Today in world-historical perspective (why not?)

[JackRiddler]

Following that link, I went on to this page, by P.D. Scott, as a pretty good overview of the deep state idea:

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Th ... _Overworld

I like his terms, choice of examples, and concept of Wall Street as an "overworld" (as opposed to the criminal underworld).

The power elite are the operational strata of the ruling (ownership) classes. Within the coalition of interests and structures of power usefully described by that term, the deep state is a number of subsets, as well as a modality -- a way of doing things. Whether lizard or plain human, in the U.S. the deep state is not a single "capstone" or executive committee of the state or establishment. It is an industry, centered around and emanating from the "power agencies" of the U.S. federal government, i.e., the ones in charge of warmaking and "security." The deep state represents the kind of power that requires secrecy, or the enhancement of power through secrecy.

Nevertheless, much power is not at all "deep" but open, although generally obscure. Although they do fetishize secrecy and proprietorship of information as a general measure, the federal power agencies, the corporations and the rich do not need to act in secret or use spooky means for everything they do. The concentration of wealth and power and entirely legal means usually suffice. I have a billion dollars, you don't, so I get to run your town and frack your watershed and build some towers on top of your house and if you don't like it, you can try moving. Progress. Fuck you.

If Internet neutrality ends, for example, it won't be a decision or imperative of the "deep state," although it may be in the interests of such actors. It won't require a covert operation, just a PR effort to convince the public that it's a good thing. It's enough that the blowhard lobbying for the cable companies, Tom Wheeler, got himself appointed to run the FCC, thanks to these corporations' power over the administration (Wheeler himself was an Obama "Pioneer", raising half a million personally). When Wheeler rotates back into the private sector, he'll make a (second) mint for a job well done. Interestingly, if net neutrality is overturned, it will be against the opposition of some other incredibly powerful corporations like Google, which doubtless has strong connections in the military-security milieux. More evidence that power is not monolithic.

Anyway, the book I'd still start with, and be it set in 1956, is The Power Elite.

[82_28]

Formative song for the character you know as 82_28. I can't believe this shit came out in 1990! 24 fucking years.

Also, you started it Jack with the simple typing of "faith alone" (made me search). It took me through a time prism of taking that song in as a kid. Every kid was into that song back then -- that listened to Bad Religion -- Bad Religion was the big skater band back then, as in what we listened to. But, I realize now that I take the lyrics much differently. To me it was a "fuck you" to religion, when in fact it was much deeper. Acoustically I always enjoyed the "choir" of harmonies for a punk band in Bad Religion. I also totally loved that Greg was a scientist on the side -- same goes with Milo from the Descendents -- two of my most favorite bands.

So, as to time, there is that. It definitely was something that appealed to some of us. As to history, there is also some of that, but there have been free forces who somehow got through before the widespread use of the Internet. We just went the "right" route.

Paris was another big one with us. I have no idea. Some good force had to be flowing us these ideas of pacifism back then in some way. We didn't just find this shit on our own. The creators of South Park lived down the street from me lived in the same miasma. Ah well. . .
[youtube]
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[bks]

A provocation:

The Deep State, fundamentally, is the (inter/National) Security State in all its many-festations and undertakings. What is "Deep" is what is exceptional, and the firmest basis for exceptional State action is "security." This is the sense in which Charles Hugh Smith's analysis is spot on: when the financial shenanigans of the FIRE sector endanger fundamental ruling class needs in too profound a fashion, "security" will be invoked in some form to reign them in more directly.

As Jack's quote from Marx should make clear, we make our own worlds, but not under conditions of our own making! So what is the holy grail, the greatest goal of the ruling class? To create conditions under which they no longer have to worry about the uncertainty of future attempts at worldmaking that threaten their dominion.

Enter surveillance. Right now, the Deep State's largest undertaking (that I can see) is the creation of a new human subject. It's goal is the production of whole populations of people who will come to expect ubiquitous surveillance as a background condition of their lives, and come to believe they need it unabatingly (for both the protection of their bodies and their consumer interest). The justification for the particulars in virtually every case will be security, but the broader motivation is easier intervention for purposes of social sorting, behavior modulation, and ultimately indefinite, even automated, social control.

A population of fully surveilled subjects, over enough time, will not expect (or even after enough time, understand) a kind of freedom that would enable it to make something radically different of itself - other, that is, than what they have been constructed to be by the surveillant powers (pliant, docile, dependent, and completely naked before the powers that ruthlessly measure and evaluate every aspect of their lives). Inner selves are created by the navigation of social boundaries, but a fully surveilled society is one where all such boundaries are surmounted or in theory surmount-able. Under such conditions human subjectivity will lack a robust conception of radical self-change.

And all this because securitization (that is, securing a desired future world), which the essential Deep State undertaking) demands it.

[JackRiddler]

Very smart stuff bks, though I'm not sure why it's a provocation. It's interesting how much of present-day ideology implicitly aims at the extinction of the human through its reproduction into something fully predictable, controllable and, as you say, surmountable. Clumsy phrenology, atavistic eugenics and mechanical Taylorism fell into the pit of the world wars, now more sophisticated successors are building toward a more refined but possibly greater barbarism: total surveillance, big data, transhumanist engineering, neoliberal economics encouraging a philosophical Taylorism of the soul. (How can I be my best self, in the service of efficiency, and thus maximize income and status, damn it?) The steering remains an oligarchic, class-bound matter. I mean, it's still about property's privilege and expectation of conformity and obedience from its slaves.

from the anarchoprimitivism vs. transhumanism thread:

Sure: transhumanism is based up on the totally insane idea that 21st Century human beings have any fucking clue what we're doing to ourselves, our environment, and the cosmos in general. We can't even manage the world we actually live in, let alone create new ones that match it in richness and complexity (sorry, English: virtual reality is pretty fucking boring compared to the real world). Anarcho-primitivism, for all of its romantic idealism (sorry, English again: crunchy-granola-hippy-dippiness), is at least based on something that actually worked for 100s of 1000s of years.

And it is of course not "21st century human beings" who will be making the decisions in the main about the design of future humans but their oligarchy (which is increasingly indistinguishable from kakistocracy). The likes of Bill Gates, whose primary interests judging from the activities of the foundation are in medical experimentation and the education of children by algorithm ("common core" and the like, teacher ratings, the idea that all teachers should be doing the same thing according to "best practices" determined by motherfuckers like Gates and rateable precisely by a number grade for the teacher -- a form of surveillance with consequences).

Otherwise I like "many-festations," you clever lad, but my syntacticalist's honor demands I pursue my losing rear-guard action against "reign in." It's rein, like a horse!

[zangtang]

syntactilist's honor ?

oh good score!

[bks]

my syntacticalist's honor demands I pursue my losing rear-guard action against "reign in." It's rein, like a horse!

Write ewe are.

[zangtang]

no,no - I'm all for perfectitude and correcticality when it comes to spelling.............

[JackRiddler]

Not to be confused with Sintacticalism, the study of how best to apply tactics in the pursuit of sin.

[American Dream]

I found the beginning to this recent article by Peter Dale Scott to be useful in fleshing out the anatomy of the Deep State, though I would add to his focus of Wall Street and suggest that it goes much further than that- that it is Capital in general, as the famous Yankee/Cowboy War scenario might suggest:

The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld

Updated March 13, 2014.

Peter Dale Scott

In the last decade it has become more and more obvious that we have in America today what the journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin have called

two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre – and its entirety…visible only to God.

And in 2013, particularly after the military return to power in Egypt, more and more authors referred to this second level as America’s “deep state.” Here for example is the Republican analyst Mike Lofgren:

There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.

At the end of 2013 a New York Times Op-Ed noted this trend, and even offered a definition of the term that will work for the purposes of this essay:

DEEP STATE n. A hard-to-perceive level of government or super-control that exists regardless of elections and that may thwart popular movements or radical change. Some have said that Egypt is being manipulated by its deep state.

The political activities of the deep state are the chief source and milieu of what I have elsewhere called “deep politics:” “all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.”

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/4090

[JackRiddler]

Overworld and underworld, example of Honduras:

SNIP

It was the same old story for the poor of Honduras. Feeble efforts at reform were crushed by unaccountable strongmen with guns, and a US-friendly, pro-business smiling face was installed as the new president. As might be expected in such a dark predatorial swampland, existing violent gangs flourished even better after the coup. Any fool could see that top-down violence was an acceptable arbiter of societal order, so it followed by natural logic that gang violence was the way to respond from the bottom-up. Unregulated, profit-making, capitalistic enterprise was facilitated at the top, while free enterprise was deemed illegal at the bottom when the product to be marketed was marijuana and cocaine. In a moral sinkhole like this, the poor and those seeking to work hard to rise into a middle class are caught between police violence and gang violence.

PLUTOCRATS AND CRIMINALS

Nils Gilman, a social scientist at the University of California and co-editor of the academic journal Humanity, wrote an essay in the May issue of The American Interest called “The Twin Insurgency.” He nicely explains the sort of sovereignty train wreck that is Honduras. These twin insurgencies began in the 1970s, he suggests, when ”social modernists states were increasingly failing to deliver on their promises.” Into the 1980s, with the growth of globalism, economic inequality grew as an empowered plutocratic class was on the rise and the political right was in its ascendancy.

“By the turn of the millennium, even elements of the Left had come to doubt whether states could be relied on to effectively and disinterestedly promote the public interest,” Gilman writes.

Here, he introduces his idea of twin insurgencies that both feed off the declining modernist state. At the top, there’s the plutocratic insurgency, made up of capitalists and financial manipulators who “see themselves as ‘the deserving winners of a tough worldwide competition’ and regard efforts to make them pay for public goods as little more than organized theft.” As they distance themselves from the public-oriented functions of the state, these plutocrats take full advantage of the state’s tax-based legal system, courts and the police to secure their rights and properties.

At the bottom, there’s the criminal insurgency,” which includes drug cartels and other “de facto political actors.” The insurgency at the top is noted for its gated communities attitude, while the insurgency at the bottom assumes a leadership role in “feral ‘no-go zones.’”

“What both plutocratic and criminal insurgents desire,” Gilman writes, “is for the social modernist state to remain intact except insofar as it impinges on them.” (Italics in the original.)

This idea of insurgencies from the top and the bottom certainly applies to the political world of 2014 in the United States. Think the Koch Brothers and war profiteers on one side and gangs and a huge criminal underclass in and out of prison on the other. In a place like Honduras where there is no middle class and no working modern state, it’s nothing but the struggle between th two insurgencies. Society becomes divided between gated communities and feral no-go zones — with nothing in between. “The ultimate losers in all this,” Gilman writes, “[are] the people who play by the rules.” For a Honduran, it’s either accept loser status “or join one of the two insurgences.”

Many Honduran parents accept the risks in order to save their kids; they scrounge together money to send them to the US border. Three years ago, 6,800 children were detained at the border; today the figure is 90,000. Twenty-five percent of them are from Honduras. The UN High Commission for Refugees interviewed 104 of these children, and 58% said they left due to violence.

SNIP

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/15/ ... ound/print

[American Dream]

I think the article above is making great points but I would like to see the analysis go further towards the interplay of the State and Capital, including not only the biggest fish, but embracing also the political economy of organized crime down to the street level.

Peter Dale Scott played an important role simply by citing the analysis of the late, great criminologist Alan Block, who helped shine a light on the dynamics behind the institutionalized collusion between state and criminal elements that can lead to the development of "gray alliances" where it's no longer clear at all which is the tail and which is the dog and where the wagging is actually coming from...

[Wombaticus Rex]

By this definition there is not too much of a difference between State and Deep state. One could argue that wherever is State there is a Deep State too. If the State is disbanded will the Deep State end?

Part of the value of the Deep State distinction is that these power networks often transcend "The State," the official borders and bodies of "legitimate" government.

The Safari Club is a great example ==> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_Club

MacArthur's bro-love-affair with Chiang Kai-shek also comes to mind...as does Angleton's "Israel Desk" and his collaborations with the Italian underworld.

[JackRiddler]

Part of the value of the Deep State distinction is that these power networks often transcend "The State," the official borders and bodies of "legitimate" government.

The Safari Club is a great example ==> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_Club

MacArthur's bro-love-affair with Chiang Kai-shek also comes to mind...as does Angleton's "Israel Desk" and his collaborations with the Italian underworld.

Yes, and in this the deep state is akin to transnational and proprietary capital generally, hybridizing qualities of state and free-flowing capital. It can be incredibly useful to those capitals that can access deep state and parapolitical networks to gain advantage in the competition of capitals, and in the class war and imperialist ventures. Deep state can (also, not exclusively) be defined as an industry that works by extracting resources from the official state -- e.g., funding out of public budgets, access to surveillance machinery and sensitive information, power to classify and act in secret, impunity for law-breaking, secret influence over policy-making and regulation, subsidies for developing technologies -- and then processes these into advantages and profits in a variety of other sectors and locations.

[tapitsbo]

Does the "Deep State" terminology have its problems too?

usually, speaking about the State involves reference to an entity with clear limits, or an appropriately defined sphere of activity. This still applies even with regards to agendas of "total politicization" - left/anarchist types who critique the State as something desirable seem awfully concerned with identifying an appropriate sphere of "praxis" or whatever, that they would have replace it. Conversely, the extreme right, that often would like to cast itself as an expression of "life", naturally has its highest priority identifying various enemies as illegitimate life.

the Deep State terminology is unclear because it's used to refer to known and unknown spheres of activity. It seems like this Deep State is everywhere and anywhere, on the one hand referring to the industry that hollows out the official state, and on the other hand referring to purely conjectural networks. It seems like it's important to discuss both these areas, and while they clearly overlap, it's confusing. Of course the areas pointed to by RI-type discussions are pretty dangerous and uncomfortable to talk about directly so I guess there's some value in being vague.

I understand that the idea of "conspiracy" is inadequate since we're often talking about people who aren't fully aware of the actions they're taking part in because of compartmentalization and what have you. "Criminality/corruption" also are inadequate terms of course since the law is usually under the control of deep-state type networks.

I think the vast amount of openly available information on various establishments, networks, etc risks being muddied by conflating it entirely with the hidden elements that are also, of course, worthy of discussion. Even Peter Dale Scott, who is obviously a great writer, sometimes seems to be doing this when he talks about groups in shadowy terms that actually have a longer openly documented history than he gets into...

I hope this post isn't too garbled and curious to hear what you guys think about the terminology used to discuss these different elements, I love reading this board and the collected posts are even better than Jeff's original material, some of you guys are great writers.

[American Dream]

Does the "Deep State" terminology have its problems too?

usually, speaking about the State involves reference to an entity with clear limits, or an appropriately defined sphere of activity. This still applies even with regards to agendas of "total politicization" - left/anarchist types who critique the State as something desirable seem awfully concerned with identifying an appropriate sphere of "praxis" or whatever, that they would have replace it. Conversely, the extreme right, that often would like to cast itself as an expression of "life", naturally has its highest priority identifying various enemies as illegitimate life.

the Deep State terminology is unclear because it's used to refer to known and unknown spheres of activity. It seems like this Deep State is everywhere and anywhere, on the one hand referring to the industry that hollows out the official state, and on the other hand referring to purely conjectural networks. It seems like it's important to discuss both these areas, and while they clearly overlap, it's confusing. Of course the areas pointed to by RI-type discussions are pretty dangerous and uncomfortable to talk about directly so I guess there's some value in being vague.

...I think the vast amount of openly available information on various establishments, networks, etc risks being muddied by conflating it entirely with the hidden elements that are also, of course, worthy of discussion. Even Peter Dale Scott, who is obviously a great writer, sometimes seems to be doing this when he talks about groups in shadowy terms that actually have a longer openly documented history than he gets into...

Your points are well taken, but I think you are misunderstanding Peter Dale Scott's intent when he uses that term. Conjecture is clearly labeled as such and factual assertions are reliably documented in his work.

After all he is an academic and one of the most rigorous conspiracy researchers there is.