The Boston Tea Party Myth

The Boston Tea Party was not a protest against high taxes, but a protest of several things. Mostly it was an anti-monopoly protest. And it demonstrated colonial resistance to British interference in the American economy.

A popular understanding of the Boston Tea Party is that the colonial Americans were protesting against high taxes on imported British tea. However, this is not the truth. This is a popular myth that this article clearly debunks. The truth is that the price of tea was actually lowered by the British. The lowering of the price was an attempt to give a monopoly to the East India Trading company. There were many reasons for the colonists to be angered by British manipulation and interference.


The Boston Tea Party, of course wasn't an actual party, but was a famous incident in American history in which some American colonists in Boston disguised themselves as Indians and dumped chests of tea into Boston Harbor as a protest. This protest by American colonists arose from two issues confronting the British Empire in 1773: the financial problems of the British East India Company, and an ongoing dispute about the extent of Parliament's sovereignty over the British American colonies.

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American colonists resented this favored treatment of a major company, (East India Company) which employed lobbyists and wielded great influence in Parliament. At this stage in American history rebellion was brewing beneath the surface of society. Colonial protests resulted in both Philadelphia and New York, but it was those at the Boston Tea Party that made their mark on American history. John Hancock organized a boycott of tea from China sold by the British East India Company, whose sales in the colonies then fell dramatically. By 1773, the company had large debts, huge stocks of tea in its warehouses and no prospect of selling it because smugglers, such as Hancock, were importing tea from Holland without paying import taxes.

The British government passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company to sell tea to the colonies directly and without "payment of any customs or duties whatsoever" in Britain, instead paying the much lower American duty. This tax break allowed the East India Company to sell tea for half the old price and cheaper than the price of tea in England, enabling them to undercut the prices offered by the colonial merchants and smugglers.

Bostonians suspected the removal of the Tea Tax was simply another attempt by the British parliament to squash American freedom. Samuel Adams, wealthy smugglers, and others who had profited from the smuggled tea called for agents and consignees of the East India Company tea to abandon their positions; consignees who hesitated were terrorized through attacks on their warehouses and even their homes.

The Truth Behind the Boston Tea Party: The Tea Act Actually Lowered Taxes
Many people today think the Tea Act—which led to the Boston Tea Party—was simply an increase in the taxes on tea paid by American colonists. Instead, the purpose of the Tea Act was to give the East India Company full and unlimited access to the American tea trade, and exempt the company from having to pay taxes to Britain on tea exported to the American colonies. It even gave the company a tax refund on millions of pounds of tea they were unable to sell and holding in inventory.

One purpose of the Tea Act was to increase the profitability of the East India Company to its stockholders (which included the King), and to help the company drive its colonial small business competitors out of business. Because the company no longer had to pay high taxes to England and held a monopoly on the tea it sold in the American colonies, it was able to lower its tea prices to undercut the prices of the local importers and the mom-and-pop tea merchants and tea houses, not only in Boston, but in every town in America.

This meddling infuriated the independence-minded colonists, who were, by and large, unappreciative of their colonies being used as a profit center for the multinational East India Company corporation. One historical interpretation is that the truth of the Boston Tea Party is that it was a protest against this meddling. The American colonists resented their small businesses still having to pay the higher, pre-Tea Act taxes without having any say or vote in the matter. (Thus, the cry of "no taxation without representation!") Even in the official British version of the history, the 1773 Tea Act was a "legislative maneuver by the British ministry of Lord North to make English tea marketable in America," with a goal of helping the East India Company quickly "sell 17 million pounds of tea stored in England ..."

"Taxation Without Representation" had a Populist Context which plays a large role in the Boston Tea Party
"Taxation without representation" also meant hitting the average person and small business with taxes while letting the richest and most powerful corporation in the world off the hook for its taxes. It was government sponsorship of one corporation over all competitors.

The Boston Tea Party Was Similar to Modern Day Anti-globalization Protests
The Boston Tea Party resembled in many ways the growing modern-day protests against transnational corporations and small-town efforts to protect themselves from chain-store retailers or agricultural corporations. With few exceptions, the Tea Party's participants thought of themselves as protesters against the actions of the multinational East India Company and the government that "unfairly" represented, supported, and served the company while not representing or serving the residents.

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In England, Parliament gave the East India Company what amounted to a monopoly on the importation of tea in 1698. When tea became popular in the British colonies, Parliament sought to eliminate foreign competition by passing an act in 1721 that required colonists to import their tea only from Great Britain. But many Americans purchased the less expensive, smuggled Dutch tea.

The East India Company did not export tea to the colonies; by law, the company was required to sell its tea wholesale at auctions in England. British firms bought this tea and exported it to the colonies, where they resold it to merchants in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

In order to help the East India Company compete with smuggled Dutch tea, in 1767 Parliament passed the Indemnity Act, which lowered the tax on tea consumed in Great Britain, and gave the East India Company a partial refund of the duty on tea that was re-exported to the colonies. To help offset this loss of government revenue, Parliament also passed the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767, which levied new taxes, including one on tea, in the colonies. Instead of solving the smuggling problem, however, the Townshend duties renewed a controversy about Parliament's right to tax the colonies.

To fully understand the resentment of the colonies to Great Britain and King George III, one must understand that there were a series of events in which the colonists were treated unfairly. In previous years, the 13 colonies saw a number of commercial tariffs including the Sugar Act of 1764, which taxed sugar, coffee, and wine, the Stamp Act of 1765, which put a tax on all printed matter, such as newspapers and playing cards, and the Townshend Acts of 1767 which placed taxes on items like glass, paints, paper, and tea. The Tea Act of 1773 was the last straw.

"If our trade be taxed, why not our lands, in short, everything we posses? They tax us without having legal representation." —Samuel Adams

In an attempt to transfer part of the cost of colonial administration to the American colonies, the British Parliament had enacted the Stamp Act in 1765 and the Townshend Acts in 1767. Colonial political opposition and economic boycotts eventually forced repeal of these acts, but Parliament left the import duty on tea as a symbol of its authority. Under the Townshend Act, many goods brought into the colonies were heavily taxed by the British. To attempt to appease the disgruntled Americans, these tariffs were repealed, except for tea, and they remained upset since the tax on tea remained in effect.

In an atmosphere of continuing suspicion and distrust, the British and Americans each looked for the worst from the other. In 1772 the crown, having earlier declared its right to dismiss colonial judges at its pleasure, stated its intention to pay directly the salaries of governors and judges in Massachusetts.

The situation remained comparatively quiet until May 1773, when the faltering East India Company persuaded Parliament that the company's future and the empire's prosperity depended on the disposal of its tea surplus. At this point, the East India Company was facing bankruptcy due to corruption, mismanagement, and competition.

The plan was to export a half a million pounds of tea to the American colonies for the purpose of selling it without imposing upon the company the usual duties and tariffs. With these privileges, the company could undersell American merchants and monopolize the colonial tea trade. Not only did this action create unfair commerce for the merchants of the colonies but it also proved to be the spark that revived American passions about the issue of taxation without representation.

Because the American tea market had nearly been captured by tea smuggled from Holland, Parliament gave the company a drawback (refund) of the entire shilling-per-pound duty, enabling the company to undersell the smugglers. It was expected that the American colonists, faced with a choice between the cheaper company tea and the higher-priced smuggled tea, would buy the cheaper tea, despite the tax. The company would then be saved from bankruptcy, the smugglers would be ruined, and the principle of parliamentary taxation would be upheld.

Resisting the Tea Act
Due to the popularity of inexpensive tea smuggled from Holland, British tea manufacturers were accumulating a large surplus of unsold tea, about 17 million pounds.

Instead of rescinding the remaining Townshend tax and exploring inoffensive methods of aiding the financially troubled British East India Company, Parliament enacted the Tea Act of 1773, designed to allow the company to bypass middlemen and sell directly to American retailers.

In September and October 1773, seven ships carrying East India Company tea were sent to the colonies: four were bound for Boston, and one each for New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Americans learned the details of the Tea Act while the ships were en route, and opposition began to mount. Whigs, sometimes calling themselves Sons of Liberty, began a campaign to raise awareness and to convince or compel the consignees to resign, in the same way that stamp distributors had been forced to resign in the 1765 Stamp Act crisis.

The truth is that the protest movement that culminated with the Boston Tea Party was not a dispute about high taxes. The price of legally imported tea was actually reduced by the Tea Act of 1773. Protestors were instead concerned with a variety of other issues. Several myths are wrapped up in the story of the Boston Tea Party. The familiar "no taxation without representation" argument, along with the question of the extent of Parliament's authority in the colonies, remained prominent. Some regarded the purpose of the tax program—to make leading officials independent of colonial influence—as a dangerous infringement of colonial rights. This was especially true in Massachusetts, the only colony where the Townshend program had been fully implemented.

Colonial merchants, some of them smugglers, played a significant role in the protests. Because the Tea Act made legally imported tea cheaper, it threatened to put smugglers of Dutch tea out of business. Other, legal tea importers who had not been named as consignees by the East India Company were also threatened with financial ruin by the Tea Act. Another major concern for merchants was since the Tea Act gave the East India Company a monopoly on the tea trade, it was feared that this government-created monopoly might be extended in the future to include other goods. And this served to alarm the conservative colonial mercantile elements into uniting with the more radical patriots.

South of Boston, protestors successfully compelled the tea consignees to resign. Merchants agreed not to sell the tea, and the designated tea agents in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston canceled their orders or resigned their commissions.

In Charleston, the consignees had been forced to resign, and the unclaimed tea was seized by customs officials. There were mass protest meetings in Philadelphia, and eventually the Philadelphia consignees had resigned and the tea ship returned to England with its cargo. The tea ship bound for New York City was delayed by bad weather; by the time it arrived, the consignees had resigned, and the ship returned to England with the tea.

Revolutionary sentiment mounted . . .
In Boston, however, the tea consignees were friends or relatives of Governor Hutchinson, who was determined to uphold the law. The opposition, led by Samuel and John Adams, Josiah Quincy, and John Hancock, was determined to resist Parliamentary supremacy over colonial legislatures.

Three ships from London, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver, sailed into Boston Harbor from November 28th to December 8, 1773. Loaded with tea from the East India Company, they were all anchored at Griffin’s Wharf but were prevented from unloading their cargo.

When the first ship, the Dartmouth, reached Boston with the cargo of tea, the Sons of Liberty prevented owner Francis Rotch from unloading the tea, but they could not force the consignees to reject it. Rotch and the captains of two newly arrived ships, the Eleanor and the Beaver, agreed to leave without unloading the tea, but they were denied clearance by Governor Hutchinson.

According to the law, if the tea was not unloaded within 20 days (by December 17), it was to be seized and sold to pay custom duties. Convinced that this procedure would still be payment of unconstitutional taxes, the radical patriots resolved to break the deadlock. On December 14, Rotch was called before a mass meeting and ordered to seek clearance again to sail from Boston. But neither the customs collector nor the governor would grant it.

Fearing that the tea would be seized for failure to pay customs duties, and eventually become available for sale, something had to be done. Demanding that the tea be returned to where it came from or face retribution, the Sons of Liberty, led by Samuel Adams began to meet to determine the fate of the three cargo ships in the Boston harbor.

On the cold evening of December 16, 1773, a crowd of several thousand spectators gathered and shouted encouragement to about 60 men disguised as Mohawk Indians. The band of patriots in Boston burst from the South Meeting House with the spirit of freedom burning in their eyes. The patriots headed towards Griffin's Wharf and the three ships. Quickly, quietly, and in an orderly manner, they boarded each of the tea ships. Once on board, the patriots went to work striking the chests with axes and hatchets.

Only the sounds of axe blades splitting wood rang out from Boston Harbor. Once the crates were open, the patriots dumped the tea into the sea. By nine o'clock p.m., the Sons of Liberty, with the aid of the ships' crew, had emptied a total of 342 crates of tea into Boston Harbor. Fearing any connection to their treasonous deed, the patriots took off their shoes and they swept the ships' decks, and made each ship's first mate attest that only the tea was damaged.

The furious royal government responded to this "Boston Tea Party" by the so-called Intolerable Acts of 1774, practically eliminating self-government in Massachusetts and closing Boston's port.

The news of the destruction of the tea raised the spirit of resistance in the colonies. On April 22, 1774, the London attempted to land tea at New York. It was boarded by a mob, and the tea was destroyed. Similar incidents occurred at Annapolis, Md., on October 19 and at Greenwich, N.J., on December 22, and the tea was boycotted throughout the colonies.

http://www.de-fact-o.com/fact_read.php?id=86
http://www.historynet.com/debunking-boston-tea-party-myths.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party
http://www.bostonteapartyship.com/history.asp

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Modern man as "apocoholic" who craves more frightening predictions of apocalyptic doom

The media keep feeding us more doomsday stories of fear that never come true. Modern man seems to be an "apocoholic," always craving more frightening predictions of apocalyptic doom. Why do people keep falling for it?

Best-selling ecologist Paul Ehrlich said in 1968: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s ["and 1980s" was added in a later edition] the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Jimmy Carter said in a speech in 1977: “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

Laughable, except that people actually believed this junk. And continue to believe similar predictions of doom. Why do they keep getting it so wrong? And why do people fall for it? Matt Ridley (Wired Magazine) spells it all out in an excellent article on this topic.

Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist religious zealots. Since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring kickstarted the modern environmentalist movement in 1962, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. The past 50 years have brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, oil exhaustion, climate catastrophes, plagues, Y2K bugs, water wars, mineral shortages, ozone holes, acid rain, nuclear winters, mad cow epidemics, and cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics. So far all of these predictions have turned out to be exaggerated.

In 1976 people were panicked about swine flu. Then in the 1980s, the media scared the hell out of Americans with the threat of the heterosexual AIDS epidemic: "... one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. That’s by 1990." It never happened of course. Then came Ebola.

The biggest threat of all is "us." Humans are the disease that must be eradicated. Activists like Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society: “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion." And other experts agreed. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” said Denis Hayes, organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970. Sending food to India was a mistake and only postponed the inevitable, William and Paul Paddock wrote in their best seller, Famine—1975!

Ever since Thomas Robert Malthus, doomsayers have tended to underestimate the power of innovation. In reality, driven by price increases, people simply develop new technologies.

In the 1970s experts were predicting that lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would all be gone by 1990, bringing about a collapse of civilization when we'd no longer have the raw materials to make machinery. These claims were soon being repeated in schoolbooks. We were told that the world’s known supplies of oil, tin, copper, and aluminum will be used up within our lifetime. The fearmongers scare us repeatedly with dubious predictions. And many people are gullible enough to believe this nonsense. Just take a look at the results of a famous wager between Paul Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon when the metals did not run out. Indeed, they grew cheaper.

Over the past half century, none of these threatened eco-pocalypses have played out as predicted. With a track record like this, why do people keep on falling for various cataclysmic claims? Humanity is a fast-moving target. We will combat our ecological threats in the future by innovating to meet them as they arise. We always do.


Apocalypse Not: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Worry About End Times
by Matt Ridley (Wired Magazine)

Doomsayer Paul Ehrlich Strikes (Out) Again
by Michael Fumento

The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS
by Michael Fumento
 

Read More . . .

Phony Fear Mongering with the Debt Ceiling

Scare tactics on economic catastrophe, automatic "default" on U.S. public debt, the political theater from Washington DC, secret negotiations on the debt limit. This is all fake political posturing. Phony baloney. A fiction used for political purposes. In a word, it's bull.

by Hal Dunn

If the U.S. government defaults on any public debts, it will only be because President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner decide to default on certain public debts, not because they have to. They would have to make a deliberate decision not to pay bondholders, which is highly unlikely.

The Default Myth
The Treasury Secretary isn't supposed to play politics, but at times, Geithner does just that. It's not likely that Geithner would decide not to pay bondholders, since the Treasury Secretary might end up being personally liable if there is a default. It is a myth that "not raising the debt ceiling" is equivalent to "default."

Obama claims that if the debt ceiling is not raised, there will be big trouble. And trouble is probably not an overstatement. Yes, it could be bad. The economic consequences do not look good. When a government runs up debts to the tune of $14 trillion, the outcome will not be pleasant, no matter how they slice it. There is no easy way out. However Obama has threatened to withhold Social Security checks, which is not likely to be something he would choose not to pay if money was to get real tight.

None of Your Business
On June 6, 2011, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Bureau of Public Debt (BPD) seeking an answer to a simple question: What is the Obama administration prepared to do if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling? But the Obama administration did not provide a serious response. The BPD found 172 pages of records that were responsive to this question, but the White House chose to release only 17 unhelpful pages.

Transparency?
Should these debt negotiations be done in secret or should they be public? Judicial Watch says it's not being done in accordance with the Constitution and they are willing to sue the Federal government to open up the debt negotiation process to the public, as they say it should be, to force it to be transparent and televised on C-Span or any neutral TV station. This would demonstrate to American citizens that it's all a political game, and it's not a serious debate to avoid default as they portray it to be.

Playing Politics
The White House wants to force the debt deal to be big enough to last beyond the 2012 elections and the GOP wants the deal to be a short-term deal, small enough so that we bump up against the debt ceiling again before the 2012 election. The GOP is betting that these debt debates hurt Obama politically more than it hurts the Republicans, so they want to guarantee that this debate is re-played again before the next election. In fact, they want it to happen next year in the middle of Obama's 2012 presidential campaign attempt to win re-election.

Both sides are playing games in an attempt to gain political advantage. The liberal Democrats want to raise tax revenues to solve the short-term "debt crisis" before August 2nd. This is short-sighted, but it could allow the government to keep on paying its bills . . . for a while. The White House and many in the media see this as the most important issue to solve right away.

The conservative Republicans want to cut spending in an attempt to help reduce the long-term problem of government debt and endless spending. This is a bigger problem than the August 2nd debt-limit issue. They know that raising tax revenues won't solve the bigger problem, so they're using this particular debt-limit debate to address the overall spending and overall debt issue.

Political gamesmanship during debt debates is nothing new in America. This sort of thing has been going on since before the USA was officially formed in the late 1700s. And the debt ceiling laws have been set and then revised again over a hundred times. But at some point, we'll need to realize there really is a ceiling that can't be adjusted upward forever.

Do the Math
The federal government takes in between $170 billion and $200 billion a month in revenues, but it only pays out $29 billion a month in interest payments on the debt. So Geithner could meet all of the federal government's debt obligations and still have more than $140 billion left over for other spending. That $140 billion is short of the $300 billion in spending the federal government is scheduled to spend for all of August, but missing any those payments would not qualify as a default on the debt.

As the Bipartisan Policy Center has confirmed, Geithner could pay: the interest on the debt, all Social Security obligations, all Medicare and Medicaid obligations, all Defense contractor bills, all Veterans payments, and all active duty troops; and still have almost $7 billion left over for other items.

Geithner would still have to cut overall federal spending by 44%, and that would have economic consequences. But those consequences would not be as bad as defaulting on the debt. Not paying civilian federal workers would be unpopular, but it's not the same as a default. Not raising the debt limit would cause a limited government shutdown, not a default, as Obama has been claiming. The mostly likely reason why Obama has not been honest with the American people about that fact is because he wants to maximize their fear.

Both sides of these negotiations have been playing these games, and not being honest with the American people. The Republicans and Democrats in Congress, as well as the Obama White House and Tim Geithner. It's political theater, and not a real worry about "economic Armageddon." The debt ceiling deadline actually passed a few months ago, and Geithner pushed it out to August 2nd. If there was any real concern, the international financial markets would have been panicking during the last several months, and that hasn't happened.

But at least the Republicans have put forth some concrete plans. The White House has not. The House Republicans have already passed Cut, Cap, and Balance. Paul Ryan has put forth detailed plans for dealing with the debt ceiling, government spending, and deficits. The GOP has presented plenty of details, while the Democrats have offered vague promises and pouty speeches. Even the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has commented on how they can't score speeches; they need a proposal of some sort. They've got nothing to work with.

The White House has had more than two years (over 800 days) to do their job and create a budget, but they have not done it yet. Obama and the Democrats have not put forth a budget yet. Instead they have just been winging it and spending taxpayer money at will. There has been no talk of a Federal investigation to determine if there has been any negligence or to find out why they have not produced a budget after two years.

Both sides are lying. It won't be the end of the world if the debt ceiling isn't raised. It will be uncomfortable, that's for sure. But default is not inevitable just because the debt ceiling is not raised on August 2nd, no matter how many times Obama or the media repeat that lie.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Washington Examiner: There is no Risk of Default

Reason Magazine: The Facts About the Debt Ceiling

Mercatus Center - Debt and Deficits: The Symptoms, not the Disease

Daniel Mitchell: Why are Geithner and Bernanke Trying to Panic Financial Markets with Debt Limit Demagoguery

Forbes: Why the Republicans will lose the Debt Limit Fight

Mercatus Center - Debt Ceiling Key Concerns (PDF)

DownsizeDC.org - Tearing Defeat from the Clenched Jaws of Victory

Mercatus Center - Truth and Consequences: A Guide to Understanding the U.S. Government Debt and Deficits (PDF)

Fox Business - Lou Dobbs: More Transparency needed in Debt Negotiations (video)

Obama White House to American People on Debt Ceiling Plans: None of Your Business!

Washington Examiner: Washington gets $200 billion a month, Social Security costs $50 billion a month, and Obama is threatening to starve Grandma

Cato Institute: Thoughts on the Debt Limit Debate
 

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Congress doesn't read the bills they vote on

Do you think Congress actually reads those bills they pass? No, they do not. The U.S. Congress routinely votes on bills that they have not even read.

It is typical for Congress members to carelessly pass mammoth bills that none of them have read. Sometimes printed copies aren't even available when they vote. Also members of Congress typically do not even write the laws they pass. Most laws are written either by special interest lobbyists or by bureaucrats. And they routinely pass unpopular measures by combining them with popular bills that are completely unrelated.

Most Congressmen are lawyers, and many others are businessmen. They know what “fiduciary responsibility” is. For members of Congress, fiduciary responsibility means reading each word of every bill before they vote.

But Congress has not met this duty for a long time. Instead . . .

• Often no one knows what these bills contain, or what they really do, or what they will really cost.
  
• Additions and deletions are made at the last minute, in secrecy.
  
• They combine unpopular proposals with popular measures that few in Congress want to oppose. (This practice is called “log-rolling.”)
  
• And votes are held with little debate or public notice.

Once these bills are passed, and one of these unpopular proposals comes to light, they pretend to be shocked. “How did that get in there?” they ask. There's a basic principle at stake here. America was founded on the slogan, “No taxation without representation.” A similar slogan applies to this situation: “No LEGISLATION without representation.” We hold this truth to be self-evident, that those in Congress who vote on legislation they have not read, have not represented their constituents. They have misrepresented them.

Many American citizens are unaware of this Congressional behavior. Congress shirks its responsibilities in many ways: Congress does't read them, and also Congress doesn't even write the laws they pass either. Most laws are written either by special interest lobbyists or by bureaucrats. Politicians don’t have to sweat the details of the laws they pass. Most laws today contain only general directives. The regulatory details are left to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.

Politicians don’t have to read the bills they pass. Congress passes thousands of pages of legislation without knowing what it contains or does. Often this legislation is not even printed before a vote is held, and new items are sometimes added to bills after they have been passed.

Politicians don’t have to deliberate, or debate the laws they create. Watch CSPAN. Whenever Congress holds a so called debate on a bill there is one person talking, a few people waiting to talk, and the rest of the room is empty. What “debate” means in Congress is that a handful of politicians are playing to the camera while the rest are out talking to lobbyists.

Politicians don’t have to cast individual votes on individual laws. Congressional leaders routinely pass unpopular measures by combining them with popular bills that are completely unrelated. This gives politicians an excuse for passing bad bills. They claim they had to do it because the bad measure was part of a good bill they couldn’t possibly oppose.

Politicians rarely have to correct their mistakes. Some laws have sunset provisions, and come up for periodic reconsideration. But Congress routinely fails to figure out if a law or program has actually worked. They just renew it and, of course, increase the funding.

If politicians had to write the laws, sweat the details, read the bills, deliberate and debate, cast individual votes on individual proposals, and routinely revisit past legislation in the same methodical way, it would be a lot harder to make the federal government grow and grow and grow . . . But they don’t, so it isn’t.

Congress has repeatedly committed “legislation without representation,” and due to that, there is an organization that is attempting to correct this with strong measures to prohibit these Congressional misrepresentations: Downsize DC at DownsizeDC.org.

Downsize DC has created the Read the Bills Act (RTBA). RTBA requires that . . .

• Each bill, and every amendment, must be read in its entirety before a quorum in both the House and Senate.
  
• Every member of the House and Senate must sign a sworn affidavit, under penalty of perjury, that he or she has attentively either personally read, or heard read, the complete bill to be voted on.
  
• Every old law coming up for renewal under the sunset provisions must also be read according to the same rules that apply to new bills.
  
• Every bill to be voted on must be published on the Internet at least 7 days before a vote, and Congress must give public notice of the date when a vote will be held on that bill.
  
• Passage of a bill that does not abide by these provisions will render the measure null and void, and establish grounds for the law to be challenged in court.
  
• Congress cannot waive these requirements.

Read the Bills Act

Downsize DC is a non-partisan organization which aims to limit the size of government in the United States through awareness and petitioning government.

http://www.downsizedc.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read_the_bills_act


 

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Stem Cell Wars: Adult vs. Embryonic

“Recent spectacular breakthroughs in noncontroversial adult stem cell research and clinical applications to effectuate cures with the mitigation of disease or disability have been well documented, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) said, remarking on the 'significant progress' achieved with adult stem cells.”

Stem cell research has become highly politicized. But, even pro-lifers and conservatives, like former President Bush, are not against stem-cell research. They are against embryonic stem-cell research (and against cloning to create embryos for use in stem-cell research, or in any research).

Embryonic stem-cell (ESC) research is not the only hope for mankind, as we are typically led to believe. The prospects of adult stem-cell (ASC) and umbilical cord stem-cell research are repeatedly ignored by media and activists. Adult stem-cell research is one of the most promising advances in medical science in the last decades. As Michael Fumento, author of "Bio-Evolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World," (Encounter Books, 2003) one of the few commentators who has shone a light on adult stem cells, has written: "Scientists have already discovered at least 14 types of ASCs that ... could perhaps be 'trans-differentiated' into all the types of cells we need."

And adult stem cells are not mere pie-in-the-sky hopes of potential medical progress. Adult stem cells are cells at work today. Dr. Scott Gottlieb has written, "Adult stem cells have already been used for more than 20 years as bone-marrow transplants to reconstitute the immune systems of patients with cancer and to treat blood cancers such as leukemia."

Umbilical cord stem cells are another potentially fertile opportunity for medical progress. Cord blood is rich in stem cells. Four million babies are born every year in the United States and the majority of their umbilical cords are thrown away. They could be used to treat some 11,700 Americans annually, according to the Institute of Medicine.

Regardless of whether you're pro-choice or pro-life, the prospects of adult stem-cells look very promising, currently treating over 80 different diseases. And possibly even being able to be transformed into all three major categories of cells, making them just as pliable as ESCs theoretically are. So is there really any point in pursuing embryonic stem-cell research?

◊ ◊ ◊

Supporters of expanded federal funding for embryonic stem cell research were disappointed by former President Bush. And they were pleased by President Obama. But those who truly believe ESC research will bring medical breakthroughs have naught to fear. For there’s a far more promising approach, likelier to produce more benefits and much sooner.

We're being flooded with exciting new developments from the alternatives to ESCs, called adult stem cells. Taken from a person's own body or from umbilical cords or placenta, these cells are treating ever more diseases. Further, ASC research in humans and animals keeps biting away at the alleged trump card of ESCs—that only they can be transformed into every type of cell in the body. Cardiologist Douglas Losordo's research lab at Caritas St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Boston has now become the latest indicate ASCs can do just that.

Reporting their results in the February Journal of Clinical Investigation, they extracted from the blood stream of three humans stem cells that originated in the bone marrow, thereby saving patients the trouble and pain of direct marrow extraction. They found what they believe to be a heretofore undiscovered type of cell, then injected these into the hearts of rats that had suffered heart attacks and subsequent—formerly permanent—damage.

Some of the cells became new heart muscle while others became new blood vessels. Indeed, they grew twice as many new vessels as other rats given a fake treatment. They also grew far less scar tissue, which impedes heart function.

Marrow stem cells have been used to induce either muscle growth or vessel growth in human hearts in hundreds of patients in labs throughout the world. But this appears to be the first time both were grown at the same time by a single type of cell. Losordo’s team is now overseeing a trial using these cells on patients with untreatable severe angina. “The safety looks good and majority of patients are doing much better,” he told me.

More exciting yet, Losordo also conducted experiments showing their cells can also become nerve tissue. That means they could be transformed into all three major categories of cells, making them just as pliable as ESCs theoretically are.

Yet several other labs have also found different ASCs (all from marrow) that seem to have this same property. One of them was that of Ira Black, a neurologist at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. "I can't say I'm surprised" at Losordo's findings Black told me. "It's consistent with studies going on across the world. And one of the most exciting areas now is the use of ASCs in heart failure."

In fact, Brazil has announced an ambitious heart-stem cell experiment involving 1,200 patients and 40 institutions across the country. The aim is to eventually replace traditional heart treatments with stem cell therapy, such that 200,000 lives could be saved within three years if the therapy proves effective. It could also reduce the government's costs for heart treatment by $14.2 million a month, the health ministry said.

Brazil also announced they are financing studies with stem cells for treating spinal cord diseases, diabetes and degenerative nerve disorders like Parkinson's. The U.S. is too. While no ESC has even made it into animal testing, ASCs are now being used in about 300 human clinical trials and are treating over 80 different diseases.

As to the plasticity of Losordo's stem cells, Black says converting an ASC into a completely different kind of mature cell "was once thought impossible." Indeed some ESC researchers desperate for federal handouts still doggedly insist it is–on par with saying lab rats can't squeak. The media rarely hesitate to repeat their claims. But "now 10 to 20 different labs have shown" such transformation is possible, says Black.

Losordo, however, says a major advantage of his adult stem cells is that they're much easier to grow than previously-discovered types. His team multiplied them 140 times with no change in their structure or effectiveness. Now, "We've got freezers full of them" he says.

He told me he thinks his work combined with that of others could "render moot the debate between ESCs and ASCs." Says Losordo, "We're entering the second phase of development of adult stem cells. We'll soon be working on methods to enhance the efficiency of adult stem cells . . . while ESCs aren't even in the starting gate yet."

He notes ESC researchers continue to be flummoxed in trying to get ESC cells to become specific types of mature cells without inducing runaway cell growth–malignancies called “teratomas” or “monster cancer.”

Losordo bemoans the broad-based assault by ESC researchers and the media to exaggerate the potential of ESC research while downplaying or even ignoring tremendous breakthroughs in ASC work. "I don't have any personal religious or other objections to ESC research despite the vowels in my name," he says, referring to his Italian Catholic heritage. "But as a clinical investigator I have an obligation to develop therapies that appear to be of most use to my patients."

Would that ESC boosters felt the same.

◊ ◊ ◊

Stem-cell research constitutes one of the most exciting areas in medical science. It promises to prevent, ameliorate and cure diseases for which there are now few if any treatments. Far easier is listing what stem cells don't have the potential to do, but here are a few of the wonders in progress:

• More than 30 anticancer uses for stem cells have been tested on humans, with many already in routine therapeutical use.



• By some accounts, the area in which stem-cell applications are moving fastest is autoimmune disease, in which the body's own protective system turns on itself. Diseases for which stem cells currently are being tested on humans include diabetes, lupus, multiple sclerosis, Evans syndrome, rheumatic disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), among many others.



• Just last February, two different human-autopsy studies demonstrated that stem cells transfused into the marrow work their way into the brain, where they can repair neurons and other vital cells. Other studies have shown that when injected into animals with severed spinal cords, stem cells rush to the injury site effecting repairs. "I think the stem cells may act as a repair squad," says the leader of one of the two studies, Helen Blau of the Stanford University Brain Research Institute. "They travel through the bloodstream, respond to stress, and contribute to brain cells. They clearly repair damage in muscle and other tissues."



• At a conference in late 2002, French researchers reported that during the last 14 years they had performed 69 stem-cell transplants with an 85 percent disease-free survival rate. Since improving their procedure in 1992, all 30 of the last transplants have been successful.



• Stem cells have been injected into damaged hearts and become functional muscle. This destroyed the dogma that heart muscle cannot be repaired, just as stem-cell research also wrecked the firmly held belief that brain tissue cannot regenerate.

Unless you've spent the last several years stranded on a deserted island, you've probably heard of at least some of these medical miracles. But here's what you may have missed. While the overwhelming majority of favorable media coverage of stem cells concerns those pulled from human embryos, called embryonic stem cells (ESCs), not a single treatment listed above has used that kind of cell. In fact, while activists such as spinally injured actor Christopher Reeve rage that but for Bush administration and congressional restrictions on ESC funding he might be walking in a few years, there are no approved treatments—and have been no human trials—involving embryonic stem cells. Each of the above therapies and experiments has involved cells that require no use of embryos.

These are called "adult stem cells" (ASCs), though they also refer to cells found in nonadult tissue such as umbilical cords, placentas and amniotic fluid. Like ESCs, they are precursors that eventually will become a mature, specialized cell. ASCs actually have been used therapeutically to treat leukemia and other diseases since the 1980s. A bone-marrow transplant is a transplant of stem cells from marrow.

Yet when an ESC so much as hiccups, it makes international news, while tremendous breakthroughs with ASCs are as a rule ignored. Welcome to what's been called "stem-cell wars," a deliberate effort to downplay the proven value of ASCs to attract more attention to the potential of ESCs. It is a war that is being fought partly over ethics, but mostly over money.

Okay, so if ASCs have such a huge advantage over ESCs then why did anybody begin researching ESCs anyway, to a point where labs and researchers all over the world now are working with them?

Blame it on the dogma—scientific dogma that is. It's long been acknowledged that ESCs carry a boatload of physiological and ethical problems. For example, ESCs implanted into animals have a nasty tendency to cause malignant tumors. That's a major hurdle to overcome, as is the fact that the body rejects them just as it rejects donated organs. Yet it was always believed that ESCs had one huge advantage over their ASC counterparts—that while an ASC could become or "differentiate" into only a few types of mature tissue with those tissues dictated by the source of that ASC, the ESCs could become any type of tissue in the entire body. In medical terminology this is known as "plasticity."

But this has never been more than theory, and lately that theory has begun crumbling under the weight of empirical findings. Or, in other words, it's had a run-in with reality.

"We do not yet know enough about adult stem cells or ESCs to make dogmatic statements of either," declared Dr. Darwin Prockop, director of the Gene Therapy Center at Tulane University, in a letter that appeared in Science.

"There's no law of physics or such that I know of that says that [ASCs] are inherently more limited than embryonic stem cells," Prockop told Citizen.

We do know that ESCs give rise to all three germ layers (as in "germination") that become all the forms of human tissue. But this doesn't necessarily mean that they can be converted into each and every one of those tissues. Moreover, Catherine Verfaillie and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota's Stem Cell Institute recently have found stem cells in human marrow that appear to transform into all three germ layers. "I think Verfaillie's work is most exciting and translatable into the clinical arena," says Dr. David Hess, a neurologist at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. "They seem to give rise to every cell in the body. She seems to have a subpopulation with basically all the benefits of ESCs and none of the drawbacks."

Verfaillie calls the cells "multipotent adult progenitor cells," and has isolated them from mice, rats and people. They already have been transformed into cells of blood, the gut, liver, lung, brain and other organs. Just a few months ago, researchers at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey published a paper explaining that in a mere five hours they had been able to convert bone-marrow cells into neurons both in petri dishes and in rats. Under the old dogma, that was simply impossible. More importantly, "We found that they express genes typical of all three embryonic germ layers," the researchers told Citizen. "In aggregate, our study and various others do support the idea that one [ASC] can give rise to all types of tissue."

And the good news keeps pouring in. One problem with Verfaillie's cells is that, in part because they come from marrow, they are difficult to extract. That problem won't matter down the road when culturing practices are perfected, say researchers, but currently it hinders efforts to keep labs supplied.

Enter Elizer Huberman and his colleagues at the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago. They wanted to find highly plastic ASCs in blood, as they would be far easier to extract and to store. Just how plastic they might be remained to be seen and wasn't even a prime concern. But when the Argonne scientists reported their results in the March 2003 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it showed that their stem cells had in fact differentiated into mature cells of all three lineages that ESCs can produce.

Even if it somehow turned out that none of the ASCs really can produce all the cells of the body, perhaps we don't need the ability of cells that are "one size fits all." That's because in recent years researchers have found that they can tease ASCs into many more types of mature tissue than was previously thought possible. Moreover, researchers now seem to be finding ASCs essentially wherever they look—including blood, bone marrow, skin, brains, spinal cords, dental pulp, muscles, blood vessels, corneas, retinas, livers, pancreases, fat, hair follicles, placentas, umbilical cords and amniotic fluid. You don't need "one size fits all" if you can provide all sizes.

At the same time, ESCs have become even more suspect ethically in the eyes of many people. The original ethical concern was that many see the destruction of human offspring, no matter how young, as an abortion. Some prominent abortion opponents believe human life only begins upon implantation in the uterine wall; therefore destruction of embryos would not count as such. Nonetheless, even to some of these people the thought of ripping apart the byproduct of human conception for the sake of science invokes images of Nazi eugenicist Josef Mengele or of Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein.

This more recent worry has nothing to do with destroying life but rather with the creation of it - cloned human life. While growing embryos into blastocysts (see note at end of article) often is referred to as "therapeutic cloning" or "research cloning" to distinguish it from the process of creating a human being, the two processes follow parallel tracks. If that blastocyst is implanted into the womb and it survives, voila!—nine months later you have a clone just like something out of Star Wars Episode II. No doubt most ESC researchers haven't the least desire to take the next step, but that's not the issue. What counts is that they are developing a technology that others can build upon to refine the process of creating human clones.

Thus, ESCs have in their favor nothing more than a decaying theory that they may have greater plasticity. Going against them are the ethical concerns and that they are years behind ASCs in commercial applications.

But there's a huge ESC industry out there, with countless labs packed with innumerable scientists desperately seeking research funds. Private investors avoid them because they don't want to wait perhaps 10 years for commercial products that very well may not materialize and because they're spooked by the ethical concerns. That leaves essentially only Uncle Sam's piggy bank, primarily grants from the National Institutes of Health, to keep these labs open. This, in brief, explains the "stem-cells wars," the perceived overwhelming need grossly to exaggerate petri-dish advances with ESCs, while life-saving new applications of ASCs are downplayed or ignored.

Thus the announcement in 2001 that ESCs could be made into blood cells received almost 500 "hits" on the Nexis media database even though published medical-journal reports of ASCs differentiating into blood cells go back at least to 1971. It's possible to read lengthy articles on the promise of stem cells that mention nothing but ESCs. The influential pro-life figure and former U.S. senator Connie Mack (R-Fla.) even questioned whether ASCs exist, which is on par with questioning the existence of Starbucks.

It's probably not a coincidence that Mack has been a paid lobbyist for ESCs, but most reporters have no financial stake in the issue and it is a complex one. They take their cues from the professional medical journals. And, unfortunately, these are among the leaders in the war against ASCs. The world's most prestigious science journal, Nature, published two in-vitro studies in March 2002 widely interpreted to mean either that ASCs are grossly inferior to what had earlier been believed or even that they're outright worthless.

The Nature writers indicated their studies showed that ASCs probably were not differentiating and multiplying at all; rather that it appeared the cell nuclei were merely fusing and the resulting fusion gave the impression of a new, differentiated cell forming. The media gobbled it up. Agence-Presse France headlined: "'Breakthrough' in Adult Stem Cells Is Hype, Studies Warn." The Australian Associated Press (AAP) declared, "New Research Tips Debate on Stem Cells." The Washington Post's subhead flatly declared: "Adult Cells Found Less Useful than Embryonic Ones." It was damning ... and false.

Stanford's Helen Blau countered with a big "So what?" In a Nature commentary, she noted that "Cell fusion has long been known to achieve effective reprogramming of cells"—so long in fact that her own laboratory was doing it 20 years earlier. Thus, far from showing that ASC research is "hype" or whatever term the particular newspaper or newswire chose to apply, it turns out that cell fusion both complements and encourages the differentiation of adult stem cells - something that's already proved valuable and is clearly very promising.

The idea that differentiation wasn't happening at all was simply bizarre in light of myriad studies and therapeutic applications showing otherwise, including one that appeared in the journal Blood shortly thereafter. Showing that bone-marrow stem cells can be converted into kidney cells, it pointedly concluded: "The process does not involve cell fusion."

"We found no evidence of nuclear material from two cells fusing into one cell," one of the coauthors emphasized to me. In an interview last spring, Prockop told me, "It may well be that fusion is part of the healing process. But clearly we can take mesenchymal cells and differentiate them into various tissues because it's into bone or fat and it's been done over 20 years." Indeed, he specifically explored the fusion issue in a study released in the Sept. 30, 2003, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, concluding "Most of the [mesenchymal cells] differentiated without evidence of cell fusion, but up to one-quarter underwent cell fusion with the epithelial cells. A few also underwent nuclear fusion."

Yet another Blood study released last September concluded, "Analysis of DNA content indicates that donor-derived endothelial [stem] cells are not the products of cell fusion." A Lancet study in early 2003 looked at cheek cells from five living women who had received bone-marrow transplants from their brothers several years earlier. They found cells containing the male Y chromosome, a sign that donor marrow stem cells had differentiated into cheek cells. Moreover, the group found almost no evidence of fusion among the cells in the cheek. Of the 9,700 cells that were examined in the study, only two showed signs of possible fusion.

And yet in late October 2003, Nature rushed into publication yet another letter claiming that there was no evidence that stem cells from marrow do anything but fuse. Of all these studies, guess which was the only one to get media attention—and lots of it.

Shortly after Nature's first effort to establish that the wheel doesn't exist, its chief competitor, Science, attempted to show that the Earth is flat after all. First it ran a letter in which authors from the Baylor College of Medicine claimed that they earnestly had tried but failed to find bone-marrow cells that had differentiated into neurons in the brain. Shortly thereafter it ran a paper from Stanford University scientists, led by Irving Weissman, claiming to show that a type of stem cell from marrow could replenish that type of marrow, but that it appeared worthless for creating other tissues. The typical media reaction was UPI's "Promise of Adult Stem Cells Put in Doubt." Weissman eschewed the usual cautionary scientific terminology such as "it appears" or "evidence indicates," or "our particular study has found." Instead he smugly told UPI: "They [the cells] don't make brain; they don't make heart muscle or any of these things."

According to Blau, it was surprising to see this published so rapidly and in such a prestigious and influential publication as Science. The Baylor study, she notes, failed to detect not only neurons but also something far more readily detectable called microglial cells. And forget that "At least 20 reports over the past 15 years have shown that bone-marrow transplantation results in readily detectable replacement of a large proportion of microglial cells in the brain." Some of these reports have even appeared in Science. Says Blau, "If they couldn't see those, how could they possibly see neurons?" It would be like announcing that you had failed to detect a tiny virus under your microscope when you also hadn't been able to see a gnat that accidentally got trapped between the slides. Either your microscope is faulty or you don't know how to use it.

"As to Weissman's paper, where you look and how you look determines what you see, and he doesn't define where he's looking," she says. "Our own experiments have shown there can be a thousand-fold frequency of stem-cell incorporation depending on where you look." Because he didn't say where he looked, "It would be quite difficult to replicate his experiments," she notes. "You could replicate ours, but he did not. The other false assumption he made was to look at a fraction of marrow, the hematopoietic part, and he looked in absence of any damage to the body; yet these are damage-repair cells." In other words, one shouldn't think it remarkable that no ambulance shows up when there's no need for an ambulance.

Weissman is also a notorious opponent of adult stem-cell research insofar as he has made millions of dollars with numerous companies that work with ESCs, according to an exposé in the Washington Monthly. "Was the publication of these two papers a political act designed to harm the image of ASCs in the image of the public?" Insight asked Blau.

"That's been a question in many people's minds," she says. "Why these negative findings should have been published in such a prominent way does suggest a political agenda."

In a commentary in the Journal of Cell Science in February 2003, British researchers asked in the very title: "Plastic Adult Stem Cells: Will They Graduate From the School of Hard Knocks?" In a good-humored, indeed sometimes humorous, piece the angst nonetheless came through. "Despite such irrefutable evidence of what is possible, a veritable chorus of detractors of adult stem-cell plasticity has emerged, some doubting its very existence, motivated perhaps by more than a little self-interest." While certain issues still need resolving, the researchers said, "slamming" the "whole field because not everything is crystal clear is not good science."

Even scientists who strongly favor ESC funding readily admit that the issue is highly politicized, with ASCs getting the short end of the stick from research publications, the popular media and the scientific community. Blau, Prockop, Black and Verfaillie are among them. "Most scientists never want a door closed, they want all doors open," says Hess. "And anybody who disagrees with that stance is seen as trying to hold up medical progress."

Another ASC researcher who strongly supports funding for ESCs is Patricia Zuk, whose lab has shown that America's most plentiful natural resource—body fat—can provide a limitless source for stem cells capable of differentiating into bone, muscle, cartilage and fat that can be used to fill in scars and wrinkles. "Certainly it's politicized," she says. But, she adds, "I think a lot of embryonic stem-cell people are right in trying to protect their jobs."

Understandable, yes. But is it right? Forget for the moment the questionable morality of a mass campaign to fool the American public. Zuk admits that the stem-cell wars are "very worrisome" in that they could harm her own efforts to get grant money. Says Hess, "Certainly one of my motivations is I don't want money from adult stem-cell research being pushed into embryonic, though it's already starting to happen."

Activists such as Christopher Reeve have it backward when they say that restrictions on ESC research funding will prevent him from walking again. ASC studies already have enabled quadriplegic animals to walk again, and human trials should be right around the corner. But the chance of ESCs helping people such as Reeve in the next 10 years is practically nil. Reeve should know about this: Many of the amazing ASC studies, including Ira Black's, have been funded by something called the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation.

Moreover, to the extent that breakthroughs with ASCs are confused with ESC technology, it harms public support for ASC research. ESC propagandists are hoping for a seesaw effect; that by exaggerating ESC research and denigrating ASC research they'll push up their side of the board. But, to the extent they succeed, they're only delaying the stream of miracles coming from adult stem cells.

Note: When fertilization initially takes place, whether within a fallopian tube (in vivo) or in a petri dish (in vitro) it forms a single-cell embryo called a zygote. The zygote divides progressively into a multicell embryo. After about five days, the embryo contains many cells with a cystic cavity within its center and is called a "blastocyst." If this blastocyst implants into the uterus and continues to develop, it becomes a fetus. But this is also the stage at which the individual cells become viable for use in ESC experimentation. "Blastocyst" is not to be confused with "blastocyte," which is simply another term for an ESC.

Beginning of the End for Embryonic Stem Cell Research?
By Michael Fumento
Tech Central Station, February 11, 2005
http://www.fumento.com/biotech/stem-cell-research.html

The Stem Cell Cover-Up
By Michael Fumento
Insight on the News - National (Issue: 5/16/04)
http://www.fumento.com/biotech/stemcell.html

Michael Fumento is author of BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World, which has been published by Encounter Books of San Francisco.

 

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The Truth About the Slave Trade

An awful lot of people seem to be unaware of the history of slavery. Especially concerning the origins of African slavery and slaves in America.

European slave traders did not themselves capture the Africans they transported, but bought them from native slave traders. Since ancient times, war captives, criminals, and debtors in Africa had been sold into slavery among their own people. For several centuries the western Sudanese kingdoms had been supplying slaves to Muslim North Africa on a commercial basis.

When European traders first came to the Guinea coast, African masters sold them their own slaves. As the demand increased, the coastal peoples began making slave raids against peoples farther inland, aided by firearms supplied by the traders. Soon blacks belonging to a variety of tribes from Senegal south to Angola were being enslaved in great numbers.

Captured slaves were marched to the sea in single file, shackled and watched by armed African guards. Fatalities were high on the grim journey. The slaves were placed in compounds (barracoons) at points along the coast, where European traders arriving by ship would examine them and reject the old and infirm. The remaining captives were branded and taken on board. Payment for slaves was in goods such as textiles, firearms, knives and other hardware, and liquor. African kingdoms such as Ashanti and Dahomey grew in power through the slave trade, because of the European goods they received.

In the mid '60s, as the civil rights movement went into decline, American black nationalists began to depict Africa as a paradise lost. Africa was the great motherland, distorted by white people and denied by Negroes. The slave trade, we were told, was imposed by whites.

This vision took hold in the early black studies departments on college campuses. And by the time Alex Haley's "Roots" told its plagiarized tale on television, Americans were given to believe that the slave trade was kept going by white men bagging Africans in the bush. The simpleminded vision of good guys and bad guys was established, but it is not completely accurate.

The first strong African assault came when the great Senegalese filmmaker Ousemane Sembene's "Ceddo" got its U.S. debut more than 20 years ago, and the black nationalist movement was stunned. Sembene showed Africans, European Christians and Muslims working together to sell Africans into slavery.

Origins
The word slave is adapted from Slav, originating from the time when the Germans supplied the slave markets of Europe with captured Slavs. For centuries, the Slavic people of Eastern Europe were the primary source of slaves for Europe and the Near East. Because of this, the word for slave in numerous European languages is derived from the word for Slavs—the English word being a clear example.

Slavery began with civilization. For hunter-gatherers slaves would have been an unaffordable luxury—there wouldn’t have been enough food to go around. With the growth of cultivation, those defeated in warfare could be taken as slaves.

Slavery has existed throughout history and practically every country on every continent experienced some kind of slavery. Scandinavia, medieval Europe, Nepal (which abolished slavery in 1924), China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, Thailand, Burma, Myanmar, Russia, Persia, Polynesia, Hawaii, New Zealand, Easter Island, just to name a few.

Western slavery goes back 10,000 years to Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq, where a male slave was worth an orchard of date palms. Female slaves were called on for sexual services, gaining freedom only when their masters died.

Early abolitionists arose in the form of two Jewish sects, the Essenes and the Therapeutae, who abhorred slave-owning and tried buying slaves in order to free them.

Slavery still exists to this day, and the slave-trade is carried on by Arab slave-traders in the interior of Africa. Slavery is in all countries considered to be a criminal activity, outlawed by UN conventions. However some states such as Myanmar and Sudan do facilitate the institution of slavery, according to anti-slavery groups such as Free the Slaves.

Slavery existed in the ancient Mediterranean cultures, such as debt-slavery and the enslavement of prisoners of war. There was slavery in the Bible, slavery in Rome and Greece. Most of the gladiators were often slaves.

The beginnings of Christianity did not seriously change slavery. Though the Christian leaders often called for good treatment for slaves and condemned the enslavement of Christians, the institution itself was not questioned. The shift from chattel slavery to serfdom in medieval Europe is otherwise an economic rather than a moral issue.

Slavery in the Islamic World
The institution of slavery pre-dates Islam in the Arab world, and was permitted under the laws of Islam. Islamic rulers made a custom of enslaving those defeated in war. The Islamic world bought and captured slaves from Europe and Africa on a large scale for roughly a thousand years.

Slavery in Medieval Europe
Slaves (especially from Slavic) countries were traded, mainly in Prague. Sold by Christians, transported by Jews and then bought in the Muslim empire. Swedish Vikings were known to terrorize and enslave many Slavs.

Slavery in Africa
Slavery was common and widespread throughout Africa into the 19th century. The Dutch imported slaves from Asia into their colony in South Africa.

The nature of the slave societies differed greatly across the continent. There were large plantations worked by slaves in Egypt, the Sudan, and Zanzibar, but this was not a typical use of slaves in Africa as a whole. In some slave societies, slaves were protected and almost incorporated into the slaveowning family. In others, slaves were brutally abused, and even used for human sacrifices. Despite the vast numbers of slaves exported from Africa, many historians say that the majority of African slaves remained in Africa, continuing as slaves in the regions where they were first captured.

More than 1 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries.

The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of slaves were captured on raiding expeditions into the interior of West Africa. These expeditions were typically carried out by African kingdoms.

Slavery persists in Africa today more so than on any other continent. The Anti-Slavery Society estimated that there were 2,000,000 slaves in the early 1930s Ethiopia, out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million. Slavery continued in Ethiopia until 1942. In northern Nigeria at the turn of the 20th century, approximately 2 million to 2.5 million people there were slaves. Slavery in northern Nigeria was finally outlawed in 1936.

Mauritania abolished slavery only in 1981, but several human rights organizations are reporting that the practice continues there today. The trading of children has been reported in modern Nigeria and Benin. In the Sudan, slavery continues as part of an ongoing civil war.

Slavery in Colonial America
Most slaves that were brought to the Americas ended up in the Caribbean or South America where tropical diseases took a large toll on their population and required large numbers of replacements.

The institution of slavery in the Americas during the 17th century made little distinction as to the race of the slave. White and Native American slavery was common. However, by the 18th century, the overwhelming number of slaves were black, and white and Native American slavery became less common.

Slavery under European rule began with importation of white European slaves (indentured servants). That was followed by the enslavement of local aborigines in the Caribbean. And eventually was primarily replaced with Africans imported through a large slave trade as the native populations declined through disease.

Slavery in North America
Only a fraction of the enslaved Africans brought to the New World ended up in North America—perhaps 5 percent. The vast majority of slaves shipped across the Atlantic were sent to the Caribbean sugar colonies, Brazil, or Spanish America.

The first slaves brought to the English colonies on the continent landed at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Slavery was legal in most of the 13 colonies, and was ended in many of the states later called "Free States" after the turn of the 19th century. Slavery was abolished in New York state in 1827. In 1806 the U.S. passed legislation that banned the importation of slaves, but not the internal slave trade.

Slavery ended in the U.S. in the 1860s. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was a reluctant gesture, that proclaimed freedom for slaves within the Confederacy, but Lincoln was the leader of the Union and had no authority over the Confederacy. The proclamation was nothing more than a political and symbolic gesture. It did not free the slaves. The proclamation attempted to change the Civil War's goal, then making the abolition of slavery an official war goal. Slaves within the U.S. remained enslaved until the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution late in 1865, 8 months after the cessation of hostilities in the Civil War.

Lincoln was opposed only to the spread of slavery in the new states. He refused to free the slaves in the border states. And he even established mechanisms to colonize millions of free blacks in Latin America. His main concern of the proclamation was to preserve the Union. It did so as an antislavery crusade in order to mute the growing opposition to the mounting costs and casualties of the war.

Slavery in the Spanish New World Colonies
Slavery in the Spanish colonies began with local Native Americans put to work in the silver mines. However, as these populations shrank due to imported European diseases, African slaves began to be imported.

Slavery in Brazil
During the colonial epoch, slavery was a mainstay of the Brazilian economy, especially in mining and sugar cane production. Slavery was legally ended by the "Golden Law" of 1888.

Brazil obtained more than 35 percent of all African slaves traded, approximately 3 million slaves were sent to this one country. The Portuguese were the first to initiate the slave trade there, and the last to end it.

In the early 1990s evidence of illegal slavery was unearthed in the Amazon region. The Brazilian government has since taken measures against such activities.

By the middle of the 18th century, British Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue had become the largest slave societies of the Caribbean region, rivaling Brazil as a major destination for enslaved Africans.

So, as you can see, there's much more to the history of slavery than is commonly known.


"The Truth About African Slave Trading" by Stanley Crouch, Monday, July 23, 2001 - http://www.racematters.org/sctruthafricanslavetrading.htm

http://history.howstuffworks.com/african-history/african-slave-trade.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_trade

http://knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/Enslavement/

http://www.newint.org/issue337/history.htm


 

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AIG the insurer of the Congressional pension trust?

Have your heard this one? "Congress supported a bailout of AIG because that company insures the Congressional pension trust."

It's not true. There is no private insurance on any federal pensions.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/aig.asp

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Nostradamus Didn't Predict Anything

The prophecies of Nostradamus have a magical quality for those who study them: They are muddled and obscure before the predicted event, but become crystal clear after the event has occurred.

Michel de Nostredame (1503–1566), usually Latinized to Nostradamus, was a French apothecary. According to many in the popular press, he was a great seer who prophesized future events. Nostradamus wrote four-line verses (quatrains) in groups of 100. Some claim that Nostradamus predicted the Challenger space shuttle disaster on January 28, 1986. Of course, they didn't recognize that he had predicted it until it was too late.

The writings of Nostradamus are so cryptic that they can be interpreted to mean almost anything. If we have some imagination, we can shoehorn just about any event to some passage in Nostradamus.

One thing Nostradamus didn't predict was that he would become a one-man industry in the 20th century. Publishing houses will never go broke printing the latest predictions culled from the manuscripts of Nostradamus.

http://www.skepdic.com/nostrada.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradomus

 

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