I travel between the US and Latin America, where I am from, but I view nations, borders, flags and the like as political tricks to keep us, "we the people" [of many countries] at the mercy of the bastard politicians, who in my eyes, are no better than carrier and spreaders of bubonic plague rats... same with their cousins, the bureaucrats.
However, as far as sports goes, I enjoy the friendly rivalry of different teams <countries> all in good sportsmanship fashion. A contradiction ? not really, as soon as we leave the playing field, we are all humans. In theory, all friends, regardless of the geographic location where each of us happen to call such "home".
The US signifies, [at least in its origin and ideal], the triumph of the individual due to the freedom and ingenuity that a system of free enterprise allows.... Laisssez Faire Capitalism.
I view what the US represents more of a "state of mind", rather than the physical boundaries of its location.
Ayn Rand's view of America.....
America's founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more --and nothing less. The rest --everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything "noble and just", and heroic, and great, and unprecedented in human history --was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle. The first consequence was the principle of political freedom, i.e., an individual's freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by the government. The next was the economic implementation of political freedom: the system of capitalism.
But today....
I realize that all this is somehow "idealistic", even utopian, particularly in the world we live today where, it seems, that TV idiocy [Beavis and Buthead] and Hollywood policy [dumb and dumber], seems to be the standard and guiding light...
Not to mention the Circus of the Absurd that the legal system has reached, and helped to create --that depends on "what the meaning of is, well... is. A world where wars are "humanitarian", budget surpluses exist while public debt continues to explode, and quarterly earnings of billion dollar companies is a mere oxymoron.
Just trying to gauge your non-U.S. bias.
I am very pro-US, but I guess I criticize a lot... "un criticón"... you know, the freedom of speech thing. Like the couple of old farts up in the balcony seats in the Muppet show, giving their .02 cents at the end of the show... remember them ? (I have forgotten their names...)
Essentially I believe in Laissez Faire Capitalism, I dislike collectivist, politicians and bureaucrats... as for sports... is hard to break old habits, particularly in soccer, which in Lat Am is fed to you as part of infant food.
To keep this in the spirit of the 4th of July...
I will say that there are two main protagonists of the American Success...
The first one is Thomas Jefferson for accomplishing the greatest real estate deal of all times, by buying the Louisiana territory from warring Napoleon for a paltry $15'000,000...
And the second,
Generalísimo Antonio López de Santa Ana... say what ?
Well... he facilitated the acquisition of the Republic of Texas, and the rest of the Southwest, including California...
btw... did you know, that the Independence of "The Republic of Texas" (1836), started by the Mexican Government (based in the northern state of Coahuila, which served as seat of government for the Tejas Territory), abolished slavery, and demanded that all slaves in Tejas be set free.... The "Texians" demanded monetary compensation at the tune of $1500 to $2000 per slave... the Mexican government refused... Tejas, became Texas, with the rebels belonging to both camps, Anglos and Mexicans, then in 1845 Texas was admitted to the Union.
Of course for historians, such was a small detail that was not considered important, or relevant.
While mismanagement and abandonment of the Tejas territory also led to the eventual Texas independence, Generalísimo Antonio López de Santa Ana, in tradition, a fraud of a leader, made matters worse.
lib.utexas.edu
(just go through the chronology to see, how many times Santa Ana, was president, surrendered it, got it back... etc.)
Ironically this corrupted leader, assisted the US in obtaining an important part of the US territory, in the ensuing war of 1846-48 the end result was that the US gained not only Texas, the republic, but also what it is now, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, California and, probably parts of the Oregon territory, as in those days, I doubt boundaries were clear and defined.
The Mexicans can not be totally blamed for this war. The attack that many patriots were so fond of using as justification for the war was simply an attempt by Mexico to defend land that it believed belonged to Mexico. Of course, Mexico could have responded in a more peaceful manner to the idea of Texas annexation. And Mexico could have responded better to American desires to purchase California and other areas of the Southwest (Lavender 130). If only it could be as easy as the Louisiana Purchase had been, Polk must have thought.
Another suspected cause of the war is the desire of the southern states to gain more slave states, thereby increasing their political power. Those in the free states to the north tended to hold this view of the war. Many of the Americans that had moved into Texas ignored the slavery restriction. Northerners feared that Texas would join the Union as a slave state, since there were obviously already slaves in Texas. It was this very fear that Calhoun had used to ensure that President Tyler's annexation treaty with Texas would not get the two-thirds majority needed in the Senate for approval (Combs 88). But if the southern states wanted Texas so badly, they had a strange way of expressing it. When the call went out for volunteers to join the military in the fight against Mexico, most came from the western states and even the territories (Lavender 130). If the south was so interested in gaining Texas as a slave state, one would think that they would have sent more troops than they did (Newhouse 142).
Many probable causes of the Mexican-American War have been posed throughout our nation's history. These range from the obvious (Mexico) to the subtle (southern "slave power"). The two causes that make the most sense, however, are the constant westward movement of Americans and the concept of Manifest Destiny.
azteca.net
And more questionable facts about the Alamo characters...
Bowie claimed hundreds of square miles of land in Arkansas and Louisiana with fraudulent Spanish land grants and phony bills of sale, Mr. Davis said.
Bowie also circumvented a law banning the slave imports by buying hundreds of Africans for $1 a pound from a French pirate before turning them over to Louisiana authorities, Mr. Davis said.
flash.net
Somehow reminiscent of present day "Freeman" (in Montana)
newswest.com
militia-watchdog.org
The Freemen didn't just issue phony suits, however; they also tried to create phony money using complicated schemes involving the filing of liens worth millions of dollars against various Montana property owners or the U.S. or Montana governments. Until they were found invalid, bank computers might list these liens as assets. This in turn created a window during which banks might transfer money against these assets. So Freemen would deposit fake money orders in other banks, to be drawn upon the bank listing the lien. The money orders, generally signed by Schweitzer (Skurdal, Daniel Petersen and William Stanton also signed the notes on occasion), looked real, except for small details such as a lowercase "u" in "United States." Bogus checks sometimes carried the words "Certified Bankers Check -- Controller Warrant," instead of a bank name, along with account and lien numbers. Many checks were drawn against a non-existent account in a Butte, Montana, branch of the Norwest Bank. The checks stated that they were also redeemable at the Office of the U.S. Postmaster. If the Freemen withdrew the funds deposited before all parties realized that there was no real money involved, they might get away with a hefty sum. They didn't always succeed; Freeman Will Stanton got caught in October 1994 when he wrote a hot check for $25,000 to pay his taxes--these funds were drawn upon $3.8 million of assets at Merrill Lynch which that company had discovered were no good.
The Freemen didn't just try to use the money orders themselves; they also sold them, advertising them as a way for people to get themselves out of debt. If you owed $20,000 in mortgage payments, you could simply make out a bogus money order to the amount, and your debts were gone. Or better yet, they suggested, make the money order out for $40,000, then demand an immediate refund of the "overpayment." They might well write you a good check before they discover that the money order they received was bad. As one "patriot" explained on the Internet, "LeRoy Schweitzer does have their [sic] own monetary system. When you attend their course on location, they will issue you CHECKS times two (biblical) to pay off all IRS debts and all loans to banks for no charge. They are having success in this area, but it is hard fight [sic]." By April 1994 more than 100 banks across the country had reported receipt of bogus money orders. Not all of these came from Schweitzer and Skurdal; a good number of them came from Posse hotbed Tigerton, Wisconsin. But the Montana Freemen contributed their fair share. One of the more bizarre incidents in the Freemen saga came when the mayor of Cascade, Montana, apparently a Freeman sympathizer, actually deposited a bogus $20,000,000 in the town bank. Most attempts to pass the checks involved considerably smaller amounts; the Denver Business Journal in December 1995 reported that 15 Schweitzer checks had been passed recently, ranging from $2,600 to $91,000. Some people tried to use them to cheat their ex-spouses, sending them as child support checks. For some time, local bank officials and postmasters were puzzled, for although they knew the checks were not valid, they had not at that point heard of Leroy Schweitzer--the fake checks had been distributed faster than the news of them had. Not until early 1996 were banks generally aware of the nature of the bogus checks, and even then, not all were. And ordinary people, many of whom received the checks in return for selling cars, boats, or for services rendered, had no knowledge whatsoever that the check or money order they had just received was bad. "People see these and, if you're a very unsuspecting person," an Omaha, Nebraska, county treasurer explained, "they really do look authentic."
Of course, there is always, "the other side of the story"....
With uncharacteristic candor, the Associated Press reported on March 24, 1998, that "one of the FBI's top con men described Monday how he lured the leaders of the Montana Freemen into a sting operation that toppled their multimillion dollar hot check operation."
But from where, exactly, does the FBI derive the authority to carry out such operations? According to Treason: The New World Order, there was no federal police force until the twentieth century, since no such agency was permitted by the Constitution. The FBI was established in July 1908 as a branch of the Justice Department. FBI surveillance of U.S. citizens became routine; between 1917 and 1921, agents compiled files on more than 200,000 individuals and organizations.
FBI harassment of political protesters and minority groups has been well-documented through the decades. During the 1960s and 1970s, the FBI established a secret domestic counterintelligence program called COINTELPRO to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize political dissidents in the United States. To discredit civil rights groups, the FBI carried out hundreds of illegal break-ins, stole membership lists, and infiltrated groups with agents provocateur who encouraged criminal activity, riots and acts of violence.
As Thomas I. Emerson said at a 1971 conference on COINTELPRO at Princeton University:
"The inescapable message of much of the material we have covered is that the FBI jeopardizes the whole system of freedom of expression which is the cornerstone of an open society... The Bureau's concept of its function, as dedicated guardian of national security, to collect general political intelligence, to engage in preventive surveillance, to carry on warfare against potentially disruptive or dissenting groups is wholly inconsistent with a system that stipulates that the government may not discourage political dissent to achieve social change as long as the conduct does not involve the use of force, violence or similar illegal action.... The government is so obsessed with its law and order function, so ridden with bureaucratic loyalties, so vulnerable to its own investigators that it cannot be trusted to curb its police force."
One must wonder why, with this history of flagrant corruption and abuse, the media does not probe the issues of the Freemen case past the thin epidermis of government propaganda. But when you look at the mega-corporations which control information in the United States -- an ipso facto monopoly of the so-called news and media outlets -- this point becomes completely transparent and obvious.
In his book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, author Jacques Ellul explains that "only through concentration in a few hands of a large number of media can one attain a true orchestration, a continuity and an application of scientific methods of influencing individuals. A state or private monopoly is equally effective... This concentration itself keeps accelerating thus making the situation increasingly favorable to propaganda."
The Associated Press version of reality is a prime example of the corporate media being used a virtual mouthpiece for manufactured, Establishment-sponsored "news." Unproven allegations against the defendants are described as a "hot check operation." Other reports refer to "worthless comptroller warrants," "phony checks," and "the Freemen's bogus warrants."
Forget the fact that financially sophisticated outfits like banks and the Internal Revenue Service would accept so-called "worthless" financial instruments as authentic signifiers of value.
The question is -- was the Freemen's operation really just a bogus check scam? Or is there a basis to the Freemen's "perfected liens" which became "credit" and later collateralized as "cash"? Even now, some claim that offshore banks hold billions of dollars worth of financial instruments which derive their value from the same system as the Freemen's paper.
Needless to say, the mainstream media found little interest in such esoteric issues -- not when it's so easy to simply brand the Freemen as "anti-government extremists" and be done with it.
<Read the rest, it seems interesting.>
parascope.com
So, who were the heroes in El Alamo..?
flash.net
and No, I am not an extremist, not a member of any "fringe cult" group, I merely observe....
I could continue.... but I really must go..... USA Vs Brazil coming up... |
