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Some honest advice- Read up on American political history. You need some perspective that goes back at least a few decades, and ideally throughout at least the
by waterlesscloud 14y ago
Some honest advice- Read up on American political history. You need some perspective that goes back at least a few decades, and ideally throughout at least the entire 20th century. None of what you imagine started with Bush started anywhere near that time. Not one bit of it.
Your stance about government has merit, but it is severely weakened by a lack of understanding of American political history.
- jacquesm 14y agoI'm all for being educated, if there is a lack of understanding here could you please make it explicit with examples of similar cases in the past?
- 3pt14159 14y agoMkultra, project mocking bird, Tonkin affair, and many many more
- jacoblyles 14y agoFDR's court packing scheme. Oppenheimer's persecution. The alien and sedition acts. Lincoln's suspension of Habeus Corpus. Lyndon Johnson's disputed election.
- philwelch 14y agoAdding on: John F. Kennedy's disputed election. The entire Nixon administration, and Ford's subsequent pardon of Nixon. The prohibitions of drugs and alcohol. The Bonus Army. Smedley Butler's "War is a Racket". The entire career of J. Edgar Hoover.
- joshAg 14y agoKorematsu. and executive order 9066.
- tedunangst 14y agothe most epic 'fuck you' ever spoken to the American people: the attack and occupation of Iraq under false pretenses. Yes, let's pretend neither the Spanish-American or Mexican-American wars ever happened. (recognizing you're not the OP.)
- kmfrk 14y agoCOINTELPRO (1956-1971) literally included attempts to get "subversive" Americans such as MLK to commit suicide.
- elwin 14y agoThe suppression of dissent during WWI. Hayes' "corrupt bargain" and Southern "redemption". The Kansas-Nebraska Act.
- foobarian 14y agoJoseph McCarthy and McCarthyism
- bobwaycott 14y agoLet's just go roughly backward from around the 1950s. A grab-bag of events that brought us to the contemporary period: US's role in post-WW2 reconstruction of West Germany & anti-soviet programs. Taft-Hartley Act. WW2 internment camps. OSS. US's complicity in doing nothing about the German work/death camps, despite knowing about them by 1942. Banana republics. The Gilded Age. America's excessively and government-sponsored anti-labor business history. The Pinkertons. Jim Crow. Plessy v. Ferguson. Dred Scott v. Sanford. Compromise of 1877. Reconstruction. The Civil War. The Missouri Compromise. Property clauses in the Constitution. Pre-revolutionary colonial America. A similar grab-bag of landmark cases one should understand if anyone is going to even speak about power of the private sector (because that power is a recent invention (in history, recent doesn't mean last decade)): U.S. v. Martin Linen. Buckley v. Valeo. Ross v. Bernhard. Wheeling Steel v. Glander. Hague v. CIO. Grosjean v. American Press Co Ligget v. Lee. Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon. Dodge v. Ford Motor Armour Packing v. US. Hale v. Henkel. Lochner v. New York. Noble v. Union River Logging. Minneapolis & St. Lous Railroad v. Beckwith. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Railroad Tax Cases. Munn v. Illinois. Slaughterhouse Cases. Paul v. Virginia. McCulloch v. Maryland. Dartmouth College v. Woodward. Fletcher v. Peck. Marbury v. Madison. The OP has an inaccurate and myopic view of how we arrived at our present state. For example, his comments on the private sector--President Bush isn't a drop in the bucket on that. He's over a century after the damage was done (two, depending on when you start counting). Even Citizens United is but a great-grandchild of earlier 'power grabs' (see Buckley v. Valeo). Case in point--After passing the 14th Amendment, would you care to guess at who brought the most cases to SCOTUS to have their legal rights as persons recognized under the Amendment? Corporations. At a ratio over 15:1. There were 19 cases that dealt with African Americans' legal rights as citizens. There were 288 cases brought by corporations asking to be recognized as persons intended by the language of the Amendment between 1890-1920. A 30-year program by American business to be recognized as having the rights of natural citizens using the most important Amendment in the fight against holding people as property at the cost of ~600K lives--all to pervert the national mind into holding property as people. It's been a long and winding road.
- igravious 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_re... The standard line is: "we had nothing to do with this or that event", until of course documents are leaked to the contrary. And of course we must prosecute those who leak these documents (sound familiar?) because they are helping the enemy (by revealing the truth) which breaks the impervious façade we day after day try to maintain.