I originally wrote the following as a reply to Booman’s recent post The Collapse of American Elite Power. I think it stands alone fairly well (slightly edited), so here it is.
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Although primarily aimed at the TTP and U.S.-Chinese relations, a serious problem with Booman’s post is how the words “elite” and “elites” are used.
Here is a working, mainstream definition of the word “elite.”
a select part of a group that is superior to the rest in terms of ability or qualities.
And of “elites.”
a. A group or class of persons considered to be superior to others because of their intelligence, social standing, or wealth: “Auguste Comte … believed that in the age of science society should be ruled by an elite of scientists” (Lewis A. Coser).
b. A member of such a group: “Elites don’t grant us [sociologists] interviews. They don’t let us hang out at their country clubs” (Sudhir Venkatesh).
c. The best or most skilled members of a group: the elite of professional tennis.
The “elites” to which Booman is referring do not really match the first definition.
Read on for more.
The “elites” to which Booman is referring do not really match the first definition. They are not in any way “superior to the rest in terms of ability or qualities” unless you consider their abilities to successfully deal with the greed, theft and bureaucratic mediocrity that have risen to dominance in the culture over the past 50+ years or so…nowhere else so plainly as in the Beltway/revolving door system.
Now…the second definition offers a little more clarity to the situation. (Emphasis mine.)”A group or class of persons considered to be superior to others because of their intelligence, social standing, or wealth” and “The best or most skilled members of a group.”
Now we’re getting somewhere!!!
So the “elites” that rule this country are by and large those who have either inherited social standing and wealth…witness Bush I and Bush II, Romney, Trump etc….or have shown such talent in the arts of big-time hustle and theft that they have risen to the top of the turd pool. (Witness the Clintons.) It’s largely the same in the military…a cheap hustler like Petraeus rises to the top while undoubtedly superior minds and hearts are halted somewhere in the middle of their career climb. In business? Ditto. Our big business is now predicated not so much on real achievement as on sheer profitability. The media? Please!!! Look at the flat-faced hustlers in the newsrooms and interview shows for all you need to know on that account. Education? Remember that old line?”Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t teach, teach teachers.” Our educational system is now run as a for-profit business by bureaucrats who can’t even teach teachers. The so-called “straight” half of Boston’s criminal Bulger brothers ended his illustrious career in bagman politics as president of the University of Massachusetts system…until of course he had to quit because he wouldn’t cooperate (couldn’t cooperate, really…he’d’a had to take the Fifth so many times he woulda drowned in it.) in nailing his brother Whitey. It’s the same right on down the line in this culture.
Booman’s title is fine.
“The Collapse of American Elite Power”
But he fails to explain the reason behind that collapse.
It’s because our “elites” are only elite at the hustle. The U.S. is now all branding, all advertising and all hustle. Very little real content.
Booman finishes with a strong rhetorical salvo:
If our elites want the public’s trust again, they’re clearly going to have to get our house in order first, and that means rebuilding our middle class and our hollowed out communities any way that they can.
In this sense, the appeal of Trump and the failure of the TPP are of a piece.
The American people have rescinded their faith in our leaders, and if that is going to have nasty geopolitical consequences and possibly lead to more war, repression, and disorder, then our elites should blame themselves first. And then they should realize that they no longer have any choice but to put the American worker and the middle class first in their set of priorities.
But it’s relatively empty of meaning…as is most rhetoric…because it assumes that “our elites” are really “elite” in the sense of the first definition I offered.
…a select part of a group that is superior to the rest in terms of ability or qualities.
These people don’t “want the public’s trust again,” they just want them to surrender to their will. Their sense of entitlement is so strong that they think they are invulnerable and damned near omniscient. They are not going to be “rebuilding our middle class and our hollowed out communities any way that they can,” because they are in reality so shallow, so stupid and so self-centered that they don’t realize the necessity of doing that for even their own benefit. They knew what they were doing when they ran the credit scams that led to the recession. They were hustling the rubes for profit. Nothing more and nothing less, although on a grander scale than in some W.C. Fields movie.
The “…appeal of Trump and the failure of the TPP” are of a piece. He’s on the anti-hustle hustle. It’s a brilliant piece of con-job, if you ask me.
“The American people have rescinded their faith in our leaders,” for damned good reason. And yes, the consequences of these “anti-elite” actions promise serious trouble. But writing that the elites “…should realize that they no longer have any choice but to put the American worker and the middle class first in their set of priorities.” is ludicrous. As long as the “elites” that ran the con up front are still in power…and I include both Clintons and the Wall St. interests for whom they work in that group…why would they try to “put the American worker and the middle class first in their set of priorities?” They’re the ones who collapsed those groups in the first place. That was their “choice.” They’re no smarter now than they were when they ran the game, number one, and number two…why would the newly awakened American people believe them even if they said that was their goal?
Really!!!
Why is Clinton so rapidly slip-sliding out of her front-runner status?
Because people do not believe her.
Duh.
She speaks with the forked tongue of the bankers.
DUH!!!
And we are going to suffer for it no matter who is elected.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
Dream on.
Looks like our “elites” have really made a mess of things, but more and more people see the hustle. China owns 30% of our foreign debt ($1.243 trillion out of $4.046 trillion). (The remainder of the U.S. $19 trillion debt is owned by the U.S. citizens or the U.S. government.) Ultimately, China wants its currency, the yuan, to replace the U.S. dollar as the new global currency. Also, China has become the largest world economy and in 2010 became the world’s largest exporter. Here’s an interesting quote from the article:
“The United States allowed China to become one of its biggest bankers because the American people enjoyed low consumer prices. Selling debt to China allows the U.S. economy to grow by funding federal government programs. It also keeps U.S. interest rates low. However, China’s ownership of U.S. debt is shifting the economic balance of power in its favor.”
https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-debt-to-china-how-much-does-it-own-3306355
The hustle only works as long as everyone involved plays their part. That could be changing with the realignment of global power.
“The hustle only works as long as everyone involved plays their part. That could be changing with the realignment of global power.”
Indeed!!!
None of the countries in which i have traveled and worked that really attracted me in terms of the way that most of their people lived…the culture, the balance of power on the streets, etc..were massive world players. Nor were they semi-slave states, vassals to the giants. I would really like to see the United States downsize and look inward, but the greed and automatic lust for power of its controllers will not allow that.
So it goes.
I would also like to see it break up into several regional, sovereign states or at least a confederacy of some sort that is different from the one under which we now live, but that’s not going to happen either. The controllers have a tight drip on all the levers of all the machines of power, and they are not about to let go short unless a total collapse necessitates their retreat.
So that goes as well.
Later…
AG
P.S. The Trump curse may turn out to be a long-term blessing in disguise. If he wins and totally fucks up…a good possibility, in my opinion…maybe that will shake things up here.
Arthur wants to bring back not just the Confederacy, but Confederacies.
Well, it’s of a piece with his rhetoric and issue advocacies here, that’s for sure.
Remember this the next time someone is fighting for their Federally guaranteed civil rights anywhere in the United States, whether it be women and abortion, African-Americans and voting, LGBTQ’s and marriage, Hispanic-Americans and health care, Arthur is not in solidarity with these people. He wants to free The New Confederacy to take away these rights if they see fit to do so.
And hey, if Trump’s election turns America into a much, much more violent and frightening place, where cops who murder non-whites are celebrated at the White House and deportation forces roust immigrant communities day and night, hey, gotta break millions of eggs to make an Gilroy omelette…
Tell us more, Arthur.
You are hearing dogwhistles that are not there. This is a common problem. Since you are the only one hearing them, you think that you are exceptional. You may even convince some others and then they’ll start imagining the same thing.
Merriam-Webster
DUH!!!
Remedial reading 101…available at your local adult education center. Go do it.
AG
You want to break up the United States, and deny Federal civil rights to hundreds of millions of people.
They are already being denied, centerfield.
AG
You are willfully blind to the civil rights movement before you, and its successes in gaining results.
Willfully blind.
I live…and work…right smack in the middle of the groups who are supposed to have been helped by the so-called “Civil Rights” movement, and I have been doing so since a year before the Civil Rights Act was passed.
Is it the “civil right” of our darker citizens…black and latino both…to watch their children suffer through inferior schools, to be unjustly hassled by the cops in every area of the country, to be relegated to minimum wage jobs if they are not exceptionally intelligent or talented in some way?
Get real.
The same controllers who enacted the Civil Rights bill to cool out the riots also killed MLK Jr. when he finally came out against the Vietnam War. That is also the same government that permitted the flooding of heroin and later crack cocaine into the ghettoes of the U.S. with the sole intent of destroying the culture that was most successfully opposing that government’s misdeeds. The same government that is not trying to “gentrify” almost every majority black and latino neighborhood in every major city of the United States.
I live inna fucking Bronx, centerfield. The last successful bastion in NYC against Bloomberg’s gentrification push. Manhattan’s gone except for a few latino neighborhoods; Brooklyn’s three-quarters gone; Queens is really mostly Long Island and Staten Island has always been a borough of suburban New Jersey more than part of NYC.
Where is it that you live again?
And you sit there and tell me that I am willfully blind to the successes of civil rights movement?
Kneejerk.
AG
I know you want to remain plug-dumb ignorant of the fact that poverty among racial minorities was much higher before the CRA, VRA and Great Society programs brought on significant reductions in poverty, and those poverty rates have not risen even close to the rates which existed before 1965. And, of course, a wide range of minorities suffered much more oppression and violence before 1965, and those levels of oppression and violence have not returned either.
The Reagan Revolution hurt our progress in these and other areas, but we’ve had recent successes in gaining economic, social and criminal justice and are on the verge of many more, even as culturally hostile property gentrifications and other challenges, new and old, encroach.
There are many facets to the modern civil rights movement, including those who fight for groups of people other than the ones you name here.
Anyone who advocates for indifference when faced with the current Presidential candidates and political Parties is no friend to civil rights, is a poor judge of governmental policies, and is no leader of people.
I do not want to be a “leader of people,” centerfiield. One mind at a time is all that I am asking. You have rote, boilerplate responses on this and many other subjects.
Surveys say what their owners want them to say.
I am willing to bet that you haven’t stepped out of your own little comfort zone-limited parts of the world for many years.
Ya oughta get out more.
AG
I’m a political organizer. I do more more of my work in Oakland than anywhere else. In the most recent campaign I did a lot of work on, we successfully passed the best Minimum Wage Law in any of the United States, and now we’re picking off local cities which are increasing their minimum wages quicker and, in a couple of cases, higher.
Tell us what the people in the photograph you share in this thread think about the Presidential choices before them. If you can.
I don’t believe that you listen to them silently when they tell you they are going to vote for Clinton, as you have portrayed yourself doing in the stories you share where you have listened silently to Trump supporters.
You write:
It depends on who they are. The smart ones? I tell them the truth as I see it…Trump supporters and HRC supporters both. And…surprisingly…many of them understand precisely what I am saying. Not many of the people in that image are going to vote for Trump…nor do I want them to do so despite your many pissy little accusations… but lots of them are not too hot on the idea of voting for HRC either.
Oakland, eh?
Are you old enough to remember what a well-balanced black urban community was like before the crack epidemic? Like the ones that arose across the country during the ’20s and ’30s for the purposes of sheer self-survival? The ones that produced the Harlem Renaissance and lay the foundation for a serious black voting bloc that wielded real power? The ones where the church was the center of both moral and political aspirations? I am. They lasted right into the late ’60s/early ’70s when I was learning my craft as an American musician. I lived and worked in them…Spanish neighborhoods, too…and many of my models and teachers were a product of those communities. They were a lot like the “Little Italys” of around the same time and earlier. They took care of their people because no one else was going to. yes, they had some rough guys in positions of prominence, but then…so did the so-called “legitimate” government, as it does to this day. An expensive suit and a Harvard education doesn’t make a criminal any less of a criminal.
Bet on it.
And then…right on the heels of the Civil Rights Act of 1964…a strange series of things happened. Maybe not so strange. First of all, three of the most prominent supporters of equal rights for all…each in his own way…were assassinated.
First Malcolm X in ’65, then MLK Jr. after his antiwar Riverside Church speech in 1968 and two months thereafter, Bobby Kennedy.
Then…and only then…the heroin epidemic erupted in the minority neighborhoods of the cities of the U.S., followed by the much worse crack epidemic, the supporters of which were identified if not busted by the Iran-Contra scandal.
And who were these supporters?
They were federal officials like Capt. Oliver North…satraps of the comntrol system.
A series of “coincidences?”
I don’t think so.
You think that this patently criminal system has miraculously healed itself?
Again…I don’t think so.
You think that HRC somehow threatens that system?
Phhffft.
I don’t agree.
Twice. Three times, even.
Go organize, kneejerk.
You are doing your masters’ bidding and you don’t even know it.
Or even worse…maybe you do.
AG
You seem to live behind an impenetrable wall of anger and sadness. Sincere consideration of the points of view of others seems beyond you, unless they support your same despairing, cynical world view.
Here’s a little tale about the city which borders Oakland to the south:
http://www.sanleandrobytes.com/archives/004400.html
CITY OF SAN LEANDRO AND HOUSING DISCRIMINATION
On May 31, 2007, the San Leandro City Council’s Human Relations Committee released a draft document entitled, “Chronology of City of San Leandro’s Efforts to End to [sic] Housing Discrimination and Promote Community Diversity.” The document details the city’s attempts to address the discrimination and segregation that became synonymous with San Leandro from the 1950s to the 1970s. According to a June 2, 2007, article in the Daily Review, the document was prompted in part by San Leandro resident Brian Copeland’s memoir “Not a Genuine Black Man,” which chronicles Copeland’s experiences as a child growing up in a city where black people were unwelcome.
The earliest city action in the document is July 8, 1968, when the City Council adopted a policy on Community Relations and Responsibilities. However, as detailed in American Babylon, San Leandro actively became a segregated community after World War II:
Immediately after the war, San Leandro residents erected a figurative white wall along the city’s border with Oakland. M. C. Friel and Associates, a Hayward real estate firm with expertise in racial covenants, became the East Bay’s leading consultant on shoring up segregation. In 1947 Friel developed a plan to place as much of San Leandro’s residential property under restrictive covenants as possible, limiting future property sales to “members of the Caucasian race.”
If there is any documented complicity by the City of San Leandro in establishing discriminatory policies, it remains well-hidden today. However, the actions of the business leaders and residents of the time are documented:
The San Leandro News-Observer reported in the autumn of 1947 that Friel outlined his “plan for protecting property values” in an address “before the board of directors of the Chamber of Commerce,” which concluded with “the board giving its approval of the program and authorizing that a letter of approval of his program be furnished Friel.” In undisguised language the News-Observer announced that the “sudden increase in the East Bay Negro population” meant that “local neighborhoods are spontaneously moving to protect their property values and calling upon Friel’s company to assist them.”…These restrictions enjoyed official local support through the San Leandro Chamber of Commerce and city council…
Many homeowners associations, few of which are thriving today, were a part of the effort to seal off San Leandro’s borders to African Americans:
Already known in the East Bay for designing racial covenants that could survive close legal scrutiny, Friel responded to the Court’s landmark decision by reconfiguring San Leandro’s covenant agreements into “neighborhood protective associations,” pseudo-corporations of homeowners that could legally select acceptable home buyers through “corporation contract agreements” as long as “race and creed” were not taken into account…
…Despite its history of housing discrimination, according to the 2000 census, San Leandro is now a diverse community, with whites comprising just over 50% of the population, Asians 23%, Hispanics 20% and African Americans 10%.
Posted by Mike Katz-Lacabe at July 5, 2007 6:37 PM
Right, because doing political organizing in Oakland is the definition of staying in your comfort zone.
You throw around insults like manhole covers, and with the same timbre.
Been to Oakland recently, Booman?
I have.
San Francisco East, much of it.
Like Brooklyn after Manhattan priced out.
Gentrification west.
Besides…who says he’s telling the truth?
You know about me. Do you know about him?
I doubt it.
AG
I was in Oakland as recently as last July, and it didn’t seem like San Francisco at all.
AG is right…the well-heeled hordes are moving across the bay and making it into SF East. Like my old low-rent Emeryville, now home to million-dollar shacks, massive retail, and a movie theater.
Emeryville also has the highest Minimum Wage ordinance in the United States.
Berkeley to the north, SF across the bay, prime real estate on the waterfront…slowly the worm turns, but turn it does.
AG
You see Arthur, to Liberals it is OK if people of color live in poverty and can be shot at will by either cops of gangs, as long as white working men can be pulled down into that Hell also. It’s the politics of Hate. In the ’60s, our AA citizens demanded their rights as citizens, demanded to be able to live like white people. Now, apparently they have given up and — edged on by those “elites” — they just want whitey to suffer as well. No more talk of the colorblind society, just the white demons.
People of color want to bring “whitey” down to their level because they’ve given up? I’m not white and you’re so full of shit with this line.
White demons? Lovely generalizations. The essence of your complaint here is that black folks are to blame for the worsening situation of some in the white working class. Your opinion of how people of color live are on the same wavelength Trump has been on as he does “outreach”.
I don’t know who you think you’re fooling with talk of voting for Gary Johnson. Just vote for Trump and be done with it. He’s your guy.
A fine example of hatred and misattribution of motives. Enjoy being on the Dem’s plantation, huh?
Our little exchange here had nothing to do with politics. With every word you’re just exposing what you’ve become. Own it.
Look in the mirror. You will see what you accuse.
Voice, this exchange is beneath you. Please reconsider.
Besides his opposition to the Vietnam War, MLK Jr was protesting against economic inequality by joining striking Memphis sanitation workers. These workers were demanding recognition of a union and better wages. The night before he was assassinated, King gave his promised land speech to an audience consisting of some of these workers. These actions threatened TPTB, as well.
Thanks for this recognition, karl. Happy Labor Day!
And you’re fine with setting Trump loose as President to execute his violent, dystopian vision, described by you as something that would “shake things up here”. You claim this as perhaps preferable among the set of options before us.
Yeah, you’re in solidarity with your fellow Americans.
I am not in solidarity with you or your “fellow Americans,” that’s for sure. s far as i am concerned people who are actively campaigning for Hillary Clinton are lambs being led to slaughter. neoliberalism has flat-out failed. End of story. Trump? he’s no better. If you were humping for rump I’d oppose you as well. I really don’t have any answers except wait this farce out and see what happens next. Either way…or any other way that might be shaken out of the situation by the controllers…we are currently in deep shit. You want to continue rolling around in it because…because you’re used to the smell, I guess.
I am not.
End of that story as well.
AG
P.S. Read my sig for more.
Arthur offers a “plan” which would actively lead to worse government, more violence, more harm done to people in the U.S. and around the world.
I disagree. Others have a better plan forward.
Again…where do you live?
In some sort of gated community, maybe?
Far away from the real world?
Or are the gates simply in your mind?
AG
Arthur – your lambs-to-slaughter argument would have weight if you had been talking about the primaries.
But now, in the general, it is not lambs-to-slaughter: people easily see the epic disaster that Trump would bring, which makes even a Clinton presidency look like a garden party.
You are right that neoliberalism has failed — but that does not mean that there are not worse alternatives out there; in fact, a worse alternative is staring us in the face.
I hate that I am going to vote for Clinton, but I will do it because that is the only reasonable choice I have been given. Do I wish that I had worked even harder supporting Sanders? Absolutely. But in the end I have to deal with the cold reality that I can vote for failed neoliberalism or some kind of unhinged fascism. The choice for me is easy.
And if people want to shy away from that cold truth and stay home on election day or vote 3rd party, they are deluding themselves if they think that they are somehow purer than the rest of us fools who are going to vote for Clinton.
I hear you over and over again railing against both Clinton and Trump (for good reason), but the time to actually do something about it ended several months ago.
We are where we are.
Regarding those “low prices”. As I see it, American retailers buy Chinese goods at one fourth the US cost but sell them at half to two thirds the price, resulting in a huge markup.
You’re right about that. At the beginning, the items were inexpensive–like teaser rates–to get people hooked. Now the prices are not that low and that goes for Walmart too.
Classic predatory pricing.
When I hear the word elite, I read it from the perspective of C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite.
The intellectual origins of The Power Elite is retrospection on the rise of national socialism and especially Franz Leopold Neumann’s Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism.
The composition of the elite in 1956, the era to which Trump wants to make America great again, because it marked the ascendance of US power from World War II and set the pattern for subsequent elite positions:
Interesting that Forbes lists the 400 richest individuals in its annual survey, but I would not make an exact match with the Metropolitan 400 of 60 years ago. Nor would those who are consulted on decisions be the largest political donors. In fact the Metropolitan 400 and the Corporate Rich have become more invisible since C. Wright Mills’s day. Or have their positions in the power elite weakened? Or have they become active and visible in one of the other categories of elite.
The helpful thing about Mills’s framework is that it is relatively easy to get a draft list of who these people might be. But he warns that the power elite are not self-consciously a corporate (separate socially-embodied group). They are players in certain structural positions that collectively have the emergent property of functioning as an elite. That means that the edges of who is in and who is out are fuzzy and changeable. And social mobility happens within the institutions that constitute each of the six groups and through the changing networks of people in these groups.
The failure of the power elite in the US then is attributable to that social mobility over 60 years as anything else. So what changed:
4, The power elite wants to pay even less of the costs of the social order than they did 60 years ago; moreover, they see those costs as being legitimate only for military and police. The days of local elites wanting transit systems that served a large geographical area or functional water systems are rapidly disappearing, and where they exist state legislatures ensure they will not go forward. The infrastructure falls apart under the tax avoidance schemes of the power elite and the forced “no new taxes” pledge on the political elite backed by the histrionics of celebrity shock jocks. And resources go to building a military of questionable capabilities and a police state perfectly capable of using dogs on peaceful protesters and shooting unarmed people in the streets.
5. The power elites have degraded the six social sectors for whom they were the appointed guardians. Metropolitan civic life has almost disappeared under economic demand for longer work hours. Media has lost all pretense of education, knowledge, or contributing to a culture. In doing so it has lost self-consciousness of its function and why society tolerates it. Entertainment, on the other hand, now takes itself much too seriously. News is withering; sports news is hot or entertainment news. People who fail to know the basic factual narrative of global or US history do know in great detail the history of a particular genre of a particular information form no matter how obscure. Corporations no longer pretend to make things or deliver services; the focus is on the quarterly bottom-line alone, even if it is phoney. The customer-facing (jargon is another issue) workers know that they don’t matter and customers don’t matter, and it shows. No wonder there is a base anger to everyday life. The Warlords can’t win wars or deliver peace and stability without creating the conditions of their further enrichment; the game is now transparent in its cynicism and hyped patriotism. And people continue to die needlessly. The Corporate Rich can no longer control the corporations that they own as shareholders; rarely can they bring down a CEO without rebellion in the ranks of officer shareholders. Moreover, most do not try, liking the passive income when it comes and the tax writeoffs when it doesn’t. Finally, the Political Directorate has morphed into a deep state power elite that coordinate from inside and outside public positions. Why else is Hillary Clinton seeking an endorsement from Henry Kissinger? And all that deep state has delivered since the coups of 1963, 1968, 1980 and 2000 is its own perpetuation and enlargement of power.
And in comes the social climber Trump who is running against the power elite. Anyone who believes that is an incredible sucker. He is the shiny object of the next transformation of the power elite to greater inequality in wealth, power, and status.
Hillary Clinton is also a social climber. Her ambitious dad rose through the “American Dream” of entrepreneurship to buy her way into Wellesley and she worked hard to make that experience her ticket to where she is today, the Democratic nominee for President. Her place in the power elite is guarnateed; Trump’s is still aspirational. That’s an important difference of viewpoint. She is a former First Lady, a former Senator, a former Secretary of State. That is a classic progression of legitimate roles in the Political Directorate. It also brings with it long-term relationships with others in the power elite and with long-term colleagues outside the power elite. That is not an argument for or against her election; it is a statement of fact about her current situation in the power structure. She will still be there even if Trump is elected and she has access to a lot of the people that Trump will be depending on to carry out his policies.
IF the power elite are going to ever return to competence, awareness of the deep shit they are in across a critical mass of the players in those six sectors must be the first step. Even with a perfect Presidential candidate, that would be true and a major obstacle if it didn’t exist.
For the moment all six sectors are in denial of the collapse they are engineering in US power, US economy, and US stability. Clinton’s optimistic whistling in the dark is a campaign foil over against Trump’s faux apocalypse. It only works if it brings to power in the political directorate those who can shake up the rest of the power elite.
One of the biggest shakeups required is in the Metropolitan 400 folks in Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, and a few other states. They become regional drags on changes in national policy. And then there’s Kansas.
Once again, I am extremely pessimistic about the consequences of the upcoming election, even if Clinton wins the Presidency. That pessimism goes to (1) the rigidity of the power elite to accountability and change; (2) the strengthening police state capabilities at the federal and local (and private) levels and the willingness to use those capabilities right out of the box; (3) the weakness and fragmentation of the popular checks on those two.
An American Evita would be a positive outcome, just to pick up one of the slurs on Clinton from the evidence-less media.
Brilliant!!! Thank you, Tarheel. You should post this as a stand-alone article.
I only see one small hole in your position. You do not give enough credit…or more accurately, blame…to the “dark matter” within this system.
The Intelligence community.
Also known as Spook Central.
You write:
And then you list five subsets to that general idea, all right on point.
I would like to add a sixth. The Dark Matter of the deep state in which we live…quite analogous to the dark matter of physics. We know it’s there because we can measure its effects, but we can neither find nor control it.
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6-Over the past 60+ years the intelligence services have morphed from being a useful tool for the executive and military powers to being an equal...or possibly by now a superior... but invisible power that suffers absolutely no oversight from any other branch of the government. It is now an addition to the basic executive, legislative and judicial threesome of the original U.S. Constitution. And worst of all, it cannot be seen. It has enormous power over the media; its intelligence capabilities over that 60 years have without a shadow of doubt enabled it to amass unearthly amounts of money through investment because it knows the secrets of major corporations, but no one outside of its inner circles has as much as a clue to what it is worth, how much power it really has or what it is doing.
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I ran into an…interesting…little article in the current primary official loudspeaker for intelligence disinfo today, The Washington Post. Here it is:
On the Ciceronian adage “A liar is not to be believed even when telling the truth”, Clapper’s name on the effort is more than enough to cause one to want to examine it with a questioning eye.
More:
As you may recall, I raised a question earlier last week about numerous possibilities for some sort of electoral coup taking place this year. One of the possibilities that I mentioned was by cancellation of the election.
Read on:
Are you hearing the drift of this? The unspoken riptide below the waves? i am.
Further:
This last paragraph smacks loudly of the old “fox guarding the henhouse” approach.
There’s more of course…it seems like there’s there’s always more with these people…but you get the drift. If an “unacceptable” candidate…read Trump most likely, unless he has made sufficient promises of cooperation already…looks like it may win the election, why…
SNAP!!!
Shore we will.
Any day now.
Aaaany day now…
Could happen.
Let us pray that it doesn’t.
Let us pray.
Later…
AG
The dark matter as you call it is within the political directorate sector of Mills power elite.
Social mobility has occurred there as well as it has ballooned in size. It can no longer be kept within the Ivy League. I would say that the morphing occurred rather quickly during the Bill Donovan era in OSS and the Allen Dulles era in the CIA.
If this is serious stuff, you are seeing an inter-sectoral fight within the power elite. Or a circling the wagons against the lone interloper.
The article you cite could do as much disruption as any actual Russian operation. Isn’t that an interesting play by the Praetorian Guard?
The description of the threat is so vague that it is not clear how the risk would play out. After all, we know how Florida was engineered in 2000; stripping 90,000 ex-felons (loosely identified by a private data broker) from the voter rolls, most of whom were African-American. Plus the clever Palm Beach County butterfly ballot that had Gore voters voting for Buchanan.
And we know the speculation about Ohio in 2004. After people started watching out for Diebold errors, some rural counties delayed their counts and issued just the right number of votes to overcome a Kerry lead. A legal challenge to validate the count was made moot by the destruction of evidence from the local polling stations.
In both those stories, there were many pieces that had to fall just right in order to alter just one state. The idea of stealing a national election with Trump’s current state poll numbers is kind of weird if they are acting for Trump and the idea of running a slack campaign so as to steal an election is also not plausible for Clinton. So cui bono?
Both Gore and Kerry conceded to avoid a Constitutional crisis bigger than the Bush v. Gore debacle.
The question if the excluded candidate is Trump is will he concede? Some read his “rigged election” charges as saying he won’t.
The same question goes for Clinton. Will she concede if she thinks that the election has been stolen and has the potential to prove it? The assumption is that she is in the Gore and Kerry frame of avoiding a Constitutional crisis. That she will be a pushover at defending the vote.
To my mind, someone, not necessarily any of the candidates is hyping a cyberconflict with Russia — possibly as cover for something else unrelated to elections and possibly unrelated even to Russia. But this is just tinfoil hat speculation as is the scenario that that article is peddling. What rigs the election is the news stories. BTW, the authors of that particular story are Dana Priest, Ellen Nakashima and Tom Hamburger. Priest brought the dark prisons into the light; she has some credibility. And she and William Arkin have warned of the growing power of the inttelligence community.
This caught my attention:
Looks like the DNI working over the refs just before Obama went to talk with Putin about the possibility of a mutual cyberattack standdown. No doubt that fact and public knowledge of Stuxnet and other NSA operations has given Putin the idea that cyberspace is now open as a theater of conflict or maneuver. The US has never thought that it wasn’t.
After this little ramble, I’m less worried about election tampering or funny business but expect that all sides will be hyping this to their supporters to turn out the vote.
It is interesting how wrought up the US gets when other nations imitate its policies and tactics.
You write:
“It is interesting how wrought up the US gets when other nations imitate its policies and tactics. “
Indeed it is.
Especially when they best us at it.
AG
You also write:
“The dark matter as you call it is within the political directorate sector of Mills power elite.”
But what if it has seceded…if it stands independently, as a competing force?
What then?
That would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?
Its war of secession?
The assassinations.
Or maybe the Watergate caper.
Or both.
Could be…
AG
Reference the history of the Roman Praetorian Guard. It’s that kind of elite dynamic.
Who guards the guardians?
Yes. Human nature repeats and repeats and repeats again, doesn’t it. Always the same shit in different containers.
So it goes.
Thanks…
AG
We are just apes in clothes.
Yup.
AG