February 10,
2015
Libertarians Of South Central Kansas (LSOCK) meet for Supper
and discussion every Tuesday at Cathy’s Westway Cafe located at 1215 W. Pawnee
in Wichita, Kansas
at 5:30 PM. If we have official business to conduct or a featured guest
speaker, that will begin at 6:00 PM. All who support personal responsibility
and individual liberty are invited to attend.
To receive the LSOCK NEWS and LSOCK
NEWS Alerts! via email please contact Steven Rosile at sarasile@att.net or 316 618-1339.
Contact the
Libertarian Party of Kansas or LSOCK at:
LPKS / LSOCK
P.O. Box 2456
Wichita, Kansas
67201
Ph. (800) 335-1776
On the Web
please go to LPKS.org or to the LSOCK Blog at:
LSOCK NEWS
IN THIS ISSUE:
- From The Editor
- Open Letter To Keen and Eileen
Umbehr
- Kansas
Libertarian Party Convention
- LSOCK Officer Elections Coming
Up
- If The U.S.
Had Stayed Out Of WWI
- From The Editor
Hello
everyone,
This is my
first LSOCK News in quite some time. Last year was both exciting and exhausting
for me and so many other Kansas Libertarians.
We had
planned for and hoped to achieve major party status last year but due to
extremely unfortunate circumstances that goal was not realized.
Despite that
we still saw a year that was a success. A success in that many more Kansans
became aware of our party, a lot of new contacts were made, our registered
voters/membership increased and many new activists joined our ranks.
Much of this
is due to the efforts of Keen and Eileen Umbehr. See my open letter to them
below expressing my (and our) appreciation.
Other items
of interest below are the 2015 LPKS State Convention and upcoming elections for
LSOCK officers.
Please come
and join us any Tuesday at the newly remodeled Cathy’s Westway Cafe.
For Liberty,
Steven A. Rosile
Editor, LSOCK News
- Open Letter To Keen and Eileen Umbehr
This letter is to you Keen, to express
my heartfelt appreciation for your inspiring campaign for Governor in 2014. You
traveled all over the state appearing and speaking to groups of Kansans large
and small. You are the first real champion the Libertarian Party of Kansas has
ever really had considering the length and breadth of your campaign for Governor,
presenting yourself, your candidacy and our party in those many months of
constant traveling, making appearances and speaking at events.
You worked tirelessly to achieve 5% or
more of the vote in order to make the LPKS a major party in Kansas.
Unbelievable, after all your effort and hard work, you only received 4% of the
vote.
I know you, along with all of us, were
shocked and discouraged at this outcome.
The fact is that this result was due
not to any failings on your part, Keen, but from the fact that the incumbent
Governor was so unpopular within his own party that a little known democrat
Kansas House Representative actually had a shot at beating him. Many
Republicans and independents that would have voted for you instead held their
noses and voted for the incumbent to prevent the democrat from becoming
Governor.
Thank you Keen, from the bottom of my
heart, for your having championed the Libertarian Party of Kansas, increasing
our visibility and our number of contacts across the state.
Thank you too, Eileen, for all of your
hard work in supporting Keen and the LPKS as Treasurer and campaign organizer
for Keen for those many months.
I know I speak for all Kansas
Libertarians and all freedom loving citizens of this state with this letter.
Thank you Keen and Eileen Umbehr.
For Liberty,
Steven A. Rosile
4th District Coordinator,
Libertarian Party of Kansas
- Kansas
Libertarian Party Convention
The 2015
Kansas Libertarian Party Convention will be held in Salina,
Kansas April 17, 18 and 19. The
location and details will be announced as they are finalized. A rough outline
of the events are below:
On Friday
evening, April 17 there will be an informal mixer, Saturday the 18th
will be the Business Meetings in morning and afternoon sessions and on Sunday
morning there will be an Executive Committee meeting open to the public.
Business at the Annual Meeting in
odd-numbered years includes election of LPKS Executive Committee Officers,
Amending the LPKS Constitution and By Laws and any other business on the Agenda
set by the LPKS Chair and Excom.
LPKS Executive Committee Offices are
Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary, Treasurer and four District Coordinators, one
from each Congressional District. The District Coordinators must live in the
particular district they are to represent and are elected by LPKS members from
each particular district. Only those members from the 1st
Congressional District can vote for that district’s Coordinator, while members
from the 2nd Congressional District vote for that district’s
Coordinator, etc.
The Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary and
Treasurer are elected by the whole of the attendees. The District Coordinators
are elected only by party members that reside in each particular Congressional
District. The current members of LPKS
Excom are:
Chair: Rob Hodgkinson
Vice Chair: Sharon DuBois
Secretary: Mike Kerner
Treasurer Ric Koehn
Congressional District Coordinators
1st District Barry Albin
2nd District Rob Garrard
3rd District Jeff Caldwell
4th District Steven Rosile
If you are interested in becoming an
officer in the Libertarian Party of Kansas please contact Chair Rob Hodgkinson
at chair@lpks.org or Vice Chair Sharon
DuBois at vice-chair@lpks.org or any
other current officer.
- LSOCK Officer Elections Coming Up
The annual
election for LSOCK Officers will be on February 24 if there is a quorum. If
there is no quorum then the election will be held March10.
The current
officers are:
Gordon
Bakken Chair
Steven
Rosile Vice Chair
Drew
Holland Secretary
Shawn
Smith Treasurer
Mike
Brincefield 1st At
Large
John
Kostner 2nd At
Large
Nominations
will be made at the Tuesday Supper Meetings up to and including the day of the
election.
If you are
interested in becoming an officer of LSOCK please come to the Tuesday Supper
Meetings and/or contact Steven Rosile by replying to this email.
- If The U.S.
Had Stayed Out Of WWI
“If The U.S.
Had Stayed Out Of WWI, There Would Have Been No Hitler Or Stalin..”
by David Stockman
July 12, 2014
WASHINGTON
–
The
first big wave of embracing a liberal international economic order — relatively
free trade, rising international capital flows and rapidly growing global
economic integration — resulted in something remarkable.
Between 1870
and 1914, there was a 45-year span of rising living standards, stable prices,
massive capital investment and prolific technological progress. In terms of
overall progress, these four-plus decades have never been equaled — either
before or since.
Then came
the Great War. It involved a scale of total industrial mobilization and
financial mayhem that was unlike any that had gone before. In the case of Great
Britain, for example, its national debt
increased 14-fold.
In addition,
England’s
price level doubled, its capital stock was depleted, most offshore investments
were liquidated and universal wartime conscription left it with a massive
overhang of human and financial liabilities.
Despite all
that, England
still stood out as the least devastated of the major European countries. In France,
the price by 300 percent,
its extensive Russian investments were confiscated by the Bolsheviks and its
debts in New York and London
catapulted to more than 100 percent of GDP.
Among the
defeated powers, currencies emerged nearly worthless. The German mark was only
worth five cents on the prewar dollar, while the country’s wartime debts —
especially after the Carthaginian peace of John Maynard Keynes skewered so brilliantly — soared to crushing, heights. In short, the wave of
debt, currency inflation and financial disorder from the Great War was immense
and unprecedented.
With all
that in mind, one important question only rises in importance: Was the United
States’ intervention in April 1917 warranted or
not?
And did it
only end up prolonging the European slaughter?
Never mind
that it resulted in a cockamamie peace, which gave rise to totalitarianism
among the defeated powers. Even conventional historians like Niall Ferguson
admit as much.
Had
President Woodrow Wilson not misled the U.S.
a
crusade, Europe’s Great War would have ended in
mutual exhaustion in 1917.
Both sides
would have gone home battered and bankrupt — but would not have presented any
danger to the rest of mankind.
Indeed,
absent Wilson’s
crusade, there would have been no allied victory, no punitive peace — and no
war reparations. Nor would there have been a Leninist coup in Petrograd
— or later on, the emergence of Stalin’s barbaric regime.
Likewise,
there would have been no Hitler, no Nazi dystopia, no Munich, no Sudetenland
and Danzig corridor crises, no need for a British war to save Poland, no final
solution and , no global war
against Germany and Japan — and, finally, no incineration of 200,000 civilians
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nor would
all of these events have been followed by a Cold War with the Soviets or
CIA-sponsored coups and assassinations in Iran,
Guatemala, Indonesia,
Brazil, Chile
and the Congo,
to name just a few.
Surely,
there would have been no CIA plot to assassinate Castro, or Russian missiles in
Cuba
or a crisis that took the world to the brink of annihilation.
There would
have been no Dulles brothers, no domino theory and no Vietnam
slaughter, either. Nor would the U.S.
launched a war in Afghanistan’s
mountain valleys to arouse the
from their slumber — and hence train the future al-Qaida.
Likewise, in
Iran there would have been no
shah and his Savak terror, no Khomeini-led Islamic , no U.S.
to enable Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein’s gas attacks on Iranian boy soldiers in the 1980s.
Nor would
there have been an American invasion of Arabia in 1991 to stop our erstwhile
ally Saddam from looting the equally contemptible emir of Kuwait’s ill-gotten
oil plunder — or, alas, the horrific 9/11 blow-back a decade later.
, the axis of evil — that is, the
Washington-based Cheney-Rumsfeld-
axis — would not have arisen, nor would it have foisted a near-$1 trillion
warfare state budget the 21st-century U.S.
The real
point of that Great War, in terms of the annals of U.S.
history, is that it enabled the
already-rising U.S.
to boom for the better part of 15
years after the onset of the war.
In the first
stage, the U.S.
the granary and arsenal to the
European allies. This triggered an eruption of domestic investment and
production that transformed the nation into a massive global creditor and
powerhouse exporter, virtually overnight.
U.S. exports quadrupled and farm income surged
from $3 billion to $9 billion. Land prices soared, country banks proliferated
and the same was true of industry. For example, steel production rose from 30
million tons annually to nearly 50 million tons.
Altogether,
in six short years from 1914 to 1920, $40 billion of U.S. GDP turned into $92
billion — a sizzling 15 percent annual rate of gain.
The
depression that could have been avoided
Needless to
say, these figures reflected an inflationary, war-swollen economy. After all,
the U.S. loaned the Allies massive amounts of money
— all to purchase grain, pork, wool, steel, munitions and ships from the U.S.
This
transfer amounted to nearly 15 percent of GDP, or an equivalent of $2 trillion
in today’s economy. It also represented a form of vendor finance that was
destined to vanish at war’s end. As it happened, the U.S.
experience a brief but deep recession
in 1920. But it was not a thoroughgoing end-of- would “detox” the economy.
The day of
reckoning was merely postponed. It finally arrived in 1933 when the depression
hit with full force. The U.S.
was cratering — and Germany
embarked on its disastrous “recovery” experience under the leadership of Adolf
Hitler.
These two
events — along with so many of the above-listed offenses later on — could have
been avoided if only the U.S.
shown the wisdom of staying out of
World War I.
