King Hemp
King Hemp V: Industrial Disease
(read the entire series @ Cyrano’s Journal)
By Rand Clifford
10/25/07
Agriculturalists versus Industrialists
The King Hemp series began with: “America was just starting to crawl, and hemp was such an essential crop that farmers could be fined for not growing it—even jailed during periods of shortage in the mid 1760s.” A struggle for the heart of America was begun, and to this day remains the real reason for American exile of The King, cannabis hemp.
The American Revolution involved this core struggle between the agriculturalists in the colonies, and the industrialists—controllers of the government in England. In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote about believing our government would remain virtuous for many centuries, as long as the country remained chiefly agricultural; but when the people get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, the government will become corrupt as in Europe.
This struggle helped define our Civil War, one main issue being the battle between Southern agriculturalists and Northern industrialists over control of Western expansion. Slavery was crucial to the agriculturalists because labor-intensive cotton was such a large part of the wealth of the South. The industrialists believed that declaring Western lands “free states” would make Southern agriculturalists uncompetitive, thus leaving most of the profits of Western expansion to the industrialists….
Victory for the industrialists positioned them to dominate the economic life of America. And for construction of the transcontinental railways, they tapped cheap labor not only from freed slaves, but poor immigrants from Europe and China. So slavery did not go away in terms of living conditions of the labor, there were simply new terminologies applied. And the role of American government hit the slippery slope leading to what we see today—what was originally established to protect and preserve the lives, property and freedoms of Americans from repressive government, slid toward an agency to protect the economic interests of industrialists. Along the way, corporations gained the legal status of citizens; not by a new Supreme Court interpretation of the fourteenth amendment, as commonly thought, but by a former railroad company president acting as court reporter sneaking the “ruling” into the books. J.C. Bancroft Davis slipped courtroom comments of Chief Justice Morrison Waite into head notes of a related ruling, and, wha-la! Instant landmark ruling. Corporations became “artificial persons” with rights of a citizen, plus many advantages such as immortality. Soon after, John D. Rockefeller, father of the modern corporation, created the Standard Oil Corporation. And by the late 1880s, over 90% of American oil refineries were controlled by Standard Oil.
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