As with the “Aztec Indians”, Paracelsus, war IS the religion still of America...... be careful.

I didn’t know that Harding let Debs out of jail...it was a BS lockup anyway.

You know far more about Mellon than I do--my main concentration was on C.E. Hughes.  What was clear was that Mellon was TRYING to do what was best for the nation and working hard at it.

I have seen NO evidence of fluoridation doing anything other than reducing cavities.  I see no evidence in my 13 year old child, who was reading at 3 1/2 and has been through many, many classics already--and is a straight A student, and never had a cavity.  I see his classmates and so many seem bright and alert--and all drink our public water.

There have been similar complaints about chlorine causing cancer.  They are actually true. But the number of deaths and illnesses caused by removing chlorine from our drinking water was shown in Parugway to increase 10 to 100-fold.  So you either take a very small risk from chorine, or a HUGE risk from not taking them.

Hey! Did I mistype something--Must be my Flouride Toothpaste!

I like that Harding let Eugene Debbs out of jail. He had a fundamental fairness about him that Wilson never had. I do regret that my grandfather got involved in a little cock up having to do with Department of Interior. I’ll just leave that alone. Obscure family history. Ah’em!

As to Mellon, he proceeded to push for lower income taxes which had been raised during the Great War. He especially emphasized lowering the income tax on wages. The inner libertarian within me brisltes at the idea that wages from work should be taxed. Though I have no such qualms about taxing unearned income from AAA bonds. It was part of Mellon’s tax plan to tax lightly hard working investment capital, such as went into plant & equipment, while taxing more heavily lazy capital. I can appreciate the difference. One of Mellon’s creations, the ALCOA Corporation, lobbied heavily to put fluoride into the water as a health measure. The problem with eletrolyzing bound aluminum is not only do you have a cathode of purified aluminum, but you also liberate great quantities of fluorine. This now goes into our water. As a result we have a population with diminished IQ. BTW, the U.S. Public Health Service was under the authority of the U.S. Treasury. Mellon left Treasury in 1930, but his agenda lived on. As to Mellon’s leadership under Hoover, he pushed for institutions with underwater assets to sell their stocks, bonds, and other securities in ‘30 and ‘31. I think such a policy only worsened the blight. It would have been better if government took over the books for the distressed assets. From a free market stand point this sounds like utter heresy, but we had been living under the cartel of the Federal Reserve, so there was no true free market in capital anyway.  So you are left with the tools that dug the hole in the first place, which means you have to use those same tools to fill up the hole.

In yet another banking crisis involving Germany, the US bankers wanted helped from the American treasury to guarantee the American loans to German debtors. Mellon advocated for the bankers, and Hoover objected to American taxpayers bailing out the bankers.

I know this account of Mello contradicts my dim view of Mellon pushing liquidation securities by large institutions. To tell you the truth I haven’t made up my mind. I worry about the moral hazard of financial institutions relying on tax revenues or debasement of the currency to save their hides.

As to earlier policy by the Fed and Mellon’s influence over it at Treasury, I think Mellon knew all too well we were giving the British a subsidy in order to keep the pound at pre war levels at our detriment. This required that the United States should inflate its currency in comparison to the British currency. This would mean that world gold holders would favor putting gold into British banks as opposed to American banks. Mellon, who was under the influence of Benjamin Strong at Federal Reserve Bank of New York, would remain perfectly complacent over the gold drain. But this is nothing new. We melted down our silver coinage and exported it to Brittainia during the Great War so as support the British system when they were running out of hard money base on account of the war. I don’t think we got real value for that transaction either. It seems that the BoE was running the Federal Reserve as one of its branches. America was like a big healthy bull that attracted parasites. 

As to the war debts, I am in agreement with you that it seems the bankers and weapons makers got the best of all the belligerents. It figures that LBJ would still use old war debts as an old crusty, bloody shirt of sorts. I could guess that the French were turning in their Bretton Woods dollars for gold, and this could bring the debt issue up.

I’ll be on vacation for the next two weeks. It has been real.

We are in agreement about Link. 

One of the little-known things about Harding was that as stupid and inept as he was, he was smart enough (or well-advised enough) to place smart, tough, knowledgable people at State, Treasury and Commerce--Frank Kellogg, Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover.

Kellogg was succeeded by one of the greatest SecStates we ever had, Charles Evans Hughes. Hughes professionalized and de-politicized the Foreign Service saying that HE was the only politician in the State Dept, and that he wasn’t a very good one.

The use of force from 1921-1926 in Central Europe was not military force (though we did occupy the Rhineland).  It was the massive war debts owed to us by France and the UK. France’s debt was on the order of $33billion--in 1925 dollars.  We steadfastly refused to accept that there was any link between the debt and the reparations owed by Germany at Versailles.  This debt was used as a hammer up until the 1960’s under LBJ!

Money and banking was the weapon of choice to exert our influence, and Kellogg and Hughes after him understood this intimately.  (BTW, Kellogg’s name is learned by schoolkids for the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a brilliant out-maneuvering by Kellogg to avoid bi-lateral treaty with Briand and France--Briand’s biggest failure)

We can agree to disagree on Germany’s chances of winning--but the German political leaders took the calculated risk in 1916 of resuming unrestricted sub warfare hoping they could end the war before the US jumped in.  No, they didn’t want war with the US.  Yes, they did plan an invasion, but that is given more credence than it deserves.  Simply, the German High Command was a VERY advanced and effective organization that ALWAYS planned ahead, and did lots and lots of contingency planning.  The JCS here now does the same thing as a matter of course. I’m sure there are invasion plans for Uzbekistan, Madagascar, Urugway, Belgium, and Antarctica--all contingency plans because IF you need them in an emergency, then it’s too late to plan them.

I find Arthur S. Link arrogant, and presumptuous. True, I only base this on one pronouncement of his, but I surmise the general trend of his world view conforms to his declaration in praise of Woodrow Wilson to “lay the foundations of a new world order."(1) Wilson had been oft quoted in saying that he wanted “to make the world safe for democracy”. I find such thinking insufferable as it thieves from the American middle classes through usury, inflation and taxes to subsidize an enterprise that is unprofitable to most citizens. This project can only erode the American citizen’s right to a government that safeguards his livelihood and civil liberties. Bryzinski in one of his seminal works mentioned the need to soft pedal empire building as it works against the general welfare of the citizen.

As to Germany winning the Great War, I don’t think they had the logistics to conquer GB. I think they were aiming for a stalemate- <>idem quod antebellum</i> (As a side note, the Germans always seem to under estimate the analytics of the enemy when it comes cryptography.) The British were never in serious trouble by German blockades through U-boats. The British communicated as little as possible by wireless. Most British ship commications were done by flagmen using semifores. So it was always a mystery to a German u-boat commander where British routes lay. Britannia still ruled the waves. And this meant that German farmer was hindered by the British blockade of imported potash and ammonianates. The diet of the average German consisted potatos and bread. There were 240 strikes in 1916, which was apprecaibly higher than the 156 in 1915. The wheels were starting to come off of the German politcal-economy.

As to the Zimmerman telegram, I find it interesting that it was British intelligence that broke the code.  And I wonder if Zimmerman might have been a mole. I don’t see how it would have been in Germany’s interest to rouse the Americans into war. The telegram came right at the time that the British were tentatively approaching the Geramns about peace talks. It would be hard to find such a precise occurence of deus ex machina.

This intervention of American forces in Germany I had not known of. I do know that as general foreign policy, the actions of American governmnt are so compartmentalized that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. At the same time that American military forces were dispatched to the Soviet Union to ostensibly support the White Russiom counter revolution, AG Palmer was sending in the National Guard troops to stop “Bolshevikism” in the labor movement. What is left unsaid is that Americna forces in Russia were actually defending the new Russia’s trans-Siberian railroad from imprecations of the Japanese in Asia. While grateful Russion citizens in Vladivostoc were giving heart felt adieu’s to American Marines, the Soviet press was writing condemnations of capitalisitic America.

As to the Japanese in China, this was formerly a German concession that had been given over to the Japanese as part of the Versailles process. The Locarno Pact had been instrumental in planting booby traps such as this.

Excuse my typos--I left an embarrassing number of them in this post.

Sorry, I don’t have any quotes to offer. This was a looooong time ago, back in the early 60s. But my memory is clear as day about it. I’m sure that’s not going to be sufficient to dissuade you, but it will have to do.

Could you quote any JBS articles that specifically blamed Jewish people for monoplization, communist conspiracy or self defeaing policies of the United States government?

Paracelsus, you know not of what you speak. Welch may have made a public display of rejecting anti-semitism (it would be PR suicide to do otherwise), but believe me, their literature and message to JBS members was unabashedly racist and anti-semitic. My grandfather was a member, God rest his soul, and I saw their newsletters and argued with him about JBS philosophy. You could barely slip a piece of paper between Nazis and JBS-ers, and that piece of paper was only the mention of the term “socialism.”

JBS was right-wing conspiracy theory on steroids.

Robert Welch disavowed and denied any connection to anti-semitism. Welch’s organization embarrassed people like Averell Harriman, who could not explain his actions in regard to the Soviet Union. The problem for Buckley was that the Birchers were correct on many things, and explaining the discordances away would be embarrassing. In the 1960’s the US export permits provided the USSR with precision equipment to manufacture ball bearing. These ball bearings would be used to in nuclear intercontinental missiles. The JBS knew of these things and tried to publicize it.

http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/best_enemy/cha pter_01.htm

This conspiracy researcher sees no good in Obama, because is part of a dialectic that is strangling and obtrusive to liberty. I see no good coming from his adminstration that is networked so tightly to the establishment with members from Skull and Bones, the CFR, and the Trilateral Commission. That said, I must point out all the other front runners have the same disadvantages. The only reason we have a republic is that the people would see too easily the agenda of a monarchy, therefore they now have the illusion of choice.

Only initially!  It was overturned on appeal…

Still, thanks for the chuckle!

So Buckley was wrong--but unlike Chimpy McFlightsuit and Darth Cheney--and Sen. McCain, WFB RECOGNIZED it and realized that Bush failed in Iraq, WHY he failed in Iraq, the Bush’s hubris caused that failure and prevented Bush from recognizing that failure and acting to ameliorate it.  WFB was a thinking man.

So instead of attacking my appropriate defense of WFB’s qualities, DC, you sink to the gutter and attack me.

If you don’t know what “Inherit the Wind” refers to, that’s typical of your ongoing ignorance.  How hard is it to Google it?

But, since that seems beyond you: It’s a fictionalized play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee about the Scopes Trial and Clarence Darrow’s BRILLIANT defense of Scopes against the forces of ignorance led by William Jennings Bryan that want, to this day, to teach the Bible instead of science, and in many states are doing that to our kids.

It was made into a movie in the early ‘60’s by Stanley Kramer starring Spencer Tracy, Frederick March, Gene Kelly, Claude Akins, Dick York, Noah Beery, and Harry Morgan.