“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”[1]
The “Deep State.”
It means nothing. It’s a construct, assembled to explain the gulf between those who have and those who want. It explains the failure of the system. The problem lies in the fact the system was working, the Middle Class was flourishing, the wealthy were, well, wealthy. But it doesn’t take much to convince people to believe somebody, somewhere is taking all the money, all their money, for themselves.
The secret is finding a scapegoat, in this case, the federal government. Nobody alive is a fan of the government, they make difficult decisions involving billions of dollars affecting billions of people. You can’t please everyone. Someone is going to feel left out. Farm subsidies don’t improve the lives of the urban poor. Social safety programs don’t help the middle class. Corporate tax cuts don’t help consumers. Sure, we’ve all heard the myth of the “trickle-down economics,” and we’ve all seen the reality. “The poor get poor and the rich get rich.”[2] Holding a huge, faceless, bureaucracy, accountable for all your problems is easy.
A wily politician isn’t that different than an experienced con man, a charlatan fortune teller, or a deceitful evangelist. They find a thread of belief, a small sliver of doubt, and exploit it.
To think there has been a shadow organization that has been working secretly to manipulate the world’s largest economy, controlling the press and programming decisions of the networks, spreading lies and carefully planned propaganda, all while employing thousands, probably millions of average citizens as civil servants stretches the bounds of credibility beyond imagination.
For one thing, it is almost impossible to imagine the American government exercising that much coordination. It’s not enough to picture a monstrous bureaucracy locked into a sorry state of inertia, it’s more like a giant, clumsy octopus in a rabid frenzy wrestling itself into beaching on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay.
It boggles the mind to imagine how many people are required to establish, build and maintain a shadow government. It would have to be thousands, maybe millions. And they would all have to be willing to keep it confidential. They couldn’t tell anybody; despite the monetary windfall such a confession would bring. “One person can keep a secret, but not two.”[3]
“Hi, I’m Janice, I was the Secretary of Defense for the “Deep State”, a shadow government that functions behind the scenes of the pretend government. I’ve been manipulating local indigenous movements to harass and manipulate foreign, sovereign states. This gives America the ability to act all snooty about being so peaceful and prosperous.”
That is probably a ridiculous statement, but what does the “Deep State” do that the regular, shallow, elected State can’t do? If they are such a powerful, enormous, willful, organization how did they let Donald Trump, who has made it a prominent campaign platform to expose and eliminate it entirely, get elected, twice?
Obviously, the “Deep State” isn’t any more effective or productive than the other, closer to the surface State. Which leads to the question, why in God’s name are we paying for two states? Bear in mind, one of the key accusations against the shadow government is how it is feeding great gobs of money to corrupt officials.
In all honesty, I would like to see the performance evaluation of the person responsible for supervising “Deep State” operations. He is obviously not up to the task. Look around, the “Deep State” is in shambles.
It might not hurt to examine the numbers for whoever is in charge of the artificial, veneer state, as well. There are indications it is in a serious state of decline.
[1] Lord Acton
[2] “Democracy” by Leonard Cohen
[3] Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
