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Caesar's wife must be above suspicion, but Trump's transition team and ultimately cabinet, seems rife with conflicts of ignorance. The Intercept reports that:
Palantir Technologies, the data mining company co-founded by billionaire and Trump transition advisor Peter Thiel, will likely assist the Trump Administration in its efforts to track and collect intelligence on immigrants, according to a review of public records by The Intercept. Since 2011, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's Office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) has paid Palantir tens of millions of dollars to help construct and operate a complex intelligence system called FALCON, which allows ICE to store, search, and analyze troves of data that include family relationships, employment information, immigration history, criminal records, and home and work addresses.
I guess this is what happens when you elect a businessman to political office: they run it like a business.
Working closely with a President-elect who has pledged to dramatically expand ICE, Thiel's varied connections to the immigration agency place him in a position to potentially benefit financially from a deportation campaign that carries highly personal stakes for millions of Americans.
They always say: you have nothing to worry about, if you have nothing to hide.
Palantir, which is backed by the CIA's venture capital arm, did not respond to a request for comment regarding its ICE contracts and concerns over potential conflicts of interest. Peter Thiel spokesperson Jeremiah Hall declined to comment on a list of emailed queries, including a question asking whether Thiel has yet signed the Trump transition ethics agreement.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday December 14 2016, @05:21PM
To summarize - it was ALL ABOUT the freed slaves, and their children.
http://sageamericanhistory.net/reconstruction/reconstruction.html [sageamericanhistory.net]
The Battle Lines Are Drawn. The fact that President Johnson was a Democrat, placed on the National Union party ticket in 1864 by President Lincoln in order to balance the team, did not help. His demeanor often left much to be desired as well. (He had been drunk during President Lincoln's second inaugural celebration.) Since Congress was not in session when the war ended, Johnson proceeded to carry out what he honestly believed was Lincoln's policy. Radical leaders still in Washington visited Johnson shortly after the war ended and came away satisfied that he would do things properly.
President Johnson issued a proclamation of amnesty on May 29, 1865, citing Lincoln’s original attempts at reconstruction as background. (See Appendix.) Exceptions to the blanket amnesty were made for those who had held prior federal office and later occupied positions in the Confederate government, but those persons would be dealt with by “special application” to the President for the sake of “the peace and dignity of the United States.” Over the course of the summer of 1865, President Johnson dispensed pardons liberally to many former high-ranking confederates. Johnson apparently took pleasure at the spectacle of former Southern aristocrats, some of whom had previously scorned him, having to plead their case before him.
By the time Congress returned on December 4, 1865, President Johnson was satisfied that reconstruction had been completed. The Radical Republicans who dominated Congress were not so sure. If the president asserted that the former Confederate states had been readmitted, however, how was Congress to assert its will? The answer lay in the Constitution, which states in Article I that, “Each house shall be the judge of the … qualifications of its own members.” When Southern legislators returned to Washington in December, 1865, they were turned away. In the first place, some of the newly-elected Congressmen had served as officers in the Confederate armies, and they belonged to the opposition Democratic Party. Furthermore, Republicans feared that they would lose control of Congress because the 3/5 rule for counting slaves was gone as a result of the Thirteenth Amendment—they would henceforth all be counted. By refusing to seat their congressional delegations, Congress effectively denied the former Confederate states readmission to the Union.
Nevertheless, President Johnson declared on December 6 that the Union was restored, which angered the Republicans, who then set out their own plan for reconstruction, quite different from that proposed by the president. In February, 1866, a new Freedmen’s Bureau Bill was passed to counteract the Black Codes. Johnson vetoed the bill, further angering the Radicals, and his veto was quickly overridden. In March Congress passed the Trumbull Civil Rights Act, which was designed to counter the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case by granting blacks citizenship. The act affirmed the right of freedmen to make contracts, sue, give evidence and to buy, lease and convey personal and real property. The act excluded state statutes on segregation, but did not provide for public accommodations for blacks. Johnson again vetoed the bill on constitutional grounds and also on the grounds that Southern Congressmen had been absent. Again, he was overridden.
The Fourteenth Amendment. Johnson's vetoes infuriated the radical leaders. In June they passed the Fourteenth Amendment because they feared that the Trumbull Civil Rights Act might be declared unconstitutional. Section 1 of the Amendment states:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment was eventually made a condition for states to be readmitted to the Union. The radicals continued to uphold their exclusion of Southern Congressmen on grounds that by excluding blacks from the political process, the Southern governments were not republican in form, which constituted a violation of the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4.
Every Southern state legislature except that of Tennessee refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, they persisted in applying Black Codes to the freedmen and denying them voting and other rights. Mistakenly thinking that the radical approach to reconstruction was out of tune with Northern sentiment, the South decided to wait things out, pending the results of the 1866 congressional elections.
Further,
The Fifteenth Amendment. In 1869 Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which stated that, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The amendment was finally ratified in 1870, and well over half a million black names were added to the voter rolls during the 1870s. The Force Acts (see below) were further attempts to suppress terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, which had become strong enough to seize political control of some Southern states.
Although the Fifteenth Amendment was meant to ensure voting rights for all males, such devices as poll taxes and literacy tests were used to subvert the purpose of the amendment. Poll taxes had to be paid two years in advance, and the financial burden was stiff for blacks. (Poor whites could procure election “loans” to enable them to vote.) Literacy tests were used to restrict blacks, and alternatives such a passing a test on the Constitution were often rigged in favor of whites. By the turn of the century, as a result of such things as amended state constitutions, grandfather clauses and gerrymandering, black voting in the South had been reduced to a fraction of its former numbers. By 1910 few blacks could vote in parts of the South; thus, a vast contrast existed between the earlier goals of the abolitionists and the reality of everyday life for freedmen in the South. This condition persisted until the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.
Further reading here on the EXCLUSION OF non-black people:
http://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/617 [nativeamericannetroots.net]
The 14th Amendment and American Indians
Posted on August 4, 2010 by Ojibwa
( – promoted by navajo)
There has been a lot of talk recently by politicians, reporters, pundits, legal scholars, and others about the Fourteenth Amendment and citizenship. There is, as usual, a great lack of awareness of what this amendment has meant to American Indians.
Adopted in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution states that:
“all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
The Amendment was intended to give citizenship to the African-American former slaves and not to Indians. Government agencies (the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of the Interior), and the courts (state, federal, and, ultimately, the Supreme Court) consistently held that the Fourteenth Amendment did not confer citizenship on Indians. Under the Constitution, and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution, Indian tribes are classified as “domestic dependent nations,” and therefore, Indians were tribal citizenships, not American citizens.
In 1870, the Senate Judicial Committee inquired into the effect of the Fourteenth Amendment on Indian tribes. The Committee declared that the Amendment was intended to eliminate the phrase “three-fifths of all other persons” which had described slaves in the Constitution and therefore did not change the status of Indians. The Committee concluded:
“To maintain that the United States intended, by a change of its fundamental law, which was not ratified by these tribes, and to which they were neither requested nor permitted to assent, to annual treaties then existing between the United States as one party, and the Indian tribes as the other parties respectively, would be to charge upon the United States repudiation of national obligations, repudiation doubly infamous from the fact that the parties whose claims were thus annulled are too weak to enforce their just rights, and were enjoying the voluntarily assumed guardianship and protection of this Government.”