Well, of course they bugged Trump Tower. Why wouldn’t
they? Trump’s big blunder du jour is that he tweeted “wiretapped,” like some
hapless sap out of a 1950s I Was a Spy for the FBI movie. (I know
people who still say “ice box,” too.) So he left himself — or rather poor
Sean Spicer — open for a week of legalistic pettifogging by reporters acting
as litigators for the Deep State’s intel corps.
Anyway, Wikileaks “Vault 7” document release earlier in the month made it
clear that US intel has the ability to cover and confuse the tracks of any
entity —including especially US intel itself — that ventures to penetrate any
supposedly private or secure realm. And, by the way, that probably settles
the matter of who “they” are. Whatever statutory restraints once existed
against CIA spying on American citizens is long gone by the boards.
You might suppose, too, that the combined forces of Hillary and Obama,
along with the still-entrenched Democratic establishment, would have tried
through late 2016 to stop The Menace of Trump at all costs. Somebody
had done them dirty in funneling the DNC and Podesta emails to Wikileaks, and
it was imperative to fight back — especially with FBI director James Comey (a
Republican, after all), going all rogue on Mrs. Clinton. Hence, the
manufactured Russia-did-it story that has gotten more mileage than any
political hallucination since Senator Joe McCarthy, at his height of
influence, played the newspapers like a whole orchestra of flugelhorns.
It’s hard to see how Trump might ever established the truth of this
matter. One of the strange features of these internecine wars is that the
Department of Justice — as far as we know — isn’t deposing scores of
operations people from the myriad agencies under the NSA umbrella to
establish who’s been doing what. Anyway, there’s enough loose scuttlebutt
around Washington that Trump might have a pretty good idea of who at the
various agencies hates his guts, and is working against him, and one wonders
why he doesn’t just fire a bunch of them. Perhaps that’s yet to come.
But it also looks a bit as though the Golden Golem of Re-Greatification
has wandered into a political minefield so dense with booby traps that he’s
already out of moves. First there’s the debt ceiling problem — which has so
far received almost no attention from the Kardashianized collective news
media. As David Stockman has pointed out on his blog, the US Treasury amassed
a “war chest” of nearly half a trillion dollars last fall (via various
book-keeping shenanigans) in expectation that President Hillary
would need it to ride out some fiscal bad weather early in her reign.
Then, the truly inconceivable happened and Hillary won bigly in the wrong
states and not bigly enough in the right ones, and, well…. Immediately, with
Trump ascendant, the Treasury and its handmaidens at the Federal Reserve
engineered a rapid burn-through of the war chest at a rate of about
$90-billion a month since November, so that now there remains only about a
month’s worth of walking-around money to run the US Government. With the old
debt ceiling truce expired, congress would have to resolve to raise it, to
legally enable the Treasury to resume its massive borrowing operations, or
else the government won’t be able to pay invoices or issue pension checks or
meet any obligations. It could even default on its “no risk” bonds.
Those dangers are theoretical for the moment, especially since there is
always more accounting fraud to resort to when all else fails. But the longer
a debt ceiling stalemate goes on in congress, the more trapped President
Trump will be. The cherry on top is the Federal Reserve’s move to raise
interest rates the same day the debt ceiling truce expired. That will thunder
through the system, making many loans more expensive to repay, dampening the
real estate markets (at a time when commercial real estate is already
tanking), and draining all kinds of other mojo (however falsely engineered)
from the Potemkin economy.
As if being trapped in a political minefield isn’t bad enough, the
remaining safe patch Trump is stranded on turns out to be the LaBrea Tar Pit
of health care reform. At this point, the crusade is doing worse than going
nowhere — it’s getting sucked into the primordial bitumen where the mastodons
and camelops sleep.
Fourth and final book
of the World Made By Hand series
