The Shadow Government

Copyright © 1994 Constitution Society. Permission is hereby granted to copy for noncommercial use.

It is becoming increasingly apparent to American citizens that government is no longer being conducted in accordance with the U.S. Constitution, or, within states, according to state constitutions. While people have recognized for more than 150 years that the rich and powerful often corrupt individual officials, or exert undue influence to get legislation passed that favors their interests, most Americans still cling to the naive belief that such corruption is exceptional, and that most of the institutions of society, the courts, the press, and law enforcement agencies, still largely comply with the Constitution and the law in important matters. They expect that these corrupting forces are disunited and in competition with one another, so that they tend to balance one another.

Mounting evidence makes it clear that the situation is far worse than most people think, that during the last several decades the U.S. Constitution has been effectively overthrown, and that it is now observed only as a façade to deceive and placate the masses. What has replaced it is what many call the Shadow Government. It still, for the most part, operates in secret, because its control is not secure. The exposure of this regime and its operations must now become a primary duty of citizens who still believe in the Rule of Law and in the freedoms which this country is supposed to represent.<1>

It is difficult to identify a single date or event that marks the overthrow, but we can identify some critical steps.

The first was the Dick Act of 1903, which repealed the Militia Act of 1792 and tried to relegate the Constitutional Militia to the National Guard, under control of what is now the U.S. Defense Department. The second was the Federal Reserve Act, which established a central bank only nominally under the control of the government.

Further erosion of constitutional governance was motivated by several challenges which the powerful felt required them to put aside their differences and unite. The first was the Great Depression of 1933-1941. The second was World War II and the threat from fascism, followed by the Cold War and the threat from Soviet imperialism and from communism.

The third defies credibility, but cannot be avoided. UFOs and aliens. Despite the lack of hard evidence accessible to ordinary citizens, there is enough testimonial evidence to compel a reasonable person to conclude three things: UFOs exist, they are intelligently directed, and they are not ours.<2> Even if that were all that the government knew about them, minds already paranoid from the Cold War could hardly help but perceive such things as a significant potential threat, one that required secrecy, preparation, and disregard for provisions of a Constitution that were inconvenient. There are, however, enough leaks from government officials to indicate that the government knows a great deal about them that it is concealing from the public.

The fourth is the eco-crisis, which combines both the ecological and economic crises. Many leaders have recognized for a long time that we are headed for disaster, not a kind of cyclical downturn like the Great Depression, but an irreversible decline brought about by a combination of resource depletion, environmental degradation, and overpopulation, playing out in an anarchic international system of disparate nation- states, national currencies, national banks, and multinational corporations, exacerbated by traditional tribal rivalries, class conflict, and different languages and religions.<3>

Confronted with the political fact that to deal with the problems faced in the last half of the 20th century, it was difficult enough to pass legislation thought to be needed, without having to also adopt the amendments to the U.S. Constitution necessary to make such legislation constitutional, it became too easy to just adopt more and more legislation without worrying about its constitutionality, and depend on compliant officials and judges to go along with it, which for the most part, they have done. This was facilitated by the lack of sufficiently strong protests from the people, many of whom, ignorant of constitutional rights and limitations on governmental powers, and focused on the problems to be solved, supported much of the legislation.<4>

We can also identify several insidious developments which seemed necessary and harmless at the time, but which led to the present situation. One was the rise of military and civilian intelligence organs during World War II. The need to prevent leaks of military secrets brought a censorship apparatus that gained substantial control over the flow of information through the press, the broadcast media, telephonic and telegraphic communications, and the mail. However, instead of dismantling that apparatus when the war was over, we immediately transitioned to the Cold War, and the information control apparatus only went underground and became somewhat less obtrusive. This led to the present situation in which the intelligence apparatus maintains effective control over the major media, can tap anyone's phone without a court order, reads people's mail, monitors their finances, and gathers information on citizens and their activities that threatens their privacy and liberties.

The situation had evolved to the extent that, at the end of President Eisenhower's second term, he warned in a speech of the potential danger to our freedoms from a "military-industrial complex". In fact, by that time, it had become a "intelligence- military-industrial-financial-political-media- criminal" complex, which reached into almost every institution in this country, and into many around the world.

What had developed was beginning to look more and more like the system of political control that prevailed in the Soviet Union, in which real decisions of government were made not by the official organs of government, but by the parallel structure of the Communist Party, backed by the KGB. In competing with the Soviets, we had taken on their methods and attributes of political control.

But this apparatus did not seem to function as an effective Shadow Government, able to make and enforce decisions apart from the official government, until it came together to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. That was the watershed event. After that, too many people had too much to hide to allow the situation to return to governance as usual.

Since then, the Shadow Government has grown and tried to strengthen its grip on every sector of the society, motivated in part by honest concern about the very real threats we have faced, and in part by venality and greed, which brought increasing corruption and the effective incorporation of organized crime into the mainstream of government.

It appears that 1963 is also the year in which the Establishment Media sector of the Shadow Government was given effective control over computerized voting in the United States, through its National Election Service, as part of a deal in which they went along with the cover-up of the Kennedy Assassination through the Warren Commission. While campaign money continued to buy influence over elected officials, if it was not sufficient, the Shadow Government had other options. It put officials in compromising situations, then used its evidence to blackmail them into compliance. Failing that, it could easily select the winner of any election, and suppress the support which third-party candidates might attain.