When Bill Moyers covers a subject one may always anticipate that it will be journalism at its most consistently sublime, at least in comparison to the work of virtually everyone else that claims any affiliation with this country’s mainstream media. However, on Friday night, with former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren, author of “The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted,” as his guest, in “The Deep State Hiding In Plain Sight,” Moyers outdid himself, IMHO; both on his show, publishing Lofgren’s exceptionally powerful essay at the show’s website, and with regard to the outstanding variety of incisive analyses about the show and its subject matter that are now accessible at BillMoyers.com.
There’s little more that I need or wish to say here other than--making a feeble attempt to convey the content, which I refuse to do, especially when it comes to Moyers’ and his guests’ work—to provide readers with the video and related links that speak for themselves.
From Friday evening, here’s Moyers’ “The Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight”… http://www.dailykos.com/story/
Full Show: The Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight
BillMoyers.com
February 21, 2014Everyone knows about the military-industrial complex, which, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned had the potential to “endanger our liberties or democratic process” but have you heard of the “Deep State?”Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member with the powerful House and Senate Budget Committees, joins Bill to talk about what he calls the Deep State, a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state, which is “out of control” and “unconstrained.” In it, Lofgren says, elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests. “It is … the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Bill.Lofgren says the Deep State’s heart lies in Washington, DC, but its tentacles reach out to Wall Street, which Lofgren describes as “the ultimate backstop to the whole operation,” Silicon Valley and over 400,000 contractors, private citizens who have top-secret security clearances. Like any other bureaucracy, it’s groupthink that drives the Deep State.In conjunction with this week’s show, Mike Lofgren has written an exclusiveessay, “Anatomy of the Deep State.”
Here’s the LINK TO THE TRANSCRIPT of the show.
And, here’s the opening excerpt to Lofgren’sessay (I know the term’s overused, but this really is a “must-read”), “Anatomy of the Deep State.”