Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Spooks go nuts as the worm is turning can judgement day be far behind




The 2016 election was interfered with in a major, egregious way and it wasn’t Russia doing the meddling.  The meddling done by “Spooks Gone Wild” and was unprecedented.  Britain’s MI6, the CIA, the FBI and Israel’s Mossad combined efforts to ensure that Donald Trump would not upset the “unending war” applecart.  These “intelligence” agencies had set in place the building blocks of a coup long before the election.  Eleven days before the election when they believed Hillary Clinton would win, FBI Director James Comey reopened the “e-mail” investigation in order to fatally injure Hillary’s campaign keeping her from attaining the 270 Electoral College votes.  From Down the Rabbit Hole:


Excerpt:

Oligarchs cheer Comey's “hail Mary pass” to defeat Clinton & Trump on November 8th

On Friday, October 28th just eleven days before the presidential election, the oligarchs threw a “hail Mary” pass, not to Donald Trump but to Paul Ryan, the oligarch’s speaker of the house.  The oligarch controlled congress has been teed up to decide the election should neither candidate garner the 270 electoral votes required to become president. 

Republican James Comey, Director of the FBI and oligarch’s handmaiden delivered a blow to the frontrunner in the presidential race, Hillary Clinton when he sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee stating the FBI was “reopening an investigation” into the e-mails of Hillary Clinton.  From Newsweek: 

Excerpt:

The disclosure by the Federal Bureau of Investigation late on Friday, October 28 that it had discovered potential new evidence in its inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s handling of her personal email when she was Secretary of State has virtually nothing to do with any actions taken by the Democratic nominee, according to government records and an official with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke to Newsweek on condition of anonymity.

The revelation that the FBI has discovered additional emails convulsed the political world, and led to widespread (and erroneous) claims and speculation…  The truth is much less explosive. There is no indication the emails in question were withheld by Clinton during the investigation, the law enforcement official told Newsweek, nor does the discovery suggest she did anything illegal.

Also, none of the emails were to or from Clinton, the official said. Moreover, despite the widespread claims in the media that this development had prompted the FBI to “reopen” of the case, IT DID NOT; such investigations are never actually closed, and it is common for law enforcement to discover new information that needs to be examined.

After meeting in London with CIA Director John Brennan, British intelligence prepared the “pee pee dossier” a disgusting personal attack on Donald Trump designed to sicken and revolt the American people.  Rupert Murdoch’s media breathlessly echoed every “unverified” salacious detail.  In the event the dossier failed to produce the desired effect, there was an insurance policy put in place by Paul Ryan and the “Never Trumpers.”   

Should neither Trump nor Clinton garner the required 270 Electoral College votes to win the election, the president would be chosen by Paul Ryan’s House of Representatives.  From Down theRabbit Hole: 

Excerpt:

Debate or “Never Trump” prelude to election theft

Presidential candidate, former CIA operative and GOP House policy guru Evan McMullin revealed on Sunday the “Never Trump” plot to steal the election.

Evan McMullin, the former chief policy director for the House GOP Conference and former CIA operative laid out the “Never Trump” plot to steal the November election from Clinton and Trump.  Appearing on Wisconsin’s Sunday morning political show, Upfront with Mike Gousha, Mc Mullin revealed his backers’ plot to take the election out of the voters’ hands and punt it to the GOP controlled House of Representatives. McMullin revealed the plan is “to block Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump from winning the Electoral College so that the election goes to the House of Representatives to choose the winner.”

GOP establishment candidate

McMullin entered the race in August as the “Never Trump” candidate with backing of the Republican establishment’s most well-known operatives Bill Kristol, John Kingston, Joel Searby and Rick Wilson.  Within days of the announcement of his candidacy on August 8, 2016 McMullin gained access to the ballots in Utah and Colorado and announced legal action would be taken against states with deadlines on or after August 15.  By August 14, the Independence Party of Minnesota declared McMullin their presidential nominee.

GOP House breaks the tie

McMullin's chief strategist Joel Searby outlined the campaign strategy on August 22nd in a memo, the campaign plans to block Hillary Clinton from reaching 270 electoral votes, thus sending the election to the House of Representatives…

Needless to say, the best laid plans of “rats and spooks” failed and Donald Trump became President.  That did not stop the spooks from using every seditious tool in their nefarious tool bag to remove Donald Trump from office.  Now the treacherous cabal is in a full state of panic, the worm is turning and Donald Trump is fighting back.   From Russia Insider:

Excerpt:

The RussiaHoaxers Are Headed for Grand Juries, and Prison - Fireworks Guaranteed


Not long ago, few Americans of the thinking persuasion might have imagined that such a well-engineered republic, with its exquisite checks and balances, sturdy institutions, and time-tested traditions would end up as so much smoldering goop in a national dumpster fire, but such is the sad state-of-the-union moving into the fateful summer of 2019.

The castle of the permanent bureaucracy is about to be torched by an uprising of deplorable peasants led by a Golden Golem made furious by relentless litigation. It’s Game of Thrones meets the Thermidorian Reaction with a Weimar-flavored cherry on top — really one for the ages!

There’s perhaps a lot to dislike about Donald J. Trump, US President No. 45. Despite all the grooming and tailoring, there’s little savoir faire there. He tweets not like a mellifluous songbird, but in snorts like a rooting aardvark. His every predilection is an affront to the refined Washington establishment: his dark business history, his beloved ormolu trappings, his Mickey-D cheeseburgers, the mystifying hair-doo.

Even so, the bad faith of his antagonists exceeds even Mr. Trump’s defects and vices. The plot they concocted to get rid of him failed. And, yes, it was a plot, even a coup. And they fucked it up magnificently, leaving a paper trail as wide as Interstate-95. Now all that paper is about to fall over the District of Columbia like radioactive ash, turning many current and former denizens of rogue agencies into the walking dead as they embark on the dismal journey between the grand juries and the federal prisons.

Hence, the desperate rage of the impeachment faction, in direct proportion to their secret shameful knowledge that the entire RussiaGate melodrama was, in fact, a seditious subterfuge between the Hillary Clinton campaign and a great many key figures in government up-to-and-including former president Barack Obama, who could not have failed to be clued-in on all the action. Even before the declassification order, the true narrative of events has been plainly understood: that the US Intel “community” trafficked in fictitious malarkey supplied by Mrs. Clinton to illegally “meddle” in the 2016 election.

Most of the facts are already documented. Only a few details remain to be confirmed: for instance, whether international man-of-mystery and entrapment artist Josef Mifsud was in the employ of the CIA, and/or Britain’s MI6, and/or Mrs. Clinton’s Fusion GPS contractor (or Christopher Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence company, a subcontractor to both Fusion GPS and the FBI). Questions will now be asked — though not by The New York Times.

The evidence already public indicates that Robert Mueller must have known as early as the date of his appointment (and likely before) that the predicating evidence for his inquiry was false. After all, his soon-to-be lead prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, was informed of that in no uncertain terms by his DOJ colleague, Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, in 2016.

Justice may seek to know why Mr. Mueller did not inform the target of his inquiry that this was so. The answer to that may be that Mr. Mueller’s true mission was to disable Mr. Trump as long as possible while setting an obstruction of justice trap — which also failed tactically.

Notice that Mr. Mueller declined to testify before the House Judiciary Committee last week. Chairman Jerrold  Nadler (D-NY) was a fool to invite him. Did he not know that minority members of his committee get to ask questions too?

In an interesting turn of the screw last week, polling showed that a majority of those asked were in favor of investigations into the origin of the RussiaGate story. The FBI, being an agency under the direct supervision of the Attorney General, will be hosed out for sure. The CIA, on the other hand, has a sordid history of acting as a sovereign state within the state — hence the derivation of the Deep State.

They are renowned for protecting their own. Remember, the Senate Minority Leader, Mr. Schumer, snidely told the incoming President Trump at the get-go that the Intel community “has six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”  I guess we’ll finally get to see about that because the CIA’s former director, the wicked Mr. Brennan, is grand jury bound. I suspect he will not be protected by his former colleagues. His downfall may presage a more thorough cleanup, and perhaps a major reorganization, of this monstrous agency.

The indictment of Julian Assange adds a big wrinkle to these upcoming proceedings. Apart for what it means to First Amendment protection for a free press (no small matter), Mr. Assange is the one person who actually knows who handed over the “hacked” DNC emails to Wikileaks. Perhaps getting the answer to that question is the real reason that the DOJ is throwing the book at him. The trial of Mr. Assange is sure to be a humdinger.

I’m convinced, personally, that all this melodrama will play out against the background of a cratering global economy, tanking financial markets, and epic disruption of the established international order. Consider laying in some supplies.

Whoa Nellie, the worm is turning indeed.  As is the norm the rats are turning on each other in a desperate attempt to cover their own asses.  Let the finger pointing begin.  From Zero Hedge:

Excerpt:

FBI-CIA Dispute Erupts Over Whether Comey Or Brennan Pushed Steele Dossier

A dispute has erupted over whether former FBI Director James Comey or his CIA counterpart, John Brennan, promoted the unverified Steele dossier as the Obama-era intelligence community targeted the Trump campaign.  In a statement to Fox, however, a former CIA official "put the blame squarely on Comey."

According to Fox News, an email chain exists which indicates that Comey told bureau subordinates that Brennan insisted on the dossier's inclusion in the intelligence community assessment (ICA) on Russian interference. Also interesting is that the dossier was referred to as "crown material" in the emails - a possible reference to the fact that Steele is a former British spy.

In a statement to Fox, however, a former CIA official "put the blame squarely on Comey." "Former Director Brennan, along with former [Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper, are the ones who opposed James Comey’s recommendation that the Steele Dossier be included in the intelligence report," said the official.

"They opposed this because the dossier was in no way used to develop the ICA," the official continued. "The intelligence analysts didn't include it when they were doing their work because it wasn't corroborated intelligence, therefore it wasn't used and it wasn't included. Brennan and Clapper prevented it from being added into the official assessment. James Comey then decided on his own to brief Trump about the document."

Former GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy - a longtime defender of the FBI - told Fox News' Martha MacCallum on Tuesday night that "Comey has a better argument than Brennan, based on what I've seen."



In March, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) suggested over Twitter that Brennan had "insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier" be included in the January 2017 ICA.

Senator Rand Paul
@RandPaul
 BREAKING: A high-level source tells me it was Brennan who insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report... Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP.

The dossier was ultimately not included in the ICA according to previous testimony by Clapper. Meanwhile, word that Comey had briefed President Trump personally on the dossier - "because he understood reporters already had that information and it could become public soon if journalists had a "news hook," according to the Associated Press. And as it so happens - the fact that Comey briefed Trump is what CNN and Buzzfeed claim legitimized their decision to publicly release the salacious and unverified dossier.

Whether the FBI acted appropriately in obtaining the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to Trump campaign aide Carter Page is now the subject not only of U.S. Attorney John Durham's new probe, but also the ongoing review by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber has been conducting his own investigation separately, although details of his progress were unclear.

As one example, in its FISA application, the bureau repeatedly and incorrectly assured the court in a footnote that it "does not believe" British ex-spy Christopher Steele was the direct source for a Yahoo News article implicating Page in Russian collusion, and instead asserted that the Yahoo article provided an independent basis to believe Steele. -Fox News

On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox News that he was pushing to declassify documents which would expose the FBI's dismal efforts to verify the claims within the dossier.  "There's a document that's classified that I'm gonna try to get unclassified that takes the dossier -- all the pages of it -- and it has verification to one side," said Graham. "There really is no verification, other than media reports that were generated by reporters that received the dossier."

Graham noted a report by The Hill's John Solomon that the FBI was specifically told that Steele was "keen" to leak his salacious dossier for the purpose of influencing the 2016 US election. The agency also knew that the document's claims were either unverified or disproven, yet it was used anyway against Trump and his campaign.

Clapper and Brennan are known to lie under oath before congress in the past with absolutely no consequences so why would anyone believe them now.  What a den of thieves and liars.  And just think of the lives of people who were destroyed by these “Spooks Gone Wild.”  The worm is turning.   According to State of the Nation, America is in for the “War of the Century.”  

Excerpt:

War of the Century Trump vs. the Deep State

COLLISION COURSE 2019: It’s gonna get ugly—REAL UGLY!

What will happen first: Trump’s IMPEACHMENT or the Swamp’s INDICTMENTS ?

At this critical stage of the American Experiment, there’s simply no stopping the Trump ship of state from hitting the Deep State iceberg.  It’s not if but when… and the deafening collision will take place very soon.  Truly, it’s getting very ugly out there with no signs of either side reversing course.  Just as Trump is determined as ever to expose the RUSSIAgate hoax, Deep State is resolved to keep it covered up.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election everything points to both sides TAKING NO PRISONERS.  That’s because only a slash and burn war strategy will secure victory, especially given the all-out war raging inside the Beltway.

Impeachment

The Democrats know that President Trump has the evidence on ALL of them to prove ongoing sedition and outright treason.  The DEMs are so desperate they’re still attempting to carry out a soft coup IN BROAD DAYLIGHT.  Therefore, short of an assassination attempt, Deep State’s primary weapon is impeachment.  Even though a Senate conviction cannot happen given the GOP majority, the DEMs need a stirring political drama to use against Trump to preclude his re-election.

Speaker Pelosi is merely biding her time before she pulls out the “impeachment card”.  When there is a critical of mass of support within the Democrat caucus, and more RINOs have joined that cause, Pelosi will call Trump in this high-stakes poker game.   It’s of paramount importance for patriots to understand that dirty cop Robert Mueller was empowered by Deep State to launch his corrupted investigation for 2 main reasons.

First, to use the DoJ to dig up dirt on Trump’s businesses that could then serve as evidence which would be farmed out to the various jurisdictions where he operated (e.g. United States District Court for the Southern District of New York).  Deep State Democrats knew the Russiagate witch hunt was utterly fake but used it as cover to go after Trump in every other way possible, which they did…

Secondly, Deep State knew from the very beginning that Trump would fall into their ‘obstruction trap’, which he did.  Even though Trump was just twittering Trumpese, the Deep State co-conspirators knew that it would not take much for him to use language that could be legally construed as “obstruction”.  However, GIVEN THE ABUNDANCE OF HARD EVIDENCE PROVING SEDITION, Trump has the perfect excuse for attempting to stop the patently obvious Democrat coup d’état. 

What else is a POTUS to do except OBSTRUCT a coup d’état by every means necessary?!  Although some of Trump’s many RUSSIAgate proclamations may technically and legally fit into an obstruction charge, his “mens rea” was clearly a very strong desire to thwart a white-collar insurrection.

After all, Obama & Company did everything possible to steal the election from Trump, just as they have transparently attempted to overthrow his administration since Inauguration Day…

The “real beauty” of this unparalleled coup is that the American people have been WITNESSING THE DEMOCRAT CRIMES AND CORRUPTION — DURING PRIME TIME — since Trump first declared his candidacy in June of 2015.  Hence, the Democrats have been given a LOT of rope to hang themselves, which is exactly what they have all done.

One wonders how they could have been so stupid and so clueless while conducting a coup against a sitting POTUS?!  Essentially, these Soros-funded purple revolutionaries allowed themselves to be videoed and recorded at their multi-location crime scene throughout the country.

The crucial point here is that, once Hilary lost, everything changed and Trump got access to all the records proving rampant criminality and endemic corruption—EVERYTHING!  The NSA has a digital record of every crime committed in the conduct of this highly complex criminal conspiracy to overthrow the POTUS.  So do other secret data-gathering agencies, by the way, some of which are located in foreign nations.

Collision Course 2019

Given this rapidly intensifying state of affairs, there’s a Perfect Storm brewing inside the Beltway.  Hence, this unprecedented political superstorm is guaranteed to tear apart Washington, D.C. like none other in U.S. history.

When you pit an all-pervasive and all-powerful Deep State against the indomitable Trump movement, you have nothing less than the Titanic hitting the iceberg.  Only in this particular case, “Captain Trump” may be navigating a Russian-built icebreaker.  In which case the Deep State iceberg is about to be rent asunder.

What’s really at stake for both sides in this epic war is not only the final control of the U.S. Federal Government, but also serious jail time for the many traitors who continue to attempt to oust the POTUS at every turn.

As for Trump, if he loses this critical 2019 battle, Deep State will continue to make his life so miserable he’ll regret ever running for POTUS.  Likewise, his family and close friends will also suffer greatly as will his many key political supporters and donors.  However, it is those who have staffed his administration who stand the bear the greatest consequences in an effort to dissuade them from backing future “Donald Trumps”.  If Trump loses the 2020 contest, the Democrats will surely prosecute him till the end of his life.

In any event, July 4th 2019 is quite likely to see a fireworks show in D.C. like none other.  The sheer panic being exhibited by the leadership of the Left is unparalleled.  Their actions reveal a level of fear about Trump’s declass initiative which is now seeing the perps turn on each other like crazy.  It’s as though the rats leaving the sinking Obama ship are now eating each other in a feeding frenzy.  Such an extraordinary spectacle has never been seen before on American TV.

All of this is only happening, incidentally, because the Democrats never doubted that Hillary would win.  Once Trump won, the fundamentally communist Democrat Party literally went insane in their endeavors to push Trump out of office.  In so doing, they have broken so many laws in the process it boggles the mind.

There are now so many scandals ending in “……gate”  that no one can keep track of them all.  And, each criminal conspiracy is not only very deep and broad in the SES staffing and top-level involvement, each one still requires an elaborate cover-up.  The stark reality is that it’s simply impossible to effectively manage so many concurrent cover-ups simultaneously.  No one can do it, not even AI brains strategically positioned throughout Deep State and the rogue C.I.A. black ops apparatus. 

False Flag Mass Casualty Event

Because of what’s truly at stake for Deep State, everything points directly at yet another false flag mass casualty event (MCE) in the very near future.  Depending on how successful or unsuccessful that black operation turns out to be, the same perps will likely conduct a second false flag; and maybe even a third.

Their highly purposeful mission will be to sufficiently shock and awe the American consciousness into a PTSD mode.  Only in this way can they completely take over the dominant narrative that might then revolve at that time around the first American coup d’état to be outed from the top down. 

Let’s face it: the U.S. Intelligence Community will simply not permit the complete exposing of SPYgate.  Every single intel agency was likely involved to include the FBI, DoJ, CIA, as were many senior officials in the Obama administration.

Obama himself knew of Hillary Clinton’s illegal home server and private email yet lied about it because he actually approved to the unlawful arrangement.  Therefore, the ex-prez is quite vulnerable to prosecution for many of the broken laws directly associated with both EMAILgate and SERVERgate, separate scandals unto themselves.

Why is the Clinton Emailgate Scandal so HUGE?

When you throw in all the other much bigger scandals in the Trump era — WIRETAPgate, SPYgate, FISAgate, DOSSIERgate — Deep State will feel compelled to blow the whole place up, if it must to keep a tight lid on all the threatening investigations.

After all, when SWAMPgate is blown wide open, the entire D.C. swamp will be full of indicted (i) agents of Deep State, (ii) rogue Intel operatives, (iii) traitors in Congress, (iv) SCOTUS imposters, (v) perfidious appointees from previous administrations, and (vi) former POTUSes who sold out their country.

SWAMPgate: You won’t believe how ALL the perps are connected…as in joined at the hip!

Hence, the primary and most effective way of keeping this all under wraps for Deep State is to pull off a 9/11-level type of terrorist attack.  Or, multiple MCEs that distract and divert over the course of this very tumultuous time period…

Conclusion

Things are quite combustible right now and getting more so for the foreseeable future.

This is really the only way it can end — WITH A BIG BANG — because the well-hidden movers and shakers who really run the whole place will not be dislodged without a HUGE fight.  The wealthy elites have had full control for centuries and will not surrender their power and influence without a knock-down-drag-out fight. That time has come!

This is why there has been a major drive throughout Big Social Media to eliminate all the truth-speakers and -writers from their platforms.  Similarly, Big Tech has been manipulating the newest IT technology, hardware, software and WiFi so that they can terminate any patriot/nationalist with the single push of a button.  They can’t have patriot bloggers and truth-tellers such as SOTN predicting their schemes before they’re even executed…

Bottom Line: Come Election Day 2020, the USA will be in a radically different place. Exactly what that will look like is anyone’s guess.  Therefore, we pray…we pray that the United States of America will somehow pass through this superstorm intact and cleansed of those nefarious forces that seek to do it harm.

Yes, indeed “Come Election Day 2020, the USA will be in a radically different place.”  The Deep State is already preparing for Election Day 2020, they cannot afford another four years of sunlight in the Trump Administration.  The worm is turning and there will be no stopping it so you can be sure the Deep State will do anything to protect themselves.  The Deep State hopes by turning over the election process to the Military Industrial Complex they can avoid the inevitable.  From Whitney Webb at Geopolitics:

Note:  This is a very long article and well worth your time to read the whole thing.

Excerpt:

Microsoft’s ElectionGuard a Trojan Horse for a Military-Industrial Takeover of US Elections

“The fact that we are handing over the keys of American democracy to the military-industrial complex — it’s like giving the keys to the henhouse to a fox and saying, ‘here come in and take whatever you want.’ It’s obviously dangerous.” — Investigative journalist Yasha Levine

Earlier this month, tech giant Microsoft announced its solution to “protect” American elections from interference, which it has named “ElectionGuard.”  The election technology IS ALREADY SET TO BE ADOPTED BY HALF OF VOTING MACHINE MANUFACTURERS AND SOME STATE GOVERNMENTS FOR THE 2020 GENERAL ELECTION. Though it has been heavily promoted by the mainstream media in recent weeks, none of those reports have disclosed that ElectionGuard has several glaring conflicts of interest that greatly undermine its claim aimed at protecting U.S. democracy.

In this investigation, MintPress will reveal how ElectionGuard was developed by companies with deep ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities and Israeli military intelligence, as well as the fact that it is far from clear that the technology would prevent foreign or domestic interference with, or the manipulation of, vote totals or other aspects of American election systems.

Election forensics analyst and author Jonathan Simon as well as investigative journalist Yasha Levine, who has written extensively on how the military has long sought to weaponize public technologies including the internet, were consulted for their views on ElectionGuard, its connections to the military-industrial complex and the implication of those connections for American democracy as part of this investigation.

In January, MintPress published an exposé that later went viral on a news-rating company known as Newsguard. Officially aimed at fighting “fake news,” the company’s many connections to U.S. intelligence, a top neoconservative think tank, and self-admitted government propagandists revealed its real intention was to promote corporate media over independent alternatives.

Newsguard was among the first initiatives that comprise Microsoft’s “Defending Democracy” program, a program that the tech giant created under the auspices of protecting American “democratic processes from cyber-enabled interference [which] have become a critical concern.” Through its partnership with Microsoft, Newsguard has been installed in public libraries and universities throughout the country, even while private-sector companies have continued to avoid adopting the problematic browser plug-in…

However, according to Jonathan Simon, election forensic analyst and author of CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy, this public relations campaign is likely just cover for more insider control over U.S. elections. “It’s encouraging that after close to two decades of ignoring the security issues with computerized voting, there’s suddenly a scramble to protect our next election that suggests those issues are finally being taken seriously,” Simon told MintPress. “Unfortunately the proposed solution is just more computerization and complexity — which translates to more control by experts and insiders, though of course that is not part of the PR campaign.”

As to the likely identity of those insiders, the fact that Microsoft’s ElectionGuard was developed in tandem with a private military and intelligence contractor whose only investor is the U.S. Department of Defense offers a troubling clue. As a consequence, ElectionGuard’s promise to “secure” elections is dubious, especially given that Microsoft itself is a U.S. military contractor.

Furthermore, amid the unfolding scandal of Israeli meddling in foreign elections, Microsoft’s growing ties to Israeli military intelligence and private Israeli cybersecurity firms raise even more concerns about WHETHER ELECTIONGUARD’S REAL PURPOSE IS TO “SECURE” AMERICAN ELECTIONS FOR CANDIDATES FRIENDLY TO THE ESTABLISHMENT, ESPECIALLY THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX…

Another interesting, and deeply troubling, admission in the Microsoft announcement is that Microsoft’s ElectionGuard development partner, the Portland-based cybersecurity firm Galois, “recently received $10 million in funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to build a demonstration voting system to help evaluate secure hardware DARPA researchers are developing as part of a separate DARPA program…”

As deeply troubling as DARPA’s $10 million indirect investment in ElectionGuard may seem, it is merely scratching the surface, as Galois itself is essentially an extension of DARPA in the private cybersecurity industry.

THE “PRIVATE” COMPANY WHOSE ONLY INVESTOR IS THE PENTAGON..

Though it describes itself as “a privately held U.S.-owned and -operated company,” public records indicate that Galois’ only investors are DARPA and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), both of which are divisions of the Department of Defense. In other words, while “officially” a private company, its only investor is the U.S. government, more specifically the Pentagon…

Aside from the numerous links to major corporations, government agencies and neoconservative think tanks, of particular concern to Free & Fair’s mission to develop “secure” election technology are its connections to DHS. This is because, before, during and after the 2016 election, DHS was caught attempting to hack into state electoral systems in at least three states — Georgia, Indiana and Idaho — with similar accusations also being made in Kentucky and West Virginia.

In Indiana’s case, the DHS’ attempted hacks occurred nearly 15,000 times over a 46 day period. In an official answer to Georgia’s claim the DHS had tried to penetrate its electoral system’s firewall, DHS which initially denied being behind the attempted hack, later responded that the attempted breach was “legitimate business” aimed at “verifying a professional license administered by the state.” Some of the states targeted by DHS had turned down the department’s offer to “shore up” election systems prior to the 2016 election.

Compare this to the alleged Russian hacking into state electoral systems, which – to date – includes only the claim from the FBI that hackers alleged to be affiliated with Russian military intelligence penetrated voter registration data in two counties in Florida. That alleged hack, the details of which remain classified and for which no evidence of it even happening has been made publicly available, did not result in any alterations to data or other manipulation of those systems, per FBI officials.

The DHS, in contrast, attempted to hack into the systems, not of individual counties, but entire states and acknowledged that it did so, even though they chose not to use the work “hack” and defended their activity. While focusing on foreign — and especially Russian — interference may make for a more patriotic story, the dangers posed by domestic actors with at least as great a stake in U.S. election outcomes appear to have been grossly underestimated and virtually ignored by the media…

Given that ElectionGuard’s system as currently described is neither as “secure” nor as “verifiable” as Microsoft is claiming, it seems clear that the conflicts of interests of its developers, particularly their connections to the U.S. and Israeli militaries, are a recipe for disaster and tantamount to a takeover of the American election system by the military-industrial complex.

“The great irony, and tragedy, here,” according to election forensics analyst Jonathan Simon, “is that we could so easily go the opposite direction and quickly solve all the problems of election security if we got the computers out of the voting process and were willing to collectively invest the modicum of effort needed for humans to count votes observably in public as they once did. If democracy is not worth that effort, perhaps we don’t deserve it.”

Yes indeed the worm is turning and things are going to get real ugly.  Should the Deep State prevail, life in America will be even more devastating for Americans, in the future there will not even be the illusion of a Democratic election.  The 2016 election was interfered with in a major, egregious way and it wasn’t Russia doing the meddling. 

The meddling done by “Spooks Gone Wild” and was unprecedented.  2016 wasn’t the first time Britain’s MI6, the CIA, the FBI and Israel’s Mossad combined efforts to steal the election.  The 2000 election was the first and America has been in decline ever since.  All Supreme Court judges place on the high court since 2000 are illegitimate.  All justices on the appellate and lower courts since then are illegitimate.  All voter ID and election laws passed since then are illegitimate, all wars started since then are illegitimate. 

Unending war for profit, corrupt intelligence agencies producing lies and destroying lives, grand theft of the wealth of nations and the criminalization of investigative journalism is rampant.  Now the Spooks are going nuts and the worm is turning. 

America must abandon electronic voting and return to paper ballots with people counting the votes.  Our elections can only be secure when these criminals are brought to justice and the full faith of the American people in their election process is restored.  The worm is turning and justice for the American people must prevail.



Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Vietnam failure, Afghanistan failure, Iraq failure, Libya failure, Syria failure, Ukraine failure, Yemen failure, next stop Iran



“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” ~ Winston Churchill

The Deep State government run by Zio-terrorists has been in operation for a long, long time, however since the complete overthrow of the US government December 12, 2000 they have been operating at full capacity.  No longer are elections determining the leaders we have, the candidates chosen by the duopoly through their corrupt primaries and funded by Wall Street Banks.  Donald Trump is the exception having beaten the Deep State’s chosen Zio-terrorists in 2016.  The Vietnam War was started after the CIA’s false flag in the Gulf of Tonkin.  From Wikipedia:


Excerpt:

Gulf of Tonkin incident

The Gulf of Tonkin incident (Vietnamese: S kin Vnh Bc B), also known as the USS Maddox incident, was an international confrontation that led to the United States engaging more directly in the Vietnam War. It involved either one or two separate confrontations involving North Vietnam and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin.

The original American report blamed North Vietnam for both incidents, but eventually became very controversial with widespread belief that at least one, and possibly both incidents were false, and possibly deliberately so.

On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox, while performing a signals intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations, was pursued by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats of the 135th Torpedo Squadron.[1][5] Maddox fired three warning shots and the North Vietnamese boats then attacked with torpedoes and machine gun fire.[5]

Maddox expended over 280 3-inch (76.2 mm) and 5-inch (127 mm) shells in a sea battle. One U.S. aircraft was damaged, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed, with six more wounded. There were no U.S. casualties.[6] Maddox "was unscathed except for a single bullet hole from a Vietnamese machine gun round."[5]

It was originally claimed by the National Security Agency that a Second Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred on August 4, 1964, as another sea battle, but instead evidence was found of "Tonkin ghosts"[7] (false radar images) and not actual North Vietnamese torpedo boats. In the 2003 documentary The Fog of War, the former United States Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara admitted that the August 2 USS Maddox attack happened with no Defense Department response, but the August 4 Gulf of Tonkin attack never happened.[8]

In 1995, McNamara met with former Vietnam People's Army General Võ Nguyên Giáp to ask what happened on August 4, 1964, in the second Gulf of Tonkin Incident. "Absolutely nothing", Giáp replied.[9] Giáp claimed that the attack had been imaginary.[10]

The outcome of these two incidents was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "communist aggression". The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for deploying U.S. conventional forces and the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam.

Sheesh sound familiar?  “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "communist aggression".  Sounds a lot like the Pompeo/Bolton plan for Iran.  From the Deep State stenographers at CNN:

Excerpt:

Pompeo says US doesn't want war with Iran but warns of 'swift' response if provoked

Washington (CNN) The Trump administration doesn't want war with Iran, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday, but he warned Tehran of a "swift and decisive" US response to any attack.

Iran "has engaged in an escalating series of threatening actions and statements in recent weeks," Pompeo said in a statement, echoing Pentagon and unnamed US officials. He provided no specifics about the nature or scope of that threat, but other US officials have said that they've observed Iranian forces moving missiles around on boats.

"The regime in Tehran should understand that any attacks by them or their proxies of any identity against US interests or citizens will be answered with a swift and decisive US response," said the top diplomat, who cut short overseas travel to fly back to Washington Wednesday for urgent meetings on the situation with Iran and North Korea…

Pompeo issued his statement after the US sent a Navy strike group and bomber into the Persian Gulf, citing "specific and credible" threats against US forces.

Bullsh*t the Zio-terrorists don’t want war, they are salivating for a war with Iran.  Since the 2000 coup in America we have been committing terroristic wars against a multitude of countries, some we don’t even know about.  While the Vietnam intervention began under President Kennedy, after he was assassinated by the CIA his successor President Johnson started the ill-failed Vietnam War based on lies provided by the National Security Agency.

The failed War in Vietnam would still be going on today were it not for the Civil Rights movement and the liberal peacemakers, many of whom were Vietnam War vets and Democrats demonstrating across the nation demanding its end.  During the 1960s there were liberal members of congress who were vocal in their opposition to the Vietnam War, such as Senator George McGovern, D-South Dakota.  From The New York Times:

Excerpt:

George McGovern, Vietnam and the Democratic Crackup

On Sept. 24, 1963, George McGovern, the junior senator from South Dakota, addressed a full chamber on America’s growing entanglement in Southeast Asia. His words rang like a fire bell in the night.

“The current dilemma in Vietnam is a clear demonstration of the limitations of military power,” the 41-year-old Democrat declared, just before the vote on a record-breaking defense appropriation. “There in the jungles of Asia, our mighty nuclear arsenal, our $50 billion arms budget, and our costly ‘special forces’ have proved powerless to cope with a ragged band of illiterate guerrillas fighting with homemade weapons.”

Even worse, in Saigon, American resources were being used “to suppress the very liberties we went in to defend,” he continued. “The failure in Vietnam will not remain confined to Vietnam…

McGovern’s prophetic warning was among the earliest of such trenchant commentaries in either house of Congress. It was a prelude to his impassioned opposition to Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war, an opposition that would split the Democratic Party in two.

Though the rift between liberal hawks and antiwar activists is often depicted as a generational struggle, between New Dealers and cold warriors on one hand and the student activists of the New Left on the other, it was also between men like McGovern — principled, veteran politicians — and a White House that they believed had led their party, and the country, toward disaster.

McGovern was no pacifist. As a B-24 bomber pilot during World War II, he had flown 35 missions over Germany and Austria and won the Distinguished Flying Cross. Those combat experiences, which placed him at the center of world-changing events, motivated him to pursue a doctorate in history and stoked his ambition to run for Congress.

His political career was marked by humanitarian efforts and legislative expertise in agriculture and education. In 1961, President Kennedy had appointed him director of the Food for Peace program. Marshaling huge volumes of surplus food and fiber, McGovern engineered a vast expansion of an overseas school-lunch initiative that would soon be feeding tens of millions of hungry children around the world…

McGovern was one of only a dozen members of Congress to speak up against the war in its opening stages. In early 1965, just after the bombing campaign known as Rolling Thunder began, he went on CBS News to denounce the operation, and he predicted “a staggering loss of life out of all proportion to the stakes involved,” creating such enormous instability “that indeed we invite a much worse situation than the one that exists.”

In June 1965, a month before Johnson escalated the ground war, McGovern pointed out that the Viet Cong were “a part of the people and terrain” and “in many cases are farmers by day and fighters by night. To bomb them is to bomb the women and children, the villagers and peasants with whom they are intermingled. To destroy their crops is to destroy the countryside on which the general population depended.” To escalate the war, he said, “would only strengthen the guerrilla’s cause” in the eyes of the South Vietnamese and “destroy the moral influence of the United States in Asia…”

“I do not intend to remain silent in the face of what I regard as a policy of madness,” McGovern began. This conflict was “the most tragic diplomatic and moral failure in our national experience,” for it was “a defeat for America whether we ‘win’ or ‘lose.’ ” And if it did not end soon, “our dreams of a Great Society and a peaceful world will turn to ashes.” Only “by a crude misreading of history and a distortion of our most treasured ideals” could anyone defend the war, “essentially a civil conflict among various groups of Vietnamese…”

Above all, Americans must learn that “conflicts of this kind have historical dimensions that are essentially political, economic and psychological; they do not respond readily to military force from the outside,” McGovern said. Corrupt regimes like the one in Saigon did not “deserve to be saved by the blood of American boys…”

A year later, in the wake of the Tet offensive, Johnson’s withdrawal from politics and the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, a “Draft McGovern” movement thrust the senator into the contest for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. HE DID NOT WIN THE NOMINATION…

McGovern ran for, and won, the 1972 nomination, and then got crushed by Richard Nixon in one of the most lopsided elections in American history…  

McGovern was prescient in predicting “a massive loss of life” that would result from the failed Vietnam War.  In the end “one out of every 10 Americans who served in Vietnam was a casualty. 58,148 were killed and 304,000 wounded out of 2.7 million who served. Although the percent that died is similar to other wars, amputations or crippling wounds were 300 percent higher than in World War II. 75,000 Vietnam veterans are severely disabled.”

It was after McGovern’s loss in ’72 that the Zio-terrorists in the Democratic Party came up with the “Super Delegate” scam that allowed the Zio-terrorists to overturn the will of the voters in the Democratic primaries to protect the interests (illegal wars) of the Deep State.  The Zio-terrorists in the Democratic Party like Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer have actively purged the party of anyone who would dare question the Zio-terroristic wars.  From Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone:




Excerpt:

The Liberal Embrace of War

American interventionists learned a lesson from Iraq: pre-empt the debate. Now everyone is for regime change

CARACAS — The United States banned all air transport with Venezuela on Wednesday over security concerns, further isolating the troubled South American nation…  A disinterested historian — Herodotus raised from the dead — would see this as just the latest volley in a siege tale. America has been trying for ages to topple the regime of President Nicholas Maduro, after trying for years to do the same to his predecessor, Hugo Chavez.

The new play in the Trump era involves recognizing Juan Guaidó as president and starving and sanctioning the country. Maduro, encircled, has been resisting.  The American commercial news landscape, in schism on domestic issues, is in lockstep here.  Every article is seen from one angle: Venezuelans under the heel of a dictator who caused the crisis, with the only hope a “humanitarian” intervention by the United States.

There is no other perspective. Media watchdog FAIR just released results of a study of three months of American opinion pieces. Out of 76 editorials in the New York Times, Washington Post, the “big three Sunday morning talk shows” or PBS News Hour, zero came out against the removal of Maduro. They wrote:

“Corporate news coverage of Venezuela can only be described as a full-scale marketing campaign for regime change.”

Allowable opinion on Venezuela ranges from support for military invasion to the extreme pacifist end of the spectrum, as expressed in a February op-ed by Dr. Francisco Rodriguez and Jeffrey Sachs called “An Urgent Call for Compromise in Venezuela”:

“We strongly urge… a peaceful and negotiated transition of power rather than a winner-take-all game of chicken…”

So we should either remove Maduro by force, or he should leave peaceably, via negotiation. These are the options.

After the disaster of Vietnam eons ago, American thought leaders became convinced we “lost” in Indochina because of — get this — bad PR.  

The real lesson in Vietnam should have been that people would pay any price to overthrow a hated occupying force. American think-tankers and analysts however somehow became convinced (and amazingly still are) that the problem was Walter Cronkite and the networks giving up on the war effort.  Quietly then, over the course of decades, lobbyists pushed for changes. In the next big war, there would be no gruesome pictures of soldiers dying, no photos of coffins coming home, no pictures of civilian massacres (enforced more easily with new embedding rules), and no Cronkite-ian defeatism.

They got all of that by the time we went into Iraq. The TV landscape by then was almost completely sterilized. Jesse Ventura and Phil Donahue were pulled from MSNBC because they opposed invasion. Networks agreed not to film coffins or death scenes.

Yet the invasion of Iraq was a failure for the same reason Vietnam was a failure, and Libya was a failure, and Afghanistan is a failure, and Venezuela or Syria or Iran will be failures, if we get around to toppling regimes in those countries: America is incapable of understanding or respecting foreigners’ instinct for self-rule.

The pattern in American interventions has been the same for ages. We are for self-determination everywhere, until such self-determination clashes with a commercial or security objective.  A common triggering event for American-backed overthrows is a leader trying to nationalize the country’s resources. This is why we ended up replacing democratically-elected Mohammed Mossadeq with the Shah in Iran, for instance.

Disrupting trade is also a frequent theme in these ploys, with a late-Fifties coup attempt in Indonesia or our various Cuban embargoes key examples. The plan often involves stimulating economic and political unrest in target nations as a precursor for American intervention.  We inevitably end up propping up dictators of our own, and the too-frequent pattern now — vividly demonstrated in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan — is puppet states collapsing and giving way to power vacuums and cycles of sectarian violence. Thanks, America!

Opposing such policies used to be a central goal of American liberalism. No more. Since 2016, it’s been stunning to watch the purging and/or conversion of what used to be antiwar voices, to the point where Orwellian flip-flops are now routine.  Earlier this month, onetime fierce Iraq war opponent Rachel Maddow went on TV to embrace John Bolton in a diatribe about how the poor National Security Adviser has been thwarted by Trump in efforts to topple Maduro.

“Regardless of what you thought about John Bolton before this, his career, his track record,” Maddow said.

“Just think about John Bolton as a human being.”

The telecast was surreal. It was like watching Dick Cheney sing “Give Peace a Chance.”  Bolton stood out as a bomb-humping nut even among the Bush-era functionaries who pushed us into Iraq. He’s the living embodiment of “benevolent hegemony,” an imperial plan first articulated in the nineties by neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan.

It involves forcefully overturning any regime that resisted us, to spread the wonders of the American way to, as Norman Podhoretz once put it, “as many others as have the will and the ability to enjoy them.”  When Bush gave his famed “Axis of Evil” speech about Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, Bolton — prophetically, it seemed — gave a speech called “Beyond the Axis of Evil,” adding Cuba, Syria and Libya to the list.

Bolton, of course, is also on board with regime change in Venezuela, saying “this is our hemisphere.” Echoing the sentiment, Alabama Democratic Senator Doug Jones said Maduro, and his allies in Russia, need to vacate “our part of the world.”

This has all been cast as opposition to Russian support of Maduro. Maddow was ostensibly reacting to triggering news that Trump was stepping back on Venezuelan action after a chat with Vladimir Putin.

This isn’t about Russia, however. MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post were open cheering sections even when it came to endorsing Trump’s original decision to recognize Guaidó. It’s been much the same script with Syria, too, where even the faintest hint of discomfort with the idea of regime change has been excised from public view.

The social media era has made it much easier to keep pundits in line. Propaganda is effective when it’s relentless, personal, attacking, and one-sided. The idea isn’t to debate people, but to create an “ick” factor around certain ideas, so debate is pre-empted.  Don’t want to invade Syria? Get ready to be denounced as an Assadist. Feel ambivalent about regime change in Venezuela? You must love Putin and Maduro.

People end up either reflexively believing these things, or afraid to deal with vitriol they’ll get if they say something off-narrative. In the media world, it’s understood that stepping out of line on Venezuela or Syria will result in being removed from TV guest lists, loss of speaking income, and other problems.

This has effectively made intellectual objections to regime change obsolete. In the Trump era, things that not long ago aroused widespread horror — from torture to drone assassination to “rendition” to illegal surveillance to extrajudicial detention in brutal secret prisons around the world — inspire crickets now.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran an exposé about Guantanamo Bay that should have been a devastating piece of journalism. It showed site officials building a hospice, because prisoners are expected to grow old and die rather than ever sniff release. One prisoner was depicted sitting gingerly in court because of “chronic rectal pain” from being routinely sodomized in CIA prisons.

Ten years ago, Americans would have been deeply ashamed of such stories. Now, even liberals don’t care. The cause of empire has been cleverly re-packaged as part of #Resistance to Trump, when in fact it’s just the same old arrogance, destined to lead to the same catastrophes. Bad policy doesn’t get better just because you don’t let people talk about it.

I had to print the whole Taibbi article because nothing could be truncated.  Matt is right, the entire media and almost the entire congress are promoting regime change without any thought to what comes next.  Like George McGovern said “creating such enormous instability that indeed we invite a much worse situation than the one that exists.”  President Trump is not an interventionist but he faces a congress and media the demand endless war.  From Anti-War.com:


Excerpt:

Congressional Letter Urges Trump to Keep US Troops in Syria
Lawmakers call on Trump to 'increase pressure on Iran and Russia'

A bipartisan letter signed by nearly 400 US Congress members is calling on President Trump to remain militarily engaged within Syria, while claiming to be “deeply concerned” about extremists in the country.   

President Trump had announced a pullout from Syria in December, but had already disavowed it repeatedly by February. Still, lawmakers want to keep emphasizing how enthusiastic about the Syrian War they are, and push Trump into escalating it against various other parties.

Once a war about ISIS, the letter urges Trump to “increase pressure on Iran and Russia with respect to their activities in Syria.” The US already treated Syria as something of a proxy war, and the letter suggests they do away with all pretext and just make it into a war against Iran and Russia over Syria.

The lead signers of the letter were top party leaders and ranking committee members in both the House and the Senate. This once again underscores that on matters of war, Democrats and Republicans within leadership positions are almost completely in-line on keeping the wars going. 

The Deep State’s Military Industrial Complex wants more war no matter what the cost to America and Americans.  Through the Overseas Contingency Funds, a secret slush funds trillions go unaccounted for.  President Trump recently had an interview with Steve Hilton on Fox News.  From Larouchepub:


Excerpt:

President Trump Tells Fox, There Is Military-Industrial Complex and It Loves Perpetual War

May 20, 2019 (EIRNS)—In his broad-ranging interview aired last night on Fox News, President Trump had some very pointed remarks to make about the existence of a military-industrial complex in the U.S. and its desire to have unending wars.

In the context of discussing policy toward Iran, Trump emphasized that if he had to take on Iran, it would be “economically.... I just don’t want them to have nuclear weapons,” he told interviewer Steve Hilton, “and they can’t be threatening us....”

He elaborated: “With all of everything that’s going on, and I’m not one that believes—you know, I’m not somebody that wants to go in to war, because war hurts economies, war kills people, most importantly—by far most importantly.”  In response to Hilton’s asking if he could “reassure people you’re not looking for some conflict in Iran,” Trump replied,

“Well, I’m the one that talks about these wars that are 19 years, and people are just there—and don’t kid yourself, you do have a military-industrial complex. They do like war. You know, in Syria, with the caliphate, so I wipe out 100 percent of the caliphate.

“That doesn’t mean you’re not going to have these crazy people who run around blowing up stores and blowing up things—these are seriously ill people. I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, they’re wiped,’ you know, ISIS. But, I wiped out 100 percent of the caliphate. I say, ‘I want to bring our troops back home.’ The place went crazy. You have people here in Washington, they never want to leave.”

Continuing: “I say, ‘You know what I’ll do, I’ll leave a couple hundred soldiers behind,’ but if it was up to them, they’d bring thousands of soldiers in. Someday people will explain it, but you do have a group, and they call it the military-industrial complex. They never want to leave. They always want to fight.”  Trump explained, “No. I don’t want to fight, but you do have situations like Iran. You can’t let them have nuclear weapons. You just can’t let that happen.”

Like CIA Director Casey said “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the US public believes is false” seems that to extend to the US Presidents too.  With Trump surrounded by Zio-terrorists it is unlikely that any of these “war failures” will end anytime soon.  But the Zio-terrorist Empire will collapse from its own weight.  From Dmitry Orlov at Russia Insider:

Excerpt:

World Ready for US Collapse as Empire Hemorrhages Gold, Oil and Credibility

Some ironies are just too precious to pass by. The 2016 US presidential elections gave us Donald Trump, a reality TV star whose famous tag line from his show “The Apprentice” was “You are fired!” Focus on this tag line; it is all that is important to this story. Some Trump Derangement Disorder sufferers might disagree.

This is because they are laboring under certain misapprehensions: that the US is a democracy; or that it matters who is president. It isn’t and it doesn’t. By this point, the choice of president matters as much as the choice of conductor for the band that plays aboard a ship as it vanishes beneath the waves.

I have made these points continuously since before Trump got into office. Whether or not you think that Trump was actually elected, he did get in somehow, and there are reasons to believe that this had something to do with his wonderfully refreshing “You are fired!” tag line. It’s a fair guess that what motivated people to vote for him was their ardent wish that somebody would come along and fire all of the miscreants that infest Washington, DC and surrounding areas.

Alas, that he couldn’t do. Figurehead leaders are never granted the authority to dismantle the political establishments that install them. But that is not to say that it can’t be done at all. 

What happened instead was that the political establishment spent two years thrashing about in search of a reason to say “You are fired!” to Trump but has been unable to find one, and so Trump remains in office, although to say that he “remains in power” would be to invite sardonic laughter from anyone who knows what real political power smells like.

The System Fails to Depose Trump

Trump is but a prisoner in the White House, just like his predecessor was. Ironically, the quest for Trump’s impeachment has been fruitless as far as firing him, but most fruitful in terms of enhancing his ability to not only fire lots of establishment figures but perhaps even send them to jail—with the help of the Justice Department—and his character traits of extreme rancor, spitefulness and vindictiveness should be most conducive toward that end, making for a fun spectacle. His numerous enemies and detractors may yet look back wistfully on the halcyon days when they could lambaste him with impunity.

The quest to stop Trump started well before the election, with Obama and the Clintons collaborating on misusing federal resources to dig up dirt on Trump; specifically, evidence of “Russian collusion”… and they couldn’t find any. They did manage to find some “Russian meddling” (in the form of Facebook clickbait ads) but the evidence they dug up was too ridiculous to show in court.

Too bad they didn’t look for Ukrainian collusion and meddling, or Israeli collusion and meddling, or Saudi collusion and meddling, because then they would have found plenty—enough to not only knock Hillary Clinton out of the running but also to lock her up. It would have been a constructive, useful exercise for them to go look for Ukrainian political meddling, but as I’ve explained before the American modus operandi is quite the opposite, and it compelled them to go after Russia instead.

Trump is still on the throne, but does he wield any power?

In any case, the complete failure of Mueller’s team to find anything actionable against Trump has left him grasping at straws, and the one straw he seized upon was the vague possibility of accusing Trump of obstructing justice, based on 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2), which specifies that someone is guilty of obstruction as follows: “…obstructs, influences or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.”

Apparently, a neuron snapped inside poor Mueller’s head making him think that his own investigation was an “official proceeding,” although if you look up this term you’ll find that it relates to things happening inside courtrooms, with one or more judges presiding, and to launch such a proceeding requires evidence that a crime has been committed. If there is no crime, then there is no proceeding, and nothing to obstruct, influence or impede.

There ensued a sort of bureaucratic danse macabre. Normally, the Attorney General has the authority to provide guidance on such questions, and AG Jeff Sessions could have told Mueller that 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) is only relevant to court proceedings and that would have been it. But Sessions had the unfortunate luck of having had a casual chat with the amiable and roly-poly Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Sergey Kislyak

By virtue of this little chat Sessions contaminated his precious bodily fluids (just breathing the same air as a Russian can be politically fatal, you know) and was forced to recuse himself from Mueller’s investigation. Trump’s legal team then reached out to William Barr, a former AG, and asked him to chime in. Barr wrote a memo clarifying the issue and sent it to deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who remained as second-in-command at the Justice Department after Sessions’ recusal, and who should have read it, understood it and acted on it, terminating Mueller’s investigation, but somehow he didn’t.

The denouement of this bureaucratic danse macabre played out as follows. After the midterm elections Trump said “You’re fired!” to Jeff Sessions and William Barr was confirmed as AG. Barr then said “You’re fired!” to both Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller for being unpardonably dense.

Barr also made it clear that he plans to leave no stone unturned in investigating this fantastic instance of misuse of official resources and prosecutorial misconduct. This will be fun to watch, if you have nothing more important to pay attention to, but I suspect that the phrase “You’re fired!” will continue to bounce around the halls of Washington like a rubber grenade for a good long time. There are, however, things to pay attention to that are far more important.

A World Re-Aligning

There is a lot happening in the world all at once right now. The entire planet is rapidly reconfiguring itself. The world is begging for a new, post-capitalist, post-industrial order to be born, but the overabundance of natural resources that have made previous such revolutions possible (coal for the age of steam, oil for the current oil age) simply no longer exist.

All that remains is optimizations, enhancements and reconfigurations of the existing order of things, cutting out that which is most harmful and most dysfunctional. To this end, Western European nations are attempting to reclaim the sovereignty they ceded to the United States and the European Union while Eurasia is coming together to form a massive economic and security conglomerate centered on China and Russia. Both are playing for time, because redirecting trade and financial flows away from the US is quite a process.

The world’s central banks are doing their best to get rid of their US dollar reserves and to buy gold, which, as of this April, they are allowed to consider a risk-free financial asset. Many people now expect gold to go up as a result, but that expectation is based on an illusion. Think of gold as a lighthouse and of fiat currencies as sinking ships: those aboard them may look around and decide that the lighthouse is going up, but that’s just an optical illusion. The purchasing power of fiat currencies is sure to fall (some more than others)…

A particularly interesting piece to the gold story is that it may turn out that much of the gold supposedly stored in the US may in fact be missing. Since Nixon closed the “gold window” in 1971, ending the convertibility of US dollar for gold bullion, and until recently the US dollar has been able to retain its position as a global reserve currency by an act of sheer financial levitation, but that bit of magic may have actually been sleight of hand: behind-the-scenes gold sales to the largest US creditors.

When various countries, Germany in particular, have attempted to repatriate their gold, which they had entrusted to the US, they were rebuffed, and when they did succeed, the gold that was returned wasn’t the same gold, and it took a long time. The US hunger for gold has forced it to conduct rather unseemly heists, stealing the gold reserves of Iraq, Libya and the Ukraine. Thus, when the time comes for the US to defend its currency by employing its hoard of gold, it may turn out that the cupboard is bare.

Gold is becoming increasingly important, but energy is more important still, and always will be. After being pushed into the background for a few years, questions of energy supply and energy security are once again becoming front and center. Peak Oil turns out to not be dead after all; it was just postponed by a few years by virtue of the US burning through a huge pile of retirement savings while exploiting shale oil.

But now most of the sweet spots have been tapped already and diminishing returns on continued frantic drilling are being added to the fracking industry’s permanently dismal financial returns. In the meantime, Russia has built several natural gas liquefaction plants, a new oil pipeline to China and two new gas pipelines to Turkey and Germany, and to Western Europe beyond, which will circumvent the Ukraine, reducing its value as a geopolitical asset to zero.

A desperate ploy by the US to seize control of Venezuela’s oil fields has backfired in a most embarrassing fashion; there, recent developments have brought up an important question: What if the US threw a color revolution but nobody came? As I had predicted would happen six years ago in my book The Five Stages of Collapse the Color Revolution Syndicate has steadily lost its mojo. In spite of all the bluster by various Washington foreign policy has-beens, a US military intervention in Venezuela is unthinkable: Venezuela’s Russian S-300 air defense systems effectively make it a no-fly zone for US planes.

Meanwhile, the US, having cut itself off from Venezuela’s oil using its own sanctions, has been forced to resort to importing Russian oil. (For now, but not for much longer, the US has a glut of low-quality light crude from fracking, but it’s useless for making diesel and other distillates unless it is blended with heavier grades of crude, which have to be imported.)

Meanwhile, Russia and Belarus have been staging a noisy lover’s quarrel over Russian oil exports to Europe, much of which go through a Belarussian pipeline. Russia and Belarus—or Byelorussia, or White Russia—are not exactly distinct entities in most ways, and when they fight the bystanders should discount the foul language and instead look out for flying pots and cutlery.

The result of this family spat is that White Russia will no longer supply the Ukraine with products distilled from Russian oil. Another odd development is that the Russian oil being piped to White Russia, and from thence to the EU, has become mysteriously contaminated and the flow has been stopped until the situation is resolved, causing a bit of a panic in Europe.

The US volunteered to unseal its Strategic Petroleum Reserve to compensate, but then, in another bizarre twist, some of that oil too has turned out to have gone foul. More foul yet, the US has imposed unilateral sanctions on Iran, threatening anyone who imports Iranian oil, bringing up another important question: What is (sic) the US imposes unilateral sanctions on the whole world, and everybody just yawns?

Financially ruinous and generally nonsensical schemes such as tar sands, shale oil and industrial-scale photovoltaics, wind generation and electric cars will only accelerate the process of sorting nations into energy haves and energy have-nots, with the have-nots wiping themselves out sooner rather than later.

Leaving aside various fictional and notional schemes (nuclear fusion, space mirrors, etc.) and focusing just on the technologies that already exist, there is only one way to maintain industrial civilization, and that is nuclear, based on Uranium 235 (which is scarce) and Plutonium 239 produced from Uranium 238 (of which there is enough to last for thousands of years) using fast neutron reactors. If you don’t like this choice, then your other choice is to go completely agrarian, with significantly reduced population densities and no urban centers of any size.

And if you do like this choice, then you have few alternatives other than to go with the world’s main purveyor of nuclear technology (VVER-series light water reactors, BN-series fast neutron breeder reactors and closed nuclear fuel cycle technology) which happens to be Russia’s state-owned conglomerate Rosatom.

It owns over a third of the world nuclear energy market and has a portfolio of international projects stretching far into the future that includes as much as 80% of the reactors that are going to be built. The US hasn’t been able to complete a nuclear reactor in decades, the Europeans managed to get just one new reactor on line (in China) while Japan’s nuclear program has been in disarray ever since Fukushima and Toshiba’s financially disastrous acquisition of Westinghouse.

The only other contenders are South Korea and China. Again, if you don’t like nuclear—for whatever reason—then you can always just buy yourself some pasture and some hayfields and start breeding donkeys.

Americans are not ready for what's coming

This may seem like shocking news to someone who’s been exposed solely to mass media in the US and other Anglophone countries or in the EU. Well, it may be shocking, but it’s definitely not news: none of these developments is particularly new, and none of them is unforeseen. The high level of denial of all of the above issues in Washington, which has been ground zero in a powerful explosion of unreality, and in Western media generally, is also unsurprising; nor is it helpful. Upon finding these things out for yourself, you may be tempted to shout about them from rooftops.

This, I dare say, would be inadvisable. The proper thing to do with people who insist on remaining in denial is to humor them, to run out the clock on any games they try to play with you, and then to politely bid them adieu. Indeed, this is what we are seeing: nobody particularly wants to negotiate with US officials but they do so anyway because, as every crisis negotiator knows, it is essential to keep talking, even if simply to stall for time.

While they are talking the hostages—to Wall Street, to the Pentagon, to US Treasury and Federal Reserve—are quietly being evacuated. Time is running out for the US, and once it has run out, what we will hear, in a supreme twist of irony, is the whole world telling the US: “You’re fired!”

Vietnam failure, Afghanistan failure, Iraq failure, Libya failure, Syria failure, Ukraine failure, Yemen failure, yet the Zio-terrorists have not lost their zeal nor enthusiasm for more war and still claim today that all the aforementioned wars are successes.   I agree with Dmitry Orlov’s prediction “Time is running out for the US, and once it has run out, what we will hear, in a supreme twist of irony, is the whole world telling the US: “You’re fired!””