The global deep state

Mike Lofgren is an important author and thinker. He is a Republican and has worked as an advisor in the Senate. In the book ”The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government,” he provides a meaningful description of what he calls the ”deep state,” its emergence, and its function: a kind of ”shadow government” that significantly influences national politics but is not accountable to the electorate.

Drawing from his own experiences on Capitol Hill, he demonstrates the connection between the ideal of a ”government of the people, by the people” and the reality where military, industrial, and capitalist interests actually control the political processes in the United States.

Lofgren begins Chapter 2 with a quote from the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR said the following in April 1938, nearly 80 years ago, but it remains just as true today:

”Unhappy events abroad have taught us two simple truths about freedom for a democratic people. The first truth is that the freedom of a democracy is safe only if the people as a whole exercise and self-restraint and maintain the spirit of the rule of law. The second truth is that the freedom of a democracy is secure only if its financial system is sound and if that financial system offers a high degree of employment and production and consumption. A concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.”

Lofgren, with almost three decades of experience in national security and military matters, uses his expertise to provide an overview of the power factors that extend from Wall Street to Washington D.C. to Silicon Valley. These factors ensure the continuation of policies behind the ”war on terror” and the militarization of foreign policy, the financing and de-industrialization of the American economy, and the creation of a plutocratic social structure that has led to the most unequal society in almost a century, along with the political chaos that characterizes daily governance. This is not a conspiracy, according to the author, but the hidden ”deep state” has arisen from historical circumstances dating back to the end of World War II. Its leaders, who come from governments, the financial and industrial worlds, are united in a web of influence that includes entrepreneurs, think tank experts, lobbyists, and other non-elected actors where money and mutual interests are the common denominator. The resulting political oligarchy ”retains the form but not the spirit of a constitutional government.” Lofgren provides an impressive account of the history and influence of the hidden ruling class and how its members move between high positions in corporations and governments (and government agencies), with occasional positions at think tanks and Ivy League universities.

Lofgren’s analysis focuses on the three mutually reinforcing ”pillars” of the modern American deep state and how its greed has evolved over time. These ”pillars” are self-organized groups with similar interests working to exploit the cracks in the power distribution that James Madison included in the Constitution. These emerging groups constitute what some authors call an ”iron triangle” of capitalists in the private sector and professional bureaucrats, as well as elected officials in the legislative and executive branches of government, and a collection of hangers-on, wannabes, and journalists who feed off the ”iron triangle.”

These triangles are driven by flows of money and influence, and their operations are facilitated by a series of ”revolving doors” that allow individual actors to gain power and wealth by freely moving between the various corners of the triangle while pumping money and producing propaganda that the triangle needs to survive and grow on its own terms. Lofgren’s discussion of Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, is particularly illuminating. His career and political actions are an extreme example of how a skilled actor can exploit the triangle to amass immense wealth and oligarchic power.

Lofgren analyzes the three corners of the triangle by examining the conditions that constitute (1) the triangular capital activity that injects money into the military-industrial-political complex, as well as the more subtle operations to gain power from (2) the financial sector’s fraud and (3) the espionage work carried out by pseudo-libertarian hyper-capitalists in Silicon Valley. Lofgren explains how the more obvious idea of an ”iron triangle” is just the central part of an extensive network of interests. This network includes intrigues of lobbyists, think tanks, political action committees (PACs), universities, pseudo-intellectuals and ideologues, journalists who advocate for the establishment, tax-exempt foundations, and, behind them, secretive billionaires and their deep pockets, who have gained increased influence through recent Supreme Court decisions.

Lofgren delves deeply into what he calls the ”deep state.” The deep state is invisible and operates behind the scenes and out of sight and without the knowledge of the American people. He traces its emergence – which is logical, given the common interests involved – in the growth of federal power during the Cold War, among politicians, both elected and unelected, and those whom Eisenhower in the late 1950s called the growing ”military-industrial complex.” These natural ties of mutually reinforcing interests become more insidious due to the ”revolving door phenomenon,” where both elected politicians and political officials are often hired by companies whose primary interests lie in seeking government contracts and/or thwarting government regulations that are not in the company’s interest. These companies also hire high-ranking military officers after they have left the armed forces.

Others have written about the concept of the ”deep state,” but he is the first in recent years who has been part of the system itself. The concept of the ”deep state” is crucial for anyone who wants to form a realistic understanding of the American government in the post-war era. It essentially refers to the real power behind the visible government that we all know. This power elite ensures that certain foreign policy and economic issues remain beyond the reach of democratic processes. This power represents global financial markets and the military-industrial-intelligence complex. The most successful politicians work for these people while pretending to represent the interests of the American people. After they have ”served the public,” they are rewarded with coveted jobs, high salaries, or fantastic sums for their speeches. To give just one example, Bill and Hillary Clinton have earned $200 million, with most of this coming from speaking fees and donations to their ”foundation” from the wealthiest corporations and shadowy Saudis (who also helped George W. Bush raise tens of millions of dollars to buy a baseball team).

Don’t be deceived; the American deep state is the world’s leading promoter of genocide and terror. The great American patriot, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler of the U.S. Marine Corps, explained the situation in a statement he called ”War is a Racket.” Butler, who twice received the Congressional Medal of Honor, distanced himself from his military service and stated that he had been nothing more than a henchman for gangsters. He said that the real purpose of his missions was to make the world safe for National City Bank, Brown Brothers, and the United Fruit Company.

Secret state apparatus, impenetrable system
The deep state is not just the ”intelligence service.” Professor Peter Dale Scott coined the term ”deep politics” in his book ”Deep Politics and the Death of JFK” (University of California Press, 1996) to refer to the study of criminal and extralegal activities with connections to the state. His definition of a deep political system/process includes institutional and non-institutional bodies, criminal syndicates, politicians, judges, media, corporations, and high-ranking officials who have the ability to practice ”decision and enforcement methods within and beyond those sanctioned by law and society. What makes these complementary procedures ’deep’ is the fact that they are secret or suppressed and thus not common knowledge or part of sanctioned political processes.”

The purpose of analyzing deep politics is to expose the state’s tendencies to engage in activities outside its own legal framework. In conventional political science, law enforcement and the criminal underworld are opposed to each other; the former seeks to gain control over the latter. However, as Scott points out: ”An analysis of deep politics notes that these efforts result in the use of informers, and this practice over time leads these informants to become double agents with status in both the police and the underworld. By protecting informants and their crimes, a situation is created where informers benefit, are paid, and ultimately lead to systematic corruption. The phenomenon of ’organized crime’ arises: criminal structures that are tolerated by the police because of their usefulness in informing on lesser criminal elements.”

This can lead to a form of symbiosis between criminals and the state, blurring the parameters that define which side controls the other. This seemingly results in the emergence of an invisible, ”deep” dimension in the state’s activities related to organized crime, but what is actually happening is that the state, by its nature, is porous: the ”deep” invisible side has connections to a multitude of private, extralegal actors who often seek opportunities to operate outside or break the law – or to influence or stretch the law to serve their interests.

In a later work, ”The American Deep State,” Scott goes on to say that the deep state ”is not a structure but a system that is hard to define but is as real and powerful as an intense low-pressure system.”

As shown in the article published in the anthology ”The Dual State” (Routledge, 2016), one of the least understood aspects of deep politics is that the ”deep state” by nature must have connections to a large number of non-state and often influential international individuals at corporations, financial institutions, banks, and criminal organizations. (How the Trump regime was manufactured by a war inside the Deep State. A systemic crisis in the global Deep System has driven the violent radicalization of a Deep State faction av Nafeez Ahmed.)

Post-war global deep system
USA’s historical role as the foremost representative of global capitalism means that global capitalism facilitated the emergence of a USA-dominated transnational deep system in which a financial elite has become increasingly involved in criminal networks.

The expansion of global capitalism since 1945 was not an automated process. On the contrary, it was a highly violent process primarily led by the USA, Britain, and the rest of Western Europe. Throughout this process, the CIA and Wall Street have acted in near unanimity. Globalization was directly linked to military interventions in over 70 developing countries, aiming to create the political conditions for ”open” markets influenced by Western capital and, thus, to control local resources and labor. The logic behind ”deep politics” implies that much of the criminal political violence must be concealed from the public or justified in other ways.

This was confirmed by strategists at the U.S. State Department unofficially when they collaborated with the Council on Foreign Relations think tank:

”War aims aimed solely at strengthening Anglo-American imperialism have very little to offer people in the rest of the world… Such objectives also strengthen the most reactionary elements in the USA and Britain. Other countries’ interests must be emphasized, not only in Europe but also in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This creates a better propaganda effect.”

An unimaginable number of people have died during this forced integration of former colonies in Asia, Africa, South America, and the Middle East into an emerging American-British-dominated global economy.

British historian Mark Curtis, in his book ”Unpeople” (2004), provides a detailed compilation of approximately 10 million casualties, which he calls a very conservative estimate. American economist Dr. JW Smith argued in his book ”Economic Democracy” (2005) that globalization is responsible for ”12 to 15 million deaths since World War II and has caused hundreds of millions more to die as these countries’ economies have been destroyed, or they have been denied the right to restructure to provide for their citizens…This is the result of Western imperialist capitalism from 1945 to 1990.”

In the wake of this deep, transnational political violence – not reported in traditional mass media and not included in history education – the USA and Britain have established a global financial architecture to serve their most powerful companies and banks, which have overwhelming influence over the political class.

State power has been used to integrate resources, commodities, fossil energy reserves, and cheap labor from these regions into a global economy dominated by a transnational elite primarily based in the USA, Britain, and Western Europe.

This has also paved the way for new forms of criminalizing power. This can be illustrated by a powerful example from terrorism expert and economist Loretta Napoleoni, who chaired the Club de Madrid’s work on terrorism financing.

She argues that financial deregulation implemented by several consecutive U.S. governments has allowed various armed groups and terrorist organizations to join forces and, together with organized crime, create a criminal economy with a turnover of $1.5 trillion. This criminal economy consists of ”illegal capital flight, profits from criminal enterprises, drug trafficking, smuggling, legal businesses, and so on”; much of this is funneled back into Western economies through money laundering via traditional financial institutions: ”It is a significant part of the cash flow in these economies.”

But the problem goes deeper. The primary currency for the criminal economy is the U.S. dollar, whose role as the world’s reserve currency has created a structural situation where the economic power of the U.S. Department of the Treasury has become dependent on the economic immunity enjoyed by transnational criminal networks: the greater the dollar reserves held abroad, the larger the revenue sources for the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

These examples illustrate how the deep state in the USA regulates a deep global system where seemingly legitimate international financial flows are increasingly intermingled with transnational organized crime and powerful corporate interests controlling the world’s fossil fuel and commodity assets and the privatization of the military-industrial complex. (How the Trump regime was manufactured by a war inside the Deep State. A systemic crisis in the global Deep System has driven the violent radicalization of a Deep State faction by Nafeez Ahmed)

The global deep state