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The New Ruling Coalition: Opposition to Afghanistan Withdrawal Shows Its Key Factions

November 19, 2020

The New Ruling Coalition: Opposition to Afghanistan Withdrawal Shows Its Key Factions

An unholy union of the National Security State and the neocon-backed and corporate-funded Democratic Party are about to assume power: with media-supported internet censorship a key weapon.

The Trump era has engendered numerous fractures, one might say realignments, in the political order. Long-time ideological allies are now adversaries, and long-time political enemies are now in full-fledged coalitions. These shifts are not temporary or Trump-dependent but enduring, because they are grounded in shared core beliefs about the defining debates shaping our new politics and how to consolidate real power: call it the Lincoln Project Syndrome.

WASHINGTON, DC – Former Obama CIA Director John Brennan (R) with The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg during the Washington Ideas Forum at the Harman Center for the Arts (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

One major reason for this transformation is a fundamental difference in how to understand Trump: is he the primary author of America’s pathologies or merely a symptom of pathologies which long pre-dated him? Relatedly: is removing Trump from power a vital step in returning the U.S. to its previous status as a benevolent and law-abiding republic, or is isolating him as the principal cause of the nation’s woes a cynical propaganda tactic for whitewashing the sins of those who are actually responsible so that they can rebuild their reputations and again assume power? Were Trump’s policies some radical, unprecedented aberration from U.S. political tradition or, stylistic quirks aside, a standard continuation of it?

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Daniel McAdams: “The US Has Ceased Being a Republic and Has Become a National Security State”

October 1, 2019

Daniel McAdams: “The US Has Ceased Being a Republic and Has Become a National Security State”

Daniel McAdams 0d77b

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Your Twitter account has just been closed. Why?

Daniel McAdams: In August I was watching a segment of the Sean Hannity program while at a friend’s house and noticed that despite an hour of Hannity ranting against the “deep state” in the US, he was wearing a lapel pin bearing the seal of the US Central Intelligence agency, which most would agree is either the center or at least an important hub of the US “deep state” itself. I tweeted about this strange anomaly and as a comment to my own Tweet on it I happened to say that Hannity is “retarded.” Twitter informed me that I had committed “hateful conduct” for “promoting violence against or directly attacking or threatening other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.” It is clear on its face that I did none of these. I used a non-politically correct term to ridicule Hannity for attacking the “deep state” while wearing the symbols of the deep state on his very lapel.

It is clear that Twitter is deeply biased against any voices outside the mainstream, pro-empire perspective. As a leading Tweeter in opposition to interventionist US foreign policy, I had long been targeted by those who enable and enforce Twitter’s political biases. Look at who Twitter partners with and you will understand why I was banned for a transparently false reason: the US government-funded Atlantic Council and other similar organizations are working with Twitter to eliminate any voices challenging US global military empire.

In your opinion, what exactly is the role of the CIA in the regime changes of some countries around the world?

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

JFK, Trump, Russia, and the Deep State

January 17, 2019

JFK, TRUMP, RUSSIA, AND THE DEEP STATE

Ever since I began writing on the JFK assassination, there have been those who have said to me, “What difference does it make whether this was a regime-change operation? Most everyone who engaged in it is dead by now anyway. What relevance does the assassination have for us living today?”

The answer: We are still living under the governmental structure that pulled it off, the same structure that has been conducting a counterintelligence investigation of President Trump to determine whether he is a secret agent of the Russian government and, therefore, a threat to “national security.”

While such an investigation appears absolutely ordinary to the mainstream press, it actually is a very shocking notion. After all, the president is the ostensible head of the executive branch of the federal government. Here we have people working in what are ostensibly subordinate parts of the executive branch carrying out a secret counterintelligence investigation of the man at the top.

To understand what is occurring here, it’s important to put the matter in a historical context.

The U.S. government began as a limited-government republic. That’s the type of governmental structure that the American people called into existence when they approved the Constitution.

In the beginning of the republic and for the next 100 years, there was no Pentagon, military-industrial complex, large and permanent military establishment, CIA, NSA, or FBI. There was only a relatively small sized army.

The powers that the Constitution delegated to the federal government were few and limited. The Bill of Rights expressly restricted the powers of the federal government. The foreign policy of the U.S. government was one of non-intervention – that is, not to get embroiled in alliances, wars, revolutions, civil wars, and famines in Europe and Asia.

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Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Surveillance Capitalism

March 22, 2018

Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Surveillance Capitalism

Whether it creeps into politics, marketing, or simple profiling, the nature of surveillance as totality has been affirmed by certain events this decade.  The Edward Snowden disclosures of 2013 demonstrated the complicity and collusion between Silicon Valley and the technological stewards of the national security state.

It took the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 to move the issue of social media profiling, sharing and targeting of information, to another level.  Not only could companies such as Facebook monetise their user base; those details could, in turn, be plundered, mined and exploited for political purpose.

As a social phenomenon, Facebook could not help but become a juggernaut inimical to the private sphere it has so comprehensively colonised.  “Facebook in particular,” claimed WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in May 2011, “is the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.” It furnished “the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence.”

Now, the unsurprising role played by Cambridge Analytica with its Facebook accessory to politicise and monetise data reveals the tenuous ground notions of privacy rest upon.  Outrage and uproar has been registered, much of it to do with a simple fact: data was used to manipulate, massage and deliver a result to Trump – or so goes the presumption.  An instructive lesson here would be to run the counter-factual: had Hillary Clinton won, would this seething discontent be quite so enthusiastic?

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The Worst Mistake in U.S. History

September 21, 2017

THE WORST MISTAKE IN U.S. HISTORY

The worst mistake in U.S. history was the conversion after World War II of the U.S. government from a constitutional, limited-government republic to a national-security state. Nothing has done more to warp and distort the conscience, principles, and values of the American people, including those who serve in the U.S. military.

A good example of how the national-security state has adversely affected the thinking of U.S. soldiers was reflected in an op-ed entitled “What We’re Fighting For” that appeared in the February 10, 2017, issue of the New York Times. Authored by an Iraq War veteran named Phil Klay, the article demonstrates perfectly what the national-security state has done to soldiers and others and why it is so imperative for the American people to restore a constitutional republic to our land.

Klay begins his op-ed by extolling the exploits of another U.S. Marine, First Lt. Brian Chontosh, who, displaying great bravery, succeeded in killing approximately two dozen Iraqis in a fierce firefight during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Klay writes,

When I was a new Marine, just entering the Corps, this story from the Iraq invasion defined heroism for me. It’s a perfect image of war for inspiring new officer candidates, right in line with youthful notions of what war is and what kind of courage it takes — physical courage, full stop.

Klay then proceeds to tell a story about an event he witnessed when he was deployed to Iraq in 2007. After doctors failed to save the life of a Marine who had been shot by an Iraqi sniper, those same doctors proceeded to treat and save the life of the sniper, who himself had been shot by U.S. troops. Klay used the story to point out the virtuous manner in which U.S. forces carried out their military mission in Iraq.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Untangling America from the American Empire

October 30, 2015

Untangling America from the American Empire

Those calling for an end of the Empire don’t seem to realize that the federal state’s vast entitlement programs are ultimately funded by the Empire.

The Status Quo would have us believe that America and its Empire are one entity. This is handy for those with Imperial designs but it is false: America could be untangled from its Empire, and many of us believe it is essential that America untangles itself from its Imperial structures and ideologies.

What I call The Imperial Project was cobbled together in the aftermath of World War II, when the Soviet Union and America posed an existential threat to each other’s ideologies and systems. It may be hard to believe, but the U.S. did not have a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other espionage/intelligence gathering agency prior to World War II.

America had no spy agency and no Black Operations/Special Forces capabilities. The National Security State as we know it today did not exist.

Though the Deep State has long been an essential feature of the American power structure, the post-war Deep State extended its reach globally in ways that the pre-war Deep State could not.

I have covered the Deep State for many years:

Surplus Repression and the Self-Defeating Deep State (May 26, 2015)

Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014)

The Dollar and the Deep State (February 24, 2014)

Many people naively think all that’s needed to end the Imperial Project is close America’s overseas military installations and end the endless wars of choice.While the eradication of the neo-conservative Imperial agenda would be a welcome first step, it would only be a first step, as I explained in  You Can’t Separate Empire, the State, Financialization and Crony Capitalism.

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Forget the New World Order, Here’s Who Really Runs the World

September 25, 2015

Forget the New World Order, Here’s Who Really Runs the World

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.

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