Is there really a "Deep State V. Trump"?

 I don't co-sign with everything that the author Paul Street said in the following article written for counterpunch, but I think that it is a must read for every serious thinker in America.

"In the 2016 presidential election cycle, two “populist” candidates running outside and against the nation’s reigning financial power centers launched remarkable insurgencies within the nation’s two dominant state-capitalist political organizations.   One of those contenders, Bernie Sanders, pushed Wall Street’s number one presidential aspirant, Hillary Clinton, much closer to possible defeat than probably he himself expected. After welcoming Sanders in as a token opponent to help Mrs. Clinton’s nomination as the Democrats’ presidential candidate seem at least partly contested, the Clinton campaign and its allies in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had to resort to dirty tricks to make sure he didn’t steal their prize.

Sanders’ message of reducing economic inequality resonated with millions of voters.  In retrospect, this is less than surprising in a time when the top tenth of the upper U.S. One Percent owns as much as much wealth as the bottom U.S. 90 percent while half the nation’s population is either poor or near-poor (living at less than half the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level).  A shocking 94 percent of the jobs created in the U.S. economy during the Obama years were part-time, contract, and/or temporary positions.

Sanders’ appeal proved potent enough to force Hillary to change her position on numerous issues, including her prior support for the arch-corporate-globalist Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In the end, however, the Bernie revolution came up short. He lacked an established organizational base to match up with the formidable Clinton machine and its allies in the Democratic Party. He did not possess the killer instinct required to deal that machine a fatal blow (as seen in his excessive willingness to provide Mrs. Clinton cover on her email scandal).  He made critical errors with critical Black voters. And he faced persistent media bias thanks in part to his self-identification as a “democratic socialist.”

The Frankenstein “Populist” Who Won

The other “populist” major party candidate was Donald Trump.  He was richly endowed at least when it came to killer instinct regarding his opponents – or, as he likes to call them, his “enemies.” With no small help from a corporate media that gave him absurd amounts of free public exposure (helping thereby to create a Frankenstein from which that media would later recoil), Trump defeated and indeed humiliated Wall Street’s chosen Republican contenders, including first and foremost Jeb Bush.

He did this by running outside the traditional Republican Wall Street formula that Bush followed and in ways that sparked consternation in Wall Street executive suites and in other “elite” outposts of concentrated wealth and power. He denounced globalist “free trade,” NAFTA, and the TPP. He claimed to speak for working class “forgotten Americans” abandoned by big globalist corporations. He said that “free trade” had cost untold masses of  working Americans their livelihoods. He said that the American political system was “broken” by big money special interests that undermine and distort democracy (something Trump said he knew all about because of his own history as a wealthy funder of politicians). Much of the country’s infrastructure was crumbling under the reign of those interests, he noted.

Along the way, Trump’s frothing promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants and build an anti-immigrant wall on the southern U.S. border troubled business interests who rely on cheap and compliant immigrant labor.  It also threatened Republican efforts to win over more Latino voters
Trump also articulated a protectionist “America First” foreign policy and trade vision that won him enemies in U.S. imperial establishment, which is intimately tied in to the nation’s globalist financial and corporate oligarchy. Adding the bipartisan imperial “national security elite” to those he irked, Trump criticized George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton for advancing costly, jihad-spreading regime-change fiascos in Iraq and Libya. He hinted that he’d drop U.S. support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and criticized Hillary and the foreign policy elite’s provocation of Moscow.

A Loose Cannon Bad for the National Brand

Beneath all this, Trump was something else the ruling class really doesn’t like – a loose cannon full of individualist chutzpah and bile. As Mike Lofgren noted in his important book The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (2016) last summer, “His painfully visible erratic unpredictability and thirst for confrontation made him anything but the sort of team player who would give due consideration to the needs of the vested interests. Dividend drawers want a reliable caretaker to run their affairs, not an insult comedian juggling sticks of dynamite.”

And Trump threatened to ruin Brand America. It is longstanding bipartisan U.S. ruling class doctrine that the United States is the world’s great beacon and agent of democracy, human rights, justice, and freedom. American Reality has never matched the doctrine, of course, but it was especially difficult indeed to square those claims with a candidate like Trump, who openly exhibited racist, nativist, sexist, arch-authoritarian and even neo-fascist sentiments and values while openly praising torture.  “If our system of government is an oligarchy with a façade of democratic and constitutional process,” Lofgren wrote in the preface to his book’s paperback edition, “Trump would not only rip that façade away for the entire world to behold; he would take our system’s ugliest features and intensify them.”

The “dividend drawers” and the overlapping imperial elite prefer people like Obama. Beneath his carefully crafted people’s and “fresh” outsider imagery, he was in fact a well-vetted, Harvard Law-minted and establishment-vetted team player who understood very well that his job was to smoothly serve his Wall Street and Pentagon masters and keep populist and anti-war sentiments at bay while pretending to embrace them both for his own electoral advantage and for broader system-rebranding effect. The neoliberal, silver-tongued Obama was the empire’s sophisticated, fake-progressive, fake-constitutional, and multicultural new clothes.  He enjoyed and embraced the deceptive role.  He told the nation’s financial elite early on in his presidency that, as he remarked to the nation’s top 13 financial executives after he called them to the White House in the wake of the financial collapse they caused, “you guys have a public relations problem and I’m here to help.”

Trump, by contrast, threatened to remove the democratic, legal, post-racial, peaceful, and ethnically diverse, cloak in particularly glaring ways.  He harkened a crisis of legitimacy for the system’s false claims to represent noble and egalitarian ideals – something that promised to be bad for business at home and abroad.  A Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio presidency might have inflicted some of the same damage, to some degree, but not to anything like the same extent as Trump.  The Republican Party has trucked in racist, sexist, nativist, and militarist white nationalism and authoritarianism for more than half a century.  (The Bush family was no exception, to say the least).  Still, no serious Republican presidential contender in memory had gone as far as Trump in making these terrible tendencies so explicit and pronounced, with the effect enhanced by Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and 24/7 cable news.  Trump threatened to rip the last remaining shreds of civilizational legitimacy from the ever more apocalyptic and radically reactionary GOP." [More]

Thoughts?

Drinking coffee while black, and the Democrats have a debate.

I, like most working professionals, will sometimes hit up Starbucks or my local coffee shop in the mornings before I get my work on.

Sometimes there is nothing like a little jolt of java to get your juices flowing.

This is, of course, unless you happen to be a black man in America.

Tonight my racism chase takes me to Cincinnati, Ohio.   

"It was just another morning in Cincinnati, Ohio for 29-year-old Charles Harrell when he was making his way back from a early morning coffee run. Filming his trip, Harrell recorded his interaction with police officer Baron Osterman, who can be seen trailing behind Harrell on a bicycle. Sharing that the police office asked if he “had a problem,” Harrell noted that this was a normal occurrence in his hometown.

 

“This is what we have to go through in Cincinnati, harassment” he said. “You can’t be a black man and enjoy your morning, because the police are going to harass you in Cincinnati, Ohio.”

 

As the video continues to roll, Osterman approaches Harrell for allegedly crossing against the light. In response, Harrell admits that he was frightened by the officer’s trailing of him, stating, “You were scaring me, sir. I don’t know why you’re following me anyway. You followed me all the way down the street.” Osterman then demands that Harrell put his phone and coffee on the ground. Refusing to lay his objects down, Harrell instead offers his I.D., and the officer become physical, warning him: “Don’t reach around.” Harrell is pinned against the wall and handcuffed.

 

According to Cincinnati.com, this is not the first time Officer Osterman has been linked to the use of excessive force. He reportedly was involved in the death of a black man, Nathaniel Jones, in 2003 in a local White Castle restaurant. The Citizen Complaint Authority ruled that Osterman and his fellow officer James Pike used excessive force in subduing Jones in 2004. They were both cleared in 2008 and awarded financial compensation.

 

Harrell was arrested for a pedestrian violation, resisting arrest and possession of a small amount of marijuana. The police department released a statement saying that the incident was up for internal review. Watch the footage of the incident below: [Video and story]

 

I hope, for his sake, Charles had decaf.  

 

Finally, I am watching the democrats debate each other, and Bernie is doing his usual shouting about Wall Street, and Hillary is trying her best to tell the people what they want to hear by wrapping herself around his Oness.

 

The moderators are having a much easier job with this one, because there are only two people and they are both, for the most part, sticking to the issues. No my d**k is bigger than yours shouting match going on with these two.

 

Bernie is telling Hillary to release her transcript of her speeches on Wall Street and I believe that she should. She has to stop hiding behind this argument that she will do it when ALL of her opponents to the same. That argument just has disingenuous written all over it.  And worse, it is giving Donald trump and the New York Times cover for their disgraceful refusal to release the transcript of his "off the record"  conversation with the Time's editorial board where he allegedly told them that his entire campaign when it comes to immigration might be a scam. 

 

Sorry Joe Concha, I get the whole confidentiality thing, but this man is running to be the president of the United States for crying out loud. Nothing a presidential candidate thinks or have said in the past should be kept from the American people. 

 

This election is way too important to allow a scam artist to pull the wool over our eyes.

 

Oh wait....too late.

 

*Pic from rawstory.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poor "Mr Newport Beach".

“Obama is the worst thing to ever happen to this country,” declares the wealthy, rakish, silver-haired Newport Beach white guy to his small group of perfectly tanned 50-something females sitting just a few feet away from us at a stunning restaurant patio overlooking the sun-kissed California coastline, just off of Highway 1, as he sipped his pinot and adjusted his wraparound Ray Bans, flush from the economy’s spectacular recovery that has benefitted his exact demographic most of all, stroking his purebred dog and taking various selfies with their $500 phones, oblivious to the furious swirls of irony and hypocrisy fluttering just above their heads.

I laughed out loud. Couldn’t help it; I had just overheard Mr. Newport Beach say something about how Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster (despite how, of course, it’s not), and if America were to somehow actually develop a health care system similar to, say, Canada’s, that would be the end of America for certain; we’d never recover from such a devastating blow. Or something. And then came the “worst thing to ever happen” quip, and I couldn’t hold back.

The worst ever! Except for the last guy.

They didn’t hear me, of course; the orgasmic thrum of their perfect lives drowned out my chuckle, and as I turned and looked at this beautifully entitled, happy crew from my vantage point only a few feet away but a million light years in perspective, we all shared one of the most spectacular, envied locales in the world and all of us sipped superb regional grape and not a single one of us suffered the slightest personal, social or economic indignity, every first-world need instantly met, every crab cake perfectly formed, the sunshine as flawless as Jesus on toast and no lines at the restroom and lots of free parking for his Lexus SUV.


A few thoughts struck me, all at once. The first was how nice this group all seemed – and of course they probably were – and I imagine if we had all had met under different circumstances and been chatting about, say, the weather or the soul-exploding coastline, I’m sure we would have been fast, easy friends – noting that, if we wanted to remain that way, we’d never talk about politics. Or religion.


Even so, I desperately wanted to ask Mr. Newport Beach what his stock portfolio looked like a mere six or seven years ago, when Bush & Co. ravaged the country and led us into one of the deepest, most brutal social and economic pits in modern history. Did he lose half his net worth? More? Was he worried he couldn’t feed his family or pay his mortgage? Did he lose his house? His job? Did he blame Bush? Clinton? Islam? The gays?


And by the way, how does he like the recovery so far? Which of his three perfect, multimillion-dollar homes was he on his way to, right now?
I also wanted to know, when Bush/Cheney lied to the world, openly violated the tragedy of 9/11 and invaded Iraq, killing tens of thousands, was he furious? What about now, when even Fox News is calling out Cheney and declaring Iraq invasion a colossal mistake, a lie from which we’re still unable to extricate ourselves?


Nevertheless, Obama ended Bush’s disastrous war, just like he said he would, on time and under budget. Does it matter?


And what of Newport’s female companions? I wonder if he knows that upwards of 99 percent of sexually active women have used some form of contraception. Is he in line with the GOP’s recent spate of nasty misogyny and anti-abortion spew? What about the awful SCOTUS Hobby Lobby decision, further bashing women, and Obama’s immediate moves to defend women’s rights? Is he aware? I bet those women are. Or surely, their daughters.


And really, what about the stock market? The Dow dances around record highs, Wall Street snorts rails of finely chopped gold every day, the income gap between the 1% and everyone else is more demeaning than ever and the banks haven’t fundamentally changed in the slightest. Why isn’t Mr. Newport Beach positively orgasmic about the Obama Administration’s generally wealth-favoring policies that made it all happen? Say what you like, but Obama managed to do what nearly all economists and pundits thought impossible back in 2008: reverse the ugliest, GOP-led social and economic tailspin in modern history, and make guys like Mr. Newport richer than ever.


My new friend looked good. Healthy. Fit. Good teeth, thick head of silver hair, that prostate cancer scare a couple years back easily nipped by a few wildly expensive treatments he never paid a dime for. Who did pay for his insurance? His company? Medicare? Did he have any idea what it was like not to be able to afford it, or be offered any in the first place?


I sipped my rosé, took a deep breath, enjoyed the magnificent landscape as one final, predominant thought swam into view: how? How can there be such a radical disconnect between Mr. Newport’s engorged portfolio, his fantastic insurance plan, low mortgage rate and grotesque corporate privilege – most of it born of the past six years – and Obama’s overall policy successes? Does he consider it all just a fluke? Dumb luck? Is he drunk on Limbaugh and Fox News, unable to see actual facts?


Look here, Newport: Since Obama took office, corporate profits are way up. So is business investment, job growth (moderately), retail sales, manufacturing (well, barely). Want to buy another house? Interest rates are fantastic. The housing crisis has largely subsided, and home foreclosures are way down. Also, people are buying lots of new cars, and there’s a fully recovered auto industry ready to meet all demand.


Did he know federal discretionary spending is well below average? Or that the poverty rate has stabilized? And the stock market is, as mentioned, breaking records, benefitting rich white dudes more than ever?


Of course, it’s all pretty shaky. Flawed and imbalanced and could give out at any second – but that’s just the nature of the excruciatingly complex, unstable world economy these days. And while corporations are raking it in, workers are seeing less and less of their fair share. There are still myriad problems, and Obama’s policies are far from perfect. No party’s ever are. Regardless, given the impossible economic hell-pit Obama was left with, it’s unlikely any president could have possibly done better.


Clearly I’m missing something, a huge bed of terrifying data to prove all these respectable charts and graphs wrong. But where is it? I’ve heard Mr. Newport Beach’s bizarre lament a thousand times, but I’ve yet to see a solid batch of evidence that proves Obama’s outright failure, or the nation’s savage decline. I see a blip about food stamps, I see a few weak economic signs here and there, but mostly, since 2009, it all’s been somewhere between timidly and shockingly positive. Did God smite us for gay marriage? Did the abortion factories, death panels and Nazi Kenyan socialist brain-washing farms steal my very soul? Hard to tell with all this perfect sunshine in my eyes.


The bottom line seems obvious: Much to the GOP’s bitter revulsion, it turns out a calm, intellectual black man really can run an entire country – certainly far better than an inarticulate Texas bumbler, and even in the face of what is easily the most obstructionist, hateful, acidic and often downright racist Congress in modern memory. Quite an achievement, really.


It’s curious, no? The unmitigated hate for Obama comes from the right, but the real disappointment comes from the left. It’s we liberals who seem to have the most legitimate gripes with a man we all thought would be far more radical and revolutionary. From the NSA to drone warfare to a shocking lack of transparency, a shameless kowtowing to Wall Street, a lack of serious education reform and barely a blip about the environment (until very recently) – Obama has been a far more mixed bag for the left than anyone wants to admit.


But right now, that seems like quibbling. To hear Mr. Newport Beach tell it, my president is a downright monster. Who cares if he ended the war, saved the economy, restored America’s stature in the world, nailed Osama bin Laden, invested billions in clean energy, partially reformed what is still the most expensive, least effective health care system in the industrialized world, or made the rich even richer? The guy’s the worst thing to ever happen to America. I mean, obviously. Now who wants more wine?" [Source]

"..the noise of others.."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."~Steve Jobs~

As A-merry-ca and the world laments the loss of this industrialist/ visionary, maybe we should reflect on some of the words he spoke at that famous Stanford University commencement address.

A lot us are happy to be living the lives of others, and we have no problem dancing to whatever tune they are playing. It seems that we can't even function without the talking points. 

Consider the following: There is a growing movement in A-merry-ca to protest the nefarious acts of some folks on Wall Street. But [right] wingnuts won't participate because they think that it is funded by left wing politicians. There was (and still is) a right wing movement in this country called the tea party, and folks on the left won't participate because they think....Okay okay, it was funded by right wing groups and politicians, but you get the point. Folks only act when they get marching orders from the people pulling their strings. I wonder why there are so many puppets in A-merry-ca?

Steve Jobs was no puppet, and he was worth billions. Some poor working class stiff living in Morgantown, West Virgina, who thinks, like that idiot Hank Williams Jr., that Obama is a Nazi, will never be worth billions. In fact, he will probably never pay his bills on time. Why? Because he is a puppet. And his job in life is to keep other people in power, and make other people rich. Obama is not the one keeping him from becoming rich or paying his bills on time, the people he sends to Washington every time there is an election who are paid millions of dollars by lobbyist who are themselves paid by other people to protect their interest, (not his) are the ones keeping him from living the A-merry-can dream. 

Herman Cain is wrong, the folks on Wall Street are keeping a lot of people from becoming wealthy, because the system is rigged against them. And Wall Street is a perfect representation of the system. They are well represented on K Street.

I know a lot of hard working people in inner city Philadelphia who will never be as wealthy as Herman Cain, and I guarantee you that they have worked harder than Herman Cain all of their lives. Tell some poor single mother who works at Wal-Mart for four hours during the day then takes three buses to the burbs to clean some wealthy old woman's s*%@ for another eight hours that she doesn't work hard.--- FYI Herman, jigging 24/7 does not count as hard work. Negro, you done lost your mind.

Finally, I see that Barbara Walters dropped the N-word on The View. Apparently it led to a "tense discussion". I guess poor Sherri Sheperd did not realize that her boss could use the word with such ease.

"The conversation was centered around the controversy surrounding Rick Perry and a hunting camp he leased. The camp's entrance contained a rock with the term "Niggerhead" on it for many years. The Washington Post broke the story of the rock, and presented conflicting narratives about Perry's knowledge of what was written on it and his efforts to get rid of it.

Goldberg used the N-word (which was silenced throughout the conversation) first, while talking about Herman Cain's use of the word during a Sunday interview. It was when Walters used the word, though, that things got awkward. "It's very hard for me to say," she said. "It gives me chills." Goldberg said it was useless to "pretend" that the word didn't exist. "Let's call it what it said!" she said.

It was here that Shepherd cut in. "When I heard you say it, it was fine," she told Goldberg. Turning to Walters, she continued, "I didn't like the way you said it." In explaining this, Shepherd used the word several more times.
"I don't know if it's a semantics thing, but it's something that goes through my body," she said.

"It's because I'm white?" Walters said. Shepherd acknowledged that it was. "It's something about hearing you say it," she said. "I don't like it when you use the word ... when you say it it's a different connotation." [Source]

"Where are the Tea Party protests about Wall Street?"

You know, I was thinking the very same thing:

"We're down to the wire here on financial reform. I can't think of a better time to put pressure on Wall Street and Washington to make sure there is adequate regulation to ensure that we never have another bailout. The AFL-CIO is about to have a protest at Wall Street on April 29th. Great, that makes sense. I'm sure the right-wing groups who are also upset about the bailouts will join them.

If you remember, the Tea Parties were originally formed to protest the bailouts. They were so mad at the Wall Street bankers who destroyed the economy and then took our hard earned money for their efforts.

So, they will take this opportunity, of course, to launch their own protest of Wall Street. They will protest the TARP money, the easy credit, the lack of regulation, the wild risk taking and the excessive bonuses paid with taxpayer money. They're really going to take the fight to them.

Just kidding. They're not going to do anything. They're going to sit out this fight on financial reform and put absolutely no pressure on Wall Street at all. Because they are tools easily manipulated by right-wing organizations funded by corporate America.

I really feel sorry for them. They're dupes. They think they are so fiercely independent when in fact they are the most easily manipulated people in the country. All that anger toward the power establishment and what happened? They were used by that same establishment to fight against health care reform and to try to protect the health insurance companies. Suckers.

Now, when it's time to fight the financial companies, where are they? Nowhere to be found. Why? Because FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity didn't organize any bus rides to Wall Street. They didn't manufacture the outrage they did in protecting the health care companies. They used the Tea Party protestors for their own purposes and then left them on the side of the road, only to be picked up again when they need to protect another company or industry.

I issued a challenge back in January to the Tea Party organizers to rally against Wall Street or even against the Obama administration (Tim Geithner in particular) for being too soft on them. And what's happened since then? Nada. Zilch. Zippo.
So, I was proven right -- they're never, ever going to protest Wall Street because they are ignorant dupes being led by the nose by their corporate overlords. And they think they're so tough and independent-minded. What a farce. The whole movement is a sad joke being played on its own members." [Story]

Yep, they are kind of like certain republicans (like one in particular who frequents this site) who like to say that they are not republicans. But don't believe them, that is exactly what they are. They try to use the independent label to gain credibility with the rest of A-merry-ca. Unfortunately for them, however, they have none.

Just ask yourself this question: If George W. Bush was president of these divided states do you think there would even be a teabagger movement? If you answered yes to that question please send me your e-mail address. I would love to sell you on this idea I have and possibly get some investment dollars from you. It's called bottled air.

O Aid intervention and crisis hotline needed.

"The “Bubba vote” and underlying racism will hurt Democrat Barack Obama in key battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania.

“The Bubba vote is there, and it’s very real, and it is everywhere,... “There’s an awful lot of people in America, bless their heart, who simply are not emotionally prepared to vote for a black man."

~Dick Armey~

First of all let me say how disappointed I am with you Obamaholics. After reading your comments which followed my last post, it is clear to me that you live in a serious state of denial. The quote you read above was not from some hick shooting the breeze at the latest Redneck 500. That was a former congressman and a majority leader of his party (the rethuglicans of course) from 1995 to 2003, and the elected representative from the 26th district in the great state of Texas. But all I keep hearing from you Obamaholics is that race doesn't matter. That in spite of what people are telling the pollsters, the end result will be different. Oh field you tell me, those people saying all that negative stuff don't really vote, so why even pay attention to them? People can hate the man's race but not him. They can compartmentalize you tell me, when they see him they don't see a black man, they see their future president......well, that's all bullshit, and you know it. But that O Aid has you living in that state, the one that starts with a big "D". You are like junkies who say that you only get high when you want to have a little fun, and that you can break your addiction whenever you want to. But you and I know that you can't, and no matter what reality throws in front of you, you will just keep hitting that pipe, and pushing that needle.

Look, do you think that the rethugs use ads. like the latest one showing the O man with Frank Raines, by accident? Don't you think they could have used a few other Wall Street types who were close to Obama, besides Raines? Of course they could. But they, unlike you, understand their constituency, and they understand that race matters; especially when they are trying to cover up their own *candidates' incompetence when it comes to the economy, and other issues. (Hat tip Greg Fuller for that link)

But like that drill Sargent, football coach, or ball busting math teacher that you hated in your youth, I only mean the best for you. So I will continue to give you my tough love, because if I don't do it, no one else will.

Now go out and register some folks, you gotta keep trying to offset that "Bubba" vote.

....Wait, this just in: it seems the rethugs have updated that ad. (god forbid they seem like they are a bunch of racist) and it features a white CEO now. Nice! I think they know you Obamaholics more than you know yourselves. See field, I told you, it's not about race. What do you have to say now wise ass?

Intervention sessions will start the first week in December. :)

*Charlotte, thanks for telling me about that broken link. It has been updated.