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Thursday, November 21, 2019

The three legs to the Deep State stool


Poor Man Survival

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“The Deep State won.”

   The Deep State [aka: the bureaucracy, career diplomats, career government workers (including intelligence agencies) and special interests prefer to keep the status quo and power to themselves vs. allowing someone who has been elected, to get in their way.  The vast majority of them in DC are Democrats & very well paid…on average, they earn twice as much as their private sector brethren and have better benefits and retirement packages.

Congress, over the years, has ceded too much authority to them. They create the endless red tape which has strangled America’s growth and competitiveness.  They are the true scourge of our nation.

Hell will break loose if/when bureaucrats lose their cushy jobs [twice that of private sector] benefits & pensions.

Government workers aren’t an oppressed class; just overpaid spoil -sports.  Our nation has been despoiled by unsustainable levels of government growth at all levels costing taxpayers an arm and a leg.

For an insightful perspective, here’s a post from financial guru and author, Bill Bonner.

The epic battle for the soul and future of America, says Bill Bonner, is over:

“No victory parade was held. And the Constitution was not repealed or rewritten. But the Deep State now controls the White House, Congress, the courts (more or less), the universities (more or less), the Pentagon, the bureaucracy, the dollar, the budget, and the press.”

To be sure, the Deep State is not a centrally controlled organization.

It’s far more insidious than that.

Rather, says Bonner, it’s “a loose and tacit alliance of cronies, politicians, bureaucrats, consultants, experts, economists, lobbyists, the press, professors, the whole medical care complex, and the military and its contractors.”

On the surface, it’s pretty banal.

The Deep State is a bunch of people with a bunch of mouths to feed who are just doing their jobs.

Dig deeper, however…

It’s a psychic epidemic, a mass psychosis, an ideological possession.

Those who are driven by the whims of the Deep State do so at the expense of their own autonomy, individuality, and critical faculties.

One tell-tale mark of possession by the beast is that the accuser is (sometimes without even realizing) doing the exact thing they are blaming others for doing…

They are quick to cast the first stone, oddly enough, so that they can do more of the very thing they chastise in the other.

(Imagine a man stabbing you with a knife while screaming, “You’re killing me!”)

Tulsi Gabbard is an apt example.

An American veteran speaks out against the endless Middle East wars…

Only to find Clinton accusing her of being a “Russian asset.”

Ironically, Clinton 
has not just proved over and over in the past to be a massive boon for foreign interests (including Russia), but is also, as Gabbard rightly put it, “the queen of warmongers.”

The accuser is indeed the accused.

The Unwitting Agents

Deep State operatives, “are like fish not realizing that they are in water,” Bonner writes. “All swim along happily with the Deep State program. And if any has the wit to understand what is going on… or the gumption to try to do something about it… he is soon eaten up by the sharks.”

Just like in the movie The Matrix…

Anyone who doesn’t realize they are in the Matrix-- from the right, left, or center -- can transform into an Agent at any moment.

From within the belly…

Not a single individual is able (or, more accurately, willing) to account for the consequences of their own actions (order followers!), let alone the actions of the Beast.

A healthy economy (and culture) runs on a mixture of cooperation, competition, and win-win interactions.

But the beast, and those who ride its back, can only get richer by plundering the private sector.

“There are so many mansions in this house,” Bonner writes, “the walls bulge and the nails pop. And the people who live in them have many different competing interests. But they have one single overriding common agenda – to shift power, status, and wealth from the public to themselves. And that and only that, is the reason federal spending, debt, and fake money go in only one direction – up.

“America won’t be the first nation laid low by a combination of a Deep State, runaway spending, and a too-powerful military. The formula is classic. From ancient Rome to modern Venezuela, the road to ruin is clearly marked, well lit, and well trod.”

America, the Doomed?

But, is America truly doomed?

We’ll explore more tomorrow.

Whatever the case, one thing is certain:

It’s never been a better time to prepare for the worst.

 


“Thank God for the Deep State,” said John McLaughlin — who for a time was acting CIA director under the younger President Bush — last month during a panel discussion at George Mason University.

Barack Obama’s CIA director John Brennan, speaking on the same panel, freely acknowledged how “Mr. Trump has this very contentious relationship with CIA and FBI and the deep state people.”

How times have changed. As recently as a few months ago, anyone who spoke of the “Deep State” was dismissed as a conspiracist loon, to be outfitted with one of these...


But something about “Ukrainegate” has liberated the establishment to drop the pretense.

“Over the last three weeks,” said a New York Times story of Oct. 23, “the deep state has emerged from the shadows in the form of real live government officials, past and present.”

“The concept of the ‘Deep State’ was first applied to countries such as Turkey and Egypt,” writes Bill Bonner — who founded The Agora Companies more than 40 years ago.

“These were places where military-police-security insiders put screws to your thumbs, forcing you to do as you were told. Elections changed ruling parties and their leaders. But the real power was elsewhere.”

It was a former congressional aide named Mike Lofgren who first applied the term to the United States, in a 2014 essay for the Truthout website, and later a book.

“The Deep State is the story of our time,” writes Lofgren. “It’s the thin red line that runs through the war on terrorism, and a militarized foreign policy. Also the financialization and deindustrialization of the economy, and a social structure that has given us the most unequal income distribution in almost a century.”

Ponder the following...

Years before the term “Deep State” entered popular usage, we took note of a report by McClatchy Newspapers (Miami Herald, The Charlotte Observer, etc.) stating that the number of Americans with “access to classified material” numbers about 5 million.

The over-18 population of the United States is roughly 256 million. So just under 2% of American adults are privileged to have “access to classified material.”

In the Oceania of Orwell’s 1984, the Inner Party made up 2% of the population.

The Outer Party made up another 13%, and the rest were proles.

“Orwell’s division of labor and power,” observes journalist Sam Smith, “was almost precisely replicated in East Germany decades later, where about 1% belonged to the General Secretariat of the Communist Party, and another 13% being far less powerful party members.”

East Germany, with its infamous Stasi secret police, was the ne plus ultra surveillance state of the pre-internet era. Helluva model to be following in the “Land of the Free,” huh?

 “The Deep State is not a homogenous or centrally controlled organization,” elaborates Bill Bonner.

“It is not a conspiracy of spooks, meeting in secret and plotting a takeover of the country. Instead, it includes hundreds of thousands of people who already run the country.

“It is a loose and tacit alliance of cronies, politicians, bureaucrats, consultants, experts, economists, lobbyists, the press, professors, the whole medical care complex and the military and its contractors.

“There are so many mansions in this house, the walls bulge and the nails pop. And the people who live in them have many different competing interests. But they have one single overriding common agenda — to shift power, status and wealth from the public to themselves.

“That is what makes them different from you and us: They can get richer only by making us poorer. And that, and only that, is the reason federal spending, debt and fake money go in only one direction — up.

“There are three legs to the Deep State stool,” Bill continues. “One controls the guns. Another seeks control over the voters. The third controls the money.

“The most powerful and dangerous of the three legs is the one Dwight Eisenhower warned about: the military-industrial complex. It’s gotten much more complex… and much more powerful… since Eisenhower outed it in 1961.

“The second leg is the politically correct, mostly culturally liberal, non-‘deplorable’ elite who dominate the universities, the media and the health, education and welfare complex.

“Wall Street is the third leg. It is not interested in politics. It is interested in money itself. But it knows that today’s fake money comes from politics, and it does its part, along with the rest of the Deep State, to keep it flowing.”
Perhaps you’re familiar with Operation Paperclip — an effort by the U.S. Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency in the 1940s, bringing 1,600 German scientists and engineers to America. The aim — leveraging their knowledge to wage the emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union.

“Although he officially sanctioned the operation, President Harry Truman forbade the agency from recruiting any Nazi members or active Nazi supporters,” says the History Channel website.

“Nevertheless, officials within the JIOA and Office of Strategic Services — the forerunner to the CIA — bypassed this directive by eliminating or whitewashing incriminating evidence of possible war crimes from the scientists’ records, believing their intelligence to be crucial to the country’s postwar efforts.”

And that’s how it’s gone ever since. In 1960, Dwight Eisenhower had ordered the CIA to cease its U-2 spy flights over Soviet territory. CIA chief Allen Dulles ignored him, Gary Powers was shot down and plans for an Ike-Khrushchev summit were blown up.

In early 1986, Reagan got a letter at the White House from the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev had been on the job less than a year, but he’d already begun his program of epic reforms. For his part, cold-warrior Reagan felt Gorbachev was a Soviet leader he could work with.

The letter proposed eliminating all nuclear weapons by 2000.

Reagan mused about upping the ante. “Why wait until the year 2000?” he asked his aides in the Oval Office.

The Deep State swung into action. “Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and CIA Director William Casey, who had done their best to sabotage earlier nuclear treaties, were appalled,” wrote Jacob Weisberg in a 2016 Atlantic article. “Few others inside the Reagan administration took the idea of nuclear abolition seriously.”

The best Reagan and Gorby could pull off was eliminating a single class of nukes in contienental Europe, with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987.

Which Donald Trump withdrew from this year, swayed by his own Deep State advisers.

Reagan appointed a U.S. Gold Commission early during his first term to investigate whether the United States should return to some sort of gold backing for the U.S. dollar. In the end, the Commission voted 15-2 against. (Rep. Ron Paul was one of the two dissenters.)

During his second term, Reagan granted a one-on-one interview to Novak at the White House. From Novak’s 2007 autobiography:

I asked Reagan: “What ever happened to the gold standard? I thought you supported it.”

“Well,” the president began and then paused (a ploy he frequently used to collect his thoughts), “I still do support the gold standard, but —” At that point, Reagan was interrupted by his chief of staff. “Now, Mr. President,” said Don Regan, “we don't want to get bogged down talking about the gold standard.””

“You see?” the president said to me, with palms uplifted in mock futility. “They just won't let me have my way.”

It was Donald Regan — the Merrill Lynch veteran who was Treasury secretary during Reagan’s first term — who stacked the U.S. Gold Commission with supporters of fiat money.

 

Somehow your editor missed this bombshell that emerged from WikiLeaks’ dump of John Podesta’s emails in 2016, when Podesta was chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. (And I don’t miss much.)

In October 2008, Podesta was soon to be co-chair of Obama’s transition team. He got an email from a Citigroup executive named Michael Froman with the subject line “Lists.”

The lists were of prospective Cabinet members. “These are the names to date that seem to be coming up as recommended by various sources for senior level jobs,” Froman wrote.

The list eerily anticipated the actual makeup of Obama’s Cabinet and senior aides. Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff. Eric Holder as attorney general. Robert Gates staying on from the Bush administration as defense secretary. Three names were floated as Treasury secretary — including the one who got the job, Timothy Geithner.

“This was Oct. 6. The election was Nov. 4,” wrote David Dayen at The New Republic. “And yet Froman, an executive at Citigroup, which would ultimately become the recipient of the largest bailout from the federal government during the financial crisis, had mapped out virtually the entire Obama Cabinet, a month before votes were counted.”

 

The Deep State’s attitude was on display for all to see last week on the first day of the public impeachment hearings.

Diplomat Bill Taylor testified that “the official foreign policy of the United States was undercut” by the White House’s “irregular efforts.”

Ditto for the closed-door testimony of National Security Council aide Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. He carped that Trump was “promoting a… narrative [that was] inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency.”

(“The interagency.” That’s how these people talk…)

Perhaps the most brazen deep-state ploy came in the pages of The New York Times last month — when a four-star retired Navy admiral and former head of U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, William McRaven, declared...

If this president doesn’t demonstrate the leadership that America needs, both domestically and abroad, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office — Republican, Democrat or independent — the sooner, the better. The fate of our Republic depends upon it.

Can’t wait another year for an election to replace him? Or even a clunky impeachment procedure? Hmmm…

Dave Gonigam
The 5 Min. Forecast


Yours for a Socialist-Free America!

Bruce ‘the Poor Man’

 

USEFUL STUFF…

 




County government seizes home over $8.41 in unpaid tax

When an 83-year old retiree paid his property taxes late, he miscalculated the interest owed to the county government.

All told, he was $8.41 short. Yes you read that correctly, i.e. less than nine dollars.

So the county seized the home over that trivial amount.

Then they sold the man’s home at auction for $24,500, even though the house was worth about $128,000.

But the county didn’t just keep the $8.41 they were owed. They kept the entire $24,500.

Although this was the most egregious case, the man found out he was far from alone.

The county has been systematically robbing homeowners, selling their homes, and keeping the proceeds over much smaller tax bills than the homes are worth.

In case you’re wondering, the county in question is Oakland County, Michigan, which is part of the Detroit area, and one of the most fiscally vanquished municipalities in the country.

(Detroit even declared bankruptcy in 2013.)

This highlights a very important lesson: when governments are broke, they will plunder the wealth of their citizens in order to make ends meet, even if it means stealing a retired man’s home.


San Francisco commuter arrested for eating a sandwich

Maybe you heard that San Francisco recently announced they will no longer prosecute public urination, amid a homelessness epidemic.

In contrast, one rule they are still enforcing apparently is an ordinance that bans eating on public transit platforms.

A video went viral last week that showed a legitimate commuter who was on his way to work being arrested for eating a sandwich on a train station platform.

He is approached by a transit officer, who told him, “You are detained and not free to go. You’re eating. It’s against the law.”


 

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How to start a neighborhood barter club

 
 
 

People need to become more self-reliant, not more dependent on government.

How to Survive the War on the Middle Class

 Download at: https://1drv.ms/f/s!AgMpmQI6plfXh0T3zKGDM-c3PUnr   or here:

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‘Grassroots’ Justice Dems Fueled by Out-of-District Money


This is the pro-Communist group which recruited, trained the likes of AOC, Omar & Rashida to run for office…

Warren, Who Flipped Foreclosed Homes for Profit, Laments Lack of Affordable Housing


 

Free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom!

 

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4 comments:

Sam said...

Terrific insights & analysis...more folks need to read this. As always, you perform a great service to those who still care about freedom.

Victor said...

Saw your link on twitter & read this-DAMN GOOD!

Frederick said...

Das is gut!

Stuart said...

TV news is all over the board with this. Of course Leftist media paints Trump in a horrible light [nothing new about that] Overall, deep in our hearts most of us know there is too much government at every level and it is crushing the lifeblood from America's competitiveness & spirit. Far too many unelected pinheads in the kitchen screwing up the pot; eventually, it will crush itself along with the country.