Someone Please Explain These Developments on FISA and the Non-Stop Funding of Wars

Matt Taibbi is flummoxed. So am I. Any curious person would be. Matt tries to explain what happened in he recent article: "A Saturday Massacre in CongressOn a Saturday to mark and remember, congress funds two wars and hands the intelligence agencies sweeping new surveillance power, getting nothing in return."

Please. Someone tell me who is moving the levers of power in DC and how?  Matt Taibbi offers this:

Mike Johnson is now Winston Churchill. All he had to do was give the NSA unlimited spying power, overrule constituents about funding two wars, and support allowing government to block a platform used by 60 million Americans.

In return he got: nothing. No immigration reform, no articulation of benchmarks or a plan for success in Ukraine, no accounting for past spending, no insistence on warrants to spy on Americans, no concession that FISA can only be reauthorized by Congress, no claw-back of a major new “Everybody is a Spy” surveillance ask. Johnson traded his starting lineup for the proverbial bag of balls.

History will look back at a moment below from April 12th, just before the House passed FISA, and wonder about a last comment from Johnson. The Speaker talks about being originally horrified by the “terrible abuses, hundreds of thousands of abuses” of FISA by the FBI.

But “then when I became Speaker, I went to the [secure briefing room] and got a confidential briefing” from intelligence officials, and heard “sort of the other perspective on that.” It “gave him a different perspective.”

Regarding FISA, Reason explains what was at stake in an article titled "Revised Section 702 Surveillance Authority Poses More Danger Than EverNew language could make almost anybody with access to a WiFi router help the government snoop."
If this became law, millions of American small business owners would have a legal obligation to hand over data that runs through their equipment," caution former Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R–Va.) and former Sen. Mark Udall (D–Colo.), both now with the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability. "And when they're done with doing their part in mass surveillance, these small businesses would then be placed under a gag order to hide their activities from their customers."

It seems like Glenn Greenwald is thinking more bad things are happening than he is willing to articulate at this time. Consider this part of Glenn's monologue: [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingSomeone Please Explain These Developments on FISA and the Non-Stop Funding of Wars

Mike Benz Defines and Describes “The Blob”

Mike Benz often speaks of "the Blob." To what is he referring? I created the following transcript Dr. Drew's interview of Mike Benz:

"The Blob" is actually a term from President Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, who was opining on the difficulty within the White House of getting things done because they seem to be up against an impenetrable force, an a amorphous alien monster that was more powerful than even even the Obama White House. And so he sort of coined this phrase, out of exasperation, in a certain sense, but it's been adopted in Washington. It refers to the foreign policy establishment and I'll sketch out what that is, and it's not just the foreign policy establishment within the government. It is the external stakeholders in the corporate and financial worlds who are the donor draftor class off of the government activity.

So I'll sketch that out a little bit here. The foreign policy establishment is the side of our government that faces outward rather than inward to manage the American empire, rather than the American homeland. We have government agencies that manage the American homeland, like Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor. They all face inward. They don't do international business, so to speak with, you know, Ukraine or Moldova, or Sub Saharan Africa.

We have three sides of our government--three departments or constellations of entities that face outward and those are the Pentagon, the State Department and our intelligence services, such as the CIA. Now, together, they basically form this defense diplomacy intelligence apparatus. And because they face outward and their mandate is to protect and maximize US national interests on the world stage, they have a license to do dirty tricks that domestic facing institutions are not empowered to do. So for example, they can wiretap foreign citizens. They don't need to get a warrant for it. They can bribe foreign media institutions to promote or kill stories. They can set up their own media vehicles to be able to swing hearts and minds so that another country's own parliament votes for or against a different bill there in order to get the people of a foreign country to support a US military base in the region, or a UN Security Council vote in a region. And they're they're deployed with this dirty tricks power, which involves a license to lie.

So for example, the Central Intelligence Agency under National Security Council 10-2 back in the 1940s, was given basically a license to do all sorts of criminal or illegal illegal activity as long as they maintain plausible deniability, meaning as long as the US government could plausibly deny that the Central Intelligence Agency or that the US government was behind it, they could engage in criminal activity. Now, that was all set up the foreign policy establishment, the blob, who again on the inside is State Department, Pentagon and, and CIA--we'll just say for shorthand--for the intelligence community. The social contract when that was set up in 1947 1948, was that it was for managing the American empire for the benefit of the citizens of the homeland. And it would have these dirty tricks powers. It would be able to spy. It would be able to lie. It would be able to rig elections, be able to rig media, because at the end of the day, the citizens here would benefit from it, but it would never be turned on our own citizens. That's what our constitution is for. And, and all the other you know, protections that go into being a US citizen.

That's the inside of the blob. The outside of it is the corporate and financial stakeholder class. These are the corporations and the banks, and the financial investors who are the sort of donor draftor class off of the activities of the government. When I refer to drafting you can think of it like a bike race. The strategy in a bike race is not to be out in front where the full blast of the wind is hitting you. The most efficient strategy in a bike race is to be second in line, to draft off of the person who goes first, so that they cut the wind for you so you save all your energy and are able to just overtake them on the last lap, so to speak.

So US multinational corporations, since the age of globalization, have relied on the blob, have relied on the State Department, the Pentagon to the CIA, in order to protect and secure foreign markets for their products, to protect and secure cheap manufacturing in those regions. To protect and secure against issues around tariffs or taxes or labor or regulations. And it's the job of the State Department to go in and pressure that foreign country's government. It is the job of our Central Intelligence Agency to go in and rig those elections or to go in and set up a constellation of surround-sound NGO media in order to get that country's population to support that initiative. And it's the job of the Pentagon to do both the sort of dangling threat of military intervention in the name of democracy or the civil affairs of hearts-and-minds works around psychological warfare in order to make that that happened.

Now, that is not that redounds to the benefit of US multinational corporations who operate in that region. So famous example: in the oil and gas space, for example, is Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, these companies, most of their most of their profits come from all the different shale or hydrocarbon reserves around the whole rest of the world. Other countries don't want to voluntarily just give up their oil or give up their gas or give up these these loose business partnerships where they get mostly railed in negotiations there. The government has to cut the wind for Chevron and for ExxonMobil, the government has to go in and basically coerce these foreign governments or or offer carrots and sticks. And so so those companies draft off of the activities of the blob. Now because they are also major financial donors to the political class, they are essentially donors into the decision making within the government, while their own corporate and financial interests draft off the activities of the government who does that work?

Continue ReadingMike Benz Defines and Describes “The Blob”

With the Democrat Party Fully Captured by the Foreign Policy “Blob,” Populist Republicans Lose a Key Battle on FISA

I have increasingly turned to Mike Benz to help make sense of America's obsessive and unnecessary warmongering. Joe Biden, his neocon cabinet and the DNC have already capitulated to the war state. Among the Democrats, there's no need any more to discuss whether a war is truly necessary. No need to weight the pro's and con's. No need to concern ourselves with the possibility of nuclear war. No need to ask whether the American treasury should be allocated to (massive) domestic needs. We always need more war. Full stop. But why? What is the end game? How does this pro-war ideology benefit ordinary Americans? It doesn't. As George Carlin stated so succinctly,

In this video, Mike Benz explains the big picture. I have created a transcript of Mike's comments at Real America's Voice. On a daily basis, I fear that his assessment is accurate.

Note 1:  When Mike is using the term "the Blob," (as set forth in the third paragraph) he is referring to the internationalist side of the U.S. government associated with big international businesses associated with the energy market associated with the military. .

Note 2: "The Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on its board. A lot of people don't even know that seven CIA directors are still alive, let alone all concentrated on the board of a single organization. That's kind of the heavyweight in the censorship industry." - Mike Benz

Natalie Winters:

On this as of course, Mike Benz who I'm so honored that last minute he was able to come on, Mike, I honestly just want to toss it to you your kind of thoughts on this whole FISA debacle. If you want to start with the press conference that we just saw, or even just the forthcoming Monday vote, what you think's gonna happen?

Mike Benz:

I share an identical rage that I feel that emanating from you here for him to take to the press conference like that and and pivot to the border reciting all of the principles, "If we don't have a border, we don't have a country." Well, you know, what if we don't have a secret police in this country, a political police in this country, we don't have a country? You know, this idea that "Oh, don't worry about it. There's checks and balances on it now."

No, there's not. It's an empty check. It's a blank check for the FBI to do whatever it wants and it's bluster instead of balances. FISA is as a Senator Mike Lee said it best federal investigators stalking Americans, and there's something very sick and twisted about what's happening right now with the FISA fight. visa vie, the Republican Party. The Republican Party is in the middle of a civil war between the internationalist sect of the GOP, the Blob side of it, versus the nationalist wing of the GOP, the populist faction, and Pfizer will not be used on the blob side, the internationalist side of the GOP, that side of the GOP associated with big international businesses associated with the energy market associated with the military. In that empire managerial class of the GOP, FISA is not an issue to them. It won't be used on them, but it will be used on their opposition in the GOP Civil War. Every single right-wing populist nationalist Republican is a target of FISA. FISA is this idea that you can get around the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, and use the Department of dirty tricks powers that our foreign policy establishment has to spy on foreigners, to spy on Americans if you simply use the word counter intelligence instead of intelligence. "We're not doing intelligence spying on our own people. We're doing counter intelligence spying on our people, because they might be being spied on by Russia."

Continue ReadingWith the Democrat Party Fully Captured by the Foreign Policy “Blob,” Populist Republicans Lose a Key Battle on FISA

Ukrainian Children Shoved Into the Meat-Grinder

Here's something you will never see on the U.S. corporate media outlets that cheer-leaded the U.S. into supporting this miserable carnage.

All of this could have been avoided, but Joe Biden and his crew of neocons who supported the Iraq debacle (Victoria Nuland and Anthony Blinken) crave endless war (and see here).

Continue ReadingUkrainian Children Shoved Into the Meat-Grinder