By John Kendall Hawkins
"Deep State" derives from a John le Carre' spy novel. It is an expression bandied about rather frequently these days. It's in danger of losing its meaning the more it becomes just another little buzzword from Hiveworld, busy bobbing among the festive fields of corn-cockle until exhaustion sets in. There is a real, non-fictional Deep State, and it's important that we come to understand what it is, before we are driven shallow by the incessant digital stim of the trite and trivial from the cybersphere of internet 'updates.'
One of the more mature and sober descriptions of what the Deep State is, and what it does, came from former GOP congressional staffer Mike Lofgren in a discussion, back in 2014, "The Deep State: Hiding in Plain Sight," with Bill Moyers. Lofgren spent 28 years working on the Senate and House Budget committees. He described the Deep State as "a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state." It is a place, says Moyers, "where elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests."
"We're having a situation where the Deep State is essentially out of control," Lofgren tells Moyers:
It's unconstrained. Since 9/11 we have built the equivalent of three Pentagons around the DC metropolitan area, holding defense contractors, intelligence contractors, and government civilians involved in the military-industrial complex [MIC].
Ostensibly, they all work together to keep America safe under the emotional rubric of "Never Again."
But there's more. The Deep State has literally declared the Internet a battlefield. There's no democracy on a battlefield. To help keep the Internet safe from perceived enemies, the MIC, or Deep State, has contracted with corporations, such as Amazon, Google and Facebook to police the cybersphere by gathering information on each and every human online and sharing it with the government.
Thus, the Deep State spends a lot of time searching for and stalking the alleged spies and traitors amongst us, while the corporations are given the green light to exploit and play with our deepest desires. In short, the Deep State is at war with privacy. We are the last frontier. (Think of your obesity as 'economic expansion,' and an act of 'patriotism'. Ten hut!)
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