Ron Paul for President 2008 -- There is Hope for America!

Friday, July 27, 2007

With additions about CODEX, the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), the rights to produce grass-fed meats, buy supplements and raw milk, and an updated analysis of Ron Paul's potential to win the Republican nomination added on December 31, 2007.

Straw poll results added on January 1, 2008.

Lessons From the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire Primary added on January 4, 2008 and updated on January 9, 2008.

Ron Paul's Defense of the Dollar added on January 9, 2008.

by Chris Masterjohn

When I started this web site two years ago, I did not expect to ever use it to endorse a political candidate. And in fact, just a month ago, I had no idea that the candidate I am now endorsing could have a chance of becoming the next president of the United States. Yet Ron Paul is not only the single candidate with a life and career founded on uncompromised and unwavering principle -- his candidacy is also gaining rapid momentum and has the promise of being the most important presidential candidacy in modern American history.

The Freedom to be Healthy

There is no question that health is political. The unholy alliance between Big Business and Big Government has given us artificial diets, cholesterol-lowering drugs, mega-farm subsidies and bans on unprocessed milk.

The National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) -- formed in 1985 during the "conservative" Reagan Administration -- has spent the first few years of the new millenium turning healthy people into patients. The panel aimed its 2003 cholesterol guidelines to triple the number of people taking statins; it expanded its guidelines even further in 2004. Eight out of nine members of the NCEP have -- surprise, surprise -- financial connections to statin manufacturers.

What do massive subsidies to the corn and soy industries give us? Grain-fed meat -- replete with its deficiencies of vitamin E, CLA and omega-3 fatty acids.

The FDA -- one dangerous noodle in an alphabet soup of unconstitutional federal bureaucracies -- is spending our tax money creating a massive paranoia campaign against unpasteurized milk. Meanwhile, its own data [figure 4] shows that raw milk is ten times less dangerous than deli meats! If only small farmers had the political clout that the manufacturers of drugs like Vioxx have, we health-conscious consumers might have the freedom to judge what we put into our own bodies.

Wherein lies our political hope against this massive, disease-promoting, thoroughly unconstitutional web of bureaucracy? It certainly isn't in the "compassionate conservatism" of the Bush Administration, whose idea of "compassion" is sending over 3,500 US troops and 75,000 Iraqi civilians to an early death in the Iraq war, and whose idea of "conservatism" is a prescription drug plan that will likely take over a trillion dollars from tax payers over the next ten years and hand it as a free gift to the drug-dealing pharmaceutical companies.

Fortunately, there is one presidential candidate who stands for freedom, for the rule of law, and who has during seventeen years of service upheld his oath to obey the United States Constitution with pristine integrity -- Congressman Ron Paul.

A Man of Principle

Congressman Ron Paul is not a politician. He is in every sense the antithesis of everything that this word has come to mean in modern America. Congressman Paul never does what is merely expedient, never justifies unjustifiable means with supposedly honorable ends, never makes alliances for the sake of getting ahead. Instead, he acts according to a fundamental principle: if you make an agreement, you keep it.

This is, perhaps, why Congressman Paul has been married to one woman, with whom he has five children and seventeen grandchildren, for fifty years. Dr. Paul is a medical doctor -- an obstetrician -- and has delivered over 4,000 babies. He is a faithful Christian; rather than exploiting his faith for political gain, however, he lives it in service to his family, his patients and his country. During his years of medical practice, which he continued part-time during his congressional service, he has never accepted Medicare or Medicaid; instead, he performed services for free or at discount when needed.

When Dr. Paul was sworn into office and made his oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, he took and continues to take that oath seriously and has obeyed it faithfully. He first entered politics in 1971 when Richard Nixon announced plans to depart from the gold standard -- anyone who reads James Madison's minutes of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 will see that the Founding Fathers considered "paper money" to be among the most dangerous of threats to liberty and sound government. During his first term, Paul delivered babies on Mondays and Saturdays, meanwhile quickly earning the nickname "Dr. No" in Congress for his consistent refusal to vote for any bill that was not expressly authorized by the Constitution. He proposed legislation to decrease Congressional salaries in proportion to inflation, has consistently refused participation in the lucrative Congressional pension program, and returns a portion of the funds allocated to his Congressional office back to the treasury each year.

Ron Paul was one of seventeen members of Congress who sued Bill Clinton in 1999 for violating the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973 during his war in Kosovo; the case was dismissed, however, on dubious grounds. In 2002, Congressman Paul introduced legislation to declare war on Iraq; he said he would not vote for the bill, but if we were to go to war, we ought to follow the Constitution and declare war. His fellow Republican Henry Hyde countered that declaring war is one of those "things in the Constitution that have been overtaken by events, by time," and that is "no longer relevant to a modern society," and called the notion "inappropriate" and "anachronistic." Yes, some people believe in enduring principles; others do not. Most of the latter become politicians.

Although Dr. Paul voted against the Iraq war, he has more support from the military than any of the other candidates. As of July, 2007, he garnered 26.2% of the contributions that members of the armed services have given to all nineteen presidential candidates and 49.5% of the contributions given to Republicans.

Dr. Paul has, with complete fidelity to the principles on which our country was founded, never voted to raise taxes, for an unbalanced budget, for a federal restriction on gun ownership, for an increase in congressional pay or for an increase in the power of the executive branch. He voted against the Patriot Act, against regulating the Internet, and against the Iraq war.

An Effective Congressman

Ron Paul has proposed numerous pieces of legislation that have never seen the light of day. Bills to abolish the income tax and the Federal Reserve never made it out of committee. Yet Congressional Quarterly named him one of the "50 Most Effective Members of Congress" from among the 535 members of both houses. He has successfully introduced amendments to end the pursuit of a National Identification Card and to ban federal teacher tests, both of which became federal law. He successfully prevented the Department of Housing and Urban Development from seizing a church in New York State through eminent domain. Most importantly, he has without fail been the uncompromising voice of liberty and conscience of the Congress.

Ron Paul on Health Freedom

On May 2, 2007, Congressman Paul introduced the Health Freedom Protection Act to the floor of Congress. In his speech, he lambasted the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for tyrannizing the health consumer:

FDA bureaucrats are so determined to frustrate consumers' access to truthful information that they are even evading their duty to comply with four federal court decisions vindicating consumers' First Amendment rights to discover the health benefits of foods and dietary supplements.

The FDA, he said, contributed to an estimated 10,000 preventable cases of neural tube defects by preventing consumers from obtaining information about the role of folic acid for years. It continues to prohibit consumers from obtaining essential information about glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate, omega-3 fatty acids, calcium, and other nutrients, and its policies will likely lead to the suffering of millions of Americans with unnecessary diseases. The legislation that Congressman Paul has introduced would prohibit the FDA and FTC from interfering with the use of free speech and the provision of scientific information to health consumers.

Dr. Paul also opposes Codex and international trade agreements associated with it like the WTO and CAFTA. Codex is a system of food and dietary supplement regulations organized by the UN that could lead to severe restrictions and increased costs for dietary supplements or even outright bans on some supplements. Congressman Paul wrote the following in July of 2005:

Does CAFTA, with its link to Codex, make it more likely or less likely that someday you will need a doctor’s prescription to buy even simple supplements like Vitamin C? The answer is clear. CAFTA means less freedom for you, and more control for bureaucrats who do not answer to American voters.

Pharmaceutical companies have spent billions of dollars trying to get Washington to regulate your dietary supplements like European governments do. So far, that effort has failed in America, in part because of a 1994 law called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Big Pharma and the medical establishment hate this Act, because it allows consumers some measure of freedom to buy the supplements they want. Americans like this freedom, however – especially the health conscious Baby Boomers.

This is why the drug companies support WTO and CAFTA. They see international trade agreements as a way to do an end run around American law and restrict supplements through international regulations.

Ron Paul and Raw Milk

Federal and state governments are revving up for an all-out assault on the right to drink raw milk. The FDA is using tax dollars to create sensationalist propaganda claiming -- using studies strongly biased against raw milk -- that raw milk is responsible for 0.4% of foodborne illness, and then concluding that it is "inherently dangerous" and that drinking it is "like playing Russian Roulette with your health."

California recently enacted a law taking effect on January 1, 2008 that its raw milk producers say may effectively end the booming raw milk industry in that state. Meanwhile, the recent deaths of two elderly men and one unborn child due to Listeria in pasteurized milk in Massachusetts has made the double standard with which federal and state governments treat this issue abundantly clear.

Ron Paul is the only presidental candidate defending the right to drink raw milk. He recently introduced a congressional bill that would overturn the Reagan executive order and FDA regulation banning the transport of raw milk across state lines. On the House floor, he called it an "unconstitutional restraint" and said that Americans who wish to consume raw milk have "the right to consume these products without having the federal government second-guess their judgment about what products best promote health."

One video on YouTube calls Ron Paul "The Raw Milk President."

NAIS and the Right of Small Farms and Pasture-Based Farms to Exist

Ron Paul is also the leading congressional opponent of the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) -- a draconian system of tracking all farm animals and even some pets by radio frequency microchips and sattelite technology promulgated by the USDA that threatens to wipe out the small farm and pasture-based farm.

According to one Vermont farmer:

Small Farmers who sell direct to their customers will be devastated. Small farmers already work at higher costs than the big factory farms. Under NAIS they’ll have to identify each and every animal at a high cost because they can’t use the group identification techniques of the big Agri-Biz corporations. The big guys do all-in/all-out animal management. Each mass group of animals are of one gene stock and the same age. The factory farms need only apply for one ID to cover the entire group of thousands of animals. Small, traditional-style farmers have many, genetically diverse animals of different ages on their farms. Each individual animal will be required to have an ID. The result is that the cost of farming will go up greatly for small farmers. This is likely to be the final nail in the coffin of small farming. Developers will be over joyed as they buy up farm land at rock bottom prices to divide up into condos and strip malls. Rural America will turn dingy with pavement. Gone will be the fields, pastures and meadows filled with grazing livestock. Vermont can kiss its tourist industry good-bye.

This farmer's concerns are reflected in Congressman Paul's writings as well. He adds that it empowers federal agents to enter and seize property without a warrant, which he calls "a blatant violation of the 4th amendment." "NAIS is not about preventing mad cow or other diseases," he writes. "More than anything, NAIS places our family farmers and ranchers at an economic disadvantage against agaribusiness and overseas competition."

Ron Paul's Defense of the Dollar

One of the gravest threats to our ability to use alternative medicine and eat farm-fresh and pasture-raised foods is one that rarely receives attention: the inflationary policy of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve itself.

The Federal Reserve is a private consortium of international bankers that controls our currency. At one time, dollars were redeemable for gold, which guaranteed that the dollar had an inherent value. But the Federal Reserve now has the authority to print money out of thin air: the more money it prints, the more prices go up and the value of the dollar declines.

Essentially, it works like this:

• When the government spends more money than it can take in through taxes, it borrows money by issuing bonds. These bonds circulate on the market and are primarily held by banks and investors.
• When US investors on the open market are not purchasing enough bonds to finance the government's spending, two things can happen: we can sell these bonds to the central banks of foreign countries such as China or the Fed can print money out of thin air and purchase them.
• The Fed is privately owned, highly secretive, and has no responsibility to take orders from Congress or the president about when to print new money or how much to print.
• When the Fed prints money, it injects that money into either the government or its favorite industries. It does this buy purchasing newly issued treasury bonds from the government or by purchasing existing tresury bonds from the investors of its choice.
• It can also inject money into the banking industry by lowering the discount rate or the reserve requirement. When it lowers the discount rate, privileged banks borrow more money at a lower rate, and then lend it out into circulation. The reserve requirement is the proportion of money a bank has lent that it must actually possess. Lowering the reserve requirement allows banks to lend out more money that does not exist.

This constitutes a transfer of wealth from ordinary citizens into the hands of the government, the banking industry, and the private industries that the Federal Reserve chooses to favor.

Why? Simple: when the money supply increases, the value of the dollar declines and prices go up -- but not right away. This effect occurs slowly over a number of months and years. Whoever gets to use the money first gets to spend it before its value declines. But by the time it makes its way into the pockets of ordinary people, its value has already declined.

The harmful effect of a devaluing dollar can be seen most readily in the price of oil and gas. Many people who commute or heat their homes with oil on a limited income are feeling the pain of these prices right now.

In a January 4 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Oil and the Dollar," the authors supplied a graph showing that since the year 2000, oil prices have gone up 350% in dollars, 200% in Euros, and zero percent in gold. "This means that if the dollar had remained 'as good as gold' since 2001," the authors wrote, "oil today would be selling at about $30 a barrel, not $99."

Ron Paul cited this article in the January 5 ABC debate, but no one else is paying any attention.

What effect does this have on health freedom?

Let's consider a few things:

The government subsidizes grains like corn so that they are sold at half or two-thirds the cost of production, but never subsidizes grass management or grass-fed beef. Government subsidies can always keep up with inflation because the government can just increase the subsidy and pay for it by selling tresury bonds or raising taxes, but the grass-based farmer has no bonds to sell. Either the farmer goes out of business, or the price of real food goes up faster then the price of supermarket food.

Pharmaceutical drugs are paid for either by the government or by private health insurance companies -- who themselves are propped up by government regulations. Health insurance companies are likely to have major financial ties to the banking industry and other private industries into which the Fed injects money. Moreover, their insurance policies are generally provided by large employers and workers have little choice in the matter. But producers of nutritional supplements or practitioners of naturopathy and acupuncture rarely have such protection, and are almost always paid for out of pocket by the consumer -- whose dollar continues to decline in value.

If we want to build an alternative to the corporate scheme of things, buying farm-fresh local foods, using foods and nutrients as medicine, pursuing practitioners that may not be part of the medical monopoly, we can only do this with a sound currency. The Fed's inflationary monetary policy constitutes a direct robbery of wealth from ordinary citizens and into the hands of the government and the very corporations we are trying to escape.

I highly recommend watching the video, Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve, on the history of how this system came into place. Ron Paul makes several appearances in the video.

Ron Paul has spent his time in Congress on the monetary committees, defending our dollar from this corporate robbery. He would restore the control of our currency to Congress, back it with hard value (as required by the constitution), and abolish the Federal Reserve.

If we want freedom from the cholesterol-bashing, drug-promoting, milk-destroying, grain-feeding Government-Disease Care Industrial Complex, we need to vote Ron Paul in as the Republican nominee and as the next president of the United States.

Can He Win?

In July I had written the following:

James Ostrowski argues that he can. Dr. Paul is now polling at 2-3% in most states – triple what he was polling at the beginning of the year -- and his campaign is gaining momentum quickly. When compared to Democratic contenders, his performance is comparable to the big-name candidates:

Giuliani 43; Clinton 44
Romney 42; Clinton 46
McCain 38; Clinton 47
Paul 34; Clinton 49

He has raised 2.4 million dollars, all from individuals, just under half from small contributions under $200. His current assets place him ahead of John McCain, and only 25 percent behind Mitt Romney. And he comes in first among military contributions (here's why).

It is now December 31 and things look even better.

On November 5, he broke the one-day online fundraising record, raising $4.3 million in a single day. On December 16, he broke the all-time one-day primary fundraising record. This record had been previously held by John Kerry, who had raised $5.7 million in 2004. But on December 16, over 58,000 people contributed an average of $102 to the Paul campaign -- bringing in $6.04 million. To date this quarter, the Paul campaign has brought in over $19 million, more than any other Republican candidate.

Ron Paul is by far and away the leading candidate according to straw poll results. As of December 10, 2008, the tally shows the following: