User:AaronBurrSociety/sandbox

The Aaron Burr Society is dedicated to exposing the myths of Free Markets and Free Trade while challenging the integrity of Wall Street and their corporate cronies. The Society is an absurdist, conceptual artwork operating in the public sphere, building on the revolutionary traditions of the Early Modernists, Situationalist and Fluxus movements. However, though we are absurdist in nature, we take great pride in the accuracy of the information that we present to The People. Our goal is a progressive, sustainable re-imagining of the American Dream to be achieved by promoting a renaissance of the Enlightenment: the secular humanist principles of the American and French Revolutions—the first revolutions for universal human rights. The Aaron Burr Society’s artworks are not metaphorical but symbolic in form and function. By this we mean that it is not like or as a revolution but we are consciously attempting to make the signs and symbols for a rebellion against Wall Street and their corporate cronies, especially those in the oil and coal industries. We do this knowing that a progressive, non-violent revolution is necessary to save our planet and its people. We cannot create a sustainable environment without economic and social justice based on internationally recognized standards of Fair Trade and a Living Wage.

The origins of the Society can be traced to my experiences as a founding member of the artist collective REPOhistory. The collective’s strategy was to create site-specific, public artworks that dealt with issues of class, race, gender and sexuality. In 1992 REPOhistory launched its inaugural public artwork titled the Lower Manhattan Sign Project, my contribution was a sign placed in front of the New York Stock Exchange titled The Advantages of an Unregulated Free Market Society. The back of the sign stated that government deregulation and Wall Street fraud were responsible for the every major economic crash since the 1890s. The president of the Stock Exchange unsuccessfully tried to have the sign taken down but never questioned its accuracy.

In June of 2008, as the financial markets began to unravel, I began a series of performances in front of the New York Stock Exchange. I wore a sandwich board sign which read that I was panhandling to raise $100,000 in order to buy a politician to protect my rights. Wall Street brokers and traders ignored me but the tourists and wage-workers appreciated the irony. By the end of September the international financial systems were collapsing and the Aaron Burr Society responded with a YouTube video titled The Wall Street Shuffle They Win, You Lose. The four-minute video used black humor to show the politicians who deregulated the financial markets and then compared today’s Wall Street moguls with historical Robber Barons and traditional bank robbers.

After a series of panhandling performances, our next action took place on April Fools Day 2009 when the Society launched the Free Money Movement. We stamped 100 real, one-dollar bills with Free Money on one side and Slave of Wall Street on the other; our name and our website’s URL were stamped on the bottom in small type. We gave away this Free Money in front of the New York Stock Exchange and the Federal Reserve Bank. The Wall Street bankers seemed to dislike this even more than the panhandling performance but the tourists, workers and indigent were amazed but confused. To clear the confusion, I told people that their children’s children would be paying taxes for Wall Street’s bailout and that the economy would be better served if bailouts were given directly to The People rather than to Wall Street. Since then the Society has continued to distribute stamped money by employing a prototypical American activity—shopping. When we started to distribute the Free Money most people didn’t understand the concept, by 2010 most people were painfully aware of its meaning. The performance, our website, and the press release all referenced a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson, “...if you let private bankers control the money supply, first by inflation then by deflation they will bankrupt the nation...” This is a perfect description of our current economic and political situation. It is important to understand that economic crashes are not just about money; they are also about political power.

Later in 2009, the Society posted its second video on YouTube titled Obama and American Socialism. Its purpose was to show the importance of both American social programs and publicly financed infrastructure development. In America, most issues of class are filtered through race. For this reason and to honor President Barack Obama, the Society appropriated and modified Langston Hughes’ great poem Let America Be America Again—the Land that Never Was Yet and Yet Must Be. Hughes was African American and a member of the 1930s Harlem Renaissance. Though lynching still existed and segregation was the law of the land when written, this poem by a black man is the embodiment of the American Dream imbedded in the Enlightened principles of universal human rights.

These principles of universal human rights are the principles that the Aaron Burr Society hopes to evoke with the 2nd Whiskey Rebellion. So on February 6, 2010, Aaron Burr’s birthday, we began distilling whiskey. We have no license, so distilling is an act of civil disobedience echoing the politics of the original Whiskey Rebellion of 1791–1794, which took place on America’s western frontier.

For the 2nd Whiskey Rebellion, the Society purchased a copper still on EBay then etched and oxidized our name onto the surface. Starting with a mash of sweet apple cider, we added yeast and waited two weeks for it to ferment into hard cider. Then we distilled the hard cider to make applejack whiskey, a quintessential American beverage. We procured handsome glass bottles with corked stoppers and printed letterpress labels on 100% pure hemp paper imported from India. Our motto was printed on the back label, Drink the Liquid • Smoke the Label • Recycle the Glass. This is a movement based on the environment, local autonomy and economic justice. It’s interesting that Americans are allowed to buy imported hemp paper but it’s illegal to grow a weed that could save millions of trees from being turned into paper pulp. One might think that the laws of god and man are arbitrary and capricious, but in fact the politics of hemp are similar to those of the original Whiskey Rebellion in that they are designed to turn ordinary citizens from producers into a consumers. Hemp is illegal because drug enforcement agents can’t distinguish it from marijuana in the wild. And in most states there is a small fine for first time marijuana possession while there are heavy fines and confiscation of property penalties for first time marijuana growers; a policy that promotes drug dealing. Though profits from the original whiskey rebellion are below today’s profits from marijuana, it did allow local autonomy and financial independence for the people on the western frontier in the 1790s. At this point, it’s necessary to reexamine America history both for our thesis and because history is an important component of contemporary Conservative politics. Conservatives try to legitimize a failed economic system by falsely equating the American Revolution and American prosperity with Free Markets and Free Trade. But the latest economic meltdown once again proves that American corporations needs The People’s financial support via taxes in order to survive. Infrastructure and the collective efforts of The People create the commonwealth of our great nation, not Wall Street manipulations. Rugged Individualism has been conflated with faux cowboys like Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin. While Conservatives have vigorously exploited history by distorting the facts, Progressives rarely contest these important themes. Based on experiences with REPOhistory, the Aaron Burr Society is presenting an alternative, but factually accurate, economic and social history of America.

In 1765, the Daughters and Sons of Liberty, a group of Boston shopkeepers and artisans, set the stage for the American Revolution. These working class heroes embodied the revolutionary principles of the Enlightenment; they were the true radicals of the American Revolution. After winning independence from England these enlisted, working class war veterans of the Daughters and Sons of Liberty reorganized as the Tammany Society and Democratic Clubs. These organizations not only represented American radicals but they were communicating directly with the revolutionary French Jacobins. These American radical organizations were more than political clubs; they were involved in four armed rebellions. After the Revolution, disenfranchised war veterans and small, yeoman farmers who were forced off their land, rebelled against war bond speculators, a Constitution that denied the majority of American citizens the right to vote, and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s economic policies. During this period, the New York City chapter of the Tammany Society, later know as Tammany Hall, asked Aaron Burr to be their political representative.

In the summer of 2010, members of the Society went to Pittsburgh to research the original Whiskey Rebellion while doing a residency at Carnegie Mellon University’s Studio for Creative Inquiry. My researched revealed that two weeks after President Washington first took office, an editorial in the Pittsburgh Gazette stated that the Constitution was unfair, unjust and you couldn’t do nothing about it. Of course, it used the formal, convoluted language of the period but the message clearly articulated a wide spread attitude of disenfranchisement. The Constitution suppressed the Enlightened revolutionary principle of universal human rights and instead imposed the draconian principle of Property Rights. The primacy of Property Rights not only permitted slavery but also denied the right to vote to all those who did not own land; this included a significant portion of Revolutionary War veterans.

The Whiskey Rebellion was the largest of the four rebellions. President George Washington suppressed the rebellion by leading 13,000 troops to western Pennsylvania, an army larger then the one he commanded during the Revolution. Treasury Secretary Hamilton’s policies included a two-tiered tax system that taxed small farmers who distilled whiskey at a higher rate than larger, slave-based plantation distillers. This made it difficult for small farmers living on the frontier to earn a living. It resulted in a loss of autonomy and further disenfranchisement from a government that centralized wealth in speculators, bankers, merchants and plantation owners at the expense of the middle and working classes as well as small farmers.

Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and New York Senator Aaron Burr supported the whiskey rebels and opposed Hamilton’s economic polices. Jefferson’s critique of Hamilton’s programs was that they established a Wall Street aristocracy by imposing an economic system based on the British model of centralized aristocratic control at the expense of farmers and the lower classes. Jefferson eventually resigned his position because of his differences with Hamilton.

After the Whiskey Rebellion, Aaron Burr continued to fight against Hamilton’s policies when he left the Senate. Burr created the Manhattan Company to bring clean water to New York City. But instead of just taking profits, he used the surplus capital from the waterworks to give loans to the working classes. Burr was a radical in the French Jacobin tradition and like Jefferson, believed that the American and French Revolutions were part of the same international movement for universal human rights. In addition to creating a clean environment and micro financing, Burr also allowed the working classes to own shares in the Manhattan Company, giving them a voice in how the company conducted business. This broke Alexander Hamilton’s banking monopoly in New York and threatened the National Bank. Hamilton had used his banking monopoly and his position as Treasury Secretary to favor his political allies while denying loans to political opponents and the working classes.

To make matters worse in the eyes of Hamilton and other members of the Federalist Party, Burr created land co-ops so that more people could become property owners and thus vote. This was a form of proto-socialism and it challenged the Constitution’s framework of minority rule. Because of his political positions on banking and the economic empowerment of the working classes, Burr alienated bankers and the upper classes. In addition to these enemies, Jefferson and Madison saw Burr as a popular, anti-slavery Vice President who threatened the succession of Madison and Monroe to the presidency, which threatened the future of slavery. Both the bankers and slave owners attacked Burr with vicious lies in order to destroy his political career and the causes that he represented.

The Aaron Burr Society believes that the principles of the Manhattan Company and the Whiskey Rebellion are as relevant today as they were in the 1790s. Ron Paul and Conservative Libertarians want to close the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed). The Progressive Libertarians of the Aaron Burr Society want to nationalize the Fed and put a branch in every state in order to give loans directly to the people, not Wall Street. Instead of government subsidies to large corporations, the Society proposes that we subsidize local communities. Promoting community-based commerce will economically stabilize local communities as well as help clean the environment. In keeping with the original intent of the Declaration of Independence, we believe that these policies must also be applied internationally because we will never have a sustainable, clean environment without international social and economic justice. At first this might seem absurd, but it is not as absurd as our current failed economic system that follows the dictates of Wall Street, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These institutions and their Neo-Liberal political allies are still promoting the mythical solutions of Free Markets and Free Trade. They are manipulating history, mythology and religion to control the future. The 21st Century, post-modern manifestation of slavery is debt—both personal debt and national debt. Are nations free if they must follow the dictates of Wall Street and the IMF? Is it possible for a student to be free if they graduate with $50,000 to $200,000 of debt? If teachers, police, firefighters and other workers are denied the right to collective bargaining and a livable wage, are they free? Today the vast majority of Americans and people from around the world understand that something is seriously wrong when Wall Street and their corporate cronies insist on a system of value that privileges Property Rights over Human Rights—especially considering that our current system of value is based on fraudulent financial manipulation of markets and property. The Aaron Burr Society’s 2nd Whiskey Rebellion and the Free Money Movement challenge these corporate, Wall Street driven assumptions of value. We are calling for a renewal of the Enlightened principles of universal human rights based on social and economic justice. Like the radically progressive patriots of the Daughters and Sons of Liberty, we are calling for today’s patriotic citizens of the Enlightenment, to rebel against the market driven forces that are destroying the environment while pursuing exploitive strategies of endless war.