On the Obameter, Part 1 - HEALTH CARE REFORM

What happened to Obama's campaign promise that health care reform proposals would be negotiated in full public view?

According to the the St. Petersburg Times, during his presidential campaign, Barack Obama made the following promise:

"I'm going to have all the negotiations around a big table. We'll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Insurance companies, drug companies -- they'll get a seat at the table, they just won't be able to buy every chair. But what we will do is, we'll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies. And so, that approach, I think is what is going to allow people to stay involved in this process."

But that's not actually happening.



For example, according to McClatchy Newspapers, the two biggest deals so far -- industry agreements to cut drug and hospital costs -- were reached in secret. (They even quote a prominent Senator saying: "[The negotiations] were private, yes.")

The St. Petersburg Times rates this a broken promise.

A politician breaking a campaign promise?

That's a big change!

What IS Bernanke Afraid Of?

I literally applauded after this speech by Ron Paul (see video below). And I am sitting in my bedroom right now, all by myself. It's that good. And it's that important.



Go Ron Paul!

Go H.R. 1207. AUDIT THE FED!!

Note especially the part of this speech (at about the 4 minute mark on the video), where Dr. Paul notes that: (1) ordinary Americans (the "people") support H.R. 1207 and WANT the Congress to audit the Federal Reserve [See Note 1 below], and (2) it is the Federal Reserve itself, and Wall Street's big banks and powerful financial interests (i.e., the very groups that created the Fed in the first place AND the very groups that have received trillions of bailout dollars in the past eighteen months after they devastated the economy) are vehemently opposed to H.R. 1207.

Then Dr. Paul asks: which group best represents the public's interests?

To ask this question is to answer it.

Note 1: Poll: 75% of Americans want Federal Reserve audit

This Picture Is Worth a (few) Trillion Words

This article tells a sobering, important tale in pleasantly plain English and in not very many words.

Here's my adaptation of its story:

• If Samuel Adams (in 1800), Robert E. Lee (in 1860), or Wilbur Wright (in 1910) wanted a loaf of bread, each had to pay approximately the same amount of money. In other words, a loaf of bread cost about the same in 1910 as it did in 1800.

AND

• If my great-grandparents (in 1913) or I (in 2005) wanted to buy a loaf of bread, it's a different story. Now I have to come up with almost twenty times as much money as my great-grandparents. In other words, a loaf of bread costs about TWENTY TIMES as much in 2005 as it did in 1913.

Here's a chart showing this in VERY graphic form:

Look how fast that red line is going up. That's how fast the purchasing power of our United States dollars is disappearing. We've already lost 95% of it. Yuck.

I encourage you to think about this chart every time you hear Ben Bernanke (or anyone else) say that the Federal Reserve has to stay "independent" because it's the Fed's job to protect the stability of the U.S. dollar or to prevent inflation or any of that sort of palaver.

They lie.

If you're against the government stealing your wealth by inflating the money supply, the most effective step I think you can take at this point is to let your elected representatives know that you want them to push for a vote on H.R. 1207 (Audit the Fed) or S. 604 (same bill, but in the U.S. Senate), and that you want them to vote in favor of those bills.

First we need to see just what horrible things the Federal Reserve has done to us.

Then, we can shut them down, forgive them, and send them on their merry way. (Even though they're probably guilty of criminal acts against us, I don't recommend imprisoning them, because then we'd just have to pay more money to keep them locked up, and we've wasted enough resources on those scoundrels.)

Establishment Media Reveals Itself (again) - Part 1

The Wall Street Journal hacked out a hit piece on Ron Paul's "Audit the Fed" bill (H.R. 1207) - see it here, including a random reference to Ron Paul's having been defrauded by a popular "comedian" making a movie. (How that has anything to do with the important question: whether the Federal Reserve should be audited, I personally can't fathom.)

I hope the LewRockwell.com crowd is right, that the cause of freedom has now advanced to the second phase of Gandhi's famous observation: "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."



It's obvious to me (and should be to you also, Erin O'Brien, hint hint), that Ron Paul and the cause of liberty and freedom can no longer safely be ignored by the power elite.

Thank God.

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And in other news, who is this guy interviewing Ron Paul in this video (below)? Doesn't the guy know he works for MSNBC (at least for now)? This is a good video. The interviewer is EXCITED!