Kunstler 250 – Chatting with Charles Hugh Smith
JHK and Charles Hugh Smith, author and blogger at OfTwoMinds.com, yak about the Deep State, our favorite new word for what used be be known as the Establishment. We also touch on Charles’s theory that the Deep State will be willing to “throw Wall Street under the bus” to save itself, if it felt threatened. This is JHK’s return to the podcast after several months off finishing the third installment of the four-part World Made By Hand series. The title of WMBH-3 is A History of the Future. It will be published in September by the Atlantic Monthly Press.
Direct Download: Kunstler 250 – Chatting with Charles Hugh Smith
Please send questions and comments to letters@kunstler.com.
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Sadly, I think the banks are acting as a financial intelligence group to expedite the smashing and privatization of countries in the military/banking 1-2 punch toward global austerity.
I would have agreed that the military would see the banks as a potential enemy, but the system globally is being run for some to own all the wealth and assets of the world and these [gunz & finance] are their tools. btw, banks are trying to own hard assets now.
Group think is one way to stop progress that could turn things around, by useful idiots much to the benefit to those who we all now like to call decision makers of the Deep State.
When it all wealth goes to the tippy top–you too can watch Godzilla vs Rodin.
I’m getting out my pop corn. I love a good horror show.–hope we all survive these crazies.
Great podcast, Jim. Glad you’re back ‘on air.’
Excerpts from Anatomy of the Deep State:
Washington Consensus”: financialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and the commodifying of labor. Internationally, they espouse 21st-century “American Exceptionalism”: the right and duty of the United States to meddle in every region of the world with coercive diplomacy and boots on the ground and to ignore painfully won international norms of civilized behavior. To paraphrase what Sir John Harrington said more than 400 years ago about treason, now that the ideology of the Deep State has prospered, none dare call it ideology. [5] That is why describing torture with the word “torture” on broadcast television is treated less as political heresy than as an inexcusable lapse of Washington etiquette: Like smoking a cigarette on camera, these days it is simply “not done.”
Still, despite the essential roles of lower Manhattan and Silicon Valley, the center of gravity of the Deep State is firmly situated in and around the Beltway. The Deep State’s physical expansion and consolidation around the Beltway would seem to make a mockery of the frequent pronouncement that governance in Washington is dysfunctional and broken. That the secret and unaccountable Deep State floats freely above the gridlock between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the paradox of American government in the 21st century: drone strikes, data mining, secret prisons and Panopticon-like control on the one hand; and on the other, the ordinary, visible parliamentary institutions of self-government declining to the status of a banana republic amid the gradual collapse of public infrastructure.
results of this contradiction are not abstract, as a tour of the rotting, decaying, bankrupt cities of the American Midwest will attest.
Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to “live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face.”
Welcome back ! Good show. I just wonder if the “Deep State” can survive the crash of the dollar,food shortages and lack of tax dollars. Command and Control can hang on WHILE we are at war or have some oil in the pipes. Maybe “W” told the truth. Prepare for perpetual war. Orwell was an optimist. Like Rome we are/have moved from a republic to an empire. Years ago. WWII is a good start date.
Two a month for book #4–good trade ! That should keep my podcast shakes and shivers under control. I really missed the show.