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Endorsing The Deep State Endangers Democracy
Since Donald Trump was elected president the New York Times' understanding of the 'Deep State' evolved from a total denial of its existence towards a full endorsement of its anti-democratic operations.
February 16, 2017 – As Leaks Multiply, Fears of a ‘Deep State’ in America
A wave of leaks from government officials has hobbled the Trump administration, leading some to draw comparisons to countries like Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where shadowy networks within government bureaucracies, often referred to as “deep states,” undermine and coerce elected governments.
So is the United States seeing the rise of its own deep state?
Not quite, experts say, but the echoes are real — and disturbing.
March 6, 2017 – Rumblings of a ‘Deep State’ Undermining Trump? It Was Once a Foreign Concept
The concept of a “deep state” — a shadowy network of agency or military officials who secretly conspire to influence government policy — is more often used to describe countries like Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where authoritarian elements band together to undercut democratically elected leaders. But inside the West Wing, Mr. Trump and his inner circle, particularly his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, see the influence of such forces at work within the United States, essentially arguing that their own government is being undermined from within.
It is an extraordinary contention for a sitting president to make.
March 10, 2017 – What Happens When You Fight a ‘Deep State’ That Doesn’t Exist
American institutions do not resemble the powerful deep states of countries like Egypt or Pakistan, experts say. Nor do individual leaks, a number of which have come from President Trump’s own team, amount to a conspiracy.
The diagnosis of a “deep state,” those experts say, has the problem backward.
…
Though Mr. Trump has not publicly used the phrase, allies and sympathetic news media outlets have repurposed “deep state” from its formal meaning — a network of civilian and military officials who control or undermine democratically elected governments — to a pejorative meant to accuse civil servants of illegitimacy and political animus.
September 5, 2018 – I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration
On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.
This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.
December 18, 2018 – Blaming the Deep State: Officials Accused of Wrongdoing Adopt Trump’s Response
President Trump has long tried to explain away his legal troubles as the work of a “deep state” of Obama supporters entrenched in the law-enforcement and national-security bureaucracies who are just out to get him. Now junior officials and others accused of wrongdoing are making the case that the same purported forces are illegitimately targeting them, too.
October 6, 2019 – Italy’s Connection to the Russia Investigation, Explained
President Trump and some of his allies have asserted without evidence that a cabal of American officials — the so-called deep state — embarked on a broad operation to thwart Mr. Trump’s campaign. The conspiracy theory remains unsubstantiated, …
October 20, 2019 – They Are Not the Resistance. They Are Not a Cabal. They Are Public Servants.
President Trump is right: The deep state is alive and well. But it is not the sinister, antidemocratic cabal of his fever dreams. It is, rather, a collection of patriotic public servants — career diplomats, scientists, intelligence officers and others — who, from within the bowels of this corrupt and corrupting administration, have somehow remembered that their duty is to protect the interests, not of a particular leader, but of the American people.
October 23, 2019 – Trump’s War on the ‘Deep State’ Turns Against Him
[O]ver the last three weeks, the deep state has emerged from the shadows in the form of real live government officials, past and present, who have defied a White House attempt to block cooperation with House impeachment investigators and provided evidence that largely backs up the still-anonymous whistle-blower.
October 26, 2019 – The ‘Deep State’ Exists to Battle People Like Trump
The president and his allies have responded with fury. Those damning testimonials are part of a political vendetta by “Never Trumper” bureaucrats, members of a “deep state” bent on undermining the will of the people, they assert.
But what is this “deep state”? Far from being a tool of political corruption, the Civil Service was created to be an antidote to the very kind of corruption and self-dealing that seems to plague this administration.
This development is disconcerting. If the deep state is allowed to make its own policies against the will of the elected officials why should we bother with holding elections?
The Democrats are stupid to applaud this and to even further these schemes. They are likely to regain the presidency in 2024. What will they do when all the Civil Service functionaries Trump will have installed by then organize to ruin their policies?
NYT’s position over the deep state is perfectly in tune with the doctrine of the “vital center”. Published in 1947, Schlesinger Jr.’s magnus opus is valid until our times, and serves as essentially the centrist/moderate manifesto.
The theory of the “vital center” states that what differentiates liberal democracy from “totalitarianism” is the fact that it enjoys a pulsating political core, made of many different ideologies that go from Left to Right (the “political spectrum”) and which dispute the power of the government through periodical elections in a peaceful manner. This way, the ideology that is not in vogue today can emerge victorious tomorrow, given that it brings the answers to new problems the incumbent ideology couldn’t solve. This “non-extermination” pact, where the victorious ideology spares the defeated ideologies, would give the liberal democracies – Schlesinger assumed – an internal dynamism the USSR didn’t have.
The existence of a society with a political spectrum characterized the existence of “freedom”. Indeed, that’s the practical definition of freedom most people in the First World countries use nowadays. Other times, the old French Revolution (bourgeois) mean of “freedom to do business” (freedom of enterprise) is used – but that’s more of a neoconservative usage.
The “vital center” doctrine is also the root of what we nowadays call “pluralism”, and what the “far-right” defines today, perjoratively, as “multiculturalism” and/or “Cultural Marxism”. The conservatives, it’s good to note, never lost sight of the origins of the Western modern “center-left”: most of them were ex-communists. They never accepted the people who commanded the CIA in the cultural front as legitimate liberals and always considered even the center-left another form of communism.
But there’s a catch to Schlesinger Jr.’s doctrine. He stated the political spectrum should never be representative of all the ideologies possible, but of all the ideologies acceptable. And what was “acceptable”? Only the non-totalitarian ideologies. What are those “non-totalitarian ideologies”? The ideologies that promote/respect freedom. But “freedom” is the existence of the political spectrum, it’s a circular argument: in practice, he’s using a rhetoric that promotes the liberal ideologies as natural and the “totalitarian” ideologies as “unnatural”. Indeed, that’s the terminology he uses: “totalitarianism” is a “disease”.
Here’s the part that is related to this blog’s post: what if the people, democratically (i.e. under a free society), elects (freely), a “totalitarian” government? Schlesinger Jr. doesn’t answer this question, although he raises it in his book. The only thing he states is that economic prosperity is key: as long as there’s good economy, an society of abundance, the people will “naturally” vote for pro-freedom governments. If that didn’t happen, then he stated the elite should feel free to use whatever means necessary to crush the elected “totalitarian” government and all the popular uprising that appeared.
According to him, this was legitimate, since the elite was enlightened and knew better what was the best for the people; and/or that it was fruit of Soviet covert operations. This is where the sophistication of his argument becomes apparent: liberal democracies are not perfect, they are not 100% free (but they are free to some extent), they are fragile — but they were better than Soviet communism (where there was 0% freedom) and thus should be protected at any cost. If we think about it, this is literally the concept of deep state.
If we analyze Schlesinger Jr.’s doctrine, we can clearly see that the newer generations which succeeded his are perfectly following the guidelines as established in the post-war. The millenials are not degenerate, as the remaining boomers and gen. X people are stating: they are carrying the post-war torch with care and zeal. The deep state has always existed in liberal democracies: they were just hidden in plain sight, in the form of a collection of powerful public servants, experts, rich people, and parallel institutions that have always influenced whoever was the POTUS. They influence the POTUS one way or the other, since the USG is simply too big and too complex for just one person to manage.
Let’s just remember: there was a plan to assassinate FDR in 1934 (botched because one of the general who was supposed to lead the militia invasion refused to be coopted and blew the whistle) and Kennedy was assassinated under Lyndon B. Johnson’s orders. It’s not a matter of the existence or not of a deep state, but at what degree the POTUS will obey it, and what price he is willing to pay.
Posted by: vk | Oct 28 2019 17:53 utc | 20
I suggest the following will take inquiring minds much deeper into the subject:
THE DEEP STATE: A Brief Bibliographical Sketch
In his book The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, Col. Fletcher Prouty, who was the briefing officer to the President of the US from 1955-1963, writes about “an inner sanctum of a new religious order.” By the phrase Secret Team he means a group of “security-cleared individuals in and out of government who receive secret intelligence data gathered by the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) and who react to those data.” He states: “The power of the Team derives from its vast intra-governmental undercover infrastructure and its direct relationship with great private industries, mutual funds and investment houses, universities, and the news media, including foreign and domestic publishing houses.” He further adds: “All true members of the Team remain in the power centre whether in office with the incumbent administration or out of office with the hard-core set. They simply rotate to and from official jobs and the business world or the pleasant haven of academe.”
I have adopted the view outlined by Joseph Farrell in his Nazi International, The Reich of the Black Sun and The Third Way, by Alfred W. McCoy in his The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade and by William Engdahl in A Century of War, Anglo-American Oil Politics And The New World Order. See also Peter Dale Scott´s writings. Essentially I am referring to a consortium of intelligence agencies, their bankers and the drug cartels who finance themselves off money laundering and resource expropriation.
Post WW2 theft of Axis booty was used to finance intelligence agencies (see Seagrave: Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold” and the transfer of control over the Asian heroin trade (see: McCoy: “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade”) has been used to finance off-budget operations of intelligence agencies worldwide. The western deep state’s object is to capture the resources of eurasia and prevent a geopolitical alignment of Russia and Germany, formulated by MacKinder: The Geographical Pivot of History” and the modern exponents of western hegemony, such as George Friedman and Brzezinski, of course. With regard to Russia, didn’t we seen a version of this movie in 1918?
In pertinent point:
London is now the global money-laundering centre for the drug trade, says crime expert
Gomorrah author Roberto Saviano says ‘the British treat it as not their problem’
“The City of London is the money-laundering centre of the world’s drug trade, according to an internationally acclaimed crime expert.”
In my view, any attempt to analyse geopolitical machinations that doesn’t recognize the everyday efforts of the multiple entities alluded to above will lack depth. I’m not referring to the holdover, identifiable bureaucrats who survive from one political administration to the next. I’m referring to those who administer the funds laundered by the too-big-to-fail-too-big-to jail banks as well as the funds disappearing into the black holes of the defense department: see:
Pentagon Claims That It Has “Lost” Over $18 Trillion, Which Probably Paid Foreign Army Payrolls
Rumsfeld says $2.3 TRILLION Missing from Pentagon
9/10/2001:
Cynthia Mckinney questions Rumsfeld and Myers about 9/11 War Games [and accounting]
MSU SCHOLARS FIND $21 TRILLION IN UNAUTHORIZED GOVERNMENT SPENDING; DEFENSE DEPARTMENT TO CONDUCT FIRST-EVER AUDIT
12-11-17
Earlier this year, a Michigan State University economist, working with graduate students and a former government official, found $21 trillion in unauthorized spending in the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.
The work of Mark Skidmore and his team, which included digging into government websites and repeated queries to U.S. agencies that went unanswered, coincided with the Office of Inspector General, at one point, disabling the links to all key documents showing the unsupported spending. (Luckily, the researchers downloaded and stored the documents.)
Now, the Department of Defense has announced it will conduct the first department-wide, independent financial audit in its history (read the Dec. 7 announcement here).
The Defense Department did not say specifically what led to the audit. But the announcement came four days after Skidmore discussed his team’s findings on USAWatchdog, a news outlet run by former CNN and ABC News correspondent Greg Hunter.
“While we can’t know for sure what role our efforts to compile original government documents and share them with the public has played, we believe it may have made a difference,” said Skidmore, the Morris Chair in State and Local Government Finance and Policy at MSU.
Skidmore got involved last spring when he heard Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, refer to a report which indicated the Army had $6.5 trillion in unsupported adjustments, or spending, in fiscal 2015. Given the Army’s $122 billion budget, that meant unsupported adjustments were 54 times spending authorized by Congress. Typically, such adjustments in public budgets are only a small fraction of authorized spending. Skidmore thought Fitts had made a mistake. “Maybe she meant $6.5 billion and not $6.5 trillion,” he said. “So I found the report myself and sure enough it was $6.5 trillion.”
Skidmore and Fitts agreed to work together to investigate the issue further. Over the summer, two MSU graduate students searched government websites, especially the website of the Office of Inspector General, looking for similar documents dating to 1998. They found documents indicating a total $21 trillion in undocumented adjustments over the 1998-2015 period. (The original government documents and a report describing the issue can be found here.)
In a Dec. 8 Forbes column he co-authored with Laurence Kotlikoff, Skidmore said the “gargantuan nature” of the undocumented federal spending “should be a great concern to all taxpayers.”
“Taken together these reports point to a failure to comply with basic constitutional and legislative requirements for spending and disclosure,” the column concludes. “We urge the House and Senate Budget Committee to initiate immediate investigations of unaccounted federal expenditures as well as the source of their payment.”
As they say, follow the money.
Posted by: pogohere | Oct 28 2019 22:19 utc | 79
The British term for the “Deep State”, coined I believe by the historian AJP Taylor, is The Establishment.
It includes but goes far beyond the Civil Service and military hierarchy. Haute Finance is central to it,
so are the educational system and the media. Its role is to act as a gyroscope ensuring, through whatever means are necessary, that the course pursued by society is that determined by the ruling class.
That course, neoliberalism, requires the subordination of ‘democratic’ mechanisms to the imperatives of the market.
The Monthly Review has a very good article this month, of which this is a small sample.
“… Today there is once again a structural crisis of capital, most evident in the
Great Financial Crisis of 2008–10, but actually going much deeper and extending back to the 1970s,
which marked the beginning of the long slowdown of the advanced capitalist economies. Stagnation,
characterized by the overaccumulation of capital, is all the more significant in our time since it
has been accompanied by the greatest inequality in history. The world has also seen the emergence
of a new phase of imperialism, best characterized as late imperialism, in which international
exploitation/expropriation has been intensified in the context of the globalization of production
and the prevalence of global value chains. International conflicts and racism are on the rise.
Both the United States and Europe are experiencing declines in their respective positions within
the international economic hierarchy, symbolized by the rise of China. On top of all this is a
planetary ecological crisis on a scale that has no precedent in history, and which threatens
the very future of humanity, not in some distant period, but already in the present century.
“Neoliberalism, which seeks to subordinate the state to the market while also using the state
apparatus to enforce market relations, is systematically dissolving all bases of community
relations, transforming them into mere commodity relations. This has served to delegitimize
the state, the unintended effect of which has been to encourage the development of radical
right or neofascist movements opposed to liberal/neoliberal political elites along with the
working poor. Xenophobic racism is being directed at immigrants and populations emanating
from the Global South. At the same time, perpetual war and imperialist-based coups have
generated millions of refugees. Overall, the conditions of our time are those of epochal
economic, social, and ecological crises, accompanied by intensified imperialism and war….”
https://monthlyreview.org/2019/10/01/the-rise-of-the-right/
The interesting question is why The Establishment feels so threatened that,
as Gruff points out above, it has torn off its mask and discredited itself over what is
nothing more than a minor spat within the ruling class. Trump is not a threat to the
system in any way. And yet large parts of the CIA and the classes that support the ruling class have gone mad in their determination to rid themselves of him.
It seems to me that this is simply a symptom of an hierarchy collapsing- as they tend
to do- from the accumulated weight of its hubris. It long ago lost any sense of proportion
and moderation-hence the decades of stupid wars pursued without discernible political cost,
and the neglect of the social base, in the slow but steady immiseration of the working
(aka ‘Middle’) class. This process continues as we speak, notably in the auto-discrediting of the UAW
in the GM strike just (shockingly) called off. The Establishment worked because it was grounded
in broad social acceptance, a contract which included some social mobility, rising living standards
for the majority and all the accoutrements of an ideology of progress. For a variety of reasons that
is all over now and the only real barrier between the capitalist class and the unsatisfied appetites
of the masses is force, the sort of force being employed in Chile, which is, after all, neo-liberalism’s
Show House.
All of which is making the Deep State’s directors very nervous, and unbalanced. Which is why they
are acting so irrationally that they seem to have convinced themselves that Trump(almost indistinguishable
though he is from themselves) is a threat. A threat that they no longer dare to assassinate, which is what
they would normally do.
Thanks pogo for the link…!!!!
Posted by: bevin | Oct 28 2019 22:31 utc | 83
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