The Ohio Energy Resource Alliance (OERA) will give a general overview of the oil and gas industry and shale exploration and production in Ohio, and will discuss how shale can power Ohio’s economy, job growth and energy security. The goal of the forum is to answer questions citizens may have about shale exploration and production and what it will mean to Ohio. The OERA is comprised of Energy In Depth – Ohio; the Buckeye Energy Forum; the Ohio Petroleum Council, a division of the American Petroleum Institute; the Ohio Oil & Gas Association; and the Ohio Oil & Gas Energy Education Program. Each of OERA’s members is a separate group with its own focus. These groups have come together for the purpose of making sure Ohio’s citizens, community leaders and elected officials get the answers they need about the opportunities and challenges related to shale exploration and production in Ohio.  The speaker will be Rebecca Heimlich, who is the association’s Ohio Campaign Manager. Heimlich is overseeing the organization’s grassroots educational outreach efforts in the Buckeye state. Heimlich is also the director of the Ohio Energy Resource Alliance, which was announced on Wednesday, December 14th, and which is an alliance among the Ohio Petroleum Council (a division of API), the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program, Energy In Depth, and the Buckeye Energy Forum.

Also speaking will be Shawn Bennett of Energy in Depth Ohio, an education and outreach initiative exploring the promise and potential of Ohio’s homegrown energy resources.

Please refer questions to David Tabaka at: 330-835-8027 or DTabaka@neo.rr.com.

General Information
This is a members-only meeting; however, everyone is encouraged to bring along friends and/or family members interested in joining. Membership forms will be available.
Please enter using the Auditor’s Office entrance (set of doors to the left as viewed from Liberty Street) which faces Liberty Street, walk straight ahead to the stairs (or elevator) and go to the second floor – Commissioner’s Meeting Room.
Please arrive a little early and if you arrive after 7:00pm and find the front door locked, call Dave Tabaka at 330-835-8027 and I will come down and let you in.

MEMORANDUM 02-13-2012
To: All WCTP members and invited guests.
Re: Member meeting and “Meet the Candidates for Wayne County Sheriff” event.
Meeting Details
Date: 02-22-2012
Time: 7:00PM
Place: Wayne County Commissioners Meeting Room. Wayne County Administration Building, 428 West Liberty Street Wooster, Ohio 44691
Meeting Agenda
• Meet the candidates for Wayne County Sheriff
Candidates Charles D. Hardman and Travis Hutchinson will speak; followed by Q and A.
• Open Discussion
Board members will open discussion on other issues appearing on the March 6th primary ballot. All members are encouraged to engage and share ideas.
General Information
Members are encouraged to bring along friends and/or family members. Membership forms will be available.
Please enter using the Auditor’s Office entrance (set of doors to the left as viewed from Liberty Street) which faces Liberty Street, walk straight ahead to the stairs (or elevator) and go to the second floor – Commissioner’s Meeting Room.
Please arrive a little early and, if you arrive after 7:00pm and find the front door locked, call Dave Tabaka at 330-835-8027 and I will come down and let you in.

c) Information under oath
Every person required to apply for the registration of himself or another under this subchapter shall submit under oath the information required for such registration. Any person authorized under regulations issued by the Attorney General to register aliens under this subchapter shall be authorized to administer oaths for such purpose.
(d) Certificate of alien registration or alien receipt card
Every alien in the United States who has been registered and fingerprinted under the provisions of the Alien Registration Act, 1940, or under the provisions of this chapter shall be issued a certificate of alien registration or an alien registration receipt card in such form and manner and at such time as shall be prescribed under regulations issued by the Attorney General.
(e) Personal possession of registration or receipt card; penalties
Every alien, eighteen years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card issued to him pursuant to subsection (d) of this section. Any alien who fails to comply with the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall upon conviction for each offense be fined not to exceed $100 or be imprisoned not more than thirty days, or both.
(f) Alien’s social security account number
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Attorney General is authorized to require any alien to provide the alien’s social security account number for purposes of inclusion in any record of the alien maintained by the Attorney General or the Service.

Obama and Holder taking on Arizona’s SB1070

There are a lot of different “wish list” items that would ostensibly make our governance better. Chief among them are a balanced budget amendment and term limits for congress. I submit these are not necessary and discussing or debating them only serves to maintain the status quo. The one item that needs to be addressed is the repeal of all campaign reform laws since these laws do not serve the needs of the people but virtually ensure an incumbent politician will keep his seat. The people should elect representatives who will overthrow those laws.

To accomplish this we really need better informed voters who will go to the polls and cast an intelligent ballot in every election. Last year we established the Wayne County TEA Party (WCTP) to do just that – educate and motivate the local voters to affect the type of governance we want. We want a return to the limited government provided by our Founders; a government that protects the rights of all individuals and states resulting in limited spending and sound fiscal policies that encourage free-market activities so that our economy can flourish.

We need to communicate with as many like-minded citizens of Wayne County to pull together with a common goal that will bring about meaningful change and overthrow the status quo. The TEA in our name is an acronym for Totally Engaged Americans; and that is what is required to fix the mess our nation is in.

Both major political parties are culpable in bringing our nation to its current unsustainable state of increased debt and hindering economic growth. I cannot see the Democrats reversing course and abandoning their core values of wealth transfer and ever-increasing tax-and-spend policies to fund their goals. Our only real hope is to get the attention of the Republican Party leaders, beginning at the local level and spreading eventually to the national level.

Republicans have traditionally been conservatives; but the real problem can be summed in this observation; good men and women go to Washington to serve the people and stay in Washington to serve themselves. Why must we accept the status quo? We don’t need term limits; we simply need to replace those members of Congress who are self-serving with representatives who will serve the public!

All politics is local, as the saying goes. I submit that all political solutions are also local. We need to pull together and speak as if there is one voice calling for change. The local Republican Party will be forced to listen to us if we represent a large enough voting bloc, since ignoring us would render them moot. We must insist on better governance beginning with the township trustees, city or village councils, and county officials. All government meeting need to be attended by a member of the WCTP so every elected and appointed official knows we are watching and evaluating their performance in accordance with our standards.

I am soliciting all conservatives regardless of their political party affiliation. Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and others are all welcome to join us as long as they share our vision, values, mission, and goals. As an individual, I only have one vote; but together, conservatives comprise more than half of Wayne County residents. Let’s all endeavor to reach out to other like-minded citizens and invite them to join us so that we may speak with a louder voice – hopefully, one that is so loud that we can no longer be ignored.

A large team of volunteers is needed to monitor all governance in the county. We are in need of concerned citizens who are able to donate time to attend those government meetings. The WCTP will need between 75 and 100 volunteers to accomplish the desired oversight. We are looking for individuals who can volunteer a few hours each month to be seen as they personally attend government meetings and report what they observe to the WCTP. We must also be vigilantly looking for potential candidates who are willing and able to serve the public.

Once we fix the local levels of government, we can expect to make changes on the state and national level by replacing those politicians who do not consistently act to provide better governance. There are numerous conservative groups in Ohio that are communicating with one another to send a clear message to our statehouse. We are seeing some progress but more unity is needed since we receive almost no response from the major media in Ohio. On a national level, virtually every member of the House of Representatives is up for reelection every two years; we could continue the performance of 2010 by electing more conservative representatives. The Senate term is six years, with roughly one-third of them up for reelection every two years; which means it will take a little longer to improve the conditions in the Senate. We do not need term limits imposed by law, we simply need to replace those who are in office for self-serving reasons and replace them with patriots who want to serve those who elected them.

Always keep in mind that those in power do not want us to converge with similar core values because, if we do, their dominance in national and state political power will abruptly end. When citizens avoid the distractions of class warfare and distracting rhetoric and cooperatively band together to replace all politicians who serve themselves, regardless of their party affiliation, the power shifts back to the people and the politicians will act in our best interest or be replaced by someone who will.

The future of Wayne County, the State of Ohio, and the United States of America is very bright indeed for all of us who are willing to commit to a little time and hard work while tenaciously resisting the indoctrination from incumbent politicians. When we are convinced they work to serve us instead of the other way around, the future will be secure. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to take positive steps now to prevent a ruinous status quo to continue past the November 2012 elections.

Gary Harper
President, Wayne County TEA Party

Next, in support of the report and the effort to meaningfully reform Ohio’s government pensions, they have created a dedicated page on their website for pension-related information. Consistent with their other first-in-nation innovative tools (government salary & estimated pension tool; Tax Calculator; and Job Comparison tool), they have created a “Compare Your Retirement” tool that allows you to enter the yearly pension you would like to have when you retire to see how much cash you will need to already have today and how much cash you will need to have when you are ready to retire to have the  pension you desire. As a comparison, they provide you with the actual median yearly pension each of the five pensions pay based on the pensions’ 2010 Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports. They also provide you with how much those median yearly pensions will require and how much government workers will receive in total if they retire when first fully eligible and live to 78 years old. The “Pensions 101″ page and the newest tool can be found at http://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/pensions101/.

Please share this information with your family, friends, and neighbors so that they can better understand the serious financial burdens that our pension system is placing on our state.

The New York Chamber of Commerce established a currency commission to report on the problems associated with an insufficient supply of money. The commission reported their findings in October 1906 and concluded the nation needed a central bank to eliminate currency instability the danger of an inelastic currency. Currency instability refers to the purchasing value of the currency being reduced as a result of inflation. Inelastic supply, to an economist, means that supply does not increase when the demand increases. Another means to describe this lack of money is to call it a liquidity crisis, in which insufficient amounts of money are available to meet an increasing demand. Bankers saw this lack of liquidity as a potential loss of profit as they were unable to issue the loans that were being demanded. There is no sound economic rationale for simply increasing the money supply to relieve a liquidity crisis.

Note: under normal economic laws, when the demand exceeds supply, the price rises. Since interest rates represent the price of money, an increase in demand for money should cause the interest rate to rise. This is a good thing. An increasing interest rate ensures that money will not be borrowed for frivolous reasons; but instead will only be borrowed for purchases that make sound economic sense like buying new capital equipment that can be used by businesses to make more “widgets” on a more economical scale and sell them for a lower price!

This commission report began a series of events that led to the enactment of the Federal Reserve Banking Act in 1916. The panic of 1907, which was the result of inflation stimulated by the President Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury Leslie Shaw over the previous two years, resulted in the big bankers coming together in agreement that a central bank, as a lender of last resort, was required to stabilize the economy. Shaw was attempting to run the Treasury as if it were a central bank by making open-market purchases; the infusion of Treasury money into the economy resulted in inflation.

The big bankers co-opted the academics into presenting a series of lectures during 1907-1908 that called for the economic reasons for a central bank. In January 1908, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich took the lead in banking reform by establishing a National Monetary Commission (NMC) that was to investigate the currency question of instability and suggest proposals for banking reform. The NMC was a sham; its real mission was to overwhelm the public with supposed academic experts and take the financial issue out of politics by putting the non-elected academics and experts at the forefront.

In September 1909, Chicago banker George M. Reynolds delivered a presidential address to the American Bankers Association calling for a central bank. On September 14, 1909, President Taft suggested the nation seriously consider a central bank during his address in Boston. On September 22, 1909, the Wall Street Journal began a fourteen-part series of front-page editorials entitled “A Central Bank of Issue”. These unsigned editorials were actually written by Charles A. Conant, who was the chief paid propagandist for the NMC.

1910 saw numerous public speaking events and printed materials all in support of a central bank and all by non-elected, supposedly non-political types. Every one of them was careful to make this appear to be grassroots movement without ties to any elected official. These behind- the-scene tactics were totally effective in spreading the word (quite a bit of it lacking facts) and thereby educating the general public for the need to support a central bank movement in America.

On November 22, 1910, a secret meeting was held at Jekyll Island, Georgia. Senator Aldrich and five businessmen representing the largest banking interests in the world at the time, traveled under assumed names in complete secrecy, to the private resort co owned by J.P. Morgan to spend a week in drawing up the bill that would eventually become the Federal Reserve Act. Aldrich presented the bill to his NMC with only minor revisions, and it officially became known as the Aldrich Plan in January of 1911. The elections of 1912 brought a change in party to the White House which required dropping the Aldrich name in favor of a more centrist politician. The bill took the name of Representative Carter Glass from Virginia. The bill underwent numerous revisions but was passed by an overwhelming majority in both houses in December 1913. Even with the changes, it was still virtually the same as the original draft written at Jekyll Island.

Now that the central bank was in place, bankers had no reason to hold gold in their vaults. They could, and did, deposit their gold with the Fed and receive reserves upon which they could make loans. They were able to pyramid their credit and thereby expand the supply of money and credit from coast to coast in a coordinated fashion. This was in inverse pyramid with the bank deposits as the base and an expanding succession of upper layers that represent the effects of that lending through successive lending. Economists refer to these successive layers as compounding or the multiplier effect. Coordination was necessary so that inflation was maintained at a low enough level so as to not upset the people and call for government intervention. In short, bankers had created a goose (the Fed as a central bank) that was laying golden eggs for them to harvest on a daily basis.

The inverse pyramiding of bank credit thus created was three layers deep; the Fed pyramided its notes and deposits on top of the newly centralized gold supply; the national banks pyramided bank deposits on top of their reserves on deposit at the Fed; and the state banks who chose not to join the Federal Reserve System could keep their deposit accounts at national banks and pyramid their credit on top of those deposits.

The Fed sat at the base of the pyramid and could coordinate and control inflation by determining the amount of reserves in their member banks. Prior to the Federal Reserve Act, the reserve requirement for national banks was 20 percent reserves to demand deposits. This meant that banks had to set aside 20 percent of demand deposits while making loans with the remaining 80 percent. That resulted in a money multiplier of 5 since 100 percent divided by 20 percent equals 5; meaning the ratio of demand deposits to new credit creation was 5:1. One of the first acts of the new Fed was to cut the reserve requirement in half to only 10 percent of demand deposits, thereby increasing the credit creation ration to 10:1.

I should note that issuing credit and loans on the demand deposits is not necessarily a bad thing under economic law. The new loan is essentially converting a piece of paper that serves as the loan agreement into checkable deposits. This act of monetizing is known as money creation. Money is created when a loan is issued and then money is destroyed when the loan is paid back. Since the temporary increase in the money supply, or monetary base, is offset by the destruction of money when the loan is repaid it does not result in a permanent increase in the money supply. That borrowed money will be spent to buy goods and services that should help the economy grow. This is only valid because the loans are based on deposits that have actual value. When the Fed creates money out of thin air with nothing to back it other than the full faith and credit of the United States, the increase in the money supply, or monetary base, is not temporary; it is permanent since the Fed never takes the closing position of destroying the money at some time in the future. I will discuss the money supply at length in part III.

Every citizen needs to understand simple economic theory. Unfortunately, modern economic theory is rife with fallacies that are more readily accepted than the basic economic truths. Economics focuses mainly on human behavior and how it related to the market functions of buying, selling, price, and quantity. The underlying assumption is that all people will behave rationally, or in their individual best interest, if given the opportunity to choose between two or more options. For example, if the price of a desired good is reduced, a rational consumer will purchase more at the lower price.

Fist, let’s discuss the concepts of immediate and delayed gratification. Immediate gratification relates to consumption while delayed gratification relates to savings or setting some earned income aside to be used for some future purpose. My generation was taught to save for down payments and outright purchases while the current generation is being coaxed into consuming now by borrowing to buy whatever they want. This immediate gratification leads to an overall increase in consumer debt which is not necessarily beneficial to a healthy economy since some of that debt will need to be written off as bad loans with the associated costs being distributed to those who did not default on their debt!

The concept of taking good money to pay for bad money is certainly not new. The history of almost every nation includes a period of poor economic performance in which bankers made loans by using their depositor’s money to finance those loans. As a result, the bankers were unable to deliver when their depositor’s asked for their money. This was known as a bank failure. Bank failures led to localized economic collapse since the currency issued by that bank was only circulated in the local community. Each bank was printing their own money and the people looked to the government to step in and regulate bankers so that bank failures would be prevented in the future. This is a fundamental economic fear, the fear of loss of savings, which allowed the people to be fooled by the government when a central bank is established.

A central bank is a single banking system within a nation that enjoys a monopoly on printing currency and controlling the amount of that currency in circulation. When any currency is backed by a precious metal like gold or silver, it is said to be commodity money because it has the intrinsic value of the commodity that backs it. In contrast to commodity money we can have fiat money which is paper money with no intrinsic value that is money only because the national government says it is money; it is backed by nothing more than the faith citizens have in their government. Our dollar, the Federal Reserve notes, is fiat money. Since fiat money costs almost nothing to produce, its intrinsic value is also very near nothing.

The Federal Reserve Act became law on December 23, 1913 when signed by President Woodrow Wilson. The Federal Reserve is charged with controlling inflation and unemployment. Unfortunately for us, those two concepts share an inverse relationship; when one goes up the other goes down. An ideal situation would be low inflation and low unemployment. The fed is not a government entity – it is wholly owned by the member banks. The fed is actually a banker’s bank that essentially transfers all bank risks to the taxpayers. In short; large bankers are allowed to keep their profits when they make good loans, and the losses associated with bad loans are passed on to the taxpayers. It is no wonder people are beginning to hate large bankers. The large bankers tolerate smaller community banks but those little banks do not enjoy the protection from loss that their large counterparts have.

Since a central bank is an essential element of a progressive form of government, the progressive era is said to have begun during the Wilson administration. One can argue that the progressive movement was afoot much earlier since the groundwork for the Federal Reserve Act had to be laid in advance of the legislation. My opinion is that the progressive era began when our political leaders presumed to be smarter than the common people and followed though on that belief by enacting legislation that would slowly increase the scope and power of the federal government by taking liberties away from the people and transferring power to the government. For simplicity, I look at the beginning of the 20th century as the beginning of the progressive era because it seems to mark the end of the free market era of capitalism.

A good reference point comes from The 5000 Year Leap: The 28 Great Ideas That Changed the World, by W. Cleon Skousen.

“By 1905 the United States had become the richest industrial nation in the world. With only 5 percent of the earth’s continental land area and merely 6 percent of the world’s population, the American people were producing over half of almost everything – clothes, food, houses, transportation, communications, even luxuries. It was a great tribute to Adam Smith.”

This economic feat was accomplished by the citizen’s ability to prosper at the maximum level in accordance with the four laws of economic freedom.
1. The freedom to try
2. The freedom to buy
3. The freedom to sell
4. The freedom to fail

Those freedoms are heavily regulated by government in today’s economy and that regulation has led us to the point of an economy that is no longer experiencing unrestrained growth; our current growth is actually anemic.

The fed has control over monetary policy, meaning controlling the amount of money in circulation. Fiscal policy is controlled by congress when they enact laws to change tax rates, tax policy, and government spending. Sometimes the fed and congress work in opposition to each other since they each have separate agendas.

In theory, increasing the money supply leads to lower interest rates, higher inflation and lower unemployment. Economic theory can only describe the relationships between variables; it cannot predict the magnitude or timing of the change.

The fed changes the amount of money in circulation by either buying or selling bonds in the open market. Those bonds are generally sold to Goldman Sachs, a firm that can even borrow the money from the fed, as the lender of last resort, to purchase those bonds. Goldman Sachs will earn a profit on every transaction of buying or selling bonds.

In closing, I want to point out a few facts:

When President Obama was sworn in, federal debt was 40% of GDP and is now 79%. Federal debt is expected to be 72% by the end of 2011.

Federal spending went from 20% of GDP to 25% of GDP on his watch so far, with absolutely no indication that is will be reduced in the short term.

We must reduce federal spending and reduce the national debt; raising taxes is the antithesis of that goal. Spending is the problem and one cannot simply reduce debt by borrowing. That would not work in a household situation and it likewise will not work for a government. Sustainable spending levels by definition must be less than the amount of money available.

Meeting Details
Date: 12-5-2011
Time: 7:00PM
Place: Wayne County Commissioners Meeting Room.  Wayne County Administration Building, 428 West Liberty Street Wooster, Ohio 44691

Meeting Agenda
• Election of New Board Member

• Brief statements from candidates
• Members cast ballots
• Ballots tallied
• Run-off (if tie vote occurs)
• Announce winner and swear in new board member

• Speaker
Gary Harper will give a brief presentation on the Federal Reserve and US monetary policy followed by Q&A.
• Open Discussion
Members are encouraged to ask questions and share ideas.

General Information

Members are encouraged to bring along friends and/or family members.  Membership forms will be available.

Please enter using the Auditor’s Office entrance which faces Liberty Street, walk straight ahead to the stairs (or elevator) and go to the second floor – Commissioner’s Meeting Room.

Please arrive a little early and if you arrive after 7:00pm and find the front door locked, call Dave Tabaka at 330-835-8027 and I will come down let you in.

Our Founding Fathers recognized this polarity and constructed our Constitution so that each group could hold to its values and keep the other group in check.  They wisely argued that the prosperity of our nation would be highest when neither side completely rules.

Today, we simple label them as left and right.  Our Founders saw the extreme left as tyranny; the extreme right as anarchy.  They created a new and unique system of government in which the people are sovereign, while at the same time submitting to the authority of limited government to maintain order.  The key to making it work is summarized in the concept of the rule of law over the rule of men.

Individuals would be willing to work hard to better themselves, knowing they could keep the fruits of their labor.  This is the foundation of capitalism; an economic system rather than a political system.

There is not one example in the history of the world in which a society became stronger and endured by giving away the wealth accumulated by hard work and innovation to feed, clothe, and care for those who do not care for themselves!

The left desires to solve the problems of society, while the right maintains that the costs associated with helping those who do not or cannot help themselves must be considered.  Both sides have a seat at the table and both sides are equally right since collectively, we strive to avoid both tyranny and anarchy!

Our nation is mired in federal debt; many state and local governments are technically insolvent.  The last 100 years of expanding government and ignoring economic reality have proven that which was not doubted by our Founders.  The very problems that the left is trying to solve with government edicts will be the undoing of our economy when there is simply no more money left to fund those grandiose ideas.

Wake up America!  We need to rebalance our national priorities to get back to the center and balance problem-solving with sustainable spending.  Do not disparage the other side; instead remind the opposite party that balance is crucial to sustainability.  Embrace your adversary as he will keep your zealousness in check as well.

Gary Harper