The Deep State Is Vulnerable to People Power
By Juan Cole See Full Article and links at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_deep_state_is_vulnerable_to_people_power_20140224
Screenshot/Billmoyers.com
My remarks below were published at Bill Moyers’ site this weekend.
They came in response to Mike Lofgren’s important essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State.” Lofgren is a former congressional staffer.
Mike Lofgren’s long experience on the Hill has given him a small window, he might say only an aperture, into a vast network of unaccountable governmental and private institutions he calls the “Deep State” in his essay. There is much that is valuable in his explication of these networks, which depend on public tax money for their operation but typically do not answer to the public in any significant way. Indeed, the public is assiduously kept in the dark about much of what they do.
The danger of this invisible institutional latticework to any but a dryly procedural notion of democracy is obvious. Its menace to individual privacy and liberty is obvious. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, invisible power corrupts invisibly.
Let me, however, push back a little bit against Lofgren’s conceptual apparatus. Egypt also has a Deep State, but the young revolutionaries who overthrew the president for life in 2011 warned against using the very conception, since, they said, it overstated the paper tiger of elite power and could discourage popular action to rein it in.
Lofgren seems to me to put too little emphasis on the impact of the September 11 attacks in allowing the vast expansion of the Deep State. It paralyzed Congress and the judiciary with regard to security and terrorism. So too did World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution allow the post-war Red Scare. These moments of timidity have occurred repeatedly in US history, but have been time-bounded. As 9/11 recedes, there will likely be a reassertion of other interests, as the author implicitly admits. A federal judge has already called NSA domestic spying “Orwellian.” As Lofgren notes, Silicon Valley’s brand name is now endangered by being tagged in international markets as spyware, and powerful tech firms with plans for cloud computing are unlikely to take it lying down.
It seems to me that Lofgren’s paradigm also needs to be interrogated in two other respects. He slights the role of the president. The Iraq War was resisted by most of the institutions he names, and had to be sold so hard by the Bush administration precisely for that reason. It was not a project of the Deep State but of interlopers from Dallas and Houston. The conflicts among these institutions and within them is also slighted. The National Security Council had a virtual civil war over intervening in Libya and was tipped into it by NATO considerations; Deep State icon and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was opposed. Wall Street historically dislikes foreign wars because they are inflationary.
If the Deep State is not monolithic but divided over policy, and if it is in fact much more responsive to the exercise of public political power than the author admits, then it is vulnerable to a vigilant public.
The Moyers/ Lofgren interview on The Deep State is here:
For other reactions to the essay by Andrew Bacevich, Danielle Brian, Henry Giroux and others, click here.
http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/
Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State
![The U.S. Capitol is seen in Washington, Monday, June 17, 2013. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)](http://cdn.billmoyers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/AP113111825607.jpg)
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.
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 testimonyunder 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 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.”
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 thenumber 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 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 theBelfer 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 impliedquid 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.
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.
![](http://cdn.billmoyers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Tim-Wu-150x150.jpg)
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 brothers are 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 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 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 wasmemorably 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.
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Transcript of Interview With Bill Moyers for foreign readers unable to access some urls:
Bill Moyers: This week on Moyers & Company long time insider Mike Lofgren on what he calls the big story of our times – the Deep State.
MIKE LOFGREN: It is, I would say, the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It’s how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion of our civil liberties, and perpetual war.
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BILL MOYERS: Welcome. If you’ve read the espionage novels of John le Carré, you know that no other writer today has so brilliantly evoked the subterranean workings of government, perhaps because he himself was once a British spy. Le Carré has a name for that invisible labyrinth of power. He calls it the “Deep State.” And now an American you’re about to meet in this broadcast has seized on that concept to describe the forces he says are controlling our government, no matter the party in power.
But Mike Lofgren’s no intelligence agent, although he had a top secret security clearance. He’s a numbers man, a Congressional staff member for 28 years with the powerful House and Senate Budget Committees. Over the years, as he crunched those numbers, he realized they didn’t add up. Instead, they led him to America’s own Deep State, where elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests.
Mike Lofgren was so disgusted, he not only left Capitol Hill, he left the Republican Party and wrote this book, “The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted.” Now, at our request, and exclusively for BillMoyers.com, he has written “Anatomy of the Deep State.” You’ll want to read it as soon as we finish this conversation. Mike Lofgren, welcome.
MIKE LOFGREN: Good to be here again, Bill.
BILL MOYERS: This is a difficult subject to talk about. It would be easier if it were a conspiracy you were describing. But that’s not the case, is it?
MIKE LOFGREN: No. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. This is not some cabal that was hatched in the dark of night. This is something that hides in plain sight. It’s something we know about, but we can’t connect the dots, or most people don’t connect the dots. It’s kind of a natural evolution when so much money and political control is at stake in the most powerful country in the world. This has evolved over time.
BILL MOYERS: And you call it the real power in the country.
MIKE LOFGREN: Correct. It is a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state. Everyone knows what the military-industrial complex is, since Eisenhower talked about it in his farewell address.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
MIKE LOFGREN: Everyone knows Wall Street and its depredations. Everyone knows how corporate America acts. They’re both about the same thing. They’re both about money, sucking as much money out of the country as they can. And they’re about control, corporate control and political control.
BILL MOYERS: You said this, in your judgment, is the big story of our time.
MIKE LOFGREN: It is the big story of our time. It is, I would say, the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It’s how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion of our civil liberties, and perpetual war.
BILL MOYERS: You write 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.”
MIKE LOFGREN: Well, that’s just the thing. The common narrative of the last five years, and on a superficial level it’s right, is that government is broken. It’s dysfunctional. It’s gridlocked. Well, that’s true. And that is the visible the government, the constitutional government we learn about in Civics 101. And it is gridlocked.
But somehow, Obama can go into Libya. He can assassinate US citizens. He can collect all our phone records without a buy or a leave from anyone. He can even bring down a jet carrying a president of a sovereign country without asking anyone’s permission. And no one seems to connect the two, the failure of our visible constitutional state and this other government that operates according to no constitutional rules or any constraint by the governed.
BILL MOYERS: You go on to say, though, that it’s not just the executive branch that is the heart of this, that it’s just one of the several constituencies that make up what you call the Deep State.
MIKE LOFGREN: Well, it’s all the national security functions of the government. It’s the Pentagon. It’s Homeland Security. It’s the State Department. It’s also Treasury because they have a kind of symbiotic relationship with Wall Street.
BILL MOYERS: For one thing, they control the flow of money.
MIKE LOFGREN: Absolutely. That’s why there’s such a flow not only of money, but of personnel between Wall Street and the Treasury Department. There’s other aspects of government. There’s a portion of the judiciary– a small portion of the judiciary, the so-called Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts. Most of Congress doesn’t even know how they operate.
BILL MOYERS: Talk a little more about the nexus, the connection, between the national security state and Wall Street. Because this is a theme that runs through your essay.
MIKE LOFGREN: Do you know that about 30 blocks north of here there is a restaurant that will sell you a truffle for $95,000. Also in New York, Christie’s sold at auction a painting by Francis Bacon for $142 million. Now a parallel situation with the national security state. The NSA spent $1.7 billion to build a facility in Utah that will collect one yottabyte of information. That’s as much information as has ever been written in the history of the world.
It costs $400 by the time the Pentagon finishes paying contractors to haul one gallon of gasoline into Afghanistan. That’s a real extravagant amount of money. In both cases of the national security state and the corporate state, they are sucking money out of the economy.
As our infrastructure collapses, we have a Tinkertoy power grid that goes out every time there’s inclement weather. Tens of millions of people are on food stamps. We incarcerate more people than China, an authoritarian state with four times our population. Does anyone see the disparity between this extravagance for the Deep State and the penury that is being forced on the rest of the country? That isn’t a natural evolution. Something made it happen.
We’re having a situation where the Deep State is essentially out of control, it’s unconstrained. Since 9/11 we have built the equivalent of three Pentagons around the DC metropolitan area, holding defense contractors, intelligence contractors, and government civilians involved in the military-industrial complex. There are over 400,000 contractors, private citizens, who have top-secret security clearances.
BILL MOYERS: And they are heart and soul of the Deep State, as you describe it.
MIKE LOFGREN: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: They’re being privatized. Which means the power shifts from accountable officials to unaccountable contractors.
MIKE LOFGREN: About 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to contracts.
BILL MOYERS: How new is this? I mean, back in 2010, the Washington Post published a stunning investigation of what the editors called “top-secret America” I mean, we have known about this, have we not?
MIKE LOFGREN: Yes, we know about this, but the intelligence functions of the government are too important to outsource in the manner we have. It’s something where absolute discretion is needed and absolute trust that they are not violating civil liberties. And to put this kind of a burden, if you will, on private-contract employees is, I think, become a great disservice.
BILL MOYERS: You say that you came to question this. It took you a while. It was a gradual enlightenment that took place. You were dealing with big numbers and particular details in the budgets that all of these agencies were sending to you when you were on Capitol Hill, right? You were seeing the numbers?
MIKE LOFGREN: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: And you– what was happening to the numbers?
MIKE LOFGREN: At the end of 2001 is– we appropriated a lot of money and it didn’t seem to be going to Afghanistan, the approximate source of the 9/11 attacks. It seemed to be going to the Persian Gulf region. And I said, “What’s going on here? Saddam Hussein didn’t bring down the twin towers.” So, the little light went on. And I began to sort of disenchant myself from the normal group think that tends to take over in any organization.
BILL MOYERS: Group think? At some point in your essay, you talk about how groupthink drives the Deep State.
MIKE LOFGREN: It absolutely does, just as it tends to drive any bureaucratic organization.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean by groupthink?
MIKE LOFGREN: Well, the psychologist Irving Janis called it groupthink. It’s a kind of assimilation of the views of your superiors and your peers. It’s becoming a yes man. And in many respects, it’s an unconscious thing.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, remember what Upton Sinclair once said “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.”
MIKE LOFGREN: That is certainly part of it
BILL MOYERS: You describe Washington as clearly and obviously the headquarters of the Deep State. But talk about some of the others who are in the game.
MIKE LOFGREN: Wall Street is, perhaps, the ultimate backstop to the whole operation. Because they generate so much money that they can provide second careers for a lot of the government operatives. They’re going to make more money than they ever dreamed they would on Wall Street. And I think a good example of that is the most celebrated soldier of the last decade David Petraeus. What did he do when he retired? He went to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a Wall Street buyout firm with $90 billion in assets under management.
BILL MOYERS: You describe him as a kind of avatar of the Deep State.
MIKE LOFGREN: He is, in a way. Because he now represents both ends of it. We see now our present-day Cincinnatus did not pick up the plow when he lay down the sword.
BILL MOYERS: Cincinnatus was the Roman who left his farm to become a general in the war. When the war was over, he went back to be a farmer. That doesn’t happen today.
MIKE LOFGREN: No, it doesn’t. The vast majority of generals seem to end up on the boards of defense contractors.
BILL MOYERS: Talk a little bit about what you call this strange relationship between Silicon Valley and the government, and how it fits into the Deep State.
MIKE LOFGREN: Well, the National Security Agency could not do what it does, the CIA could not do what it does, without Silicon Valley. Now, Silicon Valley, unlike the defense contractors, mostly sells to private individuals and to companies. It’s not a big government vendor. However, its services are necessary. And de facto, they have become a part of the NSA’s operations. I’m sure the CEOs of some of these companies try to obscure the fact that this has mostly been voluntary for many years.
BILL MOYERS: You mean the surveillance?
MIKE LOFGREN: The surveillance.
BILL MOYERS: The gathering of information of unknowing citizens.
MIKE LOFGREN: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: For commercial purposes, though.
MIKE LOFGREN: Precisely. They’ve done it themselves and they’ve assisted the NSA through a FISA court order.
BILL MOYERS: Foreign Intelligence–
MIKE LOFGREN: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. So, this has been going on for quite a while. Yet now, like Inspector Renault, they are “shocked, shocked” to find out. But I think their main shock is that they’re now starting to lose market share in foreign countries.
BILL MOYERS: These moguls, as you call them, pass themselves off as libertarians.
MIKE LOFGREN: Oh, they do. They make a big pretense about being libertarians and believing in the rugged individualism and so forth. But they’ve been every bit as intrusive as the NSA has been, in terms of collecting your data for commercial purposes, rather than so-called national security purposes.
But they’re in it just as heavily as the NSA is. And they somehow manage to get the intellectual property laws rigged so that you are theoretically subject to a fine of up to $500,000 for jail breaking your phone.
BILL MOYERS: Which means?
MIKE LOFGREN: Which means if you don’t like the carrier on your phone that the manufacturer dictates you shall have and you change it without authorization you don’t have the right to something you bought.
BILL MOYERS: Could this symbiotic and actual relationship between Silicon Valley and the government reflecting the Deep State, explain the indulgence Washington has shown Silicon Valley on matters of intellectual property?
MIKE LOFGREN: Absolutely. People no longer necessarily own their property that they buy if they’re buying it from Silicon Valley. They simply have a kind of lease on it.
BILL MOYERS: If, as you write, the ideology of the Deep State is not democrat or republican, not left or right, what is it?
MIKE LOFGREN: It’s an ideology. I just don’t think we’ve named it. It’s a kind of corporatism. Now, the actors in this drama tend to steer clear of social issues. They pretend to be merrily neutral servants of the state, giving the best advice possible on national security or financial matters. But they hold a very deep ideology of the Washington consensus at home, which is deregulation, outsourcing, de-industrialization and financialization. And they believe in American exceptionalism abroad, which is boots on the ground everywhere, it’s our right to meddle everywhere in the world. And the result of that is perpetual war.
BILL MOYERS: And you say it is shadowy and more ill-defined. More ill-defined than what?
MIKE LOFGREN: It’s more ill-defined than simply saying Wall Street or saying the military-industrial complex, or saying Silicon Valley, or the corporations. It’s a symbiosis of all of the above.
BILL MOYERS: Here’s your summing-up quote: “As long as appropriations bills get passed on time, promotion lists get confirmed, black or 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.” Is that the ideology?
MIKE LOFGREN: That is a government within a government that operates off the visible government and operates off the taxpayers. But it doesn’t seem to be constrained in a constitutional sense by the government.
BILL MOYERS: Is there a solution to the way the system works now?
MIKE LOFGREN: I think we’re starting to see some discord in the ideology of the factions that make up the Deep State. We’re seeing Silicon Valley jump ship. They are starting to protest against the NSA. We’re seeing the Tea Party bailing out against the Deep State. They may be wrong on many economic issues. But I don’t think they’re necessarily wrong on this one.
BILL MOYERS: So the public could be growing wise?
MIKE LOFGREN: I think they are. There’s a much more vivid debate going on in the country about surveillance ever since the revelations by Edward Snowden.
BILL MOYERS: Mike Lofgren, thank you very much for being with me.
MIKE LOFGREN: It’s good to be here, Bill.
BILL MOYERS: Thanks to the journalist Lee Fang, we have another revelation into how the Deep State enterprise works. Writing for the Republic Report, a non-partisan, non-profit that investigates money in politics, he takes up that controversial trade deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership that President Obama is trying to push through Congress with minimum debate and no amendments. Controversial because some of its provisions reportedly enable corporate power to trump representative government, even go around domestic courts and local laws. One is said to prevent governments from enacting safeguards against another bank crisis, another to empower corporations to sue governments for compensation if, say, environmental protections, or regulations on tobacco and drugs interfered with future profits.
Because of the secrecy we don’t know everything that’s in the draft agreement. Senator Elizabeth Warren calls it “a chance for these banks to get something done quietly out of sight that they could not accomplish in a public place with the cameras rolling and the lights on.”
Which brings us to two officials chosen by President Obama to lead those trade negotiations. Lee Fang reports that they received multi-million dollar bonuses as they left giant financial firms to join the government. Bank of America gave this man, Stefan Seelig, more than $9 million in bonus pay as he was nominated to become the Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade. And this man, Michael Froman, got over $4 million when he left Citigroup to become the current US trade representative. Now, both are no doubt honorable men – they are all honorable men – but when push comes to shove, and the financial interests of huge corporations are on the table, we can only hope they will act as independent men, not faithful servants of the Deep State. But given the secrecy, we may never know.
According to Fang, many large corporations with a strong incentive to influence public policy give executives bonuses and other incentive pay if they take jobs within the government. Among them: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, the Blackstone Group, Fannie Mae, Northern Trust. Citigroup even provides an executive contract that awards additional retirement pay upon leaving to take a “full time high level position with the US government or regulatory body.” I’m not making this up. You get a bigger incentive if you leave Wall Street to go regulate Wall Street. So it is the fox is groomed for the chicken coop, and the Deep State grows fat on its prey.
Coming up on Moyers & Company, a powerful new book breaks the code of “Dog Whistle Politics.”
IAN HANEY LÓPEZ: Dog whistle politics doesn’t come out of animus at all. It doesn’t come out of some desire to hurt minorities. It comes out of a desire to win votes. And in that sense, I want to start using the term strategic racism. It’s racism as a strategy. It’s cold, it’s calculating, it’s considered, it’s the decision to achieve one’s own ends, here winning votes, by stirring racial animosity.
And here’s a hard, difficult truth. Most racists are good people. They’re not sick. They’re not ruled by anger or raw emotion or hatred. They are complicated people reared in complicated societies.
They’re fully capable of generosity, of empathy, of real kindness. But because of the idea systems in which they’re reared, they’re also capable of dehumanizing others and occasionally of brutal violence.
BILL MOYERS: At our website, BillMoyers.com, remember to read the complete text of Mike Lofgren’s essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State,” and then tell us what you think. I’ll see you there and I’ll see you here, next time.