Inaugural Special

THE POWER OF THE PRESIDENT

The role of the president is far more than just another officeholder; the president is the holy leader through whom ordinary people may experience the power of their country. Since leadership is essentially amoral today, unconnected to any ideal of spirituality, the appeal of the state must be to the pride of the individual in the military supremacy of the state in the world community. To undermine that supremacy is to doom the entire structure of power, and no president would contemplate such a move regardless if he were a Democrat or Republican.

We are about to witness the expenditure of $42 million on a party to celebrate President Clinton's victory and inauguration. The President's willingness to jettison principle in favor of political expediency is readily visible in every executive decision William Clinton has made to date. This President has never found an issue he is not perfectly capable of making an about face on. Yet the City of Washington is aglow with excitement, putting on the biggest fireworks display since 1976, when the republic celebrated its bicentennial. Even as the lines to soup kitchens get longer.

Fortunately, the weather in Washington, D.C. during January has been so cold that a number of politicians have succumbed to it, so that it might seem that God and nature are behind the eventual cessation of the election and inauguration of presidents. The country is on the verge of massive revolt, and most of the white middle class are perfectly ignorant of the real condition of the country due to the reporting of white middle class reporters and journalists, who are in denial about the real delicate condition of the American society.

America claims to be a free country while it practices leader-worship of its president. The media will ignore small groups trying to expand the public dialogue, giving them excuses like there is not enough space or time to cover their opinions in the media, but it will give expansive time to such issues as the gown the First Lady will wear, or the menu at the White House when a foreign dignitary dines there. If the president holds a press conference to announce that he has no news on a particular issue, it will get more coverage than an opposition organization holding a press conference on the failures of the presidency.

The President is the chief executive of the republic, which is like a corporation set up in the Constitution of 1787, where the duties of the President are carefully enumerated. Even former presidents receive rank and status, for they become "Elder Statesmen," even if they committed crimes while in office. For the four years of any president's term, he is the top man, the boss, the Man In Charge. He is the Leader of the Free World, even though his chief impact on the world is felt through his executive powers, such as his position as senior law enforcement official of the government. We forget too easily that the president is the Commander in Chief, which means he is in control of the most powerful military machine on the planet, with bases that span the entire globe, and that under certain circumstances persons of certain ranks can be shot for disobeying his orders.

Clothed with the IMPLIED POWER of executive privilege -- an undefined power that every president has relied upon since George Washington and Alexander Hamilton invented it -- the president has near absolute power. Today the president presides over an establishment of over 2 million executive employees, with executive authority over a state-structure of well over 22 million people nationwide. We think that there is a division of power between the Congress and the Presidency, but in reality that is a farce. Congress is nothing other than a training ground preparing politicians for their eventual runs for the White House. Not one of them has any intention of curtailing its power or reforming its grandeur.

Ironically, the place where the Leader of the Free World officially resides, the White House, was built by slaves, and it was staffed by slaves for years. The probability is very high that much of the City of Washington was built by slaves too, which to a people truly concerned about individual freedom might be a little troubling. While we watch the pageantry of the Inaugural we forget that at that very moment 1.6 million Americans are languishing in U.S. prisons, and that millions more are homeless. While the politicians party, the country sinks into oblivion.

The real purpose of the Inaugural, as with all official celebrations, is to enable the common people to live vicariously through their leaders. In ancient Egypt the average person actually believed that his own immortality was tied to the immortality of the pharoah; if the pharoah was buried correctly, then he too would live forever. This is now carried on through the Presidency, even if all pretenses of immortality are removed from the picture. Yet in the world of the corporations -- of which the republic is the corporation-in-chief -- immortality can be attained so long as everybody follows the carefully laid out rituals that keep the corporate identity "alive."

The institutions set up under the republic are different from the institutions of the British society, the society of America's Mother Country, insofar as the republican institutions were actually created on a particular day by an enactment. In contrast, most of the British constitutional institutions evolved over centuries based on history, custom and popular will. The origin of the Congress and the Presidency, and the Supreme Court, through an enactment meant that these institutions would be governed by the enactment instead of customary law, which actually marked a departure from thousands of years of legal precedents. It also made these institutions dependent upon carefully devised formalities to distinguish them from each other, and which obliged them to create the fiction that they actually exist, even if only figuratively.

Corporations, in theory, do not die. So long as the board of directors continues to meet regularly, and proper minutes are kept of its meetings, the corporation will continue on in existence, even if the board meetings are always made up of different people. The individuals who make up a corporation are insignificant to the identity of the corporation in the law. The corporation is treated as if it were an actual person, speaking through its corporate officers. If some transgression takes place attributable to a corporation, some violation of law, the people who operate the corporation cannot be held liable for its actions. Corporations are legal fictions, and that is exactly what the Congress is; that is why every Congress is numbered, because it gives them the sense of being separate bodies, each succeeding the last, creating an artificial ancestry. This also takes place in the executive with the sequential numbering of United States Presidents, for it enables the current occupant of the office to call upon the whitewashed images of those who preceded him into power, former presidents.

There is no leadership coming from the White House, the official residence built by slaves. There is no leadership coming from Congress, the vipers' nest where new presidents spring from. The only semi-dependable ballast that remains is in the Supreme Court, and that is largely nullified by its corporate dependence upon the Constitution of 1787. The country is disintegrating, but never enough to postpone another ceremonial event in which pompous politicians can demonstrate their "popular support." Yet popular support under the republic is like the love of fans for a movie star, and let one event transpire that taints the star, and it goes into eclipse as fast as it rose.

The power of the president is absolute and unconditional. He appoints cabinet secretaries, and he directs all executive policy by direct order. The budget he has at his command is in the billions of dollars, and the military power he has at his disposal is second to none. There was once a dictator in the USSR who had equivalent powers as the dictator of Washington, D.C., the President of the United States, but today only the dictator on the Potomac remains, the Master of the World, reducing the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans into an American lake. We fool ourselves when we try to compare this America to the America of Washington or Jefferson, even though this 20th century modern America has its roots in the plantation slave-state constructed by these two former presidents. We forget that Jefferson thought that the masses were ignorant, and his designs for educational institutions were based on his plan to educate an elite to run the bureaucracy of the republic. And we forget that George Washington owned 390 slaves, and he cherished his status and privilege.

The presidency was designed to be a focal point for the masses to worship, while the property owners functioned privately and out of sight. The corporate example of the republic was copied in business, and the modern corporation was born. Yet the reality is that no president fully realizes what is going on around him until he has been in office for at least four years. This is the key to the office as a ceremonial post, because in actuality the bureaucracy is running the state, for its senior officers realize that the top offices are filled by new people every few years, and their permanent positions enable them to set the real agendas of the bureaucracy. When an elected official is asked to do anything his first question is to the staff, to find out what precedents have been decided upon.

The reason a president is limited to four year terms is that this keeps any particular president from meddling in the arrangements made by the bureaucrats. Usually presidents don't even realize that their subordinates are intriguing together until years later, when the results of these intrigues become public knowledge. Great lengths are gone to at times to keep vital information away from the president, because the bureaucrats know how a particular president might react to certain types of news. They size up their prey, knowing that they have to operate with this person; but if he proves particularly stubborn, they also know he will be out of office soon thereafter, and a new person will succeed him.

The only solution to any of this is to restore the law. The Constitution of 1787 is an aberration, that has the country arguing over its clauses as if it were the Koran. The Constitution of 1787 is not a holy relic, and the republic is not sacred. It is secular and corrupt. It is destroying the fiber and integrity of the American nation. It is setting us against each other, and arming us with guns. It is time to recognize that the ancient constitution still exists in America, and it is our way out of a TIME OF TROUBLES. As the institutions of the republic are discredited because of their pure corruption, we are obliged to accept the fact that there are precedents of restorations of law. The fall of the republic is not the collapse of hope for America. It is in truth the birth of hope, for only in the demise of the republic can the traditional rights and liberties of individuals be restored in the context of the ancient kingdom that is our homeland.