Welcome to the 2nd episode of my series. The title today is “The Foundation for Today or How We Got Here – The Rise and Fall of the Federal Government”
Everything in America is based on money. People can argue all they want, the reality is, those who have the most money have the most power. Fair? No, that’s just the way it is. The struggle to control the economy has always been a key part of the American story. What I’m going to share with you in this video might upset some people, and that’s ok. History isn’t for us to feel all warm and fuzzy about, history is what happened. You CANNOT put a 2025 moral judgement on things that happened in the past. You’re not going to be able to go back in time and change diddly-squat about those events. The only thing we can do is hopefully learn from it and if it upsets you, figure out why you’re upset.
Everything we are seeing today can be traced in one way or another to the America that came into existence after the civil war. Actually, it started even before the civil war and maybe I’ll talk about that in another video, but for today and to conserve time, I want to go back to just after the civil war. Why? Well, this is a subject that makes some people really cranky because if you went to school in most of America you were given a rather slanted look at history. Especially the civil war and what took place afterwards. We all know, well I hope that everyone knows, the civil war ended in 1865 and from 1866 until 1877, there was something called Reconstruction.
Reconstruction was something that was supposed to heal the wounds left by the civil war. Instead, it became much like almost everything Congress comes up with a totally failed program, My momma used to say the road to hell is paved with good intentions and reconstruction started out with good intentions. The biggest problem was that the rich people in the south, who had spent generations using slaves as cheap labor, weren’t in the mood to let them go. In fact, they decided that even though the south had actually lost the war, that the way of life they had before was still the best way to go. They wanted cheap labor and to keep the poor people in their place.
Before the civil war this was easy, the slaves were kept as property and the poor whites were just ignored. That all changed after the civil war and the rich and powerful were scared that they might actually have to pay fair wages for labor. What better way to maintain what they had then to make sure poor whites began to think of former slaves as people to be feared and people who were threatening their livelihoods.
Kind of like what some in Washington and other places say about immigrants. In some respects what’s taking place in Washington is very much like what happened back then the rich decided to make certain that they maintained their economic power.
It’s all about economic control
