After remembering Eisenhower's comments, this guy outlines how the military industrial complex has expanded.
Google is even carrying water for them now.
Truthout:
http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/34912-illicit-surveillance-and-the-deep-state-an-interview-with-mike-lofgren
Fabulous explanation: (excerpt)
You describe the "deep state" as the iceberg beneath the visible tip of the official US government "that is theoretically controllable via elections." How does it function and what are its main components?
It's a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry effectively able to govern the US without reference to the consent of the governed. Its nodes are the national security agencies of government, Treasury, the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court (whose dealings are so mysterious not even most members of Congress know what the court is doing).
Mike Lofgren. (Photo: Alisa Lofgren)
Mike Lofgren. (Photo: Alisa Lofgren)
Most congresspeople just vote according to what their party leadership tells them. Membership in the deep state in Congress boils down to the leadership and a handful of Defense and Intelligence Committee members. The private part of the deep state is the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about in 1961. There is also Wall Street and its symbiotic relationship with the Treasury and its regulatory agencies, like the SEC [Security and Exchange Commission]. People like Hank Paulson, who worked for [George W.] Bush, or Tim Geithner, who worked for Obama, are essentially interchangeable: Their worldview is much the same despite being of different political parties.
And then, of course, you have Silicon Valley - necessary for the technology which totally enables the NSA [National Security Agency] (which informants have told me couldn't do its job without that technology). Silicon Valley is also significant as an enormous center of new wealth. You also see their self-glorifying statements about being innovative disruptors. They certainly are disrupting the economy. There is little evidence that technology will do anything in a macroeconomic sense other than concentrating wealth even further so that we're left with CEOs on top and everyone else in the gig economy, like contractors for Uber.
How did you personally become aware of the deep state and what is the explanatory power of its existence for understanding current affairs?
I became aware that there were forces at work in the period between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq that were bigger than the government and were operating on their own compass heading. We have a supposedly free press, but when you saw people like Phil Donahue and Ashley Banfield fired or demoted for being critical of invasion, you have to wonder. I'm pretty sure nobody in the White House picked up the phone and asked somebody at NBC to fire those folks, but the NBC executives were sufficiently conditioned to perform a service to the government by firing those folks and creating the propaganda for the war.
In the correspondence leading up to this interview, you mentioned "developments in the past six months that have surprised even me, and not in a good way." Can you briefly outline what these are and their pertinence to The Deep State's premise?
I should correct that: They've surprised me in a mixed way. Certainly, six months ago I would not have imagined Donald Trump had as much staying power as he's demonstrated. Trump in many ways represents the culmination of the deep state. He's a plutocrat who's used the laws, such as business bankruptcy procedures, for his own gain and yet in a way he is frightening people in the deep state because he is so far out, that he's upsetting their business model. The standard model is for billionaires to dictate the candidates' positions on free trade, austerity etc. On the upside: He is scaring the daylights out of members of the deep state. On the downside: He's moving away from the current model of corporate oligarchy with a façade of free elections. Instead, he's using all the populist themes developed by the Republican Party in the past to keep their base happy, but he's actually making promises to act on them and moving towards out-and-out fascism.
On the other hand, you have the [Bernie] Sanders campaign also scaring the daylights out of Democrats. He doesn't have to go to David Geffen's house or to Wall Street with his hat in his hand or fundraise among the glitterati. The last time I looked, his average donation was reported as less than $30. That upsets the whole notion of fundraising described by a New York Times report that half of all political donations came from just 158 families. Unfortunately, that's the business model we've got post Citizens United. The Democrat pooh-bahs are clearly upset and Michael Bloomberg has said he would jump into the race only if Sanders won in the Democratic primaries: that tells me who his friend is and who his enemy is.
Obama appeared to have a similar fundraising model, but it was clear he was bought off in summer 2008 when he voted in favor of the FISA Amendments Act [a bill to indemnify the telecommunications companies over participation in illegal surveillance] that he previously had said he would filibuster. By then he had already taken on John Brennan as a foreign policy adviser. The extraordinary loyalty and indulgence Obama has shown Brennan was demonstrated in his waiting until it was politically possible to get Brennan appointed CIA director, after which he then promptly embarrassed Obama with the scandal of spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee as they were writing a report on CIA torture. Although he made all kinds of bombastic statements about expecting an apology from the committee chair, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Brennan ended up apologizing instead to Senator Feinstein. Yet Obama sticks by him.
