If you didn't believe the Deep State is beyond democratic
control before, you now have no choice---not after the last
minute mugging the Donald received on his way to releasing these ancient
JFK assination files.
And believe us, they are indeed
ancient. Your editor was sitting in high school civics class learning about the
difference between America's open society and democratic government and the
secretive Kremlin dictatorship of the Soviet Union when news of the Dallas
tragedy came over the school's PA.
Needless to say, the theory
that the assassination was the work of a lone gunman in the Texas
Book Depository, who fired three shots in 11 seconds with a 1890 vintage
Italian rifle and hit President Kennedy from 265 feet was never very
satisfying from the beginning.
While the record of Oswald's
proficiency as a military marksman is highly disputed, the distance of the
so-called third shot was equivalent to a touchdown run from your
own 12 yard-line. Even as country boy hunters back in the day, we
could appreciate that would have been quite a feat.
Nor did we find it any more
convincing a few years later when as a college anti-war radical we
realized that the despicable Alan Dulles, founder of the CIA, had been a
member of the Warren Commission and was the behind the scenes puppeteer who
shaped the report. And, oh, Alan Dulles loathed Kennedy for firing
him after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and was therefore possessed of no special
zeal to get to the bottom of what actually happened.
At length, a large share of
the American public also came to doubt the report---especially after
Oliver Stone's brilliant conspiracy movie called JFK hit the theatres in 1991. So
the very next year, twenty-five years ago, Congress ordered all the
files to be released no later than October 26, 2017.
In effect, that meant the CIA, FBI
and rest of the so-called intelligence community had been given 6,250 government business days to review the
files and redact or delete what they would.
Yet as of last weekend, the
Donald, who is virtually a conspiracy theory aficionado and a friend
of Roger Stone who believes LBJ did it, had every reason to let it all
hang out. To that end, he tweeted that the files are finally on the
way----fully 54 years after the event:
Subject to the receipt of further information,
I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to
be opened.
Moreover, as of 3:56 PM
Wednesday, the President of the United State had apparently not received
any "further" information.
Accordingly, he tweeted again, absent the qualifier:
The long anticipated release of the #JFKFiles will
take place tomorrow. So interesting!
Except it didn't. After two-and-one-half decades to prepare, the CIA and
FBI literally took a fire axe to the Oval Office door, vetoed the
President's clear power under the statute to make the release and then
forcibly repossessed some 200 of the 3,000 JFK documents .
Of course, this mugging was done
for the same hackneyed "secrecy" reason which allows the Deep
State to keep Congress and the public in the dark about much of what goes on in
Washington's globe-spanning Imperial operations---such as the most recent
revelations about Niger.
In fact, there are
6,000 US forces conducting more than 3,500 missions per year all around
the African continent. Niger was just the tip of the iceberg, which
apparently includes troops and missions in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad,
Gabon, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, the Seychelles, Sierra Leone,
Togo, Uganda, Tunisia, Kenya, Ghana, Djibouti and undoubtedly
still others.
The point is, the Deep State
simply asserts that "sources
and methods" must be protected and that's all it
takes. A curtain of secrecy then slams down that only a few members of the
Congressional intelligence and national security committees can peer behind.
Of course, the whole shebang is a
farce because 98% of what is being protected comes from so-called SIGINT (signals
intelligence). That is to say, from the massive NSA spying operations that
monitor every digital impulse that courses through the worldwide web from
virtually every spot on the planet.
And thanks to Edward Snowden's
courageous expose four years ago, the whole world now knows that NSA does
exactly that. So there are really no "sources and methods" to
protect.
Indeed, it's an open fact that the
combined budgets of the 17 US intelligence agencies amount to about $75 billion per year---a
figure 25% larger than Russia's
entire military budget, including research and development, weapons
procurement, fuel, ammo, spare parts, soldiers pay and spare boots, too!
So no enemy, adversary or friend,
as the case may be, anywhere on the earth is unaware that they are being
watched and tracked. Nothing would be "compromised" by telling
Congress and the public what the "intelligence community" has
gathered from SIGINT----such as any digital proof that Russia
hacked John Podesta's email--- and most of its other sources,
too.
In fact, however, the elected
politicians who come and go in the Imperial City are so domesticated to this
insane regime of secrecy that they simply acquiesce to a system that is utterly
ridiculous. To wit, there are more than 5.1 million non-elected
bureaucrats, consultants and contractors with security clearances,
including 1.5
million with "top secret" status, who
are privileged to far more "national security" information than
most Members of Congress!
Needless
to say, the fact that at one minute before midnight the FBI and CIA
pulled this "sources and methods" gambit on the JFK assassination
files is surely testimony to the unbridled power and arrogance of the Deep
State.
For crying out loud, Castro is
dead, the Soviet Union disappeared 26 years ago, and any US secret agents
in Moscow who remained alive in 1991----either have now passed on to the
hereafter or are living on a CIA pension in Florida!
However, our ruminations on
yesterday's outrage are not merely for the purpose of denouncing the CIA and
FBI and all of their malevolent doings and plots. The larger point is that a
Deep State apparatus that can operate in this unchecked manner and
with such massive resources is exactly the kind of anti-democratic usurper that
President Eisenhower famously warned about in his 1961 farewell address on
the military-industrial complex.
Unlike today's Republicans, Ike
worried about the public debt and believed that the nation's security
ultimately depended upon a vibrant capitalist economy, not an over-reaching and
over-funded military. Accordingly, he ended up cutting the defense budget he
inherited from Truman by 33%
in real terms and balanced the Federal budget
three times during his tenure-----with the eight year deficit average coming in
at under 1% of
GDP, including the 1958 recession year.
As we indicated recently, Ike's
outgoing defense budget was $52
billion, which would amount to about $300 billion in today's
purchasing power (2017 $). And that was at a time when the Soviet Union was at
the peak of its industrial and military power and could deliver thousands of
warheads by plane and missile to the continental United States.
Yet the greatest military general
ever to occupy the Oval Office believed that $300 billion of
our current money was enough even then, and that the real threat was that the
military-industrial complex would obtain "inordinate political power" and
cause the nation to bankrupt itself on excessive defense spending.
Eisenhower was right on both
counts and that is the real lesson of yesterday's mugging of our current
President. The massive regime of secrecy that blankets national security policy
and that insists on protecting 54-year old "sources and methods" is
exactly the "inordinate
political power" that Ike warned about.
The fact is, the current $700 billion defense budget is
hideously large given that the American homeland is not threatened by any
militarily capable industrial state on the planet. Russia is a pipsqueak
economy 7% as large ours with no military capacity to attack the American
homeland---other than thru a suicidal nuclear attack that no one claims is any
part of Cool-Hand Putin's game plan.
Likewise, China is a $40 trillion debt,
speculation and malinvestment infested economic house
of cards; ISIS has slithered off the pages of history; and Iran is no threat to
the American homeland whatsoever.
Oh, and the GDP of North Korea is
just $18 billion.
So does Washington really need a $700
billionmilitary budget to defend America from Kim Jong Un?
That's especially pertinent
because there is no earthly reason why Imperial Washington still has 29,000 troops in South Korea,
which mount massive military drills aimed at the North several times
every year. The whole massive phalanx of lethal US air, land and sea power
visible everywhere around North Korea, in fact, is what keeps
the Kim family business' miserable domestic economy credible in the eyes
of its endlessly propagandized public.
Stated differently, with massive
technological superiority, twice the population and 100X the
GDP of the North, South Korea could more than handle its own
defense----were Washington to permit the Korean Peninsula to be managed by the
Koreans.
But the plain fact is, you don't
keep a $700 billion military budget
funded---even by today's fiscally profligate politicians---unless there is
some semblance of a threatening enemy.
By our lights, the Fat Boy of
Pyongyang is hardly that. If anything, he emits menacing threats and
rattles his missile equivalent of sabers because he desperately wishes to avoid
becoming a victim of "regime change".
It's not pleasant. Even Kim
Jong Un has noticed that Saddam Hussein didn't have any nukes when he was
strung-up by Washington on live worldwide TV; and that the even greater
fool, Muammar Gaddafi, gave his nukes up voluntarily----only to be
dragged behind a jeep by Washington-armed rebels, who eventually awarded his
service to nuclear disarmament with a shive up the rear-end.
At the end of the day, here is the
real truth. Washington is heading for a fiscal calamity that will shatter the
foundations of the financial system. That has become more evident than ever
after even the Freedom Caucus----save for three valiant fiscal warriors (Amash,
Massie and Jones)---- threw in the towel yesterday on what amounts to a $11.5 trillion 10-year
deficit that will take the national debt to nearly $33 trillion or 140% of GDP by
2027.
Given the insuperable challenges
of the aging baby boom and the massive entitlement state they have legislated
themselves to over the last few decades, the last thing America can afford is a
pointless military empire that bleeds its fiscal accounts dry. That includes,
by the way, the $300
billionadditional annual funding for veterans of
Washington's past military follies, security assistance and foreign aid
designed to bribe its coalition of the unwilling and the debt accumulated over
the decades in the pursuit of this whole sorry business.
But as we have observed, there are
no fiscal conservatives left in the GOP. And many of those who might have
stood up to the impending $33
trillion national debt monster have---just like the
Donald yesterday----been mugged by the Deep State and its insidious regime of
secrecy.
Were the GOP backbenchers not
so blinded and immobilized by the Deep State, $400 billion could be wacked off the
nation's bloated defense budget in a heartbeat because the $300 billion that would be
left was enough for Eisenhower on the eve of JFK's tragic
assassination; it would be far more than enough today. That
is, in a world that is actually far less threatening to the safety and
security of the American Homeland.
It is only the lies and
fear-mongering of the forces which broke down the Oval Office
door yesterday that keep the real truth about the nation's
security from the Congress and the American people.
Still, you have to wonder. In the
face of what is a nearly inexorable fiscal calamity, why do the day
traders and robo-machines on Wall Street keep buying the dips?
The answer self-evidently is that
the Fed has done to honest price discovery on Wall Street what JFK
threatened to do to the CIA after the Bay of Pigs fiasco: Smash it into a
thousand pieces!
For proof, you only need
look at today's $69
billion gain in
Amazon's market cap, which brought its PE-multiple to 239X.
After all, its operating income
only declined by 40% from
the year ago quarter.
