How do Wall Street, oil companies and the shadow government agencies like the CIA and NSA really shape the global political order?
That’s the question author Peter Dale Scott examines in his forthcoming book “The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil and the Attack on U.S. Democracy,” due out on Nov. 12. Scott, a professor emeritus of English at Berkeley and former Canadian diplomat, is considered the father of “deep politics”—the study of hidden permanent institutions and interests whose influence on the political realm transcends the elected.
In the “American Deep State,” Scott takes a compelling look at the facts lurking behind the official histories of events to uncover the [amazon asin=1442214244&template=*lrc ad (left)]real dynamics in play. In this exclusive excerpt—the first of several we will feature on WhoWhatWhy—he looks at the revolving door between Wall Street and the CIA, and what that demonstrates about where power truly resides.
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In the last decade it has become more and more obvious that we have in America today what the journalists have called… America’s “deep state.” (1)
This expansion of a two-level or dual state has been paralleled by two other dualities: the increasing resolution of American society [amazon asin=0990463109&template=*lrc ad (right)]into two classes—the “one percent” and the “ninety-nine percent”—and the bifurcation of the U.S. economy into two aspects: the domestic, still subject to some governmental regulation and taxation, and the international, relatively free from governmental controls. (2)
All three developments have affected and intensified each other—particularly since the Reagan Revolution of 1980, which saw American inequality of wealth cease to diminish and begin to increase. (3) Thus for example Wall Street—the incarnation of the “one percent”— played a significant role in creating the CIA after World War II, and three decades later the CIA and big oil played a significant role in realigning American politics for the Reagan Revolution.
[amazon asin=1626360952&template=*lrc ad (left)]There is an ambiguous symbiosis between two aspects of the American deep state:
- 1. The Beltway agencies of the shadow government, like the CIA and NSA, which have been instituted by the public state and now overshadow it, and
- 2. The much older power of Wall Street, referring to the powerful banks and law firms located there.
Top-level Treasury officials, CIA officers, and Wall Street bankers and lawyers think much alike because of the “revolving door” by which they pass easily from private to public service and back.
But a much larger role for the private sector has come with the increased outsourcing of the government’s intelligence budget. Tim Shorrock revealed in 2007 that “about 70 percent of the estimated $60 billion the government spends every year on . . . intelligence” is now outsourced to private intelligence contractors like Booz, Allen & Hamilton (now Booz Allen Hamilton) and SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation). (4)
