Economist David Malpass wrote on Wednesday that the US administration’s weak dollar policy is causing job losses because investors are fleeing towards stronger currencies.
Bond buyer Bill Gross of the Pimco fund summed up the situation nicely in a recent CNBC interview. Asked whether low interest rates will weaken the dollar, the influential allocator of global capital said: “I think that’s part of the administration’s plan. It’s obviously not announced—the ‘strong dollar’ is always the policy, so to speak. One of the ways a country gets out from under its debt burden is to devalue.”
…Some weak-dollar advocates believe that American workers will eventually get cheap enough in foreign-currency terms to win manufacturing jobs back. In practice, however, capital outflows overwhelm the trade flows, causing more job losses than cheap real wages create. This was the lesson of the British malaise, the Carter malaise, the Mexican malaise of the 1990s, Yeltsin’s Russian malaise through 1999 and the rest. No countries have devalued their way into prosperity, while many—Hong Kong, China, Australia today—have used stable money to invite capital and jobs.
…Washington’s current economic program pushes capital away by weakening the dollar, threatening higher tax rates, borrowing short (the Fed’s near trillion-dollar overnight debt, Treasury’s mounds of bill and note issuance) to lend long (mortgages, student loans, entitlements), doubling down on government subsidies, and rechanneling bank loans to governments and big businesses instead of the small business job-growth engine.
British journalist Robert Fisk stands by his report from Monday that foreign countries are planning to withdraw from the dollar in the oil market and as a reserve currency.
The plan to de-dollarise the oil market, discussed both in public and in secret for at least two years and widely denied yesterday by the usual suspects – Saudi Arabia being, as expected, the first among them – reflects a growing resentment in the Middle East, Europe and in China at America’s decades-long political as well as economic world dominance.
…Saudi bankers are well aware that in nine years’ time – the current timeframe for a transition away from the dollar in oil trading to Japanese and Chinese currencies, the euro, gold and a possible new Gulf currency – China will have doubled its national income to $10trn (assuming a growth rate of 7 per cent), at which point the US might hold no more than 20 per cent of the world’s gross income.
Such massive financial movements, encouraged by the de-dollarisation of oil, will have enormous political effects in the Middle East, especially if economic superpower rivalry between America and China comes to dominate the Arab world. Will American economic support for Israel remain as loyal in nine years’ time if China and the Arabs are setting the pace in global financial markets? Indeed – perhaps with this in mind – some Israeli financiers have been expressing interest over the past two years in non-dollar Arab bank investments. Whenever a change of this magnitude takes place over a number of years, it has to be commenced in secrecy.
Market researcher Gerald Celente believes that inflationary US monetary policies are worsening the financial crisis and will lead to economic disaster.
“It is more than just the demise of the dollar – this is going to be felt worldwide. There’s a major financial crisis ahead. The United States, the world’s superpower, is failing on its most basic level,” Celente told RT.
And the reason for the future demise of the American currency, Celente says, is the disproportionate financial system:
“We can’t print money out of thin air, backed by nothing and producing practically nothing.”
Following Fisk’s report, free market activists have been contacting Congress calling for the restoration of the freedom to trade with a stable currency. One letter was written by libertarian columnist Mike Miller:
Several countries are making plans to stop using Federal Reserve Notes for oil purchases. I want the same freedom for my personal transactions.
The Fed has nearly doubled the money supply since last Fall. This will cut the future value of my savings in half and send my cost of living through the roof. Add to that . . .
The $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare
Your big bailout schemes
Your so-called stimulus package
Your cap and trade boondoggle
Your disastrous healthcare plans, and the result is . . .
I see no hope for the dollar…
If foreigners can stop using Federal Reserve Notes, I should have the same freedom. Why should foreigners have more right to control their own economic destiny than I do?
Many in Washington claim they want to protect the Fed’s independence. What about my independence? I just want you to repeal the legal tender law so I can use forms of money other than Federal Reserve Notes (like gold and silver for instance). Doing this would also moderate the Fed’s behavior. If they want me to keep using Federal Reserve Notes then they’ll have to stop their legalized counterfeiting activities.
Please represent me. Break the Federal Reserve’s money monopoly. Give me the same right that foreigners have.
To send your own letter to Congress demanding an end to the inflation tax, visit Downsize DC.
Minuteman founder Chris Simcox is running for Senate in Arizona, providing voters with an opportunity to select a candidate who opposes providing amnesty to illegal immigrants and has made a personal sacrifice to protect our border.
The co-founder of a group dedicated to fighting illegal immigration plans to challenge former GOP presidential nominee John McCain for his Senate seat in the Republican primary.
…”John McCain has failed miserably in his duty to secure this nation’s borders and protect the people of Arizona from the escalating violence and lawlessness,” Simcox said in a written statement.
“He has fought real efforts over the years at every turn, opting to hold our nation’s border security hostage to his amnesty schemes. Coupled with his votes for reckless bailout spending and big government solutions to our nation’s problems, John McCain is out of touch with everyday Arizonans. Enough is enough.”
Chris was interviewed Wednesday on W. E. Messamore’s radio program:
Chris Simcox is uniquely qualified to represent his fellow Arizonans in the United States Senate. His accomplishments in both public and private sectors give him the experience to lead. A middle-class American, Chris understands the value of a paycheck and the work ethic it requires. If you’re weary of elitist, self-funded career politicians, then it’s time to hire a Senator who will serve the people of Arizona.
Chris believes that a father’s participation is vitally important to raising young children in today’s world. Along with his wife, Alena, Chris takes an active role in home schooling their three young children. It enables him to take advantage of his notable background as an elementary school teacher.
Reflecting the enduring American spirit, Chris Simcox began a second career in the music business. From retail sales to musician, engineer, and as an artists and repertoire representative during the 1980s, Chris worked in the music recording industry based out of Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. He worked with professional musicians in producing country & western, jazz, and rock & roll music albums.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 heightened Chris’s awareness of the security issues which our country faces, including that of our open southern border.
The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 profoundly affected Chris Simcox, as it did the entire nation. Chris became aware of the serious security issues we face due to our wide-open northern and southern borders. He felt a renewed duty to country and tried to enlist in the military, and then in the U.S. Border Patrol. But at age 40, he was barred from both by age limits. Chris felt strongly that he should do something to make America aware of the grave risks our open borders pose. So, he left his teaching position and moved to Tombstone, Arizona. There he began working for the Tombstone Tumbleweed, a weekly newspaper.
In May of 2002, Chris bought the struggling paper and turned its fortunes around. It became the best hometown newspaper the town had had in decades. He gained a reputation for journalistic tenacity. Chris was not afraid to dig into local political corruption. He began writing about the lack of adequate border security and the mounting illegal immigration problems that plagued southern Arizona.
Moved to action, Chris founded the first citizen border watch activist group, Civil Homeland Defense. Over time, it evolved into the historic Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC), a citizen activist group dedicated to securing our United States borders and coastal boundaries against the unlawful entry of individuals, contraband, and foreign military. Minuteman efforts to bring national attention to the lawless nature of our borders have helped:
Significantly increase the number of Border Patrol Agents deployed on the border
Lead to the construction of a state-of-the-art border fence
Expose the out-of-control drug trafficking and violence that’s spread throughout the U.S. and all of North America
Political commentator Dick Morris has expressed alarm over plans laid out at the G-20 meeting to cede control of the American economy to emerging powers including Marxist Brazil, Communist China, and the Monarchy of Saudi Arabia.
While all eyes were on the rantings of Ahmadinejad at the United Nations, the United States — under President Barack Obama — was surrendering its economic sovereignty at the G-20 summit. The result of this conclave, which France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy hailed as “revolutionary,” was that all the nations agreed to coordinate their economic policies and programs and to submit them to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for comment and approval. While the G-20 nations and the IMF are, for now, only going to use “moral suasion” on those nations found not to be in compliance, talk of sanctions looms on the horizon.
While the specific policies to which the U.S. committed itself (reducing the deficit and strengthening regulatory oversight of financial institutions) are laudable in themselves, the process and the precedent are frightening. We are to subject our most basic national economic policies to the review of a group of nations that includes autocratic Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. Even though our GDP is three times bigger than the second largest economy (Japan) and equal to that of 13 of the G-20 nations combined, we are to sit politely by with our one vote and submit to the global consensus. Europe has five votes (U.K., France, Germany, Italy and the EU) while we have but one.
And the process will be administered by the IMF, whose counsel to less developed nations over the past two decades has consistently called for social pain and economic austerity. The IMF’s misguided policies have been responsible for more revolutions than Marx, Engels and Lenin combined. Its bureaucrats’ arrogance is legendary and their search for appropriate punishments to fit the crime of spending too much on the poor smacks of colonialism and imperialism. They are our new overseers.
As excessive government spending and intervention shoves the US economy towards total collapse, the World Bank, IMF, and G-20 are laying out plans to rise from our ashes.
The wrenching financial crisis of the past two years will provide the catalyst for a profound change in the global economy – which, according to the man running the World Bank, will see China and India become established centres of power, the dollar eclipsed as the sole reserve currency, and Latin America, south-east Asia and Africa emerge as new sources of growth.
But as he surveys the wreckage caused by what the bank and its sister organisation, the International Monetary Fund, agree is the most severe crisis since the devastation caused by the second world war, Robert Zoellick is surprisingly upbeat about the future.
Asked by the Observer how he envisages the global economy in 20 years’ time, Zoellick says: “There will certainly be a larger role for the emerging powers, there will be multipolar sources of growth, there will be more south-south trade between developing countries.
The leader of the World Bank is angling to leverage the financial crisis centered in the Western world to launch the rise of Eastern powers.
“The crisis gives us the opportunity to hasten this process. If we are concerned about the past reliance for growth on the US consumer, we have to make sure consumers in developing countries have enough finance to buy.”
Developing countries were on the rise before the credit crunch and, as the latest snapshot of the global economy released last week illustrates, their position has been strengthened by their ability to keep growing as the west teetered on the brink of a 1930s-style Depression.
…America, Zoellick says, can no longer rely on the dollar ruling the roost. The euro and the Chinese renminbi are candidates to become reserve currencies.
“These annual meetings take place at a defining moment in global governance,” Strauss-Kahn says. “We have experienced unparalleled economic co-operation in the last 12 months. It has never happened in history.“
The treasonous Democratic leadership has fully endorsed and even legislated $100 billion in funding for this international coup, which is opposed by conservatives.
Responding to media reports that House Democratic negotiators have agreed to include a new $100 billion line of credit to the IMF a top priority of President Barack Obama the top Republican in the House said Tuesday he would oppose the bill.
“Let’s be clear: a troop-funding bill should fund our troops, period,” said Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. “Weighing down this critical legislation with nondefense spending will only drag this process out further and cost it essential Republican support needed for passage.”
Obama promised the IMF money at April’s G-20 summit to help developing countries deal with the troubled global economy. About $8 billion for an earlier commitment for the IMF will be included.
At the G-20 meeting, disloyal American diplomats promised hundreds of billions to prop up the International Monetary Fund’s currency, termed Special Drawings Rights (SDRs).
The U.S. did, though, take the lead in getting the summit to agree on an increase in IMF rescue funds to $750 billion from $250 billion now. Japan, the European Union and China will provide the first $250 billion of the increase, with the balance to come from as yet unidentified countries.
“This will provide the IMF with enough resources to meet the needs of East European nations and also provide back-up funding to a broader set of countries,” said Brad Setser, a former U.S. Treasury official who’s now at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
The G-20 also agreed to an allocation of $250 billion in Special Drawing Rights, the artificial currency that the IMF uses to settle accounts among its member nations. The move is akin to a central bank such as the Federal Reserve effectively creating money out of thin air, except it’s on a global scale.
Bonds issued by the IMF are being bought up by foreign countries such as Brazil, China, and Russia.
Shortly after the September G-20 summit, it has been reported that non-US members including Russia, China and Japan have been secretly meeting with Middle-Eastern Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia to plot the removal of the American Dollar as the medium of exchange for the oil trade.
Arab oil-producing nations and some of the world’s largest oil consumers including China and Japan are reliably reported to be planning a long-term exit from pricing their oil trade in US dollars. If true, it would spell the death knell for the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and for the United States as global economic power.
…According to a leaked report from Arab Gulf oil producers, there have been a series of secret meetings in recent months between the major Arab oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, and reportedly also Russia, together with the leading oil consumer countries including two of the three largest oil import countries – China and Japan.
…Iran announced recently that in the future it would sell its oil for euros not US dollars. According to these reports, the basket of currencies would include a mix of yen, euros, Chinese yuan and gold. Brazil would reportedly join as both a producer and a consumer country.
Glenn Beck report on US dollar removal from oil trade
Review all international monetary agreements, especially in regards to their pursuance of the Constitution. This includes the BIS, IMF, World Bank, and the United Nations.
Determine if rule 4-2b of the International Monetary Fund that states that no member nation may have a currency backed by gold conforms to the Constitution of the United States.
Determine if the Bretton-Woods Agreement Act, Public Law 94-564 and Section 5 of the Bretton-Woods Agreement Act, 22 U.S.C. 5 286c, is in accord with the Constitution of the United States.
Determine if gold transferred and deposited by the U.S. to the IMF, BIS, and other international organizations conforms to the Constitution.
Abolish all Unconstitutional Policies
Repeal the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
Repeal and repudiate Federal Reserve Notes as “obligations of the United States” under 12 U.S.C. section 411.
Repeal all gold certificates held by the Federal Reserve System, in favor of a trusteeship over the gold to be executed by the United States on behalf of the people.
Repeal all Supreme Court decisions that support legal tender laws and state that they are unconstitutional.
Repeal all legislation that allowed for the seizure of gold coin in 1933, including the War Powers Act & the Trading with the Enemy Act, as discussed in the appended Letter to Congress.
Abolish all gold confiscation laws and pass news laws making it impossible to confiscate gold and silver at any time, under any circumstance, including national emergencies and acts of war.
Return all gold unconstitutionally seized in 1933 that is in the custody of the United States, and or the Federal Reserve, or other entities. All such gold should be given back to the American people on a per capita basis.
Oil-rich Middle-Eastern countries are meeting along with other world powers to plot a withdrawal from the US dollar as a petrocurrency.
In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.
Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.
The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.
Foreign organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are planning to seize the role traditionally held by the American dollar as a reserve currency.
Its twice-yearly meeting agreed a stronger voice for G20 countries in Fund decisions. Russian Finance Minister, Aleksey Kudrin, says it’s a step in the right direction
“It’s a continuation of the G20 meeting. We talked about reforming the IMF – the key question was the increase in the share of the IMF capital for developing countries, as many think organizations like the IMF and World Bank represent only the interests of developed countries. But the developing markets which are a huge part of the global economy are not presented enough in top management and the capital of these institutions.”
…The agenda of the IMF and the World Bank in Istanbul reflects tension between the growing voice of developing nations – and the traditional role of global lenders. The head of the World Bank Robert Zoelick took a middle view – saying that as the US economy loses influence, the financial institutions may take on its leading role.
A market analyst has claimed that the primary purpose of the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh was to usurp the sovereignty of the United States by placing its currency beneath Special Drawing Rights issued by the IMF.
According to Jim Rickards, director of market intelligence for scientific consulting firm Omnis, the unannounced purpose of the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh on September 24 was that “the IMF is being anointed as the global central bank.” Rickards said in a CNBC interview on September 25 that the plan is for the IMF to issue a global reserve currency that can replace the dollar.
“They’ve issued debt for the first time in history,” said Rickards. “They’re issuing SDRs. The last SDRs came out around 1980 or ’81, $30 billion. Now they’re issuing $300 billion. When I say issuing, it’s printing money; there’s nothing behind these SDRs.”
…The U.S. has fueled the world economy for the last 50 years, but now it is going broke. The U.S. can settle its debts and get its own house in order, but that would cause world trade to contract. A substitute global reserve currency is needed to fuel the global economy while the U.S. solves its debt problems, and that new currency is to be the IMF’s SDRs.
One way to address the problem of fiat currency is to restore the right for citizens to trade in gold and silver. In the previous Congressional session, Rep. Paul introduced a bill (H.R. 2756) calling for the repeal of legal tender laws which currently prohibit this practice.
The Honest Money Act repeals legal tender laws, a.k.a. forced tender laws, that compel American citizens to accept fiat (arbitrary) irredeemable paper-ticket or electronic money as their unit of account.
Absent legal tender laws, individuals acting through the markets, rather than government dictates, determine what is to be used as money. Historically, the free-market choice for money has been some combination of gold and silver, whenever they were available. As Dr. Edwin Vieira, the nation’s top expert on constitutional money, states: “A free market functions most efficiently and most fairly when the market determines the quality and the quantity of money that’s being used.”
…The drafters of the Constitution were well aware of how a government armed with legal tender powers could ravage the people’s liberty and prosperity. That is why the Constitution does not grant legal tender power to the federal government, and the states are empowered to make legal tender only out of gold and silver (see Article 1, Section 10). Instead, Congress was given the power to regulate money against a standard, i.e., the dollar. When Alexander Hamilton wrote the Coinage Act of 1792, he simply made into law the market-definition of a dollar as equaling the silver content of the Spanish milled dollar (371.25 grains of silver), which is the dollar referred to in the Constitution.
RJ Harris, an Iraq war veteran, Constitutional conservative, and Congressional candidate in Oklahoma’s 4th district, appears in the film ‘A New America’, which premiered on October 1st (to support RJ, go to rjharris2010.com).
RJ Harris – A New America
As so-called progressive politicians in Washington sell out the people at nearly every opportunity, citizens are returning to their conservative roots and forming a phalanx around the body of our Constitution to fight for the freedom upon which our forefathers founded this great country.
RJ Harris was the first 912 candidate in the nation. He full heartedly agreed to sign the contract and submit to the principles and values articulated by Glenn Beck and the 912 Project. Today as thousands march on D.C., and millions watch around the world. Mr. Harris is preparing for the biggest battle of our generation. The battle to restore our constitution, republic, and 9 principles and 12 values of the 912 project is among us.
Harris believes that we can win this battle through peaceful, yet strongly motivated, activism and charge to take back our Congress!
In the midst of bailouts, socialism, GIVE acts, continued involvement into our personal lives, and the expansion of the Federal Government, there are individuals and large bodies of activists coming together for the cause of Freedom. Harris has the integrity and leadership—being a Sgt. And leader of two platoons in the Army National Guard, and an expert on the U.S. Constitution – to lead other 912 candidates and this great nation in the fight to restore our Republic!
W. E. Messamore: So what specific policy prescriptions would you propose to fix our nation’s economic problems, for instance the health insurance industry, the finance industry, and our economy in general?
RJ Harris: Well, the first thing that’s got to to happen is we have got to stop getting involved in individual welfare. That right there causes a lot of problems because it spends money unconstitutionally, and it causes unintended consequences for the various markets for which they were spent.
The other thing is- we need to retake the delegated authority given to the Federal Reserve and take it back to the Congress. That authority has improperly been delegated and Dr. Paul has articulated way better than anyone in the last several decades how the Federal Reserve and their unconstitutional currencies they float cause these business cycles. And their cheap money and their artificial inflation of money and credit- that’s what’s causing a lot of this financial meltdown.
As for the health care industry- remember that health care is an example of individual welfare, so the Federal government doesn’t have the authority to provide that. A lot of folks out there want to say “RJ, you’re being so heartless- what about people who are indigent and need help?”
Well the different pieces of the Constitution come together to make an answer for a modern problem- and that is under the tenth amendment, we see that any powers not given directly to the Congress under the Constitution are reserved to the people and the states respectively, i.e. equally, and so the states, working with their citizens, can decide whether they want to have free market solutions, or whether they want state-based solutions for health care, but it has nothing to do with the Federal government.
W. E. Messamore: You served in our nation’s military- tell me a little more about that.
RJ Harris: I’m a currently serving Army National Guard officer, and I’ve been in either the national guard or the regular army for 18 years now, pushing 19. Two combat tours in Iraq and one peacekeeping mission in Korea.
W. E. Messamore: What did you learn in your experiences and how would that affect your view of legislation as it relates to military and foreign policy?
RJ Harris: When I became a sergeant, that’s when I read the Constitution for the first time because I had to swear an oath to uphold and defend it, so it dawned on me that I should probably read it. And immediately I started seeing all kinds of things that our government was doing that was askance of that document. The government is breaking its own supreme law constantly.
Market analyst Jim Rickards believes that the Federal Reserve should have starting raising interest rates six months ago, but has not done so because it is deliberately devaluing the dollar. He says that their goal is to cut its value in half over the coming years. While this cheapens existing debt it also undermines national security because it limits the future lending ability of the US central bank in a time of crisis and may even cause the dollar to fold under an international currency such as the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights.
Other market researchers also believe that the central bank will continue to weaken the US Dollar by keeping interest rates artificially low.
“The reversal in the dollar and gold indicates the markets believe the Fed and Treasury will keep a weak-dollar policy to stimulate the economy,” said Brian Kelly, chief executive of Kanundrum Research, a commodities and macroeconomic research firm.
“This opens the door to the potential for competitive currency devaluations,” he said, adding that in such a scenario, “the natural beneficiary is gold.”
Swiss economist Marc Faber is convinced the expansion in the money supply will flow into speculation, not capital investment. This is the reason for the so-called ‘jobless recovery’.
Marc Faber the Swiss fund manager and Gloom Boom & Doom editor said money printing flows into the system and goes into speculation in commodities, equities, art and consumption, but it doesn’t go into capital spending.
“You can boost any kind of asset by printing money. What then happens, you can print money whether physically with a printing press or electronically, what you don`t really control are the long term consequences of the money printing, Faber told Bloomberg.
The significance of what Faber is saying is fundamental: Money printing goes into speculation and consumption not into capital spending of new factories, or into the acquisition of equipment and machinery or R&D.
“You cannot postpone the hour of truth forever,” said the Swiss national, who now lives in Thailand. “The next stage is for total breakdown of the financial system and for an economic and financial crisis that will bankrupt governments.”
A problem that the Federal Reserve is facing by inflating currency is that the price of commodities such as gold rise in proportion to the increase in the money supply. It attempts to cover this up by entering into swap arrangements with foreign banks which artificially suppress its price.
Jake Towne, a candidate for Congress in Pennsylvania’s 15th district, has written that Larry Summers, the director of the Obama’s National Economic Council engaged in manipulation of the gold price through foreign swaps modeled after covert collusion between central banks during the Kennedy presidency in the 1960′s.
In October of 1960, gold trading on the London gold exchange reached $40/ounce, which was $5 higher then the central bank’s target price. Rampant speculation that a Kennedy presidency would lead to more inflation, along with the building of the Berlin Wall and the U-2 spy plane incident, triggered fears about economic stability.
To curtail these fears, President Kennedy pledged in February 1961 that America would maintain the official price to our foreign creditors, and the price of gold fell to $35/ounce. Fearing a relapse, the international bankers of the BIS and the FED-US Treasury secretly formed the London Gold Pool. Each member of the Pool would pledge some of their gold to keep the London market suppressed. The Bank of England would dump their gold on the London market whenever necessary, and at the end of each month the other members would reimburse the BoE in accordance with the percentage of the pool they owned. The members were:
50% – United States of America with $135 million, or 120 metric tons
11% – Germany with $30 million, or 27 metric tons
9% – England with $25 million, or 22 metric tons
9% – Italy with $25 million, or 22 metric tons
9% – France with $25 million, or 22 metric tons
4% – Switzerland with $10 million, or 9 metric tons
4% – Netherlands with $10 million, or 9 metric tons
4% – Belgium with $10 million, or 9 metric tons
My message is … bankruptcy is imminent in the coming years as I first clearly denoted in this series. Similar to the closing of the gold window in 1971 being preceded by the demise of the London Gold Pool, this bankruptcy has been preceded by former Treasury Secretary and current Director of the National Economic Council Larry Summer‘s gold price suppression plan enacted in the 1990s.
The “Summers Suppression Plan” has been bolder, more clever and more clandestine than the London Gold Pool, but may well be on its last legs.
Democrats are lined up at the legislative gate with a myriad of plans to tax the working class of America. The tax targets begin with energy and insurance. Coming next will be a national sales tax, termed value-added tax or VAT.
ACES will have a trivially small effect on global warming while imposing substantial costs on all American households.
Let me repeat that: a trivially small effect, while imposing substantial costs. How big are the costs? Well, he cites the Congressional Budget Office, which estimated that the resulting increases in consumer prices needed to achieve just a 15-percent reduction in carbon dioxide–slightly less than the target of this bill–would raise the cost of living $1,600 a year, every year, for every family in America. That is a $1,600 tax on every American family every year.
The Heritage Foundation predicts that the ACES approach could cost the economy $9.6 trillion and more than 1 million lost jobs into the future. And these are just the raw numbers. The real potential for economic pain goes much further.
David Sokol, chairman of MidAmerican Energy, points out that ACES–this bill–could be a bonanza. And for whom will it be a bonanza? For more Wall Street corruption and more Wall Street greed because ACES is going to deal in investment banks, it is going to deal in hedge funds and other speculators who want to speculate in the cap-and-trade market.
Next is health insurance, for which a 40% excise tax would be assessed on high end plans.
Sen. Baucus had proposed a 40% excise tax on employer-provided coverage in which premiums exceed $8,000 a year for individual coverage and $21,000 for family coverage. This would include premiums for medical, dental and vision care; employer contributions to health reimbursement arrangements and health savings accounts; and employee contributions to flexible spending accounts. The threshold amounts would increase to match rises in the Consumer Price Index for urban areas, plus one percentage point.
Alternatively, those who cannot afford insurance would be fined, or taxed, up to $1,900 per year.
The House bill calls for a penalty of a 2.5 percent additional tax on their income. The Senate Finance Committee bill would fine families up to $1,900 a year, depending on income.
In addition, employers with more than 50 employees that provide plans in which premiums paid by employees are at least 8% of their adjusted gross incomes would be hit with financial penalties, generally no greater than $400 per employee. The same penalties would apply to employers with more than 50 employees that do not offer any coverage.
A recent study, published on the same day that the $800 billion health insurance plan was introduced, suggested a tax on soda.
The group, which includes the New York City health commissioner, Thomas Farley, and Joseph W. Thompson, Arkansas surgeon general, estimates that a tax of a penny an ounce on sugary beverages would raise $14.9 billion in its first year, which could be spent on health care initiatives. The tax would apply to soft drinks, energy drinks, sports beverages and many juices and iced teas — but not sugar-free diet drinks.
The group’s review of research on the topic, appearing in The New England Journal of Medicine, was released on Wednesday, the same day that Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat, made public his health care reform plan, with an estimated cost of $774 billion over 10 years. The Baucus plan would be paid for by an array of taxes and fees on high-end group insurance plans, drug and medical device makers, and other sources, with no mention of any tax on sugary beverages.
John Sicher, the publisher of Beverage Digest, a trade publication, said that a two-liter bottle of soda sells for about $1.35. At 67.6 ounces, if the full tax was passed on to consumers, that would add 50 percent to the price. A 12-can case, which sells today for about $3.20, could rise by $1.44, a 45 percent increase.
“A one cent per ounce tax would create serious problems and potentially adversely impact sales for the American beverage industry,” Mr. Sicher said.
After this on the Democrats’ agenda is a European-style sales, or value-added tax.
John Podesta, a chief of staff in Bill Clinton’s White House, compared the nation’s budget crisis to the situation the former president faced in 1993 and said a value-added tax is “more plausible today” than ever.
“There’s going to have to be revenue in this budget,” Podesta, co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s transition team, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend.
A so-called consumption tax would “create a balance” with European and Japanese economies and “could potentially have a substantial effect on competitiveness,” he said. Value- added taxes in Europe and Japan encourage savings by taxing consumption.
As the number of jobs lost since the beginning of the recession passes 7 million, obstinate liberal economists such as Paul Krugman continue to push the upside-down theory that the best way to climb out of debt is to keep digging.
“We find that a stronger short-term fiscal policy response” — by which they mean a temporary increase in government spending — “is significantly associated with smaller medium-term output losses.”
So we should be doing much more than we are to promote economic recovery, not just because it would reduce our current pain, but also because it would improve our long-run prospects.
But can we afford to do more — to provide more aid to beleaguered state governments and the unemployed, to spend more on infrastructure, to provide tax credits to employers who create jobs? Yes, we can.
It can clearly be observed that as months of real data is placed beside the Keynesian model, the trendline does not fit (h/t azred).
Despite this, Krugman continues to insist that the only way to preserve the economy is through government handouts and centralized planning. He believes that we should adopt the same approach which nearly bankrupted Britain and ended their reign as the top global power.
It was Keynes who advocated Britain’s quitting the gold standard in 1931, a measure that did bring some relief while earning the opprobrium from the advocates of “sound” money. He wasn’t joking when he said that instead of paying out dole money it would have been better for the British government to print a great number of five-pound notes, paying people first to bury them and then to dig them up.
He helped turned the British Pound into a fiat currency. Their central bank cranked up the printing press and allowed the country to inflate and consume itself.
Keynes once demonstrated an example of his doctrine by knocking towels onto the floor and claiming that the act of picking them up was equivalent to the generation of work.
Gadding from one conference to another in the 1930s, Keynes occupied a place in the public imagination normally reserved for left-handed tennis players or erratic minor royalty. He was spotted by Bloomsbury cronies telling housewives on the newsreels how they must abjure the thrifty habits of generations. In Washington he alarmed a pundit of conservative views by tipping a pile of washroom towels to the floor in an attempt to show how increased consumption generated work and therefore would aid economic recovery.
Should we really be basing our economic outlook on the theories of a man who believes that creating disorder and then cleaning it up is a proper means of stimulating recovery?
Less than 15 years after Keynes convinced it to drop the gold standard, Britain was on the brink of bankruptcy. On the advice of Keynes, Britain took out a large loan in from the United States, twice the amount of its GDP.
John Maynard Keynes, the economist and lawmaker who was then the top adviser to the British Treasury, likened his country’s financial situation to the military rout at Dunkirk. Prime Minister Clement Attlee dispatched Keynes to Washington to seek support.
Instead of a subsidy, Keynes came back with the loan, fixed at 2 percent interest to be reimbursed in annual payments that were structured like a mortgage. The payments were mostly interest in the early years and shifted toward capital later on.
When Britain took the $4.34 billion loan in 1945, it was the world’s dominant superpower. Its debt helped fuel the growth of its financier, the United States.
Richard Nixon famously declared almost four decades ago: “We are all Keynesians now”, meaning the use of tax and spending adjustments to smooth economic fluctuations was generally accepted.
The world subsequently learned — through experience and a major revision of economic thinking — that Keynesian policies could be ineffective, or even harmful. Governments around the world are now acting as if those lessons had never been learnt, but they remain valid today.
As deficit spending drives the US into its own downward spiral, we are borrowing an increasing portion of our GDP from overseas. Judging by history, we can expect those lenders, China and Japan, to leverage our own debt into a position of global power while we fall into greater dependency. Further borrowing and spending will only increase the size of the ditch in which we are becoming buried.
According to an IMF study, as little as 10% of the money borrowed for stimulus spending is recycled into economic output.
The multi-country IMF study referred to found that the bang for the stimulus buck is small: typically 10¢ in extra GDP per dollar of stimulus at the time of impact, and no more than 50¢ even after three years. Some other commentators think the effect is even weaker. The notion that the pay-off to fiscal stimulus can be enlarged and fine-tuned through careful targeting sounds like a proposition from the Soviet handbook of economic planning, and will be about as successful.
It is little wonder that an economic theory exemplified by knocking towels onto the floor or burying money and then digging it up would consume more resources than it produced. It is a recipe for demoralization and disaster.
The most penetrating criticism of Keynes came from Friedrich von Hayek, an Austrian lecturing at the London School of Economics, who famously became Mrs Thatcher’s favourite economist. Hayek had witnessed the catastrophe of state during the hyperinflation of the 1920s. He had his own, purely economic reasons for disagreeing with Keynes; but he also suggested that the Keynes style of liberalism, by increasing the scope of state power, would end by extinguishing the bourgeois freedoms it purported to save. Somewhat unconvincingly, Keynes responded that “dangerous acts” were all right so long as they were perpetrated by the right people – ie, by the progressive, socially congenial elite educated at Oxbridge or Harvard. Keynes remained a statist who believed that “moderate planning” was better than laissez-faire.
Are we all Keynesians now? Let’s hope not. The true remedy to the economy’s ills is to stop borrowing, stop spending, let prices drop, and allow failed companies to enter bankuptcy.
Keynesian-style policies have resulted in disasters such as the Great Depression, the “stagflation” in the United States from 1970 to 1982, and the aftermath of the Japanese Bubble. Each lasted more than a decade. It would be far better to allow for an unobstructed free-market correction process. With no government safety net or bailouts, there would be more hoarding, faster deflation, more bankruptcy, and a speedy return to prosperity.
While bankruptcy sounds horrible, it is actually a wonderful and orderly process. First of all, it fixes balance sheets quickly. It also provides an opportunity to remove current owners and administrators who operated businesses in a risky fashion. No need to worry about bonus questions here! Some bankrupt firms will go completely out of business and their resources will be auctioned off to other entrepreneurs at very low prices. I would imagine that the dozens of startup firms working to bring electric cars to market would love the opportunity to buy an auto plant in Michigan for pennies on the dollar. Other firms will remain in business with most workers keeping their jobs, but bankruptcy reduces debt and cost and provides an opportunity to renegotiate contracts and wage rates.
The resulting environment after bankruptcy is one of new owners and operators with far less debt who have not had their “animal spirits” crushed. Firms would have less debt and therefore lower cost structures. Some consumers would be flush with hoarded cash and have an opportunity to buy at much lower prices. The economy enters recovery mode and can quickly attain full employment and economic growth. Most importantly, by not bailing out the losers, there is no moral hazard that entrepreneurs will believe they can rely on bailouts in the future.
The unemployment rate has risen to 9.8% as another quarter of a million jobs were shed last month.
Employers cut more jobs than forecast last month and the unemployment rate rose to a 26-year high, calling into question the sustainability of the economic recovery.
The unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, the highest since 1983, from 9.7 percent in August, the Labor Department said today in Washington. Payrolls fell by 263,000, following a revised 201,000 decline the prior month that was less than previously reported.
Economists are calling into question the inflationary policies of the government, which through excessive spending and artificially low interest rates is debasing the US dollar and undermining market stability.
Investment analyst Peter Schiff, who is running for Senate in Connecticut, attributes the country’s employment problem to the loose monetary policy of the central bank.
“The reality is, that if we put interest rates anywhere near where they ought to be, we would bankrupt most of our financial entities and we’d have a real collapse,” Schiff says.
“We’re never going to have a real recovery until the market lets us have a real recession.”
“Our phony consumer-based economy isn’t viable; it only exists as long as the Chinese and Japanese lend us money to buy their stuff.”
Financial analyst Jim Rogers expressed his concern about the effect of the central bank’s artificially low interest rates, currently set near zero. He added that the government is underreporting the inflation rate, which threatens to destabilize the economy.
“There’s no question the US is vulnerable to hyperinflation down the road or certainly the inflation we saw in the 1970s, I would expect that to come back in the foreseeable future, certainly in the next few years,” he said.
“The true inflation rate in America? It’s certainly at least 6 or 7 percent, the US government lies about it, as you know, everybody who shops knows that prices are up, everybody except the US government, and I wish we knew where they shopped so we can shop there too and get good prices.”
Rogers repeated his view that the Fed’s quantitative easing program is “debasing the currency” and said he was “extremely worried” about the fate of the dollar over the long term.
Q: It has been a big run for equity markets first and foremost, what have you made of it?
A: The governments around the world are pouring huge amounts of money into the world economy. It has to go somewhere and the easiest, best way for it to go is in the financial markets.
Q: It has also concomitant with a big fall in the dollar and there is a call now for greater weakness in that currency, would you concur?
A: I am not optimistic about the US dollar long-term. In fact, the US dollar long-term is going to be a disaster. However, there are many people in the world right now who are terribly pessimistic about the dollar including me, many people have sold the dollar short, and so it would not surprise me if there were not a big rally. If a rally comes, I plan to sell that rally but I am not selling the dollar down here.
To restore a functioning free market, he suggested that the government should stop pumping money into banks and allow those that have been poorly managed to fail.
The chairman of Rogers Holding wrote in the Financial Times, “We need some more Lehmans so we can get out of this.”
During the last 20 years, “Greenspan and Bernanke introduced crony capitalism to the West, which is leading to a lost decade(s),” Rogers writes.
“Market fundamentals are that failures should collapse and be replaced by creative new forces rather than being propped up as zombies. Financial institutions have been failing for centuries and the world has survived.”
Michelle Bachmann discusses “too big to fail” approach on Cavuto
Conservative lawmakers are pushing to bring more oversight of the Federal Reserve (HR 1207 and S 604), whose loose monetary policies have led the country into a financial crisis.
Glenn Beck radio interview of Ron Paul on his book “End the Fed”
As Rep. Clyburn, the 3rd ranking House Democrat, recently put it ‘There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do.’ Sadly, the modus operandi of leadership in Washington today is to shove through Congress whatever legislation they can get away with nearly complete disregard to the responsibilities chartered in our country’s founding document. This is demonstrated by the twisted treatment given to a Constitutional clause which was intended to protect free trade, but has been everted, spun, and woven into an instrument of distortion used to consolidate state control.
Democrats lament that insurance companies need “competition” from the government in order to lower costs and improve services, when it is in fact government mandates that have created health insurance monopolies, high costs and poor services. In defiance of the Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause, health insurers are not even permitted to sell across state lines. It must be understood that in a free enterprise system, the health care market naturally responds to whatever ailments are suffered on the population with new hospitals, increasing numbers of doctors and advances in technology. If the market was suddenly liberated from government regulations, over 100 existing insurance providers would be free to sell to anyone in any state. With such an explosion of new supply, costs would be driven down by the resulting competition, quality would be continuously increased and access to coverage would be vastly expanded by nature of the newly burgeoning healthcare sector. Our greatest problems are a result of governmental interference and cannot be solved by more of it.
Yet, if the superiority of free market competition, individual choice and personal responsibility is wildly self-evident, why has the left insisted on expanding the government, the perpetrator of every health care woe in America? Sadly, they do not believe in freedom or the sovereignty of the individual. They want to force you into “prevention” because they don’t trust you to do so yourself. They must cut costs because they demand that you foot the bill for other people’s failures. They further constrict the private sector because they see an opportunity to rob you of your greatest and most sacred liberty: your life. The government seeks to control your body and divest all private health choices from you and your doctor; it wishes to determine how and when you live or die. If the left is claiming their health care legislation is anything but tyranny, they are simply lying.
While Democrats in the District of Columbia try to deceive Americans using such marketing terms as the public ‘option’, they are preventing hundreds of companies from competing in the health insurance marketplace and are leaving us with a monolithic bureaucratic agency that will remove choice and ignore the volition of our citizens.
As a small business owner in Tennessee recently wrote, the government is preventing him from providing affordable health insurance to his employees.
As a small-business owner, I know firsthand the difficulty of providing health insurance. I also know that too much government is one reason health coverage isn’t more affordable already. You do not tear down your house and replace it with government housing just to fix a leaky roof. You fix the roof.
There are many ways to “fix the roof” of our health-care system without burdening future generations with another $1 trillion in debt and creating new bureaucracies to control and ration health care. Unfortunately, Obama’s plan does not include two simple reforms that would help immediately: interstate competition and encouraging high-deductible plans with health savings accounts.
In 1990, we started our first bicycle store. We now have three stores in the Nashville area. For years, we wanted to offer a health plan to our employees, but it was too expensive. I heard the same lament from bicycle dealers nationwide while serving as president of the National Bicycle Dealers Association a few years ago — they wanted to provide health plans but could not afford to. Dealers often asked if the association could offer an affordable plan for the many thousands of employees of the more than 4,000 bicycle dealers across America.
Through enforcement of the true meaning of the Commerce Clause by allowing interstate competition, the number of health care choices in Nashville would expand from 3 to over 1,000. Unlike the fake reforms in the currently proposed plan, this simple measure would actually increase choice 300 times over. On the other hand, the fact that it would not cost anything means that it would not benefit any of the Democrats’ special interest groups and thus receives little interest.
Although more than 1,000 companies sell health insurance in America, we only had three to choose from because of the lack of interstate competition. I have no doubt our premiums would be even lower if all 1,000 companies had competed for our business. Unfortunately HR 3200 does not allow interstate competition, and it effectively eliminates health savings accounts. Small businesses create most of the jobs in America.
These reforms would help them offer affordable insurance coverage to their employees — without exploding the national debt or putting government in charge of your health care.
If Democrats were sincerely concerned about reducing health care costs, they would tackle the taboo topic of tort reform. However, as a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee stated, ‘The reason that tort reform is not in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers.’
Eliminating defensive medicine could save upwards of $200 billion in health-care costs annually, according to estimates by the American Medical Association and others. The cure is a reliable medical malpractice system that patients, doctors and the general public can trust.
But this is the one reform Washington will not seriously consider. That’s because the trial lawyers, among the largest contributors to the Democratic Party, thrive on the unreliable justice system we have now.
Almost all the other groups with a stake in health reform—including patient safety experts, physicians, the AARP, the Chamber of Commerce, schools of public health—support pilot projects such as special health courts that would move beyond today’s hyper-adversarial malpractice lawsuit system to a court that would quickly and reliably distinguish between good and bad care. The support for some kind of reform reflects a growing awareness among these groups that managing health care sensibly, including containing costs, is almost impossible when doctors go through the day thinking about how to protect themselves from lawsuits.
Fascist Democrats unsatisfied with merely the higher taxes and dollar devaluation which will come from this $1 trillion giveaway are planning to force Americans to purchase a $10,000 government sponsored insurance plan under the penalty of a fine up to $1,900, which could result in jail time if unpaid.
Let’s say you decide not purchase health insurance. Could you go to jail? Well, the way the Senate Finance Committee bill is set up now there would be a $1,900 fine if you didn’t buy health insurance. But what if you didn’t pay the fine? You may be looking at the following scenario below:
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has called the measure ‘an unprecedented form of federal action’.
Under questioning last week, Tom Barthold, the chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, admitted that the individual mandate would become a part of the Internal Revenue Code and that failing to comply “could be criminal, yes, if it were considered an attempt to defraud.” Mr. Barthold noted in a follow-up letter that the willful failure to file would be a simple misdemeanor, punishable by the $25,000 fine or jail time under Section 7203.
So failure to pay the mandate would be enforced like tax evasion, but Mr. Obama still claims it isn’t a tax. “You can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase,” Mr. Obama insisted last week to ABC interviewer George Stephanopoulos. Accusing critics of dishonesty is becoming this President’s default argument, but is Mr. Barthold also part of the plot?
In the 1994 health-care debate, the Congressional Budget Office called the individual mandate “an unprecedented form of federal action.” This is because “The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States.”
Roger Pilon – CATO
The lack of choice resulting from the proposed socialist health reforms will not be limited to insurance. The next step will be to force citizens to take the health remedies decided by the government. This week in New York, health care workers protested regulations which would force them to take swine flu shots.
The rally is intended to call for “freedom of choice in vaccination and health care” and to protest mandatory vaccination for influenza and the H1N1 swine flu. “This vaccine has not been clinically tested to the same degree as the regular flu vaccine,” Tara Accavallo, a registered nurse on Long Island, told Newsday. “If something happens to me, if I get seriously injured from this vaccine, who’s going to help me?”
While physicians, nurses, and medical technicians may not be known for their willingness to march on state capitols, a recent New York Department of Health requirement has sparked an unusually intense response. The August 13 regulations (pdf) say that all health care workers who “could potentially expose patients” must be vaccinated for influenza by November 30 unless it would be “detrimental” to the recipient’s health.
The health care workers are justified in their concern. A group of Canadian studies involving 2,000 people have found that the seasonal flu shot actually makes people twice as likelyto get swine flu.
A previous iteration of the swine flu vaccine caused recipients to contract the Guillian-Barre syndrome, a deadly nervous system disorder.
In 1976, tens of millions of people in the United States received a massively-promoted swine flu vaccine.
About 500 fell victim to Guillain-Barré syndrome and suffered from paralysis, and although in most cases the paralysis was temporary, 25 people died.
The vaccination program was called to a halt after ten weeks, and the swine flu scare of 1976 fizzled.
An HPV vaccination campaign in England has come under fire after a 14 year old girl died and another was hospitalized following the jab.
Another schoolgirl at Blue Coat Church of England School needed an ambulance after having the cervical cancer jab, it emerged last night.
The 15-year-old pupil became cold, weak and dizzy less than an hour after the vaccine and only a short time after schoolmate Natalie Morton became fatally ill.
Her symptoms were so severe that paramedics did emergency blood tests and an ECG scan in a back room at the school, the girl’s mother said.
In Massachusetts, a law passed by the Senate calls for mandatory vaccinations following the declaration of a health emergency by the governor.
The Massachusetts Senate has passed a bill, S-2028, allowing the governor to essentially declare martial law as a reaction to the swine flu. Other states are considering similar measures.
What is the best remedy for the financial crisis which was caused by excessive government spending, credit issuance, and moral hazard? According to neoliberals Obama, Brown, and Sarkozy, who met this week at the G20 summit, the answer is to control wages.
Officials at the Group of 20 summit in the eastern U.S. city of Pittsburgh say leaders are working out the final details of a deal to limit risk-taking by large banks and control pay for their executives.
The proposed measure of telling private businesses how much they can pay employees is the latest in a line of socialist policies put forward by the administration that illegally manipulate the marketplace while failing to address underlying economic problems.
I have argued on this page that the Troubled Asset Relief Program for the banks is itself inherently and profoundly unconstitutional for several reasons. It promotes only short-term private benefit, rather than the general welfare as the Constitution commands of all federal spending. It evades the constitutional requirement of equal protection by saving some businesses and letting others that are similarly situated simply expire. And it delegates to the secretary of the Treasury the power to spend taxpayer dollars as he sees fit, in violation of the express constitutional grant of the nondelegable spending power to the Congress.
Now the federal government wants to interfere with private employment contracts already entered into — and regulate those not yet signed — in order to satisfy the perceived populist instincts of the electorate. To do so, it demands salary caps as a condition to the receipt of public assistance.
Salary caps are unconstitutional because they violate the well-grounded doctrine against unconstitutional conditions. Simply stated, the government may not condition the acceptance of a governmental benefit on the non-assertion of a constitutional liberty. The government cannot say to individual welfare recipients that they may not criticize the Congress or their welfare checks will be cut off, because the right to criticize the government is a constitutionally protected liberty. It similarly may not condition corporate welfare on the prohibition of contracts with employees above an arbitrary salary amount, because freedom of contract is protected by the Constitution as well.
To make matters worse, the Obama administration’s ‘Pay Czar’, Kenneth Feinberg, is working on establishing a formula which determines the pay for all institutions under the Federal Reserve.
Feinberg said his work could set a precedent for forthcoming pay rules from the U.S. Federal Reserve, which would impact pay at all Fed-regulated banks. Both Feinberg and the Fed are looking to set rules that discourage excessive risk-taking and that relates pay to performance.
This measure is far more intrusive than it even appears on the surface, because there are over 20,000 institutions registered with the Federal Reserve including the parent companies of insurance, real estate, and food service firms.
The ‘Pay Czar’ would be imposing a formula-based wage limit on the top 100 employees for each of these companies, resulting in pay restrictions on 2 million workers.
President Barack Obama’s “pay czar” said on Friday he was using formulas and data analysis to determine executive compensation rather than relying on pay caps.
…After Feinberg finishes his review of pay packages for the companies’ top 25 employees, he will have to approve broader compensation structures for the 75 next-highest-paid employees.
Conservatives such as the House ranking member on the Financial Services Committee, Rep. Spencer Bachus, believe that we should bring real transparency to our lending institutions by auditing the Federal Reserve and reigning in excessive government credit and spending programs which undermine real wealth in the private sector. He discussed this issue in a recent interview on C-SPAN’s Newsmakers.
“How can we discuss reform without addressing the government policies at the root of the problems? The root of the collapse? And how can we think that setting up the Fed as the monitor of systemic risk in the financial sector will result in meaningful reform?” she said. “The words ‘fox’ and ‘henhouse’ come to mind. The Fed’s decisions helped create the bubble. Look at the root cause of most asset bubbles, and you’ll see the Fed somewhere in the background.”
More generally, Mrs. Palin took the tack that the financial crisis occurred because government got in the way of free enterprise.
“Lack of government wasn’t the problem, government policies were the problem. The marketplace didn’t fail. It became exactly as common sense would expect it to,” she said. “The government ordered the loosening of lending standards. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. The government forced lending institutions to give loans to people who as I say, couldn’t afford them. Speculators spotted new investment vehicles, jumped on board and rating agencies underestimated risks. So many to be blamed on so many different levels, but the fact remains that these people were responding to a market solution created by government policies that ran contrary to common sense,” she said.
Foreign institutions led by the G20 would like nothing more than to buy Americans out from under our own feet. Further spending, bailouts, subsidies and giveaways will continue to devalue the dollar and weaken the economy. This will cheapen the value of U.S. property and allow traders using the Euro and Yen to sweep in and purchase vast chunks of our homeland.
The approach by liberal politicians to the financial crisis is completely backwards. That which needs to tightly regulated is government, not the private sector. Wage controls will not solve our problems. Auditing the Federal Reserve is the first step to real financial reform and the restoration of sound money policy.
The Federal Reserve is built on a fraud and the attendant effect on the rest of the economy is to distort normal market operations through both the supply and cost of currency. This is illegally and unconstitutionally perpetuated through legal tender laws which violate the Constitution in regards to the monetary provisions in Article 1 Sections 8 and 10, the 10th Amendment, confound the definition of a dollar, and serve to centralize power.
Jacob Hornberger – President, Future of Freedom Foundation
The Federal Reserve disclosed in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee that it has entered into gold swap arrangements with foreign banks that artificially suppress its price.
The Federal Reserve System has disclosed to GATA that it has gold swap arrangements with foreign banks that it does not want the public to know about.
The disclosure contradicts denials provided by the Fed to GATA in 2001 and suggests that the Fed is indeed very much involved in the surreptitious international central bank manipulation of the gold price particularly and the currency markets generally.
The Fed’s disclosure came this week in a letter (pdf) to GATA’s Washington-area lawyer, William J. Olson of Vienna, Virginia, denying GATA’s administrative appeal of a freedom-of-information request to the Fed for information about gold swaps, transactions in which monetary gold is temporarily exchanged between central banks or between central banks and bullion banks.
Pennsylvania Congressional candidate Jake Towne has written about this issue, which is a direct indictment of the Director of Obama’s National Economic Council, Larry Summers.
In the 1990s, the American government in collusion with the central bankers decided to execute the Summers’ scheme although they may have simply been building on his mentor Robert Rubin’s gold trading practices at Goldman Sachs. By suppressing the price of gold AND silver – a far smaller and easier-to-manipulate market than gold – and publishing rigged CPI numbers, they could slowly and steadily confiscate the purchasing power of their populations while masking the debasement of the dollar and hence all other fiat currencies while not causing a loss of consumer confidence.
THE SUMMERS GOLD PRICE SUPPRESSION SCHEME
Here is how the scheme works:
Central banks, like the FED, take gold bars from their vaults and lease them to cartel entities like Goldman Sachs (GS) at a low rate, typically around 1%. Unless the sale is announced like Gordon Brown’s infamous sale of 60% of England’s gold reserves from 1999-2002 at $275/oz., the central bank continues to carry gold on lease and gold in the vault as one line item on its balance sheet.
The cartel then sells the physical gold into the futures market at spot price. The spot and future prices were suppressed by this extra supply. Large dumps can be orchestrated to cause “waterfalls” in the price due to algorithm or stop-loss trading.
Now the cartel has plenty of capital which could be leveraged by an investment bank at 30:1 or higher and used for ANY transaction.
The physical gold bars leave the exchanges. Most of the central bank gold is melted down to meet the supply deficit, and now adorns the necks of Indian women or rests in the vaults of investors.
Towne talked about the gold price suppression issue on the radio show March of Liberty with Jason Wood.
The International Monetary Fund’s executive board approved gold sales of 403.3 metric tons valued at about $13 billion and pledged to avoid disrupting the market with the transactions.
The IMF said it would “stand ready to sell gold directly to central banks.” The sales could also be conducted in the open market in a “phased manner” over time, the Washington-based lender said in an e-mailed statement today.
…The IMF board last year endorsed the quantity to be sold, which accounts for one-eighth of the IMF’s total gold stockpile, as part of a plan to shore up its finances. The sale will also increase the agency’s ability to lend at reduced rates to low-income countries. The IMF is the world’s third-largest holder of gold reserves.
The role the Fed plays in the President’s secretive Working Group on Financial Markets goes unnoticed by members of Congress. The Federal Reserve shows no willingness to inform Congress voluntarily about how often the Working Group meets, what actions it takes that affect the financial markets, or why it takes those actions.
But these actions, directed by the Federal Reserve, alter the purchasing power of our money. And that purchasing power is always reduced. The dollar today is worth only four cents compared to the dollar in 1913, when the Federal Reserve started. This has profound consequences for our economy and our political stability. All paper currencies are vulnerable to collapse, and history is replete with examples of great suffering caused by such collapses, especially to a nation’s poor and middle class. This leads to political turmoil.
Even before a currency collapse occurs, the damage done by a fiat system is significant. Our monetary system insidiously transfers wealth from the poor and middle class to the privileged rich. Wages never keep up with the profits of Wall Street and the banks, thus sowing the seeds of class discontent. When economic trouble hits, free markets and free trade often are blamed, while the harmful effects of a fiat monetary system are ignored. We deceive ourselves that all is well with the economy, and ignore the fundamental flaws that are a source of growing discontent among those who have not shared in the abundance of recent years.
As government surveillance, perpetual propaganda, and accusations of thought crime become increasingly pervasive, our society appears every day to be moving closer to the socialist ‘Big Brother’ totalitarianism which is depicted in George Orwell’s 1984. In a recent radio interview on The March of Liberty, Jake Towne, the 9/12 endorsed Congressional candidate for Pennsylvania’s 15th district, talked about how an unelected ‘Safety Czar’ was running a multimillion dollar system of hundreds of cameras in the central Pennsylvania town of Lancaster (read more at towneforcongress.com).
Lancaster is a small town of about 50,000 people. They have the country’s oldest farmer’s market, and many of the buildings are pretty, historic, colonial buildings. As I drove through town, sure enough the cameras were looming above each intersection. The march began at a baseball field with four cameras overlooking it, and proceeded through a residential area to Lancaster’s downtown with more homes, public buildings and many businesses. Personally, I felt pretty creeped out and found myself scanning the skies for the next camera. Can you imagine strangers with the ability to track your every move throughout a city?
There is a total of 165 cameras spanning the city right now, costing over $3 million to build. These cameras are pretty high-tech. They swivel towards motion and zoom in, and are all networked. Apparently there is masking technology so they are not able to zoom into private homes and businesses.
Ettaro and the Lancaster citizens there led by Renee Baumgartner related to me that Bosch began its relationship with the city by giving it free test cameras for use, but is now deriving revenue from the taxpayer, as well as the controversial private company, the Lancaster Community Safety Coalition, which monitors the video feed. You can read more about them here in “He’s Safety Czar, Not Big Brother.” An unelected ‘Safety Czar,’ that is.
While the Democrat administration rolls over on every significant legislative measure regarding surveillance, libertarians are calling out their hypocrisy for what is a clear violation of the 4th amendment.
The Justice Department has indicated that the Obama administration is in support of renewing a pair of controversial sections of the USA Patriot Act that expire later this year. The provisions that will expire in December include Section 206, that allows “roving” wiretaps so FBI agents can tap multiple phones or computers (with court authorization) that a specific person (target) may use.
Another expiring provision, Section 215, is the so-called “library provision,” which allows investigators to obtain business records with approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
And the final provision which was nicknamed the “Lone Wolf” authorization, allows intelligence gathering of people not suspected of being part of a foreign government or known terrorist organization.
More recently, the Massachusetts Senate passed a bill, S. 2028, Pandemic Response Bill (pdf), which eviscerated the 4th and 14th amendments by authorizing state officials to search, evacuate, relocate, quarantine, and vaccinate anyone suspected of being ill. It also allows the state to set price controls upon the declaration of an emergency by the governor.
The United States of America is devolving into medical fascism and Massachusetts is leading the way with the passage of a new bill, the “Pandemic Response Bill” 2028, reportedly just passed by the MA state Senate and now awaiting approval in the House. This bill suspends virtually all Constitutional rights of Massachusetts citizens and forces anyone “suspected” of being infected to submit to interrogations, “decontaminations” and vaccines.
It’s also sets fines up to $1,000 per day for anyone who refuses to submit to quarantines, vaccinations, decontamination efforts or to follow any other verbal order by virtually any state-licensed law enforcement or medical personnel. You can read the text yourself (pdf).
Here’s some of the language contained in the bill:
(Violation of 4th Amendment: Illegal search and seizure)
During either type of declared emergency, a local public health authority… may exercise authority… to require the owner or occupier of premises to permit entry into and investigation of the premises; to close, direct, and compel the evacuation of, or to decontaminate or cause to be
decontaminated any building or facility; to destroy any material; to restrict or prohibit assemblages of persons;
(Violation of 14th Amendment; illegal arrest without a warrant)
…an officer authorized to serve criminal process may arrest without a warrant any person whom the officer has probable cause to believe has violated an order given to effectuate the purposes of this subsection and shall use reasonable diligence to enforce such order.
(Government price controls)
The attorney general, in consultation with the office of consumer affairs and business regulation, and upon the declaration by the governor that a supply emergency exists, shall take appropriate action to ensure that no person shall sell a product or service that is at a price that unreasonably exceeds the price charged before the emergency.
As the tentacles of the neoliberal agenda extend further into the most precious areas of our free society, small farms comprise part of the last remaining opposition to tyranny. If our country is to stay a free republic, we cannot place the right for families to grow food under the thumb of a government bureaucrat.
Earlier this year, H.R. 875, The Food Safety Modernization Act, was introduced by Democrat Rosa Delauro. It’s an onerous piece of legislation which requires farmers to file paperwork within hours of the birth of every animal under the penalty of up to $1 million for each violation.
Glenn Beck on HR 875
Unfortunately a similar bill, H.R. 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, introduced by John Dingell, passed the House this summer. The Senate bill, S. 425, the Food Safety and Tracking Improvement Act, is still sitting in the Agriculture Committee.
Some of the disconcerting and dire provisions within the bill include:
HR 2749 will require the mandatory imposition of annual registration fees in the amount of $500 upon any “facility” that holds, processes, or manufactures food. Even though “farms” are exempt, the bill’s definition of “farm” is so scarcely defined that folks selling cheeses, breads, and other products from their farms or at the farmers market would be required to pay this fee, potentially driving many small producers and start-ups out of business, especially during tough times.
HR 2749 will give FDA the power to directly regulate the methods by which crops are raised and harvested, essentially handing complete and total control of every farming operation to the federal government.
HR 2749 will give FDA the power to halt the movement of all food in a particular geographic area in the event of a food contamination scare or outbreak. The provision directly includes “prohibiting or restricting the movement of food or of any vehicle being used or that has been used to transport or hold such food within the geographic area”, effectively shutting down any and all local food sources, farmers markets, or cooperatives within that area, even if their products have no connection to the actual contamination source.
HR 2749 will give limitless power to FDA to conduct random searches of the business records of small farmers and local food providers without a warrant or even the slightest hint of evidence that there has been any sort of violation. It essentially allows clear passage by the federal government into the private records of its choice with no requirement of probable cause or legitimate reason for doing so.
HR 2749 will appoint the Secretary of Health and Human Services as the taskmaster in establishing a food tracing system that will require an extensive, convoluted system of tracking each item and ingredient from origin to distribution. Because the bill fails to outline the logistical procedures for how this complex task will be accomplished and how it will be paid for, it once again hands an unprecedented amount of power over to the federal government to control and tax as it sees fit in order to accomplish whatever arbitrary requirements it wishes to inflict upon our farmers and food producers.
HR 2749 imposes grievous criminal and civil penalties, including fines of up to $100,000 for each violation, per individual, and up to 10 years in prison.
It is obvious from investigation that this bill presents incredibly ominous ramifications for small, local farmers, local food producers, and anyone else who grows or sells food. It favors industrial, factory food operators, who are the perpetrators of food contamination, at the expense of small providers who many have come to rely upon for safe and nutritious fare. The bill also shifts a monumental and unprecedented amount of power and control to the federal government to dominate everything from the produce in the grocery store to the peppers a backyard farmer sells to his neighbor.
The impetus with which this bill is making its way through the legislative gauntlet is alarming and calls for immediate action in stopping it dead in its tracks. FTCLDF is urging everyone to contact their representatives and ask to speak with the staffers who handle food issues. Each person should explain that he or she is aware of the bill and its implications and opposes it. Some FTCLDF talking points include, summarily:
The bill fails to target the true culprits of food contamination, primarily the industrial food system and food imports while unfairly burdening small and local food producers and providers.
Food safety would improve if the regulatory burdens on small farms and local food processors were decreased, not increased as this bill does.
The bill immensely increases FDA power while simultaneously decreasing the agency’s accountability for its actions.
Shelly Roche – The End of Small Farms
The enforcement of H.R. 2749 is left up to none other than the ‘Food Czar’. The individual appointed to that position, Michael Taylor, is responsible for more food-related illness and death than anyone in history.
When FDA scientists were asked to weigh in on what was to become the most radical and potentially dangerous change in our food supply — the introduction of genetically modified (GM) foods — secret documents now reveal that the experts were very concerned. Memo after memo described toxins, new diseases, nutritional deficiencies, and hard-to-detect allergens. They were adamant that the technology carried “serious health hazards,” and required careful, long-term research, including human studies, before any genetically modified organisms (GMOs) could be safely released into the food supply.
…In May, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine concluded that animal studies have demonstrated a causal relationship between GM foods and infertility, accelerated aging, dysfunctional insulin regulation, changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system, and immune problems such as asthma, allergies, and inflammation.
…If GMOs are indeed responsible for massive sickness and death, then the individual who oversaw the FDA policy that facilitated their introduction holds a uniquely infamous role in human history. That person is Michael Taylor.
Shelly Roche – ByteStyle.tv
Small farms may be put out of business by the overwhelming costs of meeting the new regulations.
When you speak with small producers such as Pascal Destandau, you have to wonder if the government is taking a sledgehammer to a porcelain cup. His Pugs Leap Farm in California’s Sonoma County produces goat cheese as well as vegetables, fruit, and nuts. It grosses in the neighborhood of $100,000 a year selling at farmers’ markets and to restaurants.
Under the legislation, food producers large and small will be required to “implement a food safety plan,” which is commonly understood to be a cumbersome process known as a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points plan for each food product they sell. Destandau worked for many years in a large pharmaceutical and personal care company—and knows much about HACCP plans.
“Creating one plan would take me about 100 hours and maintaining it would [mean] two hours per day of production. Based on quotes I obtained in 2006 for laboratory testing, I estimate that I would need to budget $15,000/year just for the microbiological testing of the cheeses.”
That’s before the plans for the veggies, fruits, and nuts. He and his partner already each “work 75 to 80 hours a week. HACCP would add a few more hours to each day,” he says.
Simply ignoring the requirements and hoping regulators don’t notice would be a risky proposition. “The FDA can fine you $10,000 per infraction per day,” Destandau notes. Doreen Hannes, who with her husband runs a small farm in Mountain Grove, Mo., that derives about 40% of its income from rabbits it raises for meat and sells to a distributor in Arkansas, has similar worries. “We’re going to get killed by (H.R.) 2749,” she says. “We’d have more paperwork and less time to do our jobs.”
Farmers such as Destandau and Hannes strongly oppose the measure, which is also seen as a continued expansion of intrusive “Big Brother” government. Although H.R. 2749 has passed the House, a companion bill has not yet been voted on in the Senate (S. 425).
A number of small-farm supporters are strenuously objecting to the legislation. “Small farms and local food processors are part of the solution to food safety, yet H.R. 2749 takes a one-size-fits-all approach, subjecting local producers to the same regulations as industrial firms,” says Pete Kennedy, head of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund.
…What also upsets many small food producers is what Doreen Hannes refers to as “the Big Brother” aspects of the new legislation. For example, the FDA will have authority under the legislation to inspect the business records of food producers at any time, free of the current limitation that requires a reasonable belief that adulterated food is being sold. According to the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, “FDA would now be empowered to go on a ‘fishing expedition’ and search records without any evidence whatsoever that there has been a violation.”
…For Destandau, the latest federal efforts to crack down on food producers is part of a long-term trend. When he started in business in 2003, he had one inspector to deal with, from the California Food & Agriculture Dept. Now he deals with more frequent and costlier inspections from both the CDFA and the county health department. As Destandau contemplates the addition of FDA inspectors, he considers leaving the U.S. entirely. “Right now, we are seriously looking at moving to Australia,” he says.
In an age when lawyers and lobbyists negotiate over government handouts under the guise of health reform, we need more than ever to hear from members of working society such as practicing physicians who actually understand and can rectify the problems created by federal intervention into medicine.
Dr. Mike Vasovski has spent the last 20 years as a general physician in Aiken, South Carolina. Prior to that, he served for six years in the US Army Medical Corps where he reached the rank of Captain.
Now, he is now asking to serve the people of the 3rd district of South Carolina in the halls of Congress (www.vasovskiforcongress.com).
Upon graduating from Texas A&M University in 1976 and The University of North Texas’s College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1981, Vasovski served in the United States Army’s Medical Corp until 1987 achieving the rank of Captain. He entered the military voluntarily and without first receiving a health scholarship. His duties included service at the Wiesbaden Air Force hospital from 1982 to 1984 where he was privileged to assist in the surgical care of U.S. Marines who were injured in the terrorist bombings of their barracks in Beirut in October of 1983.
Military service was something that Dr. Vasovski grew up with. His father was a 26 year veteran of the United States Air Force with service in the Korean War and Vietnam. Military family life does not permit a family to stay long enough in one place to lay down permanent roots. Therefore when asked “where are you from”, his answer would have to be, “all over.” Born in Pres Quile, Maine, he has lived in 6 states, and up until 1981, called Texas home. He may not have been born in South Carolina, but as the phrase goes, “he got here as soon as he could”.
Upon receiving an Honorable Discharge from the Army, Dr. Vasovski entered private general medical practice in Aiken, South Carolina in 1988 and has continued to this day serving the people of Aiken and the surrounding counties. As a solo practitioner, he is also a small business owner and knows full well the burdens placed on them, not the least of which is the current tax system. Being the only physician in his practice has precluded him seeking elected public office and service until such time that family life would permit. That time has come.
Vasovski’s desire to seek a high public office is grounded also in other conservative values like the defense of our civil liberties granted in the Constitution that have recently come under attack. During college he was a member of the skeet shooting team at Texas A&M and he believes that Americans should continue to enjoy and benefit from our right to keep and bear arms for whatever legal purpose they desire, according to the Second Amendment.
Being active in the community has always been part of Vasovski’s life and he was one of the original founders of the Free Medical Clinic of Aiken. He and Cindy, his wife of 31 years, continue to volunteer there where needy people can partake of health care that is provided free of charges for professional services and generated by and from the voluntary efforts of a large staff of caring, generous and compassionate citizens of Aiken. Dr. Vasovski also volunteered time to function as the Aiken County School District consulting physician for several years. He firmly believes that we are a nation of kind, generous and loving people, who deserve to be represented by leaders who will govern by the principles of honest friendship to other countries, free trade, no entangling alliances and war only when declared by Congress.
Dr. Vasovski has an important viewpoint on the current health debate. He is interested helping the people who receive medical care, not placating a union boss or insurance executive. This is why he does not believe in allowing the government to distort the market through regulation or subsidies.
A Wall Separating Big Business and Big Government
What is socialism? It’s a word we hear thrown about quite a lot today, with fears of government takeovers and their increasing domination of private industry. Too often, people think of Socialism only in terms of regulatory practices–government telling private business what to do. What people often forget is that those who hold private power–those who have a lot of money–are also the same people who hold political power. They do not impose regulations that harm themselves. They impose regulations that harm their competition. That’s the essence of socialism–when the politically powerful wield their political power to protect and promote their own personal profits.
It’s also why the foremost principle of our great Republic must be a separation of private profit from public power. When a politician uses their position to pad their own bank account, we call it corruption. When a company uses their money to influence a politician, however, we call them a special interest. This double standard needs to end, as does the practice of using government to benefit private businesses. The idea that government exists to serve business is just as clearly wrong, and just as dangerous, as the idea that government exists to regulate business. Governments exist to serve the people they represent, not the narrow business interests of a few wealthy and powerful individuals.
It is with this in mind that our forefathers created the constitution–a document defining the limits of public power. This was not an idea that sprang up out of the clear blue. It was an idea that came about because they understood the dangers of letting a government become too powerful–especially a government that could be bought and paid for by the wealthy interests of the world. It’s time to put that wall back in place; it’s time to get the government out of business, and business out of the government. Let business do what’s best for business, and let government do what’s best for government.
The Proper Role of Government
Governments exist to serve the people. That’s the fundamental idea behind democracy–that people know what’s best for themselves, and they should therefore be able to elect representatives that will represent their preferences. Do any Americans honestly think their government acts like a government should? We get offended when people pry their noses into our business–when other people simply assume that we’re dishonest criminals. We get offended when other people tell us how to live our lives, or what we should believe, or what health care treatments we should get. Why, then, do we let the government do all of these things? Why don’t we get offended when our politicians tell us what products are worth a tax credit, or when our politicians tell us we need to open our bank accounts to government inspectors? Why don’t we get offended when our government tells us how long we can water our lawn, or what kind of light bulbs we can put in our houses? These are all actions taken by our government that are not examples of the government serving the people. These are examples of the government ordering people around.
It’s time to change that. Americans are not as stupid as our government presumes. We understand that we shouldn’t water our lawns in a drought. We can understand what our doctors tell us about the best course of treatment. We can make our minds up about the products we want to buy–we don’t need the government giving us tax credits if we buy government-approved merchandise. These are all example of the government overreaching its bounds. It’s time to remind Congress that it serves the people–not the other way around.
The current debate has been falsely constructed as a choice between either taking taxpayer money to create a government agency which manages health care or taking taxpayer money to subsidize a private entity which manages health care. The implicit assumption which Democrats are making is that, regardless of the form in which it manifests, they are going to take nearly $1 trillion from working citizens and give it the special interest of their choice.
Insurance providers seem to have successfully equated health insurance with health care but this is a relatively new concept. There were doctors and medicine long before there was health insurance. Health insurance is not a bad thing, but it is not the only conceivable way to get health care. Instead, we seem to still rely on the creativity and competence of politicians to solve problems, which always somehow seem to be tied in with which lobby is the strongest in Washington.
It is sad to think of the many creative, free market solutions that government prohibits with all its interference. What if instead of joining a health insurance plan, you could buy a membership directly from a hospital or doctor? What if a doctor wanted to have a cash-only practice, or make house calls, or determine his or her own patient load, or otherwise practice medicine outside the constraints of the current bureaucratic system? Alternative healthcare delivery models will be at an even stronger competitive disadvantage if families are forced to buy into the insurance model. And yet, the reforms are sold to us as increasing competition.
In truth, the one reform which would truly improve the health insurance market would not cost anything at all. In fact, it is already law and simply needs to be enforced. That is the Commerce Clause in the 10th amendment of the Constitution which prompts the federal government to protect free trade between states.
The same Congress that wants to tell family farmers what to grow in their backyards has declined “to keep regular” the commercial sale of insurance policies. It has permitted all 50 states to erect the type of barriers that the Commerce Clause was written precisely to tear down. Insurers are barred from selling policies to people in another state.
Instead of being used to ensure free trade, when it comes to health insurance Congress is deceptively and illegally trying to twist the Commerce Clause into the authorization to implement a $10,000 per year mandate on every citizen.
Congress cannot so simply avoid the constitutional limits on its power. Taxation can favor one industry or course of action over another, but a “tax” that falls exclusively on anyone who is uninsured is a penalty beyond Congress’s authority. If the rule were otherwise, Congress could evade all constitutional limits by “taxing” anyone who doesn’t follow an order of any kind—whether to obtain health-care insurance, or to join a health club, or exercise regularly, or even eat your vegetables.
This type of congressional trickery is bad for our democracy and has implications far beyond the health-care debate. The Constitution’s Framers divided power between the federal government and states—just as they did among the three federal branches of government—for a reason. They viewed these structural limitations on governmental power as the most reliable means of protecting individual liberty—more important even than the Bill of Rights.
Yet if that imperative is insufficient to prompt reconsideration of the mandate (and the approach to reform it supports), then the inevitable judicial challenges should. Since the 1930s, the Supreme Court has been reluctant to invalidate “regulatory” taxes. However, a tax that is so clearly a penalty for failing to comply with requirements otherwise beyond Congress’s constitutional power will present the question whether there are any limits on Congress’s power to regulate individual Americans. The Supreme Court has never accepted such a proposition, and it is unlikely to accept it now, even in an area as important as health care.
The army of constitutional conservatives running for the U.S. Congress in 2010 continues to grow as former Marine and Iraq war veteran Jesse Kelly has pledged to serve his future constituents in the 8th district of Arizona (www.votejessekelly.com).
After serving our country, Jesse moved on to work in the family construction business in Tucson, AZ. Managing multi-million dollar infrastructure projects for state and local governments, his duties include: estimating, scheduling, budget analysis, and human resource management.
Jesse’s wife Aubrey attended the University of Arizona on a gymnastics scholarship graduating with a degree in Accounting. Jesse and Aubrey are proud parents of their infant son James. Their family attends Alive Christian Fellowship Church of Tucson.
We must keep taxes low on both individuals and corporations in order to grow our economy and compete in the global marketplace. I support stopping the bailouts and letting the free markets work.
The incumbent portrays herself as a fiscal conservative but she supported the stimulus and the massive debt creating budgets enacted by our current administration. I will work to stop debt creating stimulus spending and reduce the size and scope of our government.
Health Care
I oppose Obama-care and the rationing of health care. We must reform tort laws to lower health care costs for all Americans. I support a “health care court” in lieu of the current lottery system that encourages egregious lawsuits in order to stop defensive medicine and rising malpractice costs.
The FDA needs to be restructured in order to lower the cost of life-saving pharmaceutical drugs. I support an increase in the amount allowed into tax-free health savings accounts.
We should enable insurance companies to sell health insurance across state lines, as they do car and life insurance.
We should allow small businesses to band together in order to increase their purchasing power and reduce their costs.
We need to crack down on Medicare and Medicaid fraud, saving us hundreds of millions a year.
Finally, we should allow individuals to be able to pay for insurance premiums through their own private, health savings accounts, with the same type of tax incentives that corporations have.
Sanctity of Human Life
I support and will defend life from conception to natural end.
Second Amendment
The Second Amendment of the Constitution is not just about hunting. It is about the right of a free people to defend themselves which is why I am a strong supporter of the right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms.
National Defense
We live in a time when our enemies test nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles capable of reaching American interests. Terrorists continue to plot attacks against America and her interests. We must fully fund our nation’s military and ensure the men and women in uniform have the tools, training, and care they need and deserve.
Our government has a constitutional obligation to protect its citizens. Border security needs to be a top National Defense priority. I am committed to fully funding vital military systems such as missile defense and upgrading our fighter and bomber fleets.
Sher: Jesse, first of all I’d like to thank you for taking time from your campaign for this interview. Coming from a Conservative position, you’re campaigning for the position of Congressional Representative of Arizona’s 8th District. You’re campaigning against the incumbent Democrat Gabrielle Giffords. I understand that Rep. Giffords was one of those who ran as a “blue dog” so-called fiscally more conservative Democrat when the anti-Bush sentiment was high. But, Giffords has voted consistently for Obama’s and Congress’ leftist — if not Marxist — legislation.
Is this the reason you became involved in your 2010 political campaign?
Jesse: Absolutely. This nation is being radically transformed before our eyes and Rep. Giffords has proven to be a willing participant in this transformation. Arizona’s Eighth Congressional District is nominally a Republican district and Rep. Giffords had to run as a “blue dog” in a bad year in order to get elected. Sadly, she has turned out to be Arizona’s version of Nancy Pelosi. The good news is that she can no longer hide from her extreme voting record.
Sher: Nowadays, running against the current administration in power cam be a very daunting task and I look upon those who do so as being extremely courageous. What do you perceive as your ultimate purpose in running for Congressional Representative?
Jesse: Quite simply, my purpose is to do my part to get this nation back to the founding principles that made it great. We did not become the most magnificent country in the history of the world because of government. It is the freedom from government control that has made America prosper. I fear for the future of our nation if we cannot elect representatives who love this nation and are committed to putting government back in its rightful place.
“I love my country. I was perfectly happy with my life, but I knew coming up to the [2008] election just how radical this President was.” Alarmed by events in Washington, Jesse concluded, “I will not let him spend my [infant] son into debt before he is old enough to walk.”
Did his wife, Aubrey, support his decision? Jesse revealed that he met his wife after his tour of duty ended in 2004, and that his congressional run was a decision “we made together.” Serving in Congress was “100% ‘our goal’.”
When asked which three initiatives he would like to accomplish during his time in Congress, if elected, he paused. “It’s hard to limit it to just three…there are so many…returning to limited, constitutional government, cutting taxes, funding for our security, border security, energy independence, making second amendment rights safe from interference, restoring our rights and our liberties..”
With Arizona being a border state, I knew that they felt the full effects of border traffic. “First, I would secure the border. You must patch the leak in the boat before you start bailing water.” Jesse saw the border issue as critical to national security, because aside from people “…we are importing drugs and crime.” He wanted to implement the double-row of fences that parts of California had in place, which successfully stopped the flow of illegal aliens into certain parts of the State. Then, he would turn his attention to businesses who hired illegals. “People need to come into the country legally, on our terms, like our ancestors did.”
Schiff, head of Euro Pacific Capital, used an appearance on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe” to declare the exploratory phase of the campaign over. He said the economy is spurring him to run: “I can’t sit idly by and just watch a train wreck in motion.”
Weston, Connecticut., September 17, 2009 – Today, Weston Republican Peter Schiff formally announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate. Over the past few months, Mr. Schiff, a successful entrepreneur and well-known proponent of fiscal responsibility, has been inspired by his fellow citizens urging him to bring his principled approach to Congress. As he enters this campaign, Mr. Schiff’s priority is to serve the American taxpayer. Years of reckless federal spending have placed an immense burden on every American that Mr. Schiff vows to ease.
Peter Schiff was born to a working-class family in New Haven, Connecticut. His grandfather came to New Haven in 1910 and helped with the construction of the Yale Bowl. Mr. Schiff spent his childhood in New Haven during the 60s and 70s during which values were instilled in him by his family such as hard work, self-reliance, and loyalty-loyalty to friends, to family, and to country. After successfully building his brokerage firm, Euro Pacific Capital, in California, Mr. Schiff decided to relocate the headquarters to Connecticut in 2003. He currently resides in Weston with his seven year old son. Since returning to Connecticut Mr. Schiff has published two books: Crash Proof and The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets.
Mr. Schiff gained notoriety in 2006 with a series of national interviews in which he accurately diagnosed the dangers that confronted the economy and predicted the mechanisms that led to the crash. His correct prognosis of the sub-prime lending crisis and subsequent credit crunch made him a popular economic commentator. Ever since, he has tirelessly sounded these warnings.
In January of 2009, with the near-collapse of the financial system and revelations about the corruption of Connecticut politicians, calls began to surface for Mr. Schiff to run for office. An exploratory committee was formed in June.
To date, 10,000 individuals have convinced him to run for Senate with telephone calls and letters of support; additionally, they have raised over $1,000,000 on his behalf. Schiff now believes a run for the Senate is absolutely necessary to give a voice to the majority of Connecticut taxpayers who are misrepresented.
Mr. Schiff says, “I plan to bring my dedication and experience to the taxpayers of Connecticut. I may make mistakes in this campaign—but I will not make mistakes in representing you in the Senate. I look forward to an exciting race where I can share my vision with the people of Connecticut.”
For more information please visit www.SchiffforSenate.com or email Peter Schiff your thoughts and questions at PSchiff@SchiffforSenate.com
Judge Andrew Napolitano recently asked Congressman James Clyburn (D-SC) where in the Constitution the federal government is authorized to regulate the delivery of health care. His response was ‘There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do.’
Rep. Clyburn, like many of his colleagues, seems to have conveniently forgotten that the federal government has only specific enumerated powers. He also seems to have overlooked the Ninth and 10th Amendments, which limit Congress’s powers only to those granted in the Constitution.
One of those powers—the power “to regulate” interstate commerce—is the favorite hook on which Congress hangs its hat in order to justify the regulation of anything it wants to control.
Unfortunately, a notoriously tendentious New Deal-era Supreme Court decision has given Congress a green light to use the Commerce Clause to regulate noncommercial, and even purely local, private behavior. In Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the Supreme Court held that a farmer who grew wheat just for the consumption of his own family violated federal agricultural guidelines enacted pursuant to the Commerce Clause. Though the wheat did not move across state lines—indeed, it never left his farm—the Court held that if other similarly situated farmers were permitted to do the same it, might have an aggregate effect on interstate commerce.
Interstate commerce has nothing to do with practicing medicine. The application of health care is serviced performed on a person, not a product to be traded across state lines. Therefore, the Commerce Clause does not apply.
The practice of medicine consists of the delivery of intimate services to the human body. In almost all instances, the delivery of medical services occurs in one place and does not move across interstate lines. One goes to a physician not to engage in commercial activity, as the Framers of the Constitution understood, but to improve one’s health. And the practice of medicine, much like public school safety, has been regulated by states for the past century.
The same Congress that wants to tell family farmers what to grow in their backyards has declined “to keep regular” the commercial sale of insurance policies. It has permitted all 50 states to erect the type of barriers that the Commerce Clause was written precisely to tear down. Insurers are barred from selling policies to people in another state.
That’s right: Congress refuses to keep commerce regular when the commercial activity is the sale of insurance, but claims it can regulate the removal of a person’s appendix because that constitutes interstate commerce.
What we have here is raw abuse of power by the federal government for political purposes. The president and his colleagues want to reward their supporters with “free” health care that the rest of us will end up paying for. Their only restraint on their exercise of Commerce Clause power is whatever they can get away with. They aren’t upholding the Constitution—they are evading it.
The mass collection of medical data likely to occur under proposed reforms threatens the Fourth Amendment’s “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.” Making it a crime not to buy insurance, and then forcing people to show they have not bought it, arguably clashes with the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.
The Ninth Amendment reserves to individuals all rights not expressly denied by the Constitution. Nothing in the document curtails our right not to purchase health insurance. And being forced to fill out forms to apply for insurance is in tension with the 13th Amendment’s prohibition of “involuntary servitude.”
The quality we could expect from government care may also raise constitutional questions. In early August, a federal panel ordered California to release 40,000 inmates because the health services were so strained, causing one unnecessary prisoner death per week, so as to render the treatment “unconstitutional.” If we all become captive consumers under federal mandate, could we not similarly argue that any shoddiness in our mandated health services is an unconstitutional burden?
According to the most recent bill out of the Senate, families will be fined up to $3.800 for not carrying approved insurance. This is not health care, it is the illegal extraction of wealth.
Walter E. Williams
Jim Babka, Downsize DC
Congressman John Shadegg (R-AZ) has introduced a bill (H.R. 450, The Enumerated Powers Act) in the House to require the Congress to cite which part of the Constitution each piece of legislation relies on for enactment. It currently has 51 cosponsors.
According to Jake Towne, a constitutional conservative who is running as an independent for Congress in Pennsylvania’s 15th district, the inflation of the fiat dollar is driving down its value against gold and silver, which are in their own right internationally recognized currencies. This scheme, supported by White House National Economic Council director Larry Summers, results in the deflation of real wealth for workers and investors in the U.S. and is collectively destabilizing the economy.
Conceived in liberty, America is a noble and unique experiment created by some of the most revolutionary and brilliant minds of the 18th century who made the bold leap from rule by an elite few (oligarchy) to a constitutional republic with checks and balances. Whereas most wars lead to losses in liberty, our founding fathers began, for the first time on earth, a government based on individual liberties and the rule of law. My view is that the government of a free country, properly speaking, rests not in its elected officials but in its laws. The supreme law of the land is the Constitution. Amazing in its simplicity and clarity, the Constitution has a built-in amendment process to suit the living generation…
His views regarding the monetary policy in America are shared by many and are quickly spreading as the true roots of the credit crisis become exposed.
For instance, financial journalist Max Keiser says that the U.S. is on a slippery slope to economic collapse.
The American debt levels are outrageous, and the way America gets away with it is by maintaining the world reserve currency as a big part of the American hegemony, or the American empire. When America writes checks or creates bonds to other countries, when those bonds are due, America just creates more bonds. It’s what some call an extraordinary privilege.
And this is why countries like Russia, China and Iran are looking to diverse [sic] themselves, and divorce themselves, from the US dollar. They’re doing more deals amongst themselves, more bilateral deals in their local currencies, their regional currencies. Ultimately, America is a debt-a-holic.
…To use the alcoholic metaphor, it’s like giving an alcoholic more to drink. Hank Paulson and his successor Timothy Geithner are part of the financial oligarchy, a part of the banking oligarchy, their interests are not the same as the interests of American citizens; they have their own interests. They are part of a global banking cartel, the same group of bankers all over the world, who seek to keep interest rates as low as possible, to make it as easy for them to borrow as possible. Because when they make a bad bet, their respective governments bail them out with tax payer money. It’s really a war, there’s a global war going on between investors and speculators. Anyone who’s trying to invest money for a decent return, or work for a decent wage is being squeezed out or pushed out by speculators who have access to cheap money through political connections.
Max Keiser in People & Power – Death of the Dollar (Dec. 2006)
Well, first of all, I’d like to make the following observation. Mr. Krugman recently – a Nobel Prize winner in economics – he devoted 6,000 words to write an article entitled “How Did Economists Get it so Wrong.” And he talks about economic theories. He also talks about Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Bernanke. And, of course, he doesn’t talk about himself. The article should have been entitled “How Did I Get it so Wrong.”
But in principle what strikes me in this article of 6,000 words that there is never, ever any mention about excessive credit growth, about leverage, about credit playing a destabilizing element in the business cycle. And it doesn’t even mention by going through the various economic theories the Austrian School of Economists – that is a very important school.
And I would argue also when you listen to Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Greenspan, very, very seldom did they ever mention excessive credit growth as a source or as a cause of destabilizing the economy and causing the problems. They just disregarded the excessive credit growth.
Suharto of Indonesia, whose 32-year dictatorship was one of the most brutal and corrupt of the 20th century…was driven from office in 1998 by widespread rioting, economic paralysis and political chaos. His rule was not without accomplishment; he led Indonesia to stability and nurtured economic growth. But these successes were ultimately overshadowed by pervasive and large-scale corruption; repressive, militarized rule; and a convulsion of mass bloodletting when he seized power in the late 1960s that took at least 500,000 lives.
Indonesian dictator Suharto, 45 years old, 1966
The man shown above, known as the ‘smiling general‘ who in 1966 would soon arrange to have himself elected president in the fourth most populous country in the world, bears a striking resemblance to another man, whom at 47 entered his first term as president in the planet’s third most inhabited country.
Nine months prior to Obama’s August 1961 birth, Suharto was leading an Indonesian army intelligence unit in Dutch New Guinea, just Southeast of what was then the border of Indonesia.
In 1960, Suharto was in command of the Army Strategic Reserve Command (Kostrad), a special military unit formed to recover West New Guinea in the unsuccessful Operation Mandala to drive the Dutch out.
In West New Guinea, the majority of the population are Papuans whose physical traits share characteristics with the people of East Africa, where they are believed to have migrated from tens of thousands of years ago. If commander Suharto were to have produced a son with a Papuan woman, he would have been slightly more dark skinned with tightly curled hair.
Pictured from left to right are Suharto, Obama, and a young Papuan woman
However, by 1960 Suharto had been married to his wife Siti for 13 years and already had four children together.
During the Revolution, Suharto married Siti Hartinah (known as Madam Tien), who was the daughter of a minor noble in the Mangkunegaran royal house of Solo. The arranged marriage was enduring and supportive, lasting until Tien’s death in 1996.[5] The couple had six children: Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana (Tutut, born 1949), Sigit Harjojudanto (born 1951), Bambang Trihatmodjo (born 1953), Siti Hediati (Titiek, born 1959), Hutomo Mandala Putra (Tommy, born 1962), and Siti Hutami Endang Adiningsih (Mamiek, born 1964). Within the Javanese upper class, it was considered acceptable if the wife pursued genteel commerce to supplement the family budget, allowing her husband to keep his dignity in his official role.
If the ambitious Suharto were to have been caught in an extramarital relationship, it surely would have struck a blow to his family and career. Thus, the commander would likely have kept the young child hidden.
By 1963, Suharto was back in Jakarta where he was placed in charge of an army command unit. Two years after that he would seize power.
In 1963, as Indonesia edged toward economic and political disaster, he was put in charge of the army’s strategic command, a special force kept on alert for national emergencies, based in Jakarta.
By 1965, the armed forces split into two factions, one a radical left wing and the other a conservative right wing, with Suharto in the conservative camp. In October 1965, Suharto successfully suppressed a dissident coup d’état. After the botched coup, Suharto, then a senior general, led a counter-coup, then a military takeover in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital.
When 1966 came, a hypothetical illegitimate child born in West New Guinea in August 1961 would have enrolled in kindergarten. If Suharto did not want the public to know of his relationship to the little one, he would have to find a confidant to adopt him. A prime candidate would have been Lolo Soetoro, who was a liaison under Suharto living nearby at the time.
Coincidentally, in the summer of 1966 only weeks before the hypothetical Papuan child would have turned five years old, Lolo Soetoro adopted a boy of partial African descent named Barry .
According to Dreams from My Father, Obama was four when he met Lolo Soetoro; his mother married Soetoro shortly thereafter; and Obama was already registered for school when he and his mother relocated to Jakarta, where Soetoro was an oil-company executive and liaison to the Suharto government.
In 1966, Suharto was establishing control of Indonesia and had the country’s prior leader, Sukarno, removed from power. He would arrange to have himself elected president the following year, as the young Barry was entering first grade.
The confrontation with Malaysia, initiated by Sukarno, ended and Suharto reestablished relations with Western powers, the United States in particular, while ties with China were suspended. Suharto consolidated his power and became the final arbiter of all political decisions.
On March 12, 1967, Suharto was installed as the acting president by the House of Assembly.
That Fall, only months after Suharto had become president, while attending primary school at Fransiskus Asisi in Central Jakarta, Barry wrote a paper titled ‘I want to become president‘. Forty-one years later his former teacher, Mrs. Dharmawan, would reflect on it.
Israella Dharmawan, Barry’s former teacher at Fransiskus Asisi and an avid follower of the U.S. election, said she was proud and touched by Barry’s win.
…“I remember he once wrote two stories titled ‘My mother, my idol’ and ‘I want to be a president’,” she said.
Did Barry’s desire at six years old to become president arise from his relationship to the man who had just assumed that role in the country of his residence, Indonesia?
During last year’s U.S. presidential campaign season, the mainstream media briefly showed interest in Obama’s Indonesian primary schooling when it was charged that he had attended a madrassa.
While the madrassa claim was refuted, the brief examination found that he had been registered under the name ‘Barry Soetoro’ and that he spent about four years between two schools in Jakarta. Considering that when he entered fifth grade in Hawaii in 1971 he was 10 years old, this fits with the timeline that he attended grades one through four from 1967 to 1971 in Jakarta. It has been reported that he also attended kindergarten in Jakarta at Fransiskus Asisi in 1966.
Barry’s stepfather Lolo Soetoro became engaged in 1967 to a woman named Ann who taught English at the U.S. embassy in Jakarta. They married and lived together throughout Barry’s years of Indonesian primary school.
This account directly contradicts Obama’s notion, repeated in Tuesday’s speech, that he was raised by a single mother.
I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.
In fact, Ann would remain married to Lolo until 1980, when Barry was nineteen years old. Thus, as a matter of legal record, from the time Barry was no more than six years old until adulthood his mother was not single.
Did Suharto arrange the marriage of Lolo, who was one of his aides, with Ann, whom he knew from the embassy and would have then adopted Barry?
This class photo shows Barry standing at the center of the back row
Moreover, he could have been mistaken for a relative of the late Suharto. Barry could even pass as the half-brother of the Indonesian president’s son, Tommy, who is separated from him in age by only one year.
Pictured from left to right is Barry Soetoro and Tommy Suharto
Like his father and Barry, Tommy Suharto is politically ambitious. Just two days ago, his intention was declared to run for the position of chairman in a major Indonesian party which the elder Suharto used to lead.
Seeking a new role on the national political stage, the youngest son of the late former president Soeharto, Hutomo “Tommy” Mandala Putra, officially declared his bid for the post of Golkar Party chief on Tuesday.
It is also his first appearance in front of the Golkar Party, which helped his father rule the country for 32 years, after serving his jail sentence in 2006 over the murder of a Supreme Court judge.
…Calling his program “Trikarya”, Tommy also vowed to bring back the “glory days” of Golkar under the New Order era, and transform it into an independent and dynamic party after its three defeats in the 1999, 2004 and 2009 general elections.
Again like his father, Tommy has been involved in corruption. He was released from prison in 2006 after serving a partial sentence for plotting the murder of a Supreme Court judge.
Tommy was conditionally released from jail in 2006 after he had served only a third of his original sentence for plotting the murder of a Supreme Court justice who had convicted him in another graft case.
So what is to be drawn from these inferences? Did Indonesian president Soeharto instruct his aide Lolo to keep secret the birth of an illegitimate son? Would this include hiding from the boy that his mother adopted him? What type of cover story would Soeharto have come up with?
It would have been necessary to tell the son that his biological father lived abroad and was out of the picture prior to a time when Barry would have formed a living memory of him. This is similar to the tale told of Barack Obama Sr., who never stepped foot into Indonesia.
Strangely, although Obama Sr. graduated at 17 years old from the well-renowned Maseno National School in Kenya in 1953, he was reported to not have gone to the University of Hawaii until 1959, when he got an academic scholarship despite having been out of school for six years.
His interracial marriage with Ann was rare, even in Hawaii. At the time it would have been illigal in half of the U.S. states, Hawaii not included. Less than 1% of the residents of the state were African-American. The wedding itself was unusual in that no one attended it.
“Nobody was invited,” says Abercrombie. The motivations behind the marriage remain a mystery, even to Obama. “I never probed my mother about the details. Did they decide to get married because she was already pregnant? Or did he propose to her in the traditional, formal way?” Obama wonders. “I suppose, had she not passed away, I would have asked more.”
Even by the standards of 1961, she was young to be married. At 18, she dropped out of college after one semester, according to University of Hawaii records. When her friends back in Washington heard the news, “we were very shocked,” says Box, her high school friend.
Then, when Obama was almost 1, his father left for Harvard to get a Ph.D. in economics
Interestingly, the Indonesian name for the province where the hypothetical mistress of the former dictator resided is called Papua Barat. On Western New Guinea’s southern coast is a small farming town called Obome. Is Barat Obome a reference to the true birthplace of the president and the root from which the alias Barack Obama was derived?
One passage of note from Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father, is where he described his stepfather’s trip into the jungle of New Guinea.
Obama’s Indonesian stepfather, Lolo, explains the rule of the jungle to the young boy: “Men take advantage of weakness in other men.” Obama’s mother, an innocent abroad, is shocked to learn that Lolo was conscripted into that country’s brutal repression of an insurgency and sent to the jungles of New Guinea, where he saw and did unspeakable things. In America, Obama writes, power was muted; in a place like Indonesia, it was “undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped. . . . That’s how things were; you couldn’t change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them.”
Was one of these ‘unspeakable things’ impregnating a young Papuan woman? Why would Lolo, an oil executive consultant, be overtaken by the lust for power in the jungle of New Guinea? Were the events described actually experienced by General Suharto?
Finally, Barry does not appear to resemble either of his supposed relatives from Kenya or Kansas.
Would his presence in the Suharto family be more believable?
When his parents divorced in 1980, Barry Soetoro, then 19, changed his name to Barack Obama, while his mother reverted to the maiden name Ann Dunham. Few traces remained of the Indonesian childhood which he left behind.
Since Lolo, Ann, Barack Obama Sr., and former president Suharto have all passed away, we may never find out the true extent of Barry’s relationship with the Indonesian dictator who directed the bloodshed of 500,000 of his people. The world should be wary of the political ascension of the former dictator’s son Tommy, and the parallel path of his long lost hypothetical half-brother.
Update: This diary is a satire of the ‘birthers’, thanks for reading.
Moe Lane
Dan Spencer
Dan McLaughlin
Jeff Emanuel
