America has been a Capitalist Nation almost from its inception and the reasoning is very clear; during the 18th and 19th Centuries the world was one of class distinction; in England the King and Queen ruled and the World’s largest armies fought over land. In North America the French and Indian War was won by Britain and they also gained control of India; while in Russia the Tsarina Catherine the Great ruled, stealing as much land as she could. In 1776 the Declaration of Independence was adopted and economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, which proposed a system of natural liberty in trade and commerce, the cornerstone of Capitalism. The State of Vermont prohibited slavery in 1777 but it remained constant throughout the other colonies and the Civil War was fought over this right in 1861-65.

Capitalism was at it height in America when human beings had the right to own other human beings and the owners were the highest bidders on the auction block, as the slave ships came in to port. Laws were eventually passed outlawing the importation of slaves, although not slavery itself, and this is how a Capitalist America dealt with that problem: of the slavers brought into Key West, the Wildfire, William, and Bogota were seized under the acts of 1794 and 1800, and condemned by Judge William Marvin. They were sold at public auction, and the proceeds were split between the US Treasury and the crews of the Navy cruisers who captured them. The Captains were jailed at Key West, but allowed bail – the seamen for $450, and the Captains, $1,000. Eventually charges were brought against Phillip Stanhope, and the crew of the Wildfire, and Washington Symmes (alias William Weston), Master of the William. They were initially indicted under the act of 1820, but eventually tried under the Acts of 1800 and 1818. The Grand jury found “no true bill” against Stanhope and crew, and a verdict of “not guilty” against Symmes and, despite being caught red-handed, they were freed.

I am against Capitalism; I have lived under it my entire life and I am just totally against it and here is why: Capitalism, as I see it, is a system that very simply declares that a person in a strong position, when presented with competition, takes advantage of his strong position and gets rid of the competition by buying him out or destroying him, in any way that will most benefit him. Today, this is done almost exclusively by lawyers representing huge corporate employers, where the controlling forces always arrange things to benefit their companies and they always make provisions for certain things to be deemed as criminal acts and making sure that the largest number of these acts are always property crimes; that is crimes against poverty. The ruling class has always, throughout history, come together and made laws as to what would and would not constitute a crime and, of course, the ruling class, are also those that own the most property and commodities.

In England, where America’s common laws originated, down to 200 years ago there were about that many, 200, crimes punishable by death and hungry human beings who were caught stealing food could be (and many were) simply and stoically hanged. Today, in England, there is no death penalty but we, in America, have had the death penalty for hundreds of years because it derives from Mosaic Law—“An eye for an eye.” Today, we only have capital punishment for certain crimes, in 38 of the 50 States, and we make sure we treat any prisoner who has been condemned to death very well indeed, we make sure he is warm and comfortably encased in an 8-foot by10 cell, where we provide him with a doctor and feed him better and better food as his date with the executioner approaches; we want to make sure he is in good health when we strap him into the electric chair and fry his brains or stick a needle with enough Potassium Chloride in it to kill him within 5-30 minutes. The greatest majority of these “murderers” have been convicted of a property crime; that is holding up a convenience store and shooting a clerk or a policeman or intruder into the crime or by being an accomplice to that murder, as a getaway driver or helping in some other way. I am not condoning these shootings; I am simply stating facts.

We, in America, as the World over, have built up our Armies and Navies and Marines because the reign of force and violence has spread the World over forever and we are as afraid of others’ threats as they are of ours. In the business and industrial world where the reign of force and violence means competition it is responsible for the greed and selfishness that contribute to the fortunes of the rich and the poverty of the poor.

The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, and later the 1956 Bank Holding Company Act, mandated the separation of banks, insurance companies and securities firms but when Ronald Reagan came to power, in 1981, he pushed for total deregulation of every industry imaginable and even after taxpayers had to rescue deregulated S&Ls, with a $200 billion bailout in the late 1980s, the push to loosen regulation paused only briefly and in fact strengthened when an “avowed” Democrat, Bill Clinton, in 1999, signed the Financial Services Modernization Act, which tore down Glass-Steagall’s reforms by removing the walls separating banks, securities firms and insurers; creating a system whereby huge banks and corporations, like AIG, B.O.A., Citi-Bank, etc., all came to expect privatized profits and socialized losses and they have gotten them and will continue to get them as long as they in effect “run” this country and unless Barak Obama makes good on his campaign promises, and brings the working classes, the poor and middle classes of America, the decent wages and health care that he ran on, we are headed for trouble, as the current policies devalue the dollar, by the hyperinflationary politics of the Federal Reserve, to such an extent that nothing short of an implosion of Capitalism or a Revolution will soon take place.