250 Years After the Declaration of Independence

What Went Wrong?  

The Fourth of July, 2026 is scheduled to be the day we celebrate our nation’s founding. The US has the reputation of being the world’s longest standing democracy. Despite numerous blemishes in that history, it is a claim to be proud of. In 1787, at the end of the Constitutional Convention, when asked “what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”, Benjamin Franklin replied “A republic if you can keep it”. 

Well, we tried and succeeded for a long time but nothing lasts forever. Just as the Roman Republic changed into the Roman Empire with the elevation of its first emperor, the USA has become an empire, no matter the title of the man at the top. People are now saying that Trump wants to be a king. As I’ve pointed out before, his goals and his methods suggest a desire to be emperor rather than king. We have neither a monarchy nor a republic at present. Few historians or other knowledgeable people have spoken about the American Empire until fairly recently and now everyone seems to be writing about the decline of the American Empire. I’d be the last person to contradict them. Of all the various forms of government that we have names for, “oligarchy” seems to best describe what we’ve got now. The institutions established by the US Constitution still have buildings to house them and budgets to pay employees to keep the lights on but in essence, they have abandoned or been relieved of the functions they were created for. 

Before we reach for the gin and turn on another ball game, I would like to suggest some of the events that got us to where we are now and why it will be difficult to restore what we think of as democracy. 

If you live in a tight ideological bubble or you get your news from the mainstream media, you may have little idea what’s been going on lately. Right now the US is supporting and collaborating in an on-going and publicly announced genocide, which is being seen live by anyone curious enough to look. The military and economic assaults on any country or people who do not adhere to the policies we impose continue with increasing violence. As I write, it looks like Venezuela will be the next target. The current American president has taken an ax to all institutions, in education, broadcasting, medicine, basic research, trade, journalism, regulatory agencies and law enforcement. The growing gulf between the ultra rich and everyone else has brought us closer to a new age of feudalism. In the older feudalism the people had a belief in God for consolation. In the secular neo-feudalism the consolation for the masses lies in gadgets, fast food, pornography, drugs and spectacles, including sports events with military flyovers and the virtual orgiastic half-time shows that accompany them. 

Everyone will have his or her own views on what brought us to this state of affairs, and I don’t claim that my short list is definitive but here are a few events in the demise of US democracy that the public seems unaware of or unconcerned about. 

1. The Powell Memorandum 1971- Lewis Powell was a conservative corporate lawyer from Richmond, Virginia who wrote a memo to the Chairman of the Education Committee of the US Chamber of Commerce urging that corporations become more aggressive in promoting their own interests and those of their major investors. Two months after the memo was written, President Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court. The memo leaked and its influence metastasized. Private foundations popped up like mushrooms to extend the influence of their ultra-rich and ultra-conservative founders beyond the grave. 

A few of the best known of these are: 

 -The Heritage Foundation (from 1973) which produced Project 2025, generally thought to be the blueprint for Trump’s assault on the government. 

 - The Koch Network - The Bradley Foundation 

 - The American Enterprise Institute 

 - The Cato Institute 

 - Young Americans Foundation 

The principal goal of all of them is to influence government policy. They vary slightly in outlook with some pushing hard-core Neocon pro-war policies while others are more libertarian and isolationist but mostly, they all promote tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, less government regulations, especially those protecting the environment and working people, and less investment in services and benefits for the general public. The effects of their efforts are all too visible, even if their role in the outcomes are not widely recognized. 

2. The Fairness Doctrine in US Communications Policy- 1949-1987 This Act, which derives from the Radio Act of 1927, required that all candidates for public office were to be allotted equal time by public broadcasters using the public airwaves. It was repealed in 1987 by the Reagan Administration over the objections of Congress. Anyone old enough to remember the Reagan Administration knows what a pitiful level US news broadcasting has sunk to since that time. CBS News, where Edward R. Murrow and his associates once provided serious investigative journalism, has recently changed ownership and is expected to compete with FoxNews in the sordid swamp of Neo-con propaganda interwoven with infotainment, gossip and commercial promotion. 

3. The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) 1938 This Act was originally passed to limit the influence of foreign propaganda circulating in the USA, a seemingly reasonable goal, if rationally applied. A foreign agent is one who: 

     a. engages in political activities. 

     b. acts as a political adviser/consultant in the interests of a foreign principal. 

     c. solicits, collects or distributes funds in the interest of a foreign principal. 

     d. represents the interests of a foreign principal before any US official. 

FARA does have teeth. In 2015 US Senator Robert Menendez, representing my home state of New Jersey, was tried on bribery charges but got off with a hung jury, dropped charges, and censure from the Senate, none of which impeded his reelection in 2018. However, when he got into another multiple felony corruption scandal in 2024, this time including charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent (for Egypt), he was convicted and sentenced to eleven years in prison, which I believe he started serving last January. While I doubt that Sen. Menendez sees any humorous aspect to his troubles and FBI agents did discover hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash-filled envelopes and gold bars in his house, it’s hard to suppress a chuckle when a senator is sent off to prison for steering a halal meat certification contract to an unqualified friend with ready cash, and for assuring Senate approval of arms sales and aid to a foreign country, at the same time that the president of our country is openly soliciting bribes from foreign countries and ultra-rich people, both foreign and domestic, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in response, and bragging about it. Who was writing this script, Robert Crumb or Monty Python? 

By some divine(?) miracle, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has never been required to register, although its declared purpose is to influence American politics to promote policies favorable to Israel. Heads of state are exempted from registering with FARA so when Bibi Netanyahu accepts invitations to campaign for his preferred US presidential candidate in front of the combined Senate and House membership, he is not subject to FARA penalties, but one might suppose that all those making such visits possible would be, although it could be argued that treason charges might take precedence over whatever FARA penalties might be meted out. Of course, that would involve the entire Republican majority, so it isn’t going to happen. Why then are we not hearing meatier complaints from the Democratic opposition? First of all, by my conservative unofficial guesstimates, about 80% of Democratic members of Congress are also on the take from AIPAC. Besides, after the Democratic leadership constructed the Russiagate fairy tale in a sleazy effort to discredit Donald Trump, who would they be to complain about unethical tactics used to influence elections. 

4. Citizens United vs. FEC - 2010 The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, another of the far-right groups established in 1988 in the wake of the Powell Memorandum. Rather than issuing a narrow ruling to settle the specific case which regarded advertising during a political campaign for “Hillary:the Movie”, a partisan film the company had produced, the court majority issued a decision to overturn provisions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold Law used to bar corporations from paying for advertising during election campaigns. Ironically, shortly before this Citizens United had lobbied to ban the advertising for one of Michael Moore’s films. The legal issues were complex but the effects of the decision were severe. It overturned several precedents and solidified the concepts that corporations were persons under the law and that spending money to amplify their voice was an activity protected under the Constitutional Right to Free Speech. The practical effect of this ruling was to legalize bribery and to cripple attempts to put limits on political spending. Fifteen years later, we now have a fully corrupt government, including all three branches, executive, legislative and judicial, which were established as separate entities to create checks and balances of power. Over the past decade academic studies have found that what the American public wants has virtually no effect on the legislation that the Congress passes. 

On a more subjective and intuitive level, I don’t believe that the majority of American citizens want the country to engage in a highly visible genocide. Maybe there are many who just don’t care about anything beyond their personal well-being but while I can’t produce any solid evidence, I don’t detect a collective lust for mass murder. We’ve seen that the Congress routinely approves funding of weapons and technology used for the genocide by majorities of about 85%. Either we have a representative government or we don’t. If it IS a representative government, then may the wrath of God bestow on us what we deserve, except that I don’t want to cop out by counting on any god to impose justice on the assassins among us. 

If the government is NOT representative of our collective will, then we must find a way to change it. This is not a partisan undertaking. While many clever writers document the unprecedented violations of international law, US laws, the Constitution of the United States and longstanding societal norms of decency by the current president, and his party colleagues give up their independence, their judgment and their decency to avoid his wrath, members of the “opposition party” do as they’re told by their patrons from AIPAC and the important corporations in the military industrial complex, the health industry, big pharma, big oil, and the financial sector. How does a country, an empire, or a civilization, when it has reached a level of widespread, all-encompassing corruption, ever recover? The short answer is that it doesn’t; it collapses, either from within, or from pressures brought by the world beyond its control. 

When the Roman Empire eventually collapsed it took Europe about a millennium to recover. Will that scenario be repeated? I doubt it as I think it more likely that the idiots who ridicule the risks of nuclear war, climate change and environmental disaster will manage to eliminate human life on our planet in less time. Is that too gloomy a view? Well, one of the most beautiful things about being here on earth is that life is full of surprises, some of them good. What can we do? Start by turning off the propaganda and face up to what we are doing, not what our designated enemies are doing, but us.

Designated Delays

 

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was originally passed in 1946, then modified in 1966 to prevent its misuse to hide information rather than doing its originally intended function of making knowledge of government activities available to the public. It was further amended a number of times, notably in the post-Watergate period of 1974; in 1982 when Reagan limited its application in the interests of national security; in1995-99 when Clinton opened up much information on what the government had been doing during the Cold War and most things of historic interest from at least twenty-five years earlier. In 2009 and 2010 Obama permitted retroactive classification of documents requested under FOIA, and briefly exempted the SEC from some disclosure in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007. Despite these modifications, the law and the departments organized to handle information requests under FOIA have remained as established in 1974. It has been a useful tool for those few remaining journalists who keep trying to expose the truth about government activities which the government would prefer that the public not be aware of.

Such efforts are often resisted by government agencies but in the past year or two, there have been striking revelations which together led to an important conclusion regarding the designated time frame for the release of potentially embarrassing information.  All governments lie about their activities, or at least embellish them to improve their image, but since the US has been the world’s only superpower after 1991, its activities and misdeeds have greater worldwide consequences.

As an American citizen with a tendency to be hypercritical about almost everything, I believe it preferable to have a critical eye focused on one’s own activities and those of one’s tribe, despite the negative impact it may have on one’s economic prospects, than to blame all of the world’s ills on “the other”.

In the 1960’s the US was rocked by a series of major political assassinations which the country has never fully recovered from. Within the years 1963 to 1968, President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King were assassinated. All of them were moving the country toward a broader-based democracy and in every case that trajectory was derailed by their deaths. Each killing was followed by the growth and dissemination of a fairy tale explaining the event to keep the public from growing dangerously restive. These tales were remarkably successful except in the case of MLK, where the fury of the black population could not be so easily constrained. 

In 2024 a number of reports, interviews and videos on internet finally put the mysteries to rest. Remarkably, several were documentaries made in the late 1990’s based on, or featuring, death-bed confessions by participants in these events. How it happened that such reports were made nearly three decades after the events, without making headlines in the news, remains almost as big a mystery as how the basic facts of the assassinations were concealed in the first place. That the documentaries made in the late 90’s only came to wide distribution last year adds another layer of mystery. In all four cases the evidence that has emerged indicates that there was some level of collusion within elements of government. 

 Now, let’s turn to some of the specific revelations that have found wide exposure in the past year. An interview with Chauncey Holt made a few days before his death in 1997 had him describing his career working for both the Mafia and for the CIA when their activities overlapped. He was on assignment in Dallas at the time of the JFK assassination, his role being essentially logistical in terms of supplying weapons and fabricating fake Secret Service I.D. badges for participants in the plot. He mentions his bosses in the Mafia as well as his contacts at the CIA. Holt was an interesting man with a strange combination of skill sets ranging from weapons expert to circus acrobat. His long interview on YouTube is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z5MgCG4COY

 While Chauncey Holt admitted to being involved in the JFK assassination, he said he did none of the actual shooting. Shortly after seeing that filmed report, I found a video of an interview with another participant, James Files, who admitted to being the person who fired the fatal shot. He was not the primary shooter but was stationed on the grassy knoll ahead of the motorcade in case the first shooter failed to kill the president, and so it was that he fired the one shot that completed the mission. His story seems credible enough, certainly ten times more so than the Warren Commission Report, although that’s a very low bar. Could this documentary have been created by AI? The assassination was in 1963 and the confession about thirty-four years later. The wonders of Artificial Intelligence are far more recent. Was he just seeking fame before he died? I doubt it but see for yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp1E31tnTUU

The assassination of Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21, 1965 as he was preparing to give a speech to a crowd of about 400 people seemed to be a more straightforward story of a clash between rival religious sects. Malcolm had a falling out with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, the year before and had joined a more orthodox Sunni Muslim congregation. The Black Muslims were angry. Malcolm was shot as many as 16 times, with his autopsy revealing 21 wounds, some from a shotgun fired by Thomas Hagen, a thug from NJ. Hagen was shot in the leg by security guards and escaped from the angry crowd. He was apparently never arrested for the crime. Three members of Nation Of Islam were arrested, tried and convicted for the murder. The media published reports of the crime that varied in many details, reflecting a degree of confusion as well a strong antipathy for the groups involved. One of the three men convicted of the killing, Mujahid Abdul Halim, subsequently confessed but said that the other two men convicted were not involved. In 2021, after serving many years in prison, the two men were exonerated by a judge who said the prosecution had withheld evidence at their trials. In 2024, surviving members of Malcolm X’s family decided to sue the FBI, the CIA and the NYPD for $100 million, alleging their complicity in the crime. I have no further information of the outcome of their case. 

By the time that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on 05 June 1967 the American public was demoralized by the spate of killings and the changes set in motion by them. It seems to have leaped at the chance to believe that Sirhan Sirhan, a crazed Pakistani Muslim, was the sole killer. Evidence of the killing was quickly destroyed by the LA police and there was little official follow-up. Robert Kennedy Jr. was a thirteen year-old boy at the time of his father’s murder and unsurprisingly has spent a lot of time and effort doing what the FBI and the LA Police failed to do, i.e. finding out who the real killer was, although not necessarily who paid him. Spoiler alert: Sirhan was not Kennedy’s killer, despite being in the room and firing a number of shots, one of which critically wounded a member of the Kennedy entourage. RFK was shot from behind at close range by a security guard who left the country shortly after the killing. He was named by Kennedy Jr. in his interesting report, a summary of which you can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_assassination_conspiracy_theories

When killed, RFK was campaigning in California to become the Democratic candidate for president to replace President Lyndon Johnson, who would step down rather than face a primary challenge. The assassination of Kennedy threw the party into disarray which contributed to Richard Nixon becoming president in the elections of 1968. 

James Earl Ray was blamed, charged and convicted of the killing of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. Given that the 40 year-old was both a racist and a fugitive from prison and was seen at the site of the crime, he was a convenient scapegoat, allowing the more important protagonists to escape scrutiny. A more plausible and detailed description of the crime has emerged which exonerates the long deceased Ray. He continued to insist til the day he died, in prison in 1998, that he was set up to take the rap and did not do the killing, except for the time when he took a guilty plea to escape the death penalty 

See the long wikipedia description, which includes most of the alternate theories and rebuttals, including confessions of involvement by other locals, and accusations by the King family.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Martin_Luther_King_Jr.

Besides the revelations regarding assassinations of the 1960’s, 2024 saw two attempts to assassinate former and future president Donald Trump. In the first instance, at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks managed to wound Trump on his right ear, kill one bystander and seriously wound two others before being shot to death by the Secret Service. The Director of the Secret Service was removed after what was called the biggest failure of the SS since the Reagan shooting in 1980. Was the failure a matter of negligence or was it planned? Maybe we’ll know in thirty years. 

Two months later, another would-be assassin was found in a hedge on the perimeter of the Trump Golf Course in West Palm Beach before he could fire any shots. This one, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, a disenchanted former Trump enthusiast, had some shady associates from Ukraine to Latin America helping him to acquire heavy weapons. Routh fled and escaped by car when shot at by the Secret Service agent who spotted him but was later apprehended. He has been charged with attempted murder and terrorism and is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. 

Had either of these two would-be assassins been successful and gotten away, we can assume that based on the history of the assassinations of the 60’s, confessions would start appearing around 2050 and information regarding all the people involved in any way would be released by 2084. These recent attempts may have simply been the gestures of crackpot loners with no government involvement. But what of the larger crimes the government has obviously had a hand in, from the color revolutions to all the coups d’etat around the world, or the deals with Israel to coordinate, supply and defend the on-going genocide? We’ve seen the results but how much was each member of Congress paid to support the massacre? Will the sordid planning details ever be revealed? And if so, when? We won’t know about them. Perhaps our grandchildren will but they won’t care. 

Yes, coverups are not exclusively about assassinations.  Another story that reemerged in the past year was about the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 for which Timothy McVeigh was executed. Rather than me trying to summarize the story, you can get a fuller version from Jeremy Kuzmarov with this link.

I’ll end this little essay on the long wait for concealed information to reach the public with a word of appreciation for Oliver Stone. In 1991 he made a film, JFK, a bio-pic with an all-star cast, which challenged the findings of the Warren Report. It received eight Oscar nominations, winning two of them, but it also drew criticism from the major media, ever ready to defend establishment orthodoxy, for fomenting conspiracy theories. Thirty years later, Stone made a documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which provided solid evidence for many of the events which seemed to be based on rational conjecture in the earlier film.  If you haven't seen it yet, you should.