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Weissman writes: "He starts with the usual suspects - the national security and law enforcement teams from the departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Justice, along with a handful of specialized courts and the spooks and spies at the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other agencies."

 (illustration: Moyers & Company)
(illustration: Moyers & Company)


Don't Let "the Deep State" Eat Your Homework

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

04 March 14

 

ast month, Mike Lofgren published a widely-discussed essay called “A Shadow Government Controls America.” The former GOP operative and 28-year Congressional staffer looks beyond the consent of the governed and formal structures and processes of our deadlocked government. The people who actually run the country, he argues, are a hybrid of government and top-level finance and industry all “hiding in plain sight.” Lofgren calls this hybrid “the Deep State,” and sees it as “the big story of our times.”

This is tricky territory, as Lofgren well knows. Americans have long conjured up mostly mythical shadow government conspiracies, from the Federal Reserve and its supposed control of the American economy by Jewish bankers like the Rothschilds to the Bilderbergers, Trilateralists, East Coast Internationalists, and other Illuminati with blue UN helicopters plotting a New World Order at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Lofgren avoids most of the magical thinking, while highlighting many of the individuals and groups we need to study to arrive at a credible theory of how America’s true “deciders” exercise their power at home and abroad. He starts with the usual suspects – the national security and law enforcement teams from the departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Justice, along with a handful of specialized courts and the spooks and spies at the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other agencies.

He also includes the private contractors, such as the iconic Booz Allen Hamilton, which is 99 percent dependent on government business. In one his many fascinating asides, Lofgren tells us that the current director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, worked as a Booz Allen executive and his predecessor as DNI, Admiral Mike McConnell, now works as vice chairman. A third alumnus is, of course, history’s most famous whistleblower, Edward Snowden, who was – but is no longer – one of some 854,000 private contractors with top-secret clearances.

Ever since the early Cold War, these agencies and departments have exercised enormous power, and possibly even more so since 9/11. But my journalistic research over the years suggests – as I argued in “What Did Merkel Know? And When Did Obama Know It?”– that the security and law enforcement apparatchiks were rarely rogue elephants, but “generally did what their civilian masters wanted them to do. If presidents and Congressional oversight committees did not know what an intelligence agency was doing, it was usually because they did not want to know and did not make the effort to find out.”

Others will disagree. Vehemently. But, to convince large numbers of Americans that we truly know how power works in our society, we should shun ideological or religious-like certainty, one way or the other. Independent journalists, historians, Congressional investigators, and good citizens need to probe the evidence in every significant case. Still, please note that Lofgren, a long-time veteran of these wars, presupposes that all these agencies and departments “are coordinated by the executive Office of the President via the National Security Council.”

Broadening his “Deep State,” Lofgren adds the Treasury Department, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, other financial and industry groups, along with the think tanks that sing from the corporate songbook. I think he should have gone much farther, including Big Oil, Big Pharma, Pentagon suppliers, and agro-chemical giants like Monsanto. His emphasis on national security and law enforcement is terribly significant, but it distorts the reality of power in America by drastically narrowing our field of vision.

My second reason for shying away from Lofgren’s concept should be even more obvious. He argues that his “Deep State” is “the 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 not. If we do our homework, we find that America’s overlapping layers of undemocratic, unaccountable, secretive bureaucrats and power brokers do not work together as a state within the state anywhere nearly as much as he claims.

As Professor Juan Cole argues, most of Lofgren’s “Deep State” resisted the Bush administration’s Iraq War, which is why the “interlopers from Dallas and Houston” had to sell it so hard, to say nothing of the role of the neo-cons. Similarly, the National Security Council “had a virtual civil war over intervening in Libya, while “Wall Street historically dislikes foreign wars because they are inflationary.”

Or, ask yourself the obvious questions: What consequential role did Silicon Valley play in the War on Terror? Conversely, what of importance did the CIA and NSA do to promote the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy? If someone can come up with something serious, I’d truly love to see the evidence. But I suspect it will be a real stretch.

In sum, Lofgren’s “Deep State” is too narrow and largely masks the huge policy differences among America’s movers and shakers. Like the prototypical military-industrial-Congressional complex, the perps of American power generally promote their own self-interested agendas, often indifferent to or fiercely competitive with the others, all within a pro-capitalist, predominantly neo-liberal, multi-hyphenated Corporate State.



A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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