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[Patty Guerrero (pattypax]

HI,  we can discuss this article at the next salon.  Tuesday, April 1.  

Thanks,  Patty

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Patty Guerrero <pattypax [at] earthlink.net>
> Subject: anatomy of deep state
> Date: March 26, 2014 at 8:37:12 PM CDT
> To: Patty Guerrero <pattypax [at] earthlink.net>
> 
> Anatomy of the Deep State: Beneath Veneer of Democracy, The Permanent Ruling 
> Class
> by Mike Lofgren
> 
> (Photo: AP)
> "Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is 
> the only true 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 
> 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 
> 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.
> 
> "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."
> 
> As I wrote in The Party is Over, the present objective of congressional 
> Republicans is to render the executive branch powerless, at least until a 
> Republican president is elected (a goal that voter suppression laws in 
> GOP-controlled states are clearly intended to accomplish). President Obama 
> cannot enact his domestic policies and budgets: Because of incessant GOP 
> 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 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. 
> Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any 
> other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, 
> such as arranging the forced 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 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 over the debt ceiling was beginning to 
> paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States 
> 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 about continuing meat inspections and 
> civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was 
> somehow able to 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 isnot 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.”
> 
> 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 career-enhancing 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 
> isclassified?” 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 theForeign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. This 
> legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration’s illegal and 
> unconstitutional surveillance first revealed byThe 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 quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash and lawyers to help the 
> hired hands remember their own best interests. 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 has emerged. While the government could simply dragoon the high 
> technology companies to do the NSA’s 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 self-government 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. It 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.
> 
> "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."
> 
> 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]
> 
> 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 debt-limit 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 to 
> mollify its customers who have privacy concerns, it is 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 brothersare no longer entirely happy with the 
> faux-populist 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 toencrypt 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 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.
> 
> 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 ever-expanding 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.
> 
> © 2014 Bill Moyers Media
> 
> 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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> We Shall Overcome Some Day
> pete seeger
> 

For everything there is a season
pete seeger