The daily news is in the hands of local news crews at various television stations, as well as three national news services associated with the three major television networks; with the advent of cable television this has mushroomed to four. On the other hand, this does not include news wire services, like the AP or Reuters. (There was once a third service called UPI, an actual private firm, but it went out of business, leaving the affiliation of existing press institutions, Associated Press, as the only remaining wire service in the United States, Reuters being a European outfit). This does not include the bona fide "press," which consists of the hard-copy media: newspapers, magazines, etc. While the hard-copy press actually reaches the so-called intellectuals of the American political society, therefore giving it more clout on substantive issues, the masses turn to the broadcast media for information. Yet even the newspapers and magazines all turn to the headline leaders to define the weekly agenda of the news, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time and Newsweek Magazines, and the Los Angeles Times. Noam Chomsky has done the most noteworthy analysis of this, and he has paid the price for exposing the nudity of the emperor. With genuine aplomb, Chomsky's work has made it clear that there is an opinion-making machinery at work in the press that amounts to a power-structure with an agenda, even if the process of setting the agenda is sloppy and piecemeal. Of course it doesn't take a rocket-scientist to understand the collusion between the media and the politicians when we hear about the agreement between White House press correspondents and the White House, such as when it was agreed that there would be no photographs taken of FDR in a wheelchair; or no press leaks on the many women JFK used to cheat on Jackie Kennedy.

The popular media portrays the underground as a minority of misfits and shady characters, rather than as a bona fide culture of dissent. The media cannot bring itself to even recognize that the current epidemic in suicides represents a form of dissent, because that means facing the reality that the above-ground society we have created here in the United States is not ideal. It means facing the reality that the world we have created by default in America is an extremely harsh and unyielding environment that has a grisly impact on too many people. When kids are caught committing crime it is not seen as a cry for attention and help, it is seen as weakness on the part of the system, and a refusal to punish. This is complete nonsense. The punitive focus of the Federal, state and local governments is never challenged; there is no shortage of punishment, and there is no shortage of crime; we overlook the things that are now criminal, and we overlook the bureaucracies' efforts to make it easier to convict people of the crimes it charges them with having committed. The bureaucracy is masterful at being able to divide the population with controversies over crime and punishment. The truth, however, is that there is a battle of perceptions raging in the media, and the reality on the street is something quite different.

The media is a closed-loop information system that is tightly controlled as a form of private property. The truth is that politically correct opinion is all that is allowed, and if someone wants to express an unapproved opinion, even if he has the money to PAY FOR THE TIME, the media will refuse to allow it circulated, and has done so. The mass media is part of a controlled-mob dynamic, in which the masses are incited to action by reporters who are very much aware of the power they wield. This is why there is so much anxiety over the development of the Internet as an alternative news delivery medium, because anyone with a Personal Computer and Internet software can set up as a publisher; this is why there is such a big rush to establish "name-brands" in the news delivery field.

The American underground is an enormous thing, the enormity of which is illustrated by figures from the IRS. According to the most feared and resented agency of the United States Government, approximately $500 billion goes uncollected in income taxes every year due to the so-called underground. Now this includes a wide range of activity, from millions of waitresses declining to report their tips-income, to local drug dealers and pimps declining to report their incomes from selling drugs and prostitution (illustrating that to the Government, a waitress who refuses to declare her tips is just as bad as a pimp!). What this all signifies, however, rather than a monolithic underground, it illustrates an underground that is united by a single common thread: Opposition to the system of government that prevails in the United States, and the policies of that system.

Every totalitarian system develops an underground opposition, and the sign that it is a totalitarian system is the fact that the opposition must organize underground. A significant indicator of this can be found in the news coverage of the recent death of Timothy Leary, a former Harvard professor who turned on the Establishment and became a leader of the counter-culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Characterized as a "drug guru," the real strength of Leary's example as a dissident went unexamined. One of the most powerful influences on average Americans encouraging them to use illegal drugs is the fact that the government has outlawed them. This is the dark side of the prohibition state that is never given the light of scrutiny, because it underscores the basic failings of a system of government that is styled on the Inquisition. The heavy-hand of the powerful is busy building prisons, while allowing hard- working Americans to decline to such an extent that they become desperate enough to commit crimes! In fact, the pressures on average taxpayers to pay more taxes to build the prisons amounts to redistributions of wealth from families to prison contractors and the prison guard unions! (Ironically, the most thoroughly unionized shops in America are of public employees).

The characterization of anyone who does not support the monolithic power structure of the republic as an anarchist underscores the power of the media to create opinions, that are then funnelled back in the form of elections and opinion polls. There was a time in the 1980s when every Libertarian Party candidate who suggested that Government should not run everything was immediately challenged by reporters with minutiae like, "who would run the roads?" Once Ronald Reagan, the Democrat-turned-Republican president legitimized the discussion of privatization, all of a sudden all the media pundits were experts on this topic too. The pundits are shameless in their rush to experthood on the latest fad, and they are only outpaced in the general rush to pander by the politicians, who have no actual opinions of their own. As prostitutes they are for sale to business interests, which are the only parties with the money to buy politicians in the United States; of course, the business facade disguises the faces of old-money "social register" families that all made their money before the Federal Government outlawed slavery.

The American underground -- like the American above-ground -- is rife with dissension. It is not understood, however, by average Americans that they are being led into stupid arguments in order to distract them away from the meat and potatoes issues of social control, because their level of education is on par with that of a medieval peasant. THAT is because of the teaching methodology of the American school system, which sees its role as steeping Americans in the myths and fictions of the republic, instead of the hard facts of history, because the hard facts of history undermine the validity of the republic. The republic the Founding Fathers set up was not designed to enable the average American to become free, far from it. The Founding Fathers lived in mortal fear of slave revolts, and especially of the combining of the poor with the slaves, to overthrow the power of the elite. The republic was a very deliberate effort to control the society; to promise freedom, while retaining unseen levers of control in private hands behind the scenes.

James Madison, in Federalist Paper #10, narrowed the debate down to the fact that the American society was faction-ridden by disputes from, "the various and unequal distribution of property." The problem, he said, was how to control the factions that derived from this struggle; minority factions could be controlled by the principle that decisions would be by vote of the majority. The real problem was a majority faction that might oppose the interests of the plantation aristocrats. Here the solution was offered by the Constitution of 1787, by setting up "an extensive republic," that is, a large nation extending over thirteen states, because then, "it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other... The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States."

This reveals the strategy of divide and rule that underlies the very structure of the United States since the Revolutionary War. The republic is like a net, isolating the population of each state from the others, with artificial borders that have as much reality as the Mason-Dixon Line. In the modern world we feel the repercussions of this every day in the news selection process, as editors and programming directors pick and choose the news they will cover on a particular day, and controversial news is pushed aside because it is not "local," having come from across that imaginary line that divides one American state from another. That is how that pesky news about prison riots ten miles away can be rationally excluded until it becomes large enough to warrant national news attention, because within that short ten miles runs the official line that puts those disorders in someone else's jurisdiction. The media has created a fantasy land wherein every American is as happy as the seven dwarfs, who sang songs and skipped along as they went to work in the mines. When real life has the temerity to break through this delusion, the journalists have the balls to act shocked...

The American underground is above all a human society shaped by the forces in the above-ground society. It has political institutions, religious institutions, and commercial institutions, just like the above-ground society. It also includes a vast criminal element that engages in forbidden behavior, which requires the dark of the underground in order to flourish. It is this aspect that the media focuses on, never realizing that the prohibitions of the Federal Government force ordinary good and honest Americans to patronize sinister criminal cartels, forcing people into exposure to a side of life they would otherwise never have to face. The "JUST SAY NO" rhetoric of the republic is a running joke on the street, where the junkies realize that their chances of being imprisoned far exceed their chances of getting any kind of medical treatment for drug addiction. The reality of widespread drug addiction in the United States is the driving force underlying the market demand for illegal drugs in America, which puts the spotlight on the grim reality of life in the United States; a grim reality addicts are trying to avoid through a drug-induced escape.

The underground has come into existence as the police-state functions of the Federal Government have been fine-tuned. We forget that the early years of the republic were characterized by such underground phenomena as the Underground Train to freedom for slaves. The mass media's inclination to write-off the origin of the Federal Government as an institution supported by slavery has also inclined it to dismiss slavery as a topic of no relevance to modern-day America. The reality is that American society was so harsh that if a man beat a slave to death for disobedience, his neighbors would close out the cries of the slave as he was bludgeoned, because it was no one's business how a man treated his own private property!

In our current frenzy about crime, it needs to be understood that the historic place of the Federal Government has not usually been friendly to the average man. Early laws weighed heavily against indentured servants, who were usually white, enabling them to be treated as slaves; and slaves who sought freedom were actual criminals. Far from guaranteeing freedom to black slaves, the Federal Government returned them to their bondage. So much is made of the Civil War freeing the slaves, few understand the grim reality the Federal Government embodied between the adoption of the Constitution of 1787 and 1864, when private slavery was officially ended. Or the caste system it kept in place after the Civil War, when three hundred years of keeping the slaves illiterate enabled the newly arising industrial enterprises to discriminate in favor of the educated whites, in a perpetuation of the earliest method of social control that basically amounted to pitting the racial and ethnic groups against each other.

One of the most significant causes of division in the American underground are the cross-purposes that underlie the motivations of the individuals who constitute the underground. This is not something so shallow and superficial as differences of creed, like what divides the Democrats from the Republicans. It is more substantive in nature, like the profits drug dealers make from the continued prohibition of illegal drugs. The prohibition of drugs gives substances that anyone can grow in their garden a premium value. This is what the original prohibition of alcohol did, making something someone could make in their own bathtub a commodity. We forget that our school system is pumping into the little impressionable minds of millions of youngsters that making money is good, the more money the better. Then we expect them to JUST SAY NO to drugs, and go to work at Mc Donalds for $4.50 an hour, which really pays even less, because once we subtract the taxes the hourly rate is far less. Additionally, the youth are encouraged to unquestioningly worship families that made fortunes from bootlegging -- like the Kennedys -- and ignore the facts of history. It's just expecting too much.

The underground press is like the above-ground press in that it has the feel of a shouting match in which no one is listening to anyone else. There is the sense of beating the dead horse that overshadows the whole culture, above and below ground. And this validates the correctness of each side, each unwilling to deal with the reality of another side. In the real corridors of power, this tactic functions because it enables the powerful to ignore the powerless; thereby enjoying the fruits of power without addressing the grievances of those the power was wielded against to obtain those benefits. But in the underground this tactic cannot succeed, because it disallows the factions of the underground to unite long enough to capture power. After being around the underground for awhile, it becomes obvious that its constituent members are more comfortable without power. The reality of the underground is that every armchair philosopher with access to a photocopier has all it takes to start an underground press. With a little stamina, there are no shortage of Emperor Nortons, each giving his equivalent to the San Francisco-based Emperor's order to Abraham Lincoln to marry Queen Victoria. Each is hopelessly out of touch with real issues, largely due to a reliance on the mass media for information, which can never see the forest for the trees.

Will it really make a difference in January, 1997, if Dole or Clinton is president of the United States? Both men are consummate politicians, with years of experience in manipulating public opinion through the use of the executive powers. The ideological flags of left and right are nothing more than a camouflage; battle-field colors to draw the support of ignorant masses, who are as easily spooked by a superstitious portend of a pundit-cum-expert as the medieval peasant was by a lunar eclipse. The only hope that the American underground has is liberation from the forces of oppression coming from the above-ground society, that can't build prisons fast enough, and that can't find draconian measures strong enough to satisfy the blood lust the media is generating through its shoddy journalism. America desperately needs a genuine opposition movement that has not been compromised by the Establishment interests of the status quo. The American underground has to find the courage and unity to come out from under the debris of the prohibition state, to be seen in the light of day for what it is, a genuine movement of dissent. The spirit of the hippies, of the counter-culture, even of the sexual revolution, was a spirit of defiance against the republic of the Founding Fathers. It was a continuation of the Bohemian spirit, which was of an artistic origin, which sought to empower the individual through a spiritual anchoring within the soul. This is not to be lightly brushed aside by reactionaries who want to characterize the open defiance of this widespread social movement as mere hooliganism. This is what sparked the Anti- Government Riots of 1992, as well as the Ruby Ridge Massacre, the Waco Massacre, and the Oklahoma City Massacre. These are all manifestations of an indigenous will to resist the Federal prison state, that is an open mockery of every human aspiration for freedom.

How can the underground prevail in this struggle for human freedom? Through open cooperation. But first it must see its genuine enemies as being in the Federal, state and local bureaucracies, instead of in other underground groups. THIS IS THE BIG ISSUE OF THE AMERICAN UNDERGROUND. If those making profits from the underground found common cause with those resisting the usurpations of authority of the republic, the republic could be terminated in record time, and a dialogue could be entered into as to the shape of things to come. But as long as the Establishment of the republic is able to manipulate the public dialogue through manipulating the ignorance of the people, there will be no unity, and with the American people divided from within, the republic will prevail.

One of the most significant turning points in the whole issue of the existence of the underground was the revelation that a Militia Movement existed in the United States, in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing of the Federal Building. Even though tens of thousands of ordinary Americans were involved in this movement, it had been virtually blacked out of the mass media. As far as the Establishment was concerned the Militias did not exist. It wasn't until they were implicated in creating an anti-government opinion that is blamed for the bombing, that anyone took them even remotely seriously, and even that was upon the condition that the Militia Movement be characterized as a "hate movement." The Federal Government is deathly afraid that this anti-government mood might be contagious, mainly because the bureaucracy hasn't treated Americans very well, and the whole Establishment is afraid of the logical consequences of this. The truth has always been that this great and all-powerful republic "of, for and by the people" has felt free to push those people around as much as it felt like, starting out with the Whiskey Rebellion. And any time the people felt entitled to fight back, this was always characterized as some kind of criminal conspiracy. Think about that the next time your taxes are raised to build a new prison.