This is a chart I made showing, at least as I see, it, how America is run. Obviously there’s some influence from foreign actors, namely China, as well as wealthy European elites, but this is basically the pecking order.
You may disagree, and maybe at a later date I’ll change my mind about parts of it, but this is the way I believe the country is run.
At the bottom you have us, the American people.
We are primarily influenced by the media, Hollywood and cable news, as well as social media.
The media is in turn influenced by the Deep State (the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, etc.), and to a certain degree by the elected politicians. Corporate control of the media is a major factor, as is the influence of Big Tech.
At the government level, we have two groups: the elected officials who are largely transitory, (President and Congress), and the Deep State, which is the permanent government. The Deep State has a lot more power. Sometimes the elected government can influence the Deep State, but sometimes they’re in an adversarial relationship, as we saw with Trump.
Above the government are the large corporations and big tech. I was going to make them one and the same, and technically they are, but Big Tech has gotten so powerful over the past decade that I felt it deserved its own category. As I went over in a prior article from a few years back, both Facebook and Google were created by the CIA via the CIA’s venture capital arm “In-Q-Tel.” The short story is that in the 1990s, the Pentagon was digitizing all of its billions upon billions of documents and needed a way to easily search through them on their computer databases–result: Google. Facebook came along a few years later, when the intelligence apparatus required a way to keep track of people and their beliefs and actions, and easily look them up. Result: Facebook.
There is a diagonal arrow from the big corporations to the Deep State with the initials “M.I.C.” which stands for Military Industrial Complex.
The corporations are controlled by the big Wall Street banks, and the big Wall Street banks are, finally, owned and controlled by investment behemoths like Vanguard (which I wrote about the other day), BlackRock, Berkshire Hathaway and central banks. BlackRock and Vanguard are essentially on equal footing with the central banks, and Berkshire Hathaway is even more powerful than Wall Street because, if you remember, the government tried to get Warren Buffett to bail out the big banks in the crisis of 2008.
These investment behemoths, and the central banks, are ultimately run by the wealthy elites, the billionaires, etc. We’re talking about the wealthiest and most powerful families on the planet.
I am always reading and researching and trying to learn more about how this country is truly run, so this is all subject to change in the event I uncover something that changes my mind.