The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government - Softcover

Lofgren, Mike

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143109936 ISBN 13: 9780143109938

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

The New York Times bestselling author of The Party Is Over delivers a no-holds-barred exposé of who really wields power in Washington
 
Every four years, tempers are tested and marriages fray as Americans head to the polls to cast their votes. But does anyone really care what we think? Has our vaunted political system become one big, expensive, painfully scripted reality TV show? In this powerful expose of the sins and excesses of Beltwayland, a longtime Republican party insider argues that we have become an oligarchy in form if not in name. Hooked on war, genuflecting to big donors, in thrall to discredited economic theories and utterly bereft of a moral compass, America’s governing classes are selling their souls to entrenched interest while our bridges collapse, wages, stagnate, and our water is increasingly undrinkable.
 
Mike Lofgren was the first to use the term Deep State, in an essay and exclusive interview on Moyers and Company, to refer to a web of entrenched interests in the US government and beyond (most notably Wall Street and Silicon Valley, which controls access to our every click and swipe) that dictate America’s defense decisions, trade policies and priorities with little regard for the actual interests or desires of the American people. In this essential and eye-opening book Lofgren takes his argument one step further. Drawing on insights gleaned over three decades on Capitol Hill, much of it on the Budget Committee, he paints a gripping portrait of the dismal swamp on the Potomac and the revolution it will take to reclaim our government and set us back on course.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mike Lofgren is The New York Times bestselling author of The Party Is Over. He spent twenty-eight years working in Congress, the last sixteen as a senior analyst on the House and Senate Budget committees. He has appeared on Bill Moyers, Hardball, Chris Hayes, and To the Point, among others, and lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like express my sincere thanks to Bill Moyers for his encouragement and advocacy of this project from its very inception. Bill’s suggestion to write an essay on the Deep State was the acorn from which the oak took root. Gratitude is owed to Chuck Spinney and Brian O’Malley, two firm friends and former fellow travelers with me in the government. Their observations over the years helped me crystallize and polish the concept of the Deep State. Thanks also to Andrew Cockburn, Ray McGovern, Tom Drake, Winslow Wheeler, Andrew Feinstein, and Bill Binney for their valuable assistance at critical stages. To former colleagues and bosses who provided me with an endless stock of practical knowledge about the way government really works: well, you know who you are! In hindsight, all my governmental experiences were enlightening, if not always as edifying as a Parson Weems fable at the time they actually occurred. Joy de Menil, the editor of this book, worked tirelessly with me to structure the narrative into a coherent whole. Bridget Matzie, my agent, was an unwavering supporter throughout the project. And, of course, none of this would have been possible without a loving and totally supportive family: Alisa, Laura, and Eric.

INTRODUCTION

For twenty-eight years I was a congressional employee with an interesting and challenging but by no means remarkable career on Capitol Hill as a staff member and national defense analyst for the House and Senate budget committees. I began my tenure as a mainstream Republican in the early days of the Reagan presidency. By the end of my career I considered myself a resolute nonpartisan, and increasingly viewed all political ideologies as mental and emotional crutches, or substitute religions: for leaders, a means of manipulating attitudes and behaviors; for the rank and file, a lazy surrogate for problem solving and a way of fulfilling the craving to belong to something bigger than oneself.

My first perception of this ideological syndrome came in the mid-1990s, when Republicans had taken over the majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. It was an exciting time, to be sure, but a tumultuous one. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the Robespierre of the Republican revolution, employed chaos, polarization, and scapegoating as the means of carrying out a divide-and-rule strategy. It worked for a time, but I saw in retrospect that it was a technique that crippled the legislative branch so that it could no longer work effectively. It did not help that many Republican congressmen were too busy lasciviously ogling the sordid details of Kenneth Starr’s report on the Monica Lewinsky affair to notice that an obscure extremist group called al-Qaeda had blown up two of our embassies in Africa.

The real wake-up call for me came during that surreal period between the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. If there was any point in our post–World War II history that called for careful analysis of the facts and rational responses that would serve the nation’s long-term security interests, this was surely it.

Instead, a clique of neoconservative ideologues both inside and outside the George W. Bush administration, abetted at every step by the mainstream news media, acted as carnival barkers for the most destructive and self-defeating policies since Vietnam, and maybe since the eve of the Civil War. A majority of politicians on Capitol Hill, along with a sizable portion of the American people, ambled around like sleepwalkers on the edge of a precipice, unaware of the danger the ideologues were luring them into. When the House Administration Committee instructed the institution’s cafeterias to rename French fries “freedom fries” because the government in Paris stubbornly remained unmesmerized by the Bush administration’s arguments for war in the Middle East, I recognized that the People’s House had hit intellectual rock bottom.

Still, I told whoever would listen that the “slam dunk” evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was weak and that by invading Iraq the United States might be purchasing its very own West Bank on steroids—not that my objections changed anyone’s mind. Later, when the invoices began to pile up—the total bill for Iraq summed up to a nice, round one trillion dollars, excluding debt service—I attempted, from my position on the Budget Committee, to reconcile this extravagance, as much as the numbers would allow, with the rote statements of representatives and senators that deficit spending was a sign of an out-of-control government and a national moral blot that would impoverish our children.

Parallel to these developments, the American economy was mutating into a casino with a tilted wheel. Ably assisted by politicians, whom I began to see less and less as leaders and more and more as corporate errand boys, the titans of Wall Street constructed a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose economic system based on Ponzi schemes, asset stripping, and rent extraction. The inevitable result was the economic meltdown of 2008. The eventual solution to that catastrophe was not national reconstruction but a bailout of the financial institutions that had caused the disaster in the first place. They soon returned to record profitability and market dominance as the rest of the country experienced the slowest recovery since the Great Depression.

The twin shocks of 9/11 and the Great Recession seem mentally to have unhinged a portion of the American people and much of the political class. The following years were consumed by crazy arguments about the president’s birth certificate, death panels, and voters shouting that the government must get its hands off their government-provided Medicare. By 2011, when a new crop of Tea Party freshmen had taken their seats in Congress and announced that their first priority was to drive the country into a sovereign debt default, I decided I’d had enough. The circus was being run from the monkey cage, and it was time to move on.

Back in private life, I wrote about the rightward lurch of the Republican Party and the intractable gridlock on the Hill in a book titled The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. Perhaps I can claim a modest amount of credit for helping to launch the now-thriving cottage industry of political pundits noticing the nuttiness of the present-day Party of Lincoln with the mortified distaste of an Anglican bishop confronted by a tribe of cannibals. That said, I was hardly ready to launch myself into the arms of the Party of Jefferson and Jackson. That crowd had serious problems, too.

Shortly after finishing the book, I began to feel that I had dealt with the symptoms—lurid symptoms, to be sure—rather than fundamental causes. Diseases always manifest themselves as symptoms, but these should not be confused with the underlying cause of the malady. America’s politics were broken, but so were its economic engine and its supposedly bipartisan foreign policy. Social indicators of human development such as life expectancy and maternal mortality showed that America was slipping in comparison with other developed countries. Economic inequality was growing. Infrastructure was getting rickety. Educational policy was confused and ineffectual. The Tea Party, as gaudy and irrational as its anger might be, was merely one among several warning signs of a deep-seated dysfunction in the way American society was run at the very top.

Anyone who has spent time on Capitol Hill will occasionally get the feeling when watching debates in the House or Senate chambers that he or she is seeing a kind of marionette...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0143109936
• ISBN 13: 9780143109938
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: SC; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/; ; CL MODESTO LAFUENTE 41; Madrid; Madrid; Spanien