GATA offers keepsake Krugerrands for donations of $525

3:14a ET Monday, December 3, 2001

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Our excursion to the New Orleans Investment Conference
was a big success and a little emotional.

Not long ago GATA Chairman Bill Murphy was finding
doors barred to him. Now he is being invited as a
speaker to international conferences.

The New Orleans conference was especially important to
us because of its traditional orientation to gold and
natural resouce investors and producers. And all
indications in New Orleans were that the gold-mining
industry and investment professionals all over the world
are coming to see that something is terribly wrong in
the gold market.

All indications in New Orleans were also that GATA has
become well known throughout the gold world and that
the letters and e-mails sent by GATA supporters have
had a big impact on the companies whose shares they
hold. Please keep it up; just remember to be courteous.
We want to make friends, not enemies.

But most rewarding to Murphy, GATA consultants Reg
Howe and James Turk, and me was meeting so many of
our longtime supporters, many of whom had come from
great distances, including South Africa, Europe, Australia,
and even, perhaps most remote of all, my daughter's
favorite state, Montana. At last we were able to thank
people face to face.

I was privileged to make some remarks to our friends at
the reception we held at the New Orleans conference on
Thursday, November 29. I've tried to put my notes for
that talk into readable form, and I'll append them here.

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

* * *

REMARKS BY CHRIS POWELL,
GATA SECRETARY/TREASURER,
AT GATA RECEPTION IN NEW ORLEANS,
NOVEMBER 29, 2001

Writing up the name tags for everyone tonight, I was
reminded of an old cartoon showing people at a
convention of amnesiacs. They were all wearing tags
reading, quot;Hello, what's my name?quot;

New Orleans is a great city for a convention of gold
people, for it may be the only place where many of us
can look normal.

Normal or not, I'm an accident in this cause. I'm a
newspaper editor, and three years ago, just before GATA
started, I had no special interest in gold. I had taken
to sampling some financial newsletters in search of
investment opportunities, and I came upon the late Jim
Blanchard's Gold Newsletter. It suggested that gold
was a good contrarian investment because it was trading
at historic lows, and I thought that made sense.

Unfortunately we've had a lot more history since then.

I'm not a gold bug; I'm actually an anti-trust bug. My
newspaper is relatively new -- a little more than 30 years
old -- it is among the few dailies left in America that
is independently owned, and it frequently has had to
use anti-trust law against the monopolistic practices
of our chain-owned competitors, practices that include
forcing newspaper feature syndicates not to do business
with us.

So when I came across Bill Murphy's wonderful Internet
site, www.LeMetropoleCafe.com, soon after it opened,
and I read his complaints about manipulation of the
gold market, I had to write to him to call his attention
and that of his subscribers to the Sherman and Clayton
anti-trust acts, which outlaw what Bill had concluded was
being done to gold, and which provide for triple damages
in civil lawsuits against such misconduct. I wrote that
gold's partisans should stop complaining to each other and
DO something about the problem -- form a committee, hire
lawyers, and look for ways to sue or otherwise take action.

Bill was enthusiastic. So we incorporated in Delaware, and
here we are after an eventful three years.

Maybe I'm just trying to rationalize my losses, but in
this time I believe I have learned that gold remains
crucial to the national and international economic
order, and that, big as that function is, the issues
involved in GATA's work are even bigger.

Those issues involve the most basic democracy, the
question of whether the most important public policy
will be made in public for the benefit of the many or in
secret for the benefit of the few. They involve fair
dealing between individuals and nations alike. And they
involve imperialism, the imperialism of a single world
reserve currency, which happens to be the U.S. dollar.

Indeed, I have come to think of GATA as the most
relevant anti-imperialist organization in the world.

For the imperialism we have identified and oppose is
brutally effective against the developing world because
of its surreptitiousness.

If, for example, a foreign army marched into South
Africa and, at bayonet-point, carried off the wealth of the
country and enslaved its labor, at least its victims would
know what was happening to them and who was doing
it. But when the same thing happens to South Africa
through rigged markets and dollar imperialism, people
don't even know what has hit them.

That is why ending such an exploitive system is a noble
cause, and why it reminds me of a favorite poem, quot;The
Present Crisisquot; by James Russell Lowell, who wrote it
in 1844 as a protest of American slavery.

(You can find the poem on the Internet here:
a href=http://www.bartleby.com/102/128.htmlhttp://www.bartleby.com/102/128.html/a)

Today the poem may seem a bit obtuse and didactic --
which may be why I like it -- but hear Lowell out:

When a deed is done for Freedom,
through the broad earth's aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic,
trembling on from east to west....

For mankind are one in spirit,
and an instinct bears along,
Round the earth's electric circle,
the swift flash of right or wrong;
Whether conscious or unconscious,
yet Humanity's vast frame
Through its ocean-sundered fibers
feels the gush of joy or shame;
In the gain or loss of one race
all the rest have equal claim.

Despite Lowell's protest and that of many others,
American slavery continued for another 20 years, and a
horrible war was needed to get rid of it. But Lowell
told us not to despair or give up no matter how long
it took.

Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
keeping watch above his own.

I hope we don't have to wait another 20 years, as
Lowell and the abolitionists did. But we plan to stay
with the struggle for as long as it takes, and your
support is what makes that possible.

That support astounds and stirs me because it's like
something in Richard Attenborough's film about Gandhi,
wherein the hero begins with nothing but a wrong to right
-- another imperialistic wrong -- and finds people coming
out of the blue to help him, because the cause moves them
too.

We have some frustrating and lonely nights in front of
the computer and on the road as we fight all the money
in the world, and without you we couldn't do it.

I hope it is not getting too apocalyptic to say that your
coming out of the blue to help us also reminds me of my
favorite passage from the Bible, and that you won't mind
my leaving it with you tonight, along with my thanks. It's
from Isaiah:

Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
The everlasting God, the Lord,
The Creator of the ends of the earth,
Neither faints nor is weary.
His understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the weak,
And to those who have no might he increases strength.
Even the youths shall faint and be weary,
And the young men shall utterly fall,
But they that wait upon the Lord
Shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings as eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
And they shall walk and not faint.