It Started With Ron Paul
by John Rubino and Jim
Quinn
In addition to his day job as a strategic planner with an Ivy League university, James Quinn has, in the past year, become one of the Web’s handful of must-read bloggers. Nearly everything he publishes ends up in the DollarCollapse “Best of the Web” column, and his Burning Platform website now hosts high-level discussions on topics ranging from Peak Water to Washington’s fraudulent employment numbers to Swiss bank dumping of U.S. bonds. We spoke earlier in the week: DollarCollapse: The first article on your Burning Platform website is less than a year old. Since then you’ve been churning out big, thought-provoking, well-researched articles at the rate of about one a week. What happened to suddenly make you such a prolific blogger? James Quinn: I’d never written an article in my entire life until April 2008. The reason I started was, I was watching the Republican presidential primaries and I saw how the mainstream press and the other candidates were treating Ron Paul. I’d never heard of Ron Paul until Richard Russell brought him up in his newsletter. I started investigating, and everything the guy wrote was dead-on, completely consistent with my point of view. And during the campaign they were treating him like a nut, when he was the most honest straightforward guy in the campaign. So I wrote an article titled “Why We Need Ron Paul.” I tried to get it published in some newspapers but nobody wanted any part of it. Then I came across Lew Rockwell’s site and he loved it and posted it. His site gives out its writers’ email addresses so I started getting 50 emails a day, most of them agreeing with me. So I kept going. The first five or six articles were all Ron Paul based, and Lew put them on his site. Then Seeking Alpha and Minyanville and your site picked them up. Then I came across this guy named Jason Rines, who had created a site called Raging Debate, which had used a couple of my articles. I mentioned that I’d like to do a site that would include discussion threads and he said, “I’ll create it for you.” He put together the Burning Platform. I came up with the name and supply the content, and he built the discussion capabilities. Jason’s idea is to roll out these sites for anybody who has something to say. He’ll provide the technology and they’ll provide the content. DC: Your articles cover a lot of ground, but the central theme is always the mess we’ve made of things. How in your opinion did we screw up so royally? JQ: It comes back to 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window. Before that we were a manufacturing-based economy. We produced things, and we ran a trade surplus, not a deficit. But [disconnecting the dollar from gold] unleashed the Federal Reserve to print at will, and they have. Since then we’ve had nothing but inflation. The dollar has lost 93% of its value against gold. We did fine from 1789 to 1913. We had strong growth without inflation. But when we created the Federal Reserve it was for the benefit of the bankers and politicians. It has allowed them to spend freely and create a welfare system that has skyrocketed. But you can’t let the rest of us off the hook. We’ve continued to vote for politicians who promised all the goodies without the pain. That’s how you get reelected today. September 5, 2009 Jim Quinn [send him mail] is Senior Director of Strategic Planning at an Ivy League university. This article reflects the personal views of Jim Quinn. It does not necessarily represent the views of his employer, and is not sponsored or endorsed by them. Copyright © 2009 GoldSeek
|
