Congress tried their collective best to rectify the situation, but the budget and politics always made any effective change impossible. In 1998, the Senate and House both had IRS “reform” bills before them. The Senate version of the bill had a $18.3 billion dollar price tag for IRS “honesty”, whereas the House’s bill came in approximately 3 billion dollars cheaper. The House version, which was approved by a majority of both parties and was therefore largely symbolic, died in Committee as expected. The Senate’s version, which was championed by the Republican philosophical diehards was thwarted by the liberal Democratic faction over the largely theatrical objections of the Democratic President, expired after extensive debate on the floor of Congress. It was all a sham. No one had any intention of paying over sixteen billion dollars for reform of the IRS; the showmanship had all been smoke and mirrors for re-election. The government’s thugs would go on extracting revenue by “hook, crook or outright theft” as had become customary since WWII. Citizen-slaves had no rights! Any money the IRS deigned to leave the commoners were “unharvested resources” to be taken from the slaves at a later date. The idea of having a “Citizen Review Board” for the IRS was considered by Washington insiders to be ludicrous in the extreme. Who could govern a populace that wasn’t properly terrorized by their government? Certainly not the adolescent-minded and rebellious citizens of the United States! The childlike citizens of the U.S. had to be kept in place by their betters!

Although the secret group called Majestik 12 had originally been formed in the 1940’s to deal with the possible invasion of the United States by extraterrestrials, it had extended its mandate when secret battles in space had shown that the inhabitants of the Earth were capable of defending themselves. Captured spacecraft had been disassembled and patiently reverse-engineered to reveal the technological secrets of the aliens. As each member of the group aged and died, another was selected to take his place. President Reagan’s Star Wars Initiative hadn’t been an effort to make the U.S. secure from missile attack from the Soviet Union, but the culmination of forty years of research into alien technology. When the American flying saucers met the aliens in space, the extraterrestrials were soundly defeated. Unknown to the world, America had won its first Space War.

Instead of quietly toasting their victory and slipping away into quiet retirement after winning the Space War, the invisible government schemed to tighten its hold on the reins of power. They had secretly bought stock in Thomas’s company when it was still a fledgling company and had supplied some of the data upon which Thomas’s discovery was made. They knew of Thomas’s discovery and what had happened to him and his mother. The existence of a means to rejuvenate each member meant that the group would never have to replace a member due to death by old age again. As each year passed, their power would grow until they would utterly control every human life on the planet. Nothing could be allowed to block their path to absolute power!

The successors of Majestik 12 made plans to assassinate the President of the United States just as their predecessors had when John Kennedy had spun out of their control. They reasoned that the assassination of the sitting President would so shock the country that the public would clamor for an end to terrorism and mandate real gun control. Intensive government surveillance on the public would become a fact of life as national ID cards were issued with every individual’s complete medical, educational and personal history digitally encrypted into a rewriteable magneto-optical storage area built into every card. Aside from the individual’s name, date of birth, social security number and color photo in plain text on the front of the card, the individual’s fingerprints and DNA would be encoded into the storage area on the rear for instant identification. The cards would replace all cash and credit cards and thus provide the means of tracking every monetary transaction that the subject made. For the first time in history, no one outside of prison would be immune from the prying eyes of government. The leaders of the invisible government could envision a time in the near future when they could destroy an individual by denying him credit, emptying his bank account, erasing his educational achievements, removing his licenses and modifying his medical history to show that he was an untreatable paranoid schizophrenic who had escaped from a maximum security institution for the criminally insane. The cards represented total power over Americans and the plotters lusted after it in much the same way that a heroin addict looks forward to his next fix.

The President’s secret plans for the public were laudable, but he had refused to take the final step in securing ultimate power for the group. That refusal, in their eyes, was a form of treason against the invisible government. The President would expiate his sin by dying so that their plans could proceed without interference from the so-called “Chief Executive”. The aging ex-military sharpshooter who had engineered the Kennedy assassination was called in and briefed on his new mission. The stone-faced, chain-smoking killer nodded his agreement with the invisible government’s plans and asked for an effective closure date for his mission. They told him that he was not to commit until the order was given, but to prepare a plan that could be executed within two weeks of the action order. In the meantime they asked him to take care of a small security breach on one of the group’s “special” projects. The hit wasn’t particularly difficult, they told him. They only wanted him to arrange a fatal traffic accident for two unimportant individuals. They slid a sealed manila envelop with photos and the personal details of the intended victims across the polished mahogany table and told him that the action was to be concluded as soon as possible. He stood up and nodded again, leaving the room while dragging the invisible chains of Karma he had forged by the multiple murders of innocents behind him.