cobblehillbilly: 2018

There was a change to the constitutional order in 2000 when the Supreme Court made a sui generis decision in Bush vs Gore to install the Court's majority candidate, imposing the court between voters and their elected President. That change proved the necessary pre-condition for permanent war, "The War on Terror," which the new administration set about seeking a cause for by ignoring the outgoing administration's admonitions about major, impending Al Qaeda action. Which once delivered, delivered the new administration the AUMF it sought, an open ended authorization to use force at the President's discretion anywhere "terror" could rationalize.

In 2008 when that war had lost all legitimacy and the plutocracy that supported it was flat on it's back, the American people elected Barack Obama with, however fleeting, a filibuster proof majority in the Senate to restore the previous constitutional order. Instead, "looking forward, not back" he gave a free pass to the US tele-coms we had learned through Edward Snowden were illegally surveilling everyone. In so doing, he made the surveillance state legal. From the military and intelligence "communities" who lied us into war, failed at the wars they lied us into, tortured, surveilled and extrajudicially murdered, Obama held no one to account except the whistle blowers who made public the depravity of war as a video game and other evidence of incompetence and bad faith in the US government and its military. By failing to use the power he was given, he legitimized all the abuses he was elected to mend, again changing the constitutional order, this time placing abuses of power by the MIC & IC above the law.

Likewise, instead of arresting and indicting the financial executives who precipitated the Global Financial Crisis, Obama bailed them out, "foaming the runway" with individual debtors to keep the financial frauds from crashing. Charged with the power to fundamentally reform the system, Obama chose to institutionalize all its most dramatically failing policies using the full resources of the Federal Reserve and Treasure, the power of fiat money itself, to stuff collapsed balance sheets back into solvency. By not enforcing the law when investment bankers, private equity and hedge fund managers bet against their own clients, Obama legitimized all manner of financial scams. Having loaned over $29 trillion to save these institutions, the citizens of the United States were their rightful owners, but rather than cleaning up the rot, instead the President chose to use the equity and savings of citizens to pay off the loans and save the criminal cast of bankers. Lets be clear, "de-regulation" always meant "legalization of criminal activity" in finance. Again, a change to the constitutional order making senior executives in finance above the law. The constitution now no longer applies to the elite, only to little people. After this disgusting performance, is it any wonder that given the chance Americans again voted for "change"?

Now we are confronted again with an incipient shift in the constitutional order, former CIA director and torturer John Brennan called the President a "traitor." The sitting director of the CIA, Dan Coats took it upon himself to publicly grade the President's performance in Helsinki while the President's sitting Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, directly contradicted his boss's policy on Ukraine. FBI director, Christopher Wray is backing Robert Mueller in his investigation into his boss despite that aging investigation having as yet to net anything of significance. Trump is certainly corrupt, but if the FBI can't find evidence in over a year to tie that to Russia, while it may not exonerate Trump, it does raise questions about what the FBI is really up to.

I would personally love to see Trump out of office, but the "Trump/Russia" hysteria is already being weaponized to attack any progressive candidates legitimately to the left of Clinton, who herself is well to the right of Richard Nixon and lacking even his integrity. Like that moment when Obama didn't arrest the torturers and didn't arrest the bankers, we are at the moment when, if Trump doesn't at least fire his insubordinate hirelings, they will destroy him, and ironically with him the last connection to electoral democracy in the US Federal system of government, imposing the IC between voters and their elected representatives.

At this moment, like real freedom of speech and conscience, however repugnant, and Trump is certainly that, he must be defended for the form of the role he occupies. If he is to be removed from office, the evidence must be clear, available to everyone and produced through a legitimate process, none of which is currently in evidence. If the "intelligence community", which couldn't tell the wall was about to fall in Berlin, failed to act on the 9/11 plot, got Weapons of Mass Destruction completely wrong in Iraq and has precipitated both the European and Central American refugee crises with its interventions in Syria and Central America is to get veto rights on who can be President, as a nation we are committed to the suicidally self indulgent global policies of an insular elite that feels no obligation to tell anyone outside of itself anything about the real operations of American power and has thus far experienced no pain itself for an unbroken 40 year record of failure on all the most important issues.

Thursday, July 19, 2018

Plate Shifting Links

Cold Peace?: Maximilian Forte: Zero Anthropology
Seconded: Multiple Signatories: Nation
Extraterritorial Indictments: Jack Goldsmith: Lawfare
China Lens?: Christopher Balding: Balding's World
Women In Action: Alissa Quart & Barbara Ehrenreich
Economics Of Migration: Stephanie Leutert: Lawfare
Economics Of Power: Eric Dernbach: Medium
Politics Of Guns: Stephen Eisenman: Counterpunch

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Links

Putin's Worry: Fox News: en.kremlin.ru
Looks Reasonable: Patrick Malone & Jeff Smith: CPI
Labor System Fail: Lambert Strether: Naked Capitalism
Political System Fail: Globinfo Freexchange: Unbalanced Evolution
Economic System Fail: Daniel Fernandez: UFM
Eco-System Fail: Paul Sweezy: Monthly Review
What To Do: Kris De Decker: Low-Tech

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Links

IT's Not So Determined: Eric Gade: LARB
Pots & Kettles: Caitlin Johnstone
Liquidating Education: Janine Jackson: FAIR
Liquidating The Environment: Lori Lou Freshwater: Medium
Liquidating Capital: Yves Smith & Michael Olenick: NC
Liquidating Health: John Carroll: End Points
Liquidating The US: Chris Hedges: Russia Insider

Friday, June 29, 2018

Conspiracy Theories

Ron Unz has some well considered articles up on the Kennedy assassination. He sees Johnson as the likely culprit which a simple "cui bono" and Occam's Razor, on first blush, tends to support. But did Johnson really have the machinery at his disposal to execute on something like this, or was he just a willing opportunist who found himself in the right place at the right time?

Conservatives like Unz tend to see all the progressive portraits of John Kennedy as hagiography and discount the degree to which he may have internalized the jaded idealism of FDR in a "post colonial" ambition for America's post war foreign policy. If, on the other hand, you take the portraits painted by Bill Moyers or David Talbot of Kennedy's intentions in his very short Presidency, and compare them to those of our current president, in his second year in office, and compare the Kennedy they portray to the institutional biases Kennedy was up against, you might arrive at a different conclusion to "cui bono", and with that different suspects.

De Gualle for one saw the Kennedy assassination as a political statement by the imperial forces entrenching themselves across his career in US policy circles, he said so explicitly in his memories. Allan Dulles is my prime suspect, having motive, means and opportunity, in fact this kind of thing is exactly what he built his career on. Talbot's biography of him, "The Devil's Chess Board", lays out from the old spooks personal calendar the array of exotic criminals and hit men he met with in the months prior to the event. Including some interesting correspondence with Kennedy's Secretary of Treasury, the boss for Kennedy's personal security escort which failed so profoundly on that day in 1963.

Dulles was forcibly retired by Kennedy who had openly disagreed with the very colonial foreign policy Dulles, like his late brother J. F. Dulles, was deeply committed to. The Dulles brothers, before the war had arranged for US and German industrial secrets to be shared between the cross shareholders on boards of the likes of Union Carbide and AG Farben or Ford and Daimler, who were all clients the brothers represented at Sullivan and Cromwell. Truman considered Allan's activities in Switzerland, where he had tried to arrange a separate peace with the Nazis in a piece of monstrously ambitious insubordination to FDR's express policy of unconditional surrender, treasonous. It was the political intricacy of Dulles' embedment at the head of the CIA that prevented Truman from acting on this.

Further, Talbot catalogues the rather long standing and complex relationship of Lee Harvy Oswald to Allan Dulles and the prior use that had been made of him in thwarting Eisenhower's intent to thaw relations with Krushchev. The book is well worth the read. Suffice it to say that Allan Dulles was a past master of insubordination to Presidents, a master of conspiratorial organization and a serial assassin. If one takes the word of those closest to him, Kennedy had every intention of re-grounding Cold War US policy in FDR's anti-colonial, anti imperialist (he had fenced with both Churchill and DeGaul on this subject before and with Churchill after Yalta) vision.

Dulles was an unashamed American Imperialist and a Nazi sympathizer. He didn't share their racial hatreds, but certainly their sense of racial superiority. He facilitated the post war escape of many of the richest Nazis who in all likelihood funded Dulles secret operations up to and beyond the time he left the CIA at the young, soon to be dead Presidents discretion. Not only did he talk to Douglas Dillon, former investment banker and Secretary of Treasury immediately before and after the assassination, but he managed to place himself at the head of the Warren Commission investigating the crime. It was at about this time that the CIA spread the meme "conspiracy theorist" to denigrate anyone who might look to closely at this.

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Links

Left Out: Marcel Slimjim: Medium
American Anger: Andrew Sheng: Project Syndicate
The Rich Won: Ian Welsh
New Aristocracy: Matthew Stewart: Atlantic
Their Business: Gin Armstrong, Molly Gott, Derek Seidman: Littlesis
That Kind Of People: Robert Evans: Cracked
How They Got That Way: Jerry Useem: Atlantic
Things They Do: Ron Unz: Unz Review
What To Do About It: Chris Moore-Backman: Naked Capitalism

Sunday, June 10, 2018

Systemic Fragility Links

Colonizing Brazil: Brian Maer: Brazil Wire
Mocking The Left: Mike Prysner: YouTube
Really Old Thinking: The Staff: INET
Imperial Delusions: Sam Roggeveen: Lawfare
Internal Contradictions: Andrew O'Hehir: Salon
Destabilize The System: Diana Johnstone: Consortium News

Sunday, June 3, 2018

Innovations In Poverty Links

The Evil Genius Of Poverty: Lynn Parramore: Naked Capitalism
America's Sybaritic Poverty: Umair Haque: Eudaimonia
Staffing Plantations/Prisons: Zaid Jilani: The Intercept
Disciplining The Slaves: beth Schwartzapfel: The Marshall Project
Disciplining The Serfs: Stewart Whatley: Democracy
Where It Could Lead: John Robb: City Journal
A Social Alternative: Maya Wiley: TNR
Seeing Through It: Michael Hudson

Sunday, May 20, 2018

High/Low Links

At The Top Of The Race To The Bottom: Steven Brill: Time
Defending That Position Politically: Daniel Lazare: Consortium News
Defending That Position Militarily: Sharmine Narwani: The American Conservative
Questioning It: Pepe Escobar: Asia Times
Taking Down The Top 1: Tara Isabella Burton: Vox
Taking Down The Top 2: Dylan Scott: Vox
Reseeding At The Bottom: Laura Kahn: Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists
Storing The Energy Needed: Kris De Decker: Low Tech

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Trump & Consequences Links

Conquest Of Jerusalem: Editors: Al Jazeera
Consequences 1: Patrick Lang: Sic Semper Tyrannis
Consequences 2: Patrick Lang: Sic Semper Tyrannis
Consequences 3: b: Moon Of Alabama
Consequences 4: Caitlin Johnstone: Medium
Consequences 5: M K Bhadrakumar: Strategic Culture
Consequences 6: Eldar Mamedov: Lobelog
Bolton Korea : b: Moon Of Alabama
Korea Bolton: 38 North
Should Trump actually abstain from starting WW3, he could hardly have done more in the last month to curtail US power around the world. The NeoCons could not be more discredited everywhere in the world outside Five Eyes propaganda.

As I ended my "Transformational Theory of Trump", A cleaning of the Neo-Con house, or WW3!

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

A Muffled Zone Links

Financial Censorship: u/perfectionits: Reddit
Corporate Censorship: b: Moon of Alabama
Propaganda Fills The Void: Scott Ritter: Truthdig
And Clouds Judgement: Stephan Gowans: Wordpress
Laughing At The Maddness: Paul Street: CounterPunch

Monday, April 16, 2018

Links

Real Wealth Creation: John Thackara: P2P:Foundatkion
Energy To Do It: Kris DeDecker: Low Tech
What We Take: Asit Biswas & Kris Heartly: The Wire
Tackling Tech: William Nitze: The American Conservative
Give Socialism A Chance: Elizabeth Bruenig: Washington Post

Saturday, April 14, 2018

Who Do You Believe Links

New York Times
South Front
Moon Of Alabama
Sic Semper Tyrannis
Voltairenet

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Suicidal Singularity Links

Liberal Arts: Mark Bauerlein: Chronicle
Illiberal Ones: Rational Thinker 69: Medium
What It Leads To: Mattew Stoller: Medium
The Illiberal Machine: Brian Holmes: Filming The World Laboratory
Das Netz: Lutz Dammbeck: YouTube

Monday, March 26, 2018

Unstable Links

Paradise Tossed: Naomi Klein: Intercept
Declaring Cold War: Thierry Meyssan: Voltairenet
Surveillance Under The Sun: Wolf Richter: Naked Capitalism
Surveillance Under The Hood: Greg Palast
Pulling Surveillance Strings: Ian Welsh
On Being A Dissident: Craig Murray
Brilliant Ideologue: James DiEuginio: Kennedy and King
Lying To Bears: Harper: Sic Semper Tyrannis
Lying About Bears: b: Moon Of Alabama

Friday, March 16, 2018

A Transformational Theory of Trump

Trump is a smart opportunist. His unusual speaking style and apparently limited vocabulary cause the well educated to badly underestimate him, to their own detriment. He is a gifted sociopath who has an excellent, instrumentalist grasp of human nature. I don't like him: he embodies the opportunistic gamesmanship that business school faculties indoctrinate their charges into, idolizing themselves for their exploits and bolstering their egos with thick buffers of cash, crudely obtained, they are taught to monetize trust where-ever they find it and imagine that a virtue. But feelings are irrelevant to what Trump means for the world politically and practically. Despite the damage he has done and is doing, the dominant narratives "explaining" him are missing key points, among which, that there is good coming from his actions, much of it described as "damage". More than anything else, Trump is a "survivor" and a "winner", the latter being his determining self perception and the former his fundamental, instinctive talent.

Which last word I use advisedly: he is different from most people in this regard because his instrumental understanding of human nature, his personal will to power and his narcissism coalesce around this gifted instinct for survival. Of course I'm probably totally wrong, so after some exposition and a few digressions I'll test myself with some predictions to measure in future my own cognitive bias. I like Patrick Lang's descriptor for Trump, a "delegater", he selects competent people to execute his intentions, provides a framework and sets them loose. He's a developer and has learned, as have I as an architect, that even the most highly qualified people cannot do what they are most competent for in every instance. Execution depends on team dynamics and can't be diagrammed on an "org chart". So when required, he fires people. With Tillerson, the firings have well and truly begun.

The exposition:

Domestically, the Donald has selected Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. It's too early to tell whether Sessions recusal with regards to the investigations into the Trump Campaign "ties to Russia" was agreed with the President, or a real surprise as presented to the public. Like Glenn Greenwald and Publius Tacitus, I've been deeply skeptical of the "Trump/Russia" narrative from the start: if there was anything to it, that would have leaked ages ago. What's been made public to date is far fetched speculation and obviously contrived campaign "oppo", first from the competing Republican contenders, through which Trump went like a hot knife through butter, and then the Steele Dossier solicited by the Clinton Campaign and thence apparently forwarded to political hacks within the FBI. To the extent Trump is corrupt, it is the private corruption of an oligarch, not as politician and the impunity he has benefited from is one politicians have been paid to provide. To the extent Trump is concerned about Mueller's investigation it is that it is an open ended fishing expedition likely to eventually trawl over waters where Trump has skirted the law in his function as an Oligarch, not as a presidential candidate.

While Publius Tacitus has done a fine job tracking the circulation of the of the Steele Dossier, he appears to have bought into an equally partisan Republican effort to muddy the waters regarding Trump and Russia, particularly evading the issue that Russia did in fact try to meddle in our election: there are lots of professionals in Russian intelligence who would have been failing badly in their duties were that not the case. That said, I support the FBI investigation into what the Russians did but find it very improbable that Trump was in any way involved other than being one of the presidential contenders the Russians, like everyone else, were trying to handicap in what for them was a pretty high stakes race.

Manafort, like many Neo-Cons and Republican hawks, has a long history with Ukrainian oligarchs, ones themselves deeply tied to Russian state and oligarchical interests. Where we living in an honest republic he would long hence have been investigated by the FBI. Flynn was just plain stupid to lie about a telephone conversation he had to have known the NSA had recorded and should have assumed it had shared with the FBI. What he did with the Russian diplomats was well within the diplomatic norms for an incoming administration: Trump intended to change policies and Flynn was his diplomatic representative. Carter Page and George Papadoupolos are obviously bit players, caught out of their league and beyond their wits in their flexian ways by the motivated search light of FBI careerism. What lens was pointed at them could usefully be pointed at damn near everyone in DC.

When such scrutiny briefly did skim over Hillary Clinton with regard to operating the US Department of State through a private email server all kinds of roaches came out of the woodwork but none were deemed worthy of chasing or stomping on, primarily IMHO because Clinton agrees with and supports the investigating agencies in their extra constitutional aims. Likewise when some Russians paid millions to the Clinton Foundation while Secretary Clinton was approving their purchase of a major US uranium mining company, no legal authority took note, no questions were asked. Similarly Trumps claims about Saudi payments to the Clinton Foundation at the time of the Secretary of States' review of a large arms sale to Saudi Arabia elicited lots of press coverage about how hard it is to tell what is going on at the Clinton Foundation, but it must be okay since no one is doing anything about it. Though the press paves over it, there's no shortage of dirt in DC. This is political corruption at its purest. To the extent Sessions recusal was strategic, arrests of individuals within the investigating agencies in these two investigations can be expected. I'm not optimistic about this but it would be a delightful surprise. (Andrew MaCabe's defenestration does not constitute a positive development in this light, his arrest would have.)

The digressions:

What I think we're witnessing domestically is a poker match of competing corruptions, private and public, where all the players, because of their personal rot, have weak hands. They are all so corrupt they can't hold any of the face cards that real honor or morality could deal, and they're too personally opportunistic to hold the aces of integrity or ethics. So they're all playing the numbers and suits, and since the ante was in a smoke filled room, who knows what the wild cards are? No doubt they're many, so chance will play a big part. That is where Trumps core talent figures in. Trump performs very well in chaotic environments because he can read other peoples reactions to the risks and opportunities as they perceive them and position himself to dominate and benefit from path dependent outcomes featuring other peoples attempts at self preservation.

With his Twitter feed, he's constantly hammering at the coherence of the corporate media narrative in order to identify its strengths and weaknesses and to sus out the loyalties, or lack thereof, of various participants. However narcissistic, Trump does actually view himself as a "good guy" and does have a real patriotism, a loyalty to the United States that is more honored in the breach by the "Atlanticist", NAFTA and TPP majorities of flexians in DC. The corporate agenda expressed through US trade policy from Reagan on is functionally anti-American in that it has exported manufacturing and destroyed US living standards. Trump intuitively understands this but his personal experience has been of immense personal benefit from the neoliberal roll out of "reforms" in this era so I don't believe as yet his own motives are coherent.

What is being reported as "damage" the president is doing is primarily to the norms and practices of secret institutions within the government that have, according to the Iron Law of Institutions, pursued institutional and within that careerist interests increasingly unmolested as the use of "secret" stamps on official documents has logarithmically grown in the post war era. As Trump applies his CEO ethos to these institutions, he is cutting out all the institutional constraints between executive authority and the functional premises of the institutions he's engaging with. To the horror of the permanent Imperial Class he is trying to bend their institutions to his intent against the careerist and institutional interests currently holding sway. He is restructuring them to execute his will should he succeed in constructing the opportunity to act on it and resolve finally on what that is.

Finally, no one has been in control of the overall operation of the US Empire since Harry Truman turned the institutionally insecure, and therefore dependent to some extent on personal integrity, OSS into the institutionally secure vessel of "official secrets", the CIA. This act killed the Republic's antibodies to the authoritarian institutions of official empire with results across the political spectrum and around the world: Allen Dulles' rat lines of ex Nazi's funded the first generation of extra-constitutional imperial government abroad, the "War On Drugs" the second and since shortly after the installation of George W. Bush in the White House, the "Global War On Terrorism" has funded the third. The incompatibility of Global Empire with the myth of Republican Governance has brought us to this juncture where only Americans any longer believe the bull shit our main stream institutions feed us, while our NATO allies play along because they can't keep their own physical defenses functioning, so dependent have they become on our vast, lumbering military.

What I believe is that Trump, as he said on the campaign trail, sees Russia as an Oligarchy with which he can do business. In so doing he would relieve the military families that were key to his election victory of some burden of fighting wars who's only point is to drum up business for the poorly made armaments of highly subsidized US manufacturers. While he has replaced Tillerson with Pompeo, a careerist, flexian Neo-Con at State, Trump has consolidated the take over of the most retrograde cultures in the Imperial system of the formal institutions of the erstwhile Republic: what kind of State has its chief spy as it's Minister of State? What kind of state requires the approval of its secret police for its executive to govern? As awful as this state of affairs is, Trump has done us all a favor by making it so obvious. So obvious in fact that only those who are paid to not see it can maintain any pretense of their own legitimacy.

Operational failure I expect will be the trigger point for firings that fundamentally shift policy when Trump's business school ethos intersects with political reality. Our build up for war with Russia in Syria will be the main event. With Pompeo in, McMaster on the way out and our military already tripping on its own shoe laces at the Syrian border, the next few moves in the Neo-Con play book will result in some horrifying, immediate blow back. Even with Mueller nipping at his oligarchic heels, Trump, in this context, will be justified in a dramatic cleaning of house at DOD, State, CIA, NSA and FBI all of whom exhibit the characteristics of internally, politically riven institutions with Clinton loyalist flexians acting as internal fifth columns resisting any change in fundamental policy. Trump, faced with crisis, will seize opportunity: like his bid with North Korea, he will take the opportunity of the failure of his subordinates to re-cast the game not just to survive, but to make himself a winner.

The predictions:

A cleaning of the Neo-Con house or WW3.

Update, 12 24 18: Neo-Con house cleaning appears to be underway.