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The formulation of policy in the United States takes place in a sticky and rancid black box.  The low-intensity evil perpetrated there, in slow motion so that citizens cannot perceive the shifts taking place, is not the result of a particular politician, or a specific political party.

What is considered common sense, standard practice, in the Capitol, is, in reality, insanity and depravity. It has boiled over, spilling its lurid juices on the marble floor.

“Politics” was not originally a criminal activity, but rather implementing in the real world of moral imperatives that can be traced back to ancient times. Sadly, the decay of institutions over the last three decades have reduced “politics” to a Punch and Judy show wherein politicians work day and night to convince us that policies exclusively serving the rich are formulated for our good.

The politician is not a public servant—although he or she is funded with tax dollars. He or she does not ask what our nation needs for the long term. No, the politician is up late at night finding ways to distract and to confuse us, to overwhelm our senses with images and associations—to anything that will keep us from thinking rationally.

The fundamental questions of politics, of governance, will never, never, be addressed by today’s politicians:

What is the role of government?

What is money and who controls it?

What is security and how can we best maintain it?

How can we create an environment in which citizens are educated properly so that they can serve their role as citizens, and provided with the time, and the inclination, to play their constitutional role as citizen?

Instead of asking citizens what our country should be, what our government can, or cannot, do, politicians join up with the false gods of the commercial media to promote the idea that growth, consumption, the stock market, exports and imports are somehow measures of prosperity and well-being that are dictated by God, that are natural like the law of gravity and the second law of thermodynamics.

These criminal practices in government have been around for decades, but they have slipped into the final stage of exponential decay recently.

However, no matter how many times lies are repeated, they do not become truth.

Congressmen, governors and judges, department heads and mayors, know that their primary job is pleasing their true masters, taking the orders given to them by lobbyists representing the billionaires. They are not public servants; they are simply criminals. These politicians have only two priorities: getting elected and getting reelected. They will offer up human sacrifices to any false god that aids them in that task.

Other issues are boring, even irritating, for the politician.

But politicians do get pleasure from attacking other politicians, the men and women with whom they cavort in private at the offices of investment bankers. They attack each other on cue from PR firms for odd behavior at trivial events, for supposedly improper comments about insignificant policy. These plastic, single-use, political attacks are a saccharine grand guignol for our consumption.

What policy formulation should be

The process by which policy is formulated in the Congress, planned in the Executive branch, and then implemented in the Federal government, should reflect priorities based on a long-term scientific understanding, and should respond to the actual needs of citizens.

The formulation of policy involves assessing the effectiveness of the standards by which we assess the health of the nation, determining the most effective tools for realizing meaningful change, and formulating policies that respond to current problems based on an accurate understanding of long term developments. The formulation of policy must also grapple with the critical issue of what government cannot, and should not, do, and what powers must be denied to other institutions that are wont to pray on citizens.

The process must be democratic, must reflect the opinions of the people in an accurate manner, but it also must be based on the truth, on science. If the vast majority of people vote for a candidate, or support a law, because they have been subject to misinformation pushed on them by the rich, then this process cannot be considered democracy. Our nation has wandered out into a wasteland of tyranny, corruption and cruel feudalism. The billions stolen from the citizens by banks and corporations are rolled back into paying authorities and celebrities to pretend that everything is just fine.

We have passed the inflection point. Some form of massive social unrest is guaranteed. We must not fool ourselves.

Rather, we must step back to consider how the policy making process ought to work according to the Constitution and set a goal for what we wish to achieve.

The powerful who determine policy today do not want us to have any goal. They want us to just get mad at a politician, at a celebrity, and blow off steam in the pointless manner they have decided for us in advance.

Even if our goal is the establishment of a constitutional democracy for the people, by the people and of the people, there will be different visions and conflicting interests. The process will not be smooth, but if we have even just a handful of citizens, intellectuals and practitioners who are dedicated to the pursuit of truth and to moral governance, we can minimalize the disagreements and focus on our future.

The Ideal for a Constitutional Democracy

The formulation of policy should take place within the Congress and it should be undertaken by representatives from each district and each state of the nation who are elected in a fair and transparent manner. Fair means that influence cannot be bought by multinational corporations and banks using dark money and that public officials are accountable only to the citizens. Transparent means that the information offered by journalists is scientific and accurate and there is no opportunity to distort it through the use of money.

The congressmen are paid a salary by the Federal Government and they serve the needs of the people for the short term and the long term. They have a moral and legal responsibility to reject the influence of the rich and powerful.

All citizens must be protected from a self-indulgent and narcissistic culture created by multinational corporations for the purpose of dumbing them down and degrading their capacity to make the judgements they must to be citizens in accord with the Constitution. Elections are meaningless if citizens are forced to rely on a corrupting consumption culture of waste and sexual suggestion, or on misleading, intellectually degrading, sources of information.

The elections must be a process wherein citizens are allowed to, and encouraged to, understand the issues and to engage the candidates in a frank and science-based, discussion about long-term interests of the nation.

Once elected, congressmen must work to understand the true state of affairs in the district, the state, and the nation. They must make decisions based on accurate information. They must balance their duty to represent their constituents’ immediate concerns with a moral duty to uphold the true interests of the nation, based on a scientific evaluation.

There will be moments when they must make decisions for the greater good that go against the perceived short-term interests of the region, or of the nation. It is essential that citizens be encouraged to think in a rational, long-term, manner so they will understand how such decisions are made. That critical part of governance, however, is impossible in the current consumption culture promoted by multinational corporations that encourages immediate gratification and discourages deeper understanding.

Congressmen cannot possibly have the specialized understanding necessary to make accurate and appropriate decisions regarding all policy. That means that he or she must be briefed constantly by experts, and that he or she must be given the time, and the incentive, to develop his or her expertise. That search for knowledge, and for wisdom, is critical to governance.

Those briefing and informing the congressmen must be experts with a high level competence and objectivity. Objectivity means that they are not beholden to the rich and powerful and they do not have a personal stake in the issue regarding which they brief the congressmen.

The experts are professors, or technical experts, who work for institutions that are funded by the government for the long-term so as to assure that experts remain objective and they have no incentive to distort their analysis so as to please funders, or other powerful figures. Experts at institutions that depend on funding from the wealthy, from corporations and banks or from foreign interests, have no role in the briefing of congressmen.

There must be opportunities for citizens, who often have valuable firsthand understanding of problems, to offer their opinions and insights to congressmen. Extra care must be taken to assure that citizens approach congressmen in good faith, and no individuals paid in secret to represent the powerful.

This vision for what the United States could be, how to “Make America great for the first time,” draws on the philosophy of Frederick Douglass. Douglass led a fight against slavery similar to the fight that we are engaged in today. He recognized that the drafting of the Constitution in 1787 was undertaken by the privileged and that parts of it were biased towards the protection of property and the defense of slavery and indentured labor. Yet Douglass held that the words of the Constitution, and the spirit of that unique gathering of 1787, offered the potential to realize better government. He stressed that although Thomas Jefferson was a defender of slavery, his insights on freedom could be separated from his personal weaknesses. He argued that we must realize the potential in the words of the Constitution, which say nothing of race or class, and not on the manner in which it was interpreted to suit the barbaric habits of that age.

How is policy made today?

Sadly, policy making in Washington does not resemble the process I have described above and has virtually nothing to do with the mandate of the Constitution, or with the needs of citizens. Congressmen spend their time begging for money and pushing gimmicks in the commercial media. The actual discussion of policy takes place far away from the Capitol, in secret. Policy is formulated by those who do the bidding of multinational corporations and investment banks on Wall Street, or in Hong Kong, or London. The entire process, from beginning to end, is illegal and immoral.

Although the Russell Senate Building and the Rayburn House Building still stand, although staff members still shuffle around to arrange meetings and to answer phone calls, government, in the true sense of the word, is nowhere to be found. The final blow was delivered in the 2020 election, but it was but the exponential acceleration of a trend leading back to the Kennedy assassination.

Small consulting firms that represent the super-rich, directly, or through private equity firms, set the priorities for the country in secret and feed it to the Congress. Moreover, for the last twenty years, power has shifted to a shadow government run according to secret law. Secret laws are passed by Congress and have have profound impact on policy. But it is illegal to disclose them to the public. Although the full range of the abuse of secret law and classified orders on policy in Congress and in the Executive branch is known only to God, we know that it is possible now to block the qualified from running for office, to give billions of dollars to corporations in secret, and to prohibit the discussion, under pain of prison, of the rampant corruption in our nation.

The general assumptions about what is good for the nation are set by corporations through the media sources that they control.

It is assumed to be a scientific truth that growth, in terms of production and consumption, is a positive for the nation and that the value of stocks (owned primarily by the rich), the manufacture and consumption of unnecessary things, and the export of agricultural goods and manufactured goods must be the primary concern of government.

The corporations force-feed us lies about the value of the global trade that they control, paying experts to convince us that the trade between multinationals in the United States, China, Japan, Germany and France has any relationship to the economic interests of ordinary people.

It is also presented as a given that the Federal Reserve, now controlled by international investment banks like BlackRock, can make monetary and fiscal policy with no accountability to the citizen, and that the citizen has no right to suggest how money should be defined, employed, or loaned out to corporations. Journalism is a subdomain of corporate advertising that hides from us how the inflation, produced when corporations use the Federal Reserve to print up money and buy their own stock, eats away at the paltry savings of ordinary people.

Although no one who is permitted to speak to the people mentions the dark empire of global finance, the facts are now so obvious that even those drenched in sugary food, marinated in pornography and action films, and drowned in fashion and seductive pop music, notice that something is wrong.

There is an assumption in our society, a patently false assumption, that corporations have the right to place suggestive and misleading images and messages anywhere they want, on billboards and in buses, in commercials, or embedded in movies, that justify a criminal economic and social system that benefits them.

Internet, commercial television and movies, and social media have as their primary goal the reprogramming of the brains of citizens so as to render them up to corporations as docile consumers incapable of action. This agenda is unconstitutional and criminal yet few resist it. Powerful, but invisible, totalitarian structures that have been erected across our nation.

The foreign wars that destroy the Earth, and cripple our sons and daughters, driving the militarization of our government, and of the corporations that occupy it, cannot be kept secret any longer.

The forced use of throwaway GMO seeds, and plants modified to be poisonous and innutritious, the criminal purchase of farmland by corporations using phony money that created for them by banks, the sprinkling of deadly pesticides and fertilizers on fields that not only poison our water but also destroy the precious soil that took hundreds of years to develop, are opening the Gates of Hell for future famines that the blind baby boomers never imagined possible.

The assumption in policy is that the only way to solve problems is tax the people (not to tax corporations or the super-rich) and then to use that tax money to magically resolve all issues. Although government has played a helpful role in the past, and could in the future, the institutions that call themselves “government” are no longer capable of playing that role. The money for those programs will come out of our pockets in terms of taxes, inflation, and additional costs for the products we must buy since we are prohibited from growing our own food or making our own furniture and tools.

Citizens are blocked from obtaining good educations, and teachers are treated with contempt. That policy is implemented because educated citizens can oppose corporate greed. But the corporations also want to define what a good education is, and make that specific form of education that they define the requirement for the high paying jobs they control.

Citizens who try to assert their constitutional right to “secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” or who just try to get buy, find nothing but unemployment, underemployment, exploitation and crippling debt. They are brainwashed, or simply tricked, into spending what little money they have on non-essential products.

The final step in this process is to deprive the citizen of the right to support himself or herself economically. Small businesses, small farms, every aspect of economic activity for the citizen has been destroyed by operation COVID19, the “controlled demolition of the economy.” We are forced take COVID19 payments, established without any democratic process. In the next year, most will be made dependent on these pathetic corporate payouts; we will be slaves in every sense of the word.

The great majority of government money for “COVID19” goes to corporations. The criminal media tell us that the money will create jobs, but in most cases it will be used for automation that will destroy jobs, or to hire private intelligence firms to spy on, and to infiltrate, workers so that they cannot offer resistance.

The time for action has come, fellow citizens. We cannot allow the rich and powerful to play on our human weaknesses any more. We must realize our capacity to think for ourselves, to create our own free economy, to think scientifically and to organize ourselves in opposition to this criminal takeover of our society.

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Featured image is from Emanuel for President

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

I Shall Fear No Evil

Why we need a truly independent candidate for president

Author: Emanuel Pastreich

Paperback ISBN: 9781649994509

Pages: 162

Click here to order.

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