Then, mysteriously, after the election it's as if by magic that the interests of the major corporations are furthered by the Federal and state governments, while the needs of genuine American nationals are sidestepped. Approximately 1,000 Americans die every year due to toxins in their drinking water. When the politicians finally agree on a Clean Water Act, it's full of loopholes and exemptions. The politicians have proven again and again that they cannot be trusted to serve the public interest, and time and again study after study has narrowed down the cause of this failure to the fact that the politicians are on the take.

The compromising of the public interest is directly related to the soundness of the legal system, because the integrity of the system is reflected in its decisions. When land, air and water can be polluted and poisoned with impunity, you have a prima facie case that the system is dysfunctional. Some pundits dismiss the double-dealing of the politicians as a perennial necessary evil, but the truth is that mankind has never before seen the kind of rapacious moneychanging that is now taking place in Washington, D.C.

The political parties are the dirty underbelly of the beast. They have their origins in the primeval mists of medieval Europe, when the first representative parliamentary institutions took shape. The decline of the traditional nobility and the rise of the burgher class worked to create a legal discrepancy: Extremely wealthy peasants with no political or social standing, who sought to ameliorate this by good marriages, and the active use of their influence to change the European political systems. This was the basic drive underlying the Enlightenment, the ambition of rich peasants to enter the ranks of the nobility.

Tradition always bears a heavy encumbrance from the past, (which is why it is stable), but departures from tradition are all the more questionable because of the abandandoment of this encumbrance. The business of nations has always involved transactions, but the difference between a legitimate expenditure and an act of embezzlement revolves around the integrity of the state. To those who believe that the proper function of the government is to enrich them at the expense of everyone else, then of course, embezzlement is self- justified. Americans live in the aftermath of European experience. All of American law, culture and wisdom derives of thousands of years of practices from the motherlands of Europe, The Old World. Much of this inheritance, however, was cut off in 1776 when the Founding Fathers decided to make their plantations the center of a new republican order, wherein the traditional law enforcement mechanism was effectively neutered, the executive government. The traditional executive was abandoned in favor of a rotating officer, who was always beholden to the men of the upper class for power. This was the origin of the Presidency of the United States.

The monarch of the British Constitution is a limited, constitutional prince, formally bound to obey the laws equally with every subject of the Kingdom. No sealed paper document makes it so, only tradition and practice makes it so. In the United States the President has absolute power. The president can order people arrested without warrants and without cause. The president can invade foreign countries, without consulting anyone; the president can order foreign leaders assassinated, without consulting anyone...

Political parties are the means by which commercial interests influence the legislation of politicians. Technically they are merely donating to their favorite political campaigns, but when deals are being cut in the Cloakrooms of Congress the only interests being served are the kind that pay in cash. The first parties in England revolved around the members of the royal family, which played upon the opposition of the first-born son to his father, which was characteristic of youth seeking its own adult identity separate from the parents. This came to be solidified into an actual system of opposition as the first Prime Minister came into his powers as a result of the first German English King, George I, turning over the affairs of the English Kingdom to the first minister. This laid the foundation of cabinet government, and the modern system of parliamentary representation.

We Americans fancy ourselves to be the citizens of the first free nation in history, but this is a false notion. The very idea of political freedom has its origins in antiquity, in Anglo-Saxon principles of law, and the ancient Roman principle of the "equality under the law" of all citizens. What Americans did contribute to the culture of the Earth was revolution.

The Revolution of America was not an intellectual evolution; that had taken place earlier as the Enlightenment, by intellectuals who far outpaced those of the backwater of the Colonies. The American Revolution was a mass movement of violence driven by hatred. It was a mass movement directed at the possession of property. All the embellishments put upon the Revolution were after-the-fact adornments that were heaped upon it to glorify it, and to justify its excesses. While extensive research has been done on the French Revolution, few comparative studies have examined the American Revolution under the same standards. Few people want to undergo re-living the Reign of Terror, yet no one seems to appreciate that a comparable Reign of Terror took effect in the American colonies, which became the basis of American independence, and the Federal Government.

Modern life is dominated by the tension caused by the so-called liberals and conservatives. Yet where did this cleavage originate? Did it spring to life with Adam and Eve, or was it more the invention of the snake guarding the Knowledge of Good and Evil for a price? The revolutionaries were angry that they could not make the kind of profit that they thought they were entitled to under the British Imperial colonial system, so they sought to break out of that system, and establish a new system that had none of the traditional restraints put upon it that the traditional British executive has restraining it. THEY WANTED TO CONTROL THE NEW EXECUTIVE.

The first cleavage in the Anglo-American world since the English Civil War was that which divided the Whigs from the Tories in post-Restoration England, when the nation was divided over the succession of a Roman Catholic to the Protestant English throne. However, up until the American Revolution Whigs and Tories were not actual political parties, but the names attributed to two rough alignments of interests in Britain that exercised their influences through a series of aristocratic groups and family connections operating in Parliament through patronage and influence. It was only after 1784, when such earth-shattering issues as the American Revolution were having their repercussions, that public opinion was divided so irrevocably that the only way these interests could further their positions was through political coalitions we now call political parties.

In order to further clarify the nature of the political parties as mass movements we should understand the roots of liberalism and conservatism, both of which claim origins in the Revolution. Liberals associate their schools of thought roughly with socialism, or the idea that society is more organic than commercial, and which views individual freedom in the context of nature. Conservatives also view individual freedom as a product of nature, but they emphasize tradition and continuity as the civilizing influences that husband individuals into contributing adults. Conservatives and Liberals, alike, have their roots in the ideology of the Revolution, of liberating individuals. The only problem is that the Revolution did not liberate individuals, it liberated politicians from their ancient ties with the Old World.

In the pre-revolutionary American Kingdom, people had rights based upon ancient customs because they were born; in the post-revolution American Federal republic, the citizens only have those rights allocated to them under the Bill of Rights, and no more. Lawyers knew what this meant, even if ordinary Americans did not. The creation of Congress created the biggest public marketplace on the Earth. Suddenly, the entire wealth of this new creation, the American people, was up for grabs. Money could buy access to this wealth, and the only people who had money were the descendants of those first whites who grabbed the best lands with the most violence.

Political parties are organizations that attempt to bring about the election of their own candidates for public office, through whom they intend to control the machinery of the government of the country. Men and women join political parties for the same reasons that they once joined sides in civil wars. The conflicts of parties sublimate the will to civil war, and the political parties are like makeshift political armies, whose strategy and tactics are designed to fulfill issues of ballot access and electioneering. This is why during election season the seasoned campaigners use the rhetoric of the battlefield and war, and obtain a deadly serious sense of purpose and precision. And when excesses are discovered, it is always attributed to the "overzealous campaign worker."

Political parties function on another, deeper level, too. They satisfy the deep inner need of the average man or woman to feel as a part of something bigger than themselves. It gives the common man the feeling that even he has a chance for glory. This is part of the republic's mythology that "ANY BOY MAY GROW UP TO BE PRESIDENT." Of course, this is patently not true, just ask Aaron Burr.

Dictatorships often establish their control through a one-party system, but in practice the one permitted political party is nothing other than an extension of the state itself. Today the so-called two-party system is so institutionalized, it is really a one-party system with two institutionalized factions. The Republican Party received $63 million dollars after its convention, from the Federal Government, to finance its presidential campaign for the 1996 General Election; a similar amount will be paid out to the Democratic Party after its 1996 convention. How can a third party compete with publicly financed two-party campaigns? The Democrats and the Republicans hold all the senior positions in the state, so the parties are nothing other than extensions of the state. The real function of the parties is to win the support of the population for the policies of the government, rather than listen to what the people need or want; like big membership associations designed to make the population feel as if it has an interest in the way the two parties run the state, even if the state is run in a way that is contrary to the This is the very essence of the corporate state.

The partisan system in the United States has its origins in the post-Revolutionary conflicts between the rich and the poor that followed independence under the Articles of Confederation. The thirteen states each had an independent foreign policy, and the new America acted and reacted strikingly like post- Roman Europe. The solution, in the eyes of the property-owning planter class, involved the establishment of a powerful police force that, at all times, was under their control. The way this control evolved was through the development of formal political parties.

The first factions in America revolved around the issue of independence. Although much is made today about the alleged unity behind the movement for independence, the exact opposite is actually true. The majority were in opposition to independence out of fear of what would become of them in the hands of the rich, if the rich had absolute control of the state. Another aspect that is cautiously overlooked is the basic conservatism of the masses at any given time. The revolution represented a complete break with what the great mass of people had grown up with as the legal government. While about a third of the American population may have conditionally supported the move for independence, fully two-thirds did not.

The second primary cause of factions in north America derived from the battle over the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. The Constitution of 1787 was the stuff opportunists' dreams were made of. Only the preamble is poetic, which is why the only part of the document most Americans have any knowledge of is the Preamble; unfortunately, the Preamble has no force of law. In order to get beyond the preamble one has to have a background in law, and the first thing one notices is that the whole thing has the ring of a waiver of liability. Even where the Constitution carefully enumerates all the powers to be vested in the Congress and the President, the politicians hedge their bets with immunities and privileges, to guarantee that if ever the whole thing gets out of control, they can claim to be immune from blame because of the Constitution. The absolutists who advocated the Constitution's adoption became known as the Federalists, while the opponents of the Constitution -- by no means classical liberals -- were derisively called "Anti- Federalists."

Yet the forces that supported and opposed the Constitution were in no sense formal political parties. These did not begin to take shape until the first Congress had been elected, and a need for discipline evolved. The first political party was the Federalist Party, which held power through the terms of the first two presidents; and the second political party in the United States was the Jeffersonian party, which ultimately became the Democratic Party. Alexander Hamilton was the driving force behind the organization of the Federalists, being George Washington's unofficial Prime Minister, and Thomas Jefferson was the chief architect of the faction that originated as "Madisonians," after James Madison, to later become the Jeffersonians, and ultimately, the Democrats. Alexander Hamilton was the person who set up the administrative infrastructure of the Federal Government, and he inaugurated the Federal Government's marriage of convenience with American business. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, mastered the art of patronage by appointments, ultimately becoming the chief architect of the modern caucus system in use today in the Congress of the United States, whereby he was able to steer legislation he wanted through Congress by the use of "lieutenants."

Thomas Jefferson, even today, is an enigma of a man. He was known for his eloquence, as well as his vindictiveness. He was the most powerful American president of all time, having mastered the first real political party, and literally invented "party discipline." The Federalists faded after the death of Alexander Hamilton, and finally dissolved after the War of 1812. (The Whig Party briefly replaced the Federalists, especially after Democratic President Andrew Jackson vetoed the legislation for the second Bank of the United States.) Ironically, Jefferson is really not given the credit he deserves, because he actually devised the modern political party as we know it today.

Jefferson and Hamilton were arch-rivals, but they kept their open feuding within the forms of decorum, for both men fancied themselves "gentlemen," a term that had more significance to them than it does to us because in the antique sense, a gentleman was a squire. The imprimatur of this genteel arrangement has left its mark on the entire two-party system, which runs the country in a symbiotic relationship that is nothing if it is not corrupt. Hamilton was an insecure bastard who was eternally in search of legitimacy, and Jefferson was the well-born (and therefore well-connected) favorite son of the Virginia plantation aristocracy. They despised each other because the other was everything he feared the most in himself.

Jefferson had "hundreds of slaves." He tried to use his slaves in moneymaking schemes, that all failed. It was his one deal with Alexander Hamilton that made him President, in a smoke-filled backroom. Jefferson was in fact one of only two presidents in U.S. history who were elected in a backroom political deal. As president Jefferson usurped the authority to purchase the Louisianna Territory, more than doubling the size of the country, which he effectively governed directly even after he left office, and was succeeded by another Democrat. Oddly enough, it was Hamilton's deal with Jefferson that ultimately led to his death in a duel with Aaron Burr, another rival to Jefferson.

Jefferson was an ambitious politician with many rivals. He was a master stage-manager, which is a skill that political parties still require. Modern school-children are taught things like, "Washington went to his father and said, 'I cannot tell a lie,'" because that was part of the sloganeering that was utilized by the early political parties, to get a message out to a mass audience without the benefit of television and radio. Likewise we hear that Abraham Lincoln walked a mile to return a penny. The genuine hard-core truth is that Washington did not confess to his father, nor did Abe Lincoln ever walk a whole mile to return a penny; but the idea that they might have remains.

The next major faction to become a political party was the Republican Party, in the first winds of the Civil War. We are taught to think of the political parties as having deep emotional committments to freedom and liberty and equality, but in reality, they are there to do business. Very ordinary but profitable business. Each party is not a single-issue group, but a multitude of groups brought together for the temporary purpose of winning an election. It is this temporary purpose, the ad hoc organization, that is the hallmark of the American republican system of government. The slavery issue was important to the Abolitionist movement, which had made common cause with the Republican Party, but they were not the same institution. When Abraham Lincoln took advantage of the split the Republicans caused as a new third party, and took office with the lowest vote any American President had ever taken office under, he openly stated that he would not rush into the issue of abolition of slavery.

The issues that led to the Civil War are obscure to this day to most Americans, who are taught that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. Slavery was an issue in the platform of the Republican Party, which brought the Abolitionists under the Big Top of the GOP. The Civil War, however, was fought over the issue of legal authority, as to whether or not the states could "nullify" Federal legislation, or even secede from the Union. Ironically, late in the war the Confederacy legally abolished slavery. The north won the war simply because it had all the industrial plant. The only reason Lincoln invoked the issue of slavery was because his superior armies were losing the war! The issue of slavery gave the fighting a moral purpose, which turned it into a crusade. Crusades are the very essence of mob rule, and the overt manipulation of masses. To add insult to injury, the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Lincoln only had effect over those slaves living in areas that were defying the authority of the President, and nowhere else. Needless to say, after the war the Party of Lincoln was not popular in the South, which then became the powerbase of the Democratic Party into the 20th century.

The Democratic Party came to embrace an uneasy alliance between southern planters and urban workers, while the Republican Party came to represent the co-existence of midwestern farmers with East Coast manufacturers. While little kids pledge allegiance to the flag across America, the Democrats and the Republicans are selling and giving away the property of the American people in lucrative deals that represent a payback for the financial support the political parties received from commercial interests. All the heroic legends about mythic American presidents turn out to be only so much propaganda, as we come to realize that the Presidency is nothing more than a mirage.