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"Are you saying that the current crisis has become a crisis because the President refuses to do his job?" I interrupted Steve.
"Absolutely, Pete! If he wants my advice as what to do, tell him that he must resign and hire someone like me to do the job for him. I know what the job involves. Also, warn him that if he fails to make this critical choice and refuses to resign or hire someone like me to act on his behalf, the economic collapse will continue to grow. It is bound to become critical if nobody acts in time to turn the thing around. This will happen, Peter, as surely as the sun rises every morning. If no one takes the responsibility to shift the focus from greed onto universal love, we will face a major 'civilizational' crisis in an about a dozen years. Then nuclear war will become inevitable. If people are corrupted by greed and by poverty, their life looses its substance, and with it dies the substance of their love that powers the economy and uplifts civilization. As a consequence the American economy will collapse, and the world-economy with it. The financial system will become so deeply hollowed out that it will eventually disintegrate into thin air as a soap bubble pops and blows away with the wind."
"Puff, and it is gone," I interjected, "and nobody will be able to put the fine spray that remains back together again."
"So Peter, tell that to your President. Tell him that the spray that blows away with the wind will represent the fate of civilization if he refuses to resign. Tell him that if he is at all concerned about the survival of his country and humanity as a whole, he should step aside immediately and request society to appoint someone that is qualified to do the job. In this manner he would fulfill his mandate to protect the nation."
Now it was my turn to laugh. "You can't say this to a President, Steve. And what if the cries for nuclear war come not from him at all, but from his Vice President? If the President was to resign under those circumstances, you would have a worse situation."
"In this case, Peter, tell him that he must impeach the Vice President first and fire all the others like him, and then resign. That what you must tell the President."
"You can't be serious, Steve. What you ask cannot be done."
"Even if it is true, Peter? Why can't you speak the truth to your President? If his incompetent, why shouldn't he be confronted with the fact?"
"How can you prove incompetence, Steve?" I asked. "You can make accusations."
"The proof is in the pudding, Peter. You are eating the mess already. It tastes sour. That is why you have traveled across the Atlantic all the way into communist Germany to talk to me, because the pudding tastes sour. Your King refuses to be President because he doesn't know how to be one. He has created an economic crisis that may soon overwhelm the world. Now he wants to turn his economic mess into a strategic crisis of the highest order. He wants to do this so that he won't have to deal with the consequences of his folly that caused the economic mess in the first place, that he doesn't want to deal with. That's not just incompetence, Peter. That's complete lunacy."
"I agree. That's total insanity, Steve. That's more than incompetence. Such insanity always happens when an incompetent fool has pushed himself against the wall. Such a situation would never have been possible in a fully functioning Presidency with the top elements of society participating. Unfortunately, Steve, we haven't had a functioning Presidency for decades in the USA. All we had is a bunch of clowns trying to play King."
"That's what I have been telling you, Peter," said Steve. "The incompetence doesn't lie in the fact that he wants to throw nuclear bombs around to cover up the economic mess that he created. The incompetence lies in the fact that he doesn't know what his job is. He wants to play King. A president is not a dictator, Pete. He is not a King. As I said, the U.S. President is not a hired dictator-king who rules over the nation. According to the fundamental design of the American Republic the elected President is a person that has been hired to initiate and preside over the process of collegial consultation. His mandate is to facilitate the process of dialog and compromise, of bringing the nation together on a lateral plane for the general welfare of the entire nation. His job is not to divide the nation by partisan actions, but to bridge the partisan division. His job is not to dictate to the nation's best people what to do, but to empower them to contribute to the welfare of the nation in the best way they are able. In order to do that he is mandated to stage a collegial consultation process right across the nation's most able professionals, its most experienced scientific and military leaders, and the brightest leaders of its institutions, including the business leaders, spiritual leaders, social leaders, judicial leaders, and so on. In this process of lateral collegial consultation the President is mandated to assure that the fundamental principles that the nation is founded on, its constitutional principles like the General Welfare Principle, are upheld and respected. In this sense only does the President become the leader of the leaders of the nation. The American Presidency is by design a laterally operating institution.
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