Three times George Washington acted in a way that would insure the newly born US Republic would survive.
His first act was in 1782, when Colonel Lewis Nicola wrote a letter to Washington suggesting that Washington should set up a constitutional monarchy because of the inefficiency of the Continental Congress.
Washington was offended at such a suggestion and wrote to Nicola telling him to banish such thoughts from his mind. George Washington – Legends and Myths
His second act took place in 1783, when he stepped in and saved the republic by ending the Newburgh Conspiracy, a plot in the military to seize power and create a military dictatorship. Source: Early America
The third act was when Washington stepped down as President (1789 – 1797) and returned to his farm.
When King George III asked his American painter, Benjamin West, what Washington would do after winning independence, West replied, “They say he will return to his farm.”
“If he does that,” King George said, “he will be the greatest man in the world.” Cato Institute
The cover of The Economist for October 23, 2010—in the best tradition of biased and Yellow Journalism—SHOUTED: “The next emperor – Will Xi Jinping change China?”
As I read the feature article on page 13, I laughed when I saw, “Mr. Xi’s appointment was eerily similar to the recent anointment of Kim Jong-un in North Korea.”
The reason I saw humor in this absurd statement was that there is nothing similar. Kim Jong Un inherited his for-life position as Supreme Leader of North Korea. He is the son of Kim Jong-il, and the grandson of Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea.
In Part 2 of this series that will appear on December 11, 2014, I will explain the difference between China’s one-party authoritarian Republic, and why it isn’t a dictatorship or a monarchy.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Poor George Washington. He hated being president and ALL he wanted to do was go home and be left alone. He said two terms was all anyone should be forced to serve … it was too horrible to stay any longer. But, hey, let’s print the legend.
The truth is that there was always be rich and/or powerful individuals in the United States who want to take away many of our hard earned freedoms and tell us, through law and gangs of bullies, how we must live our lives. They come and go and a vicious, never ending cycle. The best we can hope for is that we are not noticed and do not end up homeless and starving as these monsters ravage the earth.
If Washington hadn’t stopped the military from taking over, imagine what the U.S. would be today—another banana republic with endless list of dictators and tyrants?
[…] If China government isn’t a Monarchy or a Dictatorship, what is it? Part 1 of 4 […]
The weird thing about post-Mao China, and it is still true well into this reform era, is that the ‘dictatorship’ if you will is the party but never any one person… That’s true that the surrender of power by definition makes Chinese leaders technically not dictators. It’s certainly not a democratic system by any means, but it is still Communist not in the economic sense but in the sense that the party controls all power. I’ve heard others refer to the system as similar to the Roman Republic, although that’s not an optimistic analogy of course because we all know how that turned out.
It’s remarkable that it has worked this long, and I hope no one takes up like Putin’s style and decides to stay in office perpetually. It doesn’t seem like it will happen, though if anyone would be the next “Emperor” it may be Xi, but so far the most stable thing about China is that indeed so far the party won’t let any one person take over with impunity.
The People’s Republic should be lauded for that, but let us not forget it is definitely an authoritarian government. It’s better than a dictatorship at the mercy of one man’s whims, it’s evolving, but still has a very, very long way to go.
From what I’ve read, there are voices inside the party that want to be less authoritarian, but I don’t think we will ever see a democracy in China like we have in the U.S. —it’s too chaotic and volatile and right now the U.S. is going through an upheaval that is threatening the democracy we have today thanks to Milton Friedman’s trickledown theory of economics and recent rulings from the conservative 5-4 dominated U.S. Supreme court. For instance, Citizens United that all but handed power to the wealthiest 0.01% who have the money to buy it.
Since President Reagan embraced Friedman economics, the health care system was turned on its head, prisons are being privatized, the U.S. relies heavily on private, mercenary armies in addition to his own public military troops, the public schools are at war with privatization, Wall Street and Hedge Funds spent $300 million to get some of their own people elected to governs-hips of states and to take over state legislatures where public pension funds have been handed to Wall Street firms that charge HUGE fees and then refuse to share with the public what they are doing with the money from these public pensions. The children of entire cities have been turned over to corporate Charters to teach. Public schools were run by democratically elected school boards and by law must be totally transparent, but these private sector charters that have exploded in numbers across America going from about 1,600 in 2008 to more than 6,000 today and growing are opaque with their spending and may throw out any children who are difficult to teach and that is what they are going as they strip funding from public schools in addition to closing those schools and giving the property to the corporate Charters.
Friedman preached that public government run services should be privatized and that’s what Reagan started and every president since Regan has supported. The results can be seen just in the prison population. Before Reagan and the privatization of public prisons, the US had a steady prison population of about a quarter million (250,000) for decades. Once private sector, for profit prisons started to appear so did their lobbyists in state capitals and Washington DC pushing for tougher laws and longer sentences. That has led to the largest prison population on the planet—-more than 2 million or 700+ per 100,000 compared to China’s 125 per 100,000.
America’s democracy is in transition to become an oligarchy ruled by billionaires like Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, the Walton family, Eli Broad, Bloomberg, Hedge Fund billionaires—one Hedge Fund billionaire, for instance, is using his wealth that came from his part in the collapse of Enron to take over the entire public school system of Dallas Texas while another Hedge Fund billionaire in California is funding efforts to strip teachers of legal due process rights and still another one is going after public pensions to have them dissolved—-and they are winning battles and destroying millions of lives as schools are closed and the people that work at those schools fired by the thousands. In New Orleans, after hurricane Katrine, the entire school district was turned over to a corporation to run and almost 10,000 teachers and staff lost their jobs. The same thing is happening in Memphis, Nashville, Chicago, Florida, North Caroline, Ohio, Michigan, etc.
In the 2014 election, the billionaires tried to take over the public schools in California by back Tuck—one of their own—for State Superintendent of Instruction and more money was spent on that one office than the governor’s race. All of Tuck’s campaign money came from a handful of billionaires. Torkelson won by a slim margin and spent millions less had the support of the teachers’ unions, and unions all across America are under attack and shrinking. Some states have made it all but illegal for unions to operate and workers are working longer hours for less without many benefits. And get this, Tuck and Torkelson were both Democratic. There was no Republican running for that office. The cost of the campaign for that one office was about $25 million and Tuck had several million more than Torkelson. The billionaires flooded Tuck with money the last week of the election to give him an edge.
And Bill Gates is spending between $5 – $7 billion dollars to replace the democratically run public schools with corporate Charters run by high paid CEO’s with a mandate to make profits for corporations and Wall Street. Gates has been publicly quoted saying that democratically elected school boards are inefficient and get in the way of innovation, and he said this even though studies now prove that the public schools are better than the majority of corporate Charters that siphon off public funds to pay HUGE annual salaries to their mangers and CEO’s and to make profits for the companies that trade stocks on Wall Street.