Had Lincoln let a weak Gulf Coast CSA secede in 1861, sans Virginia, North Carolina, Tennesse, and Arkansas, it would have been extremely vulnerable to internal rebellions of this type both by dissident whites and slaves.

Disgraced financier Bernard Madoff has arrived at federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, CNBC has learned, though it is still not clear if that will be his permanent home.

President Barack Obama and the sitting members of Congress have not been charged, much less convicted and sentenced, for crimes that make Bernie Madoff’s look like child’s play. Note well: I am referring here not to the assorted murders, assaults, and batteries for which these men and women are manifestly guilty - I say guilty because they not only admit these crimes, but proudly take public credit for them - but to certain of their strictly financial crimes.

Madoff, 71, was sentenced last month to 150 years in prison after pleading guilty in March to charges that his investment advisory business was a multibillion-dollar scheme that wiped out thousands of investors and ruined charities.

Madoff caused people to lose billions of dollars. The U.S. government has caused people to lose trillions of dollars, and it’s not finished yet. The public’s losses mount during every minute of every day. By its effects in discouraging work, saving, and investment, and thereby reducing capital accumulation, the U.S. Social Security system has caused the nation’s gross domestic product to fall significantly below the levels it would otherwise have reached. According to Professor Edgar K. Browning, a leading researcher in this field, “the available evidence suggests that Social Security has reduced [current] GDP by 5 to 10 percent.” Ten percent of GDP is now approximately $1.4 trillion - or about 28 times the maximum amount Madoff is believed to have cost his clients. Moreover, Madoff’s harm is a one-shot loss, whereas the U.S. government’s Social Security harm is an ongoing loss that grows annually. In the future, the annual loss will be even greater than the currently estimated $1.4 trillion or so.

Authorities said Madoff had carried out the fraud for at least two decades before confessing to his sons in December that his investment business was a fraud and that he had lost as much as $50 billion.

The leaders of the U.S. government have carried out their Social Security fraud - essentially a Ponzi scheme, in substance exactly the same as Madoff’s scheme - since 1935, and they have yet to confess to their crimes, unless their family members have been told and have kept the confession to themselves.

Madoff, in contrast to the government, carried out his fraud in a civilized way: he merely misrepresented what he was doing, purporting to invest his clients’ money and to obtain a high rate of return on these investments. People dealt with him voluntarily. Those who suspected something was fishy did not do business with him, and some people went so far as to give substantial information to the SEC to show that Madoff’s business had to be fraudulent (which information the SEC ignored for years on end, of course).

The U.S. government, however, does not bother to claim any prowess in investing the money it forces people to surrender to its scheme. It admits that the “client’s” return is now close to zero (varying a bit according to the client’s age and other factors). Nor does it carry out its admitted Ponzi scheme in a civilized way. Not only is participation in the scheme involuntary, but the government threatens violence against anyone who fails to participate as it commands him. Thus, the government operates its Ponzi scheme in a markedly more thuggish manner than Bernie would ever have dreamed of. He might have been a crook, but he was not a thug.

Everyone (including Bernie himself) agrees that Bernie Madoff was a crook. What is the correct term for the U.S. government, or does the word government tell us everything we need to know about the honesty, humanity, and justice of its actions?

"No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top."

This is the second in a series of photos relating to my book (co-authored by Linda Royster Beito), Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

The book is about the civil rights leader, self-help champion, entrepreneur, and surgeon, T.R.M. Howard.

In addition to being one of the wealthiest blacks in Mississippi, and a mentor to the likes of Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer, Howard had a reputation of as America's"greatest black big gamehunter" and led safaris to Africa, India, and Alaska. In this picture, taken in his Chicago office about a year before his death, some of his trophies are prominently displayed.

For the other photos (some of which do not appear in the book), see here.

The General very much wanted an American Empire, and after the 1775 attack on Canada failed, tried, in 1781, to launch another attack, using the Vermont MIlitia. Ethan Allen told his emissary, LaFayette, the Militia would require three things: "Double Pay, Double Rations, and [Imperial?] Plunder." Those demands ended that fiasco. This came at a time when the Revolution was supposedly under severe stress in the South.

The whole notion of our Revolution's success being very much in doubt, fostered by people today like David McCullough, is essentially nonsense, when viewed from the perspective of what we know of contemporary Insurgency Theory. The British had to leave Boston and later Philadelphia because of the strength of the American forces. They controlled only New York City for most of the War, and that was convenient for American farmers to obtain British gold.

The Brits seldom ventured out in less than battalion force. Twice they sent armies into the interior, and lost them both as predicted by Tom Paine. A third of the Hessian mercenary force, the Blackwater of that day, 5,000 men, went over the hill, urged by Americans, usually to marry American women. This happened as well later to the Japanese Army bogged down in China for 8 years, but on an even more massive scale.

Finally, American privateers took over 1,500 prizes during the War, which drove Brit insurance rates sky high and caused many to seek an end to the fighting. That "loot" was a major factor in financing the emerging Industrialization in New England.

Creating this notion of an American Revolution in "Crisis" has been an important background aspect of building a similar Myth today, that our very existence is threatened by some "Terrorists," hiding out in the hills of Afghanistan, and which necessitates our spending about as much on "Defense" as the rest of the world combined! To the extent there was ever a Crisis in our Revolution, it was because Washington, with the exception of Trenton, insisted, on the whole, of fighting a conventional 18th century war, rather than the guerrilla, partisan warfare tactics advocated by some of his officers. The strength of the Revolution was so great, it succeeded in spite of these at times erroneous tactics.

Even in the 1750s, Imperialists such as Franklin wanted an American Bank to compete in paper money with the Bank of England. The boys who brought us the "Fed" in 1913 were, no doubt, aware of Franklin's ideas. He, and others such as Paine, certainly frightened the Brits with his idea that the Empire should be increasingly ruled from "across the Pond," where, given the land mass, the population was growing rapidly. The Brits had responded by the Proclamation Line of 1763. Later, when in 1778. George III solicited advice from British intellectuals, Adam Smith told the King that truth, although that leter was not discovered until 1934.

If Washington was such a "non-interventionist," rather than a "Unilateral" Empire builder, how would you explain his intervention in the Revolution in Haiti in the 1790s; $726,000, when that was considerable "foreign aid," in an attempt to help keep the Creoles in power, rather than allow the Black slaves to achieve independence? Here we have the prototype of US Counter-Revolutionary doctrine from then right up until today, certainly evident from the Philippines adventure in 1898 and after.

These Empire Builders, such as Washington, hated the Second Amendment and the Militia about which it was written, the latter quite obviously during the American Revolution itself, precisely because they couldn't be ordered around to do his bidding, then or later. As, Richard Kohn has noted, Washington attempted to "Murder" the Militia system in the 1790s as well, and in 1906 Elihu Root finished the job, when as the primary policy architect for the Imperial Party after 1898, as both Sec. State & Sec. War, he essentially organized the guidelines of the Empire along the present lines we still see in Iraq and Afghanistan today.

I think both you, Ron Paul and others, who talk about the "Founders" as you do, are simply wrong about some of them, especially Washington! You play into the hands of the Empire advocates today by continuing such errors! I have written a great deal on all of the above, most of it available on the Internet for anyone who is interested in a dissenting opinion to what has become, apparently, "Libertarian doctrine."