Five years and two presidents ago, I presented in the pages of Esquire my own State of the Union Address, based on a chat I’d been giving in various parts of the republic. Acting as a sort of shadow president, I used to go around giving a true—well, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle being what it is, a truer report on the state of the union than the one we are given each year by that loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president, who is called, depending on the year, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter. Although the presidents now come and go with admirable speed, the bank goes on forever, constantly getting us into deeper and deeper trouble of the sort that can be set right—or wrong—only by its man in the Oval Office. One of the bank’s recent capers has got the Oval One and us into a real mess. The de-Peacock-Throned King of Kings wanted to pay us a call. If we did not give refuge to the Light of the Aryans (Banksman David Rockefeller and Banksman Henry Kissinger were the tactical officers involved), the heir of Cyrus the Great would take all his money out of the bank, out of Treasury bonds, out of circulation in North America. Faced with a choice between loss of money and loss of honor and good sense, Banksman Carter chose not to lose money. As a result, there will probably be a new president come November. But whether it is this Banksman or that, Chase Manhattan will continue to be served and the republic will continue to be, in Banksman Nixon’s elegant phrase, shafted.
In 1973, Banksman D. Rockefeller set up something called the Trilateral Commission in order to bring together politicians on the make (a tautology if there ever was one) and academics like Kissinger, the sort of gung-ho employee who is always eager to start a war or to improve the bank’s balance sheet. Not long after the Trilateral Commission came into being, I started to chat about it on television. Although I never saw anything particularly sinister in the commission itself (has any commission ever done anything?), I did think it a perfect symbol of the way the United States is ruled. When Trilateral Commission member Carter was elected president after having pretended to be An Outsider, he chose his vice-president and his secretaries of state, defense, and treasury, as well as the national security adviser, from Chase Manhattan’s commission. I thought this pretty bold—even bald.
To my amazement, my warnings were promptly heeded by, of all outfits, the American Right, a group of zanies who ought deeply to love the bank and all its works. Instead, they affect to fear and loathe the Trilateral Commission on the ground that it is, somehow or other, an integral part of that international monolithic atheistic godless communist conspiracy that is bent on forcing honest American yeomen to get up at dawn and walk to work for the state as abortionists and fluoride dispensers. Needless to say, although the American right wing is a good deal stupider than the other fragile political wings that keep the republic permanently earthbound, their confusion in this matter is baffling. The bank is very much their America.
Although there has never been a left wing in the United States, certain gentle conservatives like to think of themselves as liberals, as defenders of the environment, as enemies of our dumber wars. I would think that they’d have seen in the bank’s Trilateral Commission the perfect symbol of why we fight our dumber wars, why we destroy the environment. But not a single gentle liberal voice has ever been raised against the bank. I suppose this is because too many of them work for the Bank….I shall now use the word Bank (capitalized, naturally) as a kind of shorthand not just for the Chase Manhattan but also for the actual ownership of the United States. To quote from my earlier State of the Union message: “Four point four percent own most of the United States….This gilded class owns 27 percent of the country’s real estate. Sixty percent of all corporate stock, and so on.” The Bank is the Cosa Nostra of the 4.4 percent. The United States government is the Cosa Nostra of the Bank.
For more than a century, our educational system has seen to it that 95.6 percent of the population grow up to be docile workers and consumers, paranoid taxpayers, and eager warriors in the Bank’s never-ending struggle with atheistic communism. The fact that the American government gives back to the citizen-consumer very little of the enormous revenues it extorts from him is due to the high cost of what the Bank—which does have a sense of fun—calls freedom. Although most industrial Western (not to mention Eastern European) countries have national health services, the American taxpayer is not allowed this amenity because it would be socialism, which is right next door to godless communism and free love, followed by suicide in the long white Swedish night. A major part of our country’s revenue must always go to the Pentagon, which then passes the money on to those client states, industries, and members of Congress with which the Bank does business. War is profitable for the Bank. Health is not.
Five years ago, incidentally, I said: “The defense budget is currently about a quarter of the national budget—$85 billion….[It] is now projected for the end of the decade to cost us $114 billion. This is thievery. This is lunacy.” The requested defense budget for the first year of our brand-new decade is $153.7 billion, which is still thievery, still lunacy—and highly inflationary to boot. But since the defense budget is at the heart of the Bank’s system of control over the United States, it can never be seriously reduced. Or, to put it another way, cut the defense budget and the Bank will start to die.
Since my last State of the Union Address, the election law of 1971 has come into its ghastly own. The first effect of the law was to give us the four-year presidential campaign. The second treat we got from it was the presidency of Banksman Jimmy Carter. It is now plain that anyone who can get elected president under the new ground rules ought not to be allowed to take office.
For once, even the dullest of the Bank’s depositors is aware that something is wrong. Certainly, there have never been quite so many demonstrably dim Banksmen running for president as there are in 1980. Part of this is historical: not since the country’s bright dawn have first-rate people gone into politics. Other countries take seriously their governance. Whatever one might think of the politics of Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt, each is a highly intelligent man who is proud to hold a place in government—unlike his American equivalent, who stays out of politics because the Bank fears the superior man. As a result, the contempt in which Carter is held by European and Japanese leaders is not so much the fault of what I am sure is a really swell Christian guy as it is due to the fact that he is intellectually inferior to the other leaders. They know history, economics, geography. He doesn’t—and neither do his rivals. The Bank perfers to keep the brightest Americans hidden away in the branch offices. The dull and the docile are sent to Congress and the White House.
I don’t know any thoughtful person who was not made even more thoughtful by the recent Canadian election. The new prime minister was not popular. He made mistakes. In the course of a half-hour vote of no confidence, the government fell. There was a nine-and-a-half-week campaign that cost about $60 million. At its end, the old prime minister was back. In a matter of weeks there had been a political revolution. If the United States had had a parliamentary system last April, we would have been relieved of Jimmy Carter as chief of government after his mess in the Iranian desert. But he is still with us, and the carnival of our presidential election goes on and on, costing tens of millions of dollars, while the candidates smile, shake hands, and try to avoid ethnic jokes and the demonstration of any semblance of intelligence. Although the economy is in a shambles and the empire is cracking up, the political system imposed upon us by the Bank does not allow any candidate to address himself seriously to any issue. I know that each candidate maintains, in some cases accurately, that he has superb position papers on all the great issues; but no one pays any attention—further proof that the system doesn’t work. After all, since the Bank owns the media, the Bank is able to decide who and what is newsworthy and just how much deeptalk its depositors can absorb. Plainly, the third American republic is drawing to a close, and we must now design for ourselves a fourth republic, a democratic society not dedicated to war and the Bank’s profits. Third republic? Fourth republic? What am I talking about? Let me explain.
The first American republic began with the revolution in 1776 and ended with the adoption of the Constitution in 1788. The first republic was a loose confederation of thirteen autonomous states. The second republic was also a fairly loose affair until 1861, when the American Bismarck, Abraham Lincoln, took the mystical position that no state could ever leave the Union. When the southern states disagreed, a bloody war was fought in order to create “a more perfect [sic] union.” At war’s end, our third and most imperial republic came into existence. This republic was rich, belligerent, hungry for empire. This republic’s master was the Bank. This republic became, in 1945, the world’s master. Militarily and economically, the third American republic dominated the earth. All should then have been serene: the mandate of Heaven was plainly ours. Unfortunately, the Bank made a fatal decision. To keep profits high, it decided to keep the country on a permanent wartime footing. Loyal Banksman Harry S Truman deliberately set out to frighten the American people. He told us that the Soviet Union was on the march while homegrown Reds were under every bed—all this at a time when the United States had atomic weapons and the Russians did not, when the Soviet Union was still in pieces from World War II and we were incredibly prosperous.
Those who questioned the Bank’s official line were called commies or soft on communism. Needless to say, in due course, the Soviet Union did become the powerful enemy that the Bank requires in order to keep its control of the third republic. The business of our third republic is war, or defense, as it’s been euphemistically called since 1949. As a result, of the thirty-five years since the end of World War II, the United States has managed to be at war (hot and cold) for thirty; and if the Bank has its way, we shall soon be at war again, this time on a really large scale. But then, as Banksman Grover Cleveland so presciently observed almost a century ago, “the United States is not a country to which peace is necessary.”
There comes a time, however, when the waging of war is too dangerous even for Banksmen. There also comes a time when the crude politics of getting the people to vote against their own interests by frightening them with the Red Menace simply doesn’t work. We are now in such a time. Clearly, a new sort of social arrangement is necessary.
The fact that half of those qualified to vote don’t vote in presidential elections is proof that the third republic is neither credible nor truly legitimate. The fact that the Bank’s inspired invention, the so-called two-party system (which is really one single Banksparty), is now collapsing is further proof that the fourth republic will require political parties that actually represent the various groups and classes in the country and do not simply serve the Bank. By breaking out of the two-party system this year, Banksman John Anderson has demonstrated in the most striking way that, like the Wizard of Oz, the two-party system never existed.
The time has come to hold another constitutional convention. Those conservatives known as liberals have always found this notion terrifying, because they are convinced that the powers of darkness will see to it that the Bill of Rights is abolished. This is always a possibility, but sometimes it’s best to know the worst all at once rather than to allow those rights to be slowly taken away from us by, let us say, the present majority of the Supreme Court, led by Banksman Burger.
In the development of a new Constitution, serious attention should be paid to the Swiss political arrangement. Its cantonal system is something that might work for us. The United States could be divided into autonomous regions: northern California, Oregon, and Washington would make a fine Social Democratic society, while the combined states of Texas, Arizona, and Oklahoma could bring back slavery and the minstrel show. There ought to be something for everybody to choose from in the United States, rather than the current homogenized overcentralized state that the Bank has saddled us with. The Swiss constitution has another attractive feature: the citizens have the right to hold a referendum and rescind, if they choose, a law. No need for a Howard Jarvis to yodel in the wilderness: the Jarvis Effect would be institutionalized.
Ideally, the fourth republic should abandon the presidential system for a parliamentary one. The leader of a majority in Congress would form the government. Out of respect for the rocks at Mount Rushmore, we would retain the office of president, but the president would be a figurehead and not what he is today—a dictator who is elected by half the people from a very short list given them by the Banksparty.
Five years ago I got a good reaction with this: “I propose that no candidate for any office be allowed to buy space on television or in any newspaper or other medium. This will stop cold the present system where presidents and congressmen are bought by corporations and gangsters….Instead, television (and the rest of the media) would be required by law to provide prime time (and space) for the various candidates.
“I would also propose a four-week election period as opposed to the current four-year one. Four weeks is more than enough time to present the issues. To show us the candidates in interviews, debates, uncontrolled encounters in which we can actually see who the candidate really is, answering tough questions, his record up there for all to examine.”
One aspect of our present patchwork Constitution that should be not only retained but strengthened is that part of the First Amendment that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”—which, according to Justice Hugo Black, “means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can…pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can [they] force nor influence a person to go to or remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.” This is clear-cut. This is noble. This has always been ignored—even in the two pre-Bank republics. Religion, particularly the Judaeo-Christian variety, is hugely favored by the federal government. For one thing, the revenues of every religion are effectively tax-exempt. Billions of dollars are taken in by the churches, temples, Scientological basements, and Moonie attics, and no tax need be paid. As a result, various fundamentalist groups spend millions of dollars propagandizing over the airwaves, conducting savage crusades against groups that they don’t like, mixing in politics. Now, a church has as much right as an individual to try to persuade others that its way is the right way, but not even the Bank is allowed to advertise without first doing its duty as a citizen and paying (admittedly too few) taxes.
The time has come to tax the income of the churches. After all, they are essentially money-making corporations that ought to pay tax at the same rate secular corporations do.*1 When some of the Founders proposed that church property be tax-exempt, they meant the little white church house at the corner of Elm and Main—not the $25-billion portfolio of the Roman Catholic Church, nor the even weirder money-producing shenanigans of L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer who is now the head of a wealthy “religion” called Scientology, or of that peculiar Korean gentleman who may or may not be an agent of Korean intelligence but who is certainly the boss of a “religion” that takes in many millions of tax-free dollars a year.
Until the height of the cold war in the 1950s, the American government kept God in his place—in heaven, presumably. But the Bank-created anti-communist hysteria of the era gave the Christers a wonderful opportunity to do such things as get Congress to put “In God We Trust” on the money—a sly gesture, come to think of it: God and the dollar joined, as it were, in holy matrimony, a typical Bank ploy. Needless to say, the Founders would have been horrified. Here are two comments not to be found in any American public-school book. Thomas Jefferson: “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” John Adams (in a letter to Jefferson): “Twenty times, in the course of my late reading, have I been on the point of breaking out. ‘This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there was no religion in it.’ ” But since the Bank approves of most religions (“Slaves, obey thy masters” is an injunction it finds irresistible), superstition continues to flourish. On the other hand, if we were to tax the various denominations, a good many religions would simply wither away, on the ground that they had ceased to be profitable to their managers.
Five years ago, I was eager to make changes that would benefit society without costing any money. I see now, in a curious way, that most of those changes were tied up with religion. Although our Constitution forbids the government to favor any religion, the government favors all religions by allowing them to escape paying taxes. Although the federal government has not gone so far as to oblige everyone to believe that Jesus was divine, a number of Moses–Jesus–Saint Paul laws are on the books, causing all sorts of havoc and making a joke of our pretense of being a free or even a civilized society. In 1975, I said: “Roughly eighty percent of police work in the United States has to do with the regulation of our private morals. By that I mean controlling what we drink, eat, smoke, put into our veins—not to mention trying to regulate with whom and how we have sex, with whom and how we gamble. As a result, our police are among the most corrupt in the Western world.” This used to cause some distress with certain audiences. But I’d trudge on: “Therefore, let us remove from the statute books all laws that have to do with private morals—what are called victimless crimes. If a man or woman wants to be a prostitute, that is his or her affair. It is no business of the state what we do with our bodies sexually. Obviously laws will remain on the books for the prevention of rape and the abuse of children, while the virtue of our animal friends will continue to be protected by the SPCA.” Relieved laughter. He can’t really mean that sin should go unpunished, no matter what those old WASP atheists who started the country had in mind.
“All drugs should be legalized and sold at cost to anyone with a doctor’s prescription.” Gasps! Cries! Save our children! I pointed out that our children would be saved from the playground pusher because there would be no profit for the pusher—a brand-new thought. “Legalization will also remove the Mafia and other big-time drug dispensers from the scene, just as the repeal of Prohibition eliminated the bootleggers of whiskey forty years ago.” I didn’t add that the absolute political corruption of the United States can be traced to that “noble experiment” when the Christers managed to outlaw whiskey—an unconstitutional act if there ever was one. As a result, practically everyone broke the law, and gradually lawlessness became a habit, while organized crime became a huge business of Banklike proportions (and connections).
“Obviously drug addiction is a bad thing. But in the interest of good law and good order, the police must be removed from the temptation that the current system offers them and the Bureau of Narcotics should be abolished.” That would be the trick of the week! If the bureau were ever to eliminate all drugs, the bureau would be itself eliminated. Therefore…The logic is clear. But few can follow it, because the brainwashing has been too thorough.
“I worry a good deal about the police because traditionally they are the supporters of fascist movements, and America is as prone to fascism as any other country. Individually, no one can blame the policeman. He is the way he is because Americans have never understood the Bill of Rights. Since sex, drugs, alcohol, gambling, are proscribed by various religions, the states have made laws against them.” I was too tactful in those days to add that the enslavement of the blacks (accursed descendants of Ham) and the persecution of the Jews (Christ-killers forever) and homosexualists (a duet of male angels claim to have been threatened with rape by a number of men in downtown Sodom), as well as the deep dislike and mistrust of woman as unclean, all derive from that book that Jimmy Carter likes to read regularly in Spanish and that Presidents Adams and Jefferson did not really like to read at all.
During the 1960 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon referred to John Kennedy’s Catholicism six times in practically a single breath; he then said, piously, that he did not think religion ought to play any part in any political election—unless, maybe, the candidate had no religion (and Nixon shuddered ever so slightly). As the First Criminal knew only too well, religion is the most important force not only in American politics but in world politics, too. Currently, the ninth-century Imam at Qom is threatening an Islamic holy war against Satan America. Currently, the fifth-century-B.C. prime minister of Israel is claiming two parcels of desirable real estate because an ancient text says that Jews once lived there. Currently, the eleventh-century Polish pope is conducting a series of tours in order to increase his personal authority and to shore up a church whose past excesses caused so much protest that a rival Protestant church came into being—and it, in turn, hates…
Religion is an endless and complicated matter, and no one in his right mind can help agreeing with John Adams. Unfortunately, most of the world is not in its right mind; and the Bank can take some credit for this. For years, relations were kept tense between poor American whites and poor blacks (would you let your sister marry one?), on the ground that if the two groups ever got together in a single labor union, say, they could challenge the Bank’s authority. Religion is also the basis of those laws governing personal conduct that keep the prisons overcrowded with people who get drunk, take dope, gamble, have sex in a way that is not approved by the holy book of a Bronze Age nomad tribe as reinterpreted by a group of world-weary Greeks in the first centuries of the last millennium.
The thrust of our laws at the beginning of the country—and even now—is to make what these religions regard as sin secular crimes to be punished with fines and prison terms. The result? Last year the United States shelled out some $4 billion to keep 307,000 sinners locked up. Living conditions in our prisons are a famous scandal. Although the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals declared in 1973 that “prisons should be repudiated as useless for any purpose other than locking away people who are too dangerous to be allowed at large in a free society,” there are plans to build more and more prisons to brutalize more and more people who are, for the most part, harmless. In much of Scandinavia, even vicious criminals are allowed a degree of freedom to work so that they can lead useful lives, turning over a part of the money that they earn to their victims. At present, at least five American states are experimenting with a compensatory system. All agree that the new way of handling so-called property offenders is a lot cheaper than locking them up at a cost that, in New York State, runs to $26,000 a year—more than enough to send a lively lad to Harvard, where he will soon learn how to commit his crimes against property in safe and legal ways.
But since the Bank is not happy with the idea of fewer prisons, much less with the idea of fewer crimes on the books, the Bank has now come up with something called the Omnibus Crime Bill. This has been presented in the Senate by Banksman Kennedy as S. 1722 and in the House of Representatives by Banksman the Reverend Robert F. Drinan as H.R. 6233. Incidentally, Banksman Drinan will presently give up his seat in the House at the order of the Polish pope, who says that he does not want his minions in politics, which is nonsense. A neo-fascist priest sits as a deputy in the Italian Parliament, just across the Tiber from the Vatican. Father Drinan, alas, is liberal. He does not favor the Right to Life movement. On the other hand, he is a loyal Banksman—hardly a conflict of interest, since the Vatican has an account with the Bank, administered until recently by Michele Sindona, a master criminal.
The point of these two bills is as simple as the details are endlessly complex: the Bank wants more power to put in prison those people who challenge its authority. At the moment it looks as if this repressive legislation will become law, because, as Republican Senator James A. McClure has pointed out, the Omnibus Crime Bill is now “a law unto itself, a massive re-creation whose full implications are known only by its prosecutorial draftsmen (in the Justice Department).” Some features:
If, during a war, you should advise someone to evade military service, to picket an induction center, to burn a draft card, you can go to jail for five years while paying a fine of $250,000 (no doubt lent you by the bank at 20 percent).
If, as a civilian, you speak or write against a war in such a way that military authorities think you are inciting insubordination, you can get up to ten years in prison or pay a fine of $250,000, or both. If, as a civilian, you write or speak against a war or against conditions on a military installation, and if the Bank is conducting one of its wars at the time (according to the bill—by omission—a war is not something that Congress declares anymore), you can get ten years in prison and pay the usual quarter-million-dollar fine. If the Bank is not skirmishing some place, you can go to jail for only five years while forking out a quarter mill.
If you break a federal law and tell your friendly law enforcer that you did not break that federal law, and if he has corroboration from another friendly cop that you did, you have made a False Oral Statement to a Law Enforcement Officer, for which you can get two years in the slammer after paying the customary quarter mill.
Anyone who refuses to testify before a grand jury, court, or congressional committee, even though he has claimed his constitutional (Fifth Amendment) right against self-incrimination, can be imprisoned if he refuses to exchange his constitutional right to remain silent for a grant of partial immunity from prosecution.
The Bank’s deep and abiding love of prison requires that alternatives to prison not be encouraged. According to a 1978 Congressional Research Service report, this bill (then S. 1437), enacted and enforced, would add anywhere from 62.8 to 92.8 percent to our already overcrowded federal prisons. The Bank’s dream, plainly, is to put all its dissident depositors either in prison or, if they’re young enough, into the army, where they lose most of their civil rights.
Needless to say, the press gets it in the chops. If you’re a newspaperman and you refuse to identify your sources for a story, you are Hindering Law Enforcement, for which you can get the usual five and pay the usual quarter. If you receive documentary proof that the government is breaking the law or that its officials are corrupt, you may be guilty of Defrauding the Government, and you can get the old five and pay a quarter. On the other hand, if you are a public servant who blows the whistle on government corruption or criminality, you can get only two and pay a quarter: the Bank has a certain compassion for apostate tellers.
Finally, a judge will have the right to put any person accused of any crime in prison before he has been tried, and that same judge can then deny the accused bail for any reason that appeals to him. This provision means the end of the basis of our legal system: you are innocent until you are proved guilty. According to the Los Angeles Times: “What is contemplated in S. 1722 is a fundamental reordering of the relationship between the people and the government, with the dominant emphasis placed on the power of the government….Under the proposed radical revisions of federal criminal law now before Congress, we would be less free and ultimately less secure.” But (at this writing) this huge, complex assault on our liberties continues to sail through the Congress, guided by Banksman Kennedy and Popesman Drinan, and it looks fairly certain to pass.*2
When I first gave my State of the Union talk in 1975, I said, “In an age of chronic and worsening shortages, I would propose that all natural resources—oil, coal, minerals—be turned over to the people, to the government.” I still think nationalization a good idea. Also, our government should deal directly with the oil-producing states, eliminating, as middleman, the oil companies. A dollar that Mobil Oil does not earn will be a dollar that an American gets to keep. I also proposed that “since none of us trusts our government to do anything right—much less honest—national resources should be a separate branch of the government, co-equal with the other three but interconnected so that Congress can keep a sharp eye on its funding and the courts on its fairness. The president, any president, on principle, should be kept out of anything that has to do with the economy.”
Plainly, there is panic in the boardroom of the Bank. A number of things have started to go wrong all at once. Since energy will soon be in short supply to all the world, the third republic will be particularly hard hit, because the Bank is not capable of creating alternatives to the conventional unrenewable (and so highly profitable) sources of energy, any more than the Bank was able to anticipate the current crisis of small car versus gas-guzzler, something that consumer-depositors had figured out some time ago when they demonstrated a preference for small economic models by buying foreign cars.
The empire is cracking up because the Banksmen have never had a very clear world view. On the one hand, they are superb pragmatists. They will do business with Mao, Stalin, Franco, the Devil, if profits can be made that way. On the other hand, simultaneously, they must continue to milk this great cow of a republic; and the only way they know to get their hands on our tax dollars is to frighten us with the menace of godless communism, not easily done when you’re seen to be doing business quite happily with these godless predators. The final madness occurred when Banksman Nixon went to Peking and Moscow in search of new accounts (which he got on terms unfavorable to us) while continuing to rail against those two ruthless, inexorable enemies of all that we hold dear. This sort of schizophrenia has switched off the public and made our government a source of wonder and despair to its allies.
When Banksman Nixon was audited and found wanting, the Bank itself came under scrutiny of a sort that it is not used to. Lowly consumer-depositors now speak of a national “crisis of confidence.” The ordinarily docile media have even revealed a few tips of the iceberg—no, glacier—that covers with corruption our body politic.
Now the masters of the third republic are striking back. They are loosening the CIA’s leash, which had been momentarily shortened (or so they told us). They have also come up with a new charter for the FBI that is now before the Senate (S. 1612). In testimony before the Judiciary Committee, law professor emeritus T. I. Emerson of Yale was highly critical of the new powers given the FBI. “The natural tendency of any system of law enforcement,” he testified, “is to formulate its doctrines, train its personnel, and utilize its machinery to support social stability and thwart social change.” Among the features of the new charter that Emerson found dangerous was the right to initiate an investigation where there is a suspicion, in the agency’s eyes, that a person “will engage” in illegal activity. This means that anyone is a potential target of the FBI because anyone might somehow, someday, do something illegal. The FBI also wants access to the financial records of political associations—an invasion of political as well as personal freedom. Finally, the new charter will pretty much remove the agency from any outside scrutiny. In so doing, it will create something that our pre-Bank republics refused to countenance: a centralized national police force. Well, as that wily old fox Benjamin Franklin once hinted, sooner or later every republic becomes a tyranny.
For 169 years, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, the United States was a military success, able to overlook the odd scalped general or the White House that the British so embarrassingly burned to the ground in 1814. With considerable dash, we tore a chunk of land away from Mexico (which the Mexicans are now, sensibly, filling up again); next, we killed a million or so Filipinos (no one has ever determined just how many) in order to establish ourselves as a regnant Pacific power at the beginning of this century; but then, after we got through two world wars in fine shape, something started to go wrong. In fact, since 1945 nothing has gone right for us. The war in Korea was a draw. The war in Vietnam was a defeat. Our constant meddling in the affairs of other countries has made us not only widely hated but, rather more serious, despised. Not unlike the Soviet Union, our opposite number, we don’t seem able to maintain our helicopters properly or to gauge in advance the world’s reactions to our deeds or to have sufficient intelligence to know when to make a run for it and when to stand still. What’s wrong?
Those born since World War II have been taught to believe that the CIA has always been an integral part of American life. They don’t know that the agency is only thirty-three years old, that it is essentially illegal not only in its activities (overthrowing a Chilean president here, an Iranian prime minister there) but also in its charter. The Constitution requires that “a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all Public Money shall be published from time to time.” The CIA does no such thing: it spends billions of dollars a year exactly as it pleases. Although forbidden by law to operate inside the United States, the CIA has spied on American citizens at home, in merry competition with numerous other intelligence agencies whose single interest is the control of the American people in the name of freedom. Most Americans have heard of the FBI and the Treasury men and the Secret Service (though few Americans have a clear idea of what they actually do or of how much money they spend). On the other hand, hardly anyone knows about the National Security Agency, a miniature CIA run by the Defense Department. It has been estimated that in 1975, the NSA employed 20,000 civilians, used between 50,000 and 100,000 military personnel, and had a budget of $1 billion. Needless to say, the NSA is quite as illegal as the CIA—more so, in fact. The CIA was chartered, messily but officially, by Congress; but the NSA was created secretly by presidential directive in 1952, and Congress has never legalized the agency.
All good Americans want the budget balanced, and the liquidation of the CIA and the NSA would probably save anywhere from $10 billion to $20 billion a year. For those who are terrified that we won’t have enough information about our relentless and godless enemy, the State Department is a most expensive piece of machinery whose principal purpose is—or was—the gathering of information about all the countries of the world. For underground, James Bond stuff, we should rely on the organization that was so useful to us when we were successful: army intelligence. Meanwhile, as a free society—the phrase no longer has much humor in it—we ought not to support tens of thousands of spies, secret agents, and dirty-tricksters, on the practical ground that a rich, lawless, and secret agency like the CIA could, with no trouble at all, take over the United States—assuming that it has not already done so.
The Bank hopes to maintain its power through the perpetuation of that garrison state it devised for us after World War II. This can be done only by involving the country in a series of small wars that will keep tax money flowing from the citizens to the Treasury to the Pentagon to the secret agencies and, eventually, to the Bank. Meanwhile, to stifle criticism, the Bank has ordered an all-out attack on the civil liberties of the people. There is little doubt that, from Banksman Kennedy to Banksman Thurmond, the entire political spectrum in the United States (which is always a single shade of green, just like the money) will work to take away as many of our traditional freedoms as it can. Happily, the Bank’s marvelous incompetence, which gave us Nixon and Carter and is now offering (at this writing) Reagan or Bush “versus” Carter or Kennedy, is of a kind that is bound to fail. For one thing, everyone knows that small wars have a way of escalating; and though Banksmen Nixon and Bush view with what looks like equanimity World War III, the rest of the world—including, with luck, an aroused American citizenry—may call a halt to these mindless adventures for private profit. Finally, Anderson’s candidacy could pull the plug on the two-party-system-that-is-really-one-party apparatus that has kept the Bank in power since the 1870s.*3
Meanwhile, a new constitutional convention is in order. The rights guaranteed by the Founders in the old Constitution should be reinforced; the presidential form of government should be exchanged for a more democratic parliamentary system; the secret agencies should be abolished; the revenues of the country should go to create jobs, educational and health systems, alternative forms of energy, and so on. All those things, in fact, that the Bank says we can never afford. But I am sure that what countries less rich than ours can do, we can do.
Where will the money come from? Abolish the secret agencies, and gain at least $20 billion a year. Cut the defense budget by a third, and gain perhaps $50 billion. Tax the thousand and one religions, and get untold billions more. Before you know it, the chief financial support of a government become gross and tyrannous will no longer be the individual taxpayer, that perennial patsy, but the Bank, whose entry into receivership will be the aim of the fourth, the good, the democratic republic that we must start to create sometime between now and 1984.
Esquire
AUGUST 1980