While I have reservations about the existence of a "shadow government", and I'm not ready to pull on my tinfoil hat, I have no illusions about where this country is headed if things do not change.
http://www.wealth4freedom.com/wns/truth.htm
The Chinese see the United States as a dying empire... rotting from within, collapsing under its own weight, the idiocy of its government and the ineptitude of its citizens. The speed of descent of our American civilization is matched only by its wholly illogical, unneccessary nature. I would tend to agree that if we leave our government to its own devices, the US as we know it will not exist within the next fifty to one hundred years. I believe that the future health of this republic lies in the hands of its thinking citizens, and the few elected officials who are still defined by reason.
It's much much worse than you seem to believe.
From one who routinely gets tinfoiled here, may I suggest some excellent video and essays that fill in what our educrats so deceptively determined we didn't need to know about our own country? The best Rat/RINO killers I have been able to find!
How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution
http://www.cato.org/realaudio/cbf-02-15-06.ram
The Issue of Tariffs: How U.S. Revenue Collection Was Turned Inside-Out (video)
http://mises.org:88/Sophocleus
Size Matters: How Big Government Puts the Squeeze on America's Families, Finances, and Freedom (And Limits the Pursuit of Happiness)
http://www.cato.org/realaudio/cbf-02-02-06.ram
Big Business and the Rise of American Statism
http://praxeology.net/RC-BRS.htm
The Founding of The Federal Reserve (video)
http://mises.org:88/Rothbard-Fed
The Great Depression, World War II, and American Prosperity, Part I (video)
http://www.mises.org/multimedia/video/Woods/Woods5.wmv
Secrets of the Federal Reserve
http://www.barefootsworld.net/fs_m_ch_01.html
Jackson's 2nd Bank US VETO (very important - what he correctly and constitutionally opposed is just what we ended up with in 1913)
http://alpha.furman.edu/~benson/docs/ajveto.htm