At Homestead, Pinkertons were trying to escort replacement workers into a steel mill. The strikers opened fire first, murdered a few Pinkertons, tried to burn alive Pinkertons who were attempting to surrender, and then after accepting the Pinkertons' surrender, proceeded to torture them.

From The New York Times, July 7, 1892, John T. McCurry quoted:

I was down at the foot of Beaver Avenue, Allegheny, yesterday, when Captain Rogers employed me to go up the river on his boat â" the Little Bill.

Our boat had in tow one barge of Pinkerton men and the Tide had the other. While going up, the Tide was disabled, and we took our barge up in front of Homestead, and then went back for the Tide's.

We made a landing at the Homestead mills about five o'clock this morning. The shore was crowded with the locked out men and their sympathizers.

The armed pinkerton men commenced to climb up the banks. Then the workmen opened fire on the detectives.

The men shot first, and not until three of the pinkerton men had fallen did they respond to the fire.

I am willing to take an oath that the workmen fired first, and that the Pinkerton men did not shoot until some of their number had been wounded.

The workmen were so strong in numbers that it was useless for the three fifty or four hundred Pinkertons men to oppose them further, so they retreated to the barges, carrying their dead and wounded.

One Pinkerton man was shot through the head and instantly killed, and five were wounded.

We backed out into the river, anchored the barges, and then took the dead and wounded men up to Port Perry, whence they were sent on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to Pittsburg. We then went down to Homestead again.

We were going along peaceably and expecting no trouble. When we reached the mills the strikers opened fire on the Little Bill from both sides. It was then I was hit.

The bullets broke the glass and splintered the woodwork. Captain Alexander McMichaels was at the wheel. The bullets crashed through the glass pilothouse, and to save his life, he had to rush below. Captain Rogers was on board, and he displayed great bravery.

When the firing commenced, we all laid down on the floor to escape the bullets, but I was not quick enough, and was wounded. There was a cessation in the firing, and the pilot secured control of the boat before it ran into the bank, which it came near doing.

There was no one on board at the time we were fired upon, but the crew, Captain Rogers, and one Pinkerton man, J.H. Robinson of Chicago.

When we approached Homestead from Port Perry we could see the attempts to set fire to the barges.

The strikers had a carload of what appeared to be oil, and were pouring it on the river and igniting it. The barges at this time were out in the middle of the river.

He negotiated for Iran to hold Americans hostage so he could get elected.

Liar.

Considering that this "specific class" is constantly being redefined to be ever-more stringent, I would say that the original assessments by the previous posters are correct.

Al Queda was trained and supported during the cold war

Liar. Al Queda did not exist when the US was funding the Afghan mujahedeen (who later became the Northern Alliance).

"General Bradley said that we must draw the line somewhere. The President stated he agreed on that. General Bradley said that Russia is not yet ready for war. The Korean situation offered as good an occasion for action in drawing the line as anywhere else."

The Korean War did not start with the partition. It started when North Korea invaded South Korea at the behest of Stalin.

"In 1961, Kennedy agreed that America should finance an increase in the size of the South Vietnamese Army from 150,000 to 170,000. He also agreed that an extra 1000 US military advisors should be sent to South Vietnam to help train the South Vietnamese Army. Both of these decisions were not made public as they broke the agreements made at the 1954 Geneva Agreement."

North Vietnam had made the decision to attempt to conquer the South well before Kennedy's action.

The article is entitled "Covert United States foreign regime change actions." What are you claiming it is discussing instead of covert foreign regime change actions executed by the United States? Why are you denying the validity of US government provided declassified information?

The article does not claim what you say it does. The US was not involved in the coups that occurred in Brazil and Chile, for instance.

The US did not start the Korean War, nor did it start the Vietnam War. The figures for military and civilian deaths are from both sides. I can only conclude that the figures for the civil wars in Cambodia and Laos were pulled from his ass, as Wikipedia lists the total number of dead (presumably both civilian and military) for the Cambodian Civil War at 200,000 to 300,000, and the Laotian Civil War at 20,000 to 200,000.

For Iraq, the vast majority of killings is Muslims slaughtering other Muslims.

The Wikipedia article you cite gives a long list, but fails to prove that the US was directly responsible for most of the regime changes that actually occured.

We are talking about the actions of the United States, who currently lead the world for the last fifty years in the categories of:

Dead foreign civilians: 7-10 million
Coups d'etats in foreign nations: 30+

Both those figures are complete lies.

Excessive swat use stems directly from the right to possess military grade assault rifles.

Newly manufactured "military grade assault rifles" have been banned from civilians since 1986.

A memorable example is the Tucson shooting. He was brought down during a reload. Hence, it would have ended sooner if the gunman didn't have easy access to extended clips.

He was not reloading. His "extended clip" jammed.

And shortly after Reagan created the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

This is, of course, a lie. The mujahedeen in Afghanistan that was supported by the United States became the Northern Alliance, whose leader was murdered by the Taliban the day before 9/11.

The whole point of Sarbanes-Oxley is people had no clue Enron was doing weird shit.

Untrue. Those who carefully examined Enron's books smelled something funny, and then when word got out, investors and creditors panicked, causing Enron's demise. Compare this with MF Global, where nobody who carefully examined MF Global's books could tell that MF Global had pissed away its customer's money.

Compare what happened before Sarbanes-Oxley, and what happened after Sarbanes-Oxley; before SOX, you were able to find out that Enron's books were full of shit before you lost money. After SOX, you only found out about this sort of strange accounting after your financial institution went under, and you found yourself left with nothing.

"Fascism should more correctly be known as corporatism as it's the alignment of corporate and state power." - Mussolini

That quote is a fake.

Unregulated capitalism ALWAYS and INEVITABLY can ONLY devolve into outright fascism [syn: corporatism] (which is exactly what is happening in the USA right now).

You obviously don't know what fascism is.

Fascists have a view of world history in which ethnic or national groups are primary, and a Hobbesian theory of society and the State where the nation must be reified as an individual, where disagreement and competition must be forcibly suppressed. Economic ideology is corporatist - having nothing to do with business corporations. Rather, it is a form of guild socialism - central planning, where market competition is suppressed by the State, and sectors of society and the economy, such as agriculture, business, labor, etc. are regimented into organizations under a single governing body and forced to negotiate with each other to establish policies in the interest of each organization and the body as a whole.

Capitalism is diametrically opposed to fascism.