Jefferson, Th Pres
the actual guy, not bs hijacking of his name
// madison federalist papers
merri ok
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alternet 2 24 NO LNX
Republicans don't even try to hide it anymore
February 06, 2024
Amazingly, the House managed to pass a piece of legislation Wednesday that both helps hungry kids and gives a boost to businesses that want to invest in future products. It was a compromise and neither side is ecstatic, but both Democrats and Republicans got something for their constituents.
Democrats got to lift 400,000 children and their families out of poverty, and the legislation will immediately carry an additional 3 million kids from “deep poverty” to mere poverty with an expanded child tax credit. Over the next year, reports the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the legislation will help over 16 million children growing up in low-income households.
That means those kids are more likely to grow up as healthy, well-adjusted, and productive members of society. Science tells us that reducing child poverty this way means there will be less child abuse, fewer divorces, and a healthier economy.
It could, in fact, save America as much as a trillion dollars a year or around 5.4 percent of GDP, which a groundbreaking 2018 study found was the cost to America of childhood poverty. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louise found that adults who experienced poverty during their childhood earned a total of $294 billion less in 2015 than their otherwise identical peers who did not experience poverty as kids.
Add that to the poverty-related costs associated with crime, child maltreatment, and homelessness and the researchers concluded that child poverty is costing the US an estimated $1.0298 trillion every year.
From the GOP’s viewpoint, the legislation’s corporate tax breaks would be a boon to American business. They encourage companies to invent new products with expanded research and development tax breaks, interest deductions, and tax credits for investing in new equipment.
Win-win, right? Sadly, no, according to some of the most powerful Republicans in the country.
The legislation is now heading to the US Senate, where Senator Mitt Romney, one of the richest legislators in the world, opposes it because, he suggests, helping out hungry kids will make them dependent on the government. The last thing Romney wants the government to do is take money from morbidly rich people like himself to lift poor kids out of misery.
The legislation’s help for the very poorest children in our country is, Romney says, “excessive,” and, he whines, creates “another entitlement program which is massively expensive.”
Romney, of course, should know all about entitlement programs: he’s worth hundreds of millions because, in no small part, of massive entitlement programs for morbidly rich people who run private equity operations.
They include “pass through” provisions that let them pay about half the normal income tax rate most Americans are hit with, zero-taxes on profits through Section 1202 of the tax code, and massive tax breaks through the QSBS provisions of the tax laws that billionaires’ lobbyists helped write.
“Massively expensive” doesn’t begin to quantify the largesse, the trillions of dollars, that regular taxpayers like you and me (and low income workers) shower on the morbidly rich like Romney. As the Peterson Foundation notes:
“In 2023, those breaks totaled about $1.8 trillion. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the government spends on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, or defense.”
But, still, Romney can’t stomach the idea that poor kids may make off with any of that government largess.
Neither, apparently, can the billionaires who fund Senator Chuck Grassley. As Democracy Labs pointed out yesterday, three of the wealthiest men in America fund the senator’s PAC and all benefited hugely from Trump’s tax cut for billionaires. And, as Democracy Labs noted:
“If only poor families could make big donations to Chuck Grassley, maybe he'd support the Child Tax Credit bill?”
Which perfectly captures the crisis of American capitalism and democracy we’re living through right now. After five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court took millions in gifts from billionaires and then legalized political bribery with Citizens United in 2010, most rational lawmaking has ground to a halt as special interest groups and rightwing billionaires pull the strings of Congress.
James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” warned us about this. Repeatedly.
When Alexander Hamilton finally talked him into co-writing the Federalist Papers with him (after 4 others turned Hamilton down or were ill), Madison focused his first contribution, what’s today known as Federalist 10, on how a group of rich people capturing government was the greatest threat to our republic.
“Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union,” he wrote in his first sentence, “none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. …
“The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.”
So, what is a faction?
“By a faction,” Madison wrote, “I understand a number of citizens…who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” (emphasis mine)
“Adversed” being the word used back at that time to describe what we would mean today if we use the word “opposed.”
Factions, in other words, were groups of people who were openly and nakedly opposed to what was best for the nation because it might interfere with them getting richer and richer. And he saw them as the greatest danger this country faced.
Madison wasn’t talking about an abstraction or some highfalutin concept. He was talking about how some rich people will inevitably try to seize political power to screw everybody else. How, as he wrote, their own personal, selfish “interests” are opposed to the “permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
“Property” today generally means land, but in 1788 it meant “wealth.” Madison came right out and said, in Federalist 10, that the interests of those with great wealth are typically very different from the interests of average Americans:
“But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”
In fact, he said, one of the most important jobs of government is to prevent its own corruption by the very wealthy and powerful factions that today control the GOP:
“A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation....”
Madison said in a 1788 speech that there were “two cardinal objects of Government, the rights of persons, and the rights of property.” He added that if only the rights of property were written into the Constitution, the rich would ravage the few assets of the poor.
“Give all power to property,” Madison said, “and the indigent will be oppressed.”
In fact, Madison noted, all the former republics that he had studied in his five years of preparation for writing our Constitution had ended up corrupted by the political power of concentrated wealth.
“In all the Governments which were considered as beacons to republican patriots and lawgivers,” he added, “the rights of persons were subjected to those of property. The poor were sacrificed to the rich.”
Thus, wanting to establish a country where the rich didn’t end up running it as their own private kingdom or oligarchy, he proposed that the House of Representatives — the only branch elected directly by the people, and every two years at that — should solely have the power to raise taxes and spend federal funds.
And he didn’t want the ability to vote for members of Congress to be limited to those who owned property. When that had happened, in previous governments, as Madison pointed out, “the poor were sacrificed to the rich.”
“The time to guard against this danger is at the first forming of the Constitution,” he said in his speech. “Liberty not less than justice pleads for the policy here recommended. If all power be suffered to slide into hands [of the rich],” he warned, the American citizenry would “become the dupes and instruments of ambition, or their poverty and independence will render them the mercenary instruments of wealth.
“In either case liberty will be subverted; in the first by a despotism growing out of anarchy, in the second, by an oligarchy founded on corruption.”
And, indeed, the delegates assembled agreed. Only the House of Representatives, to this day, can initiate the process of raising taxes and spending money.
Madison’s mentor, Thomas Jefferson, agreed. In a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, Jefferson wrote:
“It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”
In an 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson explained:
“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”
He added that if we ended up with an oligarchic government that was run, directly or indirectly, by the rich, America’s working people:
“[M]ust come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four ... and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they [poor Europeans] now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.”
So here we have the author of the Declaration of Independence and the man who supervised the writing of the Constitution warning us that rich people would try to rise up and corrupt our government just to expand their own wealth.
They explicitly cautioned us that such a wealthy faction presents the greatest of all possible risks to a democratic republic.
Are we there yet? Mitt Romney and Chuck Grassley sure hope so…
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an 7 22 raw
fuck your feelings: [cspan book TV had several on slavery eg UVA?] free exge of idea (free mkt in the gift shop? buy it or not, or buy and burn it.
Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy lashed out on Sunday because she said she was made to feel "ashamed" and "guilty" after visiting the home of former President Thomas Jefferson and learning about how he owned slaves.
During a discussion on Fox & Friends,host Pete Hegseth complained about how the "whole tone" at Jefferson's Monticello home has changed to focus on his slave ownership.
"It's overwhelmingly negative!" Hegseth exclaimed. "You go to visit the legacy of Thomas Jefferson and you learn about what a terrible person Thomas Jefferson was."
Hegseth said that one visitor noted that "half of the comments on Jefferson were critical."
Campos-Duffy recounted her visit to Monticello.
"I visited many of these homes," she recalled. "And that is definitely what I picked up from all of this, that there is a reorienting, reconstructing of the history to basically make sure that the idea that they had slaves is on the same level as what they did for our country."
"There are slaves across human history," the Fox News host continued. "I get that. It's a terrible history we should talk about but we should not feel guilty or ashamed of our leaders when we go and visit the people who brought us the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. You leave feeling that way."
Campos-Duffy complained that "anti-racism" books could be found in the gift shop at Jefferson's home.
"These were great men as far as their ideas go but they were able to build this on the backs of slaves and we honor that," co-host Joey Jones chimed in. "And we talk about that. That's different than re-writing the importance of Jefferson, the importance of Washington or whoever it may be. And why have Monticello at all if you're only going to use it for grievance?"
Jones argued that liberal leaders are not "perfect" either.
"Socialists," Campos-Duffy quipped. "You come away thinking how terrible this country is."
"Where's all this coming from?" she asked. "The homes of these presidents are being populated -- this is avery diabolical plan on the part of the left. So what they've done is they've taken their donors on the left and they've populated the boards of these estates with leftists."
"Don't look over here at all the amazing things that Thomas Jefferson unleashed," Hegseth agreed. "It's always about inclusivity. It's the buzzword they use. And we fall into the trap! Because good, earnest historians who take care of Monticello sit there and they go, 'Oh, you're right. You know what? We haven't included enough about the fact that he was a slave owner. So let's include more of that.' And then the ideologues come in with their money and say, let's make it all about that!"
"And then you get kids coming through thinking Thomas Jefferson was a bad guy," he remarked. "We get accused of wanting to 'whitewash' or not talk about that. We will talk about that. We know that. That's a real deal. But making it about America being an evil place is when we get into the realm of a cultural revolution."
Watch the video below from Fox News.
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wow th nelson
https://mytnnews.com/blog/2012/08/10/thomas-nelson-drops-jefferson-lies-book-over-historical-errors/
Nashville-based Thomas Nelson Publishers has canceled a controversial best-seller by David Barton, an influential evangelical leader, because the book contains historical errors.
Barton’s book, “The Jefferson Lies,” claims to expose liberal myths about Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation’s third president.
But a group of conservative scholars says Barton’s take on Jefferson is factually untrue. And a group of ministers from Cincinnati called on Nelson to cancel the book.
Casey Francis Harrell, director of corporate communications for Thomas Nelson, said the publisher had gotten several complaints about the book and found enough errors to cancel it.
“Because of these deficiencies, we decided that it was in the best interest of our readers to cease its publication and distribution,” Harrell said.
Barton stands by his book and said Nelson never mentioned any concerns about the book, which was published in April and made the New York Times best-seller list.
“All I got was an email saying it was canceled,” he said. “It was a complete surprise.”
The book is still available for sale at Amazon. com and other retailers. But Harrell said the publisher has stopped any new shipments and is recalling the book from retailers. Online retailers have been asked to stop selling the e-book version.
‘Extremely rare’
Harrell said that to her knowledge Thomas Nelson has never before canceled publication of a New York Times best-seller.
“We carefully edit every book we publish, and we rely on the expertise of our authors concerning their subjects,” she said. “It is extremely rare that the company would have to withdraw a book from the market based on concerns about its content.”
The publisher hasn’t decided what to do with the recalled books.
Barton is president of WallBuilders, an Aledo, Texas-based conservative group that says it wants to reclaim America’s forgotten Christian history.
An early press release for the book, put out by Thomas Nelson in May, portrayed Barton as battling revisionist history to tell Jefferson’s true story.
“History books routinely teach that Jefferson was an anti-Christian secularist, rewriting the Bible to his liking, fathering a child with one of his slaves, and little more than another racist, bigoted colonist — but none of those claims are actually true,” the press release claimed.
Warren Throckmorton, a psychology professor at Grove City College in Grove City, Pa., said it’s Barton who actually twisted the facts.
Throckmorton is co-author of “Getting Jefferson Right,” a book that criticizes Barton. It was released as an e-book in May and then later in paperback.
Throckmorton said he’d been concerned about Barton’s version of American history for several years. He and his co-author looked at Barton’s sources, “and we found they didn’t support what he wrote,” he said.
For example, Barton claims Jefferson was an investor in an early American printing of the Bible, when Throckmorton says Jefferson only bought one copy.
Barton wrote that Virginia laws banned Jefferson from freeing the more than 200 slaves he owned.
“That’s not true,” Throckmorton said. “Jefferson freed two slaves, one in 1794 and one in 1796. So you can’t say he didn’t free slaves, because he did free two slaves.”
Barton said Throckmorton is wrong. He said he has documents to back up all the claims in his book.
For example, he said the laws in Jefferson’s time fined owners who freed slaves, and Jefferson would have freed his slaves if he could have. He said Throckmorton doesn’t understand how complex the laws about freeing slaves were.
Slavery claim sparks protest
The claim about slavery caused a group of ministers from several Cincinnati churches to call for Thomas Nelson to drop the book.
“‘The Jefferson Lies’ glosses over Jefferson’s real record on slaveholding, and minimizes Jefferson’s racist views,” said the Rev. Damon Lynch of New Jerusalem Baptist Church, an African-American congregation in Cincinnati.
Lynch said he and other ministers from diverse backgrounds had contacted Nelson about their concerns. He said that if the book hadn’t been canceled, he would have boycotted Nelson.
“We love Thomas Nelson,” he said. “My library is filled with Thomas Nelson books, and I didn’t want to stop doing business with them.”
Throckmorton is not Barton’s only conservative critic.
World Magazine, run by former George W. Bush adviser Marvin Olasky, recently published an online news story about conservative historians who also think Barton made errors.
One was Glenn Moots, professor of political science at Northwood University in Michigan. He said Barton was well-intentioned but should have been more careful to get the details right.
“It doesn’t help any of us if the story isn’t told in an accurate manner,” he said.
Barton said he met with a different group of scholars recently and they approved of his work.
“I can’t tell you how many Ph.D.s were in the room,” he said. He would not give names, saying the scholars hadn’t given permission for him to do so.
He also said other publishers had made offers on his book and he hopes to sign a new contract soon.
The book’s cancellation disappointed Barton’s local fans. He was in Nashville in March to speak to about 250 people at a meeting of the 912 Project.
Janice Johnson said she’s heard Barton speak several times and bought an audio copy of “The Jefferson Lies.” She hopes the controversy won’t undermine his credibility.
“He’s usually so rock solid on history,” she said
Written by
Bob Smietana
The Tennessean
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https://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-horwitz/thomas-jefferson-and-the_b_273800.html
New Hampshire resident William Kostric caused a national stir on August 11 when he appeared outside President Obama’s town hall meeting in Portsmouth with a loaded semiautomatic handgun strapped to his leg. Kostric held a sign that read, “IT IS TIME TO WATER THE TREE OF LIBERTY!” This was a reference to the following quote by Founding Father Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Asked to explain the message he was trying to send, Kostric stated, “I wanted people to remember the rights that we have and how quickly we’re losing them in this country ... It doesn’t take a genius to see we’re traveling down a road at breakneck speed that’s towards tyranny.” While Kostric claimed he was not calling for violence, many viewed his actions as threatening and assumed that the “tyrant” he had in mind was the president.
It was certainly not the first time a gun rights activist had referred to Jefferson’s “tree of liberty” quote. On the day he bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, Timothy McVeigh wore a t-shirt that bore Jefferson’s words with an image of a tree with blood dripping from its branches. A Google search will reveal that the quote is cited on a myriad of pro-gun websites today, almost always with no context or source provided. But what was the context of Jefferson’s remarks, and what exactly did he mean?
“What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to William S. Smith, a diplomatic official in London, on November 13, 1787. Jefferson was commenting on Shays” Rebellion, an armed uprising in Massachusetts that had been put down earlier that year by organized state militia forces. “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion,” Jefferson remarked. “Let them take arms.”
In the same letter, however, Jefferson stated that the rebellion was “founded in ignorance ... The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.” Jefferson also referred to the delegates who had finalized a draft of the U.S. Constitution in September 1787, stating, “Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusetts: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen-yard in order.”
The delegates to the Constitutional Convention had indeed taken Shays’ Rebellion very seriously, viewing the lack of a strong institutional response to the incident as symptomatic of a weak central government that was struggling to preserve the liberties they had fought so hard for. The country could not be governed in a state of perpetual revolution, the delegates realized, and despite the fears of Anti-Federalists, the Constitution authorized Congress to raise a standing Army. Furthermore, Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution stated that one of the purposes of the Militia was to “suppress Insurrections”—not to foment them.
One of the delegates at the convention was James Madison, the man who would draft the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1789. Jefferson exchanged letters frequently with Madison, sharing his view that Shays’ Rebellion was “absolutely unjustifiable,” but “did not appear to threaten serious consequences.” We need “a little rebellion now and then,” he told Madison. Madison disagreed, and supported Congressional enlistment of troops during the rebellion until “the spirit of insurrection was subdued.” In a speech before Congress on February 19, 1787, he argued that Shays’ rebels were “internal enemies” and constituted a threat to the “tranquility of the Union.” To Madison, the rebellion was treason.
With the drafting of the Constitution, Jefferson became more tempered in his own views, and acknowledged that well ordered republican democratic political processes could make armed violence unnecessary. In a letter to Dutch diplomat Charles William Frederick Dumas, Jefferson observed, “Happy for us, that when we find our constitutions defective and insufficient to secure the happiness of our people, we can assemble with all the coolness of philosophers and set it to rights, while every other nation on earth must have recourse to arms to amend or to restore their constitutions.”
Upon becoming President of the United States in 1801, Jefferson’s views about executive power and private rebellion were further transformed. In contrast to his previous advocacy for a ban on standing armies, Jefferson proposed the creation of a national military academy, which was built in West Point, New York. In 1807, after Aaron Burr conspired with military officers to create an independent republic in the American Southwest, Jefferson declared him a traitor and had him arrested and prosecuted for treason. In 1808, Jefferson deployed U.S. Army troops inside the country to enforce a trade embargo against Great Britain and France. Historian Henry Adams observedabout Jefferson’s embargo policies: “Personal liberties and rights of property were more directly curtailed in the United States by embargo than in Great Britain by centuries of almost continuous foreign war.” Jefferson’s use of military personnel to enforce domestic laws remains unprecedented.
Those who hold the belief that the Second Amendment gives them an individual right to take violent action against our government should it lapse into “tyranny” have isolated Jefferson’s “tree of liberty” quote in order to justify a radical ideology. The truth is that Jefferson’s views on private rebellion were far more thoughtful and nuanced. While scholars like Saul Cornell have acknowledged that Jefferson affirmed an individual right to keep arms for private purposes, he never described disorganized or spontaneous insurrection as a right. Jefferson instead envisioned “a universally armed citizenry organized into well-regulated militia units based on a system of ‘ward republics’” as a deterrent against “usurpers” and a key guarantor of a healthy republic.
The anti-government protesters carrying semiautomatic handguns and assault weapons outside of contemporary town hall meetings would undoubtedly consider such detailed regulation of the Militia to be—for lack of a better word—“tyrannical.”
Follow Josh Horwitz
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sep of church and state
The First Amendment
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The First Amendment was meant to make one thing indisputably clear: free speech was the basis for a government of the people. Without a free press, as well as the ability to openly gather, debate, protest, and criticize, how would the people be able to judge their government's adherence to the other rights? How could people vote knowledgeably if they didn’t know what was being done in their name by their government? An informed citizenry, Thomas Jefferson stated, was "a vital requisite for our survival as a free people."
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Since corporations had been viewed as artificial persons for millennia, the debate over whether they should be afforded the same rights as humans had been raging long before the 14th Amendment was adopted.Thomas Jefferson had suggested explicit language to govern corporate entities, like requiring maximum life spans, be put into the Constitution. His stipulations didn't make the cut, however. And once the 14th Amendment was created, the Constitution actually expanded -- rather than limited -- the scope of corporations' power.
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