Archive for the ‘Ron Paul’ Category

by Walt Thiessen
Friday, December 10, 2010
Reuters, among other news sources, is reporting that Congressman Ron Paul of Texas has been named by incoming House Republicans as the next chairman of the Domestic Monetary Policy Subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee. The big bankers and politicians rarely get news this bad, and Ben Bernanke’s life just got miserable.
It’s not known how much incoming House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio was influenced by the likely negative reaction of Paul’s supporters if he had followed his original instincts and tried to block Paul’s nomination to the post. Also, the largest tea parties get a break on the issue, being able to put off for another day the inevitable split that would have occurred in their ranks if they had chosen not to fight for Dr. Paul on this issue. However, the Washington Post did report that a group of about 30 tea party-aligned groups wrote a letter urging Congressman Spencer Bachus of Alabama, who has been chosen to chair the parent House Financial Services Committee, and Boehner to support Paul’s bid for subcommittee chairman. In the letter, the groups warned that the “implied message” of blocking Paul would be “one of indifference towards the concerns of those who helped put the Republican Party back in the majority.” It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of Paul, but it’s better than what we’ve seen before. The Post article didn’t specify which groups signed the letter. My guess is that none of the largest tea party groups were involved.
Today, reactions across press-land are varied. The Financial Post asks bluntly, “Can this man kill the Fed?”, while Politico says simply, “Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) sparked the movement to ‘audit the Fed.’ Now he might get his way.”
So what will Paul’s priorities be once he takes over the subcommittee’s reigns? The Atlantic reports that his top two priorities are to challenge the Fed’s latest round of quantitative easing, but even more importantly to investigate the Fed’s role in fomenting the business cycle, also known as the “boom/bust” cycle. Since Paul already knows, via the teachings of the Austrian School of Economics, that the Fed is responsible for that cycle, this really means that he plans to use his new power to educate the American public about those teachings.
That thought put a smile on my face this morning as I perused the news.
I’m sure we will now see a renewed vigor in support of his Audit The Fed bill, which was swamped and sunk by Barney Frank last year leading up to its watered-down inclusion in the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 signed into law by President Obama in July. Frank’s comments since the latest revelations about who the Fed ended up bailing out as a result of the financial crisis suggest that he may be on board with Dr. Paul on the issue this year much more than last year, and that (in this case) it has nothing to do with a change in which party is in control of the House. I’m confident, though, that Dr. Paul will now not be satisfied with merely auditing the Fed. I expect we’ll see many of his other prized bills get greater attention, including his Free Competition in Currency Act, and with son Rand sitting in the other chamber, things could get very interesting in fractional reserve banking land.
One of the more entertaining things we’ll be watching will be the periodic grilling Ron Paul gives Ben Bernanke when he reports to the subcommittee. That’s always been widely watched in financial circles in the past, but from now on those confrontations should become much more entertaining, now that Paul is less restricted that he was before as a simple subcommittee member.
But more than anything, I hope Paul’s new-found power leads to a greater public awareness of the inherent harm to all of us with continuing to use a monetary system based on debt-based money. I intend to do my part to continue to help educate America in regard to this bane of our existence as human beings on his planet.
Go get ‘em, Dr. Paul!

Why It’s Time for the Tea Party – The populist movement is more a critique of the GOP than a wing of it.

By PEGGY NOONAN
The Wall Street Journal
September 17, 2010
This fact marks our political age: The pendulum is swinging faster and in shorter arcs than it ever has in our lifetimes. Few foresaw the earthquake of 2008 in 2006. No board-certified political professional predicted, on Election Day 2008, what happened in 2009-10 (New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts) and has been happening, and will happen, since then. It all moves so quickly now, it all turns on a dime.
But at this moment we are witnessing a shift that will likely have some enduring political impact. Another way of saying that: The past few years, a lot of people in politics have wondered about the possibility of a third party. Would it be possible to organize one? While they were wondering, a virtual third party was being born. And nobody organized it.
Here is Jonathan Rauch in National Journal on the Tea Party’s innovative, broad-based network: “In the expansive dominion of the Tea Party Patriots, which extends to thousands of local groups and literally countless activists,” there is no chain of command, no hierarchy. Individuals “move the movement.” Popular issues gain traction and are emphasized, unpopular ones die. “In American politics, radical decentralization has never been tried on such a large scale.” Here are pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen in the Washington Examiner: “The Tea Party has become one of the most powerful and extraordinary movements in American political history.” “It is as popular as both the Democratic and Republican parties.” “Over half of the electorate now say they favor the Tea Party movement, around 35 percent say they support the movement, 20 to 25 percent self-identify as members of the movement.”
So far, the Tea Party is not a wing of the GOP but a critique of it. This was demonstrated in spectacular fashion when GOP operatives dismissed Tea Party-backed Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. The Republican establishment is “the reason we even have the Tea Party movement,” shot back columnist and Tea Party enthusiast Andrea Tantaros in the New York Daily News. It was the Bush administration that “ran up deficits” and gave us “open borders” and “Medicare Part D and busted budgets.”
Everyone has an explanation for the Tea Party that is actually not an explanation but a description. They’re “angry.” They’re “antiestablishment,” “populist,” “anti-elite.” All to varying degrees true. But as a network television executive said this week, “They should be fed up. Our institutions have failed.”
I see two central reasons for the Tea Party’s rise. The first is the yardstick, and the second is the clock. First, the yardstick. Imagine that over at the 36-inch end you’ve got pure liberal thinking—more and larger government programs, a bigger government that costs more in the many ways that cost can be calculated. Over at the other end you’ve got conservative thinking—a government that is growing smaller and less demanding and is less expensive. You assume that when the two major parties are negotiating bills in Washington, they sort of lay down the yardstick and begin negotiations at the 18-inch line. Each party pulls in the direction it wants, and the dominant party moves the government a few inches in their direction.
But if you look at the past half century or so you have to think: How come even when Republicans are in charge, even when they’re dominant, government has always gotten larger and more expensive? It’s always grown! It’s as if something inexorable in our political reality—with those who think in liberal terms dominating the establishment, the media, the academy—has always tilted the starting point in negotiations away from 18 inches, and always toward liberalism, toward the 36-inch point.
Democrats on the Hill or in the White House try to pull it up to 30, Republicans try to pull it back to 25. A deal is struck at 28. Washington Republicans call it victory: “Hey, it coulda been 29!” But regular conservative-minded or Republican voters see yet another loss. They could live with 18. They’d like 8. Instead it’s 28.
For conservatives on the ground, it has often felt as if Democrats (and moderate Republicans) were always saying, “We should spend a trillion dollars,” and the Republican Party would respond, “No, too costly. How about $700 billion?” Conservatives on the ground are thinking, “How about nothing? How about we don’t spend more money but finally start cutting.”
What they want is representatives who’ll begin the negotiations at 18 inches and tug the final bill toward 5 inches. And they believe Tea Party candidates will do that.
The second thing is the clock. Here is a great virtue of the Tea Party: They know what time it is. It’s getting late. If we don’t get the size and cost of government in line now, we won’t be able to. We’re teetering on the brink of some vast, dark new world—states and cities on the brink of bankruptcy, the federal government too. The issue isn’t “big spending” anymore. It’s ruinous spending that they fear will end America as we know it, as they promised it to their children.
So there’s a sense that dramatic action is needed, and a sense of profound urgency. Add drama to urgency and you get the victory of a Tea Party-backed candidate.
That is the context. Local Tea Parties seem—so far—not to be falling in love with the particular talents or background of their candidates. It’s more detached than that. They don’t say their candidates will be reflective, skilled in negotiations, a great senator, a Paul Douglas or Pat Moynihan or a sturdy Scoop Jackson. These qualities are not what they think are urgently needed. What they want is someone who will walk in, put her foot on the conservative end of the yardstick, and make everything slip down in that direction.
Nobody knows how all this will play out, but we are seeing something big—something homegrown, broad-based and independent. In part it is a rising up of those who truly believe America is imperiled and truly mean to save her. The dangers, both present and potential, are obvious. A movement like this can help a nation by acting as a corrective, or it can descend into a corrosive populism that celebrates unknowingness as authenticity, that confuses showiness with seriousness and vulgarity with true conviction. Parts could become swept by a desire just to tear down, to destroy. But establishments exist for a reason. It is true that the party establishment is compromised, and by many things, but one of them is experience. They’ve lived through a lot, seen a lot, know the national terrain. They know how things work. They know the history. I wonder if Tea Party members know how fragile are the institutions that help keep the country together.
One difference so far between the Tea Party and the great wave of conservatives that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980 is that latter was a true coalition—not only North and South, East and West but right-wingers, intellectuals who were former leftists, and former Democrats. When they won presidential landslides in 1980, ’84 and ’88, they brought the center with them. That in the end is how you win. Will the center join arms and work with the Tea Party? That’s a great question of 2012.

Monday, 30 Aug 2010 02:36 PM

By: Dan Weil

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, says depression looms for the economy and that failure to extend the Bush tax cuts for everyone would hasten the process.

“It will be devastating if the (tax) breaks aren’t renewed,” the 2008 presidential candidate told Newsmax.TV.

“That represents a tax increase. It’s the unknown hanging over the market,” he said. The Obama administration and many Democrats in Congress want to renew the cuts only for those with income of less than $200,000.

“I don’t understand how they can think that way. (But) when I see what they’ve done with the medical care bill and the financial reform bill, they’re capable of doing that,” Paul said.

ven without expiration of the tax cuts, the economy is headed for depression, he predicts. “That will just make it worse much faster.”

Paul is introducing a bill next year for the nation’s gold reserves to be audited.

“It’s common sense for the country to know what it owns,” he said. The last audit was in the 1970s, and a lot of central banks have sold or loaned gold since then.

“Hopefully someday there will be a gold currency, or they will return gold to the people because it was taken from them in the 1930s at a very low rate,” Paul said.

“We should know what we own. Why should anybody oppose us counting what’s in the bank, in case we make use of it, just because too many questions are raised about what central banks have done in the last 10 to 15 years?”

Paul dismisses contentions that there’s no gold at Fort Knox or in the Federal Reserve.

“The bigger question is what have been our commitments or loans,” Paul said. “That’s why I want an audit of the Fed and to check all the agreements they have with foreign central banks and governments.”

And that’s the main reason the Fed successfully opposed his proposal this year for an audit of the central bank, Paul says. “They didn’t want us —as a people or Congress — to know what deals they made with other central banks.”

Transparency is the main issue for the Fed, says Paul.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ronald Ernest “Ron” Paul (born August 20, 1935) is an American physician and Republican Congressman for the 14th congressional district of Texas. Paul is a member of the Liberty Caucus of Republican congressmen which aims to limit the size and scope of the federal government,[2] and serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Joint Economic Committee, and the Committee on Financial Services, where he has been an outspoken critic of American foreign and monetary policy. He has gained notoriety for his right-libertarian positions on many political issues, often clashing with both Republican and Democratic Party leaders. Paul has run for President of the United States twice, first in 1988 as the nominee of the Libertarian Party and again in 2008 as a candidate for the Republican nomination.
He is the founder of the advocacy group Campaign for Liberty and his ideas have been expressed in numerous published articles and books, including End The Fed (2009), and The Revolution: A Manifesto (2008).
By one measure, Paul has the most conservative voting record of any member of Congress since 1937.
Paul proposed term-limit legislation multiple times, at first in the 1970s in the House where he also declined to attend junkets or register for a Congressional pension while serving four terms. His chief of staff (1978–1982) was Lew Rockwell. In 1980, when a majority of Republicans favored President Jimmy Carter’s proposal to reinstate draft registration, Paul argued that their views were inconsistent, stating they were more interested in registering their children than they were their guns. He also proposed legislation to decrease Congressional pay by the rate of inflation; he was a regular participant in the annual Congressional Baseball Game; and he continued to deliver babies on Mondays and Saturdays during his entire 22nd district career.
During his first term, Paul founded a think tank, the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education (FREE). Also in 1976, the foundation began publication of the first monthly newsletter connected with Paul, Dr. Ron Paul’s Freedom Report (or Special Report). It also publishes monographs, books, radio spots, and (since 1997) a new series of the monthly newsletter, Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, which promote the principles of limited government.
On the House Banking Committee, Paul blamed the Federal Reserve for inflation, and spoke against the banking mismanagement that led to the savings and loan crisis. The U.S. Gold Commission created by Congress in 1982 was his and Jesse Helms’s idea, and Paul’s commission minority report was published by the Cato Institute in The Case for Gold; it is now available from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, to which Paul is a distinguished counselor.
In 1984, Paul chose to run for the U.S. Senate instead of re-election to the House, but lost the Republican primary to Phil Gramm. He returned to full-time medical practice and was succeeded by former state representative Tom DeLay. In his House farewell address, Paul said, “Special interests have replaced the concern that the Founders had for general welfare. Vote trading is seen as good politics. The errand-boy mentality is ordinary, the defender of liberty is seen as bizarre. It’s difficult for one who loves true liberty and utterly detests the power of the state to come to Washington for a period of time and not leave a true cynic.”
In 2009, Paul was featured by CBS on Up to the Minute as one of two members of the U.S. Congress that have pledged not to receive pension from the United States government. The other is Howard Coble of North Carolina.
Paul authors more bills than the average representative, such as those that impose term limits, or abolish the income tax or the Federal Reserve; many do not escape committee review. He has written successful legislation to prevent eminent domain seizure of a church in New York, and a bill transferring ownership of the Lake Texana dam project from the federal government to Texas. By amending other legislation, he has barred funding for national identification numbers, funding for federal teacher certification, International Criminal Court jurisdiction over the U.S. military, American participation in any U.N. global tax, and surveillance on peaceful First Amendment activities by citizens.
In March 2001, Paul introduced a bill to repeal the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR) and reinstate the process of formal declaration of war by Congress. Later in 2001, Paul voted to authorize the president, pursuant to WPR, to respond to those responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks. He also introduced Sunlight Rule legislation, which requires lawmakers to take enough time to read bills before voting on them, after the Patriot Act was passed within 24 hours of its introduction. Paul was one of six Republicans to vote against the Iraq War Resolution, and (with Oregon representative Peter DeFazio) sponsored a resolution to repeal the war authorization in February 2003. Paul’s speech, 35 “Questions That Won’t Be Asked About Iraq”, was translated and published in German, French, Russian, Italian, and Swiss periodicals before the Iraq War began.
Paul says his fellow members of Congress have increased government spending by 75 percent during George W. Bush’s administration. After a 2005 bill was touted as “slashing” government waste, Paul wrote that it decreased spending by a fraction of one percent and that “Congress couldn’t slash spending if the members’ lives depended on it.” He said that in three years he had voted against more than 700 bills intended to expand government.
Paul has introduced several bills to apply tax credits toward education, including credits for parental spending on public, private, or homeschool students (Family Education Freedom Act); for salaries for all K–12 teachers, librarians, counselors, and other school personnel; and for donations to scholarships or to benefit academics (Education Improvement Tax Cut Act). In accord with his political positions, he has also introduced the Sanctity of Life Act, the We the People Act, and the American Freedom Agenda Act.
Affiliations
Paul serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee (having been on the Western Hemisphere and the Asia and Pacific subcommittees); the Joint Economic Committee; and the Committee on Financial Services (as Ranking Member of the Domestic and International Monetary Policy,
Trade and Technology subcommittee, and Vice-Chair of the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee).
Paul was honorary chair of, and is a current member of, the Republican Liberty Caucus, a political action committee which describes its goal as electing “liberty-minded, limited-government individuals. Paul also hosts a luncheon every Thursday as chair of the Liberty Caucus, composed of 20 members of Congress. Washington DC area radio personality Johnny “Cakes” Auville gave Paul the idea for the Liberty Caucus and is a regular contributing member He is a founding member of the Congressional Rural Caucus, which deals with agricultural and rural issues, and the 140-member Congressional Wildlife Refuge Caucus. He remains on good terms with the Libertarian Party and addressed its 2004 convention. He also was endorsed by the Constitution Party’s 2004 presidential candidate, Michael Peroutka.
Paul was on a bipartisan coalition of 17 members of Congress that sued President Bill Clinton in 1999 over his conduct of the Kosovo war. They accused Clinton of failing to inform Congress of the action’s status within 48 hours as required by the War Powers Resolution, and of failing to obtain Congressional declaration of war. Congress had voted 427–2 against a declaration of war with Yugoslavia, and had voted to deny support for the air campaign in Kosovo. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that since Congress had voted for funding after Clinton had actively engaged troops in the war with Kosovo, legislators had sent a confusing message about whether they approved of the war. Paul said that the judge’s decision attempted to circumvent the Constitution and to authorize the president to conduct a war without approval from Congress.
History
The bill was authored by Ron Paul to effect U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations. It would repeal various laws pertaining to the U.N., terminate authorization for funds to be spent on the U.N., terminate U.N. presence on U.S. property, and withdraw diplomatic immunity for U.N. employees. It would provide up to two years for the U.S. to withdraw. The Yale Law Journal cited the Act as proof that “the United States’s complaints against the United Nations have intensified.”
In a letter to Majority Leader Tom DeLay of April 16, 2003, and in a speech to Congress on April 29, Paul requested the repeatedly-bottlenecked issue be voted on, because “Americans deserve to know how their representatives stand on the critical issue of American sovereignty.” Though he did not foresee passage in the near future, Paul believed a vote would be good for “those who don’t want to get out of the United Nations but want to tone down” support; cosponsor Roscoe Bartlett’s spokeswoman similarly said Bartlett “would welcome any action that would begin the debate”.
It had 54 supporters in the House in its first year. It was referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and was never released for a vote.
Discussion
National Review cited the ASRA as an example of grassroots effort “to educate the American people about the efforts of foreign tyrants to disarm them”. Supporters approved of its intent to end financial ties to the UN, its peace-keeping missions, and its building in New York City. A report by Herbert W. Titus, Senior Legal Advisor of the Liberty Committee, concluded that “the American Sovereignty Restoration Act is the only viable solution to the continued abuses of the United Nations.”
On its front page, the Victoria, Texas, Advocate, a newspaper in Paul’s district, expressed pride for the Act in the face of what it called several undeclared “United Nations wars”.
Henry Lamb considers it “the only way to be sure that the U.S. will win the showdown at the U.N. Corral”, considering that without withdrawal, U.N. claims of diplomatic immunity and Congressional subpoena power threaten each other, as in the oil-for-food scandal.
Critics say it “undoubtedly paints a bull’s-eye across the entire country”. Tim Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation, finds the bill contrary to United States interests: “This piece of legislation has been brought by Ron Paul every year over the last 20 [sic] years and it never goes anywhere.”
A policy review of U.S.–Canada relations describes the Act as reflecting “extreme views,” but indicative of a majority pro-sovereignty view in Congress, expressed in tighter border and immigration policy, unilateralism in foreign policy, and increased national security focus.
Related activity
Similar U.S. legislation includes Ron Paul’s proposal to end U.S. contributions to the United Nations and affiliated agencies, which had Republican support but failed as an appropriations amendment by a vote of 74; and Roscoe Bartlett’s proposal to cut a $100 million payment to the U.N., based on General Accounting Office claims that the U.S. has overpaid by $3.5 billion (the UN claimed that it was owed $1.3 billion).
The 2002 Republican Party of Texas platform explicitly urged passage of the ASRA; withdrawal from the U.N. had been on the platform at least since 1998.
Both houses of the Arizona legislature introduced legislation petitioning Congress to pass the ASRA (HCM 2009 in 2004, SCM 1002 in 2006); in 2007 similar legislation passed the Arizona Senate (SCM 1002 in 2007), but with the focus changed from the ASRA to Virgil Goode’s Congressional resolution not to engage in a NAFTA Superhighway or a North American Union (H.Con.Res. 487, now H.Con.Res. 40).