The American Empire is ‘collapsing’

SUBHEAD: A United States military study indicates that the Global Order it supports is fraying and crumbling.

By By Darius Shahtahmasebi on 18 July 2017 for the Last American Vagabond -
(http://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/military/us-military-establishment-study-american-empire-collapsing/)


Image above: US military equipment including Hummers and tanks fill a road to the horizon. From original article.

A new study conducted by members of the U.S. military establishment has concluded that the U.S.-led international global order established after World War II is “fraying” and may even be “collapsing” as the U.S. continues to lose its position of “primacy” in world affairs.

“In brief, the sta­tus quo that was hatched and nurtured by U.S. strategists after World War II and has for decades been the principal ‘beat’ for DoD is not merely fraying but may, in fact, be collapsing,” the report states.

The report, published in June by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, evaluated the Department of Defense’s (DOD) approach to risk assessment at all levels of Pentagon policy planning.

The study was supported and sponsored by the U.S. Army’s Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate; the Joint Staff, J5 (Strategy and Policy Branch); the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Develop­ment; and the Army Study Program Management Office.

Imperial hubris
As explained by Nathan Freier, the project director and principal author of the report, the U.S. and its defense establishment “are stumbling through a period of hypercompetition.” From Freier’s point of view, the current era is marred with furious battles for positional advantage at a number of levels, whether national, transnational, or extra-national.

Freier explains that America’s failure to cope is the result of “hubris,” which is reminiscent of Imperial Hubris, a book by Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit. Imperial Hubris also warned the U.S. about the very controversial and hubristic reasons it was losing the war on terror (hubris means “exaggerated pride or self-confidence,” according to Merriam-Webster).

Technically, the report does not officially represent the Pentagon, though it does represent the “collective wisdom” of those consulted – including a number of Pentagon officials and prominent think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the RAND Corporation, and the Institute for the Study of War.

Nevertheless, the report involved consultation with key agencies across the DoD and the Armed Forces and encouraged the U.S. government to invest more heavily in surveillance, better propaganda through “strategic manipulation” of public opinion, and a “wider and more flexible” U.S. military. The report states:

“While as a rule, U.S. leaders of both political parties have consistently committed to the maintenance of U.S. military superiority over all potential state rivals, the post-primacy reality demands a wider and more flexible military force that can generate ad­vantage and options across the broadest possible range of military demands. To U.S. political leadership, maintenance of military advantage preserves maximum freedom of action… Finally, it allows U.S. decision-makers the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes in the shadow of significant U.S. military capability and the implied promise of unac­ceptable consequences in the event that capability is unleashed.”

The year-long study concluded that the DoD should discard its outdated risk conventions and change how it describes, identifies, assesses, and communicates strategic-level and risk-based choices.

As investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed observed, these are the very strategies that have led to the U.S.’ declining power in the first place. Further enacting these failed strategies will only exacerbate the problem and demonstrates America’s refusal to go down without a fight.

The blame lies with resistant states
According to Freier and his team, the dangers currently challenging the U.S. don’t just come from countries like Russia and China (and even North Korea and Iran), but also from the increasing risk of “Arab Spring”-style events that could potentially erupt all over the world.

One might wonder, then, why the U.S. decided to support a number of these events, even to the great benefit of known jihadist movements that already existed within them.

Ahmed also astutely points out that the report doesn’t actually substantiate its claims that countries like Russia are a genuine threat to America’s national security, aside from the fact that these countries seek to pursue their own core interests – as most countries should be free to do (within reason).
According to the report, Iran and North Korea are ;

“… neither the products of, nor are they satisfied with, the contemporary order… At a minimum, they intend to destroy the reach of the U.S.-led order into what they perceive to be their legitimate sphere of influence. They are also resolved to replace that order locally with a new rule set dictated by them.”

It is notable that the report does not list Iran and North Korea as nuclear threats — as traditional neoconservative propaganda often asserts — but simply as perceived threats to the American-led world order.

The report also found that the international framework has been restructured in ways that are “inhospitable” and often “hostile” to U.S. leadership. For example, “proliferation, diversification, and atomization of effective counter-U.S. resistance,” as well as “resurgent but transformed great power competition” are seen to be at the heart of this new international restructuring.

According to the report, the U.S. is not prepared for these circumstances, and the report seeks to provide the U.S. with guidance to deal with these emerging scenarios.

In all seriousness, hostility to the U.S. military did not develop in a vacuum – it is quite clearly the sheer arrogance of America’s leadership and its incessant meddling in foreign affairs that have created a number of adversaries who are no longer willing to bow to American interests.

The “Wake Up Call”
Though the report throws the word “adapt” around often, the U.S. is clearly not willing to adapt at all if the only way it can deal with its issues is to strengthen the very sources of said issues in the first place. If the only tool the U.S. has is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail. The more problems the U.S. faces, the more nails it sees in need of quashing.

While some may laud a report in which advisors to the U.S. have acknowledged America’s status as a dying power, the truth, as demonstrated in this recent analysis, is that the U.S. will not give up its place in global affairs without a fight.

As the report states, the reality of this looming collapse should not be seen as defeatism, but rather, should be a “wake up call.”

Take the Syrian conflict, for example. The more places Assad’s military liberates, the more refugees are returning home and the more concerts are being held. Syria, Russia, and Iran have achieved these mounting successes even in the face of direct American intervention – and yet the U.S. still refuses to leave the country.

Irrespective of crimes committed by the pro-Assad axis, if the ultimate objective has been to reduce the suffering in Syria and end the war, the U.S. should admit defeat and move on — especially once ISIS’ caliphate collapses entirely. But the U.S. won’t – and is reportedly considering greater involvement in the war-torn country.

The U.S. knows it is on the brink of collapse but refuses to go down peacefully. From the point of view of the powers-that-be, as long as every nail of resistance can be broken, the American hammer will continue to lead the world in international affairs.

But even as this report indicates, it is precisely because of America’s hubris that it has found itself in this position in the first place.

In this context, the report is somewhat contradictory and only further encourages the United States to provoke further hostility from aggrieved players on the world stage.

Carrying on these practices and exacerbating them is totally nonsensical, but doing so continues to be the go-to mantra of the U.S. war machine.

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The Lie of the Land

SUBHEAD: Will Trump’s presidency spell disaster for the climate, or can the green movement seize back the debate?

By Paul Kingsnorth on 18 March 2017 for The Guardian -
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/18/the-new-lie-of-the-land-what-future-for-environmentalism-in-the-age-of-trump)


Image above: Detail of photo of man in suit ignoring woman with sign reading "Need ticket home 2 Maine! Stranded in NYC w/abusive husband! Please help me get out of here!" From (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/why-education-wont-solve-americas-inequality-crisis/).

Last June, I voted to leave the European Union. I wasn’t an anti-EU fanatic but I was, despite my advancing years, still something of a green idealist.

 I had always believed that small was beautiful, that people should govern themselves and that power should be reclaimed and localized whenever possible. I didn’t think that throwing the people of Greece, Spain and Ireland to the wolves in order to keep bankers happy looked like the kind of right-on progressive justice that some of the EU’s supporters were claiming it represented.

So I voted to leave. I didn’t say anything about this before the vote and, despite being a writer, I didn’t write about it either. There was too much mudslinging on both sides already, and I didn’t want to throw any more or have any thrown at me. In any case, I didn’t have much to say.

The mudslinging, it turned out, was just a prelude to what would come next. The EU referendum, like the election of Donald Trump in the US five months later, and the Scottish independence question, newly reopened this week, tore the plaster off a pre-existing national wound that now began to bleed freely.

All sorts of things bubbled up that had been suppressed for years, and everyone was suddenly taking sides. Some people, when I told them that I’d voted to leave, looked at me as if I’d just owned up to a criminal record.

Why would I do that? Was I a racist? A fascist? Did I hate foreigners? Did I hate Europe?

I must hate something.

Did I know how irresponsible I had just been? Had I changed my mind yet? I needed to go away and check my privilege.

The eruption of anger that followed the vote, on all sides, was surprising enough. But what was also surprising to me was the uniformity of opinion among people I had thought I shared a worldview with.

Most people in the leftish, green-tinged world in which I had spent probably too much time over the years seemed to be lining up behind the EU.

The public intellectuals, the Green party, the big NGOs: all these people, from a tradition founded on localization, degrowth, bioregionalism and a fierce critique of industrial capitalism, were on board with a multinational trading bloc backed by the world’s banks, corporations and neoliberal politicians. Something smelt fishy.

I was born in the early 1970s. At around the same time, two forces – two movements, if you like – were also born that would shape the lives of my generation. One was neoliberalism. The other was environmentalism.

Neoliberalism was an economic project. It sought to replace stuttering statist economic models with a new laissez-faire order by removing “barriers to trade” wherever they might be found.

These barriers might be protectionist tariffs or taxes; they might also be national laws, local customs or environmental regulations.

The creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 was the culmination of a decades-long project, pushed by the economic and military might of the United States and its allies, to globalize the neoliberal model and cement it in international law.

By the early 21st century it seemed that this globalization process was both unstoppable and almost complete. Political parties from all traditions had surrendered to it, and the pundits and the economists were happily on board.

In the process, the economic project had developed into a cultural one, promulgated by its beneficiary class, the urban, tech-savvy, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie.

Often referred to as “globalism”, this worldview envisaged a borderless, one-world culture, in which trade tariffs and national boundaries were seen as equally damaging to the new hypercapitalist conception of freedom.

Traditions, distinctive cultures, national identities, religious strictures, social mores – all would dissolve away in the healing light of free trade and a western liberal conception of social progress.

Only bigots and luddites could possibly oppose such a utopian dream.

Being something of a luddite myself, I wrote a book, One No, Many Yeses, opposing it 15 years ago.

The book tracked the great wave of anti-globalization movements that washed over the world at the end of the 20th century, from the summit blockades at Seattle, Prague and Genoa to the uprising of the Zapatistas in Mexico and the anti-privatisation riots in South Africa.

What I found as I investigated these movements was that the most lasting of them were fuelled not by a general rage against “the system”, but by a sense of place and belonging.

Somewhere that people loved or felt attached to was being threatened by outside forces, whether they be trade treaties, buccaneering corporations or oppressive governments, and people were fighting to defend what they knew and what they were.

This sense of the uniqueness of places, and of the cultures that sprang from them, had been what pushed me towards green activism in the first place.

From a young age I had an inchoate sense that much of the world’s color, beauty and distinctiveness was being bulldozed away in the name of money and progress.

Some old magic, some connection, was being snuffed out in the process. It must be 20 years since I read the autobiography of the late travel writer Norman Lewis, The World, The World, but the last sentence stays with me.

Wandering the hills of India, Lewis is ask by a puzzled local why he spends his life traveling instead of staying at home. What is he looking for? “I am looking for the people who have always been there,” replies Lewis, “and belong to the places where they live. The others I do not wish to see.”

As a writer, whether of fiction or non-fiction, I have been looking for the same thing. That first book of mine, it turned out, was a journey in search of people who belong. It was a defence of a threatened fragility. A few years later, I wrote another, this time about globalisation’s impact on England, my home country.

I’ve since written novels and essays and poems and they always seem, however hard I try to write about something else, to circle back around to that primal question: what does it mean to belong to a place, to a people, to nature, in a time in which belonging is everywhere under attack?

 Does it mean anything? Why should it matter?

All I know is that it matters to me. That was why I joined what I wanted to believe was a movement that could derail globalization. For a while, it looked like it might.

Then came 9/11, and a different kind of anti-globalization movement – violent Islamism – began stalking the west. Governments cracked down on dissent and populations grew fearful. Everything suddenly seemed darker.

Still it seemed that nothing could stop the neoliberal train. It kept rolling, faster and faster, until in 2008 it hit a wall at full speed.

Remarkably, it survived the crash. When the banks were bailed out and the corporations given another series of blank checks, I gave up on the idea that much would ever change.

The power of money seemed as stark as the stench of corruption. Perhaps neoliberalism was unstoppable after all. Perhaps, as Margaret Thatcher had once famously claimed, there was, indeed, no alternative.

On 24 June last year I woke up, made a cup of tea and turned on my computer, wondering by what margin the nation had voted to remain in the EU. On the BBC website, the headline seemed to take up the whole screen: BRITAIN VOTES TO LEAVE THE EUROPEAN UNION.

Five months later, my morning seemed to repeat itself. I woke up, made another cup of tea, wondered how many votes Clinton had won by, and then gaped at the margin of Trump’s victory. It was clear the poles were shifting. Something big was going on.

On both occasions I can remember precisely how I felt. It was a feeling that had nothing to do with what might happen next, and it wasn’t really related to my opinions about any of the issues involved.

The feeling was exhilaration. I suddenly realized that for the last decade I had believed, even though I had pretended not to believe, in the end of history. Now, the end of history was ending. Change was possible after all.

I also began to realize something else: the anti-globalization movement had not died. Its impulse had driven Brexit as it had driven Donald Trump’s victory. It had driven Jeremy Corbyn’s rise, and those of Syriza in Greece and Bernie Sanders in the US.

In their different ways and for different reasons, coalitions of people were again pushing back against the dehumanizing world that the global economy was creating. Globalization had been impoverishing the south for decades. Now it was impoverishing the west, too, and the discontent had reached boiling point.

But change is a trickster and it makes no promises.

Back in the day, those of us who fancied ourselves as radicals thought we were the shock troops in the battle against globalization. As a young greenie, I would consume the words of Edward Abbey and Murray Bookchin, Vandana Shiva and EF Schumacher, James Lovelock and Dave Foreman.

These were the people who were constructing the sane future, and I wanted to join them.

Campaigning environmentalists, the “social justice” movement, the lefties and the greens: we would be the heroes of the coming hour.

Our rational solutions to climate change, our well-argued deconstructions of neoliberalism, our piles of evidence about the negative impact of trade treaties, our righteous demands for justice – these would shake the world. When they learned the truth about the continuing corporate stitch-up, the people would rise up in opposition.

They did rise up in the end, but it wasn’t us they were listening to. The message had found a different messenger. Trump said in his last TV spot before election victory:

“There is, a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities”.

They were words that could have been heard at any social forum, anti-globalization gathering or left-green beanfeast from the last 20 years, as could the rousing final sentence:

“The only thing that can stop this corrupt machine is you.”

In a penetrating essay in The American Interest last July, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt sought to place all this in context. He suggested that the old left-right political divide, which had been looking iffy for years, was being supplanted by a new binary: globalism versus nationalism.

Nationalism, in the broadest sense of the term, was the default worldview of most people at most times, especially in more traditional places. It was a community-focused attitude, in which a nation, tribe or ethnic group was seen as a thing of value to be loved and protected.

Globalism, the ideology of the rising urban bourgeoisie, was more individualistic. It valued diversity and change, prioritized rights over obligations and saw the world as a whole, rather than particular parts of it, as the moral community to which we all belong.

The current explosion of nationalism in the west, Haidt said, was due to globalism having overplayed its hand. Different attitudes to the issue of mass immigration – the spark that lit the fire on both sides of the Atlantic – demonstrated how this had happened.

While globalists saw migration as a right, nationalists saw it as a privilege.

To a globalist, border walls and immigration laws are tantamount to racism or human rights abuse.

To a nationalist, they are evidence of a community asserting its values and choosing to whom to grant citizenship.

Psychologically, Haidt suggested, what happened in 2016 was that many nationalist-inclined voters in the west felt that their community was now under existential threat – not only from large-scale migration, but from Islamist terrorist attacks and the globalist elite’s dismissive attitude to their concerns about both.

In response, they began to look around for strong leaders to protect them. The rest is history, still in the making.

This is the power of the new populists. The likes of Stephen Bannon and Marine Le Pen understand the destructive energy of global capitalism as well as the left does, but they also understand what the left refuses to see: that the heart of the west’s current wound is cultural rather than economic.

What is driving the modern turmoil are threats to identity, culture and meaning. Waves of migration, multicultural policies, eroding borders, shifting national and ethnic identities, globalist attacks on western culture: all that is solid is melting into air.

Who can promise the return of that solidity?

Not the left, which long ago hitched its wagon to the globalist horse, enthusing about breaking down everything from gender identities to national borders and painting any dissent as prejudice or hatred.

Instead, a new nationalism has risen to the occasion. As ever, those who can harness people’s deep, old attachment to tribe, place and identity – to a belonging and a meaning beyond money or argument – will win the day. This might be as iron a law as any human history can provide.

It didn’t take Trump’s cabinet of millionaires long, having got themselves comfortable in the White House, to start dismantling the nation’s environmental protections.

Two months in, the administration has given the green light to two controversial oil pipelines and removed environmental oversight on others, cancelled Obama’s climate action plan, removed regulations protecting clean water and appointed a former head of ExxonMobil as secretary of state.

Anti-green campaigner Myron Ebell, who believes that environmentalism is “the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world” was asked to head Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency, which he wants to abolish, and which has just seen its budget slashed by 25%.

Trump himself is notorious for his cavalier attitude to anything furry or leafy that gets in the way of his gaudy developments. The natural world has always been an inconvenient barrier to economic growth, which is why we are faced with a global ecological crisis.

But Trump’s anti-environmentalism, while it serves the interests of corporations, speaks the language of the people. In his telling, protecting the natural world from destruction is another example of the globalist elite sticking it to ordinary folk.

The notion that environmentalists are a privileged elite telling the hard-pressed that they can’t have decent lives has been a staple of corporate propaganda for decades.

Look at these horrible elitists, runs the line, trying to abolish your hard-earned holiday flights and double the price of your car journey. Who are they to tell you that you can’t give your children plastic toys at Christmas, or eat air-freighted avocados? Have you seen the size of Al Gore’s house?

Hypocrites!

Like all effective propaganda lines, this one works because there is some truth in it.

The environmental movement that emerged in the west more than 40 years ago, with the founding of organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and the birth of green parties across Europe, had its roots in the conservation world.

While its outlook was planetary – no true ecological movement can be anything else – its actions were often local or national. “Think globally, act locally”, perhaps the movement’s most effective early slogan, looks in retrospect like a beautiful combination of the best of the globalist and the nationalist impulses.

These days, though, as the Brexit vote demonstrated, green politics is a marker of the globalist class.

With their grand ecological Marshall Plans and their talk of sustainability and carbon, environmentalists today often seem distant from everyday concerns.

Green spokespeople and activists rarely come from the classes of people who have been hit hardest by globalization. The greens have shifted firmly into the camp of the globalist left. Now, as the blowback gathers steam, they find themselves on the wrong side of the divide.

All this can look like bad news from a certain perspective, but maybe it isn’t.

While environmentalism has changed the world in the last four decades, in recent years it has been spinning its wheels.

Increasingly unrealistic demands for global action on climate change, pie-in-the-sky manifestos calling for global rollouts of this or that eco-megaplan, the promotion of enormous windfarms or solar arrays that do more damage to wild nature than they prevent, all backed with a “40 months to save the world” narrative that’s been going on for 40 years: something had to give.

Some of the new populists may hope they can sound the death knell of the green movement, but perhaps they can instead teach it a necessary lesson.

What Haidt calls nationalism is really a new name for a much older impulse: the need to belong.

Specifically, the need to belong to a place in which you can feel at home. The fact that this impulse can be exploited by demagogues doesn’t mean that the impulse itself is wrong. Stalin built gulags on the back of a notional quest for equality, but that doesn’t mean we should give up on trying to make things fair.

The anti-globalist attack on the greens is a wake-up call. It points to the fact that green ideas have too often become a virtue signal for the carbon-heavy bourgeoisie, drinking their Fairtrade organic coffee as they wait for their transatlantic flight.

Green globalism has become part of the growth machine; a comfortable notion for those who don’t really want much to change.

What would happen if environmentalism remade itself – or was remade by the times?

What might a benevolent green nationalism sound like?

You want to protect and nurture your homeland – well, then, you’ll want to nurture its forests and its streams too. You want to protect its badgers and its mountain lions. What could be more patriotic?

This is not the kind of nationalism of which Trump would approve, but that’s the point. Why should those who want to protect a besieged natural world allow billionaire property developers to represent them as the elitists? Why not fight back – on what they think is their territory?

It has been done before. The nation that gave us Trump also gave us Teddy Roosevelt, another Republican populist president, but one who believed that America’s identity was tied up with protecting, not despoiling, its wild places.

Roosevelt created one of the greatest systems of protected areas and national parks in the world, using his presidency to save 230m acres of land. He wrote:

 “We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received,”“and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune.”

Protecting nature, Roosevelt believed, was a patriotic act.

If I had to offer up just one thing I have learned from my years of environmental campaigning, it would be this: any attempt to protect nature from the worst human depredation has to speak to people where they are.

It has to make us all feel that the natural world, the non-human realm, is not an obstacle in the way of our progress but a part of our community that we should nurture; a part of our birthright. In other words, we need to tie our ecological identity in with our cultural identity.

In the age of drones and robots, this notion might sound airy or even ridiculous, but it has been the default way of seeing for most indigenous cultures throughout history.

In the resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline, recently given the go-ahead by Trump, where the Standing Rock Sioux and thousands of supporters continue to resist the construction of an oil pipeline across Native American land, we perhaps see some indication of what this fusing of human and non-human belonging could look like today; a defense of both territory and culture, in the name of nature, rooted in love.

Globalism is the rootless ideology of the fossil fuel age, and it will fade with it. But the angry nationalisms that currently challenge it offer us no better answers about how to live well with a natural world that we have made into an enemy.

Our oldest identity is one that stills holds us in its grip, whether we know it or not.

Like the fox in the garden or the bird in the tree, we are all animals in a place. If we have a future, cultural or ecological – and they are the same thing, in the end – it will begin with a quality of attention and a defense of loved things. All else is for the birds, and the foxes too.

• Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, is published by Faber.

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Deep State War

SUBHEAD: Vault 7. Here is one example of how quickly the CIA's over-reach has been absorbed by the body politic.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 10 March 2017 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar17/deep-state-war3-17.html)


Image above: "CIA" derived from "CNN" logo. From (https://counterpsyops.com/2012/08/31/operation-mockingbird-2012-nyt-writer-leaked-story-critical-of-obama-to-cia/).

The battle raging in the Deep State isn't just a bureaucratic battle--it's a war for the soul, identity and direction of the nation.

When do the unlimited powers of the Intelligence/Security agencies threaten America's domestic and global national interests ?

The CIA and its political enablers claim the agency's essentially unlimited powers, partially revealed by Wikileak's Vault 7 , pose no threat to America's interests, since they are intended to "defend" American interests.

This is the rationale presented by neocon CIA allies in both political parties: the CIA can't possibly threaten America's interests because the CIA defines America's interests.

This is the wormhole down which civil liberties and democracy have drained. It is an extraordinarily defining moment in American history when the director of the FBI publicly declares that there is no such thing as "absolute privacy" in the U.S.

In effect, privacy is now contingent on the level of interest the Security State has in private conversations or data. If we read the U.S. Constitution, we do not find such contingencies: civil liberties are absolute.

Post-1790 presidents have temporarily mooted civil liberties in time of war, and the CIA-led camp of the Deep State has justified its unlimited powers by effectively declared "a state of war is now permanent and enduring."

So what's left to defend if America has become the enemy of civil liberties and democracy , that is become a totalitarian state ruled by Security Services and their political henchmen and apologists?

I have long suggested that the tectonic plates of the Deep State are shifting as the ruling consensus has eroded.

Some elements of the Deep State--what I call the progressive wing, which is (ironically to some) anchored in the military services-- now view the neocon-CIA (Security State)-Wall Street elements as profoundly dangerous to America's long-term interests, both domestically and globally.

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

I have suggested that this "rogue Deep State" quietly aided Donald Trump (by subtly undermining Hillary Clinton's campaign) as the last best chance to save the nation from the neocon's over-reach that the Establishment's Wall Street-funded leadership (Bush, Clinton, Obama, et al.) has overseen - including granting the CIA and its allies virtually unlimited powers unhindered by any effective oversight.

Does a Rogue Deep State Have Trump's Back? (January 18, 2017)

This profound split in the Deep State has now broken into open warfare. The first salvo was the absurd propaganda campaign led by Establishment mouthpieces The New York Times and The Washington Post claiming Russian agents had "hacked" the U.S. election to favor Trump.

This fact-free propaganda campaign failed - having no evidence didn't work quite as well as the NYT and Wapo expected - and so the propaganda machine launched the second salvo , accusing Trump of being a Russian patsy.

The evidence for this claim was equally laughable, and that campaign has only made the Establishment, its propaganda mouthpieces and the neocon Deep State look desperate and foolish on the global and domestic stages.

The desperate neocon Deep State and its Democratic Party allies went to absurd lengths to undermine Trump via the "Boris and Natasha" strategy of accusing Trump of collaborating with the Evil Russkies, even going so far as to briefly exhume former President G.W. Bush from deep-freeze to make a fool of himself, saying the Trump-Evil Russkies connection should be "investigated."

Now the rogue elements have launched a counterstrike--Vault 7. Here is one example of how quickly the CIA's over-reach has been absorbed by the body politic.

I highly recommend reading Wikileak's summary of Vault 7: Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed.

We now know that the CIA maintained a special program (UMBRAGE) to mimic Russia-based hackers and create false trails back to fictitious "Russian hackers." A number of highly experienced analysts who reviewed the supposed "Russian hacks" had suggested the "evidence" smelled of false trails-- not just bread crumbs, but bread crumbs heavy-handedly stenciled "this is Russian malware."

The body count from Vault 7 has not yet been tallied, but it wouldn't surprise me if former President Obama and his team eventually end up as political casualties. Non-partisan observers are noting all this over-reach occurred on Obama's watch, and it hasn't gone unnoticed that one of Obama's last executive orders stripped away the last shreds of oversight of what could be "shared" (or invented) between the Security Agencies.

Indeed, the entire leadership of the Democratic Party seems to have placed all their chips on the increasingly unviable claim that the CIA is the squeaky clean defender of America.

Vault 7 is not just political theater--it highlights the core questions facing the nation: what is left to defend if civil liberties and democratically elected oversight have been reduced to Potemkin-village travesties?

If there are no limits on CIA powers and surveillance, then what is left of civil liberties and democracy? Answer: nothing.

The battle raging in the Deep State isn't just a bureaucratic battle--it's a war for the soul, identity and direction of the nation. Citizens who define America's interests as civil liberties and democracy should be deeply troubled by the Establishment's surrender of these in favor of a National Security State with essentially no limits.

Americans tasked with defending America's "interests" globally should be asking if a CIA/NSA et al. with unlimited power is detrimental to America's soft and hard power globally, and toxic to its influence.

The answer is obvious: a CIA with unlimited power and the backing of a corrupt Establishment and media is more than detrimental to America's soft and hard power globally--it is disastrous and potentially fatal to America's interests, standing and influence.

Those of us on the sidelines can only hope that the progressive wing of the Deep State, the rogue elements who see the terrible danger of an unlimited National Security State, will succeed in undermining the powerful political support for this toxic totalitarian regime.


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Is Deep State tanking Hillary?

SUBHEAD: These blast points on Clinton's campaign could only be done by the Deep State.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 31 October 2016 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct16/Hillary-blast-points10-16.html)


Image above: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with her entourage when the Deep State still embraced her. From (http://www.modicanews.com/hillary-clinton-is-bringing-an-armed-forces-entourage-to-nbcs-military-forum/).

The Deep State's most prescient elements must derail Hillary's campaign to clear a path to Trump's executive team.

Back in August, I asked Could the Deep State Be Sabotaging Hillary? I think we now have a definitive answer: "These blast points on Hillary's campaign... too accurate for the Mainstream Media. Only the forces of the Imperial Deep State are so precise."

The Mainstream Media is presenting the FBI investigation as a "lose-lose" situation for embattled FBI Director Comey. If Comey remained quiet until after the election, he would be accused of colluding with the Clinton campaign and its allies in the Department of Justice (sic).

But in going public, he stands accused by Democrats of "intervening in an election," i.e. raising doubts about Hillary's judgement and veracity days before Americans go to the polls.

Another narrative has Comey's hand forced by the threat of disgusted FBI agents leaking information that would show the FBI caved into political pressure from the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to keep relevant material out of the public eye until after the election.

I submit another much more powerful dynamic is in play: the upper ranks of the Deep State now view Hillary as an unacceptable liability. The word came down to Comey to act whether he wanted to or not, i.e. take one for the good of the nation/Deep State/Imperial Project.

As a refresher: the Deep State is the unelected government (also called the invisible or shadow government) that is not as monolithic as generally assumed.

The neo-conservative globalists who want Hillary to continue pushing their agenda are the more visible camp, but another less visible but highly motivated camp realizes Hillary and her neo-con agenda would severely damage the nation's security and its global influence. It is this camp that is arranging for Hillary to lose.

The consensus view seems to be that the Establishment and the Deep State see Trump as a loose cannon who might upset the neo-con apple cart by refusing to toe the neo-con line.

This view overlooks the reality that significant segments of the Deep State view the neo-con strategy as an irredeemable failure.

To these elements of the Deep State, Hillary is a threat precisely because she embraces the failed neo-con strategy and those who cling to it. From this point of view, Hillary as president would be an unmitigated disaster for the Deep State and the nation/Imperial Project it governs.

Whatever else emerges from the emails being leaked or officially released, one conclusion is inescapable: Hillary's judgement is hopelessly flawed.

Combine her lack of judgement with her 24 years of accumulated baggage and her potential to push the neo-con agenda to the point of global disaster, and you get a potent need for the Deep State's most prescient elements to derail her campaign and clear a path to Trump's executive team.

Once this path is clear, the management of Trump's executive team can begin in earnest, a management process aimed at disengaging the nation and its global Empire from neo-con overreach.

If you think this scenario is "impossible," let's see how the election plays out before deciding what's "impossible" and what's inevitable.



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CETA trade deal to go ahead

SUBHEAD: Belgian threat resolved with deal. All parliaments are now able to approve by tomorrow at midnight.

By Katie Forster on 27 October 2016 for the Independent -
(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ceta-canada-eu-trade-deal-belgium-justin-trudeau-charles-michel-a7382851.html)


Image above: In Brussels at European Union office, after stick and carrot treatment, Belgium’s Prime Minister Charles Michel called the deal an ‘important step’. From original article.


Belgium has reached an agreement with its regional powers to back a landmark free trade deal between the EU and Canada.

The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (Ceta) could be signed within days if adjustments made by Belgium are approved by the other 27 EU nations.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was supposed to sign the agreement today at a summit in Brussels, but cancelled his trip after the small Belgian region of Wallonia stalled the negotiation process by rejecting the deal.

“Belgian agreement on Ceta. All parliaments are now able to approve by tomorrow at midnight. Important step for EU and Canada,” tweeted Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel.

Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, said he welcomed the news, but would only contact Mr Trudeau “once all procedures are finalised for EU signing Ceta”.

Belgium was not able give its assent to the deal, which has taken seven years to negotiate, without the backing of the French-speaking Wallonia region.

Wallonia, which is smaller than Wales and home to just 3.5 million people, voted 46 to 16 against the deal because of fears local workers would be laid off if the agreement leads to cheaper farming and industrial imports.

The deal’s proponents say it would yield billions in added trade through customs and tariff cuts and other measures to lower barriers to commerce.

Paul Magnette, the president of Wallonia, said he was sorry he made Canada and Europe wait, but insisted “what we achieved here is important”.

“We always fought for treaties that reinforced the social and environmental standards, protect the public services and that there is no private arbitration,” he told reporters. “All this is achieved as of now.”

Alex Lawrence, the spokesman for Canada’s trade minister, said hours before that the country was prepared to sign the deal whenever Europe is ready.

And Mr Trudeau told the Canadian Parliament: “We are confident that in the coming days we will see a positive outcome for this historic deal.” 

Europe’s failure to sign Ceta was highlighted during the UK’s EU referendum campaign as one reason Britain would be better off outside the union.

But it has also been underlined as a sign that the UK will have difficulty organising its own free trade deal with the EU if it leaves the single market after Brexit talks.

“I am sorry for all the other Europeans we made wait and for our Canadian partners. But if we took a bit of time, what we achieved here is important, not only for Wallonia but for all Europeans,” said Mr Magnette.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Death Blow to CETA? 10/21/16


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Trump and the end of Globalism

SUBHEAD: Elitists like Thomas Friedman cannot see the rejection of globalism in the support for Trump.

By Kurt Cobb on 2 October 2016 for Resource Insights -
(http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2016/10/donald-trump-and-impossible-destination.html)


Image above: Germans protest imposition of TTIP in August 2016 as global trade deal falls apart. Wave goodbye Angela and Barack. From (http://www.puppetstringnews.com/blog/breaking-globalist-trade-deal-ttip-talks-fail-in-the-eu).

In a recent column, The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman shows himself to be as good a spokesman for the world's elites (with whom he often communes) as anyone on Earth. He asks one simple question about Republican presidential candidate and billionaire real estate magnate Donald Trump: How?Friedman's column-length answer is a catalogue of Trump's puzzling views about NATO and ISIS, his poor command of the major issues, his contradictory statements and his strange embrace of tax avoidance.

What's missing, of course, is the centerpiece of Trump's appeal: his criticism of major trade deals which have devastated entire industries in the United States and destroyed the middle-class jobs that go with them. To the defenders of globalism--and Friedman is one of globalism's fiercest defenders--Trump's criticism is nothing short of heresy.

But the billionaire's bluster embodies the anger that people affected by those deals feel every day. Not a few of them have previously been consistent Democratic voters. Of course, there are plenty of Republicans who are voting for Trump because he is the party's candidate.

And, there are plenty of evangelicals and so-called "values voters" supporting him (despite his profligate ways) because his party has traditionally opposed abortion, supported prayer in schools, and fought same-sex marriage.

But disaffected, downwardly mobile American workers are the ones keeping the race very close, a race that few thought would ever be close just a few weeks ago. So strong is the fear of globalism and all that it represents among a certain class of Trump supporters that they readily dismiss mainstream media critiques of his fitness for office and his understanding of policy. Those supporters want to protect what little they have left.

And, some want to go back to retrieve what they and their communities--often small and rural ones--have lost to the globalist onslaught in the last two decades. In this desire they are not being irrational.

Now here's the dirty secret about the top four U.S. presidential candidates who regularly appear in national polls. None of them actually rejects globalism. (I'll come back to this later.) At this point I'm finally obliged to say what I mean by the amorphous term "globalism."

A friend recently put it into historical perspective and included the resource angle that regular readers must have already suspected I would mention.

With the discovery and then exploitation of fossil fuels on an ever growing scale, societies everywhere were faced with figuring out how to govern a world with ever increasing energy surpluses. Those surpluses made so many new things possible and in doing so led to rapid social and technological change.

We tried laissez-faire capitalism, communism, fascism, democratic socialism and finally globalism which I'll define as the management of worldwide economic activity and growth by large multi-national corporations which have no particular allegiance to any one country or people. Our belief has been that this arrangement is the most rational and efficient.

Therefore, trade deals which bring down barriers both to international trade and to the movement of capital and technology across borders are believed to encourage global economic growth. That growth supposedly will ultimately lift the world's poor into the middle class and enrich everyone else while doing it.

Around the time that the fall of communism made possible the uniting of the world's economies into one great global system, we were also discovering that this system was doomed to failure for environmental reasons.

Climate scientist James Hansen's testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1988 presaged the many "thousand-year floods" which are hitting the United States and other places around the world, and that is just one of the many emerging and dangerous consequences of climate change.

And, climate change is just one of a thicket of interrelated threats including resource depletion, pollution and overuse of groundwater, ocean pollution, overfishing, soil degradation, and toxic pollutants in the air, water and soil.

Contrary to what the apologists for globalism suggest, scale actually matters.

One million humans living as we do today would not likely undermine the habitability of the planet, for humans at least. When 7 billion live in this way, our combined effect has made us the dominant force on the planet so much so that we have created a new geologic age named after us: the Anthropocene.

It is now clear that globalism as an engine for an ever growing world economy will lead to catastrophic climate change and other untoward results that will destroy the underpinnings of modern society. In other words, globalism is a suicide pact.

The idea that we can expand globalism to any size we choose was discredited long before now. One version of this fantasy was that the Earth would be able to accommodate U.S.-style consumerism worldwide. But we know that if all residents of the planet consumed like Americans, we would need four Earths to sustain them.

Therefore, the destination offered by globalism no longer features prosperity and stability for all, but a ruinous decline. And yet, our politics and our public discourse speak as if we can still go there.

Trump in his rejection of current trade treaties is saying that we need to go back to something else. He says he wants to "make America great again," which, of course, means America's greatness is somewhere in the past.

As another friend quipped, implied in Trump's platform is the idea that we can get into a time machine and go back to a past that is more to our liking.

So, it's no surprise that Trump's critics are saying he is backward-looking. The future, those critics say, is an ever more connected global society. But, in such a discussion we are left with only two destinations:

We can try to go back to a past which we cannot hope to reconstruct and which, even if we could, would send us in a direction which is considered the opposite of progress.

Or, we can go forward toward globalism's dream of a connected worldwide sphere of material prosperity (and the inevitable ruin this trajectory implies). In our broad public discourse there is no third non-globalism destination for which we have a description and a justification because any such attempt at describing that destination is labeled backward-looking, as merely going back to the past. And, who wants to be accused of that? The accusation tends to end the discussion.

In truth, Trump is not actually proposing a retrograde movement. He merely proposes to renegotiate America's trade deals. That means he embraces the globalist system whether he admits it or not.

Hillary Clinton has now said she will oppose the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. And, she has supposedly told one union leader she will reopen the North American Free Trade Agreement. She, too, continues to embrace globalism, merely wishing to alter its terms.

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson wants to lay the groundwork for "massive job growth across the entire country." He believes in reducing regulation to encourage that growth. And, he believes in free trade which is a codeword for embracing globalism.

Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate, has a lot in her platform that working people should like. But her call for increased spending on renewable energy, drastic cuts in defense spending and broader protection of human rights probably won't go down well with many whites whose jobs depend on the old fossil-fuel-burning industrial economy, who think military spending is synonymous with security, and who perceive non-whites as competitors in the job market.

Like Trump, Stein would replace current trade deals with new ones that are "fair." Again, we have no explicit rejection of globalism as a system. We will somehow survive that system if only we embrace the "Green New Deal" plan which she proposes.

Bernie Sanders, Clinton's opponent in the Democratic primary, sounds a lot like Stein. He would mitigate the worst aspects of globalism without really challenging its legitimacy. But Sanders did something which Clinton by temperament could not or by choice would not do. Like Trump, Sanders embodied the anger of those injured by globalism.

This is why he consistently polled higher than Clinton in one-to-one matchups with Trump. (Compare Sanders' and Clinton's polling numbers.) Sanders was the candidate who not only displayed his anger at globalism, but also (unlike Trump) had a detailed plan for addressing it. That plan appealed to many Trump voters who could not register that appeal when asked about a Clinton-Trump matchup.

But they could register their approval when asked about a Sanders-Trump contest, and they account for Sanders' runaway margins in polls which show him attracting voters who would otherwise support Trump in a contest with Clinton.

It would be political suicide for any serious candidate for the presidency of the United States to announce that economic growth as we know it is over and that we will have to organize our society based on other principles. Just what those principles might be has been articulated by such people as Herman Daly, the dean of the steady-state economists. But then, Daly isn't running for anything.

Even though the idea of a steady-state economy may seem utterly foreign to us after 200 years of unprecedented economic growth, it has become a lived reality for many since even before the 2008 financial crash.

Critical to how we proceed is to understand what is actually slowing down economic growth. Climate change will certainly over time become a huge detriment to economic activity and, if unchecked, is likely to disrupt our modern technical society to such a degree (particularly when it comes to growing food) that it will not survive intact.

Many of the theories about slow growth revolve around financial and demographic constraints. What needs to become part of the discussion are energy limits (see here and here) and pollution limits, particularly on greenhouse gases.

We are now waiting for our politics to catch up to this reality. Donald Trump, the exit of Great Britain from the European Union, and threat of exit by movements in Italy, Greece and Spain, all point to the same problem. Globalism as a system has no future. The pain it has inflicted so far has been on the middle and lower classes.

At some point, that pain will spread to the highest reaches of society. Will we have to wait for that in order to get definitive movement toward a third destination?

Jared Diamond in his book Collapse pondered our predicament. Elites in past societies that have collapsed insulated themselves from the consequences of environmental and resource constraints so that they perceived no need for drastic changes.

If Thomas Friedman's column represents the thinking of today's elites, then they are truly well-insulated. Even Friedman who is more broadly informed and nuanced in his thinking shows how he himself is insulated when he writes that "income gaps are actually narrowing, wages are rising and poverty is easing."

A minor beneficial move in the statistics after so many years of moves in the opposite direction is hardly the stuff that matters to people who are hurting.
 
The elites and Friedman can't understand Trump's appeal because they don't have much contact with those who are suffering from globalism's many side-effects. Whether or not Trump actually understands those injured by globalism, he successfully embodies their rage.

And, it is that rage which is propelling his campaign to the amazement of elites out of touch with America's middle and lower classes.

Unfortunately, the answer to globalism's dead end cannot be found in the current U.S. presidential campaign. But the loud cries of its victims are audible to all those who are willing to hear them. And those victims may end up deciding who will be America's next president.
 
P.S. I am indebted to Bruno Latour, the French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist of science for his recent lecture "Why Gaia is not the Globe" which inspired this piece.


Video above: Trump speaks about this June about globalist trade deals damaging American economy in Monessa, Pennsylvania. From (https://youtu.be/FI9ZIDSlyhk).

• Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

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