Americans have been growing in awareness of the utility of the Turkish term “deep state.” Over the years, I’ve proposed a number of other useful terms such as “peak state:” that the single most likely leader of the deep state is the public ruler himself.

Another useful phrase might be the “soft state” to denote the myriad cultural and social programs the U.S. government funds or directs to be funded by allied NGOs to influence the world through things like promoting microlending to Third World women. President Obama’s mother spent her career largely working for organs of the American soft state, such as the Ford Foundation and a company I had never been aware of before this week: DAI or Development Alternatives, Inc.

A reader writes:

You’ve occasionally talked about deep state nexus of Obama’s mother but a quick google search indicates you’ve not stumbled across http://dai.com/

This was Obama’s mother’s employer at the time of her death.

The President used to bring up how his mother lacked health insurance during her final illness in the mid-1990s, although DAI has a generous plan.

Mrs. Obama Soetoro had also previously worked for DAI in Indonesia in the late 1970s.

It is a nexus of international intrigue with connections into intelligence, NGO, academic, diplomatic, etc type communities. …

One of those companies that could only exist in Washington, well, downtown Bethesda. You’d meet the most interesting people at their Christmas parties, that is for sure.

DAI is one of the rare companies where a line item on a personal expense report:

$100,000.00 — Ransom

is considered a fairly normal cost of doing business.

Anyhow, if you are looking for connections, DAI is a multiplexer.

DAI isn’t huge, but it isn’t insignificant. In 2010, DAI received $382 million in funding from the U.S. government’s USAID.

Occasionally, DAI makes the news, such as in the murky case of Allan Gross, a DAI affiliate who was locked up in Cuba from 2009-2014 on charges of spying. In 2010, a DAI employee, Linda Norgrove, was kidnapped by the Taliban. She died of wounds suffered during a Navy SEALs rescue attempt.

This supports my view that the President comes out of a very specialized family background, as I noted in 2012 in “The Muslimist” and in 2014 in “Obama: The Musical.”