Category Archives: Deep State

Our Political Parties Are Obsolete

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

When the parties do finally implode, the general mood will be: good riddance.

History informs us that once something is obsolete, it can disappear far faster than anyone expected. While we generally think of obsoleted technologies vanishing, social and political systems can become obsolete as well.

Should a poor soul who entered a deep coma a year ago awaken today, we must forgive his/her astonishment at the political wreckage left by the 2016 election. The Democratic Party, a mere year ago an absurdly over-funded machine confident in an easy victory in the presidential race, is now a complete shambles: its leadership in free-fall, its Fat-Cat donors disgusted, and its demented intoxication with pinning collaboration with Russia on the Trump camp eroding whatever feeble legacy legitimacy it still holds. What the party stands for is a mystery, as its Elites are clearly beholden to insiders, special interests and Corporate donors while glorifying the worst excesses of globalism and the National Security State’s endless war on civil liberties.

The newly awakened citizen would also marvel at the chaotic war zone of the Republican Party, in which the Insider Warlords are battling insurgent Outsiders, while the same Elites that fund the Democratic machine are wondering what they’re buying with their millions of dollars in contributions, for it’s unclear what the Republican Party stands for: it’s for Small Government, except when it’s for Bigger Government, which is 95% of the time; it’s for more law enforcement and the militarization of local police, and more intrusion into the lives of the citizenry; it’s for stricter standards for welfare, except for Corporate Welfare; it’s for tax reform, except the thousands of pages of give-aways, loopholes and tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations all remain untouched, and so on: a smelly tangle of special interests masked by a few sprays of PR air freshener to the millions left behind by the globalization that has so enriched Corporate America and the class of financier-owners, bankers, insiders and technocrats–the same group that funds and controls both political parties.

Political parties arose to consolidate centralized control of the central state.We have now reached the perfection of this teleology: the political elites and the financial elites are now one class. In our pay-to-play “democracy,” only the votes of wealth and institutional power count.

As I have often noted here, the returns on centralization are diminishing to less than zero. The initial returns on centralizing capital, production and social-political power were robust, but now the centralized cartel-state is eating its own tail, masking its financial bankruptcy by borrowing from the future, and cloaking its political bankruptcy behind the crumbling facades of the legacy parties.

Now that technology has enabled decentralized currency, markets and governance, the centralized political parties are obsolete. They are the political equivalent of buggy whips, and those holding tight to the fantasy that their current dissolution will magically be transformed into unity by some future leadership will be disappointed.

The fragmentation of the political parties is not temporary–it is permanent. As I discussed yesterday, political and social fragmentation are the consequence of economic fragmentation–these are self-reinforcing dynamics, as fragmentation in one feeds fragmentation in the others.

Those who have gotten rich inside the bloated machinery of the parties will never accept their era has ended. The dreams of private jets and millions of dollars in contributions die hard. But the voters and donors are both waking up to the cold reality that the parties are nothing but wealth distribution machines that sluice millions from financial elites to various political elites.

All the legacy claims of both parties ring false; neither party gives a hoot about the working class, small business or civil liberties. Their entire game plan is to whip up hot-button social issues to distract a fragmented citizenry and arouse last-gasp emotional loyalty to empty slogans.

Is it any wonder that people are abandoning both parties and claiming Independent status? All the core systems of the nation are failing, visibly, painfully, badly, and yet all the parties can dredge up is more of the same and TINA–there is no alternative.

The citizen who just awakened also awakened to the truth: the legacy parties have no solutions; their game plan is to milk the system as long as they can before it collapses in a rotten heap of corruption, fraud, collusion, debt and profiteering that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

When the parties do finally implode, the general mood will be: good riddance. A centralized spoils system is no longer a viable way to govern the nation. Political systems everywhere are facing a choice: Decentralize or die.

Recordings Reveal FBI Gave Man a Rifle, Urged Him to Carry Out Mass Shooting to ‘Defend Islam’

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

It’s become a near-weekly occurrence. Somewhere in some state, the FBI will announce that they’ve foiled yet another terrorist plot and saved lives. However, as the data shows, the majority of these cases involve psychologically diminished patsies who’ve been entirely groomed, armed, and entrapped by FBI agents. Simply put, the FBI manufactures terror threats and then takes credit for stopping them.

But what happens when they take it too far? What happens if the FBI actually tells someone to conduct a mass shooting? Well, in Milwaukee, WI, we are seeing this unfold first hand.

A little over two years ago, Samy Mohamed Hamzeh, 25, found himself in the midst of an FBI sting. Little did he know that he was being groomed for terrorism by the same government who claims to fight terrorism.

Hamzeh was born in the U.S. but lived much of his childhood in Jordan before moving to Milwaukee when he was 19. For four years, Hamzeh lived an entirely normal life, until one day, he was contacted by people who wanted to radicalize him and give him weapons.

The group, entirely controlled by the FBI was plotting to shoot up the Humphrey Scottish Rite Masonic Center during an event.

In February of 2016, the FBI announced they had foiled a terror plot by a man who was planning to kill at least 30 people to “defend Islam.” Americans cheered, and everyone felt safer — the FBI had saved us from extremists once again.

However, that’s not how things actually happened.

For months, two corrupt FBI informants goaded Hamzeh into obtaining weapons. According to his attorneys, hundreds of hours of recorded conversations show the FBI pressed Hamzeh into getting these weapons and eventually began pushing him to carry out a mass shooting.

Despite the intense peer pressure from people pretending that they were mass murderers, Hamzeh resisted. He didn’t even want the guns. Now, his attorneys have filed a motion to get him released on bond because they say he’s been set up.

The informants, the motion states, “frequently lobbied Hamzeh to get a machine gun despite his repeated protests that all he wanted was a legal handgun to protect himself.”

In spite of the FBI claiming Hamzeh was going to carry out a mass shooting — they were attempting to force him to do — the recordings, according to his attorneys, show he resisted and adamantly refused to ever participate in violence.

Even after the FBI announced their foiled terror plot, they were unable to charge Hamzeh with anything other than possessing a machine gun and a silencer. And even these items had been essentially shoved into his lap by the FBI.

As the Journal-Sentinel reports, a psychiatrist who evaluated Hamzeh in jail concluded he does not fit a profile of someone who would kill strangers and “has a strong moral code with a very prominent conscience and empathy.”

“There is also no evidence that Hamzeh ever made any plans or was doing anything other than making empty boasts to express his resentment about Israel or to gain attention,” reads their brief in support of the bond motion.

Hamzeh has now been in jail for a year and a half because the FBI tried to make him carry out a mass shooting that he didn’t want to do. And, he could be there much longer as each of the charges for the weapons — that he also did not want — carry 10 years a piece.

If Hamzeh never had any intention of carrying out a terror attack and the weapons were forced on him by the FBI, why on Earth would this be on the news and touted as some foiled plot?

Well, the answer to that is simple.

Former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes actually reveals the answer as he defends the tactics used by the FBI to set up poverty-stricken men by offering them large sums of money and weapons to commit crimes.

After he defended the FBI’s role in bribing poor, mentally diminished people to get them to commit crimes, he let out a bombshell statement, confirming what many of us already know.

“If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cause the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half,” states Fuentes. “You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.”

There you have it. The FBI puts Americans in danger by grooming otherwise entirely innocent people into doing harm — so they can keep fear alive.

But what would’ve happened if Hamzeh would’ve actually carried out this shooting that the FBI was trying to force on him? Would the FBI still claim they had informants attempting to groom him? Would they admit to forcing him to accept weapons?

David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps intelligence officer, the second-highest-ranking civilian in the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence, and former CIA clandestine services case officer, had this to say about these most unscrupulous operations:

“Most terrorists are false flag terrorists, or are created by our own security services. In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI. In fact, we now have citizens taking out restraining orders against FBI informants that are trying to incite terrorism. We’ve become a lunatic asylum.”

Indeed, we’ve become a lunatic asylum.

 

Putin, Xi Message To Trump: US Unipolar World Is Over

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: Information Clearing House

The US’ strategy has been to isolate Russia internationally. Evidently, it is Washington that is becoming more isolated on the global stage. This week in the run-up to the G20 summit in Germany, the reverse in fortunes could not be more glaring.

While North Korea was openly defying Washington with a breakthrough ballistic missile test, and US President Donald Trump was embroiled in his usual juvenile tweeting antics, Russia and China’s leaders were proudly consolidating their strategic alliance for a new multipolar global order.

Western media won’t acknowledge as much, but the meeting this week in Moscow between Putin and Xi Jinping was of historical importance. We are witnessing a global transition in power. And for the common good.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping bond through an apparent deep sense of mutual respect and wisdom about the political challenges facing today’s world. The two leaders have met on more than 20 occasions over the past four years. President Xi referred to Russia as China’s foremost ally and said that in a topsy-turvy world the friendship between the two was a source of countervailing stability.

On the breaking news of North Korea’s successful test launch of its first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), both Putin and Xi called for calm restraint. By contrast, US President Trump took to Twitter to taunt Kim Jong-Un. “Does this guy not have anything better to do with his life?” said Trump in words that could apply more pertinently to the American president.

Then the US and its South Korea ally also launched their ballistic missiles in a military drill aimed as a show of strength to Pyongyang. Kim Jung-Un responded that the ICBM was a “gift for the American bastards” on their Fourth of July Independence Day holiday and that there would more such gifts on the way.

Rather than escalating tensions, Putin and Xi put forward the eminently reasonable proposal that North Korea should freeze its missile tests and the US should likewise halt its military exercises on the Korean peninsula. All sides must convene in negotiations with a commitment to non-violence and without preconditions to strive for a comprehensive settlement to the decades-old dispute.

The contrast in Putin and Xi’s dignified, intelligent response with that of Trump’s petulance is clear proof of Russia and China showing real global leadership, whereas the Americans are just part of the problem.

But the Korean drama was only one illustration this week of how American ambitions of unipolar dominance have become redundant.

The G20 summit prelude of Putin hosting Xi in Moscow was followed by the Chinese president making a state visit to Germany on Wednesday two days before the gathering in Hamburg. Xi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly signed new trade deals between the world’s two leading export economies.

“Relations between China and Germany are at their historic best,”said Michael Clauss, Germany’s ambassador to Beijing. “The economic and political dynamic from a German perspective is moving toward the east.”

Of significance too was news this week the European Union is preparing to finalize a major trade pact with Japan.

It is also significant that Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called on China and Russia to help mediate the Korean crisis immediately following Pyongyang’s ICMB test launch.

Evidently, Japan, despite being an ally of Washington, is reaching out to a multilateral solution as proposed by Moscow and Beijing.

In so many ways, therefore, whether on matters of security or trade and economy, the world appears to be moving inexorably toward a multipolar format as the most appropriate response to challenges.

Not so from the American point of view, especially under Donald Trump’s leadership. All nations seem to be nothing more than a footstool for the “exceptional” Americans who feel entitled to hector and browbeat everyone else to get what they want.

America’s isolation in the world was glimpsed at the G7 summit earlier this year in May when the other nations awkwardly diverged from Trump on his decision to withdraw the US from the global climate accord. Two months on, the isolation of Washington is even more vivid on the world stage as G20 leaders gather in Hamburg this weekend.

A Bloomberg News headline put it succinctly: ‘Trump risks uniting Cold War allies and foes against him’.

Trump’s quest for “America First” through trade protectionism and his narrow-minded unilateralism toward issues of global security have put America out on a limb as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

Where is the American “team player”, the supposed “leader of the free world”? All the self-proclaimed virtues are being seen for what they always were: overblown, pretentious and vainglorious bombast.

America is seen as nothing more than a selfish, hulking giant. Its trade imbalances with the rest of the world are not because of “rotten deals”, as Trump would have it, but rather because the American economy has ruined itself over many decades. The off-shoring of jobs by American corporations and gutting of American workers with poverty wages are part of it.

When America now talks about upholding international law and security, the rest of the world just laughs with bitter irony. The wars across the Middle East and the sponsoring of terrorism are largely US products of criminal regime-change intrigues. Who is this deluded head-case in Washington?

The same deluded head-case that has “beautiful chocolate cake” with China’s president in a Florida beach resort, and then proceeds to slap sanctions on China and make provocative military incursions on its territory. It’s not just Trump. It’s the whole American political leadership. The American ruling class has become so blinded by hubris that it can’t even see how the world it claims to dominate is collectively shutting the door on it and walking away.

Washington has no answers for today’s world challenges. Because simply put, Washington is the source of many of today’s problems. It has not even the modesty to acknowledge its responsibility. The only thing the US seems capable of is to make current problems fiendishly worse. The Korean crisis is an object lesson.

Presidents Putin and Xi are not scheming to usurp world domination, as Washington would have us believe. Only in Washington would a vision for a multipolar, more democratic global order be construed as something threatening and sinister. That’s because American ambitions of unipolar “full spectrum dominance” are actually threatening and sinister.

The world can be thankful it has genuine leaders in Putin and Xi who are forging ahead to create a multipolar global order. Fortunately, the strategic alliance between Russia and China is underpinned by a formidable military capability. Joint naval exercises this month carried out in the Baltic Sea are a vital insurance policy to back up what Moscow and Beijing are increasingly bold enough to say to the Americans.

That message, as Putin and Xi effectively gave to Trump this week, is that American ambitions of world domination are no longer acceptable and no longer tenable. Washington’s days of bullying the world with its moralizing hypocrisy and military aggression are over.

The Choice: Traitor to Empire, or Traitor to Mankind

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By John Rohn Hall

Source: Dissident Voice

I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all. You live in the belly of the beast.

— Dr. Ernesto “Che” Guevara

A birth certificate from somewhere between the beast’s belly and its beating heartland condemns me to the dubious distinction of being among the privileged 5% of humans who claim United States Citizenship. A population which demands the right to consume 25% of earth’s resources while billions of our fellow-humans go hungry. A shame it was wasted on me, for I’ve never been one to make my country proud. Basically, I’ve always been a bad American. Cases in point: I never stand for The Star-Spangled Banner, nor do I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag of Retroperistalsis. I no longer believe in, nor vote in sham, mockery-of-democracy U.S. elections. I make no investments in Wall Street, for fear of inadvertently supporting The Military-Industrial Complex. If I happen to turn on the evening so-called news, I can’t resist calling Lester Holt “America’s House Negro”, for Holt’s Nightly Lies loudly confirm what Chris Hedges tells us: “No real journalist makes $5 million a year…Those in power fear and dislike real journalists.” And I pray regularly to whatever gods may be that Empire dies with a whimper, rather than a bang…and soon. There is little doubt that I am, and have for many years, been a traitor to Empire and its agendas of Neo-colonialism and wars for profit.

Fifty years ago, while Che Guevara was being summarily executed by the C.I.A. and its Bolivian Military stooges, my lifelong battle against Empire was just beginning. Che’s last words were some of the most prophetic ever spoken, as he looked his assassin in the eyes and said: “Shoot coward. You are only going to kill a man.” Only the good die young, they say. It is said that Che is much more powerful in death than he was in life, as a half century later, his legacy lives on and grows. Two years after his demise, he’d lit fire of discontent beneath a whole generation of Americans, and stood posthumously by my side as I gave the U.S. Army my very best middle-fingered salute, thereby refusing induction into the most over-funded, offensive, aggressive, killing force the world has ever known.

My neighbors and acquaintances are not evil or bad people. They’re simply oblivious to what George Carlin lovingly called “the big red, white, and blue dick” being shoved up their asses by the likes of Lester Holt and his cadres in criminal propaganda on a nightly basis. Americans are to be pitied for their willful ignorance. If I were a Christian, I’d ask God to forgive them, for they’re a bunch of clueless jackasses who know not what they do. But not being a believer in the imaginary bearded man in the stratosphere, I write. Not that I have any delusions of being omniscient, but my moderate level of enlightenment has been reached, one step at a time, one book or article at a time, and Che’s sword is now my pen. Che’s rifle, my Hewlett-Packard. The pen (in certain circumstances) is mightier than the sword. If Che had fought the Revolution, in the belly of the beast, with bullets, he would have been eliminated long before 1967. Lucky for me, thus far, Empire only executes the highest-level truth-talkers and traitors to the Military-Industrial agenda.

NBC demoted Brian Williams for the high crime of telling his own personal lies, instead of just the official ones, then replaced him with Mr. Holt. I’d seriously doubt whether either of these corporate whores, or any of their collaborating competitors give a rat’s ass whether their thousand-dollar-a-sentence blather bears any resemblance to the truth. Truth is the enemy of the overlords they serve, and has no place in the nightly news agenda, nor in any facet of Empire’s Disinformation Network. Truthful coverage of Empire’s latest wars for profit: Forbidden. Questioning the basic good intentions of our exceptional government: Not allowed. Tow the line, learn and regurgitate the fabrications du jour, read all recent directives from the C.I.A., keep your nose clean, your Armani Suit pressed, and God Bless America.

My insouciant neighbors and acquaintances have never heard of Noam Chomsky, and know nothing of Manufactured Consent. They have never seen a copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of The United States. They have no idea that “War (really) is a Racket” (Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler). They’d likely not even blink an eye at the atrocities wrought against the Southern half of The Western Hemisphere by the U.S.A. and its European counterparts, as artfully reported by Eduardo Galeano in Open Veins of Latin America. Hugo Chavez gave a copy to Barack Obama shortly before his mysterious and suspicious demise. Too bad Barack never read it. Not that he would have cared, being well programmed by the C.I.A.

When I’ve tried to explain to mainstream Americans the dastardly scheming of the C.I.A. in foreign countries; its economic hit men and jackals, bribery, coup d ‘etat, assassination, and finally bombs and bullets…as exposed by ex-C.I.A. Operative John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, the responses are glazed, dazed expressions. I might as well be talking to four-year-olds when explaining that 9-11 was an inside job, as proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by such sources as Michael C. Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon, or that the C.I.A. and other branches of our government eliminated J.F.K. for choosing the path of peace, as explained by James W. Douglass in his masterpiece, J.F.K. and the Unspeakable. The subtitle of the J.F.K. volume is “Why He Died and Why it Matters”, but what really matters to my adult four-year-olds is whatever professional gladiator games happen to be in season.

Americans don’t want to hear that “terrorism” is nothing but the direct result of Empire’s overreach and military incursions into every little resource-rich, under-militarized country on earth. Who, outside a few conspiracy theorists like me could give a shit about Chalmers Johnson’s trilogy, which includes “Blowback”, and exposes The U.S. Military’s Empire of Bases and aspirations for complete world domination? If I happen to mention The Great American Holocaust (the most deadly in earth’s history), as graphically illuminated in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of The United States, in oblivious company, white faces gaze at me in wonder…wondering why I’d care about the slaughter of a few tens of millions of inferior beings. One of the biggest secrets in the U.S.A. is the mystery of the most enduring, morally upstanding, and advanced civilization in earth’s history; a story expertly told by my friend Jeff J. Brown in China Rising: Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations. After 100 years under the heavy hand of Empire, the sleeping dragon is once again rising. Empire knows it…thus the so-called Pivot to Asia Strategy, and another $60 billion gift for The Pentagon.

The few of us who’ve come to understand the intrinsic evil, and violence on every level, of the United States of America, reach a point where a choice must be made. As U.S. Citizens, we can choose denial and ignore our own enlightenment, thus remaining part of the problem. Or we can cross The Rubicon, as Caesar did, and by doing so becoming traitors to Empire, enemies of the state, and strangers in our own land. If we choose the latter, alea iacta est; the die is cast, and there is no going back. Ignorance may be bliss, but the truth shall set ye free.

Empire is on a collision course with destiny. It’s a runaway train, carrying enough Weapons of Mass Destruction to turn our fading blue planet into shades of smoldering gray, and end life on earth as we know it. Never underestimate the blind, ignorant greed and mindless dreams of dominance of the sociopaths in the cab of Empire’s Engine. You know it. I know it. We are soldiers in Empire’s Underground Army, armed only with words, ideas, brilliance, open eyes, and hope. Those bearing arms need not apply. The battlefield of this war is for the minds of the insouciant. Somehow we must awaken an entire population which only pretends to sleep, and has no interest in buying what we’re selling. Always remember how lucky we are. We’re fighting the most important fight of all. Here in the belly of the beast.

Hasta la victoria siempre!

How Fear of Russia Misleads Americans

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NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake sees grave dangers in the U.S. government and media exaggerating foreign threats as a means to mislead and control the American public, reports Dennis J Bernstein.

By Dennis J Bernstein

Source: Consortium News

Russia has been made “the go-to scapegoat” for distracting Americans from the serious problems afflicting the U.S. government, says Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency who blew the whistle on multi-billion-dollar waste and violations of the rights of citizens through secret mass surveillance programs after 9/11.

As retaliation, the Obama Administration indicted Drake in 2010 as the first whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg charged with espionage, carrying a possible 35-year prison term. However, in 2011, the government’s case against him collapsed and he went free in a plea deal. He became the recipient of the 2011 Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize.

I sat down with Thomas Drake on June 3, 2017, at the home of ConsortiumNews editor Robert Parry in Arlington, Virginia, on the occasion of the awarding of the 2016 Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award to Oliver Stone.

Dennis Bernstein: I want to ask you about a story. ConsortiumNews has offered quite a different perspective on the relationship between the U.S. government and Russia [questioning the allegations about] Trump collaborating with Putin. What’s your take on this story? Do you think that ConsortiumNews is onto something in terms of really questioning that whole line?

Thomas Drake: Yes. This hyperbolic narrative that is posited almost to the point of hysteria. They would say that Russians are behind everything. “It’s all the Russians’ fault and you can blame Russia.” It’s just pure political pretension and there is a significant amount of propaganda behind it.

It’s intended to distract. It’s intended to keep people from really looking at some of the deeper truths of our own government and so it is very convenient for the political elites, on both sides of what has become the Democratic/Republican divide, which in fact is not a divide; it’s two sides of the same coin, with slightly different narrative – to project all the blame on Russia and particularly the hyper-conflation of the littlest thing that would appear to be that Trump is ruining the country or Trump is the worst thing that has ever happened. Just really taking this
way, way beyond the pale.

And ConsortiumNews — having written for ConsortiumNews going back several years now as a result of my case and mass domestic surveillance and government abuse of power — is one of the few – it’s surreal for me to say this right now – it’s one of the few alternative media outlets who have the courage to stand up to the elite narrative and get behind this hyper-partisan politicization of blaming it all on external entities.

And, in this case, Russia has become the go-to scapegoat, frankly. And it’s easy to simply focus on that as your excuse without having to concern yourself with the deeper trends in terms of the darker history of American politics.

And Gary Webb – I am quite familiar with his case. Remember he had his own profession turn on him because they wanted to curry favor with power and they wanted to have access to power. So it was full access press and power is an aphrodisiac. Henry Kissinger said that. …

DB: Access press, as in, if you don’t say the right thing […] they can toss you into prison.

TD: Yep, precisely. And so you’re willing to overlook what may be done under the cover or blanket of government, the government structure. And so ConsortiumNews is one of the few. …

I was sort of the pre-Snowden Snowden. …

DB: He cites you for opening that door….

TD: Well, he has said there wouldn’t have been him without me. And he has cited a number of people who have preceded him, right? And I was there at the foundation, at this extraordinary willful violation of, in secret, of what I call the subversion of the Constitution. Really, it was a silent coup against the Constitution….

DB: What are the multiple dangers of the way in which information is used now, and slanted to support policy as opposed to inform?

TD: Well, it’s self-interest. It’s largely self-interest driven. You have, what I have sometimes called Gov-Corp, which is a combination of government and corporations and it’s an extraordinarily pathological relationship because they feed on each other. One protects the other and when you have the government corrupting itself to serve very powerful interests at the expense of public interests, guess what? Something has to give and what gives is public transparency. What gives is accountability. What gives is responsible power. What gives is the promise. What gives is “we the people”, right?

Power just… generally at least, power is about the people and it’s pathological, and so unfortunately the checks and balances that have in the past – Ellsberg is eyewitness to this — he’s certainly a key person by simply standing up with his colleague Edgar Russo, standing up to power in terms of the bright and shiny light called Vietnam, right? He clearly brought into the public purview what was really going on with Vietnam and, ultimately, as we know, I was a very young teen growing up in the ’70s. He was already in his early 40s at the time. That, yeah, the government can use power… and that, yeah, power does tend to corrupt. Lord Acton was right.

So, what became known as the imperial presidency of Nixon, this era makes that era look like a hyper type of person, especially post-9/11. It’s just extremely concerning. It’s what I would call the devolution of democracy and constitutional rights following 9/11 and Ellsberg has said and I have said, what was actually unlawful and unconstitutional has been made legal from his time.

And the old, what became the infamous statement made by Nixon, “You know, if the President says it’s okay, it’s not illegal.” I heard almost those exact same words when I confronted the lead attorney in the Office of General Counsel. That was the first week in October 2001. I had already found out about the massive domestic surveillance program that had been unleashed. And I confronted him and he said, “This is great. The White House has approved the program. It’s all legal.” …. The hairs on the back of my neck were like…. I’m having major flashbacks… Wait a minute, just because the White House approves it, it makes it okay? I mean, history is not kind. He says,” Yep, we’re the executive agent – all approved. Yes. Don’t ask any more questions.”

So, because the White House approved it, then it’s okay to violate the Constitution. All those checks were put in place as a result of the … president resigning, the standing committees and intelligence House and the Senate, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and a whole lot of others, right? So that was the check and balance, right? Nah, just, hey 9/11, the failure of the government to provide the common defense. 3,000 people murdered that day. It should never have happened. It really should never have happened. And so we are going to use that as sort of a reverse false flag. We’re going to use that as an excuse, because, “Hey, after all, the Constitution is not a suicide pact… you know, we don’t know where the enemy is.”

So just this weird, everything is existential now. We now know how the enemy is because of 9/11. And so it’s weird for me, having been brought up as a very young lad during the Cold War and remembering alarms going off and they’d turn off the lights and block the hall and face your lockers, right? The air raid sign drills and fears of the nuclear winter. It’s like these people want a World War 2.0.

We have far more in common with the Russians than we don’t. We have far in common than our own disputes. I assume there are some differences, right? I recognize, I am well aware, in terms of historical notes, but hey we have far more in common than we have difference.

DB: I guess what we all have in common is the state of the Earth at this point.

TD: The state of the Earth? We are the third rock from the sun. I mean, this is our home. The world is a much smaller place, in part because of technology and in part because we find out that, yeah, we really are dependent on each other.

And yet there is this addiction to conflict. There is this addiction to have threats. There is this addiction to divide. And this is not pretty. I mean, human history, the dark side of human history, and if the 20th century is not an optic lesson, then I don’t know what is….. I could go back to any of the others, in terms of written history that we know of, right? And yet here we are. And so, to me it is a sign of an empire….

The U.S. is an empire… and it is a sign of an empire that is losing it. And so, just like the Roman Empire, I mean, if you go back to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, you know…. Those who don’t learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them.

DB: Well, and the beat goes on. We’re going to let you join the party.

TD: The beat does go on. Yeah.

DB: But as we speak, there’s a major bombing, frightening bombing in Iran today.

TD: I did not know that. Wow.

DB: After the President of the United States is in Saudi Arabia. When is the last time you heard of a major suicide bomb in Iran?

TD: Not in Iran, no.

DB: So, here we go and who knows what comes next, who know what that’s going to bring in that part of the world. We thank you for all of your courage and all the suffering you did for all of us so we could know more. Thank you very much.

TD: Yeah. No. I have really become a warrior for peace. That’s what I have become. Ultimately it’s about who we are as human beings and who we are for each other and after all it is us, right? And in terms of U.S. culture and background, I think Pogo was right. We have met the enemy and the enemy is us. We are our own worst enemies.

It’s just that, for some of us, it’s critical to hold power accountable. We recognize we don’t govern ourselves very well. If you put people over others, yeah, bad things happen. But bad things tend to happen. And it’s that whole control, power. It’s all about — psychopathy is an area of study that I increasingly have as an issue, because of this idea that people gaining pleasure from the distress of others. So, it’s a disease. It really is. And some of us, at great sacrifice, weren’t going to just sit idly by and watch it all happen.

I care deeply about who we are as human beings. And I’ve spent a lot of time in front of college students and high school students and civic auditoriums and small group settings and churches and college campuses talking about these things. These are things that matter.https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/20/how-fear-of-russia-misleads-americans/

US Gov’t Proves Love for ISIS as Bill to “Stop Arming Terrorists” Gets Only 13 Supporters

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By Matt Agorist

Source: Activist Post

For the last several decades, the US government has openly funded, supported, and armed various terrorist networks throughout the world to forward an agenda of destabilization and proxy war. It is not a secret, nor a conspiracy theory, America arms bad guys.

Given the insidious history of the American empire and its creation and fostering of terrorist regimes across the globe, it should come as no surprise that the overwhelming majority of politicians would refuse to sign on to a law that requires them to ‘Stop Arming Terrorists.’ And, that is exactly what’s happened.

H.R.608 – Stop Arming Terrorists Act was introduced by Rep. Gabbard, Tulsi [D-HI] on January 23 of this year. The bill doesn’t have any crazy strings attached and its original cosponsors are a mix of Republicans and Democrats — highlighting that it transcends party lines.

“For years, our government has been providing both direct and indirect support to these armed militant groups, who are working directly with or under the command of terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, all in their effort and fight to overthrow the Syrian government,” Gabbard said in an interview earlier this year.

The text of the bill is simple. It merely states that it prohibits the use of federal agency funds to provide covered assistance to: (1) Al Qaeda, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or any individual or group that is affiliated with, associated with, cooperating with, or adherents to such groups; or (2) the government of any country that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) determines has, within the most recent 12 months, provided covered assistance to such a group or individual.

The only thing this bill does is prohibit the US government from giving money and weapons to people who want to murder Americans and who do murder innocent men, women, and children across the globe. It is quite possibly the simplest and most rational bill ever proposed by Congress. Given its rational and humanitarian nature, one would think that representatives would be lining up to show their support. However, one would be wrong.

After nearly 5 months since its introduction, only 13 of the 535 members of Congress have signed on as co-sponsors. What this lack of support for the bill shows is that the federal government is addicted to funding terror and has no intention of ever stopping it.

To add insult to treason and murder, Senator Rand Paul [R-KY] introduced this same legislation in the Senate. He currently has zero cosponsors.

Given the overwhelming lack of support for a bill that simply asks the government to stop giving money to people who behead children and video it, it should come as no surprise that Donald Trump signed hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons deals with other countries who also fund these people.

As Americans bicker over Trump’s bogus and non-existent Russian scandal, he’s signing a deal worth hundreds of billions of dollars with the largest state sponsor of terror in the world — ensuring decades of future wars and the continuation of the cycle of terrorism.

What’s more is the fact that less than one week after publicly reprimanding Qatar for terrorism, President Trump signed off on the sale of $12 billion in weapons to the country he referred to as a “funder of terrorism.” This move, in Trump’s own stance, makes him a de facto funder of terrorism now.

What this lack of support for the bills and the recent moves to arm the terrorist regimes illustrates is the fact that the US has no intention of ever stopping terrorism. Trump, just like Obama and Bush before him, will continue to foster the growth of terrorism to enrich those who profit from war.

Terrorism is necessary for the State. War, is the health of the State.

Without the constant fear mongering about an enemy who ‘hates our freedom’, Americans begin questioning things. They challenge the status quo and inevitably desire more freedom. However, when they are told that bogeymen want to kill them, they become immediately complacent and blinded by their fear.

While these bogeymen were once mostly mythical, since 9/11, they have been funded and supported by the US to the point that they now pose a very real threat to innocent people everywhere. As the recent attacks in the UK illustrate, ISIS is organizing and spreading. Even the terrorists in the UK had ties to the British government who allowed them to freely travel and train with ISIS-linked groups because those groups were in opposition to Muammar Gaddafi, who the West wanted to snub out.

It’s a vicious cycle of creating terrorists, killing innocence, and stoking war. And, unless something radical happens, it shows no signs of ever reversing.

The radical change that is necessary to shift this paradigm back to peace is for people to wake up to the reality that no matter which puppet is in the White House, the status quo remains unchanged.

Trump is proving that he can lie to get into power and his supporters ignore it. If you doubt this fact, look at what Trump did by calling out Saudi Arabia for their role in 9/11 and their support for terror worldwide prior to getting elected. He now supports these terrorists and his constituency couldn’t care less.

This madness has to stop. Humanity has to stop being fooled by rhetoric read from teleprompters by puppets doing the bidding of their masters.

Please share this article with your friends and family to show them how their supposed ‘leaders’ — except for a few good ones — are content with funding the enemy, laying waste to rights, and condone the murder of innocence.

Absent Without Leave

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

It ain’t bragging if it’s true. I’ve said repeatedly on this blog for years that the federal government would only become more impotent, more incompetent, and more ineffectual as The Long Emergency rolled out. And here we are now, at just such pass in history.

The process has been well underway since the beginning of the century. Even the attempts to expand its scope and reach — such as the post 9-11 addition of God-knows-how-many new intelligence services — has only produced an epic clusterfuck of cross-purposed mission creep that threatens the federal government’s existential legitimacy.

After nearly a year of investigating, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, DHS, et. al. haven’t been able to leak any substantial fact about “Russian collusion” with the Trump election campaign — and, considering the torrent of leaks about all manner of other collateral matters during this same period, it seems impossible to conclude that there is anything actually there besides utterly manufactured hysteria.

Now, one might imagine that this intelligence community could have manufactured some gift-wrapped facts rather than just waves of hysteria, but that’s where the incompetence and impotence comes in. They never came up with anything besides Flynn and Sessions having conversations with the Russian ambassador — as if the ambassadors are not here to have conversations with our government officials. You’d think that with all the computer graphics available these days they could concoct a cineplex-quality feature film-length recording of Donald Trump making a “great deal” to swap Kansas for Lithuania, or Jared Kushner giving piggyback rides to Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. But all we’ve really ever gotten was a packet of emails from the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta of the Clinton campaign gloating about how nicely they fucked over Bernie Sanders — and that doesn’t exactly reflect so well on what has evolved to be the so-called “Resistance.”

The net effect of all this sound and fury is a government so paralyzed that it can’t even pass bad legislation or execute its existing (excessive) duties. That might theoretically be a good thing, except what we’re seeing are individual departments just veering off on their own, especially the military, which now operates without any civilian control. Apparently General Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, pretty much decided on his own to dispatch another 8,000 US troops to Afghanistan to move things along there in the war’s 16th year. Or did he get President Trump to look up from his Twitter window for three seconds to explain the situation and get a nod of approval?

Perhaps you also didn’t notice the news item over the weekend that a US-led fighter plane coalition shot down a Syrian air force plane in Syrian airspace. In an earlier era that could easily be construed as an act of war. Who gave the order for that, you have to wonder. And what will the consequences be? Reasonable people might also ask: haven’t we already made enough deadly mischief in that part of the world?

With the US military gone rogue in foreign lands, and the intelligence community off-the-reservation at home, and the Trump White House all gummed up in the tarbaby of RussiaGate, and the House and Senate lost in the shuffle, you also have to wonder what anybody is going to do about the imminent technical bankruptcy of the USA as the Treasury Department spends down its dwindling fund of remaining cash money to pay ongoing expenses — everything from agriculture subsidies to Medicare. That well is going dry in the middle of the summer, and without any resolution to the debt ceiling debate, the country will not be able to borrow more to pretend that it’s solvent.

I don’t see any indication that the House and Senate will be able to bluster their way through this. Instead, the situation will compel extraordinary new acts of financial fraud via the central banks and its cadre of Too-Big-To-Fail associates. In the event, the likely outcome will be a spectacular fall in the value of the US dollar, and perhaps consecutively, the collapse of the equity and real estate markets.

The public may not give a shit about Syria, Afghanistan, or federal dairy supports, but they’ll sure perk up and notice that their money is going worthless. I doubt they’ll be clamoring for Hillary Clinton to be installed as the first US Caesar to fix it all.

The Crisis of US Imperial Governance and the Struggle for a New World

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By Danny Haiphong

Source: Black Agenda Report

“Economic crisis at home and endless war abroad has placed finance and monopoly capital in political disarray.”

When I was here last year, I spoke a lot about ideology and how the struggle for social transformation in the mainland of imperialism partly depended upon the ideological development of oppressed people trapped within US borders. The 2016 elections were beginning to pick-up momentum, but it was unclear what direction they would go. Fast-forward to the present and, I don’t know about you all, but I am exhausted. The election of Donald Trump has presented both new and old challenges. It has created an almost circus-like political environment with dire consequences for the masses. What precipitated the circus-show is a crisis of governance that has been intentionally misunderstood by US imperialism’s corporately owned media and political elite.

To distort the crisis, a state of anti-Russian madness has been prescribed to medicate political consciousness in rapidly changing times. The rise of China and Russia has exposed the bankruptcy of US imperialism on all fronts. Economic crisis at home and endless war abroad has placed finance and monopoly capital in political disarray. Donald Trump took advantage of the chaos. He spoke about jobs, he spoke about wars, and he spoke to the growing insecurities of white Americans of working and middle class status who no longer can rely on the wages of whiteness for guaranteed prosperity. The duopoly and its capitalist masters had no one to offer, indeed nothing to offer, so Trump rode in on his orange horse to become the head of state of imperialism.

“The rise of China and Russia has exposed the bankruptcy of US imperialism on all fronts.”

The ruling class does not want people in the United States to understand the context of the Trump Presidency. It has reapplied Cold War fears with Russia as the prime target. Russia’s geopolitical moves away from imperialism have been deemed just as criminal as China’s economic supremacy. The US does not depend as much on Russia in the economic sense, but it trembles in fear at the prospect of growing Russian economic activity across Eurasia. Yet, provoking Russia militarily will lead to World War. This is a risk the ruling class appears willing to take as the anti-Russia narrative in the US has only intensified since Hillary Clinton made the erroneous claim of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

According to the US ruling class and its “intelligence officials,” Russia promotes “fakes news” to assist Donald Trump. Russian President Vladimir Putin lurks in our social media, and is hacking his way through algorithms to smear the US political system. Russia is infecting minds with its Russia Today “propaganda” arm. The Ruskies have no regard for the damage they have caused to so-called US democracy. Putin wants total control of the US and will wield his most talented social media users to get the job done. This is what the corporate media sounds like these days.

“The U.S. trembles in fear at the prospect of growing Russian economic activity across Eurasia.”

Of course, the US ruling class doesn’t want to talk about how US intelligence already collects the numbers, emails, and calls of every single person in the world who uses a cell phone or computer. They don’t want to tell you about how the US has interfered in every election in Russia since the Soviet Union fell, or how it has led bloody proxy wars and coups in over fifty countries in as many years. They don’t want to discuss how Russia has absolutely nothing to do with the millions of incarcerated people in the US or the fact that it is the US monopoly capitalist economy, not the emerging capitalist economy of Russia, which has automated many of the jobs and siphoned much of the wealth that once belonged to a privileged sector of US workers. No, it would rather attention be placed on the Russian boogeyman.

Anti-Russian hysteria doesn’t just distract the broad masses of people from the legitimate causes of the conditions afflicting the working and unemployed. It feeds into an atmosphere of war that strikes the very roots of the US social order. Imperialism is the rule of monopoly and finance capital. This system has run its course. It cannot hold onto political legitimacy any more than it can spur economic development beyond the meager 1 to 2 percent growth calculated year after year. In a sense, war is all the system has left. And war is exactly what the ruling class will get, with or without Trump.

“They don’t want to tell you about how the US has interfered in every election in Russia since the Soviet Union fell, or how it has led bloody proxy wars and coups in over fifty countries in as many years.”

War with Russia is today’s clarion call for “American unity.” In times of crisis, the US imperial state has relied on war to bring political and economic relief from domestic crisis. Every major US-led war has in part been waged for this purpose. What differs now is that war with Russia could bring about the destruction of humanity. Scientists have confirmed that nuclear war could make the planet uninhabitable.

What is also different about this current war drive with Russia is how it marks the historical conclusion of the current stage in the world imperialist order. When the US threatened nuclear war with the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 and the Cuban missile crisis almost two decades later, the world was in the midst of a transition from Western monopoly capitalism to proletarian socialism. Revolutions in Vietnam, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, to name a few, threatened to undo the very notion of private property. And while US and Western backlash nearly eliminated the socialist bloc by 1991, the imperialist order entered a transition stage of its own that some call “neo-liberalism.”

Neo-liberalism has greatly expanded the reach of capitalism’s tentacles and widened the impact of capitalist crisis since its inception in the late 1970s. Neo-liberalism has unleashed unfettered capitalist production by imposing economic stagnation on participating countries. Meanwhile, China’s socialist model has paved a different path, one marked by unprecedented growth and poverty reduction. China has understandably attracted underdeveloped nations so desperately seeking to escape from the clutches of neo-colonial impoverishment. Russia has grown close to China, providing both countries with much assistance in the way of constructing a multi-polar economic arrangement based on the principles of sovereignty and mutually beneficial cooperation. According to the logic of neo-liberal capital, only war with Russia and China can save the system from itself.

“War with Russia could bring about the destruction of humanity.”

This conclusion stems from the fact that neo-liberal capital is not growing, it is contracting. Eighty-percent of workers are near-poor in the US while six mega billionaires hold ownership of over half of the planet’s wealth. Concentrated profit does not mean that all is well with the ruling class. Internal contradictions are eating the capitalist system alive. Neither finance capital nor its monopoly investors can arrest the resultant decline. The growth of technology to speed up production and profit has left millions stuck in permanent unemployment. A high-tech system of production is an expensive system of production, requiring lower wages and debt to absorb the falling rate of profit. Global overproduction has thus developed alongside mass misery.

Such conditions are at the root of mass incarceration, where millions of mostly Black and poor workers are warehoused in cages because there is nothing on the outside that the system can offer. They are also the root of mass surveillance, as the system must keep tabs on an increasingly restless population and justify infringements on civil liberties as necessary counter-terror measures. The War on Terror and Drugs have been prerequisites toward keeping the population scared and its attention away from the US capitalist overlords who fund and support drug trafficking and terrorism for political gain. And when all else fails, blame Russia.

“The system must keep tabs on an increasingly restless population and justify infringements on civil liberties as necessary counter-terror measures.”

The struggle against neo-liberal capital and anti-Russian hysteria is a struggle to transform and revolutionize society. This struggle requires both practical political organization and ideological development. There will be no revolution without revolutionary thought, and no revolution without revolutionary action. All too often the left is debating which one is the most important for the future success of a revolutionary movement. The answer is both, together.

For most, this explanation is understandably too broad to inform individual political energy. Liberal thought and action thus becomes attractive because it hides behind the cloak of the possible and pragmatic. It is easier to think in terms of electoral politics than in global struggle. It is far more simple to advocate for a cooperative economy or universal basic income without spelling out the broad context that prevents their formation. In order for any material victories to be won on a mass scale, the victors must understand the world in which they fight.

“A movement for social transformation in the US has still yet to be born.”

Conscious struggle has brought about meaningful and deep changes in recent years. Mumia Abu-Jamal is now receiving Hep-C treatment after years of struggle with the State of Pennsylvania. The release of Chelsea Manning and Oscar Rivera Lopez also come to mind. Solidarity with Cuba freed the Cuban 5 and has given the socialist nation more opportunities to develop its economy. But these victories have come in the midst of great cost. A movement for social transformation in the US has still yet to be born, as the presence of dozens of political prisoners and the ongoing US blockade against Cuba reminds us.

Not once did I mention the Democratic or Republican Party. Both parties have done their part to create the crisis before us. A rejection of the two-parties means an embrace of the struggle against imperialism worldwide. It means that the nations with US targets on their backs should be seen as potential allies. Yes, this includes Russia. And Syria. It includes the left movements in Latin America. In the spirit of Malcolm X, the Black liberation movement, and the historic anti-imperialist struggle around the world, the time has come to search for real bonds of solidarity around the world to aid in the struggle against white supremacy, capitalism, and empire in the US and the West. Let no one, not even those who call themselves “the left,” tell you otherwise.

 

Danny Haiphong is an Asian activist and political analyst in the Boston area. He canbereachedatwakeupriseup1990@gmail.com