We went all-out this year, so can you help us reload?

11p ET Saturday, September 20, 2008

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Your secretary/treasurer does well enough in maintaining the organization's records and depriving the authorities of pretexts to interfere with our operations, but he is miserable in regard to fund raising, in part because he is only part-time and in part because his work with GATA's dispatches is so much more exciting -- and so much easier than asking people for money.

But he has looked at the organization's accounts, has realized that GATA has enough funds to ensure normal operations for only another two or three months, and has been told the great secret of fund raising:

You have to ask.

So while we don't often ask, we're asking now, and with the prospects for the precious metals suddenly bright again after a vicious six months, we're hoping that our request may be received a little more sympathetically.

In some ways this has been a good year for GATA, maybe our best yet.

In January we published our full-page color ad in The Wall Street Journal, which you can find here:

http://www.gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal

In April we went to Washington and held our third international conference. We're hoping to make DVDs of the proceedings available for sale in six or seven weeks.

And throughout the year market opinion moved strongly into agreement with our central proposition -- that the precious metals markets have been heavily manipulated, often surreptitiously, by Western central banks and their agents, the big financial houses, so that government currencies and bonds would not have competition.

GATA was founded in January 1999, and that we have been working at this for nearly 10 years may be evidence of our persistence. That it has taken us so long to achieve as much acknowledgement as we have gotten by now may be evidence of our own clumsiness, the stupidity and venality of the markets, the cowardice of the mining industry, or some combination of all three.

But at least we've tried, which is more than can be said for the World Gold Council, whose +$60 million annual budget has been devoted to avoiding giving offense to the very central banks and financial houses that have been trying to destroy the council's nominal product.

With the ad in The Wall Street Journal we took an expensive gamble -- a gamble of more than $264,000. Was it worth it? GATA Chairman Bill Murphy thinks it was the best thing we ever did. At least it got us into the world's leading financial newspaper for the first time, will be a permanent record of our best efforts, and brought our message to the heart of darkness. But of course that heart has been unmoved, and if we ever thought it could be moved, we were naive, for, as we have been seeing in recent days, rather than reform itself it is willing to destroy and indeed is destroying the last best hope of earth.

And the ad consumed most of GATA's modest endowment and operational funds.

Regardless of whether, in retrospect, the ad was a good or bad idea, our mandate was and remains to do stuff to liberate the precious metals markets, and even as the bad guys have overreached and are beginning to fail from their overreaching (as the worst of the bad guys always do), there is still much to be done.

As you may know, GATA has made freedom-of-information demands of the U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Board in regard to the U.S. gold reserve, and with sufficient financial support we could turn these demands into lawsuits in federal court. Further, the U.S. Mint, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the New York Commodities Exchange also seem awfully vulnerable to lawsuit for obstructing free markets in the precious metals. We are discussing such possibilities with our lawyers now.

We cannot promise to undertake any particular course of action. But we do as much stuff on behalf of liberating the precious metals markets as our financial support and our wits allow, this is more than any other organization does, and if we had even a noticeable fraction of the support the mining industry gives to the World Gold Council, we surely would undertake much more dramatic action, and soon.

Over the years we have relied on a fairly small number of regular contributors -- some quite extravagant, others just as loyal according to their means -- and so are loath to ask them for still more help. This appeal is directed mainly to those who have not already contributed but who may have begun to feel that this organization is advancing a worthy cause. If you are inclined to help, you can find how to do so -- by check, credit card, bank wire, or GoldMoney -- here:

http://www.gata.org/node/16

And if you do help, please let us know your e-mail address. We want to thank everyone individually and e-mail makes it so much easier.

Thanks for your consideration.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

* * *

GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at http://www.gata.org/.