Tag: mercantilism

When a Nation Runs Out of Internal Conquests, It Turns to Regime Change Offshore

It did not take long after the New England mercantilism elite, who milked southern cotton profits using tariff revenue and then waged war on their attempted exit from the 1781/1787 compact of states, to then turn their sights to the American Indians, in effect exterminating their independent spirit as well. By the late 1880s there were no “enemies” domestically for the US government to validate their essential nature of providing safety for its citizens. This is when the US turned imperial in nature and looked offshore for its next conquest.

By 1893, New England mercantilists turned their attention to the independent nation of Hawaii. The following clips are from an article called ‘Walter Q. Gresham – Americas Anti-Imperialist Secretary of State’ by Hunter DeRensis

In January 1893, a group of American businessmen organized a coup d’état in Hawaii, overthrowing the indigenous monarchy. The plotters’ efforts were buttressed by a company of U.S. Marines under orders from John W. Foster’s State Department. It was in effect the first regime change operation performed under the auspices of the U.S. government—and it would be Foster’s grandsons, John and Allen Dulles, who would organize more coups in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s.

This happened in the last month of President Benjamin Harrison’s presidency.

Hawaii’s new provisional government—headed by a “Committee of Safety” composed mostly of U.S. citizens—immediately sent a proposal of annexation to Washington. With less than a month left in his term, President Benjamin Harrison signed the proposal and delivered it to the Senate ..

The incoming Democratic administration of Grover Cleveland had as its Secretary of State a former Republican who was a free-trader at his core who also followed the founder’s principle of not interfering or joining in alliances with foreign powers.

Spending most of his career as a judge in his native Indiana, Gresham also served briefly in the cabinet of President Chester Arthur, first as postmaster general and then secretary of the treasury. Despite being a lifelong Republican, by the 1890s he felt increasingly out of step with the party’s devotion to prohibitively high protective tariffs. A lifelong free-trader, Gresham broke ranks and endorsed Democrat Grover Cleveland in his successful return to the White House.

The Cleveland administration promptly rescinded the treaty and Gresham issued this bit of principle that I think would make Ron Paul proud.

“Can the United States consistently insist that other nations shall respect the independence of Hawaii while not respecting it themselves?” asked Gresham. “Our government was the first to recognize the independence of the islands, it should be the last to acquire sovereignty over them, by force and fraud.”

Bingo! Principles over politics. Principles over imperialism of any kind!

Basically, the Cleveland administration could only hold off the inevitable for a few years:

To “satisfy the demands of justice,” Gresham attempted to negotiate the restoration of the Hawaiian monarchy, but arbitration broke down when Queen Liliuokalani—then under house arrest—refused to grant amnesty to the American plotters. The provisional government remained in place until Hawaii’s annexation in 1898 under President William McKinley.

Queen Liliuokalani in a black dress Hawaiian Monarchy Hawaii

However, Gresham was prophetical in his wise statements surrounding this new attribute of the United States:

“Every nation, and especially every strong nation, must sometimes be conscious of an impulse to rush into difficulties that do not concern it, except in a highly imaginary way. To restrain the indulgence of such a propensity is not only the part of wisdom, but a duty we owe to the world as an example of the strength, the moderation, and the beneficence of popular government.”

Gresham believed that “the only safeguard against all the evils of interference in affairs that do not specially concern us is to abstain from such interference altogether.” If Americans did not “stay home and attend to their own business,” then “they would go to hell as fast as possible.”

Our legacy since WWII is below:

Here we are 125 years after these events, in a political hell of our own choosing. Statesmen such as Gresham have been kept out of political positions on an increasing basis over the past century, and “the people” have lost.

Peace out.

-SF1

“Land of the Free”? Not So Fast – the Trend-line is Not Linear!

1938 USA Communist Party Convention -Abraham Lincoln as centerpiece

Like most people my age, #60+, I can remember a time when we all were a LOT more free. Rifles in the pickup trucks, shooting guns near suburban neighborhoods, playing outside ALL day with the parents not really knowing where their kids were at. This was all “normal”.

Also during this time, it was the college campuses that allowed and even encouraged thinking and expressing one’s own thoughts no matter how popular they might be. Anti-government speech was not just tolerated, it was at the heart of what it meant to be an American, the Spirit of ’76!

Well those days are long gone, and the transition to where we are today was not a linear one at all. At first there was some minor deviation, but in the past 5-10 years, the college campuses are more group-think than ever, where the narrative of the day is king, where thought police thrive.

This is not the first time this has happened, but it does seem to be the first time it has happened without a war in the past 150 years, but it does have some similarities to a time in American history over 220 years ago where the thought police surfaced, when the “Land of the Free” enacted the Alien and Sedition Act in 1798 which …:

made it a federal crime to publish any false, scandalous or malicious writing – even if true – about the president or the federal government

You see, freedom of speech is a natural, God-given right that governments can and will take away. In the “Land of the Free” in 1798, there were many who took issue with this course change that occurred only 22 years after the thirteen American colonies sought independence from the British Empire. When Thomas Jefferson became president, he and his administration repealed this act. However, one this course change is embedded in a nation’s/empire’s DNA, there is no going back:

Abraham Lincoln arrested Northerners who challenged the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson arrested Americans who challenged World War I. FDR arrested Americans he thought might not support World War II. LBJ and Richard Nixon used the FBI to harass hundreds whose anti-Vietnam protests frustrated them.

In our own post 9/11 era, the chief instrument of repression of personal freedom has been the government’s signature anti-terror legislation: the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act permits FBI agents to write their own search warrants and gives those warrants the patriotic and harmless-sounding name of national security letters (NSLs). This authorization is in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says that the people shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects from unreasonable searches and seizures, and that that security can only be violated by a search warrant issued by a neutral judge and based upon probable cause of crime.

To most libertarians, this is where we are today, where the government has successfully transitioned the US Empire to a static point where the “Land of the Free” is no more. However, there is yet another effort that has been made in the past five years or so to continue the transition towards a totalitarian state, and this one comes from the corporate side of Lincoln’s dream of mercantilism, where government and big corporations become two wings of the same bird.

– Murray Rothbard on Mercantilism

As Rod Dreher of Russian Insider indicates in this article, “A Russian Woman Working as a College Professor in the US Writes About the Sovietization of Amerika”, it seems that it is the former citizens of the old USSR are the most sensitized to this trend the most while typical Americans see this as no big deal, much like the Germans in 1930’s Germany as the Nazi’s came to power.

Clarissa [not her real name] is a college professor who emigrated to the US from Russia as a young woman, a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. She is yet another ex-Soviet bloc person who is extremely anxious about the emergence of soft totalitarianism here. Of course she can’t use her real name, because she fears professional retaliation. It should tell us something that not a single academic from a former communist country that I interviewed for this book was willing to speak using their own name — this, in the Land of the Free. Why not? Because they were afraid of facing professional consequences for speaking out against identity politics and the “social justice” regime.

I am pretty sure if I were to chart out freedom in the USA, we are now at an all-time low as both the government and corporate America are actively seeking out dissenters to the latest narratives. The tools are in place to “take out” people professionally both in social media attacks:

Totalitarianism is something that takes away from people the unbearable burden of freedom. It allows many people to hound and persecute with impunity. That is pleasant in many senses. There was a practice in the Soviet Union where people would be told to get together in groups at work and write letters to the newspaper to denounce famous poets or artists. We see that today in Twitter. People love that because it allows a little person to completely destroy somebody who has done something great.

.. as well inside universities and corporations with diversity and sensitivity training in the workplaces:

All your co-workers are enemies. Either they can get you in trouble, or they are out to destroy you with an accusation. It destroys all sorts of uncontrollable communities – friendship, families, church communities. When you set people against each other, they are much easier to control. This is what it was like under totalitarianism.

So one might think I just need to be more careful about what I share in certain social circles. But that is not how this works, to see how any flavor of totalitarianism actually works, we need to learn from those who lived there:

… wokeness in corporate America is a weapon used by white-collar professionals to weed out competitors for increasingly scarce jobs. She said, “People find ideological purity tests useful to weed out people who compete for jobs you cover. Progressive forces are completely allied with globalist capitalism.”

She also said that people have no idea how vulnerable they are to this mindset, because of social media. “You will not be able to predict what will be held against you tomorrow. You have no idea what completely normal thing you do today, or say today, will be used against you to destroy you. This is what people in the Soviet Union saw. We know how this works. This is why people like me are so upset today.

One would think that at least the church might be a place where one can be real in this regard. Anyone who understands the 1st century church, it was the underground Christians in the Roman Empire that actually turned the then-known-world upside-down NOT with violence or revolution, but with love of their neighbor where .. :

[NOTE: It seems that true “diversity” does not focus on division based on race, sex or anything else. A true team sees each unique God-created individual as part of the crew that can help to keep the ship afloat.]

Well, a note of caution, most of the churches today, especially ones with government registration in place (501c3), are part of the corporate woke-ness effort underway in this country. Most of the church of today bears little resemblance to the church in the generation after Jesus was killed by religion and empire.

Until this trend is reversed, the ‘circle of trust’ is going to get mighty small. Take your time in knowing who your friends are, it is better to be lonely than to be a fresh target for either empire or corporate-elite.

Peace out

-SF1