NC: About 70% of the public, the lowest 70% on the income scale, are pretty much disenfranchised. Their attitudes have no detectable influence on the policies of their own representatives. As you move up the scale you get a bit more influence. When you get to the top, policy is made.
Now the top can mean a fraction of 1%, so it’s kind of a plutocracy with democratic forms. And the elections, I mean by now it’s almost become a joke but it’s always been true that campaign financing plays a very substantial role in not only who’s elected but what the policies are. That goes back 100 years. Great campaign manager 100 years ago, Mark Hanna, was asked once: “What are the important things that you have to have to run a campaign. He said: “There are three things. First one’s money. The second one is money. And I forget what the third one is.”
Aside — Abby Martin is looking to be her generation's Amy Goodman. Her r
ecent interview of Larry Wilkerson was excellent, and this interview with Chomsky continues in that vein. Interesting to see Larry Wilkerson, a self-identified Republican, although now a disaffected one, agreeing with arch-leftist Noam Chomsky. I hope Abby will interview Mike Lofgren, too.
4 comments:
That interview with Larry Wilkinson is superb. Abby Martin has made a number of these excellent interviews now. I'm on the left and yet I completely identified with Larry. Paul Craig Roberts is another moderate, although be may be on the left now. I can't find the video for the Chomsky interview, but I'm going to look for it now.
The video is at the end of the AlterNet article. Just follow the link and scroll all the way to the bottom.
Or just go here at YouTube.
Peter Dale Scott provides the history of the use of "deep state" and "state within a state" here .
"Deep state" didn't gain cachet until Mike Lofgren popularized it, but the concept is ancient since the phenomenon of state capture occurred regularly in institutional governments throughout history.
Young readers of Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers would become aware of it in the intrigue between the party of the king and the party of Cardinal Richelieu. The story is about the machinations of what we would now call the deep state or the state within the state. The parallel is not prefect but it is suggestive. For example, François Leclerc du Tremblay, who was Cardinal Richelieu's "chief of staff" (enforcer), was called "the grey eminence," a term recently applied to Dick Cheney.
Thanks, I found out and watched it.
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