So You Want to Start a Resistance

By Tony Cartalucci

Talk of “resistance” ebbs and flows as political parties enter and leave power. The one constant among this turbulent process is the futility and impotence of these so-called “resistance” movements ignited and left to burn.

When President Donald Trump took to the White House in January 2017, such calls were once again made to “resist” the new president and all the perceived evils he represented.

However, so confused and detached from reality are these calls, that no such resistance has even the remotest possibility of improving America’s plight, with a much more likely possibility of actually making that plight worse.

The Deep State: From Whence Real Power Flows

According to Wikipedia, the deep state is described as:

…a political situation in a country when an internal organ (“deep state”), such as the armed forces and civilian authorities (intelligence agencies, police, administrative agencies and branches of governmental bureaucracy), does not respond to the civilian political leadership.

And the reality is, within every nation exists a deep state of one sort or another. Excluded from Wikipedia’s definition are “internal organs” comprised of corporate-financier interests with unwarranted wealth and influence on scales that likewise allow them to “not respond to the civilian political leadership,” or even directly and fully control that civilian political leadership altogether.

Beyond mere conspiracy theories, leaked e-mails made available by WikiLeaks from 2008 – one month before President Barack Obama won the 2008 election – reveal how Citibank’s Michael Froman provided a list to John Podesta laying out virtually the entire cabinet of the soon-to-be president.

The New Republic’s October 2016 article, “The Most Important WikiLeaks Revelation Isn’t About Hillary Clinton,” would report (emphasis added):

The cabinet list ended up being almost entirely on the money. It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more. For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner. 

This was October 6. The election was November 4. And yet Froman, an executive at Citigroup, which would ultimately become the recipient of the largest bailout from the federal government during the financial crisis, had mapped out virtually the entire Obama cabinet, a month before votes were counted. And according to the Froman/Podesta emails, lists were floating around even before that.

Citibank’s parent company, Citigroup, reported annual net profits for 2016 at around 15 billion US dollars. This is enough money to provide 1 million dollars in bribes to every member of the US Congress, in both the Senate and House of Representatives, and still maintain the vast majority of its wealth. And Citigroup is just one of many immense, corporate-financier monopolies not only cohabitating upon Wall Street, but cohabitating upon the boards of directors and sponsorship lists of America and Europe’s most influential policy think tanks.

Prominent US policy think tanks include but are not limited to:

• The Brookings Institution
• RAND Corporation
• The Heritage Foundation
• Center for Strategic and International Studies
• Council on Foreign Relations
• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Center for American Progress
• Crisis Group
• Freedom House
• The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
• The Atlantic Council

Think tanks are forums within which unelected corporate-financier funded policymakers devise and promote policy on behalf of their benefactors. They represent the collective interests of multiple multi-billion dollar multinational corporations, banks, and other institutions. They often have ties directly to corporate-media platforms, with corporate-media figures either included within think tank boards of directors, or their media platforms servings as corporate sponsors, or often, both.

Policy is not only devised and promoted from within think tanks and by media platforms associated with them, but this policy inevitably ends up in the hands of corporate lobbyists, who in turn, place it in the hands of both US legislators and staff in the White House itself.

The Hill in an article titled, “Top Lobbyists 2016: Hired Guns,” enumerates specific lobbying firms, while The Hill’s article, “Top Lobbyists 2016: Corporate,” enumerates specific, prominent lobbyists and the corporations they work for.

While many Americans may envision the US President bent over a desk, penning US policy in the Oval Office at night, in reality, US policy is merely rubber stamped by presidents and congress members – many times having not even read the bills and policies they are signing off on.

This is the very definition of a deep state that not only ignores civilian political leadership, but exercises absolute control over that leadership’s selection and administration.

Fighting the Deep State

Realizing then, that is it not “Obama” or “Trump” that we are actually protesting, or even conservatives or liberals, but the deep state and the corporate-financier special interests that constitute it regardless of who occupies the White House, Congress, or any side of any given mainstream debate, it becomes clear that protests against “Trump” and other politicians or parties we disdain are beyond futile.

Instead, taking on the deep state more directly is required, but how?

The Global Fortune 500 includes:

• Big-Retail
• Big-Energy and Oil
• Big-Auto
• Big-Pharma
• Big-Ag and Processed Food Giants
• Telecom and Tech Giants
• Big-Banks, Insurance, and other Financiers
• Big-Defense
• Big-Media

The corporations listed among the Fortune 500 also, without coincidence, sponsor the aforementioned, unelected policy think tanks.

They are able to wield such power and influence because of the immense, unchecked wealth they hold as well as their control over the very necessities modern civilizations requires to function. They hold this wealth, in turn, because they are uncontested monopolies in their respective industries to which hundreds of millions of people around the globe pay their paychecks to each and every month.

Imagine global wealth and influence represented by a game board. The US-European Fortune 500 have nearly covered the entire board with their pieces, with very few exceptions being competing circles of special interests in Russia and across Asia, particularly in China.

To truly fight the deep state, it is imperative to remove their pieces from the board and replace them with pieces of our own.

How Organic is Pushing Big-Ag Off the Board

While many people believe revolution involves burning cities, unfurling flags, and joining huge mobs of rebels and protesters, the reality is that positive change only comes from patient hard work, incrementally removing unjust, domineering edifices from society, and replacing them with better, localized, and more equitable structures.

There is perhaps no better example of this than the organic agricultural movement.

Resulting from a backlash against massive global-spanning and insidiously unjust chemical and genetically-modified agricultural monopolies like Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, DuPont, Dow, and Bayer, the modern organic food revolution is predicated on local grassroots networks spanning the world, consisting of millions of people – both producers and consumers, media platforms educating and informing the public, farmers’ markets, organic farms and collectives, local retailers, as well as processing companies producing value-added products and more.

Village by village, town by town, city by city, and country by country, organic agriculture has spread for a variety of reasons.

The organic food industry has been steadily growing, taking a larger and larger percentage of the market away from big-ag each year. In other words, taking big-ag’s pieces off the game board, and replacing them with organic agriculture’s pieces.And as the organic food movement grows, it becomes easier in many places for individuals and groups of people to enter into the market – further eroding big-ag’s position on the board.Big-ag has attempted to strike back through policymakers it controls, its army of lobbyists, and influence over the media to attack, undermine, and even outlaw aspects of the organic industry to reassert itself. However, it is in vain. Those entering into the organic industry outnumber those invested in big-ag a million to one – and are entering into organic agriculture out of passion and self-preservation, not profits alone.A similar tale has unfolded due to information technology empowering individuals with the ability to compete with establishment media monopolies. The alternative media  has slowly replaced the game pieces of big-media monopolies, wiping out some entirely, and pushing others into corners where they now desperately fight to retain credibility, profitability, and audiences.

Taking on the Rest of the Deep State

In order to replicate this success across all other industries and aspects of modern human civilization the deep state currently dominates, the same sort of incremental building-up of our own institutions, businesses, networks, and paradigms is required.

Image: The Game Board of global geopolitical, socioeconomic power.

As technology advances, it will empower people on a much more local level to directly compete with the biggest and most powerful monopolies on Earth. Solar power and advances in battery technology will allow larger numbers of people to make either personal or local power grids independently of both state and corporate energy monopolies.

Manufacturing technology is increasingly making it possible to manufacture locally, short-circuiting corporate-financier dominated, global-spanning supply chains and all aspects they encompass. It also allows for a larger number of players to enter into and compete in industries that have for over a century been dominated by immense, centralized monopolies every where from big-auto to aerospace corporations, and big-retail.

Crytocurrencies and blockchain technology is making it possible for people to develop their own independent monetary instruments, circumventing centrally controlled banks, financiers, and state monetary systems.While some of these solutions are just finding their way onto the game board, dwarfed by those of existing monopolies, the incremental, patient, but persistent organic agriculture movement as well as the alternative media are case studies proving that it is not only possible, but likely inevitable. As technology makes it easier for us to take a share of the market and the benefits that come with it for ourselves, we will – and at the expense of existing monopolies.

Still Not Convinced?

For those still not convinced – imagine this scenarios:

Americans take to the streets, protesting against President Trump and his policies, burning down their own cities, brutalizing their neighbors, fighting with police resulting in arrests and injuries on all sides – only to end up going home and changing exactly nothing.

Because when they go home, they continue paying into the very system they were just out protesting – by shopping at Walmart, filling up their big-auto cars with big-oil gasoline, drinking Starbucks, pecking away at the screens of their slave-made Apple iPads, fueling the actual source of social injustice – the concentration of wealth in the hands of corporate-financier monopolies – that gestated a politician like Trump and all those that inhabit his administration.

Compared with this second scenario:

Americans begin working locally, starting and supporting local businesses, organizing themselves to create local institutions that carry out the affairs of their community that government and large corporations refuse to address.

In 4-8 years, a level of self-sufficiency will exist in such communities, cutting off both the government they despise and the corporations that created and influence it from the money, time, attention, and energy of millions of people. These resources, kept locally, would be used to move the country forward directly as the people – not Wall Street and Washington – sees fit.

And because no “revolution” of fire, blood, and bullets took place, the government would atrophy and shrink where it was unwelcomed by the people, and survive and continue to function where it was needed – and where it still functioned, people who now hold leverage in their local communities with their own two hands, could demand and receive the administration that suited them – not special interests – best.

In the end, there would not be lawless mayhem, but a government brought back into balance, brought back because of the leverage the people empowered themselves with locally through constructive activism, entrepreneurship, local institutions, and decentralized networks.

Americans must realize by now, having protested the war in Iraq in 2003 only to be completely ignored and have the war rage for now 16 years under both a Republican and Democrat president, and having protested almost continuously since President Trump’s election in 2016, that protests alone accomplish nothing.

Without leverage, the special interests that dominate American politics have absolutely no reason to listen. By cutting these interests off from the very source of their strength – and channeling that strength instead into local movements like organic agriculture, alternative energy, local manufacturing, alternative media and entertainment, and alternative currencies – we empower ourselves with overwhelming leverage – not only to exact our demands from our elected officials, but to implement policy locally without conferring with or receiving “approval” from Washington in the first place.

For those who delude themselves into believing they can replicate the success of “revolutions” like the 2011 “non-violent” “Arab Spring,” they need to consider the above equation of real power, then reexamine the “Arab Spring” to see whether or not that was truly a grassroots “revolution,” or simply foreign-backed regime change fueled by billions of dollars from US-European special interests through a variety of channels – including very violent subversion.

While the actual path to resisting and overcoming unwarranted wealth and power is not as glamorous as a Hollywood summer blockbuster, an incremental transition in which we shift the direction our own resources flow, away from Wall Street and Washington and instead back into our communities locally, will not only improve our communities and enrich ourselves, but also completely and truly “drain the swamp” US President Trump has only dredged deeper and stocked with even more creatures.

Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at Land Destroyer Report, Alternative Thai News Network and LocalOrg, where this article first appeared.