|
by Mike
Lofgren and Bill Moyers
12 January 2017
from
JessesCrossroadsCafe Website
"... 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.
That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The
institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly
sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched.
Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in,
...are routine enough that it is only the
Deep State's protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel
that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent
ineptitude.
Mike Lofgren
Anatomy of the Deep State
"There are two ways to
be fooled.
One is to believe what isn't
true;
the other is to refuse to
believe what is true."
Søren Kierkegaard
I do not think our time
is all that different from those that have gone before it, insofar
as the substance and types of our actions are concerned. Every age
has its thieves and hypocrites, in high and low places.
Rather, what is a little more distinctive of us is the numbers, the
sheer number of people whose character, or a lack thereof, fits a
common pattern - mean, petty, deceitful, and often willfully ignorant
of moral constraints, lacking in civility and grace, and utterly
unrepentant of it.
They are quite proud of their cleverness in gaming the system, in
embracing the worst aspects of the human economy and abusing them,
in the name of their unnatural virtues.
-
If they are liars, they
strives to be among the most shameless and adept.
-
If they are
thieves, they admire those who steal tirelessly and the most, while
paying no consequences.
-
And above all, their perspective on life allows them to have no
shame in it, any of it, in what other times would have been done in
the darkness, and only behind closed doors, and carefully covered
up.
We take our ill gotten games, and place them in the spotlight with
the high sounding names of wise-sounding and humanitarian
organizations and foundations.
Mike
Lofgren, a congressional staff member for 28
years, joins Bill Moyers to talk about what he
calls Washington's "Deep State," in which
elected and unelected figures collude to protect
and serve powerful vested interests.
"It is
how we had deregulation, financialization of
the economy, the Wall Street bust, the
erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual
war," Lofgren tells Moyers.
|
