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Two days after his smashing essay in the New York Times, my friend Mike Lofgren has struck again with an even more smashing op-ed in the Guardian (attached herewith). Bear in mind, these essays are only the tip of the iceberg revealed in his most recent book “The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government.” If you want to get off the self-destructive evolutionary pathway the United States now finds itself on, Mike's must-read book explains how the destructive shadow government evolved by the political-economic DNA of mutually reinforcing pathologies in (1) the Miltary - Industrial - Congressional Complex, (2) the banking and business oligarchy, and (3) the Silicon Valley “entrepreneurs” who are fueling the domestic spying operations of the national security state are now working collectively, if sometimes insensibly, to destroy the “more perfect union" defined by “we the people” -- see the Preamble to our Constitution.
A necessary but not sufficient condition for evolving a salutary pathway into the future is to get private money out of the people’s politics — no small order in a nation where the law is based on legal precedent and where its supreme (and unelected) legal institution has set precedents that equate corporations to people and money to free speech.
Chuck Spinney
An oligarchy has broken our democracy. It must be dislodged
Pro forma elections have camouflaged the true state of our political system. Will that change this year?
Mike Lofgren, The Guardian, 17 January 2016
Each new election year promises change. We will choose a new president and new representatives in Congress; fresh faces will make their appearances in Washington DC, while old ones disappear. But what about the people who stay in power, one election after another, less exposed to the public eye?
The concept of a ‘Deep State’ has been around for a while, but rarely to describe the United States. The term, used in Kemalist Turkey by the political class, referred to an informal grouping of oligarchs, senior military and intelligence operatives and organized crime, who ran the state along anti-democratic lines regardless of who was formally in power.
I define the American Deep State as a hybrid association of elements of government and top-level finance and industry that is able, through campaign financing of elected officials, influence networks and co-option via the promise of lucrative post-government careers, to govern the United States in spite of elections and without reference to the consent of the governed. ... continued.
