The truth is non-partisan

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT (Brigade Combat Team) will
be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service
component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force
for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist
attacks.

According to US Army Times, helping 'people at home' may become a
permanent role for the active Army.

Although units were called up during Hurricane Katrina, this will be
the first time an active-duty army unit will serve full time in the
United States.

Based at Ft. Stewart, Georgia, the brigade is training for a variety
of Homeland Security tasks. "They may be called upon to help with
civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific
scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a
chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive,
or CBRNE," states the US Army Times.

This action contravenes the 'Posse Comitatus Act' (PCA), but is
allowed by a 2006 Act which lets the President use the military in
major public emergencies.

"The 'Posse Comitatus Act' (PCA), Title 18 of the U.S. Code (USC),
Section 1385, states:

"'Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly
authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any
part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to
execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not
more than two years, or both."

Sourcewatch describes the potential abuses of the Act which has made
the permanent posting of active-duty soldiers possible.

The John W. Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2006 (PL 109-364),
"named for the longtime Armed Services Committee chairman from
Virginia," was signed October 17, 2006, by President George W. Bush.
The Act "has a provocative provision called 'Use of the Armed Forces
in Major Public Emergencies'," the thrust of which "seems to be about
giving the federal government a far stronger hand in coordinating
responses to [Hurricane] Katrina-like disasters," Jeff Stein, CQ
National Security Editor wrote December 1, 2006.

"But on closer inspection, its language also alters the
two-centuries-old Insurrection Act, which Congress passed in 1807 to
limit the president's power to deploy troops within the United States
... 'to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence,
unlawful combination, or conspiracy'," Stein wrote.

"But the amended law takes the cuffs off" and "critics say it's a
formula for executive branch mischief," Stein wrote, as "the new
language adds 'natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public
health emergency, terrorist attack or incident' to the list of
conditions permitting the President to take over local authority -
particularly 'if domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that
the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable
of maintaining public order.'"

"One of the few to complain, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., warned that
the measure virtually invites the White House to declare federal
martial law. ... It 'subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus
statutes that limit the military's involvement in law enforcement,
thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law,' he
said in remarks submitted to the Congressional Record on Sept. 29,
2006."

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Establishing_martial_law_in_the_United_States
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Posse_Comitatus_Act
http://public.cq.com/public/20061201_homeland.html

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted
has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created
credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being
proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No
liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing
more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions
in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment
- and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of
houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial
crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line,
since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not
just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration "is working with
Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in
our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and
its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but
we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a
deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low
interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in
malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of
current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote
stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand
can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest
rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with
by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then
discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great
debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat
capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said:
"Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed
they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to
borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable
investments, and put our financial system at risk."

Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in
the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe,
government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by
bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown
that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal
government" were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to
the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which
would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your
home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout
and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to
fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway,
because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As
for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and
demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the
Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on
for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to
occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy
recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join
him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the
bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country
much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the
bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention
these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks'
manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which
we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression,
he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which
are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments
brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable
means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place;
and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without
success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression,
has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to
cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are
suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further
misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe
crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is
probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent
liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional
severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not
learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that
the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly
cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the
ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just
how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have
to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue
plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American
people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern
for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most
insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people
overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think
you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy
them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a
piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the
correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate
yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an
excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment
section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education
and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide
as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we
have.

In liberty,

Ron Paul

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Dear Friends,

Whenever a Great Bipartisan Consensus is announced, and a compliant
media assures everyone that the wondrous actions of our wise leaders
are being taken for our own good, you can know with absolute certainty
that disaster is about to strike.

The events of the past week are no exception.

The bailout package that is about to be rammed down Congress' throat
is not just economically foolish. It is downright sinister. It makes
a mockery of our Constitution, which our leaders should never again
bother pretending is still in effect. It promises the American people
a never-ending nightmare of ever-greater debt liabilities they will
have to shoulder. Two weeks ago, financial analyst Jim Rogers said
the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made America more communist
than China! "This is welfare for the rich," he said. "This is
socialism for the rich. It's bailing out the financiers, the banks,
the Wall Streeters."

That describes the current bailout package to a T. And we're being
told it's unavoidable.

The claim that the market caused all this is so staggeringly foolish
that only politicians and the media could pretend to believe it. But
that has become the conventional wisdom, with the desired result that
those responsible for the credit bubble and its predictable
consequences - predictable, that is, to those who understand sound,
Austrian economics - are being let off the hook. The Federal Reserve
System is actually positioning itself as the savior, rather than the
culprit, in this mess!

• The Treasury Secretary is authorized to purchase up to $700
billion in mortgage-related assets at any one time. That means $700
billion is only the very beginning of what will hit us.

• Financial institutions are "designated as financial agents of the
Government." This is the New Deal to end all New Deals.

• Then there's this: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the
authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency
discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any
administrative agency." Translation: the Secretary can buy up
whatever junk debt he wants to, burden the American people with it,
and be subject to no one in the process.

There goes your country.

Even some so-called free-market economists are calling all this "sadly
necessary." Sad, yes. Necessary? Don't make me laugh.

Our one-party system is complicit in yet another crime against the
American people. The two major party candidates for president
themselves initially indicated their strong support for bailouts of
this kind - another example of the big choice we're supposedly
presented with this November: yes or yes. Now, with a backlash
brewing, they're not quite sure what their views are. A sad display,
really.

Although the present bailout package is almost certainly not the end
of the political atrocities we'll witness in connection with the
crisis, time is short. Congress may vote as soon as tomorrow. With a
Rasmussen poll finding support for the bailout at an anemic seven
percent, some members of Congress are afraid to vote for it. Call
them! Let them hear from you! Tell them you will never vote for
anyone who supports this atrocity.

The issue boils down to this: do we care about freedom? Do we care
about responsibility and accountability? Do we care that our
government and media have been bought and paid for? Do we care that
average Americans are about to be looted in order to subsidize the
fattest of cats on Wall Street and in government? Do we care?

When the chips are down, will we stand up and fight, even if it means
standing up against every stripe of fashionable opinion in politics
and the media?

Times like these have a way of telling us what kind of a people we
are, and what kind of country we shall be.

In liberty,

Ron Paul

________________________________

Political Advertisement paid for by Committee to Re-Elect Ron Paul

________________________________

We Agree
September 10th, 2008 by Don Rasmussen

The Republican/Democrat duopoly has, for far too long, ignored the
most important issues facing our nation. However, alternate
candidates Chuck Baldwin, Cynthia McKinney, and Ralph Nader agree with
Ron Paul on four key principles central to the health of our nation.
These principles should be key in the considerations of every voter
this November and in every election.

We Agree

Foreign Policy: The Iraq War must end as quickly as possible with
removal of all our soldiers from the region. We must initiate the
return of our soldiers from around the world, including Korea, Japan,
Europe and the entire Middle East. We must cease the war propaganda,
threats of a blockade and plans for attacks on Iran, nor should we
re-ignite the cold war with Russia over Georgia. We must be willing to
talk to all countries and offer friendship and trade and travel to all
who are willing. We must take off the table the threat of a nuclear
first strike against all nations.

Privacy: We must protect the privacy and civil liberties of all
persons under US jurisdiction. We must repeal or radically change the
Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the FISA legislation.
We must reject the notion and practice of torture, eliminations of
habeas corpus, secret tribunals, and secret prisons. We must deny
immunity for corporations that spy willingly on the people for the
benefit of the government. We must reject the unitary presidency, the
illegal use of signing statements and excessive use of executive
orders.

The National Debt: We believe that there should be no increase in the
national debt. The burden of debt placed on the next generation is
unjust and already threatening our economy and the value of our
dollar. We must pay our bills as we go along and not unfairly place
this burden on a future generation.

The Federal Reserve: We seek a thorough investigation, evaluation and
audit of the Federal Reserve System and its cozy relationships with
the banking, corporate, and other financial institutions. The
arbitrary power to create money and credit out of thin air behind
closed doors for the benefit of commercial interests must be ended.
There should be no taxpayer bailouts of corporations and no corporate
subsidies. Corporations should be aggressively prosecuted for their
crimes and frauds.

Look at Ron Paul and Ralph Nader interview at
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/