Ron Paul: NOW is the time to UNITE and say NO BAILOUTS
|
|
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/blog/?p=583
Type of Content: Article From the Campaign for Liberty: Now is the Time to Unite and Say with ONE Voice… …NO to the bailout and NO to any congressman or senator who votes in favor of this disastrous piece of legislation that will redistribute hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars out of the hands of honest Americans and grant the federal government massive new powers to control and manipulate markets. A Rasmussen Poll out today puts the support for the bailout at 7%! For any legislator to vote yes on this plan is to spit in the face of his constituents and reveal his utter contempt for the democratic process and the voice of the people. To do so would require them to utterly disavow the Constitution that they swore by oath to uphold. It can be tolerated no more. Contact your representatives and let them know that support of this plan constitutes a betrayal of the public trust and grounds for their removal from office. We will publicize the names of all those that vote yes so everyone will know who has been bought and paid for and no longer deserves to wear the mantle of “the people’s voice in Washington.” Go here to get your representatives contact info. Go here and here to download the Campaign for Liberty action fliers on this issue. We will be adding additional tools and action items soon. Read »
Created 15 weeks 1 day ago
Made popular 15 weeks 1 day ago |
- Flag as offensive
- Login or register to post comments
- 251 reads
****
Dear Congressman,
There are people in this world who can advise on how to solve the current financial problem without taking the communist steps proposed by Hank Paulson. Please do not cave into the elitist and socialist plot being shoved down your throat by central planners. Our Founding Fathers understood the importance of a free and sound monetary system to insuring freedom of the citizens from an elite and corrupt class of men. Allowing banks to collapse is the only way to insure integrity and regulation to the system. The Federal Reserve act was a power grab that has been used to strengthen one group of people at the expense of others to the point that they now think that they are so privileged that they should never be allowed to have to experience the consequences of their actions and that the true wealth producing citizen should have to pay to bail them out. More centralized authority is not the solution but instead is a burden this country will have to carry for many years. Please fight for more state independence and a competitive system that takes away the authority given by the Federal Reserve act. If the FED can stand in the face of true competition then that’s fine but neither it nor the system that Hank Paulson is proposing should have any type of government approved monopoly or immunity. Fight against centralization for it is the culprit in this disaster. A freer and more competitive system will bless future generation and make this the prosperous and free nation it was meant to be.
I wrote this email to some associates this morning:
There should be some on the government side going to prison as well but that will never happen. If a doctor operated his business like some of these financial elitist operated their business he’d be in jail from day one, not getting assistance from the American tax payer. The financial practitioners and bankers manipulate the system so that risk is not factored in properly which acts as a trap for hard working people and artificially drives up asset prices so that they pay too much for real assets and then they create a mass of worthless CDOs to top it off. Then think that the citizens of the world should bail them out so that they can keep their nice cars and big houses on the Riviera. These arrogant and self centered people have turned a normal economic housing cycle into a world disaster and don’t think they should have to take the blame. They proudly display their diplomas and certificates when trying to get your business but don’t want to be judged as proper experts when the hammer falls. I don’t see the government running around bailing out electricians who burn down peoples houses with faulty wiring; if they did we would have a lot more houses burning down. As Alan Greenspan openly admits, the government in bed with global financial institutions and with the help of entities like GSEs and bailouts like LTCM has altered the true risk reward structure of lending and this was reflected by lower lending rates. Further more, the moral hazard created by the government’s promise to use tax payers savings to bailout the financial elitist (who now say ‘let them eat cake’ to the borrowers) created a condition that allowed the greedy to move into the realm of creating non liquid and non transparent financial instruments that basically leveraged this ‘tax payer put’ to fill their pockets. The people who operate like this do not carry one ounce of concern for their customer or for their profession they just want to put more in their bank accounts by whatever scheme honest or dishonest that they can come up with and then insure it at the cost of some hardworking Joe who sees his life’s savings disappear through inflation created in saving the ‘economy’ (saving the rich bankers and their cohorts from loosing their homes). I bet not one in ten of the people in the global financial industry could tell me anything meaningful about John Law (Jean Lass), the French Revolution or why the French quit using the term bank. There are basic economic and financial theories and anyone who calls themselves a professional in the field of finance should be held fully accountable in a court of law for practicing their profession in accordance with these principles. Professionals in all fields take a responsibility to know their trade not just to know how to milk the customer. I’m not saying that everyone in the financial world is bad, in fact many have been warning about these problems for years and many just don’t understand their profession to begin with but for the ones who produced, what Warren Buffett called, the financial sewage mess there should be no reprieve.
Clearly, there is no graceful way out of our present situation. We may opt to follow the course of government intervention or we may opt to allow the natural system of checks and balances to run their courses.
If we choose to support intervention we do not pretend to solve the underlying problems; we merely defer the inevitable results to a later time. Unfortunately, as in any investment, we not only reap the undesired results in the end, we are penalized with the compounded interest of those faulty, deferred results.
Are we not better served in the end by enduring the pain and suffering in our own time? We contributed to and participated with this problem during our lives. Wisely or not, we danced to the fiddle of "own today and pay tomorrow."
Search your hearts and conscious - is this truly a legacy we wish to pass to our children? Our grand children? Or is it finally the moment when we accept total responsibility for, not only what we have done, but for everything that we have allowed to perpetuate?
I say we draw the line in the sand! And, whatever comes to pass as a result, we will meet energetically, with all the combined abilities that we have to contribute as a people.
I agree that the $700 billion plan is not at all what any of us wanted. If the problems are as bad as they seemed to be last week, are there any better alternatives? I hope there are. What is the solution? For those who are content to let the banks fail, I hope you understand what this could mean. No more car loans. No more credit card purchases. Your home equity lines will go away. Your job, whether at a financial company or not, will be at much greater risk. Are you prepared for this?
This has been called a Wall Street bailout, but I don't think it is that simple. Wall Street is not getting bailed out. A lot of jobs and wealth and entire companies on Wall Street have been destroyed. There are no more investment banks. Even if Paulson's plan is passed, the banks will still realize massive losses on the bad mortgage instruments. It is also possible that Paulson's plan will actually make money for taxpayers (although knowing government, any money made will probably be spend on something else).
In no way do I want to see this happen. However, I don't know what a good alternative is, other than letting things go without intervention. I am for free markets, and I believe that we would not have gotten to this place if the markets were truly and fully free (Fannie/Freddie, Community Reinvestment Act, Federal Reserve, etc.)
In my opinion, letting the banks fail now and returning to a pure free market system would be the best alternative. I would rather deal with a terrible depression right now than to doom my children to an even worse one in the future. But I am still relatively young, and, I think, fairly resourceful. I could deal with being poor. I think many people would be much worse off. Many people would die prematurely as a result of that kind of economic catastrophe. Then again, if we proceed with the bailout, that could be my kids dying of poverty one day.
What worries me is that the government is succeeding in making people increasingly reliant on the state. In some ways it is now becoming illegal to rely on yourself. I had always assumed that if worse came to worse and I lost my job I could homeschool my kids rather than send them to a public school to be indoctrinated. But now I hear that it is no longer legal to teach your own children in the state of California...
But I doubt a lot of people have done so. Anyone on the brink will be pushed over the edge. I am prepared, but I feel pretty bad for those who are not.
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
www.montanaforsharbono.com
http://montanacampaignforliberty.wordpress.com/
For the last few days I have been in shock. I can't believe this is happening to us. I had trusted that there was still some power in our constitution that would prevent the government from doing something so idiotic. How can Congress hand over so much power to the Treasury Secretary? It's impossible...
Ultimately, Paulson will not be making the big decisions. They will bring in experts from the bond market to run this plan. Paulson is looking for approval for this plan, but market experts will run it using free market processes and be charged with keeping taxpayers' impact to a minimum. Some of the smartest folks in the business (Bill Gross, Larry Fink) are convinced that taxpayers will actually benefit from this! People think this is a $700 billion expenditure, when it is possible that the government (and hopefully taxpayers by extension) will recoup all or more of the $700 billion.
I hate that this has happened, but I also think that a lot of people think it is worse than it actually is. I don't think this is a Wall Street bailout at all. When all is said and done, the taxpayers may be the ultimate beneficiaries of this. Time will tell. But Wall Street has been negatively changed forever. A year ago there were 5 big investment banks in the U.S. Since then, one went bankrupt, one was bought at near-bankruptcy prices, one was bought/rescued before it could face bankruptcy, and the last two converted to commercial banks in an effort to stay alive. The investment bank model is no more.
i've lived through a full blown socialist regime and i know what that's like, but it's really interesting for me to watch socialism take root, it's an interesting experience. i used to wonder sometimes how the government was able to take over industries, now i've become a real life spectator to this travesty.
also, a little bit about your criticism of the government:
"I had trusted that there was still some power in our constitution that would prevent the government from doing something so idiotic. "
i am quite sure that these moves are anything but idiotic. they are calculated steps towards a planned outcome.
Click the link to the story to get your representative's contact information and the flyers to distribute. We all need to act NOW!