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The Party of Great Moral Frauds
Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: When Americans Understood the Declaration of Independence
For the past century and a half the Republican Party has gratuitously labeled itself as "The Party of Great Moral Ideas." The Party of Great Moral Frauds is more like it. The party began as the party of mercantilism, corporate welfare, protectionist tariffs, constitutional subterfuge, central banking, and imperialism.
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| The Wide Awakes: Paramilitary political thugs of the Republican Party. Not unlike the street thuggery of today. The large Wide Awake parade in lower Manhattan was part of a series of demonstrations in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, and Boston during the first week of October 1860. Note the deliberate placement of this “surging sea of excited humanity” on Manhattan’s “newspaper row,” directly in front of the friendly offices of the New York Tribune and New York Times. “Grand Procession of Wide-Awakes at New York on the Evening of October 3, 1860,” Harper’s Weekly, Oct. 13, 1860. Courtesy of Harpweek, llc. |
Its 1860 presidential platform promised not to disturb Southern slavery; its first president supported the Fugitive Slave Act and the proposed "Corwin Amendment" to the Constitution that would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery; the party committed treason by "levying war upon the states" (the precise definition of treason in the Constitution) and murdering hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens in order to destroy the voluntary union of the states that was established by the founding fathers. It refused to do what Britain, Spain, France, the Dutch, Denmark, Sweden, and the Northern states in the U.S. had done about slavery and end it peacefully. Instead, it used the slaves as pawns in a war that was about consolidating all political power in Washington, D.C. in general, and in the hands of the Republican Party in particular.
Three months after the War to Prevent Southern Independence ended the Republican Party commenced a twenty-five year war of genocide against the Plains Indians, killing as many as 60,000 of them, including thousands of women and children, and putting the rest in concentration camps. It did this, according to General Sherman who orchestrated this horribly immoral crusade, to "make way for the railroads" that were being heavily subsidized by the Republican Party. It also plundered the conquered South with exorbitant taxes and the legalized theft of vast tracts of property by party hacks for a decade after the war (so-called "reconstruction"), while doing virtually nothing for the freed slaves. It did nothing while as many as 1 million former slaves died of disease shortly after the war in the worst public health disaster in American history.
The Republican Party has always been about disguising a lust for economic plunder with phony ideas about "freedom," "Christianity," "equality," "civilization,"and other nice-sounding words. The War to Prevent Southern Independence allowed it to finally usher in the Hamiltonian "American System" of high protectionist tariffs for the benefit of Northern manufacturers at the expense of everyone else; a nationalized money supply with its Legal Tender and National Currency Acts; and vast amounts of corporate welfare, starting with the government-subsidized railroad corporations. It created the internal revenue system, invented dozens of new taxes, created the military/industrial complex, ran up historically high levels of debt, and destroyed the founders’ system of federalism or states’ rights as a check on centralized governmental power.
The war of genocide against the Plains Indians was a way of socializing the cost of building the government-subsidized railroads. Having succeeded in eradicating the Indians, the Republican Party next turned to tiny little countries like Cuba and the Philippines to plunder under the usual phony excuse of spreading "freedom" and "the American way" around the globe. The Republican Party claimed to embrace the message of Reverend Josiah Strong’s 1885 book, Our Country, which proclaimed a supposedly sacred American duty to "civilize and Christianize inferior peoples." They portrayed themselves as one big gang of Mother Theresas, selflessly sacrificing endlessly for the benefit of strangers in foreign lands.
A particularly galling example of this spectacular hypocrisy and dishonesty is the conquest of the Kingdom of Hawaii. By the early 1890s American businessmen had been in Hawaii for many years as corporate sugar and pineapple growers. Encouraged by the Republican Party’s aggressive and imperialistic foreign policy, they sought to get the Party to overthrow the government of Hawaii and make it an American province under their political control. They wanted to turn it into the perfect Hamiltonian corporate welfare state, in other words. As described by Gregg Jones in Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream (p. 23):
On January 14, [1893] Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani attempted to curb the power of U.S. commercial interests in the kingdom’s legislature by promulgating a new constitution. A thirteen-member coalition of Americans called the Committee of Safety angrily resisted. Two members, Judge Sanford Dole and businessman Lorrin Thurston, met secretly with U.S. envoy John Stevens and plotted to overthrow the monarchy. The committee’s armed militia promptly seized key buildings, triggering the landing of American troops. The group set up an ad hoc government headed by Dole . . .The "Committee of Safety" employed a paramilitary organization called the "Honolulu Rifles" who were allied with its puppet political party in Hawaii known as the "Missionary Party." (Sanford Dole was the son of New England Yankee missionaries who migrated to Hawaii from Maine). The Honolulu Rifles forced the king of Hawaii to sign a new constitution that was known as the "bayonet constitution" because the King was literally threatened with being gutted by bayonets unless he signed the document, "Godfather" style. The new constitution disenfranchised all Asians (considered part of an "inferior race" by the Republican business elite) and most everyone else except for affluent landowners, most of whom were Americans and their business associates. It imposed Sanford Dole as puppet president. His cousin James Dole shortly thereafter founded the Dole Fruit Company which prospers to this day...Read more>> The Party of Great Moral Frauds by Thomas DiLorenzo
