"What Mueller won't find"

Bob in Portland explicated Robert Mueller's deep state bona fides earlier this month in "What Mueller won't find" posted on caucus99percent:

I suppose my introduction to the corruption of those in power, at thirteen, was the assassination of JFK. Not actually the assassination, but the murder of Oswald two days later, in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters. I had slept overnight at a friend's and we came back from shooting basketballs to watch the transfer of Oswald to another facility. That was the moment that I realized all wasn't what it seemed. But, like most kids my age, the Beatles came along in a month or so and I was swept into the world of rock and roll, which kept me occupied until I began noticing girls. Until 1968. I was still noticing girls and rock and roll, but I was also noticing the number of progressives being gunned down by "lone nuts". And I was noticing Vietnam.

Continue reading: "What Mueller won't find."

Return of the Deep State

UPDATE: I just saw a tweet from Monday by Julian Assange where he quotes a Monmouth University poll showing that 74% of Americans believe that national policy is directed by a deep state.

**** 

It seems to have been several months since the legacy media has denied the existence of a functioning U.S. deep state. (I am thinking of last year's "What Happens When You Fight a ‘Deep State’ That Doesn’t Exist," by Max Fisher, as a prime example.) But it was back on the front page with John Brennan's absurdly sanctimonious weekend "[Y]ou will not destroy America" tweet, amplified in its absurdity by the Samantha Power's double tap "[N]ot a good idea to piss off John Brennan."

And the press harangues Trump for being gauche.

What I wondered upon reading of Brennan's tweeted outrage is whether in the history of the United States any former CIA director had attacked a sitting president in a similar fashion. For instance, did John McCone, Kennedy's Director of Central Intelligence, harangue Nixon during the Watergate constitutional crisis?

 I doubt it.

So the deep state is back, front and center, and Ray McGovern, in his delightful "Former CIA Chief Brennan Running Scared," thinks a resolution to the current constitutional crisis might be right around the bend:

Unmasking: Senior national security officials are permitted to ask the National Security Agency to unmask the names of Americans in intercepted communications for national security reasons — not for domestic political purposes. Congressional committees have questioned why Obama’s UN ambassador Samantha Power (as well as his national security adviser Susan Rice) made so many unmasking requests. Power is reported to have requested the unmasking of more than 260 Americans, most of them in the final days of the administration, including the names of Trump associates.

Deep State Intimidation

Back to John Brennan’s bizarre tweet Saturday telling the President, “You may scapegoat Andy McCabe but you will not destroy America … America will triumph over you.” Unmasking the word “America,” so to speak, one can readily discern the name “Brennan” underneath. Brennan’s words and attitude are a not-so-subtle reminder of the heavy influence and confidence of the deep state, including the media — exercised to a fare-thee-well over the past two years.

Later on Saturday, Samantha Power, with similar equities at stake, put an exclamation point behind what Brennan had tweeted earlier in the day. Power also saw fit to remind Trump where the power lies, so to speak. She warned him publicly that it is “not a good idea to piss off John Brennan.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post is dutifully playing its part in the deep-state game of intimidation. The following excerpt from Sunday’s lead article conveys the intended message: “Some Trump allies say they worry he is playing with fire by taunting the FBI. ‘This is open, all-out war. And guess what? The FBI’s going to win,’ said one ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. ‘You can’t fight the FBI. They’re going to torch him.’” [sic]

The Post, incidentally, waited until paragraph 41 of 44 to inform readers that it was the FBI’s own Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General of the Department of Justice that found McCabe guilty, and that the charge was against McCabe, not the FBI. A quite different impression was conveyed by the large headline “Trump escalates attacks on FBI” as well as the first 40 paragraphs of Sunday’s lead article.

Putting Down a Marker

It isn’t as though Donald Trump wasn’t warned, as are all incoming presidents, of the power of the Deep State that he needs to play ball with — or else. Recall that just three days before President-elect Trump was visited by National Intelligence Director James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Michael Rogers, Trump was put on notice by none other than the Minority Leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer. Schumer has been around and knows the ropes; he is a veteran of 18 years in the House, and is in his 20th year in the Senate. 

On Jan. 3, 2017 Schumer said it all, when he told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, that President-elect Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities:

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told Maddow. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.” Did Maddow ask Schumer if he was saying President of the United States should be afraid of the intelligence community? No, she let Schumer’s theorem stand.

With gauntlets now thrown down by both sides, we may not have to wait very long to see if Schumer is correct in his blithe prediction as to how the present constitutional crisis will be resolved.

Amazon is the Deep State

Making a purchase on Amazon has become as American as apple pie (and drone assassinations). This morning Niqnaq posts part one, "Amazon cashes in on war crimes and mass surveillance," of a two-part story, "Amazon and the CIA: a match made in hell," by WSWS's Evan Blake:

In recent years, the multinational corporation Amazon has risen to become the preeminent online retail giant and the fourth most valuable company in the world. One of Amazon’s most significant business contracts, which has largely been kept hidden from the public since it was finalized in October 2013, was a $600 million deal for Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a private computing cloud for the 17 American intelligence agencies known collectively as the “intelligence community” (IC).

The deal initiated Amazon’s ever-deepening integration with the American state, and implicates the company in the international war crimes, mass spying and repressive operations carried out by the spy agencies of American imperialism. Similar to the Krupp company, which supplied arms to the German military during World Wars I and II, Amazon today provides the technological scaffolding for the wars waged by American imperialism.

[snip] 

The sharing of data—facilitated by Amazon—enables scenarios to take place where the CIA, NSA, NGA and the Air Force collaborate to identify, precisely locate and carry out the drone assassination of anyone deemed to be a “terrorist,” including American citizens. Thanks to Amazon, the spy agencies can now more seamlessly conspire to carry out bloody military campaigns, such as the military assault on Mosul, or secretly orchestrate the Saudi-led war against Yemen. They are no doubt using such technology to simulate and prepare for the long-planned wars against North Korea, Iran, China and Russia, which threaten to coalesce into a new, catastrophic World War between nuclear-armed powers.

In mid-2012, the CIA began conducting negotiations with AWS, IBM and an unnamed third corporation to decide which company would win the 10-year, highly lucrative contract to create the private cloud for the IC, which had to be capable of analyzing 100 terabytes of raw data at a time, an immense figure.

In February 2013, the CIA secretly selected Amazon as the winning bidder. IBM filed a bid protest, claiming they had offered a lower price than Amazon, but in October 2013, the US Court of Federal Claims sided with Amazon, which then began to build the C2S cloud infrastructure. The cloud became operational in the summer of 2014, with then-CIA chief information officer Doug Wolfe praising it as “one of the most important technology procurements in recent history.”

Last month, current CIA CIO John Edwards declared in a speech at AWS’ Public Sector Summit, “It’s the best decision we’ve ever made... It’s the most innovative thing we’ve ever done... It is having a material impact on both the CIA and the IC.”

There were a number of factors that led the CIA to partner with Amazon, one of which was their ability to save money in the long-term. While $600 million is an enormous sum, at that point the IC was spending upwards of $8 billion annually to store and analyze the billions of pieces of metadata, phone and internet records, and other information that it was collecting en masse on its self-built servers, as noted in documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

Amazon’s cloud-based server offered a means to significantly reduce these costs, as it had a unique ability to scale up or down to meet the storage, computing and analytics needs of the IC at a given time. Amazon would also incorporate any innovations or improvements devised by their engineers, which happen on an almost daily basis, directly into the C2S cloud.

The genius of U.S. corporate capitalism is the manner in which it compromises us all. We bank with one of the too-big-to-fail giants; we use their credit cards; we shop on Amazon. Not really a prescription for the attainment of critical consciousness.

So while the sagacious Samir Amin predicts a collapse of the neoliberal world order, and I tend to agree, the counterpoint is that the neoliberal world order, "the End of History," will continue to motor along because, since we are all so complicit in its maintenance, there is truly no alternative.

Drunk on the Heady Wine of Macron's Landslide the Deep State Takes Another Bite of the Trump Apple

Despite numerous placating gestures to the permanent government, Trump is back in its crosshairs. Trump's firing yesterday of FBI director James Comey, splashed all over the frontpage this morning, was prefigured Tuesday by prominent placement of Senate testimony by Sally Yates, former acting attorney general, of how she warned the Trump White House not to hire Mike Flynn.

For news consumers this reemergence of the "Siberian candidate" meme from the obscurity of the back pages should have set antenna tingling.

Another tell is this morning's Situation Report. Supposedly devoted exclusively to foreign policy matters, I try to read SitRep every morning because it provides a synopsis of the deep state hivemind. Stories that are omitted are stories that the permanent government would rather you not read. Stories given prominent placement are of course the stories that the permanent government wants us to ingest.

Interesting then that this morning the firing of a FBI director would lead a daily foreign policy synopsis (more to play up the Russian angle):

Comey sacked. President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday, removing from office the veteran head of the agency tasked with carrying out a wide-ranging investigation into whether the president and his staffers conspired with Russian agents to swing the 2016 election in the Republican candidate’s favor. FP’s Elias Groll has more.

“Not since Watergate has a president dismissed the person leading an investigation bearing on him, and Mr. Trump’s decision late Tuesday afternoon drew instant comparisons to the “Saturday Night Massacre” in October 1973, when President Richard M. Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor looking into the so-called third-rate burglary that would eventually bring Nixon down,” writes the New York Times’ Peter Baker.

Reports indicate the move came after Trump grew increasingly frustrated Comey wouldn’t publicly clear Trump’s name. Tensions had been building in the West Wing, with aides to the president telling Politico that Trump “had grown enraged by the Russia investigation...frustrated by his inability to control the mushrooming narrative around Russia. He repeatedly asked aides why the Russia investigation wouldn’t disappear and demanded they speak out for him. He would sometimes scream at television clips about the probe, one adviser said.”

The move came as a surprise not only to the FBI and Capitol Hill, but also for White House staffers. And it led to calls from both Democrats and some top Republicans for an independent prosecutor to launch an investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

It was also revealed Tuesday by CNN that Federal prosecutors have issued grand jury subpoenas “to associates of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn seeking business records,” for transitions Flynn conducted after he was fired by president Obama from his positions as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “Investigators have been looking into possible wrongdoing in how Flynn handled disclosures about payments from clients tied to foreign governments including Russia and Turkey.”

Trump has also recently hired a law firm to tell Senators that he has no business deals in Russia.

The deep state is feeling its oats. Macron, the only anti-Russian candidate of the major contenders in the French presidential election, won in a landslide. And it looks like the Western intelligence community was able to successfully perpetrate a false flag hack attack.

The giddiness is evident in the absurd hyperbole of a quote from a story yesterday by Steven Erlanger, "Emmanuel Macron Embraces E.U. to Put France ‘Back in the Picture’":

“If Macron manages to stop the populist tsunami, he’ll be rewarded by his European counterparts,” said Florence Gaub, a senior analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris. “He’ll be able to make some demands that other French presidents could not. Because everyone needs him to be a success, and if it stops with France, maybe it stops forever.”

This is purely delusional thinking. We know where Macron's neoliberal reforms lead. Look to Greece.

In any event, in these heady days the elite of the permanent government are going to take another bite at Trump apple.

"Deep State" Goes Mainstream

There appears to be a new kind of journalism in the prestige press. Call it "Trump Porn." A wonderful example is "Inside Trump’s fury: The president rages at leaks, setbacks and accusations," written by Philip Rucker, Robert Costa and Ashley Parker (formerly of The New York Times) and published by The Washing Post.

The story opens as if it were a pulp thriller:

President Trump spent the weekend at “the winter White House,” Mar-a-Lago, the secluded Florida castle where he is king. The sun sparkles off the glistening lawn and warms the russet clay Spanish tiles, and the steaks are cooked just how he likes them (well done). His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner — celebrated as calming influences on the tempestuous president — joined him. But they were helpless to contain his fury.

Trump was mad — steaming, raging mad.

Trump’s young presidency has existed in a perpetual state of chaos. The issue of Russia has distracted from what was meant to be his most triumphant moment: his address last Tuesday to a joint session of Congress. And now his latest unfounded accusation — that Barack Obama tapped Trump’s phones during last fall’s campaign — had been denied by the former president and doubted by both allies and fellow Republicans.

From there the article looks forward to Trump's busy week: He is going to reintroduce a purportedly court-proof entry ban for certain Muslim countries, and then he is going to trot out his repeal of Obamacare.

The rest of the piece focuses on the Trump administration obsession with the deep state (without, oddly, providing a criticism of that obsession). The facts are pretty plain. Trump gave a successful speech to Congress last Tuesday night, but before he could bask too long in the positive news coverage, the Jeff-Sessions-talked-to-the-Russians story took over for the remainder of the week:

Trump, meanwhile, has been feeling besieged, believing that his presidency is being tormented in ways known and unknown by a group of Obama-aligned critics, federal bureaucrats and intelligence figures — not to mention the media, which he has called “the enemy of the American people.”

That angst over what many in the White House call the “deep state” is fomenting daily, fueled by rumors and tidbits picked up by Trump allies within the intelligence community and by unconfirmed allegations that have been made by right-wing commentators. The “deep state” is a phrase popular on the right for describing entrenched networks hostile to Trump.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), an advocate of improved relations between the United States and Russia, said he has told friends in the administration that Trump is being punished for clashing with the hawkish approach toward Russia that is shared by most Democrats and Republicans.

“Remember what Dwight Eisenhower told us: There is a military-industrial complex. That complex still exists and has a lot of power,” he said. “It’s everywhere, and it doesn’t like how Trump is handling Russia. Over and over again, in article after article, it rears its head.”

[snip] 

Stories from Breitbart News, the incendiary conservative website, have been circulated at the White House’s highest levels in recent days, including one story where talk-radio host Mark Levin accused the Obama administration of mounting a “silent coup,” according to several officials.

Stephen K. Bannon, the White House chief strategist who once ran Breitbart, has spoken with Trump at length about his view that the “deep state” is a direct threat to his presidency.

Advisers pointed to Bannon’s frequent closed-door guidance on the topic and Trump’s agreement as a fundamental way of understanding the president’s behavior and his willingness to confront the intelligence community — and said that when Bannon spoke recently about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” he was also alluding to his aim of rupturing the intelligence community and its influence on the U.S. national security and ­foreign policy consensus.

Bannon’s view is shared by some top Republicans.

“It’s not paranoia at all when it’s actually happening. It’s leak after leak after leak from the bureaucrats in the [intelligence community] and former Obama administration officials — and it’s very real,” said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “The White House is absolutely concerned and is trying to figure out a systemic way to address what’s happening.”

Trump got the narrative off Sessions and the Russians by blaming Obama for tapping his phones during the campaign. Since Sunday afternoon the Gray Lady has been topping its homepage with
"Comey Asks Justice Dept. to Reject Trump’s Wiretapping Claim."

So, yes. We are in full-on Watergate territory, with no hint that the conflict will be resolved anytime soon. It is as if Nixon would have publicly revealed back in 1972-1973 that he was being hung out to dry by the CIA.

The upside to Trump tantrums is that it is exposing the deep state to a little sunshine. Prior to Trump's election you would have had to have read a Peter Dale Scott book on the JFK assassination to be familiar with the term, though it did see the light of day in the excellent reporting done by David Kirkpatrick during the Egyptian Revolution and then the Morsi coup -- but that was in relation to a Egypt not the "exceptional" U.S.

The deep state has long been acknowledged in the mainstream, just not in the media (unless you call Hollywood blockbusters part of the mainstream media). In Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) the U.S. Government is depicted as a colossal shell, the kernel of which is a "deep state" (HYDRA) whose goals are the opposite of the citizens the government purportedly represents. The Robert Redford character represents the slick soulless "permanent government" official who operates the control board. 

This is how the world works. Ask yourself how it is people voted for the "peace" candidate in 2008 & 2012 and ended up getting a Cold War 2.0 and a re-occupation of Iraq nonetheless. Or here's another one: How is it that Wall Street banks got bailed out, made whole, while occupants of Main Street got pink slips and lost their pensions?

David Brooks Relishes Soft Coup Underway

Part of an op-ed page that was strewn with demands for an independent counsel to investigate the Trump administration for treason, David Brooks' column yesterday, "What a Failed Trump Administration Looks Like," explicitly acknowledges what is commonly accepted on the various websites branded as Fake News portals by the ludicrous PropOrNot, that the permanent government, the deep state, is engaged in a campaign of across-the-board sabotage of Donald Trump's presidency. If anyone should know it is David Brooks. He is a paragon of the governing elite.

As Brooks notes,

The Civil Service has a thousand ways to ignore or sit on any presidential order. The court system has given itself carte blanche to overturn any Trump initiative, even on the flimsiest legal grounds. The intelligence community has only just begun to undermine this president. 

President Trump can push all the pretty buttons on the command deck of the Starship Enterprise, but don’t expect anything to actually happen, because they are not attached.

But as Brooks points out:

Everything about Trump that appalls 65 percent of America strengthens him with the other 35 percent, and he can ride that group for a while. Even after these horrible four weeks, Republicans on Capitol Hill are not close to abandoning their man. 

The likelihood is this: We’re going to have an administration that has morally and politically collapsed, without actually going away.

In many ways this is exactly what is called for. The United States is a brigand that destroys states; that is all it can do at this point. It answers to the oil-rich despotic Arab sheikhdoms, the Likudniks in apartheid Israel, and the insulated, brittle governing neoliberal elites ensconced in Western capitals. It is morally bankrupt and survives by purveying lies, like "Russian aggression in the Crimea." The United States needs a reboot, a thorough overhaul, a revolution. Barring that, it needs to collapse -- for the greater health of the planet.

Trump's Press Conference Yesterday

Trump's news conference yesterday was an impressive performance. What struck me was at the very beginning, before he begins to address the reporters, his kitchen cabinet -- Bannon, Kushner, Pence, Priebus -- files in to their seats in the front row, and they look isolated, forlorn, like suspects in a police lineup. Clearly there is a war going on. It's Trump against the permanent government.

What Trump has going for him is that he is an accomplished pitch man. But his greatest asset is the loathing that the majority feels towards the media and the governing elite. Trump can lie and cajole and play off the elites for a long, potentially very long, time.

Now for Trump the Inevitable About-Face

From "Trump Embraces Pillars of Obama’s Foreign Policy," by Mark Landler, Peter Baker and David Sanger. the inevitable:

WASHINGTON — President Trump, after promising a radical break with the foreign policy of Barack Obama, is embracing some key pillars of the former administration’s strategy, including warning Israel to curb settlement construction, demanding that Russia withdraw from Crimea and threatening Iran with sanctions for ballistic missile tests.

In the most startling shift, the White House issued an unexpected statement appealing to the Israeli government not to expand the construction of Jewish settlements beyond their current borders in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Such expansion, it said, “may not be helpful in achieving” the goal of peace.

At the United Nations, Ambassador Nikki R. Haley declared that the United States would not lift sanctions against Russia until it stopped destabilizing Ukraine and pulled troops out of Crimea.

On Iran, the administration is preparing economic sanctions similar to those the Obama administration imposed just over a year ago. The White House has also shown no indication that it plans to rip up Mr. Obama’s landmark nuclear deal, despite Mr. Trump’s withering criticism of it during the presidential campaign.

The New Cold War will be maintained, as will belligerence towards Iran and the U.S. charade of commitment to a Palestinian state; add to this counting off of Deep State pillars the "safe zones" in Syria and all pretense that Trump represents a change of course needs to be dropped.

Trump wants to rule; in order to do that he needs the sinews of the state at his command. He can't handle a rebellion on the streets at the same time there is a rebellion in the back offices of Foggy Bottom and Langley.

It will be interesting now that Trump is turning his battleship away from conflict with the Deep State to see how the prestige press treats all the various protests -- the water protectors, the women's marchers, the scientists on parade, the immigrant's rights rallies. The pessimist in me thinks that maybe not immediately but before too long the message from the mainstream media will be, "Okay folks. Let's pack it up and go home. You made your point. And you're looking kind of scattered and sounding whiny. You don't want to end up behind bars, do you?"

But while Trump's pirouette might earn him some allegiance from the Deep State his supporters are not going to be mollified merely by boorish behavior and hostile tweets,

Things have changed. People have rejected the ruling ideology of neoliberal redistribution of wealth. This is driven home by an article on British Parliament overwhelming backing Brexit (Stephen Castle, "Theresa May Gets Parliament’s Backing on ‘Brexit’ Bill"). It was just last June that the British Parliament overwhelming opposed Brexit:

The June 23 plebiscite, in which around 52 percent of those voting chose to leave, has transformed the Conservative Party, which had been split over a British exit, into an enthusiast for it.

Though the opposition Labour Party campaigned last year to remain, its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is a lifelong critic of European integration and never seemed fully convinced about the pro-European case. On Wednesday, he instructed his lawmakers to vote to allow Brexit negotiations to start, an order that prompted a rebellion within his party.

Yet, that was limited to less than 50 people, because even Labour’s most ardent proponents of remaining know that some of their usual supporters ignored their advice and voted to leave.

That has provoked an almost existential crisis for Labour, one hinted at on Tuesday when Keir Starmer, the Labour politician responsible for dealing with the British exit, noted that two-thirds of Labour lawmakers represent constituencies that voted to leave in the referendum.

 The crisis will deepen.

Deep State Desperation

There is a good synopsis in this morning's Foreign Policy Situation Report of the latest Deep State effort to disqualify Trump before his inauguration next Friday:

Well, that was something. Welcome to the New Normal, where the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee personally delivers memos to the FBI director, alleging the President-elect’s team has been in contact with Russian intelligence, which has compromising personal and financial material. That was the bombshell dropped Tuesday by Buzzfeed, which published the documents, calling them “unverified, and potentially unverifiable.”

Quickly. The memos, first disclosed by CNN, were written by a former high-ranking British intelligence official hired by Republicans last year to collect information on Trump, were delivered by Sen. John McCain to FBI chief James Comey in December. While the FBI has not verified the accuracy of any of the claims, “U.S. officials had evaluated the sources relied upon by the private firm, considered them credible, and determined that it was plausible that they would have firsthand knowledge of Russia’s alleged dossier on Trump,” the Washington Post reports.

Briefing book. The information was included in the classified report the U.S. intel officials briefed to President Obama and Trump last week.

The first elements of the story were published in October by Mother Jones’ David Corn, but as The Guardian’s Julian Borger points out, Trump’s staffers have been an object of interest for the U.S. intel agencies for months. “The FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The Fisa court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation.” On Wednesday, Moscow denied having any compromising information on Trump.

Then for the Gray Lady Jonathan Weisman regurgitates Trump's tweeted rejoinder, "Trump on Compromising Dossier Leak: ‘Are We Living in Nazi Germany?’"

What Buzzfeed did was to reanimate opposition research (crafted by a former British intelligence official) that had been floating around in the press prior to the November election. Buzzfeed was able to call this news because of Deep State consul McCain's hand-off of the old opposition research to FBI's Comey. Pretty pathetic and desperate. It's reminiscent of the "Dodgy Dossier."

NFL Ratings Drop Revisited

National Football League television ratings have rebounded from the doldrums of October, but they are still below last year's, according to an article by Thomas Barrabi, "NFL TV Ratings See Post-Election Boost":

Since the election, national NFL games across broadcast and cable are averaging an audience of 18 million viewers, according to Nielsen data obtained by FOXBusiness.com. That’s a nearly 17% increase from the period from the start of the season up until the election, when national NFL games drew an average of 15.4 million viewers.

Sustained success by the 11-1 Dallas Cowboys, owner of the NFL’s largest fan base, has helped to boost TV ratings. The Cowboys’ win over the Washington Redskins drew 35.1 million viewers, the highest total for a regular-season game in more than two decades. Similar, the Cowboys’ victory over the Minnesota Vikings on December 1 drew 21.8 million viewers, making it the most-watched Thursday Night Football game in the series’ history.

The data suggests that at least some viewers are dedicating more time to the NFL since the outcome of the election was decided on November 8. But overall, TV ratings are still down across the board compared to last year.

During the 2015 season, CBS said it drew an average of 19.1 million viewers, while FOX said it drew an average of 20.75 million viewers.

NFL media executives addressed the ratings decline in an internal memo in October. At the time, ratings across all networks were down 11% through the first four weeks of the season, ESPN’s Darren Rovell reported.

"Prime-time windows have clearly been affected the most, while declines during the Sunday afternoon window are more modest," NFL executives, Brian Rolapp and Howard Katz, wrote in the memo obtained by ESPN. "While our partners, like us, would have liked to see higher ratings, they remain confident in the NFL and unconcerned about a long-term issue."

Aside from election coverage, pundits offered the NFL’s concussion scandal, a series of player protests during the National Anthem, cord-cutting and the league’s oversaturation of the television market as potential reasons for its ratings struggles.

President-elect Donald Trump took credit for the ratings decline during an October rally in Cincinnati, Ohio.

“Then you look at the NFL. Well, now they should start recovering, but their ratings were so far down, and you know what that reason was? This -- because this business is tougher than the NFL,” Trump said.

NFL executives are whistling past the graveyard. The ratings drop is clearly a long-term issue. If not for the spectacular season of "America's Team" -- for some reason people have always loved the Dallas Cowboys -- viewership would be down by more than a couple million.

As a general principle I like to pay attention to low-brow entertainment -- professional football, comic books, etc. -- because I believe it corroborates aspects of the political zeitgeist.

In the case of the NFL ratings drop, I think it mirrors the loss of faith in the Establishment, the political and mainstream media, whatever you want to call the reigning center, that has led to the rise of Trump and now the Deep State's counterattack by ginning up a Fake News crisis against a New Cold War/McCarthyite backdrop.

The NFL will have no such recourse. A majority of the games remain terrible, nearly unwatchable, like Sunday's Green Bay blowout of Seattle. The Seahawks have never been blown out in the Russell Wilson era. That's four years never having lost a game by more than ten points. That's an amazing achievement. A first like that has to augur something.

One could argue that it is just a natural changing of the guard. But it is not. Rising powers like Tampa and Tennessee remain mediocre. Overall offenses are inconsistent and defenses don't dominate. Performances are weird, lackluster.

I think the reality of CTE and the enormous amounts of money are finally suffocating amazing athleticism. Repeat head trauma and corporate concentration of wealth pretty well sums up the United States.

Gray Lady Shines a Little Light on the Deep State

Two stories over the last two days show the ease with which the Gray Lady can illuminate the Deep State rumbling beneath our tattered democracy when she so chooses.

Today Ron Nixon has an informative expose, "Report Reveals Wider Tracking of Mail in U.S.,"
on the hoary practice of mass surveillance by the United States Postal Service. There were 50,000 requests to secretly record the information on the outside of the envelope, a surveillance program called mail covers, in 2013 alone. This information was the result of USPS audit posted without fanfare, in the spirit of Poe's "The Purloined Letter," on the Office of the Inspector General, United States Postal Service web site at the end of last May.

What makes the USPS mail covers surveillance program noteworthy is that seemingly anybody can request one, from a county sheriff to Mephistopheles himself, the National Security Agency; the request does not have to be made for national security reasons, as Nixon explains:

The mail cover surveillance requests cut across all levels of government — from global intelligence investigations by the United States Army Criminal Investigations Command, which requested 500 mail covers from 2001 through 2012, to state-level criminal inquiries by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which requested 69 mail covers in the same period. The Department of Veterans Affairs requested 305, and the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security asked for 256. The information was provided to The Times under the Freedom of Information request.

Postal officials did not say how many requests came from agencies in charge of national security — including the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection — because release of the information, wrote Kimberly Williams, a public records analyst for the Postal Inspection Service, “would reveal techniques and procedures for law enforcement or prosecutions.”

Defense lawyers say the secrecy concerning the surveillance makes it hard to track abuses in the program because most people are not aware they are being monitored. But there have been a few cases in which the program appears to have been abused by law enforcement officials.

Particularly interesting is how postal surveillance was used by anti-immigrant politician Sheriff Joe Arpaio to harass a political opponent:

In Arizona in 2011, Mary Rose Wilcox, a Maricopa County supervisor, discovered that her mail was being monitored by the county’s sheriff, Joe Arpaio. Ms. Wilcox had been a frequent critic of Mr. Arpaio, objecting to what she considered the targeting of Hispanics in his immigration sweeps. 

The Postal Service had granted an earlier request from Mr. Arpaio and Andrew Thomas, who was then the county attorney, to track Ms. Wilcox’s personal and business mail. 

Using information gleaned from letters and packages sent to Ms. Wilcox and her husband, Mr. Arpaio and Mr. Thomas obtained warrants for banking and other information about two restaurants the couple owned. The sheriff’s office also raided a company that hired Ms. Wilcox to provide concessions at the local airport.

“We lost the contract we had for the concession at the airport, and the investigation into our business scared people away from our restaurants,” Ms. Wilcox said in an interview. “I don’t blame the Postal Service, but you shouldn’t be able to just use these mail covers to go on a fishing expedition. There needs to be more control.” 

She sued the county, was awarded nearly $1 million in a settlement in 2011 and received the money this June when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling. Mr. Thomas, the former county attorney, was disbarred for his role in investigations into the business dealings of Ms. Wilcox and other officials and for other unprofessional conduct. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on Mr. Arpaio’s use of mail covers in the investigation of Ms. Wilcox. 

In another instance, Cynthia Orr, a defense lawyer in San Antonio, recalled that while working on a pornography case in the early 2000s, federal prosecutors used mail covers to track communications between her team of lawyers and a client who was facing obscenity and tax evasion charges. Ms. Orr complained to prosecutors but never learned if the tracking stopped. Her team lost the case. 

“The troubling part is that they don’t have to report the use of this tool to anyone,” Ms. Orr said in an interview. The Postal Service declined to comment on the case. 

Frank Askin, a law professor at the Rutgers Constitutional Rights Clinic, who as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union successfully sued the F.B.I. nearly 40 years ago after the agency monitored the mail of a 15-year-old New Jersey student, said he was concerned about the oversight of the current program. 

“Postal Service employees are not judicial officers schooled in the meaning of the First Amendment,” Mr. Askin said.

Besides mass postal surveillance another hoary aspect of the Deep State trotted out by the Gray Lady for a jog in the national consciousness was Eric Lichtblau's "In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis." This of course has been the stuff of well-researched books, Hollywood movies and comic books for decades, so much so that it is taken for granted by most citizens, but it is nice to see the "newspaper of record" weigh in with confirmation.

Lichtblau opens his story by framing the U.S.-Nazi collaboration as a memento of the Cold War:

WASHINGTON — In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show. 

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich. 

The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of “minor war crimes.” 

And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.

That CIA spy, Aleksandras Lileikis, according to Lichtblau, was implicated in

[T]he machine-gun massacres of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He worked "under the control of the Gestapo during the war," his C.I.A. file noted, and 'was possibly connected with the shooting of Jews in Vilna.” 

Even so, the agency hired him in 1952 as a spy in East Germany — paying him $1,700 a year, plus two cartons of cigarettes a month — and cleared the way for him to immigrate to America four years later, records show. 

Mr. Lileikis lived quietly for nearly 40 years, until prosecutors discovered his Nazi past and prepared to seek his deportation in 1994. 

When C.I.A. officials learned of the plans, a lawyer there called Eli Rosenbaum at the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit and told him “you can’t file this case,” Mr. Rosenbaum said in an interview. The agency did not want to risk divulging classified records about its ex-spy, he said. 

Mr. Rosenbaum said he and the C.I.A. reached an understanding: If the agency was forced to turn over objectionable records, prosecutors would drop the case first. (That did not happen, and Mr. Lileikis was ultimately deported.) 

The C.I.A. also hid what it knew of Mr. Lileikis’s past from lawmakers. 

In a classified memo to the House Intelligence Committee in 1995, the agency acknowledged using him as a spy but made no mention of the records linking him to mass murders. “There is no evidence,” the C.I.A. wrote, “that this Agency was aware of his wartime activities.”

There it all is, sort of the grand prize of Deep State skullduggery -- shielding a genocidal Nazi asset from prosecution and lying to Congress.

Lichtblau also tells the story of how the CIA employed and protected the SS official, Otto von Bolschwing, who mentored Adolf Eichmann:

One SS officer, Otto von Bolschwing, was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution,” and wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews. 

Yet after the war, the C.I.A. not only hired him as a spy in Europe, but relocated him and his family to New York City in 1954, records show. The move was seen as a “a reward for his loyal postwar service and in view of the innocuousness of his [Nazi] party activities,” the agency wrote.

Though Lichtblau's story is tainted by framing the CIA-Nazi collaboration as a thing of the past, a "boys will boys" historical curio of the Cold War, what shines through is an account of "invisible" government, the CIA and FBI, addicted to criminality and murder.  As Lichtblau says,

Evidence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerging publicly in the 1970s. But thousands of records from declassified files, Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources, together with interviews with scores of current and former government officials, show that the government’s recruitment of Nazis ran far deeper than previously known and that officials sought to conceal those ties for at least a half-century after the war.

Lichtblau could have drawn the government's recruitment of Nazis right up to now and what is going on in Ukraine where the U.S. worked with neo-Nazis to stage a Kiev putsch in February, setting that country on a course for civil war. We are now experiencing a New Cold War with Russia.

Institutions are organic. They have a memory. Old habits die hard, particularly when elected officials do nothing to change the offending behavior.

Hopefully now after the failed Obama presidency there is a greater appreciation of the inviolability of the Deep State. We can elect supposedly transformational popular leaders in landslide elections and nothing will change. You know the scorecard: Guantanamo Bay remains opens, domestic oil and gas consumption and extraction is soaring, U.S. troops are bombing Iraq, the entire planet is under surveillance.

Where we go from here -- Hillary vs. Jeb? -- is hard to imagine.