Category Archives: Government

‘The Deep State’

Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Government, Homeland Security, The State

If possible, disregard the statist, leftist elements of Mike Lofgren’s essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State,” by which I mean Lofgren’s grief over partisan gridlock in Washington (if only), about the GOP’s plot to render the “executive branch powerless” (I wish); his conviction that “Wall Street is the ultimate owner of the Deep State,” and that corruption flow from it, rather than from government outward, to say nothing of his idiotic antipathy for Ayn Rand. Yes, there is a lot of nonsense here.

Concentrate, if you can, not on Lofgren’s analysis, but on his factual insights into what he terms “The Deep State”:

… Yes, 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 Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, 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. [2] …

… 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.

I saw this submissiveness on many occasions. One memorable incident was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. This legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration’s illegal and unconstitutional surveillance first revealed by The New York Times in 2005 and indemnified the telecommunications companies for their cooperation in these acts. The bill passed easily: All that was required was the invocation of the word “terrorism” and most members of Congress responded like iron filings obeying a magnet. …

…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. … The Deep State, based on the twin pillars of national security imperative and corporate hegemony, has until recently seemed unshakable and the latest events may only be a temporary perturbation in its trajectory. But history has a way of toppling the altars of the mighty. …

MORE.

Yes, “The Deep State” is bad, but so are aspects of Mike Lofgren’s analysis of it.

The Good, The Bad And The Banana Republic

Barack Obama, Democrats, Government, Taxation, The State

Befitting the banana republic he is fashioning, President Camacho “thinks” (and even John Stewart disagrees) that there is not a “smidgen” of corruption in the fact that Catherine Engelbrecht was visited fifteen times by four federal agencies “in a span of two years after her [conservative] group applied for tax-exempt status with the IRS in 2010.”

Reports Breitbart:

Engelbrecht’s business had never been visited by the federal government before:

The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) began a series of inquiries about her and her group; the BATF (Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms) began demanding to see her family’s firearms in surprise audits of her and her husband’s small gun dealership – which had done less than $200 in sales; OSHA (Occupational Safety Hazards Administration) began a surprise audit of their small family manufacturing business; and the EPA-affiliated TCEQ (Texas Commission on Environment Quality) did a surprise visit and audit due to “a complaint being called in.”

Of course, these agencies can be used in legally permissible ways to harass and sabotage any of us.

The vision of everything that’s good about America, Engelbrecht has also endured a personal assault from Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, the embodiment of all that is rotten about this country.

Just imagine: As a taxpayer, Catherine Engelbrecht pays Cummings’ way. Using her money, this bit of drek has embarks on a public campaign to smear her name and that of her organization.

Mass Surveillance Based On Nothing But Prior-Restraint Argument

Government, Homeland Security, Law, Regulation, Terrorism

Mass surveillance is based on nothing but a prior-restraint argument: Violate everybody’s rights in the hope of nabbing a few terrorists. That’s if you buy the government’s good intentions; its real goal—reflexive inclination, really—is to use every method conceivable to increase its sphere of control.

Glenn Greenwald puts it a little mildly for my taste, but the heroic investigative journalist, also first “to use information given to him by Snowden to break stories of NSA surveillance,” explained a similar concept to CNN’s JAKE TAPPER:

GLENN GREENWALD: “… We could eliminate all sorts of crimes, Jake, like rape and murder and kidnapping and pedophilia if we just do away with the requirement that police officers first get a search warrant before entering our house, or if we let the government put video cameras in all of our homes and offices and watch what we are doing all the time. We make the choice that we’d rather not do that because we’d rather live with a greater risk of crime than let the government invade our privacy. The fact that there’s a half of 1 percent chance that it could have helped a terrorist plot 11 years ago in terms of detection is hardly a reason to do this massive, ubiquitous surveillance program.”

In a new piece for The Guardian, Greenwald looks at the history and dynamics of the NSA scam tactics:

The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are “serious questions that have been raised”. They vow changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite: to make the system prettier and more politically palatable with empty, cosmetic “reforms” so as to placate public anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than before to serious challenge.
This scam has been so frequently used that it is now easily recognizable. In the mid-1970s, the Senate uncovered surveillance abuses that had been ongoing for decades, generating widespread public fury. In response, the US Congress enacted a new law (Fisa) which featured two primary “safeguards”: a requirement of judicial review for any domestic surveillance, and newly created committees to ensure legal compliance by the intelligence community.
But the new court was designed to ensure that all of the government’s requests were approved: it met in secret, only the government’s lawyers could attend, it was staffed with the most pro-government judges, and it was even housed in the executive branch. As planned, the court over the next 30 years virtually never said no to the government.
Identically, the most devoted and slavish loyalists of the National Security State were repeatedly installed as the committee’s heads, currently in the form of NSA cheerleaders Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House. As the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza put it in a December 2013 article on the joke of Congressional oversight, the committees “more often treat … senior intelligence officials like matinee idols”.
As a result, the committees, ostensibly intended to serve an overseer function, have far more often acted as the NSA’s in-house PR firm. The heralded mid-1970s reforms did more to make Americans believe there was reform than actually providing any, thus shielding it from real reforms.
The same thing happened after the New York Times, in 2005, revealed that the NSA under Bush had been eavesdropping on Americans for years without the warrants required by criminal law. The US political class loudly claimed that they would resolve the problems that led to that scandal. Instead, they did the opposite: in 2008, a bipartisan Congress, with the support of then-Senator Barack Obama, enacted a new Fisa law that legalized the bulk of the once-illegal Bush program, including allowing warrantless eavesdropping on hundreds of millions of foreign nationals and large numbers of Americans as well.

The ACLU’s executive director Anthony Romero had a line almost as neat as Rand Paul’s “If you like your privacy you can keep it” (and here I add the soundtrack of villainous laughter: “NHAHAHAHAHAHA”). It is:

The president should end – not mend – the government’s collection and retention of all law-abiding Americans’ data. When the government collects and stores every American’s phone call data, it is engaging in a textbook example of an ‘unreasonable search’ that violates the constitution.

On Health Care & ‘Homo Economicus,’ And The Spoils Of Entrapment & Political Predation

Economy, Government, Healthcare, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Regulation, Terrorism

Health Care & ‘Homo Economicus. Even the pro-Obama socialist youth of America act as “Homo Economicus”: they know they are young and healthy and unlikely to fall ill. Why should they partake in a scheme that financially punishes them for this natural advantage? Millennials want us to pay for them, not the reverse.

“Federal Health Care Enrollees: Older Outnumber Younger”:

.. more than 2 million people who have signed up for private [it’s not private: “A healthcare cauldron of Obama’s creation, government-run exchanges constitute a planned economy, not a market economy”] health insurance through the exchanges set up by the federal government. … Of those who signed up in the first three months, 55 percent are age 45 to 64, officials said. Only 24 percent of those choosing a health insurance plan are 18 to 34, a group that is usually healthier and needs fewer costly medical services. People 55 to 64 – just below the age at which people qualify for Medicare — represented the largest group, at 33 percent.”

Speaking of the Dah Factor, or of the news newsmen were not anticipating (but you were):

“Review Of Terrorism Cases Finds NSA Spying Helped Very Little”:

Surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency helped very little when it came to cases brought against individuals the United States says were linked to al-Qaida. …

A great deal of efforts of our spymaster “protectors” go into entrapment; concocting elaborate traps to ensnare potential “evil doers”; “setting swarthy simpletons up and then nabbing them in a so-called terrorism sting.”

More non-news:

“Majority In Congress Are Millionaires”: Of course, the reporter doesn’t tell us how the predatory political class has acquired wealth, for he doesn’t think that it’s important, nevertheless:

For the first time in history, more than half the members of Congress are millionaires, according to a new analysis of financial disclosure reports conducted by the non-partisan .
Of the 534 current members of the House and Senate, 268 had an average net worth of $1 million or more in 2012 – up from 257 members in 2011. The median net worth for members of the House and Senate was $1,008,767.

Rep. Darrell Issa notwithstanding—he made his fortune, if I am not mistaken, in business, before joining the parasites in Congress—“The political class and its sycophants utilize the political means to earn their keep. As libertarian economist Murray Rothbard reminded, these ‘are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth”—the economic means is honest and productive, the political means is dishonest and predatory…but oh so very effective.'”