Reply #80: I follow you

[Hydra]

But I propose a darker thesis.

This is the TRUE face of America.

It's amazing how something like George Bush's crimes and the lack of response can get you asking the question, "Where did this all start?"

The answer I found was amazing. It may not even have gone far enough back, but this will certainly do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shay%27s_Rebellion

he nationalists took advantage of a propitious rebellion, that of Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army officer. Shays and other local leaders led an uprising of distressed farmers from western Massachusetts groaning under the load of heavy taxes assessed to pay the interest and principal (at face value in specie) of the state's wartime debt. During an economic depression, with farm prices low and foreign markets closed, the state government was taxing the farmers (payable in hard money only) to pay wealthy eastern creditors who had lent depreciated paper (accepted at full face value) to the state government for bonds during the war.

<snip>

Obviously, the nationalists wanted to scare the country into supporting a more vigorous government. George Washington was terrified. "We are fast verging toward anarchy and confusion," he wrote. His nationalist friends did their best to heighten his terror. Henry Knox wrote Washington of the Shaysites that "their creed is that the property of the United States" having been freed from British exactions "by the joint exertions of all, ought to be the common property of all." This was utterly false, but it did the trick. Washington agreed to be the presiding officer at the constitutional convention. Later, Madison in Federalist No. 10 warned that without the strong arm of a vigorous central government, the states would be vulnerable to movements motivated by "a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property" and for other "improper or wicked project(s)." The Massachusetts historian Mercy Otis Warren, a contemporary of these events, warned of "discontents artificially wrought up, by men who wished for a more strong and splendid government.

We went into the 1st Constitutional Convention with the Nationalists fighting for the rights of Corporations and private entities to defraud their customers.

Auspicious beginning, wasn't it?