The “deep state” as a tool for redistribution of income in favor of the rich. Review of Mike Lofgren’s “The deep state”

An economist looks at Mike Lofgrens's The Deep State.

We should, it seems, stop thinking of government spending as the opposite of private spending. This is because government spending has two radically different constituencies and two very different objectives. One part of government spending (the one that we traditionally emphasize) serves the needs of the middle class and the poor: social security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits. This is the part that, from the point of view of the deep state, should be cut. The second part of government spending is support (when needed) of the financial sector and military spending. There, the beneficiaries are the people from the other end of the income distribution: the financiers, owners and managers of large military supplier companies, telecommunications, private security firms and the like. When we think of government in this way, the apparent paradox of Republicans (and many Democrats) being at the same time in favor of smaller government, and TARP and larger military spending vanishes. We are really witnessing a struggle over a quarter of GDP that is redistributed through the federal government: will most of that money go to the pockets of the rich, or to the pockets of the middle class and the poor?

What Lofgren argues is that the deep state has effectively kidnapped the government. Its objective is to use this enormous money-churning machine to help its own members. But the deep state was able to kidnap the government because it was able to kidnap the Congress, that is to make sure that majority of the members of Congress vote the way that the deep state wants. They were able to do so thanks to an electoral system where winning is practically synonymous with having access to more money than your opponent. This is why Lofgren in the last chapter, where he discusses the changes that need to be done, puts the reform of electoral funding (“ Eliminate private money from public elections”) as the number 1 priority. It all starts there, and then logically unfolds further.

As I have been saying, get the money out of politics, shut down K Street (lobbying), and lock the revolving door between the top level of the public and private sectors.

Global Inequality
The “deep state” as a tool for redistribution of income in favor of the rich. Review of Mike Lofgren’s “The deep state”
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

How the Powers That Be Maintain the "Deep State" — Leslie ThatcherI interviews Mike Lofgren

In The Deep State, author Mike Lofgren, whose 2011 commentary, "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult," remains the most-read article at Truthout.org, connects the dots between apparently disparate aspects of our current dystopia. "The deep state," argues Lofgren is "the red thread" linking the "ideological syndrome" of McMansions; DC's culture of careerist strivers; the financialization, deindustrialization and ultimate mutation of the US economy into "a casino with a tilted wheel"; the burgeoning of government secrecy even as individual privacy has been demolished; the consistency and persistence of unpopular policies regardless of which party wins elections; militarized foreign policy, "defense" and "security" establishments that thrive on failure and enjoy essentially unlimited funding whatever nostrums about the national debt and the necessity for austerity are being peddled for every other function of government; the prevalence of incompetence and ineptitude in government response to crises; unequal justice, including impunity for the wealthy and corporations, a corrupt Supreme Court and a strikingly punitive criminal legal system for ordinary people; legislative gridlock; perpetual war; political extremism and other ruinous epiphenomena.

••••••••••
LT: So you don't see them as malevolent?

MF:  Oh no, it's much more banal than that.

LT:  Like Hannah Arendt on Eichmann?

MF:  Exactly, the banality of evil.

Excellent interview.

Truthout
How the Powers That Be Maintain the "Deep State": An Interview With Mike Lofgren
Leslie Thatcher, Truthout | Interview

Chuck Spinney reviews Mike Lofgren's The Deep State

While Lofgren does not say so, I would argue there are growing signs that the emerging American political economy combines many elements of classical fascism and corporatism with neoliberal laissez faire economics into something that is new and peculiarly American — a political economy that exhibits fascist tendencies, but unlike classical fascism, subordinates the state to neoliberal corporatist interests, while it exploits many of fascism’s authoritarian organizing principles to stabilize the emerging status quo. Don’t take my word for it. Read Lofgren’s book, then think about how you would check or redefine the boxes in Figure 2 and draw your own conclusions.

One of the most important aspects of Lofgren's analysis, at least to my thinking, lies in his frequent reminders that the structural aspects of this current state of affairs are not the results of a centrally guided conspiracy hashed out in a smoke filled room. The “structure” of the contemporary American Deep State is more an emergent property triggered by the incremental give and take by thousands of players, whose successes and failures are conditioned by an interplay of chance and necessity, in what is really a cultural evolution. To be sure, there are lots of smoke filled rooms conspiring invisibly to play this game of chance and necessity, but they are competing with each other as well as cooperating -- and it is the evolutionary character of the Deep State that enables it to survive, adapt, and grow on its own terms, and that emergent character is what makes the Deep State so dangerously resistant to change.

The Blaster
Inside the Deep State

Chuck Spinney

I don't know whether Chuck Spinney realizes it, but he is making a strong argument against modern managerial and financial capitalism.

See also

American elites want to conquer every corner of the globe and make capitalism the one true faith.

Ever since the end of WWII there has been fearful speculation and warnings of a possible Third World War that always seemed just over the horizon; but what people didn’t realize is that WW3 had already begun. An ideological war was fought between the US-led capitalist camp and the USSR-led socialist and anti-imperialist alliance.

Much of this war was waged in secret by the CIA through use of propaganda, psychological warfare, economic sanctions, sabotage, funding and manipulation of political parties, assassinations and coups. This silent Cold War would from time to time break out into major “hot wars” (revolutions and counterrevolutions).

In 1991 WW3 came to an end with the defeat of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc in eastern Europe. Following Soviet capitulation and defeat, the end of history was declared and President Bush I announced that there would be a new world order – the US would now be the world’s sole “superpower” and usher in a golden era of global capitalism with America at the helm.

WW3 had only just ended when World War 4 took over. The USSR had been defeated, but there was still a lot of work to do. A lot of territory, ideological and geographical, was left unconquered or had to now be consolidated and managed. For one thing, Red China remained, as well as other socialist countries such as Yugoslavia, Cuba and North Korea. The geostrategically and economically vital Middle East was also yet to be fully subdued.…

The Greanville Post
World War IV is Happening Now
Joseph Waters | Proletarian Center for Research, Education and Culture (Prole Center)


The National Interest
Great Power Pivot: U.S. Shifts Focus to War With China and Russia
Dave Majumdar

Mike Lofgren — Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State

The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government at Amazon, 5 Jan 2016.

The following is excerpted from a fairly long article from February 21, 2014, but a very worthwhile read and as an introduction to the book. Here Lofgren defines what he means by the Deep State:

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.…

…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.… 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.…

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 implied quid pro quo. Perhaps this explains the extraordinary indulgence the government shows the Valley in intellectual property matters.…

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.…

[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.

Embedded in the essay are links to reflections by other commentators and public intellectuals.

Moyers & Co.
Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State

Mike Lofgren

see also

This post is an excerpt from The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

The Deep State: How Camouflage Became Chic in Beltwayland

Elias Isquith — Controlled by shadow government: Mike Lofgren reveals how top U.S. officials are at the mercy of the “deep state”

A corrupt network of wealthy elites has hijacked our government, ex-GOP staffer and best-selling author tells Salon.

Salon
Controlled by shadow government: Mike Lofgren reveals how top U.S. officials are at the mercy of the “deep state”
Elias Isquith

Fabius Maximus — Whatever You Do, Don’t Read This Book!

Summary: On rare occasions a book arrives that’s both important and timely. Mike Lofgren’s new book, The Party is Over” is both. Here Winston Wheeler explains why you should read this book. Or, for your peace of mind, you shouldn’t read this book. As citizens, understanding the peril of the Republic creates the obligation to act.

Review of The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats became useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted by Mike Lofgren

Fabius Maximus.com
Whatever You Do, Don’t Read This Book!
Fabius Maximus

I've posted on Mike Lofgren before, and Fabius Maximus takes it a step further.