Over time, however, the ambitious realized the monetary value of face time in Washington, D.C., and much of corporate America has opened Beltway offices. For example, defense contractor Lockheed, where my father worked as an engineer for 40 years, had started with its executive suite, offices, and assembly lines at the airport in sunny Burbank, Calif. In 1988, though, Lockheed merged with a main competitor, Martin Marietta, and relocated its headquarters to Bethesda, Md., to more conveniently schmooze the brass and politicos.
But the financial windfall that befell the Beltway after it failed to anticipate 9/11 and got wrong Iraq’s WMD threat has kicked the region into the stratosphere. In the 2010 Census, the top four counties in the country in median household income were in Virginia (the traditionally Republican-leaning side of the Washington metropolis). In sixth place is Howard County, Md. (The only non-Beltway county to make the top half dozen is Los Alamos, N.M., which has its own deep-state ties.)
Lofgren’s version of the deep state consists of the usual suspects hiding in plain sight: the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department, the Justice Department, the NSA, the small number of congressmen and staffers who involve themselves in foreign affairs, the Treasury and the Fed, defense industries, Beltway consulting firms, think tanks, plus affiliated interests on Wall Street and, more recently, Silicon Valley (as the partners of the NSA in data trawling).
Even this strikes me as a fairly limited list that could be extended to include more soft power fields. For example, the president’s anthropologist mother was a low-level apparatchik in America’s Cold War efforts to butter up Muslim countries, to display capitalism with a human face. Occasionally, she’d work directly for the government, as in her job at the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, but other times she’d be paid by the Ford Foundation or the East-West Center at the U. of Hawaii, which was founded by LBJ to compete with Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba U. for the loyalty of Third World students.
