Treasury Dept Plan To Replace Andrew Jackson With Harriet Tubman $20 Bill Sparks Controversy

Although one might think these changes are simply cosmetic, the Treasury Department does not see them that way. To introduce these new, politically-correct bills, it will take years to make sure the planned currency is adequately protected from counterfeiters:

“‘The blue security ribbon on the $100 note took over 15 years to develop,’ the source said.

‘This level of technology is why our counterfeiting remains at less than .01% of currency in circulation. We should not expedite the issuance of any currency for political purposes.’

Future Treasury Secretaries — of which there will be several — could reverse or alter the decision regarding the $20, making Lew’s announcement far less of a clear-cut victory for the movement pushing to place a woman on American currency.

The $5 bill will retain Abraham Lincoln on the front, with plans to change the back to include a mural of prominent activities that have taken place at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

The idea of including women in a mural on the back of a bill has been called into question.

‘It will take a microscope to see who those individuals are, and we’ll be left with another decade or more of woefully inadequate representation of women and their worth,’ wrote the group Women on 20s in an open letter to Lew, published by Time.

‘Nobody looks at the back of the bill, and that’s not likely to change,’ the group wrote. ‘A vignette without a woman’s portrait on the front of the bill (even if she must share with Hamilton) will be seen as a token gesture and an affront to Americans of all ages who are expecting you to reveal your choice of a singular woman based on their input. As a friend of ours put it, relegating women to the back of the bill is akin to sending them to the back of the bus. The Rosa Parks analogies are inevitable.'”

The new currency won’t be out for some time, but people are already voicing strong opinions on it. GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, for instance, opposes the move, saying a new denomination of money should be made for Tubman so that Jackson can remain on the bill:

“‘I think Harriet Tubman is fantastic,’ he said during a town hall event broadcast live on NBC’s ‘Today’ show, but ‘I would love to leave Andrew Jackson and see if we can maybe come up with another denomination.’

‘Maybe we do the $2 bill or we do another bill.’

‘I don’t like seeing it,’ the billionaire Republican front-runner said. ‘Yes, I think it’s pure political correctness.’

Trump openly defended Andrew Jackson, the former U.S. president and father of the Democratic Party currently depicted on the often-used $20 paper money, despite his history as a slave-owner.

Jackson is also reviled by descendants of American Indians as the architect of an Indian removal policy in 1838 and 1839 that required the migration of native tribes in a forced march that killed than 10,000 – an event known as the Trail of Tears.

The seventh U.S. president also, however, was the only American leader to be held as a prisoner of war, the only one to retire the entire national debt, and the first to be targeted for assassination.

And, like Trump, he was seen as a populist counterweight to politically powerful special interests including industrial and manufacturing giants, dismantling the nation’s central bank because he believed it didn’t loan enough money for small projects on the western American frontier.

‘Andrew Jackson had a great history,’ Trump argued on Thursday, ‘and I think it’s very rough when you take somebody off the bill. Andrew Jackson had a record of tremendous success for the country … and really represented somebody that really was very important to this country.'”

Joining Trump in his call for a $2 bill for Tubman was fellow Republican Ben Carson, who also defended Jackson’s record and insisted that there was a place for both figures on American currency:

“‘Well I think Andrew Jackson was … a tremendous president. Andrew Jackson was the last president who actually balanced the federal budget, where we had no national debt. … In honor of that, we kick him off the money,’ Carson responded.

Cavuto then went on the ask Carson if he had anything against Tubman.

‘No, no, I love Harriet Tubman. I love what she did, but we can find another way to honor her, maybe a $2 bill,’ he suggested.

While some Americans have applauded the new initiative, others have expressed resentment over what they perceive to be a trivialization of American heroes in exchange for political pandering.”

Curiously, several liberals have come out against Tubman being put on currency, regardless of whether it’s a $2 bill or a $20 bill. Their reasons for holding this position are, as you might guessed, totally ludicrous:

“Harriet Tubman did not fight for capitalism, free trade, or competitive markets. She repeatedly put herself in the line of fire to free people who were treated as currency themselves. She risked her life to ensure that enslaved black people would know they were worth more than the blood money that exchanged hands to buy and sell them. I do not believe Tubman, who died impoverished in 1913, would accept the ‘honor.’

Tubman is to replace Andrew Jackson, the controversial Democrat and general-turned-politician who led his era’s grassroots political revolt against the Washington, D.C. elite. (Some have compared Donald Trump’s candidacy to Jackson’s own style.)”

On a side note, some might find it strange that the Treasury is all of a sudden interested in bumping Andrew Jackson off the twenty. Could it be because of his long-lasting hostility to the Federal Reserve?

“Hamilton was a compulsive statist who wanted to bring the corrupt British mercantilist system — the very system the American Revolution was fought to escape from — to America. He fought fiercely for his program of corporate welfare, protectionist tariffs, public debt, pervasive taxation, and a central bank run by politicians and their appointees out of the nation’s capital….

Hamilton complained to George Washington that ‘we need a government of more energy” and expressed disgust over “an excessive concern for liberty in public men’…

The Philadelphie Federal Reserve publication. A History of Central Banking in America, reports:

Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, urged Congress to also assume the war debts of the individual states and then create a national bank to help refinance all these debts. Hamilton’s proposal faced major opposition. Critics said that Hamilton’s bank was unconstitutional, would be a monopoly, and would reduce the power of the states. Although Hamilton won, the bank’s charter was limited to 20 years.

And that’s right where Andrew Jackson’s legacy with the banks picks up.

With the charter of the first ‘Bank of the United States’ ending, Jackson was determined to stop the charter of the second ‘Bank of the United States’ and famously stated:

‘You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.’ (Andrew Jackson, to a delegation of bankers discussing the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States, 1832)

President Jackson likened their agents to the hydra-beast, with its many heads, and even survived an assassination attempt, by staving off an attacker personally.”

Source: CNN Money, Daily Mail, Western Journalism, Breitbart, Activist Post