2008

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As the incoming Obama administration and the Democratic congressional leadership scramble for ways to right the U.S. economy, 70% of U.S. voters say a free market is better than one managed by the government.

Just 15% say a government-managed economy is best, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided.

But indicative of the mixed feelings that beset many of the nation’s leaders, a majority of voters (52%) also believe there is a need for more government regulation of big business, although 35% disagree. Thirteen percent (13%) aren’t sure. (Last month, just 26% of adults were at least somewhat confident that U.S. policymakers knew what they were doing with regards to the economy).

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The answers for our nation’s current woes are out there. They may be a bit difficult to find, and challenging to implement, but they are there.

  • The immediate challenges that are being discussed today are:
  • To immediately implement a complete overhaul the nation’s currency, banking, investment practices and regulations.
  • To produce low-cost energy; reduce or eliminate pollution from fossil-powered energy plants.
  • To reduce dependency upon foreign oil imports by increasing the efficiency of gasoline-powered vehicles.
  • To reduce the cost of healthcare and to make health insurance affordable for all.
  • To create meaningful and substantial jobs for Americans.

First, with respect to the entire list above, libertarians would say that government needs to get out of the way and the bad parts of government need to be allowed to crash and burn, just like a forest fire purges old dead growth and brings about renewal. Can anyone argue this now that America has destroyed itself from within better than any foreign enemy could imagine?

Americans have a growing state of uneasiness as they see ahead to massive unemployment, crime, even hunger. While the absence of government would likely bring anarchy and lawlessness, the current government appears to be spurring on just such a state of chaos.

It’s obvious that the American people, schooled about the Constitution and the importance of limited government, in reality beg for more government to solve their problems. Large industries lobby for federal control, using government guidelines and regulations to impede true competition and to mandate use of their products (e.g., vaccines) and to rub out competitors (e.g., onerous requirements for underground fuel storage tanks which wiped out independent gas stations). True competition in the marketplace often doesn’t exist.

Point A: Banking and Currency Reform

In respect to point A, it is obvious that the fraudulent system of making fiat money and fractional banking must come to a halt, but it has continued to impoverish the American people for decades just as the Midianites ruined the Israelites long ago (Bible, book of Judges 6). Where to look for a model of economic and currency reform? The Mises Institute serves as the think tank for financial reform, with books on Austrian economics by Rothbard and others as models.

A curriculum needs to be developed for American young people, possibly starting in grade school forward to college, to learn about money, its origins, banking, etc. Funds need to be directed toward the writing of such a curriculum to be offered to schools. Even college professors don’t know where our money comes from. Most professors should attend this class. Online courses need to be offered. Why wait for the school systems to implement such a course into their offerings which will likely be opposed by many forces?

The blackballing of Austrian economics needs to stop. It needs to be instilled into the American mindset. Had Ron Paul been elected to the Presidency, the Mises Institute would have provided the direction for true reform of American government, including pulling the plug on most of it.

The printing of fiat money (printed at the whim of government), backed by nothing but the full faith and credit of government, which is defined by its ability to just print more paper money to cover for its debts, must stop.

The idea of gold-backed currency has been advocated by many for years. Mussolini printed Italian liras to fund WWII. The Italians threw this worthless paper money into the streets of Rome like it was confetti when the war ended. America is close to this same scenario now.

The idea that banks can just make money out of thin air by multiplying its cash reserves by 10-fold, to create more money to loan, is sheer folly. When a bank loans out $100,000 based on $10,000 of reserves, it created $90,000 of new money. But it didn’t put new money into circulation to cover for the cost of the interest payments. Eventually, a society using this type of banking system is playing musical chairs. Somebody won’t be able to sit down in a chair when the music stops because there isn’t enough money in circulation to cover for the interest payments. That is what is happening now.

Point B: Energy

With respect to point B, the nation is at a crisis point in regards to energy. Go to China where industry there cannot obtain electricity more than three days a week. This could be America soon. The US is locked in a war between those who demand clean energy vs affordable energy. Coal is polluting, obviously evidenced in China where mucky skies make it difficult to breathe. The idea of President-elect Obama to subsidize wind power is misdirected, since there would never be any incentive to develop energy at a cost equal to or lower than coal. Subsidized power just raises taxes. Furthermore, wind power is not practical as constant winds of 11–13 miles an hour are needed for minimal energy production (that’s enough wind to unfurl a flag on a pole), and there is no current way to store this energy so it can be used during less windy times.

Even if more power can be generated, the nation’s electric power transmission lines are not capable of delivering more power. These transmission lines heat up and droop, causing them to touch trees which results in short outs, power outages, and even forest fires (recent Orange County, California fires). About 8–9% of the electric power now generated from power plants is lost during transmission, which is about $30 billion of lost power in economic terms.

Enter private enterprise, not government. New power cable technology (Mercury Cable & Energy, Dana Point, CA) is about to be introduced that almost eliminates power line loss, can transmit more than double the amount of power without line droop or heat induction.

The entire 350,000 miles of power transmission lines in the US could be replaced within 3 years, without expansion of the environment footprint (it is strung on existing power lines and poles), and be completely self-funding (costs ~$80 billion to install, saves $30 billion a year). The bonus: stringing new transmission lines would yield ~48,000 megawatts of newly available power without having to burn more fossil fuel, and would eliminate the need for ~97 new power plants. Environmentalists should be pleased. Will the Obama Administration make room for private enterprise to enter the scene, or is it over-committed to wind power generation?

Point C: Dependency Upon Foreign Oil

Within respect to C, about 70% of fossil fuels are employed to power automobiles and trucks. What is desperately needed has already been invented, and by none other than US car manufacturers. It’s just not available to US consumers because the federal government doesn’t embrace diesel-powered vehicles. The objection has been air pollution, which has now been conquered with new technology. Ford Motors has a new 65-mile-per-gallon diesel car that seats 5 people and is affordable. It is going to be sold in Europe, but not America.

Such an automobile would cause oil-producing companies to shake in their boots. If Detroit auto makers are bailed out of their financial crisis, will there be a demand to produce these cars and bring them to the US? Will the US government eliminate its burdensome tax on diesel fuel? This opportunity is in President-elect Obama’s court. His bully pulpit can bring about this change, simply by letting American free enterprise go to work, unhindered, and let it compete against the best foreign imports.

It has been estimated that vehicles that get 33 mpg would reduce America’s oil demand by 500,000 barrels of oil per day in 2015 and 2.1 million barrels of oil per day by 2025. Just think of a 65-mile-per-gallon car. Think of the billions of dollars that wouldn’t be spent for gasoline that would be freed up to spur on the economy. The air would be cleaner too.

Point D: Healthcare Reform

With respect to D, there is no way any developed country, especially one facing a growing population of retirees, can avert financial collapse of its healthcare system without improving the healthspan of its citizens. The incidence of disease needs to decline. Age-related disease needs to be slowed. Japan does this by its traditional diet, characterized by less meat and dairy products, not by prescribing more medicines and performing more treatment. The fodder Americans are being fed is breeding the diabesity epidemic. Food producers like Americans to overeat. Government subsidizes the cheap less-nutrient-dense foods and high-fructose sugars.

More health insurance just increases demand for care, more doctoring, more treatments, more hospitalizations. Prevention is anathema to doctors. All that the incoming Administration has promised is to introduce a program that ensures doctors and hospitals get paid for providing care to the uninsured (many who can afford to buy private health insurance, but elect not to). The lesser advantaged are now waiting for their free healthcare card so they can run to the doctor. And there aren’t enough primary care doctors to meet the increased demand for care.

Government here can’t see that it needs to promote self-care. If it does realize this, it will never get through the food, pharmaceutical, hospital, doctor-dominated National Institutes of Health, Food & Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control. The American healthcare industrial complex has penetrated every area of healthcare with an agenda to over-vaccinate and over-medicate every citizen.

In reality, America does not have a health care system, it has a disease care system, and a medical factory line that practices little prevention and promotes more and more disease. Once people enter the clutches of the health care system, the search for disease begins with mammograms, colonoscopies, stool tests, blood tests, CT scans, and the like, but no routine testing is performed for vitamin C, vitamin D, folic acid, vitamin B12, red-cell magnesium, or essential oils. Instead, drugs are prescribed that actually induce nutritional deficiencies, ensuring more chronic disease.

American free enterprise needs to step up to the plate and offer courses in self-care, education in the use of natural antibiotics, over-the-counter pain relievers, antidepressants, artery cleansers, even home cancer cures. (Some which have been aired here at the Lew Rockwell website:

Just One Pill Away

Are Cancer Cures Being Hidden From the Public?

Real Help for Cancer?

The Overlooked Cancer Cure From Japan

If President-elect Barack Obama wants change, he can set an example here and shun the trappings of modern health care unless it is absolutely needed and set an example by giving up his tobacco habit, and starting to take vitamin and mineral supplements, and advising the public to do the same.

Point E: Employment

This article just described an invigoration of American free enterprise that would unleash millions of enterprising and hard-working Americans to rebuild America.

About 25% of the American work force is now employed by government. Fixing the employment problem by creating a national police force, federally funding more programs that build dependence upon more and more taxes, is folly. This is the feather-bedding that America used to criticize Russia of practicing.

When government manipulates the job market it often creates phony, meaningless jobs. Money hasn’t fixed inner-city schooling or made Americans any healthier. It won’t fix the job market either because you end up with the few paying more taxes to support jobs for the masses. Then any cutback in taxes means people must be dismissed from their jobs. It’s a vicious circle. Let private enterprise hire a minority woman with four kids to feed. Then she is not forever on the back of the taxpayers.

Finally, one reason why you see the Lew Rockwell website take a strong position against war-making is that it economically burdens the country. Someone has said that for a country that isn’t at war, the unemployment rate is about 25%. The ancient Egyptians at least figured a way around this, and employed their slave classes to build temples and pyramids. But these again were meaningless jobs. But at least war was averted.

War is the politicians’ way to cover for a bad economy. It has been employed by leaders since time immemorial. The Germans in the 1930s were ready for more bread lines when Hitler drummed up nationalism and the need to conquer other lands. The warmonger unites the masses in fervent nation pride, temporarily giving the masses jobs, but distracting from the real tasks of government.

Americans hear of military cutbacks as if troops in the field will be at greater risk. The federal government hides the fact that ~51% of the annual federal budget goes toward making war. This produces a false economy, making weapons, jeeps, war vehicles, army boots. Then the economy depends upon endless war for endless employment. The war budget is robbing America’s future. Whatever Medicare and Social Security have promised (there will be a $75 trillion shortfall in these programs as the Baby Boomers enter their retirement years), military spending has taken away. Our children’s future has been taken away.

The phony wars (can you recall a recent war the US really needed to enter?), and the fabrications for war (weapons of mass destruction) will continue as long as Americans are gullible to fake villains (Osama’s, Al Qaeda’s) and contrived war triggering events (Pearl Harbor, 9-11), and willingness to work for, and die for, the war establishment that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about. Yes, there will be lots of temporary unemployment as troops come home from the war fronts, but there is a lot of work to do at home. America must shed its dependence upon war to fix its economy, and to cover for the lack of proper governance by its leaders.

Our tired and worn out republic needs more than a tire change. It needs to re-invent itself in the traditions that founded the country, freedom from over-taxation, limited government, right to defend ourselves, the Judeo-Christian work ethic, freedom of worship without a state religion, free enterprise, and the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Government needs to get out of the way and let American ingenuity take charge. Take away the props and let American free enterprise thrive. The larger task is getting the masses to stop clamoring for more government and more taxes. The fire-breathing dragon of government has now drawn every American into the prospect of a dire future. Isn’t it time to dismantle this monster?

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Families tearfully put hope in clemency during last days

Monica Ramos embraces her husband, former U.S. Border Patrol agent Ignacio Ramos, two days before he was sentenced to 11 years in prison (Courtesy El Paso Times)

As president, George W. Bush has pardoned or commuted sentences for 32 drug dealers, 12 thieves, seven embezzlers, an arsonist, an armed bank robber and eight Thanksgiving turkeys, among others – but U.S. Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean remain in prison this Christmas, praying for their release.

“It’s pretty much salt in the wound,” Ramos’ wife, Monica, told WND. “But we have a lot of hope. My husband has quite a bit of faith, and we pray a lot. We are hoping the outpouring of support that we have here from people all over the nation is going to help us.”

Ramos and Compean are serving 11- and 12-year prison sentences, respectively, for shooting at a fleeing illegal alien drug dealer while he smuggled nearly 750 pounds of marijuana across the border. They were convicted of assault, discharge of a weapon in the commission of a crime of violence, tampering with an official proceeding and deprivation of civil rights. More »

by Chelsea Schilling
WorldNetDaily.com

Support These Agents

Please send cards and letters to the two Border Patrol agents sentenced to 11 and 12 years in prison for shooting at an armed, convicted drug smuggler they believed was going to shoot them.

As it stands now, agents Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos lost their final appeal. It is our hope that the men, who languish in solitary confinement cells for 23 hours out of every day, will be pardoned or exonerated on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Please pray for these men and letters to:

Ignacio Ramos #58079-180
FCI Phoenix
Federal Correctional Institution
37910- N 45th Ave
Phoenix, Az 85086

Jose Compean #58080-180
FCI Elkton
PO Box 10
Lisbon, OH 44432

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My gentle (and not so gentle) readers are all urged to join the Constitution Party, the Christmas celebration of which for Lancaster County I had the pleasure of attending last night. Among the speakers and celebrants were Jim Clymer, who ran for the US Senate, Dan Frank, who was the recent congressional candidate from our district, and Gary Odom, the Party Field Director for Pennsylvania. Yours truly was one of the speakers, and I’ll be giving the keynote address at the CP’s state conference in Carlisle in early February. Those who wish to attend will be welcome, providing they’re not drunk or foul-mouthed. (The contact person is Danielle Warren at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Although I would prefer to believe that he was kidding, Jim Clymer might have been serious when he asked me if I would like to run for the senate seat currently held by Arlen Specter. Unfortunately I am too old and too war-battered to take on such a task, one that would undoubtedly end in defeat, against the well-heeled two party oligarchy that organizes our elections and which usually offers a choice of two equally unappetizing candidates. The CP should be recruiting young people nationwide, to build up a credible right-of-center alternative to the DemReps.

The CP is the alternative party that I have chosen in preference to the Libertarians. Despite having a decent presidential candidate in Ron Paul, the Libertarians abound in eccentric types who are hung up on resisting authority figures. Its members have argued in my presence and with utmost gravity such propositions as whether a woman should be able to sell fetal membrane after having dispatched for profit her unborn child. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is hard for me to abide the discourse of many libertarians, who can’t get off the topics of individual autonomy and of doing your own thing. But this does not seem at all characteristic of members of the Constitution Party, who combine respect for constitutional limits on our gargantuan managerial state and its war-making powers with bourgeois Christian social traditions. (I use the latter term respectfully to refer to the way Americans used to live before their reconstruction by public educators, the media and our abhorrent welfare regime.)

In the remarks that I intend to deliver in Carlisle, two points will be paramount. One, a party on the right, that is, one trying to regain the place once held by Taft Republicans and other traditional Americans, seems necessary for our national well-being. The US has gone too long without having such an alternative. A party of the Right, once it takes off, could have international repercussions and possibly signal to Europeans that we in the US are building a credible alternative to the generic Left. Let me note something here that I’ve tried to document in my books. Europeans have allowed themselves to be poisoned by a leftist multicultural ideology produced partly in the US in the 1960s, and it may be useful to show the rest of the world that Americans are moving back to where we used to before we and the Europeans plunged into a no-man’s-land of diversity and public administration tyranny. . And the Right that we need to build would involve something more than the GOP rotating with the Democrats as occupants of the White House. It would have critical meaning as a counterforce to the Left.

Two, we must work to weaken the Republican Party, a looming presence that may be an even worse curse for the American Right than the Democrats. The Republicans by virtue of the support they enlist among traditional Americans do more harm than mislead the gullible. They suck the energy out of the Right; and they turn what could be a grim opposition to the Left into mere partisanship. Once in office, the Reps act like a second leftist party, expanding the public sector as a source of party favors. They provide what is mostly a toothless opposition, except when they’re unleashing neoconservative-inspired wars.

I for one shared McCain’s relief that Obama won; and I would be delighted even more if a right-of-center party could supplant the Republicans. The GOP has become silly to the point of being offensive. I still recall with a shudder how McCain ran around in the South last spring telling white voters to get rid of Confederate flags as hate symbols, before apologizing in Memphis for not having sufficiently supported the Martin Luther King national holiday. To the extent they were not merely expressing knee-jerk PC, these speeches exemplified GOP “stratergery” (if I may avail myself of the term attributed to W on Saturday Night Live), gratuitously offending one’s core constituency while trying to appeal to a left Democratic voting bloc that one has no chance of picking up.

One might claim that I expect too much of a party that has trouble getting onto state ballots and which, as one of its presidential candidates Howard Phillips once noted, considers it a victory “to break into single-digit figures.” But the strength of the CP is that it stands for what old-fashioned, normal Americans used to desire—and providing they’re still around, would endorse in a national party. Unlike the GOP, which is an entrenched and state-subsidized fixture, it not a vampire sucking the lifeblood out of the Right. The CP may be the eventual answer to what the Republicans have been unable to furnish.

By Paul Gottfried.

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Many conservatives are up in arms regarding the charge that President-elect Barack Obama may not have been born in the United States and is, therefore, not qualified under the U.S. Constitution to be President of the United States.

Article. II. Section. 1. of the U.S. Constitution states, “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President . . . .” Some accuse Mr. Obama of not being born in the State of Hawaii as claimed, but in Kenya, Africa. Several people have filed various lawsuits challenging Mr. Obama’s U.S. citizenship.

Historically, “natural born Citizen” has always been understood to mean someone born in the United States of America. If Barack Obama was not born in the United States, he is absolutely unqualified to be President. Hawaii’s secretary of state says Obama was indeed born in that state. However, to date, Obama’s actual birth certificate has not been publicly released, which only serves to add fuel to the accusations that he was not born in Hawaii.

Many conservatives seem to be obsessed with this controversy, calling it a “constitutional crisis.” The fact is, however, we have been in a “constitutional crisis” for years! The problem is, most conservatives only get worked up over a potential abridgement of constitutional government when it serves their partisan political purposes. In other words, when a Democrat appears guilty of constitutional conflict, conservatives “go ballistic,” but when Republicans are equally culpable of constitutional conflict, they yawn with utter indifference.

For example, the one man who has the notoriety and political clout to actually bring about some meaningful investigation and resolution to the Obama citizenship brouhaha is none other than Senator John McCain. After all, he was Obama’s principal opponent in the race for the White House. Plus, as the standard-bearer for the only other major political party, he has the attention of the national media, as well as the national legislative and judicial branches of government. So, why is John McCain not at all interested in the Obama citizenship issue?

Perhaps one reason that John McCain is so uninterested in where Barack Obama was born is because he, John McCain, was not born in the United States. He was born in the country of Panama. So, let me ask readers a question: Does anyone believe if John McCain had been elected President instead of Barack Obama that any notable conservative would have been distressed about a “constitutional crisis”? Get real!

Yes, I know McCain was born to a naval officer serving in Panama at the time. That fact changes nothing. John McCain was still born in a foreign country, and under a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, is not qualified to be President of the United States. Even our current State Department policy (7 FAM 1100) reads: “Despite widespread popular belief, U.S. military installations abroad and U.S. diplomatic or consular facilities are not part of the United States within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A child born on the premises of such a facility is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of birth.”

Does anyone not remember the controversy surrounding the potential Presidential campaign of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger? Born in Austria, Schwarzenegger is a naturalized citizen of the United States and is now Governor of California. However, since Schwarzenegger is a naturalized citizen, but not a natural born citizen, he is considered unqualified to run for President.

But, again, most conservatives care little about the Constitution’s requirement that a President be a “natural born Citizen.” Like liberals, most conservatives are afflicted with a very debilitating disease that I call Selective Constitutionalism. They only want to apply constitutional government when it helps Republicans or hurts Democrats. Most of them really could not care less about adherence to the Constitution. If they did, they would have been up in arms for the last eight years as President George W. Bush repeatedly ignored—and even trampled—the U.S. Constitution.

Where were these “constitutional” conservatives when George W. Bush was assuming dictatorial-style powers and contravening Fourth Amendment prohibitions against warrantless searches and seizures? Where were they when Bush was ordering our emails, letters, and phone calls to be intercepted by federal police agencies without court oversight? Where were they when Bush was obliterating the Fifth and Eighth Amendments? Where were they when Bush overturned Posse Comitatus by Executive Order? Where were they when Bush dismantled the constitutional right of Habeas Corpus? Where were they when Bush lied to the American people about the invasion of Iraq and took the United States to war without a Declaration of War from Congress? Where were conservatives when Bush turned nine U.S. military installations over to the United Arab Emirates? Where were they when Bush ordered his Department of Transportation to open up America’s airlines to foreign ownership? Where were they when President Bush nullified (using “signing statements”) over 1,100 statutes he did not like? Where were they as President Bush and his fellow Republicans reauthorized one of the most egregiously unconstitutional pieces of legislation in modern memory: the USA Patriot Act? Where were they when Bush signed the blatantly unconstitutional McCain/Feingold Act? I could go on and on.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican Party has been just as culpable in violating constitutional government as the Democrat Party has—maybe more so! If the Republican and Democrat parties had any allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama would have been chosen as their respective Presidential nominees.

While we are on the subject, if anyone cared about constitutional government, Hillary Clinton (or any other U.S. Senator or House Member) would obviously be determined as ineligible to be given any appointment in the Obama administration under Article. I. Section. 6. of the U.S. Constitution. Why? Because the Constitution prohibits House or Senate members taking Presidential posts if the salary of the job they would take was raised while they were in Congress.

However, several past Presidents have skirted this constitutional prohibition (including Presidents Taft, Nixon, and Carter) by lowering the salary of the job back to what it was so the nominee could accept the job without receiving the pay increase that was approved while the appointee was in Congress. In fact, this sleight of hand actually has a political name. It is called “the Saxbe fix,” after Nixon’s appointment of Senator William Saxbe to be attorney general.

Do we have a “constitutional crisis”? You bet we do; but it is not limited to Barack Obama or the Democrat Party. The real constitutional crisis is the manner in which the American people have, for years, allowed civil magistrates from both major parties to routinely violate their oaths to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. God help us!

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