Poor Man Survival
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How much power do unelected bureaucrats and intelligence agents wield inside the United States government?
In reality, America hasn’t had a two-party political system in decades and its bureaucrats and greedy Wall Street masters have no fear of deficits as there is no way to curb spending while on the road to national bankruptcy [on March 23 our irresponsible leaders passed a massive $1.3 trillion spending bill…which no one took the time to read and tossed any kind of fiscal sanity out the door]! Deficits will soar again, the Fed will panic, more fake money will be issued, consumer prices will increase again and the Deep State will gain even more power and the people will LOSE as they’ve done for decades!
The ‘deep state’ and its allies are attacking not only the president but also the Constitution.
You probably have a strong sense that something serious is happening to the government—but it’s hard to tell what it is. Politicians, judges, agents, lawyers, journalists and commentators are filling thousands of pages and thousands of hours of airtime, but the truth remains murky.
It begins to make sense once you realize the horrifying truth that the United States government is actually at war with itself.
Over the last century, Americans have allowed the federal government to swell into exactly what the nation’s founders sought to prevent. It now includes millions of federal agents, secretaries, regulators and other unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats exerting enormous power over average people, over lawmakers, over judges and even over the president.
Many of these bureaucrats share the same ideology. They believe that much of the power over your life should be controlled, not by you but by the government.
The most forceful parts of this bureaucracy are its agents: regulators who restrict what you can do, judge whether you are guilty, and enforce punishment on you; spies who monitor your social media posts, e-mails, phone calls and location; armed agents who can raid your home and workplace. Most Americans assume that these powers are only used against “the bad guys,” but already many of these tactics have been used against millions of average people—and against the president they elected. The unconstitutional power exerted by unelected bureaucrats has a name: the “deep state.”
The Obama Administration
During eight years in power, President Barack Obama and his administration changed the American government and transformed America.
Through his heavy abuse of executive actions, the president became infamous for overruling Congress, passing “laws” of his own, and choosing when and where to enforce them. He made illegal appointments and illegal changes to his health-care law without involving lawmakers. He ordered a federal review of state election systems. His Internal Revenue Service successfully targeted conservative political groups and got away with it. But that was not all.
Obama used the Department of Justice as a political weapon. Under Attorney General Eric Holder, it became filled with bureaucrats who were politically motivated or pressured to put radical ideology above the law. Prosecutors were found to be targeting innocent people for political reasons. The department worked to stop enforcement of immigration laws and threatened to sue states that enforced their own immigration laws. It also pressured agents at its Federal Bureau of Investigation to advance its political ideology.
The Department of Justice was found to be secretly monitoring thousands of phone calls from Associated Press journalists. It created legal arguments promoting the president’s power to assassinate people, including Americans on foreign soil and potential future drone strikes against American citizens on American soil.
The Supreme Court ruled against Obama’s Justice Department unanimously about 20 times; even the liberal justices Obama appointed to the court said he was exceeding his authority.
Obama’s National Security Agency was found to be spying on citizens’ international communications without identifying its targets in court, without a warrant, even without any suspicion of wrongdoing. (The nsa’s definition of a terrorist suspect included “someone searching the Web for suspicious stuff.”) It later emerged that top Obama administration officials—including cia director John Brennan, United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes—requested that the nsa reveal the identities of hundreds of people it had spied on who were part of the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was asked point-blank, under oath: “Does the nsa collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?” Clapper said no. A few months later, numerous leaked nsa documents showed that the agency intentionally spied on millions of everyday Americans who were not suspected of any wrongdoing. Clapper later described his perjury as answering in “the most truthful or least untruthful manner.” The nsa was also caught spying on Americans’ elected representatives: members of Congress. (The Department of Justice provided legal arguments defending the nsa.)
Since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, a large amount of classified information has leaked from the government to the press. The majority of this information from anonymous and barely anonymous sources has been designed to discredit, damage and possibly end his presidency.
Meanwhile, intelligence agencies have withheld intelligence reports from the president, and former spy chiefs have denounced the president as inexperienced, unstable and unethical. Federal agents have raided the office of the president’s personal attorney. Bureaucrats have found ways to obstruct, slow down, openly challenge or simply ignore the president’s instructions. When President Trump has publicly criticized and fired officials for such behavior, news commentators have accused him of dismantling a pillar of American government.
The vague complexities and “plausible deniabilities” inside the labyrinth of the federal government are confusing enough. But these scandals, investigations, accusations and lies within the government are absolutely bewildering to many. But it all comes down to one definite, disturbing fact: The federal government is at war with itself.
Bureaucrats in Washington are waging a civil war against the Trump administration. He said he wanted to “drain the swamp,” but the swamp is fighting back. Many commentators are saying that something called the “deep state” is trying to exert its control over the United States government to the point of forcing President Trump from office.
The vague complexities and “plausible deniabilities” inside the labyrinth of the federal government are confusing enough. But these scandals, investigations, accusations and lies within the government are absolutely bewildering to many. But it all comes down to one definite, disturbing fact: The federal government is at war with itself.
Republican strategist Roger Stone said that if globalists within the government succeed in ousting President Trump, a “spasm of violence” could erupt. Some describe the nation as hurtling toward rioting and urban warfare.
Such warnings sound extreme. But to know how seriously you should take the deep-state threat, you have to understand what it is and why it is fighting President Trump.
Deep State Rising
The term “deep state” originated in the 1970s in Turkey to describe a powerful, unelected government of bureaucrats, spies and military officers who colluded with drug cartels to put down a Kurdish insurgency.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “deep state” as “a body of people, typically influential members of government agencies or the military, believed to be involved in the secret manipulation or control of government policy.”
In the United States, the term typically describes the permanent bureaucracy of unelected officials who govern the country with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.
Fears that such a group of unelected officials could secretly be directing government policy date back to 1947, when President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act. This act created the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Central Intelligence Agency. During the Cold War, officials like cia director Allen Dulles and Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover recruited at least a thousand former Nazi agents to work as American spies and informants. This was done behind the backs of the American people, and President Truman came to deeply regret his role in establishing these agencies.
“I never had any thought that when I set up the cia that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations,” he wrote in the Washington Post on Dec. 22, 1963. “Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the president has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for Cold War enemy propaganda.”
Instead of making the cia more accountable to the American people, however, government officials allowed the intelligence community to continue operating with negligible oversight and considerable independence, to the point of assassinating foreign leaders and illegally monitoring the communications of U.S. citizens, up to and including the president of the United States. In 1971, a Navy stenographer admitted to rifling through burn bags, interoffice envelopes and briefcases for communications between President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and also passing on top-secret documents to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. (The espionage became known as the Moorer-Radford affair.) The Joint Chiefs of Staff was illegally spying on its commander in chief.
When Sen. Frank Church led an investigation into cia, fbi and National Security Agency activities in the 1970s, he warned that technological advancements were giving these agencies unprecedented surveillance powers.
“If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know,” Senator Church said on nbc’s Meet the Press in 1975. “I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss.”
But the technological capacities that Church warned about grew stronger during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. President Bush signed an executive order in 2002 authorizing the nsa to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals if the government suspected that they had ties to terrorists. Even though President Obama promised to curb data collection of U.S. citizens, he greatly expanded the power of America’s entrenched surveillance state. During his administration, intelligence agents illegally monitored journalists, members of Congress, the Trump presidential campaign and millions of American citizens.
Even though Barack Obama is no longer president, most of the 850,000 people who held top-secret clearances in his administration are still on the job.
The Fourth Branch of Government
Whether we call it the deep state or something else, it is undeniable that Washington has a deeply embedded bureaucracy that has existed for decades. Many of these bureaucrats staunchly oppose President Trump and his inner circle. The problems this reality creates represent an enormous distortion of how America’s Founding Fathers established the government
Final Notes…
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A Smoking Frog Feature, Shallow Planet Production
