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.

Dangerous Americans

The British government is protecting itself and the British people from an exceedingly dangerous American.

The Brits have refused to allow Martha Stewart into Britain.

"The lifestyle guru, convicted four years ago in the US for obstructing justice, was planning to speak at the Royal Academy and to hold meetings with several figures in the fashion and leisure industry, including Jasper Conran, and was due to travel within the next few days."

Apparently though, the Brits are comfortable with allowing US President Bush into the country! A man guilty of great violations of law and human rights.

State of Okalahoma House Joint Resolution 1089

STATE OF OKLAHOMA
2nd Session of the 51st Legislature (2008)
HOUSE JOINT
RESOLUTION 1089 By: Key
AS INTRODUCED

A Joint Resolution claiming sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over certain powers; serving notice to the federal government to cease and desist certain mandates; and directing distribution.

WHEREAS, the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads as follows: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”; and

WHEREAS, the Tenth Amendment defines the total scope of federal power as being that specifically granted by the Constitution of the United States and no more; and

WHEREAS, the scope of power defined by the Tenth Amendment means that the federal government was created by the states specifically to be an agent of the states; and

WHEREAS, today, in 2008, the states are demonstrably treated as
agents of the federal government; and

WHEREAS, many federal mandates are directly in violation of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States; and

WHEREAS, the United States Supreme Court has ruled in New York v. United States, 112 S. Ct. 2408 (1992), that Congress may not simply commandeer the legislative and regulatory processes of the states; and

WHEREAS, a number of proposals from previous administrations and some now pending from the present administration and from Congress may further violate the Constitution of the United States.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES AND THE SENATE OF THE 2ND SESSION OF THE 51ST OKLAHOMA LEGISLATURE:

THAT the State of Oklahoma hereby claims sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States. THAT this serve as Notice and Demand to the federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers.

THAT a copy of this resolution be distributed to the President of the United States, the President of the United States Senate, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate of each state’s legislature of the United States of America, and each member of the Oklahoma Congressional Delegation.

Right Issue, Wrong Commodity

High oil prices reflect a supply and demand problem in the market. The only problem is people pick on the wrong commodity. There don't seem to be shortages of oil.

The problem is that the dollar under the Bush Administration has fallen about 50 percent. There are an over supply of dollars in the market with no comparable demand for dollars.

To reduce the price of oil the dollar needs to be strengthened. That means Congress needs to stop deficit spending and the Federal Reserve needs to raise interest rates to at least 25%.

This would drive the economy into a deep recession and dry up easy credit as we know it. The only other plan of attack is to hyper-inflate the currency...which will drive prices to unbelievable levels. But this is the most likely exit that the Federal Reserve and Congress will take. "Inflate of Die!" is the unspoken motto of the Fed.

Remember the Fed has only two weapons in its arsenal: Inflation and Blarney. Every fiat currency system ends in hyper-inflation. The dollar won't be any different. What a joke our nation has become.

The Federal Reserve's Two Weapons

According to Franklin Sanders, the Federal Reserve has only two weapons to manipulate the dollar: "Inflation and Blarney."

The Income Tax

There is no reason for an income tax. All Congress has to do is pass a budget and have the President sign the budget into law. The Treasury issues bonds and the Federal Reserve creates the currency for the Treasury.

The budget is monetized.

So if the government can create limitless amounts of currency anytime it wants and for any purpose, why enforce an income tax? After much thinking for the last year or so, I've realized that there are two reasons why the income tax is enforced.

First, the income tax is enforced to keep people in submission to the government. It is designed to make certain that we know who our masters are. It is enforced to create a system of slavery.

Second, the income tax is enforced to keep inflation under "control". Inflation is the increase in the money supply. Congress know this. As does the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. If the income tax were not enforced, inflation would quickly get out of control and the government would lose credibility pretty quickly. So the government siphons off significant amounts of currency through the income tax. We think were doing our patriotic duty by supporting the government. In reality were being snookered by one of the greatest frauds in history. Shame on us.

Memorandum of Law on the Money Issue

Larry Becraft has written a very interesting Memorandum
of Law: The Money Issue.

"This brief discusses this issue at length for the purpose of conclusively demonstrating the premises that constitutional money in our country can only be gold and silver coin and that the States are constitutionally compelled to operate on a specie basis. It is the contention herein that Article 1, § 10, clause 1 of the U. S. Constitution is an absolute prohibition upon the States which cannot be circumvented by permission or command of the federal government, and that such provision prohibits the States from utilizing any paper note or credit issued by any private banking institution, whether the same be Federal Reserve Notes, bookkeeping entries of liability or otherwise."

Ted Kennedy: Sewer of the Senate

US Senator Ted Kennedy has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.

Senator Kennedy has served the gods of power, money, and pleasure during his 76 years. He has supported abortion, theft of money, expansion of the state, blocked conservative judges, and more.

He has pursued every reprobate cause to the utmost. Senator Ted Kennedy is the sewer of the Senate.

God has been very patient with this wicked man.

It is my hope and prayer that in these final months or years of his life that he will reflect upon the great wickedness that he has brought about and that he will be moved to repentance and live out his last days by serving the one true God.

Senator Ken Cuccinelli has endorsed rabid anti-gun Congressman
Frank Wolf over his Republican challenger Vern McKinley even
though McKinley has received a 100% rating from VGOC and
promised to sponsor the repealof the D.C. Gun Ban and National Park
Gun Ban.

Wolf as you know, even voted against being able to OWN a gun in
crime infested D.C. Wolf would rather guzzle tax payer dollars.  He is
calling on the President to spend millions of dollars to study the
problem of crime.

Senator Cuccinelli clearly has sold out for Wolf's endorsement in his run
for AG in 2009.

Please take a moment and wipe the vomit off your shirt so that I can
suggest a course of action.

First, Ken has been a friend to gun owners in the past but is on a
predictable trajectory that is taught in the school of politics I attend
about how good guys are ALWAYS tempted to sell out  in their quest
for higher office.  If Senator Cuccinelli did not take gun owners for
granted and wanted to be politically wise he would have stayed neutral
and not have endorsed either Wolf or McKinley.  He clearly fears Mr. Wolf's
wrath more than the wrath of gun owners.

Second, you and I will share the blame if we let Mr. Cuccinelli sell us
out without any action.

Third, this is not the first time Mr. Cuccinelli has attempted to sell
out gun owners.

Fourth,  Mr. Cuccinelli backed off when Larry Pratt at Gun Owners of
America and I played Good Cop/Bad Cop and mobilized gun owners
to tell Mr. Cuccinelli to drop his plans to sponsor anti-gun legislation.
He listened and did so.

Fifth, Mr. Cuccinelli is taking your support for granted and assumes
you will do  nothing as he sells us out to get Wolf's support.


Action Items:

1.  Email Senator Cuccinelli at ken@cuccinelli.org with a
CC: to president@vgoc.org and tell the ambitious Senator that
unless he withdraws his endorsement of anti-gun Congressman Wolf
in the same venue he gave it that he cannot expect any money or
support from you in the future.  If you have never given money or
supported him tell him he will not have it unless he stops his anti-gun
charade.

2. Please email this email to all your family and pro-gun friends and
ask them email me at president@vgoc.org asking to join our email list.
We are headed into some VERY tough years.  We need to grow
dramatically to do our part in mobilizing our lines of defense to STOP
an anti-gun President Obama or McCain - not to speak of the sell outs
of our so-called friends.

For Liberty,
Mike McHugh  President, Virginia Gun Owners Coalition
www.vgoc.org

TO DONATE GO TO:
https://va.eftsecure.net/eftcart/products.asp?M_id=467112673452

P.S. It is not a pleasant task to confront politicians, especially
when they have been our friends in the past but the unwillingness
to do so is part of why we are losing our liberties at an increasing speed.

Duty belongs to us, the results belong to God - -
quote by John Quincy Adams, U.S. President and Congressman after
being arrested on the floor of the House for breaking the House
gag rule forbidding any discussion of slavery.

Government Schools Have Succeeded

"It's not the Internet that's killing journalism, it's illiteracy. The idea that the Internet is replacing print journalism as a news source is an illusion. There is no one-to-one exchange of people canceling newspaper subscriptions and people logging onto the Internet. There is, instead, a shrinking readership of news, period, regardless of whether the news is delivered by computer or by print," says Robert Stacy McCain of The Other McCain.

This is not surprising.

Government schools in America have dumbed down the last few generations of people. Bureaucrats have felt it more important to give students sensitivity training than any type of ability to read, think, or critically analyze.

America is reaping what it has sown for the last several decades. We have a bunch of confident incompetents.

Muslim Threatens Service Dog

SCSU Student Leaves Training at Technical High School:

A St. Cloud State University student in a teacher-training program at Technical High School left the school in late April because he says he feared for the safety of his service dog.

The school district calls it a misunderstanding, and officials there say they hoped Tyler Hurd, a 23-year-old junior from Mahtomedi who aspires to teach special education, would continue his training in the district.

Hurd said a student threatened to kill his service dog named Emmitt. The black lab is trained to protect Hurd when he has seizures.

This June 5th

It's time to withdraw from the banking system.

Are you in or out?

This June 5th.

McCain Debates Bush on Abortion in 2000

John McCain supports abortion and abortion funding.

On April 14, 2007 in Des Moines, Iowa, McCain publicly stated he
wanted to change the GOP platform regardig abortion.

And if a baby is conceived in a way McCain doesn't like, he
supports abortions to let women destroy its pre-born life.

McCain regularly votes to fund pro-abortion groups with your
tax  dollars.

These groups include the so-called Planned Parenthood, which
advocates for and provides abortions to women of all ages.

So please don't be fooled.

Call the MCCain campaign before it is too late. Tell John McCain to
knock it off and defend unborn babies no matter the
circumstances of their conception.  Call his close advisor,
Del. Chris Saxman and tell him to renounce his support and funding
of pro-abortion groups.

Call 540-886-8284.  That's 540-886-8284.

Watch the videos below.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=4824779&page=1

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4823197