The Deep State is Just Another Word for Public-Private Relationships
It's a new year- a good time to begin a new coursefor the future!
Mapping The Whole and the Implicate Order- the local to the global
If you want to transform a government' just take over managing the economy- that’s what the Maine Legislature did in 1976, to establish the deep state of Maine, which favored the new tech industry above and beyond all others.
By deep state, I mean government by public-private relationships, as embodied by the incoming Musk-Trump relationship.
The Back Story
In 1969 Maine became a Home Rule State by constitutional amendment establishing local control over matters local and municipal in character.
In 1976 by legislative deeming, Maine became an economy centrally managed by the state with the stated intent to undo Home Rule as documented in the Governor‘s Report of 1976, prepared for the Governor by a board composed of the leaders of the largest, wealthiest businesses in Maine.
In 2022 LD 2003 was enacted as HP1489 declaring state-wide control over municipal ordinances
In 2024 Maine’s newly formed state-owned space industry competes against SpaceX owned by the richest man in the world who is empowered to reinvent the federal government of the USA to his liking.
To start the New Year off I sent this letter to the Editor of the Boothbay Register:
The term “Priority zone” is used in the Maine legislative act, commonly referred to as LD 2003, for zones where housing density cannot be regulated and “character of location” is forbidden to be spoken by municipal planners. The community character tends toward uniform income-capped housing units packed as densely as a city block amid a rural STR vacationland.
Soon after LD 2003 was enacted, the Boothbay Regional Development Corporation was chartered, said to be a response to the Boothbay Region workforce housing crisis.
The state uses the term “workforce” to signify workers in deals made between private corporations and the state in exchange for public subsidies.
The State of Maine Housing Needs Production Study reports that housing needed by 2030 for Lincoln County is between 880 and 1100 units. If the units are divided equally among all 13 towns, It is 84 units per town.
The Priority Zone conversation is about worker housing but the working class is not invited to participate in planning. The state is only interested in what it needs for its workforce and does not concern itself with all types of housing that the working class needs to develop working-class ideas of the way life should be, including remote workers, the self-employed, and businesses in a home.
BRDC is planning 162 income-capped housing units at 3.5 the density of the surrounding area. All of the land and most of the units will be owned by the corporation.
BRDC covers the need for workforce housing for the entire Peninsula while Priority Zones are mandated to be in every municipality.
On social media sites like Medium one can read about how the workers feel about corporate culture. It’s the boulevard of broken dreams.
An unregulated STR environment calls for multiple priority zones in every municipality that serve a variety of lifestyles and purposes.
By forbidding municipal officers from using certain words LD 2003 prohibits conversations from occurring about alternative ways of thinking about housing and community, calling for the people themselves to expand the conversation and to innovate Priority Zones to serve all.
What needs to happen to LD 2003 is to repeal all the parts that infringe upon the First Amendment of the US Constitution and the Home Rule of the Maine Constitution. That leaves a singular mandate that every municipality has to have at least one priority zone. The prohibitions against regulating density and references to overcrowding, overpopulation, and the character of location are deleted. The priority zones can be much nicer when the density can be regulated and the character of the location established.
In 2025 local Maine leadership has docilely accepted a statewide mandate over municipal ordinances that will radically change the unique historical character of the state, based on nothing more than a study and recommendations written by unelected commissioners advancing their special interests.
The unelected character of local politics is duplicated in national politics by the unelected Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of a fake government agency that replicates Congress and its constitutional power of the purse. Musk is pushing a legal theory called Impoundment that can allow the president to refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress, negating Congress‘s power and expanding his own. Musk has become so attached to the president-elect that Musk is characterized as the shadow president or even the president.
Elon Musk Meet Janet Mills
Elon and Vivek think the US government should be run in the interest of their own business. Janet Mills thinks government should be run as a business too, especially now that remote work is causing many corporation headquarters to close, making it harder to negotiate with corporations to locate a corporate headquarters within a state.
The next evolution is to institute a large-scale industry across an entire state, for the state, by the state. That business is the Maine Space Corporation, chartered in violation of the Maine Constitution, Article IV, Part Third, Sections 13 and 14. which, taken together is about the separation of powers, Government regulates business, it does not run businesses, with only two exceptions.
Section 13. Special legislation. The Legislature shall, from time to time, provide, as far as practicable, by general laws, for all matters usually appertaining to special or private legislation.
Section 14. Corporations, formed under general laws. Corporations shall be formed under general laws, and shall not be created by special Acts of the Legislature, except for municipal purposes, and in cases where the objects of the corporation cannot otherwise be attained; and, however formed, they shall forever be subject to the general laws of the State.
In a throwback to the Industrial Revolution, Musk runs his businesses like glorified tech shop sweat houses, governing by temper tantrums and demanding 24-7 access to the worker’s time and lives. This style of “leadership” is called his “work ethic” by the media.
Musk is already treating Americans as if they are his employees over whom he asserts his “tough grit, grindstone” philosophy of work as Musk and Ramaswamy expand their roles of gutting the American government to reduce the cost of government. Now the totalitarian duo is moving into the role of managing the American government by calling for the end of remote work in government employment.
When Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out their vision for slashing the size of the federal government, they touted plans to bring workers back to the office full-time.
Working from home was a "Covid-era privilege," the duo, appointed by President-elect Donald Trump to lead a new so-called Department of Government Efficiency, wrote in a Nov. 20 Wall Street Journal op-ed. Source
I applied for remote work in a government job in the patent office. Since I have many original designs in ceramic glaze, body, and form design to protect and preserve, I thought I might benefit beyond just the income but in the knowledge I would learn. I’m not going to drive long distances for such a job or move for such a job, but based on my background in designing products, I think I could do such a job and I have the basic qualifications, but Musk doesn't think I should have such an opportunity.
Musk is all about corporations telling everyone what to do because corporations are more important than we the people. Musk should tell the entire government how to manage their employees because he is the richest man in the world even though he has no understanding of institutions that exist to serve the interests of the people. In Musk’s world view the government exists to serve the interest of corporations.
Across the nation, Across the state, and in our communities, we need to get back to the rule of law and our constitutional principles such as the separation of powers and individual rights.
Some of us just want to have enough to be comfortable while living a meaningful life but that is becoming a less achievable goal as the wealth divide increases. If we deconstruct our government with a hatchet (Musk says he and Vivek are not going to be gentle) by eliminating all the programs that benefit the tax-paying public it will increase the wealth divide. Musk is signaling that micro-entrepreneurialism should not exist with his idea that government workers should be forced back to the office where they can be beaten with a whip to produce non-stop because this is how Musk believes results are achieved. (figuratively speaking)
I say Musk and Ramaswamy aren’t the brightest bulbs when it comes to understanding society at large.
Encounters I have had with the corporate mentality bump up against the “efficiency” work ethic, which one must learn to ignore if one wants to get anything done, especially not when so much work today requires the workers to use their innovative capabilities.
When I was a colorist my boss told me I was too slow but I was fixing the work of the other colorists supposedly faster than me. They were cranking it out but the results weren’t good enough to be used so I ignored my idiotic boss. The company needed me to transform the results into something that could be used. I wasn’t going to get results while focusing on beating a clock.
When I was working for the AI company the clock was being used to prevent me from being paid for my work. The company said they saw I was using a virtual private network that the company is not set up to accommodate.
Oh really? You can see that I am using a VPN? What else can you see? Can you see and access my work before I submit it if I don’t use the VPN?
The timer had a way of running out just as I was about to submit, and I did not get paid if I did not submit so that meant I would lose all my investment. I said to the company that we are independent contractors and are supposed to be in charge of our own time. In response, I was given the efficiency lecture, the kind of reasoning that Musk spouts. I responded with a legal assessment of what the terms of the agreement for independent contractors are, citing their terms of the agreement from the company contract.
Since then I have received various tasks and friendly messages which I ignore. The only thing that matters is that the company addressed my point about being an independent contractor. I won’t work on a timer. It’s not in my contract.
Remote work is independent contracting. The plus side of independent contracting is that one manages one's own work process. You get paid for results not your hours, How you manage your time is up to you. That is very important when work is innovative, and even for any type of work such as data entry because when you are focusing on the work and not the clock, you can focus on the details, and that is where good results come from.
Maybe some types of people need to have the whip cracked over them to produce, but others need to go with the flow to get results. There should be room for everyone but not in Musk’s world. He thinks the entire world should be controlled by his narrow mind.
When announcing his new role as chief advisor over the power of the national purse, the ruthless entrepreneur asked voters to be prepared to “suffer hardship” as the richest man in the world designs plans to cut social programs and tells people they were going to have to “live within their means “ for the sake of future prosperity (his own).
How people live is systemically arranged. That’s why we need to create new priorities when the existing ones are not serving the people’s interests. Even before the incoming president is elected, the dice have already been thrown with an effect like a bolt of lightning.
In August before the election, stories predicted the demise of Tesla, since the election, its stock has soared: Tesla Hits $1.5 Trillion in Market Value, Nearly Double Its Worth on Election Day
But with the new year comes reports of sales records and Tesla’s stock sinks: Elon Musk's Net Worth Plunges $17 Billion on Tesla Trouble
Despite the pompous rhetoric about high IQs required to be a Musk employee and mediocre Americans, Tesla’s technology is the problem, specifically safety technology. Loosening government regulations won’t change it, that should make buyers even more wary. Buyers have a tendency to place high value on their lives and those of their loved ones. Musk is very occluded from humanity but is that so hard to figure out?
As a creative person, I find Musk’s work process rhetoric dysfunctional. Those of us who are self-employed and independent contractors (remote workers) govern our own work process and learn to listen to our energy. When I feel my energy is tied up in a knot, I know it’s time to take a break and my inspiration returns when I am relaxed. I have reviewed many papers for HSSC about how to encourage workers to use their innovative talents on the job. Not a one of them recommended driving the workers incessantly into late hours of the night, usually without overtime pay, to get results.
Perhaps Musk’s work process philosophy works on a few who rise to the top but Musk and Ramaswamy believe they can apply their philosophy to the American people. and that there is one way that can be applied to all. This denial of individuality is a character trait of the centrally managed state.
I, on the other hand, am the sole custodian of the assets of Andersen Design, whose identification with individuality, I have a stake in the game. I am just one individual and Musk is the Empire. I believe the creative and innovative work process needs room to breathe and that is the only way to allow for room for discovery, which is what the innovative process is about.
People want to breathe and live a life of discovery and Musk wants to control everything. Musk doesn’t understand people. There is no room for individuality in his vision or in the general concept of central management since central management seeks to control all, Musk’s egomaniacal concept of the work process seeks to occlude independently organized processes.
Across the nation, Across the state, and in our communities, we need to get back to the rule of law and our constitutional principles such as the separation of powers and individual rights.
The deep state is a vaguely defined term used by the far right to represent the enemy. As the far right gains political power the deep state is interpreted to be, none other than the US constitutional system of government, based on a balance of powers. For Musk and Ramaswamy, that’s it, the deep state is nothing more or less than the US constitutional form of government that prevents DOGE, the private side of the public-private relationship, from controlling everything.
Maine has transgressed the separation of power between regulating business and running a business. SpaceX is the most glaring testimony to the fact that the object of Maine’s Space Corporation can be achieved another way, in the private sector but Musk is merging the government with his business interests.
Musk built SpaceX on federal contracts. If Maine is looking for similar contracts. Maine’s largest industrial competition is positioning itself as the budgetary decider, in opposition to the principle of separation of powers. Musk has already demonstrated that he uses his new-found power to his own business benefit and now Musk and Ramaswamy are extending their powers of reducing the budget to regulating relationships with government employees as if the whole world should be run the way Musk runs his businesses.
Neither Musk nor Ramaswamy know how to read a room. The comments made by Ramaswamy could have been stated constructively without the racial insults and he didn’t need to say “Don’t do this”. He should have just made a constructive suggestion about how to develop an interest in math and sciences.
Ramaswamy was saying America needs more education while Trump has been advocating for cutting the Department of Education from the federal budget, which makes education a state issue, not a federal one. It’s evident that DOGE has a different agenda than MAGA so what exactly is going on?
MAGA has never been a rational movement so while the initial acceptance of the richest man in the world as their new leader was at first a smooth transition, when the tech bros made exceptions for immigrants taking tech jobs. that crossed the line.
MAGA’s core identity is hatred of immigrants. Musk is an immigrant. His partner, Vivek Ramaswamy is a natural-born citizen of non-citizen parents. Trump is proposing that natural-born citizenship be removed from the Constitution.
Musk does not understand the dynamics of the power he has purchased.
Musk overlooks that it is the MAGA electoral base that Republicans fear.
Musk and Ramaswamy just started a war with the MAGA base.
How uncool!
