While spending 16 years as the Chief National Security Analyst on the House and then Senate Budget Committees, Mike Lofgren, furnished with top security clearance, began to visualize an invisible power structure running the U.S. government.
He recently joined the Financial Sense Newshour for a special interview to explain the group of entities that completely bypass the traditional political process and how they come to form an almost permanent fixture of government, which he calls “The Deep State.”
Lofgren tells listeners:
“I became more and more aware during my government service and even more strongly after I gained the perspective of retirement that there’s a more shadowy and ill-defined hybrid government that actually makes the decisions and tends to go on its own compass heading regardless of what the public wants or what the public votes for…it’s outside the lines of how ordinary representative government is supposed to work, and we get a situation in our government where it’s meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
So who forms this “shadowy and ill-defined hybrid government” that he mentions? While Chief National Security Analyst for the House and Senate Budget Committees, Lofgren became aware of what he says is a “hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country…only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”
They are: U.S. security agencies (particularly the NSA), the Treasury, secret courts like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), Wall Street, and a more recent and powerful player: Silicon Valley.
Lofgren and Financial Sense Newshour host Jim Puplava discuss the recent Snowden leaks of ubiquitous NSA surveillance as an example of the Deep State’s highly evolved dependence on technology, and why Silicon Valley has become so critical to its operation.
With his years of analyzing the government’s national security budget, Lofgren explains how the NSA “is dependent on hardware provided by Silicon Valley. In fact, every weapons platform of the Department of Defense has avionics or guidance systems or other electronics in it courtesy of Silicon Valley.”
After Lofgren explains the Deep State in full detail with each of the parts that make it up, at the end of the interview he says optimistically, “We could be at an inflection point. We did roll some of this stuff back in the late sixties and into the seventies…[T]he widespread domestic spying by the CIA of dissident groups or anybody who they felt like spying on, that sort of thing was eventually exposed and banned. Unfortunately, in the last 35 or 40 years we’ve gotten lazy and the ball always tends to roll downhill unless there’s somebody pushing it up.”
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Audio link: https://www.financialsense.com/financial-sense-newshour/mike-lofgren/ana...
