Tag: POLITICAL
-
How The Atlantic Monthly and Kurt Andersen Went Haywire
As this web site has explained at length, the MSM has been completely unable to deal with the assassination of President Kennedy in any kind of rational or evidentiary manner. Since the recent presidential election touched upon the JFK case, we posted two columns dealing with it. (Click here for one published during the election and here for one dealing with the aftermath) From those two articles the reader will understand the historical factors that allowed Donald Trump to claim his victory much more clearly than the long story on the current cover of the Atlantic Monthly.That article was written by author and radio personality Kurt Andersen. Andersen is the current host of Studio 360, a radio program carried by WNYC in New York City. I have never listened to the show, and after reading this article, I never will. It is a weekly journal devoted to arts and culture. And that is the approach Andersen took in this essay. His rather ambitious aim is to try to explain how the last fifty odd years of American history gave us Donald Trump.
The problem is that Andersen is not a historian. In any sense of that word. And his essay does not really deal with the political or economic history of that time period. Like the program he hosts, his essay (actually an excerpt from an upcoming book) is really a cultural history. It dates, of course, from the Sixties. And on the first page, Andersen makes it clear where he is coming from and how rigged his work will be. He says that America experienced the equivalent of a national nervous breakdown in the Sixties, and in his view, we are not cured yet.
Our intrepid chronicler now gears down into what one of his main themes will be: the danger of widespread belief in conspiracy theories. After concluding that too many people do believe in conspiracy theories, he then says that this has allowed America to mutate into a Fantasyland where the public does not know what to think or believe.
Why does Andersen use the Sixties as the point of demarcation for his Fantasyland mutation? A few pages later the motive becomes clear. According to our guide, the Left began believing in these constructs because of the JFK assassination. He traces this back to Thomas Buchanan’s book, Who Killed Kennedy? published in 1964. He leaves out the facts that 1.) Buchanan’s book was originally published in France, which is where he was living at the time, and 2.) that other writers had addressed problems with the official story prior to Buchanan’s book being published in America. This allows Andersen to avoid the fact that it was not just Americans who had doubts about the JFK case—the rest of the world did also. And secondly, that respectable journals like The New Republic and The Nation had also voiced doubts about the JFK case before the publication of Buchanan’s book. And that, in 1966, Life Magazine actually devoted a cover story to the problems with the Warren Commission, entitled A Matter of Reasonable Doubt. Or that, in 1967, the Saturday Evening Post featured a cover story based on Josiah Thompson’s harsh critique of the Warren Commission, Six Seconds in Dallas. It was not just Buchanan and Mark Lane.
Let us now turn to a piece of absolutely essential cultural history—which Andersen also leaves out. The late Roger Feinman showed, with CBS internal documents, that in 1967, several reporters and mangers at CBS News wished to explore the problems with the Warren Commission’s evidence. This attempt was crushed at the executive level, most notably by CBS President Dick Salant. (see Why CBS Covered Up The JFK Assassination) That counter to a genuine journalistic effort was largely motivated by the fact that Salant’s administrative assistant was Ellen McCloy, Warren Commissioner John McCloy’s daughter. By the use of both carrots and sticks, the entire trajectory of the subsequent four-night CBS special was completely reversed by this upper level decision. Feinman demonstrates step by step how this proceeded with CBS’s own documents. Somehow, Andersen did not think that was an important piece of cultural history, even though it informs us about cultural gate-keeping.
What does Andersen think is important? Walter Sheridan’s 1967 NBC hatchet-job on Jim Garrison. No kidding. Andersen says that this infamous special, in which producer Walter Sheridan used bribes and threats to coerce witnesses, discredited Garrison’s ideas. (For an exposé of Sheridan’s reprehensible tactics, see Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 235-258) Andersen ignores the fact that the program was so one-sided, so much a broadcast disgrace, that the FCC allowed Garrison to respond under the provisions of the Fairness Doctrine. Andersen also ridicules the idea that the owners of NBC, the Sarnoff family, sanctioned the program, when such has been proven to be the case. (ibid, p. 239)
But actually, Andersen’s argument is even worse than that. It’s not enough for him to ignore what was really happening in media boardrooms, or in New Orleans. He now says that all this doubt about JFK’s death was really caused by the Jungian psychic need to reject the idea that President Kennedy could have been killed by “just one nutty loser with a mail-order rifle.” He then throws in Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Which shows how far down he is scraping. That essay has virtually nothing to do with the JFK case. Hofstadter focuses there on the movement that brought Barry Goldwater the Republican nomination in 1964. Hofstadter tried to dismiss it as odd, eccentric rightwing solipsism. Oh, how wrong he was! For that movement would revive itself 16 years later to elect that B movie actor Ronald Reagan. Like others, Andersen just wanted to use the title as another smear device.
On page 84, Andersen briefly halts his cascade of smears and mischaracterizations and comes up for air. After describing some American films of the seventies, e.g., Chinatown, The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, he allows himself this thought: “Of course, real life made such stories plausible. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break in and its cover up were an actual criminal conspiracy.”
Perhaps nothing shows just how much Andersen has stacked the deck than those two sentences. First of all, he carefully does not describe the expanse of the Watergate plot. When it was over, 69 people were indicted, 48 were convicted, and Richard Nixon was forced to resign in the face of certain impeachment. Later, Alexander Haig arranged a deal with former Warren Commissioner and new president Jerry Ford. Nixon would be spared a trial with a pardon. Which, according to most polls, helped sink Ford’s short-lived presidency.
Second of all, Andersen fails to reveal how the press found out about “the infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups”. Probably because he does not want to print the two words: “Church Committee”. If he did so, he would open up a Pandora’s Box that would largely burst the Fantasyland fairy-tale he is spinning. The Church Committee did much more than expose the infiltration of left-wing groups. It exposed CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, like Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. Further, members of that committee—i.e., Senators Gary Hart and Richard Schweiker—wrote a report that showed how the FBI and CIA had misinformed and misled the Warren Commission.
But there is even more to this story that Andersen fails to tell. The Church Committee sprang to life because its predecessor, the Rockefeller Commission, was largely seen as ineffective. In the wake of Watergate, many in Washington—like Senator Howard Baker, and future Senator Fred Thompson—thought that the official inquiry had not fully explored the role of the CIA in that crime. Therefore the Rockefeller Commission, led by Ford’s Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, arose. But this body was perceived by many, even the New York Times, as being a set-up. After all, Warren Commission lawyer David Belin was the chief counsel, and people like Ronald Reagan were on the Commission. Therefore, at a closed press briefing, Ford was asked why he had arranged things as he did. He replied that there were certain things that had to be concealed from the public. When asked what he meant by that, Ford blurted out, “Like assassinations.” (See James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, The Assassinations, p. 194) Ford is very likely talking about the JFK case since, at around this same time, he revealed to French Premier Giscard d’Estaing that, while on the Warren Commission, he had determined that some kind of organization had killed Kennedy, but he could not determine which one.
But that is not all that Andersen leaves out about the discoveries of the Church Committee. Consider the following:
- He does not mention the attempts by the FBI to drive Martin Luther King to suicide.
- He does not mention the campaign by the FBI to exterminate the Black Panthers. (For a summary of this, see Government by Gunplay, edited by Sid Blumenthal and Harvey Yazijian)
- He does not mention the explorations by both the Church and Pike committees concerning CIA control of the media. This was later summarized and expanded upon by Carl Bernstein in Rolling Stone’s, “The CIA and the Media”. (Click here for that article)
Actually, Andersen loads the dice even more. How can anyone write an essay about the 50-year decline of America’s belief in its media or institutions without mentioning the Vietnam War? Well, Andersen can. What is his longest mention of that incredibly divisive issue which essentially ripped America apart for the better part of a decade? He talks about Norman Mailer’s 1967 book, Armies of the Night, where student protesters attempted to levitate/purify the evils inside the Pentagon. Forget about 250,000 wounded Americans, and 58,000 killed, or over 4 million total dead as a result of a war that should never have been fought. Andersen says a few pages of Mailer’s book is what we should remember about that terrible epic tragedy, during which the American public was being lied to endlessly on almost a daily basis.
By painting such a foreshortened picture, Andersen can leave out the ten years of nightly TV broadcasts, daily newspaper headlines, and weekly magazine cover-stories which pummeled the public with words and images about the Vietnam War, Watergate and the exposes of the Church and Pike Committees. It was not the American people who suffered a nervous breakdown from frivolities like the UFO phenomenon. It was the acts of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, plus the exposure of abuses by the FBI and the CIA, that shocked the country and drove down the public’s belief in government. (See the chart in The Assassinations, p. 634) And that was a natural reaction to that continuous montage of horror stories. None of this was part of a fantasy. It was all too real.
What Andersen does not understand, but Michael Parenti does understand, is this: Reality can be Radical. Those ten years exposed a huge systemic failure. And the media was a part of it. One only has to recall how difficult it was to get the true story about the My Lai Massacre exposed. And how the Pentagon and Richard Nixon then did all they could to pardon the killers. But further, as Nick Turse demonstrates in his book Kill Anything that Moves, there were many other atrocities that the military purposefully covered up. For as Colonel Robert Heinl wrote in a famous article in Armed Forces Journal, the American army collapsed in Vietnam by 1969. (Click here) Yet Nixon kept the war going for four more years and actually expanded it into Laos and Cambodia. That is history that Andersen, again, ignores.
Did things get better after that? Well, there was the Iranian hostage crisis; the American backing of radical Moslems—which included Osama Bin Laden—to fight the Russian invasion of Afghanistan; Reagan’s interventions in Central America and the El Mozote Massacre (where more people died than at My Lai) and which was also covered up; the Iran Contra scandal; the heists of the 2000 and 2004 elections, which allowed the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the worst foreign policy disaster to befall this country since Vietnam. Again, somehow none of this is important to cultural historian Andersen. Maybe the author ignores it since none of it deals with the paranormal, it’s all real. But with his loaded dice, the former counts more than the latter.
Which brings us to the payoff of the article. That includes three themes: Fake News, the rise of the Internet, and the victory of Donald Trump. I think Andersen wants us to believe that somehow the first two resulted in the last. But as anyone who watched that election closely knows, such was not the case. The whole Fake News phenomenon arose after the election. And it’s a much more complex phenomenon than Andersen portrays it to be. As he does with many issues, Robert Parry had done the best reporting on this flashpoint. (See here for an example)
The use of the Internet probably did help Trump’s campaign, but not in the way that Andersen thinks. Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, used a little-known company called Cambridge Analytica to micro-analyze social media data and target trends and tendencies with voters. (Click here for a good article on this) Using this data he was able to detect weaknesses in Hillary Clinton’s and the Democratic Party’s supposed fortress: the Northeast Rust Belt. In an interview Bannon did the day after the election, he said Trump’s strategy was twofold: 1.) They had to hold the south, that is, North Carolina and Florida, and 2.) They had to win some states in the Rust Belt. This is why Trump visited Michigan almost twice as many times as Clinton, and why he honed his message as one of economic nationalism—rounding up illegal immigrants, building a wall, tariffs on Chinese imports—this countered Clinton’s failed use of identity politics, e.g., Alicia Machado.
Bannon realized that Clinton could not effectively counter that Electoral College strategy. The reason being that her husband’s record on fair trade was pretty much indefensible. As many have commented, Bill Clinton was the best Republican president since Eisenhower. Bannon and Kellyanne Conway ran a very astute and pointed campaign. The Clinton campaign had much more money, many more workers, and much more favorable media. And they still lost. The problem was not just campaign tactics. Hillary Clinton simply could not fire up her own base the way that Bernie Sanders could have. Which is another factor that Andersen leaves out. Sanders outflanked the Democratic establishment almost as effectively as Trump did the GOP. Did he do that with Fake News? Or an alternative reality dealing with UFO’s and the levitation of the Pentagon? Further, according to a pre-election poll, Sanders would have beaten Trump fairly soundly. Which renders Andersen’s silly article even sillier.
But what happened afterwards also renders the article silly. Trump’s ratings have cratered since he was elected. Is that also due to Fake News? No. It’s because America has realized that Bannon’s campaign was really a sales pitch. Which Trump, a real estate salesman, managed to deliver perfectly. Trump and the Republican Party really have no solutions to the complex issues that have assaulted this country: like the gutting of the Middle Class. Past his campaign slogans and themes, Trump simply has no vision for America. Except to make the health care problem even worse and cut more taxes for the wealthy. The real mystery about Trump is how he changed paths so radically from 2000 until today. If one recalls, when he was pondering a presidential run for the Reform Party ticket, he was much more moderate in his policies, more like a Democrat. No reporter ever tried to explain this paradox.
Of course, Andersen mentions the Trump/Roger Stone accusations of Ted Cruz’s dad allegedly being in a photo with Oswald in New Orleans. Yet Trump endorsed the Warren Commission verdict of Oswald being the lone assassin. And it was people in the JFK community, like David Josephs, who showed that Trump was wrong about that identification.
Yes, there is a crisis of confidence in this country. And yes, it has gotten worse over time. And, as mentioned above, for very good reasons. And as Larry Sabato showed in the polling for his book The Kennedy Half Century, and as Kevin Phillips showed in his volume, Arrogant Capitol, it began with the issuance of the Warren Report. Most people today think that the Warren Report was wrong, and something went awry with the country after the Kennedy assassination. And they are right (e.g., Vietnam).
Andersen’s ridiculous essay is a pile of smoke and mirrors designed to distract from that fact.
-
Fraud in the 1960 Illinois Vote Count Giving Victory to JFK is a Myth
By Paul von Hippel, At: The Washington Post
-
The 2016 Election, Historical Amnesia and Deep Politics
By now, I think it is safe to say that everyone is kind of sick of discussing the 2016 election season. However nauseating it may have been, it proved to be unprecedented and monumental in various ways. Unprecedented, for example, in the fact that the two major party candidates were the most disliked in modern political history. The Republican candidate, now President-elect, who touts himself as a good businessman yet probably couldn’t tell you the difference between Keynes and Marx, has run perhaps the most hate-filled, deplorable campaign in recent memory. He often speaks of running the country like a business and harps on immigration as one of the major problems facing this country. Yet he never discusses substantive issues in detail (for example, the tens of millions of poverty- and hunger-stricken children living in the United States alone), and frequently demonstrates a poor grasp of them (such as the nuclear triad). In fact, he compulsively prevaricates and can’t seem to string two cohesive sentences together. Therefore it is hard in many cases to see where he actually stands. (For a revealing example of this, watch this clip.)
The former Democratic candidate, on the other hand, bears a resemblance to an Eisenhower Republican. She is an intelligent and experienced politician full of contradictions. She was certainly preferable to Trump on domestic issues, e.g., women’s rights, race, and overall economic policy—not to mention global scientific matters like climate change. Nevertheless, there are serious problems with Hillary Clinton’s record. While Trump compulsively exaggerates and prevaricates, Hillary Clinton is not the epitome of honesty or integrity either. Up until 2013, she didn’t support same-sex marriage, yet got defensive and lied about the strength of her record on this issue. 1 Despite the fact that FBI Director James Comey publicly stated that classified material was indeed sent over Clinton’s unsecure server, she continued to dance around that subject as if she still didn’t know the public was privy to Comey’s statements.
I could expand on the former Secretary of State’s flip-flopping and dishonesty over the years when it comes to problems like email security. And the disturbing fact that five people in her employ took the Fifth Amendment rather than testify before Congress in open session on the subject. However, in spite of their receiving a great deal of media attention, failings such as these are far from being her main flaw, and are, in this author’s opinion, a distraction from much deeper issues. As previously alluded to, Clinton’s foreign policy bears much more of a resemblance to the Eisenhower/Dulles brothers’ record than it does to what one might expect from someone who describes herself as taking a back seat to no-one when it comes to progressive values.
Allen & John Foster Dulles 
Mossadegh & Shah Pahlavi For those who might not be aware, Allen Dulles (former Director of the CIA) and his brother John Foster Dulles (former Secretary of State) essentially orchestrated foreign policy under the Eisenhower administration. They were former partners at Sullivan and Cromwell, which was the preeminent law firm for Wall Street in the fifties. Allen and Foster married global corporate interests and covert military action into a well-oiled machine that promoted coups, assassinations and the blood-soaked destruction of democracies around the world. After Iran’s democratically elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh vowed to nationalize his country’s oil and petroleum resources, the Dulles brothers—who represented Rockefeller interests like Standard Oil— designed a phony indigenous overthrow that installed the corporately complicit Reza Shah Pahlavi into power in 1953. His brutal and repressive reign lasted until 1979, and his downfall provoked a fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Iran.
Arbenz centennial (2013) 
Castillo Armas (with Nixon) In 1954, the Dulles brothers were at it again in Guatemala with operation PBSUCCESS. Jacobo Arbenz, the labor-friendly and democratically elected leader of the country, was going toe to toe with other corporate interests such as the Rockefeller/Sullivan & Cromwell associated company United Fruit. Arbenz was pushing for reform that sought to curtail the neo-colonial power of United Fruit by providing more in resources for the people of Guatemala. To the Dulles brothers and other Wall Street types with vested interests, this was unacceptable and was to be depicted as nothing short of communism. Arbenz was ousted from the country in what was largely a psychological warfare operation. He was replaced with a ruthless dictator by the name of Castillo Armas. The CIA provided the Armas regime with “death lists” of all Arbenz government members and sympathizers, and through the decades that followed, tens of thousands of people either were brutally killed or went missing at the hands of the dictatorship. 2 This constant state of upheaval, terror and violence did not subside until a United Nations resolution took hold in 1996.
II
Hillary Clinton, whether she knows it or not—and it’s a big stretch to say that she doesn’t—has advocated for the same interventionist foreign policy machine created by the likes of the Dulles brothers. There are at least three major areas of foreign affairs in which she resembles the Dulles brothers more than Trump does: 1.) The Iraq War 2.) American /Russian relations 3.) American actions against Syria. In fact, she actually made Trump look Kennedyesque in this regard, no mean feat.
Clinton & Kissinger Nowadays, Clinton refers to her vote for the Iraq War as a “mistake”, but it certainly doesn’t seem like one considering the context of her other decisions as Secretary of State. Secretary Clinton’s friendships and consultations with Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright raised eyebrows in progressive circles. (Click here for the Clinton/Kissinger relationship.) Kissinger’s record as Secretary of State/National Security Adviser was most certainly one of the worst in U.S. history when it came to bloody, sociopathic, interventionist policy around the globe. During the disastrous and unnecessary crisis in Vietnam, Kissinger would nonchalantly give President Nixon death tallies in the thousands regarding Vietnamese citizens as if they were some Stalinesque statistic. Kissinger then agreed to expand that war in an unprecedented way into Cambodia and Laos—and then attempted to conceal these colossal air war actions. Of course, this was a further reversal and expansion of that war, which went even beyond what Lyndon Johnson had done in the wake of JFK’s death. President Kennedy’s stated policy was to withdraw from Indochina by 1965.
Salvador Allende 
Augusto Pinochet Kissinger was also an instrumental force for the CIA coup in Chile, which ended in the death of Salvador Allende. About Allende, he allegedly stated he did not understand why the USA should stand by and let Chile go communist just because the citizenry were irresponsible enough to vote for it. (A Death in Washington, by Don Freed and Fred Landis, p. 8) The CIA overthrow of Allende led to years of brutal fascism under military dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Clinton & Albright Madeleine Albright demonstrated similar hawkishness. (Click here for more on the Clinton/Albright relationship.) When asked about the refusal of the United States to lift UN Sanctions against Iraq and the resulting deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, Albright stated that the deaths had been “worth it.”3 Predictably, Albright’s statement was met with stunned surprise. In May of 1998, Albright said something just as surprising. At that time, riots and demonstrations against the brutal Indonesian dictator Suharto were raging all over the archipelago; there were mock funerals being conducted, and his figure was being burned in effigy. Here was a prime opportunity for Albright and the Clinton administration to step forward and cut off relations with a despot who had looted his nation to the tune of billions of dollars. Or at the very least, join the chorus of newspapers and journals requesting he step down. What did Albright do? She asked for “more dialogue”. Even in the last two days of Suharto’s reign, when major cities were in flames, when Senators John Kerry and the late Paul Wellstone were asking the State Department to get on the right side of history, Albright chose to sit on the sidelines. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 5 No. 5, pp. 3-5)
Hajji Muhammad Suharto with Nixon, Ford & Kissinger, Reagan, Bush Sr. & Bill Clinton In this regard, let us recall that Suharto came to power as a result of a reversal of President Kennedy’s foreign policy. Achmed Sukarno had been backed by President Kennedy throughout his first term, all the way up to his assassination. And JFK was scheduled to visit Jakarta in 1964, before the election. As opposed to the silence of Albright and Bill Clinton, after Suharto resigned, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center wrote a letter to his successor asking for an investigation of the role of the military in suppressing the demonstrations that led to his fall. (ibid)
During her time as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton displayed an American imperiousness akin to the previous examples. Whether the former Secretary’s intentions in Libya truly aimed at ending what she called a “genocidal” regime under Gaddafi doesn’t really matter. She personally pushed for a NATO sanctioning of bombings in Libya. (This NATO assault in Africa followed the standard set by Albright in Kosovo in 1999, which was the first offensive attack NATO had ever performed.) The assault on Libya eventually led to the murder of Muammar Gaddafi. And that paved the way for a dangerous political power vacuum in which various elements, including Islamic extremists, are vying for power. It is safe to say that she left Libya in such a shambles that the USA had to reenter the civil war.
Clinton’s decision to arm Syrian “rebels” against Bashar al Assad has also helped create bloody conflict with no end in sight. (Click here for why this may be a strategic mistake.) Bombings occur on a daily basis, especially in areas like Aleppo, leaving tens of thousands of innocents dead. As a candidate, she wanted to establish a “no-fly zone” over Syria—much as she did in Libya. This was a euphemism for controlling the air so that American proxies could control the ground. And as many suspect, and as alluded to in the above-linked story, that likely would have led to fundamentalist dominance in Syria, resembling the endgames in Iraq and Libya. But beyond that, this would probably have ended up provoking Russia, since Russia backs Assad. (Ibid, n. 3)
“Pacific Rubiales:
How to get rich in a
country without regulations”Secretary Clinton’s policy regarding Latin America, another topic avoided by the media during the last election cycle, also demonstrates knowing or unknowing complicity with colonial/imperial interests. In Colombia, for instance, a petroleum company by the name of Pacific Rubiales, which has ties to the Clinton Foundation, has been at the center of a humanitarian controversy. The fact that Pacific Rubiales is connected with the Clinton Foundation isn’t the main issue, however. The real problem is the manner in which positions were changed on Clinton’s part in exchange for contributions. During the 2008 election season, then-Senator Clinton opposed the trade deal that allowed companies like Pacific Rubiales to violate labor laws in Colombia. After becoming Secretary of State, Clinton did an about-face. As summed up by David Sirota, Andrew Perez and Matthew Cunningham-Cook:
At the same time that Clinton’s State Department was lauding Colombia’s human rights record (despite having evidence to the contrary), her family was forging a financial relationship with Pacific Rubiales, the sprawling Canadian petroleum company at the center of Colombia’s labor strife. The Clintons were also developing commercial ties with the oil giant’s founder, Canadian financier Frank Giustra, who now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global philanthropic empire. The details of these financial dealings remain murky, but this much is clear: After millions of dollars were pledged by the oil company to the Clinton Foundation—supplemented by millions more from Giustra himself—Secretary Clinton abruptly changed her position on the controversial U.S.-Colombia trade pact.” 4
Clinton & Zelaya (2009) 
Despite recent denials, the former Secretary also played a role in the 2009 coup that ousted the democratically elected and progressive human rights administration of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. Recent editions of Clinton’s autobiography Hard Choices have been redacted to conceal the full extent of her role in the overthrow. Since the coup, and in opposition to the supposed goals of the overthrow itself, government-sponsored death squads have returned to the country, killing hundreds of citizens, including progressive activists like Berta Cáceres. Before her assassination, Cáceres berated Secretary Clinton for the role she played in overthrowing Zelaya, stating that it demonstrated the role of the United States in “meddling with our country,” and that “we warned it would be very dangerous and permit a barbarity.” 5
In addition, the U.S.-backed coup in Honduras demonstrates the ongoing trend of outsourcing when it comes to intelligence work. A private group called Creative Associates International (CAI) was involved in “determining the social networks responsible for violence in the country’s largest city,” and subcontracted work to another private entity called Caerus. A man by the name of David Kilcullen, the head of Caerus, was previously involved in a $15 million US AID program that helped determine stability in Afghanistan. Kilcullen’s associate, William Upshur, also contributed to the Honduras plans. Upshur is now working for Booz Allen Hamilton, another private company involved in U.S. intelligence funding. (Ibid, n. 5)
In his 2007 book, Tim Shorrock explained how substantial this kind of funding is. Shorrock stated that approximately 70 percent of the government’s 60-billion-dollar budget for intelligence is now subcontracted to private entities such as Booz Allen Hamilton or Science Applications International Corporation. 6
Puerto Rico, a country in the midst of a serious debt crisis, is another key topic when it comes to Clinton’s questionable foreign policy decisions. Hedge funds own much of Puerto Rico’s massive debt, and a piece of legislation, which was put forward to deal with the issue, has rightly been labeled by Bernie Sanders as a form of colonialism. The bill in question would hand over control of financial dealings to a U.S. Government Board of Regulators, which would likely strip vital social spending in Puerto Rico. The bill already imposes a $4.25 minimum wage clause for citizens under 25. While Sanders opposed this bill, Clinton supported it. 7 This may serve as no surprise, being that the former Secretary of State receives hefty sums from Wall Street institutions like Goldman Sachs, who benefit from this form of vulture capitalism. I am not asserting that Hillary Clinton is solely responsible for these foreign policy decisions, but that she has been complicit with the American Deep State that commits or is heavily involved in these operations. (An explanation of the term “Deep State” will follow.) If the results of this 2016 election, and the success of both Trump and Sanders in the primaries, teach us something, it is that we have to move away as quickly as possible from policy compromised by corporate influence if we truly want to move forward. The American public has clearly had enough with establishment politics.
III
With the election of Donald Trump, the viability of establishment politics has been seriously breached, effectively ending the age of lesser-evil voting by the proletariat. Although Hillary Clinton was the preferred candidate regarding things like domestic social issues and scientific issues, it wasn’t enough to tame the massive insurgency of citizens who were so fed up with the status quo that they would rather see the country possibly go up in flames than vote for more of the same. Nor did it inspire an overlooked independent voter base to come out and make a substantial difference in the Democratic vote. In the aftermath of this potential disaster of an election, it is our duty, as a collective, to look deeply into some troubling fundamental issues. One of these has to do with the fact that racism, xenophobia and sexism are still very much alive in this country.
I will not go so far as to label all Trump supporters as racist, homophobic or sexist. And throughout the primary/general election season, I have tried to remain receptive to their frustrations. However, I can most certainly tell you that, based on my experiences of this election season alone, these sentiments do indeed exist. During a delegate selection process for the Bernie Sanders campaign, I met and ended up having discussions with some Trump supporters. I asked them questions about why they thought Trump would make a good president, all the while disagreeing with them, but listening nonetheless. Two of the men I was speaking with were very civil, but one in particular seemed to be bursting at the seams with frustration over what he thought were the main problems with the country. While ignoring the facts I was presenting him regarding corporate welfare, this man went into relentless diatribes about why “Tacos”, his label for Hispanic people, were wreaking havoc. He exhibited no shame in expressing his distaste for other ethnicities either. During this dismaying exchange, I brought up the continued mistreatment of Native American peoples. In response, this man tried to question the severity of the atrocities committed against them and even went so far as to imply that my use of the term genocide in describing their plight was incorrect.
Steve Mnuchin This may well serve to exemplify the hateful attitudes of mistrust and resentment that have been put under a black light during the course of this election. They’ve lingered dormant under the surface and have reached a boiling point thanks to Donald Trump. To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, Trump was able to channel the frustration of a destitute middle class and convert it into unconstructive anger. While Trump made references to how the “establishment” was a major problem, like many of his policy points, he didn’t ever describe in detail what was to be done to correct it. Instead, with his references to a wall with Mexico and to mass deportations, he encouraged the belief in his supporters that minorities were ruining the country. Yet in spite of his campaign promise to “drain the swamp”, many of the Trump cabinet appointees are among the most Establishment type figures one could imagine. For example, Steve Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs executive famous for foreclosures and hedge fund deals, has been appointed Secretary of Treasury.
The election of a man like Donald Trump, who can’t seem to expound any of his policies in any sort of detail and is openly demeaning towards women, people of other races, and the disabled, makes clear that we have a cancerous political system which has metastasized in large part thanks to establishment politicians beholden to corporate interests. And these politicians are wildly out of touch with the needs of the average American. This created a very wide alley that the new Trump managed to rumble through. (I say “new” because in one of the many failings of the MSM, no one bothered to explain why Trump had reversed so many of the proposals he made back in 2000, when he was going to run on the Reform Party ticket.) Some commentators have claimed there can be little doubt that there was a liberal disillusionment following President Obama’s election. Hillary Clinton could not convince enough people that she was even the “change candidate” that Obama was. Therefore, in the search for answers for why their lives weren’t improving, many citizens had to find alternate sources of information outside of corporate influenced organizations (i.e. The Republican Party, Democratic Party and the Mainstream Media), given those groups won’t admit to the public that they are subservient to the same big money interests. This explains the rise of figures like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and even rightwing populist/conspiracy demagogue Alex Jones. Their collective answer is to paint minorities and welfare recipients as the principal ills of American society, all the while failing to recognize the deep connection between government policy and corporate influence. In short, this election warns us that when the real reasons behind government dysfunction are ignored and go unchallenged, one risks the upsurge of fascist sentiments. 8
In addition to reminding us of Hillary’s relationship with Kissinger, Bernie Sanders reminded a large portion of the U.S. populace about the other fundamental issue lying beneath the surface: corporate power. And Sanders could have neutralized Trump’s appeal among the shrinking working and middle classes, which the latter earned by invoking the need for tariffs and the threat of trade wars. This certainly was another reason for Trump’s popularity in the Mideast states like Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan and Ohio, where he broke through the supposed Democratic firewall. (As to why, listen to this this segment by Michael Moore.) With Secretary of State Clinton’s and President Bill Clinton’s views on NAFTA and the Columbia Free Trade Agreement, and Hillary’s original stance on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), she could not mount a genuine counter-offensive to Trump’s tactics in those states, for the simple reason that the Clintons were perceived as being free-traders rather than fair-traders. Thanks to their record, a Democratic presidential candidate appeared to favor a globalization policy that began decades ago with David Rockefeller—a policy that was resisted by President Kennedy. (See Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, p. 59)
Awareness of any problem is the first step toward fixing it. But I think we must go beyond simple awareness when it comes to confronting our nation’s collective “shadow”, as Carl Jung would have called it — meaning all the darker, repressed aspects of the unconscious that, when ignored, can result in psychological backlash. How do we get beneath the surface appearances of corporate greed (for instance, the increasing wealth inequality amongst classes, or the amount of tax money allocated to corporate subsidies)? I suggest that an exploration of our past guided by a concept that Peter Dale Scott labels “Deep Politics” can help us come to terms, in a more profound way, with the problems facing us.
This concept embraces all of the machinations occurring beneath the surface of government activity and which go unnoticed in common analysis, such as in news reports or textbooks. Or, as Scott states in his 2015 book The American Deep State, it “…involves all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.”9 A “Deep Political” explanation of major world events goes beyond the ostensible or normally accepted models of cause and effect. One example of a “Deep Event” is the 1965 Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which provided a motive, or casus belli, to escalate the Vietnam War into a full-scale invasion by American ground forces. Given that President Johnson had already, in stark contrast to President Kennedy’s policy, approved the build-up of combat troops in Vietnam in 1964, all that was needed was some sort of impetus in order for United States involvement to move to the next stage. As the author describes, many of the intelligence reports received by the Johnson administration regarding this supposed incident did not signal any sort of instigation on North Vietnam’s behalf. However, those same reports were ignored in order to claim that North Vietnam had engaged in an act of war against the United States. 10
Other examples of Deep Events include the previously mentioned instances of CIA, corporate and State Department interference in the economic and governmental affairs of foreign nations. It is evident that these coups did not occur for the sake of saving other countries from the grip of communism or the reign of dictators; such would only be at best a surface explanation. The deeper explanation is that a nexus of corporate, military, paramilitary, government and, on occasion, underworld elements (viz, the workings of the Deep State) had a vested interest in the outcome. The Bush administration’s lies regarding Saddam Hussein’s alleged arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction”, presented to the American people and Congress as a reason to invade Iraq, could most certainly be classified as a Deep Event. No entities benefitted more from America’s long-term occupation of Iraq than companies like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton. KBR Inc., a Halliburton subsidiary, “was given $39.5 billion (emphasis added) in Iraq-related contracts over the past decade, with many of the deals given without any bidding from competing firms, such as a $568-million contract renewal in 2010 to provide housing, meals, water and bathroom services to soldiers, a deal that led to a Justice Department lawsuit over alleged kickbacks, as reported by Bloomberg.” 11
Included under the umbrella of Deep Politics are the major assassinations of the 1960s — those of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Poll after poll has indicated that most Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, but even today many apparently have not reasoned beyond the fact that there is something fishy about the “official” version in order to understand this murder in its fullest context. It behooves us to inquire more deeply into this historically critical event. Before I go any further, however, let me assert here—and I do so quite confidently—that anyone who still buys into the government version of events regarding, for example, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, is either not looking carefully enough, or is not really familiar with the case.
IV
A suggestive point of departure for such an inquiry are the parallels between the 2016 election and that of 1968. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King in April of 1968, racial tensions were high and a presidential primary season was in full swing. Opposition towards the Vietnam War was strong and one candidate in particular represented the last best hope for minorities, anti-war voters, and the middle, as well as lower classes. That candidate was Robert Kennedy, and by the early morning of June 5th, it was becoming clear that he would likely be the Democratic candidate to run against Richard Nixon in the general election. Within a matter of moments of making his victory speech for the California primary, Robert Kennedy was assassinated when he walked into the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. In those moments, the Sixties ended—and so did the populist hopes and dreams for a new era.
Chicago DNC 1968 
Philedelphia DNC 2016 The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was attended by the protests of disillusioned voters who felt cheated out of a more liberal, populist candidate. They ended up rioting in the streets. Hubert Humphrey, who was receiving flack for not taking a strong enough stance on the situation in Vietnam, was selected as the nominee. Similarly, there were many dissatisfied delegates and voters at the 2016 Philadelphia Democratic convention. But in a tightly controlled operation, their actions were kept hidden off screen. And the threat of stripping them of their credentials was often used to suppress any protest on the convention floor. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was nominated and her candidacy helped give us Donald Trump. In 1968, the immediate result was Richard Nixon as president. But the subsequent results included the massive increase in loss of life not just in Vietnam, but also in Cambodia, and the continuing trend away from the New Deal, anti-globalist policies of John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt.
Alger Hiss, America’s Dreyfus 
Rep. Voorhis, defeated by
Nixon’s smear campaignIn fact, Nixon had been a part of the effort to purge New Deal elements from the government during the McCarthy era. Whether it was conducting hearings on men like Alger Hiss and making accusations of Soviet spycraft, or using his California Senate campaign to falsely accuse incumbent Congressman Jerry Voorhis of being a communist, Nixon contributed to the growing, exaggerated fear of communism in the United States. This fear allowed men like Allen Dulles to be seen as pragmatists in the face of supposed communist danger. Dulles’ and the CIA’s dirty deeds on behalf of corporate power were carried out under the guise of protecting the world from communism. As described in the Allen Dulles biography by David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, sociologist C. Wright Mills called this mentality “crackpot realism.”12 It is ironic that Nixon ended up distrusting the CIA, the institution so closely associated with Allen Dulles, a man who had championed Nixon’s rise to power as both a congressman and senator.
Flash forward to 2016 and, once again, we witness the results of a Democratic Party choosing to ignore the populist outcry for reform, and of a government compromised by corporate coercion, one subject to the hidden workings of the Deep State. Bernie Sanders represented the New Deal aspirations of a working class tired of corporate-run politics. As revealed by Wikileaks, the upper echelons of the Democratic Party chose not to heed their voices, thereby indirectly aiding the election of Donald Trump, who offered a different and unconstructive form of populism.
Pence & Reagan 
Rex Tillerson Being that the political spectrum has shifted far to the right as compared to 1968, this year’s election results are more extreme. Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments reflect this extremist mentality; especially in his Vice Presidential pick Mike Pence — a man so out of touch with reality that he has tried to argue that women shouldn’t be working. In 1997, Pence stated that women should stay home because otherwise their kids would “get the short end of the emotional stick.” The soon to be Vice President Pence also sees LGBT rights as a sign of “societal collapse.”13 And as for Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp”, when it comes to establishment figures, it only gets worse, considering his appointment of Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, as Secretary of State. Despite the fact that Trump appears to be “off the grid”, so to speak, when it comes to the political or Deep Political apparatus, his recent choices for cabinet positions are some of the worst imaginable for the populist of any ilk. In some cases he has actually leapt into the arms of the very establishment he warned his supporters against.
In the face of all this, Sanders continues to inspire his followers to remain politically active. We all need to be involved more than ever, and the Democratic/socialist senator from Vermont has always urged that true change lies in us having the courage to do things ourselves when it comes to reforming government. The more we stay involved, the less likely it will be that the momentum created by political movements will be squandered in the wake of a setback. The major setbacks of the 1960s came in the form of assassinations of inspiring political leaders. Yet even in the wake of such tragedies it is possible, indeed imperative, to find a glimmer of hope. To do so, however, requires, as this essay has been arguing, the insight afforded by a critical analysis of the past, and its continuities with the present. The touchstone for this historical understanding, I believe, lies precisely in the way the policies of President Kennedy have been consistently overturned by subsequent administrations.
V
As mentioned above, John Kennedy was not in favor of the neo-colonialist policies of the Dulles/Eisenhower era. Instead of wanting to occupy foreign nations for the sake of corporate profit, Kennedy believed strongly that the resources of such nations rightly belonged to their people, and that the right to self-determination was critical, as evident in his 1957 speech on French colonialism in Algeria.
Soviet stamp
commemorating Lumumba
Nixon and Mobutu at the White House In the aftermath of a CIA-assisted coup to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the nationalist leader of the Congo, President Kennedy fought alongside the U.N. to ensure that a nationwide coalition government was formed. Civil war was imminent as militant and corporately complicit leaders like Colonel Mobutu vied for power and promoted the secession of Katanga, the region of Congo that held vast amounts of mineral resources. JFK supported the more centrist elements of the potential coalition government and felt that the resources of Katanga didn’t belong to Belgian, U.S. or British mining interests. The President’s death ended hope for the pursuit of any stable government in Congo, along with the hope of halting widespread violence. 14 It should be noted that Nixon actually welcomed Mobutu to the White House after he took control of Congo.
Sukarno at the White House As noted previously, President Kennedy also worked towards re-establishing a relationship with Indonesia and its leader Achmed Sukarno. This was after the Dulles brothers had been involved in attempts to overthrow the Indonesian leader. Decades earlier, it had been discovered by corporate backed explorers that certain areas in Indonesia contained extremely dense concentrations of minerals such as gold and copper. After Kennedy was killed, Sukarno was overthrown with help of the CIA in one of the bloodiest coup d’états ever recorded. Hundreds of thousands of Indonesians perished during both the overthrow, and the subsequent reign of the new leader Suharto. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition pp. 374-75) Need we add that Nixon also met with Suharto in Washington. In December of 1975, President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger journeyed to Jakarta and gave Suharto an implicit OK to invade East Timor. This is the tradition that Hillary Clinton and her husband were involved with. For when almost every democratically elected western nation was shunning Suharto in the late nineties, Bill Clinton was still meeting with him. (Op. cit. Probe Magazine.)
President Kennedy’s policies regarding Central and South America were also a threat to corporate interests. David Rockefeller took it upon himself to publicly criticize Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, which had been established to aid less developed nations, like those south of the United States, to become economically self-reliant. Men like Rockefeller, along with the Wall-Street-connected media (e.g.,Wall Street Journal and Time/Life) also berated the President for “undermining a strong and free economy,” and inhibiting “basic American liberties.” (14, p. 57) The Wall Street Journal flat out criticized Kennedy for being a “self-appointed enforcer of progress” (Ibid p. 66). JFK’s 1962 clash with U.S. Steel, a J.P. Morgan/Rockefeller company, provoked similar remarks.
After President Kennedy had facilitated an agreement between steel workers and their corporate executives, the latter welshed on the deal. It was assumed that the workers would agree to not have their wages increased in exchange for the price of steel also remaining static. After the agreement was reached, U.S. Steel defied the President’s wishes and undermined the hard work to reach that compromise by announcing a price increase. The corporate elite wanted Kennedy to buckle, but instead, he threatened to investigate them for price-fixing and to have his brother Bobby examine their tax returns. Begrudgingly, U.S. Steel backed off and accepted the original terms. Kennedy’s policies, both domestic and foreign, were aimed at enhancing social and economic progress. Like Alexander Hamilton, and Albert Gallatin, JFK sought to use government powers to protect the masses from corporate domination. His tax policy was aimed at channeling investment into the expansion of productive means or capital. The investment tax credit, for instance, provided incentives for business entities that enhanced their productive abilities through investment in the upkeep or updating of equipment inside the United States. (Gibson pp. 21-22) While Kennedy’s policies were focused on strengthening production and labor power, his opponents in the Morgan/Rockefeller world were focused on sheer profit.
David Rockefeller & Henry Luce in 1962 It should serve as no surprise that the media outlets responsible for condemning the president were tied into the very corporate and political establishment entities being threatened. As described by sociologist Donald Gibson in his fine book Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency, the elite of Wall Street, media executives and certain powerful political persons or groups were so interconnected as to be inbred. Allen Dulles himself was very much involved in these circles, and had close relationships with men like Henry Luce of the Time, Life and Fortune magazine empire, along with executives or journalists at the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Operation Mockingbird, a CIA project designed to use various media outlets for propaganda, was exposed during the Church Committee hearings, revealing the collaboration of hundreds of journalists and executives at various media organizations including CBS, NBC, The New York Times, the Associated Press, Newsweek and other institutions.15)
John Kennedy wasn’t only trying to curtail corporate power with his Hamilton/Gallatin, New Deal-like economic policies. His decisions concerning military engagement abroad were greatly at odds with the hard-line Cold Warriors of his administration and the Central Intelligence Agency. Time after time, Kennedy refused to commit U.S. combat troops abroad despite the nagging insistence of his advisors. Although the President publicly accepted responsibility for the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs, privately he was livid at the CIA for deceiving him. Through materials such as inspector general Lyman Kirkpatrick’s report on the Bay of Pigs, and other declassified CIA documents, it is now evident that a major deception had occurred. The Agency had assured Kennedy that their group of anti-Castro Cuban invaders would be the spark that would set off a revolt against Fidel Castro just waiting to happen. This was not the case, and the CIA-backed Cubans were outnumbered by Castro’s forces 10 to 1. Even worse, as noted in the Kirkpatrick report, was the fact that the CIA had stocked the invading force with C-Level operatives. (2, p. 396) It was almost as if the surface level plan presented to the President was designed to fail in order to force his hand and commit the military into invading Cuba. A declassified CIA memo acknowledges the fact that securing the desired beach area in Cuba was not possible without military intervention. 16
When Kennedy refused to commit U.S. troops as the operation crumbled, he became public enemy number one in the CIA’s eyes. This sentiment that Kennedy was soft on communism, or even a communist sympathizer, augmented as he continued to back away from military intervention in other situations. The President reached an agreement with the Soviet Union to keep Laos neutral, and despite his willingness to send advisors to Vietnam, he ultimately worked to enact a policy resulting in the withdrawal of all U.S. personnel from the country. Kennedy’s assassination ended this movement toward disengagement from Saigon.
What was likely even worse to the Cold Warriors and CIA patriots during this time was the President’s attempts at détente with Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. During, and in the period following, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev were involved in back channel dialogue with one another. Discussion moved toward talks about détente; despite the fact that the two men’s respective countries had differing views, they agreed it was imperative, for the sake of the planet, to come to an understanding. This, along with JFK’s unwillingness to bomb Cuba during the Missile Crisis, were nothing short of traitorous to the covert and overt military power structure of the United States. In the final months of his life, the President also extended a secret olive branch toward Fidel Castro in hopes of opening a dialogue. Excited by the prospect, Castro was painfully upset when he got word of Kennedy’s assassination. Kennedy most certainly had his enemies, and was making decisions that drove a stake into the very heart of corporate, military and intelligence collusion. If he had been elected President, Bobby Kennedy was most certainly going to continue, and most likely even expand, the policies of his late brother. (ibid, pp. 25-33) Like Jack and Bobby, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X expressed opposition toward the continuation of the Vietnam War.
VI
The concept of Deep Politics may provide a helpful alternative to the term “conspiracy theory”, which has become so stigmatized and so overused as to be meaningless. Abandoning the idea of conspiracy altogether, however, risks throwing the baby out with the bath water, for it raises legitimate questions about what lurks beneath the surface of the affairs of state. The enemies that John and Robert Kennedy were facing were not some fictional or hypothetical “illuminati” group or groups. They were very real, dangerous and powerful interests, and those forces are still with us in 2016. Deep Politics does not imply that there is some singular group or set of groups that meet in secret to plot colossal calamities that affect the entire world, but rather that the events themselves arise from the milieu(s) created by a congruence of unaccountable, supra-constitutional, covert, corporate and illegal interests, sometimes operating in a dialectical manner. A more recent example would be the networking of several of these interests to orchestrate the colossal Iran/Contra project.
Other writers have also described these subterranean forces using other terms. The late Fletcher Prouty called it the Secret Team. Investigative journalist Jim Hougan calls it a Shadow Government. Florida State professor Lance DeHaven Smith, with respect to its activities, coined the term “State Crime Against Democracy”, or SCAD. (Click here for his definition.) Smith wrote one of the best books about how, with the help of the MSM, these forces stole the 2000 election in Florida from Al Gore. He then wrote a book explaining how the term “conspiracy theorist” became a commonly used smear to disarm the critics of the Warren Commission. It was, in fact, the CIA which started this trend with its famous 1967 dispatch entitled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report”. (See this review for the sordid details.)
Whether it be extralegal assassinations, unwarranted domestic surveillance, interventionist wars at the behest of corporate interests, torture or other activities of that stripe, these all in essence have their roots in the Dulles era in which covert, corporate power developed into a well-oiled and unaccountable machine running roughshod. These forces have continued to operate regardless of who is elected president, whether Democrat or Republican. (See Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda for a trenchant analysis of the operation against Richard Nixon that came to be called Watergate.)
It is my opinion that we must come to terms with these dark or, to use James W. Douglass’ term, “unspeakable” realities. And we must do so in a holistic way if we are to take more fundamental steps toward progress as a nation. George Orwell coined the term Crime Stop to describe the psychological mechanism by which humans ignore uncomfortable or dangerous thoughts. Through discussions with people young and old, it has become evident to me that this Crime Stop mechanism is at work in the subconscious of many Americans. We need to be willing to face the darker aspects of our recent past that have been at work below the surface and percolating up into view for many years.
In a very tangible way, the refusal to face these dark forces has caused the Democratic Party to lose its way. And this diluted and uninspiring party has now given way to Donald Trump. As alluded to throughout this essay, this party has abandoned the aims and goals of the Kennedys, King and Malcolm X to the point that it now resembles the GOP more than it does the sum total of those four men. To understand what this means in stark political terms, consider the following. Today, among all fifty states, there are only 15 Democratic governors. In the last ten years, the Democrats have lost 900 state legislative seats. When Trump enters office, he will be in control of not just the White House, but also the Senate and the House of Representatives. Once he nominates his Supreme Court candidate to replace Antonin Scalia, he will also be in control of that institution.
Bernie Sanders was the only candidate whose policies recalled the idea of the Democratic party of the Sixties. And according to a poll of 1,600 people run by Gravis Marketing, he would have soundly defeated Trump by 12 points. The Democrats have to get the message, or they run the risk of becoming a permanent minority party. They sorely need to look at themselves, and ask, What happened? As a starting point, they can take some of the advice contained in this essay.
Notes
1. “Hillary Clinton Snaps At NPR Host After Defensive Gay Marriage Interview.” YouTube. WFPL News, 12 June 2014 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgIe2GKudYY>.
2. David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. New York, NY: Harper, 2015.
3. Gary Leupp, “Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy Resumé: What the Record Shows.” , 03 May 2016.
4. Greg Grandin, “A Voter’s Guide to Hillary Clinton’s Policies in Latin America.” The Nation, 18 April 2016.
5. Tim Shorrock, “How Hillary Clinton Militarized US Policy in Honduras.” The Nation, 06 April 2016.
6. Peter Dale Scott, “The Deep State and the Bias of Official History.” Who What Why, 20 January 2015.
7. Ben Norton, “Sanders Condemns Pro-austerity ‘Colonial Takeover’ of Puerto Rico; Clinton Supports It.” Salon, 27 May 2016.
8. “Chomsky on Liberal Disillusionment with Obama.” YouTube, 03 April 2010 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6Jbnq5V_1s>.
9. Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and The Attack On U.S. Democracy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015: Chapter 2, p. 12.
10. “Project Censored 3.1 – JFK 50 – Peter Dale Scott – Deep Politics.” YouTube, Project Sensored, 19 December 2013 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0CFpMej3mA>.
11. Angelo Young, “And The Winner For The Most Iraq War Contracts Is . . . KBR, With $39.5 Billion In A Decade.” International Business Times, 19 March 2013.
12. Zawn Villines, “The Four Worst Things Mike Pence Has Said About Women.” Daily Kos, 21 July 2016.
13. Richard D. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.
14. Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency. New York: Sheridan Square, 1994.
15. Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.” Rolling Stone, 20 October 1977 <http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php>.
16. David Talbot, Brothers, p. 47.
-
The 2016 Election, Historical Amnesia and Deep Politics
By now, I think it is safe to say that everyone is kind of sick of discussing the 2016 election season. However nauseating it may have been, it proved to be unprecedented and monumental in various ways. Unprecedented, for example, in the fact that the two major party candidates were the most disliked in modern political history. The Republican candidate, now President-elect, who touts himself as a good businessman yet probably couldn’t tell you the difference between Keynes and Marx, has run perhaps the most hate-filled, deplorable campaign in recent memory. He often speaks of running the country like a business and harps on immigration as one of the major problems facing this country. Yet he never discusses substantive issues in detail (for example, the tens of millions of poverty- and hunger-stricken children living in the United States alone), and frequently demonstrates a poor grasp of them (such as the nuclear triad). In fact, he compulsively prevaricates and can’t seem to string two cohesive sentences together. Therefore it is hard in many cases to see where he actually stands. (For a revealing example of this, watch this clip.)
The former Democratic candidate, on the other hand, bears a resemblance to an Eisenhower Republican. She is an intelligent and experienced politician full of contradictions. She was certainly preferable to Trump on domestic issues, e.g., women’s rights, race, and overall economic policy—not to mention global scientific matters like climate change. Nevertheless, there are serious problems with Hillary Clinton’s record. While Trump compulsively exaggerates and prevaricates, Hillary Clinton is not the epitome of honesty or integrity either. Up until 2013, she didn’t support same-sex marriage, yet got defensive and lied about the strength of her record on this issue. 1 Despite the fact that FBI Director James Comey publicly stated that classified material was indeed sent over Clinton’s unsecure server, she continued to dance around that subject as if she still didn’t know the public was privy to Comey’s statements.
I could expand on the former Secretary of State’s flip-flopping and dishonesty over the years when it comes to problems like email security. And the disturbing fact that five people in her employ took the Fifth Amendment rather than testify before Congress in open session on the subject. However, in spite of their receiving a great deal of media attention, failings such as these are far from being her main flaw, and are, in this author’s opinion, a distraction from much deeper issues. As previously alluded to, Clinton’s foreign policy bears much more of a resemblance to the Eisenhower/Dulles brothers’ record than it does to what one might expect from someone who describes herself as taking a back seat to no-one when it comes to progressive values.
Allen & John Foster Dulles Mossadegh & Shah Pahlavi For those who might not be aware, Allen Dulles (former Director of the CIA) and his brother John Foster Dulles (former Secretary of State) essentially orchestrated foreign policy under the Eisenhower administration. They were former partners at Sullivan and Cromwell, which was the preeminent law firm for Wall Street in the fifties. Allen and Foster married global corporate interests and covert military action into a well-oiled machine that promoted coups, assassinations and the blood-soaked destruction of democracies around the world. After Iran’s democratically elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh vowed to nationalize his country’s oil and petroleum resources, the Dulles brothers—who represented Rockefeller interests like Standard Oil— designed a phony indigenous overthrow that installed the corporately complicit Reza Shah Pahlavi into power in 1953. His brutal and repressive reign lasted until 1979, and his downfall provoked a fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Iran.
Arbenz centennial (2013) Castillo Armas (with Nixon) In 1954, the Dulles brothers were at it again in Guatemala with operation PBSUCCESS. Jacobo Arbenz, the labor-friendly and democratically elected leader of the country, was going toe to toe with other corporate interests such as the Rockefeller/Sullivan & Cromwell associated company United Fruit. Arbenz was pushing for reform that sought to curtail the neo-colonial power of United Fruit by providing more in resources for the people of Guatemala. To the Dulles brothers and other Wall Street types with vested interests, this was unacceptable and was to be depicted as nothing short of communism. Arbenz was ousted from the country in what was largely a psychological warfare operation. He was replaced with a ruthless dictator by the name of Castillo Armas. The CIA provided the Armas regime with “death lists” of all Arbenz government members and sympathizers, and through the decades that followed, tens of thousands of people either were brutally killed or went missing at the hands of the dictatorship. 2 This constant state of upheaval, terror and violence did not subside until a United Nations resolution took hold in 1996.
II
Hillary Clinton, whether she knows it or not—and it’s a big stretch to say that she doesn’t—has advocated for the same interventionist foreign policy machine created by the likes of the Dulles brothers. There are at least three major areas of foreign affairs in which she resembles the Dulles brothers more than Trump does: 1.) The Iraq War 2.) American /Russian relations 3.) American actions against Syria. In fact, she actually made Trump look Kennedyesque in this regard, no mean feat.
Clinton & Kissinger Nowadays, Clinton refers to her vote for the Iraq War as a “mistake”, but it certainly doesn’t seem like one considering the context of her other decisions as Secretary of State. Secretary Clinton’s friendships and consultations with Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright raised eyebrows in progressive circles. (Click here for the Clinton/Kissinger relationship.) Kissinger’s record as Secretary of State/National Security Adviser was most certainly one of the worst in U.S. history when it came to bloody, sociopathic, interventionist policy around the globe. During the disastrous and unnecessary crisis in Vietnam, Kissinger would nonchalantly give President Nixon death tallies in the thousands regarding Vietnamese citizens as if they were some Stalinesque statistic. Kissinger then agreed to expand that war in an unprecedented way into Cambodia and Laos—and then attempted to conceal these colossal air war actions. Of course, this was a further reversal and expansion of that war, which went even beyond what Lyndon Johnson had done in the wake of JFK’s death. President Kennedy’s stated policy was to withdraw from Indochina by 1965.
Salvador Allende Augusto Pinochet Kissinger was also an instrumental force for the CIA coup in Chile, which ended in the death of Salvador Allende. About Allende, he allegedly stated he did not understand why the USA should stand by and let Chile go communist just because the citizenry were irresponsible enough to vote for it. (A Death in Washington, by Don Freed and Fred Landis, p. 8) The CIA overthrow of Allende led to years of brutal fascism under military dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Clinton & Albright Madeleine Albright demonstrated similar hawkishness. (Click here for more on the Clinton/Albright relationship.) When asked about the refusal of the United States to lift UN Sanctions against Iraq and the resulting deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, Albright stated that the deaths had been “worth it.”3 Predictably, Albright’s statement was met with stunned surprise. In May of 1998, Albright said something just as surprising. At that time, riots and demonstrations against the brutal Indonesian dictator Suharto were raging all over the archipelago; there were mock funerals being conducted, and his figure was being burned in effigy. Here was a prime opportunity for Albright and the Clinton administration to step forward and cut off relations with a despot who had looted his nation to the tune of billions of dollars. Or at the very least, join the chorus of newspapers and journals requesting he step down. What did Albright do? She asked for “more dialogue”. Even in the last two days of Suharto’s reign, when major cities were in flames, when Senators John Kerry and the late Paul Wellstone were asking the State Department to get on the right side of history, Albright chose to sit on the sidelines. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 5 No. 5, pp. 3-5)
Hajji Muhammad Suharto with Nixon, Ford & Kissinger, Reagan, Bush Sr. & Bill Clinton In this regard, let us recall that Suharto came to power as a result of a reversal of President Kennedy’s foreign policy. Achmed Sukarno had been backed by President Kennedy throughout his first term, all the way up to his assassination. And JFK was scheduled to visit Jakarta in 1964, before the election. As opposed to the silence of Albright and Bill Clinton, after Suharto resigned, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center wrote a letter to his successor asking for an investigation of the role of the military in suppressing the demonstrations that led to his fall. (ibid)
During her time as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton displayed an American imperiousness akin to the previous examples. Whether the former Secretary’s intentions in Libya truly aimed at ending what she called a “genocidal” regime under Gaddafi doesn’t really matter. She personally pushed for a NATO sanctioning of bombings in Libya. (This NATO assault in Africa followed the standard set by Albright in Kosovo in 1999, which was the first offensive attack NATO had ever performed.) The assault on Libya eventually led to the murder of Muammar Gaddafi. And that paved the way for a dangerous political power vacuum in which various elements, including Islamic extremists, are vying for power. It is safe to say that she left Libya in such a shambles that the USA had to reenter the civil war.
Clinton’s decision to arm Syrian “rebels” against Bashar al Assad has also helped create bloody conflict with no end in sight. (Click here for why this may be a strategic mistake.) Bombings occur on a daily basis, especially in areas like Aleppo, leaving tens of thousands of innocents dead. As a candidate, she wanted to establish a “no-fly zone” over Syria—much as she did in Libya. This was a euphemism for controlling the air so that American proxies could control the ground. And as many suspect, and as alluded to in the above-linked story, that likely would have led to fundamentalist dominance in Syria, resembling the endgames in Iraq and Libya. But beyond that, this would probably have ended up provoking Russia, since Russia backs Assad. (Ibid, n. 3)
“Pacific Rubiales:
How to get rich in a
country without regulations”Secretary Clinton’s policy regarding Latin America, another topic avoided by the media during the last election cycle, also demonstrates knowing or unknowing complicity with colonial/imperial interests. In Colombia, for instance, a petroleum company by the name of Pacific Rubiales, which has ties to the Clinton Foundation, has been at the center of a humanitarian controversy. The fact that Pacific Rubiales is connected with the Clinton Foundation isn’t the main issue, however. The real problem is the manner in which positions were changed on Clinton’s part in exchange for contributions. During the 2008 election season, then-Senator Clinton opposed the trade deal that allowed companies like Pacific Rubiales to violate labor laws in Colombia. After becoming Secretary of State, Clinton did an about-face. As summed up by David Sirota, Andrew Perez and Matthew Cunningham-Cook:
At the same time that Clinton’s State Department was lauding Colombia’s human rights record (despite having evidence to the contrary), her family was forging a financial relationship with Pacific Rubiales, the sprawling Canadian petroleum company at the center of Colombia’s labor strife. The Clintons were also developing commercial ties with the oil giant’s founder, Canadian financier Frank Giustra, who now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global philanthropic empire. The details of these financial dealings remain murky, but this much is clear: After millions of dollars were pledged by the oil company to the Clinton Foundation—supplemented by millions more from Giustra himself—Secretary Clinton abruptly changed her position on the controversial U.S.-Colombia trade pact.” 4
Clinton & Zelaya (2009) Despite recent denials, the former Secretary also played a role in the 2009 coup that ousted the democratically elected and progressive human rights administration of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. Recent editions of Clinton’s autobiography Hard Choices have been redacted to conceal the full extent of her role in the overthrow. Since the coup, and in opposition to the supposed goals of the overthrow itself, government-sponsored death squads have returned to the country, killing hundreds of citizens, including progressive activists like Berta Cáceres. Before her assassination, Cáceres berated Secretary Clinton for the role she played in overthrowing Zelaya, stating that it demonstrated the role of the United States in “meddling with our country,” and that “we warned it would be very dangerous and permit a barbarity.” 5
In addition, the U.S.-backed coup in Honduras demonstrates the ongoing trend of outsourcing when it comes to intelligence work. A private group called Creative Associates International (CAI) was involved in “determining the social networks responsible for violence in the country’s largest city,” and subcontracted work to another private entity called Caerus. A man by the name of David Kilcullen, the head of Caerus, was previously involved in a $15 million US AID program that helped determine stability in Afghanistan. Kilcullen’s associate, William Upshur, also contributed to the Honduras plans. Upshur is now working for Booz Allen Hamilton, another private company involved in U.S. intelligence funding. (Ibid, n. 5)
In his 2007 book, Tim Shorrock explained how substantial this kind of funding is. Shorrock stated that approximately 70 percent of the government’s 60-billion-dollar budget for intelligence is now subcontracted to private entities such as Booz Allen Hamilton or Science Applications International Corporation. 6
Puerto Rico, a country in the midst of a serious debt crisis, is another key topic when it comes to Clinton’s questionable foreign policy decisions. Hedge funds own much of Puerto Rico’s massive debt, and a piece of legislation, which was put forward to deal with the issue, has rightly been labeled by Bernie Sanders as a form of colonialism. The bill in question would hand over control of financial dealings to a U.S. Government Board of Regulators, which would likely strip vital social spending in Puerto Rico. The bill already imposes a $4.25 minimum wage clause for citizens under 25. While Sanders opposed this bill, Clinton supported it. 7 This may serve as no surprise, being that the former Secretary of State receives hefty sums from Wall Street institutions like Goldman Sachs, who benefit from this form of vulture capitalism. I am not asserting that Hillary Clinton is solely responsible for these foreign policy decisions, but that she has been complicit with the American Deep State that commits or is heavily involved in these operations. (An explanation of the term “Deep State” will follow.) If the results of this 2016 election, and the success of both Trump and Sanders in the primaries, teach us something, it is that we have to move away as quickly as possible from policy compromised by corporate influence if we truly want to move forward. The American public has clearly had enough with establishment politics.
III
With the election of Donald Trump, the viability of establishment politics has been seriously breached, effectively ending the age of lesser-evil voting by the proletariat. Although Hillary Clinton was the preferred candidate regarding things like domestic social issues and scientific issues, it wasn’t enough to tame the massive insurgency of citizens who were so fed up with the status quo that they would rather see the country possibly go up in flames than vote for more of the same. Nor did it inspire an overlooked independent voter base to come out and make a substantial difference in the Democratic vote. In the aftermath of this potential disaster of an election, it is our duty, as a collective, to look deeply into some troubling fundamental issues. One of these has to do with the fact that racism, xenophobia and sexism are still very much alive in this country.
I will not go so far as to label all Trump supporters as racist, homophobic or sexist. And throughout the primary/general election season, I have tried to remain receptive to their frustrations. However, I can most certainly tell you that, based on my experiences of this election season alone, these sentiments do indeed exist. During a delegate selection process for the Bernie Sanders campaign, I met and ended up having discussions with some Trump supporters. I asked them questions about why they thought Trump would make a good president, all the while disagreeing with them, but listening nonetheless. Two of the men I was speaking with were very civil, but one in particular seemed to be bursting at the seams with frustration over what he thought were the main problems with the country. While ignoring the facts I was presenting him regarding corporate welfare, this man went into relentless diatribes about why “Tacos”, his label for Hispanic people, were wreaking havoc. He exhibited no shame in expressing his distaste for other ethnicities either. During this dismaying exchange, I brought up the continued mistreatment of Native American peoples. In response, this man tried to question the severity of the atrocities committed against them and even went so far as to imply that my use of the term genocide in describing their plight was incorrect.
Steve Mnuchin This may well serve to exemplify the hateful attitudes of mistrust and resentment that have been put under a black light during the course of this election. They’ve lingered dormant under the surface and have reached a boiling point thanks to Donald Trump. To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, Trump was able to channel the frustration of a destitute middle class and convert it into unconstructive anger. While Trump made references to how the “establishment” was a major problem, like many of his policy points, he didn’t ever describe in detail what was to be done to correct it. Instead, with his references to a wall with Mexico and to mass deportations, he encouraged the belief in his supporters that minorities were ruining the country. Yet in spite of his campaign promise to “drain the swamp”, many of the Trump cabinet appointees are among the most Establishment type figures one could imagine. For example, Steve Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs executive famous for foreclosures and hedge fund deals, has been appointed Secretary of Treasury.
The election of a man like Donald Trump, who can’t seem to expound any of his policies in any sort of detail and is openly demeaning towards women, people of other races, and the disabled, makes clear that we have a cancerous political system which has metastasized in large part thanks to establishment politicians beholden to corporate interests. And these politicians are wildly out of touch with the needs of the average American. This created a very wide alley that the new Trump managed to rumble through. (I say “new” because in one of the many failings of the MSM, no one bothered to explain why Trump had reversed so many of the proposals he made back in 2000, when he was going to run on the Reform Party ticket.) Some commentators have claimed there can be little doubt that there was a liberal disillusionment following President Obama’s election. Hillary Clinton could not convince enough people that she was even the “change candidate” that Obama was. Therefore, in the search for answers for why their lives weren’t improving, many citizens had to find alternate sources of information outside of corporate influenced organizations (i.e. The Republican Party, Democratic Party and the Mainstream Media), given those groups won’t admit to the public that they are subservient to the same big money interests. This explains the rise of figures like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and even rightwing populist/conspiracy demagogue Alex Jones. Their collective answer is to paint minorities and welfare recipients as the principal ills of American society, all the while failing to recognize the deep connection between government policy and corporate influence. In short, this election warns us that when the real reasons behind government dysfunction are ignored and go unchallenged, one risks the upsurge of fascist sentiments. 8
In addition to reminding us of Hillary’s relationship with Kissinger, Bernie Sanders reminded a large portion of the U.S. populace about the other fundamental issue lying beneath the surface: corporate power. And Sanders could have neutralized Trump’s appeal among the shrinking working and middle classes, which the latter earned by invoking the need for tariffs and the threat of trade wars. This certainly was another reason for Trump’s popularity in the Mideast states like Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan and Ohio, where he broke through the supposed Democratic firewall. (As to why, listen to this this segment by Michael Moore.) With Secretary of State Clinton’s and President Bill Clinton’s views on NAFTA and the Columbia Free Trade Agreement, and Hillary’s original stance on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), she could not mount a genuine counter-offensive to Trump’s tactics in those states, for the simple reason that the Clintons were perceived as being free-traders rather than fair-traders. Thanks to their record, a Democratic presidential candidate appeared to favor a globalization policy that began decades ago with David Rockefeller—a policy that was resisted by President Kennedy. (See Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, p. 59)
Awareness of any problem is the first step toward fixing it. But I think we must go beyond simple awareness when it comes to confronting our nation’s collective “shadow”, as Carl Jung would have called it — meaning all the darker, repressed aspects of the unconscious that, when ignored, can result in psychological backlash. How do we get beneath the surface appearances of corporate greed (for instance, the increasing wealth inequality amongst classes, or the amount of tax money allocated to corporate subsidies)? I suggest that an exploration of our past guided by a concept that Peter Dale Scott labels “Deep Politics” can help us come to terms, in a more profound way, with the problems facing us.
This concept embraces all of the machinations occurring beneath the surface of government activity and which go unnoticed in common analysis, such as in news reports or textbooks. Or, as Scott states in his 2015 book The American Deep State, it “…involves all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.”9 A “Deep Political” explanation of major world events goes beyond the ostensible or normally accepted models of cause and effect. One example of a “Deep Event” is the 1965 Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which provided a motive, or casus belli, to escalate the Vietnam War into a full-scale invasion by American ground forces. Given that President Johnson had already, in stark contrast to President Kennedy’s policy, approved the build-up of combat troops in Vietnam in 1964, all that was needed was some sort of impetus in order for United States involvement to move to the next stage. As the author describes, many of the intelligence reports received by the Johnson administration regarding this supposed incident did not signal any sort of instigation on North Vietnam’s behalf. However, those same reports were ignored in order to claim that North Vietnam had engaged in an act of war against the United States. 10
Other examples of Deep Events include the previously mentioned instances of CIA, corporate and State Department interference in the economic and governmental affairs of foreign nations. It is evident that these coups did not occur for the sake of saving other countries from the grip of communism or the reign of dictators; such would only be at best a surface explanation. The deeper explanation is that a nexus of corporate, military, paramilitary, government and, on occasion, underworld elements (viz, the workings of the Deep State) had a vested interest in the outcome. The Bush administration’s lies regarding Saddam Hussein’s alleged arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction”, presented to the American people and Congress as a reason to invade Iraq, could most certainly be classified as a Deep Event. No entities benefitted more from America’s long-term occupation of Iraq than companies like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton. KBR Inc., a Halliburton subsidiary, “was given $39.5 billion (emphasis added) in Iraq-related contracts over the past decade, with many of the deals given without any bidding from competing firms, such as a $568-million contract renewal in 2010 to provide housing, meals, water and bathroom services to soldiers, a deal that led to a Justice Department lawsuit over alleged kickbacks, as reported by Bloomberg.” 11
Included under the umbrella of Deep Politics are the major assassinations of the 1960s — those of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Poll after poll has indicated that most Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, but even today many apparently have not reasoned beyond the fact that there is something fishy about the “official” version in order to understand this murder in its fullest context. It behooves us to inquire more deeply into this historically critical event. Before I go any further, however, let me assert here—and I do so quite confidently—that anyone who still buys into the government version of events regarding, for example, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, is either not looking carefully enough, or is not really familiar with the case.
IV
A suggestive point of departure for such an inquiry are the parallels between the 2016 election and that of 1968. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King in April of 1968, racial tensions were high and a presidential primary season was in full swing. Opposition towards the Vietnam War was strong and one candidate in particular represented the last best hope for minorities, anti-war voters, and the middle, as well as lower classes. That candidate was Robert Kennedy, and by the early morning of June 5th, it was becoming clear that he would likely be the Democratic candidate to run against Richard Nixon in the general election. Within a matter of moments of making his victory speech for the California primary, Robert Kennedy was assassinated when he walked into the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. In those moments, the Sixties ended—and so did the populist hopes and dreams for a new era.
Chicago DNC 1968 Philedelphia DNC 2016 The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was attended by the protests of disillusioned voters who felt cheated out of a more liberal, populist candidate. They ended up rioting in the streets. Hubert Humphrey, who was receiving flack for not taking a strong enough stance on the situation in Vietnam, was selected as the nominee. Similarly, there were many dissatisfied delegates and voters at the 2016 Philadelphia Democratic convention. But in a tightly controlled operation, their actions were kept hidden off screen. And the threat of stripping them of their credentials was often used to suppress any protest on the convention floor. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was nominated and her candidacy helped give us Donald Trump. In 1968, the immediate result was Richard Nixon as president. But the subsequent results included the massive increase in loss of life not just in Vietnam, but also in Cambodia, and the continuing trend away from the New Deal, anti-globalist policies of John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt.
Alger Hiss, America’s Dreyfus Rep. Voorhis, defeated by
Nixon’s smear campaignIn fact, Nixon had been a part of the effort to purge New Deal elements from the government during the McCarthy era. Whether it was conducting hearings on men like Alger Hiss and making accusations of Soviet spycraft, or using his California Senate campaign to falsely accuse incumbent Congressman Jerry Voorhis of being a communist, Nixon contributed to the growing, exaggerated fear of communism in the United States. This fear allowed men like Allen Dulles to be seen as pragmatists in the face of supposed communist danger. Dulles’ and the CIA’s dirty deeds on behalf of corporate power were carried out under the guise of protecting the world from communism. As described in the Allen Dulles biography by David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, sociologist C. Wright Mills called this mentality “crackpot realism.”12 It is ironic that Nixon ended up distrusting the CIA, the institution so closely associated with Allen Dulles, a man who had championed Nixon’s rise to power as both a congressman and senator.
Flash forward to 2016 and, once again, we witness the results of a Democratic Party choosing to ignore the populist outcry for reform, and of a government compromised by corporate coercion, one subject to the hidden workings of the Deep State. Bernie Sanders represented the New Deal aspirations of a working class tired of corporate-run politics. As revealed by Wikileaks, the upper echelons of the Democratic Party chose not to heed their voices, thereby indirectly aiding the election of Donald Trump, who offered a different and unconstructive form of populism.
Pence & Reagan Rex Tillerson Being that the political spectrum has shifted far to the right as compared to 1968, this year’s election results are more extreme. Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments reflect this extremist mentality; especially in his Vice Presidential pick Mike Pence — a man so out of touch with reality that he has tried to argue that women shouldn’t be working. In 1997, Pence stated that women should stay home because otherwise their kids would “get the short end of the emotional stick.” The soon to be Vice President Pence also sees LGBT rights as a sign of “societal collapse.”13 And as for Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp”, when it comes to establishment figures, it only gets worse, considering his appointment of Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, as Secretary of State. Despite the fact that Trump appears to be “off the grid”, so to speak, when it comes to the political or Deep Political apparatus, his recent choices for cabinet positions are some of the worst imaginable for the populist of any ilk. In some cases he has actually leapt into the arms of the very establishment he warned his supporters against.
In the face of all this, Sanders continues to inspire his followers to remain politically active. We all need to be involved more than ever, and the Democratic/socialist senator from Vermont has always urged that true change lies in us having the courage to do things ourselves when it comes to reforming government. The more we stay involved, the less likely it will be that the momentum created by political movements will be squandered in the wake of a setback. The major setbacks of the 1960s came in the form of assassinations of inspiring political leaders. Yet even in the wake of such tragedies it is possible, indeed imperative, to find a glimmer of hope. To do so, however, requires, as this essay has been arguing, the insight afforded by a critical analysis of the past, and its continuities with the present. The touchstone for this historical understanding, I believe, lies precisely in the way the policies of President Kennedy have been consistently overturned by subsequent administrations.
V
As mentioned above, John Kennedy was not in favor of the neo-colonialist policies of the Dulles/Eisenhower era. Instead of wanting to occupy foreign nations for the sake of corporate profit, Kennedy believed strongly that the resources of such nations rightly belonged to their people, and that the right to self-determination was critical, as evident in his 1957 speech on French colonialism in Algeria.
Soviet stamp
commemorating LumumbaNixon and Mobutu at the White House In the aftermath of a CIA-assisted coup to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the nationalist leader of the Congo, President Kennedy fought alongside the U.N. to ensure that a nationwide coalition government was formed. Civil war was imminent as militant and corporately complicit leaders like Colonel Mobutu vied for power and promoted the secession of Katanga, the region of Congo that held vast amounts of mineral resources. JFK supported the more centrist elements of the potential coalition government and felt that the resources of Katanga didn’t belong to Belgian, U.S. or British mining interests. The President’s death ended hope for the pursuit of any stable government in Congo, along with the hope of halting widespread violence. 14 It should be noted that Nixon actually welcomed Mobutu to the White House after he took control of Congo.
Sukarno at the White House As noted previously, President Kennedy also worked towards re-establishing a relationship with Indonesia and its leader Achmed Sukarno. This was after the Dulles brothers had been involved in attempts to overthrow the Indonesian leader. Decades earlier, it had been discovered by corporate backed explorers that certain areas in Indonesia contained extremely dense concentrations of minerals such as gold and copper. After Kennedy was killed, Sukarno was overthrown with help of the CIA in one of the bloodiest coup d’états ever recorded. Hundreds of thousands of Indonesians perished during both the overthrow, and the subsequent reign of the new leader Suharto. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition pp. 374-75) Need we add that Nixon also met with Suharto in Washington. In December of 1975, President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger journeyed to Jakarta and gave Suharto an implicit OK to invade East Timor. This is the tradition that Hillary Clinton and her husband were involved with. For when almost every democratically elected western nation was shunning Suharto in the late nineties, Bill Clinton was still meeting with him. (Op. cit. Probe Magazine.)
President Kennedy’s policies regarding Central and South America were also a threat to corporate interests. David Rockefeller took it upon himself to publicly criticize Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, which had been established to aid less developed nations, like those south of the United States, to become economically self-reliant. Men like Rockefeller, along with the Wall-Street-connected media (e.g.,Wall Street Journal and Time/Life) also berated the President for “undermining a strong and free economy,” and inhibiting “basic American liberties.” (14, p. 57) The Wall Street Journal flat out criticized Kennedy for being a “self-appointed enforcer of progress” (Ibid p. 66). JFK’s 1962 clash with U.S. Steel, a J.P. Morgan/Rockefeller company, provoked similar remarks.
After President Kennedy had facilitated an agreement between steel workers and their corporate executives, the latter welshed on the deal. It was assumed that the workers would agree to not have their wages increased in exchange for the price of steel also remaining static. After the agreement was reached, U.S. Steel defied the President’s wishes and undermined the hard work to reach that compromise by announcing a price increase. The corporate elite wanted Kennedy to buckle, but instead, he threatened to investigate them for price-fixing and to have his brother Bobby examine their tax returns. Begrudgingly, U.S. Steel backed off and accepted the original terms. Kennedy’s policies, both domestic and foreign, were aimed at enhancing social and economic progress. Like Alexander Hamilton, and Albert Gallatin, JFK sought to use government powers to protect the masses from corporate domination. His tax policy was aimed at channeling investment into the expansion of productive means or capital. The investment tax credit, for instance, provided incentives for business entities that enhanced their productive abilities through investment in the upkeep or updating of equipment inside the United States. (Gibson pp. 21-22) While Kennedy’s policies were focused on strengthening production and labor power, his opponents in the Morgan/Rockefeller world were focused on sheer profit.
David Rockefeller & Henry Luce in 1962 It should serve as no surprise that the media outlets responsible for condemning the president were tied into the very corporate and political establishment entities being threatened. As described by sociologist Donald Gibson in his fine book Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency, the elite of Wall Street, media executives and certain powerful political persons or groups were so interconnected as to be inbred. Allen Dulles himself was very much involved in these circles, and had close relationships with men like Henry Luce of the Time, Life and Fortune magazine empire, along with executives or journalists at the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Operation Mockingbird, a CIA project designed to use various media outlets for propaganda, was exposed during the Church Committee hearings, revealing the collaboration of hundreds of journalists and executives at various media organizations including CBS, NBC, The New York Times, the Associated Press, Newsweek and other institutions.15)
John Kennedy wasn’t only trying to curtail corporate power with his Hamilton/Gallatin, New Deal-like economic policies. His decisions concerning military engagement abroad were greatly at odds with the hard-line Cold Warriors of his administration and the Central Intelligence Agency. Time after time, Kennedy refused to commit U.S. combat troops abroad despite the nagging insistence of his advisors. Although the President publicly accepted responsibility for the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs, privately he was livid at the CIA for deceiving him. Through materials such as inspector general Lyman Kirkpatrick’s report on the Bay of Pigs, and other declassified CIA documents, it is now evident that a major deception had occurred. The Agency had assured Kennedy that their group of anti-Castro Cuban invaders would be the spark that would set off a revolt against Fidel Castro just waiting to happen. This was not the case, and the CIA-backed Cubans were outnumbered by Castro’s forces 10 to 1. Even worse, as noted in the Kirkpatrick report, was the fact that the CIA had stocked the invading force with C-Level operatives. (2, p. 396) It was almost as if the surface level plan presented to the President was designed to fail in order to force his hand and commit the military into invading Cuba. A declassified CIA memo acknowledges the fact that securing the desired beach area in Cuba was not possible without military intervention. 16
When Kennedy refused to commit U.S. troops as the operation crumbled, he became public enemy number one in the CIA’s eyes. This sentiment that Kennedy was soft on communism, or even a communist sympathizer, augmented as he continued to back away from military intervention in other situations. The President reached an agreement with the Soviet Union to keep Laos neutral, and despite his willingness to send advisors to Vietnam, he ultimately worked to enact a policy resulting in the withdrawal of all U.S. personnel from the country. Kennedy’s assassination ended this movement toward disengagement from Saigon.
What was likely even worse to the Cold Warriors and CIA patriots during this time was the President’s attempts at détente with Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. During, and in the period following, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev were involved in back channel dialogue with one another. Discussion moved toward talks about détente; despite the fact that the two men’s respective countries had differing views, they agreed it was imperative, for the sake of the planet, to come to an understanding. This, along with JFK’s unwillingness to bomb Cuba during the Missile Crisis, were nothing short of traitorous to the covert and overt military power structure of the United States. In the final months of his life, the President also extended a secret olive branch toward Fidel Castro in hopes of opening a dialogue. Excited by the prospect, Castro was painfully upset when he got word of Kennedy’s assassination. Kennedy most certainly had his enemies, and was making decisions that drove a stake into the very heart of corporate, military and intelligence collusion. If he had been elected President, Bobby Kennedy was most certainly going to continue, and most likely even expand, the policies of his late brother. (ibid, pp. 25-33) Like Jack and Bobby, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X expressed opposition toward the continuation of the Vietnam War.
VI
The concept of Deep Politics may provide a helpful alternative to the term “conspiracy theory”, which has become so stigmatized and so overused as to be meaningless. Abandoning the idea of conspiracy altogether, however, risks throwing the baby out with the bath water, for it raises legitimate questions about what lurks beneath the surface of the affairs of state. The enemies that John and Robert Kennedy were facing were not some fictional or hypothetical “illuminati” group or groups. They were very real, dangerous and powerful interests, and those forces are still with us in 2016. Deep Politics does not imply that there is some singular group or set of groups that meet in secret to plot colossal calamities that affect the entire world, but rather that the events themselves arise from the milieu(s) created by a congruence of unaccountable, supra-constitutional, covert, corporate and illegal interests, sometimes operating in a dialectical manner. A more recent example would be the networking of several of these interests to orchestrate the colossal Iran/Contra project.
Other writers have also described these subterranean forces using other terms. The late Fletcher Prouty called it the Secret Team. Investigative journalist Jim Hougan calls it a Shadow Government. Florida State professor Lance DeHaven Smith, with respect to its activities, coined the term “State Crime Against Democracy”, or SCAD. (Click here for his definition.) Smith wrote one of the best books about how, with the help of the MSM, these forces stole the 2000 election in Florida from Al Gore. He then wrote a book explaining how the term “conspiracy theorist” became a commonly used smear to disarm the critics of the Warren Commission. It was, in fact, the CIA which started this trend with its famous 1967 dispatch entitled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report”. (See this review for the sordid details.)
Whether it be extralegal assassinations, unwarranted domestic surveillance, interventionist wars at the behest of corporate interests, torture or other activities of that stripe, these all in essence have their roots in the Dulles era in which covert, corporate power developed into a well-oiled and unaccountable machine running roughshod. These forces have continued to operate regardless of who is elected president, whether Democrat or Republican. (See Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda for a trenchant analysis of the operation against Richard Nixon that came to be called Watergate.)
It is my opinion that we must come to terms with these dark or, to use James W. Douglass’ term, “unspeakable” realities. And we must do so in a holistic way if we are to take more fundamental steps toward progress as a nation. George Orwell coined the term Crime Stop to describe the psychological mechanism by which humans ignore uncomfortable or dangerous thoughts. Through discussions with people young and old, it has become evident to me that this Crime Stop mechanism is at work in the subconscious of many Americans. We need to be willing to face the darker aspects of our recent past that have been at work below the surface and percolating up into view for many years.
In a very tangible way, the refusal to face these dark forces has caused the Democratic Party to lose its way. And this diluted and uninspiring party has now given way to Donald Trump. As alluded to throughout this essay, this party has abandoned the aims and goals of the Kennedys, King and Malcolm X to the point that it now resembles the GOP more than it does the sum total of those four men. To understand what this means in stark political terms, consider the following. Today, among all fifty states, there are only 15 Democratic governors. In the last ten years, the Democrats have lost 900 state legislative seats. When Trump enters office, he will be in control of not just the White House, but also the Senate and the House of Representatives. Once he nominates his Supreme Court candidate to replace Antonin Scalia, he will also be in control of that institution.
Bernie Sanders was the only candidate whose policies recalled the idea of the Democratic party of the Sixties. And according to a poll of 1,600 people run by Gravis Marketing, he would have soundly defeated Trump by 12 points. The Democrats have to get the message, or they run the risk of becoming a permanent minority party. They sorely need to look at themselves, and ask, What happened? As a starting point, they can take some of the advice contained in this essay.
Notes
1. “Hillary Clinton Snaps At NPR Host After Defensive Gay Marriage Interview.” YouTube. WFPL News, 12 June 2014 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgIe2GKudYY>.
2. David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. New York, NY: Harper, 2015.
3. Gary Leupp, “Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy Resumé: What the Record Shows.” , 03 May 2016.
4. Greg Grandin, “A Voter’s Guide to Hillary Clinton’s Policies in Latin America.” The Nation, 18 April 2016.
5. Tim Shorrock, “How Hillary Clinton Militarized US Policy in Honduras.” The Nation, 06 April 2016.
6. Peter Dale Scott, “The Deep State and the Bias of Official History.” Who What Why, 20 January 2015.
7. Ben Norton, “Sanders Condemns Pro-austerity ‘Colonial Takeover’ of Puerto Rico; Clinton Supports It.” Salon, 27 May 2016.
8. “Chomsky on Liberal Disillusionment with Obama.” YouTube, 03 April 2010 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6Jbnq5V_1s>.
9. Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and The Attack On U.S. Democracy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015: Chapter 2, p. 12.
10. “Project Censored 3.1 – JFK 50 – Peter Dale Scott – Deep Politics.” YouTube, Project Sensored, 19 December 2013 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0CFpMej3mA>.
11. Angelo Young, “And The Winner For The Most Iraq War Contracts Is . . . KBR, With $39.5 Billion In A Decade.” International Business Times, 19 March 2013.
12. Zawn Villines, “The Four Worst Things Mike Pence Has Said About Women.” Daily Kos, 21 July 2016.
13. Richard D. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.
14. Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency. New York: Sheridan Square, 1994.
15. Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.” Rolling Stone, 20 October 1977 <http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php>.
16. David Talbot, Brothers, p. 47.
-
As Hillary Clinton signs onto Wisconsin recount, evidence says it was rigged for Trump
If the evidence in this article is correct, then it does appear that there may have been some chicanery in the Wisconsin general election favoring Donald Trump. If so, that may be the latest in a long line of flim flammery extending back to 2004 and 2000 – and in our view back to the fraud of the Warren Report in 1964.
~Jim DiEugenio
-
As Hillary Clinton signs onto Wisconsin recount, evidence says it was rigged for Trump
If the evidence in this article is correct, then it does appear that there may have been some chicanery in the Wisconsin general election favoring Donald Trump. If so, that may be the latest in a long line of flim flammery extending back to 2004 and 2000 – and in our view back to the fraud of the Warren Report in 1964.
~Jim DiEugenio
-
CTKA’s Presidential Endorsement (1996)
Pity a populace that must choose between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton as the chief executive of their government. Or even Dole, Clinton, and Ross Perot. In good conscience, CTKA cannot endorse any of them. There is someone we do support. But before we explain why, we will explain why not.
For us, Bob Dole is, in political parlance, a “non-starter”. Many have recently pointed out Dole’s support for the tobacco companies as indicative of the kind of politician he is. We say the indications go back much further and deeper than just the tobacco companies. Dole was a fond admirer of the great divider of the American political system, Richard Nixon. And Dole staunchly supported Nixon through both the escalation of the Vietnam War and the paralyzing Watergate scandal. Dole has rarely found a corporate cause or thiet he didn’t like. When two multimillionaire oil entrepreneurs were hauled before a Senate committee for stealing 30 million in oil from Indian reservations, Dole used the old chestnut of launching diversionary attacks against witnesses in order to disrupt the proceedings. The Koch brothers then became major contributors to Dole and the Republican party (for a complete report on this, see The Nation of 8/26/96). Like husband, like wife. Liddy Dole is supposed to be his better half. Not true. When Ms. Dole ran the Red Cross in the early 90’s, her chief adviser was Mari Will, wife of Washington Post pundit, Oswald did it stalwart, and CIA defender George Will. Any candidate close to the Wills is an enemy of the research community, and consequently, good government.
Most revealing about Bob Dole was his behavior during the Iran-Contra scandal. As the mainstream media tried to make Jim Garrison the criminal when he probed the Kennedy case, Dole tried to make Lawrence Walsh the culprit of that later scandal. According to Robert Parry, Dole detracted attention from the allegations against Reagan-Bush officials by hectoring Walsh over issues like where he paid his local taxes and his first class airfares. In other words, Dole was part of the Washington “insider” effort to defuse and defund Walsh’s investigation. After Bush stopped Walsh’s probe by pardoning his suspects, Dole boasted in public about his role in derailing Walsh. If one is looking for someone to fund and extend the Review Board, and later appoint an independent consul, Dole would be a hapless choice. Ross Perot is to be credited for offering an alternative to the two party system. He wants to clean the lobbyists and special interests out of Washington. He campaigned against NAFTA. But Perot has an erratic and dictatorial streak in him, as exemplified by the controversy in the nominating process of his Reform Party. Although people in the research community offered him material on Gerald Posner, he has not used it even though Citizen Perot is a hit piece timed for the presidential race. Also, like Dole, Perot was a strong supporter of Richard Nixon as is attested to in John Ehrlichmann’s bookWitness to Power. Reportedly, Perot also contributed to the candidacy of Oliver North in his run for the Senate. Recently another of North’s criminal activities was brought to light: the selling of cocaine for distribution to gangs in Los Angeles. So although Perot is better on some issues, he seems a bit myopic about the overall picture.
Which brings us to the incumbent. Most of us at CTKA voted for Bill Clinton in ’92. George Bush, former DCI, had fought the JFK Act. During the campaign, Clinton made some overtures our way. He stated in McKeesport, Pennsylvania that he realized many people had lingering questions about the JFK case and they deserved answers. The centerpiece of his nominating convention was the famous film of himself at the White House in 1963 shaking hands with President Kennedy. After his election, he made a grand photo opportunity out of his visit to Kennedy’s grave at Arlington. After a slow start, he did finally get the Review Board nominated. But then in 1993, on the 30th anniversary of the assassination, he blindsided us. In response to a question by a CNN reporter Clinton said that, after reading Case Closed , he was now satisfied with the official verdict in the case. Since then, as noted in our last issue, he has yet to make a positive decision in favor of the Review Board in any of its disputes with the FBI over redactions in released documents. To our knowledge, he has made only one mention of the Board in public since Mr. Marwell was instated, and that was a passing notice. On the Robert Kennedy case, Clinton wrote the foreword to the recent book The Last Campaign, by Time-Life photographer Bill Eppridge and writer Hays Gorey. The book states that Sirhan killed RFK. Clinton implies the same in his unqualified opening endorsement. In retrospect, we should have known better about Clinton in 1992.
With our knowledge of the media, painfully culled from its treatment of the JFK case, we should have known something was up with the Arkansas governor. Back in 1988, when Clinton blew his nationally televised nominating speech for Michael Dukakis, he was invited onto The Tonight Show where he was allowed to kid himself over his longwindedness thereby redeeming his national image. When he finished second in the New Hampshire primary in 1992, he was allowed the guest spot on Nightline and, unchallenged by Ted Koppel, he announced himself the “real” winner since he finished a closer second than expected. When the Gennifer Flowers sex scandal brimmed over, he got a spot on Sixty Minutes with Hillary as his Tammy Wynettish wife that patched up his “family man” image. Later in the campaign, when the Whitewater and Mena stories started to leak out of Arkansas, Time did its turn with a remarkably deceptive cover story. Entitled “The Doubts About Bill Clinton”, it masqueraded as an inquisition of his tenure as governor. In reality it ended up giving him the benefit of the doubt on every accusation. In other words, it was designed to put the rumors to rest.
How does a candidate get the red carpet treatment into the White House? Why would NBC, ABC, CBS, and Time-Life smooth the rails to get a Democrat into power? Those are the questions we should have been asking ourselves amid these odd maneuverings. The answers are in Roger Morris’ new book on the Clintons, Partners in Power. In our Jan/Feb issue, we recommended the Morris biography of Richard Nixon as the best in that crowded field. He has repeated that feat with his work on the Clintons. Some of the things revealed in this book confirm the suspicions many people have had about the Clintons and explain the remarkable orchestrations to get him into office. Consider:
- Clinton lied to the University of Arkansas to escape the draft and used a crony of former governor Winthrop Rockefeller to stall his local draft board into delaying their decision on his case. These delay tactics were enough to get him out of serving in the Vietnam War since Nixon instituted a draft lottery in 1969. Clinton has orchestrated a cover-up of these facts since his first run for office in 1974.
- Morris cites three confidential sources in making his case that Clinton was a CIA informant at Oxford reporting on radicals in the anti-war movement abroad.
- The Rose Law Firm was the Sullivan and Cromwell of Arkansas. If Allen and John Foster Dulles had been attorneys in Little Rock instead of New York City, they would have felt at home there. It was a lawyers’ school for scandal that fits right into the contemporary–and well-deserved–caricature of attorneys who, as long as they are paid $300 an hour, will cover up any kind of corporate malfeasance. Clinton got Hillary her the job there. It is at this time that Hillary Clinton took part in her patently rigged commodities deal, which Morris exposes as a thinly disguised political bribe. If Hillary Clinton had any ideals, and Morris indicates she had some, they were lost when she went to work at Rose in 1976.
- If Clinton had any ideals–and the case is weaker for him–he lost them after his failed reelection bid for governor in 1980. Contrary to popular belief, that loss did not change him from a dewy-eyed idealist into a pragmatist. It put him even more solidly in the camp of the powerful and wealthy interests who had backed him from the start.
- If the drugs for weapons transfer site at Mena, Arkansas is ever honestly examined by the major media or a legislative body, it will destroy Clinton and put Oliver North and George Bush in jail. Which, of course, is where they should have been if Dole had not obstructed Walsh.
The amazing thing about all of the above points is that they were all evident to Arkansas observers before Clinton ran in the Democratic primaries. Yet the American people were not allowed to know the full truth about Bill Clinton. The fact that the media provided interference for him should have alerted us like a flare in the night. So the failures of his administration, not just on the JFK Act, should have been no surprise or provided little disappointment. As Robert Parry has pointed out, Clinton was in a great position to reopen the “October Surprise” investigation since the Russians offered him new evidence that it had actually happened. Clinton has had opportunities to expose the sordidness of the Reagan-Bush years on the horrors of the El Mozote massacre, on Iraqgate, on the GOP tampering with his mother’s State Department files. On all these, as well as the JFK case, he has remained silent. In many ways he has actually endorsed two political tendencies that CTKA most deplores and anyone who still values in the legacy of John Kennedy holds dear: the excesses of the national security state, and the wild maldistribution of wealth that has ravaged America since 1980. Clinton has doubled the number of FBI authorized wiretaps that Bush allowed. As exposed by the Los Angeles Times, he secretly authorized arms shipments into Bosnia through Iranian allies. Now that historians like Gar Alperovitz have exposed the myth of the “necessity” of dropping the atomic bomb, Clinton tries to reinflate it by saying he would have made the same choice as Truman did.
On the economy, unlike JFK, Clinton does anything except battle Wall Street. Giant investment house Goldman Sachs was one of the major contributors to his ’92 campaign, so they are well represented with Robert Rubin at Treasury. The same Rubin who defended the FBI’s incineration of 96 people at Waco. Late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was a partner of Tommy Boggs, a $500 per hour Washington lobbyist. Boggs is the son of Hale Boggs and brother of Cokie Roberts, George Will’s partner in bashing Stone’s JFK and Nixon in front of millions on TV. Clinton had an opportunity to replace Federal Reserve Chairman Allen Greenspan, that darling of Rockefeller-Morgan interests on Wall Street. He didn’t and this keeps Wall Street and other wealthy interests happy; happy enough to give Clinton twelve million on his recent August 19th birthday, a sum that smashes all records for Democratic, and possibly GOP, fundraisers.
There must be a hitch to all this. Nobody shells out 12 million for nothing. There is. Far from reversing, or even halting the Reagan-Bush upward redistribution of wealth, Clinton has aided it. In a report issued in July, the standard of living for the poor is revealed as bad or worse in 1994 than in any year since 1967. The frightening pace of corporate mergers, especially in the media, has not abated. Pentagon and CIA budgets have not been seriously curtailed by the collapse of the “Red Menace”. Wall Street has been so cheered by Clinton’s policies that a headline in the Los Angeles Times of August 3rd actually reads, “Job Rate Growth Slows, Cheering Wall Street”. The defeat of Kennedy’s economic policies (so aptly portrayed by Donald Gibson), is so complete that Kennedy adviser Dick Goodwin can write an editorial lamenting the fact that Kennedy’s struggle for economic justice is now over; the rich have won out. Goodwin should have ended with the quote, “Bill, you’re no JFK.”
This is unfortunate for both Clinton and the Democrats. It is also, in an American way, short-sighted on sheer political terms. First, as Kevin Phillips has pointed out, since the issue of the Warren Report the average American’s cynicism about government has grown to epidemic proportions. This has now spread to the GOP, i.e. there seems to be a dealignment of both parties marked by large defections to third parties or independent status. In a July poll, an astonishing 60% of the public favors the rise of a third party. One of the main reasons quoted was that: People have such an incredibly poor view of politics and politicians, and such incredibly low expectations that it takes very little to make them convinced that what they are seeing is the same “old stuff”.
Concomitant with this is the voters’ knowledge that things weren’t always this bad on the economic front; there was a president we used to trust. This was demonstrated in a July New York Times /CBS poll. When the respondents were asked which former president they would like to have running the country today, the winner in a landslide was John Kennedy. He received double the votes of Reagan and triple the amount of Truman, Lincoln, or FDR. This is even more remarkable in light of the myriad attempts to defame both the man and his presidency in every kind of media. An attempt which, we feel, has demonstrably increased in recent years. When a respondent was asked specifically why she voted for Kenendy, the reply was because he was “for the poor people, while today everyone seems to be more for the rich.” In other words, he wasn’t part of the Washington crowd which Morris calls, “the culture of complicity”. For us there is very little difference between Clinton, Dole, and Perot. Or between those three and the corporate lobbyists and media pundits with whom they cavort. Kennedy wasn’t part of that Washington crowd. He felt they distorted his message. As he told Ben Bradlee, “I always said, when we don’t have to go through you bastards, we can really get our story to the American public.” Kennedy’s willingness to stand up for the public and against these money interests was never more vividly illustrated than in Executive Order 11110 of June 7th, 1963. This instructed Treasury to bypass the Rockefeller-Morgan Federal Reserve Board and begin minting its own silver dollars and silver certificates. Wall Street denizen Douglas Dillon pressed Johnson to reverse that decision. He did three weeks after the assassination.
There is one candidate running for president this year that we can endorse. In fact as this is being written I am listening to his acceptance speech given at UCLA’s McGowan Hall. His name is Ralph Nader and he is the candidate of the Green Party. Some of our younger readers may not know who he is. As a young lawyer in Hartford, he noticed that many of his personal injury clients had been crippled as a result of automobile accidents. Upon investigation he discovered that the automobiles could have been manufactured more safely to minimize many of the injuries. In 1965 he wrote a book that exposed Detroit’s culpability: Unsafe at Any Speed. It became a bestseller and vaulted him to Capitol Hill where his Senate testimony forced Congress to pass the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966. The next year he was instrumental in getting Congress to pass a law for more stringent inspection of slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. It was Nader who convinced Jock Yablonski to run against corrupt UMW leader Tony Boyle. When GM launched a secret investigation of Nader, he sued and won. With this money he set up Public Citizen Inc., the umbrella group for his investigations of misleading advertising, abuses in nursing homes, and yes, a sick political system that ignores citizens yet is all to quick to respond to corporate and Pentagon wishes. Nader’s example caused a whole slew of idealistic young people–Nader’s Raiders–to join him. Compared to Dole, Clinton, and Perot on a moral and political plane, Nader has the stature of Nelson Mandela. In fact, next to Mandela, he still looks OK. Recently, his name was enough to stop what he calls “tort deformation” in California, i.e. the limiting of malpractice awards in civil cases. Reportedly, James Carville, Clinton’s chief political adviser fears a well-funded, media exposed Nader candidacy more than any other. In other words, if Nader had Perot’s money, Carville would be having sleepless nights.
To quote Malcolm X, what we are seeing now is the “chickens coming home to roost.” The beginning of the breakdown of the traditional two party system in America. To which Probe says “Good riddance”; but more in sorrow than in anger. The party of FDR and JFK was a good one. But a party that won’t demand the truth about the murder of its most popular leader, or the man who would have saved us from Nixon, Robert Kennedy, or its equivalent of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, does not deserve to persist. In Nader’s acceptance speech of August 19th, he talked about U. S. support of foreign dictatorships that exploit cheap labor; the debasement of democracy by giant corporations; the maldisribution of wealth in America and how to correct it; the bloated Pentagon budget in the wake of the Cold War; a revival of citizenship and democracy among in schools. In short, he sounded a bit like young John Kennedy. If he gets on the national debates, Carville might have some difficulty sleeping. Even if he doesn’t, we’re for him. We’d rather cast a vote for a new beginning, no matter how far off, than be a sucker for false hope, even if it comes cynically gift-wrapped in the mantle of JFK.