Another Waite-y Proposition: Cultural Conquest and the Solidifying Role of Rule of Law
by Winsip Custer CPW News Service.
He's been retired from his position as head of the Society of Transparency in History and Myth for ten years now, but the ninety-year-old Polish immigrant, Jonah K. Susej, has long held that sunlight is a powerful disinfectant.
"So how did we get where we are?" I asked him in discussing private property and the rule of law.
"The Dark Ages were introduced by the rejection of Roman law. The Pax Romana, the Roman peace that their law supported was rejected by the conquered because of the brutality used to establish it and partially because the Huns were essentially Viking warriors who loved to kill things and conquer places. What goes around, comes around. Americans love and lament their empire which rests on the twin tenets of private ownership and rule of law and that makes for easy transfer of private property while creating a litigious environment in which everyone from the architect to the zither-maker is worried they'll be sued," he said.
"With its roots in Roman and English Common Law, US law partly left English Common Law behind in England. To settle the New World, the younger sons and brothers of England's Lords needed some assurances that they would be afforded their own land in America. The fight for land was on. Thomas Jefferson wrote the laws of first-born favoritism, called "primogeniture", out of the American laws. No President pushed the American borders as did Jefferson. What cannot be written out of any code of laws is the motives that puts the law into play either to use the law in favor of new acquisitions or to protect one against loss of those acquisitions once the transfer is made by force. We have all heard that possession is 2/3rd's of the Law. It was with this in mind that the Christian Apostle Paul wrote the words "the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life," with the 'letter' being applied to the 'letter of the law'. Paul knew from living under the heel of the Roman boot and in the talon of the Roman eagle, just how things worked," said Susej as he took a Mearsham pipe from a leather case, packed it with Borkum Riff tobacco, lit it and puffed.
"On March 3, 1853 Congress earmarked $150,000 for a route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific to be laid out. It appointed Jefferson Davis, future President of the Confederacy to complete it. That would have given the South the inside track on a Southern continental rail route across the American continent with an Eastern terminus in the Southern states, perhaps at Savannah or Charleston. Not good for the Northern industrialists like Alexander Brown whose Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was pushing West from Baltimore and Alexander Brown was the progenitor of the Brown Brothers whose English relatives were pushing an English rail road from Manchester to the Western English seaport of Liverpool where the powerful American Russell Trust had its shipping headquarters in England and from which they made fortunes in shipping during the American Revolution and American Civil War. In 1833 their family members were founders of the powerful secret society at Yale, Skull and Bones," he said.
"Meanwhile, filibusterer, William Walker, "the grey-eyed man of destiny", somewhat like Aaron Burr, decided to annex Baja, California believing that this will make him a fortune when the southern Pacific terminus of Jefferson Davis's route pops up at San Diego on the southern tip of California. That didn't happen and the account of the 1854 filibustering attempt of Walker can be seen in Juan Bandini's Account of William Walker's Invasion of Lower California by Robert G. Cleland. A fascinating character in California history, Juan Bandini's family traces their heritage to Florence, Italy where they are forever connected to the murder in the cathedral of Lorenzo de Medici by Benardo Bandini. Juan's beautiful daughter would marry Able Stearns whose family back in Massachusettes would make their fortunes in lead mining. George Luther Stearns, attempting to corner the lead market in the run up to the beginning of the Civil War was also one of John Brown's "Secret Six" and a supporter along with a number of the Boston Brahmin families funding the raid at Harper's Ferry. They took the high ground of creating a freed slave army to liberate their Southern brethren from their property, while hiding their real ambition of wanting a rail route across the flater Southern territory to the Pacific. Believe me, Reconstruction would have been much longer if the northern railroad route that connected at Promintory Point had not occured when it did thus bypassing the hard-headed Southerners," said Susej.
"Those same Northern elite families that profitted from the civil strife and railroad contruction would frequently travel to Florence to study art, history and the lives of the de Medici and Bandini families seeing them as a major influence on their own power and merchant-class status. The American cemetery in Florence is, for some, their final resting place alongside such notables as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and abolitionist Boston preacher Theodore Parker," said Susej taking another puff from his pipe.
"When Joseph R Walker charged West in 1825 to lay a trail and future railroad route to the Pacific their surveyor was Missouri Senator Joseph C. Brown. Walker and Brown laid out the Santa Fe Trail, but there has been far insufficient scholarship linking John Brown from Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas to the Alexander Brown in Baltimore and Able Stearns in California to George Luther Stearns in Massachusetts. Joseph R. Walker, would eventually travel to California not as a fur trapper working for John Jacob Astor, but with John C Fremont one of the Transcontinental Railroad's "Big Four". Walker would acquire a ranch near San Francisco and Oakland close to where Fremont would lay the Western terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad for the benefit of the Eastern rail road magnates including E.H. Harriman whose company would eventually merge with Alexander Brown of Brown Brother to become Brown Brother's Harriman. Brown Brothers Harriman would employ the son of Samuel Prescott Bush, Sam having been the head of the US Government's small arms production during World War I. His son was Prescott Bush. Prescott, of course, being the father of George Herbert Walker Bush, named for George Herbert Walker of St. Louis Missouri and for whom golf's most prestigious award, The Walker Cup, is named. George Herbert Walker was president of the PGA in 1920 and the Walker Cup was instituted in 1921 being played first in Liverpool, England the English port city and home of the American firms of Brown Brother and Russell families. In America, golf's citadel is Augusta National Country Club in Walker County, Georgia. The Walker name comes up all over. In Scotland it's a large clan and in Germany it went by the name Von Walker. It was John Hardeman Walker, a Southeast Missouri plantation owner and one of the states largest slave owners who was able to alter the southern border of Missouri to place his land in Arkansas within Missouri territory thus allowing for either slave or free status depending on the eventual outcome of the battle brewing North and South. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state maintaining the balance of power between slave and free state senator in the U.S. Senate and making Walker very happy since his crop production depended on his large number of slaves working the fertile river basin soil. Such power in Washington D.C. was not afforded everyone," continued Susej. "There was a W.W. Walker who traveled with Joseph and Joe to Texas before the Texas Revolution, but someone needs to do more research on their connection to John Hardeman Walker," he said.
"In their push Westward toward the Pacific Ocean the Walker and Brown families would be well represented, even taking the dip down to Texas because it lay in a direct path along the flatter Southern railroad route that had been assigned to Jefferson Davis to survey in 1852. They needed Texas for the route and James Walker Fannin would die helping to secure it. His cousin was Samuel B Morse, inventor of the Morse Code whose invention needed the railroad route for his telegraph poles. Whether Northerners or Southerners they are died in the wool Anglophiles and broadly supported the American eugenics programs that fed the push toward Aryanism in Germany in the 1930's and 40's. For that you need to read the phenominal documentation of Edwin Black's War Against the Weak," Susej continued.
"The first captains of the Texas Navy were Brown family members and before that Jean Lafite, the privateer in Galveston who provided needed amunition to Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, had hung a filibusterer named George Brown from the yardarm of one of his ships in Gavleston Bay. Against Lafite's orders Brown and his men had raided a Louisiana plantation. John Henry Brown would become the key power broker in Indianola the second most important port in Texas, then he'd become the mayor of Belton and Dallas while owning the Victoria newspaper The Texian Advocate which was one of two Texas newspapers which report on land transfers in the new republic. The papers produced for the early Republic were sealed in the National Archives in Washington for over 100 years while the new rule of law was established in the newly acquired territory. Southern plantation owners used railroads but not for transcontinental service. Their use was in hauling their cotton to processing centers and sea ports and they were notoriously parochial. Even if the Northern industrial powers, Astor, Morgan, Harriman and Gould, Lowell, Peabody's,Shaws and Stearns had won the Civil War, which they would do, the backwoods patrons of Andrew Jackson's rebel rouser's would not be easy to convince that they needed a railroad to San Diego run by their Northern conquerors. It would be easier to cut a new railroad through granite. Which they did, naming Omaha as the Midwest terminus city with lines East and driving a connecting spike at Promentory Point on May 10, 1869 at the Continental Divide," said Susej smiling while point to a photograph of the famous gold spike hanging on the wall of his small study.
"English Common Law or more precisely, America's newer version minus the primogeniture rules, but with the Supreme Court deciding that person-hood was extended to corporations, rode the rails in the mind of the new conquerors fueled by the writing of Andrew Greeley and Thomas Hart Benton. The law of primogeniture may have been dethroned in the New World, but they still needed the family's ability to pass on wealth as they had done in England under the Lord of the Manor's first born sons with the Royal first-born being head of the national fraternity. Enter the corporation with full legal status equal to persons under the new law. For an analysis of how this worked out in real life read The Gangs of America by Ted Nace, but keep in mind that the status of corporations was solidified in the American rule of law by Supreme Court Justice, Morrison Remick Waite (Yale Skull and Bones class of 1837). It was during consideration of the 14th Amendment that Waite firewalled the discussion of potential abuse of power that corporations held. The law took a clear turn toward private property over human rights at that juncture and would not be challenged until the Civil War and Civil Right Movement of the 1960's when the very power elites who had supposedly championed humanitarian values and liberation in abolitionism began to export American jobs to less expensive foreign alternatives. Waite's words were clear. "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinon that it does.'"
"In the 2010 movie Avatar which is basically a futuristic Dances With Wolves in blue, the indigenous Navi peoples are organically linked with each other through the soil like the inter-twining of the roots of Giant Sequoias in California. They had no need for laws that subdivide the planet for purposes of domination, exploitation and control which would eventually ruin the biosphere of their planet, Pandora. Much like mining of gold, copper, sulphur, coal, uranium, oil and other minerals has done to the lands of the Native Americans. In Avatar the culprit is the RDA Corporation which is obviously a spear point for the military industrialist complex and behind which the names of the leading architects are hidden. In the Red Wood groves of Northern California near Walker's Ranch the unnamed power elites who hide behind the corporate veil strip down before each other, cremate the "dull care" that their camoflaged ambition inflicts and urinate on the giant trees," said Susej.
"With Jefferson Davis' assignment to survey a Southern transcontinental route to San Diego in 1853, four years after the discovery of gold near the San Francisco area at Sutter's Mill, the bigger prize of Oriental opium which the New England Brahmans had long before discovered, was sweetened by the golden incentive. Names like Astor, Cushing, Cabot, Lodge, Brown, Russell and Harriman ...names that would become associated with rail transporation, armaments, drugs and eventually oil...Cushing, Oklahoma setting the benchmark price for North American petroleum," said Susej pointing to a map on the wall of Oklahoma Territory in the 1890's.
"The rush was on as if the gods were funding the push of East Coast business moguls whose ships were already plying Oriental waters when Astor employed Joseph R. Walker in his expedition West. From Texas came associates of John Henry Brown and Texas Ranger, Samuel Hamilton Walker, for whom was named the Colt Walker pistol. Texas Ranger, John Coffee "Jack" Hays, would become the sheriff of San Francisco in 1850 on the same day that another Texas Ranger, Ben McCullough, became sheriff of Sacramento less than 100 miles to the east. Hays' nephew, John Hays Hammond, would make his fortune not in California gold, but in South African diamonds as assistant to head of DeBeer Diamond Mining Co., Cecil Rhodes for whom the Rhodes Scholarship is named," said Susej smiling.
"Joseph R. Walker's ranch lay between San Francisco and Sacramento just east of Napa Valley where the first winery, the Buena Vista Vineyard of Juan Bandini, father-in-law of Abel Stearns of lead mining family member from Massachusetts. Just to the west of Napa lay the giant red wood trees along the coast about a thirty minute car drive north of San Francisco where the Bohemian Grove is located. Oral history states that the Bohemian Grove was simply a social club founded by disenchanted members of the San Francisco Symphony, but Ralph Nader has made it clear that there is more to the Bohemian Grove than playing fiddles while the nation burns. Nader believes that most of California understands what it is and the rest of the nation is clueless. As in the movie, Avatar, they are plotting, just as they have done in the board rooms of Baltimore, New York and Boston and in Liverpool and London before that, to keep rolling across the landscape, harvesting land and securing the advances with rule of law while solidifying their corporate gains," he concluded.
For Ralph Nader's assessment of Bohemian Grove see...
