exojuridik wrote:My point is that the degree to which these outside influences use the CIA, they are actually inhibited by its governmental status. Yes, any political agency is a tool for those that wield actual power - however, all public institutions demand certain protocols to be observed and appearences to be maintained. Any abuse of authority becomes an ultra vires act which creates the very liability, government bureaucrats seek to minimize. This acts as a least a little buffer to what an agency might try to get away with - not that there aren't many skeletons to hide or that in 1963 certain elements within the CIA might have engaged in a little domestic coup d'etat.
My point is that inte(ra)gency divisions within any institution serve to act as a natural limitation to its ultra vires activities. afterall, you always risk a Decembrist uprising if your actions step on the wrong toes and shock the conscience of the rank and file members.
Private, non-governmental actors have no such limitations and are therefore, in my mind, the true source our our current nightmare. They are greed unbound by decency or shame or nominal oversight. They can operate behind corporate shields and have access to every (extra)legal weapon at their disposal.
You know, I think we agree on most everything you've written with regard to private as opposed to public power in the present system. I think of it like this:
Capital is the State.
Corporations govern their own fiefdoms and operations. Banks and investors move money at will, the only "free market" competition is between national and local governments competing for their favor.
The US Government is the largest single pool of capital, amassed from taxation and unlimited credit (ultimately backed by its ability to blow up shit around the world and/or print more money). Of course, it also writes and enforces law. Thus it is very powerful.
Beyond the imperial core of the Pentagon/Intel (a.k.a. the national security state) and the automatic expenditures of Social Security, however, government capital is available on a self-service basis to the private interests best-positioned to buy the lawmakers and bureaucrats. Laws are almost entirely written by corporate lobbies, or else by the national security state.
Public budgets do attend to certain voting clienteles, but almost always through the filter of first assuring private profit for the far more important campaign-financing clienteles. (e.g., some hungry district gets jobs thanks to a dam project, funds for the poor go through corrupt front groups, most of the uninsured may happen to get medical coverage in a package that is actually corporate welfare for insurance companies, etc. etc.)
I differ with you in this: "the CIA" (as a shorthand for the "intelligence community" and especially its black-budget universe) is not a "public institution." Its budgets are hidden. Its associations are hidden. Its agents may pose as employees of any other government agency (most often the State Department or the Pentagon), or of private companies and front groups. Its front groups and contractors can and do operate as independent businesses with their own, independent, off-budget revenue streams (in drugs, transport, arms dealing, or anything else). Some of these private budget streams are fully legal. Intel officials can and regularly do turn away investigations of their operations by the "real" law enforcement agencies on all levels. They are known to have committed countless crimes here and around the world, and almost none of them have ever been prosecuted, and very few even met career setbacks (unless you think losing your "CIA" job and then getting 20 times the money at a private CIA "contractor" is a setback).
The lack of accountability and justice guarantees a culture of impunity. The intel community is not even an "it," but a very large hidden industry harboring many actors. They conduct both officially sanctioned (but secret) operations as well as side operations via private contractors, foreign intel allies ("Safari Group" or "Operation Condor" arrangements), satellites, front groups. All are compartmentalized and largely unaware of what the others are doing. All identify themselves with national security and thus feel complete sanction to do whatever they happen to consider necessary in the nation's defense. The resources and actions are unaccountable and easily elude every form of government oversight.
This area of our society's power structures has all of the advantages of private secret organizations AND of being the state, without the disadvantages of either. They can completely make up their account books (unlike most private businesses) and they can appear to be completely unrelated to the government and therefore immune to public control (unlike other government agencies).
This set-up generates power. We are even regularly reminded that the job of the CIA necessarily IS to commit crimes - in other countries - and to associate with criminals or, as the common phrase goes, "unsavory characters."
Naturally this set-up also attracts already powerful interests. who want to make use of these tools - hence the long-running associations of Wall Street and CIA, narcotics trade and CIA, organized crime and CIA, arms dealing and CIA, war plotters and CIA, all the world's kleptocracies and dictatorships and CIA.
That's why the nexus of power is there, as Paul implies, and always will be as long as we tolerate a permanent secret branch of government.
That being said, Paul's statement is actually kind of simplistic and lame. He doesn't even specify which "coup" he means. He attracts special attention because he's in Congress and has a big fan base who will eat up any easy-to-comprehend red meat rhetoric he offers up and pronounce it wise and courageous, even if they never heard of Danny Casolaro or Gary Webb or Cele Castillo or others who have really risked themselves to expose the actionable operations of the beast (sadly to little effect other than the enlightenment of a small segment of the people to date).
23 wrote:Ever wonder who the real beneficiaries are from keeping the chasm between left and right nice and wide?
Political tribalism rarely serves the tribes.
But the chieftains, now there's another story.
How we define these terms is all the difference. To me the "left" starts with an analysis based in the actual structure of the political economy and the material interests of the existing classes, before moving on to ideology and future visions. Anything else isn't actually leftist, even if labeled as such.
Given that, my answer to your question is that the chasm between "left" and "right" has benefited the right, above all. The "chieftains" (the ruling classes) have overwhelmingly been of those movements known as right and supported the right. I don't want to hear bullshit about a George Soros or two, and I'm not impressed with the occasional financing of a liberal-seeming project by a Rockefeller Foundation, because the majority of rich fuckers stand and have always stood with the likes of Murdoch, Scaife, Milton Friedman, the Christian Zionists, the hardline Cold Warriors, et al.
For the most part in this country, the ideology of the "right" is a collection of manufactured fears based in neuroses about threats to one's perceived identities (like being "white" or "American" or "male" or "Christian" or "pro-life" or, for a good laugh, an "individualist" against the "collectivists" or "unionists"). Conflicts are synthesized out of these partial identities (in many cases patently false identities) in an effort to divide and conquer the laboring classes and the dispossessed.
Often these conflicts are absurdly abstracted from anything real. You can see where the immigration question relates to petty, small-minded competition for economic rewards. That's an example where the players hate other players instead of the game, but the game actually exists.
But what difference would it make to the brainwashed anti-abortion fanatics if they left women to rule over their own bodily processes? They are no different than the Taliban in their permanent uproar about naked women in other countries. or about Buddha statues from thousands of years ago.
The same applies to a host of other complete bullshit "issues" like flag burning, "War on Christmas," the totalitarian Pledge of Allegiance, the existence of a few black men in the corridors of power, etc. etc.
Meanwhile, most of the apparently apolitical media hysterias also come out of right-wing and/or puritan neuroses (despite the enormous doses of hypocrisy involved). Thus issues like the choices of consenting adults to fuck (or the accidental exposure of a female nipple on television), or the existence of individual murderers seem to matter a lot more than the choice of other adults to rob trillions of dollars from millions of people, or the daily murder of countless individuals through the routine functioning of war and the present economic system. At least, based on the media blather devoted to each of these.
Without the right-wing nonsense of people identifying with imperialist action as something "we" do ("we" went into Vietnam, "we" are having troubles in Pakistan, "our" armed forces, "our" flag, blah blah) and without the patently insane tendencies that see an enemy in groups like Mexican workers or over-educated "elite" academics, the vast majority of people in this country would long ago have come together in a "leftist" popular front (based on their real material interests and in solidarity with the people like them around the world).
Now you may point to some "leftists" who talk the same way, and that's the real fakery. Some of the right-wingers are currently identified as such, while others are called Democrats, liberals, even socialists and Marxists. There's your top-level divide-and-conquer scam, right there.
The ambient politics in this country is overwhelmingly, transparently right-wing. That's why it's so important to keep up mythologies about the "liberal media" or the hidden power of an "internationalist" global elite.
If you're apolitical and not actively seeking your education outside the bounds of what's automatically offered up to you, you are absorbing enormous amounts of right-wing dogshit sprinkled with copious but mostly bogus doses of "tolerance," "diversity" and "political correctness" largely designed to create Pavlovian reactions among right-wing dittoheads.
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