A 28-year congressional aide advises power resides in a handful of agencies, a few congressional chairmen, a vast phalanx of intelligence and security contractors, kept within parameters by a Beltway-Wall Street axis of fixers.
The irony is that the article is hosted on the site of the Church Lady Bill Moyers whose daisy-plucking girl so enraged Sam Waterson the Law & Order actor voted for Goldwater.
As noted Snowden reveals much--and creates a near-Howard Beale revulsion.
A significant passage is:
Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.We can see the Rubin, Summers, Geithner circuit, the conflict of interest of Petraeus and Gates, the unbridled power of Obama--who once recoiled in horror at the crimes of Bush-as-Borgia.
Has Moyers forgot the insider trading before the Assassination, the ravenous profits of Bell and Brown & Root et al, the enormous investment in airframes and ordnance and construction of infrasture associated with bases and harbors all to be for naught at the end of the war fought over the 35th president's body?
There is a 26-minute interview with Mike Lofgren here:
http://mikelofgren.net/His comment on the decline of the American empire is of interest in the written article, saying the insiders believe they are Olympus as public opinion gives the future to China.
At the rate of US surveillance and regulation, there will be a seamless transfer, in my view, validating Blair-Orwell.
