It must be awfully hard being president. You can't actually demand any real change for the better. It's just not done!
Presidents do however show wonderful foresight before getting elected and hindsight long after leaving office. Think of every president's campaign promises and of Jimmy Carter suddenly discovering that Israel is an apartheid state and even writing a book about it -- 25 years after leaving the White House whereby he'd had plenty of dealings with the bandit ministate. Actually, "Jimmah" wrote in another book soon after leaving office that he wished he'd been tougher on the Israeli lobby.
Comes now ex-president Slick, who's grabbing for another 15 minutes of fame by.... calling for reduced taxes on corporations!
Bill Clinton Is Right about Taxes!
http://patriotupdate.com/articles/bill-clinton-is-right-about-taxes
This article claims authorship by Chuck Norris, a putatively conservative actor among the Stalinists running Hollywood. I like his optimism and things he says about liberals, even if Slick himself, one of the worst liberals that ever lived, serves as little more than a prop in his piece.
Perusing Carter's Wikipedia article I couldn't help laughing at its blithe references to Jimmah as a peanut farmer. The Great One had a different account: the evil and wicked government pays farmers to grow some crops and others, and in order to maintain communist price controls on commodities, it sometimes pays people to warehouse surplus produce. Jimmah, Dr. Clarkson always said, was a peanut warehouser.
That's my best recollection of RBC's words, anyway. It certainly would jive more with the President Carter we've known. Come on, could those lefty-liberal politics have just stepped off the peanut patch!? With his mother a lifelong liberal do-gooder and his father not a farmer but a "prominent business owner"?
I guess I'm getting away from the Slick Willy subject now too just like the article linked above..... but isn't that a natural human reaction once Slick comes to mind in any context -- to think of something else, quick?
For the record, I'm glad Carter wrote his recent book on Israel. He hedges his bets and bends over backwards to be inoffensive and PC in it, but to have an ex-President do such a politically incorrect thing -- well, it almost makes him seem genuinely Southern.
.............Speaking of Dixie and her farmers, rich material about it all (plus the main subject that drives everything liberal politicians do -- antebellum Southern slavery) has just arrived in an installment of Southern Heritage News and Views.
"SHNV" is a simple quasi-daily email digest on the Southern cause, the fight for Southern emblems and values, and the many ways in which outsiders try to destroy the South. Readers send items of any kind and the volunteer editor assembles the presentable ones for inclusion in the next edition. I can't recommend it highly enough, and you can have a free subscription via a simple request to demastus@aol.com. Sure, tell Chuck I sent you.
Here's a regular contributor's inclusion on the tragic so-called Reconstruction era, in which yankee schemers and moneybags exploited the prostrate South and gave themselves every advantage:
Perpetuating Slavery in the American South
From: bernhard1848@att.net
Antebellum Massachusetts mills in Lowell, Lawrence, Haverhill, Fall River, Taunton and Chicopee needed raw cotton provided by slave labor in the American South; New York and international bankers provided the credit for planters and exchange that kept vast plantations in business and producing cotton. Ending the profitability of Northern factories and banking houses dependent on African slave labor might well have saved a million American lives 1861-1865.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Perpetuating Slavery in the American South:
“Private bankers conducted much of the exchange business in Mobile as in other Southern cities that lacked sufficient local banking facilities. These exchange brokers competed with each other and with banks for the fees earned from buying and selling notes drawn on foreign and domestic banks and mercantile houses.
St. John, Powers and Company, the oldest and strongest local private banking firm, handled the bulk of local financial business not conducted by banks. The senior partner, Newton St. John, a native New Yorker who moved to Mobile in the 1830’s, maintained banking ties with Duncan Sherman and Company, and August Belmont in New York. St. John faced competition in the exchange business from the Bank of Mobile and two local agencies of major international banking houses. After the Panic of 1837 Brown Brothers and Company [of New York City] opened permanent branches in Mobile and New Orleans to compete for the extensive exchange business conducted in the Gulf cotton ports.
By the 1850’s Charles Dickey, the manager of the Brown agency, and Archibald Gracie, the local agent of the international [London] banking firm of Baring Brothers, contested the market for sterling bills with St. John and the Bank of Mobile. Attempting to increase their volume of business, St. John, Powers and Company and Brown Brothers and Company lowered their rate of profit on transactions. Charles Dickey…indeed handled some transactions in 1852 without a commission to stop his customers from going to his competitors. Yet he declined to accept bills from firms that were judged unable to pay their debts.
Besides banking, Mobile’s commercial activities required insurance services. Nonlocal firms, often with very large assets, maintained agencies in Mobile…[and] by 1833 companies from Augusta, New Orleans and Hartford [Connecticut] operated offices in Mobile. By 1845 three companies from New York and one each from Hartford, Boston, and Augusta employed local agents. Sometimes there were as many or more such agencies as there were local companies.
As an aid to commerce…prominent businessmen eventually persuaded the aldermen to enact an ordinance requiring the systematic numbering of buildings within the city. In 1858 Robert S. Bunker, a New York-born insurance agent and former president of the common council, presented the aldermen with a petition for building numbers signed by sixty merchants.”
(Cotton City, Urban Development in Antebellum Mobile, Harriet E. Amos, University of Alabama Press, 1985, pp. 38-43)
If you start to feel that Reconstruction has in fact never ceased, leading to the fedgov telling farmers today what crops to suppress, sell, warehouse or destroy, you're not alone. One could say that at least now there are no bayonets to keep those who don't like it in line, but as we speak, government is becoming ever more coercive across the board of human activity and business.
The above passage may seem a little dry and abstract......but how about the one that immediately follows it, also from the perspicacious Mr. Thuersam? Don't miss the pungent "internal revenue" factor:
Grant's Phantasmagoria of Insolent Fraud
From: bernhard1848@att.net
Without the honest and conservative stability of Southern elected leaders, the US Congress after 1861 descended into a morass of corruption, free-spending and alliances with corporate interests which fleeced the taxpayers. After the Radical Republicans were in absolute control of the government, and an unwary stooge elected president with manipulated and fraudulent votes in 1868, the Gilded Age of unrestrained finance capitalism and public officials for sale was a foregone conclusion.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Grant’s Phantasmagoria of Insolent Fraud:
“All the cost of the Civil War can, in fact, not be learned from Grant, and though he presided over the country in the White House for eight years after the war (1869-1877), the consequences of Northern victory, with its unleashing of the money-grabbing interests, were quite beyond his grasp. Grant’s Memoirs, like the writings of Lincoln, are after all, a literary creation, and intellectual construction with words. They are a part of that vision of the Civil War that Lincoln imposed on the nation, and we accept them as firsthand evidence of the actualization of that vision.
[F]ormer Vice-President Andrew Johnson…was opposed by the Radical Republicans, who even tried to remove him as President and who, in the period of “Reconstruction,” humiliated and exploited the South. This period would certainly have been difficult for Lincoln. He was dead and safely out of it, but Grant was still alive and only forty-three.
Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall Street or State Street, he resorted, like most men of the same intellectual caliber, to commonplaces when at a loss for expression: “Let us have peace”…The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone enough to upset Darwin. He had the idea, for example, that it might be an excellent thing to send some of the freed Negroes to Haiti, and he had taken advantage of a situation created by two rival governments there to draw up with one of its Presidents a treaty for the annexation of the whole island of Santo Domingo.
His appointments to his cabinet were often fantastic: he had no judgment about people in civil life, and he appointed as Secretary of the Treasury the proprietor of a large New York dry-goods store, unaware that anyone in foreign trade was debarred from holding this office; for Minister to France he selected a half-illiterate Illinois Congressman.
Under Grant’s two administrations, there flapped through the national capital a whole phantasmagoria of insolent fraud, while a swarm of predatory adventurers was let loose on the helpless South. There was the Credit Mobilier affair, in which the promoters of the Union Pacific Railroad, who had obtained an immense government loan and twelve millions acres of government land, made a contract with themselves under another name and paid themselves three times more than the cost of building the railroad, in the meantime bribing the congressmen with shares in the imaginary company.
There was the gold conspiracy of [Big] Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, in which Grant was persuaded by these two financiers, without in the least understanding their aims, to assist them in cornering the gold market by causing the United States Treasury to shut off the circulation of gold. There was the Whiskey Ring, a group of distillers who evade the internal revenue tax by bribing Treasury agents – a scandal that landed at the President’s door when his secretary, a General Babcock who was with him at Appomattox, was shown to have been taking the distillers’ money and to have used it in financing Grant’s campaign.
One can hardly even say that Grant was President except in the sense that he presided at the White House, where the business men and financiers were extremely happy to have him, since he never knew what they were up to. It was the age of the audacious confidence man, and Grant was the incurable sucker.”
(Patriotic Gore, Studies in Literature of the American Civil War, Edmund Wilson, Oxford University Press, 1962, pp. 159-167)
/\/.\/\/.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment