Robert Paul Wolff — The Deep State

Robert Paul Wolff is largely correct here, but "the deep state" cannot be equated with bureaucracy as a political factor ensuring constancy and stability, as Max Weber described.

He apparently did not so a search on the term "deep state," which seems to have originated with respect to Turkish state and intelligence services and senior administration under Kemal Ataturk. In Russia is this is known as the siloviki (senior career intelligence and military) and nomenklatura (senior administrative bureaucracy). In China, the deep state is the senior level of the CCP. 

These are special cases of a state within a state as the locus of power in a nation-state, and not all deep states resemble each other closely. However, the family resemblance is arguably close enough to provide a context for at least a semi-analytical the use of the concept of a deep state in political science. However, the meaning should be carefully specified to avoid ambiguity, conflation, and confusion.

In the US the "deep state" has several meanings, given by different analysts. The most restricted is the senior career intelligence, military, and government service that persists across administrations. It also means those that control the military-intelligence-industrial-financial-government apparatus that is based on the revolving door that provides continuity between the public and private sectors insuring effective control by unelected elites. NGOs such as think tanks but not limited to them constitute another factor mediating the connection of public and private, state and non-state, government and shadow government.

The post describes something that is related to the these factors but is not coterminous with it. The US government bureaucracy is huge since it includes all the civil servants. The deep state is something different. It is partially a subset of the bureaucracy but not limited to it, and the revolving door makes it dynamic, uniting the public and private sectors.

US deep state is also more amorphous than the government bureaucracy, since it is a shadow organization rather than one with institutional arrangements, including a foundation in law. Because it lacks institutional arrangements, many deny its existence as an entity. And that is the way the deep state likes it.

But RPW's point that bureaucracies provide continuity that can inhibit change, including reform, owing to the iron law of oligarchy, is well-taken. A deep state can be viewed as a aspect of bureaucracy that is concentrated and entrenched at the top, providing elite control.

The deep state is also a subset of the Establishment, but also different from it. The Establishment is made up of the entrenched elite and their cronies and minions. The deep state is a concentrated subset of the Establishment, characterized by occupying positions of power and influence.

The Philosopher's Stone
The Deep State
Robert Paul Wolff | Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Raúl Ilargi Meijer — The People Must Be Overthrown

Still, the negotiations are nice and all, but they’re not going anywhere, and they never will. The Troika side of the table is interested in one thing only: to humiliate Athens and force it into ultimate submission, along the lines of those photographs we’ve come to know of Abu Graibh.

Yanis Varoufakis labeled the Troika policies vis-a-vis Greece ‘fiscal waterboarding’ when he started out as finance minister, and here’s thinking he should have stuck with that image in a much more persistent and a much louder fashion....

It’s time for Tsipras to turn to his people, on national TV, and say look, whatever we can discuss with the Troika, and whatever compromise we may be able to reach, there is no option on or off the table that would allow for you, the people of Greece, to not be debt slaves for the rest of your lives.

The European Union is merely a crude modern version of a feudal society (but without the debt jubilee older versions had), that’s all the morals that Brussels and Berlin can muster. And, Tsipras should say, if that is what you want, if you want to be slaves instead of a free people, tell me so. I will draw my conclusions from that....

And no, none of us get a free pass on this one. Your voice is long overdue. Because no matter where you are or who you are, whether you’re American or European, it’s still your government, acting in your name, that supports and magnifies the craziness unloaded upon the cradle of democracy.

All the Greek people know until now is that Europe and the IMF are attempting to strangle them. Still, so many among us don’t agree with that at all. Thing is, it’s time to let that be known. To the people of Greece, and to our own ‘leaders’ who if we don’t get vocal will continue to do as they please. Just because the people you’ve elected don’t have any morals doesn’t mean you don’t have to either.

The Automatic Earth
The People Must Be Overthrown
Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Yet Another Reminder That Attention To Basic Operations ALWAYS Matters - IMF Bureaucracy & Failings Of The euro Currency

Commentary from Bill Mitchell, reviewing the sorry tale of how the euro currency was created, and recalling things said about the IMF, one of the contributors to our current mess.

"The IMF is like so many bureaucracies; it has repeatedly sought to extend what it does, beyond the objectives originally assigned to it. As IMF’s mission creep brought it outside its core area of competency in macroeconomics, into structural issues such as privatisation, labour markets, pension reforms and so forth …" Joseph Stiglitz

Options for Europe – Part 64

As summarized in posterity, these issues were clearly visible in a fogged-up
mirror, from the start.

'The irony or should we say the exemplification of what went wrong in European policy making circles was revealed in the opening paragraphs of the Lisbon conclusions. 

We read, on the one hand, that the “Union is experiencing its best macro-economic outlook for a generation … [as a result] … of stability-oriented monetary policy supported by sound fiscal policies”. 

On the other hand, it is stated that these “strengths should not distract our attention from a number of weaknesses. More than 15 million Europeans are still out of work” and the “employment rate is too low”. 

An amazing disconnect that only those blinded by the neo-liberal ideology could make!' Bill Mitchell

The Long Mistake - and making enough mistakes to correct it

commentary by Roger Erickson

Mistakes are the things we make enough of to outline and define what we call success.  If we make enough mistakes, we fall into the remaining hole called success. You would think that could be easy.  To succeed, just make enough mistakes. Yet, idiots that we are, we invest considerable resources into trying to keep ourselves from actively exploring the very things that define success.

Every scientist learns that asking the right question is more than half way to finding a useful answer. The right question for now is why we keep trying to stop ourselves from making mistakes.  In fact, we set up whole institutions with the express mission of keeping ourselves from doing things that, in past situations, were deemed mistakes.  Where's the logic in that.  Do we really fear that once a person has made a mistake, they'll keep making it, forever?  Has there EVER been any evidence for that, throughout all of evolution, including the last second of it, which we call history?

Is it a mistake to actively demand that we make no mistakes?  The answer seems rather obvious once finally asked - "Yes." Why? Simple statistics. Given zero predictive power, we rely upon massively parallel selective power, aka, rapidly shared feedback about accelerating, distributed trial and error.  In other areas we call it, for example, combinatorial chemistry.  Social species simply practice constantly expanded, highly distributed, group exploration of group options. At present, however, we're actively refusing to explore the rapid trials & errors demanded by every succeeding situation which presents newly unpredictable options? It seems that we've misread our own group logic, and concluded with the oxymoron that assisted group suicide defines progress, while also making it illegal!  Werks fur oos!

How are we supposed to fall into a hole defined as not a mistake, if we systematically refuse to optimize statistical sampling and parsing of "mistake space?" By magic?  In the end, it's our rate of survivable mistakes that auto-defines our Adaptive Rate.

So, if many of our most cherished institutions list the definition of mistakes in one situation, how many things on their lists will usefully project - unchanged - to new and unpredictably altered situations? Specifically when those new situations require unbiased recombination and re-exploration of all options?  What?  Another right question?  The answer is an unequivocal "Exceedingly Few, If Any!"  So, are most of our institutions mistakes?  Yes and no.  They clearly apply to past situations, and must remain as bridges over the situations we've traversed.  Yet we must NOT use them to limit trial and error recombinant re-exploration of new situations.  We haven't carried all this massive skill at physical/chemical/biological recombination, sexual recombination, behavioral recombination, cultural recombination and "options recombination" this far simply to not use it!

In conclusion, our suicidal defense of credentialism is our main weapon for fighting our own evolution.  We use credentialism to secure beachheads to keep but also quickly leave behind in our journey through evolution-space.  In genetics we refer to that accumulation with phrases such as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," or "junk DNA."  In building out virtual cultural variants based on - but projected from - human biology, we may use analogous terms such as "education recapitulates history" and "junk training exercises." The real value in such exercises is not junk, but they're not sufficient, and there is a remaining task.

The real point is tempo.  Our entire evolutionary past is constantly reassembled, in incredibly densely engineered steps, in 9 months of embryonic gestation.

How long does it take to prepare a human fetus and send it out with the skills needed to launch human biology and culture beyond anything it's entire history can predict?  Improving that ontologic/embryonic dance continues, with subtle steps that are incredibly arduous to select.

How long does it take to prepare human student-citizen groups and send THEM out with the skills needed to launch human culture beyond anything our entire cultural history could possibly predict? Are we putting in the arduous work to make, discriminate and select from enough minor mistakes?  Without making enough initial mistakes, and comparing notes widely and quickly enough, how can we "fall" into the next potential cultural success fast enough?

It's not just making permanent aristocracy out of previously temporary "tribal war chiefs" that is an example of a "Long Mistake."  We've also made orthodox economics as a court tool of aristocrats. Further, we've also made institutionalized rather than recombinant religions and other bureaucracies as a residual long-mistake to be manipulated by aristocrats.  And, there are harmonic oscillations of sub_long_mistakes - such as academia - within each of our bureaucracies. How many of our bureaucracies are caught up serving Long Mistakes, instead of serving group Adaptive Rate? Always too many, simply because we delay meaningful assessment and adequately honest group practice.

There are other, uncounted, parallel as well as residual long_mistakes as well, yet they are all example practices that keep us from maintaining the distributed mistake rates required to discriminate stasis from evolution, and accelerate selection of the latter.

Want yet another specific example?  The institutional concept of priests has been "one long mistake" as has, presumably, nearly the entire historical distribution of shamanistic and/or academically tenured mistakes.  They all attempt to help define success by exclusion.  Yet here we are, ritualizing memorization of the mistakes NOT to make, instead of focussing on earliest possible recognition of the successful holes that enough, survivable mistakes always expose.

How, indeed, do we accomplish the difficult task of stopping what we're doing too much of?  Once we've made enough mistakes to fall into success, can we let others get on with making enough NEWLY DISTRIBUTED mistakes,  fast enough, to fall into the new successes we can't possibly imagine?

Managing the Real Fiscal Balance, Between Bureaucracy and Autocatalysis

commentary by Roger Erickson

Adaptive rate tracks the ratio of autocatalysis vs bureaucratic lethargy (entropy). So what factors tip social adaptive rate forwards or backwards?

"News is what people want to keep hidden, everything else is publicity" ~ Bill Moyers

Ergo, bureaucracy ("desk power") can't change without knowledge throughput, i.e., without fundamental shift in feedback patterns, aka group discourse patterns. You wanna change a systems' output function? Perturb the input function, to get a different output. The system itself will auto-adjust to a new equilibrium, until again SUFFICIENTLY perturbed.

It's never just a question of what coulda, woulda,  shoulda been achieved. It's a bluntly honest question of "How do we get THIS system to start doing what's needed, soon enough to matter?" First priority is always enough Situational Awareness - in this case including group self-knowledge - to honestly answer that honest question.

Until our electorate knows itself, it knows squat.

How does an electorate know itself?

Interactions drive awareness.
.....Awareness exposes distributed options.
Distributed options demand distributed actions.
.....Distributed actions drive distributed interactions.

(And so we - potentially - arrive at cultural autocatalysis. To actually tip outselves into group autocatalysis and maintain that state, then becomes an issue of maintaining distributed interaction patterns and rates above a threshold that differentiates the three zones of system dissolution, system stasis/hibernation, or increased system agility. Of course, maintaining or even accelerating autocatalysis requires continuous re-distribution of energy, liquidity, freedom to act, and public initiative. We coulda, woulda, shoulda been measuring this, but so far we simply aren't preparing ENOUGH students and citizens to even be aware of this option, let alone want to constantly accelerate our rate of exploring it.)

With all respect to all our Shakes-em-up peers, living or dead:

To be or not to be, an autocatalytic nation, that is the group-question.
Whether 'tis Nobler in the group mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageously unpredictable Context,
Or to take Arms against our Internal Sea of Bureaucratic Frictions,
And by opposing, endlessly counter them: to never die, to never sleep.
To actively Dream while still awake; Aye, there's the rub,
What of that dread of something after change!
The undiscovered Country, from whose desks
No Bureaucrat returns. PDSA? Exceeds their OODA will.

And makes Bureaucrats rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of all Bureaucrats,
And thus our Nation's hue of Distributed Resolution
Is sicklied o'er, with a pale fear of Thinking,
And decisions triggering great pitch and moment.
With this regard bureaucratic Currents turn awry,
And lose the name of Action. Hell no! you say,
The feisty Boyds, Demings & Shewharts? In thy cursings
Be our #$%&! new explorations always triggered. Hell yeah!