Thoughtfully consider how you can help to restore the Republic, preserve what freedoms we have, and reclaim those we have lost. Thomas Paine once said, "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it." Decide now to DO SOMETHING in the Missouri Campaign for Liberty. Decide now to devote some time each day or week in the cause of freedom. Decide now to be a person of influence in your precinct.
Above you'll find references to important information about the State of Missouri. See Missouri's Congressional District map here. Additional references can be found here.
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Audit the Fed, Then End It!by Congressman Ron Paul. Click here to read the full article.
Calendar
11/10/09 7:00 PM Town Hall with Congressional Candidate Bob Parker
Bob Parker, Candidate for Congress in Missouri's Eighth District, will be holding a town hall meeting in Mountain Grove on Tuesday, November 10th at the YMCA building. The meeting starts at 7:00 pm. Bob Parker, a rancher and realtor from Texas County, will be speaking about the problems with out of control spending, the government takeover of health care, bailouts, and the "Cash for Clunkers" program.
You are invited to come listen and to also voice your concerns. A brief update on the Animal Identification program will also be given.
Ranchers and farmers, including dairy farmers, are encouraged to come. Mr. Parker operated a dairy farm for many years and is very concerned about the conditions that dairy farmers as well as ranchers are facing.
Mr. Parker explains, '' I am very concerned about what is happening to our country. The taxing and spending in Washington is out of control. Who is fighting for our rural areas? Who is fighting for the little guys? It's time to send a Missourian to Washington instead of a Washingtonian to Missouri.''
[Mountain Grove YMCA, (417) 926-6737, is found at 1 YMCA Drive, just off E. 9th Street. From US Highway 60, proceed south on MO-95 (N. Main St.). You will pass the Hillcrest Shopping Center and the Travelodge. Turn left on 9th St. (going east), proceeding several blocks to the YMCA. If you stay on 95 until you reach Business 60, you've gone too far south.]
Update on Audit the Fed - Legislation Stripped of Substance
Washington D.C. November 4, 2009 - Late last week, it was learned that H.R. 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, a bill intended to bring greater transparency to the Federal Reserve, has been stripped of many of its most substantial reforms by House Financial Services Monetary Policy Subcommittee Chairman Congressman Mel Watt of North Carolina.
"This move by Watt is just part of the usual strategy used by politicians to stop people from affecting change," said John Tate, President of Campaign for Liberty. "We're not giving up on this; we are still calling for a standalone vote on the bill as it was originally introduced."
Congressman Ron Paul, who has championed the bill on Capitol Hill, has pledged to introduce an amendment in the full Committee to restore the bill's thorough audit provisions. Many are questioning the move by Watt to remove the critical language from a measure that has garnered overwhelming support in Congress and from the American people. To date, the bill has 306 cosponsors in the House, and 30 in the Senate, with a poll boasting 75% of Americans in favor of a Federal Reserve audit.
There has been speculation that Watt, who serves a district in North Carolina that happens to include the headquarters of Bank of America, is being influenced by the powerful banking lobby. The final legislation could be included in a larger financial regulation package to be offered by House Democrats later in the session.
The sheep are quite capable of looking out for themselves. Someone tell the Democrats.
Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, recently explained the White House war on Fox News as an example of "speaking truth to power." Much of the American political world collapsed in laughter, pointing out that her boss was president of the United States, the most powerful man on earth. His every word is news around the world. Fox News is a cable channel rarely watched by more than a few million people at a time. How could she have so blithely said something completely out-of-sync with reality?
Simple: She's a liberal.
As a liberal she carries around in her head the liberal paradigm of how the world works and what needs to be done to make it work better. There's nothing wrong with that. We all use paradigms to make sense of what we see around us and couldn't get along without them. Unfortunately, the basic liberal paradigm hasn't shifted in a hundred years, while the world we live in has changed utterly since the late 19th century, when modern liberalism was born.
What is that paradigm? The basic premise is that the population is divided into three groups. By far the largest group consists of ordinary people. They are good, God fearing and hard working. But they are also often ignorant of their true self-interest ("What's the matter with Kansas?") and thus easily misled. They are also politically weak and thus need to be protected from the second group, which is politically strong.
The second group, far smaller, are the affluent, successful businessmen, corporate executives and financiers. Capitalists in other words. They are the establishment and it is the establishment that, by definition, runs the country. They are, in the liberal paradigm, smart, ruthless and totally self-interested. They care only about personal gain.
And then there is the third group, those few, those happy few, that band of brothers, the educated and enlightened liberals, who understand what is really going on and want to help the members of the first group to live a better and more satisfying life. Unlike the establishment, which supposedly cares only for itself, liberals supposedly care for society as a whole and have no personal self-interest.
Thus the liberal paradigm divides the American body politic into sheep, wolves, and would-be shepherds. The shepherds must defeat the efforts of the wolves.
This paradigm, while never wholly accurate and, of course, always self-serving (as political philosophies tend to be), had a basis in reality in the late 19th century. Then, industrial capitalism was being born and the rules needed to ensure that it worked for all, not just the capitalists, were only beginning to evolve.
A few lived at an incredible level of affluence, such as can be seen in the summer "cottages" in Newport, R.I., and had disproportionate influence with government. In 1900 one-third of the Senate were millionaires at a time when a million dollars made you very, very rich. But millions of Americans lived in abject poverty, toiling long, dangerous hours as industrial workers or as sharecroppers in the impoverished South. These millions were indeed ignorant and weak.
Even as late as 1937, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his great second inaugural address, could quite accurately note the fact that he could "see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished."
But by that time, liberals had stormed-and taken-the citadel of power. Between 1896 and 1932, the Republicans had been the majority party in this country and the conservatism of that day the ruling doctrine. Then, in 1932, Democrats swept into control of both Congress and the White House. They were now the establishment, as liberalism became the dominant American political philosophy, a status it kept for more than 40 years.
A liberal revolution from the top began as the New Deal created a safety net for American families and reformed the banking and financial systems by greatly enlarging the government and what it regulated. At the end of World War II, college education became far more affordable, thanks to the GI Bill and other measures. The GI Bill also fostered home ownership, which for the first time became the norm among nonfarm families, giving them significant wealth. The sheep were becoming capitalists too.
Between 1947 and the mid-1960s, the civil-rights movement overturned centuries of racial discrimination and greatly narrowed the gap between American claims of liberty and equality and American reality.
By the 1970s, the percentage of Americans living in poverty had been greatly reduced and those still below the poverty line were receiving assistance such as food stamps, housing assistance, and refundable tax credits that lifted most of them above the line. Race was no longer a barrier to accomplishment. The majority of American families now lived at a level of affluence and financial security known only to a few in the early 20th century.
The liberal revolution of the middle third of that century was, in short, one of the greatest-and most peaceful-political triumphs in history. And because of it, most of the sheep are now more than able to look out for themselves, having the means and education to do so. The wolves have been fitted for electric collars that largely keep them from straying into the wrong fold.
Now if only someone would tell the shepherds about their own success.
Ms. Jarrett still sees herself and her political allies as being on the outside, speaking truth to power, even when speaking from the Oval Office. The Congressional Black Caucus still routinely sees a pervasive racism, even though both the president of the United States and the chairman of the Republican National Committee are black. The rich are still looked upon by liberals as enemies of the poor and disadvantaged, even though Mr. Obama not only carried a majority of voters earning less than $50,000 but also a majority of those earning over $200,000. He did, in other words, as well among the wolves as he did among the sheep.
Not only does the liberal paradigm not even come close to agreeing with the social and economic reality on the ground today, worse, it has largely congealed into a political religion, especially in the nearly 30 years since Ronald Reagan shifted the nation's political center of gravity, just as FDR had done 48 years earlier. Since liberals care about the sheep, all who disagree with liberalism must not, making them morally inferior if not downright immoral. Thus the nastiness in American politics is largely on the left. Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, her treatment in the liberal press was ugliness personified.
The conservatives of today bear little resemblance to those of the 1930s that cartoonist Peter Arno immortalized heading down to Manhattan's Trans-Lux theater to hiss newsreels of FDR. They are instead abubble with ideas to reform aspects of American politics and economics that badly need reform, such as the tax and legal systems, and the impending entitlements crisis. They want to utilize the great power of markets to force efficiency, drive down costs, and drive up yields. But liberals refuse to engage those ideas, simply because they are not liberal ideas and must, therefore, be wrong if not the latest plot by the wolves to exploit the sheep.
But in a world where a majority of Americans work at white-collar jobs, have high-school and college degrees, own their own homes, and hold financial securities in their own right, the so-called wolves are now a majority. If liberals don't begin to take that fact into account in formulating policy, the Obama administration will not only be an unsuccessful liberal administration, it may well be the last liberal administration.
Mr. Gordon is the author of "Hamilton's Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt," out in a revised edition by Walker & Co. early next year.
I have been searching for others of like mind. Those of us that have joined this movement have a common thread in that we realize the precarious state of OUR country. We have let this happen because we didn't get involved. Now is the time to stand up and be identified. How about filling out some profile information for starters. Who are we, where do we live, what is our sphere of influence, and most of all what are our ideas. Now is the time to storm the beaches and take OUR country back!!
I would like to extend a personal invitation to everyone here at C4L to come down to the Uptown Theater to watch V for Vendetta on November 5, 2009. Please come down to the Valentine Room along the north side of the Uptown around 6 pm. We should start the movie about 7 pm. I will be in costume so polish up your Guy Fawkes masks if you have them.
The Canadian Government participated in the 2009 bailout of GM. The Canadians spent 2 million tax dollars per union job at GM to 'save' those jobs. Mexico really appreciates the USA and Canada saving GM since many of those jobs are headed to Mexico who spent 0 on bailing out GM.
The US Government spent billions of tax dollars in the so-called stimulus bills to create jobs. Their definition of jobs includes many that are short term construction jobs or seed money jobs that leave local and state governments responsible for long term funding of those jobs. Government created jobs always come at the cost of private sector spending because government must take from taxpayers to give to the chosen group.
Kansas Senator Brownback is touting a new animal research facility coming to Manhattan Kansas. The National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility will deal with highly contagious diseases such as foot-and-mouth. Brownback said entrepreneurs working to turn the lab's discoveries into products for farmers and ranchers will want to set up shop in Kansas, creating jobs. This will be the first time foot and mouth live virus will exist on the North American continent since 1929. USDA plans to bring all these live viruses right to the heart of livestock country. The risk? Foot and Mouth disease is one of the most contagious viruses known. In 2001, an outbreak of the airborne disease in England devastated the livestock industry causing hundreds of thousands of animals to be killed and burned, Buildings were burned and and some farmers committed suicide. The total cost of the catastrophe was estimated at $13 billion dollars. The source of the live virus was a research facility similar to what the USDA is planning to put in Manhattan Kansas. The cause of the outbreak was human error. USDA says it will be safe to put this facility in Kansas. Of course, Kansas is known for Tornadoes. Think of a little girl, a house, a dog named TOTO and now a vial of live virus tumbling through the air. Just last week, former Missouri Senator Jim Talent warned Missourians to be vigilant and prepared for agro-terrorism. Please don't share the location of the new research facility or the truck routes to it with any potential terrorists. Jobs for Kansas! At what risk and cost?
The recession is over! 3rd quarter GDP numbers show that the US economy grew in the 3rd quarter of 2009. So by the dictionary definition, the recession is over. Of course that increase in spending that caused the 3rd quarter increase was fueled by government spending of stimulus dollars and cash for clunkers. All of those stimulus dollars were borrowed money that you the taxpayer are now paying interest on. Meanwhile the unemployment rate is still hovering near 10%. Consumers are being frugal and spending cash while borrowing less. Nearly every economic recovery in history was created by private businesses hiring new workers. The only exception was recession ended by War Time Spending.
The number one creator of jobs in America are small businesses. When a small business creates a job, it is a win / win situation. The worker must create value and profit for the company. The worker benefits with a fair wage and the company benefits with a fair profit.
If Pelosi/Reid/Obama pass their Cap & Trade bill or Health Care Control Bill or if they raise taxes as they have clearly indicated they want to do, then they will squeeze small businesses to the point of not being able to hire more workers and expand. The result: This recession will be back in 2010 with a fury similar to the heat felt in the 1930's. Please call your Congressman and Senators and tell them No Cap & Trade! No Government controlled Health Care! No New Taxes!
"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."
—Thomas Jefferson
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