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David Stockman: Woodrow Wilson's War & Why The Entire 20th Century Was A Mistake

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Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

The Epochal Consequences Of Woodrow Wilson’s War

Remarks by David Stockman

Committee for the Republic

Washington DC January 20, 2015

My humble thesis tonight is that the entire 20th Century was a giant mistake.

And that you can put the blame for this monumental error squarely on Thomas Woodrow Wilson——-a megalomaniacal madman who was the very worst President in American history……..well, except for the last two.

His unforgiveable error was to put the United States into the Great War for utterly no good reason of national interest. The European war posed not an iota of threat to the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE, or Worcester MA or Sacramento CA. In that respect, Wilson’s putative defense of “freedom of the seas” and the rights of neutrals was an empty shibboleth; his call to make the world safe for democracy, a preposterous pipe dream.

Actually, his thinly veiled reason for plunging the US into the cauldron of the Great War was to obtain a seat at the peace conference table——so that he could remake the world in response to god’s calling.

But this was a world about which he was blatantly ignorant; a task for which he was temperamentally unsuited; and an utter chimera based on 14 points that were so abstractly devoid of substance as to constitute mental play dough.

Or, as his alter-ego and sycophant, Colonel House, put it:  Intervention positioned Wilson to play “The noblest part that has ever come to the son of man”.  America thus plunged into Europe’s carnage, and forevermore shed its century-long Republican tradition of anti-militarism and non-intervention in the quarrels of the Old World.

Needless to say, there was absolutely nothing noble that came of Wilson’s intervention. It led to a peace of vengeful victors, triumphant nationalists and avaricious imperialists—-when the war would have otherwise ended in a bedraggled peace of mutually exhausted bankrupts and discredited war parties on both sides.

By so altering the course of history, Wilson’s war bankrupted Europe and midwifed 20th century totalitarianism in Russia and Germany.

These developments, in turn, eventually led to the Great Depression, the Welfare State and Keynesian economics, World War II, the holocaust, the Cold War, the permanent Warfare State and its military-industrial complex.

They also spawned Nixon’s 1971 destruction of sound money, Reagan’s failure to tame Big Government and Greenspan’s destructive cult of monetary central planning.

So, too, flowed the Bush’s wars of intervention and occupation,  their fatal blow to the failed states in the lands of Islam foolishly created by the imperialist map-makers at Versailles and the resulting endless waves of blowback and terrorism now afflicting the world.

And not the least of the ills begotten in Wilson’s war is the modern rogue regime of central bank money printing, and the Bernanke-Yellen plague of bubble economics which never stops showering the 1% with the monumental windfalls from central bank enabled speculation.

Consider the building blocks of that lamentable edifice.

First, had the war ended in 1917 by a mutual withdrawal from the utterly stalemated trenches of the Western Front, as it was destined to, there would have been no disastrous summer offensive by the Kerensky government, or subsequent massive mutiny in Petrograd that enabled Lenin’s flukish seizure of power in November. That is, the 20th century would not have been saddled with a Stalinist nightmare or with a Soviet state that poisoned the peace of nations for 75 years, while the nuclear sword of Damocles hung over the planet.

Likewise, there would have been no abomination known as the Versailles peace treaty; no “stab in the back” legends owing to the Weimar government’s forced signing of the “war guilt” clause; no continuance of England’s brutal post-armistice blockade that delivered Germany’s women and children into starvation and death and left a demobilized 3-million man army destitute, bitter and on a permanent political rampage of vengeance.

So too, there would have been no acquiescence in the dismemberment of Germany and the spreading of its parts and pieces to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Austria and Italy—–with the consequent revanchist agitation that nourished the Nazi’s with patriotic public support in the rump of the fatherland.

Nor would there have materialized the French occupation of the Ruhr and the war reparations crisis that led to the destruction of the German middle class in the 1923 hyperinflation; and, finally, the history books would have never recorded the Hitlerian ascent to power and all the evils that flowed thereupon.

In short, on the approximate 100th anniversary of Sarajevo, the world has been turned upside down.

The war of victors made possible by Woodrow Wilson destroyed the liberal international economic order—that is, honest money, relatively free trade, rising international capital flows and rapidly growing global economic integration—-which had blossomed during the 40-year span between 1870 and 1914.

That golden age had brought rising living standards, stable prices, massive capital investment, prolific technological progress and pacific relations among the major nations——a condition that was never equaled, either before or since.

Now, owing to Wilson’s fetid patrimony, we have the opposite: A world of the Warfare State, the Welfare State, Central Bank omnipotence and a crushing burden of private and public debts. That is, a thoroughgoing statist regime that is fundamentally inimical to capitalist prosperity, free market governance of economic life and the flourishing of private liberty and constitutional safeguards against the encroachments of the state.

So Wilson has a lot to answer for—-and my allotted 30 minutes can hardly accommodate the full extent of the indictment. But let me try to summarize his own “war guilt” in eight major propositions——a couple of which my give rise to a disagreement or two.

Proposition #1:  Starting with the generic context——the Great War was about nothing worth dying for and engaged no recognizable principle of human betterment. There were many blackish hats, but no white ones.

Instead, it was an avoidable calamity issuing from a cacophony of political incompetence, cowardice, avarice and tomfoolery.

Blame the bombastic and impetuous Kaiser Wilhelm for setting the stage with his foolish dismissal of Bismarck in 1890, failure to renew the Russian reinsurance treaty shortly thereafter and his quixotic build-up of the German Navy after the turn of the century.

Blame the French for lashing themselves to a war declaration that could be triggered by the intrigues of a decadent court in St. Petersburg where the Czar still claimed divine rights and the Czarina ruled behind the scenes on the hideous advice of Rasputin.

Likewise, censure Russia’s foreign minister Sazonov for his delusions of greater Slavic grandeur that had encouraged Serbia’s provocations after Sarajevo; and castigate the doddering emperor Franz Joseph for hanging onto power into his 67th year on the throne and thereby leaving his crumbling empire vulnerable to the suicidal impulses of General Conrad’s war party.

So too, indict the duplicitous German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, for allowing the Austrians to believe that the Kaiser endorsed their declaration of war on Serbia; and pillory Winston Churchill and London’s war party for failing to recognize that the Schlieffen Plan’s invasion through Belgium was no threat to England, but a unavoidable German defense against a two-front war.

But after all that—- most especially don’t talk about the defense of democracy, the vindication of liberalism or the thwarting of Prussian autocracy and militarism.

The British War party led by the likes of Churchill and Kitchener was all about the glory of empire, not the vindication of democracy; France’ principal war aim was the revanchist drive to recover Alsace-Lorrain—–mainly a German speaking territory for 600 years until it was conquered by Louis XIV.

In any event, German autocracy was already on its last leg as betokened by the arrival of universal social insurance and the election of a socialist-liberal majority in the Reichstag on the eve of the war; and the Austro-Hungarian, Balkan and Ottoman goulash of nationalities, respectively, would have erupted in interminable regional conflicts, regardless of who won the Great War.

In short, nothing of principle or higher morality was at stake in the outcome.

Proposition # 2:  The war posed no national security threat whatsoever to the US.  Presumably, of course, the danger was not the Entente powers—but Germany and its allies.

But how so?  After the Schlieffen Plan offensive failed on September 11, 1914, the German Army became incarcerated in a bloody, bankrupting, two-front land war that ensured its inexorable demise. Likewise, after the battle of Jutland in May 1916, the great German surface fleet was bottled up in its homeports—-an inert flotilla of steel that posed no threat to the American coast 4,000 miles away.

As for the rest of the central powers, the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires already had an appointment with the dustbin of history. Need we even bother with the fourth member—-that is, Bulgaria?

Proposition #3:  Wilson’s pretexts for war on Germany—–submarine warfare and the Zimmerman telegram—-are not half what they are cracked-up to be by Warfare State historians.

As to the so-called freedom of the seas and neutral shipping rights, the story is blatantly simple. In November 1914, England declared the North Sea to be a “war zone”; threatened neutral shipping with deadly sea mines; declared that anything which could conceivably be of use to the German army—directly or indirectly—-to be contraband that would be seized or destroyed; and announced that the resulting blockade of German ports was designed to starve it into submission.

A few months later, Germany announced its submarine warfare policy designed to the stem the flow of food, raw materials and armaments to England in retaliation.  It was the desperate antidote of a land power to England’s crushing sea-borne blockade.

Accordingly, there existed a state of total warfare in the northern European waters—-and the traditional “rights” of neutrals were irrelevant and disregarded by both sides. In arming merchantmen and stowing munitions on passenger liners, England was hypocritical and utterly cavalier about the resulting mortal danger to innocent civilians—–as exemplified by the 4.3 million rifle cartridges and hundreds of tons of other munitions carried in the hull of the Lusitania.

Likewise, German resort to so-called “unrestricted submarine warfare” in February 1917 was brutal and stupid, but came in response to massive domestic political pressure during what was known as the “turnip winter” in Germany.  By then, the country was starving from the English blockade—literally.

Before he resigned on principle in June 1915, Secretary William Jennings Bryan got it right. Had he been less diplomatic he would have said never should American boys be crucified on the cross of Cunard liner state room so that a few thousand wealthy plutocrat could exercise a putative “right” to wallow in luxury while knowingly cruising into in harm’s way.

As to the Zimmerman telegram, it was never delivered to Mexico, but was sent from Berlin as an internal diplomatic communique to the German ambassador in Washington, who had labored mightily to keep his country out of war with the US, and was intercepted by British intelligence, which sat on it for more than a month waiting for an opportune moment to incite America into war hysteria.

In fact, this so-called bombshell was actually just an internal foreign ministry rumination about a possible plan to approach the Mexican president regarding an alliance in the event that the US first went to war with Germany.

Why is this surprising or a casus belli?  Did not the entente bribe Italy into the war with promises of large chunks of Austria? Did not the hapless Rumanians finally join the entente when they were promised Transylvania?  Did not the Greeks bargain endlessly over the Turkish territories they were to be awarded for joining the allies?  Did  not Lawrence of Arabia bribe the Sherif of Mecca with the promise of vast Arabian lands to be extracted from the Turks?

Why, then, would the German’s—-if at war with the USA—- not promise the return of Texas?

Proposition #4:  Europe had expected a short war, and actually got one when the Schlieffen plan offensive bogged down 30 miles outside of Paris on the Marne River in mid-September 1914.  Within three months, the Western Front had formed and coagulated into blood and mud——a ghastly 400 mile corridor of senseless carnage, unspeakable slaughter and incessant military stupidity that stretched from the Flanders coast across Belgium and northern France to the Swiss frontier.

The next four years witnessed an undulating line of trenches,  barbed wire entanglements, tunnels, artillery emplacements and shell-pocked scorched earth that rarely moved more than a few miles in either direction, and which ultimately claimed more than 4 million casualties on the Allied side and 3.5 million on the German side.

If there was any doubt that Wilson’s catastrophic intervention converted a war of attrition, stalemate and eventual mutual exhaustion into Pyrrhic victory for the allies, it was memorialized in four developments during 1916.

In the first, the Germans wagered everything on a massive offensive designed to overrun the fortresses of Verdun——the historic defensive battlements on France’s northeast border that had stood since Roman times, and which had been massively reinforced after the France’s humiliating defeat in Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

But notwithstanding the mobilization of 100 divisions, the greatest artillery bombardment campaign every recorded until then, and repeated infantry offensives from February through November that resulted in upwards of 400,000 German casualties, the Verdun offensive failed.

The second event was its mirror image—-the massive British and French offensive known as the battle of the Somme, which commenced with equally destructive artillery barrages on July 1, 1916 and then for three month sent waves of infantry into the maws of German machine guns and artillery. It too ended in colossal failure, but only after more than 600,000 English and French casualties including a quarter million dead.

In between these bloodbaths, the stalemate was reinforced by the naval showdown at Jutland that cost the British far more sunken ships and drowned sailors than the Germans, but also caused the Germans to retire their surface fleet to port and never again challenge the Royal Navy in open water combat.

Finally, by year-end 1916 the German generals who had destroyed the Russian armies in the East with only a tiny one-ninth fraction of the German army—Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff —were given command of the Western Front. Presently, they radically changed Germany’s war strategy by recognizing that the growing allied superiority in manpower, owing to the British homeland draft of 1916 and mobilization of forces from throughout the empire, made a German offensive breakthrough will nigh impossible.

The result was the Hindenburg Line—a military marvel based on a checkerboard array of hardened pillbox machine gunners and maneuver forces rather than mass infantry on the front lines, and an intricate labyrinth of highly engineered tunnels, deep earth shelters, rail connections, heavy artillery and flexible reserves in the rear. It was also augmented by the transfer of Germany’s eastern armies to the western front—-giving it 200 divisions and 4 million men on the Hindenburg Line.

This precluded any hope of Entente victory. By 1917 there were not enough able-bodied draft age men left in France and England to overcome the Hindenburg Line, which, in turn,  was designed to bleed white the entente armies led by butchers like Generals Haig and Joffre until their governments sued for peace.

Thus, with the Russian army’s disintegration in the east and the stalemate frozen indefinitely in the west by early 1917, it was only a matter of months before mutinies among the French lines, demoralization in London, mass starvation and privation in Germany and bankruptcy all around would have led to a peace of exhaustion and a European-wide political revolt against the war makers.

Wilson’s intervention thus did not remake the world. But it did radically re-channel the contours of 20th century history. And, as they say, not in a good way.

Proposition #5:  Wilson’s epochal error not only produced the abomination of Versailles and all its progeny, but also the transformation of the Federal Reserve from a passive “banker’s bank” to an interventionist central bank knee-deep in Wall Street, government finance and macroeconomic management.

This, too, was a crucial historical hinge point because Carter Glass’ 1913 act forbid the new Reserve banks to even own government bonds; empowered them only to passively discount for cash good commercial credits and receivables brought to the rediscount window by member banks; and contemplated no open market interventions in debt markets or any remit with respect to GDP growth, jobs, inflation, housing or all the rest of modern day monetary central planning targets.

In fact, Carter Glass’ “banker’s bank” didn’t care whether the growth rate was positive 4%, negative 4% or anything in-between; its modest job was to channel liquidity into the banking system in response to the ebb and flow of commerce and production.

Jobs, growth and prosperity were to remain the unplanned outcome of millions of producers, consumers, investors, savers, entrepreneurs and speculators operating on the free market, not the business of the state.

But Wilson’s war took the national debt from about $1 billion or $11 per capita—–a level which had been maintained since the Battle of Gettysburg—-to $27 billion, including upwards of $10 billion re-loaned to the allies to enable them to continue the war. There is not a chance that this massive eruption of Federal borrowing could have been financed out of domestic savings in the private market.

So the Fed charter was changed owing to the exigencies of war to permit it to own government debt and to discount private loans collateralized by Treasury paper.

In due course, the famous and massive Liberty Bond drives became a glorified Ponzi scheme. Patriotic Americans borrowed money from their banks and pledged their war bonds; the banks borrowed money from the Fed, and re-pledged their customer’s collateral.  The Reserve banks, in turn, created the billions they loaned to the commercial banks out of thin air, thereby pegging interest rates low for the duration of the war.

When Wilson was done saving the world, America had an interventionist central bank schooled in the art of interest rate pegging and rampant expansion of fiat credit not anchored in the real bills of commerce and trade; and its incipient Warfare and Welfare states had an agency of public debt monetization that could permit massive government spending without the inconvenience of high taxes on the people or the crowding out of business investment by high interest rates on the private market for savings.

Proposition # 6:   By prolonging the war and massively increasing the level of debt and money printing on all sides, Wilson’s folly prevented a proper post-war resumption of the classical gold standard at the pre-war parities.

This failure of resumption, in turn, paved the way for the breakdown of monetary order and world trade in 1931—–a break which turned a standard post-war economic cleansing into the Great Depression, and a decade of protectionism, beggar-thy-neighbor currency manipulation and ultimately rearmament and statist dirigisme.

In essence, the English and French governments had raised billions from their citizens on the solemn promise that it would be repaid at the pre-war parities; that the war bonds were money good in gold.

But the combatant governments had printed too much fiat currency and inflation during the war, and through domestic regimentation, heavy taxation and unfathomable combat destruction of economic life in northern France had drastically impaired their private economies.

Accordingly, under Churchill’s foolish leadership England re-pegged to gold at the old parity in 1925, but had no political will or capacity to reduce bloated war-time wages, costs and prices in a commensurate manner, or to live with the austerity and shrunken living standards that honest liquidation of its war debts required.

At the same time, France ended up betraying its war time lenders, and re-pegged the Franc two years later at a drastically depreciated level. This resulted in a spurt of beggar-thy-neighbor prosperity and the accumulation of pound sterling claims that would eventually blow-up the London money market and the sterling based “gold exchange standard” that the Bank of England and British Treasury had peddled as a poor man’s way back on gold.

Yet under this “gold lite” contraption, France, Holland, Sweden and other surplus countries accumulated huge amounts of sterling liabilities in lieu of settling their accounts in bullion—–that is, they loaned billions to the British. They did this on the promise and the confidence that the pound sterling would remain at $4.87 per dollar come hell or high water—-just as it had for 200 years of peacetime before.

But British politicians betrayed their promises and their central bank creditors September 1931 by suspending redemption and floating the pound——-shattering the parity and causing the decade-long struggle for resumption of an honest gold standard to fail.  Depressionary contraction of world trade, capital flows and capitalist enterprise inherently followed.

Proposition # 7:  By turning America overnight into the granary, arsenal and banker of the Entente, the US economy was distorted, bloated and deformed into a giant, but unstable and unsustainable global exporter and creditor.

During the war years, for example, US exports increased by 4X and GDP soared from $40 billion to $90 billion.  Incomes and land prices soared in the farm belt, and steel, chemical, machinery, munitions and ship construction boomed like never before—–in substantial part because Uncle Sam essentially provided vendor finance to the bankrupt allies in desperate need of both military and civilian goods.

Under classic rules, there should have been a nasty correction after the war—-as the world got back to honest money and sound finance.  But it didn’t happen because the newly unleashed Fed fueled an incredible boom on Wall Street and a massive junk bond market in foreign loans.

In today economic scale, the latter amounted to upwards of $2 trillion and, in effect, kept the war boom in exports and capital spending going right up until 1929. Accordingly, the great collapse of 1929-1932 was not a mysterious failure of capitalism; it was the delayed liquidation of Wilson’s war boom.

After the crash, exports and capital spending plunged by 80% when the foreign junk bond binge ended in the face of massive defaults abroad; and that, in turn, led to a traumatic liquidation of industrial inventories and a collapse of credit fueled purchases of consumer durables like refrigerators and autos. The latter, for example, dropped from 5 million to 1.5 million units per year after 1929.

Proposition # 8:  In short, the Great Depression was a unique historical event owing to the vast financial deformations of the Great War——deformations which were drastically exaggerated by its prolongation from Wilson’s intervention and the massive credit expansion unleashed by the Fed and Bank of England during and after the war.

Stated differently, the trauma of the 1930s was not the result of the inherent flaws or purported cyclical instabilities of free market capitalism; it was, instead, the delayed legacy of the financial carnage of the Great War and the failed 1920s efforts to restore the liberal order of sound money, open trade and unimpeded money and capital flows.

But this trauma was thoroughly misunderstood, and therefore did give rise to the curse of Keynesian economics and did unleash the politicians to meddle in virtually every aspect of economic life, culminating in the statist and crony capitalist dystopia that has emerged in this century.

Needless to say, that is Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s worst sin of all.

 

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Sun, 01/25/2015 - 04:02 | 5701546 Tall Tom
Tall Tom's picture

I am still exploring it myself...

 

I have just got below the surface and am still shallow into it.

 

It may just go all the way to the depths of Hell.

 

You never know what you may uncover.

 

It is like digging your own grave.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 04:13 | 5701551 ThroxxOfVron
ThroxxOfVron's picture

"It is like digging your own grave. "

 

No one is forcing me to dig.

A man has got to have a hobby.  Good clean work keeps a body fit.

By the time I'm done it's gonna be just the way I want it, nice and roomy, with a nice wide view of the flaming pit..

-& just like ol' King Tut, I've got room for friends!


Sun, 01/25/2015 - 10:10 | 5701790 Romney Wordsworth
Romney Wordsworth's picture

 "You see, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig!"

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a97cOa2Sy9A

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 16:42 | 5703200 Tall Tom
Tall Tom's picture

I do not even have to look...The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.

 

I do like Clint Eastwood. That was a great Spaghetti Western.

 

Dirty Harry was better.

 

In the excitement I lost count. So do you feel lucky, punk? Do you? Do you feel lucky?

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 16:24 | 5703135 me again
me again's picture

Excellent. excellent. First Class work. So good to see someone who actually understands the Mafia that is the US Government.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 12:28 | 5702083 WillyGroper
WillyGroper's picture

Member of Tri-Lateral commission.

Hotel California.

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:27 | 5701186 amadeus39
amadeus39's picture

Why do I suspect a little cherry picking of historical facts to support preconceived personal predilictions? I do also suspect your right in the main.

 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 16:27 | 5703148 me again
me again's picture

"right in the main" is not English. Are you inventing your own language. Are you struggling for some such construction as "mainly correct". I suspect so.

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:29 | 5701194 WhyWait
WhyWait's picture

Stockman's latest essay is interesting reading worth taking to heart.  He misses what seems to me the inevitability of how events unfolded during and after the Great War, by failing to see how Wilson's actions were part of the Great Game as the US ruling class made its play for global dominance, and by greatly overestimating Wilson's freedom as chairman of the corporate board that ruled America to choose his path.  

The fundamental weakness in Stockman's analysis is on display in his summary his final Proposition: "the trauma of the 1930s was not the result of the inherent flaws or purported cyclical instabilities of free market capitalism; it was, instead, the delayed legacy of the financial carnage of the Great War and the failed 1920s efforts to restore the liberal order of sound money, open trade and unimpeded money and capital flows."

ZH readers will have no trouble spotting Stockman's fallacy: that in the time of the great Trusts and Robber Barons and the founding of the Fed there still existed such a thing as "free market capitalism".

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 09:38 | 5701763 duo
duo's picture

Funny that David didn't mention the very sharp recession in 1920-21 where the budget was balanced and bad debts left to default, the opposite of what was tried in the '30s.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 16:29 | 5703154 me again
me again's picture

You noticed that too, ehh/ you're pretty well informed. The reason he didn't mention it is because it doesn't fit his thesis. An almost universal human failing.

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:33 | 5701203 blindman
blindman's picture

yea, but at least we got the creation
of the state of israel and other stuff.
american indians and palestinians, seems a trend
has been established because of people existing
in places prior to the implementation of a
political and economic objective. which came
first, the people or the objective?

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:32 | 5701949 Cathartes Aura
Cathartes Aura's picture

ah yes, you see the wider points of viewing.

which came first, the people or the objective?

perhaps the viewing of people as objects, to be moved and re-moved

as so many game pieces over time.

 

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:33 | 5701204 swass
swass's picture

Actually, Lincoln was the worst ever president. But Wilson may be a close second, followed by Roosevelt 1 and 2, Obama and Bush. 

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:46 | 5701232 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

When I read about the Presidents between Jackson and Lincoln, what I read was that slavery kept the North and South in constant economic and political war.  That was bound to end badly somehow.  Lincoln just turned out to be the man who said he would end it, and then who did end it.  Imagine living in a present-day USA in which the South still had slavery!  Also, Lincoln refused to borrow from the bankers to fund the war, and instead created the greenback dollars.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:14 | 5701288 WhyWait
WhyWait's picture

"... Lincoln refused to borrow from the bankers to fund the war, and instead created the greenback dollars." !!

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 10:32 | 5701839 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

Is that not correct, "Mr. Why Wait"?  If you have any details, please share them.  I am always wanting to learn.

If you do not share any details, then I will conclude that you are a troll, for I have read that trolls are taught to follow a set of instructions, among which is, "Do not present facts of your own, but make brief, insulting comments when important facts are presented by others." 

Such behavior, of course, is not discourse, but punishment for discourse. 

Homo sapiens follows the broad and easy path to its own damnation.  It was given not only, like all creatures, the ability to reason, but also the ability to discuss and share ideas.  Yet so many homo sapiens are so unhappy with themselves that they waste their precious time working to destroy discussion and sharing of ideas.  This is the built-in self-loathing that Jesus referred to as "the Pit".

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:14 | 5703297 RaceToTheBottom
RaceToTheBottom's picture

He was re-writting someone elses point.

Therefore, your diatribe should be addressed at the OP.

 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:33 | 5703380 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

WRITING, not WRITTING.

ELSE'S, not ELSES.

RESPONSE, not DIATRIBE.

ADDRESSED TO, not ADRESSED AT.

If, by "OP", you mean "other person", then that "other person" was me, wasnt' it? 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 18:18 | 5703609 Buster Cherry
Buster Cherry's picture

People that can't get their, there, and they're usage correct drive me nuts.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 19:28 | 5703910 WhyWait
WhyWait's picture

Great, I couldn't think of anything to add, not much time, just thought it so important it was worth repeating!  

Lincoln for all of his being a railroad lawyer and a politician was brave, a deep thinker and a man of the people. He oversaw a revolution where the bankers and corporations came out on top, but he foresaw and tried to resist that outcome.  His correspondence with Karl Marx makes interesting reading.

Mon, 01/26/2015 - 18:17 | 5706594 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

Oops.  Sorry.  In Carroll Quigley's "Tragedy and Hope", I am at the point at which Krushchev and Tito are maneuvering.  As I understand him, Quigley makes the point that a number of people in the USSR by then had realized that autocracy was not just caused by Stalin, but was inescapable in the system.  I don't know much about Karl Marx, but I wonder what he would think if he were able to come back now and review the history of the USSR.  In fact... I would love it if a lot of the historically important people could come back and see what the world is like today, and I would love to talk to them, both about their times and ours.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:26 | 5701938 Cloud9.5
Cloud9.5's picture

“On July 17, 1861, Congress passed the first of Chase’s proposals. It enabled the Treasury to borrow as much as $250 million for the war effort by issuing bonds and notes.” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/16/the-man-who-financed-the...

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:44 | 5701968 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

Thanks.  Issuing bonds is not exactly "borrowing from the bankers".  Bonds can be purchased by private citizens, foreigners, anybody.  Therefore, issuing bonds does not give a small group of bankers great power, by giving them a monopoly over the money.

(To carry this a step further, issuing bonds clearly gives the bankers far less power than letting them create a privately-owned Central Bank, letting that Bank create "the money", and then "borrowing" that money from it and paying it interest.)

Plus, issuing greenbacks at the same time provides a second funding source, and that further lessens the potential of a power grab by a small group of bankers who buy up a lot of bonds.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:38 | 5701335 cynicalskeptic
cynicalskeptic's picture

Lincoln was a victim of timing - in the Presidency at a point in time when the conflict between slave and non-slave states was coming to a head.  What's NOT taught in schools is that this conflict was a deliberately planned effort by powers in Europe to rein in a growing US that presented a threat to established powers.  He DID manage to keep the US together - in spite of a determined effort by Britain and France to break up the Union.  

Britain was profiting greatly from Southern Cotton and looked to continue that relationship.  An expanding US was becoming more and more powerful and the Monroe Doctrine was interfering with European plans for the Western Hemisphere.  Look at what else was going on - France was moving into Mexico to fill the void left by a weakened Spain.  The rest of South America was throwing off European yokes - and that was NOT good for Europe.    

The plan was for the US to be 'partitioned' - with England and France re-establishing influence in the Americas.  A Civil War would be financed - on BOTH sides - by European Banking interests which would leave an exhausted (and divided) US split and indebted to Europeans.  

BUT Lincoln did NOT borrow from banks - he printed Greenbacks.  He was also aided by the Russians who sent their Pacific Fleet off the coast of California (where gold production was ramping up) and the Baltic Fleet off the Atlantic.  This presence deterred France and England from interfering at the outset of the US Civil War when the Federal Fleet was still small and kept the South from receiving the armaments it desperately needed if it was to take on the industrialized north.  Britain and France were not about to take on the Russian fleet by arming the South directly.   Russia had resisted previous efforts by European financial interests to take over its economy and felt that losing the US as an independent power would hurt its position as well.

The reality is that Southern Plantation growing was destroying soil - forcing southern slave holders farther west each decade.  In not too much longer the plantation approach would not be viable economically - and slavery WOULD have ended (if ther were not outside interference).  But British manufacturers wanted continued access to Southern Cotton - and wanted to end the tariffs imposed by American northern manufacturers  on European imports.  The American South wanted this as wel as English manufactured goods were cheaper than Northern ones.

Instead of splitting the US and capping American expansion, the Civil War STRENGTHENED the US.    Northern Manufacturing capabilities expanded under wartime demand - making them stronger competition to England in the long run.  The US was also left with a vastly improved military capability - Army and Navy - which made any direct military moves by European countries against the US impossible.  Ironclad technology in particular virtually obsoleted all European navies.

Over the next 50 years Europe saw its influence in the Americas shrink with the US actually possessing the means to enforce the Monroe Doctrine.  The US was the one to occupy the rest of the West - not a European ruled Mexico or British Canada.  The Spanish-American War saw the US occupying the remnants of the fading Spanish Empire. The US became the power to dominate the Carribean - Puerto Rico, Cuba and elsewhere.  The US occupied the Philippines and other former Spanish territories in the Pacific and became the dominant 'western' power in the Pacific.  The US was the one to build the Panama Canal - not a European nation.

Things might have turned out very differently if Lincoln had NOT been President and somene willing to let the Union dissolve HAD been in charge......

You could have had a split US - a 'free' farming and manufacturing north and a plantation economy south - with or without slaves while the West might have ended up part of larger Mexico and Canada.  California and Nevada's riches might have ended up under direct European control.  Japan might have taken a different direction - along with the rest of the Pacific.  China's history might have been different as well.   The carribean and South America might have come under increasing European domination.

On the other hand a smaller US would never have become the superpower it became - with WWI ending differently (a draw perhaps with Russia not seeing a Revolution) and WWII actually being avoided.   Facism would have not arisen with an earlier and inconclusive end to WWII.  In fact Europe might have become committed to avoiding another war and managed to to so without Communism rising as a threat.

 

Many 'might have beens'

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:57 | 5701371 Buckaroo Banzai
Buckaroo Banzai's picture

If by "US" you mean "Federal Government" or "The Corporation of the United States", then yes, that was strengthened.

For anyone who loves freedom, states rights, individual sovereignty, and stuff like that, Lincoln was clearly the worst president.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 07:01 | 5701633 Buster Cherry
Buster Cherry's picture

Where did you get this information?

I'm not trying to be flippant. I really want to know.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:52 | 5701989 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

"Cinco de Mayo" was when the Mexicans stood up to a French invasion, and wore the French out militarily, and forced them to withdraw.  Had the French defeated the Mexicans, the French hoped to work with a puppet Mexican government and then help the Confederacy, and then become, at least, its primary client, or perhaps, depending on how the War Between The States worked out, perhaps even take Texas, or whatever became possible....

There is an excellent movie, "Cinco de Mayo", about the main battle.

Here's the Wikipedia page:

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

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:50 | 5701992 Cloud9.5
Cloud9.5's picture

At the time of the Revolution the southern states, Virginia in particular were the largest and most powerful states.  The tobacco trade was feeding a growing world addiction.  Rice was feeding the West Indies and indigo was turning the world blue.  The North East emerged as a manufacturing power house as a result of the lack of trade with Europe during the war of 1812.  The needs of the manufacturing north pushed immigration to provide cheap labor for northern mills and protective tariffs to give them an economic advantage over their European competition.  This resulted in the Tariff Of Abominations that doubled the cost of living in the south.  This tariff resulted in nullification movements in the south.

 

The Wilmot Proviso put the south on notice that the House of Representatives had been lost to their interests.  That resulted in the southern push to maintain parity in the Senate.  When Lincoln was elected without carrying a single southern state, it became patently obvious that the controlling elites no longer represented southern interests.

 

Both Lincoln and Douglas were rail road lawyers.  The rail road interests wanted to conquer the west and expand the empire.  When the south threatened secession, it was goaded into firing the first shot.  This mobilized the north.  When Lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation, he seized the moral high ground without freeing a single northern slave.   The south was defeated and became a colony of the north and remained so until the 1970’s.

 

Once the south and west were subdued, imperialism became the order of the day.  We kicked off the Spanish American war and continued our foreign wars right up to the present.

 

 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 13:40 | 5702508 MEFOBILLS
MEFOBILLS's picture

Reply to cloud 9.5

 

The south was also developing an extraction economy based on white gold….cotton.

 

Oligarch plantation owners would take land, then use human tractors (black slaves) to grow the cotton.  Said cotton would go to England an buy finsished manufacturing goods.  England sold textiles though-out its colonial system

 

English money would then recycle back to the Southern U.S. colony, so aristocratic plantation owners could then spend on their rentier life of luxury.

 

Meantime, the north was being built up using its own credit, and behind tariffs which kept out “mature” English manufactured goods.

 

In other words, free trade is a myth, and usually free trade works out to the benefit of mature economy.  Colony turns into extraction of minerals and the like, and hence the people never get wealth accumulation due to value add.

 

The southern slave system would have been endurated down to fixture, and the oligarchs would have been able to swing the votes of their slaves.  In other words a few people of the south would have directed their slaves to vote in a certain way, hence amplifying slave owner power.

 

Let’s also not forget, that our Jewish friends owned the slave ships (sans one) and were deeply involved in England.  Bank of England was a money power operation since its beginning.  City of London is entirely privately owned banker territory.

 

The Northern economy never really used slaves.  There were plenty of indentured white  slaves to be had from England  - often young boys and girls.  Black slaves had pulmonary issues in the cold north east.  The bulk of slave ownership was not to white protestants, and certainly not poor Catholics.  Jewish ownership of slaves was some 60% in the north east.

 

You cannot understand western history without looking straight at the Jewish question and associated maneuverings of money powers.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:45 | 5701984 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

?   How can anyone "downvote" a sharing of information like this post?   ?

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 01:15 | 5701404 Greenskeeper_Carl
Greenskeeper_Carl's picture

"Imagine living in the USA in which the south still had slavery"

That is a moronic argument in favor of the civil war that is always used to defend fighting a pointless was that killed hundreds of thousands of young Americans. Slavery used to be a common practice in centuries past, and EVERYWHERE ELSE, it was ended peacefully, no war was necessary. Read a little history, no one in those times was fighting to rid the world of slavery, that was not the stated purpose of the war. It is insanely stupid to think that we would still have slave plantations had the war of northern aggression not occurred. And, now that I think about it, we now have MORE slaves serving sentences in for profit prisons for victimless, non violent crimes working for major corporations for pennies an hour than we ever had on slave populations. All we really accomplished was moving the slaves indoors and giving them cable tv and air conditioning when they aren't working for da massa.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 01:17 | 5701408 Buckaroo Banzai
Buckaroo Banzai's picture

I live in a USA in which slavery exists in all 50 states of the Union.

The War Between the States did not free the black man, it enslaved the white man.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 06:51 | 5701630 Buster Cherry
Buster Cherry's picture

Aint that the truth.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 12:15 | 5702057 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

I have read a little history.  If you have a particular book you would like to recommend, then I would appreciate that recommendation.

There are always, and will be always, people who are enslaving other people, and who will not give up their slaves unless they are forced to.   They may convert from a more visible form of slavery to a less visible form, but they lack the generosity and the empathy to let others be free, and they have, one way or another, power over those others, and they are selfish, so they use that power.

Today's Bankers and other Davos Attendees aren't peacefully giving up their Central Banks, which are an almost invisible form of enslaving other people.

But imagine if you would be whipped if you learned to read.  And your children might be sold, and you might never see them again.  And your wife also.  And if you ran away, you would be whipped.  I bet that, even today, somewhere, there is someone living in precisely those conditions.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 23:08 | 5704731 Buster Cherry
Buster Cherry's picture

Damn these pop up ads............

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 23:05 | 5704735 Buster Cherry
Buster Cherry's picture

I really enjoyed David McCollugh's "Path Between the Seas" which is the story of the French and Americans construction work on the Panama Canal. Another is "Teddy Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet" by Kenneth Wimmel which describes how the US Navy was allowed to fall into neglect and disrepair after the Civil War and the subsequent restoration of it by the efforts of TR and actions during the Spanish war.

"A Stillness at Appomattox" by Bruce Catton is another good read....

Mon, 01/26/2015 - 12:36 | 5706567 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

Thank you very much.  I have put them on my list.  I am still wading through "Tragedy and Hope" by Carroll Quigley.

I get rid of most of the pop-off ads in Windows Explorer by using Tools, Tracking Protection, and then adding everything available to my list.  And then, of course, turning Tracking Protection on. 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 06:47 | 5701618 Buster Cherry
Buster Cherry's picture

Slavery was a very ineffecient way of operating farms and plantations and probably would have eventually ended with the advent of combines and the cotton gin. There were plans afoot for compensated emancipation.

I very much doubt salvery would have existed beyond 1900, except of course in those countries where the citizens fall to their knees and face Mecca when they pray. Those slaves of today are called women.

 

Sorry for the double post. Fucking Ameritrade popup ads.....

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 09:40 | 5701770 duo
duo's picture

Correct.  If the Civil War hadn't happened, economic collapse would have had the South begging to be re-admitted (probably without slavery as a condition) within a decade.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 16:35 | 5703176 me again
me again's picture

Ahh; a real student and a critical thinker; a dangerous man ! Bravo.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 06:21 | 5701619 Buster Cherry
Buster Cherry's picture

Slavery was a very ineffecient way of operating farms and plantations and probably would have eventually ended with the advent of combines and the cotton gin. There were plans afoot for compensated emancipation.

I very much doubt salvery would have existed beyond 1900, except of course in those countries where the citizens fall to their knees and face Mecca when they pray. Yhose slaves of today are called women.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 16:43 | 5703206 me again
me again's picture

Let's just get this straight once and for all; the Civil War had nothing to do with Slavery; nothing. It was Lincoln's war; it was a war of conquest and power monopoly; Lincoln didn't give a rat's ass about freeing any slaves.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 18:04 | 5703556 Buster Cherry
Buster Cherry's picture

I always enjoy hearing from those that are in the know...

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 10:06 | 5701786 effendi
effendi's picture

Without the Civil War the institution of slavery would have finished prior to 1885 (possibly as early as 1875). Blacks generally didn't benefit from how slavery ended and the method of it ending led to hatred, poverty and the Jim Crow laws; so was 600,000 dead worth it?

As for Lincoln not borrowing from the bankers I would hardly call creating fiat money (greenbacks) a good thing. It was just another way he took a dump on the rights (and savings) of the regular folk.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 10:14 | 5701797 Romney Wordsworth
Romney Wordsworth's picture

Greenbacks were not 'debt money'. They were generally accepted and liked to such a degree that Lincoln considered keeping them around after the War.

 

As soon as the war ended, Lincoln got a bullet in his head [by a guy who some said was on the payroll of European bankers]. Imagine that.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 12:18 | 5702064 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

Thank you.  That is what I was trying to say.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 16:42 | 5703199 me again
me again's picture

Correct; of course. Lincoln didn't care if he freed one slave, or all slaves, and he had a well-developed plan to ship the Negroes back to Africa. All this is available in the form of written notes from his cabineet meetings. HIs famous speech was a political performance to keep the British out of the war, and it succeeded perfectly. When it appeared in the British Newspapers, it made it impossible for the British power elite to offer military aid to the Confederacy; which of course they wanted to do in accordance with their favourite principle of divide and conquer.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 16:35 | 5703162 me again
me again's picture

You;ve been propagandized. Lincoln wasn't interested in Slavery, one way or the other. We know this from his own mouth. Do some more reading; it's good for you.  (for The Great Recovery).

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:37 | 5701209 holgerdanske
holgerdanske's picture

history is re-written by the living

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:40 | 5701220 Seasmoke
Seasmoke's picture

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. And Woodrow is driving the bus !!

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:42 | 5701221 wizardofOZ
wizardofOZ's picture

His unforgiveable error was to put the United States into the Great War for utterly no good reason of national interest.

For consideration...

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

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 01:16 | 5701405 Buckaroo Banzai
Buckaroo Banzai's picture

Bingo.

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:42 | 5701223 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

I agree with Stockman that Wilson did everything wrong, and that perhaps he was among the most damaging Presidents.

I believe Woodrow Wilson made 3 colossal errors. 

The first error was to sign into law the Federal Reserve.  This error turned the USA over to the European bankers, whom the USA had fought the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 to become and remain independent of, and whom Thomas Jefferson had warned Americans about, and whom Jefferson and Madison and Jackson had fought politically.

The second error was to stay out of WW1 for several years.  This error allowed the stalemate which ate up the human and capital resources of Europe.

The third error was to enter WW1 when he did.  This error forced all parties to continue the war, which otherwise, being exhausted, they were ready to end.  And then it gave the allies (France and Britain) a victory which they used to bankrupt Germany, which responded by elevating Hitler to power.

I would like to add that, at the beginning of WW1, Theodore Roosevelt was still alive, and he spoke repeatedly and forcefully for the USA to enter the war immediately, in order to push Germany back quickly and decisively.  That would have ended the war much sooner and saved all parties enormous damage.

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:47 | 5701233 swass
swass's picture

And Roosevelt was just as wrong too. 

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:52 | 5701250 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

I think Roosevelt was perfectly correct.  He knew the Kaiser personally, and many of the other heads of government and state in Europe.  And Roosevelt had a very good sense for both the martial and the diplomatic.  It was Roosevelt's personal diplomacy that ended the war between Japan and Russia.  Also, Roosevelt got the Panama Canal built, which required creating the nation Panama, without a single person getting killed in a war.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 01:20 | 5701413 Greenskeeper_Carl
Greenskeeper_Carl's picture

No, anyone who advocated entering the war at any point was wrong. The reason out found in fathers disparaged any kind of entangling political alliances with any nation was to avoid doing exactly what we did with WWI, and everywhere else since then. They understood that European countries conduct moronic wars that wipe out whole generations of young men every few decades, and that none of them were any of our business and certainly not our problem, so we should stay out of them. What possible fucking reason was there for us to enter that war early when it clearly posed no security threat to the US whatsoever. Threats to commercial US interests do not merit involvement or bloodshed. Something we would do well to remember

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 08:40 | 5701703 Arnold
Arnold's picture

Remember the Sony Motion Picture Division!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(This means  woar.)

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:18 | 5701893 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

"What possible fucking reason was there for us to enter that war early...?" 

The reason is that entering early would have gotten the war finished quickly, and therefore prevented what ended up happening, which was prolonged carnage and BORROWING BY ALL PARTIES to finance the war, and then the resulting Great Depression, and then the resulting Hitler and Mussolini. 

It's like fixing a leak in your roof.  You can do it right away, or you can wait until you have rot everywhere.  Entering the war early is like fixing the leak right away.

The Kaiser had a lame arm and felt unmanly, compared to his father, who had successfully invaded France.  The Kaiser wanted to prove his manliness, so he invaded the low countries and France, but the French generals tricked him away from Paris and got him bogged down in a war of attrition, which is the largest part of what we call WW1.

At that point, even just the threat of the USA entering the war might have gotten the Kaiser to sit down and negotiate for peace.  The actual appearance of USA troops, and even more the knowledge that the USA was gearing up its vast natural resources for a large war certainly would have made a huge impression.  The USA navy had, not long before, backed the Germans down militarily in South America.  Roosevelt had sent the Great White Fleet around the world.  The Germans had the U-boat, and felt they could outlast the British, but it should have been clear enough to enough smart people in the German leadership that the Germans could not outlast both the British AND the USA.  The USA could simply out-manufacture anyone at that point in history, IF it geared up for military heavy industry manufacturing.

Of course, WW1 wasn't the first time the USA got involved with European powers.  The USA's second President, John Adams, was pretty smart militarily.  He sent a USA fleet to the Mediterranean to put the Barbary Pirates out of business, because they were pirating USA ships. 

(One problem is always trade.  The question is always, how much do you have to do to ensure that your trade doesn't have to pay ransom to pirates?  We can take this back as far as the Roman-Carthage Wars, which were partly wars about who was going to pirate whose trade.  We could also say that all of today's Arab wars are really just, still, various tribes attacking each other's caravans.  Trade.  And if you trade in Europe, how much do you have to do militarily to make sure that noone pirates your trade in Europe.  I like Roosevelt: "speak softly but carry a big stick".  If you politely tell the Kaiser that you feel you have to to join the Allies, and then massively gear up to attack, and remind him of Latin America, that sounds like a very good approach to me.  And if he doesn't listen, then you come out quietly punching.)

Or... I think my favorite is the Monroe Doctrine.  Here was the 5th President of this upstart country telling the European Powers, who had Great Empires, to stay out of Latin America, because the upstart country was now the Great Power there.  Imagine!  Like ISIS telling today's Great Powers that ISIS now runs the Middle East. 

(Of course, the Monroe Doctrine didn't evict the Spanish and Portuguese from Latin America, but, luckily, Latin Americans themselves rose up and evicted them.)

P.S.  I did not downvote anyone who disagreed with me.  Thank you for reading what I wrote, and I learn something from everything I read (except the childish sarcasm of the trolls).

 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:35 | 5701957 Greenskeeper_Carl
Greenskeeper_Carl's picture

You are missing my entire point. The point is that intervention in other people affairs is not justified. We should have entered the war early(or at all) because it didn't have one fucking thing to do with us. It was none of our business. It also gave us the draft, which is WORSE than slavery, since people are trying to fucking kill you. Would you have volunteered to go fight in the trenches 'early in the war' as you advocate. You come off like one of these neo-con chicken hawk old men, willing to send others off to die for vague ideas and empire/prestige. The example you give of the Barbary pirates- they were attacking and enslaving US citizens. How is that similar to us entering WWI?(hint:it's not, at all) and, those people who went to fight the pirates weren't draftee slaves either. No where in the lead up to, and beginning of, WWI did any of the central powers do anything that would merit American intervention. However, if we did indeed live in a free country, there is no reason why free individuals couldn't VOLUNTARILY go over there and fight for whichever side they wanted, of given them money and other kinds of support. Same with all our causes we intervene in today. The difference is voluntary vs compulsion. Give me an honest answer- if you lived in America in the early days of WWI, would YOU volunteer for it, of encourage your children to go, or are you just another chicken hawk who isn't willing to risk himself and only willing to use govt compulsion to force others to go fight for causes that YOU feel are noble?

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 12:33 | 5702110 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

If you go back and read some of my posts here, you will find that I am very anti-war. 

I voted for Ron Paul.

I think I agree with you about most of what you wrote above, but...

Every conflict is different.  Sometimes I have to walk away.  Sometimes I have to argue.  Sometimes I have to fight.  George Washington decided that he had to fight, and he went in fought in New York, which wasn't his Colony and therefore, we could say, wasn't his business, and New Jersey, which also wasn't his Colony and therefore, we could say, wasn't his business.

Often, I think, it's the WAY you do something that is important.  When I said I think T.R. was right about getting the USA into WW1 right away, I DID NOT say that the draft was right.  I don't think T.R. ever proposed a draft.  However, all his children did go to the war in Europe.  One got killed in action.

Now I'll tell you what made me mad yesterday.  A USA judge gave a 19-year-old girl 4 years in prison for trying to go to the Near East and help ISIS.  19-years-old, not even old enough to drink.  Now THAT judge, IMHO, is a cowardly, bullying, sold-out, Constitution-hating CHICKENHAWK!

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 12:54 | 5702226 Greenskeeper_Carl
Greenskeeper_Carl's picture

Ok, it wasn't TRs fault we had a draft, fine. But how can you claim to be anti war WHEN YOU ARE STILL CLAIMING WE SHOULD HAVE ENTERED THE WAR AT THE BEGINNING? It wasn't any of our business at any point in that war. At all. Ever. And I don't give a shit about TRs kids fighting in the war. What I asked was would YOU have voluntarily gone over there to fight in the trenches. Would YOU have sent YOUR CHILDREN over there to fight in the war at the beginning?

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 16:50 | 5703219 me again
me again's picture

It's no use; he's going to be right no matter how many times he has to change his position to do it; he can't spell "wrong"; as applied to himself.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:10 | 5703282 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

I can claim I am anti-war because I opposed the Vietnam War, the invasion of Grenada, the bombing of Yugoslavia, the occupation of East Timor, the invasion of Panama, the invasion of Iraq, the second invasion of Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Libya, the invasion of eastern Georgia, the takeover of Ukraine, and the invasion of Syria.

I also oppose all the sanctions, period.

I consider questions worded "would YOU have..." to be rhetorical questions, and I don't answer them because I believe my answer would be pure speculation.  I never know what I will do under any circumstances, until those circumstances arise, and put the pressure on the various parts of my brain, and force them to battle it out among themselves.  Then, some parts win out and decide what I will do - whether I will act fearlessly or with cowardice, or with self-discipline or without it.  Seriously.  Human brains are complicated things. 

And I think that, knowing this about myself, is probably why I write less about principles and more about what I did or, more importantly, about what various politicians, businessmen, and bankers did.  And what seems to me to matter is what resulted from what they did.

As they say, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".  What matters is the results, not the intentions.

So... back to WW1, I believe it would have been far better for the USA to enter WW1 in Europe as soon as possible, because I believe that would have greatly lessened the carnage, and also the borrowing of money (from the international bankers).  And every dollar of that borrowing gave the international bankers more power, which, now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think it is possible to see they have since enormously and shamefully abused, and still abuse.

And I would like to remind those who respect Washington's warning not to get involved with European powers, that it was the French who kept the British navy from evacuating Cornwallis, keeping him pinned down where Washington (and some French troops) could force him to surrender.  Without that MILITARY help from a European power (France) there would be no USA.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:37 | 5703416 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

deleted

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 22:37 | 5704615 Buster Cherry
Buster Cherry's picture

I do enjoy the history lessons here

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 16:51 | 5703226 me again
me again's picture

Of course. But you're debating a ding-bat; it's useless. (for greenskeeper carl).

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 16:47 | 5703213 me again
me again's picture

You're pretty badly screwed up buddy.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:42 | 5703440 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

God loves you.  I love you.  The universe loves you.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 22:15 | 5704538 Buster Cherry
Buster Cherry's picture

Yeah, he got the canal built by bending Colombia over and fucking it in the ass. Our relations with Latin America have been lacking in trust ever since. You do know Panama was a Colombian province, right?

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:00 | 5701265 El Vaquero
El Vaquero's picture

Yes, Teddy Roosevelt was wrong, but he is one of the few who probably believed what he was saying.  He was also wrong when it came to further centralization, but I don't think that he comprehended why he was wrong and didn't think "what about the next 10 presidents?"  I don't think he ever considered the degree of corruption that has proven to be possible within that office.  I think he viewed the world from his viewpoint and his viewpoint only, and never considered how a stronger central government could come back to bite us when the government was staffed by the vipers we have today.  

 

One foreign dignitary described him as a child, and in many respects, that is how he viewed the world.  

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:46 | 5701354 cynicalskeptic
cynicalskeptic's picture

TR seemed to have a naive view of the world.  He was against trusts because he felt those runnign the trusts were doing so in a manner that HURT the nation.  T.R. wasn't against central control per se but felt He was better qualified than those that had been doing so.  Ther was a certain sense of noblisse oblige or altruism at work but he failed to see that others could use government for nefarious purposes - that others had less 'noble' intentions.  TR was definitely an elitist - seeing himslef and his class as far more capable and deserving.  He was also very much a racist - and helped put Japan on its path to Imperialism - seeing the Japanese as more ambitious and capable and 'deserving' than other corrupt Asiatics.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 02:20 | 5701467 suteibu
suteibu's picture

"...seeing the Japanese as more ambitious and capable and 'deserving' than other corrupt Asiatics."

Indeed.  But also seeing them as a proxy power in Asia, encouraging Japan to take Korea and wage war with Russia as "honorary Aryans."  Of course, in the end, it was all bullshit as seen in the Treaty of Portsmouth and the League of Nations.  Roosevelt's Nobel was on par with Kissinger's, Carter's and Obama's.

Quick quiz:  Who financed Japan's war against Russia?

 

 

 

Rothschild

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 10:15 | 5701808 Romney Wordsworth
Romney Wordsworth's picture

The Red Shield has had a circumcised hard-on for Russia for 2 centuries now [going all the way back to Napoleon].

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:24 | 5701928 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

"He was also very much a racist - and helped put Japan on its path to Imperialism - seeing the Japanese as more ambitious and capable and 'deserving' than other corrupt Asiatics."

What I read was that T.R. felt that the USA, regrettably, HAD TO take the Philippines, because otherwise the Japanese would take them.  So I can't conclude that T.R. trusted the Japanese.  Remember, please, that T.R.'s personal diplomacy had ended the Japanese-Russian War, which was the first Japanese imperial invasion.  So T.R. had studied Japan, and understood that the Japanese were becoming interested in empire.  So, his position on the Philippines showed that he didn't feel comfortable with that.  What I don't know is how much T.R. knew about how the Japanese acted in the Japanese-Russian War, which I have read was, very badly indeed.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:26 | 5701936 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

Also, T.R. invited Booker T. Washington to dinner in the White House.  First time, if my memory serves me, that a black man was invited to dine in the White House.  Unfortunately, though, the press made a big deal of it, and T.R. concluded that he couldn't get elected if he did it again, so he didn't.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 16:56 | 5703242 me again
me again's picture

Yu've really had a job done on your head; you better read a lot more.  TR was certifiable; he was a real sick puppy, and the Phillipines campaign was as filthy as anything ever done in Afghanistan or Vietnam; and it went on for decades.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:17 | 5703313 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

Philippines, not Phillipines.  One "L", two "P"s.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:58 | 5702020 El Vaquero
El Vaquero's picture

TR was all for centralization.  IMO, he viewed the government as noble, and that is where he wanted the power centralized.  He didn't trust private power, where as most of us, myself included, don't trust power, period.  I think that naive is a good adjective for him.  People have got to remember, he came to office because his predecessor was assassinated, and then when running for reelection, an assassination attempt on him was made.  He was shot in the chest, then got up and gave a campaign speech before seeking medical treatment.  That is the kind of man who can be manipulated, but not bullied. 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:18 | 5703321 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

I hope those who hate T.R. still find time to visit some of the many national parks and national monuments he created.  After all, he did it for you.

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:43 | 5701228 Yen Cross
Yen Cross's picture

 History, is a campfire with some good friends that admit their Mis~ Forgivings, to their friends on Holidays.

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:53 | 5701241 ThroxxOfVron
ThroxxOfVron's picture

Bravo.  Quite well done, David.  Unfortunately no one in the US under 40 years of age likely has much idea of what you are getting at.

...Yet, there is much you have left unsaid.    

Who are those that have benefitted from this engineered disaster and can we divest them of their ill gotten gains?  Who profited and profiteered.    Are those that profit and profiteer today the descendents of those Wilson era robber barons and banksters by any chance?   Did the robber barons and trusts builders morph into the present cronygarchy perhaps?  Feudalism by any other name...

It must also be pointed out that you have neglected to offer an approach to resolution of the predicament we are in.

How do we, if we can, return These United States to function within the pre-Wilsonian and pre-FED construct defined by the classic policies of small, republican, non-interventionist government and a prosperity of local entrepreneurship?

How do we go about purging the oppression of centralized banking based political and military fiat and return to a basis in commercial collateral and production, and to sound money and sound trade policies?

Is it not obvious that much of the federalized system is antithetical to personal and broad economic liberty?

How do we dismantle not only the MIC and The FED, but the avaricious confiscatory bureaucracies enriching themselves under the facades of domestic security, education, health care, etc..?

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:22 | 5701305 Anusocracy
Anusocracy's picture

Looks like the solution is run until failure.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:38 | 5701967 F em all but 6
F em all but 6's picture

Civil War. A new beginning. The next group of evil scum finds a way to take control. Rinse and repeat. I have no faith in the human race. If we fail to embrace our spiritual nature, we will become extinct. 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 16:59 | 5703249 me again
me again's picture

No, if the various brown-religious nutjob peoples don't find out what birth control means, we're extinct. We don't have any spiritual nature and we don't need one.

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:52 | 5701243 SanFran2000
SanFran2000's picture

How come the author doesn't mention the OBVIOUS and the MAIN DRIVING FORCE? That would be the newly found Federal Reserve. It was no coincidence that WWI started a few months after the Fed was created. With the backing of the US govt and taxpayers, the banksters could fund both sides of the war. And it is also the reason they didn't want the war to end quickly. War spending creates debt, the blood that the vampires need. 

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:58 | 5701260 ThroxxOfVron
ThroxxOfVron's picture

I think D.S. covered this in his 5th propisition more or less.

While he speaks of a transformation of The FED from a commerical liquidity provider into a tool of policy invention and intervention and political patronage, I believe that he is implying that The FED had actually been specifically engineered from inception for these purposes -and that Wilson either knew of the intent of the engineers of The FED and cooperated or actually had an active hand in creating the arrangement from before the signing of the Bank Charter.

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:59 | 5701263 Yen Cross
Yen Cross's picture

 Nice comment

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:33 | 5701319 ThroxxOfVron
ThroxxOfVron's picture

Stockman is accessing the genesis of the globalist FED.  This is sequence of events leads directly to the present Reserve Currency status.  

I suspect that the narrative went thus: 

IF The FED is 'transformed'  ( original intent at inception ) into the Bank Of The Military Industrial Complex under Wilson then:

1. The US could act as a vendor financer to the WW1 aggressors benefitting the profiteers and entrenched industrial barrons.

2. The FED would become very powerful globally due to financing the domestic war boom and the foreign purchases of armaments and supplies, etc., and indebt the foreign economies to the principal financiers that formed the core of The FED cartel.  This is proto-dollarization regime is the genesis of the FRN based Reserve/Trade Currency system.

3. Wilson, in return for commissioning The FED and yoking the domestic economy for the benefit of the profiteers and industrial barrons is backed by the burgeoning MIC/Banking complex and propelled onto the world stage.

A popular contention here on ZH is that the Banksters are enablers of the police state and welfare state domestically, and of the MIC and colonialist/globalist corporate oppression globally.

Stockman has obviously been contemplating how the system was devised.  It is important to understand how and why The FED/MIC nexus was engineered if one has any intention of dismantling or defanging it.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 02:59 | 5701509 Yen Cross
Yen Cross's picture

 Well, I haven't taken the time to explore your comment.

 One thing is for sure. At ZUlU 5 the FX markets are going to open, and lot's of traders are going to get " stopped out".

 Get your margins in place ASAP. I'm trading the gap Bitchez

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 04:17 | 5701555 ThroxxOfVron
ThroxxOfVron's picture

Happy trading, Yen.

Countdown to Xanadu...

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:24 | 5701931 tip e. canoe
tip e. canoe's picture

a detailed breakdown of the more recent developments in nexus engineering:

https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e

travels way deeper than the title suggests. if you have the time and attention span, it gets real juicy at the end of part 2 when it moves into the realm of the attempts to shape the narrative using neuropsychology.

nice color snapshots as well ;~)

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:47 | 5701986 Cathartes Aura
Cathartes Aura's picture

appreciated, I could use some outer-ripples in the restless mind pool today. . .

consider your pebble drop'd.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 10:16 | 5701801 Ghordius
Ghordius's picture

ThroxxOfVron, excellent point. Consider this, though: when the FED was designed, it was against a backdrop of several other national banks, particularly european ones (and the domestic one of previous American banks of this kind)

The Panic of 1907 had shaken the financial markets of New York. It was the first fund and trust crisis of this kind of magnitude, and the bankers of that age were in thrall of their leader*, who they saw as the number one saviour of their status quo

The United States of America was already on an imperial path. Spain was shouldered away through a war (remember the Maine!) and Cuba, Panama, Puerto Rico and the Philippines were already added to the American Empire, it's satellites under the authority of the United States Military Government (USMG) until granted increasing local political rights

The creation of the FED satisfied several interests:

- The imperialists saw the foreign national banks as for what they were: potential tools of sustained war finance. As such, strategic assets of military importance, and they wanted to be equally equipped if the next round of imperial expansion involved one of the bigger boyz

- The financialists of Wall Street saw it as the potential institutionalized JPMorgan*, i.e. the "coordinator and lender of last resort"

note the domestic backdrop: an economy that requested resources like sugar, a "finance community" that sought some backbone in the form of an institution, imperialists eying intervention

however badly you want to talk about those early 20th Century American leaders of business, finance and politics... they actually did not yet even think about a world to come where wars would not be declared or would ever end, about milking a national bank for sustained fiscal expansion, of a complete capture of all business life into financial markets, or the complete financialization of the typical American, living in a house that will never belong fully to him, having a means of transport that will never belong fully to him, in a country that allows all kind of financial bets to be extended by all kind of bank-like institutions and then bailed out... not through liquidity by the national bank but through fiscal budgets by the federal state

rascals? yes. but a more archaic form of rascals. and realists, with a good eye on how the rest of the world would react to what

note, too, that this archaic backdrop does not yet have a Military-Industrial Complex beyond the small one that was behind the American Battlefleet. It was enough to defeat Spain, but in no relation to the modern one, which has surpassed the directive of being able to defeat one foreign Major Power... to one that, spending wise... could go toe-to-toe with the entire rest of the world at the same time

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:03 | 5703256 me again
me again's picture

Of course it's not a co-incidence. It's all the same conspiracy; Wilson was the first useful idiot employed by the Oligarchs in the 20th  century. "you mean wealthy people actually meet in rooms and make plans ?"---Yes, they do.

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:52 | 5701246 essence
essence's picture

Love it. I really love this piece

David Stockman revisits history and set it right, no doubt much to the chagrin of the patriotic (my country is ALWAYS right) pinheads.

 

F... Yeah, this is what happened. History as they say, gets written by the victor, and the Banksters have been winning for a long time.

 

 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 10:33 | 5701837 amadeus39
amadeus39's picture

Yeah,  but now, thanks to the internet, the losers can try their hand at re-writing history. Ain't technology grand? 

 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:03 | 5703262 me again
me again's picture

I'm glad you got a start on modern history; but Stockman is only a partial introduction; and it's full of omissions and a few comissions. If you're really interested; keep reading; there's plenty of published material available.

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:53 | 5701247 suteibu
suteibu's picture

Based on where we are now, and the slow walk getting here, I would say that all presidents have been power-hungry sociopaths willing to sell themselves and the nation to the highest bidder.  None of these men deserve honor or respect. 

The notion that anyone in government is there because of their desire to serve the public is the biggest lie ever told. 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 08:47 | 5701709 lunaticfringe
lunaticfringe's picture

You are right of course. It didn't use to be that way. Socrates said that the first thing to go was morality.

When did that ship leave the harbor? From here, I can't see a mast or sail anymore. 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:55 | 5702007 Cathartes Aura
Cathartes Aura's picture

.

It didn't use to be that way.

perhaps ask yourself, at what point in all the stories called "history" that are offered up for your belief, some chosen as "truth" and some discarded as "lies",

at what point were any of them true beyond the need for a collective narrative that leads peoples by the nose to the next chapter, one already written yet to be experienced?

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:09 | 5703281 me again
me again's picture

Washington, Jefferson, Madison. Ike was okay; he tried to warn us, against his own clan, the professional military.  It seems to go in steps down; Wilson; for sure; big step down; JFK offed by the Govt. , Johnson presidency, big step down, Nixon, big steps down; and then just basically clown shows.

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:55 | 5701253 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

Well said, Mr. Stockman!

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:01 | 5701268 yellencrash
yellencrash's picture

"Honest money" ? Does he mean like the the beads that bought Manhattan, or the mining slave labor of chinese and irish and southern slaves bought and sold? Comr on now. I desipse the Fed too, but honest money is an oxymoron.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:32 | 5701323 bh2
bh2's picture

Not so fast. "Honest money" is always the highest order (most readily accepted) good in any economy and therefore (like any other good) can never be available in unlimited supply. If available in unlimited supply, it isn't really money because it cannot generate visible and reliable (which is to say "honest") price discovery for any other goods.

It is always dangerous to make the perfect the enemy of the good. While there is no "perfect" money, there are many kinds which are "bad" rather than merely "good".

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:03 | 5701270 assistedliving
assistedliving's picture

Harvard, Dir of OMB, Blackstone, bankrupt and historian?  who knew?

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:07 | 5701276 Chipped ham
Chipped ham's picture

My humble thesis tonight is that the entire 20thCentury was a giant mistake.

And that you can put the blame for this monumental error squarely on Thomas Woodrow Wilson——-a megalomaniacal madman who was the very worst President in American history……..well, except for the last two.

 

Truer words were never written! 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:11 | 5703284 me again
me again's picture

My humble thesis is that the entire 20th. Century was a Conspiracy; but then you'd call me a conspiracy nut, I suppse . But think about it.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:27 | 5701277 Chipped ham
Chipped ham's picture

Fucking politicians.  We keep voting for them. As if it matters.  Every one of them has both Harry Reid and John McCain in 'em. Especially the ones you like. 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:09 | 5701278 GRDguy
GRDguy's picture

It's certainly easier to write about the puppets instead of the puppeteers.  Wilson, from Princeton, was just another puppet, just like Bernanke, also from Princeton.  Makes one wonder what's in their water supply.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:15 | 5701915 Charming Anarchist
Charming Anarchist's picture

Water supply?  Nah.

It is what they do behind closed doors to make them black-mailable in the future. 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 12:34 | 5702117 WillyGroper
WillyGroper's picture

Absofuckinlutely...

A den of pedophiles, homosexuals & the most perverse debauchery.

See Kay Griggs 1998 ewetoobs.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:12 | 5701282 Yen Cross
Yen Cross's picture

 I'm a "Happy Camper"

 Mr. Yellen Says so

 Duck under your desk if the Russians get angry/

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:15 | 5701290 yellencrash
yellencrash's picture

I wonder what DOES happen to all these people when they die. Life is short.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:19 | 5701297 suteibu
suteibu's picture

If Christian, you would have to believe they went to Hell. 

If Buddhist, they went to Hell and then were reincarnated as brown-skinned children watching a drone fall out of the sky towards them.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 02:32 | 5701478 Yen Cross
Yen Cross's picture

 I was being facetious you "cock sucker"

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 02:35 | 5701481 suteibu
suteibu's picture

I didn't respond to you "dipshit." 

Dude, get a life.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 02:46 | 5701497 Yen Cross
Yen Cross's picture

 I'll be sure and get right on that.

 I don't recall rattling your cage? Ohh I acidentally woke you.

 I'm NOT your enemy suteibu

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 02:51 | 5701503 suteibu
suteibu's picture

I see, calling me "cock sucker" for no apparent reason (unless you troll here as "yellencrash" as well) is a sign of friendship? 

Explain how that works.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 03:03 | 5701514 Yen Cross
Yen Cross's picture

 Last summer you got a bit testy. I warned you about the BOJ, and you got testy.

 The usdx is 5% higher and usd/jpy is still 118.00 handle.

 Fucking central banksters!

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 03:07 | 5701517 suteibu
suteibu's picture

I'm confused.  We definately did not get into it about the BoJ as I would never defend them.  It was about some history thing that did not matter.  However, I hold nothing against you for past comments.  So what is this about?

yellencrash


Vote up!

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Vote down!

0

I wonder what DOES happen to all these people when they die. Life is short.

Sat, 01/24/2015 - 23:19 | 5701297 suteibu
Vote up!

3
Vote down!

-1

If Christian, you would have to believe they went to Hell. 

If Buddhist, they went to Hell and then were reincarnated as brown-skinned children watching a drone fall out of the sky towards them.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 01:32 | 5701478 Yen Cross
Vote up!

0
Vote down!

0

 I was being facetious you "cock sucker"

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:14 | 5703295 me again
me again's picture

Usually posts irrelevant nonsense; occasionally gets a chance to vent his rage at his life's failure; needs to be blocked from the site.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:27 | 5701315 Catullus
Catullus's picture

WWI was the capstone of The Progressive Era. It was their shining moment. It was after WWI that progressivism became engrained in the US government. The central bank, the central planning, the cartelization of industries, the "great cooperation". It's incredible to me that anyone in the 21st century would dare call themselves a Progressive.

What I find the best about Wilson is how much he was manipulated by the French and British during the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles. They knew it was his legacy. And he was honestly hurt that no one was enthused about the League of Nations. The French and British repeatedly threatened to cut out the League of Nations if Wilson didn't agree to the Treaty of Versailles. Including the war guilt clause.

Not to be forgotten: FDR was part of the American attaché with Wilson during the treaty negotiations. He was very much apart of that disaster.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:44 | 5701345 ThroxxOfVron
ThroxxOfVron's picture

"FDR was part of the American attaché with Wilson during the treaty negotiations. He was very much apart of that disaster. "

He was already being positioned.

Implementation of the perpetual Warfare State was the first phase of govenment financialization.

Implementation of the Welfare State was part two.

These 'debts' have the full faith and backing of the US Government.  They are senior to almost all other govenment obligations including Social Security payments.

I continue to assert 'The Federal Debt' is NOT debt.  It is the sale of perpetual guaranteed income streams derived from taxation.

It is the securitization and sale of revenue streams to be forcibly extracted from the citizenry.

 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 08:42 | 5701706 Wahooo
Wahooo's picture

What is debt except the sale of perpetual guaranteed income streams? And when those streams are exhausted and default occurs, the nation's assets are seized.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:20 | 5701920 Charming Anarchist
Charming Anarchist's picture

The difference is that the "assets" being seized are you and me. 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 19:07 | 5703831 sschu
sschu's picture

The author of the progressive mindset was Marx.  Progressivism is Marxism with a different name.  

Satan was ecstatic when the progressives adopted his world view.  It is all anti-God.  Satan is dancing to this day.

In the Book of Colossians Satan's System is called the "dominion of darkness".  Wilson was one of Satan's most effective minions.

sschu 

 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:31 | 5701328 Consuelo
Consuelo's picture

It's a shame that the Articles of Confederation could not have been worked to solution instead of Federalism.   Centralization of anything rarely, if ever, turns out well.

 

 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:17 | 5703309 me again
me again's picture

It all depends on your POV; it turns out well for the Central Power. for the people ? not so much.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:38 | 5701342 bid the soldier...
bid the soldiers shoot's picture

Have you considered calling your article "A la recherche du temps perdu"?  Right era and locale. 

 

Just a couple of omissions.

In your litany of blame you neglect to mention perhaps the the most important factor of all.

As you undoubtedly know, his mother the former Princess Royal and Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, Victoria, suffered a breech birth when Wilhelm was born which 

left him with a withered left arm due to Erb's palsy, which he tried with some success to conceal. 

This disability affected his emotional development as most disabilities do.


If Woodrow Wilson had not entered the war or if The Great War had never begun, what's your best guess as to what the world's population would be today?  In 2013  it was 7.125 billion.  Without the 'war to end all wars'  do you think we'd be over 10 billion now?

Do you believe in the Theory of Diminishing Returns as it might impact populations and economies?


“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” 

 Omar Khayyam

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 02:52 | 5701505 I Write Code
I Write Code's picture

+1 for the title ref

+1 for the poetry

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:24 | 5701927 Charming Anarchist
Charming Anarchist's picture

Who cares? This planet can happily support more people. There is enough land in my "country" to give every man, woman and child on this planet more than an acre.  That is a lot. 

Over-population is a false boogey man.  The problem is warfare.  Most people in 3rd world countries would be happy left alone even if their lifestyle qualifies as squalor by our standards.  Free from threat of violence, man is very creative in surviving without luxuries. 

 

<<Without the 'war to end all wars'  do you think we'd be over 10 billion now?>>

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 14:06 | 5702626 bid the soldier...
bid the soldiers shoot's picture

"Who cares?"  

No one living the good life in the West, that's for sure.

If he world population today were 9 or 10 billion, how many of them would be talking to Goldman Sachs about an IPO and how many would expect to join this tragic lot?

This year, nearly 9 million children younger than five years old will die needlessly, more than half from hunger-related causes.1

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:23 | 5703336 me again
me again's picture

It's NOT NEEDLESS. It's absolutely necessary. Learn how to think, please. Africa needs a big sign that says, "Please don't feed the Africans"; sooner or later they'll hit on the idea of birth control. There is no other way.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 22:07 | 5704511 Charming Anarchist
Charming Anarchist's picture

Then go put up that stupid sign, you idiot.  What is your agenda? Who is paying you to spread division?? 

 

Africans are not stupid.  They fuck and they have kids. They do not ask for much. 

What the hell are we doing??  Diddly with iVibraphones up our arses?!?!? Raping and pillaging their lands???? 

 

I have never been to Africa nor have I spoken to every single African alive.  Maybe I am naive but I will default to an appeal to freedom:  LEAVE THEM ALONE. 

If they want to have tons of kids, my anarcho-capitalist spirit leads me to blindly believe they can support them PROVIDED WESTERNERS LEAVE THEM ALONE. 

 

<<If he world population today were 9 or 10 billion, how many of them would be talking to Goldman Sachs about an IPO and how many would expect to join this tragic lot?>>

There would be no poor people on this planet if we Westerners were not living off the avails of their plunder. 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 22:22 | 5704576 bid the soldier...
bid the soldiers shoot's picture

 

So you are in agreement with me and Ecclesiastes then.

Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.

 


Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been born, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.

 

'Evil work" has to be one of the great understatements of that particular religious book..

 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:20 | 5703326 me again
me again's picture

I've often considered the role of the mass un-conscious and War as necessary to population control. If the human cultures could give up on their religions and their bullshit and learn birth control it would be a lot nicer. right now,  for instance; we haven't had enouigh casualties for quite a while, due to the Nuclear Deterrent; which is very dangerous. Like a Forest that hasn't had a burn in a long time; there's a lot of built up brush.

Mon, 01/26/2015 - 01:39 | 5705107 bid the soldier...
bid the soldiers shoot's picture

I hope you do not consider the role of War as necessary to population control before the beginning of the 20th Century.  

It was after 1900 that the paradigm shift of the values of increased population occurred.  As a planet spinning clockwise on its axis instantaneously begins to spin counterclockwise without slowing down first.

(Granted things happen differently in physics than they do in sexual intercourse, where no one gets points for instantaneously.)

For hundreds of thousands of years the population of the earth crept along at a snails pace until it went from struggling to achieve critical mass to deadly diminishing returns in less than a century.

None of your schemes and dreams will take us back to the paradise that existed before diminishing returns set in.

Is diminishing returns the end result of a population's critical mass?  The explosive power of the chain reaction of too great a population?

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 00:58 | 5701373 WTFUD
WTFUD's picture

So ALL dem AUDREY Murphy filums are truth bent. Say it ain't so. . . . and what of Gen. Clusterfuck . . . . . or Annabel Hayes and Kit Cuwwy. . . . question everything. Still those dastardly BRITS stole nearly everything before the USSA existed.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 01:00 | 5701381 kchrisc
kchrisc's picture

"Why The Entire 20th Century Was A Mistake"

It wasn't a mistake for those in on the rackets.

For those not, they always had the foxholes, cattle cars, and deprivations.

The banksters need to repay us.

 

Sort of like how it depends on if the war crime in Iraq was a "mistake."

 

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 01:19 | 5701409 22winmag
22winmag's picture

I'm no fan of Wilson, the Harvard man who turned a blind eye to JPM's war profiteering among other things.

 

However, the man did repent before his death, and I don't see anyone else repenting...

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 01:40 | 5701433 williambanzai7
williambanzai7's picture

Talk is cheap

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 06:27 | 5701621 falak pema
falak pema's picture

but the soul is deep.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 10:59 | 5701817 tip e. canoe
tip e. canoe's picture

and continues to weep

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 11:29 | 5701943 TheGreatRecovery
TheGreatRecovery's picture

I love Meryl Streep.    :-)

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 17:26 | 5703354 me again
me again's picture

Beep ! Beep !  (roadrunner cartoon)

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 10:23 | 5701818 tip e. canoe
tip e. canoe's picture

~

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 07:44 | 5701661 GreatUncle
GreatUncle's picture

But he had already had a fantastic life so would have likely been smiling.

Sun, 01/25/2015 - 08:01 | 5701673 Clowns on Acid
Clowns on Acid's picture

it was actually Princeton ... but Harvard sucks just as bad... so whatever

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