Episode 67: The Power Elite (EDS Part 8)
Added 2022-08-24 00:02:16 +0000 UTCWe discuss The Power Elite—the scholarly masterpiece of sociologist C. Wright Mills—and how it informs our understandings of the imperial American deep state.
This is Part 8 of our Empire and the Deep State series--an in-depth exploration on my new book American Exception: Empire and the Deep State. I am again joined by series co-host Ben Norton of Multipolarista as well our own Seamus McGuinness who is producing the series--and who did the art for this episode!
Special thanks to Dana Chavarria for the sound engineering!
Music: "Too Good Your Dreams Don't Come True"by Mock Orange
Comments
A thematically related seminal book: Die Transformation der Demokratie, by Johannes Agnoli and Peter Brückner (Berlin 1967), analyses the oligarchic/authoritarian regression of liberal democracies, particularly of the Fed Rep of Germ considered an advanced case. (Advanced, since the post-ww2 constitution of Western Germany was quite explicitely designed so as to keep the people at bay from exercising power, and Germany's weak liberal traditions don't help in damping the authoritarian tendencies.)
RT Happe
2022-09-17 14:24:45 +0000 UTCCould you Zoom guys talk about Karl Wolffe and his relationship to Allen Dulles? The reason I ask is because I'm almost finished with Ian Kershaw's "The End," about the last months of the Third Reich (aka Ukraine come Halloween), and just in passing -- in passing -- Kershaw makes mention of some "unauthorized" contact between Dulles and Wolffe. And that's it. One could probably write an entire book about that relationship. Yet again an establishment award-winning historian refuses to open those "deep state" doors. . . (Kershaw of course is way past dullards such as Caro, Beschloss, McCullough. And the always precious and disgusting Ken Burns.) Thanks!
Johnny Case
2022-08-27 14:53:04 +0000 UTCWe have more planned. The Kulture has been shaken up some and so they haven't produced videos 3 and 4. I'll try and give an update in the Zoom at the end of the month...
Aaron Good
2022-08-26 13:54:58 +0000 UTCYo, Aaron! What happened to Mr. Poulgrain??
Johnny Case
2022-08-26 13:26:11 +0000 UTCYou can! You need to get the RSS and paste it in Google Podcast app. Check this out: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041347732--How-to-use-your-custom-audio-RSS-link
Aaron Good
2022-08-25 23:35:29 +0000 UTCCan't I listen to this on Google Podcast ?
Sami Louati
2022-08-25 23:28:38 +0000 UTCWell, I haven't traced monetary institutions that far back, but am skeptical of linking present formations too directly to, say, 15th century Italians. Rockefeller began around Cleveland and then expanded but it would be interesting to know if he had any substantial European backing. As I recall, when the 1st and 2nd Bank of The US were decommissioned, it turned out there was a lot of European money in them...
Aaron Good
2022-08-24 20:28:31 +0000 UTCWell, some of the scientists--including Szilard and Oppenheimer--were critics of the US atomic policies. But Ike himself greatly expanded the US nuclear arsenal as part of his New Look plan to cut military spending by relying more on nuclear deterrence and covert operations. So there were a number of factors here. Prouty always said that the Gary Powers incident was part of the motivation behind the speech, fwiw.
Aaron Good
2022-08-24 17:59:48 +0000 UTCYou miss the dissent from the manhattan project scientists which played a role in the einshower decision to speak on the military industrial complex which expanded the nuclear testing in postwar american one of those scientist's Ralph lapp. https://youtu.be/i4pkccelD4M this interview is interesting to say the least
Thomas Reilly
2022-08-24 09:38:35 +0000 UTCPower and agency follow the creative power of money. That's why the gold ring is the one ring that binds the other nine. You can follow the critical throughlines of history by tracing the locus of the creative power of money. It is an arduous chore. It does indeed go back to the Templars. Some say they merged with the Hospitalers. Some say they went underground. The Hospitalers had a relationship with Genoa. The first privatized central bank was the Genoese Casa di San Giorgio, which had a relationship with Columbus. The Casa di San Giorgio paved the way for the Bank of Amsterdam and the Bank of England. I have read that Palmstruck of Sweden developed the first monopoly money based on pure credit, but I am not certain about that. Where did John D. Rockefeller get the money to consolidate the entire American oil industry against organized petite bourgeois resistance? I haven't found the hard evidence, but I think Europe is highly probable. Do we know who first chartered the South Improvement Company? It is wild to me that the people granted elites the power, by law, to create the fictitious capital to buy the entire world out from underneath the people. Now we are back to basic feudalism again.
Jon Croteau
2022-08-24 01:01:46 +0000 UTCI have to say that I am enjoying these more and more as we get into these chapters!
Aaron Good
2022-08-24 00:23:10 +0000 UTC
