Exclusive Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State
by Mike Lofgren
BillMoyers.com
February 21, 2014
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…
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
Moammar 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.
