My comments today owe 100% credit to Jeffrey Tucker of Brownstone Research. He is one of the most astute analysts of the intersection of politics and the economy writing today. As a result, his work is widely censored. He is the painstaking researcher who pieced together a credible theory of why then-President Trump did a 180 in the early days of the pandemic, pivoting from it's just the flu to lockdowns, masking and elevating Fauci to rock star health guru.
As part of that research he has come up with a very incisive way of describing how government and big business actually work. We've all heard the phrase "deep state". It's a term that is alternately ridiculed as conspiracy by legacy media and then described as a very good thing by the New York Times. Tucker goes deeper in his analysis and defines terms better than I have seen anywhere else.
He defines the deep state as the intelligence and security agencies that coordinate closely with law enforcement agencies. They operate largely without media scrutiny. Included would be the CIA, DHS, FBI, NSA, CISA, NSC and more than a dozen others along with their government funded foundations, think tanks and private sector cutouts. Deep means clandestine and that's the way they operate.
The middle state is otherwise known as the administrative state. Over 400 different civilian letter agencies with 2 million+ employees who, because of civil service protection and union rules, cannot be fired. The infamous Dr. Fauci is a prime example. The President can appoint a few hundred agency heads but the actual institutional knowledge and power resides with the career bureaucrats who mostly do whatever they want...or nothing at all. The political appointees are here today, gone tomorrow. The permanent bureaucrats do what they want and barely pay attention to their politically appointed "bosses".
Tucker goes on to describe what he calls the shallow state. This is where the turnstyle between big government and big business becomes the most obvious. The word state is effectively expanded to include businesses operating at the pleasure of the state, whether on government contracts, the use of regulations to stymie their competitors or using the threat of regulatory extortion to tell them that they must do whatever their government masters want them to do if they want to stay in business. The term turnstyle refers to high ranking employees in regulated industries moving fluidly from their business to the agency regulating their business and then back again.
Government contractors are most obvious in the defense sector, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics, etc.The FDA keeps pharmaceutical companies in lockstep, Moderna, Pfizer, Eli Lilly etc. Pharma's gigantic advertising budgets make sure legacy media never blows the whistle on them, witness the rapid FDA approval of COVID vaccines which were not as effective as claimed and had serious side effects. Also they were not actual vaccines but gene modification treatments.
Many other large companies that don't come to mind as government contractors, in fact, are. Amazon Web Services has upwards of $20 billion in contracts with the NSA, the U.S. Navy and is the host of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract. Their product search algorithms disfavor government disapproved products and services, The dairy lobby works with the U.S.Department of Agriculture to prevent competition from raw milk producers. The government mouthpiece New York Times chimes in calling raw milk a right wing hobby horse when anyone with any sense of history can tell you that consuming raw milk is a lefty thing.Even family doctors were paid bounties for pushing the COVID vaccine. Microsoft has upwards of $32 billion in defense contracts. Its LinkedIn division helped push lockdowns. Academia, which directly or indirectly receives most of its funding from the government , enthusiastically pushed lockdowns to the educational detriment of at least two classes of students.
And, of course, the whole monetary system is used to levy what is effectively a 2% sales tax on everyone while playing favorites with its too big to fail financial institutions.
Whether it's the deep state, the middle state or the shallow state, we're all in thrall to the state. And it's not a good thing; Sooner or later, in the latter stages of empire, it ends in collapse. We may be getting closer than you might think. That's this week's Report From the Fields. I'm Richard Fields. See you again next week.