The Trump Presidency: RIP by Paul Craig Roberts

The Trump Presidency: RIP
February 16, 2017 

The Trump Presidency: RIP

Paul Craig Roberts


Has Donald Trump overestimated his presidential power? The answer is yes.

Is Steve Bannon, Trump’s main advisor, politically inexperienced? The answer is yes.

We can conclude from the answers to these two questions that Trump is in over his head and will pay a big price.

How large will the price be?

The New York Times reports that US “intelligence agencies…sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.”

Former National Security Agency (NSA) spy John Schindler tweeted on Twitter that a senior intelligence community colleague sent him an email stating that the deep state had declared nuclear war on Trump and that “He will die in jail.” https://sputniknews.com/us/201702151050723578-intelligence-community-war-trump/

It is possible that this will be the case.

At the end of World War II, the military/security complex decided that the flow of profits and power from war and threats of war were too great to be relinquished to an era of peace. This complex manipulated a weak and inexperienced President Truman into a gratuitous Cold War with the Soviet Union. The lie was created, and accepted by the gullible American people, that International Communism intended world conquest. This lie was transparant, because Stalin had purged and murdered Leon Trotsky and all communists who believed in world revolution. “Socialism in one country,” declared Stalin.

Academic experts, knowing where their bread was buttered, went along with and contributed to the deceit. By 1961 the overarching power of the military/security complex was apparent to President Eisenhower, a five star general in charge of the US invasion of German occupied Western Europe during the Second World War. The private power that the military/security complex (Eisenhower called it the military-industrial complex) exercised disturbed Ike so much that in his last address to the American people he said we must guard against its subversion of democracy:

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Eisenhower’s warning was to the point. However, it relied on “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” which the US does not have. The American population is largely insoucient, and is heading, across the ideological spectrum from left to right, to self-destruction.

The print and TV media, which serve as propagandists for the ruling military/security complex and Wall Street elites, make certain that Americans have nothing but bogus orchestrated information. Every household and person who turns on TV or reads a newspaper is programed to live in a false orchestrated reality that serves the tiny few who comprise the ruling Establishment.

Trump challenged this Establishment without realizing that it is more powerful than a mere President of the United States.

This is what has happened: During Obama’s second term, Russia and its president were demonized by the military/security complex and the neoconservatives using the presstitute media. The demonization has facilitated the ability of the controlled presstitute media, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest, to associate contact with Russia and articles questioning the orchestrated tensions between the US and Russia with suspicious activity, possibly even treason. Trump and his advisors were too inexperienced to realize that the consequence of Flynn’s dismissal was to validate this orchestrated association of the Trump presidency with Russian intelligence.

Now we have the media whores and the political whores asking the question used to blacken President Nixon and to force his resignation: “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Did Trump know that Gen. Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador weeks before Trump said he did? Did Flynn do the unspeakable—speak to a Russian—because Trump told him to do so?

The purveyors of fake news—the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the despicable liars are using irresponsible innuendo to entangle President Trump in a web of treason. Here is the New York Times headline: “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” What we are witnessing is a campaign by the deep state using their media whores to set up Trump for impeachment.

Those at work overturning the 2016 presidential election are so confident of their success that they publicly declare their preference for coup over democracy. The zionist neoconservative warmonger Bill Kristol has expressed his preference for a deep state coup over democratically elected President Trump. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/02/15/bill-kristol-backs-deep-state-president-trump-republican-government/

The liberal/progressive/left has aligned with the One Percent against the “racist, misogynist, homophobic” working class—the “Trump deplorables”—who elected Trump. Even the uninformed muscian, Moby, felt compelled to post ignorant nonsense on Facebook:

“1-the russian dossier on trump is real. 100% real. he’s being blackmailed by the russian government, not just for being peed on by russian hookers, but for much more nefarious things.
2-the trump administration is in collusion with the russian government, and has been since day one.” 
https://www.facebook.com/mobymusic/photos/a.126687636107.103603.6028461107/10155085110276108/?type=3&theater

Now that Trump has been tainted with “associations with Russian intelligence,” the idiot Republicans, according to Bloomberg, have “joined calls by Democrats for a deeper look at contacts between President Donald Trump’s team and Russian intelligence agents Wednesday [Feb. 15], indicating a growing sense of political peril within the party as new reports surfaced of extensive contacts between the two.” https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-02-14/flynn-s-ouster-sparks-new-gop-calls-for-wider-russia-probe?cmpid=BBD021517_BIZ 

Of course, there is no evidence of such contacts, but facts are not part of the campaign to depose Trump.

Trump’s sacking of Flynn is being used as vindication by his opponents of their false charges that the President of the United States is compromised by Russian intelligence. Realizing the mistake, the White House has tried to counter its blunder by saying that Flynn was dismissed because Trump lost confidence in him, not because he did anything illegal or had connections to Russian intelligence. But none of Trump’s opponents are listening. And the CIA keeps feeding fake news to the presstitutes.

From the very beginning I warned that Trump lacked the experience and the knowledge to pick a government that would stand by him and serve his agenda. Trump has now fired the one person on whom he could have counted. The most obvious conclusion is that Trump is dead meat.

The effort of the American people to bring government back under their control via Trump has been defeated by the deep state.

Chris Hedges argument that revolution is the only way that Americans can reclaim their country continues to gain credibility.

The words that doomed Trump when he declared war before he had his army assembled:

“There is nothing the political establishment will not do, and no lie they will not tell, to hold on to their prestige and power at your expense. The Washington establishment, and the financial and media corporations that fund it, exists for only one reason: to protect and enrich itself. This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not We The People reclaim control over our government. The political establishment that is trying everything to stop us, is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration, and economic and foreign policies that have bled this country dry.

“The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories and our jobs, as they flee to Mexico, China and other countries throughout the world. It’s 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.”

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

Under the Tories, UK Continues Its Descent Into Gestapo State

February 15, 2017 | Categories: Guest Contributions | Tags: |  Print This Article

Under the Tories, UK Continues Its Descent Into Gestapo State

http://www.globalresearch.ca/british-journalists-who-publish-leaked-information-will-be-jailed-under-new-tory-legislation/5574575

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

Courageous Ron Unz Wonders How John McCain Gets Away With It

February 15, 2017 

Courageous Ron Unz Wonders How John McCain Gets Away With It

John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President

by Ron Unz

What Was John McCain’s True Wartime Record in Vietnam?

With Sen. John McCain so much in the headlines these days due to his harsh criticism of the foreign policy positions of Donald Trump, a few people suggested that I republish my article from a couple of years ago exploring McCain’s own very doubtful military record.

Given the massive media coverage of rather fanciful allegations that the Russians are blackmailing Trump, perhaps similar resources should be devoted to investigating a much more plausible case of blackmail, and one that is far better documented.

Although the memory has faded in recent years, during much of the second half of the twentieth century the name “Tokyo Rose” ranked very high in our popular consciousness, probably second only to “Benedict Arnold” as a byword for American treachery during wartime. The story of Iva Ikuko Toguri, the young Japanese-American woman who spent her wartime years broadcasting popular music laced with enemy propaganda to our suffering troops in the Pacific Theater was well known to everyone, and her trial for treason after the war, which stripped her of her citizenship and sentenced her to a long prison term, made the national headlines.

The actual historical facts seem to have been somewhat different than the popular myth. Instead of a single “Tokyo Rose” there were actually several such female broadcasters, with Ms. Toguri not even being the earliest, and their identities merged in the minds of the embattled American GIs. But she was the only one ever brought to trial and punished, although her own radio commentary turned out to have been almost totally innocuous. The plight of a young American-born woman alone on a family visit who became trapped behind enemy lines by the sudden outbreak of war was obviously a difficult one, and desperately taking a job as an English-language music announcer hardly fits the usual notion of treason. Indeed, after her release from federal prison, she avoided deportation and spent the rest of her life quietly running a grocery shop in Chicago. Postwar Japan soon became our closest ally in Asia and once wartime passions had sufficiently cooled she was eventually pardoned by President Gerald Ford and had her U.S. citizenship restored.

Despite these extremely mitigating circumstances in Ms. Toguri’s particular case, we should not be too surprised at America’s harsh treatment of the poor woman upon her return home from Japan. All normal countries ruthlessly punish treason and traitors, and these terms are often expansively defined in the aftermath of a bitter war. Perhaps in a topsy-turvy Monty Python world, wartime traitors would be given medals, feted at the White House, and become national heroes, but any real-life country that allowed such insanity would surely be set on the road to oblivion. If Tokyo Rose’s wartime record had launched her on a successful American political career and nearly gave her the presidency, we would know for a fact that some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.

The political rise of Sen. John McCain leads me to suspect that in the 1970s some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.

 

My earliest recollections of John McCain are vague. I think he first came to my attention during the mid-1980s, perhaps after 1982 when he won an open Congressional seat in Arizona or more likely once he was elected in 1986 to the U.S. Senate seat of retiring conservative icon Barry Goldwater. All media accounts about him seemed strongly favorable, describing his steadfastness as a POW during more than five grim years of torture by his Vietnamese jailers, with the extent of his wartime physical suffering indicated by the famous photo showing him still on crutches as he was greeted by President Nixon many months after his return from enemy captivity. I never had the slightest doubts about this story or his war-hero status.

https://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_960w/Boston/2011-2020/2015/07/20/BostonGlobe.com/National/Images/mccain-big.jpg

McCain’s public image took a beating at the end of the 1980s when he became one of the senators caught up in the Keating Five financial scandal, but he managed to survive that controversy unlike most of the others. Soon thereafter he became prominent as a leading national advocate of campaign finance reform, a strong pro-immigrant voice, and also a champion of normalizing our relations with Vietnam, positions that appealed to me as much as they did to the national media. By 2000 my opinion had become sufficiently favorable that I donated to his underdog challenge to Gov. George W. Bush in the Republican primaries of that year, and was thrilled when he did surprisingly well in some of the early contests and suddenly had a serious shot at the nomination. However, he then suffered an unexpected defeat in South Carolina, as the large block of local military voters swung decisively against him. According to widespread media reports, the main cause was an utterly scurrilous whispering campaign by Karl Rove and his henchmen, which even included appalling accusations that the great war-hero candidate had been a “traitor” in Vietnam. My only conclusion was that the filthy lies sometimes found in American politics were even worse than I’d ever imagined.

Although in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I turned sharply against McCain due to his support for an extremely bellicose foreign policy, I never had any reason to question his background or his integrity, and my strong opposition to his 2008 presidential run was entirely on policy grounds: I feared his notoriously hot temper might easily get us into additional disastrous wars.

Everything suddenly changed in June 2008 when I read a long article by an unfamiliar writer on the leftist Counterpunch website. Shocking claims were made that McCain may never have been tortured and that he instead spent his wartime captivity collaborating with his captors and broadcasting Communist propaganda, a possibility that seemed almost incomprehensible to me given all the thousands of contrary articles that I had absorbed over the decades from the mainstream media. How could this one article on a small website be the truth about McCain’s war record and everything else be total falsehood? The evidence was hardly overwhelming, with the piece being thinly sourced and written in a meandering fashion by an obscure author, but the claims were so astonishing that I made some effort to investigate the matter, though without any real success.

However, those new doubts about McCain were still in my mind a few months later when I stumbled upon Sidney Schanberg’s massively documented expose about McCain’s role in the POW/MIA cover up, a vastly greater scandal. This time I was presented with a mountain of hard evidence gathered by one of America’s greatest wartime journalists, a Pulitzer Prize winning former top editor at The New York Times. In the years since then, other leading journalists have praised Schanberg’s remarkable research, now giving his conclusions the combined backing of four New York Times Pulitzer Prizes, while two former Republican Congressmen who had served on the Intelligence Committee have also strongly corroborated his account.

In 1993 the front page of the New York Times broke the story that a Politburo transcript found in the Kremlin archives fully confirmed the existence of the additional POWs, and when interviewed on the PBS Newshour former National Security Advisors Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that the document was very likely correct and that hundreds of America’s Vietnam POWs had indeed been left behind. In my opinion, the reality of Schanberg’s POW story is now about as solidly established as anything can be that has not yet received an official blessing from the American mainstream media. And the total dishonesty of that media regarding both the POW story and McCain’s leading role in the later cover up soon made me very suspicious of all those other claims regarding John McCain’s supposedly heroic war record. Our American Pravda is simply not to be trusted on any “touchy” topics.

I have no personal knowledge of the Vietnam War myself nor do I possess expertise in that area of history. But after encountering Schanberg’s expose in 2008, I soon got in touch with someone having exactly those strengths, a Vietnam veteran who later became a professor at one of our military service academies. At first, he was quite cagey regarding the questions I raised, but once he had read through Schanberg’s lengthy article, he felt he could respond more freely and he largely confirmed the claims, partly based on certain information he personally possessed. He said he found it astonishing that in these days of the Internet the POW scandal had not attracted vastly more attention, and couldn’t understand why the media was so uniformly unwilling to touch the topic.

He also had some very interesting things to say about John McCain’s wartime record. According to him, it was hardly a secret in veterans’ circles that McCain had spent much of the war producing Communist propaganda broadcasts since these had regularly been played in the prisoner camps as a means of breaking the spirits of those American POWs who resisted collaboration. Indeed, he and some of his friends had speculated about who currently possessed copies of McCain’s damning audio and video tapes and wondered whether they might come out during the course of the presidential campaign. Over the years, other Vietnam veterans have publicly leveled similar charges, and Schanberg had speculated that McCain’s leading role in the POW cover up might have been connected with the pressure he faced due to his notorious wartime broadcasts.

In late September 2008 another fascinating story appeared in my morning New York Times. An intrepid reporter decided to visit Vietnam and see what McCain’s former jailers thought of the possibility that their onetime captive might soon reach the White House, that the man they had spent years brutally torturing could become the next president of the United States. To the journalist’s apparent amazement, the former jailers seemed enthusiastic about the prospects of a McCain victory, saying that they hoped he would win since they had become such good friends during the war and had worked so closely together; if they lived in America, they would certainly all vote for him. When asked about McCain’s claims of “cruel and sadistic” torture, the head of the guard unit dismissed those stories as being just the sort of total nonsense that politicians, whether in America or in Vietnam, must often spout in order to win popularity. A BBC correspondent reported the same statements.

Let us consider the implications of this story. Throughout his entire life John McCain has been notable for having a very violent temper and also for holding deep grudges. How plausible does it seem that the men who allegedly spent years torturing him would be so eager to see him reach a position of supreme world power?

But what about the famous photo, showing McCain still on crutches even months after his release from captivity? In early September 2008, someone discovered archival footage from a Swedish news crew which had filmed the return of the POWs, and uploaded it to YouTube. We see a healthy-looking John McCain walking off the plane from Vietnam, having a noticeable limp but certainly without any need of crutches. After returning home he had eventually entered Bethesda Naval Hospital for corrective surgery on some of his wartime injuries, and that recent American surgery was what explained his crutches in the photo with Nixon.

https://youtu.be/6YwnTnmbOMQ

It is certainly acknowledged that considerable numbers of American POWs were indeed tortured in Vietnam, but it is far from clear that McCain was ever one of them. As the original Counterpunch article pointed out, throughout almost the entire war McCain was held at a special section for the best-behaving prisoners, which was where he allegedly produced his Communist propaganda broadcasts and perhaps became such good friends with his guards as they later claimed. Top-ranking former POWs held at the same prison, such as Colonels Ted Guy and Gordon “Swede” Larson, have gone on the record saying they are very skeptical regarding McCain’s claims of torture.

I have taken the trouble to read through John McCain’s earliest claims of his harsh imprisonment, a highly detailed 12,000 word first person account published under his name in U.S. News & World Report in May 1973, just a few weeks after his release from imprisonment. The editorial introduction notes the “almost total recall” seemingly demonstrated by the young pilot just out of captivity, and portions of the story strike me as doubtful, perhaps drawn from the long history of popular imprisonment fiction stretching back to Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo. Would a young navy pilot so easily develop and remember a “tap code” to extensively communicate with others across thick prison walls? And McCain describes himself as having a “philosophical bent,” spending his years of solitary confinement reviewing in his head all the many history books he had read, trying to make sense of human history, a degree of intellectualizing never apparent in his life either before or after.

One factual detail, routinely emphasized by his supporters, is his repeated claim that except for signing a single written statement very early in his captivity and also answering some questions by a visiting French newsman, he had staunchly refused any hint of collaboration with his captors, despite torture, solitary confinement, endless threats and beatings, and offers of rewards.

Perhaps. But that original Counterpunch article provided the link to the purported text of one of McCain’s pro-Hanoi propaganda broadcasts as summarized in a 1969 UPI wire service story, and I have confirmed its authenticity by locating the resulting article that ran in Stars & Stripes at the same time. So if crucial portions of McCain’s account of his imprisonment are seemingly revealed to be self-serving fiction, how much of the rest can we believe? If his pro-Communist propaganda broadcasts were so notable that they even reached the news pages of one of America’s leading military publications, it seems quite plausible that they were as numerous, substantial, and frequent as his critics allege.

When I later discussed these troubling matters with an eminent political scientist who has something of a military background, he emphasized that McCain’s history can only be understood in the context of his father, a top-ranking admiral who then served as commander of all American forces in the Pacific Theater, including our troops in Vietnam. Indeed, the alleged headline of the UPI wire story had been “PW [Prisoner of War] Songbird Is Pilot Son of Admiral,” highlighting that connection. Obviously, for reasons both of family loyalty and personal standing it would have been imperative for John McCain’s father and namesake to hush up the terrible scandal of having had his son serve as a leading collaborator and Communist propagandist during the war and his exalted rank gave him the power to do so. Furthermore, just a few years earlier the elder McCain had himself performed an extremely valuable service for America’s political elites, organizing the official board of inquiry that whitewashed the potentially devastating “Liberty Incident,” with its hundreds of dead and wounded American servicemen, so he certainly had some powerful political chits he could call in.

Placed in this context, John McCain’s tales of torture make perfect sense. If he had indeed spent almost the entire war eagerly broadcasting Communist propaganda in exchange for favored treatment, there would have been stories about this circulating in private, and fears that these tales might eventually reach the newspaper headlines, perhaps backed by the hard evidence of audio and video tapes. An effective strategy for preempting this danger would be to concoct lurid tales of personal suffering and then promote them in the media, quickly establishing McCain as the highest profile victim of torture among America’s returned POWs, an effort rendered credible by the fact that many American POWs had indeed suffered torture.

Once the public had fully accepted McCain as our foremost Vietnam war-hero and torture-victim, any later release of his propaganda tapes would be dismissed as merely proving that even the bravest of men had their breaking point. Given that McCain’s father was one of America’s highest-ranking military officers and both the Nixon Administration and the media had soon elevated McCain to a national symbol of American heroism, there would have been enormous pressure on the other returning POWs, many of them dazed and injured after long captivity, not to undercut such an important patriotic narrative. Similarly, when McCain ran for Congress and the Senate a decade or so later, stories of his torture became a central theme of his campaigns and once again constituted a powerful defense against any possible rumors of his alleged “disloyalty.”

And so the legend grew over the decades until it completely swallowed the man, and he became America’s greatest patriot and war hero, with almost no one even being aware of the Communist propaganda broadcasts that had motivated the story in the first place. I have sometimes noticed this same historical pattern in which fictional accounts originally invented to excuse or mitigate some enormous crime may eventually expand over time until they totally dominate the narrative while the original crime itself is nearly forgotten. The central theme of McCain’s presidential campaign was his unmatched patriotism and when he went down to defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, the widespread verdict was that even the greatest of war-heroes may still lose an election.

I must reemphasize that I am not an expert on the Vietnam War and my cursory investigation is nothing like the sort of exhaustive research that would be necessary to establish a firm conclusion on this troubling case. I have merely tried to provide a plausible account of McCain’s war record and highlight some of the important pieces of evidence that a more thorough researcher should consider. Unlike the documentation of the POW cover up accumulated by Schanberg and others, which I regard as overwhelmingly conclusive, I think the best that may be said about my reconstruction of McCain’s wartime history is that it seems more likely correct than not. However, I should mention that when I discussed some of these items with Schanberg in 2010 and suggested that John McCain had been the Tokyo Rose of the Vietnam War, he considered it a very apt description.

 

John McCain is hardly the only prominent political figure whose problematic Vietnam War activities have at times come under harsh scrutiny but afterwards been airbrushed away and forgotten by our subservient corporate media. Just as McCain was widely regarded as the most prominent Republican war-hero of that conflict, his Democratic counterpart was probably Vietnam Medal of Honor winner Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and senator who had run for president in 1992 and then considered doing so again in the late 1990s.

His seemingly unblemished record of wartime heroism suddenly collapsed in 2001 with the publication of a devastating 8,000 word expose in The New York Times Magazine together with a Sixty Minutes II television segment. Detailed eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence persuasively established that Kerrey had ordered his men to massacre over a dozen innocent Vietnamese civilians—women, children, and infants—for being witnesses to his botched SEAL raid on a tiny Vietnamese hamlet, an action that somewhat recalled the infamous My Lai massacre of the previous year though certainly on a much smaller scale. Kerrey’s initial response to these horrific accusations—that his memory of the incident was “foggy”—struck me as near-certain proof of his guilt, and others drew similar conclusions.

As a supposed war-hero and a moderate Democrat, Kerrey had always been very popular in political circles, but even the once friendly New Republic was shocked by the alacrity with which pundits and the media sought to absolve him of his apparent crimes. The revelations also seem to have had no impact on his tenure as president of the prestigious New School in New York, an academic institution with an impeccable liberal reputation, which he held for another decade before leaving to make an unsuccessful attempt to recapture his old Senate seat in Nebraska. Bob Dreyfuss, a principled left-liberal journalist, might still characterize him as a “mass murderer” in a 2012 blog post at The Nation, but for years almost no one in the mainstream media had ever alluded to the incident in any of the articles mentioning Kerrey’s activities, just as the media has also totally ignored all of Schanberg’s remarkable revelations. I suspect that Kerrey’s war crimes have almost totally vanished from public consciousness.

The realization that many of our political leaders may be harboring such terrible personal secrets, secrets that our media outlets regularly conceal, raises an important policy implication independent of the particular secrets themselves. In recent years I have increasingly begun to suspect that some or even many of our national leaders may occasionally make their seemingly inexplicable policy decisions under the looming threat of personal blackmail, and that this may have also been true in the past.

Consider the intriguing case of J. Edgar Hoover, who spent nearly half a century running our domestic intelligence service, the FBI. Over those many decades he accumulated detailed files on vast numbers of prominent people and most historians agree that he regularly used such highly sensitive material to gain the upper hand in disputes with his nominal political masters and also to bend other public figures to his will. Meanwhile, he himself was hardly immune from similar pressures. These days it is widely believed that Hoover lived his long life as a deeply closeted homosexual and there are also serious claims that he had some hidden black ancestry, a possibility that seems quite plausible to me given his features. Such deep personal secrets may be connected with Hoover’s long denials that organized crime actually existed in America and his great reluctance to allocate significant FBI resources to combat it.

Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.

An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.

Such notions may seem utterly absurd, but let us step back and consider recent American history. Just a few years ago an individual came very close to reaching the White House almost entirely on the strength of his war record, a war record that considerable evidence suggests was actually the sort that would normally get a military man hanged for treason at the close of hostilities. I have studied many historical eras and many countries and no parallel examples come to mind.

Perhaps the cause of this bizarre situation merely lies in the remarkable incompetence and cowardice of our major media organs, their herd mentality and their insouciant unwillingness to notice evidence that is staring them in the face. But we should also at least consider the possibility of a darker explanation. If Tokyo Rose had nearly been elected president in the 1980s, we would assume that the American political system had taken a very peculiar turn.

http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-when-tokyo-rose-ran-for-president/

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.   

Will Falling Dominoes Knock Over Trump?

February 15, 2017 

Will Falling Dominoes Knock Over Trump?

Gen. Flynn’s removal as National Security Adviser is a domino that is likely to knock over other Trump appointees and perhaps Trump himself. Kellyanne Conway seems to be next in line http://sjlendman.blogspot.com

Now that speaking to Russians is a cause for removal, Trump’s agenda of normalizing relations with Russia is dead. Trump himself now reportedly has said that Russia should return Crimea to Ukraine. Flynn’s reported likely replacement, Robert S. Harward, is CEO for Lockheed Martin in the United Arab Emirates. Lockheed Martin is part of the military/security complex that needs an enemy, and the “Russian threat” is a large enough enemy to keep about 1,000 billion dollars of the taxpayers’ money flowing into the military/security complex.

The Saker spells it out for those who were unable to follow his first article on the subject.

http://thesaker.is/the-anti-flynn-deep-state-coup-spelling-it-out-in-the-clearest-way-possible/

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.   

Brasileiro -- The Saker: Neocons e o Estado Profundo castraram a presidência Trump (atualizado 2x)

The Saker: Neocons e o Estado Profundo castraram a presidência Trump (atualizado 2x)

14.02.2016, The Saker, The Vineyard of the Saker

tradução btpsilveira

Há menos de um mês, alertei que uma “revolução colorida” estava em curso nos Estados Unidos. Meu principal elemento de prova era a assim chamada “investigação” que CIA, FBI, NSA e outras agências estavam conduzindo contra o candidato a se tornar Assessor para a Segurança Nacional do Presidente Trump, o General Flynn. Nesta noite, o plano para expulsar Flynn finalmente teve sucesso e ele ofereceu sua renúncia. Trump aceitou.

Uma coisa quero deixar bem clara desde o início: Dificilmente Flynn poderia ser visto como um homem sábio ou um santo, que poderia, sozinho, salvar o mundo. Não é. No entanto, Flyyn era a pedra angular da política de Segurança Nacional de Trump. Em primeiro lugar, Flynn ousou o impensável: ele ousou declarar que a comunidade de inteligência dos Estados Unidos, superdimensionada e inchada, tinha que ser reformada. Tentou ainda subordinar a CIA e o Estado Maior ao presidente via Conselho de Segurança Nacional. Colocado de maneira diferente, Flynn quis combater o poder incontestável até então que vem da CIA e do Pentágono e trazê-lo de volta para as mãos da Casa Branca. Além disso, queria trabalhar com a Rússia. Não porque fosse algum tipo de admirador da Rússia, a simples noção de que um diretor do DIA fosse fã de Putin é simplesmente ridícula, mas Flynn é um homem racional, ele entendeu que a Rússia não é uma ameaça para os Estados Unidos ou para a Europa e que a Rússia e o ocidente têm interesses em comum. Estas noções são um crime de pensamento absolutamente imperdoável na cidade de Washington, DC.

Os neocons que governam o ‘estado profundo’ forçaram Flynn a renunciar sob o pretexto imbecil de que ele teve uma conversação telefônica através de uma linha aberta, insegura e claramente monitorada, com o embaixador russo.

Pior: Trump aceitou a renúncia.

Desde que adentrou a Casa Branca, Trump tem apanhado dia após dia, aparando golpes da mídia sionista governado pelos neocons, das “estrelas” duplipensar-mas-gente-boa (doubleplusgoodthinking, no original-NT) de Hollywood e até mesmo de políticos europeus. E Trump aparou cada golpe olimpicamente, sempre devolvendo cada pancada. Nunca se ouviu o seu famoso “você está despedido!”. E eu tinha esperanças. Eu queria ter esperanças, sentia que era meu dever ter esperanças.

Agora, Trump nos traiu a todos.

Lembram-se a ocasião em que Obama nos revelou sua face verdadeira, quando denunciou seu pastor e amigo Ver. Jeremiah Wright Jr? Hoje, Trump nos mostrou sua verdadeira face. Ao invés de recusar a renúncia de Flynn e em vez de despedir aqueles que ousaram engendrar essas acusações ridículas contra Flynn, Trump aceitou a renúncia. Isso só pode ser chamado de uma covardia abjeta, e é também uma estupidez espantosa, embutindo um suicídio político porque agora, Trump está só, completamente sozinho, encarando gente como Mattis e Pence – padrões de lutadores radicais da Guerra Fria, ideológicos até o cerne, gente que quer a guerra sem se importar com a realidade.

Volto a enfatizar: Flynn não é o meu herói. Mas, por todas as medidas, era o herói de Trump. E Trump o traiu.

As consequências serão imensas. Por um lado, agora, Trump está claramente batido. OP estado profundo levou apenas três wemanas para castrare Trump e fazê-lo reverenciar os “que mandam mesmo”. Aqueles que poderiam estar na retaguarda de Trump sentirão que ele não estará na sua retaguarda e se afastarão dele. Os Neocons se sentirão encorajados com a eliminação de seu pior inimigo e baseados nessa vitória, vão pressionar mais fortemente, dobrando a aposta mais uma vez e outra, e outra...

O estado profundo venceu, pessoal. Acabou.

De agora em diante, Trump se tornará o proverbial shabbos-goy (não judeu que realiza os trabalhos proibidos aos judeus no sábado – NT), o menino de recados do lobby israelense, fazendo o trabalho sujo que Israel rejeitar. Hassan Nasrallah tinha razão ao chamá-lo de “um idiota”.

Chineses e iranianos estarão às gargalhadas. Os russos não – eles serão polidos, sorrirão, e tentarão se restará algum bom senso político que possa ser salvo do desastre. Alguma coisa poderá. Mas qualquer sonho de uma parceria entre Rússia e Estados Unidos morreu nesta noite.

Os líderes da União Europeia, claro, celebrarão. Trump não é mais o bicho papão assustador que eles temiam. Trump se tornou um capacho – muito bom para a União Europeia.

Onde seremos largados nós – os milhões de “deploráveis” anônimos que deram o melhor de si para poder resistir ao imperialismo, guerra, violência e injustiça?

Penso que teremos direito às nossas esperanças, porque isso é tudo o que nós temos – esperança. Não expectativa, apenas esperança. Neste momento, falando objetivamente, temos poucas razões para ter esperanças. Por um lado, o “pântano” que domina Washington não será drenado. Se tanto, o pântano venceu. Poderemos encontrar talvez algum consolo em dois fatos inegáveis:

1 . Hillary teria sido bem pior que qualquer versão de uma presidência Trump.

2 . Para derrotar Trump, o estado profundo teve que enfraquecer terrivelmente os Estados Unidos e o Império AngloSionista. Da mesma forma que a “limpeza” realizada por Erdogan deixou o exército turco em farrapos, a “revolução colorida” anti Trump infligiu dano considerável na reputação, autoridade e até na credibilidade dos Estados Unidos.

O primeiro fato é tão óbvio que não necessita explicações. Assim, deixem que eu esclareça o segundo. Em sua raiva odiosa contra Trump e o povo (norte)americano (também conhecido como “cesta de deploráveis”) os Neocons foram obrigados a mostrar sua verdadeira natureza. Pela sua rejeição ao resultado das eleições, por suas manifestações violentas, pela demonização de Trump, os Neocons acabaram por mostrar duas coisas cruciais: primeiro, a assim chamada democracia (norte)americana é uma piada sem graça e eles, os neocons, são um regime de ocupação que governo em oposição aos desejos do povo (norte)americano. Em outras palavras, da mesma forma que Israel, os Estados Unidos não mais Têm legitimidade. E desde que, também como Israel, os EUA já não são capazes de amedrontar seus inimigos, basicamente nada mais têm, nem legitimidade, nem capacidade de coerção. Então, sim, os neocons venceram. Mas sua vitória está removendo a última oportunidade que os Estados Unidos tinham de evitar um colapso.

Trump, apesar de todas as suas falhas, quer favorecer os Estados Unidos como país, prevalecendo sobre o Império Global. Além disso, ele parece estar dolorosamente consciente de que “mais do mesmo” não é uma opção. Ele quer políticas compatíveis com as atuais possibilidades dos EUA. Com Flynn abandonando o campo de luta e com os neocons no comando – isso acabou. Neste instante estamos à mercê das ideologias e desprezando a realidade.

Trump provavelmente poderia ter tornado os EUA, senão “grandes novamente”, pelo menos outra vez forte, uma potência mundial de primeira linha que poderia negociar e usar o trunfo de sua influência para conseguir os melhores acordos possíveis com os outros. Isso agora acabou. Com Trump no chão, Rússia e China voltam diretamente para o nível em que estavam antes de Trump: uma resistência decidida baseada na vontade férrea e na habilidade/capacidade de confrontar e derrotar os EUA em qualquer nível.

Tenho certeza que ninguém está comemorando, no Kremlin. Putin, Lavrov e outros com certeza sabem exatamente e entendem o que aconteceu. É como se Khodorkovski tivesse derrotado Putin em 2003. De fato, tenho que dar o devido crédito aos analistas russos que por várias semanas já estavam comparando Trump com Yanukovich, que também foi eleito pela maioria da população e que falhou em mostrar a determinação necessária para interromper a “revolução colorida” que se iniciava contra ele. Mas se Trump agora está parecendo Yanukovich, os Estados Unidos eventualmente se tornarão a próxima Ucrânia?

Flynn era ainda mais que a pedra angular da tão esperada política externa de Trump. Era a chance real de dominar as grandes, duras e incrivelmente poderosas agências de três letras dos Estados Unidos, e focar então o poderio da nação contra seu inimigo real: os wahabis. Com Flynn fora de cena, todo esse edifício conceitual desaba. Estamos partindo para ficar nas mãos de gente como Mattis e seus discursos anti-iranianos. Palhaços tentando impressionar outros palhaços.

Hoje, a vitória dos neocons sobre Trump e Flynn é um grande evento e provavelmente será apresentado de maneira distorcida pela imprensa oficial. Ironicamente, os apoiadores de Trump tentarão minimizar o acontecido. Mas a realidade é que a não ser que aconteça um improvável milagre de última hora, Trump está finalizado e também as esperanças de milhões de pessoas nos EUA e no resto do mundo que tinham a esperança de que os neocons poderiam ser barrados e colocados para fora do poder através de eleições pacíficas. Claramente, isso não vai acontecer.

Vejo grandes nuvens negras surgindo no horizonte.

The Saker

UPDATE1: Quero enfatizar uma coisa importante: o desastre real não é tanto sobre o fato de que Flynn está fora, mas sobre o que significa para a análise do caráter (ou falta dele) de Trump essa rendição aos neocons. Pergunte a você mesmo – depois do que aconteceu com Flynn, você colocaria a mão no fogo por Trump?

UPDATE2: Exatamente como previ, os neocons estão comemorando e, claro, dobrando a aposta: