David Stockman 2/21/17
New York, New York
February 21, 2017
Dear Reader,
Donald Trump is turning out to be every bit the Great Disrupter I thought he would.
Last Thursday’s press conference was living proof that Trump will accomplish his historic mission. That is, to bring the Imperial City to a screeching halt.
The Donald is now fully at war with the mainstream media and the national security apparatchiks of the Deep State — and nothing could be more conducive to exposing the folly of Washington's imperial adventures abroad and its fiscal bankruptcy at home.
In an ironic way, for example, all the hysterics about Trump's allegedly illicit ties to Putin and Russia are a godsend. What underlies all the leaks and dark insinuations about the Trump campaign's "constant contact" with Russian security operatives is surely little more than petty tradecraft and tit-for-tat maneuvers and intrigues among rival spy organizations.
That this low-level nonsense has been puffed up to the grave claim of Russian meddling in the U.S. election is just Democrat sour grapes. It came out of the Obama national security apparatus led by the despicable former CIA director John Brennan.
Likewise, the “Trump is ‘soft’ on Russia” meme is nothing more than the desperate attempt of the Deep State to protect its dirty secret that America has no real enemies that can militarily threaten the homeland.
Likewise, the “Trump is ‘soft’ on Russia” meme is nothing more than the desperate attempt of the Deep State to protect its dirty secret that America has no real enemies that can militarily threaten the homeland.
But the myth that it does — led by the evil Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin — is what keeps the Warfare State's budget at upward of $800 billion.
That's more than the GDP of all except a handful of the world's largest nations. And it’s also the financial fuel for the grotesque prosperity of the Beltway's hundreds of thousands of high-income households that feed off the Warfare State as civil servants, contractors, generals, computer geeks and spymasters.
The truth is Russia is a pipsqueak economy with a $1.3 trillion GDP, which is smaller than that of the New York City metro area. It has no blue-water navy or global airlift capacity. So how exactly is it going to invade the New Jersey shores?
And why does most of Europe not care that Russia "annexed" 90% Russian-speaking Crimea after a 90% favorable referendum? Perhaps they recall that Catherine the Great paid good money for the place and the historic Russian naval home port on the Black Sea 230 years ago.
Likewise, the Chinese sand castles in the South China Sea should not cause a single American to lose even a wink of sleep.
For crying out loud, if the whole point of Washington's massively bloated and unnecessary war machine is to safeguard American democracy, individual liberty and free market capitalist prosperity, let these principles do the fighting, so to speak.
That is, let the hideous Red Ponzi and its $30 trillion of debt and command-and-control-based economic follies collapse of its own weight — just as did the old Soviet Union.
As for ISIS, it's already down to a few pulverized, impoverished towns on the upper Euphrates. Working with the Russian Air Force and the Shiite boots on the ground from Assad's army, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah, the Trump administration could actually eliminate what remains of the mutant Sunni caliphate.
But the Deep State has its own agenda.
Regards,
David Stockman
for The Daily Reckoning
