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Books by Wilson
Jeremiah Moses
Golden Age of Black Nationalism,
1850-1925 (1988) /
The Wings of Ethiopia
(1990)
Alexander
Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent
(1992) /
Destiny & Race: Selected Writings, 1840-1898
(1992)
Black
Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary
Manipulations of a Religious Myth (1993)
Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa
Narratives from the 1850s
/
Afrotopia: The Roots of African American
Popular History
(2002)
Creative Conflict in African American Thought (2004)
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The Reagan Doctrine of National Suicide
By Wilson J. Moses
Ronald Reagan’s
cunning and mischievous National Suicide Doctrine is the
cause of our present economic crisis in the United
States. His insane anti-American doctrine is exactly
the opposite of the patriotism of that true Republican,
Dwight David Eisenhower, who led the Allies to victory
over the Nazis, shaped the
Korean Truce, balanced the
national budget, and assaulted the bastions of racial
segregation. No more pernicious and divisive philosophy
than
Reaganism has appeared in American politics since
the time of Jefferson Davis.
Reagan openly
announced his doctrine in his
First Inaugural Address,
when he said: “government is not the solution to our
problem; government is the problem.” Even more
outrageous, the Reagan administration began to preach
the slogan “Starve the Beast,” in 1985, an idea later
recycled by
Sarah Palin in the 2008 Presidential
campaign. Palin, who is married to a
notorious Alaskan
secessionist, is typical of Republicans, with her idea
of cutting taxes until we have destroyed the national
economy and the Government of the United States.
Reagan Republicans hate the
Government of the United States. They call it a
“beast.”
Ronald Reagan’s
inaugural address, his doctrine of government suicide,
is currently
accessible at YouTube, and the
text is at
The Avalon Project of the Yale Law School.
The phrase “Starve the Beast” applied to the government
of the United States, originated with an anonymous hack
in the Reagan White House, according to
Michael J. New’s
article in Cato Journal, (Fall 2009), published by the
Cato Institute. Reagan’s words and his government
destroying policy sets the tone for all subsequent
discourses in American politics, and reignites the
homicidal fires of American secessionism.
Republicans seek to
validate a doctrine of localism, provincialism, and
individual isolation that was openly rejected by
Benjamin Franklin as early as 1754, repudiated by
George
Washington and
Alexander Hamilton in 1787, and
subsequently condemned by
John Adams. But the
quasi-populist fires of American secessionism were
secretly stoked by the Machiavellian slaveholder and
pseudo-egalitarian, Thomas Jefferson in his
Kentucky
Resolutions of 1798. The hypocritical and devious
Thomas Jefferson was always covertly hostile to George
Washington, to the Government of the United States, to
its Flag, and to its Constitution. Regrettably his
philosophy moved increasingly to the right over the
years, until he
repudiated the anit-slavery doctrines of
his youth and supported the expansion of slavery into
the territories. Jeffersonian thinking was among the
contributing causes of the Civil War.
The United States had to fight a
Great Civil War to extirpate “Jeffersonian Democracy.”
Capitalism is a
necessary ingredient of all civilization, and capitalism
is impossible without the existence of Law and Order.
Government is necessary for property to exist. This is
known to every college graduate who has read the works
of Thomas Hobbes,
John Locke,
Benjamin Franklin, and
Adam Smith. Without government, property is only an
abstract and insubstantial theory. As
Aristotle and
John C. Calhoun pointed out, there has never been a
human Society without government. And to this I would
add that it is only within the context of
Society, i.e.,
Government, that property rights can have any meaning,
that capital can be accumulated, or that money can have
any value.
All wealth derives from a social contract,
and is inextricable from the idea of
Commonwealth.
Calhoun knew this
was true, but he was intellectually dishonest, and
worked to undermine the sacred institution of government
that he knew was essential to human civilization,
wealth, and happiness. His conception of culture was
primitive, for he was not only a slaveholding racist,
but contemptuous of the interests of the nascent
industrial working class. Although he understood the
necessity of strong government, he encouraged his
constituents in refusing to pay their taxes, and for
this, he was rightly upbraided by
President Andrew
Jackson.
Jackson was no
paragon of statesmanship; he was a murderous, drunken
brawler, a cold-blooded dueler, an Indian scalper, and a
slave-driver. He stupidly destroyed the
Second Bank of
the United States, thereby causing a depression. But,
to his credit,
Andrew Jackson was the last American
President to balance the budget and sink the national
debt. He did this by asserting the principle that the
federal government must collect taxes, at gunpoint if
necessary. When South Carolina tried to nullify the
Tariff of 1832, Jackson showed them he meant business.
He
demolished the extreme doctrine of states rights,
announcing to the states rights deadbeats:
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The Constitution of the
United States, then, forms a government, not
a league; and whether it be formed by
compact between the States or in any other
manner, its character is the same. It is a
Government in which all the people are
represented, which operates directly on the
people individually, not upon the States. |
Law and Order are identical with
Government; they are the basis of Property, of
Capitalism, and of every other aspect of Civilization.
Even in so-called
“primitive societies,”
money has always been more than a
mere medium of exchange. Money is, and must be, by
definition, a means of storing wealth. Traditional
African and Native American societies, long before the
coming of European colonialism, created and used
sophisticated money systems, in the form of wampum
belts, and cowry shells, as means of calculating debt
and storing wealth. One of the means employed by
European colonialists to destroy African and Native
American economies, was to counterfeit indigenous
currencies. Inflation of wampum and cowries were among
the gimmicks employed by Europe in destroying African
and Native American economies.
Gradual inflation,
as
Benjamin Franklin knew, is sometimes good, for it may
stimulate the flow of goods and services, and accomplish
great public works. But unrestrained inflation is an
evil, for it destroys money the most convenient means of
storing wealth, and the basis of any predictability and
stability in the exchanges of labor and commodities.
James Madison viewed “a rage for paper money,” as
evil
and pernicious. In today’s terms, he would have to
include, not only paper, but electronic money which is
being recklessly generated by the
Federal Reserve
System, and leads to an inflationary expansion of the
money supply. But a
national debt, in the form of a
stable national currency, and the governmental capacity
to issue reliable bonds, is a national blessing, as the
wise and fearless genius,
General Alexander Hamilton
well knew.
One purpose of the
Constitution was to thwart inflation, "an abolition of
debts . . . or for any other improper or wicked project.”
(Federalist 10) The right wing of the Republican Party
is presently calling for an
abolition of the National
Debt, for no other reason than to bring down the
Government of the United States. They advocate the
destruction of the Full Faith and Credit of the
Government of the United States, because they hate the
Government of the United States!
One of the great
and tragic ironies or our time is that the Republican
Party, once the champion of National Union and vigorous
government, has become the party of weak government,
fiscal irresponsibility, and secessionism. The party of
George Washington,
Abraham Lincoln,
Theodore Roosevelt,
and
Dwight D. Eisenhower has adopted the National
Suicide policies of
Jefferson Davis and
Robert E. Lee.
How did this happen? It has to do with the disgraceful
heritage of slavery and racism, as I shall demonstrate
in a forthcoming essay.
Copyright©2011 by
Wilson J. Moses
Thursday, 14
April , 2011
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Reaganite
Denounces Bush
/Open
Letter to President Barack Obama
A Time for
Peace: A Time for War
/
Obama’s Libyan Choices /
The Country We Believe In
(Obama)
/
Tea
Party,
Schmee
Party
(Moses)
Cornel West and the fight against
injustice /
Cornel West Calls Out Barack Obama
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Jeremiah Wright with Bill Moyers
Interview with Jeremiah Wright
Ronald
Reagan Worst President Ever?— By Robert Parry—20
February 2012—Before Reagan, corporate CEOs earned
less than 50 times the salary of an average worker.
By the end of the Reagan-Bush-I administrations in
1993, the average CEO salary was more than 100 times
that of a typical worker. (At the end of the Bush-II
administration, that CEO-salary figure was more than
250 times that of an average worker.)
Many other
trends set during the Reagan era continued to
corrode the U.S. political process in the years
after Reagan left office. After 9/11, for instance,
the neocons reemerged as a dominant force, reprising
their “perception management” tactics, depicting the
“war on terror”—like the last days of the Cold
War—as a terrifying conflict between good and evil.
The hyping of
the Islamic threat mirrored the neocons’ exaggerated
depiction of the Soviet menace in the 1980s—and
again the propaganda strategy worked. Many Americans
let their emotions run wild, from the hunger for
revenge after 9/11 to the war fever over invading
Iraq.
Arguably, the
descent into this dark fantasyland—that Ronald
Reagan began in the early 1980s – reached its nadir
in the flag-waving early days of the Iraq War. Only
gradually did reality begin to reassert itself as
the death toll mounted in Iraq and the Katrina
disaster reminded Americans why they needed an
effective government.
Still, the
disasters—set in motion by Ronald Reagan—continued
to roll in. Bush’s Reagan-esque tax cuts for the
rich blew another huge hole in the federal budget
and the Reagan-esque anti-regulatory fervor led to a
massive financial meltdown that threw the nation
into economic chaos.—ConsortiumNews
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Bill Moyers
and Bruce Bartlett on Where the Right Went Wrong—14
February 2012—Bill Moyers talks with
conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, who wrote
"the bible" for the Reagan Revolution, worked on
domestic policy for the Reagan White House, and
served as a top treasury official under the first
President Bush. Now he's a heretic in the
conservative circles where he once was a star.
Bartlett argues that right-wing tax policies --
pushed in part by Grover Norquist and Tea Party
activists -- are destroying the country's economic
foundation.
Bill Moyers:
Heather McGhee speaks of how the neoliberal economic
experience of the last 30 years—including cutting
taxes on the rich and waiting for the wealth and
prosperity to trickle down—has left her generation
of Millennials standing under a spigot someone
forgot to turn on. After a few drips and drops, it
went dry. So did the very notion of equal
opportunity for all. And today we’re living in a
country deeply divided between winners and losers.
Nowhere is that more evident than in our tax
system—so distorted by loopholes, exemptions,
credits, and deductions favoring the already rich
and powerful that it no longer can raise the money
needed to pay the government’s bills.
Among the
people who saw this crisis coming was the
conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, the
supply-side champion who wrote the manifesto for the
Reagan Revolution. Bartlett became a senior policy
analyst in the Reagan White House and a top official
at the Treasury Department under the first George
Bush. Yet for all those credentials, he is today an
outcast from the very conservative ranks where he
was once so influential.
That’s because
Bruce Bartlett dared to write a book criticizing the
second George Bush as a pretend conservative who
slashed taxes but still spent with wild abandon. The
subtitle says it all:
How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed
the Reagan Legacy.
For his heresy
Bartlett was sacked by the conservative think tank
where he worked. Undaunted, this card-carrying
advocate of free markets and small government has
been a prolific writer for popular and academic
journals and has just published a new book:
The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform—Why We Need
It and What It Will Take. It’s a layman’s
guide through the jungle of a tax system that,
thanks to rented politicians and anti-tax ideologues
like Grover Norquist, enable the one percent to make
off like bandits while our national debt soars
sky-high. I talked to Bruce Bartlett soon after he
had finished his new book.
Bill Moyers:
You've made the point that America's top earning one
percent had an effective 33.1 percent federal income
tax rate in 1986, and an effective rate of only 23.3
percent in 2008. And you say if the top one percent
had kept paying at the 1986 effective rate, quote,
"the federal debt today would be $1.7 trillion
lower." That's a lot of money.
Bruce
Bartlett: Well, that's right. And when I say
effective rate that means the taxes that they paid
divided by their income. So that tells you what the
revenue is that the government gets from taxing
them. And clearly, they were doing okay at the
beginning of that period. And that was Ronald
Reagan's administration. Up until 1986, the top
marginal rate, the top statutory rate was 50
percent. Now it's 35 percent. And all the pressure
is on to lower that even further. And this just
doesn't make a great deal of sense to me. When
people say, 'Oh, we can't raise taxes on the rich.
They'll go on strike, they'll move to another
country.' But within recent memory, it hasn't been
that long ago that we had rates that were
substantially higher. And these people did just
fine.—OccupyAmerica
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Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger |
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Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world. |
Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.
Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
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Home: Social Essays
By LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)
Home: Social Essays was
published in 1965 when Baraka was still
known as LeRoi Jones. According to
Dr. Komozi Woodard, "No
study of the Black Revolt of the 60s is
complete without Home, written by
one of the founders of the Black Arts
Movement." The book begins with a long
article, “Cuba Libre,” which is a report
on his travels with a group of
other black intellectuals who check out
the new land. . . . He continues
strongly with “Tokenism: 300 years for
Five Cents.” The titles of of other
essays are “Black is a Country,” “The
Last Days of the American Empire,”
“American Sexual Reference: Black Male,”
“The Legacy of Malcolm X, and the Coming
of the Black Nation.” These essays still
have relevance for today's intellectuals
oho question the role of American
government in domestic and foreign
policies and the impact it has on
African-American well-being. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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