GATA improves its Internet site and dispatch system

8:45p ET Sunday, July 9, 2006

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

GATA is improving its Internet site -- GATA.org -- and transferring its e-mail dispatch system there from YahooGroups. This will give us more control over our work and will organize it better, putting our dispatch archive in the same place with everything else we have posted on the Internet. It also will hasten our dispatches to you.

This shouldn't be too troublesome for those of you who are on GATA's e-mailing list at YahooGroups. All the e-mail addresses on our YahooGroups list have been copied to our new e-mailing list at GATA.org. But you never know how Internet service providers are going to classify e-mail as junk mail and divert it to spam folders or block it completely, as America Online has blocked completely GATA's dispatches from YahooGroups.

So for what is hoped will be a brief transition period, GATA will send its dispatches from both YahooGroups and GATA.org so those on our YahooGroups e-mail list can see whether their addresses have been picked up for our GATA.org e-mail list and whether their Internet service providers are blocking or diverting GATA dispatches from GATA.org.

Please excuse the duplication of dispatches during this transition. If you receive GATA dispatches from YahooGroups but not from GATA.org, please take the following action.

First, go to the GATA.org home page and enroll yourself on the GATA dispatch e-mail list. You can find the enrollment box on the right side of the page, below the archives calendar and above the Kitco gold price chart:

http://www.gata.org/

Second, check your e-mailbox's spam folder to see if GATA dispatches are being diverted there and, if so, program your e-mailbox's filter (if you have one) to accept mail from GATA.org.

If nothing from GATA.org ever shows up, contact your Internet service provider about the problem.

To ensure that GATA dispatches don't really become junk mail for anyone, every GATA dispatch will continue to contain a mechanism for removing its recipient from the GATA e-mail list.

We're aware of at least a couple of glitches in the transfer of the content of our old Internet site to our new site, and they're being worked on. But the worsening cumbersomeness of the YahooGroups e-mail system and the increasing tendency of Internet service providers to divert or block mail originating from YahooGroups prompted us to make the switch as soon as the new e-mail dispatch system was working.

In any case, all past GATA dispatches have been copied to the GATA.org site from the GATA dispatch archive at YahooGroups, and all new dispatches will appear at the new archive as soon as they are sent, and you will be able to find them here:

http://www.gata.org/taxonomy/term/2

(You needn't record that link; the dispatch archive is easily spotted at the GATA.org home page.)

The new dispatch archive includes a search mechanism better than the one offered at YahooGroups.

While we'll discontinue sending dispatches from YahooGroups as soon as the new dispatch system has proven itself, we'll maintain the YahooGroups dispatch archive indefinitely, since GATA dispatches there have been linked around the Internet since GATA began sending dispatches from YahooGroups in 1999.

Effective immediately I will start using GATA.org e-mail addresses for GATA's secretarial and treasury work -- CPowell@GATA.org and Info@GATA.org. But I should continue to be reachable at CXPowell@yahoo.com, even as that Yahoo address eventually should revert to personal use.

Thanks for your indulgence in this transition. We'll welcome your comments and especially notice of any aspects of the new Internet site that don't seem to be working.

Thanks also to the designer of GATA's new Internet site and e-mail dispatch system -- none other than Trevor Johnston of ImagePoint Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, the producer of GATA's Gold Rush 21 conference DVD and the brilliant video that summarized the conference. Obliging GATA's desire to put the new Internet site and e-mail dispatch system into effect urgently, Johnston spent most of yesterday getting them operational even though it was his wedding anniversary. (So perhaps GATA's even more heartfelt thanks should go to Mrs. Johnston, a true sweetheart and a babe besides.)

GATA probably is awfully late in formalizing and (we hope) professionalizing itself this way. When the organization began in January 1999, its founders -- Chairman Bill Murphy and your secretary/treasurer -- had no expectation that it would last this long, nor much of an idea of what we were getting into. We thought it was just another big-business price-fixing scheme, to be remedied in a few years by another anti-trust lawsuit. It has turned out to be the largely surreptitious and wholly undemocratic manipulation of the value of all labor and capital on the planet through the rigging by governments of the gold and currency markets, an imperialism far more vast and successful than anything ever attempted through force of arms.

Defeating THAT is going to take a little longer than we thought, and all GATA can do is hope to hasten the day. But our cause gains strength every day as understanding grows throughout the world. GATA's dispatches of news stories and commentary from around the world are sometimes evidence of that. The world IS slowly waking up to the exploitation.

The story about gold in yesterday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which was dispatched to you, said gold's advocates are "wagering on bad times." And yes, maybe some gold advocates expect and are planning for times wherein all their capital gains arising from gold investments will have to be spent on guns, ammunition, freeze-dried food, and ventilation equipment. Maybe some gold owners will even be happy if such times come to pass.

But, to the contrary, GATA hopes for and indeed anticipates a more just and democratic world -- and times wherein economic values are determined in the open by free and transparent markets and gold is the great guarantor of human liberty and equality, undeterred by governments and national borders.

So we have shored up our virtual fortress, to which the like-minded may repair, and may be here for the duration. Thanks as always for your interest and support.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.