Vote All You Want, But Nothing Will Change

Here's a good review of a new book titled National Security and Double Government:

Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/10/18/vote-all-you-want-the-secret-government-won-change/jVSkXrENQlu8vNcBfMn9sL/story.html

This is similar to what Peter Dale Scott calls the "deep state":

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/4090

But unlike Scott, Glennon doesn't see anything sinister behind this "double state":

And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful oversight to rein them in.

Well, that's comforting ... "he's not a conspiracy theorist":

In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA.

If anything, that means that his book may be a limited hangout blaming it all on the rank and file bureaucracy instead of on the real "deep state" (which of course only nut jobs believe in).

And I seriously disagree with this statement of Glennon's:

The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people.

The ultimate problem is that the double state and the deep state, working in conjunction, have disabled all the tools of political power that the American people used to have. Having no tools of liberation, We The People are now subject to all the tools of political oppression that our brutal overlords are bringing to bear on us.

There are changes coming, all right. But you're not going to like them.

Unless you're one of those whose vote does count: the bankgangsters, the corporate thugs, and their accomplices in the one percent.