Political Class Dismissed

Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization:

“I think it would be a good idea.”

A Simple Organizational Plan for the Tea Party Movement

By James Ostrowski

PoliticalClassDismissed.com

FreetheChildren.US

The tea party movement (TPM) is on a trajectory towards victory this year. The only thing that can stop it is itself. This memo outlines a simple plan to ensure the TPM doesn’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The TPM is a grassroots, locally-controlled, decentralized and populist movement based on the individual’s natural right to liberty. The key to its success this year is the use of an organizational structure consistent with its mission and philosophy.

Unity is essential to the success of the movement, however, unity at any cost or a unity that is inconsistent with our mission and philosophy will not lead to victory but to self-destruction. That can easily be avoided but can only be avoided by a coalition approach.

There are literally thousands of tea party organizations around the country. It is a vain hope to get them all together in one giant, top-heavy, top-down formal organization funded by mysterious billionaires and headquartered in DC, that den of iniquity. And it’s not necessary either.

There already is in each metropolitan area, region or county, an organic, homegrown, grassroots TPM. We start there, with a firm foundation grounded in reality. That local TPM may consist of one or more organizations. In Western New York, for example, there are several such organizations. There may also be key activists or sympathetic allies in the media who are not affiliated with an organization at all. They are, in effect, organizations unto themselves. They must have a seat at the table. By table, I mean roundtable, a table where all are equal.

Get all the groups and key activists and media people together around a table for the purpose of cooperating, communicating, and coordinating in your area. Call it a tea party coalition. It’s not a new organization displacing the existing ones but merely a way to coordinate the activities of the existing groups. Each group retains its identity, purpose and leadership but gains strength from forming an alliance with like-minded groups and individuals in their area.

Hold a tea party convention in your area. “Area” will differ from place to place but I suggest using the well-established concept of metropolitan area. In some areas, region or county might be a better unit of operation. The purpose of the convention is to select TPM candidates, provide opportunities for members to educate themselves on policy issues, and encourage direct citizen action activities. Invite candidates to the convention to make their case.

Who gets to vote? Each local group would makes its own rules but here’s my suggestion: anyone who signs a brief statement of principles, provides contact information and agrees to donate at least $10 to one of the candidates endorsed and to work for that candidate in some capacity. A list of possible options will be listed for them to check off.

I suggest a short and sweet statement of principles:

• Government exists to protect individual natural rights that existed prior to government such as the rights to life, liberty and private property.
• Government must serve the general interest and not special interests that benefit some at the expense of others.
• The free market is superior to socialism or the “mixed economy.”
• The federal government is limited to exercising enumerated powers and all other powers are reserved for the states and the people.
• The United States are in severe crisis because of their abandonment of these principles.

Properly organized, each tea party convention will be a huge success and will generate positive press and hundreds if not thousands of additional volunteers, the army of liberty that will carry us to victory. Those who sign the agreement become members of the TPM. Members can also be recruited throughout the year at other tea party events and online.

What needs to be highlighted at the convention is the sharp contrast between how the TPM chooses its candidates and the sleazy smoke-filled room/horse-trading approach of the other parties. Challenge the other parties to do likewise: hold an open convention of their own members to select candidates. Fat chance!

Once candidates are endorsed, the TPM works with the candidates on issues of ballot access and which party lines to pursue. All such questions must be decided pragmatically, based on local conditions and each state’s crazy election laws (designed to make life difficult for people like us).

Once each area has had its convention and chosen a liaison, all the liaisons in the state should hold a conference call and create a tea party coalition for the state. The state coalition does the same as the local coalitions: communicate, coordinate, and cooperate. If major decisions must be made, each liaison can poll their own members. For example, if statewide candidates need to be endorsed after various local conventions have been held, this can be done by polling the members via email.

Each state coalition should choose a liaison for the national coalition. That coalition should organize by conference call and conduct any national business that needs to be conducted. A spokesperson should be chosen.

At all times, the function of the liaisons is to convey the wishes of the grassroots to other liaisons and try to meld a consensus for how to carry out the desires of the members. It’s a bottom up, not top-down approach.

I have kept this plan as simple as possible because complex battle plans usually fail.

The real beauty of this plan is best seen by imagining different scenarios for organizing the tea party movement. What if various groups in each area decide to elevate ego over principle and point their guns inward rather than outward at big government? We lose!

What if various DC-based groups with deep roots in the failed GOP past, use millions donated by billionaires to falsely claim that they are the tea party movement, even though many of us in the real grassroots movement have never heard of them, talked to them, or received the slightest bit of assistance from them? We lose!

So that’s the plan. It will work. Don’t let it gather dust in a drawer. As we used to say in South Buffalo, long before the Nike slogan was coined, and usually in response to someone bragging about their athletic prowess: stop talking and “DO IT!”

Joe Illuzzi reports: The State GOP is willing to spend up to a “million dollars” to coax Assemblyman Jack Quinn into the race. ###

Sorry guys. Jack Quinn will not receive the support of the tea party movement which will, I believe, field its own candidate.

These generals are always fighting the last war.

A rally in support of child “care” by strangers.

I remember the days before big government F’d up American society when children were cared for by fathers, mothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles and older siblings.

If you are going to have children, don’t park them with strangers from age three months on. And my God please don’t ask others to pay for it if you do.

The Wall Street Journal editorialist is correct; Andrew Cuomo himself is personally responsible for much of the current recession due to his reckless management of HUD and his grossly negligent encouragement of Fanny and Freddy while he was the HUD Secretary in the Clinton years. In those years, and during the Bush years as well, HUD obtained mortgages for folks it knew or should have known could never pay them back, and Fanny and Freddy encouraged the banks to give out cheap loans to borrowers with bad credit because Fanny and Freddy—in essence the taxpayers—guaranteed re-payments of the loans. Cuomo should have known that this could not last. Unfortunately, the statute of limitations has run on Cuomo’s misdeeds, and he can neither be prosecuted not sued for them. As for his pursuit of Ken Lewis for the fraudulent acquisition of Merrill Lynch (ML), there, too, Cuomo is not doing his job. The pursuit should he an indictment of Lewis, Sheila Bair (head of the SEC), Henry Paulson (then Sec. of Treasury), and Jeff Lacher (head of the Richmond Fed). Bair, Paulson, and Lacher all conspired to threaten Lewis to force him to buy ML for about $17 billion more than it was worth. That coercion was a crime: Both the coercion and the acquisition were criminal acts. Suing Ken Lewis because he harmed Bank of America (B of A) is absurd. Lewis has an indemnity agreement with B of A, whereby it must defend him and cover any judgments against him for all civil lawsuits. So, if Cuomo is suing Lewis because B of A wasted $17 billion by buying ML, what he is accomplishing by suing in such a manner is that if he wins, B of A will pay the judgment! On the other hand, if he had indicted Lewis and the federal officials, and they were convicted, public policy prevents any indemnity. The answer to all this is that Cuomo is running for Governor, and just wants bragging rights.

Source

#2 in Kindle Store > Kindle Books > Nonfiction > Education > Education Theory > School Safety & Violence

HT Eli Cryderman

Run, Ron, Run!!!

I have many significant memories from Dr. Paul’s 2008 Presidential campaign. There were the money bombs, the blimp. There was Ron Paul’s counter convention and the real Tea Party. There were the debates, with that dim bulb Sean Hannity nearly apoplectic every time Dr. Paul won the Fox News debate polls - ah yes, we Paultards with our amazing ability to game the system. There was the youtube of Dr. Paul all by himself dragging his bag through the airport and chatting with the twenty or thirty supporters who waited at the airport just to watch him walk through, the rest of the crowd oblivious to the fact that there was giant walking among them.

The one thing that sticks in my mind the most was Dr. Paul’s final debate with just Dr. Paul, McCain and Romney, the one moderated by Anderson Cooper. The contempt shown to Dr. Paul by both McCain and Romney was exceeded only that shown by Cooper himself. It made me furious. I never had much respect for McCain and had even less for that complete political hack Romney, but I never really gave Cooper much thought until that debate. To me this debate illustrated exactly how low we have sunk as a country when the one truly honorable, courageous and decent man on the stage could not even be afforded even a modicum of ordinary respect by men who, in my opinion, were not even fit to breath the same air. And that was pretty much the story for the entire campaign - the powers that be doing all they can to discredit, marginalize and trivialize this courageous, principled man.

A Presidential campaign is grueling enough under the best circumstances. Dr. Paul was was courageous enough not only to endure the ordeal of a campaign, but willingly suffered the slings and arrows and insults and slights from people not worthy (again, in my opinion) of shining his shoes. He suffered these things with a grace and a dignity that I never could muster and showed a vigor and energy that I have trouble mustering after an ordinary day at work, even being 20 years or so Dr. Paul’s junior. And he didn’t do any of it out of personal ambition or the desire for glory. He did it because he believes in the principles on which this country was founded and his desire to restore this country to those principles for the benefit of all of us.

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Read it and weep.

Just putting the finishing touches on one of the more radical books written in recent decades.

Should be for sale in about ten days.

I have hammered Brian Higgins for five years now. Initially I was virtually alone. And even until recently, the notion that Brian could lose this year was unthinkable to most political pros. Then, the Massachusetts Miracle happened and suddenly, there are no safe seats.

The tea party coalition is targeting several races this year and Higgins is at the top of the list.

We need volunteers and we need a great candidate. I am starting a database for this purpose. Just send me an email with your name, cell and town.

The $64,000 dollar question is, who should run?

The nominations are open.

Our most famous public figure says he might run for Governor and the media outside WNY yawns.

Google News.

Partition New York!

Palin loves Paul.

HT LRC

Be there!

Murphy’s Lessons for the Young Economist

January 31, 2010 3:42 PM by Jeffrey Tucker

I might have written this as a private memo to Robert Murphy but its contents will be interesting to everyone.

I’m in the process of reviewing his teacher manual for his forthcoming high school text on economics: Lessons for the Young Economist. I’m beyond mere excitement about this project. It is easily the best introduction to economics I’ve ever read - and I mean pure economic theory, not just a theory of how markets work (the domain of Hazlitt’s book). He has the right frame of mind. His has mastery of the subject matter. The logic is super clear. I can’t but marvel at the intellectual organization of his pedagogy - achieving a great balance between “plain old” economics and that aspect of economic thought that is considered particularly Austrian.

Just now, as I’m going through his examples on the division of labor and the advantages of indirect vs. direct exchange, something just occurred to me. Most of the attempts at such texts falter because they are either too dry and technical for the young reader or they are littered with attempts to keep the student entertained with references to pop culture or cheesy passages that attempt to “speak the child’s language” but only end up sounding patronizing.

Dr. Murphy’s text has none of this. The prose has relentless fire without needless fireworks. What drives it forward is intellectual passion born of his own love of the topic. What’s also nice is that he is nowhere self-consciously trying to sound like someone he is not. It is his real voice, explaining everything point by point. Here is the product of vast experience and daily writing. This permits the voicing of the book to achieve a remarkable integration page to page, chapter to chapter. Though he is drawing from the whole history of the development of economics, the text ends up being strikingly original. His approach is not based on anything but his own sense of how to teach this subject.

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Warren Redlich Running for Governor

“Tea Party Republican” will seek GOP and Libertarian lines

Albany – Small business owner and web entrepreneur Warren Redlich announced today he is running for Governor of New York State, seeking both the Republican and Libertarian lines.

“After decades of state decline due to high taxes and excessive spending, a bold new alternative is needed from someone who doesn’t live inside the Albany bubble,” said Redlich. “I have a specific plan to cut spending, end the outrageous compensation of the politicallyconnected, and lower the tax burden on struggling New Yorkers.”

Redlich, a two-time Republican congressional candidate, would eliminate a number of state agencies and authorities. Much of the savings would come from ending corporate welfare, described in budgets as “economic development.”

Redlich also proposes a $100,000 cap on pay for public employees and a $75K cap on government pensions. He pointed to the $688K salary of the head of the New York Public Library, and the U Albany president making $280K in salary, $261K in pension, plus a $100K consulting job with another state entity.

About 80,000 public employees in the state make over $100,000 a year, according to the SeeThroughNY.net database, with 32,000 making over $120K and 8,000 making over $150K. “Albany insiders are willing to lay off teachers, freeze pay for rank-and-file employees, and increase taxes,” Redlich said. “We’ll save more now, and much more later, by ending abuses at the top.”

Working with leaders of the state’s Tea Parties, Redlich hopes to force a GOP primary.

Contact: Eric Sundwall, 518-857-1731
On the Web: wredlich.com/ny/