Do you really want to bet that one person can't make a difference?

11:44p ET Sunday, July 8, 2007

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Presidential candidate Ron Paul, U.S. representative from Texas, was interviewed at length today on ABC television's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." Stephanopolous seemed amused and surprised that a politician who has adhered so closely to his professed principles has survived for so long, and the interviewer expressed his willingness to bet all the cash he was carrying (he didn't say how much that was) that Paul has no chance of winning the presidency.

Paul acknowledged that the odds against him are long but added that he was never expected to win election to Congress either, and now has served there for almost 20 years in three stints. Perhaps most interesting was Paul's explanation of his surprising success so far in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, particularly with fund raising. Paul attributed it to a simple desire among Americans for freedom from ever-more-pervasive government.

Stephanopoulos isn't the only one who considers Paul's presidential campaign quixotic, but then GATA hardly will criticize a candidate on those grounds, since each of these dispatches carries a reproduction of a colorful painting evoking Don Quixote himself as we seek to shed light on the surreptitious market manipulations of the U.S. government and other governments.

Some of us in GATA are especially fond of Richard Attenborough's 1982 historical epic film "Gandhi" for showing what can happen when one person resolves to devote himself to a just cause -- in Gandhi's case, the overthrow of imperialism and the independence of India. Other people simply materialize out of nowhere to help him, and before too long there is a mass movement. It can take a while -- decades even. It took Gandhi 30 years. But it sure can make fools of the cynics, who never see an injustice that rouses them to action and who thus accomplish nothing.

While GATA is hardly a mass movement yet, hundreds of people have come out of nowhere to help us since our founding in 1999, and we think we can claim to have had a little influence on the gold market and to have advanced the anti-imperialist cause. So we know better than to chuckle at Paul as Stephanopoulos did today, even as we are grateful to him for giving Paul a hearing and eight minutes on national television, which you can find at YouTube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COsQgwBsMjA

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

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The Silver Summit
Thursday-Friday, September 20-21, 2007
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho
http://thesilversummit.com

New Orleans Investment Conference
Sunday-Thursday, October 21-25, 2007
New Orleans, Louisiana
http://www.neworleansconference.com

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