There is no wonder why capitalism gets a bad name. Ever since the dawn of time, governments have been used by large business ventures to secure their market and guarantee their revenue.
Back in colonial days, the East India Company had a monopoly supported by the British Empire, and in more recent times the canal/railroad building and steel industry in the United States were given favored treatment to drive away competition.
In the past decade and especially during the plan-demic, it is obvious that most large businesses and their owners have benefited (top 0.1% elite’s wealth increased dramatically) from the government connection as they were exempt from the strict and arbitrary rules that government handed down to small businesses, in effect scaring them out of business.
There is a name that is appropriate for this arrangement, crony-capitalism.
Understanding this, it is easier to ready articles that criticize capitalism, because one know that the target is not free market capitalism, but capitalism achieved by exploiting a government connection to get favored treatment.
In the United States, there is no one who better understood this connection and profited from it than Abraham Lincoln, a railroad lawyer who made land purchases based on the insider knowledge he had of the railroad-industrial complexes intentions. Once president, he would further intertwine private corporations to enter into partnership with federal government to set the stage for all the fraud that the Grant administration had to face. Truth comes out eventually, and that is a treat that the political establishment has to live with every day. The corrupt US government/big corp/big tech web of deceit of 2021 is only the natural progression of what has happened over the past 200+ years here in America.
Now that we have this knowledge, there is an article by Caitlin Johnstone that helps us all understand the mental harm we are being subjected to in and around the Covid-19 overreaction.
How many of people’s mental health diagnoses are really just them struggling to function in a capitalist system that is amoral, destructive, overwhelming, overbearing, unsatisfying, and bereft of meaning?
It’s surely one of the most under-examined questions in the field of modern psychology. People in general and researchers in particular all too rarely think to take a step back from the data they are looking at and consider the large-scale framework within which that data is materializing, and to consider whether there’s anything about that particular framework which is giving rise to the particular data sets they are seeing.
Specifically:
How many people end up consulting with mental health professionals because they find themselves psychologically unable to keep up with the frenetic corporate pace that’s demanded of them in order to “earn a living”? Or earlier on as children because they are unable to successfully navigate the capitalism boot camp known as school? How many people are given diagnoses, and corresponding bottles of pills, simply because they can’t march to the beat of the capitalist drum?
Know anybody? Know yourself?
I know that listening to my company’s CEO makes me ticked that he feels he can impose HIS political agenda on the sheep in his company. Especially this past year it seems that this occasional ramp-up of subtlety saying that BLM is inherently good and Trump was 100% bad. The Kool-Aid has been moved from favored beverage almost to a point of being a mandatory IV in the past year.
But I digress.
While the sheep will always be with us, I believe there are some critical thinkers that may have been tricked by a slick marketing campaign as well as Covid-19 narrative has given hope to the climate change cult that their agenda is not dead. No doubt that the evil high priests that believe man can totally shape his world into the perfect utopia that has failed in the past, that Marxism 15.0 accomplished by an exceptional USA can give everyone equality and no hurt feelings. The marketing of this “new normal” is obvious to those that look and are not afraid of questioning the various cult’s claims:
How many of these stressors are exacerbated by being psychologically pummelled with mass media propaganda day in and day out, artificially twisting your mind into the belief that this is all normal, and that if you can’t keep up, you’re the problem? Telling you that it’s fine and normal for there to be billionaires and empty investment properties while you struggle to keep a roof over your head? Telling you it’s fine and normal for wealth and resources to go toward murdering strangers overseas while you’re forced to choose between medicine and groceries?
Apparently, the elites believe that they have too many people to manage in this world (right Bill Gates?) and the case-demic/plan-demic is intended to be version 1.0 of an annual ritual where select sections of society can be culled so that future people management attempts may be easier to carry out with less insurrection, revolt or rebellion.
And by the capitalism propaganda known as advertising? How is our psychological health affected by a nonstop barrage of corporate messaging informing us that we are deficient, and that there are things we lack which we must obtain in order to become whole? That we’re not beautiful enough, not skinny enough, not fashionable enough, not affluent enough, that we don’t own enough of the top-line items which only the well-off can afford?
Expanded areas of deficits might be some are too white, too racist and not doing enough good to keep our neighbors safe.
If you don’t know this is slavery, then you might want to research things for yourself.
The antidote to all this is to connect with others on similar paths and talk openly about your own fears for the future as society blindly follows the diktats of the ruling elite and all those who “only are following orders”. Simple actions like walking into a store sans masks as a group and watch others embolden by your actions remove their masks as well. Plan for the future in strategic ways so you are prepared for what our government might have in store for us as this twisted and demented decade rolls on, squashing freedoms and liberties. Make a hobby out of learning and training to be able to live in a much different world that is more like East Germany of the 1970s or Venezuela of the 2010s.
Good luck in all you do while seeking to really living your life in spite of the tyrannical diktats of disillusioned political types that have finally exposed their superiority complex. Small businesses and individuals need to be encouraged while big government and all their complexes who desire to group us serfs into various groups that will determine our futures needs to be frustrated by our throwing sand into the gears of their plans and programs in non-aggressive ways.
Every little bit accomplished in our communities helps. The small things do add up as there is more of us than there are of “them”.
There was a time when “consent of the governed” meant something:
That to secure these [God-given] rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consentofthe governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government ..
Even Abraham Lincoln, in a moment of clarity (i.e. when he and his Illinois could BENEFIT from something other than a government about to go to war with Mexico for Texas) said:
Quote from 1846, NOT from 1861.
By 1861, with Lincoln wanting those seven states that had left under Buchanan’s watch BACK in the UNION for REVENUE, he changed his mind.
Now think on that a bit. If you reflect on a marriage where one spouse not only takes most of your money, but also abuses you verbally, you have every right to seek a just divorce. So too did these seven southern states.
Post 2020 election, if President Trump loses, those “deplorables” who have been ripped off by democracy morphing into socialism, which Karl Marx said was only a stage before communism (REIMAGINE THIS), are once again going to think about this “consent”. Most deplorables are ardent nationalists that would still invade states that attempt to leave the union.
Secession is THE answer, whether it be the fly-over country or the east and Left coasts, it be time for a divorce!
To be honest, the deplorables will not only have to look at the evil Democratic political party, but also the stupid GOP political party that did nothing to stop the spread of socialism (Bush’s “No Child Left Behind”, Corporate Welfare State, etc). The GOP is secretly in bed with the Democrats and predictably vote in lockstep on the major shifts in this once federated republic:
The Patriot Act
The Invasion of Iraq
Obamacare (and keeping it even when the GOP had control of Prez / Congress)
Illegal Immoral Wars and Interventions: Ukraine, Syria, Libya
So just to be clear, our US political choices include plan 1.1 and plan 1.2, because they are only a little different (tough to see that these are radically different, as both cause more deaths and keeps removing our God-given freedoms):
It is time to learn the differences, but more importantly, to understand what is not talked about in political circles, that of freedom, individuality, consent of the governed and being left alone!
If Trump is re-elected, you will have a little more time to come up to speed on how politics or voting will never fix this. The “Great Reset” is here, so it will be time to:
Empires and collectives will never want freedom as they promise you various utopias. Get smart, recognize a PsyOp, and blend into the woodwork locally while connecting with like minded-people for the road ahead.
I will lay the blame primarily on Abraham Lincoln, whose reaction to the secession of seven states in 1861 led to this republic’s change from version 1.0 in 1781 to version 2.0 (thanks to the US Constitution(1787), a coup d’etat by any simple analysis) to version 3.0 in 1865 that rendered the states as impotent servants to the master (general/federal government), a virtual democracy (i.e. mob rule).
Lincoln’s effort to save actually destroyed!
The genius of the Articles of Confederation is that it recognized as each state was in fact a sovereign country (just like the 1783 Treaty of Paris recognized). The presidential election pre-US Constitution was a non-issue, and 99% of Americans only saw the federal government when the post-rider stopped a few times a week. Furthermore, if one state had a tyrant, it would minimally impact other states.
In 2020, I would give almost anything to have the federal politics happen hundreds of miles away and have little impact on my day to day, year to year life in my own community. Can it be that whatever “federal” power is necessary that it be with this aim:
The said states hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defence, the security of their Liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretence whatever. – Article III ‘The Articles of Confederation” 1777
The US Constitution brought the executive branch to a much more powerful level encouraged by those like Alexander Hamilton who saw royalty and a central government as the path toward empire. The empire has been realized, but at what cost? The cost was the soul of this republic.
Today’s situation did not happen overnight, and most people could trace it back to the 1970s, but few realize that the real roots of this go back much further. The wedding of big government and big business was a Whig wet dream from the early 1800s that Lincoln himself believed in like a religion. Even by 1861 the US Constitution was easily raped by Lincoln himself all in the name of “safety” for the “union”. Preserving all thirty-some states with territories to the west complicit with big business barons working their behind the scenes magic with the US government to eliminate the competition.
[Michael Anton] urges Americans to vote for Trump, disappointed though they may be with his performance, because they know even better than before how much this country’s ruling class would use control of the presidency to hurt us in our private and public lives for having dared to reject their mastery. Trump, imperfect as he is, is like a finger in a dike that, if removed, would loose a deluge. Anton describes how the Democratic Party-led complex of public-private power has been transforming our free, decent, and prosperous country into its opposite—and how it’s going to do to the rest of America what it has already largely accomplished in California.
Personally, I find more and more people disillusioned with how the Marxist inroads into not just the colleges but also much of corporate America has been achieved in the past few decades. Many went to college for “communications” finding out that the MSM is nauseating to consider working for, and others now feel the same way about the medical fields (MIC – Medical Industrial Complex) with the Covid-19 “over-reaction”!
It is intriguing that a rather young person would see with such clarity just into what California is experiencing right now, and all the dots that line up as to the sequence of bad decisions to get to where millions are in a state of exodus there. Angelo writes in the review of Michael’s book:
[Here] in 2020 productive middle-class families are fleeing California—so much so that the state will probably lose a seat in the House of Representatives after this year’s census. And all because its government—controlled by oligarchs in the entertainment and high-tech industries, as well as the state bureaucracy and public sector labor unions—raised taxes, imposed regulations, let public services decay, stopped defending against criminals, and empowered left-wing social activists. Today’s California is for government-favored oligarchs and those who service them. You want a career? If you don’t conform every word and action to the ruling orthodoxies, your work and talents will be wasted. You want your children to grow up intelligent and decent? The schools will teach them little reasoning and much depravity. Like you, they will also learn to compete by favor-seeking rather than by performance. You see crime rising, sense that you have to protect yourself, but know that, in most of the state, the police will arrest you for it. And you are sick of paying for it all.
The bottom line it seems is that in much of middle-upper class America, most kids do not become taxpayers until they are almost 30. This allows the Marxist/totalitarian mindset to take root the longer kids are in college, making PhDs the ones with the most student debt and the most likely to be compliant in whatever corporation will have them! This is by design.
Michael Anton goes on to say:
The real power…resides not with elected (or appointed) officials and “world leaders”; they—or most of them—are a servant class. The real power resides with their donors, the bankers, CEOs, financiers, and tech oligarchs—some of whom occasionally run for and win office, but most of whom, most of the time, are content to buy off those who do. The end result is the same either way: economic globalism and financialization, consolidation of power in an ostensibly “meritocratic” but actually semi-hereditary class, livened up by social libertinism.
The intellectuals from the monarchy days is what I am reminded of. These types do NOT like competition, and government is big and bad enough to wield a club apparently. Angelo continues:
Despising any divine or natural authority and contemptuous of America’s history, those in the ruling class make war on the American people’s culture and national identity. Ironically, this ruling class, led almost exclusively by white men, has cast white men in general as the proper targets of universal vengeance—an inversion of reality sustained by a near-monopoly of power over corrupt institutions and mass communications. Anton’s section on “Propaganda and Censorship: Narrative, Megaphone, and Muzzle” is particularly worth reading.
Insightful stuff here. It is at this point where the talk turns to conservative vs. liberals .. and right away I think of the civil approach the South had with the “rule(US Constitution)-breaking” North where the ends justifies the means:
Truth-bomb time from Angelo:
They [ruling class] do not believe they have to worry about controlling their own violent troops because they are sure that they have nothing to fear from conservatives. That is because conservatives have continued to believe that the United States’s institutions and those who run them retain legitimacy. Conservative complaisance made possible a half-century of Progressive rule’s abuse. The War on Poverty ended up enriching its managers while expanding the underclass that voted for them. The civil rights movement ended up entitling a class of diversity managers to promote their friends and ruin their opponents. The environmental movement ended up empowering the very same wealthy, powerful folks while squeezing the rest of America into cookie-cutter living and paying inflated energy prices. The feminist movement delivered divorce and abortion—far from benefiting women, it has made millions dependent on ruling class favor. The COVID-19 pandemic has had almost nothing to do with public health and almost everything to do with separating, impoverishing, and disconnecting people inclined to vote against the ruling class. As leftist judges rule, conservatives respond by appointing judges who pledge not to rule. As leftist governors establish their brand of effective sovereignty by decree, conservative ones obey court orders. So long as, and to the degree that, the illusion of legitimacy stands—so long as the Right obeys while the Left disobeys and commands—there is no end to what the Left can do because there is so little that conservatives do to fight back.
.. until there is physical fighting, and like with the War Against Southern Independence, all the gloves will come off.
The boomerang and blow-back are real things that the Left is not ready for, and some in rural America are hoping for, so for now Trump, just one person, is holding it all back. Federation to Democracy to Socialism/Fascism/Marxism which is a very toxic brew.
Continuing on the theme from a few days ago where I titled the post:
Character Flaw: US Government Has Lied Us into War of 1812 All the Way to the War on Covid-19
.. we can go one from one official/unofficial (undeclared by US Congress) war to the next to unpack the gross lies politicians use for their own agendas.
Context for the Mexican-American war that started in 1846 is important because most people fail to remember anything about this war and even less as to what led to it and why this war was so bad .. for setting the stage to the next war or two. (so-called Civil War and Indian Wars)
So as the united States (13 sovereign states as addressed in the 1783 Treaty of Paris) came out of the War for Independence (officially called the American Revolution) and found themselves lied into the War of 1812. By 1815 the United States found themselves in more debt with NO MORE territory to show for it, it seems that maybe the government learned this lesson and stayed out of another war for another generation or so.
About the same time in current day Mexico, if you remember the Spanish Empire, specifically their fleet, was badly wrecked by the British in 1805 Battle of Trafalgar. By 1810 the Mexican people, sensing the demise of the Spanish Empire, started a revolution to expel the Spanish. So note that there was a lot of slave trade going on in Mexico with the Spanish kidnapping indigenous people’s kids and visa versa, so much so that the revolutionaries promised no slavery in the newly freed Mexico. Independence was achieved by 1821 at an 11 year war, but slavery remained .. so we have yet again the typical:
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss-The Who
Sound familiar, in recent years from Bush II to Obama to Trump … but I digress. Viva la no difference ..
Starting in 1822, settlers from Missouri (called the ‘Old 300’) started moving into the region that is now the state of Texas and by 1829 Mexico did finally abolish slavery. However, in 1830 Mexico outlawed immigration to Texas, yet it had no means to prevent this until starting in 1835 Texas went to war to become independent.
While the Republic of Texas occupied only 50% of what we today call Texas, this new government claimed an area three times this size into present day OK, CO, ID, UT and AZ. This “disputed land” was under the actual control of the Comanche, Apache and Navajo Indian tribes. These tribes had kept the Spanish Empire, Mexico and the Republic of Texas out of their land.
1st Republic of Texas flagRepublic of Texas naval flag
In 1845, the US government annexed Texas as the 28th state in the Union, complete with disputed land along the Rio Grande to the southern border with Mexico. The unwritten rules was that no troops were to be allowed in this “demilitarized zone”. However, the US was not content with Mexico alone as the Whigs wanted a more aggressive move against Canada while the Democrats wanted moves against a weak Mexico. Empire building is always in powerful elite’s DNA.
The term Manifest Destiny was the thought that God actually gave the US the right to seize land in the Northern Hemisphere from Atlantic to Pacific. The phrase heard from 1818 until 1846 was “54-40 or fight” based on the Whig premise that the joint claim the British Empire and US had over the Oregon Territory was in fact the US’s to possess. In fact, James Polk, a Democrat, even campaigned for president based on this philosophy.
This region west of the Rocky Mountains and between 42 degrees north and 54 degrees 40 minutes north (the southern boundary of Russia’s Alaska territory) included what now is Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, as well as land up the western coast of British Columbia, Canada.
The first action against Mexico was accomplished during the work towards a treaty behind the scenes between the British Empire (not in any major conflict and not a good time to pick a fight with) and the US Government. Pres. Polk sent Capt. Fremont with mercenaries to California to invade (1st invasion) and when Mexico got upset, he built a fort and raised a flag there. Mexican forces arrived and Fremont retreated to Northern California to operate a more guerilla war of attrition from the safety of the northern California woods. By this time, the Oregon Treaty was signed 15JUN1846 with the British Empire and settled the boundary to be the 49th parallel. The Whigs were ticked!
The Whigs now saw that conflict with Mexico might bring more southern “slave” states and upset the balance of power between the Whigs (Northern) and Democrats (Southern) had for decades. The slavery issue was USED by both parties to keep the people divided (the 1846 version of Covid-19). Polk then dispatched reps from his administration secretly to Mexico to offer them $25M for northern Mexico. The problem was that the Mexican government was in such a fluid and weak state that its leader changed 4x and its finance ministers 16X in the time the US sought to purchase this land. His representatives returned and Polk saw this as an opportunity to spark something. He directed 70 men under command of a man named Thorton to “patrol” (2nd Mexican invasion) Mexican territory and was met by 2000 Mexican cavalry. Over 16 US men were killed and Polk then addressed Congress saying “Mexico invaded the United States” which was an outright lie. Even Abraham Lincoln saw the ruse and challenged Polk from the floor of Congress by saying “show me the spot”.
BREAK: I have to say, the Anti-War Lincoln on the floor of Congress is like the Anti-War Obama on the same floor of Congress, only to become war hawks when they each became president. This is not unlike GW Bush campaigning on peace in 2000 and Trump campaigning on peace in 2016 only to see GW Bush invade Iraq based on the WMD lies and also see Trump dropping more bombs than O-bomb-a!
The 1846 Congress however gave in to President Polk’s wishes and the US invaded Mexico in an all out war that actually accomplished a few things:
US Army generals learned their craft of war
Whig party split at their peak which allowed a political vacuum for the Republican party
Deaths, disease all told by sending men into the tropics saw a 40% casualty rate
Failed to annex ALL of Mexico which set the stage for Lincoln’s War on the South
Sherman’s total war strategy was formed which was used in the South as well against the Comanche and Arapaho in the decades to come
The blind almost religion faith in the state causes untold casualties, deaths and financial destruction 360 degrees EXCEPT to the state itself .. because:
Now you know why school kids are never taught about this war. Because there were really no lies made to cover-up the real reason of this war except the president lying outright as to the location of the second Mexican invasion near the Rio Grande River.
Without a doubt, the current overarching panic has been framed to be that of COVID-19. From all angles, those opportunists are hoping that this crisis can assist them in burying some past or paving the way to some glorious future. Whether it is the unsustainable debt, the banking sector, the pharma sector or even those that deal in welfare (to both corporations (GOP) or individuals (Dems)), everyone it seems are bent on not wasting this crisis.
The very last thing on these people’s mind is that of personal liberties or the free market. To them it is the desire of command and control that consume their soul. Real men (when I use this word I use it the same way our Creator would, meaning men and women), men of character, principled humans who are both compassionate for others and yet principled in not attempting to fix other’s lives or circumstances. Help is afforded when both the opportunity presents itself and the help aligns with what is on the giver’s heart, because surely, Jesus did not heal everyone in the crowds, only those that were on His Father’s heart.
So here we are again where a divided nation is fighting both the effects of a virus as well as the proper method to achieve that. Authoritarians (even the ones that were libertarian just weeks ago) want the government to mandate nothing less than house arrest and martial law all across this land. Libertarian leaning people think the people themselves can figure this out on their own, since only they know their specific and unique circumstance. They might be a city dweller with a network of like minded people that CAN achieve social distancing while also bartering for what may be needed in the weeks to come, OR they might live on a farm or ranch that is miles from their neighbor who can also be in their network for critical supplies.
Montana “social distancing”
What comes to mind then, out of an article penned as Brexit was achieved, is that this is not too different than what face the American people in 1860. Yes there were those who felt righteous enough to demand that others free their slaves immediately, and yet if anyone knew how prepared these slaves were for freedom, it was probably their owners and others on the plantation or farm. While slavery was in fact winding down, there were people willing to demand their agenda no matter the cost, even if it was 700,000 dead soldiers and economically ruined regions of the country that would not recover for a century.
The American leader that most people black and white still rally around today as a man of principled freedom and equality for all is Abraham Lincoln. At times, if you read his very words you have to wonder when in fact he had his heart on the fate of the black slaves and IF his version of “the union” which he was so fond of keeping intact was the best for the marriage that existed between the north and south.
John Marquardt from the Abbeville Institute only a week ago penned an article that is rich in unpacking what really happened 150 years ago as well as the economic factor that was at the root of almost all the BAD decisions by politicians along the way. Lets work our way through some critical quotes and see where this leads:
1775:
… thirteen of its major colonies, with a cry of “no taxation without representation,” declared their independence, seceded from the British Empire and joined together to form the United States of America. Faced with the loss of a vast source of the revenue needed to fill coffers drained by its seemingly endless wars with France, Great Britain opted to wage war on its own colonies.
1860:
… seven of the States in the new American nation felt that the weight of long economic oppression by the Federal government was more than they should be forced to bear and opted to secede from the Unites States to form their own more perfect union . . . and once again the action brought forth a war in which the central government attacked its own citizens to prevent their departure.
At this point I think it is helpful to see Lincoln’s own thought processes and see how they changed through the years (an inevitable characteristic of being a politician as there is nothing off the table morally when a crisis is at hand):
1848:
.. when Lincoln was a U. S. congressman from Illinois, he gave a speech in the House of Representatives in which he stated “any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.”
1858:
“neither the General Government, nor any other power outside of the slave States, can constitutionally or rightfully interfere with slaves or slavery where it already exists.”
Lincoln said that he did not understand the Declaration of Independence “to mean that all men were created equal in all respects,” and added that he was not in favor of “making voters or jurors of Negros nor of qualifying them to hold office nor to intermarry with white people.” He then went on to say that “there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”
Lincoln was not a huge fan of the blacks it is very apparent, but his core philosophy that he never gave up was that the blacks were never to be allowed to migrate north and take away jobs from whites, which would cause economic upheaval. One has to come to terms that back in 1860, it was conceivable that the northern regions were more racist than southern regions who interacted with blacks on a daily basis:
The North feared that slave labor would compete unfairly with its own low-wage, largely immigrant labor force which, unlike slaves, could be willfully hired and fired as needed and did not require food, housing, clothing or even rudimentary medical attention.
It is at this point that John paints the real economic condition of the United States in 1860. Have you ever been taught this in schools as part of a CSI to understand what businessmen around the country thought about seven states leaving the Union? I doubt it, so here it goes, consider it COVID-19 home schooling:
In regard to the true economic cause behind the War, just as it was with Great Britain’s case in 1776, the gaping hole that would be formed in the Federal revenue served as the actual rationale for the Union to wage war on the departed Southern States. In 1860, there were more than thirty-one million people in the thirty-three States and ten Territories, with only a third of these, including almost four million slaves, living in the South. According to the U. S. Federal Abstract for 1860, the total Federal expenditures for that year amounted to some sixty-three million dollars, with over eighteen million of this being used mainly to finance railways, canals and other civil projects in the North. On the other hand, Federal revenues at that time amounted to a little over fifty-six million dollars. As there was then no corporate or personal income tax and revenue from domestic sources, such as the sale of public land, amounted to less than three million dollars, the remaining fifty-three million dollars were provided by what was termed “ad valorem taxes,” in other words, the tariff on foreign goods imported by the United States. The basic problem with this, however, was that as much as three-quarters of that revenue was collected in Southern ports, which meant that there would be a loss of up to forty million dollars in Federal revenue if the Southern States left the Union. Added to this was the fact that well over half of America’s four hundred million dollars in exports in 1860 were agricultural products from the South, mainly cotton, rice and tobacco.
You can see the predicament that Lincoln had when he was inaugurated in early March 1861. You can also see what the British view was back in 1775 and why they did what they did.
Now project yourself forward in time and try to understand what the so-called united States of America faces in 2020.
Will the economic crisis cause everyone to stick together and pay the $25T in debts over the next hundred years OR will regions of the US be allowed to go their separate ways?
Would anyone in the federal government be willing to let ANY state go in peace?
These are the questions one must answer themselves, along with, what is the moral path forward? Personally I think that bankruptcy is the only moral path forward, but as I was told in the US Navy, ‘opinions are like *ssholes, everyone has one’.
Ok then, let us look to see how Lincoln (Trump-like?) evolved as President:
04MAR1861:
Lincoln stated that he would “hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the (Federal) government, and collect the duties and imposts . . . but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using force against, or among the people anywhere.”
.. [then] stating he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
Pretty clear that economics forced his hand to propose the absurd notion that tariffs would still be collected in the seven states that LEFT the union while he had no real heart change on the fate of the black slaves.
Early April 1861 before Ft. Sumter:
Virginia, which still remained in the Union, commissioned a three-man delegation headed by John Baldwin, a pro-Unionist and former judge of the State Supreme Court of Appeals, to meet with Lincoln at the White House in an effort to negotiate a peaceful settlement. During their meeting, the president was reported as saying privately to Baldwin “but what am I to do in the meantime with those men at Montgomery (i.e., the Confederates)? Am I to let them go on and open Charleston, etc., as ports of entry with their ten-percent tariff? What, then, would become of my tariff if I do that, what would become of my revenue? I might as well shut up housekeeping at once.”
By early April, Lincoln and his cabinet, the majority of the New Englanders as well as the farmers in the West (now called the Midwest) all saw clearly the economic ramifications of having just 7 states leave the union. Like today, the panic and gross exaggeration seemed to consume people and they were all looking to the US government to do something, ANYTHING!
Lincoln’s Cabinet
It is well documented that Lincoln’s plan to send troop transports to Charleston harbor where his Union garrison had broke a gentleman’s agreement on Christmas 1860 and moved from Ft. Moultrie to Ft. Sumter was to have the South Carolina cannon to fire the first shot (not unlike FDR’s efforts to have Japan do the same at Pearl Harbor, or Bush II’s efforts to have 9/11 be allowed) so he could be “justified” in his next action:
Lincoln’s call to the Union for seventy-five thousand volunteers to suppress what he termed the “rebellion” of the Southern States. Lincoln’s call not only led to the secession of Virginia, but Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee as well, and brought about a war that made casualties of five percent of America’s population, devastated a third of the nation’s States and left deep wounds in the American psyche that to this day have not yet completely healed.
Lincoln, a lawyer, never addresses the seceded states from this point forward, but relied on George Washington’s legislation created during the Whiskey Rebellion to “legally” put down the southern “insurrection” as if it was an unorganized scene of violence that had to be safely extinguished for the safety of the masses.
Keep this in mind for 2020, just sayin’.
By 1862, it was obvious what had happened:
A comparison between the conflicts of 1776 and 1861 was also made in a “London Times” article of November 7, 1861, in which it was said of the War Between the States that the “contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces.”
In a letter written in March of 1862, Dickens stated “I take the facts of the American quarrel to stand thus; slavery has in reality nothing on earth to do with it . . . but the North having gradually got to itself the making of the laws and the settlement of the tariffs, and having taxed the South most abominably for its own advantage, began to see, as the country grew, that unless it advocated the laying down of a geographical line beyond which slavery should not extend, the South would necessarily recover it’s old political power, and be able to help itself a little in the adjustment of the commercial affairs.”
So whatever became of Lincoln’s transition toward loving the black slave? Well, we do know that Lincoln was surrounded by a culture that he was totally in alignment up to the so-called Civil War:
… pertaining to racial discrimination, Dickens said “Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale.”
When the war went poorly and Lincoln was doubtful to his re-election and the possibility of an externally arranged peace conference, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation which sounded good but did not actually free one slave (and later admitted that this was a “war measure”). One can see that even this act was not from his heart as can be revealed by the following quotes:
“Send them to Liberia, to their own native land.” ~ Lincoln, speaking in favor of ethnic cleansing all blacks from the United States.
“I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I favor colonization.” ~ Lincoln, in a message to Congress, December 1, 1862, supporting deportation of all blacks from America.
“They had better be set to digging their subsistence out of the ground.” ~ Lincoln in a War Department memo, April 16, 1863
After securing a 2nd term as president he continued to meet with northern Black leaders about his plan to export blacks to the Caribbean or back to Africa after the war. For those black slaves that remained:
“Root, hog, or die” ~ Lincoln’s suggestion to illiterate and propertyless ex-slaves unprepared for freedom, Feb. 3, 1865.
So here you see that war and economics changes everything and allows politicians to make decisions that in peacetime or prosperity would have been prevented, one way or another.
It seems that today, most Americans have given in to their lot as tax slaves happy for just enough freedom for them to claim they live in the land of the free and are able to worship the flag and eat the occasional apple pie. To a majority of Americans, they know little of their history that would help them to see the red flags all around them as freedom and liberty evaporate in this once free land (mainly in 1783-1878).
May a new generation and a new remnant of Americans see though the infectious nature of government and decide for the future that they will take responsibility for themselves, their livelihood and the education of the next generation and never trust any government again.
I can dream can’t I? One day at a time everyone, one day at a time, however, it is good and well to dream and hope for a better tomorrow where the lessons of this crisis are well learned!
