If you have made a donation by credit card in response to our appeal Sunday for financial support --
http://www.gata.org/node/16947
-- and have not received a personal note of thanks from your secretary/treasurer by e-mail, it's because I did not have or could not locate an e-mail address for you. Please do e-mail me to cite any donation made by credit card so that I can acknowledge it most gratefully. Our credit card donation mechanism does not make any provision for contact information and, for security reasons, provides us with little more information about donors than their name.
If you make a donation by mailing a check, please include your e-mail address there too. This will save GATA the expense of regular postage in thanking you.
Meanwhile, a devoted friend in Canada who long has been advocating for GATA conveys this criticism he got from an acquaintance:
"GATA has been banging the drum for a long time now but what has it accomplished in a practical sense? GATA reveals information that is ignored. GATA appears before commodity market regulators who are indifferent to the evidence presented. GATA has been unable to sway the mining industry itself. This war has proven fruitless. Maybe it's time to accept that and move on. If GATA got and spent a million dollars in donations, there would be no appreciable effect. No one who profits from the game as it is now played is going to roll over and change based on any facts or exposure, and no entity with the authority to act is going to intervene. It's a captured market."
This criticism is not entirely unfair. Yes, GATA has not yet wiped the tyranny of central banking from the face of the earth. But we have exposed to a wide audience -- an audience including at least two major governments -- the part of that tyranny that rigs the gold and currency markets, and have explained how this ultimately rigs all markets for totalitarian and imperialistic purposes. We have evidence that people are acting on this knowledge and that our work has forced the market riggers to expend even more resources and become even more obvious. If, as we believe, what they are doing is evil, it will break eventually and the ascent of man will continue. For as James Russell Lowell wrote in defiance when the Slave Power seemed to have a lock on America:
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.
In any case we know one thing: Doing nothing makes nothing happen.
Yes, for those who believe in free markets, limited and accountable government, and individual liberty, these seem like our Valley Forge days, and of course many good causes are always failing from exhaustion. But what could be a grander cause than this one, a cause contending for the definitions of money and justice as they apply to all the capital, labor, goods, and services in the world?
GATA is indeed an amateur operation, doing work that should be done by others, like the World Gold Council, which, as it turns out, exists only to ensure that there never is a world gold council. But until professionals who are willing to take on the work turn up, we mean to keep at it, with the hope and faith that Arthur Hugh Clough put in rhyme:
Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labor and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light.
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
We still need your help:
http://www.gata.org/node/16
