9: Obama Accounting: "A House Divided"--Reconstruction Then, Cabinet Advocacy Now.

Lincoln's War began in 1861, ended in 1865. Before the close of the Civil War, Reconstruction had begun. Reconstruction remedied the slavery question: prohibited Constitutionally in Article 9(1) and by several other regional, state, and local laws, affecting less than 700,000 people, many of whom bartered labor for room and board and farm products, 90% of whom resided in 4 states, many of whom were illegals engaged with "slave dealers" in illegal activity.

Reconstruction produced three Consitiutional Amendments:
1865: 13th Amendment: Slavery prohibited.
1866: 14th Amendment: Former US slaves granted citizenship, including right to vote.
1870: 15th Amendment: Black Suffrage, voting rights restated.

The new nation arose from the War of Independence from Great Britain, in 1776. The US Constitution, including the three Reconstruction Admendments, was ratified by
1891. The problem was solved.

Despite Lincoln's advice to reunite the nation "with malice toward none", the legacy of the Reconstruction has been replayed regularly in the 145 years since the end of the Civil War.

The Obama legacy reflects back on where he arose. From black community organizer, to law school, to black activist in Illinois politics, Obama concentrated on black causes and demanding funding for black causes.

Like his political mentors from the 1960s, The Black Panther Party, Obama focused on racial profiling in the 1990s Illinois legislature. It is a legally expensive but empty circular argument: demand police officers make detailed racial notes about suspects, then bring lawsusits against the police department, city, county, and state governments for "racial profiling".

It is a form of the "de facto" fallacy in reasoning. If the police patrol a predominantly black neighborhood, police will stop more blacks than whites, because there are more blacks than whites in the area they patrol.

From ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now)/Project Vote registration, Obama sought to redraw districts with high numbers of blacks for ease of electing black candidates, large contingency fees or commissions from a 1995 $500 million federal civil rights lawsuit settlement against the state of Illinois on behalf of ACORN/Project Vote. And Obama sought votes for his campaigns for the Illinois legislature. Obama lost money for Cook County and Illinois. In a lawsuit against Cook County Hospital and the Hebtoen Research institute, the County lost $5 million back to the federal government from Cook County Hospital and $500,000 from Hebtoen.

The Obama/Holder Department of Justice (DoJ) continues Obama's legacy of black and ethnic advocacy. The AIG/Wilmington Finance lawsuit discussed in an earlier blog
("2: Obama Accounting: Black Funding and Lawsuit Settlements") delivered a $6.1 Million dollar settlement from AIG for wholesale broker fees involving an Afro-American mortgage company, without a finding of AIG wrongdoing. DoJ demanded $1 Million go to an "approved" ACORN-type financial literacy and credit counselling company.

Black and ethnic advocacy has become DoJ policy. In 2009, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julia Fernandez stated she would not support any enforcement of federal "Motor Voter" law Section 5 which requires the state to periodically purge voter rolls of dead people, felons, illegal voters, and those who have moved out of state. Fernandez stated "We are not interested in those kind of cases. What do they have to do with helping increase minority access and turnout? We want to increase access to the ballot, not limit it." What outrageous federal encouragement of voter fraud, and possibly "stuffing the ballot box" for the Administration-supported candidate and cause.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Division Thomas Perez restates the "de facto" lawsuit approach as the "disparate impact theory": there may be no intent to discriminate but there is a difference in results". This theory has been applied to school test scores (as in "Race for the Top" funding) and mortgage lending (as in the AIG/Wilmington, DE mortgage case mentioned above). Under this theory, white residents of any city, county, or state should be able to successfully win lawsuits for disproportionate lack of cheap housing for whites in cheaper, predominantly colored inner city neighborhoods. Whites must have been denied cheap housing in those neighborhoods, otherwise at least an equal number of whites would be living there.

Thomas Perez was a former aid to the late Senator Ted Kennedy. As an ethnic activist and Councilman in Montgomery City, Maryland, Perez promoted in-state tuition funding and drivers' licenses for Hispanic and other illegals.

Obama lawyer Craig Becker, National Labor Relations Board, formerly employed by the SEIU Service Employees International Union and affiliated with the AFL-CIO, has been investigated for ethical complaints. Becker revealed insidious special interest group government bureaucratic strategies stating "major policy changes could be implemented without legislative approval".

To save the United States from being revised from within, the educated electorate will need to monitor meetings and policies of all governmental departments, a return to large news staffs sorting through voluminous government settlements and other documents. A down-sized government bureaucracy at the federal and other levels would help make this task less formidable.

The Obama/Hillary Clinton State Department has been working with local and regional "advocacy groups" termed NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to prepare the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Report. Obama's submission of the Arizona Immigration Law to the UN is a very controversial appeal for support for his anti-Arizona law position outside of the United States.

Membership in the UN Council for Human Rights (UNCHR) and the proposal for the human rights Periodic Review was rejected by the Bush Administration for including known human rights violators like Libya and China. The UNCHR policies make it easier for known human rights violator countries to join the council, than to be dismissed for human rights violations. The UNHRC could become a council of human rights violators ignoring or promoting human rights violations.

The Obama/Clinton State Department also has been in the news for advocating "Muslim outreach" by paying travel expenses for Near Ground Zero Fitness Center & Mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to travel to and from Muslim countries.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) too deserves mention for offering Shirley Sherrod a job in "Advocacy and Outreach" after her racially offensive statements about not offering the "full force of my help" to a white farmer as Georgia Rural Director with a $2 Billion budget. USDA missed a teachable moment" about how racial respect goes both ways. Only CNN Cooper and Johns covered this and other comments by her black activist husband Charles Sherrod. On this broadcast CNN noted the $1.15 Billion "Pigford Farm" federal settlement to the Sherrods and other black farmers.

Department of Education (DoEd) Secretary Arne Duncan of the $4.3 Billion "Race to the Top" emailed over 4,000 department employees to attend Al Sharpton's counter-rally to the August 28, 2010 Glen Beck Lincoln Monument event. This raises questions of violaions of The Hatch Act which forbids federal employees from participating in political campaigns, particulary those espoused by the current administration. David Boaz of the libertarian Cato Institute noted the email "sends a signal that activity on behalf of one side of a political debate is expected within a department. It is highly inappropriate...even in the absence of a direct threat", sic, of job loss, loss of promotion, etc. at work, for not participating.

Arne Duncan called education "the civil rights issue of our generation" thus politicizing DoEd including the "Race to the Top" and changing education funding into Black Racial Politics.

Also disappointing was Washington, DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton's statement that Beck's rally "would change nothing...We will move rght over you."
What most Americans understood as equal opportunity for everyone was changed into a Black Power message of "redistribution of wealth" and "transfer of power" from whites to blacks.

Obama et.al. have changed American politics into a Black Supremacist takeover of a non-racially motivated Government and, of course, the Treasury.

The financial cost of these black and ethnic advocacy programs is phenomenal, more so during a $12.9 Trillion dollar deficit. How much of the deficit is direct cost for these advocacy programs? The ethical and moral damage done by black racializing our historically democratic government, traditionally striving for fairness and impartiality, is inestimable.

Graphic: Scales and fasces, attributes of Justice, Cartari, 1647, in Dictionary of Symbolism, H Biedermann.

References: CNSNews.com, The Washington Examiner, biggovernment.com.

email mkrause381@gmail.com or mkrause54@yahoo.com for more blogs posted by mary for monthlynotesstaff on http://monthlynotesfour.blogspot.com or http://monthlynotes.blogspot.com.

8: Obama Accounting: "A House Divided"--Reconstruction Then

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The Civil War raged on. In the South, north through Virginia, to the Washington, DC capital, and beyond to Maryland, above the Mason-Dixon line to Pennsylvania, west to Louisiana, the energies, monies and lives of Americans were lost. The Union lost 360,222 men (110,000 in battle). The Confederacy lost 258,000 (94,000 in battle). At least 471,427 were wounded on both sides.

Despite the war, Lincoln won re-election in 1864. The Confederacy, army and money, was weakened. General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, VA on April 7, 1865. The Civil War was over.

Seven (7) days later on Good Friday, actor John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln at Ford's Theater with a single bullet wound to the head. Lincoln never regained consciousness and died the next morning on April 15, 1865.

Booth's shout "sic semper tyrannis!" ("So always to tyrants!") summarizes the irony of Lincoln's Administrations. The "Great Emancipator" freed the slaves in the rebellious Confederate states. But in his war to end slavery, Lincoln became a tyrant, violating the Constitution of the US which he fought the war to preserve. Lincoln expanded the Union Army wth the first military draft in US history, the Conscription Act of 1862. Lincoln declared martial law and suspended the Writ of Habeaus Corpus, the right of the accused to face the accuser and to know the offense of which he(/she) is accused.

Lincoln's goal was to block expansion of slavery to the North and new Western territories, and gradually, even with conpensation to the southern states, to extinguish slavery in the South by 1900.

Lincoln, Black Hawk War militia captain, postmaster, and lawyer, had re-entered politics to protest repeal of the 1820 Missouri Compromise forbiding slavery and to protest passage of the more limited 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act prohibiting slavery north of the 36 degree 31 minute latitude. Other earlier local laws also prohibited slavery.

The nation was new. The War of Independence from Great Britain had been won less than 100 years before in 1776. The Constitution of the United States was debated and ratified by the states between 1787 and 1791.

The North was building factories, becoming industrialized and monetarized. The South remained agrarian, land rich, cash poor. The Southern economy depended on the barter of labor to continue farming the land. Congress recognized the south depended on laborers in various conditions of "servitude". Congress prohibited slavery by 1808, penalizing slaveholders prior to 1808 in Section 9(1)...a "tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person." Congress limited "the migration or importation of such persons", to limit immigration and the entry of "illegals" into the US.

But there were conflicting goals: prohibiting slavery yet permitting expansion of the economy, particularly the labor-intensive southern farm economy. This occurred in the aftermath of the destruction of land and loss of money during the Revolutionary War, only fifty years earlier.

In the first US Census of 1790, the term "slave" was not well-defined, appearing to refer to non-family farm workers, indentured servants, and slaves. Local laws and local opinion prohibited slavery in the North. Congress banned slavery in 1808.

17.2% of American families were "Slaveholder" families. 90% of slaves resided in 3 Southern states, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and in Maryland. 603,540 of 697,624 people classified as "slaves" in the 1790 Census resided in these 4 states.

Interestingly enough, there were black as well as white slaveholders. Thomas Day was a mixed race black cabinet maker who owned 14 slaves who worked in his antebellum North Carolina furniture shop.

The Era of Reconstruction followed the Civil War, led by Lincoln's party of Republicans and Radical Republicans. The latter coalition of newly emancipated and other blacks, northern "Carpetbaggers", and their southern collaborators the "Scalawags", molded the re-admitted Southern States to the will of the federal government in Washington, DC.

Emancipated coloreds and poor whites in various conditions of "servitude" were freed. The new "Freedmen" were provided schools and education, citizenship, voting rights, and protection from angry former Confederates under various military and other Reconstruction Acts through the 1860s.

In another irony of the Civil War and Reconstruction, on January 23, 1864 President Lincoln recgnized the concept of "free" labor in contract relations between "ex-slaves" and plantation owners and ordered the Army to encourage and supervise such contracts. This of course makes it dfficult to count the numbers of "freedmen" and slaves at the close of the Civil War.

Other significant Reconstruction era acts include the 3 related Amendments to the US Constitution:
1865: The 13th Amendment, Abolition of slavery.
1866: The 14th Amendment, The Civil Rights Act, US citizenship for all former slaves.
1870: The 15th Amendment, Black Suffrage.

Despite timely legal remedies 145 years ago, the issues of Reconstruction, including education for citizenship, voting rights, and equal rights under the law, repeatedly have been raised and remedied by the federal government. The Reconstruction Era policies of the Radical Republicans continue to this day, now under the Democratic Party and the Obama Administration Cabinet level Advocacy programs, to be discussed in the next blog in this series at http://monthlynotesfour.blogspot.com (or http://monthlynotes.blogspot.com if indexing problems have not been resolved).

Photograph: 3 cent Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (Nov. 19, 1863) Stamp, 1948:
That government, of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth. (Nov. 19, 1863).
from Research Guide to American Historical Biography, R. Mussigrosso, Ed., Beacham Publishing, W,DC: 2008.

Other references include: NPR, The World Book Encyclopedia, 20003; Encyclopedia of American biography, JA Gararaty; Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, DS & JT Heidler; Historical Dictionary of the Civil War and Reconstruction, WL Richter.

email mkrause381@gmail.com or mkrause54@yahoo.com to request a copy of this or other blogs posted by mary for monthlynotesstaff on http://monthlynotesfour.blogspot.com or http://monthlynotes.blogpot.com.