V.P. Candidate Darrell Castle to visit Tennessee

Darrell Castle Vice Presidential Candidate Of the Constitution Party
To Visit With Tennesseans

Nashville, Oct. 6th
Alternative Debate at Vanderbilt University
7:00 p.m. at Stevenson Center #4309

(Meet and Greet to Follow)

Kingsport, Oct. 9th
Kingsport Civic Center
6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Speaking on the Bailout And What It Means
To American Families

(Public invited – No Charge)

OTHER EVENTS ARE BEING PLANNED
GO TO OUR EVENTS CALENDAR FOR MORE INFORMATION

Constitution Party Vice Presidential Candidate

Darrell L. Castle

Born, 1948, Kingsport, Tennessee.

Education

Darrell has a Bachelor’s Degree in History and Political Science from East Tennessee State University. In 1979 he graduated with a Juris Doctorate from the University of Memphis Law School.

Military Service

Darrell is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corp. He served from 1970- 1974. His service as a 2nd Lieutenant in Viet Nam followed a family military tradition; his oldest brother served in the Army during World War II, another brother served as a Marine in the Korean War. Darrell left the Marine Corp a very different person than he was when he went in. It was a life changing event and his experience during those years has contributed to his strong belief that war should not be entered into capriciously, and, that the decision to go to war must be made according to constitutional provisions. Darrell firmly believes we must uphold Article I Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which makes it clear that only Congress can declare war that those powers are not granted to the president.

Political

Darrell served two terms as Constitution Party of Tennessee State Chairman, is serving his third term as Vice Chairman of the National Committee and two terms as Platform Chairman at the National Convention. Darrell has taught the Institute on the Constitution course and written articles and commentaries addressing national issues and analysis of current events. He spent the 4th of July this year on the Border with Mrs. Compean and Mrs. Ramos.

Since 2005, Darrell has served on the Board of the Conservative Caucus. He served as Chairman of the National Veterans Coalition (www.nvets.org), an outreach of the national Constitution Party, in 2007.

Professional

Darrell is an attorney in private practice with firms in Memphis, TN, St. Louis, MO, and Kansas City, MO. The Castle Law Firms specialize in Bankruptcy and Personal Injury.

Ministry

Darrell has served the local church as deacon and deacon chairman. In 1998, he and wife Joan founded Mia’s Children Foundation, Inc. (www.miaschildren.org), a Christian mission in Bucharest, Romania which ministers to homeless gypsy children.

Family

Darrell and his wife Joan have been married for 30 years and live in Germantown, TN. Their daughter Joanna and her husband Michael Miller serve with the Navigators Ministry at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Professional

Darrell is an attorney in private practice with firms in Memphis, TN, St. Louis, MO, and Kansas City, MO. The Castle Law Firms specialize in Bankruptcy and Personal Injury.

Commentaries:

* Constitution Day 2008
* Should Fannie May and Freddie Mac Be Saved?
* Something Evil This Way Comes

National Debt Clock Has Run Out Of Room

The Fake $700 Billion Bailout Rescue Plan

In other words, because these massive lending institutions and banks have been caught with cooked books and gross mismanagement, the American people must bail them out to "recapitalize," reward incompetence and perhaps even criminal activity. Americans who should never have qualified for home loans should be given special treatment at the expense of those who have never been able to buy a home (or don't want one), or who make their loan payments on time.

Representatives were threatened over bailout bill

Congressman Brad Sherman of California’s 27th congressional district told the House in a speech yesterday evening that he personally knew of several Congressional representatives who have said they were threatened with the prospect of all out martial law should they vote in opposition to the $700 billion bailout.

Your Money Is Not Safe

If high gas prices has brought back memories of the 1970's, then the recent bank failures like Indy Mac and Washington Mutual not to mention the various investment banks sound like a replay of the 1930's. Well, history does repeat itself especially when we refuse to learn our lesson.

Officially, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is a United States government corporation created by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. It was signed into law by Franklin D. Roosevelt. It provides deposit insurance which guarantees the safety of checking and savings deposits in member banks, currently up to $100,000 per depositor per bank. The vast number of bank failures in the Great Depression spurred the United States Congress to create an institution to guarantee deposits held by commercial banks, inspired by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and its Depositors Insurance Fund (DIF).

Now for the cold hard facts that they won't tell you. Pompous but untruthful statements by the bankers that all is well and that the people should go home; a stubborn insistence by depositors to get their money out; and the consequent closing of the banks by government, while at the same time the banks were permitted to stay in existence and collect the debts due them by their borrowers.

In other words, instead of government protecting private property and enforcing voluntary contracts, it deliberately violated the property of the depositors by barring them from retrieving their own money from the banks.

On the surface the weakness was the fact that the failed banks were insured by private or state deposit insurance agencies, whereas the banks that easily withstood the storm were insured by the federal government (FDIC for commercial banks; FSLIC for savings and loan banks).

But why? What does the federal government have that neither private firms nor states didn't?

In what other industry does a mere rumor or hint of doubt swiftly bring down a mighty and seemingly solid firm? What is there about banking that public confidence should play such a decisive and overwhelmingly important role?

The answer lies in the nature of our banking system, in the fact that both commercial banks and thrift banks (mutual-savings and savings-and-loan) have been systematically engaging in fractional-reserve banking: that is, they have far less cash on hand than there are demand claims to cash outstanding. For commercial banks, the reserve fraction is now about 10 percent; for the thrifts it is far less.

This means that the depositor who thinks he has $100,000 in a bank is misled; in a proportionate sense, there is only, say, $10,000 or less there. And yet, both the checking depositor and the savings depositor think that they can withdraw their money at any time on demand. Obviously, such a system, which is considered fraud when practiced by other businesses, rests on a confidence trick: that is, it can only work so long as the bulk of depositors do not catch on to the scare and try to get their money out. The confidence is essential, and also misguided. That is why once the public catches on, and bank runs begin, they are irresistible and cannot be stopped.

We now see why private enterprise works so badly in the deposit insurance business. For private enterprise only works in a business that is legitimate and useful, where needs are being fulfilled. It is impossible to "insure" a firm, much less an industry, that is inherently insolvent. Fractional reserve banks, being inherently insolvent, are uninsurable.

What, then, is the magic potion of the federal government? Why does everyone trust the FDIC even though their reserve ratios are lower than private agencies, and though they too have only a very small fraction of total insured deposits in cash to stem any bank run? The answer is really quite simple: because everyone realizes, and realizes correctly, that only the federal government – and not the states or private firms – can print legal tender dollars. Everyone knows that, in case of a bank run, the U.S. Treasury would simply order the Fed to print enough cash to bail out any depositors who want it. The Fed has the unlimited power to print dollars, and it is this unlimited power to inflate that stands behind the current fractional reserve banking system.

Yes, the FDIC and FSLIC "work," but only because the unlimited monopoly power to print money can "work" to bail out any firm or person on earth. For it was precisely bank runs, as severe as they were that, before 1933, kept the banking system under check, and prevented any substantial amount of inflation.

But now bank runs – at least for the overwhelming majority of banks under federal deposit insurance – are over, and we have been paying and will continue to pay the horrendous price of saving the banks: chronic and unlimited inflation.

Putting an end to inflation requires not only the abolition of the Fed but also the abolition of the FDIC and FSLIC. At long last, banks would be treated like any firm in any other industry. In short, if they can't meet their contractual obligations they will be required to go under and liquidate. It would be instructive to see how many banks would survive if the massive governmental props were finally taken away.

The Great Depression Explained

"From 1926 to 1929 the attention of the world was chiefly focused upon the question of American prosperity. As in all previous booms brought about by expansion of credit, it was then believed that the prosperity would last forever, and the warnings of the economists were disregarded. The turn of the tide in 1929 and the subsequent severe economic crisis were not a surprise for economists; they had foreseen them, even if they had not been able to predict the exact date of their occurrence. The remarkable thing in the present situation is not the fact that we have just passed through a period of credit expansion that has been followed by a period of depression, but the way in which governments have been and are reacting to these circumstances. The universal endeavor has been made, in the midst of the general fall of prices, to ward off the fall in money wages, and to employ public resources on the one hand to bolster up undertakings that would otherwise have succumbed to the crisis, and on the other hand to give an artificial stimulus to economic life by public works schemes. This has had the consequence of eliminating just those forces which in previous times of depression have eventually effected the adjustment of prices and wages to the existing circumstances and so paved the way for recovery. The unwelcome truth has been ignored that stabilization of wages must mean increasing unemployment and the perpetuation of the disproportion between prices and costs and between outputs and sales which is the symptom of a crisis."

Speaking of Mersenne Prime

LOS ANGELES - Mathematicians at UCLA have discovered a 13 million-digit prime number, a long-sought milestone that makes them eligible for a $100,000 prize.

The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was verified by a different computer system running a different algorithm.

"We're delighted," said UCLA's Edson Smith, the leader of the effort. "Now we're looking for the next one, despite the odds."

It's the eighth Mersenne prime discovered at UCLA.

Primes are numbers like three, seven and 11 that are divisible by only two whole positive numbers: themselves and one.

Mersenne primes — named for their discoverer, 17th century French mathematician Marin Mersenne — are expressed as 2P-1, or two to the power of "P" minus one. P is itself a prime number. For the new prime, P is 43,112,609.

Thousands of people around the world have been participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, a cooperative system in which underused computing power is harnessed to perform the calculations needed to find and verify Mersenne primes.

The $100,000 prize is being offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for finding the first Mersenne prime with more than 10 million digits. The foundation supports individual rights on the Internet and set up the prime number prize to promote cooperative computing using the Web.

The prize could be awarded when the new prime is published, probably next year.

Information from: Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/