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Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State Stat e February 21, 2014 by Mike Lofgren Like
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Rome lived upon its principal Rome principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true tr ue source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. – The Martyrdom of Man by Man by Winwood Reade (1871)
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. [1] During the last five years, the news media has been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is
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certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On one level, the critique is self-evident: In the domain that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War. As I wrote in The Party is Over, Over , the present Yes, there is another another objective of congressional Republicans is to government concealed render the executive branch powerless, at least behind the one that that is until a Republican president is elected (a goal visible at either either end of that voter suppression laws in GOP-controlled Pennsylvania Avenue, a states are clearly intended to accomplish). accomplish ). hybrid entity of public and President Obama cannot enact his domestic private institutions ruling policies and budgets: Because of incessant GOP the country… filibustering, not only could he not fill the large number of vacancies in the federal judiciary, he could not even get his most innocuous presidential appointees appointees into office. Democrats controlling the Senate have responded by weakening the filibuster of nominations, but Republicans are sure to react with other parliamentary delaying tactics. This strategy amounts to congressional nullification of executive branch powers by a party that controls a majority in only one house of Congress. Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement enforcement.. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance. These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare warfare over the debt debt ceiling was beginning beginning to paralyze paralyze the business of governance governance in Washington, Washington, the United States government government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate debate about continuing continuing meat inspections inspections and civilian air air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to
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commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life. Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude. [2] How did I come to write an analysis of the Deep State, and why am I equipped to write it? As a congressional staff member for 28 years specializing in national security and possessing a top secret security clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the world I am describing, if neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by psychological disposition. But, like virtually every employed person, I became, to some extent, assimilated into the culture of the institution I worked for, and only by slow degrees, starting before the invasion of Iraq, did I begin fundamentally to question the reasons of state that motivate the people who are, to quote George W. Bush, “the deciders.”
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Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town’s cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a careerenhancing move. The universe of people who will
critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. Government life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it’s 11:00 in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of takeout pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one’s consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: “You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified ?” No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle blowing often provokes: Unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, growing immune to the curiousness of one’s surroundings is easy. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn’t know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it. The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries. I saw this submissiveness on many occasions. One memorable incident was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. This legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration’s illegal and unconstitutional surveillance first revealed by The New York Times in 2005 and indemnified the telecommunications companies for their cooperation in these acts. The bill passed easily: All that was required was the invocation of the word “terrorism” and most members of Congress responded like iron filings obeying a magnet. One who responded in that fashion was Senator Barack Obama, soon to be coronated as the presidential nominee at the Democratic National
Convention in Denver. He had already won the most delegates by campaigning to the left of his main opponent, Hillary Clinton, on the excesses of the global war on terror and the erosion of constitutional liberties. As the indemnification vote showed, the Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called “private enterprise” is an integral part of its operations. In a special series in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which it has metastasized after the September 11 attacks. There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: Since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community’s budget goes to paying contracts. And the membrane between government and industry is highly permeable: The Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government’s largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell, is the current vice chairman of the same company; Booz Allen is 99 percent dependent on government business. These contractors now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings. Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater. Should the politicians forget their lines and threaten the status Reactions: Danielle quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash and lawyers to Brian on Legalized help the hired hands remember their own best interests. Corruption Photo: Dale Robbins The executives of the financial giants even have de facto criminal immunity. On March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder stated the following: “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.” This, from the chief law enforcement officer of a justice system that has practically abolished the constitutional right to trial for poorer defendants charged with certain crimes. It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice — certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee. [3]
The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a well trodden highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and many others. Not all the traffic involves persons connected with the purely financial operations of the government: In 2013, General David Petraeus joined KKR (formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) of 9 West 57th Street, New York, a private equity firm with $62.3 billion in assets. KKR specializes in management buyouts and leveraged finance. General Petraeus’ expertise in these areas is unclear. His ability to peddle influence, however, is a known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus, the military commanders of the Deep State do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword. Petraeus also obtained a sinecure as a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The Ivy League is, of course, the preferred bleaching tub and charm school of the American oligarchy. [4] Petraeus and most of the avatars of the Deep State — the White House advisers who urged Obama not to impose compensation limits on Wall Street CEOs, the contractor-connected think tank experts who besought us to “stay the course” in Iraq, the economic gurus who perpetually demonstrate that globalization and deregulation are a blessing that makes us all better off in the long run — are careful to pretend that they have no ideology. Their preferred pose is that of the politically neutral technocrat offering well considered advice based on profound expertise. That is nonsense. They are deeply dyed in the hue of the official ideology of the governing class, an ideology that is neither specifically Democrat nor Republican. Domestically, whatever they might privately believe about essentially diversionary social issues such as abortion or gay marriage, they almost invariably believe in the “Washington Consensus”: financialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and the commodifying of labor. Internationally, they espouse 21st-century “American Exceptionalism”: the right and duty of the United States to meddle in every region of the world with coercive diplomacy and boots on the ground and to ignore painfully won international norms of civilized behavior. To paraphrase what Sir John Harrington said more than 400 years ago about treason, now that the ideology of the Deep State has prospered, none dare call it ideology. [5] That is why describing torture with the word “torture” on broadcast television is treated less as political heresy than as an inexcusable lapse of Washington etiquette: Like smoking a cigarette on camera, these days it is simply “not done.” After Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent and depth of surveillance by the National Security Agency, it has become publicly evident that Silicon Valley is a vital node of the Deep State as well. Unlike military and intelligence contractors, Silicon Valley overwhelmingly sells to the private market, but its business is so important to the government that a strange relationship Reactions: Heidi has emerged. While the government could simply Boghosian on Mass dragoon the high technology companies to do the NSA’s Surveillance Photo: Dale Robbins bidding, it would prefer cooperation with so important an engine of the nation’s economy, perhaps with an implied quid pro quo. Perhaps this explains the extraordinary indulgence the government shows the Valley in intellectual property matters. If an American
“jailbreaks” his smartphone (i.e., modifies it so that it can use a service provider other than the one dictated by the manufacturer), he could receive a fine of up to $500,000 and several years in prison; so much for a citizen’s vaunted property rights to what he purchases. The libertarian pose of the Silicon Valley moguls, so carefully cultivated in their public relations, has always been a sham. Silicon Valley has long been tracking for commercial purposes the activities of every person who uses an electronic device, so it is hardly surprising that the Deep State should emulate the Valley and do the same for its own purposes. Nor is it surprising that it should conscript the Valley’s assistance. Still, despite the essential roles of lower Manhattan and Silicon Valley, the center of gravity of the Deep State is firmly situated in and around the Beltway. The Deep State’s physical expansion and consolidation around the Beltway would seem to make a mockery of the frequent pronouncement that governance in Washington is dysfunctional and broken. That the secret and unaccountable Deep State floats freely above the gridlock between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the paradox of American government in the 21st century: drone strikes, data mining, secret prisons and Panopticon-like control on the one hand; and on the other, the ordinary, visible parliamentary institutions of selfgovernment declining to the status of a banana republic amid the gradual collapse of public infrastructure. The results of this contradiction are not abstract, as a tour of the rotting, decaying, bankrupt cities of the American Midwest will attest. I t is not even confined to those parts of the country left behind by a Washington Consensus that decreed the financialization and deindustrialization of the economy in the interests of efficiency and shareholder value. This paradox is evident even within the Beltway itself, the richest metropolitan area in the nation. Although demographers and urban researchers invariably count Washington as a “world city,” that is not always evident to those who live there. Virtually every time there is a severe summer thunderstorm, tens — or even hundreds — of thousands of residents lose power, often for many days. There are occasional water restrictions over wide areas because water mains, poorly constructed and inadequately maintained, have burst. [6] The Washington metropolitan area considers it a Herculean task just to build a rail link to its international airport — with luck it may be completed by 2018. It is as if Hadrian’s Wall was still fully manned and the fortifications along the border with Germania were never stronger, even as the city of Rome disintegrates from within and the life-sustaining aqueducts leading down from the hills begin to crumble. The governing classes of the Deep State may continue to deceive themselves with their dreams of Zeus-like omnipotence, but others do not. A 2013 Pew Poll that interviewed 38,000 people around the world found that in 23 of 39 countries surveyed, a plurality of respondents said they believed China already had or would in the future replace the United States as the world’s top economic power. The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in
the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to “live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face.” “Living upon its principal,” in this case, means that the Deep State has been extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion. We are faced with two disagreeable implications. First, that the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change. Second, that just as in so many previous empires, the Deep State is populated with those whose instinctive reaction to the failure of their policies is to double down on those very policies in the future. Iraq was a failure briefly camouflaged by the wholly propagandistic success of the so-called surge; this legerdemain allowed for the surge in Afghanistan, which equally came to naught. Undeterred by that failure, the functionaries of the Deep State plunged into Libya; the smoking rubble of the Benghazi consulate, rather than discouraging further misadventure, seemed merely to incite the itch to bomb Syria. Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human and material capital, is slowly exhausted? The dusty road of empire is strewn with the bones of former great powers that exhausted themselves in like manner. But, there are signs of resistance to the Deep State and its demands. In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the House narrowly failed to pass an amendment that would have defunded the NSA’s warrantless collection of data from US persons. Shortly thereafter, the president, advocating yet another military intervention in the Middle East, this time in Syria, met with such overwhelming congressional skepticism that he changed the subject by grasping at a diplomatic lifeline thrown to him by Vladimir Putin. [7]
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Has the visible, constitutional state, the one envisaged by Madison and the other Founders, finally begun to reassert itself against the claims and usurpations of the Deep State? To some extent, perhaps. The unfolding revelations of the scope of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance have become so egregious that even institutional apologists such as Senator Dianne Feinstein have begun to backpedal — if only rhetorically — from their knee-jerk defense of the agency. As more people begin to waken from the fearful and suggestible state that 9/11 created in their minds, it is possible that the Deep State’s decade-old tactic of crying “terrorism!” every time it faces resistance is no longer eliciting the same Pavlovian response of meek obedience. And the American people, possibly even their legislators, are growing tired of endless quagmires in the Middle East. But there is another more structural reason the Deep State may have peaked in the extent of its dominance. While it seems to float above the constitutional state, its essentially parasitic, extractive nature means that it is still tethered to the formal proceedings of governance. The Deep State thrives when there is tolerable functionality in the day-to-day operations of the federal government.
As long as appropriations bills get passed on time, promotion lists get confirmed, black (i.e., secret) budgets get rubber-stamped, special tax subsidies for certain corporations are approved without controversy, as long as too many awkward questions are not asked, the gears of the hybrid state will mesh noiselessly. But when one house of Congress is taken over by tea party Wahhabites, life for the ruling class becomes more trying. If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda. But recent congressional antics involving sequestration, the government shutdown and the threat of default over the debt ceiling extension have been disrupting that equilibrium. And an extreme gridlock dynamic has developed between the two parties such that continuing some level of sequestration is politically the least bad option for both parties, albeit for different reasons. As much as many Republicans might want to give budget relief to the organs of national security, they cannot fully reverse sequestration without the Democrats demanding revenue increases. And Democrats wanting to spend more on domestic discretionary programs cannot void sequestration on either domestic or defense programs without Republicans insisting on entitlement cuts. So, for the foreseeable future, the Deep State must restrain its appetite for taxpayer dollars. Limited deals may soften sequestration, but agency requests will not likely be fully funded anytime soon. Even Wall Street’s rentier operations have been affected: After helping finance the tea party to advance its own plutocratic ambitions, America’s Big Money is now regretting the Frankenstein’s monster it has created. Like children playing with dynamite, the tea party and its compulsion to drive the nation into credit default has alarmed the grown-ups commanding the heights of capital; the latter are now telling the politicians they thought they had hired to knock it off . The House vote to defund the NSA’s illegal surveillance programs was equally illustrative of the disruptive nature of the tea party insurgency. Civil liberties Democrats alone would never have come so close to victory; tea party stalwart Justin Amash (R-MI), who has also upset the business community for his debtlimit fundamentalism, was the lead Republican sponsor of the NSA amendment, and most of the Republicans who voted with him were aligned with the tea party. The final factor is Silicon Valley. Owing to secrecy and obfuscation, it is hard to know how much of the NSA’s relationship with the Valley is based on voluntary cooperation, how much is legal compulsion through FISA warrants and how much is a matter of the NSA surreptitiously breaking into technology companies’ systems. Given the Valley’s public relations requirement Reactions: Tim Wu on to mollify its customers who have privacy concerns, it is Silicon Valley difficult to take the tech firms’ libertarian protestations about government compromise of their systems at face value, especially since they engage in similar activity against their own
customers for commercial purposes. That said, evidence is accumulating that Silicon Valley is losing billions in overseas business from companies, individuals and governments that want to maintain privacy. For high tech entrepreneurs, the cash nexus is ultimately more compelling than the Deep State’s demand for patriotic cooperation. Even legal compulsion can be combatted: Unlike the individual citizen, tech firms have deep pockets and batteries of lawyers with which to fight government diktat. This pushback has gone so far that on January 17, President Obama announced revisions to the NSA’s data collection programs, including withdrawing the agency’s custody of a domestic telephone record database, expanding requirements for judicial warrants and ceasing to spy on (undefined) “friendly foreign leaders.” Critics have denounced the changes as a cosmetic public relations move, but they are still significant in that the clamor has gotten so loud that the president feels the political need to address it. When the contradictions within a ruling ideology are pushed too far, factionalism appears and that ideology begins slowly to crumble. Corporate oligarchs such as the Koch brothers are no longer entirely happy with the fauxpopulist political front group they helped fund and groom. Silicon Valley, for all the Ayn Rand-like tendencies of its major players, its offshoring strategies and its further exacerbation of income inequality , is now lobbying Congress to restrain the NSA , a core component of the Deep State. Some tech firms are moving to encrypt their data. High tech corporations and governments alike seek dominance over people though collection of personal data, but the corporations are jumping ship now that adverse public reaction to the NSA scandals threatens their profits. The outcome of all these developments is uncertain. The Deep State, based on the twin pillars of national security imperative and corporate hegemony, has until recently seemed unshakable and the latest events may only be a temporary perturbation in its trajectory. But history has a way of toppling the altars of the mighty. While the two great materialist and determinist ideologies of the twentieth century, Marxism and the Washington Consensus, successively decreed that the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the market were inevitable, the future is actually indeterminate. It may be that deep economic and social currents create the framework of history, but those currents can be channeled, eddied, or even reversed by circumstance, chance and human agency. We have only to reflect upon defunct glacial despotisms such as the USSR or East Germany to realize that nothing is forever. Throughout history, state systems with outsized pretensions to power have reacted to their environments in two ways. The first strategy, reflecting the ossification of its ruling elites, consists of repeating that nothing is wrong, that the status quo reflects the nation’s unique good fortune in being favored by God and that those calling for change are merely subversive troublemakers. As the French ancien régime, the Romanov dynasty and the Habsburg emperors discovered, the strategy works splendidly for a while, particularly if one has a talent for
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dismissing unpleasant facts. The final results, however, are likely to be thoroughly disappointing. The second strategy is one embraced to varying degrees and with differing goals, by figures of such contrasting personalities as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle and Deng Xiaoping. They were certainly not revolutionaries by temperament; if anything, their natures were conservative. But they understood that the political cultures in which they lived were fossilized and incapable of adapting to the times. In their drive to reform and modernize the political systems they inherited, their first obstacles to overcome were the outworn myths that encrusted the thinking of the elites of their time. As the United States confronts its future after experiencing two failed wars, a precarious economy and $17 trillion in accumulated debt, the national punditry has split into two camps. The first, the declinists, sees a broken, dysfunctional political system incapable of reform and an economy soon to be overtaken by China. The second, the reformers, offers a profusion of nostrums to turn the nation around: public financing of elections to sever the artery of money between the corporate components of the Deep State and financially dependent elected officials, government “insourcing” to reverse the tide of outsourcing of government functions and the conflicts of interest that it creates, a tax policy that values human labor over financial manipulation and a trade policy that favors exporting manufactured goods over exporting investment capital. Mike Lofgren on the Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight All of that is necessary, but not sufficient. The Snowden revelations (the impact of which have been surprisingly strong), the derailed drive for military intervention in Syria and a fractious Congress, whose dysfunction has begun to be a serious inconvenience to the Deep State, show that there is now a deep but as yet inchoate hunger for change. What America lacks is a figure with the serene self-confidence to tell us that the twin idols of national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas that have nothing more to offer us. Thus disenthralled, the people themselves will unravel the Deep State with surprising speed.
[1] The term “Deep State” was coined in Turkey and is said to be a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary and organized crime. In British author John le Carré’s latest novel, A Delicate Truth, a character describes the Deep State as “… the everexpanding circle of non-governmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of Whitehall and Westminster.” I use the term to mean a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.
[2] Twenty-five years ago, the sociologist Robert Nisbet described this phenomenon as “the attribute of No Fault…. Presidents, secretaries and generals and admirals in America seemingly subscribe to the doctrine that no fault ever attaches to policy and operations. This No Fault conviction prevents them from taking too seriously such notorious foul-ups as Desert One, Grenada, Lebanon and now the Persian Gulf.” To his list we might add 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. [3] The attitude of many members of Congress towards Wall Street was memorably expressed by Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, in 2010: “In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.” [4] Beginning in 1988, every US president has been a graduate of Harvard or Yale. Beginning in 2000, every losing presidential candidate has been a Harvard or Yale graduate, with the exception of John McCain in 2008. [5] In recent months, the American public has seen a vivid example of a Deep State operative marketing his ideology under the banner of pragmatism. Former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates — a one-time career CIA officer and deeply political Bush family retainer — has camouflaged his retrospective defense of military escalations that have brought us nothing but casualties and fiscal grief as the straight-from-the-shoulder memoir from a plain-spoken son of Kansas who disdains Washington and its politicians. [6] Meanwhile, the US government took the lead in restoring Baghdad’s sewer system at a cost of $7 billion. [7] Obama’s abrupt about-face suggests he may have been skeptical of military intervention in Syria all along, but only dropped that policy once Congress and Putin gave him the running room to do so. In 2009, he went ahead with the Afghanistan “surge” partly because General Petraeus’ public relations campaign and back-channel lobbying on the Hill for implementation of his pet military strategy pre-empted other options. These incidents raise the disturbing question of how much the democratically elected president — or any president — sets the policy of the national security state and how much the policy is set for him by the professional operatives of that state who engineer faits accomplis that force his hand.
Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His book about Congress, The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted , appeared in paperback on August 27, 2013.
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HeevenSteven
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in his book "Democracy Inc", Sheldon Wolin described this system as "Inverted Totalitarianism". It's a great read. "
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Kenneth Killiany
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This is an issue that c oncerns me greatly actually. Both sides have adopted policies that have fed it. I find it interesting that you mention Allen Drury, who was my uncle. Al was a dogged reporter, uncovering, in his day, the Manhattan Project, which he did not report on because of World War II. Should he have? He never doubted his judgment. However, he was very concerned about how the State just grew and operated on its won. You can see mentions of it in ADVISE AND CONSENT and MARK COFFIN, where he discusses the whole public-private daisy chain and how irresponsible it is. It's true, you can't get drama out of it, but he mentions it, but in PENTAGON, he wrote a whole book about a bureaucracy can be diverted from what it is meant to do by concerns for its own prerogatives. A&C and MARK COFFIN have just been re-released, and PENTAGON will follow next year. This kind of reporting in your article is the kind he admired and it is a great service. "
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SomeRandomGuy
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A great read. Staggeringly honest, and yet, still leaves me with a ray of hope for our country. "
Jack Wolf
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Mike forgot something. There is a simple fact that rules the deep state, the reformists, and the declinests, whether they accept it or not: Natural Law. Abrupt climate change can not be controlled now. To suggest that any of these groups are in control or have the ability to make substantial change belies what is really going on. From now on, all these groups can only react and as far as I can tell, today will be the best day of the rest of our lives. It's all downhill from here and it is irreversible. "
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SomeRandomGuy
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A defeatist attitude is one of the major hurdles towards true change. I, for one, refuse to give up. "
CitizenX911
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What rings clear is we now have a non-elected government operating outside our constitutional government and is purposely gridlocked. Our government and judicial system have been hijacked and steps must be taken to remove Big Hidden money that is controlling our constitutional government. Great interview Bill, thanks as always! "
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J.G. Sandom
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We have become almost as much a plutocracy as our former Cold War nemesis, Russia. Tech, Big Oil and Wall Street oligarchs, combined with the military-industrial complex (which Eisenhower tried to warn us against) collude (in spirit, if not in actual boardrooms) to keep the people's power in check via libertarian deregulation, union busting, Citizens United (and other activist SCOTUS rulings), privatization of the Intelligence Community (IC), the opiate of digital media that pushes the idolatry of money & all things celebrity to distract us, and our collective fear of terrorism (hence our perpetual war footing). This is what my forthcoming novel, 404, is all about—not ust how IP tech is invading our lives, but how this invasion is a metaphor for the larger invasion. (HAL2, in my book, IS what Mike Lofgren calls the Deep State.) Wake up, America! Our country is being stolen from us in plain sight. Thank you Bill Moyers, and thank you Mike Lofgren for helping to alert the American public. You are 21st century Paul Reveres! Al Qaeda is less of a threat to America because of some future possible terrorist action, and more because the collective American fear it engenders helps the Deep State sink its claws more effectively into our national flesh. "
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Thomas Milligan
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Good point about our old nemesis, The Evil Empire. I always found it ironic that as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the United States was moving toward one-party rule. You c an write the Nov. 5 headline right now: "Republocrats Win Yet Again!" "
Ellie
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We have all this information, but nothing ever comes of it! No one goes to jail The laws are changed to help the criminals . We still have a two party system which is a joke. Unless people are hungry and cold and willing to die for a cause nothing is going to change in this country. "
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freelance-writer
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A.k.a.:Ukraine 2014. Though there are many factors and stake-holders at work in the Ukraine issue, it behooves the citizenry of all western nations tainted by the same `deep-state' tyranny to bear witness. It will take bricks against bullets to resolve this global crisis once and for ever. "
Philip B. Spivey
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Deep State is such a wonderful term for something I've felt in my bones since reaching social consciousness as a teenager. As an early activist in the civil rights, anti-war, antinuke movements during the 50s and 60s and a witness to the rise of movements for self-determination by Blacks, women and homosexuals, among others, I was always struck by how little "the deep structure" of our society changed; the important things--the deep structure of human welfare--- essentially stay the same. No matter the president, no matter the Congress, no matter the decade, the "haves" always "have" and the "have nots" ---well --- continue to not have. Over the past thirty years, I've seen the gap between the "haves" and "have nots" grow to grotesque proportions. I've seen the prison system balloon as it sweeps millions of Black and Latino men off the streets. I've seen the corporate entity AIG rescued and a city of 700,000, Detroit, left to drown. Is there a hidden hand in all that I see? The Lofgren essay is chilling and, sadly, while e ducating us about these hidden hands, they may lead to a sense of hopelessness and despair. I hope not; our future as a struggling democracy depends upon us finding a rescue plan. Several years ago, I became acquainted with a book entitled: "The Paradigm ---
change them". The authors are Denise B reton and Christopher Largent. This is a brilliant examination of the addictive and compulsive vectors that drive our social, psychological and societal needs for power, control and accumulation. These are the kinds of vectors that nourish the principles, values and policies of the Hidden State. Perhaps the Hidden State might be also termed our "51st State". Out of sight; out of mind? "
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richard anderson
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I have been giving the political system another chance since Vietnam. Each time we have an election I hear some good things. But when these people are in office they change. When Ralph Nader ran for office he was kept out by various means and not allowed to debate. The system is rigged. This talk of voting for the right person is not going to cut it. With the problems this deep and the protection that has been set up to keep this system in place there is NOT a way to change it. In other words voting will not work. Something more is needed. Demonstrations don't work either. Just look at how long the Vietnam war was protested and when Bush stumped for invasion of Iraq. They didn't care. Resistance may be the answer. "
Andrew Kloak
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This insightful essay shows that Silicon Valley is not be what it claims to be. Neither is Wall Street or the massive build-up of federal government power around Washington, D.C. The article also alludes to the notion that these companies in Silicon Valley are waking and trying to resist Deep State regime. California can't save American society. We are only 12% of the entire population. Plus, they don't want to, they have to answer to shareholders. Profit is the highest good for companies and government. They want influence and money. All this is like marionette theatre. James Clapper from the NSA used misdirection when reporters started to zero-in on the scale of the deception and breach of trust last Fall. Enormous change is just ahead but not without enormous turmoil. People intuitively know that national security and corporate power are worn out dogmas. There is an urgency to all this. Many of these people in these positions of power have no soul. It doesn't have to be this way, it just is. I think they want it this bad because they profit and garner influence when it is this ineffectual.
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margo
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I agree -- so now what is our work toward change? And if nature abhores a vacuum, what can we create to fill the soon void of this dysfunctional "deep state" More and more of us who wake up can join forces… we can make a difference. The multi-nationals, the corporations get t heir power from us… we can choose to make it different by what we buy, by how we think! "
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Mecca Wrecka
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if you do, they'll threaten and outlaw suppliers of your chosen products, teach your children against your choices, and if all that doesn't work, re-locate you to a cubicle in the city until the internment camps are ready to receive you when they've finally milked you for everything. "
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To the Community, Any hate-speech, even if you are attempting to be sarcastic, will be deleted and you will be unable to participate in our community. PLEASE read our comment policy before commenting. Sean @ Moyers "
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Mecca Wrecka
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what is hate speech? would that include responses worded appropriate to their plans - past, present, and future - to kill us after raping away our rights and monies? "
Latuf Tak
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Not sure whether to grin, for having an inkling, or cry - as my worst fears are now validated. Wonderful essay. "
brainburst
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You now why we are in the position we are in? Because we elect our representatives like producers cast reality TV shows. Left and right send true believers to the hill to fight and squabble in political theater. Enough! We need to send grownups to congress not progressives not libertarians not conservative not ideologues of any sort! ideologues are beholden to their causes not their constituencies. The only ones that benefit from this are the media giants from political spending and consultants. Wake up people! Stop voting ideology! "
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Charli03
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Which means you would have to send a zombie. It seems to me it isn't the politicians we need to work on, but ourselves. We need to stop the drive of theocracy. Slave owners had no compassion and the middle and lower classes in America are becoming slaves stuck in day-to-day existence, afraid to leave a job or refuse to risk change because we have to feed families. Don't let a television station or a clever talk show or politician decide for you but spend time on each candidate, google every article from a reputable source, forget the hate blogs, and if you vote and find out you've made a mistake, start the letters, change your vote, even change your party, but listen to what they say about themselves harder than you listen to how they slander, rant and lie about someone else. "
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brainburst
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Send a zombie? No! Send people that understand that ideology is not an answer, just a viewpoint. People that understand this would be the opposite of zombies; they would be independent thinkers unlike the ideological zombies that just parrot their beliefs "
Nap
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Where is the expose identifying those individuals and political leaders responsible for the institutional problems discussed? Why aren't the individuals responsible for the changes targeted and highlighted like the list of names and photos of johns soliciting prostitutes. How is the system to improve without the people knowing specifically who is doing what and when and where. It there is to be any chance of removing these people from positions of power, we as a society must begin seeing the faces and names associated with systemic problems. In the end it is an individual or group of individuals who propose and pass laws, bills, legislation, regulations, etc that give us the dysfunctional institutional systems that we are living within. We as citizens must
demand that we have government in the sunshine to a degree that allows anyone to know specifically who is responsible for whatever proposal is implemented. It is the responsibility for the media to provide this information to the viewing public. Where is the public discussion examining the motivation of the individual making these decisions. If we are to survive we must focus on the psychological characteristics of these people we call leaders. We cannot continue to talk about the systemic problems with our systems without knowing who created them and then ask the question why?. "
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Sisyphus
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Nap, you're so right. But who will have the courage to name names ? If you were to name names you might get "SLAPP"'ed or get sued for defamation. Edward Snowden did a very courageous thing; but he is paying a heavy price. Where is the public's outrage; the "I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take this anymore" outrage ? Marty Kaplan called it "learned helplessness" in his "Let's be Brazil" column. Where is the international community's opprobrium against war and famine ? Jean Ziegler says, in his book entitled "Empire of Shame", that because the wealth in the world is captured by so few people, the so-called Lords of the Economic War, that war is no longer sporadic but permanent. He says that the Lords of the Economic War attack the Normative State Powers of Sovereign States, subvert democracies and destroy populations and their freedoms, and their principal weapon is nothing other than the American military power, which operates from now on without the approval of the UN, without any control. So, the DESEASE is well known; the DIAGNOSIS is clear; but what is the TREATMENT ? As Sherlock Holmes would say: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth". And Margaret Meade is correct when she says: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever does". Good luck to us all ! "
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Antonio Germano
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What filibustering? The Republicans don't have the votes. "
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Charli03
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This republican congress has filibustered tenfold over any congress in the past and have kept this government gridlocked with more vacancies open than filled. The democrats had a filibuster-proof majority for exactly 72 days after this president took office in 2009. The only change has been the nuclear option change because a super majority was required in the senate before that -- stupid idea to begin with, with many major agencies left without a leader, t o say nothing of other hundreds of appointees. It should always be majority rule. So should electing a president. The world has changed since 1776 and the constitution needs to change with it -- that's why amendments were allowed. "
dalepues
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We're hardwired for failure; there is no avoiding it. The larger the civilization, the larger the fall. This time it would seem that we have destroyed much of the planet too. "
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Sharee Anne Gorman
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!!Wow!! (jaw drop)...I consider t his essay on par with the "Pentagon Papers" as regards U.S. policy (domestic and foreign/militaristic and financial)! !! Wow !! First, Occupy Wall Street points out the economic inequality suffered by the 99%. Now, this...I think the other shoe just dropped. "
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Eric_Saunders
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How in the world does this author write such a long essay about the "Deep State" without mentioning Peter Dale Scott, the man most responsible for introducing the concept and the term to English speaking audiences? This is an inexplicable omission. "
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Yourstruly
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Maybe you should enlighten us rather than call out the author. "
BasicFunguist
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Well, there certainly is disturbing similarity between the US and the PRC; they plan their economy while we "fine tune" ours through the machinations of the Fed controlling the supply of money (and therefore, ultimately, its value) in circulation. If the flip-side of democracy is free-market economics something here has gone way out of kilter. Call it Communism...call it corporatism, Mussolini-style fascism, the effect is the same: the disenfranchisement and ultimate enslavement of the citizenry. "
jerrymack
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We the people was a lovely idea. Too bad it turned out to be a pipe-dream. "
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Bob_Robert
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That was a painful read. The nationalization of finance is "privatization" and "deregulation"? FDR not a revolutionary? Government financing of political campaigns is "necessary, but not sufficient"? If it wasn't so consistent it would be ridiculous. Get this straight, Lofgren: There is no difference between Marxism and this "Washington Consensus". Have you never read the Communist Manifesto? Go through the planks, one by one, and tell me how the US Fed.Gov hasn't enacted them all. The Empire of the United States is a Marxist system. That's why it's failing. "
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InjusticeForAll333
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You clearly do not understand socialism or Marxism. Otherwise you would understand that the U.S. is neither and by a long shot. Learn something before you speak and shove your foot in your mouth. "
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Bob_Robert
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And you have never READ Marx. I recommend doing so before chiding others. That said, I fully agree that the endless things written ABOUT Marxism, the constant flow of commentaries, explanations, dissertations, discussions about what Marx "really meant", do not outline what is going on in America today, because they all ignore the destruction caused by Socialism. Marx, at least, admitted that total state control would lead to total destruction. And here we are. "
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I certainly have read Karl Marx' Communist Manifesto and I can assure you that you and I have apparently got a completely different set of reading comprehension skills. "
moderator
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Mod
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InjusticeForAll3333 and Bob_Robert You will have to agree to disagree. Please move on before anyone violates the comment policy. thanks, Sean @ Moyers "
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Bob_Robert
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"you and I have apparently got a c ompletely different set of reading comprehension skills" In that, we have complete agreement. Anarchy. It could not possibly be worse. "
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moderator
Mod
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Bob_Robert and InjusticeForAll3333, You will have to agree to disagree. Please move on before anyone violates the comment policy. thanks, Sean @ Moyers "
Rob Lipton
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Great discussion, but a more accurate term for "deep state" is fascism, the close collaboration of wealth and government, the destruction of trade unions and the middle class, it's, unfortunately, classic "
mthomas68
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I saw Mike on c-span Sunday and enjoyed his comments, and now reading this piece I have trouble with a GOP former congressional analysis troubled about how t he govt is working or not working beginning in 2009. As with many of former GOP legislators or analysts never do they dig deeper into the underlying problems that cause the congress to not work. Mentioning the Deep State reminds me of Washington Post investigation exposing the 2nd govt in DC. It's where all the retired legislators or lost elections legislators, the congressional staff, the retired military generals go. They pop up in media (tv, radio, newspapers) spewing out a talking point for their respective 2nd govt think tank in DC. C-span is a major platform that they use, and 99% of them promote some corporation dealing with the 1st govt. Too bad we don't see the name tags of the corporations they represent. Now that we have citizens united we're back into the age of the Robber Barons. "
Federalist45
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How can the author and mthomas68 discuss any part of Big Media as anything but a part of the Deep State. The Washington Post? NYT? WSJ? NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox? New Yorker, NR, TWS? All part of the Goebbels-like arm known as the
Deep State propaganda machine. You cite the Post as if it were not part of this cabal? "
CitizenX911
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Wars forced us into debt slavery to the Big banks that financed them, thus we are slaved to the NWO BANKS and corporations Federal Reserve Banks buys and owns most of our debt, they are international now We are controlled by the bankers and the secret NWO financial network running the governments of the world. Everything trickles down from these taskmasters. Follow the money and everything is controlled by where it leads. Globalization, one financial system running the world into their vision of one world government controlled by their big money. They been ruling us for a long time now. CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM would fix us election process and would scare them knowing they can't put their bag men in office anymore. "
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PAldrighetti
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So, is it time for a Jubilee? Zero out all debts just like in the olden days. Granted, it *might* destroy some of those Banks, but it might be what is fair. "
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CitizenX911
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I feel nothing for Loan Sharks of any kind and they get what they deserve. "
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Federalist45
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Since Lincoln, the Statists have chipped away at liberty and property, and the glowing victories of WW, FDR, LBJ, RMN, the Bush Clan, and BHO have brought us into what you call "debt slavery." Wars were but a part of it. Add to it the evil welfare state designed t o enslave millions in the underclass for eternity, worshipping their keepers in government. Add to it the Wall Street whores who are bailed out of every predicament of their own making, such that they really have no risk (since the taxpayer always pays off their risks). Add to it corporate welfare and bailouts, again paid for by the taxpayer. The common theme here is that the ENTIRE THING is designed to destroy the only barrier--the American middle class--standing in the way of the pure, global state. "
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CitizenX911
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Rothschild family made their banking trillions beginning from financing Napoleon's wars up until now. Their family owns media houses, governments, etc and their influence knows no bounds. You will never see their family listed on Forbes richest people lists because they own the media and do not want to see their names or advertise their wealth. The Bankers truly own the world and War debt was the fastest way to do it. "
Herb
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Where there is no vision the people ???? "
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WeNeedaDream
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Yep "
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WeNeedaDream
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So how do We The People find or create an inspiring vision? "
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Bob_Robert
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I think the Free State Project is a good start. "
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