America’s next president will inherit more than a
bitterly divided nation teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe when he
or she assumes office. He will also inherit a shadow government, one that is
fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence,
running the country.
To be precise, however, the future president will
actually inherit not one but two shadow governments.
The first shadow government, referred to as COG or
continuity of government, is made up of unelected individuals who have been
appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.”
The second shadow government, referred to as the
Deep State, is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations,
contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the
shots behind the scenes right now.
The skyline of Washington, DC, including the
Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, US Capitol and National Mall, is seen
from the air at sunset in this photograph taken on June 15, 2014. AFP PHOTO /
Saul LOEB (Photo credit should
read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
The skyline of Washington, DC, including the Lincoln
Memorial, Washington Monument, US Capitol and National Mall, is seen from the
air at sunset in this photograph taken on June 15, 2014. AFP PHOTO / Saul LOEB
(Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
The first shadow government, COG, is a phantom
menace waiting for the right circumstances—a terrorist attack, a natural
disaster, an economic meltdown—to bring it out of the shadows, where it
operates even now. When and if COG takes over, the police state will transition
to martial law.
Yet as I point out in my book “Battlefield America:
The War on the American People,” it is the second shadow government, the Deep
State, which poses the greater threat to our freedoms. This permanent,
corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy is unaffected by elections,
unaltered by populist movements, and beyond the reach of the law.
As the following makes clear, these shadow
governments, which operate beyond the reach of the Constitution and with no
real accountability to the citizenry, are the reason why “we the people” have
no control over our government.
The COG shadow government, originally devised
during the Cold War as a means of ensuring that a nuclear strike didn’t
paralyze the federal government, has taken on a power—and a budget—of its own
in the years since 9/11, placing the nation in a constant state of
near-emergency and acclimating us to the sight of militarized police, military
drills on American soil, privatized prisons, the specter of internment camps,
and the erosion of constitutional rights, especially as they pertain to
so-called “extremists,” domestic or otherwise.
Under the Obama administration, the plans for a
full-time, permanent shadow government, stationed outside the capital, and run
by permanently appointed (not elected) executive officials have expanded and
grown far more elaborate and costly than many realize.
Study the COG plans carefully, however, and you’ll
find that the concern isn’t so much about protecting our government as it is
about protecting the nation’s governmental elite, ensuring, in Arkin’s words,
that “Washington can defend itself, take care of its own, and survive no matter
what.”
To this end, the government has invested heavily in
the “architecture of fear”: massive underground bunkers—the size of small
cities—which are sprinkled throughout the country for the government elite to
escape to “in case of an imminent nuclear strike so that they can set up a kind
of Administration-in-exile, directing every order of business from retaliation
to recovery.”
These self-contained bunkers, staffed 24/7 and
strategically located around the nation’s capital and in key states, represent
a who’s who on the shadow government’s payroll, with every department and
agency represented, from the Department of Education and the Trademark Office
to the Small Business Administration and the National Archives. No sector has
been overlooked. They even have contingency plans to save priceless works of
art.
However, you know who’s not on the list of
key-individuals-to-be-saved-in-the-eventuality-of-a-disaster? You and me and
every other American citizen who is viewed as a mere economic unit to be
tallied, bought and sold by those in power.
Not to worry, however. The government hasn’t
completely forgotten about us.
In the event of a loosely defined “national
emergency,” the Constitution will effectively be suspended, thereby ushering in
martial law.
At that time, writes Christopher Ketcham in Radar
magazine, the government will likely round up any “potentially suspect”
Americans and place them in one of the many internment camps or private prisons
built for just such an eventuality.
Conveniently, the Department of Homeland Security
has been building a database of Americans who might be considered potential
threats in the event of a national emergency. Referred to by the code name Main
Core, this database reportedly contains the names of millions of Americans who,
“often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly,
and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify
and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.”
Sounds unnervingly like the objectives of the
government’s new Domestic Terrorism Czar and the Strong Cities network, which
will be working to identify and target potential extremists, doesn’t it?
For all intents and purposes, the nation is one
national “emergency” away from having a full-fledged, unelected, authoritarian
state emerge from the shadows. All it will take is the right event—another
terrorist attack, perhaps, or a natural disaster—for such a regime to emerge
from the shadows.
As unnerving as that prospect may be, however, it
is the second shadow government, what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren
refers to as “the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass
heading regardless of who is formally in power,” that poses the greater threat
right now.
Consider this: how is it that partisan gridlock has
seemingly jammed up the gears (and funding sources) in Washington, yet the
government has been unhindered in its ability to wage endless wars abroad, in
the process turning America into a battlefield and its citizens into enemy
combatants?
The credit for such relentless, entrenched,
profit-driven governance, according to Lofgren, goes to “another government
concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue,
a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according
to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently
controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”
This state within a state, coordinated by the
Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council, is “a
hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of
Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the
Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department.” Also included are the
Department of the Treasury, certain key areas of the judiciary such as the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and a handful of vital federal trial
courts, and select members of the defense and intelligence committees.
Finally, as the Washington Post reveals, there is
the private side of this shadow government, which is made up of Wall Street,
Silicon Valley, and 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances, “a
number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.”
“These contractors now set the political and social
tone of Washington,” says Lofgren, “just as they are increasingly setting the
direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings
unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely
subject to congressional hearings.”
As Lofgren concludes:
“[T]he Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well
protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt
resistance that it is almost impervious to change… If there is anything the
Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence
that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate
a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a
useful distraction from its agenda.”
Remember this the next time you find yourselves
mesmerized by the antics of the 2016 presidential candidates or drawn into a
politicized debate over the machinations of Congress, the president or the
judiciary: it’s all intended to distract you from the fact that you have no
authority and no rights in the face of the shadow governments.
