Through the Eyes of Jesselyn Radack: A Look at the Vital Role of Whistleblowers and Their Attorneys

“By protecting whistleblowers, sources, and online activists, we facilitate robust investigative journalism, hold government to account, protect the freedoms of speech, privacy and the press, and foster the most critical component of democratic society: an informed citizenry.” — Whistleblower and Source Protection Program

By Jimmysllama

This week Dutch journalist Rico Brouwer sat down with U.S. whistleblower attorney Jesselyn Radack in what turned out to be an absolute must-see interview. The two discussed topics ranging from what it’s like to represent some of the most hunted and hounded defendants in the nation, the perfect outcome for WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden’s best-selling book Permanent Record.

Blowing the whistle

Growing up, Jesselyn Radack always had a strong sense of right and wrong and she believed that a career path in law would enable her to make a difference in the world. She still believes that today and is now making a huge difference working in a niche area of law protecting and defending national-security and intelligence whistleblowers. She began her career at the Department of Justice as an ethics advisor who found out sooner rather than later that the U.S. government isn’t always as honorable as one might hope.

Her first case was John Walker Lindh, an American who converted to Sunni Islam at the age of 16, and later traveled overseas to join the Taliban. He was eventually captured in Afghanistan by U.S. allies and questioned by the CIA. Radack advised the government they couldn’t torture Lindh or interrogate him without an attorney. They did both. She then argued that they could use the “fruits” obtained from the interrogation for intelligence gathering but not to pursue a criminal case against him. They ignored the advice.

When the case went public and the judge demanded that the government turn over all documents pertaining to Lindh’s interrogation, the government withheld Radack’s advice, causing her to blow the whistle. She tried to give the documents to the judge but she had already resigned by that point so she eventually passed them to the media, causing the government’s case to collapse.

After her own experience with whistleblowing and the fallout that followed, Radack knew that the world needed an area of law for people like herself who were getting hammered by the U.S. government for blowing the whistle.

State of the DOJ and whistleblowing under Obama vs. Trump

When asked about the current state of the Justice Department, Radack responded that it has faced a number of challenges over the years, one of which is that high-level officials tend to ignore ethical advice. It’s good that they seek it but, as she pointed out, when they routinely ignore it, they’re just going through the motions and don’t actually care or mean it.

She also watched the DOJ change dramatically after the events of 9/11: The mission was no longer about changing things for the better but rather about complete government control, power, and secrecy — especially surrounding some of their most sensitive subjects like torture, war crimes, and surveillance. It was about using the DOJ’s power at the fullest level possible with as little restriction as possible.

The approach taken by federal prosecutors has also changed over time from the aggressive and adversarial approach Radack first saw when she was defending Thomas Drake to a more adequately restrained, low-key demeanor where both sides just want to do their job and realize that they’re on different sides of a very controversial issue. She believes that the disposition of any prosecutorial team is generally influenced by the prosecutors themselves, leadership in the government, and how hard they want to pursue a case. 

Between 2013-2014, when things were “exploding on the international landscape” after Snowden’s revelations, Radack found herself hassled by U.K. immigration while trying to visit Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. But “cooler heads are now prevailing,” perhaps in part because more people are paying attention to government revenge tactics that she describes as “death by a thousand paper cuts.”

However, the political climate for prosecuting whistleblowers and journalistic sources hasn’t cooled in the slightest, with Barack Obama “unleashing the worst war on whistleblowers,” worse than all former U.S. presidents combined. As Radack put it, “Obama reinvigorated [the Daniel Ellsberg case] on steroids,” and has since handed over that power to President Donald Trump, a vindictive, undisciplined, and thin-skinned narcissist who will go down in history as the first U.S. president to charge a publisher and journalist under the Espionage Act.

Permanent record

On September 17, 2019, Edward Snowden’s memoir, Permanent Record, was released and within hours the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the NSA whistleblower for breaching nondisclosure agreements he signed while working for the government. They also named Snowden’s publishers in the suit, including Henry Holt and Co. and Holzbrink Publishers, and requested that “the court freeze any assets related to the memoir.”

According to G. Zachary Terwillinger, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who is also trying to prosecute Julian Assange for publishing embarrassing state secrets, “The lawsuit will ensure that Edward Snowden receives no monetary benefits from breaching the trust placed in him.” However, Radack says that by going after the proceeds of Snowden’s book, the government is admitting that he had a First Amendment right to publish in the first place. 

The lawsuit also alleges that Snowden published the book without submitting it to agencies for a “pre-publication review,” which seems absurd in light of the fact that Snowden’s disclosures were about “government secrecy and the government breaking the law under the cloak of secrecy.”

Radack believes that the government is trying to “exact their pound of flesh” from Snowden for being two steps ahead of them “at every juncture of this saga.” Ironically, the government’s move to sue Snowden has had the unintended consequence of causing his book to skyrocket to the top of the best seller’s list. “The government gets so wrapped up in these cases, they can’t see the forest through the trees…they’re reactionary…they just can’t stand the fact that they were outsmarted by Edward Snowden once again,” explained Radack.

The challenges of whistleblowing and the legal system

The number of obstacles that national-security and intelligence whistleblowers face trying to avoid prosecution or achieve any sort of justice in both the courtroom and the sphere of public opinion is staggering. State-secrets privilege and classification programs hinder the defense’s case, broken internal mechanisms put whistleblowers at further risk, and government lies help shape public opinion about the act of whistleblowing or the whistleblowers themselves.

When it comes to the U.S. government raising state-secrets privilege and invoking classification programs, Radack points out the absurdity that even when a secret is well-known, such as the government’s illegal surveillance program first exposed by Snowden, they maintain they can’t talk about it — despite Pulitzer-winning movies being made and articles published about that exact so-called “secret” program. It’s a “theater of the absurd,” states Radack, where the government actually tries to tell hundreds of thousands of people they can’t read WikiLeaks:

I think the government would like to keep making the argument that the secrecy arguments and classification programs override the Constitution. Again, if they really believed that they would litigate that issue in court like a grown up rather than asserting a state-secret privilege to shut down any litigation about it…You can’t have a government agency that says, ‘Our employees, when they go home, they’re not allowed to use Facebook or something on their personal time on their own computer in their own home.’ The government can say what it wants but judicially it’s not going to be enforceable.”

As recently as a few days ago, the government argued in the USA v. Daniel Everette Hale case that “defense challenges to secrecy policy and classification decisions should also be prohibited,” illuminating the fact that government secrecy goes well beyond trying to invoke secrecy policy — they don’t want to allow any challenge to it. Hale has been charged under the Espionage Act after blowing the whistle on the U.S. military drone program.

Broken internal mechanisms for reporting wrongdoing also make it difficult for whistleblowers. As Snowden noted in his book, you’re supposed to go through a chain of command but what happens when that chain of command is involved in the wrongdoing or they simply don’t care? Contrary to popular belief, whistleblower laws do not protect anyone in the national-security or intelligence sectors such as the NSA or CIA. Snowden watched as Radack’s client, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, went through every possible channel including Congress, only to find himself charged under the Espionage Act and his life torn apart.

During an April 2019 interview with activist and radio journalist Randy Credico, Radack stated that the channels whistleblowers can follow have a glaring exception for national security violations, and that not only have these internal channels failed them, they’ve been used to entrap them.

Whistleblower Thomas Drake leaves a Baltimore court with with attorney Jesslyn Radack in 2011. Timothy Jacobsen | AP

Finally, shaping public opinion is yet another hurdle that whistleblowers and journalistic sources must try to surmount when facing government charges or discipline. Although some of Radack’s clients have since won awards like the Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage and the Sam Adams Award, it’s because of lawyers like Radack who were able to “flip the narrative” on how the public viewed their client’s case. But it’s always an uphill battle.

Media outlets that have become mouthpieces for the government will oftentimes try to shape public perception about whistleblowing or a particular case, while blatant lies spewed into the official record — such as when James Clapper told Congress they weren’t intentionally spying on Americans — can manipulate not only how the public views whistleblowers but how it views the government as well. Whistleblowers will find themselves further on the losing end if they’re professionally and/or judicially gagged.

Even during successful public campaigns, Radack points out that awards and public accolades don’t help those who were courageous enough to come forward in re-establishing relationships with their families, friends, associates, and work colleagues after the government has gone to great lengths to destroy and alienate them completely. John Kiriakou, Drake, and Snowden have all been able to find life on the other side, but it’s been on the back of those who have paid an enormous price.

Justice vs. mitigating damages

John Kiriakou once said that his defense wasn’t about justice but rather about mitigating damages. When asked how she approaches a case, Radack believes that when a client is threatened with life in prison, you have to mitigate the damages while simultaneously seeking justice and getting the truth out. Making this process difficult is the fact that proceedings usually take place in secret, classification rules tie the hands of the defense, and it’s hard to raise the defense that the whistleblower was acting in the public’s interest. In Radack’s eyes, it’s important to get a whistleblower’s motive out to the public and media because the government will undoubtedly try to distort it or keep it under wraps.

One of her solutions to the myriad of problems that whistleblowers face was to create the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts.org, which “provides critical legal support for whistleblowers and media sources in the national security and human rights arena:”

By protecting whistleblowers, sources, and online activists, we facilitate robust investigative journalism, hold government to account, protect the freedoms of speech, privacy and the press, and foster the most critical component of democratic society: an informed citizenry.”

Radack was inspired to start a nonprofit with fellow attorney Kathleen McClellen that focused on national-security and intelligence whistleblowers who are subject to secrecy agreements and a government with no accountability going after them. She believes that source protection and whistleblower protections are two sides of the same coin and they try to blend a “combination of the legal system, investigative journalism, and technology” to get the best results for their clients: “We are trying to create a safe place and help journalists do their job more safely, help the whistleblowers blow the whistle more safely.”

Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden

According to Radack, Julian Assange is in for the long haul and “the fight for his freedom is a marathon, not a sprint.” Over the course of almost a decade, Assange has been arbitrarily detained, including in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for seven years, and is now being held at Belmarsh prison while fighting extradition to the United States. He has been charged with 18 counts under the U.S. Espionage Act for doing exactly what it is that the New York Times and the Washington Post do.

Years of harassment, court cases, and the utter travesty of justice that Assange has faced have had a tremendously negative impact on his health and — according to a report by UN Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer — he’s been subjected to torture for years. Radack says it’s “abhorrent that Assange or anyone is being tortured. It flies in the face of justice and undermines any criminal case they have against him.”

But Assange has become such a “polarizing figure” right now that he “low-hanging fruit” not only for the government, but for the corporate media as well, which has made no real concerted effort to push back against the government’s attempts to prosecute a journalist for journalistic practices. That’s deeply disconcerting.

Extraditing and prosecuting Julian Assange is not only a despicable attack on an individual who has brilliantly changed the course of journalism forever (from which corporate media profited), it further puts every single journalist and news outlet in the crosshairs of both the U.S. and foreign governments. If Saudi Arabia feels that a U.S. journalist has violated its state-secret laws, who’s to say that Riyadh can’t request their extradition, which at this point might very well be granted by the Trump administration?

A figure depicts Julian Assange on a cross during a vigil outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Sang Tan | AP

Although it will be a protracted fight, Radack feels that the best outcome for Assange would be for the extradition proceedings to ultimately fail, he’s kept out of U.S. claws and released with the possibility of going home to Australia

As for alleged WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning, who has been imprisoned for over 190 days for refusing to testify in front of a WikiLeaks grand jury, Radack questioned why the government is still holding her since they now have Julian Assange in prison: 

The fact that they have Jeremy Hammond in jail and have Chelsea Manning in jail, it makes me suspect or wonder behind the scenes if they’re trying to build an even bigger case against WikiLeaks or against other people who have been WikiLeaks insiders.”

It should be noted that since early 2018 the U.S. government has sought out at least three former WikiLeaks volunteers for questioning, including FBI informant Sigurdur Thordarson, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and David House. And earlier this month it was reported that the Justice Department was trying to force imprisoned hacktivist Jeremy Hammond to testify.

Needless to say, no other media outlet that has published and profited from WikiLeaks documents, or journalists who have reported on them, have been caught in the government’s crosshairs, which screams that this entire case against Assange is politically motivated. Regardless, any chilling precedent set by prosecuting him can and will likely be used against other journalists in the future who dare to engage in watchdog journalism.

As for Snowden, Radack does see some light at the end of the tunnel and believes that, sometime in our lifetime, he will be able to come home. Despite a delayed return, she’s pleased with the fact that he’s been able to participate in “our democratic society” by being able to work, write a book, and head up a press freedom organization. She described him as a bit of “an indoor house cat.”

Generally speaking, whistleblowers do not leak as a career move, as the only personal benefit is their conscience; they usually lose their jobs, relationships, and are put under administrative or criminal investigation and on watch lists. But despite the hurdles that whistleblowers face, Snowden has been able to live a very functional and productive life. Like Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, “he’s a really good survival story — even if the U.S. throws everything at you, you can still come out on top.” 

Apathy and secrecy

The biggest challenge that Radack feels she faces today is no longer apathy but rather secrecy, despite the fact that today the internet allows us to have more transparency and access than ever before. But apathy can be driven by secrecy and one of the most important ways to circumvent that is with whistleblowers and journalists willing to publish. She believes that whistleblowing begets more whistleblowers and that courage is indeed contagious. Snowden watched what Thomas Drake did and now Radack is representing a client who saw what Snowden and Manning did.

Overall, there are about twenty national security and intelligence whistleblowers in the United States but that small group of extraordinary individuals has made the greatest impact on what we know today about what the government is actually doing. Not to mention journalists and publishers, like Julian Assange, who have the courage to publish those secrets. These men and women are vital to the democratic process in any country and it’s crucial that we protect rather than persecute them.

Just last night, journalist and Acting Chair of Pirate Parties International (PPI) Bailey Lamon, along with Pirate Parties International Board Member and activist Ray Johansen and Rico Brouwer, announced that they are writing a book with and about whistleblowers aptly titled The Whistleblowers Book of Courage. According to Johansen:

With this book we want to tell the whole story of what the whistleblower goes through and highlight the courage they have shown through their unselfish acts. The goal is of course to make it even clearer why transparency is important and why whistleblowers must be protected.”

The foreword will be written by Radack and her interview with Brouwer will be used as source material for one of the chapters in the book. Their project is the first of its kind and will undoubtedly become an important asset in the court of public opinion.

Feature photo | Lawyer for Edward Snowden and Whistleblower Jesselyn Radack holds a news conference with former United States military drone operators in New York, November 19, 2015. Stephanie Keith | Reuters

Jjimmysllama is an independent researcher and writer who provides balanced, critical analysis with a focus on the Boston bombings, Magnitsky Act, and WikiLeaks.  She is currently trying to stay warm in the Midwest.  You can read more of her work at jimmysllama.com 

The West Oppressed the Third World for so Long that It Became Third World Itself

Andre Vltchek

Many have already noticed: The US really, really doesn’t feel like the world leader, or even as a ‘first world country’. Of course, I write that sarcastically, as I detest expressions like ‘first world’, and the ‘third world’. But readers know what I mean.

Bridges, subways, inner cities, everything is crumbling, falling apart. When I used to live in New York City, more than two decades ago, returning from Japan was shocking: the US felt like a poor, deprived country, full of problems, misery, of confused and depressed people, homeless individuals; in short – desperados. Now, I feel the same when I land in the US after spending some time in China.

And it gets much worse. What the West used to accuse the Soviet Union of, is now actually clearly detectable in the United States and the United Kingdom themselves: surveillance is at every step, these days; in New York, London, Sydney, and even in the countryside. Every move a person makes, every purchase, every computer click, is registered; somewhere, somehow. And this monitoring is, mostly, not even illegal.

Speech is controlled by political correctness. Someone behind the scenes decides what is acceptable and what is not, what is desirable or not, and even what is permissible. You make one ‘mistake’ and you are out; from the teaching positions at the universities, or from the media outlets.

In such conditions, humor cannot thrive, and satire dies. It is not unlike religious fundamentalism: you get destroyed if you ‘offend’. In such circumstances, writers cannot write ground-breaking novels, because true novels offend by definition, and always push the boundaries. As a result, almost nobody reads novels, anymore.

Only toothless, ‘controlled humor’ is permitted. No punches can be administered intuitively. Everything has to be calculated in advance. No ‘outrageous’ political fiction can pass the ‘invisible censorship’ in the West (and so, novels as a form have almost died). Those who read in Russian or Chinese languages know perfectly well, that the fiction in Russia and China, is much more provocative and avant-garde.

In the West, poetry has died, too. And so has philosophy, which has been reduced to a boring, stale and indigestible academic discipline.

While Hollywood and the mass media keep producing, relentlessly, all sorts of highly insulting and stereotypical racist junk (mainly against the Chinese, Russians, Arabs, Latinos and others), great writers and filmmakers who want to ridicule the Western regime and its structure, have already been silenced. You can only humiliate non-Westerners in a way that is approved (again: somewhere, somehow), but God forbid, you dare to criticize the pro-Western elites who are ruining their countries on behalf of London and Washington, in the Gulf, Southeast Asia or Africa – that would be ‘patronizing’ and ‘racist’. A great arrangement for the Empire and its servants, isn’t it?

We all know what has happened to Julian Assange, and to Edward Snowden. In the West, people are disappearing, getting arrested, censored. Millions are losing jobs: in the media, publishing houses, and in the film studios. The Cold War era appears to be relatively ‘tolerant’, compared to what is taking place now.

Social media constantly represses ‘uncomfortable’ individuals, ‘unacceptable’ media outlets, and too ‘unorthodox’ thoughts.

Travel has become a boot camp. This is where they break you. Move through the Western airports and you will encounter the vulgar, insulting ‘securistan’. Now, you are not just expected to pull down your pants if ordered, or take off your shoes, or throw away all your bottles containing liquids: you are expected to smile, to grin brightly, like an idiot. You are supposed to show how eager, how cooperative you are: to answer loudly, looking straight into the eyes of your tormentors. If you get humiliated, still, be polite. If you want to fly, show that you are enjoying this stupid and useless humiliation, administered for one and only reason: to break you, to make you pathetic and submissive. To teach you where you really belong. Or else. Or else! We all know what will happen if you refuse to ‘cooperate’.

***

Now, ‘they’ will use double-speak to let you know that all this is for your own good. It will not be pronounced, but you would be made to sense it: ‘you are being protected from those horrible Third World monsters, madmen, perverts.’ And of course, from Putin, from the Chinese Communists, from the butcher Maduro, from Assad, or from the Iranian Shi’a fanatics.

The regime is fighting for you, it cares for you, it is protecting you.

Sure, if you live in the UK or the US, the chances are that you are deep in debt, depressed and with no prospects for the future. Maybe your children are hungry, maybe, in the US, you cannot afford the medical care. Most likely, you cannot afford housing in your own city. Perhaps you are forced to have two or three jobs.

But at least, you know that your ‘wise leaders’ in the White House, Congress, Pentagon and security agencies, are working day and night, protecting you from countless conspiracies, from vicious attacks from abroad, and from those evil Chinese and Russians, who are busy building progressive and egalitarian societies.

Lucky you!

***

Except: something does not add up here.

For years and decades, you were told how free you were. And how oppressed, unfree, those against whom you are being protected, are.

You were told how rich you are, and how miserable “the others” were.

To stop those deprived and deranged hordes, some serious measures had to be applied. A right-wing death-squad in some Central American or Southeast Asian country had to be trained in US military camps; a thoroughly absolutist and corrupt monarch had to be supported and pampered; a military fascist coup had to be arranged. Millions raped, tens of thousands of corpses. Not pretty at all, but you know… necessary. For your own good, North American or European citizens; for your own good…. Even for the good of the country that we designated for our ‘liberation’.

Few dissidents in the West have been protesting, for decades. No one has been paying much attention to them. Most of them became ‘unemployable’, and were silenced through misery and the inability to pay their basic bills.

But suddenly…

What happened, suddenly? Because something really happened…

***

The Empire got tired of plundering the non-Western parts of the world, exclusively.

Well-conditioned, brainwashed and scared, the Western public began to get treated with the same spite, as people in the plundered and miserable parts of the world. Well, not yet, not exactly. There are still some essential differences, but the trend is definitely there.

The Western public cannot do too much to protect itself, really. The regime knows everything about everybody: it spies on every citizen: where he or she walks, what he or she eats, drives, flies, watches, consumes, reads. There are no secrets, anymore.

You are an atheist? No need to ‘confess’. You are confessing every minute, with each and every computer click, by pressing the remote control button, or by shopping on Amazon.

Is Big Brother watching? Oh no; now there is much more detailed surveillance. Big Brother is watching, recording and analyzing.

General Pinochet of Chile used to brag that without his knowledge, no leaf could ever move. The old, fascist scumbag was bragging; exaggerating. On the other hand, Western rulers say nothing, but they clearly know what they are doing. Without their knowledge, nothing moves and nobody moves.

Arriving from China, from Russia or Cuba, the first thing that strikes me is how disciplined, obedient and scared, the Europeans and North Americans really are. They subconsciously know that they are being controlled and cannot do anything about it.

When trains get delayed or cancelled, they sheepishly murmur half-audible curses. Their medical benefits get reduced; they accept, or quietly commit suicide. Their public infrastructure crumbles; they say nothing, remembering the ‘good old days’.

Why is it that I feel hope, I laugh with the people, in Mexico City, Johannesburg or Beijing? Why is there so much warmth in the geographically cold cities of Vladivostok or Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka? Why are the people of London, Paris, Long Angeles looking so concerned, so depressed?

Some historically poor countries are on the rise. And the people there show appreciation for every tiny improvement. Nothing is more beautiful than optimism.

The West has fought the so-called “third world” for many, long decades; oppressing it, tormenting it, looting it, violating its people. It prevented them from choosing their own governments. Now it has gone overboard: it is attempting to control and to oppress the entire world, including its own citizens.

As various countries all over the world are getting back onto their feet, resisting pressure from Washington, London, Paris and Berlin, people in the West are increasingly getting treated by their governments with the spite that used to be reserved exclusively for the “under-developed nations” (yes, another disgusting expression).

Clearly, the West has “learnt from itself”.

While countries like Russia, China, Vietnam, Mexico, Iran and others are surging forward, many previously rich colonialist and neo-colonialist empires are now beginning to resemble the “Third World”.

These days, it is very sad being a writer in New York City or in London. Just as it is frightening to be poor. Or being different. All over the world, the roles are being reversed.

Andre Vltchek is philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s a creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, and a writer that penned a number of books, including China and Ecological Civilization. He writes especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Inequality and the crisis of the so-called ‘American democracy’

On Thursday, the Economic Policy Institute reported that average CEO pay at America’s 350 largest companies grew by 17.6 percent between 2016 and 2017. The typical chief executive received $18.9 million in compensation. The wage of a typical US worker, on the other hand, grew by a negligible 0.3 percent.

The typical CEO in the US now makes 312 times what the average worker makes, up from the 20-to-1 ratio that prevailed in the 1960s. This means that, on average, a CEOs earns in a single day almost as much as the average worker makes in an entire year.

Ten years after the Bush and Obama administrations carried out the largest bank bailout in human history in response to the 2008 financial crisis, every indicator of social inequality is soaring.

In 2008, the 400 wealthiest people in America had a net worth of $1.5 trillion. This figure has since doubled, standing at close to $3 trillion.

Ten years ago, the net worth of Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, was $8.7 billion. Now, it stands at $140 billion, a 16-fold increase. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a net worth of $1.5 billion at the time of the financial crisis. His wealth now stands at $69 billion, a 46-fold increase.

Not only have the individuals whose crimes triggered the financial crisis avoided going to jail, they have become vastly more wealthy. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein have both become billionaires over the past decade, despite playing key roles in creating the mortgage-backed securities bubble then profiting by betting on its collapse. In the ninth year of the supposed economic recovery, in which the economy is nominally approaching full employment, with the tightest job market in decades, wages continue to fall year after year. Over the past 12 months, wages fell 0.2 percent in real terms, while stock prices shot up by 12 percent.

When the capitalist media write on the persistent fall in wages amid soaring profits, they scratch their heads in bewilderment as to why the vaunted mechanism of the so-called “free market,” with its mantra that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” has broken down. But in ruling circles it is an open secret that the growth of social inequality was the desired outcome of the financial bubble, the crash and the bailout.

In the run-up to the financial crisis, Democratic and Republican administrations alike, together with the banking regulators, encouraged the creation of one financial bubble after another. After the crash, none of those responsible were criminally charged, all of the banks’ bad bets were recouped with public funds, and the Federal Reserve and Obama administration encouraged the creation of another massive financial bubble to enrich the so-called ‘ruling elite’ at the expense of the working population.

The historically unprecedented levels of social inequality are incompatible with democratic forms of rule. More than a decade ago, responding to the stolen 2000 election and the ripping up of democratic rights in the name of the alleged “war on terror,” some observers insisted that underlying the destruction of democratic rights was the growth of social inequality.

American society is deeply fractured. The level of social polarization has assumed explosive dimensions. Those in the top five or top one percent of society in terms of income and wealth have no deep commitment to democratic rights. Of course, there are exceptions to be found within this social category. But the objective relation of the wealthiest strata of society to democracy is of an entirely different character than that of the broad masses. For the ruling elite, democracy is something of a convenience, not a necessity. As has been demonstrated all too often in the 20th century, dictatorship serves to protect wealth, not to threaten it.

In the period following the 2008 crash, these processes have only accelerated. In 2010, the Obama administration asserted the right to kill American citizens with drone missile strikes, even within the United States, and murdered two American citizens without trial overseas to prove the point.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that the US intelligence agencies are spying on the American people on a scale that makes Richard Nixon’s plumbers look like amateurs. He was forced into exile in Russia. Journalist Julian Assange, who documented war crimes and conspiracies against democracy, was, and remains, effectively imprisoned in London at the demand of US authorities.

Most ominously of all, the major technology companies are, at the behest of the US intelligence agencies and leading figures within the political establishment, implementing a regime of Internet censorship unprecedented in scope and scale.

Now the crisis of the so-called American democracy has entered a new stage. Donald Trump, who embodies the corruption and criminality of the ruling system, is creating an ever-more openly authoritarian government, resting on appeals to his fascistic base. But there is not the slightest democratic content in the opposition to Trump from within the state and ruling class. Figures like former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper express the direct intervention of the state intelligence agencies——into political life, with the support of the Democratic Party and the media. The intelligence agencies are responsible for countless crimes against the Americans and other nations.

More and more, sections of the media and ruling elite are using language that implies support for a military coup. On Friday, the New York Times ran an op-ed by author Tim Weiner all but calling for a mutiny by the military and intelligence bureaucracy. He wrote that:

John Brennan, who knows whereof he speaks, believes that the president is a threat to the security of the United States—a counterintelligence threat, no less, in thrall to President Vladimir Putin of Russia. They are sending a message to active-duty generals and admirals, soldiers and spies. Remember your oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Think twice before following Trump’s orders in a crisis.

Both factions of the ruling class, despite their mutual mud-slinging, represent right-wing, authoritarian political tendencies. These representatives of the capitalist oligarchy must be opposed through the methods of due struggle—that is, the conscious, independent intervention of the people into political life.

-By Andre Damon, National Secretary of the US-based International Youth and Students for Social Equality.