As we move forward and watching this rudderless Adminstration madly careen off the guard rails of propriety and good sense, a clear pattern has gradually emerged. Going beyond the violent outbursts of vicious racism they repeatedly enable, excuse and not too tacitly support from the “Good people on both sides in Charlottesville” to the embarrassing and clumsy attempts to exploit a Gold Star widow’s grief and pain for political brownie points and how they repeatedly stereotyped the African-American Congresswoman as a shuck and jiving race hustling “empty barrell” when in fact she simply told the truth about Trump’s patheticly clunky condolence call, to their clear strain of deep authortarianism as Trump’s repeatedly calls to send the New York Truck Attacker to Gitmo even though he was apprehended by NYPD on U.S. soil not by soldiers overseas, and for Bowe Bergdahl to be executed — even when the harsh possible punishment he faced was life in prison — ultimately helped contribute to the judge’s decision to release Bergdahl without any jail time at all.
Trump, however, is partly responsible for Bergdahl’s relatively light sentence (he faced up to life imprisonment). The judge presiding over the case, Col. Jeffery R. Nance of the Army, said during a hearing late last month that Trump’s public comments about the case would be treated as “mitigation evidence.”
“I will consider the president’s comments as mitigation evidence as I arrive at an appropriate sentence,” Nance said, adding that Trump’s remarks would weigh in favor of lighter punishment.
And now this week following the indictment of Trump’s former campaign Chairman Paul Manafort, and his partner Rick Gates as well as the Guilty plea from Trump aid George Papadopoulos we continue to these odd mystifying seemingly incomprehensible outburst from the like of Kelly about the “honorable” decision of Confederate General Robert E. Lee to choose his “state over his nation” — which sounds like the definition of “Treason” to me — and then the Delores Umbrage act of Huckabee-Sanders who proclaims that it’s “disgusting and absurd to suggest anyone in the White House would support Slavery” even though on many levels that's exactly what General Kelly had just done, and even more seriously, it’s exactly the core of the ultimate White [Supremacy] House agenda — supercharging corporate power to the direct expense of worker safety, worker rights and protections from their access to Healthcare to their ability to fight back against being abused by the employers, ripped off by banks and access clean air and drinking water.
It’s all about consolidating power among the powerful and letting the powerless ultimately suffer all the consequences. Just as they did during the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Again. This is why Trump, Kelly and even Huckabee-Sanders et al. have a natural affinity the Confederacy, it’s ultimately exactly what they aspire to recreate.
Of course we know that during Kelly’s Fox News interview he made quite a few controversial statements, although I suppose to a certain crowd of people they aren’t controversial at all. To them, it’s simply “both sider-ism.”
In an interview on Monday night with Fox News, Kelly was asked whether a Virginia church should have removed plaques honoring Confederate General Robert E. Lee and President George Washington, both Virginians. Kelly said figures of the past could not be viewed through the lens of current moral values.
“I think it’s just very, very dangerous and it shows you … how much of a lack of appreciation of history and what history is,” Kelly said. “I will tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man.”
“The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand,” Kelly added.
Even Robert E. Lee's own descendant’s thought this was a steaming shyte pile.
“It is clear to me that General Kelly sees honor in a man who fought for continued enslavement of people and chattel slavery,” Lee said when asked for comment. “That is, after all, what states’ rights was for. There is no honor in that to me. John Kelly would be best to keep our president from tweeting and enacting racist policies, rather than engaging in a debate over the racist past of the South.”
Most who’ve responded to Kelly’s comment such as Te-Nahisi Coates have pointed out that compromise was far from absent during the period that ultimately led to the Civil War.
“(The) notion that Civil War resulted from a lack of compromise is belied by all the compromises made on enslavement from America’s founding,” Coates began. “I mean, like, it’s called The three fifths compromise for a reason. But it doesn’t stand alone. Missouri Compromise. Kansas-Nebraska Act.”
He said Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party’s first presidential platform was a compromise between abolition and expansion
“Lincoln was not an abolitionist,” Coates argued. “He proposed to limit slavery’s expansion, not end it. During the Civil War, Lincoln repeatedly sought to compromise by paying reparations — to slaveholders — and shipping blacks out the country.”
And there were even more compromises made. In addition to the three-fifths clause, there was the Fugitive Slave clause which put the responsibility to find and recovery run away slaves onto the non-slave states requiring them to help facility the continuation of the slave trade that they themselves opposed. Several northern states refused to honor this compromise, and ultimately the a new deal was struck with Federal Marshalls taking over the responsibility under the Fugitive Slave Act.
The Fugitive Slave Acts were a pair of federal laws that allowed for the capture and return of runaway slaves within the territory of the United States. Enacted by Congress in 1793, the first Fugitive Slave Act authorized local governments to seize and return escaped slaves to their owners and imposed penalties on anyone who aided in their flight. Widespread resistance to the 1793 law later led to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which added further provisions regarding runaways and levied even harsher punishments for interfering in their capture. The Fugitive Slave Acts were among the most controversial laws of the early 19th century, and many Northern states passed special legislation in an attempt to circumvent them. Both laws were formally repealed by an act of Congress in 1864.
Statutes regarding refugee slaves existed in America as early as 1643 and the New England Confederation, and slave laws were later enacted in several of the 13 original colonies. Among others, New York passed a 1705 measure designed to prevent runaways from fleeing to Canada, and Virginia and Maryland drafted laws offering bounties for the capture and return of escaped slaves.
It was laws such as these which enabled the capture of free African citizens already within the United States to be placed into Slavery as was the case with Solomon Northrup as shown in the recent film 12 years a Slave.
This was also the case with the Dred Scott decision several years later as Scott and his wife Harriet attempted to purchase their freedom from his owners widow while living as a free person in the North, yet rather that grant that freedom she used the Fugitive Slave act to have him and his wife kidnapped from the North and returned, and then the Supreme Court argued that not only did slaves have no rights as citizens, neither could any African in America ever be a full citizens with full rights.
Dred Scott decision, formally Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on March 6, 1857, ruled (7–2) that a slave (Dred Scott) who had resided in a free state and territory (where slavery was prohibited) was not thereby entitled to his freedom; that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States; and that the Missouri Compromise (1820), which had declared free all territories west of Missouri and north of latitude 36°30′, was unconstitutional. The decision added fuel to the sectional controversy and pushed the country closer to civil war.
Southern Judge Taney argued that because of the Constitutions original inclusion of the three-fifths, and Fugitive Slave clauses — it was not constructed to include Africans, as people. He argued that “We The People...” didn’t include Africans. That “All men are created equal” — simply didn’t count for certain people, because he said so. He argued that there was no basis even for the Missouri compromise, which allowed that state to remain free of slavery, to even have been struck.
How exactly do you compromise with that? By definition there is no “good faith” in that position.
So after you had Kelly make his statements essentially bestowing “Honor" onto the position of men who refused to believe in the humanity of their fellow man — ignoring the reality that such so-called Honor is ultimately hollow and pointless if it allows for such a broad loophole — you had Huckabee-Sanders pulling her Penelope Pissed-Off routine at anyone suggesting the Kelly had said — what Kelly had actually said.
“All of our leaders have flaws” Sanders replied. “Washington, Jefferson, JFK, Roosevelt. That doesn’t diminish their contributions to our country and it can’t erase them from our history.”
“General Kelly was making the point that just because history isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it is not our history,” she added.
No, he wasn’t saying that at all. He didn't say Lee was “flawed” he rationalize and justified the Confederate fight to preserve the Slave trade as simply an “honorable dispute” when it demonstrably wasn’t. People who support and preserve corporate racial terrorism are by definition not honorable. They may have deluded themselves into believing otherwise in selected cases, but that doesn’t mean we have give that delusion validation or credence now.
“You are a proud daughter of the south,” Thrush pressed. “When you see a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, is there a differentiation you think with certain Confederate figures who don’t deserve to be honored?”
“I don’t think we should debate every moment of history,” Sanders replied. “I think those moments took place. There are moments that we are a lot less proud of than others but we can’t erase the fact that they happened. I think you have to determine where that line is.”
Yeah, ok, that’s just plain bullshit. Kelly was saying we need to maintain a “appreciation of history”, when perhaps what he meant was a appreciation of history in context. Nathan Bedford Forrest created the KKK, so he deserves a statue for that? Sure, at the time, there were men who agreed with Taney, people like Forrest, and there were others who did not — but since this was the Supreme Court it became the final decision for the nation until Congress ultimately acted following the War.
Let’s back up a second.
America didn’t always have Slavery, it was something that was created by several colonies to solve an economic problem that they had saddled themselves with by the use of temporary indentured servitude. Prior to racial chattle slavery, it was common for people who were considered criminals or simply debtor to choose to be placed in a period of service to repay their debt or to pay for their passage into the new world. None of this was racial at the time, that came later.
Indentured servants first arrived in America in the decade following the settlement of Jamestown by the Virginia Company in 1607.
The idea of indentured servitude was born of a need for cheap labor. The earliest settlers soon realized that they had lots of land to care for, but no one to care for it. With passage to the Colonies expensive for all but the wealthy, the Virginia Company developed the system of indentured servitude to attract workers. Indentured servants became vital to the colonial economy.
The timing of the Virginia colony was ideal. The Thirty Year's War had left Europe's economy depressed, and many skilled and unskilled laborers were without work. A new life in the New World offered a glimmer of hope; this explains how one-half to two-thirds of the immigrants who came to the American colonies arrived as indentured servants.
Servants typically worked four to seven years in exchange for passage, room, board, lodging and freedom dues. While the life of an indentured servant was harsh and restrictive, it wasn't slavery. There were laws that protected some of their rights. But their life was not an easy one, and the punishments meted out to people who wronged were harsher than those for non-servants. An indentured servant's contract could be extended as punishment for breaking a law, such as running away, or in the case of female servants, becoming pregnant.
In many cases former indentured servants were promised land of their own and a stable of their own servants to help them handle to labor needed for that land, and in the short term this addressed the labor shortage but after several decades they had another problem. Too many people and not enough unoccupied land to work. Essentially they had built themselves a labor pyramid/ponzi scheme and it was their solution to that problem that eventually split the nation that formed a century later.
In the early years of the colony, many Africans and poor whites -- most of the laborers came from the English working class -- stood on the same ground. Black and white women worked side-by-side in the fields. Black and white men who broke their servant contract were equally punished.
All were indentured servants. During their time as servants, they were fed and housed. Afterwards, they would be given what were known as "freedom dues," which usually included a piece of land and supplies, including a gun. Black-skinned or white-skinned, they became free.
….
Traditionally, Englishmen believed they had a right to enslave a non-Christian or a captive taken in a just war. Africans and Indians might fit one or both of these definitions. But what if they learned English and converted to the Protestant church? Should they be released from bondage and given "freedom dues?" What if, on the other hand, status were determined not by (changeable ) religious faith but by (unchangeable) skin color?
In 1641, Massachusetts became the first colony to legally recognize slavery. Other states, such as Virginia, followed. In 1662, Virginia decided all children born in the colony to a slave mother would be enslaved. Slavery was not only a life-long condition; now it could be passed, like skin color, from generation to generation.
So we have to recognize that the introduction of racial generational Slavery wasn’t a natural occurrence or something that had been imported from England, France, Spain or other colonial nations. it was invented in America.
And it was invented for largely financial reasons, people were then forcibly conscripted, kidnappped and held captive for life — not because they were prisoners of war, or criminals — simply because they could be easily visually identified if they happened to try and escape.
Economics, tied directly to race, was exactly why states like Mississippi succeeded.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.
It’s this core decision, a financial decision that then created a centuries long social distortion that resulted ultimately in the Dred Scott decision and not long afterward the Civil War where the southern slaves states absolutely demanded that they be allowed to continue and expand the practice into future states despite that fact that at the time newly elected, but not yet sworn into office, President-Elect Lincoln had no plan or inclination to try and abolish the practice even after the war began.
In his inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln made a statement that would only later become controversial: "One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute."
The fact that slavery was the crux and cause of the war did not mean, however, that Northerners were ready to fight and die to end slavery. In early 1862, Lincoln believed that most people in the North cared "comparatively little about the Negro, and [were] anxious only for military successes." As he reminded a visiting abolitionist toward the end of January: "We didn't go into the war to put down slavery. To act differently at this moment would, I have no doubt, not only weaken our cause but smack of bad faith. ... The first thing you'd see would be a mutiny in the army."
If we’re going to look back at the Civil War and the institution of Slavery with clear and open eyes, we have to realize that it was first and foremost, about the rich trying to maintain and extend their riches by the direct exploitation of the labor of others. They just happened to have chosen Africans at the time because they were so visually different, but that was merely a convenience. Money was the point of it from the very beginning and everything else that followed from that, the concept of “White Power” and all elements of White Supremacy, the idea of Black inferiority, inherent violence, hostility and criminality are all excuses and after-the-fact rationalizations used to override the violation of basic moral values required to steal people’s life away from them — for profit. Crafting a structure of “protection and enforcement” which is primarily designed to protect the “good” White people from the “righteous wrath of uppity, sex-crazed Mandingo anti-Colonial Mau Man slaves” is exactly how our laws and law enforcement agencies have been structured and why they remain inherently racially biased in practice and application. Slavery didn’t happen because of racism, Racism was created to maintain the economic and social structures that kept the economic gravy train flowing in one direction and one direction only.
Toward those who already have everything they might ever need and away from everyone else. And no, not for everyone White, just the small minority those who were financially pulling the strings and still refuse to let go of them — as well as tossing crumbs to a few of those who were willing to be their jack booted, hood covered foot soldiers of terrorism. The Slave Patrols. The KKK. Hoover’s FBI and COINTELPRO. The Chicago Police when they murdered Fred Hampton. The Philadelphia Police when dropped an aerial bomb on the M.O.V.E. tenement. The DEA. CPB. ICE and the Military Industrial Prison Entertainment Complex.
This answers the core question, how can one man tolerate the abject inhumanity that is Slavery — or the Industrial Prison Complex, or the Drug War, or Discriminatory Red-Lining and the creation of Job Deserts and Economic Ghettos that warehouse the unwanted like open air prisons — how can he stand and do nothing when they see these weapons repeatedly used against their fellow man?
By numbing themselves to the very ideas that “those people” are even human at all. By propagating the excuse that they are little more than animals, beasts, macaque’s and chimpanzees standing on their hind legs and imitating intelligence and sentience. They’re unappreciative and disrespectful, they don’t know how much better they have it here compared to the jungles they were plucked from. They’re violent and dangerous. They don’t know how to stand for the flag and show the proper respect. They simply aren’t worthy of the rights, privileges and protection of Citizens! Therefore we have to have a Merit System to weed out the weak, the dumb and the evil. We have to round them up and throw them all out, then we have to build a wall to keep all the scum out — away from the true Citizens who belong.
This is the America they find so “Great” and want to “Make again”, and it’s also why they get so upset when someone brings the issue of up as Huckabee-Sanders huffily proclaimed “It’s disgusting and absurd to suggest anyone in the White House would support Slavery."
Yeah, well, “Slavery” in modern terms means restoring the core elements of bigoted wage servitude and inhumanity — such as busting Unions and trial lawyers and the ACLU who defend citizens from corporate and government malfeasance, kneecapping the EPA and OSHA, re-instituting the Chain Gang (Joe Arpaio) and For Profit Prisons — all of which is exactly what they support, and exactly their true agenda, restoring the tenets and trappings of Wage Slavery in order to further enrich themselves and their friends — just like their good buddy Kleptocrat Putin — all that is exactly what they’re about.
The fact of the matter is that what led to a Civl War over a century ago remains exactly the same battle we continue to have with modern Republican Confederates and the Trump Administration who claims their tax plan will “turbo charge the economy” but in reality will take away the mortgage deduction, the catastrophic health deduction, the state and local tax deduction for the middle class while granting a $1 Trillion tax cut to the rich — a process that will blow a $1.5 Trillion hole in the deficit which will force immediate and drastic cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and of course, Obamacare.
At the same time we have blows to environmental protection and worker safety — which is intended again to boost corporate profits. Rules preventing the dumping of coal ash into our rivers and streams, pulling back rules to promote Equal Pay, that help prevent corporate wage theft and unsafe working conditions, roll backs on federal overtime rules, and blocking the ability of people to file class actions suits against corrupt companies that rip them off like Wells Fargo or are incompetent and put them at economic risk like Equifax.
All of this tracks in the same way, it all benefits corporate board members and share holders — Owners and Makers not the so-called “Takers” and Manufacturers — while incrementally takes away protections and freedoms bit by bit from workers and consumers gradually edging them toward wage servitude, where they have to again mortgage themselves into years of paying for student debt or medical debt or else be relegated into a second tier economic existence.
It may not be explicitly racial, although when you think about how ICE is being deployed as a national "round up posse" just as the Slave Patrols were for over a century you still have a case of economic power being consolidated and protected using authoritarian force, it’s a bit racial — it’s still absolutely about economics.
Economics and power.