It is an honor and privilege to announce here on the BTP website that the Boston Tea National Committee has unanimously passed a resolution (7 yes, 0 no) that opposes the $850 billion bailout package that Congress passed a week ago.

Here's the text of the resolution as it has been presented:

Resolution #00001

A Resolution to Denounce the $850 Billion Congressional Bailout Package

Introduced: October 8, 2008
Amended: October 9, 2008, October 11, 2008, and October 12, 2008

Passed by the BTNC on October 13, 2008

Sponsor: Boston Tea Party Vice Chairman Todd Andrew Barnett

Sponsors: BTNC At-Large Representative Elle Larkin, BTNC Secretary Michelle Luetge, and BTNC At-Large Representative Kent McManigal

Whereas, the United States Congress, consisting of the U.S. House of Representatives and the United States Senate, passed an $850 billion congressional bailout package by a vote of 263-171, and

Whereas, the bailout will tack on an additional $112 billion to the current deficit over a period of five years because the legislation contains no provision to dramatically cut spending and tax levels, and

Whereas, the pork-barrel laced bill is laden with a gamut of tax breaks and subsidies to numerous tax-funded welfare recipients, including, but not limited to the following:

• Renewable energy credit
• Tax and energy credits for a variety of boondoggles such as small wind property, geothermal heating pump systems, biodiesel and renewable diesel, increases in and special rules for the coal excise tax, etc.
• Extensions of the alternative extension tax, new market credits, deductions for state and local sales taxes, etc.
• Mental health parity
• Indian employment credit

And

• Puerto Rican and Virgin Island rum producers, and

Whereas, the ballooned bailout package passed by both Houses of the Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush has an estimated 442 pages, and the original bailout bill, which failed by a vote of 205-228, had an estimated 110 pages,

Whereas, the United States Senate voted in favor of the $850 billion bailout package by a vote of 74-26 in the interests of its lobbyists and special interest groups and against the wishes of the American people,

Whereas, the people of the United States of America contacted their 434 elected representatives and 100 elected senators and urged them to vote against this unconstitutional measure,

Whereas, government rules, regulations, and edicts such as the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 have made it possible for low-income and minority credit risky homeowners to take out mortgages to make mal-investments on their home purchases, mortgage firms to lower their underwriting standards and issue risky loans furthering the moral hazard of the credit, real estate, banking, and mortgage markets,

Whereas, the revisions to the CRA in the 1980s that were authored and passed by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush as part of the Financial Institutions Reform Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) were made in response to the actions by Senator John McCain (R-AZ), former Senator John Glenn (D-OH), former Senator Alan Cranston (D-CA), former Senator Don Riegle (D-MI), and former Senator Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ) as part of the Keating Five scandal,

Whereas, the revisions to the CRA in response to the above-mentioned Keating five politicians were signed into law by then-President George H.W. Bush to allegedly increase public oversight of the process of issuing CRA ratings to banks, require the federal agencies to issue those CRA ratings publicly and written performance evaluations using facts and data to support the agencies’ conclusions, and mandate a four-tiered CRA examination rating system with performance levels of “Outstanding,” “Satisfactory,” “Needs to Improve,” and “Substantial Noncompliance,” and

Whereas, the revisions to the CRA in the 1990s that were authored and passed by Congress and signed into law by President William Jefferson Clinton as part of the Gramm-Leach-Billey Act of 1999 were made to repeal part of the Glass-Steagall Act as an alleged form of partial deregulation of the banking industry by prohibiting banks from expanding to insurance and securities unless they adhered to the provisions of the CRA,

Whereas, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 puts onerous requirements on CEOs and CFOs to be responsible for any errors, even honest mistakes, in their public company's books, and has driven company formation and public offerings offshore, and

Whereas, Sarbanes-Oxley also has added hugely to the burden for opening new banks and innovating in an industry which still uses 1969 telex technology to send bank wires,

Whereas, the bloated unconstitutional bill violates the letter of the Constitution because spending bills must be passed in the House first and the Senate second before it heads to the President’s desk in the Oval Office, and

Whereas, the bailout has failed to rescue the entire financial services industry from financial doom, furthering the plummeting of the Dow Jones, the NASDAQ, and the entire stock market, then

Be it resolved that the Boston Tea National Committee denounces, opposes, and condemns the $850 billion bailout package, as it deepens the financial crisis on Wall Street and Main Street and fleeces the American taxpayers of their hard-earned money to bailout companies, a practice that can be easily called economic fascism (or corporate socialism), and

Calls upon the federal government to dramatically deregulate the entire mortgage and financial services industries and abolish agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, repeal laws such as the CRA and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and the abolition of government-backed institutions such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Federal Reserve Board and its regional banks, and

Calls for the liquidation of assets of the Federal Reserve, its Board of Governors, its Governors, and its banks upon the write-offs of its liabilities and closing and elimination of its branches, and

Calls for the investigation and prosecution of Democratic and Republican congressmen who were significantly complicit in their actions supporting the government-propped and government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enterprises, the bailout package, and the subsidies to organizations like them and the fraudulent activities linked to and associated with them, and

Calls for the reduction or elimination of income, withholding, and all other taxes on productivity and consumption and the burden on entrepreneurs,

Calls for an introduction of a way to compete with the Federal Reserve in the interim and the repeal of legal tender laws, which prohibit a competitive free market currency system,

Calls for all bills for raising revenue to originate in the House of Representatives, as the bailout bill that originated in the Senate calls for raising revenue and has changed the current tax code and regulations, and thus is unconstitutional,

Encourages the incremental move from the state capitalistic system comprising of a mixed (fascistic) economy to a laissez-faire (free market) capitalism, and

Reinforces the need for federal and state accountability on the corrupt, fraudulent, and rotten actions of the regulators, bureaucrats, and corporatists aligned with the banking, financial, and mortgage sectors, and thus

The Boston Tea National Committee repudiates the fascistic and socialist direction of the United States, the legislative actions of the Congress, and the executive actions and directives by the President of the United States, especially with respect to its support for the bailout and its support for subsidizing, coddling, protecting, and backing Wall Street, Main Street, and the financial services industry.

UPDATE (10/15/2008):The vote is now 7-0-0 as of today.