If you think America is in trouble, we agree. For decades, we have been sinking deeper and deeper into a socialistic economy, and we are in the final stages of it. Four dollars out of every ten spent each year by the federal government is borrowed and we are running out of options. In 2009, we were unable to sell all of our debt and had to “print” about a trillion dollars. We had a similar experience in 2010 and it is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. As with most things perpetrated by the government, they have a nice name for it. These days, they call it “quantitative easing”. Who could ever get upset about something called quantitative easing? At some point, however, we will hit a tipping point and slide into hyper-inflation.
This happened to Germany in the 20’s with devastating results. The inflation happened over a period of only 2 years, but in that much time, virtually everyone was financially wiped out. The fix was to issue a new Greman Mark that was worth 1 billion times as much as the old German mark. That means that the amount of money in your bank account was divided by 1 billion. If that happened to us, even Bill Gates would be broke. Here is a link that you can read to find out more. It is from a series presented by PBS, hardly an extreme right-wing source. German Hyper-Inflation
We believe that we have a few years left to turn this around, but think about it. If you made $60,000 a year and had to borrow $40,000 a year just to meet your bills, how long could YOU keep it up? Five years? Ten? How long would it be before the banks quit lending you money? China is our “bank”. They started to complain about our policies in 2009. Do you think they will loan us $2 trillion dollars in 2011? 2012? 2013? 2014? 2015?… That is what it will take to keep this going. Do you believe that can happen? We don’t.
The 2010 election gave us some breathing space. The Republican congress has put a stop to the new spending, for now. However, the old spending is still in place. We are still heading toward the cliff, we just took our foot off the accelerator. The TEA party organized a large number of the American people to replace a large segment in congress, but they seem to need a big crisis to get it done. For, now, the big crisis seems to be over. Already the large TEA party events are beginning to get smaller and the Republicans are “thinking too small” when talking about budget cuts. They have a $63 billion solution to a $1,600 billion problem.
If you ever went to a TEA party, you will know that many, if not most of the people there, have never been to a demonstration before. It takes a BIG crisis to get people like us to drive many miles to a field and stand there on a hot sunny day. We did it because that is how it has been done in the past. However the concept of a demonstration was designed for leftists. They have plenty of time and think of it as a party with a “mission”, but mostly a party. That’s a venue that suits them, but not us. We have jobs, children, and homes. We need something that has an impact that can be done in a few minutes, over lunch. That is why Restore Traditional America was formed. It suits US. With the TEA party events declining, there is no one else, and there is not much time.
We aim for nothing less than to change what it means to be a US Citizen. Now, if you vote every 4 years, and don’t cause any trouble, you are considered a good citizen. That is not how it was at the beginning and not how it should be. In the 1700’s, Tomas Jefferson said: “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.” We need to become like our forefathers. We need to know what is going on and be actively engaged in the politics of the country. We need to know what our representatives are doing and we need to hold them responsible when they go astray. When our forefathers did it, it was a lot of work. Fortunately for you, it will be much easier. RTA will do almost all of the work. We will watch what they are doing and give you a heads-up when it is time to do something. We will record how your congressmen vote and present it in a way that is easy to understand. We provide a short summary about the current political climate, so that you can know what you need to know in 5 minutes a week rather than listening to hours of news.
Since we are working for a very big change in how things are done, we are doing everything that we can to make RTA different from other political websites. Restore Traditional America is designed, from the beginning, to be a personal experience. Each member has his / her own account with his / her own information. We are working hard to be the “Facebook” of political websites. No, you won’t be asked to upload pictures of your vacation or send messages to your friends. However, on RTA, the information on the screen is tailored to you. For example, we currently have 9 issues that we are working on. You chose the ones that interest you. We will not send you a request to write your congressman on an issue that you have not “signed up” for. We also let you decide how you want to be contacted. You can get an e-mail, get a text message, or just get a message when you logon to the website.
Each US citizen has 3 congressmen; 2 senators and 1 representative. There are 435 combinations of these three people and you will be presented with the one that applies to you. We also record important votes for your congressmen, but we do not create a single score for each congressman. We include in the score only votes for the issues that interest you. Thus, the score for each of the 535 individual congressmen has over 500 variations. We present the one to you that matches your interests. Thus, if a congressman has a particularly bad score on an issue that is unimportant to you, he / she will not suffer from it. In your eyes (and on your screen), he / she will score well. We treat this subject very seriously. We believe that you should vote for your congressmen based solely on how they vote for you.
Have you ever seen an add urging you to “contact your congressman right away”, but you have never done it and have no clue where to start? We will never do that. You are being trained right now. When you are done, you will be your government’s worst nightmare…an informed, active citizen. You will not only be able to act with us, you will be able to ACT ON YOUR OWN!
If we ask you to do something, we will make sure that you have everything that you need to do what we ask. We will give you websites, names, addresses, and phone numbers. We will explain what we are doing, why we think it is a good idea, and why we are doing it now, instead of some other time. We also lay out our policies and grand strategies so that you can see how it all fits together. We want your input on our strategies, and we provide a message board to make it easy for you to do it.
We make this interesting by conferring ranks on members who are the most active. As a tribute to our armed forces, we are using the US Army ranking system. We make it fun by making it possible for you to compare yourself to the most active members in your legislative district, state, and the entire country.
RTA is not a single-issue website. We are trying to provide support for the “New Type” of active citizen. Thus, we offer a number of issues for you to “sign up for”. As an active citizen of the United States, you need to be concerned with a broad range of issues, so we recommend that you chose several from our list. We will ask your support only on issues that you select, and politician voting scores will be based solely on the issues that you have chosen. We realize that taking the time to write a letter or e-mail takes effort and you will only be willing to do it for something that you care strongly about.
Most websites are reactive. They respond to the outrage of the day. We will do some of that, but we are more disciplined. We will start to set the agenda by working on a subject that interests us, whether or not it is currently in the news. They will get e-mails and letters from us “out of nowhere”. We will force them to respond to us.
Joining other political websites is like subscribing to a magazine. You send them money, get e-mails from them, and they do things that, they believe will be in your best interest. Occasionally, they will send you a request to “write your congressman or attend an event”. Joining RTA is more like joining a club. When we take an action, all members are asked to participate, not just RTA staff. You report what you have done in support of the actions so that we can see how much effect we are having as a group.
Like other websites of this type, we are funded by donations. However, we accept a MAXIMUM of $10 per month. If you send us more, we will send it back.
Here’s why:
In recent years, politics has been a particularly rough sport. Many, and you may be one of them, are weary of the battle which rages every day. You may have written letters, e-mails, or attended a TEA party, but the government quit listening. You don’t seem to be able to have an effect, so you have tired of the exercise. RTA offers an alternative to just giving up. We will keep track of things and give you a “wake up call” when it is time for you to do something. Before you vote, check your congressman’s score and vote accordingly. You have already heard enough, so you don’t have to continue to watch hours of political programs. Spend your time (no more than 20 minutes per week) actually doing something that has a real effect. In the mean time, you can go about your life, knowing that you are doing all that can be done.
Although we have termed this introduction “Training” it is mostly a website tour. As you go through your training, take the time to read the quotes and look at the pictures. They are not only interesting, but instructive and encouraging. You will see that the founding fathers predicted every problem that we currently have and had a solution for each one. In our, “wisdom" we forgot the lessons of the past and we are paying the price today.
You have just completed your first training module. Click on the “back” button on your browser and check the box in front of “RTA Introduction” and click the button at the bottom of the screen. You must click this button to save your responses for all training actions.
Next module; RTA Goals
Note that if you are short on time, you can stop your training at any time. You can either click on “Home Page” at the bottom of the screen or just shut off your browser. When you log back in, the system will know you have not completed your training and will send you back to the first training screen.
Also note that if you click the wrong button and get out of training mode, you can reenter training mode by going to the Home Page and clicking “Basic Training” in the upper right of the page. You can also just shut off the website and log back in.
Finally, some of our instructions can be lengthy. If you want to print them out, just type Cntl-P to print them to your printer.