The modern Presidents' Day holiday evolved from two separate holidays, namely, the celebration of George Washington's birthday, and the celebration of the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. The consolidation of the two holidays into one, under the name Presidents' Day, was also designed as a tribute to all Presidents of the United States. Americans are raised to believe that the Presidency is a democratic institution that represents the best men have to offer. The reality that the Presidency is not democratic, that it in fact is the leadership of a bona fide police state, is carefully side-stepped.

The original "executive" that had governed the country for millennia, pursuant to the ancient common law, was the constitutional monarchy. The U.S. monarchy was in existence from the foundation of the colonies until 1776, after which the colonies became states as republics, and the general confederation of the states took the form of a republic. Republicanism, however, in constitutional history had only the single precedent of Oliver Cromwell, and the Puritan Dictatorship. This precedent also stressed the importance of a written charter because its founders lacked true legal authority, and under the republican government of Cromwell, the leader of the army, England was a police state. The evolution of parliamentary democracy in Great Britain derived largely from the separation of the responsibilities of government from the duties of the state, when the prime minister became the head of government. In the United States the President is both the head of state and the government, creating a conflict of interest in the enforcement of justice.

It is important to consider the office of the President in the light of the men who invented it, instead of according to the mythology promoted by its minions. The men who invented the republic wanted a strong government to protect their property, but also, none of them wanted to be burdened with the responsibility for the coercion the government would have to exert to control society without the assistance of traditional common law institutions. A monarch has an actual interest in the integrity of the state, but in a republic, no one has an interest in the state; those individuals with positions closest to constituting an interest in the state are the bureaucrats, who develop their own agenda, and their own momentum, which cannot be controlled by the elected office-holders of the republic.

At the time the Presidency was invented, America had a society divided by class. The men who wrote the Constitution of 1787 - the document responsible for inventing the Presidency, as well as the other two corporate branches of the republic - were exclusively from the upper, ruling class, as plantation owners, lawyers, merchants, smugglers, and traders, who presided over a divided society of poor whites, women, and slaves. The notion that these people were united as the American people is not accurate; African-Americans were not even regarded as U.S. citizens until after the Civil War.

The most significant concern of the founding fathers, when they wrote the Constitution of 1787, was not how to protect the freedom of poor white people, but how they were going to protect their wealth from the poor people in general. Wealth which was largely produced through the labor of slaves. This wealth survived, even though the slaves were freed; and to this day, there has been no serious consideration of proposals for the remuneration of any of the descendants of this injustice, even while lip-service is given to the idea that there should be no profit from ill-gotten gain. Similarly, the Native Americans were largely displaced from lands they had regarded as their homelands since the dawn of Creation, which the republic has sought to legitimize by offering the natives cash to release the state of liability for its conquest and theft of their only valuable resource.

Nowhere in the body of the Constitution is there one protection of the civil rights of the people of the United States. But there is a clause for the protection of slaveowners, charging the republic with responsibility of returning fugitive slaves to their bondage, a job that was primarily given to the chief executive charged with carrying out the Constitution of 1787, the President of the United States. In fact, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was signed and authorized by no one less than President George Washington himself, a man who personally held in servitude 390 human beings, as his slaves.

The White House itself was built with the labor of slaves, which is conveniently left out of the media's reporting, when journalists fawn all over the so-called "First Family" of America. The fact that the President is the chief jailer of Americans, rather than their leader, is never referred to except by those courageous enough to defy the media establishment, which can lead to becoming a non-person in the eyes of the press. In February, 2000, America will have about 2 million Americans in prison and jail, more per capita than any other country in the world.

The primary responsibility of the chief executive is to carry out the laws enacted by the legislature, and because the republic lacked traditional legal authority, having not been devised pursuant to common law, it enacted an extra-legal method for representation that enabled white, male property-owners to vote, so as to generate a sense on the part of the voters that they were entering into a conspiracy, the outcome of which they would feel responsible for; however, even the members of this small group were not completely trusted, as senators were elected by state legislatures until this century, and the President is elected by an even more remote and undemocratic institution, the Electoral College, regardless of the results of general elections. Those who were outside of this small group - white, male property-owning voters - became the targets of this conspiracy: fugitive slaves, disobedient wives, indentured servants who fail to perform. It was out of this origin that the republic came into being after the Confederation was forced into retirement, in favor of the Constitution of 1787, under which the President became the senior law enforcement officer of the government, on behalf of the major interests that owned the country, which had devised the new republic as a means of protecting their property.

The republic became a model for business, having significantly obfuscated responsibility through the corporate system the founders devised at Philadelphia, behind the sealed doors and windows of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The Presidency and the Congress and the Supreme Court are all the products of the conventions of men, compromised by politics; in other words, they are corporations. They did not evolve through thousands of years of practices and custom; instead, they were enacted on a single day by powerful men who had ulterior motives. Power became privatized, so that those who wielded it did not have any responsibility to be accountable to the human community, as constitutional institutions have traditionally been. Americans have not been taught that the institution of kingship derived from the people, or that Americans did not invent the idea that authority to govern derives from the governed. These have been traditional themes in common law since antiquity.

Supporters of republics often suggest that monarchy is backwards, as a product of the past, and that republics are advanced, as the form of government of the future. The only problem with this is historic reality, which places the foundation of the first republics at the time of the founding of ancient Greece, not so long after the founding of the first historic monarchies. There is nothing modern about republics, and some of the worst atrocities known to mankind have taken place under the auspices of republics. The reason is simple, republics are by nature extra-legal. The original form of government known to all people is parental, and under the terms of parental authority, the guiding principle is seniority, creating a natural role for the elders of the society as its leaders. All societies have groups or councils of elders, and because most people are related to someone who is older, everyone is represented by the elders. The elders became generally known as chiefs, and occasionally one line of elders became "chief of the chiefs," or paramount chief, which in European terms came to be called kingship.

Republics were generally born out of reaction against kingship, especially after an individual king's reign, who might have been particularly difficult. To establish a republic the laws of the constituted and established royal government have to be violated, so that the very birth of the republic is based on outlawry. This is the first crossing of the line of legality that is necessary, for the birth of the republic to take place, and it is this first crossing of the line that often leads to the second crossing of the line, which is often the murder of the king. Once treason and regicide have been comprehended, how much more unlawful is it to proceed and arrest for trial, all those who disagree with the idea that it is necessary to kill the king to establish a republic? Furthermore, the line between right and wrong having disappeared, how difficult is it to proceed from merely arresting those who oppose the republic, to actually executing them for treason, that is, expressing opposition to the republic which had its birth through the murder of the king?

Upon the institution of the republic, of course, the society is totally unstable. Everything is in a state of flux. Wrong is made right, and right is made wrong, all with the agreement of men through conventions. The proof, of course, that the original leaders of the United States republic would use coercion against their own countrymen was proven by the Revolution itself, which was not a war against a foreign power but a war within the homeland between countrymen who upheld the ancient law, and those who sought profit from its violation. At first it was men who profited from the violation of this law, but later, when the republic with its anti-law came into effect, the beneficiaries of the government became corporations, facades for private interests that made it possible for the descendants of slaveowners to alienate the responsibility of their ancestors for taking the bounty of their slaves.

It is not by coincidence that the majority of those in the prisons and jails of the republic are from the lower castes, the descendants of indentured white servants, African-American slaves and conquered Hispanics and native Americans. The republic was born as a means for suppressing slave revolts, the fear of which pervaded early independent America. When the slaves of Haiti revolted, Thomas Jefferson sent military aid to help France suppress them, fearing the repercussions throughout north America if slaves set a precedent of securing their own freedom through violent revolution. Ironically, when the French were unable to recapture Haiti, they no longer had the island that was strategically necessary for keeping and defending the Louisiana province, which became the driving force behind the decision of France to sell what eventually became the Louisiana Purchase.

Americans comfort themselves with notions that slavery only existed in the South, but the truth is that at the time of the independence of America from Britain, there were slaves all throughout north America. However, it is not true that slavery was regarded as normal, except to racists. Even though racism was widespread among European settlers, there has always been a substantial group of people in America who neither regarded slavery as normal, or racism as acceptable. But the ability to oppose slavery or racism was limited by the republic, which was designed to exploit the social tensions between races and classes for the benefit of the ruling class, using the mob dynamics of peer pressure, punishment, and fear of reprisals.

The Presidency has been the chief source of danger to the American people since the very inception of the American Federal republic. First and foremost, the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and the very first time the armed forces were used was not against any foreign power invading America, but against Americans who opposed a tax on whiskey. Once, when the Congress had disallowed the increase of the army, President Washington sent the army out into the field to suffer defeat, forcing the Congress to increase it, and the president's power, unilaterally. This was the ultimate demonstration of police power, which was later used routinely for the benefit of the bosses against the laborers, when workers were trying to organize to have a voice in how they were treated.

When the political parties were in the process of formation, to make it possible for any businessman with money to buy influence in the government, the second President signed the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to criticize the President. The third President, Thomas Jefferson, bought the Louisiana Purchase without authorization in the Constitution of 1787, literally doubling the size of the United States, without any regard to the land claims of native American nations that existed there, and despite the fact that he was the first president to be elected in a smoke-filled room, as a result of a sleazy political bargain. The native American nations were viewed as unwanted tenants on land they had lived on for millennia, and it was the military of the President who "Removed" them. This was most pronounced under President Andrew Jackson, whose ethnic cleansing of the South led to the Trail of Tears, as native Americans were given ultimatums to leave their lands at the point of a gun.

The Presidency also led the crusade to steal the top two-thirds of Mexico, when its occupants backed the annexation of Texas, and later, the Spanish west. History is ironic in that America now complains about its "problem" with illegal migrants from Mexico, but when Texas was Mexican, the tables were turned, and it was Mexico that had a problem with illegal immigrants, Americans! Under the auspices of the republic Americans have been brought up with the disadvantage of not recognizing the difference between right and wrong. The conquest of the west was little more than what Hitler had envisioned when he talked about conquering Russia, the capture of the land and the virtual enslavement and genocide of its people. The only difference is that Hitler had a mechanized army, but his aims were equally as racist and expansionist as the best of America's Presidents.

The U.S. Civil War is probably one of the least understood of historic events in American history, especially by Americans. Americans are taught in school that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves, and African-Americans latch onto this because it seems to promise them protection from the republic's racist origins. The only problem is that it is only partially true. Abraham Lincoln was against slavery, as were most people in business in the North, but he was also a racist who considered schemes to resettle freed slaves in Africa. Slavery was not Lincoln's first concern, he was a corporate lawyer and as the new CEO of the republic, he was most alarmed by the declarations of the South that it was going to declare its independence from the North, to establish an independent country. If the South succeeded, the President's authority would be sliced in half along with the country. Lincoln's chief aim was to save the Federal Government, and the way he expressed this was that he aimed to "save the Union." Slavery, in 1861, was a peripheral issue; the power of the Federal Government to impose its law on the states was front and center, and the main cause of the Civil War.

The South is not only the ancestral homeland of the white Southerners, but also of the African-American Southerners. The real tension that caused the independence movement in the South was the industrialization of the North, which the rural South, with its old slave-based economy, held in contempt. The slave economy, however, had been integral to the original conception of the republic, as held by important Southerners such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. In fact, the commander-in-chief of the Confederate Army was related by marriage to George Washington's wife, Martha.

Lincoln used the opportunity of the Civil War to suspend the right to Habeas Corpus, to throw his political opponents in jail without due process of law. During the Civil War the President was a dictator. Time softened Lincoln's image due to the fact that he was assassinated by a racist Confederate supporter, but Lincoln was a shrewd politician, not a prince of noble bearing. Lincoln made it very clear that he prosecuted the Civil War not to free any slave, but to preserve the Federal Government, which he wrote down in a famous letter to Horace Greeley. Some scholars hold that 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War, others that 1,000,000 Americans perished, but regardless, the Civil War was one of the most horrific conflicts of the modern age, involving the resolution of social problems using violence.

The Presidency not only organizes the pursuit and prosecution of Americans through the Executive Government, such as through the Justice Department, and its agent the FBI, but it also oversees the exploitation of the national wealth of the American people through the Interior Department, while taxing them at the same time, again using the threat of prosecution and incarceration through the Internal Revenue Service. There is no doubt that government is necessary in a civilized society, and that organized institutions can best provide a professional level of service to the public interest, but the Presidency has never been held to any real standard. The Federal Government is an open door to opportunity for the faceless corporations that access its power through their influence over the political process, but it is a closed door for the American people as a nation.

Americans must accept the historic past as beyond their ability to change it, but they cannot accept the institutions of the republic as the system of government of the future, for if they do, they will lose their precious cultural heritage of freedom, which the republic has been unable to extinguish, despite two centuries of attempts to do so. The idea that the republic makes Americans free is poison, because the freedom of the American people existed before the republic was imposed upon them by slavemasters who invented it. By luring Americans into believing that the republic made Americans free, it infers that they owe the republic their allegiance, despite its origins in proto-fascist racism and violence. The truth has always been that the republic is a relic of a terrible past, and only once the republic is abandoned, and the ancient constitution restored, will America be able to proceed into a positive future of social peace and universal justice.

The republic and its CEO, the President, do not view the American people as a nation, but as a resource. In fact, government is NOT a business, and it morally should NEVER be conducted as a business. The notion that the leader of the country is the CEO, or chief executive officer, is direct evidence of the prevailing doctrines that the state is a corporation, which became known in Italy as fascism. Under the Ross Perot formula for government, the President is supposed to be the CEO, and the people are allegedly the shareholders; but in fact, the grim reality has been that while the President is the CEO, the people of the country have been his employees, and it is the very rich who own majority shares of the corporations, who are the shareholders, the owners, of the nation, for it is for THEM that the President works.

Until the promise of the American nation is made real, that all men and women are recognized as being equal before the law, under a lawful government formulated according to the principles of the ancient constitution, Americans will not know freedom. Instead, they will know fear, they will know sadness, they will know injustice, and poverty and grinding despair. Until Americans break the spell they are under, that chains them to the dominance of the republic, which cannot transcend the age when it was invented by slavemasters, their lives shall be wasted by politicians who don't know them, or care about them. The empty rituals of elections shall continue to elevate the worst sorts of men and women to power, while the society appeals to heaven for a savior who, if he were to appear, they would crucify.

The promise of freedom cannot be protected by a strongman President. Instead, the delicate balance that enables the freedom of the individual is only possible under a constitutional government, formed under the ancient constitution that does not propose to give rights to the people, but which instead is bound by law to respect the rights of people because they pre-exist in the people, which it is powerless to remove from them. Only then is freedom a birthright and not a privilege. And that can only take place under the common law executive of a constitutional monarchy, not under the police power of the President of a republic.

SOURCE: Written exclusively for the World FREE Internet by the Central News Service, the Voice of the American Underground since 1979. 2-21-2000