The Shadow Government
Copyright (c) 1994 Constitution Society. Permission is hereby
granted to copy for noncommercial use.

Secret Rule

     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 fa‡ade 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]

Transition to Oligarchy

     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     The first was the Dick Act of 1903, which repealed the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.
     1947 was a critical year. It was the year in which UFOs
became a matter of public concern, and in which it appears we
recovered at least one crashed vehicle and perhaps at least one
of its occupants. It is also the year that the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) was established, ostensibly to bring
together the disparate intelligence agencies that had often
been operating at cross-purposes. It was also the beginning of
the use of "black budgets" for government programs, the
existence of which was kept secret from both the public and
most if not all members of Congress. This led later to the
establishment of more agencies, such as the National Security
Agency, whose entire budget was black, thus preventing
effective oversight.
     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 coverup 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.

Structure and Decisionmaking

     A key question about the Shadow Government is how does it
make decisions and carry them out. Where is the center? Some
think it lies in a few major financial institutions. Others
that it lies in the intelligence apparatus. Still others that
it has no permanent center, but operates by consensus, with
shifting factions that confer through various mechanisms. Some
think that those mechanisms are reflected in public
associations such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR),
the Tri-lateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, the Federal
Reserve, the World Bank, or the International Monetary Fund.[5]
     That the key personalities in every major institution
should associate and confer through various associations is not
in itself a matter of concern, if all that was involved was the
development of a consensus. But there is evidence that a
centralized decisionmaking process exists, because too much is
done that could not otherwise occur, and that the process is
contemptuous of the Constitution and increasingly willing to
violate it. That suggests a permanent apparatus, a bureaucracy,
and that points to the intelligence and financial
bureaucracies. Therefore, the real decisions may be made not by
public figures, but by faceless persons operating in secret.
     Most available evidence indicates that the center is in
the intelligence apparatus, and that it largely controls all
the other components of the system, including the financial.
However, it also appears that the control is imperfect, subject
to resistance if it tries to go too far.
     It also appears that there are some distinct factions
involved, the two major contenders being those more highly
motivated persons concerned about meeting the challenges we
face, the other being the more corrupt ones trying to expand
their power and wealth. The alliance between these factions
appears to be increasingly strained as growing corruption
begins to impair the effectiveness of the institutions of
society to meet the perceived challenges.
     An analogy might be to a sinking ship, in which some want
to build and equip lifeboats and others who want to make sure
they are the ones who get to go in them. Each needs the other,
for the time being, but the latter are beginning to threaten
the production and seaworthiness of the lifeboats.
     What we have is in many ways a classic oligarchy, with
multiple components in an uneasy alliance with one another. No
one individual is paramount, and anyone can be replaced if he
gets too far out of line, by some combination of the others,
each of whom derives his power from the institutions and assets
under his influence.
     Of course, the ones who get trampled under this regime are
the ordinary people, who receive just enough under the deal to
keep them quiet. The Powers That Be fear above all that the
people might rise up and overthrow them, something that the
people could still do if they could ever act in concert. Social
control therefore becomes a matter of keeping them placated,
divided, and misinformed.
     Unfortunately for their scheme, they face the same problem
the Roman Empire did. To keep the people placated, they are
forced to pay them off, and meet increasing demands for such
payoffs, while growth of the productive sector falters, or even
shrinks relative to the population. Economic growth and the
solutions to our social problems are being impaired by the
depredations of the corrupt elements of the Shadow Government,
who are concentrating assets in a way and at a rate that
threaten the viability of the economy. The Romans solved the
problem of keeping their citizens supplied with bread and
circuses by predation of outlying provinces. Modern capitalist
nations tried the same thing, but that imperial order is
breaking down, and the only thing left is economic growth. If
that growth falters, the welfare state fails, and with it the
social stability on which the Established Order depends.

Shadow Finance

     Some of the best indications that the Shadow Government is
not centered in the financial sector are the things it has to
do to finance itself. Shadow Government is expensive. We can
identify the main sources of its revenue:
     (1) Black budgets. This is the core of its operations, but
is not enough to secure its control over the country and the
world.
     (2) Drug trade. It has seized control of the major part of
the illegal traffic in addictive substances, in part by using
the organs of law enforcement to eliminate competition, and by
gaining control of the money and the ways it gets re-introduced
into the economy.
     (3) Raiding financial institutions. This is what was done
with the S&Ls, and is being done, more slowly, with the banks.
It involves several aspects: diversion of the funds, seizure of
smaller institutions by a few large ones under Shadow
Government control, with the seizure financed by the taxpayers,
and acquisition under distressed prices of the assets of those
institutions, many of which are well-positioned business
enterprises that give the Shadow Government both control of the
key enterprises in most business sectors and sources of
revenue. The Savings & Loan raid was used to finance a major
expansion of the Shadow Government. However, it is not a method
that can be repeated.
     (4) Public authorities. These are quasi-governmental
enterprises that control substantial assets, often taxpayer-
subsidized, without effective accountability. They include
housing, port, energy, water, transportation, and educational
authorities.[6] To this might also be added various utilities,
and both public and publicly-regulated private monopolies, like
local telephone and cable companies. They are also a major
source of government contracts.
     (5) Government contracts. Major source of diverted funds,
but must often be shared with others involved.
     (6) Arms trade. Another major source of funds, both direct
and diverted. But requires payoffs to local officials.

Shadow Control

     The problem with secret government is that to remain
secret, it cannot involve too many people who are aware of the
situation. The more that become involved, the greater the
chance that some of them who retain some sense of honor might
defect. An occasional defector can be disabled, killed or
discredited, but a flood of them could be disastrous. That is
what brought down the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union.
     Shadow control therefore consists largely of the placement
of shadow agents in key positions in all of the institutions
that are to be controlled. Since they cannot reveal their true
role, they are also somewhat constrained in the actions they
can take. What they do has to fit their jobs and not conflict
in an obvious way with the mission of the organization, even if
they head it. Some of the main targeted institutions are the
following:
     (1) Top and key lower positions in the executive,
legislative, and judicial branches. Key judges, especially
presiding judges who assign cases.
     (2) Staff positions under the top positions, such as the
congressional staff members who really run Congress.
     (3) Intelligence agencies. The CIA[7], NSA and various
military intelligence divisions. Among their functions are
death squads that eliminate troublesome persons, although they
usually avoid doing that to more prominent ones. They also have
developed mind control techniques that can be used to mess up
the minds of people they want to discredit or disable.[8]
Actually, almost every department of government has an
intelligence function, and that function is the Shadow
Government's main point of control of the department.
     (4) Military organizations, law enforcement, and taxing
agencies, especially the IRS. Not only federal, but also state
and local, at least in the major cities. The IRS and other
agencies are used to harass persons considered troublesome, and
sometimes to prosecute them on trumped up charges, in which
evidence is planted or manufactured and government witnesses
perjure themselves.
     (5) Major banks, insurance companies, pension funds,
holding companies, utilities, public authorities, contractors,
manufacturers, distributors, transport firms, security
services, credit reporting services. Forbidden by law from
maintaining dossiers on citizens not the subject of criminal
investigation, the agencies get around the restriction by using
contractors to maintain the data for them, and have amazingly
detailed data on almost everyone. When you hire one of the
major security services, you are turning over the keys to your
premises to the shadow government.
     (6) Major media. Newspapers, magazines, television and
radio stations. Together, they control the National Election
Service, which in turn controls the outcome of computerized
elections. They suppress coverage of certain subjects, and are
the channel for the Shadow Government's propaganda and
disinformation campaigns. A major part of the budget of the CIA
is for film and video production. They aren't making training
films.
     (7) Communications networks. Telephone, telegraph, cable
and satellite. The Shadow Government can bug any communication
they wish, without bothering with a court order, and they
regularly monitor dissidents and other key figures. Major holes
in their control here are the Internet and public-key
encryption, which the Shadow Government is trying to suppress.
Although the Internet can be monitored, it cannot be
effectively controlled, and it is emerging as a major threat to
Shadow control.
     (8) Organized crime. Despite occasional convictions, they
are now mostly treated as a profit center and as the executors
of the dirty jobs. They are also the providers of vices for the
corrupt members of government, which vices are also used to
blackmail and control people.
     (9) Education. Universities and public education.
Universities are the least effectively controlled components,
but still important, largely for recruitment. Main aim here is
to divert student activists into unproductive channels, or to
get students so involved in careerism that they ignore the
important issues.
     (10) Civic, political, and labor organizations. The two
major political parties. Political action committees. League of
Women Voters. Trade and professional associations, such as the
American Bar Association and the American Medical Association.
Labor unions.
     (11) International organizations. The United Nations,
NATO, the IMF. Multinational corporations.
     (12) Governmental and nongovernmental institutions of
other countries. We are doing many of the same things there
that are being done in the United States, especially in the
more advanced countries.

Concentration of Power

     A major aim of Shadow Government control has been to bring
most of the assets and revenues of the economy under the
control of fewer and fewer people. Part of this is causing the
failure of smaller organizations and the absorption of them by
a few large chains. This is being done with banks and other
financial institutions, newspapers and magazines, television
and radio stations, agriculture and mining producers,
distributors and retailers, computer manufacturers, energy and
chemical companies, medical providers, and pharmaceutical
companies. Anti-trust enforcement has been weak, used only in a
few sectors, and then only after major concentrations of
economic power has already been achieved.
     The process goes beyond normal tendencies toward monopoly
or restraint of trade, or the economies of scale that support
the old adage that "the rich get richer". It is an attempt to
consolidate political control. The result has been for a
smaller and smaller proportion of the population to control a
larger and larger proportion of the assets and revenues of the
economy, while the middle class shrinks. We are moving away
from the original model of the universal middle class, and
toward a third-world model of a small upper class and a large
poor class, with a small middle class that mainly serve as
minions of the rich.

The Shadow Plan

     The Shadow Government appears to be operating according to
some plan. Many commentators have dubbed this plan the "New
World Order", suggested by the use of that phrase in a speech
by George Bush, referring to the state of affairs following the
end of the Cold War. Actually, that phrase goes back to the
beginning of the Republic, and appears on the Great Seal of the
United States as the motto, Novus Ordo Seclorum. What the
Shadow Government itself calls the plan is uncertain, however,
some of its elements are now emerging.
     One element is the disarming of the people.[9] There are
serious plans and preparations for a general warrantless sweep
of every location in the country to confiscate weapons.
Information about these plans comes from military and
intelligence personnel who are involved in preparing to carry
them out. Such an action would mean seizing more than 300
million firearms from more than 70 million citizens. Obviously,
after such a sweep there would be so much public outrage that
there could not be another election. Therefore, it would also
be the formal overthrow of the Constitution.
     There are indications that after things settled down, the
Shadow Government would allow the establishment of a
parliamentary system that would provide a facade of democracy,
just as it does in other countries that have such a system,
without effective limits on the powers of government, where
"rights" endure only as long as there is a sufficiently strong
constituency that defends them. Such a system is not a
republican form of government, based on the Rule of Law, or a
representative democracy, but merely a tool for control by an
oligarchy.
     There is also suspicious circumstantial evidence that part
of the plan is the release of diseases, of which HIV/AIDS is
one, to reduce the world population, selectively.
     A key part of the plan seems to involve the development
and use of mind control technologies, both electronic and
chemical, which allow the elite to disable or discredit
dissidents and keep the people compliant and productive. The
experimentation that has been done on this is one of the great
coverups and abuses of human rights of our time, far exceeding
that of the radiation experiments that are now coming to light.

Restoring Constitutional Governance

     The restoration of constitutional governance need not
require a violent revolution, and we should avoid violence if
possible. It can be brought about in much the way it happened
in the Soviet Union. This involves several elements:
     (1)Exposure ("glasnost"). The Shadow Government, even more
than the old Soviet regime, depends on secrecy. Uncover it and
it loses most of its power. We need to end black budgets,
require the declassification of most classified documents,
especially those pertaining to UFOs and aliens, and adopt and
enforce sunshine laws to require full disclosure of not just
meetings and agreements among officials, but also among major
organizations of all kinds which may exercise an undue
influence on political decisions. We must also require
independent audits of all such organizations.
     (2) Restructuring ("perestroika"). We need to enforce
strengthened anti-trust laws to break up large enterprises into
many competing firms, not just two or three, and forbid
interlocking directorates, beginning with the broadcast media
and the press. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies need
to be broken up into several competing ones, which can serve as
effective checks on abuses by one another.
     (2) Infiltration and defection. We need to get patriots
inside key organizations and encourage insiders to become
patriots. The most important are military and law enforcement
organizations, whose members must be conditioned to come over
to the side of the people if there is a confrontation. We must
also provide effective protection for whistleblowers.
     (3) Harassment. Lawsuits. Liens. Freedom of Information
Act requests. Surveillance of principals. Local prosecution of
federal agents.
     (4) Local organization and publicity. Revive the
constitutional Militia on the Swiss model[10], set up
independent investigation teams, alternative newspapers, talk
radio, alert networks. We need to inform the public on what is
happening, and to reach those who now are all too willing to
trust the government to protect them.
     (5) Civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance. Protest
demonstrations. Tax protests. Defiance of unconstitutional
laws. Refusal of juries to convict.[11]
     (6) Armed resistance. This must involve non-provocative,
but firm, defense of persons from illegal abuses, and exclusion
of illegal governmental actions from local areas, county by
county, state by state, with insistence on constitutional
compliance.
     (7) Transition plan. The oligarchy cannot be expected to
come up with a plan for an orderly return to constitutional
governance. The process must be conducted carefully, to avoid a
disastrous collapse.[12] We will need some constitutional
amendments, to make legal some of the things the national
government can do best. The government needs to end budget
deficits and acquire the stock of the Federal Reserve.[13]

Conclusion

     The myth is that World War II ended with the defeat of
fascism, but what really happened is that fascism got a grip on
those fighting it, and is becoming increasingly pervasive and
powerful. As it grows, it will induce a reaction, the outcome
of which will be a final confrontation. We can all hope that
the confrontation will not be a bloody one, and that it will be
resolved while we still have time to solve our other pressing
problems.

--------------------------------------------------------------
1. See Reed & Cummings, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA,
1994, Shapolsky Publishers Inc, 136 W 22nd St, New York, NY
10011, 212/633-2022. Also see Bartlett & Steele, America: What
Went Wrong?, 1992, Andrews & McMeel, 4900 Main St, Kansas City,
MO 64112; and Walter Karp, Liberty Under Siege, New York:
Franklin Square, 1993.

2. See Timothy Good, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-up,
New York: W. Morrow, 1988;  Alien Contact: Top-Secret UFO
Files Revealed, New York: W. Morrow, 1993.

3. For a fairly comprehensive treatment of such views, see
Albert Gore, Jr., Earth in the Balance, New York: Houghton-Mifflin,
1992. Also see Paul Ehrlich, Population/ Resources/
Environment, San Francisco: Freeman, 1972.

4. For one treatment of American history that goes into this,
see Clarence B. Carson, Basic American Government, 1993,
American Textbook Committee, Route 1, Box 13, Wadley, AL 36276.

5. There is abundant literature on this theme, most of it
lacking hard evidence. An example is Gary H. Kah, Enroute to
Global Occupation, 1992, Huntington House Publishers, POB
53788, Lafayette, LA 70505.

6. One author has identified such public authorities as the
Shadow Government, but it seems more likely that they are just
a part of it. See Donald Axelrod, Shadow Government: the hidden
world of public authorities and how they control $1 trillion
dollars of your money, New York: Wiley, 1992.

7. For a couple of sanitized depictions of this agency, see
Loch K. Johnson, America's Secret Power: the CIA in a
democratic society, New York: Oxford, 1989; Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones,
The CIA and American Democracy, New Haven: Yale, 1989.

8. This is discussed in a paper by Martin Cannon, The
Controllers: A New Hypothesis of Alien Abductions, 1990, 8211
Owensmouth Av #206, Canoga Park, CA 91304. $6.00.

9. One discussion of this is William R. Tonso, The Gun Culture
and its Enemies, 1990, Second Amendment Foundation, James
Madison Building, 12500 N.E. Tenth Place, Bellevue, WA 98005.

11. For a comprehensive treatment of constitutional history and
law, see Bernard Schwartz, The Roots of the Bill of Rights, New
York: Chelsea House, 1980.

12. The ways this might occur are discussed in Joseph A.
Taintes, The Collapse of Complex Societies, New York:
Cambridge, 1988.

13. For some views on needed reforms, see Martin Gross, A Call
for Revolution, New York: Ballantine, 1993.