Mike Whitney lays out the plot for a soft coup. It is Donald Trump’s duty to defend the office of the President and the right of the American people to choose their own leaders through democratic elections. Both of those institutions are currently under attack, and there is a real danger that the republican system of government, which we have enjoyed for over 200 years, is about to be lost. So let’s cut to the chase: The results of the 2016 election have never been accepted by a small group of oligarchs, politicos, intelligence honchos and career bureaucrats. The presidential election did not produce the outcome they wanted, so they agreed to use their power to try to change the result. With that end in mind, this group of fifth columnists settled on a plan for disposing of Trump by
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Mike Norman considers the following as important: soft coup, US Politics
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It is Donald Trump’s duty to defend the office of the President and the right of the American people to choose their own leaders through democratic elections. Both of those institutions are currently under attack, and there is a real danger that the republican system of government, which we have enjoyed for over 200 years, is about to be lost. So let’s cut to the chase: The results of the 2016 election have never been accepted by a small group of oligarchs, politicos, intelligence honchos and career bureaucrats. The presidential election did not produce the outcome they wanted, so they agreed to use their power to try to change the result.
With that end in mind, this group of fifth columnists settled on a plan for disposing of Trump by creating an Office of the Grand Inquisitor, an undemocratic, supra-legal agency that operates independent of Congress, the White House or the American people. The Mueller Inquisition is an entity unto itself, a fourth branch of government created by deep-state coup-member and perennial Trump antagonist, Rod Rosenstein, the duplicitous insider whose maneuverings have helped pave the way for an indictment of the president and, eventually, regime change. Like Comey, Brennan, Clapper and the rest, Rosenstein is neither committed to the president nor to the political system that guarantees representative government. His loyalties lie with the largely invisible group of establishment powerbrokers who manipulate policy through their agents that are spread across the bureaucracy. As we have seen in the last year, this group has infiltrated the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and the DOJ. They control nearly all the media and use it to shape a narrative that best suits their broader political objectives. These are the omniscient puppetmasters who despise Trump and are determined to remove him from office....I don't hold out much hope. I think that the American system of government has been exposed and its soft power pretty much finished. Nice work, folks.
Not that this is new. What is happening now is the culmination of a process that began at the end of WWII with the creation of the CIA (think Allen Dulles), the politicization of the FBI (think J. Edgar Hoover) and the rise of the military-industrial complex during the Cold War for starters.
There is a lot more to it, of course. In fact, it was the almost inevitable outcome of the choice of the founders to short-circuit democracy and establish a government based on oligarchy (establishment rule) out of fear of "the rabble" rising to power. This then morphed into an establishment fear of "socialism," and now "populism."
So in a way, America never got off the ground as a real democracy anyway as government of, by and for the people (pace Lincoln).
To be sure, at the founding America was a lot better than anything in Europe or elsewhere in the world at the time. And since then the feudal monarchies and landed aristocracies are largely history.
However, now it is time to move on as digitization makes participatory democracy feasible technically. And that is what the Establishment is afraid of and are trying to prevent in order to maintain control. Trump happens to be a piece in that game.
The Unz Review
Is This Trump's "Samson Moment"?
Mike Whitney
See also
Rich Whitney, an attorney and writer, sought to compare Freedom House’s rating systemof political rights for 2015 to the U.S. government’s provision of military assistance – military training,military aidand weapons sales– to foreign nations that same year. Whitney’s stated goal was to determine whether the U.S. government actually opposes dictatorships and champions democracy at a global level, as is often claimed. His independent analysis found that the U.S. has actually manifested the opposite of its stated intention, by providing military assistance to 36 of the world’s 49 dictatorships. In other words, more than 73% of the world’s dictatorships currently receive military assistance from the United States.
For his analysis, Whitney used a commonly accepted definition of dictatorship: “a system of government in which one person or a small group possesses absolute state power, thereby directing all national policies and major acts — leaving the people powerless to alter those decisions or replace those in power by any method short of revolution or coup.” He chose Freedom House’s Freedom in the World annual reports, citing it as the best source for a comprehensive list of dictatorships and “free” societies. Whitney, however, noted that the ostensibly independent organization has a “decidedly pro-US-ruling-class bias.”
Freedom House’s bias makes the results of Whitney’s analysis even more damning. The organization is funded bya combination of Western government and nongovernmental-organization sources, including the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations. Thus, its categorization of nations as dictatorships or as free societies is largely analogous to how the U.S. State Department classifies such nations — meaning that U.S. monetary support of such dictatorships is a knowing and willful repudiation of democracy promotion abroad....The Free Thought Project
‘Promoting Democracy’? US Gives Military Aid to More Than 70% of World’s Dictatorships