Friday, August 21, 2020

David Goldman on Steve Bannon

I am not going to comment on the ongoing indictment of Steve Bannon. Like everyone else I have only seen one side of the case. Unlike a lot of people I have no qualifications in the law. So, silence is the best policy here.

David Goldman is not a lawyer, but he has known and has clashed with Steve Bannon for years. He has done so within the Trump administration. He has clashed over the administration’s China policy, with which I have myself taken some exception. In fact, Goldman resigned from an administration committee because he thought its China policy was going off the rails.


Here is an anecdote that deserves some notice. Goldman recounts his last conversation with Bannon. I include it for your edification:


Our last few conversations ended acrimoniously. In May 2018 we both spoke at a conference in Budapest on the Future of Europe. I stopped by his palatial hotel suite, and he tried to convince me that a ban on selling US computer chips to China’s ZTE Corporation would lead to 50,000 unemployed engineers marching on Communist Party headquarters in Beijing. Somehow Bannon had gotten it into his head that China was ready to crack apart, and that all it would take is a sharp knock from the Trump Administration. I told him he was out of his mind.

1 comment:

Giordano Bruno said...

The dam collapsing would do the trick, but otherwise, it looks like China is mostly back in business while we role-play our way towards a pointless and unnecessary Civil War.

I do not follow the Bannon story, but all of these events smack of the deep state surveillance operations. The law is a fraud; it is applied arbitrarily based on political calculation so the media can run their concomitant weeks of hate. It's all hypnotic garbage.

Hey, at least China can evaluate the effectiveness of the Hydroxychloroquine protocols without blatantly misleading abut the process, forging dishonest studies, or having a freakout from all quarters of their institutional structure about a proven and harmless quartet of widely available drugs. When you openly lie about something that might very well bring both the hospitalization and death rates to nil, things are much worse than they appear.

We have a ruling class. That ruling class is criminal and corrupt. That ruling class just went all in to depose a legitimately elected president in plain view of everyone, and the entire power structure supported this overthrow. There have been no consequences for the coup. That ruling class controls the media and what people see and hear; they control the public narrative end-to-end. They also control virtually all the levers or institutional and corporate power including the technology sectors. They do not even try to hide their partisanship. This class will do anything to retain power. I could be describing China or the US. You are ruled, you do not have any control of your rulers. Bannon is just a man who has been on their checklist for some time.