The new Libertarian Party just claimed that the godfather of the modern libertarian movement, Ron Paul "has no idea what the Libertarian Party represents."
The post Libertarian Party Blocks Ron Paul & Judge Nap—Revealing Neocon Takeover appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
If you are a libertarian, a gold person, a blockchain/ bitcoin person, a middle class person who feels betrayed by his government, a tea-party person how sees that his ideals have been co-opted by the GOP for votes and then cast aside, then you may want to give this a listen. If you do, I thank you in advance
This verbal post is something that had to be gotten out of my system before I prepare for a 3pm interview on Gold with Daniela Cambone on Kitco. Otherwise, the visceral feeling in my gut will not permit me to focus on the more erudite Daniela"s questions. There are enough loons with tinfoil hats out there. I do not seek to be one, or worse, one pretending to be a Libertarian hawking survivalist products to scared and frustrated Americans who have been sold out by their government. Or some carpetbagger riding a wave of crypto mania (prices, not ideas) which will end badly for many people soon. I"d like people to wake up, not unlike the message of fight club, but not in a nihilistic way. We don"t have to blow up the credit data centers to level the playing field as they did. We just have to wake up, myself included.
Pictured: One opiate of the masses.
People should be spoken it as if they had brains, and not sold with dumbed down rhetoric and hot button nonsense. There is no angry moderate voice. An infuriated voice of reason, if you will. There should be. Some wars are just. Who am I? I am no-one of consequence who"d like to give voice to the people too busy working subsidizing others" prosperity and blindly hoping things will be ok. They won"t be in this generation. Not when Paul Ryan claims he is a fan of anarcho-communist bands like Rage Against the Machine to get votes and then sells those voters out. Losing misplaced hope that someone will save you in this earthly realm is the first step in obtaining the freedom to help yourself.
Over the last few days, I"ve been lucky enough to have met some brilliant people in banking, technology, the military, and entrepreneurs who are acting to make the USA and the world a place where the pursuit of success and happiness is a inalienable right.
This search for knowledge was rooted in understanding better the guts of Blockchain tech and what it can do. But it ended where I started; believing again that change is coming. Try as globalist monetary incumbents might to stop it, the zeitgeist has changed.
The tech is merely a tool to make scalable what our founding fathers intended. I am not saying you are entitled to success. Like our fathers, I am saying you are entitled to pursue that success unimpeded. But we are now very impeded by the incumbency of those who are "above us"
For me, this is about a better society and government fulfilling its duty properly to protect its citizenry. That means no power abuse. And that means decentralization in the monetary system, our circulatory system in business, will bring those changes to bear. I am no marketer, no salesman, and rarely a self promoter for money. Money is easy to make if that is all you want to do with your life. I have seen the middle class destroyed including my grandfather"s business as the pursuit of money became the first priority, replacing the providing of a valuable service in our society. I have been on bot hsides of every situation spoken of in these issues of asymetry, unfair market structure and unethical practices. And I"m telling you capitalism as originally created and in the democratic republic our founding fathers created, is dead. It is a husk of an idea., an empty shell of its former glory.
But something new is coming. in fact, it is already here. And it cannot be stopped. It can be slowed by incumbent, status quo, unelected globalist leaders; but it cannot be stopped. It is the revolutionary event that is always a part of our evolution. And G-d willing, it will be a bloodless one this time.
Power must be used and self-obviating. Not perpetual when nothing needs to be done. Decentralization helps make this happen. If you have the patience to listen to this, these points will be made more clear.
If you are a libertarian, a gold person, a blockchain/ bitcoin person, a middle class person who feels betrayed by his government, a teaparty person how sees that his ideals have been co-opted by the GOP for votes adnthen cast aside, then you may want to give this a listen.
Good Luck
vbl
About the author:Vince Lanci has 27 years’ experience trading Commodity Derivatives. Retired from active trading in 2008 after netting $90MM in an Energy arbitrage strategy he devised for a NY hedge fund; Vince now manages personal investments through his Echobay entity and advises natural resource firms on market risk. Over the years, his expertise and testimony have been requested in energy, precious metals, and derivative fraud cases. Lanci is known for his passion in identifying unfairness in market structure and uneven playing fields going back to his first anonymous Zerohedge post on Silver. He remains a contributor to Kitco, Zerohedge, and Marketslant on such topics. Vince contributes to Bloomberg and Reuters finance articles as well. He continues to lead the Soren K. Group of writers on Marketslant.
Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,
Do we need a third major political party?
I often joke that I’d be happy if we actually had a second party, as when it comes to the big issues – war, monetary policy, civil liberties – the Republicans and Democrats are more alike than different.
Perhaps that’s why a recent NBC News poll has found that nearly two-thirds of young people surveyed do not believe either the Republicans or Democrats are doing a good job and that a third major political party is needed.
I think this is an encouraging sign. I suspect the NBC News poll result reflects the fact that young people are not as easily hoodwinked by the mainstream media and by the two-party duopoly charade in Washington. This generation has grown up with the Internet and the abundance of alternative media that challenges what really is a one-party system in the United States. They have been exposed to many new ideas, including good ones like libertarianism and non-interventionism.
Currently, mainstream politics in the US is all about power – how to get it and how to keep it – and not at all about philosophy or ideology. It is about selling out principles at every turn in order to chalk up another point in the “win” column. On issues like war and spending, it’s incredible how easily the two major parties are able to “compromise.”
A serious effort to create a new political party could be very exciting, but only if that new party is based on real ideas rather than simply the desire for power. Creating a viable third party will not be easy. While there is plenty written in the media about foreign collusion in US elections, the real collusion is between the Republican and Democratic Parties to prevent new parties from joining them on the national stage and the ballot.
Unfortunately the Libertarian Party has failed to live up to what should have been its role as an ideological alternative to Washington’s one-party system. As was quite obvious in the 2016 presidential election, the Libertarians yielded to prevailing attitudes on war, welfare, the Federal Reserve, and more. In believing that winning was more important than standing for something, they ended up achieving neither.
I would still like to have some hope for the Libertarian Party, but to really fill its role as a challenger to our two party system (that is actually a one party system) it would need a major overhaul. It would need to actually embrace the core libertarian principles of non-aggression and non-intervention in the affairs of others.
At the end of my 2008 presidential campaign, I brought together the candidates of the “minor” political parties and proposed that we agree on some basic principles regardless of whether we are libertarians, conservatives, progressives, or greens. Among those was the idea that we should never go to war unless we were directly attacked or threatened, that the Federal Reserve should not be allowed to benefit the rich by creating money out of thin air, and that we should not endorse deficit spending.
If a new party could come together and agree on these basic principles while agreeing to disagree on other, less important priorities, we could begin a formidable movement toward peace and prosperity.
Let us hope that this NBC News survey provides the inspiration to a real pro-peace, pro-prosperity movement in the United States. I have much confidence in the youth of our country!
By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at
On Monday, I shared with you a conversation I had with an entrepreneur Mahdi Kazemzadeh, who"s built a business in Iran.
Here"s the astonishing thing: despite being Iranian Mahdi isn"t a terrorist. No, really!
The mere mention of Iran gets the dog-pack enzymes flowing with an easily influenced Western media-fed crowd. Pack mentality surfaces, except that those who are exhibiting it don"t call it that. No, instead they call it patriotism (discussed here), which miraculously is seen as a good, honourable, virtuous quality rather than a mental disorder.
I"ve spent a lot of time discussing the qualitative aspects affecting the global macro landscape and I receive hundreds of emails each month thanking me for sharing them. I"m deeply humbled and in fact 99.9% of readers are kind, curious, engaging, and where they disagree they do so in an intelligent and intellectually stimulating way. I genuinely love it, even if I can"t respond to all.
I like to think of Capitalist Exploits as a home for independent, objective thought. The ability to step back, observe, question where the consensus may be wrong, look to economic history for guidance, and to then objectively invest according to probabilities is at the very centre of how I feed my family and what this little corner of cyberspace is all about.
We"re here to make money, not to be popular.
As such, it"s amusing when occasionally a moron pops his wee little head up.
Fortunately, morons are desperately easy to spot. They stick out like a giant zit on a prom queen. Logic has left the building, wild accusations are used, and the pack instinct is alive and kicking. They operate purely from an emotional level, not unlike a 4-year old who"s been told Santa isn"t coming this year.
After publishing the conversation on Monday discussing Iran with Mahdi I received the usual thank yous and then this doozy:
"Listen you kangaroo meat eating hill billy...
you better quit talking ignorant bullshit about the U.S. and Trump, two subjects you know absolutely nothing about. I know you"re probably upset with yourself since you turned out to be a shit money manager and are having a very tough time dealing with redemptions but why don"t you concentrate on educating yourself and start practicing some class."
Bless this poor intellectually retarded soul.
The reason I share this with you is to demonstrate something that we"re all going to have to get very used to.
The seasons have changed. This, folks, is the pack animal zeitgeist that I"ve written about in "What the Incoming "Strong Men" Mean for the Global Economy" and elsewhere in these pages.
Humans have an insuperable tendency to form packs and proceed to bark at other packs. When a neighbour"s dog walks past my property, my dog rushes to bark at it. Every time! The neighbour"s dog isn"t a threat, it"s just what dogs do.
When a Japanese military recon plane enters Chinese airspace, fighter jets scramble furiously to bark at it. They know it"s not going to bomb China. It"s what pack animals do.
I"ve little doubt that the clown who emailed me (the one with the intellectual capacity of ringworm) gathers his knowledge of Iran from the @realDonaldTrump Twitter feed. A pack animal. Grrr! Woof! Bow-wow!
The odds he"s visited Iran? Slim!
Ever been threatened by Iran? Nope. Grrr! Woof! Bow-wow! My guy says it"s so. The hoi polloi never learn. Remember Bush"s Iraq war? The one where Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? Same pack response then. Same pack response now. Grrrr! woof!
Paradoxically, when I was writing about why "the ginger ninja" was going to win the presidency (for example, this one) I received a good dozen emails which could be summarised as, "Whoo yeah! Go Trump, stick it to em!".
I get it. It was the point I was making : the rising anti-establishment zeitgeist. The thing is - and I made this clear but it still falls on deaf ears: I"m interested in outcomes. It doesn"t matter one iota what I might wish to happen. If I was to trade based on what I wish would happen I"d not be able to afford this fancy machine I"m writing to you on.
No. The only thing that matters is outcomes and attempting to protect yourself and profit accordingly. Some seem to have unfortunately mistaken my identifying a trend for my supporting of a trend.
The response that I get when I say this is, "Oh, so you support Hillary then?". Well, no.
Actually, I was tickled pink that the reptile was kicked to the curb but that doesn"t mean you don"t question what"s taking place, and it certainly doesn"t mean that you need to support the opposition either. It"s useful to remember that your vote is statistically meaningless, anyway.
I wrote an entire article about why voting is a terrific waste of your time years ago:
"The reason I don’t vote, apart from the mathematical certainty that my vote is meaningless and the near mathematical certainty that I will be contributing towards propelling a parasitic self serving, egotistical, yet entirely ignorant, podium doughnut towards stardom is that I don’t care for any political party either. Not the Reds, Whites, Pinks or Browns, the Tea party, Libertarian party, or any other party.
They all end up the same way, with some folks moving to expand their sphere of influence to the detriment of others who disagree with them. Voting is meaningless in its present form. “The people” are presented with a select group of egomaniacs with whom they have no connection, and who have proved repeatedly that they will never “represent” said “people” anyway. What a charade. I would go so far as saying its unethical to participate in such a fraud."
Despite what you"re told by the media and any given podium doughnut, George Carlin was right:
Simply investigating multiple angles is a mental challenge few are prepared to engage in, especially where it conflicts with their chosen "guru"s" ideology. Far easier to shut your mind off and follow. Just follow. Read history and tell me it isn"t so.
The psychology of a gas station lout says that if you "diss" my guy, then I"ll beat your head in with a brick. It matters not what "your guy" has said or done. The reason this matters to us as investors is because the pack actually dominates humanity.
Patriotism is simply the loyalty of dogs in a pack.
Consider this: the German soldiers who murdered millions in World War II were patriots as were the Japanese pilots bombing Pearl Harbour. In fact, we can objectively say that the the thugs who drove a truck into a crowd in Nice were patriots.
Do we admire them for patriotism? No, they"re not "our" guy.
Do their own admire them for their allegiance to the pack? Sadly, yes.
Patriotism, like love, is blind because it"s driven not by logic but by emotion. It"s irrational thought at it"s finest.
Which brings me to how patriotism, nationalism, and meatheads all come together in our world of global macro finance.
I just hopped off the phone with a friend, the gracious, humble, and razor sharp Grant Williams. We were discussing this very theme. Grant, of course, wrote about this in late 2015. War is the likely outcome. Back then few thought it possible. Increasingly, it"s not only possible but highly probable. I fear Grant is probably right.
You see countries behave as idiotically as pack animals. Politics itself rewards unprincipled behaviour. The aggressive, arrogant, and self serving are drawn to the power it represents like moths to a flame. In order to achieve the top spots they fight, cheat, steal, and lie to get there. How is this different to dogs fighting for alpha status in a pack?
Once in power, these pathological ego-maniacs (that"s how you become an alpha dog) send entire countries to war with little crackpot third world nations that the electorate has never heard of, can"t pronounce, and can"t find on a map. Given the "right" information (remember Saddam"s WMD) the crowd bay for blood. Grrr! Woof! Bow-wow!
Read that email response to my podcast on Iran again and tell me this imbecile wouldn"t be one of those pack animals baying for blood in any altercation his "guru" leader tells him is just.
Humans have incredible powers of compassion, kindness, creativity, and loyalty. They also have another side, and right now from sea to shining sea lines are being drawn and the "other side" is rearing its ugly head.
Let me ask you a question, and this is a question irrespective of your nationality, religious, or political persuasion.
Tell me, have you experienced in the last few months heated debates or even outright arguments about political outcomes and those elected or those up for election?
If so, is this unusual to you? Are you finding that siding with one political party over another is today causing problems it wouldn"t have caused in the past?
Do you sense the shift on the ground wherever you are?
Can you feel the lines being drawn in the sand?
I"d love to have your thoughts and feedback in the comments section.
From where I sit I believe we"ve solidly entered an environment where pack animal behaviour is going to rule the day. You don"t need to be a genius to figure out that the probabilities of barking dogs getting into a scrap have been magnified.
- Chris
"Humans are the only animals who will follow unstable pack leaders." — Cesar Milan (The dog whisperer)
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Submitted by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,
Last week, a federal judge provided a long overdue victory for alternative political parties in the United States. The ruling found the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the institution that oversees the Commission on Presidential Debates, failed to sufficiently examine evidence challenging two-party dominance in national debates. The judge asserted there was no evidence “that the FEC considered the relevant factors or took a hard look at the evidence.”
The ruling, issued in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, focused on a 2014 complaint regarding the 2012 election filed by the non-profit organization Level the Playing Field. It also focused on objections from the Green Party and Libertarian Party (which were dismissed by a federal judge last year). According to Buzzfeed News, one of the few mainstream outlets to cover the ruling, there were two main elements:
“The first part involves the FEC’s dismissal of two administrative complaints claiming the debate commission and its directors violated election laws by engaging in partisan activity in support of the Democratic and Republican parties. The Green Party, Libertarian Party, and other challengers presented evidence that commission directors contributed to candidates and made statements supporting particular parties.”
The second part focused on Level the Playing Field’s request “that the FEC revise its rules to block the the commission from using a polling threshold to decide participation in presidential and vice-presidential debates.” The commission requires that a candidate receive 15% support or higher in five national polls in order to be invited to the debates. Level the Playing Field’s request was denied, and in response, the group compiled analysis from experts, who highlighted “the hundreds of millions of dollars a candidate would have to spend to meet the 15 percent polling target, and argued that the rule was not an objective criteria.”
They claimed “it was specifically designed to keep out candidates not affiliated with the Republican or Democratic parties,” Buzzfeed explained.
The Commission on Presidential Debates, a faction of the Federal Election Commission, has been criticized for these biases before. The commission’s board of directors has overt partisan leanings. As the International Business Times has noted:
“The Commission On Presidential Debates board is currently chaired by Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. and Michael D. McCurry. Fahrenkopf is a former chairman for the Republican National Committee and McCurry was press secretary under President Bill Clinton.”
As journalist Ben Swann astutely explained during the 2012 election:
“So let’s be clear: a debate commission that’s run by former bigwigs from the Republican and Democrat parties and creates a 15% polling rule in five national polls isn’t trying to create inclusion — they’re trying to prevent it. If you don’t have the money of the two big parties, getting your name out nationally to get into those polls, well, it can only happen if you’re a billionaire like Ross Perot. Aside from billionaires, no one else has a chance.”
Level the Playing Field’s suit further alleged that members of the board had conflicts of interest because of their political contributions. Judge Tanya Chutkan further documented the commission’s biases in her summary opinion:
“Moreover, Fahrenkopf has stated that the CPD was not likely to look with favor on including third-party candidates in the debates, and Kirk has stated that he personally believed the CPD should exclude third-party candidates from the debates.”
She also acknowledged the commission’s inherent commitment to the two-party system:
“The CPD is ‘bipartisan’ by its own description: the press release announcing its formation stated that it was a ‘bipartisan . . . organization formed to implement joint sponsorship of general election presidential and vice-presidential debates . . . by the national Republican and Democratic committees between their respective nominees.’”
Ultimately, she ruled that the FEC “failed to show that it properly considered all of the evidence and arguments presented by the challengers” when it was supposed to review its rules in 2014. She called that rejection “arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law,” asserting that “the evidence unaddressed – or outright ignored – by the FEC is quite substantial.” She also pointed out the FEC’s “refusal to engage in thoughtful, reasoned decision-making in either enforcement or rulemaking in this case.”
Chutkan ordered the commission to review its previous decision and gave them 30 days to do so. According to Peter Ackerman, Level the Playing Field’s founder, the decision “lays the groundwork for removing the primary obstacle to providing Americans with the independent alternative to the two parties that polls clearly indicate they want.“
Alexandra Shapiro, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, praised the decision, pointing out that it “marked the first time the FEC and CPD have been successfully challenged over debate rules. This is an enormously important ruling.”
“It could pave the way for a new kind of election in 2020,” she said.
In an age where Americans are increasingly dissatisfied with the options the political establishment provides them, this small but vital ruling could signal a turning point when it comes to promoting exposure for presidential candidates who are not members of the country’s two-party duopoly.
Unsurprisingly, according to Buzzfeed, the FEC declined to comment on Judge Chutkan’s ruling.
