Still Waiting

I'm still waiting for Change. I've not seen any yet. I've heard all the same liberal promises to spend, spend, and spend. That is the "same old same old". It's not the Change we were promised.

A Silly Charade

President Obama messed up his oath ("oaff" according to Senator Feinstein) on Tuesday. So he retook the "oaff" the following evening.

Why?

The reason given by the White House, it was done "out of an abundance of caution."

What a joke. If the Constitution were to be followed with an abundance of caution, President Obama would have to eliminate at least 95% of all government programs and departments because there is absolutely zero constitutional authority for them. Members of Congress would lose their jobs for passing unconstitutional legislation.

But Americans are about the dumbest people on earth. They are slaves who are told every Fourth of July that they are free. If Americans actually began to believe in the liberties that the US Constitution guarantees them and actually acted on those guarantees they would find opportunity, liberty, freedom and the change they all say they hope for.

The Constitution is a dead document. It was written for a people who cherished liberty, freedom, independence, small government, and the rule of law. Those people are long gone.

Change, Change, Change

All we've heard for the last two years is the word "Change, change, change, change, change" come out of Barak Obama's mouth in speech after speech.

He's been in office for nine hours and where in the hell is all the change?

Has the sea level been lowered? Has climate change been licked? Has the financial crisis been resolved? Has peace broken out in the Middle East?

I was promised change. I was told that Obama was the messiah incarnate. Where is my change?

Barak Obama has failed to deliver one single shred of change. Barak Obama is a miserable screwup as President of the United States.

Immigration, Multiculturalism, and Empire

A friend of mine published the following:

"We are witnessing one of the greatest migrations in world history, massive numbers of Third Worlders into the United States. The outcome is inevitable. Coming from tyrannical, brutal, servile cultures, these immigrants will make loyal imperial subject to replace the potentially restive native version. They will not ask questions, and they will not insist on any silly 'ancient rights.' Heart, soul, and bank account, they belong to the new imperial order.

If the United States is still a republican polity, its immigration policy is suicidal. If it is an empire, its immigration policy is logical."

THE TRUE ESSENCE OF SLAVERY

No, slavery is not forced labour. It isn't a legal term. Neither is it a form of property. Neither is it racism nor nationalism. These things are only symptoms; they are not the real essence of slavery.

Slavery isn't a "socio-economic formation." It isn't a "stage in the historical development of mankind." These are but convenient words used by people who want to conceal the true essence of slavery.

The essence of slavery can be clearly seen in the experience of Moses with his people, the Israelites. The people of Israel were in slavery in Egypt, they were forced to do exhausting labour, subject to cruel taskmasters, no human rights, and the Egyptians slaughtered their children.... And when Moses took them out of the land of slavery to bring them to the Promised Land of liberty, they rebelled and complained, "We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic" (Numbers 11:5). The former slaves remembered the slavery not for the taskmasters, the whippings, and the forced labour. They remembered it for the things which they "did eat freely."

The Stugatskie Brothers see the essence of slavery just the same in their novel, The Second Invasion of the Martians. In the "fist invasion of the Martians" in H.G. Wells' novel, War of the Worlds, the Martians come with arms and force. But the Martians in Strugatskie's novel know very well the nature of man and the essence of slaver. They don't conquer by force; they just supply everything that man needs.

Freely.

And slavery wins.

Slavery doesn't start with the slaveholders. Slavery starts with the slaves. It doesn't start when someone draws a gun and forces other people to work for him. It starts when people refuse to take care of themselves and their families and want someone else to provide the necessary things for them - from cradle to grave. Slaves come when man decides to abandon the responsibility to make decisions for his own life and leaves those decisions to other people. The true essence of slavery is in the self-conscious exchange of liberty for security. Slavery is in the self-conscious surrender of individual rights and responsibilities to other people and institutions. Slavery is in the sheepish instinct to seek for a shepherd to graze and shear you.

We can say in today's social and political language that slavery is the government welfare. It is in the government medical care for people who never care about their own health. In the pension plans for people who never want to think about their own future. In the free government educating for the children of parents who can make children but are unwilling to take care of them. In the regulations imposed upon personal and economic life.

The Constitution of Bulgaria proclaims, "the Republic of Bulgaria is a welfare state." This welfare state can be found in the tariffs that give security to the ineffective Bulgarian producers. In the labour legislation that represses the employers and gives security to the workers irrespective of their performance and skills. In the government certificates "for life" for university professors who desire security against competition from young, energetic, and ambitious scientists. In the government licensing of vast branches of the market that gives security to the old guilds against the newcomers into the market. In the election promises for free breakfast for schoolchildren or free dental fillings for the elderly people. And so on.

All these things are slavery. Fundamentally they have had the same motive: Man's desire to abandon his responsibility for his own life and work. People who insist on these things make the same cry as those Israelites of old: "We were very well off when we had fish for free, and leeks, and onions, and garlic." "We were taken care of." "We want now to be taken care of." Even if this means to be beaten with whips and to work full days under the tropical sun. Even if it means to be burdened under 60 percent tax rates. To have to wait in long lines before greedy heartless bureaucrats. To be humiliated and to see our life, liberty and property taken away from us. Give us our daily piece of bread...for freeee!

A nation of slaves doesn't have a future. It dies. Whether from foreign invasion, or by the emigration of the young and active people (the slaves' children), or by natural dying out. The European Union can't save itself. Promises for more free pieces of bread won't save it -they will only kill it. Slaves do not have a vision for the future, and therefore they cannot have a future.

Only the free man has a future. The future belongs to those who have taken their responsibility for it. The rest is self-delusion and utopianism.

-Bojidar Marinov

-Edited by David Mueller

Stop Dangerous ID

On January 21, 2009, at 1:00 pm, a coalition of 10 organizations from across Virginia will rally at the Virginia State Capital Bell Tower, 910 Capital Street, Richmond, VA 23219 in support of legislation to stop the implementation of Dangerous ID, the so-called Real ID Act of 2005. John Tate, President, will speak on behalf of Campaign for Liberty.

At least three pieces of legislation are being introduced in the 2009 Session of the Virginia General Assembly to stop the implementation of the federal mandate to come into compliance with the Real ID Act by the beginning of next year.

Similar legislation went no where last year but lobbying efforts will gain momentum as grassroots organizations take the news of the bills to the districts across the state. We are certain to shake things up in local politics with upcoming state elections on the horizon.

Leaders of the opposition consider the "REAL ID Act of 2005" to be a bad law passed under false pretenses. It was rejected three separate times by the U.S. Senate, and was only passed because it was buried in a larger bill containing disaster relief and funding for Iraq military operations. The Senate didn't want it, and the American people don't want it either. But the majority leadership in Congress imposed it on us, and so now we have to fight to get it stopped in Virginia.

Opponents fear the creation of a centralized federal database containing personal information about all Americans. Decisions about the exact nature and scope of this program will be made by Homeland Security bureaucrats in the Executive Branch. It seems inevitable that biometric information and electronic tracking tags will be included at some point. No one intends a bad use for this system today, but it is inevitable that it will be used in bad ways in the future.

There are valid concerns with regard to security of the citizen’s personal information due to the number of databases that would be storing personal information by the federal government and shared between the states across the country as part of standard procedure within Motor Vehicle Administrations in the states, and as enabled by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. Neither the Federal Government nor the states can control access, which under International law includes data sharing even with Canada and Mexico. No one can know who is getting into those data bases and for what purpose.

According to the DHS, "Real ID is a nationwide effort intended to prevent terrorism, reduce fraud, and improve the reliability and accuracy of identification documents that State governments issue." Yet it does nothing to prevent terrorists and other criminals from fraudulently obtaining a "Real ID" by forging the required documents. In fact, with multiple on-line, federated databases shared across multiple organizations and federal and state agencies, it will become much easier.

Many good arguments can be made against this Dangerous ID, but they all reduce to one overpowering truth. The more information government has the less it seems to know. The more power government has the less it seems able to accomplish. Big Government doesn't work. The federal government needs to do less in order to accomplish more. Small government is focused government. We need smaller government, not a massive new federal identification system.

Please plan to attend and tell your Virginia legislators to stand up to Congress and Homeland Security to keep federal bureaucrats from hijacking your state driver’s license for their national citizen control scheme.

Please log in to RSVP here, or email your RSVP to me at donna.holt@campaignforliberty.com.

Predicting the Media Spin

The financial markets are extremely oversold and they've been oversold for months. A sharp rebound is coming. . .only this rebound will coincide with Barack Obama's assumption of the presidency.

I predict that the media spin will credit the rebound to Obama, his policies, his appointees, and whatever else the elitist media can concoct however tenuous, nutty, or ridiculous.

Media elitists will do so because they are desperate to prop up Mr. Obama. They have invested much into the man and his campaign. He is their president. Hence, he is too big to fail, and media elitists will stop at nothing to shore up their investment.

Technorati Profile

Exchanging the Greed on the Street for the Greed in DC

President-Elect Obama today announced his choice to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"A top priority of his administration will be to “crack down on the culture of greed and scheming that’s led us to this day of reckoning,” Obama said this morning at a Chicago news conference where he also named Gary Gensler, a former U.S. Treasury undersecretary, to be chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and economic policy adviser Daniel Tarullo to fill an open seat on the Federal Reserve Board."

No doubt there is greed on Wall Street. But there is a whole lot more greed in Congress and the White House. There is not the slightest commitment to adhering to the Constitution, slashing government spending, muchless reducing the scope, size, and power of the federal government.

The individuals in Congress and the incoming administration are hands down the greediest people in the country. Obama campaigned on a platform of envy, greed, dissatisfaction, discontent, class warfare, and coveteousness.

Obama and his White House/Chicago thugs are going to shake down Wall Street for whatever they can get and then they are going to shake down the American citizenry.

It may very well be that by the time Americans see the mess that is about to come our way, President Obama may end up being the most hated president in history.

Gun Owners: Prepare for the New Reality of DANGEROUS ID – The So-Called Real Scheme

Here is your future:

You walk into a gun store, fill out your 4473, and show your government ID just as you now do. But instead of looking at your license and taking down some information, the clerk runs the license (which is likely to contain a Spy Chip (i.e. RFID - radio-frequency ID chip) through a scanner. Your purchase is instantly recorded in your state drivers’ license registry. The federal government isn’t currently allowed to keep a gun registry. But no problem; the Dangerous ID Act of 2005 gives them an open door into your state records.

Complete information on every firearm you buy will be instantly available to every police officer (and possibly every government employee, store clerk, or computer hacker) you ever encounter. You’ll be an instant criminal suspect every time you deal with someone who has access to the database.

Just as travelers are encouraged to get background checks and give fingerprints to avoid some of the worst excesses of TSA screening, gun owners will be encouraged to get background checks and give whatever biometric ID the Department of Homeland Security requires. This will be sold as a “benefit,” ensuring you’ll never again experience an “instant-check” delay. In fact, Congress, the ATF, or the FBI might even “mandate” 5-day or 15-day delays for anyone not enrolled in the “Trusted Firearms Buyer” program.

The private purchase “loophole” will be closed, so that all gun buyers must make tractable purchases. (The ultimate goal is for every purchase of every kind to be track able.) Buying ammo? The store scans your national ID card and — bingo! — your purchase is registered in the state database.

The federal government or state governments can now also _effectively_ legislate limits on the amount or kind of ammunition you’re “allowed” to purchase. Try to buy more and the database instantly rejects you. The federal government or state governments can now also effectively legislate limits on the number of guns you may own. Try to buy more, and the database rejects you.

Eventually — after the federal government “discovers” the obvious, that national ID won’t stop either illegal immigration or terrorism — the old attack on “evil guns” will resume.

When they want your .50 BMG they’ll know just where to find it (because the Dangerous ID act says your home address must be revealed). When they want your evil “scoped sniper rifle” (you know, the one you hunt deer with), they’ll know just how to get it. Ditto with you “Saturday Night Special” or your “semi-auto rifle.”

If you don’t surrender your guns, well, then the Department of Homeland Security will cut off your driving “privilege,” as well as your right to escape the growing police state via plane.

You will be a prisoner in your own home, in your own country. Or you’ll be forced to function as an outlaw, operating and living a precarious existence beneath the government radar.

It No Longer Matters

Today I received an e-mail about Obama's birth certificate. The letter writer commented that he still believes that the Constitution is relevant.

He's wrong.

The Constitution no longer matters.

The US Constitution died definitively in 1865 with the defeat of the South. It has died progressively through Reconstruction, the 14th, 16th, 17th, 19th Amendments, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, The New Deal programs under FDR, the Great Society Programs under Johnson, and numerous Supreme Court rulings creating rights and powers that the founders never imagined.

The Constitution died finally under the current president.

It does not matter what the Constitution says about being a natural born citizen. The constitution is a dead document...thrown away in the ash bin of history.

Chicago Scandel

I have to ask, "What did the President-Elect know, and when did he know it?"

It has been asked, "Why did the US Attorney stop the investigation before the crime of selling the Senate seat actually occurred?"

I submit that there are two possible reasons. One, the President-Elect was about to commit a criminal act and needed to be saved by the Democratic US Attorney. Or two, USA Patrick J. Fitzgerald now has dirt on Mr. Obama. And Mr. Obama can now be manipulated or blackmailed.

Why Doesn't Ron Paul Ask Crucial Questions?

Chris Powell of GATA writes a very good article about how Congressman Ron Paul could be more productive in his time allotment on the House Banking Committee. It is posted below.

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

As grateful as many of us are to U.S. Rep. Ron Paul for articulating, almost alone in the federal government, the monetary issues at the center of the international financial catastrophe, we might be even more grateful to him if he could sharpen his performance at the hearings of the House Banking Committee, at which he has not made the most of his many opportunities to interrogate Federal Reserve and Treasury Department officials.

Time for each committee member to speak at these hearings is very limited, and unfortunately Paul usually spends most of his time making speeches rather than asking crucial questions, even as those crucial questions must be well known to him. Just watch again his exchange at Tuesday's hearing with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, which GoldSeek posted here:

http://news.goldseek.com/RonPaul/1227028538.php

The exchange is 5 minutes and 15 seconds long and Paul uses 4 minutes and 9 seconds of it, most of that time just speechifying, only a few seconds of it asking questions. Too bad, because Paul still got a couple of important disclosures out of Bernanke -- that the prospect of a new international reserve currency never comes up in Bernanke's discussions with the central bankers of other countries, and that the only mention of gold in those discussions involves the plans of central banks to sell their gold reserves.

Of course those who follow these issues long have known what Paul thinks and don't really need to hear it again at these hearings. What is most important at these hearings is what the Fed, the Treasury, and other central bankers are doing and what they are trying to conceal from the public and the markets.

Imagine if, instead of speechifying for 4 minutes and 9 seconds on Tuesday, Paul had sought to press a few more questions, like:

1) Are the Fed or the Treasury intervening or encouraging or subsidizing certain actions by others in the precious metals and general equities markets, just as the Fed and Treasury commonly intervene in the currency and bond markets?

2) Does the U.S. government have any connection to the derivative positions in gold, silver, and interest rates built up at JPMorganChase and other financial houses?

3) Why is the Federal Reserve refusing to disclose all its records involving the U.S. gold reserve?

4) How often does the President's Working Group on Financial Markets meet? What does it do? Does it intervene in the stock market or encourage certain actions in the market by third parties? Does it keep records of its proceedings? Are those records available to the public? If not, why not?

5) Do the Fed and the Treasury convey to certain financial houses information that is not simultaneously available to all other market participants? Exactly what private communications do Fed and Treasury officials have with financial houses? What is the necessity of that privacy? How does that privacy not confer a favoritism that is potentially very lucrative?

Surely Paul himself could frame all these questions and many better ones without any help. Instead he always digresses and then at the last minute tiptoes up to a big issue only to have time run out with the Fed and the Treasury witnesses saved by the bell. Even as Paul knows better than nearly everyone else in Washington, it is hard not to wonder if he is afraid of being the one to prompt the answers he very well might get.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

The Beginning of the End

On this day in 1647 Massachusetts passed the first compulsory school law in the colonies. That was the beginning of the end. Of all the ills and woes this country has suffered, most of them can be laid at the door of public education.

Liberty

On this day in 1781 Lord Cornwallis surrendered at
Yorktown to the combined French & American
Revolutionary forces under Genl. Washington.
It was the beginning of the great American republic
that lasted eighty years. When the British troops
left their trenches to stack arms, their bands
played "The World Turned Upside Down." General
Washington ordered worship services of thanksgiving
to God for his army.

Today in History

On this date in 1918 Sergeant Alvin C. York single-handedly killed 25 German soldiers, captured 132 more, and confiscated 35 machine guns while separated from his patrol. He hailed, of course, from Tennessee.

Day of Reckoning

Day of Reckoning. - How did the United States of America, the richest nation on earth, whose economy represents 30 percent of the Global Economy, arrive at the precipice of a financial panic and collapse?

The answer lies in the abject failure of both America's financial elite and the political elite of both parties – the same elites now working together to determine how much of our wealth will be needed to bail the nation out of the crisis of their own creation.

Big Government is riding to the rescue – saddlebags full of our tax dollars – to save us from the consequences of the stupidity and folly of Big Government. New York and Washington, the twin cities responsible for the crisis, are now being hailed by the media as the 7th Cavalry, coming to rescue a beleaguered nation.

Ron Paul Response to the President

Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and
other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."

Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty,

Ron Paul

Time is Running Out

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Dear Friends,

Whenever a Great Bipartisan Consensus is announced, and a compliant media assures everyone that the wondrous actions of our wise leaders are being taken for our own good, you can know with absolute certainty that disaster is about to strike.

The events of the past week are no exception.

The bailout package that is about to be rammed down Congress' throat is not just economically foolish. It is downright sinister. It makes a mockery of our Constitution, which our leaders should never again bother pretending is still in effect. It promises the American people a never-ending nightmare of ever-greater debt liabilities they will have to shoulder. Two weeks ago, financial analyst Jim Rogers said the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made America more communist than China! "This is welfare for the rich," he said. "This is socialism for the rich. It's bailing out the financiers, the banks, the Wall Streeters."

That describes the current bailout package to a T. And we're being told it's unavoidable.

The claim that the market caused all this is so staggeringly foolish that only politicians and the media could pretend to believe it. But that has become the conventional wisdom, with the desired result that those responsible for the credit bubble and its predictable consequences - predictable, that is, to those who understand sound, Austrian economics - are being let off the hook. The Federal Reserve System is actually positioning itself as the savior, rather than the culprit, in this mess!

• The Treasury Secretary is authorized to purchase up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets at any one time. That means $700 billion is only the very beginning of what will hit us.

• Financial institutions are "designated as financial agents of the Government." This is the New Deal to end all New Deals.

• Then there's this: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Translation: the Secretary can buy up whatever junk debt he wants to, burden the American people with it, and be subject to no one in the process.

There goes your country.

Even some so-called free-market economists are calling all this "sadly necessary." Sad, yes. Necessary? Don't make me laugh.

Our one-party system is complicit in yet another crime against the American people. The two major party candidates for president themselves initially indicated their strong support for bailouts of this kind - another example of the big choice we're supposedly presented with this November: yes or yes. Now, with a backlash brewing, they're not quite sure what their views are. A sad display, really.

Although the present bailout package is almost certainly not the end of the political atrocities we'll witness in connection with the crisis, time is short. Congress may vote as soon as tomorrow. With a Rasmussen poll finding support for the bailout at an anemic seven percent, some members of Congress are afraid to vote for it. Call them! Let them hear from you! Tell them you will never vote for anyone who supports this atrocity.

The issue boils down to this: do we care about freedom? Do we care about responsibility and accountability? Do we care that our government and media have been bought and paid for? Do we care that average Americans are about to be looted in order to subsidize the fattest of cats on Wall Street and in government? Do we care?

When the chips are down, will we stand up and fight, even if it means standing up against every stripe of fashionable opinion in politics and the media?

Times like these have a way of telling us what kind of a people we are, and what kind of country we shall be.

In liberty,

Ron Paul

The Nightmare to Come

Christendom began to fall with the French Revolution. Her last bastion fell with the South in 1865. Thereafter technology became the West's post-Christian religion. For the first five decades of the 20th century, the remains of post-Christian Christendom spent destroying itself.

Technology is not only a cruel and bloodthirsty god, but it is also not self-sustaining. It is a net consumer, not a net producer. Only agriculture is a net producer, but now technology has seized even agriculture so that it, too, is a net consumer. Now technology and its ruler, fiat money and usury finance, have reached another fevered crisis. They will die, choking on their own excess, if not this time, then the next or the next. The new god will fall on its face, like Dagon.

But I am not as much concerned with its collapse, as I am with the new world to be built, and now a-building. It is springing up even before the ruins of the old fall to the ground.