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Self-exiled Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko’s false flag “assassination” in Kiev is one of the most scandalous media stunts in recent memory.
Most people are already aware of his dramatic stunt in appearing at a live press conference about his reported “killing” and then admitting that the whole thing was staged in order to capture what he claimed were his Russian-backed wannabe assassins, but many have yet to realize the larger implications of what just happened. A lot of commentary has since been made about how irresponsible it was of Ukraine to carry out this false flag incident in tricking the world for the sake of smearing Russia’s reputation right before the World Cup, with the revelation that this was 100% fake news being used to cast even more suspicion on the Mainstream Media – and especially those that are operating within Ukraine – than ever before.
Relatedly, it reinforces claims that the White Helmets’ famous videos of dead children in Syria were also faked like how independent journalist Vanessa Beeley proved through her extensive investigative reporting in the country over the years, to say nothing of renewing doubts over the official narrative about the Skripals. In hindsight, this self-admitted false flag provocation retroactively adds credence to the argument that these two aforementioned high-profile examples were also staged as well, though there’s also another angle to all of this that hasn’t been given the attention that it deserves, and that’s the cooperation between journalists and the “deep state”.
By now it’s taken for granted that some journalists clandestinely cooperate, and even coordinate their activities, with their de-facto handlers from the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies after witnessing how the media waged its infowar against Trump over the past 3 years, but Babchenko’s false flag “assassination” introduced a new dimension into all of this.
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It’s been a weird last couple of days. I wrote an article about WikiLeaks’ dismissal of “QAnon”, the anonymous 8chan poster that hundreds of thousands of conspiracy newbies believe is sharing secret, coded information about Donald Trump’s heroic war against the US deep state.
Ever since I hit publish I’ve been getting a bunch of angry Q enthusiasts in my social media notifications accusing me of being a shill for the establishment. Because I don’t believe someone who says that we should all trust the President of the United States. Blind faith in the executive branch of the US government is anti-establishment now.
As bizarre as these interactions have been, they are still vastly more pleasant than my typical interactions with the faction I see as QAnon’s mirror image, the Russiagaters. Though enthusiasts of the Russiagate conspiracy theory are far more nasty and vituperative than the Q crowd, there are many similarities. Like QAnon, Russiagate is fueled by about ten percent information and ninety percent desperate need to believe. Like QAnon, Russiagate is so thinly substantiated it doesn’t begin to look legitimate until you’ve spent weeks crawling down the rabbit holes of its bulletproof echo chambers and squinting just right at everything you see until it feels true. Like QAnon, the evangelists of Russiagate center their revolutionary sentiment around President Donald Trump. Like QAnon, they shouldn’t.
Trump campaigned on a non-interventionist policy. Thus far what that looks like is increasing US military presence in Syria and Afghanistan, edging toward direct confrontation with Russia, and pushing regime change in Iran. But it’s all 4-D chess against the deep state, right?
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Since the “Russiagate” probe began, US president Donald Trump and his supporters have used lots of bandwidth raging against what they refer to as the “Deep State.” Does the Deep State exist? If so, what is it, and are its forces arrayed specifically against Donald Trump and his administration?
Yes, the Deep State exists — probably more so at one end of its numerous definitions and less so at the other, but to some degree at both ends.
At the seemingly more benign end, the Deep State is simply what one might think of as the “permanent government” — the army of bureaucrats and functionaries whose careers span multiple administrations. Like all career employees of large organizations as groups, they tend to fear and resist change, and their sheer mass has an inertial effect. They energetically do things the old way and drag their feet on new things.
At the end dismissed by mainstream commentators as “conspiracy theory,” the Deep State is an invisible second government which acts in a coordinated manner to protect its prerogatives and advance its interests and favored policies versus changes supposedly demanded by “the people” via their elected representatives in Congress and the presidency. The premier example of this view is the claim that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and the military industrial complex because (in one version) he was about to get the US out of Vietnam.
If that end of the spectrum sounds crazy to you, consider:
Former FBI attorney Lisa Page and former FBI deputy counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok, while working on a pre-election investigation into alleged collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government, exchanged text messages with incendiary content such as “there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.”
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Most don’t have to look very hard to see clear evidence that there’s a deep state. But now it’s becoming even more clear that president Donald Trump’s White House, at least in some capacity, is a part of the same deep state the president promised to eliminate by “draining the swamp.”
Trump does indeed have a problem with people working against him, but some of those people are awfully close by…
Leaks to the media have plagued Trump’s presidency since his first day in office, and a new report on leakers’ motives opens a window into the extent of the subterfuge. “To be honest, it probably falls into a couple of categories,” one White House official told Axios‘s Jonathan Swan. “The first is personal vendettas. And two is to make sure there’s an accurate record of what’s really going on in the White House.” Many of those with ties and puppet strings connecting them to the deep state are actually in Trump’s White House, according to The Washington Post.
A wave of leaks from government officials has hobbled the Trump administration, leading some to draw comparisons to countries like Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan, where shadowy networks within government bureaucracies, often referred to as “deep states,” undermine and coerce elected governments. Though leaks can be a normal and healthy check on a president’s power, what’s happening now extends much further.
A former White House official who, according to Swan, “turned leaking into an art form,” said that “leaking is information warfare; it’s strategic and tactical — strategic to drive [the] narrative, tactical to settle scores.”
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At least it is confirmed for us. Donald Trump wants regime change in Iran. His cancellation of the JCPOA was a decision born his myopia. He has surrounded himself with people who reinforce his view and manipulate him via his vanity.
And the price of implementing his current plan will be a global debt crisis which no one will escape. The problem will be very few will see the links.
He wants to remake America and the world in his image while undoing anything President Obama touched. Most of this I’m wholly on board with. Obama was a vandal. So, however, were Bush the Lesser and Bill Clinton.
We’re All Neocons Now
We have a leaked (yeah, right) memo explaining this is the plan. But, we didn’t need this if we were being honest with ourselves. Nothing Trump has done since he’s been in office has been contra to this goal; overthrowing the theocracy in Iran.
In fact, it has been a step-wise move in this direction with each decision he’s made. Commentators I respect and have learned at the knee of still want to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Not me.
It’s right there in plain text.
Trump has capitalized on the insane Deep State opposition to his presidency to politicize this goal and get his base to ab-react for regime change, when he explicitly said that was off the table at his inauguration.
If the Democrats and Merkel want to stay in the deal, then the deal must be bad. Obama Bad, Trump Good. Trump is Orange Jesus. He knows stuff, man.
What was a worry about Israeli influence in his administration in 2017 has now morphed into a call to duty to create chaos in Iran to assuage the American ego by saving the Iranian people from themselves.
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Every nation worth its salt has a deep state, a loose network of rich and powerful players who ratify, veto or formulate state social, economic and military policies. Whether monarchy, dictatorship, or constitutional republic, no government worthy of the name lacks for a shadowy unelected elite with hands on the tiller and in the till, influential persons with inherited or recent wealth, upper crust social connections, and old school ties, often found sitting on boards of directors and golf carts in isolated settings.
Like Sandhill Cranes, they are rare and difficult to spot in their habitats, seamlessly blending as they do with their inaccessible surroundings. Amongst themselves, however, they are highly convivial. Partial to receptions, they bibulate and circulate as they joust over canapés. Not to worry they are but degenerates just killing time, important things get done under the buzz. Small talk can have big consequences and decadent environs make deal-making a sport.
Mostly these birds are captains of industry and lords of finance with close ties to useful acolytes in law enforcement, armed services, academia, NGOs, charities, and publishing and mass media. They vet and replace politicians in so-called democracies, knowing that elected officials are too unreliable and the populace too fickle and ignorant of the ways of the world to perpetuate proper governance on their own.
Meddling in affairs of a deep state by the uninitiated is to be eschewed and may be heavily sanctioned, lest intemperate initiatives capsize the ship of state that for generations has been carefully provisioned and cunningly piloted to transport treasure to home ports. Too, they eschew taxation, preferring to direct their resources to projects that will rebound to their own benefit. Should it take a war to maintain or expand their influence, it can be arranged, followed by a fragile peace to consolidate gains and gird the nation for the next remunerative conflict.
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I told you over the weekend that Trump’s presidency was over. As a practical matter it is. His yielding to his ‘advisors’ on every foreign policy issue makes it clear that he can’t or won’t stand up to the relentless pressure to do what his instincts tell him.
This morning’s article at the Deep State Washington Post paints a very clear picture of what the situation is. The advisors whose loyalties are dubious run the show. Their thinking has not evolved one whit from previous administrations.
Remember what Russian President Vladimir Putin always says, “Presidents change. Policies do not.”
Case in point they manipulated Trump into over-reacting to the Skripal poisoning by ousting 60 Russian diplomats, even though Trump clearly wanted to match Germany and France.
The United States, they explained, would be ousting roughly the same number of Russians as its European allies — part of a coordinated move to punish Moscow for the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil.
“We’ll match their numbers,” Trump instructed, according to a senior administration official. “We’re not taking the lead. We’re matching.”
The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian officials — far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on.
You can almost see the evil glee on the part of the WaPo writer and Trump’s staffers who misled him into signing an order they knew he disagreed with.
And this is why Trump is not president currently. This is not the first time he’s been backed into a bad decision by the nest of vipers in his administration.
And he won’t be until he removes the worst people from his cabinet. Unfortunately, the trend on that front is definitely not our friend.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.” – George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones
“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impassible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance.
Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
I’m always a little behind when it comes to popular TV, especially when the shows are on premium cable channels. Being cheap, I’ve refused to pay for any premium cable channels, plus I’ve spent much of my life on baseball fields and in hockey rinks, rather than watching TV. When my kids recently signed up for HBO Now, I finally got to watch The Sopranos, eleven years after its final episode aired. Now I’m finally able to watch Game of Thrones, after it has been on the air for seven seasons. In the opening episodes I was impressed by the theme which permeates the series. Numerous characters stated “Winter is Coming”. I was immediately struck by the parallels with the Fourth Turning theory about the cyclical nature of our world.
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I’m going to keep this simple. Follow the dots and try to keep up.
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Anyone who thinks democracy doesn’t matter may be in for a rude shock later this year, when we know the result of America’s mid-term elections. The Deep State is on course to take control of Congress. If this happens, it will be the next step in a global trend of side-lining democracy in the West, driven in large part by American foreign policy. It has led to governments everywhere increasing control over their people, in an inversion of democratic principles.
It affects us all. Since the Twin Towers tragedy, American foreign policy has taken the lead in extending personal surveillance to every nation in the formerly free world. It has forced banks to divulge their customers’ private affairs in the name of preventing terrorism, crime and tax evasion. Governments that resist these moves have been destabilised, and independent agencies, such as the SWIFT banking system, have been forced to implement America’s foreign policy.
All countries have been made to go along with America’s imperatives, admittedly often willingly. Swiss banking confidentiality no longer exists, and over one hundred countries automatically swap financial information on their citizens and their businesses. The Americans routinely spy on their allies, as Mrs Merkel found out in 2015.
The erosion of democracy in America is a problem that was anticipated in its founding constitution. The rights enshrined in it are there to protect the individual from the Federal Government, yet the Federal Government chips away at those rights, as the founding fathers doubtless feared it would. The right to keep and bear arms in the Second Amendment, always a contentious issue, was framed by James Madison so that a local militia would be able to repel a standing [Federal] army.[i] Americans still have the right to bear arms, due to the efforts of the National Rifle Association, but as the Bundy family discovered in Nevada, don’t expect the Federal government to respect your constitutional rights.
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With spring, things come unstuck; an unspooling has begun. The turnaround at the FBI and Department of Justice has been so swift that even The New York Times has shut up about collusion with Russia — at the same time omitting to report what appears to have been a wholly politicized FBI upper echelon intruding on the 2016 election campaign, and then laboring stealthily to un-do the election result.
The ominous silence enveloping the DOJ the week after Andrew McCabe’s firing — and before the release of the FBI Inspector General’s report — suggests to me that a grand jury is about to convene and indictments are in process, not necessarily from Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s office. The evidence already publicly-aired about FBI machinations and interventions on behalf of Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump looks bad from any angle, and the wonder was that it took so long for anyone at the agency to answer for it.
McCabe is gone from office and, apparently hung out to dry on the recommendation of his own colleagues. Do not think for a moment that he will just ride off into the sunset. Meanwhile, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, have been sent to the FBI study hall pending some other shoes dropping in a grand jury room. James Comey is out hustling a book he slapped together to manage the optics of his own legal predicament (evidently, lying to a congressional committee). And way out in orbit beyond the gravitation of the FBI, lurk those two other scoundrels, John Brennan, former head of the CIA (now a CNN blabbermouth), and James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, a new and redundant post in the Deep State’s intel matrix (and ditto a CNN blabbermouth). Brennan especially has been provoked to issue blunt Twitter threats against Mr. Trump, suggesting he might be entering a legal squeeze himself.
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Washington, D.C.— Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said Tuesday during an appearance on The Laura Ingraham Show podcast that the term “deep state” accurately describes how an unelected bureaucracy of national security officials in positions of power exert influence without Congressional oversight.
“Absolutely, there is a deep state, because the deep state is the intelligence agencies that do not have oversight,” he said. “Only eight people in Congress know what they’re doing, and traditionally, those eight people have been a rubber stamp to let the intelligence communities do whatever they want. There is no skeptic among the eight people that are supposedly overseeing the intelligence community.”
The “Gang of Eight” that Paul referenced is made up of the majority and minority leaders of the House of Representatives and Senate, along with the chairmen and ranking members of the two intelligence committees, and are the select few members of Congress with real-time access to America’s most sensitive intelligence.
Paul pointed out that he believed Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and others used intelligence collected “without any judicial warrants” for political purposes, in addition to “try to bring Trump down.”
“John Brennan and James Clapper were doing whatever the hell they wanted, without any judicial warrants, and I think there were numerous people in the Obama administration who were using intelligence — one, to try to bring Trump down; but two, also, they were using it for political purposes,” he said. “And this is very, very worrisome.”
Paul evidenced his point by noting Brennan’s politicized tweet over the weekend calling Trump a corrupt demagogue, and promising that America would “triumph” over him.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Although most Americans are unfamiliar with the term ‘Deep State,’ according to recent polling they are nevertheless skeptical of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy, John V. Walsh reports.
“Public Troubled by Deep State” is the headline that the Monmouth University Polling Institute tags to its recent poll. Acknowledging that polling about the term “Deep State” is problematic because “few Americans (13%) are very familiar with the term ‘Deep State,’” the pollsters at Monmouth defined the term as follows for their interviewees: “The term Deep State refers to the possible existence of a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy.”
The Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Defense Department, as viewed with the Potomac River and Washington, D.C., in the background. (Defense Department photo)
Then they asked whether such a group exists.
Monmouth reports the results as follows: “Nearly 3-in-4 (74%) say they believe this type of apparatus exists in Washington. This includes 27% who say it definitely exists and 47% who say it probably exists. Only 1-in-5 say it does not exist (16% probably not and 5% definitely not).”
These opinions do not follow a partisan divide. The report explains that belief in the Deep State’s existence “comes from more than 7-in-10 Americans in each partisan group, although Republicans (31%) and independents (33%) are somewhat more likely than Democrats (19%) to say that the Deep State definitely exists.”
This leads the director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, Patrick Murray, to volunteer: “We usually expect opinions on the operation of government to shift depending on which party is in charge. But there’s an ominous feeling by Democrats and Republicans alike that a ‘Deep State’ of unelected operatives are pulling the levers of power.”
In addition, there are some significant but not drastic racial and ethnic differences on this question. Says the report, “Americans of black, Latino and Asian backgrounds (35%) are more likely than non-Hispanic whites (23%) to say that the Deep State definitely exists.”
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For the past two years, the long-running narrative, at least that promulgated by the mainstream media which continues to “explain away” Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump, is that Americans had fallen for a massive, long-running fake news scam (in part aided and abetted by the likes of Facebook), which boosted Trump’s popularity at the expense of Hillary’s as part of some giant “Russian collusion” conspiracy theory between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin (which Mueller was supposed to uncover, but has instead shifted to investigating obstruction, seemingly unable to find anything).
But what if that entire narrative is dead wrong: what if Americans have become so skeptical in the government process and structure, they never needed a “fake news” boost to vote for an establishment outsider?
According to a new poll, that’s precisely the case because a supermajority of Americans believes the faction of unelected officials, known as the deep state, is orchestrating policy in Washington, D.C. and effectively running the nation.
The Monmouth University Polling Institute found that no less than 74% of Americans believe in a “deep state” when it is described as a collection of unelected officials running policy. Only 21% do not believe this kind of group exists.
As a result of countless “conspiracy theories” being proven as facts in recent years, chief among which the Edwards Snowden revelations which exposed the NSA as nothing short of “big brother”, and the Wikileaks disclosures which revealed how the Democratic Party colluded against Bernie Sanders to promote Clinton’s candidacy and countless more such examples, fully 8-in-10 believe that the U.S. government currently monitors or spies on the activities of American citizens, including a majority (53%) who say this activity is widespread and another 29% who say such monitoring happens but is not widespread. Just 14% say this monitoring does not happen at all. Shockinly, there were no substantial partisan differences in these results.
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In August 2017 we noted Russia’s largest private lender was in trouble and required a bailout. Then a month later, a second bank hit the wall and was bailed out. And now, five months later, Russia’s central bank is mulling a further capital injection of a trillion rubles to rescue Otkritie and B&N Banks.
In August, Otkritie Bank, which according to Interfax, “ranks 1st among privately-owned banks and 4th by assets among banking groups in Russia,” was rescued by the central bank because “the bank is a systemically important credit organization, it occupies the 8th place in terms of assets. The Bank’s infrastructure includes 22 branches and more than 400 internal structural subdivisions.”
Interestingly, as the FT wrote at the start of 2017, “the breakneck expansion at Otkritie is raising fears that it is creating risks the state will eventually have to deal with.
“It’s not a business, it’s all relations,” a senior Russian investor says. “They want to become too big to fail.” Adds a senior Russian banker: “They are not a bank, they are a very risky hedge fund. Why should this be done with regulators’ [the central bank’s] money?“
The market did not love it…
Ironically, Otkritie’s predecessor was the aptly named Shchit-bank:
And then, less than a month later, already nervous Russian depositors shifted their attention to another domestic lender, Russia’s B&N Bank, the country’s 12th biggest lender by assets, also sought a bailout from the central bank.
B&N Bank, which is controlled by Russian oligarch Mikhail Gutseriev and was not on the central bank’s list of systemically important lenders, said it had under-estimated the problems within the banks it had bought during an expansion drive. “Our objective is, with the support of the central bank … to conduct an effective financial rehabilitation of the bank,” said Mikail Shishkhanov, who was named as chairman of B&N Bank, whose assets account for 2 percent of the Russian banking system, according to ratings agency Fitch.
We noted at the time, that perhaps, if the Russian central bank has unlimited funds to keep bailing out the Russian oligarch’s pet banks which they used mostly to launder illicit funds, then sure. Then again, where there are two bank runs in under a month, more are guaranteed, and all that would take to cripple the Russian financial system is a panic at one of the larger domestic banks, rekindling memories of the near collapse Russia experienced in late 2014 when crashing oil prices and a plunging ruble, sent Russian rates as high as 20% and pushed the country to the verge of hyperinflation.
In other words, if the “deep state” really wants to hurt Russia, it knows what to do.
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