The following speech was given by Franklin Sanders at the Tea Party Summit in Jackson, Tennessee, on 24 June 2011. Все подробности granite countertops near me louisville тут.

Remember General Nathan Bedford Forrest at the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads, 147 years ago, 10 June 1864, between here and Tupelo, Mississippi. Forrest was the greatest military commander Tennessee ever produced, the greatest the South and North America ever produced, and perhaps the greatest the world ever produced. This was Forrest’s most brilliant battle, perfect in every respect, defeating twice his number, but strategically it was an utter disaster. Forrest never should have been in north Mississippi. He should have let the Yankees have Tupelo and ridden to Middle Tennessee where he could tear up Sherman’s supply lines into Georgia—where he could change the war’s outcome.

Over the last 50 years Conservatives have remained stubbornly blind to strategy. Like the blind Indian wise men, everyone has his own view of the elephant. The one who felt the leg declared the elephant was like a pillar, the one who felt his tail like a rope; the one who felt his trunk, like a tree branch; the one who felt his side, like a wall; the one who felt his ear, like a fan, and the one who felt his tusk, like a pipe. But nobody sees the whole elephant.

We must begin to think holistically, in terms of the whole system, because things work together. Simply restoring gold and silver coin as legal tender won’t change anything. In fact, restoring hard money all by itself will backfire, and make things worse, resulting in a backlash that sets us back another 100 years. Everything works together, and sound money won’t work as long as government and central bank control the money and the economy, and when half the economy lives off government spending. To fix the money issue, we have to restore economic freedom. {payday} We have to create all the conditions needed for a new economy to grow up alongside the old and to replace it.

Reforming one single issue won’t help, because that issue belongs to the larger problem. We face a beast built up over the last 150 years, a beast of state power and control through regulation and fiat money that has crushed our ancient freedoms, and stolen most of our freedoms under common law and the constitution. We must attack the beast from all sides. We have to kill him by a 1,000 paper cuts, until we can reach his carotid artery and deliver the killing stroke, but always with our eyes on the chance for that killing stroke.
Three freedoms must be restored:

1. Monetary Freedom
2. Economic Freedom
3. Food Freedom

Without restoring all, we won’t restore any.

SOCIALISM IS

Face the facts: The worst has already happened. Socialism has been imposed on us, all ten planks of Communist Manifesto. Go read them and you’ll see: we already live under socialism. We have met the communists, and they are us.

The process began when the War Between the States destroyed state sovereignty and centralized power in Washington. Then around the turn of the 19th century socialism mushroomed in the so-called Progressive Era with regulation of commerce, industry, professions, food, drugs, and health. World War I extended government economic control, and under New Deal fascism it metastasized to the economy’s entire body as it cartelized industries, crafts, unions, and professions under government control. World War II pushed socialism and government control even deeper into the economy, and after the War agriculture was slowly stripped and centralized and American industry shipped overseas.

All these changes have so altered the US economic, political, monetary, and social system that it has become a monster, not the shining tower of freedom Americans imagine, but a nightmare beast of government power, a “boot stamping in a human face forever.”
Do I exaggerate? The US economy is addicted to government spending. They have not taken us over, they’ve bought us off.

• Half of all income in the US comes from government spending. In Tennessee 19% from direct state and local spending, 33% from direct Federal spending, 52% in all. In some states government spending contributes over 60% of state income. And I haven’t even taken into account the Federal insurance, loan guarantees, and all of that, just direct spending. We haven’t been taken over, we’ve been bought off. We have no economy, if half of all the workers are paid to whittle, watch, investigate, indoctrinate, regulate, detect, suspect, correct, direct, supervise, and write tickets to the other half.
• Agriculture has been shipped overseas and what’s left industrialized.
• Industrial production has been shipped overseas.
• Under the cover of health and safety, regulations have been imposed that either put out or shut out competition.

WHERE DOES WEALTH COME FROM?

Remember this: All wealth begins with the things men take out of the ground. 20% mining, 80% agriculture. As $1 of agricultural income passes through the economy, it becomes $7 of national income.

But since WWII farmers have been driven off the land, farm income has disappeared, and American has been able to maintain its standard of living only by substituting debt for production.

If the damage were only economic we might live with it, but it’s not. How do you measure the damage? Look at the health statistics, heart attacks, diabetes, high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s. Stand outside WalMart and watch the people walking in. Obesity is epidemic. This is the health cost of industrializing agriculture and driving small farmers out of business.

Proof? Travel through east and middle Tennessee as my wife and I have the last five years, and you’ll see no dirt turned over. No crops, little livestock, only abandoned silos, tombstones of dead dairies and murdered prosperity. For 200 to 250 years this land has been farmed, but no more. The once productive “hog and hominy” state no longer feeds itself.

Twenty years ago Tennessee boasted 10,000 dairies, but today fewer than 500 survive, and the milk you drank this morning probably came from California 1,692 miles away or Florida 1,200 miles away, milked from cows kept in CAFOs standing up to their hocks in manure all their lives. Can that milk possibly be more wholesome and cheaper than we can raise it next door in Tennessee?

THE ECONOMY HAS BEEN TRANSFORMED

America was once a nation of fairly self-sufficient local economies, but has been centralized into one national planned economy.

How did all this happen?

• By deliberate government economic policy, by trade policy, tariff policy, and by monetary policy.
• By hijacking the monetary system and replacing public money (gold and silver) with private money (bank credit).
• By imposing regulations on all economic activity and forbidding competition.
• By outlawing economic freedoms that we have enjoyed since King Alfred the Great (died 899 a.d.).

Simply pecking tiny bites out of government spending will change nothing. Even before a massive spending reduction will work, we must destroy the present Keynesian model that promises governments can create prosperity by borrowing and spending. We must destroy that Keynesian idea.

Today that model is dying, perishing before your eyes today. Look at Greece. Iceland. The United States. The government debt and its burden are too burdensome to be borne. The model is dying.

By concentrating the economy, relying on debt, and begging for jobs from outside industries this government control and chamber of commerce economic model has brought us to a dead end. Local economies, initiative, and production have been replaced by debt, government jobs, and government control.

Local economies must be re-built in parallel to the dying economy, simply ignoring the government economy and replacing it by superior production, prosperity, justice, and stability.

THE FOUNDATION IS FOOD FREEDOM

And the foundation for those local economies is local agriculture and food freedom. It starts there.

You don’t need any outside jobs or borrowed money because right this instant you are standing right now, every town, every county, every city, on acres of diamonds.

Yes. Every man, woman, and child in every home in Tennessee spends $1,800 every year on food and drink. In Jackson alone with 65,211 people, that amounts to $117 million spent on food every year. Can you build a local economy on a $117 million cash flow?

No. Why not? Because the state of Tennessee won’t let you.

• Because farmers are robbed of their common law right to make sales at the farm gate.
• Because the State and farmers’ markets require farmers get a license before they allow them to sell their goods.
• Because the State department of agriculture forbids farmers to grow and process and sell chickens or raw milk or hams or bacon or jam.
• Because regulation forbids them from competing.

Never forget this. Set aside all the good intentions, rationalizations, and justifications about health and safety and evil producers who will poison their customers unless government regulates them. That’s all a cover-up.

The real purpose of all regulation is to stifle competition.
The real purpose of all regulation is to stifle competition.
The real purpose of all regulation is to stifle competition.

Think about it. The federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was founded in 1906 in a propaganda firestorm about food additives. Government must regulate, or we will all be poisoned!

How many additives in use in 1906 has the FDA since banned? A hundred? Fifty? Twenty? Twelve?

Not one. Not a one. Oh, they’ve banned others since then, but not one in use in 1906.

Ask yourself what chance you have of getting e. coli poisoning from hamburger when all the hamburger in the country is processed by six meatpackers. Would you take your chances with those six, or with you local butcher and farmer whom you know and trust?

Never forget: within twenty nano-seconds of regulations passing, the regulated always capture the regulators. So regulators and regulation always work for the big corporations with political pull, and their only goal is to stifle competition.

Not only in Food Freedom we must roll back regulation, but in every business, undertaking, craft, profession, or job, so that we can build healthy, prosperous, just local economies taking care of each others’ needs, instead of buying rotten milk from California and tainted hamburger from Chicago. Local agriculture merely forms the backbone of a local economy. Once it is established, it generates an income that revives trade throughout the rest of the local economy.

So here is our first strategic goal: relentlessly roll back regulations. Year after year we must hammer on the legislature, returning to demand economic freedom for all, and that means relentlessly rolling back regulation. Restore economic freedom, no matter how long it takes.

FOOD FREEDOM AND FULL FARM GATE SALES

Henry Kissinger is supposed to have said, “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”

Food freedom guarantees the only and ultimate human right: the right to life. If you aren’t free to eat, you can’t live. If government controls all the food and it must travel from a continent away, then government controls your life, and ultimately can shut you off whenever they want. Food freedom is the ultimate freedom, and they have stolen it from us.

What is our goal and strategy? Full farm-gate sales freedom.

Restoring the farmer’s freedom to sell anything grown or processed on his own farm at his own risk and the consumer’s own risk. Scare you? Not me. I’ll take my risks with my local farmer whom I know over gigantic corporations whom I don’t know, and whose public relations spin-doctors thinks of e. coli outbreaks in terms of numbers dead rather than men, women, and children personally known.

Farm gate sales must include the farmer’s right to take part freely and without license, permit, or by your leave in any and all Tennessee farmers’ markets and to sell there anything produced on their own farms exactly as if they were selling it at their own farm gate and with the same right not to be subjected to sales tax, as the law already provides.

Food freedom includes freedom to eat, drink, or consume any food product without government interference or regulation, including most of all raw milk, butchered or cured meats, and prepared foods such as canned goods, jams, cakes, or bread.

MONETARY FREEDOM

The problem is not that gold and silver coin are not “legal tender”—they are already. Problem is that the people, courts and government treat them as if they weren’t legal tender, as if only fiat Federal Reserve notes (green paper bills and bank credit) were money.

From the beginning the Federal Reserve’s strategy has been to marginalize, remove, tax, and criminalize gold and silver money.

The courts have an instinctive systemic bias to follow that strategy. I’ve seen it in person over a 15 year struggle in local, state, and federal courts. It sent me to jail in the teeth of the law. The courts ignore plain law in favour of marginalizing, removing, taxing, and criminalizing gold and silver.

THE TAPEWORM ECONOMY

We live in a tapeworm economy. The monetary system enables those who control the government-sanctioned money creation franchise to feed on all the rest of us—not an accident, but the nature of the system.

The Federal Reserve Act (1912) gives to the Federal Reserve system power to do what is otherwise illegal: print its own private money (“Federal Reserve notes”) and force the rest of us to receive it as money. In the interest of a banking cartel the government has replaced public money (gold and silver coin) with private money (bank credit) to benefit no one but the banks.

Clearly, this means that eventually all the property and all the power in the country will wind up in hands of the money-printers. The power to print money is the beating heart of tyranny, the source of all its power. Abolishing the Federal Reserve and fiat money is the strategic key, the only strategic key, to restoring liberty, prosperity, government by law, and justice. Restoring hard money restores everything.

Our strategy must reverse and overthrow the Fed’s strategy. They have employed Gresham’s Law, using bad money to drive out good money.

But most people don’t understand that Gresham’s Law works both ways. It only works to drive good money out of circulation when driven by force, by legal tender laws. If good money is available and not forbidden by law, Gresham’s Law reverses: good money drives bad money out of circulation. We must enlist that on our side.

RESTORE GOLD AND SILVER TO CIRCULATION

The US Constitution, Article I, Section 10 says: “No state shall make any Thing but Gold and Silver Coin a tender in payment of debt.” This reserves to states the power to “declare a tender” but restricts that power to “gold and silver coin.” The Federal Government has already made gold and silver coin a tender (Coinage Acts of 1792, 1832, 1873, 1985, 1986, etc. etc.), but they don’t circulate. Fiat Federal Reserve money (notes and bank credit) is accepted by public and government to the exclusion of gold and silver. Therefore we must remove all those barriers.

1. Remove government barriers to circulation.

• Remove/forbid/exempt gold and silver from sales tax, both coin and bullion. Charging sales tax on exchanges of gold and silver coin not only obstructs their circulation, it is also illegal. Did you every pay sales tax when a bank teller gave you two $10 bills for a $20 bill? Of course not. Under the common law, the constitution, statutory law, and precedent, gold and silver coin is “money” while the green paper is a “note,” a “bank note,” a promise to pay money and not itself money. But if we can’t make that leap all at once, then we need to follow the Texas and California examples, where any non-jewellery gold and silver purchase over $1,000 is automatically exempted from sales tax.
• No capital gains tax on gold/silver transactions. Every exchange of gold/silver for fiat must be defined as a “like kind transaction at full equivalency on date of exchange.”
• Eventually, Tennessee government must re-denominate all fines, taxes, and dues in gold and silver, to the exclusion of fiat money.

2. Remove commercial barriers to circulation.

• It is hard to use silver and gold. People don’t use gold and silver because they are too inconvenient. They won’t accept them because they don’t know what it’s worth. That’s cured privately and easily by Internet conversion applications like silverandgoldaremoney.com. That’s cured publicly by state government publishing exchange rates daily.
• It’s easy to use paper.Every merchant accepts checks, credit cards, debit cards.Electronic payment systems for silver and gold are rare or unknown, but already available and successful, e.g., goldmoney.com.
• But Article I, Section 10 specifies the only tender as gold and silver “coin.” The law must integrate that with electronic systems as an alternative. 100% reserve gold and silver banks must be “legalized” by statute or court judgment. In fact, they already are, but not treated that way by courts.

3. No monometallism, no fixed exchange rates or fixed ratios.

• Whatever standard is enacted, it must include both metals, but without any fixed exchange rate between the two. Against those who object to that, answer that we already have floating exchange rates among all the fiat currencies of the world. Deal with it: the world economy already does. Any monetary system with only gold or only silver is only fiat money in disguise. Honesty and integrity can only be maintained when the value of each metal is defined in terms of the other, not in terms of some fiat currency unit like “dollars.”

4. Create the legal environment, then circulate.

• Once we have created the legal environment removing the strictures against gold and silver (passed laws), then the greater hurdle appears: get people to use them daily. Once they begin using them, silver and gold will drive out fiat within two years. How can I be so sure?
  • History shows that. Cf. 1792 when silver and gold coin replaced paper money.
  • Silver and gold do not constantly lose value.
  • Silver and gold actually gain value, so saving makes sense. Savers build capital for economic expansion by equity financing, so debt is not necessary.
  • For holders of silver and gold, everything you buy constantly becoming cheaper. Day by day your money buys more.

5. Once that local cash circulation begins, local businesses will spring up to serve it.

Cobbler, tailor, hardware store and others will push out corporate franchises that drain cash away. Local production produces local demand that produces local jobs: we don’t have to bring in jobs and money from outside.

6. Gresham’s Law will keep that silver and gold money in the community.

All this happens without any laws, subsidies, government payments, or fractional reserve banks. No government interference, and heaven help us! No government “favours.” It will happen spontaneously, by human desire for prosperity, if we can only create the necessary conditions.

THE BOTTOM LINE

We must reclaim and restore not only one but three freedoms government has stolen: Economic Freedom, Food Freedom, and Monetary Freedom.

1. Restore Monetary Freedom. Place silver and gold money on an equal footing with fiat money and offer the people “freedom of choice in money”, and
2. Restore Economic Freedom by removing regulations that stifle economic freedom and initiative, and
3. Restoring Food Freedom.

Restoring one without restoring all will not only fail, but also leave us worse off that we are now.

Someone will tell me this is impossible. Things have gone too far. We have to wait until it all collapses of its own weight before we can do anything. We can’t change anything. It’s hopeless.

I answer these croakers with the words of Jonathan, son of Saul. When the Philistines oppressed all Israel as we are oppressed this day, Jonathan went by himself to the Philistine army, up on the hill. He went by himself, only Jonathan and his armour bearer, a man and a mere boy against the Philistine’s whole host.

Jonathan came to the foot of the hill, and said to his armour bearer, “Come, and let us go over unto the garrison of these uncircumcised: it may be that the Lord will work for us: for the Lord is not restrained to save by many or by few.”

So they climbed up, and they fought, and they won. They killed 20 Philistines within a half acre, and the whole army panicked and fled and Israel chased them out of the country.

That one man’s resolve to fight or die but to live free marked the beginning of his whole country’s liberation.

Is it impossible to restore our freedom, to drive out the Philistines who rule over us? I don’t know. I have looked down their gun barrels, been ridiculed in their courts, and been thrown in their jails, so I of all people offer no guarantees and make no promises

But I remember also that for all their power, all their money, all their agents, by the Grace of God I still survive and thrive, and so does the truth and the law. I only know that God is not restrained to save by many or by few, and I know it is time, our time to go up, and see if God will work for us.

We have no other hope.

God save Tennessee!

Contact Franklin Sanders at:
The Moneychanger
PO Box 178
Westpoint, Tennessee 38486

The Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database has been updated to include data through 2010. Take a look and see which of your neighbours are fattening at the government trough.

“The rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated.”
Mark Twain

The following article is reprinted here by permission of the author, Doreen Hannes. Please visit her site, Truth Farmer, and listen to her archives on Liberty News Radio.

Easter Bunny Reports “NAIS is Dead!”

As I reported after returning from the NIAA (National Institute for Animal Agriculture) meeting last August, rumors of the death of NAIS have been greatly exaggerated. (Read http://nonais.org/2009/09/05/ding-dong-nais-is-not-dead/) The USDA has finally admitted that they have too much negative publicity surrounding the name NAIS, and that they actually have to do what they tried to do in the first place: get the states to do their bidding on ‘animal identification’ and ‘traceability’ according to World Trade Organization standards. So yippee. They are only going to exercise their rule-making authority to control interstate commerce. Well, that’s all they had the authority to do at the outset. So we should be giddy with excitement that they are openly proclaiming they will do just that now.

Should we be happier than a pig in a puddle because they openly stated that they will leave animals which never exit the state out of the new plan? They never had the authority to deal with those animals anyway…unless, of course, you take money from the USDA. Otherwise, that authority rests with your state. The USDA will continue to fund the states and work in a ‘collaborative’ way with states and industry (continuing the Public Private Partnership otherwise known as fascism) to develop the “minimum standards” that must be followed in order to participate in interstate commerce.

So, as many conversations with my compatriots in the fight against NAIS have alluded to, at last the USDA is pulling the commerce clause out and holding it up as their hammer for “minimum standards” that will be required by forthcoming regulations for ‘disease traceability’. And why has the USDA taken to calling it ‘disease traceability’ instead of ‘animal identification’? Because they only HAVE authority over the diseases! The FDA has authority over live animals on the farm (http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Testimony/ucm114752.htm), even though the majority of people don’t know this, and it is a very useful poker chip in the globalization game. It is called misdirection, and those of us who have been deeply involved in the fight against the NAIS are very aware of this agency’s use of misinformation, disinformation, subterfuge and general sneakiness in foisting upon us their WTO driven desire that will create captive supply for export of the entire domestic livestock population.

The only official document available on the “NAIS not NAIS” program is a seven page Q and A available at the new page for “NAIS not NAIS” called Animal Disease Traceability. (http://www.aphis.usda.gov/publications/animal_health/content/printable_version/faq_traceability.pdf). It’s only 7 pages, so if you have read the previous 1200 pages of USDA documents on this program, it’s a walk in the park.

One of the first questions that one asks when told “NAIS is Dead!”, (aside from “what’s it’s new name?”) is “What about all the people who are in the Premises Database with PIN’s already?” According to the 7-page document, they stay in that database.

How about animals that are already identified with the “840″ tags for NAIS? They also stay in the database. What about the “840″ tags themselves? Well, the USDA and States will keep using them.

Are they going to halt further registrations into the NAIS database? Heck no! They’ll keep registering properties and will also be using a ‘unique location identifier’ for this kinder, gentler NAIS that the States will run for us.

Why are they re-using the first two prongs of NAIS? Aside from the unstated fact that they are using them because they have to use them to be compliant with OIE (World Animal Health Organization) guidelines, they say it’s because of the tremendous amount of money spent developing NAIS already even though it is un-Constitutional.

How much money? It’s government math, so it’s likely done by consensus as opposed to literal whole numbers that add up—you know, like 2+2=4. Consensus would make it possible for 2+2 to equal 5. Anyway, figures cited by various officials are anywhere from $120 million to $180 million. Less than 60¢ per person, so almost nothing when compared to the monstrous 107 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities we are currently carrying. Believe me, when I say I am not for government waste at all, but when an agency has spent this much time and money on an unfruitful program, isn’t it better to simply fully knock it in the head instead of changing the name and playing “Hide and Go Seek” with the people who have adamantly opposed this program? Why couldn’t the USDA do the only truly Constitutional thing with this international-trade driven program and let those who want to deal in international markets do this to themselves through the Export Verification Services department of the USDA? Well, if they did that, not only would they have to actually be fully open and transparent, they would need to let the public in on the big secret that the United States is no longer in charge of its own policies, rather they are obligated to follow the Sanitary PhytoSanitary (SPS) directives of the World Trade Organization agencies, namely Codex Alimentarius, the OIE and the IPPC (International Plant Protection Convention).

And we still have the very real issue of the massive database for premises registration (or the unique location allocator) having no public or verifiable oversight to check whether or not people who have been told they were removed were in fact removed from that database. So if NAIS is dead, why not allow the database to be annihilated? Obviously, they are still following the plan.

What about the states that have passed legislation designed to constrain NAIS from becoming mandatory within their boundaries? How will this new disease traceability program affect them? Well, since this is NOT NAIS and the regulations aren’t yet written, the states will have to wait to find out what requirements they MUST MEET in order to participate in interstate commerce. There’s your hammer.

So how powerful is the interstate commerce clause? Pretty dang powerful. And if people who dealt in the local food movement fully understood Wickard vs. Filburn, (http://conservapedia.com/Wickard_v._Filburn) they would feel no consolation whatsoever from the USDA’s statement that they are not interested in regulating livestock that stay within the state.

In a nutshell, this 1942 Supreme Court case found that since Filburn had accepted money as part of the Agricultural Adjustments Act and then grew wheat to feed his own livestock, that he was not only subject to the regulation of the USDA by accepting that money, but also, since he grew wheat, he hadn’t purchased it, and had he not grown it, he would have had to purchase wheat which would have likely come through interstate commerce. Therefore, his planting of wheat affected interstate commerce and solidified the USDA’s jurisdiction over his actions.

If you transplant “tomato” for wheat you can see how sinister this ruling truly is. If you grow tomatoes, you won’t be buying them, so if you don’t buy them, and since the store bought tomatoes likely cross state lines in their movement, you are affecting interstate commerce by growing tomatoes….This is precedent, and it is a very, very dangerous precedent. So taking money or help from the USDA to establish your local farmer’s market is going to put you into a relationship that is highly precarious for freedom.

The interstate commerce clause was not designed to hammer states into submission to federal or international agency trade objectives, it was to stop states from unfairly discriminating against each other and to enable us to be a strong union of sovereign states that could actually feed itself and prosper. The only thing to do is to keep fighting with full knowledge and to get the States to exercise their duty to protect the Citizens from an overarching Federal government. We need states to completely free up direct trade between farmers and consumers and we need states to work together to create their own criteria for exchange of goods across state lines.

Do we have to ‘stay engaged’ in conversations with the USDA on this “New Not NAIS”? Yes, to keep telling them to go sell crazy somewhere else, we’re all stocked up here, thank you. They should tend the borders, control and actually inspect the imports, run the disease programs that worked and were not massive consolidations of power in federal hands, and for cryin’ out loud INSPECT the packing plants and stop trying to make consumers believe that farmers and ranchers are responsible for sloppy slaughtering!

Also, go ahead and leave a bunch of the milk chocolate rabbits for us. Chocolate is one thing we probably should import, but certainly not at the cost of our freedom and sovereignty.