DEEP STATE

ERIC ZUESSE—In America, the Deep State ‘justifies’ itself in the ‘news’-media that it owns, and does so by falsely ‘defining’ what the “Deep State” is (which is actually the nation’s 607 billionaires, whose hired agents number in the millions). They mis-‘define’ it, as being, instead, the taxpayer-salaried career Government employees, known professionally as “the Civil Service.” (Although some Civil Servants — especially at the upper levels — are agents for America’s billionaires and retire to cushy board seats, most of them actually are not and do not. And the “revolving door” between “the public sector” and “the private sector” is where the Deep State operations become concentrated.

PATRICE GREANVILLE—As US troops—at last!— leave their illegally occupied zone in Syria, all hell breaks loose on the US media front, with Democrats and the Deep State shills denouncing Trump’s move as triggering a huge human rights catastrophe, reigniting ISIS, yada yada. Turkey’s long expected invasion in pursuit of the US-allied Kurds may have provided the perfect pretext—amplified by the usual arsenal of manufactured images—for all the wailing, but this is as phony as the arguments that justified American meddling in Syria in the first place. (Do you hear that Obama?)

PHILIP GIRALDI—The most recent “former intelligence agents’” blast against Trump appeared in the Business Insider last month in an article entitled “US spies say Trump’s G7 performance suggests he’s either a ‘Russian asset’ or a ‘useful idiot’ for Putin.” The article cites a number of former government officials, including several from the CIA and FBI, who claimed that Trump’s participation at the recent G7 summit in Biarritz France was marked by pandering to Putin and the Kremlin’s interests, including a push to re-include Russia in the G-7, from which it was expelled after the annexation of Crimea.

PATRICE GREANVILLE—If nothing else I found this episode interesting because it shows how much sharper the mind of a genuine radical is, when compared to that of even a bright semi-establshmentarian liberal, like Taibbi. Let us recall that while Taibbi can be at times a very fine jornalist, he is still politically far more a temperamental rebel, a bourgeois “enfant terrible” than a genuine left social analyst. In that sense he remains ensconced in the old journo illusion that more facts assure a better grasp of the subject, forgetting that this is also a sure formula to miss the forest for the trees, and that context, the historical, cultural and socioeconomic and political contexts of anything being reported is the guarantor of clarity and public mobilisation.

JIMMY DORE—LEE CAMP— The two activists discuss how Facebook and other social media giants are trying to strangle free voices telling it like it is by blocking their communications with their followers and also aggressively demonitising their sites. Their main offfence is of course that Camp and Dore are antiwar, and anti-capitalism. Lee Camp accurately describes the situation as a drip drip approach to the strangling of free speech. It reminds us of the legendary frog in the pot, who is boiled to death so slowly he never realises he must jump out immediately to avoid certain death. As stated in our pages many times and seen on similar anti-establishment orgs, the corporate system, like ghouls scared of the daylight, is frightened by truth. The water keeps getting hotter and hotter in the pot, but the animals are not taling remedial action.