Have it your way.
You can say that, but I don’t think it’s correct. I don’t know of any references the founding fathers made to to the East India Company.
Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t. But I’m not really understanding why you think the Civil War happened, with statements like you’ve made. As a result of the war, we stayed one country, and northern capital was able to come in the south and the south industrialized. But under your lack of a civil war scenario, northern capital is still coming in the south and the south is still industrializing.
None directly, I don’t think. But it was because of the East India Company they got most of their funding. John Hancock expanded his already large fortune through the smuggling of Dutch tea in the American Colonies. When the East India Company was granted a monoply to sell to all the Colonies with the Tea Act, Hancock found himself being undercut by legal goods.
He sponsored the Tea Party and people like John Adams even though he didn’t directly participate. The complaint of the revolutionaries was that they were being taxed without consent (since a new tax was added to pay for the tea) but they were receiving funding from Hancock because he wanted the British government to stop undercutting his smuggling profits.
The whole point of the Tea Act from the British veiwpoint was to stop illegal smuggling. Even with the new tax it was cheaper then both legally and illegally purchased Dutch tea.
How that relates to a suspicion of large corporations I don’t know.
With the South as a separate nation with borders recognized by the North, the South’s relationship to NC would have been quite different. At the time, the South was quite fractious but it would not have taken them long to realize that cooperating on things like a common RR gauge among themselves and with the North just made good business sense. Likewise, with war off the table, NC would move to accommodate and encourage active trade with its new (and now independent) neighbor to the south. That too, would just be good business.
I really need to get a life.
A couple of drinks, a paused video and I thought I’d go thru the posts from #1 to whatever it is now and clean up any loose ends.
You post is jest, I assume. My one prayer is, Lord, keep me sensitive to irony.
None the less, I will try to look at your comedic attempt seriously. In the OP I stated that to make sense of where we are now as a nation we need to understand our origins. True?
Our Constitution, as I have amply and ably demonstrated here, legalizes and protects stolen wealth (there is no other kind), no matter how it is obtained and it further dictates that property trumps humanity.
Once the FF legally established their right to the spoils of exploitation and repression (along with the right to further exploit and repress) they allied themselves with Capitalism and the eventual corporate control of governmental foreign and domestic policies was guaranteed.
Pakistan, per se, is a third world country “governed” by competing oligarchies with nukes. It could instantly become a “super power” should it begin to use them on folks near by. But, obviously, Pakistan plays a large role in America’s try for US ME hegemony, and local squabbles are back burnered.
So, it is fair to say, that as long as Pakistan as a cohesive unit stays bought, it is an important part of The Super Power.
I’m not sure these thoughts are very coherent —it’s late at night around here — but I’ll take a shot.
The least you could do, adhay, is apply Marxist theory correctly. Had the South managed to make its secession stick in the long-term, they would definitionally have been on the global periphery. Poor, agricultural, non-industrialized countries = periphery. Right?
As a member of the periphery, the South would have been exploited mercilessly (or so says Marxist theory). Moreover, the Southern elites would have eventually become stooges of the global centre (the North), not defenders of Southern economic interests. And actually, this part is believable —keep in mind that the bulk of white Southerners didn’t own slaves, and the production capacity tended to be pretty centrally located (that is, held by relatively few elites.) All of this means no industrialization, no development, no wealth.
Of course, you’re also misapplying Marxist theory in missing that the proletariat of the South consisted of slaves.
Anyway, the idea that we can describe American history in a balanced or even true way by describing it as the wealthy versus the poor (or the powerful versus the weak) is ridiculous. The American Revolution and the Civil War were both very much the powerful fighting the powerful, which you yourself described. But the Southern elite were drastically overrepresented in the federal government — why should we blame the North for having so many more people and so much more industrial capacity?
Also, describing American history in general, I can agree that the American Revolution was fought on behalf of (mostly) the interests of the American upper class. But the norms that those elites established did not work to their benefit in regard to the poor. How do you explain that fact?
Murder, rape and robbery aren’t specifically denied by the Constitution, either.
And again, a juristic person and a real, live person aren’t the same thing. Without understanding that, you, in a very literal sense, don’t know what it is you’re talking about.
I have never used the word Marx on these boards and I have little hope for the rise of the proletariat in this country when many of them believe that tax cuts for the rich, heavy military spending, right to work laws and the scaling back of social programs somehow benefits them.
How the South would have fared had they been allowed to secede can be nothing but conjecture. It was clear to the Southern elite that, in the long run, slavery was neither economically viable nor sustainable in the face of world opinion. Perhaps they would have recognized that their only real alternative was to collectively industrialize while phasing out slavery. Perhaps not.
Again, I have never used the word proletariat on these boards.
If there was a Southern proletariat, it was the poor white sharecropper who often had less to eat and no less work to do than a lucky slave. Had they recognized that despite their whiteness they shared the blacks’ real social and economic station, they could have led a slave revolt and easily overthrown their common masters. Instead, many of them voluntarily trooped off to defend the very system that kept them in bondage. Their social consciousness had been blunted by the idea that the term “nigger” had something to do with race. That idea persist with the same effect to this day. 
I agree that the democratic trappings of our constitutional republic have clouded the real issue thruout our history.
Norms?
Help me understand. WTF are you talking about?
What norms are you referring to? And what do you mean by “established”? Elites cannot simply impose social change. They must obtain the cooperation of the lower classes in some manner. Often they get less than they want. Or more. That the Whig leaders ended up with a social revolution does not mean they sought one.
No, these acts are denied to citizens by the power granted in the Constitution to each State to make its own laws concerning them. The Constitution says nothing about the rights of or the consequences to a State which attempts secession.
However, once Congress granted SCOTUS judicial review by its acquiescence in accepting Marbury Madison marbury v. madison summary - Google Search , SCOTUS became the supreme legislative body and, in the end, determines our foreign and domestic policies.
The following is my cite for any claims I make about SCOTUS. Some time spent with this is essential to understand our morph from a nation of modest family fortunes and a large underclass to being part of global corporate kleptocracy with a global underclass.
Timeline of Personhood Rights and Powers Timeline of Personhood Rights and Powers, by Jan Edwards et al .
The Court is, generally, a dragging anchor to social change. SCOTUS snagged us on segregation for 58 years with Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Plessy v. Ferguson - Wikipedia until it finally ‘broke free’ with Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Brown v. Board of Education - Wikipedia.
But when it comes to legalizing large-scale theft, SCOTUS’s judicial legislation of corporate ‘people’ into existence is fabulously innovative.
Seriously?
A juristic person, or a legal person, is a legal construct for allowing a multitude of people to act as a single person for legal purposes like court cases and contracts. That’s how things like companies and government departments appear in court cases. In Brown V. Board of Education, there’s obviously no human being called “Board of Education.” Board of Education is a legal person.
If you didn’t have juristic persons, you quite literally could not run a modern country. Corporations are legal persons for the rather simple reason that there is no other logical way to regard them. If they weren’t, then a corporation - big or small, and most of them are small - could not be held to a contract, could not rent a building to do business in, couldn’t pay taxes, couldn’t do anything. In fact, without the concept of legal personage, the government couldn’t legally do anything, either. How could anyone work for the Department of Transportation if the DoT has no legal standing and so can’t even sign a legal employment contract?
When the courts refer to corporations as “persons,” this is what they mean. They don’t mean that corporations are actually legally identical to human beings. You didn’t seriously think the Supreme Court had ruled that XYZ Movers Inc. was legally equivalent to a human being, did you?
Oh, corporations. See my post above yours.
I have no problems with juristic persons per se, or for that matter, corporations as long as they as they are subject to tight regulations enforced by the chartering agency, as they were by the States early on. In it’s 1889 decision and in it’s further reading of the Constitution, SCOTUS (The Ultimate Senate Of The US, USOFUS) gradually turned these limited juristic persons into entities with most of the rights of citizens and few of their responsibilities.
Oh, so you’re just making stuff up. Well, carry on, then.
Jefferson Davis Jefferson Davis - Wikipedia
So, Had Lincoln given this man some respect, things would be way different today.
One thing I can tell you for sure, we wouldn’t be dealing with Castro, Chavez and Morales.
I’m sure I need not point the irony encapsulated in Jefferson Finis.
Why don’t you check out the border States that line the southern bank of the Ohio. Had Lincoln not exempted them from the Emancipation Proclamation, what do you suppose the Union would look like today? And if Lincoln had allowed the slaveholding States to secede, which side of the border would the border States end up on after some brutal internal civil wars?
I’ll spare you a lot detail but think about how convenient Florida turned out to be for a jumping off place into Cuba.
That’s pretty much the outcome of Lincoln’s resort to war.
This and the rest of your argument is merely a recounting of post-bellum history. Had, INSTEAD, Lincoln allowed the South to walk off, NC would have been quite happy deal with SC. With war off the table, the relative merits of their two armies do not enter into their negotiations and the continuation of slave running, at least for a while, is a powerful incentive for cooperation. NC’s support of SC’s industrialization would have been a natural given Jeff Davis (please see my cite above). And don’t forget Dixie’s West Point generals. They would have then been set up to lead the charge into our mutual defense of the Monroe Doctrine instead being reduced to defending Southern Womanhood.
[quote=“adhay, post:76, topic:535521”]
And if Lincoln had allowed the slaveholding States to secede, which side of the border would the border States end up on after some brutal internal civil wars?
[quote]
No. If Lincoln had allowed the slaveholding states to secede, not only would Kentucky and Missouri have stayed in the US, but Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, all of which seceded in real life, would have stayed in the US. Those states all had strong Unionist sentiment and only seceded after Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s request for troops. It’s possible Texas, which had seceded, would have attempted to unsecede.
I don’t know what you mean by the “continuation of slaverunning”. By the time of the Civil War, the importation of slaves was illegal in the whole country, and it was illegal in the confederacy after it seceded.
But the rest of what you’re talking seems strange to me. The industrialization of the south, and northerners and southerners fighting together in war for “mutual defense of the Monroe Doctrine” all happened in real life, and it happened because we were one country. Splitting the US up into different countries doesn’t make it more likely to happen, it makes it less likely. Ideas, capital, movements, all move more quickly and easily within one country than between countries. If the CSA existed as a separate country from the USA, neither country would have been able to develop as quickly and as powerfully as we all developed together.
That would be West Virginia and Kentucky. Considering what led to the formation of West Virgina I can’t see them joining the Confederacy. Kentucky was also Unionist. The State Assembly was firmly Unionist and in a special Congressional election in 1861 9 of the 10 seats were won by Unionists.
The US was important to Cuba’s economy, but Cuba wasn’t as important to the US. And there is no reason why the ports of the North couldn’t have continued trading.
They walked off in the first place because the two sides couldn’t talk out their differences. There is no reason to think the North would have been all gung ho to rebuild a country that had just walked off with half of their territory. There was no advantage to the North in doing so, unless you look at it as America rebuilding itself as happened during Reconstruction.
Maybe, maybe not. Without the threat of Northern retaliation and faced with the legal secession of the diehards which would significantly reduce their power in the USG, who could say what these states might have done?
Weak argument on my part, I admit. OTOH, had the South not had to deal with being a part of the US and legally subject to Northern anti-slavery sentiment, would the slave trade have remained illegal there? Would Northern shipping interests have resisted the easy money in smuggling?
My phrase was used ironically. The Monroe Doctrine basically set aside the hemisphere for US expansion and exploitation and the South had it’s share of expansionists and exploiters. It is true, however, that US imperialism didn’t really get under way until the turn of the century after much economic consolidation in the North post-bellum. And if the USG had had had to deal with the South as an expansionist competitor rather than a thoroughly subdued colony, it might not have been so quick to move into Latin and South America.
Anyhoo, how things would have turned out had the South been allowed to secede is moot and not central to the OP which tries to present a frank look at the origins and rise of today’s global corporate kleptocracy. Our little digression into the alternate reality of an independent South, however, has been enlightening to me and I have come around to the position that it was not the black and white slam dunk i originally had thought it to be. Thanks for your help.
As I said in my previous post to CA, the other points in your post I admit can be reasonably argued either way.
But, about Cuba. Cuba was both a strategic Caribbean (Gitmo) outpost and a colonial plum ripe for picking which would most likely have been picked by the South. Had the South invaded Cuba, it probably would not have had to resort to the public “justification” of freeing the Cuban people from their harsh Spanish masters. It simply would have replaced them.
Of course, the USG did the same thing by establishing a “democracy” there which was run by US corporate interests.