Posts Tagged ‘Federal Reserve System’

Reaction to “Conservative to Anarchist”; Me, Communist to Missionary to Anarchist

August 24, 2014

My reaction to Steve Patterson’s post, From Conservative to Anarchist:

http://steve-patterson.com/conservative-anarchist/

Back when I joined a “new religious movement” during the Jesus People thing in the 1960s, we got educated by the founders in the future consequences of bubble fiat dollars (“green paper pigs”–think inflated piggy bank balloon) and the stupidity of getting off a gold standard, and the way the rest of the world will also get punked for counting on the dollar. We were “dropped out” of “the system” and “turned on” to the truth.

Before that, in college, all that indoctrination turned me into a Communist because ever since LBJ invaded the Dominican Republic I remembered thinking about helping the poor and being “fair” and all that. But that led to being a sort of “syndicalist anarchist”, which sounds leftish but it also sounded right. My rationale then was: If you can’t trust people to govern themselves, you can’t trust them to govern anybody else. I didn’t have a clue what label that would have other than anarchist.

Then I discovered the way certain now well-known cliques and “secret societies” manipulate things, became minarchist finally, and through a Bible-discussion forum discovered Ron Paul when a fellow believer mentioned hanging Ron Paul banners over bridges. The rest is the same history as Steve’s.

This verse means so much more to me now:

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;–Isaiah 61:1

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Perversity of Modern White-Collar Criminal Remedies (The Daily Bell)

January 12, 2014

The Daily Bell – Perversity of Modern White-Collar Criminal Remedies:
http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/34906/Perversity-of-Modern-White-Collar-Criminal-Remedies/

This is a fatal disconnect. Washington’s Blog and others seem to assume that if regulation is followed up by aggressive enforcement and incarceration, then honesty will increase and people will be better behaved. But so far as we can tell, it has never been proven to be the case that regulation and authoritarian enforcement cures wrongdoing. It is the history of empires to create a climate conducive to corruption. The corruption is then engaged by the very elements of empire that have nourished the corruption to begin with. Certainly there is wrongdoing aplenty. Here are just some of the recent improprieties by big banks, according to the article:

  • Laundering money for terrorists (the HSBC employee who blew the whistle on the banks’ money laundering for terrorists and drug cartels says that the giant bank is still laundering money, saying: “The public needs to know that money is still being funneled through HSBC to directly buy guns and bullets to kill our soldiers …. Banks financing … terrorists affects every single American.” He also said: “It is disgusting that our banks are STILL financing terror on 9/11 2013”.
  • Financing illegal arms deals, and funding the manufacture of cluster bombs and other arms which are banned in most of the world
  • Handling money for rogue military operations
  • Laundering money for drug cartels. Indeed, drug dealers kept the banking system afloat during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis). A whistleblower said: “America is losing the drug war because our banks are [still] financing the cartels”, and “Banks financing drug cartels … affects every single American”.
  • Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments
  • Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide.
  • Manipulating aluminum and copper prices.
  • Manipulating gold prices … on a daily basis.
  • Charging “storage fees” to store gold bullion … without even buying or storing any gold. And raiding allocated gold accounts.
  • Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them.
  • Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers. This would be like selling your car, and collecting money from 10 different buyers for the same car.
  • Cheating homeowners by gaming laws meant to protect people from unfair foreclosure.
  • Committing massive fraud in an $800 trillion dollar market which effects everything from mortgages, student loans, small business loans and city financing .
  • Manipulating the hundred trillion dollar derivatives market.
  • Engaging in insider trading of the most important financial information.
  • Pushing investments which they knew were terrible, and then betting against the same investments to make money for themselves.
  • Engaging in unlawful “frontrunning” to manipulate markets.
  • Engaging in unlawful “Wash Trades” to manipulate asset prices.
  • Manipulating corporate bonds through derivatives schemes.
  • Otherwise manipulating markets.
  • Charging veterans unlawful mortgage fees.
  • Helping the richest to illegally hide assets.
  • Cooking their books.
  • Bribing and bullying ratings agencies to inflate ratings on their risky investments.
  • Violently cracking down on peaceful protesters.

And yet … at least some of what is mentioned above is questionable from a criminal standpoint. Things like market manipulation, wash trades, frontrunning and other “crimes” are a function of a marketplace that has gotten too large and in which too many titanic firms trade. They simply can get away with more, and it is impossible to police much of what is taking place.

The solution is to reintroduce competition and let customers themselves sort out the “bad guys.” Unfortunately, regulations and judicial fiat make this almost impossible. The competitive market cannot perform its curative function. In its place we have regulatory democracy and occasional prosecutions.

The real problem is not “criminality” but bigness and most importantly state-enforced bigness. Let us ask: Where does this bigness come from? In fact, it comes from the state enforced immunity of corporate personhood. Wall Street firms, like large corporations everywhere, provide virtual immunity from consequences for those who manage them.

When one works for the state these days, one can use the threat of terrorism to repel accusations of almost any criminal or violent act while in Leviathan’s employment.

Similarly, corporate personhood inoculates those at the top of corporations from the consequences of their actions. They are usually not sued. They are certainly not jailed. The corporation itself – with its overflowing coffers – is subject to the “punishment.” And everyone moves on. –

 

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Christ is Anti-War

October 25, 2013

Way to go, Paul! I’ve been preaching against the state of war and especially the American version ever since before I became a missionary. Went from Vietnam-era anti-war Communist to anti-war Christian preaching against the fiat money changers. It’s a gospel message, and this looks like a “mission field” I fell into, like Wilberforce with slavery.

The books of Moses that so many atheist voices use to make their warrior accusations actually says the opposite. In fact God told Abraham he could not have the promised land because their “cup of iniquity” was not yet “full”. Only when they were past the point of no return in their violence against each other, against their women, and raising the next generation worse than ever, and sacrificing the babies to their gods, THAT is when he said to “wipe them out”, by which he ordered them explicitly and specifically in the same mission to leave the women and the children alive.

There was one exception to that, and only after they had defeated the Amalekites THREE times, only to find that the women had raised the next generation to attack the Hebrews again.

When they demanded a government (a king by any other name) from Samuel, God said they had rejected HIM. Preachers misconstrue Romans 13. The 501(c)3 status has a lot to do with them muzzling themselves, they even admit it outright, demanding a change it that very law, and the IRS attitude toward enforcement.

Romans 13 denotes more of a contract and describes what a government does when God allows one to continue extant. If they don’t “bear the sword” for good, they broke the contract. When they “[touch] the apple of [God’s] eye”, warnings abound and judgment.

And hey! Jesus paid taxes? Yeah, read the rest of Matthew 18. By way of a question, he said the people that collect taxes are corrupt. “Do their children pay tribute?” he asked. “No”, answered the disciples, and we see that today with the exemption Congressmen give to themselves, to the President and his underlings, and the Courts. And we see that also in the Federal Reserve.

Remember, the only revolutionary violence Jesus Christ did was to beat the money changers out of the temple at the end of a very nasty whip, and he overturned their tables in a fierce anger. (“Be ye angry and sin not.”- Be angry at the proper targets of same but don’t ride it into sin.) You can imagine what he would do today to the money changers of the Federal Reserve. After all they believe in that old joke: “Got change? Thanks. Yeah, I meant change from your hand to mine.”

I have written a e-booklet on the subject of how Christianity demands a libertarian type stance toward government. I’m just looking for an editor first. I’ll put it up on my blog at http://www.trutherator.wordpress.com and/or http://www.truebook.wordpress.com. The latter is more on Biblical and doctrinal issues when I post there less often than the other. This subject is voluminous.

From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? —James 4:1

 

Government “shut down” scary words for good thing: Shut down Obamacare!

September 24, 2013
Ben Swann

Ben Swann (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

 

OH yes, I didn’t finish that one thought. When our cousin’s business “shuts down”, it’s not there anymore. The federal government, unfortunately, won’t “shut down”. It will still get taxes coming in. If that’s not enough to pay the bills and service the criminal federal debt, it’s because Congress in times past took stuff on credit that some future Congress would have to pay, not themselves. First, that’s “taxation without [even] representation”.

Second, we the members of the people in the hinterland pay every time that debt ceiling goes up, through the devaluation of the dollar that comes with more dollars in the money supply, whether they be paper dollars or electronic dollars.

Third, since we all pay with the stuff we can no longer buy because of the devalued dollars, therefore all debt, all debt ceiling increases, in the fiat currency dollar, are “stealth” taxation on both the poor and the middle class.

Ron Paul used to expose the Fed Chairman on this fact every time. The “Ron Paul Channel” is up and running, by the way, and so is Ben Swann‘s channel. Recommended.

 

 

Ron Paul, Military Spending and Wars, the Fed, and Israel

July 9, 2013
Ron Paul, member of the United States House of...

Ron Paul, member of the United States House of Representatives from Texas. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How often do lies and deceitful spin from Old Media get repeated before the Truth overcomes it?

Ron Paul voted consistently NO whenever he thought a bill was unconstitutional. The problem was that Congress almost NEVER offers a constitutional bill anymore. 30 years of no compromise with Crony Capitalism, no payoffs, straight up. Incorruptible. The ONLY one for 30 years. What more do we want?

Anything less IS compromise. And with the self-enforcing culture of corruption in Congress, forget persuading them! And he convinced the people that matter. For his efforts, the ideological yoke of socialist lies over the youth of America has been broken and they have joined on to the new Liberty Revolution, it’s a Love Revolution, steps toward a consciousness of Golden Rule society, freedom.

Would that the entire Congress would have voted, No, No, HELL NO!!! all those times he did. NO WE WILL NOT RAISE THE STUPID DEBT CEILING AGAIN, NO WE WILL NOT LET YOU WAGE AN UNDECLARED WAR, NO WE WILL NOT LET THE FEDERAL RESERVE CONTINUE LOOTING OUR POCKETS!!!! **** !*##%$#$

The military interventions overseas have yielded ZERO benefits for the USA and ZERO benefits for the victims of those interventions. Contrary to the Lying Sniveling Hissing Old Media, Ron Paul did NOT want to completely dismantle the military, and he even wanted to keep some nuclear submarines going I believe.

Isolationist? Snort! Another lie! Commerce with all nations, entanglements with none. It worked the first 150 of our years, and drove the Industrial Revolution here and with a domestic free market allowed the USA to become the biggest economy of the world.

ISRAEL? The US gives FOUR TIMES as much foreign aid to Israel’s enemies than it does to Israel. Ending ALL of it would be a favor to Israel. The USA has only been a ball and chain holding Israel back. Set them free! (Google Settlers of Samaria and Israel)

And we need more people yelling about the root of the problems, like the Federal Reserve money changers, fiat currency, endless unconstitutional war making, the new declaration by the Obama administration that they now only get war-making orders and permission from the UN not the American people, and the outrageous NSA spying, the criminal presidential kill orders! Compromise for 100 years has NOT worked! Never worked! Time to put backbone to conviction and yell the truth from the treetops!

 

Socialism hurts a lot More than it helps

July 2, 2013
Ron Paul, member of the United States House of...

Ron Paul, member of the United States House of Representatives from Texas. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

SFF Madman wrote a long comment on my blog post “Socialism Cannot Save Anything”, found here: https://trutherator.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/socialism-cannot-save-anything/

It is so long it deserves another blog post. Whence this one.

But NOTE: “SFF Madman”‘s comments (that’s his handle) are prefaced by SFF. Mine are prefaced by “ttt”.

Trutherator: “Community owned mortgage banks, and credit unions, are helpless and hopeless against the power of the Federal Reserve Bank.”

SFF: Are they? I’m willing to bet they are helpless and hopeless against all the big banks, too (Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc.). Or do you think it was right to bail them out instead of breaking them up?

ttt Of course I opposed bailing them out, I am against ALL forms of welfare that robs Smith to give to Jones. I definitely prefer community banks over the big ones, and credit unions even more, and I support them over the big ones. But then you still have the problem of the Federal Reserve Bank, which is the main bad guy here, because all their policies favor the biggest ones over the smaller ones.We all saw that when Ron Paul finally got the Congress to force the Fed to tell us who they secretly gave the money to in that bailout, in fact. It was the big banks.

The government and the Federal Reserve, with TARP and the secret looting, robbed you and your neighbors to give to Wall Street heavyweights favored by government, both executive and legislature. You cannot trust the politicians to make it “fair”. Government is based on force.

ttt: “By the way, the Fed is one of a couple hundred central banks around the world, and establishing such central banks was part of the COMMUNIST platform. Why did Karl Marx want to help the most devious of the bankers?”

sff Personally, I don’t care. Not all socialists are Marxists. As I have said before, there are different kinds of socialism, revised forms of previous ideas, which were obviously needed (“democratic socialism,” “social democracy,” and many more). We need to rethink our “representative democratic republic,” too. Not because it’s a bad idea, but because we have allowed big money to subvert the democratic process.

ttt You’re missing the point about why Karl Marx supported Central Banks at all, and why socialism keeps popping up everywhere in memes pushed by oligarchs in their organs, like corporate media. Socialism refers to state ownership of the means of production, and then there are self-dubbed socialists who push lesser forms of state ownership of production. The Fabian Socialist Society for example pushes for “gradual” implementation of socialism. This came up in the “progressives” of the earliest 20th century, a word used today for the same idea: take by force of government from those who have, and give to those who have less.But the fact that the Fed is the institution that controls the money in your pocket, it is Wall Street-on-the-Potomac, and that a foremost socialist, advocated it, should raise alarm bells.

Look at America’s favorite Fabian socialist in the White House and their attitude toward the uprisings in the Middle East. Not even a whisper of support to the Iranian outrage against the tyranny of their rulers, as opposed to telling Mubarak to get out and a full-scale war in Libya. Something is not right here, ey?

Don’t like Wall Street? Look at the very first thing that the new Libyan government did, it created a central bank with the “help” of Europeans. Go figure.

sff  I would prefer that we scrap the monetary system altogether and try something new. But we know no one will go for that. Most of us peasants in the U.S. really believe we have a chance to become billionaires, not even considering the imbalance in political equality having all that money creates. Not even considering that very imbalance makes the probability of becoming a billionaire very low indeed.

Any bank is a bad idea, at least the way they are set up now. The entire banking system needs a serious overhaul.

ttt If you don’t understand how money works, and the effects of one monetary policy and another, you can do worse than even the mess we have now. Ron Paul’s “End the Fed” is good laymans’ terms explanation of money and how it works. He’s written another about gold.

The monetary system is the one thing that is impoverishing us. Even the “progressive” Dennis Kucinich wanted the Federal Reserve audited. Monetary policy is important. Keynesian monetary policy is disastrous. Stimulus only goes to favored cronies and patrons. It’s the law of politics, the law of political power: It corrupts.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are better than the central fiat money of the Fed, but one should understand it before deciding what to do.

ttt “County or City Owned Power Companies — Oh yeah, that’ll help, There are already a bunch of them, known for cronyism and corruption, because now the political bosses are in charge. They’re not magically made more pure just because they get to boss the lighting utility, but now they don’t have to worry about saving the owners money, because they’re government!”

sff I’m a bit confused about what you mean here. If you’re saying Verizon is corrupt, I agree. If you’re saying politicians eat from their hands, I agree with that, too. But that still shows who the real boss is in this picture: Verizon. Politicians are their cronies, and the cronies of any big corporation or bank willing to wave around huge wads of “corporate free speech.”

ttt You’re right of course in the general in what you say here. You just need to consider that political deciders only eat out of Verizon’s hands because they sell “rent-seeking” policies to them that smaller companies do not have. They have political power to sell. Don’t let them have it!

If you dissolve Verizon and give the telephone utility to that same politician or anybody else, the cronyism doesn’t go away. His family, or the politically appointed boss, gets the best phone service, his family gets the best jobs, his cousin runs it into the ground.I saw this every time in Latin America when I was a full-time missionary. Phone service by governments is beyond awful, and the poor are the worst off. Power companies are the worst. There are now blackouts again in Tegucigalpa the capital, because the company bosses rake it off the top, at each layer of boss. When I was in Santo Domingo is was every day. Take your bath quick when the water came, it didn’t last past noon.

Allende in Chile nationalized the copper mines. Goodbye Anaconda. In one year, production had plummeted, workplace accidents doubled, and Allende’s government had to subsidize the mines instead of getting taxes from it. Today, under economic policies adapted from Milton Friedman‘s “Chicago School” of economics, it’s thriving, but it could do even better if the free market principles of Austrian economics were implemented over the long run.

ttt “The Millionaires Tax — Oh yeah, that’ll help jobs. The guy doesn’t even try to pretend taxing 50% over a million has anything to do with helping the poor, except the proposal for a referendum. Never mind the ethics involved in all socialist and fascist proposals, of stealing money from somebody. Like the bloody Bonnie and Clyde, they “go where the money is”, except it’s less noble than Bonnie and Clyde because at least the robbers want it for themselves, whereas socialists just want to pull them down here to poverty with the rest of us!”

sff I see. Helping the poor does constitute a social program. However, what I really want is for the people building the cars, the skyscrapers, standing on the assembly lines, sacrificing sweat, blood, and time with their families to earn a fair living wage, and decent health and education benefits for their efforts. They shouldn’t have to fight for it. It should already be theirs. This is why I contend that corporations are stealing the most, because they are stealing it from their employees.

ttt Nobody should “have to fight for” anything, but they should indeed reap the benefits of the “fruit of their labor”. It’s a temptation to legislate righteousness, to emit decrees, and it’s easy to see the benefit that one supposes benefits the lowest-paid workers in particular.

What is not so easy to see are the “unseen” effects. Sometimes they can be measured. Allende took the corporation out of the picture when he nationalized the mines, took out the profit motive from the equation. But were they angels from heaven that took control? Nah, political cronies. Corruption goes up because now neither the crony appointee and the “appointer” have to account for either profits or taxes or workers’ safety to anybody.

The “fair living wage” sounds all nice and pretty, but if you put on your infrared X-ray eyeglasses, you’ll were just looking at the lipstick, but the ugly pig it’s on is all the teenagers that find it harder to get a job because the pay is not worth their work. The mentally slow ones have a hard time finding anything at all or don’t last because the productivity is not there.

I just read about a blind technologist working on handicapped-friendly interfaces. He said 80% of the blind in America are unemployed. The “minimum wage” is a barrier to employment for them. They can be productive at lower pay, even as family, friends, and charity works help them. (One such private charity work trained an uncle of mine in darkroom work)

But I don’t “owe you” a job. You don’t owe me a job with a “living wage” either. Forcing you to pay me more than I’m worth to you, kills your productivity as a manager, it robs you of the fruits of your labor, and robs the economy at large of that productivity too. That’s lost production that could have gone to raising the standard for others.

ttt “How about let them use that money to give a raise to their workers, hire more workers, invest in more productive activity?”

sff Great idea! It makes good sense and I would like to see it happen. So all these corporations with record profits lately, why aren’t they doing it? See: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10287

ttt That’s a question I think you should really ask yourself. I could just give you a list. But then it would get bogged down in the details.Instead, ask yourself these questions instead:

#1. Corporations just want to make more money right? So it’s not a matter of greed. If you’re saying they’re doing it just because they’re evil or just to punish us and “rob” potential workers of the new jobs that “belong” to them, they could do this better by just shutting the whole thing down.

In fact, that was the big socialist complaint against companies in the 1970s and 1980s that moved their factories to Japan and to China. Nobody bothered to point to their own neighbors for buying stuff made in Japan and China.

#2. If corporations want to “make more money”, and they could expand by investing in more jobs, and they’re not doing it, you have to ask why. If you had money to invest, why wouldn’t you?

#3. Maybe instead of moving the money by the force of the gun of the law from one grubby-fingered greedy corporate hack to the grubby-fingered greedy government hack, how about let’s look at what is causing companies to think there’s no safe investment? Why do they think there is risk in the future.

–One thing in the big long list of disincentives to investment is Obamacare. My son got his hours cut drastically from 40 hours plus lots of overtime (they love him there) to 35 max, because of Obamacare, a pet socialist program that isn’t going to work as promised and has already broken a lot of its promise.. It’s happening by the thousands in small companies across the nation. The big ones are waiting for some of the small ones to fold under the burden, to pick up the slack, I’m sure.

#3. Are there corporations or venture capitalists that indeed are investing and putting their money to use? Yes, there are, and plenty of them.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/vc100
Is it enough? No, because the USA does not have a free market.

ttt “So what if they sit on it? If it’s in savings, it’s getting loaned out to others doing much more productive activity than for warfare or for agents to spy on us.”

sff I say it’s being used for exactly what you say it isn’t.

ttt Why? Does the CEO have all those millions stuffed into mattresses?

Even the dumbest executive keeps his cash reserve in the bank. (Note: Of course Warren Buffet has quietly put about a third of his assets into metallic gold, I hear)

If a bank doesn’t lend out the savings, it dies. Mortgages on industrial property, credit cards, even treasury bills for the “safe” investment. Property of any kind.

ttt “25% solution — Finally, a good idea, cut down military spending. Better yet, Obama or the president could just order them home immediately, like Ron Paul said he would.”

sff Yay! I like this, because it appears there are some points on which you and I are in perfect harmony. But Obomber will only do what his corporate masters pay him to do, and I wouldn’t trust Ron Paul, either. I don’t trust any of them.”

ttt The only one who has proved himself in 30 years is Ron Paul. You should have noticed how they treated him in Iowa. Ron Paul 2nd, but “We now have three new front-runners: Romney, Perry, Bachman”. Abramoff said none of the lobbyists bothered to do anything with Ron Paul.

In the libertarian philosophy, nobody gets a government-guaranteed advantage and the fruits of your labor are respected as yours. No big corporation has any advantage over another. The Internet has proven that given a free market area, upstarts can make hay. If you take government’s regulations out, for example, anybody could sell anything from their home itself. Walmart would have ten million neighborhood competitors. I could sell you my beer. My wife could sell you her fine cooking, without having government snoops all over the place.

The corporations write the laws that regulate them. If you don’t let government make the regulations, the corporations don’t get to write them.

ttt “Public funding of all elections — The worst idea yet. Let government determine who gets a chance at forming part of the government. The most radical election year was 1968 when McCarthy got five millionaire backers to challenge the warfare machine. Those donations would be against the law today, because we already have too much campaign finance reform.”

sff No, we don’t. We now have the ridiculous “corporate free speech” reform: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2001844,00.html

ttt The McCarthy example disproves that. The Vietnam War would have had no serious candidate to champion opposition with McCain-Feingold. Incumbents went from using their built-in advantage to get some 80% re-election, to about 90 or 95% of them re-elected. That’s why it’s the same faces.
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/why-campaign-finance-reform-never-works

And now there is an irony of saying the CItizens United decision was wrong is based on the big monetary firepower of big corporations, and Obama even warning about foreign corporations. This by the one whose campaign is documented as having received foreign contributions.

The irony is that it is corporate entities like Citizens United that give a voice to citizens who by themselves cannot afford to produce a slick ad like the Demican or Republicrat Party candidates, who cannot individually express themselves with a broadcast ad, now they have a way to put a mouth to their message, by contributing to such a like-minded advocacy group. They don’t own megacorporate media empires like General Electric and Microsoft do.

So why let the big mean mega-corporations that own lots of media reach be the only ones that can contribute billions of free air time to candidates.

ttt “But the real headline of the term was the court’s decision earlier this year *giving corporations and unions sweeping new rights to spend money to elect candidates to office*. It is not an overstatement to say that the 5 to 4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which was handed down in January, could permanently change American democracy.” (The Supreme Court and Corporate Free Speech, Time.com)

sff Corporate free speech actually makes bribes legal, and it drowns out all other voices–those that do not have wads of money to throw at politicians. It definitely has “changed American democracy”: it has practically crushed it.

Besides, the government has always decided who would be in the government. There’s this little old thing in fine print in the Constitution called the “Electoral College.” Now, however, it isn’t the government deciding. It’s corporate money.

ttt First, corporate free speech only provides a way for individuals to pool resources in something they believe in. Not talking about incumbency protection schemes like McCain-Feingold, which big corporations also like, because it provides long-term return on investment into incumbent campaigns.

LBJ’s wife gets the broadcast spectrum and CBS affiliation he set up for her with his legislation, and with incumbency protection laws, now LBJ would not have to worry so much about a well-financed opposition campaign. He did, though, that was McCarthy.

The electoral college is not “the government”. It only elects the president anyway.

Presidents in Latin America and everywhere, America too, have always used their power to try to limit opposition candidates. It’s like gravity. Incumbents have lots of built-in advantages in campaigns. Letting opposition candidate get financing wherever they can get it helps balance the equation.

Plus the big profitable corporations have a built-in PR disadvantage, but they are able to hide it in the Old Media. For example, Wall Street gave millions more to Obama’s campaign in 2008 than to McCain’s. But Corporate Media did not report this at the time, not a whisper. Goldman-Sachs contributions were so lopsided it would have capsized and sunk an ocean liner.

ttt “Medicare and dental care for all — except for the ones denied by the one gatekeeper with no recourse and no competition. Better to get government spending out of it altogether and nix the corporate deductions for it –they still today don’t let individuals get the deduction– so the prices will drop to affordable. Instead we got hikes in premiums with the Unaffordable Act, companies are dropping coverage, and dictates all around and the people get less choice than ever. Doctors dropping out too, the best ones that have enough are retiring.. Now functionally illiterate “graduates” of government schools who can’t read cursive are going to take care of us. Thanks a lot, socialism.”

sff I can’t make sense of this. As for Medicare, some people need help. How are they going to get it? Denying them help is what fascists do. Some extreme fascists would even advocate “lining up all the cripples and shooting them” because they are an “unnecessary strain on the economy.”

ttt The biggest faction advocating any kind of euthanasia today are the more “socialistic” minded states like Oregon. And you can check on who was more likely to see Terry Schiavo as a vegetable, and who wanted to err on the side of letting her live.

And you can check on which side all the handicapped advocacy groups came down on. Planned Parenthood was born as a eugenics program, and Hitler’s eugenics chief was even invited to give talks in America at their meetings! And the Ku Klux Klan loved her, and she documented her visit once to a Klan meeting to speak.

Fascism and socialism are two sides of the same coin. National socialism = international socialism. The “political spectrum” that should concern us is “how much government?”

The spectrum goes from total government (tyranny) to no government (anarchy, or anarcho-capitalism, not the same).

I vote for more freedom. What’s your vote?

sff For the rest of it, I need more information. I can’t be sure I know what you mean about “functionally illiterate ‘graduates,’” but I know my own situation. I haven’t graduated yet, but I’m almost there. I’m using financial aid to go to school and I am far from illiterate.

ttt Obviously I’m not talking about you. You’re obviously very articulate, and express yourself. And I was using hyperbole, I thought it was obvious.

But as long ago as the 1980s I met a New York high school graduate that could not write a gospel tract I handed her. My two oldest sons begged me to let them drop out of high school because they were so bored out of their minds (they’re successful now, one is a music producer).

Get an elementary school McDuffy reader from 1905 or 1913 and look at it. There are high school entrance exams from those years that would stump the best Harvard grads.

sff I can also say with confidence that quite a few of the young students in my classes were skilled with the English language. Not all of them, of course, but several in every class. Their grammar and diction were often better than many politicians, that’s certain.

ttt The best hope is the education that kids can get from sources independent of government schools and government influence, and the ones who are self-motivated from their upbringing. Like the home schoolers acing the academic competition.Politicians are not selected for office for their academic credentials. Their masters like them more pliant. Obama knows economics as much as he knows how to do heart surgery.

At least Ron Paul knows what he’s talking about with economics. In one debate they told the candidates to ask any of the others any question at all. Ron Paul stumped McCain with a simple economics question.

If you read up on Austrian economics you understand more than any of the politicians about how an economy can thrive.

ttt “Nationalized weapons industries. — Oh great. Make them as efficient as the post office. By cutting corporations out of the loop for the dictator, it’ll get better? The “profit” in war will be the political cronies. That’ll work as good as it did for education, and that’s going gangbusters, right?”

sff No one should be profiting from war, corporations least of all.

ttt No one should be profiting from the looting of another, period.But understand. Today’s Godzilla corporations are government pumped. Small corporations are the Moms and Pops and partnerships, more like. We NEED them to profit from productive economic activity.

Without war, weapons industries will atrophy, but we need to push on them. Allowing the people themselves individually to provide for their own self-protection would be more effective for most of it. A government monopoly would be worse because of human nature, and for self-defense too, by the way.

Maybe at least nobody can show up if they give a war.

ttt “==> I’m not a “talking head” or politician or Old Media. I’m a Ron Paul fan, anathema to Shadow Government. We cannot be accused of shilling for the richest. But socialism is a downhill slippery path to tyranny. There are over 100 million humans sacrificed in the 20th century to the god of government.”

sff And I’m willing to bet that twice as many, at least, were sacrificed to Mammon. Corporatism is just as tyrannical, perhaps more so, as any “socialist regime.”

ttt Socialism is Mammon. Socialism defines society in terms of how many each person gets of it.

A completely and truly free market (not the false one socialists accuse the US of having now) is based on the free and voluntary exchange of goods and services. In anarcho-capitalism, for example, the economic application of the non-aggression principle is based on the principles of “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods”.

Socialist regimes slaughtered directly and deliberately over 100 million of their own subjects during the 20th century, and that’s not counting the millions of citizens who gave their lives in battle against them.

ttt “But. Socialist talking heads are indeed shills for the richest and most powerful clique of plutocrats on the planet. George Soros is no starving peasant, and he and his peers at the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and a lot more, they fund armies of writers and journalists to write articles that praise socialism on 100s of web sites all over the Internet.”

sff Wow. Real socialists would not be anything of the sort. They are pretenders, just like Obomber.

ttt Would not do what? Take money from them? Write the same things a “real” socialist would?

See Soros’ political influence (speaking about money influence!)
http://www.mrc.org/special-reports/special-report-george-soros-godfather-left
He has contributed mega-money for the Public Broadcasting Corporation to fund local journalists everywhere in the States. Nobody’s talking about what unwritten agreements were made but you can get an idea of what they’ll probably write about.

He funds “anti-corporate” interests everywhere, including big bucks for Media Matters, a very “progressive” tax-exempt non-profit. You’ll see their “education” on their web site. It’s a “watchdog”, it says but it only dogs the so-called “right”. See for yourself: http://mediamatters.org/

Here you can see how far big money goes to support fascism/socialism/control. It’s a false front racket, all about control:
http://www.mrc.org/special-reports/special-report-george-soros-godfather-left

I’ve been paying close attention. Remember I used to be a Communist. Leader of the Black Liberation Army came to speak at my college once. He said a “group of businessmen” offered him a million dollars. To cool it, one supposes, or “stand down”. He refused and the BLA is no more.

Former SDS members report that at one convention, the Rockefellers actually had a table there and they were offering support. In answer to the obvious question, the representative told one questioner that it was to make them look conservative in comparison.

ttt“I found that out when I battled the lies in 2009 when Honduras asserted its freedom and sovereignty against the socialist-orchestrated attack on it, when the Obama administration joined Chavez in trying to force that country to put the dictator Zelaya back in, who was running his own auto-coup against his own government and against his republic, using fraud for cover. And 80% of Hondurans backed Micheletti against that Chavez-puppet demagogue.”

sff  U.S. backing the oppressive dictator is nothing new. And the usual reason for it is money. The usual reason for just about any war after Korea was money (U.S.-owned opium fields in Cambodia, oil in the Middle East). In the past, the profits trickled down to average workers, stimulating the economy (which is why I say the average American should also accept responsibility for reaping the benefits of blood money). Now they don’t. Corporations are making out like bandits on the War on Terror, and the average American’s wages still are not going up.

ttt Like I say, you’ve GOT to understand even the basics of Austrian economics to know why. Like you said above, there’s not much that makes sense here.

Remember the Fed’s money-“printing” power makes it easier for the politicians to fund the war machine and the welfare state. The latter provides a cushion to absorb the deleterious effects of minimum wage laws and state-ordered union memberships, and the former creates its own circular effect.

And it also fuels inflation, devaluation of the dollar, which is a direct theft from the low wages they do allow, so it’s theft from the middle class and from their welfare subsidies to the poor, for a subsidy to the beneficiaries of money creation (Wall Street, big corporations, politicians)

sff It grieves me to see this. Everything you say is a problem in the U.S. (much of which I agree is accurate) still goes back to corporations and banks. Our “representatives” no longer represent the majority, they represent corporate money. This is “corporatism,” not “socialism.”

ttt And this corporatism only happens because people think the government can solve problems by just ordering it like some kind of divine king: “Make it so.” Government is not God, and a scheme based on robbing wealth and productivity from individuals is going to backfire on itself.

Keynesian economists gave their blessing to this racket, and the big bankers were glad to go along. The biggest banking interests in fact hatched the Fed at Jekyll Island in great secrecy, about to pull a fast one on the American public. And they did a double whammy on us in 1913 with the Fed and the Income Tax.

sff The U.S. has many social programs as you noted. I say we need social programs, but I will at least agree that the programs here are mismanaged and incompetently applied. The same goes for taxation. There’s no reason why we can’t come up with fair taxation rates for everyone. For me, I’d be willing to give up 60-70% of my income in taxes if I knew those taxes would guarantee me and my family a home, healthcare, and opportunities for education. People in the higher income brackets would not necessarily need that and should be able to opt out of taxes spent for that reason.

The sooner we learn that no government is so omniscient or even so benevolent as to be capable of guaranteeing anything for you in the long run, especially based on a monetary policy of fiat currency monopoly, enforced with laws that give you jail time if you mint a gold coin for example, the better.

The boom-bust cycle got worse after the Fed took over the money and the banking. It totally screwed up housing for the 21st century so far. Healthcare is a mess because of government pouring billions into it and propping up corporate insurance deductions. (Why didn’t they do that for individuals?)

The income tax does NOTHING to even “spread the wealth around”. Government actors write the laws and make themselves rich at our expense, and join the Old Boys Club where fashionable Harvard grad socialists sneer at the ignorance of the masses with their religion and their guns.

sff But at the very least, the workers in this country deserve better compensation and more respect from corporations. And corporations are much too large; they wield too much political power because of their billions, now even more so with “corporate free speech.”

It is very important to understand this. The problems here in the U.S. are not caused by socialism, they are caused by corporatism. A real social democracy would balance the power between corporations and workers, just as a real representative democratic republic would represent the interests of the majority (rather than a super wealthy minority).

ttt It’s frustrating I know and it looks that way on first glance and that’s why I was once a socialist myself.I was a missionary because I wanted to change the world, help the poor, and I did. Took food donations to distribute in poor barrios in Sto. Domingo. I saw distended bellies. Fellow missionaries told us about Haiti where the poor carry pans to the market to catch the blood flowing down the gutters at the meat market so they can get protein.

You’d be amazed at what people can do if you don’t make them learn to walk with figurative crutches.

There is no need to “balance power between corporations and workers” if you just quit meddling into people’s lives and let them work out their individual contracts as best they see fit.

Let me recommend Frederic Bastiat’s book “The Law”. It is a booklet written in the 19th century that clarifies the why and wherefore of socialism and government in general. It’s a good starter book to explain things, I think.

Others are Human Action and Socialism by von Mises, and Socialism the Road to Tyranny by Hayek.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/
http://www.mises.org
http://www.lewrockwell.com

Why Ron Paul has a claim on his name on the Internet

April 10, 2013
Plaque on the ICANN (Internet Corporation for ...

Plaque on the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These guys wanting a quarter million means that the web site means a lot of money for anybody who owns it, BUT I DO think they know that they can never get the use of it, nor get the liberty-message mileage, AND their demand for a quarter million speaks volumes to the FACT that they are VERY MUCH into getting something just for being the first to take advantage of a GOVERNMENT-CREATED monopoly on DNS names and the DNS system for the entire world.

ICANN independent you say, not government? No more than the Federal Reserve, right?

The assumption that somehow Ron Paul is using government force to rob something from somebody that they “homesteaded”. NOT SO!

The DNS system and the government-protected monopoly mandate ICANN has to control the names, is a government “virtual” reality.

That’s why I think eventually Stephen Kinsella may even change his mind about this issue, because I agree with his view that a government-created “virtual” property is a speech-suppressing fiction and distortion on the free market. It’s not a telecommunications monopoly like AT&T was before their breakup, BUT it is a “virtual” monopoly.

He said in one interview that if not for trademark law, Ron Paul would have no basis for a claim.

My answer to that is that without a government protection for the ICANN monopoly, and its de facto control over the names by virtue of an Internet that grew as a government creation instead of “organically” like it was before ARPA “took them over” –whether by intention or by accident. It is also a government so bloated out of proportion to the “free” economy, such as it was, that the thing was warped from the beginning by government presence, because by then it was the biggest thing going in the economy.

When you go to visit somebody in the physical world, you look for what the address is. There is no easy such system for the Internet, and when you “lease” the “rights” to the name before somebody else from this government-created committee, you also implicitly are forced to agree that the same ones who granted this monopoly on the name in the DNS servers across the country, have the right to abide by their own rules, or at least make judgments based on those rules, to give it to somebody else.

In other words, all Internet named addresses have to go to the government-created name clearinghouse before you could get to your address, and they tell your computer where to go.

I’ve seen the mentions of other famous people who could not get sites with their names, BUT the examples I’ve seen are NOT examples that equate AT ALL. billclintonsucks.com is NOT billclinton.com.

Truth is, for awhile there were maverick companies making a bit of money by setting up other primary domains. One of them was dot-info, before the ICANN “approved” it. At the time, anybody with a DNS server on the Internet who wanted to was able to direct traffic that ended in that suffix to that DNS server, or download its name-to-address tables.

So get with it people. I once went to ronpaul-dot-com expecting it to be the good doctor’s own web site, and as soon as I realized it wasn’t I lost interest in it. That’s just me but it is worth something.

But the arguments against Ron Paul getting his name back from the government monopoly on virtual names, well, that’s just fair.

And these guys have apparently done okay by the message, while building a business. But when they say they’re barely “breaking even”, get skeptical, or, if they are barely “breaking even”, then why do they think the name is worth a quarter-million?

I recommend also reading Lew Rockwell’s article on this “controversy”, as he also adds a few facts that were ignored when the story broke. Like for example, the name-grabbers and present “owners” saying Ron Paul was going to the United Nations for this. Somebody picked up on this to go to the utterly ridiculous headlines. It’s a fictitious “ownership” because ICANN ultimately controls the naming anyway, and you have to keep handing them the recognition of the ownership fee annually or it “lapses” to someone else.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/132275.html

So there you go, you think about that.

* Ron Paul and ronpaul.com: The argument I haven’t seen out there (trutherator.wordpress.com)

Ron Paul and ronpaul.com: The argument I haven’t seen out there

March 23, 2013
Ron Paul at the 2007 National Right to Life Co...

Ron Paul at the 2007 National Right to Life Convention, held at Crown Center Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, MO; June 15, 2007, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

 

 

 

Good insight, Andrew. If ICANN is set up to enforce a government monopoly controlling domain names, which it is like Kinsella says, then the way Kinsella seems to be coming down on this is self-contradictory, as is the position of the ronpaul.com supporters.

 

I heard Kinsella on the Adam Koresh youtube channel interview about this. After explaining how it is a government-mandated monopoly system under the cover of a quasi-private quasi-official organization like the Fed, and how there are some 30 government officials on the Board of it, he then goes on to refer to Ron Paul‘s actions in this matter as a taking, as if it stood in a vacuum outside of a government-enforced monopoly over domain assignments!

The Internet domain name claim system is LIKE FAKE FIAT FED CURRENCY. Use this or use nothing! If the government had stayed out of it, if there were no trademark law, and no ICANN rule-making body, then an interconnecting network of networks could have grown organically, Ron Paul would own his name and there would grow from the free market a way to see what he says without the ambiguities of who claims a monopoly right on the name first. That’s my opinion for a hypothetical obviously.

But like I have said elsewhere, get another perspective. As one who lost by two days of thinking about grabbing the URL for http://www.miami.com (arggh), just imagine the ronpaul.com guys when they went looking for it. They could not BELIEVE their outrageous good luck in finding out that they got there before Ron Paul himself. Grab it quick, Jack, before Ron Paul figures it out!

Now they whine and complain that they want compensation for being first grabber of a trademark-law-guaranteed monopoly.

Either way this goes, I lean to the same Kinsella view of copyright, patent, and trademark laws. But it is blatantly self-contradictory to say you think trademark law is theft, and then support the monopoly control over it that he says he figures will go to the current “owners” of the name. He seems to agree that the claim is an attempt to seize private property, but he did hesitate a bit when he was asked that, directly by Koresh. But it is property with conditions. Under any “natural law” that might be analogous to trademark law considered here, Ron Paul has a higher claim on the political implications of his name than anybody. They rode Ron Paul’s name and his fame to their own claim.

 

Ron Paul a hypothetical plumber in Minnesota, could make a credible claim to the name factor that is being used to criticize the action, but that’s irrelevant here because the present “owners” of the URL do not carry that name except as a government-created fiction.

And Ron Paul is NOT “filing suit”, he is filing a claim. This is an administrative body but it is an arbitration process besides that.

ARE WE DISAPPOINTED WITH RON PAUL JUST BECAUSE HE USES FEDERAL RESERVE NOTES WHEN HE BUYS GAS??!! Or because he had to use the two-party duopoly to make his point and leave his legacy? You think his usurping the Establishment Republicans’ “rightful” ownership of the party deserves any more than a spitting glance?

 

Do YOU pay for your gas with fake counterfeit money?

 

I think this whole thing has been blown out of proportion by the savvy loud and fast blast of propaganda that ronpaul.com “owners” executed masterfully and immediately.

 

They claim that they offered it free to Ron Paul without compensation, but this is a moot claim, since they obviously did not mean it. They wanted something in return, or otherwise they would just let him have it. Without monetary compensation, maybe, but they wanted something that, in my opinion, when we know exactly what it supposedly was, was something that was of convertible value. I suspect.

 

Again, we do not fault Ron Paul for using what he calls counterfeit money to negotiate for the fruits of his labor at the supermarket. Nor do we fault ourselves. It is simply does not cut so clearly in the present monopoly franchisee’s favor. We shall see how it falls, but the biggest problem is that this infighting over this issue is distracting attention from the bigger issues of the economic and social disaster fast coming, and all the issues of Ron Paul’s message.

 

 

 

 

Ron Paul’s Huge Impact on the Political Conversation

March 23, 2013
The Federal Reserve: The Biggest Scam In History

The Federal Reserve: The Biggest Scam In History (Photo credit: CityGypsy11)

Have you noticed that Ron Paul‘s presidential campaigns has caused a change in the political conversation starting with the 2008 USA presidential campaign? The effects will be felt for a long time.

FEDERAL RESERVE BANK“, SO-CALLED

First of all, one of the biggest things is that the “Federal Reserve Bank”, so-called, the private banking cartel that acts as the broker between the banks and manages a total “legal” monopoly over the nation’s currency, fixes the prices in interest rates for lending, and manipulates the economy through manipulation of the money supply. I put “legal” in quotes because the whole setup is unconstitutional.

“Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal God, I will rout you out.”

I just found a web page (here) that presents the reasons for Andrew Jackson’s veto that killed the central bank, “penned by George Bancroft” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bancroft):


The veto penned by George Bancroft outlined key points
which draw parallels to Americas present day scenario:
– It concentrated the nation’s financial strength in a single institution.
– It exposed the government to control by foreign interests.
– It served mainly to make the rich richer.
– It exercised too much control over members of Congress.
– Banks are controlled by a few select families.
– Banks have a long history of instigating wars between nations,
forcing them to borrow funding to pay for them.

First, one lesson from Ron Paul’s education campaign that is big but went somewhat unnoticed: His character and history exposed the dark underbelly of “opposition research”. This is the industry that specializes in uncovering things that will hurt a political opponent’s prospects. We saw this when they tried to smear him as a racist, and the only result of that was that everybody in the country learned that if anybody in political office has never been a racist, it is Ron Paul, and that the misinformation agents were very dirty indeed, if not racists themselves, for trying to smear a genuine unbiased gentleman. Besides, the more they talked about it, the more the audience realized that it was only Ron Paul who would kill off one of the ongoing causes of de facto harm to minorities in the country today, the useless and violent drug wars.

Another change is that everybody in the nation is now talking about the Federal Reserve, and most of it is not nice. Sure, the Obsolete Press is still “respecting” it in its reporting, tip-toeing around its economic dictatorship by a clique of bankers, but there is now with the Internet a true alternative news media that often reports facts that under the old more controlled structures, would be almost unknown by most people.

In fact, criticizing the Federal Reserve is a common practice by some Congressmen and economists. Many of them get quite acerbic in their language. I only remember one lone voice in the Old Media that had some harsh language for the Fed, Bob Brinker with the Money Talk call-in radio program. When Greenspan began strangling the stock market and the economy with his repeated increases in the base interest rates in the year 2000, Bob Brinker expressed perplexity that this decision could even be considered, and pulled no punches in his (albeit understated) language.

But Ron Paul is the one who forced the issue of the Federal Reserve specifically, and fiat money generally, and their true nature, into the national political conversation and consciousness.

RON PAUL MADE PEACE POPULAR AGAIN

To the consternation of the military-industrial complex, Ron Paul frustrated the neocon war drum pundits by making it popular to oppose unnecessary wars. The conversation his campaign catalyzed resolved into the realization that America’s wars of recent decades were not only unconstitutional, but they were a “cure” that had far worse results than the “disease”.

Now, almost everybody, get this, especially on the “right”, is now expressing weariness and puzzlement over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The “Arab Spring” misinformation cover propaganda for throwing north Africa overboard to a clique of oligarchs ruling as theocrats, ideological analogues of Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, so called. I say “so-called” because they will persecute other devout Muslims who disagree with them as fast as they would kill a “Crusader”. Make no mistake Muslims: Even if you are a member, you are under the same risk from your leaders as the rest of us. There are indeed many Muslims who are not the stereotype.

RON PAUL MADE THE WORLD SAFE FOR “SEQUESTER”

The gig is up, the secret is blown, the public now knows the fraud they use in Washington when they talk about “budget cuts”. Now Americans know they are NOT budget cuts at all, but INCREASES in the budget, in the way that Americans talk about their own personal budgets, and even corporations.

Now they know that when Congress and the President talk about budget cuts, they are LYING because they know that Americans don’t “talk like that”.

No, Americans know now that the Chicken Little squawking over the “sequester” is a great big ridiculous joke, meant as cover to do more dollar-destructive profligate increasing in the budge. And a lot of Republican congressmen are surely getting heat from their siblings and their cousins back home about it. The Republican half of the Establishment Parties was scared by the press into caving on the “government shutdown” in the 1990s but “sequester” is a different story now.

But by extending the debt limit out some more –yet again– they are exposing themselves. And even much of the alternative media did not make much noise about this. The Tea Party surge in 2010 when Americans spoke with a loud voice that they wanted the spending and the borrowing to STOP RIGHT NOW, there were four freshmen who gave in.

It seems like the Republicans are the biggest enemies to implementing their own rhetoric into law. The minimum price for raising the debt ceiling should have been at least the repeal of “Obamacare”. It has already caused great harm to Mom and Pop shops, small business, and the poor at the bottom of the wage scale has seen their pay and their hours reduced, and both health insurance costs and cost of medical services has gone up more than inflation, all harmful and opposite to the promise.

Hondurans stopped a dictatorship in its incipient stages in July 2009. They have more sense than Americans, and we call ourselves a “democracy” or even a “republic”? Who are you to talk about them? Corruption is pretty much a fact of life in Latin America, and corruption worked hand in hand with anti-corruption demagoguery to put de-facto “elected” dictators in place now in several countries in South America, but one little country said NO! to an “elected dictatorship” despite all the dollars the Chavistas poured into it.

RON PAUL EXPOSES THE WELFARE STATE

There are millions of people in the USA that get a monthly check or free food at the cost of divulging a thousand private secrets they would not tell a neighbor. But now people are much more aware of how this government intervention into people’s lives actually hurts the poor more.

Politicians for example raise taxes and borrow money to pay for a bureaucracy that gives out money (and “food stamps”) to people for the price of all their information. Some government fanatics now take a word out of the Orwellian Doublespeak dictionary and call it an increase in “revenues’. Never mind it never increases tax revenues as much as they say, because the economy is NOT zero-sum.

Say John Doe works at a low-wage job and his employer, Uncle Joe Creations, sees his taxes go up to pay for those people who have no jobs. So the Uncle Joe looks at how he can cut costs, and one of biggest expenses for business in the United States is payroll. He has to look at payroll.

If Joe has been a good businessman, he cannot cut back on infrastructure or on inventory to pay for the increase in taxes because it would decrease his own revenues. Sales would go down. Joe’s sales have been going down because the shrinking production in the economy has hurt business. That’s why the demand by government officials and “consultants” with six-figure and seven-figure salaries in Washington are demanding more “tax revenues” to “help the poor” [sic].

John Doe is maybe the janitor, say, so what “Uncle Joe” does is decide that he can use a part-time service at half of what he pays John Doe.

That’s how John Doe loses his job, the economy loses production at the margins of productivity, and now John Doe cannot buy the car he planned on, or the TV, and he has to cut back on everything while collecting unemployment. Not all is lost. The unemployment checks come from payments to the funds by people who are working, except now there is one fewer working.

So of course the bureaucrats (who started out as wanting to help the poor, and many still do) demand more from the tax base. Politicians have an easy out with debt increases, especially if it creates “currency” out of thin air. But that causes inflation, a euphemism for robbing value from your savings and your cash to pay for what they want.

YOUNGER FOLKS ARE ABANDONING THE SOCIALIST LIE

One of Ron Paul’s strongest showing in 2008 and 2012 was on college campuses. While other candidates had problems getting even one section of a stadium to look full, Ron Paul’s crowds packed stadiums and auditoriums across the country. They came often because of his opposition to unconstitutional and senseless wars, and many of those also cheered his message of killing corruption by kicking government out of the economy.

EVERYBODY IS A LIBERTARIAN NOW

It is now popular to call yourself a libertarian in politics, especially in the Republican Party, but in other venues as well. It has left the corner where the Rulers’ Media had it relegated as “crazy people” and set fire to kid’s imaginations and made it a popular cause to oppose the welfare-warfare state in the same sentence.

THE WAR ON DRUGS IS UNPOPULAR NOW EVEN AMONG PEOPLE WHO HATE MIND-ALTERING SUBSTANCES

Now the body politic is questioning the cost in lives and resources of the so-called war on drugs. They are getting the message that the war on drugs is worse overall than the drugs themselves, and that Prohibition Round Two is not working. Oh, and by the way, it’s not even constitutional like Prohibition One was.

MARRIAGE

An important and largely unnoticed percentage of BIble-believing Christians –like me– have always disdained the idea that the state would have anything to do with marriage, but the issue of so-called “same-sex marriage” has driven this idea into the open to libertarians, who now want the state to bug out of the marriage altogether.

Why should we allow the state to issue “licenses” to marry?

It’s not that I think “gays” should “be allowed” to marry. I was married for awhile before I had to get state recognition for it so I could get the visa that allowed my wife to come to the States. One “same-sex marriage” advocate that wants government permission for this has defended this by saying there are some 10,000 legal privileges “enjoyed” by heterosexual couples in the USA that “gays” should be able to benefit from.

First of all, if you concede your government the say-so, the last word on the matter, then you open it up for your opponents. If you advocate same-sex marriage and demand the privilege from political power, then you are making it a legitimate issue for those who oppose you.

“One size fits all” dilutes your own cause. I tell my close family and friends that I think homosexual practices are harmful to them in many ways that are independent of morality claims. The practice has been common throughout history –variety of expressions of hedonism has never lacked in most societies. But even in cultures where it was common, never did they consider male coupling as a “marriage”.

But I don’t think anybody, whether they represent a “government” or not, should be able to dictate who I can be with, and I would rather persuade others than use force on them.

Even so, I will mention here that one of the best defenses against a state that imposes cookie-cutter conformity on its citizens is the natural family, mother and father raising their children. Talkers in media talk about non-traditional “kinds of families”, but what they avoid talking about is the fact that all these different “kinds” of families outside the traditional model, are all take-offs from the natural family of father, mother, and children.

SCHOOL CHOICE

The idea that parents should make the decisions about their children’s education is every day more popular. The idea has breached a threshold: most “minority” parents want vouchers for their kids. A government monopoly is now ever more unpopular.

FREEDOM RINGS

What did God say about people wanting a king? What did God warn them about taxes and war?

1 Samuel 8:7 7 And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.
11 And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.

12 And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots.

13 And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

14 And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

15 And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.

16 And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

17 He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.

18 And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

19 Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us;

20 That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.

Isaiah 61:1 The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;

Federal Reserve Awareness Day: Every 5th

March 3, 2013

I’m reposting a note sent to me by one of the stewards of “Federal Reserve Awareness Day”. More information is at the link which I repeat here for your convenience, https://www.facebook.com/FedAwarenessDay

I deleted myself out of Facebook sometime ago already, but if you have a presence there, you might want to refer to the web page to spread the word. It’s a good conversation starter on the subject of liberty too..

If you’re wondering why I quit, here it is:
“This is Why I Quit Facebook”:
https://trutherator.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/this-is-why-i-quit-facebook-and-they-still-send-me-come-back-emails-after-unsubscribing-illegally/

Hi trutherator,

I’m starting a monthly effort to generate more awareness of the Federal Reserve system, alternative currencies, sound money, etc. and if you’re interested I would like your help.

The idea is every fifth of the month I will post information each hour to this Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/FedAwarenessDay (please like this page!) so that those who are following the page can easily share the information and (hopefully) reach a large amount of people who still do not understand the Federal Reserve system and how it operates.

I’m also asking for suggestions on content and materials to share on the Facebook page in this open thread:
http://libertycrier.com/forums/#/discussion/893/federal-reserve-awareness-day-open-thread

If you know of something (a video, article, image) that should be shared on the 5th I hope you’ll post it here. Any questions you might have and/or ideas for improving the effort are also greatly appreciated. Thank you for your consideration and thanks in advance for your participation.

-Trevor Lyman

Related articles
Federal Reserve confirms its system was breached (computerworld.com)
Gold and Silver Approved as Legal Tender by Arizona Senate (tenthamendmentcenter.com)