The Deep State (41 page)

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In 2003, the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in fact decreed a 15 percent flat tax for occupied Iraq.

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When Tom DeLay was House majority leader, I found out that any legislative provision having anything to do with the Middle East had to be vetted and approved by AIPAC before the bill could move forward.

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It is possible that Cheney, who wrote the dissenting views to the Iran-Contra committee's report, learned from that affair that it is vital to keep a president “out of the loop” when illegal policies must be implemented.

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Marshall embodies the permanent government: he was appointed as director of the office in 1973, serving continuously in that post until January 2015.

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Even after adjusting for inflation, the Pentagon spent more in the crash year of 2008 than during the peak of involvement in Korea and Vietnam. Both of those earlier conflicts were much larger wars than the current war on terrorism, and both wars occurred while the United States was simultaneously containing a peer competitor, the Soviet Union. Not only are we seeing unprecedented military spending, we are getting less for our money.

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President Roosevelt had prohibited private ownership of gold in 1933, but the United States still maintained a “gold exchange standard” until 1971: current account imbalances between the United States and other countries were settled in gold.

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Beheadings have become such a growth industry in Saudi Arabia that in spring 2015 the kingdom began advertising for executioners.

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The editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal,
the advocate of the investor class, has tirelessly campaigned since the 1970s for increases in military spending, even as it has championed cutting social safety net programs.

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During the early years of the Clinton administration, when the collapse of the Warsaw Pact temporarily led to a more relaxed security atmosphere, the White House ordered the declassification of old government documents to be stepped up. The action resulted in, among other things, the declassification of a 1917 document describing U.S. troop movements against the kaiser's Germany. But given the mania for increased classification since 9/11, declassifying information after a mere seventy-five years is no sure thing in the future.

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Possibly the only writing that approached such a theory was a novel:
Snow Crash,
written by Neal Stephenson in 1992, which foresaw a future United States in which the federal government had ceded most powers to private corporations and
high-tech
entrepreneurs. Stephenson was genuinely inspired and frightfully accurate when he predicted that mercenary armies would be competing for defense contracts.

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Friedman became the Lenin to Friedrich Hayek's Marx in making his chosen ideology more extreme. Like Hayek, he was a fan of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Friedman once declared that pure food and drug laws were cumbersome and unnecessary since producers out of their own enlightened self-interest would ensure that their products were safe. One wonders whether Friedman was really that naïve, or whether there was some calculated bad faith involved.

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Only
after
the bailout was the full extent known of many of these banks' mortgage fraud, deliberate promotion of financial instruments intended to fail, and robosignings of counterfeit foreclosure documents.

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Collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, were a weapon of mass financial destruction that helped blow up the residential mortgage market in 2008. Since then, financial engineers have launched a strikingly similar instrument, the collateralized loan obligation, or CLO. With Wall Street having already wrecked the housing market and thrown millions of properties into foreclosure, private equity groups are now snapping up those houses and renting them. The rental streams are then bundled into financial instruments and sold in an unregulated market—paralleling the financial industry's behavior with CDOs a few years before, merely substituting rents for mortgage payments.

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On leaving the government in 2015, Holder returned to a lucrative position at Covington and Burling, a law firm whose clients have included Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo. The law firm also represented MERS Corp, the electronic mortgage registry responsible for many falsely registered mortgage documents discovered after the 2008 financial crash. These clients were among the institutions Holder said he was reluctant to prosecute because of their alleged systemic importance.

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Police in one Indianapolis suburb said they required an MRAP against a potential attack by berserker military veterans returning from the wars. This is an example of the Deep State creating a negative feedback loop: it must now up-arm police against military veterans it had trained and sent on multiple deployments into wars of choice. Pentagon insiders of my acquaintance refer to this behavioral pattern as a “self-licking ice cream cone”: a business model that perpetuates and amplifies the very problem it purports to solve—one that is, needless to say, very lucrative for contractors.

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The chief justice, and only he, is empowered to appoint judges to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That power makes him ex officio a significant operative of the Deep State and invests him with gravitas. As such he cannot behave like a rancorous partisan, a clown, or a mental vacuum.

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Once on the no-fly list, it is virtually impossible to get off; the government will not even tell a person why he is on the list. It may not only be a case of administrative arbitrariness: because the source of any coding and translation errors can't easily be tracked down, as well as the fact that the methodology using Bayesian algorithms is understood by few people, government officials themselves may have no genuine idea why a person is on the list.

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The convictions were reversed on appeal on the grounds that some of the witnesses against him were influenced by his immunized testimony before Congress.

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Wolfowitz's career arc appears to represent a bipartisan solution to what to do with exalted personnel who make grossly misleading assessments about wars. After years of giving sunny estimates about the situation in Vietnam that he himself did not believe, Lyndon Johnson's secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, also got a gold watch in the form of the presidency of the World Bank. (Incredibly, Wolfowitz is back—he is now one of presidential candidate Jeb Bush's national security policy advisers.)

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Beginning in 1988, every U.S. president has been a graduate of Harvard or Yale (or both). Beginning in 2000, every losing presidential candidate has been a Harvard or Yale graduate, with the exception of John McCain in 2008.

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In the phone call, Nuland disparaged the European Union's efforts to mediate the brewing crisis in Ukraine by saying “F*ck the EU,” thus providing one more piece of evidence that the U.S. government, or at least some players in it, did not want a calming of the growing disorder in Ukraine's capital city.

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“Security consultant” is a Washington term of art for influence peddlers who stand astride the cash pipeline between their old employers in government and the major contractors.

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A University of Massachusetts study claims that several alternative ways of spending money would produce anywhere from 35 percent to 138 percent more jobs than spending the same amount on the DOD (http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/published_study/PERI_military_spending_2011.pdf).

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The post-2012 spat between Karl Rove and Tea Party groups has been for the most part not a fight about ideology but about control of money, patronage, and valuable mailing lists with the names of suckers on them.

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The NFL announced in spring 2015 that it will give up its nonprofit status the following year. The league determined that there was no difference in the way it would operate—raising the question of how many restrictions nonprofits must observe if they can function just like a for-profit business. The only real difference is that by running a for-profit, Goodell will no longer have to disclose his compensation.

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The House's 2011 “ban” on earmarks has been occasionally honored more in the breach than in the observance. During the February 2011 deliberations on that fiscal year's defense funding, Speaker John Boehner inserted a provision to continue funding for the F-35's alternative engine, which happened to be partially manufactured in an Ohio GE plant employing many of his district's electorate. But the new Tea Party House of Representatives demonstrated its antiearmarking fervor when the full body voted for an amendment to kill the provision.

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“Enhanced interrogation” is a literal translation of the German
verschärfte Vernehmung,
a term introduced by a Gestapo directive of June 12, 1942, to describe permissible methods of interrogating prisoners. Post–World War II war crimes tribunals judged the techniques described in the directive—techniques strikingly similar to those employed six decades later by the CIA—to be war crimes.

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Ironically, this warmongering epigram was coined by an unnamed “senior British official” in an interview with
Newsweek
just before the Iraq invasion. It was endlessly and approvingly repeated by the Beltway's flock of chicken-hawk neoconservatives as evidence of their foreign policy machismo.

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For public relations reasons, the think tank recently renamed its annual ranking the “fragile states index.”

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