In deference to the holocaust victims and their decendants the Nazi flag is banned in Germany. Why do we still tolerate the sight of the “Stars and Bars”?

JD, you are absolutely correct! 2.5%.  Thanks for the correction. I’m only embarrassed about slipping the digits.

Of course, my point that in 1860 90% of Blacks were enslaved versus 2.5% in prison is STILL a major step.

Even if you take Gulam’s point of “in the system” including parole, probation, work release, etc, there are AT MOST 4 million Blacks in the system, still no more than were enslaved in 1860.

BUT, that’s 10% of the Black citizenry, not 90%. While it’s still far too high, insanely far too high, it still doesn’t compare to 90%.  If 90% of all Black Americans were in the Penal System, well, that would be 36 million, about 12% of the total population.

It is not that Blacks don’t face disparities and discrimination today, and are MUCH more likely to be stopped and arrested than Whites, it says that comparing their status TODAY and saying it’s no better than it was in 1860 is, by any rational standard of comparison, absurd.

“…the South split the Democratic Party and later the country not in the name of states’ rights but because it sought federal government guarantees that slavery would prevail in new states.”

Anyone who diminishes the issue of slavery as being a primary cause of the Civil War is simply wrong.

Those who accuse liberals of being unconcerned about the issue of slavery on moral grounds are ignorant, or practicing simple minded demagoguery. The abolitionists were not agents of Capitalism, you dimwits. According to your logic, Harriet Beecher Stowe was a Capitalist propagandist. You people really are whack!

An economic system based on Capitalist exploitation, with all its evils, is preferable to an economic system based on slavery. After the Civil War, the issue became an agrarian based Capitalist exploitation in the South, and an industrial based Capitalist exploitation in the North. Share croppers and land tenants in the South didn’t have to punch a time clock, labor under the watchful eye of supervisors, and suffer from the soul destroying inhuman demands of their employers, but they were exploited by the leisure class of Capital landholders.

“The lust for money [And everything associated with it] is the root of all…” Western Europeans after years of turmoil, world wars, etc. should be commended for turning away from the quest for empire, for the most part, and for shifting somewhat towards improving the standard of living of the citizens within their borders. Capitalism is still the dominant economic system in the world, and the exploitation and abuses continue, but Europeans have at least made some advances towards moderating those abuses within their own borders. Living under the yoke of Capitalism is in no way a utopia for the exploited. European economies, and the people of so called “Developing Nations,” are currently suffering because of greed lust originating from the centers of world Capitalism.

Things could be worse, but things could also be better. Capitalists are not: Superior beings, they are not God’s chosen ones, they do not have larger penises, they do not have a monopoly on intelligence, nor do they have a monopoly on virtue, quite the contrary. Capitalists, as a social class, and their sycophants, are quite willing to exploit, up to and including real or de facto enslavement in order to serve their greed lust, lust for supremacy, and lust for dominance.

The actual ruling class are Capitalists, they make their appearances with well coiffed hair, wearing expensive cologne, in silk suits, and the most expensive shoes. They travel in personal jets and limousines, own the most expensive homes and automobiles, do business, and vacation in massive yachts, host parties that are sinfully lavish, they are treated with deference wherever they go, and doors are magically opened before them, but they keep their Dorian Gray like portraits concealed in closets. Those portraits portray leering, slovenly, hunched over, individuals with rotting teeth, red pussie eyes, scaled skin infected with pustules, and so on… on a portrait by portrait basis. The worst of the worst are socio-pathological in the extreme: they scoff at concepts of virtue, ridicule the virtuous, they check their balance sheets in order to calculate their self actualization, but they are never satisfied with the volume of their assets. Their balance sheets validate their self evaluations of superiority, but their charts and graphs will never reach heights sufficient to satisfy them.

I digress, slavery was the evil that brought about the Civil War. Capitalists, Plutocrats, whatever… are just very good at manipulating events to serve their ends.

Inherit The Wind

You are correct in pointing out that Gulam’s data is incorrect, but I hope you’re willing to forgive Gulam for his error, because your calculation is also incorrect. Follow me on this: 1 million is 1% of 100 million, 1 million is 2% of 50 million and so on… currently, 2.5% of the total African American population is in prison, according to the data you provided. Having researched the data recently, the actual numbers and percentages of African Americans having been incarcerated both in jail and in prison are astounding, the demographics for certain age groups are also astounding.

I’m sorry if this correction causes you any embarrassment, it’s a little like confusing the Declaration of Independence with the Preamble to the Constitution, as you may recall.

I personally believe Gulam makes some good points, but I also believe some of his accusations are absurd.

Inherit the Wind cannot read. I did not say that there were as many blacks in
prison today I said “in the penal system” which includes millions of additional
blacks on probation.

Quibble about the numbers all you want, but it is clear that the blacks in
America were not really emancipated as claimed, despite the death toll and the
precedent that the Civil War set and the military machine that was built by
Lincoln and his friends. Go look for yourself a the situation of the black man in
America today. I just found this in one search on the internet:

“No society on earth locks away its citizens with such consistency and in such
massive numbers as the United States of America, which has the highest rate of
imprisonment in the world. The total number of people incarcerated in
American jails reached 2,424,279 in 2008, including 1,518,559 federal and
state prisoners, 13,576 territorial prisons, 785,556 local jails, 9,957 in ICE
facilities, 1,651 in military facilities, 2,135 prisoners in jails in Amerindian
nations, 92,845 in juvenile facilities and an alleged several thousand in foreign,
secret and overseas prisons (1). If one includes people on probation or parole,
the number inflates to 8 million people. Despite being home to only 5% of the
world’s population, the U.S. houses a staggering 25% of the world’s
prisoners…. There is simply no question that a dramatic racial disproportion of
the incarcerated population exists in the United States of America. The
proportions of African-Americans imprisoned are disproportionate in literally
every single state in the United States. Hispanic Americans, too, are unfairly
victimized, but more so by the United States’ recent turn towards extreme anti-
Mexican chauvinism.”

Who do liberal Americans think they are? What gives them the right, when they
sport this kinds of justice statistics, to legislate morality to others, especially
when those “morals” negate the fundamental patriarchal social order that was
dominant in all of the world’s most successful civilizations for millennia? When
America imprisons so many and claims the right to murder others at will
abroad, their talk of defending freedom becomes pretty silly.

I maintain that the political Left as it operates in the US, and exemplified by
this article lauding the Crusader Rabbit mentality of the Civil War, is a full
partner with the Right in creating and sustaining these colonial wars. They
provide and further develop the philosophical jargon that gives huge portions
of the American population the illusion that the war in Afghanistan is one giant
service project, just like the Civil War, killing with a “terrible quick sword” and all
of that obscene nonsense. “While truth is marching on” and all that Civil War
jingoism sounds more and more absurd as time goes by, but some clowns
apparently still buy into it, and it is a naked intellectual disgrace that has played
no small part in bringing America to where it is today.

Gulam:

Glad to see someone with his eyes open.

The majority of folks have their heads up their ass, and are more than comfortable with their distorted world view.

Gulam is the type who has facts shown to be false, then re-states them later as fact.
“There are today in the United States more black Americans in the penal system than there were slaves
in the United States in 1860. “

This is patently false as anyone with grade school arithmetic can prove.

1) Fact: there are currently 2.4 million Americans incarcerated.
2) Fact: 38.2% are Black, meaning just under a million Black Americans are currently incarcerated.
3) Fact: The slave population in the United States in the 1860 census was 4 million.

Conclusion: At the dawn of the Civil War, 4 times as many Black people were enslaved as are CURRENTLY incarcerated.  1 million incarcerated is NOT greater than 4 million enslaved.  Only a Republican politician would try to convince us otherwise.

Some more numbers:
4) In 1860, there were 4.4 million Black Americans
5) There are now 40 million Black Americans today.

Conclusion:
90% of Black Americans were enslaved in 1860.
0.25% (1/4 of 1%) of Black Americans are incarcerated today.

How is a decrease from 90% to 0.25% definable as a “bad thing”?  Clearly, in terms of freedom, the Civil War allowed Black people to be freed from bondage.

Yet, in a week or two, Gulam will YET AGAIN post the falsehood “There are today in the United States more black Americans in the penal system than there were slaves in the United States in 1860. ”  It’s not true.  The numbers prove it.

“We would do well to be candid about its causes and not allow the distortions of
contemporary politics or long-standing myths to cloud our understanding of
why the nation fell apart.”

The great tragedy was and is that the United States did not fall apart but
remained as one and went on to become the monster that ravaged the Indians
of the west, stole California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and part of
Colorado from Mexico, and has never stopped destroying different, often far
more sustainable, cultures ever since. We now know that it faked incidents in
Havana and the Tonkin Gulf in order to start and expand wars, and Americans
would be shocked to know how many “conspiracy theorists” there are outside of
the US today who feel certain the same thing happened again recently. The
same Napoleonic Enlightenment jargon about expanding the domain of human
freedom is trotted out every time to justify war, domination, and profiteering.
The real issue in 1860 was whether the North had any business enforcing its
will on the South, whether gallant freedom hymns justify killing hundreds of
thousands of people and militarily occupying many states for generations.
Freedom is trotted out again and again and used as a stalking horse for
tyranny.

The American left is fully complicit with the right; even when they protest it is
merely to make themselves feel righteous and to suck the air out of righteous
indignation and genuine anger. Lyndon Johnson was every bit as malignant as
Richard Nixon; they were Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. In fact it was Nixon
who finally pulled America out of Vietnam. Anyone who can get all warm and
tingly over the sacrifices of the Union Army is a full partner with those who
have led America into these wars to liberate Vietnam and Iraq and Hillary’s War
to give the vote to Afghan women.

THE evil is thinking that any nation has the right to dictate morals to the rest of
the world, for this always provides an excuse for murder and robbery and every
other vice. One of the first changes in Kabul after the NATO occupation began
was the opening of bars and brothels staffed by imported whores - this at a
time when AIDS stalks Asia. This is the ever-present reality of an American
military occupation. The press does not even bother to talk about the bars and
brothels of Kabul, because they are used to such things where they live, but
what knowledgable military commander would tolerate this if he were really
trying to win hearts and minds in a conservative Muslim country?

Modern science and philosophy, and religion for that matter, do not believe in,
have well proved the impossibility of a meta-theory, a complete master
narrative, so all notions of universal standards of any intellectually substantial
kind are impossible, just hot wind blown by whatever people are in power. As a
serious intellectual doctrine the concept of universal human rights is more
mythical and unreal and almost as dated an idea as mediaeval angels.  As
biological imperatives go “not putting all ones eggs into one basket” would
seem to be primary, so is it not best for mankind to instinctively crash any
culture when it begins to promise anything like universal standards?

What kind of moral victory was the American Civil War? There are today in the
United States more black Americans in the penal system than there were slaves
in the United States in 1860. Is a man in prison not a slave? The percentage of
black Americans incarcerated is, of course, six times that of whites,
contributing to a prison population in the “Land of the Free” that is by far the
highest in the world both in terms of percentages and total numbers. The really
hilarious part for Asians, Africans, or South Americans, is watching the
Europeans, many of whom know better, obediently following the Union Armies
into these debacles, because the United States is the nation that leads the “Free
World.”

Liberals are always attempting to find “humanitarian” justification for wars.

The claims that the American Civil War was fought to free black slaves is just one of the liberals’ many BIG lies.

The Civil War was not a war between states. It was a war between economic models. The old school family plantation slavers were defeated by the new school factory farm industrial slavers.

The Civil War was needed for liberals to MoveOn everyone into the corporate state.

There’s plenty of proof that the liberal devised mental chain slavery exists. If it didn’t nobody would ever vote for any of the corporate party’s Republicans or Democrats.

ardee,

THE WELLS OF DOOM

“....The Abraham Lincoln Revolution

Since 1863, what the ruling British oligarchy, otherwise traditionally named “the Venetian Party,” has feared, and hated, more than anything else, was the relatively awesome power which the United States’s economy came to represent during the course of the years 1861-1876.(19) The facts of this history have been richly documented in books and leading papers published by this writer and his associates over more than a quarter-century. For our purposes here, the relevant essentials of that matter, as this bears upon the roles of Wells and Russell, are fairly summarized as follows.

Until the 1862-1863 interventions of Russia’s Czar Alexander II, the British monarchy of Lord Palmerston and Bertrand Russell’s grandfather, Lord Russell, was fully committed to destroying the United States. As British agent August Belmont underscored this fact in his own admissions, London’s intent in launching its puppet, the Confederate States of America, was to force the Washington, D.C. government to accept the sovereignty of the British Confederacy puppet, thus creating the situation in which London could divide the North American continent among a Balkans-like collection of perpetually squabbling local tyrannies, this according to the same “balance of power” illogic which the dubious Zbigniew “Tweedledum” Brzezinski has proposed for Central Asia.(20)

When, despite Belmont asset McClellan’s complicity, Britain’s Confederacy assets failed to bring the matter quickly to the conclusion London intended, Palmerston, Russell, and Palmerston’s French stooge, the Emperor Napoleon III, prepared to deploy the combined naval forces of Britain, France, and Spain against both Mexico and the U.S. blockade of the Confederate ports. When the Czar not only threatened to “make war throughout Europe,” should Britain deploy naval forces against those of the U.S., but dispatched two Russian naval fleets to aid the U.S. in the case of a British naval intervention in the Civil War, Palmerston’s and Napoleon III’s plan to destroy the U.S., had to be scrapped in favor of other, longer-term options….

....The developments of 1861-1876 nearly obliterated British strategic self-confidence on this account. These events demonstrated to the nations of that time, the absolute, and vast superiority of the Leibniz-Franklin-Hamilton-Carey-List American System of political-economy, over the British intellectual export to its intended victims, the “free trade” model. The spread of Henry C. Carey’s American model into Japan, Germany, Russia, and nationalist China, transformed the threat to the British monarchy, from a grave potential one, into an immediate challenge to the continued existence of our republic’s traditional and continuing chief foreign adversary, since 1714 to the present day.”

The monetarist Empire turned its attention to Egypt.  In 1865 the Anglo Egyptian bank floated loans to Egypt for the production of cotton.  By 1882 British troops occupied Egypt. Rosa Luxemburg described the nature of the beast:

“‘It should be clear, that the transactions between European loan capital and European industrial capital are based upon relations which are extremely rational and sound, for the accumulation of capital,’ Luxemburg wrote, ‘although they appear absurd to the casual observer, because this loan pays for the orders from Egypt and the interest on one loan is paid out of a new loan!  Stripped of all obscuring connecting links, these relations consist in the simple fact, that European capital has largely swallowed up the Egyptian peasant economy....’”

Sound familiar?

One thing about the Civil War:  Clear proof of the general results of war—nobody wins, but each side claims it had superior intentions and can still defend those intentions, not matter what the true results.

Both sides started out mad, and ended up mad.  Black slaves were “freed”—sort of—but discrimination and cruelty follows their grandchildren to this very day.  Most Southerners harbor deep feelings of guilt whilc most Northerners feel they did the South and the nation a big favor whereas the truth is, it was a mutual slaughter.  So much for spin.

Then don’t read it, Raver. 
But I’m sure you didn’t.  You don’t dispute my posts, offering contrasting evidence, you just write shit about me.
And you seem so proud of yourself, so remember this:
Nobody likes a fart but its owner.

Inherit the Winfbag:

More bullshit thrown at the wall like spaghetti.

None of it stuck.

You know absolutely nothing—about history or anything else.

Just a pipsqueak trying to impress.

The idea that competition between the North and the South, Industrialization, politics for power, control of trade, etc, weren’t ALL bound up in slavery is utterly simplistic.

“Wage slavery” is an oxymoron.  There’s no such thing.  Even in the attempts to create it, with company stores and company housing and payment in script ONLY succeeded when backed up by company goons, who prevented workers from leaving and beat up anyone who objected.  Otherwise workers would leave and information would disperse “Don’t work for J.H. Blair”.  They were captive just as Blacks were.

And like Black slaves, they were kept in line with whips, or the equivalent terror threat.

No, the “wage slavery” argued by Socialists is a phony and the difference is…the whip on your back.

The foundation of the Southern economy was slavery, due to a scarcity of labor—“wage slaves”.  Simply, Southern feudal barons couldn’t cost effectively hire people to work on their plantations, so slavery was a more economic alternative.  Labor was too scarce.

There isn’t a reputable economist on earth who won’t tell you that slavery is a response to a scarcity of labor.  Because that’s what it is.  American slavery was particularly harsh because, badged by skin color, Black people couldn’t achieve freedom without great difficulty, either legally or “illegally”.

Considering that pretty much all of the Southern leaders who lead their several states into treason, you’d have a tough time finding any who weren’t slave-owners, preserving their fiefdoms.

Now why did the Southern common folk buy into this travesty?  Why to common folk today, even unemployment insurance, Medicare and Social Security recipients support the party that wants to CUT OFF their benefits, or give its endowment to Wall Street?  Why?

Because they’ve been conned.

Raver,
Have you EVER had anything cogent to say?

Inherit:

How many times have you seen Gone with the Wind, anyway?

Even Margaret Mitchell had a better grasp of hsitory than you.

Your lack of education and ability to think critically is simply obscene.

Slavery had been outlawed in most of the North by 1860. Face it: The South wanted to maintain their medieval feudal society with insanely rich land barons controlling everything, with one set of laws for them, and another for the hoi polloi, and to be able to f*** as many women as they wanted with NO possible penalty (as long as the women were Black).

“States’ Rights” was the bullshit rationalization to maintain that feudal society.  Plus, as is pointed out here and in many other places, the leaders of the greatest treason ever ALL spoke about maintaining slavery.

Tap, tap tap, tap ta ta ta ta ta tap… I hear a tap dance…

E.J. is working up to something. E.J., perhaps even you will learn something about the Civil War, someday.

It was about commerce, and the anti-slavery folks were a constant annoyance to Lincoln as they were to many in the north. Lincoln actually reversed some state decisions to end slavery.

The north couldn’t compete with the south, who were being fueled still, by the British, because of slavery. When decent TARIFFS, yes, TARIFFS, were instituted against these slave-laborists, the north flourished and it was the birth of our industrial nation, lasting more than 100 years.

We can learn from that today. We also cannot compete with the worldwide slavery market, now known as the FREE TRADE AGREEMENT of this poor country and that poor country.

I can give you proof that the Civil War was not about slavery. If it WERE, then people like E.J. and Obama and Clinton and Clyburn and Pelosi and all the other pat-myself-on-the-back politicians would be crying about these trade agreements because of the slavery involved. But they are not. They discuss these trade agreements in monetary terms, insisting that things are the way they have to be. I am sure that was more the tone of the day of the Civil War. Its obvious.

TARIFFS are the best way to end slavery. But if you ignore it is happening today, even by the descendants of the VICTIMS of American slavery, then you totally and completely miss the point, and are exposed as using this middle school textbook, inadequate, description of history for political reasons. 

Lincoln’s major contribution, had he lived, would have concerned the banking institution, which he was in the process of reforming, like JFK was. And a lot like Ron Paul.

I am sorry E.J. but you are so wrong. The Civil war was fought over State’s Rights. Slavery was just a by-product. The North had slaves also. The Southern states were agricultural while the North was in the begining stages of Industrialization and building a central Federal Government.
The South wanted no part of a Central Federal Government, nor did it want Industrialization. The lifestyle of the South was in drastic contrast to the cities and industrial workers of the North! They also did not want to pay taxes to a Federal Government that did not represent their culture and way of life.

The War between the States was, in fact, a war that is still being fought by the industrialized North against the agricultural South. Slavery, whether by ownership or by subsistence wages and control of the levers of power and propaganda by a wealthy elite, persists. 

David Cyr is correct to point out that “the Civil War (as if ANY war is civil) was the labor pains during the birthing of the Corporate State.”

It’s tough for RW white folks to admit that their ideological forebears either owned slaves or defended the legal system that authorized it and the social system that rationalized it.

THAT’s the chief reason for the current (and past) denials that slavery “had something to do with the coming of the Civil War”

One need only start with the Secession Declarations issued by the various states in 1860 (So. Carolina) and 1861 (the rest of the treasonous Confederate States)...
which—candidly—state (though sometimes with obfuscatory words) that the cause of secession was what was perceived as a threat to the institution of slavery by the national government.

The Civil War was fought to determine whether white landed gentry would own government and continue to inefficiently keep just black slaves in iron chains; or corporations would own government, and much more profitably employ far greater numbers of wage slaves of all races… using more sophisticated liberal mental chains, rather than crude old conservative metal ones.
*********************

Yeah, who give a shit that 4,000,000 people were in bondage when you can use the Civil War as an excuse to implement Communism again, which has failed due to its own internal contradictions every other time, and is implemented with bloody, violent savagery every time. 

Even the modern Socialist “eden”, Venezuela, has just implemented suppression of any and all dissent, so nobody can freely challenge Chavez and his policies any more. China? China is now a capitalist dictatorship that wears a make-believe cloak of Socialism.  North Korea? Hah!  Cuba? Cuba is desperate for the USA to open unrestricted travel so it can expand its tourist industry.

But when Socialism is on the line, who gives a shit about 4 million slaves?

eir, December 27 at 4:02 am

All the histories of that war with which I am familiar are in disagreement with your contention.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_in_the_American_Civil_War

France remained officially neutral throughout the American Civil War and never recognized the Confederate States of America. However, several major industries in France and the then French leader Louis Napoleon III had economic interests or territorial ambitions which favored dealings with the Confederacy. At the same time, other French political leaders, such as Foreign Minister Edouard Thouvenel, favored the United States.

Between 1861 and 1865, the Union blockade caused a significant decreasing of the French cotton importation, leading to the “famine du coton”(cotton hunger) : textile industries of Alsace, Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Normandy suffered from this shortage of raw material (which doubled in price in 1862) and were forced to dismiss many workers.

As a result, many French industrialists and politicians were rather favorable to a quick Southern victory. French Emperor Napoléon III was also interested in Central America (trade and plans of transoceanic canal) and wanted to create a new empire in Mexico, where his troops landed in December 1861. A Confederate victory would have likely made this plan easier.

The ever (D)evious Dionne is struggling to keep the myth of liberal delivered “justice” alive.

Donkey shit!

The American Civil War (aka the War Between the States, 1861 - 1865) is routinely mischaracterized as being a bloody war between white brothers in which liberals ended slavery.

**THAT** is the spin.

The Civil War was fought to determine whether white landed gentry would own government and continue to inefficiently keep just black slaves in iron chains; or corporations would own government, and much more profitably employ far greater numbers of wage slaves of all races… using more sophisticated liberal mental chains, rather than crude old conservative metal ones.

The Civil War was the labor pains during the birthing of the Corporate State.

EJ, it’s too late. The spinning began YEARS ago.  Just look at those who claim “The War of Northern Aggression” began with Federal attacks on the South, not the great treasons of secession and firing on US Government troops.

It’s STILL about establishing the “White” race as superior and more deserving, especially now that the President is, for the first time, not fully Caucasian.

“Urban” “Welfare” “Crime” “Illegals” and other code words for non-Whites abound.

Full-blown White racism is back, albeit in a more sophisticated and sneaky way.  But every now and then it leaks out from one Southern pol or another.  In 2008, Virginia governor George Allen revealed the truth in his “Macaca” moment.  Now Mississippi governor Haley Barbour has done the same thing.

And why not? For 400 years Blacks were treated as sub-human and less deserving.  The Nazis were only in power for 12 years, and THAT ended over 20 years before Segregation was finally made illegal with Loving in 1967.  Still Germans try to paint a picture of their nation caught in an evil force rather than their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ complicity.

My point? If Germany is STILL struggling to come to terms with a 12 year terror that ended in 1945, is it no surprise that Southerners are trying to cover up and justify 4 CENTURIES of terror that didn’t end until 1967?

Sorry, EJ, but as long as Southern racists are allowed power (think Trent Lott) the Civil War will continue to be spun.

“The situation was indeed dire—almost the entire South was seceding in open declaration of war against the United States, armed to the teeth, bankrolled to the maximum that the coffers would bear, by Britain. If you ever get a chance to tour West Point, go to what they call Trophy Point, overlooking that wide expanse of the Hudson, and there you may see a row of gleaming cannons from the Civil War, and on every single one of them is stamped “Made in Birmingham” or “Made in Manchester.” They’re all British-made cannons, that were captured from the Confederates during Union victories.”

How Abrahma Lincoln Organized Victory for the Union

Divide and conquer.  The infamous tactic of Empire. At the point of the Civil War, the oligarchical monetarists had decided that we, Americans, could only be destroyed from within.  They would take the native Tory faction, “free trade”/ slave master element who controlled capital on Wall Street and who supplied raw cotton to the cotton mills of England and aim it at the Union, and The American System, or the greatest threat to tyranny, and Empire that the world had ever seen and would finally, destroy us and all that the United States represented to the world, “the last best hope of earth.”

Rosa Luxemburg on the true nature of Empire

Who says the North won the Civil War? Imagine how much better a country America would be if its southern borders were the Potomac and Ohio rivers.

We would have had universal health care since the Second World War.

We would still have a progressive income tax.

We would not have a politically influential religious fundamentalist movement.

We would not have anywhere near the level of residential and institutional racism that we have. 

All of the reactionary politics and foot dragging against social, economic, political and environmental progress has its political origin and strength in the South.

The question is not, should the Southern states be allowed to secede from the Union. The question is, why haven’t they been expelled?