Congress Support Quotes

What do Americans know about morality? They don't want their presidents to have penises but they don't mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid; they don't want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don't mind if their presidents deceive Congress- lie to the people and violate the people's constitution!

Today the game is rigged—rigged to work for those who have money and power. Big corporations hire armies of lobbyists to get billion-dollar loopholes into the tax system and persuade their friends in Congress to support laws that keep the playing field tilted in their favor. Meanwhile, hardworking families are told that they’ll just have to live with smaller dreams for their children.

Israel's demonstration of its military prowess in 1967 confirmed its status as a 'strategic asset,' as did its moves to prevent Syrian intervention in Jordan in 1970 in support of the PLO. Under the Nixon doctrine, Israel and Iran were to be 'the guardians of the Gulf,' and after the fall of the Shah, Israel's perceived role was enhanced. Meanwhile, Israel has provided subsidiary services elsewhere, including Latin America, where direct US support for the most murderous regimes has been impeded by Congress. While there has been internal debate and some fluctuation in US policy, much exaggerated in discussion here, it has been generally true that US support for Israel's militarization and expansion reflected the estimate of its power in the region. The effect has been to turn Israel into a militarized state completely dependent on US aid, willing to undertake tasks that few can endure, such as participation in Guatemalan genocide. For Israel, this is a moral disaster and will eventually become a physical disaster as well. For the Palestinians and many others, it has been a catastrophe, as it may sooner or later be for the entire world, with the growing danger of superpower confrontation.

We take this for granted in America today: a democracy in which the first test of credibility is not votes, or broad public support, but money.

[I]f the public wants the military to perform better, give more prudent advice to its civilian leadership, and spend taxpayer money more wisely, it must elect a Congress that will dial down a few notches its habitual and childish 'we support the troops!' mantra and start asking skeptical questions - and not accepting bland evasions or appeals to patriotism as a response.

How did the Farm Bill achieve overwhelming support from Congress in the face of such widespread calls for reform?...In exchange for leaving support for the large commodity crop farmers in place, House and Senate negotiators packaged support for nearly everyone else into the bill.

For nearly fifty years after the release of “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine,” Americans fought back against the statism that Reagan feared. Jimmy Carter’s efforts failed in the 1970s. So did Hillary Clinton’s in the 1990s. But in 2010, despite overwhelming opposition from the American people, President Barack Obama found just barely enough support in Congress, both houses of which were controlled by Democrats, to pass Obamacare.

Over the years, the British had strategically pitted the Muslims against the Hindus, supporting the All India Muslim League and encouraging the notion that the Muslims were a distinct political community. Throughout British India, separate electorates had been offered to Muslims, underscoring their separateness from Hindus and sowing the seeds of communalism. Teh Morley-Minto reforms in 1908 had allowed direct election for seats and separate or communal representation for Muslims. This was the harbinger for the formation of the Muslim League in 1906. In 1940, the Muslim League, representing one-fifth of the total population of India, became a unifying force. They were resentful that they were not sufficiently represented in Congress and feared for the safety of Islam.

Rubio's sudden concern for the humanitarian situation in Venezuela smacks of hypocrisy, as he supported all US sanctions that have made life for Venezuelans miserable.

Active loyalists do not merely support the president but publicly defend even his most controversial moves. Passive loyalists retreat from public view when scandals erupt but still vote with the president. Critical loyalists try, in a sense, to have it both ways. They may publicly distance themselves from the president's worst behavior, but they do not take any action (for example, voting in Congress) that will weaken, much less bring down, the president. In the face of presidential abuse, any of these responses will enable authoritarianism.

Daddy, why are we going to the Capitol?” she asked her father. “Luci Baines, we have to go to the Capitol,” Johnson said to his daughter. “It’s the only place to go. As a result of this great legislation becoming the law of the land, there will be many men and women who will not be returning to these hallowed halls because of the decision they have made to support it. And because of this great legislation that I will be signing into law, there will be many men and women who will have an opportunity to come to the halls of Congress who could have never have come otherwise.

Considerable thought was given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From the start, many people recognized that United States of America was unsatisfactory. For one thing, it allowed of no convenient adjectival form. A citizen would have to be either a United Statesian or some other such clumsy locution, or an American, thereby arrogating to ourselves a title that belonged equally to the inhabitants of some three dozen other nations on two continents. Several alternatives to America were actively considered -Columbia, Appalachia, Alleghania, Freedonia or Fredonia (whose denizens would be called Freeds or Fredes)- but none mustered sufficient support to displace the existing name.

Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that. And the primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there's a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit. The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress.

Power and influence in Congress," he explained, "are not obtained by promoting one's own measures. They come either from blocking measures others want enacted or sup-                                     porting measures others oppose. As a member of the Agricul- ture Committee, Mrs. Chisholm would have been in an ideal position to make her presence felt. Without offending her own constituents, she could have voted against all of the bills introduced for the benefit of farmers. At the same time she could have introduced bills to scuttle price supports and other farm programs. Before long, farm belt congressmen would have been knocking on her door, asking favors." That kind of long-range Machiavellian strategy may be fine for a white, mid-western congressman whose district has more cows than voters, and who has all the time in the world to try to work himself up to that comfortable share of power that a House member can achieve if he plays by the rules, makes his district "safe," and lives long enough. What I can never forget, and what my friend the reporter apparently never knew, is that there are children in my district who will not live long enough for me to play it the way he proposes.

But the real reasons why scientists promote accommodationism are more self-serving. To a large extent, American scientists depend for their support on the American public, which is largely religious, and on the U.S. Congress, which is equally religious. (It’s a given that it’s nearly impossible for an open atheist to be elected to Congress, and at election time candidates vie with one another to parade their religious belief.) Most researchers are supported by federal grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, whose budgets are set annually by Congress. To a working scientist, such grants are a lifeline, for research is expensive, and if you don’t do it you could lose tenure, promotions, or raises. Any claim that science is somehow in conflict with religion might lead to cuts in the science budget, or so scientists believe, thus endangering their professional welfare.

Someone sent me a Facebook post that summed up the dynamic in which we were caught: BERNIE: I think America should get a pony. HILLARY: How will you pay for the pony? Where will the pony come from? How will you get Congress to agree to the pony? BERNIE: Hillary thinks America doesn't deserve a pony. BERNIE SUPPORTERS: Hillary hates ponies! HILLARY: Actually, I love ponies. BERNIE SUPPORTERS: She changed her position on ponies! #whichhillary #witchhillary HEADLINE: 'Hillary Refuses to Give Every American a Pony" DEBATE MODERATOR: Hillary, how do you feel when people say you lie about ponies? WEBSITE HEADLINE: 'Congressional Inquiry into Clinton's Pony Lies' TWITTER TRENDING: #ponygate

Vice President Gore, Richard Clarke, and Madeleine Albright were “strong support[ers]” of the program, joining in President Clinton’s “intense” interest in it.5 Egypt’s most famous terrorist, Talaat Fouad Qassem, was “seized in Croatia, flown to the USS Adriatic, a navy warship, interrogated, then flown to Egypt for [torture and] execution.”6 Egypt’s secret police, the Gihaz al-Mukhabarat al-Amma, is widely known for its brutal torture regime, “real Macho interrogation . . . enhanced interrogation techniques on steroids” and was used by both Presidents Bush and Clinton.7 Congress attempted to end this program in 1998. The Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act slipped in a passage making it the policy of the United States not to “expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.”8 Clinton vetoed the bill in late October,

It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations. To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly. The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

The use of force in Iraq had been authorized by both houses of Congress, including a majority of Democrats in the Senate. It was supported in eloquent speeches by John Kerry, John Edwards, Al Gore and other Democratic leaders. But just three months into the war, they turned against an action that they had authorized, and began a five-year campaign to delegitimize the war, casting America as its villain.

Once Reagan was elected, the Republican strategy had two components. The first was to build from the bottom up, getting the party rooted so it could win state and local elections, then congressional elections, then the presidency. When it comes to the presidency, liberal Democrats have daddy issues, even when their candidate is a woman. Rather than concentrate on the daily task of winning over people at the local level, they have concentrated on the national media and invested their energies in trying to win the presidency every four years. And once they do, they expect Daddy to solve all the country's problems, oblivious to the fact that without support in Congress and the states a president under our system can accomplish very little. And so they are perpetually dissatisfied with their presidents and snipe at them from the left, which is the last thing a Democratic president in the current environment needs.

For the US to be like Russia today,” he wrote, “it would be necessary to have massive corruption by the majority of members of Congress as well as by the Departments of Justice and Treasury, and agents of the FBI, CIA, DIA, IRS, Marshall Service, Border Patrol, state and local police officers, the Federal Reserve Bank, Supreme Court justices, US district court judges, support of the varied organized crime families, the leadership of the Fortune 500 companies, at least half of the banks in the US, and the New York Stock Exchange.

After Kristallnacht, tight U.S. immigration laws were relaxed somewhat, allowing a trickle of people who wanted to leave Europe to enter the United States. Many of those given priority in a first wave of immigration were artists, writers, composers, and scientists, but even that very circumscribed immigration caused alarm. As late as 1939, 95 percent of Americans did not want any part of a European war.15 And, with the country’s economy still fragile, many people resented those fleeing it as needy hordes who would compete for scarce jobs and dwindling government support. Anti-immigration forces in Congress used fear as an excuse to deny foreigners entry. The House Committee on Un-American Activities was established in 1938 to investigate newcomers suspected of being communists or spies.16 Alarm and insecurity in some soon hardened into paranoia and hatred. In February 1939, twenty-two thousand people marched through Manhattan, giving fascist salutes and carrying U.S. flags as well as banners with swastikas, toward a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden.

Mr. President I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error. Steele a Protestant in a Dedication tells the Pope, that the only difference between our Churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrines is, the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect. In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other. I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the Builders of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another's throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best. The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good. I have never whispered a syllable of them abroad. Within these walls they were born, and here they shall die. If every one of us in returning to our Constituents were to report the objections he has had to it, and endeavor to gain partizans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received, and thereby lose all the salutary effects & great advantages resulting naturally in our favor among foreign Nations as well as among ourselves, from our real or apparent unanimity. Much of the strength & efficiency of any Government in procuring and securing happiness to the people, depends, on opinion, on the general opinion of the goodness of the Government, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its Governors. I hope therefore that for our own sakes as a part of the people, and for the sake of posterity, we shall act heartily and unanimously in recommending this Constitution (if approved by Congress & confirmed by the Conventions) wherever our influence may extend, and turn our future thoughts & endeavors to the means of having it well administred. On the whole, Sir, I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.

{Stockton, a playwright who performed plays about Robert Ingersoll, gives the four moments in Ingersoll's life that shaped him, first being the death of his father, who was a reverend} Despite their opposing religious views, the old revivalist on his deathbed asked Bob to read to him from the black book clutched to his chest. Bob relented, took the book, and was surprised to discover that it wasn't the Bible. It was Plato describing the noble death of the pagan Socrates: a moving gesture of reconciliation between father and son in parting. The second event was Bob’s painful realization that his outspoken agnosticism not only invalidated his own political career but ended his brother Ebon’s career in Congress, as well. Third was the exquisite anguish of seeing his supportive wife Eva and his young daughters made to suffer for his right to speak his own mind. And fourth was the dramatic tension of having to walk out alone on public stages, in a glaring spotlight, time after time with death threats jammed in his tuxedo pocket informing him that some armed bigot in that night’s audience would see to it that he didn't leave the stage alive.

By bundling the authorization of war funds with a declaration of war attributed to Mexico, Democrats ensured that any opponent of the measure could be accused of betraying the troops. Polk’s supporters skillfully managed to stifle dissent in the House by limiting debate to two hours, an hour and a half of which was devoted to reading the documents that accompanied the message. The flabbergasted opposition was caught completely off guard and struggled to amend the bill. Powerless and voiceless, they watched helplessly as Polk’s supporters ruthlessly stifled debate and foisted war on Congress and the country.

Meanwhile, real African American heroes—blacks who fought and won the battles for civil rights—don’t figure largely in Zinn’s account. The significant achievements of black labor and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, for example, are obscured by Zinn—perhaps because Randolph was an anti-communist who quit the National Negro Congress in 1940 because it “had fallen under the control” of Communist Party allies.32 There are only three mentions of Randolph in A People’s History—two of them quotations that have no bearing on what Randolph accomplished and are adduced simply to support Zinn’s picture of the black population “in the streets” and spoiling for a socialist revolution.

What do Americans know about morality? They don't want their presidents to have penises but they don't mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid; they don't want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don't mind if their presidents deceive Congress - lie to the people and violate the people's constitution! What Mr. Hart should have said was that nothing UNUSUALLY immoral had occurred, or that what happened was only TYPICALLY immoral; or that he was testing his abilities to deceive the American people by deceiving his wife first - and that he hoped the people would see by this example that he was immoral enough to be good presidential material!

But the last forty years had witnessed the professionalization of property management. Since 1970, the number of people primarily employed as property managers had more than quadrupled.8 As more landlords began buying more property and thinking of themselves primarily as landlords (instead of people who happened to own the unit downstairs), professional associations proliferated, and with them support services, accreditations, training materials, and financial instruments. According to the Library of Congress, only three books offering apartment-management advice were published between 1951 and 1975. Between 1976 and 2014, the number rose to 215.9 Even if most landlords in a given city did not consider themselves “professionals,” housing had become a business.

States. It was not easy for Chinese to get into the country. In 1882 Congress had passed a law suspending the entry of Chinese laborers and “all persons of the Chinese race” except officials, teachers, students, tourists, and merchants, at the same time formally prohibiting the naturalization of Chinese. The 1882 Act was the culmination of decades of anti-Chinese propaganda and discrimination. In 1852 California Governor John Bigler described Chinese immigrants as “contract coolies, avaricious, ignorant of moral obligations, incapable of being assimilated and dangerous to the welfare of the state.” In 1854 the California Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a white man for killing a Chinese miner by invoking Section 14 of the California Criminal Act, which specified that “no Black or mulatto person, or Indian shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against a white man.” In support of the decision Chief Justice Hugh Murray declared that “to let Chinese testify in a court of law would admit them to all the equal rights of citizenship. And then we might see them at the polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls.” In 1879 the California State constitution prohibited corporations and municipal works from hiring Chinese and authorized cities to remove Chinese from their boundaries.1 My father never told us how he got around the restrictions of the Exclusion Act, and we knew better than to probe because it was generally understood that the distinction between being here legally and illegally was a shadowy one.

Consider almost any public issue. Today’s Democratic Party and its legislators, with a few notable individual exceptions, is well to the right of counterparts from the New Deal and Great Society eras. In the time of Lyndon Johnson, the average Democrat in Congress was for single-payer national health insurance. In 1971, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, for universal, public, tax-supported, high-quality day care and prekindergarten. Nixon vetoed the bill in 1972, but even Nixon was for a guaranteed annual income, and his version of health reform, “play or pay,” in which employers would have to provide good health insurance or pay a tax to purchase it, was well to the left of either Bill or Hillary Clinton’s version, or Barack Obama’s. The Medicare and Medicaid laws of 1965 were not byzantine mash-ups of public and private like Obamacare. They were public. Infrastructure investments were also public. There was no bipartisan drive for either privatization or deregulation. The late 1960s and early 1970s (with Nixon in the White House!) were the heyday of landmark health, safety, environmental, and financial regulation. To name just three out of several dozen, Nixon signed the 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the 1973 Consumer Product Safety Act. Why did Democrats move toward the center and Republicans to the far right? Several things occurred. Money became more important in politics. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed by business-friendly and Southern Democrats after Walter Mondale’s epic 1984 defeat, believed that in order to be more competitive electorally, Democrats had to be more centrist on both economic and social issues.

In New York, Italian Americans became symbols of success; one of these, the half-Jewish Fiorello LaGuardia, represented the state as a Republican in Congress. Another proud group were his cousins, the Jews, both the older German Jews and the newer East European Jews. Jews at the time had a general belief in charity and taking care of one another: “All Israel is responsible for one another.” In addition, they were aware of a specific history in New York; Peter Stuyvesant had asked the Dutch West India Company to ban Jewish settlement, but the company had allowed Jews to stay as long as the Jewish poor “be supported by their own nation.” The colonial Jews had pledged that they would, and the commitment was still alive. As late as the 1910s, philanthropist Jacob Schiff said that “a Jew would rather cut his hand off than apply for relief from non-Jewish sources.

The gross domestic product of the United States in 2001 was about $10.6 trillion. The budget of the federal government was about $1.8 trillion. In fiscal 2001, the government enjoyed a $128 billion operating surplus. Yet counterterrorism teams at the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. working on Al Qaeda and allied groups received an infinitesimal fraction of the country’s defense and intelligence budget of roughly $300 billion, the great majority of which went to the Pentagon, to support conventional and missile forces. Bush’s national security deputies did not hold a meeting dedicated to plans to thwart Al Qaeda until September 4, 2001, almost nine months after President Bush took the oath of office. The September 11 conspiracy succeeded in part because the democratically elected government of the United States, including the Congress, did not regard Al Qaeda as a priority.

Our safety lies in repentance. Our strength comes of obedience to the commandments of God. My beloved brethren and sisters, I accept this opportunity in humility. I pray that I may be guided by the Spirit of the Lord in that which I say. I have just been handed a note that says that a U.S. missile attack is under way. I need not remind you that we live in perilous times. I desire to speak concerning these times and our circumstances as members of this Church. You are acutely aware of the events of September 11, less than a month ago. Out of that vicious and ugly attack we are plunged into a state of war. It is the first war of the 21st century. The last century has been described as the most war-torn in human history. Now we are off on another dangerous undertaking, the unfolding of which and the end thereof we do not know. For the first time since we became a nation, the United States has been seriously attacked on its mainland soil. But this was not an attack on the United States alone. It was an attack on men and nations of goodwill everywhere. It was well planned, boldly executed, and the results were disastrous. It is estimated that more than 5,000 innocent people died. Among these were many from other nations. It was cruel and cunning, an act of consummate evil. Recently, in company with a few national religious leaders, I was invited to the White House to meet with the president. In talking to us he was frank and straightforward. That same evening he spoke to the Congress and the nation in unmistakable language concerning the resolve of America and its friends to hunt down the terrorists who were responsible for the planning of this terrible thing and any who harbored such. Now we are at war. Great forces have been mobilized and will continue to be. Political alliances are being forged. We do not know how long this conflict will last. We do not know what it will cost in lives and treasure. We do not know the manner in which it will be carried out. It could impact the work of the Church in various ways. Our national economy has been made to suffer. It was already in trouble, and this has compounded the problem. Many are losing their employment. Among our own people, this could affect welfare needs and also the tithing of the Church. It could affect our missionary program. We are now a global organization. We have members in more than 150 nations. Administering this vast worldwide program could conceivably become more difficult. Those of us who are American citizens stand solidly with the president of our nation. The terrible forces of evil must be confronted and held accountable for their actions. This is not a matter of Christian against Muslim. I am pleased that food is being dropped to the hungry people of a targeted nation. We value our Muslim neighbors across the world and hope that those who live by the tenets of their faith will not suffer. I ask particularly that our own people do not become a party in any way to the persecution of the innocent. Rather, let us be friendly and helpful, protective and supportive. It is the terrorist organizations that must be ferreted out and brought down. We of this Church know something of such groups. The Book of Mormon speaks of the Gadianton robbers, a vicious, oath-bound, and secret organization bent on evil and destruction. In their day they did all in their power, by whatever means available, to bring down the Church, to woo the people with sophistry, and to take control of the society. We see the same thing in the present situation.

According to the Constitution as ratified, the legislature was to be the most powerful and important branch of government. Jefferson echoed this theme in the opening paragraph of his speech. “To you, then, gentlemen, who are charged with the sovereign functions of legislation, and to those associated with you, I look with encouragement for that guidance and support which may enable us to steer with safety the vessel in which we are all embarked amidst the conflicting elements of a troubled world.” Notice that Jefferson was not setting policy; he was looking for “guidance and support” from the “sovereign” men who served in the legislative branch. He would not be “chief legislator.” Jefferson’s job, as he saw it, was to make recommendations and then execute the laws of Congress, nothing more. And in a subtle though important change, Jefferson’s “recommendations” would arrive as a written message to Congress rather than in person—the executive was not to encroach on legislative matters. Every successive president continued Jefferson’s practice until Woodrow Wilson took office in 1913.

Let schools specialize, as private schools would, and common interest would overcome bias of color and lead to more integration than now occurs. The integration would be real, not merely on paper. The voucher scheme would eliminate the forced busing that a large majority of both blacks and whites object to. Busing would occur, and might indeed increase, but it would be voluntary—just as the busing of children to music and dance classes is today. The failure of black leaders to espouse vouchers has long puzzled us. Their constituents would benefit most. It would give them control over the schooling of their children, eliminate domination by both the city-wide politicians and, even more important, the entrenched educational bureaucracy. Black leaders frequently send their own children to private schools. Why do they not help others to do the same? Our tentative answer is that vouchers would also free the black man from domination by his own political leaders, who currently see control over schooling as a source of political patronage and power. However, as the educational opportunities open to the mass of black children have continued to deteriorate, an increasing number of black educators, columnists, and other community leaders have started to support vouchers. The Congress of Racial Equality has made the support of vouchers a major plank in its agenda.

...the Constitution is an invitation for the president and Congress to struggle for the privilege of directing foreign policy. Although the president is the principal foreign policy actor, the Constitution delegates more specific foreign policy powers to Congress than to the executive. It designates the president as commander-in-chief and head of the executive branch, whereas it gives Congress the power to declare war and the power of the purse. The president can negotiate treaties and nominate foreign policy officials, but the Senate must approve them. Congress is also granted the power to raise and support armies, establish rules on naturalization, regulate foreign commerce, and define and punish offenses on the high seas. Although the president is the chief foreign policy maker, Congress has a responsibility to be both an informed critic and constructive partner of the president. The ideal established by the founders is neither for one branch to dominate nor for there to be an identity of views between them. Rather, the founders wisely sought to encourage a creative tension between the president and Congress that would produce policies that advance national interests and reflect the views of the American people. Sustained consultation between the president and Congress is the most important mechanism for fostering an effective foreign policy with broad support at home and respect and punch overseas. In a world of both danger and opportunity, we need such a foreign policy to advance our interests and values around the globe.

Sometimes, as in the case of the copper companies, the nationalizations were achieved through legislation that won overwhelming support. (By now, no one in Chile loved the American companies; even the head of Chile’s Roman Catholic bishops declared that nationalization was right and just.) At other times the methods skirted or even overstepped the bounds of legality. The government would simply approve the seizures of farms and factories, one of those “loopholes” Allende was relying on. Perhaps the most important—and pernicious—method was by squeezing the companies economically, as he tried to do with El Mercurio. The government had the authority to approve price hikes and wage increases. Companies that were targets for takeovers were prohibited from raising their prices but were forced to raise their workers’ pay. Moreover, as the government extended its control of the banks, credit for distressed companies dried up. Forced bankruptcies were a favorite tool of Allende’s Socialists. And who was there to run these companies once they were taken over? Ambassador Davis reports: “Government-appointed managers were usually named on the basis of a political patronage system that would have put Tammany Hall to shame.” Many formerly profitable companies were soon incurring heavy losses. In the countryside, where peasants—often illiterate—were seizing control of the estates, there was resistance even to the simplest methods of accounting and cost calculation. As Allende told Debray, “We shall have real power when copper and steel are under our control, when saltpeter is genuinely under our control, when we have put far-reaching land reform measures into effect, when we control imports and exports through the state, when we have collectivized a major portion of our national production.” But it wasn’t just the economy that Allende was trying to control. He was also taking steps to centralize the government and restrict political freedom. He saw his most important political reform as replacing the bicameral legislature with a single chamber in order to strengthen the presidency and weaken congress’s ability to block his objectives. It would also have the power to override judicial decisions. He called the proposed new body the “People’s Assembly,” but he never gained sufficient support from the “people” to call a plebiscite on the question.

Mandal vs Mandir The V.P. Singh government was the biggest casualty of this confrontation. Within the BJP and its mentor, the RSS, the debate on whether or not to oppose V.P. Singh and OBC reservations reached a high pitch. Inder Malhotra | 981 words It was a blunder on V.P. Singh’s part to announce his acceptance of the Mandal Commission’s report recommending 27 per cent reservations in government jobs for what are called Other Backward Classes but are, in fact, specified castes — economically well-off, politically powerful but socially and educationally backward — in such hot haste. He knew that the issue was highly controversial, deeply emotive and potentially explosive, which it proved to be instantly. But his top priority was to outsmart his former deputy and present adversary, Devi Lal. He even annoyed those whose support “from outside” was sustaining him in power. BJP leaders were peeved that they were informed of what was afoot practically at the last minute in a terse telephone call. What annoyed them even more was that the prime minister’s decision would divide Hindu society. The BJP’s ranks demanded that the plug be pulled on V.P. Singh but the top leadership advised restraint, because it was also important to keep the Congress out of power. The party leadership was aware of the electoral clout of the OBCs, who added up to 52 per cent of the population. As for Rajiv Gandhi, he was totally and vehemently opposed to the Mandal Commission and its report. He eloquently condemned V.P. Singh’s decision when it was eventually discussed in Parliament. This can be better understood in the perspective of the Mandal Commission’s history. Having acquired wealth during the Green Revolution and political power through elections, the OBCs realised that they had little share in the country’s administrative apparatus, especially in the higher rungs of the bureaucracy. So they started clamouring for reservations in government jobs. Throughout the Congress rule until 1977, this demand fell on deaf ears. It was the Janata government, headed by Morarji Desai, that appointed the Mandal Commission in 1978. Ironically, by the time the commission submitted its report, the Janata was history and Indira Gandhi was back in power. She quietly consigned the document to the deep freeze. In Rajiv’s time, one of his cabinet ministers, Shiv Shanker, once asked about the Mandal report.

extent, Polly Lear took Fanny Washington’s place: she was a pretty, sociable young woman who became Martha’s closest female companion during the first term, at home or out and about, helping plan her official functions. The Washingtons were delighted with the arrival of Thomas Jefferson, a southern planter of similar background to themselves, albeit a decade younger; if not a close friend, he was someone George had felt an affinity for during the years since the Revolution, writing to him frequently for advice. The tall, lanky redhead rented lodgings on Maiden Lane, close to the other members of the government, and called on the president on Sunday afternoon, March 21. One of Jefferson’s like-minded friends in New York was the Virginian James Madison, so wizened that he looked elderly at forty. Madison was a brilliant parliamentary and political strategist who had been Washington’s closest adviser and confidant in the early days of the presidency, helping design the machinery of government and guiding measures through the House, where he served as a representative. Another of Madison’s friends had been Alexander Hamilton, with whom he had worked so valiantly on The Federalist Papers. But the two had become estranged over the question of the national debt. As secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was charged with devising a plan to place the nation’s credit on a solid basis at home and abroad. When Hamilton presented his Report on the Public Credit to Congress in January, there was an instant split, roughly geographic, north vs. south. His report called for the assumption of state debts by the nation, the sale of government securities to fund this debt, and the creation of a national bank. Washington had become convinced that Hamilton’s plan would provide a strong economic foundation for the nation, particularly when he thought of the weak, impoverished Congress during the war, many times unable to pay or supply its troops. Madison led the opposition, incensed because he believed that dishonest financiers and city slickers would be the only ones to benefit from the proposal, while poor veterans and farmers would lose out. Throughout the spring, the debate continued. Virtually no other government business got done as Hamilton and his supporters lobbied fiercely for the plan’s passage and Madison and his followers outfoxed them time and again in Congress. Although pretending to be neutral, Jefferson was philosophically and personally in sympathy with Madison. By April, Hamilton’s plan was voted down and seemed to be dead, just as a new debate broke out over the placement of the national capital. Power, prestige, and a huge economic boost would come to the city named as capital. Hamilton and the bulk of New Yorkers and New Englanders

Months later, Time magazine would run its now infamous article bragging about how it had been done. Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating “an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump.112 Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests. Accordingly, when Trump was asked whom he blames for the rigging of the 2020 election, he quickly responded, “Least of all Biden.” Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow campaign “touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.” The funding enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball described as “a revolution in how people vote.”113 The funding from Democratic donors to public election administrators was revolutionary. The Democrats’ network of nonprofit activist groups embedded into the nation’s electoral structure through generous grants from Democratic donors. They helped accomplish the Democrats’ vote-by-mail strategy from the inside of the election process. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were paying the National Football League’s referee staff and conducting all of their support operations. No one would feel confident in games won by the Cowboys in such a scenario. Ball also reported that this shadowy cabal “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” And yet, Time magazine made this characterization months after it was revealed that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal-making with Chinese and other foreign officials—deals that alleged direct involvement from Joe Biden, resulting in the reporting’s being overtly censored by social media—was substantially true. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress that censoring the New York Post and locking it out of its Twitter account over the story was “a mistake.” And the Hunter Biden story was hardly the only egregious mistake, to say nothing of the media’s willful dishonesty, in the 2020 election. Republicans read the Time article with horror and as an admission of guilt. It confirmed many voters’ suspicions that the election wasn’t entirely fair. Trump knew the article helped his case, calling it “the only good article I’ve read in Time magazine in a long time—that was actually just a piece of the truth because it was much deeper than that.

In Andhra, farmers fear Naidu’s land pool will sink their fortunes Prasad Nichenametla,Hindustan Times | 480 words The state festival tag added colour to Sankranti in Andhra Pradesh this time. But the hue of happiness was missing in 29 villages along river Krishna in Guntur district. The villagers knew it was their last Sankranti, a harvest festival celebrated to seek agricultural prosperity. For in two months, more than 30,000 acres of fertile farmland would be acquired for a brand new capital planned in collaboration with Singapore. The Nara Chandrababu Naidu government went about the capital project by setting aside the Centre’s land acquisition act and drawing up a compensation package for land-owning and tenant farmers and labourers. Many are opposed to it, and are not keen on snapping their centuries-old bond with their land and livelihood. In Penumaka village, Nageshwara Rao, 50, fears the future as he does not possess a tenancy certificate that could have brought some relief under the compensation package. “The entire village is against land-pooling but we hear the government is adamant,” Rao says, referring to municipal minister P Narayana’s alleged assertion that land would be taken with or without the farmers’ consent. Narayana is supervising the land-pooling process. “Naidu says he would give us Rs 50,000 per year in lieu of annual crops. We earn that much in a month here,” villager Meka Koti Reddy says. To drive home the point, locals in Undavalli village nearby have put up a board asking officials to keep off their lands that produce three crops a year. Unlike other parts of Andhra Pradesh, the water-rich land here is highly productive yielding 200 varieties of crops. Some farmers are also suspicious about the compensation because Naidu is yet to deliver on the loan-waiver promise. They are now weighing legal options besides seeking Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention to retain their land. While the villagers opposing land-pooling are allegedly being backed by Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress Party, those belonging to the Kamma community — the support base for Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party — are said to be cooperative.  It is also believed that Naidu chose this location over others suggested by experts to primarily benefit the Kamma industrialists who own large swathes of land in Krishna and Guntur districts. But even the pro-project villagers cannot help feel insecure. “We are clueless about where our developed area would be. What if the project is not executed within Naidu’s tenure? Is there a legal recourse?” Idupulapati Rambabu of Mandadam says. This is despite Naidu’s assurance on January 1 at nearby Thulluru, where he launched the land-pooling process, asking farmers to give land without any apprehension. He said the deal in its present form would make them richer than him in a decade. “We are not building a mere city but a hub of economic activity loaded with superior infrastructure that is aimed at generating wealth. This would be a win-win situation for all,” Naidu tells HT. As of now, villages like Nelapadu struggling with low soil fertility seem to be winning from the package.

But Muslims now find themselves in a world shaped by western theories and western values. If we are to consider how Islamic communities conducted their affairs throughout the greater part of their history, it may be convenient to compare and contrast this way of life with the contemporary western model. Today the Muslims are urged to embrace democracy and are condemned for political corruption, while western scholars debate whether Islam can ever accommodate the democratic ideal. On the whole, they think not. Democracy, they believe, is a sign of political maturity and therefore of superiority. Western societies, since they are seen as democratic, exemplify this superiority. So there is one question that has to be pressed home: what, precisely, is meant by democracy? Let me put forward an imaginary Arab who knows nothing of western ways but would like to learn about them. He is aware that the literal meaning of the word democracy is "mob rule", but understands that this is not what westerners mean by it. He wonders how this meaning has, in practice, been modified and, since his questions are directed to an Englishman, he is not altogether surprised to be told that Britain is the exemplary democracy. He learns that the people—all except children, lunatics and peers of the realm—send their representatives to Parliament to speak for them. He is assured that these representatives never accept bribes to vote against their consciences or against the wishes of their constituents. He enquires further and is astonished to learn that the political parties employ what are known as Whips, who compel members to vote in accordance with the party line, even if this conflicts both with their consciences and with the views of the people who elected them. In this case it is not money but ambition for office that determines the way they vote. "But is this not corruption?" he asks naively. The Englishman is shocked. "But at least the party in power represents the vast majority of the electorate?" This time the Englishman is a little embarrassed. It is not quite like that. The governing party, which enjoys absolute power through its dominance in the House of Commons, represents only a minority of the electorate. "Are there no restraints on this power?" There used to be, he is told. In the past there was a balance between the Crown, the House of Lords and the Commons, but that was seen as an undemocratic system so it was gradually eroded. The "sovereignty" of the Lower House is now untrammelled (except, quite recently, by unelected officials in Brussels). "So this is what democracy means?" Our imaginary Arab is baffled. He investigates further and is told that, in the 1997 General Election, the British people spoke with one voice, loud and clear. A landslide victory gave the Leader of the Labour Party virtually dictatorial powers. Then he learns that the turn-out of electors was the lowest since the war. Even so, the Party received only forty-three per cent of the votes cast. He wonders if this can be the system which others wish to impose on his own country. He is aware that various freedoms, including freedom of the press, are essential components of a democratic society, but no one can tell him how these are to be guaranteed if the Ruler, supported by a supine—"disciplined"—House of Commons enjoys untrammelled authority. He knows a bit about rulers and the way in which they deal with dissent, and he suspects that human nature is much the same everywhere. Barriers to oppression soon fall when a political system eliminates all "checks and balances" and, however amiable the current Ruler may be, there is no certainty that his successors, inheriting all the tools of power, will be equally benign. He turns now to an American and learns, with some relief since he himself has experienced the oppression of absolutism, that the American system restrains the power of the President by that of the Congress and the Supreme Court; moreover, the electe

Trump’s election and the fiercely loyal support he received from the GOP—even when stoking a violent insurrection against the U.S. Congress in the final days of his term—exposed how one of the nation’s major political parties had been radicalized. Top leaders were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to preserve their party’s power. As Stuart Stevens, a major Republican campaign operative who had managed Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, argued in his book It Was All a Lie, “In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.

The consequence of these conspiracies became manifest on January 6, 2021, when hundreds of Trump supporters, encouraged by right-wing media and Donald Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol in a deadly insurrection aimed at overturning the election. There was a time in the United States that such startling violence would have bought at least a few days of unity. But with blood still drying on the Capitol floor, more than one hundred Republican members of Congress voted to overturn the election and spread conspiracies about a “false-flag” operation that had already begun to circulate within right-wing media. Over the next twenty-four hours, hosts went on air to denounce the violence, then immediately began to argue, falsely, that left-wing agitators and Antifa were responsible for the insurrection.

In his riposte, Weinberger offered his own warning, this time of the dangers of getting too involved in what he called ‘gray area conflicts’. His tests for US engagement in these conflicts required that it be vital to national interests and a last resort, and that when combat troops were used this should be ‘wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning’ and with ‘some reasonable assurance of the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress’.

In 1988, NDTV got a good contract from Doordarshan to produce a famous weekly show called The World This Week, which was anchored by the owner Prannoy Roy. As per records, Doordarshan granted Rs.2 lakhs ($6000[1]) per episode to NDTV, which was a princely sum in those days. Incidentally the head of Doordarshan at that time was Bhaskar Ghose and his son-in-law journalist Rajdeep Sardesai became the No. 2 in NDTV. The Congress Party was in power then and showed all possible support to NDTV and provided a red-carpet welcome to the private media unit to enjoy the national resources of Doordarshan. Every resource and infrastructure of Doordarshan was used for NDTV’s growth. In fact, in the early days (1995-1997), it is this tax payer money (Doordarshan contract) that got him personal gains again when he did “sweet” private equity deals (for sale of personal stake belonging to him and his wife) to a few global private equity funds. Thus, he built a business from patronage (government money) and then created value and cashed some of it by selling to private equity investors such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Alliance Capital, Jardine Fleming etc.

After Sonia Gandhi-led UPA came to power with the support of Left parties in 2004, NDTV’s golden days started. NDTV became a go between Congress leadership and its Left partners. Money started pumping in NDTV from tax havens, violating all norms of Finance Ministry during P Chidambaram’s tenure. Padma Shri awards were granted to Barkha Dutt and Rajdeep Sardesai though NDTV was one of the originators of paid journalism; especially during the 10-year long Congress regime and was at last exposed in the Niira Radia tapes.

and prominent intellectual and political elites leaves the playing field open for others to step in and present themselves as advocates for the entire working or middle class or other distinct underrepresented groups. Indeed, politics since 2000 has been marked by the rise of populists—politicians who spurn “out-of-touch experts” and who claim to speak on behalf of millions of people with whom they in fact have no authentic connection, and in whom they have no genuine interest beyond securing votes to support their own often very personal agendas. In America, the first sign of things to come was during the Great Recession, with the emergence of the Tea Party movement in the Republican Party, inside and outside Congress. The movement formed in reaction to the efforts by the administration of Barack Obama to bail out the U.S. financial sector in the midst of the economic crisis. Its members initially presented themselves as fiscal conservatives, calling for the kind of lower taxes and limited government spending espoused by Ronald Reagan. They quickly moved on to oppose the administration’s promotion of universal health care and other social policies, and soon morphed into an activist protest movement supporting new candidates for office with a mixture of conservative, libertarian, and right-wing populist credentials. Many of these Tea Party candidates would later support Donald Trump’s election in 2016.

While I fully supported the prime minister’s position on Iran, I disagreed with his decision to present it in Congress. This would insinuate himself—and Israel—between Republicans and Democrats and exacerbate our differences with the White House. I felt the confusion and hurt of those American Jews torn between their devotion to Israel and their allegiance to the president. The same speech could have been given at that week’s AIPAC conference, I suggested, or postponed until after the Israeli elections, removing the impression of grandstanding.

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On February 12, 1912, the Empress Regent abdicated on behalf of the dynasty. China was now a Republic. As such she was welcomed by Joint Resolution of the United States Congress: “Whereas the Chinese Nation has successfully asserted that sovereignty resides in the people” and whereas the American people are “inherently and by tradition sympathetic to all efforts to adopt representative government,” therefore the United States “congratulates the people of China on their assumption of the powers, duties and responsibilities of self-government” in the hope that under a republican form of government “…the happiness of the Chinese people will be secure and the progress of the country insured.” It was not to be that simple. Yuan Shih-kai remained in control of north China, which he withheld from accession to the Republican regime. He maneuvered and waited. Lacking united support or firm authority or a reliable military arm, Sun Yat-sen could not prevail. More negotiations ensued with unavoidable result. On March 12, 1912, Dr. Sun retired as President in favor of Yuan Shih-kai, who reestablished the Government at Peking. In this unstable mongrel resolution China’s modern age began.

All I have I would have given, gladly, not to be standing here today.” The chamber became hushed. He had struck exactly the right note of sorrowful humility. It was a good start, George thought. Johnson continued in the same vein, speaking with slow dignity. If he felt the impulse to rush, he was controlling it firmly. He wore a dark-blue suit and tie, and a shirt with a tab-fastened collar, a style considered formal in the South. He looked occasionally from one side to the other, speaking to the whole of the chamber and at the same time seeming to command it. Echoing Martin Luther King, he talked of dreams: Kennedy’s dreams of conquering space, of education for all children, of the Peace Corps. “This is our challenge,” he said. “Not to hesitate, not to pause, not to turn about and linger over this evil moment, but to continue on our course so that we may fulfill the destiny that history has set for us.” He had to stop, then, because of the applause. Then he said: “Our most immediate tasks are here on this hill.” This was the crunch. Capitol Hill, where Congress sat, had been at war with the president for most of 1963. Congress had the power to delay legislation, and used it often, even when the president had campaigned and won public support for his plans. But since John Kennedy announced his civil rights bill they had gone on strike, like a factory full of militant workers, delaying everything, mulishly refusing to pass even routine bills, scorning public opinion and the democratic process. “First,” said Johnson, and George held his breath while he waited to hear what the new president would put first. “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” George leaped to his feet, clapping for joy. He was not the only one: the applause burst out again, and this time went on longer than previously. Johnson waited for it to die down, then said: “We have talked long enough in this country about civil rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time, now, to write the next chapter—and to write it in the books of law.” They applauded again. Euphoric, George looked at the few black faces in the chamber: five Negro congressmen, including Gus Hawkins of California, who actually looked white; Mr. and Mrs. Wright in the presidential box, clapping; a scatter of dark faces among the spectators in the gallery. Their expressions showed relief, hope, and gladness. Then his eye fell on the rows of seats behind the cabinet, where the senior senators sat, most of them Southerners, sullen and resentful. Not a single one was joining in the applause. •

Although many poor whites languished, refusing to attend schools built under the supposed “nigger programs” of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the formerly enslaved emerged “with a fundamentally different consciousness of literacy … that viewed reading and writing as a contradiction of oppression.”87 Instead of offering any support to those who embodied the self-reliance he said he valued, Johnson was blind to the herculean and impressive effort that blacks had mounted in the South, and he demanded that they do even more without any help.88 The Civil Rights Bill of 1866 also came under attack by the president. In vetoing the proposed legislation, Johnson raised several telling objections. He argued that blacks had to earn their citizenship, reminding Congress that African Americans had just emerged from slavery and, therefore, “should pass through a certain probation … before attaining the coveted prize.” There was to be no born-on-American-soil-lottery, he intoned; instead, they had to “give evidence of their fitness to receive and to exercise the rights of citizens.”89 For Johnson, nearly 250 years of unpaid toil to build one of the wealthiest nations on earth did not earn citizenship.

Another distinct recollection that RNK has about his student days in Law College was of communal politics that was practiced even at the level of students’ union. He recalled, ‘While serving as a member of the Executive Committee, I got my first taste of the manner in which communal politics led to aberrations and endless discussions involving people, who otherwise seemed perfectly rational and normal. One of the questions being considered by the Executive Committee at that time was whether the National Flag should be hoisted over the union building or not. This was strongly opposed by a representative of the Muslim hostel, who said that either there should be no flag or that if the INC flag was hoisted, so should the Muslim League flag side by side. All of us argued vehemently that while the Congress flag was the National Flag, representing all communities in India, the Muslim League could not claim that its flag represented anyone else other than its Muslim supporters.

Later that afternoon, Poindexter drafted a statement incorporating the president's instructions. "As has been the case at a n umber of similar meetings with the president and his senior advisers, there was unanimous support for the president's decisions," Poindexter wrote. He sent the text to Shultz's plane, which was taking the secretary of state on a long-planned trip to Central America. Shultz read the statement. "That's a lie," Shultz told his executive assistant, Charles Hill. "It's Watergate all over again." As far as Shultz was concerned, Poindexter and Casey had set up their own foreign policy, one based on secret deals and operations. Congress and even Shultz's own money and was making policy. The CIA was supposed to be neutral, and it had become a rival in making foreign policy. By cable, Shultz told Poindexter, "It says there was unanimous support for the president's decisions. That is not accurate. I can't accept that sentence. Drop the last word." Poindexter grudgingly agreed to the change, omitting the word "decisions" so the statement that was released oddly said, "There was unanimous support for the president.

When Ballard left the Titanic in 1986, it was with a new understanding and appreciation for what the site really was, a mass grave.  As a result, he abandoned his original plans to salvage items from the wreck and instead focused his attention on preserving it intact, supporting the RMS Titanic Maritime Memorial Act passed by the United States Congress on October 21, 1986.

At the Tenth Congress, he stated that in a country such as Russia, with a minority of industrial workers and a huge majority of small farmers, a socialist revolution could have final success only on two conditions: support for it in good time by socialist revolution in one or several advanced countries, and agreement between the proletariat and the majority of the peasant population. Such was the generally accepted Bolshevik view. And it continued to be accepted despite developments abroad—culminating in the Communist failure in Germany in the autumn of 1923—which dimmed the Bolshevik belief in the imminence of socialist revolutions in Europe. So Stalin was merely restating the orthodox Leninist position when he wrote in The Foundations of Leninism: “To overthrow the bourgeoisie the efforts of one country are sufficient; this is proved by the history of our revolution. For the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient; for that, the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are required.

Women who were widowed by the war—often lower-class women, since most of the soldiers were poor—lost their minimal means of support. The Continental Congress, which could barely muster enough funds to keep its fighting men in the field, did not give high priority to the wives of dead privates. Even following the war, the national government refused to assume responsibility for widows unless their husbands had been officers. The wives of enlisted men had to wait until 1832, fifty years after the fighting had stopped, before receiving federal pensions; by then, of course, few were still alive. State

The day after Republicans used Black votes to regain the House in the 1906 midterm elections, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge (and loss of pensions) of 167 Black soldiers in the 25th Infantry Regiment, a Black unit that had been a huge source of Black pride. A dozen or so members of the regiment had been falsely accused of murdering a bartender and wounding a police officer in the horrifically racist town of Brownsville, Texas, on August 13, 1906. Overnight, the most popular US president in Black communities since Abraham Lincoln became the most unpopular. “Once enshrined in our hearts as Moses,” shouted out a Harlem pastor, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Roosevelt was “now enshrouded in our scorn as Judas.” In the final days of 1906, it was hard to find an African American who was not spitting ire at the Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt’s efforts to regain Black support with new Black federal appointments failed. Sounding the indignation of the observant press, the New York Times reported that “not a particle of evidence” had been given to prove the men were guilty. Roosevelt was defiant in his Annual Message to Congress on December 3, 1906 (defiant in his crude attempts to gain southern White voters). He warned “respectable colored people… not to harbor criminals,” meaning the criminals of Brownsville. And then he turned to lynchings: “The greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape.

The economic collapse of inner-city black communities could have inspired a national outpouring of compassion and support. A new War on Poverty could have been launched. Economic stimulus packages could have sailed through Congress to bail out those trapped in jobless ghettos through no fault of their own. Education, job training, public transportation, and relocation assistance could have been provided, so that youth of color would have been able to survive the rough transition to a new global economy and secure jobs in distant suburbs. Constructive interventions would have been good not only for African Americans trapped in ghettos, but also for blue-collar workers of all colors, many of whom were suffering too, if less severely. A wave of compassion and concern could have flooded poor and working-class communities in honor of the late Martin Luther King Jr. All of this could have happened, but it didn’t. Instead our nation declared a War on Drugs.

For a State or union of States to attack with military force another State, is to make war. By the Constitution, the power to make war is given solely to Congress. "Congress shall have power to declare war," says the Constitution. 171 And, again, "to raise and support armies." 172 Thus, under a perverted use of language, the Executive at Washington did that which he undeniably had no power to do, under a faithful observance of the Constitution

Then there were those who were thrilling to Senator Sanders, who believed that Bernie would be the one to give them free college, to solve climate change, and even to bring peace to the Middle East, though that was not an issue most people associated with him. On a trip to Michigan, I met with a group of young Muslims, most of them college students, for whom this was the first election in which they planned to participate. I was excited that they had come to hear more about HRC's campaign. One young woman, speaking for her peers, said she really wanted to be excited about the first woman president, but she had to support Bernie because she believed he would be more effective at finally brokering a peace treaty in the Middle East. Everyone around her nodded. I asked the group why they doubted Hillary Clinton's ability to do the same. "Well, she has done nothing to help the Palestinians." Taking a deep breath, I asked them if they knew that she was the first U.S. official to ever call the territories "Palestine" in the nineties, that she advocated for Palestinian sovereignty back when no other official would. They did not. I then asked them if they were aware that she brought together the last round of direct talks between the Israelis and Palestinians? That she personally negotiated a cease-fire to stop the latest war in Gaza when she was secretary of state? They shook their heads. Had they known that she announced $600 million in assistance to the Palestinian Authority and $300 million in humanitarian aid to Gaza in her first year at State? They began to steal glances at one another. Did they know that she pushed Israel to invest in the West Bank and announced an education program to make college more affordable for Palestinian students? More head shaking. They simply had no idea. "So," I continued, "respectfully, what is it about Senator Sander's twenty-seven-year record in Congress that suggests to you that the Middle East is a priority for him?" The young woman's response encapsulated some what we were up against. "I don't know," she replied. "I just feel it.

The main mass-membership advocacy organizations of American Jewry — B’nai B’rith and its Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, the National Conference of Jewish Federations, and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (a kind of steering group for the major organizations), to mention only a few — are not religious organizations but ethnic ones. It is not necessary to have any Jewish religious affiliation to be a member in good standing in these organizations, and their leaderships are composed mainly of people who are not religious or Jewishly learned Jews. We need not go into foundational texts and statements of purpose on the question of origins, for the answer is simple enough: organizations like B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee were created to lobby for particular Jewish interests. … In time, these and most other Jewish organizations became explicitly or implicitly Zionist, and thereafter existed to one degree or another to support, first, a Jewish home in Palestine, and then, after 1948, the security and prosperity of the State of Israel. In other words, all these organizations have depended, and still depend, on the validity of their serving parochial Jewish ethnic interests that are simultaneously distinct from the broader American interest but not related directly to religion.

Since that September day it is not only the ordinary routines and liberties of citizens that have been changed. The constitutional institutions designed to check power—Congress, courts, an opposition political party—swore allegiance to the same ideology of vengeance and enlisted themselves as auxiliaries. Despite some solitary dissident voices, none of these institutions attempted consistently to block or resist as the president proceeded to mount an unprovoked invasion of one country and threaten others, nor to question as he and members of his cabinet bullied allies, demanding uncritical support from all nations while proclaiming the right of the United States to walk away from solemn treaty obligations whenever convenient and to undercut the efforts of other nations seeking to develop international institutions for curbing wars, genocide, and environmental damage.

An eager Congress supported the President with a series of legislative acts to deter disloyalty and root out potential traitors. The Alien Act, the Alien Enemies Act, the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, and the Trading with the Enemy Act “gave the federal government sweeping powers to fine and jail anyone obstructing the war effort in any way.”93 The Sedition Act prohibited “uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government and military.94 The government used the repressive laws to pursue Socialists across the country,

The White House phones started ringing off the hook, as members of my national security team fielded calls from reporters, leaders of American Jewish organizations, prominent supporters, and members of Congress, all wondering why we were picking on Israel and focusing on settlements when everyone knew that Palestinian violence was the main impediment to peace. One afternoon, Ben hurried in late for a meeting, looking particularly harried after having spent the better part of an hour on the phone with a highly agitated liberal Democratic congressman. “I thought he opposes settlements,” I said. “He does,” Ben said. “He also opposes us doing anything to actually stop settlements.

Quoting page 63: Business interests not surprisingly supported the [1965 immigration reform] bill as well, but were not a driving force behind it. Because the baby boom was pouring new workers into the economy, and the assault on racial discrimination promised to feed millions of underemployed blacks into the workforce as well, employers did not seem to be looking for workers overseas. Even the growers were quiet. Sponsors of the Bracero farm worker program that had imported hundreds of thousands of mostly Mexican contract workers since 1942—the program averaged 430,000 guestworkers a year from Mexico during its peak 1955-60 years—the growers had been attacked by organized labor, religious, and civil rights organization for exploiting foreign workers and depressing labor standards. The same liberal coalition that backed the civil rights and immigration reforms of 1964-65 had persuaded Congress to terminate the Bracero program in 1964. … The Wall Street Journal, commenting on the conservative nature of the immigration reform, noted on October 4, 1965, that the family preference priorities would ensure that “the new immigration system would not stray radically from the old one.” The historically restrictionist American Legion Magazine agreed, reassured by the promises of continuity. As Senator Edward Kennedy had pledged in the Senate hearings on immigration, first, “Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same,” and second, “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.

Unfortunately for the mutineers, they received no support from the Indian political leadership of the time. Both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League asked them to surrender

and on the 10th, the article was brought in, to give rulers power to support ministers by force; and in order to get a vote for it, Mr. John Adams accused the Baptists of sending an agent to Philadelphia, when the first Congress was sitting there, to try to break the union of these colonies in the defense of all our privileges. And Mr. Paine accused the Baptists of reading a long memorial there, in which were some things against our government, which he believed never existed.

That evening the House of Representatives voted to impeach the president of the United States for a second time. Ten members of his own party, including the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, joined with Democrats in supporting the article, making it the most bipartisan impeachment in American history. One hundred and ninety-seven Republicans voted against removing the president for inciting the insurrection. Many seemed more concerned about the metal detectors that had been placed outside the House chamber, believing the devices interfered with their right to carry firearms in the halls of Congress.

FROM THE beginning, the real estate industry bitterly fought public housing of any kind and had support from Republicans in Congress. Industry lobbyists insisted that socialism in housing was a threat to private enterprise, a difficult argument to make when, from the 1930s to the end of World War II, private enterprise had been unwilling or unable to build dwellings affordable for working- and middle-class families. But once the housing shortage eased, the real estate lobby was successful in restricting public housing to subsidized projects for the poorest families only. New federal and local regulations set forth strict upper-income limits for families in public housing. Beginning in about 1950, many middle-class families, white and black, were forced out under these new rules, although many would have preferred to stay in the low-rise, scatter-site, and well-maintained projects that mostly characterized pre-1949 public dwellings. This policy change, mostly complete by the late 1960s, ensured that integrated public housing would cease to be possible. It transformed public housing into a warehousing system for the poor.

the conservative Ulema opposed the Pakistan project (because they aimed at controlling the whole rather than a part of India) but supported most other communal demands of the League, thus strengthening further the communal outlook which underlay the Pakistan demand. Welcomed by the Congress as ‘nationalist Muslims’, they helped Gandhi and Nehru in suppressing all articulate Hindu voices in the Congress.

...Ironically, three decades later President Barack Obama introduced a universal health insurance bill modeled closely after the Carter bill. Mondale´s former aide Richard Moe wrote that Obamacare ¨bore a striking resemblance to Carter´s proposal three decades before."The legislation pass Congress in 2009 with the support of Senator Kennedy, by then diagnosed with fatal brain cancer. In retrospect, Kennedy´s refusal to support Carter´s incremental, catastrophic national health insurance bill in 1978-79 condemned the country to wait three decades for meaningful healthcare reform. By any measure, this was a tragedy for the country. ¨The miss opportunity,¨ Eizenstat later wrote, ¨haunts me to this day.

The ax fell on programs that could not muster strong support from Congress, industry, international allies, or the secretary of defense and his staff. In short, political wheeling and dealing, hidden agendas, and turf battles determined the future Air Force, rather than carefully weighed visions.

Once again, the civil society chanting "Todos somos Marcos" ("We are all Marcos") filled the capital's ZOcalo plaza, and support for the Mayan rebels ran so high that the Mexican congress was forced to pass legislation ordering Zedillo to open a dialogue with the Zapatistas.

Mr. Hamilton, in the Convention of New York, said: "To coerce the States is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised.... What picture does this idea present to our view? A complying State at war with a non-complying State: Congress marching the troops of one State into the bosom of another ... Here is a nation at war with itself. Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself—a government that can exist only by the sword?... But can we believe that one State will ever suffer itself to be used as an instrument of coercion? The thing is a dream—it is impossible." 100

Some speculate that Muslim nationalism was intended by its leaders and in particular the country’s founding father, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, as a movement whose goals were open-ended enough to allow for the possibility of a new political relationship between India’s Hindu majority and the Muslim minority. Such a relationship, they claim, might even have precluded the creation of Pakistan, had the Indian National Congress been willing to compromise with the Muslim League. A reprise of arguments familiar from colonial times, this theory was known in a somewhat cruder form in Jinnah’s own day, with Pakistan seen by some of its supporters as well as detractors to be a “bargaining counter” that the Congress finally made into a reality—whether by design or accident it is difficult to tell. Indeed the focus of this group of historians on hidden motives and intentions resolves Pakistan’s history into nothing more than a failed conspiracy—which is only appropriate given the conspiratorial nature of political thought in that country.

Such opposition proved inconvenient when it came to the Reagan administration’s attempt to secure congressional support to intervene on the Contras’ behalf. When Congress refused to comply, instead prohibiting the use of any funds “for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua,” Reagan turned to his evangelical allies for help in winning over the public. Inviting religious groups to special White House foreign policy seminars, administration officials peddled stories of the horrors perpetrated by Marxist guerrillas, framing the conflict as one between revolutionaries and Christians and urging religious organizations to assist them through lobbying and letter writing.

President Roosevelt refused to support it on the grounds that it would lose him his southern support in Congress, which was vital to his New Deal programs.

Another example, one that touches more people, is the nursing home industry. Numerous studies have shown that living at home, in a house or an apartment, is better psychologically, more fulfilling, and cheaper than living in nursing homes.14 Yet these institutions prosper when federal programs that foster living in the community are cut. There are also funding disincentives that the U.S. Congress, through Medicare and Medicaid, has created to ensure the profit bonanza of nursing homes. According to the activist disability journal Mouth (1995), there are 1.9 million people with disabilities living in nursing homes at an annual cost of $40,784, although it would cost only $9,692 a year to provide personal assistance services so the same people could live at home. Sixty-three percent of this cost is taxpayer funded. In 1992, 77,618 people with developmental disabilities (DD) lived in state-owned facilities at an average annual cost of $82,228, even though it would cost $27,649 for the most expensive support services to live at home. There are 150,257 people with mental illness living in tax-funded asylums at an average annual cost of $58,569. Another 19,553 disabled veterans also live in institutions, costing the Veterans Administration a whopping $75,641 per person.15 It is illogical that a government would want to pay more for less. It is illogical until one studies the amount of money spent by the nursing home lobby. Nursing homes are a growth industry that many wealthy people, including politicians, have wisely invested in. The scam is simple: get taxpayers to fund billions of dollars to these institutions which a few investors divide up. The idea that nursing homes are compassionate institutions or necessary resting places has lost much of its appeal recently, but the barrier to defunding them is built on a paternalism that eschews human dignity. As we have seen with public housing programs in the United States, the tendency is to warehouse (surplus) people in concentrated sites. This too has been the history with elderly people and people with disabilities in nursing homes. These institutions then can serve as a mechanism of social control and, at the same time, make some people wealthy.

Still, key Democratic interest groups—especially the big industrial unions—resisted any environmental measures that might threaten jobs for their members; and in polls we conducted at the start of my campaign, the average Democratic voter ranked climate change near the bottom of their list of concerns. Republican voters were even more skeptical. There’d been a time when the federal government’s role in protecting the environment enjoyed the support of both parties. Richard Nixon had worked with a Democratic Congress to create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. George H. W. Bush championed a strengthening of the Clean Air Act in 1990. But those times had passed. As the GOP’s electoral base had shifted to the South and the West, where conservation efforts had long rankled oil drillers, mining interests, developers, and ranchers, the party had turned environmental protection into another front in the partisan culture war.

Over the past few years, a loose coalition of advocates like Campbell had accomplished a goal many would have thought impossible. They had pushed through Congress a civil rights law barring discrimination against people with disabilities in jobs, in public services and public accommodations. It had passed almost unanimously, and with President Bush's support.

So I ended my speech that night by quoting from Teddy’s letter, hoping that his words would bolster the nation just as they had bolstered me. “What we face,” he’d written, “is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.” According to poll data, my address to Congress boosted public support for the healthcare bill, at least temporarily.

What do Americans know about morality? They don’t want their presidents to have penises but they don’t mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid; they don’t want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don’t mind if their presidents deceive Congress—lie to the people and violate the people’s constitution!

On the contrary, she and Harper gained the support of Alexander Lindey, an authority on copyright law for the Library of Congress. He argued that to publish these poems was in the public interest. He also considered it questionable for Mattie to pass on rights to a non-member of family. Hampson continued to threaten but had not the means or will to fight a legal battle.

By the time the Copenhagen conference kicked off in December, it seemed that my worst fears were coming to pass. Domestically, we were still waiting for the Senate to schedule a vote on cap-and-trade legislation, and in Europe, the treaty dialogue had hit an early deadlock. We’d sent Hillary and Todd ahead of me to try to drum up support for our proposed interim agreement, and over the phone, they described a chaotic scene, with the Chinese and other BRICS leaders dug in on their position, the Europeans frustrated with both us and the Chinese, the poorer countries clamoring for more financial assistance, Danish and U.N. organizers feeling overwhelmed, and the environmental groups in attendance despairing over what increasingly looked like a dumpster fire. Given the strong odor of imminent failure, not to mention the fact that I was still busy trying to get other critical legislation through Congress before the Christmas recess, Rahm and Axe questioned whether I should even make the trip. Despite my misgivings, I decided that even a slight possibility of corralling other leaders into an international agreement overrode the fallout from a likely failure. To make the trip more palatable, Alyssa Mastromonaco came up with a skinnied-down schedule that had me flying to Copenhagen after a full day in the Oval and spending about ten hours on the ground—just enough time to deliver a speech and conduct a few bilateral meetings with heads of state—before turning around and heading home. Still, it’s fair to say that as I boarded Air Force One for the red-eye across the Atlantic, I was less than enthusiastic. Settling into one of the plane’s fat leather conference-room chairs, I ordered a tumbler of vodka in the hope that it would help me get a few hours’ sleep and watched Marvin fiddle with the controls of the big-screen TV in search of a basketball game. “Has anyone ever considered,” I said, “the amount of carbon dioxide I’m releasing into the atmosphere as a result of these trips to Europe? I’m pretty sure that between the planes, the helicopters, and the motorcades, I’ve got the biggest carbon footprint of any single person on the whole goddamn planet.” “Huh,” Marvin said. “That’s probably right.” He found the game we were looking for, turned up the sound, then added, “You might not want to mention that in your speech tomorrow.

The CIA’s talk of a peaceful solution was a smokescreen. “As is typical of such clandestine operations,” Hyland writes, “the policy discussion was cryptic.”53 Just as it was better not to mention any possible collusion with South Africa, so it was better to shroud IAFEATURE in a mist of peace. This was particularly true in light of the Hughes-Ryan amendment, passed by Congress in December 1974, which stipulated that the CIA had to report “in a timely fashion, a description and scope” of covert operations to eight congressional committees. And Congress, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, was an unreliable partner. “It can be assumed,” the Davis task force warned, “that there would be strong Congressional opposition to any US involvement in support of one of the contending factions [in Angola].”54 Through the summer and the fall of 1975, the administration briefed the relevant congressional committees about IAFEATURE, but the briefings were less than candid. Representative Diggs, who chaired the Congressional Black Caucus and was a bitter foe of South Africa, would have strenuously objected had he known the true scope of the operation. “[We were told that] South Africa was not going to be any part of this. . . . So we were not going to ‘be embarrassed’ by South Africa,” Senator Biden noted in January 1976.

Yet risk feels particularly complicated in the context of the stories of white firearm. Lessons seem hard to cull when the support groups are comprised only of grieving loved ones because the primary victims do not live long enough to tell you what was going through their minds. Knowledge about best practices is fleeting because Congress effectively blocks federally funded research on gun-related risk, leading to a knowledge vacuum unlike anything ever seen for every other leading cause of injury and death. Ultimately, risk is embodied not in the imagined intruder but in the person who already lives in the house. Risk then becomes at once prevalent and invisible. Risk is an ellipsis, an evanescent void.

I was convinced that the logic of healthcare reform was so obvious that even in the face of well-organized opposition I could rally the American people’s support. Other big initiatives—like immigration reform and climate change legislation—would probably be even harder to get through Congress; I figured that scoring a victory on the item that most affected people’s day-to-day lives was our best shot at building momentum for the rest of my legislative agenda.

shifts signal a slowing in momentum for the bill among Democrats, who have faced a full-court press from a number of top administration officials, including President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. During Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, Obama vowed to veto the bill if it landed on his desk and urged Congress to let international talks play out. It’s already clear that Congress is reluctant to proceed on the issue. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has signaled an unwillingness to bring the sanctions bill to a vote, and in the House, party leaders have been meeting privately for weeks to figure out how to proceed. Talk in that chamber has centered on the possibility of voting on a non-binding resolution that would allow lawmakers to lay out their preferred endgame in Iran negotiations. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) already said earlier this month that a vote on the bill was not needed during the interim agreement. Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) punted the matter to Reid. "Senator Cardin wants to see negotiations with Iran succeed. As for timing of the bill, it is and has always been up to the Majority Leader," Cardin spokeswoman Sue Walitsky said. Both of the bill’s main sponsors, Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), held their ground when asked for their reactions to Obama’s veto threat. “While the president promises to veto any new Iran sanctions legislation, the Iranians have already vetoed any dismantlement of their nuclear infrastructure,” Kirk said in a statement. On Tuesday night, just after the State of the Union had ended, Menendez said, "I’m not frustrated." He walked quickly into an elevator as he spoke, pushing the buttons and looking ready to be done with the conversation. "The president has every right to do what he wants." A spokesman for Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) said Wednesday that merely introducing the bill -- but not voting on it -- was helpful to negotiations. "Senator Bennet supports the President’s diplomatic efforts and would like them to succeed. The pertinent question isn't about when we vote on the bill, but whether its introduction is helpful to the negotiations. He believes it is," spokesman Adam Bozzi said. Not all senators agreed that a vote should be delayed. Offices for Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) confirmed that the senators wanted to hold

He supported Jefferson’s proposed Land Ordinance of 1784,22 ceding Virginia’s western territory to Congress for division into fourteen future states in which “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude.” Congress defeated the Ordinance by one vote.

universities and the Library of Congress, with support provided by grants from the federal government (Tedd 1994). Until roughly 1978, the only such systems extant were those that had been developed by libraries for their own use. In the late 1970s, the first commercial

Demonstrating the Obama administration’s awareness of both the lawlessness of its actions and the fact that they were certain to undermine legislative efforts to reform immigration law in a manner consistent with the Constitution, one DHS memorandum observed: Even many who have supported a legislated legalization program may question the legitimacy of trying to accomplish the same end via administrative action, particularly after five years where the two parties have treated this as a matter to be decided in Congress.3

United States is committed to protecting privacy. It is an element of individual dignity and an aspect of participation in democratic society. To an increasing extent, privacy protections have become critical to the information-based economy. Stronger consumer data privacy protections will buttress the trust that is necessary to promote the full economic, social, and political uses of networked technologies. The increasing quantities of personal data that these technologies subject to collection, use, and disclosure have fueled innovation and significant social benefits. We can preserve these benefits while also ensuring that our consumer data privacy policy better reflects the value that Americans place on privacy and bolsters trust in the Internet and other networked technologies. The framework set forth in the preceding pages provides a way to achieve these goals. The Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights should be the legal baseline that governs consumer data privacy in the United States. The Administration will work with Congress to bring this about, but it will also work with privatesector stakeholders to adopt the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights in the absence of legislation. To encourage adoption, the Department of Commerce will convene multistakeholder processes to encourage the development of enforceable, context-specific codes of conduct. The United States Government will engage with our international partners to increase the interoperability of our respective consumer data privacy frameworks. Federal agencies will continue to develop innovative privacy-protecting programs and guidance as well as enforce the broad array of existing Federal laws that protect consumer privacy. A cornerstone of this framework is its call for the ongoing participation of private-sector stakeholders. The views that companies, civil society, academics, and advocates provided to the Administration through written comments, public symposia, and informal discussions have been invaluable in shaping this framework. Implementing it, and making progress toward consumer data privacy protections that support a more trustworthy networked world, will require all of us to continue to work together★ 45 ★

convened) against domestic Violence. ARTICLE V The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of it's equal Suffrage in the Senate. ARTICLE VI 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. This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. 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 Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. ARTICLE VII The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same. Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth. In Witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names, Go. WASHINGTON— Presid. and deputy from Virginia New Hampshire John Langdon Nicholas Gilman Massachusetts Nathaniel Gorham Rufus King Connecticut Wm. Saml. Johnson Roger Sherman New York Alexander Hamilton New Jersey Wil: Livingston David Brearley Wm. Paterson Jona: Dayton Pennsylvania B Franklin Thomas Mifflin Robt Morris Geo. Clymer Thos FitzSimons Jared Ingersoll James Wilson Gouv Morris Delaware Geo: Read Gunning Bedford jun John Dickinson Richard Bassett Jaco: Broom Maryland James Mchenry

SCANDALS AND MISMANAGEMENT If Secretary Clinton’s political career had ended with her defeat for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, her skills as a manager would have been judged by her disorganized and drama-filled campaign for the presidency and her disastrous Health Care Task Force as First Lady. President Obama, who defeated her calamitously run campaign, should have been wary of nominating Clinton to a post that was responsible for tens of thousands of federal employees throughout the world. While her tenure in Foggy Bottom didn’t have the highly publicized backstabbing element that tarnished her presidential campaign, Secretary Clinton’s deficiencies as a manager were no less evident. There was one department within State that Secretary Clinton oversaw with great care: the Global Partnerships Initiative (GPI), which was run by long-time Clinton family aide Kris Balderston. Balderston was known in political circles for creating a “hit list” that ranked members of Congress based on loyalty to the Clintons during the 2008 presidential primaries.[434] Balderston was brought to Foggy Bottom to “keep the Clinton political network humming at State.”[435] He focused his efforts on connecting CEOs and business interests—all potential Clinton 2016 donors—to State Department public/private partnerships. Balderston worked alongside Clinton’s long-time aide Huma Abedin, who was given a “special government employee” waiver, allowing her to work both as Secretary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and for other private sector clients. With the arrangement, Abedin would serve as a consultant to the top Clinton allied firm, Teneo, in a role in which, as the New York Times reported, “the lines were blurred between Ms. Abedin’s work in the high echelons of one of the government’s most sensitive executive departments and her role as a Clinton family insider.”[436] Secretary Clinton and her allies have placed great emphasis on the secretary of state’s historic role in promoting American business interests overseas, dubbing the effort “economic statecraft.”[437] The efforts of the GPI, Abedin, and Balderston ensured that Secretary Clinton’s “economic statecraft” agenda would be rife with the potential for conflicts of interest reminiscent of the favor-trading scandals that emanated from her husband’s White House. While the political office and donor maintenance program was managed with extreme meticulousness, Secretary Clinton ignored her role as manager of the rest of the sprawling government agency.[438] When it came to these more mundane tasks, Secretary Clinton was not on top of what was really going on in the department she ran. While Secretary Clinton was preoccupied with being filmed and photographed all around the world, the State Department was plagued by chronic management problems and scandals, from visa programs to security contractors. And when Secretary Clinton did weigh in on management issues, it was almost always after a raft of bad press forced her to, and not from any proactive steps she took. In fact, she and her department’s first reaction in certain instances was to silence critics or intimidate whistleblowers, rather than get to the bottom of what was actually going on. The events that unfolded in Benghazi were the worst example of Secretary Clinton neglecting her managerial responsibilities. This pattern of behavior, which led to the tragedy, was characteristic of her management style throughout her four years at Foggy Bottom. “Economic Statecraft” A big part of Secretary Clinton’s record-breaking travel—112 countries visited—was her work as a salesperson for select U.S. business interests.[439] Today, her supporters would have us believe her “economic statecraft” agenda was a major accomplishment.[440] Yet, as always seems to be the case with the Clintons, there was one family that benefited more than any other from all this economic statecraft—the Clinton family.

In heeding the summons to help Soviet Russia, he laid down two conditions: that American relief personnel be allowed to operate independently, and that U.S. citizens in Soviet prisons be released. Lenin cursed Hoover and acceded. In a monumental triumph of philanthropy and organization, Hoover mustered more than $60 million worth of foreign food support, primarily in the form of corn, wheat seeds, condensed milk, and sugar, much of it donated by the United States Congress, some of it paid for by the Soviet regime with scarce hard currency and gold (melted down from confiscated church objects and other valuables). Employing 300 field agents who engaged up to 100,000 Soviet helpers at 19,000 field kitchens, the ARA at its height fed nearly 11 million people daily.180 Gorky wrote to Hoover that “your help will enter history as a unique, gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of millions of Russians . . . whom you have saved from death.

I exaggerate only slightly when I tell audiences that, if they are impressed with Congress’s management of the federal budget, they should support audit-the-Fed legislation to give Congress the responsibility for making monetary policy as well.

Understandably, given public anger at bailouts, support had been gathering from both the right and the left for breaking up the largest institutions. There were also calls to reinstate the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law, which Congress had repealed in 1999. Glass-Steagall had prohibited the combination within a single firm of commercial banking (mortgage and business lending, for example) and investment banking (such as bond underwriting). The repeal of Glass-Steagall had opened the door to the creation of “financial supermarkets,” large and complex firms that offered both commercial and investment banking services. The lack of a new Glass-Steagall provision in the administration’s plan seemed to me particularly easy to defend. A Glass-Steagall–type statute would have offered little benefit during the crisis—and in fact would have prevented the acquisition of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan and of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, steps that helped stabilize the two endangered investment banks. More importantly, most of the institutions that became emblematic of the crisis would have faced similar problems even if Glass-Steagall had remained in effect. Wachovia and Washington Mutual, by and large, got into trouble the same way banks had gotten into trouble for generations—by making bad loans. On the other hand, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were traditional Wall Street investment firms with minimal involvement in commercial banking. Glass-Steagall would not have meaningfully changed the permissible activities of any of these firms. An exception, perhaps, was Citigroup—the banking, securities, and insurance conglomerate whose formation in 1998 had lent impetus to the repeal of Glass-Steagall. With that law still in place, Citi likely could not have become as large and complex as it did. I agreed with the administration’s decision not to revive Glass-Steagall. The decision not to propose breaking up some of the largest institutions seemed to me a closer call. The truth is that we don’t have a very good understanding of the economic benefits of size in banking. No doubt, the largest firms’ profitability is enhanced to some degree by their political influence and markets’ perception that the government will protect them from collapse, which gives them an advantage over smaller firms. And a firm’s size contributes to the risk that it poses to the financial system. But surely size also has a positive economic value—for example, in the ability of a large firm to offer a wide range of services or to operate at sufficient scale to efficiently serve global nonfinancial companies. Arbitrary limits on size would risk destroying that economic value while sending jobs and profits to foreign competitors. Moreover, the size of a financial firm is far from the only factor that determines whether it poses a systemic risk. For example, Bear Stearns, which was only a quarter the size of the firm that acquired it, JPMorgan Chase, wasn’t too big to fail; it was too interconnected to fail. And severe financial crises can occur even when most financial institutions are small.

That may well be what hardliners, and Mr Netanyahu, want. They look around and see the world going their way: the Palestinians are weak and divided; Syria and Iraq are torn by civil war; jihadists are keener to kill Arabs than Israelis; Egypt is ruled by a friendly general who hates Islamists; Saudi Arabia is an ally against Iran; America’s Congress is supportive and Barack Obama will soon be a lame duck. Why compromise?

Finally, McClintock went on to really tear Calderón—and the moronic Democrats who supported him—a new one: It is an outrage that a foreign head of state would appear in this chamber and actively seek to do so [undermine our immigration laws]. And it is a disgrace that he would be cheered on from the left wing of the White House and by many Democrats in this Congress. And that was the line that really made us want to grab Representative McClintock and plant like twelve zillion kisses on his face. See, that’s the difference between liberals and conservatives. Liberals stand up and applaud a foreign leader who rips on their country on their own soil. Conservatives don’t take that crap lying down.

The Sunday edition of the Detroit News on September 15 ran a special section about “Olympic City,” making the case for how and why Detroit would be selected. The next day Cavanagh was at the White House where, at four in the afternoon, President Kennedy signed Joint Resolution 72, expressing Congress’s full support for Detroit.

What do Americans know about morality? They don't want their presidents to have penises but they don't mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid; they don't want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don't mind if their presidents deceive Congress—lie to the people and violate the people's constitution!

Concerns about bankruptcy abuses prompted Congress to crack down in 2005, decades after it unlocked the bankruptcy door for the Boomers. Like George Orwell’s pigs, some bankrupts ended up being more equal than others. One of the 2005 law’s most significant changes made discharging student debt exceedingly difficult. The Boomers did not have to worry, as formerly generous subsidies meant they carried relatively little of such debt. Their children, however, carried quite a bit, with interest remitted to companies in which Boomers held shares. That was of no moment for the Boomer legislature. After 2005, student debt would fall into the same legal category as debts like criminal penalties and child support. A

NumbersUSA's work was critical to derailing the 2007 comprehensive federal immigration bill, which had, at that point, received the support of President Buch, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the high-tech industry, the Catholic Church, immigrant-advocacy organizations, and several industries reliant on immigration labor, including farming, food services, and construction. During the weeks leading up to the floor vote on the bill, NumbersUSA coordinated weekly phone calls with the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, mobilized its members to engage key senators, and provided those senators with information and arguments necessary to oppose the bill. Several actors, including pro-immigrant advocates, restrictionists, and members of Congress, have credited NumbersUSA with causing the collapse of the bill in the Senate.

Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or 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 grievance ... Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Liberals including James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and John Kenneth Galbraith and conservatives like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek have all advocated income guarantees in one form or another, and in 1968 more than 1,200 economists signed a letter in support of the concept addressed to the U.S. Congress.4 The president elected that year, Republican Richard Nixon, tried throughout his first term in office to enact it into law. In a 1969 speech he proposed a Family Assistance Plan that had many features of a basic income program. The plan had support across the ideological spectrum, but it also faced a large and diverse group of opponents.5 Caseworkers and other administrators of existing welfare programs feared that their jobs would be eliminated under the new regime; some labor leaders thought that it would erode support for minimum wage legislation; and many working Americans didn’t like the idea of their tax dollars going to people who could work, but chose not to. By the time of his 1972 reelection campaign, Nixon had abandoned the Family Assistance Plan, and universal income guarantee programs have not been seriously discussed by federal elected officials and policymakers since then.* Avoiding

On March 12, 1947, President Truman appeared before a joint session of Congress. In his eighteen-minute speech, he stated: I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.

In the case of Obamacare, leading members of the intellectual class produced the appropriately rigged studies to promote the racket. Then members of the Obama administration and liberal Democrats in Congress took up these studies as an irrefutable demonstration of the wonders of Obamacare. Finally anchorpeople and reporters lined up to amplify the falsehoods and complete the sale to the American people. Despite all this, the American people remained unconvinced. Even so, the con men generated enough support that Democratic legislators, on a straight-party vote, got Obamacare through.

Harry H. Laughlin was highly important for the Nazi crusade to breed a “master race.” This American positioned himself to have a significant effect on the world’s population. During his career Laughlin would: ~ Write the “Model Eugenical Law” that the Nazis used to draft portions of the Nuremberg decrees that led to The Holocaust. ~ Be appointed as “expert” witness for the U.S. Congress when the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was passed. The 1924 Act would prevent many Jewish refugees from reaching the safety of U.S. shores during The Holocaust. ~ Provide the "scientific" basis for the 1927 Buck v. Bell Supreme Court case that made "eugenic sterilization" legal in the United States. This paved the way for 80,000 Americans to be sterilized against their will. ~ Defend Hitler's Nuremberg decrees as “scientifically” sound in order to dispel international criticism. ~ Create the political organization that ensured that the “science” of eugenics would survive the negative taint of The Holocaust. This organization would be instrumental in the Jim Crow era of legislative racism. H.H. Laughlin was given an honorary degree from Heidelberg University by Hitler's government, specifically for these accomplishments. Yet, no one has ever written a book on Laughlin. Despite the very large amount of books about The Holocaust, Laughlin is largely unknown outside of academic circles. The Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. gave this author permission to survey its internal correspondence leading up to The Holocaust and before the Institution retired Laughlin. These documents have not been seen for decades. They are the backbone of this book. The story line intensifies as the Carnegie leadership comes to the horrible realization that one of its most recognized scientists was supporting Hitler’s regime.

Humans have natural rights in the state of nature but they do not have civil rights. Civil rights are derived from membership in a society. The Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress after the Civil War knew this. They also knew that, before conferring civil rights, they had to once and for all abolish slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865. Republican support for the amendment: 100 percent. Democratic support: 23 percent. Even after the Civil War, only a tiny percentage of Democrats were willing to sign up to permanently end slavery. Most Democrats wanted it to continue. In the following year, on June 13, 1866, the Republican Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment overturning the Dred Scott decision and granting full citizenship and equal rights under the law to blacks. This amendment prohibited states from abridging the “privileges and immunities” of all citizens, from depriving them of “due process of law” or denying them “equal protection of the law.” The Fourteenth Amendment passed the House and Senate with exclusive Republican support. Not a single Democrat either in the House or the Senate voted for it. Two years later, in 1868, Congress with the support of newly-elected Republican president Ulysses Grant passed the Fifteenth Amendment granting suffrage to blacks. The right to vote, it said, cannot be “denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” In the Senate, the Fifteenth Amendment passed by a vote of 39 to 13. Every one of the 39 “yes” votes came from Republicans. (Some Republicans like Charles Sumner abstained because they wanted the measure to go even further than it did.) All the 13 “no” votes came from Democrats. In the House, every “yes” vote came from a Republican and every Democrat voted “no.” It is surely a matter of the greatest significance that the constitutional provisions that made possible the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Bill only entered the Constitution thanks to the Republican Party. Beyond this, the GOP put forward a series of Civil Rights laws to further reinforce black people’s rights to freedom, equality, and social justice. When Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866—guaranteeing to blacks the rights to make contracts and to have the criminal laws apply equally to whites and blacks—the Democrats struck back. They didn’t have the votes in Congress, but they had a powerful ally in President Andrew Johnson. Johnson vetoed the legislation. Now this may seem like an odd act for Lincoln’s vice president, but it actually wasn’t. Many people don’t realize that Johnson wasn’t a Republican; he was a Democrat. Historian Kenneth Stampp calls him “the last Jacksonian.”8 Lincoln put him on the ticket because he was a pro-union Democrat and Lincoln was looking for ways to win the votes of Democrats opposed to secession. Johnson, however, was both a southern partisan and a Democratic partisan. Once the Civil War ended, he attempted to lead weak-kneed Republicans into a new Democratic coalition based on racism and white privilege. Johnson championed the Democratic mantra of white supremacy, declaring, “This is a country for white men and, by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government of white men.” In his 1867 annual message to Congress, Johnson declared that blacks possess “less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a consistent tendency to relapse into barbarism.”9 These are perhaps the most racist words uttered by an American president, and no surprise, they were uttered by a Democrat.

Justin Raimondo warns us: “All the elements of a police state are in place: universal surveillance, arbitrary restrictions on travel, and, most importantly, the increasingly radical and aggressive political pushback by the NSA and its supporters in Washington – up to and including the open acknowledgment that they’re fully aware of the online habits of whatever members of Congress are foolish enough to get in their way.”[37]

In the many different scandals of the Obama administration, from Benghazi to Hillary Clinton’s emails, how has Judicial Watch succeeded so often in exposing the truth when Congress has failed? Part of it is the hard, focused, and dogged work of our investigators and the skill, professionalism, and tenacity of our lawyers, as well as our other staff who help support and run one of the most effective citizens’ groups in the country. But it is also because FOIA is a straightforward tool that quickly gives Judicial Watch access to the federal courts in order to ensure compliance with our record requests to ensure transparency. Congressional investigations, when committees bother to conduct them, are political by nature. Their effectiveness is often hindered by committee members of the political party whose president is in the White House in order to protect the president, their party, and their political allies. Congress today relies on the Justice Department to enforce subpoenas issued by committees that are intended to force executive branch compliance with requests for information and witnesses. With a politicized Justice Department, which has been the hallmark of the Obama administration, there is no effective enforcement of such congressional subpoenas. A sorry example of this is the refusal of the Obama Justice Department to enforce the contempt citation against Lois Lerner for refusing to comply with a subpoena for her testimony before the House Committee investigating the IRS scandal. The administration was not about to go to a judge for an order compelling Lerner to testify and reveal what she knew about the administration’s targeting of conservative organizations.

In fact, when I came to Detroit, Coleman Young had just become a hero in the black community because he had stood up against the House Un-American Activities Committee, declaring, “If being for human rights makes me a Communist, then I’m a Communist.” Like most of his friends Jimmy was aware that the American Communists had provided indispensable leadership in the struggle against Jim Crow and to create the unions: it was the intervention of the Communist Party that stopped the legal lynching of the Scottsboro Boys, and the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) would probably not have been organized in the 1930s without the active participation of Communist Party members. At the shop and community level Jimmy worked with Communists as comrades; they were his coworkers, friends, and neighbors. During World War II he participated with black members of the Communist Party in sitdown strikes to protest union and management discrimination against black workers. During the Reuther-led witchhunt, when management and the union tried to get rid of radicals, he mobilized black workers to support Van Brooks, a Chrysler-Jefferson coworker and Communist Party member. He was very conscious that without the existence of the Soviet Union and its opposition to Western imperialism, the struggles of blacks in this country for civil rights and of Third World peoples for political independence would have been infinitely more difficult. Jimmy was not unaware of the atrocities that had been committed by the party and Stalin. However, what mattered to him was not the party’s or the Soviet Union’s record but where people stood on the concrete issue at hand, and he was grateful to the party because, as he used to say, “It gave me the fortitude to stand up against the odds.” Like other politically conscious blacks of his generation he recognized that without the Communists it would have taken much longer for blacks to make the leap from being regarded as inferior to being feared as subversive, that is, as a social force.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) estimates that there are 340 jurisdictions with sanctuary policies, located in forty-three states and the District of Columbia. CIS found that in just one eight-month period in 2014, more than 8,100 deportable aliens were released by sanctuary jurisdictions. Three thousand were felons and 62 percent had prior criminal records. Nineteen hundred were later rearrested a total of 4,300 times on 7,500 offenses including assaults, burglaries, sexual assaults, thefts, and even murders—none of which would have occurred except for these sanctuary policies! Such sanctuary policies are illegal under federal immigration law, which specifies that “no State or local government entity may be prohibited, or in any way restricted, from sending to or receiving from the Immigration and Naturalization Service information regarding the immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any alien in the United States.”9 But in accordance with its nonenforcement policy on immigration, the Obama administration announced in 2010 that it would not sue sanctuary cities for violating federal law. As Kate Steinle’s father, Jim Steinle, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 21, 2015: Everywhere Kate went throughout the world, she shined the light of a good citizen of the United States of America. Unfortunately, due to disjointed laws and basic incompetence at many levels, the U.S. has suffered a self-inflicted wound in the murder of our daughter by the hand of a person who should have never been on the streets of this country.10 Kate Steinle’s murderer had been deported five times, and kept reentering the country with no consequences. So on July 9, 2015, Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ) introduced H.R. 3011—Kate’s Law—to impose a five-year mandatory prison sentence on anyone arrested in the United States after having been previously deported. A companion bill was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). But the Obama administration made it clear it would not support such a bill if it passed Congress.

On January 8, 1959, Fidel made his grand entrance into Havana. With his son Fidelito at his side, he rode on top of a Sherman tank to Camp Columbia, where he gave the first of his long, rambling, difficult-to-endure speeches. It was broadcast on radio and television for the entire world to witness. For the Cubans it was what they had waited for! During the speech, smiling Castro asked Camilo Cienfuegos, “How am I doing?” and the catch phrase “Voy bien, Camilo” was born. The following Christmas the celebrations were exceptional and made up for the drab Christmas of 1958. There were great expectations on the part of the Cuban people, but most of these expectations would be shattered in the years to come. In the United States, people saw things differently. “Kangaroo trials” of Batista’s followers, ending with their executions, infuriated Americans who couldn’t believe what was happening on what they considered a happy island. Members of the U.S. Congress held formal hearings, interviewing exiled Cubans known as Batistianos. The result was that in the United States, people began to rally against Castro and in Cuba, people saw the United States as presumptuous and overbearing. Eisenhower treated Fidel with contempt and Nixon did not hide the fact that he disliked the Cuban leader. It was this combination of events that led Cuban-American relations into a diplomatic downhill spiral, from which the two countries have just now started to emerge. Without American backing, Cuba turned to Communism and looked to the Soviet Union for support. The results that followed should have been expected and were the consequences of American arrogance and Cuban misplaced pride.

Gaddafi became an icon for those fighting apartheid in South Africa. He supported the African National Congress with money, weapons and training, earning the undying gratitude of Nelson Mandela, which caused immense diplomatic inconvenience in later years, when Gaddafi was still a pariah and Mandela the toast of the world.

I could write a whole book about why I think Obama was the worst president in American history. He was so detrimental to our nation that it is easy to compile a list of things he was the first president to ever dare to do: • The first president to preside over a cut to the credit rating of the United States. • The first president to violate the War Powers Act. • The first president to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf. • The first president to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party. • The first president to abrogate bankruptcy laws to turn over control of companies to his union supporters. • The first president to bypass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat. • The first president to order a secret amnesty program for illegal immigrants. • The first president to demand that a company

Agitational politics are endemic in Punjab, used by the leading non-Congress party there, the Akali Dal, to mobilize support when it is out of power.

Discussing the bill wasn’t easy, even in the abstract. Although Northern congressmen opposed dueling, supporting a law that seemed aimed at protecting themselves seemed cowardly.

KwaZulu-Natal is rife with political warfare. Supporters of two political parties, namely the ruling African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party, regularly attack one another. Thousands of semi-automatic rifles are hidden in those picturesque huts and arms caches lie buried in the surrounding forests. Faction fighting has been part of Africa’s heritage for centuries, especially in this area, and during the previous century the Boers and the British added their blood to that which already saturated the soil of KwaZulu-Natal. There is even a river called Blood River in this province. The sound of automatic gunfire has replaced the ancient war cries and sophisticated twentieth-century weaponry has replaced the ‘knopkieries’, spears and shields of the past.

Separation-of-Powers Principles Support the Conclusion that Congress May Validly Prohibit Corrupt Obstructive Acts Carried Out Through the President’s Official Powers

The creation of this digital collection, which brings together the entire body of research materials related to William F Cody's personal and professional life, will enable a variety of audiences to consider the impact of William F. Cody the cultural entrepreneur on American life and provide contextualizing documents from other sources, including audio-visual media that exist for the final years of his life. It will allow more scholars to study the man within his times, will provide new resources to contextualize studies of other regional and national events and persons, and will encourage digital edition visitors to explore and learn more about these vital decades of American expansion and development. The digital edition of the Papers will differ significantly from the print edition by including manuscript materials, photographs, and film and sound recordings, and it will offer navigational and search options not possible in the print edition. As Griffin's volume reveals, it took many people to make Buffalo Bill's Wild West happen. Likewise, there are many people whose combined efforts have made this documentary project a reality. All of the generous donors and talented scholars who have contributed to the success of this effort will be noted in due course. But in this, the first publication, it is appropriate to acknowledge that big ideas are carried to fruition only by sound and steady leadership. The McCracken Research Library was fortunate at the advent of the papers project that in its board chair it had such a leader. Maggie Scarlett was not only an early supporter of this documentary editing project but also its first true champion. It was through her connections (and tenacity) that the initial funds were raised to launch the project. Whether seeking support from private donors, the Wyoming State Legislature, federal granting agencies, or the United States Congress, Maggie led the charge and thereby secured the future of this worthy endeavor. Thus, this reissue of Griffin's account is a legacy not only to William Cody but also to all of those who have made this effort and the larger undertaking possible. In that spirit, though these pages rightfully belong to Charles Eldridge Griffin and to Mr. Dixon, if this volume were mine to dedicate, it would be to Maggie. Kurt Graham

In 1992, Senator Harkin had first introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act, which proposed a U.S. ban on importing products made with child labour. The legislation ultimately failed to pass congress but even the threat of such a boycott sent a chill through industry worldwide and had devastating consequences, particularly in Bangladesh, where the country's garment manufacturers abruptly dismissed about fifty thousand child workers. Most of the children had been supporting their families and were subsequently forced to turn to other more dangerous and less lucrative employment - some in rock crushing and many others in prostitution. It was perhaps a well-motivated gesture on the part of the senator, but it demonstrated some of the unintended consequences of benevolence.

NDTV got a good contract from Doordarshan to produce a famous weekly show called The World This Week, which was anchored by the owner Prannoy Roy. As per records, Doordarshan granted Rs.2 lakhs ($6000[1]) per episode to NDTV, which was a princely sum in those days. Incidentally the head of Doordarshan at that time was Bhaskar Ghose and his son-in-law journalist Rajdeep Sardesai became the No. 2 in NDTV. The Congress Party was in power then and showed all possible support to NDTV and provided a red carpet welcome to the private media unit to enjoy the national resources of Doordarshan.

The war with Mexico fiercely divided the American people. While the majority supported the war, a loud minority despised it, and their rancor filled the newspapers and the debates in the houses of Congress. A newly elected congressional representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, declared: ‘The war with Mexico was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the president.’ Lincoln challenged Polk on the issue that American blood had been shed on American soil and implied that the American troops were the aggressors. He charged that Polk desired ‘military glory … that serpent’s eye which charms to destroy … I more than suspect that Polk is deeply conscious of being in the wrong and that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.’ However, like many critics of the war, Lincoln voted for an appropriations bill to support military operations. An Illinois newspaper responded to Lincoln’s fulminations by branding him a ‘second Benedict Arnold,’ and Lincoln was defeated for reelection. Comparing Lincoln to Arnold was perhaps the most vicious charge that could then be made against an American. General Arnold has been a trusted favorite of George Washington during the American Revolutionary War. In August 1780 he had turned traitor and attempted to turn over the American army’s position at West Point to the British in exchange for money and a brigadier’s commission in the British army. His act of treachery was discovered but he was able to escape to safety behind British lines. Henry Clay, a former senator from Kentucky and unsuccessful candidate for president, often called the ‘Great Pacificator’ or the ‘Great Compromiser’ for his efforts to hold the Union together, spoke out forcefully: ‘The Mexican war,’ he said, ‘is one of unnecessary and offensive aggression … Mexico is defending her firesides, her castles, and her altars, not we.’ Representative

I think it is one thing to protest the war and quite another to criticize the soldiers who are sent to fight it. The soldiers are simply doing a job we’ve assigned to them. They’ve given their country a blank check on their lives and the lives of their loved ones; we should at least show our sympathy. Protest Congress or the president, the people who are actually making the decision to go to war; support the troops, no matter what.

Lighting the Way for Sailors SENTINEL Hamilton’s lighthouse at Cape Hatteras was rebuilt after the original succumbed to erosion. As his storm-tossed brig passed North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras on the way to New York in the early 1770s, a fearful Hamilton vowed to someday build a way-finding lighthouse there. In 1789, Congress passed An Act for the Establishment and support of Lighthouse, Beacons, Buoys, and Public Piers, and the job of maintaining those structures was given to the Department of the Treasury. Thus did Hamilton find himself the “Superintendent” of Lighthouses. His first commission, which rose near the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay, was designed by John McComb Jr., who would one day build the Grange, Hamilton’s New York home. And in 1803 a promise was kept, as “Mr. Hamilton’s Light” opened on Cape Hatteras.

some of those who crafted the Constitution had serious doubts about tax-supported clergy. James Madison, for example, wrote that such employment was a “palpable violation of equal rights as well as Constitutional principles” and a “national establishment” of religion.10 He suggested that if Congress wanted chaplains to discharge religious duties, members should pay for them from their own pockets. “How just would it be in its principle!” he proclaimed.

Neither the First Amendment nor any other provision of this Constitution shall be construed to prohibit the Congress or any state from imposing reasonable limits on the amount of money that candidates for public office, or their supporters, may spend in election campaigns.

The land north of the Ohio River and west of the Appalachians was to be surveyed and marked off in a rectangular pattern—with east-west baselines and north-south ranges—before any of it was sold. This territory was to be divided into townships six miles square, with each township in turn cut up into thirty-six numbered sections of 640 acres each. Land was to be sold at auction, but the minimum price was set at one dollar per acre, and no one could buy less than a section of 640 acres, which meant that a very substantial sum was needed for any purchase. In each township Congress retained four sections for future sale and set aside one other for the support of public education. Although only seven ranges were actually surveyed in southeastern Ohio, this policy of surveying in rectangular units became the basis of America’s land system.

The Illuminati use several umbrella organizations whose leaders usually don’t know that they are being manipulated and controlled. One of the Illuminati organizations working from behind the scenes of visible world politics is the Association of the Round Table. Just like the Order of the Illuminati this society is devoted to the destruction of national states, and they strive for a sort of international super-state: the prototype of the so-called New World Order! The Round Table was founded in 1891 by the politician Cecil Rhodes and is built in the same way as the Order of the Illuminati. In 1902 the Association of Helpers (a group of supporters from the outside from seven different countries) was created. This group created the Round Table Societies in different countries. The North American branch of the Round Table Group was initially called National Civic Federation, a name that was changed in 1921 by Colonel Mandell House into Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).[46] Today the organization claims approximately 2000 members. It is striking that almost all members of the CFR hold important positions in the government of the United States, the CIA and the American financial world. Aside from the enormous influence of the organization over the majority of American public life, it also exercises considerable pressure on the Congress and the government of the United States. At the moment the CFR is the most important component of the “World Government” operating behind the scenes.[47] The grandson of Franklin Roosevelt declared that the President completely depended on the CFR; every step he took was dictated by this institution. In 1975 retired Navy Admiral Chester Ward, former Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Navy and former CFR member, wrote in a critique that the goal of the CFR is the submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all powerful One World government. In one of the first issues of Foreign Affairs (1922), the Council on Foreign Relations magazine, World Government is already endorsed:

It was at this point that Truman once again sought Marshall’s help. With his enthusiastic support, in July 1947 the president had succeeded in inducing Congress to pass the National Security Act, creating a new Department of Defense to replace the separate War and Navy Departments that had coexisted—and squabbled—since the early days of the republic.

If you are a member of Congress, (no offence,) and one of your constituents who doesn’t know anything, and does not want to go into the bother of learning something, and has no money, and no employment, and can’t earn a living, comes besieging you for help, do you say, “Come, my friend, if your services were valuable you could get employment elsewhere — don’t want you here?” Oh, no: You take him to a Department and say, “Here, give this person something to pass away the time at — and a salary” — and the thing is done. You throw him on his country. He is his country’s child, let his country support him. There is something good and motherly about Washington, the grand old benevolent National Asylum for the Helpless.

In its heyday, Strategic Air Command (SAC) was the prima donna Air Force unit. It demanded and got the cream of the crop of personnel for practically every discipline needed, from flight operations to maintenance and support. And there's no denying that SAC got most of the money it wanted from a Congress anxious about the Cold War and our defensive posture vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.

After Lincoln became president he campaigned for colonization, and even in the midst of war with the Confederacy found time to work on the project, appointing Rev. James Mitchell as Commissioner of Emigration, in charge of finding a place to which blacks could be sent. On August 14th, 1862, he invited a group of black leaders to the White House to try to persuade them to leave the country, telling them that “there is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us.” He urged them to lead their people to a colonization site in Central America. Lincoln was therefore the first president to invite a delegation of blacks to the White House—and did so to ask them to leave the country. Later that year, in a message to Congress, he argued not just for voluntary colonization but for the forcible removal of free blacks. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, shared these anti-black sentiments: “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” Like Jefferson, he thought whites had a clear destiny: “This whole vast continent is destined to fall under the control of the Anglo-Saxon race—the governing and self-governing race.” Before he became president, James Garfield wrote, “[I have] a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the negro being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or got rid of in any decent way . . . .” Theodore Roosevelt blamed Southerners for bringing blacks to America. In 1901 he wrote: “I have not been able to think out any solution to the terrible problem offered by the presence of the Negro on this continent . . . .” As for Indians, he once said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the health of the tenth.” William Howard Taft once told a group of black college students, “Your race is adapted to be a race of farmers, first, last, and for all times.” Woodrow Wilson was a confirmed segregationist, and as president of Princeton he refused to admit blacks. He enforced segregation in government offices and was supported in this by Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, who argued that “civilized white men” could not be expected to work with “barbarous black men.” During the presidential campaign of 1912, Wilson took a strong position in favor of excluding Asians: “I stand for the national policy of exclusion. . . . We cannot make a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race. . . . Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson.” Warren Harding also wanted the races kept separate: “Men of both races [black and white] may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality. This is not a question of social equality, but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference. Racial amalgamation there cannot be.

Most white Americans believe elections should be a choice of policies rather than expressions of racial identity. If Americans vote for a candidate because of his racial agenda, representative government is crippled. Democratic systems operate well only when politicians recognize that even if their opponents’ approaches may be different, all parties are trying to work for the good of the country as a whole. When politics fracture along racial lines, it becomes easy to assume that elected officials work for narrow, ethnic interests, and political contests become very bitter. The ultimate logic of politics in a racially fractured electorate is a system of quotas in which seats in elective bodies are set aside in proportion to the racial composition of the population. This is the formula hopelessly divided countries such as Lebanon and immediate post-white-rule Zimbabwe and South Africa hit upon. It could be the solution for other divided countries such as Iraq, Sudan, Fiji, Malaysia, or Sri Lanka, where politics is a perpetual squabble over ethnic interests. There is already implied support for proportional racial representation in the federal approach to voter districts. The US Department of Justice has long required that congressional districts be gerrymandered to create black and Hispanic majorities that are expected to vote along racial lines and send one of their own to Congress. The department also routinely sues cities that choose their governing bodies in at-large elections. If, for example, a city is 30 percent black but has no blacks on the city council because all candidates must appeal to the entire city, voting must be switched to a ward system, with wards drawn so that blacks—by voting for people like themselves have approximately 30 percent of the council seats. In 2006, the Justice Department used precisely this argument to threaten Euclid, Ohio, with litigation if it did not replace its at-large elections with a system of eight separate wards. In 2010, Hispanics made the same argument when they sued the city of Compton: They claimed that an at-large voting system shut them out and kept the city council all black.

Furthermore, as evangelical pastor and Republican candidate for Congress in 2018 Robb Ryerse says: “To vote for him because he sees the political expediency of supporting restrictions on abortion [Trump supported abortion before he ran for president] is a Faustian deal with the devil that is ultimately more likely to exact greater cost than reward.

If Callender thought his series of articles would destroy Jefferson’s political fortunes, then he was wrong. Callender’s reports did not surprise many White male voters, either in Virginia or around the nation. If anything, Callender upset them, because some of them were having their own secretive affairs with Black women—or raping them—and they did not want such things publicly aired. Nationally, White male voters bolstered Jefferson’s party in Congress in the 1802 midterm elections, and they overwhelmingly supported his presidential reelection in 1804.

One thing more makes these men and women from the age of wigs, swords, and stagecoaches seem surprisingly contemporary. This small group of people not only helped to end one of the worst of human injustices in the most powerful empire of its time; they also forged virtually every important tool used by citizens’ movements in democratic countries today. Think of what you’re likely to find in your mailbox—or electronic mailbox—over a month or two. An invitation to join the local chapter of a national environmental group. If you say yes, a logo to put on your car bumper. A flier asking you to boycott California grapes or Guatemalan coffee. A poster to put in your window promoting this campaign. A notice that a prominent social activist will be reading from her new book at your local bookstore. A plea that you write your representative in Congress or Parliament, to vote for that Guatemalan coffee boycott bill. A “report card” on how your legislators have voted on these and similar issues. A newsletter from the group organizing support for the grape pickers or the coffee workers. Each of these tools, from the poster to the political book tour, from the consumer boycott to investigative reporting designed to stir people to action, is part of what we take for granted in a democracy. Two and a half centuries ago, few people assumed this. When we wield any of these tools today, we are using techniques devised or perfected by the campaign that held its first meeting at 2 George Yard in 1787. From their successful crusade we still have much to learn. If, early that year, you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you that ending slavery was wildly impractical: the British Empire’s economy would collapse. The parliamentarian Edmund Burke, for example, opposed slavery but thought that the prospect of ending even just the Atlantic slave trade was “chimerical.” Within a few short years, however, the issue of slavery had moved to center stage in British political life. There was an abolition committee in every major city or town in touch with a central committee in London. More than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat slave-grown sugar. Parliament was flooded with far more signatures on abolition petitions than it had ever received on any other subject. And in 1792, the House of Commons passed the first law banning the slave trade. For reasons we will see, a ban did not take effect for some years to come, and British slaves were not finally freed until long after that. But there was no mistaking something crucial: in an astonishingly short period of time, public opinion in Europe’s most powerful nation had undergone a sea change. From this unexpected transformation there would be no going back.

Jones, along with the US military attaché in Indonesia, took Subandrio’s advice. He emphasized to Washington that the United States should support the Indonesian military as a more effective, long-term anticommunist strategy. The country of Indonesia couldn’t be simply broken into pieces to slow down the advance of global socialism, so this was a way that the US could work within existing conditions. This strategic shift would begin soon, and would prove very fruitful. But behind the scenes, the CIA boys dreamed up wild schemes. On the softer side, a CIA front called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which funded literary magazines and fine arts around the world, published and distributed books in Indonesia, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the famous anticommunist collection The God That Failed.33 And the CIA discussed simply murdering Sukarno. The Agency went so far as to identify the “asset” who would kill him, according to Richard M. Bissell, Wisner’s successor as deputy director for plans.34 Instead, the CIA hired pornographic actors, including a very rough Sukarno look-alike, and produced an adult film in a bizarre attempt to destroy his reputation. The Agency boys knew that Sukarno routinely engaged in extramarital affairs. But everyone in Indonesia also knew it. Indonesian elites didn’t shy away from Sukarno’s activities the way the Washington press corps protected philanderers like JFK. Some of Sukarno’s supporters viewed his promiscuity as a sign of his power and masculinity. Others, like Sumiyati and members of the Gerwani Women’s Movement, viewed it as an embarrassing defect. But the CIA thought this was their big chance to expose him. So they got a Hollywood film crew together.35 They wanted to spread the rumor that Sukarno had slept with a beautiful blond flight attendant who worked for the KGB, and was therefore both immoral and compromised. To play the president, the filmmakers (that is, Bing Crosby and his brother Larry) hired a “Hispanic-looking” actor, and put him in heavy makeup to make him look a little more Indonesian. They also wanted him bald, since exposing Sukarno—who always wore a hat—as such might further embarrass him. The idea was to destroy the genuine affection that young Sakono, and Francisca, and millions of other Indonesians, felt for the Founding Father of their country. The thing was never released—not because this was immoral or a bad idea, but because the team couldn’t put together a convincing enough film.36

The Left have always opposed the Congress on foreign policy when it suited them. They criticized Panditji, they criticized Indiraji, they attacked Narasimha Raoji. Whatever I did as finance minister, they criticized. They criticized non-alignment when it suited them, they supported it when it suited them. As long as I am prime minister, I will not allow these communists to dictate our foreign policy.

All the art experts, all the big galleries, if not maybe quite all of the humble folk who look at them, agree Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings do indeed count as great art. And JP intended it to be art too. But what’s curious about most of the most radical artists of the post-Second World War period is that they came from nowhere to prominence with the support of . . . the CIA! Yes, the American secret services actively promoted (through books, funding schemes, newspapers and of course galleries) radical art as part of a labyrinthine strategy to undermine the Soviet Union. This was all part of a special strategy to win over intellectuals – including philosophers – described as ‘the battle for Picasso’s mind’ by one former CIA agent, Thomas Braden, in a television interview in the 1970s. Tom Braden was responsible for dispensing money under the heading Congress for Cultural Freedom. Naturally, most of the people he gave money to had no idea that the funds, and hence the artistic direction, actually came from the CIA. Intellectuals and great artists, after all, hate being told what to think. And what was the communist empire doing meanwhile? They were promoting, through galleries, public funding and so on, a very different kind of art supposedly reflecting communist political values. ‘Soviet realism’ was a kind of reaction to ‘Western Impressionism’ (all those dotty – pointilliste the art-experts call them – landscapes and swirling, subjective shapes) and ensured that people in the paintings looked like people, decent, hard-working types too, and what’s more were doing worthy things – like making tractors or (at least) looking inspirationally at the viewer. When Soviet art wasn’t figurative (as this sort of stuff is called), it was very logical and mathematical, full of precise geometrical shapes and carefully weighted blocks of colour.

Politicians are notorious for their cynical use of scientific information; in the U.S. Congress, where only 8 percent of elected officials hold a science or medical Ph.D., scientific studies are regularly used as an excuse for doing nothing. Calling for “more research” is an excellent way of punting. At the same time, politicians are notorious for digging up scientific “facts” that appear to support what they already wanted to do anyway.

Claims of anti-White racism in response to antiracism are as old as civil rights. When Congress passed the (first) Civil Rights Act of 1866, it made Black people citizens of the United States, stipulated their civil rights, and stated that state law could not “deprive a person of any of these rights on the basis of race.” President Andrew Johnson reframed this antiracist bill as a “bill made to operate in favor of the colored against the white race.” Racist Americans a century later framed supporters of affirmative action as “hard-core racists of reverse discrimination,” to quote former U.S. solicitor general Robert Bork in The Wall Street Journal in 1978. When Alicia Garza typed “Black Lives Matter” on Facebook in 2013 and when that love letter crested into a movement in 2015, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani called the movement “inherently racist.

Not only had Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment, but in November 1973, over Nixon’s veto, Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution. It required that the president obtain congressional support within ninety days of sending American troops abroad for military action. The North Vietnamese knew that no such support would be forthcoming.

In the United States the fate of veterans was also fraught with problems. In 1918, when they returned home from the battlefields of France and Flanders, they had been welcomed as national heroes, just as the soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are today. In 1924 Congress voted to award them a bonus of $1.25 for each day they had served overseas, but disbursement was postponed until 1945. By 1932 the nation was in the middle of the Great Depression, and in May of that year about fifteen thousand unemployed and penniless veterans camped on the Mall in Washington DC to petition for immediate payment of their bonuses. The Senate defeated the bill to move up disbursement by a vote of sixty-two to eighteen. A month later President Hoover ordered the army to clear out the veterans’ encampment. Army chief of staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded the troops, supported by six tanks. Major Dwight D. Eisenhower was the liaison with the Washington police, and Major George Patton was in charge of the cavalry. Soldiers with fixed bayonets charged, hurling tear gas into the crowd of veterans. The next morning the Mall was deserted and the camp was in flames.7 The veterans never received their pensions.

He had come to some somber conclusions about Russia, he added. “At the top there appears to be a personal struggle in which the foulest means are used by power-hungry individuals acting from purely selfish motives. At the bottom there seems to be complete suppression of the individual and freedom of speech. One wonders whether life is worth living under such conditions.” Perversely, when the FBI later compiled a secret dossier on Einstein during the Red Scare of the 1950s, one piece of evidence cited against him was that he had supported, rather than rejected, the invitation to be active in this world congress.71 One

In his germinal work, Black Awakening in Capitalist America, reprinted in part in this anthology, Allen documents how the Ford Foundation’s support of certain Black civil rights and Black Power organizations such as CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) actually helped shift the movement’s emphasis—through the recruitment of key movement leaders—from liberation to Black capitalism.

Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger offered six such criteria, drawing upon our experiences in Vietnam and in 1983, the loss of 241 Marines in Beirut: (1) the U.S. should not commit forces to combat unless the vital national interest of the United States or its allies is involved; (2) U.S. troops should be committed wholeheartedly and with the clear intention of winning—otherwise, troops should not be committed; (3) U.S. combat troops should be committed only with clearly defined political and military objectives and with the capacity to accomplish those objectives; (4) the relationship between the objectives and the size and composition of the forces committed should be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary; (5) U.S. troops should not be committed to battle without a “reasonable assurance” of the support of U.S. public opinion and Congress; and (6) the commitment of U.S. troops should be considered only as a last resort.

The reason the loanable funds story is not in sync with reality is that it asks us to treat the federal government like a currency user. When we reject this naïve lens, we see that countries like the US aren’t dependent on borrowing to fund themselves, nor are they at the mercy of private investors when they do sell bonds.17 Uncle Sam is not a beggar, who must go hat in hand, in search of funding to support his desired spending. He’s a muscular currency issuer! He can choose to borrow (or not), and Congress can always decide what rate of interest it will pay on any bonds it decides to offer. That’s not true of all countries, but it is true of those with monetary sovereignty.

The most controversial part of the controversial legislation now derided by Republicans as “Obamacare”—the mandate that individuals buy health insurance—was originally proposed by Republican economists, championed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, introduced in Congress by Republican politicians, and enacted in Massachusetts under Republican governor Mitt Romney.16 Planned Parenthood, now anathema to Republicans because of its pro-choice policies, enjoyed the support of two of the biggest dynasties of Republican politics, the Goldwater and Bush families, until the rise of the Religious Right in the 1980s made the pro-life position a litmus test for the GOP. And Republican platforms from 1940 to 1976 endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment for women.

The Secret Government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spies, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and superpatriots, who, for a variety of motives, operate outside the legitimate institutions of government. Presidents have turned to them when they can’t win the support of the Congress or the people, creating that unsupervised power so feared by the framers of our Constitution. …”1 —BILL MOYERS, journalist and White House press secretary under President Johnson

Fang soldiered on nonetheless, asking Koch what he wanted from the new Congress under Speaker Boehner. “Well,” Koch answered, with growing animation, licking his lips as he habitually did, “cut the hell out of spending, balance the budget, reduce regulations, and uh, support business!

James Monroe served as the fifth President of the United States between 1817 and 1825. He was from Virginia and the last of the Founding Fathers to serve as President and was a wounded veteran of the Revolutionary War. After the war he studied law and served as a delegate in the Continental Congress. As president he and John Quincy Adams, who served as his Secretary of State, eased the prevailing partisan tensions bringing about what was called an “Era of Good Feelings.” He easily won a second term in office and in 1823, announced that the United States opposed any European intervention in the Americas by European Countries by enacting the Monroe Doctrine. Monroe strongly supported the founding of independent colonies in Africa for the return of freed slaves. These colonies eventually formed the nation of Liberia, whose capital was named Monrovia in his honor. In 1825 Monroe retired to New York City where he died on the 4th of July, 1831.

Jefferson was no friend of Aaron Burr, and he had no intention of going lightly on Aaron Burr. Certain of Burr’s guilt despite the murky nature of the scheme and evidence, he convened his Cabinet and alerted members of Congress about the matter.  Jefferson, with resolute support from his Cabinet and the Congress, thus ordered Burr’s arrest on the charge of treason, the nation’s highest crime.

The British government in 1807 had issued the “Orders in Council,” which enforced a naval blockade against France, and with a shortage of seamen to man the Royal Navy, Britain also felt justified in stopping and sometimes firing  on ships flying the American flag in the name of apprehending escaped British sailors. The other main cause of war was distress on the Northwestern frontier, where the British in Canada were supporting Indian resistance to American settlement.  So-called “War Hawks” from that region in Congress pushed for a declaration of war.  Some hoped that a war would not only stop Indian depredations but evict the British from Canada and lead to completion of some unfinished business from the American Revolution, namely Canada

This mostly restrictionist trend reached an important pivot in 2012. Three major developments prompted this change in direction and momentum. First, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Arizona v. United States opinion, delivering its most consequential decision on the limits of state authority in immigration in three decades. Rejecting several provisions of Arizona's controversial omnibus immigration enforcement bill, SB 1070, the opinion nevertheless still left open possibilities for state and local involvement. Second, President Barack Obama, against the backdrop of a stalemate in comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) in Congress and contentious debates over the role of the federal executive in immigration enforcement, instituted the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) program, providing administrative relief and a form of lawful presence to hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth. Finally, Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate whose platform supported laws like Arizona's and called them a model for the rest of the country, lost his bid for the White House with especially steep losses among Latinos and immigrant voters. After these events in 2012, restrictive legislation at the state level waned in frequency, and a growing number of states began to pass laws aimed at the integration of unauthorized immigrants. As this book goes to press, this integrationist trend is still continuing.

In 1998, when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was unseated by a vote of no-confidence, Sonia made an abortive bid to become prime minister. She was thwarted by Mulayam Singh Yadav who withdrew support to the Congress-led government after indicating an initial willingness to offer it.

in 1862, Congress set aside $600,000 (about $14 million today) to eject Black people from the country. Black people made their opposition to colonization loud and clear in the summer of 1862. Lincoln, desiring their support, welcomed five Black men to the President’s House on August 14, 1862. The delegation was led by the Reverend Joseph Mitchell, the commissioner of emigration for the Interior Department. The discussion quickly turned into a lecture. The Black race could never “be placed on an equality with the white race” in the United States, Lincoln professed. Whether this “is right or wrong I need not discuss,” he said. Lincoln then blamed the presence of Blacks for the war. If Blacks leave, all will be well, Lincoln touted. “Sacrifice something of your present comfort,” Lincoln advised, asking the group to press their fellow Blacks to make the trek to Liberia and start anew. To refuse would be “extremely selfish.

On Black Monday, October 19, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 508 points, or 22.6 percent, and the New York Stock Exchange lost $1 trillion in value. Many feared that Black Monday was a repeat of the stock market crash in 1929, which signaled the Great Depression of the 1930s. Nobody wanted history to repeat itself, and Congress did not want to be blamed for causing the collapse of financial markets. Support for antitakeover legislation, which was perceived as a contributing cause of Black Monday, disappeared.

Senator Warren questions SEC chair on broker reforms 525 words By Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senator Elizabeth Warren said Friday that the Labor Department should press ahead with brokerage industry reforms, and not be deterred by the Securities and Exchange Commission's plans to adopt its own separate rules.    President Barack Obama, with frequent Wall Street critic Warren at his side, last month called on the Labor Department to quickly move forward to tighten brokerage standards on retirement advice, lending new momentum to a long-running effort to implement reforms aimed at reducing conflicts of interest and "hidden fees." But that effort could be complicated by a parallel track of reforms by the SEC, whose Chair Mary Jo White on Tuesday said she supported moving ahead with a similar effort to hold retail brokers to a higher "fiduciary" standard. "I want to see the Department of Labor go forward now," Warren told Reuters in an interview Friday. "There is no reason to wait for the SEC. There is no question that the Department of Labor has the authority to act to ensure that retirement advisers are serving the best interest of their clients." Warren said that while she has no concerns with the SEC moving forward to write its own rules, she fears its involvement may give Wall Street a hook to try to delay or water down a separate ongoing Labor Department effort to craft tough new rules governing how brokers dole out retirement advice. She also raised questions about White's decision to unveil her position at a conference hosted by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), a trade group representing the interests of securities brokerage firms. Not only is the SEC the lead regulator for brokers, but unlike the Labor Department, it is also bound by law to preserve brokers' commission-based compensation in any new fiduciary rule.     "I was surprised that (Chair) White announced the rule at a conference hosted by an industry trade group that spent several years and millions of dollars lobbying members of Congress to block real action to fix the problem," Warren said. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who frequently challenges market regulators as too cozy with industry, stopped short of directly criticizing White. The SEC and SIFMA both declined to comment on Warren's comments. SIFMA has strongly opposed the Labor Department's efforts, fearing its rule will contain draconian measures that would cut broker profits, and in turn, force brokers to pull back from offering accounts and advice to American retirees. It has long advocated for the SEC to take the lead on a rule that would create a new uniform standard of care for brokers and advisers. The SEC has said it has been coordinating with the Labor Department on the rule-writing effort, but on Tuesday White also acknowledged that the two can still act independently of one another because they operate under different laws. The industry and reform advocates have been waiting now for years to see whether the SEC would move to tighten standards.     Warren expressed some skepticism on Friday about whether the SEC will ever in fact actually adopt a rule, saying that for years the agency has talked about taking action, but has not delivered. (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Christian Plumb)

Very quickly, the Obama administration lost political momentum. The obscene sight of those who had played a major role in setting the scene for the Crash (men like Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke) effectively returning to the scene of the crime as ‘saviours’, wielding trillions of freshly minted or borrowed dollars to lavish upon their banker ‘mates’, was enough to turn off even the hardiest of Mr Obama’s supporters. The result was predictable: as often happens during a deflationary period (think of the 1930s, for example), those who gainpolitically do not come from the revolutionary Left; they come from the loony Right. In the United States it was the Tea Party that grew on the back of a disdain for bankers, 6 a denunciation of the Fed, a clarion call for ‘honest’, metal-backed money, 7 and a revulsion towards all government. Ironically, the rise of the Tea Party increased the interventions of the Fed that the movement denounced. The reason was simple: once the Obama administration had lost its way, and could not pass any meaningful bills through Congress that might have stimulated the economy, onlyone lever was left with which anyone could steer America’s macroeconomy – the Fed’s monetary policy. And since interest rates were dwelling in the nether world of the first liquidity trap to hit the United States since the 1930s8 (recall Chapter 2 here), the Fed decided that quantitative easing or QE – the strategy that Chapter 8 describes in the context of the 1990s’ ‘lost Japanese decade’ – was all that was left separating America from a repugnant depression.

Interest groups exercise influence way out of proportion to their place in society, distort both taxes and spending, and raise overall deficit levels through their ability to manipulate the budget in their favor. They also undermine the quality of public administration as a result of the multiple and often contradictory mandates they induce Congress to support. All of this has led to a crisis of representation, in which ordinary people feel their supposedly democratic government no longer truly reflects their interests but is under the control of a variety of shadowy elites. What is ironic and peculiar is that this crisis in representativeness has occurred in part because of reforms designed to make the system more democratic.

The Westminster system understandably produces governments with more formal powers than in the United States. This greater degree of decisiveness can be seen clearly with respect to the budget process. In Britain, national budgets are not drawn up in Parliament, but in Whitehall, the seat of the bureaucracy, where professional civil servants act under instructions from the cabinet and prime minister. The budget is then presented by the chancellor of the exchequer (equivalent of the U.S. treasury secretary) to the House of Commons, which votes to approve it in a single up-or-down vote. This usually takes place within a week or two of its promulgation by the government. The process in the United States is totally different. The Constitution grants Congress primary authority over the budget. While presidents formulate budgets through the executive branch Office of Management and Budget, this office often becomes more like another lobbying organization supporting the president’s preferences. The budget, put before Congress in February, works its way through a complex set of committees over a period of months, and what finally emerges for ratification (we hope) by the two houses toward the end of the summer is the product of innumerable deals struck with individual members to secure their support. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was established in 1974 to provide Congress with greater technocratic support in drawing up budgets, but in the end the making of an American budget is a highly decentralized and nonstrategic process in comparison to what happens in Britain.

Indeed, the consensual nature of the EU itself has meant that EU-level institutions are far weaker than certain federal institutions in the United States. These weaknesses were made painfully evident in the European debt crisis of 2010–2013. The United States Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Congress responded quite forcefully to its financial crisis, with a massive expansion of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, the $700 billion TARP, a second $700 billion stimulus package in 2009, and continuing asset purchases by the Fed under successive versions of quantitative easing. Under emergency circumstances, the executive branch was able to browbeat the Congress into supporting its initiatives. The European Union, by contrast, has taken a much more hesitant and piecemeal approach to the euro crisis. Lacking a monetary authority with the same powers as the Federal Reserve, and with fiscal policy remaining the preserve of national-level governments, European policy makers have had fewer tools than their American counterparts to deal with economic shocks.

BERNIE: I think America should get a pony. HILLARY: How will you pay for the pony? Where will the pony come from? How will you get Congress to agree to the pony? BERNIE: Hillary thinks America doesn’t deserve a pony. BERNIE SUPPORTERS: Hillary hates ponies! HILLARY: Actually, I love ponies. BERNIE SUPPORTERS: She changed her position on ponies! #WhichHillary? #WitchHillary HEADLINE: “Hillary Refuses to Give Every American a Pony” DEBATE MODERATOR: Hillary, how do you feel when people say you lie about ponies? WEBSITE HEADLINE: “Congressional Inquiry into Clinton’s Pony Lies” TWITTER TRENDING: #ponygate

Restricting the sale and use of guns became a salient political issue only after the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr. The gun control laws enacted or seriously proposed were modest. When Congress was passing gun regulation in 1968, the National Rifle Association’s executive vice-president wrote that “the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.” The GOP platforms of 1968 and 1972 supported gun regulation—and President Nixon, his speechwriter William Safire recalled, told him that “guns are an abomination” and that he would have outlawed handguns if he could. But violent crime had tripled in a decade, and in the late 1970s hysterics managed to take over the NRA, replacing its motto “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation” with the second half of the Second Amendment—“The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.” Within a decade, the official Republican position shifted almost 180 degrees to oppose any federal registration of firearms. In other words, fantasy was starting to hold its own against reason.

In 1898 the clouds of war between Spain and the United States accumulated over Cuba. President McKinley decided to deploy the battleship USS Maine to Havana, to insure the safety of Americans. As a backup, other ships were deployed to Key West and many other hot spots around the world involving Spain. Most Americans allied themselves with the Cuban people, and identified their movement with our American Revolutionary War. The arrival of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor with only 18 hours of advanced warning was contrary to diplomatic convention. At 9:40 p.m. on February 15, 1898, a massive explosion sank the ship while she was at anchor and took the lives of 268 sailors. Although the cause of the explosion was never proven to be sabotage, and was most likely caused by a smoldering fire in one of the ship’s coal bunkers, “Remember the Maine, To Hell with Spain!” became an American battle cry. What was termed “yellow journalism” had fired up the American public so much, that on April 11, 1898, President McKinley asked Congress for authority to send troops to Cuba to support the Cuban people in their revolt against Spain. The situation spun out of control when Spain declared war on the United States on April 23, 1898, and in turn, Washington declared war on Spain two days later.

In early 1941, the United States was a fifth-rate military power, its armed forces ranking seventeenth in size compared to other world forces. Long starved of financial support by Congress and the White House, the Army had little more than 300,000 men (most of them just drafted), compared to Germany’s 4 million and Britain’s 1.6 million. Not a single armored division existed, and draftees were training with broomsticks for rifles and sawhorses for antitank guns. The Army was in such bad shape, according to one military historian, that it would not have been able to “repel raids across the Rio Grande by Mexican bandits.” Although the Navy was in better condition, nearly half its vessels dated back to World War I. The Army Air Corps, meanwhile, could boast only about two thousand combat aircraft. After

TRAGIC RACISM HERETOFORE IGNORED Rich and poor have this in common: The Lord is the Maker of them all. Proverbs 22:2 Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger was a racial eugenicist, a proponent of the idea that through birth control, abortion, and sterilization of the “unfit” we could create a “cleaner” human race and enable “the cultivation of the better racial elements.” She actually addressed this with the Ku Klux Klan. Yet far from repudiating Sanger, liberal leaders defend her. Hillary Clinton expresses great admiration for her; Barack Obama praises Planned Parenthood and asks God to bless what they do; the New York Times has mentioned Sanger as a replacement for Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill. When the media went into hysterics trying to ban the Confederate Battle Flag—while simultaneously ignoring the revelations about Planned Parenthood harvesting the organs of aborted babies, and babies born alive, for profit—I posted a graphic of the rebel flag alongside the Planned Parenthood logo with this question: “Which symbol killed 90,000 black babies last year?” Our government—using your tax dollars—is not to be subsidizing abortion. It’s illegal and immoral. Yet, Planned Parenthood receives more than a million tax dollars out of your pocket every single day. It shouldn’t get a penny. Good news: light now shines on this darkness. The abortionists were caught on tape nibbling lunch and sipping wine while nonchalantly pondering where to spend the profits made from bartering the bodies of innocent babies . . . just another day at the office. I know that it sounds unbelievable, like something from a macabre horror movie script—but the exposé must stir you to action, lest a nation, through complacency, accept the most revolting mission of Margaret Sanger. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, don’t just pray for unborn children. Demand that Congress stop funding abortion mills; elect a pro-life president; support pro-life centers that provide resources to give parents a real choice in this debate—knowing that choosing life is ultimately the beautiful choice.

Americans came to not only accept that our presidents will speak to us, directly, and ask for our support, plebiscitarily; they began to expect it, even though the Founders surely did not. Tulis and other scholars who wrote on this subject during the Reagan years generally found the rise of the rhetorical presidency worrying. By appealing to the people, charismatic chief executives were bypassing Congress, and ignoring the warnings of—and the provisions made by—the Founders, who considered popular leaders demagogues: politicians who appealed to passion, and not to reason. The rhetorical presidency, Tulis warned, was leading to “a greater mutability of policy, an erosion of the processes of deliberation, and a decay of political discourse.”24

In the early 1970s, Buchanan orchestrated a campaign that overrode Congress, ignored polls showing strong public support, and so utterly obliterated a bill that would have created a high-quality universal child-care system in America that in forty years, the very idea has never surfaced for discussion again. Ever. The veto of the child-care bill set the stage for unpaid medical leave and all subsequent U.S. family policy. Schulte, Brigid (2014-03-11). Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time (pp. 97-98). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

The history of the twentieth century, he pointed out, is replete with instances of the tragedy that overtakes democracy when a leader who has risen to power on the crest of a popular wave or with the support of a democratic organisation becomes a victim of political narcissism and is egged on by a coterie of unscrupulous sycophants who use corruption and terror to silence opposition and attempt to make public opinion an echo of authority. The Congress as an organisation dedicated to democracy and socialism has to combat such trends.

Paul Cuffee, born in 1759, was a free, able and resourceful Quaker businessman of African and American Indian descent. Although he was black himself, Cuffee became a ship’s captain and built a lucrative shipping empire. Becoming a prosperous merchant he had the money to carry out his various philanthropically ventures. In 1815 he also established the first racially integrated school in the United States, locating it in Westport, Massachusetts. The following year he advocated settling freed American slaves back to the West Coast of Africa. At first he found little support from the young American government but being aware of a British colony founded in Freetown, Sierra Leone a British colony he looked for support for his venture from the British government. Although they didn’t support him financially, they did allow him to bring in the freed former slaves. As he became better known as a crusader for this purpose, free black leaders and some members of United States Congress joined him and embraced his plan to take emigrants to Sierra Leone. At the start Cuffee intended to make only one voyage per year, taking settlers and off set his expenses by bringing back nonperishable valuable cargoes such as hand crafted items and furniture quality hard woods. In 1816, at his own expense, Captain Cuffee took thirty-eight American freed blacks, from Boston to Sierra Leone, which was still the only colony that existed for this purpose in West Africa.

What are your feelings from Bush to Obama? Besides being responsible for the death of half a million people, I feel like Bush dealt a huge economic and social blow to the USA, one from which we may never fully recover. He directly flushed 3 trillion dollars down the toilet on hopeless, pointlessly destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq …and they’re not even over! For years to come, we’ll be paying costs for all the injured veterans (over 50,000) and destabilizing three countries, because you have to look at the impact that the Afghan war has on Pakistan. Bush expanded the use of torture, and created a whole new layer of government bureaucracy (the “Department of Homeland Security”) to spy on Americans. He created Indefinite Detention (at Guantanamo and other US military bases) and expanded the use of executive-ordered assassinations using the new drone technology. On economic issues, his administration allowed corporations to run things and regulate themselves. The agency that was supposed to regulate oil drilling had lobbyist-paid prostitutes sleeping with employees while oil industry lobbyists basically ran the agency. Energy companies like Enron, and the country’s investment banks were deregulated at the end of the Clinton administration and Bush allowed them to run wild. Above all, he was incompetent and appointed some really stupid people to important positions at every level of government. Certainly, Obama has been involved in many of these same activities. A few he’s increased, such as the use of drone assassinations, but most of them he has at least tried to scale back. At the beginning of his first term, he tried to close the Guantanamo prison and have trials for many of the detainees in the United States but conservatives (including many Democrats) stirred up public resistance and blocked this from happening. He tried to get some kind of universal healthcare because over 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance. This is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcies and foreclosures because someone gets sick in a family, loses their job, loses their health insurance (because American employers are source of most people’s healthcare) and they can’t pay their health bills or their mortgage. Or they use up all their money caring for a sick family member. So many people in the US wanted health insurance reform or single-payer, universal health care similar to what you have in the UK. Members of Obama’s own party (The Democrats) joined with Republicans to narrowly block “The public option” but they managed to pass a half-assed but not-unsubstantial reform of health insurance that would prevent insurers from denying you coverage when you’re sick or have a “preexisting condition.” The minute it was signed into law, Republicans sued in the courts (all the way to the supreme court) and fought, tooth and nail to block its implementation. Same thing with gun control, even as we’re one of the most violent industrial countries in the world. (Among industrial countries, our murder rate is second only to Russia). Obama has managed to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan over Republican opposition but, literally, everything he tries to do, they blast it in the media and fight it in Congress. So, while I have a lot of criticisms of Obama, he is many orders of magnitude less awful than Bush and many of the positive things he’s tried to do have been blocked. That said, the Democratic and Republican parties agree on more things than they disagree. Both signed off on the Afghan and Iraq wars. Both signed off on deregulation of banks, of derivatives, of mortgage regulations and of the energy and telecom business …and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. I’m guessing it’s the same thing with Labor and Conservatives in the UK. Labor or Democrats will SAY they stand for certain “progressive” things but they end up supporting the same old crap... (2014 interview with iamhiphop)

In Guatemala, in 1954, a legally elected government was overthrown by an invasion force of mercenaries trained by the CIA at military bases in Honduras and Nicaragua and supported by four American fighter planes flown by American pilots. The invasion put into power Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who had at one time received military training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The government that the United States overthrew was the most democratic Guatemala had ever had. The President, Jacobo Arbenz, was a left-of-center Socialist; four of the fifty-six seats in the Congress were held by Communists. What was most unsettling to American business interests was that Arbenz had expropriated 234,000 acres of land owned by United Fruit, offering compensation that United Fruit called "unacceptable." Armas, in power, gave the land back to United Fruit, abolished the tax on interest and dividends to foreign investors, eliminated the secret ballot, and jailed thousands of political critics.

The Fugitive Slave Act ordered all citizens to assist law enforcement in apprehending fugitive slaves. It voided state laws in Massachusetts, Vermont, Ohio, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, which barred state officials from aid ing in the capture, arrest, or imprisonment of fugitive slaves. In the Fugitive Slave Act, Congress “nationalized slavery. No black person was safe on American soil. The old division of free state/slave state had vanished.”40 If there was any question of whose states’ rights Southern leaders supported, it was certainly not those of free states.

Alexander Stephens, the longtime friend of Lincoln who supported Stephen Douglas until the bitter end, was now the vice president of the Confederacy. Elected by the Confederate Congress the same day as Jefferson Davis as President, he traveled across the South speaking about the new government. Stephens gave his Cornerstone Speech of March, 21, 1861, in Charleston, South Carolina. In it he defined Confederacy’s nature. The speech echoed the racist nationalism Southerners held to for years— that Blacks were a lesser order of humanity, and slavery was their natural condition: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery— subordination to the superior race— is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.] This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

For most Northerners abolition only became an issue after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. So long as slavery was confined to the South and out of sight, the majority of Northerners showed little concern for the issue, while profiting from or reaping its benefits. Though Northerners wore clothes made of cotton harvested by slaves and corporations that supported the slave economy paid the wages of Northern workers and shareholders, few considered the moral issues until their state laws were overturned by Congress and Supreme Court.