Showing posts with label nixon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nixon. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Arizona Challenges the Fed’s Money Monopoly

(RPI) History shows that, if individuals have the freedom to choose what to use as money, they will likely opt for gold or silver.







Of course, modern politicians and their Keynesian enablers despise the gold or silver standard. This is because linking a currency to a precious metal limits the ability of central banks to finance the growth of the welfare-warfare state via the inflation tax. This forces politicians to finance big government much more with direct means of taxation.




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Despite the hostility toward gold from modern politicians, gold played a role in US monetary policy for sixty years after the creation of the Federal Reserve. Then, in 1971, as concerns over the US government’s increasing deficits led many foreign governments to convert their holdings of US dollars to gold, President Nixon closed the gold window, creating America’s first purely fiat currency.





America’s 46-year experiment in fiat currency has gone exactly as followers of the Austrian school predicted: a continuing decline in the dollar’s purchasing power accompanied by a decline in the standard of living of middle- and working-class Americans, a series of Federal Reserve-created booms followed by increasingly severe busts, and an explosive growth in government spending. Federal Reserve policies are also behind much of the increase in income inequality.


Since the 2008 Fed-created economic meltdown, more Americans have become aware of the Federal Reserve’s responsibility for America’s economic problems. This growing anti-Fed sentiment is one of the key factors behind the liberty movement’s growth and represents the most serious challenge to the Fed’s legitimacy in its history. This movement has made “Audit the Fed” into a major national issue that is now closer than ever to being signed into law.


Audit the Fed is not the only focus of the growing anti-Fed movement. For example, this Wednesday the Arizona Senate Finance and Rules Committees will consider legislation (HB 2014) officially defining gold, silver, and other precious metals as legal tender. The bill also exempts transactions in precious metals from state capital gains taxes, thus ensuring that people are not punished by the taxman for rejecting Federal Reserve notes in favor of gold or silver. Since inflation increases the value of precious metals, these taxes give the government one more way to profit from the Federal Reserve’s currency debasement.







HB 2014 is a very important and timely piece of legislation. The Federal Reserve’s failure to reignite the economy with record-low interest rates since the last crash is a sign that we may soon see the dollar’s collapse. It is therefore imperative that the law protect people’s right to use alternatives to what may soon be virtually worthless Federal Reserve notes.


Passage of HB 2014 would also send a message to Congress and the Trump administration that the anti-Fed movement is growing in influence. Thus, passage of this bill will not just strengthen movements in other states to pass similar legislation; it will also help build support for the Audit the Fed bill and legislation repealing federal legal tender laws.


This Wednesday I will be in Arizona to help rally support for HB 2014, speaking on behalf of the bill before the Arizona Senate Finance Committee at 9:00 a.m. I will also be speaking at a rally at noon at the Arizona state capitol. I hope every supporter of sound money in the Phoenix area joins me to show their support for ending the Fed’s money monopoly.


By Ron Paul / Republished with permission / Ron Paul Institute / Report a typo

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Jeff Sessions’ War on Weed Is a War on You

(ANTIMEDIA) It seems Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ former comments claiming the enforcement of federal marijuana rules is a “strain on federal resources” have been completely forgotten. The former Alabama senator showed his true colors on this issue during a recent exchange with reporters, and we now know his office is “going to look” at cases in some states of people violating local marijuana rules. After all, he told journalists, “[s]tates they can pass the laws they choose … [but] it does remain a violation of federal law to distribute marijuana throughout any place in the United States, whether a state legalizes it or not.”


Worse than ignoring states’ rights by asserting the federal government might intervene in certain cases is Sessions’ claim that marijuana has been inviting more violence.


“We’re seeing real violence around that. … Experts are telling me there’s more violence around marijuana than one would think, and there’s big money involved.”


Unfortunately for the attorney general, this is nothing but a bogus claim.


In Colorado, crime has been dropping considerably ever since the state passed recreational marijuana laws, with homicides dropping 12.8 percent in the first year of legal pot. Other studies suggest that while Sessions believes marijuana legalization is associated with more crime, attempting to make this case is nearly impossible. According to a 2014 study, “findings run counter to arguments suggesting the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes poses a danger to public health in terms of exposure to violent crime and property crimes.”


But even if in an alternative universe the legalization of weed had, indeed, led to higher crime rates, what’s at stake in this case is not public safety — or even health for that matter. The essence of prohibitionist policies has nothing to do with safety. Instead, these policies are here to restrict personal freedoms.


Like similar prohibitionist rules, marijuana criminalization is about control of what one does with one’s body. Not about safety or health.


“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman famously admitted years later, explaining the war on drugs was never meant to boost domestic security.


He continued:


“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”


Controlling groups of people who fail to go along with government policy has always been a political aim of people in power — whether Democrat or Republican. Tools put in place to criminalize certain behavior help any administration to keep groups of people from persuading others to follow along. And what better tool to accomplish that than to use the power of the law to crush dissent?


Winning the war on drugs doesn’t mean anything to those writing the legislation. In the end, the public safety rhetoric is nothing but hot air. But to those living under these immoral rules, reminding the wider public that the war on pot is a war on the sovereignty of the individual and his right to self-ownership is what is going to turn the public’s attention to what really matters.


What’s at stake is not people’s health or their right to choose what poison they use but what makes us human: our right to make our own decisions.


Watch Jeff Sessions address the National Association of Attorneys General below:




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Monday, February 6, 2017

Here’s A Better Solution Than Trump’s Border Wall

February 6, 2017   |   admintam




(RPI – Op-Ed) Just two weeks in office, President Trump is already following through on his pledge to address illegal immigration. His January 25th executive order called for the construction of a wall along the entire length of the US-Mexico border. While he is right to focus on the issue, there are several reasons why his proposed solution will unfortunately not lead us anywhere closer to solving the problem.


First, the wall will not work. Texas already started building a border fence about ten years ago. It divided people from their own property across the border, it deprived people of their land through the use of eminent domain, and in the end the problem of drug and human smuggling was not solved.



Second, the wall will be expensive. The wall is estimated to cost between 12 and 15 billion dollars. You can bet it will be more than that. President Trump has claimed that if the Mexican government doesn’t pay for it, he will impose a 20 percent duty on products imported from Mexico. Who will pay this tax? Ultimately, the American consumer, as the additional costs will be passed on. This will of course hurt the poorest Americans the most.


Third, building a wall ignores the real causes of illegal border crossings into the United States. Though President Trump is right to prioritize the problem of border security, he misses the point on how it can be done effectively and at an actual financial benefit to the country rather than a huge economic drain.


The solution to really addressing the problem of illegal immigration, drug smuggling, and the threat of cross-border terrorism is clear: remove the welfare magnet that attracts so many to cross the border illegally, stop the 25 year US war in the Middle East, and end the drug war that incentivizes smugglers to cross the border.



The various taxpayer-funded programs that benefit illegal immigrants in the United States, such as direct financial transfers, medical benefits, food assistance, and education, cost an estimated $100 billion dollars per year. That is a significant burden on citizens and legal residents. The promise of free money, free food, free education, and free medical care if you cross the border illegally is a powerful incentive for people to do so. It especially makes no sense for the United States government to provide these services to those who are not in the US legally.


Likewise, the 40 year war on drugs has produced no benefit to the American people at a great cost. It is estimated that since President Nixon declared a war on drugs, the US has spent more than a trillion dollars to fight what is a losing battle. That is because just as with the welfare magnet, there is an enormous incentive to smuggle drugs into the United States.


We already know the effect that ending the war on drugs has on illegal smuggling: as more and more US states decriminalize marijuana for medical and recreational uses, marijuana smuggling from Mexico to the US has dropped by 50 percent from 2010.



Finally, the threat of terrorists crossing into the United States from Mexico must be taken seriously, however once again we must soberly consider why they may seek to do us harm. We have been dropping bombs on the Middle East since at least 1990. Last year President Obama dropped more than 26,000 bombs. Thousands of civilians have been killed in US drone attacks. The grand US plan to “remake” the Middle East has produced only misery, bloodshed, and terrorism. Ending this senseless intervention will go a long way toward removing the incentive to attack the United States.


I believe it is important for the United States to have secure borders, but unfortunately President Trump’s plan to build a wall will end up costing a fortune while ignoring the real problem of why people cross the borders illegally. They will keep coming as long as those incentives remain.



This article (Here’s A Better Solution Than Trump’s Border Wall) by Ron Paul originally appeared on RonPaulInstitute.org and was used with permission. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

Monday, January 16, 2017

Betting Odds Say Trump Has 50/50 Shot of Being Impeached in First Term

January 16, 2017   |   Jake Anderson




(ANTIMEDIA) – One of the few people who openly predicted Trump’s victory, Washington D.C.-based professor Allen Lichtman, also predicted he would be impeached. Lichtman’s reasoning was that the Republican Congress would turn on him:


“They don’t want Trump as president, because they can’t control him. He’s unpredictable. They’d love to have Pence — an absolutely down-the-line, conservative, controllable Republican. And I’m quite certain Trump will give someone grounds for impeachment, either by doing something that endangers national security or because it helps his pocketbook.”



Lichtman isn’t the only one who believes this will happen. As soon as Trump was elected, people across the political spectrum began figuratively preparing articles of impeachment with the presumption that the President-elect would instantly fill in the blanks with high crimes and misdemeanors soon after his inauguration.


Last week, there was news of a dossier handed over to the CIA by British intelligence that allegedly contained egregious offenses committed by Trump. Apparently, both Trump and Obama had been briefed on new compromising evidence from Russia — and some of it was of a reportedly sexual, incendiary nature. However, with that evidence unsubstantiated and a 4chan user claiming to have manufactured the sexual parts of the claim as fanfiction, it’s unlikely there is anything in the new imbroglio that will stick.


Down the road, this may not be the case. New betting odds show a 50/50 chance Trump will be impeached before the end of his first term. While gambling odds are surely no predictive science, the British company Ladbrokes offered a slate of Donald Trump Specials that, by the end of the week, saw impeachment odds rise to 11/10. Other Donald Trump bets included him visiting Russia within the year, not being re-elected in 2020, and not even being inaugurated (for which the odds are 6/1).


Angelia Wilson, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester, also believes Trump will be impeached within the first 12 to 18 months of his presidency:



“Whether it will be about the Russia dossier or other scandals that are undoubtedly there, he has become a liability for the Republican party. At some point they will need to distance themselves from him in order to solidify reelection for the House.”


While popular sentiment may assume Trump will be impeached, the political calculus of the situation is a bit more complex. This is mainly because you would have to believe Republicans would impeach a Republican president. Impeachment is a historically political act. The only recent example of it (remember that Nixon resigned before he could be impeached) was when a Republican-controlled House voted for articles of impeachment against then-President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about sexual dalliances with Monica Lewinsky.



People who believe Trump will be a political liability for the Republican brand should ask themselves if they think an impeached president is a bigger liability for the party. The answer is almost certainly yes. They should also consider the political liability of disenfranchising Trump voters and fracturing the party. Historically, impeachment has been a constitutional tool levied politically by the legislative branch against the executive branch. It’s a political power play used by one party to damage another.


In 2018, if the Democrats flip 24 seats and retake the House — where a simple majority is required to draft impeachment articles — the story could change…slightly. While politicos consider this unlikely, it is a less daunting proposition than the Dems retaking the Senate. However, even if the Democrats retook the House, there might be an inverted repeat of the 90s Kenneth Starr crusade against Clinton. Starr wasted tens of millions of dollars dragging an impeachment trial through the House knowing there was little to no chance the Democratic-controlled Senate would convict their party’s president. In the present case, it would be a Democratic-controlled House looking for impeachment knowing the GOP controlled the Senate.


Meanwhile, there is virtually no chance of Democrats flipping 20 seats and retaking the Senate in 2018. Thirty-three seats will be up for grabs, and 23 of them are currently held by Democrats. Two are held by independents, including Bernie Sanders from Vermont. In contrast, only eight Republican senators stand to lose their seats, meaning the math overwhelmingly favors the GOP in the 2018 senatorial elections.


Again, the math boils down to there being little to no chance that Democrats will control both the House and the Senate during Trump’s first term. To believe Trump will be impeached, you have to believe the Republicans will impeach their own president at the risk of invoking the wrath of his voters and splintering the party even further. While it’s been made plainly clear that middle-of-the-road establishment Republicans preferred other candidates — some of them vehemently so — it would take an especially heinous, larger than life offense by Trump to turn his own party against him to that extent.


You tell me, is he capable of such an offense while in office?



This article (Betting Odds Say Trump Has 50/50 Shot of Being Impeached in First Term) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Jake Anderson and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

Monday, December 19, 2016

What Nixon Could Tell Trump About Ticking Off the Establishment




What Nixon Could Tell Trump About Ticking Off the Establishment | white-house-danger | Globalism Politics Rockefellers Trump


Note from the Editor: Many people are still surprised (pleasantly or otherwise) that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. As with all new presidents, Americans have high hopes and questions about what his administration will bring. Although there have been some questionable appointments, Trump has shown that he is willing to fight for jobs, he is well on his way to making amends with Russia (and thus averting nuclear war), and I feel like our Second Amendment rights are safer than they have been in years.


Because Trump has flown in the face of the establishment (and the mainstream media) for his entire campaign, his time in the White House could be fraught with peril. In the article below, freelance writer Jon Rappoport takes a look at history to break down the dangers that Trump could face during his presidency ~ Daisy.





Trump: what dangers does he face from Globalists?


by Jon Rapport: No More Fake News


As I keep emphasizing, Trump achieved two great things in his campaign for the presidency: he stopped Hillary Clinton from occupying the Oval Office, and he ran against big media, helping to further destroy its reputation.


From here on, we shall see.



How many compromises will the new president permit? How many will he seek?


To put it another way, how many covert victories will arch-Globalist David Rockefeller and his associates pile up? They are, of course, aware that Trump has promised to kick the can of Globalism down the road, stop the excesses of “free trade,” and bring stolen jobs back to America. What actions will they take against Trump?


Here’s a lesson from the past, about a president who put a brief dent in David Rockefeller’s master-plan. Let’s look at Richard Nixon and a different version of Watergate, the scandal that toppled him.


On the mega-corporate front, the plan for world control remains the Rockefeller template. “Free trade.” This plan was advanced, ceaselessly, for 40 years until, on January 1, 1995, the World Trade Organization was fully formed and took charge of criminal rules of global commerce: the crowning moment for global corporate predators. No more tariffs.


However, back in the early 1970s, the whole operation had almost been derailed. One man, a crook, a president, a liar, an insecure parody of a head of state, Richard Nixon, went off script. He REALLY went off script.


In an effort to bolster US companies and protect them from foreign competition, Nixon began erecting tariffs on a range of goods imported into the US.


If this Nixon economic plan spread to other countries, the entire global program to install “free trade” and mega-corporate emperors on their thrones for a thousand years could crash and burn.


Nixon was a Rockefeller man. He was owned by them. He’d been rescued from financial ruin by The Family, and now he was in the White House undermining their greatest dream. You can’t overstate the degree of the betrayal, from the Rockefeller point of view. You simply can’t.


Something had to be done. The president had to go. This was the real motivation behind Watergate. This was the real op. Yes, there were sub-motives and smaller contexts, but the prime move was: get Free Trade back on track; get suitable revenge on the puppet in the White House who went off the script.


Whether the Watergate break-in was planned to serve the higher goal or was pounced upon after the fact, as a grand opportunity, is beside the point. It was there, and it was used. It became the starting point for the Washington Post, its publisher, veteran editor, and two cub reporters to break Richard Nixon into pieces.


And if the Rockefeller people needed an inside man to report on the deteriorating mental state of the president as he heated up in the pressure cooker, they had Henry Kissinger, who was another Rockefeller operative.


The Washington Post was owned by Katharine Graham, who was a very close friend of the Rockefeller family. Years later, she would be awarded a medal of honor by the University of Chicago, an institution founded by John D. Rockefeller. On her death, a paid heartfelt obituary was inserted in the NY Times by the trustees, faculty, and staff of Rockefeller University, where she had served on the University Council.



And she and Nixon already hated each other by the early 1970s.


The managing editor of the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, was an old hand at writing promotional material, having worked in Europe crafting releases for a CIA front group. A former Naval intelligence man, he liked one of his cub reporters, Bob Woodward, who had also worked for the Navy in intelligence.


When Woodward came to Bradlee with a story about a man in a parking garage who was passing secrets from the White House/FBI about Watergate, we are supposed to believe that Bradlee naturally responded by giving the green light to a major investigation. Woodward and Carl Bernstein, another cub, would undertake it—with nothing more than Bradlee’s reputation and the future survival of the Post and Katharine Graham’s empire on the line if the cubs got it wrong.


We are supposed to believe Bradlee gave the green light, without knowing who the man in the garage was, without knowing whether Woodward could be trusted, without even getting permission from Graham to move ahead.


Bradlee, a grizzled veteran of Washington, understanding exactly what Washington could do to people who told secrets out of school, just said to Woodward and Bernstein, “You’d better be damned sure you’re right, because otherwise we’re all in trouble.”


Two untested cub reporters set loose in a cage with tigers.


The odds of that happening were nil.


Bradlee had to know a great deal from the beginning, and he had to have Katharine Graham’s signal to move. The series of breaking stories would be spoon-fed to the unsuspecting young reporters, instead of veteran reporters who would become suspicious that they were being used. The cubs would be consumed by their ambition to advance their careers.


Bradlee was confident in the whole op because he had the essentials of the Watergate scandal in hand—all the way up to Nixon, the target—well in advance of his two young reporters.


To have proceeded otherwise—Bradlee was simply not that kind of fool. Whatever Deep Throat, the man in the garage, was dishing out to Woodward didn’t really matter. Bradlee already had it in his pocket. Deep Throat was merely a contrivance to allow the story to expand and grow by steps, and to permit Woodward and Bernstein to believe they were peeling layers from an onion.


The man behind the curtain was David Rockefeller.


After the whole scandal had been exposed and Nixon had flown away, in disgrace, from the White House for the last time, Rockefeller addressed a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce of the European Community (October 1975). He was there to allay their fears about Nixon’s betrayal of the new economic world order. There was really very little he needed to say. David had already created (1973) the elite free-trade Trilateral Commission; a new puppet, Gerald Ford, was in the White House; and Ford had appointed David’s brother, Nelson Rockefeller, as his vice president.


David told the European attendees, “Fortunately, there are no signs that these anti-[free] trade measures [of Nixon] are supported by the [Ford] Administration.”


And that was that. The global mega-corporate colossus was back on track.


The temporary rip in the Matrix had been repaired.


On a far lower level of power politics, everyone and his brother was consumed with the contrails of the scandal that had driven away Nixon and his colleagues. People were congratulating each other on expunging a corrupt conspiracy from public life.


The real players, of course, were still in place, more powerful than ever. David Rockefeller and his aides were preparing for an even greater coup. They had chosen an obscure man with zero name recognition to be the next president of the United States. Jimmy Carter. Carter would function to forward the goals of the Trilateral Commission in bold view of anyone who knew the score.


And every president since Carter, regardless of party affiliation, has supported and extended those Globalist-corporate goals. No questions asked. Obama, who fatuously remarked during his 2008 election campaign that NAFTA “needs to be revisited,” has taken his cues like any other puppet.


When, from this perspective, you examine the global takeover of land and resources by GMO agribusiness, the destruction of small family farms, the plundering of natural resources in the Third World, the use of UN “peacekeepers” and “humanitarian groups” and intelligence agencies to create a wedge, for corporations, into these areas, you see the hand of the Rockefeller plan.


When you see the destruction of currencies and the escalation of insupportable debt, the incursion of a bewildering number of UN-affiliated groups sinking their teeth into local communities all over the planet to “manage sustainable development,” you see the plan.


Now, as Donald Trump prepares to take office as the 45th president of the United States, the plan is very much intact. What will he do to disrupt it? How much will he risk? What deals will he make? How far will he go in opposing the Rockefeller Globalists? Is he already co-opted? What measures are the Globalists launching?


We will see.


But the lesson of Richard Nixon reveals that David Rockefeller and his team are willing to do whatever it takes to depose an enemy.


They play hardball.


Jon Rappoport