The 'three-fifth clause' in the Constitution

1783-1799: The Miracle of Democracy

1783-1865: UNITED STATES. The U.S. Constitution is approved. Amongst other things, this fabulous instrument of freedom carries a provision preventing Congress from banning the importation of slaves. But, most significantly, the authors of the Constitution were very careful to ensure that it validated slavery by means of a so-called "positive" law embedded in Article 4, Section 2: "No person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up; on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due." In plain English, there was no escape for slaves in the land of the free and the U.S. Constitution made damned sure of it.

In a magical inversion of reality, U.S. histories repeatedly refer to assemblies, governors and presidents as being elected by “popular” vote. In truth, however, in the United States, popular votes are strictly verboten. Blacks in the new “democracy” are items of property who cannot vote or hold office. Indentured whites, are simply slaves of another name and another color and who can not vote or hold office. Indians, upon whose stolen land the new nation stands, and who were described in the racist Declaration of Independence as “merciless Indian savages”, cannot vote or hold office. In most states in this brave new homeland of “religious freedom”, Catholics and Jews cannot vote or hold office. Women, regardless of race, creed, color or religion, are chattels who cannot vote or hold office. White men, even those most sacred of all God's creatures; white, Protestant, non-indentured men, cannot vote or hold office unless they meet a further qualification for membership in the ruling class; they must be very, very rich.
Although it varied from state to state, the property qualification which opened the doors to participation in the new demockracy was as much as $4000, an astronomical sum in the eighteenth century, equal to millions of dollars today.
The right to vote and hold office and all political and economic power in the new demockracy was, of course, held by a tiny handful of what would later come to be known as fascists, a small fraction of one percent of the population, the ultra-wealthy, white, male, Protestant, slave-owning, land speculating, terrorist, thoroughly unscrupulous elite; a self-appointed aristocracy of hypocrisy which looked down in open contempt upon most of their fellow human beings including ordinary Americans of all races.

Depend upon it, sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation, as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters. There will be no end of it. New claims will arise. Women will demand a vote. Lads from twelve to twenty one will think their rights not enough attended to, and every man, who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks, to one common level. John Adams.
Imagine that, equality in the land of the free! Can't be havin' none of that.
Those who refused to swear allegiance to the newly installed dictatorship of the ultra-wealthy were denied virtually all civil liberties, were jailed, murdered or forced into exile and their property stolen.
The “three-fifths” clause of the Constitution counted each slave owned as three-fifths of a person for the sake of apportionment of electoral districts although the slaves themselves were not, of course, allowed to vote. The effect was to give slave-owners a hugely disproportionate share of political power amongst the tiny minority of Americans who had any at all. The slave-owners had about a third more seats in Congress and a third more electoral votes than they would otherwise have had.
The desire to keep control of the country in the hands of the slave-owners also stood behind the creation of the Electoral College. Votes in the Electoral College, which “elects” the president, neatly sidestepping direct election, were apportioned using the same three-fifths rule. Thanks to the three-fifths clause, slave-owners dominated the government of the United States until 1865. For most of the period, slave-owners occupied the presidency, the chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Speaker’s chair. During the same period, eighteen of thirty one justices of the Supreme Court, that great protector of human rights and dignity, were slave-owners.
The much propagandized first president, George Washington, was an elitist snob who considered ordinary Americans no better than cattle. He called the white citizens of the new country over which he lorded “the grazing multitude”. Washington was a slave owner and a land speculator.
The great freedom lover owned about two hundred and fifty slaves, dressed them in rags, auctioned off their children for yet more cash, of which he could never, apparently, acquire enough, and had them viciously whipped for “disobedience”. Among Washington’s many business "enterprises" was the construction of a canal through the Great Dismal Swamp in the Carolinas. The canal was hand-dug by slaves through steaming, mosquito-infested swamp. The slaves were worked to death in appalling conditions so that Washington, already the wealthiest man in the United States, could grow even richer.
Aside from his desire to maintain slavery, Washington, as a leading land speculator, was particularly anxious to gain control of the government because the British had signed a treaty with the Cherokee Nation and other Indian nations which prevented him stealing their ancestral land for profit. As President, Washington, in his fervor to steal the maximum possible amount of Indian land, was also a mass murderer of considerable accomplishment; the country's leading early practitioner of the ethnic cleansing of native Americans. According to Washington, native Americans were "wolves and beasts" who deserved nothing from the whites but "total ruin."
The second president, John Adams, had no higher opinion of ordinary white Americans than Washington. They were, he said, the “common herd” and had “no idea of learning, eloquence and genius” and were “locked within vulgar, rustic imaginations”.
1780: UNITED STATES. Captain Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, fought at Saratoga, Bunker Hill and Lexington and was wounded in action. A poor farmer, he, like thousands of others, was not paid by the ruling class which had forced colonists by threat and violence into the Revolutionary armies. He returned to his hometown of Pelham, Massachusetts, where he, like many others, was promptly imprisoned for unpaid taxes by the new regime.
Although he had had to fight for “democracy” and was assessed taxes he could not afford to pay, Shays was not permitted to vote or hold office in new demockracy. To Shays and the vast majority of people in the new United States, the slave-owners’ propaganda slogan, “no taxation without representation” was simply a sick joke of the wealthy hypocrites who now completely controlled the country.
Revolutionary “hero” Sam Adams, staunch hypocrite and liar, safely installed as one of the ruling class sitting in the Massachusetts State Council, achieved new but unsurprising heights of hypocrisy when he proposed to hang Shays and anyone else resorting to civil disobedience in an attempt to bring genuine democracy and liberty or even something as simple as "no taxation without representation" to the United States.
The Massachusetts Riot Act of 1786 ordered the killing of any rebellious farmer and instituted a property seizure law. Rebellious farmers were to "forfeit all their lands, goods and chattels to the Commonwealth." Massachussetts also suspended habeas corpus meaning that citizens could be imprisoned indefinitely by the ruling junta without charge or trial. Freedom of speech in Massachussetts was banned if it was "to the prejudice of the government." The chief sponsor of all this fascist oppression? None other than the great freedom fighter Sam Adams. Vermont went down the same road, enacting The Riot Act which authorized county sheriffs to shoot rebellious farmers on sight
Petitions were made to the regime for an honest monetary system, lower taxes and a fair judicial system. The petitions were ignored and, in desperation, groups of farmers occupied the courthouses in Northampton, Worcester, Concord, Taunton and Great Barrington, Massachusetts in an attempt to stop the ongoing jailing of those who could not afford to pay the taxes assessed by the regime.
The Supreme Judicial Court, sitting in Springfield, indicted eleven leaders of the uprising for “sedition”. Upon his release from jail, Shays lead a ragtag army of fifteen hundred ex-soldiers, wearing the uniform of the Revolutionary army which had betrayed them, to occupy the Courthouse. Later, Shays lead two thousand farmers in an assault on the Federal Arsenal in Springfield.
Shays’ Rebellion, the real American revolution for liberty and equality (for white people at least), for no taxation without representation and for some semblance of democracy, was ruthlessly crushed by overwhelming military force, leaving the United States firmly in the hands of the slave-owning ruling class. Shays and thirteen others were condemned to death for “treason” against the elitist dictatorship. Ultimately, twelve of the fourteen were pardoned by the newly-installed governor of Massachusetts. Two were executed. Shays, one of the few true heroes of the era, died in poverty.
1782: UNITED STATES. A raiding party of one hundred and fifty Pennsylvania militiamen under Lieutenant Colonel David Williamson rounds up a group of Munsee Indians near Gnadenhutten, Ohio. Even though the Indians are unarmed non-combatants who have converted to Christianity, they are falsely accused of taking part in raids into Pennsylvania. In true democratic fashion, the militiamen vote to slaughter the Indians anyway and inform the Munsee of their fate.
The Munsees spend the night praying and singing hymns. The following morning, they are slaughtered as they kneel, praying, their skulls crushed with mallets. Twenty eight men, twenty nine women and thirty nine children are murdered and then scalped by the forces of freedom. The corpses are then heaped into nearby Christian mission buildings and the entire town burned to the ground. Other towns nearby are burned as well. Two Munsee boys, one of whom had been scalped, survived to tell of the massacre. Slave-owner and land speculator General George Washington's reaction to the massacre was not to punish the murderers but to order that no American soldier allow himself to be taken alive by Indians for fear of retribution for the massacre.
1783-present: UNITED STATES. The new regime immediately allows the land speculators who had been instrumental in the planning and execution of the Revolution to seize Indian land, abrogating treaties and carrying out a relentless program of genocide and ethnic cleansing against native Americans which will last for more than a century. Millions of American Indians are killed outright or die as a result of deliberately-induced disease and starvation. Virtually all Indian land, consisting of the vast majority of the land west of the Mississippi River, is stolen. Of course, this will all be presented to Americans of later generations as valiant pioneers taming the wilderness.

A British visitor to America, 1784
1789-1797: UNITED STATES. Slave-owner, land speculator, ethnic cleanser and mass murder cover-up-artist George Washington becomes the first President of the United States, an office to which he was “elected”, unanimously, by his fellow land speculators and slave-owners in the Electoral College, dispensing with even the merest pretence of democracy.
A great proponent of liberty, Washington takes eight of his slaves to the executive mansion in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania had outlawed slavery but Washington, a straight shootin' guy as we all know, got around the law by declaring that he was a Virginia resident only temporarily staying in what was then the capitol.

Once he gets his slaves settled in, Washington gets down to work, spending eighty percent of the budget of the new nation on ethnic cleansing; exterminating native Americans and stealing their land, something very dear to his own heart and bank account.
1791-1794: UNITED STATES. The new U.S. government, with an unelected president and voting for other offices restricted to wealthy, white, Protestant males, continues to explore the limits of hypocrisy by broadening its policy of taxation without representation. The federal government imposes a new tax on distilled spirits. Naturally, the rate is fifty percent higher on small farms than on large commercial producers. Because they often lacked any way of getting their grain to market, distilling liquor, thereby making a compact, easily transported commodity, was, for many small farmers, the only way of making any money at all from their crop.
Bitterly opposing such taxation without representation, farmers harass tax collectors and stage sometimes violent protests in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia in the so-called Whiskey Rebellion. As in the case of Shay's Rebellion, the fine new "democratic" government of the United States uses overwhelming violence to suppress dissent by American citizens and to enforce the policy of taxation without representation. Slave-owner and ethnic cleanser cum unelected President George Washington invokes martial law and assembles a force of 13,000 troops, about the same size as the entire American army in the Revolutionary War. He personally leads the troops against the citizens of the United States in order to enforce obedience to his regime's dictates and its policy of taxation without representation.
Ultimately, twenty residents of the new demockracy are arrested and imprisoned. One dies in captivity. Two are convicted of treason and sentenced to death by hanging.
1793: UNITED STATES. Congress passes the Fugitive Slave Act which mandates the return of escaped slaves to their "owners" from anywhere in the U.S. Blacks fleeing slavery no longer just have to get to a state which has abandoned slavery but have to escape completely from the "land of the free” to British territory in Canada or elsewhere in order to find freedom.
1798: DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. U.S. Marines invade the Dominican Republic and seize a French vessel in the city of Puerto Plata.
1798: UNITED STATES. Just seven years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment to the Constitution goes right down the toilet when the Sedition Act of 1798 makes it a crime to, gasp, criticize the government. Can't be havin' none of that in the world's greatest demockracy, can we now bubba?
There were numerous indictments, prosecutions and convictions under the act, the best known of which was the prison sentence given to Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont. Taking the first Amendment a bit too literally for the tastes of the ruling class, Lyon had a few harsh words for President John Adams saying that Adams is "swallowed up in a coNewer Post
1620: Lie Number One, The Pilgrims
1763-1783: Lie Number Two, The American Revolution
1783-1799: Lie Number Three, The Miracle of Democracy
1800-1849: Thirty Five Invasions And A Genocide
1850-1859: Invasions, Racism, Slavery and Ethnic Cleansing
1860-1864: The Civil War, But First, Let's Kill Some Indians And Get Rid of the Jews
1865-1869: The Final Solution To The Indian Problem And The Invasions Keep On Coming
1870-1884: More Invasions, More Racism, More Ethnic Cleansing. Happy 100th Birthday America.
1885-1894: The U.S. Steals Hawaii, Four Thousand Lynchings, Shooting Workers in the Streets and Planning For a Splendid Little War
1895-1899: The Spanish-American War, A Sordid Little War
1900-1904: The Philippines, A Full Dress Rehearsal For Iraq
1905-1909: Treacherous Muslims and Ze Quest For Ze Master Race
1910-1912: Invasions, Apartheid, Lynchings, Censorship And The Quest For The Master Race But No Conspiracies
1913-1914: Destroying Democracy in Mexico and the Federal Reserve Scam
1915-1916: Dangerous Singers, Lynching Jews and Blacks Speaking French!
1917-1918: Now The Great War's A Good Thing, Fascism In America, SettingThe Stage For Old Adolf Plus The Miracle Of Free Speech
1919-1920: A Summer Of Blood, Lynching Will Brown And J. Edna Hoover Takes The Stage
1921-1922: Setting Up The Hitler Project, Giving Away The Nation's Oil, Mass Murdering Black Americans And Poisoning All Americans
1923-1924: Destroying Rosewood, Racial Purity In Virginia And Prescott Bush And The Boys Get Old Adolf Started
1925-1926: Legislated Ignorance, Dupont's Supermen, Hoover In Drag And Murdering Nicaraguans
1927-1928: Sterilizing Americans, Slaughtering Miners, Making Your Boyfriend FBI Assistant Director, Invading China And Dive Bombing Nicaraguans
1929-1930: The Crash of '29--A Federal Reserve Production, Racist Pseudoscience, Murdering Workers (Again) And The Dulles Brothers Help Old Adolf
1931-1932: Admiring Mussolini, The Depression Ain't So Bad For Some, Murdering U.S. Veterans And Killing Puerto Ricans And Black People For Science
1933-1934: The Dust Bowl, Gangsters In Pinstripe Suits, Pimping For Hitler, The Merchants of Death And An All-American Coup
1935-1936: Arming The Nazis, Gangsters For Capitalism, Hanging Out With Hitler, Blackmailing Hoover And Truth, Justice Or The American Way
1937-1938: Lebensborn U.S.A., Murdering Workers (Again), Murdering Puerto Ricans (Again), Arming Adolf (Again) And Outlawing The Killer Weed
1939-1940: War's Just Good Business, Shortselling Czech Stock, Torturing Veterans' Kids, Crushing Dissent And The Hitler Project Boys Hedge Their Bets
1941-1942: Lobotomizing Rosemary, Shock And Awe, Playing Both Sides Of The War And Concentration Camps In The Land Of The Free
1943-1944: GM Builds Jet Engines For The Nazis, Apartheid In The Workplace, Beating Up Hispanics And The Hitler Project, Plan B
1945: At Nuremberg, Kissinger Joins The Boys, Experiment In Hiroshima, Installing Fascists And It's Not A War Crime When We Do It

You'll be amazed how often the same family names keep popping up. Or maybe not.

This is what is called, in the history biz, a revisionist history. American history, at least as far as the general public knows it, is in desperate need of revision, bringing what is taught and what is said about America's past more in line with the truth.
Making the World Safe For Hypocrisy is a chronology of the largely suppressed history of the United States. It is the history that good upstanding Americans are not supposed to know.
Almost everything you read here is based on publicly available information and most historians know all about it. And yet they remain strangely silent, allowing the fantasyland, propagandized version of American history and the fatuous pseudo-patriotic nonsense spewed by politicians and the mass media to stand unchallenged.

A nation
which does not know
what it was yesterday,
does not know
what it is today.

Woodrow Wilson

He who controls the present,
controls the past.
He who controls the past,
controls the future.

George Orwell

The essence of propaganda
consists of winning people
over to an idea
so sincerely, so vitally,
that in the end
they succumb to it utterly
and can never escape from it.

Joseph Goebbels

America has been something
of a divided personality,
tragically divided
against herself.
On the one hand
we have proudly professed
the great principles
of democracy,
but on the other hand
we have sadly practiced
the very opposite
of these principles.

Martin Luther King

None are more
hopelessly enslaved
than those
who falsely believe
that they are free.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

ANTI-AMERICAN?

Whenever anyone dares to point out the painfully obvious fact that the U.S. and its leaders have for two hundred years consistently acted in a fashion diametrically opposed to the values which America claims to represent, that person is instantly accused of being anti-American.

Do you consider yourself anti-american?
If believing in free speech and real democracy is anti-American, If believing that a government should not lie endlessly is anti-American, then I guess I am. If believing that a government should not spy on its own citizens is anti-American, then I guess I am. If believing that a government should not kidnap, torture and murder is anti-American, then I guess I am. If believing that a government shouldn't slaughter millions of innocent people simply to further enrich the same old handful of psychopathic bastards and their offspring is anti-American, then I guess I am.


RESOURCES ON THE WEB

911 Truth: A very good place to begin thinking about the Bush regime's unlikely conspiracy theory of 9-11.
AdBusters: A spunky Canadian anti-consumerist magazine with a lot of interesting news and comment you won't find in the mainstream media.
Alex Jones' Prison Planet: Lots of coverage of events past and present.
Amnesty International.
Common Dreams: The news CNN and Fox don't want you to know.
Conspiracy Planet: Amazing how often the simple truth is labelled a "conspiracy theory".
CorpWatch: The dark underside of corporate America.
Exulanten: An exhaustively researched look at how anti-German hatred was manufactured by the CPI during World War One.
Global Research: Excellent and detailed background and commentary on the American Empire.
Indy Media: An excellent resource of the news the mainstream media studiously avoid.
John Pilger is an intrepid Australian journalist. Read his stuff.
KryssTal, The Acts of the Democracies: An appalling record of genocide and war crimes carried out by the "democracies".
Mostly Water: A slightly differenent compendium of news and comment.
National Security Archive at George Washington University: A repository of declassified U.S. government documents. Imagine what they are still hiding from us.
Project Censored: Decades of documented censorship and suppression of truth in the American corporate mass media.
Robert Fisk: One of the most intrepid journalists in the world. What you're not supposed to know about Israel, Iraq and much more.
The Memory Hole: A treasure trove of official documents.
Third World Traveler: A huge resource on what the U.S. really does in the developing world.
Without Sanctuary: A heartbreaking collection of photogaphs of lynchings. Real U.S. history.
World Socialist Website: Never mind socialism, more truth than you'll ever find in the corporate mass media.

NEEDLES OF TRUTH IN THE HAYSTACK OF LIES

1984, George Orwell: Old George was bang on with the techniques used by the rulers. "America" couldn't exist without doublethink.
A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn: More history you're not supposed to know.
American Holocaust, David Stannard: The genocide of the American Indians.
Body of Secrets, James Bamford: The National Security Agency spies on all Americans all the time.
Deadly Deceits, Ralph McGehee: A insider's look at one of the world's leading terrorist organizations, the CIA.
Freeing The World To Death, William Blum: Essays on the American Empire.
Full Spectrum Dominance, Rahul Mahajan: The U.S. in Iraq and beyond.
Hidden Agenda, Ramsey Clark et al: The destuction of Yugoslavia by the U.S. and NATO.
House of Bush, House of Saud, Craig Unger: The Bushes have had their snouts up the Saudi pursehole for half a century.
IBM and the Holocaust, Edwin Black: the Nazis and America's most powerful corporations in cahoots.
Imperial Brain Trust, Laurence Shoup and William Minter: The Rockefellers' Council on Foreign Relations.
Killing Hope, William Blum: A saddening record of America's use of overwhelming violence to crush democracy and hope around the world.
Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen: American children are taught the lies from day one.
Propaganda, Edward Bernays: The textbook of manipulation of the public by Woodrow Wilson's propaganda maven.
Rogue State, William Blum: All other rogue states pale into insignificance when compared with the U.S.
Terrorizing the Neighbourhood, Noam Chomsky: What America really does to its neighbors.

The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Anthony Summers: America's leading law enforcment officer was a lifelong crook. Quelle surprise.
The Splendid Blond Beast, Christopher Simpson: Nazi war criminals rescued by the U.S. and hired by the U.S. government and military.
Warriors of Disinformation, Alvin Snyder. On disinformation by someone who should know, the former director of the U.S. Information Agency.
Western State Terrorism, Alexander George Editor: The title says it all.