Martin adds a summary to his previous excellent series of three articles (see here and here) examining the takeover of one of the two ruling class parties allowed to participate in "democratic" elections. The Deep State, the network of political activists serving the ruling One Percent, want to preserve the myth of democracy by more closely managing elections with their chosen participants.
Yes, the political climate was much different in the 1970s and '80s when the Church and Pike committee hearings exposed so many of the crimes of the CIA. As Martin describes it:
The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was widely viewed as “Murder Incorporated.”Yes, how things have changed since then! The Deep State's solution was for their secret (from us) agencies of the CIA and other "intelligence" agencies to execute the false-flag event of 9/11 that proved so successful in quashing this hostile anti-establishment attitude to where we are today: half of the population believing the lies of the ruling class media and the other half immobilized by bewilderment and fear for their own security.
How times have changed. One of the main functions of the “war on terror,” launched in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has been to rehabilitate the US spy apparatus and give it a public relations makeover as the supposed protector of the American people against terrorism.Recently our masters in the Deep State decided to take over the Democratic Party to insure that no populist elements like the Bernie Sanders phenomenon could have much influence in the party and that ruling class policies and actions were implemented. Now we as a society are descending into more overt fascist rule.
This meant disregarding the well-known connections between Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and the CIA, which recruited them for the anti-Soviet guerrilla war in Afghanistan, waged from 1979 to 1989, as well as the still unexplained role of the US intelligence agencies in facilitating the 9/11 attacks themselves.
The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand, the Republican Trump administration has more military generals in top posts than any other previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.
The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its “bodies of armed men” serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.
... working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.
