ALOHA !!

Bill, on that note about Canada tightening its border we here in the USA this ... SPP ...

More government efforts to control us and have us pay for it ... Wake up time !!!

This is from the US House Of Representatives, Ron Paul Of Texas(Rep) ...


READ ON:
A North American United Nations?

by Ron Paul

Globalists and one-world promoters never seem to tire of coming up with ways to undermine the sovereignty of the United States. The most recent attempt comes in the form of the misnamed "Security and Prosperity Partnership Of North America (SPP)." In reality, this new "partnership" will likely make us far less secure and certainly less prosperous.

According to the US government website dedicated to the project, the SPP is neither a treaty nor a formal agreement. Rather, it is a "dialogue" launched by the heads of state of Canada, Mexico, and the United States at a summit in Waco, Texas in March, 2005.

What is a "dialogue"? We don't know. What we do know, however, is that Congressional oversight of what might be one of the most significant developments in recent history is non-existent. Congress has had no role at all in a "dialogue" that many see as a plan for a North American union.

According to the SPP website, this "dialogue" will create new supra-national organizations to "coordinate" border security, health policy, economic and trade policy, and energy policy between the governments of Mexico, Canada, and the United States. As such, it is but an extension of NAFTA- and CAFTA-like agreements that have far less to do with the free movement of goods and services than they do with government coordination and management of international trade.

SPP website http://spp.gov/

Critics of NAFTA and CAFTA warned at the time that the agreements were actually a move toward more government control over international trade and an eventual merging of North America into a border-free area. Proponents of these agreements dismissed this as preposterous and conspiratorial. Now we see that the criticisms appear to be justified.

Let's examine just a couple of the many troubling statements on the SPP's US government website:

"We affirm our commitment to strengthen regulatory cooperation...and to have our central regulatory agencies complete a trilateral regulatory cooperation framework by 2007"

Though the US administration insists that the SPP does not undermine US sovereignty, how else can one take statements like this? How can establishing a "trilateral regulatory cooperation" not undermine our national sovereignty?

The website also states SPP's goal to "[i]mprove the health of our indigenous people through targeted bilateral and/or trilateral activities, including in health promotion, health education, disease prevention, and research." Who can read this and not see massive foreign aid transferred from the US taxpayer to foreign governments and well-connected private companies?

Also alarming are SPP pledges to "work towards the identification and adoption of best practices relating to the registration of medicinal products." That sounds like the much-criticized Codex Alimentarius, which seeks to radically limit Americans' health freedom.

Even more troubling are reports that under this new "partnership," a massive highway is being planned to stretch from Canada into Mexico, through the state of Texas. This is likely to cost the US taxpayer untold billions of dollars, will require eminent domain takings on an almost unimaginable scale, and will make the US more vulnerable to those who seek to enter our country to do us harm.

This all adds up to not only more and bigger government, but to the establishment of an unelected mega-government. As the SPP website itself admits, "The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America represents a broad and ambitious agenda." I hope my colleagues in Congress and American citizens will join me in opposing any "broad and ambitious" effort to undermine the security and sovereignty of the United States.

August 30, 2006

Thanks for the excellent CBC summary. It sounds quite rosy. I understand they are not spinners, correct? Would you agree that interest rates have peaked?

Me thinks the word "trilateral" has Rep. Paul on edge.

As in... http://www.trilateral.org/about.htm

Visit the past and current membership tab (Paul A. Volker, David Rockefeller, Thomas S Foley, etc,).

Kaimu, I had no idea.

Actually, I should have had an idea. My sister was hammering at me on the subject of CAFTA and NAFTA a long time ago. The problem was that I didn't really believe her. Then.

Thank you very much for your detailed comment and information.

ALOHA !!

To read more on Congressman Ron Paul's fight against BIG government and his initiative to reinstate US Constituional values go to his website.

http://www.house.gov/paul/

He has his "Project Freedom" mailing list. This guy is probably the only elected politician in Washington DC that is on the "little guy's" side. He is the only one that grills both Greenspan and Bernanke on their mismanagement of the US monetary system and their deceptive data and practices. Many of his past and present speeches in the House are posted on his website.

Ron Paul is widely regarded in Washington as a crank. He's the kind of politician who regularly finds himself on the losing side of 434-1 votes in the House of Representatives.

I just consulted the Congressional database of legislation, and failed to find a single piece of material legislation that Rep. Paul has successfully written in his 20 years in Congress. There might be something that I missed, but one has to hunt high and low to find him as anything other than a self-appointed Don Quixote without influence on the issues of the day.

This doesn't mean everything he says is bunkum, of course, but given his gadfly status I would counsel caution before relying upon him as a source of learned insight into Washington.

ALOHA !!

From Bernanke's last run in with Congressman Ron Paul ... In this exchange Bernanke comes off as a cheap hustler being interviewed by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes ... What is this "I don't know" stuff coming from a Fed Chairman controlling our money????

Show me any other politician that speaks to Bernanke this way ... I am sure Greenspan warned Bernanke about Paul, but I see Bernanke doesn't think as fast on his feet as Greenspan did ...

READ ON:
From the Hearings on Monetary Policy and the State of the Economy
Committee on Financial Services, the U.S. House of Representatives
July 20, 2006, Washington, D.C.

MR. PAUL: Good afternoon, Chairman Bernanke.

I have a question dealing with the Working Group on Financial Markets. I want to learn more about that group and actually what authority they have and what they do. Could you tell me, as a member of that group, how often they meet and how often they take action; and have they done something recently? And are there reports sent out by this particular group?

MR. BERNANKE: Yes, Congressman. The President's Working Group was convened

by the President, I believe, after the 1987 stock market crash. It meets irregularly, I would guess about four or five times a year, but I am not exactly sure. And its primary function is advisory, to prepare reports. I mentioned earlier that we have been asked to prepare a report on the terrorism risk insurance. So that is what we generally do.

MR. PAUL: In the media you will find articles that will claim that it is a lot more than an advisory group you know, if there is a stock market crash, that you literally have a lot of authority, you know, to impose restrictions on the market. And we are talking about many trillions of dollars slushing around in all the financial markets, and this involves Treasury and, of course, the Fed, as well as the SEC and the CFTC. So there is a lot of potential there.

And the reason this came to my attention was just recently there was an article that actually made a charge that out of this group came actions to interfere with the prices of General Motors stock. Have you read that, or do you know anything about that?

MR. BERNANKE: No, sir, I don't.

MR. PAUL: Because they were charging that there was a problem with General Motors, and then there was a spike in GM's stock prices.

But back to the issue of the meeting. You tell me it meets irregularly, but there are minutes kept, or are there reports made on this group?

MR. BERNANKE: I believe there are records kept by the staff. These are staff mostly from Treasury, but also from the other agencies.

MR. PAUL: And they would be available to us in the committee?

MR. BERNANKE: I don't know. I am sorry, I don't know.

MR. PAUL: The other question I have deals with a comment made by one of the members of the Federal Reserve Board just recently. He made a statement which was a rather common statement made. He expressed a relief that the economy was weakening, mainly – inferring that the weakening economy would help contain inflation. And I hear these comments a lot of times, the economy is too strong, and therefore we need a weaker economy. If this assumption is correct – would you agree that this assumption – that a weaker economy is helpful when you are worried about inflation?

MR. BERNANKE: Congressman, as I talked about in my testimony, we need to go to a sustainable pace. We need to have a pace which matches the underlying productive capacity; that will probably be a bit less robust than the last few years, because over the last few years we were also reemploying underutilized resources, and going forward we don't have that slack to put to work.

MR. PAUL: But if you accept the principle, as it seemed to be in this quote, that if you are worried about inflation, you slow up the economy, and then inflation is brought down, it is lessened, it infers that inflation is caused by economic growth, and I don't happen to accept that, because most people accept the fact that inflation is really a monetary phenomenon. And it also introduces the notion that growth is bad, and yet I see growth as good. Whether it is 3 or 4 or 5 or 6, if you don't have monetary inflation, we don't need to worry, because if you have good growth in the marketplace rather than artificial growth, that it is this growth that causes your productivity to increase. You have an increase in productivity, and it does help bring prices down, but it doesn't deal with inflation.

And I think what I am talking about here could relate to the concerns of the gentleman from Massachusetts about real wages. There is a lot of concern about real wages versus nominal wages, but I think it is a characteristic of an economy that is based on fiat currency that is just losing its value that it is inevitable that the real labor goes down. As a matter of fact, Keynes advocated it. He realized that in a slump, that real wages had to go down; and he believed that you could get real wages down by inflation, that the nominal wage doesn't come on and keep the nominal wage up, have the real wage come down and sort of deceive the working man. But it really doesn't work because ultimately the working man knows he is losing, and he demands cost of living increases.

So could you help me out in trying to understand why we should ever attack economic growth? Why can't we just say economic growth is good and it helps lower prices because it increases productivity?

MR. BERNANKE: Congressman, I agree with you. Growth doesn't cause inflation; what causes inflation is monetary conditions or financial conditions that stimulate spending which grows more quickly that the underlying capacity of the economy to produce. Anything that increases the economy to produce, be it greater productivity, greater workforce, other factors that are productive, is only positive. It reduces inflation.

MR. PAUL: Do you see our deficits that we produce – and that you have control on – as a burden to the Fed in managing monetary affairs and maintaining interest rates as well as maybe even living with a lower increase in the money supply?

MR. BERNANKE: Well, in our short-term monetary policymaking, we are able to adjust for the conditions of fiscal policy, however they may be. I think fiscal issues are more important in the long-term sense because of the long-term obligations we have, for example, for entitlements. We have not found the fiscal situation to be a major impediment to our short-term management of monetary policy.

August 24, 2006

Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas. END

Re: "Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas. END"

As shocking as the following may read, I rise in agreement with some of my more conservative blogging colleagues on the integrity (mixed with a pinch of urban mythology) of Rep. Ron Paul.