The Group of Eight major industrial nations announced Wednesday they will hold a global summit – perhaps as early as November in New York – to forge common action to prevent another economic meltdown.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said all European Union nations backed radical restructuring of global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. He called for a meeting “preferably in New York, where everything started” and said it should lead to “a new capitalism.”

Sarkozy said emerging economies such as China, India and others outside the G-8 should also participate because “no one should feel excluded from what we are recasting.”

EU leaders meeting in Brussels “all agreed that we don’t want the same causes to produce the same effects in future,” the French leader said. “We don’t want all this to start again; we want lessons to be learned.”

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the meeting would require vision similar to the creation of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods conference that laid out the post-World War II international financial and monetary system.

The G-8 leaders said in a joint statement released by the White House that they were united in their commitment to change the regulation of the world’s financial sector to restore confidence and “remedy deficiencies exposed by the current crisis.”

“We are confident that, working together, we will meet the present challenges and return our economies to stability and prosperity,” they said.

Brown, a longtime former Treasury chief widely seen as a leader in crafting policies to combat the financial crisis, said he wants a group of supervisors from major nations to monitor the world’s 30 largest financial institutions.

“I believe there is scope for agreement in the next few days that we will have an international meeting to take common action … for very large and very radical changes,” Brown told reporters before meeting for talks on the financial crisis with other EU leaders, who on Wednesday endorsed a $2.3 trillion continentwide emergency bailout for the banking sector.

Thousand Oaks, CA – A national caucus of Republican activists has urged GOP legislators to stand firm against the “Paulson Bailout” of a corrupt financial regulatory system. “This proposal is a government takeover of the entire U.S. economy,” says Republican Liberty Caucus Chairman William Westmiller, “whose only purpose is to rescue those who made risky bets on bad mortgages.”

The Caucus [www.RLC.org] opposes any taxpayer payoff to rescue those who made bad investments in any sector of the economy. “The problem is not a lack of government control,” says Westmiller, “but rather the decades of market distortions imposed by Congress through subsidies, mandates, guarantees, and constraints on free-enterprise mortgage offerings.”

The Paulson proposal grants the Secretary of the Treasury total control over all mortgage-related financial instruments, nearly a trillion-dollars in discretionary funds, and the power to nationalize or deputize every financial institution in the nation. “This isn’t a rescue plan,” says Westmiller, “it is an economic police state.”

Over the past five years, Congress has refused – on multiple occasions – to impose standard accounting practices on “Government Sponsored Enterprises”, maintained an implicit taxpayer guarantee against all of their losses, and expanded the discretion of federal agencies to allocate new national debt to failed investments and insurance brokers.

“This is not free enterprise, nor anything even remotely associated with the American Dream,” says Westmiller, “it is pure and simply corporatism, designed by oligarchs, suitable for a Weimar Republic or Soviet Union, not the United States of America.”

The RLC favors clear legislation protecting individuals against fraud, misrepresentation, and theft. It opposes any law that benefits one class of Americans at the expense of another, including any form of financial guarantee or subsidy that rewards failure or encourages foolish investments.

“The worst aspect of all the proposals now pending in Congress,” says Westmiller, “is the destructive craving to save a system of patronage, political favors, and class benefits that has brought us the current crisis. More of the same is no solution.”

“The ‘Pelosi Compromise’ is a fruitless exercise of battling against the most extreme Democratic proposals,” says Westmiller, “adding new layers of bureaucracy, prolonged studies of alternative interventions, and phased-in destruction of the dollar is not progress, it is more, much more, of the
same failed policies.”

The RLC applauds the stamina and fortitude of multiple Republican Senators and Congressmen who
have opposed any corporate bailout, expansions of government fiscal power, new burdens on taxpayers, or any further assaults on the value of the dollar through inflation.

The RLC is a political membership organization working within the Republican Party in support of individual rights, limited government, and free enterprise. The Caucus has members in all 50 states and 20 chartered state chapters. The RLC has urged all of its members to communicate to their representatives in Congress their total opposition to any bailout.

References:

RLC Statement of Principles and Positions:
“We oppose all legislation that concedes Congressional power to any regulatory agency, executive department, or international body.

We favor the privatization of all government assets and a transition to free market management and services for all programs that exceed the enumerated powers of the Constitution.
http://www.republicanliberty.org/docs/rlc2004_principles.htm

RLC Advisor Mike Pence (R-IN):
“House Republicans believe that we should not pass along the cost of a $700 billion bailout from Main Street to Wall Street … I simply find it anathema that the federal government would borrow $700 billion from future generations of Americans to nationalize every bad mortgage in America”.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec08/lawmakers_09-26.html

“Economic freedom means the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail. The decision to give the federal government the ability to nationalize almost every bad mortgage in America interrupts this basic truth of our free market economy.”
http://www.politico.com/blogs/thecrypt/0908/Pence_comes_out_against_the_plan__again.html

RLC Advisor John Shadegg (R-AZ):
“The problem here is that the government created this. … Now we see the two chairs on each side, adding all kinds of things to the bill. I think the last thing you do when government policies get you in trouble is write a blank check to the government.”
http://johnshadegg.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=103296

RLC Advisor Ron Paul (R-TX):
“Unfortunately, the government’s preferred solution to the crisis is the very thing that got us into this mess in the first place:government intervention.”
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/23/paul.bailout/index.html

“By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy – all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment – and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.”
http://www.ronpaul.com/2008-09-25/ron-paul-my-answer-to-the-president/

RLC Advisor Vernon McKinley on “Corporate Welfare King and Queen” [1997]
“The GSE structure is a classic case of a special legislative benefit that its recipients will fight to the death to maintain. Congress should immediately revoke all the benefits of government sponsorship …”
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6047

Republican Liberty Caucus
44 Summerfield Street
Thousand Oaks, CA 91360
(866) RLC-Liberty [752-5423]
www.RLC.org