PARTY LIKE IT’S 1929
I recently learned a curious scientific fact. The same area of the brain that is stimulated by cocaine is also stimulated by the acquisition of money. Some of the short-term cocaine effects that first time users experience include increased energy and faster heart rate. Addicts are also said to ‘chase the high,' meaning they continue to use cocaine, seeking the feeling they felt the first time they used it. As the use of cocaine becomes habitual, tolerance increases, leading to lying and stealing to support the craving, alongside denial and increasingly drug-induced bizarre behavior. Addiction can eventually lead to permanent damage, and without intervention; death.
Given this physiological parallel between cocaine use and the high of financial gain, it would make for an interesting experiment if, hypothetically of course, a nation’s corporate and financial industries were given free rein to pursue their constant need for profits, unhindered by government ‘interference’ and regulation, and by any means they saw fit. How would this scenario unfold? Would they ‘self-regulate’, as has been proposed in the past by many right-wing advocates, and produce a positive environment where the country as a whole would prosper? Or conversely, like an addict desperately seeking the next and greater fix, would they single-mindedly ‘chase the high’ all the way to collapse?
That would be an interesting experiment indeed.
Of course, anyone familiar with history, or basic human nature for that matter, would never allow this scenario to unfold, because we’ve been there, with disastrous results. The massive stock market crash of 1929 gave citizens and lawmakers a pretty good idea of what overzealous commercial bank involvement in stock market investment and commercial banks taking on too much risk with depositors’ money looks like.
The Great Depression forced North America into rehab, and withdrawal lasted a decade, while millions suffered and many lost everything. It was from this crisis that capitalism learned many lessons and enacted safeguards to ensure it wouldn’t happen again. Among these measures was the 1933 ‘Glass-Steagall Act’, separating investment and commercial banking activities, making it illegal for this destructive type of activity to occur in the future.
In spite of the startling evidence that the free-rein experiment would turn out badly, lets take it a step further and imagine, for argument’s sake, that the leader of this country were rendered almost completely powerless, even with his direct orders to appointed staff flat-out ignored. Since this is a hypothetical scenario, let’s also say that members of key government departments, who create and enforce regulations, would henceforth take their orders directly from corporations and banks. Or better yet, why not just have employees of the corporations come and actually do this job themselves? It would be much simpler.
Obviously, this scenario is ridiculous, and in no way resembles the democratic ideal we hold up so proudly, and violently, to the world (government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people…). Of course, if power brokers ever strayed this far, citizens would, as they have always done when leaders betray them, boldly rise up to reaffirm the will of the people through public displays of outrage. So why worry? North America is home to the world’s greatest democracies and we’re just fine... what could go wrong?
Thomas Jefferson knew a long time ago what could go wrong: “Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.”
How many times do we hear of ‘billions in executive bonuses’ and ‘record corporate profits’ in these times of debilitating government and personal debt, mortgage foreclosures and poverty rates? How is it that executive salaries and bonuses have skyrocketed while unemployment in the US is at levels not seen since the great depression?
How is it that, as the world economy hurtles at breakneck speed toward the entirely possible scenario of total and catastrophic financial collapse, any attempt to increase taxation by as little as 3.8% on the super-rich and corporations, who have enjoyed years of low rates (as low as zero), is met with rabid, vein popping outrage from the right-wing and the supposedly ‘populist’ tea party, while at the same time, savage attacks on workers’ unions, seniors’ benefits, social programs and more, are also well underway?
How is it that pension plans for 44 million Americans that were, only a decade ago, fully funded with a quarter trillion dollar surplus, are suddenly ‘under-funded’, while executives, drawing from the same programs, retire with massively increased packages in the tens of millions of dollars, and, at the same time, employee pensions are frozen or reduced? The answers to these questions become obvious once certain facts are brought into the light.
Let’s back up to post-World War II. After the great Depression, and with the Glass-Steagall Act safely in place, the US suffered no major economic crisis for over half a century and had developed into a full-fledged superpower. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US increased by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population grew by 122%. Workers rights to bargain collectively were secure, and tax rates on the wealthy were FAR higher than today.
These were, overall, good times for the US - its most prosperous period, without a doubt. One could argue that the old adage ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ applied to America’s situation. Unfortunately, a ‘fix’ was all that America’s bankers could think about.
So in 1981, Ronald Reagan, the long-time poster boy for right-wing ideology, appointed bank CEO Donald Regan (Merrill-Lynch) as treasury secretary, starting a 30-year period of radical deregulation and tax cuts for the rich … or as Reagan famously said, “We’re going to turn the bull loose.” (This philosophy was also know as trickle-down).
What happened? What happened was an unprecedented rampage of corruption resulting in billions in losses. The 1980’s Savings and Loan Crisis, which was the largest financial scandal in US history, up until that time, generated 10,000 criminal referrals and over 1000 felony convictions of financial executives. Time to wrap up this little party? No way... these boys were just getting started.
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In 1998, the banking giant Citicorp and financial conglomerate Travelers Group merged to form Citigroup, the largest financial services group in the world. Because it combined commercial banking with investment banking, its creation contravened the Glass-Steagall Act, and was a blatant violation of federal law, and Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said .... nothing.
It also broke a fundamental economic principle - that no single bank should be ‘too big to fail’. The reason for this principle is that if any bank’s failure were to bring a nation’s economy, or indeed the worldwide economy, to the brink of collapse, it knows it would be bailed out with unlimited public money. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle of economic destruction that will continue until either the banks are reined in, or the entire system eventually collapses.
If America was going to realize its mistake and re-think its policies, somebody would have to do something. Fortunately, an agency existed ensure stable financial practices - the CFTC (The Commodity Futures Trading Commission).
Brooksley Born, the chairperson of the CFTC, concerned primarily over what was seen as ‘dangerous and irresponsible activity’ in the trading of something known as ‘derivatives’, began an initiative to regulate these activities.
When Ms. Born announced the needed regulations, the reaction was immediate; thirteen of the nation’s top bankers descended on the office of the Deputy Secretary of the US Treasury, Larry Summers. It took one phone call to the CFTC by Mr. Summers, right there and then, and Brooksley Born’s regulation attempt was halted. This phone call was to be a turning point in world history.
Ms. Born, who’s job was to protect the US from unethical and dangerous financial activity, and having been brushed aside by Summers, Greenspan and other key figures, ‘resigned’ shortly after. It was quite clear who was in control of America.
Shorty thereafter, any chance at avoiding disaster was lost when congress placed a formal ban on any regulation on Derivatives, present or future. This new law, which also formally dissolved Glass-Steagall, was the ‘Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act’, and was written with the ‘assistance’ of financial industry representatives and passed through congress under intense pressure from the financial lobby. (It might be of interest to Canadians that in the years that followed, Stephen Harper and finance minister Jim Flaherty who are, at present, implementing a Canadian version of this same radical right-wing agenda, vigorously promoted derivatives and deregulation. Fortunately, then liberal finance minister Paul Martin knew better, and did the opposite, saving Canada from much of the carnage that would follow in 2008-2009. Once Stephen Harper became Prime Minister, he wasted no time taking full credit for Canada’s enviable position).
So with the would-be regulations, and their advocates, put firmly in their place, Wall Street’s party was now in full swing. In the forewarned orgy of greed and fraud that followed, lenders could (and therefore did) freely lend to almost anyone with a heartbeat, collect their fees, and incur zero liability... all thanks to derivatives. The number of mortgages signed each year from 2000 to 2003 nearly quadrupled. And sometimes, a heartbeat wasn’t even required to earn profits. Thanks also to derivatives, corporations like WalMart, Disney and others, could now take out life insurance on their employees without them even knowing, earning the company tens of thousands of dollars upon death. These are facts.
By 2007, Goldman Sachs, just one of many financial firms, was raking in billions, selling mortgage securities to its customers, including pension plans, known to be junk. Also at the party were ratings agencies like Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, who, for a healthy fee, would place a value on these investments to guide purchasers - raked in cash by the truckload by falsely rating these worthless products as high as AAA, the highest possible rating. When questioned about these ratings post-crash, executives nonchalantly brushed off any notion that their recommendations carried any weight at all, saying over and over that they were “merely opinions” and that “They do not speak to …. its suitability as an investment.” Now I’m not an investment guru, but I thought that was the entire point of their existence.
After profiting on the initial sale of these junk debts, Goldman Sachs, thanks again to the new unregulated derivatives market, were able to bet against the very debt they had sold - debt they of course, knew would fail. It was later revealed that banks were specifically ‘designing’ derivatives so that the more money their customers lost (people like you and me), the more their investment banks profited.
Now Goldman Sachs had profited twice on these junk debts. Perhaps they could find a way to profit a third time… it would be the ultimate high.
As Goldman Sachs had sold these toxic debts through AIG, they knew that AIG was itself at risk of collapse. In the ultimate act of greed, Goldman Sachs bet on the failure of AIG, and it paid off. By the end of 2008, AIG was collapsing with losses totaling over $99 billion.
By the time the crisis had reached its peak, a worldwide recession had been triggered. Tens of millions of people worldwide lost their homes, jobs and savings. Senior citizens’ retirement funds were decimated. The US national debt instantly doubled and 20% of national net worth, accumulated over 2 centuries, was gone. How much did you lose in your stocks? What about your parents? Your neighbors and friends?
And what was the punishment for what can only be described as the largest corporate crime in all of history?
Out of the $700 billion taxpayer funded bailout, both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were to pay out BONUSES to executives of nearly $7 billion and $6.5 billion respectively, and AIG over $1 billion in bonuses. Even some firms that had gone bankrupt still managed to give out bonuses ‘somehow’.
This crash was not a ‘mistake’ or a ‘market correction’ as it’s been so casually referred to by people in financial circles. These men knew exactly what they were doing and they knew what would happen. This is simply a new level of corruption on a scale the world has never seen before; a story so implausible, no one would believe it, had it not actually happened. But it did happen, and considering that certain key architects of this new paradigm were bank employees and CEO’s, it’s not hard to understand why.
Of the many men involved, none more than Henry (Hank) Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, illustrates the corruption more starkly. During his time at Goldman Sachs, Paulson was the primary figure in the creation, expansion and application of derivatives, which, of course, formed the basis of the current crisis. In a curious coincidence of timing, in the same year that derivatives activity was at peak levels (2006), Paulson left Goldman Sachs and became Secretary of the US Treasury, a position that paid a miniscule salary compared to what he had been earning at Goldman Sachs. You may recall seeing Henry Paulson on television, just days prior to the crash, telling the public that everything was fine and not to worry. After the crash, you may also recall him telling the public about how we are now dealing with problems that were “created years ago ”. What he didn’t say, of course, is that these problems were designed, overseen and executed by the hands of he and his Wall Street associates; and they all profited immensely.
With taxpayers and their $700 billion to the rescue, who would be the one person on the face of the earth you would NOT want to be responsible for handing out this free money to bankers like Goldman Sachs? Well, that would be Henry Paulson, executing his new government job with great enthusiasm.
So shockingly (but predictably), as Secretary of the US Treasury, Paulson was tasked with funneling billions in government bailout money to executives of bankrupt and collapsed firms. “A Wall Street insider who maintained close friendships with higher-ups of the bailout beneficiaries,” Paulson ensured that his former firm, Goldman Sachs, was the largest recipient of the public funds from the AIG bailout. And further, as part of the so-called bailout ‘negotiations’, Paulson also ensured that AIG would not be allowed to sue Goldman Sachs, and therefore himself, for fraud.
Further, if one were to write a single line that would characterize a case-study assault on democracy, it might be a line from Paulson’s proposal for the bailout plan. The new law would state (in regards to the position he himself held): “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” Perhaps give that a moment to sink in.
So as unspeakable acts of corporate corruption decimate millions of lives, it was with a profound distaste, a kind I have rarely experienced, that I listened to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of the richest men in America, referencing ‘the law’ and ‘responsibility’ in his eviction of Occupy Wall Street protesters from camping in a park.
But there were, of course, many others implicit in this financial debacle, including Robert Rubin, a 26-year veteran of Goldman Sachs and subsequently Citigroup, and former Secretary of the Treasury to December 2007. A key figure in the death of the Glass-Steagall Act and financial regulation, Rubin served temporarily as Chairman of Citigroup, and resigned from the company in 2009, after the crash. He received more than $126 million in cash and stock during his tenure at Citigroup.
Another key figure as mentioned earlier, was former Secretary of the US Treasury Larry Summers, a fiery opponent of financial industry regulation before the crisis, had this to say in an ABC interview in 2009, after the full extent of the crisis had become known: “There are a lot of terrible things that have happened in the last eighteen months, but what’s happened at A.I.G. ... the way it was not regulated, the way no one was watching ... is outrageous.”
Since the crisis, many people have asked why white-collar criminals aren’t being prosecuted. William Black, a former bank regulator explains: “It all starts with the regulators... because we have, of course, the wrecking crew, Bush’s wrecking crew, what Tom Frank called them, in charge, and they stopped making criminal referrals. Our agency, in the (1980’s) savings and loan crisis, made over 10,000 criminal referrals to the FBI. That same agency, in this (2008) crisis, made zero criminal referrals.”
“If you don’t get people pointing the way and pointing to the top of the organization, you don’t get effective prosecutions. So, in the peak of the (1980’s) savings and loan crisis, we had a thousand FBI agents. This (2008) crisis has losses 70 times larger than the savings and loan crisis. And the savings and loan crisis, when it happened, was considered the largest financial scandal in U.S. history. So we’re now 70 times worse. And as recently as 2007, we had 120 FBI agents - one-eighth as many FBI agents for a crisis 70 times larger.”
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But what is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the situation is that, in the aftermath of yet another unprecedented (and very much ongoing) financial calamity, and as the full depravity of a delusional economic policy is revealed, is the sheer resistance to abandon these destructive practices and make serious changes.
In 2009, with the financial crisis in full swing, just months after Barack Obama took office, the new president was about to get a reality check on his presidency, finding out, first hand, who really runs America. In an effort to rein in the banking sector and avoid future calamity, Obama ordered his Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, to draft a plan to break up CitiGroup (Geithner, another key player in the deregulation of the banking sector, had also played a supporting role with Henry Paulson in the bailout proceedings.) Three months later, Obama and Geithner met to go over the plan. Just one problem… there was no plan, and there would be no plan. Obama was furious, but to this day there is still no intention, let alone action on fixing ‘too big to fail.’
How could this be? The democratically elected ‘Leader of the free world’ had issued a direct order to a member of his inner circle, and the order was ignored. One would presume after such egregious insubordination, to the President of the United States no less, Geithner was probably charged or at least brought before a commission? Certainly though, he would be fired? So what happened to Tim Geithner? Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing, and he is still Secretary of the US Treasury as of this writing.
And what of truly meaningful changes needed to rehabilitate the banking sector; major changes such as the re-instatement of Glass-Steagall? In spite of much talk and bluster, well-intentioned attempts in this direction such as the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 have been willfully ignored and largely unimplemented. As each financial crisis causes more and more damage and the standard of living continues to fall, the very wealthy have made more and more money in an environment made increasingly accommodating for them, and BY them.
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But the financial sector is just one of many areas of the US government that suffers the same depth of corporate ‘influence’ and privatization. The same goes for environment, food and drug, energy, education, agriculture, foreign policy and more.
For those not familiar with Washington’s infamous ‘revolving door’, this is when high level corporate executives ‘leave’ their private sector jobs to take ‘advisory’ and policy making positions in government. They then manipulate the levers of power to ensure higher profits for their corporations through favorable legislation, regardless of the consequences to the environment, the health of individuals, or society as a whole. This process has been documented in detail, but generally kept very much on the down low.
There are several excellent documentaries that clearly (and most importantly, factually) illustrate the near total dismantling of the US democratic mechanism, and the consequences that society and future generations will face as a result of runaway corporate influence. These films include: ‘The world according to Monsanto’, ‘The Corporation’, ‘Food Inc’, and ‘Inside Job’: an absolutely stunning revelation of the lead up to, and aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008/2009.
Obviously it’s not possible to document the full scope of corporate dominance over government and public well-being in one article (this information would fill a library). But I would like to include at least a few typical examples, highlighting the absolute subversion of the US regulatory system as a whole. The following is from an article by Terra Mealey, discussing Monsanto’s genetically engineered Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) and the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA):
“Monsanto’s genetically engineered Bovine growth Hormone has been linked to breast cancer, colon cancer and prostate cancer. The Bovine growth hormone is given to dairy cows to artificially increase their milk production. This product, BGH, was approved by the FDA while still in its experimental stages. We must also note that (at the time of writing) BGH is not used in any other country besides the United States, in fact Monsanto went as far as to outlaw non BGH dairies from labeling their products non BGH. This leads us to the question, is the FDA controlling Monsanto or is Monsanto controlling the FDA?
After researching Monsanto, it is easy to see how they wield so much power, former employees are literally scattered throughout the government and some have even become leaders within the FDA. For example, Margaret Miller was a former supervisor for Monsanto, and was actively involved in the BGH program. In fact, she was the very person who created the report that was sent to the FDA seeking approval to use BGH in the milk industry. Soon after she finished the report, she left her job at Monsanto and went to work for the FDA as the new Deputy Director of Human Food Safety… her first assignment with the FDA was to approve her own report, effectively poisoning our milk supply.
Michael Taylor was the legal advisor to the FDA who fought for the labeling guidelines that kept the non BGH dairy farmers from labeling their products BGH free. By passing this unconstitutional law, the FDA has effectively stopped consumers from making an educated choice in regards to their food. After shilling for Monsanto (in the FDA), he was given as job as head of the Monsanto division in Washington DC. “
In later years, 3 Canadian government scientists were suspended by Health Canada shortly after raising serious health related concerns about BGH and the approval process. They also testified that they were being pressured by elements of their departments to approve the product, but they refused. One of these scientists, Dr. Margaret Hayden, testified that her research had been stolen from a locked file cabinet, and that she had been present at a meeting where Montsanto had offered Health Canada officials one million dollars for approval of the drug (Monsanto, when pressed by CBC news, tried to say that they offer was misinterpreted as ‘research money’). Only when the Canadian public became aware of the scandal, did the government decide not to approve BGH in Canadian milk.
So as the list of toxic (but highly profitable) products in our food, air, soil, ground water and homes grows with incessant pressure from corporations, and with regulatory bodies thoroughly prostituted to them, we shouldn’t be surprised that today a stunning 1 out 2 American males will now develop cancer in their lifetime. In what should be a serious wake-up call, the increased rates of diagnoses in non-smoking cancers, most notably malignant melanoma (156%), liver (104%), non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (87%), thyroid (71%) and overall childhood cancers (26%) speak for themselves.
In the latest example of how out of control things have become, the US Congress recently ‘agreed’, after $5.6 million dollars in lobbying by food companies, including the frozen food manufacturers, the salt industry and potato growers, that some changes be made to an existing Obama administration proposal that sought to make children’s lunches healthier. The Obama proposal required that the amount of French fries be reduced, and the amount of vegetables increased. Although this was a direct threat to corporate profits of frozen food giants, even a hardened cynic could not have predicted the absurdity that would follow. In what can only be described as proof that life is stranger than fiction, Congress declared that, with two tablespoons of sugary tomato sauce sauce on it, frozen pizza is legally a ‘vegetable’.
The Huffington Post reported: “If there were any lingering doubts as to whom our elected representatives really work for, they were put to rest Tuesday when Congress announced that frozen pizza was a vegetable. The United States Congress voted to rebuke new USDA (Department of Agriculture) guidelines for school lunches that would have increased the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables in school cafeterias and instead declared that the tomato paste on frozen pizza qualified as a vegetable. For this we can thank large food companies - in this case ConAgra and Schwan - which pressured Congress to comply with their financial interests.” (In a failed 1981 bid, conservatives proposed classifying ketchup and pickle relish as vegetables to save money on school lunch programs).
What’s key here is not that food companies would seek this (that’s a given), but how politicians, using underhanded tactics, hijacked the regulatory process of a democratically elected government to do a corporation’s bidding, at the expense of children’s health. Unfortunately, these examples are not the exception in America and beyond, but very much the norm.
Corporations all over the world have, time and time again, proven that after all the smiles have been smiled, after all the ‘community support’ has been handed out, and after the shareholders meetings are done ... it’s profit that is inevitably the singular driving factor. From toxic lakes ablaze, to tobacco executives denying cigarettes are addictive, to melamine in baby formula - it’s about market share. It’s about stock value. It’s about numbers - period.
Of course modern societies need corporations and financial institutions, but what people sometimes forget is that they are not our friends. These institutions exist ONLY to make money, and profiteers have proven repeatedly over centuries that given the choice between your well-being vs. their profits - there’s simply no contest. And we absolutely should expect nothing different of them, because after all, money is said to be the ‘root of all evil’, and with good reason. Many have argued that the relationship between finance and social well-being must be viewed as a symbiotic partnership, a balance, where abuse of one or the other leads to eventual decline. The intoxicating and harmful effects of an imbalance in the concentration of money and power are all too well known to human history, and therefore what should be most critical to us in the long run; our absolute number one priority - is to safeguard the laws, wisdom and principles that many centuries of compounded experience have yielded; laws and principles that are now under vicious attack all across North America.
When the power of special interest groups reaches a point where they are able to form government policy to suit their own needs, regardless of who is in power, it is no longer a democracy. When business, now firmly in control of government, devises and perfects the means to profit from the collapse of the middle class, and indeed the collapse of democracy itself, decline has not only begun, but is well under way.
For thousands of years, this has been the struggle between the ‘99%’ and the ‘1%’ - a seemingly never-ending cycle of tyranny, revolution and complacency... with tyranny the inevitable and natural product of this complacency. Only through this messy, painful and terribly bloody process could evolve a modern democracy - and only through an equally terrible process will it step backward, as it is about to very soon, if present day conditions continue. The tragedy of it is that any novice historian can tell you in detail how all the great civilizations fell, yet these lessons are yet again going unlearned as so many North Americans, ‘fat and happy,’ remain almost entirely oblivious to the massive corruption that has overtaken them, or even worse, turn on the very people that dare to raise their voices against it.
As previously mentioned, between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But after Reagan ‘turned the bull loose’ from 1979 to 2009 giving control and vastly increased wealth to the very rich, productivity slowed dramatically to rise only by 80%, and the income of the bottom fifth did not improve at all. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by an astounding 270%.
Conservatives complain endlessly about how Liberals are trying ‘re-distribute wealth.’ The fact is, wealth has already been massively re-distributed, and what so many people are screaming for is simply to shift the balance back to where it was. Given the reality of our present condition, we would all be wise to consider US Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis advice: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Just as the blues legend Robert Johnston is said to have sold his soul to the devil at a darkened crossroads for instant musical gratification, is it inevitable that human society is inherently incapable of resisting the intoxicating short-term ‘increased energy’ buzz that is nearly always at the expense of sustainable growth? Will we proceed into the future with a sober eye toward future generations, or will we submit to the never silent voices that demand instantaneous maximum growth at any cost?
As we arrive at our own crossroads, it would be wise for us all to take a good look at our situation with a courageous eye. Would “lying, stealing, denial and increasingly bizarre behavior” adequately describe the actions of corporate leaders and their government enablers? And as crisis after crisis results in more and more carnage and we all slide toward an economic and environmental cliff, do the words “permanent damage, and without intervention; death” sound any alarm bells?
The good news is that this much-needed intervention has taken it’s first breaths on a global level. Our challenge as citizens; participants in a global economy, is to invest in our democracies rather than remain timid, or worse; willfully blind. History is showing us once again that power requires control, and at the end of every seemingly inevitable cycle of abuse of power; control has always been taken back by the people.
Keeping in mind Edmund Burke’s advice that “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” what role will you play in the outcome of this struggle? In the timeless words of Abraham Lincoln; “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.”
