At his recent press conference, an angry President-Elect Trump accused CNN, now part of the US’ third largest media conglomerate, to be “fake news”. He officialised the well known fact that the cable network, like other mainstream news organisations in the US, is entwined with the military industrial and intelligence systems, with its reporters often doubling as propagandists, counter-intelligence agents and cheerleaders. The derisive monickers “Clinton News Network” and “CIA News Net” are not unsubstantiated.
Barack Obama, a President literally raised and trained by the intelligence complex as a role model of politically correct “BoBo” liberalism, has bound even more tightly than before media and IT powerhouses with the political machine that took him to the White House. While dramatically expanding government secrecy, repression and surveillance, he dropped an average of 72 bombs a day somewhere overseas during his eight-year tenure. Civilian intel agencies now operate for the Democratic ruling elite and its allies and patrons such as George Soros, as a political police working full time to sabotage and help overthrow the soon-to-be President.
The current CIA director John Brennan voted communist in his youth and is an Arabicist, who headed the Agency’s station in Saudi Arabia. He is reported to have converted to Islam, which might explain his selection by a President who has Muslim roots and affinities. Brennan’s public hostility to Trump and his long-standing policy of supporting Islamist rebels in Libya and Syria are perhaps not solely rooted in professional convictions.
The systemic crisis is not unprecedented in the US, where the lines between the political system and organised crime syndicates have long been thin and porous. Decades ago, the CIA stepped out of its formal mandate as an agency operating abroad to assume a critical role in US elections and political processes and every President has had to deal with this fact.
Like John Kennedy and Richard Nixon before him, Trump is confronted with that mighty scourge. “17 intelligence agencies” have openly conspired to discredit him by leaking to friendly media unproven allegations of Trump being in effect a Russian agent, thereby opening the door to his impeachment, while the outgoing Obama team is ratcheting up tensions in Europe to force his successor’s hand into a strategic impasse even before his inauguration. Yet, even though it has been argued by both Wikileaks’ founder and by US intelligence experts that the DNC leaks came from inside the Democratic Party, it can also be pointed out that all alleged Russian hackers did was present to the American public opinion a mirror of its own regime. Americans are getting a healthy dose of the medicine they commonly force on many other countries as part of their foreign policy.
The conflict between the two Americas—the bipartisan “Open Society”, imperialist neo-con elite and the Trumpist mid-western and southern middle classes allied with a section of the industrial sector—threatens the viability of the system and even the fabric of the nation.
Russia is the key bone of contention, as in the days of the Cold War, because the Kremlin is the ideal bogey that much of the ruling military-technocratic oligarchy in the US habitually raises, to keep boosting its one trillion a year plus national security budget (not counting some seven trillions that are officially listed as “missing” during the last two decades). Lots of very powerful people and their retainers depend and thrive on this bottomless slush fund. In their perspective, accusing a recalcitrant President of treason makes sense, though it is well known that even if Trump were proven to have sold out to Moscow, he would be far from unique. Many top politicians in America are notoriously bought and paid for by either private interests not committed to the country’s welfare or by foreign governments, “friendly” or not. The Clintons have long benefited from huge contributions made to them, directly or indirectly by oil-producing and other countries, and the Zionist lobby controlled by Israel is well known for bankrolling a large number of senators and congressmen. Recent admissions in a letter to the Daily Mail by a former member of David Cameron’s Cabinet that his country is “in hock” to the Jewish state and that “MPs act as agents of foreign powers” has not surprised many. China, among other states, is also generously and regularly funding influential US (and European) statesmen and bureaucrats. The globalisation of the American empire has, as a corollary, the increasing internationalisation of the US political system, which is infiltrated and pulled hither and thither by anonymous and not-so-hidden foreign puppet masters.
The real question is not so much whether Trump is his own man or is under obligation to President Vladimir Putin, but rather how he is going to tackle the massive challenge he is facing from a rival gang, whose leaders are both Republicans and Democrats, joined by common interests and paymasters.
The history of one of his main enemies within his own party, exposed by Congressional researcher and Senate Counsel Jeff Gates, John McCain is instructive. Nicknamed the “Hanoi Song bird” when he was in Vietcong captivity, “war hero” McCain initiated his political career by marrying into the Hensley bootlegging clan, affiliated to Meyer Lansky’s underworld empire. Involved in various financial scandals as one of the “Keating Five”, the long standing senator and ex-presidential candidate has been one of the drivers of the policy to involve the US into a direct war with Russia in Ukraine, the Caucasus and the Baltic states and to arm and support the Al Qaeda-Jabhat al Nusra among other terrorist groups in Syria, through US trading companies which deal in weapons, many manufactured in his own state of Arizona. He has also been accused of meeting with some of the founders of the so-called Islamic State in its early days. His rationale, apart from personal profit, is to prevent any détente or agreement with Russia in Europe and a settlement in the Middle East, where the “strategy of tension” and unending wars ensure rising arms sales for US corporations.
McCain is one of the key lobbyists for the state of Israel, worried about the prospect of an agreement between Washington and Moscow, which could bring about, with the EU’s and China’s cooperation, a negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestine, entailing substantial concessions on the part of the Jewish state as well.
Trump is seen by many Israeli policymakers as eager to take a backseat in the Israel-Palestine issue and let other countries, within and outside the region, assume a bigger role in the negotiations. That evokes the spectre of Turkey, the Gulf states, Egypt and even Iran having a say in making the final deal. Attacked as a prospective “traitor” to Israel by some community leaders in the US, like Obama has been, Trump may be using his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who belongs to a prominent conservative Jewish family, as a rampart and he plans to hand him that s
ticky wicket in order to personally concentrate on his plans to rebuild America’s infrastructure, heavy industry and competitiveness.
The conflict between the two Americas—the bipartisan “Open Society”, imperialist neo-con elite and the Trumpist mid-western and southern middle classes allied with a section of the industrial sector—threatens the viability of the system and even the fabric of the nation. Confronted with a dogged and ruthless opposition, the new President will have little choice but to drastically purge the Augean stables of the intelligence community and reshape the media as he has pledged to. Whatever may be held against him, he cannot be accused of lacking courage, which is sorely needed. Will the current political clash turn into a new civil war? Neither the frayed tempers, the frustrations nor the weapons are lacking in this explosive mix.