Cross post because it makes more sense here:
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Observation, then I go again:
The American empire system is not static, it changes. It produces crises as a function of its operation, and until now its managers at each stage have always successfully reproduced it through their response to the systemic crises. (Not that it was ever easy. Oh, the travails of the ruling class!) The system adopts modified forms after each round of crisis.
Several generations on from its new birth and globalization during World War II, confronted with many global power shifts and loss of domestic consensus, it has entered a particularly unstable period. This was incipient already during the imaginary new golden age of the late 1990s, and blew up with the big crisis manifestation of 2007-9.
The ascendance of a Trump, especially the Trump, who is like the Platonic form of himself and was already a top-10 celebrity, is a terrible symptom of power elite decline and the more general socio-ideological decay. In part, this is because he is such an exemplary product of this system -- fourteen seasons of NBC The Apprentice are no lie -- and also such an obvious and (formally) criminal case of everything wrong with it. The personal flourish he adds is that he is also a busy, angry, senescent loudmouth. Not incidentally, this was the key to his base appeal, the secret sauce by which he effected the hostile takeover of the GOP. Amid the hourly lies and dissembling and rambling, he regularly lets out unspeakable truths about how the system actually works. ("Do you think we don't have killers?" "Take their oil." "Grab them by the pussy.") Therefore his ouster initially seemed necessary, even inevitable, also because of the instability involved when a mid-level money-laundering con-artist family org headed by a whack-job playing Hitler on TV purports to run the empire by fiat pronouncements. It posed an unprecedented disaster for systemic credibility.
The regime's attempted solution has been, predictably, to ally very closely with the worst avatars of imperial adventurism, the worst elements among the foreign allies, and the most aggressive elements of the real Deep State, which resides in places like Langley and is currently chieftained by Pompeo Maximus and Mini-Bolton. (I don't think the Dulles brothers would have ever seen that coming. And there is no McCloy or Rockefeller figure able to create consensus, I mean who? Bloomberg? Gates? Bezos?!) From the start, they have been looking for what I called America's New War, Part 2017.
The attempted response of the rump establishment power elite has been to cast the Little Gangster From Queens Who Could as a foreign enemy run by remote from a distant capital. Nothing less than the post-modern Red Scare 3.0 would suffice, and it synced for those who prefer that We Have Always Been at War with Eurasia not Eastasia. (This factional wrangling over whether China or Russia is the Global Enemy meanwhile drives them together.)
Which brings us to today's installment. The Cohen testimony is exemplary of the contradiction between Trump as the unwanted kitschy flower of the American system who practically had the presidency handed to him by the corporate media, as against the attempt to style his ascent as the product of a deeply hidden foreign intervention. Cohen presented a theatrical exposure of the conventional criminal Trump Organization, with solid evidence from the inside such as the financial disclosures and the check used to buy the silence of Trump's temp-job courtesans. But the show requires the Russia-Wikileaks narrative to be pasted on, and treated as though it is somehow the news lede, through the device of Cohen saying he heard (most likely true) about how his fellow grifter, Roger Stone, was running his own con on the Trumps, bragging about his made-up inside line to Assange.
Trump being ousted for his assuredly criminal dealings as an exemplary standard capitalist wealth-maximizer is damaging to a wobbly system in which a growing majority now justifiably hates the billionaires, and a glimmer of good news for those hoping for a better world. His being ousted for the #Russiagate construct is seen as the best outcome for the system, and is of course potentially very bad for hopes of a better world, given that it involves perpetuation (and added destabilization) of the global state of nuclear superpower cold war.
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) U.S. and SK. It would bolster the encirclement of China with the 'Stans on the western borders and Burma in the south.
