Audit the Fed Rally

On November 22, the Wash U YAL joined the Campaign for Liberty and several members of the local community for a rally outside the Federal Reserve building. The point of this rally was to garner support for HR 1207 and increase the public's skepticism toward the Federal Reserve. Protestors stood outside the Fed from 1.00 PM to 3.00 PM, the perfect time to attract the attention of fans attending the 3.15 Rams game. The Federal Reserve of St. Louis is just a few blocks from Edwards Jones Dome, so thousands of people walked by. We handed out hundreds of flyers, spoke with several people, and received a large amount of support from passersby.

We had over forty people attend the rally, with several from Wash U YAL. Fox 2 News (a local TV news station) and KMOX radio both covered the event.

Are We Rebuilding the Wall?

On November 9th, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we constructed a mock gulag complete with two Soviet guards and some prisoners. We played the Soviet national anthem and a reformatted speech by Joseph Goebbels on a continuous loop. In the speech we replaced Judaism with capitalism and all WWII references with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because we drew so much attention we ran out of informational handouts. We distributed one handout with excerpts from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and another with Karl Marx's 10 planks of Communism and how the U.S. has fulfilled several of them.

After about three hours and all the local bloggers and media had left, Event Services shut our event down. They said we had to have permission to build a structure on campus. However, we had thoroughly read all policies applicable to our event, and kept printed copies with us. We have found no such policy applicable to us since the event. Our event, particularly our having been shut down, drew media attention from KMOX radio, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, several local bloggers, and biggovernment.com. James O'Keefe, the creative mind behind the ACORN prostitution videos attended the event. His video of the event can be seen below.

UPDATE: For its gulag, Wash U YAL won a nationwide competition for best event to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall. We won a $500 grant from national YAL to help put on future events.

Free Trade vs. Fair Trade Coffee Taste Test

Our Fair Trade vs. Free Trade Coffee Taste Test was a great success by sheer measurement of how many minds we persuaded. We did not receive any coverage from the school paper despite our media advisories to them. However, we are not entirely surprised because of the very liberal inclinations of the paper. We did provoke conversation though. One of our members sat inside of the Danforth University Center where students eat lunch and she overheard several people talking about our event and free trade vs. fair trade. Also, during the event several students walked by from the Students for Fair Trade, gave us the “stink-eye” and several looks of contempt. They also refused to approach our table, participate in our taste test or discuss trade with us.

We gave out well over two hundred of our flyers and had over 60 students participate in the taste test. Also, our chapter president engaged many students and faculty alike in thorough discussions on trade. He very effectively persuaded students. For instance, one of Wash U’s faculty, who participated in the event, thought fair trade products were good to buy until she spoke with us and grabbed some of our information. Also, several die hard fair traders left questioning the benefits of fair trade after discussing it with us. Several admitted they would have to look up more on fair trade afterward. There is no doubt that we got the vast majority of students who we approached to question the validity of fair trade.

Continuous Recruitment

We constantly recruit new members, tabling two or three times a semester for new recruits. We recently received our Operation Politically Homeless packets with the world's smallest political quiz to help find conservatives and libertarians amongst the multitude of liberal students. We currently have well over 50 members on our e-mail list.