Democrat, Republican, Independent, Libertarian Understand This.

Written by admin on June 12, 2010 – 5:20 pm -

An open letter from a woman in Arizona to our nation’s leadership: I have read this letter many times, and nothing I could add would or could say any more.

Please read this letter carefully and feel the depth of passion the lady feels and so eloquently expresses.

I’m a home grown American citizen, 53, registered Democrat all my life. Before the last presidential election I registered as a Republican because I no longer felt the Democratic Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. Now I no longer feel the Republican Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. The fact is I no longer feel any political party or representative in Washington represents my views or works to pursue the issues important to me. There must be someone. Please tell me who you are. Please stand up and tell me that you are there and that you’re willing to fight for our Constitution as it was written. Please stand up now. You might ask yourself what my views and issues are that I would horribly feel so disenfranchised by both major political parties. What kind of nut job am I? Will you please tell me?

Well, these are briefly my views and issues for which I seek representation:

One, illegal immigration. I want you to stop coddling illegal immigrants and secure our borders. Close the underground tunnels. Stop the violence and the trafficking in drugs and people. No amnesty, not again. Been there, done that, no resolution. P.S., I’m not a racist. This isn’t to be confused with legal immigration.

Two, the TARP bill, I want it repealed and I want no further funding supplied to it. We told you no, but you did it anyway. I want the remaining unfunded 95% repealed. Freeze, repeal.

Three: Czars, I want the circumvention of our checks and balances stopped immediately. Fire the czars. No more czars. Government officials answer to the process, not to the president. Stop trampling on our Constitution and honor it.

Four, cap and trade. The debate on global warming is not over. There is more to say.

Five, universal healthcare. I will not be rushed into another expensive decision. Don’t you dare try to pass this in the middle of the night and then go on break. Slow down!

Six, growing government control. I want states rights and sovereignty fully restored. I want less government in my life, not more. Shrink it down. Mind your own business. You have enough to take care of with your real obligations. Why don’t you start there.

Seven, ACORN. I do not want ACORN and its affiliates in charge of our 2010 census. I want them investigated. I also do not want mandatory escrow fees contributed to them every time on every real estate deal that closes. Stop the funding to ACORN and its affiliates pending impartial audits and investigations. I do not trust them with taking the census over with our taxpayer money. I don’t trust them with our taxpayer money. Face up to the allegations against them and get it resolved before taxpayers get any more involved with them. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, hello. Stop protecting your political buddies. You work for us, the people. Investigate.

Eight, redistribution of wealth. No, no, no. I work for my money. It is mine. I have always worked for people with more money than I have because they gave me jobs. That is the only redistribution of wealth that I will support. I never got a job from a poor person. Why do you want me to hate my employers? Why — what do you have against shareholders making a profit?

Nine, charitable contributions. Although I never got a job from a poor person, I have helped many in need. Charity belongs in our local communities, where we know our needs best and can use our local talent and our local resources. Butt out, please. We want to do it ourselves.

Ten, corporate bailouts. Knock it off. Sink or swim like the rest of us. If there are hard times ahead, we’ll be better off just getting into it and letting the strong survive. Quick and painful. Have you ever ripped off a Band-Aid? We will pull together. Great things happen in America under great hardship. Give us the chance to innovate. We cannot disappoint you more than you have disappointed us.

Eleven, transparency and accountability. How about it? No, really, how about it? Let’s have it. Let’s say we give the buzzwords a rest and have some straight honest talk. Please try — please stop manipulating and trying to appease me with clever wording. I am not the idiot you obviously take me for. Stop sneaking around and meeting in back rooms making deals with your friends. It will only be a prelude to your criminal investigation. Stop hiding things from me.

Twelve, unprecedented quick spending. Stop it now.

Take a breath. Listen to the people. Let’s just slow down and get some input from some nonpoliticians on the subject. Stop making everything an emergency. Stop speed reading our bills into law. I am not an activist. I am not a community organizer. Nor am I a terrorist, a militant or a violent person. I am a parent and a grandparent. I work. I’m busy. I’m busy. I am busy, and I am tired. I thought we elected competent people to take care of the business of government so that we could work, raise our families, pay our bills, have a little recreation, complain about taxes, endure our hardships, pursue our personal goals, cut our lawn, wash our cars on the weekends and be responsible contributing members of society and teach our children to be the same all while living in the home of the free and land of the brave.

I entrusted you with upholding the Constitution. I believed in the checks and balances to keep from getting far off course. What happened? You are very far off course. Do you really think I find humor in the hiring of a speed reader to unintelligently ramble all through a bill that you signed into law without knowing what it contained? I do not. It is a mockery of the responsibility I have entrusted to you. It is a slap in the face. I am not laughing at your arrogance. Why is it that I feel as if you would not trust me to make a single decision about my own life and how I would live it but you should expect that I should trust you with the debt that you have laid on all of us and our children. We did not want the TARP bill. We said no. We would repeal it if we could. I am sure that we still cannot. There is such urgency and recklessness in all of the recent spending.

From my perspective, it seems that all of you have gone insane. I also know that I am far from alone in these feelings. Do you honestly feel that your current pursuits have merit to patriotic Americans? We want it to stop. We want to put the brakes on everything that is being rushed by us and forced upon us. We want our voice back. You have forced us to put our lives on hold to straighten out the mess that you are making. We will have to give up our vacations, our time spent with our children, any relaxation time we may have had and money we cannot afford to spend on you to bring our concerns to Washington. Our president often knows all the right buzzword is unsustainable. Well, no kidding. How many tens of thousands of dollars did the focus group cost to come up with that word? We don’t want your overpriced words. Stop treating us like we’re morons.

We want all of you to stop focusing on your reelection and do the job we want done, not the job you want done or the job your party wants done. You work for us and at this rate I guarantee you not for long because we are coming. We will be heard and we will be represented. You think we’re so busy with our lives that we will never come for you? We are the formerly silent majority, all of us who quietly work , pay taxes, obey the law, vote, save money, keep our noses to the grindstone and we are now looking up at you. You have awakened us, the patriotic spirit so strong and so powerful that it had been sleeping too long. You have pushed us too far. Our numbers are great. They may surprise you. For every one of us who will be there, there will be hundreds more that could not come. Unlike you, we have their trust. We will represent them honestly, rest assured. They will be at the polls on voting day to usher you out of office. We have canceled vacations. We will use our last few dollars saved. We will find the representation among us and a grassroots campaign will flourish. We didn’t ask for this fight. But the gloves are coming off. We do not come in violence, but we are angry. You will represent us or you will be replaced with someone who will. There are candidates among us when he will rise like a Phoenix from the ashes that you have made of our constitution.

Democrat, Republican, independent, libertarian. Understand this. We don’t care. Political parties are meaningless to us. Patriotic Americans are willing to do right by us and our Constitution and that is all that matters to us now. We are going to fire all of you who abuse power and seek more. It is not your power. It is ours and we want it back. We entrusted you with it and you abused it. You are dishonorable. You are dishonest. As Americans we are ashamed of you. You have brought shame to us. If you are not representing the wants and needs of your constituency loudly and consistently, in spite of the objections of your party, you will be fired. Did you hear? We no longer care about your political parties. You need to be loyal to us, not to them. Because we will get you fired and they will not save you. If you do or can represent me, my issues, my views, please stand up. Make your identity known. You need to make some noise about it. Speak up. I need to know who you are. If you do not speak up, you will be herded out with the rest of the sheep and we will replace the whole damn congress if need be one by one. We are coming. Are we coming for you? Whom do you represent? What do you represent? Listen. Because we are coming. We the people are coming.

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Tea party ignites passions

Written by admin on March 18, 2010 – 5:27 pm -

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Newly energized activists revel in their role as agitators
By Steve Law

The Portland Tribune, Mar 18, 2010, Updated Mar 19, 2010 (18 Reader comments)

Americans for Prosperity members on Saturday protest Democrats’ plans to expand health-care insurance. The protesters rallied outside Democrat Kurt Schrader’s Congressional town hall meeting in Oak Grove.
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Democrats dismiss them as cranky right-wingers and nut cases. Libertarians hail them as new recruits to the cause.

Republicans view them — sometimes warily — as a force to be harnessed to help reenergize the conservative movement.

They’re participants in the local “tea party” movement, a motley mix of new political activists and longtime true believers in limited government.

Some are passionate and unsophisticated, learning politics on the fly. Many are fired up by right-wing talk show hosts. Others are mobilized by national groups with a libertarian, pro-corporate agenda — such as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.

Many were spurred to action — or seized a political opening — after the U.S. financial system sputtered in September 2008, and the panicky Bush and Obama administrations responded with an extraordinary series of corporate bailouts and stimulus spending programs. Tea partiers’ angst about the sagging economy, mushrooming budget deficits and government interventions was further stoked by President Obama’s ambitious plans to expand health coverage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite minimal funding and mainstream media attention, the local tea party movement has mobilized thousands of residents to protests at Pioneer Courthouse Square, Beaverton, Oregon City and elsewhere. The movement captured the media spotlight with last summer’s raucous disruptions of congressional town hall meetings.

Hundreds are now attending monthly chapter meetings of Americans for Prosperity, the Oregon 9-12 Project and other groups nurtured by the tea party upsurge. Many of the local activists filed to run for political office in Oregon’s May 18 primary, several of them for the first time.

Here are some of the key players and issues in the local tea party movement:

• Blogger turned state tea party leader
Geoffrey Ludt was an armchair activist until early last year.

The 37-year-old West Linn resident regularly offered his slant on current events on blogs and Twitter posts — earning enough of a following to be listed among the Top Conservatives on Twitter.

Then Seattle blogger Keli Carender organized the nation’s first tea party protest on Feb. 16, 2009, in Seattle. Three days later, CNBC cable TV commentator Rick Santelli took to the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. In a live broadcast, he ranted against newly inaugurated President Barack Obama’s mortgage bailout proposal and called for a Chicago tea party protest.

Ludt soon joined a conference call with other Top Conservatives on Twitter to plan a national series of protests the following week.

On Feb. 27, Ludt showed up at Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square with a bullhorn and a pitchfork, but no permit. He was escorted off the square — no pitchforks allowed. But Ludt and 100 or more people moseyed across the street to resume their protest on the Pioneer Courthouse steps.

Locally and nationally, the movement went viral, egged-on by conservative radio and TV hosts and bloggers. FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity joined the bandwagon, supplying money, paid organizers and volunteers.

Ludt put together an Oregon Tea Party Web site and coordinated larger statewide protests on April 15, the federal income tax filing deadline.

Crowd estimates vary widely, but Ludt says 5,000 people showed up at Pioneer Courthouse Square that day, plus hundreds more at 17 other Oregon tea parties.

Ludt, while earning a living in workplace safety and bookkeeping, now serves as the volunteer state coordinator of the Oregon Tea Party. He calls it a “diffuse, leaderless organization” of like-minded individuals and groups, modeled after the “open activism model.”

Under the tea party banner, various groups cooperate to mobilize protests, such as last Saturday’s march outside the town hall of U.S. Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Canby, to protest the Democrats’ health insurance bill.

Tea party groups consciously stick to a fiscally conservative message against government bailouts, bulging budget deficits, and government intervention in the economy. Sometimes their demands dovetail conveniently with the agendas of their corporate funders.

Tea parties steer clear of social issues — such as abortion and gay marriage — so they can attract a broader following, regardless of party affiliation.

Most tea party-affiliated political candidates in Oregon are running as Republicans, but the relationship to the party is complicated. The GOP is joined at the hip with religious social conservatives, and some of its corporate donors and interest groups “may not be aligned ideologically with the tea party movement,” Ludt says.

“We want the party to be more aligned with us,” he says, rather than bending the tea party movement to fit the GOP. “I’m really ideologically driven,” Ludt says, adding that he “bristles” at the idea of being a loyal party member.

Some of his own views might not be so palatable in the Oregon GOP. In an ideal world, Ludt says, each state would be “sovereign,” with the federal government mainly providing national defense.

While the mainstream media mostly ignored the tea party movement until last summer’s raucous congressional town hall meetings, Taft has been there since “day two,” Ludt says. During the Feb. 27, 2009 protest in Portland, Taft says she leaned over to Ludt and said the two of them had to organize a much bigger protest for April 15.

Taft broadcast her radio show live from Pioneer Courthouse Square on April 15, as the movement demonstrated its newfound muscle with protests around the country. “That was the fifth-largest in the nation,” Taft says. “Something’s happening here.”

She regularly uses her airtime to promote tea party events, much as Fox Network commentators do nationally.

Taft says the decentralized nature of the movement is a strength, and she resents accusations that protesters are taking marching orders from Republican organizations.

Ordinary people are worried about being “enslaved” with debt from the bailouts and stimulus spending, Taft says, and the “diminution of freedom” from Democrats’ plans to expand health insurance and enact a cap-and-trade system to counter greenhouse gas emissions. “That would be command and control over every aspect of their lives,” she says of cap and trade.

Taft insists she’s never been a registered Republican, yet she doesn’t see much potential in mounting a third-party movement. “We need to impose our values on the Republican Party, or any party that will have us.”

Taft says she’s working on another big protest in Portland this spring, but it won’t be a tea party.

“I think people are beyond tea parties right now.”

• The gay Libertarian
Marc Delphine left the Republican Party years ago because he couldn’t understand how people espousing limited government could work so hard for laws denying gay rights and banning abortion.

He’s the local tea party movement’s gay Libertarian.

“I believe that government is force,” Delphine says. “It’s in bed with big business.”

Delphine likes the tea party movement’s push for smaller government and its avoidance of social issues. He also likes its potential.

The Sherwood resident, who also serves as vice-chairman of the Oregon Libertarian Party, organized the April 15 tea party protest at the Beaverton Izzy’s Pizza, and was astounded when hundreds of protesters showed up. Most had never been involved in politics before, he says.

Delphine is no newcomer to the cause. He ran for the Legislature in 2004, 2006 and 2008, and expects to get this year’s Libertarian nomination for the U.S. Senate seat held by Portland Democrat Ron Wyden.

Americans for Prosperity, the largest group in Oregon that latched onto the tea party movement, recruited Delphine to lead its Washington County chapter in late 2008. Then Ludt recruited Delphine to organize the Beaverton tea party rally last April.

Delphine says the movement has its share of “radical crazy freaks,” such as those drawing Hitler mustaches on Obama posters. He likens it to flamboyant gays who once garnered negative publicity during gay-pride marches.

Most tea partiers are really rather “mild-mannered” people, he says, who are willing to attend rallies or protests when called together.

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Alan Greenspan Isn’t a Libertarian, Complacency Isn’t Stability, and Debt Isn’t Wealth

Written by admin on March 3, 2010 – 6:42 pm -

 

Copyright (c) 2008 Les Lafave

A recent New York Times article “Taking a Hard New Look at Alan Greenspan’s Legacy” (Peter S. Goodman), did an entertaining job of slamming former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and for that, I’d gratefully subscribe (if I could afford it).

But there was a pigeon sized fly in the Timesian ointment– the article calls Greenspan a libertarian with a straight face, and blames the financial crisis, not on Chairman Greenspan’s monetary policy lead foot, but on his “faith” in “free markets”.

Anyone who spends his entire (much too long) career horsing interest rates up and down according to his own bad forecasts can’t possibly be a libertarian, no matter if he once knew Ayn Rand (who said she wasn’t a libertarian anyway), and no matter how many times he may have said the words “free market” (undoubtedly with his fingers crossed).

It doesn’t matter anyway what ideology Greenspan (or anyone else) may say that he has– he’s betrayed them all, or any combination of them all. Alan Greenspan has always readily taken on or cast off whatever belief best suited his unquenchable narcissism.

Goodman’s Times article focuses on credit derivatives, and makes a convincing case that when they explode, they aren’t very helpful.

But if former Fed Chairman Greenspan et al weren’t continuously stuffing credit into every possible economic crevasse, there wouldn’t have been either a need or a mechanism for the derivatives market to come into existence in the first place.

The most entertaining part of the Times piece is the description of the confrontation of Fed Chairman Greenspan and Treasury allies Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers with then CFTC Chairman Brooksley E. Born. She wanted to review the derivatives market, while this triumvirate instead made the argument that even talking about derivatives regulation could trigger a financial crisis.

The Greenspan/Rubin/Summers argument appears appropriately ludicrous in current light, yet their viewpoint remains prevalent in government, Wall Street, and banking circles. This mental map, which absurdly gets called “free market” is based on:

Assumption #1. Markets are delicately balanced, and the upside down pyramid can get harpooned and yanked over randomly (like by a suddenly uppity CFTC Chairman). This is true, but it’s manufactured truth– the pyramid could balance nicely on its base; we choose to stand it on its tip.

Assumption #2. Once the economy stumbles then government, having in their view not infinite power, but infinite possibilities for power and the country’s sharpest minds to develop and use it, can always push the market upright and back to “stable growth”. This isn’t true– they mistake the market’s strong organic self-correcting predisposition (often even against the head wind of their efforts), for their self-important wish fulfillment. (Picture a pre-historic band of sun worshipping priests, who begin to think that their pre-dawn rituals bring up the sun. If one day they sleep in and the sun comes up anyway, do they change their minds? Of course not– they’d say, “We sure got lucky that time. Tomorrow, let’s do two rituals.” The human capacity to shoehorn powerless insignificance into self-aggrandizing puffery is stunning (and I’m no longer talking about the ancient sun priests, but the modern monetary priests, who should have every advantage to know better).)

So, I’ll repeat the question that one can imagine Ms. Born asking Mr. Greenspan (and apparently Mr. Summers and maybe Mr. Rubin). “Just what kind of “stable”, “free market” system might it be, that will collapse if it’s even discussed?”

That would of course be ours, as we’re finding out ten years later. However, instead of not discussing it, maybe we should consider a financial system that doesn’t balance (upside down) on a pyramid of debt?

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