Perhaps the biggest media story of 2010 was the influence of Tea Party voters on the congressional landscape. The new congress comes to Capitol Hill with a mandate to end profligate spending and restore fiscal sanity, we are told. But when the House and Senate convene in January, the newly elected members will face tremendous pressure to maintain spending levels for entitlement programs. Even the most modest proposals to trim Social Security or Medicare spending will be met with howls of indignation and threats of voter revolt. Legislators who propose any kind of means testing or increased retirement ages can expect angry visits from senior citizen lobbyists ready to fund a candidate back home who supports the status quo.
But millions of Americans now realize that the status quo is an illusion that will not last even another 10 or 20 years. The federal government cannot continue to spend a trillion dollars more than it collects in revenue each year, because we are running out of creditors. Fiscal reality is setting in, and the consequences may be grim even if Congress finds the courage to take decisive action now.
Courage begins with a commitment to see things as they are, rather than how we wish they were. When it comes to Social Security, we must understand that the system does not represent an old age pension, an “insurance” program, or even a forced savings program. It simply represents an enormous transfer payment, with younger workers paying taxes to fund benefits. There is no Social Security trust fund, and you don’t have an “account.” Whether you win or lose the Social Security lottery is a function of when you happened to be born and how long you live to collect benefits. Of course young people today have every reason to believe they will never collect those benefits.
Notice that neither political party proposes letting people opt out of Social Security, which exposes the lie that your contributions are set aside and saved. After all, if your contributions really are put aside for your retirement, the money is there earning interest, right? If your money is in your “account,” what difference would it make if your neighbor chooses not to participate in the program? The truth, of course, is that your contributions are not put aside. Social Security is simply a tax. Like all taxes, the money collected is spent immediately as general revenue to fund the federal government. But no administration will admit that Social Security is nothing more than an accounting ledger with no money. You will collect benefits only if future tax revenues materialize as hoped; the money you paid into the system is long gone.
My hope is that at least some members of the new Congress will cut through the distortions and see Social Security as it really is. The best way to fix the impending Social Security crisis is also the simplest: allow younger individuals to opt out of the program and use their tax savings to invest privately as they see fit. This is the true private solution. Your money has never been safe in the government’s hands, and it never will be.
Tuesday
WHAT I THINK........BILL ANDERSON
When the Republicans retook the U.S. House of Representatives last November, it meant that Ron Paul would be in line to chair the subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve System. Despite the intense lobbying by Ben Bernanke and others who loathed the prospect of Rep. Paul being able to subpoena them to appear before Congress and then to ask them pointed questions about their secret operations, the Republican leadership still gave Rep. Paul his rightful position.
Obviously, the Usual Suspects on the Right and the Left are not happy, and today, I wish to concentrate on the attacks on Rep. Paul by another Paul, that being Krugman, who has deliberately misrepresented Rep. Paul’s positions in recent columns and blog posts. Krugman’s December 20 column called Rep. Paul a "zombie," and then proceeded to attribute false views to the congressman. All in a day’s work for the man whose name disgraces the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics.
Actually, Krugman’s smears began over the weekend when he first gave Rep. Paul a backhanded "compliment" for being consistent in his thinking, but then wrote that his ideas were "crazy." Wrote Krugman:
In a way, I almost welcome the frankness of someone like Ron Paul, who tells us that there’s no need for any kind of bank regulations. It’s crazy, of course – even Adam Smith called for bank regulations, comparing them to building regulations designed to prevent the spread of fires. But at least the guy’s consistent.
However, this is what Rep. Paul actually said:
"I don’t think we need regulators. We need law and order. We need people to fulfill their contracts." He added: "The market is a great regulator, and we’ve lost understanding and confidence that the market is probably a much stricter regulator."
What Rep. Paul wants is not government regulation, nor does he approve of "self-regulation," but rather he wants market regulation which comes about via profits and losses. For example, the banking crisis that came about in the fall of 2008 existed because consumers and investors were telling the banks they made wrong choices, and that they needed to pay.
However, Congress (with Krugman’s approval) intervened and then pretty much proceeded to nationalize the country’s financial system. As Austrians (and we count Dr. Paul among our number) have noted, this will not make the financial regime more stable and it certainly will not make it more solvent. It just makes the hole deeper and the Day of Reckoning even more sinister.
Krugman hardly was through. He then created another post for his blog in which he misrepresents Dr. Paul’s views on money. Krugman writes:
I used that term (paleomonetarism) – it’s probably not original, but who knows? – in a recent post about the increasingly obscure meaning of the money supply. The best example would surely be Ron Paul, who’s now going to have oversight over the Fed. If you read his stuff, it’s very clear: money is a well-defined quantity that the Fed controls, and inflation comes from – indeed is defined as – increases in that quantity.
What he means, I guess, is monetary base.
Krugman then goes on to compare the changes in the monetary base with the changes in the CPI in order to claim that Dr. Paul is wrong on money and wrong on inflation. Robert Wenzel deftly challenges Krugman in this blog post.
However, Krugman was just getting warmed up, and his December 20 column not only refers to Dr. Paul as a "zombie," but he repeats the "regulation" quote but this time fails to link Dr. Paul’s statements to the article in the Wall Street Journal from where the quote came. He writes:
When historians look back at 2008–10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything – yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.
How did that happen? How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees, did we end up with Ron Paul, who says "I don’t think we need regulators," about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed?
We can expect much, much more of this, and not just from Paul Krugman. Ben Bernanke has lots of friends in the media, and one can be sure that Bernanke will be the source of "anonymous" quotes that will denigrate Dr. Paul’s character and his understanding of money and the economy. For that matter, Bernanke was the chair of the economics department at Princeton when the university hired Krugman, so one can be sure that Krugman has Bernanke’s back.
Furthermore, one can bet that much of the banking and monetary establishment is going to try to destroy Dr. Paul’s character over the next two years, and given that the Washington media really does not care about facts and certainly not the truth, one can bet that every false rumor about Ron Paul will be bandied about by the mainstream media.
Of all people, Krugman understands that when an academic writer such as himself deliberately misrepresents someone by using a quote to push a point of view the other person does not have, he is engaged in fraud. This is the kind of fraud that at one time discredited someone to a point where his good reputation and sometimes his academic position were taken away from him.
Obviously, that no longer is the case. Krugman has signaled that he is quite willing to be a hatchet man for Bernanke and others and to insult and misrepresent what Ron Paul is doing and saying. That Bernanke and his Wall Street friends are willing to go along with this tells us much more about them than I really want to know.
(I would add that Henry Hazlitt, who was a much better economic thinker than Krugman ever will be, wrote columns for Newsweek for many years, yet never engaged in this kind of personal invective. Today, invective is about all Krugman and others like him understand.)
It is going to become even uglier than it is now, and the new Congress has not even been seated.
Obviously, the Usual Suspects on the Right and the Left are not happy, and today, I wish to concentrate on the attacks on Rep. Paul by another Paul, that being Krugman, who has deliberately misrepresented Rep. Paul’s positions in recent columns and blog posts. Krugman’s December 20 column called Rep. Paul a "zombie," and then proceeded to attribute false views to the congressman. All in a day’s work for the man whose name disgraces the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics.
Actually, Krugman’s smears began over the weekend when he first gave Rep. Paul a backhanded "compliment" for being consistent in his thinking, but then wrote that his ideas were "crazy." Wrote Krugman:
In a way, I almost welcome the frankness of someone like Ron Paul, who tells us that there’s no need for any kind of bank regulations. It’s crazy, of course – even Adam Smith called for bank regulations, comparing them to building regulations designed to prevent the spread of fires. But at least the guy’s consistent.
However, this is what Rep. Paul actually said:
"I don’t think we need regulators. We need law and order. We need people to fulfill their contracts." He added: "The market is a great regulator, and we’ve lost understanding and confidence that the market is probably a much stricter regulator."
What Rep. Paul wants is not government regulation, nor does he approve of "self-regulation," but rather he wants market regulation which comes about via profits and losses. For example, the banking crisis that came about in the fall of 2008 existed because consumers and investors were telling the banks they made wrong choices, and that they needed to pay.
However, Congress (with Krugman’s approval) intervened and then pretty much proceeded to nationalize the country’s financial system. As Austrians (and we count Dr. Paul among our number) have noted, this will not make the financial regime more stable and it certainly will not make it more solvent. It just makes the hole deeper and the Day of Reckoning even more sinister.
Krugman hardly was through. He then created another post for his blog in which he misrepresents Dr. Paul’s views on money. Krugman writes:
I used that term (paleomonetarism) – it’s probably not original, but who knows? – in a recent post about the increasingly obscure meaning of the money supply. The best example would surely be Ron Paul, who’s now going to have oversight over the Fed. If you read his stuff, it’s very clear: money is a well-defined quantity that the Fed controls, and inflation comes from – indeed is defined as – increases in that quantity.
What he means, I guess, is monetary base.
Krugman then goes on to compare the changes in the monetary base with the changes in the CPI in order to claim that Dr. Paul is wrong on money and wrong on inflation. Robert Wenzel deftly challenges Krugman in this blog post.
However, Krugman was just getting warmed up, and his December 20 column not only refers to Dr. Paul as a "zombie," but he repeats the "regulation" quote but this time fails to link Dr. Paul’s statements to the article in the Wall Street Journal from where the quote came. He writes:
When historians look back at 2008–10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything – yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.
How did that happen? How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees, did we end up with Ron Paul, who says "I don’t think we need regulators," about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed?
We can expect much, much more of this, and not just from Paul Krugman. Ben Bernanke has lots of friends in the media, and one can be sure that Bernanke will be the source of "anonymous" quotes that will denigrate Dr. Paul’s character and his understanding of money and the economy. For that matter, Bernanke was the chair of the economics department at Princeton when the university hired Krugman, so one can be sure that Krugman has Bernanke’s back.
Furthermore, one can bet that much of the banking and monetary establishment is going to try to destroy Dr. Paul’s character over the next two years, and given that the Washington media really does not care about facts and certainly not the truth, one can bet that every false rumor about Ron Paul will be bandied about by the mainstream media.
Of all people, Krugman understands that when an academic writer such as himself deliberately misrepresents someone by using a quote to push a point of view the other person does not have, he is engaged in fraud. This is the kind of fraud that at one time discredited someone to a point where his good reputation and sometimes his academic position were taken away from him.
Obviously, that no longer is the case. Krugman has signaled that he is quite willing to be a hatchet man for Bernanke and others and to insult and misrepresent what Ron Paul is doing and saying. That Bernanke and his Wall Street friends are willing to go along with this tells us much more about them than I really want to know.
(I would add that Henry Hazlitt, who was a much better economic thinker than Krugman ever will be, wrote columns for Newsweek for many years, yet never engaged in this kind of personal invective. Today, invective is about all Krugman and others like him understand.)
It is going to become even uglier than it is now, and the new Congress has not even been seated.
DISTORTING THE TAX POLICY DEBATE
George Orwell warned us about the use of “meaningless words” in politics, words that are endlessly repeated by sloganeering politicians until they have no meaning at all. Meaningless words certainly were on display during last week’s congressional debate over the latest tax bill.
Over and over again we heard trite, empty phrases like “tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%,” “tax giveaways,” “tax earmarks,” and “borrowing money to give to millionaires.” Time and time again the same falsehoods were presented as fact, and reported as such by a credulous media.
But all of these clichés about taxes are based on the presumption that government has a right to all of your income, and so government “gives” you something when it allows you to keep a portion of that income. To this mindset, tax cuts represent a “cost” to government. After all, they argue, money that really ought to go to the most noble of purposes – wealth redistribution via taxation – is being kept by greedy people and corporations who just don’t want to pay their fair share.
Far too many Americans truly believe that tax cuts represent a government giveaway, indistinguishable from an outright subsidy or entitlement payment. To combat this mindset, we need to be clear with our language.
A subsidy, properly understood, occurs when government takes tax dollars and gives them to favored individuals, companies, or industries. A tax cut, by contrast, simply means government takes less from an individual, company, or industry. When government takes less from you, it has not given you anything; it merely has harmed you less. This is the critical distinction that has been lost in the endless, tired debate about tax policy.
Of course the bill passed last week did contain some actual spending, mostly in the form of an extension of unemployment benefits for another 13 months. The total spending in the bill amounted to about $60 billion. But the tax savings in the bill, meaning the amount of money that will remain in the hands of taxpayers rather than being sent to Washington, is approximately $850 billion. So while a clean tax bill certainly would have been preferable, the tax relief it contains is significant. It means $850 billion will be spent, saved, or invested by American citizens rather than being sent into the black hole known as the federal treasury.
The media, however, dutifully reported that opposition to the bill came from concerned members of Congress who felt the $850 billion “cost” of the bill was too high, and would add too much to the deficit. As always, they could not distinguish between government giving and government taking away. The American people already pay plenty in federal taxes; the deficit is the result of a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
Had the bill not passed, millions of Americans would have seen their paychecks shrink in January due to increased tax withholding. That is the plain and simple truth, and that is why I voted for the bill.
Over and over again we heard trite, empty phrases like “tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%,” “tax giveaways,” “tax earmarks,” and “borrowing money to give to millionaires.” Time and time again the same falsehoods were presented as fact, and reported as such by a credulous media.
But all of these clichés about taxes are based on the presumption that government has a right to all of your income, and so government “gives” you something when it allows you to keep a portion of that income. To this mindset, tax cuts represent a “cost” to government. After all, they argue, money that really ought to go to the most noble of purposes – wealth redistribution via taxation – is being kept by greedy people and corporations who just don’t want to pay their fair share.
Far too many Americans truly believe that tax cuts represent a government giveaway, indistinguishable from an outright subsidy or entitlement payment. To combat this mindset, we need to be clear with our language.
A subsidy, properly understood, occurs when government takes tax dollars and gives them to favored individuals, companies, or industries. A tax cut, by contrast, simply means government takes less from an individual, company, or industry. When government takes less from you, it has not given you anything; it merely has harmed you less. This is the critical distinction that has been lost in the endless, tired debate about tax policy.
Of course the bill passed last week did contain some actual spending, mostly in the form of an extension of unemployment benefits for another 13 months. The total spending in the bill amounted to about $60 billion. But the tax savings in the bill, meaning the amount of money that will remain in the hands of taxpayers rather than being sent to Washington, is approximately $850 billion. So while a clean tax bill certainly would have been preferable, the tax relief it contains is significant. It means $850 billion will be spent, saved, or invested by American citizens rather than being sent into the black hole known as the federal treasury.
The media, however, dutifully reported that opposition to the bill came from concerned members of Congress who felt the $850 billion “cost” of the bill was too high, and would add too much to the deficit. As always, they could not distinguish between government giving and government taking away. The American people already pay plenty in federal taxes; the deficit is the result of a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
Had the bill not passed, millions of Americans would have seen their paychecks shrink in January due to increased tax withholding. That is the plain and simple truth, and that is why I voted for the bill.
Friday
WHAT I THINK........JAMES ANTLE
The Revolution is here! Searching for leadership, congressional Republicans have finally turned to Ron Paul. Well, to chair the House subcommittee on domestic monetary policy, at least. But that does put Congress's leading critic of the Federal Reserve in charge of the panel that oversees the central bank.
Ben Bernanke, beware. The 12-term libertarian-leaning congressman from Texas has written a book-length manifesto – titled simply End the Fed – calling for the Federal Reserve's abolition. He will likely call leading Austrian economists affiliated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute to Capitol Hill to testify alongside staid mainstream economists. Fortune magazine recently asked, "Will the Fed be able to survive Ron Paul?"
For years, Paul laboured in obscurity. He ended his first stint in Congress with an unsuccessful run for US Senate in 1984 (he lost to eventual Senator Phil Gramm in the Republican primary). Before returning to the House 13 years later, in order to join the stalled government-shrinking "Republican Revolution", Paul was the Libertarian party's presidential nominee in 1988.
But it was Paul's first Republican presidential campaign in 2008 that really put him on the map. Debating alongside John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, Paul stood out as a voice for peace and civil liberties. Unlike all the other Republicans on stage, he opposed the Iraq war and the Patriot Act. A strict constitutionalist, he was also more consistent than the rest of them in his rejection of debts, deficits and runaway government spending.
Paul's views on war and peace remain deeply controversial within the Republican party. When Paul defended Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, for instance, the conservative blog RedState denounced him as "al-Qaida's favourite member of Congress". But when it comes to economics and the requirement that federal legislation be explicitly based on the Constitution, Paul's philosophy is starting to resonate.
Republican leaders resisted pressure from the banking industry to block him from his new subcommittee chairmanship. Every GOP member of Congress, and a not insignificant number of Democrats, co-sponsor his bill to audit the Fed. His son Rand was elected to the Senate from Kentucky in November. According to a Paul profile in the New York Times, "others are beginning to credit him with some wisdom – or at least acknowledging his passionate following."
Ben Bernanke, beware. The 12-term libertarian-leaning congressman from Texas has written a book-length manifesto – titled simply End the Fed – calling for the Federal Reserve's abolition. He will likely call leading Austrian economists affiliated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute to Capitol Hill to testify alongside staid mainstream economists. Fortune magazine recently asked, "Will the Fed be able to survive Ron Paul?"
For years, Paul laboured in obscurity. He ended his first stint in Congress with an unsuccessful run for US Senate in 1984 (he lost to eventual Senator Phil Gramm in the Republican primary). Before returning to the House 13 years later, in order to join the stalled government-shrinking "Republican Revolution", Paul was the Libertarian party's presidential nominee in 1988.
But it was Paul's first Republican presidential campaign in 2008 that really put him on the map. Debating alongside John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, Paul stood out as a voice for peace and civil liberties. Unlike all the other Republicans on stage, he opposed the Iraq war and the Patriot Act. A strict constitutionalist, he was also more consistent than the rest of them in his rejection of debts, deficits and runaway government spending.
Paul's views on war and peace remain deeply controversial within the Republican party. When Paul defended Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, for instance, the conservative blog RedState denounced him as "al-Qaida's favourite member of Congress". But when it comes to economics and the requirement that federal legislation be explicitly based on the Constitution, Paul's philosophy is starting to resonate.
Republican leaders resisted pressure from the banking industry to block him from his new subcommittee chairmanship. Every GOP member of Congress, and a not insignificant number of Democrats, co-sponsor his bill to audit the Fed. His son Rand was elected to the Senate from Kentucky in November. According to a Paul profile in the New York Times, "others are beginning to credit him with some wisdom – or at least acknowledging his passionate following."
Thursday
WHAT I THINK.......BOB BAUMAN
“And when man faces destiny, destiny ends and man comes into his own.”
Those words were uttered by the late André Malraux, French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman, but they certainly apply now to my friend and former congressional colleague, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.
If proof were needed of that truth, one need only glance at today’s New York Times front page.
There, under the cynical headline “Rep. Ron Paul, G.O.P. Loner, Comes In From Cold” is a lengthy article that chronicles Ron’s ascension in the new Congress to the chairmanship of the House Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy which oversees the Federal Reserve as well as the currency and the valuation of the dollar.
After years of blocking him from a leadership position, Rep. Paul’s fellow Republicans have elevated him to what could become a highly visible platform for exposing Ben Bernanke and the Fed’s squandering of trillions of declining paper dollars. They did so, despite the reported opposition of a number of Wall Street bankers who apparently fear Paul – as well they should.
End the Fed
Ron Paul has strong views on the issues. He has written a book called End the Fed; he embraces the Austrian school of economic thought, which holds that the government has no role in regulating the economy; and he advocates a return to the gold standard.
Sounds damn good to me!
That The Times, the declining mouthpiece of the American Left, would give such prominence to one whose presidential candidacy they routinely have vilified, is at least an acknowledgement of the power of Paul’s influence – as well as the national groundswell that is the Tea Party Revolution.
Many of the new Republicans in the next Congress campaigned on precisely the issues that Ron Paul has been talking about for 40 years: forbidding Congress from any action not explicitly authorized in the U.S. Constitution, eliminating entire federal departments as unconstitutional and checking the power of the Fed.
A Positive No
In 1973, when I was first elected to the U.S. House, my late colleague and good friend, John Ashbrook of Ohio told me: “Bob, 99% of the time in the House you can’t go wrong by voting no.”
During his 20 years in Congress, Ron has staked out the lonely end of 434-to-1 votes against legislation that he considers unconstitutional, even on issues as ceremonial as granting Mother Teresa a Congressional Gold Medal. His colleagues have dubbed him “Dr. No,” but his wife insists that they have the spelling wrong: he is really Dr. Know.
Rep. Paul wasted no time in assuming his new role in the House. In a statement on his web site he made plain his future plans:
“Since the announcement that I will chair the congressional subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve, the media response has been overwhelming. The groundswell of opposition to Fed actions among ordinary citizens is…in the tremendous interest shown by the financial press. The demand for transparency is growing whether the political and financial establishment likes it or not. The Fed is losing its vaunted status as an institution that is somehow above politics and public scrutiny. Fed transparency will be the cornerstone of my efforts as Subcommittee Chairman.”
Freedom Alliance
By the way, if you had been a member of the Freedom Alliance, which I chair, you would have had full audio access to an interview I did last month with Ron Paul. Ron had many interesting things to say about numerous topics and was very candid in revealing he may well run for president again in 2012.
The Times notes: “Aides, supporters and television interviewers now use words like ‘vindicated’ to describe him — a term Mr. Paul, a 75-year-old obstetrician with the manner of a country doctor, brushes off.
“I don’t think it’s very personal,” he said in an interview in his office on the Hill, where he has represented the 14th District of Texas on and off since 1976. “People are really worried about what’s happening, so they’re searching, and I think they see that we’ve been offering answers.”
The right answers, I might add.
Those words were uttered by the late André Malraux, French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman, but they certainly apply now to my friend and former congressional colleague, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.
If proof were needed of that truth, one need only glance at today’s New York Times front page.
There, under the cynical headline “Rep. Ron Paul, G.O.P. Loner, Comes In From Cold” is a lengthy article that chronicles Ron’s ascension in the new Congress to the chairmanship of the House Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy which oversees the Federal Reserve as well as the currency and the valuation of the dollar.
After years of blocking him from a leadership position, Rep. Paul’s fellow Republicans have elevated him to what could become a highly visible platform for exposing Ben Bernanke and the Fed’s squandering of trillions of declining paper dollars. They did so, despite the reported opposition of a number of Wall Street bankers who apparently fear Paul – as well they should.
End the Fed
Ron Paul has strong views on the issues. He has written a book called End the Fed; he embraces the Austrian school of economic thought, which holds that the government has no role in regulating the economy; and he advocates a return to the gold standard.
Sounds damn good to me!
That The Times, the declining mouthpiece of the American Left, would give such prominence to one whose presidential candidacy they routinely have vilified, is at least an acknowledgement of the power of Paul’s influence – as well as the national groundswell that is the Tea Party Revolution.
Many of the new Republicans in the next Congress campaigned on precisely the issues that Ron Paul has been talking about for 40 years: forbidding Congress from any action not explicitly authorized in the U.S. Constitution, eliminating entire federal departments as unconstitutional and checking the power of the Fed.
A Positive No
In 1973, when I was first elected to the U.S. House, my late colleague and good friend, John Ashbrook of Ohio told me: “Bob, 99% of the time in the House you can’t go wrong by voting no.”
During his 20 years in Congress, Ron has staked out the lonely end of 434-to-1 votes against legislation that he considers unconstitutional, even on issues as ceremonial as granting Mother Teresa a Congressional Gold Medal. His colleagues have dubbed him “Dr. No,” but his wife insists that they have the spelling wrong: he is really Dr. Know.
Rep. Paul wasted no time in assuming his new role in the House. In a statement on his web site he made plain his future plans:
“Since the announcement that I will chair the congressional subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve, the media response has been overwhelming. The groundswell of opposition to Fed actions among ordinary citizens is…in the tremendous interest shown by the financial press. The demand for transparency is growing whether the political and financial establishment likes it or not. The Fed is losing its vaunted status as an institution that is somehow above politics and public scrutiny. Fed transparency will be the cornerstone of my efforts as Subcommittee Chairman.”
Freedom Alliance
By the way, if you had been a member of the Freedom Alliance, which I chair, you would have had full audio access to an interview I did last month with Ron Paul. Ron had many interesting things to say about numerous topics and was very candid in revealing he may well run for president again in 2012.
The Times notes: “Aides, supporters and television interviewers now use words like ‘vindicated’ to describe him — a term Mr. Paul, a 75-year-old obstetrician with the manner of a country doctor, brushes off.
“I don’t think it’s very personal,” he said in an interview in his office on the Hill, where he has represented the 14th District of Texas on and off since 1976. “People are really worried about what’s happening, so they’re searching, and I think they see that we’ve been offering answers.”
The right answers, I might add.
Monday
AUDIT THE FED IN 2011
Since the announcement last week that I will chair the congressional subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve, the media response has been overwhelming. The groundswell of opposition to Fed actions among ordinary citizens is reflected not only in the rhetoric coming out of Capitol Hill, but also in the tremendous interest shown by the financial press. The demand for transparency is growing, whether the political and financial establishment likes it or not. The Fed is losing its vaunted status as an institution that somehow is above politics and public scrutiny. Fed transparency will be the cornerstone of my efforts as subcommittee chairman.
Thanks to public pressure earlier this year, Congress did pass legislation that requires the Fed to disclose some information about its bailout of select industries and companies following the 2008 financial crisis. So two weeks ago the Fed released data concerning more than $3 trillion of assistance it offered to banks through its bailout facilities. After reviewing this data, however, we are left with many more questions about the Fed's “lending”.
In the “Term Securities Lending Facility”, the Fed was supposed to have loaned against AAA-rated securities-- yet over half of the collateral put up by banks to obtain loans had no listed credit rating. Should we assume that the Fed accepted absolute junk rated securities as collateral for loans? Presumably these securities were so bad that they wouldn’t even publicize their credit rating. So why should our central bank, backed up by your taxes, accept such collateral?
On another note, of the $1.25 trillion purchased under the Fed’s “Mortgage-Backed Securities Purchase Program,” only $877 billion in purchases have been publicized. What happened to the remaining $400 billion?
These kinds of limited disclosures by the Fed only underscore the need for a full and complete audit of the Fed’s financial books. This audit should be done by an independent third party, in the same manner that public companies are audited. The Fed should make public its balance sheet, income statement, and perhaps most importantly its cash flow statement. It also should publicize the notes explaining those financial statements.
We seem to forget sometimes that Congress created the Fed-- it is a government-created banking monopoly, and its top decision-makers are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. If the Fed does not perform satisfactorily in the eyes of these politicians and their constituents, the Chairman and Governors may not be re-nominated.
In theory, Congress could even repeal the Federal Reserve Act altogether since it has the authority to do so. Obviously Congress is within its authority to audit an organization it created by statute, and it is time to assume that responsibility.
With 320 Members of Congress cosponsoring my legislation to fully audit the Fed in the 111th Congress, my hope is that we can build on our broad bipartisan coalition in 2011 and continue the push for greater Fed transparency going forward.
Thanks to public pressure earlier this year, Congress did pass legislation that requires the Fed to disclose some information about its bailout of select industries and companies following the 2008 financial crisis. So two weeks ago the Fed released data concerning more than $3 trillion of assistance it offered to banks through its bailout facilities. After reviewing this data, however, we are left with many more questions about the Fed's “lending”.
In the “Term Securities Lending Facility”, the Fed was supposed to have loaned against AAA-rated securities-- yet over half of the collateral put up by banks to obtain loans had no listed credit rating. Should we assume that the Fed accepted absolute junk rated securities as collateral for loans? Presumably these securities were so bad that they wouldn’t even publicize their credit rating. So why should our central bank, backed up by your taxes, accept such collateral?
On another note, of the $1.25 trillion purchased under the Fed’s “Mortgage-Backed Securities Purchase Program,” only $877 billion in purchases have been publicized. What happened to the remaining $400 billion?
These kinds of limited disclosures by the Fed only underscore the need for a full and complete audit of the Fed’s financial books. This audit should be done by an independent third party, in the same manner that public companies are audited. The Fed should make public its balance sheet, income statement, and perhaps most importantly its cash flow statement. It also should publicize the notes explaining those financial statements.
We seem to forget sometimes that Congress created the Fed-- it is a government-created banking monopoly, and its top decision-makers are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. If the Fed does not perform satisfactorily in the eyes of these politicians and their constituents, the Chairman and Governors may not be re-nominated.
In theory, Congress could even repeal the Federal Reserve Act altogether since it has the authority to do so. Obviously Congress is within its authority to audit an organization it created by statute, and it is time to assume that responsibility.
With 320 Members of Congress cosponsoring my legislation to fully audit the Fed in the 111th Congress, my hope is that we can build on our broad bipartisan coalition in 2011 and continue the push for greater Fed transparency going forward.
Saturday
WHAT I THINK......THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG
Is Ron Paul finally in position to really do something about the Federal Reserve? U.S. Representative Spencer Bachus, the chairman-elect of the House Financial Services Committee, has announced that Ron Paul will chair the domestic monetary policy subcommittee starting next month. This puts Ron Paul in tremendous position to be able to put significant pressure on the Federal Reserve. In previous years Ron Paul has introduced legislation to end the Federal Reserve but it never got any traction. During this most recent session of Congress an effort by Ron Paul to have a full audit of the Federal Reserve conducted gathered quite a bit of momentum for a while, but in the end it did not get passed. However, a very limited examination of Fed activities during the recent financial crisis was passed, and that examination has revealed some really shocking things. With so many Tea Party members entering Congress this upcoming session there may be more momentum than ever to hold the Federal Reserve more accountable. Ron Paul is already talking about how he is planning for a full slate of hearings on U.S. monetary policy and he has indicated that he plans to restart a push to have the Fed audited.
And why shouldn't the Federal Reserve be fully audited? The Federal Reserve has more power over the U.S. economy than any other institution and yet it has not been subjected to a comprehensive audit since it was created back in 1913.
So what would an audit accomplish?
Well, it would hopefully expose what is going on inside the Federal Reserve.
A very, very limited examination of Fed transactions that occurred during the recent financial crisis forced the Federal Reserve to reveal the details of 21,000 transactions stretching from December 2007 to July 2010 that totaled more than 3 trillion dollars. It turns out that the Federal Reserve was just handing out gigantic piles of nearly interest-free cash to their friends at the largest banks, financial institutions and corporations all over the globe.
These revelations have many members of Congress wondering what else has been going on inside the Federal Reserve.
For example, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders was absolutely outraged by these "backdoor bailouts" by the Federal Reserve....
"The $700 billion Wall Street bailout turned out to be pocket change compared to trillions and trillions of dollars in near zero interest loans and other financial arrangements that the Federal Reserve doled out to every major financial institution."
More members of Congress than at any other time in recent memory are openly wondering if it is now time "to pull back the curtain" at the Federal Reserve. For those who would like to see the power of the Federal Reserve greatly diminished, there should be one primary goal right now.
Expose the Federal Reserve.
The truth is that the more the American people learn about the Federal Reserve and about what it has been doing the more they disapprove.
During his farewell speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate this week, Senator Jim Bunning noted that as the American people become increasingly aware of what the Federal Reserve is doing the less they like it....
"Public awareness of what the Fed is doing is increasing while public opinion of the Fed is falling."
Unfortunately, the views of Ron Paul and other anti-Federal Reserve members of the Tea Party movement are strongly opposed by many other members of the Republican Party.
In a recent Bloomberg Television interview, Barney Frank noted this division within the ranks of the Republicans....
"I do not believe that Ron Paul’s views on the Fed represent the views of most Republicans."
However, there is evidence that the tide is turning with the American public.
According to a recent Bloomberg National Poll, the number of Americans that would like to see the Federal Reserve held more accountable or even completely abolished is increasing....
Asked if the central bank should be more accountable to Congress, left independent or abolished entirely, 39 percent said it should be held more accountable and 16 percent that it should be abolished. Only 37 percent favor the status quo.
Those are very exciting numbers. A majority of Americans now want the power of the Federal Reserve to be reduced or they want it shut down entirely.
If Ron Paul is able to get a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve passed, the revelations that would come out of that would certainly turn public opinion against the Fed even more.
So what is so bad about the Federal Reserve?
Well, think of it as a perpetual debt machine.
Did you know that the U.S. national debt is 5,000 times larger than it was a hundred years ago?
That's right – back in 1910, prior to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the national debt was only about $2.6 billion.
Since that time, our debt has been endlessly skyrocketing.
Under the Federal Reserve System, the U.S. government cannot just go out and print money. It is actually the Federal Reserve that issues our currency.
The way our system works, whenever the U.S. government arranges for the Federal Reserve to issue more currency, more government debt is created at the same time. In fact, as I have written about previously, all of our money is now based on debt.
No debt, no money.
What we desperately need is for the current monetary system to be scrapped. The federal government should take back the power to issue currency and should implement a new system based on money that is debt-free.
The truth is that it is insane that any sovereign government should have to go into debt just to produce more of its own currency.
Instead, what we have under the Federal Reserve System is a money supply that will forever be expanding, a currency that will forever be deteriorating in value and a national debt that will continue to skyrocket until the entire system collapses.
Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the U.S. dollar has lost over 95 percent of its purchasing power. This continual debasement of our currency is called "inflation" and it is a hidden tax on every man, woman and child in the United States.
It is absolutely guaranteed that every single dollar that you own will go down in value over the long-term.
But the American people have come to accept that a constantly expanding national debt and a currency that is constantly losing value is the most "rational" economic system that humanity has ever come up with.
So who benefits from all this?
Well, for fiscal year 2010 the U.S. government paid out over 413 billion dollars in interest on the national debt. In future years that number is projected to rapidly skyrocket even more.
Wouldn't you like to be getting a nice chunk of that 413 billion dollars?
It turns out that loaning money to the U.S. government is very, very profitable.
That 413 billion dollars is money that was transferred from the American people to the U.S. government, and then transferred from the U.S. government to big financial institutions, foreign countries, and very wealthy bankers.
So what did we get in return for our 413 billion dollars?
Nothing.
Sadly, this is not just going on in the United States. This is going on literally in almost every nation on earth.
All over the world sovereign governments are drowning in debt and so they have to drain their citizens dry so that they can meet their obligations.
In the book of Proverbs, it tells us that "the rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender." Americans like to think that they live in "the land of the free," but the truth is that we have become enslaved to debt.
But even worse, we have consigned our children and our grandchildren to a lifetime of debt. They will have to work all of their lives to pay trillions of dollars in interest on all of the debt that we have accumulated in this generation.
How would you like to be born into a world where the previous generation had racked up a $13 trillion debt that now you were expected to pay off?
There is a reason why people like Ron Paul are so obsessed with the Federal Reserve. It is not because they don't have anything better to do. It is because the future of our country literally hangs in the balance.
Throughout American history, presidents, top members of Congress and leading business people have warned us about the dangers of having a central bank. In fact, even though our young people are no longer taught this, the debate over central banking was one of the most important themes in early American history.
But we didn't listen to the warnings.
We were convinced that we knew better.
Well, now we have an economic system that is dying and a $13 trillion debt that we are passing along to our children and to our grandchildren.
Perhaps we were not as smart as we thought we were.
And why shouldn't the Federal Reserve be fully audited? The Federal Reserve has more power over the U.S. economy than any other institution and yet it has not been subjected to a comprehensive audit since it was created back in 1913.
So what would an audit accomplish?
Well, it would hopefully expose what is going on inside the Federal Reserve.
A very, very limited examination of Fed transactions that occurred during the recent financial crisis forced the Federal Reserve to reveal the details of 21,000 transactions stretching from December 2007 to July 2010 that totaled more than 3 trillion dollars. It turns out that the Federal Reserve was just handing out gigantic piles of nearly interest-free cash to their friends at the largest banks, financial institutions and corporations all over the globe.
These revelations have many members of Congress wondering what else has been going on inside the Federal Reserve.
For example, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders was absolutely outraged by these "backdoor bailouts" by the Federal Reserve....
"The $700 billion Wall Street bailout turned out to be pocket change compared to trillions and trillions of dollars in near zero interest loans and other financial arrangements that the Federal Reserve doled out to every major financial institution."
More members of Congress than at any other time in recent memory are openly wondering if it is now time "to pull back the curtain" at the Federal Reserve. For those who would like to see the power of the Federal Reserve greatly diminished, there should be one primary goal right now.
Expose the Federal Reserve.
The truth is that the more the American people learn about the Federal Reserve and about what it has been doing the more they disapprove.
During his farewell speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate this week, Senator Jim Bunning noted that as the American people become increasingly aware of what the Federal Reserve is doing the less they like it....
"Public awareness of what the Fed is doing is increasing while public opinion of the Fed is falling."
Unfortunately, the views of Ron Paul and other anti-Federal Reserve members of the Tea Party movement are strongly opposed by many other members of the Republican Party.
In a recent Bloomberg Television interview, Barney Frank noted this division within the ranks of the Republicans....
"I do not believe that Ron Paul’s views on the Fed represent the views of most Republicans."
However, there is evidence that the tide is turning with the American public.
According to a recent Bloomberg National Poll, the number of Americans that would like to see the Federal Reserve held more accountable or even completely abolished is increasing....
Asked if the central bank should be more accountable to Congress, left independent or abolished entirely, 39 percent said it should be held more accountable and 16 percent that it should be abolished. Only 37 percent favor the status quo.
Those are very exciting numbers. A majority of Americans now want the power of the Federal Reserve to be reduced or they want it shut down entirely.
If Ron Paul is able to get a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve passed, the revelations that would come out of that would certainly turn public opinion against the Fed even more.
So what is so bad about the Federal Reserve?
Well, think of it as a perpetual debt machine.
Did you know that the U.S. national debt is 5,000 times larger than it was a hundred years ago?
That's right – back in 1910, prior to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the national debt was only about $2.6 billion.
Since that time, our debt has been endlessly skyrocketing.
Under the Federal Reserve System, the U.S. government cannot just go out and print money. It is actually the Federal Reserve that issues our currency.
The way our system works, whenever the U.S. government arranges for the Federal Reserve to issue more currency, more government debt is created at the same time. In fact, as I have written about previously, all of our money is now based on debt.
No debt, no money.
What we desperately need is for the current monetary system to be scrapped. The federal government should take back the power to issue currency and should implement a new system based on money that is debt-free.
The truth is that it is insane that any sovereign government should have to go into debt just to produce more of its own currency.
Instead, what we have under the Federal Reserve System is a money supply that will forever be expanding, a currency that will forever be deteriorating in value and a national debt that will continue to skyrocket until the entire system collapses.
Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the U.S. dollar has lost over 95 percent of its purchasing power. This continual debasement of our currency is called "inflation" and it is a hidden tax on every man, woman and child in the United States.
It is absolutely guaranteed that every single dollar that you own will go down in value over the long-term.
But the American people have come to accept that a constantly expanding national debt and a currency that is constantly losing value is the most "rational" economic system that humanity has ever come up with.
So who benefits from all this?
Well, for fiscal year 2010 the U.S. government paid out over 413 billion dollars in interest on the national debt. In future years that number is projected to rapidly skyrocket even more.
Wouldn't you like to be getting a nice chunk of that 413 billion dollars?
It turns out that loaning money to the U.S. government is very, very profitable.
That 413 billion dollars is money that was transferred from the American people to the U.S. government, and then transferred from the U.S. government to big financial institutions, foreign countries, and very wealthy bankers.
So what did we get in return for our 413 billion dollars?
Nothing.
Sadly, this is not just going on in the United States. This is going on literally in almost every nation on earth.
All over the world sovereign governments are drowning in debt and so they have to drain their citizens dry so that they can meet their obligations.
In the book of Proverbs, it tells us that "the rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender." Americans like to think that they live in "the land of the free," but the truth is that we have become enslaved to debt.
But even worse, we have consigned our children and our grandchildren to a lifetime of debt. They will have to work all of their lives to pay trillions of dollars in interest on all of the debt that we have accumulated in this generation.
How would you like to be born into a world where the previous generation had racked up a $13 trillion debt that now you were expected to pay off?
There is a reason why people like Ron Paul are so obsessed with the Federal Reserve. It is not because they don't have anything better to do. It is because the future of our country literally hangs in the balance.
Throughout American history, presidents, top members of Congress and leading business people have warned us about the dangers of having a central bank. In fact, even though our young people are no longer taught this, the debate over central banking was one of the most important themes in early American history.
But we didn't listen to the warnings.
We were convinced that we knew better.
Well, now we have an economic system that is dying and a $13 trillion debt that we are passing along to our children and to our grandchildren.
Perhaps we were not as smart as we thought we were.
LYING IS NOT PATRIOTIC
WikiLeaks’ release of classified information has generated a lot of attention world-wide in the past few weeks.
The hysterical reaction makes one wonder if this is not an example of killing the messenger for the bad news.
Despite what is claimed, information so far released, though classified, has caused no known harm to any individual, but it has caused plenty of embarrassment to our government. Losing a grip on our empire is not welcomed by the neo-conservatives in charge.
There is now more information confirming that Saudi Arabia is a principle supporter and financier of Al Qaeda and this should set off alarm bells since we guarantee its Sharia-run government.
This emphasizes even more the fact that no Al Qaeda existed in Iraq before 9/11, and yet we went to war against Iraq based on the lie that it did.
It has been charged, by self-proclaimed experts, that Julian Assange, the internet publisher of this information, has committed a heinous crime deserving prosecution for treason and execution or even assassination.
But should we not at least ask how the U.S. government can charge an Australian citizen with treason for publishing U.S. secret information, that he did not steal?
And if WikiLeaks is to be prosecuted for publishing classified documents, why shouldn’t the Washington Post, New York Times, and others that have also published these documents be prosecuted? Actually, some in Congress are threatening this as well.
The New York Times, as a result of a Supreme Court ruling, was not found guilty in 1971 for the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg never served a day in prison for his role in obtaining these secret documents.
The Pentagon Papers were also inserted into the Congressional Record by Senator Mike Gravel with no charges being made of breaking any National Security laws.
Yet the release of this classified information was considered illegal by many, and those who lied us into the Vietnam War and argued for its prolongation were outraged. But the truth gained from the Pentagon Papers revealed that lies were told about the Gulf of Tonkin attack which perpetuated a sad and tragic episode in our history.
Just as with the Vietnam War, the Iraq War was based on lies. We were never threatened by Weapons of Mass Destruction or Al Qaeda in Iraq, though the attack on Iraq was based on this false information.
Any information that challenges the official propaganda for the war in the Middle East is unwelcome by the administration and supporters of these unnecessary wars. Few are interested in understanding the relationship of our foreign policy and our presence in the Middle East to the threat of terrorism. Revealing the real nature and goal for our presence in so many Muslim countries is a threat to our empire and any revelation of this truth is highly resented by those in charge.
Questions to consider:
1. Do the American people deserve to know the truth regarding the ongoing war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
2. Could a larger question be: how can an Army Private gain access to so much secret material?
3. Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not our government’s failure to protect classified information?
4. Are we getting our money’s worth from the $80 billion per year we spend on our intelligence agencies?
5. Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths; lying us into war, or WikiLeaks’ revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
6. If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information, that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the First Amendment and the independence of the internet?
7. Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on WikiLeaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
8. Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in the time of a declared war – which is treason – and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death, and corruption?
9. Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it’s wrong?
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised: “Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.”
The hysterical reaction makes one wonder if this is not an example of killing the messenger for the bad news.
Despite what is claimed, information so far released, though classified, has caused no known harm to any individual, but it has caused plenty of embarrassment to our government. Losing a grip on our empire is not welcomed by the neo-conservatives in charge.
There is now more information confirming that Saudi Arabia is a principle supporter and financier of Al Qaeda and this should set off alarm bells since we guarantee its Sharia-run government.
This emphasizes even more the fact that no Al Qaeda existed in Iraq before 9/11, and yet we went to war against Iraq based on the lie that it did.
It has been charged, by self-proclaimed experts, that Julian Assange, the internet publisher of this information, has committed a heinous crime deserving prosecution for treason and execution or even assassination.
But should we not at least ask how the U.S. government can charge an Australian citizen with treason for publishing U.S. secret information, that he did not steal?
And if WikiLeaks is to be prosecuted for publishing classified documents, why shouldn’t the Washington Post, New York Times, and others that have also published these documents be prosecuted? Actually, some in Congress are threatening this as well.
The New York Times, as a result of a Supreme Court ruling, was not found guilty in 1971 for the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg never served a day in prison for his role in obtaining these secret documents.
The Pentagon Papers were also inserted into the Congressional Record by Senator Mike Gravel with no charges being made of breaking any National Security laws.
Yet the release of this classified information was considered illegal by many, and those who lied us into the Vietnam War and argued for its prolongation were outraged. But the truth gained from the Pentagon Papers revealed that lies were told about the Gulf of Tonkin attack which perpetuated a sad and tragic episode in our history.
Just as with the Vietnam War, the Iraq War was based on lies. We were never threatened by Weapons of Mass Destruction or Al Qaeda in Iraq, though the attack on Iraq was based on this false information.
Any information that challenges the official propaganda for the war in the Middle East is unwelcome by the administration and supporters of these unnecessary wars. Few are interested in understanding the relationship of our foreign policy and our presence in the Middle East to the threat of terrorism. Revealing the real nature and goal for our presence in so many Muslim countries is a threat to our empire and any revelation of this truth is highly resented by those in charge.
Questions to consider:
1. Do the American people deserve to know the truth regarding the ongoing war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
2. Could a larger question be: how can an Army Private gain access to so much secret material?
3. Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not our government’s failure to protect classified information?
4. Are we getting our money’s worth from the $80 billion per year we spend on our intelligence agencies?
5. Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths; lying us into war, or WikiLeaks’ revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
6. If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information, that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the First Amendment and the independence of the internet?
7. Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on WikiLeaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
8. Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in the time of a declared war – which is treason – and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death, and corruption?
9. Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it’s wrong?
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised: “Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.”
Monday
FOCUS ON THE POLICY, NOT WIKILEAKS
We may never know the whole story behind the recent publication of sensitive U.S. government documents by the Wikileaks organization, but we certainly can draw some important conclusions from the reaction of so many in government and media.
At its core, the Wikileaks controversy serves as a diversion from the real issue of what our foreign policy should be. But the mainstream media, along with neoconservatives from both political parties, insist on asking the wrong question. When presented with embarrassing disclosures about U.S. spying and meddling, the policy that requires so much spying and meddling is not questioned. Instead, the media focus on how so much sensitive information could have been leaked, or how authorities might prosecute the publishers of such information.
No one questions the status quo or suggests a wholesale rethinking of our foreign policy. No one suggests that the White House or the State Department should be embarrassed that the U.S. engages in spying and meddling. The only embarrassment is that it was made public. This allows ordinary people to actually know and talk about what the government does. But state secrecy is anathema to a free society. Why exactly should Americans be prevented from knowing what their government is doing in their name?
In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, however, we are in big trouble. The truth is that our foreign spying, meddling, and outright military intervention in the post-World War II era has made us less secure, not more. And we have lost countless lives and spent trillions of dollars for our trouble. Too often "official" government lies have provided justification for endless, illegal wars and hundreds of thousands of resulting deaths and casualties.
Take the recent hostilities in Korea as only one example. More than fifty years after the end of the Korean War, American taxpayers continue to spend billions for the U.S. military to defend a modern and wealthy South Korea. The continued presence of the U.S. military places American lives between the two factions. The U.S. presence only serves to prolong the conflict, further drain our empty treasury, and place our military at risk.
The neoconservative ethos, steeped in the teaching of Leo Strauss, cannot abide an America where individuals simply pursue their own happy, peaceful, prosperous lives. It cannot abide an America where society centers around family, religion, or civic and social institutions rather than an all powerful central state. There is always an enemy to slay, whether communist or terrorist. In the neoconservative vision, a constant state of alarm must be fostered among the people to keep them focused on something greater than themselves-- namely their great protector, the state. This is why the neoconservative reaction to the Wikileaks revelations is so predictable: “See, we told you the world was a dangerous place,” goes the story. They claim we must prosecute- or even assassinate- those responsible for publishing the leaks. And we must redouble our efforts to police the world by spying and meddling better, with no more leaks.
We should view the Wikileaks controversy in the larger context of American foreign policy. Rather than worry about the disclosure of embarrassing secrets, we should focus on our delusional foreign policy. We are kidding ourselves when we believe spying, intrigue, and outright military intervention can maintain our international status as a superpower while our domestic economy crumbles in an orgy of debt and monetary debasement.
At its core, the Wikileaks controversy serves as a diversion from the real issue of what our foreign policy should be. But the mainstream media, along with neoconservatives from both political parties, insist on asking the wrong question. When presented with embarrassing disclosures about U.S. spying and meddling, the policy that requires so much spying and meddling is not questioned. Instead, the media focus on how so much sensitive information could have been leaked, or how authorities might prosecute the publishers of such information.
No one questions the status quo or suggests a wholesale rethinking of our foreign policy. No one suggests that the White House or the State Department should be embarrassed that the U.S. engages in spying and meddling. The only embarrassment is that it was made public. This allows ordinary people to actually know and talk about what the government does. But state secrecy is anathema to a free society. Why exactly should Americans be prevented from knowing what their government is doing in their name?
In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, however, we are in big trouble. The truth is that our foreign spying, meddling, and outright military intervention in the post-World War II era has made us less secure, not more. And we have lost countless lives and spent trillions of dollars for our trouble. Too often "official" government lies have provided justification for endless, illegal wars and hundreds of thousands of resulting deaths and casualties.
Take the recent hostilities in Korea as only one example. More than fifty years after the end of the Korean War, American taxpayers continue to spend billions for the U.S. military to defend a modern and wealthy South Korea. The continued presence of the U.S. military places American lives between the two factions. The U.S. presence only serves to prolong the conflict, further drain our empty treasury, and place our military at risk.
The neoconservative ethos, steeped in the teaching of Leo Strauss, cannot abide an America where individuals simply pursue their own happy, peaceful, prosperous lives. It cannot abide an America where society centers around family, religion, or civic and social institutions rather than an all powerful central state. There is always an enemy to slay, whether communist or terrorist. In the neoconservative vision, a constant state of alarm must be fostered among the people to keep them focused on something greater than themselves-- namely their great protector, the state. This is why the neoconservative reaction to the Wikileaks revelations is so predictable: “See, we told you the world was a dangerous place,” goes the story. They claim we must prosecute- or even assassinate- those responsible for publishing the leaks. And we must redouble our efforts to police the world by spying and meddling better, with no more leaks.
We should view the Wikileaks controversy in the larger context of American foreign policy. Rather than worry about the disclosure of embarrassing secrets, we should focus on our delusional foreign policy. We are kidding ourselves when we believe spying, intrigue, and outright military intervention can maintain our international status as a superpower while our domestic economy crumbles in an orgy of debt and monetary debasement.
Saturday
WHAT I THINK.......ROBERT WENZEL AND SOME OTHERS
With Republican control of the House, Ron Paul, as senior member of the House Financial Services subcommittee that oversees monetary policy, is scheduled to become chairman of that subcommittee.
The banking elitists that were thrown billions upon billions by Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve sure don't want the real supervision that Ron Paul would bring. And they are plotting.
Write Phil Mattingly and Robert Schmidt at Newsweek:
Officials at several major banks have privately raised concerns with Republican leaders that, by allowing Paul to become a chairman, his radical views would gain legitimacy, according to three bank lobbyists...Five GOP leadership aides, speaking anonymously because a decision isn't final, say incoming House Speaker John Boehner has discussed ways to prevent Paul from becoming chairman or to keep him on a tight leash if he does.
Mattingly and Schmidt continue:
If Boehner, who will help determine who gets to chair subcommittees as early as Dec. 8, rejects Paul, he may have to contend with thousands of grassroots supporters and dozens of younger lawmakers who see Paul as a hero. Boehner, through a spokesman, declined to comment.
If Boehner as much as takes away Paul's bathroom privileges, there is likely going to be serious hell to pay. There is no way Ron Paul's followers will take any messing around with Paul's chairmanship or the power that now comes to the subcommittee. All they need is a cause to rally around, and messing with Ron Paul would be such a cause. Boehner would be a very wise man to move on and pick on somebody that isn't principled and who doesn't have a following many, many times greater than those who participated in the original Boston Tea Party.
The banking elitists that were thrown billions upon billions by Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve sure don't want the real supervision that Ron Paul would bring. And they are plotting.
Write Phil Mattingly and Robert Schmidt at Newsweek:
Officials at several major banks have privately raised concerns with Republican leaders that, by allowing Paul to become a chairman, his radical views would gain legitimacy, according to three bank lobbyists...Five GOP leadership aides, speaking anonymously because a decision isn't final, say incoming House Speaker John Boehner has discussed ways to prevent Paul from becoming chairman or to keep him on a tight leash if he does.
Mattingly and Schmidt continue:
If Boehner, who will help determine who gets to chair subcommittees as early as Dec. 8, rejects Paul, he may have to contend with thousands of grassroots supporters and dozens of younger lawmakers who see Paul as a hero. Boehner, through a spokesman, declined to comment.
If Boehner as much as takes away Paul's bathroom privileges, there is likely going to be serious hell to pay. There is no way Ron Paul's followers will take any messing around with Paul's chairmanship or the power that now comes to the subcommittee. All they need is a cause to rally around, and messing with Ron Paul would be such a cause. Boehner would be a very wise man to move on and pick on somebody that isn't principled and who doesn't have a following many, many times greater than those who participated in the original Boston Tea Party.
Friday
DON'T START ANOTHER KOREAN WAR
Before the US House of Representatives, November 30, 2010, on the resolution condemning North Korea
Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this saber-rattling resolution that unnecessarily escalates tensions between North and South Korea and may in fact put U.S. troops stationed in the area at risk. This resolution portrays the recent hostilities between the two Koreas as "an unprovoked military attack'' by North Korea, which is untrue. We know that South Korea was conducting live fire military exercises in the vicinity of disputed territory and that this action, taken with U.S. military support and participation, likely led to the exchange of gunfire between the two sides.
As the resolution states, the "USS George Washington Carrier Strike Group is conducting exercises with Republic of Korea naval forces in the waters west of the Korean Peninsula.'' Let us for a moment imagine the Chinese military holding joint exercises with Venezuela off the Texas coast. Might that be viewed as provocative by the United States? This is not to excuse or endorse the actions of the North Korean military, which are certainly regrettable, but it is important to accurately portray the events.
This resolution is long on inaccuracies and hyperbole but it avoids the real issue, which is why, more than fifty years after the end of the Korean war, the American taxpayer is still forced to pay for the U.S. military to defend a modern and wealthy South Korea. The continued presence of the U.S. military as a "tripwire'' to deter North Korea is ineffective and dangerous. It is designed to deter renewed hostilities by placing American lives between the two factions. As we have seen recently, South Korean leaders, emboldened by the U.S. protection, seek to provoke North Korean reaction rather than to work for a way to finally end the conflict. The U.S. presence only serves to prolong the conflict, further drain our empty treasury, and place our military at risk. I encourage my colleagues to reject this jingoistic resolution and instead use our Constitutionally-granted authority to finally end the U.S. military presence in and defense of South Korea.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this saber-rattling resolution that unnecessarily escalates tensions between North and South Korea and may in fact put U.S. troops stationed in the area at risk. This resolution portrays the recent hostilities between the two Koreas as "an unprovoked military attack'' by North Korea, which is untrue. We know that South Korea was conducting live fire military exercises in the vicinity of disputed territory and that this action, taken with U.S. military support and participation, likely led to the exchange of gunfire between the two sides.
As the resolution states, the "USS George Washington Carrier Strike Group is conducting exercises with Republic of Korea naval forces in the waters west of the Korean Peninsula.'' Let us for a moment imagine the Chinese military holding joint exercises with Venezuela off the Texas coast. Might that be viewed as provocative by the United States? This is not to excuse or endorse the actions of the North Korean military, which are certainly regrettable, but it is important to accurately portray the events.
This resolution is long on inaccuracies and hyperbole but it avoids the real issue, which is why, more than fifty years after the end of the Korean war, the American taxpayer is still forced to pay for the U.S. military to defend a modern and wealthy South Korea. The continued presence of the U.S. military as a "tripwire'' to deter North Korea is ineffective and dangerous. It is designed to deter renewed hostilities by placing American lives between the two factions. As we have seen recently, South Korean leaders, emboldened by the U.S. protection, seek to provoke North Korean reaction rather than to work for a way to finally end the conflict. The U.S. presence only serves to prolong the conflict, further drain our empty treasury, and place our military at risk. I encourage my colleagues to reject this jingoistic resolution and instead use our Constitutionally-granted authority to finally end the U.S. military presence in and defense of South Korea.
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