Sunday, June 29, 2014

What’s the Matter With Eastern Kentucky? Where's the replacement industry for coal?



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There are many tough places in this country: the ghost cities of Detroit, Camden and Gary, the sunbaked misery of inland California and the isolated reservations where Native American communities were left to struggle. But in its persistent poverty, Eastern Kentucky — land of storybook hills and drawls ­ — just might be the hardest place to live in the United States. Statistically speaking.
The team at The Upshot, a Times news and data-analysis venture, compiled six basic metrics to give a picture of the quality and longevity of life in each county of the nation: educational attainment, household income, jobless rate, disability rate, life expectancy and obesity rate. Weighting each equally, six counties in eastern Kentucky’s coal country (Breathitt, Clay, Jackson, Lee, Leslie and Magoffin) rank among the bottom 10.
Mother Jones giving children shoes. Paint Creek
Clay County, in dead last, might as well be in a different country. The median household income there is barely above the poverty line, at $22,296, and is just over half the nationwide median. Only 7.4 percent of the population has a bachelor’s degree or higher. The unemployment rate is 12.7 percent. The disability rate is nearly as high, at 11.7 percent. (Nationwide, that figure is 1.3 percent.) Life expectancy is six years shorter than average. Perhaps related, nearly half of Clay County is obese.
It’s coal country, but perhaps in name only. In the first quarter of this year, just 54 people were employed in coal mining in Clay County, a precipitous drop from its coal-production peak in 1980. That year, about 2.5 million tons of coal were taken out of the ground in Clay; this year, the county has produced a fraction of that — just over 38,000 tons. Former mines have been reclaimed, and that land has been repurposed in scattershot ways: a golf course, shopping centers, a medium-security federal prison. But nothing has truly come to replace the industry on which Clay County once depended.

The public debate about the haves and the have-nots tends to focus on the 1 percent, especially on the astonishing, breakaway wealth in cities like New York, San Francisco and Washington and the great disparities contained therein. But what has happened in the smudge of the country between New Orleans and Pittsburgh — the Deep South and Appalachia — is in many ways as remarkable as what has happened in affluent cities. In some places, decades of growth have failed to raise incomes, and of late, poverty has become more concentrated not in urban areas but in rural ones.
Despite this, rural poverty is largely shunted aside in the conversation about inequality, much in the way rural areas have been left behind by broader shifts in the economy. The sheer intractability of rural poverty raises uncomfortable questions about how to fix it, or to what extent it is even fixable.
The desperation in coal country is hard to square with the beauty of the place — the densely flocked hills peppered with tiny towns. It’s magical. But it is also poor, even if economic growth and the federal safety-net programs have drastically improved what that poverty looks like.
 
Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared his “war on poverty” from a doorstep in the tiny Kentucky town of Inez, and since then, Washington has directed trillions of dollars to such communities in the form of cash assistance, food stamps, Medicaid and tax incentives for development.

 (In some places, these transfer payments make up half of all income.) Still, after adjusting for inflation, median income was higher in Clay County in 1979 than it is now, even though the American economy has more than doubled in size.
There have been periodic attempts to flood persistently poor counties with federal dollars in an effort to jolt them into higher growth rates. The Obama administration this year named southeastern Kentucky a “promise zone,” putting it at the top of the list for federal grants. It’s an old idea: Draw in businesses, create jobs, help finance infrastructure, turn the cycle virtuous.
On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, Kentucky’s libertarian senator, Rand Paul, has proposed a more supply-side-oriented strategy: Let certain counties eliminate capital-gains taxes and institute a special federal income tax of 5 percent in those areas. “I’m just letting you keep more of your own money,” Paul said to a small crowd in a college auditorium in eastern Kentucky last winter. “The difference between this and a government grant is I don’t choose who gets it.” On either side of the aisle, the underlying assumption is the same: Places like Clay County just need a kick-start. But what if that isn’t true?
In many cases, a primary problem in poor rural areas is the very fact that they’re rural — remote, miles from major highways and plagued by substandard infrastructure. Think about the advantages of urban areas, described by thinkers going back to Jane Jacobs and beyond. Density means more workers to choose from, more potential customers, more spillover knowledge from nearby companies. As such, cities punch above their weight, economically speaking. The 10 largest metro regions produced more than a third of the country’s entire economic output as of 2012.
The converse is true for rural areas. Take eastern Kentucky, grappling with the decline of coal — and perhaps looking at an even bleaker future for the industry, given recent carbon-reduction efforts by the E.P.A. Those rolling hills might be picturesque. But those country roads make it hard to ship goods in and out, in turn making it more expensive to build a warehouse or a factory.
“One of the challenges that faces eastern Kentucky is the remoteness of the area,” said James P. Ziliak, the director of the Center for Poverty Research at the University of Kentucky. “It’s difficult to get to a lot of places.
The communities are small, and they’re spread apart, so you lose that synergy that you want to spark development a lot of times.” Even with additional government subsidies, would businesses really want to move there? “It’s this chicken-and-egg problem,” Ziliak said. “My view is that firms will never locate into a community with an unskilled labor force, unless the only labor they need is unskilled. And there has been a historic lack of investment in human capital in these areas.”
 
The queasy answer that economists come to is that it would be better to help the people than the place — in some cases, helping people leave the place. Generally, the wealthier and better educated the family, the more mobile they are. It takes resources to pack up all your things, sign a new lease, pay for gas or a flight and go. That might help explain why more Americans aren’t flocking from places with high unemployment rates to places with low ones, even if those places are surprisingly close together. College graduates, for instance, are several times as responsive to differences in labor demand as those who completed only high school, according to a study in The Journal of Human Resources.
But government policy based less on place and more on people might help ameliorate that trend. “Let’s say I was a hardworking person who lost my job in Harlan, Ky. — the ideal place, really, to go is Williston, N.D.,” Senator Paul said. “People need to be mobile to go there. Some government programs prevent mobility or discourage mobility.” And none encourage it: There are scant federal resources to help the unemployed or the poor in rural areas move to a job or even just a better neighborhood. (Imagine Senator Mitch McConnell running for re-election on the campaign slogan: “I’ll get you out of this moribund area and up to the wilderness of North Dakota!”)
Of course, thousands of families in places like Kentucky, South Dakota and West Virginia manage to cobble together enough resources to make the move themselves; the share of Americans living in rural areas has slowly drifted down. In Clay County, the population has declined for the last decade. And the overall population in rural areas declined for the first time from 2010 to 2012, according to the Census Bureau.

Jeff Whitehead runs the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, which helps retrain laid-off coal miners and find them new jobs. “There’s just very limited opportunity for the people who were working in the region,” he said, adding that he helped 220 families move out of the area in recent years, despite many workers’ understandable resistance. “That’s a really hard pill to swallow. People are really connected to place here. For a lot of people, it’s the last thing they’re doing. They’re holding off until they have no other choice.”
But the number and proportion of people living in poverty in places like eastern Kentucky persists, despite all the trillions of dollars spent to improve the state of the poor in the United States and promote development. Ziliak thinks that efforts focused on human capital — meaning education initiatives, from prekindergarten all the way through college — might be the best use of any new money. But, of course, that also might mean more people moving away.

Annie Lowrey was, until recently, an economics reporter for The Times. Alan Flippen contributed reporting.

Friday, June 27, 2014

"As for the Republicans" H. P. Lovecraft 1936

H. P. Lovecraft
"As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."
—Lovecraft in a letter to C. L. Moore, exact date unknown, mid-October 1936

Monday, June 23, 2014

Jourdon Anderson, former slave replies to his Old Master,


(Source: The Freedmen's Book; Image: A group of escaped slaves in Virginia in 1862, courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

Dayton, Ohio,The Mind Unleashed with April Keeler

In August of 1865, a Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, wrote to his former slave, Jourdon Anderson, and requested that he come back to work on his farm. Jourdon — who, since being emancipated, had moved to Ohio, found paid work, and was now supporting his family — responded spectacularly by way of the letter seen below (a letter which, according to newspapers at the time, he dictated).



August 7, 1865
To My Old Master,
Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable.

Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.
To My Old Master

In August of 1865, a Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, wrote to his former slave, Jourdon Anderson, and requested that he come back to work on his farm. Jourdon — who, since being emancipated, had moved to Ohio, found paid work, and was now supporting his family — responded spectacularly by way of the letter seen below (a letter which, according to newspapers at the time, he dictated).

Rather than quote the numerous highlights in this letter, I'll simply leave you to enjoy it. Do make sure you read to the end.

UPDATE: Head over to Kottke for a brief but lovely little update about the later years of Jourdon and family.

(Source: The Freedmen's Book; Image: A group of escaped slaves in Virginia in 1862, courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

Dayton, Ohio, 

August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdon Anderson.

The Mind Unleashed ॐ
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Fukushima’s Children are Dying

| June 14, 2014 10:11 am | Comments



hwassermanSome 39 months after the multiple explosions at Fukushima, thyroid cancer rates among nearby children have skyrocketed to more than forty times (40x) normal.
More than 48 percent of some 375,000 young people—nearly 200,000 kids—tested by the Fukushima Medical University near the smoldering reactors now suffer from pre-cancerous thyroid abnormalities, primarily nodules and cysts. The rate is accelerating.
More than 120 childhood cancers have been indicated where just three would be expected, says Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project.
The nuclear industry and its apologists continue to deny this public health tragedy. Some have actually asserted that “not one person” has been affected by Fukushima’s massive radiation releases, which for some isotopes exceed Hiroshima by a factor of nearly 30.
More than 48 percent of some 375,000 young people—nearly 200,000 kids—tested by the Fukushima Medical University near the smoldering reactors now suffer from pre-cancerous thyroid abnormalities, primarily nodules and cysts.
More than 48 percent of some 375,000 young people—nearly 200,000 kids—tested by the Fukushima Medical University near the smoldering reactors now suffer from pre-cancerous thyroid abnormalities, primarily nodules and cysts.
But the deadly epidemic at Fukushima is consistent with impacts suffered among children near the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island and the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl, as well as findings at other commercial reactors.

The likelihood that atomic power could cause such epidemics has been confirmed by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which says that “an increase in the risk of childhood thyroid cancer” would accompany a reactor disaster.
In evaluating the prospects of new reactor construction in Canada, the Commission says the rate “would rise by 0.3 percent at a distance of 12 kilometers” from the accident. But that assumes the distribution of protective potassium iodide pills and a successful emergency evacuation, neither of which happened at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima.
The numbers have been analyzed by Mangano. He has studied the impacts of reactor-created radiation on human health since the 1980s, beginning his work with the legendary radiologist Dr. Ernest Sternglass and statistician Jay Gould.
Speaking on www.prn.fm’s Green Power & Wellness Show, Mangano also confirms that the general health among downwind human populations improves when atomic reactors are shut down, and goes into decline when they open or re-open.
Nearby children are not the only casualties at Fukushima. Plant operator Masao Yoshida has died at age 58 of esophogeal cancer. Masao heroically refused to abandon Fukushima at the worst of the crisis, probably saving millions of lives. Workers at the site who are employed by independent contractors—many dominated by organized crime—are often not being monitored for radiation exposure at all. Public anger is rising over government plans to force families—many with small children—back into the heavily contaminated region around the plant.
Following its 1979 accident, Three Mile Island’s owners denied the reactor had melted. But a robotic camera later confirmed otherwise.
The state of Pennsylvania mysteriously killed its tumor registry, then said there was “no evidence” that anyone had been killed.

But a wide range of independent studies confirm heightened infant death rates and excessive cancers among the general population. Excessive death, mutation and disease rates among local animals were confirmed by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and local journalists.
In the 1980s federal Judge Sylvia Rambo blocked a class action suit by some 2,400 central Pennsylvania downwinders, claiming not enough radiation had escaped to harm anyone. But after 35 years, no one knows how much radiation escaped or where it went. Three Mile Island’s owners have quietly paid millions to downwind victims in exchange for gag orders.
At Chernobyl, a compendium of more than 5,000 studies has yielded an estimated death toll of more than 1,000,000 people.
The radiation effects on youngsters in downwind Belarus and Ukraine have been horrific. According to Mangano, some 80 percent of the “Children of Chernobyl” born downwind since the accident have been harmed by a wide range of impacts ranging from birth defects and thyroid cancer to long-term heart, respiratory and mental illnesses. The findings mean that just one in five young downwinders can be termed healthy.
Physicians for Social Responsibility and the German chapter of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War have warned of parallel problems near Fukushima.
Japan earthquake and tsunami aftermath
The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) has recently issued reports downplaying the disaster’s human impacts. UNSCEAR is interlocked with the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, whose mandate is to promote atomic power. The IAEA has a long-term controlling gag order on UN findings about reactor health impacts. For decades UNSCEAR and the World Health Organization have run protective cover for the nuclear industry’s widespread health impacts. Fukushima has proven no exception.
In response, Physicians for Social Responsibility and the German International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War have issued a ten-point rebuttal, warning the public of the UN’s compromised credibility. The disaster is “ongoing” say the groups, and must be monitored for decades. “Things could have turned for the worse” if winds had been blowing toward Tokyo rather than out to sea (and towards America).
There is on-going risk from irradiated produce, and among site workers whose doses and health impacts are not being monitored. Current dose estimates among workers as well as downwinders are unreliable, and special notice must be taken of radiation’s severe impacts on the human embryo.
UNSCEAR’s studies on background radiation are also “misleading,” say the groups, and there must be further study of genetic radiation effects as well as “non-cancer diseases.” The UN assertion that “no discernible radiation-related health effects are expected among exposed members” is “cynical,” say the groups. They add that things were made worse by the official refusal to distribute potassium iodide, which might have protected the public from thyroid impacts from massive releases of radioactive I-131.
Overall, the horrific news from Fukushima can only get worse. Radiation from three lost cores is still being carried into the Pacific. Management of spent fuel rods in pools suspended in the air and scattered around the site remains fraught with danger.
The pro-nuclear Shinzo Abe regime wants to reopen Japan’s remaining 48 reactors. It has pushed hard for families who fled the disaster to re-occupy irradiated homes and villages.
But Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the plague of death and disease now surfacing near Fukushima make it all too clear that the human cost of such decisions continues to escalate—with our children suffering first and worst.

Harvey Wasserman edits www.nukefree.org and wrote SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth. His Green Power & Wellness Show is at www.prn.fm.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Breaking News: ex-Goldman Sachs chiefs like dog-poo..they stinkup everything they touch

How the vampire squid is controlling our lives: They helped cause the crash. Then profited from it. Now, from the Bank of England to the Fed, ex-Goldman Sachs chiefs are pulling the levers of power


Amid the recent management shake-up at the top  of the Bank of England, as  it was dragged into the investigation of the alleged fixing of the £3 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange markets, one crucial appointment went almost unnoticed.
While public attention was understandably focused on an Egyptian-born mother of twins becoming only the second female deputy governor of the bank, the far more influential appointment was that of economist Ben Broadbent.
As the new deputy governor for monetary policy, he is now the predominant voice on the future direction of interest rates. 


Influential: Ben Broadbent, the Bank of England's new deputy governor for monetary policy, who spent a decade during the boom-and-bust years as senior economist at Goldman Sachs


Influential: Ben Broadbent, the Bank of England's new deputy governor for monetary policy, who spent a decade during the boom-and-bust years as senior economist at Goldman SachsHis work will have a huge effect on the lives of the British people, for he will have a key role in deciding when the record five years of super-low mortgage rates will end — a decision that will inevitably lead to home-owners facing considerably bigger monthly bills.

But there is one crucial fact that should concern us about the Cambridge and Harvard-educated Broadbent: he spent a decade during the boom-and-bust years as the senior economist at the global headquarters of the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

He joins an elite few who hold senior positions in the world’s most powerful central banks — from London to New York, Frankfurt and beyond — and all of whom come from this one company, which was controversially described by Rolling Stone magazine as ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’.
The fact that so many alumni of the world’s most profitable — as well as most ruthless and cunning — investment bank wield such a level of influence in these central banks is nothing short of remarkable. 

Because Goldman Sachs is an institution that, as I will explain, not only helped cause the financial crisis in 2008, but also profited from it — hugely enriching its own staff while leaving a trail of chaos for taxpayers to clear up. 

Do we really want one of the most controversial financial institutions on the planet, which was eventually fined a record £343 million for shamelessly misleading investors during the crisis, to have so many of its ex-staff holding the levers of power in the City of London?

What makes the choice of Broadbent an issue of major public concern is that his period at Goldman saw the New York investment firm deeply embroiled in some of the most shocking financial scandals of  recent years.
First, there was the crisis triggered by the sub-prime mortgage disaster, when vast quantities of loans were made by U.S. banks to homeowners who could never pay them back. 

This reached disaster point in 2007-8, once the loans had been sold on by banks and institutions around the world — by which time they had been packaged up as financial instruments or ‘derivatives’ so complicated that no one could tell how toxic they were. 

Goldman Sachs played a key part in inventing these poisonous derivatives, which were a major factor in triggering the financial crisis.
But even more morally offensive was that once people finally began to realise how dangerous these derivatives were, Goldman Sachs started making money by speculating in the market that they would collapse in value.
So not only did the bank help create the crisis, it also profited from it. 

'God's work': Goldman Sachs fast-talking CEO Lloyd Blankfein stunned the world last year when he offensively boasted - amid his banks return to fat profits - that that's what he and his employees were doing
'God's work': Goldman Sachs fast-talking CEO Lloyd Blankfein stunned the world last year when he offensively boasted - amid his banks return to fat profits - that that's what he and his employees were doing


It was the same Goldman Sachs that, during the financial crisis in 2008, when, like all financial institutions, its shares were falling, accepted a $10 billion bailout from the U.S. government.
Handily, many of its former staff — such as Hank Paulson, who was then U.S. Treasury Secretary — happened to be in key posts in the government when the decision was made.
'A vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money' - Matt Taibbi in Rolling StoneThen there is the fact that Goldman Sachs reportedly arranged with the Right-wing Greek government to present the national accounts in the best possible light so that Greece could join the Eurozone in 2001. The bank was subsequently involved in elaborate schemes that masked the true horror of the country’s public debt crisis, which saw Greece having to be bailed out by the EU and left in economic ruins.
Despite this, Goldman bosses were able to pick up $111 million in bonuses soon afterwards, which were understandably branded an outrage as they were awarded during the worst recession for 80 years — one that had mainly been caused by irresponsible bank behaviour.

'A vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money' - Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone


Influence in high places, though, did not stop Goldman from being heavily fined by the Wall Street regulator, the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), in 2010 for selling dodgy complex securities, based on sub-prime mortgages, to clients including the hapless Royal Bank of Scotland.
What makes the behaviour of Goldman Sachs so shameless is the arrogance with which it has sought to protect its reputation and the claims its bosses like to make for  its integrity.

The group’s chairman and chief executive, the smiling and fast-talking former trader Lloyd Blankfein, stunned everyone last year when he offensively boasted — amid Goldman’s return to fat profits — that the bank was doing ‘God’s work’.
Perhaps it is this arrogance that enables former Goldman executives, such as Ben Broadbent at the Bank of England, to rise ineffably to the very top jobs in international finance.

With the approval of Chancellor George Osborne, 49-year-old Broadbent was plucked from his relatively obscure role as an external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee and promoted over the head of the Old Lady’s best and brightest internal prospects. 

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney spent the longest stretch of his career working at Goldman SachsHis elevation to the top economic role at Britain’s central bank means he will now be making the crucial interest rate, inflation and growth forecasts for the Bank’s quarterly Inflation Report — on which key decisions are made that affect millions of people.
Broadbent’s promotion must have seemed the most natural thing in the world to the Bank of England’s Canadian governor Mark Carney.

Carney, after all, is himself an Old Goldmanite and a member of the most exclusive club in world economic policy-making — much more influential than David Cameron’s kitchen cabinet of Old Etonians.
Carney spent the largest stretch of his career — from 1990 to 2003 — working for Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, New York and London.
Alumni: Bank of England Governor Mark Carney,  spent the longest stretch of his career working at Goldman Sachs. The chairman of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi is another former Goldman Sachs banker


The choice of Goldman bankers for senior roles at the Bank of England  is a novel development for an institution that has always frowned on any suggestions of dual loyalty or conflicts of interest.
When Gordon Brown was Chancellor (from 1997 to 2007), he steadfastly refused to appoint the person many regarded as the most talented economist of his generation, Gavyn Davies, as governor of the Bank of England. 

 The chairman of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, arguably the most powerful figure in European finance, is another former Goldman Sachs bankerBrown feared a political backlash because of Davies’s role as the millionaire chief global economist at Goldman Sachs, and the fact that his wife, Sue Nye, was a special assistant to the Chancellor.
However, despite 13 years in a variety of roles at Goldman, and a successful stint as governor of the Bank of Canada, Carney was given not only the Bank of England role but also the job of chairman of the Financial Stability Board.
This is the body established by the G20 committee of rich and emerging market nations to try to reform global banking — including the rapacious bonus culture — in the aftermath of the 2007-9 credit crunch.

Indeed, Old Goldmanites seem to be everywhere. When Broadbent and Carney meet fellow central bankers, there will be a number of familiar faces around the table. 
    
The chairman of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, who is credited with rescuing Euroland from total implosion with his promise to do ‘whatever it takes’ to save the euro, is another former Goldman Sachs banker.
Arguably, he is the most powerful figure in European finance, having forced Euroland interest rates down to rock-bottom levels and bought the government bonds of Europe’s struggling ‘Club Med’ economies before exchanging them for cash. He is now trying to tackle Europe’s near-bankrupt banking system.

The Goldman Sachs booth at the NYSE: The banks culture of ever-more complex securities and trades was at the core of the financial crisis
The Goldman Sachs booth at the NYSE: The banks culture of ever-more complex securities and trades was at the core of the financial crisis

In the U.S., there is the amiable Bill Dudley, the former head of U.S. economics at Goldman, who is now president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the operating arm of America’s central bank.
Goldman boss Lloyd Blankfein once explained to me that one of the advantages of paying Goldman Sachs’s bankers so lavishly — they sit at the top of the bankers’ pay league — was that the ‘partners’ can retire young and very rich, and then go off to jobs in the public service. 

There is, however, a deeply disturbing paradox in the fact that Goldman bankers are now effectively running the world’s monetary system.
The Goldman culture of creating ever-more complex securities and trades, coupled with absurdly high pay and bonuses as incentives for the bank’s workforce, were at the very core of the financial crisis that brought the world to the brink of economic collapse and led to a long period of painful austerity. 

None of these former Goldman economists and executives, who are now the overlords of the global economy, seems to have predicted the fact that the world was sitting on a financial time-bomb.
It seems very strange that when there are so many talented economic thinkers, Nobel prize winners and lifelong central bankers to be called upon, it is nearly always Goldmanites that carry off the plum jobs.
Allowing such a cultish group to control the levers of global finance shows, I would suggest, a worrying lack of imagination and judgment by the ruling class of politicians that appointed them.
The concentration of such huge economic power in the hands of a small cabal of economists and financiers, drawn from such a narrow pool of interests, is deeply unhealthy. 

However honourable the motives of this group, there remains a fear that when the next crisis comes — as it inevitably will — their concern to protect their cronies in the banking world will take precedence over their responsibility to look after the long-suffering public.

Jim DeMint: Nazi Bigots "R" US


Heritage Foundation Benghazi panel descends into Islamophobic freak show

With the help of some bigoted guests, Jim DeMint's right-wing think tank continues its descent toward rock bottom VIDEO


Heritage Foundation Benghazi panel descends into Islamophobic freak showJim DeMint (Credit: AP/Patrick Semansky)

Although its reputation for intellectual seriousness was previously overstated, those who worried that former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint’s ascension as chief of the Heritage Foundation would lead to the right-wing think tank’s disgrace are looking mighty prescient after a Monday afternoon panel on the Banghazi attack’s lingering “unanswered questions” devolved into a bigoted freak show.

When one considers the panelists involved, it’s unlikely the so-called discussion was ever going to go too well. Alongside straight-up crank and professional bigot Frank Gaffney, Heritage also invited ACT! for America’s Brigitte Gabriel (known for repeatedly describing Muslims as “barbarians“) and Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi’s Clare Lopez (who previously described the Obama administration as having “switched sides” in the war on terror). Leading the conversation was Chris Plante, a conservative talk radio host.

According to the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, while the panel rather quickly and predictably transitioned from vague expressions of concern about a Benghazi conspiracy to a more free-floating animus toward Islam and Muslims, things didn’t get really ugly until one audience member, an American University law student named Saba Ahmed, decided to push back against the panelists’ many ignorant and harmful assertions.

“We portray Islam and all Muslims as bad, but there’s 1.8 billion followers of Islam,” Ahmed reportedly told the panel. “We have 8 million-plus Muslim Americans in this country, and I don’t see them represented here.”


Copy and paste to browser for video:
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This was unacceptable. Gabriel was the first to attack, according to Milbank, responding that “180 million to 300 million” Muslims are “dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization” and that the “peaceful majority” of the world’s Muslims “were irrelevant” on September 11, 2001. Besides, Muslims are like Nazis, Gabriel argued: “Most Germans were peaceful,” she said, “yet the Nazis drove the agenda, and as a result, 60 million died.”

Gabriel then questioned Ahmed’s citizenship before telling her that “political correctness” of the kind she spouts should be kept “in the garbage” where it belongs. Ahmed was then asked “Where are the others speaking out?” but before she could explain why demanding a community of hundreds of millions have “others” who “speak out” against murder is ridiculous and disingenuous, the audience drowned her out with a standing ovation.

As the evening progressed, Plante implied Ambassador Chris Stevens’ real cause of death was being hidden, Gabriel suggested Stevens was secretly working on a weapons-swap between Libya and Syria, and Lopez joked about how journalists covering the attack are secretly friends with Islamist terrorists, with whom they were “sipping frappes … in juice bars.” One audience member even suggested that Gen. Carter Ham, then-commander of U.S. Africa Command, had been “placed under house arrest” so as to allow the attack to occur. Plante said he’d heard the same.

Monday, June 16, 2014

Misinformed USA: Why average Americans vote for Republicans

One can only wonder why average working class Americans would vote for a party that is so obvious in their bias towards the wealthy. It would make sense that someone in the top 1 percent of the income bracket would vote for the Republican party since they have the wealthiest American's best interest at heart. You could even make the case that highly religious Christians would vote for Republicans even though, at times, they vote against their own best economic interests. So the question remains, while scratching your head, why do working class Americans vote for Republican candidates?

Recent Tea Party Rally

I once sat down and spoke with an acquaintance of mine, trying to get a grip on what people are thinking about the future of our country. He said he voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 because, "we need a business person to get our debt down." I asked where he got his news and information from, and after trying to deflect from the question, the answer finally came. "I don't pay attention too much, but when I do, I watch Fox." Fox News is the primary source for information for millions of Americans across the country and that's where the problem starts.

Whether it's Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity or other right wing ideologues, Fox News is a tunnel vision information outlet with only one particular agenda that is being pushed through. Millions of Americans watch Fox News, listen to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Neal Boortz, Michael Savage and others while getting information from right wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. With big businesses and billionaire allies, the truth and facts in American have gone from a clear right and wrong, black and white situation to muffled shades of gray. It's not to say that Fox News, the Cato Institute and others like them totally lie because that would be too difficult to pull off. What these think tanks do, is take a fact and twist it to fit their own personal agenda, leaving out key information that would contradict with the platform they're trying to create.

A perfect example in describing the way groups like the Cato Institute operate is a report that came out by alternet.org. In the early 2000s, the Cato Institute released a report that suggested that families receiving welfare were making between $17,000 and $25,000 a year, but the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities countered that claim. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities showed that the average income for welfare recipients was below $9,000 a year, which is nearly $3,000 a year below the poverty line.

The misinformation also comes from another right wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation. In 2011, when Paul Ryan released the "Ryan" Republican budget, the Heritage Foundation claimed that unemployment would drop to 6.4% in 2012 and to 2.8% in 2022. A report released by the Washington Monthly pointed out that these claims were extremely exaggerated. The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, showed the errors of the Heritage Foundation's report and the director of the Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis, William Beach, was forced to walk backed the claims.

In 2009, the Heritage Foundation released ads attacking the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that was brought to congress that would give all employees the right to form a union without fear of being fired from their current job. Since the Heritage Foundation is bought and paid for by million and billionaire conservatives, the idea of having workers unite with more power and freedom threatens their control at the top. The ads released painted a false picture about the Employee Free Choice Act, claiming that unions will bully workers into joining them with an attempt to take money from the employee. According to the Huffington Post, the Heritage Foundation "frame(s) the EFCA issue based on bald-faced lies. Business-financed 'think tanks' like Heritage propagandize workers against their own interests in psychologically sophisticated ways, often pulling on their heartstrings and framing their anti-union stance as 'common sense.'"
Average Americans need to be more informed about what is going in the country, but also where to get their information. The argument isn't about holding a liberal or conservative ideology, it's about facts that are based on truth and not information based on twisted logic. Americans need to learn to dig a little deeper to find honest reporting, not just believe something that falls in their lap at the expense of a billionaire funded think tank or news organization.
(Updated: 2/20/2014)
Like what you've read? Have any questions or comments? If so, e-mail me at rsobelexaminer@gmail.com, Tweet me on Twitter at @liberalexaminer

Thursday, June 12, 2014

The French are right: tear up public debt – most of it is illegitimate anyway

Debt audits show that austerity is politically motivated to favour social elites. Is a new working-class internationalism in the air?

Occupy Wall Street's debt buying strikes at the heart of capitalism
Chile artist burns studetn debt 
 
Contracts for Chilean student loans worth $500m go up in flames – the 'imaginative auditing' of the artist Francisco Tapia, commonly known as Papas Fritas (Fried Potatoes). Photograph: David von Blohn/REX
 
As history has shown, France is capable of the best and the worst, and often in short periods of time.
On the day following Marine Le Pen's Front National victory in the European elections, however, France made a decisive contribution to the reinvention of a radical politics for the 21st century. On that day, the committee for a citizen's audit on the public debt issued a 30-page report on French public debt, its origins and evolution in the past decades. The report was written by a group of experts in public finances under the coordination of Michel Husson, one of France's finest critical economists. Its conclusion is straightforward: 60% of French public debt is illegitimate.

Anyone who has read a newspaper in recent years knows how important debt is to contemporary politics. As David Graeber among others has shown, we live in debtocracies, not democracies. Debt, rather than popular will, is the governing principle of our societies, through the devastating austerity policies implemented in the name of debt reduction. Debt was also a triggering cause of the most innovative social movements in recent years, the Occupy movement.

If it were shown that public debts were somehow illegitimate, that citizens had a right to demand a moratorium – and even the cancellation of part of these debts – the political implications would be huge. It is hard to think of an event that would transform social life as profoundly and rapidly as the emancipation of societies from the constraints of debt. And yet this is precisely what the French report aims to do.

The audit is part of a wider movement of popular debt audits in more than 18 countries. Ecuador and Brazil have had theirs, the former at the initiative of Rafael Correa's government, the latter organised by civil society. European social movements have also put in place debt audits, especially in countries harder hit by the sovereign debt crisis, such as Greece and Spain. In Tunisia, the post-revolutionary government declared the debt taken out during Ben Ali's dictatorship an "odious" debt: one that served to enrich the clique in power, rather than improving the living conditions of the people.
The report on French debt contains several key findings. Primarily, the rise in the state's debt in the past decades cannot be explained by an increase in public spending. The neoliberal argument in favour of austerity policies claims that debt is due to unreasonable public spending levels; that societies in general, and popular classes in particular, live above their means.

This is plain false. In the past 30 years, from 1978 to 2012 more precisely, French public spending has in fact decreased by two GDP points. What, then, explains the rise in public debt? First, a fall in the tax revenues of the state. Massive tax reductions for the wealthy and big corporations have been carried out since 1980. In line with the neoliberal mantra, the purpose of these reductions was to favour investment and employment. Well, unemployment is at its highest today, whereas tax revenues have decreased by five points of GDP.

The second factor is the increase in interest rates, especially in the 1990s. This increase favoured creditors and speculators, to the detriment of debtors. Instead of borrowing on financial markets at prohibitive interest rates, had the state financed itself by appealing to household savings and banks, and borrowed at historically normal rates, the public debt would be inferior to current levels by 29 GDP points.

Tax reductions for the wealthy and interest rates increases are political decisions. What the audit shows is that public deficits do not just grow naturally out of the normal course of social life. They are deliberately inflicted on society by the dominant classes, to legitimise austerity policies that will allow the transfer of value from the working classes to the wealthy ones.
French Indignants  
 
A sit-in called by Occupy France at La Défense business district in Paris. Photograph: Afp/AFP/Getty Images 
  A stunning finding of the report is that no one actually knows who holds the French debt. To finance its debt, the French state, like any other state, issues bonds, which are bought by a set of authorised banks. These banks then sell the bonds on the global financial markets. Who owns these titles is one of the world's best kept secrets. The state pays interests to the holders, so technically it could know who owns them. Yet a legally organised ignorance forbids the disclosure of the identity of the bond holders.

This deliberate organisation of ignorance – agnotology – in neoliberal economies intentionally renders the state powerless, even when it could have the means to know and act. This is what permits tax evasion in its various forms – which last year cost about €50bn to European societies, and €17bn to France alone.

Hence, the audit on the debt concludes, some 60% of the French public debt is illegitimate.
An illegitimate debt is one that grew in the service of private interests, and not the wellbeing of the people. Therefore the French people have a right to demand a moratorium on the payment of the debt, and the cancellation of at least part of it. There is precedent for this: in 2008 Ecuador declared 70% of its debt illegitimate.

The nascent global movement for debt audits may well contain the seeds of a new internationalism – an internationalism for today – in the working classes throughout the world. This is, among other things, a consequence of financialisation. Thus debt audits might provide a fertile ground for renewed forms of international mobilisations and solidarity.

This new internationalism could start with three easy steps.

1) Debt audits in all countries

The crucial point is to demonstrate, as the French audit did, that debt is a political construction, that it doesn't just happen to societies when they supposedly live above their means. This is what justifies calling it illegitimate, and may lead to cancellation procedures. Audits on private debts are also possible, as the Chilean artist Francisco Tapia has recently shown by auditing student loans in an imaginative way.

2) The disclosure of the identity of debt holders

A directory of creditors at national and international levels could be assembled. Not only would such a directory help fight tax evasion, it would also reveal that while the living conditions of the majority are worsening, a small group of individuals and financial institutions has consistently taken advantage of high levels of public indebtedness. Hence, it would reveal the political nature of debt.

3) The socialisation of the banking system

The state should cease to borrow on financial markets, instead financing itself through households and banks at reasonable and controllable interest rates. The banks themselves should be put under the supervision of citizens' committees, hence rendering the audit on the debt permanent. In short, debt should be democratised. This, of course, is the harder part, where elements of socialism are introduced at the very core of the system. Yet, to counter the tyranny of debt on every aspect of our lives, there is no alternative.
• This article was amended on 10 June to say that Greece and Spain had been "harder hit" by the sovereign debt crisis, not "hardly hit".

Roger Williams Biography: The Puritan Quaker of Rhode island

Roger Williams Biography

roger williams standingCHILDHOOD, YOUTH AND COLLEGE YEARS: Childhood in London, 1603-1617
Roger Williams was born in the Smithfield district of London sometime between the years 1603 and 1606, on a street called Long Lane. Nobody has ever found the records of his birth or of his parents' marriage, so we don't know the exact dates of either. The parish church where the records would be kept burned in 1666, during the Great London Fire. In different years during his life Roger Williams wrote that he was "about" so many years old but the ages he gave don't come out to one birth date. Between 1603 and 1606 is as close as we can get. (We don't know what he looked like, either. No portrait was painted of him during his life and no physical description written. Any picture you see of him is the product of somebody's imagination.)
It is more interesting to think of 1603 as the year when he was born because that was a dramatic year in English history. Queen Elizabeth I died and James I became King of England. Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII, was a Tudor. James was a Stuart. The English people loved Elizabeth, who reigned for forty-five years. While she was queen England became rich and powerful, and explored the New World. The middle class, mostly city merchants and country gentry, grew larger in numbers and became more influential. The scene was set for changes when the new king came to power but as it turned out the changes led to trouble and conflict. Roger Williams grew up in a time of political and religious disagreement. He was lucky to survive infancy and grow up at all, because 1603 was a year of plague in London. People died by the thousands, and those who were able fled the city for the infection-free countryside. King James even asked Londoners to stay away from his coronation because so many had died the week before.
Roger Williams was a true city boy. London had a population of 210,000 in 1603. His neighborhood was one of busy, crowded, narrow streets. The buildings were a mixture of tenements, warehouses and taverns. Shops and homes shared the same wooden buildings. There were still open fields within walking distance of the neighborhood, but young Roger may have gone more often to the docks for excitement. There he could see tall sailing ships, listen to sailors talk, and watch cargoes from faraway places being unloaded. When he was thirteen the Indian princess Pocahontas, with her husband John Rolfe and their son, came to England from Virginia. Around the same time everyone was talking about John Smith's explorations, his maps of America and his writings.
Roger Williams' father was a Merchant Tailor, which did not then mean somebody who made clothes but a shopkeeper who sold imported cloth. The father became somewhat prosperous in his business but the best Roger could hope for in his station in life was to train as a clerk or "scrivener" (something like a secretary) and perhaps go into business himself. His education would have ended after grammar school.
PREPARATORY SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 1617-1627
As a young teenager in 1617 Roger Williams met Sir Edward Coke, a powerful lawyer who had been Chief Justice of the King's Bench. This meeting changed his life. They probably met when Sir Edward noticed Roger taking shorthand notes of the sermon in church. (Roger Williams did learn shorthand when he was very young, an unusual accomplishment at such an early age.) Sir Edward hired Roger to take shorthand for him, and a close relationship developed between them. In 1621 Sir Edward got Roger Williams admitted to the Charterhouse School, set up by a rich man especially for boys who could not afford to pay private school fees. This school prepared Roger Williams for college. In 1623 he was admitted to Cambridge University, and received his Bachelor's Degree in 1627. His university fees were paid at least partly by scholarship, but he may also have gotten some help from Sir Edward.
Roger Williams learned French and Dutch as a child, from refugees living in his neighborhood. By the time he graduated from Cambridge he could read and speak Latin, Greek and Hebrew and had also studied grammar, logic and rhetoric. All of this shows up in his writings.
PURITANISM, GRADUATE SCHOOL, AND CHAPLAIN'S POST IN ESSEX 1627-1620
The Anglican church, the national church of England, was established by Henry VIII in 1534. Before that time England was a Catholic country. All of European Christianity was Catholic until the Protestant Reformation, a religious revolution that took place in Western Europe in the sixteenth century. The Reformation was based on objections to doctrines and practices in the medieval Roman Catholic Church. Two branches of Protestantism grew up, one in Germany and Scandinavia following Martin Luther, and one in other European countries following the teachings of John Calvin. The Anglican church, when established by Henry VIII, created a third Protestant branch. The Puritans, a seventeenth century movement within Protestantism, called for even greater reforms to return the churches to the early Christianity described in the New Testament. They wanted to "purify" the church, and got their name from that goal. English Puritans attacked the Anglican church for keeping Catholic rituals in the service and for keeping the same order of bishops and priests, only without the Pope.
Most English Puritans were members of the middle class that had become important while Elizabeth was queen. These issues about the church were matters of life and death to them—they lived in a time when religion was a major part of life. Almost everybody believed strongly in heaven and hell, and thought Christ would return to earth, perhaps in their own lifetime. These same Puritans had also become more powerful in government, and were well represented in Parliament (the English law-making body). They wanted to pass laws enforcing Puritan standards but King James took a strong Anglican stand. After James died in 1625 King Charles I was even more opposed to the Puritans. William Laud, appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Charles I, was the most powerful person in the Anglican church. He began a program of persecuting Puritans. By the late 1620's (when Roger Williams was at Cambridge), they were in danger of losing their political offices, their professional status and even their lands. It was more than just a religious issue; it was political because it concerned who would have power in the country. Parliament, now with many Puritan members, tried to limit the king's power and to enforce civil liberties. This struggle between the king and Parliament ended up in the 1640's as the English Civil War.
Chaplain in Essex
Roger Williams stayed in graduate school at Cambridge for a year and a half, training to be a minister. At some time during these months he became so committed to Puritan ideas that his conscience would not let him become an Anglican minister. Roger left Cambridge early in 1629 without finishing his graduate degree, to take a position as family chaplain in a private household in Essex County. It was common for well-to-do families, especially in the country, to have their own religious advisor. Essex was the home of many prominent Puritans and the place where most of the Puritan migration to America was organized in 1629. There Roger met Puritan leaders and ministers, some of whom he would later know in Massachusetts and others who later became powerful as England's rulers during the Civil War.
In December 1629 Roger Williams married Mary Barnard. They left England together for Massachusetts in December 1630. Roger was then twenty-seven and his wife was twenty-one. By that time Sir Edward Coke had become a member of Parliament and was a great fighter there for civil liberty. Roger Williams, meanwhile, had publicly expressed his own Puritan views. Sir Edward, a staunch Anglican and anti-Puritan, broke off their long and close relationship.
EARLY YEARS IN AMERICA: CONFLICT WITH MASSACHUSETTS PURITANS 1631-1635 Boston
As soon as Roger Williams arrived in Boston he was offered the post of teacher in the church there. (New England Puritan churches divided the minister's role between two people, one called the pastor and one the teacher.) To their surprise he turned the job down because the Boston church was not "separated" formally from the Anglican church, and was therefore not pure enough for his beliefs. From this time on Roger Williams forthrightly expressed his beliefs regardless of what it cost him in position, privilege or money. The Massachusetts leaders did not immediately see Roger Williams as a major threat to the community, but knowing now that he had "radical" ideas they watched him. When the town of Salem offered him the teacher position in their church the Boston leaders wrote the town a warning against hiring him. Williams moved to Plymouth, which was not then a part of the Massachusetts colony. It also had a Separatist church—that is, one that had completely withdrawn from the Anglican church.
Plymouth
Roger Williams was the assistant to the pastor in Plymouth until 1633. During this period he worked closely with the Indians, living with them and getting to know their language and their customs. It was one of his goals at this time to convert the Indians to Christianity, although some years later he gave up the idea. The native Londoner, Cambridge University graduate, chaplain to a titled family, now fell under the influence of the wilderness. It is almost impossible for us to imagine the changes this meant, but these years and the wilderness experience clearly affected how Roger Williams thought and lived for the rest of his life.
Salem
In 1633 Roger Williams moved to Salem and in 1634 did become teacher in the church. At this point troubles began between him and the Massachusetts government that led to his banishment from the colony in 1635. Roger Williams said what he thought, and what he now thought was a threat to authority in Massachusetts.
First, he was firmly set in his Separatist beliefs. He said that the Anglican church was corrupt; Massachusetts Puritans should publicly withdraw from it, denounce it, and have nothing to do with it. But these same Massachusetts Puritans hoped deep down that someday their party would come to power in England. The last thing they wanted was to separate from a church they might go back to and run on their own terms.
Second, he said that the magistrates (lawmakers and judges) could not punish offenses against the first four of the Ten Commandments. Massachusetts was then using the Bible as its lawbook. The governor and assistants regularly consulted the ministers for advice on legal and political matters. Church and state worked hand in hand in Massachusetts—and Roger Williams argued that they should be separate.
Third, Roger Williams claimed that the patent from King Charles by which the English held and governed lands in New England was invalid because England claimed the lands by "right of discovery" instead of buying them from the Indians. The Massachusetts leaders saw control of the colony as crucial to their own religious and political interests. They were already worried about a threat from the king to limit or remove their patent.
Fourth, Roger Williams objected to the use of an oath in taking evidence or swearing allegiance to the commonwealth. (Massachusetts had just adopted a residents' loyalty oath.) He said the oath, swearing before God, is an act of worship and should not be used in a non-sacred way.
Fifth, when Roger Williams was called to account by the Massachusetts authorities for these positions, the Salem church protested his threatened banishment. They wrote to other churches in the colony, but their letters were suppressed. Roger Williams and another church elder then wrote to Boston claiming their right to communicate directly with the membership of other local churches, a demand for democracy in the churches.
Banishment
Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts in October 1635. His original idea was not to found another colony himself, but to live among the Indians and preach to them. Roger Williams had earned his living in Plymouth by farming and by trading with the Indians. Ministers had to till the soil and do hard physical labor like everybody else in the primitive new world conditions. Several people from the Salem church approached him with the idea of leaving with him, though, and so the idea of a colony was formed. They planned to search for a site in the spring. Williams himself left Salem in haste in January to escape deportation to England. He survived the winter by finding shelter with the Indians. When his companions joined him they moved onto a piece of land that Roger Williams had bought from Massasoit, the Wampanoag chieftain, while he was still living in Plymouth. It turned out that the land lay within Plymouth's territory, and the authorities asked them to leave. So they paddled across the Seekonk River and had their famous meeting with the Narragansett at Slate Rock, a spot now at the corner of Williams and Gano Streets on the east side of Providence. Williams' first word of greeting to the little group of Indians he saw on the opposite shore was "What Cheer, Netop?" Guided by Indian suggestion, they continued from there to the site where Providence was founded at a spring that is now part of a national park along a portion of North Main Street.
EARLY YEARS IN RHODE ISLAND 1636-1643
Roger Williams and his few companions founded Providence in Narragansett Indian country with no authority of any kind from England. But in keeping with Roger Williams' principles, they bought the land from the Indians. His friendship with the sachems Canonicus and Miantonomu made this possible. He was later to say that Rhode Island was purchased "by love"—the Indians would not have sold to anybody else, even at a much higher price. When their families arrived, the original colony included eight households with a total of about thirty-two people.
The Colonial Covenant
Democracy is not a word many seventeenth century people used, or a concept they held up to admire. But it is the closest term we have for the way Providence was set up. They spoke of a government based on "mutual consent" which meant by majority vote of the male heads of households. The settlers formally incorporated Providence as a town in 1637. It is worth reading in full the covenant of incorporation to get an idea of how the small group saw their colony.
"We whose names are hereunder, desirous to inhabit in the town of Providence, do promise to submit ourselves in active or passive obedience to all such orders or agreements as shall be made for public good of the body in an orderly way, by the major consent of the present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated together into a town fellowship, and others whom they shall admit unto them, only in civil things”. This is not a democracy as we understand it. Only male heads of households could vote. There was also the question of how to admit other people to the colony and who should have the power to admit or reject them. Roger Williams bought the land in his own name, but from the beginning he granted admittance to anybody who came along. Later, he gave up sole proprietorship of the land in favor of group title to it. The original colonists each had a house lot, farmland, and grazing meadow. The rest of the land was held in common by the town. Roger Williams wanted newcomers to get equal shares in it that would be the same as those the first settlers got, but this became a source of conflict because not all the original colonists shared his ideals.
One thing never in question from the first day was religious freedom and church-state separation. Rhode Island never set up a state church as Massachusetts had done with Congregationalism. Rhode Island alone let people of all religions move in and stay, and the government had power to compel obedience "only in civil things." This difference is visually evident even in our own day. Towns in other New England states all have a village green with a Congregational church at the head of it—a charming sight, but a relic of religious conformity. Rhode Island towns don't have village greens because they were not laid out with the church as a central focus. (See map of early Providence.)
Events of Rhode Island's Early Years
Although the Massachusetts leaders thought Roger Williams was too dangerous to live among them, they called on him to protect their safety and to do diplomatic service with the Indians. It was no secret that he was a good friend of the Indians and a very good negotiator in all kinds of situations. He did this for years, serving Massachusetts well in spite of the hard treatment they had given him—even in spite of their frequent attempts to claim Rhode Island lands.
His first mission probably saved the Massachusetts colony altogether. He talked the Narragansett out of joining in a treaty with the Pequot Indians against the English. As a result, when the Pequot War broke out in 1637 Massachusetts destroyed the Indians rather than the other way around. Roger Williams was almost the only person to protest the wholesale slaughter of the Pequot and the enslavement of captives. In spite of this, he was the key negotiator in the treaty that distributed the Pequot captives among the Narragansetts and Mohegans who fought on the side of the English. Over the years Roger Williams mediated cases of English and Indians involved in murders, thefts, plots, and jurisdictional disputes.
1637 was also the year that Anne Hutchinson was banished from Massachusetts. Her family and others leaving with her came to Aquidneck Island, where Roger Williams arranged for them to buy land from the Indians. They founded the town now known as Portsmouth. In the midst of all his negotiations for others, Roger Williams had to build his house, work his farm, and try to support his family. He also established an Indian trading post at Wickford.
In 1638 Roger Williams became a Baptist, but not for long. All his life he searched Scripture and his conscience for truth in religion. It was a search in which he could not compromise. Once he was convinced of an idea, he acted on it in his own religious practice. With other Rhode Islanders he founded the first Baptist church in America in 1639. He left it within a year, when he decided that he could not belong to any church because none of them could present good enough proof of uninterrupted succession from Christ's original apostles. He later became a Seeker, the name given to a sect that began in England. Seekers denied that there were any true churches and urged people to worship God "alone, without any church at all."
From 1638 on Rhode Island struggled to remain independent. Differences over control of land led some colonists in Warwick to offer to join Massachusetts so that they could continue to own the land. This group was in conflict with Samuel Gorton, who also settled in Warwick. They put the whole colony in jeopardy by their actions. Roger Williams was sent to England in 1643 to try to get an English patent officially recognizing Rhode Island and confirming its boundaries. He sailed from New Amsterdam (New York after the English took it over from the Dutch in 1664) because as a banished person he wasn't allowed in Massachusetts.
WRITER AND DIPLOMAT 1643-1645
While Roger Williams was on board ship he wrote his first book, A Key Into the Language of America. It is a dictionary or phrase book of the Indian language, but also much more. It explains Indian culture and customs and features poetry by the author. The knowledge and understanding contained in this book show his familiarity with the Indians, and his ability to accept their culture as having its own worth. This book was published in England and its popularity made Roger Williams well known there. While he was in England he also published several books promoting separation of church and state, opposing a national church as a violation of individual conscience, and saying that the teachings of Jesus do not allow persecution for any religious belief. One of the books, The Bloody Tenent of Persecution, was publicly burned for its radical ideas of "tolerating all sorts of religion." By the time the burning took place, however, Roger had left England and was on board ship returning to Rhode Island.
When Roger Williams arrived in London in 1643, the issues that led to civil war were being fought in Parliament. Soon they would be fought on the battlefield. Roger Williams still had powerful friends in England, especially now that the Puritan party was on the rise. Ten months after he arrived, on March 14, 1644, he received a charter that established a land grant to Rhode Island and gave the colony the right to rule itself by a civil government of its own choice. He arrived back in Providence in September to a triumphant welcome from a fleet of fourteen canoes filled with his friends and neighbors.
OFFICER, TRADER, AND PREACHER 1644-1651
The next few years were a time of unrest during which Roger Williams headed the town of Providence as its chief officer. It took until 1647 for the four Rhode Island towns of Providence, Newport, Portsmouth and Warwick to agree to the terms of the charter and to join together officially. There was also a series of Indian disorders requiring his diplomatic services. When these tasks were finished Roger Williams left public life for his trading post at Wickford and his farm in Providence. He also spent much time preaching to the Indians at Wickford.
By this time Roger Williams had six children. He seems from his letters to be a loving husband and father even though his life took him away from his family often and for long periods. We do not know very much about Mary Williams except that she certainly had to manage by herself a great deal. There is a clue to Roger Williams' ideas about bringing up children in his description of Indian children. He considered them totally spoiled and on one occasion remarked to his Indian host that he would not allow such behavior from his own children.
RETURN TO COLONIAL SERVICE IN ENGLAND 1651-1654
Even after Providence, Portsmouth, Newport and Warwick agreed to join as one colony under the patent, political power struggles went on. William Coddington, a former supporter of Anne Hutchinson who had become governor of Newport, tried to separate Aquidneck from the rest of the colony and get himself declared governor of Aquidneck for life. He went to England with a false claim that he had personally bought Aquidneck from the Indians. Once again Roger Williams went to England, this time with Dr. John Clarke and William Dyer, both of whom had also come to Rhode Island with Anne Hutchinson. They both had been punished in Massachusetts for expressing their religious beliefs, and Dr. Clarke wrote an account of it that led to strong feelings in England against Massachusetts. Roger Williams, too, published more pamphlets in England discussing his religious and political ideas. One of the strong beliefs he wrote about was his opposition to ministers being paid for their work. He called this pamphlet The Hireling Ministry None of Christ's and argued in it that a minister could not preach the true word of Christ if he took money for doing so. A paid minister's motivation, Roger said, came from the income and not from the inspiration of the Bible. The argument was influential because in both old and New England everybody's taxes went to support the official church and its ministers, whether the taxpayer was a member of that church or not—except, of course, in Rhode Island.
During this time Roger Williams also wrote in support of allowing Jews to enter England and live there in peace. This was a new idea in England. A couple of years after Roger Williams returned to Rhode Island the first Jews arrived there and were admitted. The first Quakers came about the same time. As with the Jews, Rhode Island was the only New England colony that would take in the Quakers.
Roger Williams and John Clarke were able to settle their business and defeat Coddington's case by October 1652. They had proof that Roger Williams had signed the Aquidneck deed and that the majority of Aquidneck voters opposed Coddington and wanted his commission revoked. It helped that Roger Williams' friend, Sir Harry Vane, was President of the Council of State. The Council confirmed the 1644 charter. However, Williams and Clarke had been assigned to work for a new charter, because Massachusetts, Connecticut and Plymouth were all pressing claims to parts of Rhode Island territory. This would take a long time, especially since the Puritans in Parliament split among themselves. They had deposed, defeated and beheaded King Charles I but they could not govern England in peace as a Puritan commonwealth. In 1653 Oliver Cromwell, the leading Puritan general who became Lord Protector of England after the king was defeated, dissolved Parliament just as the king had done. Roger Williams' friends were on the losing side in this power shuffle. He decided to return to Rhode Island where political chaos still threatened the colony's survival. He had already been asked to return and become governor (or president of the colony as the title was then). He had put off the request to complete his business in England. But now he left John Clarke behind to work for a new charter and accepted the job at home. It took Dr. Clarke until 1663 to get the charter. By that time the Puritan government had been overthrown altogether and the English returned to monarchy under King Charles II. Rhode Island ended up with a royal charter, but one that guaranteed religious freedom.
COLONIAL PRESIDENT AND PEACEMAKER 1654-1657
Roger Williams served three terms as Rhode Island's president, from 1654 to 1657. During these years he traveled back and forth between Providence, Warwick and Aquidneck Island trying to get the colonists to resolve differences and find the strength in unity they needed to survive as an independent colony. Indian uprisings continued during these years. By the time he left office, Rhode Island was a unified colony. In 1657 Roger Williams was about fifty-four years old, and Rhode Island had reached the traditional age of majority—twenty-one.
THE LAST QUARTER CENTURY 1658-1683
The first years of Rhode Island's life were Roger Williams' prime of life years. He spent those years in ceaseless, varied activity: religion, politics, diplomacy, local government, writing, farming, trading and studying. He devoted himself to learning everything he could, asking his friends to send him books on a variety of subjects such as geography. He was equally busy in body and mind, thinking through the ideas and the words of Scripture while walking from Boston to Providence (he was finally allowed to enter Massachusetts when he traveled to and from England in the 1650's), while crossing the Atlantic, or while rowing across Narragansett Bay. The classical learning of his schooldays also stayed with him all his life.
Roger Williams continued active service to the town of Providence and to the colony of Rhode Island until the very last years of his life. In 1675 the tragic Indian war known as King Philip's War took place. When the war began, both the English and the Indians in Rhode Island were neutral; but the Narragansett gave shelter to women and children of the Wampanoags, who were fighting against Massachusetts. Because of this English troops from Massachusetts and Connecticut invaded Rhode Island and attacked the Narragansett at their shelter for the Wampanoag in North Kingstown. This is the battle known as the Great Swamp Fight. The English won at heavy cost, but the Narragansett suffered even more terrible casualties. In revenge they attacked and burned Rhode Island towns, killing many people. Providence had evacuated most of its population to safety on Aquidneck Island. Roger Williams and twenty-six other men stayed behind in fortified houses to defend the town. Roger Williams parleyed with the Indians when they came, but although they would not hurt him they still burned the town, his own house included.
After the war ended Roger Williams and his wife had to be supported by their son, with whom they lived. Roger Williams continued in various official jobs for the town and took part in organizing its rebuilding. He was lame and crippled in his later years, with aches and pains that often laid him low. But he never refused a call to service as long as he could stand and drag himself around. If we take "that wonderful year, 1603" as the date of his birth, he was eighty when he died in poverty in 1683. According to the town records, he was honored at his funeral with a parade through the town and a militia salute over his grave.
Roger Williams lived simply, with his service to the state its own reward. In his lifetime he knew no fame or wealth. The only record we have of public appreciation during his lifetime is the welcome he received when he returned to Providence with the patent from Parliament in 1644. He did know the love of family and friends, along with the loneliness and condemnation that came because he followed his ideas to the end. His children honored and protected him in his old age, never complaining or caring that their father took a path that left them without inheritance, even though Roger Williams could have chosen one that led to comfort. To do that, however, he would have had to choose conformity as well; and that is one of the few things Roger Williams would list as impossible.
SUMMARY OF ROGER WILLIAMS' MAJOR IDEAS
1. Separation of Church and State
Roger Williams is most closely associated in people's minds with the concepts of religious freedom and toleration, and with what we have come to call separation of church and state: that there be no officially recognized or mandated form of religious worship, no state-sanctioned church, and no financial support of any religious body with public funds. No particular religious point of view should be expressed as public policy in legislation. All religions should be equally free to operate without governmental limit or interference. No individual should be persecuted or penalized for a religious belief or expression. Government should deal strictly with civil affairs, and each church should deal exclusively with religious matters.
Roger Williams espoused all these precepts but it is important to note that the source of his concerns was itself religious. The freedom he cherished most was, in the oft repeated phrase, "soul liberty." Although he addressed himself to a number of secular issues in his various political roles, his advocacy of church-state separation sprang from a concern for the purity of the church itself, not for the civil rights of the populace. He was searching for a pure and uncorrupted path in the service of God and towards salvation. He felt that the church—and religion--would be contaminated by contact with worldly affairs; the church should deal only with the affairs of God. Regardless of his thinking, its effect in colonial Rhode Island was a kind of freedom unknown elsewhere. Religious persecution was endemic in Europe in his day, and in Massachusetts the state joined with the church to banish dissenters within their own flock, to jail, whip and banish Baptists and Quakers, to prohibit entry to Jews, and ultimately to hang Quakers who came back once too often.
2. Individual Rights
In Roger Williams' mind this was a corollary to church-state separation and religious freedom. He felt that nobody should be in danger of punishment or hardship "for conscience' sake." In contrast to Massachusetts, Roger Williams advocated tolerance of error in the interest of freedom of conscience. He held that God reserved unto Himself the prerogative of calling sinners to account for religious error, and that this judgment would take place after death. He believed, based on his reading of Scripture, that Christ expressly forbade persecution of any individual because of his or her religious beliefs.
3. Religious Toleration/Liberty of Conscience
This principle follows naturally upon the ideas that nobody should be persecuted for religious beliefs and the state should not meddle in or regulate religion. Roger Williams supported admittance to Rhode Island of people of all faiths, not just all Christian faiths. This does not mean that he accepted all religious ideas as having merit. He was vehemently opposed to the Quakers' beliefs, for example, and considered the Indians' religion barbaric. Nevertheless he contended that it was not the province of any human being to pass judgment on religious error. (Apparently debating religious issues in the most denunciatory terms, as he did with a group of Quakers, did not count as judgment.) The phrase "liberty of conscience" reflects his attitude more than religious toleration. The latter suggests religions coexisting by permission of the state, and Roger Williams felt that people of all religions should be able to practice their faith in peace without having to seek government permission. He even favored extending this freedom to Catholics, whose religion he despised above all as riddled with corruption. If Catholics ever came to Rhode Island, he wrote, they would have to be admitted and left in peace to worship as all others were.
4. Government by Mutual Consent of the Governed
Roger Williams believed, as did Puritans in general, that government originates in an agreement between rulers and people. In this view, government is indeed an ordinance of God established to hold in check "evil propensities of fallen man." The rulers are in fact God's agents but they do not get their power directly from God. Authority comes from God to the people, and they pass it to the rulers through a covenant. Roger Williams supported liberty of conscience for women (see reference to the Verin case in notes on the biography) but apparently never thought of woman suffrage.
5. Equality of Participation in Government
This position can be inferred from the way Rhode Island was run in Roger Williams' day. It was in effect a democracy of the voters. Although suffrage was limited to male landholders (freemen) in a system typical of the seventeenth century, Roger Williams advocated broadening the voting populace as much as possible by making land readily available on an equal basis to original settlers and newcomers alike. He also favored land distribution to single men as well as heads of households. In advocating this kind of land arrangement Roger Williams differed from the policies of other New England colonies where the original landholders limited suffrage through strict control of distribution and where only Congregational church members could vote. Roger Williams also supported what we would call equality of opportunity— everybody gets land, in those days the basis of wealth and power. In Massachusetts, besides applying a religious test to voting rights the original colonial officials voted themselves huge grants of land. In Rhode Island, with no religious test for anything, Quaker freemen were numerous enough with the support of one or two splinter groups to gain control of the colonial government in a 1670's election. (Rhode Island was not admired in other colonies for its tolerant practices. A group of New Amsterdam ministers, refusing entry to a shipload of Quakers, commented in 1657, "We suppose they went to Rhode Island, for that is the receptacle of all sorts of riff-raff people and is nothing less than the sewer...of New England. All the cranks of New England retire thither...They are not tolerated...in any other place.")
6. Pacifism or Non-violence
Roger Williams was opposed to the use of force, also on the basis that it was un-Christian. He said that Christ does not rule by the sword. Therefore no government should try to force its will on another through war, and no government can claim, in effect, "God is on our side." God is involved only in religious, not temporal affairs. Williams felt that all governments instituted by human beings were equal, should not judge each other, and should deal with each other peaceably in worldly affairs, such as trade. God approved of government but He did not favor one people or one kind of government over another. Laws and governments would vary as needs and circumstances of different people varied, and it was therefore wrong for any government to demand that another conform to its own standards. He applied this principle to his dealings with the Indians, approaching them on equal terms in spite of despising their religion and finding many of their customs barbarous. He acknowledged each tribe as a people and its government as valid and legal as English government. However, Roger Williams did not completely rule out war in self-defense. He supported the Pequot War in 1637 because he felt that the Pequots were clearly the aggressors. He opposed a proposed punitive expedition against the Niantic in 1640, writing to Governor Winthrop that "I...doubt whether any other use of war and arms be lawful to the professors of the Lord Jesus, but in execution of justice upon malefactors at home: or preserving of life and lives in defensive war, as was upon the Pequots... .Isai 2 Mic 4." (Note the Scriptural citations.)
Roger Williams believed that the purpose of government is to protect the bodies and goods of the people. In this light, to wage aggressive war is destructive of both, but to fight in defense of life and property when attacked is permissible.
7. Scope of Government in Issues of Morality and Public Welfare
Although Roger Williams denied the state's right to interfere in any way with religious freedom, he supported the state's right to enforce a community code of morality through the rule of law, and he believed that code should be based on the fifth through tenth of the Ten Commandments. He felt that the state should not address the first four commandments, as they related to purely religious matters. He gave the state wide leeway in controlling behavior that threatened the public safety. He included quarreling, disobedience, uncleanness and lasciviousness in his list of threatening behavior along with murder and theft. He thought that if Government paid due respect to people's consciences it could regulate morality without infringing on religious freedom. He believed it the duty of the civil magistrate to punish actions against public safety and welfare even if those actions were taken on the basis of conscience. He gave examples such as human sacrifice, practiced for conscience sake in Mexico and Peru (this example also shows once again how well informed and well read he was in his obscure New England "sewer"). He also gave such examples as the protection of chastity, giving the government the right to prohibit prostitution, censor books, prescribe proper dress and use the "civil sword" to cut off "the monstrous hair of women upon the heads of some men." Quaker men, for example, wore their hair long as part of their religious ordinances. Roger Williams did not specifically say so, but this logic suggests he would have supported punishing Quakers who were led by the inner light to go naked in public. Roger Williams supported compulsory militia service in Rhode Island when war threatened in the 1670's and prosecuted pacifist dissenters from military service.
8. Racial Equality
Roger Williams believed that all human beings were equal in the eyes of God. He carried out this belief throughout his life in his dealings with the Indians. His own words say it best. "Nature knows no difference between Europe and Americans in blood, birth, bodies etc. God having of one blood made all mankind... " That statement, and the following poem are from the Key Into the Language of America.
"Boast not, proud English, of thy birth and blood,
Thy brother Indian is by birth as good. Of one blood God made him, and thee and all. As wise, as fair, as strong, as personal.
By nature wrath's his portion, thine no more
Till Grace his soul and thine in Christ restore.
Make sure thy second birth, else shalt thou see
Heaven open to Indians wild, but shut to thee."
Source: The Legacy of Roger Williams Study Guide: A Project Commemorating the Tercentenary of His Death, sponsored by the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities, 1983.