'low information voters' – I've little reason for optimism and plenty of evidence for pessimism without hope.
- Anonymous
After reading this all I can say God help us. I think I can speak for millions of Americans who grew up in a different country. We use to believe that hard work, play by the rules and everything would work out for the Middleclass American. All could share in the American dream. Those beliefs are not what I hear anymore. Apathy and fear are rampant..I fear for the country my children with inherit.
- fenway67
yeah, i don't think that is his main point. it's the corporations and the banks that have infiltrated and that is the fault of both sides of the aisle. The author notes that the bipartisan divide is mostly noise obscuring the bigger picture.
- fenway67
i am hopeful that firstlook.org will be a source of honest journalism. Scahill, Poitras, Greenwald and Taibbi are real journalists working toward finding the truth.
- Anonymous
Wars forced us into debt slavery to the Big banks that financed them, thus we are slaved to the NWO BANKS and corporations Federal Reserve Banks buys and owns most of our debt, they are international now We are controlled by the bankers and the secret NWO financial network running the governments of the world. Everything trickles down from these taskmasters. Follow the money and everything is controlled by where it leads. Globalization, one financial system running the world into their vision of one world government controlled by their big money. They been ruling us for a long time now. CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM would fix us election process and would scare them knowing they can't put their bag men in office anymore.
- Anonymous
So you believe the blame for big government lies only with the liberals? Give me a break. Here are just four Presidents who expanded Government. They are named Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush. Flaming liberals to you I would assume.
- John Gregor
Looking forward to odering some of those books. Have read all Foucault's books. The author wrote quite a nice essay about contemporay American politics. Our majot export seems to be Dollars, like manure they have some value, but I imagine alot of the people who are getting them are not entirely happy
- Anonymous
I saw Mike on c-span Sunday and enjoyed his comments, and now reading this piece I have trouble with a GOP former congressional analysis troubled about how the govt is working or not working beginning in 2009.
As with many of former GOP legislators or analysts never do they dig deeper into the underlying problems that cause the congress to not work. Mentioning the Deep State reminds me of Washington Post investigation exposing the 2nd govt in DC. It's where all the retired legislators or lost elections legislators, the congressional staff, the retired military generals go. They pop up in media (tv, radio, newspapers) spewing out a talking point for their respective 2nd govt think tank in DC. C-span is a major platform that they use, and 99% of them promote some corporation dealing with the 1st govt.
Too bad we don't see the name tags of the corporations they represent. Now that we have citizens united we're back into the age of the Robber Barons.
- Andrew Kloak
This insightful essay shows that Silicon Valley is not be what it claims to be. Neither is Wall Street or the massive build-up of federal government power around Washington, D.C.
The article also alludes to the notion that these companies in Silicon Valley are waking and trying to resist Deep State regime. California can't save American society. We are only 12% of the entire population. Plus, they don't want to, they have to answer to shareholders. Profit is the highest good for companies and government. They want influence and money.
All this is like marionette theatre. James Clapper from the NSA used misdirection when reporters started to zero-in on the scale of the deception and breach of trust last Fall. Enormous change is just ahead but not without enormous turmoil. People intuitively know that national security and corporate power are worn out dogmas.
There is an urgency to all this. Many of these people in these positions of power have no soul. It doesn't have to be this way, it just is. I think they want it this bad because they profit and garner influence when it is this ineffectual.
The biggest changes are within anyway. We have to go deeper in ourselves. That shift in consciousness is already underway. The confluence of forces will sweep away these external constructs. The hidden factors not discussed in the article are the unconscious forces (emotion). Once people are more aware of the light and darkness in themselves things will open up. There is dynamic tension (a good thing) in each person. Self-awareness, integrity and connection to others will change everything.
This article makes interesting connections to something that is hidden in
plain sight. It will change.- richard anderson
I have been giving the political system another chance since Vietnam. Each time we have an election I hear some good things. But when these people are in office they change. When Ralph Nader ran for office he was kept out by various means and not allowed to debate. The system is rigged. This talk of voting for the right person is not going to cut it. With the problems this deep and the protection that has been set up to keep this system in place there is NOT a way to change it. In other words voting will not work. Something more is needed. Demonstrations don't work either. Just look at how long the Vietnam war was protested and when Bush stumped for invasion of Iraq. They didn't care. Resistance may be the answer.
- Anonymous
Rothschild family made their banking trillions beginning from financing Napoleon's wars up until now. Their family owns media houses, governments, etc and their influence knows no bounds. You will never see their family listed on Forbes richest people lists because they own the media and do not want to see their names or advertise their wealth. The Bankers truly own the world and War debt was the fastest way to do it.
- Anonymous
lol. good comment and link.
I will be interested in seeing what First Look does, but I really don't trust the bazillionaire who is starting it up – or at least his motives. Once a plutocrat, always a plutocrat. I predict it will start like Arianna Huffington's HuffPo, initially game changing and valuable, then slowly just another click generating tabloid profit machine with a bubble like mentality forced on contributers, moderators and commentors alike. Time will tell.
- Ellie
We have all this information, but nothing ever comes of it! No one goes to jail The laws are changed to help the criminals . We still have a two party system which is a joke. Unless people are hungry and cold and willing to die for a cause nothing is going to change in this country.
- J.G. Sandom
We have become almost as much a plutocracy as our former Cold War nemesis, Russia. Tech, Big Oil and Wall Street oligarchs, combined with the military-industrial complex (which Eisenhower tried to warn us against) collude (in spirit, if not in actual boardrooms) to keep the people's power in check via libertarian deregulation, union-busting, Citizens United (and other activist SCOTUS rulings), privatization of the Intelligence Community (IC), the opiate of digital media that pushes the idolatry of money & all things celebrity to distract us, and our collective fear of terrorism (hence our perpetual war footing). This is what my forthcoming novel, 404, is all about-not just how IP tech is invading our lives, but how this invasion is a metaphor for the larger invasion. (HAL2, in my book, IS what Mike Lofgren calls the Deep State.) Wake up, America! Our country is being stolen from us in plain sight. Thank you Bill Moyers, and thank you Mike Lofgren for helping to alert the American public. You are 21st century Paul Reveres! Al Qaeda is less of a threat to America because of some future possible terrorist threat, and more because the collective American fear it engenders helps the Deep State sink its claws more effectively into our national flesh.
- Anonymous
What rings clear is we now have a non-elected government operating outside our constitutional government and is purposely gridlocked. Our government and judicial system have been hijacked and steps must be taken to remove Big Hidden money that is controlling our constitutional government. Great interview Bill, thanks as always!
- Jack Wolf
Mike forgot something. There is a simple fact that rules the deep state, the reformists, and the declinests, whether they accept it or not: Natural Law. Abrupt climate change can not be controlled now. To suggest that any of these groups are in control or have the ability to make substantial change belies what is really going on. From now on, all these groups can only react and as far as I can tell, today will be the best day of the rest of our lives. It's all downhill from here and there is irreversible.
- Thomas Milligan
Oh, I know about those guys and I love what they do. The trouble is, somehow *their* work doesn't, as a rule, get picked up, amplified and developed in the mass media the way, say "Watergate" was back when we had real journalists. Meanwhile every load of BS that comes out of the Heritage Foundation, Cato et. al. somehow becomes received wisdom. I'm also a bit concerned that by going off on their own they're setting themselves up to be marginalized and ignored. Trees may fall, but very few people will hear them.
- Thomas Milligan
Somehow your response above… to *my* response… to your original post… got posted under a *separate* post I offered… scroll down far enough, you'll find your original post & my response.
Can't blame you for wanting to shield your children. The thing is, you can't, neither from the anger nor from global climate change. I have grandchildren and grieve when I look at them for the world they're apparently going to inhabit.
One last thing: it's possible… theoretically at least… to have anger without hatred. Anger at what's been done can be a spur to action… and effective action could be taken while still treating the perpetrators with the compassion we know all sentient beings deserve. I'm not sure *I* could manage it because truth to tell I'm not a very good Christian… or Buddhist either… but it's at least theoretically possible.
- Thomas Milligan
Good point about our old nemesis, The Evil Empire.
I always found it ironic that as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the United States was moving toward one-party rule. You can write the Nov. 5 headline right now: "Republocrats Win Yet Again!"
- fenway67
Agreed, the MSM has a vested interest in having their product on the shelf at eye-level and it's hard for the little guy to buy space in this market. I'll be doing my part by re-posting and tweeting important stories that they cover and I just hope the quality will get them noticed. I'm sure the smear campaign against them will begin soon.
- fenway67
I wasn't aware of his motives beyond providing a platform for real journalists. What have you heard? I am hopeful that the high quality work of the people he has hired so far will keep it in the same company as the Moyers people.
- Kenneth Killiany
This is an issue that concerns me greatly actually. Both sides have adopted policies that have fed it. I find it interesting that you mention Allen Drury, who was my uncle. Al was a dogged reporter, uncovering, in his day, the Manhattan Project, which he did not report on because of World War II. Should he have? He never doubted his judgment. However, he was very concerned about how the State just grew and operated on its won. You can see mentions of it in ADVISE AND CONSENT and MARK COFFIN, where he discusses the whole public-private daisy chain and how irresponsible it is. It's true, you can't get drama out of it, but he mentions it, but in PENTAGON, he wrote a whole book about a bureaucracy can be diverted from what it is meant to do by concerns for its own prerogatives. A&C and MARK COFFIN have just been re-released, and PENTAGON will follow next year. This kind of reporting in your article is the kind he admired and it is a great service.
- freelance-writer
A.k.a.:Ukraine 2014. Though there are many factors and stake-holders at work in the Ukraine issue, it behooves the citizenry of all western nations tainted by the same `deep-state' tyranny to bear witness. It will take bricks against bullets to resolve this global crisis once and for ever.
- Mary Brown
The only terrorists we have to face in the USA are our own government and the ones that government is purposely importing to continue their reign of fear. Problem is a large part of America is now well armed and a terrorist would die rather quickly long before any government police forces arrives.
- Len
Most of us frogs are in a pot of water that is getting hotter and hotter and we don't feel it. As quoted from this essay "After
a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another
context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply
bounce off one's consciousness like pebbles off steel plate". Replace "a functionary of the state" with "we the people".This essay was terrific.
- Anonymous
I am worried that the boiling pot will lead to the elimination of Social Security. For years now politicians been saying it will end to each generation. When it does, a very high percentage of Americans will be at poverty level. I don't want to be living in American cities when that happens, crime and robberies will be common place.
- Anonymous
Yes, this is not a new development… The funny thing is that Bill Moyers' Iran-Contra era expose entitled "The Secret Government" actually covers this subject better than the piece we are commenting on. And iirc, he interviews Peter Dale Scott about the CIA in that report…
- Anonymous
There is a world of difference between bailouts and nationalization. I cannot begin to quantify the folly of calling this system "Marxist" when the party on the left of the two party system has moved so far to the right as to make Eisenhower seem like Trotsky by comparison.
- Anonymous
For Gods sake, not this again. What Banking family who made the bulk of their fortune from War debt and being worth $500 Trillion dollars are you referring to? Everybody is afraid to print anything on these influential banking members. Their influence in this world has no bounds. As we all know Bankers always protect their money and are devising new ways to make more money. If you naively think that Bankers in this world are Godly benevolent people, you better look around the state of the world again and formulate a revised opinion. but there you go, I got my opinion and you have yours and we will respectfully leave it as that. Thanks for your comment!
- Anonymous
Last time I looked capitalism is buying and bought our election process. In fact, in the past the main focus of our government has been on business priorities and concerns. Doesn't look anything as Marxism to me.
- Jimmy Solomon
I read this article and watched your interview. Both are most enlightened. What happened, however, on the eleventh day of the ninth month thirteen years ago was clearly a result of this deep state and it is too bad you won't recognize this glaring example of the corruption of which you write.
- Anonymous
"the party on the left of the two party system"
There is little or no difference between the two faces of the party of state power. They use different words, and then enact the same policies.
Politics is about power, nothing more. There is no "left" or "right", only power.
- Antonio Germano
Again, what filibusters? You have provided no examples. Except for the (unfortunately) pathetic attempts of Cruz, Paul and Lee to derail Obamacare and the recent debt ceiling/government shutdown (I wish) affair, where has there been any effective Republican opposition to any of Obama's agenda?
You are typical of the person who blames one side for our problems, when it's both sides (i.e., the government) that is the problem. Both sides are playing their respective constituencies like a Stradivarius. get over your obsession with partisanship and see the real issue – the whole system is corrupt and needs to be abolished.
Your pining for 'majority rules' is a recipe for tyranny. The filibuster rules were put into place to prevent temporary majorities from steam-rolling temporary minorities. I think it should be even harder to pass laws, not easier, so mischief is avoided.
I repeat – the State is the enemy of us all. get over blaming one side or the other. You are being played.- Anonymous
amazing that such a powerful article was written. too bad its several years too late, and ever so slightly off the mark. you need to let go of the rhetoric of bipartisanship. the DNC and GOP establishments are both operating on the same basic policies. while they offer crumbs to their bases, they are both pushing the agenda of the deep state.they are both to blame, and until people declare that both have no clothes, the powers behind the curtain will continue to rule.
- Anonymous
Thanks, well said.
There's also the "Shallow State" of American campaign consultants like David Axelrod and Mark Penn who make big money in places like Ukraine and Georgia because the locals assume they wield influence over their clients in Washington. If American foreign policy became less aggressive, foreigners wouldn't pay them so much money:
- Auntie Analogue
"F]inancialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and the commodifying of labor."
Yes, "commodifying of labor" thanks to Teddyquiddick pushing the 1965 Hart-Cellers act that began the importation of million Third World unskilled laborers per year, thanks also to the Deep State paralyzing all efforts of us, the People, to force our so-called "representatives" to close, fortify, and defend our borders – to stop the massive flow of scores of millions of illegal immigrants. Immigration has done more to stagnate and reduce Americans' wages and to destroy what had been our historically unprecedented middle class affluence and economic-political power.
Objective One for those of us who would dismantle the Deep State and restore our democracy is obvious: Stop All Immigration. Accomplish this by these measures: one, end birthright citizenship (and thus also end birth tourism); two, abolish State Department power to import refugees and government funding of NGO's that "resettle" refugees; deport all illegal aliens; impose massive, draconian fines on employers that hire illegal alien labor. Why are these measures Objective One? Simple: when we allow our Dear Rulers to displace and dispossess us on our own soil, we forfeit – we surrender – our power to control our representatives and their appointees and their wealth transfer from ourselves to foreigners.- Mil
This is just a small list. But it at least provides some of the examples you are asking to see.
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/bills-blocked-by-republican-filibusters
- rgrisham
This is not a revelation. Noam Chomsky has been pointing this out clearly for the past 40 years… There a couple public documents that might help explain to the educated class exactly what has been going in the U.S. for the past 40 years… The Powell Memo written by Lewis Powell in 71 and the Crisis of Democracy a document publicly published by the Trilateral Commission in the mid 70's these are both damning omissions by powerful groups that control both the business world and governments at all levels of governance. These two documents that we know about are internal look at the dogma of the ruling class.. Neo Liberalism is the term they used but it sure aint new and it sure aint liberal. It just another way for the ruling class to re-institute Feudalism.
- Anonymous
What you say is essentially true. Fascism by definition is the merger of corporations and the military. Another amusing quote: "A capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with." Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
These Deep State proponents will succeed in fully displaying their stupidity when the global environment collapses under the weight and consequence of their actions and humanity becomes extinct. In the meantime, they will be having fun and braying like jackasses as they descend into the abyss.
- Anonymous
What about the level of organization required to create the Trilateral Commission and its formal takeover of the US executive branch when Carter took office? The majority of the cabinet (all but one) were Trilateralists in the newly created group of only 300 worldwide members. Trilateralists were placed in high level international corporate and political positions and this paradigm holds today. Scholars Antony Sutton and Patrick Wood wrote extensively on this international power dynamic with its influence now extending to every part of the globe. It was Trilateralist Larry Summers, former US Secretary of Treasury and Goldman Sachs executive, who was sent to Russia when it's economy imploded to advise Putin on how to privatize the Russian peoples' state owned assets leading the to rise of eight powerful oligarchs with internationalist sensibilities, a very deliberate centralization of capital and a means to control Russian political power players. From the beginning of the transfer of the US manufacturing sector to China, it became Brzezinski's model Technocracy, Brzezinski being the a founder of the Trilateralists, Carter's National Security Adviser, and author of The Grand Chessboard. (reference: Patrick Wood's augustforecast.com) These actions and the concomitant level of organization goes beyond the Deep State model.
- Anonymous
.. if there were no abuses by the IRS, then why did IRS official Lois Lerner plead the fifth ? If my boss asked me to explain possible abuses of power at my job and I pleaded the fifth, my new office would be on the curb.
- Anonymous
The meetings happen in Rancho Mirage and other places for Koch Brothers, and ALEC, etc. They are the ones paying the Pols and they definitely meet and plan conspiracies to disenfranchise voters. And, William Pepper wrote a book that reveals the conspiracies within those security agencies that control pols. It is great the Lofgren is talking about the Deep State. But, to deny the conspiracies within it is naive. The crashing of the Obama garden party by Robert Gates associates is a case in point. The Supreme Court ultimately is the last point of call to stop this Deep State within all the branches. They have judicial oversight, and they are not using it.
- scratphd
The great swamp philosopher Pogo got it right. "I have meet the enemy and he is us."
A complacent America.- Christanne
Lofgren: What America lacks is a figure with the serene self-confidence to tell us that the twin idols of national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas that have nothing more to offer us. Thus disenthralled, the people themselves will unravel the Deep State with surprising speed.
This essay echoes Ivan Illich's "Tools for Convivality," which, although written in the '70s is even more applicable today. This is not new. Lofgren is an important wedge to cauterize the deep state and dispell delusions of unending "progress." However, I don't see any evidence for his assertion that the people themselves will unravel the Deep State. What we've done so far is just buy a new toy, both literally and figuratively, even when so many of us are going hungry.
- Anonymous
Excellent essay. A very good (semi-) insider's look at happenings within the Beltway. However, my instinct tells me that the real nexus of power doesn't lie there, but that the Deep State operatives are allowed to continue their game-playing at public expense in order to serve a larger agenda–the ultimate bankrupting of the US and the ushering in of a new world order which has been in the making for centuries by the real powers-that-be. Uber-conspiratorial? Maybe, but I just can't shake the feeling.
- The One
There is no doubt that the great american experiment has ended in ruin. There is hope on the horizon though. Due to technological progression and its rapid increase in power, the very fabric of society will change. Our social and economic models must change radically due to technological improvements. There is no end in sight to the technological pace we have been blazing at, and if there is an end it seems to be distant. The tremendous benefits of creative AI and the automation of white and blue collar workers must be built into a new social and economic model in which the benefits are distributed evenly and equally among the peoples of planet earth. Even now, if we used our technology wisely, we could unshackle large swaths of the labor markets with automated robots.
The current state of unimaginable corruption which is inflicting the world, not just the US, is a dying last grasp for air as the oligarchies face a new powerful threat, the connection of all things. The internet has the power to upend these corrupt power structures which lie at the heart of society, and thus at the heart of every human life on this planet. Our current economic model is not situated in reality. I can't say if the market will be up or down tomorrow, but what I know for certain is that earth is 196.9 million square miles. Which is a finite space. Not a good place for an economic model which requires economic expansion for survival. The labor markets will be greatly dis-stressed due to technological displacement. The current scientific revolution is unlike any that has ever happened on the surface of this planet. Even highly skilled workers such as surgeons have the capacity to be replaced by highly advanced robots specializing in surgery. People will see awaken to the fact that this "annoying high unemployment" is actually the new normal and will only get worse. This REQUIRES a new economic model.
If a business refused to integrate their business with the latest automation technology, a rival that had enough foresight to not oversee this would drive his competitor out of business. Then, in our current economic model, that rival that just won the market would reap all the rewards. BUT, it will also be in the best interest of that company, if in some new economic manner, a portion of those profits would go into a general citizens fund which would provide all humans with a basic income. This type of model will be absolutely necessary due to mass unemployment. This leaves the motive for profit intact which also leads a motive for innovation, creation, and competition that humans need. With scarcity gone, and universal income for all, the future will look very very bright for our young human species. The seas of interstellar space beckon.
- Anonymous
"…another thing" – yup – if they changed the rule so they could get what they claimed was their agenda passed, the Reps might have been able to do the same – however the Reps could do that anyway themselves if they regained power –
In any case, what does that say about a Party that would refuse to advance a decent agenda just so the other party couldn't advance its own at another date – in essence, cutting off our noses to spite the Reps face – they could have done what they knew we sent them there to do, and they refused, hiding behind rules they could have changed – more and more folks are waking up …
ISTM it oughta be obvious by now that this "struggle" between the Reps and the Dems isn't about principle or ideology and it certainly isn't about representing us – it is about who gets to be in charge of handing out the perks and who gets the perks – those in power are the ones who get both ….
- Charles Shaver
Nice to keep learning of a plethora of ambiguous symptoms but, short of too costly general strikes or domestic insurrection, only voting proved corrupt politicians of both major parties out of high office every other November will eventually restore legal functionality to the U.S. Government. So, vote in every general election and vote against those who stray. 'How to know' one might ask? Simply vote 'out with the old; in with the new,' every time, until we have the kind of America the Founders prescribed in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution.
- Anonymous
It only depends on your definition of "the US." Yes, a panel of CEOs famously declined Ralph Nader's invitation to join him in the Pledge of Allegiance, but in the State Department memo that outlined the policy of containment of the USSR, George Kennan said the vast wealth disparity between the US and the rest of the world must be maintained, while civil rights and democracy could be neglected.
By then, the post-World War One idealists who'd joined calls for socialism and one-world government, to prevent another such catastrophe, had seen things differently once Russia turned Eastrrn Europe into a barricade against further invasions from the West. They could not bring themselves to reb against their banker fathers, but they still believed in a one-world government – it would simply be the government of the United States. The entire world would be brought into the economc system we ran, no matter what citizens and their elected governments wanted.
During the Cold War, NATO was used to bring European intelligence agencies and militaries under domnance by the CIA and the Pentagon. Putting ordnance, money and men in place to resist a Soviet takeover made perfect sense, but it operated in peacetime to keep left-wingers out of Continental governments. We overthrew an Italian government, for example. Not by ourselves, of course: the secret "stay-behind" troops were nitorious right-wing fanatics, who could be trusted to carry out their missions regardless of law, Constitutionality or morality. False-flag shootings and bombings in public squares and supermarkets killed many innocent civilians and were blamed on leftist radical groups which had been thoroughly penetrated already anyway. This was to win public support for stricter security policies and, perhaps, punish citizens for voting in liberal-to-left governments. This was admitted in the Italian parliament by the Prime Minister in 1990. Operation GLADIO, as it was called, involved every NATO country. Investigations were promised, but were aborted or came to mothing.
This is what Putin knows will happen if Ukraine joins NATO, for instance, so don't expect him to take it lying down. He operates a Russian version.
In the US, a group of Wall Street financiers discussed literally overthrowing FDR in order to end the New Deal regulatory state, but didn't get past the talking stage. The Senate held hearings but J. Edgar Hoover declined to investigate becayse "no crime was committed." This is the same FBI director who opened pressure dossiers on citizens who carried protest signs or wrote letters to newspapers or the government opposing our war policies, and tried to get Martin Luthed King to commit suicide.
Note the secrecy surrounding current trade-agreement negotiations, and accompanying high security. This dates back to the fiaco of the world trade talks in Seattle some years ago, when street protests neatly brought them to a halt. An Italian citizen was killed during protests against trade talks in Genoa yeats later.
- Anonymous
This was a superb essay–one I have been awaiting for years. One minor addition: there is another non DOD component to the aforementioned group, which is DOE. Admittedly,
it's rather easy to forget about them–but one should not. Ever.- Anonymous
But I really wonder if voting is a sufficient tool for the citizenry to tell the government what it thinks.
Elections are not very frequent, they are deeply manipulated by complex "strategists" (look at the connection between the now-slowly-debunked gay marriage referenda and the re-election of Bush Jr).
Though I find it tedious and at times inefficient I wouldn't mind being part of a citizenry like France that literally shuts the country down until the government says "uncle".- Anonymous
I believe the fourth estate and the way the US government interacts with it have a lot to do with the opacity of the veil I find floating between myself and whatever happens inside the beltway.
The US government keeps journalists begging for the tiniest crumbs. No one is willing to leak anything for fear of being caught.
When I asked a friend in the diplomatic corps what was the most striking about his stint in DC he said the depth at which government officials changed with each new administration compared to other countries. DC's moving business is booming beyond anything imaginable. This is also a tidy way to keep a tight grip on "messaging" – a skill each administration seems to get better and better at.
There is a reason wikileaks has emerged and parody has replaced the stale format of the evening news.
- Charles Shaver
Voting is still an effective tool. Unfortunately, statistically, a majority of manipulated voters will only dirty their hands to install and re-install soluble Democrats and Republicans when seeking water tight integrity; insane, by Einstein's definition. Now is well past the best time to make some real repairs but, perhaps, not yet too late to save a sinking ship. And, shutting the engine down won't plug the leaks.
- Pat Kittle
We Americans are already plenty overcrowded, but Israel lobby billionaires want open borders and they've paid big bucks to both Republicans & Democrats. So open borders and endless population growth it is, ecological sustainability be damned.
And don't give me that "anti-Semitic" hooey, I'm just stating facts.
Zuckerberg, Bloomberg, Soros, Gelbaum, Adelson, etc., etc., Israel lobby, all of them.
No serious discussion of the "deep state" would ignore that elephant in the living room.
- Anonymous
This is not a valid critique. The Deep State serves organized wealth and works to further increase inequality and social stratification. Thus the Deep State represents entrenched right-wing power. It is a matter of state capture. Both parties support this consensus and are thus supremely conservative. The same goes for the media which is owned by these same centers of organized wealth.
- Matt P.
It's not a matter of keeping one's mouth shut, but actions speak louder than words. Being angry and contentious all the time is not the same as being productive about the issues you believe in. Whenever I see an inequality in the street, on the subway, or at a party I react. I stand up for the person, I intervene and get involved. The rest of the time I do keep my mouth shut because there's nothing to say. It doesn't help anyone to spread unhappiness around. In fact it drains your energy so you're not ready or as effective for the next opportunity.
- Sean Kurnow
I get a laugh at people who yell, whine and complain about politicians and party politics….It's like yelling at a ventriloquist dummy instead of the person controlling it. America became a plutocracy in 1913 when the Federal Reserve was created. Since then, we all know that special interest groups control almost every aspect of government policy.
- Anonymous
I will assume you simply did not understand what I wrote or what 'slouching' wrote – ironic eh?
Lets remove Thom Hartmann from the equation, as it seems to be where you flew off the rails…what then is your defense of the idiots we allude to?- Anonymous
I well understand the argument about brainwashing – have heard it a gazillion times ….
The "idiots" you refer to – who are these folk? And while the corp media was brainwashing them, what were the rest of us doing? Sitting on our hands?
- Bill Wesley
well for once I have no comment, its not required in that the writer has made the case with expert precision, I find no flaws, no omissions, no theory or dogma obstructing the writers view. Its nice to see such well presented intellectual compitance, it allows me to feel relief, I can take a break since others are seen to be on the ball
- FroboseTF
Charles:
Voting used to be an effective tool. Unfortunately with the advent of "Electronic Voting Machines" which must be "Programmed", and leave no paper trail to allow a recount; I fear that if the truth be known our elections are probably rigged on a regular basis to reflect the will of those in actual power now.I believe it was Joseph Stalin who said "It's not who casts the votes that's important. It's who counts them.
- Anonymous
Actually, it was a Mossad (Israeli Intel)/US Intel op. US organized it and funded the Al Qaeda end of it via Paki intel officer General Mahmoud Ahmed, while the Mossad prepped the US targets and ran the anthrax mail op. I'm not sure that Mossad didn't dream it up in the first place, but, whatever the details, Al Qaeda was definitely just a bit player in the op with the real culprits being our own fearless leaders.
- Reuben_the_Red
Winner-takes-all elections (as opposed to proportional representation) and the Electoral College are inherently undemocratic and present the illusion of voter participation without the danger of undue voter influence.
- Reuben_the_Red
Excellent discussion of the intersection of money, power, and early 21st century technology in the US today. Food for thought, especially paired with Moyer's recent documentary about ALEC.
One caveat: Paragraph 21 starts out saying, "the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by
surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that
it is almost impervious to change," but in paragraph 22, "there are signs of resistance to the Deep State and its demands." Paragraph 21 has already made the case that resistance is irrelevant and impotent in the face of the Deep State apparatus, power/wealth reserves, and democracy-subverting methodology. And that's probably true. There may be no way to actually extricate the Deep State from The Superficial State.We are left in the final few paragraphs with a series of reasons that the Deep State might reverse course voluntarily, or unravel of its own accord, but in the end what we really need is "a figure with the serene self-confidence to tell
us that the twin idols of national security and corporate power are
outworn dogmas that have nothing more to offer us": in other words, some kind of charismatic, messianic Jesus-person, to save us from ourselves. I don't object to the author trying to end with a hopeful note of optimism, but how would this person reach us with that message? Are there not already a host of people who have been saying exactly that for decades, from Noam Chomsky to Angela Davis, from Daniel Quinn to Arundhati Roy, from Mark Twain to John Lennon? Have we not managed to ignore and disregard a notable and widely-published list of people trying to tell us that national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas that do nothing to elevate humanity nor the human condition?"Thus disenthralled,
the people themselves will unravel the Deep State with surprising speed." It seems clear that we will be forever enthralled with our credit scores and our televised sporting events and other televised virtual realities until the government of the US actually collapses due to a variety of currently known and unknown factors (economic, ecological, etc). And that's not gonna be pretty either. And even then there is the further possibility that in such an event of complete destabilization (not unthinkable, has happened throughout history, around the world), the Deep State could become simply The State.- Reuben_the_Red
Agreed. Presumably there is no incentive in the Deep State to undermine the omnipotence of the Deep State.
There are ways to increase voter participation (non-participation fines and penalties as I understand Australians are subject to; make voting day a federal holiday or even better a three-day weekend; give the right to vote back to felons and inmates alike; etc.) but wouldn't we still be left to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee?
- Charles Shaver
I haven't voted for Tweedledee or Tweedledum for President since Ronald Reagan and, since learning of Gramm-Leach-Bliley in 2012, I don't vote for either for Congress. I'd rather take a chance on a third, fourth or fifth party unknown, a blank ballot or a write-in candidate than on another known destroyer from one of the two major parties. Participation alone is not enough; it has to be informed participation, referenced against the clear, plain and simple language of the U.S. Constitution. So, how do we get the word out?
- Reuben_the_Red
It would have been a very different election in 2012 if the Republican establishment and the corporate media machine had not colluded to rig the primaries so that Mitt Romney was the nominee, and not the one that the majority of voting Republicans wanted, Ron Paul, who ran on a platform that ironically appealed to many leftists, because of his insistence that foreign military interventions and US global military incursions cease immediately.
It's possible that the realistic threat of a viable third party candidate on the outer fringe of the left or the right could be enough to force that respective party to yield to those fringe demands, incorporating those demands into a mainstream platform, more or less like the Tea Party did with the Republican party in recent years, threatening to take their votes elsewhere.
At the same time, more Americans voted for left wing platforms than right wing platforms in 2000, but due to the winner-takes-all elections, we didn't get a government that was 5% Nader, 45% Gore, 45% Bush, majority leftist reflecting the vote. We got 100% Bush. We got corporate welfare, tax cuts for the uber wealthy which did not result in higher employment, we got two decade-long unprovoked foreign wars riddled with war crimes, and we got persistent recession. Some of these things, if not all of them, would not and could not have happened under a Nader/Gore-led government. The Deep State expanded massively with the Bush/Cheney administration's complicity. I wish that it was worthwhile to vote for third-party candidates, but we can expect them to receive no media coverage, few votes overall despite the possibly broad appeal of their platform, and in the end it would be irrelevant because of the Electoral College. If I live in Oregon and vote for Romney my vote is thrown away as surely as if I live in Utah and vote for Obama.
In answer to your question, how do we get the word out, I think the only answer is media ownership. Our lives are more consumed by media today than ever before in the history of the world, and all of the media is concentrated in fewer hands, with more consensus among those few hands, than ever before.
- Charles Shaver
It would be a very different election every time, and nation, if the majority would simply quit believing in the now defunct two-party system, corporate owned media and an extremist capitalist system that values the gains of the uber wealthy over the lives and limbs of workers and the poor. It's okay to question the status quo, ignore corporate media, do independent research, vote totally independent of family tradition and elect questionable strangers (as opposed to proved bipartisan failures) to defund the Deep State. Need a little more direction? Review the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. It pretty well sums it all up in rather clear, plain and simple English, if you keep in mind that not just millionaires, billionaires and multi-national corporations (allegedly) are 'people.' Good conversation.
- jeffries
Mike Lofgren wrote the essay. Bill Moyers was allowed to interview him. PBS has its hands tied by the "deep state" too. If you doubt this talk ask PBS why they pulled the plug on the Koch Brothers expose.
- jeffries
The "deep state," like a parasite, will continue until its host is dead. My guess is they are in a state of panic-their host is on life support. The party is over- the rest of the world has had enough of the U.S. The petro dollar has been broken. The dollar will be dethroned as the world reserve currency and the torch will be passed to China no later than 2018. The players of the "deep state" will not be able to infiltrate and latch onto this new host and so they will fight to the death, more accurately our sons and daughters death, to keep the U.S. in its position. Resist war is all we can do and not buy into the steady stream of propaganda that will be bombarding us at every turn.
- Hatha Sunahara
I haven't read all 328 comments so far, but I just wonder if anybody has picked up on the reason the deep state has developed. I think it's development stems from the evolution of the United States from a Republic into an Empire. No empire can exist with restrictions on its power like those put on the United States by the Constitution. So, instead of discarding the Constitution, the United States was subsumed into an 'extra-constitutional government'. Of course, nobody bothered to tell the people of the United States that their power had been usurped by a lawless Imperial overlord. Responsibility for that egregious oversight can be laid to the mainstream media, which is owned by the owners of the extra-constitutional government. These are the global media corporations.
If you view politics this way, it explains a lot of things. Empire relies on it's military power and the acceptance of its money. Anyone who does not accept the empire's money generates hostility from the empire. The empire wages war without any declaration of war. The extra constitutional government allows that. The empire cannot tolerate privacy because that would allow people to plot against the empire without interference. So the empire puts everyone under surveillance. The empire cannot tolerate resistance or disobedience, so it develops a police state to instil fear and obedience in people. There are many many more examples of how empire rules America and usurps the US government–which exists for the people of the United States. Americans, and the people of the other countries in the world understand this viscerally, but are unable to express this in coherent thought because their language has been corrupted by the forces of empire. Mike Lofgren doesn't make this connection because iit violates the rules of political correctness. Everyone's career is tied to strict adherence to political correctness, and
- Anonymous
And many of the voters have been brainwashed by the 5 or 6 corporations that control the media. Fear entertainment.
- Anonymous
After I read Top Secret America I came to the conclusion that since 9/11 Homeland Security has become so incredibly humongous and so political it will keep growing until the US is bankrupt. The was the goal of Benladen. Europe did not fall for it be we did.
- Anonymous
Some contemporary books Blackwater, Bloodmoney, and especially Confessions if a Economic Hit Man. Also Top Secret America.
- Charles Shaver
I think a better name for 'Homeland Security' is 'elitist money addict insecurity.' And, it and treasonous corporate media propaganda will keep growing until we as an injured people finally 'Just say NO!' to the 'perpetraitors.' Thanks for commenting, above and below.
- Anonymous
There is a small very readable book written by John Perkins named Confessions of an Economic hit Man. This is the way the Corporatocracy has used the IMF and World Bank to take over the assets of less developed countries. And if their leaders do not agree to go along well then read what happens to them.
- Anonymous
In many states felons are legally allowed to vote if they have served their sentences. And if they moved to Florida their vote was legal. But Jeb Bush broke the law and did not allow their vote to count in the Bush/Gore election. The Republicans also paid a fortune to a company named Choice Point to scrub the polls. They also did this in the latest election for Governor. How can they get away with these tactics? The tactics that are being used in North Carolina lately are extremely difficult to counteract.
- Anonymous
Funny (not ha ha) when I try to tell friends what is going on within Homeland Security (the redundancy, the extreme size of it and the number of government and private buildings all around the Washington suburbs) they respond by stating that they approve of all this. Homeland security is so political that this state if affairs will be sucking up our tax dollars forever.
- Neil Kitson
"These men, largely private, were functioning on a level different from the foreign policy of the United States, and years later when New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan read through the entire documentary history of the war, that history known as the Pentagon Papers, he would come away with one impression above all, which was that the government of the United States was not what he had thought it was; it was as if there were an inner U.S. government, what he called 'a centralized state, far more powerful than anything else, for whom the enemy is not simply the Communists but everything else, its own press, its own judiciary, its own Congress, foreign and friendly governments – all these are potentially antagonistic.
It had survived and perpetuated itself,' Sheehan continued, 'often using the issue of anti-Communism as a weapon against the other branches of government and the press, and finally, it does not function necessarily for the benefit of the Republic but rather for its own ends, its own perpetuation; it has its own codes which are quite different from public codes.
Secrecy was a way of protecting itself, not so much from threats by foreign governments but from detection from its own population on charges of its own competence and wisdom.' Each succeeding Administration, Sheehan noted, was careful, once in office, not to expose the weaknesses of its predecessor. After all, essentially the same people were running the governments, they had continuity to each other, and each succeeding Administration found itself faced with virtually the same enemies.
Thus the national security apparatus kept its continuity, and every outgoing President tended to rally to the side of the incumbent President.
"Out of this of course came a willingness to use covert operations; it was a necessity of the times, to match the Communists, and what your own population and your own Congress did not know was not particularly important; it was almost better if they did not know…"
David Halberstam
The Best and The Brightest- Charles Shaver
Very typically, you appear to be better informed and better read on some aspects of our failed and failing nation-state than I. Admittedly, I don't have all the answers. Briefly, though, respective of all you cite, I find the vast majority of Americans just don't want to be burdened any more with good citizenship (e.g., election statistics). Most recently, another symptom of the underlying problem was highlighted when the billionaire owner of a mere commercial (as opposed to 'professional') basketball team in a society that tolerates abject poverty and illegal war was severely chastised and sanctioned for only elitist, racist remarks. Summarily, let me say that my America took a big turn for the worse when the 'Pied Piper' was bribed to play the National Anthem. Nope, not 'ha ha' funny, at all. And, I don't know whether to dread or rejoice the day when the coerced laughter finally ends, and the music dies.
- Anonymous
During the 2nd Bush administration I started to notice all the books listed in the Washington Post book section about his administration. After awhile I thought maybe I should start reading. The first page turner was one by Bob Woodward about the lead up to the Iraq war. It showed me that we were not getting truth from the media so I kept on reading books. First about Iraq-Fiasco, The man who got is into the war Amad Chalabi, Blackwater, Bloodmoney and many others. I keep telling people to read more but they choose not to. They are either working too hard or if retired playing too hard. They just want to be spoon fed and are addicted to outrage entertainment. I continued my reading on economics, finance, climate change and understand much more than I did before. Keynes vs Hyeck explains the history of the two economic theories. Also how the shift to the right happened during The Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Age of Greed explains how a few very greedy men influenced congress to repeal laws and pass laws in their favor. Tim Flannerys book The Weather Makers explains Climate change. And there are too many books written on income disparity and the danger to democracy. What is happening is out of control and a nightmare. I don't think people understand that when a government service for the commons is privatized it becomes a corporation with lobbyists that influence Congress and that we taxpayers must pay their employees at a much higher rate. Like the army contractors, prisons and so on. People do not put on their thinking caps. Sorry for the rant.
- Charles Shaver
Interesting, impressive; different paths, one destination; better a rant than a sell-out or surrender. Beware of putting too much faith in the opinions of others, myself included. We all are products of our past and there is a natural tendency for the adult progeny to emulate the parent; the student to mimic the teacher; the reader to quote the author. I find the U.S. Constitution is the best source of information about how America should function but I don't hear or see much of that from any of the so-called 'experts.' If electrical engineers treated Ohm's Law like authors, bankers, government, lawyers and the 'people' treat the U.S. Constitution, you'd be reading this in script on parchment by candlelight, if at all. And, don't let me discourage you; where I fail you may succeed. Let reason prevail. Thanks for the stimulating conversation.
- Anonymous
Yes we all have the tendency to read whatever validates our worldview. I read Gretchen Morgensterns book named Reckless Endangerment about Fannie Mae. Saw her talk on Cspan book channel. Needed to get to the bottom of that mess. Jim Johnson was and still is a very shady character. It is strange however that the Republicans reduced the entire 2008 recession down to two sound bites Fannie Mae and the CRA (I think that is the acrynom) for the program to stop the redlining. No one knows anything about the history and purpose of Fannie Mae and it's original purpose until Johnson got his hands on it. If one has critical thinking one can sift out the truth. I just cannot believe that people will believe a sound bite without any hesitation.
- Charles Shaver
Been 'deep thinking' a lot more about the Deep State but, without yesterday's lost credentials or celebrity (good or bad), there's not much I can presently do. One clever sound-bite might do the trick but none I've composed and tried so far have caught on. Still, probably, is tomorrow.
- Anonymous
I actually thought of a really good sound bite and communicated it to the White House. No one took me up on it. Wish I could remember what it was. If you have any you could try. But they are not very confrontational.
- Charles Shaver
I liked candidate Obama's words but never voted for him, because he already belonged to one of two already proved dysfunctional major political parties. Writing the Obama White House and even getting a few generic replies while watching him fail the office, too, I do not regret 'wasting' my vote on a 'green' third party candidate. After rereading The Anatomy of the Deep State, today, I'm sure I could read more and probably phrase things better but am still confident in my decades of working-class experience-based conclusions and suggestions.
- sorval
"Land of the Free, Home of the Brave"
has become
Land of the "Free", Home of the "Brave".
- johnnyomaha
Privatization of the US constitution to serve the elite…..
- http://www.rrstevens.net/ Robert Stevens
… OR is it "Land of the Greed, Home of the Knave" -- Let's sing it all together before the next Football Game and Circus: ♫ "o'er the Land of the Greed …" ♫
- Anonymous
Where's the who, what, when, where, and why? Collected everyday simple observations will awaken one to the existence of a higher controlling entity. No more problem identification or descriptions, thank you very much. We need 1) facts and 2) solutions.
- unheilig
Lofgren gives both. Did you read the article? Confirmation is easy enough too: all you need is a browser and a few hours searching off-off-lamestream information sources.
- Jocelyn Hawley
To both dn7904 and Charles Shaver, I read your back and forth discussion and realize that I so crave that type of intelligent, informed and aware discussion within my interactions in my daily life, but none can really exist. Most people are so concerned with the outcomes of the game, or fantasy football, or the latest t.v. series, and how on earth to pay rent and other minutia. The little bit of news comes from prime time networks like Fox, NBC and CNN and they think they know what is happening in the world, but don't actually want to know what is really happening. The trick to an article like this one, is not yet how we change the problem, but how we get people to notice, be aware and to care. That is the real question and the first- most prominent problem to be solved.
- Anonymous
I think there are more creative ways for the citizenry to communicate their discontent than to wait four years for the next highly-funded election.
I remember being in an international conference and the minister of Health from a major developed country came on stage just days after making a very unpopular move. One person stood up and simply turned her back on the Minister, then another, then a dozen, then the whole auditorium of major players in the scientific community.
It made headlines.
I resent the fact that a movement like MoveOn now just asks me for money like all the other PAC's. They used to send out flyers and have photos posted of people all over the country holding the same flyer.
What comes to mind is that we remain the developed country in which the fewest people take vacation. How can we possibly stop and think about creative democracy? Ironically the revolutionary thought that was the spark that set off the flames of this country came from the leisure class who had plenty of time to think and write about things like freedom and liberty.- Charles Shaver
Thank you for prodding me to do some additional 'Deep Thinking.' The harm is done. Thanks to the apathetic and/or ignorant majority of a voting minority, the balance of power in the U.S. has now been transferred from the left hand of organized crime to the right hand, for the next two years. At least the majority is consistent in its failure to self-govern by voting, and voting wisely.
While (if) still allowed, voting wisely is the only reasonable solution. Creative protesting (e.g., 'occupy' them, pass out flyers, shout them down, turn your back or throw them a shoe) means nothing when the final vote is counted to determine who actually makes and enforces the rules. Not omniscient or perfect, either, I'm open to suggestions but with very little to work with after several decades of too-typical abuse, betrayal, exploitation and oppression, served in the pseudonyms of loyalty, patriotism, sacrifice and service. If mere reasoning worked then Bill Moyers and 'company' would have already solved most of the major problems. Don't let me discourage you, though, keep on with your own deep thinking.
- John Schoneboom
Two flaws jump out at me from this otherwise rather good and useful article. The first is that Mr. Lofgren implies that the Deep State is mainly a Republican thing. In the picture he paints, it's the Republicans who want to pay the national security state, while the poor hapless Democrats just want to increase social spending. Similarly, he makes excuses for Obama in footnote 7. (Presidents are surely mostly puppets, but Obama's 2008 FISA vote as Senator betrays his own predilections well enough.) At best, this is the farcical veneer of Deep State Theatre. I suspect Mr. Lofgren knows better and didn't mean to imply otherwise.
Secondly, government shutdowns and budgetary problems may be an inconvenience to the Deep State, but no accounting of the Deep State is complete without figuring in off-the-books revenue from the global drug trade. International partnerships and oil interests also help diversify the income stream nicely. There are many billions feeding this thing that have nothing to do with the US budget.
It's also somewhat criminal not to name-check Peter Dale Scott in this subject area. But I'm nitpicking. I'll not bother criticizing the piece for not addressing Deep State ties with terrorism, that kettle of fish deserves its own barrel. Like I said, nice piece, useful, well done, thank you.
- Douglas Harris
does no one see there is a reason for the immense defense spending as America becomes #2 in world economy and the dollar might be replaced as the reserve currency?
The Chinese own enough treasury paper to close the American economy, alone or with several willing partners. BUT…America even as a declining economic dictator will still have the arms to maintain world control…- Anonymous
I had no real a-ha moment reading this well written piece. Nothing jumped out at me as something foreign or unknown. Instead, I had the sense of deja vu, the kind of deja vu I'd rather not have. All these things have been known if the consumer of this good piece has been paying attention to the not-mainline press. What is so exciting about this is the writer put all the information in one place and drew out the connections that weren't always so obvious. Though Mr. Lofgren paints a somewhat plausible picture of how this State may rather suddenly crumble, I'm a bit dubious.
What seems missing are the global links among many of these actors especially the oligarchs reach and connection to many things terrorism. What I'm saying is that I'm not terribly optimistic that a leader will come along who is sufficiently unbeholden to the state and who can remain un-co-opted and call this state for what it is thus raising our fellow Americans sustained interest and desire to see through the mess it will take to overthrow this Deep State.. In any case, thanks so much for such a thoughtful and creepy picture.
- Anonymous
None of this is news. A President who cared could smash the Deep State in, probably, nine months. The key lockhold the Deep State has at the moment is on the nomination process, which is used to filter out any Presidents, and most Congressional nominees, who show signs of independent thought. They've been doing this since Reagan (Carter was the last President with independent thought; Reagan was ideal, being an actor with Alzheimer's and so not thinking much at all.) There are two ways this can play out: either they lose their lockhold on the nomination process, or the entire system is discredited and we get a revolution.
The Deep State is actually very fragile due to their fundamental incompetence. But they're quite capable of wrecking our existing system, at which point there will be an opening for a Caesar or a Napoleon or a Lenin who *is* competent. That is the true danger moment. The worst scenario is revolving-door coups, such as Mexico suffered for decades in the 18th and 19th century.
- Anonymous
The American Empire is, however, in decline phase. You can identify that by the inability to conquer territory and the slow loss of territory from the edges. The peak of the American Empire was actually in the late 19th century… A collapsing empire follows a weird trajectory. Many comparisons have been made to the Roman Empire. That worked out poorly.
- Anonymous
You could also read the much older "War is A Racket" by Smedley Butler.
The IMF/World Bank scam was working for a while. It doesn't work any more: South American countries simply reject it. And the US has no power to muscle South American countries any more; I'm not quite sure how they managed to become immune to US military intervention, but they have. They have had about 200 years of trial and error in figuring out how.
Now, the rest of the world just needs to copy the South American model and the US IMF/World Bank scam becomes untenable.
- Anonymous
Proportional representation is critical, but I haven't figured out how to get anyone to pay attention to it. Even at the local level, where the deep state has no traction because it's paying no attention.
- Anonymous
Thankfully the fight against electronic voting machines is already pretty strong. This is something people understand viscerally and this is a key plank for whatever party is going to dethrone the Rs & Ds. Basically, if electronic "voting" machines are delegitimized (as they should be), this means people will actually fight for their paper ballots…
- Anonymous
I think you're wrong about how most Americans will react. The levels of disillusionment are very, very high now and you can measure them in polls.
Just before the Civil War, we saw the same dynamic: most of the country was completely disillusioned about the "slavocracy", as they called the corrupt US government dominated by slaveholders. This led to the election of Lincoln, the destruction of the Whig Party, and finally, the Civil War.
This is the sort of situation we have now. The Deep State can't win; it will be smashed as Americans unite behind a Lincoln-like figure. The only questions are when this will happen, and more importantly *what comes next*. Things are wide open after that happens: Sun Yat-Sen led (unfortunately) to Mao.
- jeffries
Well it will be interesting how the Greece situation plays out. It seems strange we don't hear much or read much in main stream media about it. They are challenging the status quo. At first the banks gave them until the 28th and then cut it to 10 days. It would be in everyone's best interest if this was the beginning of the end for the EU. Diffused power is the best power. If the EU fails we won't be pressured into a union with Canada and Mexico. I think that was the plan of the global deep state. Aggregate nations into regions and then larger regions and then it would not be such a jump to global government.
- Anonymous
"….. Americans sustained interest…."
Lack of interest is the real killer of all empires.
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January 20, 2015 | Homeland Security Watch
That's the question Michael J. Glennon asks in his book "National Security and Double Government."
His answer: national security policy is determined largely by "the several hundred managers of the military, intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement agencies who are responsible for protecting the nation and who have come to operate largely immune from constitutional and electoral restraints." The president, congress and the courts play largely a symbolic role in national security policy, Glennon claims.
You can read a Harvard National Security Journal article that outlines Glennon's argument at this link: http://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Glennon-Final.pdf. The paper is not an especially easy read, but I found it to be well researched and – for me – persuasive.
His book adds more analysis to the argument, using (from Graham Allison's Essence of Decision) the rational actor model, the government politics model, and the organizational behavior model. Glennon extends that framework by discussing culture, networks, and the myth of alternative competing hypotheses. The book is richer, in my opinion. But the core of Glennon's position is in the paper.
This link takes you to a video of Glennon talking about his book at the Cato Institute: http://www.cato.org/events/national-security-double-government (the talk starts at the 5:20 mark).
From the Cato site:
In National Security and Double Government, Michael Glennon examines the continuity in U.S. national security policy from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. Glennon explains the lack of change by pointing to the enervation of America's "Madisonian institutions," namely, the Congress, the presidency, and the courts. In Glennon's view, these institutions have been supplanted by a "Trumanite network" of bureaucrats who make up the permanent national security state. National security policymaking has been removed from public view and largely insulated from law and politics. Glennon warns that leaving security policy in the hands of the Trumanite network threatens Americans' liberties and the republican form of government.
Some blurb reviews:
- "If constitutional government is to endure in the United States, Americans must confront the fundamental challenges presented by this chilling analysis of the national security state."
Bruce Ackerman- "Glennon shows how the underlying national security bureaucracy in Washington – what might be called the deep state – ensures that presidents and their successors act on the world stage like Tweedledee and Tweedledum." John J. Mearsheimer
- "National Security and Double Government is brilliant, deep, sad, and vastly learned across multiple fields–a work of Weberian power and stature. It deserves to be read and discussed. The book raises philosophical questions in the public sphere in a way not seen at least since Fukuyama's end of history." David A. Westbrook
- "In our faux democracy, those we elect to govern serve largely ornamental purposes, while those who actually wield power, especially in the realm of national security, do so chiefly with an eye toward preserving their status and prerogatives. Read this incisive and richly documented book, and you'll understand why." Andrew J. Bacevich
- "…Michael Glennon provides a compelling argument that America's national security policy is growing outside the bounds of existing government institutions. This is at once a constitutional challenge, but is also a case study in how national security can change government institutions, create new ones, and, in effect, stand-up a parallel state…." Vali Nasr
- "Instead of being responsive to citizens or subject to effective checks and balances, U.S. national security policy is in fact conducted by a shadow government of bureaucrats and a supporting network of think tanks, media insiders, and ambitious policy wonks. Presidents may come and go, but the permanent national security establishment inevitably defeats their efforts to chart a new course…."Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer
I've spoken to three people I consider to be members of the "shadow national security state." One person said Glennon's argument is nothing new. The second told me he's got it exactly right. The third said it's even worse.
William R. Cumming, January 20, 2015 @ 8:38 am
ah! the deep state analyzed correctly imo!
and imo only the nuclear priesthood rivals the deep state but not exactly part of it yet its original source!
like the mayan priests only those in it know how accurate this book is in its analysis!
and a congress marches on in complete ignorance!
Mike Mealer, January 21, 2015 @ 7:48 pm
Great article. Read it a few months ago. I didn't know whether I should feel more secure or afraid. Looking the items I highlighted and a few standout.
"The dirty little secret here," a former associate counsel in the Bush White House, Brad Berenson, explained, "is that the United States government has enduring institutional interests that carry over from administration to administration and almost always dictate the position the government takes."178 P34
Its cohesion notwithstanding, the Trumanite network is curiously amorphous. It has no leader. It is not monolithic. It has no formal structure. P32
The maintenance of Trumanite autonomy has depended upon two conditions. The first is that the Madisonian institutions appear to be in charge of the nation's security. The second is that the Madisonian institutions not actually be in charge. P34
Public opinion is, accordingly, a flimsy check on the Trumanites; it is a manipulable tool of power enhancement. It is therefore rarely possible for any occupant of the Oval Office to prevail against strong, unified Trumanite opposition, for the same reasons that members of Congress and the judiciary cannot; a non-expert president, like a non-expert senator and a non-expert judge, is intimidated by expert Trumanites and does not want to place himself (or a colleague or a potential political successor) at risk by looking weak and gambling that the Trumanites are mistaken. So presidents wisely "choose" to go along. P70
John Comiskey, January 22, 2015 @ 7:14 am
Civic Education 101
Glennon laments as did Justice Souter, the pervasive civic ignorance of the citizenry. Democracy requires an informed and engaged citizenry. The recent and ongoing debates about the role the police in society raise similar question and doubts about our social contract and governance for the 21st century.
Where to from here?
A national conversation about civics and K-12 civic education.
What is the proper role of citizens in society?
What is the proper role of our polity?William R. Cumming, January 22, 2015 @ 8:53 am
Again interesting thread and comments. The use of the term "Trumanite" is unfortunate and totally inaccurate IMO! Truman reluctantly signed the National Security Act of 1947 to resolve the documented failures of Jointness between the Army and Navy in WWII [the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy--Stimson and King]! Truman was personally opposed to the establishment of the CIA for many good reasons.
What is the real failure is the creation of the Nuclear Priesthood which largely failed to guard its secrets from other Nation-States and individuals and the warping into the DEEP STATE [the better term than DOUBLR GOVERTNMENT]!
And now IMO the DEEP STATE is about to DEEP SIX the Career military in the US as it organizes violence and the SURVEILLANCE STATE outside the ARMED FORCES.
A close study of the overturning of the ALIEN AND SEDITION Acts of 1798 which destroyed chances for a second term for John Adams and created the first real Presidential Election in the USA, the Presidential Election of 1800, which brought into officer Jefferson, but almost brought Aaron Burr to real power.
Study of James Madison so-called VIRGINIA RESOLUTION opposing the ASA is fully warranted. Too bad John Yoo did not know this history.
William R. Cumming, January 22, 2015 @ 2:43 pm
I need to mention that I did read the article and listened to the Cato Institute Panel.
The Panel presentations might lead one to argue that Double or nothing or the DEEP STATE what difference does it make past, present, or future?
My short answer is that Government of the people, by the people, and for the people [the Lincoln formulation] probably expired with the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki! Perhaps not but until argued and proven otherwise that is my conclusion! Perhaps wrong and hoping so!
Jack, January 24, 2015 @ 2:47 pm
A fascinating and needful argument, though I think we could make as much of the supine legislature that lends weight to Glennon's argument as he does the "permanent" executive agency security apparatus. If they're to be properly responsive to public will, executive agencies need better written laws.
The Critical Infrastructure Protection Act or CIPA, which passed the house in 2014, would, "require the Assistant Secretary of the National Protection and Programs Directorate to: (1) include in national planning scenarios the threat of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) events…" (emphasis mine). The national planning scenarios were rescinded in 2011, making CIPA either a very easy or very hard law to execute.
Likewise, the Biggert-Waters flood insurance reform act of 2012 altered regulatory definitions for "substantial damage" and "substantial improvement" by misunderstanding the way field damage assessments are performed under the National Flood Insurance Program.
Which means, I suppose, that we need more able legislators…which may be unlikely if more Americans don't know Publius from Curly.
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www.theguardian.com
This is the state of such legislation in this country, where lawmakers wanted to do something but, by passing Cisa, just decided to cede more power to the NSA
Under the vague guise of "cybersecurity", the Senate voted on Tuesday to pass the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa), a spying bill that essentially carves a giant hole in all our privacy laws and allows tech and telecom companies to hand over all sorts of private information to intelligence agencies without any court process whatsoever.
Make no mistake: Congress has passed a surveillance bill in disguise, with no evidence it'll help our security.
eminijunkie 28 Oct 2015 17:34
Being competent requires work. Actual work.
You can't honestly say you expected them to do actual work, now can you?
david wright 28 Oct 2015 13:44
'The Senate, ignorant on cybersecurity, just passed a bill about it anyway '
The newsworthy event would be the Senate's passage of anything, on the basis of knowledge or serious reflection, rather than $-funded ignorance. The country this pas few decades has been long on policy-based evidence as a basis for law, rather than evidence-based policy. Get what our funders require, shall be the whole of the law.
Kyllein -> MacKellerann 28 Oct 2015 16:49
Come ON! You are expecting COMPETENCE from Congress?
Wake up and smell the bacon; these people work on policy, not intelligence.VWFeature -> lostinbago 28 Oct 2015 13:37
Bravo!
"...There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing." -- Daniel Webster, June 1, 1837
"If once [the people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions." -- Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787
lostinbago -> KhepryQuixote 28 Oct 2015 12:09
We became the enemy when the people started attacking the Military Industrial Corporate complex and trying to regain our republic from the oligarchs.
lostinbago 28 Oct 2015 12:07
Congress: Where Catch 22 melds with Alice in Wonderland
Phil429 28 Oct 2015 11:44
we now have another law on the books that carves a hole in our privacy laws, contains vague language that can be interpreted any which way, and that has provisions inserted into it specifically to prevent us from finding out how they're using it.
They were counting on nobody paying much attention. Didn't you hear somebody got killed on Walking Dead? Who's got time to talk about boring nonsense like a Congressional bill?
guardianfan2000 28 Oct 2015 08:53
This vote just showed the true colors of the U. S. Government,...that being a total disregard for all individuals' privacy rights.
newbieveryday 28 Oct 2015 02:11
Inverse totalitarianism. Read Sheldon Wolin. We're sliding down the slippery slope. Who's going to be der erster Fuehrer? David Koch?
Triumphant George -> alastriona 27 Oct 2015 18:55
From elsewhere:
On Tuesday afternoon, the Senate voted 74 to 21 to pass a version of CISA that roughly mirrors legislation passed in the House earlier this year, paving the way for some combined version of the security bill to become law.
CISA still faces some hurdles to becoming law. Congressional leaders will need to resolve remaining differences between the bills passed in the Senate and the House.
President Obama could also still veto CISA, though that's unlikely: The White House endorsed the bill in August, an about-face from an earlier attempt at cybersecurity information sharing legislation known as CISPA that the White House shut down with a veto threat in 2013.
--"CISA Security Bill Passes Senate With Privacy Flaws Unfixed", Wired
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Amazon
J. Roth on October 14, 2015
A Groundbreaking Resource, Second Only to "JFK and the Unspeakable"
A tremendous resource of breathtaking depth and clarity. Talbot builds on the now decades-old body of research - initiated by investigative reporters Tom Mangold ("Cold Warrior") and David Wise ("Molehunt"), and largely developed by assassination researchers James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease ("The Assassinations") - and adds groundbreaking new information.
Talbot focusses extensively on James Jesus Angleton, the shadowy counterintelligence figure at the heart of the domestic assassinations of the 1960s, and examines the inner-workings of Dulles' ambitious (and dastardly) plot to consolidate and control global political power. "The Devil's Chessboard" is a startling and revelatory masterwork. In terms of easy-to-access assassination research, this book is second only to James Douglass' "JFK and the Unspeakable." In terms of biographies of Dulles and Angleton, two of history's most infamous figures, this work is second to none.
Note: Be wary of one-star reviews for this book. Some trace back to commissioned-review services, the same services that give five-star reviews to shady/suspicious health and beauty products. Go figure.
James Norwood on October 14, 2015
The Shadow Government of Allen Dulles: Organized Irresponsibility
To read this magnificent book by David Talbot is to understand how the JFK assassination occurred and how the truth was concealed by officialdom in the Warren Report. Unlike his brother, John Foster Dulles, the younger Allen Welsh Dulles rarely makes it into American history textbooks. In this extremely detailed study, the singular importance of Allen Dulles is demonstrated as being central to a watershed period in the American Century.
First and foremost, "The Devil's Chessboard" is a beautifully written and meticulously researched volume. Talbot drew upon archives at Princeton University, where the Allen Dulles papers are housed. He also conducted research in other archives across the country. The documentary work is buttressed and amplified by interviews with the surviving daughter of Dulles, as well as interviews with the children of Dulles' colleagues and over 150 officials from the Kennedy administration. Nearly forty pages of notes serve to document the author's sources.
One of the most revealing moments about Allen Dulles was when he was ten years old and spending time at the family's lake home in upstate New York. After his five-year-old sister fell into the lake and was drifting away from him, Allen stood stock still, "strangely impassive. The boy just stood on the dock and watched as his little sister drifted away." (p. 19) Fortunately, the child was rescued by the mother. The behavior of young Allen is representative of a lifelong predilection for observing the imponderables of life as an insider while looking to others to "risk their skins." For this little boy, the world was already forming into a chessboard with pawns to manipulate for his self-serving needs. Talbot describes Dulles' rogue actions in allowing Nazi war criminals to avoid prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials in these chilling words: "Even in the life-and-death throes of wartime espionage, Dulles seemed untouched by the intense human drama swirling around him." (p. 120)
In one of the most riveting moments of the book, Talbot describes an interchange between Dulles and researcher David Lifton at a colloquium on the JFK assassination at the campus of UCLA in 1965. Lifton came prepared to challenge Dulles on major deficiencies of the Warren Report. By the end of the evening, the students attending the session were more interested in Lifton's findings than Dulles' unsuccessful attempts to deflect the tough questions. In retrospect, Lifton apparently claimed that he "was in the presence of 'evil' that night." (p. 591)
A heretofore unanswered question about the JFK assassination is what was Allen Dulles was doing between the time he was fired by JFK as Director of the CIA in 1961 until the moment of the assassination on November 22, 1963. A related question is how was it conceivable for Dulles to have been appointed to the Warren Commission that eventually produced the conclusions that are still accepted by mainstream historians and the media? Talbot's intensive research helps to shed on light on those questions by tracing the arc of development of the career of Allen Dulles as a high-powered attorney at the center of the elitist East Coast establishment, his shocking collaboration with the Nazis while working in the OSS, and his career in clandestine activities at the CIA
Talbot's research probes not merely the activities of Dulles as Director of the CIA, but explores the broader context of his function over three decades as a power broker, whose "efforts were directed not against hostile governments but against his own." (p. 3) Talbot cites revelations from the Columbia University sociology professor C. Wright Mills about the secret government of Allen Dulles, which was comprised of a "power elite" and based on the anti-Constitutional premise of "organized irresponsibility."
In many ways, "The Devil's Chessboard" is a companion volume to Talbot's essential study "Brothers," which focuses on the relationship of John and Robert Kennedy, the assassination of JFK, and the aftereffects on RFK. But the more recent book on Dulles covers the broader scope of how the American government was transformed into the national security state in the years following World War II. Talbot's goal in preparing this book is to demonstrate the urgency of coming to terms with our past and how "it is essential that we continue to fight for the right to own our history." (p. xii) An excellent place to begin that quest is to own this book.
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Sep 24, 2015 | TheAntiMedia.org,
For decades, extreme ideologies on both the left and the right have clashed over the conspiratorial concept of a shadowy secret government pulling the strings on the world's heads of state and captains of industry.
The phrase New World Order is largely derided as a sophomoric conspiracy theory entertained by minds that lack the sophistication necessary to understand the nuances of geopolitics. But it turns out the core idea - one of deep and overarching collusion between Wall Street and government with a globalist agenda - is operational in what a number of insiders call the "Deep State."
In the past couple of years, the term has gained traction across a wide swath of ideologies. Former Republican congressional aide Mike Lofgren says it is the nexus of Wall Street and the national security state - a relationship where elected and unelected figures join forces to consolidate power and serve vested interests. Calling it "the big story of our time," Lofgren says the deep state represents the failure of our visible constitutional government and the cross-fertilization of corporatism with the globalist war on terror.
"It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street," he explained.
Even parts of the judiciary, namely the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, belong to the deep state.
How does the deep state operate?A complex web of revolving doors between the military-industrial-complex, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley consolidates the interests of defense contracts, banksters, military actions, and both foreign and domestic surveillance intelligence.
According to Mike Lofgren and many other insiders, this is not a conspiracy theory. The deep state hides in plain sight and goes far beyond the military-industrial complex President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in his farewell speech over fifty years ago.
While most citizens are at least passively aware of the surveillance state and collusion between the government and the corporate heads of Wall Street, few people are aware of how much the intelligence functions of the government have been outsourced to privatized groups that are not subject to oversight or accountability. According to Lofgren, 70% of our intelligence budget goes to contractors.
Moreover, while Wall Street and the federal government suck money out of the economy, relegating tens of millions of people to food stamps and incarcerating more people than China - a totalitarian state with four times more people than us - the deep state has, since 9/11, built the equivalent of three Pentagons, a bloated state apparatus that keeps defense contractors, intelligence contractors, and privatized non-accountable citizens marching in stride.
After years of serving in Congress, Lofgren's moment of truth regarding this matter came in 2001. He observed the government appropriating an enormous amount of money that was ostensibly meant to go to Afghanistan but instead went to the Persian Gulf region. This, he says, "disenchanted" him from the groupthink, which, he says, keeps all of Washington's minions in lockstep.
Groupthink - an unconscious assimilation of the views of your superiors and peers - also works to keep Silicon Valley funneling technology and information into the federal surveillance state. Lofgren believes the NSA and CIA could not do what they do without Silicon Valley. It has developed a de facto partnership with NSA surveillance activities, as facilitated by a FISA court order.
Now, Lofgren notes, these CEOs want to complain about foreign market share and the damage this collusion has wrought on both the domestic and international reputation of their brands. Under the pretense of pseudo-libertarianism, they helmed a commercial tech sector that is every bit as intrusive as the NSA. Meanwhile, rigging of the DMCA intellectual property laws - so that the government can imprison and fine citizens who jailbreak devices - behooves Wall Street. It's no surprise that the government has upheld the draconian legislation for the 15 years.
It is also unsurprising that the growth of the corporatocracy aids the deep state. The revolving door between government and Wall Street money allows top firms to offer premium jobs to senior government officials and military yes-men. This, says Philip Giraldi, a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer for the CIA, explains how the Clintons left the White House nearly broke but soon amassed $100 million. It also explains how former general and CIA Director David Petraeus, who has no experience in finance, became a partner at the KKR private equity firm, and how former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell became Senior Counselor at Beacon Global Strategies.
Wall Street is the ultimate foundation for the deep state because the incredible amount of money it generates can provide these cushy jobs to those in the government after they retire. Nepotism reigns supreme as the revolving door between Wall Street and government facilitates a great deal of our domestic strife:
How did the deep state come to be?"Bank bailouts, tax breaks, and resistance to legislation that would regulate Wall Street, political donors, and lobbyists. The senior government officials, ex-generals, and high level intelligence operatives who participate find themselves with multi-million dollar homes in which to spend their retirement years, cushioned by a tidy pile of investments," said Giraldi.
Some say it is the evolutionary hybrid offspring of the military-industrial complex while others say it came into being with the Federal Reserve Act, even before the First World War. At this time, Woodrow Wilson remarked,
"We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
This quasi-secret cabal pulling the strings in Washington and much of America's foreign policy is maintained by a corporatist ideology that thrives on deregulation, outsourcing, deindustrialization, and financialization. American exceptionalism, or the great "Washington Consensus," yields perpetual war and economic imperialism abroad while consolidating the interests of the oligarchy here at home.
Mike Lofgren says this government within a government operates off tax dollars but is not constrained by the constitution, nor are its machinations derailed by political shifts in the White House. In this world - where the deep state functions with impunity - it doesn't matter who is president so long as he or she perpetuates the war on terror, which serves this interconnected web of corporate special interests and disingenuous geopolitical objectives.
"As long as appropriations bills get passed on time, promotion lists get confirmed, black (i.e., secret) budgets get rubber stamped, special tax subsidies for certain corporations are approved without controversy, as long as too many awkward questions are not asked, the gears of the hybrid state will mesh noiselessly," according to Mike Lofgren in an interview with Bill Moyers.
Interestingly, according to Philip Giraldi, the ever-militaristic Turkey has its own deep state, which uses overt criminality to keep the money flowing. By comparison, the U.S. deep state relies on a symbiotic relationship between banksters, lobbyists, and defense contractors, a mutant hybrid that also owns the Fourth Estate and Washington think tanks.
Is there hope for the future?
Perhaps. At present, discord and unrest continues to build. Various groups, establishments, organizations, and portions of the populace from all corners of the political spectrum, including Silicon Valley, Occupy, the Tea Party, Anonymous, WikiLeaks, anarchists and libertarians from both the left and right, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and others are beginning to vigorously question and reject the labyrinth of power wielded by the deep state.
Can these groups - can we, the people - overcome the divide and conquer tactics used to quell dissent? The future of freedom may depend on it.
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The American Conservative,It has frequently been alleged that the modern Turkish Republic operates on two levels. It has a parliamentary democracy complete with a constitution and regular elections, but there also exists a secret government that has been referred to as the "deep state," in Turkish "Derin Devlet."
The concept of "deep state" has recently become fashionable to a certain extent, particularly to explain the persistence of traditional political alignments when confronted by the recent revolutions in parts of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. For those who believe in the existence of the deep state, there are a number of institutional as well as extralegal relationships that might suggest its presence.
Some believe that this deep state arose out of a secret NATO operation called "Gladio," which created an infrastructure for so-called "stay behind operations" if Western Europe were to be overrun by the Soviet Union and its allies. There is a certain logic to that assumption, as a deep state has to be organized around a center of official and publicly accepted power, which means it normally includes senior officials of the police and intelligence services as well as the military. For the police and intelligence agencies, the propensity to operate in secret is a sine qua non for the deep state, as it provides cover for the maintenance of relationships that under other circumstances would be considered suspect or even illegal.
In Turkey, the notion that there has to be an outside force restraining dissent from political norms was, until recently, even given a legal fig leaf through the Constitution of 1982, which granted to the military's National Security Council authority to intervene in developing political situations to "protect" the state. There have, in fact, been four military coups in Turkey. But deep state goes far beyond those overt interventions. It has been claimed that deep state activities in Turkey are frequently conducted through connivance with politicians who provide cover for the activity, with corporate interests and with criminal groups who can operate across borders and help in the mundane tasks of political corruption, including drug trafficking and money laundering.
A number of senior Turkish politicians have spoken openly of the existence of the deep state. Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit tried to learn more about the organization and, for his pains, endured an assassination attempt in 1977. Tansu Ciller eulogized "those who died for the state and those who killed for the state," referring to the assassinations of communists and Kurds. There have been several significant exposures of Turkish deep state activities, most notably an automobile accident in 1996 in Susurluk that killed the Deputy Chief of the Istanbul Police and the leader of the Grey Wolves extreme right wing nationalist group. A member of parliament was also in the car and a fake passport was discovered, tying together a criminal group that had operated death squads with a senior security official and an elected member of the legislature. A subsequent investigation determined that the police had been using the criminals to support their operations against leftist groups and other dissidents. Deep state operatives have also been linked to assassinations of a judge, Kurds, leftists, potential state witnesses, and an Armenian journalist. They have also bombed a Kurdish bookstore and the offices of a leading newspaper.
As all governments-sometimes for good reasons-engage in concealment of their more questionable activities, or even resort to out and out deception, one must ask how the deep state differs. While an elected government might sometimes engage in activity that is legally questionable, there is normally some plausible pretext employed to cover up or explain the act.
But for players in the deep state, there is no accountability and no legal limit. Everything is based on self-interest, justified through an assertion of patriotism and the national interest. In Turkey, there is a belief amongst senior officials who consider themselves to be parts of the status in statu that they are guardians of the constitution and the true interests of the nation. In their own minds, they are thereby not bound by the normal rules. Engagement in criminal activity is fine as long as it is done to protect the Turkish people and to covertly address errors made by the citizenry, which can easily be led astray by political fads and charismatic leaders. When things go too far in a certain direction, the deep state steps in to correct course.
And deep state players are to be rewarded for their patriotism. They benefit materially from the criminal activity that they engage in, including protecting Turkey's role as a conduit for drugs heading to Europe from Central Asia, but more recently involving the movement of weapons and people to and from Syria. This has meant collaborating with groups like ISIS, enabling militants to ignore borders and sell their stolen archeological artifacts while also negotiating deals for the oil from the fields in the areas that they occupy. All the transactions include a large cut for the deep state.
If all this sounds familiar to an American reader, it should, and given some local idiosyncrasies, it invites the question whether the United States of America has its own deep state.
First of all, one should note that for the deep state to be effective, it must be intimately associated with the development or pre-existence of a national security state. There must also be a perception that the nation is in peril, justifying extraordinary measures undertaken by brave patriots to preserve life and property of the citizenry. Those measures are generically conservative in nature, intended to protect the status quo with the implication that change is dangerous.
Those requirements certainly prevail in post 9/11 America, and also feed the other essential component of the deep state: that the intervening should work secretly or at least under the radar. Consider for a moment how Washington operates. There is gridlock in Congress and the legislature opposes nearly everything that the White House supports. Nevertheless, certain things happen seemingly without any discussion: Banks are bailed out and corporate interests are protected by law. Huge multi-year defense contracts are approved. Citizens are assassinated by drones, the public is routinely surveilled, people are imprisoned without be charged, military action against "rogue" regimes is authorized, and whistleblowers are punished with prison. The war crimes committed by U.S. troops and contractors on far-flung battlefields, as well as torture and rendition, are rarely investigated and punishment of any kind is rare. America, the warlike predatory capitalist, might be considered a virtual definition of deep state.
One critic describes deep state as driven by the "Washington Consensus," a subset of the "American exceptionalism" meme. It is plausible to consider it a post-World War II creation, the end result of the "military industrial complex" that Dwight Eisenhower warned about, but some believe its infrastructure was actually put in place through the passage of the Federal Reserve Act prior to the First World War. Several years after signing the bill, Woodrow Wilson reportedly lamented, "We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
In truth America's deep state is, not unlike Turkey's, a hybrid creature that operates along a New York to Washington axis. Where the Turks engage in criminal activity to fund themselves, the Washington elite instead turns to banksters, lobbyists, and defense contractors, operating much more in the open and, ostensibly, legally. U.S.-style deep state includes all the obvious parties, both public and private, who benefit from the status quo: including key players in the police and intelligence agencies, the military, the treasury and justice departments, and the judiciary. It is structured to materially reward those who play along with the charade, and the glue to accomplish that ultimately comes from Wall Street. "Financial services" might well be considered the epicenter of the entire process. Even though government is needed to implement desired policies, the banksters comprise the truly essential element, capable of providing genuine rewards for compliance. As corporate interests increasingly own the media, little dissent comes from the Fourth Estate as the process plays out, while many of the proliferating Washington think tanks that provide deep state "intellectual" credibility are similarly funded by defense contractors.
The cross fertilization that is essential to making the system work takes place through the famous revolving door whereby senior government officials enter the private sector at a high level. In some cases the door revolves a number of times, with officials leaving government before returning to an even more elevated position. Along the way, those select individuals are protected, promoted, and groomed for bigger things. And bigger things do occur that justify the considerable costs, to include bank bailouts, tax breaks, and resistance to legislation that would regulate Wall Street, political donors, and lobbyists. The senior government officials, ex-generals, and high level intelligence operatives who participate find themselves with multi-million dollar homes in which to spend their retirement years, cushioned by a tidy pile of investments.
America's deep state is completely corrupt: it exists to sell out the public interest, and includes both major political parties as well as government officials. Politicians like the Clintons who leave the White House "broke" and accumulate $100 million in a few years exemplify how it rewards. A bloated Pentagon churns out hundreds of unneeded flag officers who receive munificent pensions and benefits for the rest of their lives. And no one is punished, ever. Disgraced former general and CIA Director David Petraeus is now a partner at the KKR private equity firm, even though he knows nothing about financial services. More recently, former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell has become a Senior Counselor at Beacon Global Strategies. Both are being rewarded for their loyalty to the system and for providing current access to their replacements in government.
What makes the deep state so successful? It wins no matter who is in power, by creating bipartisan-supported money pits within the system. Monetizing the completely unnecessary and hideously expensive global war on terror benefits the senior government officials, beltway industries, and financial services that feed off it. Because it is essential to keep the money flowing, the deep state persists in promoting policies that make no sense, to include the unwinnable wars currently enjoying marquee status in Iraq/Syria and Afghanistan. The deep state knows that a fearful public will buy its product and does not even have to make much of an effort to sell it.
Of course I know that the United States of America is not Turkey. But there are lessons to be learned from its example of how a democracy can be subverted by particular interests hiding behind the mask of patriotism. Ordinary Americans frequently ask why politicians and government officials appear to be so obtuse, rarely recognizing what is actually occurring in the country. That is partly due to the fact that the political class lives in a bubble of its own creation, but it might also be because many of America's leaders actually accept that there is an unelected, unappointed, and unaccountable presence within the system that actually manages what is taking place behind the scenes. That would be the American deep state.
rehypothecator
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Martian Moon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3xgjxJwedA
Latest on 911 by James Corbett
Educate yourself
All Risk No Reward
This is all you need to know to prove, beyond all doubt, that the official pile driving narrative is false.
The reality is that anyone can OBSERVE that the top of the building DID NOT DO WHAT A CUE BALL DOES EVERY SINGLE TIME IT HITS ANOTHER BILLIARD BALL - the top of the building did not decelerate.
It did not decelerate because IT DID NOT HIT THE LOWER SECTION OF THE BUILDING. For if it had hit the lower section of the building, IT WOULD HAVE DECELERATED.
The official story never addressed this point. They wisely stopped their investigation at the initiation of collapse. That was no accident.
AitT - Sir Isaac Newton Weighs in on the World Trade Center North Tower Collapse Official Narrative
http://www.weaponsofmassdebt.com/index.php/blog/aitt-sir-isaac-newton-we...
Now, some people will attack either me or this factual, observable, and repeatable information based on their programmed "crimestop" response...
crimestop - Orwell's definition: "The faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. In short....protective stupidity."
http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-dict.html
But what nobody will do - because they can't do it - is to explain a physics based scenario where the top of the building hit a structurally solid lower section of the building WITHOUT DECELERATING.
There are NO CONTRADICTIONS in reality. One leading blogger claimed he had done lots of research that showed the official story was correct.
But what he didn't do before he stopped the conversation (smart subconsciousness!) was to explain how the top of the building could have hit a structurally sound lower section of the building without experiencing marginal deceleration.
This is the video that needs to replace all the complex theories that are too easily dismissed by the masses.
No, make the masses exclaim the physics equivalent of 2+2=5 in order to continue believing in the Debt-Money Monopolist false narratives engineered to damage ordinary people across the globe.
NeoLuddite
Elections are just advance auctions of stolen goods.
junction
"Deep State" operatives killed Michael Hastings and Philip Marshall. Whether Paul Walker was also killed by the "Murder, Inc." - type agents of the "Deep State," to make flaming car crashes look normal, is an open question. When Tennessee Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)employee Katherine Smith died in a flaming car crash in 2002, her death was called a murder (still unsolved) because a Tennessee state trooper driving behind her saw her car explode into flames before going off the road.
Smith was the DMV employee who sold driver's licenses to Arabs, licenses they used to identify themselves when they did work on the sprinkler systems at the World Trade Center before 9/11.
Sprinkler systems which all did not work on 9/11, even though they were ruggedized after the 1993 WTC truck bombing.
And who can forget the California policeman, on a 100% disability pension, who turned up in Orlando, Florida as the FBI agent who murdered a martial arts associate of Boston Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The guy murdered had just undergone knee surgery and could only walk with a cane, yet he supposedly lunged at this crooked FBI agent, illegally collecting a disabilty pension tax free of some $60,000 a year.
The initial report from the agent said this guy had a sword cane but that report was false.
doctor10
Politics is merely the entertainment wing of the MIC/Anglo-American Central Banking junta.
Has been since November 23rd 1963. Reagan required a 22 cal message to that effect after he thought he'd been elected President.
kliguy38
Of course I know that the United States of America is not Turkey. But there are lessons to be learned from its example of how a democracy can be subverted by particular interests hiding behind the mask of patriotism.
no of course its not Turkey......its a hundred times worse
Ms No
Turkey's deep state is our deep state with some local players. This is going global, I thought everybody knew that. Turkey has been a vassal for the Ziocons as long as anyone can remember and they are one of many. Most of our presidents seem to prefer the term The New World Order. It's funny how people snicker about that term but I didn't catch a grin off of any of our presidents going back to Bush I snickering about it when they mention it in their State of the Union addresses and this current clown is not an exception.
It's quite real and not at all funny. People need to take a look around they have even spelled it out for you. What do these guys have to do send us our own eulogies? Lets just hope that while everybody else is trying to figure this out that we don't end up getting too familiar with our torture state.
Majestic12
"America is in deep shit as are all governments run by central banks neo-Keynesian fascist economic policy."
I got you on the "deep shit" and "run by central banks", but lost you on "Keynesian Fascist economic policy".
ZH is full of half truths and obfuscation.
I do not agree with much of Keynes, but most here support Von Mises (the Rockefeller Foundation product) and the London School of Economics.
These "institutions" are profoundly contradictory, corrupt and were born of the 00001%.
At least Keynes decried relying soley on monetary policy and "supply side" economics.
Most here have only known "supply side" (Reagan and after), so they have nothing to compare it to.
Listen to boomers talk of the 60s and 70s...there were always jobs, it didn't take 2 earners, it didn't take a degree, everyone took vacation, and the "information" deluge ended at 11:00pm until the next morning.
And, you really didn't have to lock your doors, unless you lived in urban Chicago, NY, LA any other huge metropolis.
So, it was all "Keynes"'s fault?
Keynes, who promoted "demand-side" and "fiscal policy"...really? Fascist?
Remember, there are 94 Million people out of the work force...but the poulation is 100 million more than in 1977, and the dollar was worth 70% more.
Salah
Seminal piece on the US 'deep state': http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/
Why the Clintons & Obama are both CIA No-doubt-about-it.
2nd Big Question: why was the CIA rushed into existence (bill signed in an airplane at end of National Airport by Truman) 45 days after the crash at Roswell?
Freddie
David Rockefeller as a young man was an OSS officer in WW2. Mi6 is the Red Shield.
They are just instruments of terror used by the elites,
Majestic12
"2nd Big Question: why was the CIA rushed into existence 45 days after the crash at Roswell?"
I am glad you asked.....the CIA's involvement was temporary.
The NSA (who now administers the black space program) began as the Armed Forces Security Agency, just 2 years later in 1949.
... ... ...
unitwar
Bill Moyers? I wonder why he doesn't report on those Bilderberg meetings he attends? He reports what he is told to report. Everything he does is a limited hangout.
Usurious
JustObservingthe french called the guillotine the national razor.........just sayin...
monica jewinsky was a honey pot.....
IgnatiusThe Deep State runs everything in America since at least Nov 22, 1963. Kennedy promised to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. Instead, the CIA shattered his brains into a thousand pieces.
The NSA spies on the Supreme Court, Congress and the White House and you.
The most extraordinary passage in the memo requires that the Israeli spooks "destroy upon recognition" any communication provided by the NSA "that is either to or from an official of the US government." It goes on to spell out that this includes "officials of the Executive Branch (including the White House, Cabinet Departments, and independent agencies); the US House of Representatives and Senate (members and staff); and the US Federal Court System (including, but not limited to, the Supreme Court)."
The stunning implication of this passage is that NSA spying targets not only ordinary American citizens, but also Supreme Court justices, members of Congress and the White House itself. One could hardly ask for a more naked exposure of a police state.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/09/13/surv-s13.html
Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.
http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/
Who rules America?
The secret collaboration of the military, the intelligence and national security agencies, and gigantic corporations in the systematic and illegal surveillance of the American people reveals the true wielders of power in the United States. Telecommunications giants such as AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, and Internet companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter, provide the military and the FBI and CIA with access to data on hundreds of millions of people that these state agencies have no legal right to possess.
Congress and both of the major political parties serve as rubber stamps for the confluence of the military, the intelligence apparatus and Wall Street that really runs the country. The so-called "Fourth Estate"-the mass media-functions shamelessly as an arm of this ruling troika.
It's a big club, and we ain't in it.
jmcoombs
Institutions, left unchecked, eventually come to worship themselves. The Catholic Church during the Spanish Inquisition is a sterling example.
Majestic12
jcdenton"What happened to all those bags of money that were in Iraq that disappeared?"
That was only $8 BBBBBillion in cash....chump change.
Remember last year the DoD stated that they cannot account for $8.5 TTTTTTTTrillion.....
1 Billion = One Thousand Millions.
1 Trillion = One Thousand Billions.
If your head has stopped spinning, then please, tel me....what could they spend $8.5 TTTTrillion on?
Remember, all the wars to date are paid for in the "open" and "public" military budget...so this is "extra"....
Now maybe you can see why some of us here take whistle blowers seriously about a secret space program.
Engineers, secret construction hangars and bases ain't cheap....the shoe fits.
So, there are a shit load of "Amercians" taking a big paycheck to help the elite and off-world assholes plan our demise.
I don't know how you feel about "sell-outs", but they make me think of guillotines.
Some believe that this deep state arose out of a secret NATO operation called "Gladio,"
Well it's more than logical, more than plausible ..
This Deep State arose out of ........................ you figure it out for your own sake, and convince yourself. I'll just assist ..
Directive 166
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/09/22/fraud-on-the-u-s-supreme-court-b...
The Deutsche Verteidigungs Dienst (DVD)
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/05/04/neo-so-much-more-than-nukes/
http://wantarevelations.com/2014/01/wanta-plan-macro-financial-economic-...
Tesla's Assistant
http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20070405.htm
(do a quick search for "Jesuit" and see how many hits you get. Notice who the DVD answer to.)
Go here: https://app.box.com/s/hfgvcqg7gqh7i27at6sv53ywu87lwarp
Go to Rulers of Evil, pg. 170. Start reading from Adam Weishaupt. Now you know the purpose of the creation of the United States of America ..
Ms No
I think Hitler was right about one thing, most people cannot see the big lie, it just seems to complex to them and thus ludicrous. Just look at a small portion of a military you have cores, divisions, brigades, betallions, generals, colonals, companies, Air Force, Navy, Special Forces, intelligence, espionage, propaganda depts, indoctrination depts, etc, all under one umbrella of centralized control.
Is it really that hard to believe that a organized self serving entity who has had plenty of time and very little opposition can grow to a gargantuan empire that nearly global in scale?
Two good reads among at least a hunderd that prove otherwise Sibel Edmonds and Tales of an Economic Hit Man.
tumblemore
"most people cannot see the big lie, it just seems to complex to them"
I think it's more to do with not being sociopaths.
People tend to think other people are like them so say the average person can only tell level 6/10 lies before they feel ashamed then they have a hard time believing other people can tell level 10/10 lies. They couldn't do it themselves so it's hard for them to imagine other people being that shameless - hence the bigger and more shameless the lie the more likely it is to be believed.
Only part-sociopaths can see it.
Ms No
There maybe an element of that occuring because a psychopath can identify another path immediately which would lead one to believe they may be able to identify their activities as well but over all there is something else going on.
There most certainly is something different about people who can go against the grain and challenge common propaganda but it isn't a lack of empathy. Some people are more resistant to indoctrination and we really don't know why. We do know that there has been a large amount of research on and use of subliminal technology and trauma disassociation. I would hazard a guess that there has been a ton of research on this subject that we will probably never see.
tumblemore
JRThe thing about the deep state idea is generally they exist to keep the members in power *and* keep the state in question strong in the long-term so that power is worth something.
What's odd about the US deep state is it doesn't seem to care about the long term at all and seems only really interested in selling America piece by piece.
For example from their behavior it's pretty blatant now that lobbyists have bought the GOP's foreign policy position but the dark side of that is it probably means every other aspect of policy is for sale also.
It's like the US deep state is living off the capital rather than the interest.
"On 9/11/2001, America received its new Pearl Harbor"…to strike fear into the hearts of Americans and pave the way for the perpetrators' profitable and soul-destroying global "war on terror"... Enough is enough! "There are at least 8.5 trillion reasons to investigate the money trail of 9/11" and to end the perversion of law that has bolstered the power of those who hold the reins in Washington, DC, and use the law, perverted, as a weapon for every kind of global control and personal greed!
NEW VIDEO: 9/11 Trillions: Follow The Money
One of the best documentaries on 9/11... "The first suspects of a big crime should be those who benefit from it."
Published on Sep 11, 2015
TRANSCRIPT, SOURCES AND MP3: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=16167
"Forget for one moment everything you've been told about September 11, 2001. 9/11 was a crime. And as with any crime, there is one overriding imperative that detectives must follow to identify the perpetrators: follow the money. This is an investigation of the 9/11 money trail."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3xgjxJwedA&feature=youtu.be
RichardParker
Engagement in criminal activity is fine as long as it is done to protect the Turkish people...
I call bullshit on this one. More like engagement in criminal activity is fine as long as it is done to preserve/enhance the Turkish government's power.
ddsoffice
Ja, diese ist eine gutte fragge. Aber, es ist wie die 'Jetzt Neue Deutschland' uber alles vielleicht seit WWI! (Yes, this is a good topic. But, it is like the 'New Germany Now' perhaps since WWI!)
(laughing now that I still remember some of my high school German lessons over 25 years ago.)
Eine Gutte Fragge. (A good topic)
Sehr Gut. (Very good)
Jetz Deuschtland ober alles. (Now Germany over all)
krage_man
There are various terms for this - deep state, elite, etc.
But ultimately, current political system so-called democracy is far from original definition of democracy. And I dont mean that original "greek" democracy is the better one.
This is a feature of modern democracy to pretend to be old-fashioned peoples democracy. This is to make sure people do feel their power to elect (ans they have it to a degree)
This is a feature of modern democracy to have 2-3 alternative parties. Each is more attractive to a certain human personality category. This way each can find something to associate with and be associated against. This means satisfaction of citizens with having a choice even though the choice is created for them based on 2-3 major types of their personalities.
All 2-3 parties are really backed by this deep state or elite institution which manages all things behand the curtain. For instance, foreign policy basixally ghe same no matter which party has power.
Political elected officcials do not really manage the affairs, they commmunicate but the final decisions are not theirs but come deep from the state departments which are receiving instructions from deep state.
Elected president is supervised by a vise president with direct access to deep state. He would take state affairs in his hands if the president is not cooperaring or incapacited ( could be related)
Deep state controls 95% of mass media via proxy corporations. A special mass-media department of the deep state issues directives to the editors of mainstream TV/news media. This department coordinates with other depaetments like one managing foreign affairs linked or even located in official state department. One may notice a delay when a certain major events take place and mass media delays reporting by 24-48 hours while waiting for the right spin of the reporting to the nation.
Latitude25
Interesting that Turkey is mentioned. When I was in college my room mate was a Turkish guy who was definitely from the .001%, second richest family in Turkey. He said that turkey has 100s of years of experience keeping the masses occupied with one war or another and that the economy could not run without it. He also liked chasing the most beautiful blondes he could find and with his money he sure found them.
Burticus
"The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests." - Rothschild Brothers of London
withglee
Ordinary Americans frequently ask why politicians and government officials appear to be so obtuse, rarely recognizing what is actually occurring in the country.
Ordinary Americans are clueless ... witness less than 8% know anything about WTC7.
That notwithstanding, government officials "appear" to be obtuse to what is going on in the country because they "are" obtuse. At the Federal level, at best, a representative speaks for 500,000 people. He can't know those people and they can't know him.
Our system is a "fake" representative democracy. What we get is what we should expect from such a charade.
ISEEIT
"Deep State America"?
FRAUD is the singular truth. Deception, corruption.
"Rational actor" absent philosophically (and with increasing clarity, empirically via what little remains of classical scientific method)..a once socially respected 'norm' of ethics.
Morality has become hostage to maniacal narcissism. World "leaders" are simply apparatchiks of the now fully globalized machinations of failing souls.
History is repeating itself.
All indications are that death is just fine. Inevitable...
It's just the dying part that causes pain.
NuYawkFrankie
re In truth America's deep state (...) operates along a New York to Washington axis.
In an even bigger truth America's deep state (...) operates along a New York to Washington to TEL AVIV axis
- FIXED
Atomizer
Time to go to bed Zero Hedge family. Mrs. Atomizer is getting cranky for me to shut off the computer. I wanted to leave you with a Friday night boost of laughter. turn up the volume. See you bitchez in the morning!
Mortgage Thrift Shop (Macklemore WALL STREET parody ...
Usurious
good nite
John Coltrane
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmD16eSy-Mg
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Aug 26, 2015 | Zero Hedge
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,Take your pick--here's three good reasons to engineer a "crash" that benefits the few at the expense of the many.
... ... ...
3. Settling conflicts within the Deep State. I have covered the Deep State for years, in a variety of contexts--for example:
Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014)
The Dollar and the Deep State (February 24, 2014)
Surplus Repression and the Self-Defeating Deep State (May 26, 2015)
Without going into details that deserve a separate essay, we can speculate that key power centers with the Deep State have profoundly different views about Imperial priorities.
One nexus of power engineers a trumped-up financial crisis (i.e. a convenient "crash") to force the hand of opposing power centers. As I have speculated here before, the rising U.S. dollar is anathema to Wall Street and its apparatchiks, while a rising USD is the cat's meow to those with a longer and more strategic view of dollar hegemony.
Take your pick--here's three good reasons to engineer a "crash" that benefits the few at the expense of the many.
remain calm
Everything is managed for control. They think they have control and can manage everything. They can't and then they lose control. They will lose control again. But the loss of control is not staged. Again, they think they can manage eveything. Their models fail. We are about to see a big failure. Some of you need to add another layer of tin foil added to your head. They will manage after the failure, again, because they think they know what they are doing.
Crash N. BurnI wrote on the "planned crash" scenario several months ago. Why would the fed raise rates into poor macro economic conditions, officially no inflation, with bubbles popping throughout the world, if not to cause or exacerbate a crash, all to allow them to try some new policy tools. After all the st Louis fed did come out and say QE is ineffective. I think they really want to ban cash and push rates significantly negative. Not possible under current statute, but that's easy enough to change with the politicians shitting themselves.
"They will manage after the failure, again, because they think they know what they are doing."
Could be because "they" have done it before. People should be taught who "they" are
"The Rothschilds were universally acknowledged as the wealthiest clan on the planet in the 19th century. They never lost that wealth. We simply lost all knowledge of it. The House of Rothschild has effectively erased itself from our (so-called) history books. That takes power.
Are children taught in our classrooms that most of the (endless) wars between European powers during the 19th century were examples of House Rothschild already "playing" the governments of Europe against each other, like puppets? Are the children taught that a basically unknown cabal of bankers created the Bank for International Settlements in the early part of the 20th century, so that these Western bankers could do the money-laundering necessary to allow Western industrialists to supply armaments to the Third Reich?
They certainly aren't taught that one of those "industrialists" – Prescott Bush – was convicted of "trading with the Enemy". Because if they had been, clearly it would not have been possible for both his son and grandson to be elected as presidents of the United States, where they could serve the bankers.
Postulating a group of ringleaders for this banking crime syndicate other than House Rothschild is problematic. It involves manufacturing an entire mythology around such hypothetical ringleaders, whereas with this clan of megalomaniacs, the historical, financial, and political context is already in place.
Their wealth is undeniable. Their intentions are unequivocal. The amoral malice they hold toward the rest of humanity is documented, historical fact."
How Western Governments Will Steal Your Land, Part III"They" are Rothschild!
"People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders."
- The Bankers Manifesto of 1892
"Simply put, there was/is no other clan on the planet that already possessed the wealth and power to make the pledges contained in The Bankers Manifesto of 1892, in 1892 – and then to (finally) pursue that crime-against-humanity to (near) fruition, in 2015."
pods
They aren't that powerful. Why give them the benefit of the doubt? They (if there really is a they that has control) would like nothing more than for you to sit home whimpering, worried about how much control "they" have.
Macro has been in the shitter for years. China was bubblicious and bound to crack.
The reason why I know this was no engineered event is the damage control I have seen due to it. Even the lowliest podunk local talk show host was able to have on some talking head who was talking about why this was just an over reaction and macro is golden and our economy is the cat's meow.
Don't buy into it.
And fuck numerology too. The only way where they can set the closing price is if we are all stuck in a damn powerplant with tubes coming out of our body.
If that is the case, where the fuck are you Morpheus?
Beam Me Up Scotty
I'm not so sure. This article might be spot on. Consider this:
Federal Reserve can print and create INFINITE digital and physical dollars. With infinite dollars, they can control EVERYTHING. Both UP and DOWN. We can't audit the Fed, how do you know their balance sheet is really 4 trillion? Because they say so? They could literally decide the prices of every single thing in dollar terms with unlimited dollars at their disposal.
messymerry
Yo pods, next time you get a bag of M&Ms, eat the red ones first,,,
;-D
I don't think the Skxawng in charge have the organizational capability to pull off an event of this magnitude with any reasonable expectation of success. They manipulate where they can and surf the waves just like the rest of us...
pods
Most of the actions taken by government are taken to increase debt. In the USA, the housing bubble was blown because of the dumb thought of "everyone should own a home" or, as the bankers like to think of it "Everyone should have a mortgage". Same shit with subprime auto loans, student loans. All these things involve creating massive new conduits for debt creation. If you don't exponentially grow, you blow. But, when these bubbles get blown, the extra $$ created has to go somewhere. And it chases yield that is greater than the inflation the debt creation creates. Before you know it BOOM.
tc06rtw
I truly wish it were all rigged… There could be some comprehensible intelligence behind all this disaster
Oh, no -- They were smart enough to wreck the machine in stripping out all its wealth, but THEY ARE NOT SMART ENOUGH TO UN-WRECK IT!
pods
You blow a bubble.
As the bubble gets bigger, you know it is getting weaker. But a crowd cheers you to keep going cause they love the bubble. So you keep blowing.
Can someone step in and buy some futures to sway the futures market, sure. But the problem is that the price of credit is below market. When that happens, you get too much credit. Too much credit sloshes around wreaking havoc on all things of substance or fancy that might increase your worth (in your mind).
Now, crashes are a known side effect of the system, and they do take advantage of it, but they are not planned.
Payne
The horrible secret is that no one is manipulating the system. Instead it is run by the Greedy self interest of multiple parties a conspiracy of sorts with no real organization. The TARP program is an excellent example of bubblegum and bandaid repairs.
Usurious
the system was designed to crash............all debt money systems are.....they knew in 1913 and they know it now
DeadFred
PTRThe UN will be meeting up next month to figure out how to replace the worthless Agenda 21 with the next step, what a wonderful time to have the markets in turmoil. Maybe we should schedule the Pope to talk to them and Congress about his vision of replacing evil capitalism with a benevolent world-wide central control, oops they already have him scheduled?
My question is what happens if you hold a 'fake' meltdown and something real happens when volatility is already really high? Nothing like people playing Russian roulette only they point the gun at your head, not theirs.
Russian roulette only they point the gun at your head, not theirs.
That, sir, is an awesome quote and should be used repeatedly.
Wed, 08/26/2015 - 09:33 | 6472428 ThroxxOfVronIF it is possible to move specific securites higher via HFT/deliberate buying/spoofing/etc. and concerted buying by institutions and/or the fabled PPT, then it is only logical to assume that the same activities and entities can move those same securites lower via HFT/spoofing/deliberate selling/naked shorting/etc...
I believe that the desks sell what they do not have and buy with funds that do not exist/re-hypothecated client funds ( 'MF Global-ation' ) interbank and/or inter-affiliate leverage.
NON DELIVERY? WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
"This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized. The people may not know it immediately, but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed. The trusts will soon realize that they have gone too far even for their own good. The people must make a declaration of independence to relieve themselves from the Monetary Power. This they will be able to do by taking control of Congress. Wall Streeters could not cheat us if you Senators and Representatives did not make a humbug of Congress... The greatest crime of Congress is its currency system. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill. The caucus and the party bosses have again operated and prevented the people from getting the benefit of their own government.""The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation...they can unload the stocks on the people at high prices during the excitement and then bring on a panic and buy them back at low prices...the day of reckoning is only a few years removed."
"When the President signs this act [Federal Reserve Act of 1913],
the invisible government by the money power -- proven to exist
by the Monetary Trust Investigation -- will be legalized.
The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation.
*** From now on, depressions will be scientifically created. ***"
-Senator Charles A. Lindbergh
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This is from Edmund Phelps. It was kind of hard to highlight the main points in brief extracts, so you may want to take a look at the full article:
What Is Wrong with the West's Economies?: What is wrong with the economies of the West-and with economics? ...Many of us in Western Europe and America feel that our economies are far from just...
With little or no effective policy initiative giving a lift to the less advantaged, the jarring market forces of the past four decades-mainly the slowdowns in productivity that have spread over the West and, of course, globalization, which has moved much low-wage manufacturing to Asia-have proceeded, unopposed, to drag down both employment and wage rates at the low end. The setback has cost the less advantaged not only a loss of income but also a loss of what economists call inclusion-access to jobs offering work and pay that provide self-respect. And inclusion was already lacking to begin with. ...
How might Western nations gain-or regain-widespread prospering and flourishing? Taking concrete actions will not help much without fresh thinking: people must first grasp that standard economics is not a guide to flourishing-it is a tool only for efficiency. Widespread flourishing in a nation requires an economy energized by its own homegrown innovation from the grassroots on up. For such innovation a nation must possess the dynamism to imagine and create the new-economic freedoms are not sufficient. And dynamism needs to be nourished with strong human values.
Of the concrete steps that would help to widen flourishing, a reform of education stands out. The problem here is not a perceived mismatch between skills taught and skills in demand. ... The problem is that young people are not taught to see the economy as a place where participants may imagine new things, where entrepreneurs may want to build them and investors may venture to back some of them. It is essential to educate young people to this image of the economy.
It will also be essential that high schools and colleges expose students to the human values expressed in the masterpieces of Western literature, so that young people will want to seek economies offering imaginative and creative careers. Education systems must put students in touch with the humanities in order to fuel the human desire to conceive the new and perchance to achieve innovations. This reorientation of general education will have to be supported by a similar reorientation of economic education.
We will all have to turn from the classical fixation on wealth accumulation and efficiency to a modern economics that places imagination and creativity at the center of economic life.
I'm skeptical that this is the answer to our inequality/job satisfaction problems.
Posted by Mark Thoma on Friday, July 24, 2015 at 10:38 AM in Economics, Income Distribution, Productivity | Permalink Comments (14)
Peter K. said...
JohnH said in reply to Peter K...."With little or no effective policy initiative giving a lift to the less advantaged, the jarring market forces of the past four decades-mainly the slowdowns in productivity that have spread over the West and, of course, globalization, which has moved much low-wage manufacturing to Asia-have proceeded, unopposed, to drag down both employment and wage rates at the low end."
The jarring market forces? It was a political project with the desired results.
Indeed! And there is currently no meaningful effort to fix the problem, only to worsen it through TPP and TAFTA.
Rune Lagman said...
"We will all have to turn from the classical fixation on wealth accumulation and efficiency to a modern economics that places imagination and creativity at the center of economic life."
Well, ain't gonna happen by "reforming" the education system.
Everybody (more or less) knows what it takes to "fix" the western economies; lots of infrastructure investment (preferable green) and higher wages. I'm getting fed up with all these "economists" that keep justifying the status quo (probably because their paycheck depends on it).
dan berg said...
Could it possibly be that your skepticism arises from the fact that -precisely because you are an academic economist - you haven't got an imaginative or creative bone in your body?
RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to dan berg...
Dear AH,
Doc Thoma wrote "I'm skeptical that this is the answer to our inequality/job satisfaction problems."
Everybody has imagination and creative potential. Most people just lack the mean to express it in a way that will enter the economy. Even Edmund realized that people got to eat. The obstacles run from there. It was Edmund's answer that Doc Thoma was skeptical of. This was Phelps answer to the question:
"... Of the concrete steps that would help to widen flourishing, a reform of education stands out. The problem here is not a perceived mismatch between skills taught and skills in demand. (Experts have urged greater education in STEM subjects-science, technology, engineering, and mathematics-but when Europe created specialized universities in these subjects, no innovation was observed.) The problem is that young people are not taught to see the economy as a place where participants may imagine new things, where entrepreneurs may want to build them and investors may venture to back some of them. It is essential to educate young people to this image of the economy.
It will also be essential that high schools and colleges expose students to the human values expressed in the masterpieces of Western literature, so that young people will want to seek economies offering imaginative and creative careers. Education systems must put students in touch with the humanities in order to fuel the human desire to conceive the new and perchance to achieve innovations. This reorientation of general education will have to be supported by a similar reorientation of economic education..."
If you agree with Edmund Phelps on his answer then at least we must all admit that you have an astronomical imagination.
djb said...
Our financial leaders don't want a thriving economy
The want to crush the opposition and keep people under their thumb
Give people real hope and the economy will thrive
anne said...
By way of Branko Milanovic, referring to randomized trials in economics:
http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/bblonder/phys120/docs/borges.pdf
1658
On Exactitude in Science
Suarez Miranda…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
(1946
Viajes de varones prudentes
Jorge Luis Borges)cm said...
"The problem is that young people are not taught to see the economy as a place where participants may imagine new things, where entrepreneurs may want to build them and investors may venture to back some of them. It is essential to educate young people to this image of the economy."
He left out the part who will pay for all these new things. Aggregate demand. I don't know where this idea comes from that young people don't imagine creating new things. They do it all the time, until the rubber hits the road and they have to get a corporate job because there is just not enough interest and funding for what they are interested in offering. No amount of education will help there.
Not to put words in his mouth, but its sounds like an impersonalized form victim blaming - schools suck and young people have no imagination.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to cm...
cm said in reply to RC AKA Darryl, Ron...Schools suck and young people have too much imagination. But Edmund Phelps has more imagination that anyone that I have ever known :<)
Not sure how this relates to my point. How will "better education" fix the fact that when you have a good idea, more likely than not there is no market for it? A lot of tech innovation "rests" in actual or metaphorical drawers because of no ROI or no concrete customer/market to sell it. And this is not a recent phenomenon.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron said...
AN excellent paper up until Eddie tries to solve the problem. His description of the long term societal effects of consolidation of corporations into corporatist behemoths and wealth into obscene levels of power, isolation, and self-indulgence was unerring. Too bad he had no idea what he was depicting.
Lafayette said...
Lafayette said in reply to Lafayette...{... which has moved much low-wage manufacturing to Asia-have proceeded, unopposed, to drag down both employment and wage rates at the low end.}
Yes, unopposed. Just what should any nation do about it? Forbid it?
That's not the way economies work.
The Industrial Revolution took a lot of people off the farms, brought them into large cities, where accommodations were created for their families, and gave them jobs in factories with which to pay the rent.
Many then moved on to purchase those properties an become homeowners, which was a typical example of "economic progression".
Of course, the Industrial Revolution, which started in western developed nations, aided by a couple of wars, inevitably progressed from more developed to lesser developed societies.
We in the industrially developed West should not have permitted the Chinese, Vietnamese or Filipinos from bettering their lot by making exactly the same societal progression?
Where is the Social Justice in that, pray tell?
If there has been any failure in Social Justice, it is in the US. Piketty was very clear about that in this info-graphic: https://www.flickr.com/photos/68758107@N00/14266316974/
The income unfairness that has occurred since the US ratcheted down drastically upper-income taxation was not replicated in the EU. Is a third of all income going to only 10% of the population in Europe unfair? Perhaps.
But not quite as unfair as the nearly 50% in the United States. And as regards Wealth, the societal impact is even worse. As Domhoff's work shows, 80% of the American population obtain only 11% of America's wealth historically. See that tragic bit of unfairness here: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/images/wealth/Net_worth_and_financial_wealth.gif
Perhaps well worth a rather long read, is Domhoff's piece titled, "The Class Domination Theory of Power, here: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/class_domination.html
Excerpt: {The argument over the structure and distribution of power in the United States has been going on within academia since the 1950s. It has generated a large number of empirical studies, many of which have been drawn upon here.
In the final analysis, however, scholars' conclusions about the American power structure depend upon their beliefs concerning power indicators, which are a product of their "philosophy of science". That sounds strange, I realize, but if "who benefits?" and "who sits?" are seen as valid power indicators, on the assumption that "power" is an underlying social trait that can be indexed by a variety of imperfect indicators, then the kind of evidence briefly outlined here will be seen as a very strong case for the dominant role of the power elite in the federal government.}
Thanks to RR in the 1980s.
No wonder "they" make statues of Reckless Ronnie. Can't believe that? See this from WikiPedia: "List of things named after Ronald Reagan", here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Ronald_Reagan
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June 26, 2015 | nakedcapitalism.com
If someone had used the word "elites" in 2006, they would have been seen as a hair-on-fire hysteric, long on conspiracy theories and short on sober understanding of How Things Work. But as the 1% and 0.1% amass more and more of total income and wealth, so too have they come to believe their interest diverge from those of the rest of us (and in a literal sense, they often do, since in too many cases, their wealth rests at least in part on predatory conduct). And now that that gap has become obvious, it has reshaped the role of the ruling class, as in the people who are in charge of the administrative apparatus of society. While some members of these top income groups play a direct role in running powerful organizations (CEOs of large an/or strategically important businesses, for instance), it also includes much less affluent individuals, like government officials and those who influence values and collective perceptions, like major publishers and public intellectuals.
Increasingly, these administrators, influencers, and top professionals seek to use their roles as an entry ticket to the top cohort. The prototype is the revolving door regulator, but there are plenty of other embodiments.
A recent example is Raj Date, who was the Deputy Director at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after having worked at Deutsche Bank, Capital One, and McKinsey. I'm told consumer groups were never comfortable with him; he was too slick to be seen as trustworthy. And he tried to elbow Elizabeth Warren aside and he grab the directorship of the new agency before Warren put a stop to that by throwing her weight behind Richard Cordray. Date founded Fenway Summer, a "venture investment firm focused on financial services." It sought to compete with Promontory Group, a money and influence machine headed by former Comptroller of the Currency Gene Ludwig. Established readers may recall the prominent role that Promontory played in the Independent Foreclosure Review fiasco, in which Promontory walked away with over $600 million in fees for a job badly performed and never completed (for details, see Regulatory Looting, Promontory-Style: Botched Foreclosure Reviews Alone Generate More than Double Goldman's Revenues per Employee, Bank of America Foreclosure Reviews: Why the OCC Overlooked "Independent" Reviewer Promontory's Keystone Cops Act (Part VB)) and Bank of America Foreclosure Reviews: How Promontory Became a Shadow Regulator (Part VA).
Date just sold Fenway Summer to Promontory. As a well-recognized banking expert said via e-mail:
Not surprised. I read it as a failure of Fenway Summer. It was supposed to be a rival to Promontory, not bought out by it. I sure as hell wouldn't pay for Raj's advice.
But members of the elite like Raj manage to fail upwards, or at worst sideways. And that helps preserve the widening gap between them and everyone else.
This Real News Network interview with Robert Scheer, which is number six in a ten part series, discusses how the self-serving attitudes among the supposed leaders of our society became entrenched.
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network. We're continuing our discussion with Bob Scheer. Bob is a veteran U.S. journalist, currently the editor-in-chief of the Webby Award-winning online magazine Truthdig. And his whole biography you'll find beneath the video player.
We're just going to pick up where we were.
So here's what I'm accusing you off, that you seem to be suggesting that there's some rationality left in this system within the elites. And I'm not talking–of course there are some individuals that have some rational long-term view. I mean, even people like Soros has been crying about the lack of banking regulation. And there's people in different sectors of the elites who realize this is a train wreck and about go over a cliff. But those voices are actually marginalized. Even somebody who's got as much money as Soros within the banking and financial elite is completely marginalized. Nobody really listens to a word he says–people with power, at any rate. [1:07]
PROF. ROBERT SCHEER, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Well, they listen to–.
JAY: Let me finish the point.
SCHEER: They listen to Buffett.
JAY: Well, maybe. But Buffett doesn't raise as much alarm as Soros does. But within there–they don't even seem to be able to rule in their own interest. It would be in the interest of global capitalism to have more rational banking regulations as they introduced in the 1930s. It would be in the interest of global capitalism to deal with the threat of catastrophic climate change. It would be in the interest of any rationality not to let fossil fuel and the arms industry so dominate U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, I mean, this fueling of a Saudi-Iranian conflict. The idea that, you know, could there be a United States without a massive military, yeah, there could, but not this United States, not this economic system, not this elite. These guys aren't going to come around to some kind if view of we could be an equal, modest country.
SCHEER: Well, you're absolutely right that the current configuration of power in America is irrational. We don't have adults watching the store. And we go from one disastrous pursuit to another. I mean, there was no reason whatsoever, if we had adults watching the store, you'd go knock off Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, was a force against Iran, which–you know, we backed him in his war with Iran. So the contradictions are obvious, that we don't have adults watching the store, we don't have rational policy.
However, I think you are not the only person that now knows that.
JAY: Oh, I'm sure lots of–I would say most ordinary people kind of know it.
SCHEER: No, I think even in those circles there's an awareness that we're not doing very well, and there are reminders that we're not doing well. You know, our economy is stagnant. We're up against some real problems in terms of our future. Income inequality is one. You don't have to be some wild lefty liberal to see that. I mean, the whole foundation of our country was always on a stable middle class and an expanding middle class, opportunity, equal playing field. I'm not saying that was the reality, but that was always the expectation. You know. And, you know, whether it's de Tocqueville or the founding fathers, there was always an assumption that at least for what you thought was the base population there would be this opportunity. You know. And we have been forced over the last couple of decades to recognize that no, it's going alarmingly in a different direction.
Internationally, we know we're not doing very well. I mean, we don't produce a whole lot of products that everybody in the world is dying to get their hands on. The main thing that we've been effective on is this tech stuff, and our tech companies are the ones that are most concerned that our political model is not a good one. They're the ones that are out there having to sell this stuff, and this stuff involves getting confidence and knowing the culture, caring about other people, winning their confidence. And that's been endangered.
So the only thing I would–I don't disagree with you at all as to whether our model is in trouble. It's in trouble. I disagree with you only on whether–the number of people who know it's in trouble.
JAY: I would say even most of them–I would probably think most of the elite know it's in trouble. They're just going to cash in on it, and it's going to be someone else's problem to do something about it.
SCHEER: Okay. You're putting your finger on something that I feel is very critical. And I have spent my life interviewing people generally around power, in government and so forth. I've traveled with Nelson Rockefeller and David Rockefeller. You know, I have interviewed people who became president, from Richard Nixon, Clinton, and so forth and so on.
And if I were to try to explain, the big shift that I've seen is long-term as opposed to short-term, that most of the people I had interviewed in the first stage of my career, say somewhere up until 1970, were people that at least were concerned what their grandchildren might think. You know? There was either through family, inherited wealth, or going to certain schools, or there was some sense of social responsibility, you know, that you could find, that we have to leave our mark, we have to leave it a better place, we have to–and just for our place in history, that it mattered. Okay? So you could be concerned, oh, we'd better get with the civil rights movement, because otherwise we're going to fall apart, or we'd better care about the economic condition of the rest of the world, because otherwise it will rebel, we'd better worry about the living condition of our own people here or they'll rise up with pitchforks and toss you out.
I think what happened is we went into this madcap period of short-term greed.
JAY: And let me just–Bob wrote a book called The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street. And this was a kind of turning point you're talking about.
SCHEER: Yeah, that's really what my book is about, because you had sensible rules of the road that came out of the New Deal, and there was a recognition, because of the Great Depression, that you just can't have this madcap, crazy, Gilded Age society. Again I overuse this concept of adults watching the store, but I remember going back to just being a kid in the Bronx, and you didn't leave the children to run the fruit stand, 'cause they'd give everything away or they'd go off themselves and play stickball. Somebody had to be there to make sure the stuff got sold and money was paid and things. And you lost that. You got people coming out of the law schools and the business schools that were shysters. You know, they just wanted some hustle, some scam. That's how you got into credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations.
JAY: Yeah, but the bubbles are euphoric,–
SCHEER: Yeah.
JAY: –if you're in on cashing in on the bubble.
SCHEER: And anybody who looked at that knew. I mean, I was interviewing people during those years, and they'd say, this is, you know, as Buffett said, financial instruments of mass destruction. You know, how could you believe in any of this stuff? How could anybody believe if you–this is what my book was about–you take all these loans and you redefine them and you talk about the risk in stupid ways and you give loans to people who can't support it, and somehow, okay, and whether you were in Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or whether you were in the private sector, 'cause Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were being traded on the stock market, you had to know that this was going to explode. They knew it. And they got the laws to change to make it legal. It should have been illegal.
You know. I mean, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Bill Clinton signed off as a lame duck president in 2000, after it was already–you know, the election was over, he was now a lame duck, and he signed this bill. What was the purpose of it? It was to make all of this garbage legal. It said–I think it was Section 3 of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act–a Republican-Democratic bipartisan bill–said no existing law or regulatory agency will have jurisdiction over credit default swaps or collateralized debt obligations or any of these new financial mechanisms. Why? Because they said this is modern. We have to compete with Europe. You have to be able to do these things. We can't let–we have to give legal certainty–Lawrence Summers, you know, secretary of the Treasury–we have to have legal certainty for these financial instruments; otherwise, they won't be effective. Right? Legal certainty meant no one's going to look at it, no one's going to challenge it, no one's going to set any standards, no existing regulatory agency or law will apply. So it was a license to steal.
JAY: Now, for people that don't understand the concept, quickly.
SCHEER: Well, quickly, what happens is they developed all these new financial gimmicks. You know, a credit default swap was something that was an insurance policy, but it was not an insurance policy. It's what AIG did and got into so much trouble. They said, you do these collateralized debt obligations, you take all these different loans, subprime mortgages–.
JAY: Which were invented in Baltimore, by the way.
SCHEER: Yeah, auto loans, or any of these things, and then they don't make sense on their own and they all seem quite risky, but we'll put them into a pool and we'll assess their value and we'll get these credit rating agencies that have a stake in saying, yeah, they're all good to go because they're going to get money from it. So there was no regulation. And then you pass a law that says you're allowed to do this, no one will look at it carefully, no existing regulatory agency will have control. So you've got a license to steal. Go knock yourself out. You know? And they, selling all these loans, packaging them, and then reselling them to people over the world. Right? And we can predict, you know, get this income and so forth. And then, if it looks shaky, we're going to give you these phony insurance policies, right, that will seem to back them up. But there's no money behind it. It's not like a real insurance policy. Nobody's putting any resources.
So, suddenly, you've got this thing that's going to explode, and AIG, which is supposed to be backing up the insurance, says, hey, we can't do that; we have no money for that. So now your housing bubble has collapsed and AIG can't support it. And it's nothing more than the mafia doing a scam, only you have passed laws that say that's all legal, that's all legal.
Now, you're absolutely right. You wouldn't do that if you were worried about how even you would appear to your grandchildren. Okay? People looking back now know these people were crooks, whether they went to–they didn't go to jail, 'cause they they get the law passed to make it that it's not a crime to defraud people. It's legal. It wipes out half of the wealth of African Americans in this country, wipes out the economic gains of the civil rights movement, 'cause they were particularly a group that was particularly victimized. It wipes out two-thirds–these are Pew Research Center figures–wipes out two-thirds of the wealth, the collected wealth over generations of Hispanics in this country because they were subject to these subprime. They lose everything when they lose their house. But the guys putting it all together, they escape with their billions. They don't go to jail. So, yes, if what you mean by your opening statement was we don't have solid, responsible people who even care how they will appear to their grandchildren–.
You've got a guy like Robert Rubin, okay? Robert Rubin was secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton. He had come from Goldman Sachs. He had convinced Clinton you could do all this stuff, this is all great, we'll do all this crap. He brings in Lawrence Summers. Timothy Geithner, who's a younger person working in there, he becomes the Treasury secretary under Obama. They do all this stuff. They get Clinton to sign off on it. He does it with Phil Gramm, the Republican, so it's bipartisan. Very few people challenge it. You know, now, I think if you ask anybody about Robert Rubin, they say, God, yeah, he wasn't too good for it. I'll bet you his own family members think he got his–you know, what happens? He leaves the Clinton administration; he goes to work for a bank that he makes legal, right? The merger of Citibank and Travelers Insurance they make legal with their reversal of Glass-Steagall, the Financial Services Modernization Act, and then they got the Commodity Futures [Modernization Act], which makes these gimmicks legal. He gets $10 million a year for the next decade. Sure, he's got money salted away. But I don't think he's got a reputation that's worth anything. I don't know. Lawrence Summers, again, I don't think people particularly treat those with respect. But they have money. You know, they can take care of their nephews and nieces. But I think it's generally accepted they caused a lot of damage to the economy.
JAY: But it's not, like, that it's just a bad group of people happened to get into power. And I'm not suggesting you're suggesting that.
SCHEER: No, it's the best and the brightest that Halberstam wrote about in Vietnam. These are very well educated people who know what they're doing and, I believe, have to know it's going to destroy the lives of millions of people, and they go ahead and do it. It's just like–.
JAY: Yeah, 'cause they say if it ain't me doing it, it's going to be him doing it, or her.
SCHEER: Whatever their rationalizations, they surround themselves with lawyers and PR people who tell them this is all wonderful, and they get away with it.
JAY: But it's the way the system has evolved that so much money is in so few hands. There's not much else for them to do with it than bet and gamble against each other, create this massive speculative sector of the economy, which is financializing everything. Even when they talk about climate change, all they really have in mind is a way to financialize it. So whether it's this group or the other group, the sort of system itself is created where there's–so much capital has become completely parasitical.
SCHEER: Yes, but they could also be decent people. They could actually wonder about what would Jesus do. They could actually think about what does their lives mean.
JAY: I think some do and drop out.
SCHEER: A few.
JAY: Some do, and they can't take it anymore, and they drop out.
SCHEER: Yeah.
JAY: But they're not in any position to change the course of the ship.
SCHEER: Well, but also the question you should ask is why aren't they being observed in doing this. And the reason is because they can buy off everyone.
JAY: Especially the media.
SCHEER: The media, but the universities, the grants of–you know, build buildings at universities. Come on.
JAY: I want to stress the media 'cause they have this theatrical show going in the elections–I'm not saying there isn't a real contention for power, but when you have unlimited contributions, unlimited spending, what are they spending it on? They're spending it on TV advertising.
SCHEER: Yeah, and they're spending it on candidates who will not give them a hard time. There's no question about it.
But it's not just the media. I mean, I don't want to exonerate the media, but you–you know, in the day of the internet, you should have more critical voices, right, 'cause–but even there you look at where could–you know, okay, to understand the economy or foreign policy requires a little brainwork, okay? Most people have got to take care of their job and their family and pick the kid up and how do I pay this bill and am I going to lose my job and/or how am I going to make that sale. And so their lives are taken up. And then we have a group of people, whether they're called journalists or professors or consultants or what have you who actually have the time and are really charged with figuring stuff out.
Now, most of this stuff is not all that difficult to figure out. So then you have to ask yourself the question, why didn't you figure it out? I mean, why didn't the media–in my book I describe how The New York Times was a cheerleader for this radical deregulation. They used words like modernization. They said long overdue. Now, why? You know, because they were living in a culture and benefiting from a culture that was benefiting from the ripoff. These are the people who advertise. These are the people who invest in your venture, in your media. These are the people who buy chairs at the schools where you're teaching. These are people who support the charities or political causes that you happen to agree with. There is a culture of corruption, I mean, 'cause anyone else looking at this, they say, wait a minute, this is nonsensical, this is bad. Why are you selling–I remember writing about this stuff. I would go out to what they call the Inland Empire in California where they're building all of these–. I said, who's going to live here? How are they going to get to work? Who's paying for this? Why are they making the loans? And then you realize there is no there there. Don't confuse the thing–I remember an old advertising [incompr.] don't confuse the thing being sold with the thing itself. They're not selling a house to somebody who needs a house and is going to live and be able to afford the payment; they're selling this collateralized debt obligation that's 1,000 of those houses that you have made and chopped up and iced and diced and everything and sliced, and then you're going to make that seem like a good bet to somebody. Where? In Saudi Arabia or in France or–.
JAY: Knowing it's all going to default.
SCHEER: Yeah, but you're going to get in and out before it defaults.
JAY: Yeah
William C, June 26, 2015 at 4:05 am
O tempora O mores.
Little changes really?
Benedict@Large, June 26, 2015 at 8:08 am
Scheer understates (just a bit) what the Commodities Futures Modernization act was all about. What all these credit default swaps and other exotic new derivative instruments were all about was recreating and expanding the list of instruments in use on Wall Street. CFMA's purpose was to insure that this parallel market was unregulated. I one fell swoop, CFMA gave Wall Street the ability to recreate itself, only the recreation was to be entirely without government oversight.
I'm sure there were a few incompetent fools (like Alan Greenspan and Phil Gramm) who actually believed the toxic hype that this was all about leading the curve to the new Nirvana, but pretty much everyone else knew that is was nothing more than a government-sanctioned heist, because almost at once, everyone started acting like it was. Even as early as 2000, the national association of real estate appraisers was petitioning the government for relief from bankers forcing them to scam their appraisals or get kicked out of business.
By 2002, Dean Baker was complaining that the rent-vs-own ratios that had been constant for a hundred years were careening wildly, with no apparent cause.
By 2004, the FBI was begging Congress to fund more investigators, saying that the mortgage industry had become a swamp of corruption.
By the end of 2005, the entire mortgage market began collapsing, and the only thing that delayed it for another 30 or so months was that the Bush administration forced Fannie and Freddie to take their hundreds of billions of wealth … OUR WEALTH … and throw it against that market's collapsing edifice.
The only thing left was that the next President would have to owe his election to the very people who needed to be indicted, convicted, and jailed.
LifelongLib, June 26, 2015 at 4:48 am
The wealthy's acceptance of the New Deal was always grudging, and lasted only as long as they thought their wealth/safety depended on some of the rest of us being fairly prosperous. When they found a way out of it (globalization) they were happy to toss the New Deal away.
Ben Johannson, June 26, 2015 at 5:45 am
Bubble talk leads us back to the mainstream of economic thought. The notion of bubble is a deviation from some normal state of affairs, namely a growing, self-equilibrating economy and markets (called growth theory among neoliberals.) Some event, it is presumed, external to the normal state forces the economy out of kilter but once this is dealt with economic growth and employment will return to the trajectory everybody knows and loves.
What happens to the concept of economic bubbles if we do not assume that markets are self-correcting? It goes out the window because there is no norm from which to stray.
Maju, June 26, 2015 at 8:08 am
Actually what happens is that we reach an overproduction crisis, which is the natural thing to do for Capitalism, at least according to Marx.
But while we are in that overproduction crisis, the financier capitalists still grow in power and wealth, because they speculate with it, being almost the only ones able to still make a sustained profit, and use that power to contain any attempt of reform and rather promote even greater deregulation, like the triple-T secret treaties. All very natural and expectable, albeit unfortunate, in good economic and political science.
Maju, June 26, 2015 at 6:26 am
TRNN are generally very worth watching, thank you. Although they may have overdone the interviewer's makeup on this occasion.
This links very well with what I was saying in another thread: modern financier capitalism has no plan other than "loot while you can". The last comment of Scheer points to pyramidal or Ponzi schemes being all what is, and, if that's the backbone of the economy, we are certainly in for a massive shock that will make the 2007-08 one look almost anecdotal.
Another interesting comment of Scheer is that a key "rational" (or "productive") US economic sector is the technological one, what is no doubt true. I am under the strong impression that the USA could for example be leading the transition to renewables, as most technological advances in solar energies, for instance, happen in the USA. But paradoxically the republic is actually betting heavily on oil and not using that advantage to reaffirm itself as avant-guard global economic power, what could well give Washington another whole century of hegemony.
So indeed there is no plan, only short-termism and loot-while-you-can.
ambrit, June 26, 2015 at 6:33 am
I'm glad that the concept of 'elites' is finally gaining widespread acceptability. It is a sorry state of affairs when a class of people develops an "us or them" worldview, but there it is. If I understand it correctly, MMT is a system based on a rational and pragmatic view of how money works. 'Elites,' as an organizing model serves a similar function in the socio political sphere of human endeavour. Each contends with 'official' ideologies promoted by the system itself.
I agree with Feynmans' contention that the system architecture of a human institution defines and circumscribes it's functionality. His addendum to the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident Report lays out his contention. Essentially, the idea is something I've read in other accounts of how the government bureaucracies work. Functionaries are punished for presenting facts and analysis counter to the perceived desired outcome. The perceptions guiding the process are generally internally produced and shaped. No sinister 'master criminal' is required. The group as a whole develops it's own world view, and designs systems to support and expand that "World."It has been asserted that Bernays et. al. applied the scientific method to crowd control and manipulation. That generation is now long gone, and with them the concept of 'public service.' Even if one were to apply a maximum degree of cynicism, that bygone generation of 'elites' had an infinitely greater regard for the 'public good' than today's 'elites.' As the article above plainly states, even that degree of concern for out groups is gone.
Something will eventually break, if only for the reason that the 'elites' have forgotten the basic rule of parasitism: Do not kill your host.
ambrit, June 26, 2015 at 6:55 am
Blast! I forgot to append Feynmans appendix to the Rogers Report. (I've put this up once before, so please excuse the redundancy.)
http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htmH. Alexander Ivey, June 26, 2015 at 11:52 pm
Thanks for the link, interesting report.
Am struck with the NASA managers over-riding their engineers' concerns. This is not a result of a "bureaucratic mind-set" but of people not being held responsible for their actions. The managers were paid to have a flight go on time. The engineers held to their belief that the flight should be as safe as they could make it.
The fault is not in our stars, but in our compensation systems. I don't think any NASA manager lost their job, got demoted, or a letter of reprimand over the Challenger accident.
ambrit, June 27, 2015 at 10:27 am
Yes, but that very "flight go on time" consideration is a part of the "bureaucratic mind set." When a functionary believes that adherence to an even unstated expectation will determine that bureaucrats future career arc, ways will be found.
The other dimension of this, seldom voiced, is the fact that President Reagan was scheduled to give the annual State of the Union speech the night of the launch day, January 28, 1986. Rumours have since circulated that Christina McAuliffe was scheduled to participate by remote camera link from orbit. Having a cameo in the State of the Union speech by Americas favourite teacher in space is exactly the sort of stunt a trained Hollywood actor would endorse. I blame Ronnie Reagan and "politics as usual" for this disaster.
As for bureaucrats overriding the opinions of technocrats, well, that's life. The political actors keep pushing the envelope regarding safety, and especially cost, until someone gets killed. Then the game is reset. I have personally seen this dynamic play out several times.
Even better than the Challenger fiasco was the outright negligence that caused the Columbia 'event' in 2003. There had been serious concern voiced by engineers about the big piece of foam that broke off of the main tank and struck the underside of the shuttle during launch. This was no love tap. The foam chunk hit the shuttle going approximately 1900 miles per hour. This made a hole in the underside left wing heat tile array. Hot gasses from re-entry entered the wing root and broke up the shuttle. The defining factor again was the mindset of the NASA bureaucracy. This excerpt from the Columbia disaster wiki shows how it happened.In a risk-management scenario similar to the Challenger disaster, NASA management failed to recognize the relevance of engineering concerns for safety for imaging to inspect possible damage, and failed to respond to engineer requests about the status of astronaut inspection of the left wing. Engineers made three separate requests for Department of Defense (DOD) imaging of the shuttle in orbit to more precisely determine damage. While the images were not guaranteed to show the damage, the capability existed for imaging of sufficient resolution to provide meaningful examination. NASA management did not honor the requests and in some cases intervened to stop the DOD from assisting.[11] The CAIB recommended subsequent shuttle flights be imaged while in orbit using ground-based or space-based DOD assets.[12]
Details of the DOD's unfulfilled participation with Columbia remain secret; retired NASA official Wayne Hale stated in 2012 that "[a]ctivity regarding other national assets and agencies remains classified and I cannot comment on that aspect of the Columbia tragedy."[13]
So, there you have it. Bureaucracies, large and small, exhibit definable and consistent patterns of behavior. The fault lies not in our stars, as you observed, but in our Chairs.
ewmayer, June 27, 2015 at 7:40 pm
NASA also exhibited such managerial fubar-ness in the run-up to the Hubble main mirror fiasco – here is a 1990 NYT piece on that. The punchline: For more than a year pre-launch NASA had not one but TWO fully finished main mirrors in storage – the flawed one made by Perkin-Elmer, and a perfectly sound one subcontracted by P-E to Eastman Kodak. Did NASA bother to do the simple "let's comparison-test these 2 mirrors and use the better one, if one proves superior, in the Hubble" thing? Of course not. Hell, a simple scaled-up Foucault test of the kind amateur telescope makers have been doing for over 150 years using primitive tools would have revealed the problem right quick. Classic other-people's-money insular elite stupidity.
Vatch, June 26, 2015 at 10:16 am
Something will eventually break, if only for the reason that the 'elites' have forgotten the basic rule of parasitism: Do not kill your host.
I like that! Biologically true, and also true in the realm of political economy.John Smith, June 26, 2015 at 2:57 pm
Paul Tioxon June 26, 2015 at 9:04 amExcept the parasites think TINA and therefore are unaware that they ARE parasites and thus don't have the good sense to recognize that their lucre is filthy.
Capitalism. What is most exceptional about this site is its name. The mere fact that it uses the name capitalism at all, even nakedcapitalism, is the most taboo breaking aspect announcing a real discussion about a real topic. Notice how Yves preambles this discussion to pre-2006 conformity of thought:
"If someone had used the word "elites" in 2006, they would have been seen as a hair-on-fire hysteric, long on conspiracy theories and short on sober understanding of How Things Work."
You might as well add "capitalism" to ill chosen words.
The apex of American power in the aftermath of the Clinton years coupling robust job creation and technological advancement of an extensive internet infrastructure to produce the capitalist propaganda theme of the coming the 21st Century: Supertanker America! Remember when the unbroken quarters of growth, low interest rates, steady stock market index rising and company after company emerging from the pages of science fiction to launch from NASDAQ into the real economy? The American Economy would ride out any boom or bust, out sail any crashing waves of stormy global contraction and lead the world economy out of any doldrums just as our military stood dominant across the oceans to the West and East of the continental hegemon. Our military might, our economic resilience and now, our triumphant ideology of capitalism would be consumed by the world more readily than any other export. There was a plan drawn up for a bold new global order of the ages, The Project for a New American Century PNAC. Of course, that failed miserably, unleashing WWIII across the Arab/Muslim world.
But amidst all of the talk of globalization, world trade organization, international summits of G-7s and G-20s, NATO and NAFTA, we have Davos. The Woodstock for capitalists, but never spoken of any such terms. In the above TRNN interview, "the system" and its "elites" are discussed. But as usual, there is always an internalize euphemism, socialized squeamishness for giving the system a formal name and giving its actors a title. Capitalism and the capitalists who love it. There, I said it, the love that dare not speak its name! And the key to breakdown from long term perspective to short term greed came from banking deregulation. Not surprising for capitalism to turn its longing eyes to banking, the platform it was built upon 500 years ago from the banking centers of Genoa, Venice, Florence etc. Despite Simon Johnson's supposed revelation of a silent financial coup, capitalism all along has ruled implicitly, with the only silence coming from the people who master the rules of capitalism not resorting to its name.
Giovanni Arrighi in an essay points out the disappearance of capitalism from academic research, almost in its entirety from economics. Notice, there are Marxist Economists or Keynesian Economics, and then there is just plain Economics. Not Capitalist Economics, that would not be value free positivism, the purest of methodological based scientific endeavors.
http://krieger.jhu.edu/arrighi/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2012/08/NewEconomicSoc_000.pdf
Arrighi finds in an almost 800 page " THE HANDBOOK OF ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY", sparse mention of capitalism. Basically, a small usage of the word and a single reference, but mostly, a great number of writings by Marx, Weber and what others have had to say about capitalism, but not much about capitalism by its presume supporters. Much of this Arrighi attributes to the micro focus of the social sciences and its failure and or unwillingness to deal with long term structural features of capitalism. Basically, an ahistoric or short term approach has capitalism disappearing altogether under the weakened methodology too attenuated to measure the processes that compose capitalism. It is not there because the unit of analysis is too small, too short in time or too segmented by focusing on one nation or one enterprise and not the whole economy of one nation connected with and trading with other nations in a global system.
An entire generation of myopia induced social science, including economics has produced nothing less but the short term crisis producing best and brightest, who can't see beyond the next quarter. The motto is; "Are we there yet?". Impatience, hyper frequency trading, dedicated fiber optic fast as the speed of light trading cables from where ever to Wall St, all to shave off a few seconds or micro seconds or quantum seconds, in order to turn a profit of pennies a few billion times over a second or a minute, hour after hour, day after day. No wonder this cognitively captured educated elite can not see anything larger than a minute portion of reality that their algorithms symbolically represent.
Jim A June 26, 2015 at 9:19 am
There's nothing inherently wrong with managing risk by aggregation. In fact insurance companies have been doing that for centurie as the fact that the mortgage insurance business (where traditional underwriters and experts set the price for insurance) was effectively pricing the risk of default for riskier mortgages VERY differently than the bond market was pricing the exact same risk.
Noonan June 26, 2015 at 9:23 am
The godly person has perished from the land,
And there is no upright person among men.
All of them lie in wait for bloodshed;
Each of them hunts the other with a net.
Concerning evil, both hands do it well.
The prince asks, also the judge, for a bribe,
And a great man speaks the desire of his soul;
So they weave it together.Micah 7: 2-3
Don't forget MIT economist Lester Thurow's classic essay "An Establishment or an Oligarchy?"
http://www.ntanet.org/NTJ/42/4/ntj-v42n04p405-11-establishment-oligarchy.pdf
Some if it's a little dated, but the key points remain pertinent.
"The central goal of an establishment is to insure that the system works so that the country will in the long run be successful. An establishment is self-confident that if the system works and if their country does well, they will personally do well. Being self-confident they don't have to make their own immediate self-interest paramount when they influence public decisions."
"In contrast an oligarchy is a group of insecure individuals who amass funds in secret Swiss bank accounts. Because they think that they must always look out for their own immediate self-interest, they aren't interested in taking time and effort to improve their country's long-run prospects. They aren't confident that if the country is successful, they will be successful."
nat scientist June 26, 2015 at 10:13 am
Bad science makes bad law.
When kindness is kicked to the curb, the jungle is free to grow.William K. Black at UM-KC is instructive about so much of what has gone on in regulatory and financial circles.
For reference, see his website including archived articles
readerOfTeaLeaves June 26, 2015 at 11:14 am
Depressing, but important, interview
Belongs in a time capsule
susan the other June 26, 2015 at 11:28 am
Sheer talks about the aftermath of going off the gold standard. After 1970 there was a long hysteria (still in motion) that translated into austerity (supply side nonsense) because maintaining the value of the dollar meant everything. If the dollar took a dive, both our military and our finance complex would begin to fail. There would be no confidence in the once great USA.
Witness the EU today. Those guys would rather bleed Greece to death than allow the euro to slide too much. They only pretend that they are protecting the EU taxpayers. It is such a fiction to try to maintain austerity for a strong currency because it defeats itself every time, and in order to surface an economy must do bubbles because there is no economy left after austerity. So it all turns into froth. There is a reason derivatives were invented and laws were passed making them legal. Because Larry Summers et.al. all knew their own positions were at stake if capitalism no longer produced profits for the elite. As Stephanie Kelton has informed us, we do not need to worry about the "value" of the dollar – the exchange rate – all we need to do is manufacture products that people want to buy. But that won't save the bloated ranks of the elite.
Crazy Horse June 26, 2015 at 1:57 pm
I must say that the moral and intellectual depravity of the world's elites is great news for the planet. From the point of view of the robin building her nest in the tree outside my window, humans are a toxic cancer, poisoning the soil that produces the worms she needs to feed her hatchlings. (assuming they survive the overly thin eggshells that agricultural chemicals have caused her to produce).
Indeed, for most of the planet's inhabitants homo sapiens are the biggest threat to their continued survival. So rapid economic collapse brought on by the Masters of the Universe's insatiable greed and the human species fatal inability to behave as part of an interconnected ecosystem is the best hope for the survival of a planet capable of supporting all the other life forms that have evolved with it.
Lambert Strether June 26, 2015 at 3:03 pm
Thinking back to elites past, at least civilization got some great art or architecture or literature out of the surplus. Sure, the Italian elites were adept at poisoning each other, but the world got Michelangelo and DaVinci. The Elizabethan elites had the Star Chamber, but the world got Shakespeare. The Victorians had the empire, but also Alice in Wonderland and Dickens. The Bourbons lost their heads, but the world got the Louvre. And on and on and on.
But for this elite, I'm trying to think of one great artist and I can't come up with one. Jeff Koons?
OK, the meta, I get it. But still. Am I wrong on this? Is there a squillionaire Medici out there somewhere?
Stupidest, most vile, and destructive elites in the history of the world and that is saying something.
Vatch June 26, 2015 at 4:40 pm
Nowadays, the members of the top 0.01% just seem to buy and sell, at ever escalating prices, the art that was created in previous generations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintings
Jerry Denim June 26, 2015 at 5:23 pm
I really appreciate Paul Jay insisting on calling out the media for their role in all of this. It really puts me up the wall how supposedly left wing media outlets always insist on having a right wing propagandist sit in as a counter weight to the lefty when conducting an interview, but then NOBODY calls out the right wing propagandist on his/her blatantly obvious, totally false bullshit regardless of crazy their claims.
Perfect example was the Amy Goodman hosted "Democracy Now" segment on the TPP which was linked here yesterday. They had a guy from Public Citizen on to denounce the TPP and a professional liar from the Cato institute to defend it and no one batted an eye or piped up to say word when the Cato guy floated this howler:
"You know, I certainly do think that the TPP, to the extent that it liberalizes trade, is going to increase wages. It's going to improve the economy of the United States. By opening markets to exports, the TPP will help create jobs. By opening up access to imports, the TPP will help create jobs. Most of the imports that come to this country are used by American manufacturers. It will increase productivity, increase wages and promote growth. So I think that for the criteria that Hillary Clinton sets out, the TPP will most likely be a good deal."
Why in the world Amy Goodman the host of the show or her guest from Public Citizen doesn't even make an attempt to counter this blatant lie in the interest of truth or journalistic ethics is beyond me. Why not something like this: " Excuse me Bill, what did you just say? Did you just claim the TPP is going to raise wages and create jobs in the United States? My god Bill, that is the biggest fucking lie I have ever heard and you know it. As I'm sure you know Bill the entire point of the TPP and other Free Trade pacts is to open the borders of low wage, low regulation countries so companies in the United States can offshore more jobs or at least use the threat of relocating as leverage to further drive down wages, so don't you dare sit there with a straight face and your little American Flag lapel pin and insult this show and my audience with such blatantly false lies. Shame on you Bill, you're a disgrace."
How hard would that be?
Jerry, I agree with you on the Democracy Now show (I listened to it, too) … but what really got me was this lovely exchange:
"JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bill Watson of the Cato Institute, your reaction to the impending, now appears to be, passage of the fast-track legislation?
BILL WATSON: Well, I'm really looking forward to seeing the TPP be completed, find out what's in the agreement and how well it liberalizes trade between the United States and the other 11 members in the agreement."
Um … explain to me how you're looking forward to the TPP being completed, but you still need to "find out what's in the agreement …"
WHAT? You don't know what's in it, but it's all good?
different clue June 27, 2015 at 9:14 pm
If only someone had quoted Pelosi's very words . . . . " you mean we have to pass it to find out what's in it?"
Tony Wikrent June 26, 2015 at 8:28 pm
Lambert Strether June 26, 2015 at 11:34 pmI read comments like Scheers, that "these are educated people" and they knew what they were doing, and I just am not sure how correct they are. It just does not make sense to me that these people allowed what is essentially a "crimogenic environment" (as Bill Black often writes) to devolve into the open sociopathy and psychopathy we have today. Something is missing; it all just does not fit together.
The one thing nobody ever mentions is the role of organized crime. The mergers and acquisitions and the leveraged buy outs of the 1960s through 1990s was heavily financed and influenced by organized crime. Look at Penny Pritzker's family, and its roots in The Outfit of Chicago. Look at Lord Hanson and his connections to organized crime. Look at the historical legacy of HSBC as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in the opium trade and opium wars. Good lord, look at Ronald Reagan – who is fingered as organized crimes' favorite politician by Gus Russo in his book Supermob.
Was it a good thing that organized crime "went legit"? Or is the true legacy the "crimogenic environment" we have today?
"heavily financed and influenced by organized crime" Sourcing?
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Jun 10, 2015 | therealnews.com
Transcript
Plundering Our Freedom with Abandon - Robert Scheer on Reality Asserts Itself (6/10)
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network. We're continuing our discussion with Bob Scheer. Bob is a veteran U.S. journalist, currently the editor-in-chief of the Webby Award-winning online magazine Truthdig. And his whole biography you'll find beneath the video player.
We're just going to pick up where we were.
So here's what I'm accusing you off, that you seem to be suggesting that there's some rationality left in this system within the elites. And I'm not talking--of course there are some individuals that have some rational long-term view. I mean, even people like Soros has been crying about the lack of banking regulation. And there's people in different sectors of the elites who realize this is a train wreck and about go over a cliff. But those voices are actually marginalized. Even somebody who's got as much money as Soros within the banking and financial elite is completely marginalized. Nobody really listens to a word he says--people with power, at any rate. [1:07]
PROF. ROBERT SCHEER, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Well, they listen to--.
JAY: Let me finish the point.
SCHEER: They listen to Buffett.
JAY: Well, maybe. But Buffett doesn't raise as much alarm as Soros does. But within there--they don't even seem to be able to rule in their own interest. It would be in the interest of global capitalism to have more rational banking regulations as they introduced in the 1930s. It would be in the interest of global capitalism to deal with the threat of catastrophic climate change. It would be in the interest of any rationality not to let fossil fuel and the arms industry so dominate U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, I mean, this fueling of a Saudi-Iranian conflict. The idea that, you know, could there be a United States without a massive military, yeah, there could, but not this United States, not this economic system, not this elite. These guys aren't going to come around to some kind if view of we could be an equal, modest country.
SCHEER: Well, you're absolutely right that the current configuration of power in America is irrational. We don't have adults watching the store. And we go from one disastrous pursuit to another. I mean, there was no reason whatsoever, if we had adults watching the store, you'd go knock off Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, was a force against Iran, which--you know, we backed him in his war with Iran. So the contradictions are obvious, that we don't have adults watching the store, we don't have rational policy.
However, I think you are not the only person that now knows that.
JAY: Oh, I'm sure lots of--I would say most ordinary people kind of know it.
SCHEER: No, I think even in those circles there's an awareness that we're not doing very well, and there are reminders that we're not doing well. You know, our economy is stagnant. We're up against some real problems in terms of our future. Income inequality is one. You don't have to be some wild lefty liberal to see that. I mean, the whole foundation of our country was always on a stable middle class and an expanding middle class, opportunity, equal playing field. I'm not saying that was the reality, but that was always the expectation. You know. And, you know, whether it's de Tocqueville or the founding fathers, there was always an assumption that at least for what you thought was the base population there would be this opportunity. You know. And we have been forced over the last couple of decades to recognize that no, it's going alarmingly in a different direction.
Internationally, we know we're not doing very well. I mean, we don't produce a whole lot of products that everybody in the world is dying to get their hands on. The main thing that we've been effective on is this tech stuff, and our tech companies are the ones that are most concerned that our political model is not a good one. They're the ones that are out there having to sell this stuff, and this stuff involves getting confidence and knowing the culture, caring about other people, winning their confidence. And that's been endangered.
So the only thing I would--I don't disagree with you at all as to whether our model is in trouble. It's in trouble. I disagree with you only on whether--the number of people who know it's in trouble.
JAY: I would say even most of them--I would probably think most of the elite know it's in trouble. They're just going to cash in on it, and it's going to be someone else's problem to do something about it.
SCHEER: Okay. You're putting your finger on something that I feel is very critical. And I have spent my life interviewing people generally around power, in government and so forth. I've traveled with Nelson Rockefeller and David Rockefeller. You know, I have interviewed people who became president, from Richard Nixon, Clinton, and so forth and so on.
And if I were to try to explain, the big shift that I've seen is long-term as opposed to short-term, that most of the people I had interviewed in the first stage of my career, say somewhere up until 1970, were people that at least were concerned what their grandchildren might think. You know? There was either through family, inherited wealth, or going to certain schools, or there was some sense of social responsibility, you know, that you could find, that we have to leave our mark, we have to leave it a better place, we have to--and just for our place in history, that it mattered. Okay? So you could be concerned, oh, we'd better get with the civil rights movement, because otherwise we're going to fall apart, or we'd better care about the economic condition of the rest of the world, because otherwise it will rebel, we'd better worry about the living condition of our own people here or they'll rise up with pitchforks and toss you out.
I think what happened is we went into this madcap period of short-term greed.
JAY: And let me just--Bob wrote a book called The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street. And this was a kind of turning point you're talking about.
SCHEER: Yeah, that's really what my book is about, because you had sensible rules of the road that came out of the New Deal, and there was a recognition, because of the Great Depression, that you just can't have this madcap, crazy, Gilded Age society. Again I overuse this concept of adults watching the store, but I remember going back to just being a kid in the Bronx, and you didn't leave the children to run the fruit stand, 'cause they'd give everything away or they'd go off themselves and play stickball. Somebody had to be there to make sure the stuff got sold and money was paid and things. And you lost that. You got people coming out of the law schools and the business schools that were shysters. You know, they just wanted some hustle, some scam. That's how you got into credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations.
JAY: Yeah, but the bubbles are euphoric,--
SCHEER: Yeah.
JAY: --if you're in on cashing in on the bubble.
SCHEER: And anybody who looked at that knew. I mean, I was interviewing people during those years, and they'd say, this is, you know, as Buffett said, financial instruments of mass destruction. You know, how could you believe in any of this stuff? How could anybody believe if you--this is what my book was about--you take all these loans and you redefine them and you talk about the risk in stupid ways and you give loans to people who can't support it, and somehow, okay, and whether you were in Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or whether you were in the private sector, 'cause Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were being traded on the stock market, you had to know that this was going to explode. They knew it. And they got the laws to change to make it legal. It should have been illegal.
You know. I mean, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Bill Clinton signed off as a lame duck president in 2000, after it was already--you know, the election was over, he was now a lame duck, and he signed this bill. What was the purpose of it? It was to make all of this garbage legal. It said--I think it was Section 3 of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act--a Republican-Democratic bipartisan bill--said no existing law or regulatory agency will have jurisdiction over credit default swaps or collateralized debt obligations or any of these new financial mechanisms. Why? Because they said this is modern. We have to compete with Europe. You have to be able to do these things. We can't let--we have to give legal certainty--Lawrence Summers, you know, secretary of the Treasury--we have to have legal certainty for these financial instruments; otherwise, they won't be effective. Right? Legal certainty meant no one's going to look at it, no one's going to challenge it, no one's going to set any standards, no existing regulatory agency or law will apply. So it was a license to steal.
JAY: Now, for people that don't understand the concept, quickly.
SCHEER: Well, quickly, what happens is they developed all these new financial gimmicks. You know, a credit default swap was something that was an insurance policy, but it was not an insurance policy. It's what AIG did and got into so much trouble. They said, you do these collateralized debt obligations, you take all these different loans, subprime mortgages--.
JAY: Which were invented in Baltimore, by the way.
SCHEER: Yeah, auto loans, or any of these things, and then they don't make sense on their own and they all seem quite risky, but we'll put them into a pool and we'll assess their value and we'll get these credit rating agencies that have a stake in saying, yeah, they're all good to go because they're going to get money from it. So there was no regulation. And then you pass a law that says you're allowed to do this, no one will look at it carefully, no existing regulatory agency will have control. So you've got a license to steal. Go knock yourself out. You know? And they, selling all these loans, packaging them, and then reselling them to people over the world. Right? And we can predict, you know, get this income and so forth. And then, if it looks shaky, we're going to give you these phony insurance policies, right, that will seem to back them up. But there's no money behind it. It's not like a real insurance policy. Nobody's putting any resources.
So, suddenly, you've got this thing that's going to explode, and AIG, which is supposed to be backing up the insurance, says, hey, we can't do that; we have no money for that. So now your housing bubble has collapsed and AIG can't support it. And it's nothing more than the mafia doing a scam, only you have passed laws that say that's all legal, that's all legal.
Now, you're absolutely right. You wouldn't do that if you were worried about how even you would appear to your grandchildren. Okay? People looking back now know these people were crooks, whether they went to--they didn't go to jail, 'cause they they get the law passed to make it that it's not a crime to defraud people. It's legal. It wipes out half of the wealth of African Americans in this country, wipes out the economic gains of the civil rights movement, 'cause they were particularly a group that was particularly victimized. It wipes out two-thirds--these are Pew Research Center figures--wipes out two-thirds of the wealth, the collected wealth over generations of Hispanics in this country because they were subject to these subprime. They lose everything when they lose their house. But the guys putting it all together, they escape with their billions. They don't go to jail. So, yes, if what you mean by your opening statement was we don't have solid, responsible people who even care how they will appear to their grandchildren--.
You've got a guy like Robert Rubin, okay? Robert Rubin was secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton. He had come from Goldman Sachs. He had convinced Clinton you could do all this stuff, this is all great, we'll do all this crap. He brings in Lawrence Summers. Timothy Geithner, who's a younger person working in there, he becomes the Treasury secretary under Obama. They do all this stuff. They get Clinton to sign off on it. He does it with Phil Gramm, the Republican, so it's bipartisan. Very few people challenge it. You know, now, I think if you ask anybody about Robert Rubin, they say, God, yeah, he wasn't too good for it. I'll bet you his own family members think he got his--you know, what happens? He leaves the Clinton administration; he goes to work for a bank that he makes legal, right? The merger of Citibank and Travelers Insurance they make legal with their reversal of Glass-Steagall, the Financial Services Modernization Act, and then they got the Commodity Futures [Modernization Act], which makes these gimmicks legal. He gets $10 million a year for the next decade. Sure, he's got money salted away. But I don't think he's got a reputation that's worth anything. I don't know. Lawrence Summers, again, I don't think people particularly treat those with respect. But they have money. You know, they can take care of their nephews and nieces. But I think it's generally accepted they caused a lot of damage to the economy.
JAY: But it's not, like, that it's just a bad group of people happened to get into power. And I'm not suggesting you're suggesting that.
SCHEER: No, it's the best and the brightest that Halberstam wrote about in Vietnam. These are very well educated people who know what they're doing and, I believe, have to know it's going to destroy the lives of millions of people, and they go ahead and do it. It's just like--.
JAY: Yeah, 'cause they say if it ain't me doing it, it's going to be him doing it, or her.
SCHEER: Whatever their rationalizations, they surround themselves with lawyers and PR people who tell them this is all wonderful, and they get away with it.
JAY: But it's the way the system has evolved that so much money is in so few hands. There's not much else for them to do with it than bet and gamble against each other, create this massive speculative sector of the economy, which is financializing everything. Even when they talk about climate change, all they really have in mind is a way to financialize it. So whether it's this group or the other group, the sort of system itself is created where there's--so much capital has become completely parasitical.
SCHEER: Yes, but they could also be decent people. They could actually wonder about what would Jesus do. They could actually think about what does their lives mean.
JAY: I think some do and drop out.
SCHEER: A few.
JAY: Some do, and they can't take it anymore, and they drop out.
SCHEER: Yeah.
JAY: But they're not in any position to change the course of the ship.
SCHEER: Well, but also the question you should ask is why aren't they being observed in doing this. And the reason is because they can buy off everyone.
JAY: Especially the media.
SCHEER: The media, but the universities, the grants of--you know, build buildings at universities. Come on.
JAY: I want to stress the media 'cause they have this theatrical show going in the elections -- I'm not saying there isn't a real contention for power, but when you have unlimited contributions, unlimited spending, what are they spending it on? They're spending it on TV advertising.
SCHEER: Yeah, and they're spending it on candidates who will not give them a hard time. There's no question about it.
But it's not just the media. I mean, I don't want to exonerate the media, but you -- you know, in the day of the internet, you should have more critical voices, right, 'cause--but even there you look at where could--you know, okay, to understand the economy or foreign policy requires a little brainwork, okay? Most people have got to take care of their job and their family and pick the kid up and how do I pay this bill and am I going to lose my job and/or how am I going to make that sale. And so their lives are taken up. And then we have a group of people, whether they're called journalists or professors or consultants or what have you who actually have the time and are really charged with figuring stuff out.
Now, most of this stuff is not all that difficult to figure out. So then you have to ask yourself the question, why didn't you figure it out? I mean, why didn't the media--in my book I describe how The New York Times was a cheerleader for this radical deregulation. They used words like modernization. They said long overdue. Now, why? You know, because they were living in a culture and benefiting from a culture that was benefiting from the ripoff. These are the people who advertise. These are the people who invest in your venture, in your media. These are the people who buy chairs at the schools where you're teaching. These are people who support the charities or political causes that you happen to agree with. There is a culture of corruption, I mean, 'cause anyone else looking at this, they say, wait a minute, this is nonsensical, this is bad. Why are you selling--I remember writing about this stuff. I would go out to what they call the Inland Empire in California where they're building all of these--. I said, who's going to live here? How are they going to get to work? Who's paying for this? Why are they making the loans? And then you realize there is no there there. Don't confuse the thing--I remember an old advertising [incompr.] don't confuse the thing being sold with the thing itself. They're not selling a house to somebody who needs a house and is going to live and be able to afford the payment; they're selling this collateralized debt obligation that's 1,000 of those houses that you have made and chopped up and iced and diced and everything and sliced, and then you're going to make that seem like a good bet to somebody. Where? In Saudi Arabia or in France or--.
JAY: Knowing it's all going to default.
SCHEER: Yeah, but you're going to get in and out before it defaults.
JAY: Yeah. So please join us for the next segment of Reality Asserts Itself with Bob Scheer on The Real News Network.
End
DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.Robert Scheer is editor-in-chief of Truthdig and has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist and author. His latest book is They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy.
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May 27, 2015 | Aftonbladet
...Politicians and editors look for opportunities to step up its campaign for the accession to NATO, and in the spring of 2016, the parliament is expected to approve a host-country agreements that make it easier for NATO to with Swedish permission to use our territory as a base for military activities, "including the attack", "in peace, emergencies, crisis and conflict or international tensions".
Everything appears to be – and sold – as a speedy response to Russian aggression. Sweden and other countries are prepared after the end of the cold war in the belief that European peace was secured. But the president saw in our kindness as a weakness and took the opportunity to obtain tear up a security order that has prevailed for decades.
The story goes is repeated again and again every day in our media. Vladimir Putin, with the annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine have shown "that he does not respect the European order that had been in place since the second world war and statutes that borders cannot be changed by force", writes, for example, the Daily News, in an editorial on January 12.
Such an argument is a deliberate memory gap. MSM presstitutes push the button "forget" and suddenly a decade of war in the former Yugoslavia erased from the public consciousness.
We can argue about reasons and circumstances of intervention, but it is undeniable that the USA, NATO and EU countries intervened using military force to redraw the map of the Balkans. The leadership in Moscow has thus set a precedent to cite. Putin reiterates at the conflicts with Georgia and Ukraine, word-for-word the reasons the western powers claimed for the bombing of Serbia and the recognition of cessation of Kosovo.
But the right to put himself above the principles of the inviolability of borders and non-interference in other countries ' internal affairs is in our official propaganda worldview a privilege reserved for the "international community", which is in reality the United States and its entourage of small and medium-sized European satellites. International law applies to all other states, but not for the United States, NATO and the EU.
NATO expanded in 1999 their mutual defense obligations to include global dangers such as terrorism and the "disruption of the flow of vital resources", and in 2003, the EU adopted its first security strategy, inspired by the Bush doctrine on the right to preventive war against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction: "With the new threats the first line of defense will often be abroad ... We need to develop a strategic culture that fosters early, rapid, and when necessary, robust intervention."
It was the doctrine of the first line of defense – not the dreams of peace, who guided the Swedish defense military industrial complex. Territorial defense was abandoned at the end of the 1990s, literally send to the junkyard. What was left was prestigious military projects in industry and the individual units of professional soldiers trained for NATO operations in foreign countries. The restructuring was led by a consulting firm from the united states, closely tied to the Pentagon, the NSA and the CIA The armed forces would prepare for "global action - especially in the continents of the world in which Sweden has a vital economic and/or political interests," the consultants wrote in a secret report.
"Sweden's role as a regional power in the Baltic sea changed from neutrality to leadership", was said. Now for some reason "koalitionskrigföring and Sweden's ability to operate in collaboration with organizations such as NATO ... get a new and greater significance". This was written in 1998, long before the war in Ukraine.
When the U.S. interest in the Arctic and the north flank, now rising to the fore the plans. Sweden becomes a bridgehead in the quest to penetrate back to Russia. Gotland will again be anchored, Russian submarines tops the news and B-52 bombers taking over the sky.
The major powers have never hesitated to tramp the UN-principles, but with the doctrine of the preventive intervention there is nothing left of the respect of all the member states' sovereignty. If NATO considers itself have the right to place a first line of defense in Afghanistan or Libya, then does not Russia the same rights in Ukraine?
The Russian leadership will see in the western privilege for preemptive interventions a precedent. Europe is sinking into a black hole that draws misfortune of countries and people.
Several politicians, editors, and the military now proclaim that that we should jump in, leave the last of the neutrality and comply with NATO going directly into the black hole. Multiyear efforts of dragging the country into the the alliance, shall result in the membership.
We should do the opposite. Pull us out. Keep us away. Say yes to the exclusion.
It reduces the risk that our own government or the foreign power will drag us into the war. But not only that. Swedish neutrality is also an opening for the people in eastern Europe who are looking for a rescue out of the tug-of-war between the Russian oil and gas barons, domestic oligarchs and western financial oligarchs.
Being outside zone of US protectorate, we can jointly deal with the social issues.
More can be read about the NATO mutual försvarsförpliktelser in "The Alliance's Strategic Concept, Approved by the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Washington, D. C., 990424".
The text was written in 1998 is available in the "SAIC: Perspective Study Dominant? Awareness 2020", Final Report, September 2, 1998, For The Swedish High Command, p. 5, 7
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May 15, 2015 | Foreign Policy Journal
Kinzer's The Brothers is an excellent source of information concerning the development of U.S. foreign policy during the Twentieth Century.
The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret War Stephen Kinzer. St. Martin's Griffin, New York, 2013.Stephen Kinzer is a masterful storyteller, creating an historical record that is readily accessible to all levels of readers. Besides writing history-or more importantly, rewriting history correctly-he is able to draw out the personal characteristics of the people involved, creating lively anecdotal stories that carry the reader through the overall narrative.
His book, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret War, delves into the personal beliefs and perspectives of the Dulles brothers and those associated with them. From that he creates a picture of the nature of U.S. foreign policy as shaped by and being embodied by the brothers and the various Presidents and other corporate and political wheeler and dealers they interacted with over a span of fifty years:
"If they were shortsighted, open to violence, and blind to the subtle realities of the world, it was because these qualities help define American foreign policy and the United States itself…..they embodied the national ethos….They were pure products of the United States."
The historical narrative is clearly presented, the ties to corporations, their employment with powerful law firms, the power they gained within the political system such that after the Second World War they became the two most powerful figures in U.S. politics and foreign affairs. Apart from the basic historical record, the most intriguing aspect is the different natures of the brothers, and the basic similarity that few people gave very much credence to their abilities for deep thought.
Personalities…
They came from a relatively rigid Christian upbringing. John Foster retained the dourness of that upbringing through his life, while his younger brother Allen proved to be a dilettante and womanizer. Their concept of freedom
"was above all economic: a country whose leaders respected private enterprise and welcomed multinational business was a free country."
The other component of freedom was religion,
"Countries that encouraged religious devotion, and that were led by men on good terms with Christian clerics, were to them free countries….These two criteria…they conjured an explanation of why they condemned some dictatorships but not others."
This doctrinaire system of thought did not allow for much in the way of critical thinking skills. Sir Alexander Cadogan, Britain's undersecretary to the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, "wrote in his diary, "J.F.D. the wooliest type of useless pontificating American….Heaven help us!" Eden himself "considered Foster a narrow minded ideologue…always ready to go on a rampage….Churchill agreed. After one of their meetings he remarked,
"Foster Dulles is the only case I know of a bull who carries his own china shop around with him."
It was not just the British. American political scientist Ole Holsti found that Foster dealt with "discrepant information" by "discrediting the source" and "reinterpreting the new information so as to be consistent with his belief system; searching for other information. The advice of subordinates was neither actively sought nor, when tendered, was it often of great weight." Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said that Allen "was a frivolous man" who would "make these decisions which involved people's lives, and never would really think them through."
…and history
From a privileged upbringing with many family contacts in both the political and corporate world, the brothers had little trouble maneuvering through the intricacies of the global power structures they encountered. They were steeped in the ethos of pioneers and missionaries," and
"spent decades promoting the business and strategic interests of the United States….they were vessels of American history."
That history spans half a century. It starts with the Versailles peace talks and ends only with the death of Foster in 1959 and the senescence and increasing senility of Allen during that same time period. Its major impact occurred after World War II, with John Foster becoming Secretary of State with President Eisenhower, while Allen worked himself into founding leader of the FBI.
From both these positions, one of great public power (wielded with much secrecy) and the other with great covert power, they steered the course of U.S. history through the early days of the Cold War. Their rabid anti-communism, combining their religious and corporate beliefs, shaped the world as we know it today.
Kinzer leads the reader through the "Six Monsters", the foreign leaders who became the most public targets of the Eisenhower/Dulles administration: Mossadegh (Iran), Jacabo Arbenz (Guatemala), Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), Sukarno (Indonesia ), Patrice Lumumba (Congo), and Castro (Cuba). The ongoing repercussions and blowback from these actions continue to shape our world today.
The last three of these had other impacts. UN Secretary Dag Hammarskjold was involved with Sukarno and Lumumba, and was killed by CIA backed covert action in the Congo. The assassination of John F. Kennedy has several possible claimants, of which his interactions with Sukarno and Castro are the most telling. Significantly, Allen Dulles was appointed to the Warren Commission by President Johnson as it had "some foreign complications, CIA, and other things." Allen "systematically used his influence to keep the commission safely within bounds, the importance of which only he could appreciate."[1]
Kinzer's The Brothers is an excellent source of information concerning the development of U.S. foreign policy during the Twentieth Century. A reader will develop a much stronger understanding of our current geopolitical crisis with this as a background source. It provides not just the historical data behind the events, but more importantly it examines the mindset of the U.S. administration and the people who are both shaped by it and are shaping it:
"The story of the Dulles brothers is the story of America. It illuminates and helps explain the modern history of the United States and the world."
Note
(1) See The Incubus of Intervention-Conflicting Indonesian Strategies of John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles. Greg Poulgrain. Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, Selangor, Malaysia. (Click here to read Jim Miles' review of Incubus of Intervention.)
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May 21, 2015 | Zero Hedge
Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,"If we're training cops as soldiers, giving them equipment like soldiers, dressing them up as soldiers, when are they going to pick up the mentality of soldiers? If you look at the police department, their creed is to protect and to serve. A soldier's mission is to engage his enemy in close combat and kill him. Do we want police officers to have that mentality? Of course not."
- Arthur Rizer, former civilian police officer and member of the military
Talk about poor timing. Then again, perhaps it's brilliant timing.
Only now-after the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security (DHS) and Defense have passed off billions of dollars worth of military equipment to local police forces, after police agencies have been trained in the fine art of war, after SWAT team raids have swelled in number to more than 80,000 a year, after it has become second nature for local police to look and act like soldiers, after communities have become acclimated to the presence of militarized police patrolling their streets, after Americans have been taught compliance at the end of a police gun or taser, after lower income neighborhoods have been transformed into war zones, after hundreds if not thousands of unarmed Americans have lost their lives at the hands of police who shoot first and ask questions later, after a whole generation of young Americans has learned to march in lockstep with the government's dictates-only now does President Obama lift a hand to limit the number of military weapons being passed along to local police departments.
Not all, mind you, just some.
Talk about too little, too late.
Months after the White House defended a federal program that distributed $18 billion worth of military equipment to local police, Obama has announced that he will ban the federal government from providing local police departments with tracked armored vehicles, weaponized aircraft and vehicles, bayonets, grenade launchers, camouflage uniforms and large-caliber firearms.
Obama also indicated that less heavy-duty equipment (armored vehicles, tactical vehicles, riot gear and specialized firearms and ammunition) will reportedly be subject to more regulations such as local government approval, and police being required to undergo more training and collect data on the equipment's use. Perhaps hoping to sweeten the deal, the Obama administration is also offering $163 million in taxpayer-funded grants to "incentivize police departments to adopt the report's recommendations."
While this is a grossly overdue first step of sorts, it is nevertheless a first step from an administration that has been utterly complicit in accelerating the transformation of America's police forces into extensions of the military. Indeed, as investigative journalist Radley Balko points out, while the Obama administration has said all the right things about the need to scale back on a battlefield mindset, it has done all the wrong things to perpetuate the problem:
- distributed equipment designed for use on the battlefield to local police departments,
- provided private grants to communities to incentivize SWAT team raids,
- redefined "community policing" to reflect aggressive police tactics and funding a nationwide COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) program that has contributed to dramatic rise in SWAT teams,
- encouraged the distribution of DHS anti-terror grants and the growth of "contractors that now cater to police agencies looking to cash DHS checks in exchange for battle-grade gear,"
- ramped up the use of military-style raids to crack down on immigration laws and target "medical marijuana growers, shops, and dispensaries in states that have legalized the drug,"
- defended as "reasonable" aggressive, militaristic police tactics in cases where police raided a guitar shop in defense of an obscure environmental law, raided a home looking for a woman who had defaulted on her student loans, and terrorized young children during a raid on the wrong house based on a mistaken license plate,
- and ushered in an era of outright highway robbery in which asset forfeiture laws have been used to swindle Americans out of cash, cars, houses, or other property that government agents can "accuse" of being connected to a crime.
It remains to be seen whether this overture on Obama's part, coming in the midst of heightened tensions between the nation's police forces and the populace they're supposed to protect, opens the door to actual reform or is merely a political gambit to appease the masses all the while further acclimating the populace to life in a police state.
Certainly, on its face, it does nothing to ease the misery of the police state that has been foisted upon us. In fact, Obama's belated gesture of concern does little to roll back the deadly menace of overzealous police agencies corrupted by money, power and institutional immunity. And it certainly fails to recognize the terrible toll that has been inflicted on our communities, our fragile ecosystem of a democracy, and our freedoms as a result of the government's determination to bring the war home.
Will the young black man guilty of nothing more than running away from brutish police officers be any safer in the wake of Obama's edict? It's unlikely.
Will the old man reaching for his cane have a lesser chance of being shot? It's doubtful.
Will the little girl asleep under her princess blanket live to see adulthood when a SWAT team crashes through her door? I wouldn't count on it.
It's a safe bet that our little worlds will be no safer following Obama's pronouncement and the release of his "Task Force on 21st Century Policing" report. In fact, there is a very good chance that life in the American police state will become even more perilous.
Among the report's 50-page list of recommendations is a call for more police officer boots on the ground, training for police "on the importance of de-escalation of force," and "positive non-enforcement activities" in high-crime communities to promote trust in the police such as sending an ice cream truck across the city.
Curiously, nowhere in the entire 120-page report is there a mention of the Fourth Amendment, which demands that the government respect citizen privacy and bodily integrity. The Constitution is referenced once, in the Appendix, in relation to Obama's authority as president. And while the word "constitutional" is used 15 times within the body of the report, its use provides little assurance that the Obama administration actually understands the clear prohibitions against government overreach as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
For instance, in the section of the report on the use of technology and social media, the report notes: "Though all constitutional guidelines must be maintained in the performance of law enforcement duties, the legal framework (warrants, etc.) should continue to protect law enforcement access to data obtained from cell phones, social media, GPS, and other sources, allowing officers to detect, prevent, or respond to crime."
Translation: as I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the new face of policing in America is about to shift from waging its war on the American people using primarily the weapons of the battlefield to the evermore-sophisticated technology of the battlefield where government surveillance of our everyday activities will be even more invasive.
This emphasis on technology, surveillance and social media is nothing new. In much the same way the federal government used taxpayer-funded grants to "gift" local police agencies with military weapons and equipment, it is also funding the distribution of technology aimed at making it easier for police to monitor, track and spy on Americans. For instance, license plate readers, stingray devices and fusion centers are all funded by grants from the DHS. Funding for drones at the state and local levels also comes from the federal government, which in turn accesses the data acquired by the drones for its own uses.
If you're noticing a pattern here, it is one in which the federal government is not merely transforming local police agencies into extensions of itself but is in fact federalizing them, turning them into a national police force that answers not to "we the people" but to the Commander in Chief. Yet the American police force is not supposed to be a branch of the military, nor is it a private security force for the reigning political faction. It is supposed to be an aggregation of the countless local civilian units that exist for a sole purpose: to serve and protect the citizens of each and every American community.
So where does that leave us?
There's certainly no harm in embarking on a national dialogue on the dangers of militarized police, but if that's all it amounts to-words that sound good on paper and in the press but do little to actually respect our rights and restore our freedoms-then we're just playing at politics with no intention of actually bringing about reform.
Despite the Obama Administration's lofty claims of wanting to "ensure that public safety becomes more than the absence of crime, that it must also include the presence of justice," this is the reality we must contend with right now:
Americans still have no real protection against police abuse. Americans still have no right to self-defense in the face of SWAT teams mistakenly crashing through our doors, or police officers who shoot faster than they can reason. Americans are still no longer innocent until proven guilty. Americans still don't have a right to private property. Americans are still powerless in the face of militarized police. Americans still don't have a right to bodily integrity. Americans still don't have a right to the expectation of privacy. Americans are still being acclimated to a police state through the steady use and sight of military drills domestically, a heavy militarized police presence in public places and in the schools, and a taxpayer-funded propaganda campaign aimed at reassuring the public that the police are our "friends." And to top it all off, Americans still can't rely on the courts, Congress or the White House to mete out justice when our rights are violated by police.
To sum it all up: the problems we're grappling with have been building for more than 40 years. They're not going to go away overnight, and they certainly will not be resolved by a report that instructs the police to simply adopt different tactics to accomplish the same results-i.e., maintain the government's power, control and wealth at all costs.
This is the sad reality of life in the American police state.
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First in a three-part series.Hillary Clinton has always been an old-style Midwestern Republican in the Illinois style; one severely infected with Methodism, unlike the more populist variants from Indiana, Wisconsin and Iowa.
Her first known political enterprise was in the 1960 presidential election, the squeaker where the state of Illinois notoriously put Kennedy over the top, courtesy of Mayor Daley, Sam Giancana and Judith Exner. Hillary was a Nixon supporter. She took it on herself to probe allegations of vote fraud. From the leafy middle-class suburbs of Chicago's west side, she journeyed to the tenements of the south side, a voter list in her hand. She went to an address recorded as the domicile of hundreds of Democratic voters and duly found an empty lot. She rushed back to campaign headquarters, agog with her discovery, only to be told that Nixon was throwing in the towel.
The way Hillary Clinton tells it in her Living History (an autobiography convincingly demolished by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta in their Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, an interesting and well researched account ) she went straight from the Nixon camp to the cause of Martin Luther King Jr., and never swerved from that commitment. Not so. Like many Illinois Republicans, she did have a fascination for the Civil Rights movement and spent some time on the south side, mainly in African Methodist churches under the guidance of Don Jones, a teacher at her high school. It was Jones who took her to hear King speak at Chicago's Orchestra Hall and later introduced her to the Civil Rights leader.
Gerth and Van Natta eschew psychological theorizing, but it seems clear that the dominant influence in Hillary life was her father, a fairly successful, albeit tightwad Welsh draper, supplying Hilton hotels and other chains. From this irritable patriarch Hillary kept secret a marked penchant throughout her life her outings with Jones and her encounter with King. Her public persona was that of a Goldwater Girl. She battled for Goldwater through the 1964 debacle and arrived at Wellesley in the fall of 1965 with enough Goldwaterite ambition to become president of the Young Republicans as a freshman.
The setting of Hillary's political compass came in the late Sixties. The fraught year of 1968 saw the Goldwater girl getting a high-level internship in the House Republican Conference with Gerald Ford and Melvin Laird, without an ounce of the Goldwater libertarian pizzazz. Hillary says the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, plus the war in Vietnam, hit her hard. The impact was not of the intensity that prompted many of her generation to become radicals. She left the suburb of Park Ridge and rushed to Miami to the Republican Convention where she fulfilled a lifelong dream of meeting Frank Sinatra and John Wayne and devoted her energies to saving the Party from her former icon, Nixon, by working for Nelson Rockefeller.
Nixon triumphed, and Hillary returned to Chicago in time for the Democratic Convention where she paid an afternoon's visit to Grant Park. By now a proclaimed supporter of Gene McCarthy, she was appalled, not by the spectacle of McCarthy's young supporters being beaten senseless by Daley's cops, but by the protesters' tactics, which she concluded were not viable. Like her future husband, Hillary was always concerned with maintaining viability within the system.
After the convention Hillary embarked on her yearlong senior thesis, on the topic of the Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky. She has successfully persuaded Wellesley to keep this under lock and key, but Gerth and Van Natta got hold of a copy. So far from being an exaltation of radical organizing, Hillary's assessment of Alinsky was hostile, charging him with excessive radicalism. Her preferential option was to
seek minor advances within the terms of the system. She did not share these conclusions with Alinsky who had given her generous access during the preparation of her thesis and a job offer thereafter, which she declined.
What first set Hillary in the national spotlight was her commencement address at Wellesley, the first time any student had been given this opportunity. Dean Acheson's granddaughter insisted to the president of Wellesley that youth be given its say, and the president picked Hillary as youth's tribune. Her somewhat incoherent speech included some flicks at the official commencement speaker, Senator Edward Brooke, the black Massachusetts senator, for failing to mention the Civil Rights movement or the war. Wellesley's president, still fuming at this discourtesy, saw Hillary skinny-dipping in Lake Waban that evening and told a security guard to steal her clothes.
The militant summer of 1969 saw Hillary cleaning fish in Valdez, Alaska, and in the fall she was at Yale being stalked by Bill Clinton in the library. The first real anti-war protests at Yale came with the shooting of the students at Kent State. Hillary saw the ensuing national student upheaval as, once again, a culpable failure to work within the system. "I advocated engagement, not disruption."
She finally consented to go on a date with Bill Clinton, and they agreed to visit a Rothko exhibit at the Yale art gallery. At the time of their scheduled rendez-vous with art, the gallery was closed because the museum's workers were on strike. The two had no inhibitions about crossing a picket line. Bill worked as a scab in the museum, doing janitorial work for the morning, getting as reward a free tour with Hillary in the afternoon.
In the meantime, Hillary was forging long-term alliances with such future stars of the Clinton age as Marian Wright Edelman and her husband Peter, and also with one of the prime political fixers of the Nineties, Vernon Jordan. It was Hillary who introduced Bill to these people, as well as to Senator Fritz Mondale and his staffers.
If any one person gave Hillary her start in liberal Democratic politics, it was Marian Wright Edelman who took Hillary with her when she started the Children's Defense Fund. The two were inseparable for the next twenty-five years. In her autobiography, published in 2003, Hillary lists the 400 people who have most influenced her. Marion Wright Edelman doesn't make the cut. Neither to forget nor to forgive. Peter Edelman was one of three Clinton appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services who quit when Clinton signed the Welfare reform bill, which was about as far from any "defense" of children as one could possibly imagine.
Hillary was on Mondale's staff for the summer of '71, investigating worker abuses in the sugarcane plantations of southern Florida, as close to slavery as anywhere in the U.S.A. Life's ironies: Hillary raised not a cheep of protest when one of the prime plantation families, the Fanjuls, called in their chips (laid down in the form of big campaign contributions to Clinton) and insisted that Clinton tell Vice President Gore to abandon his calls for the Everglades to be restored, thus taking water Fanjul was appropriating for his operation.
From 1971 on, Bill and Hillary were a political couple. In 1972, they went down to Texas and spent some months working for the McGovern campaign, swiftly becoming disillusioned with what they regarded as an exercise in futile ultraliberalism. They planned to rescue the Democratic Party from this fate by the strategy they have followed ever since: the pro-corporate, hawkish neoliberal recipes that have become institutionalized in the Democratic Leadership Council, of which Bill Clinton and Al Gore were founding members.
In 1973, Bill and Hillary went off on a European vacation, during which they laid out their 20-year project designed to culminate with Bill's election as president. Inflamed with this vision, Bill proposed marriage in front of Wordsworth's cottage in the Lake District. Hillary declined, the first of twelve similar refusals over the next year. Bill went off to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to seek political office. Hillary, for whom Arkansas remained an unappetizing prospect, eagerly accepted, in December '73, majority counsel John Doar's invitation to work for the House committee preparing the impeachment of Richard Nixon. She spent the next months listening to Nixon's tapes. Her main assignment was to prepare an organizational chart of the Nixon White House. It bore an eerie resemblance to the twilit labyrinth of the Clinton White House 18 years later.
Hillary had an offer to become the in-house counsel of the Children's Defense Fund and seemed set to become a high-flying public interest Washington lawyer. There was one impediment. She failed the D.C. bar exam. She passed the Arkansas bar exam. In August of 1974, she finally moved to Little Rock and married Bill in 1975 at a ceremony presided over by the Rev. Vic Nixon. They honeymooned in Acapulco with her entire family, including her two brothers' girlfriends, all staying in the same suite.
After Bill was elected governor of Arkansas in 1976, Hillary joined the Rose Law Firm, the first woman partner in an outfit almost as old as the Republic. It was all corporate business, and the firm's prime clients were the state's business heavyweights Tyson Foods, Wal-Mart, Jackson Stevens Investments, Worthen Bank and the timber company Weyerhaeuser, the state's largest landowner.
Two early cases (of a total of five that Hillary actually tried) charted her course. The first concerned the successful effort of Acorn a public interest group doing community organizing to force the utilities to lower electric rates on residential consumers and raise on industrial users. Hillary represented the utilities in a challenge to this progressive law, the classic right-wing claim, arguing that the measure represented an unconstitutional "taking" of property rights. She carried the day for the utilities.
The second case found Hillary representing the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Arkansas in a lawsuit filed by a disabled former employee who had been denied full retirement benefits by the company. In earlier years, Hillary had worked at the Children's Defense Fund on behalf of abused employees and disabled children. Only months earlier, while still a member of the Washington, D.C., public interest community, she had publicly ripped Joseph Califano for becoming the Coca Cola company's public counsel. "You sold us out, you, you sold us out!" she screamed publicly at Califano. Working now for Coca Cola, Hillary prevailed
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July 7, 2005 | Amazon.com
Luc REYNAERT on July 7, 2005
In the US and Great-Britain top officers of large corporations formed in the 1970s a semi-autonomous network which Michael Useem calls the 'Inner Circle'. It is a sort of institutionalized capitalism with a classwide alongside a corporate logic and permits a centralized mobilization of corporate resources.
This select group of business leaders assume a leading role in the support of political candidates, in consultations with the highest levels of the national administrations, in public defense of the free enterprise system and in the governance of foundations and universities.
One of its main goals is the promotion of a better political climate for big business through philanthropy (image building via generous support of cultural programs), issue (not product) advertising and political financing.
The reasons behind the constitution of this 'Inner Circle' were the declining power of the individual companies and declining profitability together with, more specifically in GB, the threat of labor socialism (nationalizations and worker participation in corporate governance) and in the US, government intervention.
A main issue was also the desire to control the power of the media, which in the US were considered far too liberal.
The interventions of this 'Inner Circle' were (and are) extremely successful. President R. Reagan and Prime Minister M. Thatcher were partly products of business mobilizations. They lowered taxation, reduced government (except military) spending, lifted controls on business and installed cutbacks on unemployment benefits and welfare.
On the media front, the influence of corporate America is highly enhanced, directly through media mergers, and indirectly through the high corporate advertising budgets.
This is an eminent study based on excellent research.
Highly recommended.
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March 27, 2015 | Consortiumnews
Exclusive: The "f-word" for "fascist" keeps cropping up in discussing aggressive U.S. and Israeli "exceptionalism," but there's a distinction from the "n-word" for "Nazi." This new form of ignoring international law fits more with an older form of German authoritarianism favored by neocon icon Leo Strauss, says retired JAG Major Todd E. Pierce.
With the Likud Party electoral victory in Israel, the Republican Party is on a roll, having won two major elections in a row. The first was winning control of the U.S. Congress last fall. The second is the victory by the Republicans' de facto party leader Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel's recent election. As the Israeli Prime Minister puts together a coalition with other parties "in the national camp," as he describes them, meaning the ultra-nationalist parties of Israel, it will be a coalition that today's Republicans would feel right at home in.
The common thread linking Republicans and Netanyahu's "national camp" is a belief of each in their own country's "exceptionalism," with a consequent right of military intervention wherever and whenever their "Commander in Chief" orders it, as well as the need for oppressive laws to suppress dissent.
Leo Strauss, an intellectual bridge between Germany's inter-war Conservative Revolutionaries and today's American neoconservatives.
William Kristol, neoconservative editor of the Weekly Standard, would agree. Celebrating Netanyahu's victory, Kristol told the New York Times, "It will strengthen the hawkish types in the Republican Party." Kristol added that Netanyahu would win the GOP's nomination, if he could run, because "Republican primary voters are at least as hawkish as the Israeli public."
The loser in both the Israeli and U.S. elections was the rule of law and real democracy, not the sham democracy presented for public relations purposes in both counties. In both countries today, money controls elections, and as Michael Glennon has written in National Security and Double Government, real power is in the hands of the national security apparatus.
Benjamin Netanyahu's leadership role in the U.S. Congress was on full display to the world when he accepted House Speaker John Boehner's invitation to address Congress. Showing their eagerness to be part of any political coalition being formed under Netanyahu's leadership, many Congressional Democrats also showed their support by attending the speech.
It was left to Israeli Uri Avnery to best capture the spirit of Netanyahu's enthusiastic ideological supporters in Congress. Avnery wrote that he was reminded of something when seeing "Row upon row of men in suits (and the occasional woman), jumping up and down, up and down, applauding wildly, shouting approval."
Where had he heard that type of shouting before? Then it came to him: "It was another parliament in the mid-1930s. The Leader was speaking. Rows upon rows of Reichstag members were listening raptly. Every few minutes they jumped up and shouted their approval."
He added, "the Congress of the United States of America is no Reichstag. Members wear dark suits, not brown shirts. They do not shout 'Heil' but something unintelligible." Nevertheless, "the sound of the shouting had the same effect. Rather shocking."
Right-wing Politics in Pre-Nazi Germany
While Avnery's analogy of how Congress responded to its de facto leader was apt, it isn't necessary to go to the extreme example that he uses to analogize today's right-wing U.S. and Israeli parties and policy to an earlier German precedent. Instead, it is sufficient to note how similar the right-wing parties of Israel and the U.S. of today are to what was known in 1920s Weimar Germany as the Conservative Revolutionary Movement.
This "movement" did not include the Nazis but instead the Nazis were political competitors with the party which largely represented Conservative Revolutionary ideas: the German National People's Party (DNVP).
The institution to which the Conservative Revolutionaries saw as best representing German "values," the Reichswehr, the German Army, was also opposed by the Nazis as "competitors" to Ernst Rohm's Brownshirts. But the Conservative Revolutionary Movement, the DNVP, and the German Army could all be characterized as "proto-fascist," if not Fascist. In fact, when the Nazis took over Germany, it was with the support of many of the proto-fascists making up the Conservative Revolutionary Movement, as well as those with the DNVP and the Reichswehr.
Consequently, many of the Reichstag members that Uri Avnery refers to above as listening raptly and jumping up and shouting their approval of "The Leader" were not Nazis. The Nazis had failed to obtain an absolute majority on their own and needed the votes of the "national camp," primarily the German National People's Party (DNVP), for a Reichstag majority.
The DNVP members would have been cheering The Leader right alongside Nazi members of the Reichstag. DNVP members also voted along with Nazi members in passing the Enabling Act of 1933, which abolished constitutional liberties and dissolved the Reichstag.
Not enough has been written on the German Conservative Revolutionary Movement , the DNVP and the Reichswehr because they have too often been seen as victims of the Nazis themselves or, at worst, mere precursors.
The DNVP was the political party which best represented the viewpoint of the German Conservative Revolutionary Movement. The Reichswehr itself, as described in The Nemesis of Power by John W. Wheeler-Bennett, has been called a "state within a state," much like the intelligence and security services of the U.S. and Israel are today, wielding extraordinary powers.
The Reichswehr was militaristic and anti-democratic in its purest form and indeed was "fascist" in the term's classic definition of "an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization." Mussolini merely modeled much of his hyper-militaristic political movement on the martial values of the Reichswehr.
German Army officers even had authority to punish civilians for failing to show "proper respect." In its essence, the viewpoint of the DNVP and the Conservative Revolutionaries was virtually identical to today's Republican Party along with those Democrats who align with them on national security issues.
These groups have in common a worshipful attitude toward the military as best embodying those martial virtues that are central to fascism. Sister parties, though they may all prefer to be seen as "brothers in arms," would be Netanyahu's "national camp" parties.
German Conservative Revolutionary Movement
The Conservative Revolutionary Movement began within the German Right after World War I with a number of writers advocating a nationalist ideology but one in keeping with modern times and not restricted by traditional Prussian conservatism.
It must be noted that Prussian conservatism, standing for militaristic ideas traditional to Prussia, was the antithesis of traditional American conservatism, which professed to stand for upholding the classical liberal ideas of government embedded in the U.S. Constitution.
Inherent to those U.S. constitutional ideas was antipathy toward militarism and militaristic rule of any sort, though Native Americans have good cause to disagree. (In fact, stories of the American conquest of Native Americans with its solution of placing them on reservations were particularly popular in Germany early in the Twentieth Century including with Adolf Hitler).
Historians have noted that when the German Army went to war in World War I, the soldiers and officers carried with them "a shared sense of German superiority and the imagined bestiality of the enemy." This was manifested particularly harshly upon the citizens of Belgium in 1914 with the German occupation. Later, after their experience in the trenches, the Reichswehr was nearly as harsh in suppressing domestic dissent in Germany after the war.
According to Richard Wolin, in The Seduction of Unreason, Ernst Troeltsch, a German Protestant theologian, "realized that in the course of World War I the ethos of Germanocentrism, as embodied in the 'ideas of 1914,' had assumed a heightened stridency." Under the peace of the Versailles Treaty, "instead of muting the idiom of German exceptionalism that Troeltsch viewed with such mistrust, it seemed only to fan its flames."
This belief in German "exceptionalism" was the common belief of German Conservative Revolutionaries, the DNVP and the Reichswehr. For Republicans of today and those who share their ideological belief, substitute "American" for "German" Exceptionalism and you have the identical ideology.
"Exceptionalism" in the sense of a nation can be understood in two ways. One is a belief in the nation's superiority to others. The other way is the belief that the "exceptional" nation stands above the law, similar to the claim made by dictators in declaring martial law or a state of emergency. The U.S. and Israel exhibit both forms of this belief.
German Exceptionalism
The belief in German Exceptionalism was the starting point, not the ending point, for the Conservative Revolutionaries just as it is with today's Republicans such as Sen. Tom Cotton or Sen. Lindsey Graham. This Exceptionalist ideology gives the nation the right to interfere in other country's internal affairs for whatever reason the "exceptional" country deems necessary, such as desiring more living space for their population, fearing the potential of some future security threat, or even just by denying the "exceptional" country access within its borders - or a "denial of access threat" as the U.S. government terms it.
The fundamental ideas of the Conservative Revolutionaries have been described as vehement opposition to the Weimar Republic (identifying it with the lost war and the Versailles Treaty) and political "liberalism" (as opposed to Prussia's traditional authoritarianism).
This "liberalism," which offended the Conservative Revolutionaries, was democracy and individual rights against state power. Instead, the Conservative Revolutionaries envisaged a new reich of enormous strength and unity. They rejected the view that political action should be guided by rational criteria. They idealized violence for its own sake.
That idealization of violence would have meant "state" violence in the form of military expansionism and suppression of "enemies," domestic and foreign, by right-thinking Germans.
The Conservative Revolutionaries called for a "primacy of politics" which was to be "a reassertion of an expansion in foreign policy and repression against the trade unions at home." This "primacy of politics" for the Conservative Revolutionaries meant the erasure of a distinction between war and politics.
Citing Hannah Arendt, Jeffrey Herf, a professor of modern European history, wrote: "The explicit implications of the primacy of politics in the conservative revolution were totalitarian. From now on there were to be no limits to ideological politics. The utilitarian and humanistic considerations of nineteenth-century liberalism were to be abandoned in order to establish a state of constant dynamism and movement." That sounds a lot like the "creative destruction" that neoconservative theorist Michael Ledeen is so fond of.
Herf wrote in 1984 that Conservative Revolutionaries were characterized as "the intellectual advance guard of the rightist revolution that was to be effected in 1933," which, although contemptuous of Hitler, "did much to pave his road to power."
Unlike the Nazis, their belief in German superiority was based in historical traditions and ideas, not biological racism. Nevertheless, some saw German Jews as the "enemy" of Germany for being "incompatible with a united nation."
It is one of the bitterest of ironies that Israel as a "Jewish nation" has adopted similar attitudes toward its Arab citizens. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman recently proclaimed: "Those who are with us deserve everything, but those who are against us deserve to have their heads chopped off with an axe."
Within Israel, these "Conservative Revolutionary" ideas were manifested in one of their founding political parties, Herut, whose founders came out of the same central European political milieu of interwar Europe and from which Netanyahu's Likud party is descended.
Ernst Junger
Author Ernst Junger was the most important contributor to the celebration of war by the Conservative Revolutionaries and was an influence and an enabler of the Nazis coming to power. He serialized his celebration of war and his belief in its "redeeming" qualities in a number of popular books with "war porn" titles such as, in English, The Storm of Steel, The Battle as an Inner Experience, and Fire and Blood.
The title of a collection of Junger essays in 1930, Krieg und Krieger (War and the Warriors) captures the spirit of America in the Twenty-first Century as much as it did the German spirit in 1930. While members of the U.S. military once went by terms such as soldier, sailor and marine, now they are routinely generically called "Warriors," especially by the highest ranks, a term never before used to describe what were once "citizen soldiers."
Putting a book with a "Warrior" title out on the shelf in a Barnes and Noble would almost guarantee a best-seller, even when competing with all the U.S. SEALS' reminiscences and American sniper stories. But German philosopher Walter Benjamin understood the meaning of Junger's Krieg und Krieger, explaining it in the appropriately titled Theories of German Fascism.
Fundamental to Junger's celebration of war was a metaphysical belief in "totale Mobilmachung" or total mobilization to describe the functioning of a society that fully grasps the meaning of war. With World War I, Junger saw the battlefield as the scene of struggle "for life and death," pushing all historical and political considerations aside. But he saw in the war the fact that "in it the genius of war permeated the spirit of progress."
According to Jeffrey Herf in Reactionary Modernism, Junger saw total mobilization as "a worldwide trend toward state-directed mobilization in which individual freedom would be sacrificed to the demands of authoritarian planning." Welcoming this, Junger believed "that different currents of energy were coalescing into one powerful torrent. The era of total mobilization would bring about an 'unleashing' (Entfesselung) of a nevertheless disciplined life."
In practical terms, Junger's metaphysical view of war meant that Germany had lost World War I because its economic and technological mobilization had only been partial and not total. He lamented that Germany had been unable to place the "spirit of the age" in the service of nationalism. Consequently, he believed that "bourgeois legality," which placed restrictions on the powers of the authoritarian state, "must be abolished in order to liberate technological advance."
Today, total mobilization for the U.S. begins with the Republicans' budgeting efforts to strip away funding for domestic civilian uses and shifting it to military and intelligence spending. Army veteran, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, exemplifies this belief in "total mobilization" of society with his calls for dramatically increased military spending and his belief that "We must again show the U.S. is willing and prepared to [get into] a war in the first place" by making clear that potential "aggressors will pay an unspeakable price if they challenge the United States."
That is the true purpose of Twenty-first Century Republican economics: total mobilization of the economy for war. Just as defeated German generals and the Conservative Revolutionaries believed that Germany lost World War I because their economy and nation was only "partially mobilized," so too did many American Vietnam War-era generals and right-wing politicians believe the same of the Vietnam War. Retired Gen. David Petraeus and today's neoconservatives have made similar arguments about President Barack Obama's failure to sustain the Iraq War. [See, for instance, this fawning Washington Post interview with Petraeus.]
What all these militarists failed to understand is that, according to Clausewitz, when a war's costs exceed its benefits, the sound strategy is to end the costly war. The Germans failed to understand this in World War II and the Soviet Union in their Afghan War.
Paradoxically in the Vietnam War, it was the anti-war movement that enhanced U.S. strength by bringing that wasteful war to an end, not the American militarists who would have continued it to a bitter end of economic collapse. We are now seeing a similar debate about whether to continue and expand U.S. military operations across the Middle East.
Carl Schmitt
While Ernst Junger was the celebrant and the publicist for total mobilization of society for endless war, including the need for authoritarian government, Carl Schmitt was the ideological theoretician, both legally and politically, who helped bring about the totalitarian and militaristic society. Except when it happened, it came under different ownership than what they had hoped and planned for.
Contrary to Schmitt's latter-day apologists and/or advocates, who include prominent law professors teaching at Harvard and the University of Chicago, his legal writings weren't about preserving the Weimar Republic against its totalitarian enemies, the Communists and Nazis. Rather, he worked on behalf of a rival fascist faction, members of the German Army General Staff. He acted as a legal adviser to General Kurt von Schleicher, who in turn advised President Paul von Hindenburg, former Chief of the German General Staff during World War I.
German historian Eberhard Kolb observed, "from the mid-1920s onwards the Army leaders had developed and propagated new social conceptions of a militarist kind, tending towards a fusion of the military and civilian sectors and ultimately a totalitarian military state (Wehrstaat)."
When General Schleicher helped bring about the political fall of Reichswehr Commander in Chief, General von Seekt, it was a "triumph of the 'modern' faction within the Reichswehr who favored a total war ideology and wanted Germany to become a dictatorship that would wage total war upon the other nations of Europe," according to Kolb.
When Hitler and the Nazis outmaneuvered the Army politically, Schmitt, as well as most other Conservative Revolutionaries, went over to the Nazis.
Reading Schmitt gives one a greater understanding of the Conservative Revolutionary's call for a "primacy of politics," explained previously as "a reassertion of an expansion in foreign policy."
Schmitt said: "A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics. It is conceivable that such a world might contain many very interesting antitheses and contrasts, competitions and intrigues of every kind, but there would not be a meaningful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, authorized to shed blood, and kill other human beings. For the definition of the political, it is here even irrelevant whether such a world without politics is desirable as an ideal situation."
As evident in this statement, to Schmitt, the norm isn't peace, nor is peace even desirable, but rather perpetual war is the natural and preferable condition.
This dream of a Martial State is not isolated to German history. A Republican aligned neoconservative, Thomas Sowell, expressed the same longing in 2007 in a National Review article, "Don't Get Weak." Sowell wrote; "When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can't help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup."
Leo Strauss, Conservative Revolutionaries and Republicans
Political philosopher Leo Strauss had yearned for the glorious German Conservative Revolution but was despondent when it took the form of the Nazi Third Reich, from which he was excluded because he was Jewish regardless of his fascist ideology.
He wrote to a German Jewish friend, Karl Loewith: "the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l'homme [inalienable rights of man] to protest against the shabby abomination."
Strauss was in agreement politically with Schmitt, and they were close friends.
Professor Alan Gilbert of Denver University has written: "As a Jew, Strauss was forbidden from following Schmitt and [German philosopher Martin] Heidegger into the Nazi party. 'But he was a man of the Right. Like some other Zionists, those who admired Mussolini for instance, Strauss' principles, as the 1933 letter relates, were 'fascist, authoritarian, imperial.'"
Strauss was intelligent enough when he arrived in the U.S. to disguise and channel his fascist thought by going back to like-minded "ancient" philosophers and thereby presenting fascism as part of our "western heritage," just as the current neocon classicist Victor Davis Hanson does.
Needless to say, fascism is built on the belief in a dictator, as was Sparta and the Roman Empire and as propounded by Socrates and Plato, so turning to the thought of ancient philosophers and historians makes a good "cover" for fascist thought.
Leo Strauss must be seen as the Godfather of the modern Republican Party's political ideology. His legacy continues now through the innumerable "Neoconservative Revolutionary" front groups with cover names frequently invoking "democracy" or "security," such as Sen. Lindsey Graham's "Security Through Strength."
Typifying the Straussian neoconservative revolutionary whose hunger for military aggression can never be satiated would be former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame and practitioner of the "big lie," who returned to government under President George W. Bush to push the Iraq War and is currently promoting a U.S. war against Iran.
In a classic example of "projection," Abrams writes that "Ideology is the raison d'etre of Iran's regime, legitimating its rule and inspiring its leaders and their supporters. In this sense, it is akin to communist, fascist and Nazi regimes that set out to transform the world." That can as truthfully be said of his own Neoconservative Revolutionary ideology and its adherents.
That ideology explains Bill Kristol's crowing over Netanyahu's victory and claiming Netanyahu as the Republicans' de facto leader. For years, the U.S. and Israel under Netanyahu have had nearly identical foreign policy approaches though they are at the moment in some disagreement because President Obama has resisted war with Iran while Netanyahu is essentially demanding it.
But at a deeper level the two countries share a common outlook, calling for continuous military interventionism outside each country's borders with increased exercise of authority by the military and other security services within their borders. This is no accident. It can be traced back to joint right-wing extremist efforts in both countries with American neoconservatives playing key roles.
The best example of this joint effort was when U.S. neocons joined with the right-wing, Likud-connected Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in 1996 to publish their joint plan for continuous military interventionism in the Mideast in "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," which envisioned "regime change" instead of negotiations. [See Consortiumnews.com's "How Israel Outfoxed U.S. Presidents."]
While ostensibly written for Netanyahu's political campaign, "A Clean Break" became the blueprint for subsequent war policies advocated by the Project for the New American Century, founded by neocons William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The chief contribution of the American neocons in this strategy was to marshal U.S. military resources to do the heavy lifting in attacking Israel's neighbors beginning with Iraq.
With these policy preferences goes a belief inside each country's political parties, across the spectrum but particularly on the Right, that Israel and the United States each stand apart from all other nations as "Exceptional." This is continuously repeated to ensure imprinting it in the population's consciousness in the tradition of fascist states through history.
It is believed today in both the U.S. and Israel, just as the German Conservative Revolutionaries believed it in the 1920s and 1930s of their homeland, Germany, and then carried on by the Nazis until 1945.
Israeli Herut Party
The Knesset website describes the original Herut party (1948-1988) as the main opposition party (against the early domination by the Labor Party). Herut was the most right-wing party in the years before the Likud party came into being and absorbed Herut into a coalition. Its expansionist slogan was "To the banks to the Jordan River" and it refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Kingdom of Jordan. Economically, Herut supported private enterprise and a reduction of government intervention.
In "A Clean Break," the authors were advising Netanyahu to reclaim the belligerent and expansionist principles of the Herut party.
Herut was founded in 1948 by Menachem Begin, the leader of the right-wing militant group Irgun, which was widely regarded as a terrorist organization responsible for killing Palestinians and cleansing them from land claimed by Israel, including the infamous Deir Yassin massacre.
Herut's nature as a party and movement was best explained in a critical letter to the New York Times on Dec. 4, 1948, signed by over two dozen prominent Jewish intellectuals including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt.
The letter read: "Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the 'Freedom Party' (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.
"It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine. (…) It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents. …
"Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future."
According to author Joseph Heller, Herut was a one-issue party intent on expanding Israel's borders. That Netanyahu has never set aside Herut's ideology can be gleaned from his book last revised in 2000, A Durable Peace. There, Netanyahu praises Herut's predecessors – the Irgun paramilitary and Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, a self-declared "terrorist" group. He also marginalizes their Israeli adversary of the time, the Hagana under Israel's primary founder and first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.
Regardless of methods used, the Stern Gang was indisputably "fascist," even receiving military training from Fascist Italy. One does not need to speculate as to its ideological influences.
According to Colin Shindler, writing in Triumph of Military Zionism: Nationalism and the Origins of the Israeli Right, "Stern devotedly believed that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' so he approached Nazi Germany. With German armies at the gates of Palestine, he offered co-operation and an alliance with a new totalitarian Hebrew republic."
Netanyahu in his recent election campaign would seem to have re-embraced his fascist origins, both with its racism and his declaration that as long as he was prime minister he would block a Palestinian state and would continue building Jewish settlements on what international law recognizes as Palestinian land.
In other words, maintaining a state of war on the Palestinian people with a military occupation and governing by military rule, while continuing to make further territorial gains with the IDF acting as shock troops for the settlers.
Why Does This Matter?
Sun-Tzu famously wrote "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
When we allow our "Conservative Revolutionaries" (or neoconservative militarists or proto-fascists or whatever term best describes them) to make foreign policy, the United States loses legitimacy in the world as a "rule of law" state. Instead, we present a "fascist" justification for our wars which is blatantly illicit.
As the American political establishment has become so enamored with war and the "warriors" who fight them, it has become child's play for our militarists to manipulate the U.S. into wars or foreign aggression through promiscuous economic sanctions or inciting and arming foreign groups to destabilize the countries that we target.
No better example for this can be shown than the role that America's First Family of Militarism, the Kagans, plays in pushing total war mobilization of the U.S. economy and inciting war, at the expense of civilian and domestic needs, as Robert Parry wrote.
This can be seen with Robert Kagan invoking the martial virtue of "courage" in demanding greater military spending by our elected officials and a greater wealth transfer to the Military Industrial Complex which funds the various war advocacy projects that he and his family are involved with.
Kagan recently wrote: "Those who propose to lead the United States in the coming years, Republicans and Democrats, need to show what kind of political courage they have, right now, when the crucial budget decisions are being made."
But as Parry pointed out, showing "courage," "in Kagan's view – is to ladle ever more billions into the Military-Industrial Complex, thus putting money where the Republican mouths are regarding the need to 'defend Ukraine' and resist 'a bad nuclear deal with Iran.'" But Parry noted that if it weren't for Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, Kagan's spouse, the Ukraine crisis might not exist.
What must certainly be seen as neo-fascist under any system of government but especially under a nominal "constitutional republic" as the U.S. claims to be, is Sen. Lindsey Graham's threat that the first thing he would do if elected President of the United States would be to use the military to detain members of Congress, keeping them in session in Washington, until all so-called "defense cuts" are restored to the budget.
In Graham's words, "I wouldn't let Congress leave town until we fix this. I would literally use the military to keep them in if I had to. We're not leaving town until we restore these defense cuts."
And he would have that power according to former Vice President Dick Cheney's "unitary executive theory" of Presidential power, originally formulated by Carl Schmitt and adopted by Republican attorneys and incorporated into government under the Bush-Cheney administration. Sen. Tom Cotton and other Republicans would no doubt support such an abuse of power if it meant increasing military spending.
But even more dangerous for the U.S. as well as other nations in the world is that one day, our militarists' constant incitement and provocation to war is going to "payoff," and the U.S. will be in a real war with an enemy with nuclear weapons, like the one Victoria Nuland is creating on Russia's border.
Today's American "Conservative Revolutionary" lust for war was summed up by prominent neoconservative Richard Perle, a co-author of "A Clean Break." Echoing the views on war from Ernst Junger and Carl Schmitt, Perle once explained U.S. strategy in the neoconservative view, according to John Pilger:
"There will be no stages," he said. "This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there . . . If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
That goal was the same fantasy professed by German Conservative Revolutionaries and it led directly to a wartime defeat never imagined by Germany before, with all the "collateral damage" along the way that always results from "total war."
Rather than continuing with this "strategy," driven by our own modern Conservative Revolutionaries and entailing the eventual bankrupting or destruction of the nation, it might be more prudent for Americans to demand that we go back to the original national security strategy of the United States, as expressed by early presidents as avoiding "foreign entanglements" and start abiding by the republican goals expressed by the Preamble to the Constitution:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. In the course of that assignment, he researched and reviewed the complete records of military commissions held during the Civil War and stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
45 comments for "Neocons: the Echo of German Fascism"
tateishi
March 27, 2015 at 12:38 pmGood article. Often people forget that Germany is a very aggressive war mongers, sending soldiers to many areas, and actually it started Yugoslavian war together with the US. It also has many people who believe that they are Aryans, Hitler's imaginary race, though there are real Aryans peaceful one in the mountains of Iran, etc.
Lutz Barz
March 28, 2015 at 5:23 amThe Brits and French were far more militarily aggressive than the late comers Germany. The sun never set in British bayonets imposed on peaceful people globally. Over 3 million died in Bengal in the early 40s thanks to British indifference on feeding her own first [though she could source wheat from Canada and Bengal from Australia-this was not done]. Post WW1 into 1919 600+ Germans esp the young and old were dying of starvation courtesy of a British blockade still in place after the armistice. As for terrible Germany invading Belgium the Kaiser never protested about the British occupation of Ireland and it's bloody suppression. Then there is/was Palestine. One could go on. Every country has it's neanderthal conservatives. And Prussia was far more progressive during the early 19th century schooling its citizens and being part of the German Enlightenment. But as we know history is written by those who dominate militarily.
Lutz Barz
March 28, 2015 at 5:24 amThe Brits and French were far more militarily aggressive than the late comers Germany. The sun never set in British bayonets imposed on peaceful people globally. Over 3 million died in Bengal in the early 40s thanks to British indifference on feeding her own first [though she could source wheat from Canada and Bengal from Australia-this was not done]. Post WW1 into 1919 600+ Germans esp the young and old were dying of starvation courtesy of a British blockade still in place after the armistice. As for terrible Germany invading Belgium the Kaiser never protested about the British occupation of Ireland and it's bloody suppression. Then there is/was Palestine. One could go on. Every country has it's neanderthal conservatives. And Prussia was far more progressive during the early 19th century schooling its citizens and being part of the German Enlightenment. But as we know history is written by those who dominate militarily.
Lutz Barz
March 28, 2015 at 5:24 amThe Brits and French were far more militarily aggressive than the late comers Germany. The sun never set in British bayonets imposed on peaceful people globally. Over 3 million died in Bengal in the early 40s thanks to British indifference on feeding her own first [though she could source wheat from Canada and Bengal from Australia-this was not done]. Post WW1 into 1919 600+ Germans esp the young and old were dying of starvation courtesy of a British blockade still in place after the armistice. As for terrible Germany invading Belgium the Kaiser never protested about the British occupation of Ireland and it's bloody suppression. Then there is/was Palestine. One could go on. Every country has it's neanderthal conservatives. And Prussia was far more progressive during the early 19th century schooling its citizens and being part of the German Enlightenment. But as we know history is written by those who dominate militarily.
Lutz Barz
March 28, 2015 at 5:25 amThe Brits and French were far more militarily aggressive than the late comers Germany. The sun never set in British bayonets imposed on peaceful people globally. Over 3 million died in Bengal in the early 40s thanks to British indifference on feeding her own first [though she could source wheat from Canada and Bengal from Australia-this was not done]. Post WW1 into 1919 600+ Germans esp the young and old were dying of starvation courtesy of a British blockade still in place after the armistice. As for terrible Germany invading Belgium the Kaiser never protested about the British occupation of Ireland and it's bloody suppression. Then there is/was Palestine. One could go on. Every country has it's neanderthal conservatives. And Prussia was far more progressive during the early 19th century schooling its citizens and being part of the German Enlightenment. But as we know history is written by those who dominate militarily.
Lutz Barz
March 28, 2015 at 5:25 amThe Brits and French were far more militarily aggressive than the late comers Germany. The sun never set in British bayonets imposed on peaceful people globally. Over 3 million died in Bengal in the early 40s thanks to British indifference on feeding her own first [though she could source wheat from Canada and Bengal from Australia-this was not done]. Post WW1 into 1919 600+ Germans esp the young and old were dying of starvation courtesy of a British blockade still in place after the armistice. As for terrible Germany invading Belgium the Kaiser never protested about the British occupation of Ireland and it's bloody suppression. Then there is/was Palestine. One could go on. Every country has it's neanderthal conservatives. And Prussia was far more progressive during the early 19th century schooling its citizens and being part of the German Enlightenment. But as we know history is written by those who dominate militarily.
Steve
March 29, 2015 at 11:07 amA very strange comment from a presumed Iranian especially. Germany is not aggressive at all since WW2, which was a result of much aggression by several nations starting with Japan and Italy. German soldiers have gone almost nowhere since then, a limited deployment in Afghanistan being the main case. Germany did not start the "Yugoslavian war" at all, which was begun by Serbia attacking Slovenia and Croatia after they voted and declared independence. Aryanism is very rare in Germany today, and far more belligerent language comes out of Iran than Germany, Iran having swapped Aryanism for Islamism to little if any benefit.
As for the article itself, it makes the common error of imputing excessive influence to a limited era of German militarism, whilst ignoring the far more globally influential records of Western colonial and Communist militaristic imperialism, as well as Italian Fascism which was the more influential model for many amenable to such ideas, with its aggressive colonial and corporatist notions, and successful attainment of power a decade before Hitler's.
March 29, 2015 at 12:14 pm
Yea, but lesson is that USA is the continuation and revival of nazi ideology carrying its propound ideology of "exceptionalism". The neo conservative hawkish holding the belief that USA has the right to interfere in others countries internal affairs, that USA is above the law, that USA is predestinated by providence to spread its civilization and more others imperialists beliefs.
F. G. Sanford
March 27, 2015 at 1:20 pmConcur. A common slogan of the political opposition in the 1930's was, "Fascism Means War!" It was true then, and it's still true today. The Major speaks the truth. I hope someone is listening.
bobzz
March 27, 2015 at 1:42 pmThis piece tracks well with Charles Derber's, Morality Wars: How Empires, the Born Again, and the Politically Correct Do Evil in the Name of Good. Hitler was rabid on the subject of morality (i.e., favored it). He was well received by many professional theologians, and the church generally swung in line. Not enough of the Barmen's Confession. This is another parallel with America and Israel and a major contributor to exceptionalism.
John
March 27, 2015 at 2:12 pmVery true. The relationship of fascism and warmongering was described by Aristotle as the tactics of the tyrant over a democracy: fascist leaders must promote war and internal policing because it is the sole basis of their demand for power: they must create, provoke, or invent foreign enemies to demand power as "protectors" and accuse their opponents of disloyalty. They must appeal to the bully-boys as their militant wing, so they produce pseudo-philosophies of dominance.
Fascism must at times be clarified in meaning to avoid limitation to specific historical instances, and it should be understood in those instances, but in is actually a very simple and universal attitude. It is nothing but the behavior and propaganda of bully boys. They are selfish, ignorant, hypocritical and malicious youths and abusive husbands and fathers, who glory in their small circle of the intimidated and push everyone around as a principal life skill. Those who extend that circle by operating small businesses, or as military or police officers, create and approve rationalizations of special rights. There is no real "exceptionalism" belief or philosophy of national/religious/ethnic superiority, it is just outright propaganda for bullying. They are quite stupid, and yet quickly pick up the methods of fascism, so it is not worth much analysis.
John
March 27, 2015 at 2:33 pmI should add that the resurgence of fascism and its strength in the US and Israel is due to its association with economic concentrations. In business, the spoils go not to the inventor or ingenious professional as claimed in business propaganda: the spoils go to the bully-boy. Those who rise to the top in the corporate world are not the brilliant professionals or the effective managers who shine at lower levels. The path upwards is limited to those who come out on top wars between groups in collusion, who are without exception scheming bully-boys. There is no other way to the top. Only the methods are different from politics. So only bully-boys have great economic power.
In the US, economic concentrations did not exist when the Constitution was written, so it provides no protection at all for the institutions of democracy from economic power. Economic powers controlled elections and the press in the 19th century, so there has been no way to even debate the issue, and now that control is almost absolute. Those are the powers obtainable only by bully-boys, the predominant fascists of Nazi Germany and the US, and no doubt Israel. So the US has been loosely controlled by fascism for a long time, and that control is nearly total now. Only the propaganda to rationalize this changes to sell the policies to the intimidated.
Randy
March 27, 2015 at 2:50 pmWar is inevitable.. You simply cannot deny this and anyone who does is just dreaming… The world cannot live in some perpetual peace forever, what will happen when oil, water, and even living space runs out? Will you watch your family starve to death while the people over in the next town are eating to their hearts content?
As much as you want to deny it, Hitler had it right. Peace is only attainable through war, and can only be won for your own people. There cannot be world peace, and the events of today proves it. Hitler and Japan was defeated more than 50 years ago, where is the peace? There will come a day where money will be worthless, the only currency will be strength, only those rich in this currency will survive. How nature intended it to be.
Hitler knew this, and was preparing his own country, the rest of the world took the Banker path, and look where that led us.
Zachary Smith
March 27, 2015 at 3:08 pmThe world cannot live in some perpetual peace forever, what will happen when oil, water, and even living space runs out?
Has it occurred to you that oil is only one of the many energy sources, and that the amount of water on Earth is basically a fixed quantity? Living space? Consider contraception combined with incentives, and disincentives for having babies galore.
Can't help but notice you didn't mention Global Warming as a gnawing problem. Why?
Finally, WHY is this site a magnet for the Hitler Fan Club?
Randy
March 27, 2015 at 3:52 pmThe idea is that resources run out, right? I wasn't going to list everything. There is not a infinite amount of resources in this world, you can continue living in your fairy tale world if you'd like but I will not.
Even the soil that we grow food in will one day become unusable if it is abused like it is today. Global warming is a result of your delusion of world peace. Nature hits back when you delay and ignore up its rule for to long.. There would be no Global Warming problem i
Zachary Smith
March 27, 2015 at 4:00 pmGlobal warming is a result of your delusion of world peace.
As I suspected.
No doubt wind turbines kill the cute birdies.
And contraception is some sort of sin.
John
March 27, 2015 at 3:36 pmRandy, be careful to avoid traps here:
1. Wars will continue in history, but that is not a justification for doing wrong.
2. When groups are in conflict, good leadership avoids war because it causes great wrongs. Sometimes it cannot be avoided, usually due to bad leadership. But of course that does not justify unnecessary war.
3. Peace is not obtained by war. Sometimes it results from a successful defense against wrongful war, sometimes it is only the peace after a wrongful war succeeds. Those who prefer peace want to avoid unnecessary war. They are not afraid of necessary defense.
4. Those who want to keep the US from unnecessary wars know more about the world's cultures and problems and solutions than those who always think of war as a solution. They know that our security depends upon making friends among a wild variety of cultures at different stages of development. That is done by helping the unfortunate even when we disagree with them, and we can't expect much from them in return. Wars mainly make us enemies, and those who promote wars conceal those failures. That's what this site is about.holycowimeanzebra
March 27, 2015 at 10:53 pmGee, we couldn't just talk like adults about the importance of having fewer children? War and killing is the only method of human population control?
holycowimeanzebra
March 27, 2015 at 10:54 pmGee, we couldn't just talk like adults about the importance of having fewer children? War and killing is the only method of human population control?
zhu bajie
March 30, 2015 at 1:03 amNonsense. War is caused by fighting.
March 30, 2015 at 11:04 pm
war, slavery and general ignorance are "inevitable" so long as people are mentally enslaved enough to tolerate them…the only thing inevitable about life is death…the rest is all subject to at least some measure of control, whether those are called political, religious or scientific..belief in such nonsense as above guarantees the continued master race-self chosen people-ism the article's writer is trying to contend with, call attention to and end..hitler was right about some things and wrong about most, like obama, bush, clinton, reagan and all other "leaders" of the status quo.
frank scott
March 30, 2015 at 11:17 pmdeath is inevitable but the rest of life is subject to control by concerned, thoughtful and informed humans..war is inevitable only if the opposite type of humans continue and if they do it may be that all of us will lose continuity, fulfilling their dreadfully negative religious belief..the article seems to be at least trying to locate sources for some of the diseased madness that prevails but talk of "inevitable" war is an example of the disease.
Gregory Kruse
March 27, 2015 at 5:17 pmMr. Pierce appears to be a good example of a person who "knows himself, and knows his enemy", for indeed the Kagans and Cheneys of these times are enemies of the people. Unfortunately, most of the people don't know it yet, and in fact don't know themselves. It is absolutely dumbfounding to hear strains of Fox News coming from the mouths of otherwise seemingly decent and intelligent people who have the facility to think for themselves, but find it easier to parrot a TV station. I rue the fact that history and what served for political education in my youth led me to believe that there were no real enemies of democracy anymore. Reading back now through the history of Europe after the War of 1812 in Russia until WWI, I have come to appreciate the strength of fascist sentiment and passion, and I fairly tremble at the thought of the possible rise of another Otto von Bismark or Adolph Hitler in what we think of as "modern" times. There is only one ray of hope for me and that is the writing of such as Pierce, Parry, and some others scattered about the internet. It isn't clear to me that people will wake up and perceive the path we are on and in dreadful fear force a change of direction, but if not, we will learn again what it is to suffer unimaginable horror.
Zachary Smith
March 27, 2015 at 7:21 pmIt is absolutely dumbfounding to hear strains of Fox News coming from the mouths of otherwise seemingly decent and intelligent people who have the facility to think for themselves, but find it easier to parrot a TV station.
Dumbfounding is right!
Sometime back I was astonished to hear a relative at least as bright as myself (and educated at the same University) tell me that Fox was the ONLY news source which could be trusted. She'd moved from Indiana to the deep South years ago and sort-of "gone native". It was an ordeal to remain calm and use lip-glue.
Theodora Crawford
March 27, 2015 at 6:56 pmExcellent discussion and worth the challenge of a thought-provoking and complex argument about governance and war. Today's environment is frightening with so much negative opinion, an absurd sense of US "exceptionalism" and unthinking faith in the power of war (clinched by a nuclear option as last resort).
Alas, we have the government we deserve.
Abe
March 27, 2015 at 7:33 pmIn 1926, German political theorist Carl Schmitt wrote his most famous paper, "Der Begriff des Politischen" ("The Concept of the Political"), in which he developed his theory of "the political".
For Schmitt, "the political" is not equal to any other domain, such as the economic, but instead is the most essential to identity. As the essence of politics, "the political" is distinct from party politics.
According to Schmitt, while churches are predominant in religion or society is predominant in economics, the state is predominant in politics. Yet for Schmitt the political was not an autonomous domain equivalent to the other domains, but rather the existential basis that would determine any other domain should it reach the point of politics (e.g. religion ceases to be merely theological when it makes a clear distinction between the "friend" and the "enemy").
Schmitt, in perhaps his best-known formulation, bases his conceptual realm of state sovereignty and autonomy upon the distinction between friend and enemy. This distinction is to be determined "existentially," which is to say that the enemy is whoever is "in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible." (Schmitt, 1996, p. 27)
For Schmitt, such an enemy need not even be based on nationality: so long as the conflict is potentially intense enough to become a violent one between political entities, the actual substance of enmity may be anything.
Although there have been divergent interpretations concerning Schmitt's work, there is broad agreement that "The Concept of the Political" is an attempt to achieve state unity by defining the content of politics as opposition to the "other" (that is to say, an enemy, a stranger. This applies to any person or entity that represents a serious threat or conflict to one's own interests.) In addition, the prominence of the state stands as a neutral force over potentially fractious civil society, whose various antagonisms must not be allowed to reach the level of the political, lest civil war result.
Leo Strauss, a political Zionist and follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky, had a position at the Academy of Jewish Research in Berlin. Strauss wrote to Schmitt in 1932 and summarized Schmitt's political theology thus: "[B]ecause man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against – against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men… the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of order, but a condition of the state."
With a letter of recommendation from Schmitt, Strauss received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to begin work, in France, on a study of Hobbes. Schmitt went on to become a figure of influence in the new Nazi government of Adolf Hitler.
On 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. The SA and SS led torchlight parades throughout Berlin. Germans who opposed Nazism failed to unite against it, and Hitler soon moved to consolidate absolute power.
Following the 27 February Reichstag fire, the Nazis began to suspend civil liberties and eliminate political opposition. The Communists were excluded from the Reichstag. At the March 1933 elections, again no single party secured a majority. Hitler required the vote of the Centre Party and Conservatives in the Reichstag to obtain the powers he desired. He called on Reichstag members to vote for the Enabling Act on 24 March 1933.
Hitler was granted plenary powers "temporarily" by the passage of the Enabling Act. The law gave him the freedom to act without parliamentary consent and even without constitutional limitations.
Schmitt joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933. Within days of joining the party, Schmitt was party to the burning of books by Jewish authors, rejoicing in the burning of "un-German" and "anti-German" material, and calling for a much more extensive purge, to include works by authors influenced by Jewish ideas.[
In July 1933, Schmitt was appointed State Councillor for Prussia (Preußischer Staatsrat) by Hermann Göring and became the president of the Vereinigung nationalsozialistischer Juristen ("Union of National-Socialist Jurists") in November. He also replaced Hermann Heller as professor at the University of Berlin (a position he held until the end of World War II).
Schmitt presented his theories as an ideological foundation of the Nazi dictatorship, and a justification of the Führer state with regard to legal philosophy, in particular through the concept of auctoritas. Half a year later, in June 1934, Schmitt was appointed editor-in-chief of the Nazi news organ for lawyers, the Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung ("German Jurists' Journal").
In July 1934, he published "The Leader Protects the Law (Der Führer schützt das Recht)", a justification of the political murders of the Night of the Long Knives with the authority of Hitler as the "highest form of administrative justice (höchste Form administrativer Justiz)".
Schmitt presented himself as a radical anti-semite and also was the chairman of a law teachers' convention in Berlin in October 1936, where he demanded that German law be cleansed of the "Jewish spirit (jüdischem Geist)", going so far as to demand that all publications by Jewish scientists should henceforth be marked with a small symbol.
Nevertheless, in December 1936, the SS publication Das schwarze Korps accused Schmitt of being an opportunist, and called his anti-semitism a mere pretense, citing earlier statements in which he criticized the Nazis' racial theories. After this, Schmitt resigned from his position as "Reichsfachgruppenleiter" (Reich Professional Group Leader), although he retained his post as a professor in Berlin, and his post as "Preußischer Staatsrat".
After World War II, Schmitt refused every attempt at de-nazification, which effectively barred him from positions in academia. Despite being isolated from the mainstream of the scholarly and political community, he continued his studies especially of international law from the 1950s on.
In 1962, Schmitt gave lectures in Francoist Spain, two of them giving rise to the publication, the following year, of Theory of the Partisan, in which he qualified the Spanish civil war as a "war of national liberation" against "international Communism."
Schmitt regarded the partisan as a specific and significant phenomenon that, in the latter half of the twentieth century, indicated the emergence of a new theory of warfare.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the most simple formulation of Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction was enunciated by this intellectual giant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sfNROmn7bc
In that Schmittian fulmination known as the Bush Doctrine, the "partisan" is transformed into the "terrorist," no longer "internal" but a truly "global" enemy to be destroyed wherever found.
As further codified by the Obama Doctrine: the decider has the right.
The world-ordering, planet-appropriating doctrine of American exceptionalism has no space in its Grossraum (great space) concept for a "Eurasia."
The very enunciation of a "Eurasian" political sphere is a "terrorist" act, and all those associated with such "lunacy" are "enemies" to be annihilated.
John
March 28, 2015 at 12:50 amJunger was not so pro-war when he lost his son in WW11.
John
March 28, 2015 at 12:50 amJunger was not so pro-war when he lost his son in WW11.
Dato
March 28, 2015 at 6:28 amJust as defeated German generals and the Conservative Revolutionaries believed that Germany lost World War I because their economy and nation was only "partially mobilized
One would like to know wherein lay the premises of such a belief. Indeed, the general staff of the Reich laid out plans and performed actions for a "total war", and the effects, once the war ended, were hard to oversee: Not only were there scant resources and only barely functioning capital infrastructure left after the war, people were actually dying of hunger in the streets (made worse by the entente's continuing blockade even into 1915). Maybe all the information was hard to come back then.
From "Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism" by Astore and Showalter, p 40ff:
The war, Hindenburg noted, had become a colossal Materialschlacht, or material struggle, waged by modern industrial juggernauts. The western front in particular witnessed organized destruction on a scale theretofore thought impossible. Staggered by the sheer wastage of modern war, all combatants sought with varying degrees of success to mobilize their economies. The so-called Hindenburg Program was Germany's concerted attempt to mobilize fully, if somewhat belatedly, for total war. Improving the efficiency of economic mobilization was certainly a worthwhile goal. Hindenburg's, and especially Ludendorff's, key mistake was to presume that an economy could be commanded like an army. The end result was a conflict of effciencies. What was best for the army in the short term was not necessarily best for the long-term health of the economy. Furthermore, as economic means were mobilized to the fullest, the sacrifices required and incurred by modern warfare's destructive industrialism drove Germany, as well as the Entente powers, to inflate strategic goals to justify national sacrifice. Extreme economic mobilization encouraged grandiose political and territorial demands, ruling out opportunities for a compromise peace, which Hindenburg and Ludendorff rejected anyway. Under their leadership, imperial Germany became a machine for waging war and little else. And Hindenburg and Ludendorff emerged as Germany's most committed merchants of death.
Nothing in Hindenburg's background prepared him for the task of overseeing an economic mobilization. Thus, he left details to the technocrat Ludendorff. Aided by Lieutenant Colonel Max Bauer, Ludendorff embarked on a crash program to centralize and streamline the economy. Fifteen separate district commands in Germany needed centralizing if economic mobilization was to be rationalized; rivalries among federal, state, and local agencies needed to be curtailed. As enacted, the Hindenburg Program sought to maximize war-related production by transforming Germany into a garrison state with a command economy. Coordinating the massive effort was the Kriegsamt, or War Office, headed by General Wilhelm Groener.
Yet, Ludendorff's insistence on setting unachievable production goals led to serious dislocations in the national economy. Shell production was to be doubled, artillery and machine gun production trebled, all in a matter of months. The German economy, relying largely on its own internal resources, could not bear the strain of striving for production goals unconstrained by economic, material, and manpower realities. The release of hundreds of thousands of skilled workers from military duty back to the factories, which led to short-term increases in the production of armaments, did not solve critical and systemic shortages of labor. Large-scale deportation and impressment of Belgian workers was a stopgap that only further alienated world opinion, notably in the United States. In the aggregate, the high level of autonomy enjoyed by the military contributed to wasteful duplications of effort and patterns of bureaucratization that eventually defied even the Germans' gift for paperwork.
Brad Owen
March 28, 2015 at 6:36 amExcellent article. I still think the Financial Oligarchy, which currently holds the "Imperium" in City-of-London/Wall Street jointly, are the financial enablers of these "Conservative Revolutionaries". One of the main tasks of an Empire is to PREVENT any rival power structure (such as a legitimate Republic taking root within a colony, becoming a powerful nation-state, and becoming most attractive to the other subjugated colonies…the ONLY basis for U.S. "exceptionalism", and our one unforgivable "sin" in the, now covert, British Empire) from arising within its' Realm. The witless conservative revolutionaries are enabled by the Financier/Emperors (think of Grand daddy Prescott; bagman for the NAZIs) PRECISELY because they will lead to "the eventual bankrupting and destruction of the Nation", as Major Pierce says, thus being rid of a dangerous Republic within their Empire. These policies and wars are meant to destroy US, here, in America, and lead us, and the World, FAR AWAY from the wisdom of our Preamble. BTW, Kaiser's Germany, and Dr. Sun Yat Sen, were influenced by "Lincoln's economists" Henry Carey and Friedrich Liszt…the "republican infection" was spread far and wide, after Lincoln's victory in his proxy war with the British and French empires (The Russian Empire, as always, was USA's quiet ally in that war).
Peter Loeb
March 28, 2015 at 6:45 amNAMING NAMES…
The history of fascism is helpful, It remains that it is a common tendency of liberals/
progressives to believe in the illusion that one person, one party exchanged for another
will transform a society (any society).As Naseer Aruri documents in his incisive book, DISHONEST BROKER, that the US has collaborated with Zionism for decades, Both US political parties have been complicit. This
has been the case for 35 years prior to the current Administration and certainly was the
case going back as far as Harry Truman.(Aruri's brief book was written just prior to
the election of Obama.)Netanyahu's supposed "shock" to Washington is that his blatant racism and opposition to
the "peaceful negotiations" of two so-called "sovereign" nations made such good PR. One commenter observed that it was like asking the lamb to "negotiate" with the wolf. Aruri
repeats that the US, which has always supported the oppressor(Israel), could act as"mediator" thus excluding international law altogether. (Aruri blames in equal measure PLO's Arafat who agreed to "occupation by consent" (Aruri).Netanyahu blew the US "cover" for just a second. The next Democratic leadership if it is
Hillary Clinton as President or Chuck Schumer as Democratic leader has never been
noted for any sympathy for Palestinians aka "the inferior race" (Israelis). Both Clinton and
Schumer have represented New York State in the US Senate. Both want to elect more members of their party (Democratic) and to use the dollars of wealthy US Jews in accomplishing this.The voices of the hundreds of thousands who lose their jobs as disposeable (except in
campaign rehetoric) have less and less meaning. The very rich are the beneficiaries and they lay off thousands of workers and managers to move to low wage and more compliant
location with high tech ease.From my perspective, the only means to delay this is economic. On the one hand it is
BDS but on a larger field it is the weakness of the US economy and others of the West.Recalling that it was WW II that "solved" the Great Depression and not the ineffective programs of FDR's "New Deal" (See Gabriel Kolko, MAIN CURRENTS IN MODERN AMERICAN
HISTORY). Todd E. Pierce does not mention the so-called global "revolution" but as the
French have phrased it "La revolution se mange" (" The revolution eats itself") Everyone
wants someone else to fight their battles for them at no cost to themselves.Pierce does not evaluate the power relationships weakening virtually all governments
today. Inequality has eaten us up (we have eaten ouselves!).-Peter Loeb, Boston, MA USA
muggles
March 28, 2015 at 1:41 pmExtremely good essay today by Todd Pierce. Very impressive scholarship and insight, particularly in the light of his impressive military career.
Many good comments posted also, despite the inevitable odor of anti Semitism found in some, always the case when "Germany" is part of the topic. "Bankers", etc. Much easier to stereotype than to think.
Yes, France and Britain were also hyper militaristic in the 19th century, far more than Germany, which of course wasn't united until the very end of that century, which meant that while some German states were quite active militarily in the period (Prussia) it didn't act as a "nation" as it did later in the 20th century.
France lost most of the militarist ideology after two crushing defeats in the World Wars and post colonial failures. Britain maintained that outlook despite the World Wars but the wars devastated the economic ability and imperial reach which had sustained that view, despite the persistent Churchill worship. Thatcher's defense of the tiny Falklands was merely an almost comic echo of times past. Still, today in many British intellectual circles (if not in actually participating in the armed forces) military worship continues.
Germany today has now lost most of its taste for war. Instead it leads Europe economically. Butter rather than guns.
Pierce's essay highlights the sinister influence of Leo Strauss, something that libertarian historian-economist Murray Rothbard warned about several decades ago as well. As Godfather of the neocons, Strauss is the intellectual architect of today's bloodlust American political establishment. His being Jewish was the only thing which kept him from being a full fledged Hitlerite.
So neocons, many themselves Jewish (though many not) are mere slightly less crazy fascists as were the interwar German nationalists who easily jumped into the Nazi bed when the cult of personality overwhelmed the German rightwing.
There has long been a cult of war worship, going back to ancient times. The fact that warfare brings death and disease and horrible injury doesn't matter. The fact that it destroys wealth and human prosperity and harmony is ignored. Individuals are crushed to the greater "good" of arms against whatever enemy can be found. Sociopaths and psychopaths use militarism as the path to "greatness."
That much of the American "right" is in the thrall of the pseudo fascist neocon ideology of Straussian war worship as the path to "security" and "national greatness" should be the red blinking "danger-danger!" light for every thinking American.
Thanks Mr. Pierce.
Steve Naidamast
March 28, 2015 at 3:07 pmI have not thoroughly read this article but will do so after I print it out.
However I would like to add that though there were quite a few people in 190s Germany that were proponents of warfare there is a slow but increasing amount of research that is beginning to show that Adolph Hitler was not the war-monger western historians have made him out to be. In addition, after the advent of war in 1939, up through 1941, Hitler was making peace overtures to the west, which Britain continuously ignored and rejected.
This too was done up through 1915 by Germany in World War I, which Britain also
ignored.As recent research is beginning to show, it was not Germany who was itching for
war in 1939 but in fact Britain and Poland. And war is what they eventually got and
very much to Britain's and Poland's demise as the former lost her empire and the latter was
swallowed up by Soviet Russia.Coleen Rowley
March 28, 2015 at 6:26 pmGreat article showing how history repeats! But most of your points, with the exception of Boehner's invitation to Netanyahu to speak to Congress and more Democrats than Republicans backing Obama's negotiation strategy with Iran, apply as much to the Democrat as Republican Party leadership. I think I even read where Robert Kagan may back Hillary Clinton whilst his fellow PNAC founder William Kristol will back Bush or whatever Republican wins the nomination. The neocon ideology seems to be fully in control of both parties.
March 29, 2015 at 12:09 pm
Thank you Coleen for your comment. I share your concern that a Clinton/Bush race will be one in the same. I'm desperately hoping we get neither as candidates because it will mean "business as usual".
hisoricus
March 28, 2015 at 8:29 pmOne of the most startling things I've found in reading "Nazi propaganda" is their dead-on accurate prediction of America's coming role as a primary threat to world peace, in its rulers' quest for total global domination. The United States was routinely mocked in the German press as the phony "democracy of dollars" controlled by the plutocrats of Wall Street – gosh, how'd they ever get a wacky idea like that, huh?
Hitler clearly stated in Mein Kampf "we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
Hitler attempted to rapidly build Germany into a global power that would be capable of fending off the twin threats of capitalist imperialism from the west and totalitarian communism from the east – but these forces were too strong: the "new Germany" never had a chance of survival. Eighty million Germans faced a billion-strong British empire that was determined to destroy all economic rivals, and had centuries of experience in mass murder and destruction in the Third World. Add to this the 320 million people of a communist USSR and a capitalist USA whose elites could agree on only one thing, that Germany's astoundingly successful experiment in national socialism must first be annihilated and then its true character erased from history.
Today the German government's cruel treatment of Jews – who made up one half of one percent of Germany's population, by the way – is all that most people know of National Socialism, which is rather like remembering America's Founders only as the brutal slaveholders and Indian killers that they were.
Ask yourself: how is it evenly remotely possible that the second German war could be the only time in our history that our leaders did not lie to us about why we were supposed to hate and butcher a people who had done us no harm?
Monster from the Id
March 28, 2015 at 9:44 pmHoooo boy, the delusion is strong in this one…
richard vajs
March 29, 2015 at 8:54 amOne good thing about the "coming together" of the fascist Republican Party and the fascist Israeli Likud Party – it will make for a unified target. As I've heard military drill instructors advise, "You people need to spread out – one hand grenade would get you all!". I look forward to no separation between the two and the tossing of that grenade.
Coleen Rowley
March 29, 2015 at 10:34 amFirst I need to make clear I'm against bombing. Anyone. I'm in the "war is not the answer; war is a crime; war is waste; war is a lie; war is hell camp. I think individuals are justified in valid "self defense" but not the nation-state or ethnic-religious type tribalism that Carl Schmitt apparently referred to as the "political" groupings that justify and benefit from "pre-emptive" wars of aggression. It IS a slippery slope but still we must stick to principles.
But with that said, the Likud-inspired AIPAC and other Israeli fronts were very much aware of your drill sergeant's advice, Richard. The Israel lobbyists were highly effective in the past, in contrast to other political lobbies (who generally favored one party or the other), simply because they did "spread out" and were able to infiltrate both Republican and Democratic parties (as well as their corresponding "think tanks") so as to better control the whole US government.
The Boehner invite of Netanyahu, Republican Militarist Senator Cotton's letter and the exposing of AIPAC's forcing of Democratic congresspersons to now oppose their own Party Leader, Obama, in order to launch war on Iran, could be significant in ending that control of both parties by splitting the parties. Bush's former UN Ambassador and top neocon John Bolton's outright and explicit call for bombing Iran in the NYT helps pull off the mask and expose what the neocons are after. Middle of the road Democratic congresspeople, almost all of whom are normally are hard-pressed to not vote and give AIPAC anything it wants, may find it easier to publically explain how they cannot in good conscience vote this one time, for the Israel Lobby and what the terrible new war it wants.
And my guess is the reason Kristol and Kagan would be splitting their support, if that does materialize, Kristol for Bush and Kagan for Clinton, would be exactly in line with your old drill sergeant's advice.
Solon
March 29, 2015 at 10:26 pmre: "Avnery's analogy of how Congress responded to its de facto leader was apt"
The analogy could not be less apt.
The German leaders were in their own nation, addressing the concerns of their own people, concerns including the debasement of their culture, the debasement of their money, high unemployment, challenges in finding food, riots and mob violence incited by Communist and Bolshevic subversives, and chaos in their political system. Promises were made to the German people by their leaders to solve their problems, a plan was laid out and most of the promises were kept: within 4 years, Germans were employed, the economy was revitalized with public works spending, and the people's morale was unified around German cultural values. Several of their international problems were settled without violence, as the people demanded and the NSDAP government promised.
On the other hand, the leader of a foreign state stood before a representative body in which only 16% of the people have any confidence. He told this body that their leader should not be trusted, and they cheered.
The representatives of the people pledged their fealty to this leader of a foreign state and promised to send him more taxpayer money to kill more of the people whose lands and homes the foreign state is stealing. None of the concerns of the American people - for jobs, for relief from high food prices, for adequate treatment of 50,000 military persons wounded in wars fought at the behest of the same foreign leader - none of those concerns were addressed by the cheering crowd.This author suffers from Hitler Derangement Syndrome: his thinking is so suffused with the relentlessly propagandized notion that Hitler and NSDAP are the embodiment of evil that his analysis is forced and his judgments flawed.
An assessment of the full panoply of facts and evidence will reveal that it was not Hitler and NSDAP but the forebears of the same man who sought to - and came pretty close to succeeding in subverting the US political system.
The German people under NSDAP leadership were reclaiming their government and culture, and for that they cheered.
Their resistance to the ideology that Strauss and his cohort sought to impose on Germans was an affront to the pro to-neocons, and so they organized with warmongering British and manipulative American leaders to destroy Germany and incinerate the German people in what C E Hughes called the first use of weapons of mass destruction as a means of terror against a civilian population.
zhu bajie
March 30, 2015 at 1:23 amThe comparison is interesting, but it a comparison between Japanese Militarism and the US permanent war regime would also be enlightening. Neither the US nor Japan have or had a charismatic orator, a Mussolini or a Hitler.
zhu bajie
March 30, 2015 at 1:58 amRe "exceptiohnalism," Lewis' _The American Adam_ should be read. The idea that Americans can do no wrong has been around since the early days of the Republic.
Paul E. "Marbux" Merrell, J.D.
March 30, 2015 at 12:06 pmRe: "It was left to Israeli Uri Avnery to best capture the spirit of Netanyahu's enthusiastic ideological supporters in Congress."
I disagree with that sentence, albeit it's a judgment call. But I don't think Avnery is even in the running. The best capture of that I've seen is Noy Alooshe's masterful video remix of the event itself. .
hbm
March 31, 2015 at 3:06 amYou don't get Nazis without Ashkenazis.
Why should Neocons be at all surprising?
Rob
April 2, 2015 at 10:58 amI enjoyed the article, but I cannot agree that Netanyahu is the de facto leader of the Republican Party. Rather, he is a prop in the ongoing drama known as "Republicans doing everything in their power to oppose and embarrass President Obama and the Democrats."
I have long advocated that those public figures who agitate for war should be sent into the battlefield along with all able bodied members of their families. That would quickly put an end to chicken hawk warmongers. The exception would be Charles Krauthammer, who is paralyzed in his lower extremities. That man should be sent into battle in his wheelchair.
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February 25, 2015 | The National Interest
In 1961, Richard Rovere, a correspondent for the New Yorker, wrote an essay in the American Scholar called "Notes on the Establishment In America." In it he described, with extensive footnotes, a northeastern mandarin class, composed of everyone from John McCloy to John Kenneth Galbraith, that was manipulating the levers of power at the highest levels of government and industry. Rovere wrote:The Establishment, as I see it, is not at any level a membership organization, and in the lower reaches it is not organized at all. In the upper reaches, some divisions have achieved a high degree of organization and centralization and, consequently, of exclusiveness and power. The directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, make up a sort of Presidium for that part of the Establishment that seeks to control our destiny as a nation.
Rovere's spoof occasioned a good deal of comment -- one credulous legislator and member of the John Birch Society even entered it into the Congressional Record as a profound indictment of the establishment's reach and sway -- but perhaps no riposte was more telling than William F. Buckley Jr.'s. It appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1962 and was titled "The Genteel Nightmare of Richard Rovere."
Buckley, who had devoted much of his early career to attacking the Eisenhower administration and mainstream liberals alike, pounced upon Rovere's study. He said that for all his mock sobriety, Rovere was likely revealing more than he had intended. "The fact of the matter," wrote Buckley, "is that Mr. Rovere's disavowals notwithstanding, there is a thing which, properly understood, might well be called an American Establishment; and the success of Mr. Rovere's essay wholly depends on a sort of nervous apprehension of the correctness of the essential insight."
Indeed it did. For much of its history, the establishment has operated quietly in the corridors of power. The very idea of an establishment, after all, can seem antithetical to American democracy, a sentiment that was vividly expressed in Senator Joseph McCarthy's description of Secretary of State Dean Acheson as "this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with a phony British accent." The Vietnam War further discredited the establishment in the eyes of the Left and the Right, the former blaming it for being too hawkish and the latter for not being hawkish enough. As the militant rollback doctrines championed by Buckley and his crowd, which had been expressed but never acted upon by the Reagan administration, were put into operation by the neoconservatives during the George W. Bush administration's war in Iraq, the establishment seemed as passé among Republicans as among Democrats.
More recently, however, the establishment has seen its reputation rise steadily. An entire field of what might be called establishment studies has appeared to depict leading foreign-policy figures from the Cold War, some of whose surviving members (most notably George F. Kennan, who died at the age of 101 in 2005) warned against both NATO expansion and the Iraq War. The volumes include Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas's The Wise Men, Kai Bird's The Chairman, Geoffrey Kabaservice's The Guardians, Godfrey Hodgson's The Colonel and John Lewis Gaddis's George F. Kennan: An American Life. The reason for this steady output about patricians such as Kennan, Acheson, Henry Stimson and Robert Lovett isn't simply a case of nostalgia for a bygone era, though there is certainly some of that. It's because these grandees represent a foreign-policy tradition that retains its relevance-a conception of public service that, as far as possible, seeks to define and defend America's national interests rather than focus on partisan gain.
ENTER BRENT Scowcroft. In his new biography The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security, Bartholomew Sparrow, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, offers a timely reminder of his significance. Few former government officials epitomize the belief in public service better than Scowcroft. As a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant general, a former military assistant to Richard Nixon, and U.S. national-security adviser under Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, Scowcroft has become Washington's quintessential wise man.
Over the past five decades, beginning with his service to Nixon and continuing to the present, Scowcroft has played a central role in promoting an internationalist foreign policy grounded in realist precepts. He stands for the antithesis of a crusading doctrine that goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The bluster and braggadocio that characterize many of his detractors are alien to Scowcroft. So as a welter of Republican candidates prepare to seek their party's nomination for the presidency, they would do well to contemplate his legacy. Here are five lessons Scowcroft's career offers.
The first lesson is a reminder of the importance of character. Born in Ogden, Utah, in 1925 into a Mormon family, Scowcroft has never lost sight of the bedrock values that his parents instilled in him -- tenacity, diligence and self-effacement. This translates into his approach to international relations. He does not think that Washington can successfully hector or even bully other nations into following its lead. Instead, Sparrow notes, "Although he has not stated so explicitly, Scowcroft believes in an indirect pursuit of human rights-human rights as the by-product of public policy and international diplomacy." The most that the United States can do is to engage in quiet diplomacy in order to persuade other governments to respect human dignity. His views seem quite reminiscent of Kennan's: wary of Congress, skeptical of the media and wary of the abrupt mood swings of public opinion. Like Kennan, he is sympathetic to a national-security policy guided by an elite-"a hierarchical approach to leadership," Sparrow astutely notes, "that is characteristic of several of the institutions which Scowcroft has been a part of, such as the Air Force, the Department of Defense, the presidency, and the Mormon Church."
The second lesson is about what actually constitutes realism. A problem that realists sometimes run into is that they aren't all that realistic. Not Scowcroft. He considers himself to be an "enlightened realist," which is to say that he takes account of practical circumstances as opposed to seeking to force events into a procrustean framework. In short, unlike a number of classical realists, who take a rather simplistic view of international relations by reducing countries to a set of billiard balls that supposedly react predictably to one another, Scowcroft takes a more sophisticated approach. As an Air Force intelligence staff officer who served in Yugoslavia in the mid-1950s, Scowcroft worked under Kennan, who was ambassador to the independent Communist state. Scowcroft, who studied Russian history and Communism, came to the sensible conclusion, not all that different from Kennan's, that Soviet ideology was more an outgrowth of Russian nationalism and geopolitical insecurity than an expression of an unquenchable drive for world domination. Nor was there anything inherent "in the Slavic soul," he said, that stipulated that the Soviet Union expand abroad.
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THE THIRD, and related, lesson is to avoid triumphalism in foreign policy and emphasize diplomacy. As national-security adviser to George H. W. Bush, Scowcroft played a central role in crafting America's response to the collapse of the Soviet Union. He had no sentimental attraction to Mikhail Gorbachev, though as Gorbachev's grip on office began to slip, the Bush administration became increasingly worried about the prospect of an abrupt and chaotic Soviet collapse. Overall, upon entering office, Bush was much more cautious in dealing with the Kremlin than the Reagan administration had been during its final years, when it signed sweeping arms-control treaties with the Soviets.
Some of this caution was rooted in apprehensions about Russian president Boris Yeltsin, whom Scowcroft referred to in private conversations with British prime minister John Major in August 1991 as "an egoist, a demagogue, an opportunist, and a grandstander." Bush came under criticism at the time for reacting too slowly to changes taking place in Russia. Scowcroft, however, worried about the possibility of bloodshed and the command and control of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had a different view. He maintained that the United States should encourage independence movements in the disparate Soviet republics and establish diplomatic relations with them.
Scowcroft pursued a more nuanced policy. He exploited Soviet decline during the Gulf War. He kept Moscow on board while resisting Soviet diplomatic attempts to obstruct a U.S. attack. But after the formal dissolution of the Soviet empire, Bush conspicuously refused to gloat over its demise. To their immense credit, Bush, Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker helped to unify Germany and end the Cold War - all without firing a shot. It's an accomplishment that is only beginning to receive its proper recognition.
The fourth lesson of Scowcroft's career centers on the paramount goal of maintaining stability in the post–Cold War era. When it came to Iraq, the George H. W. Bush administration deployed a combination of diplomacy and military power to extrude Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. But it also refrained from entering Baghdad for fear of the unpredictable consequences that might follow. Scowcroft never deviated from this stance, which is why an op-ed under his name appeared on August 15, 2002, in the Wall Street Journal headlined "Don't Attack Saddam." Just as Scowcroft had concluded that the Soviet Union lacked true missionary zeal, so he argued that Saddam Hussein was, at bottom, a "power-hungry survivor" who would not operate in tandem with Al Qaeda. Instead, he wrote that toppling Saddam would "swell the ranks of the terrorists" and might "destabilize Arab regimes in the region." Scowcroft had it right
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April 9, 2015 | Crooked Timber
That's the title of a piece I had in the Chronicle of Higher Education in February. CHE is paywalled, but they kindly agree to let me republish here, after a suitable interval. The article (or at least a near final version) is over the fold.
Every year, U.S. News & World Report, Times Higher Education, and others update university rankings. Reactions are paradoxical. On the one hand, university administrators and faculty members scan the lists for evidence of small movements up or down. On the other hand, everyone knows that the top 10, or 20, or 50 names will be much the same as they have always been.
The Duke sociologist Kieran Healy points to a four-tier classification of leading universities made in 1911, and compares it to the most recent U.S. News ranking. Of the top 20 universities in the ranking today, 16 were in the top class in 1911, one (Notre Dame) was in the second class, and three (Duke, Rice, and Caltech) had not yet been established under their current names.
The United States is not unusual in this respect. In most countries with an established higher-ed tradition, the list of high-status universities has changed little over decades or even centuries. There have been some modest shifts in the relative status of different kinds of universities (for example, private versus public in the United States), and there are some impressive new institutions in Asia and other areas of rapid economic growth, but the impacts are marginal.
Broadly speaking, the 1911 list would not raise any eyebrows if it were used as the basis for the next U.S. News ranking. For those seeking to answer the question "What makes a great university?" the answer appears to be "having been great 100 years ago."
Now compare the Dow Jones Industrial Average for 1911, which included such companies as the American Smelting and Refining Company (now Asarco), U.S. Rubber (now Uniroyal), and U.S. Steel. Some of those companies have vanished altogether, and others have survived as subsidiaries of a larger enterprise, but only General Electric is still included in the Dow Jones index. Most of today's Dow Jones companies did not even exist in 1911.
What accounts for the remarkable stability of university rankings in comparison to the instability of big business, and for that matter, other nonprofits? More important, what implications does this have for university management and higher-education policy?
Several features of universities are important in explaining these outcomes. First, unlike other enterprises, universities almost never die and rarely merge. The 14 universities that formed the Association of American Universities, in 1900, are all still in existence, as are all those admitted since then.
Second, and directly related, universities are what are called, in the literature on industrial organization, "single-plant firms." The vast majority have one (or at most two) main campuses, with a few peripheral offshoots. Apparent exceptions like the University of California system are in reality a set of distinct universities, linked only by notionally shared governance.
Those structural facts put an upper bound on the feasible size of a university. A single campus can't accommodate more than about 40,000 undergraduate students without running into diseconomies of scale, such as constraints on the size of lecture halls. The biggest state universities reached that size in the 1970s, and their enrollments have remained broadly stable ever since. Elite private universities operate on a much smaller scale, typically 3,000 to 5,000 students, and most have maintained that size since the 1950s.
Taken together, those facts rule out many of the mechanisms by which markets reward success and punish failure. A successful university doesn't typically create new campuses or even greatly expand its enrollments. (Some American universities are attempting to test that proposition by establishing offshore campuses such as those of Yale in Singapore and NYU in the UAE. If only they'd learned from the experience of their Australian counterparts who followed the same path in the 1990s, with results ranging from disappointing to disastrous.) Conversely, poor performance may create stresses of various kinds, but almost never leads universities to close down, or even to radically contract.
As a result, growth in the university system has occurred primarily through the creation of new universities, or through the upgrading of vocational-training institutions such as teachers' colleges. At least initially, the new entries are almost always at the lower levels of the status hierarchy. The creation of a new research university, such as the University of California at Merced, is a rare event.
Those facts are enough to explain part of the difference between the relatively stable ranking of universities and the ever-changing rankings of top companies. With no departures, and limited possibilities for growth, the only way that universities can change their ranking is through a change in the (perceived) quality of their research and teaching. This is necessarily a slow process.
Moreover, universities are nonprofit enterprises that nonetheless generate substantial operating surpluses. In the absence of shareholders, the surplus generated by a university is available to improve the university's standing, for example by hiring star professors, establishing new research centers, or adding facilities to attract students.
But while those structural features explain why the relative status of universities doesn't change much from year to year or decade to decade, they don't explain the near-constancy of the rankings over scales of a century or more.
In statistical terms, we can think of university status as a process characterized by mean reversion. That is, if a high-status university performs poorly for some time, perhaps because of poor leadership or bad hiring decisions, it is likely to recover the lost ground over time. Conversely, a lower-status university that does well for a few years will find it difficult to maintain its enhanced status.
The crucial factor in explaining mean reversion is the existence of exceptionally durable assets of various kinds, the most important of which are human and reputational. A long-established high-status university has a large body of alumni, Ph.D. graduates, former faculty members, and research collaborators. Apart from obvious benefits such as alumni donations, that group can be looked to as a source of legacy students, opportunities for graduate placements, and senior hires keen to return to their former affiliation.
One way to test that idea is to look for other examples of status competition where rankings remain stable over long periods. An interesting case is that of European soccer leagues. Unlike American sport leagues, these mostly lack a draft or salary cap. Mobility is supposed to be achieved through a system of promotion and relegation, in which the winners in lower-division competitions move up, while the bottom-placed teams in the higher division move down. In practice, however, promoted teams usually struggle, while those relegated one year often return to the higher division the next.
Moreover, while most teams are privately owned, few of the owners seek to extract profits. Rather, returns are plowed back into the team and used to attract better players. That in turn produces winning records, which attract more fans and more revenue. Once attracted, fans, like alumni in the university context, are commonly lifelong assets.
Not surprisingly, the results are the same as in competition between universities. Most of the European leagues, notably including those of Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain, are dominated by the same two or three clubs, decade after decade. The Scottish competition provides a typical, if somewhat extreme, example. In 118 years of competition, two clubs (Rangers and Celtic, known collectively as the Old Firm) have won 99 times between them.
The Scottish League also provides a good example of mean reversion. A financial scandal in 2012 led to the Rangers' being declared insolvent and ejected from the competition. A reformed club was admitted to the Third Division (roughly the equivalent of the bottom tier of minor-league baseball), but with its top management, most of its money, and many star players gone. Crucially, however, the new Rangers retained the membership and fan base of the old one. It is rapidly ascending the status ladder and is set to resume its rivalry with Celtic in a season or two.
What should we learn from all this?
Most obviously, there is not much point in worrying about university rankings, whoever may issue them. Differences from year to year in a given ranking, or between different rankings, will inevitably be dominated by random noise. But even if changes in rankings reflect actual differences in performance, mean reversion ensures that this will mostly wash out over time. For the kinds of decisions for which rankings should matter, such as which university to attend, year-to-year variations are of no significance.
Second, it seems unlikely that university presidents, or other top managers, can make much difference in the way their institutions perform. As much as a decade at the helm is still simply too short to produce any sustained shift in rankings. Conversely, the departure of presidents and other top administrators, even under a cloud of disgrace, seems to have little or no impact on the status of the institutions concerned.
But the big question is whether the stable hierarchy is beneficial or harmful to the teaching and research mission of the university system as a whole. If harmful, what can be done about it?
As regards research, the advantages of stratification are obvious. The institutions at the top of the status hierarchy have continued to produce the bulk of research in leading journals, to earn Nobel Prizes and similar awards, and so on. Nevertheless, there are plenty of cases where this self-perpetuating elite might benefit from the challenge of outside perspectives.
For undergraduate education, American experience has shown that a highly stratified system works poorly. Competition for status encourages high-ranked institutions to restrict enrollments and to provide a high-quality experience to a small number of students, which inevitably implies high tuition fees. Since new entrants to the system inevitably enter with lower status, a steep and stable hierarchy implies that an increasing proportion of students attend poorly funded institutions that struggle to provide a quality education.
What, if anything, can be done to flatten the hierarchy and increase mobility within it? Sporting leagues have adopted solutions such as salary caps and draft systems for the recruitment of new players. Analogs could be imagined in the university context, but seem unlikely to command much support.
A more plausible response is a shift in public-financing priorities. If, as we've seen, success or failure in the status race is largely preordained, financing systems designed to reward and "incentivize" success are misconceived. Support should be allocated on the basis of need rather than used to amplify historical advantage. In this respect, President Obama's initiative to expand access to community college is a step in the right direction.
John Quiggin is a fellow in economics at the University of Queensland; a columnist for The Australian Financial Review; a blogger for Crooked Timber; and the author of Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us (Princeton University Press, 2010).
Tom West 04.10.15 at 4:22 am
The institutions at the top of the status hierarchy have continued to produce the bulk of research in leading journals, to earn Nobel Prizes and similar awards, and so on.
I think there's a case for strongly recognized elite institutions.
In many areas where an objective evaluation of value is nearly impossible, a strong, universal status hierarchy allows all participants to establish value in a manner shared by all participants. Bereft of the hierarchy, value judgment can often end up all over the place, which can heavily diminish external respect for the field, and in the worst case, can call the worth of the entire field into question.
I suspect most people (and certainly most institutions) prefer the illusion of certainty over the reality of randomness. Unchanging rankings that conform to expectations help satisfy that preference.
Sebastian H 04.10.15 at 6:03 am
"For undergraduate education, American experience has shown that a highly stratified system works poorly. Competition for status encourages high-ranked institutions to restrict enrollments and to provide a high-quality experience to a small number of students, which inevitably implies high tuition fees. Since new entrants to the system inevitably enter with lower status, a steep and stable hierarchy implies that an increasing proportion of students attend poorly funded institutions that struggle to provide a quality education."
For the elite this is surely a feature, not a bug.
TM 04.10.15 at 12:52 pm
Further to 1: In a system where higher education is publicly funded and each institution gets a roughly constant amount per student, as is common in parts of Europe, it is hard to see how a strong hierarchy between institutions could develop, unless of course the intention of creating elite institutions is built into the funding formula. In both cases, there is nothing to explain.
In the US, isn't there a strong correlation between endowment and ranking, and isn't that – and the tendency of the rich to continue giving to those who already have – the most obvious explanation for the self-perpetuation of the system?
Tom West 04.10.15 at 3:45 pm
Tom West, can you provide examples for the argument in the second sentence of your second paragraph?
First, I hope it was obvious that I'm not terribly serious about my thesis. It's mostly a reaction to a lifetime of observation that (1) for most things it's really hard to objectively measure quality on any but the coarsest of scales and (2) people get very unhappy on the odd occasions when (1) is revealed.
It was also based on my observations as to what happens when groups fail to reach an authoritative consensus on issues upon which reality indicates there probably shouldn't be one. Often, the funders lose confidence and withdraw. In the absence of elite institutions that we "know" are the best, would public and private funding dry up?
So I was mostly making light that we're happier when we have an unjustified certainty, and elite institutions provide that certainty.
And yes, I was thinking about academic hiring, where in the absence of an institutional background in which to guide the evaluation of candidates, there'd probably be a lot more nasty apples vs. oranges type faculty battles on who to hire (candidate quality being highly multi-dimensional).
Vasilis Vassalos 04.10.15 at 8:43 pmItaly is a good example of a system where a uniform state funding scheme has led to a much less stratified university system. Strong departments have developed in various universities – although it seems there is correlation between university size and budget on one hand and the importance of the city/region in which it is located (the proxy presumably being political clout of the local reps).
There is also I think stricter hierarchy for universities in the same city.
Vasilis Vassalos
BTW, I'm no expert on Italian universities, what I posted is my impression based on interactions with many Italian colleagues and a few discussions about the system. As for Germany, the system was so egalitarian that the German government a few years ago took pains to introduce stratification by identifying Excellent universities and bestowing them with lots of additional funding (thus helping them become even more excellent)
TM 04.11.15 at 3:40 amHarold 04.11.15 at 8:21 pmJQ: When I studied in Germany (where all Universities are run by the respective state except for one Catholic and a handful of private ones, the latter having little relevance), I never for a minute considered the comparative "status" of my University and neither did any of my fellow students. Rankings didn't exist at the time although they probably now exist and there has been a push towards a more elitist approach (establishment of "centers of research excellence" with EU and state money, stuff like that). There also was no tuition at the time; meanwhile experiments with relatively low tuition rates were started and abandoned in most states.
In the German context, the age of each respective University I think has little consequence because there isn't really any mechanism that would allow some sort of advantage to accumulate. Most universities were either founded by some prince or king of a territory that doesn't exist any more, or are recent foundations of the post war states wishing to expand higher education. The universities each have independent status (no "state system"). There is no reason why the state would want to favor one over the others (*). Oxbridge and Paris are different because of (1) long-standing institutional continuity, and probably (2) an intentional policy of promoting stratification. There is no reason why that stratification should happen all by itself, absent such policies. Post-war Germany and others never pursued such a policy (*), the stated goal was universal access.
(*) This is of course not to say there is no stratification in the educational system. There are several functionally defined tiers within higher education, from more academic to more vocational (one should actually count the vocational system itself as part of higher education, although that is rarely done). But there is no perceptible hierarchy within each tier.
This is so wrong.http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/09/1376096/-Private-Universities-are-Promoting-the-Plutocracy
There ought to be disincentives for selective private primary and high schools as well, IMO, if not outright bans on them.
Shirley0401 04.13.15 at 5:46 pm@Marshall 04.10.15 at 5:05 pm
"President Obama's initiative to expand access to community college is a step in the right direction."
My experience suggests that expanded access will be counterproductive unless way more attention is paid to quality. Actually I think it would be better to focus on improving the general ed/liberal arts/capital-Education preparation in the high schools, beyond AP ticket-punching.
>>>
Rare instance where I've actually got some experience. I worked with high school students for years, and the on-the-ground reality is that whenever "expectations" for all students were "raised," it inevitably results in many different forms of watering-down. The reality is that when we want 100% of students to take/complete/pass something, the standards have to be revised down to allow for kids who lack motivation and/or support and/or stability and/or proper nutrition and/or medicine and/or [insert thing some student somewhere lacks here] to still take/complete/pass that course/test/whatever.
Personally, I find a lot to like about variations of the German model - incentives for those who can, and want to, succeed/excel/achieve, and cascading options for those who don't make the cut. As much as it pains my lefty heart to admit it, part of the problem with expecting everyone to succeed results in success not meaning a whole lot.
Don't get me started on AP ticket-punching. The mystifying belief that every child can simultaneously be "accelerated" and/or "above average" has infected the entire middle/upper-middle class population of the last school at which I worked. For many of these parents, a failure of their child to achieve at a level in the top decile is adequate reason to have said child screened for disabilities, considered for special services, and/or enrolled in expensive "enrichment" programs.
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Apr 10, 2015 | Zero Hedge
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
One of the primary purposes of Liberty Blitzkrieg is to dispel the myth that America is politically a democracy and economically a free market, and prove that it is in fact a centrally planned oligarchy. If the people were well aware of this and fine with it, that's one thing, but my contention is that the vast majority of the public is merely buying into the myth. This is why the population is so passive and easily controlled. They simply don't understand what is happening to them. The proverbial frog slowing boiling to death.
Whenever I note that real median incomes in America haven't increased for decades, many people have a hard time believing it. Nevertheless, as John Adams famously proclaimed: "facts are stubborn things." Indeed they are, and an article published today by Bloomberg View provides some disturbingly stubborn facts that must be admitted to and faced. We learn that:
If you worry about the declining fortunes of the U.S. middle class, take heed: It might be worse than you realized.
Tracking the middle class can be difficult, because the group is hard to define. Typically, researchers look at households with incomes or net worth in the middle of the entire population. This approach, though, might provide a falsely rosy picture.
Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis - William Emmons and Bryan Noeth - sought to address this shortcoming by focusing on households' demographic characteristics, rather than income or wealth. Specifically, they looked at families whose breadwinner was at least 40 years old and had achieved a level of education that would typically allow a middle-class standard of living. Whites and Asians needed exactly a high-school diploma to qualify. For blacks and Hispanics, it took a two-year or four-year college degree - a stark recognition of persistent racial inequality.
The results are not pretty. As of 2013, this group's median annual income stood at about $45,000, down 16 percent in inflation-adjusted terms from 1989, with a big part of the drop occurring since 2001. Over the same period, a more commonly used measure of the middle class's fortunes - the median income for all families - declined just 1 percent.
Yep, since 2001. This is not a coincidence. This is when America reacted like a bunch of scared imbeciles to a terrifying terrorist attack, and squandered what was left of freedom, civil liberties and common sense (see: How I Remember September 11, 2001). But moving along…
The picture for wealth is no better. The group's median net worth (assets minus debt) was about $127,000 in 2013, down an inflation-adjusted 27 percent from 1989 and 38 percent from 2007, just before the financial crisis hit. By comparison, the median net worth for all families declined just 4 percent over the whole period (it's also lower overall because it includes younger families that haven't yet saved much).
While the numbers revealed by this alternative methodology are downright devastating, I'd note that even by the conventional measurement income and wealth are still DOWN since 1989. Don't worry though, oligarchs are more wealthy and more powerful than ever. This is no accident, it's baked into the system.
* * *
For related articles, see:
- The Stock Market Myth and How the Japanese Middle Class is on the Precipice Thanks to Abenomics
- Just Another Tale from the Oligarch Recovery – $100 Million Homes Being Built on Spec
- The Face of the Oligarch Recovery – Luxury Skyscrapers Stay Empty as NYC Homeless Population Hits Record High
- Another Oligarch Preaches to the Peasants – Charlie Munger Says "Prepare for Harder World"
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Apr 07, 2015 | The Guardian
Virginia Roberts's accusations about Andrew ordered to be struck from the record as judge denied her attempt to join a lawsuit against Jeffrey EpsteinAllegations that a 17-year-old was forced to have sex with Britain's Prince Andrew, which prompted a crisis at Buckingham Palace earlier this year, have been removed from a federal court case by a judge in the US.
Judge Kenneth Marra ordered Virginia Roberts's accusations about Andrew, the Duke of York, to be struck from the record and denied her attempt to join a lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein, a friend of the prince and a convicted sex offender.
"At this juncture in the proceedings, these lurid details are unnecessary," Marra wrote in his order, issued at the US district court in southern Florida on Tuesday morning. "These unnecessary details shall be stricken."
Andrew and Buckingham Palace vehemently deny Roberts's allegations.
Marra made no ruling or statement about the veracity of Roberts's allegations. He said the "factual details regarding with whom and where" she had sex were "immaterial and impertinent" to her argument that she should be allowed to join the lawsuit.
However, Marra noted that Roberts may yet appear as a witness when the long-running case finally goes to trial.
Brad Edwards, an attorney for Roberts, said in a statement that her legal team "absolutely respect" the judge's ruling, which had recognised Roberts's right to take part in the case as a witness. Roberts said: "I'm happy to get to participate in this important case."
A Buckingham Palace official said the Duke had been informed of the Florida court's ruling and was spending this week in private, before resuming his schedule of public engagements next week.
His spokesman declined to comment further but referred back to repeated palace denials of Roberts claims, including a 3 January statement that "it is emphatically denied that the Duke of York had any form of sexual contact or relationship with Virginia Roberts. Any claim to the contrary is false and without foundation."Five court filings in the Florida case, including a document filed on December 30 last year in which Andrew was first accused, were immediately sealed from the public.
The filing at that time placed Andrew under intense pressure, forcing him to return to his home at Windsor from Verbier in Switzerland where he was on a skiing holiday with a party including his daughter Princess Beatrice.
The duke only resumed public engagements at the World Economic Forum in Davos in late January where he was pursued by reporters and used a short speech "to reiterate and to reaffirm" the existing emphatic Buckingham Palace denials of what courtiers described as "lurid and deeply personal" claims.
Buckingham Palace broke with convention to directly address the sex claims, and Andrew approved a statement which vehemently denied "any form of sexual contact or relationship with Virginia Roberts". It continued: "The allegations made are false and without any foundation."
Roberts, who is referred to in the case only as Jane Doe 3, and a fourth woman were seeking to join two other alleged victims of Epstein in suing the US government over a plea deal that federal prosecutors struck with the hedge fund tycoon in 2008.
Under the plea agreement, Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl. He received an 18-month jail sentence and served 13 months before being released. He remains a registered sex offender in Florida and the US Virgin Islands, where he lives on a private island.
The agreement was criticised as being extraordinarily lenient by attorneys for a series of women who allege that Epstein sexually abused them when they were under the age of consent. The FBI, which took over the investigation into Epstein, said it had identified dozens of potential victims.
Roberts has for years alleged that she travelled around the world with Epstein as his "sex slave" and was made to have sex with some of his influential associates, including prominent politicians and royalty.
Marra ruled on Tuesday that the application by Roberts and Jane Doe 4 should be denied, as it was "entirely unnecessary" for the pair to be added as plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The women suing Epstein allege that the government's plea deal violated their rights as victims.
Describing Roberts's allegations as "duplicative" of the existing lawsuit, the judge said the lawsuit already sought to overturn Epstein's plea agreement on behalf of all "other similarly-situated victims".
Marra noted in his order that US law empowers judges to "strike from a pleading an insufficient defense or any redundant, immaterial, impertinent, or scandalous matter."
Allegations that Roberts was also made to have sex with Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and another friend of Epstein, were also struck from the case by Marra. The judge said a legal attempt by Dershowitz to intervene in the case was now unnecessary.
In recent weeks the duke has carried out more engagements, including opening the Yorkshire Air Ambulance (YAA) Air Response Unit prior to Easter and before that leading a "Pitch@Palace" event, a Dragons Den-style scheme to match investors with entrepreneurs using technology in the creative industries.
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October 28, 2014 | Tufts Now
Elected officials are no longer in charge of our national security-and that is undermining our democracy, says the Fletcher School's Michael Glennon
"We are clearly on the path to autocracy," says Michael Glennon. "There's no question that if we continue on that path, [the] Congress, the courts and the presidency will ultimately end up . . . as institutional museum pieces." Photo: Kelvin Ma
Michael Glennon knew of the book, and had cited it in his classes many times, but he had never gotten around to reading the thing from cover to cover. Last year he did, jolted page after page with its illuminating message for our time.
The book was The English Constitution, an analysis by 19th-century journalist Walter Bagehot that laid bare the dual nature of British governance. It suggested that one part of government was for popular consumption, and another more hidden part was for real, consumed with getting things done in the world. As he read, Glennon, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School, where he also teaches constitutional law, saw distinct parallels with the current American political scene.
He decided to explore the similarities in a 30-page paper that he sent around to a number of his friends, asking them to validate or refute his argument. As it happens, Glennon's friends were an extraordinarily well-informed bunch, mostly seasoned operatives in the CIA, the U.S. State Department and the military. "Look," he told them. "I'm thinking of writing a book. Tell me if this is wrong." Every single one responded, "What you have here is exactly right."
Expanded from that original brief paper, Glennon's book National Security and Double Government (Oxford University Press) takes our political system to task, arguing that the people running our government are not our visible elected officials but high-level-and unaccountable-bureaucrats nestled atop government agencies.
Glennon's informed critique of the American political system comes from a place of deep regard. Glennon says he can remember driving into Washington, D.C., in the late spring of 1973, at the time of the Senate Watergate hearings, straight from law school at the University of Minnesota, to take his first job as assistant legislative counsel to the U.S. Senate. Throughout his 20s, he worked in government, culminating in his position as legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Sen. Frank Church from 1977 to 1980. Since entering academic life in the early 1980s, Glennon has been a frequent consultant to government agencies of all stripes, as well as a regular commentator on media outlets such as NPR's All Things Considered, the Today show and Nightline.
In his new book, an inescapable sadness underlies the narrative. "I feel a great sense of loss," Glennon admits. "I devoted my life to these [democratic] institutions, and it's not easy to see how to throw the current trends into reverse." Tufts Now spoke with Glennon recently to learn more of his perspective.
Tufts Now: You've been both an insider and an outsider with regard to government affairs. What led you to write this book?
Michael Glennon: I was struck by the strange continuity in national security policy between the Bush administration and the Obama administration. Obama, as a candidate, had been eloquent and forceful in criticizing many aspects of the Bush administration's national security policies, from drone strikes to Guantanamo to surveillance by the National Security Agency-the NSA-to covert operations. Yet as president, it turned out that he made very, very few changes in these policies. So I thought it was useful to explain the reason for that.
Were you surprised by the continuity?
I was surprised by the extent of it. I knew fundamentally from my own experience that changing national policies is like trying to change the course of an aircraft carrier. These policies in many ways were set long ago, and the national security bureaucracy tends to favor the status quo. Still, I thought that a president like Obama would, with the political wind in his sails and with so much public and congressional support for what he was criticizing, be more successful in fulfilling his promises.
You use the phrase "double government," coined by Walter Bagehot in the 1860s. What did he mean by that?
Walter Bagehot was one of the founders of the Economist magazine. He developed the theory of "double government," which in a nutshell is this. He said Britain had developed two sets of institutions. First came "dignified" institutions, the monarchy and the House of Lords, which were for show and which the public believed ran the government. But in fact, he suggested, this was an illusion.
These dignified institutions generate legitimacy, but it was a second set of institutions, which he called Britain's "efficient" institutions, that actually ran the government behind the scenes. These institutions were the House of Commons, the Cabinet and the prime minister. This split allowed Britain to move quietly from a monarchy to what Bagehot called a "concealed republic."
The thesis of my book is that the United States has also drifted into a form of double government, and that we have our own set of "dignified" institutions-Congress, the presidency and the courts. But when it comes to national security policy, these entities have become largely for show. National security policy is now formulated primarily by a second group of officials, namely the several hundred individuals who manage the agencies of the military, intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracy responsible for protecting the nation's security.
What are some components of this arrangement?
The NSA, the FBI, the Pentagon and elements of the State Department, certainly; generally speaking, law enforcement, intelligence and the military entities of the government. It's a diverse group, an amorphous group, with no leader and no formal structure, that has come to dominate the formation of American national security policy to the point that Congress, the presidency and the courts all defer to it.
You call this group the "Trumanite network" in your book. What's the link to Harry Truman?
It was in Truman's administration that the National Security Act of 1947 was enacted. This established the CIA and the National Security Council and centralized the command of the U.S. military. It was during the Truman administration as well that the National Security Agency [NSA] was set up, in 1952, although that was a secret and didn't come to light for many years thereafter.
In contrast to the Trumanites you set the "Madisonians." How would you describe them?
The Madisonian institutions are the three constitutionally established branches of the federal government: Congress, the judiciary and the president. They are perceived by the public as the entities responsible for the formulation of national security policy, but that belief is largely mistaken.
The idea is driven by regular exceptions. You can always point to specific instances in which, say, the president personally ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden or Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution. But these are exceptions. The norm is that as a general matter, these three branches defer to the Trumanite network, and that's truer all the time.
So the trend is toward increased power on the Trumanite side of the ledger.
Correct.
If that's true, why has there not been a greater outcry from the public, the media-all the observers we have?
I think the principal reason is that even sophisticated students of government operate under a very serious misunderstanding. They believe that the political system is self-correcting. They believe the framers set up a system of government setting power against power, and ambition against ambition, and that an equilibrium would be reached, and that any abuse of power would be checked, and arbitrary power would be prevented.
That is correct as far as it goes, but the reality is that's only half the picture. The other half is that Madison and his colleagues believed that for equilibrium to occur, we would have an informed and engaged citizenry. Lacking that, the entire system corrupts, because individuals are elected to office who do not resist encroachments on the power of their branches of government, and the whole equilibrium breaks down.
What role, if any, have the media played?
The media have pretty much been enablers. Although there are a handful of investigative journalists who have done a heroic job of uncovering many of the abuses, they are the exception, for a number of reasons. Number one, the media are a business and have a bottom line. It takes a huge amount of money to fund an investigative journalist who goes about finding sources over a period of years. Very few newspapers or television concerns have those sorts of deep pockets.
Second, access for the press is everything. There is huge incentive to pull punches, and you don't get interviews with top-ranking officials at the NSA or CIA if you're going to offer hard-hitting questions. Look, for example, at the infamous 60 Minutes puff piece on the NSA, a really tragic example of how an otherwise respectable institution can sell its soul and act like an annex of the NSA in order to get some people it wants on the TV screen.
What is the role of terror in this environment?
The whole transfer of power from the Madisonian institutions to the Trumanite network has been fueled by a sense of emergency deriving from crisis, deriving from fear. It's fear of terrorism more than anything else that causes the American people to increasingly be willing to dispense with constitutional safeguards to ensure their safety.
Madison believed that government has two great objects. One object of a constitution is to enable the government to protect the people, specifically from external attacks. The other great object of a constitution is to protect the people from the government. The better able the government is to protect the people from external threats, the greater the threat posed by the government to the people.
You've been involved with the U.S. government for 40 years. How has your view of government changed?
Double government was certainly a factor in the 1970s, but it was challenged for the first time thanks to the activism stemming from the civil rights movement, Vietnam and Watergate. As a result, there were individuals in Congress-Democrats and Republicans like William Fulbright, Frank Church, Jacob Javits, Charles Mathias and many others-who were willing to stand up and insist upon adherence to constitutionally ordained principles. That led to a wave of activism and to the enactment of a number of pieces of reform legislation.
But there is no final victory in Washington. Those reforms have gradually been eaten away and turned aside. I think today we are in many ways right back where we were in the early 1970s. NSA surveillance is an example of that. The Church Committee uncovered something called Operation Shamrock, in which the NSA had assembled a watch list of antiwar and civil rights activists based upon domestic surveillance. Church warned at the time that NSA capabilities were so awesome that if they were ever turned inward on the American people, this nation would cross an abyss from which there is no return. The question is whether we have recently crossed that abyss.
To what degree are we still a functioning democracy? I'm sure you know that President Jimmy Carter told a German reporter last year that he thought we no longer qualified as a democracy because of our domestic surveillance.
We are clearly on the path to autocracy, and you can argue about how far we are down that path. But there's no question that if we continue on that path, America's constitutionally established institutions-Congress, the courts and the presidency-will ultimately end up like Britain's House of Lords and monarchy, namely as institutional museum pieces.
Bruce Morgan can be reached at [email protected].
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Dec 2, 2014 | anduskyregister.com
My favorite nonfiction book this year is "National Security and Double Government" by Michael J. Glennon, which argues that the president and Congress are largely figureheads in setting U.S. national security policy.
Glennon's book suggests that U.S. foreign and security policy is formed by "Trumanites," a network of several hundred top bureaucrats. They're named after Harry S. Truman, whose administration saw the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 and the creation of the National Security Agency. The elected officials who are supposed to make the decisions are dubbed "Madisonians," after President James Madison.
The Madisonians do have power, and they make important decisions. President Barack Obama made the decision to carry out the raid that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, Glennon notes. No one will know whether Al Gore would have invaded Iraq. But Glennon argues that very little in American foreign policy actually changed when Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush at the White House.
As an example, Glennon's book is quite devastating in describing how prominent Madisonians reacted when James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, was caught lying to Congress about whether it collects data on "millions" of Americans. (Leaks from Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency in fact attempts to collect the phone records of all Americans.) Sen. Dianne Feinstein knew the statement was false and said nothing, Glennon writes. Obama knew or should have known the statement was false and also was silent, "allowing the falsehood to stand for months until leaks publicly revealed the testimony to be false," he writes. "Obama, finally caught by surprise, insisted that he 'welcomed' the debate that ensued, and his administration commenced active efforts to arrest the NSA employee whose disclosures had triggered it." Glennon's heavily-footnoted book then documents the misleading statements Obama made about the matter.
Glennon is not a campus radical or a conspiracy theorist blogging in his parents' basement. He's professor of international law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Before he entered academia, he had a legal career that included a stint as legal counsel for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He has written several books, and his opinion pieces have appeared in "The New York Times" and "The Washington Post," among other newspapers. He kindly agreed to take our questions about his new book:
Sandusky Register: Did the election of President Barack Obama, and the subsequent disappointment of many who thought he would change U.S. national security policy, spur your book, or had you already had it in mind for years?Glennon: Both. I had noticed for years that U.S. national security changed little from one administration to the next, but the continuity was so striking mid-way into the Obama administration that I thought it was time to address the question directly. Hence the book.
Sandusky Register: Your book suggests that elections in the U.S. have little effect on national security policy - most of the decisions are made by a network of several hundred national security bureaucrats, regardless of who occupies the Oval Office or the seats in Congress. Do politicians in Washington privately admit that this is true?
Glennon: I've spoken with many members of what I call the "Trumanite network" who do acknowledge that reality - it's hard to deny, really, though few will say so publicly - but members of Congress and federal judges have too much at stake to pull back the curtains. As I describe in the book, public deference depends upon the illusion that the public institutions of our government are actually in charge, and their legitimacy would suffer if they were brutally honest about how much power they have transferred to the Trumanites.
Sandusky Register: Drawing upon "The English Constitution" by Walter Bagehot, you refer to the politicians who are supposed to be in charge as "the Madisonians" (after James Madison) and the national security bureaucrats who actually govern as "the Trumanites" (after Harry Truman's National Security Act of 1947). Is it a misnomer to refer to the Trumanites as a "secret government," as some do?
Glennon: The Trumanites surely operate in secrecy; most of their work is highly classified because the security threats have to be addressed out of the public eye, for the most part. But the Trumanite network itself exists in plain view, and has been readily visible for some time. So it's a mistake to think of it as a "deep state" or "shadow government" to the extent that those terms imply some nefarious conspiracy. There has been no such thing.
Sandusky Register: The U.S. Senate just defeated an NSA reform bill, and even supporters admitted it would not have brought major change. Does this fit your book's suggestion that reform from the "Madisonians" is going to be a difficult enterprise?
Glennon: The bill was mostly cosmetic and would not have addressed the deeper sources of double government. Its defeat can be attributed to a number of factors, one of which surely is the power of the Trumanite network. But in the interest of complete accuracy, it's useful to think of the phenomenon of double government as something like climate change: not every bad storm or hot day is caused directly and exclusively by the dynamic of global warming. The theory of double government merely predicts that, over time, national security policy as a whole will be largely continuous. Individual elements of that policy could change.
Sandusky Register: I've noticed you haven't been invited to appear on national TV yet, or on NPR's "Fresh Air," although your thesis would seem to be controversial and interesting. Are there institutional reasons why your book isn't getting a huge amount of publicity, or is it just hard to get an academic press book out there?
Glennon: Some good books never get reviewed and some bad books do. Lots of it just seems to be luck and happenstance. I tried to write it for informed lay readers; time will tell whether they pick it up.
My other author interviews are archived. Professor Glennon also was interviewed by the Boston Globe. He also appeared on the Scott Horton Show.
Sandusky Register reporter Tom Jackson reviews and recommends local and national reading opportunities. You can read the other blog posts and follow this blog on Twitter.
Email him at [email protected]
Comments
Tue, 12/02/2014 - 12:40pm
Tom, thanks. That will go on my reading list - right now I'm into "Why We Lost (in Iraq and Afghanistan)" by Gen. Dan Bolger.
And for influence on security policy, don't forget the Neo-cons and their Israeli partners.
We're spending trillions on the military and becoming ever less secure - they are bankrupting the country.
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November 7, 2014 | fletcherforum.org
Professor Michael Glennon on the Rise of the American System of Double Government
In his latest book, National Security and Double Government, Professor Michael Glennon challenges common understandings of American government institutions and provides daunting insights into the nature of the U.S. national security apparatus. Glennon claims that the "Trumanite network," consisting of managers of the military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies, guides and often makes key decisions on U.S. national security policy. He highlights the lack of oversight, accountability, and the mutually beneficial relationship between the public-facing "Madisonian" actors, such as the President and Congress, and this classified "Trumanite" network. The Fletcher Forum Editorial team sat down with Michael Glennon, Professor of International Law at the Fletcher School, to talk about his book and discuss the future of American democracy.
FLETCHER FORUM: How did your experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and your continued work with the government inform your book?
GLENNON: When I worked for the Committee I was struck by the large number of Ford administration officials who continued on into the Carter administration. Many of these officials held significant policy-making roles in the realm of national security. I was also struck by the many programs and policies that also carried over from the earlier administration. Most of these related to classified intelligence and law enforcement activities. As a result the public believed that in many areas, things had changed much more than they actually had. What I was observing in closed meetings and in classified documents was not the civics-book model that the public had internalized. The courts, Congress, and even presidential appointees exercised much less influence over national security policy-making than people commonly believed. And the 1976 presidential election had had much less impact than people had expected. So it was pretty clear the data didn't fit the conventional tri-partite, separation-of-powers paradigm, but I wasn't sure what a more accurate paradigm would look like, or even whether there was one.
FLETCHER FORUM: When did you start thinking about this topic? How did you formulate this thesis and how did we get to this point?
GLENNON: Two years ago, I was struck again by the strange inalterability of U.S. national security policy. Before winning the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama had campaigned forcefully and eloquently against many elements of the Bush administration's national security policy. Yet rendition, military detention without trial or counsel, drone strikes, NSA surveillance, whistleblower prosecutions, non-prosecution of water-boarders, reliance on the state secrets privilege, covert operations, Guantanamo-you name it, virtually nothing changed. Obviously something more was going on than what the defenders of those policies claimed-which was that all those policies somehow happened to be the most rational response among all competing alternatives. The fact is that each of these policies presents questions on which reasonable people can differ-as indeed Obama himself had, as a Senator and as a candidate for the presidency. The epiphany occurred when I pulled a little book off the shelf and read it in amazement one rainy Sunday afternoon-Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution.
FLETCHER FORUM: What are some components of this double government in the U.S. today? What are the key institutions and players?
GLENNON: Bagehot's objective was to explain how the British government operated in the 1860s. He suggested that it had in effect split into two separate sets of institutions. The "dignified" institutions consisted of the monarchy and House of Lords. The British people believed that the dignified institutions ran the government. This belief was essential to foster the legitimacy needed for public deference and obedience. But that belief was an illusion. In fact, the government was run by the "efficient" institutions-the House of Commons, the prime minister, and the cabinet-which operated behind-the-scenes, largely removed from public view. Gradually and quietly, these efficient institutions had moved Britain away from a monarchy to become what Bagehot described as a "concealed republic." My book's thesis is that in the realm of national security, the United States also has unwittingly drifted into a system of double government-but that it is moving in the opposite direction, away from democracy, toward autocracy. With occasional exceptions, the dignified institutions of the judiciary, Congress, and the presidency are all on the road to becoming hollowed-out museum pieces, while the managers of the military, law enforcement, and intelligence community more and more come to dominate national security policy-making.
FLETCHER FORUM: You identify the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American public as the root problem, and argue that reform must come from the people. How can this actually work in practice? Is there any hope that change is possible?
GLENNON: It's a bit simplistic to focus exclusively upon the public's "pervasive civic ignorance" (a term used by former Supreme Court Justice David Souter). As I point out in the book, the American people are anything but stupid. And while it's true that they're not terribly engaged or informed on national security policy, their ignorance is in many ways rational. Americans are very busy people and it doesn't make much sense to expend a lot of effort learning about policies you can't change. So we're in a dilemma: because the dignified institutions can't empower themselves by drawing upon powers that they lack, energy must come from the outside, from the people-yet as the electorate becomes increasingly uninformed and disengaged, the efficient institutions have all the more incentive to go off on their own. It's telling and rather sad that the American public has become so reliant upon the government to come up with solutions to its problems that the public is utterly at loose ends to know where or how to begin to devise its own remedy. Learned Hand was right: liberty "lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it."
FLETCHER FORUM: Does a lame duck President have a different relationship with the Trumanite Network? If President Obama were to read your book and ask for advice on changing the system, what would you tell him?
GLENNON: I'd suggest that he demonstrate to the American people that the book's thesis is wrong. He could do that by changing the national security policies that he led the American people to believe would be changed. Among other things: (1) fire officials who lie to Congress and the American people, beginning with John Brennan and James Clapper, (2) appoint a special prosecutor to deal with the CIA's spying on the Senate intelligence committee and Clapper's false statements to it, (3) stop blocking publication of the Senate intelligence committee's torture report, (4) stop invoking the state secrets privilege to obstruct judicial challenges to abusive counter-terrorism activities, (5) halt the bombing of Syria until Congress authorizes it, and (6) stop prosecuting and humiliating whistleblowers who spark public debates he claims to welcome.
FLETCHER FORUM: Are there any potential 2016 Presidential candidates that could challenge the Trumanite Network?
GLENNON: No.
FLETCHER FORUM: Do you have any other recommended reading on this subject?
GLENNON: The English Constitution, by Walter Bagehot; President Eisenhower's farewell address; The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills; Why Leaders Lie, by John J. Mearsheimer; The Arrogance of Power, by J. William Fulbright; Top Secret America, by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin; the final report of the Church committee (S. Rep. No. 94-755, 1976); On Democracy, by Robert A. Dahl; The New American Militarism, by Andrew Bacevich; Groupthink, by Irving Janus
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Amazon.com
Mal Warwick on December 22, 2014
Who makes national security decisions? Not who you think!Why does Barack Obama's performance on national security issues in the White House contrast so strongly with his announced intentions as a candidate in 2008? After all, not only has Obama continued most of the Bush policies he decried when he ran for the presidency, he has doubled down on government surveillance, drone strikes, and other critical programs.
Michael J. Glennon set out to answer this question in his unsettling new book, National Security and Double Government. And he clearly dislikes what he found.
The answer, Glennon discovered, is that the US government is divided between the three official branches of the government, on the one hand - the "Madisonian" institutions incorporated into the Constitution - and the several hundred unelected officials who do the real work of a constellation of military and intelligence agencies, on the other hand. These officials, called "Trumanites" in Glennon's parlance for having grown out of the national security infrastructure established under Harry Truman, make the real decisions in the area of national security. (To wage the Cold War, Truman created the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the NSA, and the National Security Council.) "The United States has, in short," Glennon writes, "moved beyond a mere imperial presidency to a bifurcated system - a structure of double government - in which even the President now exercises little substantive control over the overall direction of U.S. national security policy. . . . The perception of threat, crisis, and emergency has been the seminal phenomenon that has created and nurtures America's double government." If Al Qaeda hadn't existed, the Trumanite network would have had to create it - and, Glennon seems to imply, might well have done so.
The Trumanites wield their power with practiced efficiency, using secrecy, exaggerated threats, peer pressure to conform, and the ability to mask the identity of the key decision-maker as their principal tools.
Michael J. Glennon comes to this task with unexcelled credentials. A professor of international law at Tufts and former legal counsel for the Senate Armed Services Committee, he came face to face on a daily basis with the "Trumanites" he writes about. National Security and Double Government is exhaustively researched and documented: notes constitute two-thirds of this deeply disturbing little book.
The more I learn about how politics and government actually work - and I've learned a fair amount in my 73 years - the more pessimistic I become about the prospects for democracy in America. In some ways, this book is the most worrisome I've read over the years, because it implies that there is no reason whatsoever to think that things can ever get better. In other words, to borrow a phrase from the Borg on Star Trek, "resistance is futile." That's a helluva takeaway, isn't it?
On reflection, what comes most vividly to mind is a comment from the late Chalmers Johnson on a conference call in which I participated several years ago. Johnson, formerly a consultant to the CIA and a professor at two campuses of the University of California (Berkeley and later San Diego), was the author of many books, including three that awakened me to many of the issues Michael Glennon examines: Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis. Johnson, who was then nearly 80 and in declining health, was asked by a student what he would recommend for young Americans who want to combat the menace of the military-industrial complex. "Move to Vancouver," he said.
The mounting evidence notwithstanding, I just hope it hasn't come to that.
Tom Hunter on November 22, 2014
Incredible Rosetta Stone book that Explains Why the US Government is Impervious to ChangeThis work is of huge importance. It explains the phenomenon that myself and many other informed voters have seen--namely--how the policies of the United States government seem impervious to change no matter the flavor of administration. I found myself baffled and chagrined that President Obama, who I cheerfully voted for twice (and still would prefer over the alternatives) failed to end many of the practices that I abhor, such as the free reign of the NSA, the continual increase in defense budgets and the willingness to keep laws that are clearly against the wishes of the vast majority of Americans, be they Progressives or otherwise.
This incredible book acts as a Rosetta Stone that explains why nothing ever changes. Highly recommended.
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Zero Hedge/The Web of Debt blog
"The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. . . . You have owners."
- George Carlin, The American Dream
According to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America's political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites.
"Making the world safe for democracy" was President Woodrow Wilson's rationale for World War I, and it has been used to justify American military intervention ever since. Can we justify sending troops into other countries to spread a political system we cannot maintain at home?
The Magna Carta, considered the first Bill of Rights in the Western world, established the rights of nobles as against the king. But the doctrine that "all men are created equal" – that all people have "certain inalienable rights," including "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" – is an American original. And those rights, supposedly insured by the Bill of Rights, have the right to vote at their core. We have the right to vote but the voters' collective will no longer prevails.
In Greece, the left-wing populist Syriza Party came out of nowhere to take the presidential election by storm; and in Spain, the populist Podemos Party appears poised to do the same. But for over a century, no third-party candidate has had any chance of winning a US presidential election. We have a two-party winner-take-all system, in which our choice is between two candidates, both of whom necessarily cater to big money. It takes big money just to put on the mass media campaigns required to win an election involving 240 million people of voting age.
In state and local elections, third party candidates have sometimes won. In a modest-sized city, candidates can actually influence the vote by going door to door, passing out flyers and bumper stickers, giving local presentations, and getting on local radio and TV. But in a national election, those efforts are easily trumped by the mass media. And local governments too are beholden to big money.
When governments of any size need to borrow money, the megabanks in a position to supply it can generally dictate the terms. Even in Greece, where the populist Syriza Party managed to prevail in January, the anti-austerity platform of the new government is being throttled by the moneylenders who have the government in a chokehold.
How did we lose our democracy? Were the Founding Fathers remiss in leaving something out of the Constitution? Or have we simply gotten too big to be governed by majority vote?
Democracy's Rise and Fall
The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a paper called "The Collapse of Democratic Nation States" by theologian and environmentalist Dr. John Cobb. Going back several centuries, he points to the rise of private banking, which usurped the power to create money from governments:
The influence of money was greatly enhanced by the emergence of private banking. The banks are able to create money and so to lend amounts far in excess of their actual wealth. This control of money-creation . . . has given banks overwhelming control over human affairs. In the United States, Wall Street makes most of the truly important decisions that are directly attributed to Washington.
Today the vast majority of the money supply in Western countries is created by private bankers. That tradition goes back to the 17th century, when the privately-owned Bank of England, the mother of all central banks, negotiated the right to print England's money after Parliament stripped that power from the Crown. When King William needed money to fight a war, he had to borrow. The government as borrower then became servant of the lender.
In America, however, the colonists defied the Bank of England and issued their own paper scrip; and they thrived. When King George forbade that practice, the colonists rebelled.
They won the Revolution but lost the power to create their own money supply, when they opted for gold rather than paper money as their official means of exchange. Gold was in limited supply and was controlled by the bankers, who surreptitiously expanded the money supply by issuing multiple banknotes against a limited supply of gold.
This was the system euphemistically called "fractional reserve" banking, meaning only a fraction of the gold necessary to back the banks' privately-issued notes was actually held in their vaults. These notes were lent at interest, putting citizens and the government in debt to bankers who created the notes with a printing press. It was something the government could have done itself debt-free, and the American colonies had done with great success until England went to war to stop them.
President Abraham Lincoln revived the colonists' paper money system when he issued the Treasury notes called "Greenbacks" that helped the Union win the Civil War. But Lincoln was assassinated, and the Greenback issues were discontinued.
In every presidential election between 1872 and 1896, there was a third national party running on a platform of financial reform. Typically organized under the auspices of labor or farmer organizations, these were parties of the people rather than the banks. They included the Populist Party, the Greenback and Greenback Labor Parties, the Labor Reform Party, the Antimonopolist Party, and the Union Labor Party. They advocated expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reform of the banking system, and democratic control of the financial system.
The Populist movement of the 1890s represented the last serious challenge to the bankers' monopoly over the right to create the nation's money. According to monetary historian Murray Rothbard, politics after the turn of the century became a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties sometimes changed hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players.
In All the Presidents' Bankers, Nomi Prins names six banking giants and associated banking families that have dominated politics for over a century. No popular third party candidates have a real chance of prevailing, because they have to compete with two entrenched parties funded by these massively powerful Wall Street banks.
Democracy Succumbs to Globalization
In an earlier era, notes Dr. Cobb, wealthy landowners were able to control democracies by restricting government participation to the propertied class. When those restrictions were removed, big money controlled elections by other means:
First, running for office became expensive, so that those who seek office require wealthy sponsors to whom they are then beholden. Second, the great majority of voters have little independent knowledge of those for whom they vote or of the issues to be dealt with. Their judgments are, accordingly, dependent on what they learn from the mass media. These media, in turn, are controlled by moneyed interests.Control of the media and financial leverage over elected officials then enabled those other curbs on democracy we know today, including high barriers to ballot placement for third parties and their elimination from presidential debates, vote suppression, registration restrictions, identification laws, voter roll purges, gerrymandering, computer voting, and secrecy in government.
The final blow to democracy, says Dr. Cobb, was "globalization" – an expanding global market that overrides national interests:
[T]oday's global economy is fully transnational. The money power is not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works to reduce their influence on markets and investments. . . . Thus transnational corporations inherently work to undermine nation states, whether they are democratic or not.The most glaring example today is the secret twelve-country trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If it goes through, the TPP will dramatically expand the power of multinational corporations to use closed-door tribunals to challenge and supersede domestic laws, including environmental, labor, health and other protections.
Looking at Alternatives
Some critics ask whether our system of making decisions by a mass popular vote easily manipulated by the paid-for media is the most effective way of governing on behalf of the people. In an interesting Ted Talk, political scientist Eric Li makes a compelling case for the system of "meritocracy" that has been quite successful in China.
In America Beyond Capitalism, Prof. Gar Alperovitz argues that the US is simply too big to operate as a democracy at the national level. Excluding Canada and Australia, which have large empty landmasses, the United States is larger geographically than all the other advanced industrial countries of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) combined. He proposes what he calls "The Pluralist Commonwealth": a system anchored in the reconstruction of communities and the democratization of wealth. It involves plural forms of cooperative and common ownership beginning with decentralization and moving to higher levels of regional and national coordination when necessary. He is co-chair along with James Gustav Speth of an initiative called The Next System Project, which seeks to help open a far-ranging discussion of how to move beyond the failing traditional political-economic systems of both left and Right..
Dr. Alperovitz quotes Prof. Donald Livingston, who asked in 2002:
What value is there in continuing to prop up a union of this monstrous size? . . . [T]here are ample resources in the American federal tradition to justify states' and local communities' recalling, out of their own sovereignty, powers they have allowed the central government to usurp.
Taking Back Our Power
If governments are recalling their sovereign powers, they might start with the power to create money, which was usurped by private interests while the people were asleep at the wheel. State and local governments are not allowed to print their own currencies; but they can own banks, and all depository banks create money when they make loans, as the Bank of England recently acknowledged.
The federal government could take back the power to create the national money supply by issuing its own Treasury notes as Abraham Lincoln did. Alternatively, it could issue some very large denomination coins as authorized in the Constitution; or it could nationalize the central bank and use quantitative easing to fund infrastructure, education, job creation, and social services, responding to the needs of the people rather than the banks.
The freedom to vote carries little weight without economic freedom – the freedom to work and to have food, shelter, education, medical care and a decent retirement. President Franklin Roosevelt maintained that we need an Economic Bill of Rights. If our elected representatives were not beholden to the moneylenders, they might be able both to pass such a bill and to come up with the money to fund it.
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naked capitalism
By Steve Fraser, co-founder of the American Empire Project and Editor-at-Large of the journal New Labor Forum. He is the author of Every Man a Speculator, A History of Wall Street in American Life, and most recently co-editor of Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy. This article is excerpted and slightly adapted from The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. Originally published at TomDispatch
The American upper classes did not constitute a seasoned aristocracy, but could only mimic one. They lacked the former's sense of social obligation, of noblesse oblige, of what in the Old World emerged as a politically coherent "Tory socialism" that worked to quiet class antagonisms. But neither did they absorb the democratic ethos that today allows the country's gilded elite to act as if they were just plain folks: a credible enough charade of plutocratic populism. Instead, faced with mass social disaffection, they turned to the "tramp terror" and other innovations in machine-gun technology, to private corporate armies and government militias, to suffrage restrictions, judicial injunctions, and lynchings. Why behave otherwise in dealing with working-class "scum" a community of "mongrel firebugs"?One historian has described what went on during the Great Uprising as an "interlocking directorate of railroad executives, military officers, and political officials which constituted the apex of the country's new power elite." After Haymarket, the haute bourgeoisie went into the fort building business; Fort Sheridan in Chicago, for example, was erected to defend against "internal insurrection." New York City's armories, which have long since been turned into sites for indoor tennis, concerts, and theatergoing, were originally erected after the 1877 insurrection to deal with the working-class canaille.
During the anthracite coal strike of 1902, George Baer, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and leader of the mine owners, sent a letter to the press: "The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for… not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men of property to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country." To the Anthracite Coal Commission investigating the uproar, Baer proclaimed, "These men don't suffer. Why hell, half of them don't even speak English."
Ironically, it was thanks in part to its immersion in bloodshed that the first rudimentary forms of a more sophisticated class consciousness began to appear among this new elite. These would range from Pullman-like Potemkin villages to more practical-minded attempts to reach a modus vivendi with elements of the trade union movement readier to accept the wages system.
efschumacher April 4, 2015 at 8:25 am
The nuggets of actual history are useful but Thorstein Veblen skewered them far more deftly.
MartyH April 4, 2015 at 4:38 pm
As did Frederic Lundberg in America's 60 Families (1938) somewhat later. Still protected by the "Protect Mickey Mouse Act" (copyright extension to perpetuity) as best I can figure but there are copies around in those subversive Public Libraries and such.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef April 4, 2015 at 9:57 am
But neither did they absorb the democratic ethos that today allows the country's gilded elite to act as if they were just plain folks: a credible enough charade of plutocratic populism. Instead, faced with mass social disaffection, they turned to the "tramp terror" and other innovations in machine-gun technology, to private corporate armies and government militias, to suffrage restrictions, judicial injunctions, and lynchings….
We still see that in play today across the globe.
Some security states are clumsy and some suave.
The suave ones say to their ruled, 'Behold them savages. Thou are truly blessed to have me."
MyLessThanPrimeBeef April 4, 2015 at 10:04 am
But an opposed instinct, native to capitalism in its purest form, wanted the state kept weak and poor so as not to intrude where it wasn't wanted. Due to this ambivalence, the American state was notoriously undernourished, its bureaucracy kept skimpy, amateurish, and machine-controlled, its executive and administrative reach stunted.
Thanks to its capture, after the tragic Sack of New Rome by a roaming band of billionaires, the state can now be safely allowed to expand, to be given unlimited money to spend. No more undernourishment, no more skimpiness. Amateurish maybe, as the debate rages eternally whether it's evil intent or just incompetence.
One word – Peopleism.
human April 4, 2015 at 10:11 am
Thank you for this post, Yves. I found it cathartic and rejuvenating, especially with May Day right around the corner.
As the grandson of an emigrated Menshevik pamphlateer, I have for two generations now understood his reluctance with small government.
OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL April 4, 2015 at 6:30 pm
What a sad fact to learn in this post, that May Day originated in the US and is now expunged like some unwelcome Kommissar airbrushed out of a Kremlin lineup. Oh the mere thought of the actual people who do all of the actual work, not the financial leeches, the tax-free corporo-fascist bosses, or the millionaires per capita of Maryland, that those actual people who do *work* should have some kind of identity and voice and actual claim to the social fabric…perish the thought!
Turning point in my mind was Reagan's stamping out the air traffic controller strike, in the Capital versus Labor battle of course Capital could buy every last possible advantage. Only with the consent of the governed of course…so the very idea that workers have rights needed to be demonized, and how completely successful they have been at that.
The very word "union" is spat with contempt by the widest possible swath of the populace, with holdover associations from the Red Scare. Mayor Bloomberg knew what to do: arrest 243 people for loitering in the Occupy Park…because he knew everybody was behind him. At the same time Jamie and Lloyd were flying to St. Barts for a really nice confab…when they should have been the ones getting the ankle bracelets.
Steve H. April 4, 2015 at 11:06 am
Many things of interest in this post. Let me highlight one of the milder juxtapositions:
"Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest
Eight hours for what we will."
–
and
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"Work hard, but never work after dinner."
hemeantwell April 4, 2015 at 11:43 am
susan the other April 4, 2015 at 2:26 pmThis is particularly useful for the references to alliances between working class and "petty bourgeois" shopkeepers, e.g. the Pittsburgh strike. I'm fairly familiar with the strike history lit and hadn't seen that before.
In a related vein, Yves has usefully pointed out that the resistance to the TPP has been drawing together sections of the left and right. In my contacts with our Congresscritter, Gwen Graham, I've stressed this point strongly. I think she's basically a hack looking to run for higher office asap but, for someone trying to maintain a seat in a district that went Tea Party in 2010, an anti-TPP position should be a no-brainer.
'The Gilded Age' is such an apt moniker. Under its veneer of wealth there was no there there. My all time favorite book on the subject of the struggle for democracy is "Framing America" by Frances Pohl. The first plate is the memorial statue dedicated to those who died in the Haymarket riot. It is extremely beautiful. No need for gilding. There was another horrendous incident in 1913, a mining incident where miners and their families were massacred by the owners of the mines (Colorado I think) which became a rallying cry for NY artists and they produced an exhibit of abstract art in protest at the NY Armory. And then, of course, WW1.participant-observer-observed April 4, 2015 at 4:00 pmWhen civility breaks down in one country it usually spreads. And the threat of socialism was on the horizon. Which is why it is so unbelievable to see the encroachment (really a takeover) of what is yet another gilded age trying to keep power. It's crazy.
participant-observer-observed April 4, 2015 at 4:13 pmWhile plutocracy puts on its show, its fascism face is taking over-it is not enough to consider the economic elements of plutocracy isolated from its political implications:
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/4/2/20_years_in_prison_for_miscarryingThis report shows not only this one case, but the loss of personal sovereignty of pregnant women, and the abusive police state power.
(Same like Ferguson: going after minorities, women…..who's next?)
There is also a hidden plutocracy-internecine war theme to the misogyny police state story:
A misogynist police state will never elect Hillary Clinton!
Why would any American worker want Hillary the Globalist to be president?
montanamaven April 4, 2015 at 4:03 pm
A month ago there was a discussion on Ian Welsh's site about the lack of non-fiction books of depth and original thought. Commenter Jessica had a list of good books that I decided to follow. I read Graeber's "Utopia of Rules" and am now tackling "Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life" by Jonathan Sperber. I am totally taken with it. (And mind you, I've never read or studied Marx. As a theater/film major the closest I got was studying Bertolt Brecht.) Sperber's book puts Marx in the context of his times not through a 20th Century lens. Marx lived in an exciting but turbulent time; the mid-nineteenth century. It was a time of heady ideas and deep philosophical thought. Did God exist? What should replace him? Should nations or "the state" exist? Are "united" states a good idea or bad? Why should Marx's region of the Rhineland be either French or German?
Well heeled "shop keepers" put money into radical newspapers as share holders or gave great writers like Marx, Engels and Hess "grants" to publish their ideas. Shoe makers and other tradesmen moved from Germany to cities like Paris, Brussels, and London to take up revolutionary causes that had started with the French revolution and spread out. There were cafes, reading rooms, and back of the bar discussions that included factory workers, skilled craftsmen and scholars. Marx committed his life to action although as a scholar and writer not a professional agitator like a Karl Schapper or Giuseppe Mazzini. He did not want to just "interpret the world" as philosophers had done before him, he wanted to change it.
We did have some heady days in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Revolution was in the air in 1968 like it was in 1848. The anti-globalists have soldiered on and created a great event in 1999. Occupy gave a brief but heady time. It is good to be reminded of the labor clashes and solidarity that existed in the 19th Century amongst workers, farmers, and shop keepers. I am grateful to Yves for pointing out yet another book worth reading. Here at NC, we have a virtual cafe where we can hone our ideas and bicker in true Hegelian style. But after reading this book on Marx, I am determined to get back to the city for more meet ups of NC readers. The Most Holy Order of the Knights and Dames of Capitalism Most Naked dedicated to as much leisure time as we can get our hands on. In an age of acquiescence, drinking does help.
participant-observer-observed April 4, 2015 at 5:15 pm
You might enjoy a new book out by a scholar of process studies, called "Organic Marxism"
http://philipclayton.net/books/organic-marxism/
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February 28, 2014 | theamericanconservative.com
Steve Sailer links to this unsettling essay by former career Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren, who says the "deep state" - the Washington-Wall-Street-Silicon-Valley Establishment - is a far greater threat to liberty than you think. The partisan rancor and gridlock in Washington conceals a more fundamental and pervasive agreement. Excerpts:
Excerpts:These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi's regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country's intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.
Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an "establishment." All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State's protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude.
More:
Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater. Should the politicians forget their lines and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own best interests. The executives of the financial giants even have de facto criminal immunity. On March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder stated the following: "I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy." This, from the chief law enforcement officer of a justice system that has practically abolished the constitutional right to trial for poorer defendants charged with certain crimes. It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice - certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee. [3]
The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a well trodden highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and many others. Not all the traffic involves persons connected with the purely financial operations of the government: In 2013, General David Petraeus joined KKR (formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) of 9 West 57th Street, New York, a private equity firm with $62.3 billion in assets. KKR specializes in management buyouts and leveraged finance. General Petraeus' expertise in these areas is unclear. His ability to peddle influence, however, is a known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus, the military commanders of the Deep State do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword. Petraeus also obtained a sinecure as a non-resident senior fellow at theBelfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The Ivy League is, of course, the preferred bleaching tub and charm school of the American oligarchy.
Lofgren goes on to say that Silicon Valley is a node of the Deep State too, and that despite the protestations of its chieftains against NSA spying, it's a vital part of the Deep State's apparatus. More:
The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to "live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face."
Read the whole thing. Steve Sailer says that the Shallow State is a complement to the Deep State. The Shallow State is, I think, another name for what the Neoreactionaries call "The Cathedral," defined thus:
The Cathedral - The self-organizing consensus of Progressives and Progressive ideology represented by the universities, the media, and the civil service. A term coined by blogger Mencius Moldbug. The Cathedral has no central administrator, but represents a consensus acting as a coherent group that condemns other ideologies as evil. Community writers have enumerated the platform of Progressivism as women's suffrage, prohibition, abolition, federal income tax, democratic election of senators, labor laws, desegregation, popularization of drugs, destruction of traditional sexual norms, ethnic studies courses in colleges, decolonization, and gay marriage. A defining feature of Progressivism is that "you believe that morality has been essentially solved, and all that's left is to work out the details." Reactionaries see Republicans as Progressives, just lagging 10-20 years behind Democrats in their adoption of Progressive norms.
You don't have to agree with the Neoreactionaries on what they condemn - women's suffrage? desegregation? labor laws? really?? - to acknowledge that they're onto something about the sacred consensus that all Right-Thinking People share. I would love to see a study comparing the press coverage from 9/11 leading up to the Iraq War with press coverage of the gay marriage issue from about 2006 till today. Specifically, I'd be curious to know about how thoroughly the media covered the cases against the policies that the Deep State and the Shallow State decided should prevail. I'm not suggesting a conspiracy here, not at all. I'm only thinking back to how it seemed so obvious to me in 2002 that we should go to war with Iraq, so perfectly clear that the only people who opposed it were fools or villains. The same consensus has emerged around same-sex marriage. I know how overwhelmingly the news media have believed this for some time, such that many American journalists simply cannot conceive that anyone against same-sex marriage is anything other than a fool or a villain. Again, this isn't a conspiracy; it's in the nature of the thing. Lofgren:
Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called "groupthink," the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town's cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. Government life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it's 11:00 in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of takeout pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one's consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: "You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?" No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes: Unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, growing immune to the curiousness of one's surroundings is easy. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn't know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it.
When all you know is the people who surround you in your professional class bubble and your social circles, you can think the whole world agrees with you, or should. It's probably not a coincidence that the American media elite live, work, and socialize in New York and Washington, the two cities that were attacked on 9/11, and whose elites - political, military, financial - were so genuinely traumatized by the events.
Anyway, that's just a small part of it, about how the elite media manufacture consent. Here's a final quote, one from the Moyers interview with Lofgren:
BILL MOYERS: If, as you write, the ideology of the Deep State is not democrat or republican, not left or right, what is it?
MIKE LOFGREN: It's an ideology. I just don't think we've named it. It's a kind of corporatism. Now, the actors in this drama tend to steer clear of social issues. They pretend to be merrily neutral servants of the state, giving the best advice possible on national security or financial matters. But they hold a very deep ideology of the Washington consensus at home, which is deregulation, outsourcing, de-industrialization and financialization. And they believe in American exceptionalism abroad, which is boots on the ground everywhere, it's our right to meddle everywhere in the world. And the result of that is perpetual war.
This can't last. We'd better hope it can't last. And we'd better hope it unwinds peacefully.
I, for one, remain glad that so many of us Americans are armed. When the Deep State collapses - and it will one day - it's not going to be a happy time.
Questions to the room: Is a Gorbachev for the Deep State conceivable? That is, could you foresee a political leader emerging who could unwind the ideology and apparatus of the Deep State, and not only survive, but succeed? Or is it impossible for the Deep State to allow such a figure to thrive? Or is the Deep State, like the Soviet system Gorbachev failed to reform, too entrenched and too far gone to reform itself? If so, what then?
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Zero Hedge
Authored by Ben Tanosborn,For years, Winston Churchill's famous quote, "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried," has served as Americans' last word in any political discussion which requires validation of the US government, no matter how corrupt or flawed in its behavior, as the best in the planet, comparatively or by default. Never mind the meaning that Mr. Churchill had intended back in 1947, or how the international political panorama has changed during the past seven decades.
These remarks were made by Britain's prime minister before the House of Commons a few months before there was a changing of the guards in the "Anglo-Saxon Empire" as the Brits gave away their colonial hegemony in favor of the super-influential economic and military power represented by the United States. And that was symbolically marked by Britain's relinquishing its mandate in Palestine, and the creation of Israel.
Such reference to democracy in the quote, explicitly defining it as a "government by the people," basically applied to Britain and the United States at the close of World War II; but such condition has deteriorated in the US to the point where the "common people" no longer have a say as to how the nation is run, either directly or through politicians elected with financial support provided by special interests, undoubtedly expecting their loyalty-vote. Yet, while this un-democratization period in our system of government was happening, there were many nations that were adopting a true code of democracy, their citizens having a greater say as to how their countries are governed. Recognizing such occurrence, however, is a seditious sin for an American mind still poisoned by the culture of exceptionalism and false pride in which it has been brainwashed.
And that's where our empire, or sphere of influence, stands these days… fighting the windmills of the world, giants that we see menacing "American interests," and doing it under the banner of "for democracy and human rights." Such lofty empire aims appear to rationalize an obscene military budget almost twice as large as those of Russia, China, India and United Kingdom combined! Americans, representing less than 5 percent of the world's population, are footing a military bill almost twice as large as that expended by half of the world's population. If that isn't imperialistic and obscene, it's difficult to image what other societal behavior could be more detrimental to peace and harmony in this global village where we all try to co-exist.
Empires and global powers of the past most often resorted to deposing of antagonistic foreign rulers by invading their countries and installing amicable/subservient puppet rulers. The United States and the United Kingdom, perhaps trying to find refuge, or an excuse, in their democratic tradition, have resorted to regime change "manipulations" to deal with adversary governments-nations. [Bush43's Iraq invasion stands as a critical exception by a mongrel government: half-criminal (Dick Cheney-as mentor), and half-moronic (George W. Bush-as mentee).]
Regime change has served the United States well throughout much of the Americas from time immemorial; an endless litany of dictators attesting to shameless in-your-face puppetry… manipulations taking the form of sheer military force, or the fear of such force; bribery of those in power, or about to attain power – usually via military coup; or the promise of help from the Giant of the North (US) in improving economic growth, education and health. Kennedy's 1961 Alliance for Progress proved to be more political-PR than an honest, effective effort to help the people in Latin America… such program becoming stale and passé in Washington by decade's end; the focus shifting in a feverish attempt to counter the efforts by Castro's Cuba to awaken the revolutionary spirit of sister republics in Central and South America (Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua…).
After almost two centuries of political and economic meddling in Latin America under the Monroe Doctrine (1823) banner, much of it involving regime change, the US is finally coming to terms with the reality that its influence has not just waned but disappeared. Not just in nations which may have adopted socialist politics, but other nations as well. US' recent attempt to get other regional republics to label Venezuela (Maduro's leftist government) as a security threat not only met with opposition from the twelve-country Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) but has brought in the end of an era. It's now highly unlikely that secretive efforts by the CIA to effect regime change in Latin America will find support; certainly not the support it had in the past.
To Washington's despair, similar results, if for other reasons, are happening throughout North Africa and the extended Middle East; certainly not the results the US had hoped for or anticipated from the revolutionary wave in the Arab Spring, now entering its fifth year. It is no longer the flow of oil that keeps Washington committed to a very strong presence in the Middle East. It is America's Siamese relationship with Israel.
But if regime change is no longer an effective weapon for the US in Latin America or the Middle East, the hope is still high that it might work in Eastern Europe, as America keeps corralling Russian defenses to within a holler of American missilery. Ukraine's year-old regime change is possibly the last hurrah in US-instigated regime changes… and it is still too early to determine its success; the US counting on its front-line European NATO partners to absorb the recoil in terms of both the economy and a confrontational status now replacing prior smooth relations.
Somehow it is difficult to envision an outcome taking place in Ukraine which would allow the United States a foothold at the very doorsteps of Russia; something totally as inconceivable as if China or Russia were contemplating establishing military bases in Mexico or any part of Central America or the Caribbean.
The era of using regime change as a weapon of mass deception may have already ended for the United States of America… and hopefully for the entire world.
Mon, 03/23/2015 - 22:46 | 5920475 JustObserving
America has always lied itself to war - few believe US lies now. Obama almost lied his way to a war with Syria about sarin:
Lies: An Abbreviated History of U.S. Presidents Leading Us to War
8. Vietnam (Kennedy, Johnson, 1964) -- Lies: Johnson said Vietnam attacked our ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in August, 1964.Truth: The US didn't want to lose the southeast Asia region, and its oil and sea lanes, to China. This "attack" was convenient. Kennedy initiated the first major increase in US troops (over 500).
9. Gulf War (G.H.W. Bush, 1991) -- Lies: To defend Kuwait from Iraq. Truth: Saddam was a threat to Israel, and we wanted his oil and land for bases.
10. Balkans (Clinton, 1999) -- Lies: Prevent Serb killing of Bosnians. Truth: Get the Chinese out of Eastern Europe (remember the "accidental" bombing of their embassy in Belgrade?) so they could not get control of the oil in the Caspian region and Eastward. Control land for bases such as our huge Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, and for the proposed Trans-Balkan Oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea area to the Albanian port of Valona on the Adriatic Sea.
11. Afghan (G.W. Bush, 2001) -- Lies: The Taliban were hiding Osama. Truth: To build a gas/oil pipeline from Turkmenistan and other northern 'xxstan' countries to a warm water (all year) port in the Arabian Sea near Karachi (same reason the Russians were there), plus land for bases.
12. Iraq (G.W. Bush, 2003) -- Lies: Stop use of WMDs -- whoops, bring Democracy, or whatever.Truth: Oil, defense of Israel, land for permanent bases (we were kicked out of Saudi Arabia) to manage the greater Middle East, restore oil sales in USD (Saddam had changed to Euros)
http://www.activistpost.com/2010/12/13-lies-abbreviated-history-of-us.ht...
Lies and Consequences in Our Past 15 Wars
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/9419-lies-and-consequences-in-our-pas...
gdogus erectus
Even articles like this erroneously refer to the US as a democracy. WTF. The programming runs deep.
"A republic...if you can keep it."
cornfritter
Very poorly written article. Better to say that Andy Jackson was about the last bad ass to fight of the banksters and die a natural death, then Salmon Chase and his buddies passed the legal tender laws, and shortly thereafter (or possibly before) London dispatched the Fabian socialists with their patient gradualism. We were firmly back under the yoke of London banking cartel come 1913. And you are correct, a republic is an EXTREMELY limited form of democracy (not truly akin to traditional 51% takes it democratic concepts at all). The elected leader's function was supposed to be to guard the principles of the Constitution and the limited Republic, and history will remember that, despite this cruft of an article.
In the eyes of many who founded this nation, it was only a stepping stone to a global government, the new Rome - but the new Rome will be the UN with a global bank, and the multinational corporations holding court, and then the end come.
Then again, I may be wrong.
negative rates
suteibuWhat passes for gvt is silly these days, we are a legend in our own minds.
anusocracy"Governments would become political churches"
Like in the Middle East? And you will counter by saying that people are forced to live under those governments and, yet, thousands are freely going there from around the world to join ISIS.
Otherwise, such a system would work right up until one government church decided there wasn't enough room in the area for competitors (probably within a year, maybe six months). Let the political/religious tribal wars begin.
|Bankers couldn't be banksters without government.
Maybe it's the monopoly of force thingy you don't understand.
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Amazon.com
Panopticonman on May 1, 2004
Whose Reich Is It Anyway?
The Marquis de Morés, returning to 1890s Paris after his cattle ranching venture in North Dakota failed, recruited a gang of men from the Parisian cattle yards as muscle for his "national socialism" project -- a term Paxton credits Morés' contemporary Maurice Barres, a French nationalist author, with coining. Morés' project was potent and prophetic: his national socialism was a mixture of anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism. He clothed his men in what must have been the first fascist uniform in Europe -- ten-gallon hats and cowboy garb, frontier clothes he'd taken a shine to in the American West. (Author Paxton suggests the first ever fascist get-up was the KKKs white sheet and pointy hat). Morés killed a French Jewish officer in a duel during the Dreyfus affair and later was killed in the Sahara by his guides during his quest to unite France to Islam to Spain.
Morés had earlier proclaimed: "Life is valuable only through action. So much the worse if the action is mortal."
Here assembled together are all of the elements of what Paxton would classify as first stage fascism: "the creation of a movement." Most fascist movements stall in this first stage he notes -- think, for instance, of the skinheads, the American Nazi Party and Posse Comitatus.
Paxton's other stages are
- the rooting of the movement in the political system;
- the seizure of power;
- the exercise of power; and
- the duration of power, during which the regime chooses either radicalization or entropy.
He notes that although each stage
"is a prerequisite for the next, nothing requires a fascist movement to complete all of them, or even to move in only one direction. The five stages permit plausible comparison between movements and regimes at equivalent degrees of development. It helps us see that fascism, far from static, was a succession of processes and choices: seeking a following, forming alliances, bidding for power, then exercising it. That is why the conceptual tools that illuminate one stage may not necessarily work equally well for others." pg. 23.
Paxton also tentatively offers a definition of fascism, but only after tracing the rise of various movements from their beginnings in the 19th century through the present day. Other historians and philosophers, he suggests, have written brilliantly on fascism, but have failed to recognize that their analyses apply to only one stage or another. He also notes that often definitions of fascism are based on fascist writings; he maintains that fascist writings while valuable were often written as justification for the seizure of power, or the attempted seizure, and that what fascists actually did and do is more critical to understanding these movements. Indeed, the language of fascism has changed little since the days of the Marquis De Mores.
He hesitates in offering both his definition and his analytical stages, saying that he knows by doing so he risks falling into the nominalism of the "bestiary." He demonstrates that this is a common failing of definitions of fascism which are often incomplete or muddled as they typically describe only one or two typically late stages.
Other historians, for instance, split fascism into Nazism or Italian fascism, avoiding the problem of understanding their common elements by concentrating on their differences, insisting that they are incommensurable. Finally in the last pages, Paxton offers up this fairly comprehensive and useful definition:
"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
Paxton is particularly strong in showing how the circumstances in post WWI Germany and Italy -- the demobilized mobs of young soldiers, sent to war by elites who had no conception of the destruction and suffering they had unleashed upon the younger generation -- were ripe for fascism's appeals. For many, liberalism, conservatism and socialism all seemed equally complicit in the crack-up of Europe in the Great War. Fascism, rising from the ashes, employed the socialistic tools of mass marches, the military techniques of terror learned in the war, and as they gained power, the new tools of mass communication and propaganda developed in the US during WWI.
Fascists also reacted astutely to public discomfort toward the mass migrations from southern and eastern Europe coming in the wake of political and economic distress in those regions, using that fear to increase their power through scapegoating and its attendant rhetoric of purity.
Fascism is both charged and blurry word these days, used by both the left and the right to assail their critics and enemies.
The Nazi remains the evildoer par excellence in popular and political culture, invoked for a thrill of fear or the disciplinary scare or emotional incitement. In this masterful synthesis of writings in politics, history, philosophy and sociology, Paxton untangles the vast literature fascism has generated, establishes some essential ground rules for coming to grips with its many expressions, stages, and manifestations, and clears a space for further, better focused research.
Although academic in its orientation, it is well and clearly written. Finally, for the reader who is not familiar with modern European history, it is a very useful and informative text as it takes into its scope by necessity much of European and American history over the past one hundred years. Absolutely required reading.
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NOW THAT Israel is going to the polls on March 17, the air is befouled with gutter invective, accusations of treachery and thinly veiled racial baiting. The ruling Likud Party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, has been consumed for a month with complaints of malpractice and legal wrangles, arising from the primaries that were supposed to determine the composition of its slate of candidates. Yisrael Beitenu, the party led by the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is imploding under a wide-ranging criminal investigation for corruption. The largest Orthodox Jewish religious party, Shas, is headed by the Moroccan-born former interior minister Aryeh Deri, who served a prison term for bribery; after a party rival released uncomplimentary tape recordings of a speech by a dead rabbi, denouncing Deri, he theatrically resigned-only to reemerge, unabashed, a few days later (his party, meanwhile, split). Former prime minister Ehud Olmert and former finance minister Avraham Hirschson have been sentenced to prison terms for financial crimes; former president Moshe Katsav is serving time for rape. And these are only the most prominent such cases in what some like to call "the only democracy in the Middle East."The first line of defense when such awkward facts are mentioned is invariably, as in the Kremlin of yore, the tu quoque: Israel, indeed, is far from alone in exhibiting grave defects in its governing elite. Is American political discourse these days, even in the once gentlemanly Senate, so civil? Is extremist populism unknown in Greece, Spain, France or Sweden? Is Italian public life a model of rectitude? Are politics untainted by religious fanaticism in Turkey or India or, for that matter, the United States? We look in vain in modern democracies for a latter-day Pericles or Demosthenes-and, if truth be told, even those paragons were accused in their own time of demagogy, warmongering, inconsistency, cowardice and peculation.
Nor is the disagreeable, often-hysterical tone of Israeli political debate altogether new. Politics here have always been a rough-and-tumble affair. Westminster-style courtesies have never been the rule. Even before the Jewish state was established, there were political murders in Palestine of Jews by Jews. As in America, the more closely we examine the characters and behavior of the founding fathers of Israel, the more blemishes we find.
Withal, there has been a perceptible decline in the standards of conduct of the Israeli political class. The other day I walked down a street in Tel Aviv past the former home, now a museum, of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion. This was where he lived while leading Israel to independence and then to victory in the wars of 1948–1949 and 1956 (after the 1967 Six-Day War, he urged Israel to withdraw from its new territorial conquests). It is a spartan two-level dwelling, drably furnished, with one striking feature: the library, which runs from floor to ceiling around all the walls of several rooms. It comprises about twenty thousand volumes. Although Ben Gurion formally studied law in Constantinople, he was really an autodidact rather than a conventionally educated man. On visits to England in the 1930s, he would alternate calls on the Colonial Office with trips to Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford, where he would stock up on classical texts. Anita Shapira's new biography of Ben Gurion relates how his intimate friendship with a young Englishwoman was nurtured by a shared love of the ancients, especially Plato. She would write to him from London and send books from Blackwell's. Apart from Shimon Peres, the last member of the founding generation, I cannot imagine any Israeli politician today who boasts a library half this size or quality.
And that was not even the whole of it. After his retirement, when he had retreated to the Negev desert kibbutz of Sde Boker, I met Ben Gurion. He was living in a small cabin that was crammed full of yet more books. A welcoming, gnome-like figure with white tufts of hair, he was a rumbustious, if one-sided, conversationalist, happy to reminisce about his relations with British, Arab and Jewish figures of the early twentieth century. He rambled on amiably far beyond the time allotted for our meeting.
Only at one point in the conversation did a cloud cross his brow. That was when I noticed, half-hidden among the massed tomes on an upper shelf, a television set. I was puzzled because, as prime minister, Ben Gurion had never permitted a television broadcasting service to be established in Israel. He thought it would lead to Americanization and a decline in Zionist cultural values. A little cheekily, I said to the old man that I was surprised to see the offending object perched there. Visibly cross, he tossed my remark aside, declaring that the set was a gift from an American friend and that he never watched it. I believed him: he much preferred browsing in Plato and Aristotle.
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Mar 10, 2015 | Zero H4edge
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,"What are we going to negotiate about? What I would say is, 'Listen, you see that desert out there? I want to show you something,'" Adelson said at Yeshiva University. "You pick up your cellphone, and you call somewhere in Nebraska, and you say, 'okay, let it go.' So there's an atomic weapon goes over - ballistic missiles - in the middle of the desert that doesn't hurt a soul."
Adelson continued: "Then you say, 'See? The next one is in the middle of Tehran.' So, we mean business. You want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position and continue with your nuclear development.
– From the Washington Post article: Adelson: Obama Should Fire Nuke to Send Message to Iran
That a handful of extraordinarily rich and powerful oligarchs as well as mega-corporations have completely hijacked the American political process is hardy news. It's been the key topic of discussion here at Liberty Blitzkrieg and elsewhere for many years (see: New Report from Princeton and Northwestern Proves It: The U.S. is an Oligarchy).
What makes their control so effective is the use of an army of lobbyists, lawyers, Super PACs and bought and paid for politicians to do their dirty work, thus employing an opaque network of well-heeled minions created to conceal who is really pulling the strings.
Of all the commentary written about Netanyahu's embarrassing political stunt in front of the U.S. Congress last week, the most important angle was largely overlooked. That is, it sort of represented a coming out party for the American oligarch from behind the curtain.
Sheldon Adelson, by all accounts a vile and violent sort of the worst kind, has made entirely controlling the Republican party his lifelong achievement. Additionally, and quite significantly to U.S. and Israeli citizens, Mr. Adelson has transformed himself into the puppet-master behind Benjamin Netanyahu. Just so there's no misunderstanding about who Sheldon Adelson is, let's revisit a post from last year titled, Inside the Mind of an Oligarch – Sheldon Adelson Proclaims "I Don't Like Journalism". Here's an excerpt:
Billionaire casino mogul and conservative donor Sheldon Adelson said Sunday that the Palestinians are a made-up nation which exists solely to attempt to destroy Israel.
At the conference, which also featured top Democratic funder Haim Saban, Adelson also said Israel would not be able to survive as a democracy: "So Israel won't be a democratic state, so what?" he asked Saban, adding that democracy, after all, is not mentioned in the Torah,and recommended that the country build a "big wall" to protect itself, saying, "I would put up a big wall around my property."
Saban and Adelson should buy The New York Times together in an effort to bring more "balance" to the newspaper's coverage of Israel and the Middle East, Adelson suggested to wild applause.
"I don't like journalism," Adelson said, highlighting what he said was the media's insistence on focusing on the empty half of the glass.
Bill Moyers recently hit the nail on the head when it comes to Sheldon Adelson and his war catalyzing puppet, Benjamin Netanyahu. He writes:
Everything you need to know about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to Congress Tuesday was the presence in the visitor's gallery of one man – Sheldon Adelson.
The gambling tycoon is the Godfather of the Republican Right. The party's presidential hopefuls line up to kiss his assets, scraping and bowing for his blessing, which when granted is bestowed with his signed checks. Data from both the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics and the Center for Public Integrity show that in the 2012 election cycle, Adelson and his wife Miriam (whose purse achieved metaphoric glory Tuesday when it fell from the gallery and hit a Democratic congressman) contributed $150 million to the GOP and its friends, including $93 million to such plutocracy-friendly super PACs as Karl Rove's American Crossroads, the Congressional Leadership Fund, the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund, Winning Our Future (the pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC) and Restore Our Future (the pro-Mitt Romney super PAC).
Yet there's no knowing for sure about all of the "dark money" contributed by the Adelsons – so called because it doesn't have to be reported. Like those high-rise, multi-million dollar apartments in New York City purchased by oligarchs whose identity is hidden within perfectly legal shell organizations, dark money lets our politicians conveniently erase fingerprints left by their ink-stained (from signing all those checks) billionaire benefactors.
Adelson owns the daily Israel Hayom, a leading newspaper, as well as Makor Roshon, the daily newspaper of Israel's Zionist religious right and NRG, a news website. He gives Israel Hayom away for free in order to promote his hardline views – the headline in the paper the day after Obama's re-election was "The US Voted [for] Socialism."
More important, he uses the paper to bang the drum incessantly for Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud Party, under the reign of which Israel has edged closer and closer to theocracy. As Hebrew University economist Momi Dahan put it: "De facto, the existence of a newspaper like Israel Hayom egregiously violates the law, because [Adelson] actually is providing a candidate with nearly unlimited resources."
In fact, as Israel's March 17 election approaches, Adelson has increased the press run of Israel Hayom's weekend edition by 70 percent. The paper says it's to increase circulation and advertising, but rival newspaper Ha'aretz reports, "Political sources are convinced the extra copies are less part of a business plan and more one to help Netanyahu's re-election bid." Just like the timing of Netanyahu's "State of the Union" address to Congress this week was merely a coincidence, right? "I deeply regret that some perceive my being here as political," Netanyahu told Congress. "That was never my intention." Of course.
So Netanyahu gets the best of both of Adelson's worlds – his powerful propaganda machine in Israel and his campaign cash here in the United States. Combined, they allow Netanyahu to usurp American foreign policy as he manipulates an obliging US Congress enamored of Adelson's millions, pushing it further to the right on Israel and the Middle East.
There you have it: Not only is this casino mogul the unofficial head of the Republican Party in America ("he with the gold rules"), he is the uncrowned King of Israel - David with a printing press and checkbook instead of a slingshot and a stone. All of this came to the fore in Netanyahu's speech on Tuesday: the US cannot determine its own policy in the Middle East and the majority in Congress are under the thumb of a foreign power.
Everything you need to know about Benjamin Netanyahu's address to Congress Tuesday was the presence in the visitor's gallery of that man. We are hostage to his fortune.
Don't forget the quote at the top where he suggested scaring Iran into submission by threatening to drop a nuke on Tehran. Who's the aggressor again?
This whole thing takes on a much greater level of significance given Adelson's near total control of the U.S. Republican party, as well as his control over Israel's Prime Minister. The man is not only the 8th richest man in the world, he's also a menace to civilized society, and people need to start paying a lot more attention to him.
I think the following illustration from Haaretz sums it up best:
Divine WindStop firing missiles into our territory.Greenskeeper_CarlStop sending suicide bombers into our territory.
Remove from your charter the destruction of Israel.
It really is that simple.
Start here, and perhaps we will stop punching you in the face.
http://original.antiwar.com/rothbard/2010/03/02/war-guilt-in-the-middle-...cornfritterhere you go, people. read this and learn something. Before you start in with your "thats anti-semitic" crap and repeat the same bullshit that any criticism of Isreal is jew hating, keep in mind this was written by Murray Rothbard, a Jew. And, it was written in 1967.
YHC-FTSEHere's a badass summary of these critters... they are trouble, and there are people fighting them - MUST READ
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/03/08/the-hidden-history-of-the-incred...
Peace
PS - I always liked rothbard - straight talker
If you want to see why people equate Israel with ISIS, look no further than the Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman who said that Israeli arabs disloyal to the State of Israel should have their heads chopped off. How about ISIS terrorists being treated in Israeli hospitals to be sent back out to fight again? These Israelis are sick fucks who deserve all the insulting epithets I can muster to describe their actions.
I cannot for the life of me understand the psychopaths who support Israel. I implore jewish folks to join all of us to voice their displeaure instead of keeping silent about the pernicous evils of zionist nazis who founded and control that terrorist apartheid state of genocidal lunatics.
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