The United States DEEP STATE Is the Billionaire Class that Always Gets Its Way, Not "A Handful of Anonymous Government Employees"
US presidents, when mentally competent, have REAL power, but ONLY as long as they use it on behalf of the billionaire class
In response to the now-apparent mental incapacity of President Joe Biden, some commenters and pundits are using the phrase “deep state” to ask, and answer the question: Who is REALLY running the country? Unfortunately these people don’t get it right because they don’t explain what the highest authority in the United States actually is. Instead, they tell us that the real power is some behind-the-scenes anonymous government employees, and that to make things right we need to make sure that the president we elect is indeed the person with the real power running the country. This notion is a cover-up of the truth, designed to ensure that the public not direct its anger at the people who really are running the country.1
The highest authority in the United States—the Deep State—is not some anonymous government employees, it is the collective will of the richest people.
Before discussing how this collective will of the richest people actually works, let’s first see that it is indeed the highest authority.
The most obvious evidence that the collective will of the richest people is the highest authority is the simple fact that they always get their way, and the contrary will of the have-nots doesn’t prevail. For most people this is simply obvious. It is obvious to the have-nots at the bottom of society that they are treated like dirt by the haves. I give 21 concrete examples of this, along with an explanation for WHY the rich must treat the have-nots like dirt, in my article, “Why Have No Rich and No Poor?” To take just one example, we don’t have affordable housing for the have-nots—which is something virtually all regular people want and are furious that we don’t have—but instead, new luxury housing appears like mushrooms after a rainy day everywhere. Why? This is the collective will of the richest Americans, obviously.
When top notch scholars investigated what the top authority is in the United States, using lots of data and valid statistical analysis, they came to the conclusion that we live not in anything deserving to be called a democracy but rather an oligarchy—rule by the rich. This academic study reported in the journal Perspectives on Politics [DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595 ] published September 18, 2014, by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, (also described here and here) concludes with the following statements:
"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."
"When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it."
"Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."
In other less academic wording, we have a fake democracy that is actually a dictatorship of the rich.
OK, If It’s the Rich who rule, how does that actually work?
In the early years of the United States when only men of substantial property could vote, the kind of people who got elected to the office of President of the United States, men such as George Washington and other Founding Fathers (who were, as I show in some detail here enemies of We the People) were trusted by the class of rich people to have the interests of the rich and not the have-nots as their chief concern.
And the election process resulted in competent men getting elected. The rich people wrote the Constitution to be the actual law of the land, picking their words in it very carefully to makes sure that the class of rich people would rule (as I discuss in some detail here) and that an individual tyrant (like a king) would not rule over the class of rich people (hence the famous “checks and balances”.)
Over time, the class of rich people strengthened their grip on society by their increased wealth and control of society’s most important institutions—big agriculture (including slave plantations initially), industries, the media, universities, etc.. At the same time ordinary people clamored for more say in the government. The rich responded by giving more ordinary people the right to vote, while at the same time using their power over the key institutions of society to ensure that the top elected positions in government would be filled by individuals beholden to the class of rich people.
The rich gave their vitally important make-or-break backing to politicians vetted by them and known to be loyal to the rich. And yes, among the vetted loyal politicians is Donald Trump, as I discuss here and as Brian Berletic discusses near the end of his very interesting video about the flagrantly inferior Secret Service protection of Trump when he was shot by a would-be assassin.
The rich also marginalized or character-assassinated any popular politician whom they did not trust. Read here how the rich (including FDR!) did this to the very pro-have-nots Upton Sinclair when, to the shock of the rich, Sinclair won the Democratic Party’s primary vote and became its candidate for Governor of California in 1934.
The rich allowed politicians to make whatever promises to the have-nots that were useful for getting votes (such as the promises—all ignored after the politician was elected—that I discuss in detail here), as long as these promises did not undercut or refute the key Big Lies that the rich used to divide-and-rule the have-nots. For example, politicians could promise the moon to the have-nots but they could never say that racial discrimination against non-whites HARMED, not benefited, ordinary whites. Oh no! (When Martin Luther King, Jr. did explain the truth about this, the government assassinated him.) The rich made the election process a means by which they weeded out politicians who were inept at controlling the have-nots with promises and lies (i.e., who lost the election) and ensured that the winner would be very skilled in this social control on behalf of the rich.
The class of rich people are like the board of directors of a corporation
By managing things this way, the class of rich people are like the board of directors of a corporation, and the president of the United States is like a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the nation. Let’s stop and consider how a corporation is ruled.
The board of directors appoints a Chief Executive Officer to run the corporation. Now on the one hand, this CEO has real power. He or she is NOT merely a figure head. He or she really does make the key decisions. He or she really does hire and fire whom he or she wishes. The lower level management employees really do take their orders from the CEO. The advisors to the CEO really are JUST advisors. There is no shadowy
”real authority” or “Deep Corporation” calling the shots.
On the other hand, it is also true that if the CEO loses the trust and confidence of the board of directors for any reason—be it mental incompetence or a failure to make the interests of the board of directors primary, or whatever—then the board of directors will fire the CEO and replace him or her with somebody else.
The President of the United States is like the CEO of a Corporation
Like the CEO of a corporation, the president of the United States really does have the powers assigned to that office by the Constitution of the United States. The president really does make key decisions, really does send proposed budgets to Congress, really does veto Congressional bills, really does issue executive orders, really does appoint or fire key executive officials such as secretary of state and defense, and director of the CIA, etc., really does appoint or fire generals when he or she wishes, really does give orders to the military. There is no shadowy “real authority” or “Deep State” of government employees calling the shots…..except when the following happens.
When the president of the United States loses the trust and confidence of the class of rich people for any reason—be it mental incompetence or a failure to make the interests of the class of rich people primary, or whatever—then the class of rich people will do whatever it takes to get their way in spite of the disagreement of the president. Sometimes the rich simply rely on their agents in top government positions to ignore orders from the president, as happened regarding the early Eisenhower years of Vietnam policy and discussed here.
The most obvious example of this is that when president John F. Kennedy “went off the tracks” after the Cuban Missile Crisis and decided to end the Cold War in order to avoid a thermonuclear war, which almost occurred during that Cuban Missile Crisis, the class of rich people had JFK assassinated.2 The class of rich people absolutely wanted the Cold War to continue, for reasons that I discuss here. When what the class of rich people want and what the president of the United States wants conflict, the class of rich people get its way. The deep state is the class of rich people.
How does the class of rich people organize to get its way?
Rich people have both formal and informal power. Their formal power is visible: they sit on the board of directors of corporations and they own things (like corporations and property) and do with them what they wish.
Their informal power takes many not-so-visible forms. One form is that they place people loyal to the rich in positions of authority in the government. I discuss this in some detail here with respect to the CIA-orchestrated assassination of JFK and the role of the Dulles brothers’ loyalty to their law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, LLP that was beholden to its billionaire clients.
Rich people may have their differences, but when it comes to wanting to make sure that our society remains one in which the rich stay on top of the have-nots, they have no trouble agreeing on what must be done when this status quo is threatened, even if it is threatened by an off-the-tracks president of the United States. One example of this is how the rich (bankers) stepped in to destroy the Occupy Wall Street Movement, as you can read about here.
While we are not privvy to the details of how the rich organize and use their informal power, the fact that they do so is crystal clear from the fact that they orchestrated the assassination of President Kennedy and managed to maintain a complete official cover-up of the fact for all these many years.
The supreme power of the rich is also clear from these facts:
There is total censorship of the fact that racial discrimination against non-whites harms, not benefits, ordinary whites.
There is total censorship of the fact (which I prove here) that Israeli violence against Palestinians is for the purpose of enabling billionaire Israelis to control and get rich off of the Israeli Jewish working class, and not at all for the purpose of making Israeli Jews safe.
There is virtual (see one tiny exception in footnote *** here) total censorship of the fact that the reason so many people from south of the U.S. border have been trying to (even illegally) enter the United States is because the U.S. ruling class for decades has been doing things to FORCE them to have to enter the United States just in order to survive.
There is ABSOLUTELY TOTAL censorship of the fact that most Americans would love to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor, as I prove here. This censorship is a crucial element of the ruling class’s strategy to prevent the have-nots from gaining the confidence required to actually take concrete steps to make an egalitarian revolution, steps such as those I describe here.
The Boston Globe newspaper, owned by the billionaire John Henry, pushes one version of this notion, specifically that the deep state is anonymous government employees who stay on the job no matter who is elected president, in its article “Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.” The billionaires know that people realize that we don’t live in a real democracy, and so they try to channel this discontent into the aim of just making sure that the elected president has the real power and not the anonymous government employees. This is all about protecting the dictatorship of the rich by ensuring that its existence is not the object of anger.
Regarding specifically Allen Dulles’s role in orchestrating the JFK assassination, see The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government, by David Talbot.
Regarding the CIA’s role in orchestrating the JFK assassination and the motive being to prevent the president from ending the Cold War, see: 1. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James W. Douglass; 2. JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, by Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years who ran the global system designed to provide military support for the clandestine activities of the CIA from 1955 to 1964; 3. “When They Killed JFK They Killed America” by Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.