There have been many commentaries and editorial cartoons on the surreal, laughable shallowness and superficiality of the topics and coverage of this presidential campaign. This shallowness begs a much more important question: What are they avoiding talking about?
DUers know. And they know that what's not being talked about is even worse than the non-coverage of the ongoing Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. What's not being talked about is even worse than the Payday Loan bailout of the big banks.
Nevertheless, the bipartisan support for the Payday Loan scam is a good place to begin talking about those things which our lords and masters wish to remain unspoken. The basic silence is about the Democratic Party's leadership's refusal to take a strongly partisan stance against Bush and the military-offshoring-banking (MOB) cabal that is robbing America blind. That is, the silence is about the fact that our representatives don't represent us.
Case in point: Sybil Edmonds. Now, here is a poster child for the total and treasonous corruption that has run this country under Bush. Selling nuclear secrets for profit to Arab countries. But look whose dirty little hand is also in the cookie jar: Israel. Well, you can stop right there. And that's exactly what the U.S. press and our Democratic Party has done for the last six years.
I guess the Dem leadership's attitude is that Sybil is just a rogue agent.
"What's a 'rogue' agent?, we asked.
"The honest law enforcement authorities, be it on the local, state, or federal level," Blackie replied. "Guys who weren't clued in on the protected nature of the enterprise being carried out."
No description we heard was more telling. "Rogue' agents were guys that weren't in on the joke.
- "Barry and the Boys", Daniel Hopsicker
A second case would be the Kyl-Lieberman amendment. While we're at it, why is the Democratic Party still chums with Traitor "I'm for McCain" Lie-berman? Just asking.
A third case: Retro-active telco amnesty. Harry Reid is bringing it to the floor for a second time over Christopher Dodd's "hold". Just whose side is Harry on?
Since the 2006 election, the number of instances like these has grown and grown. But anytime someone begins to talk about it, and to suggest that maybe something is going on "behind the scenes", two words are inevitably spoken: conspiracy theory. It doesn't matter that the DLC made a secret deal with Bush. Speculating about why they did it is CT. The Dem leadership makes zero noise about political prisoner Dan Siegelman, Governor of Alabama - and has done next to nothing about the US attorney purge that made him a prisoner. Any speculating about that is also met with the charge of CT.
CT here, CT there, pretty soon you are talking real paranoia. Which usually shuts down any further discussion.
The purpose of this post is to offer a way past the CT roadblock. I want to do that by reminding people that there is a middle ground that is neither CT nor the Washington Post's sanitized version of political reality. Appropriately, that middle approach is called "deep politics.
Conspiracy theories (in the words of Alexander Cockburn) 'encourage a belief that if we get rid of a few bad people, everything would be well in the world.'
I propose deep political analysis...not as a substitute or alternative to the structural analysis desired by Cockburn...but as an extension of it. I have ...argued that a true understanding...will lead, not to 'a few bad people', but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed. The conspiracies I see as operative, in other words, are part of our political structure, not exceptions to it."
Normally, these deep political processes are not brought to the public eye: for example, the way in which major drug traffickers are recurringly protected by the U.S. Justice Department... Such arrangements are widely known, but rarely written about. One way or another, scholars and journalists learn to back off...
A deep political system or process is one which habitually resorts to decision-making and enforcement procedures outside as well as inside those publicly sanctioned by law and society. In popular terms, collusive secrecy and law-breaking are part of how a deep political system works.
What makes these supplementary procedures "deep" is the fact that they are covert or suppressed, outside general awareness as well as outside acknowledged political processes. Sometimes the secret is an open one, as when a particular city knows that its cops are on the take, or a nation knows that its parties have found ways to completely thwart the intention of campaign-financing laws. But some secrets are more closely held.
We see deep politics in imperial and post-imperial systems which are accustomed to use criminal assets to intervene lawlessly in other societies. But it is also a feature of large-scale political systems which include within them ethnic communities or regions where the law of the outside majority is challenged by, and ultimately reaches an accommodation with, locally based gangs, triads, or mafias.
Deep political analysis focuses on the usually ignored mechanics of accommodation. From the viewpoint of conventional political science, law enforcement and the underworld are opposed to each other, the former struggling to gain control of the latter. A deep political analysis notes that in practice these efforts at control lead to the use of criminal informants; and this practice, continued over a long period of time, turns informants into double agents with status within the police as well as the mob. The protection of informants and their crimes encourages favors, payoffs, and eventually systemic corruption. The phenomenon of "organized crime" arises": entire criminal structures that come to be tolerated by the police because of their usefulness in informing on lesser criminals. In time one may arrive at the kind of police-crime symbiosis familiar from (Prohibition Era) Chicago, where the controlling hand may be more with the mob than with the police department it has now corrupted.
It is customary to acknowledge this kind of symbiosis as a local or regional problem, not a central one. But in the 1980s we learned in a court case that one of the mob's top men in the Teamsters, Jackie Presser (who had been a member of the Reagan presidential transition team), was simultaneously an FBI informant.
Such dirty realities are not usually talked about in classrooms. But the mechanics of accommodation are important, at least as much so in the area of political security, where security informants are first recruited, and eventually promoted to be double agents. Experience teaches us that these double agents tend to become increasingly important in the hierarchy of both the investigative agency and the party investigated...double agents (are) likely to become provocateurs...Truly successful double agents acquire their own agendas, distinguishable from those of their agency and possibly their party as well.
This is not a theoretical matter...Time after time, from the fiascos of Oliver North's Middle Eastern ventures to the bombings of Pan Am flight 103 and the (1992) WTC,, we have seen how the tolerated crimes of double agents have proven disastrous to those who think they control them.
----
A deep political system is one where the processes openly acknowledged are not always securely in control, precisely because of their accommodation to unsanctioned sources of violence, through arrangements not openly acknowledged and reviewed.
Years ago the late A. J. Liebling observed how difficult it was to separate the power of the mob from the power of City Hall, and he asked whether the powers of both were not a front for those private corporations who preferred endemic corruption to the enforcement of laws against themselves.
- "Deep Politics and the Death of JFK", Peter Dale Scott (1993, preface to 1996 edition)
That's about all I think DU can digest in one post. Bon apetit.
Please discuss.
arendt
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