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The takeover of our society by the billionaires and their lackeys cannot be understood unless we grasp how a veil of secrecy has been spread over most of the government and over corporations for the last twenty years that makes it impossible for people to even speak about the horrific crimes that are destroying our nation. It has become common sense for most people in the upper middle class to simply assume that there is a set of issues which are simply taboo, which cannot be brought up in any context, ever.
President John F. Kennedy addressed this crisis of governance by secrecy at the beginning in a brave speech he delivered in April of 1961.
President Kennedy spoke,
“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings.
We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.
Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.”
A massive increase in secrecy in the United States started after President Kennedy’s assassination in1963, a blatant attempt by global finance to intimate all politicians that was complemented by the expansion of classified status to cover any document that revealed criminality in government. This move was combined with a purging of committed and responsible individuals from the Department of Defense and from intelligence.
That trend towards secrecy went into an exponential upwards curve after the 9/11 attacks. Those attacks involved massive conspiracies to destroy the functionality of government, to mislead the public about fundamental policy decisions, and to threaten, or suppress, opposition while launching endless foreign wars. Laws were set in place, many of which remain illegal to even mention, that set stiff punishments for the disclosure of the truth in any format, for any reason.
To this day, although the contours of the fraudulent attacks on the World Trade Center are known to many, the actual internal process by which it was planned, coordinated, and implemented remains obscure.
There are three main approaches to making secret the corruption and criminality that has spread across government and corporations, and to punishing anyone so foolish as to search for the truth: 1) the use of classifications (secret and top secret), 2) the use of secret law, and 3) the use of non-disclosure agreements.
Rendering corporate and government documents detailing institutional criminality as “secret” and “top secret” and punishing anyone who refers to the criminal actions with massive fines and jail terms for violating the conditions for security clearance, is an old trick that has been radically expanded over the last decade. Numerous whistle blowers have gone to jail and have been driven into bankruptcy, for simply speaking the truth for the good of the nation. Many are subject to courts agreements, to keep them out of jail, that bar them from even discussing what was done to them illegally.
These days, whistleblowers are few and far between because in the current reign of secrecy, those who violate the rules will be punished without anyone ever knowing what happened to them. There seems little point in the growing darkness of risking one’s life and livelihood.
Just about anything that might get someone in trouble for corruption is immediately stamped as classified and thereby rendered off limits. This practice is what has allowed for the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars by investment banks and multinational corporations from the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency (and elsewhere) over the last two decades—without a trace. It is also the means that permitted investment banks to steal trillions of dollars from the Federal Reserve in 2020, an act that fundamentally transformed American society by creating such a concentration of wealth as to establish an untouchable all-powerful ruling class.
That could not have been done if most pertinent documents in the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve had not been classified as top secret (in an egregious act without precedent).
These days, documents are classified by the FBI, the Treasury Department, the Coast Guard, the Department of Commerce, and yes, of course, the Center for Disease Control, on a daily basis to protect the interests of investment banks and the billionaires who run them.
This new culture has rendered a government that was already fatally wounded by 9/11 into an undead, zombie criminal syndicate that does the bidding of the very few.
Secret law, as opposed to classification, is a law, or laws, passed by the Congress which has the full impact of Federal Law, but that remains secret and for which you can be punished for discussing the existence of.
The very concept of secret law is so blatantly unconstitutional that you would have thought people would be screaming from the rooftops about it. But, in our sad age, decadent intellectuals are too compromised, too caught up in their own little worlds, to worried about their retirement funds, to care about such matters.
I cannot describe here all of the ways in which secret law is employed in the United States to support a shadow government that makes decisions long before any institution described in the Constitution can take action. Secret law is employed to block people from running for public office, or to make sure their ideas are never covered in the media—no matter how relevant their arguments may be.
Secret Law renders topics taboo in debates on policy in government, think tanks, universities and the media, debates on many important issues. It is not simply that the media does not want to cover the truth because of its corporate interests. It legally is not permitted to do so.
Those who violate the regulations of secret law in their pursuit of truth are brutally punished, but their punishments remain unknown to the public, or even to friends.
Finally, there are non-disclosure agreements which people in business and government are forced to sign from the start if they want to have a job at all. These agreements include enormous fines, and other punishments, for any disclosure of the criminal actions of the organizations that demand the use of these agreements.
In addition, there are non-disclosure agreements that are forced upon citizens by courts whereby, in order to avoid jail and fines for speaking the truth, citizens must sign agreements that prohibit them, forever, from relating the details of the criminal actions by corporations or governments that led to their misfortunes.
The implications of this sweeping institutional secrecy in the United States, at all levels in the Congress, and in the Federal Government, and extending to corporations, banks, and privatized intelligence and law enforcement, are grave.
More and more critical issues in the United States are becoming taboo, more and more criminal conspiracies are off limits for the media, for academics, and even for the man in the street.
This empire of secrecy is the primary driver, not the foibles of any particular politician, that is behind the catastrophic institutional collapse taking place in the United States today—a collapse that is starting to resemble, under the COVID19 regime, the end of the Roman Empire.
We cannot make any progress in stemming the flow of the lifeblood of our nation until we take on the unconstitutional walls of secrecy that have shut citizens out of the policy process, shut down the fundamental functions of government, and made possible the current totalitarian governance system.
At this point, all classified materials must be made public with only exceptions for ongoing discussions on treaties and agreements. All secret law must be deemed to be illegal and unconstitutional by its nature and made public, and the criminal enforcement of non-disclosure agreements must end.
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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.
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.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
