American Republican Candidate Ron Paul

[Marulus]

Originally Posted by Errigal

As for Ron Paul's Libertarianism, I agree. One of the key reasons America has such a strong Libertarian streak is that citizens of America who come from Ron Paul's social class look around at the underclass of poor Whites, African-Americans and Mexican-Americans and quite reasonably decide they don't want to share a government with them. Because the ocean of 300 million Americans don't particularly like or trust each other, the small government Libertarianism and states-rights platform of Ron Paul appears to be the only workable solution. I would agree but I would not recommend American Libertarianism for any other state than the United States. I think the nations of Europe, and New World states like Australia and Canada, can do better.

This libertarianism advocated by Ron Paul, Llewelyn Rockwell and similar kind of people might be - at least as far as I was able to grasp it - something completely different from the now ruling Liberal Capitalism, which in fact consists of the oligopole of several big corporations. Those big corporations suffocate small businesses, which cannot stand the stiff regulations imposed by the government, which is - in turn - influenced by the corporations themselves to issue such regulations. Libertarians a la Lew Rockwell favour loosening of all those possible regulations, less government, so that small businesses in small communities could prosper. As far as I could understand them, and I am not sure if I understood them correctly.

Maybe it is good system for America after all.

Kucinich is a hack, although he is a friend of Ron Paul's.

This is Kucinich durring the last Democrat debate:

"I believe there ARE illegal humans".

Ron Paul is an economist and knows what hes talking about when it comes to Libertarianism, and experts are agreeing with him.

Ron Paul is a libertarian. I true dumbass idealist. He is totally blind to corporate power. His mantra is free trade, no matter what.

He supports true free trade, as opposed to NAFTA and CAFTA

I think the nations of Europe, and New World states like Australia and Canada, can do better.

Nationalism aside, what ways can other nations do better than Libertarianism?

[Marulus]

Confirmation of that what we were talking about...

November 18, 2007

I'd love to support Ron Paul if only he weren't allied with Nazis!

Posted by J.H. Huebert at November 18, 2007 10:31 PM

How many nasty guilt-by-association smears can a person fit into one blog post -- indeed, one paragraph -- about Ron Paul? Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, a legal blog that some unfortunately associate with libertarianism, George Mason University law professor David Bernstein gives it his best shot. The other Republicans get mere indifference or respectful disagreement from Bernstein, while his co-bloggers support the warmongering phony, Fred Thompson.

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[Errigal]

Originally Posted by Flash

...
Nationalism aside, what ways can other nations do better than Libertarianism?

If the citizens of a state are able to trust each other enough to share government services then I don't see why they should not do so. I think the open secret of Libertarianism in America is that they claim the government is useless and unreliable when they really want to say that many of their fellow citizens are useless and unreliable.

Unfortunately the current governing class in Europe, Australia and Canada have decided to learn exactly the opposite lesson from the US experience. They want to prove it is possible to have the social programs of Prince von Bismarck and millions of citizens who come from a different civilization and who feel no bond to the nation. Their experiment is failing spectacularly.

Originally Posted by Plethon

Confirmation of that what we were talking about...

I know what you mean, but it is worth mentioning that Ron Paul would be smeared as a racist, anti-Semitic madman no matter what Stormfront and VNN did. A racist because he is for states rights and anti-Semitic for failing to praise Israel at every opportunity.

[Marulus]

December 7, 2007

'Homegrown Terror' Act an Attack on Internet Freedom?

by Rep. Ron Paul

Before the US House of Representatives, December 5, 2007

I regret that I was unavoidably out of town on October 23, 2007, when a vote was taken on HR 1955, the Violent Radicalization & Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act. Had I been able to vote, I would have voted against this misguided and dangerous piece of legislation. This legislation focuses the weight of the US government inward toward its own citizens under the guise of protecting us against "violent radicalization."

I would like to note that this legislation was brought to the floor for a vote under suspension of regular order. These so-called "suspension" bills are meant to be non-controversial, thereby negating the need for the more complete and open debate allowed under regular order. It is difficult for me to believe that none of my colleagues in Congress view HR 1955, with its troubling civil liberties implications, as "non-controversial."

There are many causes for concern in HR 1955. The legislation specifically singles out the Internet for "facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process" in the United States. Such language may well be the first step toward US government regulation of what we are allowed to access on the Internet. Are we, for our own good, to be subjected to the kind of governmental control of the Internet that we see in unfree societies? This bill certainly sets us on that course.

This seems to be an unwise and dangerous solution in search of a real problem. Previous acts of ideologically-motivated violence, though rare, have been resolved successfully using law enforcement techniques, existing laws against violence, and our court system. Even if there were a surge of "violent radicalization" – a claim for which there is no evidence – there is no reason to believe that our criminal justice system is so flawed and weak as to be incapable of trying and punishing those who perpetrate violent acts.

This legislation will set up a new government bureaucracy to monitor and further study the as-yet undemonstrated pressing problem of homegrown terrorism and radicalization. It will no doubt prove to be another bureaucracy that artificially inflates problems so as to guarantee its future existence and funding. But it may do so at great further expense to our civil liberties. What disturbs me most about this legislation is that it leaves the door wide open for the broadest definition of what constitutes "radicalization." Could otherwise nonviolent anti-tax, antiwar, or anti-abortion groups fall under the watchful eye of this new government commission? Assurances otherwise in this legislation are unconvincing.

In addition, this legislation will create a Department of Homeland Security-established university-based body to further study radicalization and to "contribute to the establishment of training, written materials, information, analytical assistance and professional resources to aid in combating violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism." I wonder whether this is really a legitimate role for institutes of higher learning in a free society.

Legislation such as this demands heavy-handed governmental action against American citizens where no crime has been committed. It is yet another attack on our Constitutionally- protected civil liberties. It is my sincere hope that we will reject such approaches to security, which will fail at their stated goal at a great cost to our way of life.

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[bombadillo]

Originally Posted by Plethon

Anyway, the whole Stromfront's conception is very weird. According to them it seems that Jews rule absolutely everything (literally the entire world), that they are all-powerful, nay, it would appear that they are some supranatural beings, endowed with special magical powers.

You are doubtless familiar with the old adage that "there is no 'us' without 'them'." American whites, of different ethnicities and spread over a large land mass, have not much to unite them. Creating the mirage of a potent enemy provides a rallying cause. And also, for many dispossesed white Americans who are not clever enough to understand the world in a nuanced manner, "the Jew" becomes the personification of everything that oppresses them and keeps them down. Thus "the Jew" is simultaneously responsible for communism as well as being the hidden force in global capitalism (in fact, some of the loonier posters claim they are one and the same). It is like Orwell's "Animal Farm," where the pig Snowball -- who has fled the farm -- gets blamed for everything that goes wrong, or Orwell's "1984," where Goldstein gets similar treatment.

For this (and other) reasons, American "white nationalism" and the various European nationalisms (much more sophisticated, and rooted in history and culture) will never converge, see eye-to-eye, or have that much in common. The very word "white" is an American invention going back to colonial times.

[Marulus]

December 14, 2007

Ron Paul: Slings and Arrows, Left and Right

The Trots and the neo-Trots gang up on Ron

by Justin Raimondo

Ron Paul's simultaneous reenactment of the Goldwater and McCarthy (Eugene, not Joe) campaigns has excited a wave of enthusiasm on both sides of the political spectrum – and also a much less enthusiastic reaction from committed ideologues, left and right. While they come at the Paul campaign from different angles, both wind up with surprisingly similar negative analyses of the Paulian phenomenon, more so than you might imagine.

Let's take the lefties first, starting with one Sherry Wolf, whom, we are told, is an editor of the International Socialist Review. Writing in Counterpunch, she starts out her polemic by acknowledging the utter lack of any alternative to the object of her intense irritation:

"'Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum,' goes the revamped aphorism. Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul's surprising stature among a small but vocal layer of antiwar activists and leftist bloggers appears to bear this out."

By way of understanding the full implications of this statement, perhaps you ought to know that the International Socialist Review, where Ms. Wolf serves on the editorial board, is the quarterly theoretical journal of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), the largest Trotskyist organization in the US, associated with the "Third Camp" views of the late Tony Cliff. Last time around the ISO supported Ralph Nader for President, attracting much criticism from its more orthodox Trotskyist competitors: I remember going to a Nader rally at Mission High School in San Francisco at which Nader attacked the idea of state socialism, much to the embarrassment of the ISO, which provided the organizational muscle for the Nader campaign in Northern California – and their embarrassment must be even greater this time around, when there is no "progressive" candidate on the ballot or likely to appear on any ballot, and Nader is saying good things about … Ron Paul! (at around 4:40 minutes into this Youtubed "Hardball"clip).

Panic! What to do?! Well, Ms. Wolf complains, at length, that Ron isn't a socialist, which seems to me a rather useless pursuit. After all, neither is Nader. If they want a socialist, then why not run their own candidate, like the Socialist Workers Party used to do? Oh, no, they can't be bothered. Instead, they recycle the smears initially hurled at Paul by the neocons: he's a "racist," albeit Wolf's rationale is even loopier than that dreamt up by Ron's opponents on the Right. Paul is a racist, you see, because he "imagines a colorblind world" – as did Martin Luther King, and the entire integrationist tradition of the civil rights movement, oh, but never mind. Aside from citing quotes that were not written by Rep. Paul, and were instead authored by a fired aide, Wolf can't do any better than that. This is a lot like the Clintonians implying that Barack Obama may have been a drug dealer. One can't help wondering, if, perhaps, the ISO is secretly supporting Hillary – or else, why the effort to wall off the left from Paul with this ridiculous smear of "racism"? Who benefits from that? Clearly, the Democrats ….

Wolf decries Paul's opposition to a policy of open borders, and yet Nader took almost the same position as Paul: he opposes illegal immigration, and pledged to reduce it last time around. In an interview with Pat Buchanan published in The American Conservative, when asked about the growth of the US population to 400 million in the near future, Nader said

"We don't have the absorptive capacity for that many people. Over 32 million came in, in the '90s, which is the highest in American history. We have to control our immigration. We have to limit the number of people who come into this country illegally. First of all, we have to say what is the impact on African-Americans and Hispanic Americans in this country in terms of wages of our present stance on immigration? It is a wage-depressing policy."

The hypocrisy of the ISO attack on Paul is breathtaking.

Like the neocons, Wolf attacks Paul for supposedly being one of those dreaded "isolationists." Does she realize that this is a code-word for anti-war and anti-imperialist? Of course she does, yet she cynically avers: "In the isolationist fashion of the nation's Pat Buchanans, he decries intervention in foreign nation's affairs and believes membership in the United Nations undermines U.S. sovereignty." Such a sentence, dripping with contempt for Paul's "no entangling alliances" keep-us-out-of-war stance, might easily have appeared in the Weekly Standard, or National Review. Out of the United Nations?! Oh, heavens-to-Betsy, then how would the Security Council enforce all those delightful sanctions against Iran, and threaten to unleash the armed might of the West if Tehran doesn't bow to the Council's demands? Of course, this is par for the course for the ISO, whose British predecessors, the Cliff-ite Socialist Review faction, refused to condemn the US invasion of Korea, which was sanctioned, you'll recall, by the UN and fought under "international" auspices.

The ISO is so f*cking clueless, that I have a hard time taking Wolf's polemic seriously: it is so obviously the result of pure political calculation, and sheer panic, that one has to wonder if they take it seriously. I have to say, however, that they just don't get it. They don't understand Ron's appeal to the left, aside and apart from his unrelenting opposition to US intervention abroad. They think they can gull the left if they bring up his economic views:

"Complaints against ‘big government' and ‘over-regulation,' though often justified, also issue from the privileged who are frustrated at finding that their quest for still greater privileges at the expense of their community are curtailed by a government which, ideally, represents that community. Pure food and drug laws curtail profits and mandate tests as they protect the general public."

Yet Paul's critique of state capitalism takes on the commanding heights of the system: the Federal Reserve. Inflation, he says, is the means by which the plutocratic elite gets the freshly-created assets first and gets to spend them at full value – while the currency is debauched and the poor and the middle class suffer. His is also a trenchant criticism of the military-industrial complex, which is the main beneficiary of a system founded on manipulation of the money-supply and a foreign policy of perpetual war. This is real economic populism to suit the times we are living in, and the mainstream media is taking note of how Paul's message targeting the central bankers is very effective.

To counterpose "pure food and drug laws" against this kind of radical assault on the very foundations of state-capitalism is just pathetic. But just what one might expect from a fossilized Trotskyist sect with a reputation for rank opportunism.

I was going to go into Jonah Goldberg's analysis of the Paul campaign, but I see this column threatening to get so long as to test the patience of my readers, so I'll save that for a later date. I would simply note that Goldberg, too, hits the "isolationist" meme – a favorite theme of the lapsed Trotskyists of the neoconservative movement, who also conjure the supposedly scary persona of Pat Buchanan in this regard. What's interesting is that not only is the analysis quite similar, but so, too, is the motive: Goldberg and his confreres at National Review want to prevent their conservative flock from defecting to the Paul campaign, just as the ISO is horrified that many on the liberal-left and even left-radicals are rallying to the banner of the Ron Paul Revolution.

Well, isn't that just tough?! Both the orthodox "left" and the neoconservative "right" are intellectually and politically bankrupt: they have nothing to offer but empty slogans, stale dogma, and an outmoded paradigm that has kept us barreling down the road to tyranny and perpetual war, a process that seems to have accelerated ominously since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Rather than support the only antiwar, anti-authoritarian candidate on the ballot, the sectarians of the ISO would rather stand on the sidelines and stew in their own watery juices.

Well, then, let them. The Paul campaign is so much bigger than the ISO, so much more capable of launching a real revolution in this country, that it isn't even funny. Surely Wolf recognizes this – which accounts, one would guess, for the unusually venomous attack.

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[Marulus]

Interesting blog...

Europeans for Ron Paul

[Menydh]

Originally Posted by Plethon

Interesting blog...

Europeans for Ron Paul

"Europeans"? Most comments I read there are from American "expats" (PC for "immigrants").

[Marulus]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

"Europeans"? Most comments I read there are from American "expats" (PC for "immigrants").

Yes, you're right, most of them are. But the title of the blog says so (Europeans for Ron Paul).

[Crvena zvezda]

Originally Posted by Plethon

Yes, you're right, most of them are. But the title of the blog says so (Europeans for Ron Paul).

Whether or not these are American immigrants, Ron Paul would be the best candidate. Europe and the world would benefit most from Ron Paul. I mean look at his stances -- he would withdraw from NATO, move U.S. troops out of foreign lands (I read that he would start by moving out of rich and developed states -- i.e. Europe, Japan, Korea). Not only that he is a non-interventionist, so the chances of him starting a war are small.

[Errigal]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

"Europeans"? Most comments I read there are from American "expats" (PC for "immigrants").

That is a bit of a relief; I really didn't like the idea of native Europeans getting that involved in US politics for several reasons. Firstly, it gives legitimacy to the American claim that their president is "leader of the free world" or "the West". Secondly, it is more than a little odd to support an American advocate of smaller government, less bureaucratic centralism and the revival of state sovereignty (regional autonomy) in front of the EU parliament!

Also, Americans cannot stand getting advice or criticism from foreigners. This sort of thing would do more harm than good to Ron Paul.

Here's a quote from an interview with the odious Bernard-Henri Levy which helps illustrate the massive gap between the EU's project and Ron Paul's.

What did you learn about Europe in America?

I learned that it's possible. When I came to the USA I was in a melancholy mood over the question of Europe. It was the time of the French debate over the European constitution, the time when even the "yes" partisans didn't dare say you had to vote "yes" because Europe was a good thing in itself, but because it was good for France. I was close to thinking that the Europe was possible just an illusion of our generation. I said to myself: "I've spent my life thinking Europe was one with history, that it will come together no matter what happens, you just have to let it be. We could all go to bed and it would form, behind our backs. But perhaps it won't form itself at all, perhaps it's undoing itself before our eyes…"

And America made you see things differently?

Yes. I saw this federation of states, this national community made up of people who speak even less the same language than the Europeans and who are faced with problems of ethnicity far more weighty than those in Europe. And I think that miracles are possible, that the inorganic nation, the inorganic social body, can be constituted. I discover that constitutional patriotism, to speak with Habermas, is not just a philosophical reverie, that it's something that works. One can create an army, maintain schools, raise taxes, etc. When you cross the country as I did, when you see how a landowner in Alabama has nothing in common with a Mexican from San Diego or a European from Savannah or Charleston, and that despite all that America has been able to constitute itself, that rekindles your hope in Europe.

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1305.html