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By Jason Hirthler

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Elites fear Trump may derail master plan

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Which is why it is so disorienting to listen to Donald Trump air his unfiltered views to the public. This unscripted rogue billionaire has the military-finance-energy establishment in an hysterical frenzy, sweat pouring off its brow, hands rubbed raw in consternation, shouting incoherent diktats to its rabble of stenographers and demanding its stable of slow-footed intelligence tsars manufacture treasonous charges to brandish before Congress. The Wall Street financiers, the opaque defense contractors, and the IP-backed pill-pushers were not counting on this. Nobody was.

Just this past weekend, then president-elect Donald Trump launched another fusillade of bombast over the bow of the military-finance deep state. In two short days, Trump managed to declare NATO “obsolete,” poor-mouth the European Union and suggest more countries would defect if given the chance, declare he would force Big Pharma to negotiate bulk discounts with the Medicaid and Medicare, threaten to slap tariffs on BMW if it tried to import cars to the U.S. from some Mexican maquiladora, and promise a bilateral deal with the UK to ensure Brexit turned out well for England.

All of this is anathema to the scions of Wall Street and the fat cats at Lockheed Martin. Big finance can’t stomach the thought of countries like Greece coming to their senses, defaulting, dropping out, and rebooting the sovereign currencies. Who would buy up all those German exports? The defense industry can’t abide the thought of a premature thaw of the New Cold War, before a half-dozen proxy wars are lit up in Central Asia, necessitating billion dollar arms deals with shady Central Asian Republics under the auspices of the State Department. After all, look at how well they do from war. To defense, there’s nothing so terrifying as the prospect of peace.

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Mike Whitney says neither Clapper, Comey, or CIA Director John Brennan are calling the shots. Rather they are being coerced by forces behind the scenes hell-bent on preventing Donald Trump from derailing Washington’s imperial project. Well, what exactly is the project the establishment is abjectly trying to protect? It is, in short, global hegemony.

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In other words, to those that thrive on conflict, hot wars, autocratic trade regimes, debt slavery, and other salacious features of the one percent’s kingdom of chaos, times are tough. But they are not without their victories since election day. Their 24-hours-a-day barrage of mudslinging about hacking, treason, and vile sexual behavior has forced Trump’s nominees for State and Defense to mumble grave warnings about Russian interference. Hopefully, these were just guileful concessions to the Senatorial hyenas, but don’t be surprised if the deep-state arm-twisting works.

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The Venal Dems Boil Over 

In a sure sign of Democratic distemper, the Democrats absolutely lost it in a closed Senate hearing with FBI Director James Comey, who they blame for Hillary’s defeat, most probably because he declined to join their fear-mongering bandwagon. The venal dems emerged in a blind fury from the closed-door session, with alternating comments of “I’m very angry” to “I’m…outraged” to “My confidence has been shook” to the risible remark from Minnesota Democrat Tim Walz, “I was nonjudgmental until the last fifteen minutes.”

Then, legendary Congressman John Lewis lead a smattering of spoiled Senators in a boycott of Friday’s inauguration. And neoliberals say Republicans are the petulant cranks who refuse to work together? Lewis, of course, has had a public spat with Trump, declaring that he didn’t see Trump as a “legitimate” president because he believes the phantom Russian hackers got him elected. The Donald characteristically flayed the civil rights icon on Twitter, calling on Lewis to focus on repairing the “burning and crime-infested inner cities of the U.S.”

Lewis has either been duped by the Russian hacker farce or is simply posturing and taking the party line on the Trump presidency–which is that it is wholly illegitimate. This will serve as a useful pretext for the Democrats to refuse to work with the Trump administration, just as the Republicans refused to work with the Obama administration. Of course, to delusional neoliberals, their refusal will be principled and wholly concerned with the fate of the republic, while the Republicans refusal was merely petulant racism.

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Peddling Putrefaction 

My two favorite sections of the government reports on Russian hacking come right at the beginning. The Joint Analysis Report from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)  is “provided for informational purposes only” and “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within.” The report issued by the National Intelligence Director’s Office has a nice caveat buried in the appendix. It says, “estimative language” refers to “judgments (that) are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”

Ex-intelligence agents like William Binney, Bill Blunden, and Philip Giraldi, have all poured cold water on the intelligence reports. Even then National Intelligence Director James Clapper felt compelled to distance himself from the factitious nonsense in a public statement. We can see this high-strung state-of-mind reflected in the intelligence community’s increasingly frantic efforts to compromise Trump’s standing, even releasing a third baseless report, the “Trump dossier,” accused the Trump team of conducting ongoing information exchanges with representatives of the Russian government. It was then larded with lascivious sexual potboilers about Trump, a bevy of escorts, and a bed Barack Obama once slept in. How could this been seen as anything but an attempt to blackmail or coerce the president-elect into following their aggressive foreign policies? The stuffing of these reports has come from private firms contracted by the DNC, anti-Trump research projects, and other prejudiced sources. And yet, mouthed through the opaque bureaucracies of national intelligence, these claims have been shrouded in whatever faint legitimacy the populace accords to the surveillance state.

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“…To those that thrive on conflict, hot wars, autocratic trade regimes, debt slavery, and other salacious features of the one percent’s kingdom of chaos, times are tough.”

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The Master Plan: Strategic Goals

Mike Whitney says neither Clapper, Comey, or CIA Director John Brennan are calling the shots. Rather they are being coerced by forces behind the scenes hell-bent on preventing Donald Trump from derailing Washington’s imperial project. Well, what exactly is the project the establishment is abjectly trying to protect? It is, in short, global hegemony. It has been on the books since the post-World War Two era when national security documents revealed a desire to go after Middle Eastern energy resources, as it was perhaps the “greatest material prize” in world history. It was rearticulated in Paul Wolfowitz’s 1992 National Security Planning document for the Clinton administration. It was tactically spelled out by the Bush administration in the early 2000s, when Dick Cheney’s rogue minions planned to conduct regime change in seven countries in five years. The thrust of that plan was to shatter the Shia Crescent in the Middle East, which included uncooperative Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. This would break the back of independent resistance in the region (the vestiges of Arab nationalism) and allow the U.S. to essentially use the Middle East as a forward operating base from which to project power into Central Asia, which happens to be, by many estimates, the economic engine of the 21st century. China’s New Silk Road project promises to build a corridor of development from Siberia to Eastern Europe, thanks in part to massive cooperative rail projects undertaken by Beijing and Moscow. Washington feels predictably marginalized by these endeavors and it won’t achieve anything like full spectrum dominance without a controlling stake in Central Asian development. In addition to the plan to project power from the Middle East, the vaunted Asian pivot is one of the hallmarks of Obama’s legacy, a ramping up of military presence in the South China Sea, inside a variety of nations near China, and an effort to push trade deals that exclude Beijing. In other words, if all goes to plan, Washington would have Russia and China, and all of Central Asia, bookended with military might and forms of economic coercion designed to break open these nations to Western financial, energy, and defense concerns, among others.

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The Master Plan: Tactical Goals and Surprising Setbacks 

The major tactical element of the grand strategy is simple: divide and plunder. The nation-state, as a construct, is the only barricade left between populations and total uninhibited exploitation by imperial capital. So dismantling the nation-state is the central tactical objective. Syria is the latest case study. Wedging apart this independent, secular, socialist country would divide and weaken Shia resistance and create a series of more manageable and less threatening statelets. It has the same designs on Russia, dating at least back to the strategies of former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

This plan has suffered a serious setback in Syria’s imminent triumph against NATO-backed mercenary army that had attempted to topple the Assad government. Russia’s intervention on behalf of the SAA has Washington elites in a state of nervous anxiety. The recent election of a presidential candidate who repeatedly made divisive anti-NATO and anti-interventionist statements throughout his campaign only pushed elite blood pressures into hypertension.

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A Rush to Stack the Deck 

Given this unexpected state of affairs, the elite establishment has hurried to expand their program of conquest in order to raise as many obstacles as possible should Donald Trump actually try to dismantle or reverse it. Before leaving office, our Nobel laureate has hastily amplified the AUMF, rolled troops into Poland, Romania, Norway, Estonia, and Latvia, expanded special operations across Africa, where Green Berets and Navy Seals hunker down. As if we weren’t spending enough time terrorizing people around the world. We dropped 26,000 bombs in 2016, up from 23,000 in 2015. All this after inheriting two wars and turning it into seven. People think he’s smart because he doesn’t put divisions and brigades on the ground like George Bush, but what does he do instead? Covert war. Litters the planet with companies of soldiers and special forces who command malevolent gangs of mercenaries to do our dirty work for us. This is how Carter did it in Afghanistan. This is how Reagan did it in Nicaragua. It lends a bit of plausible deniability to the administration, so they aren’t tarred and feathered in the press when things go sideways, like LBJ and Nixon and Bush the Younger. Then he activates a robot army of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to drop bombs on suspected criminals around the Middle East and North Africa. How exactly is this an improvement? The problem with Democrats and Republicans is that they swing back and forth between these two tactical poles, never thinking of ending the whole brutal charade.

Now listen to newly anointed President Donald Trump tell the truth about our wars in Syria and Iraq and Libya. If you can make it past the nuclear glow emanating from his cheeks, and past the pussy-grabbing “locker room” banter he conducts in private, that is. This baffling creature of elite privilege has strangely claimed he wants to end the American rituals of rolling regime change and for-profit humanitarian destruction, and make friends with other nuclear states. The opposition is fierce, and should he shutter the Syrian proxy war without compensating with a plot to invade Iran, he may well find himself impeached through the freshly minted model of the bloodless putsch, or “constitutional coup,” that, perhaps not so coincidentally, just concluded a successful trial run in Brazil.

 

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MAIN IMAGE: Dissembler in chief Barack Obama. The greatest demagog, so far, of the postwar period. His Teflon index surpassed that of Reagan. The image is a photo op of his visiting a civil rights “shrine” the Edmund Pettus Bridge, part of the Selma to Montgomery march, a turning point in the struggle of African Americans.