Author: Campaign For Liberty Blog

By Matt Holdridge

In November of 2007, Bill Kauffman gave an excellent speech for ISI titled “Wendell Berry on War and Peace: Or, Port William Versus the Empire“. 

For those of you unfamiliar with Wendell Berry, he is an “American man of letters”, academic, cultural and economic critic, farmer and prolific author.

The son of a tobacco farmer, Berry has written some of the best novels, short stories, poems, and essays from his farm in Port Royal, Kentucky for more than 40 years. 

Berry’s nonfiction is a dialog about the life he values. The good life, according to Berry, includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence, and the interconnectedness of life.

As Berry states in his letter, The Failure of War (1999), “In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to “the enemy” the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill “combatants” without killing “noncombatants,” it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.”

Bill Kauffman, in a speech only he could give, brings a few of Berry’s characters to life in a profound critique of empire and a robust defense of home. 

This is an excellent speech that has an exceptional message. I encourage you to listen to it and perhaps share it with your friends, family, or neighbors; they may not think the same about war afterward. 

Listen to the speech here.

By Matt Hawes

We’ll have to see what Dodd unveils later today, but it looks to be exactly what we expected.

Via The New York Times:

The legislation would create a consumer protection agency within the Federal Reserve to write rules governing mortgages, credit cards and other financial products, said the people, who insisted on anonymity because the details were still in flux….

The bill would also reshape the regulatory role of the Fed. It would be entrusted for the first time with oversight of all of the largest and most interconnected financial companies, even if they are not banks….

Read the rest.

By Matt Holdridge

Via Fox News:

Everyone’s heard the advertisement that claims, “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” While that’s questionable, one thing that is not questionable is that what happens in the Texas education battle will not just stay in Texas.

What your kids learn about historical figures like Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein most likely depends on what happens in Texas in the next two days.

Texas is in the process of adopting its social studies standards, which only happens every ten years. The standards cover U.S. Government, American History, World History, and more, and they affect how students in grades K – 12 see America, its founding principles, and its heroes for the next decade.

More than that, because Texas is one of the largest consumers of textbooks in the nation, publishers use these curriculum standards for textbooks that are distributed in nearly every state in the union. Thus, what happens in Texas will impact the nation.

The Washington Examiner details a few of the proposed changes being made to history and economics textbooks in Texas. For instance:

• Question the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government
• Cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state
• Present Republican political philosophies and figures in a more positive light, including Joe McCarthy
• Stress the superiority of American capitalism while eliminating the word “capitalism” from the text
• Refer to the United States form of government as a “constitutional republic,” rather than “democratic republic”
• Give Confederate president Jefferson Davis equal footing with Abraham Lincoln
• Cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state”)
• Consistently defeated proposals to include more Latino figures as role models, though they failed to eliminate mention of Thurgood Marshall from the textbooks (he was the first black Supreme Court Justice and instrumental in the 1954 decision, Brown-v-Board of Education)
• Banned the children’s book “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” because they thought the author had also written a book on Marxism

The only real truth in history is that it has been interpreted since the words, “This is the Showing forth of the Inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassos…” This is why I can’t help but be uncomfortable with this news. 

Even if we acknowledge that there is a “liberal bias” in history/economic education, or sympathise with the school board’s cause, is creating a statewide mandated curriculum the answer? I personally would argue no. 

Isn’t it just as insidious for people who profess to be “conservative” and for limited government to use the power of the state to “indoctrinate” children into their belief structure? 

There isn’t a one size fits all solution to our education problem, be it liberal, conservative, religious or secular. Education, like almost all issues, is something best dealt with within the smallest of political units, namely the family. 

What are your thoughts? 

By Andrew Ward

After years of being on life support, the government’s decades-old insurance-turned retirement program is once again running into demographic and economic reality.  The Associated Press reports that for the first time since the last Congressional overhaul in the 1980s, Social Security is projected to pay out more in benefits than it brings in through taxation by nearly $29 billion.

Don’t let guys like former Enron-adviser Paul Krugman tell you that there’s a magical “trust fund” out there that will buy us some time.  The so-called “trust fund” is little more than approximately $2.5 trillion dollars of IOUs from the Treasury.  This intergovernmental debt is the product of years of a spend-thrift government automatically depriving the program’s reserves to pay for other things (e.g. war, bailouts).  Yes, this does mean that the “balanced budgets” of the 90s were a farce.

Now, with the shortfall in revenue and the baby boomer generation eagerly moving toward retirement, you can expect the some level of benefits to be cut, the end of the payroll cap, a rise of the official “retirement age,” and an increase of taxes to cover the shortfall in revenue.  Oh, and monetary inflation.

An aside: Back in 2005 there was a rather positive push by the Bush administration to reform this so-called “third rail” of politics.  The national youth group that I was a part of lobbied to grant individuals (especially the youth and poor persons) the ability to set aside a percentage of our payroll taxes into personal accounts, where workers would be allowed to invest in the stock market.  Sure, this solution wasn’t the least bit ideal, and maybe last year’s the stock market crash would have embarrassed the program, but big points were made in our efforts: the monopoly system is not stable, we need choices, we need out of this enormous Ponzi Scheme.

By Matt Hawes

Via the Washington Post:

The potential picks also suggest that the president wants the Fed to do more to restrict actions by banks that could endanger consumers, regardless of what consumer protection responsibilities the Fed ends up with in financial reform legislation now under consideration. The central bank failed to protect consumers from dangerous borrowing practices during the last economic boom, though it has taken more aggressive steps in the past three years.…

Read the rest.

By Matt Hawes

Campaign for Liberty’s Kevin Brett interviews writer and radio host Jack Hunter (aka “The Southern Avenger”) at CPAC 2010.

The interview covers topics such as real conservatism, a true conservative foreign policy, the political climate at CPAC, and the Ron Paul effect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmnWQLS4hQI

By Matt Holdridge

The Daily Caller is reporting that a new report is out by the bank examiner hired by Lehman Brothers to assess the reasons for the financial company’s collapse and, the final product is not pretty.

It story quotes the New York Times saying,

“But the examiner, Anton R. Valukas, also for the first time, laid out what the report characterized as “materially misleading” accounting gimmicks that Lehman used to mask the perilous state of its finances. The bank’s bankruptcy, the largest in American history, shook the financial world. Fears that other banks might topple in a cascade of failures eventually led Washington to arrange a sweeping rescue for the nation’s financial system.

 

According to the report, Lehman used what amounted to financial engineering to temporarily shuffle $50 billion of troubled assets off its books in the months before its collapse in September 2008 to conceal its dependence on leverage, or borrowed money. Senior Lehman executives, as well as the bank’s accountants at Ernst & Young, were aware of the moves, according to Mr. Valukas, the chairman of the law firm Jenner & Block and a former federal prosecutor, who filed the report in connection with Lehman’s bankruptcy case.”

 

The Daily Caller states another angle to the report from Naked Capitalism.

“It also emerges that the NY Fed, and thus Timothy Geithner, were at a minimum massively derelict in the performance of their duties, and may well be culpable in aiding and abetting Lehman in accounting fraud and Sarbox violations.”

Read the rest here.

By Matt Hawes

Via CNN:

A Democratic leadership source told CNN Radio that the legislative push begins Monday when the House Budget Committee is expected to vote on a key procedural piece of the health care package.

That measure will not contain new policy language, but it ignites the process, known as reconciliation, that Democrats are using to pass and change the Senate health care bill….

Read the rest.

Click here to get information for the House Budget Committee and be sure to contact your representative if he is on it.

By Matt Hawes

In a Politico piece out today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s John Berlau and Jonathan Moore point to the bailout and subsequent practices of AIG as an example of what a public option in health care could look like in the marketplace.

Since September 2008, the government has infused billions into an insurer that provides coverage for cars, homes and business assets. Once this insurer got government funding, it began slashing premiums for many of the insurance policies it sells. Its private-sector competitors have cried foul, but new customers keep signing up.

Chances are that most readers have heard of this insurer – just not referred to as a “public option.” Rather, it is known by its initials: AIG.

Though the primary argument for the government to pour more than $180 billion into American International Group’s coffers was to save the financial system from the company’s bad mortgage bets, the infusions have given the company an advantage over its rivals in its daily businesses….

AIG cut premiums by 34 percent, for example, to underbid three other firms and win renewal of a policy with the U.S. Olympic Committee, the Journal reported. It pried away a rival’s contract covering the city-owned airport in Mesa, Ariz., by bidding about 30 percent less. The company assuaged concerns about safety and soundness by pointing directly to the government infusion that, it says, “strengthens [AIG’s] capital positions.”…

The Government Accountability Office and the insurance department of Pennsylvania are investigating whether the company has been charging inadequate amounts for the risks involved in its policies since it received bailout money…..

Read the rest

By Matt Hawes

Read the Roll Call piece on the Senate parliamentarian’s ruling here.

By Matt Hawes

On Freedom Watch, Judge Andrew Napolitano interviews The Independent Institute’s Dr. Robert Higgs concerning how government intervention prolongs economic crises.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ij7l2KVwPE

By Matt Hawes

Campaign for Liberty’s Kevin Brett interviews historian and author Tom Woods during CPAC 2010.

The interview covers topics such as the tea parties, the political climate, the nullification movement, how Tom came to hold his beliefs, and the Ron Paul effect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv59mFGmIdI

By Andrew Ward

Yesterday, I joined Deborah Stockton, President of the National Independent Consumers and Farmers Association (NICFA), and Joel Salatin, author of the wildly popular “Everything I Want to Do is Illegal,” in lobbying our senators to vote against S.510, the so-called “Food Safety Modernization Act.”

We were not alone.  Many other consumers and producers of local foods spoke with their representatives about the dangers and consequences of granting the FDA even more power over the food “industry,” which would undoubtedly put an unfair burden on the suppliers of  arguably the most healthy food in America.

S.510 gives sweeping new powers to the inefficient FDA to invade local farms if they have “reason to believe” a food-borne illness exists, and quarantine or shut the farm down.  An FDA agent could decide that raw milk, for instance, was “adulterated” or “misbranded,” and that therefore the farm should be shut down.  On top of that, the bill would also apply strict internationalist standards, which include the slaughterhouse-destroying HAACP and International Plant Protection Convention’s burdensome “Pest Free” standard, to small farms.  In short, it’s the Patriot Act of Foods, and will bring unabsorbable regulations to small restaurants, farmers, and individual producers of food. 

The belief from Congress seems to be that everyone involved with food needs to be regulated by the government in order to reduce the risk of mass amounts of people getting sick.  What they don’t seem to understand is that the farmer to consumer system is already regulated by a market that thrives on reputation instead of a rubber stamp by government bureaucrats.  If there is ever an issue with the food, the consumer goes directly to the intermediary or farmer, and the problem is resolved.  The suppliers are held accountable by their clientele who are naturally in a position of power. 

Contrast this kind of decentralized, consumer-driven regulation with the political FDA monopoly, which tends to let barely-tested drugs and foods through, while barring potential life-saving products from entry into the larger market.  In the government’s monopolized system of regulation there isn’t substantial accountability, and producers of harmful products and foods have less incentive to ensure that what they are supplying to the public is safe.

Well, the Utopian mindset of Congress-persons was certainly on display yesterday, but progress was made to convince many well-meaning statists that their laws were at best ineffective, and at worst destructive to localities.  A reception full of delicious restaurant-prepared local and farmer food was held after the hours of lobbying, and Congressman Ron Paul was kind enough to speak to the large crowd of activists and congressional staffers about liberty and health freedom.  It was overall a very productive lobbying day, and many minds were open to alternatives to government regulation as the answer to our health and safety woes.

Despite existing corporatist laws on the books that make it difficult for small time growers and suppliers of food to survive, the market for unsterilized, unpasteurized, organic farmer food is skyrocketing.  From the looks of it, this “well-intended” piece of legislation is aimed at crippling these grassroots markets to the delight of giant international food conglomerates.  So even if you are not (yet) a producer or consumer of these foods, please take the time to contact your senators and tell them to oppose S.510, the anti-farmer, anti-locality Food Sterlization Act.

By Matt Hawes

Via the Washington Post:

At the same time, Obama intends to lobby wavering House Democrats to vote for a Senate version of the legislation and to support the subsequent reconciliation process, which Republicans have characterized as an unjustified use of majority power. Among the rewards Obama is ready to offer, White House officials said, are election-year visits to competitive congressional districts, where a presidential appearance can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds….

And just for fun:

“I don’t believe we should give either the government or the insurance companies more control over health care in America,” Obama said. “I want to give you more control over health care in America.”…

Riiiiight.

Read the rest. (Thanks to N.S.)

By brandonwbarrios

True reform of our Health Care Industry while respecting constitutional government, free markets and individual liberty.

If you had the opportunity to watch the health care summit, there were a few noteworthy suggestions made by the Republican side.  One or two were liked, most were dismissed, and none of the suggestions have been adopted in the current bill or discussed further.

For example, a suggestion was made to allow health insurance competition across state lines.  This suggestion was dismissed by President Obama as favoring more basic, inexpensive insurance plans.  These plans would attract more business.  In other words, a considerable amount of Americans would find enough value in basic, inexpensive plans that they’d choose to actually purchase insurance instead of foregoing health insurance altogether.

What can be derived from President Obama’s dismissal is that providing inexpensive insurance plans to the most amount of Americans is not the goal for this health care reform bill.  Special interests hold priority over allowing meaningful competition amongst private insurers.  This competition, as noted at the health care summit by President Obama himself, would lead to more customers buying the more basic, inexpensive plans.

Apparently, that the customers make this decision of their own volition is what the administration has a problem with.  This type of thinking hardly respects an individual’s economic liberty.

In the case we haven’t made it obvious enough, our Campaign for Liberty office is currently working on a major petition push.  This petition represents and voices our supporters’ opposition to governmental take over of the health care industry.

A petition can be filled out here: Keep Government from taking over Health Care Petition

Campaign for Liberty does not stop there, however.

Our office is advocating on behalf of three pieces of health care reform legislation at the federal level.  This legislation seeks to improve the health care industry while respecting free markets, constitutional government, and individual liberty.  

One of the pieces of legislation aims to circumvent the federal government’s attempt to force mandate the purchase of insurance upon all citizens or otherwise pay a hefty fine/fee/penalty/tax.  This will be achieved by making law the individual’s liberty to make economic decisions for themselves- stating the federal government cannot force a citizen’s purchase of health insurance.

Another piece of legislation pushes for the allowance of health insurance competition across state lines.  In a normal operating market, these insurers must compete for customers through the offering of better products at cheaper prices.  Currently, the special favors granted to health care insurers by government have allowed the industry to overlook the foundation of a private business- to offer a product or service of value in order to attract customers.

Information on this very important legislation can be found on our website: C4L’s Operation Health Freedom

Nationwide, we are witnessing the advancement of state level legislation that follows our federal level legislation.  There is state level legislation just passed by Virginia’s General Assembly and soon to be signed by the Governor that aims to nullify possible federal legislation mandating the forced purchase of health insurance upon its residents.

Lawmakers from 44 states have introduced measures warning Congress to respect the states’ rights and dozens of other resolutions opposing federal legislation on issues that include gun control, state commerce and health care.

These are very important precedents being set state by state by concerned citizens.  The Campaign for Liberty office fights on many of these fronts.  There are many legislative efforts currently being undertaken by C4L, and your support is critical to seeing them through.

By Matt Holdridge

From the New York Times:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Kansas City Board of Education voted Wednesday night to close almost half of the city’s public schools, accepting a sweeping and contentious plan to shrink the system in the face of dwindling enrollment, budget cuts and a $50 million deficit.

In a 5-to-4 vote, the members endorsed the Right-Size plan, proposed by the schools superintendent, John Covington, to close 28 of the city’s 61 schools and cut 700 of 3,000 jobs, including those of 285 teachers. The closings are expected to save $50 million, erasing the deficit from the $300 million budget.

What’s your opinion on this news? 

By Matt Hawes

Kudos to Congressman John Duncan for an excellent speech yesterday on our never-ending wars during Wednesday’s debate on the resolution to end the war in Afghanistan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMnj8yd8dqA

By Matt Hawes

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank has written a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke asking him to “fully investigate” possible incidents of Fed wrongdoing during the 1970s and 1980s.  Congressman Paul raised concerns about these incidents during a recent Committee hearing.

“During your Humphrey-Hawkins testimony before this Committee last week, Representative Ron Paul raised questions about inappropriate political interference with the Federal Reserve System resulting in hidden transfers of resources to facilitate crimes during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, and to Iraq for weapons purchases during the 1980s.  These are serious allegations and must be fully investigated.  I expect that you will do so promptly, and share the results of your investigation with Congress.”

Read the rest.

By Anthony Gregory

This has become the mainstream consensus, as Glenn Greenwald explains, and much of it has to do with a Democratic “peace” president in the White House. Americans used to be impatient about this war going on and on, but now it looks like much of the country is resigned to it.

By the way, I’m blogging this from a plane, a good reminder that just as we all get used to government folly, we also get used to market wonders and come to take them for granted.

By Matt Hawes

During our activities at this year’s CPAC, C4L’s Kevin Brett interviewed several of our speakers.

This interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano covers nullification, secession, the current political climate, Ron Paul’s influence, and more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY1QtmFpP3I