On April 20, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said abolitionist/suffragist/civil rights activist Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the front of new $20 bills. The former president gets demoted to their reverse sides.
Tubman was born into slavery, escaped to freedom and worked to rescue dozens of enslaved families, using so-called Underground Railroad safe houses.
Post-war, she was active in the struggle for women’s suffrage. Former slave Frederick Douglas said he “kn(ew) of no one (else) who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people.”
Honoring her can’t erase the longstanding stain of state-sponsored war on Black Americans – from chattel to wage slavery, Jim Crow to its modern-day version, freedom to mass incarceration.
According to Law Professor Michelle Alexander, “(m)ore black men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1950 before the Civil War began.”
Racist drug laws largely affect “poor communities of color.” In America’s inner-cities, most Black youths can expect criminal injustice prosecutions one or more times during their lives.
Over 60% of Black men born in 1965 or later without high school degrees (following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act banning discrimination) have prison records.
They’re marked for life, targeted by militarized cops, leaving them vulnerable to re-arrest or death.
America is more police state than democracy, its inner-city streets battlegrounds, Blacks and other people of color terrorized.
Honoring Tubman belies US ruthlessness, waging war on its most disadvantaged, enslaving them by other means.
Jefferson opposed the first Bank of the United States, giving private interests the power to create money. He got Congress to refuse to renew its charter.
Madison signed a 20-year charter. When Congress renewed it, Jackson vetoed it, calling it “a hydra-headed monster,” knowing “(t)he hydra of corruption is only scotched, not dead,” he said.
January 1835 was his finest hour, accomplishing something never done before or since. He paid off the first installment of the national debt, then reduced it to zero and accumulated a surplus.
Lincoln financed the Civil War with publicly created money, free from interest to private bankers. His 1862 Legal Tender Act let government issue its own money, rescinded post-war.
Powerful bankers rule the world by creating and controlling money, entrapping nations in debt. Since Jackson’s presidency, interest alone on America’s debt was paid – to bankers and other owners of US obligations.
The income tax was instituted to make the public pay interest to bankers on America’s debt. As long as private interests control the nation’s money, debt entrapment will continue – along with booms, busts, inflation, deflation, instability and crises.
The 1913 Federal Reserve Act empowering bankers to control America’s money was the most destructive legislation in US history.
No Jeffersons, Jacksons or Lincolns today vie to become president – only aspirants beholden to Wall Street, money changers ripping us off for profit.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.
