"A Hybrid Entity of Public and Private Institutions Ruling the Country"

"Its principal institutions are mostly large and obvious: the immense professional bureaucracies at the State Department, the Defense Department, Treasury and Justice, along with the CIA and NSA and Homeland Security and a laundry list of smaller and more mysterious entities like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose every action is a highly classified state secret. As Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks have partially made clear, the Deep State is tied by many subterranean threads to both Wall Street and Silicon Valley, so much so that it is not always clear who is the servant and who the master. While the functionaries of the Deep State profess to be non-ideological and above politics, they actually represent the 'Washington Consensus,' a self-reinforcing combination of neoliberal, free-market economic policies and an aggressive, militaristic foreign policy that defines the zone of American interests as the entire globe.
"Lofgren makes clear that he is not claiming the existence of a secret conspiratorial cabal, but you could almost say he's protesting too much."


Andrew O'Hehir in Salon considers Mike Lofgren's "Anatomy of the Deep State."