routine deep-state activities

This topic has 10 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 8 months ago by Billy_T.

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March 3, 2018 at 9:44 am #83390

wv
Participant

The Reason i like the term ‘deep state’ is it suggests the ‘secretive’ nature of much of what goes on ROUTINELY in the Empire. So much is secret. How much? Who knows? How could any citizen know? But read Clintons quote (which we all have seen before) and think about the ‘casual’ way its said. Like this kind of thing is essentially ‘routine.’

Rigging foreign elections is just another day at the office
in the deep state. Imho.

This is why the russia thing just makes me crazy. The hypocrisy.

w
v
———————–
2006 Audio Emerges of Hillary Clinton Proposing Rigging Palestine Election
Influencing/Rigging Elections:http://observer.com/2016/10/2006-audio-emerges-of-hillary-clinton-proposing-rigging-palestine-election/

“….
…….has taken on new relevance amid persistent accusations in the presidential campaign by Clinton’s Republican opponent Donald Trump that the current election is “rigged.”…
…………
….Speaking to the Jewish Press about the January 25, 2006, election for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority), Clinton weighed in about the result, which was a resounding victory for Hamas (74 seats) over the U.S.-preferred Fatah (45 seats).

“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”

Eli Chomsky recalls being taken aback that “anyone could support the idea—offered by a national political leader, no less—that the U.S. should be in the business of fixing foreign elections.”

March 3, 2018 at 9:57 am #83391

wv
Participant

Israel-Gate. The gate that MSNBC and the DNC and the MSM will never talk about…

I didnt realize Kushner actually contributes money to build settlements. Sigh.

w
v

===================

link:https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/08/missing-the-significance-of-israel-gate/

“….
…………Dennis Bernstein: Jared Kushner is a broker for illegal settlements.

Ali Abunimah: He is a donor to illegal settlements, a philanthropist for illegal settlements. How many headlines have been devoted to Kushner failing to disclose important information in his government ethics filings? The latest is that he failed to disclose the fact that he was a director of his family’s foundation, which has donated to building settlements in the occupied West Bank, particularly the settlement of Beit El, the same settlement that receives philanthropic donations from David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador in Tel Aviv.

Kushner, who is supposedly charged with coming up with a peace plan, is actually busy funding settlements. Kushner’s family are close friends of Benjamin Netanyahu. It is just farcical to pretend that anyone like Jared Kushner could ever be an honest broker.

Dennis Bernstein: Is all of this legal?

Ali Abunimah: That’s questionable. Actually, in the past year there were lawsuits filed challenging this massive multi-billion dollar flow of tax-deductible, so-called charitable funds for illegal purposes, including the construction of settlements and massive donations to groups like Friends of the IDF.

Another issue is this whole business of what Jared Kushner was doing during the transition, when he was trying to undermine the policy of the sitting Obama administration and stop the UN Security Council resolution passed last December condemning Israeli settlements. This all came out in the context of the Mueller investigation and Michael Flynn’s guilty plea, which revealed not so much a collusion with Russia as a very close collusion between the Trump transition and Israel.

Dennis Bernstein: You would think then that MSNBC, which makes a living on pumping up Russiagate, would want to jump into this case of collusion.

Ali Abunimah: The Michael Flynn revelation did not show collusion with Russia and certainly did not show any interference in the US election. What Flynn pled guilty to was lying about two meetings. Flynn is a serial liar, he lied about his work for the Turkish government.

The facts that were filed in the documents with his plea show that a “very senior member” of the Trump transition team, who has since been identified as Jared Kushner, had ordered Flynn to contact every member of the UN Security Council to try to defeat this resolution criticizing Israel. It was also reported in The New York Times that Kushner had acted at the urging of Netanyahu.

None of this has anything to do with Russian interference in the elections. What it does show is clear collusion at the highest level with a foreign government [Israel] to undermine and sabotage the policy of the sitting administration.

President Donald Trump places a prayer in-between the stone blocks of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, May 22, 2017. (Official White House Photo by Dan Hansen)

Dennis Bernstein: It doesn’t appear that Arab outrage is going to have much influence over what happens with this plan to move the capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Ali Abunimah: On the contrary, I think that it has actually been facilitated by the fact that Saudi Arabia, which markets itself as the guardian of Islam, has been engaging in this major rapprochement with Israel, pressuring the Palestinians to accept what amounts to surrender, in order to get them out of the way so that Saudi Arabia and Israel can embrace each other and go to war together against Iran.

The New York Times reported details of the so-called Trump peace plan that Jared Kushner has been putting together, which basically creates a Palestinian state in name only. The Palestinians would have very limited autonomy in very small non-contiguous areas of the West Bank. They would have no control, no sovereignty, no capital in East Jerusalem, no right of return for refugees, and so on. But they would be free to call this a Palestinian state if they want to.

All of this sounds familiar to people who have followed this issue because this is a rehashing of the kind of schemes that have been put forward since the 1990’s. What is different this time is that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority leader, was called to Riyadh last month and told by Mohammad bin Salman that he was going to accept this or else. The thinking behind it is that the Palestinian issue is a thorn in the side of the Saudi/Israeli alliance that wants to escalate the catastrophic confrontation with Iran.

Dennis Bernstein: How does the crisis with the prime minister in Lebanon play into all of this?

Ali Abunimah: The Saudis have been behind so many of the regional disasters, including escalating the situation in Syria by funding a proxy war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. For two years they have been bombing the poorest Arab country, Yemen, with millions suffering famine and tens of thousands killed and injured. Saudi Arabia has been unable to defeat the people resisting them in Yemen. They were trying to destabilize Lebanon and that failed because [Prime Minister] Hariri went home and rescinded his forced resignation under pressure from the Saudis.

Dennis Bernstein: I guess maybe the one silver lining in all of this is the boycott/divestment movement. There is not much else going on in terms of global resistance to the brutality in occupied Palestine.

Ali Abunimah: I suppose it is possible to look at all of this and just feel immobilized and hopeless. But I think it is important to feel hope as well. Even in Jerusalem, Palestinians have been standing up to Israel and winning victories, as they did this summer when they forced Israel to back down from its efforts to impose stricter control on entrance to the al-Aqsa mosque compound. That was a real victory for people power in Jerusalem against one of the strongest armies in the world.

Despite a twenty-fold increase in lobbying, Israel has not been able to stop the “impressive growth” of the Palestine solidarity movement, particularly the boycott/divestment/sanctions movement. So it’s not time to be hopeless, it’s time to get on with the work, because there is lots to do and people power is still winning victories.

Dennis Bernstein: I guess you could say that proof of those victories is the amount of repression and clamp-down of Palestinian students and their supporters all over the country.

Ali Abunimah: And it is across the board now, including the effort of the big Silicon Valley companies who are helping the establishment to censor and limit the reach of independent media like us. They know that people are listening and we are powerful, even though we may sometimes feel small in the face of the forces that are trying to reshape the world.

Dennis J Bernstein is a host of “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom. You can access the audio archives at http://www.flashpoints.net.

March 3, 2018 at 2:08 pm #83399

Billy_T
Participant

wv wrote:

The Reason i like the term ‘deep state’ is it suggests the ‘secretive’ nature of much of what goes on ROUTINELY in the Empire. So much is secret. How much? Who knows? How could any citizen know? But read Clintons quote (which we all have seen before) and think about the ‘casual’ way its said. Like this kind of thing is essentially ‘routine.’

Rigging foreign elections is just another day at the office
in the deep state. Imho.

This is why the russia thing just makes me crazy. The hypocrisy.

w
v
———————–
2006 Audio Emerges of Hillary Clinton Proposing Rigging Palestine Election
Influencing/Rigging Elections:http://observer.com/2016/10/2006-audio-emerges-of-hillary-clinton-proposing-rigging-palestine-election/

“….
…….has taken on new relevance amid persistent accusations in the presidential campaign by Clinton’s Republican opponent Donald Trump that the current election is “rigged.”…
…………
….Speaking to the Jewish Press about the January 25, 2006, election for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority), Clinton weighed in about the result, which was a resounding victory for Hamas (74 seats) over the U.S.-preferred Fatah (45 seats).

“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”

Eli Chomsky recalls being taken aback that “anyone could support the idea—offered by a national political leader, no less—that the U.S. should be in the business of fixing foreign elections.”

You and I are both against empire and the violent machinations needed to create and maintain them. I just finished rereading two really good book about the late Roman Empire and early Christianity: God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism (Viking, 2004, and Richard E. Rubenstein’s When Jesus Because God . . .

Fascinating histories. Roman emperors murdering each other, their family members, sons, wives, turning on each other soon after merging families via arranged marriages . . . bishops killing each other, or starting riots in various cities, resulting in hundreds dead, all to gain or keep power . . . ostensibly because various factions disagreed over the tiniest of doctrinal differences (Arians and anti-Arians, etc.).

The back-stabbing, sometimes literally, the betrayals. In the 4th century, for instance, the Huns scared the Goths to death when they went on their rampages on their way to Rome’s door . . . so the Romans promised the Goths a safe space if they’d join their armies, but then basically left them to starve. The Goths, btw, prior to the Huns, were considered the most fearsome fighters in Europe. Roman soldiers were scared to death of them. But the Goths were scared of the Huns.

Fast-forward to today. We have an (dis)organized crime family in the White House. And, IMO, that’s not hyperbole. Clinton? She’s small potatoes in comparison.

March 3, 2018 at 2:13 pm #83400

Billy_T
Participant

Btw, just as some of the folks you post don’t think we should talk about the Russia thing . . . I’m beginning to think leftists shouldn’t talk about “the deep state.” Or maybe find different terms. Why? Because the right has latched onto this and is using it to push for a purge of government, from top to bottom. NOT to end any “deep state.” But to make sure it’s ALL in far-right, GOP hands. Most of it already is. But they aren’t satisfied with that.

Second biggest reason: Their spin is to say it’s all a Democratic Party coup against Trump. Fox and fiends and all of Trump TV land says the “deep state” consists of Dems and ONLY Dems.

The left shouldn’t be in the business of aiding and abetting folks like Hannity, Tucker Carlson, much less Trump himself.

Gotta be another way to critique government corruption and empire, etc.

March 3, 2018 at 6:50 pm #83413

wv
Participant

Billy_T wrote:

Btw, just as some of the folks you post don’t think we should talk about the Russia thing . . . I’m beginning to think leftists shouldn’t talk about “the deep state.” Or maybe find different terms. Why? Because the right has latched onto this and is using it to push for a purge of government, from top to bottom. NOT to end any “deep state.” But to make sure it’s ALL in far-right, GOP hands. Most of it already is. But they aren’t satisfied with that.

Second biggest reason: Their spin is to say it’s all a Democratic Party coup against Trump. Fox and fiends and all of Trump TV land says the “deep state” consists of Dems and ONLY Dems.

The left shouldn’t be in the business of aiding and abetting folks like Hannity, Tucker Carlson, much less Trump himself.

Gotta be another way to critique government corruption and empire, etc.

==================

Oh yeah. I agree with you about the term. Most of the time i hear it
used here in WV, its used by Alex-Jones-Types in a real paranoid way.

I like the term for lots of reasons (for one, its a conversation starter —
‘what do you mean by deep state…”), but I use it in some places and i avoid it in others. I use it ‘here’ but i would not use it a lot of places.

w
v

March 3, 2018 at 7:40 pm #83415

Billy_T
Participant

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Btw, just as some of the folks you post don’t think we should talk about the Russia thing . . . I’m beginning to think leftists shouldn’t talk about “the deep state.” Or maybe find different terms. Why? Because the right has latched onto this and is using it to push for a purge of government, from top to bottom. NOT to end any “deep state.” But to make sure it’s ALL in far-right, GOP hands. Most of it already is. But they aren’t satisfied with that.

Second biggest reason: Their spin is to say it’s all a Democratic Party coup against Trump. Fox and fiends and all of Trump TV land says the “deep state” consists of Dems and ONLY Dems.

The left shouldn’t be in the business of aiding and abetting folks like Hannity, Tucker Carlson, much less Trump himself.

Gotta be another way to critique government corruption and empire, etc.

==================

Oh yeah. I agree with you about the term. Most of the time i hear it
used here in WV, its used by Alex-Jones-Types in a real paranoid way.

I like the term for lots of reasons (for one, its a conversation starter —
‘what do you mean by deep state…”), but I use it in some places and i avoid it in others. I use it ‘here’ but i would not use it a lot of places.

w
v

That makes sense. And it’s not as if what we say here impacts any movers or shakers elsewhere. It’s just us shooting the breeze, etc.

I live in a mostly conservative town/county as well, with the area around the university more on the “liberal” side and much younger. Which is typical. I’m guessing it’s like that in WV too.

In general, most people around here don’t initiate political discussions these days. I have a feeling people are burnt out. They’d rather talk about pretty much anything else.

Hope all is well —

March 3, 2018 at 9:08 pm #83416

wv
Participant

Billy_T wrote:

In general, most people around here don’t initiate political discussions these days. I have a feeling people are burnt out. They’d rather talk about pretty much anything else.

Hope all is well —

================

I bought “The Invention of Capitalism”. Dunno when I’ll have time to read it, but i have it. In a pile.

I also bought a turn-table. Havent had a turntable since i was a teenager.
I am looking forward to discovering quirky old records in junk shops. This is the first album i bought, for a dollar. I think its from 1970. John Mayall. Havent played it yet:

March 3, 2018 at 9:25 pm #83419

wv
Participant

did Kushner really get two banks to give him half a million bucks
while he was in the white house?

March 3, 2018 at 9:49 pm #83421

Billy_T
Participant

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

In general, most people around here don’t initiate political discussions these days. I have a feeling people are burnt out. They’d rather talk about pretty much anything else.

Hope all is well —

================

I bought “The Invention of Capitalism”. Dunno when I’ll have time to read it, but i have it. In a pile.

I also bought a turn-table. Havent had a turntable since i was a teenager.
I am looking forward to discovering quirky old records in junk shops. This is the first album i bought, for a dollar. I think its from 1970. John Mayall. Havent played it yet:

Perelman’s book is a must-read, IMO. Very thorough, extremely well-researched and heavily documented. It’s also a pretty good read. I’ve mentioned it before, but I’d also highly recommend you follow that one up with The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood. It’s also a must-read. Short, comprehensive, concise, and highly accessible. It’s the best single description of what makes capitalism unique and why.

I like Mayall. Great blues guy. You’ve always had a talent for discovering stuff at those yard sale thingies.

March 3, 2018 at 10:01 pm #83424

Billy_T
Participant

wv wrote:

did Kushner really get two banks to give him half a million bucks
while he was in the white house?

Yes. He had meetings with head honchos for Apollo and Citibank, and then received roughly half a billion in loans.

It’s also been reported that Kushner supported the blockade against Qatar after being turned down for another massive load request from them.

This article is from July, with The Intercept having raised the issue first, I think. But it’s coming back to the surface in the last few days . . .

Jared Kushner Punishing Qatar Over ‘Soured Real-estate Deal,’ Reports Allege The Intercept raised questions about the status of a deal between Qatar’s former prime minister and Kushner, a potential conflict of interest

Mueller wants to know if Jared Kushner’s personal grudges influenced White House policy March 2, 2018

Kushner is desperate for cash. He owes more than a billion on failed real estate properties, that we know of. Trump is almost as much in debt, though he might be even moreso. I think debt is the major driver for their outreach to foreign agents. Neither family business has been able to find willing lenders in America, primarily because they have a habit of stiffing them — in Trump’s case, going back decades. Kushner’s father also has a criminal background.

March 3, 2018 at 10:08 pm #83426

Billy_T
Participant

I hope America learns a lesson from this fiasco. Never, ever elect big business tycoons, especially when they try to hide their business dealings, refuse to divest, won’t publish their taxes, and bring in family.

We actually have nepotism laws against much of this, but the GOP basically said, whatever. Same with the security forms, which Kushner has revised more than 100 times, apparently — after being caught in lies and omissions. That’s why his permanent clearance was never granted. There are dozens and dozens of staff still waiting for clearance.

Drain the Swamp? He’s the biggest swamp creature in American history.

I also hope — but doubt — this will force Congress to enact laws for the Executive and itself that will prevent future abuses. Those “norms and traditions” obviously failed, and we can’t trust the Dems or the GOP to follow them, at all. Gotta have real teeth.
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