Impeachment, the Left, and the Deep State (Keep going, Toto!)
Bill Martin
Dear Off Guardian readers,
Warm greetings, my name is Bill Martin. You can read a little about me at the end of this article. I have been writing about the Trump phenomenon and related matters since March 2016, at CounterPunch.org.
Increasingly, I have found myself out of step with most of what is written there, and the editor there has now determined that it would be best if I moved on. The editors at OffGuardian have kindly offered to continue my series, and for this I am very grateful.
The basic argument in these articles is that the presidency of Donald Trump represents a clarification regarding how our social system works and a disruption of business-as-usual in this system.
(Of course, I go into many specifics in the articles, and if you would care to read more deeply on my larger perspective, please see especially “The Trump Experiment” and “The Fourth Hypothesis” at CounterPunch.org.)
For his efforts, Trump is opposed by the far greater part of the Deep State, neoconservatives in the Republic Party, the neoliberal globalist core of the Democratic Party, and the elements that make up the Deep State, with the “intelligence community” at its core.
“The Left” is little help here, having now attached to Identity Politics and the Democratic Party, whether wittingly or unwittingly.
Lastly, let me say that while I support the Trump Disruption and Clarification, I think it is also very important to press the case that, the people who believe in the idea that Trump must be got rid of at all costs either have no clue as to the real costs, or they are themselves agents of the Deep State.
Of course, it is the former among “ordinary Democrats” and Leftists, and my articles are meant as a challenge to their delusions.
Ultimately these articles will be edited and made into a book, which I hope to title, The Trump Clarification: Disruption at the Edge of the System.
* * *
The impeach Trump people don’t understand that if the coup against the elected president succeeds, every future president will know that if he attempts to “drain the swamp” or bring any changes not acceptable to the ruling elite, he, too, will be destroyed.
Voters who want real change will also get the message and give up trying to elect a president or members of the House and Senate who will be responsive to voters. It will mean the end of democracy and accountable government. Unhindered rule by the Deep State and associated elites will take democracy’s place.
Paul Craig Roberts (Russia-insider.com, 11.8.19
Paul Craig Roberts is completely right about the Deep State; where he is just a little bit wrong is in this idea of “losing our democracy”— an expression he uses later in the article and that is often used by liberals and the Left in America when talking about Trump.
For sure, the election of Donald Trump could very well turn out to be the last gasp of what “democracy” there is, and obviously we see how the establishment and the Deep State have responded to that.
However, I do think we need to reach a consensus that when almost anyone (I’m willing to make an exception for Roberts, certainly here) leads into an argument with something about “losing our democracy,” what follows is almost always bullshit.
Certainly that is true when Democrats or the allied Left use this or a similar expression, but let’s cut it out altogether, as it detracts from focusing on where the real power is in the United States and in the world, and what we can do about it.
Here my aim is to say something more direct regarding the current “impeachment process”.
*
The term “process” has to be placed in scare-quotes because this is a carefully-organized and –timed maneuver of the establishment and the Deep State, stage-managed by the leadership of the Democratic Party.
It resembles thus far certain “processes” in academia that are Star Chamber proceedings, without even the pretense of fairness. But of course fairness is a principle, and this “process” is about power.
Sean Wilentz, in his recent piece in Rolling Stone (Nov. 2019), couches his argument for impeachment in historical terms that, more often than not (e.g., the cases of John Adams and Andrew Johnson), tell against his argument — but he knows he can get away with this because any claim or “argument” will suffice for the anti-Trumper (and, after all: this is a Princeton History Professor we’re talking about!).
The article’s title is “Why We Must Impeach.” Writing in the middle of Kansas, I will invoke Tonto here: Who do you mean, Prof. Wilentz, by that “we”?
Wilentz’s article is an excellent primer in establishment “thought,” both as an exercise in self-justification for the establishment (e.g., many students at Princeton and other elite institutions) and in the bullshit that “blue no matter who”-types lap up as if it was manna from heaven.
One hilarious bit of such bullshit is Wilentz’s assertion, “Trump is said to fear Joe Biden” (p.46).
In the same issue of Rolling Stone, two pages later, Matt Taibbi writes that, “All year, Trump has displayed an almost grastrointestinal eagerness to face Biden in the general election” (“The Biden Paradox,” p.48).
This seems more likely the case to me, and certainly that’s what I thought when the “Blue People,” as I’ll call them, started raving about Trump’s trying to discredit/take down “a political opponent.”
By the way, that’s it for any discussion of Biden by Wilentz: no reference to his manipulation of foreign aid to get Hunter a high-paying no-work/no-show job, and to further strengthen the anti-Russia agenda of the neoliberal and neoconservative military alliance (well represented by the Clintons and Bushes).
No mention of how this same alliance has worked tirelessly to take down Trump since before he was elected, and certainly since then. No mention of how all of this is yet another extension of the “Russia” narrative.
No mention of the relationship of the impeachment “process” to the fact that the Democrats have no one to run against Trump and no actual proposals (Elizabeth Warren’s bizarre fantasies aside — does she really think people are going to vote for a “plan” that has a $52-trillion price tag attached to it?; and Bernie Sanders, on whom more later, also aside, as the DNC is undoubtedly working overtime to deal him out one way or another — note that Mayor Pete recently declared that he is now in a two-way race with Warren, with no mention of Biden or Sanders), and so would prefer to head off running against Trump altogether if they can, and to at least drag out the “inquiry” stage of the “process” as long as possible to try to undermine Trump on the way to an election—if they have to have one.
Instead, Wilentz disparages Trump’s references to “Congress’ lawful investigation” as a “coup.” Wilentz also pulls the standard Blue ploy of dismissing talk of the Deep State as some kind of lunatic conspiracy theory.
Here is another of the central dangers of permitting Trump to stay in office. According to Wilentz, he has shown he will stop at nothing to taint the 2020 election. And more profoundly, he is trying to subvert the American government. Trump and his supporters like to rail against what they call the “deep state” as an un-American force.
But that “deep state” is, in fact, nothing more than the government of the United States of America, which he and his supporters hold in open contempt and which the Trump White House has done its utmost to decimate, replacing responsible officials with flunkies. (p.47)
In the same moment that this article came out, the Deep State itself (with the help of the establishment and Democratic Party leadership) began an open effort to redefine itself, at least as far as the public imagination is concerned.
Here is a helpful guide from Edward Curtin (a sociology professor at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and excellent debunker of the establishment and Deep State); I have placed the third paragraph of the piece first, then the first two paragraphs:
It was two years ago, early in the Trump administration, when The New Yorker and Salon, among many others, were asserting in no uncertain terms that there was no deep state in the United States, and so Trump had nothing to fear from that quarter since it was a figment of his paranoia.
It gets funny, this shallow analysis of the deep state that is currently big news. There’s something ghoulish about it, perfectly timed for Halloween and masked jokers. What was once ridiculed by the CIA and its attendant lackeys in the media as the paranoia of “conspiracy theorists” is now openly admitted in reverent tones of patriotic fervor. But with a twisted twist.
The “Deep State” has been redefined as career bureaucrats doing their patriotic duty.
– The Metamorphosis of the Deep State, off-guardian.org, 10.31.19
Curtin summarizes at the end of the article, “To think that the deep state is government employees just doing their patriotic duty is plain idiocy and plainer propaganda.”
The thing is, Wilentz doesn’t need to cover anymore for the CIA and other parts of the “intelligence community” among his Blue fan base — they’re fine with a CIA coup against Trump.
And, of course, “responsible officials,” as Wilentz puts it, means people willing to do the bureaucratic, administrative, “political,” police, military, and most of all the secret-police work of advancing the neoliberal/neoconservative military economic compact.
These people are as much “flunkies” as anyone, though they are often highly competent and effective—just like Hillary Clinton is “competent” in ways that Donald Trump is not.
If you’re on the Left, you’re supposed to be able to see through this establishment bullshit.
Therefore, by modus ponens, the “real Left” does see through it and doesn’t get involved in any way (including cheerleading for impeachment) with these machinations; therefore, by modus tolens, if one is not able to see through this bullshit, one is not really on the Left.
Unfortunately, the valid conclusion is elsewhere: This is what the American Left is today.
As for those who do see through the bullshit and refuse to be a part of it, we will have to reconstitute ourselves as a radical force in new terms and new ways.
(I have tried to contribute to this effort. It is difficult work, in theory and practice, and I am feeling my way toward things as best I can. That is why my articles in this series are so long, complicated, diffuse, the latter in the sense of going in many directions—and notwithstanding the need for some good editing heading into the final versions.)
*
Facebook discussion continues to be a helpful grist for my mill regarding my Trump Clarification project.
The following bit of Facebook dialogue began with a post by a fellow from NYC, who now lives in a small city near Reykjavik, Iceland. He is a poet and Buddhist priest, a meditation teacher, and a fellow CounterPunch writer.
The post referred to Trump as a huckster for his recent move from New York to Florida. The writer says that Trump will probably be reelected, though he “can’t fathom why.” On further thought he attributes this to the ignorance of “USAmericans.”
Two women, with whom I am also friends on FB, make the following contributions:
1. Trump will be reelected because of the corruption of the Democrats, their insane and insidious obsession with Russia, combined with decades of neoliberalism and utter neglect of much of “flyover country”. These people have been subjected to a form of what a friend called ” capitalist nihilism”; they’re now returning the favor.
2. All they have ever done for the past thirty years is shift to the right and try to become more like the Republicans to win elections. Now they have copied the worst elements of the right with these Tea Party conspiracy-mongering tactics, replete with their own woke version of Rush Limbaugh in Rachel Maddow, peddling nonsense every night on MSDNC.
That term, “capitalist nihilism,” deserves to enter our general political category! My own contribution to the thread:
The terms “left” and “right” have now completely outlived their usefulness, but if they must be used, let’s just recognize that there is now a “Left” (“developing”/devolving for roughly thirty years now) that is to the right of the Right.
We now see a “Left” that, wittingly or unwittingly, is on board with an impeachment “process” that is nothing more than a rolling coup to put the CIA-led Deep State back into full control.
This is not about Republicans or Democrats, except that the latter is at present the leading “political” steering media for this restoration of the establishment.
Once this restoration occurs, it will become much harder to loosen things up again. Perhaps, though, when the establishment/Deep State reasserts itself, under Democratic Party leadership, the conditions will be ripe for the emergence of a Yellow Jersey-type movement of working people in the U.S.
(But note the general lack of enthusiasm by the U.S. Left for the Gilets Jaunes in France. This mainly shows the instinctive way that the U.S. Left now folds itself into the Democrats, as the Gilets Jaunes are not protesting France’s Trump but rather France’s Hillary.)
Whether Donald Trump is a true spanner in the works of the establishment/Deep State or simply a loose screw in the mechanism, there is no excuse for getting behind the Democrats and this impeachment “process.” None whatsoever.
As this “process” goes forward, however, it should be obvious to those with eyes and ears with which to see and hear, or, more to the point a brain with which to think, that the establishment and the Deep State do see Trump as a threat. “God bless the Deep State,” said former CIA deputy director/acting director John McLachlan last week, regarding the impeachment drive.
Trump’s main effectiveness in disruption and clarification has been “rhetorical.” What this means is that what he has mainly done is to pull the curtain back on how things really work with the establishment and Deep State. (Tulsi Gabbard did a good job with this a couple weeks earlier, and this was a good thing quite apart from anything else that can be discussed regarding Gabbard.) My view is, Keep going, Toto!
The view of today’s Left, that supports this “impeachment process”/establishment coup is that they are fine with, or at least can accept, what they see behind the curtain. “Because Trump … .” That’s ridiculous. In fact, one would want to say it’s insane, truly crazy.
One last thing that I hope concentrates how crazy liberals and the Left are these days: Comparing Trump with Hitler (or the “Trump regime” with the Third Reich) is not only crazy and ridiculous, it is anti-Semitic. It is a complete trivialization of the Holocaust and much else that is horrible besides.
To pick up on the Facebook conversation I began this section with: my fellow Buddhist and CounterPunch writer then responded especially on the “Left” question:
“[T]he “left” you refer to are not “Left” at all. They are US liberals and neo-liberals and a large group of center-Rightists. The Left barely exists in the US and this is clear from every[where] else in the world that there is a Left. The US Left (what there is) DOES support the popular movements we see in France and elsewhere.
All my comrades do certainly and are actually careful and critical in their thinking (a sign of a real Leftists, imho). Personally though, I do not refer to the impeachment activities as a “coup” nor do I think it helpful to say as it most certainly is not, by any definition.
That there are divided sectors of the US ruling establishment explains both Trump’s rise, longevity and present circumstances. He is benefiting many within the ruling class (see his judiciary appointments and his anti-environmentalism stances) but his anti-interventionist instincts (less global worldview and sort-of “America First”-ism à la Lindbergh) puts him at odds with other elements of the establishment.
Either way, the ruling class, made of both Reps and Dems remains unchallenged. A Left, would and does [challenge the ruling class?] in areas around the US but in far smaller numbers than elsewhere. My 2 cents…
One screwy thing on my part was that, because my contribution was predicated upon the other two comments, I had forgotten that the writer of this last part was also the one who initiated the conversation in the first place. So, I looked up this person and asked them if we had met previously in Iceland, as I had been there for a philosophy conference in 2014. However, not thinking about the original post, about how Trump will be reelected, I propose that some of our disagreement is perhaps more “semantic.”
I appreciate the spirit of what you were saying, but I disagree quite a bit, but perhaps there are some semantic aspects that could be cleared up.
The “Left” I refer to is not “left” at all–of course, on some level, and as I’ve said, they are to the right of the Right. However, they are “the Left” as it exists in the U.S.–they are largely folded into this “impeachment process” and the Democratic Party agenda of neoliberal globalism. As far as a “Left” that is other than this goes, perhaps there are a few anarchists.
What I am calling a “coup” is the attempt, through the “impeachment process,” to remove Donald Trump from the White House, because he is perceived as a threat to the smooth functioning of the Deep State, the establishment, the ruling class, and the neoliberal/neoconservative compact on the globalist economic and military agenda.
To what extent has he affected the power of the establishment, etc.?
I would say not very much – perhaps more than an ant stepping on an elephant’s toe, perhaps “1-2%” if there was any possibility of quantifying things. But this does not mean that he is not perceived as a threat. There’s a joke in Chicago politics about the Dalys (former mayors Richard M. and Rich Daly):
“What do the Dalys call 99% loyalty?” Answer: “Disloyalty.”
Anything departing from the neoliberal globalist agenda cannot be tolerated. With the Democrats, any departure from that agenda will not get a candidate anywhere near the White House, almost certainly not even near the nomination.
If, with a mass movement, Bernie Sanders manages to prove me wrong on this point, I will be quite pleased – and not because he is a “real socialist” or even an anti-imperialist (he’s neither), but because he will also be a disruption to the smooth running of the agenda.
In any case, I think the disruption and clarification brought about by Trump, mainly in the “Toto”/pulling back the curtain-mode, is real and good and to be supported. I’m not saying that there aren’t some bad things that go into this deal – there are.
But there is much more to this than the accepted binaries of the establishment and the system–Democrats and Republicans, factions of the ruling class that are representative of different sectors of capital (which is what the Clinton impeachment was about, along with different views of American power in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union; though, yes, this is in play in the present, too, especially in terms of finance capital and its relation to other sectors of capital, perhaps especially manufacturing and other areas where ordinary workers are employed), and “left” and “right.”
On some level what ought to really frighten us is not the idea that Trump is “like Hitler” or that “U.S. history is at its lowest ebb” (as a friend of mine wrote the other day). These are assertions that could simply be regarded as silly products of ignorance, if they weren’t so ludicrous, obnoxious, and offensive. What is actually much more frightening is that all elements of the establishment, including the ideological apparatus and “the Left,” have whipped up a significant number of people who thoughtlessly reach for these desperate “comparisons,” all in an effort whose effect, if it comes about, will do no more than restore the full strength, without exposure, of the neoliberal agenda.
And then the Left can go back to sleep, while the liberals cheer on the destruction of the working class (of all colors, genders, religions, sexualities, etc.) and the military invasions and interventions that will be necessary to keep the neoliberal globalist agenda running for the benefit of the U.S. ruling class, political establishment, Deep State, and, yes, the professional middle class who say they prefer Warren to Biden but will vote for Biden if it comes to that, etc.
The rogue element at the edge of the system is qualitatively better than any of what I just mentioned. What is hopeful here is that Trump’s only hope of beating this impeachment “process” is to follow the lead of Toto and to keep pulling the curtain back. That and the tens of millions of people who know what a sham this thing is.
Bottom line: Whatever anyone thinks of my analysis of the Trump disruption, clarification, etc., and whatever one thinks of my analysis of terms such as “the Left,” there is nothing good that will come from getting mixed up in the power-machinations of the establishment and Deep State–and there is much bad that will come from this.
Thinking afterward, though, about the original post, it seems I did just wander into the territory of “who will be the best Democratic candidate to take on Trump?”
Of those who are plausible candidates, the only one worth thinking about is Bernie Sanders, because that will increase the disruption factor at the edge of the system.
*
When I question the Hitler-Trump comparison, I sometimes receive responses that are both fantastically over-the-top but that, at the same time, serve to show how ridiculous this comparison is.
Here I will cite the example of someone who is a friend in real life, here in Salina, Kansas (population 48k) — a town where this person has spent the greater part of his life, though I should mention that he has a doctorate in his field and has lived for some years in San Francisco and Ann Arbor.
He hates Salina and almost all of the people here, and feels that he is superior to almost all of them — he’s a very good example of the deployment of the term “rural” in recent years to refer to all but a handful of coastal cities, and certainly to flyover territory.
He constantly says that he hates the United States, too — for instance, his response to Trump’s having served fast-food to Clemson football players after they won the national championship. Of course, he hates those same players, too, so it’s unclear what the problem is, exactly.
He constantly says on Facebook that he wants to leave the U.S., and leave our mostly-pleasant little city here in the middle of the U.S., as if it is the U.S. itself that is stopping him.
A few days ago, my friend posted on Facebook some story from aol.com with the headline, “The stock market could be ‘halved’ if Elizabeth Warren becomes president: Anthony Scaramucci.”
My friend’s comment at the head of the post: “But, of course! Would one expect anything other from a Wall Street representative? Does one expect Nazis to advocate Jewish rights?” Here’s the ensuing conversation:
Me: How do you get from an economic prediction to Nazis and Jews?
My friend: Simply: both Trump and Hitler are in opposition to human rights, particularly those of minorities (e.g., those who are not super-rich, and those who are not Jews). Trump is a documented anti-Semite who reportedly studied Mein Kampf; Hitler also nurtured anti-Semitic tendencies.
Me: I think the comparison itself is anti-Semitic, it trivializes the Holocaust.
My friend: Given that Trump strives to terminate the planet’s life, notably through his denial of climate change, he is worse than Hitler, who limited his ministrations to six-million Jews. Also, there is much documentation of the parallels between Trump’s and Hitler’s strategies, notably from Holocaust survivors. The difference between Trump and Hitler is that Trump’s plans, while in progress, have not yet come to fruition.
“Nurtured anti-Semitic tendencies”? – you think? Obviously, what we have here is a very advanced case of the Trump Derangement Syndrome — but the advanced case reveals the essence of Trump-haters who are attached to the Democratic Party.
The essence is: Say, think, believe anything, no matter how crazy on the face of it, if it is anti-Trump or at least serves to undermine Trump with the aim of getting him out of the White House. We’re a long way from Malcolm X with this current version of “By Any Means Necessary.”
(That we are dealing with advanced TDS here is the reason I won’t take the time to pick apart all the mistaken assertions my friend makes, from his association of Wall St. more with Trump than with neoliberal Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, to the idea that “Hitler limited his ministrations [!] to six-million Jews.” Just on this last bit, I can’t even begin …)
I suppose there is a distinction to be made between advanced/hyper-TDS, where the person actually believes this stuff (Trump is like Hitler or even “worse than Hitler”), and a more “pragmatic” form where spreading this bullshit is just a means to the power-aims of the Democrats, and, in reality, the establishment and Deep State behind the official faces.
Here is Trump Derangement Syndrome in a nutshell — while I’ve had these Facebook interactions in the last few days, this has also been going on: “Visiting Morocco for the first time, Ivanka Trump received a warm welcome Thursday from housewives, widows and other women who are benefiting from new laws that allow them to own land” (apnews.com, Nov. 7, 2019).
The person afflicted with TDS will have one of three reactions to this story: either this is somehow a bad thing, or it isn’t real (it just looks like Ivanka is helping these women, but really she isn’t), or the story will just be ignored altogether if it isn’t possible to go with either of the first two options.
It is quite significant to me that so many TDS-infused “arguments” against Trump, whether it is my friend or Sean Wilentz (who is more or less a Deep State operative, given how he is situated), and all sorts in-between have a significant psychological component. Trump’s plans, Trump’s intentions, his character, etc. — “Trump strives to terminate the planet’s life”: I guess this is what about sixty-two million evil and/or irredeemably stupid people voted for.
In fact, this is what my friend thinks, but it isn’t too far from the path Hillary Clinton opened up with her “basket of deplorables” statement, which includes at least tens of millions, and which she has defended many times since she made the remark.
But my real point has to do with what is going on with this constant recourse to psychology, which includes the role that professional psychologists and psychotherapists are playing as well. My own view is that this is largely an anti-philosophical effort to apply the intentional fallacy to structural issues.
This all bears further discussion, but the main question here is why “the Left” would get mixed up with this TDS, whether advanced/maniacal or pragmatic.
Trump outplayed the system, at least to the point that he got to where the curtain has been pulled back in important ways. For the existing Left, the tragic outcome is that it has been outplayed by the Democrats, and the latter has now played a very important card with this impeachment nonsense.
Almost certainly — or is this wishful thinking on my part? — the only other card the Democrats have to play is impeachment itself.
Sean Wilentz’s (and others’) hyperbolic, tendentious propagandizing aside, it should be taken as significant that the decision was made at some level to go with a “case” that is not only flimsy but also so susceptible to exposure for its many ties to the establishment/Deep State’s ongoing coup attempt.
Those deeply-afflicted with TDS, whether confirmed Democrats or people simply hoping that impeachment will deliver the world from Trump, are not to be reasoned with.
For everyone else in the anti-Trump camp, “the Left” or whatever one wants to call it, I guess you can try to further convince yourself that Trump is some sort of evil that positively requires you to side with institutions that are among the worst things ever, starting with the CIA. Or you can recoil from this tragic dog’s dinner of a turn and try to look and think in other directions.
Bill Martin is a philosopher and musician, retired from DePaul University. He is completing a book with the title, “The Trump Clarification: Disruption at the Edge of the System (toward a theory).” His most recent albums are “Raga Chaturanga” (Bill Martin + Zugzwang; Avant-Bass 3) and “Emptiness, Garden: String Quartets nos. 1 and 2 (Ryokucha Bass Guitar Quartet; Avant-Bass 4). He lives in Salina, Kansas, and plays bass guitar with The Radicles.
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Spot The Goy
Schiff Nadler Schumer Goldman Sherman Green Slotkin Engel Vindman Ioanovich Feldman Karlin Gerhardt Sondland Eisenberg Cohen1 Cohen2 Cohen3
Oops, sorry, there isn’t one.
Joo Coup No.1.
Board of Deputies Mossad Office Chief Rabbi Friends of Israel
Joo Coup No.2.
Paul I’m starting to think you are an agent provocateur.
Sorry, G, but sometimes even brainwashed goy donkeys can no longer ignore the obvious and put 2 and 2 together.
Hi mark, will john or matthew be your next avatar? Pritty predictable…
“Comparing Trump with Hitler (or the “Trump regime” with the Third Reich) is not only crazy and ridiculous, it is anti-Semitic.”
Oh, for heaven’s fucking sake.
Yeah – can’t figure that one out myself. I’d say the term “anti-Semitic” has become so overused (and usually with a sense of raging spittle flying) that it’s now just a noise.
Ah the alt left spews more pro Trump propaganda. It’s just mind blowing how much love and affection this part of the “left” has for a fascist, globalist, misogynist, racist, authoritarian jerk.
Neoconservatives are against him? Huh? That’s just one tidbit of this author’s alt-left lunacy.
I mean, the Deep State wouldn’t ever want a strong man fascist jerk in the White House!!!!!!! Oh no, never.
God this idiocy gets old.
The Deep State loves him so much that they’ve been running convoluted smear campaigns and conspiracy hoaxes against him since before he got elected.
Any refugee from the Faux Left Soros funded Counterpunch is welcome here.
First of all, Bill, welcome to Off-Guardian from CounterPurge. Sounds like you’ll fit in reasonable well here.
Secondly, does your FB friend realize that he actually contradicted himself in the same breath?
If Trump were opposed to the rights of those who are not Jews, how exactly would that make him an “anti-Semite”? Alas, TDS seems to attack the cerebral cortex aggressively–especially the part responsible for logic!
Anyway, keep up the good work. And if Louis Proyect ever turns up and starts trolling you here–sometimes he does that–feel free to disregard him.
Although this might be an uncomfortable notion the Deep State is “us” — not us as individuals but us collectively. Its every member of local, state and national government, every member of the numerous agencies charged with enforcing laws, every teacher, administrator, everyone who has sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution to the best of their abilities. The fact that individually we may disagree with it and its policies isn’t important to it, it believes what it is doing is right and just — even when it quite obviously isn’t.
Politicians can’t change this. Obama found out very quickly that top down driven change just doesn’t work, you eventually have to go with the program. The only agent for change is bottom up, providing a mass focus that convinces the people that a cultural shift is the right and proper thing to do. Unfortunately, a perfect storm from both our left and our right have left us in a cultural desert — the right has spent lavishly on convincing us that a hybrid of deregulation and libertarianism combined with enhanced social control while the left has focused on identity politics, the cult of victimhood and all the other excesses of social justice that engenders divisiveness. We all know deep down that something is wrong and want change but its difficult to find an agent of change — we’re now at the point that anyone who advocates change gets torn to bits as soon as they open their mouth for their inevitable (human) failings.
This stalemate is exactly what the wannabe feudal lords want. It allows them to amass unimaginable wealth and power and to keep that power in the family, as it were, leaving the rest of us to a rather dystopian future, a sort of Blade Runner without the flying cars.
Where does Trump fit in? As leaders of nations go he’s totally out of his depth — his base might believe all the bluff and bluster, their belief is all they have left, but he’s not fooling anyone else. He’s not smart enough to know when to quit, either — a really smart Trump would know when to fold, would anoint successors and quit while they’re ahead. Instead, he’ll just drive the Republicans into the ground (which, given their total lack of any coherent policies — social and economic — is probably where they belong).
This week marks the 35th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, December 1984.
The corporate worshippers in the US congress have remembrance deficiency when it comes to Bhopal-like events, where the Exceptional American company Union Carbide gassed an entire village Bhopal in India, with Methyl Isocyanate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Apart from deaths, here is a snipet from a 2014 report: An estimated 120,000 to 150,000 survivors still struggle with serious medical conditions including nerve damage, growth problems, gynecological disorders, respiratory issues, birth defects, and elevated rates of cancer and tuberculosis.
And this is just one incident among millions others, the US Congress is playing dumb in order to avoid discussing and dealing with.
Much like the numbers of victims in Vietnam, the numbers of victims of corporate/state crimes by using depleted uranium, will be rising for an unforeseeable time. The correct term for the mindset of these corporate profit missions must be ‘impunity’.
Shilling for the DNC Donkeys? “Trump outplayed the system…..”
Trump does exactly what he’s told to do by the criminal DS. If he refuses, he knows they’ll kill him. Standard so-called mafia MO.
Trump is a child of the deep state. He’s like a spoiled child who is hard to control. The deep state no doubt consciously uses Trump’s bipolar dyslexia to normalize evil and lies. Trump doesn’t really need to worry so much about being killed as being spanked– and having his toys taken away. Who the specific “parents” are is a matter of speculation, but it seems safe to assume it’s not the front-line top management of the CIA, NSA or FBI. Pentagon, maybe?
Trump’s chaotic behavior has helped expose internecine conflict within the deep state which might otherwise remain hidden from view. But it is foolish to assume Trump is a savior or white knight. Lots of anti-deep state rhetoric while the deep state police state accelerates before our very eyes.
Brexit, Democrats vs Republicans, Left vs Right, or even Trump vs the Deep State: are all complete side shows. I’m amazed so many people find themselves so vehemently opposed to one and other as to which road we should all collectively march down to arrive at the same totalitarian destination.
The totalitarian Chinese surveillance society is led by a Government/Corporate partnership in which the government notionally takes the lead. In the West the same Government/Corporate partnership is driving the same developments more slowly and it appears far more ‘benign’ because it is corporations that are practically taking the lead in installing the surveillance infrastructure and the totalitarian hand and surveillance interests of government in the Fourth Industrial Revolution are rendered invisible to the public. If it promises to bring more jobs and growth then it must be good.
The same arguments were used to encourage the people of many EU countries to adopt the Euro and give up monetary sovereignty (and a good deal of democratic sovereignty with it), for a slight easing of inter-European trade frictions which was similarly presented as an economic panacea for more wealth and jobs which never materialized as advertised. The loss of sovereignty was real enough, the economic benefits: not so much if at all and whatever they might been need to be balanced off against the migratory social and economic pressures and problems that freedom of movement brought in addition to the loss of monetary sovereignty.
On the Left we have the Global Green New Deal and on the Right we have the Blue Dot Network. The net result of the imperialist universalization of corrupted Neoliberal capitalism is exactly the same no matter which notional left/right fork in the road we take. At the same time, throughout Asia, China and Russia’s equally corrupt State/Corporate/Oligarchy governed ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ achieves the same essentially capitalist economic expansion as all are involved in the same global trade markets in every sector. No-one is coming from any direction to save either us or the planet from such corporate fascism.
We are blinded by the notion of a Western US led New World Order vs a supposed counter initiative of a multi-polar World Order including China and Russia as the major other players. The whole point of this is to censure the rather more obvious view that it is a globalist, fascist corporate world order that has taken control in the background. Despite supposed political differences, a cartel of cross industry global corporations and central banks around the world are working together to roll out our dystopian futures regardless of the stated political nuances voiced by the governments of their multiple host countries. All political parties are fully on-board with the globalist corporate agenda and gratefully receiving their payments.
All sides claim the same noble and benevolent intentions of proliferating economic growth and lifting the entire world out of poverty and saving it from state/capitalist/consumer driven extinction at the same time, whilst never admitting that those two objectives are fundamentally incompatible.
The pollution and waste production that is directly tied to economic growth is not a consideration to be taken seriously. Around the world, we find all of them making the same environmentally conscious green-washing claims about the sustainability of such massive industrial expansion whether that be all the coal fired power stations that will be built in the BRI or the increased industrial scale wind and solar farms of the GGND and hundreds of millions of EVs and new charging stations in the US and EU.
In the grand scheme of things is Trump, Corbyn or anyone really a problem or impediment to this direction of travel? Obviously not. Like all of them we think that Trump means what he says or says what he means but this is not the case. Trump claimed to want to drain the swamp and withdraw from aggressive military action overseas. If he truly meant these things he wouldn’t have surrounded himself with so many swamp dwelling Goldman Sachs alumni and Neocons such as John Bolton and Mike Pompeo.
Trump poses no credible threat to the establishment so why does it oppose him? Is it really opposing him or is that merely an illusion that deceives us into thinking we have come kind of credible or meaningful choice? I’m afraid we are being offered no credible or meaningful choices.
Trump may have thrown a small spanner into the works holding up the co-operation between Western corporations and China but behind the scenes they carry on working together developing and perfecting the surveillance and control infrastructure that will come to entirely dictate and monitor the terms on which we are able to ‘live’ our lives: even down to dictating which insects are best for us to consume.
This partly involves the evolution of societies from its traditional distribution and separation of the home and the penal system into societies of a general A.I. automated punishment and control where the smart cities and societies of the near future becomes nothing other than state monitored and controlled ideological correctional facilities in which everyone is effectively a prisoner and from which there is neither escape nor parole.
All of this continues as an inexorable, technological progress which we do not get to vote on: our political parties and dysfunctional systems of democratic government merely serve to provide an illusion that we might have some kind of choice over the totalitarian future that is being prepared for us.
The ‘resistance’ against Trump is nothing more than an illusion of resistance in much the same way that the choice between Democrat or Republican is an illusion of a democratic choice. The same holds true in the UK and throughout the rest of Europe. All spokes lead to the same totalitarian hub and it was always designed to develop that way.
We all sit as very slowly boiling frogs, letting the temperature rise as we are bemused by our gadgets and smartphones and stupefied by an overload of data which has blown our critical awareness circuits. Even those who realize where we are heading are also realizing the unlikely or impossible nature of the dizzying task of resisting such focussed and concentrated forces on so many fronts and acknowledge their control of media and censorship on all levels accept for very small pockets in alternative media which at times are equally as untrustworthy or even disguised outlets for the same MSM propaganda as one suspects sometimes with CounterPunch and MediaLens etc.
At one stage the Internet was a useful information sharing platform, but it has now developed into another global surveillance and propaganda distribution platform, captured by corporations in league with governments and mutated via principles such as those of surveillance capitalism to control the people not set them free.
Where do we go from here? Do we have any real alternative choices?
You are too gloomy, Simon (that bulge is my tongue in my cheek!). We are moving away from Societies of Discipline and Punishment toward Societies of Control. Where the simulation of freedom and the synthesis of false-binary choices is freedom from control. Sort of. We can choose Left or Right: but the central core of exponential capitalist accumulation is, as you put it, the central hub of all the spokes of consensual choice. But look at all the shiny toys they’ve given us!
What else is the ritualised EV fetishism for? It serves no real productive or life-coherent purpose. It will not spur the famed lacking productivity of the economy: nor will saving 40 minutes per journey on HS2. It is nothing more than a symbol of hyper-individualised freedom: and the democratisation of labour. The freedom to take ones labour wherever it is most productive to the worker: an ‘Uber-freedom’ of sorts. Apparently, 99% of workers are happy in the gig economy. Exploitation is the new freedom? ‘I’ am in control of my own life: not it is in control of me.
It is all part of neoliberalism’s new investment in the maximised wellbeing, valorised self-worth and status of the individual …as the new green conscious capitalist stakeholder. Gone is the old Friedmanian short-termism and quarterly shareholder model of social exclusivity. The corporate bottom line was the corporations. Now – through ‘conscious’ corporate self responsibility – the bottom line is intergenerational and invested in the people. The WEF is going to keep tally: with its new ‘ESG scorecard’ of environmental, social, and global governance for businesses …as part of the global corporate-social inclusivity compact. The corporations really care now, ask Klaus Schwab.
Maximal hyper-individual competitive wellbeing; greenwashed sustainable global growth; and the protection of sovereignty are the new, green, socially just, conscious capitalist protocols replacing shareholder primacy. Finance to be allocated by Mark Carney in his new role as the UN’s Climate Envoy – replacing that other well known eco-warrior – Michael Bloomberg.
The alternative is for those who have uncritically fallen for the GGND to burst their bubble and see that we are being ridiculed and taken the piss out of. Carney replacing fucking Bloomberg and designing our ‘just transition’ to 100% renewable net zero green globalist finance-capital’s climate economy sometime never. The alternative is rapid degrowth and deployment of renewables at a human scale – as if people and the earth systems ecology mattered. That means paring back our per capita resource consumption from 3.45 planetary biocapacity equivalence to less than one. As a measure of insurance. That means NO EVs …or maybe one per thousand or something: for emergencies.
It is not about us: or our hyper-normalised individuated consumption fetishism. Universalist-emancipatory value-ethics are about all of us globally. We all matter. Increasing our bourgeois consumption/pollution biological footprint is a crime against nature and a crime against humanity. The alternative is to deal with the 14.3 million of us in the UK in poverty by wealth redistribution: not increasing mass aggregate throughput …re-materialising our economy. We have to do more with less: which means reversing primitive accumulation and building resilient ‘antifragile’ localised infrastructure with fair trade international solidarity with our indigenous comrades …not murdering them and pretending America did it To keep the blood from staining our hands.
We can have all the socialism we want when we do not have to give the capitalists the superpredatory ‘accursed’ share. The earth systems ecology cannot support our superpredatory superstructure: we have to transversalise and equalise at the base …the life-ground itself. Where everyone is equal: with no entitlement or privilege. We have no time for utopianism: this is survivalism. Unpalatable now, to those who cannot see the collapse all around. But vastly superior to letting Mark fucking Carney and his globalist green finance-capital buddies design a ‘just transition’ to conscious capitalist stakeholding. In the words of Malcolm X: “You’ve been had”. The alternative is to admit it and reclaim the future from the conscious capitalist extinction.
I hope others will follow the links: because this is perhaps not the best introduction to Bill’s work. If, like me, you gave up on Counterpunch years ago. Without the understanding of the image schema within which Bill has already framed his work: I feel this piece is not representative …particularly of his ‘Fourth Hypothesis’ conceptual schema.
To get a better handle on this: I feel we need to encounter the ‘Ontological Principle’ and the ‘Ontological Turn’ is social science. Groan. I know: but someone has to break the mould …and that is how I read Bill’s Third and Fourth hypotheses. Which are – succinctly – revolution and a bridging event (or series of events) that catalyse revolution. The “globalist finance-capitalist order” System is dysfunctional and failing all life on Earth. The solution to systemic failure is not projected *ressentiment* – turning of our woundedness onto a fixated fetishised idol like Trump. It is the healing of our woundedness: without the amplification of hatred and aggressive ill-will that will tear societies apart.
https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Ressentiment
To which the Ontological Principle speaks of the exteriorisation of social pain. At its most basic: it means whether we are in society (we actively and intersubjectively create societies) or passive outside observers (societies pre-exist and happen to us – victimising and inferiorising us). It boils down to ‘observer independence’ or ‘observer dependence’. Is society a disjunct alienation of independent atomised individuals? Hell yeah: so how do we tackle that?
The ‘Ontological Turn’ speaks to how we construct social reality and how our interventions create or modify the institutionalised structures. Stripped of all outer iconic regalia and institutionalised paraphernalia – the state is just a bunch of people doing stuff …badly. If this putative state of affairs pre-exists – and we are born into a habituated constitutionalised belief system …we are fucked. No one can change a state system that has concretised its existence for centuries. We have to play the game – the slow dialectical materialism of gradualist modification. Where we always accept being subordinated second class citizens: obsequiously grateful for the rights and freedoms the state may grant …in order to reproduce itself.
Fuck that: that is delusion. A solution we are socialised into accepting pseudo-freedom for slavery. Not least that now the life we accept – as a product of expansionism, extractivism, and exploitative expropriation – is cannabilising the very life-ground of existence and evolution. We are being paid off with our own Thanatocide and ecogenocide. Which kind of cheapens and short-term time-limits the whole unconscionable blood-soaked deal. does it not?
The state is the problem. Even if it is not yet apparent: the State; the Corporation; and the natural attitude of the Cartesian subject are all constituted from the same belief system. A belief system we choose – or not – a nominal thousand time a second. The state is an intentional structure: convened and constituted in the mind’s of people. Nothing more. We can unchoose the state: if and when we realise the profound insights of the Ontological Principle – nothing pre-exists human cognition. We determine what we think can be said to exist on a moment by moment basis. This ontology is of appearances and representations we socially construct from collective consensual belief. The Ontological Turn is the realisation that our pre-determined conceptual methodologies determine the social-state realist ontology. It is a falsely concretised assertively reified mass hallucination. Searle’s ‘brute facts’ of actual existents are so disparate from the ‘institutional facts’ of a sick and failing system that there has to be a correction. To heal our woundedness: we have to realise the system is wounding us by simulating freedom with unfreedom. All the time we agree to this systematic abuse: our social anomie can only multiply existentially.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/anomie
We are inferiorised and infantalised in choosing state realism …which is epochal Capitalist Realism. There ARE alternative participatory ways of organising social realities. I do not, and will not ever, understand why the hegemony of capital is so entrancing. It’s exponential extractivist expansionism and expropriation will kill us all soon enough: particularly if we keep affording it the legal-rational authority overpower to do so. Which seems clinically insane to me. At least Bill is asking the right questions and framing – with his Third and Fourth Hypotheses – some sort of much needed alternative conceptual framing.
Welcome aboard, Bill.
“The state is the problem”
Perhaps it is technology which is the real danger, not the state. Elites have always sought to control both peasants and peers. What is new is that technology gives elites the capability to surveil, manipulate and attack without the large standing armies or police which have been needed up to the present.
Hi Big B! Sorry for the late response, but I’ve been meaning to thank you for giving readers a little introduction to my work, especially regarding my “fourth hypothesis.”
Incidentally, regarding the question of the State, have you read The Structure of World History by Kojin Karatani? He makes a convincing argument for the combination of Capital-Nation-State, and that any one of these cannot be addressed without addressing the others.
Warm regards,
Bill
is a self inflicted disease. it is a Radical Chic. it is where someone pretends to look smart trying to hide the dead bodies in some freezer/closet.
it is psychedelic drug used to avoid dealing with reality!
– imagine, they have to deal with human rights Act in France.
– imagine they have to deal honestly with their Best Friends Forever, like those who solve journalistic freedom with a bonesaw.
– imagine they have to deal with the body count from their endless wars
– imagine they have to deal with the havoc and diseases they are spreading all over the planet
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Syria has built a new pharmaceutical plant; henceforth fewer Syrians will be dying from Uncle $cam’s $anctions on anti-cancer drugs. Mad Maddie Albright and Krazy Killary Clinton, eat that! and yell with frustration.
https://youtu.be/SU-ktm3rAJc
Krazy Killary Klinton, Vexarb, surely? ;o)
Gwyn, surely you have seen Killary’s face photoshopped to show how well it suits a strait jacket? On a fairly recent OffG thread, Keywords snake pit.
I’ve yet to have the pleasure of seeing that. Even so, it’s easily imaginable. Perhaps a Hannibal Lecter face mask would complement the look?
(Apologies to Dr Lecter, of course…).
Don’t think so, the great British film actor who played that part specialized in what he called “closed characters” (but real good deep down). Whereas Shrillary is openly and extrovertedly demented (but real good deep down — say, about 12 feet under).
And many, many more: Hillary Killary Klingon, a Suitable Case for Strait Jacket.
This can be condensed as follows.
U.S. selection system:
A two (2!) ‘party’ system with
A) The Fascist Democratic ‘Party’
and
B) The Fascist Republican ‘Party’.
Comparisons of Trump with Hitler the Great are nothing but psychological projection, a dish the U.S. is wholly addicted to – they need their fix every day. Hitler this, Hitler that – all the while representing the worst fascism has to offer – the complete and utter manipulation of the mind.
How well that works is clearly visible – in this and way too many other articles. Absolutely NOBODY is willing, or able to lay out all of the fascist FATHERLAND’s regime that changes its dirty underwear every four years.
Americans suffer from a far progressed cognitive dissonance. To comfort anybody that feels addressed by that – you’re not the only society that has lost its marbles. This is not a history lesson, but a reminder that things have not been going stellar for a very long time. U.S.ians were simply more compatible to the whisperings of fascism than most other peoples. Well, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Israel, Saudi Arabia are all in the race to the bottom as well.
Nobody here gets out alive. What is most disturbing though, is the fact that the U.S.ians do not have the integrity and balls/ovaries to ACCEPT the way things are run in the fascist West. Because Introspection is the first and most important aspect of healing.
Even in the face of death, even with the likelihood of defeat, do each of us not nonetheless have a responsibility to act?
Politicians are placed center-stage with armed police guards so that the population has their attention drawn to the actors that exist center-stage. Corporations do not put CEOs center-stage as front-line staff. State & Congressional politicians work the mosh pit of population whilst the CEOs do the backstroke in the public trough.
Punch & Judy 2019 is good Kabuki Theater so far.
MOU
Deep State, CIA, Wall St, arms manufacturers…a conspiracy of sick bastards who ruin the world for people who just want to live their lives in peace.
How do they become so detached from their humanity? They must have been starved of love at a vital stage in their development.
Speaking of love, here’s a song by one of my favourite artists. One of the many which keep me going in these dark times:
Here’s a part of the song’s lyrics that I hadn’t fully paid attention to until listening to it just now. These words have just hit home for me with considerable power. Prophetic wisdom from the great Stevie:
The force of evil plans,
To make you its possession,
And it will if we let it,
Destroy everybody,
We all must take,
Precautionary measures,
If love and peace you treasure,
Then you’ll hear me when I say, oh, that,
Love’s in need of love today…
One of the highlights of human evolution. The whole three record album. The vinyl on my records are pretty worn for that reason. And yes, this song was later built on – in my opinion – by U2 with ‘Still Haven’t Found What We Are Looking For”.
Love: Looked for in all the wrong places, hardly ever found.
Infuriatingly, I can’t find my vinyl copy of that excellent album. Looking on the bright side, it means that there’s a long-lost box of my records somewhere. I can’t wait to get my grubby little hands on Songs In The Key of Life again…
Thanks for you interesting reply. And, while I’m at it, many thanks (again) for recommending the thoughtmaybe website to me. It’s truly excellent.
Here’s a link for anyone else who might want to have a look at it:
https://thoughtmaybe.com/
In my case, I know where they are (my beloved vinyls), but that location is at the other end of this world. In the truest sense of the notion.
There are so many others that should be revisited, or maybe ‘re-listened’ to. One of my recent relistening sprees (on yt) garnered the Eric Burdon Band with ‘Power Company’ and it’s awkward to hear them singing about the same issues that are plagueing us. That was from 1983. Only 36 years ago.
Followed by ‘Tobacco Road’ which also gives a pretty good insight into the charming living conditions of the working class.
Only my limited data plan prevents me from watching all the documentaries. I downloaded the most important ones to be able to watch them anytime. “The Century of the Self” ranks very high. And it will always be my pleasure to be able to recommend somthing really worthwhile.
Apparently, there’s a general election next week in the UK – whatever happened to that?
To be filed alongside ”Is the Pope a Catholic?” and ”Does a bear shit in the woods?” – ”Did Hitler nurture anti-Semitic tendencies?”
The whole impeachment thing might be a distraction from issues of corruption within the Democrats.
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/12/httpswwwnbcnewscompoliticsjustice-departmentrussia-probe-witness-charged-funneling-millions-hillary-clinton-s-2016-n1.html
The re-definition of terms like “Left wing” and Liberal might be an artifact of the MSM and thus of the deep state. What’s in the papers shouldn’t be confused with public opinion.
“Deep State” should refer to all those circles of influence which affect the functioning of the formal state. Those circles might share personel with the formal state and/or other circles of infuence. Some parts would be more formaly organised than others (e.g. organised crime) and some would be more concious of their class interests than others, the whole thing would have emegent behaviour which none of the individuals concerned would be concious of.
Conspiracies would emerge as more or less concious expressions of class interests, out of larger class based socialnetworks.
Certainly Trump has drawn back a curtain on many of the machinations and interests of the ruling class and its state, so rudely unveiled to many more than those in the so-called ‘deep state’, especially its liberal Democratic Party-loving elements, are comfortable with. Trump is such a bad liar that everyone can see and catch out his lies and he’s called a compulsive liar simply for that reason. Yet on the rare occasion he’s told the truth, it’s been utterly devastating. Trump, in probably the most truthful public utterance of any US president, said the following:
Tulsi Gabbard perhaps could have written that, but not Bernie Sanders, and it’s these ‘unmentionable’ truths more than anything the ruling class abhors and dreads because they should never ever come from the mouth of the Commander in Chief of US imperialism. This is what they really despise about Trump, and the whole ruling class are united on that score.
In short, the lies and the ‘craft’ of lying so foundational to bourgeois politics, polished and burnished over many decades and ministered unrelentingly by smooth-talking ‘career’ politicians, is being blown away by this craftless incompetent who runs on impulse, and appears to be influenced by the last person he’s had conversation with. Unpredictably and without notice, the truth sometimes leaks out of Trump’s mouth. The ruling class and its ‘career’ politicians hate that with a passion.
Yet this pales into insignificance as other sources increasingly have been exposing the ruling class, its interests and its state empirically, in detail, that the bourgeois media would never contemplate letting out. WikiLeaks, and more generally the so-called web ‘Fifth Estate’, which the ruling class feels even more deeply discomfited by, are constantly pursued in the effort to put this genie back in the bottle, to shut down all the alternative information sources. Likely the effort will be in vain given that millennials and younger people are deserting the mainstream bourgeois media in direct proportion to the corporate mouthpieces’ manifest inability to craft the tissue of lies and illusions so necessary for effective bourgeois rule. The Pentagon’s creation, the internet, is coming back to bite the bourgeoisie.
The real driving force behind this has been the harsh social realities in most capitalist countries that have subjected the working population and the poor to 40+ years of ‘free market’ capitalism which no amount of lies can paper over. The abject failure of neoliberalism, and the even more abject failure of the bourgeois politicians and the bourgeois media to put lipstick on this pig, increasingly has made workers and young people see that they have no prospects under capitalism, and the likes of Trump are thrown up in despairing response, as the first immune response to a deep social illness. Or as Gramsci more eloquently put it: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
While the desperate effort to impeach Trump might be viewed as a ‘deep state’ coup attempt, it’s not really or only that because it isn’t simply the so-called ‘deep’ state doing it. It’s the CIA component of the ordinary old state machine in league with the Democrats. The Pentagon on the other hand didn’t have much input into Russiagate nor into this latest impeachment circus and appears to be more neutral or supportive of Trump (depending on the day) — as generally does the MIC that depends directly on Pentagon/taxpayer largesse and on arms sales abroad. In terms of conflicts within ruling class, roughly speaking, Trump broadly has perhaps grudging support from industrial capital which is the traditional Democratic Party constituency (and the Democrats hate that too), particularly military-industrial capital, and especially with Trump’s protectionist trade wars and maintenance of the US’s real wars. In contrast, finance capital tends to be less supportive because its needs are more for a consistent foreign policy doctrine of US hegemony to carry out its imperial depredations around the globe; to effect financial penetration of its prey which requires steady payment of its predatory loans, for example. Historically, the CIA has always been much closer to finance capital, as shown for example in David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard.
What passes for the ‘left’ and class consciousness today was the outcome of the restoration of capitalism in the USSR in 1991-92, a world historic defeat for the working class internationally. The consequent degradation and retrogression of the left and class consciousness in general has been an international phenomenon. The USSR for all its faults, and illusions that many held in it, nonetheless was the home of the October revolution, the only workers revolution that successfully overthrew capitalism. The USSR embodied the possibilities and potential of rational social and economic planning despite its isolation and consequent political and economic maladministration. This example was anathema to capitalism, but the Stalinist bureaucracy was also capitalism’s greatest ally in besmirching the so-called socialist ‘experiment’.
The loss of socialist consciousness inside the USSR — brought about by the thoroughly incompetent, cynical, corrupt and repressive Stalinist bureaucracy that for decades couldn’t deal with imperialist encirclement on the one hand nor satisfy the basic material and political needs of the population on the other — had its corresponding expression in the retrogression of class consciousness most sharply in the centres of capitalist imperialism post 1991-92. The ‘left’ in the imperialist centres today is still largely devoid of a class outlook and instead wallows in sectoralist, classless politics and causes. Within the working class itself, class consciousness has also been otherwise suppressed or kept in check by a corrupt and paid-for trade union bureaucracy, not qualitatively different from the Stalinist bureaucracy at the head of a deformed workers state: ever ready to appease the ruling class (or imperialism in the case of the Stalinist bureaucracy), ever ready to sell the workers’ interests out. Trade union membership has declined precipitously, mostly due to the sellouts of these pro-capitalist bureaucrats. At best, and partly as a result of the steady stream of lost and sold out struggles over the last 40 years, the ‘left’ sees the working class not as a potent force for change at all but simply as yet another oppressed ‘sector’. In short, while there’s no such thing as an ‘ebb in history’, class struggle over the last four decades has reached a very low ebb in most capitalist countries, especially in those subject to the ‘globalism’ of imposed neoliberal economic doctrine.
This seemingly hopeless situation is open to change: one major strike that wins and shows the true social power of the working class can transform political consciousness quickly in the population overall, but more importantly within the working class itself. The US in particular sits on a social and economic volcano, and when it blows hopefully the flow of red-hot lava will be directed to cauterise the capitalist ruling class and its state (‘deep’ or otherwise), once and for all, and that the lava spreads beyond the US’s shores. And it might well originate from France.
A Trotskyist crying at the deep state nature of his fellow Trotskyists oh the irony
Please define ‘Trotskyist’ only I’m dying to know.
Hilarious that you would think I’m a Trotskyist, and are you saying that Trump is a Trotskyist also?
Welcome Bill Martin,
Another refugee from CP, these fake lefties like LP must have no discerning readership left!
I do hope that your presence doesn’t mean we get less of CJ Hopkins – who has been quiet for a while. There is plenty of room to accommodate many here.
I haven’t read your inaugural piece through yet as it is fullsome and will require some time to digest, so won’t make a comment on the content yet.
The reason for that is – you may not know – we have a general election taking place at the moment in little old Blighty. Maybe you have referred to it in your article even, given how the first genuine leader of the UK’s real social democratic party – Labour – has been pilloried as much as your Trump has been by our DS msm AND hardcore ‘leftists’, never mind all the centrists and rightist – actually the whole ‘upper classes’ and rich – who hate that their 40 year reversal of the social democratic post war gains of social equality – is about to be in turn reversed by a relative outsider and peacenik that they let achieve leadership of the Labour party, which they had effectively highjacked. A bit like your Bernie…
Anyway no doubt there are parallels to be drawn between Trump and Corbyn and once I have given full consideration to your tome, I hope you will appreciate my observations.
I was hoping that Off-G may have relented and found time for at least one article about our GE this week, but obviously Trump trumps all.
And such a seismic election – the most important in 40 years if not since 1945 need not cause too many tremors here.
Talking of seismic tremors it seems Somerset has experienced one overnight centred on one of these quaintly named places they have down there in the west country – like Bradford Pevrill or Jacobrees Mogg …
Back later. All best.
DG
DG:
You talk about my monomania: you should have actually read some of Bill’s earlier work. Framed in his own image schema of the ‘Fourth Hypothesis’: Bill eschews voting left or right – the first two hypotheses – in order to precipitate a revolutionary overthrowing of the current order. Something along the lines of ‘Code Yellow’ – an American ‘Gilets Jaunes’. The Fourth Hypothesis stems from the Third – that some sort of (unspecified) emancipatory bridge might catalyse the revolution and allow the new – of “universalist-emancipatory agendas” to take form and take hold.
I do hope I haven’t misrepresented his thesis: but it looks to me that you have projected your ‘vote Corbyn’ fixation without even trying to assimilate Bill’s broader thesis. Which, you may notice, is closer to my own. Whoever we vote for: what Bill termed the ”globalist finance-capitalist order” gets in. If I’m reading him correctly: then this is the Trumpian ‘Clarification’ of which he speaks.
We need more radical solutions than merely legitimating the current capitalist order. And please stop pretending it is socialism. It is state capitalism: which is entirely predicated on the globalist finance-capitalist order completing its ‘money multiplier cancer’ and turning the planet into a Mordor-like wasteland. Trying to avert which is my monomania. To which I am at least as dedicated as you are. 🙂
‘State capitalism?’ I wish it were BigB. What we have is a throwback to 18th and 19th century Rentier capitalism ruled over by a ‘ finance, i.e., Banks, shadow banks, rentiers of various stripe, an aristocratic landowning class, a safe haven for criminal monies, capital flight, and tax-evasion and a perfect site for US Investment Banks where could do things in London that it couldn’t do in New York. Once described as US banks’ financial Guantanamo. This overbearing financial industry has been highly dysfunctional as it has sucked the life out or the rest of the UK economy. An example of the dreaded Dutch Disease or Resource curse. Additionally we have non-elected Head of State, a non-elected upper house – what Bagehot referred to as the dignified aspect of the ‘Constitution’. I have put constitution in quotation marks since the UK doesn’t have one, at least not a written constitution. No written constitution effectively means no constitution. Not forgetting of course the First Past the Post electoral system – a system loaded against the minor parties and in favour of the established 2-party political cartel.
In many ways Britain is an antique political and economic construction. Not conducive to change, it is brittle and suffocatingly traditional. It will be interesting to see where this anachronism goes in the near future.
Oh Francis – but that is what HARD brexit is ALL about preserving!
Lol.
@Francis Lee: “This overbearing financial industry has been highly dysfunctional as it has sucked the life out or the rest of the UK economy.”
Has done so for more than a century. At least since the Anglo Zio Capitalist invasion of the Free Afrikaaner Republics in 1899: capital was diverted from Britain to build up the mining industry in South Africa. But capital flight from Britain probably started earlier, with investment in India and other colonies by the East India Company nabobs. Not to mention WW1, the AZC’s last desperate attempt to stop German capital investment in German industry outstripping London’s ever-diminishing investment in Britain’s own industrial base.
Margaret ‘the milk thief’ Thatcher climbed into bed with Ronald Reagan & Alan Greenspan for the great asset inflation era that Greenspan instituted with the ever prevalent Greenspan Put & his ‘Maestro Greenspan’ persona.
After taking the reins from the most historically competent Federal Reserve Chair Volcker, Greenspan blew the largest asset bubble known in the history of banking.
Today we have the fallout & concomitant deflationary headwinds that were known all along by the Ivy League Economists of Yale, MIT, Harvard, & Oxford too.
The United Kingdom is merely a franchised Collateralized Debt Obligation-CDO in the proprietary derivatives universe that Goldman Sachs manufactured to build the European Union into yet one more monopoly banking asset of the central banking empire controlled by private Western interests.
The United Kingdom is essentially Deutsche Bank if we look at the finance macroeconomically. When the derivatives universe finally implodes into itself like a deflating balloon the UK & EU will become officially insolvent.
The future for all countries in the EU is just like the Greeks hypothesized with their Acropolis/Metropolis/Necropolis cycle of life paradigm.
No growth model is evident for the EU going forward. This means thermonuclear hot kinetic war is the only outcome given the zero sum nature of the geopolitical calculus.
MOU
I know: we read the same book [Shaxson]. £4.5 trillion in underdevelopment the ‘finance curse’ has cost us …according to SPERI. I think is quite apparent where this anachronism goes in the near future. That overfinance system is pumping itself up on ‘easy money’ steroids: $190bn a day from the Fed; a further $60bn a month in bond purchases; 20 bn euros a month from the ECB: and unspecified amounts of QE and repo ‘not QE’ from the PCOB. With rates actually negative and junk bonds piling up all over the world. $595 tn OTC derivatives looks like a very shaky mountain of ‘jelly on a plate’. Only, someone took the plate away. A crap analogy: but you get what I am saying.
Carney and Javid could make an awful mess of John McDonnell’s first and last day as Chancellor if they were to be so bold. Which is not an encouraging thought. My alternative vision of rapid degrowth and a Great Simplification might yet enter the mass consciousness. Hopefully not as a regret in retrospect? What did Private Fraser say!
Ah BB I haven’t read any of Bills work before – as I wrote i’ll read it before critiquing it.
I don’t believe in the left-right construct, it is one dimensional creation, of the top-bottom 3-D pyramid of wealth and power.
Designed to seperate humanity and keep it fighting between outselves rather than punching-up and storming their palaces and treasuries.
Your ‘real socialists’ are such creatures trying to divide the natural humanity of mankind.
Which I have plenty of experience and faith in.
It is not subject to ‘entropy’.
Lol.
Certainly not here to make less space for CJ Hopkins, whose work I admire very much. And if you think this one is “fulsome,” you should almost all of the others!
Corby-Hitler, Trumpy-Hitler. Gore Vidal once talked about the “Hitler of the Month Club”. Saddam Hussein was Hitler – as was Milosevic, Gaddafi, Assad …it goes on and on. There is a satirical website called The Encyclopedia Of Decency which sums up the thinking:
And:
It should be clear beyond a doubt now, that the Nobel prices are fake for the most part. The bombmaker price.
My recommendation is the creation of the ‘Adolf Hitler Price for Freedom and Democracy’.
Now, can you see who’s on the list of future recipients?
Chances are there will be no ceremonies this year, but that should not prevent anybody from celebrating. Rumors have it that HRC/BHO are the first recipients for their trailblazing from bad to worse ‘Freedom and Democracy’ programs.
“The extent of Hitlerification is open to individual discretion and is reckoned by complex arithmetical formulas – Osama Bin Laden, for instance, rates at almost 2000 mega-Fuhrers” – love it!
Is the backbone of Western Civilisation is now, officially and certifiably, complete bullshit?
Yup. The only word more bullshit than “democracy” is “freedom”. You have to understand that both words apply only to that miniscule minority of parastites bleeding everyone at the top. This explains the odd contradictions in the rhetoric – as demonstrated by two clips from Boris’s splendid new think tank: On the one hand we hear that “The British are among the worst idlers in the world,” on the other we hear about how our masters want to “give people power over their own money and their own lives”. It is clear that this rhetoric describes two different groups of people.
Is democracy the backbone of Western Civilisation?
Or is it a self-special fig leaf over naked greed or shame?
Insofar as civilisations have evolved or unfolded in the West, have they been mercantile competition consolidating to regional and global dominance in which all number of civilising attempts or movements have been subverted to serve the agenda they sought to hold in check and to balancing or just account?
The mind is a masking deceiver in service to a fear-driven agenda.
Human civilisation and human consciousness both – are an alloy of hate and conditional love – with conditional love being invoked to make a bubble reality within a backdrop of hate that will not reconcile because an identity invested in fear, is afraid of love’s communication as threat and loss to its ‘self and world’ – and is therefore hated and denied excepting under terms of conditions of support for the right to persist in loveless agenda or fear-defined self and world.
Love reveals itself in the shared willingness to arrive at outcomes through yielding to a process of communication – of listening and speaking from the heart. But hate is founded on grievance that is freshly recycled and reiterated by exposure to association with fear of pain and loss – even to an automatic pre-emptive attack as the only and necessary ‘defence’,
Under such terms and conditions anything you say can and will be used as ammunition with which to attack and undermine you.
Limiting war of mutual projection of hate and fear to forms or rules of engagement includes the idea of voting. The determining of what or who can be voted for and the framing of the differences generates factions, identities and tribal allegiances of totemic ‘goods’ set against demonic evils.
What could result from such managed war but a deep state of paralysis, and powerlessness that becomes increasing irrelevant to having any effect over mercantile power wielded by stealth while the circus of the idea of democracy plays out in parody?
However – I feel that the statement by which you were so easily baited to react is more to note that lies will always seek to appear or mask in the forms of truths – and insofar as the idea of democracy has been a check to absolute power of monarchs or their usurping corporate and financier replacements, it offers some means to hold some sense of sovereign will to a freely shared sense of individual responsibility rather than coercive of collective groupthink under whatever colour you prefer.
Wars are flagged to moral causes for which you are induced to vote or give compliance and conformity. When the dream of a positive future is broken and cannot be called on and believed, the nightmare is summoned under which if you do not vote away your freedom, all will be destroyed – even the little that ye hath.
The characteristic of deceit is that it reveals what it is intending by what it pretends to defend against, and likewise what is being destroyed by what it is fighting for.
But while you or anyone is invested in such identity you will believe it is your remaining freedom even while it consolidates a slave mentality that allows no questioning of its necessary dictate as ‘fact’.
I regard our structure of consciousness as that which explicates to social and cultural structure, ideology and system. But the quality of conscious communication is the only ‘consciously’ shared life it has. Insofar as voting is choosing, we are generally framed in unconscious or replayed past conditioning, such that a truly aligned choice or voice is ruled out – regardless the current presentation of the robes of power.
The ‘special hate’ hates that its own specialness is denied, while ‘special love’ (sic) loves to join in hate of the unmasked hater as moral superiority. But the latter is further dissociated from a self-honesty that can recognise the hurt beneath hate as the call for love in place of call to war and vengeance.
Civilisation begins with the recognition and extension of self within the other and the other as our self. Not homogeneity or conformity but giving and sharing in freedom to be who we are – and relationship reveals more of who we are than we currently think and often identify as if such thinking can or should be fixed down and protected from change.
Locked into our own control-mind of terms and conditions, a global system of regulatory paralysis beckons. Armies of lawyers don’t cause it – but are initiated by defences to attax the living body wherever it moves – so as to ‘Skinnerise’ conformity to its ratted maze.
O self-hating human, where would you be without the ‘other’ to judge over, to dump on and stand over in victory … but then fall to subjection, and to, and fro. Does this clock wind up time itself to an unraveling? Is an Ancient hate summoned up from the Deep to be revealed undone?
To arrive at our starting place and know it for the first time is a willingness not to take another round self-blinded. If thine eye offends thee – of what mind does it go forth to seek its report? We cannot pluck our own mind out – but only hide it in others. We can let what is not chosen and not used, fade from non use. We can recognise that what we resist, persists, and so choose whether to persist in what we say we do not want. We cannot of ourselves become loving or free of hate because we ARE not ‘of ourselves’ – but of a relational wholeness that cannot be grasped – or possessed and controlled (without identifying struggle in lack and limitation, conflict and pain of loss).
“It’s Life Jim, but not as we try to know it!”
Perhaps what we react from as if we ‘know’ is a quantitative structural ruleset of controls in which the primary qualities of life are replaced by virtue signalling – in attempt to escape invalidation by the bot-net of a systemic inhibitions bordering on paralysis.
If a bubble-reality lords it over Life then it is with all the soap of dramatic tension that we give it.
Always good to see good writers leave the formerly awesome site called ‘counterpunch’, and happy to see them here.
In terms of ‘deep state’, I am always getting confused, because it can mean so many things to so many people. The problem is that while deep state exists, it is undefined and therefore cannot be challenged (like you are fighting with ghosts).
So I would steer away from all issues that relate to ‘deep state’ and instead aim for the things that can be defined. If not, you have a high chance (as a writer) to only confirm your prejudice of how the world works and state (deliberately or not) increasingly stupid things (usually the writer’s own fear) about that what is known as ‘deep state’ (Hedges and PCR come to mind, as also many of these clueless writers who report at Unz).
I personally would use the term “deep state” as a convenient shorthand for “the vested interests”, “the ruling class”, that collection of corporate bosses, their political servants and the networks that serve them including intelligence agencies and links to organised crime. None of this implies that these people are organised into a unified monolithic block. I think it beneficial to use a term like this since if you merely talk about specific organisations you may give the impression that there are just a few “bad eggs” and if only we could replace them, everything would be OK. There is an underlying system holding them up and it is called capitalism.
It’s because ‘wikipedia’ is SPOOKSpedia. ‘Deep State’ has been translated so many times into the most ludicrous ‘any other name’ that the truth has been successfully scrapped from the collective mind. However, the only truthful translation remains:
DEEP STATE – previously known as THE POWERS THAT BE.
George, you left out the classic Marxist capitalist class as part of the deep state.
how the world works
here’s a highly plausible description:
Max Kolskegg — 9/11 In Context: Plans and Counterplans
Very good point made by Max Kolskegg: September 11 was a desperate operation from the Elites in Washington to salvage their dominion from a ‘rapidly deteriorating condition of the global control system’.
All of Kolskegg’s theorizing was rendered moot March 10th 2008 around 11:00am Bear Stearns time NYC. Since the advent of the Great Financial Crisis it is evident to all that the superstructure of the United States of America, European Union, & that of the Middle East is poised for macroeconomic, macroprudential, and Reserve Currency re-writes for the entire no longer liquid global economic system.
Always remember Dickens, A Christmas Carol, & the line of script…”Whomever controls the cashbox controls the world.”
MOU
Journalism & fellating Trump are two different things, Mr. Martin.
The Duck’s goose & gander are cooked.
No amount of Deplorable Kool-Aid served up by the proto-Fascist pushing Steve Bannon types of propagandists is required here, thanks.
MOU
whoosh
Ultra leftist weirdo detected
you’re mistaken; it’s clearly a deep-state disinfo operative.
MOU:
You’ve got Bill all wrong if you think he is ”fellating Trump”. I think that is what you are implying. In his earlier work: he is using Trump as a device to expose the current dysfunctional depravity of the “globalist finance-capitalist order” system. To which he proposes a radical revolutionary overthrow …his ‘Third Hypothesis’.
The ‘left’ is somewhere right of the right – in his view – and consumed by ‘State Feminism’ and ‘IdPol’ (identity politics). Which renders it *practico-inert* (my term). I agree: this particular article does not really convey his own conceptual framing. But he did link to it. Putting the current article in his previously drawn semantic framing (it’s ‘episteme’) radicalises it completely.
I’m not sure you can imply “fellating Trump”: especially if you follow the links. It is easy to see why he has been excluded from the also *practico-inert* ‘manufactured dissent’ of Counterpunch …he is trying to get us to think outside the Left-Right false-binary constructivism of the capitalist state. For which he should be applauded. To which I am sure you would agree: now you are aware of his broader framing?
I’m not a journalist and don’t claim to be. I do try to mix philosophy and social theory with a bit of journalism, but I’m never on time with the “jour.”
Not since I was on debate team in high school have I received a fellatio-related criticism, so I thank you for this trip down memory lane.
Fellate is a perfectly acceptable adjective & rhetorical device that writers utilize to impart meaning. Taking words literally is not the intention as it is used figuratively & as a figure of speech.
Trump is yesterday’s child.
MOU
That is Daley with an E, Bill.
“(Elizabeth Warren’s bizarre fantasies aside — does she really think people are going to vote for a “plan” that has a $52-trillion price tag attached to it?…”
They already do: the costs of the Healthcare system in the US are by far the highest, per capita, in the world. Just about any single payer system, however expensive or inefficient would cost less. And deliver, for the average person, a lot more.
That is a very small point and far from the central arguments that you are making. But your assessment of Warren is actually no more radical than the Mayor of South Bend, Indiana’s. That is significant.
So far as your general assessment of Trump’s significance is concerned I am in agreement. On the other hand far from being a cunningly designed and cleverly executed coup against Trump, the preliminary impeachment proceedings both in terms of the hearings in Congress and the massive propaganda campaign of the media, have been laughably, farcically lacking in credibility.
The Democrats and their allies have taken leave of their senses: it is they who have adopted Karl Rove’s idea that they have become-thanks to their control over an increasingly discredited media and an Academy crumbling from the core ideology outwards- capable of creating their own reality. They have to believe this because the alternative, which would involve not just weaning themselves from the ruling class’s cream filled breast but, even more scary, exercising their brains is impossible. A culture of conformists, corporate ghosts and careerists has reached its inevitable end: it has run out of ideas in a real world in which new problems pop up all the time.
@Bevin: “far from being a cunningly designed and cleverly executed coup against Trump, the preliminary impeachment proceedings… have been laughably, farcically lacking in credibility.”
In other words, Russiagate is an attempt to wage Lawfare against the people of the U$A:
“Lula: The Legal and Political Battle for His Innocence
Brazil’s Federal Justice Wednesday acquitted former leftist presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff of accusations of being part of a criminal organization whose purpose was to divert public funds to the Workers’ Party (PT).
RELATED:
Lula: The Legal and Political Battle for His Innocence
“Before an impartial judge, we have obtained Lula’s summary acquittal. The Brazilian magistrate highlighted an ‘attempt to criminalize political activity’ by the misplaced charge known as the ‘quadrillion,’ which is part of lawfare against Lula,” former president’s lawyer Cristiano Zanin tweeted.
TeleSUR, 28 November 2019”
I couldn’t agree more, Bevin. Only, the same is true in the UK. The solutions proposed on either side of the Atlantic are a greenwashed capitalist reproduction of business as usual. In the UK that is predicated on buying voter loyalty with a modicum of state capitalist social inclusivity. Making us even more dependent – as stakeholder capitalists – in the overall performance of the ‘globalist finance-capitalist order’ (Bill’s terminology). My terminology is the ‘money multiplier cancer’ that is consuming the life-ground of all value [after McMurtry]. Obedient loyalty to the system entails living on a Mordor-like wasteland …much sooner than most would hope for.
I do not know if you read my last reply to you: but the validation of left and right (Bill’s first two hypotheses) is not what he sees as a solution. Nothing but his ‘Third Hypothesis’ of a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist corporate state will achieve any real solution. Legitimating the current symbolic order will do nothing to achieve this. I notice Chris Hedges has recently been saying the same. It is what Phillip revived the Marxist term ‘Parliamentary Cretinism’ to describe. We need revolutionary ‘out-of-the-statist-box’ blue sky thinking …not BAU.
It looks as though you have mistaken Bill’s broader thesis? His ‘Fourth Hypothesis’ is entailed by the Third – revolution – and involves some sort of bridging hypothesis. I would suggest the inevitable and ongoing collapse of the price system of the globalist finance-capitalist order. They are fighting fire with gasoline (pouring debt onto debt deflation catalysing debt deflation) with no possible positive outcome available. All state capitalist ‘socialisms’ are predicated and contingent on a collapsing market economy.
And no one is really looking beyond the inevitable collapse to at least envisage a greatly simplified “universalist-emancipatory” human-scale ‘Seneca Rebound’ economy – the Great Simplification …one where the people and the ecology of the planet are the primary life-ground …not capital. That is an alternative to being the Host of the current cancer state-system …the one we – incredibly – keep on validating. Something has to give. We have to look outside this current ‘one-dimensional’ state realist Capital Realism. And Bill appears to be asking the right questions. We need to give form to his idea of revolution – and not keep legitimating state realist econometrics of extractivism, expansionism, and expropriation. Surely you can see this makes sense?
Hi Bevin, thanks for this comment. You’d think after twenty-eight years of living/working in Chicago I could spell “Daley,” but apparently not!
“… exercising their brains is impossible”–I recently asked some local (here in Salina, Kansas) members of the anti-Trump/pro-impeachment “Left” (as they style themselves–amazingly, they even call themselves the “Salina Resistance”) who some of their favorite philosophers are. No responses–when they practically stalk me on Facebook to respond to everything else I say. I do think in general the hatred of philosophy is a significant part of what constitutes the Left these days, not that the “Right” has a lot to brag about on this score for the most part, either.
And I agree that the coup is not too well-designed. Clearly, only inside of their echo chamber can they think they’re doing something impressive. Still, I think it is an attempt at a coup, or at least part of their election strategy. It’s not too impressive as the latter, either.
Still haven’t got round to reading through your piece yet Bill.
But just scanned through the comments here. Both you and Bevin are slightly off about the coup in my opinion.
The attempted putsch started with the killing of Seth Rich.
The government Agencies were brought in formally by the Obama Administration- whether he gave it a nod is not yet clear, but Hillary certainly did as a means of gathering/manufacturing dirt against candidate Trump (the accusation they are projecting at Trump re Biden!). The link from their lawyers to Fusion to the 5+1 eyes sis’s is proved.
The involvement of Ukrainian actors in that election started then as a direct result of the email leaks. The desperation to take down Assange accelerated (her inner bloodlust raised again …he must die!). On her failure to be crowned queen of America as planned – The Resistance was launched and the Executive became a target by the very institutes of state violence it is supposed to have control over.
There is a quid-pro -quo, not potus’ making though.
It is this hollow Impeachment threat fiasco.
It is the pathetic Resistances.
They failed with their Russiagate fabrication and the Executive has legally traced back and nailed the conspirators – who are the highest and mightiest security and law enforcement chieftains and THEIR political bosses – the previous Administration.
The public revelation and criminal charges, trials and punishment of them, up to cackling Clinton, if not even hapless Obama, threatens to reveal the wizards behind the curtains to all citizens and the world – whence the ‘great democracy’ then?
Going down fighting, to Impeach right or wrong , to pull down the whole edifice – IS the QPQ – that Pellosi dramatically threatened, begging that charges aren’t brought for Treason.
Two bald men fighting over a comb would be a just war compared to two groups of empty headed Keystone Congress creatures, plunderers of the public purse, accusing each other of Corruption.
After 28 years of Chicago your brain probably edits out any knowledge of Daley and his tribe, of which Obama is an honorary member.