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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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From that Washington Post article:

"Deep state” refers the unsubstantiated idea, frequently invoked by Trump, that a group of bureaucrats is working to undermine elected officials in order to shape government policy.

I'm not sure which annoys me more, that they don't even pretend that an opposing view might be worth hearing out, or that they have stopped bothering with proofreading as well.

It’s a poor definition of the deep state. The deep state exists, but it’s not about undermining the elected government. The deep state is all of the agencies that the elected government has given the power, for all practical purposes, to create legislation to run the state rather than do so itself. So you have OSHA banning chemicals in the workplace or requiring safety equipment rather than making the legislators do it. Or they have the FDA declare pot schedule I and thus illegal rather than them doing so themselves. And so these agencies have taken on a life of their own governing the nation, but without pesky things like elections or balance of power or accountability to hold them back.

I'd say that the deep state is probably best defined by asking two different questions:

Who is the Vice President of the United States?

Who is the Treasury Department employee in charge of NYC and thus the NYSE?

The one who's name I can't reasonably expect you to know is the deep state.

Who is the Treasury Department employee in charge of NYC and thus the NYSE

While thats not exactly how the Treasury is structured, its likely this guy:

https://home.treasury.gov/about/general-information/officials/josh-frost

"Before serving as Assistant Secretary, Josh was most recently the co-chair of the Liquidity Program for systemically important financial institution supervision at the New York Fed. Prior to this, he spent almost two decades in the New York Fed’s Markets Group in a variety of positions, including a role overseeing the two corporate credit facilities launched in response to the pandemic. Josh also served as the Director of Money Markets and Director of Treasury Markets, where his teams launched the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, conducted open market operations, and facilitated auctions of debt on behalf of the Treasury. Josh began his career at the New York Fed in 1998 as an analyst on the Central Bank and International Account Services team."