Showing posts with label senate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label senate. Show all posts

Saturday, July 28, 2012

DO NOT CALL HARRY REID on Audit the Fed, not unless you want it to fail 23-77



Do not call Harry Reid on Audit the Fed, not unless you want it to fail by a vote of 23-77. Putting Audit the Fed to senate floor for a vote is a guaranteed FAIL.

Audit the Fed desperate needs co-sponsors because it only has 23.

The senate's 60 vote cloture rule is a very difficult hurdle given the composition of the senate - 47 Republicans, 51 Democrats and 2 Independents (who typically vote with the Dems). All 23 of the current co-sponsors are Republicans so there are 24 Republicans who are not on board, including 4 states with 2 Republicans senators who have not co-sponsored Audit the Fed - Alabama, Indiana, Kansas and Tennessee.

Game Plan

How to lobby a congress critter:

Bombard them! First, plan to call, fax, e-mail and write a letter. Also hit their local offices. In big states, senators have multiple local offices (address, fax and telephone numbers are on their Senate websites).

ALWAYS BE CALM AND POLITE. DO NOT SCREAM AND SHOUT AT THEM.

Try to get through to a legislative aide who is handling the issue.

Get everybody you know to do the same thing over and over.

Congess critters only care about one thing - the next election and nothing else. If they fear they could be voted out of office, they will co-sponsors Audit the Fed.

Senators Who Need to be Contacted

We need to first focus on Republican Senators and then Democrat Senators. There are 47 Republican Senators listed below - their names and term expiration. Senators highlighted in yellow are already Audit the Fed co-sponsors.  States with 2 Republican senators who are not co-sponsors of Audit the Fed are highlighted in red.

AL Sessions      2014
     Shelby          2016
AK Murkowski   2016
AZ Kyl                2012 (retiring)
     McCain         2016
AR Boozman     2016
GA Chambliss   2014
     Isakson         2016
FL Rubio           2016
ID Risch            2014
     Crapo           2016
IL Kirk                2016
IN Lugar            2012 (lost primary)
    Coats            2016
IA Grassley       2016
KS Roberts       2014
     Moran          2016
KY Paul            2016 wrote the bill
     McConnell    2014
LA Vitter            2016
ME Snowe        2012 retiring
      Collins        2014
MA Brown        2012
MS Cochran     2014
      Wicker        2012
MO Blunt          2016
NE Johanns      2014
NV Heller          2012
NH Ayotte         2016
NC Burr            2016
ND Hoeven       2016
OH Portman     2016
OK Coburn        2016
      Inhofe          2014
PA Toomey       2016
SC DeMint        2016
     Graham        2014
SD Thune          2016
TN Corker         2012
      Alexander    2014
TX Cornyn        2014
      Hutchison    2012 retiring
UT Hatch           2012
     Lee               2016
WI Johnson       2016
WY Barrasso     2012
      Enzi             2014

We've got a lot of work to do so let's do it!

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Audit the Fed - What Next? Here's What You Need to Know.


With Audit the Fed (HR 459) passing in the House on July 25, 2012 with 326 Yeas to 98 Neas, it's on to the Senate where the challenges will be formidable. For starters, the Senate cloture rules requires 60 votes. Presently, the Senate version of Rand Paul's Audit the Fed (S. 202) has 23 co-sponsors (all Republicans) and 3 of those co-sponsors only signed on after it was clear that HR 459 would indeed pass in the House and by a very wide margin. 

Activists are screaming that we should bombard Harry Reid with phone calls. That's a HUGE error in strategy and tactics at this juncture because it will fail. Forget Dingy Harry. We need to first focus on Republican Senators and then Democrat Senators. There are 47 Republican Senators listed below - their names and term expiration. Senators highlighted in yellow are co-sponsors.

AL Sessions      2014
     Shelby          2016
AK Murkowski   2016
AZ Kyl                2012 (retiring)
     McCain         2016
AR Boozman     2016
GA Chambliss   2014
     Isakson         2016
FL Rubio           2016
ID Risch            2014
     Crapo           2016
IL Kirk                2016
IN Lugar            2012 (lost primary)
    Coats            2016
IA Grassley       2016
KS Roberts       2014
     Moran          2016
KY Paul            2016 wrote the bill
     McConnell    2014
LA Vitter            2016
ME Snowe        2012 retiring
      Collins        2014
MA Brown        2012
MS Cochran     2014
      Wicker        2012
MO Blunt          2016
NE Johanns      2014
NV Heller          2012
NH Ayotte         2016
NC Burr            2016
ND Hoeven       2016
OH Portman     2016
OK Coburn        2016
      Inhofe          2014
PA Toomey       2016
SC DeMint        2016
     Graham        2014
SD Thune          2016
TN Corker         2012
      Alexander    2014
TX Cornyn        2014
      Hutchison    2012 retiring
UT Hatch           2012
     Lee               2016
WI Johnson       2016
WY Barrasso     2012
      Enzi             2014

AL, IN, KS and TN all have two Republicans Senators that are not on board.  They need to be pounded into submission, as do all the other Republican Senators who have not yet co-sponsored Audit the Fed.

Only 5 states have both Republican Senators on board:  ID, MS, OK, SC and UT.

 We've got a ton of work to do to get this in the Senate:


Thursday, July 12, 2012

When I Would Hold My Nose and Vote Republican


As a Libertarian and a Ron Paul Republican, I rarely vote Republican because I've never met an establishment Republican who wasn't a socialist, a Marxist, a warmonger, a usurper of the Constitution, an enemy of civil liberties and a tax and spend progressive.

That said, there are circumstances where I would hold my nose and vote Republican.  The US Senate. Screwed up as America is, one of the few things we have going for us is our sovereignty and while it's constantly under attack by the UN and its treaties that are attempting to impose global totalitarian government, treaties are extremely difficult to get ratified.

A treaty must be ratified by 2/3 of the US Senate and that's a very difficult thing to accomplish.

The Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), a horrifying nightmare of a treaty that literally puts 70% of the earth's surface under UN control and taxing authority, has been sloshing around un-ratified since the days of Ronald Reagan who opposed it.  Clinton attempted to get LOST ratified and failed.  Even Bush couldn't get LOST ratified despite several attempts and a Republican controlled Senate from 2003 through 2008.  The elites of the Bush Crime Family are extreme advocates for ratifying UN treaties because they are indeed major power brokers in what has been dubbed the New World Order.

Republicans are less likely than the Dems to ratify sovereignty slashing treaties.  The Dems, on the other hand, are addicted to sovereignty slashing supranational international bodies like the UN and its treaties.  It doesn't mean that all Republicans are supportive of US sovereignty, they aren't, but Republicans are generally far less likely to cede US sovereignty to the UN.

If I lived in a swing state with a tight senate race, I'd definitely be holding my nose and voting Republican unless I knew for certain that the candidate was a UN lover (George Allen in Virginia comes to mind).  While I'm a fanatical liberty activist, I'm also a fanatical US sovereignty activist.

Without our sovereignty, we have nothing and no hope whatsoever of solving our problems.

Meanwhile, Obama and the Dems are pushing for ratification of the UN's Small Arms Treaty, a direct assault on American 2nd amendment rights.  Yes, the UN and the Dems are fanatical about disarming us and the Republican senators are our best bet when it comes to preserving our sovereignty and constitutional rights (now that's something that really makes me cringe!).

Right now the Senate consists of 51 Democrats, 47 Republicans and 2 Independents (who generally vote with the Dems).  Another reason to increase Republican representation in the Senate is Obamacare.  The senate has unique rules, specifically its cloture vote of 60 which means that a simple majority doesn't pass a bill.  However, there are a few exceptions and one of those exceptions is budget reconciliation.  Obamacare taxes can actually be overturned with 51 Senate votes.





Friday, June 15, 2012

Secret Sovereignty Slashing Treaty Being Negotiated in Secret


Liberty activists are accustomed to knowing acronyms like SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, NDAA, LOST and many other liberty slashing legislative and treaty initiatives. Apparently, there's a new nightmare being brewed in DC called TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Yesterday, The Huffington Post alarmingly wrote about TPP.
Obama was warned, frankly, about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Given his status as a center-left president, the public's burgeoning disapproval of free-trade agreements, and the fact that he criticized such agreements when President Bush made them, he really should have known that such treaties were not for him.
And yet he chose to plow ahead. As I noted last year, the omens were not good. After the failed promises of NAFTA, a job-destroying trade deficit that has grown despite a long series of free-trade agreements, and ever-more-aggressive foreign mercantilism, it really should have been obvious that America needed a new trade strategy.
Now, thanks to a leak, we get to see that the Trans-Pacific Partnership really is as bad as feared. The text of the treaty had been kept from the public during two years of closed-door negotiations, and now we know why: It does not reflect any of the changes that Obama promised as a candidate. It's more Bush-era same-old, same-old.
The proposed agreement would embrace Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam to start. Eventually, its advocates hope, it will include every nation on the Pacific rim, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico, Russia, and China.
Read the rest here
The Huffington Post 

Apparently, something super sneaky is going on and it's so sneaky and backhanded that even Congress Critters are complaining because they've been shut out of the super secret, super sneaky deal. Imagine that! Really, Congress is notorious for being a most willing and compliant accomplice to their masters; the usual suspects include banksters, defense contractors, campaign coffer filling corporatist rent seekers, The CFR, the Bilderbergs etc.

One of my favorite blogs, washingtonsblog.com, provides details on why some in Congress are quite upset with TPP.
Treaty Threatens Global Government … Run by Giant Corporations
The normally-reserved Yves Smith asks whether Obama should be impeached over it.
Democratic Senator Wyden – the head of the committee which is supposed to oversee it – is so furious about the lack of access that he has introduced legislation to force disclosure.
Republican House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa is so upset by it that he has leaked a document on his website to show what’s going on.
What is everyone so furious about?
An international treaty being negotiated in secret which would not only crack down on Internet privacy much more than SOPA or ACTA, but would actually destroy the sovereignty of the U.S. and all other signatories.
It is called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Wyden is the chairman of the trade committee in the Senate … the committee which is supposed to have jurisdiction over the TPP. Wyden is also on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and so he and his staff have high security clearances and are normally able to look at classified documents.
And yet Wyden and his staff have been denied access to the TPP’s text.
Read the rest here
Washington's Blog

Nobody really knows what's in the TPP because no one has been briefed on the specifics of the treaty nor have relevant legislative bodies, like Congress, been provided with copies of the document.

The Constitution is very clear on the treaty ratification process. A treaty must be ratified by 2/3 of the Senate. But President Obama is deliberately bypassing the treaty ratification process by classifying treaties as 'Executive Agreements' that he alone has the power to negotiate and ratify.

About the same time the American people, civil liberties activists and tech companies were fighting SOPA at the beginning of 2012, Obama signed ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.  Obama effectively and unilaterally ratified a significant treaty with an executive agreement.  This is what The New American said about ACTA:
Before the American people were protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the president managed to sign an international treaty which would permit foreign companies to demand that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) remove web content in the United States without any legal oversight. Entitled the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA ), the treaty was signed by Obama on October 1, 2011, but it is currently a subject of discussion because the White House is circulating a petition demanding that senators ratify the treaty.

What’s worse is that the White House has done some maneuvering — characterizing the treaty as an "executive agreement" — thereby bypassing approval by members of Congress. Concerned by this action of the administration, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore., above left) sent a letter to President Obama in which he declared:

"It may be possible for the U.S. to implement ACTA or any other trade agreement, once validly entered, without legislation if the agreement requires no change in U.S. law. But regardless of whether the agreement requires changes in U.S. law ... the executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement covering issues delegated by the Constitution to Congress' authority, absent congressional approval."
Read the rest here
The New American

Treaties are very important agreements because they affect US sovereignty and relationships with foreign nations. Shockingly, we no longer have treaties with individual nations and have resorted to these hideous multi-national treaties that are typically and specifically drafted to advance global governance under the UN and its governing bodies. Our founders envisioned the treaty process as a contractual mechanism to accommodate mutually beneficial relationships to both nations, like ending tariffs to promote free trade.  But our founders never supported the massive give away of US sovereignty - it would have been unthinkable for them to defer to an international body after having just waged a successful revolution against the most power military empire on the planet at the time.

These multi-national treaties are defined as supranational governing bodies and they pose extremely grave threats to US sovereignty because once we enter into these treaties, US sovereignty automatically becomes subordinate to an international governing body that holds massive powers over America and the American People.

The June Chantilly, VA meet-up of the Bilderberg group was attended by anti-NWO activists but there was virtually no mainstream media reporting on the protesters.  The folks advancing a totalitarian global governance agenda are very powerful and extremely determined.  They make it perfectly clear that their goal is the abolition of the nation state and its sovereignty.  It's all about forcibly and militarily demanding that every nation on earth submit to its powers.  Jim Tucker, a guy who has been following the Bilderbergs and its players for years, wrote a piece describing the Chantilly, VA event and its power players.
Internationalists at the annual Bilderberg confab in Chantilly, Va. gathered to press on for integrating the world under one global government....
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) was denounced by a gang of Bilderberg boys wolfing down cocktails in the lobby on Thursday, May 31. Paul has been denounced for years because he opposes U.S involvement in foreign wars....
“It would be much easier to get the world to accept our policies if Paul and other ‘nationalists’ would disappear,” said one. “I’d like to charter a jet, hire a Muslim suicide pilot and give them all a free ticket to hell.”
Read the rest here
Fat Cats Running Scared
American Free Press 

Most Americans remain clueless when it comes to international treaties and their governing bodies.  I sincerely doubt that many Americans have even heard of ACTA.  Yet, ACTA has the raw and absolute power to instruct the US government to shut down websites it doesn't like and/or remove website content.

Despite the wars, oppressive government, the miserable economy, bankster bailouts, the wholesale slashing of civil liberties, the militarized police state and never ending corporate welfare, the Internet has been a godsend for the people.  For the first time in human history the people have this incredibly magnificent tool at their fingertips and it enables us to communicate, share information, blog, educate each other and even build a powerful alternative media.

I remember being young and confused back in the 1970's and 1980's.  Back then we only had government controlled ABC, CBS and NBC.  The 1960's were tumultuous times that bore witness to the murders of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War and the civil rights marches.   Young Americans were shocked and appalled by these unfolding horrors.  We wanted to understand.  We wanted answers. We wanted justice.   Many gravitated to the libertarian movement in the early 1970's because it brought intellectual clarity to a world otherwise gone mad.  By exposing precisely why governments are inherently anti-liberty and why they always morph into something evil, vile and hideous, these early liberty activists kept the flame of the liberty candle burning through the dark pre-Internet era.

Now we've got the Ron Paul Revolution that has successfully advanced the liberty movement beyond small groups engaged in intellectual discourse.  The Revolution is now a full blown political movement that is encircling the Republican Party while even drawing in sane Dems fed up with endless wars and Banksters Gone Wild.

In America, we no longer have the constitutionally mandated 3 branches of government to create even the slightest semblance of a  balance of powers.  We've got an elected absolute monarch who is above the law, above the constitution and vested with so much unaccountable power that he, along with his partners in crime, have wiped out the middle class of the freest and most prosperous nation ever to exist.  America is no long a free or prosperous nation.  From a proud creditor nation  with the strongest middle class in human history to a pathetically bankrupt debtor nation on its deathbed, the politicians display remarkable 'Oscar' quality acting skills when they speak of American exceptionalism with a straight face.  

What destroyed America?  The concentration of wealth and power into the hands of the banksters, military and the fascist corporatists has not only destroyed America but is also creating a global industrial feudalism that is rapidly eradicating liberty in America and everywhere.  Yet, we as voters complacently submit to their will and are like wax for them to mold  into whatever they want us to be because we only exist to serve them and their agenda.

I though Bush was an absolute horror.  Obama is even worse. And if Romney wins the election in November, he will be Obushma on steroids.

A secret shadow government has ruled America for a very long time.  It won't be long before we turn on our computers, smart phones and TV's and are welcomed to the Orwellian UN media.   The industrial feudal plantation has gone global as the merger of big business and big government stretches its oppressive tentacles over every nook and cranny of the planet.