The Preamble Project

The Imperial Cruise, by James Bradley

2011-12-16T16:03:00.003-05:00

subtitle: A Secret History of Empire and War. 2009, Back Bay Books, 387pp.

Bradley's father was one of the US troops who raised the flag on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima (http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq87-3l.htm). Bradley wrote about it in Flags of My Fathers.

For some reason, I was particularly stunned by this narrative of turn-of-the-century activities of such men as presidents McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt & Taft. As if the late Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States: 1492 to the Present (and there's a new afterword in new editions) were not shocking enough, starting with Columbus' slaughter of from 2,000,000 to 8,000,000 Arawaks, the "indigenous peoples" of the Caribbean. Then there was Andrew Jackson's "Indian Removal Act" of 1830 and the Trail of Tears, etc.

This work contains descriptions of US activities in Hawaii, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, a bit of Cuba and Puerto Rico, threaded together by the 1905 far eastern cruise of US delegates, headed by Wm. Howard Taft, Teddy Roosevelt's eldest child Alice.

The racism of presidents, military and a goodly chunk of citizens is murderous. And the exploitation of Asians by the British (some 20% of their GDP sustained by harvesting opium from India and foisting it upon the Chinese.

England controlled a vast swath of prime opium-growing country, stretching five hundred miles across Bengal, and the British Empire invested enormous sums in state-of-the-art opium farming and production systems. More than two thousand British opium agents oversaw the efforts of one million registered Indian opium farmers." p. 273.

And there were big drug lords among the Americans, with big players like Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandfather, Warren Delano, from NYC, the Cabots of Boston, who

endowed Harvard with opium money, while Yale's famous Skull and Bones society was funded by the biggest American opium dealers of them all, the Russell family. The most famous landmark on the Columbia University Campus is the Low Memorial Library, which honors Abiel Low, a New York Boy who made it big in the Pearl River Delta, and bankrolled the first cable across the Atlantic. rinceton University’s first big benefactor, John Green, sold opium in the Pearl River Delta with Warren Delano.

The list goes on and on: Boston’s John Murray Forbes’s opium profits financed the career of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and bankrolled the Bell Telephone Company. Thomas Perkins founded America’s fist commercial railroad and funded the Boston Athenaeum. [p. 290]

Many of our "founding fathers" were smuggling Caribbean rum, sugar and molasses past British blockades in the 1760s and 1770s. And of course, during Prohibition, Joseph Kennedy made the family fortune smuggling Scotch into Chicago (the Kennedy's still own the Chicago Merchandise Mart, I believe). And of course the CIA, run by Wall Street banksters, has been involved in drug-running almost since its inception. If you include ethanol as a mind-altering drug, there's a whole lot of US history and US leaders who've been drug lords, never prosecuted, never imprisoned.

But this is just part of the chapter I've put below here, and by no means is it the most shocking. See what you think.

Without further ado:

Chapter 10: Roosevelt’s Open and Closed Doors

Pages 269-297

‘We do not understand why your people in China preach the doctrine of Love, while in American you treat Chinese worse than any other nation, nay even the negroes!

—1903 Petition to

President Theodore Roosevelt

from Students of the

Anglo-Chinese College

in Fuzhou, China, 1903.

Hednote, p. 269

On September 3, 1903, Secretary of War William Howard Taft steamed west from British Hong Kong to the Chinese city of Canton. For this segment of the cruise he was not following the sun. Instead, Big Bill was traveling secretly at night, aboard the U.S. Navy gunboat Laliao that glided quietly through the Pearl River Delta, entering China on a warship under the cover of darkness because U.S. consular military officials had warned him that he risked personal harm. Anti-American posters were plastered on city walls up and down China’s coast, and furious attendees at packed mass meetings shook their fists as they listened to emotional anti-Yankee speeches. Nevertheless, [end 269]

[Page 270 is a map of the Pearl River delta, which flows from Canton,

out to sea between Macao and Hong Kong.]

[271] after much debate, Taft had decided he would face local wrath and deliver a tough message from President Roosevelt in the Chinese city most aflame with anti-Americanism.

From ancient times, the emperor—the Son of Heaven—had reigned from Beijing. Uninterested in dealing with lowlife traders, he had designated the southern port city of Canton as a backdoor service entrance for those “foreign Devils” hoping to do business in China. The emperor had assigned Cantonese merchants the odious job of dealing with these barbarians and thus Canton became the international commercial outlet for the Middle Kingdom.

As a result, for centuries, Foreign Devils had come to Canton from Arabia, Persia, Africa, Egypt, Rome France England, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Japan , the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, India, and the United States. During that time, the Cantonese had endured, and in a number of ways benefited from, these intrusions. That changed three years into the Roosevelt administration. To protest Teddy’s treatment of them as uncivilized beings, the Chinese had united to boycott all things American.

Uncivilized the Chinese were certainly not. For most of human history, china was the most populated, wealthiest, and most sophisticated country on earth. The travels of Marco Polo, published in 1295, to astonishing tales of enormous banquet rooms with five thousand seats, walls studded with precious stones, and consumers using paper money to purchase mass-printed books from well-stocked bookstores. (Marco Polo was so amazed by Chinese paper money that he devoted a chapter to it.) In Europe, monks hand-copied tomes while thousands of best-selling books rolled off China’s modern printing presses. China’s [p. 271] iron manufacturing industry produced one hundred twenty-five thousand tons a year—an amount not equaled by Europe until the twentieth century. Chinese wore soft, luxurious silk versus the Europeans’ rough-hewn tunics, and at home the Chinese lived in a stylish comfort of which Europeans could only dream.

The Chinese invented movable type four hundred years before Johannes Gutenberg was born. China built a suspension bridge two thousand years before one appeared in the West. It took the civilized Aryans seventeen hundred more years than it did the Chinese to figure out how to make porcelain. Cast iron, the crank handle, deep drilling for natural gas, the belt drive, the fishing reel, chess, matches, brandy, gunpowder, playing cards, the spinning wheel, the umbrella, and countless other innovations—such were the products of China’s inventive genius.

Europeans would eventually borrow such Chinese innovations as the plow and experience an agricultural revolution. Similarly, literacy spread as the Europeans exploited paper and printing, both Chinese inventions. The British public would become addicted to drinking tea from China mixed with adrenaline-pumping sugar from its Caribbean colonies. This was the heady stimulant that would eventually transform the English from agricultural laborers to alert, regimented cogs in Britains’s new factories. But when the English asked the Chinese to accept their manufactured goods as payment for tea instead of expensive silver, the Son of Heaven wrote dismissively to King George III in 1793, “We possess all things. I set no value on an objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”

The Chinese insistence upon silver as payment for tea was a serious economic threat to the British Empire and a huge windfall for the Chinese. As the historian Carl Trocki writes in Opium Empire and the Global Political Economy:

The 1700s were boom times for the middle Kingdom as English silver flooded into China. China’s population over that period tripled from about one hundred million to over three hundred million. The constant importation of Asian products into the European markets accused a permanent drain of gold and silver from Europe towards Asia. Only a small trickle of precious metals must have re-entered Europe…. The greater part of gold and silver remained in Asia never to return to Europe.

To the British Empire’s financial rescue came a very clever colonial official, Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal in Northern India. Bengal had long produced opium, for centuries used across Asia as a medicinal and social drug. Portuguese sailors in Asian waters had observed a profitable Bengal-to-China opium trade conducted by Arab merchants. The Portuguese muscled in on the trade, also ringing to the Chinese market tobacco from their Brazilian colony. Tobacco mixed with Indian opium proved to be a pleasing combination to the Chinese, and opium smoking soon become popular. Realize the harm to his people, the Son of Heaven banned opium’s sale and use in China.

Nevertheless, his edict meant little to those Foreign Devils hoping to profit and restore a more favorable (to them) trade balance. England controlled a vast swath of prime opium-growing country, stretching five hundred miles across Bengal, and the British Empire invested enormous sums in state -of-the-art opium farming and production systems. More than two thousand British opium agents oversaw the efforts of one million registered Indian opium farmers. Opium sap was dried into balls, each weighting 3.5 pounds, then placed on floor-to-ceiling factory shelves, where Indian boys would rotate each ball a quarter turn once every six days as it dried. Each opium ball was then stamped with the coveted trademark brand Patna or Benares.

White Cristian opium smugglers could not legally sell the banned drug on Chinese soil, so they installed floating wooden warehouses in the Pearl River Delta, where they sold their booty to Chinese criminals who rowed out under the cover of darkness.

Opium soon accounted for an estimated 15 to 20 percent of the British Empire’s revenue, as the India-to-China smuggling business became the “world’s most valuable single commodity trade of the [274] nineteenth century. Western banks, shipping companies, and insurance companies sprouted to serve this enormously profitable trade. As Carl Trocki notes, “The entire commercial infrastructure of European trade in Asia was built around opium” It was Christians who smuggled the poisonous drug into China, so the Chinese called it “Jesus opium.” This Christian drug-running was nearly fatal to the Middle Kingdom. Between 1814 and 1850, the Jesus-opium trade sucked out 11 percent of China’s money supply. China lost more silver in thirty years than had flowed into the country in the 125 years leading up to the opium trade. As he Chinese money supply contracted, silver became unnaturally scarce, peasants had had trouble paying their taxes, counterfeiting rose, waves of inflation and deflation whipsawed the economy, and unrest grew.

The Jesus-opium trade also tore at the moral fabric of Chinese society. Since the sale of the banned drug was illegal, the Christian smugglers’ business partners were Chinese criminal lowlifes who now got rich and gathered power.

The Son of Heaven finally put his foot down and dispatched a royal representative to Canton in 1839 to stop the Foreign Devil drug trade. Buckingham Palace shook at the news. Queen Victoria was just twenty years old at this point, on the British throne less than two years, but when the Chinese elder threatened to cut her largest single source of income, she understood the dire financial consequences. Opium production and smuggling not only paid for imports from China that England could not afford in silver, but the drug trade also provided the easy money that most sustained her empire. Victoria dispatched her industrialized navy to enforce Britain’s ability to push an illegal drug. What followed were the two Opium Wars—one from 1839 to 1842; the other from 1856 to 1860. What Victoria spent on these [page 275] military operations against China was paltry compared to her take of profits from the illegal Jesus-opium trade.

Victoria also grabbed Hong Kong as part of the spoils in the first of there two Opium wars. Sir John Francis Davis, governor of Hong Kong from 1844 to 1848, admitted: “Almost every person not connected with government is employed in the opium trade.” The British Empire grew fat on Chinese silver drained from the formerly richest country in the world. The sums were so enormous that Queen Victoria stands as history’s largest drug dealer.

AS SECRETARY TAFT CUT through the night on his way from Hong Kong to Canton that September evening, he was passing the homes of the Pearl River Delta families who had more experience dealing with American Foreign Devils than people in any other part of China. Starting with the California Gold Rush, it was primarily the families of the Pearl River Delta who had sent their sons to the United States in search of opportunity.

These Cantonese had brought with them their ancient habits of hard work, cooperation, self-denial, and thrift. Compared to the White workers, the Chinese mined more gold more efficiently, saved more of their earnings, drank and caroused less, behaved better, and almost never caused trouble. An American minister, Augustus Loomis, testified to the Chinese workers’ diligence, steadiness, and clean living: They are ready to begin work the moment they hear the signal, and labor steadily and honestly until admonished that the working hours are ended. Not having acquired a taste for whiskey, they have few fights, and no ‘blue Mondays’ You do not see them intoxicated, rolling in the gutters like swine.”

White workers claimed that the Chinese competed unfairly [pg. 278] because the Mongolians could live cheaper on their diet of rice and rats. But in truth, while the Whites ate a bland diet—“Boiled beet and potties, beans, bread and butter, and coffee”—the Cantonese “Ate healthy, well-cooked and tasty food…an astonishing variety—oysters, cuttlefish, finned fish, abalone, meat, Oriental fruits, and scores of vegetables, including bamboo sprouts, sea-weed, and mushrooms. Each of these foods came dried, purchased from one of the Chinese merchants in San Francisco. The Chinese drink tea from boiled water. “The Americans drank from the streams and lakes, and many of them got diarrhea, dysentery, and other illnesses.”

Some admired the Chinese miners’ superior work and living habits. The White miners did not. Unable to compete on a level playing field, the Whites soon employed state laws to hold the Chinese back, as Stephen Ambrose explains in Nothing Like It in the World:

California law discriminated against them in every way possible, and the state did all it could to degrade them and deny them a decent livelihood. ‘They were not allowed to work on the ‘Mother Lode.’ To work the ‘tailing,’ they had to pay a miner’s tax,’ a $4-per-head so-called permission tax, plus a $2 water tax. In addition, the Chinese had to pay a personal tax, a hospital tax, $2 school tax, and a property tax. But they could not go to public school, they were denied citizenship, they could not vote, nor could they testify in court. Nevertheless, they paid more than $2 million in taxes. If Chinese dared to venture into a new mining area, the whites would set on them, beat them, rob them, sometimes kill them. Thus the saying, “Not a Chinaman’s chance.’”

Nevertheless, the Chinese workers continued to outperform the White laborers. George Hearst, later a U.S. senator from California, who observed Chinese miners for ten years in four different states, proclaimed worriedly, “They can do more work than our people and live on less. They could drive our laborers to the wall.”

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln called for the construction of a transcontinental railroad. Two teams of White workers—one proceeding west from the Mississippi River and one working east from the Pacific Ocean—began work on the giant undertaking. Those proceeding west over the Great Plains made progress, but those proceeding east from the Pacific coast hit the solid granite of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. The White workers laid down their picks in defeat. The Chinese, [p. 280] from the country that had built the Great Wall, filled the gap and succeeded where the Aryan had tried and failed. Governor Leland Stanford of California wrote President Andrew Johnson, “Without the Chinese it would have been impossible to complete the western portion of this great National highway.”

Most American textbooks feature the May 10, 1869, photograph depicting the east and west construction teams meeting at Promontory Summit, Utah, to drive the golden spike that competed the transcontinental railroad. Although there were many Chinese on the scene—some who had that very morning laid the last ties—when history’s flashbulbs [did they have flashbulbs then, or was it flash-powder in a hand-held trough?] were about to pop, the Aryans self-consciously pushed aside the yellow men who had succeeded where the Whites had failed.

With the transcontinental railroad completed, the workers who had built it were dismissed and they dispersed across the West. The pop culture image of the American West is based more on the films of director John Ford and Monument Valley than fact. This Hollywood version features John Wayne walking through a White town. What’s missing is the Chinese hotel that John Wayne would have slept in, the Chinese restaurant where he would have dined, the Chinese laundry where he would have done his wash, and the Chinese general store where he would had purchased his provisions. Notes the historian Stephen Ambrose, [pg. 281] “In nearly every Western railroad town there used to be a Chinatown.”

With their better work and living habits, the Chinese produced services and sold goods of higher quality at a lower price, driving out their humiliated White competitors. And to those who viewed the world through the prism of Aryan superiority and following the sun, the threat extended well beyond the economic. If 10 percent of the Chinese in China came to the United States, China would still have 360 million people. But if 40 million Chinese crossed the Pacific, they would become America’s major it race. And these Chinese might breed with White women, causing Aryan westering to halt.

Luckily for civilization, the Aryan instincts came to the fore. The media consistently presented the Chinese as opium-besotted, rodent-eating, filthy creatures, shoe lifestyle and lack of morals threatened the White race. In 877, the Order of Caucasians for the Extermination of the Chinaman declared its goal: “to drive the Chinaman out of California…by every manner and means within the thin gauze of the la.” Anti-Chinese labor unions such as he Knights of Labor and the Workingman’s Party spread their slogan across the land: “The Chinese Must Go.”

Senator James Blaine of Maine warned that men “who eat beef and bread and drink beer…will have to drop his knife and fork and take up Chopsticks [if] those who live on rice” are allowed to stay in America. “Either the Anglo-Saxon race ill possess the Pacific slob or the Mongolians will possess it.” In 877, the United States Congress established a Joint Special Congressional Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration. The White Christian male legislators concluded:

There is not sufficient brain capacity in the Chinese to furnish motive power for self-government. The [page 282] Mongolian race seems to have no desire for progress and to have no conception of representative and free institutions. There is no Aryan or European race which is not far superior to the Chinese as a class.

California’s second constitution, ratified in 1879, prohibited companies from employing “directly or indirectly, in any capacity, any Chinese or Mongolian”; prohibited the employ of Chinese “on any state, county, municipal or other public work, except in punishment for crime”’ and mandated that the legislature “delegate all necessary power to the incorporated cities and towns of this state for the removal of Chinese without the limit of such cities and towns, or for their locations within prescribed portions of those limits, and it shall also provide he necessary legislation to prohibit the introduction into their state of Chinese after the adoption of this Constitution.”

From America’s inception in 1783 to 1882, a period of ninety-nine years, there had been no concept of illegal immigrants in the United States. That changed with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. For the first time in U.S. history, an immigration gate was erected with the specific goal of blocking non-Whites. Senator George Hoar of Massachusetts described the Chinese Exclusion Act as “nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination.” But because of the dire race threat presented by the yellow men, most Americans had no problem with the new legislation. Twenty-four years old and just out of Harvard, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed in 1882, “No greater calamity could now befall the United States than to have the Pacific slope fill up with a Mongolian population.”

ROCK SPRINGS, WYOMING, was a mining town that reduced almost half the coal that fueled the transcontinental railroad. [pg 283] Front page of Harper’s Weekly, “ Journal of Civilization, Saturday, September 13, 1879. lead, centered headline

POLITICAL ASSASSINATIONS
Taking the Consequences
two “panel” drawing
South and West
Left caption: The Nigger Must Go”
Right caption: “The Chinese Must Go”
double caption for both:
The Poor Barbarians Can’t Understand Our Civilized Republican Form of Government. (Harpweek, LLC)

[page 284]

Approximately six hundred Chinese and three hundred Whites lived in the dust-blown settlement. On he evening of September , 1885, the Rock Springs chapter of the Knights of Labor held a “Chinese Must Go!” meeting. The next day, the race cleansing began. “White men fall in” was the call to arms.

Armed White miners surrounded Chinatown. The local Chinese laundryman was in his was house when a bullet shattered his skull. White wives and daughters laughed and clapped as their men shot fleeing Chinese and then earthed their pockets. White women who had earlier taught English classes to the Chinese now looted their students’ homes. Chinese who escaped into the countryside were picked off by waiting Knights of Labor snipers.

The first Wyoming state official o arrive in Rock Springs described the scene: “Not a living Chinaman—an, woman or child—was left in the town…and not a single house, shanty, or [pg. 285] structure of any kind, that had ever been inhabited by a Chinaman was left unburned. The smell of burning human flesh was sickening and almost unendurable, and was plainly discernible for more than a mile along the railroad both east and west.” In the court trials that followed, there were no convictions.

Rock Springs was just the beginning. All across the West, the American Aryan raged against the Chinese. From California, north to Alaska, west to Colorado, and south to New Mexico, posters told the Chinese to get out and those who hesitated would face the barrel of a White man’s rifle. In Fresno, a mob killed Chinese workers in their beds. In Tacoma, the mayor led hundreds of armed Aryan in rousting the Chinese from their homes and pushing them onto waiting trains. In Seattle, the chief of police led a mob who marched the local Chinese at gunpoint up the gangplank of a waiting ship.

Theodore Roosevelt deemed the Chinese a “race-foe” and called upon the United Sates to maintain “race-selfishness” to exclude “the dangerous alien who would be ruinous to the white race.” When he became president, Roosevelt inherited two competing U.S. approaches regarding China. In America, voters demanded Chinese exclusion. In China, U.S. businessmen demanded “The Open Door.”

The United States had come late to the slicing of the Chinese melon. It wasn’t until 1898 that the nation had acquired the Pacific links—Hawaii, Guam and Manila—required to tap China’s riches. President McKiley’s challenge at that time had been how to insert U.S. business interests into the powers’ ongoing scramble for the Middle Kingdom. For his China policy, he chose the kindly slogan “The Open Door.” The Open Door called on the Western power to be benevolent and avoid partitioning China to the point that it could not function as a national entity, allowing all to compete within one another’s spheres of influence. [page 286]

The Open Door was a huge hit among humanitarian Americans who saw the Chinese as “wards” in need of protection. But when foreign ministers in London, Rome, Berlin, Paris, Moscow, and Tokyo considered McKinley’s request to open their China doors, not one bothered to respond. Nevertheless, in July of 1900, Secretary of State John Hay declared that the powers agreed with McKinley “in principle.” McKinley did not bother sending a copy of his new Chinese policy to Beijing. Yellow men would not decide Asia’s fate. Hay sniffed,” We have tone the Chinks a great service, which they don’t seem inclined to recognize.”

In fact, McKinley’s benevolence had no practical effect on commercial competition in China. It did, however, humiliate the Chinese. Outraged at the attitude of these distant powers who felt that they had rights to dismember their country, Chinese patriots arose to oppose the Foreign Devils within their midst. Because these athletic young men often practiced martial arts, foreigners called the “Boxers.” In June of 1900, the Boxers entered Beijing and laid siege to the embassies of the Foreign Devils, who held out for fifty-five days until twenty thousand troops from the Eight Nation Alliance came to their rescue. Now armed barbarians marched outside the Forbidden City.

While President Roosevelt would have been happy to nab almost every Chinaman in the United Stats and ship him back to where he came from, strong U.S. business interests were concerned that if this happened, the Chinese in China might stop doing business with the United States. To straddle the diametrically opposed positions, Teddy spine in favor of allowing a minuscule number of “upper-class” Chinese int the United States and blamed the Bureau of Immigration for any anti-Chinese abuses. But even when he did point a finger at the bureau, he could never find his Big Stick to discipline anyone.

Roosevelt’s first commissioner general of the Immigration urea [page 287] was Terence Powderly, the rabid former leader of the Knights of Labor, which had led the race war against the Chinese in the 1880s, including the Rock Springs Massacre.Shortly after Roosevelt became president in 1901, Powderly wrote an article in Collier’s Weekly assuring voters that the new, young resident had their race interests at heart:

American and Chinese civilizations are antagonistic; they cannot live and thrive and both survive on the same soil. One or the other must perish.

In his December 1901 message to Congress, Roosevelt called for a closed door for Chinese in America but an open door for Americans in China. Roosevelt’s stance was deplored by the Jewish Exponent of Philadelphia, which contended that the president was in effect telling the Chinese, “You must take our goods, the missionaries, and anything else we choose to send you…but o must not show your face within our borders, for you are too far beneath us to be fit company for us.” But far more Americans agreed with Teddy than they did such editorials, and in April, Roosevelt signed into law the most draconian anti-Chinese piece of legislation in U.S. history, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1902, which continued the odium of the original 1882 version and extended exclusion of Chinese laborers to Hawaii and the Philippines.

Viceroy Kin was the governor of Shanghai province. His son studied in England and wanted to transit across the United States to return to China. He obtained a letter of introduction from Joseph Choate, the American ambassador to England. When Viceroy Kin’s son arrived in Boston harbor in June of 1902, he was detained by federal officials for twenty-four hours, strip-searched, and photographed naked. This upper-class Chinese boy was then forced to post a bond not to open a laundry or become a manual laborer. Another Chinese student arriving in San Francisco with admission papers from Oberlin College was held in one of Teddy’s immigration pens for one year. And on October 11, 1903, Roosevelt’s immigration men swooped down [ page 288] upon Boston’s Chinatown. Two hundred thirty-four Chinese were arrested and fifty were deported. The next day a United States district judge declared the raid perfectly legal. Students from the Anglo-Chinese College in Fuzhou petitioned Roosevelt:

‘We do not understand why your people in China preach the doctrine of Love, while in American you treat Chinese worse than any other nation, nay, even the negroes!”

In January of 1904, Beijing notified Roosevelt that it would end the U.S.-China Treaty—due for renewal in 1905—and called on him to renegotiate a fairer agreement. With the presidential election months away, Roosevelt righteously demanded that China maintain an open door and at the same time called for an indefinite extension of his Chinese Exclusion Act.

In an attempt to be shown as tolerant, Roosevelt invited Yu Kit Men, a Shanghai shipping magnate, to serve as one of China’s representatives at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Yu entered the United States in New York and boarded a train for St. Louis. The Shanghai businessman was asleep when he heard a knock on his stateroom door. Bureau of Immigration goons seized him, pulled him off the train, and jailed him near Buffalo. Running for president,, Roosevelt did nothing and wrote meekly, “I have been for a long time uneasy about the way in which Chinese merchants and Chinese students have all kinds of obstacles thrown in their way hen they come to this country.”

` For years White Christians had treated China with disrespect. With Theodore Roosevelt, the Chinese drew a line. In May, 1904, Shanghai businessmen called for a boycott of American goods beginning August 1. A united, peaceful, yet effective repines to a barbarian country was an unprecedented event in Chinese history, and the idea spread like wildfire throughout China and to the world’s Chinatowns. In Havana, Chinese chipped in ten thousand dollars to get the anti-American word [page 289] out. In Victoria, British Columbia, Chinese established a fund of six thousand dollars to compensate Chinese dockworkers who refused to unload American ships. Distraught U.S. merchants suddenly bombarded Roosevelt; missionaries and educators demanded that something be done. But with his thick race lenses, Teddy could not see that the Chinese harbored patriotic feelings and that they would actually do something about it. Surely this sudden flame would quickly fizzle.

Roosevelt’s inability to recognize third-world nationalism in Asia had already cost—and would cost—America much treasure and many lives. He had dismissed Aguinaldo [Father of the Philippines] and the result had ten quagmire. Roosevelt simply could not accept that Asian primitives could cause much trouble—all of race history had made that clear. Such underestimation—indeed, lack of any attempt at estimation—would cost the United States dearly in the Twentieth century. Aguinaldo had been the first. Others yet to come included Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh.

ON MARCH 17, 1905, one of the most significant weddings in American history took place in a house in New York City at 8 E. 76th St., between Madison and Fifth Avenues. At 3:30 p.m., Miss Alice Roosevelt—serving as a bridesmaid dressed in a white veil and holding a bouquet of pink roses—opened the ceremony as she proceeded down the wide stairs from the third floor to the second-floor salon. The bride—her cousin Eleanor Roosevelt—followed, and behind her was President Theodore Roosevelt, who would give his niece away to the bridegroom, his fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Eleanor wore a pearl necklace and diamonds in her hair, gifts from Franklin’s rich Delano relatives. Even tough Franklin had never made much money himself, Teddy knew that he would be [p. 290] able to care for his new wife: FDR was heir to the huge Delano opium fortune.

Franklin’s grandfather Warren Delano had for years skulked around the Pearl River Delta dealing drugs. Delano had run offices in Canton and Hong Kong. During business hours, Chinese criminals would pay him cash and receive an opium chit. At night, Scrambling Crabs—long, sleek, heavily armed crafts—rowed out into the Pearl River Delta to Delano’s floating warehouses, where they received their Jesus opium under the cover of darkness. The profits were enormous, and at his death Delano left his daughter Sara a fortune that she lavished on her only son.

The Delanos were not alone. Many of New England’s great families made their fortunes dealing drugs in China. The Cabot family of Boston endowed Harvard with opium money, while Yale’s famous Skull and Bones society was funded by the biggest American opium dealers of them all—the Russell family. The most famous landmark on the Columbia University Campus is the Low Memorial Library, which honors Abiel Low, a New York Boy who made it big in the Pearl River Delta and bankrolled the first cable across the Atlantic. Princeton University’s first big benefactor, John Green, sold opium in the Pearl River Delta with Warren Delano.

The list goes on and on: Boston’s John Murray Forbes’s opium profits financed the career of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and bankrolled the Bell Telephone Company. Thomas Perkins founded America’s fist commercial railroad and funded the Boston Athenæum. These wealthy and powerful drug-dealing families combined to create dynasties.

In His Savage-To-Civilized Dogma about human evolution, Roosevelt imagined Chinese laborers as bucktoothed dummies, [p. 291] and he appealed to the better class of Chinese, who he assumed looked down on their own, just as aristocratic Teddy looked down on his American inferiors. In late June, the president held several conferences with K’ang Yu-wei, a respected Chinese community leader. Roosevelt tried to convince K’ang that besides Chinese laborers, American welcomed the Chinese. Roosevelt’s pose did not fool K’ang, who said after the White House meetings hat “the whole nation of China [was] indignant,” and he endorsed the boycott of American goods to “prevent the exclusion of any Chinaman from the United States.”

Back in China, enraged patriots swung into action. Newspapers featured the boycott as front-page news; refused advertisements for American goods; announced boycott meetings and reprinted anti-American speeches as breaking news; listed American trademarks and asked readers to refuse all goods marked “Made in the U.S., “United States,” or “American”; sponsored boycott essay contests; and even argued that their 1905 boycott was comparable to the colonists’ boycott of British tea during the American struggle for independence.

Chinese homes and stores boasted huge colorful placards that read “Do Not Use American Goods,” while students marched with flags inscribed “Boycott American Goods.” The Cantonese danced to a hit song titled “Boycotting the Cruel Treaty.” A Chinese publisher translated Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, pointing out in the preface that White America’s treatment of its negroes had now been transferred to the Chinese. Thousands of fans were distributed in Canton portraying sense of Chinese being abused by Americans Gambling houses that had offered their customers free American cigarettes switched to a Chinese brand, and on August 16, the U.S. consul to Canton, Julius Lay, “wrote of the loss in sales of 10,000 cases of oil by [292] Standard Oil and of the failure to sell any flour at a time when 500,000 bags would normally have been sold.

Chester Holcombe, a former U.S. State Department diplomat in China, tried to signal Washington about "the intense racial pride of the Chinese." Roosevelt must have been puzzled. Of what could the “Chinks” possibly be proud?

On June 28, the New York Times Wrote:

CHINESE VERY BITTER AGAINST THIS COUNTRY
The question of Chinese exclusion from the United States continues chiefly to occupy the attention of the Chinese. The extent and depth of the feeling manifested astonish foreigners, and are regarded as an evidence of the growth of a national sentiment and public spirit which five years ago would have been inconceivable.

Roosevelt sought to counter the boycott with the Big Stick. When Taft arrived in Hong Kong from Manila on September 2, he read a telegram from Roosevelt instructing him to be tough on the Chinese: “Make them realize that we intend to do what is right and that we cannot submit to what is now being done by them.” The implicit “wrong” Teddy presumed was a rumor that the government of China had ordered its army to enforce the boycott. In fact, the Chinese were for the first time intentionally employing nonviolent tactics. With a plank in his eye, Roosevelt focused the U.S.-China rift on a sliver that wasn’t even there.

Canton was plastered with anti-American posters, one entitled, “Turtles Carrying an American Beauty.” The poster pictured turtles carrying Princess Alice on a palanquin. To the Chinese, a turtle was a lowlife weakling with no integrity. Teddy’s consul [page 293] in Canton—Julius Lay—huffed to the viceroy of Guangdon and Guangxi provinces on August 39, 1905: “Today a poster in gold is posted in several places in the city with an illustration of a young girl being carried by four turtles meant to represent the daughter of our President. This disgraceful insult to the daughter of the President of the United States is only another evidence of what the boycott organization has been allowed to resort to, and for which the Chinese officials are alone responsible.” American newspaper did not inform their readers that Roosevelt’s daughter had been portrayed in a demeaning manner; the Washington Post mentioned only “obnoxious placards” and the New York Times referred only to “insulting posters.”

When Alice observed the osiers, she chuckled Nevertheless, Consul Lay and some American military officers advised Taft not to allow Alice to travel to Canton. But Burr McIntosh, the party’s official photographer, recalled: "Miss Roosevelt wanted to see Canton and that settled it.”

TAFT RISKED ONLY A FEW jittery daylight hours in Canton. His party disembarked after dawn on September at the U.S. consulate, located on the small island of Shaneen, in a river that flowed through Canton. Taft ordered Alice to remain in the fortress safety of America’s island consulate. Taft then traveled u under guard to the Manchu Club for a luncheon hosted by the viceroy of Guangdong. But when Taft arrived at the club, his Chinese host was not there. The New York Times Reported, “The Viceroy was seriously ill in bed.” Claiming illness was a polite way for Chinese officials to snub irksome Foreign Devils.

Oblivious to the diplomatic rebuff, Taft delivered a rambling speech accusing the Chinese government of using intimidation to enforce the boycott and claiming that President Roosevelt would [page 294] give the Chinese a square deal. The September 7 Washington Post reported:

TAFT IS BREAKING BOYCOTT

Instructed by the President to Disillusionize Rabid Chinese

He Gives Assurances that the United States

Intends to Treat Immigrants Fairly.

In fact, Big Bill’s tough talk had little pacifying effect. Days after Taft’s visit, Consul Lay cabled the State Department that “the agitation has taken a new lease of life and instead of subsiding is growing.” A Cantonese jeweler later refused to serve the American consul’s wife, and Lay told Washington: “My chair coolies are hooted in the streets an I would not be surprised if my servants left me.” James J. Hill, a railroad titan trying to build track in China, later described the boycott as “the greatest commercial disaster America has ever suffered; [Europeans in China had] practically monopolized the trade.”

Taft got out of Canton under cover of darkness, returning to the safety of Hong Kong the evening of September 3. The party spent the next day being entertained by the more welcoming British Anglo-Saxons. On September 5, the party split in two;: Taft and about sixty people decided to return to San Francisco on the Pacific Mail steamer Korea via Shanghai, Nagasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama; Princess Alice and about twenty-eight people would go on to tour Beijing, Korea, and Japan.

ALICE BEGAN HER NORTHERN explorations in Beijing, where the court cared little about the boycott by China’s southern merchants. [page 295] On the throne was the elderly despot, Empress Cixi, who wasn’t Chinese at all, but the last in a line of Manchu rulers. The empress housed Alice in her Summer Palace, a series of ornate structures, complete with an artificial lake, in the cool hills beyond the Forbidden City. At the welcoming dinner, Alice remembered, “I got [page 296] quite dunk. I remember…thinking, ‘Am I able to walk that line without swaying’ as I wove my way off to bed.”

The next morning a hungover Alice, “feeling slightly unsteady on my feet,” made the obligatory three curtsies as she approached the empress, who sat “very erect and looking just like her picture.”

Alice was escorted to another room for a luncheon banquet with no interpreters, so neither side could understand the other. Next she was taken out into the palace gardens, and she later recalled Empress Cixi showering her with gifts. Alice gushed; “I absolutely loved all the loot I amassed.”

Further gifts and partying followed, enough to leave a bad impression with their American host, Consul William Rockhill, who wrote to James Rodgers, the American consul-general at Shanghai, “My experience with a section of the Taft party which came up here was identical with yours. I never saw such a pack of irresponsible men and women in my life…. Yesterday, at 11 A.M., I was glad to say goodbye to the last of them.”

ESTIMATES VARY, but some conclude that the 1905 boycott cut U.S. exports to China by more than half. Outraged by the Rough Rider in the White House, China had stood up to a White Christian country for the first time with a coordinated, peaceful response. One man in Shanghai foresaw a new era: “If we succeed in getting justice from America now, we may then boycott the nation that forces opium down our throats and the others that grab our provinces.” Indeed, the New York Tribune warned that “the greatest significance of the boycott is the possibility of future use of this method of coercion if the first attempt succeeds.”

The paper had it right. The boycott united China’s nationalists for the first time as they coordinated national communication, staged rallies, managed propaganda, and distributed millions of [page 297] giveaways to rally their countrymen. Many of the leaders of the 1905 boycott would use their skills in further uprisings against domination by Foreign Devils. Unable to imagine that the Chinese would behave as patriots and assuming that they’d always react as merchants, Roosevelt had fundamentally underestimated the Chinese character and had lit another long fuse.

[end of chapter 10]

Are we still as racist a nation as we were in 1905?

2011-12-05T23:35:00.004-05:00

Here's a sampling of what struck me in James Bradley's The Imperial Cruise. Sorry for the lousy reproduction. (click on image to get full scan in separate window on captions/text that has been 'clipped'.) Paperbacks available.

One Amazon reviewer faulted Bradley for calling this "waterboarding," when the US troops in the Philippines who were administering the torture called it "the water cure," but I would have to say that he doesn't understand the tenuous hold accurate use of language, logic and truth have on reality, in the face of concerted propaganda, spin, lying, all intended to hide the truth.

[pp 106, et sequitur] Quoting from Bradley who's quoting from many others, here's how 1st Lt. Grover Flint, 35th Infantry, described the "water cure" to a Senate hearing: "A man is thrown down on his back and three of our men sit or stand on his arms and legs and hold him down, and either a gun barrel or a rifle or a carbine barrel or a stick as big as a belaying pin … is simply thrust into his jaws and his jaws are thrust back,and, if possible, a wood log or stone is put under … his neck, so he can be held firmly .…[I]n the case of very old men I have seen their teeth fall out—I mean when it was done a little roughly.

He is simply held down, and then water is poured into his face, down his throat and nose from a jar, and that is kept up until the man gives some sign of giving in or becoming unconscious, and when he becomes unconscious he is simply rolled aside and he is allowed to come to ….

Well, I know that in a great many cases, in almost every case, the men have been a little roughly handled; A man suffers tremendously; there is no doubt about that. His suffering must be than of a man who is drowning, but he can not drown." One soldier noted that he'd water boarded 160 POWs, and only 135 of them died.

"A private from Utah summed things up in a letter home to his folks: 'No cruelty is too severe fro these brainless monkeys, who can appreciate no sense of honor, kindness or justice'." Speaking from the other end of the Bell curve, Then-NY-Gov. Roosevelt weighed in with "a speech he called 'The Strenuous Life': 'We cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines…. I have scant patience with those who fear to undertake the task of governing the Philippines, and who openly avow that they do fear to undertake it, or that they shrink from it because of the expense and trouble; but I have even scanter patience with those who make a pretense of humanitarianism to hide and cover their timidity, and who cant about "liberty" and the "consent of the governed," in order to excuse themselves for their [un?]willingness to play the part of men. Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation'." [Well, duuh. Another leader who's not read the US Constitution. (Or hasn't understood it, if he did.)]

Before the Nov. 6, 1900 election, the administration declared "military operations have now ceased"--oh, wait, that was the 2003 reprise of the Philippines operation. It was US Military Gov. General Otis who told reporters: "I have held that opinion for some time that the thing is entirely over. I cannot see where it is possible for the guerillas to effect any reorganization, concentrate any force or accomplish anything serious.' On the day Gen. Otis spoke those words, Filipino freedom fighters killed nineteen US soldiers in a fierce battle. ...snip...

"On July 4, 1901, the US pulled off one of the most remarkable shell games in colonial history. Textbooks recall that on that day the US ended 'military government' in the Philippines and initiated 'civil government'. Sounds to me like the playbook for Iraq in 2003.

How naïve of me, but I found this look at the US government at the turn of the 20th century just breath-taking. And not in a good way.

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There were voices that spoke out against the raw military aggression of "our young nation"--folks I've even read about, like Mark Twain/Sam'l L. Clemens.
But what seeps through is a sense of a national gummint so convinced that the White Invaders from Europe, who had "honed and improved their self[-governing powers in the Black Forest of Germany as Teutons and (no kidding) Aryans, then "moved West to follow the setting sun and their destiny to take over the world, along with the northern tribe of Aryans who migrated to Britain as Anglos and Saxons (Jutes are not mentioned).

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This "foundational notion" of Aryan superiority on the part of White American gummint officials (like Teddy Roosevelt, McKinley, Taft) finally gave me some insight into why it seemed that "the American 0.01%--the "ruling plutocracy" felt it had so much in common with Adolph Hitler, and why Wall Street Banksters actually funded Hitler at the same time they were funding the United States military effort. They were "all Aryans together," and all going for "world domination for the benefit of the Aryan "civilization."

Zinn also noted his suspicion of the less-than-honorable intentions towards "riff-raff returned soldiers" in the timing of a constitutional convention, following so closely on the heels of Sheas' Rebellion.

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The "internal caption" in white-out on the trench wall reads:
Burial of the Dead at the Battle of Wounded Knee, S.D.
NorthWestern Photo Co Chadron Neb.

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As seems always to be the case, the plain meaning of words, like "giving aid and comfort to the enemy" does not survive inclusion in the gummint lexicon. For example, it appears that, in government terminology, "aid" does not include bank loans.

Or as Howard Zinn pointed out about the Sedition Act a century earlier, the words "Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…." did not mean that Pres. Adams couldn't have his law punishing people for the things they said or printed. People could say anything they wanted, any time they wanted, but if it happened to offend the president (or make him look stupid, blind, fat and ugly), then the speaker could be put in jail, as per the law. I think one of Ben Franklin's relatives actually died in prison while awaiting trial under the Sedition Act.

One jurist, going back to "English Common Law," I believe Zinn noted, said that what was meant under English common law was that government could not by statute engage in prior restraint. It somehow eluded the jurist that the threat of being punished for speaking was certainly prior restraint. And Zinn also asked (on a WBAI interview, I think it was), "Didn't we just spend a lot of time and effort to get out from under British law? Why would we be citing it in our own cases, then?"

Zinn made two other points, one about the so-called "father of a free market economy," Adam Smith, because he used, once, the phrase "the invisible hand of the market place". What Smith lectured on at Glasgow, in his course Laws & Jurisprudence, were notions like this one:

Laws and government may be considered in this and indeed in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence.
Adam Smith—Tuesday, Feb. 22, 1763; lecture series on Laws & Jurisprudence. Page 208, facsimile (PDF) version, vol 5.

Does that sound like a "free marketeer" to you? Sounds a lot like a (shudder!) "European." (Maybe they learned something about getting along after killing one another for a couple thousand years or so. We've only been at it since 1492, so perhaps have more to learn.)

Zinn's second point was about post hoc, ergo propter hoc, and the fact that the call for a Constitutional Convention came maybe three months or less after farmers, following Daniel Sheas, and who'd served without pay as continental soldiers, came home to find their farms and livestock being repossessed by (you'll never guess) Banksters who had the support of the Massachusetts legislators in raising property taxes so they could be bailed out of the loans they'd advanced to secure themselves a new, independent country. One that they, the landowners, could now REALLY control. (Anyone see a pattern here?)

However, Daniel Sheas and his ex-soldier farmer friends decided to Occupy Springfield Armory. John Adams, who became prexy #2 but was in the Mass. legislature, wanted him hanged. Not much sympathy on the part of the 0.01% for the suffering of the 99.99% even back then. And of course you recall that the WWI veterans, who were paid a pittance for WWI, could not wait the nearly 30 years for their "bonuses" to be paid--the US was in the depths of the Great Depression, brought about by (you'll never guess) the same Banksters who had rammed the Federal Reserve Act though Congress (on the day before Christmas, was it? in 1913, with how many Congressmen still in DC? (This is where parliamentary lingo gets very cute: Is it "a majority of the members of the house /senate" or is it "a majority of the members then present? In other words, if there were only three senators sitting, any two of them would be "a majority of those present," but certainly not 51 of the Members of the Senate.

We're still having difficulty right now, today, agreeing on what is equally plain, that "Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Are tents, tarps, ground cloths and sleeping bags "speech"? "Symbolic speech"? Are "drum circles" a petition? Are "Mic Checks" "peaceable"? Does "peaceably to assemble" require the use of lethal pepper spray, the use of "less than lethal" shotgun blasts? Is the holding up of a sign or poster "symbolic speech"? Is wearing a yellow armband without words "symbolic speech" or just wearing clothes? Is the Internet a "press"?

For me, the answer is quite simple--pretty much "No" to all of those examples. There is no such thing as a "penumbra" or half-shadow, of the first four amendments. No need to go through such linguistic torture. These rights are obviously "others retained by the people," as set out in the Ninth Amendment.

Regarding the rights and powers of We the People, the Preamble, Ninth and Tenth Amendments are key. We might have specified speech and the press back in 1789-1791, but Madison added the Ninth to cover the thousands of other rights "retained by the people," but not listed. Ditto with powers (reserved to the states, or the people). A key right we all retained was the right to communicate with one another, by the best means available, and by all the rest. Radio, TV, Cable, WiFi, Cellular (same thing) & the Internet just didn't happen to be around 2030 years ago.

A couple of years before Zinn died, he gave a lecture commemorating the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, (UDHR, ratified December 10, 1948). If you skim them quickly, you might have a reaction like mine--and similarly, upon reading the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of Prisoners of War, as well, namely, "Holy Dead Letter Office, Batman, we don't comply with any of this stuff!"

When I read through the Geneva Conventions, a couple of things were discordantly obvious violations, in letter and spirit, between US treatment of POWs and the UDHR: Bags over the head are prohibited; sensory deprivation is prohibited; torture is prohibited. POWs are to be allowed to help prepare their own meals (yeah, right, where did we see them doing that at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo?). They're to be given a set number of sheets, pillows, pillow cases, blankets, wash cloths, towels, bars of soap. They're to be given a "salary" or allowance that can be used at the prison camp "PX" (post exchange) to buy such things as stationery, stamps, I think cigarettes, coffee, writing implements, and I can't recall what else. And of course, one presumes that if they could buy these things, they could USE these things. Which would be difficult when you're hanging from the ceiling by your wrists, which are fastened behind your back.

On the other hand, take a look at the ILB (I Love Bagram) website--a grunt's view (or "'boots'" or "troopers'") compendium of a few years'-worth of "reasons why I love Bagram air base. Sounds as SNAFU and/or FUBAR as it was in Vietnam, but now with a 50% or more overhead of LNs (local nationals) and TCNs (third country nationals) and other mercenaries from stateside and poverty-striken countries around the world. (And of course, American companies like Brown & Root (oops, that was in Vietnam--now they're Kellog, Brown & Root), Fluor, Blackwater, of course (one entry on the soldier's log mentions what I also thought was strange about the name Blackwater, as it's part of the RVer's glossary: on an RV there are three water tanks--one for potable water, another for "grey-water" ( post shower, dishwashing, toothbrushing, and the third for "black-water," or sewage.

Maybe our government imagines, about every 100 years, that it can disregard everything about being a "nation of laws, not of men," and do as they please, Constitution and their oath to support it notwithstanding. Adams in 1800, Roosevelt in 1900, Bush in 2000. Except this time it's going to take a whole nother level of effort to bring our government, our economy, and our society back into balance, and perhaps even into harmony with the rest of the world.

Occupy Wall Street is a good beginning. But only a beginning: we have far to go.

Wow! Comments were so negative on "Bomb Plot" Photo Op that NYT turned them off.

2011-11-21T00:58:00.000-05:00

After 34 comments, only three or four of which could (arguably--many had a sarcastic tone, so it's hard to tell) be considered "positive."

This was about to be my entry: (now expanded beyond the NYT character count limit.

Gosh, are the NYPD going to start charging their own buddies with assault & battery, resisting arrest, interfering with the administration of what passes for "justice" these days in ye olde Yew Ess of Aye? How are the civil suits coming against NYPD Ossifer Tony Baloney (Anthony Bologna)? Does Det. Bologna get to keep his pension, along with sitting at a desk, investigating for cockroaches in Staten Island?

All of this theatrics and "drahmer" wouldn't be so foul and pestilential if we actually had an investigation into who placed the very fancy, high-tech demolition explosives in WTC #7, #2 and #1 back a decade or so ago. I suppose if good ol' Cyrus Vance were not one of the 1%ers, he might bestir himself to impanel a Grand Jury and actually do a no-holds-barred (but no beatings with telescoping billy clubs, either--I think that's a Constitutional no-no, isn't it?) investigation of how it came to be that Larry Silverstein and NYFD Fire Marshals could decide to "pull" a building (#7 in this case), and then, a few minutes later, "we watched it collapse." Larry did not add, "…collapse in about as perfect a controlled demolition as you're ever likely to see," one that didn't trash the three adjacent buildings (and thereby expose Larry & his gang to lawsuits).

And of course the demolition of WTC #2 and #1 were absolutely stunning, spectacular — and sufficiently murderous to have folks lose just about every bit of common sense, chemistry and physics they ever possessed.

Go talk with a few of your welder friends. Guys and gals who use gasses and electricity and plasma "guns" to make metals melt. Go visit Sandia National Labs and get a demo of how you can use plasma torches to "spray-paint" TUNGSTEN (or Wolfram) and ceramics onto steel. Of all metals in pure form, tungsten has the highest melting point (3,422 °C, 6,192 °F). A plasma torch can reach 6,740.33° F. Remember the guy from Underwriters Labs who disproved the NIST "sagging, warping, steel beams" theory and was immediately fired? Never mind "missing" 2-foot-by-three-foot by 4-inches-thick walls structural columns--47 in each #1 & #2, only 25 in #7. The normal folks you seek out don't even have to be an architects or engineers — just people who have worked with steel, steel construction--and not some college prof who's never gotten real-worldian grit under his fingernails. Or howsabout subpoenaing personnel from all of the controlled explosive demolition companies in the US, to get their insight on how this job was pulled off. Or demolition companies around the world. Or, heck, even special forces, like Sealant Team Six (the guys Jon Stewart wants Obama (our Unitary Disappointment-in-chief) to tackle the winterizing of American homes--the ones that are still lived in, anyway. Don't those figures of $20 million to winterize something like 4 or 11 homes kind of depress you? Or the $2.6 Trillion in Pentagon money Donnie Rumsfeld claimed, on 9/10/2001, could not be accounted for? Was that for a year? A decade? Or maybe just one month.

But back to our "runaway" Grand Jury, 24 good persons and true, commanding the DA or federal prosecutor to serve this and that subpoena, bring in this and that witness. Then, when you're ready, you can bring in all the Bush-era folks, put 'em under oath--and order them to bring in their cards--especially take 'em deuces with 'em when they come (bad joke)--subpoena duces tecum--that is, compel the production of their documents, too.

Short of a Grand Jury, with a foreman who knows that the DA works for him and not vice-versa, to get to the bottom of WTC 9/11/01, why should any citizen believe what any public official has to say, ever? After you reach an official lie level in the 95% range (or 99.44% pure BS), folks will, as they have begun to do already, form their own government. We've had enough pain (OW!) and debt (OWeS). Time to get on with major reformation, starting with free TV campaign advertising channels. The FCC would be a good building to occupy when the weather turns inclement. And the requirement that a batch of The People's Channels be dedicated to free campaign advertising, come one, come all, can be done in simple English. Nothing inchoate about this requirement.

And of course, no more tolerance for election fraud (that's fraud by election officials--as we all know, that kind of fraud and illegal conduct is rampant. What's exceedingly rare is VOTER fraud--that "vote early and vote often" thing that Tammany Hall and Mayor Richard Daley (the elder--he of the police riots at political conventions in Chicago--remember that one? More cops run amok). Had enough yet?

No more 17,832% return on political investment (ROPI)--what companies get back in billions (and, for the Banksters, in trillions), for the few paltry millions they "contribute" to campaigns. We need a ROPI Windfall Profits Tax--any profit over Prime Rate is hit with the tax--the rate, 100%--which goes right back into OUR treasury.

Response to comment by SeanNY53 re: capitalism & sanctimonious santorum

2011-10-09T17:13:00.044-04:00

Yes indeed, SeanNY53! And while we're on the topic of ca-PETE-alism, here's something that the so-called "father of capitalism" (or economists?) wrote in his lectures on Law & Jurisprudence:

Laws and government may be considered in this and indeed in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence.

Adam Smith—Tuesday, Feb. 22, 1763; lecture series on Laws & Jurisprudence. Page 208, facsimile (PDF) version, vol 5. [59 ]

Ain't that a pip?!

Just as "democracy" is a myth (as in, Tell me one place in the world that EVER had a functioning democracy--rule by a majority of the people. Athens? Sure, if you consider 15% of the population eligible to serve in the demos an example of "majority rule." [Slaves, women, children, and men both of whose parents were not born in Athens were excluded.] The USofA? Nope. It's a Constitutional, or Representational Republic, or once was, anyhow, before 1985 or so.

And the framers went to great lengths to guarantee that there would indeed be no majority rule--or "mob rule," as they called it), so too is it a myth that Adam Smith was "in favor of" or "an ardent supporter of" anything like a "free market economy" (or the jungle, where might makes right, etc., or "a state of economic savagery, where life is solitary, nasty, brutish and short," as Thos. Hobbes put it.

The late Howard Zinn pointed out that nice little quote above in a crowded Hvd conf. room a couple of years ago, on the occasion of the anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. He also mused, puckishly (and devastatingly, seems to me), that it was interesting to note that there had been no call for a new Constitution until after Sheas and his pals staged a protest against the high taxes they were being forced to pay to "make whole" (it's OK to call it a bailout, of course) the Banksters of the time who "bankrolled" the War of Separation from the British.

Zinn noted that good ol' John Adams, Pres #2, thought that Sheas and pals should have been hanged. White landowners like Adams had it pretty good, with the British chased away and being left with their old government (which they controlled). Note that the first order of business for the new Congress, the 1st Congress,was to pass a bailout bill. And in the Constitution itself, what did the framers write? "Article VI, ¶1: All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation." So the soldiers who did the fighting got nothing, or next to nothing, but were going to be taxed in order to bail out the banksters. Banks, with the courts as willing partners, were auctioning off the returned soldiers' livestock, foreclosing their mortgages and, now with the Sheriffs' help, evicting them from their farms. What's that line? "The more thin change, the heavier your pants pockets"? Never could translate French. (The more things change, the more they stay the same, I think is the gist of it.)

As to the US Constitution, and its Preamble, Zinn commented: "It's always nice to have some pretty-sounding window dressing to cloak the chains of oppression," or words 2 that effect. I'll hafta post the video. Wonder why Zinn got so cynical in his old age? (Didja know Zinn & Chomsky helped edit what that crazy guy, Daniel Ellsberg was it? purloined from the Pentagon way back in the day?)

By the way, it was President Adams (who has gotten off lightly, considering that he violated his oath of office to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the US of A"), considering his attitude towards the citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and then the citizens of the new Republic, given that he signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, and threw folks in jail for criticizing The Man (what formerly was our gummint). As Zinn noted in another venue (an interview on WBAI-Pacifica Radio, NYC), "what is so difficult to understand about 'no'?" (Although Bill Clinton had his own trouble with 'is'--I guess it's those short ones that get people confused.)

Zinn continued in this vein: "The operative phrase is 'Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. ' " The Sedition Act (read it here) repealed everything but religious freedom in the First Amendment. This was 1798, July 14, a little less than six years after ratification of the Bill of Rights (15Dec1791). The fine could be up to $5,000, and a prison term of from six months to five years. In the bill just before the Sedition act was a measure to grant a $250 annual salary to a surveyor for the port of Gloucester. If that's a representative annual wage, then the fine for asserting First Amendment rights was 20 years' (one score years) wages.

Well, lookee here! It's First Friday, and Unemployment jumped to 16.5%

2011-10-07T21:44:00.001-04:00

I'm talking about the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS') joblessness category U-6.

These government officials' "official" unemp rate stayed the same, at 9.1%, but the REAL, or Fact-Based, official unemp rate jumped from 16.2% to 16.5%.

So, do you feel that our current government (a Constitutional Republic) can handle the task to save the country, our economy, and maybe event he global economy?

Or should we go back to the Declaration of Independence, and start all over again?

Let's just see if we can update that document a wee bit, shall we?

The Declaration of Independence

The Ninety-Nine Per Cent
of
The Citizens of The United States of America
From
The Most Rich, Powerful, Connected, Greediest and Mean-Spirited
Remaining Plutocratic One Per Cent of The Population

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for 99% of the people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with the ruling 1%, and to assume, among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the 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, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that the 99% are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the practices of the 1% to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such plutocrat-controlled Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of the 99%, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present 1% is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over the 99% majority of this nation. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

 The 1% have refused Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good and promoting the general Welfare.
 The 1% have forbidden the representatives of the 99% to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till the assent of the 1% should be obtained; and when so suspended, the representatives of the 99% have utterly neglected to attend to them.
 The 1% have refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of equal, balanced and non-gerrymandered Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
The 1% have called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, expensive to get to and distant from the depository of their public Records (which the 1% and its representatives refuse to give over to the 99%), for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with measures of benefit only to the 1%, but paid for by taxing the 99%.
he 1T% have blocked the functioning of the representative Republic in matters of war and peace, have endeavored to use the military as its personal police force, and to use police forces local police forces as their own private Blackwater and Pinkerton mercenaries, while at the same time requiring the 99% to pay for them. At least in the previous Gilded Age, the 1% had to pay for their own private armies of Pinkerton goons.
The 1% have paid the campaign expenses of our elected officials, in the millions of dollars, with the expectation--and the result--of getting returns on these political investments in the thousands of a per cent ($70 million in campaign contributions, for $700 BILLION (and more that we don't even know about) in bailouts for the Wall Street Casino operators.
The 1% have, through their purchase of the government, allowed the United States to be attacked, either from without or from within, and have refused to allow an investigation which would establish some simulacrum of the truth, and mete out accountability for the destruction their captive government allowed to occur (at the very least).
The 1% have refused for the past several decades, to let elections occur without committing fraud on the 99%, by illegally disenfranchising as many of the 99% as they can, preventing others the 99% choose, to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, now must be said to have returned to the People at large, the 99%, for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
The 1% have endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
The 1% have obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Justice, the second adjuration in the Preamble to the Constitution for the United States of America.
The 1% have made Judges dependent on their Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
The 1% have erected a multitude of New Departments, such as the Heimats Versicherheit Abteilung, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
The 1% have kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies, without the Consent of our legislatures.
The 1% have affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power, and to coerce local police departments, state militias and National guardsmen, to serving the needs and wishes of the 1%.
The 1% have combined with others to subject us to powers foreign to our constitution, such as the Federal Reserve System, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving their Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation by silence or overt approval:

For inflicting upon us a standing army, augmented by militarized state and local "law enforcement" personnel
For killing American citizens abroad without due process, or any process at all, that we know of
For permitting the National Surveillance Agency since 2002 to wiretap without court order our telephones, cellular phones, fiber-optical internet data transactions, copy our financial transactions, our conversations, our email, our keystrokes, our health records, financial records, school records, library records, vehicular travel records--in fact any and all communications over our telecommunications networks
For directing the Secretary of the Environmental Protection Agency to lie about the safety of the air in Lower Manhattan after the 9/11/2001 building demolitions
For protecting government officials from punishment for any Murders which they have committed or will commit on the Inhabitants of these States, on the inhabitants of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Jordan, Pakistan, Libya, as well as any and all other sovereign nations which has raw materials or other benefits with the 1% see as beneficial to their fortunes:
For sending our manufacturing and trade overseas to all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on the 99% greater than those taxes imposed on the 1%.
For depriving the 99% in many cases, of the benefits the writ of Habeas Corpus, of due process of law, of Trial by Jury
For authorizing local, state, federal police and espionage agencies to enter the homes of the 99% without search warrants, to beat up, spray blinding capsicum oleoresin into the eyes of the 99%, and then deny redress of grievances of the 99%
For transporting members of the 99% in this or other countries into "dark sites," where they are known to be tortured, in an attempt to extract Russian-style "Confessions" to acts perpetrated by the 1% or their agents
For causing the rescission of long-standing global treaties to which the 99%'s country was a party and had ratified
For establishing a large network of concentration camps and an unknown number of deep, deep underground cities to which only the 1% will be allowed access, in the case of a global catastrophe, such as thermonuclear, chemical and/or biological warfare, for which they have been preparing, in secret, for several decades (at least)
For taking away our funding, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments by means of this withholding of funds and application of unfunded requirements:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever, under the guise of the Commerce Clause.
The 1% have promoted the abrogation of the nation's laws, its 231-year history of government of laws, not of men
The 1% have polluted the 99%'s air, our seas, our rivers and streams, have ravaged our way of life, have torched our economy, destroyed our homes, villages and towns by bankrupting them and the the 99% who live there--in short, have destroyed the economic well-being of our people.
The 1% are at this time supporting large armies of soldiers and foreign mercenaries occupying several sovereign nations abroad, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and others we do not yet know about, to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of so-called "Shock and Awe," of collective punishment for decades, and such Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of the wishes of the 99%
The 1% have endeavored to use the support of the 99% to build chemical, biological and thermonuclear weapons and nano-weapons of mass destruction in the nation's research laboratories, armories and other research facilities
The 1% have celebrated the murder overseas of American citizens who, so far as been adjudicated, said nasty things about our country--these "remote controlled murders" violate our Constitution and are, in fact, "justice-free" governmental actions, not approved by the 99%
The 1% have attempted to foment domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless South American Drug Dealers whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We, the 99%, have peaceably assembled and petitioned for Redress of our grievances in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury and reprisal and harassment, by a new (if it was ever discontinued) COINTELPRO, now all grown up, computerized, web-savvy, and much more sophisticated than in the 1960s when dissent against an illegal and fraudulent war, a cratering economy, racial and economic discrimination again mobilized the 99%.

This 1%, these Plutocrats, "Royalty" and "Princes," these "Corporate Titans," Wall Street Banker-Gangsters, these Wall Street men who have turned our economy into a Gambling Casino where all the chips are paid for by us, the 99%, these members of the richest 1% of our nation, whose character is marked by every act which may defined as Tyranny, are unfit to control the 99% of this nation of free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our One Percenters. We have warned them from time to time that their attempts to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us and our economy are anathema to us. We have reminded the 1% of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here, that we are no "Homeland" no Heimat or Vaterland in Herr Hitler's terminology; we, the 99%, are the children of immigrants, of "the melting pot" that once was our nation, our country, our America. We, the 99%, have appealed to the better angels of their nature, and having found none, we have conjured them, have begged them, evoking the ties of our common immigrant kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections, our cooperation, our consent, and correspondence. But the 1% have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.

We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold the 1%, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.—

WE, THEREFORE, the 99% of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General Assembly gathered, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of 99% of the citizens of these United States of America, solemnly publish and declare, That the 99% of the un-rich, the un-priviledged in these United States are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT CITIZENS;

That they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the 1% and their minions, lobbyists, purchased Senators, Representatives, Judges and legislators at the state and local level, and that all political connection between them and the 99%, is and ought to be totally disolved; and that as Free and Independent Citizens, we have full Power to disenfranchise the 1%, levy War against them, conclude Peace with them, implement all that we must to recognize that People are Corporations Too, to contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent Citizens, as Citizens and Citizen Corporations, may of right do. —And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

In its earlier form, this declaration was submited on July 2, 1775 to the Continental Congress (as seen on the back of the $2 Federal Reserve Fiat Note), approved and then signed by:

John Hancock Benj. Harrison Lewis Morris

Button Gwinnett Thos. Nelson, Jr. Richd. Stockton

Lyman Hall Francis Lightfoot Lee Jno. Witherspoon

Geo. Walton Carter Braxton Fras. Hopkinson

Wm. Hooper Robt. Morris John Hart

Joseph Hewes Benjamin Rush Abra. Clark

John Penn Benj. Franklin Josiah Bartlett

Edward Rutledge John Morton Wm. Whipple

Thos. Heyward, Jr. Geo. Clymer Saml. Adams

Thomas Lynch, Jr. Jas. Smith John Adams

Arthur Middleton Geo. Taylor Robt. Treat Paine

Samuel Chase James Wilson Elbridge Gerry

Wm. Paca Geo. Ross Step. Hopkins

Thos. Stone Caesar Rodney William Ellery

Charles Carroll of Geo. Read Roger Sherman

Carrollton Tho. M: Kean Sam. Huntington

George Wythe Wm. Floyd Wm. Williams

Richard Henry Lee Phil. Livingston Oliver Wolcott

Th. Jefferson Frans. Lewis Matthew Thornton

Occupy Wall Street -- People Are Corporations, Too.

2011-10-06T16:25:00.001-04:00

When the Supreme Court's Gang of Five decided that they could reach their "Socialism For Corporations/Free Economy for the other 99%" result by permitting corporations to give money without limit to corporations and those they bribe (make campaign donations, pay for ads, think tanks, etc.) by declaring that "Corporations Are People, Too," they did us all a very big favor.

Because the corollary "People Are Corporations, Too" is, of necessity, also true.

So what? you ask.

Here's what:

1) There are myriad different and specific goals espoused by Occupy Wall Street. But the first among them must necessarily be "It's all about the money."

We all are clear that if any of our money goes to Washington, then we have completely lost control of it. If we could keep it in our states, we might have slightly more control over it, but perhaps only slightly, as our state capitols are, on average, closer to each of us than Washington, D.C. And I'm not talking about a "tax strike" -- a nationwide refusal by the 99% to send in taxes. That's almost impossible anyway, because taxes are deducted from wages, right at the well-head (your place of work). *

2) We just need a way to stop sending our money to Washington. And the Gang of Five Supremes have handed us a nice way to do that. I call it:

3) Don't Marry--Incorporate.
In plain English, register yourself as a corporation with your state or commonwealth's secretary of same. If you have a family, then the whole family becomes the corporation, and you are all engaged in making a profit in the business of your lives. I've looked at the business statutes in the 50 states, and I don't see anything that would prohibit this.

On the tax side, however, unless each state legislature specifically declared that all monies paid for goods or services to what was once called "an employee at will", is deemed corporate payments, from one corporation to another (you and your family). If the legislature will NOT do that, then each current employee will have to negotiate a contract between his or her corporation and the corporation of which you were once a "wage slave."

However, if the unions got involved--particularly if they followed the path established by the NYC organization for freelance "workers,"such unions (which don't have much to do these days anyway, after decades of government efforts to smash them, on behalf of, and for the benefit of, the 1%) could offer training in negotiation, guidance and practice, sample contracts, reports on compensation for all companies, and so on. And the unions could help lobby for hard-nosed training in schools, K-12, in Home Economics. But this new curriculum would indeed be about economics, about running a business--because what once was a "home" is now your new corporate Headquarters. The new "home ec" would encompass accounting, business planning, contract law, negotiating, financial planning, using financial modeling tools--as well as "eating for success."

The late Howard Zinn had noted that, in the US, basically no societal improvements came about without the vigorous and prolonged and intense activity of the unions. The 1% even had to hire and pay their OWN armies to brutalize striking workers – before the gummint recruited, drafted, maintained a standing military to keep the world safe for the 1%. Here's what the then most highly decorated soldier in US history--and a Marine Major General, Smedley Butler had to say in 1935 about his three decades of military service, while I'm on the topic:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.^[12]

Wikipedia noted that, "In addition to his speeches to pacifist groups, he served from 1935 to 1937 as a spokesman for the American League Against War and Fascism.^[51]^[52] In 1935 he wrote the exposé War Is a Racket, a trenchant condemnation of the profit motive behind warfare. His views on the subject are summarized in the [above] passage from a 1935 issue of the socialist magazine Common Sense.

* Also, whether the Democrats or Republicans are "running" the gummint, the result is the same--they take our money and give it to their friends. There are some slight differences between friends, but not lately--the biggest "friend" is Wall Street, the Federal Reserve Private Banking System, and the largest of corporations. And the biggest friend of Democrats and Republicans on Wall Street seems to be Goldman Sacks-of-our-money. The other friends are in the military-industrial-legislative complex. They benefit from war, particularly wars to capture oil, natural gas, and other "strategic" raw materials.

This military complex gets 57% of our money, by the way. Think of it: 57% of our "gross domestic product" goes to wars and paying for the aftermaths (think reparations, settlements, VA hospitals)--and we're supposed to be exporting our Constitutional Republic all over the world, right? At the fuze end of a Stinger missile, delivered by a glorified radio-controlled model airplane controlled from eight thousand miles away, by a glorified GameBoy or X-box or PlayStation controller? (By the way, did you read about the young physicist from Framingham, MA, who actually understands the connection between model airplanes and "UAV"s (which, under the Obama administration, now stands for Unlimited American Violence [by remote control]). Here's the link. When I recently commented on how new batches of people might try to "up-armor" their radio-control model airplanes and outfit them with missiles--to add realism or murder to their computer games, I had no idea that there were models this big:

A model like this (or this actual model), said by the UBEs
(Unidentified [Federal] Bureau [of Investigation] Employees.

Here's one about twice the size--a twin-engine MIG-25:

The young avionics dude, Clinton Kraidy, barefooted, built this for a school project (no question that dad helped out some). Someone commenting on his emulation of Shoeless Joe explained that he'd traded his Tivas in for 50 imperial gallons of Jet A kerosene. Some of these large RC planes, with 9-channel controllers, are found in 80% scale--I guess that'd be .8:1?-- and weigh 100 plus pounds. And when the interviewer asks Kraidy whether he could mount guns, or drop bombs from his high school science project, Kraidy answered, "Yes."

The "take-away" (or "lesson learned") from the above is that the only real limit to these things is your budget.

For example, here's a model of a 747, maybe 70% of the original airframe. Then a 1:1 version below it. If hobbyists could afford the fuel and had a place to park their own 747s--and for their own particular reasons, didn't want to fly IN the plane, but rather control it with a remote control unit (instead of 9 channels, it would probably have a digital feed, computer to computer, satellite telemetry, very high resolution cameras mounted where the pilots would have been), and, ta da, you have Project Global Guardian, wherein the military (with bottomless pockets--just like bottomless pages on the internet), flew their remote-controlled 747 from California to Australia, did a few exercises with the ANZAC gang, and then remote-controlled the 747 back to California.

The special thing about the US remote-murder UAVs and the remote-espionage UAVs is that they've been designed especially (purpose-built, the Brits might say, like a "bespoke suit" for high-altitude, high fuel-efficiency (can stay airborne longer than a duck, say, or jet fighter), to be quiet, and very, very stable in flight, as they're a "platform" for high-rez. spy-cams.

And here's a 1:1 example or two:

Be the Gyroscope: Maced or Pepper-Sprayed (OC) Wall Street Petitioner for Redress of Grievances

2011-09-28T02:27:00.000-04:00

Youtube Comment on Pamela Parker’s recommendation (on Facebook) of YouTube video, title: Maced Wall Street Demonstrator, or "Petitioner for redress of grievances," in First Amendment lingo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moD2JnGTToA&feature=player_embedded

Looks like, at seconds 19, 20 and 21, there's a white-shirted officer, to right, over blue shirted officer's right shoulder, wielding what might be Mace container, with his arm outstretched, thumb over the top of it. I think I can make out a white stream of something. Seems his hand and what's in it are 3 feet from the girl who then falls on her knees. Can someone do a frame-by-frame analysis?

Also, a plea,from a frequent taker of video & stills, to all folks taking video:

Be The Gyroscope.

(borrowed without apology from the golfers’ nifty mantra, “Be The Ball.”)

That is--and as nearly impossible as it is in crowd situations, the highest camera priority is "keep camera as stable as possible". It's like an exercise in gymnastics or ballet, to keep the camera steady while everything else--you and everyone/-thing about you is chaos, in movement.

You can practice "being the gyroscope" in the privacy of your own digs and/or with friends and family. View, critique and delete the results, and do it over again. And again.

Why make this effort?

I’m thinking that all of us must become proficient "cinematographers" and camera-persons in the coming days. And it's difficult to make out what's on a video when the camera's field of view is wildly yawing, rolling and pitching so's to make you hurl--or be unable to see details of the image, like name tags, badge numbers, faces ringer rings, license numbers, VINs under the windshield, hair & eye color (or if you're REALLY good, totally sharp images from an iris identification app on your iPhone4.

This and other video from the Wall Street Casino reminds me of the 1966 Democratic Convention in Chicago when Chicago's finest went berserkers, and we had the spectacle of the Chicago Eight-Minus One on trial before an almost certifiably crazy judge (not that he wasn’t provoked as never-ever in his life, but that’s hardly an excuse--item #2 in the Preamble? “We the People of the United States, in order to … establish Justice….”. That was 1966. This is 2011, a decade after what will surely be called the Most Successful False Flag Operation In History” (blaming all Muslims and beige people for something whitey did to whitey’s own), and virtually all local police departments have been "federalized" by the Heimats Versicherungen Abteilung ("Homeland" "security," Dept of.). With the latest in "crowd-control" weapons, in abundance--from mace to internment camps “closed” military bases refurbished and reconstituted as internment camps by (drum roll, pls) Halliburton Industries.

It's probably wise for any and all citizens who seek "peaceably to assemble, and petition the government for redress of grievances," without being injured or killed doing so, to start bringing to such peaceful assemblies (along with cameras) gear like helmets, goggles, shoulder-, bicep- and thigh-pads--remember from your Abu Ghraib training that billy clubs to the thigh leave hardly any "audit trail" but are immensely debilitating/incapacitating/bring you to your knees. Perhaps even gas masks.

If any of you ride trains, you may have noticed that each conductor has a "signature" paper punch (issued by the transit authority). I’m thinking that perhaps all police billy clubs, night sticks, brass knuckles, saps and, for musically minded crowd control, the extended or telescoping "baton" (doesn't that sound so benign--a perfect euphemism for a bone-shattering club, dontcha think?-- should have an individual, citizen-identifiable, reverse “users’s logo,” or “brand,” permanently engraved on its striking surface(s).

This way, if you didn’t have a chance to ask for the officer’s name, rank and badge number, either you or a friend, or lawyer, will be able to make the connection between the marks and the miscreant from the police-person's brands in your bruises.

Of course, just as some police persons in the 1966 Chicago Convention kerfuffles (sounds like feminine ruffles, rather than bone-breaking scuffles, no?) or police riots, if you prefer accuracy, taped over their badge numbers (so they wouldn't be charged with not wearing their badges, while at the same time defeating the purpose of wearing them--so too might enterprising "enforcement folks" be able to come up with counterfeit brands or unmarked batons, much like cattle rustlers in the good old days when the killing of African American slaves and "indigenous persons" by white European invaders was seen as not such a bad thing by white European-immigrant prosecutors and judges.

Also, you should be alert to the context in which police-persons work every day, with heightened awareness in large crowd “situations.” Please take a thoughtful look at this beautiful web catalog from manufacturer ASP, for Armament Systems & Procedures), who manufactures the “telescoping baton” that is, I think, used now by the Bobbies in Britain, US military, federal agencies, state and local police. Also handcuffs, disposable handcuffs, batons with OC dispensers (oleoresin capsicum, or hot, hot red chili-pepper spray), super-bright flashlights, baton holsters, optional equipment such as a Human Rights baton tip (no kidding), and so on. Take in the pictures of the products, the beautiful diagrams, the lovely stamped and cloisonné medallions you can mount on the butt of the batons, with state seal, surrounded by department name, such as NYPD, or HVA (Heimats Versicherungen Abteilung to help your recollection), and to the full-page, staged “active encounter” situations, and take in the ad copy. Here’s the ASP catalog URL.

There's also a YouTuber, "knuckledusterbooks" who put up an "introduction to saps" (saps are a slab of lead on a spring-steel shank wrapped in leather; blackjacks are a round billet of lead, molded over a compressed coil spring (like a screen door screen) also wrapped in leather--these are very good at breaking human clavicles (collar bones), face bones, skulls, fibula (small calf-bone), ulna & radius (the two small forearm bones).

The instructions below are in the nature of “Know what you’re up against, and “Be Prepared,” as in “having advance information gives you two more arms (Forewarned is Four-Armed). This is no apologia for law-breaking, Constitution-busting individuals and the agencies that fund, command, supervise, outfit and train them. So, herewith, some very broad-stroke caveats to consider:

If you haven’t yet learned this, police officers live and operate in a world where the presumption is that an approaching person is “armed and dangerous,” or merely “dangerous with his or her arms, voice, psyche,” etc. The younger of them, not yet risen in rank, have truly abysmal, home-wrecking working hours (weekend duty, shifts that precess ’round the clock, all the while surrounded by critics & potential danger. Anyone who’s in the restaurant bidness, entertainment bidness, or bidness of nursing, ambulance, fire outputting -- or copy editors for morning newspapers & TV shows & weekly magazines that come out on Mondays -- can empathize. Except in the danger department.

However, some journalists can even empathize in the that department as well, like: investigative reporters in the US, war correspondents overseas, correspondents representing non-US news modalities (like Al Jazeera—Baghdad bureau bombed by US; one cameraman killed) and any reporters in and from foreign countries, esp. in the Asian con- and sub-continents, particularly where US troops are active, where empathy and life-ending activities are congruent with, or surpass, those of police personnel -- and even more so, if the police and their gummints are trying to terminate reporters’ assignments w/ extreme prejudice (or what Darth Cheney might call (after first submitting it to focus groups to make certain that people won't or don’t understand a word of the phrase but THINK they do, and that it has a really nice meaning), “enhanced unitary interviewee techniques”—the "unitary" here is the killer, "if I may"). (In rhetorical and “language arts” circles, this is called euphemism or cynical obfuscation, and my description a sad attempt at sardonic sarcasm, to use a tautology twice in the same phrase.)

You should also be aware that the number of physicians, professors, cancer researchers, Wall Street Casino operators, PhDs in the Arts and Sciences, etc., are severely underrepresented in police departments throughout the US. And members of those professions are not insisting to any and all that they’re being discriminated against, marching on Washington, clamoring to gain admission to police department ranks. Although, given our economy’s slide into third-world status, that may be changing, under the red headline: “PhD Paupers Can’t Be Choosers.” Those of you who live in big cities, haven’t you already found that you have an ample supply of foreign-born, foreign-trained MDs and PhDs driving cabs? In NYC and LA and SF and Boston and Atlanta? And not practicing their professions? I think that proves the point.

Be the Gyroscope.

and be well.

bw

Comment on Koch Brothers Must Be Rejoicing, by Sybil Disobedience...

2011-09-23T22:09:00.000-04:00

on Huffington Post story of audience booing after clip of a gay US soldier serving in ...?

"Sybil Disobedience" wrote:

“and this must be a koch brothers dream come true...
that they have gotten these folks primed at a level that no matter how depraved they act this group will cheer them on and boo/violence for the vulnerable...
it is glory days for the many high powered sociopaths....
and an incredibly frightening reality for many others...
this country is on its last breaths...”

Totally, dudette! Get everyone fighting about sex and its concomitants (abortion, STDs, HIV), and NOBODY will pay attention to what's going on with the Banksters at the Wall Street Casino, the international cartel of private "central banks," the US Treasury, our nation's wealth, reputation, and power.

Not to mention the absolute lack of accountability for 9/11/2001, the short-selling of AA and UA stocks, global illegal wiretapping by the National Surveillance Agency (NSA), illegal invasions and occupations of (almost getting too numerous to count) of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the 57% of the budget that goes for war and its aftermath (drugs and prostheses for surviving soldiers).

As all advertising and propaganda experts have known for generations, the sexist male adage ("D**k hard, brain soft") is absolutely true (for priests, gays, all males of high or low station). As is the non-discriminatory "trending" (I hope) adage, "Emotions high; IQ low".

See rest of comment at http://www.ThePreambleProject.com

I think recent brain research bears these homilies out: Emotional responses bypass the thinking, rationalizing, analyzing, skeptical, common sense parts of the brain.

Which, by the way, is why the Framers of the Constitution went to such great lengths to set up our gummint as a REPUBLIC (merely somewhat representative of We the People) rather than a "democracy." The last thing they wanted was democracy, which they called "mob rule," and others call "majoritarian" rule. Now, of course--because no one has been paying attention, too busy watching T&A TV, T&A cable & web, too busy fighting about sex and abortion and consensual adult conduct, "patriotism"--i.e. scoundrels wrapped in the flag), what we now have as a form of gummint is Oligarchy or Corpocracy (but remember that corporations are run by just a handful of mostly men (and probably some of whom are gay, drug addicts, polygamists (long-time "mistresses" are 2nd, 3rd, etc, wives w/b/o ceremony, IMHO--think Eisenhower, GHerbWBush, FDR, J. Ed "Mary" Hoover--man by day, woman by night)), or Plutocracy.

Plutocracy's probably the more accurate name for our de facto form of gummint, as it's "rich" oligarchs who run the show--i.e., plutocrats. And they get rich by stealing money, resources, power...from everyone NOT in the Plutocracy. And most easily from those of us who aren't paying attention to the thievery and arrogation of power, too busy arguing about sex, worrying about sex, dressing for sex (think cleavage, short skirts, tight tops, "beautiful shoes"--i.e., sexy shoes (definitely not "sandals & socks," or "sandals 'n' pantyhose"), watching sex (movies, magazines, "Hollywood" magazines, sex lives of the stars 'n' starlets), dialing for sex, sex ed. in schools.... (Read "Brave New World," by Huxley, on the sex pill Soma, and "pneumatic women"--and read appendix A, NewSpeak, in Orwell's "1984"--and about 1984's "Room 101", where dissidents are tortured until they betray their loved ones. Also note well Big Brother, the 24/364.25 surveillance (which our National Surveillance Agency currently performs on all our communications traffic--and has since Jan-Feb, 2002--think "splitter boxes"--eavesdropping computers plugged into the "private" telecom grids of AT&T, Verizon, SWBell, Qwest, PacBel--it was easier to remember the names when it was just "Ma Bell," but gradually, we're getting back to those days of monopoly. This time, though, they'll be an UNregulated monopoly. Yahweh help us.

Have you been tracking the militarization (as in "federal militarization" via grants from the Heimats Versicherheit Abteilung (HVA)--"dept of 'homeland' 'security'") of local and state police forces? Isn't "Serve & Protect" missing the most important last two words? "Serve and Protect the Plutocrats"? Are you tracking the federalization of STATE militias? of "National" Guards? Hasn't freedom of speech degenerated to "freedom to say anything without prior restraint--we'll get you after you speak." And "peaceably to assemble (when & where we say you can)," and "petition the government for redress of grievances" to "petition…(but we can and will ignore your petitions, even if you take us to court to try to force us to listen--and act--on your petitions)?

Finally: Another "wedge" issue (driving a wedge between our emotions and our rational capabilities), certainly must be politics. Except maybe for Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, and now Elizabeth Warren, and Marcy Kaptur, can you think of any on "the national political scene" who actually refer to and use, every day, the Constitution for the United States of America? All of it, including the Preamble. Who honor, abide and act in accord with their oaths (or affirmations) of office? I hope I'm missing some, but I doubt it. Post names at www.ThePreambleProject.com if you can think of any.

And did you ever read the massively unconstitutional "presidential findings" and HVA findings memos in the COGs--"continuity of gummint"-- realm that were on Shrub's web site, along with his line-item- and whole-bill-veto "signing statements"? Are you following the efforts of folks who are trying to determine/have found where Cheney's (and others') so-called "undisclosed locations" are located, supposedly deep, deep bunkers in which the martial law gummint, now supposedly a "shadow gummint in waiting" will wait out the "emergency" that "justifies" the declaration of martial law?

Have you noticed that Guantánamo Prison is still open for business? That the "state secrets" argument of Bush's gummint has been used by the OhDearMeHowCouldWeHaveBeenSoNaïveAsToHaveExpectedSomethingDifferentFromBush-bama admin?

Have you noticed that Obama has said it might be OK, in some cases, to have unconstitutional "preventive" detention, without benefit of charges, lawyers, writ of habeas corpus for a judicial determination of the grounds of imprisonment, incarceration (or those wondrous Frank Luntzian euphemisms, "detaining, detention, detainees")? In short, without benefit of our, what is it now? 222-year-old Constitution for the United States of America, or without benefit of law. D'you perhaps remember that Bruce Fein, a Republican legal beagle who vociferously championed the cause of impeaching Bush and Cheney (at the least) back in the same-old-same-old days, warned that if this nation did not smack down the high crimes and misdemeanors of the the Shrub administration (see Dennis Kucinich's 33-or-so count indictment of Bush), then they would stay in a Pandora's Box of Misdeeds and Misbegotten Powers, ready to be opened by the next President? If you don't remember the impeachment stuff, and Dem. Nancy Pelosi's unconstitutional amendments to all of the impeachment provisions in the Constitution -- ("Impeachment is off the table") -- and her rescission of ALL of Article V, Amending the Constitution, by the way)), I assure you that Bruce Fein did indeed make these assertions, in books, in appearances on the Bill Moyers program, in appearances before local ACLU and Bar Association meetings.

And, hoooo-boy, was Fein ever right. (You may remember the curse of Cassandra was to always be right--and ignored. It might have been a myth back in the time of other failed civilizations/gummints/nations, but we no longer have the luxury of ignoring such right guys. We're on a rocketship straight down to the US as a third-world dictatorship, or so I think in my more pessimistic hours (like, when I'm awake).

Digression on the euphemism "detainee": Examples: "I was "detained by [traffic; the US gummint--choose one]".

"He was sent to detention [for sticking sharp pencils into the ceiling tiles; for us to torture a confession out of him that he hijacked American 11; to torture the address of the place George Tenet & Leon Panetta were putting bin Laden up--pick one]; .

"He is a detainee, detained somewhere in the world where the global activities concerning the business of making people frightened are, were, or soon will be taking place. (Real world xlation: he's one of our POWs, imprisoned without benefit of law or Constitution, in our so-called "Global War on Being Really Frightened," aka "global war on 'terror'."

---EOD---
(disambiguation: end of digression, not explosive ordnance demolition)

Have you noticed that the guy who was President of the NYC Fed. Res. Bank and supported the Wall Street Casino Operators (aka Banksters) operations, and their subsequent $1.6,.7, .8, $N-point-whatever Trillion bailout...is now the Secretary of the Treasury? (Tim Geithner--rhymes with kite-ner, as in "kiting checks" (or parafoils).)

Have you noticed that--OMG, this is so trite-but-true--the rich are getting richer, and the poor (and middle class--everyone, in fact, in the non-filthy-rich 99.99% of the US (and world) population) are getting poorer?

Has it struck you that the reason the private Fed Reserve will not disclose the amount of munee (aka fed reserve notes (FRN), formerly known as money) now in circulation is because it's perhaps now twice or more than twice what it was before the Bush Admin.'s Big Bankster Bailout --without any concomitant, supporting increase in manufacturing revenue (or any revenue, for that matter). In other words, because the "value" of the FRN, our munee, has been reduced by 50% or by whatever multiple is based on all the new, secret munee Treasury or the Fed prints?

[By the way, who does pay for the paper, the engravers, ink, presses, paper guillotines, counters, shrink-wrappers & wrap, joggers and the rest of the paper-handling equipment--oh, and security cameras, guards, scanners, armored cars, etc., involved in the printing of our munee? The Constitution only treats of coins and "securities":

Art I, §8, ¶s 6 & 7: Congress shall have the power…
¶6). To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
¶7). To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

That is, we actually might have maybe 50% inflation or more, and maybe, what? 50% fewer jobs--and the Fed's marching orders, (if they mean anything beyond flatus to a private Federal Reserve), are to Maintain Full Employment and Prevent Inflation. So they've failed on both counts: Real unemployment* is about 16.2%, and we have no clue as to inflation. And of course, the employment numbers are gummint figures, so they must be taken with a cattle salt-block. And the inflation figures are secret. Although, apparently, not so secret that there aren't now lots of countries quietly deciding that they're going to dump the dollar as their "reserve currency" or "fallback currency" or "oil-buying currency," and use something else.

If they do so, it may mean that Treasury and/or the Fed will no longer be able to just print money, without paying for it with the munee of some other nation (or nations--there seem to be cartels forming, maybe China, Russia and Gabon, or Middle-eastern-Oil-Nations and China and Diego Garcia, Britain, Germany, France and Luxembourg. I'm just sposin').

PS: Article I, Section 8, paragraphs 12 and 13: ¶12). Congress shall have the power…to declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
¶13). To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.

* The Bureau of Labor Statistics' U-6 unemployment category. See http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm on the first Friday of every month. The URL refers to "employment situation.Table 15" Alternate measures of unemployment. U-6 is the most comprehensive category of citizens (based on 2,007 households surveyed over the course of a seven-day week) vis-a-vis their employment. More later.

Waltham Amendment Defeated, 4 to 11

2009-06-29T21:12:00.003-04:00

First attempt, a fizzle. Waltham City Council voted, 4 for, 11 against, to defeat the motion. I'll add what I recall of the rationale a couple of members stated in the Committee of the Whole session.

Unfortunately, Committee of the Whole sessions are not recorded or cable-cast.

I'd say that's a violation, at least of the spirit, of the open meetings regs in "our fair Commonwealth," to paraphrase Click & Clack, the Tappet Bros.

Some Words on the So-Called “Pledge of Allegiance”

2009-04-06T15:46:00.007-04:00

The so-called Francis Bellamy Salute, Bellamy being the chap who ginned up the “pledge” in September of 1892, to be used in the 400th Anniversary of Columbus Day. (This "pledge" appeared in the Sept. 8th edition of Youth's Companion, a Boston publication.

The first image is from Hawaii, in 1941. Name of photographer unknown.

The bottom photo was taken in Southington, Connecticut, during the week of May 23-30, 1942, a couple of months after I was born, by Fenno Jacobs for the United States Office of War Information. It is now part of the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).

The Bellamy salute and the pledge of allegiance that he dreamed up and published in Youth's Companion Magazine were intended to the magazine's sales campaign for American flags —goal: a flag in every classroom — and to augment a national effort to celebrate the 400th Columbus Day, which had that July 21, 1892, been made an official US Holiday.

Francis Bellamy, a Boston minister, and others involved in the Nationalist movement (like his brother, Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backward, a best-seller in 1888), helped to put together a national school program for the celebration of the event.

I'd like you to imagine, instead of these images, a full classroom, city council chamber, the US Senate chamber, House of Representatives chamber, state house or senate chamber.

Imagine that all of the members, students, teachers, public officials and citizens in the galleries are seated, hands on their desks, or standing, hands by their sides.

And imagine that they are reciting the 52-word first sentence of the Constitution of the United States of America, the Preamble, in unison, or prompt/response:

WE the PEOPLE of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.

This is the first sentence of our one, single, only, unique founding document that is active and in force today. It is the only document which all federal and state public officials and members of our military make an oath of “support and defend, against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

The president has a special oath, spelled out in the Constitution, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Unfortunately, the president is left a large loophole — he promises only to do so “to the best of my ability.” (Sadly, to our great, great detriment as a nation, as we have seen in the eight years from Jan. 20, 2001 to Jan. 20, 2009, of some presidents we can only conclude, “His best was none too good.”)

Follow-up Press Coverage, Waltham Daily News Tribune

2009-04-06T15:41:00.001-04:00

For however long the page stays online, this is its URL.

The text of the article follows:

Resolution to Recite Preamble at Start of Council Meetings

2009-03-29T08:45:00.005-04:00

Well, we're now actually started, with a simple resolution to recite the Preamble to the US Constitution, all 52 words of it, before getting down to the City's business.

The resolution to amend the "order of business" in the council Rules manual has been referred to the "Committee of the Whole" for April 6, 2009.

Here's what it says:

City of Waltham: A Resolution

Whereas The Preamble to the US Constitution is the first sentence in our Constitution, a terse, fifty-two word sentence that takes twenty seconds to recite, give or take, and sets forth, in a powerful and thoughtful order, the six assignments the people gave their government at the moment of its inception, and

Whereas The Preamble (set out below) is a forceful and inspirational mission statement for every one of us, citizens all, and for our government, viz.:

WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence [sic], promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.

and

Whereas All Waltham officials are bound by oath to support the Constitution of the United States, as well as the Massachusetts Constitution, its laws and regulations, as well as the ordinances and rules of The City of Waltham, and

Whereas All members of the military services, all Senators and Representatives in Congress, Members of the Commonwealth Legislature, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, under Article VI of the United States Constitution, by Oath or Affirmation, to support and defend the Constitution, against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and

Whereas The President of the United States is bound by oath or affirmation to faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and, to the best of his Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and

Whereas All official meetings of the Waltham City Council are held within the ambit of said Constitution, and

Whereas It is of indisputable benefit and in our best interest to increase every citizen’s awareness and understanding of the US Constitution, and

Whereas That awareness and understanding will be immeasurably enhanced by the public recitation of the Preamble before the start of public sessions, now therefore

Be It Resolved That Rule 31 of the Waltham City Council Rules, setting out the council’s order of business at every regular meeting, be amended to prefix, as a new first item, Recitation of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America, and that current items 1 through 10 be renumbered to become items 2 through 11.

The President of the Council, shall, at his discretion, lead or appoint a leader or order of leaders, perhaps by council seniority or other order, to initiate the recitation, for the council and members of the public attending, either in unison, or as a prompt-response format.

He also may, at his discretion, invite the members of council and the public to stand during the recitation.

Respectfully submitted: ( 1). ______________________

( 2). _________________________ ( 3). ______________________
( 4). _________________________ ( 5). ______________________
( 6). _________________________ ( 7). ______________________
( 8)._________________________ ( 9). ______________________
(10). ________________________ (11). ______________________
(12). ________________________ (13). ______________________
(13). ________________________ (14). ______________________

Attest: _____________________________________ Read & Adopted:
Rosario C. Malone, CMC
City Clerk _________________________________ ______________________________________

Here's a video description of the project.

2009-03-08T06:37:00.003-04:00

Preamble project, the video:

What the Constitution Means to Us

1998-02-05T00:00:00.002-05:00

Over the course of the two-year 2008 presidential campaign, it became fairly obvious that members of the press and members of the candidate pool and members of the US Congress and ordinary citizens ... have hardly a clue about what the United States Constitution is all about.

At the VERY LEAST, it occurred to me, EVERY ONE OF US should know, be able to recite, call to mind at will, any time, any place, the 52 words of the first sentence of the Constitution.

That sentence is called The Preamble to the US Constitution, and it goes like this:

We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Preamble sets out, from the very first word, the relationship between you and me —the “WE the People” part — and the republic: WE have the powers, rights, duties and responsibilities for running our somewhat representative republic. WE have delegated only SOME of those rights, powers, duties and responsibilities to our governments (plural) — the federal republic, states, cities, school and sewer districts, etc.

The exception to this geopolitical governmental structure is what little of the country we left to its once numerous original occupiers, the "indigenous peoples," the First Americans, Native Americans, or Indian tribes. That land remains just tantalizingly out of reach, as controlled/owned by separate sovereign nations, supposedly 4FR, “as long as Grass grows and water runs,” Andrew Jackson's promise to the Indians as he sent his general off to enforce Jackson’s very own “Indian Removal Act.” Historian Howard Zinn has a detailed web essay on Jackson's genocidal activities against our First Americans. I commend it to your attention. It appears that the Zionists have studied Jackson's playbook (see “The Incredible Shrinking Palestine”). Jackson, of course, followed a long line of illustrious genocidalists, beginning with Christopher Columbus's extermination of the Arawak Indians of Hispaniola, from 1492 to a handful of years later. But I digress.

We the People of the United States … do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

We ordain. We establish. We, the people, do that. Did that, in ratifying the Constitution in 1789, and the Bill of Rights on Dec. 15, 1791.

That seems pretty straightforward, doesn't it?

The people have all the power. There is no federal government without the people having created it, ordained it, established it. There is no federal government without “the consent of the governed,” as noted in that other document, the signing of which is commemorated on the back of the $2 “federal reserve note.”

In the words of the youngest among us, “WE” are the boss of “THEM”; and “THEM” are the folks in the republic we elect to run it for us, day to day. Supposedly on our behalf.

Did We the People set any directions for the new Republic we created? Did We the People create a mission statement to guide the overall conduct of the Republic We the People established?

You betcha we did. And what were they? What ARE these general instructions? What is that “mission statement”?

In other words, why did we ordain and establish this Republic? What did we expect our agents, our employees, our representatives, our elected and appointed officials to do with the deliberately limited, but nonetheless huge dose of people-power we delegated to them?

Well, that's what appears between “We the people of the United States…” and “…do ordain and establish.” The RULES begin with the second sentence of the Constitution, with Article I, Section 1: “All legislative Powers herein granted2 shall be vested in a Congress of the United States which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”

These are our expectations, our directions to our government.

We the People … ordained and established this Republic:*

… in order to:
form a more perfect Union,
establish Justice,
insure domestic Tranquility,
provide for the common defense,
promote the general Welfare and
secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

You can consider these priorities in at least two ways — individually, and as an ordered list, a prioritized list (which is why I like to number the six imperatives). As a prioritized list, it is good to notice that there are THREE priorities that come before #4, "provide for the common defense."

Why is that significant? You may remember that members of the 2001 to 2009 administration kept repeating, over and over and over and over and... etc., that "keeping you, Charlie, and your wife and your children SAFE is my first responsibility." (That was how the then-president G. Walker Bush put it to $7+-million-a-year anchorperson Charlie Gibson in one oval office interview. When I find the link, I'll add it here).

Well, the President, and All the President's Men and Women were absolutely, rock-solid WRONG about that. But they did use it as an excuse to ram through power-grabbing, rights-strangling legislation, take illegal actions, invade another country or two, torture prisoners of war, stealthily invade our electronic privacy — illegally — and those NSA wire-taps are still probably in place in the facilities of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Comcast, BellSouth (did the NSA ever get into Qwest's main trunk switching stations? Were they set up before 9/11/2001? Interesting questions).

That 2001-2009 gang should have paid attention to the Preamble, and the rest of the Constitution before launching their illegal capers, and on so many other matters.

* Short footnote on The Republic:

The United States is/are a Republic, not a “democracy,” Period. There are only two instances in our Constitution, as amended, where a simple majority of We the People (the “demos”) get to directly “rule” (the “cracy” thing) some itty-bitty part of our Republic, and that is in electing representatives from our Congressional Districts, and our two senators, since Article XVII, The 17th Amendment, was ratified April 8, 1913. Until then, the state's legislators, when they could manage to agree, elected US Senators. Joe Biden's state, Delaware, went without senators for four years.

You should pay careful attention to people who insist that the US is a democracy. At best, it shows that they don't know what they're talking about. When they happen to be folks who have regularly taken oaths to “support and defend” the US Constitution — or, in the special case of the President, to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution (at least “to the best of [his] ability,” which is a gaping loophole we should remove from his/her oath of office. If that “ability” is pathetically wanting, recent history should have taught us that we definitely cannot afford a president of such impoverished talents and should remove him/her from office.

Such a one demonstrably neither tried to:

form a more perfect Union (in this case, applying both to labor unions and the Republic),
establish Justice (both as a concept and as a cabinet-level department),
insure domestic Tranquility (how rapidly are your hands shaking? We all probably need tranquilIZERS after the Cheney/Bush run),
provide for the common defense (Trillions spent on our military, and they couldn't even shoot down four lumbering passenger jetliners in our most populous urban corridor, from Boston to New York to Washington, D.C. and Virginia. I still can't believe that virtually everyone in charge of the military was given PROMOTIONS after what officially seems to be their abject, stunning failure!),
promote the general Welfare (welfare for generals, maybe; welfare for Wall Street gamblers (formerly known as "bankers" and “investment bankers” and “hedge fund managers” and just plain ordinary, though gifted, Ponzi scammers. The Nigerian Spam-Scam industry (”Dear Honorable Sir, Because of the untimely passing of my [minister of the interior, richest man alive, etc.], I have $58.7 billion I'm trying to smuggle out of my impoverished country," etc.) should study our Financial Gambling Services Sector more closely). As for the rest of us, our Socialistic-minded officials and Welfare system generally rewards the richest and most powerful in our midst — actually, NOT in our midst, as they pay billions to isolate themselves from the rude unwashed masses, the “demos.” And as for trying to
secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, the prior administration went on a veritable rampage to wrap itself in secrecy, in false patriotism, in the flag, to use our military as a shield AGAINST the people, especially any and all critics, to drain our Treasury dry, and strip any and all potential blessings of liberty from Congress, the courts and from We the People, of Preamble note. (See above).

And it was for EXACTLY that reason — that paranoid, conspiracy-theory-steeped attitude the Framers of our Constitution had about any and all governments run by human beings, now, as then, mostly of rich, old white men — that they worked so hard to prevent the arrogation/concentration of power by splitting power at least four ways (House, Senate, Executive, Judicial), did NOT create a directly-elected executive and judicial branch, and, in extreme cases of arrogation and usurpation of power and/or dangerous incompetence (seems we just had eight years of both, a really deadly combination), the reason that they created the mechanism for impeachment, trial and removal from office.

(Just so you know: The fact that the House Speaker took "impeachment off the table" — unilaterally amending the Constitution she swore to “support and defend,” is itself sufficient grounds for impeachment and removal of her from office. Apply the Preamble Test to the Speaker's actions — remembering that words seldom count, but actions do.)

The speaker was apparently more worried that "We the People" would object to ending our Constitutional crisis by Constitutional means and, because we're all so stupid and manipulable, whipped into an ignorant frenzy by market-tested, three-word Republican slogans (tax-and-spend, partisan witch-hunt, partisan Clinton pay-back, cut-and-run, terrorist-rights wusses, gun-control fanatics, Obama is black, war-losing wimps, etc.) refuse to elect a Democratic president than she was about honoring her oath of office. But maybe I'm just being picky, picky, and members of Congress, like Rush Hudson Limbaugh III (who knew he was not only a bombastic gas-bag of an entertainer, but also an “aristocratic, addicted, bombastic gas-bag”), have themselves devolved into mere political entertainers and wily fund-raisers. Although I would suggest that I know of hardly anyone who could subsist on a diet of bumper-stickers, unless it was slathered with Colgate toothpaste and perhaps wrapped around dirt cookies women and children are now eating in Africa.

We all should suggest that every Republican “I Want Obama to Fail” obstructionists sup on their own slogans. And remind them that only a REAL man (or woman), with brass stomachs, has the acid strength to digest their own words. After all, the plastics are all made from oil, and the Republicans love oil so much they'd sacrifice anyone else's children to get it. As they have so amply demonstrated.

But, “Don't worry; be happy. Every little thing's/ gonna be all right.” We will all get the opportunity to try living on such a diet as the Global Depression of 2008, 9, ... spreads and deepens. I hope Tom's Toothpaste isn't too fattening. And New Orleans could be big in dirt cookies, with that all-American topsoil turned into Mississippi River mud. John Boehner, you be sure to pass a law giving Mississippi Mud Cookie Manufacturers a real tax break, y'hear?

A multi-billion-dollar earmark for manufacturers of mud-slurry mills would be doubly good; in Africa, the women have to use large mortar-and-pestle-like stones, by hand, to make the mud more uniform. AND, since we will soon have to do without indoor plumbing, the cookies will help to restore good topsoil to our lands, so despoiled by the Agribusiness Welfare Program that encouraged and supported a mono-cropping mentality in the Archer-Midlands. (John, you should really talk with Tom Vilsack about this.) The earmark should be worth at least three or four million in campaign contributions (though if it were me, I'd hold out for 50% of the appropriations amount — you guys sell us out for mere chump-change. I can't imagine that any of you even studied arithmetic. Our nation's “bankers” certainly didn’t, and some of them thought they were rocket scientists.

But back to the Preamble: As the example above may suggest, the six compact instructions we deliver to our elected and government officials, our agents, our employees, in fact – we are paying their salaries, expenses, some of their room and board, transportation, Secret Service escorts, special, lavishly accoutered, secret offices in the Capitol Building (mostly in space abandoned by the Supreme Court when they moved into their own digs across from the Library of Congress, I think it is). Etc. — can serve as a very useful “Ratings Guide” or benchmark against which to compare the job they are doing for us. It's only recently dawned on me that this is indeed the case, so I find myself a bit awkward at it. However, I can imagine that maybe some outfit like the Princeton Educational Testing Service, they of the SAT, scholastic aptitude test — or should it be scholastic accomplishment test, I wonder — could design a "test instrument” with which we could gauge our representatives’ performance, with far more precision/accuracy than any even sophisticated listing of votes cast or avoided. (By sophisticated, I mean taking into account how these clever employees of ours can work and vote in committee or markup committee to completely gut a bill, but have it appear that they support it in “open session.”)

In order to: 1) Form A More Perfect Union

1997-02-05T00:00:00.000-05:00

form a more perfect Union,

establish justice,

insure domestic tranquility,

provide for the common defense,

promote the general welfare and

secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity

---------------

So, what does "form a more perfect Union" mean?

When the Constitution was drafted, by 55 fairly well-to-do white guys, still ringing in the air was the 1775 document asserting that:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the 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, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Because women, slaves and First Americans (Indians, the indigenous population, Native Americans) could not vote, there was a little bit of perfection missing — lots of philosophical room to grow in, you might say. Had Bill Clinton been around then, he might have told disenfranchised Native Americans, women and slaves that voting "depends on what the meaning of 'men' is."

Seems to me we've come a long way, now that we've had the inauguration of our 44th President, Barack Hussein Obama, even though a well-educated white boy, the head of our judicial system, screwed up the administration of the Constitutional Oath of Office, and a waaay, waaaaaay too polite first-ever African American president-elect let him get away with it when Obama apparently (if his interrupted delivery and body language, etc., is any guide) KNEW that the Chief Justice was screwing up the administration of the oath. I mean, Obama had taught Constitutional Law for a time, never mind having had the one semester of it that all law school students take in their first year of law school.

What Obama should have done, in my view, was stop the Chief Justice, politely of course, and ask, "Excuse me. That's not the wording of the oath. Do you have a written copy with you? Does anybody? Or is there anyone here who has a copy of the Constitution that the Chief Justice can read from? Or should I dictate it to you, and then you repeat to me, and then I'll repeat it after you, so as not to make a complete mockery of this condition precedent to my taking office as President of the United States?!"

I think that would have been the ballsiest thing Obama could have done — and WHAT a great start it would have made to his term of office. Just imagine: the new president of the United States is demanding that the Constitution be followed, to the WORD! And demanding that of the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. It would have been a classic!

In retrospect, it seems to me that this, our highest judicial officer, one John G. Roberts, showed the American people and the president-elect a significant lack of respect by not being prepared for administering the oath properly — either by having memorized it, cold, or by having a copy of the Constitution from which to read. And, oh by the way, the final sentence fragment, "So help me, God," is NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT in the Constitution. For it to be there would have violated one of the first founding principals of our Republic, the separation of church and state.

In fact, I'm of the opinion that no president should ever include it in his/her oath of office again. Nor should the phrase be in the statutory oath of office required of our Members of Congress, soldiers, officers, federal, state and local officeholders. It actually flies in the face of, contradicts the one part of the Constitution that candidate Willard "Mitt" Romney knew during the debates, namely Article VI, ¶ 3:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualifi-cation to any Office or public Trust under the United States. [emphasis added]

And saying "So help me, God," sounds like a religious test to me. I'm just sayin'.

Another warning worth noting:

When you hear anyone call the United States "a democracy," that lets you know that they either don't understand the US Constitution or that they are lying, and usually lying for a "feel-good" political purpose or to mislead (We invaded Iraq to "make the world safe for democracy," "we're spreading democracy all over the world," etc. The US is a CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC. IT IS NOT A DEMOCRACY. (Period) (.)

There are only TWO instances where a simple majority of the people (the "demos" in democracy) "rules" (the "cracy" part) in this republic of ours — in elections to the US House and elections to the US Senate (and senators were originally elected by state legislators, not ordinary citizens, until 1913, when the 16th Amendment was ratified. And, in retrospect, the 16th was probably a bad idea).

For every other federal activity, the Framers put in place all manner of checks and balances to GUARANTEE that the United States would NOT be a democracy--that is, NOT governed by a simple majority of its citizens. (Again, period.) (.)

Some notable examples: Only the House can impeach; the Senate tries the impeachments and decides the sentence (removal from office). All money bills must originate in the House. Only Congress can declare war. Only the President can pardon criminals. Only the Supreme Court can make the final determination on what a statute means, or what the Ninth Amendment means, until they overrule themselves, of course. Or Congress does. Or the people do (but that's a very slow operation). Only the Electoral College elects the President, not the people (The framers did NOT want a president elected by a simple majority vote of the citizens. Not, not not. They were almost as afraid of mob rule as they were of the government of men they were setting up, given that governments of men ALWAYS tried to usurp the rights of and power of others, to aggrandize their own power and wealth, and oppress anyone who wouldn't fight back. You perhaps remember the Bush comment that "This would be a heck of a lot easier if this were a dictatorship. And I was the dictator, heh, heh? You can find it on YouTube if you don't remember it. (And that's not an exact quote.)

And you're welcome to contribute your own definitions.

In order to: 2) establish Justice

1996-02-05T00:00:00.000-05:00

form a more perfect Union,

establish Justice,

insure domestic Tranquility,

provide for the common defense,

promote the general Welfare and

secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, ...

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So, what does "establish Justice" mean?

Here are some synonyms, examples, definitions. From the thesaurus:

justice
noun
1 I appealed to his sense of justice fairness, justness, fair play, fair-mindedness, equity, evenhandedness, impartiality, objectivity, neutrality, disinterestedness, honesty, righteousness, morals, morality.
2 they were determined to exact justice punishment, judgment, retribution, compensation, just deserts.
3 an order made by the justices judge, magistrate, jurist.

PHRASES
do justice to the movie, didn't do justice to the book, consider fairly, be worthy of.

And from the dictionary:

justice
noun
1 just behavior or treatment : a concern for justice, peace, and genuine respect for people.
• the quality of being fair and reasonable : the justice of his case.
• the administration of the law or authority in maintaining this : a tragic miscarriage of justice.
• ( Justice) the personification of justice, usually a blindfolded woman holding scales and a sword.
2 a judge or magistrate, in particular a judge of the supreme court of a country or state.

PHRASES
bring someone to justice arrest someone for a crime and ensure that they are tried in court.
do one's elf justice be as fair to your elf as possible, keeping in mind how much smaller than you they really are.
do someone/something justice (or do justice to someone/something) do, treat, or represent with due fairness or appreciation : the brief menu does not do justice to the food.
in justice to, out of fairness to : I say this in justice to both of you.
rough justice see rough.

DERIVATIVES
justiceship noun ( in sense 2).
ORIGIN late Old English iustise [administration of the law] via Old French from Latin justitia, from justus (see just).

And "establish" is pretty straightforward: set up, put in place, self-sustaining, with a hint of mint (as in "perma-mint").

Of course, what it takes to establish Justice is the kind of "infrastructure" that folks who claim to be "free-market capitalists" would never be willing to pay for on their own, y'know what I'm sayin'? (Like roads, bridges, schools, court-houses, teachers, farmers, soldiers and police, firemen and such. I like to say that if you show me a George Steinbrenner who says "I'll put up the new Yankee stadium completely on my own nickel, I'll extend the sewers, water, gas, electric, subway, roads, buy all the land myself, and I'll make it back in attendance, etc., and won't ask for city handouts, tax reductions, eminent domain" and I'll show you a free-market economist. Or "Show me a big-box Wal*Mart that comes into a community and signs a contract promising 10,000 living-wage jobs, with superior medical insurance, for 40 years, promises to extend all the roads, services, pays for the expanded police force, never asks if it can keep all the sales taxes they collect, and I'll show you a free-market capitalist country."

Of course Mr. Steinbrenner is unwilling to do the "free market" thing — he insists on public welfare, as does Wal*Mart. Were I a geopolitical entity handling their welfare requests, I'd tell them all to go to Hell, which is a very small town in Norway, just east of Trondheim, which I'm sure could really use some fresh input from US business welfare recipients.

In order to: 3) Insure Domestic Tranquility

1995-02-05T00:00:00.000-05:00

form a more perfect Union,

establish Justice,

insure domestic Tranquility,

provide for the common defense,

promote the general Welfare and

secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

------

So, what does "insure domestic Tranquility" mean?

Does it mean constant war between various factions of government and We the People? Does it mean constant erosion of people's rights? Does it mean the siphoning off of a nation's wealth by a very small number of the richest and most powerful of its population?

Does it mean a government that constantly attempts to train its civilians to "Be afraid. Be Very Afraid!"? A government that places surveillance cameras at every corner of every street, every store. But not every corner of Congress, where the citizens need them to exercise the Constitutional role of Congressional Oversight? [Readers should note that when I speak of "Congressional Oversight," I mean citizens micro-managing their elected senators, representatives and all the federal officials who we intend to be busy executing governmental policies in furtherance of the six priorities set out in the Preamble. This is not the general meaning given to what used to be called congressional oversight, before the American Invertebrate Incumbent Party took over all but a half dozen or so positions in Congress back in the Regan/Bush I administration, when the nation was plunged into international debt and a pattern of illegal governmental activities.]

How about this:

tranquil

adjective
free from disturbance; calm : her tranquil gaze | the sea was tranquil. See note at calm.

DERIVATIVES
tranquility |ˌtra ng ˈkwilitē| |-ˈkwɪlɪti| (also tranquillity) noun
tranquilly adverb
ORIGIN late Middle English: from French tranquille or Latin tranquillus.

There's an interesting piece in Wikipedia about the health benefits of tranquility. Who knew? Along with a "tranquility map" of England, Scotland and Wales (what happened to Ireland?).

One thought seems obvious: Without a "more perfect Union" and an established system of Justice, there's probably not a snowball's chance in Spring of achieving any lasting sense of domestic Tranquility.

In order to: 5) Promote the General Welfare

1994-02-05T00:00:00.000-05:00

form a more perfect union,
establish justice,
insure domestic tranquility,
provide for the common defense,
promote the general welfare and
secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity

In order to: 4) Provide for the common defense

1994-01-26T11:53:00.000-05:00

form a more perfect Union,

establish Justice,

insure domestic Tranquility,

provide for the common defense,

promote the general Welfare and

secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

------

I never ceased to be amused by the fact that members of the Cheney/Bush administration kept insisting that their "first responsibility to the nation" was to keep us "safe," or "keep your kids safe," etc., from "terrorist attacks."

As will be definitively proven sometime in the future, by "the judgement of history," there was probably not one single higherf-up member of that administration who ever read the US Constitution. If they had read even the very first sentence, they would have seen that "provide for the common defense" was the FOURTH priority on our mission statement, the Preamble.

I also note with interest that each of the six priorities has capitalized one or more "operative nouns" within it, EXCEPT for "provide for the common defense" (spelled "defence" in that old-timey, way-back-when style they had). Wassup widat, one wonders.

What does stand out is that, without a more perfect Union, Justice and domestic Tranquility, there's not a whole heck of a lot worth defending, if you ask me. We'd all probably be proving out Thos. Hobbes' contention that the "natural life of man is solitary, nasty, brutish and short" and would perhaps rather shuffle off this mortal coil to seek out our 72 virgins (hopefully, they'd complement the particular reproductive bent of each shufflee, rather than be, as ventriloquist Jeff Dunham's puppet Achmed, The Dead Terrorist, discovers, 72 more virgins just like him who got the stick, as it were.

However you define "common defense," it's clear that "common" means to cover the largest portion of We the People, not the multi-national corporations that have dominated our efforts at colonizing the world, from United Fruit in Guatemala, ITT, Kennecott & Anaconda Copper in Chile, supposedly Cuba's hemp and kenaf competition for Bill Hearst's pine-based newsprint enterprises in the US ("You provide the illustrations; I'll provide the war"), the oil and war sectors of our economy, etc. Remember that the Iraq invasion was first called Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) until someone recognized the parapraxis (Freudian schlep, or a unintended and troublesome trek towards the truth) involved and renamed the operation Oil, Iraq's, For-us (OIF)--also seen as Operation Iraqi Fiefdom.

Finally, for this essay at least, the notion that the US was "attacked" by "terrorists" on 9/11/2001, has not yet been proven in any court of law or with any full, independent investigating commission with access to all civilian, military and governmental records and witnesses — definitely including the boxes and boxes of secret records that Dick Cheney threw his back out on January 19, 2009 whilst removing from them from the multiple Mosler Standup Safes in his office as he cleared out for Joe the Vice President (aka Joe Biden).

Our national position on Cheney's (and Bush's, if he had any), records should definitely be, "Dude, those are are records. They're the 'work product' of your eight years on our payroll. You may have thought you had a job in your own private little industry, but actually, you were supposedly working for the "common" good of all Americans, not just you and your "deferred compensation" from the war machines Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, etc. So cough 'em up. All of 'em, Dickie-boy." (No respect intended.)

And of course, as a country we are definitely NOT safe, with an undermanned and overextended military, broken hardware, dead and broken soldiers, a nation in the deepest debt we've ever been in, and a world-wide depression triggered by our very own rogue Financial Gambling Casino Services Sector. (If you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics un- and underemployment measure, labeled "U-6", we've been in "double-digit unemployment" for more than a year; as of January, 2009, we're at 14.9% of the "workforce" unemployed or underemployed (not making a wage sufficient to support their families).

As a nation, we really can't afford to let corporations sell off our complete manufacturing capabilities. Like selling off to China the company that provided 88% of the permanent magnets for all of our so-called smart bomb guidance systems. China, of all countries? Why would we do that? Wouldn't the billionaires who sold out recognize that when those "smart bombs" are dropped on the US, they could get hit, too. Unless, of course, they live in Switzerland, Tahiti, Monaco, which well may be the case. Maybe David Cay Johnston can take a look-see into that now that he's retired from the NYTimes.

Then, of course, these million- and billionaires need federal welfare to "maintain their lifestyle." F. Scott Fitzgerald may have been right when he claimed that "The rich are different than you and me." Not only, as Hemingway is said to have riposted, to they have more money, but, generally, they also have an extraordinary sense of entitlement which (I aver) has absolutely nothing to do with merit, deserving, rationality, morality, insuring domestic tranquility, promoting the general welfare or the establishment of justice.

And while almost anyone would have to concede that the French Revolution got a little bit out of hand in the tumbrils-to-the-guillotine department, the revolutionaries weren't all that far off in the establishment of justice and promotion of the general welfare and the securing of the Blessings of Liberty to themselves and their kids (as Alberto Gonzales liked to say it was his job to protect, as US Attorney General — "the kids," or "your kids" as he so frequently put it) department.

We should also be reminded of the interesting words of the July 4, 1775 document, The Declaration of Independence, which offered this assessment of the relationship between We the People and governments:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the 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, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. [emphasis supplied]

We've already had, as a nation, three wars to establish that Declaration of Independence doctrine that it is the "…right of the people to alter or to abolish…" a government which is "destructive of" "… the unalienable rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The three: two with Great Britain (the War of Independence, 1776-1782, and The War of 1812; and amongst ourselves (the Civil War of 1861-1865).

One might well ask the members of our current local, state and federal governments whether they would support and defend THAT particular right of the people, as supported by the 10th Amendment — to change or abolish the existing government. Such a war as I imagine would result would at the very least really, really cut back on overpopulation.

In order to: 6) Secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity

1993-02-05T00:00:00.000-05:00