Still the Best-Aren't We? Why the Deep State is Dumping Hillary

 

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Still the Best…Aren’t We?

Whenever I listen to Americans discuss their country, I find people that are eager for more news and information, yet most, without even knowing it, accept much of the dogma they’ve been fed on a daily basis by their government and the media, even if, to outsiders, the assumptions are preposterous. Only those who make a concerted, ongoing effort to see through the smokescreen seem to keep clear.

Here are six impossible things that many seem to have little trouble accepting as reality…

1) “Yes, the country’s in a mess, but that’s because of opposition-party meddling. If the party I favor could get a majority, they’d sort things out.”

This seems to have been a popular belief for decades. It’s believed by Democrats and Republicans alike. But, in 2001, the Republicans held both houses of Congress, plus the presidency, yet even then they failed to deliver on what they claimed were their party’s fundamental goals. Between 2009 and 2011, the Democrats controlled all three, yet they, too, failed to deliver. If the electorate were to step back and look at the history of who is in power vs. changes in policy, they’d find that the government’s central programme of welfare/warfare continues unabated, regardless of who controls the Congress and White House. The primary policies of the U.S. are determined independently of who has been elected. As American writer Mark Twain stated correctly, “If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.”

2) “We’re on the road to economic recovery. We just have to be patient.”

The U.S. is deeper in debt, by far, than any country ever has been in the history of the world. The level of debt is so great at present that it’s impossible to pay back. The reaction by the U.S. government has been to increase that debt, pumping more heroin into the body of the addict. There’s no possibility for this to end well; all that can be achieved is to postpone the inevitable, thus ensuring that the final outcome will be even worse. The final tab will be picked up, not by the political class, but by the electorate.

3) “I don’t like government bailing the banks out, but if they don’t, the system will collapse.”

Bank failures have existed for as long as banks have existed. Under a laissez-faire system, a bank that’s behaved recklessly with lending, to the point that it becomes insolvent, collapses. Depositors are harmed and sometimes financially ruined. Often, there’s a brief economic downturn, but the culling of the bad bank actually strengthens the economy in the long run. However, in the last century, the major banks in the US have become so powerful with regard to government policy that they can now act recklessly, then be bailed out by the government, then act recklessly again. (Ultimately, this trend will result in a crash of epic proportions – an event that may come quite soon.)

4) “There’s no problem raising the debt ceiling. All that’s necessary is to print more money to pay for it.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Dramatic printing of currency generally leads to higher prices. Inflation robs people of their wealth. Hyperinflation can utterly destroy it. And, as regards foreign debt, trading partners don’t take kindly to having the debtors degrade their debt. At some point, they’re likely to sell back their debt into the debtor’s economy. It would only take a fraction of the U.S. debt held by the rest of the world to be sold back into the U.S. for the U.S. economy to collapse.

East are necessary to make the world safe for democracy.”

Since the end of World War Two, the U.S. has regarded itself as the world’s policeman – a role that most of us outside the U.S. consider to be quite an arrogant one for any nation to take. Even more puzzling for us is the general belief in the U.S. that American invasions of countries actually result in democratisation. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Libya (the list goes on), there has been little evidence that U.S. invasions have led to stable, democratic rule. In most cases, they have led to increased chaos. America is seen, not as the policeman, but the world’s foremost aggressor. This is not conducive to long-term American hegemony.

6) “I realize that the U.S. has passed considerable legislation lately that’s taken away my basic freedoms, but it’s been necessary in fighting terrorism.”

Beginning with the Patriot Act of 2001, the U.S. government has gone mad with the passage of a plethora of legislation that has trashed the U.S. Constitution (often regarded by the outside world as the finest founding document that any country has ever produced.) As a result, even many Third World countries now enjoy greater individual freedom than can be found in the U.S.

7) “This is still the best country in the world.”

By almost every standard, this has, over recent decades, ceased to be the case. Before the world wars, the U.K. was the most powerful country in the world. Britons managed somehow to equate this fact to the belief that the U.K. was the “best” in every way. This was never entirely true, but most Brits accepted it anyway. Today, the methadone has finally taken effect and most of us accept that the dew is very much off the vine. This suggests that it will be a long time, possibly generations, before Americans come to realize that the glory days of empire are over and the decline is in process.

Alice had the right idea. As a young person not yet programmed by her government and the media to believe impossible things, she had a greater ability to see the world as it was. The rest of us have to work quite a bit harder to see through the smokescreen that governments and the media create. By the 1960s, it was apparent to the world that Britain had become a shell of its former self, but many Brits weren’t ready to accept that the party was over. (Today, 70 years after the war, the message has sunk in.) Now it’s America’s turn and it will be equally hard for them. For most, the standard of living and quality of life will diminish.

Those who will be the most likely to do well will be those who choose to recognize that, as America declines, there are some countries that are on the upswing. Those few who choose to diversify themselves beyond American shores will not only increase their objectivity, but, very likely, will assure themselves a freer, more prosperous future.

 

Why the Deep State Is Dumping Hillary By Charles Hugh Smith

In the context presented here, the personalities of the two candidates matter less than their perceived role in the changing of the Imperial Order. Let's start with a quick overview of the relationships between each political party and the Deep State--the unelected power centers of the central government that continue on regardless of which person or party is in elected office. Liberal Democrats have always been uneasy bedfellows with the Deep State. Republican President Eisenhower had the political and military gravitas to put limits on the Military-Industrial wing of the Deep State, so much so that Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy claimed the U.S. had fallen behind the U.S.S.R. militarily in the 1960 presidential election (the infamous "missile gap"). Kennedy entered office as a foreign policy hawk who was going to out-hawk the cautious Republicans. A brush with C.I.A. cowboys (the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba) and a taste of Imperial meddling in distant, poorly understood lands (Vietnam) increased his interest in peace and reduced his enthusiasm for foreign adventurism. Kennedy entered office as a foreign policy hawk who was going to out-hawk the cautious Republicans. Lyndon Johnson, perhaps the most activist liberal Democrat of the era, was not about to be out-hawked by the Republicans, and so he followed an expansive Imperial agenda into the 10-year quagmire of Vietnam. Liberal Democrats could find no easy political ground between the pressure to out-hawk the Republicans and the demands of an expansive Cold War Deep State. Both liberal Democratic presidents between 1965 and 1980, Johnson and Jimmy Carter, were one-term presidents, undermined by military/foreign entanglements. The disastrous defeat in Vietnam of expansive Imperial ambitions (nation-building, etc.) led to an era of retrenchment and consolidation. Other than "splendid little wars" in Grenada and Panama and supporting proxies such as the Contras, the 1980s were years not of Imperial expansion but of Cold war diplomacy. Republican President Reagan was also given a free hand to be a peacemaker, overseeing the fatal erosion of the U.S.S.R. and the end of the long, costly Cold War. President Bush Senior was a cautious Cold War leader, careful not to alienate the post-U.S.S.R. Russians and wary of over-reach and quagmires even in the new Unipolar world of unrivaled U.S. power. The era's one hot war, Desert Storm, restored the sovereignty of Kuwait but left Saddam Hussein in control of Iraq. Bush and his inner circle (and the Deep State they represented) were mindful of the lessons of Vietnam: Imperial over-reach led to costly, drawn-out failures of nation-building in the name of exporting democracy. Though it was poorly understood by the public, Desert Storm played to American military strengths: a high-intensity conflict with concentrated forces, maneuver warfare with heavy armor protected by absolute air superiority, aided by proximity to allied bases and aircraft carrier groups. If you designed a war optimized to American military strengths, it would look much like Desert Storm. No wonder it was one of the most lopsided victories in history. The end of the Cold War and victory in Iraq left the Republicans without their hawkish agenda and political raison d'etre, and Ross Perot's third-party movement in 1992 effectively delivered the presidency to Democrat Bill Clinton. Clinton was blessed with a booming domestic economy and a peace dividend from the end of the Cold war. Though Clinton reportedly hankered for a great crisis he could exploit to burnish his place in the history books, alas none arose, and the 20th century ended with a decided absence of existential threats to the U.S. or even U.S. interests. The incredible success of Desert Storm and the temptations of Unipolar Power birthed an expansionist, activist Imperial doctrine (neoconservatism) and a Deep State enthusiasm for flexing America's unrivaled power. What better place to put these doctrines into practice than Iraq, a thorn in the Imperial side since Desert Storm in 1991. Alas, Bush Junior and his clique of doctrinaire neoconservatives had little grasp of the limits and trade-offs of military tactics and strategies, and they confused the optimization of Desert Storm with universal superiority in any and all conflicts. But as veterans of Vietnam knew, low-intensity war with diffused, irregular combatants is quite a different situation. Add in the shifting politics of Sunni and Shia, tribal allegiances, failed states and a post-colonial pot of simmering resentments and rivalries, and you get Iraq and Afghanistan, two quagmires that have already exceeded the cost and duration of the Vietnam quagmire. A decade after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and 25 years after Vietnam, the Deep State was once again enamored of expansion, hot wars, conquest and nation-building. Fifteen years on, despite endless neocon PR and saber-rattling, the smarter and more adept elements of the Deep State have given up on expansion, hot wars, conquest and nation-building. Even empires eventually taste the ashes of defeat when expansion and hubris-soaked ambitions lead to over-reach, over-extended military forces, and enemies who are not just undeterred but much stronger than when the over-confident expansion began. In my view, the current era of U.S. history shares parallels with the Roman era of A.D. 9 and beyond, when a planned expansionist invasion of the Danube region in central Europe led to military defeats and insurgencies that took years of patient warfighting and diplomacy to quell. Which brings us to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. President Obama, nominally a liberal Democrat, has pursued an extension of the neocon Bush expansionism, with the key difference being Obama has relied more on proxies and drone strikes than on "boots on the ground." But the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan have not only persisted, they have expanded under Obama's watch into Syria and Libya. War by drone and proxy is even more tempting than outright invasion, as American casualties are modest and the responsibilities for failure are (it is fervently hoped) easily sidestepped. Alas, fulfilling Imperial ambitions via proxies has its own set of limits and trade-offs; proxy wars only get the desired results in very specific circumstances. The Democrats have out-hawked the Republicans for eight years, and the Deep State is in disarray. I have been writing about this for several years now. In March 2014, I wrote, for example: When we speak of the Deep State, this ruling Elite is generally assumed to be monolithic: of one mind, so to speak, unified in worldview, strategy and goals. In my view, this is an oversimplification of a constantly shifting battleground of paradigms and political power between a number of factions and alliances within the Deep State. Even the Deep State only rules with the consent of the governed. The wiser elements of the Deep State recall how the Vietnam War split the nation in two and exacerbated social upheaval. These elements recognize America is tired of Imperial expansion, quagmires, proxy wars and doomed nation-building. Even the Deep State only rules with the consent of the governed. The wiser elements of the Deep State recall how the Vietnam War split the nation in two and exacerbated social upheaval. This exhaustion with over-reach shares many parallels with 1968 America. In this long view of Imperial expansion, defeat and retrenchment, Hillary is holding down the status quo fort of failed expansionism and proxy wars. Her ability to out-hawk the Republicans is unquestioned, and that is one of her problems.   When the governed get tired of Imperial over-reach and expansion, they are willing to take chances just to get rid of the expansionist status quo. In this point in history, Hillary Clinton embodies the status quo. The differences in policy between her and the Obama administration are paper-thin: she is the status quo. The governed are ready for a period of retrenchment, consolidation and diplomatic solutions to unwinnable conflicts, as imperfect as the peace might be to hawks. For these reasons, the more adept elements of the Deep State have no choice but to dump Hillary. Empires fall not just from defeat in war with external enemies, but from the abandonment of expansionist Imperial burdens by the domestic populace. Put another way: drones and proxies don't pay taxes. Regards, Charles Hugh Smith

 

Yours for another revolution,

Bruce ‘the Poor Man’

 

Additional Resources

The Anatomy of a Breakdown

The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster

Prepper’s Home Defense: Security Strategies to Protect Your Family by Any Means Necessary

Contact! A Tactical Manual for Post Collapse Survival

7 reasons to pay attention to the global economy

 

 

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