We will be meeting up the next 2 Saturdays around 10AM to petition, and volunteers are needed!
If you can help out, please contact either David Posipanka at dposipanka_at_verizon.net or David Powell at depst8_at_gmail.com (replace the _at_ with @). We can arrange transportation, etc.
Thanks, and we hope to hear from you!
DaveP
Chairman, LP-PGH
Do we here in the U.S. need to worry about hyperinflation?
There is a big debate on economics blogs about whether the U.S. is experiencing inflation or deflation. Perhaps it is some hybrid of both. Credit card and mortgage defaults should be deflationary, the money that is lost in foreclosure instead of being profit just goes poof (currently at ~$500 billion).
But prices are going up, everyone can see that. However, this is mostly due to the weakness of the dollar in buying all of these globalized goods, as the Fed is not actually printing more Federal Reserve Notes (dollars). What they are doing is loaning out their Treasury bonds (about half of what they hold so far) for toxic mortgage backed securites so the banks can stay in business. They are staying in business by buying the only thing making money right now, which is commodities, exacerbating the price rise.
Some have said that this is a de facto partial nationalization of the banks, because the Fed as lender cannot recall it’s loans when it wants, but instead has to wait for when the banks feel that they can pay the loans back. When you give $$$ to a business and can’t get it back until there is profit looks a lot like buying a stake in a business, no? We will see if the banks become ‘zombified’ ala Japan.
So, the U.S. faces a $52 (projected by GAO as of Nov ‘07 / [See .pdf Presentation Here] trillion deficit due to Medicare and Social Security in the next 30-40 years. The nation’s current household total net worth is $58 trillion, which means a burden to net worth ration of ~90%. How many times would our money supply have to double to print our way out of that, as we certainly shouldn’t just tax everything at 100%! (though I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried)
This San Jose University faculty website offers a fairly simple explanation of how a doubling of money supply leads to price increases of not only double, but 6 times previous prices.
Soooo, let’s see here, $4/gal gas *6 = $24/gal gas. Great.
If/When Helicopter Ben fires up the printing presses, watch out!
Dave Powell
Chairman, LP-PGH
P.S. There is an interesting list of Hyperinflation events here going from Roman times to interestingly, CIA induced inflation in the Kurdish areas of Iraq ( http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/CIAinfl.htm ) Here’s government ‘logic’ for you, and a great example of how our meddling foreign policy screws things up for other people and pisses them off: the US government wanted to buy off cooperation of the Kurdish leadership with a million dollars. So what does it do? Sends in a CIA spook with 44 pounds worth of hundred dollar bills, problem (for the govt anyway) solved. However, since nobody in the Kurdish zone had any $10’s or $5’s, the price of everything rose to $100, even a cup of coffee.
What a classic example this video is of abuse of power, cowardice, and the nature of politics and politicians.
Let’s face it: It is human nature to try to live as comfortably as life will allow. This is the human condition, and civil and government service folks are as human as anybody. Yet for some reason - irrational idealism, we’ll call it — the average person can’t seem to comprehend that the same fallibility they see day to day in the average person translates directly to government. As the video above points out, politicians are as susceptible as any, if not more, to abuse of power and corruption — the E.U. being no different than any Congress or State Assembly in the United States.
Worse yet, most observers fail to understand that government has a tendency to attract people who are more inclined to abuse power than others. Why do we make such a bold assertion? Consider the methods those who love government power use vs. those who do not.
In the free market (and let’s, please, not confuse the free market with the current capitalist plutocracy that runs our governments these days in the United States, as they are entirely different things…) an entrepreneur must compete with others to earn the consumers trust and dollars. Those with the best ideas, products, and values end up with the most satisfied customers, and consequently the most wealth as a reward. Those who abuse their consumer, overcharge, or provide a lousy product will intimately find bankruptcy. At least that is the way it works in a truly free market without government handing out favors to this industry and business, or that.
With the Fourth of July fervor fast approaching, we thought a little sobriety is necessary. Please be careful for what it is you are waving that flag whose origins are in liberty, not global intervention and the at home police state such folly requires.
“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”
“Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood.
But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” [citation]
– Herman Goering, Commander German Airforce (Luftwaffe), Senior Nazi Party member, and Second in Command in the German Third Reich, behind Adolf Hitler.
This should make you think. Your comments are welcome!
Extraordinary Power and Privacy Grab. That’s exactly what the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) is. FISA empowers the government to spy on U.S. citizens communications — their emails, phone calls, etc. As Libertarian Presidential Candidate, Bob Barr, notes in the video above, the only requirement some bureaucrat needs to tap into your communications — phone, email or otherwise — and record them for posterity is that the other party is located abroad. That person does not need to be a suspected terrorist, or a member of Al Queda, or even engaged in committing a crime! — nothing! The other party just needs to be at a foreign location. Moreover, private telecommunication companies were previously doing this illegally, and FISA will simply grandfather their prior crimes — clear violations of law — magically turning them illegal.
No doubt U.S. citizens have been willing to allow for lost liberty and privacy in this so called War Against Terror. What many don’t realize is that many of the losses of liberty they thought would be used against terrorists are, instead, used by the Big Government to fish around on completely unrelated situations.
This is just as advocates of liberty and freedom like the LP argued would happen with the Patriot Acts I and II. Instead of being used exclusively for terrorists wanting to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil — the whole reason we needed to suspend constitutional provisions of individual privacy and the requirement for a judge to approve the constitutionality / need of a wire tap and surveillance — communication data that is mined indiscriminately using government hired super computers is sifted through at the convenience of whomever is surfing for evidence of something. Such ill-gotten evidence is being used to charge defendants in crimes completely unrelated to terrorism, and is functionally no different than having authorities entering one’s home to see what can be found as evidence. Worse yet, with the added structure of FISA, the government covers-up its own evidence gathering methods, preventing the public from ever knowing it is being spied on.
In these advanced stages of global interventionist U.S. policy, where the U.S. administrations and many in Congress — and many of the voters — demand that whatever the U.S. wants all over the world, the U.S. should get — U.S. citizens are paying both with a badly inflated currency and dramatically decreasing freedoms. This author is reminded of George Carlin’s quirky observation:
“If crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?”
If that’s too pop-culture for you, we can just provide for you an original patriot from the era of the Declaration of Independence and an actual founding father, Samuel Johnson:
Not a big fan of the freedom and privacy grabbing FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) that is cruising through Congress? [Learn more about FISAs Orwellian features by clicking this text.] Here is a draft letter you can send to your Senators (please pass it around!):
Dear Senator:
I do not support the rewriting of the FISA bill. Exaggerated statements about mushroom clouds aside, the administration has failed to show how the current FISA statutes do not allow sufficient intelligence gathering. Current FISA law allows wiretapping to begin before judicial
approval is granted, contrary to the administration’s characterization. Oversight of the Executive Branch is one of the core functions of the Judicial branch, and the credible threat of being made to answer for one’s actions is one of the big differences between our style of
government and, say, Saddam Hussein’s style.
The worst part of the bill is the retroactive immunity granted to the telecomm companies, whose counsel MUST have known that the administration’s requests were illegal (this is why Qwest refused). Granting this immunity will prevent any information about possible crimes committed by the administration from coming to light, all other avenues have been closed off by classifying everything in sight.
Equal protection under the law is a cornerstone of our society. The rewritten FISA bill will make some more equal than others.
I support Senator Feingold’s and Senator Dodd’s filibuster of this legislation, and vow to vote against any who support it.
The story of Owen Beck, his bone cancer, and medical professionals recommendations, and state and local government acceptance — all butting heads with federal government busy bodies, as told by Drew Carey. The video discusses the medicinal value of marijuana by doctors, and the Federal Government’s incarceration (with the use armed agents) of a very sick minor who was suffering from the effects of chemo.
Really, readers: We required a constitutional amendment to make alcohol prohibition illegal. Why not cannabis? And what of local laws — the very people who are affected — allowing for legal medicinal use, yet the Federal Authorities step in and disregard all? In federal trials, the jury will never hear that locally it is all perfectly legal! People will go to jail. Their families ruined. And for what?
If this strikes you as unjust, only the Libertarian Party has this issue on its platform!
